TV Watch: Lost, The Variable

I've got mixed feelings about this Faraday outing, to be honest. Although, for a pleasant change from some seasons past - I don't feel like the episode was bad or in some way derailing the plot in general ... there was just some stuff I wasn't entirely sold on.

First, the good. The show continues to mine the DHARMA material for gold. I feel like we've got our island back, and it is mysterious and spooky and good like it was always supposed to be before the writers kept filling it with a bunch of twisted lack of answers and meaningless back stories. DHARMA, Widmore, the Others - all feel like real portions of a tangible storyline which is actually going somewhere.

And the portions of this episode that really worked for me are the parts that spoke directly to that. Daniel's many connections to the island, to Widmore, etc., fleshed out his character and aspects of the island's story as well. Even his matter of fact explanation of more or less the entire plot of the show so far seemed real.

What I'm not totally buying is this sudden concept that people can, in fact, change the future. That the past was a fixed object was a very powerful narrative rule. The recent episode about Ben worked off this premise quite well and was one of the reasons it worked for me.

Now Faraday says that the Losties are variables, not constants and that they can change the future. Yet Jack seemed pretty determined to try and change Ben's future, only to be foiled because (we thought) it was his destiny to fail. It was a pretty clever play on free will and fate.

Daniels' explanation that the Losties are beyond the laws of relativistic physics didn't really fly with me because I didn't really hear an explanation. It was like the worst suspension of disbelief moment ever. I'm supposed to believe that this rule which has been talked about to some length is possibly tossed aside simply because Daniel says that's the way it is.

Also, I'm supposed to buy that exploding a hydrogen bomb to stop the future is a good idea. Because Dan said so.

It's a lot to swallow, but of course Jack's character seems to have devolved into being the bitch of whatever theory gets put in front of him, apparently is buying into it wholesale. Course, wasn't it Jack who decided it was time to stop pushing the button in the first place? And if Daniel is right, mistakenly dragged everyone back to the island? Does this guy ever get tired of being really, really wrong?

(Because of course, it is very possible that Dan is wrong here)

Probably not, and I'm guessing this season will end with highlights which will feel very similar to the button pushing violent sky finale from days of old.

Beer Drink: Lazy Mutt Farmhouse Ale

This is a new section for Cathode. Since the blog keeps evolving more and more into a description of habitual escapes, I'm not sure why beer wouldn't be on the list.

The first thing you'll note about Lazy Mutt is the marketing gimmick. The beer comes in eight packs with a big note on the end reminding that there are "two more in this one". What this really comes down to is that the beer is really cheap as the price is still comparative to your average six pack.

Taste wise, the beer is pretty average as well. Beer snobs will note that it does not really meet the standards of a farmhouse. There's a hint, maybe, of apple or other fruit flavors, but the beer taste a lot more like a red to me than anything else. It's got a low weight and not a lot of body.

So in the end, it's an average beer at a better than average price. It is, if anything else, aptly named as it seems best for people who may not want to run to the store quite as often.

Swine Flu A Bit Of A Misnomer

I don't usually comment on health issues (as it doesn't fall into the "describing geeky things that happened last night" camp), nor do I generally link from Boing Boing (as it would be unlikely for most people to see a BB article here first, statistically speaking).

But this - this I found interesting:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported that, people in the U.S. infected with the virus have either traveled to Mexico recently or have been exposed to someone returning from the country. The CDC originally thought the virus was a straightforward swine flu virus. However after closer analysis determined it is a new virus containing a mixture of swine, human and avian viruses.

-- Swine Influenza Update from a Nurse: Virus, Panic, Precautions, and End of the World Websites.

Which is pretty creepy considering this thing's special trick seems to be hopping from species to species. I don't know how likely it is for a bug to go from say, swine to human and then human to human and then, uh, human to turtle - but it sure sounds like a great House episode if there ever was one.

Course, others don't agree:

Meanwhile, the UNRELIABLE sources are in full bloom. Rightwing and survivalist commentary ranges from decrying the swine flu as a bio-terror attack (Terror Pigs?) to celebrating this as the beginning of the Rapture.

Apocalypse swine.

This is the way the world ends, people. Not with a bang.

But a snort.


Update: Apparently the "cross-gene" theory is being disputed, and the swine flu may be all swine after all.

Snort.

Gadget Use: Roku Netflix Player

Getting The Girl a Roku for her birthday comes from the multiple times I've stumbled into the living room to watch her relaxing to some afternoon Comedy Central matinee. If you're lucky in such a situation, it's Half Baked playing for the 100th time and if you are aren't, it may be some odd amalgamation of B-List actors who, at as we suspect, got stuck in a coffee shop together one day and decided to make a movie for fifty bucks and a pizza.

