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Starting in Earnest

2004-01-17 · by peterb

Now that I actually have my official copy of Final Cut Pro, and its voluminous, ox-stunning manuals, I want to learn how to use the tool better than I have. I find myself wanting to jot down notes all over the place on things I should try, or things that work great (or don't). I'm setting up this blog as a repository for those notes.

The thing that's kind of disturbing to me is how much I still don't understand about how this immensely complex program works. Some of it -- like keyframing -- I've kind of stumbled into. But most of the editing tools on the timeline, for example, I have had no idea how to use. That's gotta change if I'm going to use the tool effectively.

Anyway, for the first post-install project, I set the following goals for myself:

? Learn how to edit a project in Offline RT mode. ? Use at least one editing tool I haven't used before. ? Apply at least one special motion effect.

Offline RT is going to warrant its own entry, later. Today I learned how to use the ripple delete tool (keyboard shortcut: rr), and the 'magnify' tool. If you're saying to yourself "What kind of idiot has never even used the magnifying glass icon before?" the answer is "the kind of idiot that foolishly played with the stretchy and expandy scrollbar instead." I also used the razor blade (shortcut: b).

As for special effects, I played with transparency between layers. I eventually ended up taking it out and just used the prerolled crossfade effect, but at least I see how it works now.

One thing I haven't figured out is when it's "better" to put a different video clip on a completely separate track versus when it should be on the same video track. It looks to me like to use the prerolled effects, it has to actually be on the same track. But maybe this is something I can figure out for next time.

Wizardry 8

2004-01-18 · by peterb

Wizardry 8 is a game that succeeds in spite of itself. I've been nibbling at this little clunker of a game for over a year now (which seems like a common occurrence -- people keep coming back to it) and recently have become engrossed in it once again. It has many, many flaws, yet behind those flaws is an entertaining CRPG that is fun to toy with. Interestingly, it has one of the most dedicated fan communities of recent CRPGs, with pages upon pages of material devoted to how to get the most out of playing and replaying the game.

Wizardry has always had a special place in my heart. It was one of the first full-fledged Computer Role Playing Games that had all of the elements we're familiar with today -- graphics (albeit rudimentary ones), a group of characters with different skills and talents who could be swapped around, interesting magic spells, a confusing dungeon that had to be mapped by hand, powerful (and sometimes cursed) treasure, and a variety of interesting monsters to kill or be killed by. There were games that met some of these requirements before the 1980 release of "Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord" (which came in a really cool box with a shiny green dragon on it), but Wizardry really knitted them together.

Many hours of my youth were misspent huddled around the monitor of Jeff Hollander's Apple ][+, with Jeff, his brother Steve, and I slogging our way through the dungeon, painstakingly making a map on graph paper (games in these days had no automaps. Sort of like automobiles before the invention of the wheel.) In Wizardry I, only the three party members in your front ranks could attack monsters directly; the three in the back could only cast magic spells or just "parry." You instructed a character to fight by hitting "F", and to parry by hitting "P". This meant that most easier battles had rounds in them where you just typed F-F-F-P-P-P, usually mumbling under your breath "fight fight fight parry parry parry". The magic spells used a constructed language that was simple and memorable: to this day, I am wasting valuable brain cells storing the fact that katino is the sleep spell, halito is a small fireball, and that I can make a bigger version of some spells by adding the prefix ma-, or la- (leading to mahalito, and lahalito). And who could forget the "nuclear blast" spell tiltowait? ba- negated the meaning of a spell, so while dios healed some of a player's hit points, badios injured a monster.

I am a sad, sad, man. I know.

Wizardry was modeled closely on Dungeons and Dragons. One of the things about the series that is accidentally interesting is that they simultaneously wanted to emulate D&D as closely as possible, but were clearly aware of the risk of getting sued. So in certain key places they changed the names of various attributes, classes, and the like, and then later ended up building on the ideas suggested by their changed names. For example, the first edition D&D Ranger class became the Samurai in Wiz 8. This led to the inclusion of asian-themed equipment. The assassin became the Ninja; Paladins became Lords.

Likewise, the world the party moved through was full of whimsical anachronisms -- for example, in the middle of the dungeon, you might find an electric-powered elevator. While these elements were clearly just spur of the moment, when the game was successful they were kept by Sir-Tech as elements in the future releases in the series. They are part of what gives the Wizardry world its unique flavor.

Wizardry 8 begins with your party's spaceship crash-landing into the world of Dominus, where you are searching for MacGuffins of incalculable power before the bad guy finds them. The plot, as is par for the Wizardry course, is pretty weak. The developers tried to create a detailed world with shifting alliances and political intrigue. They failed. In large part this failure is because of the horrible interface you use to talk to NPCs, which is similar to Morrowind's terrible "choose from this list of six hundred nouns until you find something this NPC cares about" UI. I won't focus on the plot for the rest of this review, except to note that because the plot tells a story, most of the significant battles and powerful items are statically placed. Yes, there are random encounters and some random treasure, but the most interesting set-piece battles (and the most rewarding weapons and magic items) are always in the same place. I think that's something of a letdown, but I understand the reasoning behind it.

Building Characters

One of the most interesting parts of the game, as in many RPGs, is in character development. Wizardry 8 is above average in this respect, and I think that's one thing that has kept the game warm in the hearts of gamers. Because there is so much variety in the ways you can develop your characters, the game rewards playing again and again to see how different strategies work out.

Roughly, there are two "types" of characters, and there are a large variety of classes that fall within those types. "Pure" characters do one thing, and they do it very well. For example, Fighters and Rogues are each pure. Likewise, a magic user that can cast from only one of the four realms -- Mages, Alchemists, Psionicists, or Priests -- are considered pure. Pure characters advance character levels quickly, and become more powerful in their specialization quickly. "Hybrid" characters have a class which has more than one ability. For example, a Samurai is an OK fighter, but can also start casting Mage spells at fifth level. Rangers gain the ability to cast Alchemist spells. Other hybrid classes include the Valkyrie, the Ninja, the Monk, and the Bishop -- a magic user who can cast from all four realms. Lastly, there are the Bard and Gadgeteer, who are basically thief/magic users who rely on musical instruments and mechanical gadgets respectively. They don't quite fall into either category.

Each character class has at least one aspect that is unique to that class. For example, Fighters can go berserk, whereas the fighting hybrids cannot. Samurais can make critical hits to achieve instant kills with melee weapons; Ninjas can make critical hits to achieve instant kills with thrown weapons, and so on.

One aspect of character development that can be tricky the first time you play through is that the game rewards skill specialization and punishes the lack of specialization. Every attribute (Strength, Intelligence, etc.) and skill (Swordsmanship, Stealth, and the like) has a value from 0 to 100. The curve for bonuses in these skills feels logarithmic, so for a good portion of the game you will completely suck at some task and then suddenly you hit '90' in the associated task and you start kicking ass and taking names. Furthermore, there are "elite skills" that are only unlocked once the attribute associated with that skill reaches 100. The implication of all this is that a character who has all around good attributes will do horribly compared to a character who has focused on one attribute (or skill) to the exclusion of all others. This takes some of the bloom off the rose of the myriad options discussed above, but once you've internalized it it's simply another choice to be made. The upshot is: pick what you're going to specialize in early, and stick with it no matter what.

Combat

Combat in Wizardry 8 is enjoyable and frustrating at the same time. Wizardry 8 combat is almost tactical. You can create different party formations, which affect which characters can reach which enemies, and vice-versa. Characters have initiative. Between turns, you give each character in the party your orders, and then hit the 'go' button, and each character (and enemy) executes their orders in initiative order. This should be tactical combat, yet it isn't. Why not?

For one thing, your party cannot split up; it moves as a group. Right off the bat, this has a tactical implication: your party can be flanked by enemies, but you cannot flank your enemies. Yes, there are rare situations when you are fighting alongside an allied group of, say, town guards, but they are truly rare circumstances. To the 99th percentile, it's accurate to simplify this as "you cannot flank your enemies." Tactics, therefore, is reduced to "make sure you're walking near a wall so you can wedge yourself into a corner to protect your own flank." Furthermore, although the individual characters in you party have wildly varying initiative, enemies within a given group do not. So if you're fighting, for example, one group of five highwaymen and one group of five swarming wasps at the same time, all of the highwaymen will move one after another, and all of the wasps will move one after another -- the groups might have differing initiative with respect to each other, but not with respect to their other group members. This element of the combat is flawed.

Movement within combat is also flawed. Choosing to do party movement -- which is the only type of movement there is -- uses the initiative of your slowest character. While that makes sense mathematically, it also means that the party move button also means "I want to swing last." The engine does not support the idea of taking a swing, then moving, then taking another swing, no matter how fast your characters are. There is also no concept of delaying one's move conditionally until an enemy is in range. If you need to do this (and you will), what you end up doing is hitting the 'party move' button, letting the enemy approach, and then cancelling movement and taking your swing. While this is serviceable, it's also incredibly lame, because it means that you can't issue a 'delay' order on a per-character basis. What I'd really like to be able to do in most situations (for example), is have my bowmen go ahead and shoot right away, let my magic-using characters cast their spells, and have the fighters attack with their melee weapons if the enemies close in. Instead, my choices are to delay the entire party by moving (probably taking damage when the monsters close and get the first swing), or not delay and let my magic-users do their thing, and if my fighters initiative comes up first, before the enemies close, they will forfeit their attack. It's worth noting that since enemies don't move as a group, they effectively have this privilege. It's only the player that is punished.

If it seems like I'm complaining, well, I am, but only because I enjoy the combat engine so much that I've been willing to play it enough to discover these irritations. Despite all of my complaints, the important point is that even with all these problems, the damn game is fun.

Magic

Magic is the most highly polished element of the combat system. It takes a while to realize the depth of the magic system. Every spell belongs to one of six domains -- fire, air, water, earth, divine, or mental. Every spell has an intrinsic level at which it can be learned, and furthermore can be cast at a specific power level. So a given spell might last for 2 turns per power level, or inflict 1-6 hit points of damage per level. Characters (and enemies) have different resistances to the different spell realms, so a fire spell might do more damage to a water-based enemy while a water spell would be completely ineffective. Powerful casters have the ability to overcome resistances somewhat. Casting a spell at a higher power level will carry an increased risk of the spell failing or backfiring.

It takes a while to figure out how to use magic effectively. While the direct damage spells (fireballs, etc) do exist, they are for the most part ineffective. Effective use of magic in Wizardry 8 is all about improving your party's resistance to the attempts of your enemy to disable you, and disabling the enemy. There are a huge number of status effects in the game. You or your enemies can be slept, blinded, irritated, nauseated, paralyzed, knocked out, made insane, silenced, hexed, blessed, hasted, slowed, energized, and probably made into a ham sandwich. Effective magic use is all about doing the bad things unto the other guy and not letting him do them unto you. This part of the game, once you "get it," might be the most addictive aspect of the combat.

Bugs

The game has some bugs that can be irritating but not show stopping. The automap can sometimes take upwards of 30 seconds to be displayed. Also, enemy movement is frustratingly slow. Fans claim that the wizfast utility fixes this problem, but they're wrong -- it just makes you sit there and wait for the enemies to move without their animation, instead of waiting for them with their animation.

Community

The game has an active fan base who are happy to talk, in soul-numbing detail, about various strategies for building a succesful party, and about what secret items are where, and just about how great the game is generally.

Wizardry 8 can be found at most major game outlets today for just $20. It's a bargain at that price, if you like the genre, and I do recommend it.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have to go have my Ranger practice casting Alchemy spells so she can learn Set Portal.

"Editing Offline" in Final Cut Pro 4

2004-01-20 · by peterb

One of the most misunderstood features in Final Cut Pro -- other than all of them -- is "offline" mode. This is probably because the word "offline" is overloaded in the program's GUI. The most common usage is simply that the media is offline, but you can still edit the project.

However, there is another, more useful definition of "offline" in FCP4, sometimes referred to as "Offline RT": editing in a resolution lower than that which you eventually intend to deliver. It's not obvious how to do this, or even that it's possible at all, without a little investigative work. But once you figure it out, it opens up the possibility of a much quicker workflow.

Why would you ever want to do this? A few reasons:

The downside to working in Offline RT is that it isn't terribly well documented, and it takes a leap of faith to try it the first time. It also requires you to log your clips with thorough devotion and use batch capture or capture clip rather than "capture now" when acquiring the media -- but you should be doing that anyway.

Without further ado, here is Peterb's guide to completing an Offline RT project in Final Cut Pro. Note that I'm assuming your "native" resolution is DV-NTSC and your "offline" resolution is half-size PhotoJPEG. The same principles apply, however, even if you're working natively in HD and are using DV-NTSC as your offline res.

(1) Log your clips carefully. When all the media you think you'll use is logged, go ahead and batch capture them using the DV-NTSC -> Offline RT/Photo JPEG mode. Note: don't capture them in DV-NTSC and recompress later, as this can lead to aspect ratio problems. If you must capture in DV-NTSC, use the Media Manager's "Create Offline" feature, not "recompress."

(2) Edit a rough cut of your project as usual -- nothing has changed except you are working with lower resolution clips.

(3) When you're near completion and want to work with the higher resolution clips, go to the Media Manager for all clips and sequences in your project and choose "Create Offline" (yes, this is not intuitive -- don't you want to Create Online? Just trust me. This is one place where the double meaning comes in, because "Create Offline" and "Make Offline" have completely different meanings). For format, choose DV-NTSC (or whatever the final resolution you intend to work in is). Make sure "delete unused media" is checked, and make sure the "copy and place in a new project" checkbox is checked. You're going to create a junk project to hold your online clips and sequences. "Create offline" is going to upres our sequences, special effects, and clips to the target resolution (it will still look ugly at this point, of course, because we've basically just taken a half-size photo jpeg clip and made it larger and more pixelated. Don't panic).

(3) Now go to your new "junk" project. Select all the clips, right-click (or control-click) and choose "Make offline". This time, we really do mean "get rid of the media", unlike the "create offline" we did in step 2. You can do whatever you want with this media, since it's already a copy of what is in your 'real' offline project.

(4) Now you should have an empty project with a bunch of clips which have no media associated with them. What now? A batch capture, of course! Only this time, we're going to capture at full resolution, which will connect the full res clips to our sequences.

(5) Rerender the project, do whatever last minute touchups you feel are necessary, and export the completed movie to its final destination -- I usually write it to a DVD as data and print it to tape to keep an archival copy around.

It sounds easy, but the nonintuitive names Apple chose for some of the Media Manager functions make this a much more dramatic and fear-inducing process than it should be. Done properly, using OfflineRT mode will let you keep many more projects in flight at once, and let you finish them faster. It can even open up possibilities you've never considered -- you'd never send even a 5 minute video to a friend in DV format for them to edit, but if you're using Offline RT you can send them your project and media, they can edit it, and send it back

If you have any tips on working in OfflineRT mode, or you've noticed any inaccuracies in this article, please let me know by commenting in this thread. Thanks!

When Emulation Goes Bad

2004-01-21 · by peterb

...because you can never have too many parodies of Mortal Kombat.

Startup Envy

2004-01-26 · by peterb

I've been compulsively reading every single article on Andy Hertzfeld's Folklore page dedicated to the early days of building the Macintosh. I discovered this through a link at Daring Fireball. I can't stop reading. Part of me is filled with an overwhelming sense of envy; I was only 13 years old when they started building that machine but that was what I wanted to do.

Not only that, but I look at the stuff I've done, and while it's pretty cool -- telerama wasn't exactly chopped liver -- it's not quite as exciting, somehow. Perhaps I simply think the grass is always greener, yet "I'm building a world-class network storage solution" just plain doesn't sound as earthshaking as "I'm building the computer for the rest of us."

One thing about this series of articles that I think is pretty cool is the demonstration of how the skills of an engineer grow in their use. Hertzfeld's main characteristic that makes him a great engineer is that he's not afraid to dive into things that he doesn't know much about and figure them out.

I'll take a smart engineer with no experience in a given field over a super-experienced dope any day. Especially in a startup, where very often hard work is more important than your resume.

The other interesting thing that the site shows is that the engineers on the ground were quite unaware of the effect their little computer might have. Sure, Steve might have been asking people "Do you want to change the world?" But to the engineers -- with the possible exception of Bill Atkinson -- it was just another neat hack. Diego thinks this was all part of a master plan, but I disagree -- making a new product is like making sausage. The end result may be delicious, but what goes into it is more a matter of trial and error and discovering what tastes good. Yes, we eventually had style guidelines for the Mac and Lisa, but those were, practically speaking, given by the users to Apple, not the other way around. The one thing we can (and should) give Apple credit for is being one of the first companies to actually bother listening to their users.

And I wish I had a Monkey to test my code.

Icarus of Pittsburgh and other short films

2004-01-28 · by peterb

While trying to figure out what the hell, exactly, the lyrics to Aimee Mann's superb song Red Vines mean, a friend pointed me to the wonderful animated video (Quicktime). The video was done by artist Evan Mather. I was interested in his work and enjoyed it. His animation workflow involves Adobe Photoshop, After Effects, and Final Cut Pro. I especially liked his short film Icarus of Pittsburgh, but perhaps that's just location-based snobbery.

As is typical in these matters, I'm the last person in the world to know about Mather's work.

Hitchens, Danner, Power, and Frum

2004-02-02 · by peterb

Rajeev Advani posts his notes on the debate between Christopher Hitchens, Mark Danner, Samantha Power, and David Frum on the topic (of course) of "Iraq and Beyond." Thanks to Rajeev for preserving his view of the record.

Update: Part two of the debate is described here.

Good Tools Are Worth Paying For

2004-02-04 · by peterb

I definitely would not have survived the past couple of days at work without Perforce, the version control system of champions. I'm sure there are version control systems other than P4 that are just as good; it's just the particular flavor of crack that I'm addicted to. It just seems like the ubiquity of CVS, the de facto standard for open source projects, is yet another great example of Worse is Better.

Most open source projects you meet use CVS, which stands for "Concurrent Versions System." Everyone uses CVS for exactly two reasons:

You'll even find advocates on the web explaining why you should use CVS even though it's totally broken. These advocates conveniently overlook the fact that CVS sucks. Let's review, shall we?

So when people call CVS "version control" you need to realize that that's a very optimistic description. It's really more of a hope.

There's just something about this topic that makes people's willing to accept a level of badness that they wouldn't take for a minute, in, say, their OS, or their text editor, or their web browser. Do you think people would keep using Emacs, even though it is both free and Free, if, periodically, it just decided to corrupt the files you were editing? Yet when it comes to version control, people accept just that. For example, here's a CVS apologist I found on java.net:

"CVS expects you to trust merges. A lot of people don't, usually saying how they once spent hours resolviing [sic] a horrible merge. It doesn't occur to them that the problem was not source-control but bad process - two developers editing the same part of the same file, with at least one failing to synch with the server often enough."

Wow, imagine that -- people failed to realize that their version control system didn't actually control versions of the files they were working on. Those crazy kids with their loud rock and roll music and their hamburger sandwiches and their French fried potatoes!

Think about that claim for a minute. Implicit in it is the idea that any software process model where more than one developer is working on a given region of a file at a time is broken. I guess that's a workable theory, if you don't actually have deadlines, or competent developers. Perhaps the lack of deadline pressure is the whole story of why CVS is adequate for free software (as opposed to Free Software -- there are open source software products which are sold for money and therefore have some deadline pressure). But since CVS provides no locking or notification support, how do I know if someone else is working on the same files I'm working on, anyway? What's my process if I work in a company with 10 people? Do we all send out mail saying "I'm editing the fold_monkey() function in monkeybagel.c now"? What if I work in a company with 50 people? 100? 500?

The idea that process should adapt to the inadequacies of the tool is insane. When a tool is inadequate to good process, you should find a better tool. (In this particular case, the inadequacy is not "CVS doesn't do notification," but "CVS doesn't do atomic checkins or make complex merging workable.")

Here's another one that I just have to share, and let's be frank, mock:

"CVS is indeed the best version control system I've used."

Translation: CVS is indeed the only version control system I've used.

The best version control system I've used is Perforce.

So what is Perforce? Perforce is basically CVS if CVS wasn't designed by hamsters on crystal meth. Just about every problem you can identify with CVS is fixed in perforce. There are command line tools that are disturbingly similar to CVS's, with the difference that they actually work. There's a Windows interface, if that's your thing. There's a (good) web interface. Hell, there's even a Half-Life interface to p4. Multiple users working on the same file works intuitively in p4 (the integration procedure is pure love). Multiple branches and/or multiple client views into the same or different branches are easy as pie. You can manage multiple changelists, all checkins are atomic, it's backed by a database, and reverting to earlier versions of the tree (or a branch, or a file) is simple.

The basic unit of a P4 checkin being a "changelist" has another consequence: you don't check in files to Perforce, you check in a changelist. So if I say "I want to see the specific fix that Bill checked in that fixes bug 14982," it's trivial, no matter how many files it touched. Try doing that in CVS.

And, most importantly, if you're working on a project with more than three people, you won't want to go hang yourself every time you need to check out or check in a file. At least not because of the version control system.

Random links: This discussion thread over at Joel on Software discusses some of the differences in a slightly less antagonistic tone than I've used here. It's a good read. Ned Batchelder blogged a bit about this too. Dana Epp is looking for advice on which SCM system to use. I plan to tell him to use Perforce; drop by and counter my advice if you disagree.

Perforce is a commercial product, but it is free (as in beer) for two users or less, and they're pretty liberal about issuing evaluation licenses so you can see what you're getting yourself into. It may seem comparatively expensive at $750/seat (less as you buy more seats) once you are working on a big project, but at my company, at least, it has been worth every single penny. And they claim that they offer free licenses to Open Source projects. So check it out.

What version control do you use? Have you killed anyone yet?

Update: See my article about using Perforce on Mac OS X.

What I'm Playing

2004-02-09 · by peterb

A brief list:

A Fistful of Hobbits

2004-02-13 · by peterb

This article at the Wall Street Journal suggests that if MGM and New Line can't work out the details of distributing The Hobbit, perhaps Jackson could invent a new story that takes place in the Lord of the Rings universe.

We have a few suggestions.

Final Cut Pro: What Do You Do When Your Soundtrack Sucks?

2004-02-14 · by peterb

Last night I finished my first large project, a 25 minute oral history documentary about my grandmother. I've been working on it, on and off, for about six months. When I started, I didn't know anything, really, about video production, and now, through the arduous process of making tons of mistakes, I probably still don't know enough to claim to be skilled. However, I am very good at screwing things up. So I do at least have some information to share with you, which is "Here's what I learned by screwing up."

The most important thing I learned is: in a video project, what you hear is more important than what you see.

That's a pretty controversial statement, so let me explain a little bit. What I really mean to say is that producing good (or at least acceptable) audio for a video is harder than producing good (or at least acceptable) video. It's harder for a few reasons: when we are shooting video with 'basic' equipment (a camera, some lights, a tripod) we have better previews available to us of video than we do of audio. Deciding whether the video is right is easier than deciding if the audio is right. We have better and more powerful editing techniques to cover up subtle video mistakes in postproduction than we do to cover up audio mistakes. Discontinuity in video has a different (and easier to compensate for) psychological effect on film and video viewers than discontinuity in audio.

So with that in mind, let's talk about some of the ways you can improve the audio on your video production. Up front let me say that I'm not trying to tell you how to improve the quality of the audio during the shoot. I'm far too inexperienced to be able to advise even a five year old child on such matters, so if your goal is "get better audio into my editing software," I will simply recommend that you pick up a copy of Jay Rose's superb book Producing Great Sound for Digital Video, and follow that. This article, instead, is targeted at people who, like me, have already screwed up their project and have captured crappy audio. How do you know if you've captured crappy audio? Here are some rules of thumb: if you have thought more about lighting then about sound, your audio is inadequate. If you used an on-camera mic, your audio is inadequate. If you didn't have someone monitoring the audio during the shoot while you concentrated on the visual aspects, your audio is probably inadequate.

Don't use any audio from your camera

Getting decent audio quality is, as I observed, hard. It requires forethought. It requires some expense -- a mic and perhaps a mixer or balanced adapter. It requires effort and care during the shoot. And it requires attention during postproduction. So one of the easiest ways to deal with all of this is: punt! Plan to not use any in-camera sound at all. Making a film of your kid's soccer game? Find a piece of music you like and use that in the background. Making a short film for fun? Use silent film techniques and dialogue cards. Making a nature film? Record voice-overs later using better equipment than you have in the field. Obviously, you can't take this route for every (or even most) projects, but it's worth mentioning as a reasonable choice.

Listen Carefully

Video is easy to evaluate. Put an image up on the screen; your eyes will instantly evaluate it and you can say things like "That's too dark," "It's out of focus," "The frame is unbalanced." Audio can be trickier to tease out. Often, the idiosyncracities of an audio mix are only apparent when listening at a certain volume, or in a room with certain acoustical properties. With my present project, I knew I had problems with the audio mix, but I thought I had brought them mostly under control. When I previewed the rough cut for my grandmother, who has hearing problems, we turned the volume up substantially. All of the blips and transition problems that were barely -- or not -- perceptible when listening at a normal volume became monstrously apparent and distracting.

The lesson here is: I was editing on a computer. But the video was watched in an entertainment room. No one watches TV from 10 feet away with the volume as low as they do when working on a computer one foot away. Either turn those speakers waaaaaay up or, better yet, get a set of good headphones and always use them while editing.

Room Tone

For each scene that you edit, find a gap where no one is talking and cut it into its own short clip. This is the "room tone" for that scene. When you're done with your edit, look along your timeline and find any places where there are audio gaps (on my project, for example, I used title cards to introduce certain segments; those title cards didn't have any audio with them. The first time I watched the video at full volume the first cut to the title card, with its hard, sharp, cut to no audio made me wince). Insert room tone -- hopefully from the scene you are in -- into those gaps. You can use the crossfade audio transition effect to smooth the transition between your room tone and the 'real' soundtrack, but if you play your cards right you shouldn't even have to do that. If you feel that room tone is inappropriate for your project, consider using an audio fade-in/fade-out filter to lessen the harshness of jumps to and from black.

The ear is superb at detecting discontinuities. If you have a jump from room tone to no sound at all your viewers will hear it and be discomfitted by it, even if they aren't consciously aware of it. Know room tone. Love room tone. Use room tone.

The rule of thumb here is "even room tone that sounds bad is probably better than no room tone at all." Another rule of thumb is: when you're previewing your video, pay as much attention to the quality of transitions between scenes as you do to the content and quality of the scenes themselves.

Postprocessing

So far I've found Final Cut Pro's audio filters to be less than thrilling. They don't seem to work very well to me, and the range of control they give you is very limited. However, the filters included with Apple's bundled Soundtrack program are superb, and Soundtrack integrates very smoothly with Final Cut. For almost any dialogue-driven project where you haven't carefully mixed at capture time you can't go far wrong in putting a compressor filter into the loop. If you have lots of fricatives and plosives in the mix you can use a limiter to smooth them out. If there's a constant background noise and you are very very lucky, you might be able to use the band pass filter to reduce its impact. Play around with the filters in Soundtrack. Explore.

Listen Without Watching

When you think you're approaching the sort of sound mix you want for your project, hook your computer up to good speakers or headphones, get a notebook and a pen, play your project, and turn off the monitor. Just listen. Listen carefully. I guarantee you you'll find at least three problems that you didn't notice when you previewed your project while watching. Make notes on the problems when you find them, and go back to the drawing board to see how you can correct them.

I hope you've found this little discussion of what I learned by screwing up my project helpful. If you have tips of your own, feel free to use the comments section below to share them.

Games

2004-02-15 · by psu

I bought myself an xbox for my birthday 4 or 5 months ago. I've never been a big gamer. Over the last decade or so, I've played the odd shooter game for a while and then stopped again for years at a time. But, I heard that Half-life 2 was going to be coming out soon, and since I don't own a PC, I figured an xbox would be a cheaper way to get that game.

I was also interested in the xbox since a lot of my friends had them, and I had seen at least one game that interested me a lot: Project Gotham.

So I bought the box, a cheap copy of Gotham, and borrowed a few other games. For the first few months, I would play Gotham once in a while, but nothing serious.

Then a BAD THING happened. Actually, 3 bad things.

  1. Project Gotham 2

  2. Xbox Live

  3. Counterstrike.

Now I feel that a wierd shift has happened in my brain. Some kind of chemical imbalance. I find myself scanning game review sites. I bought not one, but TWO football simulation games, and I'm not even much of a football fan (in my defense, my copy of Madden 2003 crashes all the time, so I had to get something else).

Anyway. Project Gotham 2 is just an excellent version 2 of perhaps the best Xbox game that there is. The game-play and the structure of the "Kudos world series" is nearly perfect. They've made the game challenging, but not impossible for even feeble old non-gamers like me to make it to the end and drive at least some of the coolest cars.

And, the Live aspect is super even if you don't want to actually race live against your buddies. This is because there is a global scoreboard for all the races that is an endless source of obsessive competition.

Counterstrike is the sort of first person shooter that had traditionally been my favorite kind of game. Not much back story, lots of guns, and short rounds that you can start and then quit 15 minutes at a time. Perfect. But, I never thought I'd play this kind of thing on the xbox because of "the controller problem". Well, I still have controller problems (the two sticks don't seem to allow me to whip around 180 degrees as fast as the mouse), but the game is great anyway, especially since I never played it on the PC.

So, in summary, the first hit wasn't free, but I somehow got myself hooked on the crack anyway. Someone must pay.

Perforce SCM on OS X

2004-02-19 · by peterb

At the behest of one of the commentators here, I decided to try to download and install Perforce on my OS X laptop and see how the experience compares to installing it on FreeBSD or Windows. It worked fine for me, but I can understand how one would find the experience confusing, particularly if you're not familiar with the unix side of the world. Here's some notes on the experience.

I have a few advantages over your novice user, in that I've been using Perforce for about four years, and so already understand the model it uses, and why it is better than CVS -- how the repository stores data, what the relationship between a client, a branch, and the repository is -- so I deliberately tried to forget as much as I could and approach this with a fresh mind. I tried to follow the instructions as written, rather than filling in the blanks with things I've learned over the years.

Finding the packages themselves was no problem; Perforce has a page for Mac downloads, and there is client, server, and the visual client software available, along with some extra Macintosh-specific installation notes.

Installing the server was fairly easy; per the install notes I used the Darwin p4d software installation. I then became root via 'sudo', copied the p4d to /usr/local/bin, and did a "chmod a+x /usr/local/bin/p4d". /usr/local/bin is already in my path, so I didn't have to worry about that. But to make a long story short, I agree with reader David Trevas about this point -- it really wouldn't have killed Perforce to have provided a 5 line shell script to do this busywork for me.

Likewise, I installed the client and set up my P4PORT environment variable correctly, but then I already knew how to do that. The installation notes are indeed a bit scatterbrained about this. Hey, Perforce, you're already printing a 3-line error message when my P4PORT is set wrong -- instead of just saying "check $P4PORT", why not spend the extra 25 characters or so to give an example of how to set it to something well formed? Or point to a URL that explains it?

In the release notes, I saw a disclaimer that, at first, I simply didn't believe: "IMPORTANT: The Perforce server on Darwin is case-insensitive, unlike Perforce servers on other UNIX platforms." Ouch. "That can't be right, I thought." I was all ready to be angry at Perforce for being stupid, when I decided to do a little experimenting, and learned Today's Fun Fact: HFS+ is a case insensitive filesystem. This is so mind-numbingly stupid that I'm actually kind of mad at Apple about it, although I guess it's a well known bug^H^H^H"feature" of HFS+. Apparently the bug is fixed in 10.3 Server, which provides an option to make the filesystem not suck so much. So my formal recommendation would have to be "Don't run p4d on 10.2 or earlier, and if you run it on 10.3, turn on the 'make the filesystem not suck' bit (you can't actually just twiddle a bit; you have to newfs the filesystem as case-sensitive HFS. That, in turn, will probably cause a bunch of your other applications to break).

This is actually going to present a problem to anyone using the p4 client -- or, in fact, any other version control system -- which has files in a directory with filenames that are identical apart from case. In my quick tests, the behavior can be described as "last sync wins" -- if you have two files, "test.txt" and "TEST.TXT", and you sync, whichever is synced last overwrites the other. If you sync a deletion of TEST.TXT, test.txt gets deleted. Sloppy, Apple, really sloppy. OK, I know the filesystem is just doing what it's specced to do -- but what it is specced to do is dumb. For what it's worth, Windows/NTFS seems to have the same behavior. I think it's dumb there, too.

Apart from the case problems, which will afflict any SCM system on this platform, the p4 client worked as expected -- I was able to connect to both the p4d I just started up on my Powerbook, and also to the Perforce server at work. I tried their visual client "p4v", but didn't love it overmuch -- right off the bat it feels like it's missing important functionality. One major point of a visual client is to make things easier for newcomers, it seems to me, and since p4v won't even let you create a client workspace from the login screen, it seems kind of pointless to me. Perhaps it gets "better" once you're used to it, but I quickly reverted to just using the command line client. In p4v's favor, it comes in a .sit file and is a clickable OS X app, suitable for installation in your Applications folder. Hopefully future revisions will make it a bit more fully-featured

In summary: Perforce++ for having a readily available OS X client. Perforce++ for providing a powerful and reliable SCM system. And Perforce-- for not making their installation procedures as easy as they should be.

For another perspective from someone actually using Perforce on the Mac for Real Work, read Chris Hanson's journal (the 3:19 pm entry).

I use Perforce day in and day out, but in a nearly pure Unix environment. I'd be interested in feedback from those of you who run p4 clients on MacOS regularly, and I'm very interested to know if there are any of you out there using MacOS as a p4 server. Please share your experience in the comments section below, if you would.

Tigons and Ligers and Bears, oh my!

2004-02-20 · by peterb

I knew about hinnies and mules, of course, but in the "everyone else probably already knew this but I just found out" department, today I learned that it is possible to crossbreed lions and tigers, creating ligers and tigons.

I don't know why this comes as a surprise to me. I knew that you could crossbreed an asian leopard cat and felis sylvestris catus and end up with a bengal cat, but I never envisioned that two cats as different as lions and tigers could crossbreed. I think they look amazingly cool, but I bet the mating procedure is fraught with peril.

Intriguingly, ligers and tigons (a liger has a male lion as a parent, and tigon has a male tiger as a parent) have very different characteristics, with ligers being prone to gigantism and tigons being prone to dwarfism.

Other interesting hybrids include breeding a serval to a caracal, a sheep to a goat, and a zebra to everything on the planet

Cats sleeping with dogs! Kids playing loud rock and roll music! WHERE IS IT ALL GOING TO END?

Ceci n'est pas un manifesto

2004-02-21 · by peterb

It's time to make what, I hope, will be the only self-referential post on this site. It's time to specify the rules of what I'm going to be writing about here

I probably shouldn't do this at all, since it intrinsically violates some of the very rules I'm going to lay down, but I feel like I have a few things to get out of my system. If I can get those things out on paper now, once and for all, I will have a document that I can refer to later when I have the urge to publish something stupid. I will read that document -- this document -- and say "No. Don't do that. That violates the rules."

Final Cut Pro: Why Log Clips?

2004-02-23 · by peterb

Filmmaking is a creative process. One of the exciting things about editing on a computer rather than with traditional video or film editing machines is that we are free to try new techniques in a comparatively risk-free way. Because of this freedom, I personally found it a bit jarring that Final Cut tries, in subtle ways, to channel the user into doing what I considered to be annoying bookkeeping when capturing video from tape. Specifically, Final Cut tries to encourage you to log your clips rather than just capturing them.

It took me a month and a large project to be come face to face with the problems that you invite when you don't log your clips. Now, I understand why the authors of Final Cut push us this way, and I'm a believer. Except for the most trivial of projects, always log your clips. Let's have a brief discussion of what it means to log clips, what the process is for doing it, and most importantly, why you should log clips.

Capture Techniques

A clip is the basic unit of video (and, if applicable, audio) in Final Cut. Clips can be divided into subclips or built up into sequences. Final Cut offers three ways to capture clips: "capture now," "capture clip," and "batch capture."

Capture now is the simplest of the three. Users migrating to FCP from iMovie or Final Cut Express 2 often want to use this mode, because it seems the most analogous to the capture workflow in those tools. Click the "capture now" button, hit "play" on your camcorder or VTR, and Final Cut will begin capturing the video until you hit the escape key, up to a maximum of 30 minutes of video. Capture clip involves logging a single clip, and batch capture involves logging a bunch of clips and then telling FCP "Go capture these clips now." To log a clip, you tell FCP at a minimum the name of the tape or reel the clips are on and the starting and ending timecode of each clip. You can optionally provide scene or take names; if you don't provide them, FCP will pick names for you, along the lines of "clip-1", "clip-2", etc.

Why Should I Log?

So why not just use "capture now" for everything? If I'm willing to live with the 30-minute-per-chunk limitation, isn't it less work than doing all this logging stuff?

Well, no. If you use "capture now," you are limiting your ability to use some of Final Cut's most powerful features. The 30 minute limit is just the first subtle pressure FCP puts on you to avoid the use of capture now. There are other pressures, too: unlike iMovie and FCE 2, FCP won't do the magic "clip separation" where it detects where you paused and unpaused the video camera and splits those clips into separate subclips for you. (Reader Bj¯rn Hansen correctly points out that you can use the "DV Start/Stop Detect" function in the "Mark" menu to do this splitting after the fact, and then make your subclips into independent master clips to approximate the FCE/iMovie experience. I personally have had issues with master/affiliate clips where FCP behaves unintuitively -- for example, you delete a subclip or a 'duplicated master,' and a whole bunch of media that you didn't expect to go offline disappears, so I avoid this technique).

When you use "capture now," you end up with one big glob of video and audio data, and no metadata other than what you add after the fact (in the initial revision of this article, I claimed that this made it impossible to work in OfflineRT mode, but reader Tom Wolsky pointed out that I am mistaken). The lack of metadata is a problem in larger projects: I have an interview project which spans 5 DV tapes. All the interviews are with one subject. Frankly, I have no idea which segments of the interview are on which tape, other than through logging. Had I used "capture now" instead of logging the clips, when I wanted to reconnect media (either for offlineRT work or because I deleted media to conserve disk space), I would have to manually start looking at all the tapes to figure out which one I needed before recapturing. Sure, I could keep a page of copious notes attached to every tape, but avoiding that sort of drudge work is why I'm using a computer. If I log my clips, when I need to recapture, FCP prompts me to insert tape "interview-daytime-4", I find my clearly labeled tape on the shelf, and I'm done. I think that's worth something. "Capture now" is a workable solution if you always know exactly what scenes are on what tapes. I don't; I prefer to let the database in Final Cut track that information for me.

Tom Wolsky still thinks I am being too hard on "capture now," and he has written books about Final Cut Pro, so you should probably listen to him, and not me. Tom's point is that even if you use "capture now," you are still (morally) obligated to actually log information about reels, etc, and so really it's no different than using "capture clip" or batch capture. I both agree and disagree with Tom -- I agree that if you log carefully, the use of "capture now" is fine. My concern is that that path makes it too easy to say "Well, I'll capture now and then log later" and then you skip the log later part, and now you're in a world of hurt. I think this is especially true for people coming to FCP from the iMovie world, who are less likely to understand why one should log clips carefully. So my personal rule is to log them beforehand.

So this is one reason we log clips: Our tapes have timecode, the timecode never changes, so if we tell Final Cut what clips a project contains in terms of timecode and tape rather than in terms of "grab this clip", we can recover. No matter what goes wrong, no matter how badly we screw a project up, at least if we have a list of logged clips and an original tape, given a backup of an edit list file that takes up just a few kilobytes, we can recover a lot of our work.

Another reason we log clips is it allows us to offline clips with impunity. If we are running low on disk space or memory, we can edit a project in OfflineRT mode at a lower resolution and increase the responsiveness of our machines. Or we can simply chose "make offline" and delete clips that we're not actually using at the moment, knowing that when we want to work with them later we can just slap the tape in the camcorder, hit "reconnect media," and go get a cup of coffee while FCP does the drudge work for us.

One final reason I want to suggest is that logging clips can actually help the creative process by giving you what amounts to a pre-edit winnowing. If you're anything like me, you shoot too much material. Not being Orson Welles, I very often shoot from the hip. Sometimes I go into a project not having a plan, but just say to myself "well, I'll shoot way too much and then edit it down later." Logging your clips gives you a chance to look at your work in raw form and make the easy choices before devoting time and disk space to capturing it.

Typically, if I'm capturing from a 60 minute tape (assuming it's on a project I haven't organized carefully beforehand -- there are of course exceptions), I'll typically find only about 20 minutes of material worthy of actually capturing. Those 20 minutes get captured. I will also certainly winnow further while editing online, of course, but that first step gets a huge amount of material out of my way. That frees me up to look more closely at the material that was actually worth working on without getting distracted by footage that I knew was garbage to begin with.

How to Log Clips

Everyone has their own workflow for logging clips. I'll share mine here. Generally, I'll sit down with the camcorder or a monitor and a pad of paper and a pen. I generally don't do this first phase at the computer, because otherwise I get tempted into making edits and moving too fast. Also, my tiny simian brain is easily distracted by shiny things, and the Final Cut Pro GUI is very shiny. By working with just the video and a piece of paper, I'm able to focus all my attention on the content. I'll play the tape and start taking notes on what timecodes correspond to logical clips in my mind. It's fine to be approximate here - rounding to the nearest second or two will be fine.

When I'm done watching the tape, I have a handwritten list of timecodes and names of clips. I then take those, choose "Log and capture" from the file menu, and start logging the clips. I'll generally log even the clips I know I won't capture, just so that I have the record preserved.. Some people might find the first 'offline' viewing to be intolerable; I find it helps keep me focused on the content and not the UI of my editing program. It's entirely possible to do your first cut online and log clips directly into FCP as you see them. Some of the URLs in that follow this article give a good explanation of how to do this.

Last Words

Now you've logged your clips, captured what you want, and you're ready to edit, right? Wrong! There's one more thing you should do:

Pick up your carefully labeled tape, flip the write-protect tab to 'read-only', and put the tape away. Don't use it again. Once you've logged clips from a tape never write to it again. All it takes it one slip of the finger to turn your carefully collected logging data into a worthless pile of junk. Sure, it means you have to buy more tapes. A tape costs $5. Your time is worth much more than the cost of a tape. Put the tape away.

And, lastly, don't forget to back up your project files frequently.

I hope you've found this article useful. When I first started using Final Cut, I found lots of material explaining how to log my clips, but not really any in-depth explanation of why I would want to do so. If you've found this article to be useful, feel free to let me know. Likewise, if you see any errors or inadequacies within, I'd like to hear from you so I can correct them.

Additional Resources

"The Bomb Has Been Planted"

2004-02-25 · by peterb

My friend Jon plays board games. Of the hundreds of games he plays, there is one -- Advanced Squad Leader -- that has the distinction of simply being referred to as the game. For many years the first person shooter Counterstrike was my the game. It has recently been re-released for the Xbox and I've been playing it lately. It's rapidly becoming the game once again.

Counterstrike is a team-based first person shooter: "terrorists" versus "counterterrorists." Cops and robbers, with objectives. In any given mission, either the terrorists want to blow up some site and the CTs want to prevent them, or the terrorists are trying to hold hostages and the CTs are trying to rescue them. The game was made before 9/11, so "take a bunch of hostages and then kill them, along with yourself," didn't make it into the mission objectives list. And in perhaps the only nod to how the world has changed, the "terrorists have taken over a 747" map is not included in the game. I can't say I blame them for that particular change.

"Enemy Spotted"

Desert EagleCounterstrike was revolutionary when it was released. Many of the innovations it introduced (or at least popularized) have since rippled through to other games in the genre, such that it's easy to forget how stale and rigid the FPS genre was at the time; perhaps the only game that comes close to being as innovative as Counterstrike was the Team Fortress mod, albeit its creative impulse moved in a different direction.

What are the attributes that make Counterstrike what it is?

"Hold This Position"

When I heard the game was being released on the Xbox, I rolled my eyes and dismissively waved my paw. Shooters are meant to play with a keyboard and mouse -- there's no way that using two joysticks can even come close to the precision one gets with a well-tuned mouse. I eventually caved in and picked it up because a number of my friends were playing every night, and I wanted to play with that group.

I was right: it's nothing like playing with a mouse. It's completely different. And, to be perfectly honest, it ain't that bad.

It is different. All of my elite keyboard and mouse based skills are meaningless here, of course. The game has a slightly slower pace than on the PC -- aiming takes a bit longer, and it's no longer possible to just whip the mouse around and change directions in an instant (there's actually a control to do exactly that, but it is practically unusable, along with the 'move quietly' control, which is currently my biggest gripe with the game.) Weapon purchasing and selection is easy and intuitive. The core of the game is exactly the same as the Windows version.

One thing that goes a long, long way towards making up for the loss of the mouse is the consistency of the experience. Yes, it's a bit of a burn that I can't aim as well as I used to, but I know that everyone is using the same controller -- everyone shares that handicap. Since the game is going through the Xbox Live service, my confidence that the people I'm playing with aren't cheating is extremely high (except perhaps for this guy). And everyone has headsets. Oh, the joy of the headset.

Yeah, yeah, I know. "You could buy a headset for your PC!" But you know what? I didn't. Neither did anyone else. Everyone using Xbox Live, for the most part, has the headset, and it brings a new dimension to the game. There's something gloriously ominous about hearing someone on your squad say "Uh oh, they're in the--" and then break off as he is brutally cut down in a hail of gunfire.

AK-47You can play team vs. team, of course, but the game ships with the ability to have you battle against "bots," or computer controlled opponents. The AI on the bots is pretty good on the higher levels; they seem to know to work as a team. In other words, If we're playing 2 humans against 2 bots, the humans almost always win even against the best bots. If we're playing 8 humans against 8 bots, the bots routinely clean our clocks. They have the basics of Counterstrike-specific tactics down, too -- they use grenades intelligently, will camp near the bomb after they have set it, and will go back to the hostage rescue point to ambush you if the CTs penetrate their defenses on the way in. I like the humans-vs-bots mode because, again, it introduces an innovative new feel to the game; an aggressive, violent, player vs. player game morphs into a somehow more cooperative experience. I don't know why that is -- maybe it's all in my head -- but that's how it feels to me.

My criticisms of the game are few and far between. Probably the most annoying aspect is that your options for configuring scenario selection are fairly primitive; you've basically got a choice between "randomly choose between all available maps" or "keep playing this map over and over." Load times between maps are higher than I'd like, but that was true in the Windows version of the game as well. Some of the best maps -- notably the "Assault" map -- are missing in the Xbox version; that's compensated somewhat by the presence of some new, superb Xbox-only maps.

If you have an Xbox and you like (online) first-person shooters, you should get Counterstrike.

Additional Resources

Formula 1 2004 Season Preview

2004-02-26 · by peterb

Formula 1 is not a sport in decline; it's actually in a full-fledged plummet. Addicted to tobacco money, scouting race locations in such dynamic and interesting places as Bahrain and Hyderabad, trying to be a fan of Formula 1 nowadays is like trying to give emotional support to your crack-addicted second cousin who is constantly scaring young girls in the supermarket parking lot but somehow still manages to think that they're just intimidated by his great looks.

What do we have to look forward to this year? Fewer European races. More stupid rules. Drivers that can't wait to escape from the teams they are driving for. Where to begin?

Rules Changes

Friday qualifying is gone; now there are two sessions of (single-lap) qualifying on Saturday. I'm leading with this item as it's the only positive development. Unlike everyone else in the rest of the world, I actually like the single-lap qualifying. It adds some drama to know that it only takes one mistake to cost a driver the pole.

Rear wings can now only sport a maximum of three elements, in an effort to reduce the aerodynamic grip on the cars. This makes the cars go slower through the corners, which is a key element of the FIA's "make the race as boring as possible" master plan.

One rule that some commentators think will help the slower teams is the "one engine rule": if a team changes their engine between qualifying and the race, they will drop 10 places on the starting grid. The theory is: the Minardi team is always last, therefore they can change engines without losing any places, and will get a reliability advantage that will help them do better. The problem, of course, is that in racing "reliably slow" is not really much better than "unreliably fast" for values of "unreliable" under "guaranteed to explode in flame"

Drivers

Michael SchumacherWanna-be footballer and 6 time world champion Michael Schumacher, Inc, is still the lead driver for Ferrari, and is scheduled to win the championship once again. Don't look for any surprises here. About once a month throughout the season various F1 online magazines will post articles with headlines asking "Can Anyone Beat Schumi?" At the risk of spoiling the season, I can reveal that the answer to that question is "No." At times, people will propose various theories as to how and why Michael might manage to lose. Perhaps Bridgestone's tires will fail to be competetive with Michelin. Fernando Alonso will develop further and be able to challenge Schumacher in every race. A meteor will fall from the sky and annihilate the Ferrari paddock. None of these things will happen. Ferrari will dominate again, and despite what many people wish, he's not about to retire.

Juan Pablo MontoyaNow. Juan Pablo Montoya is still driving for Williams/BMW. He doesn't want to drive for Williams, and Williams doesn't want him to be driving for them; McLaren/Mercedes has offered him a lot of money to drive for them, and he wants it, but Sir Frank Williams (who once put square tires on his 1988 F1 car because he heard a rumor that McLaren was developing Square Tire Technology), has decided that he has to hold on to the driver he doesn't want because someone else wants him. Until next year. With me so far? Williams instead wants Ralf Schumacher to be their main driver, except they don't want to pay him what he wants, and so he doesn't want to drive for Williams either. My understanding is that Williams/BMW's current plan is to actually detonate explosives under their cars at the start of the first race this year, killing both Juan Pablo and Ralf. They will then be able to complete the rest of the season with robotic drivers.

McLaren/Mercedes, meanwhile has issued a press release saying that until Montoya arrives in 2005, their drivers will be young Finn sensation Kimi Raikkonnen and "that other guy whose name we can never remember. The Scottish guy. You know. With the chin."

There are a few drivers that have been 'promoted' from Formula 3000 this year, but since none of them is my personal favorite, American Townsend Bell, I will snub them by not discussing them here. Fear my awesome power.

Tracks

Bahrain paid Bernie Ecclestone a kerjillion dollars to arrange for a race there, as did China. F1 is continuing to flee Europe as various European countries outlaw tobacco advertising. Really, this is a losing proposition. While people in Bahrain are enthused about this, it marks yet another step away from the traditional, sprawling Grand Prixs of Monaco, Nurburgring, and Spa towards the modern soulless closed-track in the Malaysia spirit. Eventually, we'll end up only having races in Chad, Peru, and Micronesia. F1 needs to kick the tobacco habit: it's not helping the sport in the eyes of fans, although I guess it is helping pay for those extravagant garages. Bahrain and China take the place of France (which is scrambling to slip onto the schedule anyway, although they probably won't manage to raise the money) and Canada, always one of my favorite races. Thanks, Bernie. You're a real mensch.

Conclusion

This would be a good year to start following the WRC World Rally Championship instead of Formula 1.

Additional Resources

I find the following resources useful when looking for F1 news:

What Programming Language?

2004-02-27 · by peterb

I hear this question a lot, typically from kids who have just discovered that there's more to a computer than a web browser, and who are curious about where to go for here. The people who ask this question typically don't have any specific project in mind; if they did, it would be a lot easier to answer them. Instead, they're really saying "I don't know much about programming, but I think it might be kind of fun. Where's the best place to start?"

An experienced programmer on a dark day might answer the question "What programming language should I learn?" with "None. Learn to play a musical instrument instead." Today is not a dark day, however, and I'll do my best to answer it.

The person I'm addressing this article to isn't the person that has as their objective "I want to write a Windows application" or "I want to write a GUI for Bittorrent on Linux" or "I want to write a little tool that will run on my Mac to talk to iTunes." The target of this article is someone who has a general desire to become a software developer but doesn't yet understand how to get there.

So in that context, the high level, vaguely accurate answer to the question "What programming language should I learn?" is "It really doesn't matter." Partially this is because the question is ill-formed. The specific language one uses is mostly orthogonal to developing the skills one needs to be a good software developer. Let's look at what those skills are, first, and then later we can come back to the question and make some actual recommendations, rather than just rejecting the question.

High-Level Skills

A developer needs to be able to describe a problem to be solved. She needs to be able to break the problem down into smaller, easier problems. She needs to be able to describe a set of conditions that constitute solving the problem. She needs to be able to think of tests that determine whether a given program or part of a program are correct.

Those are the sorts of skills every good developer has regardless of whether they're writing code for themselves or for the marketplace. If a developer wants to work on a project with other people, be it open source or commercial, she needs additional skills. She needs to know how to find and read documentation. She will need to know how to use an Applications Programming Interface (API) that someone else has provided. She will need to be able to know when to use an already-existing API ("almost always") versus developing a new API ("almost never"). She will need the discipline to not be constantly reinventing the wheel. She will need to know how to write documentation. She will need to understand what makes code maintainable (correct and adequate documentation, proper use of namespaces, consistent formatting, useful comments), and to actually use that knowledge when she writes code.

All of those skills apply no matter what your weapon of choice is in terms of language.

Classifying Languages

There are three rough categories of languages of interest to the modern programmer: imperative languages (sometimes you'll hear these described as procedural) such as C, C++, Java, Pascal, and Modula-3. Imperative languages are about providing a sequence of commands for the computer to execute. In functional languages such as ML, Lisp, and Scheme programs aren't so much executed as they are mathematically evaluated , as with the lambda calculus. And scripting languages such as Perl, Python, and Tcl which allow for rapid prototyping of simple tasks. Note: yes, I understand that there's no academic reason to separate scripting languages from their imperative compiled brethren, but there are practical reasons which I'll discuss later.

When programming almost any (modern, useful) language, you're going to find yourself using a variety of directives. Some will be part of the core language specification: in C, integer arithmetic and assignment will be the same on every platform. Others will be part of a library that is likely to exist on any platform your program runs on (eg, stdio in C). Lastly, there are APIs which are platform-specific; a C library routine to open a dialogue box on a Win32 OS would be an example of this.

Specific Cross-Language Skills

Learning to program skillfully is something that comes only with great time and effort. There are plenty of programs that will compile just fine and run correctly that can still be called "bad programs," in the sense that when you look at the source, it is clear that the author doesn't have a grasp on some fundamental concept. The three little pigs built houses of straw, sticks, and brick. All of them served just fine as shelter, but only the brick house was strong enough to withstand the wolf. Your goal should be to not just learn how to make your programs run, but how to be confident in their correctness, robustness, and performance, before you've written a single line of code. To achieve that state, which may seem like a paradox, you need to understand the concepts underlying the craft of programming.

A shorter way of saying this is: don't worry about learning the syntax of a language. Don't concentrate on it. Don't spend time worrying about it. Learning where the semicolons or parentheses go will come by itself, as you write code and go through compile-run-test cycles. Look that stuff up when you need to, but understand that "learning what a constructor in Java looks like" is, in the long term not a valuable thing to concentrate on. Learning what a constructor is and what it does is a valuable thing to concentrate on.

So that's what you shouldn't focus on: syntax. What should you focus on? Here, in a vague sort of didactic order, are concepts that I expect a skilled programmer to understand regardless of the language they are using -- even if the language they are using at the moment doesn't actually support the item in question.

Any one programming language you choose, unless you're really going out of your way to be obscure (e.g. Prolog), should get you through at least half of that list. Then you can decide whether to stick with the language you started with for the rest of the list, or start on a new one to fill in the gaps.

Practical Considerations

Programming is fundamentally a "learn by doing" activity, so your language choices are somewhat constrained by the need to use a language that can actually run on your operating system of choice. This still leaves you with a fairly wide set of options.

Language availability isn't the only practical consideration. If applicable, is there a debugger for the language you want to use? What set of libraries will you be using? How much documentation is available for the language you want to learn? Is there an active community you can turn to for help?

Enough Already. Just Tell Me What to Learn!

OK. I've tried to make the point here that whatever languages you decide to learn, you should be able to develop your skills over a period of years such that when you decide to learn a new language, it will just be a trivial matter of absorbing the new language's syntax. However, in the interests perhaps of sparking debate, I'll give my own personal opinion on teaching languages. Nothing in this section should be construed to mean that I'm saying that languages other than the ones I'm recommending aren't any good (except Modula-3. Modula-3 isn't any good. I'm saying that.)

First, learn a compiled imperative language. I very much like Java as a teaching language. I have a few reasons for liking Java. In addition to being somewhat cross-platform (cue mocking laughter), it is actually a fairly elegant language with a robust, extensive, powerful and most importantly for the novice, well-documented set of APIs. One of the things I like about Java as a teaching language is that it's always very clear, because of the namespace design, when you're using a "built in" command versus when you are calling some library API; I've seen novices using C and C++ get confused when the distinction wasn't as clear to them. There are many resources to help the novice Java programmer get off the ground. A student learning Java can learn about Object Oriented programming concepts, threads, events, dynamic allocation and garbage collection, advanced data structures, and most of the items on my list above. The fact that Java runs in a virtual machine is both a benefit and a drawback -- it will probably slow your development of understanding how these high level data structures map to the architecture of the machine you're on, but you can always go back and learn C later. Also, the syntax of Java is simple enough that it won't pollute you or ruin you for other languages (the way, say, Objective C would).

And in the interests of disclosing any bias on my part: I don't program in Java on a day to day basis. My day job is all C, all the time.

Next, learn a functional language. Lately I've been toying around with OCaml and ML, and I like them, but really its hard to go wrong here. Lisp, Scheme, ML -- these are all fine choices. I haven't examined it yet myself, but I've been told that Microsoft Research has a neat language called F# which is basically a version of OCaml that can call .NET library functions. That's pretty tempting, because it has such an aura of the forbidden about it -- take a pristine, educational, not-very-useful-in-practice language and turn it into something that can be used to develop Windows applications. Mmmmmmmmmmmmm, forbidden transgressive language.

Uh, what? What was I saying? Um, yeah, F#. Very bad. Don't use that! It's morally wrong. Learn Standard ML. Yeah.

Lastly, learn an interpreted scripting language of some sort. I like Perl, but Python has a big following, too. People will tell you that scripting languages are just as powerful as compiled languages. They're right. But it's been my personal experience that because of the environment scripting languages grow up in ("Oh my gosh, I have to change all occurrences of this string in every file on the server within 10 minutes, or I'll be fired") the idioms in common usage aren't as carefully thought out. Shortcuts are taken. Error cases are punted. Sloppiness is rampant. I agree fully that this is more of a cultural matter than anything intrinsic to the design of a language, but I can't ignore the reality, and that's how I see it.

If you're an experienced developer and you'd like to chime on this topic, please feel free to comment below. The only thing I ask is that you keep in mind that the topic is languages for learning the craft of programming, not languages for best accomplishing a specific task. Thanks.

Additional Resources

Location, Location, Location!

2004-02-29 · by peterb

This is the first in a series of articles examining videogames and what makes them fun.

I enjoy driving games, all kinds of driving games. Driving games feed into my love of auto racing, and of cars, and put an entire class of vehicles that I can't afford in real life into my hands. So I tend to play them a lot. One class of games is the "tune up" game: you don't just acquire cars, but actually have to go buy aftermarket parts and adjust the shocks and choose the right tires, etc., to get your car in shape to win races. Two examples of these are Gran Turismo 3 for the Playstation 2 and Sega GT 2002 for the Xbox.

From a pure driving perspective, Sega GT is the better game. The way the cars handle is more realistic; the change in the way the cars move when you tune them feels more correct. And the graphics are better, too. So are the controls. Yet every time I want to play a "tune up" game, I reach for Gran Turismo 3. Every single time. Sega GT, which delivers a "better" driving experience, sits on my shelf, unplayed. Why?

Because with Gran Turismo, I can drive at Laguna Seca. I can drive -- virtually -- around a real space, a space that existed in my head before I bought the game.

In other words, a sense of place can be an important element of the enjoyment of a game. For some of us -- and I'm one of these people -- it's not only important, it's crucial. Turning again to Sega GT, the game is full of a number of interesting, cleverly designed, well-balanced tracks that allow for great racing. But if you make me choose between "drive around a perfect race course that seems to be placed in a generic-yet-unnamed European city" and "drive around a deeply flawed race course that takes place in Rome," I'm going to choose Rome every time. Look, there's the Forum. There's the Colosseum. There's the Baths of Caracalla.

Sydney - the real thingMicrosoft Games learned this lesson well; Project Gotham Racing took place in New York, Tokyo, London, and San Francisco. Project Gotham Racing 2 -- which is, for my money, simply the best pure street racing game ever made -- takes place in a raft of other cities, including the iconic Washington, DC, speedy Stockholm, atmospheric Barcelona, and the most absolutely perfect virtual realization of Florence possible, among others. I usually like the courses that take place in cities I've been in; I don't think that's an accident. (Dear Microsoft: really, Pittsburgh would be perfect for PGR3 -- come visit!)

Sydney - PGR2For me, this goes beyond the mere representation of a city, and even gets into naming. If Sega GT had a Rome track which had the Colosseum, and the Forum, and all the streets I've driven, and street vendors selling chestnuts on wet March days, and little enoteche where you could get a great wine for a few euros that even if you can find it when you get back Stateside still won't taste as good, if Sega GT had that track and then called it EUROPE 03 instead of "Rome," I wouldn't like it, in the same way that I don't like it in GTA3 how they make up names for the cars like "Inferno" instead of having a Ferrari. There's a semiotic issue here, somewhere. At the very least, there's an issue in my head, but I don't think I'm alone in this.

The tricky thing is that this issue of labeling, of naming, of mapping a videogame model into the player's model of a real-world space, has nothing to do with games qua games. Any game has somewhere deep beneath it a set of abstract rules that describe it; all racing videogames are fundamentally the same when stripped of details: move your piece in a circle, and finish first. But those details, location first and foremost among them, are what give games the element of fantasy, narrative, and drama that separate them from mere mental and physical exercise. The location doesn't even have to be a literal real-world location. Very little separates Day of Defeat from most other first person shooters except for the fact that most of us have seen the first battle scenes in Saving Private Ryan, and so when we storm the beach in Normandy in the game it points to our memory map of that location, which was in turn given to us by the movie, which pointed to a place that, in some sense, doesn't exist any more

I was talking to Andrew Plotkin about "platform" games (eg, the Mario games) the other day, and I mentioned that my new technique for dealing with how stale the genre has become is that I'll play a platformer until I reach the first "lava level." "As soon as I reach the lava level, I know that the designers are completely out of ideas, and there won't be anything else interesting in the game." He told me that his understanding was that as a general rule, the plot for these games is only written long after development has begun, so it's standard operating procedure for early versions to incorporate a lava level, a water level, etc. If true, this is one example of what separates videogames, as a form of mass entertainment, from movies. Filmmakers -- well, successful ones, anyway -- understand that the location of a movie can be as important as the main character.

Only when it's unheard of for a video game to be designed without its location and mise-en-scene being one of the first things considered, rather than one of the last, will it even begin to make sense to talk about the videogame medium being as mature, artistically, as cinema.

Additional Resources

If you liked this article, you might be interested in some of these links:

There and Back Again

2004-03-01 · by peterb

This is the second in a series of articles investigating the question "What makes videogames fun?" The first article in the series can be found here

In my last article I talked about the importance of location and how the use of a model which points back to the real world can be compelling in and of itself. This is only half the story, though. Not every game can take place in Times Square, nor should every game. It's (arguably) unfair to make a space opera or fantasy story take place in Dayton, Ohio. The question then is: if you are describing a space that doesn't signify a real-world space, how do you make the player care? How do you increase the power of the virtual space you've created so that, when she is done playing your game, the player thinks of it, on some level, as a "real" place? In this article, I'm going to discuss three techniques: familiarity and reuse, signifiers such as maps and text, and geometric and logical consistency.

Familiarity and Reuse

The least trustworthy but easiest technique in our arsenal is reuse: keep the player in a certain portion of your virtual space until they are acclimated to it and begin to identify with it. It is the easiest because it requires the least amount of work to implement; it is the least trustworthy because doing this may not fit the needs of a game's narrative, and if done poorly may cause the player to rebel against monotonous repetition.

There are two variants of reuse commonly deployed: "hub and spoke," which is common in platform games, and "safe house," which is common in CRPGs. A given location may be both a "hub" and a "safe house" at the same time. The difference between the two is largely one of emotional perception: a hub is a place which one transits to reach new, more interesting places. A safe house is a place one goes to be protected from the ravages of the world. Grandma's house in Zelda: The Wind Waker is a safe house. The hideout in Grand Theft Auto 3 is a safe house, and the entire first island on Liberty City is made familiar by preventing the player from leaving it for a time (that also serves as a gate, but that's the subject of a later article). The witch's castle in Banjo Kazooie is sprinkled with hub areas that the player must cross and re-cross. The cities in Diablo II are both hubs and safe houses.

A safe house -- or a series of them, if need be -- can usually be justified in just about any narrative without breaking mimesis. Players will naturally familiarize themselves with the area around safe houses unless you go out of your way to make them extra-boring. Hubs are trickier. They're frequently used as a "magician's choice" by lazy game designers who aren't very good magicians. Consequently, a carelessly designed hub will be seen as a mere distraction and as a connection to the next "good part." When players can see the wires the result is usually boredom. If the hub serves no narrative purpose, get rid of it; if you want to force the player to go someplace else next, then just really force them ("Poof! You're in Emerald City now"), and get it over with. Forcing the player to trudge across your virtual city for no narrative reason will quickly earn you their contempt.

If you provide good reasons for the player to trudge across your virtual city, it will not be a trudge. More on that below.

Internal Signifiers

The player is part of your narrative. For sufficiently advanced games, you may be able to use signifiers to help build the player's map of your space before having to actually depict that space. By signifiers we mean text, maps, roadsigns, graffiti, conversations with other characters, or any technique that allows you to suggest the existence of part of your virtual world to a player before they actually get there.

At its most basic, this can be used to prime the player not only with a knowledge of geography, but of her objectives, as well. "Oh!" said the Princess, "recently the forest to the east has been overrun with wolves!" Right, thinks the player. East, forest, wolves. Got it. With one line you've advanced your narrative and filled in the topology of your insipid little game world somewhat.

Map from Silent Hill 2Signifiers do not have to be so straightforward, though. They are a mechanism to manage expectations on the part of the player, which also means they can be used to subvert expectations as well. The Silent Hill games do this magnificently. At various points in the game, players can obtain maps of the areas they were in. The maps are rough sketches, plans, nothing more -- gas station maps, fire escape route diagrams of apartment buildings, and the like. The player might read the map and say "Oh, I can travel west on King Avenue here and reach the park." The protagonist begins heading west and encounters a water main break -- the road is closed. When he discovers this, the protagonist scribbles a red line on the map across King Avenue -- can't go that way! As clues are collected or obstacles encountered, the player's map becomes (automatically) updated with notes, circles, jagged lines. The player learns quickly that the map is untrustworthy, but it's all he's got. For me, at least, the zombies and monsters in Silent Hill are not what keep me going -- what keeps me going is the maddening knowledge that there is still an area on that damn map that I can't get to.

I'm not a big believer in overlay or radar maps that give the player a precise view of where they are in the game world. As a rule, they distract the player from the game world you've created. If the player is distracted and not paying attention to the virtual space you've constructed, then they're not internalizing it, and if they're not internalizing it it's not as meaningful. To reduce this to a simple rule for the designer, never show the player the same map that the game uses internally. Although it seems like a contradiction, disagreement between a signifier and the signified will tend to increase the player's concentration on the environment, as they try to work out why the contradiction happened. Obviously, how you present that contradiction will have great narrative impact -- if a trusted ally simply lies to the player for no good reason, that has one set of narrative consequences, whereas if they are simply somewhat wrong, that has another. And if a signifier, be it text, map, or a character is always wrong all the time, the player will simply discard or ignore it.

Consistency

In Sony's magnificent Ico, the protagonist is a young boy trapped in an ancient, decrepit castle. The edifice itself is more than the environment the protagonist moves in. The edifice is his true opponent. The castle you are trying to escape from is the nemesis. The monsters you encounter, the Witch-Queen who imprisons you, are not half so impressive and oppressive as the place you are trapped in. The monsters are shadowy figures, easily dispatched with the thwap of a stick. The castle is bigger than you. The castle is older than you. The castle has seen thousands of boys like you come, and none have ever left. Hit the walls with your stick. They will not fall.

Ico One thing that makes this work is the internal consistency of the game space, which is intimately tied to its visual style. It's not just that the castle is a consistent mappable space which obeys the laws of geometry and physics -- it's that this is shown to you, deliberately, time and time again. You leave a room and step out onto a balcony. In the distance is a hexagonal tower. You struggle through three or four more rooms and find another balcony; that tower is closer now. Forty-five minutes later, you are at the base of the tower. Climb it, and look back, and you can see the balconies you were on early. That is where I was. This is where I am. Over there is where I'm going.

The intro to the classic FPS Half Life is a great example of this. It is positively glacially paced. Nothing happens; you're in a tram car which trundles through the Black Mesa complex, carrying you into your lab at the heart of it. What it accomplishes, though, is that it gives us the sense that this is a fully realized place, with its own geography. On our way out through the shattered complex we will pass some of the places we see on the way in. This self-reinforcement enhances the experience. (It's also my theory that this is one reason why the "Xen" levels near the finale of Half Life are so amazingly weak -- you go from a consistent, thoroughly realized world into a fantastic world. A fantastic world that looks like it could have been ripped straight out of Super Mario World, complete with platforms that move for no discernible reason other than to let the player reach the boss monster. A very disappointing ending to one of the best games of the decade.)

This tradition is as old as computer games, with even the original Colossal Cave text adventure presenting the player with an internally consistent (although in places confusing) plan, complete with foreshadowing of places yet to be visited (think of its famous "mirror room"). A consistent, believable model of physical space is a precursor requirement to the location itself having a meaningful impact on a game. There's no guarantee that a consistent, believable model will be interesting, but a model into which no thought has gone will be nothing more than window dressing. This is, obviously, one of those "know the rules to break them" situations -- obviously a dream world might have different rules than the real one, likewise the hallucinogenic flightscapes of Rez. But if you simply throw together a virtual space without a vision of where the player belongs in it, the players will be able to detect your laziness on an almost subconscious level.

Additional Resources

I hope this article has been helpful in suggesting some techniques to make your game world more compelling and, hopefully, more fun. If you find any inaccuracies in this article, or just wish to comment, feel free. If you enjoyed this article, you might also find the following URLs to be of interest to you:

Tea Update

2004-03-02 · by peterb

In a past life, over at Tea Leaves, I've already discussed my favorite purveyor of fine tea, Upton Tea Imports. I'm not their only fan, either. Another season has come and gone, and with it another care package from Upton. Here are my capsule reviews.

The biggest winner, to my surprise was the Organic Yunnan Select Dao Ming. I ordered this as an experiment, with some trepidation. "Organic" is a word all too often associated with "stale and tasteless," particularly with respect to comestibles like tea where freshness, among the vast majority of consumers, is (wrongly) not a concern. The Yunnan Dao Ming is very drinky, with a medium body and the expected spicy note. It is not a transformative experience, by any means, but then at $7/125 grams it is also less than half the price of China Yunnan Superior, which strikes me as an entirely reasonable tradeoff.

The Organic Keemun Dao Ming by the same supplier was extremely disappointing. Flat, characterless, it lacked all the assertiveness and smoky flavor one comes to know and love in Keemun. This was more in line with what I expected when I held my nose and ordered an organic tea. It may be unfair to blame its organic nature -- the fact is, like buying burgundies, obtaining Keemun of any type is often a hit-and-miss experience; even the famed Hao Ya "A" has a reputation for being superb one year and lackluster the next. In any case, I don't recommend this tea, even at bargain-basement prices.

I continued my never-ending and probably doomed quest to find an Indian tea that I enjoy more than a standard malty no-name Assam. This season's entry is the Sikkim Temi Estate FTGFOP1 CL . See, I don't really enjoy Indian tea as much as Chinese tea, but I keep buying it simply because it gives me the opportunity to go around saying things like "Fine tippy golden flowery orange pekoe clonal." This tea might become my standard Indian contender -- it has tannic Darjeelingesque overtones without the characteristic lackluster thin body of that more famous but, in my opinion, inferior tea. It's got panache. It's got vim. I like it. At $8.60/125 grams it is more expensive than its superior Chinese brethren, but much less expensive than the ludicrously priced Darjeelings out there.I usually throw an ultracheap alternative in to my orders just to see if I discover a diamond in the rough. Unfortunately, the generic Australian black BOP was not that diamond, nor not even an opal. It's tannic, rough, scratchy, and has a funny sort of onion-like aftertaste. The price was right, at $3.20/125 grams, but the tea was not.

I am always open to recommendations -- what tea are you drinking?

Brief Intro to Pointers

2004-03-03 · by peterb

I've been toying with the idea of writing an article about pointers and why we use them. When I was first learning about them, I understood the hows just fine, but couldn't ever find a lucid explanation of why one should use pointer. With an air of superiority, however, psu instructed me that the cool kids of today with their crazy dances don't condescend to worry about anything as low level as mere pointers, and I'd merely be making myself look old and unfashionable.

But I haven't worried about looking unfashionable yet, so why start now?

What's a Pointer?

Lots of new programmers think they hate pointers. Don't hate pointers. Love pointers. Pointers are the difference between having someone's address written down in a notebook and carrying their house around with you wherever you go.

Let's limit the discussion to pointers in C and C++, since those are the implementations most of us are familiar with.

A pointer is a number (the object oriented guys hate it when I say that) that describes an address somewhere else in memory. We say that a pointer "points to" the address it contains. Strictly speaking, that definition also encompasses any variable on the left hand side of an assignment (when you say "a = 5;", you're actually saying "put the value '5' in the memory pointed to by 'a'), but in common usage when we talk about pointers we're talking about an additional layer of indirection over that.

This is the point where I'm supposed to include a picture of a bunch of little cells with arrows pointing from some to others, and that is somehow supposed to make you magically understand pointers. The problem is, it won't: it'll just annoy you when you actually go to use them and there are no friendly arrows or boxes and all you have is a command prompt where you tried to run your program and it promptly responded Segmentation fault (core dumped).

In C, the two operators that are most commonly associated with pointers are "&" (the "address of" operator) and "*" (the "dereference" operator, which should not be confused with the multiplication operator that uses the same glyph). Taking the address of a variable gives you its location in memory. Dereferencing a pointer lets you read or change the contents of whatever is stored in the address that pointer points to. Dereferencing a NULL pointer, or a pointer that does not point to valid storage, will usually result in your program crashing, typically with what we call a segmentation fault. Instead of giving you diagrams, I'm going to give you code. The code will be confusing too, but hopefully you can actually run it and experiment with it yourself to make things work.

Here's a tiny function to try to demonstrate these operators in use, in an extremely non-useful manner (note: don't try to cut and paste these examples; they are line-wrapped and abbreviated to make them more readable on the web. If you want to try to compile these yourself, click the link after each example.)

int main(void) { unsigned int a, *a_ptr;

a = 5; aptr = &a; printf("a is %d. aptr is %p. *aptr is %d. &aptr is %p. &a is %p\n", a, aptr,*aptr, &a_ptr, &a); }

You can download this here. To compile it on most unix systems, try: cc -o indirection indirection.c.

When I run that, I get this:

a is 5. aptr is 0xbfbff76c. *aptr is 5. &a_ptr is 0xbfbff768. &a is 0xbfbff76c

The ugly hex numbers in this case are the addresses of memory locations within my process' stack. "a" happened to be at 0xbfbff76c. "aptr" was at 0xbfbff768. After we set aptr = &a, aptr (ie, the memory on the stack at location 0xbfbff768) contained the integer 0xbfbff76c. When we dereferenced aptr -- that would be "*a_ptr" -- our program fetched the value contained at 0xbfbff768, followed it to 0xbfbff76c, and told us what the contents of that memory was -- in this case, "5".

If you're confused, don't worry -- that's par for the course. I'm half-convinced that the reason people prefer to talk about objects instead of pointers is that the C syntax for pointers is so horrific. It really is awful. It's especially fun how the "*" glyph means one of several different things depending on whether it appears in a declaration or in a statement context. You're not hallucinating: that really does suck, and don't believe anyone who tells you otherwise. You will, in time, get used to it, but that doesn't mean we can't complain about it in the meantime.

You can also have pointers to pointers, and so on. I won't talk about those in this article.

But Why?

There are basically three reasons to use pointers:

There are actually more reasons than these, but they're the three I consider to be most important.

I'm not going to talk too much about data structures here, because that's a subject that is deep enough to warrant it's own article (or book, or high-level University class). We can just summarize by saying that there are certain data structures that would be so difficult or expensive to implement without pointers that it is reasonable to describe them as impossible without pointers. It is no exaggeration to say that deciding what data structures to use is probably the single most significant choice you will make on any given program. Likewise, object oriented programming, under the hood, is all about doing clever things, systematically, with pointers (when we talk of a language with OO support, we mean "the language does the clever things with the pointers for me, so that I don't have to go on a killing spree when I put an ampersand in the wrong place.")

Lets talk about passing data by reference instead of by value. There are two implications of passing a pointer rather than the value itself around. The first is a data access issue: if you pass a function a pointer to a variable, it will be able to change the value in that variable, whereas if you pass the value, you can't. Here's an example.

void valincr(int counter); void refincr(int *counter);

int main(void) { int counter = 9;

printf("main: at startup, counter is %d\n", counter); valincr(counter); printf("main: after valincr, counter is %d\n", counter); refincr(&counter); printf("main: after refincr, counter is %d\n", counter); return 0; }

void valincr(int counter) { printf("valincr: start, counter is %d\n", counter); counter++; printf("val_incr: exit, counter is %d\n", counter); }

void refincr(int *counter) { printf("refincr: start, counter is %d\n", *counter); (*counter)++; printf("ref_incr: exit, counter is %d\n", *counter); }

You can download this here. To compile it on most unix systems, try: cc -o ptrdemo ptrdemo.c.

We pass the value of counter to the "valincr()" function, and pass the pointer to counter ("&counter") to "refincr()". Let's run our little test:

% ./ptrdemo main: at startup, counter is 9 valincr: start, counter is 9 valincr: exit, counter is 10 main: after valincr, counter is 9 refincr: start, counter is 9 refincr: exit, counter is 10 main: after refincr, counter is 10

Note that after valincr, when we returned to the scope of main(), counter was the same as what we started with -- 9. However, refincr was able to actually change the value stored in main's "counter" variable. The reason for the difference is because of lexical scoping -- the "counter" in valincr() is not the same -- that is to say, it points to a different location in memory -- than the "counter" in main(). The "*counter" in refincr() isn't the same either, but since it is a pointer, it can contain a pointer to the memory location referenced by main()'s "counter", and we can then dereference it and make changes.

Some of you may be scratching your heads right now and saying "But why not just declare 'counter' as a global variable, and then both valincr() and refincr() would be able to change it without any gymnastics, and indeed without even passing it as a parameter?" That's true, and is a bigger subject that I'm prepared to tackle right now except to say that we gain significant advantages in maintainability, portability (in the sense of being able to reuse functions we write for one program in a later program) and provability by not using global variables. As a rule of thumb: don't use globals. That's definitely a rule you'll find good reasons to break, but it's to your advantage to learn discipline early.

The other reason we like pointers is for performance. When you pass by value (or do struct assignments) you are doing memory copies: if the variable you're passing is a large structure, then you're spending a lot of your time copying data. Let's look at an example.

Just for fun, I decided to run some numbers to see how expensive struct copies are versus simple pointer copies on a typical system (where "typical" is tautologically defined as "whichever machine I happen to be testing on at the time" -- i am not trying to do super-scientific measurements here, I'm just having fun.) I'm not normally a performance geek; as a developer, it's of much greater concern to me that a given piece of code run correctly, and that it be maintainable, than that it run fast. In my experience, it's usually easier to make readable, correct code faster than it is to make unreadable and buggy fast code correct. But, y'know. Sometimes you just want to play.

So here's some lame synthetic source code:

typedef struct mystructs mystructt; struct mystructs { char field1[80]; char field2[80]; char field3[8192]; int somenumber; long othernumber; mystructt *next; };

int main (void) { mystructt source, dest, *sourceptr, *destptr; register int marker;

marker = 1111; destptr = sourceptr; marker = 2222; dest = source; marker = 3333;

return 0; }

That compiles down to this:

movl $1111,%edx # pointer copy starts here movl -16732(%ebp),%eax movl %eax,-16736(%ebp) movl $2222,%edx # struct copy starts here. leal -16728(%ebp),%edi leal -8364(%ebp),%esi cld movl $2091,%ecx rep # repeat the following bulk copy until done movsl movl $3333,%edx

Doesn't look that different, does it? If we add some instrumentation to count the number of CPU ticks, though, we can see how long each of those segments take. You can download the source of the instrumented version of this program to try yourself here. To compile it on most unix systems, try: cc -o ptrtest ptrtest.c. To generate and look at the assembly code (at least with gcc), do gcc -S ptrtest.c. The output will be in a file named ptrtest.s (and will look a little different from what you see above, since that's the instrumented version).

% ./ptrtest pointer copy took 332 ticks struct copy took 53631 ticks

The number of cycles to do the struct copy increases linearly with the size of the structure being copied, as you'd expect. The pointer copy always takes about the same number of cycles.

Of course, this isn't a truly fair test. Maybe those egregiously uninitialized pointers would point to stack-allocated memory in a real program, but it's more likely that I had to allocate and free the memory from the heap for them. What does it look like in that case? So let's change that first test to allocate the memory, do the pointer copy, and then free it. Suddenly things look a lot different:

% ./ptrtest pointer copy took 81392 ticks struct copy took 53921 ticks

That's with the standard FreeBSD malloc implementation; results might vary depending on what malloc you're using. Now you're in real trouble! 30,000 more ticks! Boy, is your boss going to be angry that you went over your tick budget. Those ticks were a precious resource, and you went and squandered them! So, naturally, you go on to implement a chunk allocator which preallocates all the memory your application is likely to use so you can quickly grab items off of a freelist, and then the next thing you know you're drunk, drinking sterno, unwashed, living under a bridge and whimpering "Garbage collection. Why can't I be programming in a language that has automatic garbage collection?" It's a hard knock life, thinking about performance, kid.

Really, though, this last case is worst-case for pointers. It's pretty rare that you allocate memory, copy a pointer once, and then free it right away; in a program of any size it's probably that you'll be doing many copies or assignments over the life of some variable. The bottom line is that (large) programs that don't use pointers will generally perform worse than programs that use them correctly.

I hope this article has proven useful. If you find any inaccuracies, please drop me a line, or comment below.

Additional references

You can begin your slow descent down to skid row by following these links:

Creative Ways To Back Up Large Movies

2004-03-04 · by peterb

So, you made a half hour film. At DV resolutions that takes up about 5 gigabytes of storage. How are you going to back it up?

Well, yes, you can print to tape. I do that too. Print to tape, keep the tape forever, yes, that's a good idea and all but it seems so...low tech. Where's the excitement? Where's the danger?

Press to DVD, you say? Excellent idea -- just write a DVD-R with the raw DV data, and -- oh, wait. This file is bigger than we can fit on a single DVD. Well, that's OK, we can use Stuffit or some other tool (live dangerously -- use dd!) to split it into manageable chunks. Of course, if one of those DVDs suffers a media failure, you're screwed. And writing multiple copies of multiple DVDs can be such a drag.

Here's what I do, for when I'm feeling really paranoid:

Take your 5 gigabyte movie and split it into 100 or 200 megabyte chunks. Take the chunks and feed them into MacPAR deluxe or its Windows equivalent. Generate about 30 to 50 parity files; for each parity file you generate you'll be able to tolerate a media error in one of your data files. At your leisure, write the data files and parity files to a few DVDs. Most of the media failures I've encountered on DVD-Rs tend to affect individual files rather than the whole disk, so I think it's a reasonable strategy to just split the data and parity files over two discs. If and when you encounter media failures, you just use MacPAR to reconstruct the lost data from parity.

If you want to be super-paranoid, you can even sprinkle the parity files among any other DVD-Rs you're writing at the time (I find that I always have some headroom when writing data DVDs).

Voilà! You have a redundant array of inexpensive DVD-Rs. You are now cyber. Congratulations!

Puzzles

2004-03-07 · by peterb

Note: This article may contain spoilers for a number of popular and not-so-popular video games. I'll try to keep my discussion oblique, but you have been warned.

The study of puzzles is one that consumes some people. There are brilliant folks who spend most of their waking hours thinking about historically significant puzzles, trying to develop novel puzzles, and who have a deep, analytical sense of what makes a puzzle challenging and enjoyable.

I am, I confess, not one of those people. Neither, apparently, are many of the people designing video games for the consumer market.

I play a lot of games (video games and otherwise), and I enjoy a good puzzle when I come across one in that context, but personally I'm much more interested in the narrative of a game than in the mechanics of any specific puzzle therein, as this series of articles demonstrates. So I don't speak with authority as an expert on brilliant puzzle construction, but merely as a player who encounters too many tired puzzles in the games he plays.

Let's start with a touchy-feely definition of puzzle to distinguish it from a game. I'm happy wiith the first two definitions from the American Heritage Dictionary:

1. Something, such as a game, toy, or problem, that requires ingenuity and often persistence in solving or assembling. 2. Something that baffles or confuses.

In a video game context, I'm speaking of puzzles as being parts of games. The typical puzzle implementation is self-contained ("Solve this puzzle to advance past this door,") but that is a matter of habit, not a requirement. A puzzle can have a scope that encompasses all of the non-narrative parts of a game, or can even be intimately intertwined.

Knights of the Old RepublicI've been enjoying BioWare's Star Wars fantasy game Knights of the Old Republic, lately. It's very well balanced, has a better story than the past three Star Wars movies, and most of the time is very satisfying. I think it's a good game, and everyone should play it. Go buy it, for the PC or Xbox, if you don't have it. I'm saying that up front because I plan on mercilessly criticizing Knights of the Old Republic ("KOTOR") for the next week: even though it is a truly great game, it also has some very evident flaws. It is precisely because I enjoyed the game so much that the flaws irritate me to the extent that they do.

