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.
Tuesday, January 15, 2013
Monday, December 17, 2012
Cubing without even trying to - Part 3 or, No, I don't get the picture.
I am so glad that they have not made a Jackson Pollock picture cube, but perhaps it would have been easier than the Minnie/Daisy picture cube that I encountered a couple of weeks ago. I remember as a child that there was some puzzle billed as "The World's Hardest Jigsaw Puzzle" and it had Pollock's "Convergence" as the subject.
To review the problem that I had with Minnie and Daisy, I need to review a bit of the basic mechanics of the 3x3x3 Rubik's cube. The Rubik's cube, for the sake of our discussion, has twenty-one pieces. There are 12 edge pieces with two stickers each, 8 corner pieces with three stickers each, and the center spindle mechanism with six stickers.
Let's say that we have a particularly difficult picture cube, but you recognize one of the pictures enough to know which nine of the 54 stickers go on one of the faces. Now, if you know what stickers go on one certain face, and can move them all there, then you have one center, four edges, and four corner pieces all on the correct face. If for some reason they aren't in the right place relative to each other, there are only a few ways it can be wrong, and it can be a simple matter to fix if you know what to look for. Taking the location of one corner and the center piece as a starting point, there are 3!*4! ways the remainder of the pieces can be placed, and on a picture cube there can be 4 different orientations of the center piece, so lets say that there are 576 possible permutations of the pieces on the one face. If you can correctly move just one more piece into place, you cut that number to at least 192, and with each successive piece you reduce the number of possibilities further and further. Even if you had to do it completely by trial and error to see what the side pictures are, we're not talking about so many different cases that you couldn't get it done in a few hours. The great part about this is that once that's worked out, you now have one third of the picture for the four adjacent sides put together also. (For those of you that have been away from a math class too long, the exclamation point represents the operation called 'factorial'. n!, or n factorial, is the product of the integers 1,2,...,n-1,n. For example, 3! is 3*2*1=6, and 4! is 4*3*2*1=24.)
Now, if you can't discern which group of nine stickers comprise any face of the cube, the challenge is orders of magnitude more difficult. If you select a particular corner to start with, the only stickers you have eliminated as possible other pieces for that face are the other two stickers on the same corner piece. Considering only corner pieces, you have 1330 possible sets of corners to try to go with the one you start with. Factor in the edge pieces and you have 10,626 possible groups of four edges to try out, not to mention having to try all six centers. Multiplying all that out means that just to get a single face on a hard-to-decipher cube means you would have to try almost 85 million possibilities if you took one corner piece as a starting point. This is far too many to do by trial and error. If you could check one configuration each second, it would take more than 2-1/2 years to check them all.
These previous two scenarios also assume that the cube has not been tampered with. If the stickers have been moved around, then your best bet would be to just consider any possible grouping of 9 stickers out of 54 to see if they formed a picture. Now you're at 531 million or so possibilities to check, just to get one face of the cube figured out.
So, in case I haven't made this clear enough, let me summarize. If you can't figure out any of the pictures on a Rubik's picture cube from a scrambled state, you probably don't have enough free time to sort it out by accident.
To review the problem that I had with Minnie and Daisy, I need to review a bit of the basic mechanics of the 3x3x3 Rubik's cube. The Rubik's cube, for the sake of our discussion, has twenty-one pieces. There are 12 edge pieces with two stickers each, 8 corner pieces with three stickers each, and the center spindle mechanism with six stickers.
Let's say that we have a particularly difficult picture cube, but you recognize one of the pictures enough to know which nine of the 54 stickers go on one of the faces. Now, if you know what stickers go on one certain face, and can move them all there, then you have one center, four edges, and four corner pieces all on the correct face. If for some reason they aren't in the right place relative to each other, there are only a few ways it can be wrong, and it can be a simple matter to fix if you know what to look for. Taking the location of one corner and the center piece as a starting point, there are 3!*4! ways the remainder of the pieces can be placed, and on a picture cube there can be 4 different orientations of the center piece, so lets say that there are 576 possible permutations of the pieces on the one face. If you can correctly move just one more piece into place, you cut that number to at least 192, and with each successive piece you reduce the number of possibilities further and further. Even if you had to do it completely by trial and error to see what the side pictures are, we're not talking about so many different cases that you couldn't get it done in a few hours. The great part about this is that once that's worked out, you now have one third of the picture for the four adjacent sides put together also. (For those of you that have been away from a math class too long, the exclamation point represents the operation called 'factorial'. n!, or n factorial, is the product of the integers 1,2,...,n-1,n. For example, 3! is 3*2*1=6, and 4! is 4*3*2*1=24.)
