Mon, 01 Dec 2008

Papyrus
Many of the games I enjoy come with a disclaimer printed on the back: "Basic reading skills are required to enjoy this game." This simple statement has caused a surprising amount of grief for young gamers and their parents, who are apparently horrified at the idea that literacy and vocabulary might be a prerequisite for what is being treated as a mindless babysitting activity. If you believe, as I do, that video games are a form of literature and are valid for imparting narrative and values, then you should understand that all forms of communication will be leveraged in their presentation. This can and must include sophisticated language.

Of course, communication need not be based in language. This is the problem I'm having with Heroes of Might and Magic for the Gameboy Color. With only a tiny screen to display information adapted from the PC version, New World Computing's flagship strategy title must depend on icons and pictograms to convey information. The advantage is that this makes for easier localization, since you have to translate fewer words. The disadvantage is that a first-time player has no idea what's going on without an explanation in prose. I'm still determined to figure this game out, but maybe I'll start with the PC version first. If I can find a copy.

posted at: 07:44 | path: /VideoGames | permanent link to this entry | blog home

Fri, 28 Nov 2008

Point and Click
I wanted to like Contact for the Nintendo DS, the funny Atlus RPG that I picked up on sale back in May. It deserves praise for being quirky and unconventional, in the way that it uses the touch screen to make you interact with the game world without using a menu. But the use of the Professor character takes away the sense of a second-person narrative. Anybody who decries the young, up-and-coming RPG protagonist stereotypes should play Contact for an hour or so and see if they miss having it.

posted at: 16:00 | path: /VideoGames | permanent link to this entry | blog home

Wed, 26 Nov 2008

Pre-release
I was in a bookstore. No, I was in a place that sells coffee and greeting cards and Internet access that, for reasons that will be very unclear to the archaeologists studying our culture in two-thousand year's time, we call a bookstore. But I digress.

I was in a bookstore reading two magazines that you wouldn't think are hard to find. Newsweek and Time are lost in the shuffle of special interests and celebrity trackers and lad mags, but if you look hard enough you can find them. And when I say I was reading them, what I mean is that I read the first two lines of every paragraph before realizing that I had already read every single word online.

I have nothing insightful to add on this subject, except to say that aggressive use of advertising blocker software makes me an unprofitable customer.

posted at: 18:55 | path: /Media | permanent link to this entry | blog home

Tue, 25 Nov 2008

Project Dragoon
Finally scored an affordable copy of Starblade Alpha for the Playstation. Distressingly, at first glance it looks like a pixel-for-pixel port of the 3DO version of Starblade. Still, by owning it I don't spend all my time looking for it like I did before.

Back in the early days of 3D graphics, flat shaded polygons were the order of the day. Simple squares and triangles with no discerning features were stitched together by the magical graphics processors to form articulated wireframes that might look like something familiar. This is why, more often than not, these old games featured vague spaceship designs. Starblade Alpha improves on the original by adding textures and lighting effects to the original graphics.

I'm bordering on an obsession with the minor differences between each port of a game on a different platform. The Sega CD version of Starblade didn't even bother with the flat shading, and rendered most of the ships as bare wireframes. And yet most of the game is still present, with gameplay value that is very close to the original arcade experience with much more restrictive technology.

posted at: 08:50 | path: /VideoGames | permanent link to this entry | blog home

Sat, 22 Nov 2008

PLUGE
I love doomed Atari consoles. The Jaguar was no competition for the Nintendo 64 or the Sony Playstation, and it was so unpopular that software pirates never bothered to copy its games. The Lynx had customizable hardware years ahead of the Game Boy and the Game Gear, but the games were so terrible that most consumers passed on the platform. And Tiger's Game.Com had a touch screen a full decade ahead of the Nintendo DS, but old black-and-white graphics and terrible marketing couldn't sell it to anybody. And so in the spirit of all those predecessors, I have today purchased a Toshiba SD2300 Nuon DVD player.

Nuon was a good idea that nobody had time for. Instead of being one of a dozen proprietary, specialized game platforms, Nuon was a standardized chipset that could be added to almost any DVD player. In much the same way that the 3DO game standard was manufactured by Panasonic and Goldstar/LG, the Nuon chips were used in DVD players made by Toshiba, Samsung, and RCA. Of course, with only eight games available for the system, there was no way for Nuon to be successful in the larger gaming market against the Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft juggernauts. When Nuon and its backers left the market, there was no memorial or funeral.

