Cathode Tan

[Logically Speaking] Santorum vs. Gay Marriage

2012-01-29T16:47:00.000-08:00

I generally try to keep politics out of Cathode Tan, but sometimes politicians just say things which are simply an affront to logic itself.

And yes, I'm talking about Rick Santorum. Faithful Cathode Tanners also know that I'm a fairly staunch advocate of gay rights - though I generally just consider it advocating human rights. Anyone who has actually spent time with a loving, faithful gay couple and walks away with the thought that "we should totally ban that" ... well, I just can't see how it doesn't come from a place of fear and ignorance.

When the politicians use logic to cover up that fear and ignorance - it requires logic to set that right.

When Santorum is asked about gay marriage, he often applies the "slippery slope" argument, that for instance legalizing gay marriage would in turn open the door to legalizing polygamy. Here's Santorum laying out his so-called argument:

Rick says that if we are going to have a conversation about one, we have to distinguish the other for him.

So let's do that.

Let's outline Rick's logic.

All people have the right to be happy.
Because gay marriage would make some people happy, it should be legalized.
However, marrying multiple people would also make some people happy.
Therefore, if we legalize gay marriage - we will need to legalize polygamy as well.

This is a classic straw man argument. The formula here goes:

You have proposed X.
I can prove Y is similar to X.
Y is undesirable.
Therefore, X is also undesirable.

The problem is, of course, that X != Y. It's a substitution for a real argument when you lack the facts to actually distinguish X from Y. This is why it works for Santorum as a stump response. The potential voter is prepared to talk about gay marriage, not polygamy - and so is placed in the same camp of not really being able to distinguish X from Y.

The first fundamental problem comes from Rick's first statement.

All people have the right to be happy.

Which is a) not the original argument and b) isn't factual. We have a constitutional imperative, as it were, to the "pursuit of happiness" - but we have laws in place because if being a serial killer makes you happy the state still has the right to track you down and place you in the electric chair (your state laws may vary). So no, not everyone has the right to be happy.

A more factual opening statement would be:

The state should not create laws which impede a citizen's pusuit of happiness without proof of harm to the state or citizens.

At this point we don't need to worry about introducing ridiculous arguments like I can kill people because it puts a smile on my face. It should also neatly remove equally ridiculous arguments like "legalizing gay marriage would open the door to bestiality or pedophilia" since proof of harm in such cases easily fall under sexual and/or physical abuse. So let's continue with this as our opening statement (we'll lump citizens and state into one here as well).

The state should not create laws which impede a citizen's pursuit of happiness without proof of harm to the state or other citizens.
There's no evidence which shows gay marriage causes harm to to the state and therefore should not be made illegal.
However, there's also no evidence that polygamy causes harm to the state and therefore should also not be made illegal.
Therefore - if we legalize gay marriage, we should legalize polygamy as well.

So ... that's a more realistic framing of Santorum's argument. And there's one problem, at least for Santorum. In this state, it actually holds water. Without proof that polygamy causes harm - perhaps it as well should be legalized as well.

You read it here first: logically speaking - Rick Santorum supports legalizing polygamy. Once you remove the moral panic aspect of it, at least. Of course, Santorum's biggest stock is moral panic. If he's going to try to attack polygamy as well as gay marriage - he should really get some facts on both first.

The case against polygamy is rather complicated and gets very quickly wrapped into cultural specifics like child marriages. However, existing laws in place should provide the protection of children. Probably a more utilitarian issue also provides a segue into a core issue of the rest of the debate - legalizing polygamy could likely tear a hole in our tax and estate code that current lawbooks aren't really willing to deal with. It's not the definition of marriage which causes an issue here, it's the fact that you've now compounded the possibilities of what was previously defined. "1 Man, 1 Woman" simply makes for an enforceable tax code - far more than "X number of men, and X number of women."

The ramifications on divorce alone would keep the lawmakers busy for years. So we can leave whether polygamy would result in direct societal harm and state that our current legal structure isn't yet equipped to deal with it.

You know, kinda like how lawmakers are currently handling the Internet and plenty of other technological issues.

Since gay marriage is clearly a different issue than polygamy and we've laid out a case for why polygamy should not be (currently) legalized which does not effect our case for gay marriage, our argument now looks like this:

The state should not create laws which impede a citizen's pursuit of happiness without proof of harm to the state or other citizens.
There's no evidence which shows gay marriage causes harm to to the state and therefore should not be made illegal.
Therefore we should legalize gay marriage.

We can remove polygamy completely as it has no bearing on either the original statement nor the outcome. The only real issue at stake here is our second statement. There are now studies which show that gay marriage raises well adjusted kids, some evidence that lesbians may be better parents than their heterosexual peers and even some that state it is good for the economy. Also, statistically speaking - even if gay marriage were to become legal in every state ... the overall percentage of gay marriage would still be extremely small - so any impact on society (good or bad) would likely be minimal making our second statement fairly safe.

The problem Santorum has from a logical perspective is that the slippery slope began not when people began to propose gay marriage - but rather when the federal government got into the business of defining marriage in the first place. By placing this definition on the books, it clearly opens the door for changing said definition down the road. If Santorum and his ilk really want to "defend" the nation from gay marriage - the only logical method would be to bar the government from legalizing marriage at all. Remove the federal definition, and you remove any chance that the government will "permit" it. By insisting on a definition is to invite a debate on changing that definition - that's simply how our government works. This would in fact be the most direct route to get what the far right wants - a definition of marriage organic enough to be bound by local laws and morals.

Of course - this would also remove the benefits of formalizing legal marriage. Tax benefits, a legal framework for familial issues and a definition for estate laws all directly benefit society. In other words, all the reasons why legalizing polygamy would be inherently difficult (if not undesirable) are justifications for creating a legal framework for marriage.

So now our argument looks like this:

A legal framework for marriage benefits society.
Excluding gays from marriage benefits fewer people than inclusion.
Including gay marriage into the legal framework will increase the benefits offered from the marital legal framework.
Therefore, gay marriage should be legalized.

Any questions? If you're going to respond in rebuttal, please:

Don't use religion as justification. This is why we have separation of church and state. Leviticus quotes may simply get deleted.
Same goes for gay bashing. Take it elsewhere. Or preferably, nowhere. Insults and the like may also simply get deleted.
If you're going to quote studies, please link to them.
As a warning - beware of editorials which can't prove causation. Yes, I've read them.

[In The News] The Old "Consoles Will Block Used Games" Returns

2012-01-27T09:32:00.001-08:00

Long time readers of Cathode Tan might remember back when the PlayStation 3 was about to roll out, we got tons of interesting news posts of very dubious quality, not the least fervent that the PlayStation 3 wouldn't play used video games. It started with a rumor based on a patent, got twisted, add a big of blog phone game and then the Guardian was reporting the rumor (only to get it later vetted and pulled).

Well ... it's baaaack. Via Kotaku:

But that disc detail could be far less impactful to the next generation of game consoles than the assertion I've heard from one reliable industry source that Microsoft intends to incorporate some sort of anti-used game system as part of their so-called Xbox 720.

It's not clear if that means that the system wouldn't play used games or how such a set-up would work. Obvious approaches—I'm theorizing here—like linking a copy of a game to a specific Xbox Live account could seemingly be foiled by used-game owners who would keep their system offline. My source wasn't sure how Microsoft intended to implement any anti-used game system in the new machine.

-- Sources: The Next Xbox Will Play Blu-Ray, May Not Play Used Games (And Will Introduce Kinect 2)

Emphasis mine. First, let's set aside the notion that the next gen Xbox will use Sony's Blu-Ray for a whole other rumor-busting post. Let's focus on the concept of reporting something based on an anonymous source who can't provide any actual details on how this might work. If you can't detail how this might work - I don't see what the point is in reporting it at all. How this would work is the story. Last time, people were actually thinking the PS3 would scratch a notch into the disc to determine if it had been played.

We'll also set aside the questionable grammar of describing obvious approaches and only describing one approach and instead focus on the notion that the theory is hypothesizing using Microsoft's paid online service for punishing used game owners.

Because yeah - that sounds like a decent business strategy. Hey, I finally signed up for Xbox Live. Why aren't my old games I bought at GameStop playing?? Unsubscribe.

So not so much obvious, more like ridiculously bad customer trust.

Look people - the games industry might see the used games market as some kind of "grey market" area where they don't see any revenue while GameStop sells a $59.99 game once for $59.99 and then again for $56.88 ... but Microsoft's (or Sony's) role as a game publisher isn't going to override their need to sell consoles and XBox Live. And any strategy down this general direction would do just exactly that.

And that's aside from the point that I've yet to hear anyone give a technical method which would actually work. Bad business and sketchy technology? Not buying it. Let's wait for some real 720 news.

Which out of the original article is ... uh, yay! Kinect 2!

[Gratuitous Plug] To Trust The Wolf

2012-01-22T13:35:00.000-08:00

So my brother wrote a book which you can grab from virtually every e-service on the planet. The summary:

As the mundanes riot against the control of the witches, threatening to tear the fragile realm of Raioume apart, the Gran Mater of the Coven races to defend one little girl who holds the key to mankind's future, only to find her beset by ancient demons the Gran Mater had assumed long vanquished.

So begins the story of Perdita Perrault, an awkward but precocious young witch who struggles to find her place in the world, a path which ultimately leads her to the Gran Mater's greatest enemy, the vicious and blood-thirsty Wolf King, Lupus Rex.

To Trust the Wolf is the first book of the Little Red series of novels, set in a land filled with political intrigue, governed by a matriarchal society led by a martial order, the Red Cloaks. The story of the Gran Mater, Perdita, and Lupus Rex weaves a dramatic thriller against a backdrop of magic, witches, and wolves that will captivate and enthrall.

-- Smashwords

You can buy it from Amazon or Barnes & Noble. I've got my copy on Kindle on the trusty iPad - to be read soon during business trips when I once again forget how heavy the volumnious hardback edition of 1Q84 is...

Game Play: Kingdoms of Amalur Demo

2012-01-18T10:47:00.000-08:00

It's been about a month, faithful reader (or both of you - if the other guy is still around) ... the holiday drag is now nearly officially over and the gaming hangover which has been the survival of all of those November releases is behind us.

I could tell you about Uncharted 3 - which is simply one of the most technically impressive games on any platform to date. It's just so ... so ... insanely solid. The writing, the animation, the graphics, the inner mechanics - everything just clicks.

But you probably already knew that. You might not have known about the Kingdoms of Amalur demo which just dropped on PSN and XBLA. It's gotten some legs in the press because of Ken Rolston, of Morrowind and Oblivion fame, coming out of retirement to help retire it.

The main feeling on the net, even before playing it, is that the game is a mashup of Skyrim (or more generally, The Elder Scrolls in general) and Fable. There's a little truth to that - but I think either comparison is dangerous. Rolston's stamp is certainly all of this game - in the latter portion of the demo you can essentially go and do whatever you want. So I tried to steal from a store, got caught, busted out of prison and went on a killing spree on the townsfolk as they tried to reign me in. And that was all in like twenty minutes.

But the world design feels more like World of Warcraft, or I suppose Fable - if Fable was far less linear. You don't quite get that "what is over that hill" feeling you get in Skyrim - but that doesn't mean the world isn't open to explore. The combat mechanics are very difficult to describe - they easily transcend the usual button mash + power attack of most action RPG's by forcing players to dodge and defend themselves ... as well as pay close attention to the tactics of the enemy which change impressively from one type to the next, but I certainly wouldn't call it "strategic".

The thing is - Amalur is so clearly utilizing the playbooks of other games that describing it without making comparisons is difficult. The problem is if you were honest - you would be making comparisons not just to Rolston's previous games, but WoW, Fable, God of War, most Bioware RPG's and probably wear yourself out by the time you remembered Nethack.

What Amalur has going for it is some excellent design and mechanics. Unfortunately the demo appears to be plagued by more than a few bugs - I noticed a few "hall of mirrors" ... a graphics glitch when the rendering engine doesn't know what to render. Other players have reported crash level gltiches. As anyone who has read Cathode know, I've beaten on the rotting corpse of the horse which is Bethesda's miserable QA process in the past ... and hope Amalur won't have such issues.

One thing that I noted: I don't know if the lack of specific save is because it is a demo, or will be part of the game. Not being able to have multiple save points would give the game a sort of permadeath like quality (not really, but actions would have consequences you can't take back ... like murdering a whole town). I'll be curious to see what the full version has in the way of save game control.

Full version comes out Feb. 17th - very much looking forward to it, if it isn't too crash-laden.

Why Skyrim is not Game Of The Year Worthy ( and Bethesda certainly not studio of the year )

2011-12-13T23:47:00.000-08:00

The recent marketing spun Spike awards granted the latest version of Skyrim both Game of the Year and Bethesda studio of the year.

I wish I could feel differently, but these accolades are really a sad reflection on the industry leaning towards the figure of sales on a certain product rather than actual quality. In my initial play of Skyrim, I thought it a high watermark of the RPG genre ... and well it should have been, except for the thousandfold number of bugs which have been found within the game since people have played the game for the hours for which it was designed.

Many professional review sites have boasted playing the game for 50 hours or more. 50 hours on the design of Skyrim is nothing. Most users play the game for over 100 hours, if not 200 hours before what they consider completion. Skyrim should not be granted lenience because the designed hours of play is far greater than the industry average ... this should be rewarded greatly but only if Bethesda can offer it without the sacrifice of quality.

Honestly, I don't think they can. And after their marketing brigade about how Skyrim is based on a completely new engine - which is clearly a false assumption ... I don't know how any gamer can trust Bethesda again as a game studio.

I'm not going to replicate the many videos out there showing the horrendous performance on the PlayStation 3. I haven't seen this kind of performance, but what I have seen are these insane quest breaking bugs, like the inability to break through spider webs with a two-handed sword:

Spider webs, Bethesda? Seriously? I didn't hack this quest in any way ... in fact I can run through it twice and get completely different results on spiderwebs which can result in me being able to finish the quest or not.

Someone at Bethesda please explain how this is possibly the result of modern quality assurance. How is this anything remotely in the realm of acceptable loss?

Update: My video on the map being confusing to use was pointed out to be more of a usability nightmare than really a technical issue with the game. OK, I'll grant that. I'll also grant that it was probably a factor of being annoyed at running into both the Blood on the Ice quest breaker and the quest breaker above.

Fine. It isn't like you have to throw a stone very far to find other examples of quest breakers.

Like this one:

Or this (glitch doesn't happen again for this guy until towards the end of the vid):

Or this (seen this one documented a few times):

Or this one where you can get out of the Mind of Madness quest, and find yourself unable to do anything:

And so on, and so forth, etc. and yada yada.

I may have enjoyed Skyrim, but that really does not excuse the media's ability to completely ignore Bethesda's inability to properly test their software title after title.

Bethesda Owes Gamers Truth on "Creation" Engine (hint: It's still Gamebryo)

2011-12-05T15:49:00.000-08:00

I'm not even going to go back and drag up all the posts I've made about Fallout: New Vegas and what a horrible bugfest it was.

The important thing here: it's still broken for some players, even today.

Now, like myself, many other gamers who experienced the nightmare which was Fallout: New Vegas were delighted to hear that it was going to use an all-new engine. And when I say it was reported to use an all-new engine, I mean: Bethesda themselves stated that the engine for TES V: Skyrim would be all-new.

I'm not even paraphrasing here, not even a little bit. Now, if you read through that recent FO:NV forum post, you'll see that the user is stating that the game becomes unplayable after the save file reaches a certain file size.

Gee, I dunno? Sound familiar? Yup, it's the exact same issue that everyone is talking about with Skyrim on the PlayStation 3. And what is the most technical explanation for the problem that has been released to date?

It's the one offered by Obsidian, the developer of Fallout: New Vegas. It explains how the Gamebryo based games use a file strategy to track the changes throughout the game world, and how consoles can have problems loading and managing those changes into memory. No memory = no performance.

Now, I've been lucky. I've had a few quest bugs and the occasional performance issues. I've had two crashes. I've had maybe a handful of lockups. From my time with the game, I would say that I'd stick to my guns in that compared to Fallout: New Vegas - it is a godsend, and compared to normal games it is only slightly buggy.

But - that's me. There's now plenty of video evidence that other players of Skyrim are experiencing what I experienced with Fallout: New Vegas (and to a slightly lesser degree, Fallout). I don't know why I'm one of the lucky ones - but that isn't really the point. The point here is that I bought Skyrim because I thought it was an all-new engine, as did many other people.

But how is it that an "all-new" engine has the same fundamental problem as the last engine, with apparently the same save file structure and loading concepts as well?

How is it that items in the world are rendered and handled in almost the exact same manner as the old engine? Sure, the textures look nicer and Bethesda has cranked up the pretty in all sorts of ways, but someone who has played all the Gamebryo games can't load up Skyrim and deny the fact that the game looks and feels just like the old games did.

All-new engine, my ass. All new graphics pipeline, perhaps. Kicking Speedtree to the curb and implementing your own plant-life, sure. New ways of loading textures, maybe.

But at the end of the day - the so called "Creation" engine is just lipstick on a pig. Bethesda hasn't even been able to fix the problems with their last game, but they continue to march on with the same core technology ... only this time with more of PR spin to give gamers false confidence.

That's pretty shameful, and there are a lot of Skyrim players ... especially on the PS3 ... with plenty of righteous anger at the company right now.

I really don't know if I'll buy the next Bethesda game. I can't trust the Gamebryo engine, and I can't trust Bethesda when they say they aren't using it.

Game Play: Skyrim

2011-11-16T10:37:00.000-08:00

Update: Obviously I was a bit hasty, as several PS3 owners are reporting that after save files of a certain size, the game will start to increase in lag while playing until slowly becoming unplayable.

My own file size is about 9mb, and I have had a few issues like what is being reported - but can still make an afternoon out of it. Currently on a thumbs sideways kind of judgement. Bethesda has a patch coming out supposedly after Thanksgiving, but no confirmation that patch will fix it.

I'm still a big fan of the game in general, but feel for the PS3 players. And some of the player stories are of the kind I can't recommend it for the PS3 anymore. This is absurd, Bethesda, just absurd.

Faithful readers of Cathode Tan (and yes, I am referring to both of your) know that I have frequently felt that for the Fallout titles in particular frequently performed, shall we say, less than the standard amount of quality assurance. I won't bore with a bunch of old links, but let us just say that the terms "buggiest" "game" and "ever" might have been used in regards with words like "New Vegas".

Seriously, a bug which can be fixed by wearing the right in-game hat? Seriously? A few months ago Bethesda released an update to New Vegas which reportedly fixed all the crashes, slowdowns, world holes, and other game breakers. I tried it out for about five minutes before realizing that my experience with all the previous bugs had sucked every ounce of desire to ever play the game again out of my marrow.

So let us just say that I bought Skyrim with some trepidation. Sure, I hadn't read any previews mentioning bugs - but it isn't like the gaming media has done a particularly good job calling Bethesda out on these issues, usually sidelining it to a paragraph in a review and then just giving the game a 9/10 anyway.

I've now spent many, many, many hours in Skyrim on the PS3.

Many hours.

And I haven't had a single serious technical problem. I've run into the very rare temporary slowdown. There was one instance where the ground didn't load and I could fall into it. Compared to the "grinding slowdown to a crash" of the previous games, Skyrim is quality assurance nirvana. But more importantly, compared to most games out there - Skyrim is easily as stable if not slightly more so.

Why is this so important? Why am I devoting several paragraphs starting out this review to it? Simple. I'm astonished with how utterly complete the experience is without all the glitches and crashes of the previous games. That Skyrim is more graphically intense than the previous engine is nice, but being able to wander the Nord countryside without worrying about a crash was the real mission Bethesda needed to succeed.

Skyrim essentially takes some of the best concepts from the recent Fallout games, wraps them within the expansive RPG concepts of Elder Scrolls and delivers them in a very eye pleasing package. Bethesda is declaring the Creation Engine a completely new engine, as opposed to the Gamebryo engine of the past titles. How much is completely new I somewhat wonder - there is an awful lot about the game which has the identical feel from the Gamebryo titles ... but whatever is new, old or slightly updated - Bethesda has gotten this one right.

Elder Scrolls fans will be familiar with the core mechanics here. Wander the countryside, stumble onto adventures, advance your skills by using them, and otherwise take in the open world RPG events of Skyrim. The amount of content available to the player is insane. I've currently got about twenty open quests, I think, and I don't know when I'll finish them because I'll stumble onto new ones while questing.

There's some streamlining at play here over the older games. The crafting is simpler, and I feel as if magical items are more functional and useful than they were in Morrowind or Oblivion. I find myself using the same strategy as I have before - a kind of mage/warrior/thief hybrid which works wonderfully with Skyrim's skill system. I've seen YouTube videos of more "pure" builds and it seems that the game properly rewards you for either type of play.

My complaints are rather small. Item management is still a burden, even once you get a faithful companion to offload some items. Some missions feel a bit too linear, too hack and slash. There have been a couple of the puzzles which honestly the solution was more annoying than entertaining. But these are just tiny issues in an otherwise epic game.

Skyrim is simply one of the best RPG games to ever grace any console or PC. It's the high watermark of the game design and philosophy of the Elder Scroll franchise. I'm quite glad to now be in a camp where I can look forward to the future titles instead of dreading a soul crushing experience.

Highly recommend.

Unless you have a PS3. Sadly. Until Bethesda and PS3 gamers can confirm a proper fix.

Movie Watch: Paranormal Activity 3

2011-11-07T10:22:00.000-08:00

I've generally been a pretty big fan of the Paranormal Activity franchise. I got some friends to re-watch the first two prior to heading out to see the third. I think one of the most positive things about this series is its ability to dig deeper into the history of the story with every installment without feeling overly forced.

By itself, Paranormal Activity 3 holds its own against the first two movies. There is still the methodic observations on everyday life and scenes where nothing goes on at all just to set that creepy baseline for the viewer. There is still the judicial use of sound of effects to warn the viewer that something is about to jump above that baseline.

And there is still what I like to refer to as excellent Hollywood magic tricks. I simply refuse to point to an example because the less you know about what happens in the film, the better, but while the series has special effects - they're extremely subtle and you could almost imagine most of the events of the film happening on a stage in front of you, not something which simply must be pumped through a high end computer to generate.

End the spoiler free section of it. If you liked either of the first two, highly recommended. If you haven't, and now that we are in the post-Halloweeen season, I'd probably recommend snagging the first one at least and watch all the films. But Paranormal Activity 3 is certainly a fun spookfest on its own right.

Is the plot unraveling?
If there's any complaints about the third movie - it's that it raises some interesting inconsistencies with the first two movies.

SPOILERS ABOUND FROM THIS POINT ON

Got that? Is the bold and all caps clear enough? Ok, then.

First problem that the movie gets itself into is the dubious use of images in the various trailers. The trailers seem to be sections of the film which were mostly not used in the long run, which is relatively legitimate but can get a little confusing.

This is especially true since one of the key plot points mentioned in the first two films is the girls' house being burned down, which is apparently shown only in one of the trailers (I've seen it, but never caught it on TV). The timestamp of the trailer, however, points to the house fire happening after the events of the film and my guess is that the makers wanted to keep the "final shock scene" which has been the trademark of the first two films instead of any kind of explanatory epilogue.

Also confusing the references to the girls' mom in the first two films. Micah makes a crack about not inviting her over in the first film, and the girls talk about her briefly in the second with references not shown in the third film (namely people coming over and their mom crying a lot).

There are two defense for the mentions in the second film. One is that their mom may have been crying more than we saw in the first film, especially considering the overall discord in the house towards the end ... and perhaps "people" included Dennis' friend.

Or, and this goes for Micah's reference in the first film - "mom" refers to their adoptive mother. We don't really know what the girls remember or think happened after grandmother walks them upstairs, after all.

Still, this shows a danger of a story being told in a chain of prequels. You can't expect viewers to try and piece together all these minor aspects - it should be part of the fun. I don't think the third film necessarily violates anything plot-wise of the first two movies, but the filmmakers should be on notice: Paranormal Activity fans are taking notes. And any future movies will be judged with those notes in the margin.

Paranormal Activity 4?
When walking out of the theater, I had thought that perhaps this would be swan song of the series. After all, we have a pretty complete picture of the story in general. And if they do another prequel, they would probably have to drop the found film aspect or go to reel to reel or something like that. Neither sounds like a good idea.

But money is money - and Paranormal Activity 3 made a metric ton of it. A fourth film is almost assured. Those note taking fans have noted there is a "1992" tape shown in the box Katie brings over ... which possibly indicates they'll advance the story a few years after the events of the third film and perhaps explain the house fire, the adoptive mother, etc.

Another good possibility is having a movie which takes place after the events of PA2. The makers have clearly made an effort to keep in touch with the original cast members, perhaps to make sure Katie Featherston would be around to portray her more demonic side in what would probably need to be the series finale.

So far the producers, directors and writers have done a good job keeping to the spirit (no pun intended) of the first film, so I'm still confident they can keep the quality up.

First trailer which reminds me of Blair Witch 2, however - and I am so not confident....

Game Play: Battlefield 3

2011-11-05T13:03:00.000-07:00

Let's put this review into two distinct parts.

Singleplayer
The offline campaign of Battlefield 3 is stunningly beautiful in parts and quite honestly one of the best written single player first person shooters in recent history. The story actually manages to make sense for almost the entirety of the game, unlike the plot line of Modern Warfare 2 which I could only describe as a wtfest.

Sadly, the graphics and decent writing get absolutely kicked in the balls by some completely rookie mistakes in level and game design. Invisible walls inhabit the otherwise immersive world in a surprising number of places. My favorite was after having held down the fort (metaphorically) for some time, myself and my fellow soldier finally made our way to an Osprey for escape. Hooray!

Except that my fellow soldier could run into the Osprey, whereas I was blocked by a force field of doom while getting shot at by enemy forces. That was until he started yelling at me to get on the ramp...

Worse, however, is the number of times your squad will be positioned in a spot which seems utterly reasonable ... and yet is actually a complete death trap. Try to position yourself in the same manner as your squad and you will get cut to ribbons.

These flaws aren't minor and they aren't rare. They trip up the game nearly constantly. If Battlefield 3 was a single player game - I would recommend giving it a pass.

Thankfully...

Multiplayer
I am absolutely enamored by BF3's multiplayer. Despite several warnings that the Quick Find may be malfunctioning - I have never had a problem jumping into a game. I think mute may be the default, because the battlefield is devoid of singing, guitar playing, racist, swearing and threatening sounds of other online shooters. The squad mechanics are simple and unobtrusive. The servers do not seem to be dominated by clans making teams one sided.

That last bit is, I think, very interesting. From what I can tell, BF3 seems to try to balance teams in between maps. I haven't gotten into many situations where a blowout appears to continually occur on a server. This is a massive relief. I haven't had a chance to dig into Uncharted 3 yet, but one of my huge complaints with the online play of Uncharted 2 was that their "buddy" system meant that veteran players could essentially mop up levels if they were friends and enough of them were online at the same time.

The vehicle mechanics seem well tuned. There's the occasional moment of having to run across long distances - but seems far more rare than BF2. The firepower of vehicles also seems well balanced versus available counter-measures.