The thing that I'm thinking about today is KOTOR's lackluster puzzles. Periodically, the player is confronted with puzzles -- generally very self-contained, narrow puzzles -- to solve. Some of these are optional; some are required to pass gates. All of them are uniformly terrible; it's like the designers ran across the street to the Barnes and Noble and picked up a copy of "Encyclopedia Brown's 100 Most Tired Brain Twisters." There's the "complete the pattern of numbers" IQ test puzzle, ("Complete this pattern: O T T F F S S..."). There's the "tribute to Gollum Riddle Game" (complete with riddles taken straight out of The Hobbit), where the player faces the overwhelmingly daunting task of being asked a riddle that is easy to begin with and then has to choose the right answer from a list. There's the "You have two buckets, one holds 5 gallons, and one holds 3..." puzzle.

In between these embarrassingly bad puzzles, I was actually having a really good time swinging a lightsaber around. The puzzles were so transparently artifices that they actually destroyed my immersion in the narrative of the game, and I had to spend a few minutes after each one re-acclimating to the game world to recover what the puzzle took away.

And then we got to the Towers of Hanoi puzzle. Which I now officially dub the "lava level" of puzzles: if Towers of Hanoi is in your game, you should just eliminate it and instead put a big sign in your environment that reads "I am completely out of ideas." Word to the wise: if Emacs ships with a module that solves the puzzle you're putting in your game, that's a good sign that the puzzle isn't actually any fun.

So am I saying that it's never legitimate to include a classic oldie like Towers of Hanoi in your game? Well, yes. I am.

What you should do is develop a completely new, novel type of puzzle that no one has ever seen before, that is perfectly integrated into your narrative, and that is neither too difficult nor too easy to solve. That's ambitious, and a lot of work, so I can already hear the commercial game designers muttering under their breath "That'll never happen." So therefore, let me suggest some guidelines for puzzle development, selection and use (at least in games where narrative is paramount; obviously, if you're making a game whose raison d'etre is "to be a collection of classic puzzles", you will and should ignore these guidelines):

The puzzle has to have a reason for existing. I mean, here, a good reason, not the stupid one you just came up with. Is it a lock on a door? Does the owner of the mansion (Hi, Strahd!) sit there and play "jump the pegs and leave one in the center" every time he wants to open the lock?

The existence of the puzzle should move the narrative forward somehow, even if only by a little bit. If a puzzle is a lock on a gate, then at least make it a lock that the player will further the narrative by opening in a way other than "now he gets to go through that door." Make the solution rely on some other element of your narrative, or some knowledge the player's character should have picked up elsewhere.

MystThe more integrated into your game world the puzzle is, the better. Myst is the gold standard in this regard; even though the puzzles themselves were mostly not very innovative ("Press these buttons to make this number reach this value.") there was an aura of believability about them that came from the care with which they were placed. A corollary to the integration guideline is "puzzles that you are in are better than puzzles that you are standing in front of." Myst accomplished some of this with tromp l'oeil -- even though sometimes you were just standing in front of "the puzzle" as a control panel, the game went to lengths to convince you you were inside (for example) a power station. Likewise, even the puzzles in Myst that were just keys to gates often opened a gate somewhere else, and part of the fun was figuring out where (for example, following the power transmission lines from the generator room to the spaceship.) Myst had the advantage of being the first of its kind to achieve wide success. Guess what? You don't have that advantage. If you want us to like your use of puzzles in your game, you've got to do better than Myst.

This one is debatable, but I believe that where possible, the puzzle should be to figure out what the puzzle is. That is, if you have to explain the rules to the player when they start, you've already lost. Ideally, once the player recognizes that they have encountered a puzzle, they should be able to solve it within moments of figuring out how to solve it. For example, most of the puzzles in the "Selenic age" in Myst had this nature; once you realized that you needed to pay attention to your ears rather than your eyes, you could make steady progress; even the maze is actually an anti-maze (you can brute-force your way through, but then you're doing it wrong). Contrast this with Towers of Hanoi, where a player who knows exactly how to solve it still has to spend 20 minutes moving rings around because the designers were lazy.

I suspect that at this point these puzzles appear in games like KOTOR because designers believe that players expect them. I don't believe that players do. As the success of the Final Fantasy games show, players are content to put up with even the most stultifyingly horrific and boring gameplay if it is attached to a compelling narrative (preferably involving sullen teens and large hair). The inclusion of tired textbook puzzles doesn't just frustrate and bore the sophisticated player, it actually does violence to the quality of the story you are telling. The only people that aren't bothered by bad puzzles are the people who have never seen them before, and frankly, that's not a market worth capturing (especially since it's likely that they will enjoy your game just as much without the Riddle Game as with it.)

Tread carefully. We're counting on you. Bioware, please avoid making the same mistakes in Jade Empire.

Is it a deal?

Additional Resources

Here are some games with puzzles that don't suck.

Contest Results

2004-03-08 · by peterb

The answer is:

"Three Guys and a Router"

No one guessed it, but, well, I've got these prizes and, so, congratulations! The "Tried To Think About it Analytically" prize goes to Kristen. The "Obsessive-Compulsive" prize goes to Francisco. The "Reminded Me about how wonderful Rome is" prize goes to Simone. The "I wish I had thought of that as a name for this site instead of the mega-stupid 'Tea and Peterb'" prize goes to monty. Lucky winners, please email your mailing addresses to "namecontest@tleaves.com" and you will receive your fabulous prizes in the mail shortly.

Formula 1: It's the Coverage, Stupid!

2004-03-09 · by peterb

Well, the Australian Grand Prix is over, and once again I have to face ridicule from people like Dushyanth, who ask:

"Why do you watch this "sport"? All they do is go round and round in circles, and in the end Schumacher wins."

As time goes by, I have fewer and fewer answers to that question. But instead of talking about Formula 1 as a sport, let's discuss it as a media event.

Troll and Supermodel

Supermodel and Troll

In particular, I'd like to know who took the competent TV producers and replaced them with Folger's Crystals. Without reference to the actual events of the race, the entire production from start to finish was a train wreck of Hesperian proportions. The chosen camera angles were bad. The cuts were bad. The FIA-provided graphics were bad. Everything was bad. How bad was it? It was so monumentally bad that on the US Speed Channel broadcast, David Hobbs and Steve Matchett were saying things like "I say, Steve, this coverage sure is terrible." "Yes, David, you're right. It certainly is. Why, this is worse than the toad-in-the-hole I had down at the Vicar's on St. Swithin's Day." (Editorial note: the author is paraphrasing). There is nothing positive one can say about the FIA-provided feed short of "Well, at least we didn't have to see that horrific troll Flavio Briatore necking with whichever supermodel girlfriend he's with this week."

Passes were ignored. Cars would burst dynamically through a camera's field view, about to make a spectacular overtake, and the camera would remain still, pointing at the bereft, empty stretch of road behind the pass. Occasionally, a camera would accidentally be about to catch a pass in progress, at which point the program director would cut to a shot of the pit crew, filing their nails.

FIA likes to blame the local team they contract with for the poor quality of the camerawork at a given race, but given that it is the FIA that is doing the contracting, why shouldn't they be held accountable?

Also new this year are different graphics to represent the running order and gaps between cars. They are as comprehensible as an interpretive dance version of Jude the Obscure. Perhaps this is fallout from last year's super-smooth "FIA blames Tag Heuer for FIA's mistake" PR disaster in Brazil, but these are truly the worst graphics to have appeared on my TV screen since the Coleco Telstar Arcade was released. Periodically, a vertical bar with cells with the first three letters of each driver's last name in an unreadable font would appear. Then it would flicker rapidly, initials shuffling and permuting. Eventually, it would go away. At that point, everyone in the room I was in turned and looked at each other and said "What the heck was that?"

Look at NASCAR. No, really, look at it closely. Even if you don't like oval racing, everything about the NASCAR presentation is carefully designed, well thought out, and professionally implemented. Massive amounts of statistics are presented in a short period of time in a way that even an unsophisticated viewer can interpret. In addition, the camera coverage at a NASCAR race blows away even the best F1 coverage (which would in my opinion probably be found at either of the German races). Even on their road courses, there is practically no event at a NASCAR race that happens off-camera or is not covered immediately after it happens. The coverage is consistent and superb.

Racing fans are easily spoiled. What was acceptable TV coverage in 1984 is completely inadequate for 2004. As long as F1 can't figure out a strategy to improve their production values, they will continue to lose ground, world-wide.

Additional Resources

Review: The Battle for Wesnoth

2004-03-12 · by peterb

Over the years, one of my favorite types of computer games has fallen under the rubric of "turn-based strategy"; basically, traditional units-in-hexes wargames where the computer takes care of all the bookkeeping for me. The first of these was probably, I'm guessing, Empire for the VAX/VMS system (and yes, I played it).

Xconq

Xconq

Empire had supply points (cities) which could be captured, that could produce a variety of units with different capabilities (land, sea, air) and different attack and defense values. That's the core of this sort of game. There have been hundreds of implementations of these throughout the years. In my college years, I enjoyed XConq, which was a very thorough (though baroque) implementation. One feature of this sort of game is that the theme is more or less completely disconnected from the mechanics. Draw pictures of artillery pieces and tanks on the chits, and it's a World War II game. Change the artillery pieces into men in funny hats and the tanks into trolls, and it's a "fantasy" game. Change the trolls into cavalry and now you're in the Napoleonic era. So one core game mechanic can be used for many different vibes.

For my money, the best in class of these games was the Warlords series. The original Warlords, which had both Mac and DOS versions, took place on a large continent named Etheria. 8 kingdoms each started with a single castle, a hero, and an army. Castles generated income, which could be used to fund more armies (and to support them; you had to pay upkeep for your existing troops). The goal was simple: take over the world. I liked Warlords better than the alternatives because the designer made some smart simplifying assumptions about unit management and generation. Often in games of this class the early game is fascinating and then by the late midgame you are staggering under the logistical weight of managing several hundred units, and suddenly it's not fun anymore. Warlords avoids that syndrome.

Warlords IIWarlords II Deluxe

The series reached its apogee of playability in the superb "Warlords II Deluxe." This added the concept of experience for heroes, more customization of what types of troops towns could product, the ability to 'vector' troops from where they were marshaled to a city where they should be deployed, and the idea of searching ruins for magical treasures which made the hero a better commander (this turns out to be less annoying than it sounds: rather than turning the game into a hunt for loot, the ruins were generally distant enough that setting out for one meant taking a serious strategic risk.) Warlords II Deluxe combined fast, intuitive play, a good GUI, a wonderful set of included campaigns and battles, a great map editor that spawned an incredibly prolific fan community, and -- unfortunately -- was written such that if you are running any OS more recent than Windows 95 (or, on the other side of the world, MacOS 9) you have little hope of actually playing it anymore. Warlords II Deluxe is one of the games I've considered buying an ancient PC just to be able to continue playing.

Steve Fawkner, the author of Warlords, has continued to turn out the sequels. Each sequel has, to me, played progressively worse. I hate to say that, because he has always been kind and courteous to me, and I know that there are countless improvements under the hood. Steve is an AI geek. He'll talk about how the pathing in Warlords III blows away the WL II version, and how much more challenging the opponent is, yadda yadda yadda, but all I know is that it took me 15 seconds to play a simple turn of Warlords II Deluxe, and it takes 5 minutes to play a simple turn of Warlords III, 4 minutes and 46 seconds of which is spent watching the lovingly rendered animation of an orc move deliberately across the screen, pausing to make himself a hot toddy. You can actually watch the molasses drip from the jar into the teacup. It's very detailed. And oh so very slow.

Warlords IV: Heroes of Etheria likewise continues the trend towards more bigger slower. If you don't believe me, download the demo and try it for yourself.

skiingSo: newer doesn't always mean better. Prettier graphics doesn't always mean better. I would argue that some games can be made better by giving the player a view of his units that has less graphic detail, not more. Graphic designers that work in the real world understand this. Consider the icons used by the Olympics to denote sports. Surely, we could probably replace those with 3d holographic movies of people actually participating in those sports. And it would probably result in everyone having to take a few more seconds to think about what they were looking at rather than immediately mapping the simple icon to "Oh, that's skiing".

Atari football

Atari Football

Now, that's not to say that all games should have primitive graphics; obviously many genres work well with the best graphics you can throw at them, for example sports games (although, secretly, I would still pay good money for a "coaching" football game that just displayed the players as Xs and Os). And there are good reasons even for strategy games to animate these moves to some extent (the most obvious reason being that you need to show the player where a piece moved from and to, and if it just blinked to the destination, you'd be confusing them). But it's just as easy to kill a game by overloading it as it is by not paying enough attention to the presentation.

I feel bad slamming the newer Warlords games in this way, because I'm sure it's not as if Steve walked in to the office one day and said "Hey, I've got this great idea: let's degrade the user experience somewhat and make the game slower." I have no doubt that he shopped an incremental improvement to Warlords and got told by a publisher "If it doesn't look as good as this other game over here, we won't be able to get it on the shelves, so therefore we won't publish it for you, so therefore no more Warlords sequels." I've been in that position myself, albeit not with games. If you're not a sales and marketing expert and the marketing guy says "Your product must have feature X or no one will buy it," you either decide that you know more about marketing than he does and ignore him, and then you go out of business and starve to death and people laugh at you, or you shrug, sigh, and go back to your office and add the feature the marketing guy asked for, even if you personally think it's sort of stupid.

Thinking about it a little more, I'm not really saying "I wish Warlords III (or IV) had worse graphics." I'm actually making a complaint about the user interface. I'm saying "In the old version, I could accomplish this task in X seconds, and in the new version that same task takes four times as long." (Please note that I haven't gone and actually measured the times. I'm speaking of impressions here, but I think that that's valid: half of UI design is about managing user perception.) Perhaps if I hadn't used the older, more responsive UI I wouldn't care. Maybe I'm not Steve's market any more. Maybe I'm more persnickety about response time than other old Warlords fans. But fundamentally, this is the same complaint people make about Windows XP taskbar animations, or the 'genie' effect to and from the dock on Mac OS X.

So the reason this all matters is that I'd rather spend time playing the (open source!) game The Battle of Wesnoth than buy Warlords IV because it has a better response time, even though I am 100% positive that Warlords has better graphics, better sound, better production values, fewer misspellings, and superior computer AI. That's how much the response time matters to me. I'm playing a strategy game. Strategy games are like chess. How often would you play a chess game if every time you told the computer to move a piece you had to watch it move for 15 seconds? Another way of saying this is: I have more confidence that there will be patches to Wesnoth to improve enemy AI than I am that I'll ever be able to make Warlords III's UI more responsive.

Wesnoth

The Battle of Wesnoth

The Battle of Wesnoth gets the response time issues almost exactly right, especially when you turn on the "fast animations" option. It's a clever game with some aspects to tactical combat resolution that I haven't seen in a game of this particular type before, that are worth mentioning. Each unit may have multiple types of attacks (for example, perhaps your bowmen also carry a dagger which is not as strong as their bow). When you attack, you have the option of choosing the type of attack (fire your bows, or stab the enemy with your dagger?) The enemy must respond with an attack of the same kind. If you have bows and the enemy is a thug with a club and no ranged attack, you can attack with impunity. This introduces a rock-scissors-paper aspect to the combat that is pleasing without being trivial to resolve.

Thinking about it a bit more, I now realize that I have seen this before, almost -- it's very similar to the "hard attack" / "soft attack" handling in Panzer General. This is actually another way in which Wesnoth differs from Warlords. In Warlords the natural unit of control is the city, which provides a defensive bonus for units within it and generates income and potentially builds new units. Unlike Warlords, units in Wesnoth exert a (panzer-general-like) zone of control (as in PG and other games), and so you can actually use your forces to shape the battlefield, rather than simply attacking or defending with them.

The scenarios were designed with care. The tutorial was a bit disappointing, and somewhat disorganized, and the unit recruitment rules are not well explained at first (you quickly figure it out once you move your hero out into the fray and then discover that you can't hire new units if you're not in your keep.) The first real scenario made things much more interesting, however, and the difficulty ramp is appropriately challenging without being impossibly steep. I liked that scenarios support victory objectives other than "kill everyone else" -- the first two scenarios in the first campaign, for example, are "reach this spot on the map without these two VIPs dying" and "kill foozle OR survive for 12 turns", respectively.

The game is still in beta, and there are some areas that need work. For example, while different terrain types exist and are implemented, their effect on the game is fairly opaque; the impact on movement is fairly straightforward, but it's clear that it also impacts combat, but not how. When you decide what attack to use, the game tells you the percent chance success you'll have, so you end up having to kind of intuit the effect terrain is having by comparing those percentages across several battles. Personally, I'd rather see something like "+10% bonus due to being in the woods, +10% bonus for bravery" and not know my absolute chance of success than the inverse. Better yet, give me both. Also, while I've already said I like the responsiveness of the game overall, there are definitely GUI nits; right-clicking is supposed to bring up a context menu, but this doesn't work on a Mac running OS X. There are too many spelling and grammar errors; hopefully they'll fix those soon (I know, I know, it's an open source project: I should volunteer).

The music is nice and understated. I enjoy being soothed while slaying the armies of darkness.

The Battle for Wesnoth is one of the most polished games I've seen released under the GPL thus far. I approve of its SDL/multi-platform nature, and the fact that it's clearly made by people that understand and love the genre. I look forward to seeing it develop more, and I hope the team stays together and works on other projects as well. Perhaps the answer to the unceasing but understandable pressure from commerical game publishers for sequels that focus on flash and not simply on improving the user experience is for small projects to demonstrate that fun does not require seed funding from Electronic Arts to exist.

Personal to Steve Fawkner: I can't promise you the sort of mad cash you get for making the top shelf at Best Buy, so I realize that I can't make a business case to you as well as your publisher can. But here's an offer: Your newest game, Warlords IV: Heroes of Etheria retails for $19.99 (at least at Amazon), and you just released Warlords II Deluxe for the PocketPC. If you update Warlords II Deluxe to work on modern Win32 systems -- most of which I bet you in fact had to do to release the PocketPC edition -- I'll pay you $19.99 for that, making it the third time I will have bought the game. I bet there's a few other people out there that would do the same, although, honestly, probably not more than a few hundred. But, y'know. While we may not be a market, we are dedicated fans.

Don't run it by your marketing team. This can be our little secret.

Additional Resources

Some of these links may be of use to those of you who like turn-based strategy games.

Stupid Symlink Tricks

2004-03-13 · by peterb

I do all of my work on my laptop. I have an external drive for large projects, but the desire to keep everything on the laptop means that I really only want to spend internal hard drive space on the essentials.

I love LiveType, but I only use it once in a blue moon, generally when finishing a project up. Unfortunately, Apple's dopey installation program requires that LiveType (like all the Pro apps) be installed completely on the internal drive. Here's how to route around their bogosity.

All we're going to do is use the unix ability to have symbolic links from one directory to another allow us to store the most egregiously large directory on our external drive. Symbolic links are created with the ln command.

(I am assuming that your external drive is hooked up during this procedure. For instructional purposes, let's assume the drive is named external)

That's it! You're done. (You could of course just do sudo bash and then issue the mkdir, mv, and ln commands from a root shell, but that violates the principle of being conservative when wearing your root hat).

You can do this not only with LiveType, but with Soundtrack, and in fact even with iTunes, if you're willing to accept parts of your collection being unavailable when you're not tethered to your drive. Note that iTunes goes to greater lengths than most to disallow this technique (in particular, it will actually insist that your "iTunes Music" directory is on a local drive, but you can set up symlinks within that directory for specific artists. I have two little shell scripts to let me migrate data back and forth as I desire. Here's one:

% cat offline.sh

!/bin/sh

mv "$1" "/Volumes/My External Drive/Music" ln -s "/Volumes/My External Drive/Music/$1"

...so from within my iTunes Music directory offline.sh "The Beatles" will migrate the entire Beatles directory to the external drive, and set up the correct symlinks so that I can still access it as needed. Of course, there's an online.sh to reverse the process.

One thing of note is that most of the HFS+ savvy applications hate symlinks and do unexpected things when asked to store data in a symlinked directory. So if after migrating data offline you try to add anything to those directories (for example, by ripping another Beatles album, say Let It Be in iTunes), it will end up sticking that in ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Let It Be rather than in ~/Music/iTunes/iTunes Music/Beatles/Let It Be. It still works, it's just unpleasant. This means that you should always be prepared to undo your symlinks before installing software updates, for example, lest you confuse the poor lost little Finder.

I hope this little trick helps you, and be sure to make backups of any unrecoverable data before trying it, lest a careless slip of the fingers (or a mistake on my part!) cause data loss.

Gjetost: Freakish Norwegian Caramel Cheese

2004-03-14 · by peterb

I have a cheese problem.

My problem centers around the fact that the two best cheesemongers in town (Penn Mac and Whole Foods) are somewhat inconvenient for me to reach without planning. So I often find myself in the local supermarket, Giant Eagle, which purports to have a good selection of cheese. And they do: in the abstract, their selection is "ok." Nothing fabulous, but they often have cheeses that I would like to eat, especially if I haven't had time to pick up something great at Penn Mac.

However, for some reason that I don't fully comprehend, Giant Eagle wraps their cheese in a plastic that makes all of their cheese taste disgusting -- it has a penetrating, oily, plastic aroma that can manage to penetrate to the core of the stinkiest Stilton. Some middle-level manager probably had to go out and do hard research to locate a plastic that was this effective at completely ruining cheese. So I am caught in an infinite cycle wherein I am craving cheese, but I have no cheese, and I'm in the supermarket, and Giant Eagle has a type of cheese that I want, and I know that it will probably taste like rancid plastic but I still convince myself that somehow it won't taste bad this time, and I buy the cheese anyway, and I bring it home, and it tastes like plastic and I am sad and swear that I'll never do that again.

Since I don't seem to be able to break my habit of buying cheese at the supermarket when I'm craving it, I've developed a tactic designed to minimize the risk: only buy cheeses that were factory-wrapped, rather than cheeses cut and wrapped at the supermarket. These generally end up being not top-of-the-line cheeses, because of the way they are packaged and sold, but my logic is that it's less depressing to buy a cheap cheese that turns out to be not very good than it is to buy a superb stilton that tastes like plastic because of an incompetent cheesemonger's stinky packaging.

Following that tactic today led me to buy "gjetost," which I knew nothing about other than it is Norwegian and comes in a cute small square package.

Gjetost is...odd. I am not entirely convinced it is really cheese. I think it may actually be a very large piece of "Bit-o-honey" candy.

Gjetost

First impressions: medium-brown or dark tan, it has a consistency just a little softer than salt-water taffy, firm to the touch without being actually hard. The package recommended slicing off thin slices, so that's what I did. The odor was a distinct burnt caramel; the first taste is sweet, just beneath a level I'd consider cloying. The second, third, and fourth tastes are like that too.

So I'm eating this candy cheese thinking "this can't possibly be right," so I turned to the internet, which confirmed that, yes, this is indeed what gjetost is supposed to be like. It's a cow's and goat's milk cheese which is prepared such that some of the lactose caramelizes. One site suggested that it's common in Norway to enjoy it with a cup of coffee for breakfast. I happened to have just brewed a pot of coffee so I tried it: it didn't improve the experience substantially.

People describe gjetost as a "love it or hate it" experience. I don't love it or hate it. But I might give out slices to trick or treaters next Halloween.

Additional Resources

Remember: a life without cheese is not worth living.

Platforms in Play

2004-03-16 · by peterb

I play video games, on average, maybe an hour a day. Sometimes more, sometimes less, but on average probably 1/24th of my adult life is spent playing videogames. That's quite a lot.

I have a love of the game medium that is wide and deep. For the past many years, I've played games both on the PC (Windows and Mac) and more or less every console in vogue. I spend time and money on gaming as a hobby. And lately I notice that a greater percentage of my playing time is devoted to games on a console, as compared to games on the PC.

Why is that?

Although it's popular for people to blame cost, that's not really a major factor for me. I've got my PC. I've got my consoles. They're all paid for. I'm asking "What are the feelings that make me reach for the console rather than the PC when I'm in a gaming mood?"

For one thing, there's the comfort factor. I sit at a desk in front of a computer all day long. Perhaps somewhere in the back of my mind is the feeling that sitting at a desk in front of a computer in my leisure time too is wrong somehow -- playing a game is psychologically transformed into work. This holiday season, when I had a huge stack of games that I hadn't made progress in, I had a brief period where I was actually feeling guilty that I wasn't playing enough games. When games are work instead of fun, I'm less likely to play them.

I can play a console game from the couch, sitting well back from the monitor, which is an attractive, large TV. Friends can play or watch at the same time in the same room, which makes the console experience a bit more social, comparatively speaking. If I'm playing Project Gotham Racing 2, I can play standing up (everyone knows that if you lean when turning left, the car turns faster, right? Just like how you can steer the ball when bowling.)

Lastly, there's the "just works" factor. This weekend while preparing my review of The Battle for Wesnoth, I decided to fire up Warlords III to refresh my memory of it. Same hardware configuration as when I used to play it, same disc, but now, presumably because of some magic Windows update, the game no longer works -- it crashes after a few minutes. I spent about 2 hours downloading various driver updates and trying different configurations, but in the end I was foiled. Congratulations! This is what it's like to play games on the PC. Get used to it.

When I want to play a game on the PS2 or Xbox, I walk up to it, hit the power button, put the disc in the drive, and I'm playing in a minute or so. No fuss. No wondering if there will be some subtle incompatibility between the game and my sound card. It all just works.

Perhaps this is just another example of how specialization brings convenience. If you really want to, you can make toast by sticking a piece of bread on a spit and holding it above a flame, or by putting it in the oven for the right amount of time. Everyone has an oven. Everyone has a stove. But everyone also has a toaster. You don't hear people saying "Hey, don't use that toaster -- this Viking range is much more powerful!" Yet people make that argument about PC games versus console games all the time.

Chromatron

Chromatron

Are there downsides to leaning towards console games? Sure. Although it's no longer fair to characterize all console games as "less intricate" than all PC games (I played Knights of the Old Republic for a good 60 hours, for example, and found it involving and enjoyable), it is true that there's a certain class of games that are less likely to break through to the console world, due to the ergonomics of controlling them (I don't expect to see Europa Universalis II on a console any time soon, just to pick one example -- real time strategy games which require fine mouse control might make up the lion's share of this class). And because the cost of entry for developers to the console market is higher, great little games like Chromatron and Escape Velocity aren't likely to appear on them. I'm glad those great little games exist (especially because I can play them on the couch, on my laptop). I think there is a nostalgia factor for those of us who are a bit older who remember sitting in front of our Apple ]['s (or whatever) knowing that the game we were playing was written by one person, who was maybe just like us, and wouldn't that be cool to do for a living?

Castle Wolfenstein

Castle Wolfenstein

You can't maintain that illusion with consoles; obviously any commercial console project is a serious undertaking by a comparatively large team. There's no Bill Budge or Nasir or Dani Bunten producing all aspects of the game themselves. But that's also true of large commercial PC games. Castle Wolfenstein, arguably the best game of its era, was written by Silas Warner. Return to Castle Wolfenstein was created by a huge team of coders, artists, designers, and producers. There are thousands of great, independent, small scale games written by unique individuals today. You (and I) never get to hear about most of them. So if you're going to spend money on the product of a faceless multinational conglomerate, why not at least spend money on the product that reliably works?

A year ago I would have said that a PC was the better choice for online gaming, but frankly the Xbox Live user experience has so far exceeded my expectations that I no longer hold that opinion. I've drunk the Kool-aid. Here's my money; a few bucks a month to pay for a voice-enabled rendezvous service that lets me play with my friends rather than a bunch of rude 13 year olds is well worth it.

Will I keep playing PC games? Sure, especially the smaller, independent ones. But the sharp dividing line of quality that used to exist between PC and console games no longer exists. As time goes on, I find that the ergonomic advantages of consoles overwhelm PC games for all games except those with the quirkiest user interfaces. I'm already choosing to play most game available for both PC and Xbox in their Xbox form.

Toast, you see, should be made in a toaster.

Additional Resources

This is what we talk about when we talk about games:

Why I don't buy a Silvia, or Ode to La Prima

2004-03-17 · by psu

Home espresso machines are a big business. For a few hundred dollars you can get a machine on par with the stuff that Starbucks is using to make those Venti half-caff double caramel 2-pump vanilla machiatto smoothie drinks for the local teenage set. But here is why I'd rather just go to La Prima espresso.

Really good coffee is a complicated thing.

My wife never drank, and in fact, hated coffee for at least the first 15 years we were together. This is because coffee in the U.S., for the most part, sucks. I believe this is for a few reasons:

  1. The coffee is not fresh. Most places use a service that delivers packets of preground coffee that have been aging for months.

  2. The coffee is boiled. Most places use drip coffee machines or worse, those industrial strength brewers that boil the coffee and then put it in a tank to keep at a super hot temperature for hours. By the time you see it, the coffee is long dead.

  3. The Starbucks curse. Starbucks has made espresso and boiled fancy coffee almost universally available. Unfortunately, only the busiest Starbucks goes through enough coffee to have fresh grounds and people who know how to make a good shot. So most of the time you get tasteless crap with too much milk.

The first coffee my wife drank was a café au lait at Café de Flore in Paris. This is some of the best coffee I've ever had. It's basically a triple or quad shot of espresso in one small cup, and hot milk in another. You mix it into little mugs at the table. Let us compare:

  1. The coffee is super fresh. This café sells so much coffee that they have to buy new stuff every day.

  2. The people know how to make espresso. The espresso here is so good that it has a rich nutty flavor and little or no hint of bitterness. This is the result of perfect brewing. Every shot is done fresh and the grind and tamping are perfect for the machine they use. Getting stuff this wired in is the result of years of practice and expertise.

In Pittsburgh, we have a single coffee place that can reach this level of perfection on a regular basis: La Prima Espresso in the strip. Like the Paris coffee, the coffee is always fresh. Like the café in Paris, the people at La Prima have been making espresso for years and know just how to do it. In fact, when you go, you should always strive to have one of the veteran bar people make your shot for you because the ones of lesser experience will only disappoint.

Finally, La Prima does not commit the Starbucks Cappucino Sin. To wit, the La Prima Cappucino is not this mutant drink wherein a tiny shot of coffee sits at the bottom of a mile deep sea of foam. The drink is as it should be. Hot, slightly foamy, milk mixed in with a perfect espresso shot so that the foam from the coffee mixes with the steamed milk to form a perfect bond of milky rich, smooth, nutty, perfect coffee goodness.

For me, the La Prima cappucino is the closest thing to the apotheosis of coffee that I've had, short of that café au lait in Paris. It would take me years to come even close to doing something as perfect in my own home, with expensive equipment that is too loud and takes up too much space in my kitchen.

Therefore, as pretty as the Silvia is, I don't think I'll buy one. I'd just make bad coffee with it, and that would be tragic.

Europa Universalis

2004-03-17 · by peterb

Since my last article was spent talking about console games and how great they are, let me shift gears and talk about a PC game I've been playing lately: Europa Universalis II.

[Europa Universalis II

Europa Universalis II](/img/eu21.jpg)

This is a game with beautiful, beautiful maps. Gorgeous maps. Maps that literally take your breath away and make you marvel at them. You'll sit back, contemplating the intriguing position of the Low Countries in relation to the principality of Brandenburg, and say -- perhaps out loud, even -- "Damn that's one beautiful map." See, I like maps. I love them. And the tragedy of Europa Universalis, for me, is that the game isn't as good as its maps. I keep playing the game, even though I don't like it that much, because I'm convinced that it has to be better than it is. Because of the maps.

At first blush EU II looks like a standard "conquer the world" civ-alike, perhaps with a feel akin to Merchant Prince, but it's really more of a history simulator than an actual game. It brings some interesting mechanisms to bear on the conquer-the-world genre that I enjoy on their own, yet which fail to cohere into a playable whole. Let's first take a look at some of these mechanisms by themselves, and about some of the positives of the game, and then talk about the negatives

Time Period

EU covers the period from 1419 through to the early 1800s. There are optional campaigns that cover smaller lengths of time, if you're not up for the full challenge of 400 years modeled a single day at a time. Yes, I said one day at a time. The days fly by, but this is not a game of lightning warfare and swift technological change; the sands of time drip through the hourglass one by one. I've been playing the "France 1492" campaign for perhaps two weeks now, and it's still only 1526. This is not a quick game.

Combat and Conquest

One of the aspects of the game which I intensely disliked when I started playing but have come to admire is how, exactly, conquest works. In your typical civ-alike (or Risk-alike), you march your troops off to some enemy province, dice are rolled, blood is spilled, and when all is said and done, to the victor goes the spoils. That's kind of how it works in EU II. But not really.

First, your invading army has to dispose of any standing troops in the province; that works pretty much like you'd expect. Then, you have to mount a siege. You can expect your average siege to take between 6 months to a year, or longer. Eventually, you'll starve the province into submission and the province is yours. Except it isn't: sure, you might have possession of that province, but if other leaders (and God!) don't recognize your claim to it, you are merely a pretender. No, if you want to claim that province you'll have to earn it the old fashioned way: by sending your best councillors off to negotiate peace, and getting the country you wrested the province from to agree to give it to you (unless the entire country is just a single province, in which case you may simply take it.)

[England conquered

England Subjugated](/img/eu22.png)

This leads to hours of fun. So let's say you're France, and you want to assert your claim to Bretagne, which is owned by England. Sure, you can go conquer Bretagne, but you'll probably also send some troops to Britain to take over Cornwall and Kent, and beat up on British troops in the field for a year or so, in order to make the British desperate enough that they'll start suing for peace and be willing to part with Bretagne, and perhaps some lucre, too. My personal version of the Hundred Years War Part Deux ended with me in control of half of England, as well as the keys to their lovely colony of Massachussetts. Really, the British are quite tame once you've knocked down Buckingham Palace a few times.

Raising a military is an expensive proposition, and you have to worry not only about taxes, but about support, attrition, and the disparity in technology levels between you and your opponent. It is challenging, if a bit unrealistically whack-a-mole like -- defeated armies "retreat" in seemingly random directions, sometimes deeper in to your own territory, so you have 16th century armies engaging in what seems like maneuver warfare, accidentally. It can be frustrating.

Religion

Provinces have religions (and cultures, too). Catholic, Orthodox, Protestant, Sunni, Shia, Buddhist, Hindu...all the major religions are represented (although not Zoroastrianism. Yea, verily, the Wise Lord Ahura Mazda shall punish the developers for their perfidy.) Religion is the backdrop against which politics moves throughout the years. It is more difficult to wage a war against a country that shares your religion (it damages the stability of your realm), and provinces of a different religion have a tendency to rebel more frequently (depending in part on how tolerant you decide to be of other religions). You can send missionaries around the world to convert the infidels.

Trade and Colonization

The game has a fairly opaque concept of "centers of trade" where your merchants compete for goods that I couldn't quite wrap my head around or enjoy. Colonization is expensive and takes forever, which makes sense, since it did in real life. You'll fight hostile natives (if there are any), plague (the game accurately models the dictum "Don't try to colonize subsaharan Africa, you idiot"), and the other great and not-so-great powers.

Exploration is a bit...strange. Put simply, you can't just go off into terra incognita and discover the world; you need a special army: an explorer (for seas) or a conquistador (for land). You can't buy them, find them, or hire them. You get one when the game decides to give you one; Spain and Portugal get plenty, early on, and everyone else gets few to none. This is part of what I mean when I describe the game as a "history simulator." There will be no alternate histories here (in the main game, at least) where France discovers the New World.

Hail, Mecklemburg!

One of the major changes from EU to EU II was the addition of the ability to play any country, not just the great powers. Want to play as Japan in 1419? You can do it. Brandenburg, Mecklemburg, or Tuscany? You got it. Playing the game as a tiny power has a very different feel from playing as a great power (it's the difference between "Can I conquer the world?" and "Can I survive the next two years?")

One of the things that recommends the EU series of games is: they're dirt cheap. You can get the original Europa Universalis for $5 on the remainder shelves of most big PC software chains, and EU II is going for around $10 to $15. That was, in fact, what convinced me to take a risk on it, and if I view my investment as "I spent $15 to get a really cool map of the world in the year 1500", it seems sensible to me.

The Downsides

The user interface is terrible. Of course it's clunky and unintuitive: it's a strategy game put out by a European software house, ergonomics in software are against the law there. More than that, it has a disturbing mouse-feel. By that I mean that the mouse tracking feels sloppy and inadequate, like they somehow misused DirectX and didn't get it right. At first I thought this was specific to the Mac version of the game, but I've since played on the PC and it's the same thing. I can't quite put it into words, but the mouse just doesn't move right. That makes the fact that the UI elements themselves are all undersized and not well marked that much worse.

The game is slow. No, slower than that. Glacially slow. Not in terms of how fast your pieces move, but just in terms of pacing. Obviously, some people like that in this class of game. I'm not saying it's an out-and-out negative, but it's a strange thing to say to yourself "OK, well, that was a good round of conquest. Now I'll watch the days go by one at a time for three years until my reputation improves."

The biggest negative of the game, for me, is that it fails to coalesce into something more than a toy; at times it feels more like Europa is playing you, rather than vice-versa. What is the game looking for? What inputs can I give it to make it happy? I admit that that is a vague description, but it's how I feel: I have fun looking at the game. I have fun thinking about the game. But I don't have all that much fun actually playing the game. I think the detailed After Action Reports on the publisher's forums by avid players attest to this: what's fun in Europa Universalis is, in large part, the mirror it holds up to the history buff's psyche, rather than the mechanisms and machinations of the game itself.

Additional Resources

Here are some links you can follow while you're thinking about how cool maps are:

Metamechanics

2004-03-20 · by peterb

Game mechanics: the underlying rules and goals of a game. How do you decide what a player is allowed to do? When has a player won? How do player actions affect the game? The mechanics of a game are part of a game that is not narrative.

Some basic game mechanics:

Compound games exist: Get the ball in the goal while killing everyone (Deathrow). Run around in a circle while killing everyone (Wipeout XL, Quantum Redshift). There are plenty more. What I've been thinking about today is not so much mechanics in the sense of the specific ways games play, as in these examples, but in what I think of as "meta-mechanics," the classes that the rules themselves fall into. For example...

[Malaysia

Malaysian circuit, Formula Dé](/img/ext/27ebcbaf-sepang.jpg)

Since it's the eve of the Malaysian Grand Prix, let's look at two Formula 1 board games: Carabande and Formula Dé. Both games involve going around a track, with the first to finish the winner. but the metamechanics are totally different. In Carabande, the player flicks his "car" piece with his finger and tries to carom it around the track, while in Formula Dé he chooses a gear and rolls a die corresponding to that gear, then moves the car the number of spaces indicated by the die. Carabande relies on the skill and dexterity of the player, Formula Dé makes no such requirement.

Computer Ambush

Computer Ambush

That's a fundamental distinction, and one that we see not only in board games -- board games that require dexterity, while not unheard of, are probably more the exception than the rule -- but also in video games. A first-person shooter Counterstrike and SSI's Squad Leader-like Apple II game Computer Ambush tell a very similar narrative tale, but the mechanics could not be more different: real-time, single-avatar control of one member of a team where victory is determined by dexterity versus turn-based control of an entire team where victory is determined by careful plotting of tactical movement. We can even find games that fall in the middle: in Close Combat the default mode is semi-real time. In video games, this decision might be the most fundamental design question: some people prefer only one mechanic over another. Some strategy gamers won't even touch a game if it requires any manual dexterity at all.

A similar decision is whether there is a role for random chance in a game. A game such as chess, checkers, or go is a "pure" game; the outcome is determined entirely by where the pieces are placed. On the other side of the spectrum would be Candyland, where the player actually has no control whatsoever over his move, and just obeys the random chance of the card he pulled from the stack. Many in-between shades exist, from The Game of Life (where you get to make essentially one decision: "Go to college" or "Don't go to college") to Monopoly (where in the early part of the game you can decide whether to purchase or not purchase each property you randomly land on) to The Settlers of Catan where you make early wagers on probability and make non-random moves which will provide payouts later (or not) based on a die roll. There is a school of ludological snobbery that says that "pure" games that have no randomness -- such as chess, go, and checkers -- are inherently superior to games with a random element. The logic here seems to go something like: games are a competition, and if I can't prove my superiority every time by applying the power of my gigantic brain then the game sucks. I think that's clearly wrong -- randomness can have a place in games, just like in life. De gustibus non disputandum est.

[Gladius

Gladius](/img/gladius.jpg)

It is an increasingly common trope in videogames to let the player substitute dexterity for randomness. For example, in Gladius, a well-designed tactical combat game, the player moves his pieces around an arena and chooses from a variety of attacks. There's an option to have the attack's success or failure be determined by a die roll (which would be the likely method of resolution if Gladius were a board game), but the default mode is io display a "skill bar." The game requires the player to press buttons on the controller in a certain pattern or with a certain rhythm. If the player completely muffs it, the piece she is controlling misses its opponent. If the player gets it right, the piece hits. If the player gets the rhythm just so, her piece performs a "critical hit" for extra damage. Many of the execrable Final Fantasy games use a variant on this system as well.

Robotron 2084

Robotron 2084

Most video games, for better or for worse, have adopted a model where the abilities of the player's avatar change over time, either by granting the avatar more power directly or by teaching the player new ways of manipulating her avatar. This is a fairly significant change from the early days of game design. In Pong a player's paddle is static throughout the life of the game. The hero in Robotron 2084 never gains additional weapons or more speed. Today, I think you'd be hard pressed to find a game where it's not true that either the player's character gains power or skill (for example, by acquiring better weapons or armor in a shooter, or more accuracy in a golf or tennis game) or the player herself is led to have more skill (for example, introducing the ubiquitous "double jump" in any platform game you care to name.) These aren't purely videogame innovations, of course -- in chess, a pawn can become a queen, after all -- but it's interesting that their presence has become the rule. Perhaps the only exception that comes immediately to mind is in team-based sports games such as football, and those are somewhat prevented from increasing the skill of their avatars by their desire to claim to accurately model real teams and players.

What other metamechanics can we identify? Why do some "strategy" gamers so vehemently prefer randomness to dexterity, when that randomness is only a part of the genre because doing more sophisticated modeling in a boardgame context is ponderous? Shouldn't the "roll a die" method of determining an outcome in RPGs and strategy games be outmoded, now that we have hyperintelligent transdimensional computers to do the hard modeling work for us? Is "roll a die" still the preferred method of combat resolution simply because it's easier for developers to implement, and we're all lazy?

Additional Resources

Score points by moving your piece into the target areas below and clicking.

Digital Picture Workflow

2004-03-22 · by psu

One of the digital photography web sites recently published an article on how Sports Illustrated manages its digital photographs. The piece described the process of shooting and editing 16,000 pictures during the Super Bowl. After reading it, I realized that the workflow that I've come up with for managing my own personal digital pictures is similar to SI.

Workflow is a word that gets tossed around a lot when referring to the management of digital pictures. But, there is nothing really new going on here. Even in the film days, we all had a workflow. To wit:

  1. Shoot the film. Organize the shot film into buckets.

  2. Process the film buckets. I always used Tri-X and D76 1:1.

  3. When the film was dry, cut it into strips, but the strips into storage containers. Organize the storage sheets somehow.

  4. Make contact sheets. Pick the frames you like. Label and organize the contact sheets to relate them to the stored film.

  5. Make proofs of the good frames, pick the ones you want to print well. Label the proofs and final prints so you can find the negative when you need to make others.

And so on.

The idea here is to be systematic about how the pictures are processed and stored so that you find the pictures you need later.

It turns out you need to do exactly the same sort of thing with digital pictures. The medium makes some of this easier and some more tedious. But, it's important to have a structured and repeatable process, since you don't to be losing that one file with a favorite picture in it.

The Big Picture

I shoot with 2 cameras, a small point and shoot that makes JPEG files and a bigger digital SLR that can make JPEG files, but also allows me to store the pictures in a "RAW" format. The following is what I do with the pictures from shooting to final print.

  1. With the SLR, I shoot RAW files only, except when I know I might need to shoot more than 100 pictures before downloading. I have a single 1GB flash card, which fits 100 RAW pictures. With the P&S, I shoot JPEG.

  2. Every once in a while, I take the card out of the camera and stick it in a card reader. I use iView Media Pro to download and catalog the initial pictures. All pictures for a given year are downloaded to a single folder on my laptop called "2004".

  3. I use iView to rename the picture files to be unique by adding on the capture date. iView automatically keeps track of this date for me, so it's handy.

  4. For the RAW pictures, I convert each picture from RAW to a small proofing JPEG file using a batch script and Adobe Camera RAW inside photoshop. For JPEG files, I also make a small proofing JPEG, just to be consistent. All the JPEG proofs go to a different folder called "2004-JPEG". The JPEG files are tagged with an sRGB color profile. More on this later.

  5. I browse the JPEG proofs to pick pictures I like.

  6. The good ones get reconverted and then turned into files for printing or for display on the web. I have a script that generates the albums on the web site. These albums are driven off another collection of JPEG files that are completely separate from the main catalog. That way if I need to back up the web site it's easy. Also, the image file names on the site match the ones in my catalog so the RAW file or JPEG that the picture came from are easy to find. iView also lets me tag pictures with keywords and such to make them easier to find.

  7. All RAW and original JPEGs are backed up to 3 external hard drives stored in two places. I keep the originals online on my laptop for a year, and then move them offline and just keep them on the backup drives.

For prints, I have to come up with a way to organize the print files and attach them to the originals. I don't make many prints, so I haven't worked this out yet.

The Rationale

I came to this particular workflow after about a year of fussing around with a few different schemes. So here is the rationale for the steps I take above.

  1. iView is simply the fastest and most straightforward cataloging program I've found. It doesn't have server features, but I don't need that. It reads EXIF keywords, keeps track of color profiles correctly, and so on. It also automaticlaly lets me browse the archives by date, keyword, and other queries. Very nice.

  2. JPEG proofs turn out to be very handy to have for multiple reasons. First, browsing a ton of small jpegs to find the good ones is a lot faster and easier than browsing RAW files or larger JPEG files. My wfe likes to do this using the slide show feature in iView, and this is only really usable with smaller JPEGs. Second, the small JPEGs make a good base image for the web albums, so I'd be making them anyway. Finally, having the small JPEGs lets me carry around my whole picture archive on my laptop. The laptop disk isn't really big enough to hold more than a single year of RAW pictures, but I can hold many years of JPEGs and still have enough room to keep my RAW files for the current year online.

  3. I use hard disks for backup because burning CDs or DVDs just takes too much time and is no more archival. My plan is to just buy a big firewire drive every year and cycle the entire archive to it. For the forseeable future, disks will keep getting bigger faster than I can shoot more pictures.

  4. The only manipulation I do with the image file names is to tag them with the capture date of the picture. Putting any more meta-data into the filename is problematic in various ways. Better to have it in the iView catalog. It's also handy to know that your file names are always unique so you can use them as database keys. The main thing to do is to make sure you use the same filename for the same picture everywhere the picture appears.

  5. I like shooting RAW files on the SLR because it's really easy to post-process the things to fix things like color balance under mixed lighting and general underexposure if I or the camera messed up. Doing this with JPEG files is trickier.

Someone asked me how I keep the two catalogs I make in sync. The answer is that I don't, really. The JPEG catalog is for proofing only and I only use it to navigate to the actual NEF files in the main catalog.

But, most of the meta-data (dates, keywords, labels, etc) that I might attach to a file gets put into the EXIF part of the file which is preserved when I convert from NEF to JPEG. If I change a lot of this info, all I have to do to sync the catalogs is reconvert the NEF files and then rebuild the JPEG catalog based on the new information.

Oh, so for reference, what I do that is similar to SI is:

  1. Keep both JPEG and RAW around.

  2. Proof using JPEG

  3. Reconvert the RAW file and process for printing.

  4. Use a good fast catloging program for meta-data.

My final thoughts are a quick meditation on color profiles.

Why sRGB?

Color profiling and color spaces are a large and confusing topic. Rather than get into a long and abstract discussion about color spaces, device profiles, gamut and so on, I'll outline my reason for using sRGB for everything via a simple problem that I was trying to solve:

I use a Mac. My wife uses a PC. I needed my web pictures to look at least similar on the two machines.

It turns out that the easiest way to do this is to always convert pictures into the sRGB color space, and make sure that the JPEG files on the web site are correctly tagged with this color space. Why should this be?

Historically, Macs and PCs have displayed images very differently. Apple's default display setups use a gamma of 1.8 and some pre-defined color balance. PCs use a gamma of 2.2 and some other predefined color balance. It turns out that sRGB is a color space that is defined to model a sort of generic PC display. What does this mean?

Basically what it means is that for every (r,g,b) value in the image file, the display software will look at the sRGB profile and transform the numbers into a new (r,g,b) so that the whole image displays with an overall gamma of 2.2 and a certain color balance. The exact transformation that takes place depends on the display device. On a Mac, the transformation makes everything a bit darker and more contrasty. On the PC, the transform does almost nothing.

But, the overall result is that if I look at the picture on my Mac with software that respects the color profile, it will look similar to what my wife sees on her PC. Happily, most of the display software on the Mac does the right thing because it all hooks into Colorsync. Earlier versions of Mac OS X didn't have this universality, so if you look at my pictures in Safari under Jaguar, they will look too bright and washed out.

In digital photography circles, sRGB is scorned as a poor least common denominator color space. You'll hear a lot of complaints about lack of color gamut for example. This all might be true, but for me, sRGB makes perfect sense because:

  1. I'm mostly concerned with web display, and this makes sure that the pictures look right even on PCs that don't have color management.

  2. Most inkjet printers and digital minilab machines do automatic color balance based on an assusmption that you are using sRGB. Sticking with this saves me an extra calibration headache. I haven't noticed that I'm losing a lot in sRGB. But if I did, I'd just redo the job in another color space if I had to.

  3. Most point and shoot cameras implicitly capture in sRGB and tag their JPEGs as such, so I don't have to do anything special.

So there you have it. Maybe another time we'll talk about color calibration some more. Except it gives me a heacache.

Two Overpriced Ports

2004-03-22 · by peterb

Buying vintage port is like going on a blind date in Manhattan. No matter how many close friends vouch for your blind date, you really can't know in advance whether it will be fun or a disaster, and the only thing you know for sure is that it's going to cost a lot of money.

You can't even count on having a good time if the date isn't completely blind. Since vintage port is a wine that we often keep for years, it's not unusual to end up in a situation where one bottle of a given house and vintage is superb, and then the next bottle from the exact same batch is awful, because it has spoiled, because you didn't rebottle it; this happened to me with a bottle of 1977 Smith-Woodhouse. I'm still recovering from the trauma. There are people who rebottle their vintage port periodically to avoid this outcome. I don't personally know any. (Pet peeve: if the wine industry would just get over itself and admit that "real" corks are completely inadequate to the job they're being asked to do, and move to some less stupid technology such as a bottlecap and wax seal, this wouldn't be an issue.)

So vintage Port, because of value issues, remains for me a rare luxury. Most of the Port I drink, when I drink Port, is just straightforward nonvintage ruby Port; I'm fond of Cálem, but the variance in quality between all of the great Oporto houses in this segment of the market is very small. It's hard to go too far wrong. Occasionally I'll grab an unassuming bottle of cheap white Port, when I can find it, which isn't often. That's a little riskier (and many people don't enjoy white Port). I dislike tawny Port intensely; i'd rather drink Sherry.

Ruby Port is a fine drink. Typically it will run you around $10 to $15 a bottle in the US, a little less overseas. The houses in Oporto, sensing an under-served market ("I want to be snobby about my wine, but I don't want to pay for it.") have developed a class of wines in recent years referred to, broadly, as "Late Bottled Vintage" In one of those amusing false cognates, "Late Bottled Vintage" is Portuguese for "not vintage." Like vintage wines, LBVs come from a single year's harvest, but spend much longer in oak casks compared to true vintage Ports, and much less time maturing in the bottle. This forces some complexity into the wine, at the cost of subtlety. They're ready to drink earlier, although they will generally have a lighter body. A typical LBV will run you between $25 and $40.

Late Bottled Vintages have been a thundering success for the houses of Oporto. I believe this isn't so much wannabe wine snobbery as a genuine desire to drink good Port, and drink it now: the only vintage Ports most of us can reasonably afford are the truly young ones. Buying a case of young vintage Port is a risky endeavor, because you don't know how it's going to turn out, and drinking a bottle of vintage Port before it's matured feels like an ethical violation, at least to me. "Infanticide" is the word bandied about by Portophiles. Late Bottled Vintages are an understandable compromise.

The houses, emboldened by the success of the Late Bottled Vintage marketing experiment, have now developed a new product to capture the dollars lying between the $10ish Ruby price point and the $30ish LBV price point. These wines are referred to as "reserve" Ports. "Reserve" has a long and hoary tradition in the wine industry outside of the niche Port market. Roughly, it translates to "this wine isn't any better than our standard wine, but I somehow think I can convince you to pay more for it." On very rare occasions, you'll find a reserve that is actually noticeably superior to its undesignated cousins. But less often than you would hope.

I succumbed to the marketing this week, mostly because my local wine store (I live in Pennsylvania, where human life is cheap and the State controls all liquor sales with an iron fist) didn't carry an adequate selection of ruby Port. I decided to experiment, and picked up two "reserve" class Ports: Graham's Six Grapes (on sale at $19/bottle) and Sandeman's Founder's Reserve ($18). As usual, we tasted the Ports with neutral crackers and a selection of good blue cheeses (Port and Stilton, Roquefort, or Cabrales is truly an incomparable paring).

Graham's Six Grapes

Six Grapes

The Graham's Six Grapes was pretty bad. Its initial sweetness was very restrained -- which I liked -- but the rest of the experience was not so good. Everything about Six Grapes screams "alcohol." Before the wine touches your lips there is a pronounced vodka aroma. The initial taste is good and not cloying, but the mouth feel is very thin and attenuated. The finish is short and bitter; basically instead of a tail I felt (or think I felt; same thing) the alcohol evaporating off the back of my tongue, and now I could taste the vodka aroma that I smelled up front. It held up a little better with food -- the bitterness here actually melded fairly well with a tangy cheese -- but on the whole I found this disappointing and unacceptable. I won't buy it again.

The Sandemans Founder's Reserve was acceptable, although, arguably, still overpriced. Much sweeter than the Six Grapes, it managed to stay just under cloying. It did this mostly by having an interesting middle -- there's a sour note that was equal parts offputting and intriguing, a bit like the hint of sour milk in Hershey's chocolate. It lacked the attenuated wino-on-Saturday-night attack (and sustain, and release) of the Graham's. The tail was noticeable if not outrageous. I initially thought the nose was a bit on the light side, but that was because I was comparing it to the beaker of rubbing alcohol that was the Six Grapes; when I tasted it again in isolation it was fruity, with almost a bright citrus or sangria aroma.

My foray into the world of "reserve" Ports has, simply, reconfirmed my prejudices: from now on, when I'm not willing to open one of my vintage Ports, I'm going to stick with a standard ruby Port from a house that I know and love. I'm sure there must be some reserves out there that might be worth the premium, but I'm not inclined to experiment much more with this particularly marketing label.

Additional Resources

If you enjoyed this review, the following links may be of interest to you.

Got (raw) milk?

2004-03-24 · by peterb

Note: I originally published this article at Tea Leaves.

For a long time I've been fascinated by the idea of being able to buy and drink raw milk (or as some would have it, "real milk") rather than the pasteurized and homogenized product we all know and love. Part of it is the (realistic) fantasy of being able to make real clotted cream and part is the (unrealistic) vision of myself living in the Dordogne making an earthy, runny cheese from lait cru, which I bring to market each week. After the market, I would gather with my fellow peasant workers of the terroir and we'd sit and quietly get drunk on cheap red wine and complain about stupid Americans and the constantly striking truck drivers.

I always assumed that I'd never get the chance to make either of these fantasies come true, but thanks to a well-placed word, I now have a gallon of raw milk. Time to get to work.

Mystery surrounds raw milk. I had always assumed that it was totally illegal to sell it, everywhere in the US. It turns out this isn't true. Despite it being technically legal in my state, I quickly discovered that since everyone (like me) thinks it's illegal, trying to get someone to sell you some in any sort of retail setting is difficult to impossible. It was on a tour of a cheesemaking facility north of Pittsburgh that I got my first useful clue -- we saw how the farmers delivered raw milk, which the cheesemaker then separated the cream out of, and pasteurized. I asked the owner how I could get some raw milk. Looking at me strangely, he said "I guess you should find a farmer."

The only problem was, I didn't know any farmers.

At an Easter dinner, I got into a conversation about cooking and baking; I'd been making a lot of crème fraîche lately, and I let slip my yearning for raw milk to play with, and that I was giving up on ever getting any, since I didn't feel comfortable driving up to some farmer I didn't know and asking him if I could fondle his milk cow's teats. One of the people dining with us said she knew a dairy farmer, and offered to introduce me. I leapt at the offer with enthusiasm. I got a call a few days later setting up a time and place -- "It depends on the milking schedule, see." I was already liking this more and more.

Bob and Tomalee's farm is nestled in Somerset County under the shadow of giant, elegant, and intimidating windmills. Tomalee is short, voluble, and hugs strangers, all the while accompanied by an entourage of placid dogs and scrawny farm cats. Bob's face is cheerful and red, and he clearly relishes playing straight man to Tomalee's trickster. Tomalee seems puzzled by my need for raw milk ("Clotted cream? Never heard of it.") but is thrilled for the chance to show off her menagerie ("my friends") to my friends and me. Suppressing my urge to say "Yeah, yeah, lady, just hand over the loot!" I take the tour. And what a tour.

Tomalee's friends are many and varied. Apart from the milk and meat cows, which don't "count," there are of course the pet cows. Which are like the other cows, only cuter. Or something. But my first indication that something is truly different about this farm are the hens. They have little antennae. "Are those peahens?" I say. "Yep!" says Tommalee. And there, in the corner, is a peacock, with a five foot tail. "Did you know that the peacock is a tropical jungle animal?" she asks. "I learned that in science class." "Huh," I say, resisting the temptation to ask her "So what the hell is this one doing in Western Pennsylvania?" Next to the Peacock are the rabbit cages, which are next to the pen with the goats and a single (still unsheared) ram.

On a pile of hay near some of the pet cows a black farm cat is sleeping, near some piled up blankets. Then the blankets move. They're not blankets -- they're a pot bellied pig that has grown to the size of a small washing machine, looking disturbingly like Old Major from the animated version of Animal Farm. "That's Hunter!" says Tomalee. She walks over to Hunter and unleashes a torrent of high pitched baby talk. Tomalee explains that Hunter is real lazy. We walk down an aisle of about 8 "pet" cows. "We don't eat friends," says Tomalee, and I nod. "Never eat anything you've been introduced to, like in Alice in Wonderland." She looks at me funny again, and shakes it off. There's also a horse. I confide that I was scared of cows when I was younger, because they seemed so huge. Tomalee says she's scared of horses, when they're not in a pen, for the same reason.

There are about 50 milk cows in the barn, standing, sitting, eating, pissing (the first time I hear this, I start looking around for the firehose) and generally waiting to be milked. Each animal has a tag on its ear with a number. Above each stall is a sheet of paper with the name of the cow written on it ("Debra", "Marcy", "Vanna"...) and notes on what type of feed it gets -- grass, corn, soy. I've been absentmindedly petting the cows as we walk along. They seem to like being scritched on the sides of their face; several enjoy licking my arm. On my second time trying to pet Debra between her eyes, she lifts her head up, and slides it roughly down the side of my arm, turning it, pushing my arm away roughly.

I have just been brushed off by a cow.

Bob is talking to one of my friends about using Bovine Growth Hormone (BGH) to increase milk production, and how he doesn't use it because he thinks it overworks the cows. These people wouldn't think to market their products as organic, yet they have an intrinsic distrust of Monsanto corporation. It's like I'm in heaven. I am salivating at the prospect of trying their milk.

Gold pheasant

Yellow Golden Pheasant

But first, there are more friends to meet. In a set of coops outside the barn are four pheasants, with plumage as bright as any parrot's. We see the newborn chicks ("peeps"), 5 of them with their mother (2 were eaten by farm cats). We're brought over to the chicken run, where four male turkeys compete and display for our benefit. Overwhelmed by everything, we stop in briefly to the farmhouse and I collect a gallon of milk in a plastic iced tea bottle. Tomalee won't take any money; I promise to return after their next milking; we agree that we can work out a price for regular purchases if the first batch works out.

I promise Tomalee I'll bring some clotted cream with me when I visit again. She says she looks forward to finding out what it is.

The milk itself, when I finally try it, has a musty, almost cheeselike taste, with just a hint of a sulfurous tone. The cream does indeed rise to the top, although the clotted cream didn't turn out that well, the crème fraîche was awesome. With spring just around the corner, I'm looking forward to going back to visit Tomalee and her friends. I think Debra the cow and I have some unfinished business.

Additional Resources

These links might be of interest to you:

Blame Canada!

2004-03-26 · by peterb

I'll be in Toronto this weekend, eating good food and visiting good bookstores; probably no updates until Monday.

350 Miles for a Hot Dog

2004-03-29 · by peterb

I arrived in Toronto at about 2 in the morning, and the very first thing I did, after parking the car and checking in to the hotel, was to walk down Yonge Street to the nearest street vendor and buy a sausage, slather pickled peppers and mustard and kraut on it, and walk back to the hotel, eating my hot dog, victoriously. Hot dogs taste better in Yankee stadium, or on Yonge street. No one knows why. It's just that way.

I love Pittsburgh, but one of its biggest drawbacks is the near-absolute lack of street cart or vendor culture. The city council doesn't just not support it, they actively oppose granting new licenses (and then they write whiny, stupid articles in local papers wondering "Why don't more people move here?") Oh sure, there's the Saigon Sandwich lady on the strip, who makes the best Saigon sandwich I've ever had, anywhere, and there's Dilly and her ribs, but they're in the Strip District where there's already a ton of great food. Half the joy of a street vendor is that you can find them in neighborhoods where there's nothing but overpriced restaurants and banks. Hand them $2, walk away with the best meal you'll have all day. Other than the strip ventures, there's a few truck-based places that operate near the University campuses, and one Asian cart on the South Side. That's pretty much it.

Another aspect of Toronto street food that I love: everyone eats it. When I lived in New York, you could pretty much divide people -- on sight -- into those that will eat a hot dog from a cart and those that won't (there was also a third category, which was "I would eat a hot dog from a cart, but I decided to go to Nathan's in Coney Island, instead.") In Toronto, dividing people up this way isn't possible, because they don't let you into the city if you don't eat street vendor hot dogs (all of the vendors sell vegetarian sausages, too, so you're out of excuses). Every time I go, I see someone I wouldn't expect to be chomping down on an Italian sausage in public wolfing one down. Last trip, it was the 60-something asian grandmother, squatting on the curb (onions, peppers, mustard). This time, a Muslim man and his wife (in a chador!) walking down the street eating their very delicious looking beef dogs (I presume), which were covered in chilli.

It was a long drive. But it was a really good hot dog.

More culinary notes from Toronto will follow soon.

Bodies in Motion

2004-03-30 · by peterb

[Jagged Alliance 2

Jagged Alliance 2](/img/ja2.jpg)

Lately I've been playing a bit of the squad-level strategy game Jagged Alliance 2 (both the original and the new "harder than killing a puppy in cold blood without guilt" Wildfire version.) I generally prefer turn-based strategy to real time strategy games, but thinking about some of the design decisions the JA2 guys made sparked some thoughts about the fundamental choices designers make when building these games.

The fundamental choice, it seems to me, is whether your pieces move simultaneously or in turn. This is completely orthogonal to the issue of "real time" versus "turn based":

Control Quanta vs. Movement

| | Turn-based | Real time | | Single move | "Move your piece" Jagged Alliance X-Com Gladius Fallout Tactics | (none?) | | Simultaneous | "Plotted movement" Eastern Front Combat Mission TacOps Galactic Gladiators | "Clicky-Clicky" Close Combat Baldur's Gate / Neverwinter Nights Warcraft Age of Empires Starfleet Command 2 |

As you can see, it's hard to classify some of these games, and the more you think about it the harder it gets. For ease of simplicity, I'm explicitly declaring that games that allow you to pause the action are not invalidated from being considered "real time". All computer combat games are turn-based in some internal implementation sense (e.g., in Warcraft your grunt will get a swing every X quanta of time). In my taxonomy, a game is "turn based" if those quanta are explicitly exposed to the user as "Now is the time when you must enter your orders, or your men will stand around, slackjawed, looking rather like 3D-rendered apes."

AI, in other words, can turn a turn-based game into a real-time one. Neverwinter Nights implements D&D style turns and rounds, but if your avatar is attacked he or she will at least have some default "hit the monster back" type behavior. Likewise, Starfleet Command 2 is an almost direct implementation of the completely turn-based system from the Star Fleet Battles board game, but successfully hides its turn based nature from the player.

So for me the vertical axis is the more interesting one -- simultaneity of movement. "Single move" means that in the context of the game, either the player is moving or shooting, or the enemy is, but not both at the same time. "Simultaneous" means that the enemy can be on the move at the same time as your pieces are.

I find it interesting that most of the squad level games are single move. The compromise that most of them seem to have adopted is "only one piece moves at a time, but if the moving soldier moves into the field of view of an enemy who has movement points left, the enemy may get an attack of opportunity." I've never played Advanced Squad Leader, but I have a suspicion that that is exactly how it resolves combat. Any ASL experts want to enlighten me?

The battalion and division level games are more sophisticated; from as early on as Chris Crawford's Eastern Front, these games generally allow you to input orders for all your units, and then tell the computer "go." A notable exception is the Panzer General series of games, which essentially acts like the squad-level games in my list.

[Panzer General

Panzer General](/img/panzer.jpg)

I don't think it's coincidental that Panzer General is universally viewed as a more approachable, mainstream game than (say) Combat Mission. "One piece moves at a time" semantics aren't just easier for developers to implement, they are also arguably easier for players to understand. Somewhere deep in the darkest recesses of our medulla oblongata, "go over there and whack the other guy with a stick" is a concept we all understand.

This is an intrinsic advantage of "move your piece" over "plotted movement" type games from a UI perspective: you click the mouse button and something happens. A piece moves. A little animation of a gunshot or an explosion plays. You whack the other guy with the stick. In a plotted movement game, the most that can happen is the computer can play a little happy sound that means "Yes, orders received." UI matters. This is a big hurdle for plotted movement games to overcome.

Scale is another issue that may make it harder to implement simultaneous movement in a squad level turn based game. In a game like Combat Mission, the distance troops need to cover is large enough that they're generally not going to fly past each other by accident. A carelessly implemented squad level game could result in multiple rounds of combat with antagonists running past each other and then pirouetting around to fire off a shot.

Yet if we're honest, the "move your piece" games suffer from their own class of problems: believability. This is less of an issue in the fantasy games, but it does stretch credulity in, say, Jagged Alliance when one of my men has enough action points to saunter up to an enemy and calmly fire a Desert Eagle into his face, and the enemy just stands there for the entire 10 second period because he had higher initiative and therefore has already moved and used up all of his action points. So even though plotted movement games have usability hurdles to overcome, I think it's worth trying to overcome them, because they bring greater realism -- of a sort -- to the player. Clicky-clicky games bring that realism also, but at the cost of requiring more dexterity and -- potentially -- less strategic thought (at least, that's the argument. I'm not actually convinced that this is necessarily true, but I'll put it forward for consideration anyway).

[Computer Ambush

Computer Ambush](/img/assault.jpg)

Thus, I'd love to see more squad level games where combat is resolved simultaneously. I know of two, neither of which are modern. Both SSI games, Computer Ambush was a "squad leader" type game with a World War II mise-en-scene, and Galactic Gladiators (and its sequel Galactic Adventures) were based in the 28th century. Computer Ambush's user interface was terrible (for instance, to move, you told a soldier "MRdnm" where "d" was the direction, "n" was the number of squares, and "m" was the "mode" in which you were moving.) The Galactic games, to the contrary, stand up well even against today's best squad combat games. The interface is good for their era, and combat is quick and brutal.

Here are some rules of thumb that I think one could use to make plotted movement games work as well as "move your piece" games:

Or, instead of developing rules of thumb like this, maybe I should just see if I can find someone to fund me to produce Galactic Gladiators 2004. I see maybe a Bruce Willis in the main role, with Julia Roberts as the love interest. It'll have lots of heart. And a happy ending. I promise.

Additional Resources

If you enjoyed this article, you might enjoy some of these links, too:

I Have no Sense of Humour

2004-04-01 · by peterb

As my special gift to all of you, I am providing this small, modest space -- perhaps the only one on the entire Internet -- where there will be no stupid April Fools' jokes. Enjoy.

Pittsburgh Gets Apple Store

2004-04-02 · by peterb

In the "taking away things I like to whine about" department, Apple Computer will apparently be opening a retail store in Pittsburgh. Now I have no excuse for not buying that iPod.

The rumor is that they will be getting planning approval on April 6th, and MacMinute says it will be located at 5508 Walnut Street, in the upscale ("bohemian," say the marketers) Shadyside neighborhood. I can't picture a huge space at that location -- Walnut is a street of fairly modestly sized spaces, so perhaps this is the first of their rumoured new "mini" stores.

I swung by that area on the way home from work tonight -- as near as I can tell, that space is currently occupied by a boutique, which is neither miniscule nor huge. In any event, it's clear that any store opening is months and months away from happening.

Here's a link to the job posting for the Store Manager. If you get the job, I want a discount on my iPod Mini.

And please don't make me wait outside in the rain, OK?

Why Orlowski Hates Google

2004-04-03 · by peterb

Even in an article ostensibly about Sun and Microsoft, Andrew Orlowski can't help throwing in some foaming-at-the-mouth about how Google is evil. Someone asked "Geez, what did Google ever do to Orlowski that he's such a nutbar where Google is concerned?" and this of course led to:

Top (Fictional) Reasons Orlowski Hates Google

  1. His wife made out with Google CEO at wild party, who bragged to all of his friends. [peterb]

  2. Google sold him oregano, claiming it was marijuana. [peterb]

  3. Google cut in front of Orlowski in the lunch line, using "frontsies-backsies." [peterb]

  4. Killed his dog [jch.z]

  5. Gets 10x more hits for Google-bashing articles than for anything else he writes [jch.z]

  6. Did not enjoy being beta-tester for "gWedgies" [jeffrey]

  7. The other night in Counterstrike Google kept headshotting him, leading Orlowski to conclude that Google must be using a hacked client! [peterb]

  8. Orlowski secretly has a crush on Google; pulls Google's pigtails and calls it nasty names so that no one guesses. [peterb]

  9. Google keeps putting flaming bags of poop on doorstep, ringing bell, running away giggling [goob]

  10. Sick of Google calling house, asking to speak to "Michael Hunt" [peterb]

  11. "...And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it wasn't for you damn Google kids!" [peterb]

  12. Finds orlowski.google.com creepy and intimidating [goob]

  13. Bad memories of being an altarboy for Father O'Google [jeffrey]

Additional Resources

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350 Miles for Liquor

2004-04-04 · by peterb

Some more loot from my Toronto trip: alcohol! The LCBO store on Queen's Quay near Yonge is truly a revelation.

Egly-Ouriet à Ambonnay Champagne, Grand Cru Brut Tradition (try saying that five times fast). I've been looking for this for about 6 months, but of course you can't get it in Pennsylvania because of our antediluvian state-controlled wines and spirits system. This is a champagne that has some of the body of a red wine; if you close your eyes you can almost imagine that it's a Belgian lambic. It has a very up-front, fruity yet dry taste; the front is much more assertive than the tail. It went very well with lamb. A half-bottle was $CAN 33, and a normal 750 ml bottle was $CAN 60.

Montevina Zinfandel Port. I decided to try a Zinfandel port on Tilt's recommendation, and I'm glad I did. It was not terribly sophisticated or deep, but it had a characteristic Zinfandel spiciness and was very drinky. At nearly $20 (US) it's a bit dear for what it is, but it's worth at least trying once. Goes well with Stilton or good stinky Camembert (and you can get good stinky Camembert -- young, raw, and moronically illegal in the US -- at Alex's Farm Products at the St. Lawrence Market, Tuesday through Saturday, or in the basement of the Manulife Center, 7 days a week). Based on this one example of the genre, while I don't think Zinfandel Port is a replacement for vintage Porto, I'd surely consider it before a "reserve" Port. It's basically the first port I've had from outside of Portugal that I consider truly drinkable.

Fonseca White Porto. White port enjoyed a fashionable phase in France a few years back, which they are now embarrassed about, looking at it like we look at the "wine cooler" craze of the mid-80s. The French were wrong to be head over heels in love with white port, and they're wrong now to be embarrassed about liking it. It's an unassuming, simple drink, appropriate as an aperitif. Not everything we drink has to be the sine qua non of sophistication. Sometimes you just want a beer. Sometimes you just want some cheap white port. At $8/bottle, there's no reason to be embarrassed about keeping some in the house. Or even offering it to guests. A little dryer than Ruby port (but still noticeably sweet), it has a slightly chalky, talcumlike note. If you want something sophisticated in this range you'd do better with a low end Sherry, but this doesn't have the aggressive Sherry oak infusion which I sometimes find to be a little monotonous. So it makes for a nice change.

Additional Resources

Notes and miscellany:

Smooth, Rich, Bold, Lousy.

2004-04-06 · by peterb

After a whirlwind weekend gustatory tour of Toronto I was driving home, and needed coffee to stay awake. I stopped at Krispy Kreme donuts, which for a long time had perfectly fine coffee, and once again was confronted by the trio of horrible coffees that they replaced their old, perfectly adequate coffee with. The new Unholy Trio goes under the nom de suck of three vague adjectives: Smooth, Rich, and Bold. Each of the three is completely unacceptable in unique and sad ways. Decaf drinkers, presumably used to second class citizenship in the Abbasid Caffeinate, may only elect Robust .

The Smooth blend is the least innocuous of the three, although that makes it the most subject to picking up the aroma of donut oil that pervades the Krispy Kreme shop (I acknowledge that this is not necessarily a flaw). The Bold blend is a nasty, overburnt past-French roast that makes Starbucks standard espresso roast seem subtle. It is thin-bodied and unbalanced, with no mouthfeel to speak of. The Rich roast is as bitter as the Bold, but adds an unpleasant sour note, although it has a slightly better body than the others. Your best bet to get through any of them is to try to gulp without tasting. I didn't try the decaf.

The most frustrating thing about the new coffees, apart from the whole "they all suck more than the perfectly adequate thing that they replaced" aspect, is the names. The names completely fail to describe the coffee in substantive terms, so if I want to remember which one sucked in the least offensive way, I have to equate that to which lifestyle choice the marketing name describes. Normally, all things being equal, I'd go for the Bold roast, because that adjective best describes my dashing, devil-may-care attitude towards life, my joie de vivre, my trim physique and forceful yet attractive manhood. Too bad for me that this is the worst of the three coffees.

Next up I'd probably consider Rich, since who doesn't want to be wealthy? Perhaps this "rich" roast could refer to my impeccable taste in wine, or my worldly travel experience? But, of course, the Rich coffee sucks only marginally less than the Bold, which brings me back to Smooth, which I typically associate with Smoove B ('While you sip your drink, I will stroke your hair and tell you such complimentary things as "You are like a fine statue carved out of brown marble," and "Your eyes are like pools of creamy Italian butter," and "You have beautiful shoes." You will know that I mean these things because they come from the heart, and the heart is always true.') While Smoove B is indeed a man to be admired, I'd never considered emulating him. But to get the least sucky coffee at Krispy Kreme, that is indeed what I have to do. So each time I want to get coffee there, I have to go through this process where I gaze thoughtfully at each adjective and ask myself "Which one of these would I least like? Because that's the one that comes closest to drinkable."

Damn, girl.

I want my old coffee back. Where once there was a thumbtack right in the middle of the triangle of good coffee, now there are three thumbtacks outside the triangle, in the Seventh Circle of Suck. Thanks, guys. Thanks, marketers. Thanks, Krispy Kreme.

Maybe you could get rid of your glazed donuts next time, and replace them with "Cloying," "Obese," and "Ignorant" versions, instead.

This is a reprint of an article that originally appeared at Tea Leaves.

Dramatis Personae

2004-04-08 · by peterb

'"Help him. Help him" Dobbs sobbed. "Help him"
"Help who? Help who?" called Yossarian once he could wrestle his headset back into the intercom. "Help who?"
"The bombadier. The bombadier. Help the bombadier"
"I'm the bombadier" Yossarian yelled right back to him. "I'm the bombadier, I'm all right, I'm all right."
"Then help him, help him" Dobbs begged. "Help him. Help the bombadier."
And Snowden lay dying in the back. --Joseph Heller, Catch-22

It's a silly little thing, really. Just a tradition. When I crew my first bomber in the classic SSI Apple ][ game Fifty Mission Crush, I name the crew members after characters from Catch-22. The pilot will be Orr or McWatt, Snowden is the tailgunner, Aarfy is the radioman, and of course the bombadier has to be Yossarian. Various other minor characters from the book fill out the other positions.

This leads to a problem, of course, when you take heavy flak over Lille and Aarfy (for example) dies. Who takes his place? You could of course hypothesize that Aarfy Junior joined the service also, or that Aarfy has a clone, suitably named "Aarfy 2," but that somehow isn't quite as satisfying. Consequently, I tend to get attached to the first generation of each crewman, perhaps mostly because it's such a pain to come up with a new name if they die.

So like a sense of place, a sense of personality can increase a player's engagement in a game. Personality can come from the game's designers, who deliberately create personality through character and plot design, or cut scenes, as in The Mark of Kri, or in the worst case personality can be provided in the accompanying manual (How can you tell I'm old? I remember when games came with printed manuals, and the size and quality of the manual was considered to be a good indicator of the quality of the game. How naive we were then). The problem here is that not all game designers are good storytellers, by which I mean "most game designers are not good storytellers." So if you provide a character that is stupid, you lose (look at the universally negative reaction Kojima got to the "twist" in the middle of Metal Gear Solid 2. People didn't like the character, and that translated to "people didn't like that part of the game.")

The other route is for the designer to allow the player to define the personality of the character; this is the route that most American-style role playing games take (but not their Japanese cousins). It's a riskier strategy. If it pays off, then the player has an extremely immersive experience and feels empowered (you'll hear people raving about Morrowind, for example, because it "lets them be whatever they want to be.") But the flip side of "empowered" is "directionless." Since the player will get out of a game like this what they put into it, to a casual player (say, one that is just evaluating the game to see if they like it) this type of game will seem bland. Without personality.

The third path is to try to allow for the player to decide in what directions their character or characters develop, and to provide scripted personality development accordingly. The downside of this is that you're multiplying the amount of work you need to do, because you need to provide personality and narrative along several axes. Bioware and Black Isle have both done this with a few of their games. The only one where I thought they really pulled it off was in the superb Planescape: Torment, although Fallout came close.

There's a belief that is rampant among developers that writing well is easy. It's not. Telling a good story is harder than developing a complex piece of software. So I think where I come down on this from a design perspective is: if you aren't positive that you (or someone you collaborate with) can write a good story and tell it well, punt. Give the user some way to customize the character and invest her own chosen personality in her avatar, and get the hell out of her way.

Fifty Mission Crush

Fifty Mission Crush

And, to tell the whole truth, when we're bombing Rotterdam from 30,000 feet I really do imagine Yossarian there in the bombadier's nest, not caring if he hits the target, just wanting to unload his payload close enough to avoid court-martial. And I feel a little -- just a little -- sad when he dies. Conversely, since at the start of every mission you get a brief report showing you who is crewing your plane and how many missions they've survived for, there's a little thrill to know that you've managed through skill (read: luck) to keep one of these guys alive for 10 or 20 missions (in Fifty Mission Crush, life is cheap, not to mention short).

It has no plot to speak of, but 20 years later, I'm still playing Fifty Mission Crush. I'm still trying to keep Yossarian alive.

"I'm cold," Snowden said. "I'm cold." 
"There, there," said Yossarian. "There, there." He pulled the rip cord of Snowden's parachute and covered his body with the white nylon sheets. 
"I'm cold." 
"There, there."

Additional Resources

Ou sont les neigedens d'antan?

Tokaji

2004-04-10 · by peterb

A brief followup Toronto booze report: I've always "liked" Tokaji, but never been crazy-go-nuts over it. In Toronto I picked up the 1999 Hétszóló Tokaji Aszú ("3"), and I love it. Although it has the sweetness you expect from a pourriture noble wine, like Sauternes, it is balanced not just by a peppery bite, but by actual saltiness. It's refreshingly tart, with an unripe apricot ester-like aroma. I've never tasted a wine quite like it. It's better by itself than with food. I'm going to buy a bunch more the next time I head up north (road trip, anyone?)

Needless to say, the infinitely stupid Pennsylvania State Liquor stores don't stock this wine, although they have the "5" and "6" versions (much sweeter) of the same house.

I still think that I prefer port, in the abstract, to Tokaji. Although I'd probably turn to Tokaji ahead of Sauternes, when in the mood for a noble rot wine, I'd still rather have the Pourriture produced by the practically unheard of Fattoria di Petreto in Tuscany. My supply of the '94, though, has run out. Calamity!

Why do I like good dessert wines so much? I think wine critic Jancis Robinson nails it when she says:

Poor-quality sweet wines are indeed pretty disgusting, their sweetness running to flab and stickiness. But good sweet wines refresh the palate, leaving it stimulated by their whistle-clean combination of natural grape sugar, lively fruity acidity and, often, the densely vegetal flavours of botrytis, the so-called noble rot, a mould that expensively concentrates the sugar and acid in grapes affected by it, dramatically reducing the quantity of wine produced but equally dramatically increasing its quality and potential longevity.

There are those who say that Monbazillac is an undervalued alternative to Sauternes. Don't believe them. Monbazillac is undrinkable swill, not even fit for the pigs of Bergerac. I've apologized to sinks when pouring bottles of Monbazillac down them. (Perhaps I am being unfair to an entire appellation based on three or four bad experiences. I'm OK with that.)

Additional Resources

In case you haven't noticed, I like dessert wines.

Gabba Gabba One of Us

2004-04-12 · by peterb

I finally stopped resisting and bought an iPod, the 15 gigabyte model.

Although I was probably doomed to buy the "regular" iPod rather than the Mini, simply because Minis are not readily available enough to satisfy my desire for immediate consumer gratification, I did actually go use a Mini before making the choice.

A lot of people talk about the superior controls of the Mini; coming to both of them cold, I thoroughly disagree. While the position of the controls on the Mini might be superior -- I couldn't say for sure without using it for a few days -- the feel isn't quite as nice, to my taste. The buttons and scroll wheel on the bigger iPod are outlined with ridges (I almost said "are ribbed for your pleasure") so that it's easy to locate the control you're looking for without looking. If the Mini has any similar tactile cue, it was too subtle for me to notice. Also, just from handling the two of them side by side, the wheel on the mini didn't connect as well to the on screen cues. I'm being vague there, but it's hard to describe. I was able to use the bigger iPod wheel perfectly, but with the Mini I kept overshooting my target. That could simply be because I have big hands.

After a couple of days with the 15 gigabyte iPod I've come to the conclusion that 4 Gb is plenty of space. It turns out I really don't listen to my entire collection of MP3s -- about 40 days worth -- in any one session. It is nice being able to have an extra complete backup of the archive, though, so I don't exactly regret having the space.

For me, the difference in size between the Mini and the standard iPod wasn't great enough to convince me to go small, but I can surely see how that would matter to a lot of folks. For me the problem with the iPod isn't its size, but the mere fact that it is a separate device at all. My problem is that I generally have barely enough brain power to remember to pick up exactly one portable device when I leave the house; it turns out that that is almost always the cell phone. This is, basically, why I stopped using my Palm Pilot -- a personal information manager that is never with you isn't much use. I'm less worried about the iPod since (for me) it's basically for working out, and just needs to be kept with the rest of the gym stuff.

I'll be first in line for the combination iPod/Pilot/GPS/Phone, though, once they're cheap enough to give them away at McDonald's.

Dawn Comes Early, With Rosy Fingers

2004-04-15 · by peterb

It has been a long time since I've experienced a web site that filled me with such elation and glee as does Winged Sandals, a Shockwaveriffic introduction to Greek mythology for kids. It has really enjoyable, accessible movies that everyone can enjoy, some neat activities (I like the trading cards), and a wonderful searchable "Who's Who," which while not comprehensive is well designed. The art style is Samurai Jack meets Pocketskeleton. The load times are substantial, but worth the wait: do the Flash version if you can.

I am, as it were, a mythology geek, and love diving in to the legends, tales, and fables of just about any culture. There is something exciting to me about reading fables and myths; the archetypes that underlie consciousness are distilled and pickled in myths, and they can take your breath away when you taste them. True, a superb author, such as Italo Calvino or Gabriel Garcia-Marquez, can channel those archetypes to create a novel story that nonetheless feels like it came from the deepest recesses of cultural memory. But there are only so many Salman Rushdies (or J. K. Rowlings) in the world, and so I return to the oldest tales whenever the mood strikes me, which is often.

I have a special place in my heart for Greek mythology. The ancient Greeks were such a venal, corrupt people that they can't help but be interesting; they wear their sins on their Gods' sleeves. No sombre procession of order brought out of chaos here; the history of the Gods and Titans is, from the outset, filled with cannibalism, rape, murder, thievery, jealousy, pillaging, boasting, cowardice, and getting completely hideously smashed on cheap wine. It's like one long action sequence.

So yeah, you can read your copy of Bullfinch's Mythology or Frazier's The Golden Bough, or listen to Joseph Campbell drone on in Bill Moyer's ear about the mythic journey of the Hero with a Thousand Faces yadda yadda fertility rite yadda yadda sacrifice yadda yadda zzzzzzzzzzzzz, or you can just visit Winged Sandals and poke around and have fun. Maybe you'll even learn something you didn't know before. I certainly didn't know about the "goat ritual," for example.

[Perseus Meets Andromeda

Perseus Meets Andromeda (Mark Fiore)](http://www.mythweb.com)

The Internet is, of course, a mythology geek's paradise, and Winged Sandals isn't the only (or the most comprehensive) site one will find. But it is one of the most engaging, I think, for someone who hasn't already developed a love of the subject. And that's worth something. Probably the closest analogue I've found is the superb (and slightly more comprehensive) MythWeb, which has excellent little animations by Mark Fiore. There are other resources too, but I won't laundry list them: I'd rather you chose a responsible guide and followed him or her down the path they recommend. I recommend Winged Sandals.

