February 2008 Archives
Thirty days hath September,
April, June, and November;
All the rest have thirty-one
Excepting February alone,
Which hath but twenty-eight in fine
Till leap year give it twenty-nine.1
Congratulations! You've made it to another year divisible by four (but indivisible by 400). Your reward is an extra day. Don't spend it all in one place.
Geek Out
Cross words. I'll spend my weekend assembling wall-to-wall exclusive in-depth on-the-scene breaking coverage of the American Crossword Puzzle Tournament in Brooklyn. There's still time to register as a competitor or a spectator. Tournament organizers tell me that cruciverbal phenom Tyler Hinman remains a force to be reckoned with as he goes for his fourth consecutive championship, but 2007 runner-up Al Sanders remains a sentimental pick since his appearance in the 2006 film Wordplay. Hope to see you there, but if geography makes attendance impractical, you can play along online.
Engage in hyperbola. The Hyperbolic Crochet Coral Reef is coming to NYU in April, an announcement that probably warrants further explanation. The HCCR is a project that invites crafters worldwide to contribute crocheted representations of hyperbolic space, which also double as organisms on an ever-growing network of reefs and sub-reefs. Christine Wertheim, a leader of the project, will be at NYU this weekend, lecturing and offering workshops to teach you how to make a hyperbolic reef of your own. There's one workshop Saturday and another on Sunday. If you're a closet crafting geek, don't worry, you can tell people you're there for the math. Or vice versa.
Space out, again. I want to offer a quick reminder that previously noted dance-party series One Step Beyond returns to the Rose Center for Earth and Space—i.e., the planetarium—this Friday night. In my amateur opinion, the DJ lineup is even better than last month.
Geek In
Break your toys. For many of us, our first gadget came from the likes of Fisher-Price. We all had some "cow says MOO!"-type thing that lit up and belched sound effects when you pushed a button. Well-meaning parents buy millions of these things every year, only to stuff them in the back of a closet because they're so obnoxious. Well, dig your electronic memories out of the closet because there's a way to make those toys even more annoying. An Instructable on toy circuit-bending shows how you can turn that plastic noisemaker into an otherworldly musical instrument guaranteed to make any toddler cry. Also worthwhile on Instructables: the winners of the "Get the LED Out!" Contest.
The high demand for the Wii continues in large part because of Nintendo’s inspired decision to include Wii Sports. In this series, Geek Out New York looks at the 8-bit progenitors of Wii Sports. Are the modern Wii games really so much more fun than the sports titles we played “back in the day”? Yes, yes they are.
Today: Bowling.
Aside from Wii Sports bowling, the only bowling video games I have ever seen are the arcade consoles at bowling alleys. That never really made sense to me—the actual lanes are right there, people—but in any case, I thought it would be difficult to find NES bowling games for this piece. I was wrong. It appears that there was a strong market of NES players who wanted to experience the majesty of 10-pin bowling at home without going the Daniel Plainview route.
Such homebound pin jockeys would have been well served to pick up Championship Bowling, which is a serviceable little bowling game. Trouble is, Championship Bowling was a little cocky for its own good—how else to explain the female character flipping the double-fisted bird right on the freaking title screen?1 You want a piece of this championship bowling action? Yeah, you know you do, mofo, so push the start button and maybe I’ll give you some sugar.
The gameplay is smooth, so Championship Bowling would receive a passing grade (with points off for bad attitude) if it weren’t for the music. Not content to let the bowling excitement stand on its own, Championship Bowling adds a soundtrack—or, more accurately, a 20-second loop of acoustic terror. Here’s a taste.
For best results, turn your cellphone up to max and make this your ringtone.
Eschewing the thuggery of Championship Bowling, Dynamite Bowl boots up with a bowling-ball bomb animation, complete with crackling fuse. The sequence isn’t just pleasing to the eye; it also works from a marketing point of view, tying together every aspect of the game’s brand. Bowling: check. Dynamite: check. Now that’s a successful logo.
Past the title screen, Dynamite Bowl is less appealing. The “pins” were drawn by somebody who had never seen a bowling pin in person, and the physics are off, too. When the ball hits the pins, instead of exploding away like you would expect in Dynamite Bowl, they just clunk over like steel milk bottles in the old “knock ’em down and win a prize” carny game.
If you overcome the clunk effect and manage to get a strike, the shot indicators flash and a red “V” fades into the black space at the center of the screen. Not only does it make no sense, the “V” apparition is unsettling. I flicked the game off at this point for fear that I would be hypno-indoctrinated into a Dynamite Bowl cult. Silly, huh? So anyway, purchase Dynamite Bowl, for the day of ascension is near, and you must infuse your wounded soul to survive the reckoning.
