October 2008 Archives
Work off your Halloween hangover with all this fun. Remember, too many Sour Patch Kids + too many whiskey sours = a bad night.
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You have been fragged by the nominee for Best Director. LittleBigPlanet would like to pretend it has the game-as-creative-tool market all to itself, but independent filmmakers have been using games to create original works for years. It’s called Machinima, a movement that produces movies with the spaces, characters, physics and camera controls of modern game engines—essentially acting as directors in a virtual realm. The best of Machinima will be celebrated at this weekend’s Machinima Filmfest, starting Saturday at 11 a.m., at Eyebeam (540 W. 21st St.).
The video above is Portal: A Day in the Life of a Turret (set in the world of the game Portal, naturally). Nominated for the festival’s Best Short Format award, it could stand a little trimming, but still, it made me laugh.
You may also recognize Machinima from the South Park episode that was set partly in World of Warcraft.
But it looked so good on paper! Even if you didn’t make your own paper airplane last weekend, there’s still a good time to be had the the New Millennium Paper Airplane Contest, an event sponsored by the Public Art Fund. Takeoff is scheduled for 1:00 p.m. in the Great Hall at the New York Hall of Science. If you want to take advantage of the free shuttle form Manhattan, which leaves at 12:15 from the corner of 15th St. and 10th Ave., you’ll need to RSVP—details are on the event page.
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Abandonware no longer. All of the major consoles have an online shop where you can buy classics from bygone eras, and GOG.com (for Good Old Games) is an attempt to create something similar for the PC. Dealing only in games like MDK2 that have long since evaporated from the bargain bin, GOG looks like a great, DRM-free way to have some fun on the cheap. Most games are around six bucks and download immediately. GOG plans to continue adding new (old) games to the lineup. King’s Quest, please.
I ate a bowl of Cinnamon Toast Crunch last night. That was a mistake. You should not eat Cinnamon Toast Crunch late at night. It messes with your head, makes you all twitchy, and you have weird dreams as the sugar and cinnamon swirls you’ve ingested assault the blood-brain barrier.
If you compare the nutrition labels, Cinnamon Toast Crunch has as much sugar per serving as most other sweet cereals, but when you look more closely at the serving size, which for Cinnamon Toast Crunch I believe is a single flake, the story changes.
I don’t care because Cinnamon Toast Crunch tastes awesome. It was a brilliant innovation in the field of breakfast technology. In 1984, the cereal potential of miniature marshmallows had been largely explored, so the good people at General Mills decided to miniaturize another sugary snack. Their masterstroke was to restrict their palette to the world of breakfast food, making the morning delight of cinnamon toast both more convenient and more potent. This is why they succeeded where Cookie Crisp failed. (It’s not a surefire formula, though, as the atrocious Waffle Crisp demonstrates.)
That was almost a quarter-century ago. Where is breakfast-cereal innovation today? At the grocery store, all I see are variations on the old standards. Either they contort a classic into a flavor combination that should not exist (cf. Chocolate Lucky Charms1) or they toss in “real fruit!”—i.e., freeze-dried nuggets that, in a past life, resembled fruit.
My sense is that America’s formerly great cereal industry has run out of ideas, but to confirm that my hunch wasn’t just nostalgia, I decided to take a look at the numbers. I assembled a list of the top selling cereals, as of 2008, from the data provided by breakfast-cereal enthusiast Topher’s Castle. My list included the top 13 cereals on the market (Topher’s chart only breaks out 15 individual brands), as well as each manufacturer’s top five. I excluded Quaker Oatmeal Squares because I couldn’t find any historical data for them (you’ll see why that’s important in a second). I excluded Malt-O-Meal cereals entirely because, c’mon.
I took that list, cross-referenced it with the cereals’ debut years, mostly according to Wikipedia, and put everything on a Dipity timeline. Each cereal is placed according to the year it came out. Click on each entry for some context by way of a pithy comment or two.
Click the “View in Dipity” button for a more expansive look at the whole timeline (Dipity is kind of glitchy, especially in the embedded version, so I recommend clicking through). Note that a little “+” at the bottom of the timeline means there are more entries to display (click on the “+” to view them). Sometimes the Dipity software collapses entries because it is lazy.