Oh, one more thing: whatever you do, once you start your journey, don't look back.

Additional Resources

Links to sites discussed in this article, and more:

New Addiction

2004-04-16 · by peterb

The only MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game) that is any fun: The Kingdom of Loathing. And it's free!

I blame Zarf.

President Forever

2004-04-18 · by peterb

As a followup to my preview of The Political Machine, I decided to try President Forever, which was suggested by one of my alert readers (who, I believe, is involved with the publisher?) There is a free demo available, and the full game can be purchased and downloaded for a mere $12. I paid more than that for lunch this week. (They also will sell you, as a bonus, their previous game President 2000 for just $2. I bought it, because I'm a sucker for a bargain, but I haven't tried that one yet.)

President Forever is a Windows-only game. (Question for game publishers out there: why aren't you developing all your games in SDL? Then you'd get great graphics and sound and everything could be trivially ported to Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, and probably other platforms. This isn't a rhetorical question -- I really want to know.)

A word before we continue: I'm going to compare President Forever to The Political Machine a lot in this review. I think this is reasonable, since they both address the same topic. That being said, please remember that the version of The Political Machine I've played is just a beta, and for all I know they're going to completely change it before it's official release.

Let's start with the positives. I had fun playing both the demo and the full game (warning: the demo doesn't let you complete a full election, so if you're desperate to see George Bush lose to someone, be prepared for disappointment). The game takes a more strategic, higher-level view of the US Presidential Election than The Political Machine. Yes, there's the same aspect of "run your candidate around the country and make speeches and fundraise" that existed in TPM, but those are inadequate to win an election by themselves.

President Forever

President Forever

Roughly, there's "platform", which is the particular position your candidate takes on the issues; there's a raft of issues on which you can take a position which is liberal, center-left, centrist, center-right, and right. Which position you take gives you a bonus or penalty that isn't terribly well explained in-game. You can change your platform in the middle of the campaign, but you run the risk that the press will mock you for flip-flopping on an issue. There's "theme", which determines what your stump speeches and ads will be about (you can create ads on any issue, but obviously ads that are "in theme" tend to be more effective.) Your campaign can pick three issues from the myriad available to be part of your theme. You can change any or all of those issues in your theme at any time without any penalty, but since your candidate gains familiarity with issues over time, switching issues sacrifices some bonus.

Why would you ever change your theme? Well, issues wax and wane in importance over time. Stump speeches on military intervention are going to be more important in 2004 (for example), then will speeches on, say, affirmative action, because the issue is hotter.

There's also electoral strategy, which gives you a bird's-eye view of what states you are trying to win in order to put together 270 electoral votes. This sounds obvious, but isn't, and the implementation of strategy is fairly nice, because it lets you enact broad decisions like "run this ad in all of the states in which I'm marginal that are part of my strategy." Electoral strategy also influences where your crusaders go. More on crusaders below.

Whereas The Poltiical Machine makes candidate stamina the central currency, here the primary currency is "command points," a renewable (you get 6 each turn) non-bankable resource. There are also "political points," a nonrenewable resource (you get 10: when you use them all, they're gone) that can be used to help win endorsements. Your candidate does have a "fatigue" meter, and when it gets low he becomes less effective and is more likely to commit a gaffe. The only way to recover from fatigue is to rest. There is also, of course, cash.

You won't have enough command points to do everything you want to do, which is as it should be. There's a few things you can spend command points on that span multiple turns. For example, you can hire foot soldiers or crusaders. Recruiting a crusader takes 1 command point over 10 turns; once you start, you've lost that command point for good until the recruiting is done. Once a crusader is "hired" (as John Kerry, my first crusader was Theresa Heinz-Kerry -- jeez, can't I even get my wife to campaign for me easier than that?), they hit the campaign trail, barnstorming and making speeches on the themes you've chosen. They decide where to go based on what states are in your electoral strategy. This compares pretty favorably to the implementation of specialists in The Political Machine beta, where I found I was constantly shuffling them around from state to state trying to optimize the benefit I got from them. I like that crusaders in President Forever are basically autonomous -- you set the strategy, and they go try to implement it.

Public polling in President Forever is inaccurate. If you want to see accurate numbers, you need to commission a private poll, which costs cash. That's pretty cool. It's unclear to me what the effect of not having cash is; as John Kerry I ran out of money three days before the election, but apart from newspaper headlines saying "Kerry campaign is bankrupt!" there didn't seem to be any effect -- my megaexpensive advertising blitz, for example, seemed to continue as usual.

One other fascinating aspect is that at the beginning of each turn, you see the stories the newspapers are going to report. You then have a chance to spend CPs to "spin" the stories your way. I'm assured that the effect of spin is very important, but I couldn't quite see the connection in my game. I like the idea a lot, but the implementation needs work (for example, you spend your CPs but don't find out whether it "worked" until the next turn. That may be realistic, but it's confusing.)

My criticisms of the game are fairly minimal. First off, there's much less graphical flash than The Political Machine, but given the nature of the game, I didn't really mind that. The graphics were functional, if characterless, and got the point across. While I liked that the game runs in a window (dear game developers: please make it at least optional for all games to run in a window? Pretty please? It's not 1985 any more) it has a weird non-Windows feel to it -- there aren't any pulldown menus. So it feels like a bit of a hack job. This doesn't impact playability, it just goes to the fit and finish aspect of things.

I don't know whether to add bonus style points or deduct plagiarism points for the fact that one of their "menu selection" sound effects seems to have been lifted wholesale from X-Com: UFO Defense. Maybe it's a stock footage sound that they licensed. All I know is that it's probably a bad tactical move for any game to remind me that I could be playing X-Com instead.

The manual is pretty sparse, and the in-game help doesn't exist. My first time starting up the game I sat for a good two minutes staring at a bunch of hand-rolled buttons with gnostic words on them like "FS" and said to myself "Well, what the heck do I do now?" There's a ton of room for improvement in this area; a tutorial mode would work wonders. Even as an experienced player of a given game, I still rely on popup tooltips and in-game help to remind me of mechanics and strategy. There's no excuse for any game more sophisticated than, say, a driving game to not provide that sort of help. (Well, OK, frankly "The game only costs $12" is actually a pretty good excuse, in that kielbasa-sandwich-at-Chiodo's sort of way.)

The game models the candidates' debates but in such a cursory and forgetful way that it might as well not. You have to spend CP to prepare for debates, and the newspapers report whether you won or lost, but there is no actual debate drama or detail beyond "So and so won." That's a real missed opportunity.

The actual election-night coverage is utterly and didactically anti-climactic. Wait until the appointed time for the state's returns, hear who won. Yawn. Didn't any of these people play President Elect? What about precincts reporting in little by little? What about states that appear to be leaning one way suddenly becoming too close to call, or flipping the other? These things happen in real life and that's why watching election night coverage in real life is compelling. Election games should be at least as compelling as TV.

On the whole, I think this game is great value for money -- I bought it -- and the core gameplay is fun and compelling. To hotpot software, publishers of President Forever: more and better in-game documentation, please, and work a little more on the presentation issues. You've obviously done a lot of hard work to create a gem of a political election game here. It doesn't make any sense to hand a gem to the customer in a ratty paper bag.

Additional Resources

Please feel free to contact me with any corrections or further information (or pointers to more election games!).

Children's Books vs. Video Games

2004-04-20 · by peterb

  1. If You Give a Mouse a Glock 19 [peterb]

  2. Duck on a Warthog [peterb]

  3. Horton Hears a Sniper [agroce]

  4. Cat In A Hat With An M-16 [jch]

  5. The Cat In The Hat Talks Smack [peterb]

  6. The Little Castle Wolfestein on the Prairie. [tmwong]

  7. Green eggs and fireballs. [bhudson]

  8. Goodnight, Moon Patrol [peterb]

  9. The Little Rocket Launcher Who Could [tomault]

  10. Little Red Jedi Knight [bhudson]

  11. Put a Cap in Pop [rochberg]

  12. Grandma, Felix, and Mustapha Tactical Nuke [agroce]

  13. One Fish, Two Fish, Red vs. Blue Fish [peterb]

  14. Splinter Cell: Puppy Helmet [agroce]

  15. Go, Link, Go [peterb]

  16. Click-clack, Doom [peterb]

  17. Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad NAZI HORDE [agroce]

  18. American McGee's The Velveteen Rabbit [agroce]

  19. Clifford the Big Red Faction [peterb]

  20. George and Martha Rematch [rochberg]

  21. Charlotte's Web Hunt [rochberg]

  22. Charlie and the Chocolate Shotgun [peterb]

  23. The Hoboken Chicken Shootout [rochberg]

  24. James and Princess Peach [peterb]

  25. How Tommy Vercelli Stole Christmas [peterb]

  26. Twisted Metal Black Beauty [peterb]

  27. The Adventures of Winnie the Pooh, Opposing Force: Book of the Year Edition [peterb]

  28. Are You There, God? It's Me, That Guy From Quake. [peterb]

  29. Sarah, Plain, Tall and with a Wicked Headshot [tomault]

  30. The RPG of the Swan [tomault]

  31. Alan Mendelsohn's Pro Skater [rochberg]

  32. Medal of Honor: Briar Patch [rochberg]

  33. Beyond Good and Evil My Little Ponies [baird]

Additional Resources

If you liked this, you'll also like:

Beyond Good and Evil

2004-04-23 · by peterb

Currently on the bargain racks for the Xbox, GameCube, PS2, and PC platforms is a little gem of a platformer: Beyond Good and Evil. It was released with some fanfare late last year, and proceeded to impress critics and fail to sell at all. The fact that this game (essentially) flopped makes me a little sad. I am not certain if it is a sign that the publisher, Ubisoft, is an incompetent marketer (as a friend of mine said, "Beyond Good and Evil? They might as well have named it Marcus Aurelius's Meditations") or a sign that the game playing public is, by and large, composed of morons. Given that the somewhat inferior (but "branded") Prince of Persia handily outsold Beyond Good and Evil, and that the latest abysmal Need for Speed driving game outsold Project Gotham Racing 2, I lean towards the latter hypothesis.

I might like this game first and foremost because of its style. It has a lot of style to spare.

[Jade

Jade wears green. Get it?](/img/beyond1.jpg)

Beyond Good and Evil tells a formulaic story ("Save the world. And your friends. Win valuable cash prizes! Oh look, a plot twist."), but it tells it very well. You are Jade, a nearly broke freelance reporter who lives in a beautifully decorated lighthouse on the planet Hillys with a bunch of adorable orphaned street urchins. Well, OK, lighthouse urchins. Hillys is bombarded daily by the appropriately insectois DomZ (hereinafter "bad guys," since their name violates my capitalization ethics), and is defended by the oddly incompetent yet ominous military organization called the Alpha Section (think Buzz Lightyear with stormtrooper helmets). Jade gets a mysterious job offer, one thing leads to another and...well, I don't want to spoil the plot. It really is very professionally produced, and I found myself staying up to unreasonable hours more than once to see what would happen next. "Just five more minutes," I'd say, and another hour would roll by.

A large part of the game is using your camera (you're a reporter and a photographer) to take pictures of unique animals, enemies, and activities relevant to the plot. This might be the first game I've played with "camera view" controls that didn't have me cursing in frustration (the incredibly, disgustingly awful Fatal Frame just about gave me an aneurysm). The camera controls are crisp, responsive, and sensible. It's also nice that this gives you a motivation beyond "go in and beat people up" (although combat does, of course, become inevitable).

[Jade

Sneaking (click to enlarge)](/img/beyond2-dont-steal-bandwidth.jpg)

The game's mechanics match my tastes perfectly. I called it a platformer, earlier, but that's not quite right. The nearest comparison would be to The Legend of Zelda, with a little bit of Metal Gear Solid thrown in. In other words, the challenging part of the game is figuring out the right way to approach an obstacle (be it a blocked entryway or enemy guards), rather than using your joystick virtuosity to get past them. There's some degree of dexterity involved (particularly in the obligatory pod hovercraft races), but the difficulty is always manageable. In every case where I got stuck, it was because I wasn't thinking about the problem correctly, rather than because I wasn't nimble enough.

The sound design, art, and music direction are very good; Hillys, although small, is consistently realized and depicted, with a sensibility drawn from a somewhat jarring yet amusing mixture of different contemporary Japanese anime styles (I think of it as Ghost in the Shell meets Pokemon). It works, somehow. The voice acting, with the notable exception of the near-racist stereotype hispanic computer, was excellent. The one negative comment I have is that the game falls on the stupid side of the "save points vs. save anytime" divide in that it uses save points, but they got enough other things right that I'll forgive them that one bogosity.

It's a good game. I hope the team that worked on it sticks together for more projects.

So if you, like me, bought Prince of Persia this past holiday season and were disappointed by its boring, repetetive gameplay and high difficulty level, then I suggest you do like I did: sell Prince of Persia to EB Games (or to some friend you don't like very much) for $15, and then buy Beyond Good and Evil for $17. It'll be $2 very well spent.

Simple pleasures

2004-04-27 · by peterb

Two eggs 1 - 2 teaspoons soy sauce generous squirt of sriracha chili sauce (a.k.a. "rooster sauce") dash sesame oil scramble in skillet with a little canola oil

Enjoy with tea.

And the Ass Saw the Angel

2004-04-28 · by peterb

One of the more egregiously out of print books, in America at least, is Nick Cave's And the Ass Saw the Angel. Elise introduced me to this book ages ago, lending me a copy of her precious (Imported! British! Naked lady on the cover!) paperback.

It's written in an approximation of how Cave, a Australian gothic heroin chic musician, thinks an illiterate retarded Southern anti-Elvis educated at Eton might write:

A single naked bulb hung from the ceiling directly over mah crib. The bulb throbbed hotly, brazen and hypnotic, as ah lay upon mah back and observed, with increasing annoyance, a growing number of night-insects serried around the humming cynosure. Ah watched helplessly as every minute or so an over-zealous moth or gnat or fly would collide with the deadly bulb, frying to ash its little wings and hair-like appendages in the doing. Thus its futile business would end in a screaming descent, invariably coming to ground within the fruit-crate in which ah lay. Spinning insectile amputees littered mah crib -- died ghastly deaths, their last agonies performed in all their screaming luridess right before mah eyes, to bring them at last to the end of their days, bereft of life -- stone cold dead.

That's the style, and if you can't handle the jarring inconsistency of "ah" and "mah" sandwiched next to "cynosure," you won't get very far in this book, and I can't blame you. But, look, if We can Cut Thomas Pynchon Slack for Writing a Novel wherein he Capitalized every Noun and Seemingly Other Random Words for Over One-Thousand Pages, surely we can give Cave a "get out of pretentious prison free" card for this, his first novel.

And the Ass Saw the Angel takes the point of view of the bestial, filthy mongrel Euchrid Eucrow, despised by all and cared about by none, and chronicles his obsession with the beatific, beloved, and disturbingly-named girl Cosey Mo. Cave's obsessions with the American South's poverty culture, Elvis, biblical retribution, religious fanaticism, and redemption are all on display here. I can quibble about Cave's inability to remember that we call them "trucks" in the American South, not "lorries," but that's really beside the point: the intensity of his obsession with these Southern hypergothic archetypes is on display here, and the uniqueness of his voice can't be denied.

Of course, if obsession was all it took to make a good novel, there would be a lot more good novels. Pity the poor Southerner: Faulkner tried to capture their voice accurately, showing them in all their flawed, human glory. Fifty years later we have books like the execrable Vernon God Little winning the Booker prize with the incisive observations that most Americans in Texas are fat, eat lots of junk food, and can't spell the word "fucking" (Dear Rest of the World: look, if there's one word pretty much every American can spell, that's the one, OK? Apparently the London literati must still be bitter about Renée Zellweger's British accent in Bridget Jones' Diary, and giving Vernon God Little the Booker was their revenge.) With this in mind, the problem with And the Ass Saw the Angel is that one can't escape the fact that it was written by an outsider, and while its voice is unique, it is not authentic. In trying to express his obsession with his fictional, Biblically significant Gomorrah-of-the-psyche, Cave does some violence to it. Violence other than that which he intended, I mean.

So it's a conundrum. It doesn't ruin the book, but it does suggest a lost opportunity to me. It's easy to lose yourself in the Otherness of a foreign culture, but familiarity or love for the Other doesn't necessarily help us write in their voice. In trying to do so, you can not only create a voice which rings false (as in Vernon God Little) but also weaken your own ability to connect the reader to the impulse that you're trying to express. Cave's obsession with and search for redemption would exist even if he had never heard of America. How much power, how much truth, how much reflection was lost or obscured because of the voice he chose for the novel? Somewhere in Victoria, Australia, many years ago, a young man grew up feeling outcast and despised. As he grew, he began to turn those feelings into art. I know it's a mistake to conflate an author with his characters -- particularly when the tale is in the form of a fable, as it is here -- but these themes run so solidly through everything Cave has ever done that I think I'm on safe ground doing it. I would like to hear that boy's story in Cave's own native accent, in his own idiom, rather than in a fake Southern patois.

Much to my surprise, I discovered there is now a spoken word album with some "experimental" music ("experimental" is Australian for "bad") and readings from the book by Cave. There are samples at Amazon, but if you're looking for a soundtrack to this book you're probably better off listening to his album The Firstborn Is Dead.

Additional Resources

Ah do declare that mah pillocks grow all ossified like the stinking, feculent ravens that shit and mewl in the junkyard, pecking at the scabs that cover mah bruised and broken body, when ah think you maht click on these links:

Ten Little Ladybugs

2004-04-30 · by peterb

[Ten Little Ladybugs

Ten Little DEAD Ladybugs](/img/ladybugs.jpg)

A gothic tale of kidnapping, murder, cannibalism, and mayhem in the insect kingdom, Ten Little Ladybugs, written by Melanie Gerth and illustrated by Laura Huliska-Beith, presents a troubling view of the devastating havoc that eschatological idolatry and ideology wreak on America's children. That such potentially scarring material is promoted as a "children's book" is even more troubling.

The cover is gaily festooned with the pastoral scene from a bourgeois garden, the smiles on the faces of the predatory insects arrayed around the ladybugs designed to mislead even the most cynical reader. The ladybugs themselves are given special treatment, being plastic appliques which can be touched by the unwitting child-victim. This pre-literate tactile contact enhances the bond between the reader and the helpless meals-ready-to-eat. As the pages are turned, and the ladybugs are devoured one by one, the appliques disappear one at a time as well, leaving only holes in the book (and in the soul and heart of the toddler holding it).

Once the reader is lured to begin the book, there is no respite. It begins with an almost Tarantinoesque shock of bloody violence:

Ten little ladybugs, sitting on a vine.
Along came a butterfly, then there were....

and when the reader turns the page, of course, they will find the word "nine," and the first of the harmless ladybugs has been consumed by the innocently smiling butterfly. The phrasing of the poem, an homage to Agatha Christie's classic suspense thriller Ten Little Indians, is both calculated and cruel. As in that grim, humourless work, there is no detective come to save the day here; no Pea weevil Poirot to stop the slaughter and accuse the guilty. All there is here is death, senseless and brutal.

Nine little ladybugs, skipping on a gate
Along came a caterpiller, then there were eight.

The innocence of the ladybugs is maintained throughout the narrative. It is more than mere unwariness -- even as they move towards their stomach-acid drenched doom, the author relentlessly describes them as "skipping," "dancing," trying to force the reader into accepting the (nonsensical) idea that the ladybugs have accepted, even welcomed joyously, being rent asunder in this fashion. The analogy to Leni Riefenstahl's Tag der Freiheit, which likewise disguised the horrors of the Nazi regime by focusing on the smiling, fresh faces of German soldiers, could not be more clear. Of course the caterpilllar is healthy and strong -- he is nourished by the flesh of those he oppresses.

I will not excerpt the entire book here -- enough harm has been done by Gerth and Huliska-Beith, and I do not want to continue the madness -- but their message is corrupt and corrupting: "No one is innocent." A bee, a turtle, a duck, even animals that are not insectivorous take part in the macabre ladybug buffet.

I was ready to write this off as merely another piece of "shock" fiction, when I reached the chilling conclusion that demonstrated the devious (and subtle) ideology behind the tract:

One little ladybug, sitting all alone
Along came a breeze, and then she was...home.

The symbology here is powerful and insidious. By employing the very elements themseves to deliver the coup de grace, Gerth disclaims responsibility and absolves the guilty of their crimes. "That's the way the world really works," she seems to be saying. "Get used to it, kids. Eat or be eaten." Such a message, while dispiriting, might be acceptable in a book targeted at an older audience (Orwell's "a boot stomping on a human face...forever" comes to mind), since it could be viewed as a cautionary tale. Here, targeted at toddlers, it is merely mean-spirited.

In the final page, depicting all the ladybugs "safe and sound" in the afterlife, happily cavorting with their various tormentors, you can hear the authors' cruel, mocking laughter echoing through the page. It chilled me to the very bone.

Ten Little Ladybugs is readily available to children at your local bookstore, and also at amazon.com.

Next week: The feast of Atreus and Miss Spider's Tea Party.

On the Tragedy of St. Nicholas' Greek Food Festival

2004-05-03 · by peterb

When spanakopita is wet and lame there is no pastry quite so false and weak, with spinach, feta, phyllo over flame, we eat it only at festivals Greek

It's true, indeed, that this need not be so: somewhere a Turkish baker plies his craft, but on divided Cyprus, Greeks say "No!" (a culture war can make one's taste buds daft.)

A rice pilaf that costs almost ten bucks is robbery even by standards Church The dollars flow in like a row of ducks, Somewhere a bishop cackles in his perch.

Though every year I forget lessons past this time I swear will be my very last.

Schadenrennen

2004-05-04 · by peterb

He's insanely talented. He has won Grand Prix after Grand Prix, and seems absolutely invulnerable. The gods love him. He can take certain defeat and, using a seemingly endless reserve of luck, skill, and cojones, turn it into a victory. His rivals seethe with bitterness and jealousy, and fans wonder if the sport will ever be free of his domination.

I am speaking, of course, about MotoGP champion Valentino Rossi.

What, you thought I meant Michael Schumacher? It's true, much of what I wrote also describes him, but his domination of Formula 1 has gone beyond competitiveness and into the realm of dadaist art. Every two weeks we gather to watch the race, over an unhealthy breakfast of crêpes, sausages, and strong tea, and every week we have the same conversation: "So, who is going to come in third?" That's what the sport has been reduced to: wondering who is going to come in third.

There's a line that we walk here, when talking about this, a line of whining that shouldn't be crossed. The same complaints that people make about Schumacher's effect on the sport today have been made about Tiger Woods, and about the Williams sisters, and about Lance Armstrong. We like our contests close; we like drama. When someone comes in who is so dominant that the question is no longer "Will he win the championship?" but "Will he win the championship this month?" well, some might argue that that makes the sport less interesting to watch. The other side of that coin is that we are blessed: in the first part of the twenty-first century, we have the privilege to watch one of the best drivers that has ever raced, at the height of his powers, drive one of the most magnificent cars ever created. Complaining about that seems somewhat picayune.

Rossi

Valentino Rossi

And yet...and yet, there is MotoGP. Where young Valentino Rossi dominates like Schumacher while putting on a better show. "Il Dottore," they call him -- the doctor -- and watching him slice through the corners in South Africa was like watching a surgeon work, swift and sure. Rossi this season gave up his Honda ride and is with Yamaha, riding an unquestionably inferior machine. If Michael Schumacher drove a Renault instead of a Ferrari, no one doubts that he would still find a way to win a race. So too with Rossi.

Some of this is the nature of their respective sports. No one questions that Lance Armstrong's victories would not be possible without the help of his team. No one questions that the money that's poured into the technology surrounding him -- his clothes, his bike, his food -- has a significant impact in helping him win. But at the end of the day, we see him climbing a mountain on a bike with his legs, and we see him do it faster than the other guys. Even with all the support he gets, the victory is his. Likewise, the physicality of a MotoGP race, the leaning a bike to impossible angles, the sense of imminent peril, all combine to tell us that it's not the bike that wins all those races, it's Rossi. We may know intellectually that a Formula 1 driver is under extreme G-forces and must be in top mental and physical shape to win a race, but it is the nature of auto racing to make it hard for the viewer to see or experience that. And so there's a tendency to say "Well, if you put any good driver in that Ferrari, he'd win as much as Schumacher. Really, it's Jean Todt and Ross Brawn and the engineers who are winning those races."

Steve Matchett has written about this extensively: there's an inherent tension when you've got a race where you're interested in determining, at the same time, who has the best car and who is the best driver. The only way to really be sure that someone is the best driver is to homologate the formula so tightly that the cars are, effectively, identical, as in Formula 3000. This runs contrary to the desires of the major investors in the sport -- no, I don't mean the tobacco companies, I mean the other major investors, the car companies -- to win renown and a positive marketing aura by winning races in their name.

Rossi recently test drove a Ferrari Formula 1 car. No one knows if it was just a courtesy drive, or if he's seriously considering a leap into the cage. The FIA is in the process of rewriting the Formula 1 rules again in order to encourage "closer racing" and "more overtaking." The example they gave of what good racing looks like was the battle between Rossi and Max Biaggi in South Africa.

So, any bets on who will come in third in Barcelona this weekend?

This article originally appeared at FastMachines, the motorsports weblog.

Losing My Religion

2004-05-06 · by peterb

Jack Chick has a new tract, and I am once again nearly speechless:

chick

I have a hard time seeing straight when I have to look intolerance in the face. It's an issue that hits very close to home with me. As an adult, I've managed to order my life such that, most of the time, when we're not in an election year, I can pretend that most people, most of the time, aren't hateful. But all it takes is reading a Chick tract, coupled with the knowledge that there are plenty of people who, on the whole, find Chick's views to be downright moderate to pull me back to reality.

You can't drag people kicking and screaming into the 15th century. You can't defeat hate with debate. All you can do is remember that they exist, take appropriate precautions to defend yourself. And if I find it hard to write this while keeping my promise to refrain from profanity, well, I'll just have to take a deep breath and think about how much harder it must be to grow up steeped in the values of a perverse, life-hating Christian cult.

And, even if it does no objective good, even if it doesn't change anyone's mind, for the purposes of posterity, you can speak the truth and identify things like this tract as evil when you see them.

You can find the whole sordid tract on Chick's web site. I was tipped off by Pharyngula.

High End Wine Battle

2004-05-07 · by peterb

Since I tend to wax rhapsodic about the great dessert wines I encounter, it's only fair that I mention the losers. This season's big loser was La Tunella tocai friulano. To be fair, this is really my fault. Although I am American, I do know a little geography, and I knew going in to this that Tokaji is not, in fact, located in the Friuli province of Italy. So, I got what I deserve: a nasty, attenuated wine that had the consistency, nose, and taste of oversweetened grapefruit juice.

Never one to pass up an opportunity to promote a home-grown American product, I present, for your enjoyment, a blow by blow comparison between the cleverly marketed La Tunella and the humble, yet honest, MD 20/20 Pink Grapefruit flavor.

Category La Tunella MD 20/20 Pink Grapefruit
Vintage 2001 March
Country of Origin Italy Upstate New York, aka Canada
Taste grapefruit grapefruit
Color sickly yellow festive pink!
Cost $10.99 $3.00

There is, quite simply, no comparison: MD 20/20 wins this battle of the superstars with one hand tied behind its back. Viva America!

Additional resources

"It's the one to have...when you're having more than one!"

The Grail of Yendor

2004-05-10 · by peterb

Random thoughts on the meta-design of roguelike games, preserved here so I don't lose them.

In the late '80s, I nearly failed out of college playing urogue, a rogue derivative by Herb Chong that, as near as I can tell, was heavily based on AT&T's Advanced Rogue. I was quite addicted. I liked it even compared to the then-more-advanced Hack, because it seemed simpler, more elegant somehow.

In the late '90s, I tried compiling urogue on the then current x86 systems, Linux and NetBSD, and the build failed utterly. I spent a little time and ported it to modern unix and ANSI C (and, before you ask, no, I won't give you the source code). It was a fun weekend project and I got to play around a bit.

A couple of years ago I noticed that parts of my port no longer worked on FreeBSD, although it still worked fine on Linux -- specifically, the restore from save file functionality was broken. After a while I figured it out. When urogue (or arogue) want to save the game, they basically dump the data segment into what amounts to a core file, and then at restore time read it back in using sbrk. It is a tragedy of Learian proportions: it's amazing that it ever works at all on any system with modern memory management. Presumably it stopped working on FreeBSD when they unified the VM and the buffer cache.

I spent a day or so sketching out various designs to actually save the state in an orderly fashion and read it back in at restore time without resorting to Stupid Unix Tricks. I prototyped one method that got me about 70% of the way there, but it was pretty ponderous coding. And I sat back in my seat and said "God, this all sucks so much that it would probably be easier to just reimplement the whole thing from scratch."

[ding!]

I didn't immediately sit down and start writing it because: plenty of people have written rogue clones, and a urogue clone wouldn't really add much to the culture of roguelikes except giving a nostalgia kick to the 16 or 17 people left alive who remember actually playing the original. And besides, there was so much cookie-cutter work. All of the really interesting parts of urogue were the corner cases. Those are what I wanted to spend time working on. What I really wanted was a set of classes that took care of all the stupid, boring stuff that is practically the same in every roguelike, leaving me to concentrate on the interesting stuff, which is the content.

But nothing like that exists.

I guess, if I really want it, I'm gonna have to make it.

Probably 90% of the content of roguelikes is in the monsters, items, item descriptions, and their effects on the player character. In an ideal world, the designers of a roguelike would spend their time on that content rather than on implementation details.

If this is true, then we can abstract out the following things to be done via a java class library. (Why Java? Why not. Seriously, mostly because I want to at least pretend that this could be usable on any platform, and because if there were ever an application where performance is not an issue, roguelike games are it.)

Provide standard classes which do boring things for all of the above, but could be overridden by the ambitious developer who wants to do something special.

Most interesting behavior is going to be defined by callouts to user-provided interfaces. There has to be support for scripted behavior and events (think: cut scenes, movies, Nethack's "special" levels, etc. in a way that isn't mind-numblingly painful). Put another way: the library has to be complete enough that you get real value from using it as a base to build off of, but liberating enough that you don't need to rewrite huge sections of it the moment you want to do something unique. This may not be possible. I don't know yet.

Victory conditions

Minimal victory: reimplement urogue with this class library.

Marginal victory is if one can implement a close approximation of both Nethack and Angband in it.

Complete victory is if one can also implement something like Diablo in it.

You may all commence the calling me crazy. Here are some spoilers for urogue that might explain why I love it so (note: although the extension for the spoiler file is ".doc", it is a normal text file.)

C64 vs. Atari 800

2004-05-11 · by peterb

The thing about boys and their toys is we've just got to argue about whose is bigger.

Microsoft employee Mike Fullerton has had it with his Mac because all software for the Mac sucks. Meanwhile, over at Mac and Back, an intrepid ex-Mac user sold his Powerbook and has replaced it with a Dell Inspiron, and has discovered that all software for Windows sucks.

Really, this shouldn't surprise anyone: all software sucks. Yes, you there in the back. Emacs sucks, too.

I use Macintoshes and Windows boxes every day at work (I use Unix workstations also, but let's factor those out for now). I pretty much have identical functionality between them. Really, now that the Mac has an actual operating system rather than a glorified program loader, the differences between the platforms are fairly minimal. Basically, if you can't find programs that perform adequately for whatever major platform you're using, you're a whiner: both Apple and Microsoft platforms have a plethora of software that will do what you need. In the amount of time it takes to write a screed, you could do a Google search to satisfy your need.

One difference between the platforms that is significant, in my experience, is sleep and wake. I've never used a Windows laptop where sleep and wakeup wasn't an unmitigated whirling nightmare of hatred, pain, and misery. This isn't rocket science, boys -- it's pretty simple stuff. It's the year 2003 -- why does it take a modern Thinkpad running your latest OS 20 to 40 seconds to wake up from sleep and be ready for use, even when restoring from RAM? (Apparently, the answer is because Windows muffs power management by presenting a stupidly baroque interface). When I open my Powerbook, it's ready in under 5 seconds. My friend Mr. Hardwick says that tablet PCs do better, but frankly, no one outside of Microsoft actually uses a tablet PC.

The other arena where it's fair to point out a difference is in development environments: Visual Studio is light years ahead of ProjectBuilder/Xcode, which is one of the reasons that developers are so loyal to Microsoft. Give someone a good development environment, and they're yours for life. Promise someone a stable development environment and then play bait and switch and make it practically impossible to support legacy systems (meaning "the last version of the OS") without maintaining two completely separate build trees and you're...well, let's be honest: you're Apple.

But I don't use my Mac for development anymore (I don't use Windows, either). Like most users, I'm just a user. I use my Windows and Mac PCs for content management and creation. And in this arena, Apple has Microsoft down on its knees and whimpering like a date-raped cheerleader. There's just no reasonable comparison: one of these environments is transparent, and one of them is kludgy. One of them focuses the user on her content, and one focuses the user on the unimportant minutiae of applications.

It's surprising to me that Microsoft, a company that is usually so effective at focusing on what the user wants, seems to have a huge blind spot in this segment of the market. Look at iTunes, for example: MS just doesn't get it. All of the synchronized complaints about how WMA sounds so much better than AAC miss the simple fact that every Windows user I've ever known -- at least, those who don't work for MS -- who has used iTunes has immediately recognized it as the best, most transparent solution to the problem of music management.

And hey! It runs on both platforms.

How about that? I guess there's at least one piece of software that doesn't suck, after all.

Ask The Game Geek

2004-05-12 · by peterb

Sabotage Instructions

Intro screen

To the person who arrived at my site googling for "apple II games remake download old parachute": The name of the game you're looking for is "Sabotage," and you can get it here. It should play in any halfway decent Apple II emulator.

I liked Sabotage. It was one of my default "pick up" games that you could always rely on when you wanted something quick and fun.

Sabotage

Sabotage

It was a diverting little game, with a surprising amount of tactical trade off. You could shoot the paratroopers full on, blowing them into bits, or you could take them out by shooting the helicopters, whose shrapnel would cut them to pieces, or you could aim carefully, shoot out their parachutes and watch them plummet. If you were accurate enough, you could even make a paratrooper plummet and squash a trooper who had already landed safely. If three or four paratroopers managed to land safely on one side of your gun emplacement or the other, they would team up and blow you up, ending the game.

You're welcome.

Bánh Mi

2004-05-15 · by peterb

How do you know it's Spring in Pittsburgh? When Lucy, the best Bánh Mi vendor in the world (aka "The Saigon Sandwich Lady") sets up her outdoor stand and starts vending her wares.

Lucy

photo:Krista Schinagl, Post-Gazette

A good Bánh Mi (literally "French Sandwich," colloquially "Saigon Sandwich") is a transcendent experience. Along with Phó, their beef noodle soup, it is empirical evidence for classifying the Vietnamese palate as the best in the world. Bánh Mi is about fresh ingredients, contrasting textures, and intriguing tastes combining to provide perfection in handheld form.

Start with the best baguettes you can find. Into them put some form of meat (ideally thinly sliced roast pork, but you can get them with chicken or other meats; once I actually had one made with braunschweiger). Not too much -- the meat is just an accent. Add shredded and pickled carrots, cucumbers, hot jalapeno peppers, and finish with a healthy garnish of fresh cilantro.

You can find Lucy right outside My Ngoc on Penn Avenue most days of the week in good weather. If she doesn't know you, she'll tend to put in a bit too much meat, because that's the fashion in sandwiches around here. Try a Bánh Mi once, and I guarantee you'll keep going back again and again.

Welcome to Spring, finally.

The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette recently did an article on street food in Pittsbugrh, profiling Lucy specifically. I'm glad of that, but they failed to point out that although there are a few stars here, street vendor culture in general is lousy because the City makes it very difficult to cheaply acquire licenses. Compared to some place like Toronto, street food culture in Pittsburgh is practically nonexistent. I hope that changes.

P.F. Chang's: Why it's evil.

2004-05-15 · by psu

Places like this represent a new trend in the marketing of what is essentially bad fast food towards a more lucrative audience.

A couple of years ago, my new job took me to a set of offices that were situated close to a new retail complex in the Pittsburgh area. The complex was anchored by a large cineplex and a few "box restaurants" and a few more "box stores".

At some point, one of the "box restaurants" that opened was a chain of apparently high reputation called P.F. Chang's. At the front of the place stood two huge stone horses that were, apparently, meant to remind one of the terra cotta horses at the tomb of the First Emperor of China. Between these two horses sat the sign, in large vaguely Charlie Chan type letters: P.F. Chang's China Bistro.

For months after this place opened, you couldn't get into the place without waiting more than two hours. It was always full. It was full at lunch, dinner, late dinner, after the movies. There was not a time at which the place was not full.

So, obviously we folks at work had to try it out.

As you enter the place, you are greeted by a huge mural done vaguely in the style of a Chinese scroll. You almost expect to be greeted by a hyperactive immigrant from Hong Kong who you can't understand. But this doesn't happen. Instead, a nice person who you can understand perfectly leads you to a table. You look over the menu. The menu is filled with the standard assortment of American Chinese dishes that have been the core of thousands of cheap takeout joints for decades. There are dumplings, there are ribs, there is Ma-Po Tofu, there is fried rice, etc.

But, what you also realize is that this isn't a cheap greasy Chinese takeout joint. This is a high overhead, very expensive greasy Chinese takeout joint. But, while extremely expensive, the food is no better than your typical greasy Chinese takeout joint. You order an $8 plate of pot stickers that you can buy frozen in a bag for $4 for 50. You order the ribs, they are chewy and not sweet. You order a series of gloppy greasy entreés with no real distinctive flavor. You order Ma-Po Tofu and it has frozen peas and carrots in it. The dan-dan noodles taste like spaghetti and hoisin sauce.

So, what do you get for all the extra money you spent? As far as I can tell all you get is a level of pretension and self-importance that is insulting. The horse statues, the "Chinese" lettering, the murals and so on are just the beginning. Before serving your food, some genius in marketing at P.F. Chang's Inc has dictated to the staff that they must give you a live demo of their "favorite" little nugget of Chinese Cuisine. So the poor student slob can't just serve you your food and escape, she has to sit there at the table and proclaim the wonders of the P.F. Chang's secret favorite Chinese dipping sauce that you should put on everything. What is this sauce? As far as I can tell, Hoisin sauce, soy, pepper sauce and maybe some oil. In other words, it's all just a humiliating sham. It's as if you went to an Italian restaurant and they serenaded you with the magic of their olive oil and ketchup bread sauce.

Basically, what P.F. Chang's and their brethren (other examples include Bravo! Italian Kitchen, Ted's Montana Grille, Olive Garden, Don Pablo's Mexican Kitchen, Cheesecake Factory, and so on) are after is to serve crappy food on nicer plates and separate you from more of your money so their margins are higher without them actually doing any real work. They crank out the same cookie cutter generic food as McDonald's, KFC, and all the rest, but they put on an elaborate show to try and make you think they are doing better.

Lost in all of this is the fact that even in a relative backwater like Pittsburgh there are smaller, cheaper, better places that are far more deserving of your dollars. They are found on the sides of roads, in shopping centers, and off of highways. They are run by real people who care about making decent food that is not so much Authentic as at least genuinely distinctive and fresh. But, the tide is against places that serve Real Food because they don't have the connections needed to get the huge spaces and exposure that even a crappy shithole like P.F. Chang's can manage just on sheer volume. This is just another case where the Big Evil Coporation is crushing the forces of light and goodness.

So, do everyone a favor and the next time you are to be dragged to P.F. Chang's, find the hole in wall Chinese place that is a bit further away, or the little Vietnamese noodle joint just down the road, or the street vendor selling fresh Falafel, or the little South Indian shack with the great paratha, or that tiny little place near the railroad tracks with the killer BBQ pork. Go anywhere else and get anything but the frozen cardboard tasteless shit that they will serve you at P.F. Chang's.

Do it for little guy. Do some good in the world. It will make me happy. Just this once, tell THE MAN to fuck off.

Stop me

2004-05-20 · by peterb

Stop me if you think that you've heard this one before: Once again the consumer bit of my brain has gotten the sickness, and I have the urge to upgrade my "gaming" PC. I am fighting it tooth and nail.

Those really are derision quotes around "gaming," since most of the games I actually want to run on my PC -- like Warlords II -- don't actually run on modern versions of Windows. And because I never use my gaming PC because it is loud, and takes 5 minutes to boot up, and is in the wrong room, and is big and ugly, and because I can't play on the couch, like I can with the Xbox.

But, stupid is as stupid does. I'm trying to remind myself that all I'll accomplish by upgrading is I'll waste time and money and I still won't be playing any good games on it, since there will no doubt be some odd compatibility glitch between whatever OS/video card combination I have and whatever game (City of Heroes? Maybe) I decide I must obsess over.

Also, the calculus that said upgrading would be "worth it" assumes that my PC133 RAM from ages ago would still work so I could continue to do this piecemeal. I bet that's not true anymore. Everytime I read some article about how you should spend more on some motherboard because this time the new super CPU slow format will guarantee forward compatibility, I want to punch someone.

Hold that ball really still, Lucy -- here comes Charlie brown to give it a good swift kick.

Paris in the Springtime

2004-05-21 · by peterb

Microsoft has released their first downloadable content for Project Gotham Racing 2, including a bunch of cars I'll never be able to afford and a whole new city: Paris.

paris comparison

Paris Comparison (click to enlarge)

I don't particularly care about the new cars -- Gotham already has more than enough cars to hold my interest -- but I've been eager to drive down the Champs-Elysées since I got the game. The developers did a great job of bringing the city to life. Although bereft of pedestrians and slightly greyer in tone than I expected, the feeling is overall that of the final day of the Tour de France. The textures on the road are good, and the tracks are challenging (and mostly short) -- there's quite a few tricky chicanes and odd-angled corners here. You'll be firmly in center "Tourist Paris" here, from the Arc de Triomphe to the Tour Eiffel -- no left bank cafés for you, young artist. And in one slightly sad twist to the tale, you can only drive a sunny, daytime Paris; there is no night time in the City of Lights. While this makes sense from an actuarial standpoint -- this download content is mostly for online play, after all, and I can count the number of night time or rain races I've played online on one hand -- it is disappointing on an emotional level. Despite that drawback, this download was well worth the $4.99 Microsoft charged.

The next release is rumoured to be Los Angeles, more specifically Long Beach. I'll be buying that one, too.

Vegan cats

2004-05-26 · by peterb

This story makes me angry. It's about vegans who feed their cats vegan diets.

Cats, you see, are obligate carnivores. Feeding them a diet without meat (or rather, with amino acids that are only found in adequate quantities in meat) is abuse. I can understand people who don't eat animal products because they think it is cruel or exploitative, even though I don't share that belief. But I have nothing but contempt for people who have ethical objections to eating any animal product, but delight in torturing their pet.

Apparently, for these people "vegan" means "against animal cruelty where the cruelty is fast enough that I notice it." If your cat goes blind over a 3 year period because you were abusing it, though, that's fantastic.

I'm so enraged I can hardly see straight.

Why Google Mail is Better than Mail.app

2004-05-27 · by Hugo Malcovich

Mail.app is a desktop mail application for NeXT/Macos with a long development history. It does POP, IMAP, and so on. Has a rich UI. But it blows and Google mail does not.

I've been using Mail.app day in and day out for the last 3 or 4 years, as my current job involves working with Macs a lot. I've come to a sort of grudging peace with the application, not pushing beyond the functionality that I know works fairly well. Not trying to make it do things I know that it just won't do.

I use it to read IMAP mail at work and at my personal ISP mail account. I have five or ten thousand messages stored in it. It generally works pretty well, it is fairly flexible, doesn't crash a lot.

But it sucks anyway. It really doesn't do mail the way I want. It makes you set up byzantine filters and rules to organize mail automatically. It forces you into a hierachical network database sort of mindset that should have died in the 1970s after SQL took over. And, the UI is a bit odd. Things you do a lot are not quickly found. You do a lot of clicking. The main window doesn't show you enough. The mailbox drawer is stupid. And so on.

All this from an app that has a development history that reaches back at least 10 years.

Compare and contrast with the recent Google Mail beta. You have to figure Google has been working on this for maybe a year or two. Yet the UI is much more streamlined. Common operations have quick single letter key commands. Nice touches abound. Example: when you read a message, there is a blank text box at the end under the reply links. You click in the box and it bounces open with the reply template right in place. No new windows, no muss, no fuss. You can also hit the reply/reply all links, or hit "r". Having multiple ways to do things, all of which are fast, is nice.

The top level UI shows you a lot of information at once. The threading even kind of works without being stupid. Overall, it just feels more polished. And then you realize that you are using it in a web browser. This is an amazing accomplishment. You almost don't realize you are using a web page. And, as a bonus, this web interface will work from almost anywhere. No need to lug the laptop along just to read mail.

One of the many minor things Gmail does better that Mail is address completion. You start typing your address, and you get a little javascript menu that updates in real time. The menu is organized by which names you used most often.

Mail has something like this too, but it has a tendency to pick a name at random for you before you realize what has happened. Gmail has a bit of a delay so you don't accidentally send mail to the wrong Steve.

One of the major things Google does better than Mail is search. Considering that Mail has the complete strength of local Macos behind it and gets to store all of your mail on the local hard drive, you'd think that it could build a good text search index. But it can't. Hits displayed in a completely random order. It doesn't find messages that should be hits. It finds tons of messages that are not hits.

Google is, of course, as good as google. You type in words, it shows you the hits you wanted. Basically, it crushes Mail.app even though it is indexing the mail of thousands of other users in addition to mine.

Filters are much better in Google mail because they are not based on the idea of moving mail to folders. You tag mail with labels and then your "folders" are just google queries against the labels. This is far superior. Not only do you not waste time filing mail away into useless hierarchies, you can do things like label messages with multiple labels and compose complex queries that are more useful than any given folder might be. It's like relational vs. non-relational databases. It's just clear what the right answer is.

The one thing Google needs to fix is the spam filtering. It sucks. Nuff said.

Summary: I wish I could use google mail for everything I do with e-mail. Sadly, I'd get fired if I put my work mail there. Oh well.

City of Heroes

2004-05-28 · by peterb

In the mid-80's, Saturday's were for going over to Junot Diaz's apartment (yes, "that" Junot Diaz) where we'd go into the basement and play role-playing games. I'd say we played "all day and all night," but really they played all day and all night, and I'd play for just a couple of hours until my mother called and yelled at me to come home, because she thought it was unhealthy for a teenage boy to spend 14 hours in the basement playing D&D (personal to mom: OK, 20 years have passed and I can admit it. You were right.)

Nexus

Nexus

Saturdays were, in other words, geek days. We didn't actually play D&D; typically we played in various intricate universes that Junot had created, using Rolemaster or Spacemaster from a company called Iron Crown Enterprises to resolve the combats. These systems focused on lovingly gory descriptions of exactly what happened when you hit your opponent, so you'd roll a die and look up column "D" on the "slash critical" table to find out that your opponent had severed your achilles tendon, causing you to fall to the ground in agony, or you'd look in column "E" on the "pierce critical" to see that your arrow went straight through the enemy horseman's eye and into his brain, killing him instantly. There were critical tables for bludgeoning, burns, explosions -- it was fun. Characters didn't tend to live very long. Roleplaying games, pizza, coca-cola, and comics books -- lots of comic books.

I have always been an avid comic book reader. I learned to read at an extremely young age primarily so that I could read comic books. To this day, I'll read anything I can get my hands on. Danny Clowes, Robert Crumb, Superman, Archie and Veronica -- it doesn't matter. I am egregiously unselective about it. Something about the medium moves me.

Nexus

Nexus (click to enlarge)

One in-joke in our group used had to do with a comic book character Junot introduced me to called Nexus. Nexus was basically Space Ghost with angst. He had strange dreams of mass murderers, feeling the death throes of every one of their victims, which tortured him until he assassinated the killers. The first mass-murderer he killed was his own father (paging Dr. Jung, white courtesy telephone). He could fly, he shot energy beams that could travel around corners, he was practically invulnerable. So when someone was about to get stomped in our game in a particularly brutal way, the joke was to lift your arms, angle your hands together down at the target and say "Fwhoooooosh!", thus implying that a Nexus-level amount of death and carnage was about to happen.

Later, when I got to college, I could play all the games I wanted, whether they were role playing games or computer games, without my mom calling and yelling at me. One of the games I was involved in was called "Champions," which was basically a build-your-own-superhero sort of thing. I played with a bunch of other freshmen and sophomores on the verge of failing out of CMU. My character for that campaign was a thinly-disguised version of Nexus: I had adopted Junot's hero as my own.

Which brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation to City of Heroes, a massively multiplayer onling role playing game whose conceit is: be a superhero.

Nexus (City of Heroes)

Nexus, in-game

I'm not much enamoured of playing games with people I don't know, so for my tastes the adjective "massive" when applied to an online game is generally a derogatory term. In the context of this game, however, it works. What makes comic books -- and here I'm generally speaking of American "hero" genre comic books -- work is the way that deep cultural archetypes are, quite literally, worn on the sleeves of the characters, often in bright colours with festive silk trim. And this is what I enjoy about City of Heroes: gawking at the characters other people come up with, as well as, truth to tell, coming up with my own. Here's my heroic shadow for the world to see: I can play Nexus in a videogame now.

The Overanalyzer

The Overanalyzer

Of course you see lots of people emulating their favorite heroes from comic books they've read. I've seen at least one Superman, a few Spider-men, and Santa Claus, and of course I've already talked about my version of Nexus. But it's the heroes people create themselves that are the most fun. There's the four foot tall gray haired old lady with the spider on her chest, named "Grandma Death". There's the angst-ridden teenage girl with a big letter "O" on her costume named "The Overanalyzer." Occasionally you see people who coordinate their costumes, which makes an already surreal world even stranger. My contribution to the oeuvre is Harriet Houdini -- great-granddaughter of the famous escape artist and medium debunker, she was debunking a presumed charlantan's seance when she discovered that this one was real; a few psychic transfusions from an evil ancient Egyptian god later and, ta-da! A brand-new superhero is born. As much fun as the costumes are, I admit I love the names people come up with, too. Fearleader. The Guy. Darth Mall.

The actual game portion of City of Heroes isn't very much fun: you run around kicking ass by pointing your mouse at villains and repeatedly pressing buttons to activate your Mysterious Powers, and then wait for them to recharge. Then, like a rat pressing a lever hoping for a food pellet, you press the button again. The strange thing is, although it's not much fun to play it's a heck of a lot of fun to watch. It's fun to just find a safe perch and watch the fireworks fly.

Grandma Death

Grandma Death

The developers have done a good job of coming up with interesting super powers. They've divided up superheroes into five rough archetypes. Blasters are frail but do a lot of damage by shooting ice, fire, electricity, or guns from a distance. Controllers can brainwash, use telekinesis, control gravity, and similar psychic-like powers. Tankers can take a lot of damage in melee, and scrappers can dish out a lot of damage in melee. Lastly, defenders provide support and healing for their team members. Many of the more interesting powers have the restriction that you can't use them on yourself, but may only use them on a team member, so there is some incentive built in to the game for taking on the (repetitive, boring) missions as a member of a team.

Dr. Raven Darktalon Blood

Dr. Raven Darktalon Blood

As you level up you will have the opportunity to gain more powers, but most archetypes are interesting right out of the box -- the game manages to avoid the trap of "The first few levels are boring" by giving every archetype some neat powers right away. While you can't be flying or leaping tall buildings right away, you can reach those heights in relatively short order. And while you're floating along, you will continually encounter heroes and personalities you never expected to meet such as Penny Arcade's Dr. Raven Darktalon Blood.

Street Scene

A super team

Is it worth it, either in time and money? I'm not sure. I love the configuration tool that lets you define what your hero looks like; you can literally spend hours and hours adjusting the finest details of your little dollie's clothing, trying on different shoes, belts, spandex, appliqués, and other accessories. But if you want to play, you have to pay: $50 for the game, and a $15 / month, with the first month's fee being include in the price of the software. If you don't have an account, you can't even get to the hero creation screen, so once you decide you've had enough of the game you won't even be able to enjoy any aspects of the game offline. I find that pretty off-putting. For now, I'm enjoying the exposure to other people's wish-fulfillment fantasies, but I don't know how long that will keep me paying $15 a month.

It's the first (for pay) online RPG I've been willing to play since A Tale in the Desert, though, and I think that says something positive about it.

And even though I hate to admit it, every time my avatar flies through the air, I start grinning.

Additional Resources

Look! Up in the sky!

Administrivia

2004-05-31 · by peterb

I've invited psu to join me in this little writing adventure, which means the name -- Tea and Peterb -- will no longer be appropriate.

Besides, secretly I hated that name anyway. Suggestions are welcome.

Classic Music is Dead (or at least Terminal)

2004-05-31 · by psu

Events have conspired this week to bring up a topic that I find sort of near and dear to my heart and yet simultaneously deeply depressing. That topic is the state of "classical" music in our modern times. Growing up, my father listened to nothing but classical music in the same way he read no paper except the New York Times. Once you hear the best, he reasoned, nothing else is interesting.

Of course, I've recently seen crossover panflute music in his CD collection, so not everything is forever, but that's another story.

I, of course, did not remain immune to the pop music of the day, but as I got into college and especially graduate school, my music taste tended to drift towards "serious" music, as opposed to "pop" music. So while I try to keep my feet in the pop arena as well, I buy mostly jazz and classical. I go to jazz and classical concerts. I subscribe to the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. And so on.

First, let's get some terms out of the way. When I say "classical" music, I mean specifically music that has evolved from the Western European art music tradition. But I also mean the more modern incarnations of such: orchestral film music, some show music, and so on. Generally anything that would be played at a subscription concert at the PSO falls in line here, except maybe for the Drek that they hoist on the audience for the "Pops" series.

You don't have to go much further than a PSO concert to get a picture of what the classical music scene is like these days. It's old. I'm not sure I've met a regular concert goer (by regular, I mean at least 12 shows a year, which I used to do before I had a son) younger than me.

You also notice a few things:

  1. A lot of the young people are there as a one off, or to see someone famous from their ethnic group. They often have no idea what is going on.

  2. Everyone hates the "new" music. Even I, who have sat through 2 hours of Cecil Taylor going completely apeshit crazy free jazz while reciting poetry, think that most of the new music is completely pointless.

  3. The whole experience is incredibly ritualistic. We all sit quietly (well, except for the people on life support). We all clap at the right times, we all stand and clap at the end, even when the performance sucks (that's depressing).

  4. Efforts to break up the ritual... the conductor giving little speeches, guest speakers, video of the players, subtitles, and so on, always end up being at best badly produced and at worst insulting. I remember one guest speaker getting up and reading from a paper he had given at some music conference for twenty minutes before the Orchestra came out and just destroyed us with a soul crushingly beautiful performance of the Mahler 9th. I wished they had had a gong to get rid of the guy 5 minutes in.

  5. Finally, the programming is depressingly conservative. This is not to say that I wish they'd play more pointless new music. I wish they'd play some of the new music that does exist that is not pointless. 20th century Russian music besides Shostakovich and Prokoviev, central European music, even some of the more interesting film music would be better than the constant stream of unlistenable drek combined with another ditty that Mozart ripped off before he was 12.

All of these things point to a few general syndromes in the classical music world.

  1. The audience is often passive, ignorant, closed-minded, and growing old.

  2. The people who program the shows think the audience is even older than it is, and are completely paralyzed by it.

  3. Classical music, as such, has become completely detached from the fabric of the musical culture of the time. People don't know what to do with it, and no one seems to have any idea how to make it connect up again.

The third point is the one that has come to the fore this week.

First, the New York Times published two pieces that illustrate better than I possibly can the disconnect between the classical music world and the real world:

First we find out about how this "young" violinist has been putting up with nonsense about the cover photo from her first record for almost ten years.

Then there was this piece about how the New York Phil is trying to attract the geek gadget crowd by giving them Palm Pilots that display live video and program notes:

My feeling is this:

  1. Only in the pathetic museum world of classical music would anyone complain about an attractive woman being semi-naked on an album cover.

  2. If you have to explain the music to people in real time to keep them interested, you've already lost. The problem here is not that the show is no good, the problem is that the people never had an interest in the first place.

This brings us to the third piece of media on this subject, the current episode of STUDIO 360 , which is about the future of the Orchestra. Here, among other things, Daniel Baranboim and Greg Sandow argue over tiny little semantic quibbles, never realizing that they both agree on a central premise: classic music these days is culturally irrelevant.

Barenboim observed, correctly, that even the elite of our time, the most educated and succesful could get to be 30 or 40 and know nothing about classical music. He phrased this as "knowing nothing about music", which isn't quite right. But the point stands. This music is not the central pillar of the culture the way it used to be.

Sandow then "disagreed" with Baranboim while having made exactly the same point: he said that people in his audiences with degrees in English literature didn't seem to understand that there could be this music with a complex narrative structure, like a novel or film... but that these same people could be serious consumers of jazz, pop, folk music, and so on.

I think that this is basically the same point, and the basic reason why classical music is dead. We live in a world where even if you have great interest in music overall, classical music can completely miss your radar screen.

I don't think there are simple solutions to this. Certainly "education" and "outreach" are not enough, unless you can reach out and educate 2 generations of parents who have grown up on pop music and album oriented rock. I am pessimistic that this is the world we are stuck in and it's not likely to get a lot better. I mean, I don't even make it to the PSO shows anymore since I have a two year old. They are just too tiring. And I like the stuff.

I think for the music to survive and continue to be relevant, we need more parents like my dad, and you aren't going to get that with some new outreach program and a few Palm Pilots.

Les bluets

2004-06-01 · by peterb

Summer brings with it blueberries, as suddenly the geography of the world food distribution network becomes clear. One day, little 6 ounce packages of Mexican blueberries sell for $4. The next day, $3 buys you a pint of berries from South Carolina. And so it goes, through the summer, the prices getting lower and the berries getting better and being shipped from further north. As autumn arrives, there is a last gasp of late Canadian blueberries, and then finally we return to meagre, shrunken berries from distant lands south of the equator.

Frozen blueberries work better than other fruits, for the same reason that frozen peas do better than other vegetables. But they are still a poor substitute. When summer arrives, I eat blueberries by the bushel. With cream, whenever possible. They've got loads of healthy antioxidants, and more importantly they taste fantastic.

And so: bon appetit!

Blackberries

2004-06-03 · by peterb

I'm not much of a gardener. A few years ago, I had a blackberry bramble growing in my back yard, and I killed it.

primocane

Primocane

Ironically, I killed it when trying to weed around it to give it space to grow. I broke a cane near the bramble that didn't look -- to me -- like part of the bramble -- it was a single sticky-uppy cane, with no flowers, and no fruit. It even had a different number and pattern of leaves on it -- it just looked like a weed. Little did I know, this was the so-called "primocane," and is the most important part of the plant (for domestic blackberries and raspberries there's actually a big market in selling genetically engineered "primocane bearing" plants, so that you don't "waste" a year.) The next year: no more blackberries. That was a bad year; clearly my failure to protect this plant was a metaphor for all of my life's failings. Guilt-wracked nights of shame followed. Denial, anger, bargaining: "Please, baby, come back. I won't treat you wrong no more." But it was over. I had killed them. I was a blackberry murderer.

It was a long, bitter summer, that year. Sure, I had blueberries. Sure, I had strawberries. Hell, I even had some Swedish Gooseberries that were in town on an exchange program. But it just wasn't the same. They all tasted pale: too cultured, too watered-down. Tame.

blackberries

Immature fruit

Fortunately, blackberry brambles are hardy survivors, and this year I am nearly drowning in them: with a little (much more careful) weeding help from me, I've got the back slope practically crawling with them. And, even luckier, one has popped up in the front garden, giving me convenient driveway access to as many blackberries as I want. I'm considering ripping out all the perennials to make more room for that bramble. The truth is, I hate gardening, weeding, nature, the outdoors, insects, plants, and pretty much anything else that occurs naturally in environments that are not air conditioned. But I can make myself weed by turning it into a video game in my head, where the evil weeds are encroaching on my precious wild blackberries, trying to choke them out, and I must zap the weeds thus ensuring that I have a blackberry-filled summer.

See, I really really like wild blackberries

Grünen Hölle

2004-06-05 · by peterb

Nordschliefe map

Nordschliefe. Kinda.

My new favorite site, Autoblog, has pointed out a fabulous article on learning to drive the Nordschleife. Project Gotham Racing fans, start saving for airfare to Frankfurt.

The Nordschliefe vies with Belgium's Spa for the distinction of being one of the most famous and unforgiving road courses in the world. In 13 miles (!) it has over 100 corners (!!), and elevation changes that are more suited to an air show than a road race. I've only ever driven it in simulation, but even that has been enough to induce gut-wrenching fear.

On the down side, Autoblog is a frustrating my fantasies of obtaining a Lancer Evolution. So I guess if I ever do take a lap around the Nordschliefe, it won't be in a LanEvo. If only I could convince Nissan to sell a street-legal version of the Skyline here.

Software Engineers: A lexicon

2004-06-06 · by psu

I've been working at software companies for the last 15 or so years of my life. In this time, I've worked with a lot of people who call themselves software engineers. The following is a collection of shallow, unfair, insulting and overly general classifications of the types of people you will run into if you get into this business. It's up to the reader to figure out which category I fall into.

1. The Genius

Sits down every day and writes beautiful code that does just the right thing in just the right way and as efficiently as is possible. Hits all the reachable deadlines, fixes all the hard bugs, and is also easy to talk to and personable. Plays well with others, and tends to have an intuitive understanding of just the right amount of give and take between engineering and the rest of the organization. I've met two people who fit into this category in my life. I think there are probably only about five or ten working at any given time in any given area. You want to hire one.

2. The Prima Donna

Thinks he is a Genius, but is really just pretty smart but much more anal retentive than normal. Likes to make like every day is full of Thinking Very Important Thoughts and solving Very Interesting Problems. Never fails to provide and endless stream of whining about how the rest of the organization is brain dead and doing everything wrong.

A subclass of Prima Donna that is specific to Engineering consists of the people who just cannot abide the idea Engineering serves the rest of the company rather than the other way around. These people are always shocked, shocked that anything would happen without direct input from the engineering team as to the impact on the implementation and whatnot.

3. The Zealot

Always Right. Always. Never argue with this person. Will sit through 9 hours of the Lord Of The Rings and point out to you that some minor plot point comes around backwards in the films and thus completely ruins the entire devleopment of the story, and so Peter Jackson is just a worthless HACK.

It's not good to have a zealot as a client of your code, because your interfaces will always be wrong. It's not good to have a zealot providing you with code, because then you are always using his code wrong.

Various subclasses here include the Language Zealot (non-functional languages are for the morally weak), the Design Zealot (anything that you have not diagramed in UML isn't worth building), the Process Zealot (no code will ever be shipped without unit tests), and so on.

4. The Craftsman

Not as good as a Genius, and might not be as smart as a Prima Donna, but is reliable, careful, meticulous and always ready to do whatever is needed to get the job done. Is able and willing to work at any level of the system from design to the grimiest parts of the implementation. Is able to work with others in the organization without becoming physically ill and understand the tradeoffs between time, beauty, and completeness in the code base. The better ones can also talk on the phone in complete sentences and write a decent document about something complicated if they need to.

5. The Moron

Checks in code that doesn't build and then when it does build it doesn't work and causes regressions in other people's code. Will change, and break, other people's code. Constantly three steps behind in the design meetings but take 45 minutes to get caught up because they have to explain all the points that everyone understands to everyone else. Not the guy you want to give a vague specification to if you want the code to have any chance of being right.

6. The Slacker

Always giving work to other people. Gives away all his bugs because they are in other parts of the system. Argues away new requirements because workarounds exist that give you "the same effect" using code that he has already implemented, although it doens't really work yet. In extreme cases, just doesn't do anything at all.

7. The Bad Estimator

Never gives an estimate that is too short. Never gives any estimate at all. Never thinks any estimate is long enough. I'm generally guilty of this.

8. The Tools Geek

Spends all his free time playing around with useless tools that don't really help anything but are shiny to look at. Likes to spend a whole day reconfiguring his X11 window manager customizations or writing perl scripts to automatically classify mail using Bayesian classification. Never gets much real work done.

9. The Intern

Interns tend to fall into all the above classes, they are just less developed than the full blown adult version. The exceptions are the Prima Donnas, who seem to come out of the womb that way.

Tomorrow, we will discuss commonly used software engineering terminology.

Software Engineering Terms: A Lexicon

2004-06-07 · by peterb

Software engineering is a scientific discipline, as well as an art. Like many such fields, it has developed specific terminology and jargon, whose meaning may be subtly different or even completely opposite to what one would guess. In the interests of spreading enlightenment among budding software engineers, we have prepared this brief lexicon that covers some of the more important terms you may encounter in your career in software development:

If you found this lexicon useful, you might be interested in yesterday's profile of the different types of software engineers.

Cheesemonger

2004-06-08 · by peterb

It's nice living in a town with a decent cheesemonger.

Penn Mac

Penn Mac

The unfortunately named Pennsylvania Macaroni Company is the go-to place in Pittsburgh. Located in the culinary center of town, the Strip, Penn Mac provides brusque, unsentimental service and a decent array of interesting cheeses at reasonable prices; 1 pound minimum. Their selection covers an impressive, though not encyclopedic, array of cheesy comestibles. If you go on a Saturday, when it's packed, please know what you want in advance and don't dither. I'm probably standing behind you, and I'm hungry.

Since Penn Mac is basically a wholesale Italian Store (back in New Jersey they call places like this "pork stores"), it's not surprising that their selection of Italian cheeses is comprehensive (try the Pastore Sini). They also have a nice selection of the more common French soft cheeses -- none truly young enough, of course, because the United States' Food and Drug Administration is composed of ignorant simian microcephalic cretins. There's a decent selection of British cheddar-alikes, Spanish cheeses of various pedigrees including a very aggressive Cabrales, and a growing group of Portuguese entries. They do not carry Gjetost, and for this, I salute them. They're also very interested in finding superb domestic cheeses -- I've seen more domestic goat cheeses at Penn Mac than anywhere else.

Penn Mac will also conveniently provide one stop shopping for olives, cured meat, pasta, olive oil, baccala, and many other foods that make life worth living. But it's the cheese that draws me in, every time. This week's main pick for me was Bleu d'Auvergne, a cow's milk blue cheese with a creamy texture but a wonderful sulfurous nose. It goes well with port (but then, what doesn't?).

Whole Foods has some interesting cheeses not available at Penn Mac, if you don't mind paying twice the price (quick comparison: Roquefort Abeille is $10/lb at Penn Mac, $18/lb at Whole Foods. That's a representative markup). If you're fixated on a specific cheese that Penn Mac doesn't have, that's not unreasonable. Another viable tactic is to drive to Toronto and go to Alex's Farm Products in the St. Lawrence Market (or their open 7 days a week outlet in the Manulife Center). You'll pay less (as long as we're not counting gas and tolls), have a better selection, have access to young raw milk French cheeses, and hey, you'll be in Toronto.

If you're determined to not travel to another country to get your cheese while in Pittsburgh, you can also go to McGinnis Sisters, which isn't really as good an option as either Penn Mac or Whole Foods. In their favor, their product is always extremely fresh, so they're already miles ahead of Giant Eagle. Their selection is more limited, though, and they have an annoying habit of renaming cheeses to suit their whims, which offends my sensibilities.

Additional Resources

del.icio.us

2004-06-10 · by peterb

The "recent bookmarks" on the sidebar come from one of Joshua Schachter's projects, del.icio.us. Amusingly, I think I might have set this off when complaining on zephyr a few years ago about bookmark management -- I use too many computers for local bookmark lists to be of any use at all. I kept whining and whining about how I wanted a way to not just access the same bookmarks from different computers, but easily, trivially add them from anywhere, too. Editing an HTML page was too much work; it violated my delicate sensibilities and disturbed the flow of internet chi.

Joshua whipped up a solution involving bookmarklets, but I was too lazy at the time to really investigate it, so I settled on a hacked up solution using unison (an rsync-like utility). Eventually, I just stopped using that and let my bookmarks fall into disrepair. I looked at del.icio.us a few times and didn't really 'get it' because I think the front page design isn't really sensible -- it doesn't adequately explain what it is. There's documentation, but it's fairly dry. The best way to understand it is to register an account and start adding your own bookmarks. Then it will become apparent.

Services like this -- and there are a few imitators, some who have copied the idea, and some who (it seems to me) have actually stolen Joshua's code without credit -- have adopted the moniker "social bookmarks", but for me that's not really the draw. It turns out that I don't really care, for the most part, what other people are bookmarking. What I want is a central repository of my bookmarks, and a convenient way of organizing them so that I can find them later without having to go through a huge list. In any browser, I find that I use the bookmarks until I fill up an entire menu. The moment I have to scroll they become useless.

So really, I want gmail for bookmarks. Which is more or less what del.icio.us is. When you add a bookmark, you assign it a tag and a description, and those are searchable. If you put the relevant link on your bookmarks bar, adding a new bookmark is a two click process.

There are a few features that I'm hoping del.icio.us adds:

Accept no imitations. If you're not using del.icio.us yet, you're missing out. Give it a shot.

Additional Resources

The Nexus of Pittsburgh Food

2004-06-11 · by psu

Pete wrote about Penn Mac the other day, which brings up the larger subject of the Strip in general and in particular, that part of the Strip which is really the Nexus of almost all the good food in Pittsburgh.

This nexus lies in that area of Penn Avenue within a couple of blocks of 21st street on either side of the actual crossing. Here, in a square that is about half a block on each side, you wil find a group of establishments that are either the source of some of the best food in town, the source of the best raw materials in town, or just a group of people who are connected to almost all the good food in town.

In fact, I believe if you hang out on that corner long enough, the only foodies in Pittsburgh who you will miss are the ones down at Lotus buying the best fresh vegetables and other Chinese items in town. Lotus is, of course, on the other side of the Strip, but that's just because there is no appropriately large floorspace near 21st street.

So anyway, just what am I talking about here? Let's get to the list.

  1. La Prima Espresso

Simply the best coffee you can buy in Pittsburgh, period. Don't try to tell me about your Coffee Tree, or your 61C or whoever else. It's not as good.

  1. Il Picolo Forno

A truly old world bakery. Amazing pizza, great pasta lunches on weekdays, the best muffins I've had in town (and only a $1 each!). You can't do better than a Cappucino next door at La Prima and a pizza slice for breakfast. Plus, Antonio will cook his awesome ricotta pies, and his just as awesome savory tortas, to order for your pot luck gatherings. He does other catering items too.

  1. Enrico Biscotti

Walk down Penn on a winter morning and just sniff when you get near Enricos. Heaven ... on ... Earth.

Also, the Café that he runs in the back was, for a while, the best casual lunch joint ever. Sadly, with the new fancier digs in Shadyside, the Café is not as strong as it used to be. But at least that crazy guy Roy is back.

  1. Mon Aimee Chocolates

Best chocolate store in town. Really. I've seen all of them.

  1. The Saigon Sandwich Lady

Nuff said.

  1. Lotus

Not really in the area, but still bears mentioning. Actually, I already mentioned it above. Lotus has the best variety of Chinese and other Asian greens, other vegetables, fruit and prepared items of any store in Pittsburgh. it is truly a watershed for this town that you can get fresh Lychee at Lotus.

  1. Benkovitz

With the fish at Whole Foods being more convenient and the fish at Lotus being better, we haven't gotten here as often over the last couple of years. But, it used to be the only place you had a chance of getting decently fresh fish in town. Don't talk to me about Wholey's. Wholey's smells like stale sewer water, and the fish smells too. Also, best fish sandwich ever.

  1. Penn Mac

Covered by Pete.

In addition to all these places, people from some of the best restaurants in town can be found in this part of the Strip at one time or another every week. This includes Roberto from Regina Margherita, who got his start making pizzas for Larry at Enrico's. Sam, the owner of Vivo, arguably the best restaurant in town on several axes. I've seen the people who run Tessaro's down there, the owner of Tasty, and on and on. If you want to be around the Pittsburgh food scene, be at La Prima in the morning and just hang around. It will all come to you.

Chinese Food in Pittsburgh

2004-06-11 · by psu

After my rant about P. F. Chang's you might ask, "Pete, where do you get chinese food you like in Pittsburgh?". Ten or so years ago, my answer would have been "I call my mom and ask her to come into town." Happily, things have gotten better since the dark days of the mid to late 80s and early 90s. Now I believe that there are four places in town that it is safe to bring your Chinese Mother Who Can Cook for a meal and stand a fairly good chance of not completely blowing it.

  1. Tasty

This dive in Shadyside breaks all the rules by having pictures of the food and being in a shopping center. But, they have really nice home style Cantonese food here which is a welcome change from the cookie cutter generic Americanized Szechuan standards that you see everywhere else.

Scrambled eggs with shrimp or sweet roast pork, eggplant and tofu hot pots, great fresh greens from Lotus, fried Udon noodles, and the Deanna Rubin memorial Beef Chow Fun are among the favorites here. Carol can get snippy, especially if you order the salty/spicy fried squid. So beware.

  1. Chopstick Inn

Out in the sticks of the North Hills, this place has the largest and best Cantonese Seafood menu in the area; and most of it is well executed. Never get takeout. Great whole fish, whole roast chicken and duck, pork belly, and a few dishes involving animal parts normally not seen on plates around here round out a great selection. Good with kids.

  1. Rose Tea Cafe

The bubble tea place has been around a long time, but the big news is that they are now serving food, and it's really really good. Fairly authentic Taiwanese style home cooking. Get any of the special "over rice" dishes (curry beef over rice, beef stew over rice, etc). The Taiwanese sausage is yummy, the pork stir fries look good, and for the adventurous, they have pork intestines served with large cubes of duck blood sausage, or something. I'm not sure what it was. But they make it there and it's yummy. The bubble tea is interesting too.

  1. Ya Fei

Out in the sticks near IKEA. This is the most generic of the four places, but the good dishes here are really good, so it's worth going. I like the soft shell crabs and their other seafood things.

Greetings from Azkaban Park, New Jersey

2004-06-12 · by peterb

Watching the third Harry Potter movie is a bit like watching someone drive an aging, souped up car: when they improve the engine, it just makes how the car's suspension creaks through the corners more obvious.

harry / hermione

Harry / Hermione Slash. You know it's coming

In the earlier, worse movies, it was easy to ignore the underperforming actors and actresses, because Chris Columbus' (Home Alone) direction was so ox-stunningly, earth shakingly bad. Three hour movies -- that felt longer -- with every unimportant detail of the Rowling books included, and littered with endless reaction shots, like some freakish movie version of "Hello Kitty" mixed with Edvard Munch's The Cry. Instead,The Prisoner of Azkaban is blessed with director Alfonso Cuarón, who unlike his predecessor does not consistently underestimate the sophistication of his audience.

Where Columbus tells, Cuarón shows. Where Columbus explains in soul-crushing detail, Cuarón hints, or simply omits. Where Columbus overwhelms with baroque detail, Cuarón overwhelms with simplicity, cutting to the emotional core of the story: that while Harry may be a powerful wizard, he is also walking wounded.

Unfortunately, although the quality of the filmmaking has improved, the quality of the acting has not. It is painful to contemplate that out of the three leads, the most improved is Rupert Grint's portrayal of semi-comic-relief Ron Weasley. I give up on Emma Watson, completely. One moment, she's almost capturing the essence of the character in movement and mannerism, and then she opens her mouth, literally stiffens like a board and proceeds to recite lines as if off a cue card. At least the actor who plays Harry, Daniel Radcliffe, is consistent in his mere adequacy.

Notably improved from previous movies is the role of Dumbledore. Michael Gambon (who in my mind is inextricably linked with the raging, magnetic, apocalyptic portrayal of gangster/restaurant owner Spica in The Cook, The Thief, His Wife, and Her Lover) brings much needed life and spice to the role. Richard Harris' somnabulic stint as Dumbledore should be forgotten like a bad dream. Perhaps, if we're lucky, Hermione will undergo a similar transformation. Gary Oldman also has a brief cameo, playing Gary Oldman.

The special effects were much better in this film than in either of its predecessors. The editing was tight and fast, and many intelligent choices were made about what to omit from the screenplay. This is yet another example where less is more. I mope at the opportunities lost in the last films, where so much fat could have been trimmed off the bones. The stories (or at least the movies of the stories) would have been better for it.

I enjoyed Azkaban more than either of the two previous films -- for example, I didn't fall asleep during this one -- and I hope that for the fourth film, the producers continue to make more changes of the sort that improved this film. Audiences are flexible. If we could deal with James Bond changing faces ten times, we can deal with Harry or Hermione suddenly changing their appearances during adolescence and developing acting skills.

Are You Experienced?

2004-06-14 · by peterb

I play games; a lot of games. Many of the games I play are computer games. Some of those are of the broad category called "Role-Playing Games," or RPGs. There are many definitions of this, but a simplified one is: if it sounds sort of like Dungeons and Dragons, it's a role playing game. I've been thinking about the mechanics of these games, and I am judging them and finding them wanting. In particular, the concept of "levelling up" in nearly all of these games is tied, in a nearly inextricable way, to combat.

I don't like this.

Levelling up as a concept is dubious at best, but for good or ill it is central to the RPG experience. All around the world, at this very moment, thousands of RPG players are striving to get a few more hitpoints, or to find a Blade of Lion-o with an extra +1 to hit, +1 to damage, or to find the Codpiece of Lordly Might that might let them defeat the dragon / orc / big-eyed japanese demon girl named "Sunflower." Why? So they can level up more, of course.

So we're not going to get rid of levelling up. It's here to stay. People like putting emotional investment in to their characters, which means they have to feel like they're "making progress," (cf ProgressQuest), so let's buy in to the concept.

Experience and level advancement in CRPGs is nearly always tied closely to combat (I'll discuss some exceptions below). In one sense this is understandable: much of the effort in designing a CRPG happens to revolve around the combat engine. Games rise or fall based on how much fun combat in them is. It's a central experience. So saying "You defeated Foozle in battle, here's 1500 experience points" makes a certain amount of obvious sense. However, this has negative impact on narrative. By adopting this scheme, you're committed to a few unalterable assumptions:

The typical RPG (examples: most computer D&D games, all Japanese "Final Fantasy" style CRPGs, Wizardry) assigns an experience point value to an enemy (typically referred to as a "monster," thus adopting the implicit position that slaughtering them is OK). Kill the monsters, collect the experience points (and any loot the monsters were carrying), and eventually level up. Some games adapt the difficulty of the battles to the current level of the characters (now that's wish-fulfillment in action). Others have areas with a pre-set difficulty that require a key that the character must be a certain level to obtain. In some games, if your characters are ready to advance (from a narrative standpoint) but lag in abilities, the rational response is to wander around the world aimlessly, looking for things to kill. Some games are designed around this very principle -- consider the humble "roguelike" games like Nethack or Angband. Sometimes my best friend sees me playing Angband and asks me what I'm doing. "Knitting," I say, and this is pretty accurate -- it's repetitive, mindless, and somehow comforting.

There are a lot of CRPGs that are just variations on knitting. And I think that there's a place in all of our hearts (and certainly in the marketplace) for that. I believe that there is room (and indeed desire among players) for higher aspirations as well.

morrowind

Morrowind

There are some games that tinker with the basic formula to try to provide incentives for non-combat development. Bethesda's The Elder Scrolls: Morrowind has a skill-based levelling system where a character chooses his or her primary skills, and when they have advanced (through practice) 10 of them, they gain a level. Killing monsters provides no intrinsic experience bonus, although it might allow you to practice your sword skills. It's at least theoretically possible in Morrowind to create a character whose primary skills are all non-combat -- a sort of fast talking sneaky acrobat who knows a little magic -- so let's applaud Bethesda for that. I'm uncertain whether playing the game while avoiding most combat is feasible, but at least the engine allows for it.

The problem with the purely skill-based approach, of course, is that you only advance in skills you practice. I'm not pushing for a completely nonviolent game here, although it may sound like I am. Sometimes, in an adventure, you're going to have to fight. If you take the non-combat path through Morrowind, when you eventually DO get forced into a fight, you're going to be as helpless as a newborn kitten hopped up on ketamine. So pure skill-based with practicing doesn't get us there.

I'm also thinking of the classic game Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar. This had the standard kill-monsters-to-get-XP structure, but most of the interesting parts of the game were actually unlocked by ethical development, as your character strove to become the avatar of virtue. In the game world, the eight virtues were Compassion, Sacrifice, Spirituality, Valor, Honor, Honesty, Justice, and Humility. When I played it, I pretty much ignored the combat and followed the quests to develop my virtues. Again, sure, eventually you would get forced into combat, but they were a distraction from the quest, not the goal.

This, it seems to me now, was good game design. I still think about Ultima IV from time to time, and think about replaying it, specifically because of the intellectual and ethical content of the game. I never think of replaying, say, Phantasie.

The one modern example that I know of to follow this path is Rob Bartel's The Witch's Wake, an adventure designed for Bioware's Neverwinter Nights Dungeons and Dragons (D20) game. In Witch's Wake, the character's goal is to discover who they are and to unravel the plot. Experience is meted out specifically for reaching various narrative goals. Combat yields no experience whatsoever; it is a complete distraction. However, since advancement in D20 is not based on exercising skills, the player is free to develop their character to be effective in combat, so that they may survive difficult battles that they are forced in to.

This is a sensible path, and would provide flexibility to all comers. Those who prefer the straightforward hack-and-slash solution should still be able to charge in and fight; those who want to avoid combat should be able to sneak. Diplomatic solutions should be possible in some cases. Rewards should be given to the player characters for accomplishing goals, not for knitting.

Witch's Wake was a success with both critics and players. Whether this will inspire other game designers to follow in Bartel's path remains to be seen. There is surely a lot of inertia and the market can be cruel to products that aren't what the customer expects. Today, most customers expect combat and loot, because that's what we as game designers have given them.

I think we can give them more.

Blackberry harvest

2004-06-17 · by peterb

Can't talk. Busy eating blackberries! Pictures tomorrow.

Workaday Port

2004-06-18 · by peterb

Quinta do Noval

Quinta do Noval

Every so often some bureaucrat at the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board screws up when filling out the computerized order form and ends up accidentally ordering 300 cases of some wine when he meant to order 30. When this happens, good wines go on sale. This has apparently happened with the Quinta do Noval LB Porto. Typically, this unpedigreed port would sell for between $15 - $18 a bottle. It's been on sale at state stores for $10, and I'm stocking up.

It's not cloyingly sweet, and strangely this makes it go less well with food than some other ports of similar distinction. It has a noticeably alcoholic nose and a strong blackcurrant jam foretaste. The tail is somewhat bitter, but not unpleasantly so -- more like a sour apple with a hint of sour cherry (oh, how I wish I could get sour cherries here. I miss them.)

Is it a great port? No. But it's a good port, and at $10 it's a steal. In a world where one has to pay $75 (!) for a bottle of Fonseca vintage 2000, there's something to be said for economizing on the stuff you drink when you're not celebrating a special event.

Seen at Indy

2004-06-19 · by peterb

The highlight of the Indianapolis Formula 1 Grand Prix qualifying session for me was seeing some enterprising fans holding up a hand-made sign which read:

"Team McLaren: New Tech Center - $300 million Drivers - $17 million 3 Points behind Sauber - Priceless"

Berry Scandal

2004-06-21 · by peterb

ripe-berries

Ripening berries

I've been talking for the past few weeks about how proud I am of my wild blackberries, how I have great plans to protect them and hug them and love them and call them George. But something has been gnawing at my subconscious, and yesterday it dawned on me.

Blackberries are supposed to have their cores intact. Are these really blackberries? Maybe they're not. Maybe they are black raspberries.

The realization came while picking them. Take a look at the photo to the right (click to enlarge it). Note in the cluster in the center where you can still see the 'stub' from the center of the berry, still on the branch. This is in large part how we classify raspberries versus blackberries: with blackberries, that stub (usually) stays in the berry; in raspberries it stays on the plant. This is why blackberries are cheaper -- that stub lends them structural integrity and makes them easier to transport without getting crushed.

Discussions with friends and neighbors ensued. Everyone told me I was mistaken -- "I've been eating those since I was a kid. They're clearly blackberries. Black raspberries are something completely different." I think, however, that it is these folks who are mistaken. These are black raspberries.

berry-closeupCloseup of berry

Here is a closeup of one of the berries from these brambles. Note the core is completely gone, and the druplet's distinctive raspberry shape, and especially note the hairy nature of the berry -- that's more of a raspberry characteristic. The most common variety of raspberry around these parts, in fact, goes by the name "Rubus Pensylvanicus," vulgarly referred to as the "Pennsylvania blackberry" (which explains why my neighbors call them "blackberries" -- that's their name, even though they're not the same as the blackberries you get in the store). Making the matter more complex is the fact that all members of the rubus family vigorously interbreed, making a specific identification difficult.

The other aspect that makes me lean towards the black raspberry identification is the growth pattern of the stem -- the primocanes get very long, and then arc towards the ground, which is not how (I'm told) trailing blackberries grow. In fact, where the tip of the primocane hits the ground, it roots -- this is not an easily trellissed plant.

Are there any budding botanists out there that can suggest ways I can identify the actual variety I've got here with confidence?

Idlewild

2004-06-22 · by peterb

Jack in the Box

Jack in the Box

Idlewild is an amusement park about 40 minutes east of Pittsburgh, near the historic town of Ligonier. It's positioned as a "family" amusement park, and definitely caters to kids, particularly younger kids. There are a few thrill rides here, but apart from a small (though worthy) old wooden coaster, you won't find rides here that you wouldn't find at a local fair. The permanent attractions are a bit more interesting.

The oddest part of the park, for me, is called "Storybook Forest." Storybook Forest is simply a long, winding path past a number of set-piece sculpted panoramas and the occasional costumed teenager. Each panorama is based on a children's story, fairy tale, or nursery rhyme. Apart from the voices of children and their parents, it's quiet -- the wooded locale helps instill some tranquility -- and fairly meditative.