Atari didn't actually have any direct relationship with the Nuon platform. But just as Tiger's game machine was an honorary Atari machine due to common association with Hasbro Interactive, the Nuon is also an Atari sibling since it's the home of Tempest 3000. The successor to the series is Space Giraffe, which is due for a PC release very soon. I hate missing out on little incremental sequels, which is why I'm crazy enough to hunt down obscure hardware like this.

posted at: 14:09 | path: /VideoGames | permanent link to this entry | blog home

Thu, 20 Nov 2008

Poison
Bless me, it's a strategy RPG. I just picked up Eternal Poison for the Playstation 2, and didn't even realize that it's a grid-based tactical combat game in the style of Shining Force. But every character is dressed in some sort of black frill or lace, as befits its gothic art style. Even the talking wolf with antlers seems to be wearing some sort of designer lingerie.

I remember sharing Shining Force III with an old girlfriend who had no love for video games. Her description of it was "overdone chess," which is a succinct (if dismissive) way to sum up the genre. I do enjoy chess, and I have a lot appreciation for miniatures wargaming, and both these pastimes are what made this sort of game possible. Best of all, in the absence of human opponents there's no time spent arguing over rules or enforcement thereof.

posted at: 19:53 | path: /VideoGames | permanent link to this entry | blog home

Wed, 19 Nov 2008

Prices and Participation
I'm not thrilled about the price cuts I'm seeing on the discount racks. I mean, I'm happy to take advantage of those deals. But when I see an artistic, critically acclaimed game like No More Heroes on sale for seven bucks, that's a sign that the economic slowdown is catching up to game consumers.

posted at: 19:28 | path: /VideoGames | permanent link to this entry | blog home

Tue, 18 Nov 2008

Porphyria and Lycanthropy
In the speculative historical game Operation Darkness, you must field an international team of Allied special operations soldiers against the forces of the Third Reich. For Her Majesty knows what the Allies dare not tell their citizens, that Adolf Hitler is a vampire and cannot be slain by mortal men with mortal means. Or something.

I played the demo for this game, and found it overly complicated and not interesting enough. But the price of the game online recently dropped to $20, and I can't get enough of the premise. If it takes werewolves to beat the Nazis, then come and bite me.

posted at: 18:54 | path: /VideoGames | permanent link to this entry | blog home

Mon, 17 Nov 2008

Parking
If I find your car parked in a fire zone, I will leave trash on it. I won't key it, because I've already gotten in trouble for that once. But I will put something on your car that doesn't belong there, because your car is someplace it doesn't belong. If you can't walk thirty feet to be where you need to be, then obviously you need to be in a wheelchair. I can arrange that too.

posted at: 17:24 | path: /CurrentEvents | permanent link to this entry | blog home

Fri, 14 Nov 2008

Pulling My Leg
Humor should be clearly labeled. And the past tense of 'label' should have three letter 'l' characters in it, but that's an argument for another day.

News organizations are sheepishly retracting stories based on blog entries from a non-existent political adviser. News that private citizen Joe Wurzelbacher was related to banking fraudster Charles Keating turned out not to be true. Neither is the allegation that vice-presidential candidate Sarah Palin doesn't know that Africa is a continent.

I don't appreciate it when people with the ability to get my attention do it to waste my time. Everyone is perfectly free to be a comedian, but if you're not selling a gag then you're just running a bait-and-switch. This sort of one-sided juvenile prank isn't worthy of anybody that claims to be serving the public.

posted at: 09:53 | path: /CurrentEvents | permanent link to this entry | blog home

Thu, 13 Nov 2008

Part and Parcel
You may recall back in July, my neighbors received a package intended to be delivered to my house. Rather than give it to me at the earliest opportunity, they took a week to enjoy the items inside that I had ordered, and then sheepishly left the open boxes on my doorstep without so much as an apology. Today I learned that their house is presently in foreclosure and is up for public auction.

I won't be so crass as to publicize their contact information. But a search of public records shows that they have something on the order of fifty liens in effect. They attempted to get rich quick off of the real estate market and now they're suffering for their greed. I'm sorry to say, nobody in foreclosure gets my sympathy today.

posted at: 17:13 | path: /Commerce | permanent link to this entry | blog home

Wed, 12 Nov 2008

Pool Shark
I appreciate the game that Grand Theft Auto IV is, but at this point I think I'm ready to throw in the towel. I'm not a big fan of realistic, modern violence. There's a reason that the ESRB distinguishes between fantasy, cartoon violence and the more graphic, gory variety that adult gamers appear to demand. I don't mind it, and I don't judge anyone who enjoys it as entertainment, but at this particular moment it's not really for me.