Those first two games were fine, but if you’re like me, you’ve often thought to yourself, “Bowling would be perfect if I could bowl on some sort of space station with a group of fem-bots and strapping men in neon wife-beaters. Oh, and if the balls were electrocuted into existence instead of placed there by a machine. Then, and only then, would bowling be perfect.” Little did I know that my prayers had been answered all the way back in 1989 by the Tokyo Shoseki Video Game Manufacturing Concern.
Perfect Bowling makes no apologies for its strange environs. Indeed, it doesn’t acknowledge them at all. It’s not called Space Bowling, and there’s no backstory explaining that, say, in the post-apocalyptic future these humans are stranded on an intergalactic freighter, where bowling serves as their only form of entertainment. The scenery in the screenshots above is presented as self-explanatory.
Among your shipmates on this crazy far-out bowling cruise, there is a telling gender gap. All the women are replicated from the same Female Character 1-A mold, yet the character designer lovingly crafted every pixel of the male physiques, presumably working from sketches he made at the beach. I don’t want to make any assumptions about the artist, but let’s just say that when Fred rolled into town with his big ol’ 16-pound balls, Tokyo Shoseki made sure the lanes were greased.2
Reach the end of the tenth frame, and your abrupt reward is this philosophical variation on the traditional “Game Over” screen:
ARTICLE IS OVER.
The high demand for the Wii continues in large part because of Nintendo’s inspired decision to include Wii Sports in the package, a polished game that makes a compelling sales pitch for the Wii’s motion controls. Nintendo’s breakout hit is just the latest in a long lineage of sports simulations. In this series, Geek Out New York looks at the 8-bit progenitors of Wii Sports. Are the modern Wii games really so much more fun than the sports titles we played “back in the day”? Yes, yes they are.
Today: Golf.
Of the games in the Wii Sports lineup, golf gets the least attention. Tennis and boxing show up at award shows and on late-night television, baseball’s legendary TV-smashing abilities have inspired commercial parodies, and bowling seems to be the choice of old people. Quiet and cerebral, golf lacks the sweaty, media-friendly suspense of the other games, but it’s still a good time—especially if you have two players. The controls require a nuanced touch, just as in real golf, and my only complaint is that the course selection (nine holes) is too limited.
Even NES Golf, originally released in 1984, offers a full 18 holes, which you attack with a character who looks like Mario’s old, grizzled uncle. He smokes Camel lights, likes biker chicks, and did some stuff he’s not too proud of in the ’70s, but that’s all behind us now, so are we gonna play some golf here or what? [Hacking cough.]
The Golf course designers didn’t bother with the concepts of “fringe” or “rough.” In this game, you either hit your drive down the fairway (light green) or you land out of bounds (trees). In the latter case, a humiliating BOOP…BOOP…BOOP sound effect alerts you that you will have to re-hit your shot, you pathetic duffer.
As if the margin for error weren’t already thin enough, the game also features a course design from Mephistopheles’ sketchbook. The general unfairness is exemplified by the hole above, in which you will get wet.1
Realism plays more of a role in Jack Nicklaus’ Greatest 18 Holes of Major Championship Golf, the 1989 cartridge that…I’m sorry, I’m a little winded from that title. I think I need to sit down for a second.
Whew, OK, I’m back. I hope you enjoyed the wait, because JNGEHOMCG is all about waiting. Back in ’89, the crack staff at Accolade2 surveyed the golf games on the market and said, “You know what our competitors forgot to include in their golf simulations? Long moments of boredom.”
So after each shot, you have to sit through an interminable loading screen while the game renders the scenery in quasi-3D. Most NES games would just throw up a default “water” or “sandtrap” background to move things along, but JNGEHOMCG strives for realism, and as you see above, it’s well worth the wait. Just look at those trees! And that brown-ish stuff!
My favorite moments come when pro golfer and apparent burn victim Jack Nicklaus appears to tell you why the upcoming hole made his top-18 list. At first, Jack’s explanations are pretty gripping—the most dangerous tee shot in all of golf!—but toward the end, his comments get more esoteric, like Hole #16’s blurb, “Most difficult second shot on a straightaway par four.” Wow…?
The reverent tone of JNGEHOMCG stands in contrast to its contemporary, Lee Trevino’s Fighting Golf. As noted previously in these pages, this game features absolutely no fighting, but the game does offer you the opportunity to choose from one of four colorful characters.
They all play pretty much the same, except for Miracle Chosuke. As with most Japanese characters in games of that era, Chosuke is far superior to his lazy Western compatriots. The game is near-unplayable with the other three, even Trevino himself, “Super Mex.”
Unlike the original Nintendo Golf, Fighting Golf has rough around its fairways. In fact, rough is the signature feature of the game’s two courses. Every hole is pockmarked with black “Super Rough™,” which looks and plays like a greenside tar pit. Here’s me (as Miracle Chosuke, naturally) stuck in a patch of the stuff on my way to a septuple bogey.