I'll undoubtably get into Modern Warfare 3 over the holidays - but for the moment Battlefield 3 is definitely my goto game for online play. Uncharted 3 may well occupy for some time next week, but if Battlefield 3 was multiplayer only - I'd still highly recommend it.

Game Play: Dark Souls

2011-11-04T12:45:00.000-07:00

I was a rather huge Demons' Souls fan ... even if I did find the ending so mind numbingly difficult that I ended up using a rather nasty "cheat" to accomplish. This was after several attempts at finishing the final boss with online players, an attempt which only resulted in my online ratings getting butchered with every failure.

When I kept reading that Dark Souls, the "spiritual successor" as it were, was going to be even harder ... I was a little apprehensive. Could From Software had decided to just amp everything up from the original - perhaps for the sake of publicity?

Thankfully, the answer seems to be no. If anything, I'd say Dark Souls is an excellent refinement on the original. It maintains that crisp sense of combat with an absolutely brilliant grinding design which slowly allows the user to increase their knowledge of the area and increase their skills and ability to deal damage. I'm certainly not going to call Dark Souls easier ... but it feels like the mechanic have been shifted around more than simply amplified.

That's not to say that there aren't spikes of difficulty. I tried to assault a two demon tag team event for most of an afternoon, only to get through in ten minutes when I managed to summon two players for aid. This was true of the first one as well, however - Dark Souls is intended to be played within the confines of the inventive online functionality - and woe goes to the player who isn't taking advantage of the seamless co-op design From has used here.

My only complaint is that the grind can still get to be somewhat numbing. Impressively - I can't call it annoying. I don't want to throw the controller across the room because I just got killed by some dextrous skeleton. But there are times when I just need to take a step back from Dark Souls and give it a rest.

Which is perhaps why the game is so unique. In this day and age where if a company can churn out enough graphics to distract a player for twenty hours ... it's considered a success. But Dark Souls insists that you engage it from the mechanics at the very root of the game - and finish it when and how you can.

Highly recommend.

FedEx Does Not Actually Track Your Package

2011-10-06T20:28:00.000-07:00

I know what you're thinking.

You're thinking: Josh, it's been months since you have written here. And now this. Clearly this is just a rant.

And yes. For one thing, my apologies. I actually get to write with my new job and one of the side effects is that my hypografia is more or less tamed by it. Hence, I'm not writing on Cathode as much as I'd like.

And I am sorry for that, I will try to find the time. So much to catch up on. But, I digress.

FedEx does not actually track your package. And that is fucking ridiculous in an age of technology where I can find the closest and best brewpub to me in a city that I have never been in and do not own a map of simply by asking my phone to find it for me.

I'm not asking FedEx to lojack their drivers. I don't need GPS updates of the exact vector of my package is at any given time. I don't want a satellite feed of where the delivery driver is taking his lunch.

I just think that if FedEx is going to offer tracking numbers, and a page where you can supposedly track your package - that maybe they could actually track your package.

Backstory: The trusty PlayStation 3 got killed by an errant disc with a crack in it, but that is a whole other rant. Sony's customer support was, to be quite awesome without being overly fanboy ... pretty awesome. The PS3 has been to Sony, reportedly fixed, and sent back to me.

When I checked yesterday - the PS3 was supposed to arrive today. The sixth of October, 2011. This requires a signature (thankfully) so I made sure today was scheduled so that either myself or The Girl would be around to sign for it, because forbid the thought any delivery service let you know it might arrive in the AM or PM.

So when around 7:30PM arrived I called FedEx to see if the package was still going to show up today. They said it was still scheduled for today and that the local delivery went until 8PM. So I got a more or less verbal agreement that it would arrive in the next half hour.

A half hour later, I got a very different story.

This time, FedEx asked if I would go on hold so that they could "review the notes" for the delivery. A few minutes later, the person from FedEx informed me that the "initial confirmed date" was actually for Friday, October 7th.

OK. Wait. Let's step back here a second. October the 6th has been happily going around for many hours now. The original estimated date of delivery on October the 4th was ... October the 6th. It has said that all along. Every time I have checked the tracking site it said that. When I called FedEx, they confirmed that. Now that 8PM has magically hit, the estimated date is suddenly ....

October 7th

You know, I admit. I kinda suck at math. Most people don't think that because I work with computers but most people don't realize that people that work with computers have computers around to do math for them. So I'm not going to pretend to know the kind of calculus require to estimate on October 4th that a package will arrive on October 6th versus October 7th.

But I know some people who are good at math. I know some fucking brilliant people at math. And they will all tell you this: whatever equation required to make that calculation does not magically change at 8PM at night. Math simply does not play by those rules, I've been told.

No, what happened is that at 8PM someone at FedEx realized that their shame of a tracking system had been called out and this is the next thing I saw when I refreshed my browser while talking to FedEx:

Now the casual observer might ask ... what should I glean from this, Josh? ... and I will tell you:

That is a FedEx tracking page with no estimated delivery date. Minutes after the package as actually supposed to be delivered it was simply erased from reality.

So I ask FedEx: what the fuck kind of tracking system are you running over there? I mean seriously, I have to call you to report that my package has not been delivered, to go through your automated system, to hit zero a bunch of times, to talk to a human person, to have that human person read some kind of confidential notes, to have that human person inform me that the original confimed date is actually a day later than the original estimated delivery date, to have your tracking system erase the actual delivery date???

Was your software written by chimps? Are there pre-adolescent children involved? Is this some kind of nepotism gone horribly wrong? Please, tell me. Confess. I want to know how in 2011 when I can buy a car from Ford that fucking park itself that you have system that can't even track my package until I call you to ask where the fuck is my package.

Let me inform you of the useful and accurate information an actual human being was able to confirm from me when I called FedEx:

Where the package was shipped from.
Where was the package being delivered.

And so far, that is all I am sure of, because hours later the shipping page was updated with:

Ohhh ... so now you know, because I told you that my package had not actually been delivered on time. We live in an day where you could in theory be tweeted an earthquake before it actually hits you but I can't be informed by FedEx that my package will be late until I fucking call them to ask them if my package will be late. Don't get me wrong, people, it's not that my package will arrive on Friday instead of Thursday. My Thursday has been full of delights and really didn't miss the old PS3 one bit. No, it's that hours if not days went by where FedEx had the entire Internet at their disposal to warn me that my package was running late and that nobody had to stay home to sign for it but instead of actually using technology designed in this decade - I had to verbally berate a probably completely innocent phone operator to get that information updated for me. For shame, FedEx. For shame. I've sent much of this to your twitter account. I'll call tomorrow around the close of business to check to see if if anyone fucking monitors it.

Game Play: Duke Nukem Forever

2011-06-19T19:12:00.000-07:00

Duke Nukem Forever has finally arrived, after just under fifteen years of developments, moving through multiple game engines, swapped between different publishers, and passed back around multiple development teams (before finally being finished by Gearbox ... formed by 3D Realms developers who ditched that company during the "early" years of DNF).

A lot has changed since 1997, when Duke Nukem Forever was originally announced. For instance, Zoid's CTF mod came out for Quake 2 in 1998 - which is when Duke Nukem Forever was supposed to originally be released. Zoid's CTF was really the starting point for objective based team play for first person shooter. So every shooter which has ever been made since DNF was announced has taken this concept and evolved it into the kind of online play we see in Call of Duty.

Or to put it another way, Duke Nukem Forever has been in development for as long as team based shooters have started going past pure team deathmatch.

While the shooter genre is a something of a slow moving bunch, there has been paradigm shifts like Zoid's CTF (1998): GoldenEye 007's location based damage and lack of health packs (1997), Half-Life's first person cinematics (1998), Counter-Strike's objective based maps (1999), Deus Ex's hybrid RPG elements (2000), Halo's use of shields over health points and realistic inventory handling (2001), Half-Life 2's use of physics (2004), WinBack's use of cover (1999) and Rainbow Six's first person adoption of it (2006), Vanquish's slide movement (2010 ... almost all of these mechanics becoming either de facto standards (especially in the case of GoldenEye 007 and Halo) or important design choices for titles as they're released.

Fun Fact: The title for Duke Nukem Forever comes from Duke Nukem 4Ever, which was to be a 2D sequel to the 3D classic employing concepts from the old game and some new ones while returning to Duke's original nemesis, Doctor Proton.

And all this time, the development of Duke has been watching these titles released - and apparently then struggling to keep up as best it could. Duke Nukem 3D was a landmark title in it's own right and easily as influential on games like Deus Ex and Half-Life as the above list has been on other titles. It was clear that 3D Realms was never going to be happy with DNF unless it used the greatest technology and using the latest tricks.

The problem is: you can't simply adopt these tricks once you've seen them. And Duke Nukem Forever is a game plagued by this fact.

For instance, Duke uses "Ego" instead of health and the usage is clearly aped from Halo's use of shields (which would later be adopted to the realistic shooters use of damage of health points in general). However, considering that Halo was released in 2001 and DNF had already been in development for five years at that point ... you have to wonder how much redesign that would require.

Fun Fact: According to the game, development began with the original Quake engine and moved quickly to the Quake II engine when the game was being announced. In 1998, after having developed on Quake II engine for 14 months, 3D Realms declared they would use the Epic's Unreal engine. Since then, Epic released Unreal Tournament, Unreal Tournament 2003, Unreal Tournament 2004, Unreal Championship, Unreal II, Unreal Championship 2 and Unreal Tournament III - each with specific updates and overhauls to the engine.

Moving from a health based system centered on pickups to a shield based system centered on the user avoiding damage to heal is not a simple change. It's not like you can simply remove all the health packs from the game and then add a timer to the player's health bar. The damage the enemies deal needs to be handled, the levels need to provide players with enough area or cover to deal with a bad situation to regain health, the amount of "shielding" a player requires needs to be balanced, etc., etc. It's a core design change that needs to ripple throughout the game.

While Duke adopted the concept, and surely the idea of Duke Nukem being protected solely by his ego is funny enough: it never really seems to handle it correctly. There are sequences which are simply woefully unbalanced because you'll be picking off Assault Captains left and right only to run into a boss where a few blows can kill you but you really have nowhere to protect yourself from. In fact one boss fight in particular seems to have exactly two or three points of cover where the boss almost inexplicably can't hit you momentarily as if to solve this problem. Though, it's still a problem until you find these spots left for you by a benevolent level designer.

Fun Fact: In 2009, Wired removed Duke Nukem Forever from their yearly vaporware awards list as the project appeared officially cancelled and "the joke was getting old". In 2010, Gearbox would officially announce the game's release and the game hit 11th on the vaporware list that year.

Or the fact that back when Duke was King - shooters simply let players collect as many weapons as they could find. This idea of a "primary" weapon and a "secondary" weapon was completely alien. You found a weapon, you had the weapon, you used the weapon, you ran out of ammo ... you found more ammo. Weapon and map design matched this fact: you had weapons which were weak but utilitarian and weapons which were the BFG and used ammo like a mofo. You would simply swap out weapons depending on the situation.

The primary/secondary weapon mechanic that Halo introduced requires some weapons to be more useful than others so that you can rely on at least a common group of ammo and resources to keep fighting even when you used up your secondary BFG style ammo. Duke Nukem Forever adopted the Halo weapon concept but the actual weapon design is nearly exactly the same as it was from 1997. The end result is that you end up using the Ripper nearly the entire time because it's the closest thing to generic plasma rifle the game offers the player. Some situations even insist on the usage of specific weapons - forcing the player to hunt down a obviously conveniently placed weapon pickup just to swap out.

If there was ever a first person shooter which could excuse itself from the idea of only holding two weapons: it is Duke Nukem Forever. Duke Nukem can bench press 600 pounds (according the relatively funny in-game hint notes). Duke Nukem punches alien overlords in the balls. Duke Nukem can take a rocket or two in the face (provided his ego is big enough). But Duke Nukem can't hold as many weapons as he did ten years ago.

This isn't a game burdened by reality, as noted buy some of the more entertaining underwater scenes - so why did it feel the need to grab mechanics from games which are intended to make shooters feel more real?

This mishmash of game design plucked but not entirely cooked from ground breaking titles over the years creates a uneven landscape of good and bad the player can barely navigate through. It's not that Duke Nukem Forever is all bad or without charm - but the design flaws and lack of polish aren't something one can simply power through or laugh about when Duke pulls out another signature one-liner. The game constantly beats the player over the head with the woes from development past and every moment of fun the game offers up is quickly dashed by five more which are either frustrating or simply boring. There are portions of this game which an anyone used to the genre will simply have to wonder if this level was left unfinished. There are portions which seem oddly devoid of enemies, or enemies which seem to spawn simply to elongate scenes, or boss sequences which feel like they never got past the design phase of the creature concept, or maps which clearly don't have the correct lighting and ... on and on and on.

Obviously no game is worth this much development time - it's an absurd question which doesn't need to be asked. We're not talking about genetic research here, we're talking game development and if you can't get the game out in a certain timeline you're game is going to feel outdated. This is simply a law of physics.

The parts of Nukem which work the best are the parts Nukem learned from itself. Unabashed humor, interactive and unique levels, and the occasional feeling of a somewhat epic fight with an unrepentant use of tits and ass - there are moments of pure Dukedom.

The multiplayer has some merit in the sense that it manages some fast old school deathmatch killing. Sadly, the game browser suffers from some network issues (like the age old problem of constantly finding open games which by the time the browser lets you try to join ... the game is full) and there simply aren't enough servers out there to really make the online portion stick.

But Duke Nukem Forever doesn't just feel dated, the damn game still feels unfinished. The Dilbert cartoon at the top of this post refers not just what happens when it is better to ship nothing at all, but was the source of Macromedia's Director 5 being code named "better than gum". While Nukem has more character in the first five minutes of game than some shooter have in an entire game, the Duke's bravado simply doesn't live up to the final offering. This may not entirely be a gum release, but it is a product clearly out the door with the intention of publishing before completely forgotten.

In the early parts of the game, Duke wanders into a bathroom and can, in a now infamous scene, pick up a turd from a toilet. Disgusted with himself he then moves out to a stadium to re-enact a boss fight from the Duke Nukem 3D's end boss fight only to have the action pull back to be revealed as just a video game being played by Duke and a pair of buxom twins.

And honestly, that encompasses nearly everything you need to know about Duke Nukem Forever. There's some crap, and there's parts which will remind you of the original game and there's some parts where Duke is clearly just pick up what he learned from playing games for over a decade.

If you've never played Duke Nukem 3D and you're wondering what all the fuss is about - I have to recommend giving the game a pass. Maybe we'll finally get a proper modern Duke release, or maybe Duke Nukem: Zero Hour for the Nintendo 64 was the last decent follow up the franchise will ever get. For the nostalgic, Forever will likely just be a disappointment. It's surely a moment in history for the gaming industry and while it has some moments - it's probably better a moment to just move on from.

There was an Iron Maiden video game?

2011-06-15T12:18:00.001-07:00

And I never knew....

Armchair E3 2011: Nintendo

2011-06-15T09:39:00.000-07:00

Of all the big three gaming companies, Nintendo probably had the most to prove. It's not really a terribly good time for the big N. Their sales, while still solid in comparison to the other consoles - have dropped considerably from their previous heights and probably will continue to do so. The 3DS hasn't managed to sell as well as the DS, despite plenty of technical prowess. Microsoft and Sony have both released their motion solutions to the world, and while Sony's isn't doing poorly by accessory standards - the Kinect has sold incredibly.

When the Wii was released, HDTV adoption was slow on the rise and the concept of motion controlled gameswas absolutely and utterly new. The console was inexpensive, easy to use and surprisingly social. The Wii Fit was a brilliant add on, continuing on the theme of user controls that weren't controller based and also giving gamers a reason to learn yoga.

HDTV prices have dropped considerably - and the competing consoles are not only cheaper than when this generation first hit, but they have an excellent library of exclusives, mainstream and indie titles. The Wii has continued to struggle to bring anything but their own first party titles to real success, and while the post Fit era has seen a few gems, it would be hard to imagine a lot of third party developers lining up to release on hardware which is now, to be diplomatic, a bit quaint. This is probably why the vast majority of third party Wii titles are licensed based shovelware.

So E3 would certainly be Nintendo's time to shine.

I would probably describe what they announced more as ... glimmering? Maybe a bit of a glisten?

Since this post is late out of the gate, the Wii U is probably not a surprise to anyone. Quick recap: it will backwards compatible with the Wii, it sports a tablet styled controller with a 6 inch screen surrounded by the expected set of game controls as well as motion sensing and a camera.

The feature Nintendo seemed to thump the podium the most was the ability to display either a secondary screen on the controller, or to send the the main (TV) display to the controller, or flip them, or do a tango, etc., etc. Technically speaking, it's pretty some pretty neat stuff and I can imagine they have cool VNC style tricks going on.

The problem is that unlike the announcement of the Wii controller, the Wii U controller doesn't feel as revolutionary. We've seen this kind of trick before from all the way back to the Dreamcast's VMU and recently with Sony's tethering of the PSP. And while I know I'm missing out on some of the first person experience wow factor that distincts it ... it's also hard to get excited about something that seems like a tablet in a world that is getting increasingly ruled by tablets. If the 3DS is having trouble competing against iPhones ... how will the Wii U not have trouble competing against the iPad?

It's not that Nintendo can't answer these questions - the problem is ... they didn't answer these questions. Mainstream press walked away from E3 still not quite understanding what the console itself was capable of accomplishing. While it's not been confirmed that the hardware should be more powerful than the PS3 or 360 - Nintendo failed to display anything that proved that fact.

Worse, in fact, they showed demos of other platform's software. And then someone in the press realized Nintendo hadn't shown the Wii U working with multiple Wii U controllers, leading Nintendo to confirm that they currently have it only designed for a one controller to work with one console ... which promptly kicks in the shin some of the more interesting concepts of having the secondary display.

For a company which changed the industry with innovative ideas, the Wii U feels like a jumbled bag of other people's tricks. While it isn't surprising that Nintendo didn't talk cost - it is hard to think that a console with next generation hardware and a touchscreen controller is going to be cheap, which was one of the big factors of the Wii's success.

After their announcement, Nintendo's stock dropped sharply. Then it dropped a little more. Nintendo has about three quarters before it has to show the goods ... and they have a lot of information to nail down and offer up before then.

Armchair E3 2011: Sony

2011-06-10T07:27:00.000-07:00

Sony deserves, I think, credit for at least being the company with enough muscle to trail Nintendo as the #2 handheld gaming platform. That might sound like a back handed complement, but the path leading up to the Gameboy, DS and 3DS is littered with technology which really couldn't even be considered a runner-up.

Having the Vita their big push now seems a bit like a product plan set in place years ago that nobody forgot to cancel. It's not the Vita is bad - in fact it looks like might actually be the most awesome handheld gaming device ever created by man. Someone has clearly been taking notes on the flaws of the PSP, PSP Go, etc. But even Nintendo is having a hard time keeping handheld gaming in their mighty grasp, with the 3DS falling behind the DS in sales and having little sign of picking up anytime soon. The cheaper DS still clobbered the 3DS last month (though the 3DS cremated the PSP, so...).

If this was last year, I could understand Nintendo and Sony's not having an appropriate response to the onslaught of smartphones and tablets coming out earlier this year. What's odd is that the Sony Experia, with PlayStation certification and a little title called Minecraft, seems a more intelligent response to the current mobile scene than the Vita.

However, all hope for the Vita is I think not lost. The PSP might not have the same size demographic as the DS, but Sony's mobile gamers are quite loyal and since the Vita is well designed ... Sony might be able to hit sales goals if they've been made rational and not overly optimistic. And Sony seems to have potentially outflanked Nintendo, whether it was intentional or not.

And it could be crippling to Nintendo.

I'll have more on the Wii U later, but let's assume Sony pushes harder for the kind of continous client, tight integration that the Vita has with the Ruin demo for the PS3. PSP tethering with the PS3 is already in the bag, and one has to wonder how hard it would be for Sony to replicate some of the Wii U's thunder. It would take what ... some fancy custom VNC software to play my Vita games on my HDTV with my PS3 as an intermediary? OK, so it would have to be some pretty fancy VNC ... but if Sony could steal some of Nintendo's features and position them as value adds for the Vita? That would be a serious win for Sony and potentially a serious blow to Nintendo.

Sony gets high points for showing off new games with new ideas as well. Microsoft's Kinect push is solid, but doesn't show much new innovation for the game. Sony demo'd several games I'm really looking forward to trying out, and much of it feels fresh and new.

But letting Microsoft walk away with a Minecraft exclusive? With Kinect? After all that ballywho about it being on the Experia? That's just embarrassing.

Armchair E3 2011: Microsoft

2011-06-08T17:56:00.000-07:00

Not only is this totally armchair E3 in that I've never been to an E3, but I'm not even a 360 user. And hence some might think that I would easily find fault with Microsoft's offering...

But that's really not the case. In fact, I think Microsoft might have the smartest strategy this year. Microsoft managed to sell more units of Kinect than, well most anyone has sold anything and their E3 keynote seems to appropriately position to match that success. The worst thing Microsoft could do is to ride off into the sunset assuming that was the end of the story while planning on the Xbox 360++/720/Full Circle Squared.

Microsoft is, instead, riding on the safe bet that their are several Kinect users out there waiting for new games. There might not be anything particularly bullish going on here, especially since it seems that the non-Kinect announcements include such complete non-surprises as a more Call of Duty (shock!), more Gears of War (no way!) and more Halo (wow! really?).

Short version: if you're a 360 user, and especially a Kinect user, expect more of the same with some additional bells and whistles. There's no need to knock this strategy in general, it worked well for Nintendo for years (another Zelda?? OMG!) and I think Kinect users should be happy that the big M is throwing support behind the product instead of simply cashing the checks.

Hunted: The Demon's Forge

2011-06-06T10:51:00.000-07:00

Hunted: The Demon's Forge is the very definition of a mixed bag. It's been described as a fantasy setting version of Gears, though Army of Two is probably a better analogy in the fact that the game is deeply rooted in co-op play, even when you're just in the single player mode.

It's difficult to know where to start with a title like Hunted, since it is such a tangled knot of good and bad. I suppose we could begin with the average stuff, which isn't much. It uses the Unreal 3 engine to good, though not great, effect. The character design and world setting is fairly cookie cutter fantasy stuff, with the story being told through a combination of unlocked movies and stories told by the deceased via the in-game deathstone. There's a very heavy use of buddy gates to insure that you and your partner stay together and the loot mechanics are designed as such that there's never a question to splitting things up.

On the good front, Hunted offers up some tight combat mechanics, including melee - which isn't the easiest thing to do with an FPS based engine ike Unreal. Sniping with either the crossbow or bow is entertaining as well, and when you start combining the fights with magic, there is some truly great fun to be had. Having one player lift enemies up, and then the other freeze them - it's very gratifying to watch them shatter. There's actual strategy and teamwork to be had here, and working together feels the way a coop game should feel.

However, if the core of this game is based on solid mechanics - the entirety of that core is constantly challenged by flaws, bugs and quirks which kick the game in the knees and quite often in the head. These start from the very first moment the post-tutorial game kicks off, with a serious disconnect between the player and basics of the game and the level of difficulty the game starts out with. Be ready to get killed repeatedly for a while, especially at any level above Casual, before truly getting the hang of using cover, utilizing magic, being decent at melee, sniping head shots, etc. There seems to be an assumption, design wise, that the tutorial level should properly prepare players for the game - and it simply is not the case.

The difficulty level is often quite brutal, even on Casual mode. This is especially true early on when the characters aren't leveled up enough to hold multiple potions to revive and heal as needed. Most of the enemies can cut health away quite quickly, and so having to manage that single health potion gets annoying and hoping your partner still has the ability to revive you can be an early indicator that all the combat fun may be coming to a quick end.

Worse, however, is Hunted's completely inane concept of checkpoints. Checkpoints are reserved only for the start of major portions of the map and so a sudden ambush can send you and your partner back about a half hour or so of gameplay. Worse is that real save points are even more reserved, and there's no clear indication as to which is which - meaning that knowing when it's safe to quit a session is utter guesswork. Secret/side portions of the map are sometimes not counted as their own checkpoint, which means you can find yourself repeating large portions of the game.

And speaking of the map, I had originally thought to give the game some props for level design in general, but any good there is tossed out around the midgame where you will find yourself enveloped in complete darkness frequently - no matter what gamma setting you might chose. This happens so often that I have to wonder if inXile was afraid how their dungeon was appearing and so simply decided to just make it completely black in places. You can use flaming arrows and/or certain spells as a light source - but this feels like an accidental effect and not an intentional design choice.

Gameplay bugs crop up more frequently than one would like. At one point, we had explored an area where you need to collect runes only to find the game had forgotten to actually place the runes. Another spot had us stuck completely on the map and hence requiring another annoying long checkpoint restart.

Perhaps in a culmination of the above, we're currently stuck on a boss scene where we have to run frantically across a dimly lit area and apparently any misstep will cause us to be squashed and we have to try again.

Truth is, we're such coop nuts that we've actually been enjoying our time with Hunted despite many of the flaws, but it is at best a very close call. I can't safely recommend the game in the current state, though I would love to see either a patch or DLC perhaps be able to overcome the problems.

Quick Overview of Sony's "Welcome Back" PS3 Games

2011-05-17T11:16:00.000-07:00

I'm going to reserve judgement on Sony's 'Welcome Back' plan until all the details about identity theft protection are released and the PlayStation Store is actually back online. The most often quoted portion of the plan, the two free games, isn't really of interest to me since I already own all the titles they list. While I appreciate the cost in offering free games to the entire PS3 community, only two are full release titles and c'mon - LittleBigPlanet came out in 2008 and inFamous in 2009. Anyone who wanted these titles probably already has them.

But if you don't, here's some quickie reviews for you.

Dead Nation
Top down, zombie apocalypse action best played with another person sitting next to you. This was done by HouseMarque, who also did another title on the list: Super Stardust HD. The graphics are pretty excellent, and they manage to change up some game mechanics so that this doesn't feel like just another coop zombie shooter / Smash TV clone. If enjoy couch coop, this is a pretty great title.

inFAMOUS
I rather enjoyed inFAMOUS when it was released and look forward to the sequel. The gameplay gets a little repetitive, but still stands as one of the better free roaming superhero themed titles out there, even today (though not quite as good, imho, as say Crysis 2). The good/evil mechanic is a little overwrought, but hey - so are most good/evil mechanics.

LittleBigPlanet
If you don't have this one, get this one. Some of the platforming concepts might not appeal to people who don't like, well, platformers - but LBP is an excellent and unique title which also offers an absolute plethora of user made content.

Super Stardust HD
I actually find Stardust's difficulty curve a bit frustrating, but there's no doubting this is one pretty PSN title and very easy to jump into. It was the first game when I got my HDTV that a fellow gamer insisted I had to try out. Twin shooter/boat style mechanics against asteroids with lots of powerups - it is a lot of fun if you don't mind dying a lot.

Wipeout HD + Fury
I got Wipeout HD and played it a few afternoons, that was about it. It's not bad - but seemed overly derivative to me. A title only for racer fans for sure, and probably only if you've grown bored with Need for Speed.