Having said that, I'm ready to get back into Sega's Yakuza series. Their answer to Grand Theft Auto has all the mission-based sandbox exploration and gritty gangster narrative, but much fewer firearms. Gun control and bushido being what they are in Japan, there's a perception that criminals would prefer to settle their differences with nicely theatrical hand-to-hand combat. That works better in the context of a video game too.

posted at: 16:55 | path: /VideoGames | permanent link to this entry | blog home

Mon, 10 Nov 2008

Paypal Owes You Money
Just a reminder that the class action against PayPal and eBay is still in the information gathering stage. If you submitted payment using PayPal after February 1, 2004, and if you got ripped off, PayPal owes you that money back under banking regulations that they're now forced to comply with. You have until December 14 to get a claim in the mail. Here's a convenient link to the settlement web site:

http://www.steelesettlement.com/

Note that the form generated for each class member asks you for the amount you lost. It's not often that a class action is tailored to the specific amount of money that each member is due. Don't miss out.

posted at: 16:29 | path: /Commerce | permanent link to this entry | blog home

Thu, 06 Nov 2008

Past Perfect
In a move probably unrelated to its declining reputation, Google has further impeded the operation of the DejaNews Usenet archive by adding web forum and generic website search results to discussion queries. This is a lot like a boneheaded ingredient substitution my mother used to perform, the addition of ketchup to spaghetti sauce. I understand that fewer Usenet posts overall logically means less content to view, but this problem was supposed to be handled by the propriety Google Groups interface.

I'm still making daily, active use of Usenet. International propagation of text-only content makes it the closest thing to a permanent record that you'll ever find on an ever-changing Internet. For Google to start mixing in other content is not a pleasant juxtaposition like chocolate in my peanut butter.

posted at: 07:30 | path: /Media | permanent link to this entry | blog home

Wed, 05 Nov 2008

Powdered Fruit Drink
Let's cut through some of the nonsense of this year's American presidential election to address an issue of vocabulary. It's an axiom that extremism gets more attention than moderation. Unfortunately, this means that ideological terminology gets misused for pejorative intent. When "fundamental Christian" is thrown around as an insult, nobody is thinking of an indiscriminately kind and generous person like Billy Graham. More likely, the intent is to evoke thoughts and memories of intolerance from people like Pat Buchanan. In the same way, when a presidential candidate is described as a socialist, he's not being compared to a pragmatic nationalist like Francois Mitterand. The people making the comparison are trying to make you remember Jonestown.

Just as the cult of Jim Jones should not be taken to embody socialism as a whole, so too should the extremists of either party not be representatives of liberalism or conservatism. "Conservative" should not be shorthand for ignorant and inflexible. "Liberal" should not be code for immoral and indulgent. Our system of government is intended to cultivate reasoned and productive debate, and hopefully we can get away from what is essentially schoolyard name calling. Using labels to exclude individuals from group membership is worthy only of the Chinese government.

posted at: 08:08 | path: /CurrentEvents | permanent link to this entry | blog home

Mon, 03 Nov 2008

Pale Impaler
Literary purists may not like it, but for many people my age the story of Dracula, Vlad the Impaler is best told in the Castlevania series of video games. In place of monster hunter Van Helsing, the tragic family of Simon Belmont is forever doomed to confront the immortal lord of the vampires every time he decides to make another paycheck-inducing appearance.

Like all movie monsters, Dracula has lost some of his mysterious appeal over the years. His ethnic identity has been diluted, his vampire legions are too numerous to be unusual, and science has actually provided a reasonable explanation for the biology of the myth. It's fascinating to me that Dracula's menace and power is best embodied in the medium of a game, where the second-person narrative puts the player in danger in a way that Bram Stoker's prose can't for a reader.

posted at: 19:15 | path: /VideoGames | permanent link to this entry | blog home

Sat, 01 Nov 2008

Pink Hearts
Just a quick post to show off my new clock. Fei Yen is my favorite Virtuaroid, but not because she's pink and her gun shoots heart-shaped lasers. In one-on-one fighting games, I gravitate towards fast combatants that can hit hard and then move out of the way fast. Big, slow bruisers like the Temjin or the Bal Bas Bow don't fit the bill.

posted at: 13:56 | path: /VideoGames | permanent link to this entry | blog home

Fri, 31 Oct 2008

Push Poll
I don't like to endorse candidates, or to discuss politics in general. It's been my experience that the secret ballot makes personal interaction more pleasant by not dividing people based on perceived beliefs. This is why, in general, I'll make posts that link to someone else's interesting content but make no comment myself about issues that could turn partisan.

