December 2008 Archives

In 2008, I produced the following features that, if I may be so bold, are worth a look:

• Now I Know What an Etui Looks Like: GONY at the 2008 American Crossword Puzzle Tournament
• ask me n e thing: Life in the Human Search Engine
• Do Not Stare Directly at Manhattanhenge 2008
• Keyboard Napoleons: The ‘This Isn’t News’ Guy
• Cereal Innovation is Over (with awesome interactive timeline!)
• That Didn’t Exactly Go as Planned, But We’ll Always Have Akihabara

In 2008, the following technology columnists got mad at me:

• David Pogue. Part one, part two (the good part), epilogue.

In 2008, I went to these places:

• The Compleat Strategist, a board game store ’n’ more.™
• St. Mark’s Comics, the closest thing in New York to the comic-book shop you used to frequent as a kid. (Or, at least, the one I used to frequent.)
• The rotting corpse of the Columbus Circle CompUSA.
• Jan’s Hobby Shop.¹
• The world’s largest arcade.

In 2008, the following ideas got split up into series because I was too lazy to write them all at once:

• YouTube Game Show Classics: Double Dare, Trump Card, Split Second, Time Machine, and backstage clips.
• The Way Wii Sports Were: Golf, bowling, tennis, boxing.

In 2008, I wrote game reviews for the A.V. Club:

• The Last Guy, B+
• Air Traffic Chaos, B
• Mega Man 9, A-
• LittleBigPlanet, A
• Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World, C+ (extra notes)
• The Last Remnant, B+ (notes)
• A Kingdom For Keflings, B (notes)
• Rise of the Argonauts, C+ (notes)

You can check out the rest of 2008 in the archives. To my readers: Thank you so much for your support in 2008, and here’s to a happy new year. To my non-readers: Bite me.

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1. I reread the original Jan’s Hobby Shop piece just now, and I’m surprised that I left out the weirdest detail of my visit. Fred Hutchins, the owner of the shop, was showing me his amazing models in the store’s basement. He said, “Since you’re not from the New York Times, I’ll show you this.” And he pulled out this innocuous-looking party boat, a couple of feet long. I leaned in to inspect the craftwork and saw that the boat was populated by a couple of guys in boating garb and more than a dozen miniature, lovingly painted nude women, lounging around the craft in all their nude nudity.

   Hutchins was beaming with pride and making jokes about how this was his fantasy boat or some such—my notes got a little sketchy at this point because I was busy trying to mask my discomfort by voicing bold, heterosexual approval: “Now THAT’S a pleasure cruise! HEH!” I guess I didn’t include this snippet in my post because it makes Hutchins seem a little creepy, which he wasn’t. Anyway, remember: People treat you differently when you don’t work for the New York Times. ↑

About a month ago, I reviewed Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World. Not only was this game boring outside of battle sequences, there was way too much of it. Symphonia was a goddamn chore. In reviewing Rise of the Argonauts, a new action RPG based in Greek mythology, I ran into the opposite problem. The story was fun, but the gaming was thin. The result was the same letter grade, C+, despite the fact that I liked Argonauts much better. Such is the tyranny of the letter grade. I can’t make a case for grading Argonauts any higher, but if I had it to do over again, I might knock Symphonia down a notch or two. (But even as I entertain the thought, I’m arguing with myself in my head, so who knows?)

One thing I liked about Argonauts despite its paucity of action was the way it loaded that action with meaning. I always felt there was some intention and purpose behind Jason’s battles—nothing profound, but fitting the “Cinemascope! In Color!” vibe of the whole production.

Anna and I laughed at the ending to this game, which follows a final boss fight against a Ganondorf-like foe. After a huge amount of dialogue and many long (skippable) cutscenes, the game’s parting scene is essentially a couple of throwaway lines and a fade to black. You killed the boss, huzzah, cut, print, we’re outta here. Guys, it’s the ending! It’s supposed to have a little pomp!

Argonauts isn’t worth the $60 retail price, but it’s worth a rental (and can easily be polished off in a weekend) or a bargain used-bin pickup. Oh, and read my review, preferably a billion times. Thanks.

“Hope you feel comfortable with the Christmas thing, but hey, if you don’t, that’s OK with me, too.”¹

It’s the last DSTW of 2008! I began the Do Something This Weekend feature in January with the goal of giving people something to do that weekend. I was pretty happy with myself until seven days later, when I realized another weekend was about to happen. Since then it has been a hellish cycle of finding things to do, writing them up, and watching in horror as yet another weekend comes up over the horizon. Curse this Sisyphean litany, this relentless march of time!