Now, if you can't discern which group of nine stickers comprise any face of the cube, the challenge is orders of magnitude more difficult. If you select a particular corner to start with, the only stickers you have eliminated as possible other pieces for that face are the other two stickers on the same corner piece. Considering only corner pieces, you have 1330 possible sets of corners to try to go with the one you start with. Factor in the edge pieces and you have 10,626 possible groups of four edges to try out, not to mention having to try all six centers. Multiplying all that out means that just to get a single face on a hard-to-decipher cube means you would have to try almost 85 million possibilities if you took one corner piece as a starting point. This is far too many to do by trial and error. If you could check one configuration each second, it would take more than 2-1/2 years to check them all.
These previous two scenarios also assume that the cube has not been tampered with. If the stickers have been moved around, then your best bet would be to just consider any possible grouping of 9 stickers out of 54 to see if they formed a picture. Now you're at 531 million or so possibilities to check, just to get one face of the cube figured out.
So, in case I haven't made this clear enough, let me summarize. If you can't figure out any of the pictures on a Rubik's picture cube from a scrambled state, you probably don't have enough free time to sort it out by accident.
Friday, November 23, 2012
But wait - there's games out there!
I'm not quite ready to post the next part of Cubing Without Trying - I got a little distracted by the release of the demo for "DmC". "DmC" is the lastest entry in Capcom's long-running stylish action series "Devil May Cry". The past "Devil May Cry" games star a white-haired half-demon called Dante who tracks down demons to keep them out of the human world with a sword, a couple of pistols, and whatever other weapons he finds along the way. Instead of being a direct sequel or prequel to one of the existing games, it is set in a parallel universe. I let it download when I went to bed Tuesday night, and didn't really get to play it seriously until Wednesday night.
I had heard a lot of negative talk about DmC, since
1) Capcom wasn't doing its latest iteration of the "Devil May Cry" series in-house,
2) the developer, Ninja Theory, was using the Unreal Engine instead of using MT Framework and there was concern that the fast-paced juggling and precise combos of the first four games would be compromised, and
3) Dante's hair was not white this time and he just looks like a stupid cigarette-smoking emo kid now.
I can hardly blame Capcom for farming out "Devil May Cry" to Ninja Theory. Capcom has more different series going at the same time now than they have in quite some time. While "Devil May Cry 4" was a decent game, I could certainly see some things in "Heavenly Sword" that might have made somebody at Capcom take notice, so perhaps they thought it better to let Ninja Theory give them a new take on it. I thought that Capcom had already taken a big risk last time, by having you play a substantial portion of "Devil May Cry 4" as someone other than Dante (you play as Nero up to the game's midpoint), but the Devil Bringer weapon that Nero had made for an interesting addition to the game. The Devil Bringer could bring enemies to you, or it could allow you to grapple to and propel yourself from distant points. However, this weapon was unique to Nero, and Dante had to find his own way to get around.
