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.

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.

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.

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.

The Importance of X (or A, as the case may be.)

Over the course of the summer I played the following action/platform games on PS3 all within a short span of time.

God of War 3 (completed regular difficulty)

Heavenly Sword (completed regular difficulty)

Ratchet and Clank:Tools of Destruction

Devil May Cry 4 (completed regular difficulty)

Bayonetta

Ninja Gaiden 2 (completed once, can't recall which difficulty)

I like all of these games, and for different reasons. Ninja Gaiden 2, Devil May Cry, and Bayonetta are a different kind of gameplay from God of War and Heavenly Sword, and Ratchet & Clank is yet another kind of gameplay. The thing that I noticed the most from playing all of these games in the same timespan is that you can't jump in Heavenly Sword, and that Bayonetta and God of War use two different buttons to get into the item menus. The problem with the item menu didn't take too long, but the other thing really got me noticing how ubiquitous the use of the X button to jump with is (or A, if you're playing on XBox/XBox 360.)

I think that I only own a few games that have a jump mechanic where it's mapped somewhere strange. On the first Devil May Cry, they mapped the jump button to triangle which I never got used to. I was so glad that they fixed it in Devil May Cry 2 that I overlooked a lot of the game's other flaws. I wonder if they changed it for the HD remake? On the game "de Blob" for the Wii, they mapped jumping to swinging the Wiimote. In one case, it was workable but I had to think about it a lot. In the other case, I didn't have to think about it that much but it was largely inaccurate for me. I think Onechanbara for Wii has the jump button mapped someplace strange also, but you don't jump in that game enough for it to matter.

In general, I found it nice for the games that I listed at the beginning here that I didn't have to think about jumping. It kept me engaged in the game and not perpetually having to run back and check the controls in the menu. I presume that the same sort of thing happens with FPS games, where people have a certain expectation of a control layout and it's nice not to have to think about it so they can just play the game. With fighting games, I'm used to having to adapt a little for each character, so it's not so bad with different games having different button layouts but I'd be lying if I said I didn't have a preference.

In the event that there isn't a standard, ubiquitous layout, I have to say that I really appreciate the times where there are visual cues or on-screen reminders available, especially for context-specific controls or buttons that see only occasional use. God of War does that fairly often, and I have to say that it's nice to jump back into a game after not having played it for a while and be able to open up a treasure chest right when I walk up to it and not worry that I'm about to accidentally use a magic attack on it by mistake. I just started playing Arkham Asylum in the last week and like the little touches like seeing (R1) right next to the little reticle that shows you what ledge you can grapple up to, or the little reminders in the corner about how to use the explosive gel once you equip it.

I have complained about bad controls before, so before I launch into a tirade about those I would just refer people back to my old post about Suda51 and Killer7.

Familiar controls (or at least intuitive controls) can help make a good game great, and in a lesser game can keep a help player interested long enough to care whether they finish or not.

Math vs. Capcom

So now that I have Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3, it still seems... incomplete. It's not that I'm good at the game or anything – I haven't even faced Galactus in single player yet althought I suspect that perhaps my son playing LEGO Batman 2 may have something to do with part of that. It's just knowing that there are two more characters available, and they're characters that were available in Marvel vs Capcom 2. I never found myself using Shuma-Gorath that much in the previous games, but I did use Jill once in a while as a rushdown character and to supply my teammates with health.

Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 is the expanded version of Marvel vs Capcom 3, part of Capcom's 'Vs' series fighting games. Many popular characters from the Street Fighter series are present in the 'Vs' games, along with other characters from their action franchises Devil May Cry, Okami, Mega Man, and Resident Evil. The 'Vs' series games differ from the standard Street Fighter series games in that there are teams of multiple characters, and while each player only directly manipulates one character at a time, they are allowed to call their partners in to do 'assist' moves, or tag out to one of the other characters if needed.

Should I get the two downloadable characters? Well, let's do the math.

The math is a little funny, though. Interpreted purely in terms of the number of characters, it seems crazy that the first 48 characters cost you $40 which is $0.83 each, and the next two characters cost you $5 each. Of course, if you bought the original version of Marvel vs Capcom 3 when it came out, paying $40 to get 12 more characters than what you originally had (which is $3.33 apiece) then the DLC (DownLoadable Content) pricing doesn't seem as far off.

However – let's ignore the original MvC3 for a moment and look at the math in terms of the number of possible teams. In UMvC3, without the two DLC characters, there are 48 characters and three characters on a team. Realistically, it doesn't matter what the order of the characters are – if you have a team with Spiderman, Hulk, and Wolverine, it's the same as if you had picked Wolverine, Spiderman, and then Hulk. As it turns out, for three characters, there are six different ways you could pick the same team. (This will be important in a moment.) So, since the game does not allow repeat characters on the same team, the number of possible teams works out like so:

There are 48 possible characters you could pick first.

There are 47 possible characters you could pick second, because the character you picked first cannot be picked again.

There are 46 possible characters you could pick third, since the first two characters cannot be picked again.

Which gives a preliminary figure of 48 * 47 * 46 = 103,776. However, since a bunch of those teams are repeats of each other, just with a different order of characters, we divide by 6 (See, I said it would be important later...) to get the total number of unique teams. That gives us 103,776 / 6 = 17,296 possible teams.

This is the part where the kid in the back of the room raises his hand and says "Isn't this just C(48,3)?" to which I would remind him that we're not all math majors and maybe it would be nice to show the steps instead of just cramming the problem into a formula straightaway.

So, if we figure in the two downloadable characters, the total number of possible teams increases to 50 * 49 * 48 / 6 = 19,600. That's 13% more teams, with just 4% more characters.

Phooey. I still don't know if it's worth five bucks.

LEGO Batman 2: A few days in, a couple of bugs.

My older son seems to have a reasonable array of heroes unlocked for LEGO Batman 2:DC Super Heroes at this point, plus the 5 extra villains from the villain pack and a few other miscellaneous characters. However, we had a small problem with Green Lantern. Around the Gotham Zoo area, there are some piles of green translucent bricks that are made for the Lanterns to build.  Holding the circle button (PS3 version) is supposed to build the group of bricks into an object, and then the object does whatever it is supposed to do and leave behind a significant number of LEGO studs. However, we here having the problem that the group of bricks would be built and then no action taken. Once the built bricks lay dormant for a moment, they disassemble, and then we were left to try again. It didn't seem to matter if some of the extra options were turned on or not. The only thing that seemed to resolve the issue was exiting to the main PS3 menu and restarting the game.

I had a different problem previously - after I loaded the villain pack the first afternoon, I started my own game but picked 'Load Game' even though I was pretty sure that there wasn't a game on my profile to load.  It appeared to start a new game, but it locked up at the first save point. I played again the next day, and was correctly kicked out of the 'Load Game' screen into the 'New Game' screen the second time and had no problem saving the game.

I don't know if there are more bugs to find, or if this is even the sort of game that will be bothered to be patched. We had problems with the Wii LEGO games locking up periodically, but of course those games didn't get patched.