Oops, I mean: See you in 2009!

Geek Out

Grinch! After my post examining the inefficiencies of Christmas, a friend joked that I must hate Jesus to advocate eliminating his birthday. Of course, I was careful never to argue that we should kill Christmas, for I fear the wrath of the “War on Christmas” types. People get pretty touchy about the holidays, regardless of creed. A couple years ago, when I was writing a humor column for one of the local rags, I wrote a piece arguing that Black Friday was the only true national holiday this time of year. I included this line:

But Black Friday is … the one universal ritual we have left. Look at the month ahead: a fractious landscape of Christmas, Kwanzaa and crazy make-‘em-up holidays like “Winter Solstice” and “Chanukah.”

Some of my Jewish readers didn’t realize that I was kidding when I designated the Festival of Lights a “crazy make-‘em-up,” and they wrote in with the fervor of a jilted David Pogue to tell me as much. One woman said she would be organizing her synagogue in a campaign to denounce me. I’m still waiting to hear back on that. (In fairness, most people were very gracious once I explained that it was just a stupid joke.)

The moral of the story is that during this season of love and joy, people get a real stick up their collective butt. If a cynical geek can’t break the ice with humor, what’s left? How about pedantry! The Merchant’s House Museum (29 E. 4th St., Manhattan) is exhibiting “Christmas Trees of Old New York—Roots of Tradition” (get it, “roots”?) through Jan. 12. You’ll learn the origin of the tree tradition and see some authentic reproductions of what a 19th-century parlor would look like for the yuletide. Be sure to share what you learn with your children, nieces and nephews on Christmas Day before you let them open their presents. They’ll be grateful for the edification, as kids always are.

Or, to take your iconoclasm to the next level, attend the New York City Atheists Solstice party, noon Sunday at Les Sans Culottes restaurant (1085 2nd Ave., Manhattan). Judging by their booths at Columbus Circle—and their newsletters, oh, the newsletters!—it should be a rip-roaring good time.²

Geek In

Maintain order. This is more of a suggestion for the coming week, when you may need a few moments’ respite from your families. Or a few hours. Hey, I love my folks, on both sides of the family, but I love them even more knowing that when things get tense, I can slink off to play a little Castlevania. The Castlevania entries on the Game Boy Advance and Nintendo DS have served me well through years’ worth of Thanksgivings and Christmases, most recently with Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia. Most of the modern handheld Castlevanias are the same, and they’re all quite good, so grab one from the used bin at Gamestop (or Video Games New York). You can thank me later, when you’re slaying zombies while your relatives fight over the estate tax in the next room.

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1. According to a cartoonish president (cf. 1989 strip). ↑

2. Have I pissed off everybody now? Yes? Great. ↑

The Christmas shopping season is inefficient. It’s a boon to retailers, sure, but it comes in the worst possible way: all at once. To accommodate the Christmas season, employers have to hire and train seasonal employees for a few weeks worth of work, shopping centers have to build parking lots that sit mostly empty 11 months out of the year, and so on. If Christmas were eliminated and the income from the shopping frenzy were spread throughout the year (like for birthdays, which are more or less evenly distributed), retailers would be thrilled. They wouldn’t just kill Christmas, they’d dance on its corpse to the tune of crying children.

Of course, Christmas is a community tradition, so it’s important that its celebrants mark the occasion at the same time, no matter what the grinches at Kmart would prefer. Even people who don’t celebrate Christmas often feel compelled to join in the spirit, either by enhancing the significance of an existing holiday or by creating a new one. It’s an old trick—after all, Christmas piggybacked on pagan traditions like Saturnalia and the birthday of Sol Invictus. Point is, people like to party in December, and even if we’re not sacrificing goats anymore, the December traditions work best when everybody’s in sync.

Last week, PlayStation Home launched an “open beta.” Millions of PS3 owners signed on to try the virtual world, the servers got overwhelmed, and Sony got hit with the usual wave of “I can’t connect!” complaints. Online product launches have become miniature Black Fridays all their own. Launch, crash, apologize, and return to step 1, until enough people are frustrated enough to give up and ease the load on the network. It’s the gaming industry’s own Christmas Problem, and sometimes it even coincides with Dec. 25, like last Christmas when kids everywhere plugged in their new Xbox 360s for the first time, hosing the Xbox Live servers.