Game Review: Brink

2011-05-16T13:12:00.000-07:00

Brink is a bit of an odd title, and correspondingly it is getting reviews a bit all over the map. It's a bit curious to me that this was branded and sold as a "new breed of shooters" and that most of the previews seem to emphasize trying to figure out just exactly "what Brink is" - when what we really have at the core here is a fairly competent twist on Team Fortress, which is one of the oldest online game templates to go from.

The "evolution" most oft described for Brink is the supposed blending of single and multiplayer modes. Let's be specific and honest about this - there aren't really single player modes in Brink. Well, there are - but nothing in the same vein as what most FPS players are used to playing ... and not what's advertised. There are four challenge modes which seem to be mostly designed for one player, and actually serve as a decent tutorial for the game ... except that it isn't advertised as such and hence some players may be prone to playing after they've stumbled through parts of the game.

What Brink has done in lieu of a single player mode is to line up a series of objective based maps in a pretty convincing stand-in for a story-based campaign mode. Both teams have their own version of the maps, and playing completely through both sides actually has a decent narrative. It just lacks all the dialogue and in-game cinematics that most players associate with a single player mode. Which means that the maps are designed to be played by teams - not the shooting gallery setup of most offline campaigns.

It's not a bad design. Setup a narrative through team based maps, and then let players decide if they want to play against mostly bots, players on their side or players on both sides. As noted by many reviews, the flaw isn't the concept - the flaw is the AI. If you play offline, or mostly with bots, you must be prepared to push forward on all the main objectives and you simply can't always rely on your team to support you. I actually don't think the AI is as terrible as some of the reviews imply, it's simply that relying on AI for this kind of thing is the reason most games don't design single player campaigns like this. It's why I can't entirely buy into this "new breed of shooters" PR campaign. It's a different trick, but the same breed trying the trick out.

Then there is Smooth Movement Across Random Terrain, AKA SMART. SMART is designed to add parkor style movement to a shooter, and it does in general work pretty well. The truth is, though, that it mostly just solves the fact that ladders kinda suck in online shooters. It makes the maps feel more natural, my only real complaint is that many previews and reviews describe it as "point and press a button" to move to a point in the map, and while sprinting alone will accomplish some of that, don't expect all the platform jumping style frustrations to go away. In other words, it's neat - but it's not a game changer.

What's left is a competent, though occasionally flawed, objective based online team shooter with player class. There's more of a mix and match feel to building out your player's avatar, from the various options for appearance, to unlocking certain powerups, to selecting a specific body type (which gives "heavy" and "light" options to all the classes ... you can be slow and defensive or fast with lest health). There's not nearly the varied gameplay of say, Team Fortress 2, it actually feels more inline with the customizations that are available for Call of Duty.

That's not to say the classes themselves aren't important. In fact, they're key to success on a map because specific objectives can only be handled by specific classes. This will force you to change classes in the middle of gameplay to give your team with more options to succeed at the objective. This is particularly important for some of the time based objectives like hacking - your team is far more likely to succeed with multiple Operatives working together. Some reviews have knocked the game for forcing players to jump to classes they may not have leveled up as much, but temporarily jumping classes to help the team push through a section is pretty common for this style of shooter, even if it isn't the class you're best at - and since none of the powerups feel overpowered, I haven't really find this a big deal.

The classes are a mixed bag. The engineer feels a little overpowered, able to buff damage, build turrets and plant mines. In fact, the engineer is a bit more of a damage dealer than the soldier - which feels more like a support role to blow up objectives and hand off ammo. That the core gameplay on all the classes feels extremely similar, giving it that more Call of Duty feel, is both a curse and a blessing. There's less exploration in playing the classes, but it is also friendlier to new players and makes it easy to jump from class to class during the game.

If Brink has its flaws its that the technology doesn't completely fill in the gaps introduced with the concept. Mashing offline, coop and versus modes into the same map is a great concept, but the AI, having no squad command mechanic, and the lack of a lobby system - kicks the game in the knees a bit. There's some moments of real frustration - like trying to win an offline match with stupid AI support, or realizing that the challenges don't seem to offer their unlocks online.

And on an odd note - the graphics are a muddled result. Great design, and the customization screens offer awesome model detail, but in play - the actual detail and texturing has a tendency to dip in quality randomly (this was on a PS3, for reference - but I've heard tale it is true across platform).

That aside, the core gameplay is pretty strong. Some of the complaints I've read - that the maps host choke points, that most of the strategy comes down to getting a larger concentration of players in the right place, the repetition of play .... they're really somewhat true of this genre and subgenre in general. In some ways, I think Brink is a victim of a marketing push on features which aren't really the game's strength. Brink should be commended for some of the small things that it does really, really well. It's effectively solved grenade spamming with a simple cooldown mechanic. To be in disguise, Operatives need to scan a dead enemy - which keeps spies from constantly flooding objective points. They've resisted importing uberattacks, which nearly every shooter seems to feel the need to lift from Call of Duty. The interface design is pretty top notch, especially the customization and menu screens - but even the HUD is minimalist while informing the player. While there isn't a lobby system - there is something to be said for the "visibility" concept of starting a match exactly the same for offline, coop and versus that makes it easy to jump into the action.

At the end of the day, it's a good game - but probably only appealing to FPS gamers not completely addicted to the Call of Duty model. My biggest wish right now is that there were more players consistently online, as I think an all out human match is how Brink was really designed to shine, all marketing aside.

So recommend, though with reservations. Read up on this one first, or find a way to take it for a dry run. It's a great change from many of the console shooters out there - but not really a great game.

However, since it has sold well - I'm fairly optimistic for a sequel.

Sony clarifies PSN breach, somewhat...

2011-05-02T09:47:00.000-07:00

The LA Times is reporting a few updates on the PSN breach after Kaz Hirai's press conference. Two notable bits:

Sony has revealed that 10 million credit card accounts may have been exposed two weeks ago when a hacker broke into the company's computers in San Diego and stole data from 77 million PlayStation Network accounts.

-- Sony apologizes, says 10 million credit card accounts may have been exposed in network attack

Which isn't much of a clarification. Actually, just a more dire way of putting what Sony has been saying all along: they don't know if the credit card information was obtained, so you should probably act like it was.

Then there's this (and the only reason I'm still blogging on this topic):

Clarifying an earlier statement that said consumer passwords were not encrypted, Sony said they were "hashed," a form of mathematical obfuscation that makes it difficult for a hacker to read the passwords.

So "hashed" means it wasn't in plain text - but any hacker capable of this breach is capable of decoding the password somewhat easily. If the passwords used a salt with the hash (I know, I'm thinking of breakfast foods as well) - it would much harder, perhaps prohibitively so, for the hacker to get them.

So what does that mean? Means you should still treat your password like someone else has them. And honestly, Sony is being kinda dodgy about this (took me forever to find the article above) ... so I'm kinda guessing they were unsalted ... since if I were Sony I'd be trumpeting anything they did correctly right now, no matter how geeky the explanation.

More on the PSN Fail

2011-04-29T10:28:00.000-07:00

I really don't want to keep blogging about this, I would think the message should be pretty clear: change your passwords and watch your accounts. However I'm almost mystified by the two extreme reactions on the net right now. The first is just pure impatience that PSN is down ... which is totally understandable, I've got some Portal 2 Coop to play after all ... but really seems to be missing the proportions of the breach in general. This thing was huge, and I can't imagine what all is going on over at Sony right now ... but I'm sure some engineers aren't getting much sleep in the process.

Then we have this:

Meanwhile, the New York Times reports -- citing security researchers -- that discussions on forums have popped up from hackers claiming they snagged credit card numbers from PSN users.

An excerpt from the article:

"Kevin Stevens, senior threat researcher at the security firm Trend Micro, said he had seen talk of the database on several hacker forums, including indications that the Sony hackers were hoping to sell the credit card list for upwards of $100,000. Mr. Stevens said one forum member told him the hackers had even offered to sell the data back to Sony but did not receive a response from the company."

The New York Times also says they could not prove this list exists. On Thursday, Sony revealed credit card data was encrypted and there was no evidence that numbers had been swiped.

-- PlayStation Network roundup: Impact on Sony, compensation, more

So here's what happened. Some guys on IRC were talking about the hack, and they talking about rumors that the DB was up for sale. On his twitter account, security research Kevin Stevens mentioned the chatter - which somehow media sources took as a recipe that the whole thing was probably on like Donkey Kong and start reporting that millions of credit card numbers are now up for sale, and that Sony turned down an offer to buy them back.

Woah. Let's slow the fsck down. The IRC log isn't even from anyone claiming to have seen the database, just people talking about rumors they've heard. They certainly seem familiar with the details, the security implications, etc. - but it's not like these are the actual hackers talking about how they can cash in data or anything. It's actually a pretty fascinating conversation, especially one key bit I'll get to in a bit, but it's no smoking gun. And that Kevin Stevens tweeted about it doesn't mean that Kevin Stevens is commenting on the authenticity of the rumors. It's all hearsay. But media outlets are now treating Stevens as if he intended to add credibility to the claims, which he makes clear in a later tweet that he wasn't. It was, as he puts it, "seeing a post on a forum and tweeting about it." It's one thing to tweet about it - but if you're a major news source and you are putting in a bit which ends with "we have no proof about any of this" ... maybe don't put it in at all.

Probably the biggest problem with the rumor is that there is a claim that the CVVN (CVV? CV2 - fsck, I can never remember) is part of the data. That's the number on the back of the card which which you enter with phone and online purchases these days. It was huge push back several years ago to help prove that you were in fact holding the card you said you were using and most online retailers use it now.

And for that reason, it should never be stored anywhere after the purchase is complete. It completely destroys the reason for its existence. So I'm willing to believe Sony wasn't storing them, and I don't recall ever giving it to Sony in the first place. So unless there was another massive breach somewhere, I don't see how that could be up for sale.

Unless, of course, the whole thing is fake and there's just a bunch of people trying to con a phony database on to people. Which is probably the most likely scenario, and the New York Times and USA Today just gave them free advertising. Bang up job, there, real journalists.

So database up for sale? I call shenanigans on that one.

However, there's one bit from this whole sordid tale which still has me on edge. In their first Q&A, Sony revealed that the personal data was unencrypted. Which, OK, obviously I wish it was encrypted but I can imagine a lot of companies don't encrypt information like billing address, first name, etc.

But my password?

My fscking password?

Please, someone from Sony, please, clarify this bit and tell us that the current PR blitz wasn't specific. Because when I first read that the passwords were certainly breached, I did - as should anyone - assume that meant that a hacker would eventually be able to read them.

But to think that my username and password were both sitting in a datatable within Sony's network with only "a very sophisticated security system" between it and prying eyes ... I ... I.

OK, look, I'm not a security expert. I did a stint as a Data Security Analyst for a major insurance company many, many, many years ago. I've got friends in the hacker community which I don't really keep in touch with that much. And yet, data security 101 will tell you never to store passwords unencrypted at any time. It's just too sensitive. The only person on this planet who should be able to see their own password is the user. It's just a fundamental concept of data security. That password is the key piece of evidence that you are you. If anyone can read it? Then anyone can be you. Everything you do after that is simply a fail. You have lost the game.

I called PlayStation support to clarify. They could not (not too surprising, and I don't envy their job right now so I didn't hassle them on it). Sony's blog hasn't clarified. Then I read this in the log from Kevin's tweet:

[21:54:45] I doubt sony stored passwords in plaintext on the server
...
[21:55:04] kkk: they either did that or they hash em cause they are sent plaintext
...
[21:55:49] kkk: unsalted hashes wouldn't be too far from plaintext anyway :D

-- #ps3dev log

So a hashed string is essentially an encrypted string. "Unsalted" means that the encryption has no additional randomization to it, and these days hackers can use something called a rainbow table to unencrypt it. Salting adds randomization, which makes rainbow tables time/cost prohibitive to use.

But you know what? I'd at least like confirmation that Sony encrypted the damn things in any way. I'd prefer it to be a decent enough way that the hackers would at least have to break a sweat to get it. I don't need, or even want, to know the exact methods Sony used to encrypt my password.

I'd just like to know they bothered to do so. It doesn't mean I can ignore the fact that they're out there in the wild.

But at least I could assume Sony's data security wasn't being run like this.

Have a good weekend, people.

Game Play: Sword and Sworcery

2011-04-29T09:23:00.000-07:00

My interest for Sword and Sworcery started just by seeing the screenshots. It's a game that's quite unique in several ways, and hence actually becomes somewhat difficult to review. The experience is designed from the ground up for someone who really has very little knowledge about the game's story, mechanics, characters and ... heck, even style. I was rather surprised by some of the tone of the narration - even though everything from the writing style to the mechanics corresponds quite nicely to create a rich gaming experience.

Without getting to specific, the impressive thing about Sword and Sworcery is its ability to play up old school gameplay from the days of King's Quest while rolling in modern concepts like social media. It is also a game which is neatly, I guess "metasmart" for lack of a better term. It's probably the least cliche use of the player being a "god's finger" that I can think of, but also neatly explains why you can point a direction for the hero and rustle bushes as well.

I wish I had access to the iPad version, but the iPhone version seems suited well enough for the smaller screen real estate. It is an absolute must to play this game with headphones (or really good speakers, I suppose). Not only is the music part of the rich experience the Superbrothers are weaving together, but there are few spots which use audio cues in critical moments as well.

I'm in the third session, and as an aside I enjoy the fact that the game actually insists on a bit of an intermission (it's part of that "metasmart" portion of the design). I've been using S&S as something of a night time read - and it feels in some way like an interactive story right for bedtime that you can simply put a bookmark in and pick up later.

My only complaint so far is that a few of the moments where they clearly want you to explore as oppose to explain get somewhat confusing, and I actually found some of the mechanics of the first boss battle a bit annoying (like holding down the shield to heal, which seems like a silly warmup exercise at best). But these are really small things compared to the game as a whole - which I highly recommend.

PSN #FAIL: Yes, it is probably time to change some passwords

2011-04-26T15:07:00.000-07:00

That the PlayStation Network has been down isn't exactly earth shattering news, but Sony just released the first real information on the outage, which started on April 20th.

It's not good. Recently, rumors came about that the outage was done to build a defense around an a custom firmware hack called "Rebug", which allowed normal consoles to be identified as debug consoles which apparently gives them all manner of access on the network, including download free versions of games. Sony has yet to confirm if that was the original cause, but they have confirmed a successful intrusion into the network, which as a result has...

obtained the following information that you provided: name, address (city, state, zip), country, email address, birthdate, PlayStation Network/Qriocity password and login, and handle/PSN online ID. It is also possible that your profile data, including purchase history and billing address (city, state, zip), and your PlayStation Network/Qriocity password security answers may have been obtained. If you have authorized a sub-account for your dependent, the same data with respect to your dependent may have been obtained. While there is no evidence at this time that credit card data was taken, we cannot rule out the possibility. If you have provided your credit card data through PlayStation Network or Qriocity, out of an abundance of caution we are advising you that your credit card number (excluding security code) and expiration date may have been obtained.

-- Update on PlayStation Network and Qriocity

Everyone who has a PSN account should probably take the time to read that again. It's pretty significant, even if the intrusion did not successfully gain any credit card numbers. Consider this:

Many online systems now accept a valid email address as your username
Most users reuse the same password across multiple websites
Most users reuse the same security question information, when possible

And that's not adding on the truckload of personal information now open for social engineering.

It's a pretty big deal. And while I'm sympathetic to Sony that the event happened in the first place, I think waiting a whole week to notify users to the potential danger is a bit absurd. Did it take a week for Sony to realize the extent of the data theft? Or just a week to write the above update? Either way is a pretty massive fail.

If you're a person who falls under the bold behavior above, I'd recommend visiting your more sensitive online sites (banking, bill pays, mortgages, etc) and updating the password to something new. In this day and age, a good password should:

1) Not be based on personal data like birthdate, children names, home addresses. All of that was potentially just scooped up in this theft.

2) Be six characters in length or more. Five is still the standard used by many websites. Six is better.

3) Include at least one number, and at least one other non-alpha character like a "!", "#", etc.

4) Use a mixture of caps and non-caps.

I'm a pretty security aware kind of guy, and I'm honestly pretty annoyed at Sony right now. While I don't entirely fall into the mold of someone who uses "password" or "12345" everywhere - but this amount of data kinda spooks me. There's certainly a level of due dilligence that Sony is doing here, so I don't think we need to brace ourselves for some coming credit apocalypse ... but at the very least changing your passwords to something more secure is like calling your mother, it's always a good time to do it anyway.

Image lifted from Addicted Gamer

Nintendo Rumors: Revolution versus Cafe

2011-04-25T11:16:00.000-07:00

There's something about Nintendo which sparks rumors to an extent greater than most companies. I'm not entirely sure what it is - it's not just because of how much of a game changer the Wii turned out to be, though those rumors certainly hit a high watermark. Now we're faced with the successor of the insanely popular Wii, now confirmed by the big N, and the rumor mill is churning at full speed.

One the big ones? That the controller will have a large, probably touchscreen, LCD display jammed into the middle of it. Something a like the picture to the left ... which was actually a rumored leaked image circulated for the Wii (or Revolution as it was called before being branded). Other rumors? That the Revolution would have a large hard drive, that it would have graphics comparable to the Xbox, and even that it would sport a 3D interface. I think someone even did a mockup of Revolution with a big holographic display in the middle - a la a Star Wars chess game.

The new controller rumors have decent weight behind them - and it may fit well into Nintendo trying to think out of the box. Of course, I'm an old Dreamcast guy ... so I don't find the idea overly revolutionary - but I do think Nintendo could make it work much better than the old white box did.

Otherwise, the rumors for Cafe are fairly reserved. That Nintendo would want to surpass the current generation of consoles is a bit of a no-brainer - when the Wii first faced off with the 360 and PS3, the HD generation was still expanding into critical mass. Now, HD sets are cheap and easily available - and Sony is even moving on to push 3D on the people. How much muscle Nintendo will throw down is an interesting question - since they're getting out of the gate earlier than Sony and Microsoft - they may be attempting a 360 strategy where their graphics will be good enough that they could soak up the early adopter marketshare. To make that work, they'll certainly need to bite the hard drive bullet - which given how cheap hard drive space is these days, seems a certainty.

On a geeky side, I have to wonder what Nintendo will use as a disc format. This could almost be the first console to not use a disc format, but that seems a stretch even for Nintendo. It wouldn't be a bad idea for Nintendo to embrace Blu-Ray, but Blu-Ray is probably not enough of a dominant HD format to justify licensing it from a competitor.

In fact, I'm not even all that interested in the Cafe hardware. Where Nintendo really needs to compete is on software. Both PSN and XBLA are excellent gamer networks, and if Nintendo was incapable of generating at least a worthy clone - the Cafe is going to have trouble out of the gate.

And the other thing Nintendo needs to fix, which I think has been mentioned in most of the previews up till now - is third party support. I'm not going to buy another piece of Nintendo hardware just to play the next Zelda or Metroid game. They're great franchises, sure, but they don't offer anything new to the table in the same way that, say, Little Big Planet or even Gears of War does. Nintendo needs to join the Call of Duty crowd for this generation - because while the old Nintendo mascots may have some of the most loyal following in the world, I don't see their numbers increasingly drastically in 2012.

Dungeon Hunter Alliance; Gameloft Versus Bethesda

2011-04-21T12:14:00.000-07:00

I do need to preface this incoming rant with the fact that The Girl and I are big fans of co-op action RPG's. We played every iteration we could get our hands on, and a few them we played through a couple of times.

Oddly, this genre has been sorely lacking on the PS3. There was the near launch title Untold Legends, but when this title was released we were still pretty content loading up Champions of Norrath instead, which sounded like a much more competent title.

IGN gave a Untold Legends a 6.5.

And of course, the was Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2, which was a cut and paste of Marvel Ultimate Alliance with enhanced graphics.

IGN gave Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 a 7.7.

Finally, there was Sacred 2, which had some pretty odd issues when setting up the coop functionality but we played quite a bit, even starting over a couple of times - because it was probably the deepest game of this type we found.

IGN gave Sacred 2 a 6.5.

So we were pretty stoked when we saw that Dungeon Hunter Alliance was hitting PSN and offering offline coop. I would say my expectations on the game were somewhat reserved. I had played the original on my iPhone and enjoyed it to a point. If it didn't have coop, I probably would have gotten anyway as just a late night console crawler - but couch coop made this an easy buy at $13.

And honestly, the game doesn't take much to review: it's solid, albeit highly derivative (I mean, the game world is called Gothicus of all things) action RPG in the same vein as every other Diablo clone on the planet. It does support a competent menu system, a decent skill system, and solid (though occasionally blocky) graphics.

The most impressive thing about Dungeon Hunter Alliance, however, is that it has one the better coop setups of any game of its type on the console. MA:U2 probably being the only one with a more robust setup. The only real flaw I can find is that it's a pain to drop someone out locally, which isn't much of a problem. You can seamlessly play the same characters online, offline or a mixture of both. Trading items is easy, and they've implemented a simple color assignment system to make looting straight forward, and giving items back to the players uses the same system. The only thing missing is trading gold, I think. So far, I've found very easy to find online games to jump in and join, which isn't always the case for this genre.

There does some to be a couple of flaws with the hit detection, though it's more of an annoyance than anything that will cause you to toss a controller to the ground. We'd love to have more customization, or classes at least, offered as well.

If this genre is your thing, this is an easy buy - especially if you have someone to coop with. It's not going to impress you, but it will entertain you.

So why did IGN give it a 6.0? By that account this should be the worst of the bunch by far, despite the fact that it is about 1/3 the cost, the only offering in the genre on PSN, has many of the same flaws as MA:U2 in being completely unimaginative, and actually a better coop setup than some of the titles? The reader average is an 8, press average about a 7 or so. My score would be 7, maybe a 7.5 on bias. So why is this just "Okay" and not at least "Good"?

Simple. It came from Gameloft. And it's very trendy to hate Gameloft.

Don't believe me? Here's how the review starts out:

Gameloft is at it again. The company has succeeded on a strategy of similarity throughout the past several years, creating cloned versions of other studios' biggest hits and serving them up mostly on mobile platforms. Dungeon Hunter: Alliance is another of these projects, a game that feels like a riff on more original dungeon crawlers like Diablo -- and it, too, originally debuted in the mobile space.

-- Dungeon Hunter Alliance Review [IGN]

Let's examine this for a moment. There's no denying that Gameloft has made a business model out of lifting successful themes and mechanics and deploying them different platforms, especially the iPhone.

But the phrase that stands out for me? This one:

a game that feels like a riff on more original dungeon crawlers like Diablo

Are you kidding me? Of course it feels like a riff on Diablo. Diablo was released in 1996 and has spawned so many clones that "Diablo clone" is synonymous with "Action RPG" as a genre. You could level the same critique at so many titles, but because this is Gameloft, it must be some kind of evil. And that the game originally debuted on a mobile platform? Like that should be odd for a PSN title? Should I go look up any Angry Birds reviews to see if anyone wrote that like it was a bad thing?

So Dungeon Hunter Alliance has almost the exact same core as a game released in 1996. Let's also note that the most recent game of this type was dropped onto the PS3 in 2009, so "Diablo clone" fans have been waiting a couple years to play anything new. And what do we have to look forward to? There's Torchlight, already on XBLA and supposedly coming out for PSN - which doesn't even have couch coop. That leaves Dungeon Siege III for the console market that is similar to Dungeon Hunter in terms of features, and it's fully priced game.

Some of the other points in IGN review are just bizarre:

Then there are only three different character classes to choose from -- the Warrior, the Rogue and the Mage. That selection made sense when it was just a game with one main character, but expanding out to four means that at least two people in your party are going to be playing the same guy. That's like the Ninja Turtles having Raphael, Donatello and two Leonardos. It feels odd.

What's worse, technical issues are currently plaguing the game's online play, meaning you probably won't be able to reliably get a party of your friends connected together until Gameloft releases a patch.

I've played four player online. I had no problems connecting (and I got the game like a couple hours after it came out, so no more patched than anyone else). And I didn't find it odd at all. I seriously have no clue as to what the reviewer is talking about here.

The closing comments indeed sums it up:

Dungeon Hunter: Alliance has left me less than impressed. Gameloft's strategy of copying other studios' hits has worked before and the core game here was a worthwhile clone back on the iPhone two years ago -- but playing it on the PS3 now feels out of place. The extras that have been tacked on to sell this version as a new experience all fall flat, or, worse, just don't work. You'll never forget for a minute that you're playing a game not originally meant for PlayStation, so save your PSN cash for a different download and give this port a pass.

The point that the reviewer completely misses is that in the two years that, according to him, Dungeon Hunter went from a "worthwhile clone" to a junk PS3 port ... is that there haven't been any releases in this genre. Which in many ways, makes Dungeon Hunter just as worthwhile as when it debuted on the iPhone, especially for just $13.

And my question to IGN would be ... what download would you suggest instead? There are exactly zero other titles in this vein on PSN. Zero. Dungeon Hunter Alliance deserves some credit because even if it derivative, unimaginative and shallow - it's also the only game like it on PSN and it manages to do a solid job of delivering such a game. Gameloft isn't stupid, and they aren't unskilled. They see a viable market, and they offer competent games otherwise not seen on that market. And I'm rather glad they have. We've been playing the hell out of it.

Now, this post has gone on longer than I intended and I know most of you have probably zoned out by now. But I did put "Gameloft versus Bethesda" in the title. Yes, I am going to kick this rather dead horse again. Because I've read a few reviews of Dungeon Hunter which spend a rather inordinate amount of time dissing Gameloft for being Gameloft ... and yet when I peruse through the flood of Skyrim previews I notice on thing still hasn't happened.

Not one previewer has had the balls to ask Bethesda the completely obvious question on whether they are going to fix their stability issues.

It is absurd that Bethesda gets such a free pass from the press on delivering some of the buggiest games in the industry because they offer a game experience which is somewhat unique, and yet when Gameloft finally delivers a PSN title which no other company has bothered to produce ... they get shafted simply because they are Gameloft. I honestly don't give a "kill 10 rats" quest if Skyrim is beautiful, or has a new skill structure, or anything at all about the title unless I know that Bethesda is at least willing to acknowledge the failure of quality from their previous titles and is making it a priority not to repeat such mistakes.

And people, there's no other way to describe not being able to finish a game unless you are wearing the right hat on your character than a complete and miserable failure of quality. As I've said before, I won't be buying Skyrim until I see a review - and the first review that states something like:

Typical of Fallout games, there are performance issues and game-breaking bugs that seriously detract from the experience.

...which is from IGN review of the New Vegas: Blood Money ... I am writing Bethesda off as a competent developer forever.

And let's note that the Blood Money DLC, which shipped with game breaking bugs, got a 6.5 from IGN. So even shipping with game breaking bugs, according to IGN that's a better use of your $10 than a game which, you know, works.

Game Play: Crysis 2

2011-03-30T08:21:00.000-07:00

After having second, and possibly even third, thoughts on Dragon Age II - I thought it best to keep trying Crysis 2 for a while before writing about. Truth be told though, it is just simply one of the better shooters I've played.

It's a bit sad, actually, that the release of this game has been mostly centered around whether the PS3 version has the same resolution as the 360 version. My understanding is that it doesn't ... but I really could care less. It's breathtakingly beautiful. Yeah, OK, there's the occasional LOD model jump, or perhaps the infrequent frame rate drop ... but you'll be too busy going ZOMG to notice for the most part.

