TV Watch: House Season 4 Finale

House was rapidly becoming one of those shows we watched out of habit, but wasn't truly addicted to anymore. Last season's closer definitely peaked our interest enough to dive back into this season, but the whole reality show metaphor in the first quarter felt a bit odd.

But boy golly did they manage to end with a bang. Compare this finale to the one where House was battling ... what was it? An evil administrator? Ooooh. Nooo. Don't administrate me and stuff.

Now House left against who should be his worst enemy - himself. And the whole reality show cast has settled into an interesting blend of the old cast and the new. When House is average, it's really average.

But when it's good? It's really good.

Word of the day: Potemkin Village

Potemkin village: An impressive facade or display that hides an undesirable fact or state; a false front.

Don't know why, just struck me as neat.

Game Play: GTA IV & The PS3

I haven't mastered parking yet, it seems. The dented up semi that I thought I left outside was no longer there when I went tearing back through the neighborhood in the stolen SUV. Course, it was really more of a consolation prize after sending that muscle car off the bridge.

Must remember to take the construction signs more seriously.

So yes, the PS3 arrived yesterday and so GTA IV finally had a home. We briefly tossed San Andreas into the machine, just to watch what would happen. I swear the game is actually a little smoother, like maybe a hardware level of anti-aliasing has been enforced. I rode CJ around his bike for a while, stole a motorcycle and then he went back into the box.

Next we installed GTA IV. And as we were sitting on the couch waiting on the little bar to go to the end (The Girl occasionally egging it on) it seemed to me that maybe it really isn't fair to say PC gaming is dying when the next generation behaves almost as much like a PC as my PC does. I just hope the annoyance ends with installation waits.

When the game finally loaded up, it was an eyeful. Now we're playing this on an SDTV and I can safely say that for the most part it looks completely awesome on an SDTV. In fact, if anything this game has leaned me more to the belief that "720P is sufficient for most everyone" unless you have like a honking 60" set. I mean if the game looks this good at 480i and full resolution isn't even 720P but like 680P or whatnot, then is the extra $700 ever going to pay off?

Still, there's a bit of eye strain involved with all that detail being slightly unfocused. And those text messages are like an eye test from hell. Being the good geek that I am, I'll probably get the 1080P plasma. Probably. But at this point I'm mostly convinced that it will mostly benefit those times we tack a Mac to the thing.

Anyway, GTA IV. We quickly ignored Roman and his constant whining about a taxi and whatnot and went rampaging down the city streets in whatever car we could find. I think this is the first GTA (aside from III) that's required serious adjustment. Having just played San Andreas made flipping to the shoulder controls for driving a bit awkward. The added physics are a little odd as well, but I think in general an improvement as it honestly feels like I have more control of the car at times. Plus all those wonderful physics are great when you plow headlong into an armored truck.

Payday. Yay.

I'll have more on the game and the console later, I'm sure. I downloaded the Haze demo last night to see how it fares on 480i. For now the HDTV purchase is still on hold, but inevitable.

TV Watch: Lost, There's No Place Like Home (Part 1)

Honestly one of the better episodes we've seen in awhile, even with this season's strong return to the quality of writing we had in Season One. This episode mixed Lost's three great strengths: character development, mysterious island happenings and teasing the fans with knowledge. The last one has taken more of a backseat, thankfully, this season as much of this plot has been trying to keep track of who is with whom and how the Oceanic Six become the Oceanic Six.

But first, the first two parts. This episode not only gave us some great moments with the characters - it managed to balance it between Hurley, Jack and Sun and balanced it very well. Each character had some brilliant scenes that helped blend the life back home into a great backdrop. This is rare for the show as it usually provides a lot of focus on one character and handles a subsection of the ensemble in a side plot. Here, both island and off island time was shared well between the players. It gave the episode a rare epic quality that the show has lost touch with from time to time in recent seasons.

Second, we see a bit more of the Island and the Others ... although clearly this is mostly appetizer as the Orchid Station gets opened up a little more. What we're really seeing here is a closer definition of the war that the Losties stumbled into in the first place. My guess: first there was DHARMA, a somewhat well-intended organization out to save the world. Maybe when Hanso was in charge everything was peachy, but as Widmore started to take over, or have more influenced, and The Purge happened. What we have at the beginning of the show is a dysfunctional remnant of that union, with supply drops still occuring thanks to the odd time/space shifting of the Island.