LittleBigPlanet, Call of Duty 4, and countless other games, not to mention shiny phones, have suffered crippling server issues this year. But given that a network spike is so much easier to handle, in terms of staffing and facilities, than the annual rush of customers that a brick-and-mortar retail chain faces, why does it always go so wrong? Why are huge, presumably capable companies like Sony, Microsoft, and Apple unable to prevent the Christmas problem from popping up again and again? Possible explanations, in order of credibility:

1. Load testing remains a dark art, so it’s tough to predict where a system will break when millions of customers place it under strain.
2. Even though it’s possible to lease more computers and bandwidth, accountants decide it’s not worth the expense to accommodate the first-day flood of tire-kickers.
3. The executives making the IT decisions don’t think their products will be as popular as they turn out to be.
4. The companies secretly like the publicity they get from server outages because it shows that everybody desperately wants their product.

Explanation #3, “We didn’t expect that it would be such a hit,” is the party line trotted out by PR people in the midst of network snafus. To its credit, it does manage to put a shine on a crappy situation, to the extent that naïve cynics start to believe Explanation #4. It doesn’t make sense, though. Game companies have access to sales figures, pre-order numbers, etc. Estimating an upper limit to the number of users who will sign on to your network is not exactly high-level calculus.

I’ve heard Explanation #4 a lot, and it is, in short, complete crap. Around the time that the PS3 and Wii came out, when both were facing shortages, one conventional wisdom was that the companies intentionally limited supply to create a frenzy around their product. “There’s no such thing as bad publicity,” they say. You know what they don’t say? “There’s no such thing as bad sales.” The reason they don’t say that is because it’s so freaking obvious. On Dec. 25, Microsoft executives would rather sell Xbox Live Arcade games to millions of euphoric new Xbox owners than read a story in USA Today about how they ruined Christmas. $$$ > press.

My best guess is a mixture of #1 and #2: Companies are willing to deal with some growing pains at the outset, and computer networks remain complicated enough that it’s very hard to tell when and where they’re going to go wrong. But I wonder if I’m right, and more to the point, I wonder if there’s a smart solution to the Christmas Problem, online or off.

A Kingdom for Keflings is a fun game that left a bad taste in my mouth. Finishing the game was such a letdown—“That’s it?”—that it was hard not to let that disappointment color the fact that for ten hours or so, I liked picking up and ordering around the little Keflings quite a bit. I ended up giving the game a “B,” which might have been a little on the kind side, but letter grades are tough.

My wife watched me play Keflings a bit and deemed it “SimCity with slaves,” an accurate line that I nonetheless thought better of appropriating for my review. (It’s more like Populous without fighting, anyway.)

The comment thread is made up mostly of sniping over my use of the word “addicting” in the review (rather than “addictive”). I found it irrelevant and entertaining. Rest assured that both “addictive” and “addicting” are both perfectly cromulent words. Used in the same context, they mean the same thing, which people hate, but that stuff happens all the time. What’s weird is that people only make a stink about it in certain instances. For example, nobody would blink at this sentence:

I cast the deciding vote.

Except why didn’t I say this sentence instead?

I cast the decisive vote.

Obviously, either one is fine. Language is messy.

“Hack the planet! Hack the planet!”¹

Geek Out

Since the advent of the network age, the meaning of the word “hack” has been remarkably unstable, to the extent that today, it can be applied to almost anything. The New Museum continues a long desecration of the word with tonight’s otherwise admirable event Craft Hackers. The museum will host a bunch of crafters with a tech flavor to their work at 7:30. Panelists include Christy Matson, who creates synesthetic installations with a Jacquard loom, and Cody Trepte, whose projects include punch-card embroidery.

I would be remiss not to mention that if you would like to explore the intersection of craft and geek yourself, Mochimochi Land’s (read: my wife’s) free Resisty the Resistor and Captain Capacitor are two great projects. (Good gifts, too!)

Geek In

The Ron Howard film Frost/Nixon is an engrossing piece of historical fiction, especially for a Nixon buff like me. When I got home from the exhilarating movie, I said, “They would be insane not to release the actual interviews on DVD now.” They’re not insane, and they already have. I’ve watched parts of the interviews for previous projects, and they’re gripping. Be warned, if you watch the movie first, you’ll be disappointed at times—most notably, the “when the president does it, that means it’s not illegal” moment is a more exciting climax in Ron Howard’s retelling. The matter-of-fact-ness is stunning in its own way, though.

