March 2008 Archives

Foreign-language teachers often operate under the assumption that TV is a great teaching tool because the kids, they love their tube. This can be a convenient strategy for frazzled educators, as with my high-school Spanish teacher’s “multimedia days,” which coincidentally allowed her to eat Oreos and catch up on her steamy telenovelas for the duration of the class period. Or it might be a genuine attempt to capture students’ interest, like the Japanese professor’s familiar tactic of incorporating anime into the lesson plan.

In any case, instruction by way of pop culture rarely proves as effective as the teacher thinks it will. That fuzzy videotape of last weekend’s Sabado Gigante may be a smorgasbord of fun, but “entertaining” doesn’t necessarily mean “memorable.”

“Weird,” on the other hand, tends to have a stronger hold on the psyche. So while casting about for novel Japanese learning aids recently, I was delighted to find that a user on Japanophile video-sharing site Crunchyroll had uploaded vintage “Learn Japanese” TV programs from NHK, the country’s public broadcaster. I was hooked after just one minute of the first episode:

The formal lesson hasn’t even begun, and already we learn how Japan sees the rest of the world: an unruly mass of garish stereotypes, smushing their noses against the glass in the hope that they might glimpse the wondrous Land of the Rising Sun. “Here, broad caricatures, observe the beeping and text on our precision-manufactured video device. Does this display please you? Yes, of course it does.”

By the way, I believe the “quack” at the 0:20 mark is an artifact mistakenly added by the Crunchyroll uploader, but I’m not 100% sure. It kind of fits.

NHK produces a raft of Japanese instruction materials, and they still make Japanese lessons for broadcast, so it’s not hard to find recent episodes. Yet who wants the modern, polished stuff? The episodes on Crunchyroll have ripened with age. (The uploader thinks they were made in the 1980s, but my guess is early ’90s.)

As the videos’ technology, production value, and cultural sensitivities become more dated, the strangeness and humor value increase accordingly. For intance, if I saw a professional actor in a present-day lesson pull out his smartphone, I would be bored. Yet in 1991 Japan, I’m enraptured as “American”¹ David Roberts cracks open a portable mainframe to bang on the keys and stare at a blank screen.

Note that the producers of this episode weren’t satisfied to let the enormous notebook computer pass unnoticed, so they added a “clink-clank-clink” sound effect when David fires that sweet machine up. Really sells the moment.

Doko desu ka is page-one phrasebook stuff, but the lessons do get more interesting, like this vignette at the “AMERICAN STATE OFFICE” where David learns that passive aggression is built into the Japanese language.²

That’s from Episode 23, “Saying No Politely,” which is one of my favorites, along with Episode 28, “Criticizing Mildly.”

The videos are hilarious even for non-students, but if you are learning Japanese, they’re actually practical. The lessons won’t help you decipher the great works of Japanese literature, but they honestly are a good way to polish your conversation skills. A typical language tape’s key phrases are lifeless, utilitarian sentences that you hope to chisel into memory. But in these artifacts from NHK’s past, the Japanese phrases act as punchlines to a bizarre joke. It’s easy to remember a good punchline.

We often romanticize new frontiers in space while forgetting that there’s plenty of exploration to be done on our own hunk of rock. But when Alan Winick was a kid, a confluence of excitement over Jacques Cousteau and the Apollo program inspired an obsession with Earth's greatest depths. Tonight at the Explorers Club NYC (46 E. 70th St., near Madison Ave.), Winick will talk about his life-consuming quest to build a one-man submarine.

The submarine, aptly named Explorer, is sea-worthy and has seen some active duty (I think—information is pretty scant), but it appears to have spent more time plumbing the depths of grade-school classrooms than it has logging leagues under the sea. That takes some of the shine off for me, but if you spend three decades inventing and constructing your own submarine, I guess you earn the right to do whatever you want with it.

“Can we not do any more of these ‘oogie-boogie’ myths, please?”¹

Geek Out

Oogie-boogie. I wasn’t aware that haunted houses have a season, but apparently it ends on March 28, as tonight is the last night that the Garibaldi-Meucci Museum will be offering its haunted house tour. (I guess ghosts just aren’t as spooOOOoooky in April.) According to the museum, Haunted Times Magazine have certified their house as haunted, but you and your lifetime Haunted Times subscription already knew that. Even skeptics should enjoy the opportunity to be an amateur James Randi, pointing out why every supposed paranormal observation is scientifically implausible (because everybody loves that guy). It’s also a chance to experience the fabled “fifth borough,” Staten Island. Does it really exist? You be the judge.

Ala-kazam. Bummed that you missed out on the last 98 annual salutes to magic? I have good news for you: Tomorrow, the Tribeca Performing Arts Center welcomes the 99th Annual Salute to Magic. As the latest issue of Make so ably demonstrated, magic has a rich grounding in wizardy—of the technical sort, that is. Hopefully tomorrow’s event will be heavy on the geekery and mind games while keeping schlocky patter to a minimum, but even a bad magic show has its charm.

Geek In

OD on Zelda. Five Gamecubes, five TVs, Four Swords. Those are the ingredients for a decadent Nintendo weekend, as conjured up by retro-gaming blogger Racketboy. Nintendo is infamous for cool games that require you to buy proprietary, borderline-useless Nintendo accessories, but with a new generation of consoles, the cost of this rig has tumbled. At an estimated $350 for all the required kit (minus a bunch of equipment you and your friends likely have already), damned if that pricetag might not be worth it to play the collaborative Zelda game Four Swords the way the Hylians intended.

The Skull Phone-“glitched” billboards that made waves yesterday turn out to be a hoax, sort of. Rather than cracking the Clear Channel mainframe and uploading a Trojan horse poison packet virus worm or some such, artist Skull Phone used a different technique. He paid Clear Channel a large sum of money to place his image on their nice billboards, thank you kindly.

Not only is that less impressive than the supposed “hacking,” it’s also a waste of money. Here in New York we have the huge PSP billboard on Houston & Lafayette that regularly glitches out free of charge.

Make Magazine suffered a big loss at the end of 2007 when Bre Pettis, star and producer of the Weekend Projects videos, left Make to pursue other interests. Pettis’ goofy, unaffected style made it fun to watch even the more mundane Weekend Projects (of which there were few).