It's not that she doesn't have good taste, it's just that she isn't normally allowed access to the kinds of movies and TV she likes and I could honestly skip. Roku solves that by giving us direct access into her Netflix Instant Watch queue (and Amazon On Demand as well).

Setup is about as easy as it could possibly be - plug it in, follow the wizard and enter the Roku code into your Netflix account. Voila, your list appears. You still need to manage your list online, but it isn't much of a bother. When we first played it, we couldn't seem to get more than two out of four dots of quality. Which when you're watching Tango and Cash, isn't really all that bad.

Eventually, though, the quality seemed to magically fix itself and soon she was watching her Irish soap opera at pretty much DVD quality. Since then, we've only had a couple of hangups. One - a later disc of said Irish soap opera seems to have been poorly encoded by Netflix and the audio is completely off. We reported it via Netflix and I'll be interested to see what the turnaround is for getting it fixed.

Then, we were watching Vantage Point and at one spot the player kept insisting it needed to download more, and then play a bit, and then start downloading again. Bit like a skipping record. Pretty easily fixed, though, we just bounced out of the film and back in - and the rest was fine.

So pretty high marks all in all. There are always going to be foibles with online delivery, but so far the Roku belongs way up there (and certainly deserves its own niche in the recent "Your TV Watching Options" post).

Bethesda Fixes Fallout 3 Ending (PS3 Probably Left Out)

Apparently the upcoming Broken Steel DLC will fix one of the major complaints about the game, the way the ending was handled.

Awesome - unless of course, you don't have access to the DLC. Actually, I see this as kind of a big jab with a pointy stick to all Fallout 3 fans. Bethesda is basically saying, "yeah, we screwed up - it was a pretty stupid way to end it. Now pay us if you want it better."

I get paying for extra content. But there's a more acceptable way of updating your game to fix stupid things that were done during development. It's called a patch. I get that Bethesda signed an exclusive for DLC, but why a) make users pay to correct a mistake and b) refuse to offer that fix for every player?

Update: Of course since this posting, DLC for PS3 has been announced...

National Geographic's Infinite Photograph Fairly Addictive

National Geographic has created a mosiac of user photos which will create new mosiacs as you drill into it. Like eye candy and a kaleidoscope had a bastard child.

Compilation Of Critical Thinking On BioShock

Thanks goes out to the Discount Thoughts blog for this excellent roundup on articles about BioShock, and I say that not just because Cathode has a link in there. It's a pretty impressive summary across several blogs and a great index for discussing the game.

TV Watch: Your Viewing Options (2009 Edition)

We had a Betamax, back in the day. That the format would eventually go the way of the dodo didn't really stop us from hoarding large amounts of content on tape in the off chance we'd watch it again (though as kids, I believe we did quite a lot of that). Time shifting had begun, though, and just because you weren't there for the show - didn't mean you couldn't watch it.

Our VCR didn't even get hooked up at our last place and we had TiVo nearly on day one. Live television took a back seat as the thought of watching commercials became somewhat painful. We'd even watch shows a half hour late just so that we could fast forward if we wanted.

Now, it's 2009, and user owned TV is on a whole new level.

DVR
Still probably the king of hill, especially since nearly every cable and satellite provider on the planet offers some form of storing shows on your hard drive. We actually don't have one anyone more - we used to have the Mac hooked up via EyeTV, but our cable company went all digital and EyeTV doesn't know what channel is what anymore. Someday we'll probably cough up the goods for HD, though, unless the following choices continue to pan out...

Netflix
Hands down the easiest way to catch up on a season of that show you meant to watch, rent a few discs off Netflix and you can avoid that whole annoying need to wait another week. I think we polished off the first season of Veronica Mars in about three weeks. Now that more shows are showing up on Blu-Ray, convenience and quality are cranked up another notch.

The other nice thing about Netflix is stumbling on shows you wouldn't normally have access to watch. Canadian and English spy shows Intelligence and Spooks (MI-5 in places), for instance.

And then there's Roku, of course, for those who really need to watch Quantum Leap without waiting for delivery.

Online Viewing
Hulu is quickly being accepted as the gold standard for watching shows online, although many networks offer a variety of ways to watch content for free from their websites. My experience with them, though, is pretty glass half empty. It's nice that you don't have to wait for anything, but the quality of the show is often marred by the network itself. I tried catching up on recent Dollhouse episodes and the dropped frames alone were a bit of a headache. I know a lot of people who swear by Hulu, but it's rapidly become a last resort for us.