What's interesting about Crysis 2's graphics is that they're a different kind of beauty from say, Killzone 3. Killzone 3 was an extremely pretty game, but you knew there were sheets of pre-rendered graphics making that happen. That's not a knock against such graphics, I loved Killzone 3 - but Crysis 2 (while yes, I'm sure has some pre-rendering tricks of its own) manages to make an extremely immersive world because of the detail on everything around you.

But really, do you need me to tell you it's pretty? I can confirm PS3 users shouldn't shy away from it. However, outside of the graphics - it is a very tightly designed game. The gunfights are dynamic and fun. The story is inventive and interesting for the genre. The interface isn't terribly intrusive. The AI is very good.

I'm probably only half way through the game at most, and my negative comments on it are short and nitpicky. The voice acting could have been kicked up a notch, especially Gould's. It's not that it's bad, it's just that Gould's voice is pretty constant and so you pick up on artificial nuances about it. The combat is a little repetitive, though this is usually remedied by a changes in the scenario which will force you to shift strategies ... so you can't always sneak/snipe/brute force your way through the game.

Also, and probably my biggest pain - the waypoint HUD is sometimes confusing. There's a random point somewhere, but how to get to it may be a bit of puzzle. When it happens, it's really annoying - but it doesn't happen often.

My positive comments are many. The core mechanics are tight. The combat is fun. The story is interesting. The music is haunting. The environment feels vast and interactive. In truth, this is great shooter bordering on being one of the best ever. The only thing keeping it back is that while it gets high marks for doing many things right, there's not a lot here which feels like pushing the envelope. Even the online modes feel a little Call of Duty like (not that a dozen other shooters don't make the same design choices there).

Definitely recommended.

Final Thoughts on Dragon Age II

2011-03-20T15:59:00.000-07:00

Towards the end of Dragon Age II, I was ready to post a pretty positive footnote to my previous review, saying that once you get knee deep into the game, the story, characters and gameplay really seem to overshadow the other flaws. I was going to briefly try out either a warrior or rogue to see if mages may just be more fun, and probably continue that through a slow second playthrough.

Then I got through the last chapters of the game. Free of spoilers, all I can say is that the story completely falls apart and the mechanics issues of the past come roaring back.

Spoilers ahead.

I didn't buy Anders. Not one bit
While I think the characters and plot of DA2 are still more two dimensional than Mass Effect 2, it was shaping up to be an interesting tale. I knew Anders was up to something, and it probably wasn't going to be the most peaceful thing in the world but ... blowing up the Chantry? What? It makes no sense, and only served to re-ignite open violence across the city. One could argue that the final ending might justify his actions, but Anders went from being a troubled mage trying to save lives to a cliche terrorist in about a heartbeat - with only a set of new shiny black robes as an explanation.

As soon as that moment hits, the plot stops making sense. It's way too black and white. Anders' actions are clearly out of bounds, but instead of anyone reacting to Anders - they just go off on a tear in whatever extreme they might have possibly been pointing at.

Speaking of - screw you Fenris
The worst of the lot, I think, is Fenris. I really wanted to like this character, but every time he managed to have a complex moment, it was punctuated with "all mages are evil." I had made every effort throughout the game to befriend and help the guy, but he uses Anders as an excuse to essentially swear an oath to kill me. The mages act as an odd reflection of racism in the game, and by the end Fenris proves himself to be the equivalent of a Neo-Nazi jackass who would stab a friend if he found out they were dating a black girl. At the end of the day, nothing matters to Fenris except who is or isn't a mage.

Blood mages, blood mages, everywhere there are blood mages
Course hating Fenris and even Meredith becomes problematic towards the end since apparently you are actually the only potential mage in the entire game not inclined to become a complete asshole (assuming you played one, otherwise there are none). Let's recap from my game: Merrill stubbornly seeks demonic advice, which ends up with us being party to slaughtering her whole tribe. After, let's see - her keeper decided to get possessed by a demon. We had to tranquil one kid because he might have become a powerful scourge on the world. In trying to help a group of apostate mages in the game, most of them try to kill me with blood magic - and the rest turn to blood magic to betray me later. Orsino, who should be making it his life goal to prove how mages aren't all evil, turns to blood magic and becomes an abomination ... resulting only in trying to kill his most trusted allies. And after Orsino's death, I keep running into not just circle mages using blood magic - but freaking templars.

The problem with wanting to hate Fenris and Meredith is that the game constantly tries to prove them right.

Those were some darn spammy boss fights.
Wanting to save the lovely Isabella, I got into a challenge with the Arishok. At first I wasn't sure how I could win with just myself. Then I realized I could run, zap, run, zap. Run. Zap. Run. Zap. Wash, rinse, repeat, oh ... about a thousand times. The guy never stood a chance statistically, provided I didn't die of boredom first.

Most of the boss fights ended up this way. There was no trick to beating Orsino or Meredith, just determined button mashing. And somehow, this seemed far less true of the standard battles I played out in the game.

And sadly, I ran into one battle I don't think was possible to win. Right after Anders goes all Al-Qaeda on you, you run into a series of fights with templars and blood mages. The last of these pits you against something like fifteen shades, a pride demon, a desire demon and the blood mage. By this time I had lost Fenris and Anders, which means I couldn't have two warriors and I was the only mage with healing. Every time, the shades just did way too much damage to the party, and there was no way my revival cooldown could keep things up to get past the two greater demons.

And whether this was winnable or not - the point is that it was off the scales more difficult than every other battle that followed. Including the end boss fights, which were cake walks. There's no way that is defendable as a well balanced game.

So in the end
Yeah, this obviously turned into a far more negative post than I had originally intended. In truth, I still liked the game overall - just very disappointed by the end. I compare it to Mass Effect 2, and it seems like a copycat from some company other than Bioware. I'm now a little concerned for Mass Effect 3, to be honest. It's not that Dragon Age II is a bad game, it's a good game. It just is far removed from a great game.

Game Play: Dragon Age II (and failed reviews in general)

2011-03-15T09:17:00.000-07:00

I'm finding Dragon Age II a pretty fascinating game, and not just because of what comes on the disc, but also how it's turning into a somewhat controversial title. Not controversial like "Hot Coffee" controversy, but in that it seems to be causing a marked schism between industry reviewers and fans.

To recap from the original Dragon Age - the game was mashup of promising to deliver on the old Baldur's Gate PC games of the past and Bioware's usual character driven, branching conversation, see who can sleep with, style of gameplay. It was very highly reviewed, sold like crazy, and was in general a fan favorite.

However, while I enjoyed the game for the most part - many of Tanners know that I found the game to be wildly unbalanced. I won't even bore you with the link, rather just say that in follow up discussions I found everything from people who either ran into the exact same thing to people who never ran into a problem. The two main factors seemed to be whether people were playing it on a console and if they had been consulting wiki's and online guides to structure their play.

When I played the Dragon Age II demo, I almost got the impression that BioWare had actually read my blog post and made massive design decisions based on it. Since that's statistically impossible, I'll just assume my feedback wasn't a lone crazy voice in the woods. The short version is that the entire game has been re-tailored to be more console friendly and less dependent on micromanagement details (which I still say shouldn't be confused with tactics).

But have they gone too far?

First, let's note that I don't think I've read more negative opinion about a demo in a long while. I can't tell if that is because of the core mechanics or because, to be quite honest, the demo was something of a mess. You couldn't save, you couldn't access inventory, you couldn't modify anything about the character save for gender and class, and the story jumped around ... basically meaning you had to set aside a decent amount of time to get a clearly truncated experience.

But I gotta say - the demo kinda sold me on it. It felt more like Mass Effect than Dragon Age, which was exactly what I was looking for in the sequel. For an excellent counter-example, check out this Game Critic article from Brad Gallaway or this one from Sparky Clarkson.

Because I also gotta say, I can see where he is getting nearly all of those points. Except for the crashing one, though, I've been spending a decent number of hours in the game and haven't had a single glitch.

I think there's truth in the statement that if you loved the first one, you might want to be cautious of your expectations for this one. It really is a different experience in many ways, even if it does a great job of expanding the story. The skill trees are smaller, there are fewer character choices, the combat is simpler, etc. From my own perspective, however:

The Good
While I have had to try a few boss fights over a few times, I haven't once run to a wiki post to figure out why I can't get past a certain point. The combat is by no means flawless, but it certainly feels way more balanced to me. I don't think I'm going to get trapped in the Deep Roads at some point simply because I failed to train my rogue in how to make bombs correctly.It also means I'm not spending so much time bouncing around management screens. I can focus on actually playing the game.

And let's face it - this is still a BioWare game. I don't entirely agree with the Game Critics' take that the characters are poorly written ... I've found them quite entertaining and enjoy the conversation sets quite a bit.

The writing deserves some credit for brief moments of incredible cleverness too - the scenes where you play out Varric's tall tales, like in the beginning of the demo, are quite fun and you'll wish there were more of them.

The Not So Good
There are some side effects from the design changes, though, that aren't necessarily outright bad ... but they're certainly not improvements. The missions, for instance, feel disjointed and short. If you compare the design to either Dragon Age or Mass Effect 2, you get the impression that Hawke's story is less epic and important mostly because of all the time spent doing a series of quick and completely unrelated tasks. You're also likely to have several open quests at one time, and honestly you end up chasing down mission markers on the map with little regard as to what quest the marker is attached with ... you just kinda find out when you get there.

And there's no getting around that Kirkwall feels like a cheap way to shove a lot of mission options in to very little space. You end up in the same small instance dungeons repeatedly - a stark contrast from Mass Effects 2' array of fully realized alien spaces. BioWare has gone from presenting you with the feeling of wandering a galaxy to wondering why they couldn't bother making a new four room dungeon for this particular quest.

The Bad
While I enjoy the combat in general, I agree the way that mobs respawn in the game is a bit bizarre. It's also a little frustrating when you use up the last of your mana and suddenly there's a new hoard the teleports in from behind you. And the game isn't shy about the fact that they pop in from nowhere ... it happens frequently right in front of your eyes. It's a serious distraction from immersion and combined with the reuse of maps in the game really reminds you that you're just playing a game.

And I have no idea who thought it was a good idea that only Hawke could equip armor. Your companions can get new weapons and trinkets, but you're stuck with whatever they're wearing at the time. While appreciate that this reduces the amount of team management I need to do - it gets kinda frustrating when you find this amazing suit of armor that does nothing for you. And I'm playing a mage ... so this happens quite a lot. In fact, all of the extra goodies I had stacked up prior to playing the game, by playing the Dead Space 2 and the demo, were useless to me. I can see some reasons why this might have been done, but it feels like BioWare should have added some kind of mechanic in place of it.

The Ugly
I don't have an ugly for this game. Rather, I think the negativity is being produced as a sum of all the small and medium things that are a) wrong with it and b) different from the first title. I think if you play the demo and hate the demo, you're probably right in not buying the game ... because the plays a lot like the demo with a few more annoyances tacked on.

Though I will say this: I do find it somewhat ugly that what I think is the final showdown is featured so prominently in promos, trailers and ads. Um - spoiler much?

Short version: I'm liking, but not loving the game. I wonder how much of that is because I'm playing a mage, which from some accounts is less spammy in the combat than the other two classes. I find it funny that the mage was my least favorite in the first game, and I'm quite enjoying it in the sequel. If it weren't for the disjointed mission structure, I'd consider a replay as another class to compare it with - but let's be honest ... there are too many awesome games coming out this year to have time for replays.

What's even more fascinating to me is the stark difference between some of the forum and blog posts about the game and the game. When last I looked, the metacritic review for the 360 version was 81/100. The player review average? 4 out of 10. Review sites have become too complacent with franchise titles, I think. I know I bitch and moan about it all the time, but take this quote from the 360 review of the New Vegas DLC Dead Money:

Typical of Fallout games, there are performance issues and game-breaking bugs that seriously detract from the experience.

-- Fallout: New Vegas -- Dead Money Review

The review is, in general, pretty reserved ... and only receives a 6.5/10 in the end. But, 6.5
is "Okay" by IGN standards. So IGN is saying, "Because this is Bethesda, it's OK to have game breaking bugs".

No. No it's not. It's never OK to have game breaking bugs. You know why? Because they're game breaking bugs. By definition, that means the game is broken. Until that bug is fixed, that content should never be rewarded with an above average rating. It simply defies logic. And as I've said before - if any review of Skyrim mentions lockups, crashes, or game breaking bugs ... I'll probably be done with that franchise forever. I don't care how highly rated it is...

OK, off soap box. That was a long post, and you deserve a cookie.

Unreal 3 (Almost 4) Video

2011-03-11T07:24:00.001-08:00

Why bore yourself with screenshots, when you can see the whole thing?

#wow

Unreal Engine 3 ... almost 4?

2011-03-06T13:55:00.001-08:00

'Though the full range of technological bells and whistles unveiled at GDC will probably have to wait, according to his cryptic comments, until the next generation of consoles, he made much of the engine’s scalability, babbling enthusiastically about its application in a range of iPhone and iPad games, literally pulling out handheld devices from an array of unseen pockets to prove his point.

Sympathetically, also, he was eager to emphasize Epic’s status as a sort of gaming patron of the arts, developing useful, cutting-edge tools and then making them available to licensees like some kind of jolly developer Santa Claus: “That’s how Epic works,” Rein enthused. “We spend way too much time on tools, which helps our level designers and also our middlewear people…We work really hard so that what we learn in our games, we can share.”'

GDC 11: Epic Unreal Engine 3 Rollout - http://pulsene.ws/14c5f

Impressive screenshots, and it was apparently noted that version wise, this stuff is almost more like 4 than 3. I still miss my old modding days, and I'm sure Epic will pass out their toys as much as can.

Is the Playbook RIM's last hope?

2011-03-06T13:51:00.001-08:00

"The PlayBook is beginning to look like RIM’s last, lone hope. It’s allegedly a terrific piece of hardware, running their sleek new QNX OS, and I think there’s a lot of room in the market for a good little tablet. The Streak 7 and Galaxy Tab aren’t it, but a PlayBook that runs Android apps would qualify — if it didn’t have to tether to BlackBerries. Unfortunately, that apparently remains RIM’s policy, even though it’s like chaining an Olympic swimmer to an anchor and telling her to win a medal."

-- RIM Finally Sees The Light. Unfortunately, It’s An Onrushing Train – Or Is It? - http://pulsene.ws/147CH

Xoom, the iPad 2, and the next App Gold Rush

2011-03-03T21:12:00.001-08:00

I knew, of course, that when I picked up a Xoom something else would get announced shortly after. Naturally, Apple did not disappoint here. I'd considered getting an I pad last year but wanted to see what 2011 might bring. March is barely a whisper of Spring and the tablet wars are truly underway.

The have been two interesting trends since Apple's announcement. One is the coverage of what the iPad 2 didn't bring to the table: no Retina, no Thunderbolt, no USB, no SD slot, no 4G. Hardware-wise, the new iPad's real trick is to maintain a bit of parity with the Xoom while cutting into the price point. And of course, now you can get the still quite attractive original I pad for even cheaper.

But still, I don't think I've seen quite so many articles following in the heels of an Apple announcement which points to all the things Apple didn't do, instead of what it did. Sure, the magnetic cover is slick ... but give me the pixel density of Retina, or at least the resolution of the Xoom instead.

The other trend is the rather palatable, though predictable, word from the Apple camp of ... so what? It's still going to be the hottest thing since sliced bread and everyone will want one. And, they're right - Apple me brilliant in its conservatism here, leveraging their excellent hardware profit margins and superior software suite to push their platform.

Did I say superior software suite? I did, but before the Android mob shows up on my doorstep - let me just say I love my Xoom and have zero regrets in purchasing it. My iPhone is perfectly sufficient for my iOS needs, and I've had a blast with the Xoom so far. But that's not to say Google can simply dismiss the iTunes factor, or that Motorola can really compare the current stock of iPad apps with a handful of apps geared for the Xoom.

But like I said in the last post: we don't have a mobile landscape, we have a tsunami. Android tablets will sell and as that market grows larger it will attract more developers. Google, or Amazon, or someone will realize the next app gold rush is starting. We may be living in Apple's Post-PC world, but it's a world whose rules are becoming more strongly defined by software instead of hardware ... and Android as a lot of resources for delivering software.

Hardware: Xoom Review

2011-02-26T15:51:00.000-08:00

I picked up a Xoom last week to expand my development options. Since I've already got a dual booted MacBook and an iPhone, the Xoom neatly rounds out both tablet and Android projects.

I had a tweet recently knocking the pricing and Verizon's fee to enable WiFi. The former turned out to be about $400 less than had been rumored, and I know it isn't a common opinion - but I think it's actually slightly competitive. More expensive than the iPad, but also more powerful ... the real problem is that the WiFi only version isn't out yet and Verizon needlessly tacks on another $20 to get you on their network.

It will be interesting to see how it sells. Most reviews have been positive, but most also mention that a certain company based in Cupertino might be making an announcement soon. Still, the Best Buy I went to said nearly every unit had been pre-ordered.

Pricing aside, let's take a quick gander.

The Good
Firstly, it really is a well put together device. It feels solid, has a hefty feel without feeling like you have to start lifting weights to carry it. The size is a great intersection of space and yet feeling comfortable. You get a mini USB, a mini HDMI, AC and headphone outlets out of the box - for some reason the microSD slot is disabled at the moment, but promises another storage option down the road.

For some people, the real attraction will be Honeycomb, Android's first real tablet OS. Combined with the Xoom's hardware, the OS really does sing. While the screen isn't quite as sharp as the iPhone's Retina display, browsing and email feels nearly akin to using a laptop. The UI has some quirks, but in general is very friendly and feature rich.

And from a development point of view, I compiled a quick AIR Hello World app and deployed it to the device effortlessly. Compared to iOS development, with the wrangling of certs and provisioning devices - it's simply night and day. Android is a very developer friendly OS, Honeycomb is well suited to tablets, and this tablet has some great hardware. In short - it's a very attractive device to develop with.

The Not So Good
Hardware wise, probably the only miss are the speakers, which carry too much vibration at louder volumes. They're fine for system sounds and listening to things around the medium range.

Also I found the cradle oddly difficult to work with - hard to determine where the connecting ports were.

Sadly, there's random bugs here and there. Widgets seem to occasionally take dirt naps if they require online connectivity. I've had a couple of browser crashes. Probably the most odd: I had the Xoom emit a strange hum if it was on the cradle and a system notification sound went off. There's no deal breakers and in general the experience doesn't feel overtly buggy - but you do get the impression that maybe some things still need a few round of testing.

The difference between the iTunes platform and not having the iTunes platform is palatable. Apple has made it so easy to purchase and consume media - Google and/or Amazon really need to take notes.

The Bad
If there's any real crime here, it's the fact that the device is sufficiently powerful with a well designed OS ... and yet there's so little content that even approaches showcasing the device. A couple impressive games have hit, and Google Earth is always a crowd pleaser ... but there's only a handful of apps really designed for the tablet screen and less that really take advantage of the hardware and software features.

Probably the two biggest criminals here are Facebook and Twitter. I find it rather astonishing that Pulse could take an app and so well adapt it to device for launch, and yet two of the most popular websites in the world cough up the same UI for phones.

Or in other words...
Having a Xoom right now is a bit like owning a Porsche that you can only drive in a parking lot. There's nothing about the hardware or software that I think is really a strike, or at least nothing which seems significant in a sea of positives. It really reminds me of the early days of the iPhone, when the App Store was first getting under way and development was still fresh. It's like that but - but imagine if Apple had started with the iPhone 4.

That might, and likely will, change quickly over the next few months. I feel I can recommend the device, but I understand why all these reviews mention that the iPad 2 is likely to be announced soon. There isn't so much of a mobile landscape right now as a tsunami, and the only thing that is really certain is that it's going to be an interesting year. With just device alone, we're going to get Flash and an AIR update soon, 4G compatibility and ... hopefully better apps.

Game Play: Mass Effect 2 (PS3)

2011-02-04T12:35:00.000-08:00

I played the first Mass Effect briefly on a friend's 360, and while saw that it was clearly polished wasn't entirely sure what the real appeal was about the extremely popular title.

That's because you can't play a Mass Effect title briefly and get the real appeal. In fact, if I have any real complaint about the recent PlayStation 3 port of Mass Effect 2, it's that they won't be porting the first one.

Mass Effect 2 is a Bioware RPG through and through, and so players familiar with Dragon Age or Knights of the Old Republic know the basic score: a streamlined experience tailored around gathering characters into your party and selecting a couple of them to bring along with you on missions. There's a morality scale, there's a grand story, there's a lot of memorable NPC's to meet and interact with.

Kindly, though, the morality scale is less black and white, less "save the kitten" or "kill the kitten" - and feels more like changes in the style of the player than really building "the ultimate hero" or "the ultimate villain.

If anything impressed me about Mass Effect 2, it was how it managed to avoid pitfalls similar titles fell into. Take Fallout 3 for example. Fallout 3 could also be considered an open ended RPG based heavily on decisions made by the player. Mass Effect 2 has one huge advantage over Fallout 3, however, which trumps any other comparison:

Mass Effect 2 does not consistently crash. In fact, I think it crashed once on my during my entire 45+ hours of gameplay. Once, Bethesda, once... which is technically one more than it probably should be two less than an average Fallout title might accomplish in a single night.

Outside of that, Mass Effect 2 requires less wandering - and oddly enough, felt more like a shooter hybrid than the Fallout 3 titles. I never once felt the need to forcibly pause Mass Effect 2's action (though it does pause to let you select new weapons and use powers).

More interesting to me is Mass Effect 2 was also far more enjoyable than Dragon Age - at least for myself. As I wrote in the past, Dragon Age has serious balance issues which more or less beg for you to refer to wiki articles on how to "correctly" play the title if you don't want to get stuck in a dwarven dungeon getting devoured by some monster boss (still a bit bitter about that one). I never had that instance with Mass Effect 2, never felt like I had to be cautious in where I went in the galaxy, I simply explored and adventured and upgraded my party.

So this is a game that had none of the technical issues of Fallout 3, or New Vegas ... and had none of the frustrations I found with Dragon Age. In short: it was freaking awesome. I'm considering a second playthrough before Mass Effect 3 hits the holidays, which I rarely take the time to do anymore (even with Demon's Souls - and some would argue that was the point of that game).

Highly, highly recommend.

Game Play: Minecraft

2011-02-01T08:31:00.000-08:00

I had peered over the shoulder of other Minecraft players via tweets and YouTube videos and to be quite honest, had no idea what big deal was all about. If you've been living under a rock, Minecraft is an indie sensation; grabbing awards and selling like hotcakes. And when you first look at it, it looks basically like a game about punching blocks.

And even once you first jump into the game, the game seems like it's just basically about punching blocks. You may have seen videos about people creating enormous towers and elaborate traps, but you've got a fist and mountain full of dirt to get through and little idea of what else is out there. Then night falls and there's a lot of groaning going on and a pretty good chance you might just die.

Maybe it's a sign that gamers have gotten so used to in-game tutorials and intro level handholding that there's an expectation that you simply shouldn't need documentation anymore, but trust me when I say the first thing you'll want to do in Minecraft is read the tutorials to get a grasp for the basics of the game, how to build important little things like torches, and surviving your first night.

Once you've gotten past that step, and especially if you're a child of the Lego generation - there's a good chance you'll be addicted to the game right away. Minecraft is essentially a lightweight RPG for the Lego set, where mining for materials means that you can control the world more and more - and eventually you'll be trying to do things like carving out an underwater observatory for simply no other reason than to see how what it's like when you're done.

The mechanics of the game are, to be honest, quite fascinating. It's not questing as much as exploration and the risk to reward ration is heavily tied to investment in time rather than loss of save points or experience. I've been playing the game quite a lot and really my most horrible fate to date is losing a diamond pickaxe while I was trying to tunnel a water plume from the ocean to my dungeon's floor. It's annoying - but it really just means I have to go find another diamond vein somewhere. The monsters, part of the creatures called mobs in Minecraft jargon, are more parts of the environment than encounters - they're something to be tamed just like that landscape you'd rather seen turned into a castle. The emphasis on the sandbox nature of the game is important, and really what makes it shine.

It's also interesting to look at Minecraft's roots - the game essentially takes Infiniminer, which was intended to be a team game about, well, mining blocks and building things, to solve the complexity issues around Dwarf Fortress, a game about mining, crafting and defending yourself.

It's a relatively untapped subgenre of the sandbox variety - very different from the GTA concept of simply running around a moderately fixed environment. But the appeal is now officially undeniable, and I'd keep an eye out in this space in general.

Obviously, highly recommended.

TV Watch: Persons Unknown

2011-01-12T14:17:00.000-08:00

We stumbled onto Persons Unknown in a way similar to how we found Harper's Island in that it's a recent TV offering we got through Netflix Instant. Having just completed a run last August, it's already on Instant in what might be a bid to get some support for a second season.

Having just watched the last episode recently - I wouldn't hold my breath.

Persons Unknown is a clearly a post-Lost vehicle, shoving random people into a bizarre situation against a somewhat ambiguous and nameless enemy. Instead of an island getaway, our heroes get stuck in a town in the middle of nowhere where they are essentially the only residents and leaving seems impossible.

If you don't want any spoilers, then let me just summarize with this: if Lost's great trick was to convince viewers that the writers were going to explain themselves for six seasons - that's clearly one more trick than Persons Unknown is capable of performing, as you'll find yourself questioning the plausibility of mere scenes, much less the entire season. While the acting is generally pretty good, nearly everything else about this show falls apart after the first few episodes.

For example: in a scene later in the season a character rallies the rest to try and leave the town. He does this by whistling, after which every other character in the town opens the door from a different building and starts to follow him in a group. Why were they all waiting in different buildings for a whistle? We do not know.

Which is just one example of lazy writing which culminates in the season finale, which is quite possibly one of the worst ever written.

Really bad spoiler alerts. Seriously, if you don't want to know what happens in the finale stop reading now.

Ready? Ok.

Having escaped the town (warned you), the previously imprisoned hijack a van and then subsequently crash. That's actually the event which leads to the finale, but what occurs in between the van crash and the finale is potentially the worst plot hole in TV history. Drive a truck through it? You could fly Darth Vader's personal Star Destroyer through this. One character ends up back in San Francisco. She at least has the excuse that she can't remember what happened. Two others appear to have stolen a car and are driving somewhere around San Francisco. Where they got the car or how is left up to your imagination. Heck, even why the car eventually breaks down is - though I guess you assume they just ran out of gas. A fourth ends up back in the hands of the enemy.

But these are just the opening wounds to the big one: two characters end up in Morocco. Yes, two of them made a transatlantic flight and are hiding out in Morocco even though another pair can't even keep a gallon of gas in a car. There is no explanation to this, nor is their any explanation as to how they are eventually re-captured (again, warned you).

The entire scene stinks of needing to shove the two characters in somewhere and thinking this would look really cool and never giving it any more thought. In other words, it is completely brain dead.

At best, Persons Unknown offers a few decent twists and decent, if completely wasted by the end, premise. At worst, it reminds how good Lost fans really had it.

Obviously - not recommended.

