Fly The Cheap Little Wind

That's a line from a FSOL song actually, and with prices these days I won't be flying any cheap winds anytime soon. I will be flying out to San Fran for WWDC which means I don't know how much blogging I'll get done for the next week. Apple is odd about that kind of stuff as it is and I'll probably be spending most of my time as I usually do in these situations - half listening to whatever it is going on around me and half coding on some project which may or may not have anything to do with anything but sounds really, really cool to me at the time.

I'll probably be either updating the app we're developing at work or the game I've been playing with. I still love how game and business development dovetails. I completely rewrote the basic interface framework while we were in New York (The Girl was getting her hair done at the time) and it went so much faster after knowing more about how to build out delegates and views and the such.

In game related news, I'm glad to see Play Digital's podcast finally getting updated with the return of the lovely Katharine and her brutally good reviews. I don't see the site updated, however, which is fine as I'll be taking it with me for the flight anyway.

I got a few follow up questions, by the by, on using the Mac as a wireless media server for the PS3. For a moment there it looked more dire than my initial take on the matter. When we tried to watch My Name Is Earl the video would stutter and freeze about every three minutes or so. This, however, seems to have been a result of my D-Link wireless router finally dying. Well, I say finally for no good reason since the damn thing is barely a couple years old. Once I got a new router (some Netgear number with a big blinking blue top) and got the access point up in the living room (cheaper than paying RCN to come out and "internet enable" the living room cable jack) - it's been stone cold smooth ever since.

So to be specific - I'm using a Mac with 10.5, NullRiver's MediaLink and an area with a really strong wifi signal. I've had less luck with say, TwonkyMedia - although that seems to be more of a format issue than anything else.

The HDTV decision is coming down the pipe soon should anyone have any last minute armchair advice on such a purchase.

Movie Watch: Iron Man

The pun is too easy. Iron Man is easily one of the most solid summer blockbusters put to the screen. I'll refrain from making any repulsor lift jokes though, let's just settle on the fact that the movie manages a near brilliant tempo which avoids the non-stop special effects ride which is so easy for a studio to churn out, skips over the needless changes from the source material and doesn't fall headlong into overwrought romance.

It's quite easily the best comic book ever made.

One of the most impressive things about the script and the directing is that someone remembered that a hero story is sometimes the inverse of a horror story. A lot of good horror stories build the picture of the monster/killer/spooky doll very slowly. In this move, Iron Man is that spooky doll and it makes the payoff of the explosions to follow that much sweeter. Downey's peformance as Stark might not be too far removed from his core, but he plays the billionaire playboy with a heart of iron probably better than anyone else could.

There's a whole other layer being draped on top of this movie - I won't go into too much detail for fear of being spoilerific, but it certainly sounds like Marvel Studios is starting to try and ferry their franchises into a network of movies rather than a series of one-off money makers. It should be pretty interesting to watch.

Highly recommend (as action movies go).

Demo Play: Battlefield: Bad Company And Iron Man

Had a little free time this morning so I finally installed and tried out the two demos I had been sitting, Bad Company and Iron Man.

Battlefield: Bad Company
Bad Company has a pretty interesting dose of grim humor to add to the modern combat arena of shooters. Cast into the "Bad Company", the single player campaign tosses you headlong into a nearly hopeless scenario with little warning. You'll be stabbing yourself with medical hypos in no time flat.

The multiplayer takes a nice avenue from the normal CTF / spawn control style of play. The attackers are looking to take crates of gold from the defenders, which in turn increase the number of spawns the team gets. The defenders are trying to wear down the attackers to defeat. Server side stats are recorded with players gaining rank.

It's quick, gritty and looks amazing. The online play was crisp and easy over PSN. I would definitely at least recommend the demo when it goes fully public on June 5th.

Iron Man
Having just walked out of the movie itself not too long ago, I can say that they're certainly remaining faithful to the film. Downey's voice lends a great deal to the game and all the visuals fall in line with the feel of the movie.