There are some unhappy and depressed looking farm animals in pens scattered throughout to provide additional color. Bo Peep's sheep. The three little pigs.

Snow White

Snow White

The toddlers we passed were enchanted by it, but much to my surprise some of the older kids ("older" in this context meaning around 8 or 9 years old) seemed to enjoy it as well. I walked past one 8 year old saying to his mother "I thought this would be stupid, but I'm really having fun!"

This is the innocence gap; this is the chasm. All through Storybook Forest I'm confronted with the urge to mock, to denigrate, to poke fun at. I can see the scuffed paint and the decrepit shingles, and I can see that Snow White really can't wait for her cigarette break, and I can see that the animals just want to be left alone, and the whole thing just seems sad and depressing to me. But the children love it. They're seeing something I can't see, and I'm seeing something they can't see.

Steeplechase Park

Come back, come back

The grinning Jack in the Box reminded me of Tillie. In Coney Island, on Surf Avenue, I would ride my bike past the ruins of Steeplechase Park, the place that defined America's very notion of "amusement park." My older relatives would get a faraway look in their eyes when they talked about it. To me, it was like looking at a dinosaur's bones; the parachute jump in particular, skeletal and immense, beckoning from the Verrazano Narrows Bridge, showing me the way to my family and a place to play punchball. And always the smiling clown, Tillie, shouting "come back...come back..." to the deserted lot he presided over. When I was very young, I thought he was talking to me, making a promise. As I grew, I decided his face was disturbing, and his cry was a threat. Now, with time and distance, I pity poor Tillie, and I figure that he was simply begging someone, anyone, to come back and not leave him alone in his dark empty lot. He is the spirit of Coney Island, weeping for the vanished masses.

This is, after all, why we hate clowns: they are the makers of broken promises. To grow old is to be battered by the fine print of life, to learn that a promise is only as good as the one making it. In the tattered decadence of the Three Little Bears' house I see every lie told to me as a child. The group of first graders behind me, who haven't yet had to start keeping track of that, see only a good story made real.

Old King Cole

Old King Cole

You can't stop time from moving forward, and you can't stop children from discovering their own truths about the world. But you can treat a child's innocence with respect. And so I present these pictures from Idlewild without the mocking captions I originally wrote for them, without the knowing wink and the wry smile. I've left out the digression about overpriced amusement park food, and the complaints about screaming toddlers and grumpy parents. And if the pictures themselves are framed to mock, or to accentuate the grotesque -- as the Jack in the Box photo above certainly is -- then I apologize, and ask you to look again from another angle, where perhaps a less cynical vision can prevail.

Perhaps Tillie's shout of "Come back" is, after all, just an invitation.

Jack in the Box, take 2

Signs

2004-06-23 · by peterb

sign

Click to enlarge

After September 11th, the sign board became a way for suburban America to express solidarity. All down any given highway you could see hundreds of small storefronts asking us to pray for the victims, to support our troops, and in some cases crying out for vengeance. For some reason, I was transfixed by this. Something about the grass-roots nature of it moved me. I'm kicking myself for not taking more photos of them at the time.

Several years later, this has mostly died down, but occasionally there's someone who still uses this medium in a particularly attention grabbing way; here's one of them. I meant to take a picture of this sign a few weeks ago, when it had a provocative rant about Iraq and gas prices. But before I remembered to bring my camera when passing it, it had changed to something less interesting. Fortunately, this week's return of the phrase "camel jockey" makes it worth sharing.

It's an interesting sentiment, and I think it is representative of the fundamental split between our leadership and their base. Unlike the justified and measured retribution the US engaged in in Afghanistan, the Iraq war is unquestionably an imperial adventure. By this I mean that it is an enterprise that is of no demonstrable present value to the United States (it may give some benefit to the Iraqis themselves, or to the Kurds, or to history, or give some unquantified future value to the US), although it certainly has involved incredible cost in both blood and treasure. Patriotic Americans, by and large, understood exactly the trade off involved in the Afghanistan war, and understood the motivation. No one -- at least, no one unwilling to use the word "empire" -- has provided sufficient justification for the Iraq war that is both reasonable and truthful.

Imperial ambitions, of the very sort that George Washington warned us about, are destructive to a Republic. By its very nature the act of taking and holding territory incurs expenses that are unimagined otherwise. Furthermore, the more territory that one has to defend, the more thinly spread one's resources become. The British didn't just abandon their empire out of niceness, but out of necessity: it was bankrupting them. I don't see any particular reason that the same fate won't befall this latest American flirtation with imperialism.

Another sign

Rage is mounting

I found the sign that originally struck me on the restaurant's web site, so I have reproduced it here. While it's easy to focus on the hate and rage being projected at the Iraqis, there is a subtext of confusion and anger at our own government here: Why are we there? What are we gaining? What's the point?

The Bush administration has so far steadfastly ignored these sorts of commonsense questions from the public. I hope that the electorate responds appropriately to that disrespect in November.

The restaurant where these signs stand has proudly posted pictures of previous messages on their web site, here.

Depressing Software Thought

2004-06-24 · by peterb

It's the year 2004, and I am helping my parents configure their brand new Thinkpad to talk a completely standard wireless access point, and it is so painful that it is beyond the power of language to express.

Name Change

2004-06-25 · by peterb

All the URLs are the same, but starting today we are "Tea Leaves," since the related project with that name is going dark.

If any of the participants in the tleaves project want to have a place to hang their hat here, just let me know.

Groundhog Day

2004-06-28 · by peterb

Having to deal with yet another bad designer's stupid implementation of "save points" is the worst part of being a console gamer. Almost everyone gets it at least a little bit wrong. Many designers get it very wrong. A few game designers get it so wrong that you want them to be put into suspended animation and then revived only when the Earth has been conquered by a race of technologically advanced yet horribly malicious alien beings who will transport them into a whirling nightmarish dimension of transinfinite pain.

For those of you who are not gamers, allow me to explain the idea of "save points." Back in the 1980s, game consoles had extremely limited memory profiles and storage space. To allow larger games to be played in several sittings, designers introduced the concept of save points -- when you reach a specific point in the game, the player can save their progress to some stable or semi-stable storage. This allows the game designer to merely have to store a bit meaning "I have reached point 4" rather than keeping track of all the state in the game world.

The existence of save points caused a number of conventions to be placed on the narrative of the game worlds: the idea that enemies come back whenever you play the game, even if you've "cleared" that section, the idea that, since all gamers are 12 years old, they won't have to stop playing at a moment's notice, and the idea that if you die halfway between save points, you have to play the last segment of the game over again. And over. And over. And over. And over.

Here's what other types of media and life experiences would be like if they were implemented the same way some game designers implement their games:

The worst part about this, to me, is that people make up stupid reasons why this braindamaged behavior is good. Among the dumber reasons I've heard offered are: "Allowing the user to pause so they can take their bleeding child to the hospital will ruin the dramatic flow of the game," "But, if we let the player save at an arbitrary time, they might save after every combat and ruin the 'challenge' of the game!" and -- I swear I'm not making this last one up, this is a paraphase of a certain idiot reviewer on a not-to-be-named game review site -- "If you can't spend a solid hour playing a game, you're not hardcore enough and you shouldn't be playing video games."

There's a kernel of truth in some of these. Yes, it's true that a player can ruin the fun of his game by saving immediately after every hard challenge is passed. So what? The bottom line is that the player can better manage their happiness than you, the game designer, can. Based on my own experience and the conversations I've had with fellow gamers, the single most common reason a player puts an otherwise good game down and never comes back to it is because of the inadequate placement of save points. No one wants to replay a segment that they already played through just because they made a mistake 90% of the way through.

In today's videogame world, the common case is that the design of the game sucks. The common case is not that I am sitting there, unable to save, saying to myself "Gosh, I sure am excited by the dramatic tension introduced by the fact that if I die here, I'll have to spend 20 minutes trudging through the castle and fighting the same monsters I just defeated to get back to this point all over again." The common case, rather, is that most people, most of the time, say "I just died because of the stupid camera, and now I have to do the whole stupid lava level all over again from the stupid beginning, because the stupid designers were too stupidly arrogant to put in enough stupid save points." You know what most of us do when confronted with that sort of game?

We stop playing the stupid game.

I have a friend who never finished Shenmue, because the climactic battle was a horrific 40 minute deathmarch. With no save points, and with plenty of unpausable cutscenes. He had started playing it early one evening, not realizing what he was getting himself in to. And he was about to go out on a date, and had to stop. Was he going to play the entire 30 minutes he lost again? No. He decided -- correctly, in my opinion -- that the annoyingness of the game exceeded whatever pleasure he might get out of seeing the end.

Listen. I know it's hard to accept. But the odds are, simply, that your game is not that good. Really. It isn't. We want to play your game because we want to see what comes next, not because we want to see the stuff we've already seen 6 times because some boss keeps defeating us. If the player wants to ruin your big dramatic moment, too bad. I can pause Scorsese's movies any time I want, and I should be able to leave your game, and come back to it, any time I want. If Scorsese can get over it, so can you.

The other objection I hear is that to get the sort of "instant save and restore" functionality I want, I can just pause the game and turn off the TV. This is a morally disordered argument: someone else might want to use the console to play a different game, immediately. Some games -- those would be "poorly designed games" -- don't let you pause any time you want. And, frankly, I grew up in the 1970s with the "Energy Blues" playing on Schoolhouse Rock. I don't want to leave my console on when I'm not using it. I want to turn it off. Lastly, I guarantee that if I turn the TV off but leave the console on, someone (such as myself) will turn the console off accidentally.

There are basically two ways to fix the brokenness of save points: the somewhat wrong way, and the right way. I'll describe them, and then I'll describe an alternative solution that, I think, will eventually become the norm.

The somewhat wrong way to fix the problem -- which is still better than nothing -- is to put a metric ton of save points around your game, so that the player has the opportunity to save "frequently enough" that they're not bothered by them. Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance went this route. As I say, this is at least better than nothing, since it will likely allow the player to not have to play for a solid hour to get back to where they were when they died. The risks here are twofold: first, you might underestimate what "often enough" means, and second, if you provide a save point the player will feel obligated to use it, so a larger percentage of the game is taken up with the mechanics of saving. Halo tries to fix this latter problem by frequently "checkpointing" the player's progress -- just silently saving it when the player crosses certain boundaries -- but I've never met anyone who felt that it actually worked right, since it only works within a given session, not across sessions.

The correct solution is to allow the player to manage their own save points. Let them get access to a menu anytime, anywhere, and save the game immediately. Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic does this, and it is a pleasure to use.

The software developers -- particular the user interface geeks -- among you may have noticed a systemic problem in what I'm describing. It relies on the game developer doing the right thing. As game developers are apparently intent on proving, over and over again, that they don't know or care about proper user interface design, I will suggest a different idea. The issue I'm most concerned with is not "saving" for purposes of time travel, but the ability to stop playing at a moment's notice and to pick up exactly where I left off later. That service could, and I argue should, be implemented by the console itself, not by the software developer. When I want to suspend or hibernate my laptop, I don't have to go around to each application asking for permission: I just suspend the damn thing. On a system with a hard drive (hello, Microsoft!) doing this sort of hibernation is a solved problem.

In summary, this is not a game-specific issue. This is a user-interface issue. You'd dismiss as unacceptable a word processor that refused to allow you to save your work unless you finished the paragraph you were writing. We should not hold games to a lower standard.

Additional Resources

Abay

2004-06-29 · by peterb

For too many years i've been forced to take road trips to Washington, DC, Toronto, or Cleveland when I had the desire for Ethiopian food. A new restaurant, Abay, has opened up in the East Liberty section of Pittsburgh (on Highland Avenue). To say I'm pleased would be an understatement.

The space is warmly lit, unassuming, and uncluttered; it seats about 50 to 60 comfortably. The menu is still under development, but has a decent variety of vegetarian, beef, and chicken options (I did not see any lamb on the menu, which makes me a bit sad). The injera, a sponge like bread that is both figuratively and literally the centerpiece of the meal, was fantastic. Sour, springy, and leaving just a dusting of unidentifiable chaff on the fingertips, I could eat it for weeks and not get tired of it. EntrÈes are spread in mounds on the flatbread, and are shared by all at the table. Some of the people I dined with felt the dishes weren't adequately spicy, but I found them to my taste; rather than being spiced for pain, they were spiced for depth.

I generally enjoyed the vegatarian offerings more than the meat dishes. In particular, I found the ye' abesha gomen, a savory mixture of kale, chillis, garlic, and onion to be particularly good, the metallic tang of the kale melding with the hint of sweetness from the onion. The tikil gomen -- cabbage and carrots -- is the very definition of homestyle food, and is as good as any I've had in other cities.

The one weakness of the menu is the drinks; you can get Ethiopian coffee or tea, spiced with cardamom, but there's no hint of the relaxing and enjoyable Ethiopian coffee ceremony here -- you'll still need to go elsewhere for your black clay coffee pot and incense fix. There's also no sign of Tej, the amazingly vile Ethiopian honey wine, so perhaps it's a fair trade. Prices are very reasonable -- averaging $8 / entrÈe at lunch, and $11 at dinner -- and decrease if you order dishes in sets, as you undoubtedly will.

Abay is a great addition to the growing stable of interesting and unique cuisine you can find in Pittsburgh. On behalf of...well, I guess just on behalf of myself, let me say to those running the new restaurant: Welcome!

Additional Resources

Hiro Sushi

2004-06-30 · by psu

We were in Toronto for the weekend a couple of weeks ago. For those who don't know, Toronto is a great food town only 4 or 5 hours drive from Pittsburgh. In particular, we have found Chinese and Japanese food in Toronto that is as good or better than anything I've had in North America. One of these most excellent establishments is Hiro Sushi. I have never personally had better sushi than at Hiro Sushi.

To give you an idea what Hiro is like, I'll run down the events of our last dinner there. The place is a relatively compact space on King St. East in downtown Toronto. There are maybe a dozen tables and another eight or ten seats at the bar. Hiro-san and one or two assistants handle all the sushi for the place, and Hiro also runs out to the kitchen for the odd dish. We sit down at the bar and tell Hiro-san to just give us whatever is good. We will get an assortment of sushi, sashimi, hand rolls, and other rolls over the course of the night.

Soon after we sit down, Hiro pulls a small whole fish out of the cooler where he stores the fish at the bar. He cuts the fish 2 or 3 times with his enormous knife and quickly pulls two fillets off of the skeleton. This takes about ten seconds. He then makes two small cuts and pulls the skin off the fillets with two pulls. The skeleton is still in one piece. He bends it up and puts it in a large bowl with a skewer stuck through it to keep it vertical. Then the fillets are chopped into a small dice and mixed with fresh ginger, scallion and oil. This mixture is added to the bowl along with a soy sauce based dressing and slices of many other kinds of fish. Presto. Sashimi salad.

What gives you an indication that you are in a different kind of spot is the speed and fludiity with which Hiro-san slices the fish and makes the sushi pieces. Sushi is always the perfect size, with the perfect amount of rice formed into a perfect elongated ball. The rice is never pasty. The soy sauce is never stale. And, the sushi always has little touches on it (extra ginger here, a tiny bit of scallion there) that bring out the taste of the fish without hiding it under in a wad of wasabi or a river of soy. It's simply perfect.

Hiro gives us each two pieces of white tuna. This tastes like normal tuna sushi, but has a richer, fattier texture like toro.

Then he makes dishes for the house and the other patrons on the bar. The guy sitting next to us is the son of the owner of The Indian Rice Factory, a place that we've been meaning to go. He gets some special dishes over the course of the night.

Hiro is busy, and one of his assistants makes us California rolls. These are the only real disappointment of the evening. But, what can you do. What you notice about the assistant is that he never makes sushi, only rolls and hand rolls and other dishes. You also notice that he is not nearly as good with the knife as Hiro. It takes him almost a minute to fillet the whole same whole fish for the salad, and he can't keep the skeleton in one piece.

It turns out the whole fish that Hiro-san has been slicing are Spanish Mackerel. We each get two pieces off one of the fillets. They are topped with a bit of ginger and scallion. Sublime.

Next, squid. Tender but not chewy.

Next, two kinds of shrimp. One cooked and one sweet raw shrimp. Unlike most places, the cooked shrimp is actually decent.

Hiro-san pulls out an enormous side of tuna that has been marinated or roasted or something. It turns out that this is a huge piece of Bonito. He makes the Indian Rice factory guy a bonito salad in a black ceramic bowl that is the size of my head. Indian Rice factory guy grins.

Next, two kinds of tuna. Marinated toro (which is belly meat) and also marinated plain tuna. This is the best tuna I have ever had.

Now the assistant makes us each a spicy scallop hand roll. It is sweet and spicy at the same time. Yum.

While we munch the hand rolls, the waitress whispers something in Hiro-san's ear about a special order. He gets a pained look and starts pulling out pieces of fish to slice. Soon, he has slices of every sort of fish and roe in his case along with pickles and the cooked egg. He stuff all of this into a rice roll that turns into a log. He starts taking slices off of this log and puts two on a plate and then hands them out to the folks at the bar. It's like a freaky mutated futo-maki, but with everything imaginable in it. It's great. Mostly it tastes like roe and pickles.

Karen asks for fluke. Hiro has not given us any tonight, even though we've had it here before. It turns out not to be so great. Which is why he didn't give it to us.

Hiro runs out into the kitchen and brings back a small pot. He turns to the Indian Rice Factory guy and says, "Look, I have made curry". He ladles out a brown curry dish from the pot. Apparently it was some sort of seafood stew. Indian Rice factory guy grins.

Next, eel sushi. This is pretty standard stuff, but as usual, he does it better.

We also ask for toro, and we get some. It is good toro.

Hiro does another everything roll. He slices it up and there is a huge end piece left over. He hands it to the Indian Rice Factory guy.

Next, we get little sushi pieces covered with a vegetable that is similar to asparagus spears or chinese broccoli or something. It's been marinated and has a very fresh spring-like flavor.

Karen is now full. I ask for salmon. I get a smoked salmon and a fresh salmon. It's like the best lox you've ever had, except sweeter and more tender, and each piece on top of one of those perfect little nuggets of rice. Incredible.

I've probably missed some things that actually came by our plates. But I think this is a pretty good summary.

We were there for two and a half hours. We walked out stuffed. Hiro-san charged us a relatively paltry amount of $45US each.

If you don't want to get in your car and drive there right now, you are just a fool.

Canard

2004-07-01 · by peterb

It was in a small auberge in the Dordogne, in the south-west of France, maybe forty-five minutes from the town of Villeneuve-sur-lot, where I encountered the perfect fried potatoes.

I was dining with my parents, my sister, and a somewhat vegetarian friend. I, of course, went straight for the foie gras over arugula, among other things, but my mother and sister got the crayfish, which came with pommes frittes. Jennifer, the vegetarian, picked at the fries and soon started wolfing them down. We all talked about them -- they were, everyone agreed, the best we'd ever had.

Jennifer knows no French; my mother and I have a little. So when Mom asked the proprietor how he made some incredibly good fries, I understood the response and Jennifer didn't: "Oh, that's simple. They taste good because we fry them in duck fat."

"What did he say?" asked Jennifer, and my mother and I, guided by some psychic link, practically shouted the same thing at the exact same time: "He says the oil is really hot!" Lubricated by this little white lie, dinner continued, with Jennifer able to enjoy the best fries in the world guilt-free.

So duck fat is really one of the tastiest things you can fry with. I always keep some around. You can use it for just about any sort of high temperature frying -- anything you might use bacon fat for, use duck fat instead. The high heat needed for a good omelette will scorch plain butter, but just a dollop of duck fat mixed in will let you get that same butter much hotter without burning it (and, not incidentally, will make the omelette taste better).

The problem with duck fat is that you can't really find it on the shelf of your average supermarket. Even if you could, it wouldn't be fresh. The solution is obvious: go buy a duck.

There's a million ways under the sun to prepare duck, but I find the simplest is the best: slow-roast it. No sauces, no soy, nothing except duck and salt. The recipe from The Joy of Cooking is just fine.

Get a duck, between about 4 and 5 pounds. A frozen duck will have a noticeably inferior texture, so fresh if you can find it (or, if you can only find frozen, then you might consider doing something more intricate with a sauce to try to compensate for the texture). Preheat your oven to 250 degrees Fahrenheit. Remove everything from inside the duck, and pull off the most egregious globs of fat off of the skin in the neck (don't worry about losing this -- you're going to have plenty left over). Using a sharp, thin skewer, pierce as many holes as you dare in the skin of the duck. The goal here is to give the subcutaneous fat somewhere to drain to -- in so doing, it will become crispy. Try not to pierce the actual flesh beneath the skin. I like to slip the skewer underneath the skin and kind of work it around horizontally. (Chinese chefs who make Peking duck will frequently use an electric bicycle pump to do this, just pumping compressed air under the skin of a tied fowl -- if you've got some other innovative way of accomplishing the task of "loosen the skin from the muscle beneath," have at it.)

Rub the duck all over, inside and out, with kosher salt. Place in your preheated oven on a rack breast-side down, for 3 hours. Every hour or so, poke a few more holes in the skin. After 3 hours, flip the duck breast side up, drain off the excess fat to a jar (which you'll refrigerate and save for use in cooking later) and turn the heat up to 350 degrees for 35 to 40 minutes. I usually then give the duck a 5 minute roast at 500 just to really crisp it up. Remove from the oven, set on a platter, cover, and let rest for 10 minutes.

Bon appetit!

Additional Resources

There is Magic Yet In Pittsburgh

2004-07-02 · by goob

Find a map of Pittsburgh and spread it out upon the table. Make it a good map, detailed enough to show all of the actual streets downtown and surrounding, perhaps even the paper ones that fly off into space above the rivers or worm their old ways under newer steel and stone. Put your finger on the Monongahela river where it reforms itself into half of the Ohio. Begin to drag it east, up the channel. Put ripples in the water with your nail past the Fort Pitt bridge, past the Smithfield Street Bridge, past the little train bridge that carries the T and holds a name that no one remembers (Panhandle Railroad Bridge). Let your finger feel the draw of that mighty river, navigable in entire, and keep pushing east.

Stop at that next bridge running over the river, and investigate. This is the Liberty Bridge, carrying cars to and from the Liberty Tubes (tunnels) to the south and a tangled mess of road and ramp to the north, which I will not attempt to explain, even with the help of the map. Put your finger on the bridge, now, and trace it south (please remain in the western lanes) to where the roadway runs to tunnel and dips beneath Mount Washington.

Do not enter the tunnel with your finger; it is not likely to fit, and trouble in the tunnels snarls traffic for miles upon miles. Even if your finger fit, you would be forced by local custom to slow to ten miles per hour, and after five minutes of following that dotted line on the map on the coffee table your back will begin to hurt. Instead, at the southern end of the bridge, turn west. This will also be a turning upward, as you are now scouring a nail-plowed furrow in the surface of McArdle Roadway.

This road climbs as it clings to the side of Mount Washington, offering access to the oohs and aahs of the downtown Pittsburgh view at the top. It is worth the trip up it to walk along the top of Mount Washington, taking in sights and looking down on birds. I would recommend to take your finger there on a summer afternoon when the hillside trees are in full leaf, driving up the roadway and moving through a corridor of green and outcrop, with occasional view of the deepening city peeking through from the right.

Over this road passes one of Pittsburgh's two working Funiculars, the Monongahela Incline, on a steep thin track just below the tops of trees. If you are lucky on the way up, you will pass beneath the trackway just as one of the Incline's cars rumbles by above, going upways or down. It will spill into the space over the roadway as an invader, intruding from bygone years, an incongruity made more so by the quickness of its passing from view. You may see people on it, and they may see you, but there is no time to wave; a curt nod is what is possible, and all that is really required.

This trick does not work as well on the way down McArdle; I do not know why. This, also, is not a thing that can be planned. It happens or it does not. The only remaining difficulty is that your finger, heavy and massive and huge from the sky, would easily snap the tracks in two, should it try to pass there.

I say: take a car instead, and good luck.

Ouch

2004-07-03 · by peterb

Marcus Gronholm's co-driver Timo Rautiainen was injured when a metal bar lying in the road pierced the undercarriage of their Peugeot 307, and the seat, and Timo's backside. It was at this moment that viewers everywhere learned that it is entirely possible to rattle off driving directions in Finnish while, at the same time, cursing in English.

Gronholm, understandably, stopped the car to make sure that Timo was OK. When interviewed after the stage, he described it thusly:

"We had to stop because some stone came up through Timo's, uh, seat." Long pause. "Up into the ass of Timo." Another pause. "So we stop."

The Finn illustrated his point with an upward thrust of his fist.

Impressively, Gronholm and Rautiainen still managed to come in second. Timo's ass is said to be healing well.

Offal in Koreatown

2004-07-06 · by peterb

There's not really very much that I won't eat, or at least that I won't try. This weekend in Toronto I got to cross one of the long-standing entries off the list of foods I have knowingly ducked: pig intestines, which we call "chitterlings" or "chitlins" around these parts.

Offal is not generally a really big part of the standard American diet. Growing up in the Jewish tradition I probably had more than your average kid -- Grandma's chopped liver was great, and I loved stuffed derma and kishka (which are basically simple, salty chicken fat sausages). The textures of some of the organ meats, though, make them hard to deal with if you're not used to them. Tripe, in particular, I ducked for years; I even avoided it while in Oporto, where it is the city's specialty dish. It just looks evil, nasty, rippled and spongy. I'd see a plate of tripe and imagine my teeth sinking in and then never being able to get them out. I imagined they'd find me, dead of starvation at the dinner table, a mass of tripe tangled around my teeth. When I finally broke down and tried it, in a bowl of Phó, I enjoyed it -- the chewy, springy texture of the tripe was a nice counterpoint to the soft noodles and the crunchy bean sprouts. I still wouldn't order a big pile of tripe to eat all by itself, but I was pleased to find a dish where I could enjoy it.

Korea House, on Bloor in the middle of the Annex neighborhood, described "soondae" as "pig intestine and sausage," and it was available in a number of different dishes. You can call soondae "blood sausage," but that doesn't really get the point across. Spanish morçilla, for example, is technically a blood sausage, but you don't really experience the casing as an essential component of the dish, the way you do with soondae. Remembering my phó experience, I decided that this would be where I'd get chitterlings off of my "will not try" list. Korean soups are notoriously spicy and flavorful, and I figured that if anything could make pig intestine edible, hot pepper could; armed with that knowledge, I ordered soondae guk, a spicy stew. The waitress looked at me suspiciously. "You know soondae guk?" I nodded confidently, hoping to project the attitude that I eat it all the time. She padded away and, soon brought, along with the inevitable procession of small side dishes, my bowl of spicy offal soup.

Pig intestine is like tripe, only more so. In terms of texture it is rubbery and chewy, just like tripe, but also a bit thicker, so eating it is a bit like eating gristle. The taste was very neutral, and not offensive at all -- basically, it just tasted like the spicy pepper broth it was in. What was disconcerting was the smell. I was prepared for it to smell like rotting flesh, or to have a sulfurous odor, or a sickly sweet bloody odor. It smelled like none of these things.

It smelled like vulcanized rubber. It smelled like a bicycle tire.

It didn't smell somewhat like a bicycle tire. It wasn't redolent of a bicycle tire. It didn't suggest the odor of a bicycle tire. If you rubbed a bicycle tire with sandpaper and held it up to your nose, that's exactly what this smelled like.

So that's not so offensive that one loses one's lunch and stops eating, especially since, as I said, it felt and tasted just fine. It was just confusing. I continued eating the soup with a quizzical expression on my face. The sausage in the soup tasted more like I expected. It was a livery, sulfurous mass that contained mysterious chunks and bubbles of nameless flesh that we in wealthier countries typically throw away when cooking for people we love. Since I've eaten tapas in Madrid, where they pride themselves in discovering new and innovative uses for body parts previously believed to be indigestible, this was nothing terribly new. (I have a fantasy of someday encountering a tapas bar that has figured out a way to serve fried fur and hair, chased by a jigger of sweet homemade vermouth). The sausage was loose and fell apart in the soup into its component lumps, so eating was an exercise in trying to balance a lump of sausage meat with a curl of intestine, along with some spicy liquid and perhaps an onion or two in the spoon, and slorping it down in one mouthful.

chitty

"Chitty the Chitterling"

It was pretty good. There's enough other things on the typical Korean menu that I can't see myself gravitating to the soon dae guk every time, but if you're looking to overcome your fear of chitterlings and try something new, this is a good way to do it.

Additional Resources

Mangosteen

2004-07-07 · by peterb

mangosteens

Mangosteens

The mangosteen (Garcinia mangostana L) is perhaps the most treasured of the tropical fruits, and virtually unknown in the US except among those fortunate enough to travel abroad. They're not legal to import to the US because of concerns about fruit fly infestations; but you can find them on the street markets in Chinatown in Toronto.

It's an exceptionally attractive fruit, with a thick, royal purple skin and a tomato-like green stem up top. Cut it open and you'll find white flesh, ivory-white, with almost an iridescent pearl like sheen. Foodies love to crow about the indescribably orgasmic flavor which is incomparable to anything else in the world, but they're just being drama queens: mangosteens have a papaya and grape sweetness, with a refreshing lime-like acidity. They are juicy enough to make a copious supply of napkins a requirement.

mangosteen

Mangosteens at market

There's mystique surrounding the mangosteen, and it's hard to separate fact from fiction. Folklore holds that Queen Victoria offered a knighthood (unclaimed) to anyone who could bring her back an unspoiled one to try from the Indies. It also holds that it was her favorite fruit, a somewhat incompatible notion. Perhaps derived from this story is the unofficial designation of mangosteen as the "Queen of Fruits," which sounds great until you realize that the smells-like-vomit durian is the "King of Fruits."

I obtained my mangosteens from one of the Vietnamese open-air markets on Spadina near Dundas. While there, I also picked up some rambutan, sugar apples, rose apples, and passed on the dragon fruit and fresh lychees. They are conveniently located near many shops where you can get a Saigon sandwich. Basically, this is where you go when you die, if you're good.

I'm always surprised that more of these hyperperishable tropical fruits don't end up in preserved (or preserves) form; although of course that does violence to the fruit in its fresh form, it's better than nothing.

So, can someone obtain a cashew apple for me? I'll trade you this here mangosteen...

Additional Resources

À la recherche du temps à noix

2004-07-08 · by peterb

hodo kwaja

hodo kwaja

Hodo kwaja is a Korean filled sweet that is shaped like a walnut. In the mid-1930s, a Korean baker (one Mr. Cho Kwigum) was apparently contemplating a madeleine and said to himself "You know what would be great? It would be great if there was stuff inside of this thing." He gave it a distinctive walnut shaped mold, chose a popular filling, and named it, and Korea has loved them ever since. We found a coffee shop (descriptively named "Hodo Kwaja") in Little Korea in Toronto that sold hodo kwaja, madeleines, hot coffee, and nothing else.

But I don't just want to tell you about Hodo Kwaja, I want to show them to you. So I made a short film about them. You can view it in low (1 Mb), medium (3 Mb), or high (7.5 Mb) resolution versions. If you've the bandwidth to spare, get the high res version. (Since all video plugins for every browser are stupid and don't allow resizing, best results will be obtained by right-clicking the link and choosing "save", then watching in a standalone video program where you can make it full screen. But just clicking should work too. The movies are in Quicktime format; if you click on the links and don't get a movie you can install the free Quicktime player and try again.)

The walnuts are filled with either a red bean paste or a mixture of mashed potatoes and walnuts or almonds. The dough is a basic madeleine dough like you or I would make at home. The mashed potato hodo have a cloying maple flavor that makes them taste a little too breakfasty for me. I preferred the red bean versions, but the rule here is "get whichever ones are still hot." Their coffee is great.

walnut-machine

The Machine

The most impressive part of the experience, for me, was the robotic hodo kwaja assembler, which inspired me to come back the next day with the video camera and make this short film. I want one of those machines for my living room. Oh yes. Oh yes, I do.

Tomorrow I'll be talking about the process of making this video and some neat things I learned about Final Cut Pro, but for now, just enjoy the video. And, if you're hungry, make yourself some madeleines.

Additional Resources

Mistakes Were Made

2004-07-09 · by peterb

The walnut cake movie is the first movie I've made in a while. It was made without any planning or forethought. Every time I make a movie, I screw it up in new and interesting ways. Here's what I learned from my screwups this time:

Although lots went wrong here, I'm optimistic about the format. I'm a big believer in tiny yet good things. Perhaps there will be more 2 minute movies about food in my future.

Shortcuts

2004-07-11 · by goob

The land that Pittsburgh sits on is a rumpled place, a piece of rough cloth thrown carelessly on the table. A very long time ago, this place was a flat plain made up of the debris washed down from the left side of the decaying Appalachian mountains. This grand flatness was then itself carved up and out by rivers and kills and everything in between, leaving a landscape of close valleys and hills of oddly similar height.

One effect of this is a habit of running major transportation routes along the river; it is really only there where it stays flat for any great while. This becomes a particular problem where the hills curl up next to the water, squeezing road and rail together on the thin strip of land between the rock and the river. The land becomes precious, and the rights of way become thin and jealously guarded. The decades-long question of the fate of bottom four miles of Route 28 is an excellent example of the pressures produced by the situation. It is the topology that traps us on roadways that become ever less capable, unable to expand to meet unforeseen legions of the poor souls who clog the choke points with the weight of their presence every morning at eight and every evening at five.

The underside to this is that the topology also gives itself over to secrets. There are inconvenient sides to hills, I suppose, where it is difficult to reach, or difficult to run services to, or the possible property development is just too thin to be worth it for the steepness. Where it would not be worth it to do whatever else, they run roads. An unknown road swings a careless ess curve through tall grasses, a stone's throw from the congestion of a major local roadway but so hidden as to not be there. A middle-class neighborhood of trim homes gives up its lane to the adjacent city park, which consumes the road and compresses it with leaves and shade. A road leaps from another neighborhood and tumbles down a hill, back and forth, until it reaches the smoothness of the valley below, making short scary work of an otherwise long, looping route. These are some of the ones I know about, roads so hidden and lost they turn the world to forest, or jungle, or sky. I cannot tell you where they are, of course.

There are other shortcuts that I could not reveal if I wanted to. I see them in the distance when sitting in an idling car behind a sea of brake lights. I only see glances of them, and always of the middle: I never see where they begin or end. I do not know where the drivers on those paths go. I do not know what led them to find those roads, that first time.

Folding Shirts

2004-07-12 · by peterb

Cloth folding

Om mani padme hum

Here's a short movie -- not by me -- on how to fold a shirt to such a perfect, crisp shape that its very existence provides nearly irrefutable evidence of the presence of a pantheon of benevolent and all-knowing Clothing Gods. I find it compelling. I find it hypnotic. I can't stop watching it, over and over again, hoping to absorb how to perform such household magic. I have taken my shirt off in the kitchen. I have sat, and emulated the master. And I am here to tell you it is not a trick of the light; it is not a special effect; it is not clever editing. It really works.

The language being spoken is Japanese. Here's a rough translation:

"Start by laying the Tshirt flat and sideways in front of you, neck opening to your right. Find the centerpoint on the far side and pinch it with your left hand, about two inches in from the far edge.

With your right hand, draw a line from your left hand to the right edge of the tshirt, parallel to the edge of the shirt. This brings your right hand to the neck-opening side of the shirt. Grasp the edge with your right hand.

Now, while maintaining your grip, cross your right hand over your left, towards the opposite (waist-opening) end of the tshirt. Maintain the same imaginary line you've been working on (about two inches from the far edge of the shirt, parallel to the edge) and add the new edge to the grasp of your right hand.

This is where the magic happens. Simply uncross your hands and extend them in front of you, lifting the shirt perpendicular to the floor. Complete the fold by letting the loose arm hole drop to the floor and folding the shirt in half over it!

Breathe deeply and contemplate the terrible beauty you have wrought."

OK, that last line wasn't actually part of the voiceover. But it should be.

Famous Last Words

2004-07-13 · by peterb

If you're a software developer for long enough, you'll hear certain things throughout your career that almost never, ever, ever turn out to be true. Here's a partial list of some of the more popular lies and simply wrong things you'll hear.

....any others? Add yours below. It's also worth mentioning the following somewhat related topbot lists: worst commenting practices, new Windows API features, and the ever-popular (and accurate!) all software sucks list.

Gmail Invites: Going for a Song

2004-07-14 · by peterb

It makes me somewhat disgusted that people are still trying to profit off of gmail invites, "selling" them on craigslist and elsewhere for $5, $10, etc. I mean, how desperate do you have to be? What happened? Did the blood bank stop accepting your plasma? Did your attempt to corner the suburban lemonade stand market fail when some sixth graders moved in on your turf? Did no one join your Ponzi scheme?

So the other day, in a fit of pique, having already invited all of my friends that I knew wanted in, I offered to give my gmail invites away for free to the first takers on craigslist; all I asked for was that they tell me what their favorite Pittsburgh restaurant was, and why. I had about 8 takers, and all my invites (and those of some helpful friends -- thanks!) were slorped up in no time. It was a good deed, and I feel good about it.

So, why not expand it? I'm out of invites right now, but more will undoubtedly come in. Thus: if you'd like a gmail invite, add a comment below saying so, and I'll take responsibility for trying to get you one. I can't make any guarantees, obviously, but I'll give it my best effort.

Since this weblog is subtitled creativity x technology it's appropriate to attach a little proviso to this to make it more fun. Requests will be given priority if they come with a short yet interesting story. Some suggested topics (which, not coincidentally, are among the topics that I concern myself with on this site) might include:

As I say, these are just suggestions -- if something else is on your mind, feel free to lay it out there as your contribution.

Lastly, if you already have a gmail account, feel free to contribute a story if you like, just to show people how it's done. If you're interested in donating invitations to the cause, just drop me a line at the address gmail-invite at tgr dot com and let me know how many creative contributors you'd like to sponsor; I'll gate their requests to you as they come in.

California and Me, a Short Interlude

2004-07-17 · by psu

I grew up in Massachusetts, and now have lived in Pittsburgh for about the last ten years. Because I work in the computer industry I am forced to travel to California against my will. I have spent a lot of time in Silicon Valley and even a summer in Pasadena.

All this time in CA has lead to one inevitable conclusion: On balance, I hate the place.

Now, don't get me wrong. Visiting San Francisco is great fun, and we do it often to escape the relative lack of real Chinese Food in Pittsburgh. But aside from the better food environment, there is almost nothing to recommend this area as a place to live day to day. Let us review.

  1. The weather sucks.

Sure, it's warm enough to allow one to bicycle almost year round. But, the oppressive non-changing dry boring blandness of it all just sucks my soul out of my eyeballs. Apologists for the area will always bombard you with some pithy remark like "oh, yeah, you must love freezing your ass off all the time in the winter", which completely misses the point. The weather, while inducing suffering, is a reminder that time passes, that the world changes, that summer is different from winter in more ways than just being dryer, that there is a cycle to things. I find this to be reassuring. When I'm in CA, it's like time stands still and has no meaning. I hate it.

  1. The cars suck.

The entire car oriented culture is poisonous. Everything is sprawled out along thousands of square miles of paved oblivion. You can't walk anywhere. You can't park anywhere. Today, just to get to the airport cost $100 in a cab. This is ludicrous.

  1. The traffic sucks.

I was going to meet my friend at Google for dinner tonight. He calls me at 6:30 (an hour and a half late) saying that he is on the way home. It takes him 45 minutes to get home because of "traffic". Google is in Mountain View. My friend lives in Mountain View. How can it take 45 minutes to get home because of traffic when the longest possible distance that he just drove is a few miles?

  1. The housing sucks.

$500,000 buys you a hovel with a tin roof. The only way to buy a decent house is to win the stock options lottery at a place like google and pray you can cash out fast enough.

  1. The attitude sucks.

If I get that puzzled look from one more CA fan-boy asking me why any rational person would willingly live on the east coast, I'll punch his teeth out. If you like your little car infested hell hole, then that's fine. Just don't expect me to understand it.

  1. The culture sucks.

California encapsulates all the contradictions of modern life in the U.S. In San Francisco, homeless people sleep outside of Nordstrom. The weather is warm enough to cycle and walk outside all year, so everyone drives everywhere. The place is a hot bed of various progressive civil liberties paranoia and identity politics, but you can't smoke in bars. The area has some of the best food and cooking in the world, but the paranoia about the latest diet fads and the complete obsession over minutae like grass fed free range organic vegetables is just exhausting. Finally, the intellectual environment is best described as my friend Corey put it: "the vapid crystal-rubbing health-food and high-colonic culture."

Overheard At Enrico's

2004-07-19 · by peterb

Enrico's

Photo courtesy Peter Su

Enrico's Biscotti is one of the treasures of our town, and is surrounded by legends, myths, and stories, passed on by word of mouth from person to person. When they stopped selling daily lunch in the back room -- a converted auto garage -- in preparation for opening their trendier Shadyside location, I was depressed for a week. Recently, the back room opened again for lunch on Saturdays. With visions of beans and greens dancing in my head, or perhaps a simple pizza margherita, I stopped in last weekend, and now have a story to relate.

We were sitting next to a woman from California who was eating her way across the USA; in fact, she had with her a copy of Jane and Michael Stern's Eat Your Way Across the USA, and Enrico's was listed as a must-stop destination. Larry, the owner, saw the book and stopped to chat. He told her a story. This is the story he told.

"So, I'm in the kitchen slicing biscotti and this guy walks in and says 'Are you the owner?' And of course, my reaction is 'Uh oh, something is wrong.' So I slowly put the knife down and he says 'I'm Michael Stern,' and just then my hand slips and I slice my thumb half open. 'Michael Stern? I'm such a huge fan of yours!' And now I'm worried that he's going to think I'm a dork who can't even handle a knife so I just kind of cross my arm and tuck my thumb up under the other arm and try to act casual, you know? Like I'm not bleeding all over the place. So we talk for a while about the business, and about the biscotti, and everything, and we set up a meeting for that evening so he can interview me on tape for The Splendid Table."

"So he leaves, and I take my thumb out from under my arm and scream, and my apron is sopping wet with blood. Apparently, while I was just acting as if nothing happened, blood was pouring out of my thumb. He had to have noticed. Apart from bleeding a lot it was actually OK -- after I bandaged it up it healed just fine"

"That night he comes by and we do the interview, and I show him the place, and we're having a great time -- he's just a great guy, a fabulous guy -- and we're finishing up, and he's about to leave, and he looks at me and kind of smiles and says 'So, how's that thumb?' So then I had to explain how I didn't want to look like a complete dork, and we both had a good laugh about it."

If you're in Pittsburgh, you owe it to yourself to visit Enrico's. On a cold winter morning, the smell of biscotti and macaroons that drifts onto Penn Avenue from their front door is like a message from another, better world. Their pizza -- traditional Napolitan style -- is thin and understated and fantastic. Their "big fat salad" is a full meal without being offensively built. Their soups, stews, and quiches are hearty and simple. This is peasant food from a magical land where the peasants eat better than everyone else. You can eat at Enrico's every day and never get bored.

Additional Resources

The Spice Must Flow

2004-07-20 · by peterb

If there's one annoying trend that has permeated Asian cuisine as prepared and served throughout America, it's that I can hardly find a place where a server doesn't ask me "How spicy? 1 to 10?"

You don't ask me how much salt I want in the dishes that come out from the kitchen. You don't ask how much sugar you should put in the cheesecake. You don't offer me a choice of an omelette fried in yummy butter, healthy duck fat, or disgusting institutionalized margarine. Why do you ask about spice? A simple reason: people are stupid.

People, in this case, are not the cooks, but the customers. I actually pity the restaurant owners, serving staff, and chefs. There's no doubt that diners have wildly differing ideas of what "spicy" means. Here in Middle America, for example, put some black pepper on something and fiftysomething women will start having hot flashes and asking for more water to soothe their scalded tongues. So it's clear that the "1 to 10?" question has evolved as self-defense by restaurants that have had too many dishes sent back by people who think they like spicy food, but secretly don't. I understand why restaurants ask this question. I just don't like it.

The best -- by which I mean worst -- part of the "1 to 10?" scale is that it is illusory. The chef isn't going to say "Oh! A 6! I should add 3.5 grams of illegal szechuan peppers to this dish as I finish it" (nor should she). Rather, any response is going to be channeled into one of three categories. Here are the rules.

So, there are really only three levels. Then we apply the hidden rules to the customer's stated preference to determine which of the three levels they fall into.

You'd think "Aha! I can just ask for the dish the way it's supposed to be from the get-go," but it turns out that in practice this usually doesn't work. You can get away with it if you're actually speaking to the person preparing your food. If you try it on a server -- at least, one that doesn't know you -- you're just going to confuse and upset them, and they'll wish you'd stop being difficult and just say a lousy number already.

If I'm eating out, it's in large part because I don't want to cook. I want to put my trust in you, the chef, to deliver a dish that represents your vision of what the dish should be like. So on a scale of 1 to 10, I want the dish to be spiced how you think it should be. Don't ask me. That's a cop-out.

If it really doesn't matter how the dish should be spiced, and it's reasonable for the customer to make the decision, then let her add her own at the table. If that's not practical then, well, maybe you should consider taking that dish off the menu. If you think a dish served "as it should be" is going to be too spicy for some diners, then just make sure the serving staff gives them adequate warning. If the customer plows ahead and is sad because their spicy dish is spicy, it's their own fault. Would you accept criticism from a vegetarian who was upset that their steak contained meat?

Next week: people who ask for their steaks "well done," and why they must be destroyed.

The Problem with Data that is Meta

2004-07-21 · by psu

Talk to geeks the world over, and they will wax lyrical about all the ways in which meta-data will save the world.

It will make your disk searchable.

It will provide a semantic framework for WWW content.

It will allow tools from different vendors to manage your workflow and asset files.

It can form the basis for archiving your digital life.

Sadly, it's all a lie.

The problem here is that by its nature, the data that is meta is still data, and therefore it is subject to all the same problems that the original data had in the first place:

and so on.

An example of this problem that is near and dear to my heart is meta-data related to digital photographs. There are multiple standards (EXIF, IPTC, XMP) and multiple standards for embedding those standards into various standard file formats like JPEG. In addition, different camera vendors embed the data differently in their various proprietary formats (Nikon NEF files, for example). I had a workflow set up between Photoshop and iView that was working great for me mostly because Photoshop and iView agreed to write the EXIF data in the same place in all their files. This is something of a minor miracle, actually, as I was soon to find out.

Then I got Photoshop CS. One of the new features in the Adobe CS line is a completely new standard (XMP) for embedding meta-data into files. Adobe trumpets this new standard as a new extensible base for all your meta-data needs now and in the future. All I know is that iView can't read the new data, so my entire workflow is shot, and I downgraded back to Photoshop 7 until I can find another solution.

Of course, if I were to just use the Adobe tools for this, I'd be all set, since presumably they all know how to read the same formats.

In other words, Adobe changed the schema, didn't give people time to evolve the tools, and thus used the new meta-data standard to try and lock me in to their stuff, even though their file browser software blows.

Hallelujah and Amen.

The Tour De France, a Primer

2004-07-22 · by psu

Now that we're more than two weeks into this year's race, I thought I'd write a short primer on the basics of what is going on in the race so you all can keep it in mind for next year.

I know I should have done this before, but I was busy. Sue me.

The Tour De France is a three week race organized into stages. Each stage goes from a start point to an end point. The position of the riders in the overall classification of the race is computed by the cumulative time they take to finish each stage. In addition, there are various points in the race where a rider can pick up "time bonuses" of a few seconds which reduce the total time for that rider for that stage.

There are three major types of stages:

  1. Road stages: the riders all start at once and the time is measured from there until the end line.

  2. Individual Time Trial: the riders start in intervals and must ride alone. The total time from the start to the end is the time for that rider for the stage.

  3. Team Time Trial: the teams start in intervals, must bring five riders to the end line, and every rider gets the time of the fifth rider across the line.

Sometimes the ITT is on flat land. Sometimes it is uphill (like yesterday's stage).

The leader of the overall wears the Yellow Jersey so you can pick him out easily. In addition, there are several sub-races going on for other jersies:

  1. The Green Jersey: this is given out to the rider who gets the most "sprint points". You get these by finishing each stage close to the front and also at various intermediate towns in flat stages. Generally sprinters go after this jersey.

  2. The Polka-dot Jersey: this is given to the rider with the most "mountain points". You get these by being the first over the hills.

  3. White Jersey: best time for a young rider.

That's basically it. To make sense of each stage, you have to know what the goals of the teams are and some basics about tactics. Day by day, the main things you need to understand about bike racing tactics can be summed up in two sentences:

Examples: When the long breakaway gets caught at the end for the bunch sprint, it's because the big group could share the work in the wind better than the small breakaway. Similarly, if you have two people on the same team in a break, they can trade turns jumping off the front of the group and forcing the group to chase them down. This gets the group tired, giving the pair on the same team a better chance to win. Note that in an earlier stage of this year's race, the Euskatel team completely botched this tactic when they had two guys in the final break and let victory slip away from them.

If you keep these things in mind, and watch what Lance Armstrong's team does, you'll note that they have been almost perfect tactically:

Now, to win the race, Lance still has to be among the best climbers in the race and among the best time trial riders in the race, but having the awesome team around him certainly makes his job easier.

Next time: another short bit on what goes on in the various stages day by day.

Latter Days

2004-07-23 · by peterb

Latter Days

Latter Days

For those unfamiliar with it, Cerebus is mixed-media pictures and text, black and white ink on paper, originally released as 20 page bound pamphlets, periodically bound into folios referred to as "phonebooks." That's how you'd describe it in a museum, anyway. A more concise description would be "Cerebus is a graphic novel." A less pretentious description would be "Cerebus is a comic book." The most recent "phone book", covering the penultimate chapters of Dave Sim's epic work, is entitled Latter Days.

This by itself guarantees that practically no one will read it. The American literary establishment is composed of people who are, by and large, afraid of visual art; unless the art is safely caged within a gallery or a museum, its presence is threatening, intimidating, confusing. Every ten years or so The New Yorker or some similar arm of the prep-school cultural politburo will publish a brief item by some bewildered trust fund baby who just discovered that maybe Art Spiegelman's Maus isn't really for kids. They talk about the article at a gallery opening. "Well, of course, I've known about Spiegelman for years, darling. I met his wife, Françoise, in the Hamptons last summer." Even more galling to me are the articles about Japanese manga and how adults in Japan read them, completely ignoring the vibrant work, such as Cerebus, that you can find right here.

Then they ignore the medium for another ten years.

So comic books occupy a singular place in American culture. Everyone -- without exception -- has read them at some point or another. The "funny pages" are probably the most fought over section of newspapers in busy households, and the political cartoon is still alive as an acceptable art form for adults to enjoy. Beyond that, the medium has languished in the children's ghetto mostly because of distribution issues: since most of the money in the medium is to be made from kids and teenagers, the major distributors focus their marketing and distribution efforts there, which retards the growth of the adult graphic novel market. It's a bit of a vicious circle, although the fact that most mass market bookstores at least have a graphic novel section is a sign of some small improvement.

The unique position of comic books in our culture is a recurring theme in Cerebus, which isn't surprising given Sim's role as one of the most prominent self-published writers. It sometimes has negative aspects. Comic book characters and, often, their authors make appearances throughout the text as extended in-jokes. So, for example, if you don't know anything about Todd McFarlane's Spawn character, or about McFarlane's reputation as a ruthless capitalist who can turn anything, anything at all, into a profitable merchandising opportunity, some of the early parts of Latter Days will simply go over your head. More often, though, it works. Sim's world -- like our own -- is a world of semi-illiterate people. In that world, small books with mixed pictures and text are simply called "reads."

Sim writes "reads." So, he would argue, did F. Scott Fitzgerald, Oscar Wilde, and Ernest Hemingway, all of whom appeear in earlier chapters of Cerebus. And in comparing himself to, appreciating, and in some cases brutally critiquing these writers (he dismisses Hemingway, in particular, as a mere "typist.") Sim is reminding us of a simple, unavoidable truth: it's not the number of words per page that makes a great writer great. It's what those words are, and how they are used. The division of texts into "comic book" and "novel" is not, primarily, a literary distinction. It is a marketing distinction, and an indication of the seriousness the reader chooses to assign to the text.

Latter Days is worthy of being treated seriously. As in all his later works, Sim chooses an author and deconstructs his work through the eyes of his characters. The author in question this time around is: God. Well, if you believe that God wrote the Bible, that is, since that's the text Cerebus is analyzing (having been Pope once, Cerebus is more qualified than most to be able to opine on scripture). I don't want to reveal too much about the plot of Latter Days, but you can infer a bit from its guest appearances, which include The Three Stooges, Woody Allen, and the films of Bergman and Fellini. One of the "in-jokes" that works better than most is Cerebus's obsession with a comic book called The Rabbi ("Cerebus knew it was great literature, because it had lots of pople being killed in different ways.") which features a superhero with an unending (and hilarious) list of Secret Rabbi Powers ("Rabbi Hernioplasty Touch!" "Rabbi Dextrorotary Breath!" "Rabbi Fully Detachable Foreskin!").

Latter Days is thoroughly a modernist work, although the author would be repelled by that label. Nonetheless, it is: every panel of the work is aware of and obsessed with its form. Cerebus is maddening to read in serialized form, because Sim makes no concessions to the format. There is no guarantee that in any given 20 page span of the novel anything will "happen"; perhaps he will cinematically "pan" over an area for several pages, establishing the locale. Perhaps there will be a few empty black boxes, which are surrounded by paragraphs of dense prose. Frames are arranged in a variety of ways. Figures break out of their frame. The reader may need to rotate the book in order to read for several pages. Another example: in Latter Days, towards the end, we are shown a long, seemingly endless pastiche of panels which have no narrative connection to the text at all. Intentionally. The author is poking fun at the reader: "Don't you wish I'd stop all this boring writing and thinking and just show you more pretty pictures?" he seems to be saying. Like much other modernist art, Cerebus makes you work. It is no exaggeration to say that Sim has expanded the idiom of mixed-text-and-pictures the way Joyce expanded the idiom of the modern novel. His work is that revolutionary.

Lastly, no discussion of Sim and his work is complete without at least some reference to his misogynism, perhaps the biggest piece of baggage he took away from his divorce. Sim hates when people label him misogynist, or theorize about why he went over the edge the way he did, but given that he has written entire books discussing how various writers' personal lives influenced their writing I feel quite guilt-free labeling him. His incomprehension of and disgust for women is, indeed, odious, and quite on display here.

Which goes to show you: someone can write well and still be a raving lunatic. Sometimes, although thankfully not always, the two are related.

So with respect to the bee he has in his bonnet about women being the anticreative force in the universe, a force which is opposed to the creative male principle, yet seeks a "merged permanence" in which it will absorb and destroy the male essence, we can say confidently: Sim is crazy. He's not eccentric, he's not odd, he's crazy. This is a man who speaks his own language with the confidence of the someone who thinks deeply about everything except his own prejudices: of course "God" and "YHWH" are different -- but real! -- entites. Of course YHWH is the feminine principle, and is thus sneaky and untrustworthy. Of course God created Freud to cause World War II to cause the sacrifice of millions of Jews to pay for the blood debt they incurred.

Back in 1990, I interviewed Sim for a radio show; I just found the digital audio tape of the interview not too long ago. In the interview, my co-host Steve Peters, asked him "So, how did the divorce from your wife and business partner Dani influence your work?" At the time, I was mortified -- I practically made throat cutting motions at Steve when he started asking the question, not wanting to embarrass the artist. Now, given the uglier parts of the work (which to be fair, hadn't been published at that point) I wish I'd had the desire to pursue that question, rather than avoiding it.

Arguing with Sim is, pretty much, like arguing with Ralph Nader -- both are convinced not only of the rightness of their cause (who isn't?) but that such rightness is self evident, and that therefore anyone who claims to not see it is either lying, evil, or brain damaged. I guess I'd fall under "evil" -- I understand the arguments that Sim is making very precisely, because I've seen so many variations of them from delusionals of different stripes. Only the persecuting "them" differs between stories. Sim is a fruitcake. A nutbar. He's crazy.

With that said, I can also say: so what? Latter Days, taken in isolation, is the best thing Sim has ever written. Taken as a single chapter of the Cerebus project, it is unparalleled. Put in context, it is thought provoking and more evidence of his continued development as a serious writer. I read an author's work when I find his style and subject compelling and visionary, even if I disagree with him. I disagree with Sim on a lot of things. But Cerebus is both compelling and visionary, and I am richer for having read it.

Additional Resources

Hockenheim: Quote of the Race

2004-07-26 · by peterb

Heinz Pruiller, a commentator for ORF TV in Austria was asked "How many more races is Michael Schumacher going to win before the end of the year?"

He looked at Speed TV's David Windsor as if he were daft, and answered: "All of them. All of them."

He paused, briefly.

"All of them."

DVD Menus: A Desperate Plea

2004-07-27 · by psu

Here is what happens to me on a regular basis when trying to access the various "extras" on a DVD release:

Rip DVD player out of the wall and throw it through a window.

So, my question is, why do they do this to me? Who thinks this is a good idea? Who are the poor slobs working at the media companies spending months developing this drek that is specifically designed to make it difficult and time consuming to actually play the content that I bought the disk to see?

The most egregious example of this sort of "design" was the DVD for Daredevil. The menus on that disk were all done with the same visual effects used to simulate how Daredevil sees the world. Trouble is, Daredevil is blind. The effect of this is that it is completely impossible to read the menus at all. Brilliant!

My only conclusion is that the people who package this stuff are dumber than rocks.

My Plea: please free me from this awful world.

Ultima

2004-07-28 · by peterb

Shelf of old videogames and computers

Shelf 1 (of 4)

Nostalgia, in general, is an emotion that I am suspicious of. We grow by moving forward, and though sometimes that involves looking back introspectively, nostalgia is the opposite of introspection: it is the fetishism of the past. Some part of the past is thought of as good because it wells up nostalgic feelings, rather than because of anything one can qualify objectively. I try to consciously choose introspection instead of nostalgia whenever I can. However -- as the regular reader may be able to guess -- when it comes to obsolete videogames, I am completely in thrall to the teenager in my head.

I don't think this is uncommon. If you ask people (or at least American men) who grew up in certain eras what the best video game consoles were, you will get different answers -- I'm in the Atari 2600 camp, those about 5 years younger than me will talk about the original Nintendo Entertainment System, those a few years younger than that will talk about the Sega Genesis or the SNES, and so on. Basically, whatever your first console was (or, whatever the first console that your best friend had but your parents wouldn't get for you was, so later in life you feel compelled to buy them on eBay. Er, not that I'd know), that's the one that you feel nostalgic for. This works for old home computers, too, and of course computer games.

The most recent wave of nostalgia to overcome me is the "Ultima Classics" package put together by one very obsessive-compulsive fan. It's floating around the ether, and if you have a Windows PC and are at all interested in classic games I recommend you track it down. I actually already own all of the Ultima games -- some in their Apple ][ incarnations -- but the sheer comprehensiveness of the collection inspires nothing short of awe. Included are every version of every Ultima game (except Ultima 9) for the PC, Apple ][, Commodore 64, Vic-20 (!), and Amiga platforms, along with emulators to run the non-PC native ports. Also included are various fan-authored remakes and ports (such as Exult and XU4), full documentation for every game, and just to add insult to injury a series of videoclips of Richard Garriott (a.k.a. Lord British) talking about his work.

This, therefore, seems like a good time to talk about the Ultima games and their progress through the years.

Time and travel made me wise
precious gold, a clue it buys!

Ultima II

Ultima II

The first Ultima game I played was Ultima II. I remember staring at the fabulous box cover art in a software store -- in 1982, when the idea of a store that sold software was itself an innovative and risky idea -- and saying to myself, "I must have that". The packaging was part of the excitement of the game -- it came with a wonderful cloth printed map of the Earth. Very spiffy.

The goal of Ultima II was to kill the Enchantress, Minax. I wasn't too clear on why she had to die, but the game manual said so, and I was a big believer in obeying authority. (Minax, it seems, was the apprentice of the wizard the player allegedly assassinated in the first Ultima game, but I hadn't played that yet). Sure, it's standard fantasy garbage, but it was very well packaged standard fantasy garbage. At the age of 13, I found the very idea of a powerful, evil villain being a woman to be very surprising, even transgressive. Ah, innocence.

Ask me no questions, I'll tell you no lies
The Queen is the King and the King is a spy

I liked a lot of things about Ultima II. I liked that it was fast. I liked that it took place on a map of Earth rather than in some amorphous fantasyland. I liked that it had time travel, and that the portals you walked through were called "moongates" -- that sounded really cool and science fictiony. I liked the various eras you could travel to: there were frigates in the seas in the middle ages, go back far enough in time and you're in Pangaea, go ahead far enough and you find yourself in a world after the nuclear holocaust. I liked the little staticky ** sound the game made when you hit a bad guy.

The game centered around combat, which was fast and furious: enemies walked up to you in the wild and you beat on each other until one of you died. Despite this focus, there was a plot of sorts. You could talk to every townsperson; 90% of them had nothing interesting to say (every fighter, for example, would say "Ugh, me tough!" and every cleric would say "Believe!") A small minority of townspeople (often behind locked doors, almost always standing still) would give you bits and pieces of the plot, or clues about where to look next.

Ultima II, Europe

Ultima II - Europe

One of the best parts of the game, for me, was the space travel. The entire solar system was modeled (to a minimal degree) in the game; you could land on every planet, and every planet had at least a small human outpost, which you could walk around and talk to people at and advance the plot. Realistic? Of course not. Fun? Absolutely: just the idea of saying "Hey! I wonder what kind of colony is on Mercury?" is enough to stir my imagination. Maybe I'm an easy sell, but I found this enchanting as a teenager, and it still makes me smile today.

I finished Ultima II in record time, and was desperate for more. Rumors swirled that there would be a sequel, but I couldn't wait that long. I found Garriott's first game, Akalabeth (informally, "Ultima 0") at an Apple retailer in Westfield, NJ, hanging in a cheesy ziplock bag on a rack, and also picked up the first Ultima game at the same time.

I needn't have bothered with Akalabeth. While it has collectible cachet today, it's pretty much intolerably unplayable, and anyway is incorporated wholesale as basically the dungeon parts of Ultima I. I played Ultima I through to completion throughout 7th grade, but it was painful. It looked just like Ultima II -- at least in the "outside" world -- but was painfully slow; there was a delay of about a quarter-second each time you took a step. And the cities were primitive compared to the later game. Still, perhaps because I had some lingering guilt over my brutal murder of the Enchantress from the latter game, I pressed on, determined to seek karmic balance by committing the crime for which she sought revenge. Ultima I is littered with odd bits of literary flotsam and jetsam ("Find the Pillar of Ozymandias!" the King commanded me, and when I dutifully reached it -- I was still following orders at that point in my life -- a few lines from Shelley's poem were among my reward). The incorporation of literary themes by reference was common in the days before advanced graphics were vivid enough to be representational enough standing by themselves. To this day, one of my most vivid memories from that era is playing a text-based Star Trek game which, for no apparent reason, would occasionally emit page-long quotes from Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. Every so often, driven by nostalgia, I scour the internet, looking for it. I haven't found it yet. I'll never find it. If I ever do find it, I will be disappointed.

(One bug in Ultima Classics v1.3, by the way, is the lack of the original Ultima. The organizer included two versions labeled "original" and "enhanced," but this is a mistake -- the "original" version he includes is in fact simply another copy of the "enhanced" assembly language rewrite that Origin did in the mid-80s. The original Ultima, written entirely in glorious Applesoft Basic, can still be found at the Asimov Apple ][ archive, or on rotting 5 1/4" floppy disks of those of us old enough to have bought it and lame enough to have kept it as a souvenir.)

Ultima II

Ultima III

Finally, after months of endless waiting, Exodus: Ultima III was released. It was the last Ultima that I actually played to completion; it was also the last Ultima that was released while I was in Junior High. That's not a coincidence. The plot -- well, the plot is exactly the same as the previous two games, Minax and Mondain had a child, Exodus, who threatens the peace of the world, so could you please go kill him? Thanks!

Exodus had real music, if you shelled out the money for a "Mockingboard," a sound card for the Apple ][. I begged and pleaded with my dad, trying to somehow convince him that this was essential to me eventually having a lucrative and rewarding career as a software developer (Hey, Dad! It worked!) and he eventually gave in and bought the damn thing. I loved the music.

The biggest change was that instead of being a lone adventurer wandering the wide world, you controlled a party of up to 4. Somehow, this made the game social: every day after school, Albert Bobowski and Paul Castlegrant would come over and we'd play Ultima III until late into the night, confusing the hell out of our parents who didn't understand what we were doing on the computer for so long.

Another change in Ultima III was the introduction of tactical combat. When you encountered an enemy on the world map, the view changed to a tactical map where your party would be confronting a group of enemies. You could then manuever around the map, shooting arrows, casting magic spells, and whomping on each other. Most people think of this as a great improvement, but my tiny simian brain actually preferred the simpler, faster combat of Ultima II. The tactics don't really change much throughout the game, so once you figure out the One Correct Way To Win Battles, it's all just stretching out the game.

Paul, Albert and I eventually did finish Ultima III, learning the horrific secret of Exodus and returned to our normal juvenile deliquent activities. It was two years until the next game, Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar came out. I got it, and played it quite a bit, but by this point school and after-school activities were competing with videogames for attention. I loved the intricate plot of the game, and the focus on developing your character's virtues. To this day, I can't tell you what the Christian seven deadly sins are, and I can't tell you what Buddha's Eightfold path, is and I can't tell you what various Jewish mitzvot are, but I know instantly that the eight virtues of the Avatar are Compassion, Honor, Justice, Valor, Honesty, Sacrifice, Spirituality, and Humility. What's my religion? I'm an Ultimist!

Once you perfect your virtues, however, the rest of the game is basically a dungeon crawl, and combat in Ultima IV was even slower than in Ultima III. I simply told myself that from an ethical standpoint, I had fininshed the game by becoming the Avatar of Virtue, and moved on. Fundamentally, once you've slogged through one dungeon, you've slogged through them all.

Ultima V came out right as I went to college. I bought it, but didn't have an machine to play it on (I tried playing it on one of the library's Apple ][s, but the environment was just all wrong.) I've tried playing it a few times since then, but haven't truly gotten in to it.

Ultima VI I saw while working at one of the computer clusters in Wean Hall. I poked around with it a bit, but I found its mouse-based nature offputting. A year later, I did end up trying the Martian Dreams game based on the same engine, and played it to completion. I'm a sucker for a good alternative universe, and taking a spaceship to Mars with Sigmund Freud, Mark Twain, Nelly Bly, and H.G. Wells was beyond my power to resist. It was a well-written game, and I'd play it again if I could make time.

By the time Ultima VII came out, I was in grad school, and even three years after it came out computers still weren't really fast enough to actually play it and have it be bearable. It's only in the past few years, with the success of the open-source Exult project, that playing Ultima VII has become a reasonable option for most of us. It turns out it's a reasonably OK game. Who knew? Certainly not me: my experience with U7 was so bad that I gave up on the franchise completely.

It was around the time that Ultima III was announced -- Reagan was President then -- that people started making jokes about how "Ultima 9" and "Wizardry 12" would be coming out in the late 90's. It was kind of a backhanded slap to the very idea of sequels in computer games: every year, games come out which are totally new, which are totally innovative. As if we'll be playing the same old tired genre games twenty years from now! As if the fickle computer game player could possibly have that much desire for continuity.

And, of course, now there is an Ultima 9, and every year another Madden football game comes out, and every year people buy the new one, and innovation, when it comes to actually making money on games, is more of a curse word than a byword.

And here's where nostalgia is our enemy: the temptation to say that it is the older Ultima games that are better, because they are somehow "purer," that later games in the series were panned by critics and fans because they weren't "true" to the spirit of the game. This is a lie. The purity of the earlier games is nothing more than a memory of the purity of youth, when you could use a game with a terrible user interface and inconsistent pacing and not notice. The Ultima games are remarkable for their consistency, both in vision, character, and mechanics, even until the end. The things that were good in the very first ones -- epic scope, quirky characters, a unique sense of place -- are good in the very last ones. The things that were not very good in the very first ones -- terrible user interface, langourously paced plot, the drudgery of combat -- are not very good in the very last ones. Only the implementation details have changed.

There is, I think, something special about the original Ultima games when compared to their contemporaries. They had a unique narrative voice that sprung from their being the product, essentially, of one man. That's not to say his narrative voice was the best of all possible ones; merely that it was unique, and that the player can feel this. Compare it to, for example, two games that have nearly the exact same graphical quality, scope, and game mechanics of Ultima: Chris Crim's The Wrath of Denethenor and Xyphus. They're both eminently playable, but they're missing some ineffable element.

What that element is, I can't say. I know it when I see it. But I know that it is more likely to come from the mind and heart of one person, such as Brad Wardell, then from any design committee in the heart of NCSoft or Blizzard.

Pining for the days when one man could program an epic adventure and bemoaning the fact that all 'big' games today are designed by committee: that's nostalgia. Thinking about how we can commit enough resources and large enough teams to create a modern video game while still maintaining the design integrity and vision that a single designer brings: that's introspection.

Additional Resources

Time Travel

2004-07-29 · by peterb

HOUR 1: Hey! Guys! I got DOOM 3! Whooooooo!

HOUR 2: Stupid installer erased my datebook.

HOUR 3: OK, it's running. Why is everything so slow? What the hell?

DAY 2: Got new videocard at CompUSA. Runs OK now, when not crashing.

DAY 3: Couldn't take crashing. Bought new computer.

DAY 3: Still crashing. Hate everyone.

DAY 4: No friends playing; computers all too slow. Maybe play with strangers?

DAY 5: 13 year old kids humiliating me. Hate everyone and everything.

DAY 6: I will master this. Stayed home from work to practice.

DAY 7: Boss called. Told him I had plague.

DAY 8: Lost to Estonian third-grade girl, 16-0. Hate everyone and everything in the entire universe.

DAY 10: Stopped playing stupid game. Will wait for Halo 2.

That Joke Isn't Funny Anymore, Part 1

2004-07-30 · by peterb

apb

APB

APB ("All Points Bulletin") was an Atari arcade game designed by Dave Theurer, who also made the classic games Missile Command, Tempest -- the best arcade game ever made, for my money -- and I, Robot. It was the forebear of the original, overhead view Grand Theft Auto games. It was primarily a driving game; you were a police officer, and had a certain amount of time to arrest a certain number of miscreants (hitchhikers, litterers, speeders, etc.) while avoiding getting demerits. It was fairly challenging. On each round, there was a special "super villain" you could arrest to end the round immediately and get bonus points.

The game was published in 1987, also known as "a few years before the Rodney King incident." If you caught the super villain -- the first one was a hippie -- the view switched to an exterior view of the interrogation room, with you and the suspect visible in silhouette. Your fat, stupid, donut-eating sergeant was slowly walking down the stairs. You then slapped the buttons fast and hard to "interrogate" (read: beat up) the suspect. If you beat him up enough before the sergeant came in to the room and witnessed the rights violation, he would confess.

It was popular at the time for Congressmen, Senators, and other idiots to complain about the values that videogames taught "our children," but I never once heard a Congressman or law enforcement official complain about the values taught by a game that gave you points for beating up a suspect.

Tour de France Primer, part 2

2004-07-31 · by psu

With the race over, this is obviously a good time to write the second part of my little stage racing primer. This part focuses primarily on tactics and strategy.

Each rider and team goes into the Tour with different goals and expectations. Most teams are there to try and win a couple of stages and get into breakaways so their sponsor logos are on TV for a while. A few teams with strong sprinters will try and win the Green jersey. A few other teams with strong climbers will try and get the mountain jersey. Finally, a few teams will have riders that they think can win the overall.

The other main thing to understand about the race is that it lasts three weeks. As such, teams have to be careful about how they spend their energy. No team can chase down every breakaway and try and win every stage. Teams must be careful to expend energy only when the outcome is important to them. This is why you saw Postal give up a nine minute lead and the Yellow jersey to Voelker this year. They knew that he wouldn't last in the mountains and they also knew that with the Yellow jersey on a different team, they would not have to chase down breakways, thus saving energy for the important days.

Finally, day to day tactics depend on the nature of the stage:

Late in the race the flat stages (or stages with small hills) become the one place where teams that are not contending for the overall, and don't have a strong sprinter can pick off stage wins. This is because if the break doesn't have any threatening riders, in general it will be allowed to stay away since it takes a lot of energy to chase it down. This is where you'll see the stages where breakaways get 15 minutes ahead of the group. This works out because to win the overall, you just have to have the best overall time. Whether or not you win stages doesn't actually matter. Indurain won the race multiple times without ever winning a road stage.

Bonaguil 0.1

2004-08-02 · by peterb

Because I'm kinda thickheaded, I spent my weekend vacation programming a game. That's my idea of relaxation. I'm funny that way.

Bonaguil

Bonaguil (click to play)

This is a bare-bones reimplementation of the SSI-published Apple ][ strategy game Fortress, ("A game of strategic development and fortification") which combines elements of Go and Chess, although it is much less sophisticated than either of those games. I don't know if this was based on some actual board game; I suspect not, since the scoring is irritating enough that I can't imagine doing it without a machine's help. It's a fun game, though, and I got tired of firing up the emulator in order to play it. Thus, this version, which I call Bonaguil (I was considering calling it "Harlech," since the original Fortress used the ancient tune "Men of Harlech" as its theme song, but if you've ever actually seen Château-Fort de Bonaguil up close and personal, you'll agree it's a good choice).

Bonaguil is a game of taking territory. Each player takes a turn; on a player's turn they can either place a new castle on an unoccupied square, or fortify one of their existing castle. Castles can be fortified twice, so a castle has a strength of 1, 2, or 3. Castles exert their strength level on the square they are on and on the squares in all 4 cardinal directions (or fewer, if they're on an edge.) Influence strength of like castles are additive, influences of opposite-coloured castles that intersect are subtractive (so two strength 1 castles of opposite colours with one empty space between them result in that empty space being uncontrolled.)

If a castle is on a space with no positive influence, it is "in check" (for example, two opposite coloured castles right next to each other will control the spaces away from each other, but will put each other "in check", in the absence of any other factors). The game represents being "in check" by the drawbridge coming up and the windows turning red. A castle on a space the enemy controls is destroyed. Newly placed castles get to exert influence before they are destroyed, so it is legitimate to drop a castle in a suicidal spot if doing so might kill an enemy castle

The present version is extremely primitive, but all of the game logic is encapsulated in its own class, so it will be easy to extend, which I'll be doing over the next few weeks. I even went ahead and drew some cheesy icons and used those instead of text display, even though I'm about as comfortable with drawing as W.C. Fields was with playing with children. My initial cut was a bit more colorful -- I used red and blue, instead of black and white -- but I toned it down to try to stay true to the feel of the original.

Features I plan on adding, if I can find the time, include:

I'll release the source code under some fairly permissive non-Gnu license once I'm comfortable that it's not completely embarrassing -- it's been several years since I've done anything in Java, so this is still too rough to show the source code to anyone yet.

Which brings me to a brief digression: God, I love Java. I know this is probably simply the-grass-is-greener syndrome. I work writing systems-level code for a high-performance distributed filesystem in C. I have to ask myself questions like "What happens when we get a request to do a few thousand of these operations at once?" or "What happens if this update needs to go out to several thousand clients?" Programming a little game like this in Java is like being an alcoholic on-the-wagon children's clown at a party with an open bar. "Yeah! Let's do this the slow way because it doesn't matter! Hey, I need some scratch space. Let's just allocate a bunch of objects even if I might not use them! Hmmm, gonna be doing some arithmetic. I'll just precache a matrix table of every integer addition with addends below 1000 just because I can! WAHOOOOOOOOOOO IT'S PARTY TIME!"

(Of course, after I do those things, I make sure to complain to everyone I know that Java is slow. Just kidding!)

I had a basic, text-only version of the game up and running in about 60 minutes; it took just another two hours or so to get the graphical version working, and most of that was spent drawing the icons. It's not very pretty, of course, and it doesn't do much of anything yet. But just the mere thought of how much more painful this would have been to implement in pure C on pretty much any platform you care to name -- well, it makes me love Java all over again.

If you see something that looks like a bug, please drop me a line and try to describe what you saw.

Hopefully the authors of the original game (Jim Templeton and Patty Dembrook -- I've tried to locate them, without success) won't sue me.

To play Bonaguil, if you have a Java-enabled browser, just click here. I've noticed some "issues" getting it to work if you're behind a firewall, so if any Java gurus want to educate me on how to deploy an applet that doesn't break in a firewalled environment, I'm all ears.

Château-Fort de Bonaguil

2004-08-04 · by peterb

bonaguil-front

Château-Fort de Bonaguil

In the latter years of the 15th century, after losing a lawsuit brought against him by his vassals, the Baron Berenger de Roqueteuil is reported to have said:

By Lord Jesus and all the saints of his glorious Paradise, I will raise a manor house that neither my unpleasant subjects will be able to take, nor English if they have the audacity to return there, nor even the powerful soldiers of King of France.

And that is just what he did, creating the awe-inspiring Château-Fort de Bonaguil over the course of 40 years.

Bonaguil is located between Perigord and Quercy, and is open to the public. If you're brave enough, you can climb its decaying ramparts and contemplate the surrounding woods.

T.E. Lawrence said of Bonaguil "It is so perfect that it is almost ridiculous to call it a ruin."

Software Development Considered Harmful

2004-08-05 · by peterb

Those of us who develop software are familiar with all sorts of bonehead mistakes. I use "bonehead" in this context as a term of endearment -- we all do stupid things like forget to initialize some value or forget to close a brace now and then. And there are plenty of discussions, in books and elsewhere, about the sorts of mistakes that new programmers make.

That's not what I'm going to talk about today.

What I want to talk about today are the most common mistakes I see experienced software developers make on a somewhat regular basis. Not every developer makes all these mistakes, of course, but if you work for a big enough company you'll see all of these at different times. They bug me. I've committed some of the sins in here myself, and I bug myself when I realize that. Note that I'm deliberately keeping this list fairly low level, and not addressing larger questions of design. The overall problems I'm aiming for are the sorts of things when you're reading someone else's code (or your own) and have that "What? Didn't you go to school and have 10 years of experience that should have told you not to do something lame like this?" moment.

I've heard things like this referred to as "antipatterns," but I think that's an unnecessarily highfalutin' name for what can more accurately and concisely be described as: screwups. So here we go.

1. Improperly maintained namespace.

Software projects tend to grow over time, like the blob. Assumptions about your environment that you made early on in the project don't always turn out to be true. Do yourself a favor; pick a prefix for every global variable and every extern or public function or class, and use it. Maintain a naming scheme so that if your project has many files -- and it always does -- I can tell just from looking at an identifier where to find it.

2. Misuse of asserts.

I see this all the time, and it drives me up a wall:

status = some_function(foo, bar); ASSERT(status == SUCCESS);

Assertions aren't there for you to claim that errors are impossible; asserts are about finding impossible conditions -- programming errors. "Out of disk space" is not a programming error: asserting on it is never right (although, depending on the nature of what you're doing, panicking might be correct). Contrariwise, something like decrementing the refcount on some resource and finding that it is less than 0 is a programming error, and is a good candidate for an assert.

If a function really, honestly, cannot ever return any value other than SUCCESS, then it should return void.

There's a school of thought that says that asserts should never be used, particularly in any code that is going to an end-user. I don't know what sort of crack these people are smoki I'm not going to get involved in that particular argument, but if you do use asserts, you should use them correctly.

3. Ignoring return codes.

This is even more annoying than the last one. If it's valid for you to ignore a return code from a call -- any call -- then at a bare minimum I want a detailed comment explaining why it's OK.

4. Making everything extern/public.

If a function or method is intended to only be used internally, don't rely on me, the user of your function, to be polite and not use it. Experience has shown that users -- including me -- are stupid, and if we can use something we're not supposed to, we will. You can smack big banners on your functions that say "Don't use this, you dope", and we will still use them. Think of this as self-defense. If you make a function or method static or private, then we can't use it without checking in a change to your code, and then when it bites us, you can point to our dumb checkin where we changed your nice, safe code, and it will be our fault, not yours. Don't make internal functions extern. Keep them secret. Keep them safe.

If you write the API for a given part of your code first, then it's really easy: the API calls are extern. Everything else is static. You'd be surprised how many people who should know better just make everything extern by default.

5. Not thinking about versioning until "later".

The voice of experience: if you don't figure out how to version interfaces right from the get go, it will be a nightmarish whirling calliope of hatred, pain, and misery later on.

6. Making a change to a changelist after running the regression tests.

Look. I understand. I've been there. I know all you did was update a comment. I know you just made some change that couldn't possibly, in a million years, cause anything to fail. I know the regression test suite takes a long time to run. That change you made was totally trivial, and couldn't possibly break anything. I feel your pain. But the fact is, those are inevitably the checkins that break the build. No one knows why. It just works that way. So run the tests again before pulling that trigger.

7. Sending a human to do a robot's job.

Any piece of software that is more than trivial is too big for a human to debug properly without help. I'll tell you my dirty little secret: I hate code reviews. Yes, they're valuable in their own special way, and yes, I've caught bugs in other people's code in a review (and others have caught bugs in my code), but in terms of pure effort/reward ratio, I have gotten more out of letting the robots debug my code than out of the hours I've spent in code reviews. Use Purify to find memory leaks. Use Coverity to find other types of programmatic mistakes. Run gcov to find out what parts of your code your tests aren't exercising. If speed is a problem, profile your code to find out where it's slow, rather than looking at the code and guessing.

8. Not obeying the robots

Really, a special case of the last item. Turn on all of your compiler's warnings. Fix your code so it doesn't trip any of them. If the language you're using has a lint program, run it. Listen to what it says. Fix your code so lint is happy. To quote Peter van der Linden, from his excellent book Expert C Programming:

Lint is your software conscience. It tells you when you are doing bad things. Always use lint. Listen to your conscience.

Separating lint out from the compiler as an independent program was a big mistake that people are only now coming to terms with. It's true that it made the compiler smaller and more focused, but it was at the grievous cost of allowing bugs and dubious code idioms to lurk unnoticed. Many, perhaps most, programmers do not use lint by default after each and every compilation. It's a poor trade-off to have buggy code compiled fast. Words to live by.

That's my list. These are things that I see people mess up with some regularity. What would you add to this list?

Additional Resources

Persepolis

2004-08-07 · by peterb

According to amazon.com, the English version of the second part of Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis comes out at the end of this month.

I may not be able to wait.

persepolis

Additional Resources

Madness and the Minotaur

2004-08-09 · by peterb

coco

"cloadm"

Slot machines, so the theory goes, are addictive precisely because of the randomness of the payoff. It's not simply the possibility of winning that draws players, but the hypnotic, chaotic patternlessness of winning and losing that sucks them in.

Videogames work this way too, sometimes. D.B. Weiss's otherwise undistinguished book Lucky Wander Boy does have the germ of an idea in exploring the (fictional), eponymous arcade game, which was both exceedingly difficult and surrealist.

My own personal Lucky Wander Boy is a text adventure for the TRS-80 Color Computer called Madness and the Minotaur. To the best of my knowledge, no one has ever beaten the game. It's not clear to me that it is actually possible. I've held on to a TRS-80 Color Computer solely to play this game. For years I've dragged a cassette around with a backup of the game on it, on the b-side of a tape which held Frank Zappa's Joe's Garage album. I could sing you the scratchy John Zorn song the accumulated bits make from the tape as they load, slowly, into memory.

I didn't have a Color Computer in 1980, but my best friend, Billy, did. If Ultima and the Apple 2 make me think of Albert and Paul and eighth grade, the Color Computer makes me think of Billy and his Irish Setter, Sputnik, and the fireworks his parents let us set off -- a firecracker, a moment's distraction, looking back and time slows and expands as I see the red glowworm of lit fuse crawl into the paper, my face just a foot away, the report knocking me back in slow motion, high pitched ringing in my ears and the sky ash-gray over a green green lawn. Like a long-forgotten odor, memories of each of these little computers, these little bits of consumer electronics, activate different aspects of my nostalgia. Each time the perfume of nostalgia wells up, it clouds my vision, and I have to wrestle with a part of my emotional past and understand it before I can see these products for what they were, rather than getting lost in what they represent to me. Perhaps what they represent is more important than what they actually were. But, nonetheless, let's talk about the game that, to me, epitomizes the Color Computer.

madness-title

Title page

Madness and the Minotaur is a text adventure game. It is a brutal, unfair, senseless labyrinth which is amateurishly written and probably unwinnable. The parser is primitive and arbitrary. Object placement is semi-random (some objects are guaranteed to be on certain floors of the labyrinth). Some objects are protected by key-rules: for example, you can't pick up the shield unless you're holding some other object. In one game, that might be the dagger, in another, the sword. There's never any explanation for these rules; they simply are. If you are holding the dagger, you can reach the shield. If you're not, the shield is out of your reach. There's a wandering Oracle whom you'll meet occasionally, who will tell you the arbitrary rules. But sometimes he lies.

Part of the labyrinth -- the first part -- is the same from game to game, so the player is comforted by the sense of familiarity. Things go rapidly downhill from there. There are one-way doors, and secret doors. The obstacles in the game I hate the most, perhaps, are the pits that must be jumped even though you have no reason to suspect they're there. With a different syntax each time -- maybe here you'll need to JUMP PIT, or here you might have to JUMP UP. Or JUMP POOL. or just JUMP. If you pick the wrong adjective the game will ask you JUMP WHAT?, as if the randomness of its syntax is your fault.

There are monsters, but most games don't end with players getting killed by them. Usually, players will either lose the lamp (due to a random event) and die by falling into a pit. Or there will be a rock slide, trapping them in a room until they die of boredom (there are magic spells to blow away the rock slides, but they're very hard to get, and usually the rock slides happen early in the game, long before you've gotten the spells.) Or players will wander in to the maze part of the map and then give up.

I'd never met anyone who had successfully mapped the maze. Every few years, I'd fire up the Color Computer (or, in more recent years, an emulator), play the game a bit, and then search the internet to see if anyone else knew anything about it. For the first few years of the early 90s, it seemed that no one had even heard of the game. Then, in 1995, I found a fan page that basically said "This game is really hard. Here are some hints, but I've never even come close to finishing it." Another page cropped up the next year.