Game Play: Assassin's Creed Brotherhood

2011-01-08T07:15:00.000-08:00

I was somewhat surprised when I finished Assassin's Creed Brotherhood last night, and I think if I pulled up the game right now I'm still at like 62% "synchronicity", which is apparently Assassin's snarky way of talking about "completion". I had gotten so used to mixing up story missions with wandering for side missions - but the way the last few missions were structured ropes you into a more linear path. Once you've recovered a certain spherical MacGuffin, it's rather off to the races.

For me, the Assassin's Creed franchise is starting to feel a little like Dynasty Warriors. Some of the hardcore gamers might take that as a knock, but The Girl and I played the living hell out of those games. That was until the PS3 generation and I think while I was playing like, Dynasty Warriors Monopoly or something, I realized that there was very little new here and while I still liked the core mechanics - I was already getting somewhat bored with them.

Ubisoft is making a noble attempt to keep the gameplay fresh ... but before we get to the new mechanics, let's look at what is similar here. Your main avatar gets knocked down, stripped of all his cool gadgets, seems to forget previous tricks and has to start from scratch rebuilding himself and the area around him. To do this, you'll jump around some occasionally overly convenient areas, punch, stab and kill. Often by leaping on someone's head.

And that all still works. Well, mostly at least. The rebuilding mechanic is rather flawed, I think. You spend money to rehab shops the Borgia have, for some reason, shut down, and in return you get part of their income. I didn't know that this was Extortionist's Creed as well, but there you go. The real end result of how the shops are laid out is that towards the end of the game you'll have enough money to buy the Colosseum three times over but still can't find a damn blacksmith when you want one. There are other excuses to spend money, like buying the Colosseum or repairing old ruins ... which really just give you more racket money.

The Borgia Towers were, I think, a better twist. In order to remove Borgia influence, you have to assassinate a captain and burn his tower down. Essentially a free mode assassination mission which actually makes it easier to get other missions done. They were fun and I actually felt like they were having an impact.

I was also constantly baffled as to why the game doesn't have a "restart from checkpoint" option. If I die, I can "restart from checkpoint" - but if I want to restart from just the menu, I have to go all the way to beginning of the mission? Could I just get a "die now" option?

One big addition to the game is the ability to find and train new assassin's. Most of this is split into two things: a zero player style admin game where you send guild members off to far away lands to earn XP and the ability to hit a shoulder button and rain fiery death from the sky. OK, the death isn't really fiery so much - but the general outcome is that guards get their ass kicked to some varying degree.

The training aspect is nearly non-existent. You can upgrade their weapon points. Or armor points. It doesn't really matter since it seems to have no impact on their success, so just auto-upgrade anyway. You can also change the color of their costume, but it only does anything on the admin screen - anywhere else they always wear white. You know the chance of success of the mission and making sure mine were 85% or above - I never failed one. The "brotherhood" in Assassin's Creed Brotherhood is an interesting twist which adds some value, but has little meat on it.

If anything, the big addition here is multiplayer. And I have to give Ubisoft credit here - Brotherhood's multiplayer is a very bold concept. It's the kind of thing I wish more games would attempt instead of just jamming multiplayer deathmatch into every concept. You play as an Abstergo/Templar trying to kill other Templars is an area populated by NPC's. You get a PC target as your prey, and usually you are someone else's target as well. You need to spot your target with a proximity indicator and their behavior while trying to blend in well enough (or run fast enough) to avoid your potential killer.

It's actually rather brilliant, especially for a console title. It mostly works really well, though I think the team versions muddy the waters a bit. My only complaint is that once that fresh gameplay smell wears off, it feels a little redundant. Spawn, walk, run ... stab or run away. Repeat.

But honestly, that's not surprising. The game should be praised for trying something different online, which is why I think everyone should go, buy it and try it out. I'd love to see another iteration of this concept.

So short version: the game is still one of the few that makes me enjoy jumping puzzles while playing it - at least most of the time, and it will always be fun to stalk some poor sap from a rooftop. That said, I'm not overly inclined to go get closer to 100% synchronicity now that the main story is over. I may finish off the Temple missions, though the reward of some new suit of armor I'll never actually wear has little shine to it.

Short, short version? It's good - and if you're a Creed fan you've probably already played it and are about to send me an angry email about how I didn't refer to the Colosseum as "Colosseo" or some such.

But for next one, the franchise really needs to crank it up notch.

Game Play: GoldenEye 007 (Wii)

2011-01-02T10:33:00.000-08:00

The original GoldenEye on the Nintendo 64 was such a high watermark that it still pales over console shooters today. The game's level design, pacing, weapon selection and multiplayer modes still impact designs today, but perhaps most importantly was the game's ability to tell a story despite the constraints of the cartridge based format. Gamers who played the game will still remember scenes where they dropped in on guards, protected Natalya from swarms of soldiers, and stormed after Trevelyan ... a far cry from the "find the red key" norm from shooters of the day.

Eurocom was responsible for The World Is Not Enough also on the the N64, one of the few games not done by Rare or ex-Rare developers which clearly had learned from the earlier game. So if any company other than Rare could take the original classic and update it for the Wii, it would probably have been them.

GoldenEye on the Wii follows the same basic skeleton of the original game while adding in-game cinematics, more expansive and detailed levels, more modern weapon selections and online multiplayer. The port is carefully done, with an emphasis on the elements from the original and maintaining new versions of scenes fans will remember while making sure the game doesn't feel out of date for the Call of Duty crowd as well. The result is possibly one of the best shooters on the platforms which can take advantage of modern design while making sure fans of the original can keep their nostalgia safe and secure. It is quite probably the best the Wii gamers could have asked to have.

The online mode is decent by most standards, but top notch for a Wii game ... the platform still struggles for a definitive online experience. I'm not sure I'm a fan of it having experience levels considering how much fun the original was to play with proximity mines and other gadgets out of the box, but again the online manages to capture much of the same pacing and fun of the original. Technically my only complaint with it is that the spawning logic on some of the game modes seems off ... hard to build up a solid defense when you're getting placed far away from your goal. Still, the only real problem is that aren't enough people playing it.

I hate to say it, but I would love to see a Sony Move version of the same game with updated graphics and PSN support. Games like GoldenEye and Red Steel 2 shows that good games are still quite worth playing on the Wii, but the console still shows a serious technical divide when you compare it to the other platforms.

Highly recommend however.

Early Look: DC Universe Online Beta (PS3)

2010-12-20T09:30:00.000-08:00

It shouldn't really be surprising to anyone that currently DC Universe Online is a buggy mess. For one thing, it is technically a beta ... but also a beta of an MMO from SOE, who doesn't exactly have a long track record of deploying stable products in their first iteration or so. Take Planetside, for instance, where I routinely spawned into walls.

So when I spawned into floor while playing DCU, I was hardly surprised. Course, this is now many years later and I would thought SOE would have had a few new tricks to keep this kind of thing from happening. Other common issues: sound will disappear, you'll occasionally be unable to jump into a new zone (including logging out), odd delays between doing damage and actually seeing the effect, graphics detail jump here and there (DCU uses the Unreal Engine - though it seems to vary between UT2004 and UE3 sometimes. I think the detail settings are TBD), random complete lockup, mission items may be missing, etc. etc.

If you squint really hard and ignore the bugs, what remains is a fairly by the numbers MMO experience. The character creation is quite decent, perhaps not quite as impressive as City of Heroes, but offers a gamut of physical options for your comic avatar. You can create a hero or villain, and select a specific mentor - all of which will guide the missions you get out of the gate. Power selection is fairly shallow, you select a power base (Fire, Sorcery, Ice, Nature, Technology, etc.), a weapon (from hand blasting to massive hammers), and a movement type (flight, acrobatics or super speed).

Much of the game feels like a fantasy MMORPG with a comic book theme and the action setting set to high. That might sound like a bad thing, but it's really not and offers a solid and familiar core to the gameplay. You do gather gear as you go along, but you can equip the gear without having to change that carefully selected appearance of your costumed crimefighter. You can swap out the appearance of your gear at any time without having to change what you actually have equipped, making it easy to toy around with the look and feel of your character. You select a gear palette when you create your character which all new gear conforms to - meaning that even that Amazonian helmet might suit your wardrobe.

If I ignore the complete lack of stability - my real complaint about DCU is that I've actually found it very hard to engage many things which warrant the MMO side of the equation. Sure, when I'm running around Metropolis there are umpteen other heroes fighting around me - but often that's a liability more than anything else as they're in competition for the same rats I need to kill for my "Kill Five Rats" mission. At least on the console, the interface for creating groups on the fly seems clunky at best and my time waiting outside zones for a party only ever resulted in one invite ... and then the zone itself was crashing.

DCU does have the ability to create quick groups for instanced quests, such as the "Alerts" - where Martian Manhunter will teleport you and a few other heroes to a specific location. While this could potentially create some greate Pick Up Game potential, I would generally teleport into a location unable to find half the party and on one Alert, kept getting trapped in a room with no doors (literally).

It's bizarre to me that I can load up Borderlands - also on the Unreal Engine, and grab a pick up game in minutes, and the experience is seamless ... and yet DCU is an actual MMO and I've spent 99.9999% of my time solo on it. As a solo RPG, it might be worth the price of admission without the monthly cost, if made to actually work, but I'm certainly not getting anything from the game I'd pay monthly for right now.

If they make the game stable, look a bit better, and fix the grouping - DCU might be a big draw for MMO fans on the console. You can see the potential in the game right now, but there is plenty of work to be done for sure.

What Sucks In Black Ops (And Most Online Shooters)

2010-12-02T10:58:00.000-08:00

I had been playing with "tips & tricks", or "notes" or "thoughts" on Black Ops, but honestly nothing will really sum it all quite like of stuff that sucks about the game.

Conditional: It's a pretty great game, and honestly these are complaints not really aimed at it specifically. It's not like the game crashes repeatedly at a crucial moment unless you wore the right in-game hat or anything (because that would just be insane). No, some of these things have been true since I was an admin on a Counter Strike server so, so, so many years ago.

Second conditional: Many of these things are resolved by having a solid set of people (or even a clan) to play with. But most aren't completely.

But that doesn't change the fact that they suck.

Lobbies Suck
Once, there were dedicated servers - and they were good. Well, mostly good - but the nice thing about dedicated servers is that once you found one you liked you could stick with the same crowd every time you wanted to play - day or night. Our Counter Strike server was a full blown community where you could easily find people you were comfortable playing with and then chat with them on forums after the game.

Lobbies, on the other hand, are nothing more than random groups of people. The connections suck and honestly the whole system rewards you for jumping from one lobby to another lobby often during a game session to get into existing games quickly - and before the you get the dreaded dropped connection.

Oh, right ... speaking of:

Server Disconnects Suck
With dedicated servers, it was very rare that the game dropped you. You may have dropped from the game, or your cat might have kicked out your cable or whatnot ... but the servers were usually up and running. With the peer to peer lobby system, all it takes is a drop between you and random user 22, or maybe random user 22 decides they doesn't want to be on the losing team anymore and drops out - taking the ball, the game and the whole enchilda with them.

It's double annoying since games like Black Ops make tracking experience and stats a big portion of the game - and you may play through 90% of a match only to have the connection pulled out from under you. Ironically in what is probably an effort to punish players who drop out early because they're losing, nobody keeps their score in this case.

VOIP Sucks
I know I've harped on this before, but dear god almighty is VOIP the most wasted technology on the planet. At it's best I occasionally hear useful tips from someone on my team. There's a chance of like 1:1000000 that might happen. There's nearly a 1:1 chance that I will hear random music, someone's kids, their dog, their significant other yelling at them, heavy breathing, or whatnot. Also common is just idle chatter between two players who know each other ... which is usually not rude as much as it's just completely unnecessary background noise.

At it's worse? You might get berated by a player who got killed in the first two seconds of the game. Or sexually harassed by another player. Or threatened, or called any number of pretty impressive insults. And if you aren't the target of all this - you still get to hear it.

I've actually started syncing my bluetooth mic, muting it ... and then setting aside on the floor. I've said it before, and I'll say it again - every online game should have a fast "mute all" option.

And actually, Sony and/or Microsoft should offer teamspeak options at the OS level. Every game should have "talk only to people on your friend list" as a possibility. That way I only talk to people I care about, and nobody has to listen to me do so...

Campers Suck
And I'm going to do everyone a favor here and define a camper as:

A person more concerned with their kill to death ration than actually playing the game.

Honestly, I'm not even going to get into the argument about whether it's bad pool to hide in a fern for five minutes during team deathmatch. However, when I run pass someone hiding in a fern for five minutes while trying to cap a domination point, the urge to TK rises. "Hiding in a fern", mind you, is different from "sniping in a fern" - the distinction is that a sniper will take out opponents in my way. Hiding just makes you decoration.

Matchmaking Sucks
Honestly, Black Ops handles it better than most. However, sometimes when three people drop out right before a match begins and you're stuck with 3:6 for the first ten minutes, or when all the other team is on the same prestige clan, etc. - it sucks the fun out of the game.

Worse, I used to consider it a cardinal sin to drop out of a game which I knew was doomed. Honestly, if I'm in a lobby with a bunch of people yelling into their mics, hiding in ferns and probably ready to drop their own connection ... I'm pretty willing to bail and find a real game.

Knife Fights Suck
Knife attacks have somewhat annoyed me since Counter Strike, and they occasionally still annoy me today. For one thing, in a semi-realistic military shooter - killing someone with a quick swipe of a knife is pretty unrealistic. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that people dying in a modern gunfight from knife attacks are probably statistically low.

But worse is that the mechanic is flawed. OK, if you sneak up behind me and stab me in the back ... you win. If you rush me and I miss you you completely and you stab me ... you win. But there's just no way in hell someone should take three bullets and still get to stab someone and get an instakill from point blank range. At the core, these games are gunfights - and guns should trump knives.

Game Play: CSI Fatal Conspiracy

2010-11-24T10:12:00.000-08:00

I'm not entirely familiar with the shovelware genre in general, so perhaps there is a subculture out there of people who are used to franchise cash ins which they might find appealing, but I'm going to have to guess there probably is not.

In some ways, the gaming community should see the release of this game's demo as a kind of blessing. It's a free package which shows just how bad gaming development actually can be. Thought Doom III was bad? Ha. If you put Fatal Conspiracy on a spectrum of bad to good, most of your least favorite games would probably not even be visible on the other end.

Start with the production value, or the complete lack of it. Most of the menus and images look like they were designed and developed by someone putting their first website together. I honestly can't tell if the voice actors were used to deliver dialogue, because the sound quality is so uneven that I couldn't tell if that was Marg Helgenberger doing a bad Willows impersonation or somebody else.

If you squint enough that the poorly formatted menus don't annoy you into oblivion, you can stumble around the lackluster interface which appears to be specifically designed to slow the user down and confuse them. Possibly the most important thing to do in the game - investing evidence for "trace", either stopped working for me completely during the demo or the secret combo of buttons to get it working again was lost on me.

If you're a fan of the show, you should hate the game. If you're a fan of self-flagellation, then this might be the game for you. Games like this make me mourn what has become of the adventure genre in general, and despair for where it might go.

RCN Chicago's Idea Of Service

2010-11-15T21:45:00.000-08:00

Excuse the local PSA for a moment, Cathode readers - though I suppose RCN internet users of other markets may want to pay attention anyway...

For awhile now, The Girl and I have had some troubles getting high quality video running on the old Roku. For the longest time I figured this was just a technical issue with the old wifi, and so I strung 300 feet of ethernet to plug it all in directly from the source so that we (and in particular she) could appreciate some quality entertainment.

I pay for 10mb service from RCN here in Chicago, which is far and above the connection speed Amazon recommends. This is a service that RCN widely advertises here in Chicagoland.

Problem? They can't actually deliver on that service. When we tried to rent an HD movie from Amazon, we simply couldn't watch it in anything less than a couple of dots after some time ... in other words, we rented an HD movie only to watch in blocks.

Why?

Heres why:

Now, while this is off my iPhone and off WiFi - it's not like I was taking this reading from the street or anything. Sure, I would expect some degradation from WiFi and whatnot - but ... this reading is showing a 0.66 download speed and the lesson here is simple:

RCN was selling a 10mb service. From WiFi I was getting less than 1. When I looked at the wired connection? I was getting about 2-3. Sometimes less. The speed is utterly unreliably and usually under 5.

RCN admits this is a problem on their end - but their technical support says that the "capacity upgrade" has no estimated time of delivery. Which is interesting, since I had an estimated time of delivery expected from me when I signed up for the service, although it has been over two weeks now and RCN has shown absolutely nothing from their part for the same. The best I can get, in fact, is "no estimated time of delivery".

So RCN in Chicago advertises a service to which they can apparently not technically deliver - and just tonight I got an email from The Girl that not only was nothing new being done about it, but that our service was actually completely down for the entire night.

Utility companies need to be made accountable, because they will for sure not it for themselves. I would encourage anyone to check their Internet connection compared to what they pay with a simple run of Speedtest.net - but especially if you have RCN in the Chicagoland area. If I'm getting this level of service, there's a good chance you are too - I'm pretty certain few people in the Wrigleyville area are getting what they actually pay for...

And for the record - RCN customer service has been abysmal. I've been hung up by the automated service twice and left on hold for nearly a half hour at least once. I've never gotten a straight answer as to the problem or when RCN will solve it - leaving me to wonder if they're even capable of fixing the issue at all.

Anyway: here's the PSA ... we live in a world where we may pay for exacting Internet service which we only use at certain times, but that fact does not change the fact that we have a contract with a company to deliver that service. I don't care if you pay for speeds to deliver pictures of cute kids or to achieve a better frag count online ... you pay for it, but sadly only you will police it. Nobody on this planet will check to see if you're actually getting the net service you pay for ... there is no regulatory body for it in existence. It's just a contract between you and a business.

Which is why the Better Business Bureau is probably my next step. RCN's response at this point is completely atrocious - and I worry not just for the fight I've got with them, but the fight many of their customers may not even realize they are entitled to have.

First Impressions: Call of Duty Black Ops

2010-11-10T08:28:00.000-08:00

Faithful Cathode readers know that I was somewhat torn about the release of Modern Warfare 2. In one hand, it was a slick looking military shooter with some brilliant cinematic scenes and lots of stuff blowing up. One the other hand, it felt like it was written by a frantic monkey with homicidal tendencies and the entire No Russian controversy was clearly absurd sensationalism.

Black Ops sees the franchise in the hands of Treyarch and the early review is that they've handled it quite well. I can't speak to the single player campaign yet, going to crack that open over the weekend - so it's difficult to say how reviews claiming it is "the best story in the series" compares to, well, actual storytelling - but I can be hopeful.

Multiplayer is still the tightly designed gameplay that military shooter fans have grown to expect. There's little variation here from past editions - thought I have to say that I often forget how important it can be to play the same online game as a few hundred thousand other people at the same time. Stability still seems to be a bit of a concern, and can certainly be annoying when you've had a particularly good round and get dropped - but hardly a big deal when you can just jump right back into another game in about a minute.

In the hours I spent in the game, I tended to drift to the more "strategic" game modes. I never seem to do well point wise when it's pure deatchmatch, but I am glad to see objective based game modes which actually work. I still remember back in the CounterStrike days how nearly every game, no matter the mode, descended quickly into Team Deathmatch - and there's occasionally the same here, but for the most part you have a game which helps team quickly organize for specific, simple goals, and it just works.

Tentatively a huge thumbs up - I'm willing to say this may be the game I wanted Modern Warfare 2 to be.

Game Play: Neuroshima Hex (iPhone)

2010-11-05T14:39:00.000-07:00

This is a post a long time coming. As a huge Neuroshima Hex fan, I was impatiently waiting the release of the iPhone version of the game since I first heard about it. My expectations were pretty high: it is a fast pacedturn based game, very strategic and dynamic, played out on a board of specific height and width - in other words, a nearly perfect candidate for the iPhone's touchscreen.

I couldn't have been more pleased with the results. The guys at Big Daddy's and Portal Publishing took the effort to heart and have created a highly polished, extremely authentic, and insanely fun portable version of the game. As of the latest version (1.01 I believe), the bugs are quite few and the only one that really comes to mind is the ability to crash the game by flipping back and forth between menus at the wrong time during a battle. Trust me, that doesn't happen anywhere near as often as it might sound and actually only turns up as minor inconvenience from time to time. The game saves the game before every turn, so even if you have to go dash off to that meeting - everything will be waiting for you when you return.

While geared mostly to fans of the game, the developers do provide an introductory video and explanations for all the tiles. If the game is intimidating to new users, that's probably more to do with the unique ruleset of Neuroshima rather than any fault on the development team. I actually feel like I know the game much better now having played against the computer with the core set of rules.

So the only thing I want now is more, more, more... the expansion sets, the iPad support, online play, etc. But for now, I think the dev team deserves a well earned lager and a couple rounds against Moloch.

Fallout: New Vegas ... A Game So Buggy Good Luck Finishing It

2010-10-31T09:22:00.000-07:00

This is a follow up to the post from Friday which noted that while Fallout: New Vegas is pretty fun, it's also full of bugs which are completely ridiculous for a console game in this day and age. I challenged anyone to find a buggier game in the history of the console.

I'm going to up the ante on that. I think Fallout: New Vegas may be the buggiest game ever released.

On any console.

Ever.

My evidence? I can't finish the game. I've tried previous saves, I've tried cleaning the disc, I've tried giving the PlayStation 3 a good old reboot, I've tried moving to other locations and then back - but I can't get into The Strip. The load screen appears, and then there is a black screen. And where do I need to go to finish the game? The Strip. Is there any other way to get there? No, Bethesda didn't have any of the locations in the The Strip as a named location. You can't even go directly there via fast travel, you have to go to a gate first and the walk in ... which is where every thing just fades to black.

And that's it. I've played this game for hours, I've gone on dozens of quests and in an effort to stop the game from crashing I decided to just sprint for the finish line and get to the end of the main storyline. But I'll never get that. This is how the game ends for me:

The load screen appears, and then there is a black screen.

That Bethesda has released a game of this low quality is bad, but it's equally bad that the gaming media has decided to give them a pass. IGN rates this game an 8.5, or "great". Really? Let's recap.

The load screen appears, and then there is a black screen.

That is not a great game. I might be able to give it a good, but a game that can crash consistently after only running for thirty minutes or less with nor rhyme or reason is probably barely worthy of even being a good game, even if everything about the gameplay was stellar.

So Bethesda: don't count on me buying any DLC for this game. Hell, don't even count on the disc ever gracing my console again. And if any game from Bethesda ever has a review with the word bug in it again, I don't care if the rating is off the chart - it's not a purchase option for me. I'd be irate if this was a PC game, but on a console? This lack of quality control is simply idiotic.

Gameplay: Fallout New Vegas

2010-10-29T07:49:00.000-07:00

I'll start with a confession: I've been playing the hell out of New Vegas. And I could rattle off all the reasons why that is so - except none of them would surprise you if you have already played Fallout 3 in the last two years. Bethesda has managed to sneak in a few new details, most of which add at least a few new concepts - most of which are pretty sound but don't really do anything to change the core gameplay from when Fallout and Elder Scrolls first got mashed together.

And there have been many, many reviews which have mentioned all of that, and how wonderfully the mechanics hold up over the last couple years. So lets' talk about something else.

Let's talk about just how often this damn game crashes, and how completely wrong that is for a console game in the year 2010. The level of instability that this game has is so far off the charts compared to every single other title I have ever played on the PlayStation 3 that I challenge any other blogger or gamer to argue the case that this is not the buggiest release in the history of the console, with the only other contender being Fallout 3 or the even buggier DLC for Fallout 3.

Let's talk frequency: Nightly. At least once a night that I've powered this game on, it has crashed. Let's talk severity: It completely locks up the console, requiring a manual reboot. Let's talk about predictability: There is none. You'll just be walking down the street, turn and look at something and ... bam. Instant lockup. I've had it happen at least once in between locations, causing nothing but a black screen to stare at me while I wondered if I should wait or go reboot the thing again.

The only saving grace is the frequency of the saves in the game: it does an autosave when you change locations or when you sleep. Course, the location autosave may not work correctly if the game crashes at the right moment, so unless you remember to save after every important action - you might be completely hosed anyway. I've lost hours of gameplay by not being absolutely draconian about saving after key points, a habit I've now fallen deeply into for the sake of my own sanity.

And it's not like the game itself is spotless. I walked right past a quest item because it was buried mostly in the ground ... not in "oh look, buried treasure" kind of way - but rather a "model was graphically blended with landscape" kind of way. While talking to a major game character, the conversation was stopped for cinematic animation ... which was blocked because the character for said animation was stuck on a chair. There are times when VATS goes completely on vacation. I'll be swarmed by evil poisonous creatures and tapping the shoulder button like a madman, and absolutely nothing happens.

So it's hard for me to be excited about things like factions, weapon mods, reloading benches or the nifty new companion wheel (though, it is kinda nifty) when I know every time I load the game, I'll end up rebooting my console. I said this about the Fallout 3 DLC, and I'll say it again: this is why I left PC gaming for a console. That Bethesda has had two years to work the kinks out of the engine and it's just as buggy as it ever was tells me one simple thing:

Bethesda needs to ditch this engine. While playing New Vegas, I was also playing the new Borderlands DLC and realized: it looks better, plays faster and never crashes. Yeah, I know it doesn't have the same dynamically loaded overworld that Fallout does, but these are things engines like Unreal and Id's latest have been working on. The Gamebryo engine has always been a burden on Bethesda games, it's never been able to deliver the same graphical quality of contemporary engine and apparently porting it to the consoles saddles the consoles with PC level bugs. It's ridiculous that in a two development timespan that Bethesda has released a product with this few updates, that looks exactly the same as the game before it, and is buggy as all hell.

Is the game fun? Yes. Does it offer hours and hours and hours of play? Yes. Do I recommend it? Yes. Well, if you liked Fallout 3.

Does that justify the level of instability in this game? No.

There, quite honestly, is no justification for the level of instability in this game.

A Brief Guide To Shaky Cam Horror

2010-10-28T12:33:00.001-07:00

In the vast amount of time I have not been blogging, I have managed to catch up on many, many horror movies. While on they way, I rewatched Paranormal Activity in anticipation of of the sequel, and regretfully (because it was free and easy to click on) watched Paranormal Entity.

In my review of Activity, I hoped that shaky cam would become more of a genre in it's own right. And when you get a mockbuster made of your picture, I think maybe that's arrived. So in preparation for a Halloween weekend, let's go through the shortlist of the shaky cam spookers.

The Last Broadcast
One of the earlier, if not the earliest, movies of this type - The Last Broadcast is also one of the least formulaic of the bunch. While you'll see many of the same trappings - first person confessions, running through the woods, people wandering off into isolation, there's more of a whodunit storyline being followed at the core. Not the scariest, or best produced, by far - but worth watching for those who found Blair Witch at least interesting.

Ghostwatch
Back in 1992, the BBC released this little known gem. It actually caused some hysteria upon its release and was named in one suicide (no joke). I haven't seen it as of yet because it's nearly impossible to find, it has only aired twice and while it hit DVD in 2002, doesn't look like it's been made available for import anywhere.