Digital Downloads
iTunes, PlayStation Network and Xbox Live all allow you now to download shows for a price. A recent experiment to download a handful of shows to our PS3 was marred by the fact that the downloads seems to pause if the system menu wasn't all that was running. We do occasionally download from iTunes directly to the Mini, hooked up to the HDTV - but the problem there is that the Mini's PPC processor won't support iTunes new HD content.

Still, at least iTunes allows you to purchase a whole season at a discount. Cost is probably the biggest roadblock here - it doesn't really make much sense to pay $3 for a show in HD you are going to watch once. Plus, I can't speak for Xbox Live - but some of Sony's decisions about format make little sense. How is that one show is only available for SD purchase while another movie title has HD rental?

Until the powers that be come up with a subscription model for shows that make sense, the pay per episode concept is really going to be shelved for an as-we-need-it basis, right in behind Hulu.

BitTorrent
It would be pretty dishonest to ignore torrenting as a distribution model. It's the elephant in the room for online distribution - and for good reason. With turnaround times often better than iTunes for availability, users can download decent to high quality shows, without commercials, with a speed that can get the content in often a couple of hours, or less, depending on the seeds out there. Once it's on your hard drive, there's no bandwidth concerns and you can use a variety of software to move the content to mobile devices if needed.

Which is the problem the legitimate outlets have - torrenting is just so convenient. Hulu comes to close to a promise of a free and easy outlet, potentially easier the torrenting (many people don't like to navigate the various BT portals, for instance) - but until compression catches up with the range of bandwidth out there - torrent still has it beat.

Not that I suggest anyone should do anything illegal - but it should be acknowledged that people are downloading this content not just because they're cheap, but because it offers fast quality content.

Now, if you'll forgive me, I need to figure out how to best catch up on this week's Fringe...

TV Watch: Lost, Some Like It Hoth

How can anyone argue with a Miles and Hurley episode? I'm still giggling a little from having Mile explain time travel to Hurley in the previous episode, and the comparison of their "powers" was just a great bit of awesome. That the entire plot ends with a joke about Empire Strikes Back? Golden.

This felt a little more like a first season episode, with an interesting backstory link intrinsically to the island. Although less in general to other Losties, Miles' connections to the island seem pretty obvious, with that "guy from all those movies" and all.

Island-wise, the whole "shadow of the statue" mystery is getting more ground - and its good to see the writers adding mystery without having to add new random nouns to the overall story (we have plenty to get back to you, thank you very much). Bram is, I guess, an Other from some faction - but it seems odd that he and Ben weren't exactly seen conspiring together. That Ilana has teamed up with him is even odder, considering she seemed like a separate agent aimed at Sayid the whole time. Could the whole thing have been a coup Ben set up before getting back to the island?

Great season so far.

Game Play: Killzone 2 Multiplayer

I've finally had a bit of a chance to dig into Killzone 2's online features. To give a quick summary, it's a pretty sound achievement. I've had little problem getting into nearly full servers and the multiple objectives manage to keep the games fresh and interesting (though for the deathmatch fans out there, there's also plenty of servers which are purely deathmatch based).

It's an excellent portion to an already excellent game and impressively visual for an online experience. My real caveats is that some of the maps seem to be hobbled by some crucial choke points. More than a few matches seemed to be mostly about getting out of the spawn area alive than completing goals. And while the squad system adds quite a lot to the game - the matchmaking system doesn't always seem to compensate. When you're getting trampled by guys with rocket launchers and heavy machine guns, the match loses a certain amount of appeal.

That said, as some Tan readers know - I used to do Unreal mods as a hobby. From a modder perspective, the online portion is somewhat interesting.

For one thing, the concept of having multiple objectives on a single map isn't outright new. I knew modders who had been playing around with the concept at least since UT2003, if not earlier. The fact that we're really just seeing the idea come out commercially now is, to me at least, a factor of how much mods became commercialized after Counter-Strike got boxed and how little attention had been served to new gameplay innovations (which is where modding originated).

One of the main issues with placing multiple goals on the same map is that the map layout needs to appease all those goals. Traditionally deathmatch maps are rather blockish with plenty of avenues, capture the flag maps are more or less narrow and mirrored, domination/king of the hill maps are open with specifically designed zones, etc. Choke points aside, the level design handles a lot of requirements extremely well.

I'm moving into moderate addiction mode already, highly recommend.

For Sunday: Sales Guy Vs. Web Dude (NSFW)

Thanks, Jason. It's not incredibly NSFW, but I certainly wouldn't play it with the sound up. Or your boss walking by...

Notes From Management: Scarcity of Time

Sorry for the week long draught, peoples, but sadly things are pretty busy over at Cathode HQ, and not with Cathode related stuff. Will probably continue for a bit, too, though I'll get a couple posts up this week.