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1. So exhorts Zero Cool. ↑

My brother Merrick emailed me yesterday to say that he had the $10,000 Pyramid theme running through his head and thought of me. Maybe that doesn’t seem worthy of an email, but we’re close. I replied that his earworm was probably not the $10K theme but the more famous $25,000 Pyramid theme. Yes, there is a difference.

Here’s the $10K theme, called “Tuning Up.”

Unless you’re above a certain age or an inveterate game-show buff, this is probably a first-time listen for you. The roots of the more famous $25K theme (which would debut on The New $25,000 Pyramid) are there, but these were clearly groovier times.

Despite the song’s title, the full “tuning up” section was usually clipped on air, as the producers wanted to get to the brass section more quickly. This is a phenomenal theme. Its loose swagger doesn’t sound like a game show at all, yet it set the right tone for a word game that, without the right presentation, could have been clumsy and boring (as the Donny Osmond-hosted version demonstrated).

After I sent him the MP3, Merrick made the $10K theme his ringtone. It’s a great tune, and it will serve as a thought-provoking conversation starter when his phone rings among friends, but I maintain that the $25K theme is the best game-show theme ever. It brought the Pyramid shows in its heyday of the 1980s, and its catchy brass fanfare is the ideal punctuation to a jackpot win. Plus, it has a secret!

The secret is the laid-back 30-second stretch at the end. It was rare that the bass solo in the latter half of the song would make it to air during the credits roll. So the theme has a second “verse” that was unjustly withheld from Pyramid’s loyal viewers for years.

You were probably expecting that the secret was something sinister, like if you play the theme backwards, you can hear the words “Dick Clark is a robot,” but that’s not the case. OR IS IT?

The $10,000 Pyramid theme is available on the album Best of TV Quiz & Game Show Themes, and the $25,000 Pyramid theme is on Classic TV Game Show Themes, both of which I own and love. (Those are Amazon affiliate links, so if you click through and decide to own and love them yourself, I’ll get a little kickback. It’s not much, though. Buy ten copies.)

“Music Box: You can make Hammer Brothers and others fall asleep on the map.”¹

Geek Out

Go beyond chiptunes. Nintendo’s humble Game Boy was one of the most successful and longest-lived platforms in video game history, and it’s now enjoying a second life as the darling of techno musicians looking to manipulate that 8-bit sound. Visual and audio art produced with Game Boys, Commodore 64s, and other re-appropriated computer junk are featured in this weekend’s Blip Festival 2008. At this event, it’s not about the games; it’s about these odd little machines and the crazy low-res art they can produce. The DJs and VJs will be performing through the weekend; here’s the schedule and ticket info.

Geek In

You don’t know Buzz. You might remember an ingenious series of quiz-show games from the CD-ROM era called You Don’t Know Jack. These pitch-perfect titles were enormous fun to play with a couple of friends, and I’ve long mourned their absence from the scene. The Buzz! series, as I found over the Thanksgiving weekend, recaptures some of that YDKJ spirit, with a good sense of humor and a wide range of subject matter. Buzz! even does a couple things better than You Don’t Know Jack. First, it rewards the leader while never making the person in last place feel left out. Everybody feels like they’re in it until the end. Second, it uses actual big red buzzers that you slap to ring in. Sweet. If you don’t have a group of four, you can play online versus other in the “Sofa vs. Sofa” mode.

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1. According to the Super Mario Bros. 3 instruction manual. ↑

Holy crap, is this the Slashdottiest story summary ever posted to Slashdot?

Political and Technical Implications of GitTorrent

lkcl writes
“The GitTorrent Protocol (GTP) is a protocol for collaborative git repository distribution across the Internet. Git promises to be a distributed software management tool, where a repository can be distributed. Yet, the mechanisms used to date to actually ‘distribute,’ such as ssh, are very much still centralized. GitTorrent makes Git truly distributed. The initial plans are for reducing mirror loading, however the full plans include totally distributed development: no central mirrors whatsoever. PGP signing (an existing feature of git) and other web-of-trust-based mechanisms will take over from protocols on ports (e.g. ssh) as the access control ‘clearing house.’ The implications of a truly distributed revision control system are truly staggering: unrestricted software freedom. The playing field is leveled in so many ways, as ‘The Web Site’ no longer becomes the central choke-point of control. Coming just in time for that all-encompassing Free Software revolution hinted at by The Rebellion Against Vista, this article will explain more fully some of the implications that make this quiet and technically brilliant project, GitTorrent, so important to Software Freedom, from both technical and political perspectives.”

Let’s review.