In the demo of "DmC", Dante has three different weapon sets. His regular weapon set is the sword Rebellion, with his pistols Ebony and Ivory. Hold the R2 button, and you get a large, heavy battle axe called the Arbiter, and a whip-like doodad that pulls things towards you. In the first level of the demo, there are a couple of platforms you have to pull away from a wall before there's enough room to land on it. Hold the L2 button instead and you get a large, light, fast, scythe called Osiris, and a similar whip-like doodad that pulls you toward enemies or platforms. Right out of the gate, I was comfortable with the combat - the only thing that was even the least bit odd was the lack of a 'lock-on' button, but for the most part the game was adept at targeting what you were looking at. If the game ever opted to target a close enemy behind me when I was shooting at something that I was pointed at in the distance, I didn't notice. Perhaps super-hard-core Devil May Cry fans will complain that their 200 hit combos no longer connect because they made some move 2 frames too slow, and since the whole point of the series is 'stylish action' it completely ruins the game, but I find it unlikely. I have found that somebody, somewhere, always manages to find the move combos that were never evident when the game was made. I was actually very impressed with the demo's look and feel. There were lots of architectural similarities to the other Devil May Cry games - the first few streets you walk through wouldn't be out of place in Devil May Cry 2 or 3. Another thing that I was very impressed with was the dynamic landscape. Buildings shove together to trap you, floors pull away revealing a long drop into nothingness, and a church stretches apart while you're trying to walk through it. The feeling that the city itself was attacking you was both unnerving and exhilarating. There are also hidden enemies (well, they're not that hidden) to defeat and keys and doors to find that add to your level completion percentage. The doors contain the 'Secret Missions' common to the other Devil May Cry games, but since there was an obvious door, I don't really know how 'secret' they are. I did like that it was very easy to start a Secret Mission again - it doesn't kick you outside if you flunk it. You are exactly where you were when the level finished (all the ones I did were timed, I think) and it asks you to press Select to retry it.
The other level in the demo is a boss battle, which was a crazy caterpillar looking thing hanging by some strange tubes in an ancient underground cavern. (I don't think that's the first time a Devil May Cry boss fits that description.) I guess I hadn't noticed the juvenile F-bomb war that permeates the dialogue in the cut scene that precedes the battle since I didn't have the sound turned all the way up the first time. Well, the game is supposed to be... oh wait, "M" is supposed to stand for "Mature". You get to spend a lot of time in the battle swinging from platform to platform as the boss makes them temporarily (or sometimes permanently) uninhabitable. The close quarters combat with the large boss feels satisfying - smacking its four hands off the platform with the axe to get it to let go is fun. (Just watch out for the puke - it stings a little.)
So, I would say - Yes, it looks a little different. That's not a bad thing. The controls felt very responsive to me, but I would consider myself an enthusiast and not an expert. I stopped caring what color Dante's hair was about a second after I swung the sword in the game the first time. It is not hurt by the Unreal engine in my opinion, as the dynamic levels are a welcome new addition that helps with the immersion in the game. It feels like Devil May Cry, perhaps in a way that I hadn't gotten to do since DMC3. Ninja Theory has done a great job at merging new gameplay ideas with old ones and still feeling faithful to the series. My only actual complaint is that I would rather have the older slightly cheesy double entendre-laden dialogue over a barrage of F-Bombs. (Proof that I'm turning into SuperGeezerCube, perhaps.)
Also, while you're out shopping now, don't forget to check out the Nintendo kiosk at your local retailers. Most locations have their WiiU displays out now, and you can check out what's up with Nintendo's new machine. When I saw our local one last weekend, there were no playable demos yet, but there were trailers for quite a number of games, and you can see how the Wii U touchscreen controller feels in your hands and how it is to operate. You can even use the stylus to swipe between games and then select a trailer to play.
I had heard a lot of negative talk about DmC, since
1) Capcom wasn't doing its latest iteration of the "Devil May Cry" series in-house,
2) the developer, Ninja Theory, was using the Unreal Engine instead of using MT Framework and there was concern that the fast-paced juggling and precise combos of the first four games would be compromised, and
3) Dante's hair was not white this time and he just looks like a stupid cigarette-smoking emo kid now.
I can hardly blame Capcom for farming out "Devil May Cry" to Ninja Theory. Capcom has more different series going at the same time now than they have in quite some time. While "Devil May Cry 4" was a decent game, I could certainly see some things in "Heavenly Sword" that might have made somebody at Capcom take notice, so perhaps they thought it better to let Ninja Theory give them a new take on it. I thought that Capcom had already taken a big risk last time, by having you play a substantial portion of "Devil May Cry 4" as someone other than Dante (you play as Nero up to the game's midpoint), but the Devil Bringer weapon that Nero had made for an interesting addition to the game. The Devil Bringer could bring enemies to you, or it could allow you to grapple to and propel yourself from distant points. However, this weapon was unique to Nero, and Dante had to find his own way to get around.