What you’ll notice as you browse the timeline is that the period from 1952 to 1969, especially the 1960s, was a boom in cereal development. The 1980s saw a few notable blips, but since then the landscape has been barren. There are no entries past the notable 1989 introduction of Honey Bunches of Oats. Since then, the industry has rested on its laurels.
Where will the next great cereal idea come from? Do we need a cereal Manhattan project, or should the government fund thousands of cereal garages across the nation? I am not content to watch cereal and milk become a dying art.
I’ll probably update the timline with more cereals as I think of them, as the top-sellers hardly comprise everything that General Mills et al. have to offer. If you have anything you want me to add, let me know.
This was a tough game to assess because, as I write in my A.V. Club review, the game that comes in the box is unfinished. Polished, for sure, but not finished. The LBP servers go online today, so as a global network of freelance level creators share their ideas, we’ll see how great this game really is. I gave it an "A" because as far as I’m concerned, the developers of LBP laid all the groundwork for this game to be a phenomenon. Read the review for more details.
“Don’t blame me, I voted for Kodos.”1
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Higher education is spoooOOOOooky! The New York City College of Technology has a Department of Entertainment Technology where they train pyrotechnicians, theme park engineers, special-effects artists, and the like. Shouldn’t every college have something like this? You can reap the benefit of City Tech’s “EntTech” department at Gravesend Inn, a haunted house assembled annually by students and faculty. There are a lot of haunted houses around the city, but this is the only one I know of that’s an ongoing student project. Only six bucks ($4 for students) in Brooklyn at 186 Jay St. This Saturday, the house opens at 6:00 p.m., and naturally there will be shows next weekend, as well.
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Let it fly. Grab a piece of office paper and get to work on the next 8.5-by-11-inch aeronautic speed demon. Nov. 1 in Queens, the New York Hall of Science will host The New Millennium Paper Airplane Contest, so this weekend is the perfect time to streamline your craft. Entrants will be judged on distance flown, duration aloft, beauty, and best of all, “spectacular failure.” Complete rules and details are in the link a few lines up.
Mars 2112 sits on the periphery of the Times Square theme-restaurant scene, and it’s a bit of an oddball. It’s not part of a chain, like Hard Rock Cafe or Planet Hollywood, nor is it backed by a global mega-brand like the ESPN Zone. It’s simply an eatery about Mars—practically low-concept as far as Times Square is concerned.
I visited a few months ago, and as far as I know, the restaurant may not even exist anymore, although its aurally misbegotten website remains, so odds are good you can still get your Red Planet fix at 51st and Broadway. I went to Mars 2112 because I’d read a report that an Attack From Mars pinball machine (not to be confused with its successor, Revenge from Mars) was on the premises. I wanted to play.
For residents of the city, there’s obvious shame in visiting a theme restaurant, but typically when we do visit, we are accompanying some overeager friends or family from out of town. With a regimen of eye-rolling and bemused head-shaking, we can disassociate ourselves from our guests to let everyone know, hey, get a load of these lame other people, they don’t understand I am too cool for this scene, which I definitely am. Too cool, that is. Definitely.
But this time, I was alone, with no foil against whom to demonstrate my relative worldliness. And when I passed a faded sign outside the entrance that read, “Astrodelicious!” I broke out in a sweat and reassessed the situation. “You are visiting a theme restaurant—not even a top-tier theme restaurant, but rather one that bills itself as ‘astrodelicious’—in the middle of a weekday, by yourself.” I could have bailed right then. I forged on in the interest of journalism. The Mars 2112 hostess struck at the heart of my insecurity with this greeting:
“Hi, will somebody be joining you?”
She’s not even entertaining the possibility I could be alone, I thought. So I lied.
“Yes!” I said. Well done, John. You dodged that bullet. She doesn’t suspect a thing.
“OK, and what is their name?”
“Peter. He should be here in the next 20 minutes or so.” Excellent use of detail. Filling in the backstory. Nice.
“And you are…?”
“Andrew,” I said. What? Why are you still lying? OK, hold it together, you’re a passable Andrew. Just remember, you’re Andrew now. Andrew Andrew Andrew.
