It's Batman Day! Part 3

So, my older son had adequate opportunity to play his new copy of LEGO Batman 2:DC Super Heroes today, although without the villain pack installed. His favorite thing so far is the electric suit for Batman.

It was nice that once I logged on and redeemed the code on the receipt and everything installed that the villain pack worked on his profile, so he didn't have to replay everything from earlier in the day.  Oddly, I tried a playthrough and it locked up at the first save spot, so I'll have to see what's up with that later. The Lex Luthor minifig is cool.

I did not expect my older son to also come home with a Dalek minifig from the nearby bookstore.

 The only thing they had to report about the movie earlier in the day was that Mr. Popper's Penguins was better than Zookeeper, the movie they saw last week, and that the funniest thing in the movie was a penguin fart joke. I'm not sure what that says about Jim Carrey.

It's Batman Day! Part 2

At noon SuperMonkeyWife called me from the store to see if I want the $3 warranty. I made the John Casey noise, which I am quickly called out on. It was funny mostly because I was listening to the Nerdist podcast with Zachary Levi at the time. The kids had just gotten out of seeing a summer showing of “Mr. Popper's Penguins”, which I suspect that I will hear nothing about this evening.

It's Batman Day!

For some of you, you may think of today as Juneteenth, or others may just know that today is the new moon. For a lot of you today is just Tuesday. For me, today is Batman day. We picked out shirts last night, although my older son figured out that his long-sleeve LEGO Batman shirt was too itchy to wear, I had to put a LEGO Star Wars shirt on him instead. (Note to self : Wash the LEGO shirts with extra fabric softener.)

I haven't pre-ordered a game in a while – I may have mentioned it before. Since my older son got a pretty good report card, we decided that we would get him the LEGO Batman 2 video game when it came out. I did the actual purchase a couple of weeks ago, so that today I can send him with the receipt to just pick it up. (I called the store just to make sure.) Gamestop opens up at ten here, so we'll see what happens. There is supposed to be a Lex Luthor minifig, and some code for a villain pack.

Yo dawg, I heard you like criticism in your criticism...

So, if criticism of criticism is metacriticism, then if I complain about Metacritic it's metaMetacriticism?

Maybe I should back up  a few steps. I finally got to a point where I picked up a PlayStation 3. I had really been missing Street Fighter, and the few times that I had played Street Fighter IV and Super Street Fighter IV over the last couple of years were just fantastic. To be fair, I was playing against people that were my equal or better - both of the people in question were people that had helped teach me the game back when all of the versions of Street Fighter had a 2 in them, and they had both started playing before there was a 2 in the title. I can't even say that Street Fighter is a game that I play because I'm good at it - it's a game that I play because I like it, and to some degree I have some nostalgia for it because of the people that I learned it from and the time that it was all happening. Unlike my two teachers, I played a lot of the Alpha games that followed, and I even played a little bit of Street Fighter 3 when a home version finally came out for the PS2.

This is the part of the discussion where the guy with a beard and glasses with his arms folded in the back of the room loudly states that clearly I was not serious about fighting games or I would have purchased a Dreamcast. 

I was not usually playing against people, which is not what people who play fighting games typically do, but as most of my other friends had no interest in tackling a game that I had already invested a lot of time into, my matches against people were few and far between once everybody had regular jobs. I was grateful that at least one of my friends took the time to learn at least one character from me, and I am happy that my older son is now learning a little bit of the game with more than a little help from Tatsunoko vs Capcom.

The day before we went to go pick up a PS3, we checked Metacritic for review scores on a few games, including Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 (which I found a copy of at ToysRUs for $9.98!), Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 and SSFIV:AE just for the heck of it even though I was sure that I was going to pick up SSFIV:AE. It drove me nuts every time I saw a user review of 0 for those games. I think that I understand why people are mad, but I don't think that I understand why people are surprised. I also thought that giving a game a review score of '0' was more than a bit insincere. While I understand that there is no way that we can give a completely impartial review because our perception is largely based on experience, giving any of those games a '0' is not being intellectually honest about what a bad game really is.  Maybe some people need to go back and play the Super Nintendo version of Rise of the Robots or perhaps the side-scrolling 'Tick' game.

I could understand not liking Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 as much as Ninja Gaiden Sigma, but neither of the two games are so bad as to warrant a zero. The Ninja Gaiden Sigma games are slightly different PS3 ports of the XBox versions. Ever since the very first Ninja Gaiden, people had complained about the camera and the difficulty. Ninja Gaiden and Ninja Gaiden Black for XBox got some low user reviews because of the camera and the fact that it was too hard, so it was all the more head-scratching for Ninja Gaiden Sigma 2 to get low user review scores because it was too easy. (I'll take a wild guess and say that those aren't the same people giving out zeros in those two cases, but if they are they should have their medications adjusted. Those games have quite a wide range of difficulty available.) As an extra question for those of you reading this, what third person action game has the best camera (or at least a good, recommendable one)?

As for Capcom and their proclivity for sequels, it should come as no surprise to anyone. In the early 90's, when SNES cartridges often went for $60 or more new, Capcom put out new versions of Street Fighter II every year for four years in a row. Believe me, I know. Home versions of the Alpha series for the Playstation followed quickly after that, followed by the EX games, Street Fighter 3 on Dreamcast, Rival Schools, and the Marvel Vs. games. If you check carefully, there have been releases or re-releases of Street Fighter games for either arcades or home platforms almost every year from 1987 to the present.

Getting mad at Capcom for releasing a lot of sequels and reissues is like getting mad at the sky for being blue. Still, people had to bomb Metacritic's website with low user review scores for Super and Arcade Edition because they felt burned by paying $60 or more on day one of Street Fighter IV back in 2009 instead of being glad that they got to play it at all, and not viewing their extra years of playing the game as having value.

So is the problem with Metacritic, or is the problem with human nature? If I look at ten review scores, and it's all 6's, 7's and 8's, then I could feel pretty good about  the information.  If a game gets 3 0's and 7 10's, then I don't believe anybody.  The two groups could average out the same, but the group with the 0's in it has a much larger standard deviation. In a judging situation with a small, fixed number of judges you just throw out the highest and the lowest score . You a real sense of what the real consensus is, and quickly lessen the possible effects of favoritism. It's a quick way to reduce the standard deviation of a data set.  There are ususally too many user scores on these games for a solution like that to work, though.  Maybe I could get Metacritic to sort their reviews in order of increasing standard deviation, so I could read the reviews that were statistically consistent first.

As a side note, I should mention that due to his time with TvC my older son was a lot more interested in Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 than Street Fighter IV, but I chose SFIV:AE ($17) and a gamepad ($20) instead of getting UMvC3 ($40) so that we could both play.  After a little more paying attention to the toggle switch on the back, I was pretty happy about the MadCatz Street Fighter x Tekken gamepad.  The only problem I had was not being able to negotiate the menu screen as player 2, but that may be the game. It's a little smaller than the SFIV MadCatz gamepads in overall size, but the buttons are the same size so I found it pretty easy to get around. There's a nice feel to the buttons, and I have had no problem with the D-pad. I'm a little shaky on double 360's, but I'm pretty sure that's me and not the controller. Now all I have to do is start playing as characters that are better than Dan next time I play online.

As a second side note, this would appear to be my 100th blog post here on blogger, so here's to hoping it doesn't take me as long to get to 200.

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.