In the demo of "DmC", Dante has three different weapon sets. His regular weapon set is the sword Rebellion, with his pistols Ebony and Ivory. Hold the R2 button, and you get a large, heavy battle axe called the Arbiter, and a whip-like doodad that pulls things towards you. In the first level of the demo, there are a couple of platforms you have to pull away from a wall before there's enough room to land on it. Hold the L2 button instead and you get a large, light, fast, scythe called Osiris, and a similar whip-like doodad that pulls you toward enemies or platforms. Right out of the gate, I was comfortable with the combat - the only thing that was even the least bit odd was the lack of a 'lock-on' button, but for the most part the game was adept at targeting what you were looking at. If the game ever opted to target a close enemy behind me when I was shooting at something that I was pointed at in the distance, I didn't notice. Perhaps super-hard-core Devil May Cry fans will complain that their 200 hit combos no longer connect because they made some move 2 frames too slow, and since the whole point of the series is 'stylish action' it completely ruins the game, but I find it unlikely. I have found that somebody, somewhere, always manages to find the move combos that were never evident when the game was made. I was actually very impressed with the demo's look and feel. There were lots of architectural similarities to the other Devil May Cry games - the first few streets you walk through wouldn't be out of place in Devil May Cry 2 or 3. Another thing that I was very impressed with was the dynamic landscape. Buildings shove together to trap you, floors pull away revealing a long drop into nothingness, and a church stretches apart while you're trying to walk through it. The feeling that the city itself was attacking you was both unnerving and exhilarating. There are also hidden enemies (well, they're not that hidden) to defeat and keys and doors to find that add to your level completion percentage. The doors contain the 'Secret Missions' common to the other Devil May Cry games, but since there was an obvious door, I don't really know how 'secret' they are. I did like that it was very easy to start a Secret Mission again - it doesn't kick you outside if you flunk it. You are exactly where you were when the level finished (all the ones I did were timed, I think) and it asks you to press Select to retry it.
The other level in the demo is a boss battle, which was a crazy caterpillar looking thing hanging by some strange tubes in an ancient underground cavern. (I don't think that's the first time a Devil May Cry boss fits that description.) I guess I hadn't noticed the juvenile F-bomb war that permeates the dialogue in the cut scene that precedes the battle since I didn't have the sound turned all the way up the first time. Well, the game is supposed to be... oh wait, "M" is supposed to stand for "Mature". You get to spend a lot of time in the battle swinging from platform to platform as the boss makes them temporarily (or sometimes permanently) uninhabitable. The close quarters combat with the large boss feels satisfying - smacking its four hands off the platform with the axe to get it to let go is fun. (Just watch out for the puke - it stings a little.)
So, I would say - Yes, it looks a little different. That's not a bad thing. The controls felt very responsive to me, but I would consider myself an enthusiast and not an expert. I stopped caring what color Dante's hair was about a second after I swung the sword in the game the first time. It is not hurt by the Unreal engine in my opinion, as the dynamic levels are a welcome new addition that helps with the immersion in the game. It feels like Devil May Cry, perhaps in a way that I hadn't gotten to do since DMC3. Ninja Theory has done a great job at merging new gameplay ideas with old ones and still feeling faithful to the series. My only actual complaint is that I would rather have the older slightly cheesy double entendre-laden dialogue over a barrage of F-Bombs. (Proof that I'm turning into SuperGeezerCube, perhaps.)
Also, while you're out shopping now, don't forget to check out the Nintendo kiosk at your local retailers. Most locations have their WiiU displays out now, and you can check out what's up with Nintendo's new machine. When I saw our local one last weekend, there were no playable demos yet, but there were trailers for quite a number of games, and you can see how the Wii U touchscreen controller feels in your hands and how it is to operate. You can even use the stylus to swipe between games and then select a trailer to play.
Saturday, November 17, 2012
Cubing without even trying to - Part 2
Saturday a week ago, I had a lot of time to sit in the car and I presumed that I would have plenty of time to tackle my problem with the two Disney cubes, pictured above with my 25th Anniversary cube. The Disney cube on the right has Mickey, Donald, Goofy, and Pluto on it. Each face has a colored background and a differently colored burst on it. It didn't take too long to narrow down which pieces went with which center once I got once face done correctly. It was finished by 10 after 7 that morning, even with other distractions and eating breakfast-like substance in the car. As with most picture cubes, once it is clear what goes where the only thing that makes it different from a standard Rubik's cube is that the orientation of the center piece matters.