I will unambiguously state this, though. If a political campaign makes an automated phone call to my house, that candidate loses my vote. If you want to influence my decision, have a real person call me and engage me on the issues with back-and-forth dialogue. If you waste my time, you don't get my support.

posted at: 06:35 | path: /CurrentEvents | permanent link to this entry | blog home

Wed, 29 Oct 2008

PLCC
A few years ago, my lovely girlfriend got me an Aoyue 968 SMD Rework station. SMD stands for surface mount... something. It's how you distinguish integrated circuits that sit on top of a printed circuit board, as opposed to those that have pins that go all the way through the board. Most modern electronic devices have SMD chips, which are mounted mechanically and are a pain to service. You can't replace these components using a normal soldering iron; blowing 300 degree Celsius air or shining hot IR light on them is the only way to melt the solder and recover the component successfully.

I recently bought a copy of Castlevania Legends that wouldn't run past the Konami splash screen. I knew instinctively that this was a problem accessing data on the ROM chip, or perhaps with the memory bank switcher that's common to most original Game Boy cartridges. A few passes with the hot air gun and the right nozzle, and now all the solder is reflowed and there's positive contact on all pins. Maria Belmont lives to fight Dracula. And the woman of my house really knows how to shop for me.

posted at: 20:16 | path: /VideoGames/08Oct | permanent link to this entry | blog home

Mon, 27 Oct 2008

Pointy Rock
After several months of searching, I finally tracked down a copy of Survival Kids for the Game Boy Color. The very first in the series we now know as Lost In Blue, it's a non-standard RPG with a freeform exploration aspect. It's an early example of the sandbox game, where events are dependent on the player's actions and not on pre-programmed plot points happening.

I've had some of the most fun with sandbox games. From Sid Meier's Pirates to the current Grand Theft Auto series, it's nice to be able to wander freely and not worry about getting the next piece of the chalice across the river to the dwarf kingdom before the dragon riders arrive.

posted at: 15:08 | path: /VideoGames/08Oct | permanent link to this entry | blog home

Fri, 24 Oct 2008

Plajiner
I'll post pictures of it later, but I wanted to mention that I picked up a desk clock with Virtual On artwork. It's an officially-released tchotchkie that Sega put out in 1998 to promote the Oratorio Tangram version of the game.

I'm fond of telling people that I love to play Virtual On, but that I'm no damned good at it. It takes real daring and ingenuity to create a game that people will love to play even when there's no chance of winning. This perennially popular giant robot fighting game deserves all the praise it gets, even from hopeless amateurs like me.

posted at: 19:37 | path: /VideoGames/08Oct | permanent link to this entry | blog home

Wed, 22 Oct 2008

Pimp Walk
Let's take a moment to remember Rudy Ray Moore, who passed away last night at the age of 71. Best known to us as Dolemite, Moore continued to write and perform well into the 21st century. And while white audiences never warmed to him, he reached them by proxy through the countless number of performers he influenced and wrote material for. I remember Moore as one of the great minds that connected Asian and black culture in logical and entertaining ways. It's hard out there for a pimp, in part because Dolemite set a fantastic standard no other man could ever meet.

posted at: 09:16 | path: /Media | permanent link to this entry | blog home

Mon, 20 Oct 2008

Palantir
I'm getting way too much entertainment out of the thought that Sean Connery was the original choice to play Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings motion pictures.

"A wishard ish never late, Frodo Bagginsh, nor ish he early. He arrivesh preshishely when he meansh to."

"Shpies of Sharuman! The passhage shouth is being watched!"

"You shall not pash!"

posted at: 18:23 | path: /Media | permanent link to this entry | blog home

Sat, 18 Oct 2008

Permanent Residency
Just picked up Grand Theft Auto IV for the Xbox 360 today. It's the special edition too, with the beautiful metal lockbox and the duffel bag and all the extra tchotchkies that make gamers go crazy. For twenty bucks, it was a nice stealth bargain during a week when the rest of the gaming world was distracted by many new releases and one particular controversy.