Mars 2112’s pinball is located in “Cyberstreet,” which is what they will call an arcade 104 years from now because by then the term “cyber” will be hilariously old-timey, just like today’s society thinks Teddy Roosevelt is a real gas. As expected, Cyberstreet did have an Attack from Mars, and it was in pretty good shape. I must have played for a solid 45 minutes before I felt sorry for the guy stuck on the very dirty Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein machine and finished up. He soon jumped over to the AFM.
AFM and Revenge From Mars were two of the last pinball machines that didn’t have a prominent entertainment license attached. (Attack From Mars has nothing to do with Mars Attacks!, the Tim Burton movie that was coincidentally released around the same time.) In the 1990s, pinball makers leaned more and more on movies and TV to provide the themes for their machines, and today, Stern doesn’t make any machines without big name backing. Just like the standalone concept of Mars 2112 is an oddball in Times Square, machines like Cactus Canyon and Medieval Madness have given way to Spider-Man and Wheel of Fortune.
Maybe theme-restaurant aficionados mourn the mega-brand trend in their field. If so, I feel their pain. For my part, I miss the days where a pinball machine featured original settings and characters like Rudy. Licensed pinballs are nothing new, and they’re not necessarily bad pins. Four of the top ten on the Internet Pinball Database’s top-rated machines have licensed themes, including the No. 1 machine (Twilight Zone) and the runner-up (Star Trek: The Next Generation). It was nice, though, when pinball was a creative venue unto itself, however modest.
By the way, while I was playing, I came to the slow realization that somebody named Peter could actually show up to the restaurant, and the hostess could bring him in to join me, and then the jig would be up. I cast worried glances at the entrance to Cyberstreet between every ball. Then, when Peter didn’t come, I invented a whole shtick to perform for the hostess when I walked out. It consisted of saying “So, Peter never showed up?! I guess he doesn’t have time for his old friend and business partner Andrew!” Then I would throw my arms up in astonishment and exasperation. But when I left, nobody looked in my direction, and I realized nobody cared. The end. Moral: Lying works great.
I’ve been traveling, so apologies for the lack of DSTW last weekend. If I’d been available Friday, I would have told you to go to Robot Village! I mentioned them just a couple weeks ago, but I got word on Friday that the Robot Village store will be shuttered at the end of the month. Apparently they are refocusing on their party/corporate event services. Nice to know that the company and its spirit of robot domination survives, but this is sad news. If you haven’t seen Robot Village yet and are even marginally of the robotophile persuasion, check out the Village before it’s gone.
(I even plugged Robot Village in an interview for Metrotwin, a new travel site I’ll be contributing to on occasion. Mere hours after the interview was posted, complete with my statement that Robot Village was my favorite place in the city, they announced their imminent closure. This does not bode well for my future recommendations. The Curse of GONY?
I’m taking a break from the YouTube Game Show Classics “tradition” here to showcase a few well-known shows because a bunch of rare behind-the-scenes footage has popped up, some of it quaint and some fascinating.
This 8-mm movie (the author disabled embedding, so you’ll have to click the link to view the video) shot by an audience member at a 1979 Dick Clark $20,000 Pyramid taping is a little dizzying, but I love that opening shot of the marquee at ABC TV-15, also known as the Elysee Theatre, formerly of 202 W. 58th Street. Sets typically look smaller and cheaper in person than they do on TV, and indeed Pyramid seems pretty chintzy from this balcony view. Of course, even on TV the original Pyramid set came off as something like a basement rec room. The show’s creator and producer, Bob Stewart, was notorious for cutting corners on production costs (although the set used for Pyramid later in the 1980s was gorgeous and remains a gold standard).
Nice to have a little face time with the late, bird-flipping Ray Combs in this brief backstage look at Family Feud. I’ve always wanted to see the enormous Feud trilon from behind, and the video comes so tantalizingly close.