This year, I found a page by someone who has gotten further than anyone else I know. Through seemingly obsessive effort, he has cracked the puzzle of the maze, although he still hasn't won the game. I never would have been able to figure out how this maze worked in a million years. Here's how it is laid out (skip to the end of this article and download the game itself if you want to avoid spoilers):

madness-intro

Starting out

The game itself takes place in 4 floors; you start on the top level. Each floor is an 8x8 grid. The bottom three rows of each floor are part of "the big maze". In the big maze, every room has basically the same description ("You are in a maze of...") and is connected to every other room above and below it (if you go down from the fourth floor, you'll end up in the same cell on the first floor). The rooms also wrap east-west, but discontiguously: if you're in the easternmost room of row 7, and you go east, you'll end up in the westernmost room of row 8. Of course, just to make it even harder, there's no indication to tell you you've "wrapped" to the next row. There's no north-south wrapping. The southeasternmost room of each floor generally has no eastern exit.

There's one and only one way to exit the big maze. You have to find the southeasternmost room on the "bottommost" floor. That room has an eastern exit, which if you take it leads to another, smaller maze (which can't be distinguished by description, only by mapping it). Somewhere in that maze is a pit. If you jump the pit, you get outside.

"Cruel" doesn't even begin to describe this game.

The guy who figured out the maze has done better than anyone else I know -- he's gotten 220 points out of a possible 240 (for comparison, the most I ever got was, perhaps, 30, which is about all you can hope for without figuring out the maze). He has no idea where the other 20 points could possibly come from.

The game was written by "Spectral Associates," a company that usually put author credits on their games, but didn't on this one. Who actually wrote it? What was he thinking? Did he ever play his own game through to the end? I will probably never find out. But I will always wonder. Madness and the Minotaur was not my first computer game obsession, nor my last, nor even my strongest, but it occupies a strange and special place in my soul. A little portion of my brain is twisted in a labyrinth of black on green uppercase letters, searching for systematic meaning and order where there is only an undertested game, and...a maze.

Additional Resources

Eclipse

2004-08-10 · by peterb

Last night I downloaded the Eclipse Java IDE to try to make a little progress on Bonaguil.

Wow.

Suffice it to say that I was bitter that I had to go in to work today and work in an environment without it. It is the best IDE I've ever used, and I've tried quite a few. It's like music, love, and cookies all rolled up into one convenient package and available for free download. And I haven't even tried the CVS integration yet.

Things I like about Eclipse, in no particular order:

Simple Pleasures (summer)

2004-08-11 · by peterb

simple pleasures

mmmmmmm

Nevat, a Spanish goats' milk cheese that has the body of a brie but the lightness of a chevre. Cabrales, the best blue cheese in the world after true Roquefort. No bread, no crackers. Just a fork.

A glass of white port.

And, last but not least, two ripe, fresh green figs.

Sometimes, life is good.

Bonaguil 0.2

2004-08-12 · by peterb

Bonaguil

Bonaguil 0.2 (click to play)

Bonaguil 0.2 is out, with support for pluggable AI modules. Give it a try.

The UI still sucks, because, well -- I'm not very good at user interfaces. "Know thyself," said the Oracle, and I know that I've never been one of the graphics people. Fortunately, in addition to making the AI easily customizable, I tried to keep all the GUI callouts separated in their own little ghetto. So hopefully someday when Bonaguil Mania is sweeping the world, someone more talented at graphic design and usability than I am will rewrite the GUI.

There are currently only two robots, both intended simply as demos. The Jester makes completely random moves, and is intended to showcase the bare minimum interface you need to implement to make things work. The Knave looks at the board and does a 1-ply calculation to find the move that will give him the best score. He doesn't think about degrading the enemy's position, and in the event of a tie he just goes with the first thing he found, which is stupid. The point of the Knave from a tutorial standpoint is to show how to use the Board class's copy constructor to make a virtual representation of the board that isn't connected to the display that can then be used for analysis.

I'm not ready to release the source generally yet, because there's still at least one bug (each) in the AI and UI interfaces which will require a change to the API. If you're a glutton for punishment and promise not to complain when I cruelly change the method signatures on you, and are interested in trying your hand at supplying an AI early, drop me a line at developer -at- tleaves.com and I'll arrange a source drop. (Oh, Eclipse, how I adore your "refactoring" menu, you adorable little mynx).

The next release is going to concentrate on freezing the UI and AI interfaces and on improving the display slightly. In particular, it has to add some simple animation, which I am dreading, because it calls on me to draw more little pictures, and I hate that. There's a corner case where you can drop a castle in a suicidal spot for tactical purposes, and currently the display updates everything pretty much instantly, so the user can't tell what actually happened. Some blinky animation would make that a lot more apparent.

There's one aspect of Fortress that I probably can't simulate in an applet, and that's machine learning. Fortress claimed that the AIs got smarter as they played more games. Basically, after each game, the game would ask you if you wanted the computer players to update their strategy tables. If you said yes, they (allegedly) got smarter. Once I add move logging, it might be feasible to have the results reported to a central server, and update them there. But I haven't yet decided if that's actally worth the effort.

Olympics Rant

2004-08-13 · by peterb

AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH! Björk is singing, but I can't hear the song if you are talking during it, you idiots. Shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up, shut up. I hate you.

Is there anyone, anywhere, who has thought that NBC's Olympics coverage for the past 20 years has been anything less than uniformly terrible? Who are these people? Why haven't they been fired yet? What can I do to hasten the process?

These aren't rhetorical questions. Have you ever met anyone who said "Wow! What a great job NBC did covering the Olympics, ignoring most of the non-American athletes and not covering most of the events!"

I didn't think so. Me neither.

kouroi

The Kouroi

Also, NBC decided to only show the Kouroi from the waist up, leading this poster on an internet forum to comment:

Whereas they only see dirty, filthy penises and breasts, most of the rest of the world, including myself, saw culture, history, art, architecture, sculpture and the human form.

Not a single shot of the naked statues below the waist, and I had no idea there was a naked snake lady...

Well, the FCC can rest happy. They won't have to arrest or fine anyone. Ratings are safe. Advertisment dollars will be spent.

Right on.

Blueberry Pie

2004-08-14 · by psu

Where I grew up in Amherst, MA, there is a farm market called Atkins Fruit Bowl that has been around forever. They started out as just an apple orchard, but quickly grew into almost a whole supermarket. In particular, at some point they started baking pies and donuts and other things in the store. And oh, what pies they are. They have a perfect crust, which is incredible in a semi-mass produced product. They come with a variety of different fillings, but the pumpkin, apple, and blueberry pies are the best.

Whenever we visit home, we take two or three pies back with us. Whenever my parents visit, they bring two or three pies with them. I know people visit to buy a dozen pies and freeze them when they get back home.

A particular pleasure is blueberry pie from Atkins in the summer. This is because they are close enough to Maine to make the pie with wild blueberries. This is a blueberry pie like no other. Nothing even comes close. The wild blueberries make the pie sweet without making it sugary and gloppy. It's a natural fruity sweetness. Also, the fact that the wild blueberries are teeny weeny gives the pie a different texture than the big golf ball blueberries. It's just incredible. I will go eat the whole pie now.

Olympics Without NBC

2004-08-16 · by peterb

Minoan Boxers

Minoan Boxers

If you're in the USA, and want to see how Olympics coverage should be done, consider grabbing this video of the BBC's coverage of the opening ceremonies in three parts. You'll need a Bittorrent client like Azureus to download these, and probably also the DivX video codec. The movie files are quite large -- about 700 Mb per part -- but worth it.

Typically, I hate spectacles like this -- they're usually full of noise and bombast, but signify nothing other than spending. This presentation grabbed me, though -- I found it, if not understated, at least stately. The fact that I'm a mythology geek might have something to do with that. It's the same video feed that NBC used, yet without Katie Couric's incessant babbling you can actually follow the narrative. (I almost choked when one of the NBC commentators attributed "know thyself," the dictum of the Oracle, to Socrates.)

I remember in 1980, NBC test broadcast a football game without any announcers. It was the Miami Dolphins vs. the New York Jets. No voiceovers. No play by play. Just the game, and the occasional graphics telling you stats and game positions. It was one of the best games I ever watched. They never did it again. They probably never will.

So it's a serious question I have for NBC: why is your coverage so awful? Why are you so afraid of airtime that isn't filled by the chiaccharare-batcheat-chitchat of your chirpy and uninformed magpies? Who is responsible for this? Does your market research show that people would rather listen to your talking heads babble about what we're watching rather than actually listen to the show they tuned in to watch? Do you really think you're going to be able to compete in the global marketplace in 2008, when instead of having to wait all of 24 hours to see the BBC feed, I'll be able to watch it live as it happens? Because if you do, it's time for me to short-sell General Electric.

Additional Resources

Favorite Words

2004-08-17 · by peterb

Decimation, in Latin, does not actually refer to senseless violence, but to a very specific -- and rare -- military punishment that could be imposed on a legion (or a subunit thereof, such as a cohort) for extreme cowardice. The soldiers were divided into groups of 10. Each group drew lots. One soldier in the group drew the losing tessera. The other 9 were given clubs, and forced to beat the losing soldier to death. A devious and harrowing punishment, decimation was arguably as hard on the soldiers who "won," who had to murder the comrade they had marched, ate, slept, and fought with, as it was on the soldier who was killed. Probably the most well-known decimation was that handed down by Crassus on those of his legions who were routed by Spartacus. Fifty squads of ten men each were decimated.

As Plutarch observes, "Those who are punished in this way not only lose their lives but are also disgraced, since the whole army are there as spectators, and the actual circumstances of the execution are very savage and repulsive."

OfflineRT Woes

2004-08-18 · by peterb

I have a problem that I can replicate reliably. If I capture in OfflineRT mode in Final Cut Pro I can generally only capture about 30 seconds of video before I drop a frame.

This has led to me spending hours debugging my camera, film, and every element in my chain other than my computer before reaching the sad conclusion: there's nothing wrong with my equipment per se. The 867 Mhz Powerbook G4 with 640 Mb of memory is just too slow to capture more than about 30 seconds of OfflineRT video (30 seconds, incidentally, sounding suspiciously like "the amount of time it takes some internal buffer to fill up before it has to page to disk.") My working theory is it's not a problem during the 'true' capture -- after all, I'm able to capture full rate DV just fine -- but the extra CPU time spent compressing the frames into photo JPEG is just a tiny bit slower than needed, resulting in hosage.

So, not particularly wanting to buy a new laptop, I arrived at a workaround: turn off "abort capture on dropped frame". I leave the warnings on, just on principle. I turn the abort back on when I capture at full res.

I know, I know, I'm playing with fire. But what else can I do? I'm addicted to OfflineRT editing. It's a sickness.

I've found precious little information on the net about OfflineRT, and of course nothing useful from Apple about system requirements. So let me turn the question around: is anyone else out there using OfflineRT on a laptop? What model laptop are you using? Do you experience dropped frames?

Foreshadowing

2004-08-19 · by peterb

I have cancelled my City of Heroes account. It was fun while it lasted, but eventually I realized that my main motivation was to see cool super powers and beat up computer controlled bad guys. City of Heroes did that very effectively, but so does Diablo II, and that doesn't charge me $15 a month for the privilege.

However, I have once again gotten entangled in the intriguing game A Tale in the Desert, this time as part of the beta test for the next version. Watch this space for an overall discussion of the game in game terms, and then, later, an interview with the developers, focusing specifically on the challenges of software development.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to go comb some flax.

A Tale in the Desert

2004-08-23 · by peterb

The gamer's complaint of "we want innovative games!" is one that the industry has learned, through experience, to ignore. Some gamers want innovative games. Most gamers say they want innovative games, but really the marketplace proves that -- as a group -- they want derivative games that carry the illusion of being innovative. This is doubly true in the tired and pretty much creatively dead genre of multiplayer online role-playing games, which combine the kludgy game mechanics of any mediocre game that is five years out of date with the social culture of IRC and the lousy user interface of a MUD. (As I speak, some commissar in the politburo of pretentiousness is marking me down for the next purge for referring to this technology as "multiplayer online game" rather than "virtual world." History, however, will be on my side).

When innovative games do come along, it often takes us a long time to recognize them. I've been playing the A Tale in the Desert II beta lately -- I played the original game last year, but never wrote about it -- and I think it's innovative enough that anyone who is interested in online games should at least try it. Whether or not one wants to actually pay to keep playing it is, of course, a matter of taste.

There are a few things I find intriguing about A Tale in the Desert. I like the mise-en-scène. I like that there's no combat at all -- not against other players, not against bad guys or monsters. I like the sheer size of the land (which, while not actually as large as the real Egypt, manages to feel like it is). I like the tech tree that punishes antisocial people (like me!) who try to build everything by themselves. I like that technologies are locked until enough people in an area cooperate to open them up.

The theme of A Tale in the Desert is: you're in Egypt, and there is stuff around you -- grass, mud, sand, rock. You can pick stuff up and do things with it and build structures and devices. You can learn new skills from schools and universities (in some cases paying a tuition via barter) or from other players. You can teach skills in turn to other players. That's basically it.

In the introductory part of the game, for example, you'll learn and apply some basic skills. You'll find a body of water and pick up some pieces of slate from the shore. If you bring some slate to the local school of architecture, they'll take it in barter and in return teach you how to smack two pieces of slate together to make a stone blade. You can then make a stone blade, and use that and some more slate to build a wood plane. Gather some wood from trees, cut it into boards, and then you can make brick racks. You'll pick up some grass and dry it into straw in the sun; then you mix straw, some mud, and some sand and dry them on your brick rack. Now you have bricks.

Small projects can easily be made by one person (creating a flax comb, for example, or a distaff for spinning fiber into thread), but the scale of projects rapidly mounts to the point where solo progress is impracticable: when a project requires 1000 boards, 10 people have a huge advantage over the solo player. And in the game's tech tree, a 1000 board project is probably considered comparatively small. That being said, there's no strict requirement for cooperation in most parts of the game. Just like in a real economy, if you're happy living by the shore and growing flax, well, you can do that.

The game is glacially paced. This is not for everyone. I find myself simultaneously fascinated and repelled by it. On the one hand, I love the idea that for me to run -- literally run -- down the Nile delta to the nearest bridge and a few miles away will take me many minutes of real time. And there's pretty scenery to look at while you do it. But when I say I love the idea, you can also guess that secretly I hate the actual doing. I have these moments that hit me like a lightning bolt: "What the heck am I doing? I'm in the middle of a desert running seventy miles to find a mountaintop to dry some papyrus! Am I insane?" The game is full of places where -- if you are playing by yourself or in a sufficiently small group -- you have no alternative but to spend 10 minutes or more just running from place to place. That by itself is what drove me away from the first telling of the Tale, and it may yet drive me away from the second one.

Transportation is somewhat better than in Tale 1 in that a hub and spoke "chariot" system has been introduced, so you can run to the nearby chariot stop and hop a bus to another region many miles away, instantly. That helps alleviate some of the pain, but it really isn't enough. Players can "earn" the ability to set waypoints that they can warp to immediately (by spending "accumulated offline time," which fortunately isn't in short supply), but it takes long enough to unlock those when playing "from scratch" that the impatient will have a rough time of the first week or so, if they want to explore.

The other interesting aspect of the chariot system is that it changes the way in which the economy is developing. More populated regions will tend to develop more quickly as they can unlock technologies at the local Universities faster. In Tale 1, the Nile Delta advanced the quickest, and there was a lag time before technologies reached the other regions (say, Lower Nubia). Intrepid explorers could, of course, run up to the Delta and learn the technologies there. But fundamentally the different regions had different qualities and different population densities. With the chariot system in place, there's no essential reason to prefer one region over another, and what we see happening in the beta is that population density accrues and thickens around the bus stops, rather than simply around the resources. So the key question in terms of local economies and competitions will likely be not "how close are you to the Delta?" but "how far are you from your local bus stop?"

The other major improvements from Tale 1 include a revamped mining system (the idea of "veins" and the aggressive resource competition they brought have gone away, replaced with the idea that every mine can produce any sort of ore, but correctly smelting it is up to the player's judgment) and a few additions and tweaks to the technology tree.

Pretty much all online games that have tried to design an economy have messed it up. The main reason for this, I think, is that the scarce resource in most games is rewarded in the form of treasure. In A Tale in the Desert the economy is complex enough that the scarce resource -- as Andrew Plotkin pointed out to me the other day -- isn't any particular treasure, per se, but labor. So much labor is required to build, say, a Lesser Sphinx, that it doesn't particularly matter how much richer one individual is than another. The richest individual in Egypt doesn't have 140,000 straw, 33,000 clay, 31,000 silt, or the thousands of gallons of paint required. But the richest corporation might.

This has interesting implications. In the same way that City of Heroes solved the Gordian knots of economics and inventory management by just mostly getting rid of them, A Tale in the Desert solves the economic problem by making labor basically interchangeable. Sure, there are some subtleties -- a more experienced player might have more endurance or be able to run a little faster, but these are differences of degree, not of fundamentals. To accomplish a goal in the game, you generally don't need to own a smelting pot (or whatever the hard-to-build building of the day is). You just need the right to use one.

Tale also has a clever self-modifying nature. Any citizen can propose a rule change; rule changes are voted on, and any rule change that passes by a 2/3's vote and is not vetoed for technical reasons by the developer can be implemented. This can dramatically reshape the land, or property rights, within the game world. While the prospect of a veto always remains, it's still a bold move to put so much of your game's future (and, to be frank, your development schedule) in the hands of your users.

I plan on signing up for A Tale in the Desert 2 once it gets out of beta. I can't be sure that I will actually play it much or for a long time -- look, between you and me, there's only so much flax growing a man can bear -- but it's such a creative take on the multiplayer game idea, so completely devoted to crafting, exploration, and such a rebuke of the "kill monsters, level up" ideal enshrined in every other online RPG that I feel, at some level, "I want these guys to have some of my money, because I want to see what they do next." Sure, it's still a treadmill -- but at least it's a different treadmill.

Additional Resources

Reviews of Games You've Already Played

2004-08-24 · by psu

I don't buy too many games the day they come out, so by the time I'm done with one it's been around a while. Here are some thoughts on a couple of games that have been around for a while.

DEUS EX: Invisible War

This game has been derided for being a shallow, cheap, and generally lame followup to DEUS EX. Having not played the first game, I can only give impressions of the second on its own terms.

On the up side, the game has excellent production values. It's pretty, with nicely rendered and detailed environments. The writing is interesting and the game makes you want to see what's going to happen next, which is always good. I didn't even mind the NPC dialog much, and that usually drives me bats. The game generally offers many paths through each particular phase, and it's sometimes interesting enough to play different stages multiple times with different strategies. You can save any time you like. Hoorah.

On the down side, the game's levels are small, and to make up for it they take a ludicrous amount of time to load. The game world is a bit contrived. Vents are conveniently placed to allow you to bypass locked doors. And, the world is full of a myriad of items all of which might be useful, but you never know. This would be OK, except that the game has a stupid inventory system where you are allowed to carry a ludicrous amount of stuff, but for some reason you can't carry as much as you want. This means you leave half the stuff you find lying around, and you risk needing to backtrack for some crucial item that you didn't have room for.

My other main beef with the game is that the combat blows. Except for the sniper rifle, all the weapons are severely underpowered and chew ammo at a high rate without killing anything. The shotgun is particularly anemic. The game tries to support multiple styles of combat, but I can't really see how you'd do this game with the melee weapons.

Once you get the sniper rifle, the game is a bit too easy. Sneak around, possibly completely invisible, and snipe everything in sight at will. This is particularly true on the last level of the game, where if you set yourself up with the right abilities your enemies will fall like flies.

Finally, the game is a bit short. I don't usually complain about short games. But, I got through this in a little over a week, and that includes replaying multiple areas. I could imagine someone who was good at games could finish this in a couple of nights.

Overall though, this game was good and interesting enough for me to finish, which in and of itself is a recommendation.

Mario and Luigi: Superstar Saga

I mentioned this game briefly in my recent bout with self confession. This Gameboy RPG is modeled after the Super Mario RPG and Paper Mario games for the SNES and Nintendo 64 machines. Briefly, you control the two brothers as they run around, fight stuff, collect coins, mushrooms and other magic vegetables, and try to rescue something valuable.

The game design is remarkable. You never feel like you have to optimize your path through the world for fear of running out of some critical resource at a bad time. You never search endlessly for the next step in the path through the game, or just the right sequence of button pushes for some stupid puzzle. Things are generally transparent but interesting.

The navigation and combat system is really fun. You move around in the world much like you would in a platformer, although perfect timing isn't always necessary. The combat system is similar. It's a great combination of turn based play and timing based attacks. Each turn, you decide what attack you want to use. Each attack can do a certain amount of damage, but if you hit the right button at the right time, you can do extra damage. Again, the game design shines here. While Mario doesn't have 3-d rendering, pixel shaders, normal maps and physics, what it does have is nearly perfect game-play mechanics. A game like DEUS EX just wishes it could have something as good as Mario jumping, but it doesn't come close.

The most gratifying aspect of the gameplay is how the brothers gradually gain cooperative moves and attacks. For example, each brother can jump a certain height and distance. But, a bit into the game, you learn how the two can combine to be able to jump both higher and further than each can alone, so you can get through more challenging terrain. The moves available for combat evolve in a similar way. You start with simple jumping attacks, but soon the brothers can combine multiple jumps to do extra damage. Not only is the system easy to understand, but the interface is described to you in tutorials integrated into the gameplay. If only all interfaces were this well designed and explained.

The main nit I have about the game is the use of savepoints. But, this is mostly mitigated by the fact that you can hit a hot key and sleep the GBA any time you want. Hit the hot key again and the game comes back exactly where you left it. So you can just carry the game with you and play in arbitrarily small slices of time. Perfect!

If you are thinking about getting a GBA, you must buy this game. In fact, this game highlights one of the pleasures of the portable platform, which is that it has a really strong collection of turn based strategy and RPG games which have mostly died out on PCs and consoles. This is a great thing.

Pharaoh Speaks

2004-08-25 · by peterb

teppy

Andrew Tepper

Continuing our focus on A Tale in the Desert, here is an interview with the Pharaoh of this particular Egypt, Andrew ("Teppy") Tepper, the game's designer and President of eGenesis, its publisher.

Typically, interviews like this focus on the gameplay design or community development. I'm less interested in that (in part because I think you can often explore those aspects by simply playing the game). Instead, my aim for this interview was to focus specifically on the actual technical development challenges in creating a complex online game with a small team, something that few of us have done. If you're want details about the game itself, you might want to look at my recent review. I reached Andrew at home, just after he had finished up work for the evening.

peterb: A Tale in the Desert has been released on multiple platforms (Windows and Linux) with more on the way. How early did you decide to go multi-platform? Did it impact development?

Andrew Tepper: We did it immediately, so right from the start we did things like separating the rendering code so that in theory there was one file that needed to be changed to go to a different platform, or to a different graphics API (openGL to DirectX, for example) and then a single #ifdef to change to a system that was different byte order. In practice, it worked pretty well. There were a few bugs, but it's been pretty easy. For the most part there were just a half dozen or so bugs where we made assumptions about byte order...the whole idea was that stuff that hooks in to the operating system is isolated. It was pretty clean. The Linux port took about 3 weeks. And the Mac port has been underway for about 5 weeks.

How big is the team, and what development environment are you using?

We have 2 full time coders, and 3 full time graphics artists. We use Visual C (a slightly older version) on the Windows side and just gcc in Linux and, I don't even know what we use in Mac. gcc, I think?

How do you track bugs?

We just started using bugzilla for script code kinda bugs. With two programmers, tracking bugs isn't a big deal -- if there's a bug, you just scribble down a note and then fix the bug.

How about version control?

We use cvs. That's been helpful. Sometimes, i'll go off on a project kind of experimentally, or my partner will, and 20% of the time it won't work and we'll just throw it all away.

What's the single hardest bug you've encountered in developing A Tale in the Desert? How did you fix it?

The hardest bug was probably -- well, I have to explain this. Our execution model is that the client has synchronous and an asynchronous, or we sometimes say a predictive, model of the game world. The server has a master world model, distributed over many physical CPUs, and a predictive world model for each client. The synchronous model is the subset of the master model that a particular client sees. The invariant is that the server model for a given client, and the synchronous model on a client, always stay in lockstep. So for a given time, the synchronous models must match exactly. So we had one or probably a few bugs where for some reason the synchronous model on the client got out of sync with the model on the server. So that required changing the memory manager and rewriting a whole bunch of subsystems in the server so that we were able to log every byte going in to one of the cpus and every byte coming out. So we wrote a replay facility which we still use which simulates the bytes going in to a server. The solution to finding the bug was replaying on both the client and server kind of at the same time and figuring out where the two synchronous models diverged. It turned out to be something like uninitialized memory. It was not a very glorious bug. But because our execution model is pretty unique, it took some custom tools.

The replay tool is so handy that now when we get a server crash, 90-plus percent of the time, the solution is you take the replay log, rerun it in a debugger, the server crashes in the same place, and then you say "aha!" For something as complicated as a massively parallel system as this -- boy, I can't imagine a better way to do it. The server itself, by the way, is a single-threaded application. the server is designed to handle a million pseudo-threads at once -- every building in the game gets its own pseudo-thread. On the client we use three threads.

A pseudo-thread isn't actually sharing memory with other threads, so there aren't any tricky concurrency issues?

Yeah, it's not an OS-level construct. It's just an internal thing. That's just what we call it.

Is there any feature you implemented that you wish, from a timeline standpoint, that you wouldn't have implemented? Something that you look back on and say "Wow, that really blew the schedule for not a lot of benefit?"

Josh [Yelon] would have different answers than me. For instance, I bet Josh would say bump mapping was more effort than it was worth, but I would say just the opposite. For me, there were a bunch of kind of specialized things we added, not big architectural things that were a pain in the ass.

Are any of those still in the codebase?

That still remain in the code? No, because usually when something like that happens we rip it out. For instance we had a conversation system built in, so if you had NPCs in the game you could talk to them. We didn't actually start out to write A Tale in the Desert. We were writing a system for creating massively multiplayer RPGs, so you had a character in the middle of the screen, and there are other characters running around, and objects to interact with. We knew we were a small company, so we spent a long time writing sophisticated tools to let us quickly develop content, because we knew we'd never be able to dump millions of dollars into developing the content. We spent 2 and 1/2 years not writing a game, just developing a toolset. If you ask me what part of the toolset is the biggest thing, it's being able to change the code on the fly without kicking people off. That's as big a change to developing as going from punch cards to interactive editing. Instead of the big testing cycle, you can put your code out as soon as its done, and the really bleeding edge players will run into bugs, and you can fix them in minutes. It's a giant leap forward.

A lot of the players in A Tale in the Desert seem fairly sophisticated, and they're very vocal. So it's clear that a lot of the content has been developed with these more sophisticated players in mind. Certainly, most of them have played other MMORPGs before. So how do you gauge how the game is received by Joe Average who has never played an online game before? Do you capture those guys, or do they wander away confused?

It's very hard, because they're kinda shy. They don't talk as much as the MMO veterans. I've done things like kinda gone incognito and played the start of the game, to try to find out. But you don't know if someone's dropping out because their connection went down, or they don't like it and they're embarassed to say it, or they feel stupid. I don't know. It's very hard.

You're extremely accessible to your users; players and GMs have your cell phone number, and often lobby for features vocally (even outside of the in-game 'election' protocol). Is there a downside to giving such easy access to your users? Has pressure for a particular feature ever blown the schedule?

In 18 months I've only had 10 inappropriate calls. As for the questions on the schedule, players will always ask for features, but ultimately I'm in control.

I've tried to stick to questions about development, but do you have any comments on the game design in terms of the choice to go with economic model vs. monster killing?

I consider this an adventure game. I think Tale is kinda the MMO side of adventure games, where the puzzles are all social puzzles... Think about the Test of the Covered Cartouche, for example. [Ed: In this test, participate in successive rounds of creating a building in secret, all throughout Egypt. At the end of each round, the player whose building is the smallest is eliminated. Since creating larger buildings is quite expensive (which can spoil your chances for future rounds), the challenge is to spend as little as possible on your building while not spending the least.] The puzzles in A Tale in the Desert are all like the old-style adventure games, but with the smartest NPCs you ever came across. If you think about the game, about unlocking technologies, it's an adventure game. We add some stats so it's RPG-like, but I think Tale is much more an adventure game then everquest.

To me the boring stuff is where there's just a single plodding path -- find a sheep, grow onions, feed the sheep -- but, y'know, the whole game can't be a chess match. There has to be some mindless stuff, then some thinking stuff. But the coolest thing to me is where I make up a challenge where I don't know what the best solution is. A few times, I've screwed up and the players haven't stumbled on a solution. For example, the Test of the Seven Phoenix in Tale 1 [Ed: The Test of the Seven Phoenix involves building expensive statues of a specific type in named locations within a one hour period. "Waypoint" travel during the test is forbidden. Which statues need to be built in which locations is a secret before the test begins.] Either I just made it too hard, or there is no good solution, but it hasn't been a great success.

If you could work on any game next, and it couldn't be an MMO, what would it be?

If it couldn't be an MMO, I like physics games. But what those have in common with Tale is that they're both sorts of sandboxes where the designer ahead of time doesn't know what the best way to solve it is.

Thanks for your time. I hope Tale 2 is a great success.

Thank you. Nice talking to you.

Pittsburgh Apple Store Update

2004-08-26 · by peterb

According to Apple's web site the Pittsburgh (Shadyside) store should go live the weekend of September 4th.

Quoth people who have walked by and looked in the window: "Hmm. the store didn't look like it was 2 weeks away from completion when I went by yesterday. Must look more carefully."

I'll try to post some photos tomorrow evening; check this space then.

Update: The photos are here.

Pittsburgh Apple Store Photos

2004-08-27 · by peterb

apple_store_interior_close

Signs

As promised, here are some photos of the soon-to-open Pittsburgh (Shadyside) Apple Store. I concur with the opinion that it doesn't look anywhere near close to done, but then my experience in constructing anything other than computer programs is severely limited. Perhaps Steve will visit. We could have coffee at the relaxing and sociable café, Jitterz, across the street, and down one block.

Here's the exterior (click to enlarge) which still has quite a ways to go:

apple_store_exterior

Exterior

The interior looks mostly finished, though. One of the construction workers mentioned that they're hiring:

apple_store_interior

Interior

The target date is allegedly September 4th. I'll be out of town that weekend. My wallet thanks me.

Note to Mac fan and news sites: please feel free to link to this article. As a courtesy, I ask that you do not link directly to the photos. Thanks.

Gamers' Bill of Rights

2004-08-30 · by peterb

Every so often, I forget that many PC games are bug-riddled sacks of garbage. When this happens, I go out and buy a couple, until I remember why I was driven to transfer most of my gaming to dedicated consoles. This is sad, since PC games do have a rich and storied history, and address a market that is not adequately served by consoles (that market being "people willing to spend way too much money on games.")

Many of you style yourselves "game developers" and write computer programs that you call "games." From this point forward, all games that you develop must conform to the following requirements. Those who produce games that do not meet these criteria will be punished.

  1. Every modern operating system is capable of running more than one program at a time. Every modern windowing system provides a command key sequence to switch which program is in the foreground (e.g. Alt-Tab in Windows). Every game should honour that key sequence and be well-behaved in its presence. Violation of this rule shall result in this key sequence being permanently disabled on the developer's personal machine.

  2. If your game changes the resolution of my monitor when I start the game, it should restore the original resolution when I exit the game, or when I alt-tab to another application while playing.

  3. The use of scantily clad women in advertising, splash screens, or actual games, while unfortunate and somewhat immature, is still permitted. The use of women wearing "armor" that leaves them nearly naked, however, is now forbidden. Developers and artists must choose between lingerie and plate mail. You may not have both. Developers incapable of understanding the difference between armor and lingerie will have a steel plate welded to their groin.

  4. If your game enforces minimum hardware requirements, those requirements should be enforced at the very beginning of the installation phase (at which time the installation should give the user the opportunity to abort the install), not at runtime. Violation of this clause shall result in lashing; one lash for every 100 megabytes of data your game installs.

  5. All cut scenes and movies should be interruptible with the "esc" key. No exceptions. Ever. Peter Molyneux (Black and White), this means you. Violation of this clause shall result in the developer being tied to a chair and forced to watch the movie "Bad Lieutenant" from start to finish.

  6. All games should provide some facility to pause the game at any point. Multiplayer games are exempted from this rule. Violation of this clause shall result in the confiscation of the developer's Tivo.

  7. Wherever possible, games should accommodate the colorblind and the hearing impaired. Where not possible, note this on the box, in the installation notes, or on your web site. Open question: what other common disabilities can be reasonably accommodated by most games? (For example, clearly text adventures can be designed to work well with reading software for the visually impaired). Violation of this clause shall require the developer to feel ashamed of him or herself.

  8. No game should require the game disk to be in the drive in order to play, unless the user chooses to not do a full install. No other exceptions. Violation of this clause shall require the developer who wrote the CD-checking code to personally field every telephone support call from purchasers of their game who have lost or damaged their game disk, in perpetuity. "My publisher made me do it" is not an adequate excuse for violating this clause.

  9. If the platform you are using supports a standard method of uninstalling programs, your game should use that method. Violation of this clause shall result in RealPlayer being installed on the developer's machine.

  10. Your game should synchronize to real time or a target frame rate, not number of CPU ticks. I know it sounds unbelievable, but this still happens. CPU speed, unlike the intelligence of game developers, doubles approximately every 18 months. If five years from now I try to run a game on my 250 GHz six-CPU gaming monstrosity and it is unplayable because the enemies are running around at 25 times their intended speed, the developer shall be placed in the stockade in the village square and forced to wear a dunce cap, while the Chipmunks Christmas song plays in the background, slowed down to normal speed.

By following these simple guidelines and respecting the PC Gamer's Bill of Rights, you can help make the word a better place.

Thank you all in advance for your cooperation. If you feel I've left any rights out, please feel free to contribute them in the comments section, below.

Additional Notes

Bargain Bin

2004-08-31 · by peterb

One of the advantages to owning a nearly-obsolete PC is that you know off the bat that the latest and greatest games won't run on it. So rather than spend $49.99 on the latest releases, which, let's be frank, are usually not that good, you can hit the bargain shelf and find games for $10 or less. You've heard me talk about this before, as the "kielbasa sandwich in Chiodo's" effect: it may not be a great sandwich, but it was only $2, so who cares?

My favorite bargain rack, currently, is the one at Electronics Boutique. EB is already predisposed to dump their PC game stock -- the real money is in consoles, after all -- so you can find some great deals on preowned PC games there. This weekend I picked up four titles, three of which I've been actually able to play.

Myst III: Exile ($4.99)

myst3

Myst 3: Exile

I'm enjoying this. It's been a while -- years -- since I've played any of the Myst games. Some of the mystery of the larger game is dissipated off the bat by the presentation of the plot on a silver platter, but perhaps that is to be expected of a sequel. Once you're past the cheesy dialogue, though, the game has the right feel.

Puzzle difficulty (I'm only a quarter of the way in, so it may improve later on) feels a little low compared to the first Myst, and certainly easier than in Riven. This is compounded by the comparatively linear nature of the early puzzles. One of the beguiling things about Myst, to me, was the idea that there were various puzzles that were exposed almost from the very beginning. I found that in that game, I wanted to go around and explore all of them and taste them before picking one to spend time on and solve. The first quarter of Exile, contrariwise, has been "solve the very next puzzle in order to even open up the possibility of solving others." That's a disappointment.

As expected, the game is visually breathtaking. The pallette is rich and varied, and the visual style within each world consistent. It is mostly presented in the same sort of slide-show manner as the original Myst (and indeed, their earlier work The Manhole). One notable difference is that you can look around freely in environments when not moving. There's a bit of a fisheye effect, as if you're in the middle of a sphere upon which has been plastered an image (which, in fact, you probably are), but my eyes adjusted to that very quickly, and I don't even notice it anymore unless I'm specifically looking for it. Good use of audio is made and is essential to solving some puzzles ("subtitles" can be turned on for purely aural clues, so this is a game even the hearing impaired can enjoy).

I haven't finished the game yet, so I can't give a truly full review; but I've definitely already gotten 5 bucks worth of enjoyment out of it. If you see it on the bargain rack, grab it.

Etherlords II ($3.99)

etherlords2

Give me a break.

I spent 4 bucks on the first Etherlords, and didn't like it. Now I've spent 4 bucks on the second Etherlords, and I don't like it either.

It's frustrating, because this is a game that should be good. I want it to be good. It's not good. Basically, Etherlords is an attempt to implement a game similar in nature to Magic: The Gathering without tying itself quite so closely to the idea that you are playing actual "cards." Etherlords II has a number of improvements over the previous version. These include: it crashes more. It doesn't support Alt-Tab, thus violating Article 3 of The Gamers' Bill of Rights. It has higher hardware requirements for no detectable benefit.

There's also the mostly-naked-except-for-armor-chick issue. When the first image you see when installing a game is of a chick wearing bright orange leather "armor" that exposes her boobs, holding on to the leash of a reptilian monster with a huge penis projecting from its forehead, it's hard to have any reaction other than "uh oh." In this particular case, the first reaction is the correct one: the game really is that bad.

Supposedly, Etherlords II brings new features to the online arena. I won't be checking these out. I don't know about the rest of you, but I find that before I am ready or willing to spend time playing a game online with strangers, I want to play it offline to see if it's any fun. If the offline experience is subpar, then the online experience will be as well. Are there exceptions to this? Maybe. But that's still my rule of thumb.

Myth: The Total Codex ($2.99)

myth

Myth: The Fallen Lords

Bungie's Myth games still engender a cult following to this day. I actually owned this years ago and managed to misplace the disks (this was before I developed the habit of making the very first thing I do with a new game be ripping each CD to an image I keep on the hard drive.) The Total Codex consists of Myth: The Fallen Lords and Myth II: Soulblighter in one package.

Myth is a real-time tactical combat game. I'd call it a "real time strategy" game, but it is missing some aspects that we normally associate with RTS games. It is a stronger game for not having these elements. Rather than building structures and creating new troops, each battle in Myth is a set piece battle: both the number, type, and starting locations of all troops, both yours and the enemy's, are predefined. This leads to the rock-paper-scissors aspect of combined arms warfare that we've seen in strategic-level games such as Panzer General: archers defeat infantry at distance, but infantry cuts archers to pieces in melee, for example.

I've had a lot of fun playing and replaying battles, trying out different tactics, seeing what works and what doesn't. And, since it's Bungie, the plot is fairly enjoyable as well. Style points are granted for discs that work on both Windows and MacOS (download OS X versions of the installers here, or, for Myth II, here). Out of the four bargains I picked up this round, Myth wins hands down.

Finding the OS X install binaries for Myth wasn't trivial -- I remembered that they used to be at mythdev.com, but visiting that site just brings up an annoying and useless pig that talks about Myth III, which is nice, but not what I wanted. The Internet Archive indicates that there was some sort of trouble that lead to one of the Mythdev developers getting all Fatal Attraction on a rival developer's connectivity. If anyone knows more about this and wants to gossip about it, please drop me a line. It feels like there's a story here, somewhere.

Silent Hill 3 ($8.99)

I splurged on this one, mostly because the PS2 version is still around $20. Unfortunately, it won't run on my system, because it requires a slightly better video card than I actually have. More unfortunately, it let me go through the entire 5-disc install and actually try to run it before informing me of this, thus violating Article 4 of the Gamer's Bill of Rights. On the upside, it came with a soundtrack album. So I paid $9 for a fairly enjoyable music CD. So now I need to find someone to lend me the PS2 version of the game so I can actually play it.

So, that's what I've been lifting from the bargain racks, not counting Flight Simulator 2004 which, with the $20 coupon floating around the net, can be had for just $7. But that deserves its own article, which is forthcoming.

What good deals have you found lately?

Cafe Anatolia

2004-09-01 · by peterb

anatolia

Cafe Anatolia

I spent Monday in downtown Pittsburgh, taking a class. I only had about a half-hour for lunch, which left me with not quite enough time to head to Buon Giorno Café, my usual haunt. From the corner of my eye as I walked up Fifth Avenue I saw a marquee on the Warner Centre with the intriguing name "Cafe Anatolia." Having always liked Turkish food, I decided to check it out. I'm glad I did.

Cafe Anatolia is in a food court. An ugly food court, with a Chik-Fil-A, a greasy looking taco place, and an ice cream stand. There's nothing enjoyable about the surroundings. Don't take a date here if you care about ambience.

However, if your date cares about food, you could do a lot worse. There's a number of options on chafing dishes, available for inspection. I had stir fry beef, bulgur cooked with cumin and tomato paste, and turkish style leeks, along with a "shepherd's salad." The owner generously tried to cram about 4 other dishes on my plate, but I declined. Total damage: $5.50.

The food was good. If you've ever had Indian food from one of Sree's stands, I'd put it on about the same level: not high cuisine. Not even medium cuisine. This is the sort of food that you might get from a street vendor on a cold winter day -- but a street vendor you'd return to again and again. The main notes of everything I had were tomato, cumin, and to a lesser extent turmeric. I left satisfied and plan to return.

Turkish food is fairly underrepresented in Pittsburgh, so if you're like me it's refreshing to have a new spice palette on your palate. The stir-fry beef was OK, but not notably distinct (which makes sense, since it is clearly there as the 'meat' half of the formula that unadventurous businesspeople downtown are likely to try for lunch). The Turkish-style leeks were great. Braised until they were butter-soft in a light tomato broth, with sweet peppers and spiced with cumin, I want to try to reproduce this at home. I don't use leeks nearly enough in my own cooking -- they go in every stock and broth I make, but I generally don't present them as a vegetable on their own. Now I have a plan to do so.

The bulgur was an interesting alternative to rice (which is also available, if that's your style). The tomato lent it a nice tang, and it served as a good base to the other dishes. The shepherd's salad was primarily tomato and cilantro -- think tabooleh without the grain.

And, of paramount importance, the Turkish coffee was excellent.

They have a web site listing the full menu, and also sell Evil Eyes, in case you need one (Really. I didn't make that up. You can even buy Evil Eye Teddy Bears.)

It may just be the ethnic equivalent of the neighborhood hamburger joint, but there is no shame in that. I'll be going back to Cafe Anatolia. If you find yourself downtown with no lunch plans, give them a try.

Suck - Squeeze - Bang - Blow

2004-09-03 · by peterb

"The power output of an engine [equals] the size of the bangs, times the number of bangs per minute that you can manage to get."

Keith Duckworth -- Cosworth Engineering

chariot

The Chariot Makers

Former Benetton mechanic Steve Matchett has written a new book, The Chariot Makers: Assembling the Perfect Formula 1 Car. True to his usual style, it is a breezy, informal, and very readable book. While perhaps too light on detail to satisfy the most hardcore mechanic, it's aimed at those of us who merely appreciate the engineering that goes into race cars, rather than understand it.

Before his second careers as an author, commentator and announcer for Speedvision, Steve Matchett was perhaps best known for being one of the Benetton mechanics who caught fire at the German Grand Prix in 1994 (you should really watch the video for the full effect -- it's quite stunning that no one was killed.)

In The Chariot Makers, Matchett discusses his final trip to New York to work for Speedvision, around the tragic events of September 11th. Stuck in an Air France executive lounge with some wealthy and quite stereotyped British men (I half-expected to see "Pip! Pip! Cheerio, old boy!" whenever I turned a page), Steve and our public school lads pass the time by trying to build -- on paper -- the perfect Formula 1 car. In doing this, he takes us on a tour of the great leaps grand prix technology has made over the years (the first monocoque, the first carbon-fibre chassis, and so on) and also explains some of the tradeoffs that go in to building such a beast.

Matchett deliberately eschews the maths behind the mechanics, and goes directly for metaphor and example whenever possible. His written voice is, in fact, very much like the spoken voice he uses when commenting on races:

Blasting around the race track, a Formula 1 car sticks to the ground in exactly the same way that an aircraft doesn't... When the amount of lift generated by [an aircraft's] wings exceeds the aircraft's weight it will take-off. In the case of our Formula 1 car, the very last thing we want is for it to take-off. For, although this will certainly focus the driver's attention, it also has the tendency to sap his confidence.

The Chariot Makers is about on par with Matchett's earlier book The Mechanic's Tale, which covered his experiences seeking (and getting) a job as a mechanic for a Grand Prix team. It's far superior to his initial foray into writing, Life in the Fast Lane, a somewhat breathless and obsequious catalogue of Benetton's 1994 season. Matchett is at his best when he is focusing on the technology and how it relates to the driver and the team. If he sometimes tries a little too hard to tell a story ("I say, Steve, old lad..."), we can forgive him because it's so clear that he is completely in love with the subject matter.

My one serious complaint about the book is that it desperately needs a bibliography. I understand -- and agree with -- Matchett's decision to not go into to excessive mechanical detail, but for those of us who wanted to delve further into the subject mattter, some pointer to other resources (other than "Get a job with an F1 team") would have been valuable.

Pip pip, cheerio, Steve.

You can find The Chariot Makers at Amazon.com, or at your local bookstore.

A Clean, Well-Lit Space

2004-09-06 · by peterb

applestore-done

applestore-done.jpg">Inside the Apple Store

The Pittsburgh Apple store is open. Welcome to the neighborhood.

The kids section is fun, everything is hands on, and the staff is (as should be expected) friendly and knowledgable. Three cheers for genius (and CMU grad) Meredyth for giving me the tour. Plenty of Birkenstocks were in evidence, as was lots of brand new, shiny merchandise. I don't even need a new Mac and I found myself glad that I left my wallet in the car.

I believe psu may be following up with some photos of the opening day's line soon.

Update from psu

DSC_20040904-6855-small

In the line.

Here is my picture of the line. This is from about 1/2 of the way in, and you can almost see the head of it three blocks up. The car in the foreground is iconic, I think.

Call for Participation: The Sims

2004-09-07 · by peterb

I want to like The Sims.

A large number of people whose opinions I respect adore the game. The graphic sensibility in it is bouncy and fun. The sound design and music are top-notch. The game has a sense of whimsy and humor. The ideas are clever, and the amount of customization you can do to your characters and their surroundings is practically unlimited.

And it bores me. It bores me to tears.

I'm preparing an article on why I feel this way about The Sims, but want to enlist some help from others who have played it. I'm particularly interested in those of you who do like the game: why do you like it? What absorbs you? When you play the game, what do you spend your time actually doing? I'm looking for just a couple of paragraphs that summarize these aspects of your experience in The Sims. Submissions from those of you who dislike the game are welcome, as well. Please email your submissions to sims-article@tleaves.com.

Never Send a Human To Do a Robot's Job

2004-09-08 · by peterb

In my article Software Development Considered Harmful, I talked about a number of mistakes that are often made by developers who should know better. I'd like to expand on one of them here.

Never send a human to do a robot's job.

A lot of the code we have to write to make programs run on modern platforms is code that can be more effectively generated by programs than by a human. This is particularly true of things like XML files or other structured data. Let me put it simply: if you're editing a file that contains structured data by hand, you're making a mistake. You're editing the Info.plist in a Macintosh application bundle by hand using vi? You're making a mistake. Editing your DNS/BIND zone info files by hand? You're making a mistake. Creating RSS feeds by hand? You're making a mistake.

I'm overstating the case a little, of course, but not by much.

I generally see this sort of mistake made by two classes of people. The first are sysadmins who don't have access to adequate tools and don't have the desire or ability to learn how to write them themselves. I mostly sympathize with these folks, whose only option is basically "hope someone else writes a tool that does what I need." (When I was in this position, it motivated me to learn to program, but I understand that not everyone wants or needs to learn a new skill.)

The second group of people I have less patience with: developers who somehow have gotten the idea that it's more impressive to start a fire by banging two rocks together than by using a match. These are people who know that tools exist to do what they are doing, who know that the tools will do a better job than them, more consistently, at generating provably correct output, but who still dive in anyway because they don't want to bother learning a new tool.

You see this a lot with developers who want to write an app for Mac OS X who have come from a pure Unix background. Yes, OS X is BSD under the covers. Yes, there's a shell prompt. Yes, it is conceivable that you can write an application that requires the user to install (non-framework) shared libraries and wants to create .rc files and acts like a Unix app, and doesn't require you to build an Xcode project, or use the Property List editor to create a property list. But just because something is conceivable doesn't mean it's a good idea. Xcode (or Codewarrior, or some IDE that has robots to do the drudge work for you) is the correct solution. If you start writing shell scripts and makefiles to solve a problem that was solved long ago by someone else, you're screwing up.

There is no other side to this coin: if you reject superior tools because of some misplaced Slashdot-begotten "artisan" ethos, you are saying that you think it is more important to work on boring, stupid problems that other people have already solved than it is to work on something important. How many bugs lingered on in Linux because of Linus's completely irrational and wrongheaded belief that using a kernel debugger means you're less of a man? (Or the belief that a number of developers who worked on Linux's old TCP stacks had that memory copies are effectively free; but that's the subject of a rant for another time.) There are other examples, of course, but suffice it to say that this isn't a theoretical concern. I see developers trying to end-run around Apple's admittedly ugly and clumsy IDE and toolset (or, on the Windows side, Visual C++) all the time. It always causes more pain than it saves.

We all like to gripe about users being dumb, but in some ways users are extremely smart. In particular, many users grew up watching Sesame Street. They are extremely good at playing "which one of these is not like the other? Which one of these does not belong?" Every platform has its own natural development environment. The more you, as a developer, diverge from that development environment, the more likely your app is going to feel "different" from other applications on that platform. If you're writing an app for an X windows environment, where everything being inconsistent and utterly broken is the norm, that's not such a big deal. If you're writing an app for the Windows or Mac OS environments, where users expect applications to look and behave in a consistent way, it's the kiss of death.

There's a corollary to this discussion, which is that some of the best use of a developer's time is spent writing code to generate code. I love generated code, because when I find and fix a bug in the code generator, I've really fixed every possible instantiation of that bug in one fell swoop. And often, debugging generated code is easier than debugging handrolled code, because you tend to have the same bug in many places, which usually makes it easier to reproduce.

It's fine to eschew the use of sophisticated tools for personal projects because you want to know what's going on under the hood. But if you're going to give that car to someone else to drive, be a responsible mechanic, and use the best tools you have available.

Let the robots write the boring code, so that you can focus on the problems that really need your intellect.

"Genesis" Probe Yields New Science

2004-09-10 · by peterb

genesis-1

Genesis Space Probe

In a press conference today, NASA Director Sean O'Keefe announced the preliminary findings of the Genesis space probe. Genesis, which succesfully engaged on a 3-year mission to explore the solar winds before crashing to Earth when a parachute failed to open, was salvaged from the Utah desert and moved to the clean room facilities of the Jet Propulsion Lab in Pasadena, California.

"Thanks to the hard work of the recovery team," said O'Keefe, "we have completed the processing and analysis of approximately 98% of the samples, and can now announce our preliminary results: the 'solar wind' that is blowing from our Sun is composed primarily of dirt."

"The majority of the solar wind is silicon dioxide, comprised of particles ranging in size from 0.063 to 2 mm, but a variety of other compounds and substances are present in trace amounts, including alumina, ions of potassium and magnesium, and nitrogen. Surprisingly, the particles we found -- despite their extraterrestrial origin -- are very similar to topsoil samples taken in southern Utah. While I don't want to wax philosophical, this coincidence does emphasize that the Earth is, indeed, a child of the Sun. It really makes you marvel at the complexity of our Universe."

genesis-2

Collector array

In addition to determining the chemical composition of the solar wind, NASA has announced other findings as well. "Many of the gold, sapphire, silicon, and diamond wafers inside the Genesis capsule were shattered, as if they had suffered some sort of blow, or severe impact. This leads us to conclude that the solar wind is stronger than we had previously imagined, and presents a potential risk to near-Solar spaceflight. This may affect the design of future spacecraft."

O'Keefe was reluctant to discuss the crash itself, which has been the latest in a string of embarassing equipment failures at NASA. "Our engineers are still studying the data. Our current best theory is that the constant buffeting during reentry caused either an overabundance of bogons or a temporary dearth of relions in the parachute release mechanism. Some of our best quantum bogodynamicists are pursuing this path now, but really, it's far too soon to say for certain what caused the event."

Inquiries about this article may be directed to nasa-genesis@tleaves.com.

Mario and the Jedi

2004-09-11 · by psu

In addition to an orgy of Madden Football, I've been playing a lot of RPG titles lately. I'm still in the early stages of both Knights of the Old Republic and Mario and Luigi, the latter of which I've already written about.

These two games seem completely different. Mario is a sort of platformer/RPG hybrid, while KOTOR is described as an epic story with complex character development. These characterizations may be true, but I think if you look past surface elements like presentation, graphics and combat engines, you find that they are really the same game.

For those who haven't played the games, here is a summary of what goes on in each one.

In Mario and Luigi, you control both brothers at the same time. They are sent on a quest to rescue the Voice of Princess Peach. The voice has been kidnapped by Cackletta who has also stolen a trinket of great power and plans to use the voice to unleash death and destruction on all the kingdoms of the land. Or something. Mario and Luigi have to travel to the Bean-Bean kingdom, rescue the Voice and save the world.

In KOTOR, you start out as a second rate nothing officer on a Republic ship that crashes on some shithole planet out in the middle of nowhere. You must go on a quest to first rescue a warrior who plays a central role in the current war that the Republic is involved in and in doing so start a journey toward your ultimate fate as a powerful Jedi who will turn the tide and save the galaxy (or not). KOTOR introduces a twist in the classic quest structure by allowing you to play the bad guy if you want. But ultimately, assuming you've picked a path, and that path is light side (which everyone does first), both games basically have the same high level structure. The light/dark side twist mostly serves as theoretical replay value.

But, the similarities between these two games goes far beyond high level structure, I think. After all, all RPG games are basically quest stories. So here are other similarities.

Last Call: The Sims

2004-09-13 · by peterb

The article on The Sims, and why we love (or, in my case, hate) it goes live tomorrow. If you want to get your $0.02 in, it's now or never. Send your submissions to sims-article@tleaves.com.

So far, most of the submissions are from Sims addicts aficionados. Surely, I can't be the only person out there who just Doesn't Get It? Send me your take on it.

The Sims: Perspectives

2004-09-14 · by peterb

I've never liked The Sims, despite trying to play it at least three times a year for the past few years.

I think a big part of this is the mise en scene. I can read books, cook, take out the garbage, go to work and shower all by myself; the idea of playing a game where I shepherd a little avatar through these activities feels just a little too meta.

I also find playing The Sims to be a fundamentally emotionally stressful experience in a way that, say, playing a fighting game isn't. Getting beaten up by some guy with a sword? I can handle that. Setting the kitchen on fire, however, is a blow from which I'm not sure my delicate psyche can recover. I don't know how to use a sword in real life, so it's no big deal if my videogame self makes a mistake. But I spent several long, long years learning how to urinate in the toilet rather then the floor, and having to relearn this skill just to play a game doesn't please me.

I think part of my problem is that I like games more than toys. The Sims feels like more of a toy to me -- and I am not using the word "toy" in a disparaging sense. Rather than having objectives, scoring, and winning conditions, the Sims just kind of is. That's not to my taste.

But (clearly!) a lot of people like that aspect of it. Jenna, for example, really enjoys the feeling of omnipotence the game brings to her:

It's a control thing. I tend to play it more when my life feels less controlled, or when I'm broke. At least I can make their lives work, kinda thing. More than anything, I mess around with their houses. Shopping without spending real money, you get the idea. It's satisfying to me when I can keep everything running smoothly.

So for some people, the game is a stress-release, and for others, like me, it's a stress-generator. Dave Rochberg is a fellow Sims-hater who finds the game makes his blood pressure go up:

Twenty minutes into the game, my character desperately needed to pee and his carpool showed up outside the door and started honking. I thought "I'm capable of generating this sort of stress in real life" and I've never played since. Want my copy?

Personal to Dave: no.

One of the interesting aspects of The Sims is that a lot of people who love the game don't actually play it. I'm being a little cute here, but what I mean is: by one estimate, about 25% of the people who play the Sims never actually "run" the simulator. They spend the majority of their time building their house, planting flowers, buying furniture, and creating a little virtual world, without actually getting engaged in the "activities" the Sims pursue. I think Sue, while not strictly embodying this way of playing, reveals some of the attitude:

I think it all started with the God complex...'So, you're telling me that I can create little people and then tell them what to do?  And if I tire of them, I can lock them in a box and watch them die a slow, lingering death?  Sweet!'   I'll admit that, in it's pure form, the Sims is a tedious, repetitive game that holds no interest to anyone, but there are few folks who actually play the game the way it was built.  There are cheat codes galore (including programs users have created that allow you change everything about your sims at will), millions of fan sites are available for downloading new content (outfits, furniture and other decorations) and more.  Anyone who actually plays the game (get up, shower, eat, go to work, come home, shower, eat, raise a skill point, go to sleep) is missing out on the actual fun.   Now, I'm mainly an architect and landscape/interior designer.  I get my kicks building new homes, vacation spots, stores, etc. and making them look cool.  I may also enjoy occasionally creating photo album stories, but I'll deny it in public.  I doubt this is a convincing argument, since you either love the game or hate it (my boyfriend can't understand the fascination), but it keeps me happy and that's enough for me.

The splendiferous Tilt weighs in as well. Tilt is the anti-Susan. Where she sees the game as something beside the point, he is focused on levelling up his little Tiltettes until they are earth-destroying monsters able to rake in the simoleans and seduce their neighbors at will:

For me, The Sims are like the absolute essence -- the potent, purified, crack-like absolute evil, that by all means, should NOT be microwaved -- of CRPGs. You've got a little avatar (or possibly a party) that start out unable to cook even a simple meal or screw in a lightbulb without facing the threat of imminent death. You've got little quests: get to work on time; don't get lonely; don't wet yourself. You've got the promise of interesting objects to acquire or new areas to unlock, and never quite enough time in the virtual day to do them before once again you've got pee, eat, or work. It's that horrifying, fascinating, and satisfying death trap: the karmic hamster wheel of unending 30-minutes-or-less short term rewards.

(This, by the way, is also what's causing me to obsess about City of Heroes, you rat bastard.)

I think what makes The Sims so fascinating to such a broad range of people is the very everydayness of it all. It's a sandbox that's eminently relatable-to. The irony is never lost on me that I often put off my own need to void myself in favor of helping out my little puppets; or that, on the other hand, my attentiveness to kitchen tasks often improves after one of my infrequent but epic couple-day jags of playing this stupid, stupid game. Once I thought, "maybe I'll try building my own apartment, to see how the game flow works," but then got sucked into the hours-long task of building a self-sufficient dyad and then instead of patiently accumulating simoleans, instead introducing rampant and malicious instability into the system. I've never really been drawn into the "traditional" addiction games, like Civ or SimCity, but once I start empathizing with these little bits of willful code, I end up forsaking family and friends for just a little too long, playing temporary god, voyeur, and trickster, until I burn myself out and swear (once again) "never again."

So naturally I've pre-ordered The Sims 2. I mean, holy cats, have you seen the graphic engine on that thing?Does this mean that Tilt has already tired of Doom 3? Only amazon.com knows for sure.

I'm not going to be joining in on the Sims 2 frenzy. I've come to accept that my brain just doesn't have whatever wire The Sims electrifies in some people. One question that has (fairly) been asked of me is: how can I reject The Sims if I'm willing to spend time growing flax in A Tale in the Desert? My answer has to do with progression. Somehow, in the latter game, I feel that I'm working towards a more tangible goal. if all I ever did was grow flax, I'd be bored with it in a week. But since the technology in the game is constantly changing, the activities you're engaging in are too; this week I'm mining, perhaps later I'll be fishing or mastering some other task. In The Sims, even though you may acquire a new item or meet a new "friend," the basic routine never changes: wake up, go to the bathroom, wash, eat, work, home, eat, clean, friends, sleep.

I think The Sims occupies a unique space in the gaming biosphere. I'm glad it exists,. But I'm also glad that I'm not playing it.

What games do people go crazy over that you don't like?

Sims 2 Early Reactions

2004-09-15 · by peterb

For those of you who might want to play Sims 2, you could do worse than to read Tilt's mini-review of his first exposure to it.

Aerodelugia

2004-09-17 · by peterb

I'm still in my office, rather than on my way to Toronto, because Pittsburgh -- inland though it is -- has had its own close, personal, and somewhat intimate encounter with Hurricane Ivan. To call what has happened here "flooding" is somewhat of an understatement.

17 September 2004, is officially the rainiest day in Pittsburgh's recorded history, with 5.08 inches falling in a single day.

Small Japanese sedans are floating through the streets. Highways are closed. Basements are flooded. And, most tragic of all, the traditional Friday Night Pizza has not been delivered to my place of employment. While realizing that you can't go home does tend to focus the mind on fixing the bugs -- since there's nothing else to do -- the gnawing hunger tends to distract.

It's not just raining cats and dogs here; the cats and dogs themselves are actually spitting and drooling as they tumble from the sky. I still have plans to try to get to Toronto tomorrow -- the room, alas, has been booked and paid for -- but won't be surprised if the highways are blocked. Somewhere on Yonge street there is a hot dog with my name on it, though. I shall persevere, and find a way.

The Nikon D100 and D70

2004-09-18 · by psu

In an earlier article, I outlined my general thoughts on digital cameras. In that article, I noted that digital cameras fall into two basic categories: point and shoot cameras, and digital SLRs. At the time, my main camera had been a Nikon D100. So I thought now I'd write a more specific piece about that body and its more recent cousin, the D70.

The D100

The Nikon D100 handles and shoots basically like a high quality mid-end Nikon film body, except that it captures digital files instead of slides or negatives. Light goes in one end, hits a sensor, and out the other comes a digital representation of what the camera was looking at. I will forego the particulars and specifications of the body because you can google for that.

Instead, I'll concentrate on what I like and dislike.

Likes:

There isn't much more to say than that. The thing is awesome. Now here are my picky whiny quibbles:

The D70

Summary: The D70 is the D100 with most of the above quibbles fixed.

The only thing that isn't really improved in the D70 is the viewfinder and the interface for changing some autofocus modes that I never change. Here is a more detailed summary:

All this, and they fixed the flash system too. Although I have to buy a new flash to get the new features.

Two Updates

First, the NEF+JPEG isn't as useful as I'd hoped. The JPEG files are not tagged with the right color space, and they are full size. I like to make proof JPEG files that are half size. Also, the new NEF files preview very quickly at nearly full resolution (apparently the preview image embedded in the NEF is now a full sized JPEG instead of the teeny tiny one the D100 put in), so I don't really need JPEG files for quick proofing. They are mostly just useful for my dual catalog workflow.

Second, the lens hood casts a shadow. I never noticed this before with my D100.

Appendix

This article is also at my main web site, so I'm gonna link to it here to up my google points:

here you go.

Coming Attractions

2004-09-20 · by peterb

Back from Toronto, with new tales to tell. This week, expect to see some or all of the following items:

...and, when they're done, book reviews of Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return, In the Shadow of No Towers, and the most recent of Jasper Fforde's "Thursday Next" books, Something Rotten.

Elementary

2004-09-21 · by peterb

Everett Kaser had one great idea for a game.

He's taken that one idea, and leveraged it into many, many games. Which of them you play is a matter of taste. But if you don't own at least one Kaser game, you're missing out on the most addictive puzzlers since Sokoban.

Rewind to 1990: my friend Nerak hands me a floppy with a DOS shareware version of Kaser's great idea: the game Sherlock. Have you ever heard those logic puzzles that begin: "Doctor so-and-so needed to seat 12 people at the dinner table. The lawyer wants the vegetarian dish, and won't sit next to the doctor. The man with the yellow hat wants roast beef. Red wine is being served to the person who has the chicken..." (and so on, and so on, and so on). Sherlock is a more abstract version of that puzzle.

The main playing board is a 6x6 matrix of cells. When the puzzle is solved, each cell will contain a single icon. When you start playing, each cell has 6 small icons representing the possible inhabitants of that cell. Cells are grouped into rows. So, for example, the 6 cells in the top rows are all faces; to "solve" this row, each of the 6 possible faces must be put in its proper cell. With the default icon set, from top to bottom, the rows were faces, houses, numbers, fruits, road signs, and letters. (More recent versions of Sherlock allow the player to customize the board size from as small as 3x3 to as large as 8x8.)

Arrayed around the main board are the clues. There are a few different sorts of clues, all in pictographs. I find that as I read them, I translate them into words in my head: "The 'No Parking' sign is in the same column as the face which looks like a big lemon head." "The green house is between the strawberry and the number '3'." "The letter 'H' must be to the left of the Egyptian Headdress Guy." You'll quickly learn there are corollaries to the different rules that let you make progress quickly (for example, if the green house is between the strawberry and the number 3, then logically it can't be in columns 1 or 6, which are not 'between' anything).

To help you keep track of what possibilities are available, you can right click on a 'small' icon (or a clue) to dismiss it from consideration. Left-clicking on an icon is an assertion that you believe you know where it belongs.

To call Sherlock an addiction is to underestimate it. Every game is different. Every game is fun. I have been playing Sherlock for more than 10 years. I'll be playing it forever.

Kaser, knowing a good thing when he saw it, took the Sherlock idea and ran with it. The first sequel was called Dinner with Moriarty, and was a more elaborate (and slightly less abstract) version of the same game:

The nefarious Professor Moriarty is giving a dinner party. As luck would have it, YOU have been invited. Professor Moriarty and his guests are seated about the table, and each person is eating a different food on a different colored plate and drinking a different drink. It's your task to determine WHERE Moriarty is seated (along with everyone else) and which person he's poisoning.

The core mechanics of Moriarty are the same as Sherlock, although the board configuration differs and there are some slightly different types of clues.

There are other variations, as well. There's Honeycomb Hotel (Sherlock tilted diagonally and with the addition of borders between cells that you must deduce.) There's Latin Squares, a particularly vicious variation which adds affinity groups which span multiple rows and columns. There's Occam's Quilt, in which every cell has not only an icon, but also a background color and a background pattern, only one of which must match with its neighbors. These are generally harder games. Any given Sherlock puzzle is always solvable -- somehow -- given the provided clues. It's about straightforward deduction. Honeycomb Hotel and Latin Squares, however, will often generate puzzles which require the player to make forward progress by making an assumption and then eliminating that assumption as invalid when they discover a contradiction (the games provide an in-game mechanism to make reverting to the move before you made your assumption simple).

Kaser has created some other great games in addition to his deductive masterpieces: Descarte's Enigma, in particular, is a great implementation of the "Paint by Numbers" or "Nonogram" puzzle. But it is with Sherlock and its kin that my addiction rests. Until Cliff Johnston releases A Fool and His Money later this fall, I'll be clicking my way through Kaserland, one small deduction after another.

Regrettably, Kaser's games are only for Windows (and in some cases PocketPC). If you can track down a DOS version of Sherlock it runs fine on Mac OS X under DOSBox. Sherlock is available at Kaser's web site, as are demos of all of his other fine games. You can purchase full versions on line, as well. Enjoy.

And remember: I warned you.

How to stir fry beef

2004-09-22 · by psu

Don't be fooled. This is easy. You just have to follow a few simple rules and you too can make a beef stir fry that will show up the dishes at P.F. Chang's as the chewey carboard crap that they are.

First, the typical chinese stir fry starts with flank steak. I don't know why, but it's what my mom did, and she's generally right.

Second, cut the meat as thin as you can across the grain. This is critical. If you cut with the grain, you get rubber biscuit. I'm assuming for the rest of this piece that you started with about 1/2 to 1 pound of meat.

Third, marinate for a while in a mix of soy, sherry and chopped ginger. A while is around a half hour.

Now, heat your pan. Any pan will do. I like the small non-stick omlette pans. My mom always used a cast iron frying pan. You can use a Wok if you must, but it's not critical. When the pan is hot, add oil. I usually have olive oil, so that's what I use even though it's sort of wrong. Add about a teaspoon or two of corn starch to the meat and mix it around. Toss the coated meat in the pan and mix it around so the meat isn't all stuck together. Toss in more ginger, some salt, and pepper.

The fourth secret is as critical as the second. Let the meat cook until it starts to make its own gravy in the pan. Do not under any circumstances add any liquid of any kind to the pan. If you do this, you will get rubber beef.

When the meat is done, it will expel some juices back into the pan and give you a nice sauce. At this point you can add oyster sauce or something if you like that. You can also toss in cut up green onion and wilt it with the meat.

Otherwise, just throw the meat on a plate. You are done.

The meat should be tender and coated evenly with a nice brown sauce that is not gloppy.

To make the classic variation on this dish, take the meat out of the pan just before it is done. Throw garlic, scallion and big chunks of tomatoes into the pan. Cook until the tomatoes start to fall apart. Add the meat back in. Mix and take out of the pan. Don't cook the meat with the tomatoes too long or it will get tough (see point 4).

This is all you need to know about beef stir fry.

Bonjour Brioche

2004-09-23 · by peterb

bonjourBonjour Brioche is a breakfast place in Toronto. It's inconveniently situated on Queen Street East about midway between downtown and the Beaches, at the corner of Queen and Broadview. It's small, cluttered, and there's usually a wait to get in. The hours are annoying and too short. And it has some of the best bread you'll ever have.

The croissant is superb. The baguette transcends belief. The coffee is good. Amusingly, the brioche they are named for is only just sort of OK -- if you're in the mood for a pastry, skip it and get the croissant instead.

Bonjour Brioche sports a full breakfast menu, so if you want an omelette, or some bacon, or some scrambled eggs, smoked salmon, and caviar, no problem. Their non-pastry breakfasts are good, but kind of miss the point. The highlight of any of the omelettes, inevitably, is the piece of baguette that comes with it.

One notable item on the menu is the "baked French toast." This is somewhat of a misnomer. It's really a slab of bread pudding about the size of a loaf of bread. It is loaded with cinnamon, and sugar, and butter. In a pinch, it could be used to feed a family of four for an entire night. It's a bit overwhelming, but is definitely worth convincing someone else at your table to order.

My recommendation? Just get a whole baguette and some butter and homemade preserves. This is not intended as an insult to the rest of their breakfast food, which ranges from serviceable to good. Rather, it's an indication of how excellent their baguettes are. There's a belief I hear expressed that you can only get good baguettes in France. That's false. The main issue with baguettes is that they are breads with minimal fat, and high surface area. This means that the amount of time in which a baguette is truly fresh can be measured in a small number of hours. Baguettes are consistently better in France not because of some unknown mysterious secret baguette-making technique, but simply because, being smarter about food, they eat more of them and the ones you get are, usually, fresher.

There are also a variety of fruit tarts and quiche. All are excellent. If you're in Toronto over the weekend, and don't mind waiting for your breakfast, it's definitely worth a visit.

I considered making a short film of my last trip to Bonjour Brioche, but realized that they were too busy to talk to me, so basically all you would have had was a movie of me eating food that was better than whatever you're eating right now. So I skipped it. My new plan is to contact them and ask them to let me spend a night in their kitchen and film them while they bake bread. That would be a good short film.

Bonjour Brioche is closed on Mondays. Other days, they open at 8 am and close at 5 on Tuesday through Friday, 4 on Saturday, and 3 on Sunday.

Retsina

2004-09-24 · by peterb

I've heard about Retsina for years, but it was not until recently, at a Greek restaurant on Danforth in Toronto, that I actually got to taste it.

It tastes like rosemary wine.

That's not a bad thing.

Rosemary, of course, is a member of the pine family, and Retsina is treated with pine tree resin; hence the taste.

It's a light white wine, similar in body to a Frascati or a Pino Grigio. Behind the rosemary/pine nose and taste, there's a vegetal, grassy flavor, and a slightly medicinal, bitter tang. I could see some people not liking it, but like the hoppy finish in a good beer, I found that the bitterness cleansed my palette and readied me for the next sip, or the next taste of food. This is definitely a wine to drink with food.

Not something I'd drink every day, but it makes a nice wine for a warm summer day.

Loans and Lattes

2004-09-27 · by peterb

coffee-time

What time is it?

Coffee Time is a Toronto coffee and donuts chain, roughly equivalent to what Dunkin' Donuts used to be in the US, before they made the conscious corporate decision to make all their donuts suck. They also have the best brewed coffee of any chain in Toronto (which, as I've alluded to before, isn't really saying much), and better donuts than Tim Horton's. They seem to be a thoroughly urban phenomenon -- as soon as you get on the highway, they disappear, and you are left and bereft, Coffeetimeless.

CIBC

venti skim no-foam vault

Meanwhile, in another sector, CIBC provides banking services to the eh-ing multitudes of Canada, along with convenient ATM service, from which we lucky American citizens can withdraw money from our American banks without paying any extra fees. (Have I mentioned how much it annoys me that it is cheaper for me to withdraw money from an ATM in Madrid than it is at the "wrong" bank in the US?) But the most notable feature of CIBC bank, to me, is that their logo looks disturbingly like Coffee Time's. So I always experience a moment of cognitive dissonance when I encounter a CIBC bank and think "Cool! I can get coffee!" and then a rush of disappointment hits me as I realize that all they have there is a bunch of stupid money.

Every problem, however, is also an opportunity. I propose that CIBC Bank purchase Coffee Time, thus adding the latter's roster of delicious and inexpensive treats to their bank's portfolio. In these highly competitive times, the ability to draw in new customers through any means cannot be dismissed. And Coffee Time will benefit as well, as CIBC's large customer base discovers the delights of a walnut cruller and a large black coffee while waiting on line to make a deposit.

Do not be dissuaded by the naysayers and small-minded ones who throw out trivial objections -- "Oh, but banking and coffee shops are different," they will whine. "What about your customers who don't drink coffee?" they will mewl. They'll tell you that basing a merger simply on the color of your logos is "crazy." To which I say: "HA! Crazy like a fox!" Think of the most successful financiers you know. Think of stockbrokers, think of floor traders. Is there even one that doesn't drink coffee? Of course not. Coffee is bold. Coffee is strong. Just as currency is the lifeblood of our economy, my friends, so too coffee is the...um, lymph. Coffee Time is one of the most productive lymph nodes. With one fell swoop, you can grab that lymph node and squeeze! Sure, they'll laugh at you now, but when their banks are closing because you've got the best lymph coffee, well, they'll be singing a different tune, I promise you.

Gentlemen of the Boards of Directors of CIBC Bank and Coffee Time -- I thank you, capitalism thanks you, and the people of Canada thank you.

Additional Resources

Both Coffee Time and CIBC have web sites. Soon, I hope there will only be one.

Bug Triage

2004-09-29 · by peterb

The number of people that know how to effectively debug and triage problems in a complex software product is upsettingly small.

I don't know why this is. Debugging has always seemed to me a very simple, straightforward task. Start at the top: figure out if the problem is reliably reproducible. If it is, start eliminating codepaths. It's basically the Holmes Principle applied -- when you've eliminated every other explanation as impossible, whatever is left, however improbable, is the explanation. Of course there are some bugs that are harder than others -- usually, the worst are the ones where you can't actually describe the conditions under which it happens. But even if we forget about those, I still see people who should know better whose preferred approach seems to be simply flailing at the problem until it goes away.

Computers, and software, are complex things. No one can keep the entirety of a complex software product in their mind at once when debugging. The desire to simplify the problem solving regimen is understandable, and even correct. But there's a right way and a wrong way to do it. The right way, as I described it, is to break the problem down into subcomponents and perform tests that either validate or eliminate a hypothesis about that subcomponent. Here are some of the wrong ways.

If you ever go to the hospital for a serious condition, you'll see proper problem solving in action. A succession of medical students, residents, and interns will march into your room and start asking you questions. Typically, they will ask the same questions, in the same order, until you are ready to scream from the monotony. This is because they are running down the diagnostic evaluation, and each answer is helping them (hopefully) eliminate some possibilities from the universe of things that might be wrong with you. As software developers, we don't have the collective knowledge that the medical community has about the human body, but we can at least aspire to their commitment to proceed logically.

There's an old saying "If architects built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, the first woodpecker that came along would destroy civilization." I'd suggest a corollary: "if doctors diagnosed patients the way programmers debug programs, no one would ever risk going in to a hospital."

I should also admit that I'm blurring the lines between "triage," which is coming up with a rough idea of what component of a software system is failing, with "debugging," or fixing the bugs. One is really a special case of, or a part of, the other. I'd argue that getting triage wrong is worse than getting a bug fix wrong, because of the inherently timewasting nature of misclassified bugs.

So I've given you some sarcastic ranting about how not to triage problems. How about some constructive suggestions? I've already talked about trying to ensure that you can reproduce problems, but that won't be possible for every bug. What else can we do?

I hope in some small way this little rant has proven helpful. Good luck. Now go squash some bugs.

I am the Mirror of Your Emotions

2004-09-30 · by peterb

I admit it: I didn't watch the candidate's debate tonight. I had two reasons:

(1) My mind is already made up.

(2) Contemplating the sick feeling I will get in the pit of my stomach when I wake up the day after Election Day and read about who won makes me break out in hives. I get enough existential dread when I think about being forced to program in Tcl without adding politics to the mix.

So, I ask those of you who watched, who won? Did it change your mind? Do you think it changed anyone's mind? What surprised you, if anything?

Add your comments below.

I Giochi Inesistenti

2004-10-03 · by peterb

startrek

A typical Star Trek game

Last night I dragged one of my Apple IIs up from the basement and set it up, and searched through every disk I own, searching for a game that only I remember. It was a version of the old text-based Star Trek games that randomly printed out page-long quotes from Marcus Aurelius' Meditations.

I didn't find it.

Unfortunately, I only have about half of the disks I had from that era -- I don't know what happened to my "main" box of disks. Probably, I brought it to college with me and lost it during some move. I love playing "Ask the Game Geek" for other people, so it's somewhat driving me crazy that I can't find this one. I found lots of other interesting things that I had forgotten about -- frankly, I'm surprised that so many of those 5 1/4" floppies still worked.

You'd think that we'd have everything about the Apple II written down on the web somewhere, but we don't. The Asimov software archive (among others) is very good, and very comprehensive, but also disorganized and incomplete. And short of downloading every disk image you find and trying it out, you just can't data mine for information about the games. In frustration, I've offered to pay Google Answers $10 if they can find me the game itself or adequate identifying information. The same offer is open to any of my readers: if you can ID this game, I'll Paypal you 10 bucks. Here's the information I gave to Google:

"There's a standard type of noncommercial, amateur-produced "Star Trek" game that has existed for nearly every computer, from mainframes on down. Typically it is played in a grid of sectors, where each grid itself is composed of a subgrid. The Enterprise might be represented by an "E", klingons by "K", etc. You play by entering commands to the Enterprise -- for example, "T" and then a number 1-8 to indicate a direction to fire photon torpedos, "M" to move with warp drive, "I" with impulse, etc. The implementation details of these games all vary, but they're instantly recognizable when you see them.

In the early 1980's, I played a particular version of this game on the Apple II computer. The odd thing about it was that at random times, for no apparent reason, it would spew out long quotations from Marcus Aurelius "Meditations". I mean, long quotes -- we're talking a full screen of confusing philosophical text -- "And it is this which makes us ask what the difference is between the representation of a thing and the thing itself, which is to say a thing in itself, yadda yadda yadda" (I just made that quote up completely to give you an idea -- it's not a literal quote from the game/meditations).

My question can be answered in one of two ways: (1) Identify this game, naming the precise game name or executable name, and author, and if possible publisher or distribution channel). The identification must be sufficient to distinguish it from the hundreds of other versions of this game -- "The game is called 'Star Trek'" is not an adequate answer. (2) Alternatively, point me to a disk image containing the game.

Again, I want to emphasize that I already know there are many versions of this game that don't emit obscure Marcus Aurelius quotes. I have most of them. I'm only interested in the one described here."

It probably doesn't help matters that most of these games have completely generic names -- "Apple Trek" "Star Trek." The most distinctive name of the bunch is "Stellar Trek" by Rainbow Computing and Tom Burlew. I played it for a while, but was not Marcus Aurelianized.

Someone else has apparently approached this problem from the other end, and is trying to collect a massive database of all Star Trek games ever made. Unfortunately, I can tell just by glancing at their list of Apple II games that it's incomplete. It's amazing, though, seeing how many versions of what I think of as the "mainframe Star Trek" game. There's even an Atari 2600 version! Now that's one I need in my collection.

The history of these games is pretty well documented -- you can look at their source code in the original Fortran, and then look at derivative versions, see them be translated to other languages, and watch them change, grow, and gain new features. It's a fascinating activity in and of itself. But looking for the specific version I'm describing feels like looking for a single piece of eight in a treasure chest (or, let's be frank about this, looking for a piece of obscure junk that you for some reason have a strange emotional attachment to in a box full of other pieces of obscure junk.)

Which leaves us with the last remaining question: why? Why do I care about this at all? Surely, each time I think about something like this I am losing another skirmish in the ongoing war against nostalgia. My only explanation is that the Aurelius-quoting aspect of the game was so strange, so completely a non-sequitur, that it has at times left me wondering if it really happened. More than anything, I want to know the story behind this game. Who created it? Why Aurelius? Why those quotes? Where is the author today? I want to know.

If there are any games that you think only you remember, ask me in the comments, below. It would be nice to be able to solve someone else's mystery, since I've reached the frustration limit on solving my own.

Additional Resources

Here are some links to some of the resources mentioned in this article.

Libraries

2004-10-04 · by peterb

On Sunday, the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh -- one of the greatest libraries I know of, outside of the New York Public Library -- opened for the first time after completing their extensive renovations. It was a magnificent celebration. There were tours, there were children listening to stories and singing songs, there was free pizza. There were books, and music, videos, and people everywhere. The place was completely packed. In a strange way, that was the best part of the opening. Not just that the library exists, but that lots of people care. In a world where we're constantly bombarded with messages about how Americans are uneducated and ignorant, it's wonderful to look around and see that this convenient stereotype is not, in fact, universal.

The physical plant has been opened up and retouched. There's now an interior courtyard open to the sky now. There's a coffee shop (finally!) where we can use the wireless access the Carnegie has been providing for the past few years (they've always been ahead of the internet curve) to good effect. The stacks and upstairs research areas remain mostly the same -- staid, quiet, reserved, suitable for concentration and study. The downstairs area has been made more vital, more chaotic, more noisy. Terminals (for catalog services, or just for websurfing) dot the landscape -- basically, wherever you might want one, it's there.

The thing a lot of people don't seem to realize about the Carnegie is that it's not just books. They're committed to archiving all sorts of media. There are tens of thousands of music disks in the music section (and, of course, extensive collections of sheet music and related items). There's a superb movie and DVD collection (I'll probably never buy Claude Lanzmann's Shoah, and Blockbuster will surely never carry it, but the Carnegie makes it possible for me to see it.) They have Xbox games, for crying out loud. And graphic novels. And visual art.

I love the Carnegie Library. I imagine myself sitting around saying "If only there were some magical place where I could go in and they would have Aimee Mann's latest music and Adam Barr's Proudly Serving my Corporate Masters and I could sit and drink coffee and read and then take them home with me for free, and maybe it would be cool if I could log on to some web site while I was at work and say 'Hey, send me an email when this item comes in, so I can swing by and pick it up.'"

And then -- poof! -- it turns out that place really exists.

Thank you, Andrew Carnegie, and thanks to all of you who work at the Carnegie Library for making my dream come true.

Additional Resources

> TAKE LAMP

2004-10-05 · by peterb

Reminder: the 10th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition has begun. Anyone and everyone is welcome to play and judge the games.

We used to call them "text adventures" instead of "interactive fiction," but you know these crazy kids with their loud rock and roll music and their hamburger sandwiches and their french fried potatoes.

Film and Digital in 2004

2004-10-07 · by psu

I have a book by the late great Galen Rowell called Mountain Light. The book is filled with breathtaking landscape photographs from all over the world and the stories of how the photographs were created. Rowell worked with a series of 35mm color slide films during his career: Kodachrome, Velvia, and so on. At the end of the forward, he talks about how a friend of his had periodically told him that in the next few years, a digital camera would come out that would put his film to shame and be easier to use besides, and that he had been hearing this story for the last decade or two.

Well, if Galen had lived to see the year 2005, I think his friend truly might have finally been right.

To the outside observer of the Internet message groups, the digital/film debate seems to center primarily around technical issues. Back in 2001/2002, reams of bits were wasted in a useless argument over a web page that claimed that the digital camera that Canon had just released, the D30, was "better" than 35mm film as tested by some guy who runs some web site. Almost every discussion of this issue between then and now that I have read can be summarized like this:

  1. Digital guy says "my digital body is just as good as film, I hate you."

  2. Film guy says "that's ludicrous, it would take 50 bazillion megapixels to match a single frame of my super chromaticasm iso 25 ultra slide film, especially if I shoot 4x5. Also, I hate you."

Both of these arguments are, in fact, wrong. It is a fact that there are things film can do that digital cannot (make a nice fiber print, for one). It is also true that for all intents and purposes, you can buy digital cameras that for the most part will get you prints that are as good or better than any color film made.

Let's be clear. There are no technical issues one way or another that clearly distinguish between digital capture and film. Digital cameras have evolved to the point where within each price class the technical playing field is level. If anything, from a technical standpoint, the current crop of thousand dollar digital SLR cameras are probably better in most ways than the 35mm cameras they are based on. By this I mean:

  1. At equivalent ISO and print sizes up to 12x18, the prints you hold in your hand will be better in almost every way, especially at higher ISO ratings. If you don't believe me, go shoot some ISO 640 35mm color print film and let me know how 18x12 prints look. I have such prints made from a D100, and they are stunningly good. Even at ISO 400, my old 3mp point and shoot made great 8x10 prints.

  2. They handle the same.

  3. They are just as convenient to use from the standpoint of extras that you have to haul along. A laptop and card reader are just as easy to carry as 40 or 50 rolls of film, and they won't be destroyed by x-ray machines.

Nice fiber prints aside, the technical argument is done. Digital as described by Rowell's friend has arrived.

But, you should keep in mind that digital had started to taken over many areas of photography long before we had reached this level of technical parity. If you delve deeper into the message board arguments, you will see why. At some point, there will be an exchange like

  1. The digital guy says "digital rules because I can just download my pictures and in 5 seconds I have a web site to show everyone."