Blair Witch Project
BWP remains the epicenter of the shaky cam films, having gathered a lot of attention, making lots of money and distilling the basics of the concept: low budget, handy cam directing, and possibly most importantly ... a plot which centers just as much about how relationships take a downward spiral in a crisis as it does about ghosts and creepy moments. It's a hallmark, actually, of what works and doesn't work for these kinds of films ... if the actors can't sell you on the fact that they're in crisis mode, you're probably not going to be in crisis mode either.

Quarantine
Not nearly as much of a copycat as it could have been guilty of, Quarantine uses the shaky cam concept on a twist of the zombie genre with somewhat mixed, but usually decent results. There's a level of predictability, partially because we've all seen the same kind of zombie film a dozen times before ... and also because this is one of those movies that oddly features one of the final scenes as its cover. Can't strongly recommend, but did find it somewhat entertaining.

Cloverfield
The reason why Cloverfield is something of a landmark film in that it combines the general formula: a small group of people armed with a handycam in a desperate and bizarre situation, with Hollywood special effects and a big budget. Most interesting is that the former seems to work much better than the latter, though the level of destruction that the budget provides offers a great deal of value. Somewhere along the way, the movie starts to feel more like a standard monster flick - but it offers a lot of new moments along the path.

Paranormal Activity
The genre took something of a breather for a few years, but a great awakening with this 2007 title. The movie nails precisely what works - focusing on sounds more than visuals, keeping a tight lens on the two leads while document the strain on their relationship the spookhouse moments have on them night after night. I wasn't sure what would hold up during a late night rewatch, but really the only diminished effect is that lack of theater speakers to really catch the mostly invisible action during the film.

The Fourth Kind
A victim of overselling the premise by repeatedly trying explain why Milla Jovovich is on the screen, The Fourth Kind moves the concept over to alien abductions while also trying to provide a backdrop for better produced "re-enactments" than the normal handycam directing provides. There's some very good bits in the midst of it all, though the sum doesn't quite live up to the parts.

Paranormal Entity
A pretty hideous copycat of Paranormal Activity, courtesy of mockbuster producers The Asylum - Entity plays out like a poor student that couldn't pay attention during class. Lacking nearly all of the elements that made Activity work, Entity manages a couple of shock moments but in the long run will mostly scare you for the fact that you bothered to watched the thing in the first place.

Paranormal Activity 2
Have not seen it, but the reviews have been good and fully plan to either by or shortly after Halloween.

Paranormal Entity

Notes From Management: Not Dead Yet

2010-10-16T09:06:00.000-07:00

Apologies for the near month long dearth of anything on old Cathode Tan, it hasn't really been by choice and I hope in the next couple weeks to start being able to blog on a more regular basis again. It's the same old story - lots of paying job type work devouring aspect of daily life, little room to not just blog but to be doing much worth blogging about. Heck, I downloaded the latest Borderlands DLC recently and I'm not sure I've even installed it yet.

However, I just recently accepted an offer from Salesforce.com to become a Developer Evangelist. As an Evangelist, maintaing blog and twitter content will become part of my job description, so hopefully Cathode will be able to benefit from that inertia as well.

I've got one more week of work at Model Metrics left, then a week off, then off to evangelizing. Does New Vegas come out just in time for that one week off?

Oh, I believe it does...

For Sunday: Mozilla Seabird

2010-09-24T10:46:00.000-07:00

Mozilla recently got community feedback and design concepts from Billy May, the guy who redesigned the Blackberry into touch screen and produced this demo:

Sadly it will likely not go much past this relatively awesome video, but awesome all the same.

Is Good Old Games Dead, Or Just Playing?

2010-09-19T15:01:00.000-07:00

Apparently over the weekend, Good Old Games, a digital distributor of old Windows games from the Polish company CD Project, went bully up with a public message that it couldn't exist in it's current form anymore:

We have recently had to give serious thought to whether we could really keep GOG.com the way it is. We've debated on it for quite some time and, unfortunately, we've decided that GOG.com simply cannot remain in its current form.

We're very grateful for all support we've received from all of you in the past two years. Working on GOG.com was a great adventure for all of us and an unforgettable journey to the past, through the long and wonderful history of PC gaming.

This doesn't mean the idea behind GOG.com is gone forever. We're closing down the service and putting this era behind us as new challenges await.

Following this, however, has come the announcement of a re-release and more information to arrive later this week ... fueling the notion that this is more publicity stunt than funeral wake. Stunt might be harsh - though the overly morbid tone of the plain home page message doesn't lend to mere restructuring ... so if GOG returns in a week or so, they could certainly be accused of being overly dramatic.

For Sunday: Monsters Trailer

2010-09-16T08:25:00.002-07:00

This looks pretty awesome.

For Sunday: Congress in AutoTune

2010-09-14T13:33:00.001-07:00

Love. It. Thanks Klem.

Geocache Hunt Turns Bomb Scare

2010-09-14T07:02:00.000-07:00

Sigh.

Lake County Sheriff's Department officers, including the bomb squad, and the Long Grove Fire Department were called to the scene, Jonites said.

The store and the parking lot were evacuated as a precaution, but no injuries were reported.

Officials determined the box contained a geotag used to help GPS systems track locations, and pieces of paper, the lieutenant said.

The geotag is part of an Internet treasure hunt called Geocaching, where players use a GPS device to track hidden geotags which issues the latitude and longitude of its location, the lieutenant said.

-- Internet scavenger hunt leads to bomb scare in Riverwoods

I sigh mostly because there's nobody to really rail against here. You can't really blame the police for investigating a mysterious package being hidden in a public place, nor can you really hate geocachers. They're just so darn adorable. But sigh, this is the world in which we live.

(Also) For Sunday: Portal 2 Coop Trailer

2010-09-10T12:53:00.000-07:00

For Sunday: Paranormal Activity 2 Trailer

2010-09-10T12:45:00.000-07:00

Apple Quietly Reverses Developer Tool Ban

2010-09-09T13:36:00.000-07:00

Apple did not specifically mention Adobe — though investors drove up shares of the company up 12 percent on the news — but the changes seem to mean that you can use Flash to develop your apps, and then compile them to work on the iPhone and iPad with a tool called Adobe Packager. This could be boon to publishers, including Condé Nast, owner of Wired, which use Adobe’s Creative Suite to make print magazines and would now be able to easily convert them into digital version instead of re-creating them from scratch in the only handful of coding languages Apple had allowed.

To be clear, that doesn’t mean Flash is coming to iOS as a plugin: You still won’t be able to view Flash content on your iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. This change in Apple’s policy just means developers can use third-party tools such as Flash to create apps sold through the App Store

-- Apple Eases App Development Rules, Adobe Surges[Wired]

For all the bluster that roared from Apple on banning the use of tools like Adobe's Packager, including a strongly worded essay from Jobs which essentially ignited the debate on HTML5 versus Flash/RIA/the world, it has now softly backed away from the stance that such tools would lower the quality of the App Store and let developer use them.

Why? Well, possibly because Apple's reasoning was mostly PR nonsense designed to look like a strong technical argument ... but I have to somewhat doubt that really factored much into the equation. This is Apple we're talking about here and the company has been able to use PR to defy gravity countless times before.

The more prominent, and probably more likely, theory, is that Apple decided it wanted to trot out that amazing Epic Citadel demo (which is, by the way, truly amazing - at least on the iPhone4) they realized that there would be no way to unleash it onto the world without subsequently backing off on the whole third party development tool.

Epic's bread and butter, after all, is the third party development toolset which allows for other companies to license their technology for games ... and a huge feature of that is UnrealScript - a specific language the engine uses and how the majority of Unreal games are coded. To have shown the demo and then not change their policy would have just been an enormous tease.

And to change the policy to only let Epic in would likely have brought anti-trust champions bearing down on Steve Job's office door.

So it's true - you can probably thank video games that Apple has come to its senses.

Land of Me And The Wilderness Downtown: AIR and HTML5 Demos

2010-09-07T08:01:00.000-07:00

I love mornings where new things land in my lap. First was an email asking to go try The Land Of Me, an interactive children's story/game developed in Adobe's AIR. Designed for preschoolers and with Prof. John Siraj-Blatchford from the The University of Swansea - The Land Of Me looks to be a delightful artistic romp ... well, if you're around two years old. There is a free chapter to download and try and since it runs on AIR - the game runs on most PC's and Mac's.

A few twitters also pointed to The Wilderness Downtown, probably best described as an experimental HTML5 video mashup with Google Maps. It's an interesting concept which mostly works - currently best serving as an example of what using the HTML5 video tag might mean down the road. It is, however, specifically designed for Chrome - though it appears to work in Safari, those certain devices using Mobile Safari need not apply.

Enjoy, peeps.

Game Play: Blur (and a little Mod Nation Racers too)

2010-08-25T07:33:00.000-07:00

A twist on an old joke: multiplayer would be a lot of fun, if not for all the people. Bringing a bunch of random people from the intertubes repeatedly to game together has had a pretty uneven history - with the addition of VOIP to online gaming resulting in a thunderous din of people singing, cursing and warbling.

That said, Blur manages it pretty well. I played the hell out of the online only demo and now haven't even bothered touching the single player of the full version. It's very pick up game oriented and since the action is pretty intense even when you're trying to catch up to the pack - uneven skill levels across player don't feel quite so bad because you can still wreck the hell out of other cars.

And it doesn't hurt that as kart racers go, Blur is very good. Driving feels tight and controlled, there isn't a dramatic emphasis on drifting and the power-ups, while mostly classic renditions of favorites from the genre, do the game justice to helping even the score. The graphics are great and the presentation is geared to getting you in a game, out, and back in again as swiftly as possible.

I'm light on complaint - I wish there were more powerups, and that the mods were more varied and arrived a little sooner. But it's hard to complain about a game I'm enjoying this much and yet haven't even played it's "other half". Definitely recommend.

A quick side note: Blur was actually a trade in for Mod Nation Racers, which I was somewhat looking forward to and yet found the racing itself, well, really frustrating. Seems to place a heavy, heavy emphasis on drifting and drafting and not so much on just pure driving. I get the modding aspects are pretty powerful, but if LittleBigPlanet was any indication, I won't have time to really get into it.

For Sunday: Brink Gameplay Video

2010-08-24T07:31:00.000-07:00

This looks fairly cool, I haven't really played much online shootery since MAG (which I may dive back into with the beta). Anything with a Quake Wars pedigree is worth checking out in my book.

OMG THE WEB IS DEAD

2010-08-19T06:54:00.000-07:00

Yeah, people - this is what it takes to get me blogging again. Not one - but TWO stories that have mostly caps in the titles and begin with OMG. Because apparently this is such a slow news month that people really need to get the attention grabbing headlines.

Wired has declared the web is dead (though, to be fair, they've branched this out to multiple articles to offer a rather interesting and broad discussion).

First, never trust an article that starts with a graph - which I've now stolen and duped here:

It's an interesting graph ... but the important bit is to note that it spans 1990, when even the Net was barely a mote in someone's eye, to 2010 ... when high school kids have smartphones with more sophisticated browsers than most corporate networks. Since the graph is depicting total net traffic, and it is safe to assume that total net traffic has increased dramatically in two decades ... lines sliding down may actually indicate portions which have stayed even while the larger pie gets bigger. Note for instance that video doesn't even appear on the scene until the late 90's, and it wasn't until about 2005 when technology and bandwidth allowed creations like YouTube to flourish that it even begins explode.

So yeah, it's an interesting graph. But in relation to the argument at hand ... it's kinda bullshit.

The argument in short, and it's hard to put this in short terms with it several pages and oddly being split into two distinct articles running side by side (which is probably the kind of design decision which could kill the web) is that applications are sprouting everywhere to digest specific points of data as opposed to an army of browsers trolling for everything on the planet.

And I'm not really about to deny that argument, for in doing so I'd have to pretty much ignore the fact that the iPhone and the iPad exist at all.

For the sake of brevity, I'm going to encapsulate the argument around this table (also blatantly stolen):

Because it seems pretty core to their concept and is wildly misleading.

Browsers Versus Apps
This is a cyclical argument as old as DARPA and is slowly spiraling into oblivion. Firstly, it (and much of the article) ignores the fact that apps have made a resurgence because of concepts like REST which allows the web to be a generic source of data. Is it honest to say that a web server which is returning JSONP or XML based on a simple set of incoming variables is ... no longer a web server? The trend, even since the referenced (and failed) push revolution of the late 90's, has been for the formatting of data which allows nearly any client - native or web - to consume data. That Facebook is both a very successful website and iPhone app is indicative of this, and Facebook's recent Graph API allows for others to create clients of nearly any variety as well.

Also, I'm always surprised by the number of articles proposing this trend as fact while overlooking the fact that many major web publishers are foregoing native iPad apps in lieu of HTML5 ones. The real transformation of the web is into more than just a content center, but a data center as well, data which can be accessed by a wide variety of clients.

Syndication Versus Subscription
I'm actually not even sure why this is a line on the table. Syndication is the act of formatting to data so that it can be subscribed. This isn't an either or - it's a cause/effect. Moving on.

Update: It occurs to me the models at conflict here are subscribe versus follow, which are actually different metaphors. Insert question mark.

Free Versus Freemium
While catchy, this is also an apples to advertising based models comparison. Take Pandora for example, which embraces freemium but also pushes ads for the free version. As the name assumes, freemium is an extension of a free (usually ad based) model ... not a replacement - and can apply equally to native, RIA or browsers based apps.

JavaScript versus Objective-C
This just seems like a silly comparison, but I think the real versus here is AJAX/HTML5 against Objective-C. Which seems to unfairly leave out the 3,000 other options for building web apps.

HTML versus XML
See above about the web turning into a data center. Like the Freemium comparison, XML isn't a replacement for HTML (though some developers would argue that XHTML is...) - it's another format for storing data without storing UI. Want UI? Get HTML. Want to create your own UI? Get XML.

Basically, let's return to the graph and consider what's really going on - the web isn't disappearing into oblivion, it's just that there has never been the all consuming webtop to eliminate the rest of an ever growing list of neighbors. It also seems premature to put nails into the web's coffin before Google has managed to release the Chrome OS, the first serious webtop concept to be produced in something like 15 years (I know, I developed one 15 years ago).

Maybe I'm biased though. I'm reading my email in a native app which actually just creates WebKit instances, while debugging my work in the cloud and listening to music in AIR. Does the use of AIR apps, which is closely associated with Flash, which is a plugin for web browsers ... mean that the web is dead or very much an undeniable part of our daily lives now?

My old boss and I had an ongoing argument we both knew was relatively ridiculous ... PDA's versus phones. Ridiculous because each debate resolved to the same conclusion ... that they'd converge to the point where you couldn't hold the distinction. That seems to be the real story of the web - that eventually you won't know where your native desktop and web technologies divide.

OMG STEVE JOBS WUZ RIGHT! (WAIT ... what?)

2010-08-19T06:31:00.000-07:00

This is insane:

How bad is mobile Flash? When I went to ABC.com and tried to play a clip, I waited five minutes while the player said “loading.” During that time, it was nearly impossible to scroll around the page or tap objects on it. Eventually, I scrolled up to see a message that was previously obstructed and said ”Sorry. An error occurred while attempting to load the video. Please try again later.” It gets worse…

When I visited Fox.com and tried to start an episode of House, the program actually played but, even over Wi-Fi, the playback was slideshow-like. Worse still, the player became unresponsive as it ignored my attempts to tap the pause, volume, and slider buttons.

-- Mobile Flash Fail: Weak Android Player Proves Jobs Right [LaptopMag]

OMG! FAIL! STEVE JOBS WAS SO RIGHT! Wow, thank god I have an iPhone. I'll just go right over to ABC.com and watch me up some shows.

Um, ok ... here we go:

Oh, uh. Oh, right. Steve Jobs said plugins are bad and that we should be using native apps for anything cool. Apparently HTML5 video wasn't, um ... I dunno. Around or something. So I'll go download that app now and...

Well, that's embarrassing. I guess before you go pronouncing the Steve Jobs was right and that Flash has failed - maybe ... just maybe, you should actually compare it to something in reality.

Ground Control to Major Tom

2010-08-18T08:44:00.000-07:00

Yeah, as Cathode regulars have noticed, the intermittent blogging has now turned into a full scale stop. Sorry, true believers, there's just a lot of bat guano flying around the old CathodeCave, so to speak. Life's complicated and when it's this complicated, it's hard to make an informed opinion about situations like the Penny Arcade Rape Joke - which is kinda what you people don't pay me for.

I don't really have a time frame for when this is will not be the case, in the meantime we'll still be twittering away (and to think I once mocked it so), so keep in touch there.

For Monday: 500 Fireworks At Once

2010-08-03T09:56:00.001-07:00

Because sometimes it is just that kind of Tuesday.

Via Kottke.

3 Things Apple Could Do (If They Really Supported HTML5 iPhone Apps)

2010-07-30T08:17:00.000-07:00

Apple's made a big push against Flash/Flex, which is what many would call traditional Rich Internet Application (RIA) development, in favor of HTML5. One can argue the merits of their points, but one part that is somewhat confusing is rather significant gaps which makes it difficult to make HTML5 behave in way that would really allow it to compete with native apps on the iPhone (and iPad).

While you can certainly argue that none of the following are "pure" HTML5 - let's not pretend that the iPhone in particular is a pure HTML5 platform to begin with. Mobile Safari is a great browser, but has some very specific quirks to it. Whether it's the way pages are rendered in their entirety outside of the viewport (which makes, say, creating fixed bottom elements difficult) or that there are unique touch events outside of the normal mouse event structure, developing for Mobile Safari forces the developer to go a little outside the web standards. Apple does provide some useful features, though, like sending numbers over to the phone or linking to the Google Maps app - but they could do a lot more for both the user and the developer.

1. Camera Access
This is really the big one. There is no way to access the camera via pure HTML5. Cocoa based frameworks like PhoneGap attempt to bridge the two, though I've been told that getting PhoneGap based apps onto the normal App Store has been difficult. Being able to utilize the camera is an oft requested feature for business and productivity apps. The first app our company submitted to Apple used it to store images of receipts, for instance. Scanning bar codes is another common request. Apple provides zero interactivity between the browser and the camera - not even giving users the ability to browse into their photo albums.

2. User defined database limits
There is a hard 5 MB limit for offline database storage via HTML5. In most desktop implementations, this is something the user can easily override. While five megs is sufficient for many tasks - there are many where it simply won't work, like storing offline media assets within the database or even attempting to store a complete product directory in some instances. While having standard limits makes plenty of sense, if a user wants to up that limit to 50 or even 500 megs, they should be allowed to do so. I've got 32GB on this phone, and if I want to shove 1GB of product data into it via a web app, I see no reason why Apple shouldn't let me.

3. User friendly controls
Currently working with iPhone web apps is a somewhat hacky affair. Most users don't associate "adding to the home page" with the same notion as "install this app" (hence the reason many web apps are now adding a big arrow pointing to the plus sign for the iPhone) - nor is there any indication if that app is available offline, etc. Apple still maintains its web apps directory, but that's a poor offering compared to the App Store, Apple Store and iTunes Store apps. I could forego a web app store app (sorry for the redundancy there), but users should at least be able to go to one place and see which web apps are installed, what data is stored offline, and check for new versions. Google is moving in all of these directions with Chrome - and to a certain extent shows how serious they are compared to Apple in truly getting people to adopt web apps as a serious platform.

That third one is a luxury - the first two, however, I can report is somewhat crippling the iPhone and iPad as a robust platform for web application development. Apple can produce fancy CSS demos until the day is long, but if they really see HTML5 as the future, then they should give developers the tools to make it so.

For Sunday: Sonic 2006 Bug Reel

2010-07-23T13:04:00.000-07:00

Via Wired and @kobunheat.

Ebert Folded

2010-07-23T08:20:00.000-07:00

This may be the best evidence to date that film critic Roger Ebert's very public stance that games can never be art was, at best, fodder for flame wars. Ebert recently retreated, saying:

I was a fool for mentioning video games in the first place. I would never express an opinion on a movie I hadn't seen. Yet I declared as an axiom that video games can never be Art. I still believe this, but I should never have said so. Some opinions are best kept to yourself.

At this moment, 4,547 comments have rained down upon me for that blog entry. I'm informed by Wayne Hepner, who turned them into a text file: "It's more than Anna Karenina, David Copperfield and The Brothers Karamazov." I would rather have reread all three than vet that thread. Still, they were a good set of comments for the most part. Perhaps 300 supported my position. The rest were united in opposition.
If you assume I received a lot of cretinous comments from gamers, you would be wrong. I probably killed no more than a dozen. What you see now posted are almost all of the comments sent in. They are mostly intelligent, well-written, and right about one thing in particular:

I should not have written that entry without being more familiar with the actual experience of video games.

-- Okay, kids, play on my lawn[Chicago Sun-Times]

Emphasis is Ebert's, not mine. He continues to ramble on, sometimes his original stodgy stance reappearing but in general giving gamers the due they rightfully deserve. Yet the response now has been largely silent - Ebert is just reassuring us what we already knew, that he was clinging on to a position he didn't have any real reason to have except because it was generating controversy.

Kudos to him for reversing that, of course, and hopefully in doing so it will serve as a guidepost to others in similar fields to do a little research on modern gaming before trolling for posts, but it still feels like the opportunity to have a decent conversation on the subject was tossed away.

Stick to movies, Roger - Transformers 3 is coming out soon and probably won't be art either.

Gameplay: DeathSpank

2010-07-21T07:43:00.000-07:00

Having recently joined the rest of the world in enjoying the incredibly well designed Torchlight - I was overjoyed to see that DeathSpank was hitting the PlayStation Network last week. DeathSpank is essentially Diablo for Monkey Island. Which is to say - it's pretty awesome.

There's more of the former than the latter in the game in terms of mechanics - so if you don't like hack and slash action RPG's, you probably won't suffer through enough to enjoy Gilbert's immense sense of humor - though it might be close. The character DeathSpank is essentially The Tick with a broadest sword and no Arthur to keep him in check. The graphics are a slick combination of 2D cartoon and 3D effects, the overall production from voice work to sound effects is pretty top notch and the RPG mechanics have been simplified to make the game extremely accessible.

Actually, if I had any complaint it would be that the game is a little too accessible. My inventory is cluttered with potions I really don't need (except for healing). There is offline 2 player co-op with the second player as DeathSpank's trusty friend Crackles ... but Crackles is essentially just a walking turret without any upgrade paths or inventory of his own. The "justice meter" mechanic is slightly flawed since the uber-attack uses the same button mashing as any other attack, leading to several unintended overkill blows. DeathSpank's inventory management is simple, but also so shallow that you eventually feel more like you're just doing spring cleaning than actually configuring.

These are minor aspects to what is otherwise a brilliant game, though - and aspects which are really just victims of a design which is trying to streamline fun and remove frustration. The goal is to have enough action RPG to get to the adventure game concepts - heavily displayed in the character conversations but also apparent in the slightly less successful puzzles which suffer from some of the same interface problems as every other adventure game puzzles, i.e. letting the user know that a random noun or verb is really what they require. This is, again, a rather small nuisance and rather easily corrected with the ingame hint system.

It's a great game, with a beautiful style and possibly the best sense of humor available for digital download right now ... highly recommend.

For Sunday: iDosing - Digital Drugs Are After Your Children!

2010-07-20T11:30:00.000-07:00

An astonishing combination of biology, psychology and technology being completely misunderstood all for the cause of moral panic. Via @ShawnElliott.

Antennagate, as a new iPhone 4 user

2010-07-19T06:29:00.000-07:00

Look, I've clearly haven't been a proper Apple fanboy for a while, and even briefly considered the same defections some of my geek comrades are making towards the recent crop of Android phones - but the argument that the iPhone 4 is such a massive refinement to the product line as to nearly perfect was something I had to try for myself.

And the office was giving out a discount, so...

I just got my hands on the phone last Friday when I returned to the office after a business trip to California. I had hoped to get it before the trip, but considering I procrastinated ordering until late last week - I was lucky to get it when I did. Before ordering I interrogated the early adopters I knew - the ones who grabbed it day one, and compared their notes to what was coming out from respected portions of the industry - like Consumer Reports.

So I'm right-handed - though I would probably describe my phone usage as 'polydextrous', I kind of fiddle and fumble with the phone unless I'm just talking one on one: which is probably my rarest activity, I email and text far more frequently. Still, I actually had more phone conversations than the norm this weekend, and except for a local pizzeria hanging up on me (which at best I could blame on AT&T) ... I haven't had any problems at all. In fact the reception, especially the WiFi reception - is better than ever. And the WiFi is certainly noticeable better.

I think Apple's recently press events and especially the offer of free bumpers will defuse the situation somewhat. The general consensus from iPhone4 users is that you'll probably want a case with this one, though I'm holding off for a while as I'd prefer to get the slimmest one possible - I really like the feel and form factor of this model.

Once again, I don't think Steve Jobs should be allowed to answer emails anymore - he just can't respond directly to problems customers are having without sounding a bit like an ass. If anything, this fiasco is a case scenario of what happens when a beloved brand comes under fire with a bit of evidence behind it. Did the press exaggerate the magnitude of the situation? I think, but if you don't want to be shark bait ... don't flail around in the water. Apple could have saved themselves a lot of headaches by getting to this point sooner in the game. Or even finding a bumper-like case they aren't wildly overcharging in the first place.

So bottom line? If you're a southpaw and a have phone user - go borrow a friend's iPhone4 for a couple calls. Worst case scenario? Get a case. It's not armageddon, nor is it a killer flaw in an otherwise well designed product.

Notes From Management: See Ya'll Next Week (Probably)

2010-07-12T12:06:00.000-07:00

I've got a relatively intensive travel week starting in about a half hour, so probably little in the way of updates unless I actually find myself bored around WiFi (unlikely).

I am trying to start a crop of posts which for a better three-four posts a week cycle, but remains to be seen if that's overly optimistic or not.

For Sunday: Kirk Steals Spock's Bike

2010-07-09T14:00:00.000-07:00

Thanks, Corvus.

Some Notes On Red Dead Redemption

2010-07-06T08:43:00.000-07:00

Red Dead Redemption is one of those games I don't think needs an outright review from the likes of me. All the reviews agree, and I agree with them - it's good. In fact, it may be Rockstar's best. It's interesting that the mechanics are nearly identical to the GTA series, but Red Dead avoids much of the overwrought GTA controversy simply by being a western.

Like the changes in Grand Theft Auto IV, Rockstar proves very capable at surgically altering their core gameplay for the better. While RDR is clearly the first cousin of that series, many small tweaks add up to much better overall game.

No health bar
Red Dead is the first Rockstar game that I can think of that employs the YAMS (Yet Another Military Shooter) style health system. You'll suffer quickly after repeated hits, but a respite will eventually heal all wounds. This saves the player from needlessly finding the wester equivalent of Burger Shots, saving the game or stealing ambulances just to move on to the next mission. This is quickly becoming the norm across all action titles, for not only this reason - but the fact that it also simplifies the interface required to explain things. Do I have 50% health? 20%? You don't really care, the feedback you have is that you are being shot and you will die if that doesn't stop. Not sure if it works for all scenarios (see the multiplayer notes below) - but it works here.