A 1982 local-news feature on The Price is Right is the best behind-the-scenes featurette I’ve ever seen for the show. One of the disappointing things about modern-day Price is how sloppy the crew has become. The direction isn’t as quick or reliable, the timing of the sound effects is off, the camera work is swishy. In 1982, the Mark Goodson crew, led by director Marc Breslow, ran a tight ship. That didn’t mean everything ran perfectly. I love the way they handle a malfunction on the game “Any Number”: If it screws up again, just give her the damn car and get on with it.
My favorite behind-the-scenes look, though, is this Match Game tape that includes the director’s track. The voice on the recording is the aforementioned Breslow, and I find it so engrossing to listen to Breslow’s rat-a-tat chatter. Having done the show for years, he has an instinct for the supposedly unpredictable shows and always has the cameras in the right position when the action gets a little loopy. Here are links to part two and part three.
This snapshot from the Apple MacBook announcement is immensely interesting. (Photo, such as it is: Gizmodo)
Apple’s ability to energize technology fans is well documented, to the point that technology fans assume they will be energized by any Apple announcement. This can lead to disappointment, as it did at this year’s WWDC keynote. By the same token, it can also lead geeks to contort their tastes to avoid the cognitive dissonance of being letdown by Herr Jobs. In other words, we can’t handle the notion that Jobs will be boring, so whatever he talks about must excite us.
The past week has been a strange one as gadget sites have competed to break the latest news about an Apple project supposedly code-named “Brick.” The consensus emerged that Brick is a new manufacturing process that allows laptop frames to be created from a single block of aluminum.
Now, what I just told you there, to a rational person, was very, very boring. I enjoy a good episode of How It’s Made as much as the next guy, but come on, manufacturing-process gossip ought to be the bottom of the tech-journalism barrel. Yet “Brick” was easily last week’s top story, and at today’s MacBook announcement, it was the showcase piece. Jonathan Ive, Apple’s design chief, gave a lecture on MacBook manufacturing. They had a short video of the new process. Jobs passed around a piece of the new frame for journalists to fondle. Etc.
When people talk about Steve Jobs’ iconic “reality distortion field,” the implication is often that he makes his fans believe things that aren’t true. More accurately, though, the RDF makes you care about things you wouldn’t otherwise give a second thought. As you read stories about the new MacBooks in the coming days, you will inevitably encounter a blurb about the manufacturing process. Ask yourself, why do the reporters writing these stories suddenly care how Apple carves the aluminum for its laptops? Because Jobs made them care, and he does it better than anyone on earth.
Apple knows how to sell its products, but careful: That doesn’t mean they don’t have quality kit to back up their talk. Sweet lord do I want one of those MacBook Pros.
“I know, and in the next level, sprites are zombies. They’ve got flesh on their bones!”1
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Level up. A gaming platform hasn’t really “made it” until it has a thriving homebrew community. As much as Nintendo, Sony, et al., might try to ensure that their customers only play through corporate-approved avenues, a huge group of users insist on hacking the roadblocks to use their consoles the same way they’ve always used their PCs: to play games that didn’t cost millions to produce. The New Museum (235 Bowery) hosts a forum tonight, “Next Level,” where indie game auteurs will look at the ever-growing phenomenon of self-made, self-published games. The museum’s PR copy for the event could not be any worse—blathering meaninglessly about “games that blur the line between digital art and creative entertainment”2—but the lineup of speakers is very good. Mark Essen, Jason Rohrer, and others will attend. The trailer for Essen’s latest, Cowboyana, is above, and I also recommend Rohrer’s Passage.
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Superstruct the future. The previous sentence probably doesn’t make any sense, and neither does The Superstruct Game, at first. I can’t do a much better job of explaining the premise than the above preview video, but the gist is that you sign up for the game, you form one part of a collaborative effort whose goal is to predict what the world will look like in 2019, and how it will respond to global crises. Through a social-networking framework, you build theoretical structures in the hope of efficiently organizing people to solve problems like a raging respiratory virus or a brush war over alternative energy. OK, I am not helping the game make much more sense, and I’m done rewriting this paragraph. Try it out for 15 minutes and you will catch on. It’s a novel idea created by game theorist Jane McGonigal.