• One long, impenetrable paragraph: check.
• Obscure, boring Linux-related technology: check.
• Blind faith in distributed computing: check.
• Windows-bashing: check.
• Borderline delusional political conjecture: check.
• PGP: check.

I could go on, but the upshot is that I can’t imagine a story summary Slashdottier than this one. It’s the quintessential Slashdot screed, a creation so perfect that we ought to preserve it, like Einstein’s brain, for further study.

(The first comment on the story is pretty great, too: “Reread the summary in Davros’s voice, increasing the volume and excitement as you get closer to the end.” Try it, it really works!)

Please tell me you are availing yourself of William Shatner’s YouTube channel, where the Star Trek legend and national treasure expounds, usually to one of his daughters, about the pressing matters of the day. One highlight so far is “Shatner Tries To Settle Takei Feud.” Shatner has always laughed off the trash talk from Trek co-star George Takei, which seems like the right approach for an unflappable starship captain. In this clip, Shatner again manages to come off as bemused by the whole ordeal (yet quite willing to milk it for publicity). I love when, about 30 seconds in, Shatner brings viewers up to speed by saying that Takei “has been mean to me.” MEAN to him!

The exchange that begins at 1:54 is priceless, too.¹

Another highlight is “Shatner On His Star Trek Signature Drop Kick,” in which he recounts his epiphany that Kirk’s patented move for dispatching bad guys violates the laws of physics. (The fatal flaw of the Shatner drop kick is that only one person is guaranteed to end up flat on his back, and that’s the kicker, not the kickee.)

I think I enjoy Shatner most, though, when he’s simply making banal observations about stuff that has nothing to do with Star Trek or his new talk show. Stuff like Tina Fey and golly how much she looks like that Sarah Palin person!

Halfway through that Tina Fey video, I asked myself, “Why am I watching this?” The answer: Because it is Shatner. And that is enough.

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1. Shatner mentions Takei’s longstanding desire for Sulu to have his own starship. I read Takei’s autobiography years ago, and his crusade to have his own starship took up almost a whole chapter. I remember understanding the symbolism of it but also being bewildered, as Shatner apparently was, by how hard he pushed for it. Why the hell would you want to get off the Enterprise? The most interesting part of the book was not Takei’s sniping at Shatner but rather his story of being in Japanese internment camps as a child. ↑

Note to self: Do not schedule yourself to review two epic RPGs within days of each other. These two games kicked my ass for the past couple of weeks. At least in one case, I enjoyed it.

That case was not Tales of Symphonia: Dawn of the New World. Pretty much everything I could say about this game is in the review—there isn’t too much to break down. There are glimmers of a thoughtful story, moments where I said, “Ah! Here’s an interesting angle!” but nothing ever comes of them. The fights are fun, which is saying something in the RPG genre, where battles are often a slog. The monster collecting is kind of neat. Everything else is just OK, except for the characters, which are obnoxious. I gave it a C+, the letter-grade equivalent of a shrug.

I liked The Last Remnant a lot. The hero, Rush, and his supporting cast are unusually realistic and relatable characters for the genre. For once I wasn’t embarrassed to watch the cutscenes of an RPG with my wife in the room. (New World was a nightmare on that front.) The settings are lush and gorgeous. I loved journeying to new places in Remnant’s world.

The gaming press has criticized Remnant a great deal for its graphical issues. Long story short, there is a lot of choppiness during battle sequences. The developers obviously had a deadline to meet, and they couldn’t get the visuals 100% polished in time. Not an ideal situation, but not a dealbreaker, either.

One common complaint about The Last Remnant among reviewers has been “texture pop-in.”¹ This may be the pickiest nit one could possibly pick, but to read some reviews, you’d think it burns your corneas. One critic wrote that the texture pop-in ruins the game’s dramatic moments by “killing any emotions they might convey.” Now that is a bit much. If you are complaining about texture pop-in taking you out of the game, you weren’t very much into it to begin with.

Like I said, people’s opinions will differ, and I don’t mind that many writers liked The Last Remnant less than I did. (I have long suffered gladly as one of the few who believes that Final Fantasy VIII was a highlight of the series.) But I am bothered by the obsession with glitches. When we focus such inordinate attention on benchmarks and framerates, we get the games we deserve: vapid, technically capable exercises in shock and awe.

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1. For those who don’t know what texture pop-in is, it’s a phenomenon of 3-D graphics where parts of the image appear blurry for a second or two while the computer finishes rendering. If I showed it to you, you would blink and say, “People complain about THAT?” ↑