  2. The film guy says "film rules because I don't have to fuss with the damn machine. I just drop my film off and an hour later I have prints to show everyone."

In other words, what you are doing to do with the image trumps any sort of technical compromise there might be in the tools you are using to create the picture. Galen Rowell made 35mm color landscape photography viable because the tools fit his style and allowed him to get pictures that transcended the limitations of the medium. The important aspect of his decision to shoot 35mm is not the technical question of what kind of "image quality" he could capture, but the pragmatic question of how to get the tools to where the pictures were, and what he wanted to do with the images once he had captured them. Small cameras let him take pictures on mountains. 35mm slide film let him publish pictures in the magaziines that were his major market.

So the question for you to ponder about film and digital is what you want to do with the pictures. If you hate computers and have the time and the love needed to put into the darkroom, or you just want a shoebox of nice 4x6 prints, digital is not for you. Ignore the hype.

On the other hand, if you are handy with the machines, and all your buddies have e-mail, and you want to be able to share baby pictures quickly and easily, what are you waiting for.

Arrested Development

2004-10-08 · by peterb

maus-1024

Comic books are for kids

I was at the Carnegie Library last night, trying to track down volume 2 of Alan Moore's Promethea. A very nice librarian was helping me, and we got to talking, and she said "So, are you really into..." There was a long pause. "...graphic novels?"

Now, I'm sure she was just making conversation, but there was a very large part of me that was sure that the real question being asked was "Why are you reading comic books? Aren't you past that yet?"

I'm sensitive about this, in part, because of something someone said to me not too long ago. They were saying that they read my writing and thought it surprising that a guy in his thirties "still played videogames." I laughed it off, but inside I was stunned. It had never occurred to me, even for a moment, to entertain the idea that playing videogames was something that one would set aside with adulthood, like playing with dolls or making mudcakes.

There are lots of games that are for kids, sure. There are lots of movies for kids, too. I'm imagining someone asking Martin Scorsese when he will be graduating to actually writing something substantial, like a book, now that he's exhausted the infantile palette available to him in film. Or dismissing books as a medium, because, y'know, Charlotte's Web was for kids.

I could stand around coming up with counterexamples of videogames (or, for that matter, graphic novels) that are clearly written by adults and for adults, but that is a tired argument, and not very interesting. It's fascinating to me how pervasive the meme is, the idea that an entire medium is unworthy of serious consideration, regardless of the message it carries.

My suspicion is that in large part this comes down to marketing and money. The entire graphic novel channel is geared towards delivering cheaply printed, mass-produced content at high profit margins to kids (and the Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons). That's who has traditionally spent the money on comic books. That's changing, but very slowly. Videogames have changed more quickly, largely because those of us who grew up with them won't accept anything less. You can still see the fault lines, though: would anyone walk up to a 66 year old retiree in a Vegas casino and tell them that the videogame slot machine they're playing is "for kids"?

It is, in the end, all a matter of perception. Go to any chain bookstore and you'll find a "Science Fiction/Fantasy" section full of crappy writing with half-naked barbarian women in chainmail lingerie on the covers of their books. You'll also find some superb writers and wordsmiths, such as Gene Wolfe or Terry Pratchett ("Who writes amazing sentences," says A.S. Byatt, whose own Babel Tower includes a story-within-the-story that would be right at home on the chainmail bra shelf, as would the similar story in Margaret Atwood's Booker prize-winning novelThe Blind Assassin). Meanwhile, the best science fiction story of the 20th century is probably Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children. You'll find that on a different shelf, because some over-privileged Yale prat only gets paid if he decides that some works are Literature, and other works merely Genre.

This serves the interests of consumers, but not, necessarily, the interests of readers.

I'm in my thirties. I read books. Some of them have pictures. Some of them don't. I watch movies. I watch TV. I play video games. I write, and publish what I write, without necessarily expecting money in return.

Welcome to the new adulthood. See you on Xbox Live.

What I'm Reading (Library Version)

2004-10-11 · by peterb

Since I spent so much time raving about the Carnegie Library recently, it's only fair that I indicate what I've actually been reading. What follows is a laundry list with some brief comments on each item. The hyperlinks in each item will take you to Amazon, in case your local library isn't as good as mine.

Books

Graphic Novels

Music

I have 19 other items on hold, currently. How do I find the time to read all of this, and still get my work done, you ask? The answer could not be simpler.

I don't sleep.

Something Rotten

2004-10-12 · by peterb

The bad part about buying books in Canada is that they are often from Great Britain.

This sounds wrong, intuitively. For me, at least, mentioning "books" and "England" in the same sentence conjures up an image of a sober, thoughtful old gent, reading a thick, leatherbound volume with a sewn-in silk bookmark while comfortably -- but not indulgently -- ensconced in a leather chair. The smell of pipe smoke is in the air. Later, when the boys come by and the time for reading is done, the port will be passed.

Perhaps your image of "British books" is similarly reverent. If this is the case, I urge you not to buy any, for if you do, your image will be destroyed when you buy your first one and realize that British books suck.

Oh, not the writing, I imagine that they have the same distribution of quality as anywhere else in the world with readers and writers. I mean the books themselves. The physical objects. The paper is garbage. The ink smears. The bindings are weakly glued. They are absolutely disgraceful along every axis.

I always manage to forget this when I visit Toronto, and am overwhelmed by the heady perfume of paper and ink and the fact that I'm in a city that seems to have 2 used bookstores per block, and I spend $150 on books, some of which are inevitably of British manufacture. The final straw came on my most recent trip, where I bought a copy of Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, and the last pages in the book started falling out before I'd finished the second chapter.

So why buy them at all? Impatience, mostly. Some books never make it to the US except as imports (some of Iain M. Banks' works seems to fall into this category, for some reason I can't discern.) Other books are simply released in Britain (and therefore Canada) somewhat earlier than in the US. Like Jasper Fforde's latest, Something Rotten; the trade paperback is available at Bakka and other fine bookstores. And it's worth mentioning, given the the long introduction, that my copy hasn't fallen apart yet. Knock on wood.

I was originally of two minds about Something Rotten. I enjoyed it because it continues the adventures of Fforde's Thursday Next character (it's the fourth book in the series), and manages to bring them to a satisfactory conclusion; a logical stopping point, even. I was worried, though, because I felt like it might not be the end. And I wanted it to be the end. I've really, really enjoyed Thursday Next. And it's time for Fforde to stop writing about her for a while.

I needn't have worried -- while not explicitly saying he's done with Thursday Next for eternity, Fforde indicates on his website that his next project will be something more, as he puts it, "standalone." Good.

Something Rotten is a delight to those of us who have been reading the Next story from the beginning. In addition to the usual gamut of amusing names (a stalker named "Millon DeFloss" is the one that sticks in my mind), it's clear that Fforde has been spending a lot of the past year listening to the way politicians talk:

'Thank you, Tudor. Yes, I condemn utterly and completely the Terrible Thing in the strongest possible terms. We in the Whig Party are appalled by the way in which Terrible Things are done in this great nation of ours with no retribution against the Somebody who did them.'

It was only a page or so later that I had my first involuntary audible giggle:

'...I'd like to wander completely off the point and talk about the Health Service Overhaul that we will launch next year. We want to replace the outdated "preventative" style of healthcare this country has relentlessly pursued with a "wait until it gets really bad" system which will target those most in need of medical treatment -- the sick. Yearly health screenings for all citizens will end and will be replaced by a "tertiary" diagnostic regime which will save money and resources.'

Come November 3rd, no doubt, you'll find me under my bed, weeping hysterically, reading and re-reading that paragraph. But for right now it still makes me laugh

Something Rotten is a much stronger outing than Fforde's previous novel, The Well of Lost Plots, which was essentially an extended exercise in elaborating on things that ought not to have been elaborated on. So much of the vitality and freshness in The Eyre Affair came from the jovial sense of chaos imparted to the reader by the discovery of the strange universe of books and their characters. It was enough to know that this world existed. Delving into the details of the world's rules simply destroyed the mystery. Something Rotten veers sharply away from this overexplication and is, at its core, a much more emotionally open and human book.

As I said, if you've been with Thursday Next from the start, you'll enjoy Something Rotten. If you've never read any of the Thursday Next books, I can't in good conscience recommend that you read Something Rotten yet. But the first novel in the cycle, The Eyre Affair, is yours for the taking, and that I can recommend without hesitation.

As for me, I'm looking forward to his next, Nextless, novel.

Additional Resources

Hot Dog Rules

2004-10-13 · by psu

I have an almost irrational fondness for sausage that extends even more irrationally to hot dogs. A good hot dog can be a thing of beauty and a stupendous culinary experience besides. A bad hot dog is at best sad and at worst something that will make you vomit in a dark alley somewhere far away from home.

After some years of obtaining hot dogs in various locales on this planet, here are some guidelines for their proper construction.

  1. Fried or grilled are much better than steamed or boiled.

  2. Generally, you want more dog than bun. Too much bun is bad. I don't really go for poppy-seed buns either.

  3. A limited number of condiments is better than putting a whole salad bar on top of the poor piece of sausage. There is no reason to ever have more than three things on the dog at once.

  4. It is not always the case that chili and/or cheese on a hot dog is a sin.

  5. Under no circumstances, however, should you ever put ketchup on a hot dog.

  6. Some people like sauerkraut. I'm neutral.

  7. Never, under any circumstances except possibly the threat of death to you and your entire extended family, buy a "hot dog" in Paris, France. Almost everything related to food is better in Paris, but they know nothing about hot dogs.

  8. Hot dogs taste better at the ball park.

My favorite hot dogs are made at a place called The Original, or "The O" in Pittsburgh. My favorite O dogs are the big all beef dogs with onions, a bit of mustard and maybe pickles or relish. I also love the same dogs with chili and/or cheese and onions if I'm in the mood. O dogs are grilled on a big flat grill for hours so they have a nice crunchy crust to them that is a pleasure to bite into. They also tend to be larger than the bun.

Of course, what I like may not be what you like. So on the one hand, the list above is really just my own personal set of guidelines. On the other hand, if you disagree with them, chances are you are a sniveling freak who wouldn't know good food if it came up to you and bit you on the ass. Just my friendly opinion.

Slow Food

2004-10-14 · by psu

Who would have thought that a pizza with fresh mozzarella and roasted potatoes would be a great thing?

Anyway. To go back to the beginning. There is an organization in Pittsburgh called Slow Food Pittsburgh which is a local chapter of an international group of the same name. They are dedicated to the proposition that we need to defend traditionally prepared regional foods against the onslaught of large scale generic mechanized "fast food". I think the organization got started in Italy when McDonalds started to open stores there.

In Pittsburgh, this movement has spawned a series of local food events that have been graciously hosted by Roberto Caporuscio, the owner of the excellent Regina Margerhita pizzerias.

Roberto has been hosting these events for the past few months. The theme of the series is "A tour of Italy" so each night covers a different region of the country. He serves two salad courses, several appetizers, and several pizzas. The dishes are made with ingredients and techniques that reflect the region of Italy that makes up that night's theme. The beauty of the food is that it consists of just a few ingredients and requires no specialized techniques. But, it transcends this simplicity and is like nothing you've had before.

The last one of these we went to was this last Tuesday. The courses were as a follows:

Simply amazing. Nothing fancy, expensive, pretentious or complicated. Just simply amazing food.

I have this experience with food in only one other context, and that's when my mom shows up at the house, pulls random stuff out of the fridge and makes a set of Chinese stir fry dishes that are so far beyond anything I've ever managed that I just sit there at the table gawking in disbelief.

This is food like your mom made, if your mom could cook. Food that evokes your favorite food related times from your childhood. And I think that's the important point here. The issue is not slow food vs. fast food. Nothing in the menu above is particularly slow to make. The issue is preserving the memory and spirit of every mother's cooking. The issue is making sure that we don't end up burying the world in an ocean of conveniently packaged, mass produced, frozen, tasteless dreck that is so deep that no one remembers what real food is anymore.

Looking in to the Eyes of God

2004-10-15 · by peterb

...that's how I feel tonight, because my fabulous employers gave me, as a gift, a 19" flatscreen monitor. It's a ViewSonic VX910.

It's pretty. Oh yes, it is pretty.

The big problem, though, is that now I am having the feeling that I need to upgrade my computer so that I have a game playing box worthy of the monitor.

The other problem is that I'm running Win2k, so I don't get any ClearType antialiasing love. How painful is upgrading from Win2k to Windows XP? Will it throw me into a dimension of transinfinite pain? Assume for the sake of argument that I'm not willing to do a clean install, but must do an upgrade install. Because I'm not.

Excuse me, I need to go stare at my screensaver for a while now.

Turning of the Tide

2004-10-16 · by peterb

If, like me, you're not in the habit of watching CNN, you probably missed the Daily Show's Jon Stewart lay a righteous smackdown on Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala. I did. Sure, you can read the transcript, but that doesn't really do it justice.

For the full-on effect, if you have a fast internet connection, you'll want to watch the video

Jon Stewart, I salute you. On the one hand, it's depressing that it takes a comedy show host to raise this issue and not, say, a journalist. On the other hand, I guess mocking the powerful has always been the right of jesters and fools. Jon Stewart is a superb fool. And I don't mean that as an insult.

Enjoy!

Hedging My Bets

2004-10-18 · by peterb

My mom is convinced that John Kerry is going to win the election.

I think she couldn't be more wrong. I'd like for John Kerry to win. I'd like for George Bush to lose. But I don't see it happening. I do have to say that her logic is pretty compelling: she says that I'm a guaranteed jinx when it comes to politics, and since I'm so certain that Bush is going to win, he won't.

She was pretty sure, though, so I got her to put her money where her mouth is, and we made a bet. If John Kerry wins, as she says he will, I have to buy her a couple of bottles of the Nippozano Reserva Chianti by Frescobaldi (plus maybe a few bottles of Two-Buck Chuck), totally about $50. If George Bush wins, as I bet he will, she has to buy me the videogame of my choice, up to a value of $50.

It turns out that Halo 2 will be out the week after the election. So if Kerry wins, I'll be thrilled to send my mom the wine she wants. And if Bush wins, at least it will mean that I'm getting a free copy of Halo 2. Even if you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, I'm still going to try.

At 8 pm on Tuesday, November 2nd, as election returns roll in, I plan on not watching them, but will instead be online playing Counterstrike. Drop me a line if you'd like to join our little group of people shooting each other and shouting "LA LA LA I CAN'T HEAR YOU" at the electorate.

Calamari Misterdarcy

2004-10-19 · by peterb

What are all the cool kids playing on their consoles today? Katamari Damacy!

It's the sort of game that only comes along once every few years, where the controls, theme, and tone all coalesce perfectly to create a kind of Platonic gaming mood. Katamari Damacy is a Namco release for the Sony Playstation 2.

Katamari Damacy

The plot is a tissue thin excuse to justify the madness. Your father, the Lord of All Creation, got drunk and accidentally destroyed all of the stars in the sky. Your job is to go to Earth and roll around a small ball, called a katamari. Anything smaller than the katamari sticks to it. As more and more objects stick to it, the katamari gets bigger, and can pick up more items. So you'll start off the size of a thimble, able to pick up things like thumbtacks, chessboard pieces, the occasional butterfly, and the like. As you grow, you'll be able to pick up larger and larger items -- teapots, small dogs, children, people, bicycles, cars, islands, and so on. After each level, you're graded on your performance and, if you collected enough stuff your katamari (and everything it picked up) is turned into a star.

The best thing about the game is it's simplicity. There's basically one rule: if it's smaller than you, it sticks, and if it's bigger than you, you bounce off (possibly knocking parts of you off). Likewise, the controls are elegant. No buttons are absolutely necessary to play: just use the two thumbsticks, and drive like a tank. Push both forward, and the katamari rolls forward. Pull them back, it rolls backwards. Push one stick forward and the other back, and you turn. There's initially some emotional guilt the first time you pick up a mouse, or a kitten, but soon enough you are lost in the sheer joy of it, and you're gleefully chasing a shrieking Mrs. Tanaka down the street on the way back from her grocery shopping. Amusingly, the game also gives you a brief description of every object you pick up, and a biography of every person you ruthlessly murder reunite with the cosmos.

Visually, the game is whimsical and charming, without being cloyingly sweet. It's pretty clear that hallucinogens played at least an inspirational role in the game's design. Lines are crisp and cartoony, with a rich and varied palette, polygons are blocky in a Fisher-Price sort of way. It's clear that Toy Commander for the Dreamcast was a big influence on the developers. The problem with Toy Commander, though, was that it was much too difficult. Katamari Damacy imports the best parts of that earlier game, and leaves the hugely complicated game mechanics at the door. The mechanisms of the game itself also suggest Atari's Marble Madness at times, although this is a much more chaotic, open-ended, and less abstract game than that arcade puzzler.

The reason the simple controls work so well is that the gameplay is so subtle. The fact that your katamari changes in scale during each level is transformative in and of itself. So in the early parts of a level, larger objects are effectively obstacles, and serve to delineate the landscape in which you move. By the time you've tripled in size, you can simply roll over them and absorb them. In this way the landscape manages to be dynamic even when no objects in it are moving. Effectively, you're playing in four dimensions.

The soundtrack is infectious and simple. The starting theme song (listen to a brief sample here) has been lodged in my brain all day (only being driven out when I occasionally play The Girl from Ipanema). There's a variety of other songs in the game itself, and if there's a soundtrack album, I'm buying it. The music is eclectic, jazzy, infectious, and perfectly appropriate. Here's another brief sample for your enjoyment.

Lastly, one of the best aspects of Katamari Damacy is that it is available, retail, for a mere $20. (I guarantee you that someone at Namco, right now, is kicking themselves repeatedly). At that price, there's no excuse to not get it if you have a PS2.

Many of the strangest Japanese games don't make it to the US market. I'm hoping that the wild (and perhaps unprecedented) success of Katamari Damacy is the thin edge of a wedge that opens us up to more strange and delightful things. American publishers and distributors, take note.

Additional Resources

10 Things I Hate About Tcl

2004-10-20 · by peterb

I really, really, really don't like Tcl. Here are some of the reasons why.

  1. The syntax for basic language elements is broken and inconsistent. Look, go ahead and put dollar signs in front of variables. Or don't put dollar signs in front of variables. I don't really care. But make up your mind; don't make me have to figure out which syntax I need to use from context.

  2. No syntax checking until the program actually executes a given line of code. Look, guys, maybe this made sense twenty years ago when you were running on a DECstation 2100, but those few extra milliseconds really aren't going to kill us. Conversely, the interpreter is forced to reparse all syntactic blocks (for loops, if statements, and so on), every single time they are executed. So you spend cycles reparsing the syntactic blocks that actually execute at runtime, yet I still have no confidence that the syntax of every line in my script is correct, unless I use some external tool like procheck. Way to go, boys! Welcome to 1986!

  3. The backtraces. Oh my god, the backtraces. Python has backtraces, and yet somehow they're useful. No one has ever, in the entire history of Tcl, fixed a bug based on its unreadable and baroque backtraces.

  4. A special case of item 3: if you're taking the trouble to tell me what line offset in a given function the bug you encountered was, maybe you could spend another thirty bytes or so and mention, casually, what file the error was in? No, that would make too much goddamn sense.

  5. Idiomatically, the existence of exceptions in the language is used to excuse lousy programming. Here's how every Tcl program in the world that has ever been written since the beginning of time handles exceptions:

try { set somevar [10000linesofcode [1000lines {$arg}]] } catch { error "Something went wrong!" }

  1. Tcl wants to use { and } in places where God intended us to use ( and ).

  2. The "expr" construct is hateful. Which of these makes more sense? value = value ^ 2 or set value [expr $value ^ 2]"?

  3. You have to explicitly invoke expr, except it's automatic in if and while conditions, which is pretty much the one place where you don't want it.

  4. No real data structures to speak of. Everything is a string.

  5. Tcl doesn't actually have scoping "rules." Really, they're more like scoping "polite suggestions." You can examine and change (!) variables in your caller's stack frame (upvar). You can execute blocks of code in your caller's context (uplevel). You can tear your own face off with your toenails and devour it, ending your life as a slavering, pathetic beast, whimpering in a pool of your own blood.

In summary: I really, really, really don't like Tcl. Thank you, and good night.

Red Sox Win

2004-10-21 · by psu

The Red Sox are in the World Series. That's pretty cool.

Northern Spy

2004-10-25 · by peterb

One of the best features of the Xbox home console system is that you can rip music from music CDs to the hard disk. Some games then allow you to play that music back in-game. The classic street racer Project Gotham Racing is one such game. One of the first things I did upon acquiring an Xbox was to rip a whole bunch of surf music on to the hard drive. Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet. Los Straitjackets. Huevos Rancheros. And a small, barely known band called Barbacoa, who have a song called Northern Spy which, as you would expect, was a sort of Canadianish James Bond-y sort of thing.

It wasn't until many years later that I learned that "Northern Spy" is actually the name of a variety of apple. I'd certainly never tasted one. I decided I wanted one because, well, y'know. It's called Northern Spy. It has to be great! They seem to be very hard to find -- everyplace I've asked has just said that they don't carry them, or that they're sold out. But tonight, at Whole Foods, I found a cache of Northern Spys. So I brought some home.

They're a blotchy red and green, and quite large. The flesh has the texture of a Red Delicious, but the skin is much thinner and thus not so intrusive. They're on the tart side, which I consider to be a virtue -- not as tart as a Granny Smith, but nearly so, and much juicier. They're apparently considered a "pie apple," presumably because people only like eating super-sweet things out of hand. But I enjoyed the one I've eaten in hand so far. I intend to eat more.

I've looked online to find someone who specializes in interesting and unusual apples, but haven't had any luck, at least at reasonable prices (I found one place offering to send me a box of 15 Stayman-Winesaps for something like $40. No, thanks.) Mail order is fine, but I'd be willing to take a road trip, too. If you know of any place like that, please add a comment, below.

Additional Resources

Strange and Norrell

2004-10-26 · by peterb

strange

Strange and Norrell

I'm currently reading Susanna Clarke's Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell, which I'd characterize as Jane Austen meets Neil Gaiman's The Sandman.

Most reviewers have compared the book to the Harry Potter series, undoubtedly because the book is "about" magic, and takes place in England. This isn't any more accurate than comparing Catch-22 to A Farewell to Arms simply because both are "about" war and take place in Italy. Stylistically, the books could not be farther apart. Where Potter is breathless and credulous (not unreasonable attributes for a public school coming-of-age story), Strange & Norrell is sophisticated and subtle. It's quite enjoyable and would make a fine addition to anyone's winter reading list.

Without going in to enough detail to ruin the plot, let me discuss the broad outline of the book. The year is 1806. For many years, magic had been a potent force in the North of England, with the coming of a fierce, faerie-raised youth, known as the Raven King, in the 1400s. Since the departure of the Raven King, magic has been in steady decline. At the time the book opens, there are no known practicing magicians in the realm. All is theory. Until, that is, a challenge is issued to a reclusive scholar, one Mr. Norrell. Mr. Norrell accepts, and literally makes the statues in York's cathedral talk and sing. The notoriety gained from this demonstration helps establish Norrell in London society, and enables him to pursue his dream of restoring English magic. The novel is the story of dour, somewhat cautious Norrell and -- later -- his bolder and more impulsive protogé, Jonathan Strange, and how these two men work with, and against, each other.

It is very mannered novel. This isn't an unreserved compliment. What readers like about Austen is not, in the final analysis, simply the look she gives into the Regency era. There are plenty of novels that do that, most of them unreadable. What makes Austen compelling, at least to me, is the drama. The drama comes because for Austen's characters, finding a financially secure husband is a matter of life or abject poverty, not merely an issue of creature comfort. The seriousness with which Austen takes these issues is reflected in the moods of her works. Clarke's writing is wrapped in the trappings of the day, but not actually concerned with them. There are many descriptions of London parties, eligible young gentlemen who have livings of 1000 pounds a year, etc., etc., but there's no impact behind it. It's not a life being lived; it's a mere mise-en-scene.

That being said, it may just be a mise en scene, but it's a fun one. What Strange and Norrell brings to the depiction of magic is a sense of true menace and mystery. It's this element that some critics (notably Byatt) have found lacking in the Potter stories. The most apposite comparison of the magic in the novel would be that found in the works of Neil Gaiman. Gaiman's magic, with its emphasis on the inhuman lands Faerie, and the dire consequences of transgressing against rules you may know nothing of. In the world of Strange and Norrell, magic is not merely an expression of forces beyond human power, but also of worlds beyond human morality. It is in this context that the quotidian setting of early 19th century Britain is effective. The fastidiousness of the actors serves to throw the wildness of the hidden world into sharp relief.

Strange and Norrell will appeal to those who like their books thick and fast. For although it is 800 pages long, it reads quickly. It's not, in the final analysis, Great Writing; 10 years from now, I won't be waking up in the middle of the night with my head ringing with the power of Clarke's prose. You can be haunted by the magic of Rushdie or Garcia-Marquez, or oppressed and elated by the eloquence of Martin Amis, or hear echoes of Italo Calvino as you wander through daily life. Clarke's writing will engender no such emotions. But that's OK: I'm praising with faint damn. If I only read books by writers with the power of Garcia-Marquez I would read very few books indeed. Clarke is telling a great story, and telling it well.

Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell is almost certainly available at your local library, bookstore, or from amazon.com.

Red Sox Win

2004-10-27 · by psu

My first Red Sox World Series experience was in 1975 against the Reds. My dad didn't let me stay up for game 6 and Carlton Fisk's home run. Of course, they lost game 7.

In 1986, I was in school and didn't even realize the Sox were in the series until we tuned in on game 6. For game 7 I was at a Billy Joel concert. He's a Mets fan.

Last year, I picked up the Sox again in the ALCS, and remember thinking that we had it locked just as it all fell apart.

I tried to watch the playoffs this year with a certain detached optimism. Time after time it looked like it would all fall apart again, and yet somehow this year it was always the other team that had Red Sox Moments. We get two calls reversed in Yankee Stadium? We get that fateful ground rule double that keeps the score tied in game 5. We get the Cardinals making weird base running errors. And, we survive eight errors in the first two games of the World Series against one of the best offensive teams in the league.

But ultimately, in the last two games I think the Red Sox showed that they were just playing better baseball. Great hitting, great pitching and great defense. A thing of beauty all around.

Let's hope we don't have to wait 86 years for the next one. It would be cool if my son could see this happen before he's 38.

Brief Outage

2004-10-28 · by peterb

Due to a power outage at our ISP, followed by a hard drive crash, Tea Leaves was unavailable for most of the day. But, thanks to the hard work and dedication of the folks at Telerama Internet, we're back online without even having lost any data (other than perhaps a few comments.)

Here's a big plusplus going out to the team at Telerama. Thanks, guys!

Northern's Pie

2004-11-01 · by peterb

DCP_1207

As American as apple pie

Not a lot of sugar, an amazingly fantastic whole wheat crust, and a ton of Northern Spy apples. It was yummy. Still, I maintain my position that sour apples are perfectly fine to eat out of hand.

When I was a kid, we had a sour cherry tree in our backyard. Every summer, we were overwhelmed with baskets, buckets, crates of sour, tangy cherries that would make you pucker like a persimmon. Eventually, over the years, the tree grew old and stopped producing.

I haven't had a sour cherry since.

Anyone know where I can buy some?

The Id Parade

2004-11-02 · by peterb

Today's the day. Place your bets, make your choice, and vote.

Four years ago, the cant among the hipper-than-thou was that it didn't matter whether Bush or Gore was elected, because they were both corporate drones with indistinguishable policies.

Today, it is clear to everyone: it matters whether Bush or Kerry wins this election. It matters a lot.

Preemptive Strike

2004-11-03 · by peterb

I Blame Ohio

I promise, I promise, the political articles will stop, soon.

In anticipation of the continuing disaster that is our electorate's (apparent) choice, I present, for your delight and consumption, the I Blame Ohio line of fine clothing products. Coffee mugs, T-shirts (for you or your budding little politicians), mouse pads -- if you're bitter, have we got the products for you. Just stop by and visit the store.

If you haven't tried blaming Ohio yet, start today!

Tea Leaves: Profiting from everyone's misfortune since 2004.

Prince Of Persia

2004-11-04 · by psu

Last week I found I was in my local GameStop and happened to browse past Prince Of Persia: The Sands of Time. Since Pete was pretty hard on this game and I tend to believe Pete, I had avoided it until now. But I figured (1) it was cheap and (2) I could return it in a week if I hated it, since it was used.

Prince of Persia is not the type of game I usually get into. This is because it requires two things that I do not possess in abundance:

  1. Hand/eye coordination.
  2. Timing.

In addition, the game has a third person real time combat thing going on that is also the sort of thing at which I do not excel.

But, the game sucks you in because the main character, the Prince, is one nimble acrobatic badass, and except for some camera issues, the controls make even the most unlikely moves really easy to pull off. It's also damned pretty.

However, none of this is my main point. If you've played the game, you know that fairly early on in the proceedings, there is a long and difficult sequence involving a fight with many zombies and the zombified remains of the Prince's father. Let me summarize. Between savepoint A and savepoint B (ah yes, stupid savepoints), the Prince must

  1. Run up a wall and hit a switch to make a pillar appear.
  2. Run up the pillar and swing on to a pole.
  3. Jump over to that platform over there
  4. Wall run over to that other platform.
  5. Jump down and crawl around to that ledge.
  6. Run into the scary spacey area and drink the magic water.
  7. Swing through 3 poles to get over to that other ledge.
  8. Evade the knives of doom.
  9. Wall run under the saws, hit switch on the floor then wall run back under the saws to get through a door before it shuts.
  10. Pull out a lever which opens a door one level above me.
  11. Evade the knives of doom.
  12. Run up the wall to hit a switch which brings up a pillar so I can jump up to it and climb this shaft.
  13. At the top of the shaft, wall run through the hall over another set of saws and slide under the door which is closing.

After all this, the Prince is then treated to a long fight with several zombies. This fight is much harder than the zombie fights that have come before it, and you will die several times before you figure out how to finish it. When the fight is done, you get savepoint B. Then, to get to savepoint C, you run outside, jump into a courtyard, and kill 10 easy zombies. That's it. The game timer shows me that it took me 45min to get from savepoint A to savepoint B. It then took me 5 minutes to get from savepoint B to savepoint C.

Here is my main point: whoever designed this sequence of the game should be taken out in the back yard and tortured until he cries like a little girl.

The interval between the savepoints A and B is ludicrously long, especially since the time to savepoint C is so short. This long interval is combined with a level of difficulty that is much higher than anywhere else in the game. I can't imagine any rationale for this design, especially when the rest of the game is so excellent. Is Ubisoft saying "if you aren't hard core enough to get through this, then you may as well just throw the game away"? Why would they do that?

Game difficulty is admittedly tricky to tune. It seems to me that the ideal game is one that lets you win while making you think you had to work for it. This is something that a game like Madden Football does really well. You can tune the game so you win the Super Bowl every year and your team kicks CPU butt, but it always feels like a challenge while you are doing it.

Prince of Persia also does this very well, except for this one sequence. It leaves me wondering why the game designers, after doing so well everywhere else, would give us this one wart which is so ugly that it make people who want to love the game hate it enough to quit. Which brings up my main question. What are Boss Battles for? Boss battles in every game from Mario and Luigi Superstar Saga to Half Life have this sort of "ha ha, you better be hard core to get past THIS" character. You are coasting along, loving the game, and then you hit this wall.

Why are these walls here? What's the point?

iTunes OCD

2004-11-05 · by peterb

You'd think that having an iPod would be an endless parade of musical bliss. And, mostly, it is. But the one worm in the apple is that now that you have 5,000 songs in the library, and you have to rate them.

"Oh, come now," you say. "You don't have to rate those songs." And maybe you'd be right in a sort of narrowminded, positivist, literal way. But when you're talking about me, you're talking about someone who eats all of the green M&M's first, and is convinced that they actually taste better. The robots demand that I rate my music; therefore, I must rate it. I am a man without free will.

So the first problem you face is what the ratings actually "mean." iTunes lets you rate songs anywhere from 0 to 5 stars. I quickly disposed of the "0" rating -- with 5,000 songs, I needed some way to distinguish those that I haven't rated at all. So a zero rating means "not rated yet."

It only took me a few days to assign semantic meanings to each of the ratings:

The rating isn't everything, of course. Ratings are focused on songs, and that doesn't tell the whole story. For example, The Ex's Joggers and Smoggers album is composed of bits of found sound and rhythm that, considered on their own, are probably 1 or 2 stars no matter who is "rating" them; but taken as a whole, the album is a masterwork -- the songs need their neighbors. This is true also for the brief, nameless interstitial audiocollages on The Loud Family's Days For Days. But at least for your average pop song, it's a workable system. I just took a look at the distribution of ratings, and it is pleasingly bell-shaped, with perhaps a slight bias towards low ratings.

The next problem is what to do with the ratings. Sure, I made the inevitable smart playlists and such, but fundamentally I've generated this mass of data, and I'm a geek, so: I want to data mine it. What music do I like? Off the top of my head, if you said "Who are your favorite artists?" I'd say: Aimee Mann, Loud Family (a.k.a Game Theory), Nick Cave, Tom Waits, and Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet. Does the view of my library I get when I look at my individual song ratings match what I would say that I like if you asked me?

It turns out that iTunes doesn't have any built-in way to do this easily. Lots of people have written scripts to do various things, but I was only able to find one script that came close to what I wanted to do: a script which ranked albums, rather than artists. So as a first cut, I decided to run it and see what it said.
Rank Artist Album Rating
1 David Bowie Scary Monsters 4.2
2 Aimee Mann Bachelor No 2 4.08
3 Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds Live Seeds 4.0
4 They Might Be Giants Lincoln 3.78
5 Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds Let Love In 3.7

Hmmm, not too bad. It's a deceptive view, though. The album ranking script is brittle. In particular, it will only rank albums for which you've rated every single song. Since I know for a fact I haven't even come close to that yet, I know it's missing a lot of data (and by the very nature of rating psychology, there's probably a bias to rate songs that you like before rating songs that you don't like). Furthermore, the "album" is the wrong unit of measure for this sort of averaging. Going back to my Loud Family example: Days for Days has 10 superb songs that I rated highly and 10 little interstitial pieces that I gave low ratings because they don't really stand on their own. This kills the curve. The end result is I have a script telling me that I think, subconsciously, that The Proclaimers' Sunshine on Leith is marginally better than Days for Days, which isn't true at all.

So, I decided to take the script and see if I could use it as a base to generate some more interesting views of the data. This meant I had to play with Applescript. Have you ever used Applescript? It's like Cobol, but less versatile. Oh my God, what an ugly language. Basically, you can have your script interact with iTunes, sending iTunes commands asking it to give you the ratings for all the songs by such and such an artist. Really, if you want to do something like this, I think a better way would be to just parse the iTunes Library XML database directly, rather than using Applescript. But, what can I say, I was lazy.

So with just a little tweaking, I got a list of artists and rankings, rather than albums. The invariants were a bit different: you didn't have to have rated every song by an artist, but only rated songs count towards an artist's score. Artists with fewer than 10 rated songs weren't included at all:
Rank Artist Rating
1 Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds 3.85
2 Aimee Mann 3.81
3 DJ Z-Trip & DJ P 3.8
4 Kate Bush 3.64
5 Me First And The Gimme Gimmes 3.42
6 Nick Cave 3.35
7 Paola & Chiara 3.33
8 Michiru Oshima 3.29
9 Billy Bragg 3.29
10 Jane Siberry 3.26
11 Richard Thompson 3.25
12 Tom Waits 3.22

Better, but still some odd results. Fundamentally, I started converging on the idea that using the mean of the score in number of stars is broken. The stars have a semantic meaning which doesn't really map smoothly on a real 0-5 scale. So I gave it one more try.

This time, I decided that what I really wanted to know was: which artists have the strongest repertoires (subjectively) in my library? So I decided to use the idea of "hot songs." If I gave a song a 4 or 5 rating then -- by my personal scale, described above -- it was a song that I'd be glad to listen to nearly any time. Whether it's a 4 or a 5 doesn't matter while I'm listening to it. If a song is below that threshold, it doesn't really matter whether it's a 1, 2, or 3. Back to the Applescript editor once again (oh, the pain, the unending pain) to generate a list of artists. This time, the score is an integer between 0 and 100, which is approximately "number of 'hot' songs by that artist in the library, divided by the total number of songs by that artist in the library, * 100". So an artist for whom I rated every song a 4 or 5 would get a score of 100, and an artist who got no 4s or 5s would get a 0. I also decided to actually display the number of songs affecting the calculation, rather than just showing the score. I find this a bit more interesting:
Rank Artist Rating # Hot Songs # Songs
1 Aimee Mann 59 22 37
2 Bob Mould 55 6 11
3 Billy Bragg 52 11 21
4 Nick Cave 45 14 31
5 Nick Cave And The Bad Seeds 44 18 41
6 Lou Reed/John Cale 40 6 15
7 Indigo Girls 40 4 10
8 DJ Z-Trip & DJ P 39 9 23
9 Pixies 38 36 94
10 Game Theory 37 10 27
11 Tom Waits 36 49 135
12 Karl Hendricks Trio 34 23 68
13 Talking Heads 33 5 15
14 The Ex + Tom Cora 33 4 12
15 Me First And The Gimme Gimmes 33 4 12
16 Mary's Danish 33 4 12
17 Los Straitjackets 33 4 12
18 Paola & Chiara 31 8 26
19 Wall Of Voodoo 30 3 10
20 The Sisters of Mercy 30 3 10

Now we're starting to approximate my subjective worldview much better. Kate Bush drops completely out of the top 20 (thank God, my hipster status is secure, unless people notice that Paola e Chiara are there also). Furthermore, it's immediately apparent which of the top 20 members are outliers, just by seeing the low number of tracks that have been rated. I have one Indigo Girls album; it's the one that is universally known as "the good one," and it has 4 songs on it that I really like. That's enough to give them a probably unjustly high position in the list. So this version of the script is unfairly generous to artists who only have a few tracks in the library. Probably the next step is to give a bonus to artists who have many tracks in the library, and a penalty to artists who only have a few (David Bowie, for example, has pretty much the same rating as Roxy Music, even though they only have 2 highly rated songs in my library, and he has 30. That's unjust. Unjust, I tell you!)

And, of course, I'll need to continue with the arduous, backbreaking work of listening to all my music. And rating it.

The original Applescript that I used as the pattern for all of this stat generation can be found here. If you've got a script that you like that does something similar, please mention it in the comments below. I can't possibly be the only person in the world that is obsessive-compulsive about this.

Pot Stickers

2004-11-06 · by psu

Chinese dumplings, or the fried variation called Pot Stickers (more literally, the stuff that tears up because it is stuck to the bottom of the frying pan) were a fixture of my youth. My mom brought them from China to the U.S. and I remember huge get togethers where a dozen friends and family would crank out hundreds of these things for all of us to gorge on.

Although I was never much help making them as a child, one of the missions of my adult life was to figure out how they are made, and at least be able to create a reasonable facsimile of the dish in my own home. Ironically, my parents have moved on to the frozen sort, since the real stuff is too much work.

I don't like giving people recipes for this sort of thing, because this dish is one of those that you cannot make out of a book. Someone who knows how to do it has to show you (preferably someone's mom). But, I think I finally have a method that is tuned well enough to present here for those who are curious. Even so, you'll notice various parts of the recipe that defy precise description. So, the following description is more for my own records than something that I expect anyone to be able to use as an actual recipe. I don't know how to describe this so that you can do it without me around to show you once. But here we go.

If you make one batch of filling and two dough balls as below, this will net you maybe 60 dumplings. We usually do a double batch and get 120-150. This can feed 5 or 6 people and leave us with a tray or two to freeze. Yum.

The Dough

  1. Start with 2-3 cups of flour and one cup of cold water.

  2. You must use crappy bleached bad for you Pillsbury all purpose flour. The fancy-ass organic whole wheat stuff will make you crappy dough. Trust me.

  3. Put 2 to 2 1/2 cups of the flour in a bowl. Add most of the water but not all and stir it around with chopsticks.

  4. If the flour does not soak up all the water, add flour. If it is too dry, add water. Stir some more, check again. Turn the mixture out on to a board and knead it until it holds together. Don't worry about making the ball smooth.

  5. Put the ball into a ziploc bag and stick it in the fridge for a few hours.

  6. Pull the ball out of the fridge. The dough should be stiff but flexible. Knead it around a bit, adding flour if it is sticky. Put it back in the fridge for a few more hours.

Obviously I can't tell you how to tell when the dough is right. That is what you need my mom for.

The Filling

  1. Put a pound of ground pork in a bowl.

  2. Add 1-2 tablespoons of soy sauce, 4-5 tablespoons of minced ginger (more if you like more), a dash of sesame oil, salt, 5 or 6 turns of pepper. Mix it up.

  3. Finely chop up 1 bunch of scallions. Mix that in.

  4. At this point I give it a whiff, decide it needs more soy sauce and add another tablespoon or two.

  5. Put this into the fridge until the dough is ready.

Now you have to get the chinese cabbage ready. This part is critical and tricky.

  1. You use about half of a large chinese cabbage per pound of meat. Cut it up into small pieces, then chop it in a Cuisinart until it's a fine dice. The pieces should be around the same size as if you just diced a yellow onion to a nice size.

  2. Put some cabbage into cheese cloth and squeeeeze as much liquid out of it as you can. This is critical. Keep the juice in a bowl. Salting the cabbage a bit will draw out the moisture and make this easier. Repeat this until you have worked through all the chopped cabbage.

When you have all the cabbage squozed, and you are ready to start filling, start mixing the cabbage into the pork. The mixture will dry up a bit. Add a couple of tablespoons of the cabbage juice back into the pork. You should be able to mix 2 or 3 cups of chopped cabbage back into the pork mixture. One pound of meat will make enough filling to use up between one and two batches of the dough recipe depending on how much flour you end up with in the dough.

Rolling and Filling

This is the part I can't really tell you how to do.

  1. Take the dough ball out of the fridge. Work it a bit. Cut it into thirds.

  2. Form each third into a cylinder about 1/2 inch in diameter. Then cut it into 1 inch pieces.

  3. Flatten these pieces with the palm of your hand. Then take a small rolling pin and roll the dough out into small flat circles.

The goal is to have a skin that is a bit thick in the middle and thin on the outsides. Each disk should be around 2.5-3 inches in diameter or a bit bigger, and reasonably thin. Take a look at a package of frozen dumplings some time. Those skins are about the right thickness.

This is where having the dough be soft enough, but not too soft, is key. If it is too soft, the skins will have no bite. If it is too stiff, you won't be able to roll and fill.

Assuming you are right handed, here is how you fold the dumplings: take one of the rolled out skins and hold it in the palm of your left hand face up. Put a small amount of filling in the middle. Now with your right hand, pick up the skin in the "middle" and fold it over the filling and pinch it together on the other side. Then turn the thing over to the left, pinch the left ends together, and work your way back to the middle. Then do the same thing from the right end. When you start at this, you usually end up with something that looks like a ravioli. But, with practice, you'll get stuff that looks more like a pot sticker and can "stand up".

Take the filled dumplings and put them on a tray. I like to use sheet pans with floured wax paper. Don't let them sit around too long before cooking. An hour or two at most. Anything you don't cook should be frozen on the trays, then put into freezer bags.

Cooking

To make the boiled dumplings, fill a large pot with water. Bring to a boil. Drop the dumplings in one by one. Cook until they float, then a couple of minutes past or until you are sure the pork is cooked through.

To make pot stickers, get a large non stick frying pan. Heat it up. Add a couple of tablespoons of oil. Put the dumplings down in a single layer in the pan in the spiral. Mix a little water with a little vinegar. Pour this into the pan (you don't want too much liquid, or the things will boil, just a thin layer on the bottom of the pan). Cover, turn the heat to medium and cook 10-15 minutes or until the dumplings char to the bottom of the frying pan. This is where the name pot stickers comes from.

Review Copies

2004-11-08 · by peterb

OK, I give up. Someone clue me in. Who am I supposed to be talking to at game companies to get on their press lists?

Great Moments in Geography

2004-11-08 · by peterb

It was just this past summer, and I was in my favorite French bistro in Toronto: La Palette. It is small, comfortably crowded, and quirky. It was a wonderful day. Kensington Market was closed to auto traffic in a "take back the streets" sort of moment. Live music blared from three different bands. And a summer shower forced us all inside -- wet, but happy. I was looking forward to a simple plate of steak frittes. The beer list at La Palette is great, and I was able to enjoy a Hoegaarden Verboden Vrucht, which I haven't had since the last time I was in Antwerp, nearly 8 years ago now.

I struck up a conversation with the couple next to me, older, visiting Toronto themselves from Prince Edward Island. Talk turned to the recently opened -- and now bankrupt -- ferry connecting Toronto and Rochester. We all agreed that it was a great idea. My new friend seemed concerned, though. "We tried to get seats for the opening run, but they weren't organized enough for us to be able to buy tickets." "You mean they were sold out?" "No, they just couldn't figure out how to sell me a ticket." (No wonder the ferry is now shut down).

As for me, I've long wanted a warp gate that would make travelling to Toronto faster. And even if the ferry wasn't actually faster, it would be more interesting than driving the QEW. "Gee," I said, "Rochester is just a little too far away from me. I'm hoping they'll have a ferry between Toronto and Buffalo."

An uncomfortable silence ensued. The husband and wife looked seriously at each other. Then he looked back and, gently, said, "Well, you see, the difficulty with that would be that Buffalo is on a different lake."

Why, yes, in fact, I am American. How could you tell?

Halo 2 Tragedy

2004-11-09 · by peterb

Today, I bought the Collector's Edition of Halo 2.

In a cruel twist of fate, the box I got had only one disk in it -- the "making of" DVD -- and no game disk. So I had to trudge back to Huge Corporate Chain tonight to exchange it for a box which actually, y'know, had the game I paid for.

So, expect the first look review tomorrow, instead of today. Fortunately, I was able to try it out tonight with about 9 other people.

Wow.

Fundamentally, the multiplayer is nearly the same as the original. But the ability to play on Live without having to muck about with getting a bunch of Xboxen and TVs and sweaty geeks in the same room is, in and of itself, transformative. There have been some gameplay tweaks (notably the addition of dual-wielding) that feel like they don't add much. The deathmatch levels feel much better designed than in Halo 1. In the first game, all of the levels were these huge, sprawling edifices that felt like they were made for 16 player system link. Unfortunately, we usually played with 4 players, which meant that 90% of our time was spent wandering around looking for each other. The levels in Halo 2, by contrast, feel much more tightly designed: most of your time is spent killing. And dying.

The graphics are brighter, sharper, and nicer than in Halo 1, but not such that you would write an essay about them. I haven't spent much time in the single player game. Given Bungie's history of writing good plots, that's what I'm most looking forward to.

That being said: 90 minutes of online play (in both deathmatch and capture-the-flag matches) has left me trembling from adrenaline overload. Which says something about the pace of the game.

More tomorrow. In the meantime, you can read a great description of the experience at Must Work Harder.

Halo 2: Day One

2004-11-10 · by peterb

Apparently, I'm not that good at it.

And not just the online version, either. I started the single-player campaign of "Heroic," which is one notch above normal, and am now ruing it. I'm considering restarting on "normal," or perhaps even looking to see if there is some easier setting, perhaps named "creampuff Casper Milquetoast".

But it sure is pretty.

Now, don't get me wrong. I like Halo, a lot. It's pretty much a rock solid implementation of "the 3d multiplayer deathmatch shooter." It's Quake 3 with a pace that isn't stupidly painful, and with much, much better designed maps. But but but: I like the pace of Counterstrike better. I like that if you die in Counterstrike, you have to sit out for a good long time. It lends an air of gravity to the proceedings: actions have consequences. Whereas the 3-2-1-respawn we find in Halo and its ilk leads to a completely different style of gameplay.

I'm not whining that Halo has the gameplay that it has; I'm wondering why Counterstrike seems to be the only shooter that adopts the opposite position. Counterstrike is the most popular game of its genre. Wouldn't you think that someone else would at least try to imitate it?

Halo 2: The Good

2004-11-11 · by peterb

My praise of Halo 2 on this site has been pretty lukewarm so far. This is unfair, because it really is a great game. I think the issue is that some of the improvements from the first game are so subtle that they're hard to notice, and then once you notice them they're hard to describe to someone that hasn't played both games. Because of this, Halo 2 is perhaps missing some of the "wow factor" that some of us expected. The greatness of the game only becomes apparent after you play for a little while, especially in multiplayer. I'll try to enumerate some of those aspects here.

psu contributes a few items to this list, which I also agree with:

So I hope that when, in the future, I inevitably complain about this detail or that nit, you keep this list in mind. It's a great game

Halo 2: Variants

2004-11-12 · by peterb

Tonight I discovered that Halo 2 lets you define custom variants and name them. So, as a test, tonight I'll be rolling out Glock 19, a very simple variant: Players start with a pistol. There are no weapons to be found anywhere on the map, and no vehicles. And you have no shields.

It's about as close to Counterstrike as I could make Halo be. You also have the option of making players sit out for up to 2 minutes when they die, but I figure I'll see how the rest of the group takes it before adding that little rule.

We played it tonight; it was fun! Plus I did pretty well. Rare is the game when I can defeat TheEnglishman.

At Arm's Length

2004-11-14 · by peterb

Dear Robert:

Here's a question for you. It's inspired by the knowledge that the demo for Microsoft's upcoming Xbox release Forza Motorsport is circulating amongst the gaming press, but is not yet in wide enough circulation for any of the game bloggers I know to have played it yet. The question is "Why aren't demos like this going to the blogosphere first?

One of my primary interests is game blogging. I write intelligent, straightforward, in-depth, and (I think) fair commentary on video games, their design, and implementation. I must be doing something right, because quite a few game designers seem to read and enjoy my weblog, in addition to game players.

With one notable exception -- Pete Hines of Bethesda Softworks, who very courteously returned my phone call -- I cannot get the game developers' press or marketing liasons to give me the time of day.

Microsoft and a few other companies seem to have "gotten" blogging. They understand that the credibility they gain from letting some light shine in to what they're doing via sincere, honest communication beats a hundred press releases. So why are the game divisions of these companies -- and let's include Microsoft here -- still just sending review copies and demos to the same tired old media game magazines and sites, rather than trying to cultivate relationships with credible bloggers (and I humbly include myself among that number)?

I read the big online game magazines, sometimes. So do my friends. Everyone I know realizes that, barring a disaster of Ishtar proportions, they toe the corporate line. Gamespot, IGN -- these guys aren't credible. Every single reader understands that they are, generally, not reading honest impressions, but simply reworded press releases.

Guys like Tycho and Gabe at Penny Arcade are credible, and I think that Microsoft realizes it -- they understand that there's a risk that the Penny Arcade guys might disparage their product to their entire audience, but they take the risk on occasion because when the Penny Arcade guys say "This game rocks," their readers know it's not just marketing propaganda.

I doubt there are many game bloggers out there with the readership of Penny Arcade, yet. But a hundred (or more) credible voices talking honestly about a game's strengths and weaknesses, in detail, will carry more weight than yet another in an endless string of meaningless "9.2" ratings from Gamespot.

The word "game" doesn't appear once on the list at http://blogs.msdn.com/bloggers.aspx, although I've chanced upon the occasional article (for example, from the Flight Sim team). Electronic Arts is being drawn and quartered on Slashdot and elsewhere for their rumoured employment practices, and as near as I can tell they have no legitimate blogosphere presence to present another face to the world. What if there was a credible blogger at EA, who had a history, who had developed a trusted relationship with his readers, who could step forward and say "Hey, wait a minute. It's not like that. I love this company. Here's why."

So given that the game companies themselves aren't blogging, maybe I shouldn't be surprised that they don't understand how bloggers that don't work for them could be an important part of getting the word out about their games.

You get it. The .NET team gets it. The SMS/MOM team gets it. How do we get the game companies -- at Microsoft, and elsewhere -- to get it?

I want to say to them: "We're out here. We want to tell the world about your games. We want to talk about them. And we want to do it honestly."

Why not try talking with us, instead of at us?

Participation

2004-11-15 · by peterb

If you're able to borrow someone's child for a few hours, you should visit the Pittsburgh Children's Museum. Although their web site is vile, the installations at the museum are nothing short of superb. Nearly everything in the museum is interactive, interesting, and playful in visual, aural, or tactile ways.

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

There's a studio space where you, can make paper, silkscreen prints, paintings, or pottery. There are interesting interactive visual exhibits like the one pictured to the left. There's a floor with large pools, fountains, and lots of PVC pipe plumbing equipment to let you build little microinstallations of your own. There's my favorite section, the garage, with a car, some kinetic sculptures, a million switches, dials, and lights, and a small workshop with intermittent demos and lessons in woodworking and electronics.

It's somewhat sad that this is better than most of the museums I've been to that view adults as their primary audience, particularly with respect to the art installations. The idea that art can only be playful when it's targeted at children is depressing. That's not to say that art must always be playful, but seriously: when was the last time you went to an art exhibition and left with a smile on your face?

The exhibit I photographed above is a great little example. It's "just" a video projector showing an image of the people passing by against the wall. Various letters, in several colors, cascading down from the top of the screen. The exhibit engages viewers on different levels. Many people just walk by and look at themselves, wave, smile, or point. Others soon notice that the letters, through some clever programming, "land" on surfaces that are projected. Some people start playing with this; the woman in the center of the photo spent 5 solid minutes doing little soccer "headers," bouncing a letter off of her forehead. Another man realized that the letters weren't random -- they spell a message, Different viewers seek out different strategies for figuring out what it says. I was partial to sticking out an arm and letting the letters land on it; an older gentleman enjoyed walking from left to right and reading the message one syllable at a time.

To know what it says, you'll have to go visit the museum yourself.

Ikon Angst

2004-11-16 · by peterb

Time at which I deployed the new, custom designed category icons for Tea Leaves yesterday: 7:38 pm.

Time at which the first reader complained that I took away their favorite icon: 7:49 pm.

I love the little fruit-lover as much as the rest of you, but he's not mine. I always felt a little guilty about my icons; they're grabbed from all sorts of random places. I wanted something that would give the site a little more consistent feel. I commissioned Elise to design some replacements, and I'm really happy with the results.

However, for nostalgia's sake, I have left the FF2000 as the miniature icon that should show up in bookmark lists, browser tabs, and the like.

Non Sequitur

2004-11-16 · by peterb

I have no point here, I just like saying "343 Guilty Spark".

The Latent Object

2004-11-17 · by psu

There was a discussion on our local chat system a while back about the genesis of the frenzy over Halo 2. Pete suggested that the pre-release hype for a game such as Halo has its origins in the hard-wired obsessive addiction that hard-core gamers have for the next big hit, having been searching for the next big hit since their first exposure to games as young men.

This, of course, does not apply to me. My strange obsessive frenzy for Halo has a completely different source that Pete could not understand. After thinking about how to explain it, I came up with the following.

It is actually pretty simple. For any given hobby, there is always the object that you can see, but do not yet own, which will improve your experience in the hobby.

By analogy to photography, I'll call this object the latent object of desire. Back when we captured images on film, the undeveloped image was referred to as the latent image. Exposed film has the potential of an image on it, but the picture itself is not there until you develop it. Any photographer will tell you that exposed film only contains perfect images. It's only in development that you find out that you did it wrong. So the reality of the actual image is almost always a letdown compared to the perfection of the latent image.

Similarly, the reality of the real object is always a letdown compared to the perfection and bliss of the latent one. Therefore, it is usually much more fun to shop for things than to actually buy them. Not coincidentally, the way I tend to interact with hobbies, especially when I don't have much time to really do them, is in shopping for latent objects that will improve my relationship with the hobby when I finally have time later. Which brings me back to Halo 2.

The gaming industry, being full of talented sales people, are masters of manipulating the desire for the latent object. This is the reason that "journalism" in the industry concentrates almost entirely on previews of games that have not been released yet. The game not played is still in a state of perfection. The latent game, if you will, has no save problems, no glitches in the online servers, no gameplay foibles, pacing problems, or unbeatable boss battles. Gaming provides an almost unending stream of new latent objects to shop for, to think about, and to compare.

So of course this drives my natural addiction to shopping into a frenzy, and hence the psychological mania over Halo 2. Luckily, I mostly shop, as opposed to this guy.

My other little shopping project of late has been comparing the GameCube and the Playstation 2 as second console purchases. After weeks of painstaking research, it seems to me that it all boils down to Mario and Zombies against Final Fantasy and cult Japanese imports. But more on that another time.

Bonaguil source release

2004-11-18 · by peterb

Work has been super-busy, so I haven't had any time to hack on Bonaguil. Therefore, I'm releasing the source code for people to look at and/or play with. All right are reserved at this point; consider this free (as in beer) for personal use, but not in the public domain or GPLable. If you produce a derivative work based on Bonaguil, please give credit accordingly and include the URL of this weblog. Bonaguil may not be included on any archive of games or software being sold for profit; if you want to do this, you'll need to contact me and arrange a separate licensing agreement.

So if you care, you can download a jar file that includes all resources, including source code. The AI interface is fairly well-isolated, so it should be trivial to implement AIs that are much smarter than the two demo AIs I provided here. If you end up implementing an AI and send it to me, I'll include it in the next release, if you like.

Realism

2004-11-19 · by peterb

I have a friend who won't play The Sims. She won't even try it.

This is someone who likes whimsical videogames, who enjoys nonviolent, nontraditional games. So it seemed to me that even if this wasn't her cup of tea, it would at least be worth trying. I asked her why she was so sure it wasn't for her.

"It's like this," she said. "In Kindergarten, we used to play 'house.' Playing 'house' is fun, and you and your friends take on different roles and do different things. But inevitably, there would be that one person who took things to a level of detail that turned a fun game into drudgery. So you'd be playing 'house,' and you'd pretend to have 'dinner.' And then after dinner, if that person was playing, you'd have to wash every dish. And put everything back in the cabinets. And scrub the floor. And take out the trash. And so on. When I look at The Sims, it looks to me like it was made by that same person."

This isn't meant to trash The Sims (After all, I have already done that.) It illustrates the point that "realism" in games, like honesty in the face of the question "does this make me look fat?" can be an overrated virtue.

What most game players seek is not realism, but iconic verisimilitude. You want the game's settings and mechanics to seem realistic, but you don't usually want them to actually be realistic.

Examples abound. In Electronic Arts' Formula One racing games, you can turn off all the driver aids and turn on realistic crashes. For most players, this has the effect of making their car impossible to control. The very first time they brush into another player or a barrier, pieces of their car fly off, and their race is over. That's "realistic" -- if you've ever seen an F1 car lose a wing because of contact with another car, you know this -- but for the average player, it's not a lot of fun. Compare this with Project Gotham Racing 2, a game that some players call realistic, in which the typical online race may have hundreds of high speed collisions with no injuries and no retirements.

It's not fair to simply dismiss PGR2 as "not realistic." Rather, the effort to create realism is concentrated in certain areas and downplayed in others. Immersion in a virtual world is enhanced by realistically modeled environments, noticeable differences in the handling of cars, etc. However, there are plenty of places where realism is blown off: damage is "realistically modeled" visually, but doesn't make the cars harder to drive. There are no traffic lights. You don't get parking tickets. You don't have to send in monthly car payments.

Most people would distinguish Counterstrike from other first-person shooters by describing it as "more realistic." It has lovingly modeled weapons. Weapons are lethal -- getting shot has consequences. Dying means you are out of the mission. You can't magically grab a first-aid pack and be healed. On the other hand: dying is fast - no sitting in a puddle of your own blood, gut-shot and moaning, à  la Reservoir Dogs, for 2 hours before finally expiring. There's no real negative consequence to being almost dead -- you can lose 99 points of "blood" and still aim just as well as when you started the round. None of the characters faint or vomit at the sight of blood. If the hostages you are rescuing get shot, there's no corresponding civil suit. Apart from the hostages, there are never any innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire. You never have to wonder if your character has adequate life insurance to take care of the wife and three children he left behind.

And that's OK. Just like its kissing cousin "open-endedness", "realism" is best used in small doses (by comparison, you'll never hear someone say "There was a bit too much fun in this game, for my taste.") In the real world, there are no second chances after death. In nearly every videogame ever made, the character's death is quickly followed with another opportunity to try again. (There actually are some exceptions to this, but they are rare enough that we can name them: Wizardry 8, The Temple of Elemental Evil, and Angband each have an optional "ironman" mode where the death of a character is permanent. You are not allowed to revert to an earlier save; saves in that mode are for pausing only, not for backup. Steel Battalion for the Xbox will delete your savegame if you die while in a mission. To the best of my knowledge, that's the full list of current games that try to punish you "permanently" for dying.)

If the elements that the author brings to a videogame are ludology (the game mechanics) and narrative (the story), what the players bring is curiosity and a willingness to suspend disbelief. In this way, game players are like movie audiences. Filmmakers have had decades to develop a vocabulary that is detailed enough to create immersion but not so finely-grained that it annihilates the suspension of disbelief with boredom ("Let's make dinner," someone says, and then with just one simple cut, everyone is sitting at a table, eating.) Game developers are still working on their vocabulary; the medium is still in its youth. And unlike in film, where formalism without narrative has been completely, utterly rejected by the viewing public (and has thus become solely the realm of experimental artists), formalist games without narrative are still among the most popular (Tetris, anyone?)

football

Atari Football

Twenty-five years ago, videogame football was three white blobs and three pink blobs doing "the running play" or "the passing play." Today, nearly all the rules of the game are implemented, player movement is largely motion-captured, and even the trappings of the TV broadcasts are imitated. But despite all this realism, the game does not have the feel of real football. It is, to twist a phrase of Douglas Adams', something that is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike football. The John Madden franchise isn't actually a football simulator; it's a simulator of being John Madden.

So go ahead, model the ballistics in your game, or the ragdoll physics of one player tackling another. Go ahead and motion capture and render the graphics at a higher resolution. Play the explosions in surround sound. But remember, the moment you forget that realism needs to be subjugated to the game's fun factor, and not the master of it, you run the risk that half of your audience will go play Tetris or Bejeweled instead.

Say, does this shirt make me look fat?

Halo 2: My View

2004-11-21 · by psu

Just finished the single player in Halo 2, so I feel like I can talk about the game in more detail.

Good:

The single player campaign improves on the first game in almost every way. For example, in the first Halo, there was a load screen for every large chapter of the game, but then none within each level until you got to the end. In Halo 2, there is a load screen when you start the game but then there isn't another one until you quit. Ever. Whoever implemented this gets super genius kudos.

At first, the enemies seem a bit too easy on the Normal difficulty level. While they seem to fall down easier, they also seem faster and meaner than in the first game. The new enemies are mostly enjoyable. By the end of the game, they were beating me up pretty well. I like the energy sword, and I like the shotgun. Dual wielding the plasma rifle is also useful.

The plot twists and turns much like the first one, but overall the pacing is much better. The stages were more linear, with no backtracking and fewer sequences of dozens of identical hallways to get lost in. There are multiple moments in the game where the action is so frantic that you will want to cower under the couch and sob like a little girl.

The ending is a bit abrupt, and hints at a sequel much more explicitly than the first game does. But the final stage is much less annoying than "the drive the warthog off the end of the earth" deathmarch that ended Halo 1.

People have complained that the game is short. These people are nuts. What they mean is, the game's pacing was not padded out with worthless backtracking missions and boring driving.

Not so good:

There were some rendering glitches in my game, especially in the in-engine cut scenes. What would happen is that textures, or sometimes whole objects would just pop in from nowhere after a scene change. These were relatively rare.

Checkpoints still suck. But there were only one or two sequences between checkpoints that were so long as to piss me off. Usually, these took the form of "you must kill these 10 things over and over again because you keep dying on the 9th one".

I still hate the Warthog, but the power sliding makes it less stupid.

Too many of the weapons are basically useless. Or maybe I'm just useless trying to wield them.

Multiplay:

The multiplay rocks. I don't think much more needs to be said about it. My only gripe is that the respawn times don't give my hands enough time to rest between rounds.

Metal Gear Stupid

2004-11-22 · by psu

I found out today that the title of this piece is sadly not original. In fact, much of what I have to say is even told more concisely here. But I figured, why let lack of originality stop a good rant. So here we go.

The new Metal Gear Solid game is out, and I noticed that aside from the exception above, all the game review sites seem afraid to tell their readers the truth, which is that if this game is anything like the other two in the franchise, then it completely blows. Since they can't possibly not think this, they must be talking in code. Luckily, I have broken their little code. What follows is a guide to translating the game reviews into rational language.

What they say: The game has an epic storyline.

What they mean: You will spend several hours in the game conversing with a motionless head over your in game radio.

What they say: The game is cinematic.

What they mean: For every twenty minutes of gameplay, you will watch three hours of cut scenes revealing a plot that could only make sense to a serious meth addict.

What they say: The game's controls follow the classic configuration and provide Snake with a great combination of stealth and action moves.

What they mean: You can walk, or aim your weapon, but not both at the same time. This makes you the world's most bad-ass super spy.

What they say: The game camera could be better, but it's not too bad.

What they mean: Worst third person camera ever. You will spend more time looking at the floor or the wall or the ceiling than actually being able to see your enemies and environment.

What they say: The enemy AI forces you to use those stealth skills to the limit.

What they mean: To avoid your enemies, you can walk around underneath a carboard box.

What they say: The game is has a high degree of difficulty.

What they mean: If you have to hear the screams in the GAME OVER screen one more time you will rip your ears off the side of your head.

I hope this simple guide will help you in understanding all the glowing reviews of Metal Gear Solid.

Can WRC Rally Be Saved?

2004-11-23 · by peterb

Around Thanksgiving, in my house, the pheromones that men emit while bonding flow thickly and freely. In the haze of their L-tryptophan enhanced post-prandial stupors, men move slowly, so as not to alarm their pack-mates. Belts are loosened. Talk of politics is avoided. Attention focuses, inevitably, on whatever sport is on TV. Often, this ends up being football, naturally, but every so often I'll walk into the room only to find all eyes focused in rapt attention on a golf match.

I have great respect for the skill required to be a competitive golfer. It is a subtle game. It requires more stamina and strength than you'd think, if you've never tried it. Put on a replay of an amazing putt and I'll be able to appreciate it, as long as I don't have to watch for more than about 30 seconds or so. But I can't understand the point of watching an entire golf match, or even a hole. As a spectator sport, it is composed entirely of interstitial pauses. Watching golf because you "like sports" is like listening to John Cage's 4'33" because you "like music." When a golfer is taking a shot, the game is interesting. At all other times, the sport is of merely academic interest.

Realize, then, the pain it causes me to admit that WRC Rally racing, which I love, is the golf of the motorsports world.

Rally is about timing. Drivers compete only indirectly. Each driver and co-driver attacks the course, and the best time wins. Unless something has gone very wrong, there are effectively no passes in rally, except for simulations created by compositing telemetry data after the fact. If you played the most popular rally videogames, you might not even realize this, since they typically offer an "everyone races the same dirt track at once" experience, a race format that would probably lead to molten flaming death in real life. The game manufacturers do this for an obvious reason: to most people, time trials are more boring than wheel to wheel racing.

There is not an obvious solution to this problem; which is mostly one of presentation and immanence. The networks -- for both golf and rally -- are increasingly moving towards highlight reels. Take all the action from a single day and compress it into ten minutes, or an hour. Viewed this way, both sports are marvelously dense with thrills and cliffhanger moments.

And yet, as a viewer, this treatment leaves me cold. A highlight reel is not a sporting event. Sports, like news, or a good chilli, is best served hot. As a spectator, I can't even stand watching a sporting event more than a few minutes lagged on my Tivo. Once the Steeler game is over, I could care less about seeing what happened. I want to watch in the moment. I want to be in the moment.

A few years ago, Speed Channel would broadcast a compressed highlight reel each night after the day's rallying. Last year, they moved to showing a single three-hour show on the day after the rally finished. This year, they are showing a one-hour highlight reel a full week after the rally ended. For that entire week, I creep around the Internet like a cat burgler, hands ready over my eyes, lest I find out that Petter Solberg and Subaru won in Wales, and therefore I won't want to bother watching the highlight reel. Most Americans have no idea what WRC Rally is. Speed Channel isn't helping; viewership is down.

Combine this with the fact that WRC Rally is a monstrously expensive sport, and you have a sport in freefall. Citroën and Peugeot -- the only two teams to have won the manufacturers title in the past five years -- have both announced that they are leaving the sport at the end of 2005. When even the team that is winning the championship is fleeing, how do you make a compelling case to other manufacturers that this is a value proposition they want to be a part of?

WRC Rally is not going to disappear tomorrow, any more than F1 will. But if something isn't done to improve the ratio between the expenses of running races where it's more or less expected that half the drivers will drive their cars off a cliff and into a tree, and the returns for participating in the sport, then the participating talent pool will continue to shrink. Colin McRae has already decided that the Paris-Dakar Rally is more worth his time than WRC. Who will be next?

Relish Not

2004-11-24 · by peterb

I listen to NPR, as required by my "urbane liberal" membership. If you listen to NPR also, you know that the passage of the seasons can be marked not only by the weather, but by the reappearance of certain set pieces, regular as clockwork, like old friends.

Or, in the case of Susan Stamberg's cranberry relish recipe, mortal enemies.

Stamberg recites this little bit of culinary performance art -- originally inflicted upon the world by food writer Craig Claiborne -- every Thanksgiving, without fail. She always talks about how her revolting concoction of cranberries, onions, and horseradish "sounds awful, but is actually delicious."

I am here to tell you: the woman is lying.

I'm an adventurous, nontraditional eater, who enjoys strong tastes and rough contrasts. The Stamberg relish recipe has no redeeming qualities. I would not feed it to a rat. It is so utterly vile that it transcends mere loathsomeness. It is the Platonic ideal of repulsive food. Through some sort of near-miraculous negative synergy, it takes three foods which are versatile and delicious and turns them into a foul brew that does violence to the very concept of food.

Here's a better cranberry relish recipe.

Tiny Epiphany

2004-11-25 · by peterb

If you just eat turkey and salad, and green vegetables, and skip the mashed potatoes, stuffing, candied yams, and so on, Thanksgiving dinner doesn't actually make you feel so full that you might die.

I say that L-Tryptophan is just a convenient excuse to deny that gluttony makes you sleepy.

Holiday Gamer's Gift Guide

2004-11-29 · by peterb

It's hard to know how to shop for a videogamer. How do you find something that's appropriate for their age, fun, and not too expensive if you don't play games yourself? The answer is: you bend to my will and let me choose your gifts for you.

My goal here is to recommend games beyond the "big names" -- the fact is, most gamers are more than happy to go out and buy the big marquee titles themselves; if there's a gamer in your family with an Xbox, for example, she or he probably already has Halo 2. Instead, I'm trying to find the more oblique, offbeat, and inexpensive selections.

Atari Anthology - $19.95 - Xbox or Playstation 2 - Perfect for the older gamer who used to own an Atari, this title will evoke feelings of nostalgia and guilt that will overwhelm the delicate and overjoy the unthinking. It contains 85 of the original Atari VCS games. Only in-house Atari titles are represented. Frankly, all of these games are available in more comprehensive collections for various computer systems, but there's something to be said about playing them on a TV with a reasonable console game controller. Available in both Xbox and Playstation 2 versions. Appropriate for all ages, but probably most appreciated by those over 30.

Katamari Damacy - $19.95 - Playstation 2 - If you can only buy one game for someone, and they have a Playstation 2, make it this one. You will instantly be transformed from whatever you are to this person -- friend, mother, gastroenterologist -- into "the glorious angel who bought me Katamari Damacy." "Odd" doesn't begin to describe this game. It goes through strange, past whimsical, and wraps all the way around into profound. The colorful graphics, the insanely infectious music, the oddball concept, and the straightforward yet challenging gameplay meld into the perfect game. You can read a review of it, if you'd like, but it's not necessary. This is the one. Buy it now. Appropriate for all ages; there's some cartoony violence, but it's as nonthreatening as an all-consuming ball sweeping up all in its path can be.

Harvest Moon - A Wonderful Life - $19.99 - GameCube - The Harvest Moon games can be a bit saccharine, giving a somewhat idealized view of farm life, but they nonetheless provide a view into husbandry of animals and crops that kids seem to adore. The game centers around doing chores and making schedules (rotating crops, for example). I find this sort of thing a bit tedious, but to kids under 10 it exerts a disturbingly magnetic pull. I wouldn't get this for a teenager, but for younger kids it's a good choice.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2004: A Century of Flight - $24.95 (or $4.95 (!) with coupon) - Windows PC - It's become harder and harder with each passing year to justify using Windows as a game platform. Flight Simulators are probably the last class of games -- outside of text adventures, which are more of a boutique hobby at this point -- that realistically require a PC to play. MS Flight Sim is still best-in-class, and is beautiful to look at. Not really appropriate for kids, unless they're obsessed by airplanes -- this is a real simulator, and not so much a game. If the giftee loves to fly in real life, and doesn't have this yet, this is a no-brainer. Also, you can use this coupon until 2005 to obtain a mail-in rebate of $20, making this game, effectively, free.

Reiner Knizia's Samurai - $19.95 - Macintosh - Boardgames are different overseas. One of life's ongoing mysteries is why German mass market boardgames are interesting, clever, and fun for all ages, while American mass market boardgames -- like Monopoly -- are boring, stupid, and aren't any fun. Reiner Knizia is a famous German boardgame designer, and Samurai is one of his classics. Played on an iconic map of Japan, players play chits to try to exert influence over three different social groups -- samurai, peasant, and priest -- to gain domination. The computerized Mac version of this boardgame provides a decent single-player challenge via computer players, and also allows play over the Internet. The user interface is intuitive and the game is visually appealing. There is a demo available for download. Appropriate for all ages.

I hope you enjoyed this little list. If you've got suggestions, feel free to add them below. Extra bonus points if the game you suggest is under $25.

Console Shopping

2004-11-30 · by psu

As I outlined before, a large part of my life is spent shopping. This is not to say that I buy a lot of stuff. Mostly I just make mental lists of what I would like to buy, in an ideal world, depending on what my current obsession is. Since my most recent obsession is game consoles, naturally I have been shopping for them latey.

This, of course, makes no sense at all, since the Xbox that I have is perfectly adequate. It is still what I would have bought first, and IMHO has the strongest collection of titles plus Xbox live. The purpose of this exercise is not really to aquire a new console (although that is is likely end result), it is to be able to answer the question what would you get if you wanted to buy a non-Xbox console right now. This, of course, depends on several factors. To me, the three most important are:

  1. What does it cost?
  2. Does the thing fit in my TV stand?
  3. What games do I want to play on the thing?

This is a great time to be shopping for consoles. We are late in the latest cycle, so they are all dirt cheap. Also, there are tons of games available for basically every platform, and there is probably one more major round of releases before people start concentrating on the next cycle. This eliminates question (1) from the discussion. All of the major consoles are basically free. It also makes (3) much simpler, because all you have to think about are exclusive titles.

For a long time, these facts, plus the small and cute thing had basically locked me into thinking GameCube. The PS2 is just too big and clunky, and its exclusives are uncompelling. The GameCube basically makes its entire living off of excellent first party titles that I haven't played yet:

All this in a nice small package that can also play my GBA games on the TV if I want. What could be better?

Sadly, all grand plans can be undone with time and more research.

Time brought us the small cute PS2. Curses. Research found a few titles exclusive to the PS2 that appear to be worth trying.

In the past, I'd have written this stuff off as not likely to be enjoyed. But even the RPG has come into my field of vision as a fun thing to do from time to time so now the latent object syndrome kicks in and we are off to the races finding all of the cool strategic turn based titles that Japan can crank out.

Happily, the Christmas season can cure all ills. You can't find a new style PS2 anywhere. All sold out. So now I don't have to worry.

But, should the question of which console to buy come across your mind, here, at least, is the information you need to make an "informed" decision.

(*) I just made up that name, because Shin Megami Tensei is a stupid name and hard to remember.

Chasing the Dragon

2004-12-01 · by peterb

It was just last week that my friend told me he was going to build his own computer. I asked him to understand in advance that in the weeks to come, after he put it together and it either didn't work or suffered from a string of ongoing stability issues, I would mock him cruelly. But I would be doing so out of love.

Last night he IM'd me: "OK, you can start laughing now."

I really do feel his pain, because the same thing happened to me. For whatever reason, a few years ago, I convinced myself that putting together a PC at home from assorted parts would be "fun." And it was, up to a point. I researched carefully, and religiously followed the recommendations of the best of the hardware sites -- you know the one, let's call it "Tom's AnandTechnica Extreme." The parts came in, the pieces went together, the power went on, and I had a fully operational computer, all set to play the latest games of the day. And it was a little cheaper than a Dell!

Of course, it locked up about once an hour. So I spent several weeks de-tuning it until it was slow enough to stop locking up. I knew to do this because of the support forum, filled with thousands of other people who followed Tom's AnandTechnica Extreme's recommendation, who were suffering from the exact same problems, who eventually figured out through the process of elimination that the soundcard needed to be in slot 2, and you should only use these certain USB ports, and yadda yadda yadda.

This isn't unusual. It's par for the course. Just ask Tilt. Marvel at his plummet from the peak of wide-eyed optimism into the pit of despair.

The whole concept of "building a computer" is iffy. You're not building anything. You're assembling some parts where all of the interesting engineering has already been done for you. There is nothing technically challenging -- or even interesting -- about doing so. Anyone with a grammar school education, enough dexterity to handle a Phillips-head screwdriver, and a grounding strap can do it. "I put together my own computer" (if what we're talking about is a mainstream Windows or Linux PC) is as impressive a technical achievement as "I installed some software from a CD-ROM."

The reasons people (including my past self) give for building a computer fall into three categories:

The first argument is the one I have the most sympathy for. It's the one that actually makes the most sense; if you're going to spend a lot of money to create something that is inferior to what you can buy ready-made, it had better be fun to put together. But this argument never stands alone; it's not like people want to build computers and then go on to the next project; they want to build them and then use them for stuff, and there's the rub. If "fun putting something together" is one of your motivations, you would be better served by doing the following:

(1) Buy a Mac (or a Dell)

(2) Buy some Legos.

(3) When you want to put something together, build stuff with your Legos. When you want to use your computer, start up your Mac or Dell.

The "cheaper" argument only turns out to be true if you are willing to discount all risk of hardware failure any time within the warranty period that would cover a ready-made box. And if you're willing to discount the shipping costs and hassle of dealing with separate vendors. And if you're willing to assume that your time is worth nothing. Lots of people are, in fact, willing to do these things. There's a kind of blame the victim mentality among the home-tuner crowd. The assumption is that if your homebuilt machine crashes, you must be doing something wrong. That's sort of right: what you did was buy a bunch of parts that were never QAd by any serious vendor to work together for any substantial period of time, believing that it was a smart thing to do. Hardware is tricky. Just because some system survives long enough to run a graphics benchmark for Bladehunt: Deathspank 2: The Revenge does not mean it's stable enough for use day in, day out, for years.

The performance argument is similarly an argument of false economy. Yes, you might indeed squeeze out a few extra frames per second than the roughly price-equivalent machine from Dell. Or, you could just wait about 30 days, and the next revision of the same Dell will outperform what you would have built yourself. The rate of change of performance in hardware you can obtain by just waiting a little while dwarfs the gains you'll see by assuming greater risk in assembling your own. If you buy a preassembled PC, maybe Big Computer Company will sell you a lemon. If that happens, you send the whole thing back to them, at their expense, and wait for the working replacement. If your home-built hotrod has a problem, good luck sending individual components back (restocking fees, anyone?)

People like to analogize computer assembly hobbyists to guys who tinker on cars. In my experience, there's a stark difference (in addition to the people who work on cars, generally, being more knowledgeable in their domain than people who assemble computers). Every guy I know who is serious about cars is completely clear-headed about whether or not a given car he is working on is actually drivable. You never see one of these guys saying "oh, yeah, the rear axle breaks if I drive it over 55, sometimes, but on the whole it's reliable transportation!"

I don't really expect to influence anyone with these observations. I still get the latent object sickness from time to time. Fortunately, my friends keep trying to assemble their own computers and encounter the obstacles I've described. This helps remind me that I shouldn't do it again. So if you want to go ahead and roll your own, go ahead. When you are in the depths of your depression, trying to figure out why everything works fine until you try to play an MPEG movie, and then the machine reboots itself (Hi, ewm!) I will be by your side, mocking you.

Mocking you with love.

Generational Digital Stupidity

2004-12-02 · by psu

Dear NPR,

Your recent series of radio stories entitled "Digital Generations" is clearly the most ignorant, juvenile, cliched and simply lazy reporting that you have done all year, and that includes the coverage of the election. Where to start.

Let's start with the profile of the "digital child" and his "digitally challenged" parents. This piece presents us with the wide brush generalization that "kids these days" have some sort of subconcious connection with technology that their parents simply do not understand.

Let me clue you in. Remember all those strange anti-social people you knew in high school who seemed to understand all those hard subjects like math, and science? You know, the smart nerdy types who dressed badly? Well, we own you now. The digital child has existed for at least the last twenty five years (just ask my parents). It's true that we used to be a splinter group, but let me inform you of something else: there are millions of us and we are now reaching our 40s. The idea that technology is only for the young may appeal to the insecurities of the clueless baby boomer demographic, but it is simply completely wrong.

Who do you think creates all these toys that the kids are playing with? Just who are all those people working at Apple and Sony and Microsoft who seem to understand this stuff? They are me and millions of other people who understood how to use the machines decades ago while you lot were sitting around smoking dope and skinny dipping in the mud at Woodstock proclaiming just how groovy and cool you were.

I was going to let you off the hook for the digital kid piece, since it had the sounds of Halo 2 in the background. But then you go and run this profile of David Henley who utters those words that are most popular with the set who like to feel themselves superior and elite for not being able to run a machine that any five year old can understand, namely: "Technology makes it all too easy".

I would ask Mr. Henley, who I gather is a potter: does he use a wheel? Has he, in the past, used mass produced materials, or has he always taken spade to soil in his backyard to collect the best clay? In the story he admitted to using a felt tip pen in his past. I'm sure he feels ashamed now at taking such a shortcut, and would in the future only put ink to paper using only a hand-sharpened premium goose quill, if indeed, he would allow himself the use of paper or ink at all.

For some reason the notion that creative work on a computer is of lesser value seems to be unduly popular among people who are completely ignorant of how the machines work (a letter you ran just before the profile of Mr. Henley tried to make the same tired point). I would like to not so respectfully disagree. The idea is simply wrong. It is not a clever and humorous opinion to hold to give balance "for the other side". It is a position that can only be taken out of ignorance and stupidity. Not only that, it is insulting to the millions of people who do creative work every day on these machines.

I'd like Mr. Henley to walk up to the animators at Pixar, or the motion capture people and digital artists at Weta (think Gollum), or the photojounalists who cover every major modern news event, and tell them that what they have achieved was "too easy" and "not creative". The notion is just so mind bogglingly moronic that I can't really even grasp it.

Any artist with a shred of intelligence and integrity knows that the tool you use to create the artifact is at best only tangentially related to the final quality of the artifact. Cameras, microphones, computers, typewriters, pottery wheels and pens are all just tools that make the physical act of creation a bit easier. But, they don't make creating the art any easier. The art comes from somewhere else. It does not come from Photoshop.

So, in all, since this is a family forum, a big raspberry to you, NPR. Here's hoping you people wish for a brain for Christmas so you don't spend next year being quite so stupid.

Picoreview: ESPN Basketball 2k4

2004-12-03 · by peterb

This is last year's ESPN Basketball game, and you can pick it up for about $7, or less, from any number of game stores. It's essentially the exact same superb game Sega was making for the Dreamcast 5 years ago, except now I can play it on Xbox Live and have my 76'ers humiliate psu's mispronounced Celtics, 60-36.

Magic Missile

2004-12-06 · by peterb

I recently started re-playing the Baldur's Gate games -- the originals, for the PC -- as well as the somewhat newer Icewind Dale II.

What motivated this was a little bit of hackery over at the Pocket Plane Group called bg1tutu. Put simply, this is a project which takes the Baldur's Gate data files and converts them so they can be played with the Baldur's Gate II engine. It's a neat hack.

There's a similar mod which lets you play BG II with the Icewind Dale II engine, but it seems to have been abandoned midway through implementation, so I haven't tried that yet. bg1tutu is still being actively developed.

What you "win" by playing Baldur's Gate 1 in the BG2 engine is a slightly more sophisticated, but less well-balanced game. You have access to the "prestige" classes out of the starting gate, so you can play the original Baldur's Gate as a Kensai, or an Assassin, or what have you. And of course you get a number of the interface enhancements -- you can browse your inventory and remain paused, for example. Or travel while looking at the map.

There are also a number of modifications to BG1 made specifically to be run in the "tutu" version, which adds some interest to the game as well.

The install procedure is hairy, and the wrong combination of mods can send you scampering back to the very beginning; I eventually settled on keeping a "virgin" BGII install on my drive so I could revert and start over without too much pain. Is it worth the hassle? Well, probably not. But I'm a sucker for a neat hack, and I had fun playing around with it.

I also finally tried Icewind Dale II. This brings D&D 3rd edition rules to the Infinity Engine. So far -- I'm still in the prologue -- I'm unimpressed. The palette is dull and uninteresting -- even compared to similar locales in similar games -- and 90% of the prologue is spent doing boring FedEx quests.

What is amazing to me is how well the Infinity Engine holds up nearly ten years later. The great rush to 3d, as epitomized in Neverwinter Nights, has added precisely nothing interesting to the genre of dungeon games -- it's the same game, only now the user has the hassle of having to also manipulate the camera. It reminds me of the Great Leap Backwards that Monkey Island 4 was, with its hideously ugly and hard to control "true 3d nature." Graphically intensive, ugly to look at, and more poorly written than the first two Monkey Island games. Congratulations, guys! You hit the Trifecta!

A construction kit that let users create their own Infinity Engine scenarios would produce more playable and fun games than what we have in Neverwinter Nights. When I played the tactically brilliant but flawed Temple of Elemental Evil I thought to myself "Once I'm done playing this game, I'm done with it forever. If there was a construction kit, other freaks could make scenarios that I could play." Time and again, this has proven to be true -- you can still find scenarios for Warlords II on the net, for example.

