Anybody can 'take' a preorder...

The trick is, to paraphrase from Jerry Seinfeld, is to deliver on the preorders. I was at my local Gamestop the other day, and asked them what the window was for preordering LEGO Batman 2. I was somewhat surprised that the window was from now until the day before the game's release on June 19, but it's been a while since I preordered anything. Off the top of my head, I'm going to say that the last time I preordered a game it was Tekken 4 and even though it was a total nightmare and shipped late because of some dockworker's strike someplace I still got my T-Shirt as a preorder bonus.

I suppose LEGO Batman 2 is not the sort of game that is going to sell completely out on the first day, but one of the preorder bonuses is a Lex Luthor minifig. I assume that the sort of people that are still willing to play the LEGO videogames are LEGO nuts like my older child, and the prospect of getting an actual LEGO figure along with the game is pretty awesome to them. My concern is that the number of preorders and what the store may receive in terms of promotional items won't necessarily match up, and some of the people that preorder will get shortchanged. I base this on the fact that there isn't quite enough time to react if there is increased demand in the week right before the game is released.  Of course, the game is probably out the door a little early so that the retailer already has it hand, and they will probably know if too many orders stack up at the last minute and start trying to get copies from stores that had less demand for that particular title. But, in my mind, the concept of a preorder is exactly what the name implies - people put money down to reserve a copy so that a retailer knows how many copies to bring in from the vendor once the game is available, and that necessarily involves cutting off that preorder window at least a week before the game is out.  If you didn't preorder, you would genuinely risk not getting a copy until the store got more copies in.  Back when games shipped on cartridges, perhaps that was probably a more important consideration than it is now, but since we're still getting physical copies (for now) it's not like the shipping part of it is going to be any different.

There are parts of the preorder game that are radically different now, of course.  If you have an XBox360 or a PS3, depending on who you preorder from you can get either five extra villain characters (Bizzaro, Captain Cold, Black Adam, Black Manta, and Gorilla Grodd from Gamestop/EB) or five extra hero characters (Nightwing, Shazam, Katana, Zatanna, and Damian Wayne from Best Buy). They just send you an email code for you to download, but of of course you couldn't have it both ways for a reasonable price. There's no way to know if those characters would be available later as DLC, and none of these characters would be available for the Wii at all since the Wii still doesn't have any way to do DLC. Why should I care about extra LEGO characters on the Wii version? Because Wii owners are part of the core LEGO audience, that's why.  How do I know this?


Because LEGO licensed an official Wii remote.

So I ended up reading Kotaku later, and I got even more cranky about the whole preorder thing by reading an article that suggested that we stop preordering altogether.  I wasn't ready to go that far, but they do have some good points.  I'd just like to get some reasonableness back to the situation - although I hear that's an unreasonable position these days.

A little weekend cubing, some gaming nonsense, plus Bonus Taco Content!

Well, I was quite pleased with my cubing over the weekend - I started a little tiny bit early because the band was playing a local 80's night and I did a couple of table solves for listeners between sets.  The downside of the cube solves at a loud musical establishment is that it might as well be mime. It's so loud in there that everything has to be done with facial expressions or hand gestures.  Add to that the fact that I'm dressed a little like a guy that should be playing turntables circa 1988, and it's quite surreal.

I got to do a little more cubing on Saturday at the local Surfers for Autism event - it's both a way for me to keep the kids around us in line occupied, and a a way for me to break the ice with the vendors there and various other people I haven't talked to before. I used to worry about dropping a cube in the sand, but I take one that has springy enough action that a few grains of sand in the mechanism doesn't matter that much. A couple of the high-functioning kids that I hadn't talked to before were very interested in the cube and talked to me about it in line, and when we weren't in line I gave demonstrations to a few of the vendors.  I also got to demonstrate to one of the volunteer groups that were working with my younger son, since yesterday was pretty chilly out and #2 son needed long breaks to catch his breath.