The second Disney cube, the one on the left, was more problematic. The six centers had either Daisy's or Minnie's face on them, plus one edge piece had Minnie's face on it. The remainder of the pieces were either pink, light green or sky blue, with either polka dots or flower patterns. I was able to figure out that almost every face had some combination of two colors on it, but it was rarely clear what went where as some pieces were just a bow on the background color with nothing that specifically tied it to an adjacent sticker. I never managed to complete any face, and I don't think I managed to be certain about more than three pieces going together. I abandoned it for Saturday, and looked at it again on Sunday, hoping that perhaps I would be saved by Google Image Search. Sadly most of my searches for a picture of these cubes yielded either the official Disney Rubik's Cube (which is a standard size cube far easier to solve than either of these) and a few of the links led back to the previous Friday's post. I looked at it again a few times subsequently but I had no breakthroughs. Given enough time, I suppose that I could have scanned the stickers and printed them out and treated them like 6 small jigsaw puzzles, which could have corrected for the possibility that some of the stickers had been moved prior to my attempt at solving it, but as the other one had not been tampered with, it was probably not the first thing I should have assumed.
I handed back the cubes on Friday, one solved, one unsolved, with the promise that if someone can tell me what the pictures are, I can get it solved in 10 minutes or so. (I never want to lowball a solve time for a keychain size cube since turning them too hard can result in injury or a broken cube.) In part 3, we'll get into the math of a picture cube when you don't know what the picture is.
Friday, November 9, 2012
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.
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.
Tuesday, October 30, 2012
The importance of X, part 2.
After some review and comments from the peanut gallery, it would appear that 1) I already had one game that I did not mention at all with a very non-standard jump button and 2) I picked up a second game with a very non-standard control set (to me) that has the jump button in a very strange place.
The answer to 1) was Katamari Forever. Since jumping (OK, it's called the 'Prince Hop') is a relatively new mechanic in the game, I totally forgot/disregarded/ignored it. I like the mechanic, but I space out sometimes and don't use it. Being able to jump does save you from having to replay boards quite as many times to get all the stuff. Katamari's jump button is R2 - but since most of the game is controlled by the two analog sticks, it would be impractical to map anything important to a face button when the triggers are easier to get to.
The answer to 2) was Mirror's Edge, which I am finally playing (and liking) but it kicks my butt since I've never played a FPS with a controller that wasn't on a Nintendo machine. (Goldeneye 64, the cheesy port of Quake 2 for N64, and Metroid Prime for GameCube.) Most of my FPS time happened a long time ago (Doom 1-2, Quake 1-3) and was mostly with mouse/keyboard. Believe it or not, I never used a mouse for Doom, and didn't start using a mouse for the first Quake until after I started playing Deathmatch games. Similar to our Katamari situation, all of the movement controls for Mirror's Edge are on the two analog sticks, so the jump and duck buttons are mapped to L1 and L2 by default.
I would have to say that both of these games - Katamari Forever and Mirror's Edge - are different enough from other games that it's easy to treat them separately and not expect the controls to be similar.
The answer to 1) was Katamari Forever. Since jumping (OK, it's called the 'Prince Hop') is a relatively new mechanic in the game, I totally forgot/disregarded/ignored it. I like the mechanic, but I space out sometimes and don't use it. Being able to jump does save you from having to replay boards quite as many times to get all the stuff. Katamari's jump button is R2 - but since most of the game is controlled by the two analog sticks, it would be impractical to map anything important to a face button when the triggers are easier to get to.
The answer to 2) was Mirror's Edge, which I am finally playing (and liking) but it kicks my butt since I've never played a FPS with a controller that wasn't on a Nintendo machine. (Goldeneye 64, the cheesy port of Quake 2 for N64, and Metroid Prime for GameCube.) Most of my FPS time happened a long time ago (Doom 1-2, Quake 1-3) and was mostly with mouse/keyboard. Believe it or not, I never used a mouse for Doom, and didn't start using a mouse for the first Quake until after I started playing Deathmatch games. Similar to our Katamari situation, all of the movement controls for Mirror's Edge are on the two analog sticks, so the jump and duck buttons are mapped to L1 and L2 by default.