My only complaint is the controls. It's an overcomplicated mess of movement and shooting with little concern for targeting in between. You feel a little less like man shaped tank when your repulsor shots shank to the right or when you accidentally jet yourself into a wall. My most effective attack seemed to be to just run up to a target and punch it a lot. Which worked awesome for the last Hulk game I played, but I was hoping for a little more sophistication from Stark's creation.

For Sunday: Ass Pennies Sketch

Audio is NSFW (depending on your workplace, I guess).

A Few Battlefield Demo Notes

Just to clarify:

- I'm all out of codes. Thanks again to everyone who wrote in. I'm going to try and wrangle some more out of EA.

- The demo is not available for download until June 5th, I believe. There was some confusion that it was ready now. The demo may be available for download now (thanks TimeDoctor). I haven't tried yet and don't have the instructions or anything - so try clicking around until something sounds like a machine gun.

Yeah, they are definitely live, I just finished the download. For PSN users:

- Go to Account Managent,
- Go to Transaction Management
- Go to enter promotion code

I don't have XBL, so I'm not sure what the path is there.

- Update: Neomorph notes: "The code is limited to North American XBL users only apparently." Apparently for those lot, you can try the demo now however. This might have added to my own confusion, actually.

- Update to that update: According to EA, these should be international. Neomorph, if I get a second round I'll try to work it out.

- I got more than a couple emails saying that GameStop had dropped the ball with a preorder and people didn't get a demo code when they should have. I asked EA about it and apparently there's no widespread problem with the program, so poke your local GameStop employee with a sharp stick.

- If you end up with a code by some other means (like sharp stick induced torture), please email back and let me know. There are about five times as many people who wrote in as those who actually got one, so do a brother proper and let someone else have the extra one.

Thanks again to everyone who wrote in.

TV Watch: Lost, There's No Place Like Home (Parts 2 & 3)

There be spoilers here.

I think we can uniformly declare this season a triumph. Last season was something of a mess of subplots and the character development felt slow and clumsy. This season we've had mostly tight writing which actually feels like it's going somewhere and the flash forwards have managed to build on the characters in a meaningful way.

Even more than that - previous gambles by the writers like keeping Ben (he was originally slotted as an incidental character) have paid off quite well.

This two hour finale was, as expected, largely finishing touches to all the arcs we've been seeing with the closing gap between the flash forwards and time on the Island. This is all fine with me and they left us some fairly tasty morsels as well. Locke's assumption of power, while expected, is made even more interesting with the twist at the end, his use of an alias, etc. Jin and Michael got a great sendoff and I think we can expect to see them again in the Obi Wan Club along with Christian Shepherd and the gang. Does that include Claire, btw? I'm still at a lost as to whether she is dead or just kidnapped.

The island's "move" turned out way more interesting at the very end than I would have expected. Did it strike anyone else of having a certain spaceship kind of quality? While I've been going on and on about the Island being a kind of godlike character, the writers could easily be invoking that old Asimov "technology looks like magic" philosophy as well.

That's right people, I'm calling it right now. The Island? It's The Heart Of Gold. The Improbability Drive explains everything.

Now while the twist was neat and all, I'm a bit reluctant to get excited about a main theme for next season being "getting the band back together." Sure, Jack has a hard road ahead and all - but he's never exactly been my favorite character. Way more interested in seeing the closing acts between Widmore, Ben and the Island. I am a little confused as to why Locke wasn't provided the same protection as Ben though...

Great finale, though, and glad to be excited about the show again.

Battlefield: Bad Company Demo Codes

Update:

These are gone now. Mostly to the first to the door and I still have the emails from those that didn't get to snag one. If EA can shake loose a few more, I'll give those precedence.

If you didn't tell me which system it was for - send me a follow up email even if you didn't get a code. It will help if a new batch comes up. New batch will be alerted in a new post.

Thanks for everyone who wrote in!

I (and probably a decent number of other bloggers) have been given a handful of codes for the upcoming Battlefield: Bad Company demo arriving June 5th for both Xbox Live and PlayStation Network. To get your hands on one (and you don't already have my IM/Skype/email/phone number/postal address/blackmail) - just send an email to the email over in the Hate Mail section of the right nav. I won't promise first come, first serve - but if you say nice things about me in the email it might help your cause.