TV Watch: Lost, Dead Is Dead

This season continues to impress. This episode showed us a great glimpse into Ben's life, the island and general and was actually pretty even handed in explaining things while creating some mystery - and not even in a "oh, behind that door is another mystery" kind of way.

While seeing the inside of the temple, the smoke monster up close and personal and enough symbols and glyphs to keep the Internet crowd pixelated for some time - the episode was actually a pretty good story all by itself. Ben has never actually been a favorite of mine, even though I think he's well acted and gets a decent chunk of good dialogue. There's just something convenient about his evil. Is he lying? Well, probably if it helps the plot somewhere down the road.

But this duplicity, and that Ben himself is a conflicted character with his own petty emotions, worked well for this one. Honestly, I had no idea whether he would get smoked (har har) by the end, but that it worked out that he seems terrified about following Locke is just perfect.

It will be interesting to see what this does to his character in the long run. What will Ben be if he can't be quietly scheming? Or will he just start pulling pranks to keep himself occupied?

As far as the mystery of the island goes, not sure what to say. The island as character got a few more points, and that it seems pretty all powerful. It's interesting that Christian Shepherd might not be a smoke-person, but a revived corpse. Anyone wanting to figure out a scientific explanation of old Smokey should have given up a long time ago, but that it lives under some kind of altar pretty much kills the notion.

I think the most interesting part was watching Ilana go all weird. It seems to echo what happened to CFL pretty closely. If the next episode gives us some goods on the whispers (thankfully they seem to have not forgotten them) and the statue, this season might just continue on its roll.

Pushing Daisies' Brief Return ( Happy Birthday To Me )

ABC haven't announced their summer schedule just yet, but when they do, don't be surprised to see the brief return of Bryan Fuller's Pushing Daisies. Just don't celebrate, just yet.

The show's rumored return may not be official yet, but it's not a full-scale change of heart on behalf of the network... They're simply showing the last three episodes of the second season before it gets released on DVD in July. The episodes - reworked by Fuller before the show's cancellation to bring some sense of closure - are rumored to have a Saturday 10pm timeslot, starting May 30th.

-- Pushing Daisies Back From The Dead For More Than Sixty Seconds (Just)

Nice. Might just stay in that night...

Game Play: Godfather II

Godfather II is an interesting combination of a game. The short version is that despite some flaws, I played the hell out of the single player (haven't had a chance to try the multiplayer, partially since it was just released) and quite enjoyed it. For those who missed the previews, the game expands on the original by adding more strategy elements, but the core is the same - this is a sandbox gangster game where you try to own the town.

Some of the problems with the game are apparent from the start. The graphics are pretty average, with the occasional texture or model glitch around - although the cities in general are well constructed and period pieces are nice as well. There's the occasional interface glitch - like how the game will warn you that a new property has no guards on it, even if you added some right away. Level design is sketchy at times, too, with plenty of properties being confusing as to how to navigate or even enter. On the surface, at least, it seems hard to say that Godfather II holds up in a post GTA IV world.

But the strength of the game lies in the fact that it doesn't attempt to be a proper GTA clone in the first place. You'll spend time in the "Don's View" in order to marshal your forces, upgrade your made men and keep track of favors you either attempting to earn or have earned. The soldiers in your families have different abilities, which effect how you take down properties.

If your guys are up to it, you can always just send them on ahead to a property to attempt a takeover without you - and here's where the gameplay really takes hold. There's plenty of multitasking to be done in the game, determing which properties to send guys, what tasks you take on yourself, and how much you need to leave in your pocket for defense when one family decides to take that strip club back. By the end of the game, I was having the majority of my family taking over properties without me, a few left behind for defense, and myself out performing favors and attempting to assassinate the made men of other families.

If I had any real issues with the game, it wasn't in the graphics or the occasional glitches, but when these relatively innovative gameplay mechanics turned frustrating. I killed more than a few property owners by accident, although I could have sworn I was well below the bar to do so. Owning crime rings, which are a full set of like properties, give your men bonuses - but they seem to have negligible effect. You can only have a certain number of guys in your crew, and they have to be in your crew to perform their special abilities - so if you end trying to lend a hand to men you've sent automatically to a property, you might get stuck if the AI doesn't realize it should blow up that wall.

In the end though, these things grind against what is clearly an excellent attempt to make the sandbox gameplay more unique, more engaging and more interesting. When it works, it works really, really well. You get the impression that you're in control (or trying to take control) of a city, not just a random mob wandering around beating people up. It is very much strategy light, but it is also a bit of strategy fun.

I recommend the title, not strongly - but it is the kind of game I think should be rewarded for attempting, and often succedding, to break the mold. I'm hoping EA sees this game as a solid foundation to make more in the series to improve even further on the genre.