Wii baseball may get all the attention, but I’m betting that Fighting Golf was responsible for a few hurled controllers in its time, too. It just goes to show, the more things change, the more Lee Trevino’s Fighting Golf is a terrible game that you should not play, ever.
“Life is like underwear, should be changed twice a day.”1 If you’re forced to choose one or the other this weekend, choose life. Laundry is boring.
Geek Out
Look directly at the sun. This week’s lunar eclipse was all well and good, but as far as heavenly bodies go, it doesn’t get much more heavenly than the sun. After all, the sun is the source of all existence on the planet, and what has the moon done for us lately? The tides? Oh, clap clap, moon, you’re really pulling your weight.
Every Saturday, members of the Amateur Astronomers Association of New York City gather at the Conservatory Water in Central Park to observe Sol. AAA members provide equipment, and while you can bring your own, make sure you have all the right filters if you like your corneas the way they are. The observation is canceled when there is excessive clouds or rain, so while the forecast doesn’t look too bad as of this writing, check it again before you head out. After all, the sun will still be there next Saturday. I hope.
Sit in traffic. The Department of Transportation recently installed a left-turn signal at an intersection near my home to improve traffic flow. The signal has reduced logjams, but for a few reasons, it has also led irate motorists to drive on the wrong side of the road with disturbing frequency. I think this is fascinating, not just because I don’t own a car, but also because traffic in a large city is an endless study in unforeseen consequences. I realize I may be in a select group of New Yorkers who consider traffic savant Gridlock Sam a personal hero, but if you’re of like mind, you might enjoy Too Much Traffic! Is Congestion Pricing the Answer? at CUNY’s Newman Conference Center on the 25th. OK, not technically the weekend, but if you leave now, you can beat the traffic. (Rimshot.)
Geek In
Laugh. Pop-science show Radiolab premieres its fourth season on WNYC AM 820 tonight at 7:00. You can listen to episode #401, “Laughter,” via the Radiolab site or on an actual AM radio, I suppose. If you’re new to Radiolab, the three previous seasons are available for download, and they make for a good listen (although some of the earlier stuff skirts dangerously close to This American Life territory). And as a preview of the new season, check out this video experiment, which verifies the long-held hypothesis that a joke is miraculously funnier when the boss tells it.
Assassinate the king. This week’s weekend game recommendation is Citadels, a city-building card game that isn’t really about city building at all, but rather about deception. At the beginning of a round, each player picks a character that she thinks will advance her goal of completing a lavish city. The trouble is, if you make the obvious choice, you’re open to attack from your opponents, so you have to conceal your motives. When your Assassin snuffs out the other guy’s King, it feels like picking up an inside straight on the river. I got my copy of Citadels at The Compleat Strategist; you can find it anywhere fine games are sold.
It would be hard to find a tech enthusiast who shed a tear over CompUSA’s recent announcement that it was shuttering its stores. For me, the news brought a sense of relief, as it meant that the CompUSA at 57th Street and Broadway would finally be put out of its misery.
I visited the store this week to pay my last respects. It was the Land of Misfit Electronics. I found wheezing printers, disemboweled PCs, grimy office equipment that had been hauled out of the manager’s office for liquidation, and “today only!” tags advertising great deals on the actual shelving—in case you want to recreate the thrill of CompUSA in your own home, I suppose. They were essentially inviting customers to loot the place for a small fee.
A depressing scene, for sure, but the thing is, it was no more depressing than usual. As the only computer retailer in my neighborhood, the Broadway CompUSA was my grudging choice when I needed that particular cable or adapter right away. Of course, they never had that particular cable or adapter, so I would just wander through dank aisles of “ergonomic” wrist rests and grade-F CD-Rs.
Eventually, I’d forget what I came in for, and so I’d go home and read a book, or play a board game—anything without a screen. Trying to use a computer after going to CompUSA was like trying to eat a quarter-pounder after your school field trip to the slaughterhouse.1
So even though the current liquidation sale is a sad scene, I didn’t see any atrocity against tech that would have felt out of place in CompUSA before the collapse. Even the LCD television with a shattered screen—a sticker warned the consumer of “minor damage”—wouldn’t have made me blink if I saw it on the shelf a year ago. In fact, I would have been impressed that they were only asking $100 for it. Defective pieces of crap usually fell more in the $200-$300 range, at least when they were on sale.
I think what upsets a nerd most about a place like CompUSA, “The Computer SUPERstore,” is that it gives technology a bad name. Those of who grew up loving computers take it as a personal slight when a corporation abuses our wonderful machines, so full of potential, for their crass purposes. We like companies to profit from technology, just not when they do it through extended warranties, restocking fees, exorbitant (and incompetent) technical support, bait-and-switch rebates, etc.
CompUSA didn’t invent all of the underhanded tactics that plague the electronics retail world, but if there was a scam to be run, rest assured they were running it. And when they did, they made computers look bad to novices who had no way of knowing better. I took that personally.