Now Make reports that Pettis and some friends have rented a space in Brooklyn they’re calling NYC Resistor, where they'll offer classes starting soon. Pettis, naturally, will be teaching a class on video podcasting, and you can check out the full class schedule at the NYC Resistor Eventbrite listing. It’s an enticing lineup, marred only by a bit of strange scheduling. (Electronics 101 at 1:00 p.m. on a Tuesday? Huh?) I’ll be traveling in April, or else I’d definitely hit up the Game Boy Software Development class.

The New York Comic Con has announced that they will be presenting the Inaugural Comics Legend Award, also known as the First Annual Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence, to Stan Lee at this April’s New York Comic Con. According to NYCC blogger Lance Festerman, 150 tickets to the April 17 gala award reception will be sold to fans this Friday—details to come on the Medium at Large blog.

Highlights of the event include a talk and a signing session, plus, if you’re lucky, you may get to watch Lee painfully contort his weary frame into the Spider-Man pose for the billionth time because his rabid fans demand it. You people are jackals.

During the first years of the personal-computer revolution, Bill Gates didn’t say “640K [of RAM] ought to be enough for anybody,” but nonetheless his supposed prediction is perhaps the most famous in Internet lore. There is an underlying truth to it, as Gates was never much of a visionary. His 1995 treatise The Road Ahead famously had to be reworked soon after its release because Gates’ forward-looking prose had failed to predict the Internet, which was rising up beneath his feet as he wrote.

But Gates wasn’t such a dullard to think that a finite amount of memory would serve humanity’s computing needs forever. So where did the quote come from? Author and librarian Fred Shapiro is trying to figure it out. He wants to find out either who spoke the words or who was the first to misattribute the quote to Gates.

I’d focus my search around the late 1980s, when 640K was a significant barrier and was viewed as a major limitation of Microsoft’s MS-DOS, among other operating systems. Take this 1987 Usenet thread in which users dream of a DOS that can address more than 640K of memory.

Expanded memory is the only way to get around 640k in PC-DOS 3.3. Microsoft claims that MS-DOS 3.3 is “functionally equivalent” to PC-DOS 3.3. Ergo, it is 99.99999999999999999% certain that the 640k barrier remains.

That's pretty certain.

Though it’s not explicitly stated, it’s clear from the thread that users were annoyed by an apparent attitude in the computer industry that breaking out of the 640K space was not a pressing need. It wouldn’t have been a big leap for that general irritation to morph into a “direct quote.”

This 1990 thread on the topic shows how the notion of 640K as a symbol of poor foresight had established itself in the consciousness of hobbyists, but Gates is nowhere to be found:

IBM really messed things up when they designed the original PC (hindsight is wonderful!) - they didn’t think that anyone would ever need more than 640k of memory.

Indeed, I always remembered the 640K canard being pinned on IBM—it wasn’t until the late 1990s/early 2000s, when Microsoft’s dominance was unquestioned, that I started hearing it attributed to Bill Gates. It makes sense: In 1990, IBM would have been the more satisfying target. Perhaps in another few years, we’ll cite the 640K quote as an old Steve Jobs chestnut. You know, when we all hate Apple.

“Do you know what the definition of a hero is? Someone who gets other people killed. You can look it up later.”¹

Geek Out

Be a hero. Despite being a lifelong Mac user, I’ve never disagreed with the knock that Mac OS is a mediocre gaming platform. The selection of titles has been reliably sparse in part because Apple turned its nose up at game developers. That attitude has changed of late (especially after the switch to Intel), as evidenced by a Guitar Hero III tournament at the flagship Apple Store on 5th Avenue this Saturday at 7:00 p.m. Top-notch guitar heroics will only earn you a $5 iTunes gift card, so you’re practically playing for pride, but it’s still an opportunity to show the milquetoast Apple Store crowd what a real (pretend) rocker is made of.

Get behind the wheel. Running until March 30 at the Javits Center, it’s the New York Auto Show, where you can see cars from the World of Tomorrow! Like the incredible Ford Transit Connect Taxi, which is like present-day taxis, but, um, improved. Slightly.

There are some novel attractions, such as the Automotive X Prize exhibit, but in my experience, the NYAS is all about people waiting in line to sit in stationary cars. The thing is, what are you supposed to do when you finally get to sit in the car? I’ve never figured it out, so I typically spend about 20 seconds acting like the dashboard styling is a source of great fascination. Then I sidle out so that the impatient family from New Jersey can take their long-awaited road trip to nowhere. Good times.

Geek In

Tint embryos. That is, if you’re of the Christian persuasion—or even if not, I suppose, since dipping eggs in food coloring doesn’t have much to do with the resurrection of Christ. An Instructables video recaps the basic coloring techniques, while other tutorials demonstrate the use of onion skins and how to make “dragon eggs” that will impress your local RPGer. I don’t really like the taste of hard-boiled eggs, so I’d rather ditch the food and decorate eggs in Mathematica.

Make a tool-assisted speedrun. I wrote a whole tutorial to get you started. What are you waiting for?

The first post on Geek Out New York extolled the artistry of “tool-assisted speedruns,” especially those featured on TASvideos.org. Tool-assisted speedrunners use emulation tricks to create movies of classic games being played as fast as possible, like a video that completes Super Mario Bros. 3 in ten-and-a-half minutes.

The most dedicated TASers use software robots and RAM analysis to create their movies—a process that can take several months to generate a final product—but they’re exploring the absolute limits of the game software. If you’re creating a TAS just for fun, to explore the limits of your own skill, you don’t need nearly that much time. In a single afternoon, you can produce a video of yourself blazing through games as a technology-enhanced NES savant.

What You’ll Need

• An emulator. FCE Ultra 0.9.8.15 is the best emulator for TAS purposes. Windows or Linux only. I’d love to do speedruns in Mac OS X, but the software isn’t there.
• A ROM file of the game you want to play. Google is your friend.
• The FFDShow codec. This drastically lessens your video’s size and recording time.
• A gamepad/joystick. This is optional, but it’s much more natural-feeling and fun than playing with the keyboard. I use a Dual Shock 2 (PlayStation) controller connected by a USB adapter.