My Xbox Live subscription runs out in February. I'm told that the most appealing aspect of GTAIV is the multiplayer function, which would not be available to me if I let the service lapse. On the other hand, I find online gaming to be a patience-testing exercise. Let's see if I can find decent and humble people to play a fantasy crime simulation with.

posted at: 12:52 | path: /VideoGames/08Oct | permanent link to this entry | blog home

Thu, 16 Oct 2008

Potato Chips, Part 2
Saw the second Death Note motion picture just an hour or so ago. Once again, the experience was flavored by the talkative and exclamatory crowd. That might be fine at a high school football game, but not in a darkened theatre. There's a story that Jimi Hendrix was unable to get through a performance in this city due to his audience not quieting down, and so he cursed the place with a long chant and a ceremonial burning of a map from Triple-A. I believe every detail of that story, and I have no expectation of polite behavior from the ignorant hicks that live here.

posted at: 21:23 | path: /Media | permanent link to this entry | blog home

Tue, 14 Oct 2008

Policeman vs. Zombie, Round One
Resident Evil 2 is probably the most popular game in the long-running survival horror series. I keep forgetting that I don't like survival horror games, so I buy them and then I play them, and then I remember that I'm no good at them. But I love pushing the limits of technology, so it wasn't a hard decision to buy the Game.com version of this title. It brings to the tiny, black-and-white handheld all the relative control and complex inventory management of the original game, and it supports many touch screen functions as well.

The game gets full marks for effort and extra points for design, but it doesn't exceed the status of an interesting failure. It's like watching Gilbert Gottfried perform Greek tragedy with sock puppets. It's wrong, but you just can't stop watching it.

posted at: 19:28 | path: /VideoGames/08Oct | permanent link to this entry | blog home

Mon, 13 Oct 2008

Poetic Rhythm and Meter
In the same way that British musicians adopted and improved on rock and roll in the 1960s, performers from Japan have taken the American pop formula and refined it to a three-minute, 21st century perfection. We're seeing this in the States now as popular bands like Flow and The Pillows earn for themselves increasing exposure through the performance of game and television theme songs. Unfortunately, this also means a wider use of "Engrish" lyrics as non-native speakers attempt to write songs in an authentic pop music esperanto. One only has to listen to the opening of Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 to understandingly how crashingly wrong the words can be.

As a hobby, I have taken to 're-translating' Engrish lyrics into properly metered and rhyming lines. I don't yet have the bravery to post these anywhere, much less record new vocals for these songs. Next time I complain about boredom, somebody come and remind me that I have some music to fix.

posted at: 08:13 | path: /Media | permanent link to this entry | blog home

Sat, 11 Oct 2008

Personal Touch
In the face of an illegal monopoly one has to find alternative ways to buy games. I can't say enough kind things about Good Deal Games, the online store based in New York run by Mike Thomasson. He's not only a game enthusiast, but an experienced tester and artist, as well as a savvy businessman. What his website lacks in automation he makes up for with personal service, as every order is conducted with a series of attentive e-mails. I love buying games from this company.

posted at: 16:10 | path: /VideoGames/08Oct | permanent link to this entry | blog home

Fri, 10 Oct 2008

Pax Romanus
Attention, government employee driving the vehicle with license tag GI1-4201G. I'm privileged to fund a portion of your salary and your transportation costs with my federal income tax payment. However, I'm observing that you may be overworked. Specifically, I'm concerned that you may be so wrapped up in the challenging tasks of public service that you are not able to use your left hand to operate the turn signal in your government-issued vehicle. I'd like to kindly ask that you contact your field supervisor and ask for a driver, who will operate the vehicle for you while you are otherwise engaged in your job.

Bye the way, that Chevy Impala you're driving was assembled in Canada. Can you ask your boss to remind his boss that an equivalent Toyota Camry would cost taxpayers about $4,000 less at wholesale, and it would be built in Indiana at a factory that employs Americans? That'd be great. You guys are doing a heckuva job.

posted at: 02:58 | path: /CurrentEvents | permanent link to this entry | blog home

Thu, 09 Oct 2008

Planeswalker
In a moment of weakness, I ordered Heroes of Might and Magic for the Gameboy Color. Generally negative reviews appear to have had no effect on my desire to buy the game, and I would rather get it new in the box with the manual. Given that this is a highly detailed strategy game intended for use with a full keyboard and mouse setup, I don't think it'll be immediately obvious how the interface translates into a directional pad and three buttons. Used, loose copies with no documentation are going on the open market for only five dollars less, so this is worth it in my mind.

The more I read about the Might and Magic series, the more I wish that the 3DO company had found more business success. In retrospect, there seems to have been a real spirit of ingenuity and creativity embodied at 3DO, in a way that is not at all apparent at Trip Hawkins' previous company. As Sega learned (just in time, too) good intentions don't necessarily lead to profits.

posted at: 11:32 | path: /VideoGames/08Oct | permanent link to this entry | blog home