So thirdly - our main question for this season seems pretty clear now. Six people enter a dinghy and head out for a nearby island (whose location will be handed over by Michael). The *real* question now is - what happens to the rest? Things don't look so good for Jin as it's hard to think of him leaving Sun behind (or vice versa). Some portion might remain with the Island as defenders (or get ... Claire'd? what's the verb for become a spooky extension of the Island without dying?)

So definitely looking forward to the two hour finale next week (we get a Grey's Anatomy finale this week).

Game Play: Back in San Andreas & GTA IV PC

So the PS3 is to arrive tomorrow. GTA IV actually already arrived at the office, sans anything to play it on. If you think that shows enough of our Grand Theft Fanboyism, it should also be noted we've spent most of our available gaming time last week and this weekend on GTA: San Andreas.

Spoilers ahead, btw.

We've actually pretty quickly hit that bittersweet moment in the game where CJ has pulled Grove Street from the ashes and The Girl is now delighting taking hood after hood in the Gang Wars minigame. I'll be honest that I'll miss this gameplay in the GTA IV. While it certainly could have been more sophisticated, that there was this completely optional portion of the game which lets you control most of Los Santos (and earn money from the territory) adds a lot to the game. When we played through before, we obsessively hunted down every little section, even the obviously buggy 10x10 squares that Rockstar probably never assumed anyone would. One of the great things about this subgame is that the storyline takes it away from you. We spent hours and hours on this originally and one act of betrayal and we were exiled out into the country - all our hard work stripped away. A brilliant combination of narrative and gameplay if there ever was one.

The Girl loves it as she was never really into the missions. She loves the franchise for allowing her to unleash wanton violence on the world.

Heck, one of the reasons I have a PS2 is because I would come home to find my PC occupied with flame-thrower induced mayhem and darn if I didn't have some modding to do. Which brings up an interesting side question: Why won't Rockstar announce a PC version of GTA IV?*. We're talking about a franchise which started on the PC, has always faithfully ported games at least 6-8 months after and has enjoyed a decent modding community on the PC.

Basically I've got two theories. One is that the new engine Rockstar now enjoys, RAGE, isn't up and running on the PC yet and so they have no timetable to base a port on. I occasionally give people a work a response something along the lines of "this is either going to be really easy or just near impossible" meaning that most of it is simple (there is already a 360 build after all) but there might be one or two key questions that could hold the whole thing up. It's not terribly easy to put that into a PR release.

Second is my PC pessimism rant. Having already broken records and made money hand over fist, Rockstar might just decide that the money will be best spent moving ahead on the franchise and avoiding the delay that we saw before getting our hands on San Andreas. The PC version of San Andreas accounts for a mere fraction of the current 21.5 million total ... although to be fair so does the Xbox version - which probably is a shared position of having lost out of the initial launch.

Course the PC is in that position now. And while the mod community can certainly be notable, it's failed to push any serious after-market sales in the way that Counter-Strike did for the original Half-Life or Epic's Editor's Edition did for UT2004 (albeit on a much smaller scale, of course). Tack on that Hot Coffee hit Take Two particularly hard and you have a platform which doesn't measure up a lot of dollars out of the total pie.

But my real answer is all of the above. If RAGE can be made to run on the PC, and it doesn't cost too much, and they can make sure there's no way Hot Coffee can be repeated (like not keeping unused sex games in the code, for instance) - we'll see a PC version announced and/or released around the holidays.

Anyway, we're going to back to roll on some Ballas. We got this game like three years ago and it's still pretty addictive. Hopefully GTA IV looks decent enough on the SDTV...



* For the record, this happened when GTA: SA came out too. It was a "PS2 Exclusive" and much hand-wringing was to be had. So there's a decent chance that there's a lot of speculation over nothing.

Why XP And OLPC Is A Good Thing

Yeah, I know. I'm a bit surprised too. I'm going to defend Microsoft here. I'm going to defend them pretty hard, actually.

News that the OLPC will offer XP (check out the video) has been met with a kind of rabid fanboy reaction that is usually reserved for knee jerk comparisons between screenshots to determine if a 360 bloom effect is better than a PS3 bloom effect.