Step 1: Set Up Savestates

Imagine you were playing a game of basketball in which every time you missed a shot, you had the power to go back in time and try the shot again until you made it. To an onlooker, you would be a phenom with a 100% shooting percentage. In essence, this is how tool-assisted speedruns work, thanks to savestates.

Typically, a game will only let you save your progress between levels or at designated save points. With an emulator, though, you can save your progress at any moment and return to that “savestate” whenever you want. By creating a savestate, you’re essentially marking a point in time that you can revisit later.

For this piece, I decided to make a movie of myself playing the Bubble Man stage in Mega Man 2 without taking any damage.¹ This isn’t a difficult stage, but to complete it without getting hit even once would take a little practice. Not with savestates.

My strategy was simple. Whenever Mega Man defeated an enemy or passed an obstacle without getting hurt, I would save my progress. Whenever Mega Man took damage, I would return to the previous savestate—jump back in time, so to speak—and try again. After about ten minutes of this streamlined trial and error, I finished the stage with Mega Man’s energy bar fully intact.

Regardless of your goal, your savestate strategy will probably be similar. So before you start playing, set up your emulator’s hotkeys (Config > Map Hotkeys… in FCEU) so that you can quickly create and restore savestates. As you can see from the screenshot above, FCE Ultra uses the function keys by default, which might be fine, but configure a setup that works for you. I use the Dual Shock’s shoulder buttons—buttons on the right side to save, buttons on the left side to load.²

FCEU offers 10 slots for savestates, but when creating a “just-for-fun” TAS, you can just use two. I save to Slot 1 often as I go along, and at major checkpoints, I also save into Slot 2. In other words, Slot 1 is for little bits of progress; Slot 2 is for big chunks.

The “big chunks” slot serves as a backup. If I screw up—say, by accidentally saving my state after Mega Man gets hurt (Heaven forfend)—I want a fallback in the second slot so that I don’t have to start all the way back at the beginning.

Step 2: Play

Fire up a ROM and play with the savestate feature until it becomes second nature, which doesn’t take long.

When you’re ready to make your run, choose File > Record Movie… from the FCEU menu, and instruct the emulator to record from “Start.” After resetting the game, FCEU will begin recording your button presses.

Then you’re good to go. Simply save your state whenever you succeed, and load the savestate whenever you make a mistake. When you load a savestate, this also “rewinds the tape” on your button-press recording, so FCEU instantly edits your missteps out of the final product.

After you reach your goal, choose File > Stop Movie. This creates a button-sequence file of your run. (FCEU calls this a “movie.”) Load that file into FCEU with File > Replay Movie… and watch “yourself” play with perfection. Even though you know the trickery behind the action, it’s a blast to watch this idealized version of you lay enemies to waste.

Step 3: Create a Video

This is optional. You can rewatch your speedrun anytime you want, simply by loading the ROM into FCEU and replaying the button-sequence file. If you made the run purely for your own enjoyment, you’re done.

But if you’d like to show your creation off on a wider scale, you need to create an AVI. TASVideos.org has thorough instructions on this process for various emulators; here’s the link to the Making AVI on Windows FCEU page. Note that the only section of the TASVideos.org directions that you truly need is the “capturing” section, which creates a YouTube-ready video file. The rest of the information is useful but not necessary.

A note on honesty: Some gamers think that tool-assisted speedruns are inherently “cheating.” They’re not, except perhaps in some cosmic sense. It is dishonest, however, to publicize a TAS video without explicitly noting that it is tool-assisted. That’s a cardinal sin in the speedrunning world. Label your video appropriately.

Here’s my Mega Man 2 Bubble Man run. It’s not particularly fast or smooth, and I didn’t bother to tweak the encoding, so it’s blurrier than it should be. None of that matters, though, because it was a lot of fun to make. And this was 10 minutes’ worth of work. You could make something pretty cool in a weekend.

May 10 is the day of the 2008 Metropolitan Odyssey, brought to you by Metro Metro. Start preparing now for the premier urban gaming event of the year.

If you’ve never done the Metropolitan Odyssey before, don’t sweat it, as the event is welcoming to newcomers. And if you come, be sure to say hello to my team, “Revenge of Scavenge of the Nerds.” You’ll find us at the top of the leaderboard.

It is with a little pain and a lot of jealousy that I looked over Brett Weiss’ photo sets (one, two) from this year’s Texas Pinball Festival. I always thought pinball, with its sense of tradition and physical energy, was a game well suited to New York, a city that boasts both qualities in spades. Yet we have to travel far and wide to find a good machine. There are a couple of notable upcoming pinball events in the Northeast: the mid-April Rochester Gameroom Show and August’s PAPA Championships in Pittsburgh. Those are closer than Texas, but around the “NYC area” only in a global sense.

If you want good pinball nearby, head to Brooklyn. I recommend Zablozki’s on 107 N 6th St., which has well-maintained Funhouse and Wheel of Fortune machines, and Enid’s on 560 Manhattan Ave., where you’ll find the Bally classic Creature From the Black Lagoon. Southpaw at 125 5th Ave. has a couple of recent pins, too, but at $1 a game and no discount for quantity buys, the price is a little dear.

When you type “Hell” into the iPhone’s weather widget, the “smart” phone cheerfully directs you to New York, NY.

As noted by approximately one billion Digg commenters and counting, this is probably because of Hell’s Kitchen, but that doesn’t make the hurt go away.

Two can play at this game, however. Note that if you type “dumbass,” the first result is some place in Sweden. Suck on that, Sweden.

According to a Friday piece in the New York Times, those gee-whiz 3-D movies are sweeping the nation. Wotta scoop!

The New York Times, Feb. 1, 1953, “Hollywood’s ‘3-D’s’; Producers List at Least a Dozen Three-Dimensional Features for This Year”:

The big story of the moment in Hollywood is three-dimensional movies.
…
The question to which Hollywood now is seeking an answer is this: How long can the novelty of such pictures be expected to hold public interest?

June 14, 1953, “On a Fruitful 3-D Field; Expert Sees Fine Future for Such Films When Technical Aspects Are Mastered”:

Why all this 3-D activity? My opinion is that the obvious answer is the applicable one. People would rather look at 3-D subjects than at “flat” pictures, even if glasses are required for the 3-D view.