I picked up a few games recently, one of which was Hulk:Ultimate Destruction. I was hoping that it would be the perfect game for #2 son since he seems to hate the structure of some games so I presumed he needed something more open-world. He's the one that figured out how to control the chicken in The Legend of Zelda:Twilight Princess because he delights in goofing around in the open areas more than doing the dungeons. (I was also thinking about the Toy Story 3 game for Wii but the PS2 hulk game was only $9.) The down side of the Hulk game is that even if you're just wandering around the city, learning the streets, you will still get shot at.  I didn't remember that happening in Grand Theft Auto 3 until after you started doing bad stuff.  I guess walking around while green is enough to get you shot at.

Well, I promised bonus taco content, so here it is.

E aho la'ula!

Wider is better?  Well that's what that old Pontiac commercial wanted us to think, anyway.

Vizio now has available a 21x9 format television, in an attempt to catch up to the ever-widening format of the movie theater (which ironically keeps widening in an attempt to differentiate itself from television).

TV started out roughly the same aspect ratio as the movies at the beginning. TV was roughly 4x3 (a ratio of 1.33) and the movies were 1.37, just a touch wider. Most television shows from the beginning of black and white until sometime during the 5^th season of the X-Files are all the 1.33 ratio. Some TV shows in the last 10 years or so are in a 16x9 format (a ratio of approximately 1.78 ). Movies over the years have utilized quite a number of different aspect ratios, as different film companies and equipment manufacturers sought to differentiate themselves. The ones most commonly encountered at the movies would be 1.85, 2.35, and 2.39. (If you don't watch any movies before 1970 you can skip 2.35.) As far as your DVDs and Blu-Ray discs go, just check the back cover where it has the info about the languages and the rating and the surround sound and you'll usually find the ratio listed.

So, let's perform some basic calculations to quantify exactly how crazy it is to watch video of various formats on various screens. Let's start with an old-fashioned 4x3 TV program on a 21x9 screen. This one's pretty easy - a 4x3 ratio is the same as 12x9, so the 4x3 program would cover 12/21 of the screen - about 57%. Next a 16x9 picture on a 21x9 screen - again, pretty easy - it's 16/21 or 76% of the screen area. Cinemascope (the current after 1970 variety), with a ratio of 2.39 is a touch too wide for 21x9, so with only a tiny bit of letterboxing , it fills almost 98% of the screen. If we do the same sorts of calculations for a 4x3 TV, we get 100% (of course) for 4x3 programming, 75% for 16x9, and around 56% for Cinemascope, somewhat the opposite of the 21x9 scenario. Running the numbers a third time for a regular 16x9 widescreen TV, you get 75% screen coverage with 4x3 footage, 100% (another of course) for 16x9 programming, and 74% screen coverage for Cinemascope.

It would seem that if you watch a variety of formats, that a 16x9 TV is the sweet spot where you can still get a lot of screen coverage, and that a 21x9 TV would only be advantageous if superwide movies were all you had. I'm sure the hardcore cinephiles that really want this 21x9 screen don't have to worry about watching too many standard old-school format TV shows, but I think the rest of us are not much worse off sticking with regular 4x3 TV's if they still have them (except in one area, which I'll have to save for next time). When it's time to get a new TV, I hope that a 16x9 is still the sweet spot and we haven't all been coerced into heading into ultrawidescreen land.

Cubes from the holidays Part 3

This is the last of the cubes that I got during the holidays, the V-Cube 7 Illusion. Before I edited it, it was a boring 6 minute video because I kept talking while the camera was rolling.  After I edited it, it's down under three minutes and I hope that my sense of humor is still intact and I didn't give away too much about how to solve it.



The background music is a silly remix of some cover song my band is working on - it was preferable to listening to the camera's slightly noisy autofocus.

I really am excited about the V-Cube in general now. Since its invention, it has respawned interest in large cubing, and interest in making improvements to the cube mechanisms themselves. I am not particularly speedy at large cubes, but I do enjoy them.

Cubes from the holidays Part 2

Here's the second part in my series on improvements on the basic Rubik's Cube.

Oddly, the cube shown in the preview thumbnail is my Zontik, which is not an improvement over a regular Rubik's Cube unless you're strictly basing your assessment on mass.

Cubes from the holidays...

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.

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.