It’s unseemly to take pleasure in an event that results in many decent people losing their jobs, so I’ll just say that I take satisfaction in the fact that CompUSA is dead. Very pleasurable satisfaction.
While you’re enjoying the annual Presidents’ Day traditions—which, if you’re not a federal employee, likely include “going to work” and maybe “getting a great deal on financing for a new 2008 Toyota”—be sure to take some time to reflect on the contributions of our nation’s geekiest commanders-in-chief.
Take John Quincy Adams. We like to think that automated phone jamming and push polling are tactics connived in the modern era, but the history of the auto-dialer traces all the way back to John Q. Adams’ 1828 reelection campaign against Andrew Jackson. The telephone didn’t exist yet, but amateur inventor Adams nonetheless designed a prototype auto-dialer. His device was comprised of a guy on a horse riding from house to house, screaming, “WOULD YOU BE MORE OR LESS LIKELY TO VOTE FOR ANDREW JACKSON IF YOU LEARNED THAT HIS WIFE WAS A BIGAMIST WHORE?” The rudimentary push poll did not convert to electoral success, but Jackson’s wife died shortly after the election, a moral victory for Adams.
Death played a more meaningful role in the political career of Millard Fillmore, who took over the Oval Office when Zachary Taylor died from gastroenteritis caused by bad salsa. Fillmore seized the opportunity by opening relations with isolationist Japan, writing to Congress that “the general prosperity of our States on the Pacific requires that an attempt should be made to open the opposite regions of Asia to a mutually beneficial exchange of wacky snacks and pop-culture items.”
Commodore Matthew Perry returned from his triumphant voyage to the Orient with a crate of import games for the president. Fillmore played them for a few days and then stuck them in a corner because, according to his correspondence, he “did not understand what was transpiring, owing to difficulties of translation” and was “perplexed by the apparent Japanese obsession with nosebleeds.”
Finally, a fun fact. We all know that AOL’s famous “You’ve Got Mail!” greeting is a recording of William Howard Taft, but he’s not the only president whose vocal talents delighted dial-up users in the 1990s. The familiar screeches, whistles, and metallic tones of modem negotiation originally emitted from the mouth of one Calvin Coolidge. The president known as “Silent Cal” was actually an avid practitioner of mouth noises in his private time, and he transcribed his bizarre warblings to wax cylinder in the hope that they would someday benefit the nation. So the next time you phone in to your favorite BBS, think of Cal!
“A happy man is too satisfied with the present to dwell too much on the future.”1 So maybe you shouldn’t even be reading this.
Geek Out
Sulk. It’s Valentine’s Day weekend, and judging by yesterday’s stereotype-reinforcing GameFAQs poll—a statistical tribute to loneliness—many of you would be happy to lock yourself in a dark room until this artificially sweetened delirium passes.
The New York Japan Society is selling admission to their big dark room, and they’ll even give you something to watch. Tonight at 7, they’re screening the “Propaganda” portion of their Dawn of Japanese Animation series, presenting a dozen WW2-era silent films (some with live benshi narration) that herald the glory of Mother Japan. The cuddly cute fascism of shorts like Sankichi the Monkey: The Storm Troopers ought to blow your mind long enough to distract you from your romantic concerns. Part four of the series, Music & Dance, shows tomorrow at 5 p.m., and a special screening of Orochi will follow at 7:30.
Further old-timey silver-screen fare can be found in Astoria, where the Museum of the Moving Image holds afternoon screenings of the 1941 film serial Adventures of Captain Marvel. The good captain’s 12-episode journey marked the first time a comic-book character was adapted for the big screen by a major studio. A new installment premieres every Saturday. Tomorrow’s episode: Time Bomb!
Geek In
Craft. The other day, one of my buddies picked up a knitting pattern from the coffee table (my wife designs them) and exclaimed, “It’s like a C++ program!” Indeed, sites like Etsy and O’Reilly’s Make/Craft blogs are a testament to coders’ and crafters’ ongoing discovery that they have a lot in common. Amid the din of rejuvenated enthusiasm for knitting and crochet, allow me to make a plug for counted cross-stitch, my mom’s craft of choice when I was a tot. A few bloggers like Sprite Stitch have noticed that the blocky pixel art of retro gaming converts perfectly to cross-stitch patterns, with a 1:1 ratio of pixel to stitch. A few simple Mega Man patterns would make a good starter project. Or you could just email the patterns to Mom and encourage her to get started on Christmas presents early this year.
Write the FAQing thing yourself. If you’re wondering why the results of the GameFAQs Valentine poll shake out the way they do, I present Exhibit A: the NES FAQ Completion Project. It’s a quest to create a FAQ for every known Nintendo game, and despite the many hundreds of games already documented on the GameFAQs site, a stunning 444 remain. Maybe you’ve played one. Check the list of unfinished business and see if you might have a write-up to contribute to this quixotic cause.