There's always a horse to be had...
This isn't really new, more of an adaptation of GTAIV's system - but it becomes a very important one. You can steal horses if you so wish, but early in the game it doesn't become necessary because you can always just whistle for a new horse. The RDR area is lousy with horses, and one seems always willing to come to your aid (if your horse dies, you just have to wait a bit before it "respawns").

Unrealistic? Yes, but RDR is a vast open area as opposed to the inner city of GTA. Rockstar wants you to ride, and be able to ride even if you were left alone in the middle of a prairie.

...or you can just camp it out.
If you don't feel like riding all the way from Armadillo to Mexico, you can always just set up camp and then quick travel to nearly any accessible point in the map. Again, this works well for the massive amount of open space that RDR offers.

Course, the real problem with these mechanics is that they override others like horse theft and the stagecoach. The stagecoach is particularly disappointing since the camera doesn't even offer much of a view and it is much slower than a horse.

Well that was a good shot
RDR offers players a fast auto-aim if you simply tap the aim button in the general vicinity of the target. It forces you to keep tapping to continue landing hits and to either slow down for fine targeting, or use Dead Eye. Dead Eye slows down time for the player, allowing for highly accurate shots.

The only real problem here is that the auto-aim nearly makes Dead Eye obsolete, except when the game insists that you use it. I think I can count on two fingers when I've used Dead Eye outside of when a mission required it - and neither time was particularly productive. Later in the game when you're trying to do some of the challenges, it has a brief interlude as an interesting mechanic and towards the end when the difficulty ramps up a little ... but you can easily play most of the game without it.

In general though, it does a good job - better than previous Rockstar titles - of making the player feel like a badass bounty hunter without being invincible.

Serious production value
While some of the assets in the game look simply like a westernized version of GTA, one has to give a tip of the hat to the landscape presented in Red Dead. It's ridiculous. My favorite part? The thunder. Whoever did the audio for the storms in RDR needs a medal and in general the environment effects are just outrageously good. And it's bone chillingly appropriate for this game - when your cowboy rides off into the sunset, you want a sunset this beautiful.

And the music? The music is awesome. Thematic and yet properly dynamic - you may find yourself dragging those bounty missions out just to hear the excellent bass line riding along with you.

An odd sense of justice
Where in GTA the concept of having a wanted level and escaping the police is baked right into the middle of your game session - Red Dead Redemption alters the setup a little where you rarely require a wanted level at all. In the place of trying to evade the cops, several missions will have gunmen trying to hunt you down and stopping you from reaching your destination. This is one of the chief dynamics with the bounty hunting side missions - do you rush back to the sheriff or wait for the droves of minions to fall and offer more loot?

In general, this works pretty well. What doesn't work is the more direct analog from GTA where you get a bounty for doing something wrong. The problem is that "wrong" is very loosely defined and so it is hard to tell what will get you in trouble. For instance, I went up to see if I could open a door and got a bounty for trespassing. I accidentally pointed my gun at a lawman and suddenly had five people on horseback chasing me.

Poker, side missions, and ambient design
Rockstar has always seemed to insist that being able to play games in random locations is part of the overall open world experience. If you want to be a completionist in RDR, you'll need to excel at playing poker, liar's dice and various other in-world mini-games. The design isn't bad, but can be haphazard. While I enjoyed liar's dice, the imposed strategy of arm wrestling, for instance, was simply annoying. You ignore them completely for the most part (there's a single mission I think where playing a little poker is required) - so they're mostly a plus.

Dueling is ... odd. For one thing, you can stumble on dueling before the game really introduces it and hence be completely lost. The mechanics are strange - while it is one part trigger finger it is mostly about timing and placing all of your shots on the target. Once you get the hang of it, it works - but the game does little service in getting the player up to speed with it.

One huge success is RDR's "ambient" missions, which are random encounters you'll run into around the frontier. This includes everything from running down thieves to getting in the middle of gunfights. They're impressively fluid and have a bare sheet of artificiality imposed on them. By the end of the game they can get somewhat redundant - but it takes some time to get there and they add a great layer of depth to the open world in general. This is a natural extension to the otherwise random events that take place in Rockstar's games (one example in RDR - I actually had a stranger save *me* from an animal attack instead of the other way around) and hopefully it evolves even more in the future.

Bottom Line
I think this is easily Rockstar's best work. The beauty of Rockstar's games is that they are always slightly flawed - but usually because they're tweaking their own formula. In the next iteration, those flaws are usually addressed and yet replaced by new ones as they experiment with new mechanics. If you're going to have flaws, that's probably the best way to do it.

Movie Watch: Alice In Wonderland

2010-06-28T06:30:00.000-07:00

Alice is interesting source material - the nonsensical landscape has been a Disney movie, a video game, a surrealistic stop-motion animation, 70's song and now Burton movie. The Burton movie takes a safer route than many adapations, relegating Alice to a now older (and hotter) role returning to Wonderland in what constitutes a semi-sequel to the original narrative, keeping some elements and replacing many, many others with a boilerplate Hollywood action plot.

There is a lot of compromise here. Fans of Carroll's work will both recognize and miss many of the elements, and probably cringe at some of the handling of some characters - especially Mad Hatter. Burton's style works well with many of visual aspects of the work: Chesire Cat and bringing many of the Jabberwocky material into line as well.

If it wasn't for the flair that Burton brings to the canvas, this would likely have been a disaster, with the Hollywood elements riding right over the literature ... but the combination of strong cinematics and acting make the movie highly enjoyable in the long run.

Recommend - though not terribly strongly. Serious fans of Carroll should be prepped for the handling, but anyone looking for a just a fun summer film can dig right in.

Fun Fact:"Jabberwocky" was meant by Carroll as a satire designed to show how not to write a poem. The poem has since transcended Carroll's purpose, becoming now the subject of serious study.

-- [Wikipedia]

2010 E3 Impressions

2010-06-18T10:00:00.000-07:00

I'm not at E3, nor am I even remotely close enough to making a profit off of gaming in any sense to attend it anytime soon (nor do I figure The Girl would sign off on it as a holiday).

But I have Twitter, and opinions - and not afraid to use either. So, from what I can gather:

3DS
I think the main win here for the big N is that the 3DS appears, from all reports, to be everything Nintendo wants it to be. True 3D, no glasses, backwards compatible with DS but finally some real new tricks to give developers for 3DS only titles. As Nintendo themselves put it - this isn't just another rendition of the now what, four times redone DS? It's a new beast altogether, and whatever magic they put into the 3D screen sounds like it might pay off.

Wii
Wii-wise, there seemed to be some decent enthusiasm behind some of the new titles, but stance remains the same: the Wii's endurance is going to be tested in the next 12 months, as Kinect and Move hit the scene and now HD equipped casual gamers wonder about the only SD console remaining on the scene.

Kinect
Speaking of that though: Microsoft's big push, Kinect, sounds like it is going to run into early adoption problems with the $149 price tag. I honestly think this is mostly perception: it seems closer to the Wii's $199 price tag, and the Wii has better brand power at the moment. So there will be a lot of people doing the apples to oranges comparison and just deciding to get the Wii instead.

Fair? I'm not sure it is - but I think Microsoft will need to get some impressive software reviews out there to get away from it. A Halo-esque flagship title would go along way to making it distinct ... or perhaps a better way to put is a Wii Sports that in no way resembles Wii Sports.

Move
Sony's real advantage is position Move more like an accessory with a $99 bundle. How much of a difference in MSRP this is in reality when a second controller is what - another $49? And the MoveChuck is another $29? I think people who go to stores and buy the two products would quickly have similar totals.

Move sounds like it has the advantage of being more appropriate for compatibility with existing games, having those buttons and all. This could prove a serious boon to Sony in the long run. I may be more willing to pick up Move just to try Killzone 2 with the new controls - more so than I am just to replace my Wii Sports with an HD version.

3D Gaming
Sony made a big push on this and to be honest, I can only find it pretty bizarre. Prior to E3, Sony had started updated the PS3 software to handle 3DTV's. I jokingly sent the official PlayStation twitter the question if this was the kind of 3D that required $5 glasses or a $5,000 TV. This was their response:

3D TVs are starting to roll out now, they use "active shutter" glasses with embedded circuitry. In a year or two, most TV will be 3D & cheap

I'm assuming they mean "most" as in "most available". Let's not forget that HD only became truly commonplace (as in over 50% market) in the last year or so, something like half a decade after becoming commercially available. And if by "cheap" they mean "around the same cost as my current television" - then Sony's 3D revolution has already failed. I'm not about to replace my perfectly good TV for a single feature that only one thing attached to it would really offer.

Or to put it this way: I'm already doubtful paying the surcharge at the theater to see the 3D version is worth it, I'm not about to drop a grand to do it in my living room.

Nintendo seems to understand this: the 3DS is really the only part of the 3D platform I can get behind. It doesn't require glasses and I'm only replacing my already aging DS for less than a couple benjies.

Now, I've continually been asking why a new TV is even necessary - and even poked the Internet Bear a little about Sony showing the Killzone 3 demo on a 100 foot project screen (clearly not a 3DTV). It looks like an odd mosiac of technology limitations that actually makes this true, and I'll post a follow up on that later.

Valve on PlayStation 3
Hurrah!

So Why Does 3D Need A 3DTV?

2010-06-18T07:24:00.000-07:00

My earliest memory of 3D is watching the decidedly un-spooky yet relatively funny Three Stooges "Spooks", which had a wide variety of object on wires dangled in front of us.

And that was on our old, decidedly non-HD television. So when Sony starts beating the pulpit that you need a TV to experience games and movies off the PlayStation 3 in 3D ... should I believe it?

Well, like so many things in technology - the answer is: sorta. Let's go backwards from the new technology to the old Stooges technology.

Active Shutter Glasses
This is the 3D of choice for television providers. It works by having a signal sent to glasses which alternates the right and left lenses being closed at a very fast refresh rate. The advantage to this tech is that it doesn't put any filter between your eye and the screen, only alternates them - and hence you don't get the muted or distorted colors that other glasses provide.

It is also the technology which requires the most hardware. Since each frame is alternated, you halve your refresh rate. So if your isn't a 120hz television (and many HDTV's in the home today are not), you won't get the 60hz that most moviegoers are used to viewing. Also, something needs to send that signal to the glasses. In theory, you could have an add-on device if you television is 120hz or more ... but hardware providers are focusing on new sets, not add-ons.

However, the technology that is distinct 3D from HD isn't that expensive, so new 3D ready sets should resemble HD prices in the relatively near future.

Polarized Glasses
Also called "passive" glasses, polarized lenses are what cinemas like IMAX used, and I'm guessing what Sony must have used at E3 to show off Killzone 3. These glasses rely on having an image displayed with two different polarities, and quite like those old red and green glasses from the Stooge days ... only one lens allows one kind of polarity to pass.

Since each lens requires a polarized screen, colors are muted when using the passive glasses. However, the big reason you aren't using this at home is because it's suited for projection screens. Flatscreen TV's are already polarized to properly display their pixels and don't really have the capacity to split the views. Existing projection sets may also require additional

Whether games and movies could be made to send out a mode for projection TV's, though - I don't really know. But it doesn't sound like Sony has any plans to offer such a feature.

Anaglyph Glasses
These are the old school, two color, Stooge glasses. The advantage is that they work on nearly anything that can display more than two colors. The bad thing is that they are well known for all the problems 3D can have: ghosting, eye fatigue, washed out colors, etc. So I think there's an unspoken concept of the "new 3D" that they don't want to support the "old 3D".

So the big question is...
Would the availability of anaglyph, which has been used to bring 3D to your home as recently as Coraline, outweigh any of the problems traditionally associated with it? Anaglyph poses two problems for TV makers like Sony: it's a substandard experience and they don't sell any new TV's with it. So having software which supports both active shutter and anaglyph is a cost which would only reduce sales - potentially not the best business strategy.

So the answer might be: you could do anaglyph 3D gaming on your TV, but there's a chance it might make you want to vomit.

I can't feel like I'm missing much. I have yet to see 3D is use where it is really a game changer. Interesting, sure - but maybe by the time I'm ready to retire the not-so-old plasma ... we won't even be using googles anymore.

TV You Might Have Missed (or are missing, or are about to miss...)

2010-06-15T08:19:00.000-07:00

Lost is gone. I've accepted the end, and I've dealt with the grief. I've moved on. Amazingly, the TV still works fine. Here's some shows that either just ended, or is ending:

Spartacus: Blood and Sand
When the first season of this show ended, I had the sudden realization of just how densely packed the narrative had turned out. This is Shakespeare meets soap opera - plenty of well written drama even in the middle of the blood and boobs. The acting is solid, the production is generally good when it doesn't imitate 300 too much. If you've dismissed this show because of the gratuitous use of nudity, you're missing out.

Though yes, there is plenty of nudity.

Justified
I've raved about this show before, but with the recent season finale - I can't help but recommend it again. It just feels like a good, gritty novel playing out on your TV and I'll say it again - Timothy Olyphant was genetically engineered by a secret government agency to play a cowboy. This was one of the most tightly produced first seasons I may have ever seen, the show just hits on all cylinders from the first scene of the first episode and rarely misses a beat until the conclusion.

Happy Town
Having nearly given up on high concept shows in general, I gave Happy Town a bit of suspicion ... though comparisons to the somewhat campy yet utterly fun Harper's Island helped make the case.

The show is good - it takes itself more seriously than Harper's ever did, but the core mystery is unique and engaging. The characters are strong and the writing doesn't try to follow the ensemble formula, but only focusing on characters as they are important to the current plot. Also, they aren't quite as paranoid as certain other shows about giving reveals to the viewer, and the story is an interesting combination of things you know and don't know, and what various characters know and don't know.

Sadly, Happy Town has already been cancelled. I'm hoping we get at least a full first season and something other than a complete cliffhanger - the show deserves it.

Party Down
Available via Starz and Netflix Instant at the moment - this comedy from some of the people originally responsible for Veronica Mars is just over the top excellent. The second season is about to wrap and while we weren't sure where the misfit bunch of wanna-be writers and actors slumming it as caterers would go ... it has only gotten better since the first episode. The show has a low-budget, indie kind of feel - but the writing and acting are top notch. The only downsides of this show is the short length of the season.

What's the rest of the blogosphere watching?

Kate's Horse

2010-06-11T10:56:00.000-07:00

At the end of Lost ...

..and it should be noted that when I say "end of Lost", I mean the final episode of the final season of the TV show and hence, everything in this post is nothing but a series of serious spoilers for anyone still planning on watching the show. So if you haven't seen the show to the end, I would go find a video about a cat playing piano or something.

Ahem.

At the end of Lost we discover that the Smoke Monster was a cigar ...

Ah. See? Big spoilers. Now go away.

Now let's see if I can do this in one grammatically correct sentence:

At the end of Lost, we discover that the Smoke Monster was in fact an entity transformed when his brother Jacob, protector of the island, tossed him into a well of mysterious light and that his (if in fact genderless amorphic beings can be called such) prime motivation was to kill Jacob and any candidates for Jacob's position as protector so that he (the Smoke Monster) could leave the island.

OK: here is my first piece of evidence that Lost failed as a show. I'm betting that if anyone just starting the show ignored all those warnings and just read that bit, they wouldn't make it past season three.

Why? Because of Kate's Horse. See, the sad thing is that even if it is nearly an accident of convenient writing, the fact that Smoke Monster can't directly kill the candidates but rather must trick them into killing each other or offing themselves is a neat premise. Kind of like Saw but with brains, which is something I wouldn't mind watching.

And this is the main conflict of season six - that the candidates must save the island before Smoke Monster figures out a clever way to end them.

So why is Kate's Horse a problem? Because it shows that this wasn't the main conflict of the show ... just season six. In fact, I don't think Lost ever really had central source of conflict - it was always just Man versus Crazy Shit The Writers Made Up. If we were to believe season six as the "reveal" of the show, then we would be able to look back at past seasons and see how it was all playing out.

But let's look at the Smoke Monster's victims have died: crushed in tree, chewed off arm, crushed in tree, crushed against tree, slammed into tree, buried alive, stabbed by Ben, slammed against floor, slammed against person, slammed against person, crushed by ceiling, slammed into cage, blown up, drowned, broken neck, shot, slit throat.

You'll notice a theme. A lot of slamming, and a few creative incidents like getting Nikki buried alive after biting her in the shape of the spider. Oh, that Medusa Spider was the Smoke Monster, confirmed by producers. You can hear the mechanical sound when they approach and (thankfully) setup Nikki and Pool Boy for their final scene.

So in other words - occasionally Smoke Monster stuck to the premise, but usually it just slammed things around. When it wasn't slamming things around, it would occasionally appear as Christian Shepherd.

Or Kate's Horse. Why would the form of Kate's Horse be useful to the goals of the Smoke Monster? Well, it wouldn't. But gee golly it was neat, wasn't it? Where did that horse come from?

And that, ladies and gentlemen, is how Lost was written. Just a series of distractions lumped in a row. So without any further adieu, my final final thoughts on the show:

It was a character driven show that ran out of character development
The first defense people give for Lost's feel good reunion of a finale is that Lost was, in fact, "all about the characters" and not really about the origins of smoke monsters or how the island does stuff or DHARMA or anything. Prior to the finale, the producers stated they would only answers questions about the show "the characters cared about". Which considering how bad these characters were at figuring out what was happening around them meant: not much.

The first three seasons of Lost had a consistent formula: character backstories interwoven with island mystery. It was getting pretty obvious by Season Three, though, that most of the relevant history of all the main characters - even the Tailies that had been added in Season Two, had been well illustrated. In Season Three, Lost fans suffered through two completely unnecessary characters: Nikki and Paulo, for more backstory fodder.

In Season Four - we start to get flashforwards and other twists on the backstories ... but they serve little in the way of adding to these characters. Actually, at this point most of the "off island" content actually serves the mystery plot. Who is the person in the coffin? Why does Jack want to return to the island and how will they get that done?

Truthfully, the characters of Lost work well as sketches and often in ways to offer up some brilliant dialogue ... but the note that the show ends on ... that love is what will get you to heaven ... is easily the weakest part. The motivations the characters have to fall for each other, with obvious exceptions like the Kwans, is often somewhat forced and probably best attributed to jungle fever as opposed to "the most important thing in their life".

Here's my proof on this: can anyone tell me why Kate loves Jack? What is it about him? They've already endured one failed relationship. She often acts closer to Sawyer than anyone else (particularly physically - the only steamy scenes we get with Kate are with Sawyer, not Jack). And Jack - oh, Jack. People - Jack is a complete loser. Every one of Jack's plans fails miserably throughout all six seasons and all the way up to the last episode. In fact, the only version of Jack which is isn't a loser is the one that wasn't even real. No, more likely Kate "loves" Jack because at the last minute the writers decide that love conquers all and Sawyer made a little more sense with Juliet.

The writers became pathological about not revealing anything
If the crown jewels of the show was the characters, as the producers like to say, then why was it that the writers went so far out of their way to only offer explanations about the island in short discrete bursts, usually during season opener and closers? By the end of the show, the cast includes two characters - Ben and Juliet - who once were part of The Others, the mysterious antagonistic group for most of the first half of the show. Ben was the leader of The Others, and nobody ever bothers to ask to get even basic answers from them like who they are and what they want, except to get inanely vague answers like "We're the good guys."

Bizarre examples from the show: Sawyer at one point has Karl, a refugee from The Others with certainly no love for Ben at gunpoint. Instead of bringing him back to camp, he tells him to run off. When Sayid, our stalwart interrogator/torturer asks why - Sawyer doesn't really have an answer. Locke at one point inexplicably destroys an entire DHARMA building, despite the building having tons of documentation and apparently access to the outside world.

Or my favorite: Man In Black had a name, people. It was Samuel all along. The point of making it such a secret? They just wanted to give the audience one more thing to guess about. Anyone looking for deeper meaning in the absence of his name will come up empty handed.

Much like everything else about the show.

The finale capped off six seasons' of inconsistent, convenient writing
Even a defender of the show recently admitted the Smoke Monster started off as a mindless beast, to some kind of calculating security system, to an actual man - and it is not an easy or smooth transition if you go back through episodes. It has the appearance until about Season Five that they are simply revealing new aspects of the creature, but the revelation that it is Jacob's brother and the rules that go along with it breaks that trend and any sense of cohesion that was being setup in the first half of the show. The Smoke Monster can't hurt the Losties? He is stuck in Locke's form? If you were to re-watch the show from the beginning now, what used to be a great and original threat is now shrouded with questions like, "doesn't Jacob control this thing with his rules anyway?".

And in the finale the show can't even follow the same concepts it had outlined episodes ago ... even within the same season, Jack's interaction with the Magic Light Cave is completely different from Jacob's in Across The Sea. For some time the show makes a big deal about details, lists and rules - but by the end credits of the finale it is hard to find any that the show itself decided were worth paying any attention.

There was an underscored theme of Season Six: why ask questions?

The big questions that fell off the table after Season Three are numerous. The sickness, a massive portion of the island events early in the show, is never really explained despite having Doctor Juliet join the cast. One might be lead to think that pregnancy and children are very important to some deeper mythology of the show, but one would be wrong. One would be simply thinking too much.

It would work better as a dream
Why is Kate's Horse in the jungle? There is no reason plausible based on the events of the show. What happened, happened - and it apparently always about faith and not reason.

The only way to reconcile six season's worth of dropped plot concepts is to accept that normal logic just does not apply. This is why I think so many people mistook Jack's final scene as an indication that they were dead all along - it makes the cognitive dissonance required to watch the show beginning to end so much easier. As Neil Gaiman might say, sometimes dream logic is the only way to tell the story.

And here is why I am so disappointed in Lost: they couldn't even give us that much. They couldn't even give us a cliche excuse of an explanation but instead pulled a mass cop out and went for the heartstrings. And then acted as if the show was never really about the mysteries of the island in the first place.

Meh. Lost, we had some good times - but I wish I had broken up with you seasons ago. Now I get to listen to The Girl brag about how right she was about the show until the end of time.

So, you know, thanks for that.

The Great AT&T iPad Security Breach

2010-06-09T18:34:00.000-07:00

Sweet Jeebus.

Then we began poring through the 114,067 entries and were stunned at the names we found. The iPad 3G, released less than two months ago, has clearly been snapped up by an elite array of early adopters.

Within the military, we saw several devices registered to the domain of DARPA, the advanced research division of the Department of Defense, along with the major service branches. To wit: One affected individual was William Eldredge, who "commands the largest operational B-1 [strategic bomber] group in the U.S. Air Force."

-- Apple's Worst Security Breach: 114,000 iPad Owners Exposed [Gawker]

So, here's the short version: AT&T had an open web service for an AJAX process which would deliver a valid email address if you gave it a valid ICC-ID. And ICC-ID is what phone SIMs, like the one in the iPad, use to identify the unique device (and hence, user).

Note that this was an open web service. So anyone on the net could hit it. Anyone was free to keep trying ICC-ID's until they get an email back. ICC-ID's aren't particularly secure, Gawker points out that they show up on Flickr as part of photo tags.

According to Gawker, AT&T has not informed users of the presumably now fixed breach and it isn't clear if they've contact Apple.

From a security point of view, this could be worse. There's no passwords involved, though emails could be considered usernames in some situations. ICC-ID's themselves are relatively benign - though I don't think I want a black hat hacker having both my email address and device ID. It is a nightmare for a portal where people trust their private data though, and a real red flag for the kind of protocols and practices AT&T has in place. I've always thought their site was somewhat miserable, this is beyond bad.

Thoughts On HTML5

2010-06-07T16:48:00.001-07:00

My current project has dragged me through the rails of HTML5, with the luxury that we're targeting WebKit (Chrome specifically) alone. So I can conveniently ignore a lot of the current disadvantages of working with HTML5, or rather the main one - that 90% of the web has no idea what the hell it is - and focus on the positive.

Since Apple declared that HTML5 would destroy all plugins, there has been rather sudden amount of marketing and attention to the specification. Some of this may be good, as most web specs don't get decent advertising ... but marketing can control the message, and messaging can impact how developers tackle new technologies.

Which can be dangerous. For one things, HTML5 is not all about plugins. Here's a few notes I've had since working with HTML5.

Flash and HTML5 can (and will) co-exist
Steve Jobs would like to have people think that HTML5 and Flash are some kind of binary decision. What HTML5 is providing in terms of audio and video is a rather logical and much needed update to the way web pages handle assets. Since the web was young, the image tag has been foremost in people's minds and has been slowly appended to include rather advanced features. All the while video and audio were relegated to various kinds of plugins.

Take Timex as an example. They have their Flash lead banner, with rich interactivity and animation, and they have a simpler HTML item scroll beneath it. It's actually a very good use of both Flash and dynamic HTML.

Could the canvas tag be made to replicate the Flash banner's smooth animation and interaction? Perhaps, but unlikely. And the reason why Flash is going to be around for some time is that the pipeline to create that animation? That's all Adobe. From Photoshop to Flash Studio - developer use Adobe products to create these kinds of products.

Or in other words: HTML5 probably won't be a complete replacement for everything Flash does a) performance for the canvas tag is increased, b) the complexity of dealing with SVG is decreased, and (or essentially) c) until Adobe designs the toolset to to make HTML5 as powerful as Flash.

And these thing may never happen. Which is fine - plugins have existed to give browsers functionality they wouldn't normally have. HTML5 gives web developers more options, but that doesn't mean we need to start taking any away.

To truly sum it up: Flash is not the blink tag.

HTML5 extends the browser
If we can ignore the fact that you'll be able to sometimes embed videos without Flash, there's a larger picture about the new features. If anything, it seems that the real goal of the HTML5 seems to be about extending the reach of the browser to your desktop and the world around you. With an offline database, geolocation, web workers and web sockets HTML5 browsers are poised to be able to offer new capabilities to enhance the things people do today in the social networking world.

Theoretical example: Twitter could have a whole new concept of local trends. Background processing could localize tweets only within a 50 mile radius of your current location and provide a list of current hash tags. Or why not 50 feet? See what trends are occuring in your coffee shop, not your entire city. Meanwhile your offline storage is tracking tweets you've replied to and retweeted - essentially creating a potential recommendation list for future browsing.

HTML5 extends the concept of a website
When I first encounted the concept of offline web applications I dismissed it as merely a more intelligent cache scheme - which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but not really a wonderful thing.

The more I tinkered with it - the more I realized, though, that works in a very subtle way with the rest of HTML5 to blur the notion of a website and an application. If you go to ebay.com right now, you are very clearly going to a website. More than likely anything you haven't recently viewed will be downloaded for the browser to render, the same with everything else on the rest of the website.

Browsing as normal, right? OK - now think of ebay.com as just the place you go to get the initial download of ebay's web application. As you browse, ebay's manifest is storing all the important assets you need to use ebay on your drive. Not in a transitional sense, but a rather permanent one. You'll use this version of ebay's website - online or offline - until you intentionally remove it or ebay updates the manifest.

First you'll notice everything is faster, because fewer assets need to be loaded per page load. Also, any mobile functionality could be automatically provided to you. Static information about your account, etc., could be stored in the database. You really only need to call out to the server for search results and to get the latest update on that bid you've made.

The bottom line: if ebay were to deliver a desktop application for you to use, it would probably look a lot like this. And you didn't have to do anything to install it but browse to ebay.com, and to load it again - just return to ebay.com ... even if you aren't online. Looking for the details on that gizmo you bid on last week? Just go to ebay.com, head to your account and pull it up. Ebay's server won't need to be hit once.