Oct. 20, 1960, “A Cloudy View; ‘September Storm’ Has 3-D Failings”:

Some people never get the message. As long as seven years ago, it was pretty convincingly demonstrated that this business of having to wear special eyeglasses in order to get the effect of so-called three-dimensional films not only was an annoying inconvenience but also was full of technical flaws.

Jan. 2, 2000, “The Next Wave? 3-D Could Bring On a Sea Change”:

As we reset the Great Clock, new technologies are appearing by the minute. Some filmmakers who have worked in the medium believe that large-format 3-D is the wave of the cinematic future—“the next click,” in the words of Brett Leonard, director of “T-Rex: Back to the Cretaceous.”

July 20, 2003, “3-D Rides Back to Save the Day”:

“One reason 3-D burned out in the 50’s is that those movies felt so forced, with everyone aiming things at the camera,” [director Robert Rodriguez said. “To make this work, filmmakers will have to do better at the storytelling part.”

May 27, 2007, “Why Hollywood is Getting Serious About 3-D”:

But 3-D is clearly coming into its own, and its cinematic aspect is just one element of technology’s broader march toward a new era of make-believe super-realism.¹

March 13, 2008, “With Theaters Barely Digital, Studios Push 3-D”:

Coming soon, and coming straight at you: houseflies in astronaut suits, Brendan Fraser boldly exploring the earth’s core and an animated, nearly 50-foot-tall she-monster with Reese Witherspoon’s voice.

Sifting through the Times archives, I was surprised that the reports and essays became more credulous about this bit of tech gimmickry as time went on, when you’d expect (hope) the opposite. But hey, who am I to argue? People in the 1950s must have been completely stupid. Now that we have giant Reese Witherspoon she-monsters on our side, it’s not even possible to fail.

“It is so difficult to mix with artists! You must choose businessmen to talk to, because artists only talk of money.”¹

Geek Out

Mix with artists. From 5 to 7 Friday night, cartooning students will join bona-fide cartoonist Paul Karasik at Jim Hanley’s Universe (33rd St. and 5th Ave.) to shill for the Center for Cartoon Studies based in White River Junction, Vt. (I went to school near White River Junction—it’s a beautiful area, and then January arrives.) “Center for Cartoon Studies” may sound like a fly-by-night scam advertised in the back pages of Batgirl, but it’s well respected among new-media scholars. They’ll give you the tools you need to make your Brisket Man comic—pardon me, graphic novel—a reality.

Your mind awash with dreams of becoming the next Daniel Clowes, take the F Train to Brooklyn for Rocketship’s belated Hotwire II release party. Artists featured in the hard-nosed Fantagraphics anthology—including Mark Newgarden, R. Sikoryak, And More!—will be on hand for realsies this time after the February party was scuppered by snow. If you buy a copy of the book, they might even write their names in it for you.

Geek In

Frighten pets and small children. A few weeks ago, I finally put together a Herbie the Mousebot kit I got for Christmas. I shouldn’t have waited so long. Herbie features infrared sensors, an obstacle-avoidance system made from a bent paperclip, and other novelties, but the kicker is that Herbie is freaking fast. You won’t believe how much pepper this thing gets from one 9-volt battery. Plus, if you get more than one, you can modify them to chase each other around. Your dog will hate this. You can find Herbie or a similar kit at your neighborhood robot emporium. In NYC, that’s Robot Village on the Upper West Side.

Revisit old foes. Nothing washes away the taste of Nintendo boxing awfulness like a lazy afternoon of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!. The Tyson-free edition of the classic game is available on the Wii Virtual Console, but for a truly retro experience, download a MAME emulator and find ROMs of the original arcade Punch-Out!! and Super Punch-Out!! games—I won’t link to them for gray-area legal reasons, but your Google searches don’t need to be especially imaginative to find what you’re looking for. The crude wireframe character will probably feel strange to players accustomed to Little Mac on the NES, but it’s fun to get a look at the series’ roots.

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: Boxing.

It’s a scenario I’ve witnessed many times. Gamers and novices alike are having a grand old time at Wii Sports when one foolish soul pipes up, “Now let’s try boxing!” You try to dissuade him, but everyone insists. So you hook up the nunchuk (all the other games just use the Wiimote, but no, not boxing). The first eager contestant steps into the ring. Cries of “Wow, this is cool!” give way to “What’s going on?” and “LORD GOD, HOW DO I PUNCH???” The crowd disperses, and everybody hates you and your stupid dumb Wii.

Wii Sports boxing isn’t a bad game, but it does have a learning curve, as newbies inevitably learn when the computer opponent rains blow after blow upon their Mii’s smiling face. Experienced players, who can handle the challenge, tend to be disappointed in a different way, as Wii Sports can’t approach the fun of Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!!, the only boxing video game that ever mattered.

Despite the dominance of Punch-Out!!, there were other boxing games for the NES, presumably purchased as gifts by parents who didn’t know any better. (“You said you wanted the Nintendo boxing game! Why are you crying?”) These pugilistic also-rans make many of the same mistakes we’ve seen throughout this retrospective series.

Like the ill-advised celebrity endorsement. Mike Tyson signed over his name, cashed his check, and got lucky when the resulting game was a winner. Pity George Foreman, who did the very same thing, minus the luck part.

To be fair, George Foreman’s K.O. Boxing shows promise in its first few screens of window dressing. Just look at the gritty realism of that fight card!

Now, look at the gritty…whatever this is. Yup, that’s supposed to be Lorenzo “Bullet” Luciano, and while he looks nothing like his photograph, don’t forget that the video camera adds ten pounds and also transforms you into a completely different ethnicity.

The player assumes the role of George Foreman, facing off against Luciano on a fenced-in blue square. You’re rooted on by a crowd of faceless torsos and limbs. They’re not much for cheering, but they clap like nobody’s business.

Between rounds, Foreman entertains the torsos and limbs by flirting with the Doritos® logo. Given the way his physique has withered between the title screen and this one, Foreman’s love of that Cool Ranch® taste appears to be taking its toll.

Crass commercialism has no place in World Champ: Super Boxing Great Fight, but the game falls victim to another familiar pitfall of early NES sports titles, namely overselling. Whether it’s Perfect Bowling or Fighting Golf, overzealous marketing types set themselves up for failure by promising players experiences they couldn’t deliver. Is World Champ a decent game? Yes.¹ Is it super boxing great fight? That, sir, is asking too much.