Update: - It will also help your cause to send me your XBLA/PSN ID. Not required, if you're really shy (and I'm not even on XBLA anyway) ... but I figure it's a good way to track the handouts.

Here's a teaser:



Thanks to Andrew over at EA for dropping these by.

There's This City Modelled After Liberty City

You might have heard of it. They have a baseball team and everything.

New York City is pretty much the bomb, as cities go. I'm still a Chicagoan at heart, it's true. There's a density to Manhattan which takes getting used to - a slight pressure difference even from the likes of London which is hard to describe. With that said though, I can't deny that we'd be hard pressed to match the fine eats and treats which are within reach in the city. We had Saturday night at Momofuku - possibly the finest Thai food I'll ever have.

Best quote of the week belonged to the random stranger who faced with The Met responded with a "You know, this museum is actually pretty nice." I mean, unless you like, you know, grew up in the Louvre or some crap that takes a certain perspective to pull off gracefully.

And Spamalot rules. It's a simply dead on adaptation of Holy Grail and will make you giggle in all the same ways.

We're still catching up on television, work and the real Liberty City. Not necessarily in that order, mind you.

Brief Incommunicado

We're going to head to NY for the long weekend and hop the plane tonight. Internet access will be spotty, so I'll see you all sometime next week.

A few quick thoughts about stuff in general:

Haze Demo
I didn't spend much time with this game, to be honest. I first downloaded the demo as another test to see how a PS3 games hold up on an SDTV. Then it peaked my interest when the less than stellar reviews hit. I really like Free Radical's stuff, huge TimeSplitters fan actually, so I was curious.

The good: It's fairly good looking, even on SD. The bad: It's dull. The nectar "mechanic" is way overblown - it's basically just a merged version of every Quake powerup. Not to mention it makes no sense, narratively, to send a bunch of mercs into a jungle with a drug that can both make them powerful and insane.

A Day In The Life Of Niko Bellic
We've more properly settled into life in Liberty City and so far everything is a positive. The short version is that Rockstar shows an impressive ability to modify their previous work - to cut things which worked somewhat, change things that were working without breaking and them and overall build a better experience.

The PS3 In General
Surpassed our expectations. Not only has it performed quite well on the SDTV, with everything I can throw at it: menus, GTA IV, Haze, Stardust, fl0w (which The Girl walked in on and asked if I was playing a constellation) - but it's really lived up to being the digital hub of our living room. Not just replacing my aging Toshiba (although it still produced excellent picture) - but also streaming movies and music from the MacBook. As I've said, the quality has been as such that I'm strongly considering a 720P set over a 1080P one at this point, but we'll see.

Gaymer Tags
You know - I get that these communities are hard to manage, but I think Microsoft is in the wrong here. Not just the whole "Dick Gaywood is his real name" thing - which, OK, if I had name that was also porn name I'd probably use it as my handle too -but if someone wanted to tag themselves "TheGayAgenda" (props to Three Panel Soul) or "Lord StudMuffin" or "BlackPower" or whatnot, if these words don't have any intrinsic wrong to them until someone else's prejudice comes to play - then let them stand and let those people who get all riled up about them go play elsewhere or get some character development themselves and learn to deal with it.

It's not like "PopeFan1" or "IMAGaymer" is in the same field as like "HolocaustApologist" or "ThirdReichWarrior" or "YayKKK". There is a pretty distinct line in the sand and it's idiotic to treat "Dick Gaywood" like it's the same offense as "TitsAndAssMan".

TV Watch: House Season 4 Finale

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

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

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

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

Word of the day: Potemkin Village

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

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

Game Play: GTA IV & The PS3

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

Must remember to take the construction signs more seriously.

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

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

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

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

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

Payday. Yay.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Game Play: Back in San Andreas & GTA IV PC

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

Spoilers ahead, btw.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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



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

Why XP And OLPC Is A Good Thing

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

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

Here's Mike Arrington of TechCrunch:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-- The Face of the $100 Laptop

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

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

And the second line:

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

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

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

-- The Face of the $100 Laptop

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

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

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

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

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

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