But it's hard to make money off of empowering the users. So it is the exception, and not the rule.

Every so often, I imagine a project to make a clean-room, free library implementing the D20 tactical combat rules. The whole shebang: spec out a high-level API, crank out implementation specs for at least two different languages, recruit some people who are willing to spend too much time doing the implementation, and have a small team that does the simplest possible complete application using that library (think a single "rogue" level with preset starting characters and monsters).

Manipulation and display of graphic and sound assets, scripting NPCs and encounters, plot -- none of that would be part of this library. Basically, this would be a little nugget to give away to game developers -- corporate or independent -- to use to make D20/D&D type games for me, er excuse me, I mean "for the public," to play. What percentage of the development of D20 videogames is spent debugging the rules, combat resolution, and spell effects? Use this hypothetical nonexistent library. How much complexity did you just remove from your product? (Since my library is hypothetical and nonexistent, I get to assume that it doesn't have any bugs.)

I think about this sometimes. And then I wake up, and I go into work, and instead of writing libraries for games that will never get written, I do what I'm getting paid to do, instead.

More Software Engineering Terms

2004-12-07 · by peterb

From time to time, I share certain terms that I find useful in my space-age-au-go-go career as a software developer. This is one of those times.

Idimpotent - An operation is "idempotent" if it can be safely attempted multiple times. An operation is "idimpotent" if it should be idempotent, but instead it brings your system to a crashing halt if you try it twice. (Variation: idemimpotent).

Implementation detail - This term is usually used to describe the requirements of any given project.

Trivial - Any piece of software ("We need a library with a simple API that solves the halting problem") that must be implemented by some other team.

System tests - A term used to describe the delivery of product to users.

Frozen - As the ship date of a product approaches, it enters the "feature freeze" period. This means that new features are added to the product only if they are really, really cool.

Reproducible - If a bug does not occur every time the unit tests are run, it is not reproducible, and may be closed.

Unit tests - Pieces of software that thoroughly exercise, at a bare minimum, at least 5% of a given software component.

Regression tests - Comprehensive tests that you expect other people to run when they make changes to the codebase.

Sophisticated - Hard to use.

Simple - Doesn't do anything useful.

Efficient - Does not do anything useful, but it not does it very quickly.

Debugger - A crutch for the weak programmer who is not sufficiently 3l33t.

Comments - See "Debugger"

Other useful software engineering terms can be found here. Thanks to Stewart Clamen, Benoît Hudson, and psu for helpful suggestions and editing.

Magician's Choice

2004-12-08 · by peterb

Branches That Don't.

Branches That Don't.

I've been playing a bit more Icewind Dale II recently, and I have gotten a bit further in to the game. The game is so soulless and uninteresting that it takes my breath away. Only a committee could have taken such a simple concept and turned out something so completely lacking in fun. As I plow through the same Forgotten Realms setting as the Baldur's Gate games, using the familiar D20 rules that I enjoyed in other games, I am overcome with ennui and want to lay down and take a nap (or, more accurately, play BGII or bg1tutu instead.)

Why?

If you've ever played a Japanese RPG -- and really, with the success of Final Fantasy, who hasn't? -- then you have probably noticed the Magician's Choice. The magician's choice is where someone asks you to make a selection ("pick a card, any card!") but whatever you choose, you are guided to pick the card the magician wanted.

That magician's choices happen in games is not surprising or upsetting in the least. Narratives, if you're not reading Burroughs, are about telling a story, which necessitates starting in one place and ending in another. American games, following the pattern of Wizardry and Ultima, have traditionally been very laissez faire about forcing players to take a particular path. If the player want to wander around in random places killing monsters or exploring, he can. Arguably, that's the point of this type of game. Bethesda's Morrowind is the most modern example of this school of thought. Japanese games tend to be a lot stingier. The minute you defeat the boss of a given area (and of course there has to be a boss, heaven forbid there be anything original), you are either unceremoniously booted onward and upward, or simply subjected to artificial boredom until you leave.

So the question isn't whether you'll be given a magician's choice. You will be. The question is how well the magician executes the force. If the magician is good, as were the authors of Planescape: Torment, you won't notice it. If the magician is bad, as are the authors of Icewind Dale II, you can't notice anything else.

Forcing can happen on a macro or micro level. The classic Infinity Engine games followed a pattern that worked pretty well. The player began in a very narrow area where choice was comparatively constrained, but soon found himself in an immense sandbox with an overwhelming array of choices (the city of Athkatla in BGII, the city of Sigil in Placescape: Torment). On a macro level, the magician's choice was still in play -- you're trying to get 20,000 gold pieces, find your kidnapped friend Imoen, learn your identity, and so on -- but on a micro level choices could be made which had no impact on the plot and which served no point except to add color and depth to the game. This was especially true of Torment, the best RPG of the 1990s. For me, at least, there was never a moment when I did not believe, completely, that the world I was in was bigger than my role in it, and that I would probably never discover everything about it.

Five hours into Icewind Dale II, I'm pretty sure I know everything there is to know about it. The constrained choices aren't just on the macro level. Practically every step you take is predetermined. "I, the game designer, will force you to walk down this twenty-five foot hallway before you can walk down that twenty-five foot hallway. I will provide no explanation for this; the pile of logs in your way will just magically disappear at the appropriate time."

This wouldn't annoy me nearly as much if I were playing a Japanese RPG, if only because I would expect it. But using the Infinity Engine for this sort of scripting feels akin to using kobe beef to make Old El Paso Taco mix flavored tacos. It might taste OK on some level, but all you can think while experiencing it is: what a waste.

Cooking Rice

2004-12-09 · by psu

Occasionally, people ask me about cooking rice. I always say:

"First you get out your rice cooker."

At this point, they might ask, "Well, what if I don't have a rice cooker?"

In that case, my answer starts:

"Well, first you go buy a rice cooker."

I will state without proof that if you ask most people of East Asian heritage how to cook rice, the first thing they'll tell you is to get a rice cooker. This is because they don't know how to make rice because their parents had a rice cooker, and their grandparents had a rice cooker, and their relatives all had rice cookers, and all their friends families had rice cookers. Here is why. This is how you cook perfect rice with a rice cooker:

  1. Put rice in the cooker.
  2. Maybe rinse it if you are supposed to.
  3. Fill with water up to the appropriate line.
  4. Turn on the cooker.
  5. Go play Halo 2 until the cooker pops.

This is all I know about cooking rice. In fact, many of my most disastrous kitchen debacles involve trying to cook rice on the stove. I just don't do it anymore.

One final note: please none of that crappy pre-cooked rice. Get nice California rice. Minute Rice is a crime against humanity and Uncle Ben's should be grounds for criminal prosecution. I'll hurt you if I catch you.

One more final note: perfect rice is sticky, but with a light fluffy texture. The rice should stick together though, since this facilitates consumption with chopsticks. The main reason Uncle Ben's is a crime is the fact that the rice does not stick to itself. Why anyone would do this on purpose is a mystery to me, but the rice I get in most non-Asian restaurants is like this. The Italians have it right though, with their risotto.

Where to buy a rice cooker

Here is a nice cheap one from Amazon.

Here is an expensive one from Amazon. Use this for Sushi Rice.

Indie Game Week

2004-12-10 · by peterb

Next week will be Independent Game Week here at Tea Leaves. Ron at Grumpy Gamer is having his own micro-protest wherein he is not playing the blockbusters. In solidarity, all next week I will be highlighting and showcasing Windows and Macintosh games produced by small teams for not a lot of money. Games will be featured because I think they're fun; I'll be focusing on games that are comparatively new (however much I might want to evangelize System's Twilight to you, the goal here is to showcase games that were developed recently, not "old classics".)

If you have a game you think is worthy of consideration, feel free to drop a line to blog @ tleaves.com.

Ninjaneer

2004-12-13 · by peterb

Welcome to this week's first article focusing on independently developed games.

The funny thing about being a ninja is how really, it's all about the basics. Sure, sure, you can learn advanced jutsu to channel your chakra into a deadly weapon, or distill a lethal poison for slipping into the drink of the man you've been hired to assassinate. There's the parties with other ninja, the endless fashion parade of simple black clothes and ever more expensive accessories ("Oh, didn't I show you my new shuriken? It's titanium.") Despite all the glitz and glamour of the ninja world, though, when you're on a mission it inevitably comes down to the simple things your first teachers tried to teach you: speed, agility, and intense concentration.

N is a simple, addictive, and elegant game for PC, Mac, and Linux PCs. It is, at it's heart, a descendent of Lode Runner, itself based on Apple Panic. The premise is simple: you are small. The world is big. The world has gold, and lots of things that can kill you. Get the gold. Don't get killed. That's it.

If that sounds familiar, it's because these sorts of games are also the precursors of Donkey Kong, and thus also of the Mario games. The genre is named after their most easily identified feature: they are platformers. N is a throwback to the game in its purest form.

N

N (click to enlarge)

N is primarily a game about motion. One of the most strange and wonderful things about it is the cognitive dissonance between the time that you first see a screen shot and the time that you first play the game. Seen as a screen shot, N is ugly and uninspired. Your avatar is a stick figure. The palette consists of different shades of gray, black, and the occasional (tiny) red spot, and the yellow pieces of gold. It looks, in screenshots, like something a 12 year old might draw on a history notebook in a really boring class.

But then you play, and your ninja begins to move.

He glides with elegant panache across open floors. He leaps impossible distances, swinging his little stick figure arms forward and back in time with the jump. He climbs up walls and scrabbles up and down ledges. He falls from a great height, and reaches out and drags his little stick figure limbs against the wall to slow his descent. He is lithe. He is nimble. He is beautiful. He does his best to navigate treacherous mazes and avoid lethal ninja-killing robots. He has no offensive abilities. His only weapons are grace and speed.

The controls are sensitive, with an "aftertouchy" nature that is not immediately apparent at first. After a few levels, you'll be making in-flight adjustments and making jumps that seemed impossible at first. The animation is great, the collision detection precise, and the various ragdoll movements that occur when you die -- in many, many gruesome and entertaining ways -- look disturbingly realistic, given their stick-figureness.

I can recall the exact moment that I decided that I loved the game. I had finished most of a level and had a clear path to the exit. There were a few bags of gold left, but they were in an incredibly dangerous spot. Trying to get them would have been foolhardy and arrogant. The sane thing to do was to head straight for the door. "The hell with that. I'm a ninja. I do not fear death." Leaping down into the crevice, I slowed my fall against the wall, narrowly avoided the proximity mines, grabbed the loot, and only then exited the level.

Now that's what I call fun.

N was written by two guys from Toronto over a six week period. There are no cinematics, cutscenes, plot twists, dialogue, or other extraneous material. The game application also includes a built-in level editor (somewhat hidden beneath debug menus -- read the documentation). N is an in-your-face slam at those who insist that the only way to improve games is to create a "more realistic virtual experience" (also known as "spending more money and thought on art and sound asset development than you do on gameplay"). N isn't just a great little game. It's a great little tutorial on what a game is, stripped down to its essential elements.

It's a lesson that other game developers should heed.

Additional Resources

Star Sonata

2004-12-14 · by peterb

There is nothing new under the sun.

Nearly every videogame (or, for that matter, board game) one plays borrows mechanisms from one or more previous games. Innovation is rare. When we describe a game as being "novel" what we're often referring to is a novel way of combining elements of previous games. I often complain about corporate games that blow their budget entirely on graphics and sound, but part of me understands why: it's easier to innovate visually (or, to a lesser extent, in telling a story) than it is to develop a brand new type of gameplay that is still fun. So the big game companies are simply spending money where it will be most effective at distinguishing their product from the pack.

The one sentence description of Star Sonata is: "It's nearly identical to Escape Velocity, except it's online." But of course, most people have probably never heard of Escape Velocity, so then I have to explain about the early 1980's game Elite and how the space opera genre developed. So instead of talking about Star Sonata directly, let's start at the distant end of this ball of yarn, and reel it in.

In the dark old days of mainframes and minicomputers we had, of course, various "Star Trek" style games which involved flying around a (text rendered) galaxy, shooting klingons. There are also Spacewar and its descendants, which are among the earliest games played on a graphics display.

The true genesis of what I'm calling the "space opera" genre was also the genesis of one of the most successful game companies of the 1980s, Brøderbund. Doug Carlson, a practicing lawyer, wrote Galactic Empire for the TRS-80 in 1979. It was a clever and engaging game, and is still very playable even today (at the end of this article I will give links to versions for playing on Macs, natively, and on other platforms by emulation.) That game was one of four, collectively referred to as the Galactic Saga.

Galactic Empire took place in the star cluster RS-232 (groan if you want to). There were 20 inhabited worlds in this system, each of which could be identified by its starting initial. To this day, their distinctive names -- some historical, some invented -- linger in my memory, consuming valuable neurons. Alhambra. Bok. Ootsi. Javiny. Farside. The goal of the game was to conquer all 20 worlds via military force; you began on Galactica, a mid-size, medium-tech world with 200 ships. Each world had a potentially different population size and technology level; the larger the population, and the higher the technology level, the more difficult it was to conquer the planet. Once a planet was yours, you could levy taxes and manpower from it and have it build ships for you. For purposes of our present discussion, the following facets are significant: Galactic Empire is the first game that I'm aware of that had a "galaxy" of planets which you had to jump to; in other words, interstellar space was not significant. You didn't simply fly around until you reached a destination, but rather moved directly from play area to play area.

The next game in the series, Galactic Trader, was built on the same engine, only instead of being a game of military conquest, the goal was simply "amass a billion dollars." Each planet buys and sells a variety of commodities. Commodities originate at certain planets; the further away from that planet you are, the more you will be able to realize when you sell it (or, for a better deal, trade it for different commodities). The elements introduced in Galactic Trader will be seen in nearly every space trading game for years to come: hidden information (you don't know the price of a good until you visit a star system), imperfect information (the price can change when you're away), an economy with overhead (buying a good and then immediately selling it in the same place will always cause you to lose money), and automated tracking of information (the computer in Galactic Trader will keep track of what prices goods were selling for at each system you visit, although the information may be out of date. This was actually introduced in the previous game, although there it was used to track population and technology level.)

The final two games in the series, Galactic Revolution and Tawala's Last Redoubt were variations on the theme of the first game, but with more complex victory conditions. I mention them here simply for the sake of completeness.

Elite

Elite

Fast forward to 1984: Ian Bell and David Braben introduce Elite for the BBC Micro computer (and quickly follow on with ports to many other 6502 based platforms, such as the Apple ][ and the Commodore 64). Elite is a game of space combat and trading. When not docked at a space station, the view is from the cockpit of your vessel; the game is rendered using polygonal 3D graphics, which was impressive at the time (Bill Budge had released a 3D vector graphics kit for the Apple ][ at around this time, but Elite looked much spiffier). Other games, of course, provided 3D views of spaceflight, both before and after. But what Elite brought that is relevant to this discussion is a merging of that with the trading concept of Galactic Trader. Also, since Elite involves space combat, making money so that you can upgrade your ship is critical. (In Trader, upgrades are simply about additional cargo capacity. In Elite they are a much more urgent matter).

The problem with Elite is that it turns out that flying through a real(ish) 3d space is (a) hard, and (b) boring. The first time you try to dock with a starbase and realize that, yes, you really do have to line up just perfectly and match your rotation with the docking bay, and not hit any other ships, and... well, let's just say that although it has a devoted following, Elite is better appreciated as a fond memory than as a game. Which is a shame, because there is a lot of game there, and the only thing that kept many people from playing it more were the actual mechanics of flying around.

Which is why, 20 years later, people are still producing games that are basically "Elite, but without the annoying 3d docking/combat sequences."

Probably the least famous of these is Galactic Trader for VMS, no financial or code relation to the Brøderbund game of the same name. This game takes the mise-en-scene, plot, and concept of Elite -- right down to the actual ship names -- and places it in a text-only, menu-driven user interface. Which, if you're old and slow like me, is great. Dexterity is completely removed from the equation (although, in typical VMS fashion, now you're constantly querying help pages to remember the one and two character sequences you need to enter to undertake various operations.) This version of Galactic Trader is still around, and is worth at least trying for novelty's sake (see below for links).

Escape Velocity

Escape Velocity

The pinnacle of the Elite-clone category is Escape Velocity. Originally a Mac-only game, it has now been ported to Windows. EV gets the balance exactly right. Gone is 3d combat; in it's place is a simple 2d plane on which ships manuever and, sometimes, shoot at each other. Docking is as simple as moving your ship over a spaceport (or planet) and hitting the "land" key. EV also has its own (interesting) plot, rather than simply using the elements from Elite, and it is expandable via user-written modules and scripts. It's a great game. I've been playing it for years.

Every time I talk with someone else who played EV, the topic eventually turns to online play. "Wouldn't it be great if you could play EV online?" people ask? I've been noncommittal when discussing this. I enjoy online games as much as anyone, but I don't believe that online play automatically makes all games better. I like cumin, too, but it tastes sort of funny on ice cream. Some games are better played offline.

So now that you know the history of space opera games, I can say: "Star Sonata is like Escape Velocity, only online," and you'll know what I mean. This isn't the only possible geneology -- we could talk about VMS Empire, which begat Civilization, which introduced the tech tree which has an impact in this game. Or we could trace a line from Empire to Reach For the Stars, which was the inspiration for Spaceward Ho, which was in turn shamelessly ripped off by Microprose for Master of Orion. But although all those games do have some influence here, I think the line I've described in detail is the most relevant one.

Star Sonata

Star Sonata

Star Sonata has a lot to recommend it. The graphics are both pretty and low-impact, so even on my comparatively low-end system, it looks great. The starfield is dual-layered, with the layers scrolling at different speeds when you move, creating the illusion of depth fairly effectively (if I recall correctly, Armada for the Dreamcast used a similar technique.) The game starts you in a small tutorial sandbox so you can play around without risk while you adjust to the controls. In short order, you are introduced to your weapons systems, the concept that you can only shoot something you have "targeted" or selected, the trading interface, and ship (and neural) upgrades. In no time at all you are out of the sandbox, and in the large, threatening, and confusing galaxy. In the context of a space opera, "large, threatening, and confusing" is a compliment. I spent my first hour in the game just jumping to random star systems, checking out space stations, and fleeing any combat I saw (there is no fuel for hyperspace jumps, so the only cost for exploration is your time).

The neural upgrade mechanism is interesting, and I feel a little conflicted about it. The idea is that each time you earn a level, you gain a number of character points that you can spend on training points; these points can apply to skills like piloting, weaponry, as well as some more advanced skills. When the time comes to purchase (or salvage) upgrades for your ship, you discover that any given item you could try to equip comes with a "rating." You can only equip or use items that are rated at your skill level or below. So there are actually two gates you need to pass before you can put the megahuge laser on your ship: you have to get the money, and you have to earn the skill points. But you can only earn skill points by levelling up. And you can only level by earning experience points. And you can only earn experience points by destroying other ships. So while I don't mind the idea of skill points per se, here's yet another example of where a game's progression system has a major impact on the narrative flow of the game, which is disappointing. In Escape Velocity it is perfectly possible to "role play" as a peaceful trader, amassing income, buying faster ships, with better shields, running away from combat. In Star Sonata, that's not really a reasonable path.

One innovation that is extremely clever is the introduction of "slave AIs". When you reach certain skill levels, you can purchase extra ships beyond the one you pilot, and an AI for the ship. Then you "train" the ship in what you want it to do (for instance, "go to this system, dock here, buy so many units of baobabs, undock, go to this system, sell the baobabs and buy nuclear waste, repeat...") Although I've seen macro systems in other games, this is the first space opera where I've seen it done. And it feels right: it fits the universe, it fits the game, and it's clever. Star Sonata deserves kudos, if only for this feature.

The game plays slower than EV; this is a good thing. Given the requirements of shipping packets around the country to keep all the clients synchronized, maintaining an EV-like pace would guarantee that only those lucky enough to be lag-free would have a prayer of doing well. Thankfully, that's not the case. The game feels a bit more contemplative than EV in this respect. There's a lot of flying, a lot of waiting, a lot of travel time. But somehow, it isn't annoying: it fits the genre. One thing that doesn't fit are the trade goods; the inclusion of "crack whores," among the trade goods, while perhaps entertaining to some, will probably just appear juvenile to others.

Star Sonata impresses me. I probably won't play past the demo period, simply because my short attention span means that I am constitutionally incompatible with anything approaching the time commitment of a MMORPG. But the download of the fully-featured demo is free, so if you like space games, I think it's worth your time to check it out.

Additional Resources

The Witch's Yarn

2004-12-15 · by peterb

I'm a huge fan of text adventures -- the name "interactive fiction", it seems to me, is way too general, since it could cover any number of similar-but-different media -- but they are possibly the most unapproachable genre in the world of computer games. There's a lot of really interesting work being done with the medium, but it's pretty much impossible to get anyone who does not already accept the strictures of the form to try them more than once. You can always get someone to try them once. Inevitably, within less than a minute, the new player will try to examine some item that is just part of the "scenery," or guess the wrong word, and they decide that this is stupid and they don't need to further subject themselves to the medium.

In one sense, that's their loss. In metaphorical sense, though, the author of the work just lost a reader because it wasn't obvious how to turn the pages of the book. Anyone who has ever watched a new player play a text adventure knows exactly what I'm talking about.

>> Grab plate
I don't know how to grab.
>> Lift plate
I don't know how to lift.
>> get plate
I see no plate here.
>> get platter
I see no platter here
>> get dish
Which dish do you mean, the green plate, the blue
plate, or the red plate?
>> red
I don't know how to red.

Presumably, some authors choose the text adventure medium specifically because they like its constraints, and want those pages to be hard to turn. For those authors, the above scenario really isn't their problem. Others, however, may simply be trying to tell a story, and don't care about the idiosyncrasies of (say) the Inform parser. For these people, a different system might be appropriate.

The Witch's Yarn

The Witch's Yarn

The Witch's Yarn is, essentially, a "choose your own adventure" book, in the form of a computerized stage play. It is available for both Windows and Mac. Rather than controlling "a character," the game is presented as a series of scenes, with you as the 'director'; you queue up characters, items, and events, and then watch the drama unfold. Characters appear and disappear from the stage, speak in text baloons, and otherwise expound on the plot (which I won't spoil here, but centers around a witch who is trying to interact with the "mortal world" by openin a yarn store.) The wordsmithing is better than you see in most adventure games -- I'm including text IF here -- but let's be frank, this is a videogame, not a Henry James novel. The main characters are believable; the supporting cast is very caricature.

There have been other tools that let people develop "choose your own adventure" style games, but the system used for The Witch's Yarn seems particularly polished, at least from the user's point of view. Helpful prompts explain how to let the story progress (without dictating a choice). The game is always implicitly saved, so just quitting at any time will always allow you to pick up where you left otf. If you make a mistake and steer the story to an endpoint, the engine allows you to undo the previous choice, or roll back to the beginning of a chapter. The graphics are simple; it looks like cues can trigger simple animations. It's unclear to me how much scripting the engine allows. At least in The Witch's Yarn the effect is that of being shown a play performed by Colorforms stickers.

I'm being a little unfair when I describe the game as simply a choose-your-own-adventure book. It's a little more complicated than that. Rather, the cues you introduce have an effect on the game state; the same cues introduced in a different order can yield different results. So in the second chapter, for example, the main character's emotional state is bouncing around based on what cues are introduced. Some cues (for example, an aggravating visitor) make her angry. Some make her depressed. Some make her happier. Send in too many "angry" cues in a row, and the story comes to an end. So at least in this chapter, I started thinking of the protagonist not as an actor, but as my little pet finite state automata, and I found myself trying to draw a mental state diagram of all possible transitions.

This cueing system, actually, feels to me very much like what Emily Short did in her artwork Galatea. The player conversed with a character in the game, based on topics the player introduced, the game would take a different course. In that work -- which was text based -- you basically had to guess-the-trigger. In The Witch's Yarn, the cues are all presented to you on a silver platter. Other than that, the underlying concept is the same.

The engine that underlies The Witch's Yarn is called CineProse. The press release from the publisher, Mousechief, has an interesting paragraph that cuts to the heart of the issue:

We believe that current adventure games do not address the constraints of the casual game market. In our user testing, the majority of a sample population was unable to perform basic control over the main character. That´s why we re-invented the genre specifically for this market. Thus, the CineProse style of adventure game was born. Subsequent testing of computer novices showed that 100% of ages 8 to 78 were able to pick up and play The Witch´s Yarn.

There are things one can quibble with, here. It's arrogant to talk about "re-inventing" the genre when multiple other publishers have "re-invented" the same product, using the same mechanism, albeit not as slickly. And the people who are producing adventure games for the people who already play adventure games are not going to stop what they're doing and start licensing CineProse: the increased usability it provides is at the cost of eliminating whole classes of user interaction that experienced players of the genre have come to know and desire. But let's zoom up to the 50,000 foot level and acknowledge: they're right. The casual game player finds the interface of the typical adventure game bewildering.

The question, then, is how close to the bone can you strip an interface and still be left with something that is fairly characterized as an "adventure game." That's a bigger question, and not one i have an answer for.

The full version of The Witch's Yarn is $20; I didn't buy it. My calculus went something like this: "Hey, this is a really neat story, and I'd kind of like to know how it turns out. It seems like an interesting play. But it's not that much better than some of the IFComp games that came out this year. Those are free. Also, $20 would get me a ticket to a community theater performance of some other play that I haven't seen. I don't think I want to pay $20 to see how this turns out; maybe if there was more game here I would, because then there would be more of an intellectual challenge. I think this one is a no-go for me."

So it's a conundrum. I estimate I would have spent about $10 to see how the story ended. Any more than that, and you start asking yourself questions like "Why don't I buy a book, instead, which will be longer, probably better written, and can be read away from my computer?" Despite the fact that I wasn't willing to shell out the lucre, I think that Mousechief has correctly identified a need and has built what seems like a polished product to serve it. The real question to me is: what will happen with CineProse? There's a few ways it could go. It could remain as Mousechief's internal engine for their adventure games, it could be licensed to other publishers for use in their games as well, or it could be given away for free to all comers.

I've spoken briefly with the developer, Keith Nemitz, and he does indicate that he intends to license the engine, and that there would be no fee for noncommercial projects. This could be a very viable business model. I've talked mostly about text adventures as being the alternative here, but graphic adventures have their place as well, and as Ron Gilbert has described in detail, the economics of producing them are gruelling. If the CineProse bundle of Python scripts, SDL libraries, and application software is basically marketed as "produce your adventure game at a third of the cost of what your competitors are doing," then Keith may do very well indeed.

Giving away the tools for free to noncommercial projects seems like a smart decision to me, particularly if Mousechief can figure out how to monetize it. Off the top of my head, I'd imagine "give the dev tools away for free, but require that the 'player' be purchased by the users to view the entire works" might be workable. I'm really not going to pay $20 to read one potentially bad short story. I might pay $40 to be able to read many, if I know for a fact there are some good ones in the mix.

I feel bad saying that The Witch's Yarn isn't my cup of tea, because it's an attempt to look an entire genre in the eye and say "What you're doing doesn't work for most users. We're going to try something completely different." I respect that. So despite the fact that I didn't buy it, I still think you should visit their web site and download the Windows or Mac versions, and try it for yourself. And let me know what you think.

Additional Resources

Game Stores

2004-12-16 · by psu

I went to buy Half-life 2 this afternoon. Up the hill from where I work, there is a huge EB Games. What I forgot is that every time I go in that store I have a crappy experience. So I ended up getting the game at a smaller local chain store across the street called The Exchange. Since this is Indie game week, here are some thoughts on why EB Games blows.

Motives

Every big chain game store I've been in just feels to me to be motivated primarily by profit. They could be selling you chips and widgets to do anything as long as they made enough money at it. Very rarely can you get good prices on first or second run games, or even used stuff. The local EB has Disgaea selling used for $10 more than I can currently purchase it at Fry's outpost.com, and $25 more than the same used title at the Exchange.

The Exchange wants to make a profit so they can stay open, but it doesn't feel like they are relentlessly attempting to squeeze every possible cent out of the existing market. They offer a reasonable selection of merchandise at reasonable prices with no bullshit.

Staff

I hate the staff at the EB. I hate talking to them. I hate listening to them talk to other customers. I hate their attitude. Admittedly, I have experienced more tolerable staff at other stores, but comparatively speaking, the staff at the Exchange seem to be normal kids who like records and stuff and like working in the store. The people at the Exchange also don't look upon their customers with disdain.

At the EB today, I listened to the clerk there lie to a customer in the following way:

Customer: How reliable are these console machines? Clerk: They have a three month warranty. They are designed to break. We offer extended warranties so you can get get the machine fixed when it breaks.

This is just a bald-faced lie to try and upsell the guy on the fake extended service plan with which EB wants you to flush your money down their toilet.

Presell

EB and their friends over at Gamestop have this cool scam. Whenever something new and cool is coming out, they convince you to give them your hard earned cash early on the premise that the manufacturer of the new and cool item will completely blow their sales projection on the item and immediately cause a huge shortage of supply and that they are the single outlet in the entire distribution chain that will actually have product available on launch day. This is called "pre-ordering". I suppose it must make them a lot of money and get those crowds of freaks outside the store at midnight. But it does nothing for you and me.

Here are my two presell stories.

A big game this year was Halo 2. Halo 2 generated something like 2 million preorders. People were nuts to get the game, lining up for hours at midnight. How did I get the game? I walked into a Target at 9am on launch day and picked a copy of the "limited edition" Halo 2 off a pile of 200 copies of Halo 2 that they had set out on a table. I could have just as easily walked into the Exchange and grabbed one, but they were not open yet.

Another big item this year was the Nintendo DS. In my trip to the EB today, the same clerk told the following lie to the same customer right after the lie about extended warranties:

Customer: Why can't I buy one of these? Clerk: No one can buy those. We're only selling to people on the list. No one can get them. Customer: What about this one? Clerk: That's just a demo. If you look around, none of our stores will have any of these. You and the rest of the planet just have to wait.

Meanwhile, last weekend, I saw Nintendo DS systems coming off the shelf at the local Target like hot cakes.

A related note: those new small PS2s have been hard to get this year too... does EB have a special supply? I think not. They are sold out just like everyone else.

The point is, EB Games is just one of a billion distribution outlets in the modern gaming world, and presell is just a sham to get you to part with your cash early while getting nothing back in return.

Stock

Finally, here is what really confuses me. This EB store is huge, yet they don't really stock that many games. They seem to just stock 50 billion copies of the big games, and hardly anything else. They really don't have that much more than the small store across the street or the games part of a Target or Best Buy store. I went in today looking for a couple of not so obscure PS2 titles (for the new thin PS2 I scarfed at Target this weekend while EB was sold out) to go along with my Half-Life 2. They didn't have either one. EB basically doesn't stock anything that won't make a sufficient margin. Nothing off-beat. Nothing old. Very few bargains.

So I went over to the Exchange, and found HL2 and one out of two Playstation games mixed in with the old PC games, stuff for the Sega Dreamcast and N64 and even the SNES.

EB Games is over for me.

2 Risky Games

2004-12-17 · by peterb

One of the mainstays of computer gaming over the years has been translating board games to videogame form. Boardgames are a popular pasttime in their own right, and their constrained playspace and (hopefully) unambiguous rules are a nice change for the developer: there's a whole class of game design and balance issues that you just don't have to worry about. It's all about implementation.

One of the more popular games for translation is the simple and addictive wargame Risk. There are innumerable versions of this game for every possible platform. Today, I'd like to talk about two new games that fall in to this class. Lux is Sillysoft's faithful implementation of Risk, and it runs on Mac, Windows, and Linux. War! Age of Imperialism is not a Risk translation, but a translation of Eagle Games' board game of the same name. Its conquer-the-world nature makes it close enough to Risk that I'm comfortable discussing it in the same review. War also runs on the Mac, Windows, and Linux platforms.

Actually, I'd like to make one brief digression before I start looking at these games. Last April, in my review of President Forever, I asked why so few developers used SDL to produce multi-platform games. It seemed like a no-brainer to me. A number of readers discussed some of the drawbacks of SDL, and it made for interesting reading. This year, I would estimate that almost half of the games in the Independent Games Festival are multiplatform (not always via SDL; War and Lux are both written in Java). This is a dramatic sea change, and one that I hope represents the start of a trend, rather than the crest of one.

Let's start with Lux. I begin with a warning: Lux is simply a Risk clone. If you like Risk, you'll like Lux. If you don't, you won't.

Lux (click to enlarge)

Lux (click to enlarge)

So given the preponderance of free Risk games, why would you pay $20 for this one? Well, it's a very good implementation, and it has some features that most of the free games lack. There are a few things I liked about Lux. First, the computer opponents. The AI in most Risk games is terrible. Lux's AI is very configurable, and the hard AIs are challenging, although they seem to be much better on the 'standard' map than on some of the variants. The maps are pretty, and as I've mentioned in previous articles, I'm a sucker for a good-looking map. The combat effects are nice and shiny; the game is very easy on the eyes. In addition to the maps that come with the game, there's an active community that is developing unique maps to play on (I liked the Roman Empire map, personally, and the Middle Earth one looked like fun also).

Another significant feature in Lux is online play. It used to be that playing any independently developed game online was an exercise in patience and typing in IP addresses; we live in a better world now. Just click "show network games," and you're presented a happy little list of games in progress that you can join. I had fun joining other people's games just to kibbitz and watch.

Lux's demo lets you play full games on a small set of included maps for a few weeks, so you can really get a sense of the game. You can't use the plugin manager to install other maps, but if you connect to an online game using a map you don't have, the game magically installs it for you. That's a nice touch. I liked Lux. If you like Risk, it might be worth $20 to you.

War! (click to enlarge)

War! (click to enlarge)

War! Age of Imperialism is a more serious game than Lux. The game is more slowly paced than Risk, which is not in and of itself a vice. Unlike that simpler game, whose primary mechanism is "plop down a huge number of armies and sweep across the board," movement in War is more deliberate. During each movement phase (there are two per turn), you can attack at most one province per army. This assumes that your army can reach the province in question, and if you want to survive it's in your best interest to attack a single province with more than one army (in a nice touch, you get a "combined arms" bonus for attacking with combinations of infantry, cavalry, and artillery). These limits make conquest -- at least in the early part of the game -- a far more gradual process.

However, military force is not the only mechanism you have at your disposal. You can dispatch special "explorer" units in to neutral territory to try to convert the natives. Depending on the resistance they encounter, this will often be a cheaper path to success, and will leave the province's resources intact for exploitation. Resources, once exploited, serve to generate resource points, which can in turn be used to buy military units, or cities, schools, factories, and other structures. Lastly, there is a technology tree that may be researched which can have dramatic effects on your empire's fortunes.

Unfortunately, not all of the slowdown is due to the game mechanics imposed by the board game. The game has quite a few phases. In a very understandable attempt to be helpful, the application pops up dialogue boxes at the start of each phase, explaining what it is, and what it's for. So far, so good. The dialogue boxes even have a "click here if you don't want to see this message again" box. Even better. Unfortunately, if you're playing against the computer, the game will display each of those boxes once for each player in the game. Which was enough to drive me absolutely insane.

It's clear that the developers are targeting the online market more than the standalone player, so it wouldn't surprise me if the single-player demo wasn't as much of a concern to them. But it was still a letdown.

Also unfortunately, the demo only lets you play the first seven turns of the game against the computer. This is enough to get the feel of the game, but not actually enough to understand the strategies that are likely to be successful in the long haul. In my short 7 turn games, I had the best luck when I completely ignored all of the complex economy and industrial rules and simply sent a combined-arms strike team rampaging across the continent. Which kind of turns the game into Risk. Maybe that strategy would prove flawed in a real game against real opponents, but without a more substantial demo, I have no way of knowing.

This ties in to a conversation I was having with an independent developer earlier this week. Figuring out the right amount of time and features to put into a demo is tricky. Put in too little, and users don't buy the game because they aren't sure if they like it. Put in too much, and users don't buy the game because they don't have to. It seems to me that figuring out where to draw the line on the demo might, in fact, be the single most important marketing decision an independent game developer can make.

Indie game week may have ended, but I still have more games to review, and so I will be extending it until I am satisfied. Next week, look forward to reviews of The Lost Admiral Returns, Avencast, and Gate 88. See you on the other side of Sunday.

Additional Resources

The Lost Admiral Returns

2004-12-20 · by peterb

The Lost Admiral Returns

The Lost Admiral Returns

The best game I've played in my recent spate of reviewing is, without question, The Lost Admiral Returns. You've heard the clichés applied to other games: easy to learn, hard to master. This time it's true.

Some purists divide games into two camps: those that involve random chance (typically through rolling dice), and those that don't. The latter type are sometimes called "pure" games. In my experience, people who are better at games prefer purer games, because their gigantic brains help guarantee them the win. They aren't cheated of their victory by a random roll of the dice.

Because I'm actually pretty unskilled at anything that involves more planning than figuring out what I should have for lunch, I tend to lose at pure games, which means I usually don't like them as much. The Lost Admiral Returns is the exception that proves the rule. Let's review the basics of the game.

The Lost Admiral Returns is played on a hex map depicting water and land; pieces move only on water. Cities, with attached ports, are based on land, and are worth victory points. In order to own a city (and thus accrue victory points from it), a player must have a troop transport stationed in the harbor of the city at all times. A city with no transport in the harbor is neutral, and no one gains points from it.

At the end of a turn, up to two friendly ships can share a hex without negative consequences. If ships from opposing teams occupy a hex at the end of a turn, they fight. Ships can move a certain number of hexes per turn; if they enter a hex with an enemy, they must stop. In addition to the two types of troop transports, there are PT boats, destroyers, submarines (both submerged and surfaced), aircraft carriers, cruisers, and battleships. Normally, you can only see enemy ships if they are in the same hex, so the fog of war is heavy and thick. Aircraft carriers can detect enemy ships -- except for submerged submaries -- up to two hexes away.

There is no die-rolling here. Rather, combat is very rock-paper-scissors. A submerged submarine can do substantial damage to a battleship, but the battleship cannot hurt the sub at all. A destroyer can sink a submerged sub in one shot, but the sub can barely dent the destroyer. A battleship can squash a destroyer like a bug; a destroyer barely tickles a battleship. Combat is resolved nearly automatically. There's a little animation of the ships shooting at each other, but there is no dexterity involved (except the occasional need to click on a ship to indicate that you want to target this enemy rather than that one.) Movement between the player and the computer alternates in turns. It can be a bit of a burn to attack a battleship with your sub, only to have the other player move a destroyer in to take you out on the next turn; of course, you're trying to do the same thing to him as well.

Gameplay is fast-paced, for a hex-based wargame, and addictive. I constantly find myself saying "Just one more battle before bed," which is a sure sign of incipient dependency.

Soon I will make Webelo

Soon I will make Webelo

Battles are wrapped up into a somewhat baroque but fun "career mode," wherein you have an overall rank (based on how many battles you've fought) and class (expressed as a colour, based on how well you've done in those battles). So a blue ensign has fought more battles than a gold master mate, but the latter did better, on average, in his fights. As you finish battles, little medals begin to decorate your career screen. It makes a cub scout's heart glow warmly to see these little merit badges accumulate. If you needed any proof that war is really about boys and their toys, it's right here.

There are nine pregenerated maps, and a nice variety of options to generate random maps. There is also a campaign mode, called "Save the Admiral," where you fight a large number of set-piece and random battles. Sprinkled in among the games, particularly in the campaign, are additional missions where you are responsible for more than simply amassing the most victory points. For example, in the "Secrets" mission, you need to perform reconnaissance on certain hexes deep in enemy territory. The "Fishing Territory" mission requires you to defend certain sea hexes from enemy incursion. "Death By Duel" requires you to try to destroy certain enemy ships with certain designated ships in your own fleet. In order to win a mission battle, you have to make your victory point quota and fulfill whatever the terms of the mission are. Completing the mission successfully usually isn't hard; getting enough victory points usually isn't hard. Doing both at the same time is surprisingly hard.

Completing battles -- again, particularly campaign battles -- gives you a variety of rewards that you can use in future combat. For instance, there are a variety of points that can be used to buy special abilities for a flagship (that can be used in only one battle) -- move faster, better radar, and so on. There are also "power plays," that can be used if you want to even up a tough battle a bit -- the "traitor" play, for example, causes several enemy ships to mutiny and join your side, whereas the "spy" play reveals some of the enemy's ship positions to you. When I first read the description of these abilities, I thought they were a bit cheesy; some sort of way to reward the player by letting him cheat.

But it turns out that the computer players accrue these rewards also. In the last game I played, the computer played both "traitor" and "spy" plays against me. So as far as I'm concerned, the gloves are off.

Planning for battle

Planning for battle

The setup for a battle is one of the most well-designed parts of the game. For every battle, you must determine which ships you're going to purchase with your initial allocation of points. First, you can blow it off completely by just clicking "Auto Buy," and letting the computer pick for you. That's a great optimization for a busy player who wants a comparatively quick game. If you want to, though, you can reasonably spend as much time picking your weapons as you do actually playing the round. You set a mission for each victory point (capture, attack, raid, defend) and set a monetary budget; then you can assign ships to that port's mission. It's both fun and disturbing to watch your carefully laid plan completely unravel after the first few skirmishes.

The Lost Admiral Returns is not an online game; all battles are against the computer. The AI can be set to one of ten levels; I found level 1 to be trivial to beat, and have slowly been ratcheting the difficulty up. So far, I just barely managed to defeat a level 5 opponent, so the difficulty ramp feels about right. To the best of my knowledge, the computer isn't cheating. After each battle, you are given the option to post your scores on the internet and see how other people did on the same map, against the same AI you played. That can be pretty humbling.

So, there's a lot to love about The Lost Admiral Returns. The game concepts are simple to grasp, but provide a lot of tactical depth. The opponents are strong, and there's a sense of reward for progressing through the game. Are there any downsides to the game?

Well, there's basically one problem. It's not a huge problem, but I'd be remiss if I didn't mention it. When I started up the game for the first time and got into the tutorial, I said to myself "Wow, this game looks exactly like the old game The Perfect General, from QQP, from way back in 1991." See, I hadn't paid any attention to the word "Returns" in the game's title -- this is Thurston Searfoss's update of the original Lost Admiral game, also published by QQP. The game feels the same. It has the same little almost-but-not-quite square buttons and the same sorts of hand-drawn icons. Tooltips pop up in hand-coded dialogue boxes that are not generated by any toolkit you've ever seen before. The UI would be considered advanced, if this were a DOS game written in 1990. But it's not 1990.

This is not a problem specific to The Lost Admiral; in fact, let's take a brief detour to talk about the subject.

It is pretty much par for the course for game designers who know nothing about Human-Computer Interaction to throw away the style guide for whatever platform they're coding on and instead develop their own unique interface for their games with visual, tactile, and response time characteristics unique to their game. This drives me insane. For some truly pathological cases, try the following examples: Fire up Windows and move the mouse around a little. Get the feel of it. Now start up Deus Ex, or Europa Universalis and move the mouse around. It will have a completely different feel -- in Deus Ex, the cursor movement feels slippery, like you're driving on ice. Europa Universalis' mouse control feels like you're driving through deep mud; you have to move the mouse twice as fast to travel the same distance as in Windows proper.

Most games have to have some user interface specific to the game ("clicking here does this," "moving the joystick does this"). But this specific act of throwing away platform standards and building your own behavior for every single aspect of user interaction disturbs me. Therefore, I will call it "overcreating a UI". Maybe overcreating a UI makes sense in certain situations (for example, your game is going to be ported to a bunch of different platforms, and you want them to look consistent across all of them). But on the whole, this feels like a morass for game developers, where they have a mission ("design and implement a game that's fun") and then sign up to overcreate a UI without thinking about whether it's really appropriate. In the early 1990s, a number of companies actually designed their own extended memory managers rather than using Windows or existing DOS memory infrastructures. Origin's memory manager for Ultima 7, for example, made the game amazingly painful to play. I think in years to come, games with overcreated UIs will be seen the same way.

It's one thing if you've got an HCI expert on your team who is going to help you create a UI that's as good as Windows or OS X. But most smaller developers don't have that expert. So by developing their own custom buttons and cursor-movement code, all they do is make their game look more distinctive -- which may be good -- and subtly irritate all their users on a subconscious level, as various UI elements act almost, but not quite, like the elements they use in 90% of their other activities.

And that's the big drawback of The Lost Admiral. It has a massively overcreated UI. This is constantly with you as you play. Apart from the obvious issue of the buttons not being pretty drop-shadowed Windows buttons, there are other annoyances. The game is full of tooltips which pop up as you scroll the mouse around the screen, sometimes obscuring what you actually want to read. The game pauses and continues during the computer's turn without waiting for user input, but displays a box with a "continue" button for three quarters of a second, just long enough for me to start moving the mouse to try to click it. To select ships, you have to right-click, which changes the display in a manner so subtle as to be imperceptible if you're not paying close attention. Then, to move a ship you left click. I've made bad moves in a couple of battles because I accidentally left-clicked and sent a ship sailing off into somewhere it was never meant to go. Compare this to the UI in Panzer General. When a unit was selected, the hexes to which it could move to were normal and all other hexes were practically opaque. It was extremely visible. This was an instant visual cue to the user to Be Careful. Also, in Panzer General if you clicked outside of the permitted movement area, you deselected the unit; in this game, the unit will move as far as it can towards wherever you clicked.

None of these interface issues ruin the game. The developer is aware of them, and is working on addressing the most pressing ones (which you'll read about in the next few days, when we publish our interview with him). I highlight them only because the gap between the superb game design and gameplay and the dowdy, hand-rolled interface is so stark. If there's anything that will turn players off the game, I think it will be the interface.

Lots of information on The Lost Admiral Returns is available at the game's web site. There's a very generous 30 day trial period in which you have pretty much full access to all of the game's features. If what you've read here interests you, I encourage you to download the demo (for Windows PCs only, unfortunately) and give it a try.

Ask the Game Geek, Part 2

2004-12-21 · by peterb

Here's another game that I vividly remember playing, but could not recall the name of. A little research has helped me figure it out, however. (Yes, I've updated this article since last night, when I still didn't know the name and was bemoaning my fate).

awacs

AWACS (Click to enlarge)

It was an Apple ][ game. My memory of it was as follows: The game was played on a map of Europe, with the Soviet Union on the east and West Germany and environs on the west. Soviet fighters and bombers would appear on the map, identified by little call signs ("Tu-26" "Mi-25" "Su-11"). The planes would begin flying towards their western targets. In response to this, the player's job was to select an appropriate airbase and dispatch a fighter plane from that base to intercept a given Soviet plane.

It was similar in some ways to NORAD, a very clever missile command clone, which involved intercepting missiles rather than planes. But in my memory, all you were doing was choosing which planes intercepted the Soviet planes, on a sector-by-sector basis. You didn't actually steer them, whereas in NORAD there was an actual dexterity requirement. This mystery game was, essentially, a simple air traffic controller game.

I liked it.

Some lucky searches showed me that this game was called AWACS, and it's a little more complex than what I describe above. The ways in which my memory diverged from the truth are interesting.

AWACS is Missile Command in concept, but a bit more interesting in implementation. Specifically, you should move your AWACS plane close enough to the radar contacts so that you can identify them; some of the radar contacts are friendly, and shooting them down is frowned upon. You don't actually "steer your plane" around as much as you move a "window" of viewing area over a map of Western Europe. When planes are nearly centered, their blueprint shows up at the bottom of your screen. Rather than launching fighters to intercept, as I remembered, you just hit "enter," and the closest base launches a missile at the nearest contact. If the plane reaches a base, the base is destroyed (I lost Prague within the opening seconds of a game I played this morning. It's quite challenging.) The reason I remembered launching fighter planes is that after a while, your own bases start launching planes on their own, and you need to identify them so that you don't accidentally shoot them down.

You can obtain the disk image for AWACS here, but the fastloader is incompatible with the operating system on the disk image; boot your emulator with a dos 3.3 image and then load the game disk into a second drive and run it there (try BRUN AWACS,D2).

Christmas Update

2004-12-22 · by peterb

For those of you taking off for the holiday, have a great time doing whatever it is you'll be doing. I plan on continuing to try to update regularly through to the New Year. If you're travelling, drive safely, and please remember to drink only homemade egg nog, never the store-bought stuff. You have my permission to use pasteurized eggs, if you worry about that sort of thing.

Part of the Problem

2004-12-23 · by peterb

This week Salon published an especially depressing The Year in Games article, full of various commentators saying obvious and, for the most part, untrue things.

My favorite had to be the "he's usually smarter than that" Greg Costikyan talking about how there's "no indie games industry." I'd be willing to bet that any random game by Ambrosia software has sold more copies, than, say, any Nokia N-Gage game. Would it be accurate, therefore, for me to say "there's no mobile gaming industry?" Or is the metric for whether an industry exists not whether you book any revenue, but just whether a company is spending money?

The other aspect of the article was how it's pretty clear that pretty much none of the commentators -- except for Costikyan -- have ever played any game that wasn't given to them by some PR flack as a freebie. Halo this, Half-Life that, and their version of being "edgy" was recommending Namco's Katamari Damacy . And the guy who said the best game of the year was the unplayable -- but oh so corporate -- Ninja Gaiden made me weep bitter tears of blood.

Stop asking why games aren't innovative. They are. It's just that the games you're choosing to play aren't innovative.

And if you want to know why that is, just look in the mirror.

The Long Dark Hallway

2004-12-24 · by psu

As I mentioned earlier I bought Half-Life 2 last week. Here is a short meditation on why the game is perhaps the perfect shooter.

First Person Shooters are characterized by fairly simple gameplay:

  1. Enter area.
  2. Kill everything that moves before you die.
  3. Exit area.

Ultimately, no matter how dressed up a shooter is with narrative, cut scenes and interactive non player characters, the key to the game's success is how well it delivers on this core mechanic. Shooters are at their best when you are runing down a long dark hallway and using your bad-ass skills to cut your enemies to pieces.

I have a soft spot for Half-Life. The original Half-Life was the last game I played before my current descent into addiction. It is also generally credited with expanding the role of narrative in a shooter. The game is played as a series of narrative episodes all told from the game engine without separate cut scenes, and always from the point of view of the player. At its best, the game combines this narrative style with great level design to give you at least the sense that the story, such as it is, is just unfolding in front of you as a result of your actions in the game. The fact that the game sort of falls apart in its last act doesn't really detract from the fact that everything leading up to that point was brilliant.

After Half-Life, shooters and action games took on more elements of interesting story telling (Halo, Max Payne) and more open ended gameplay (Far Cry, GTA, Deus Ex). It's now fashionable to tout interactive environments, uncanny AI and complete freedom of gameplay as a set of holy grails that once obtained will usher in a new age in gaming glory.

But I don't think this is so, and I think Half-Life 2 is a small bit of proof that I am right. Half-Life 2 is brilliant precisely because it is not open ended, but completely linear and scripted. One minute the goons will be chasing you over a rooftop. The next you'll notice an open window near a ledge and you leap in just in time to save yourself from the rush of the drone army. You feel like a brilliant bad-ass. As the rush subsides, you realize that the game led you there. This happens over and over again. The game has perfected a technique that Half-Life got right once in a while, which is to take you down a long dark hallway that is cleverly disguised as "the real world".

Half-Life 2 builds this illusion using state of the art rendering and flawless pacing and level design. City 17 is full of beautiful light, texture and a palpable "sense of place." There was never a dark hallway this pretty. The place looks wide open, but the areas are cleverly designed to frantically direct you in exactly one direction, which is towards the end of the mission. You hardly ever find yourself wandering aimlessly through the game world with no idea where to go. This is in stark contrast to, say, Halo 2, where you could get lost even in the middle of the most frenetic action set piece.

The other tool that Half-life 2 uses to keep you running is some of the best human character animation I've ever seen anywhere. Humans in the game walk, run and fall like real people. But the faces are pure magic. Character's mouths move like they are really talking, and the faces really project a sense of feeling and emotion. It's cool how they carefully look at you as you move around them. All of this makes you forget is that most of your interactions with non-player characters who are not trying to kill you are completely scripted.

The result of this design is a game that puts you right on the rails of its story and doesn't allow you to fall off. You run, you hide, you shoot, the story moves forward. It's perfection.

My only complaint is that they didn't hire the guy that implemented Halo's level loading code, so your time in the game world is broken up by too many stupid load screens.

Other people who agree with me and said it first

Here tilt gushes in much the same way.

Here the Game Brains guys do the same thing.

A Very Retro Christmas

2004-12-25 · by peterb

The wonderful gift of the Atari Anthology (more on that tomorrow) inspired my relatives and I to talk about (and play) some other retro games on various emulators. When I fired up Richard Bannister's Mugrat, I got the following splash screen...

Colecovision Easter Egg

...complete with animated snowflakes and "Winter Wonderland" playing in the background. Since I don't think the Colecovision actually had a clock and battery, I can only assume this was Richard's easter egg, specifically for mugrat. In which case: Thanks, Roger! Joyeux Noël to you, too.

And, since this is an entry about an obsolete 8-bit game console, it feels somehow appropriate to note that this is the 256th article on Tea Leaves. Thanks to everyone who both reads the site and writes for it, for keeping it interesting and fun for this entire year.

Signal To Noise

2004-12-27 · by peterb

Today, I cancelled my satellite TV service. I have no more broadcast or cable TV.

I hate saying that, since I've met so many people who get so in-your-face about not watching TV. You know the type. All you have to do is mention that, say, you saw the football game last night, and wasn't that a great interception, and these people will literally pounce from half a room away, rushing over to inform you, for the eighty-sixth goddamn time, they they wouldn't know, because they don't watch TV. They're too busy reading books and doing macrame and yoga and running their own business selling homemade homeopathic herbal tea.

For me, the decision isn't really being driven by some sense of cultural superiority, but simple economics.

For a long time now, I've been watching basically two things on TV: The Daily Show, and various forms of motor racing on Speed Channel. That's really about it. It's not that the other stuff on TV "isn't good," or even that I wouldn't necessarily like it. It's just that it has to compete with other forms of entertainment that I find more compelling: movies, downloaded foreign TV shows, video games, and books. Add to this the fact that the better segments of The Daily Show show up for download semi-regularly on BoingBoing, and the fact that the winter is a racing wasteland (except for the upcoming Paris-Dakar Rally), and the equation becomes fairly clear:

I'm paying $50 a month for the privilege of not actually watching any TV. That's $600/year. If you asked me explicitly "How much is it worth to you to watch The Daily Show and all the F1 and MotoGP races?" my answer would be "significantly less than $600/year." So this is a case where the economy of scale of TV delivery works in the exact opposite way that I want. Let's say a satellite provider carries 150 channels. They want to deliver those 150 channels to me for $50/month. Really, I just want Speed Channel and Comedy central. I'm willing to pay, say, $10/month for just those 2 channels. Too bad. I'm out of luck, the satellite provider is out of luck, and instead I'll be looking to download video of races a day later, online.

Maybe my $10/month simply can't be captured -- perhaps the cost of sales to someone like me is prohibitively high, and it's not worth trying. It does seem like a strange failure, though. My impression is that as the internet accustoms us to content that is more and more specifically tailored to our desires, it is becoming a more common failure.

How much TV do you watch? How much are you paying? Is it worth the money to you?

Thurston Searfoss Interview

2004-12-28 · by peterb

thurston

Thurston Searfoss and Devoted Fan

Excerpts from an interview with Thurston Searfoss, author of The Lost Admiral Returns. We recently published a comprehensive review of the game.

peterb: "How long was the development cycle for the game?"

Thurston: "It's been about 4 years, part time. I do a number of other different jobs. So a lot longer than I would have liked. I'm a part time developer, marketer -- the whole works, for good or bad -- so I have to switch to alternative tasks, and then I get very frustrated at how long it takes to do anything"

What development environment and tools did you use to create the game?

"For tools, the usual C++ environment. A lot of them are actually older, so I'm actually using fastpath for file formats, that kind of stuff. I'm having to use DirectX, of course. I evaluated a couple of 3D engines but rejected them in favor of building a 2D sprite system, where I'd have more control."

Why?

"This is a downloadable product, so I needed to keep the download size reasonable, around 15 megabytes. That's pretty hard to do when you increase the resolution past 800x600 or when you start going in to 3D. And it just makes it 100 times easier to get reasonable views."

Who do you perceive as the primary audience for your game? People who played and enjoyed the old QQP Lost Admiral, or new players?

"A big part of it is aimed at the core original audience of all of my original games. At the same time, the core and essence of Lost Admiral is a very simple game; it's meant to be given a chance to be a breakout. the actual [user] interface has proven to be an obstacle to that. So I'm actually in the middle of rewriting parts of the interface to lean towards the mainstream expectations of the game."

Why did you build your own UI, rather than using standard Windows (or some well-known toolkit's) GUI elements?

I had to make the decision early on. [Windows] is a standard, but it doesn't cater to games that well, because what the heck does "edit" mean? So no, I prefer to have an in-game menu. By the same token, I try to keep all the interface elements simple."

I found it very easy to make mistakes in-game; for example, I'll try to select a ship by left-clicking on it, only to realize a moment later that I've just given an order to some other ship to move.

"In all my games it was very standard to left click to move and right click to select. The selection box was meant to indicate how far out you could move, and I guesss I never revisted the other side."

How long does it take to 'balance' a new scenario?

"The actual maps go back to the original game, so those aren't really an issue. The new material I have these days are these missions. The next mission we add to the game will be Bismark, Beachhead, and then Convoy, which is actually in the spirit of the north atlantic convoy. Each one of those is going to be very strongly WWII themed. For the missions I trust my instincts, and my actual users are the testers. Because of the in-game update system, any balance problems that are discovered can be fixed very easily. Players will complain about certain things, so that's good feedback.

Partially this works because missions are designed to be randomly created, just like the random map is created. So you have the core very balanced game, which has been balanced to work with random maps and then on top of this you blend on each and every mission with its own challenges. Right now there is a small chance you might get, for example, an unfair 'Secrets' mission, where the objective it too far away. So the question for me as a designer is how many more safety checks do I put in to detect situations like this?

What's the most positive, surprising thing about the game now that it's done?

"The way that the missions really do create a totally new breath of fresh air in the way the game plays. The core game is extremely rich, as you know."

They're a great way to make the game about more than just victory points.

"The new missions actually complement the new core of The Lost Admiral very well, once you get into them. They become a different set of victory criteria totally separate from the VP struggle, to the point where it's a trade-off, balancing which can you get away with. Can you get away with not taking that last city to finish 'The Trouble Next Door?" Or are you going to blow your VP total if you don't divert a ship to take a city?

It makes for a richness of strategic decisions. 'He's got one sub over there; I don't have any destroyers in that region. If I move a destroyer over there, I'll eventually get his sub, but can I afford to do that?' You don't just get a free lunch."

What games, other than your own, have you been playing lately?

"Tons of board games. Not many computer games, actually. So many of them are real-time strategy, and there's only so much you can do with them. It basically devolves into a puzzle agame: which units do you have to build, and then how quickly can you deliver them? It loses that chess-like feel. I've tried some of the remakes of some classic games -- Hearts of Iron, for example -- and they seem to fall pretty flat."

When you started building Lost Admiral Returns*, did you expect more people to want to play against the computer, or against other people?*

"When I put my first beta version out, players could only play against each other. I ran into a lot of technical issues with more advanced [network] connections. So I wound up disabling that and going back to the tried and true AI. My surveys repeatedly show that most strategy gamers prefer to play against the AI. No one is saying 'I'm going to return this game unless it goes multiplayer.' So there's a bunch of code in there that is disabled; it's disabled in the sense that it's unmaintained, so it probably needs to be reimplemented if we're going to get it back in to the game."

You've said on your web site that you plan on working on updates of your other classic games, The Grandest Fleet and Conquered Kingdoms next. Will the development cycle for those take 4 years also?

"Based on the engine work, the development time for the next products should be tremendously reduced. It should be 10 times easier going in to Conquered Kingdoms and The Grandest Fleet to deploy them. As long as the engine is not seen as so antiquated that no one wants it, to be quite blunt, it should be good.

The real issue is that I've been throwing my home on this project, so I have to balance my books and pay the bills. So how much can I fine-tune the biggest downfalls of the game (user-interface issues) and figure out who is it going to appeal to? Only gamers? Or does it have enough interest for any gamer? So the biggest hinge point for me right now is whether financially whether people will support me enough to go forward."

What level of sales do you need, realistically, to make continued work on these projects viable?

"To start balancing the books, 200 units/month or so. I'm beginning to wonder if the 'try before you buy' model makes it too easy for people to not spend the money. If you buy a game for money the pressure on try-before-you-buy games is to be '30 days, full access.'

Who puts that pressure on you?

"The download sites. It used to be, also, word of mouth. So far, for Lost Admiral at least, it isn't like an arcade game, so most people if they do like it, they do buy it. Its more a question of the user interface, and for some people, the graphics. So that's another weakness in my marketing model right now -- what is the reasonable limit for a number of days?"

Frankly, 30 days is longer than it takes me to get bored of most games, so for me, at least, I'm probably less likely to buy something if the trial period expires after 30 days than, say, 2 weeks. But I don't know whether or not I'm typical. Although I really appreciate having all the features active -- that makes me more inclined to buy a product, because I know exactly what I'm getting.

"If anything, in my haste to get it out the door, I simply took the easy route and left all the features active. At some point I may start boiling that down to 'here's a very small but good taste of it, and buy it to get the rest."

Thurston, thanks for your time.

It was nice talking to you.

Grand Bereft Auto

2004-12-29 · by peterb

Here are some things I hate about the Grand Theft Auto games, in no particular order.

Things I like:

That's about it, I think.

10 Things I Like

2004-12-30 · by psu

I have a reputation, perhaps deserved, of being generally grumpy and hateful. In the spirit of the Holiday Season, I thought I would try and dispel this notion by listing many things that I like, in no particular order.

Solis Maestro

I had a cheap Pavoni burr grinder that I had used for the last 5 or 6 years for my home coffee needs. I don't need much from a coffee grinder. I make coffee with a french press or a moka pot. So all a grinder has to do is go from super coarse to medium fine easily. The Pavoni always worked fine, except for the layer of fine coffee dust that it spewed everywhere. Finally, after years of abuse, coffee stopped falling into the burrs, so I decided to get something new.

It may seem strange to spend more than $100 on a coffee mill, and it did seem strange to me at the time. But the Solis is really a thing of beauty. You can set it from french press coarse to Turkish Coffee fine in one easy twist. Whatever the setting, it generates coffee grounds of a uniform fineness without spraying dust and without a huge amount of static, even in Pittsburgh winters. It's also easy to clean, so it won't sit uncleaned like the Pavoni did for 6 years.

Rose Tea Cafe

Rose Tea has gone from a purveyor of an odd Asian drink craze to simply the best Chinese food in Pittsburgh period. The home style Taiwanese food that they serve here is actually good enough for me to want to go even if I've recently eaten my mom's food. In fact, it is much like my mom's food, which is why it simply rules.

Chopstick Inn has a larger menu, but IMHO it is not as well executed. Here are some dishes that Rose Tea does that are so good they will make you weep with joy:

All this and good prices too. I used to rate Chinese places in Pittsburgh by how many different sauce colors they had on their menu. It is therefore something of a watershed to have a place in town that has two brown sauces that are completely different in flavor. There is finally real Chinese food in Pittsburgh. Go get it.

P.S. If I catch you in P.F. Chang's, I'll kill you with my bare hands.

My G4 Powerbook

I do almost all my computing on my laptop.

That's pretty much it. If the software I worked on weren't quite so large, I would not even use the G5 tower at work. But I've gotten used to the fast build times. The fact that I use this machine basically 24/7 and it has not failed in two years makes me like it. It's also silent, except when it gets hot. I love that.

Airport Express

It's a power brick that gives you wireless network anywhere there is an ethernet tap. What more could you want?

The modern game console

As I discussed in more detail elsewhere it's just not possible to go wrong with console game machines these days. The current set of consoles are better than their PC counterparts in almost every way and an order of magnitude cheaper. You can buy all of the major brands (GameCube, Xbox, PS2) and a few games for each for the price of that graphics card and monitor you need to play DOOM 3. So I did.

Counterstrike and Xbox Live

Halo 2 and Half-Life 2 may be prettier and feature excellent single player gameplay, but nothing is more fun to me than a few rounds of Counterstrike with my Xbox Live buddies against bots. Xbox Live makes creating and joining the game session quick and painless, and the intense pace, team based gameplay (always with headsets) is simply too good to really pass up.

Counterstrike:Source on the PC is prettier, but leaves the gameplay unchanged, and the current server browser system is so bad that it will make a strong man break down into uncontrollable weeping. The other day, tilt and I tried to get into a game together (I have a PC at work I use for this, it's a long story). Here is how it went:

I am never playing any online game that isn't on Xbox Live or some other similarly centralized service. Life is too short.

My Stove

A couple of years ago, we got a new kitchen. As part of this work, we replaced the old underpowered cooktop with a new shiny overpriced cooktop. This stove is a wonder of the modern world. Unlike others I looked at, all five burners put out roughly the same range of heat. Most other cooktops have "high power" and "low power" burners, which sucks. Most others especially suck because they put the high power burners on the left side of the stove, which is simply wrong (that's a long story).

My favorite thing about this stove is that on the one hand it can put out enough heat that I never have to worry about my saute going flat because I add a bit of cold stuff to the pan, and on the other hand, you can turn the stove on at the lowest simmer it will do and the burner will light at precisely the level you want. No hiccups. Since I got this stove, for reasons I don't completely understand, a lot of dishes I make involving long simmers suddenly started to work better. Now, I don't really believe that the stove did this for me, but it certainly made it easier for this to happen.

For reference, this is a DCS CT-365 five burner gas cooktop. Here is a google link in case the other goes bad.

Google Mail

Finally mail done right. No stupid folders, just fast search. This is the future way of all things.

The Bruckner Symphonies

Of all the great warhorses in the Classical Canon, I think these are the most compelling. Bruckner wrote huge expansive and abstract meditations that are infused with an intense spirituality. Nowhere in music is there a stronger mix of the intellectual and the emotional. If you can sit in a concert hall and not get chills when the orchestra hits one of the massive brass chorales in the later (6th, 7th, or 8th) Symphonies, then you are emotionally dead.

For The Record

My favorite record store on the planet. This store has been in the middle of Amherst, MA for almost my entire life. It started out as an annex in a larger store, but soon became a standalone entity. I love it because the people who run it know what they are doing and have an encyclopedic knowledge of what they carry. They are not the biggest store on the planet, but they stock the most consistently excellent collection of music in all areas that I have had the pleasure of browsing. The guy that runs the Classical section is particularly wonderful and seems to know exactly where every single classical recording in the store is and when it was ordered or when it will be ordered or how many copies they have in stock on a given day.

For The Record is a testimony to the local shop run by people who love music and records more than they love money. The prices are also much better than average.

Navelgazing

2004-12-31 · by peterb

I started this weblog last January. Originally, it was just meant to be a place for me to keep my notes on my Final Cut Pro projects. My "real writing" was meant to go on the (now defunct) Tea Leaves project of the Danampersanderic art collective. But that project somehow didn't take off, and I found myself putting more and more content here. Before I knew it there were actually readers.

It was a month later that I published a document meant to summarize my philosophy of writing for this space. It's still on the sidebar today. The quick summary is: longer, in-depth articles. No "hey, look at this neat link!" items. Keep confessional, overly intimate, or personal details about myself to a minimum, or better yet eliminate them completely. Lastly, and perhaps most significantly, no "blogging about blogging." If you want to find a weblog where the authors incessantly talk about Movable Type vs. WordPress, or how great or stupid RSS is, or how blogging is going to change the world, you can go practically anywhere else. I find these topics intensely boring. I want to write about stuff. I don't want to write about writing stuff.

All rules are made to be broken, on occasion. Since it is the end of 2004, this is a good point to suspend the "no blogging about blogging" rule, for one day. I'd like to take a moment to look back at how this space has grown in the past year, and how it will develop in 2005.

Readership has increased dramatically over the past year. What started as a URL handed out to a few friends now gets about 30,000 page visits a month. Lots of people read us via an RSS newsreader, or through bloglines, livejournal, or some other aggregated feed. Eventually, I may need to deploy a new host to handle traffic. At that time, I may transition the site to the (already reserved and working, although not publicized) domain name tleaves.com.

In terms of topics covered, the site has a strong emphasis on games with discussions of food, culture, and computers and software development topics coming not far behind. The other topics -- racing, filmmaking, and photography -- have become unusual digressions. I'm inclined to leave them as such, rather than formally eliminating them.

Early on, I decided that the unwritten goal for frequency of posting was "one good, reasonably long article per weekday." No excuses, no "I don't have time to post today" items; silence is preferable to weaseling. We haven't been 100% successful in meeting this target, but we've been closer than I thought we'd get when I set the goal. This has been good in many ways. First and foremost, it has kept me writing at a furious pace, which means I'm continually honing my writing skills. That was always my secret goal for having this space. I think it also benefits the readers. It would give me a warm and fuzzy feeling to know that there were even two or three people out there who say to themselves, once a day, at work, "Hey, I should check and see if there's a new article at Tea Leaves." I have a day job that takes precedence over the weblog. But I look forward to writing an article each night. If there's someone out there who looks forward to reading it, that's super cool.

Having the "one article per weekday" goal has had some negative effects too. It means that I've published some articles on topics that I was only borderline interested in. Worse, it has pushed me to publish articles that weren't ready; they really needed more work. This has had both micro effects (the occasional typo or clumsy phrase that my volunteer editor yells at me for the day after I've posted) and the occasional big effect (where I take what was meant to be a more in-depth article and instead chop it down to be "one day's worth" of posting.) That latter problem hasn't happened as much since psu started contributing.

And bringing psu on board was a superb thing. I look forward to reading his articles eagerly, and in more than just an "oh, phew, I don't have to meet tonight's deadline" sense. We agree philosophically on many things, yet our interests are just divergent enough to give the site more breadth without having strict conformity of opinion. In the coming year, I hope to bring at least one more author on board, if I can find someone whose style, areas of interest, and willingness to write frequently mesh well with mine. My interests in this are somewhat selfish: as the principal behind Tea Leaves, I feel obligated to provide an article a day. But since this isn't paying work, I'm realistic about my ability to maintain that pace with so few writers.

So it's a tricky balance. I have a sense that having a few more writers would improve the quality of each article (because of reduced pressure to "just post it, already"). Having too many writers could reduce the thematic consistency of the site. I'm not sure where, exactly, the line is. But I'm going to continue looking for it.

Even though I view Tea Leaves as a place for writing (as compared to a place for "discussion"), I do read all of the comments and appreciate them, even when I don't necessarily agree. The most surprising thread of the year for me was in the article about Idlewild, where Snow White and Little Bo Peep yelled at me for (in their eyes) being an insensitive, child-hating clod. On the constructive side of the fence, the comments on the article What Programming Language brought up some interesting points and opinions. I really wished I had thought of some of the items readers came up with in the discussion on Software Development Considered Harmful. So thanks to all of you who participate regularly, or occasionally, and I hope you keep reading -- and writing -- in 2005.

I'd also like to specifically thank psu for joining me in this little exercise; my volunteer editor for being completely willing to point out every awkward sentence, verb tense disagreement, and boring part of every article I write; and the folks on CMU CS Zephyr for their useful feedback, helpful suggestions, and not stabbing me in the neck every time I post another URL.

See you next year.

Dinnertime Disasters

2005-01-03 · by peterb

From a culinary standpoint, I was having a good weekend. I had a guest who had some dietary restrictions; to wit, no saturated fats at all, minimal unsaturated fats, low cholesterol foods only. Since I, typically, am someone who starts nearly every recipe with "Take a cup of heavy cream and..." I had to do a little more planning to get the weekend's meals ready.

I settled on primarily Japanese cuisine, on the theory that I could get the needed ingredients, and had a variety of dishes that met the low-fat requirements. Making dashi is always fun and easy, and miso soup is always appreciated. I also took the opportunity to try some things I hadn't done before. Every time I go to Chaya, they are out of kimpira, so I made it myself to find out what it was like (it was yummy).

I also picked a recipe out of Tokiko Suzuki's book Japanese Homestyle Cooking for Pomfret broiled in Saikyo-way, a miso and sake mixture. Knowing how Suzuki is a stickler for procedure, I was careful to follow her instructions religiously, to the letter. I was somewhat suspcious of her instructions to salt the fish (and later, clean off the salt) before sandwiching the fish between saikyo-wai covered cheesecloth and preserving it for two days, but I trusted her. I admit I departed from her brief in one way: I decided to skip the "place the filet on a chysanthemum leaf" presentation.

The dish turned out bad. Not "unpleasant," not "unfortunate," but a complete and utter culinary calamity, salty to the point of being inedible. Amusingly, I had bought a nice filet of bacalhao a few days earlier as well, and I'm pretty sure I would have ended up with something more edible had I just soaked that filet for a couple of hours and then broiled it. ("But don't you have to soak bacalhao for 2 days before enough salt is leached out so that it's actually edible?" I hear you ask. Yes. That's my point.) I forced myself to choke it down as punishment for serving my guests something I hadn't tried successfully first. I was fairly mortified.

So either Suzuki-san's recipe leaves something to be desired or more likely I, being illiterate and stupid, misread something and made some critical mistake. My sister relies on a variant of this dish as a staple, so I can certainly believe I did something wrong, and I should try it again. That's not what I'm getting at here.

My question is: what do you do when this happens in front of guests? Am I simply naive for trying something new when someone else's meal is at stake? Or is there some graceful way to recover from this situation? Beg for forgiveness? Order a pizza? At our table we had made many other dishes so people didn't go hungry, but it was still a humbling experience.

If you've ever wondered what crow tastes like, I can assure you it tastes like very, very salty fish.

Reveries on Reveilles

2005-01-04 · by peterb

Arcade games used to make noise. They don't, anymore. Not really.

I'm not talking about videogames, of course, but arcade games. Being of a certain age means that I've actually played non-video arcade games, other than pinball, something that I suspect most people under 30 haven't done.

Upper Deck

Upper Deck

My favorites were the shooting gallery games. The mechanism in the era in which I was playing was light-based; the games had a small light bulb in the gun that flashed when you pulled the trigger, and light sensors on the targets. Earlier versions of these games didn't use light, but were entirely mechanical. These games were marvelous orchestras of industrial noise. The points were tracked by clunky odometer-like wheels with numbers on them that made a satisfying ka-CHUNK ka-CHUNK noise when they spun, not a soulless LED. As targets (little metal or plastic figures of hares, or bears, or birds) moved into and out of the target area, they would click in to place, THUNK, or smoothly whiiiiiiiiirrrrrrrrrr across the field. Scores were often announced with the sound of bells. Many of these devices had electronic samples, as well, especially in later years, but the physical nature of the device was not completely abstracted.

Nearly as much fun were the sports games. The baseball games, with their core mechanic of pitching and batting resembling pinball, were extremely well-suited to the medium. The machines encouraged abuse. The sheer physicality of slamming on the "hit" button and hearing the metallic crack of the bat on the ball was addicting.

There is not, of course, a clear line dividing video games from their mechanical cousins. Early videogames used many of the same mechanical parts as the other games. I was thinking of one of these games in particular, the other day, because I couldn't remember its name, and it was driving me insane. I described it to a friend of mine, and in doing so got specific enough to be able to research it and find the game.

The game was a timed vertical scrolling shooter. You moved a crosshair left or right to control where your missiles landed (missiles took about a second to land, so there was some timing involved). Scrolling down the screen at you were various targets -- bridges, oil depots, the occasional airplane -- and your mission was to shoot as much as you could in the allotted time. Beyond that, I only remembered a few things about the game. First, it was in black and white. In at least one arcade I frequented, the game had a red filter placed on the screen so that everything was pink and black, rather than white and black. Second, the sound effects in the game were mostly modulated white noise.

Sky Raider (click to enlarge)

Sky Raider (click to enlarge)

A little research gave me the name I was looking for: Sky Raider. It was the first continuously-scrolling video game. It was implemented on Atari's 6502 black and white hardware. The strangest thing about this platform had to be the mirror. It wasn't a direct-view game. The game, on the video monitor, was upside down and backwards, and in a trapezoid form. This was reflected on a mirror which was mounted at an oblique angle; the overall effect was a pretty good simulation of 3D for the time. You can play the game in the MAME emulator, but the sound doesn't work, and you have to be willing to play it upside down and backwards. And although Sky Raiders was an electronic videogame with electronic sounds, it had a clunky control yoke that made satisfying little noises as you manuevered your crosshairs left or right. Those, of course, can't be adequately emulated in software.

Somehow without the sound it's just not the same.

Additional Resources

The Game Geek Quiz

2005-01-05 · by peterb

Googling for the answers is cheating. Some questions are easy. Others are harder. I don't believe any are impossible. If you answer them all right, you win nothing but the pride (or the shame, depending on how you want to view it) of spending such a large percentage of your brain cells on videogame and computer trivia. Feel free to contribute guesses in the comments.

  1. What was "Contra-Dextra Avenue"?

  2. What was the first (computer) adventure game that took a text adventure interface and added significant graphics?

  3. Who wrote most of the games for Sirius Software (example game: Gorgon). First name only is OK.

  4. Who saw farther?

  5. Finish this phrase: "Ho eyoh he ___"

  6. This platform game was one of the earliest games to be ported to nearly every popular home computer (and game platform) in existence in 1983. It was famous for having versions on just about everything, from the Vic-20 up through all the Atari consoles and computers, to the Apple ][, and beyond. What was its name?

Banshee

Banshee

  1. In the superb chess-like game Archon, each piece had a counterpart. The dark goblin was the opposite of the human Knight. The dragon was opposed by the Phoenix. The basilisk was opposed by the unicorn. What light-side piece corresponded to the dark-side banshee?

  2. How can you open the jewel-encrusted egg without damaging the clockwork canary?

  3. Rick and Ilsa. Heloise and Abelard. Guybrush and ______?

  4. Eric Snider wrote the classic card game Eric's Ultimate Solitaire for the Mac, later ported to other platforms. Solitaire, of course, is a game that people play without computers, and Eric's Ultimate Solitaire is a computer implementation of that game. In the early 1980's, Eric's older brother David wrote a successful game which took another non-computer game and put it into software. What was it? (CMU alumni who know the answer because you are friends with Eric are asked not to give this one away.)

  5. Leisure Suit Larry was actually a with-graphics reworking of an earlier, text-only game. What was the name of that game?

Komensie!

Komensie!

  1. In Silas Warner's classic game Castle Wolfenstein, you played a prisoner trying to escape from a Nazi castle. Patrolling the castle were scores of Nazi soldiers. There were also SS officers who would try to track you down once they discovered corpses of common soldiers. The SS were very hard to kill because...?

  2. In the game The Prisoner (and Prisoner 2), what ASCII character was used to represent the player?

  3. The arcade game Tron put the name of a computer language at the bottom of the screen to identify what "level" you were on; each time you cleared all four stages, the language changed. What language was used for the very first level?

  4. What were the dungeons in the game Realm of Impossibility named after, thematically?

  5. In the Atari 800 game Star Raiders, what color did the screen turn when you turned on your shields?

quack

quack

  1. Everyone knows the story about how Warren Robinett hid his name in the Atari 2600 Adventure cartridge as a hard-to-get easter egg. Most people who played it obsessively have done it, I'd guess -- you have to go into the black castle, find an invisible dot, drag the dot back across the dungeon, and then figure out that it lets you walk through a certain wall, if you're dragging it behind you. Your reward is seeing the creator's name, in glowing chromaluminescent letters. (And if you've never tried Adventure, try this Flash version). Fewer people remember that the three cute duckies fearsome dragons who chase you have names. What are they?

  2. This Atari computer game used the theme song from the Alfred Hitchcock TV show ("Funeral March of the Marionettes"; MIDI sample is not actually from the game) for its title screen. What game was it?

  3. This game had a cult following that lasted well into the 1990's, despite the fact that it was practically unplayable. You and your opponent each had a shield and an axe. The camera was situated directly above you. From this odd top-down view, you could independently control your left arm, your right arm, and move around. Combat consisted of flailing into the opponent while "blood" spurted until pieces started falling off. Then the guy who was losing would run away, and you would chase him hopelessly for 10 minutes cursing the controls. What was the name of this game?

  4. How many hostages did you have to rescue to have a 'perfect' round in the original Choplifter?

Answers will be posted in the next few days. The answers have been posted, but feel free to make your guesses below, anyway, before peeking at the answer key.

Metapost: Minor cleanup

2005-01-06 · by peterb

Many of my articles have small captioned images that show up, when you visit the site, offset next to a paragraph, nicely formatted. I just realized, however, that since the RSS feeds don't really support stylesheets, these look completely wrong to anyone who is reading the site via a newsreader. So I'm fixing them, which may make a number of old posts appear to be marked as new. Sorry.

Also, although I've got I format that seems to work well in most RSS aggregators, the images still look wrong on bloglines. If you've got a bright idea about the right way to fix this, please send email to blog -at- tleaves.com

Great Moments in Cooking, #47

2005-01-06 · by peterb

I actually did this a few months ago. I think of it every time I cook now.

Thankfully, there was no permanent damage. But misery loves company, so: what's the stupidest thing you've ever done in the kitchen?

Game Geek Quiz Answers

2005-01-07 · by peterb

It's Friday, which means it's time for the answers to the Game Geek Quiz. If you haven't tried the quiz yet, click here if you want to see the questions without spoilers. Otherwise, read on!

The original questions have been included in italics. The "official" right answer is in boldface. I've tried to provide context for every answer.

1. What was "Contra-Dextra Avenue"?

In Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, the first game in the series, you saw the message "Contra-Dextra Avenue" when you took your first step on the very bottom level of the dungeon. This was a clue on how to find the wizard Werdna's lair. "Dextra," from the Latin word meaning "right" and "contra" meaning against. At every intersection, turn left. Simple.

2. What was the first (computer) adventure game that took a text adventure interface and added significant graphics?

This was one of the easier questions: Sierra On-Line's Mystery House, authored by Naked Roberta Williams, is generally considered to be the first text adventure with graphics (fairly crude black and white drawings).

3. Who wrote most of the games for Sirius Software (example game: Gorgon). First name only is OK.

The prolific Nasir Gebelli. He also wrote Star Cruiser, Horizon V, and many other Apple ][ games. In addition, he was the main programmer on -- wait for it -- the early Final Fantasy games, as well as The Secret of Mana and other Square/Enix works.

Stubborn as a M.U.L.E.

Stubborn as a M.U.L.E.

4. Who saw farther?

I expected more people to know this one: Electronic Arts. They pushed an ad campaign which portrayed game developers as artists, not programmers. The poster was very soft focus, with Bill Budge looking all butch, and Dani Bunten back when she was preoperative Dan Bunten, and the Free Fall Associates guys looking all thoughtful and clever. I actually had 3 copies of the poster until just a few years ago. Of course, now that I've thrown it away, it's worth money. The scan of the poster is courtesy Gotcha, a site well worth visiting.

5. Finish this phrase: "Ho eyoh he ___"

Hum. Iolo the Bard periodically sings this throughout the original Ultima. The four continents in that game are also named Ho, Eyoh, He, and Hum.

One of the things that disturbed me about the Ultima games on an almost subliminal level was how through at least Ultima IV, the entire geography of the planet would change and no one would say anything about it.

6. This platform game was one of the earliest games to be ported to nearly every popular home computer (and game platform) in existence in 1983. It was famous for having versions on just about everything, from the Vic-20 up through all the Atari consoles and computers, to the Apple ][, and beyond. What was its name?

Robot Attack

Robot Attack

This question, I've decided, is unfair because it is simply too vague to come up with a definitive answer. The answer I was looking for was Miner 2049'er. The following platforms had ports of this game: Atari 400/800/XL, Atari 5200, Apple ][, Atari 2600, Colecovision, Commodore 64, Vic-20, TI 99/4a, IBM PC, Gameboy, Thompson MO-5, Super Cassette Vision, and a Tiger Pocket LCD version. But basically, this is the one question in the entire quiz that I regret asking. It was a bad question.

I learned over at ClassicGaming that the author of Miner 2049'er was also the author of a number of disturbingly enjoyable games for the TRS-80, including a really playable version of Berzerk called Robot Attack. I remember playing it in the local Radio Shack and being captivated.

Banshee

Banshee

7. In the superb chess-like game Archon, each piece had a counterpart. The dark goblin was the opposite of the human Knight. The dragon was opposed by the Phoenix. The basilisk was opposed by the unicorn. What light-side piece corresponded to the dark-side banshee?

Valkyrie

Valkyrie

The Banshee's opposite was the Valkyrie. This question is tough even for Archon addicts, because the Valkyrie is so unlike the Banshee. Most of the pairings are between creatures which have fairly similar mechanics. The banshee has an area of effect "scream" which surrounds her, whereas the Valkyrie throws spears from a long distance away.

8. How can you open the jewel-encrusted egg without damaging the clockwork canary?

In Zork I, just give it to the thief.

9. Rick and Ilsa. Heloise and Abelard. Guybrush and ______?

From The Secret of Monkey Island. Guybrush's crush was Elaine. Christina earns Bonus Geek Points for remembering her last name.

David's Midnight Magic

David's Midnight Magic

10. Eric Snider wrote the classic card game Eric's Ultimate Solitaire for the Mac, later ported to other platforms. Solitaire, of course, is a game that people play without computers, and Eric's Ultimate Solitaire is a computer implementation of that game. In the early 1980's, Eric's older brother David wrote a successful game which took another non-computer game and put it into software. What was it? (CMU alumni who know the answer because you are friends with Eric are asked not to give this one away.)

Pinball games, like card games, are not computer games (you can debate this with me, but you will be wrong). David Snider wrote David's Midnight Magic. Pinball fans who have played the game recognize it as a nearly exact replica of what was possibly the best pinball machine ever made, Black Knight.

11. Leisure Suit Larry was actually a with-graphics reworking of an earlier, text-only game. What was the name of that game?

The emotionally scarring Softporn Adventure.

Komensie!

Komensie!

12. In Silas Warner's classic game Castle Wolfenstein, you played a prisoner trying to escape from a Nazi castle. Patrolling the castle were scores of Nazi soldiers. There were also SS officers who would try to track you down once they discovered corpses of common soldiers. The SS were very hard to kill because...?