World Champ shares another common offense with its contemporaries, boasting the worst audio atrocities I’ve heard from a Nintendo game. Remember when I whined about the robotic voice synthesis in Top Players’ Tennis? I guess those robots weren’t available during the making of World Champ, so instead the programmers kidnapped a low-level staffer and inserted his consciousness into the game’s code. Whenever a boxer in the game gets knocked down, you hear the imprisoned stooge screaming for help, deep within his cyberspace hell. His screeches almost sound like numbers. There’s plenty of examples in this video, but fast-forward to the 5:10 mark in this video to hear the whole blood-curdling 10-count:

(It is admittedly impressive that the thick Japanese accent comes through all that distortion.)

The gameplay in the video demonstrates what I’ve found to be the best sequence of attack in World Champ, going something like this: punch punch punch punch punch punch punch punch punch punch punch punch punch punch punch punch punch punch punch punch punch punch punch punch punch. Feel free, of course, to develop your own strategy along those general guidelines.

Finally, there’s Power Punch II, which embraces a motif I didn’t expect to resurface after Perfect Bowling: inexplicably setting the action in space. Nintendo washed its hands of this would-be sequel to Mike Tyson’s Punch-Out!! midway through the (outsourced) development process, partly because Mike Tyson was no longer a wholesome role model, and partly because they were freaked out by alien Don King:

I don’t plan to delve any deeper into Power Punch II’s backstory than that screenshot, so suffice it to say that you play star boxer “Mark Tyler” in the year 2006, and you have to box against a bunch of aliens. In space.

You can tell you’re in space because of the gargoyles and green carpet (obviously). Plus, instead of a win-loss record, your stat sheet shows a “cosmic record,” and you’re playing for the “Solar Championship”—apparently, in some deep-space goth freak’s dingy basement.

On that note, this will be the final installment of “The Way Wii Sports Were.” I didn’t do baseball, I know. For me, 8-bit baseball begins and ends with Tengen’s R.B.I. Baseball, and I plan to keep it that way, having been scarred by the horrors of NES golf, bowling, tennis, and boxing. I’m sure that there’s some celebrity-endorsed, outer-space robot monster voice-synthesizing baseball game out there, but for the sake of childhood memories, I choose to remain blissfully unaware.

Fred Hutchins, proprietor of Jan’s Hobby Shop, advised me to choose my words carefully. “It’s not a model,” he insisted as we examined his replica of the Navy cruiser USS Ticonderoga. “You’re looking at a real thing, in miniature.”

I thought it was an awfully fine distinction, but Hutchins’ point was that small things can be functional, like the working mini-Ticonderoga, which he crafted from scratch and sails in Central Park’s 72nd Street Boat Pond.¹

You could also apply the “small but functional” tag to Jan’s Hobby Shop itself, which manages to pack the gamut of hobby modeling into one tiny room on Lexington & 94th. I was the only visitor in the store when I swung by recently, but the corners are so tight that I couldn’t get out of my own way. That’s not a criticism. Among the most cramped storefronts in New York are some of the best.

Normally, a storekeeper faced with close confines will narrow his focus and try to exploit a niche that fits within his four walls. In this city, though, you’ll keep coming across places like Jan’s Hobby Shop, which refuse to reduce their all-encompassing purview. Instead, they cram. This creates a sense of adventure, as with Jan’s back aisle, where it seems one misstep will bury you in an avalanche of Chevy Impala kits.

You can miniaturize most whatever you want with the kits at Jan’s: an Aston Martin, the Spirit of St. Louis, a Civil War barracks, etc. Hutchins a passion for watercraft, noting one major advantage that R/C boats have over their twitchy, fragile airborne counterparts: “Boats are a lot of fun because if you hit the shore, just add a little bit of black paint, and it’s set to go again.”

Hutchins won’t try to force his preferences on customers. Hobbyists “don’t dabble,” he said. A model builder with a love of old motorcycles won’t be interested in anything but old motorcycles. It’s too much of an investment to try something other than what you know and love. “Unfortunately, the way [kits] are priced now,” Hutchins said, “it’s hard to do different things. A basic kit with finishing supplies will run up to $200 or so.” With such single-minded customers, Hutchins must be ready for every obscure taste that might walk in, hence the bursting shelves.

It’s not just what you build; there’s also the matter of how you build it. While most people build from kits, Hutchins has a fondness for “scratch builders” like himself, who design their own replicas from photographs of the original.

“You have to have a passion for your subject” to scratch-build, Hutchins said. I asked him how long it had taken to construct one of his U.S. Navy ships, and he shrugged. “Oh, this was a quick one, 15 months or so.”

The first kit I ever assembled was a “Jokermobile” from the Tim Burton Batman movie that was out at the time. It took me one evening, and I put the wheels on crooked, so the thing just squeaked when I tried to push it along the kitchen table. Fred Hutchins takes 15 months to build a precise miniature boat that slices through the water like the real thing.

If your skill set falls somewhere between those two examples, you’ll probably find something cool at Jan’s. That’s the beauty of a little store acting like a big one.

“If we’re going to be damned, let’s be damned for what we really are.”¹

Geek Out

Save Coney Island. Damn it, I really want to play mini-golf and ride the Tilt-A-Whirl at Coney Island every summer. “Save Coney Island” may be the most practical and organized outfit working toward that reality. Their vision acknowledges a need to redevelop the rickety boardwalk area while demanding that developers respect its history. On Saturday, SCI will throw a benefit featuring a cavalcade of carny talent, including The World Famous Pontani Sisters and The Fisherman Xylophonic Orchestra. Get the details on the Save Coney Island MySpace page, which is a garish mess, but isn’t that the point?