This city is not lacking for quality comic-book stores. Midtown Manhattan alone boasts two landmark stores that rank among the best on the East Coast: Jim Hanley’s Universe and Midtown Comics. These expansive stores boast a wide selection of comics, collectibles, apparel, etc., etc. Either store qualifies as a Mecca for comics fans.
But sometimes, you don’t need to go to Mecca; sometimes, you’d rather just go to church. St. Mark’s Comics is church. When I walk into one of the mega-stores, I feel that to do the place justice, I can’t just browse and pick up an issue or two. I sense a need, however misplaced, to buy into a comics “lifestyle,” whatever that might be. The slogan of Jim Hanley’s Universe is “Where Art and Literature Meet”; St. Mark’s doesn’t have a slogan, but if it did, it would probably be something along the lines of “Comics for Sale.”
Located on St. Mark’s Place (naturally) between 2nd and 3rd Ave., this place just sells comics. Sure, they have a few other things, some scattered collectibles and trading cards by the register, but what I mean is that St. Mark’s doesn’t aspire to do anything more than sell you a bit of paper-and-ink bliss for a couple bucks. There’s no tiresome preaching to the choir that comics are a valid art form (I agree, but I also think comic artists doth protest a bit much for their own good) and no pressure to inject superhero merchandise into every cranny of your life.
Better still, St. Mark’s Comics mirrors my mental picture of “comic-book store.” The floorboards are worn and creaky; the back issues have been thumbed through countless times; shy, silent nerds peer over fragile racks in search of the latest releases. It’s somewhat precious for a guy in his twenties to wax nostalgic about comics stores like the ones they had when he was a kid, but that’s the feeling I get here.
The only major difference between St. Mark’s and the comics stores of yore is the replacement of a surly store proprietor with a friendly, genuine staff. This is a change I can deal with. When they say, “Can I help you find something?” they mean “Can I help you find something?” rather than “Can you please hurry up and say ‘no’ so I can get back to working on my Aquaman fan fiction?”
The shelves are ecumenically stocked. Work from “indie” luminaries like Tony Millionaire and Peter Bagge—”Fantagraphics-y stuff,” as one staffer put it—is as plentiful as superhero stuff, like a not-homoerotic-at-all Superboy & Robin crossover I found in the rear. Even Archie and Uncle $crooge were out in full force. That said, the back-issue selection was spotty, especially in the Fantagraphics-y section, as there’s only so much old material a cramped store like this can afford to keep on hand.
There are plenty of other, bigger, probably even better places in the city for wanna-be Supermen. For the mild-mannered Clark Kents of the world, St. Mark’s Comics is a refreshingly laid-back alternative.
You might not have heard of User Operation Prohibition, but if you watch DVDs, you’ve probably encountered it. UOP is the programming innovation that allows studios to disable certain controls on your DVD player for portions of the disc. In other words, UOP is the reason that you can’t skip past the FBI warning or studio logo on any recent major studio release.
There are worse fates than sitting through a couple of boring preliminaries. I guess. Maybe. But the UOP chaff on my Planet Earth Blu-Rays is so bad that I don’t even like to watch them anymore. My wife has to beg me to break them out, and even when she gets her wish, she still has to endure a two-minute-long tantrum of profanity and futile button-mashing (to which the PS3 responds, “operation is prohibited”) as the unskippable crap plods along on-screen.
Here’s a closer look at the footage that plays at the beginning of a Planet Earth disc, deemed so important that it literally cannot be missed.
0:00–0:14 — Above, you see a video capture from the moment I begin playback on my PS3 to the moment where control is restored. The first 14 seconds or so are blackness, punctuated by the brief appearance of the PS3’s swirly “loading” icon in the upper-right. Even though I know what’s next, my response to the swirly thing is so conditioned that a part of my brain always lights up like, “Oh boy! Here comes fun!”
0:14–0:27 — But it’s not fun. It’s boilerplate finger-wagging from the scolds at the FBI. Irony alert! If you want to skip the FBI piracy warnings on a DVD, the most reliable technique is to pirate the disc. See, when you burn a copy of a DVD on your computer, it’s a trifle to remove the UOP restrictions. So when you play back the pirated disc, you can skip ahead to your heart’s content. Of course, if you could skip the FBI warning in the first place, there would be less incentive to pirate the disc. That concludes today’s irony alert.1
Unfortunately, copying technology for Blu-Ray discs isn’t widely available yet. But let the FBI rest assured that once it becomes practical to do so, I plan to pirate the bejesus out of these discs. I’ll wallpaper my kitchen with, print my Christmas cards on, and swim in a bathtub full of pirated Planet Earth Blu-Rays. Purely out of spite.