HTML5 is very suitable to tablets
A large screen on a mobile device? With GPS? Yeah, trust me - people haven't even scratched the surface of how functional web apps can be on tablets.

The Chrome Web Store Gets It
When I saw Google announce the Chrome Store during I/O this year, it became apparent that their strategy around Chrome and Chrome OS is a tightly woven web. Google is clearly going to be championing this kind of development and providing a marketplace around it. Interesting that Apple is doing a lot of podium pounding about HTML5 and yet web apps are still treated like second rate citizens when it comes to the iPhone OS. Installation is a bit of a mystery to most users, with no real indication of the difference between a bookmark and a web app, and management is limited to mostly just deleting. Chrome, Chrome Store and Chrome OS will probably provide users with a fully functional interface to find, purchase, install and maintain web apps in much of they way they deal with desktop apps today.

So it will be interesting, as HTML5 continues to mature and feature adoption increases. It's not a small change to web standards, or more specfically - web features ... and it certainly isn't all about plugins. To think of HTML5 as the replacement to Flash is narrowing the concept down to a point where it just isn't useful.

Things You Didn't Know About Empire Strikes Back

2010-06-07T13:36:00.001-07:00

Luke's fight with Fake "Force cave" Vader is actually a fight with a Celestial Vader! In the original story, the swamp and the cave disappear, and Luke and Vader lightsaber it out in deep space. Vader even grabs a handful of stars to show how powerful the Dark Side can be. (That scene was apparently sponsored by LSD.)

-- 100 Things You Didn't Know About The Empire Strikes Back [movies.ign.com]

There's some interesting production notes, but the first part is all about the differences between Leigh Brackett's original script and the edits Kasdan made. Brackett's draft is often credited for giving Empire the punch that nearly everything else Star Wars lacks. Interesting to me is that Empire has the lowest body count of any of the movies and yet is the clearly the darkest and grittiest of the bunch.

For Sunday: Deep Hole Dive

2010-06-06T08:37:00.000-07:00

As usual, for no particular reason:

For Apple, Web Standards Equals Safari Only

2010-06-04T08:21:00.000-07:00

Apple's campaign to push HTML5 as the alternative to plug ins has taken a very odd turn. They've added a page to Apple.com to demo HTML5 with this particular twist:

You need to use Safari to access the demos.

Now, I'm browsing in the latest version of Chrome - which also uses WebKit for rendering and JavaScript. I'm sure there is a fork in the road from the Chromium project but they should be extremely close when it comes to features and standards.

And Apple won't even let me use that.

Instead of championing the supposedly future thinking open development that Jobs insists is superior to the "old ways" - the page highlights exactly what is wrong with the stance Apple has taken. First, net users have never really cared if a feature set is blessed by some committee - they want things to work in the browser of their choice. Second, Apple's concern for the use of these standards is directed in one direction: users of Safari ... and in reality, users of Mobile Safari.

Together and you can see that this is actually the same strategy Apple took with the cross-compilation issue. They're not concerned with creating content consumable across the net - if they did then they wouldn't block this demo down to Safari and conversely, developers would not need to worry about an iPad version of their website. No, they are concerned with content which falls under the umbrella of Apple software.

Game Play: 3D Dot Game Heroes

2010-06-04T06:38:00.000-07:00

3D Dot Game Heroes is essentially a love song to any gamer old enough to have played nearly any 2D Zelda game ever made. As a Zelda clone, it is such a spot on implementation of the game mechanics which worked so well for these games that it is truly impressive.

Somewhat because of this - this will be a pretty short review. If you loved these games and have a PS3, you certainly owe it to yourself to pick up a copy. However, even as brilliant of homage as the game is - an in no small part due to the incredible sense of humor that the game manages, starting from the very premise of the art style being that the king declares nobody cares about 2D games anymore - it is also burdened with the fact that it is a spot on implementation of the game mechanics, with very little twist applied. So fans who love this genre will be all too familiar with what's going on.

So in other words, it's pretty brilliant while at the same time not the deepest gameplay you've ever met. For the price point, under $40, it is probably about right. I would put it in the safely, though not highly, recommend category.

Even A Lost Writer Can't Really Explain Lost

2010-06-03T12:43:00.001-07:00

I swear, almost *this* close to never talking about the damn show again - but this was too much to pass up. Apparently someone stating that they worked on the show as a writer posted to a forum and sure enough, it has been making the rounds.

And for people like me still trying to figure out just how far Lost got from actually explaining anything, it is wildly unsatisfying as an explanation.

Here's a big chunk:

Thus began Jacob's plan to bring candidates to the Island to do the one thing he couldn't do. Kill the MIB. He had a huge list of candidates that spanned generations. Yet everytime he brought people there, the MIB corrupted them and caused them to kill one another. That was until Richard came along and helped Jacob understand that if he didn't take a more active role, then his plan would never work.

Enter Dharma -- which I'm not sure why John is having such a hard time grasping. Dharma, like the countless scores of people that were brought to the island before, were brought there by Jacob as part of his plan to kill the MIB. However, the MIB was aware of this plan and interferred by "corrupting" Ben. Making Ben believe he was doing the work of Jacob when in reality he was doing the work of the MIB. This carried over into all of Ben's "off-island" activities. He was the leader. He spoke for Jacob as far as they were concerned. So the "Others" killed Dharma and later were actively trying to kill Jack, Kate, Sawyer, Hurley and all the candidates because that's what the MIB wanted. And what he couldn't do for himself.

Dharma was originally brought in to be good. But was turned bad by MIB's corruption and eventually destroyed by his pawn Ben. Now, was Dharma only brought there to help Jack and the other Canditates on their overall quest to kill Smokey? Or did Jacob have another list of Canidates from the Dharma group that we were never aware of? That's a question that is purposley not answered because whatever answer the writers came up with would be worse than the one you come up with for yourself. Still ... Dharma's purpose is not "pointless" or even vague. Hell, it's pretty blantent.

Someone From Bad Robot's Take

I almost believe this is someone from Bad Robot because that's the kind of "of course it makes sense!" bullshit I expect it would take to sleep at night after writing for Lost. Let's quickly tick off some of the things wrong with all of that:

If Jacob has really been trying for centuries to kill MIB and this is how things turn out ... then Jacob is officially the only character on the show who is a bigger loser than Jack. The worst part of Richard's flashback was the revelation that these two have probably thought of nothing better than having others run at them with knives for decades.

So for the explanation of why DHARMA is even on the island to be "Jacob brought them there to kill MIB" ... well, that's the most over engineered failure in the history of attempted murders. Time Travel! Polar Bears! But, in the end all DHARMA and The Others figure out about their target is that it doesn't like sound waves.

So Ben was tricked by MIB and Richard was ... wait, no - Richard had a direct line to Jacob. That's clearly laid out in Richard's flashback. And we have no reason to think that MIB could pose as Jacob, or any explanation as to why Jacob couldn't pose as himself. AND The Others were clearly not actively trying to kill the Lostaways as they could have offed the whole bunch of them several times during the first couple of season. Tom Friendly could have easily killed Jack, Sawyer and Locke personally in one scene during Season Two.

Gah. And even more annoying is how much this dovetails back into the first two seasons when Lost was like, you know, good. Now, this might be just another rabid Lost fan, or maybe the guy who got coffee or something. I'd rather believe that, because if this was someone actually involved in writing the show then I've been closely following the events of a show from writers who can't really grasp cause and effect.

However, if anyone thought that the producers were to leave the finale as final middle finger to Lost fans, be warned: they apparently saved over ten minutes of material showing Ben and Hurly as protectors of the island.

Course, in order to see it - you have to buy the DVD.

Somehow, I don't see that happening. Anyway, I have a rough of a post on final thoughts on the show. I may or may not post it. Starting to feel like the guy still at the scene of a crime when even the cops have gone home.

Apple to Pull "Widgety" Apps

2010-06-03T12:17:00.000-07:00

Apple can't even be nice to Apple fans anymore:

In late April, an unnamed Australian — one of a small team of cross-platform developers known as Shifty Jelly — made a point of telling the world that the Apple App Store is a mighty wonderful place. "I love the app store and the amazing hassle-free distribution it provides and I only really have a few niggling concerns with how Apple has dealt with us, as developers," he wrote in a blog post entitled "Sorry Media, But Apple Isn’t Evil."

But little more than a month later, this outspoken Aussie has accused himself of talking nonsense after the Jobsian cult said it was booting his company's photo-centric iPad application, My Frame, from the App Store. "A month ago I wrote a blog post about how Apple were not actually evil, because I was getting sick of all the media hype and bashing that was going on," he now says. "Little did I know that a month later that blog post would come back and smack me in the face."

-- Steve Jobs beheads iPad apps for acting like desktops

This really is the evil part of the App Store. This app violates no terms of service, appears to be pretty well done, and was getting popular. So why would Apple ban it? The common wisdom, and about the only thing that makes any sense, is that Apple wants to reserve the idea of a widget based desktop to ... Apple. So this is not an app that can do any harm to you, or your phone, or anything - but it may do harm to Apple at some point in the future.

So gone it goes. This isn't just developer unfriendly, this is outright hostile. You might have a good idea, and a good execution - but if it gets too close to competing with Apple, you've just wasted all of your developer money.

Apparently the developer emailed Steve Jobs to see WTF. Jobs responded with:

We are not allowing apps that create their own desktops. Sorry.

Sent from my iPad

Anyone else find the "Sent from my iPad" particularly annoying in that setting?

How Lost Should Have Ended

2010-05-28T10:08:00.000-07:00

Failed animated GIF load - so here's the link to the Daily What ... via @kiyote23.

Lost: A Few Points Of Clarification

2010-05-27T21:37:00.000-07:00

Spoilers, obviously.

I promise, only a couple more posts on Lost and then I'll never speak of the show again. This one, one more - then I'm done.

However, in the muddled writing which was the finale there has been a whole new brand of confusion. Since I've been faithfully tracking the show since the first episode (and blogging about since around the third season) - let's nail down some of the few things the writers/producers actually did tell us.

First, and very important:

No, they were not all dead from the beginning
Two things are causing this confusion: the first is the timing of Christian's speech to Jack within the last ten minutes of the entire series (hence giving the audience not a lot of time to process) and the images ABC added (apparently not the producers) to the end credits of the plane wreckage.

Proof: Christian actually says so during his speech and even indicates that what happened on the island was "the most important thing" in their lives. The producers have confirmed this (and that the end images weren't their idea).

But yes, the "flash sideways" wasn't "real"...
A lot of people simply call it "purgatory" but, that doesn't seem accurate to me. There's some Buddhist notions here about transcending but not having reach full enlightment which is closer, I think. I don't see these sould being tested or cleansed ... LA X wasn't about being tried or anything - just making your connecting flight to "heaven" once you find your soulmate (groan).

What I find really odd about this one is that some people seemed to enjoy the finale because they thought this was true. Which I can get - there would be a certain comfort in thinking that all six seasons were just, say, the imagination of a dying man in a bamboo forest ... because it would allow for essentially any contradiction on the planet thanks to dream / death logic. But no, that's not what happened here.

Ajira Did Not Crash After Frank's Takeoff
This is just more confusion over ABC's end credit scenes. Those images were just filler, not part of the real narrative. Frank, Sawyer, Kate and Miles get to do non island things for a while.

The Smoke Monster Can Become More Than Dead People
I don't know why this has kept coming up recently - I think because the whole Church/Purgatory thing and when I post my final complaint about the show I'll bring this up more - but the writers and producers have used Old Smokey to make all kinds of appearances. I guess "Kate's Horse" was technically dead at the time she met it - and I'm 99% sure the horse was Smokey. Smokey certainly took the form of the spiders that (thankfully) bit Nikki. So what form Smokey can and can't take is really, really not well defined. But don't assume because, say, Walt showed up as an apparition somewhere that it wasn't Smokey (course, I wouldn't assume it was either).

Another likely candidate (sorry) is Dave, Hurley's imaginary friend. Interestingly, if Dave is Smokey then it is also a really early example of Smokey trying to off a candidate while still obeying the rules (something Smokey proved really bad at - but more on that later). Course, Dave is also confusing once we learn Hurley can see dead people - so maybe Dave was dead all along (sigh).

Short version: the only consistent "rule" is that the Smoke Monster can take the form of things it reads from other people minds (and/or dead people). Or short, short version - it can become things integral to The Island, but apparently not the living.

Walt, Michael, Eko, etc., aren't in the church because...
Because they're not dead? Except that Christian states there is no "now". Hurley and Ben are at LA X at the same time as the Kwans, despite apparently having gone off and had merry offscreen adventures together (groan).

Look, I have a lot of problems with the church and I did actually think the lack of black people seemed like pretty stupid oversight ... but Ben and Ana Lucia do give the writers a decent out here. Just because people have arrived at LA X, having died whenever, doesn't mean they're ready to "let go" and move on.

Actually, I think Ben, Eko, Michael and Walt were left out also in part because they didn't fit well into the "find love" mechanic they had set up to be "awakened" (groan). The producers say the actor who played Walt has grown so much that he woudn't have been recognized, which I don't entirely buy into. However, getting actors on contract for a highly touted finale might be a different story in general.

Regardless, we can probably assume that these characters are bouncing around LA X somewhere offscreen though. Don't get me wrong - I think the fact that Walt dropped so completely off the narrative radar is bullhockey. But that's for another post.

Lost has always been mostly about the characters
So prior to the finale, Damon and Carlton said that they were going to be answering the questions "important to the characters" - and that is when we should have known we were in trouble. These characters have been almost pathological in their inability to communicate reasonably. Let's not forget that Juliet was one of The Others and we still have little idea why The Others actually did anything. Sawyer at one point had Karl, also an Other, at gunpoint ... and simply let him go.

It's true - the characters were always an important aspect of the show. The flashbacks, their lives before the island, their interactions on the island - all very, very important.

Lost, however, did not get a third season because of character development. Lost got past two seasons because thousands of rabid fans were recording the show, going over every detail and then swarming forums en masse to detail how it proved or disproved theories about the show. When people like Javi did live chats with fans, they rarely discussed if Kate liked Sawyer more than Jack - they wanted to know about the mechanics at work when came to the mysteries of The Island.

Or maybe more to the point, if Lost has always been about the characters - we can't forget that The Island was one of the more important characters of the show. It's the character everyone fell for and wanted to know more about. Jack was, quite honestly, a pretty lousy lead in a lot of different ways - but The Island was always a star.

OK, so like I said ... one more to go. I'm just so annoyed with people asking inane questions like "what was inconsistent" or "what kind of answers did you really want" ... I mean, really - I'm beginning to think that the majority of the people left for the finale were people who stopped really tracking the show years ago.

Movie Watch: Exiled

2010-05-27T09:30:00.000-07:00

The Girl and I were in a Kung Fu mood last night and ended up with Exiled, a 2006 Hong Kong bullet ballet which just recently arrived on Netflix Instant.

It is surprisingly good. This is clearly the kind of movie which inspired Tarantino's early films (this film being a 2006 I wonder if some of it isn't being paid back now). There's a lot of themes about power, revenge, redemption - but mostly it is a movie about comrades in arms who just end up getting mixed into a heap of trouble.

While some of the cinematography isn't great, it had a few brilliantly directed scenes (there's a gunfight which moves to an outside shot of a stairway which is just awesome) but the writing is really, really tight.

Highly recommend.

Fun Fact: The film was awarded a Category III rating (18+ restriction), particularly for one scene showing Simon Yam's character shaking hands with another gangster with their left hands turned around, making a triads agreement handshake. The scene is present on the Mega-Star uncut Limited Edition DVD. However, only the Category IIB cut version was released in Hong Kong theatrically.

[Wikipedia]

Unanswered Lost Questions

2010-05-25T13:53:00.000-07:00

Spoilers, obviously.

This is meant for funny, course - though I had naturally forgotten most of them. I'd find it funnier if it didn't remind me about a lot of the big balls they dropped. That they couldn't even keep their own rules about who or what can appear when or where straight now just feels incredibly sloppy (from the first season on).

See more funny videos and funny pictures at CollegeHumor.

Via Kottke.

TV Watch: Lost, The End

2010-05-24T06:34:00.000-07:00

Yeah.

Uh.

WTF was that?

The Lost season finale was a boon to one subset of fans: those really, really curious about whether Kate was in love with Jack. For everyone else, it was at best a nod and wave goodbye from the characters people have watched for six years.

For anyone hoping for a decent conclusion to the storyline, though: you were out of luck.

I'm going to save the LA X stuff until the end - because it really was somewhat meaningless based on Christian's final speech. Emotional? Yes. But meaningless.

Obviously massive spoilers follow. Pretty much a blow by blow.

If you remove the LA X portions, you aren't left with much and most of it doesn't make any real sense. And I don't mean "doesn't make any real sense" as in "they didn't fully explain X was Y" I mean "doesn't make any real sense" like the way old bad television serials are put together.

We start with Sawyer inexplicably, but conveniently, figuring out that SmokeLocke needs Desmond - even though Widmore really described Desmond as a "failsafe". In one of those mystical Lost moments, Sawyer manages to run to point A on the island, have a conversation with someone, and get back to point B while another group was making their way to point C.

Remember back in like Season Two when everyone was trying to figure out how The Others got around the island so fast and easy? Simple: it's called convenient writing. For those scoring at home, convenient writing is not good writing.

Jack, having been at this protector thing for all of about ten minutes, decides the best thing to do is ... whatever SmokeLocke wants to do. So they lower Desmond into the light, where he sees some kind of underground temple with the skeletons of other people who went to the light, but did not become Smoke Monsters but perhaps died in some slave labor effort to build this undergrou...

Wait. What? What the... underground temple? OK, so Desmond has a "immunity to the unique electro..." whatever, we know he won't die. Who the hell is down in the crazy light building temples? Find out next time on Lost? Uh, no. Ignore the fact that Mother Dearest suggested anyone going near the light would suffer a fate worse than death - which would seem to make construction pretty hard, why exactly would "life, death and rebirth" need a sun pool? The entire underground temple was nothing but a place for Desmond and Jack to futz around - making no sense whatever with anything we've shown before.

So after Desmond pulls the plug, the island starts to self-destruct. In frustration with his poor job performance, Jack starts to beat Locke to death. And he can, because SmokeLocke is now corporeal. Why? Don't ask! Seriously! Why are you asking questions? What show do you think this is after all?

SmokeLocke beats Jack unconscious with a rock and runs away to his secret boat. While Jack naps, a tree falls on Ben who then explains his escape plan while he has nothing better to do. Jack wakes back up to nothing but mud and rain ... and still manages to hunt down SmokeLocke before he can get away. How? Don't ask! What the hell is with all these questions? The island did it, ok?

SmokeLocke beats Jack with a knife, but then Kate shoots him! How did she know where they were? Or manage to get there in time while she was helping save Ben? Who knows! Why would you still care? She got a funny line! Go Kate!

As soon as SmokeLocke is fatally wounded by a commercial break, the rain stops (Why? Seriously stop with the questions). Also, Ben is saved. Yay! Jack, Hurley and Ben run off to fix that thing that we don't even know what is while everyone else escapes.

Jack saves Desmond, plugs island, dies. Hurley and Ben don't. Everyone else gets off the island.

Then there was a puppy. Yay! Puppy!

And that was a wrap, people. Did you expect some great reveal when Desmond went to the light? Yeah, sorry. Or some great climatic battle between SmokeLocke and everyone else? Uh, no. Not really. Or maybe some really great ending to this whole candidate thing? Happens off screen between Hurley and Ben. Maybe they would have showed it - but they really, really had a lot of ads to get through.

Look, I had lowered my bar considerably for the finale. I didn't expect any complicated solution which explain everything ... or even most things. I expected one more layer of the onion pulled back which just brought everything together: the rules, the candidates, the island, etc. Leave some of it to faith, fine, but at least put a bow on it. At least try to tie things into a knot. The on-island events of the finale were a complete mess and simply not good writing. As someone who thought that bouncing theories around and paying attention to detail was part of what made this show great - it became quite clear that the producers did not have any great story arc. The island was the distraction, the show was really just playing around with the backstories.

Here is the great failure of the finale: you would enjoy the show more the less attention you paid. The message was: don't ask questions - just watch love conquer all and be happy about it.

So yeah, on LA X: so instead of an alternate reality, LA X was just a waiting room for some of the people on the island after they died. They might not be dead yet during the main story, but that doesn't matter. Which is why the LA X events are completely meaningless - they aren't actually related to the story. LA X was all epilogue, from the very beginning, and very strange structure wise since you haven't actually finished telling the story. At best you could say "Jacob did everything he did so that the gang could go to heaven" - which, fine, whatever. Except that it doesn't fit anything else from the rest of the show.

When I said that I thought LA X would survive so that the writers could have an out for a happy ending - I had no idea how far they would take it. This ending was pure fan service, watching characters fall back in love and leave in a warm white light. It demonstrates none of the aspects that made the first season great - including reasonable character development. Many fans probably enjoyed watching what amounted to a clip show followed by a curtain call ... but that doesn't make it good storytelling. The story deserved more.

OK, this has been too long as it is. Honestly, this episode and the show doesn't get any better if you try to analyze it. It only gets worse.

I still enjoyed the show in general, but I mark this finale my least favorite of any show I've watched.

TV Watch: Lost, What They Died For

2010-05-19T06:35:00.000-07:00

Well, let's just get right to it then.

The Good
This episode probably had me more excited about the LA X world than most, and I'm hoping that whatever Desmond pulls off will be truly explosive for the finale (honestly, I'm half expecting a bomb to go off). The scene where Desmond beats the hell out of Ben to remind him who is was relatively awesome.

I'm rather liking Ben in general, actually. On the island, it is very tough to tell if he is just being his old manipulative self or if he has some long con for redemption. In LA X, his potential hookup with Danielle is both touching and mildly creepy. Ben's a complicated guy.

The Kinda Good
There were some sideways explanations here - which is I suppose better than no explanation at all, even though we are almost at the finish line. Is the pregnancy issue tied to the importance Jacob puts on someone being a mother? Are the powers of Jacob and Not Jacob actually tied to conversation, and that's why Not Jacob went ahead and just offed Zoe? It will be annoying if some of this isn't more fleshed out in the finale, especially the pregnancy thing which has been so core to the show - but I'm pretty much braced that we're not going to get a real good definition of the "sickness" at this point.

The Not So Good
The whole "why they died" speech and Jack getting promoted to protector gets lumped into what is a series of anticlimactic explanations which have been put out this season. Considering what has happened to these characters over the last few years, one might think they would have a more heated Q & A with the entity most directly responsible for it. That the island and the candidates "needed each other" fits well into what we know, but why Jacob had to do it by crashing a plane (killing a bunch of people), the actions of The Others, why it took so long to reveal the idea of "candidacy", etc. - nobody asks? I guess Kate kinda did, but who is listening to her anymore...

And Jack actually getting the promotion was about as exciting as, well, watching a normal person get a promotion. He was the obvious choice and the entirely scene seemed most ceremonial, even plot-wise. Maybe this all gets more detailed in the finale, but it seems like a small prize tied to a very long string at the moment.

I did like the "just a name in chalk" bit. Sometimes a cigar smoking chimp is just a cigar smoking chimp, people.

The Outright Bad
Ben and Widmore really deserved more air time. Well, more specifically - we deserved more air time to explain what has been going on with these two characters. Why do the rules apply to them? OK, I still don't know why the rules apply to anyone or anything, but the power dynamic between Widmore and Ben is the untold story of the island from the military, to DHARMA to The Others. And to have it seem that Widmore is suddenly good because he and Jacob had an offscreen chat is just downright annoying.

And if Richard is dead and does not make an appearance during the finale I will throw a chair in the general direction of Carlton Cuse. Not anything against him over Damon or anything, but I do believe he is taller and therefore easier to hit when throwing a chair several thousand miles.

Bottom Line
We are in the eleventh hour and I think we're about where most fans expected: the story is coherent (good), they don't have time to really reveal everything (bad), but all in all we should have one thing to comfort us:

I don't think there has been a bad Lost finale yet, and I honestly suspect this one will be the best of the lot.

If you can watch it out without a mental checklist of things left unexplained - it will probably be awesome. If the last episode was bringing the story to a simmer - we're certainly at a full boil by now. I think we're done moving the pieces on the chess board ... it is time to throw down.

My long shot guesses? SmokeLocke is throwing Desmond down Ye Old Tunnel Of Light. Or trying to do so. Also, my money is on the LA X world surviving, especially with the current kill rate on the island ... or by bringing LA X down there will be a chance of some kind of reunion.

Also for the last scene? Jack and something that appears to be Locke on the beach.

Steam on OS X: Nice But Certainly No Nirvana

2010-05-18T06:38:00.000-07:00

Last Wednesday, Valve officially released Steam for OS X. Along with the release was the promise of the release of essentially the entire Source library for Mac eventually.

To date, only one Source game is available - Portal, but it has been offered free for a limited time. Portal is a pretty great game, so Steam + Free Portal is pretty decent gift to the Mac community. And honestly, I'm still optimistic - but having played around with it for nearly a week now, most of my original feelings about Steam haven't changed.

For one thing, Steam is buggy. I can't speak to the PC version anymore - but I never knew it to be terribly stable. The OS X version likes to do things like block you from closing Steam because a game is running - even though a game is not in fact running. The browser Steam uses shows an almost interesting lack of performance considering how basic most of the pages are constructed. It will lock up. It will zombie.

Also, Steam is just poorly designed. Essentially one large custom browser with a lot of access rights, Valve didn't bother to actually coordinate your Steam account with your community account, forum account or support account in 2008 - and they apparently haven't bothered to add such things by 2010. The end result is a decent browsing experience, a relatively robust checkout experience and a a lackluster everything else (at best).

Partially because of that - Steam is quite possibly the most user unfriendly gaming product in the history of gaming. It's not just that their support section feels like a bad PHP script bolted onto the side of an online store, but rather that is the support for a product which can at any time update code on your hard drive without any control on your part, completely trash your game, and then simply walk away.

And remember people, Steam does not offer refunds (unless you feel like reporting them to the BBB it seems). So if Valve forced an update on you and it broke your favorite game - well, tough. And I've had Torchlight less than a week and guess what? That very thing has already happened. I don't think there is a Mac user on the planet right now who can play the game.

And has Valve responded to any of the many forum posts about it? No. Have they sent out any tweets from the Steam twitter account? No. Have they bothered to respond to any of "Ask A Question" support tickets (I could go on for some time about how annoying that they frame support issues as me asking questions. I shouldn't have to ask Valve why their QA sucks)? Not that I've read and certainly not mine.

So yeah - Portal for free running natively on the Mac? That's a nice thing. And if down the road I can play Team Fortress 2 and Left 4 Dead off the MBP as well, then that will be a win. But Steam is still Steam - it's a buggy mess and does nothing to empower users when things go wrong. So remember Mac users - Steam is buyer beware for the digital age.

TGIF: Kittens In AutoTune

2010-05-14T09:00:00.000-07:00

Technically I should thank @feliciaday for the find, but I doubt she needs my traffic. Enjoy the weekend, people.