I would have to say that both of these games - Katamari Forever and Mirror's Edge - are different enough from other games that it's easy to treat them separately and not expect the controls to be similar.
Tuesday, October 23, 2012
A world without limits.
So it would appear that Lance Armstrong has been stripped of his Tour De France titles and that the UCI is going to abide by the decision of the USADA.
I was a little bummed out at first. After all, with Lance single handedly getting Americans excited for a sport that usually posts worse TV ratings than hockey here, and with a sport that translated well into people buying bicycles and being more active, and to top it all off was a cancer survivor, it was hard to want to accuse the guy of being a cheater. The accusations seemed to channel away from him like the way you see water channel away from the surface of a rain tire in the Michelin commercials.
The more that I learned about it, though, the more I wondered about how somebody could win the Tour seven times in a row under the competitive pressure that there was at the time. Jan Ullrich who won the Tour in 1997 is now recently banned from cycling because of doping. Marco Pantani, who won in 1998, suffered a long downhill slide in his mental state after being disqualified from the Giro d'Italia in 1999 for an irregular blood result and was accused of doping for the rest of his career. Pantani subsequently died in 2004 from a cocaine overdose.
Looking at humanity as a whole, we love competition - it's what makes us go. It's what got America on the moon when we got scared by Sputnik and the Soviet's perceived capability. It's what makes our cars on the road better every year when we get innovations spurred by NASA and NASCAR. It's what makes you check your leaderboard scores on your favorite game, or to see how your football pool is doing. In a way, I try to tap into that competitive urge when I talk to somebody about cubing, since some people see something and say to themselves "I gotta do that". Under the right circumstances, it's a great motivator, and it can spur on the innovations and new ideas that we might not see otherwise. That's not to say that competition is not without its perils. Would we be ready for a world without limits? If we removed all restrictions on cycling, how long would it take for someone to have a stroke on live TV during a race? If we removed restrictor plates from NASCAR, how long would it take for the cost of the accidents to be a deterrent to going to a race?
The thing is, some people need some competition once in a while to make them feel alive, but there's little value in it if it's just going to kill them.
I was a little bummed out at first. After all, with Lance single handedly getting Americans excited for a sport that usually posts worse TV ratings than hockey here, and with a sport that translated well into people buying bicycles and being more active, and to top it all off was a cancer survivor, it was hard to want to accuse the guy of being a cheater. The accusations seemed to channel away from him like the way you see water channel away from the surface of a rain tire in the Michelin commercials.
The more that I learned about it, though, the more I wondered about how somebody could win the Tour seven times in a row under the competitive pressure that there was at the time. Jan Ullrich who won the Tour in 1997 is now recently banned from cycling because of doping. Marco Pantani, who won in 1998, suffered a long downhill slide in his mental state after being disqualified from the Giro d'Italia in 1999 for an irregular blood result and was accused of doping for the rest of his career. Pantani subsequently died in 2004 from a cocaine overdose.
Looking at humanity as a whole, we love competition - it's what makes us go. It's what got America on the moon when we got scared by Sputnik and the Soviet's perceived capability. It's what makes our cars on the road better every year when we get innovations spurred by NASA and NASCAR. It's what makes you check your leaderboard scores on your favorite game, or to see how your football pool is doing. In a way, I try to tap into that competitive urge when I talk to somebody about cubing, since some people see something and say to themselves "I gotta do that". Under the right circumstances, it's a great motivator, and it can spur on the innovations and new ideas that we might not see otherwise. That's not to say that competition is not without its perils. Would we be ready for a world without limits? If we removed all restrictions on cycling, how long would it take for someone to have a stroke on live TV during a race? If we removed restrictor plates from NASCAR, how long would it take for the cost of the accidents to be a deterrent to going to a race?
The thing is, some people need some competition once in a while to make them feel alive, but there's little value in it if it's just going to kill them.
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