0:27–0:50 — This 23-second—23-second!—motion logo for publisher “2 entertain” is an ego trip on par with the old “genius at work” Stephen J. Cannell Productions tag. At least Stephen got the job done in 11 seconds. That’s just not enough time for “2 entertain” (clever name, by the way, the numeral “2” really adds a lot) to admire itself. The self-love is in evidence on the corporate website, as well:
Now in our third year, many in the industry would agree that we have become the most exciting and successful new company in our sector.Here’s the picture they use to illustrate their crackling excitement.
0:51–1:03 — I sort of feel sorry for this BBC logo. British people apparently expect us to be impressed that they can do HD. They’re all, “Watch, we can do ice rays! And then fire! And then ice again—oop, time to go.” Look, Beeb, we even have Wheel of Fortune in high-def now. It’s just not that…aw, I don’t have the heart. Yeah, you’re super, BBC. Real super.
1:03–1:31 — You may think that this sunrise over Earth is actually quite beautiful. And it is. Trouble is, this sunrise is at the beginning of every episode of Planet Earth. Same footage, same orchestral swell, everything. Obviously, I am going to watch one of those episodes when I put the disc in. That’s the whole point. So why make me sit through it twice?
And finally, there’s four seconds of elephants. A plea to the entertainment industry: Never use 90 seconds of warnings and “branding” where four seconds of elephants will do.
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For the record, I consider making a backup copy of your DVD to be a perfectly acceptable use, qualifying as “piracy” only to those paranoid about such things. ↑
I admire a store like “The Compleat Strategist,” whose name makes its intentions known from the outset. This board-game store, on E. 33rd St. between 5th and Madison, doesn’t just seek to attract “players.” It demands “strategists.”
The distinction is important. Everyone knows that kid games like Chutes & Ladders and Candy Land are games of chance, prettied-up dice races to keep the little hellians quiet. Yet our prototypical “grown-up” board games don’t offer much strategy, either. The Parker Brothers juggernaut Monopoly is highly dependent on dice rolls, and offers scant strategic decisions relative to the epic time it takes to finish a game.1 A nuanced gameplan comes in handy when playing the venerable Scrabble, but it’s still primarily a game of skill (i.e., linguistic ability) rather than strategy. Likewise Trivial Pursuit, Pictionary, Taboo, etc. In spite of their strategic paucity, you can find all these familiar games at The Compleat Strategist—in the back.
The prime shelf space up front goes to games that require tactical prowess, and to my eye these boxes satisfy a broader range of taste than “traditional” board games. For seasoned tabletop veterans, there are war simulations that reenact seemingly every major conflict of the past millennium, so if you’ve got a late-17th-century Indian Subcontinental imperialistic itch to scratch, you’re covered.
There’s also an array of role-playing games in the Dungeons & Dragon lineage (with associated pewter tchotchkes), but before your eyes glaze over at the thought of graph paper and dodecahedron dice, take a close look, as many are more accessible than old-fashioned D&D.
And then there are the “Your wife will like it!” games. In gaming forums like BoardGameGeek, where male contributors outnumber their female counterparts by a ratio of around 13 to 1,2 “Your wife/girlfriend will like it!” has become an unfortunate but easy shorthand for games that “non-gamers” can enjoy.
YWWLI! games are exemplified by titles with deep possibilities but a shallow learning curve, like Carcassonne, Ticket to Ride, and Settlers of Catan. Incidentally, all of those modern classics originate from Europe, as do most of the best novice-friendly games these days, the Continent having long surpassed the New World in its ability to engage the minds of budding strategists with cardboard and little wooden men.
This place isn’t just “The Strategist,” though; it’s “Compleat,” an anachronistic term at a store that deals in a seemingly anachronistic medium. The word choice is inspired. It entices customers with a sense of nostalgia to get them in the door, and once they’re in, they’re hit with the newness of it all. There are some dusty items, like a “1993 Year in Review” Trivial Pursuit expansion or old Strat-O-Matic sets, but the store always impresses me as the hub of a vibrant community. The Compleat Strategist doesn’t preserve a dying art. It lives.
Indeed, on my latest visit, I was admonished for not keeping up with the times. I asked a clerk if they had the Cold War simulation game Twilight Struggle (mentioned previously on these pages—I’ve only played with a friend’s copy), and the store manager walked over to tell me that it was out of print, awaiting another run by the manufacturer.
“It’s one of the hottest games! Where have you been?” he said. He seemed to be kidding, but I wasn’t sure, so I made a half-hearted excuse and chuckled. He rebuked me again, and again I couldn’t tell if he was kidding, so I made another dumb excuse and chuckled a little louder. This continued so that by the time we were finished, I was making remarks like: “I guess I was busy playing other great games. HA! HA! WHAT A HUMOROUS EXCHANGE WE ARE HAVING!”3
But the manager never cracked, so I left the store determined to march back in there when Twilight Struggle returns, cash in hand, to prove that I am in touch with the board-game zeitgeist, dammit. This is exactly the victory he desired, of course. I realized that I might consider myself a strategist, but I am far from compleat.