Here's Mike Arrington of TechCrunch:

There are no financial terms being disclosed, although it wouldn’t be dumb to assume that not only is the software being supplied for free, but Microsoft made a healthy donation to the organization as well. The last thing Microsoft wants is for anyone who’s computer literate to think that a world without Microsoft Windows is possible.

On the upside, though, the pain of having to deal with Windows crashes may make some of these kids excellent technical support people over time. They’d just get lazy with Linux being so stable all the time.

If it isn’t obvious from what I’ve written above, I’m not impressed. OLPC is in danger of becoming a celebrity cause rather than a real attempt to bridge the digital divide. My guess is Linux worked just fine as an operating system for these machines.

-- Poor Children Of The World No Longer Will Have To Struggle With Linux

First - let us note that he assumes Microsoft has made a "healthy donation" to an organization trying to give poor kids laptops and manages to turn that into a bad thing. As if OLPC will be more successful if they had less money.

Second, Mike here continues to repeat a common shortcut ... referring to the OLPC OS as Linux. While that's technically accurate - it runs a version of Red Hat, this version, called Sugar, runs a pretty experimental UI. While Sugar has some interesting design concepts and I'm sure was developed with a truckload of good intentions - the result is a bit of nightmare.

I should note here that I've actually used an OLPC. I didn't use it for very long. I didn't use it for very long because in general I found the OS to be horribly confusing and after trying out some of the apps, it seemed to have more or less crashed.

This is a pretty important distinction Mike and most of the Internet is overlooking. This not about XP versus Linux, per se, this is about XP versus Sugar. And if you asked me which one I'd rather have a poor kid in a developing country use, I will say XP. And I will say it repeatedly.

It's not Microsoft's fault that Sugar is a mess of theoretical design concepts that were never properly tested. OLPC did no usability testing, a move that UI guru Jakob Nielsen called "reckless". OLPC was even proud of this fact:

But XO developers defend their approach, which grew out of a core philosophy of the MIT Media Lab known as "demo or die." Researchers are encouraged to build new things, critique them, and then make improvements—rather than doing a lot of concept-testing up front. They're backed up by John Maeda, a user-interface design guru from the Media Lab who has been watching the XO development process from its beginnings. "They're using the Steve Jobs method," he says, referring to Apple's famous chief executive and design whiz. "You don't use focus groups. You just do it right."

-- The Face of the $100 Laptop

"Just do it right" makes for a great quote and all, but it's actually a pretty miserable development philosophy. And for the record, it is not Apple's philosophy. Here's is the first line from the first chapter of the first part of Apple's document "Apple Human Interface Guidelines":

The best way to make sure your product meets the needs of your target audience is to expose your designs to the scrutiny of your users.

And the second line:

Doing this during every phase of the design process can help reveal which features of your product work well and which need improvement.

Not doing these things will lead to things like shipping a web browser without a location bar, or things like this:

To that end, Sugar offers a simple technique for moving objects—a document, say, or an image—from one application to another. A student can pluck a photo off of a Web site by clicking on it and dragging it to the left side of the frame. Then, after she launches another activity on the display screen, she can click on the icon for the photo and drag it onto the screen. The drop-off spot on the frame is conceived as a "pocket" that the kids can use to carry around things they want to use later.

-- The Face of the $100 Laptop

Because drag, drop and a desktop metaphor have worked so horribly for decades. That someone approached this OS thinking that kids will not get dragging and dropping makes me wonder if they ever bothered to even meet a kid before starting. Most I've ever known take to new technology remarkably well in that freaky "my five year old speaks better French than you" kind of way.

And while this probably reads as indictment of Sugar, which it is, the real point here is that all of this "Microsoft against Linux" talk really should be more about a "Desktop based OS against whatever the hell Sugar is" kind of talk. Maybe if this was XP displacing Ubuntu running Open Office scenario, I could all like "MS is evil" or stuff.

But if OLPC is actually supposed to bridge developing countries to the modern world, then showing them the computer paradigm the modern world uses instead of someone's untested experiment makes perfect sense.

So let's stop with the hate. Not everything Microsoft touches withers and dies. Just because a kid grows up using XP doesn't mean that he won't discover Linux or OS X later.