Bzzzzz. Also Saturday, the Wave Hill Garden and Cultural Center in the Bronx is holding an “Urban Beekeeping Day,” a day on which nothing could possibly go wrong. Local beekeepers will show you how to set up a hive in your own apartment complex, providing a boost to threatened honeybee populations. Your trained army of insect minions are also a handy way to resolve neighbor conflicts. Old Mr. Winston in #3B might think twice before bitching about your Guitar Hero noise again once he opens his sock drawer to see where that buzzing sound is coming from.²

Geek In

Be eaten by a grue. The tired term “retro gaming” has become shorthand for blocky 8-bit classic from the NES generation, but truly retro gamers reject the decadence of “graphics” and “sound” for text-based adventures. You might have played these on your Commodore 64 decades ago—you know, the games whose picturesque prose you navigated with commands like “LOOK EAST” and “PICK UP LAMP.” You can still battle grues in the seminal Zork series, but fans are creating new narratives, as well—this Sunday, the XYZZY Awards will honor the best interactive fiction of 2007. Whether your chosen adventure is old or new, the Brass Lantern beginner resources are a good jumping-off point.

Play fake pinball. It kills me to plug a pinball video game, as nothing approaches the visceral delight of a classic machine. That said, given the paucity of real pinball in the New York area, pinball fans might slake their thirst with Pinball Hall of Fame: The Williams Collection for Wii and PS2. This title was released with little fanfare—the developer doesn’t even acknowledge the game on its website—but initial impressions among “pinheads” on the Web have been positive, including a favorable notice from Game Chronicles. Have fun, but promise to throw down a few quarters the next time you see a machine in the flesh.

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: Tennis.

Nintendo has gotten tennis right in recent years. Big N nailed the feel of tennis for Wii Sports, and I count Mario Tennis for the Nintendo 64 among the five best sports games I’ve played—even in those pre-Wiimote days, the spot-on rhythm of play proved engrossing.

It took some trial and error to get to that point, though. While Wii Sports makes you feel like you are actually on the court, NES Tennis make you wish you were actually on the court. Instead of playing NES Tennis. The players swing through the ball very s-l-o-w-l-y, which hurts the realism, although if Nintendo had retitled the game Underwater Tennis, they might have had a winner.

Then there’s the perspective problem, which was a bear for many early sports games. Simply put, it’s hard to portray the height of the ball (i.e., all three dimensions) with 1985 video hardware. Nintendo’s designers solved this problem with sound, by exploiting the well-known phenomenon that balls, when lobbed high in the air, go BEEEEE-YOOOP. Younger gamers, this may seem like a bizarre effect to you, but note that soundless tennis balls were not invented until 1989. What a privileged world you live in.¹

Naturally, real-life tennis champions saw NES Tennis and wanted a piece of that mediocre-sports-game pie. So Chris Evert and Ivan Lendl combined their white-hot star power into Top Players’ Tennis Featuring Chris Evert and Ivan Lendl. “Featuring” might have been too strong a word, as Evert and Lendl don’t make any substantial appearance aside from the two-frame title-screen animations, as seen in this gameplay video from NESguide:

You might have noticed that the intro features voice synthesis that, by NES standards, is quite good. Unfortunately, the TPTFCEAIL programmers got a little carried away with their toy, so throughout the game, you’re subjected to halting robotic announcements like “THIRTY…FORTY.” and “ADVANTAGE…SERVER.” It’s like playing tennis with your answering machine. BREAK…POINT. YOU HAVE…TWO…NEW…MESSAGES.

TPTFCEAIL may boast big stars and voice robots, but Rad Racket: Deluxe Tennis II had another trick up its sleeve: radness. This cartridge, from the venerable Idea-Tek, was so rad that corporations clamored to attach their brands to it, marking one of the first instances of video-game product placement:

“Dudes With Attitude” later became Microsoft, of course, and “A.V.E.” is better known today as…? That’s right, McDonald’s Hamburgers.

Gnarly corporate synergy aside, Rad Racket offers all the typical tennis amenities: forehand/backhand controls, realistic physics, a bonus rat, and so on and so forth.

Yup, there’s a rat that scurries onto the court from time to time. The verminous conditions are bad enough, but where does the referee get off yelling “YUK A RAT”² in the middle of a point? Can we please have some decorum here?

I suppose I should explain the rat, but be realistic. It’s a bonus rat in a tennis game. Is there any explanation that would satisfy you? Good lord, I hope not.

Tyler or the Field?

When people in the pro golf world look ahead to a major tournament, they don’t ask “Who’s going to win?” Instead, as Tiger Woods continues to demonstrate that he is the world’s greatest golfer, the question is, “Tiger or the field?” With 24-year-old Tyler Hinman playing for a record fourth consecutive championship at this weekend’s American Crossword Puzzle Tournament, the question this weekend was, “Tyler or the field?”

Hinman, a recent graduate of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, lowered expectations like a pro athlete before the competition. “I made a mistake in ’04, and I’m sure a day will come when I stumble again. Hopefully, that won’t be this year…but I certainly don’t consider myself invincible in that regard.”

Despite the buzz surrounding a potential four-peat, Hinman said that eventually breaking the record for most career championships (seven) would be much sweeter. “The streak is a tricky thing. All it takes is one bad square in one year, and it’s over.” With a pursuit of the overall titles record, “you can always try again the next year. It just speaks much more to consistency.” Of course, consistency is one thing. Dominance is another.

I’ll admit, the Tiger Woods comparison has its limits—you wouldn’t mistake the frat-boyish Hinman, in his loose-fitting jeans and T-shirt, for a sports star. Neither would you take him for a typical crossworder. His mat of red hair, bursting from his RPI cap, stood out from the salt-and-pepper majority in the ACPT crowd.

The demographically accurate representative of “the field” would be perennial runner-up Al Sanders, a Linux project manager and father of three from Colorado. One of the friendliest in an amiable bunch, Sanders has a built-in rooting section ever since losing to Hinman in the 2005 ACPT, which was filmed for the documentary Wordplay. The climax of the film comes when Sanders smashes his headphones to the ground, realizing that he left two squares blank on his championship grid, robbing himself of his long-desired win.

You would not guess from Sanders’ huggable disposition that he had such agonizing brushes with victory. “I’m just trying to get into a positive mindset,” he said Friday, on the eve of competition. “For years, I thought, ‘Oh, gee, I really hope I make it to the top three,’ and then I realized, maybe that attitude was my problem.”

Puzzle #1: “Encouraging Words” by Andrea Carla Michaels

The competition portion of the ACPT takes place over two days. Six puzzles are played throughout the day on Saturday. After a seventh puzzle on Sunday morning, the scores are tallied, and the top three competitors in each skill division face off on a championship puzzle. All the puzzles are played on a time limit.