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In fairness, Monopoly gets a little better when people follow the letter of the law as printed in rules booklet. For instance, very few players are aware of the “auction unsold properties” rule, and the common “Free Parking jackpot” house rule throws the game mechanics out of whack. ↑
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That ratio is accurate in my experience, but it’s still just a ballpark estimate; it comes from this report on gender biases in game ratings conducts by a BoardGameGeek member. ↑
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It should be noted that the staff is generally quite friendly and helpful. This is simply a HUMOROUS ANECDOTE! HA! HA! ↑
"One never notices what has been done; one can only see what remains to be done."1 So the question is, what remains to be done this weekend?
Geek Out
Find an accomplice. "Accomplice: The Village" is part walking tour, part game, part theater—point being, if you like stuff with a lot of parts, you may enjoy "A:TV." The Accomplice performers send groups of urban adventurers out into lower Manhattan (i.e., "The Village") to gather clues for a shadowy mission. Trouble is, as you follow the path and solicit help from would-be accomplices, you don't know who's in on the act and who's just an innocent bystander. What's real life, and what's part of the game? It's like that Michael Douglas movie, I forget what it was called…? Oh, right, You, Me, and Dupree.
Satisfy your curiosity. What better way to celebrate the release of an anticipated Nintendo DS game than by shuffling through the aisles of the Rockefeller Center Nintendo World store as you're buffeted by a sea of puffy-jacketed Nintendo fans? You'll have that opportunity on Sunday when the store throws a release party for Professor Layton and the Curious Village from 1 to 3 p.m.
The DS has been on a hot streak lately, with The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass, Contra 4, and Final Fantasy XII: Revenant Wings among the top-shelf games that have come out in recent months. Professor Layton, which at the moment scores a preliminary 80 on Metacritic, distinguishes itself by the fact that it's not yet another sequel in an ancient franchise. Fresh blood! The Nintendo World soirée will have the game on hand, plus some prize giveaways, so consider joining the hordes this Sunday. Their joy will be infectious. Then again, so will their influenza virus. Your call.
Geek In
Bust out the blockbuster blocks. In other words, get out your Legos.2 Stop-motion Lego versions of popular movie trailers have become a fun sub-genre on YouTube, with varied results. My favorite recent work is a meticulous trailer for The Dark Knight, which hits just the right balance of verisimilitude and whimsy. I'd like to see the Lego technique branch out, though, into terrible movies. We've had plenty of little plastic Indiana Joneses; where's the little plastic Fool's Gold? The Lego version might even be watchable.
Play the bonus round. What bugs me about the game-show bonus round reproductions at "FLASHGames2" is that, objectively, they're not very good games. Yet I can't stop playing them. I love the programmer's attention to detail, how he got the nuances of the Caesars Challenge set just right, etc. It just bugs me, as a student of gaming, that I am enjoying games that don't have much substance without real money at stake. Is it simply my lifelong game-show fandom that makes them entertaining? Probably. But if you ever stayed home sick when you were a kid to watch Wink Martindale beat the dragon, then you'll probably have some irrational fun with these, too.
Update 7:26 p.m.: I was remiss not to include a link to a YouTube user who creates Lego versions of vintage game show episodes.
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According to a woman who won two Nobel Prizes (but what has she done for me lately?). ↑
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Or "LEGO® bricks," as the Lego trademark mavens would have it. ↑
Owing to their fragile makeup, nerds rarely come to blows (although when they do, it is supremely entertaining), so they tend to release their tension online. Typically, these outbursts take the form of comment-thread flamewars—you know, garden-variety “get cancer and die” stuff. Quite tame. Only when conditions are just right does a conflagration erupt to the level of full-fledged blog posts. When the rage reaches that point, you’ve got a blogfight on your hands, and spectators can drink in a heady cocktail of posturing, bravado, and general verbal loutishness.
The great thing about a blogfight is that self-awareness plays no part in the proceedings. Take the first great blogfight of 2008, in which Gizmodo blogger Brian Lam came under fire for turning off a bunch of TVs at CES, the annual gadget expo. The stunt was so puerile that even a grade-school kid who squeezes out armpit farts in the back row would consider it beneath his purview, yet by the time the whole flap was over, Lam had deemed his prank a noble act of “civil disobedience.” Bonus points: He made this statement on the eve of Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday.
You may someday find yourself in the throes of a blogfight. I hope that day never comes, but you must prepare yourself nonetheless. Observe today’s blogfight case study, which concerns the origin of species. Or glowing green checkmarks. It’s hard to tell. Let’s go to the breakdown.