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From the 1990s Saturday-morning cartoon ReBoot. Did anybody else watch this? I remember loving it when it first came on even though I might have been at the high end, age-wise, of their intended audience. ↑
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This “blur the line” crap must be the most trite and overused cliché in the museum industry. Here’s how you write a museum blurb for something when you have no idea what you’re talking about:
- Think of two ways to describe the thing.
- Pretend that there is a dichotomy between those two descriptions.
- Say that the thing “blurs the line” of your false dichotomy.
Earlier this year, I set out on a mission to play as many public pinball machines as I could in the five boroughs. I planned to catalog my travels in an epic GONY piece. After three locations, I cut the project short because it was depressing. There were too few machines and they were in too poor shape. I hated to see my beloved game suffer so.
The place that made me give up was Ace Bar, a pub in the East Village. It’s the type of bar that’s referred to as a “dive” by people who have never been to an actual dive.1 I’d heard that Ace had Spider-Man and Family Guy machines, so I grabbed a roll of quarters and headed there, arriving in the early evening, so I could play before it got crowded.
Not only was it uncrowded, it was empty. I got a Bombay & tonic and fired eight bits into the Family Guy coin slot and the machine came to life, sort of. Don’t get me wrong, it was in good working order. The trouble was I couldn’t hear anything. The dialogue, the music, the quintessential bells and whistles of the pinball experience were all a muted whisper. Somebody had set the machine’s audio levels close to zero.
I was lucky, though, because the service guy was right there, checking up on the Spider-Man machine while his colleague installed a new Big Buck Hunter Pro virtual-hunting rig. I went to the bar and asked the manager, jerking my thumb toward the Family Guy machine, if I could have the tech raise the volume a touch.
“Oh! I’m so sorry about that!” she said. I was relieved. A kindred spirit! Or not. She waved her hands at the bartender, who cranked the alt-rock radio station beyond the point of distortion. Fearing that the Ace Bar staff was about to blow out its tinny speaker system, on which they undoubtedly lavished dozens of dollars, I explained that NO, UH, I MEANT THE PINBALL MACHINE. CAN I HAVE THE GUY TURN THE VOLUME UP ON THE PINBALL MACHINE? The music went back down.
“Oh, the pinball machine!” she said. “No.”
“Really? You can’t even hear it.”
“There’s no volume control on a pinball machine.” Lies!
“Of course there is.” She bristled when I called out her bumbling prevarication, but I forged ahead. “It’s right inside the coin door. If you get the tech to open it, he can show—”
“Look! It gets really loud in here. The last thing we need is a pinball machine making noise.”
It was an interesting argument, and not just in light of the fact that moments ago, she had fallen over herself to flood the place with a sensory overload of FM radio. I wonder, if I were the manager of a loud bar, and I wanted something that didn’t make more noise, what would I buy? Here is an abridged list of possible choices, in order of preference:
NON-NOISE-MAKING BAR ITEMS
1. Cigar-store indian
2. Humorous wall plaque
3. Fish tank
[…]
32,455. Pinball machine
32,456. Live shooting range
You do not get a pinball machine and tell it to shut up. The manager ultimately relented, and as the technician boosted the volume, he whispered, “I agree with you. It’s too low.” He then gave me 14 free games, and we grinned at our furtive rebellion against the Ace Bar powers-that-be. Here was my kindred spirit after all.
I’m gratified that places like this are still buying pinball tables and supporting the industry (i.e., supporting Stern, the only pinball manufacturer left), yet it’s hard to get too excited when pinball is treated as nothing more than a set piece. Pinball machines have always been part novelty and part game, and after my night at Ace, I felt like only the former part was surviving.
There remains hope, however. More TK.
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Actually, people around here are more likely to use the term “dive bar,” which sounds redundant to my ears—“dive” alone seems sufficient—but that’s common usage. I’ve even heard a friend say they wanted to go to a “dive-y bar,” which made me want to knife someone—specifically, the person who said it. Also, for the record, I’m not looking down on people who have never been to an actual dive. I don’t like dives. ↑
My review of Mega Man 9 is up at the AV Club. Short version: Awesome.
“Beep boop.”