The scoring is complicated, but past champion Trip Payne gave me the quick gloss as part of a pep talk before the first puzzle: “The most important thing is accuracy, much more than time. Your first mistake costs you 195 points, and a minute of time costs you 20 points.”

When he finished getting me psyched up, I asked Payne how he was feeling. He claimed that he was “tired” and “not as gung-ho” as in the past. “I’m just taking it easy this year, I guess,” Payne said, in a bit of gamesmanship that would ring false as the tournament went on.

Besides, nobody was taking it as easy as Manhattan copywriter Stella Daily, who lounged around in her crossword pajamas. I gathered this was something of a tradition: “I had to replace the old ones,” she said, “because they were falling off, and it wouldn’t have been pretty.” She gave her new PJs points off for inaccuracy, pointing out that the grid had misplaced clue numbers and clumsy design that resulted in two-letter words. “Whoever designed this didn’t know what they were doing.”

Puzzle #2: “Change of Venue” by Mike Shenk

The New York Times daily puzzle, the gold standard of crosswords, famously gets more difficult over the course of a week. The Monday crossword is welcoming to novices, but by Saturday, the clues are cryptic and unwilling to give up their secrets.

Heading into the weekend, I wondered how this close-knit group would receive a nosy guy from a website with a smartass name. I had no need to worry; the ACPT regulars are a Monday puzzle.

A sense of community defines the ACPT despite an attendance that has almost doubled since the release of Wordplay. This year, more than 700 people competed. The tournament’s growth forced a move from the Stamford Marriott, site of the first 30 ACPTs, to the Brooklyn Bridge Marriott.

There were few complaints. “Stamford was noisy, noisy, noisy,” said Karen Otto, a travel agent from Greenwich, Conn. Joan Young, a 19-year veteran of the tournament, gave a vigorous nod and said, “That’s because it was right across the street from a mall.” She spat the word “mall” as if it were “whorehouse” or “secret organ-harvester hideout.”

Locale is irrelevant to the ACPT; it’s about people. Smart people: IT experts made up a huge proportion of the competitors, and there were plenty of educators—one math teacher said, “I keep recognizing people I know from conferences.”

I reveled in the intelligence of the crowd, as did Ruth Tetschner, a retired high school principal. “I’ve never been in a group of brainier people. You will see some amazing wit here, especially among some of the younger guys.”

Joan Young again piped up: “Young turks, we used to call them! Now, you call them ‘geeks.’” Actually, now I call them “turks,” because that is awesome.

Puzzle #4: “Can You Dig It?” by Paula Gamache

To understand a subculture, study their humor. Will Shortz, the New York Times crossword editor, NPR puzzlemaster, and director/emcee of the ACPT, had attendees in stitches throughout the tournament. Shortz is a talented wit, but I’ll admit that many of the laughlines passed me by.

Before the fourth puzzle, Shortz took the podium and held up a tchotchke he had been given by an attendee’s mother. “As you can see, it’s a small, brown leather thing that folds and opens like a wallet,” Shortz said. “And on the outside, there’s something written, it says ‘Needle Case.’”

The audience roared. Shortz waited for the laughs to simmer and said, “So now you know what an ‘etui’ looks like.” Applause.

Huh?

A neighbor noticed my befuddlement and cleared things up by writing out the word for me. “Etui” is one of those crossword words, like “epee” and “oleo,” that crossword constructors love because they have a lot of vowels (and are therefore easier to squeeze into a crossing). There’s a bit of shame attached to these crutches, but they keep showing up anyway. There’s no alternative.

As we set to work on Puzzle #4, there were scattered chuckles as solvers reached this clue for a four-letter word:

DOWN
[…]
45 Decorative needle case

Although it made his punchline that much sweeter, Shortz seemed upset by the coincidence, and he later apologized for “revealing an answer.”

Puzzle #5: The Bastard

Puzzle #5 is traditionally the hardest in the tournament, and Shortz deemed this especially brutal grid “the bastard puzzle.” It lived up to the billing. This puzzle’s perverse difficulty became the day’s prime topic of conversation. One solver grumbled, “It’s one thing to have a difficult crossing, but an entire puzzle that hard? Come on.” I gathered he did not enjoy the challenge.

Much of the consternation came from the puzzle’s theme. Many of the most literate crosswords tie longer answers together with a common bit of wordplay or punnery. On puzzle #4, for instance, all of the long Across answers were clued the same way—“Digs”—but the answer varied. LIVINGQUARTERS for 20-Across, GETSTHEPICTURE for 47-Across, etc. Cute, and once you catch on, helpful.

Puzzle #5’s sheet noted that the theme would be revealed “step by step.” One entry clued “Pitched weight-loss products” for the entry SOLDDIETS. It was clearly one of the themed answers, but I didn’t get it, and judging by post-puzzle interview, I wasn’t alone.

Turns out that every long Across answer in Puzzle #5 took a common phrase, extracted a note on the vocal scale, and replaced that note with the next step up. So take FAD DIETS, replace FA with SOL (as in do-re-mi-fa-sol etc.), and you get SOLDDIETS.

If the previous paragraph was painful, there’s a taste of what it was like to work this puzzle.

The Trust

Al Sanders was the first to emerge from the ballroom after Saturday’s last puzzle. His smile was gone, and his shoulders drooped. “The sixth one was fine, but I died on five.” He shook his head. “That one killed me.”

Sanders had completed Puzzle #5, but he took too much time. To make the Sunday finals, perfection isn’t enough, as most of the top competitors will turn in flawless grids. You also need to be fast.

So after each puzzle, competitors powwow in a frantic exchange of information to figure out where they stand: “You gained a minute on me,” “I lost some time on the lower-right corner,” etc. The official standings take hours to compile, but by then it’s old news to the people who really care.

I stood alone with Sanders for a moment, until the rest of the best, having finished seconds later, arrived in the foyer to bark times and answers like stock traders on the exchange floor. A passerby jerked his thumb toward the scrum and cracked, “The brain trust.” That’s the right word, “trust.” This would be a great opportunity for a cutthroat player to deceive his opponents, but such tactics are anathema to this scrupulous group. Complete trust is implicit.