The Fighters:
- Casey Luskin, intelligent design “scientist,” Discovery Institute fellow
- Mike Dunford, actual scientist, author of “The Questionable Authority” blog
The Charge: Dunford, an evolutionary biologist, got upset when Luskin posted an intelligent-design argument to the Discovery Institute blog with a special “Blogging on Peer-Reviewed Research” icon attached. This icon was designed by BloggingResearch.org, which is leading a burgeoning movement to unify scientific discussion on the web through the power of a 5-kilobyte PNG graphic.
Anyway, Luskin used the One True Science-Dork Icon without permission, an offense that appears to have initiated the collapse of modern science, as Dunford explains: “When he slapped the icon on a post that does not meet the standards of the project, [Luskin] made it harder for the project to gain a reputation as a way to find reliable information about peer-reviewed papers.”
The Evidence: Here’s the icon in question, which Luskin did indeed place on his site without proper attribution.
So, right off, you can see where the people behind this image would be worried about illegitimate copying. The drop shadow, the glowing green checkmark, that coy curl in the corner, the barely legible text—I could go on. Point is, that’s some painstaking Photoshop wizardry. You can’t just give that away.
The Blow-Up: Luskin, the make-believe scientist, removed the icon and, as if to parody the original effort, replaced it with an even shittier graphic.
Great touch. Luskin then updated his original post to say, essentially, that he’d never heard of ResearchBlogging.org in his life, and you kids get off his lawn or he’s calling the cops, he means it.
This infuriated biologist Dunford, who threw up a post unironically titled “Luskin and the Peer-Reviewed Research Icon - the Saga Continues.” After noting that it said “ResearchBlogging.org” right on the damn icon, casting doubt on Luskin’s version of events, he concluded, “If [Luskin] really wants to come up with an excuse, he’s going to need to do better than willful ignorance.”
Dude, Luskin’s a creationist; willful ignorance is his shtick. And you fell right into the trap. Luskin’s final word on the ordeal delivered the deathblow:
People commonly make unjustified personal attacks against me, and my response is not to get mad or even get upset. Rather, my response is that it is to feel that this kind of behavior is saddening because it does damage to what might otherwise be a fruitful, friendly, and objective scientific debate.The Winner: Luskin.
Today’s Lesson: Identify your opponents’ weaknesses. For instance, scientists love facts. Luskin knew this, so he lied, and when Dunford predictably called him on it, he shifted to the “high road.” Aloof, then condescending: a one-two punch that will often win the day.
“The electron does anything it likes. It just goes in any direction at any speed, forward or backward in time, however it likes, and then you add up the amplitudes and it gives you the wave-function.”1 You may not be an electron, but you’re still welcome to do anything you like this weekend.
Geek Out
Pass The Time. On second thought, we might not be so different from electrons. Williams College religion professor Georges Dreyfus and NYU philosophy prof J. David Velleman will discuss the question “Does Time Go By?” at the Rubin Museum of Art this Sunday. The two professors will compare traditional Eastern and Western conceptions of time, with special attention to Buddhist thinking. This event, like last weekend’s Dark Crystal screening, is part of the Brainwave NYC series, which runs until June. “Does Time Go By?” begins at 4:00 p.m. on Sunday, at least by our crude chronological reckoning.
Levitate Your Dipole. If Eastern philosophy is too mushy for you, ditch work early and head to Columbia University today at 3:10 p.m. for the Plasma Physics Colloquium. Every Friday, a bunch of scientists and eager observers gather at the city’s Ivy campus for a cordial chat about our least understood state of matter. This week, they’re analyzing results from the First Flight of the Levitated Dipole Experiment, “which consists of a 560 kg superconducting coil floating within a 5m diameter vacuum chamber.” (No, I don’t think they’ll let you touch it.)
Geek In
Miss The Point. The ASUS Eee PC notebook has quickly earned a following for being cheap, quiet, small, and hackable. When you buy an Eee PC, you’re getting no frills, but some people just view that as an opportunity. Like one enterprising Eee owner who cracked open his rig and added: eight USB ports, GPS, Bluetooth, a 56k modem, an FM audio transmitter, a 4GB flash drive, and improved 802.11 wireless. This is all internal, mind you—no ugly geegaws hanging out of the case. It may seem a little silly to spend so much time and money on what is supposed to be a just-the-basics computer, but in this case, missing the point is the point. There’s an instructions wiki, so you can spend the weekend making your own enhancements.
Make Contact. Reviewers weren’t entirely sure what to do with Nintendo DS game Contact when it came out, so while I was always intrigued by the strange backstory of the game, it was never at the top of my list. I started playing it this week, and if you passed it by, it’s worth another look. “Breaking the fourth wall” has become a cliché, but Contact does so as an effective storytelling device. The player is part of the story in this game, and not just through the proxy of the main character. If you have a game store nearby, consider shuffling out to pick up Contact and then waiting out the weather with this fun oddity.
All contents copyright © 2007-2008 John Teti.