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I am a robot. GONY doesn’t usually deal in kiddie stuff, but I’ll make an exception for Robot Village, the city’s one-stop animatronic shop at 252 West 81st St. Throughout October, the Village is running after-school and weekend workshops for kids eight years old and above. On Saturdays, the Robot Village staff does battle robots, and Sundays are for “Robot Guts: Magnetism, Electricity, and Motors.” If you don’t have kids, maybe you’ve got a niece or nephew who you can “generously” offer to bring to the workshop. Call Robot Village at (212) 799-ROBO for details and reservations.
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No, seriously, air-traffic-controlling is fun. I know you’ve heard enough, but let me just disgorge myself of this ATC kick once and for all. Air Traffic Chaos for the DS is fun, but this niche genre has some classics from decades past, as well. I remember being awed by the speech synthesis in Microprose’s mid-’80s C64 game Kennedy Approach, which lives on at an amazingly elaborate fansite. The site hosts a modern Windows remake of the game, along with the original C64 and Amiga ROMs for play on emulators. There’s also TRACON and TRACON II, which have their roots in software used to train actual ATCs. I’ve never played these, but many aspiring propellorheads swear by them. Google for “TRACON game” and you’ll uncover a slew of different versions and download options. Have fun in those unfriendly skies.
After playing and reviewing Air Traffic Chaos for the DS, I wanted to get an idea of how close the game comes to real air traffic control. The answer is surprisingly close, for a handheld game. But then I learned something even cooler. From what I gather, each airline has three designators that are used in different contexts.
First, there’s the IATA airline designator. This one is only two letters.1 As you probably guessed, they ran out of unique IATA codes a long time ago, creating a huge mess. Nonetheless, they still use IATA codes on, say, the arrival/departure board, or your boarding pass. A lot of booking computers are still on the IATA system, too. The IATA sells an ASCII text download of the codes for $3,150. Presumably, the price is so high since they have to employ top-tier ASCII programmers to produce this document every month.
Next, there’s the ICAO airline designator. This is a three-letter code, allowing for 16,000 combinations or so. (“Don’t you mean 17,576 combinations?” you ask, computing the cube of 26 in your head. No, I don’t, because codes beginning with “Y” and “Z,” along with a few others, are reserved for special purposes.) I gather that the ICAO designator is now the standard code used in most airport operations, but I didn’t research it very much because I got too excited by a third, non-boring designator, the telephony designator.
In the Wikipedia article about call signs, I learned that an airplane’s radio call sign, used by flight crew and air traffic controllers, is typically made up of its telephony designator and its flight number. Wikipedia provides this example:
For example, British Airways flight 75 would use the call sign Speedbird Seven-Five (with the last word properly pronounced fife), since Speedbird is the telephony designator for British Airways and 75 would be the flight identification.
“Speedbird 75”? Holy crap, I went into the wrong line of work. I mean, being at the controls of a 777 would be cool enough, but if I’d known you also get to call yourself “Speedbird,” well, that would have been the icing. I’d be a fancy airline pilot by now, and you wouldn’t be reading this post, and you would probably cry. So thank goodness things worked out the way they did. I guess.
It turns out that most telephony designators are based on the airline’s name and thus aren’t as interesting as British Airways’ “Speedbird” (named for its classic logo). Don’t worry, there are still a lot of great ones. I found a number of perfectly awesome airline sobriquets in a BBC h2g2 article listing non-intuitive telephony designators. Below is a selection; imagine yourself barking each one into the radio as you hurtle through the sky at untold airpseeds.
- Aero Services: Bird Express
- African Safari Airways: Zebra
- Air Chaparral: Maverick
- Baron Aviation Services: Show Me
- Braathens Helikopter: Bee Copter
- Express Airlines: Flagship
- Germania: Joker
- Lux Aviation (Luxembourg): Red Lion
- Nawa Air Transport: Supernawa
- Nurnbergen Flug: Flamingo
- Oman Air: Oryx
- Skywings: Skyfox
- Titan Airways: Zap
This is Zap Five-Niner-Niner, signing off.
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Technically the IATA code can contain three letters, as this is what the modern specification calls for, but it’s never been implemented. I guess IATA is first waiting to see if they add any more letters to the alphabet. (“Double-Q,” anyone?) ↑
All contents copyright © 2007-2010 John Teti.