In fact, he's more likely to be able to discover both of those by having used XP out of the gate instead of Sugar.

Thanks to Thomas for the post that got me thinking about all this in the first place. Also of note is 90% Of Everything's usability review of Sugar.

Rumor Mill: 3G Phone out June 27th, Not Cheap

This ModMyiFone post links a few supposed leaks from AT&T managers (who apparently forgot their Steve Jobs Secrecy Oath) together to state that the 3G iPhone will be out late June and that the 8GB and 16GB will cost $599 and $699 respectively.

Personally I don't notice the lack of 3G much. Course, that's because I have a tendency to go from one wifi network to another wifi network and if reading Google Reader takes a little bit longer on the bus it's really quite fine since it's better than wondering when the constant braking will pull my arm out of the socket anyway.

In related news, it turns out I'll be at WWDC (when all this will probably be officially announced, along with more AppStore details). I'm actually pretty psyched. The last time I spent five days rolling around new technology was when Netscape announced Communicator.

OK, now I just feel old.

No Force Unleashed PC ... Why Again?

Anyone buying this?

The Force Unleashed takes place between Star Wars Episodes III and IV and puts players in the shoes of Darth Vader's secret apprentice and is due out in September for the PS3, Wii, DS, PSP, PS2, and Xbox 360. Suey elaborated why there will be no PC version of the game in an interview with Videogamer.com.

If LucasArts had delivered a PC version, it would have been based on the Xbox 360 and PS3 versions of the game, which feature new technologies that LucasArts has either licensed or helped to develop, such as the Euphoria for emotion-based character actions and Digital Molecular Matter for destructable materials.

"The PC being the gaming platform that it is, someone with a $4,000 high-end system would definitely be able to play the Euphoria, the DMM and really technical elements of the game. But someone with a low-end PC would have a watered down experience, they would have to turn all the settings down and it wouldn't be the same game," said Suey.

Suey believes that developing the game to reach a more mass market will hinder the potential of killer rigs. Therefore, no matter how you cut it, only "a select few people" can enjoy the game as it was intended.

-- IGN: No Force Unleashed For PC

Um. Wait. There's a version out for the Wii and the DS but the PC version got cut because the majority of PC hardware isn't powerful enough?

And does it really take $4K to play a game designed for the PS3 or the 360? Four grand? That's a top notch rig right there. You can get a pretty powerful one for under three two grand and most of the older boxes out there could be upgraded for a few hundred.

I think what Suey isn't saying, but he might actually mean, is that the power PC gamer market is of a size that is hard to justify the cost of the port. This is similar to the story that we've heard from other game houses, like longtime PC developer Epic. It's piracy, it's QA and it's support costs. These are all much larger factors on a home computer running a standard DVD drive with parts of a dozen or so manufacturer than it is with a console running a custom format made in one consistent manner.

It's a very bad sign for the PC game market in general when they start losing even the cross platform titles.

DVD Watch: Idiocracy

Idiocracy is one of those sleeper hits which has found a nice niche as a cult favorite. From Mike Judge (Beavis And Butthead, Office Space), the movie details what happens when smart people decline to have kids and morons have ten ... 500 years into the future.

The result is pretty funny and while the movie suffers a little bit from being a one joke note - it manages to try and refresh the joke enough times to make it work. Throw in some cameos (including Judge alum Stephen Root), enough crude humor to fill a Brawndo barrel and you have a pretty winning formula.

Apparently Fox wasn't so amused. As the film's distributor, they provided no real advertising and didn't screen for critics. This is often attributed to the anti-corporate message and Rudolph Murdoch's failed sense of humor. Or as The Girl pointed out, in light of Fox's handling of Family Guy, Futurama and even Firefly ... "they like to kill the fun".

Definitely recommended.

Also For Sunday: Little Big Planet, Killzone Style

Part of me posts this simply because IGN's annoying ads actually plastered themselves ontop of the video when I tried to watch it - and I care enough about you to try and save you from that fate.

TV Watch: Lost, Cabin Fever

How the hell did I miss that Claire identified Christian Shepherd as her *dad* last week? Did we get that confirmed earlier and I missed that too? I knew it was a widely held assumption, but *damn* I gotta stop watching my recordings late at night.