Tyler Hinman shared a near-death experience. After an early finish on the fifth puzzle, “I decided to play it conservative. So I finish and take an extra minute to check [my answers]. Fifteen seconds later, I see a blank.” His compatriots gasped. Any square left blank would have torpedoed his championship run. (Recall Trip Payne’s warnings about the cost of an error.) A flush Hinman smiled weakly, calling his cautious strategy the “best decision I ever made.”

Spelling Counts

Over the weekend, various competitors wondered aloud why ESPN hadn’t yet picked up coverage of this event. After all, they air Scrabble and the spelling bee, why not crosswords?

Probably because for a spectator, the first seven rounds of the ACPT are very, very boring. People file into a ballroom to work silently on a crossword. As they finish, they raise their hands and skulk out. Sure, the format could be reworked for TV, ginned up with intensive editing and post-production, but it would destroy the homey feel of the affair. As a CNN marketing producer who flew up from Atlanta for the competition remarked, “I like that it’s not polished. It’s not quite together.”

Fact is, the spelling bee has the tension of the spotlight, a Scrabble competition has the excitement of head-to-head competition, and the crossword tournament has neither. Until the final puzzle, when it has both.

The setup for the championship round places three customized whiteboards on rickety easels at center stage. The top three contenders from each skill division are announced, fitted with noise-blocking headsets, and set their dry-erase markers loose on the championship puzzle. The C, B, and A divisions all play the same puzzle (in that order), but the clues are different. For instance, the C division had the clue “Part of ESP” for 44-Down, SENSORY. The A-level clue for 44-Down: “Organoleptic.”

After the C and B winners were decided and ushered offstage, the championship contenders—Hinman, Payne, and Howard Barkin, a software engineer who looked content with having made it this far—emerged from sequestration to play for the title.

An official started the 20-minute clock, and as Barkin riddled his grid with gaps and errors, focus tightened to the other two finalists: Hinman, the slouching kid who still qualifies for the ACPT “junior” division, and Payne, the tight-laced veteran with the levitating trousers. “What’s with Trip’s highwaters?” asked one of the play-by-play commentators.

Hinman rushed to an early lead, nailing words like EQUIVOQUE (clue: “Bit of paranomasia”) in the upper-right. Yet Hinman had a problem. All of his gains came on the right side of the grid, meaning that he would have to work backwards to fill in the very tricky left side. It is easier to work left-to-right (and top-to-bottom), as it gives you the starting letters of words you don’t know. As he finished the right half, Hinman’s progress sputtered.

Payne’s trademark idiosyncrasy is to fill in clues patchwork-style, all over the board, and then take another pass to fill in the gaps. That strategy served him well. As Hinman pondered a half-empty canvas, Payne’s grid got darker and darker. He nailed 1-Down, LEFTJAB (“Lead-in to a cross-over hit?”), and the upper-left corner followed. He got 60-Across, ULTRANICE (“Politer than polite”) where many contestants had fallen into the trap of entering EXTRANICE.

Meanwhile, Hinman chipped away at his puzzle. He made inroads in the bottom left corner, but the upper-left loomed large. He would have to work this trap-filled corner from the right and from below, the worst positioning possible. And as Hinman’s pace slowed, Payne’s marker gushed, spraying letters into the squares.

A buzz spread as Payne filled in the last entry that had eluded him, 5-Down, HELLSCANYON (“Snake carving?”). He stepped back, surveyed his board for blanks, glanced over to see Hinman still at work, and then threw his hands up. “Done!” Payne peeled off his headset, surely expecting to hear a spirited cheer for the new champion.

Instead, he heard a chorus of moans. For 42-Down, with a clue of “Adds,” Payne had written INVESTS. The correct answer was INJECTS. Like Payne said, accuracy is the most important thing, and at the last, he had been inaccurate.

Tyler or the Field?

All the other contestants having faltered, Hinman had only one opponent left, a field of white squares in the upper-left corner of his puzzle, glaring back at him under the lights. As long as Hinman completed his grid perfectly (or with only one error), he would win. With about eight minutes remaining, it seemed a sure thing that he would break through. At seven minutes, a little less sure. At six, a little less.

Hinman’s biggest roadblock was 1-Down, LEFTJAB. The entry was a timely boon to Payne, but it gave Hinman fits, and the corresponding Across answers were difficult enough that he had only filled in the “E” to build on. With about 6:30 on the clock, Hinman shrugged and wrote in BEATSME.

The joke, which Hinman erased seconds later, seemed cavalier, but Hinman didn't know what was at stake. He thought he was playing for second. Shut off from the crowd reaction by his headset, he would have glimpsed accuracy-is-everything Payne leaving the stage, considered his own stretches of inactivity, and done the math. As far as Hinman knew, the day was already lost.

Anxiety ran thick, and a few spectators yelled out in futility to cheer Hinman on. They had nothing against Payne, but nobody wanted to see a champion fall this way. Nobody wanted to see Tyler Hinman beaten by the puzzle. Yet the clock wound down. 6:30. 6:00. 5:30.

Then came 30-Across, BITMAP. Then 3-down, ACROBAT. Then 1-down, LEFTJAB.

Then:

When Hinman doffed his headset, he expected polite applause. Instead he got a delirious, pulsating yell of joy from 700-plus crossword nerds. A gracious Payne stood up and pointed at Hinman, mouthing “It’s you!” The unwitting champ looked to his family in confusion. “I didn’t understand why my dad was so excited about a second-place finish,” he said later.

Enthralled by a surprise (to him) victory and a record winning streak, Hinman admitted that he had “tried to play down the whole consecutive wins thing.” Downplaying was a theme of the weekend. “I’m not so good,” “She’s better than I am,” “I’ll be lucky to finish all the puzzles”—these were constant refrains.

Maybe these cruciverbalists felt a need to downplay because the notion of a “Tournament” carries too much pomp for an event that offers only about 20 minutes of truly heated competition. Except for that flash of excitement at the end, the ACPT is primarily a way for old friends to cross paths again and share in their love of language.

Crossword puzzles, after all, are far from a blood sport. They’re something you do at your kitchen table. For one weekend a year, that kitchen table gets a little bigger.