So this episode was mostly filler, but I'm willing forgive this for two reasons. One is that what was not filler was ooey gooey John Locke goodness and quite honestly that's an easy formula to keep me liking the show. Setting parallels between John and Ben is narratively sound, quite interesting and makes keeping Ben around (he was, apparently, supposed to be only a minor character at one point) seem sensible and worthwhile. That John is a man who until his walkabout fought his destiny and now is the island's chosen warrior helps the entire story move along.

The second reason is that while the rest was largely filling in lines between dots on a map (getting Sayid closer to saving people off the beach, explaining the doctor's death, etc) - I can't knock the show for filling in a few gaps when I so frequently knock the show for *not* filling in the gaps. Gaps like how Ben could control the smoke monster or why Abaddon would at one point be working to get John on the island and one point working with Widmore.

See - I just can't help myself.

But with this episode the picture gets clearer, not cloudier, and that always helps. We can see how some leave the island, some stay behind (I doubt they all die at this point) and the island moves away (as we could guess by Widmore's inability to return to ti) and leaves the "war" in the state we see during the flashforwards.

Course, massive holes still abound. Like how Claire magically seems to be, well, dead. How dead people seem to appear in dreams and in real life on the island. How physical things on the island can seem to vanish and reappear - but the Jacob ... er, I mean, the island can't simply vanish a troup of psychotic mercenaries. Why a group of scientists would even be mixed in with said mercenaries in the first places (does Faraday really seem the type to wait around for people to get slaughtered? Or stupid enough to think the mercs would be doing anything else?). Stuff like that.

But for a show seemed mostly interested in padding it's own character subplots, the show has come a long way this season.

I don't think you've met my mom...

Mother's Day might seem like just another Hallmark style holiday to the untrained eye, but anyone who's worked retail knows that for some sectors it's essentially an abridged Thanksgiving. I can't back this up with any numbers, but I'm pretty certain it's Crate's third largest holiday (course there is a huge gap to number four, I believe ... sorry Father's Day).

Apparently this fact has obviously not escaped the attention of other sectors. While flowers and household goods might be obvious - it seems that some people want memory cards and DVD burners to be in the mix. Now look, Outpost.com and TigerDirect - I'm not saying that we should support any kind of gender bias here or anything, but I'm pretty sure even my *dad* would find a 22" LCD monitor a pretty damn lame gift on *his* holiday.

I get that we're a capitalist culture and all but c'mon ... wasn't killing Christmas enough?

For Sunday: Clone Wars Animated Trailer

Looks moderately sweet. I still think Genndy did an excellent job, but honestly it seems like anyone does a better job than Lucas when it comes to telling the Star Wars saga.

Of Breakpoints And Puppies

Work is pretty lenient with us being able to use the home as an office - which is most thankful as recently there's been a spat of SARS and root canals which honestly just feels a bit dangerous to me. For me that means that my day usually gets punctuated between phone calls, long IM chats, our 13 year old puppy demanding attention and lately - setting several breakpoints in the hopes of running down bugs.

On that last note - I am hereby swearing never to brag again about achieving something with iPhone development. The last time was when I uploaded a record to Salesforce and when I decided, moments later, to try the same code on the actual hardware ... it crashed. Yesterday it was when I figured out my memory leak when it came to threading and when I decided, moments later, to try the same code on the actual hardware ... it crashed. It's not a happy trend.

I'm actually installing the new SDK as we speak. Overall development has been pretty much a joy, but trying to track down a mysterious crash yesterday was pretty frustrating and apparently the very download I'm installing now corrupted our other OS X developer's compile - so I may have that to look forward to.

Alongside my three hour fight with breakpoints, The Girl pulled an 11 hour day - so the long of the short of all this is that we're tired and I won't be talking about Lost just now.

The Brewing SAG Strike

Remember when the WGA strike ended? There was much rejoicing and then we *still* had to wait like a month for new episodes (since we still hadn't learned that these shows write themselves).

Following the Lostpedia Blog (because I am still at least that much of a Lost geek) informs me that we might have a SAG strike to deal with instead. Current contracts expire in the quickly arriving June 30th date, and there's no resolution in sight right now.

Still - would anyone in Hollywood want to repeat the last few months? I would hope that this alone would push some kind of agreement before July hits.