This one was guessable: they wear bulletproof vests.

13. In the game The Prisoner (and Prisoner 2), what ASCII character was used to represent the player?

"I am not a number, I am a free man!" The symbol used to represent the Prisoner was #.

Tron

Tron

14. The arcade game Tron put the name of a computer language at the bottom of the screen to identify what "level" you were on; each time you cleared all four stages, the language changed. What language was used for the very first level?

RPG, a report generation language developed by IBM. There are actually 12 named levels, as follows: RPG, COBOL, BASIC, FORTRAN, SNOBOL, PL/1, Pascal, Algol, Assembly, OS, JCL, and "User". After level 12, all the levels are named "user".

Me, I could only rarely make it past SNOBOL. I didn't think Tron was a very good game, but there was a sister product called Discs of Tron that was actually superb. It's rather hard to play well on an emulator, because the controls aren't really suited for it.

15. What were the dungeons in the game Realm of Impossibility named after, thematically?

Tartarus, Gehenna, Elysium, and so on -- the lands of the dead.

16. In the Atari 800 game Star Raiders, what color did the screen turn when you turned on your shields?

All spaceships have to have blue shields. I'm pretty sure there's a law about that.

quack

quack

17. Everyone knows the story about how Warren Robinett hid his name in the Atari 2600 Adventure cartridge as a hard-to-get easter egg. Most people who played it obsessively have done it, I'd guess -- you have to go into the black castle, find an invisible dot, drag the dot back across the dungeon, and then figure out that it lets you walk through a certain wall, if you're dragging it behind you. Your reward is seeing the creator's name, in glowing chromaluminescent letters. (And if you've never tried Adventure, try this Flash version). Fewer people remember that the three cute duckies fearsome dragons who chase you have names. What are they?

The yellow, green, and red dragons were Yorgie, Grundle, and Rhindle. They each had different roles, too -- Grundle was the God of Guarding Miscellaneous Objects (like the magnet), the fearsome Rhindle generally guarded the white key, and Yorgie guards the chalice, but for some reason never adequately explained is afraid of the yellow key.

18. This Atari computer game used the theme song from the Alfred Hitchcock TV show ("Funeral March of the Marionettes"; MIDI sample is not actually from the game) for its title screen. What game was it?

Still the best reason to install an Atari 800 emulator on your computer twenty years later, this game was called Shamus. The Underdogs describes the game as Adventure meets Berzerk, and I think that's a fair assessment.

19. This game had a cult following that lasted well into the 1990's, despite the fact that it was practically unplayable. You and your opponent each had a shield and an axe. The camera was situated directly above you. From this odd top-down view, you could independently control your left arm, your right arm, and move around. Combat consisted of flailing into the opponent while "blood" spurted until pieces started falling off. Then the guy who was losing would run away, and you would chase him hopelessly for 10 minutes cursing the controls. What was the name of this game?

The Bilestoad. There's an interesting interview with the developer, Marc Goodman, where he talks about how he implemented the game. "Datamost only sold around 5,000 copies of the game. I've gotten email from a lot of people and even met people who know and love the game and you know what? I've never met or talked to anyone who had an official copy."

20. How many hostages did you have to rescue to have a 'perfect' round in the original Choplifter?

There are 16 hostages per level -- four in each building. I probably lost more hostages by squishing them than by being shot down.

I hope you enjoyed the quiz, and the memories. As of the time I posted the answers, there were correct guesses made to 12 of the 20 questions (13, if you count jon's near miss on my poorly-formed Miner 2049'er question). I was surprised that no one got the Wizardry or Ultima related questions, but maybe that's just an indication of the poor way in which I spent my time as a teenager. If you're so inclined, throw your own questions down in the comments below. It can be your turn to try to stump me, instead.

Hyperball-ad

2005-01-10 · by peterb

Hyperball

Hyperball

In the 1980's pinball manufacturers searched desperately for ways to stay relevant to a public that increasingly chose videogames over their mechanical cousins. After bankruptcies and consolidation, the industry settled on licensing movie and TV show trademarks as their path forward. But in the early '80s, they were still trying to be creative.

I'm back at my cliff
still throwing things off

In 1982, Williams introduced perhaps one of the most ill-advised pinball machines ever made: Hyperball. The game was basically Tempest without a monitor. Instead of moving a little vector shape around a playfield, you rotated a cannon left and right at the bottom of a pinball chassis. Instead of firing bolts of energy, you shot ball bearings at a rate of up to 250 balls per minute. (Pinball geeks get all snitty when you describe Hyperball as a pinball machine. They're wrong. It may use nonstandard rules, different sized balls, and have no bumpers, but it's a pinball machine by the "how would your mother describe this device?" rule.)

I listen to the sounds they make
on their way down

The game was incredibly loud, even by arcade standards. Each ball was launched with a loud THUNK-fwip, targets clattered as you hit their flaps, balls smacked onto wooden pieces of the playfield. And of course, ball bearings that missed targets collided with newly fired shots, and ricocheted loudly off of the glass plate covering the playfield. Multiply that by the rapid rate of fire, and the noise was truly deafening. Perhaps overcompensating for this mechanical cacophony, the electronic sound effects of the game were equally loud, a pastiche of samples borrowed from Defender and Robotron (such as this one).

I follow with my eyes 'til they crash
I imagine what my body would sound like
slamming against those rocks

The mechanics of the game were simple and twitchy. The playfield had a number of "target" flaps with letters in front of them. Red lightning-bolt shaped lights stretched from the targets down to your cannon. As the game went on, the lights illuminated, one by one, marching downward in columns. If you shot a ball into the flap or hole associated with a column, the bottom most light went out; the effect was as if you were "beating back" the lights. If a lightning bolt reached the bottom of the playfield, you lost a life.

I'm simplifying the game a bit -- you also had smart bombs, for example, which destroyed everything on the playfield -- but that's the basic idea.

and when it lands
will my eyes
be closed or open?

The gun was not fully automatic, and had two triggers, once for each hand. You had to pull a trigger for each ball fired. The gun could be fired at a faster rate than you could pull the triggers, so this led to all sorts of odd "chording" finger patterns on the triggers which could induce terminal carpal tunnel syndrome in about 10 minutes.

Hyperball was designed by Steve Ritchie, who designed a number of games, including the classic (or infamous, depending on your taste) Black Knight. Hyperball occupied a strange niche, and it showed. It wasn't videogame enough to draw in videogame players with regularity, and it wasn't pinball enough to draw in pinball players either. I tried it a couple of times to slake my curiosity, and then left it alone, saving my quarters for other, more traditional machines. Because of the tremendous beating each game exerts on the chassis and mechanical components, there aren't too many of them left in good working condition.

Only 4,444 of these machines were ever produced.

Additional Resources

iPod Shuffle Summary

2005-01-11 · by peterb

...courtesy of Dave Rochberg:

THOSE LIARS. They say "240 songs. A million different ways." But they clearly mean "240 songs, 40678853636470581204935759214868853 10172051259182827146069755969081486918925585104009100729728 52292382089024587009865914715605190573256314738159909845924475348 246302768811570537170462828632662123845654330726760861254 3777966913875945176039596821742361795433073703416459649696398651683 817722252221059768080852489940995605579171999666916004042 3896799800598079985264195119506681577622056215044851618236292196529 36960000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 different ways." Although it could be that their PRNG is entropy limited.

10 Little Balls of Hate

2005-01-12 · by psu

Well, the Holiday Season is over, so let's get back to reality. Last week I gave you a sickeningly positive look at things that make my life bright. Here is the flip side.

My Car Radio

The car radio in the Chrysler Town and Country Limited is the single worst piece of human/machine interaction design that I have personally been subjected to in the last ten years. This is saying something, because I've used HP/UX in the last ten years. Some examples:

Flying

It's hard for me to imagine a customer service experience that is worse than that provided by the modern airline. This is very sad to me, since I really do love to travel. But, these days, even flying by myself with minimal baggage is about as enjoyable as a self-inflicted stomach wound. Add a few extra bags, children, and other incidentals, and just the overhead of getting on the plane is enough to make strong men contemplate suicide in the jetway.

Let's consider my most recent experience just getting through security. Here's what happened.

Result: Even though we arrived at the airport an hour and a half ahead of our flight time, no coffee, no snacks, no time to do anything but run to the gate as they board. This means that while we are sitting in a tin can at 35,000 feet for six hours we have to pay upwards of $10 for a snack that the food service people at a local high school would be ashamed to serve up.

There is no level of hate strong enough to capture exactly how I feel about airport security lines.

Using an iPod in the Car

The FM transmitters suck. The little tape doo-hickies are noisy and painful to use. It's a bad tradeoff. Also, it's hard to use the little iPod UI while driving. At least if you don't want to crash.

My Neurotic Dork Self

I got a shiny new Powerbook for work. I take it home, and where I used to get 4 bars of airport, now I only get 3. This bugs the hell out of me. I run all around the house trying to figure out how to get 4 bars like I used to get. I try to just turn off the signal strength meter, but this leaves a hole in my menu bar where 4 bars should be. I hate myself.

Broadcast Sports Television

It's not clear to me that there is any other endeavor where so many people work so hard to bring a product over the airwaves and into your home and fail so utterly to create content that is even at a tolerable level of quality. The sports broadcast seems to center around the notion that that broadcaster must constantly distract you from the fact that you are watching a sports event. The camera never stays still, the on-screen graphics are always changing and most importantly, there are sound effects synchronized with the moving camera and the dancing graphics. All of this, plus the announcers for whom English is apparently a second language.

The only thing you can say is that at least the sports content itself manages to transcend the crappy presentation. There is no other way I could have survived what FOX SPORTS does to baseball while I watched the Red Sox finally win one.

Save Points

The fact that save points are completely wrong is well known and well documented.

Here is a new twist: In the highly regarded game, Ratchet and Clank: Going Commando, you get to "continue points" every once in a while. The game allows you to save any time you want, but always brings you back at the most recent continue point if you die while playing. So, you have to play the same level over and over again because the camera didn't let you judge that lava jump quite right. If you quit the game and come back, the game puts you at the start of the level again, no matter how many continue points you have passed.

BUT, if you did make it past a continue point, the games does remember that you cleared that stage, so you don't have to fight the monsters again. In addition, it saves how many coins and other items you have collected. So, it basically saves everything except the 4 bytes of information it would need to remember where in the level you were located when you saved the game. This mechanism also allows you to collect an infinite amount of money, since you can save and restart between continue points and then go in and collect money over and over again.

The mind reels at how something like this made it past alpha testing.

Blister Pack

Since I stupidly acquired too much gaming hardware this Christmas, I've been dealing with packaging. I would like to officially go on record as recommending that the person who invented Blister Pack be retroactively killed by time traveling cyborgs.

Here we truly have a product that serves no one except the manufacturer. How can one justify putting product into a package that requires the user to completely destroy the package to get at the product? The best case is when the product is not only behind the blister pack, but also tied into the backing material with wire ties and has a cable of some sort (like in a game controller) which if destroyed renders the product useless. In these cases, you stand a good chance of destroying the thing you just bought just by opening the box it came in. Bravo. Brilliant. Kill them all.

Smooth Jazz

First you take what is arguably the greatest creative achievement in 20th century American Music and put it into a centrifuge to separate the soul of the music from its tasteless white liquid center. Then you package the tasteless center for mass consumption over distribution networks run by faceless conglomerates. What you get is the so called smooth jazz. This is great music to listen to if you have just had half of your frontal lobe removed, or if you want to make yourself suicidal. But it's not so useful for anything else.

Cell Phone Address Books

My current cell phone has this great feature. It wants me to organize all the phone numbers I have for a given person (home, cell, office, etc) in one address book entry. But it only allows me to speed dial one of them. No problem, I think, I'll just make another entry with the other number I want to dial. But this fails, because I can't enter the same number twice in the phone number database.

In other words, the morons who implemented this system built a database that is smart enough to separate address book entries from phone number entries in its main model, but they are not smart enough too allow a reference to a single phone number to exist in more than one address book entry because apparently they missed the lecture on foreign keys or simple pointers when they went to database school.

It's also not so great how the interface is inconsistent about when you have to tell it you are going to change a something by "editing it" and when you get to edit it directly.

It's also not so great how it takes 15 buttons pushes to find or change anything in the address book.

Don't tell me I should be syching this stuff with Outlook or whatever, because I already know that it won't work right and will waste my time.

Those Bar Code Stickers on CD and DVD Boxes

Here is another packaging item that serves no purpose but to piss you off. I mean, it's not like the bar code isn't already on the CD/DVD box somewhere. So, these stickers are completely redundant, but to make up for it, they make getting the CD take at least twice as long. No wonder Apple sold 200,000,000 downloads over the last couple of years.

I think the guy who invented this should be forced to challenge the blister pack guy to a two-up knife fight in a gas chamber.

It's 2005. X11 Still Sucks

2005-01-13 · by peterb

Copy and paste in X? That's easy! Just highlight the text you want to copy, and choose "copy" from the menu, then paste it into whatever application you want to paste it into, assuming that application supports clipboard copy and paste. If it doesn't, then just highlight the text you want to copy, and then click the middle mouse button, thus copying the primary selection. It's also an important part of the X Window Experience to make sure that you always forget which buffer it is that you're trying to paste, and so accidentally paste the "wrong" one, thus making any copy and paste operation take twice as long. Like salmonella in chicken dishes, this adds exotic glamour to your boring workday.

X Windows.

It's not just that X11 is terrible -- everyone knows that. It's that the rest of the world has gotten so much better, and X...well, X has gotten better too, but not better enough.

I get this epiphany all the time. Last night, I was working on something late at night on my Powerbook, and it suddenly hits me, like a bolt from the blue: I'm using Unix. With a fabulous GUI. That looks and functions great instead of like crap, and then I sit down at a Linux desktop the next day and it's like being forced to eat rancid cabbage after a night dining at Hiro Sushi. It's awful. Complain about Windows XP all you like, but the core mechanics of using the GUI are about 640 times better than X11 (and somewhere out there, someone is having the same epiphany I am, only they're saying: "I'm using VMS. With a fabulous GUI".)

Gnome and KDE have come a long way from the primitive world of twm. And I don't want to just randomly tear down the work that went into them. But at some point, it feels like the right thing to do to point out when someone has decided that they should build their house on a foundation made entirely of loose sand. I'm configuring gnome the other day, and within 5 minutes something goes subtly wrong, and I have to start reading man pages on my .xinitrc file, and looking at the startx script. I mean, Christ on a crutch, it's 2005 and you're going to force me to exit and restart the windowing system completely to see if I can support a new resolution? Maybe I should go back to lovingly assembling opcodes by hand while I'm at it.

X11's continuing use as the open-source window system of choice is just another example of "worse is better" in action. X was a research project. It was never supposed to be a product that was meant to bring any benefit to an actual user. The whole idea of "let's build a windowing system that is all mechanism, and no policy" is utterly and didactically braindead from the word "go." It's like building a "car" where the driver must provide their own suspension and transmission. It's like building an alarm clock that requires the user to wire up buttons to set the time.

If you want to build something as usable as Windows or Mac OS, there's only one way to do it: tear down the house built on the loose sand foundation, and start designing a product, from the ground up, that is meant to be used and not just played with. Yes, that'll be a lot of effort. Tons of effort. Building software is hard. Building usable software is harder.

But using software that was poorly designed and implemented, like X11, is the hardest of all.

San Francisco

2005-01-14 · by psu

Although I've documented how I hate California, I make something of an exception for San Francisco. My wife and I have travelled there periodically for the last fifteen years, and now it's become a pleasure to go and visit old haunts and eat in our favorite places. So here is a guide to what we do and where we stay in the city.

Monticello Inn

This hotel is near the main cable car stop at Market and Powell. It was a small independent inn when we started going, but has since been hooked into the Kimpton group of fancy local hotels. We started going because they have a nice handicapped accessible room and a good location. From here you are walking distance to Union Square and huge mall on Market Street for the ultimate in yuppy indulgence. A longer walk puts you in Chinatown, gets you to the City Lights bookstore, or puts you into North Beach. I have found the service here to always be excellent. They know what a hand held shower is. They remember us when we show up again after two years away.

The place is also close to a few favorite food spots.

Blondie's Pizza

Just around the corner from the Inn is this pizza slice place. The thing here is a huge slice of pizza and a coke for $4. It's a great snack or dinner for your first night in off the plane. I won't say the pizza is transcendent or anything, but it's huge and convenient.

Dottie's True Blue Cafe

Here we have a breakfast place that is truly sublime. I love to get a counter seat and just sit there and watch Kurt (the owner and chef) move behind the stove. He has been doing this so long that every motion is automatic and perfectly efficient. Crack two eggs here, scoop out four pancakes there, flip the omlette over there, turn back and scoop out the oatmeal.

The breakfast here is the best I have ever had. Eggs are done just like you want them. Unlike most places on earth, the scrambled eggs are soft and fluffy, not a rubbery overcooked mess. But the true pinnacle is the pancakes. They are thick and airy, never chewy, not too sweet but with a hint of cinnamon and nutmeg. They are the perfect pancake. There is generally a huge list of specials, various egg scrambles, special french toast, and the ever present black bean cakes with salsa and eggs. Also don't miss the corn bread. Really, I mean it.

You have to get here early or be ready to wait in line. But if you are in the city, don't go anywhere else for breakfast. Life is too short.

Yank Sing

Walk down market street to the Rincon center, and you can get the best DIm Sum on the continent (although the stuff in Toronto is just as good).

Yank Sing serves up a spectacular assortment of steamed dumplings filled with meat, scallops, crab, scallions, and best of all, snow pea sprouts. The pea sprout dumplings are sometimes just sprouts and sometimes have chicken in them. You have to get them. They are incredible.

Other standards that come around on the carts include roast duck with pancakes, the wrapped sticky rice, long rice noodles with beef or shrimp, pork buns, and lettuce wraps with minced squab. All excellent.

The main problem we have in SF is wasting meals at places besides Yank Sing, and figuring out how to bring takeout on the plane.

The Ferry Farmer's Market

Stumbling out of Yank Sing, you can walk to the Ferry building and go to the farmer's market in the parking lot. This market may have moved inside the building, because the Ferry building has recently been renovated into a large up scale mall. If you can find it, you will be in the midst off the best that Northern California has to offer: more kinds of produce than you can ever imagine.

My farmer's market story: One time, we were in the city at the end of October and went to the market. In one of the stands was a huge sign with large tragic writing on it: Last Berries Until March. This is what California is about.

Marin Headlands

Just the other side of the Golden Gate bridge is a huge expanse of almost empty land that stands in stark contrast to the sprawling city that sits just across the bay. This is the Golden Gate Recreational Area, and the part of it that is closest to the Bay is the Marin Headlands. It's an awesome bike ride to cross the bridge, loop back around off of Route 101 and then climb the long hill up to the top of the headlands and look back over your shoulder at the city.

It's also cool to crawl around in the old military tunnels. But mostly what I like to do is sit there and just stare.

Ebisu

Ebisu is a small sushi joint in the Sunset district. The Sunset district has some of the best Asian food anywhere, but we're always going to Ebisu. Great rolls, fresh fish, good service, and pretty cheap for the area.

Ton Kiang

On the other side of Golden Gate Park from the Sunset is The Richmond, where the other great Asian food is in town.

Ton Kiang is a Dim Sum joint in the area, and while not quite as spectacular as Yank Sing, it does have the Shanghai Soup Meatball dumplings. So you gotta go.

Imperial Tea Court

Finally, in Chinatown, is this stylish tea house. They sell great tea and on weekends you can go there and sit in the completely serene atmosphere and sip as much tea as you'd like while hanging out with the old men and their caged birds. I've had no more relaxing experience in San Francisco.

Other Things I can't Expand On

Things to Avoid

X11, Part Deux: Why It Blows

2005-01-17 · by psu

In a recent flame war about X11, a comment suggested that using Emacs under X11 and then saying that X11 was "primitive" was like judging modern Windows by using Windows 3.1.

It's interesting that they bring up Windows 3.1, since the evidence will show that Windows 3.1, for the majority of actual users, was already years ahead of X11 and its ilk even back in 1992.

Ultimately the roots of why X11 blows come back to the community that designed it and the community for which it was designed. It was designed by engineers and dorks to be an interesting technical exercise in how to construct a display server. Note that the term Window Manager never appears in that statement, and that is telling. X11 as a system was not initially designed with the idea of being a comprehensive user interface and application support platform. It was initially designed as a way to experiment with display system mechanism vs. policy, but was hastily rolled out to crush Sun's network window system before it became another NFS. So, at its core, it was a funky display hack. 20 years later it is still a funky display hack.

Meanwhile, even the Macintosh has had time to put a real operating system under its nice user interface, and update the display technology to do things that X11 only dreams about (Windows as OpenGL textures? Resolution independence? Fully antialiased rendering? Decent system wide text layout?). MacOS has all of this infrastructure not just as a technical exercise, but to support the requirements of the applications that users run on the platform.

But, all of this is the lowest level of the infrastructure. MacOS (and Windows) also have mature mechanisms that support application development at a high level. For example, It's great to be proud of the fact that GNOME and KDE have text only copy paste covered. But how about a system wide standard for drag and drop? How about styled text? HTML? Images? Structured graphics?

MacOS, via Cocoa, also has high level frameworks for modelling a lot of the standard functionality of a GUI application. I'm not just talking about the user interface widgets. I'm talking about comprehensive support for MVC. There is standardized infrastructure in the AppKit to model your document, archiving, control flow and input focus, communication between the model and the view (key value coding, key value observing), undo, redo, copy and paste of rich content, drag and drop, shared support for text styled text editing and, in addition, for no extra charge, lickable icons.

But this isn't anything new. Even as early as 1985, the MacApp framework on MacOS 2 or 3 provided a lot of these features. Just not in a package at the same level of maturity.

Of course, as X11 shows so well, all the mechanism in the world does you no good without developers who care passionately about the usability of the final product. This is why Firefox or Mozilla are pretty decent even on X11. This is why most of the X11 applications I have ever used completely blow (GIMP? Xfig? Please). Usability and polish are not high priority requirements. Other things take precedence, and it shows.

Stuff you need for cooking

2005-01-18 · by psu

Hobbyist cooks are almost by definition equipment and gadget freaks. This is one endeavor where the latent object has great power.

Therefore, as a public service, I'm here to tell you what I think you really need, and what is just stuff that's nice to have.

You really need one good knife. I suggest a 8-10 inch chef's knife depending on how big your hands are. I have a soft spot for my mom's old chinese cleaver, but I never use it. A couple of good expensive paring knives also help, but are not critical.

You really need one good non-stick pan. I used to think non-stick pans were for girlie-men who didn't know how to season a decent cast iron skillet. But I find that a 10 inch silverstone-lined frying is perfect for almost everything. I use my pan for

For bigger jobs you of course need a bigger pan, but I hardly ever use by larger frying pans anymore, so I think bigger jobs are rare.

You really need one good soup pot. I suggest a 6-8 quart soup pot/dutch oven. Perfect for soup, stew, oven roasting stuff and making pasta. I recently tried one of those tall stock pot things with the pasta insert and it blows. I like my dutch oven better.

You really need a decent cutting board. Make it big enough so you have room to work. I like the wood ones best. But I'm getting old and have started to use lighter plastic ones that are easier to clean.

You really need a good oven. By good I mean, at least even. Sadly, you are usually stuck with the oven you have.

That's really it. You don't need a Wok. You don't need a huge flame thrower stove burner that can char a whole turkey in 20 minutes. You don't need a suitcase full of knives. You don't need three ovens. You don't need a bread machine, Cuisinart, 9000 horse power mixer, or all the rest. But damn they are nice if you have them.

Also, you don't have to spend hundreds of dollars on cookware to get good stuff. Buy it on sale. Go to a restaurant supply house. In particular, don't buy super expensive frying pans. Frying pans, if you are using them right, get destroyed. Buy a $30 pan every couple of years instead of a $100 pan every couple of years.

Oh right. You need a rice cooker.

What To Drink (Booze Edition)

2005-01-19 · by peterb

Since psu covered cooking equipment yesterday, I wanted to talk a little about ingredients. In particular, alcohol. The typical home bar -- and I use the term "bar" loosely, in my house it's just The Cupboard With The Booze In It -- is stocked more by happenstance than by planning. If, as is common, you buy your alcohol on an as-needed basis ("Oh, I need two ounces of Jasper's Honeydew-and-Prosciutto Liqueur for these cookies...") and don't drink a lot yourself, then you end up with large quantities of comparatively expensive bottles that neither you nor anyone else will ever drink taking up lots of space. If you plan what you want or need, you can avoid that.

As in yesterday's article, the goal here is to describe a reasonable minimum that you can have. This should give you flexibility in cooking, a small buffer with which to entertain your friends who drink, and provide a little room for growth and experimentation. If your heavy drinkin' cousin Bartleby comes over and starts hitting the sauce, this might not satisfy his needs. Although maybe that's a good thing.

Before we begin, I'd like to note that while alcohol is a common and useful ingredient in many cuisines, not everyone can have it. Some people are allergic to it, it's generally considered inappropriate for children in anything but the tiniest quantiies, and many people -- possibly you, or possibly one of your guests -- have problems with alcoholism. For some of these situations, any alcohol is too much. So please remember as you read that when I say things like "You need a bottle of such-and-such in your pantry," I'm referring to situations where alcohol in food (or a little social drinking) is acceptable. Obviously, if having booze around is going to result in disaster, you don't "need" it.

Things You Need

-several bottles of red wine (I'll go into more detail about exactly how much and what type below) -one bottle of white wine -one bottle of vodka -one bottle of brandy -one bottle of whiskey (optional, for entertaining guests who drink) -one bottle of some form of digestif, aperitif, or cordial. -equipment: glasses and a corkscrew.

That's it. Obviously, this gets modified a little by your personal preferences. I like Porto. I love Porto. Therefore, I always have some. But I wouldn't suggest that it be part of everyone's standard kitchen stock.

Red wine is a gimme. It's the thing you should be drinking a little of several times a week. In addition to being healthy and delicious, it adds depth to just about any tomato or meat dish. If you haven't planned a sauce for any given meal, you can simply tack on "...and then deglaze the pan with a cup of red wine, and reduce until it starts to thicken" to the end of any almost recipe. Congratulations. Now you have sauce.

Wine is an intimidating topic for most people, because there's such a variety of products out there, and most of us can only afford to sample a small percentage of what's available. So what should you keep in the house? In order to answer this, we have to understand the fundamentals of wine. Yeah, yeah, nose, color, mouth feel, whatever. Those are incidental to the topic of wine. Here's all you need to know to get started.

-Trust your own taste buds.

It doesn't matter what Robert Parker, your snobby friends, or anyone else think of a wine. If you think it tastes bad, it does. If you think it tastes good, it does. The reason we turn to experts on wine is because of the expense incurred in figuring out what we like. If you luck out and find an expert whose tastes match yours (or, equally useful, an expert whose tastes completely oppose yours), then go ahead and trust them. But in the end, it's all your call.

peterb's Theorem of Wine Tasting: Let Ps represent an value indicating how good a given wine tastes, higher values meaning tastes better. Let E represent the price you personally paid for the wine. Pe, the amount of enjoyment one receives from wine, can be expressed by the formula: Pe = Ps / E

The obvious corollaries to this rule are: expensive wine tastes best when someone else is paying for it. Furthermore, if you like two wines about equally, the cheaper wine is better.

Since we're stocking your kitchen, and since I'm not going to pay for your wine, the thing to do is to find an inexpensive red wine and stock up on it. For me, a case of Charles Shaw ("Two Buck Chuck") Cabernet meets my base level needs just fine. If you're in Pittsburgh where there aren't any Trader Joe's, and you can't get that, ask friends who cook for their recommendations. Stick one bottle in the cabinet, put the rest of the case in the basement, and buy another case when you're down to just a few bottles. And at $3 / bottle, I don't feel guilty using it in whatever recipes I need, in copious quantities. (Personal note to Mario Batali: recommend just one more time that some poor schmuck upend a $60 bottle of Barolo into your recipe for braised beef and I'm going to drag you down to Nobu and shove two chopsticks so far up your nose you'll be able to breath through your ears. Not only is Two Buck Chuck a more economical wine for that recipe, it tastes better in that sauce. If you want a $60 bottle of Barolo with that recipe, why not try drinking it, you testa di cavolfiore).

You only need one bottle of white wine because it's better used younger, and so you'll want to replace that bottle more frequently rather than buy a bunch and sit on them. Also, white wine is not as good as red wine, and people who like white wine more than red wine are the devil.

Vodka is a good neutral spirit to have around. I always keep some in the freezer. Get a small screw-top jar, put in a couple of split Madagascar vanilla beans, and fill the jar with vodka. In a couple of months, you'll have your own vanilla extract that is cheaper per-ounce than what you can buy, and will also taste better. Top off the bottle with the vodka as you use it. There's a lot of variability in vodka, so it's worth avoiding the very bottom tier, which will taste more or less like battery acid. I favor Stolichnaya because it's not too dear, but there are plenty of options that will work. If you plan to use the vodka for drinking, stick to 80 proof. If you'll only use it for cooking and baking, 100 proof is fine.

Brandy is versatile. Any time you're making a dessert, it's worthwhile asking yourself if some brandy could play a role. It's a volatile spirit, but it has a very interesting flavour, and quite a lot of it. This means you can add it to any sort of heated concoction and boil off the alcohol, but still infuse the dish with the taste and (psychological) warmth of the brandy. Brandy matches with any sort of fruit desserts perfectly, and is should also be your liquor of choice for flambé. There's no limit to the types and varieties of brandy, and not coindentally there's no limit to the amount of money you can spend on the high end. If you're not going to be drinking it, something like Hennessey VS Cognac should only cost you around $25 / 750ml, and will last a long time. If you're going to sip it, you might look in to a more unusual and tastier choice, such as a good Armagnac, but then you probably won't want to cook with it. So let's stick with VS for our kitchen cabinet.

You generally speaking won't use much whiskey in cooking. Yes, I know there are recipes that call for it, and bourbon particularly matches well with coffee and chocolate, but remember that there's some recipe that calls for nearly any liquor, and our goal here is to hit the common cases. No, whiskey is on my list simply because, ounce for ounce, it's likely to be useful when entertaining guests who drink. It's a fair approximation of the truth to say that if a randomly chosen cocktail recipe doesn't call for vodka, it probably calls for bourbon or scotch. And plenty of people just like whiskey on the rocks. I could write a little treatise here about the different sorts of whiskeys, sour-mash bourbon versus scotch malts, but this isn't the time for that. Pick a midrange name bourbon or mixed scotch; bourbon is probably a bit more useful in cooking because it's sweeter. Put it in the cabinet. Now you're set.

Cordials are tricky. The problem with cordials is they're meant to be drunk a very small amount at a time. Which is fine. Except that means that you open the bottle, and you pour a couple of tiny glasses of Grand Marnier or what have you, and then it sits in the cabinet and then you buy another, because you tried one at a party and kind of liked it, and then the next thing you know, your liquor cabinet has 150 bottles in it: a bottle of wine, a few bottles of spirits, and 146 different varieties of cordial, each 7/8ths full, except for that "egg liqueur" thing your parents gave you that they bought in 1962 in Verona, which is only 1/8th full, because over the years it has evaporated away leaving a gloopy, disturbing yolk-coloured pudding on the bottom of the bottle. (Note: egg liqueur really exists.)

But a good cordial has its place, particularly one classified as a digestif. They really do work. I've found that if I'm feeling a little ill, for example, often a small glass of creme de menthe or Sambuca can help settle my stomach. So find one you like (how? Visit your friends who have the aforementioned 146 bottles and try theirs) and buy one bottle. The rules for inventory management of digestifs is simple, but you have to keep on top of them and actually enforce them: If the bottle is unopened a year after you buy it, give or throw it away, and if you haven't returned to an open coridal a year after you opened it, give up. Throw it away.

For equipment, there is again no end to the goofy booze-related merchandise you can buy. All you really need are a set of wine glasses that you like, and a reliable, well-made wing-type corkscrew, although there are of course other varieties available. There is a real pleasure in fine, special-purpose glasses for given drinks, and if you have the cash to burn, go for it. But a nice set of simple wine glasses goes a long way. For your "survival kit" needs, make sure you get glasses that are dishwasher-safe. And while I'm a little skeptical of those wine vaccum pumps to try to "save" your wine for a few days after opening, they are inexpensive and do seem to let you eke out maybe an extra day. Since most corks expand after being removed, the kits are convenient if for no other reason than to have some extra plastic corks.

That's everything you need. Obviously, there are exceptions -- if you cook Japanese cuisine, for example, you'll want a bottle of sake for mixing with miso -- but if you need to invoke those, you'll know it.

Things You Don't Need

-Rum. Shut up. You don't need it. I know, you think you need it, particularly that Myers' dark rum. But you don't need that. You need a bottle of molasses. Use that instead of the rum. For recipes that call for rum that actually need alcohol, use your brandy and a little molasses, instead. -Tequila. -Gin. It's useful in martinis and gin and tonics, but that's it. -Rye. Remember when I said just pick some random whiskey and be done with it? Small modification: don't pick rye. Nobody likes it (except me). I don't know why, but that's just the way it is. -Any cordial developed after about 1975. It's hard to identify those if you don't already know a priori, but if it is a strange colour and looks like it's marketed at college chicks, stay away from it. Also, avoid anything made by Jacquins. -Most other alcohol-related paraphernalia. Swizzle-sticks. Shot glasses. Shakers. Little umbrellas (hey, I said need, not want). Maraschino cherries.

There are maybe two more things you should have when stocking your kitchen with booze.

First, you should have a sense of adventure and a willingness to experiment. If you can, taste the ingredients that you're using. Ask yourself what characteristics they have, and if there's some booze that would do a better job. Look for opportunities to try new things when out and about so you don't have to gamble $50 on a bottle of something that turns out to not be what you hoped.

Second, you should have a sense of what it means for you and your guests to drink responsibly. Let me reiterate that some people are allergic to alcohol, or have problems with alcoholism. Just as you would when serving nuts or shellfish, make sure you know the dietary restrictions of your guests before you serve them drinks or food with alcohol.

And with all that said, na zdorovie!

Sticks and Stones

2005-01-20 · by peterb

B1 Bomber (click to enlarge)

B1 Bomber (click to enlarge)

The second most tiresome thing about the "there's too much violence in these newfangled videogames" discussion is that violence has always been a part of games.

The argument is made, usually poorly, that today's violence is "worse" because graphics today are so much more vivid than they were in the past. This is twaddle. More accessible, perhaps, but not necessarily worse.

One need only to look to Thomas Pynchon's V for an example of how the written word can depict more vividly than image. Chapter 4, "In Which Esther Gets a Nose Job" still makes me feel faint if I try to read the whole thing through at once, in a way that the goriest hospital video does not. I can only handle it a paragraph at a time. Here's one of the easier passages, before the going gets really rocky:

Schoenmaker first made two incisions, one on either side through the internal lining of the nose, near the septum at the lower border of the side cartilage. He then pushed a pair of long-handled, curved and pointed scissors through the nostril, up past the cartilage to the nasal bone. The scissors had been designed to cut both on opening and closing. Quickly, like a barber finishing up a high-tipping head, he separated the bone from the membrane and skin over it. "Undermining, we call this," he explained. He repeated the scissors work through the other nostril. "You see you have two nasal bones, they're separated by your septum. At the bottom they're each attached to a piece of lateral cartilage. I'm undermining you all the way from this attachment where the nasal bones join the forehead."

By the time Schoenmaker gets out the saw, I'm usually ready for a stiff drink. The idea that better rendering of pictures inherently means more powerful images is false. Alfred Hitchcock made an entire career building suspense and emotion based as much on what he didn't show as on what made it onscreen. If we are to worry about violence in games, it must not be in the mechanics of how it is depicted, but in the emotions it exploits.

Nukewar (click to enlarge)

Nukewar (click to enlarge)

In the early '80s, Avalon-Hill released a few simple but challenging games, mostly written in BASIC. One was a version of Sid Sackson's "Acquire", another was a reconstruction of the Battle of Midway. Two of the ones I liked playing the most were B1 Bomber and Nukewar. I liked them because the goals were clear, the mechanics were simple, and the stakes were high. HOT WAR HOT WAR HOT WAR flashed the screen, and as a patriotic American I understood that it was time to fly to Leningrad, drop a single nuclear bomb, and kill everyone there, because, y'know. That was the job. There's a war on, you know. Nukewar presented you with the further strategic decision of when, or whether, to start a war. In the screenshot to the right, you can see the results of a game where, as the US, I just sat tight and didn't start a war, and the Russians beat me to the punch. The lesson is clear: if you want to survive, start a nuclear war. And people want to complain because there are games now that let you knock over a liquor store?

I don't have an awful lot of sympathy for all the crocodile tears about the violence in games like Grand Theft Auto. Yes: I find it tasteless, I find it demeaning, and worst of all it's not a very good game. But the quality and scale of the violence therein is not, it seems to me, necessarily any worse than the cold war fantasies of the Clancy generation, who believed (or in some cases still believe) that politics might -- regrettably -- require the murder of half the people in the world.

Truth and consequences

Truth and consequences

I don't believe that Nukewar and its ilk did any lasting damage to me. I don't believe that Grand Theft Auto will do any lasting damage to the people who play it. In the final analysis, games are instruments of fantasy. Fantasy, being what it is, often transgresses across boundaries that we do not cross in real life. Attempts to suppress, to channel such imaginings are just another form of fantasy -- a fantasy that life is simple, and that we can always recognize evil when we see it. If you want to worry about violence, worry about the violence that is being done on our behalf. Institutional violence, where one person decides that the killing should start, but someone else has to go and do the actual dirty work, is to me the most frightening of all.

And it's a lot harder to stop a war than to boycott a videogame.

Beef Braised in Two Buck Chuck

2005-01-21 · by peterb

After mentioning this dish in passing in the "what to drink" article, I realized that it was worth sharing the recipe. It is based loosely on one of Mario Batali's. My version is a little bolder, and about 350% cheaper.

Start with 2 pounds of beef brisket (you can also use a large chuck roast or similar cut). Salt and pepper it, and brown it on all sides in a large stockpot with 6 tablespoons of extra-virgin olive oil. This will take you about 10 minutes, including time for turning. Set it aside.

Drain most of the liquid and then add one chopped carrot, one chopped onion, one chopped celery stalk, and about a quarter-pound of bacon, diced. Sweat those until they start to get soft. Pour in a bottle of Two Buck Chuck or some similarly cheap-but-drinky wine, and add 2 cups of simple tomato sauce (homemade is best, but the world won't end if you use canned. We're going to cook this into oblivion). Bring the concoction to a boil. Put the meat back in, lower the heat until just simmering, and cook until the meat starts falling apart -- about 3 hours, but you can use your judgment. Since this is wet cooking, don't worry about overcooking the meat.

When you've decided it's done, remove the meat from the stockpot, raise the heat, and reduce the liquid until it reaches a consistency you like. Slice the meat, spoon the sauce over it, and serve.

Easy, delicious, and the leftovers will last for a few days if you keep your guests from devouring it all.

Unfinished Business

2005-01-24 · by peterb

Yesterday, I finished The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.

It took me about 2 years or so to finish it. This isn't because the game was particularly hard, but because about 18 months ago I reached the final dungeon, made it most of the way through, and then, dreading the inevitable endless boss battle, set the game aside.

My game shelf is a study in unfinished business. Just glancing along it I can see numerous games that I've abandoned midway through. As I look at them, I feel a vague sense of unease, of foreboding. A sense of obligations unmet.

I feel guilty because I didn't play games.

The odd thing is, this doesn't happen to me over, for example, books. With a book, I tend to either read it until I'm finished, or decide that it's not worth reading. Then I put the book away forever without any guilt whatsoever. It seems to be only videogames which throw me into such emotional turmoil.

Could this be an expression of psu's theory of the latent object of desire? Perhaps the games represent my failure to fulfill that desire. I fixated on what I "needed" to be satisfied, purchased it, and there the object sits on my shelf, rebuking me with expectations unfulfilled? That theory fails, I think, because of the lack of guilt over books and movies on my shelves, which certainly qualify as (former) latent objects.

I don't have a big picture explanation for this, but perhaps inspecting each game I've abandoned will bring enlightenment. I'll limit the discussion to console games, or else I'll be here all day, writing separate entries for every Wizardry game since The Knight of Diamonds.

Now I understand. It's perfectly clear. I have transcended my guilt, and left it behind. I stopped playing all of these games because there was some part of them that I didn't like. I felt guilty because the parts of the games that I did like were more memorable than the parts of the games that I didn't like. So when I thought of Beyond Good and Evil, for example, I would think to myself "Gee, I'm vaguely sad that I don't know whatever happened to Jade and her battle against the zombie aliens," instead of "Wow, I sure am glad that I don't have to deal with those super-frustrating save points that are spread too far apart."

So now that some of my reasons for abandoning games are down in black and white, let me try to distill them into general principles that developers can use to make their games more compelling. More compelling to me, at least, and of course I am the apotheosis of what All Gamers Want.

  1. Keep the action moving constantly. A game where the plot moves along at a brisk pace will keep me more interested than a game where I have to engage in 300 random battles to reach the next phase. While Zelda doesn't proceed at breakneck speed, its pacing is perfectly consistent from start to finish. Once you've played for an hour or so, you develop an innate sense of about how far away you are from the next plot point. This consistency did a lot to keep me playing.

  2. Stupid control schemes ruin games. You can have the best plot in the world, but if moving my protagonist around feels like driving a one-wheeled forklift, it's not a game I'll keep playing very long.

  3. Replaying sequences is boring. You've heard me say it before -- console-style save points are idiotic. In a single player game, there is no value in forcing the player to replay a segment they've already cleared. None. Whatsoever. For any reason. If I feel like I'm a hamster in a spinning wheel, I drop the game as quickly as possible.

  4. Game difficulty needs to adapt to the player. This is related to points (1) and (3). Many of the games I play let you choose a difficulty level. This is a classic example of the broken way software engineers think when left to their own devices. "We don't want to do the work to make a smart decision, so let's give the user a knob they can twist to choose the behavior of our product." Even though at the time the game asks the player to choose the difficulty level, the player isn't in a position know what it means. This is especially egregious in games where you can't change the difficulty level once you've started a game, but I'm not letting the other games off the hook either. A game with a narrative should be actively working to move the player along at a consistent pace, providing a challenge appropriate to their skill level. If the player is breezing through areas with ease, the game should throw a little more at them until they start to struggle. If the player is constantly dying, the game should dial the difficulty down. Do it quietly, do it without fuss, and do it without even informing the player. There are some games for which this model isn't appropriate, but I maintain that any game with a significant, sustained narrative would benefit from it.

  5. Tell the player how far along she is. I have an intrinsic bias towards shorter games, yet I don't shy away from even the largest books. I was musing about this in conversation the other day, and Stewart Clamen incisively pointed out "You know how much longer you have with books." He's absolutely right: at any moment, you can just glance and know about how much further you have to read to end the experience. Some of the better games manage to do this (again, we can use Zelda as an example. There's always a status screen showing you how much of the world you've uncovered, how many pieces of the Triforce remain to be found, and so on).

  6. Lastly, boss battles are stupid. Scientific research that I just completely made up shows that the same people that like "boss" battles in videogames also like unusable third-person 3-d cameras. And drink white wine.

For the record, apart from Zelda, here's a partial list of some of the games I have actually finished in the past few years: Knights of the Old Republic, Baldur's Gate (I and II), Ico, Planescape: Torment, Halo 2, and the first two Silent Hill games. What these titles have in common is consistency of pacing. That's why I listed it first in my list of principles. From this I conclude: in a narrative-focused game, pacing is paramount. Which sounds obvious but, based on the games I've played over the past few years, apparently isn't.

Now, if you'll excuse me, I have to find that save file for Gladius. I've been playing it for nearly a year, and I'm just about halfway through.

Console Buying

2005-01-25 · by psu

Earlier I babbled at length about the three major consoles. Well, the result predicted in that piece has come to pass. I have come out of the other side of the Christmas season with a new GameCube and a new slim line PS2.

GameCube

You will recall that I came into this thinking that the Nintendo box would be the stronger of the two. This was mostly based on my experience with the GameBoy Advance, which is an excellent little box with a lot of excellent little games. In my mind, the latent GameCube was like a big GBA but with prettier graphics allowing the creation of even bigger, more immersive versions of all the great GBA games. But, this isn't really how it turned out.

There are two problems with the actual GameCube that make me like it less than I thought I would.

The Controller Sucks

While it fits the hands well, the GameCube controller, to me, feels sloppy and imprecise. It's hard to make the sticks go where you want, and the camera stick feels different than the main control stick, which is disturbing. It's not clear to me that the oddball placement of the face buttons achieves any real purpose. Finally, the two stage triggers are morally disordered. They have neither the easy accessibility of the PS2 shoulder buttons nor the long smooth travel of the Xbox triggers. Overall, the Xbox controller S and the PS2 controller are both much nicer to use.

Expensive Games

It seems to take forever for the Nintendo titles to get cheap. It is just recently the case that titles that have been around forever, like Zelda and Mario Sunshine are starting to hit the bargain bins. This cuts down on the number of titles I've tried.

So far I've played mainly Zelda and Mario Golf on this machine. I also tried out Tales of Symphonia (because it was free). Let us not speak of that game again.

Mario Golf is wacky and fun. Zelda is not the transcendent experience that I was expecting. The game design, plot, graphics, music and gameplay are all for the most part excellent. However, I found some of the controls, and especially the camera, a bit sloppy. The game has a hybrid camera system that both sticks to the main character and allows you to spin the camera around using the second stick on the controller. Unfortunately, the free camera is so loose that it's useless and the non-free camera is sort of stupid, often ending up behind your head or in some wall somewhere so you can't see anything. This, combined with the controller problems make me slightly less enthusiastic about this game than I think I should be. Luckily, I just found the Explosive Fruit, and I think all is forgiven.

Playstation 2

I like this box more than I thought I would. In particular, I love the controller. While the shoulder buttons are weak compared to the great triggers on the Xbox, the overall layout of the controller is just perfect for my hands. It's easy to reach all the buttons and the sticks all at the same time without stretching my hands much on the controller. The controller is neither too large nor too small. Finally, I seem to be able to play the longest on this controller before needing to rest my hands.

The games on the PS2 all come in at or above expectations. Disgaea is a fun strategy and battle game with twisted penguins that say "Dude!" a lot. Katarmari Damacy is so good my wife plays it. Ico is beautiful to look at, but I've been too distracted by other things to really get started.

The surprise is Ratchet and Clank: Going Commando. I picked it up cheap with low expectations because I had given up on all the other third person shooter/action games I ever tried. R&C is different. The controls are tight and well tuned. It's easy to jump, flip, shoot, and hit stuff. Perhaps most importantly, the camera and targeting system mostly help you shoot and destroy enemies rather than getting in your way. This makes the combat fun, even when it gets a bit hard. I wish Zelda controlled this well. The game has a fast pace, levels that are not too long, its always easy to keep track of what you are supposed to be doing. The only major flaw is the psychotic save point system, but the pacing of the game mostly makes up for that.

So, overall, except for a bit of role reversal, I think the material consoles lived up to their latent expectations. I still play too much Halo 2.

Quick Pick: Land of Legends

2005-01-26 · by peterb

Land of Legends

Land of Legends

Indie Game Week may be over, but that doesn't mean Tea Leaves won't continue its coverage of independent games. Since yesterday's article was about consoles that can only be used to play duly authorized corporate funded and developed megaprojects, let's veer off today and look at a small, independently-produced game for Windows PCs: Tiny Hero Game Studio's Land of Legends.

As I've mentioned several times, I have a soft spot in my heart for turn-based tactical combat games. Land of Legends falls firmly into this category, derived straight from board games such as Squad Leader and computer games such as Warlords. Here's a few brief comments about Land of Legends, based on the beta.

The metamechanic in Land of Legends is, in my taxonomy, "Single move / Turn Based." By this I mean that you move one piece at a time, and you have the option to move all your pieces on your turn, rather than there being some attempt at simulating simultaneous movement via initiative. This is a fine system, with a number of virtues. It's simple to implement, of course, and also easy for the player to understand. Some of the best tactical combat games, such as Nectaris and it's barely-known sequel Earthlight, fall into this category.

Zombie "card"

Zombie "card"

The art in the game is bouncy and lighthearted. It's heavily influenced by both Japanese manga and Richard and Wendy Pini's Elfquest. Animation is minimal at this point in its development, but that's fine -- the graphics are meant to be iconic, and they get the point across perfectly. One element of the interface that doesn't work quite as well are the cards used to represent units. They're meant to be a compact representation of all the attributes and powers a unit can have. And they are. They're pretty, and have a nice sense of style about them. But I found the icons beyond attack, defend, and move to be a bit bewildering, especially when every piece has its own unique power. To work around this, you hover the mouse over the icons to get a tooltip-style description of what it is, but doing this thirty times in a battle gets tiresome. I understand the desire to invoke the feel of a collectable card game, but it doesn't quite gel here.

Only a few maps were available in the beta for single-player play, but they were diverse enough to showcase some of the careful design that went in to the game. One aspect of the game balance that I liked is that there are quite a lot of "support" units that don't deal direct damage. For example, the "Mystic" unit has the ability to increase the mobility of your forces by allowing a piece that has already moved to move again. Another nice attribute is that most of the battles available have a specific goal besides "kill all the bad guys," so there's some strategic flexibility built in to the engine. On the downside, most of the maps that are available in the demo are extremely small. None approach the size of a decent Warlords map or, choosing an open source example, The Battle for Wesnoth. It may very well be that the released version will have some battles more epic in scope; we'll have to wait and see.

One interesting technical note: the beta of Land of Legends was written in C#, and relied on the .NET framework and Managed DirectX. This means that that build, of course, was completely impossible to port to other popular platforms, such as Linux or MacOS. The game is currently being ported to C++. I do hope the developers consider making the game available on other platforms: portable code is good code. I enjoyed the taste of Land of Legends, and look forward to trying it again when it is completed. That it plays as well as it does this early in its development is a good sign indeed.

Land of Legends supports online play, but I didn't try this it out, as inevitably when I play tactical games online I get whipped like a copper bowl filled with cream, and then I have to go sulk for two weeks.

If you want to try Land of Legends for yourself, you'll need to create an account on Tiny Hero's web site and then follow these instructions. It is currently available only for Windows.

Pants!

2005-01-27 · by peterb

It's been a while since the last top ten list. You know what that means.

Today's topic: famous quotations that are improved if you replace one of the nouns with the word "pants." Some of the sources are obvious, some are a little more obscure. The tag of whoever suggested a particular twisted quote follows each quote in italics. Feel free to ask for attributions for the original quotes or contribute your own entries in the comments.

"It is bitter -- bitter," he answered; "But I like it Because it is bitter, And because it is my pants." [peterb]

Hope is the thing with trousers. [peterb]

Cover her face; my pants dazzle; she died young. [agroce]

If you meet the Buddha on the road, pants him. [visigoth]

Qui du cul d'un chien s'amourose, Il lui parait un pantalon. [peterb]

Lasciate ogni pantaloni, voi ch'entrate. [peterb]

The pants that can be named are not the true pants. [sdavis]

Into what dangers would you lead me, Cassius, That you would have me seek into my pants, For that which is not in them? [mahim]

The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our pants, But in ourselves. [agroce]

Every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of pants. [visigoth]

Workers of the world, unite! You have nothing to lose but your pants. [peterb]

You're one microscopic cog In his catastrophic plan Designed and directed by his Red Right Pants [agroce]

My god, it's full of pants. [sdavis]

Men have died from time to time, and worms have eaten them, but not for pants. [agroce]

Pants first; morals later. [peterb]

Scandal is pants made tedious by morality. [visigoth]

It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of pants. [agroce]

I am not a vegetarian because I love animals; I am a vegetarian because I hate pants. [rlink]

Of all the pants, in all the towns, in all the world ... she walks into mine. [mahim]

In the beginning there was the word, and that word was "pants" [sdavis]

Don't judge a person until you've walked a mile in their pants. [dpelleg]

I'm shocked, shocked to find that pants are going on in here! [agroce]

Some pants! Some pants! My kingdom for some pants! [tomault]

In Heaven, everything is fine. In Heaven, everything is fine. You'll have your nice pants and I'll have mine. [peterb]

And as human beings, you and I need fresh, pure pants to replenish our precious bodily fluids. [sdavis]

Oh Pants, thou art sick! The invisible worm That flies in the night, in the howling storm

Has found out thy seams Of crimson joy. And with his dark secret love, does thy thread destroy. [jch]

Man I ain't getting nowhere just sitting in pants like this There's something happening somewhere baby I just know that there is. [mahim]

Something zippered this way comes. [peterb]

A slip of the foot you may soon recover, but a slip of the pants you may never get over. [rlink]

Look, Daddy! Teacher says, every time a bell rings, an angel gets his pants! [visigoth]

Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, pants? [clamen]

All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in pants. [krevis]

I should have been a pair of ragged pants Scuttling across the floors of silent seas. [agroce]

In pants, no one can hear you scream. [rlink]

Renewed shall be blade that was broken: The pantsless again shall be king. [peterb]

It is by pants alone I set my mind in motion. [visigoth]

The pants of the many outweigh the pants of the few. [sdavis]

Socialism needs democracy like the human body needs pants. [visigoth]

A man without religion is like a fish without pants. [peterb]

The fastest way to a man's heart is through his pants. [tomault]

Despair thy charm; And let the angel whom thou still hast served Tell thee, Macduff was from his pants Untimely ripp'd. [jch]

Look on my pants, ye mighty, and despair. [nlanza]

I only regret that I have but one pair of pants to give for my country. [psu]

(the full, unedited list may be found here.)

Lazy Food

2005-01-28 · by psu

I like to cook but I am, by nature, a rather lazy person. This can be a problem at times, since good food is often labor intensive. Luckily, many of the best things you can make do not require your full attention during the making. So here are some easy recipes for great food that you can make while playing Halo.

Rice

Use a rice cooker. Set and forget. You can play Halo for 20 to 30 minutes while it cooks.

Coffee in a French Press

OK. This is barely a recipe, and you don't get to play Halo, but bear with me.

I like coffee, but making a really good drip or espresso or even moka pot shot is sometimes just too much cognitive effort. For these times, I do this

Wait a while. Drink. The trick is to judge the amount of water you should put in by how many grounds you end up with, and don't let the grounds sit in the press too long. I like to put in way too much coffee but not have it sit in the water that long before pressing it.

I hear vaccum pots are also a nice lazy way to make coffee. They make me nervous about boiling the coffee too much.

The french press also lets you be really lazy and make good tea. And tea is even less work than coffee because you can steep it multiple times. This is good for when you are sick.

Homemade Chicken and Matzoh Ball Soup

I described this to my boss one day, and he thought it sounded like too much work. So I tried to cut it down a bit.

First, buy a two or three pound package of chicken wings. Then cut up 2 onions, 2 or 3 carrots, and 2 or 3 stalks of celery. Put all this in a pot, cover with water, add salt, pepper, and bay leaves. Turn the heat on until you get a simmer. Now play Halo for 3 or 4 hours. If you are industrious, you can saute the vegetables before adding the wings and the water. You can also hack the wings in half. But these are both extra work and not really needed.

Here is the hardest part: dice an onion, 2 more carrots and 1 or 2 more celery stalks. Dice as small as you can.

Saute these in a soup pot with salt and pepper. Add a quart or two of stock, as much white wine as you like, and another quart or two of water (until you get enough soup). Simmer this for a while. Then make matzoh balls using the directions on the mix. Add to the broth, get all this to a low simmer. Go play Halo for however long you like your matzoh balls to sit.

That's all.

Pasta with Bolognese Meat Sauce

Start with a pound and a half of ground beef.

Dice 1 or 2 onions, 3 or 4 carrots, 2 or 3 celery stalks. You want to dice this as small as you possibly can. This is the only hard work in the whole recipe.

Saute the onions in a pan with olive oil. Add carrots and celery. Add salt and pepper.

Now put the beef in with another spray of salt and pepper. Brown it until it is not red anymore.

Add a cup or so of milk. Turn the heat to simmer. Play Halo until the milk has reduced off. Check the stove between matches (every 10 minutes or so).

Add a cup or so of white wine. Do the same simmer and Halo trick.

After the white wine has cooked off, add one 28oz can of crushed tomatoes (maybe slightly more), or the same volume of fresh that you have ground up in the Cuisinart. Stir, turn the stove down as low as it will go. Play Halo for 5 or 6 hours, stirring every few rounds.

Now make your favorite pasta that is similar to penne. Mix the pasta with the sauce, grate on some Parmigiano Reggiano. Eat.

Indestructible Beef Stew

This is a variation on Pete's Braised Beef.

Dice an onion, saute in olive oil. Throw in a pound or two of cubed stew beef. Add salt and pepper. Stir around until the beef is browned. Add sliced mushrooms and a couple cups of red wine. Put this in the an oven set to 300-350F. Go play Halo for an hour or two.

When you get all done with Halo, cut up a few potatoes, and a couple of carrots. Add this to the pot, throw it back in the oven. Play Halo for 2 or 3 more hours.

Pull the stew out, throw in frozen peas. Salt and pepper to taste. Stir it around so everything is still hot. Serve with bread or rice.

Note: I call this indestructible stew because one time I accidentally added soy sauce instead of red wine, and the stew was still edible.

What recipes do you have that require little work, and allow you to play Halo and still get credit for kitchen time?

Mediocrity Begins at Home

2005-01-31 · by peterb

There's no shame in bugs.

Really. In consumer-grade software, there are bugs. I wish it wasn't so, but it is so. I can't think of a product I've used in the past 20 years that hasn't had a bug or two.

There are a few different reactions to finding out that your product has a bug. One of those reactions is to say nothing at all. While this often displeases the peanut gallery, sometimes it's the wisest course. Another reaction is to acknowledge the bug and move on. "Oh man, you're right. That sucks. I hope we can get that fixed soon." I think that's usually a pretty good response, although it may give your lawyers a conniption fit.

Then there's what I have come, over the years, to think of as "The Linux Answer." That's the one where you blame the user for wanting to use the product in a way which exercises the bug.

User: "The kernel's interface for force unmounting the filesystem is broken, and it can't ever possibly work." Developer: "Why are you trying to force unmount? You shouldn't try to use that API, even though it's documented and no bugs are filed against it."

User: "The performance of the threads implementation on your OS is an order of magnitude worse than the one on these other OSs when I run any app that uses a lot of threads." Developer: "Threads are stupid. You should rewrite all your code."

It's not really fair anymore to call this "the Linux answer," because of course overzealous fans of any product sometimes have this sort of reaction when confronted with its shortcomings. As a developer, I find that I get possessive of the code I write. Someone will ask me how a component I've contributed to acts when given certain inputs, and I'll find myself saying "well, when we get this request, we apply these policies and then give this answer back to you." And then I'll stop, and listen to myself referring to the code I wrote in the first person, and have to smack myself in the head a few times.

I suspect that it's this sort of anthropomorphism of software that causes The Linux Answer. Some level of identification with your code is inevitable (it provides a convenient conversational framework, if nothing else). But when it reaches the point that you're willing to blame the user for criticizing your code (because the user is therefore criticizing you, which wounds your feelings) -- well, look. It's just code. It has bugs. Fixing the bugs is good. And you can't fix the bugs unless you know about them.

So the right thing to do when a user tells you about a bug is to thank her.

The Legend of Zelda: Groundhog Day

2005-02-01 · by psu

I have been playing Zelda: Wind Waker on my new Gamecube lately. Aside from some control issues, the game is a wonder of interesting and unique mechanics, enjoyable narrative, excellent game design, good music and great graphics. However, my experience the past few nights might make me give up on the game altogether, and this is sad. Here is my story.

I have often referred to Pete's savepoint rant in my own rantings about games. Savepoints are truly one of the curses of console gaming. When he had originally written that piece, I mapped the term to what Halo or Splinter Cell do, where the user is only allowed to save her state upon reaching certain fixed points in the game narrative. While this system is pretty annoying, I had no idea that an entire universe of pain existed just outside the edge of my vision.

So I was playing Zelda, and having finally acclimated to the mechanics, I was really enjoying myself. It's not often you come across a game that uses more than two or three mechanics well. Zelda gives you a new toy to play with in every level. This, along with the fantastic presentation and graphics had me really grooving. Then, just as I was really having fun with the jumpy plants, it was bed time. See, I'm old and feeble and need to go to bed at night rather than playing my favorite game until I actually reach the next savepoint. In a fit of optimism, I saved my game, so I could pick it up again the next day. But as I learned, you can never underestimate the psychotic cruelty of the console game designer.

One would think that a correctly functioning save system would save two basic sets of data:

  1. The state of the game world.

  2. The state of the player.

Apparently, in the world of console game design, one is free to pick and choose which, if any, of these data you actually save. The great thing is that you have to experiment to find out exactly what is saved when you hit that save button. As we have seen before, Splinter Cell and Halo save everything.

In Metal Gear Solid you have the "Oh sure, save anywhere. HAHAHAHA just kidding! We only kept the last savepoint" scheme. Here, the Save menu item is always available, but is silently ignored unless you happen to have recently passed a savepoint. So, you load your game and rather than being back where you saved, you are back at the most recent savepoint before the point at which you saved. This is because it would be thousands of man hours of work to change the game's user interface to disable the Save menu unless it would actually do something.

Ratchet and Clank has a slightly different twist on this theme. Like Metal Gear, the game lets you pick the Save menu item any time you like, but the game picks a different subset of state of save. In general, if you save and then quit and restart, you come back at the start of whatever mission you were playing. You have to run through the level and do all the jumps and puzzles over again. But, the game does remember which enemies you killed between the start of the level and the checkpoint you reached. So you find yourself running through a long empty area. Also, the game very carefully remembers what items you have, how much health you have, and so on. Thus, the savepoint saves everything that is interesting about the your state and the game state, except your location in the level. This is because storing one extra 64 bit piece of data would have been too resource intensive.

Zelda follows the lead of other platformers, which seem to define an unpredictable continuum that saves some parts of the game world and some parts of the player's state, but not all of both.

So, the next night, I come back to the game, and I notice that even though I saved my game in the middle of a long dungeon, I appear to have come back at the beginning of the dungeon. Not only that, but all the creatures that were in my way, which I dispatched with my sword, are back again. I conclude that saving the game in the middle of a dungeon does nothing, even though the save game button is always there. This is not quite true. The game does keep track of the puzzles I've already solved and the items I already have. I guess it would have been just too hard to also keep track of where I am in the dungeon and what I have killed. Orders of magnitude more data and expense.

It gets worse though. Occassionally in the game, you will come across a Boss, or a Mini-Boss. If you suck, like me, it can take a few tries before figuring out how to kill them (e.g. try a few times, read the walkthrough). Of course, every time you fail you get sent back to the start of the dungeon. This is sadism of the highest order. The end result of all this is that I'll be playing the same dungeon all over again tonight, and I was already tired of the jumping puzzles last night. If I don't make it through this time, I will put the game down and never pick it up again.

This is sort of sad, since there is so much in this game that is awesome. But, I don't have time to deal with the game designer's brain dead ideas of when I can and cannot save my state.

Of course, adding one simple hardware mechanism to every console would save the day and allow me to finish this game. This mechanism has been widely implemented in mass market computing hardware. I refer, of course, to instant sleep. To wit: when I feel like quitting for the night, and I want to save my place, I hit a magic button and the console goes into a sleep mode where it is inactive, but the complete state of the machine is kept intact by a trickle of power to the memory system. When I want to pick up the game again, I hit another button and the machine wakes up exactly where I left it. The only constraint is that I can't open the console and switch games.

Now I am free of whatever stupid save system the game designer has decided to implement. I can stop playing when I am stumped by a puzzle, knowing that I won't have to navigate the whole dungeon again. I can quit just as I meet the new Boss and read the walkthrough before dying the first time. And, most importantly, when I sleep/save/quit, I know for a fact that the system is saving everything, not some random subset of the state that is important to me.

Note that this is not the same as "save anywhere". This mechanism does not allow for creep saving or saving an infinite tree of different game timelines. It does not require huge save files (since we are keeping the state in the console itself) and both the save and load are instantaneous. All it does it let me save and quit when I want and come back exactly where I left off. This, it seems to me, is what saving my game is supposed to be about. In addition, many modern games on the GBA SP (including all of the GBA ports of Zelda) implement this mechanism, and it is good enough that it allows me to forgive almost all the savepoint sins that might be in the actual game.

So how about it Nintendo, put this into the next GameCube. Then maybe I can see what all the fuss is about Zelda.

Zelda Status Update: I managed to get to the end of the dungeon in one more try. So I might keep going.

DV Dilettante Buyer's Guide

2005-02-02 · by peterb

Jonathan writes:

My brother has uttered his semi-annual wish that someone would just tell him what DV camera to buy.

My reply is: I live to serve

People use their DV cameras for producing different types of work. Since I don't know what, exactly, your brother is interested in doing, I'm going to construct an ideal consumer and write my advice to him. My ideal consumer wants a DV camera because he wants to produce some body of work. He wants to produce finished product (by which I mean, not just take a bunch of raw footage of his cats and then occasionally watch an hour of it, unedited). He wants that product to have some level of professionalism, although he is not a professional. In other words, he'd like to produce something that a complete stranger might look at and say "hey, this was pretty nicely done," although not necessarily at the level of something one might make part of a portfolio for getting a job (hopefully, a person who is aiming to make their living as a videographer doesn't need my advice on equipment).

(1) First, come up with a budget. For the sake of this example, let's say your initial budget is $1000. Whether one is talking about cameras or computers, you'll always be able to find something to spend "just $200 more" on. So it's important to know what we're working with before we begin.

(2) Go ahead and look at the cameras that cost $1000.

(3) Cut your camera budget in half -- in this case $500 -- and pick up pretty much any camera in that price range. Don't spend more than half a day thinking about it. Consumer-level cameras are mostly interchangeable. This is more or less true of "prosumer" (a Japanese word that means "has too much money") cameras as well.

(4) Now take the money you have left over from your initial budget ($500), and spend it on lighting, a good tripod, and balanced microphones/audio equipment.

If you follow my recipe, you have a chance at making far superior films (footnote 1) than you would if you blow your entire budget (or more) solely on the videocamera. The videocamera is just one tool in the filmmaking process. It's certainly the most obvious tool, but it is arguably not the most important one. The cheapest balanced lavalier mic will get you better sound quality than the most expensive camera's on-camera mic. Furthermore, your audience will notice that difference more than they will notice the difference in video quality between the most expensive prosumer 3-ccd camera and the cheapest miniDV device you can find. As a culture we are very finely attuned to subtle differences in audio. Poor video quality can be dismissed as a stylistic issue, and we are accustomed to accepting a variety of different video qualities in our day to day viewing activities. Poor audio is intrusive and jarring, because nearly all of the things we listen to, apart from AM radio, are of a standard professional quality. A poor audio track can make an otherwise fine video unwatchable. Therefore, I say: get a real balanced mic. (I actually wrote an article last year about what to do when your soundtrack sucks, but you're much better off avoiding having that happen in the first place.)

There is one situation in which you can skimp on the mic, and that's if you know in advance that you won't be using the audio track from whatever videos you shoot (for example, if you will be overdubbing later, or setting your work to music). But if you intend for your movies to have sound recorded at shoot time, get a mic. Below, I'll provide a link to Jay Rose's book on producing audio for digital video, which is a worthwhile investment if you want your sound to be good. And you should.

Most consumer (and prosumer) cameras compete not on basic quality-of-video issues, but on "features." Most of these features are completely superfluous to making good videos. Also, if this is your first camera, you probably don't yet know what features you actually need. For example, 90% of the camcorder reviews talk about "low light performance." But we've already established that my hypothetical consumer wants to make something watchable. Watchable films have lighting design. Ergo, you could care less about low light performance, because you're going to use the money you saved on the camera to buy some real lighting. Obviously, I'm giving this as an example. If you're determined to charge in to a darkened gothic cathedral and use your Panacanony's super infrared feature, well, I can't stop you. But if the Paris Hilton video isn't enough to convince you that "low light" cameras are a bad idea out of the starting gate, you need to watch it again. Er, solely in the interests of Art.

So in my mind, the feature list is more or less a distraction that you want to ignore when evaluating cameras. The only things you should care about are: does it shoot video? Does it feel comfortable in your hand? Does it have the inputs and outputs I need? That's about it.

Things you should specifically not care about: whether it takes still photos, and at what resolution. Whether it does dubbing. The "in-camera" editing features, which no one, in the entire history of video since the beginning of time has ever, ever used. Digital zoom. Digital image stabilization. Low/no light mode. Camera motor noise (you are using an external mic, right?).

HAD CCD verticle smear

Photo credit: David Reuther

The one thing to concern yourself with at the low end is "Sony vs. Everyone Else". That's what the decision comes down to. Many of the Sony DV cameras use a CCD that causes vertical "striping" on bright light sources that I find very distracting, whereas the Canons, for example, don't. The photo to the right is an example of vertical smear. It looks like lens flare, but isn't -- it's entirely due to the characteristics of the HAD CCD that some camcorders use. That was one main reason I avoided the Sonys. My personal pick when I had to make this decision was to find a used Canon Optura Pi. But that being said, the guidelines are simple: figure out what you want to spend, don't spend more than that, spend as little as possible, and worry more about the process of shooting and editing than about the equipment.

I'm not being flip. My honest recommendation is that you figure out what you think you want to spend on a camera, and cut it in half. Get a camera half as expensive as you think you need, and spend the remainder on sound and lighting (and, start saving up for a moderately inexpensive or a really expensive non-linear editor software package). All of those things will be more important to the quality of your finished work than the camera you buy.

But, if you're going to wrest a recommendation out of me, I would say, assuming your budget isn't unreasonably large, get a Canon Elura 65. It is lightweight, inexpensive, and isn't loaded with 800 stupid features that you'll never use. I recommend this model instead any of the various Sony ones because I really dislike the "vertical lens-flare" effect from Sony's CCD's. Also, the Canon has a top-loading tape, so when your tape runs out in the middle of a shoot, you don't have to remove it from the tripod to change it, as you do on some of the Sony models. I would have recommended the even cheaper Canon ZR models, but the most recent revisions of that line lack a mic input, making them little more than toys. An older used ZR with a mic input would be a good choice for a bargain hunter. If you're absolutely, 100%, positively sure that you will never need to do in-camera recording, then the Canon ZR-80 becomes a reasonable choice, saving you over a hundred bucks and a few ounces in weight over the Elura.

Additional Resources

Footnote 1: Yes, I am well aware that works that are on video are not, in fact, "films." In the name of international peace and goodwill I can only say: bite me.

Dear NPR Ethicist

2005-02-03 · by psu

I have a tricky question that has been bothering me for a while. Maybe I should ask NPR about it.

In the video game "Halo", the player is often accompanied by a squad of Marines that are driven by the computer and help the player out in combat situations.

These marines are actually fairly intelligent. They will provide cover fire, take cover to keep from getting killed, and also provide a wide variety of commentary on what is going on in the game.

At one particular stage in the game, you land on an enemy star ship and there is a huge fire fight in a hanger. If you lose your squad of marines, the game automatically calls in more help, and another squad arrives.

But, it can happen that a lone super-marine will survive the initial fire fight, putting you in a bad position... you need more help than one marine to get past the next wave of killer aliens, but help will not arrive as long as this super-marine manages to keep himself alive.

So, my ethical question is: should I shoot the last guy in the head so I get a new squad?

thanks Pete

Roasting Almonds

2005-02-04 · by peterb

It's a simple problem, with a simple solution.

The problem is that raw almonds are too sweet and unfocused to enjoy on their own, while most roasted almonds you can get at the store are dry and unenjoyable. Do not speak to me of the overpriced "Marcona" almonds sold to suckers at places like Whole Foods. They're greasy and have all the character of frozen okra.

What you want to do is roast your own. Here's how to do it.

Equipment:

Ingredients:

Preheat your oven to 250 degrees Fahrenheit. Take your raw almonds and spread them out on the cookie sheet. Pour some oil on the pan, and swish the almonds around the pan with a spatula until they're all coated with a little oil. You can always add more oil if you didn't use enough, so start sparingly -- a teaspoon or so might be enough, if the almonds are small. Once they're coated, grab a generous handful of salt and toss it over the almonds. No need to agitate them any further. Put the pan in the oven and go play Halo 2 for about a half an hour. When the kitchen starts smelling good, they're nearly done.

Figuring out when they're actually done is somewhat problematic. Roasting nuts is a tricky business. If you under-roast them, then they will taste raw, and you will have spent time and energy for no particular reason. As they approach "perfectly roasted," they will taste better and better. Then, there is a magical, awful line across which the nuts move from "perfectly roasted" to "burnt and inedible" in a matter of seconds. Finding and avoiding that line is a matter of experience. The almonds will continue to roast for a bit after you remove them from the oven, so for your first attempts it's probably better to take them out too soon rather than too late.

Once they're out, take another big handful of salt and throw it over the almonds. The double-salting is one of my secrets to great almonds (the other is simply using almond oil, rather than the peanut or sunflower oils used to roast most commercially processed almonds). You can taste them at this point, but right out of the oven they will be soft and mealy, and not worth eating. Let them sit, and cool, and harden. When they are completely cool, transfer them to a jar, and enjoy.

Eat them however you want to. I like them with slices of apple, and oil-cured olives, and cheese.

Patriots Dynasty

2005-02-07 · by psu

Three championships in four years. Two championships in Boston in the same year. It's a good time to be a fan there right now. Too bad about the Celtics though. I guess I can finally forgive the Pats for that game against the Bears back in 1986.

Paris Things

2005-02-08 · by psu

My friend Eric asked me what to do in Paris. Since I live to serve here is a list of my favorite activities. In general, I am not much of a tourist. My idea of a good time on a trip is to eat a lot, walk around and stare at the natives, and take pictures of buildings when the light gets good. This list reflects this bias. No bus tours of the major monuments for me.

Brentano's

This is an English bookstore on Avenue de L'Opera. You must go here first not because it is some huge significant land mark. You must come here first to pick up one item which is essential if you are to survive your trip and get decent food. The book to get is the The A-Z of French Food, which is a French to English food dictionary which will explain to you what all the flowery language on the French menus means. This will allow you to go to the good places (no English menus) and not have to guess what they are serving you.

Buy it in France. It's cheaper there.

While you are there, you can pick up the definitive Paris map book. Look for a little blue book with the title Paris Practique. The book has one or two maps per arrondissement (or neighborhood) all on individual pages. This is handy because everything in Paris is labeled with the number of the arrondissement in which it resides. There are 15-20 arrondissements in all organized in a spiral out from the center of the city. If you hear people saying things like "Oh that's in the 8th", this is what they mean.

Jardin du Luxembourg (6th)

This is my single favorite place to go in the entire city. A trip spent sitting in this garden every day for an entire week would not be a waste of your time. The people watching is on an awesome scale. The tourist density is a bit lower than at other gardens for some reason. There are many different areas on the grounds with different looks. There are the fountains, kids playing in the fountains with the little boats, a great building to stare at, and the ubiquitous young people in amorous poses. If you go only one place while in Paris, go here.

Markets

One of the joys of Paris as a city is the dozens of open air markets that move around the city at regular intervals. Find the location and schedule of a market close to where you are staying in town. Then get up in the morning and go. Here you will find access to some of the best food you will eat in the city without the overhead of dealing with the long, snooty and expensive service of your typical high end Parisian restaurant. Head over with your empty bag and pick up fruit, vegetables, bread, cheese that is illegal in the U.S., fresh fish, raw oysters, live langoustines, and loads of hot dishes ranging from quiche to kabobs to whole roast chicken. It's a feast in a tent. Another bonus is that while tourist traffic exists in the markets, it's fairly light compared to other attractions in the city.

Café de Flore (6th)

This is a tourist trap, but it's the coolest tourist trap that I know of. The place has excellent coffee by any standard, even if it does cost $6. Go in the morning, sit on the terrace, stare at the people going by. Do this every day at the same time for a week or two. Pretty soon, they'll stop treating you like a tourist dog.

The area around the café is also fantastic for window and other sorts of shopping. Walk up and down Blvd. St. Germain and Blvd. St. Michel, or really in any other direction from the café to find dozens and dozens of places to spend your weak dollars.

The Marie-Anne Cantin Cheese Shop (7th)

Go here to buy cheese to smuggle back to the U.S. Get two wheels of raw milk Camembert (this is similar to Brie, but the wheels are a smaller size). This cheese is like nothing you have had in the states. It has a strong flavor, but not astringent. It has layers and layers of aftertaste that range from salty and cheesy to mellow and sweet. It is simply amazing.

Get two rounds of the St. Marcellin to eat on the way back to your hotel with some insanely fresh baguette from the bakery around the corner. This is like the soft goat cheeses you can get in the States, except that it actually has character and flavor instead of tasting like the white paste that is every single pasteurized piece of crap that is legally available in the U.S. (and mostly in Canada too).

Get some Epoisse, just because. You can't buy real Epoisse here, so you have to get some. The Camembert is better, but you still have to get some anyway.

Finally, grab some of the nice aged goat or sheep milk cheese that they have. Whatever they recommend.

Wrap it all up in a vacuum sealed bag (they do this for you) and stuff it in your checked luggage.

Les Fontaines (5th)

Great steak and meats in a great area to walk around in. Close to the Jardin du Luxemborg and the Pantheon. There are many funky stores and stuff around this area. It's fun to hang around. I've seen some trash talk about this place going down hill after a change in ownership a few years ago. All I can say is, it must have been at some other transcendent level before if what we had was "down hill". Get the Filet de Boeuf en Croute. This is a filet steak wrapped in puff pastry with a deep brown sauce and a little piece of foie gras on top. Oh, and it comes with a big enamel dish filled with fries. It's a great way to die.

Alain Ducasse (8th)

When you want to blow the price of an iPod on lunch, this is the place to go to be sure you get your money's worth. It's probably the best restaurant experience that I've ever had. I had asparagus here that had five separate tastes all going on at once. The rest of the meal until the little chocolates is just a blur. They also hand you a loaf of bread on your way out of the place. Also, four years after my wife and I went, we still get a card from this place every Christmas.

Maison Européenne de la Photographie (4th)

This gallery is in the Marais just a few blocks off the Seine. On my first trip to Paris we wandered in here and they were having a massive retrospective on Ralph Gibson. I found out later that Ralph Gibson is one of the most famous living photographers ever. It was a really good show. I go back every time now. It's always good.

Musée Rodin (7th)

A bit out of the way in the 7th a couple of miles from the Eiffel Tower and a few blocks away from Invalides is this gorgeous historical mansion filled with exquisite light shining on exquisite sculpture of all kinds. The grounds of the museum also hold a fantastic sculpture garden. The museum is admittedly narrow in scope compared to the Louvre or the Orsay, but I don't think there is a prettier space in which to examine and contemplate works of art than the Rodin.

Ile St. Louis (4th)

This is the small island just off of Notre Dame. While the big church is cool, the Ile is cooler. During the day, there are great cafes, Bertillon ice cream, the Au Gourmet de l'Isle restaurant for lunch, a nice toy store, and other things to gawk at. It's also very pretty at night.

St. Chapelle (1st)

An astoundingly beautiful chapel near Notre Dame. Much smaller scale and more intimate. I like it better here than dealing with the throng at the big place.

Around Le Louvre

I don't recomment spending a lot of time in the Louvre. I think it's more fun to walk around the places surrounding the museum. The Palais Royal is great. There is the Jardin des Tuileries. And then if you walk back towards the river there are various bridges you must stand on. Really. Just stand there and look up and down the river. Bring a picnic to the Ponts Des Art. Eat your food, look at the river, stare at the amorous young people. This is good for about a whole day.

If you must go to the Louvre, dash quickly to the Venus de Milo, and then leave immediately and go back to the gardens or the bridges. That's my opinion.

Things to Avoid

For god's sake do not under any circumstances buy a hot dog from a street vendor.

Avoid the huge mall that is Les Halles.

Summer is not a great time to be in the city. It's hot and ultra-crowded. Better to go in the early spring or in the fall.

Can't really think of anything else.

Other Things I Missed

You have to just walk around and stare stupidly at everything. I like just looking at the old doors on buildings. They are astounding. Bring nice clothes. Leave the tennis shoes and baggy shorts at home. Even if you dress really really well by casual American standards you'll stand out like a sore thumb. Meal service in France is at a much more relaxed pace than you are used to. Expect to spend a couple of hours eating the average meal in a good restaurant. Go to the Cafe Marly and get a really expensive burger. If you want to go to one of the really famous museums, go to the Orsay, or the Picasso. Everyone should also see Montmarte and Sacre Coeur at some point.

The list goes on and on. I could keep writing for months.

Xs and Os

2005-02-09 · by peterb

Every year, like clockwork, the big gaming megacorps turn out this year's model of their (American) football games. A little more glitz, a little more glamour, some new player statistics. Every year, like clockwork, the gaming press issues their boring roundups of the subtle differences between the nearly identical games. This one has better graphics, that one has a better running game. The commentary on this one sounds more realistic, that one has better stadiums.

I'm not going to do that. I'm going to do something a little different.

I'm going to compare the latest megacorp NFL Football game, EA Sports' Madden 2005 to an older game: XOR's NFL Challenge, a mixed text-and-graphics DOS-based game first published in 1985.

The thing about sports videogames that both attracts and repels me is that I'm not good at any sport that doesn't involve a firearm. On the upside, sports games provide an outlet for me to fantasize about a world where I possess some degree of athletic prowess. And sport by its nature contains many dramatic moments that lend themselves well to videogames. On the downside, I feel the residual guilt of willingly playing a game where I am in some respects pretending to be one of the people I loathed in high school.

You'd think that football, with its macho tradition and homoerotic undertones, would be my least favorite videogame. In truth, it's one of my favorites. This is because football, more than other sports, is a tactical game. The tactical aspect of football shines through in the videogame versions. All football videogames, deep inside, are just immensely complex versions of rock-scissors-paper. This isn't as evident in other sports videogames. I "know" that on some level there are formations in soccer, and plays. I "know" that I can tell my basketball team to go full court press, or take a zone defense. But the constant action in those games means that I, as a player, end up focusing more on making whoever has the ball engage in some outrageous piece of on-field bravado in order to score. In football often a play's success depends more on trying to trick the opponent's defense into anticipating a run when I am really going to pass than on raw playing talent.

In most videogame versions of football, it is considered legitimate to pick a play, hike the ball, and then not touch the controller, but to just let the players run the play as best they can. So most football games already allow you to treat them as nearly pure coaching games.

NFL Challenge is a pure coaching game. The game has a statistical mode where it simulates an entire season, but for this review I'm going to focus on the "play one game" mode. If you like football as an abstract battle, NFL Challenge might be the most fun you can have with your pants on.

You can have two human players, or one player can challenge the computer, or you can let two computer players fight it out and you just watch. Assuming you choose to control a team, the mechanisms are simple: choose a formation and a play. Then, watch the play happen. There are more options than that, of course -- you can call time outs, substitute players, go to a "hurry up" offense -- but the core of the game is choose a play, watch the play.

XOR NFL Challenge

XOR NFL Challenge

The play calling interface is sparse but effective. You see an overhead view of the field drawn in colored ASCII graphics. A red triangle indicates the position of the ball on the field. Pop-up text menus let you choose a formation by number. Once you choose a formation, you choose a play. The perspective then transfers to the "run the play" view.

This is where the simplicitly of the game shines through. What you see is nothing less than a colour version of the old Atari arcade football game: 11 Xs represent the defense, 11 Os represent the offense. The play commences, and the Xs and Os begin their dance. There's no control on this screen at all. You've chosen your team, they have their preset skills, and they run the play to the best of their ability. The game is simple. The game is elegant. The game is addictive.

Madden 2005 stands up surprisingly well to NFL Challenge as a strategic game. In addition to allowing you to play "hands off," it has some features that are of use to the football novice. The best of these is "Football 101", which allows you to explore different offensive formations and plays, with a voiceover explaining the purpose of the formation and how the play is supposed to work. Regrettably, I haven't found a way to get Football 101 to explain defensive formations and plays to me yet, but half a loaf is better than none.

As you'd expect, it is in the overall presentation of football as a beauty pageant where Madden 2005 outshines its predecessor. The actual player animations are underwhelming. If you've played any of the 2000-era games on the Sega Dreamcast, then this is basically more of the same. Ball collision detection is still loosey-goosey and feels unnatural and otherworldly. You have complete control of your players, if you want it. If you'd rather not play as a coach, you can control one player at a time with great precision, making him juke, stiff-arm, dive, and run. Also, the spit and polish on the other aspects of the presentation are notable.

For example, the first time you start the game, it asks you what your favorite team is. From that point forward, all of the animations and background movies in the menus are of your "favorite" team in action, and the color scheme is coordinated to your team's colours as well. When you start playing with the "play now" option, you're given an setup menu which by default has your favorite team as the home team, with you controlling it. This is one of those optimizations that seems so obvious after you actually see it in action that you marvel that everyone hasn't already done it.

The color commentary from John Madden and the other crew "in the booth" is generally on-target and feels very natural. There are none of the discontinuities and aberrations that plagued earlier games. Stadiums and teams are all correctly depicted, and Electronic Arts gets a nice big plusplus for remembering that the Pittsburgh Steelers don't have cheerleaders. You can create customized players, and even customized fans who show up in some cutscenes. It's cute.

Madden also provides a large number of play modes, including online support (via Xbox Live on the Xbox version -- welcome to the 21st Century, EA). There's also a sort of strange "collectible card" thing going on. As you play the game, complete training challenges, and meet certain goals (for example, "make 5 tackles with the same player") you earn "tokens" which can then be used to buy "packs" of Madden cards. The cards have various powers that can then be deployed during the game, up to and even including cheatsing. I'm the sort of obsessive-compulsive collector who should like this, but it doesn't really work. It muddies the focus of the game.

One specific area where Madden isn't quite as enjoyable as NFL Challenge is in substitutions, penalties, and injuries. In several weeks of Madden games, I haven't seen a single penalty. I haven't seen a single injury. And for the life of me, I can't figure out how to get the game to stop undoing my roster changes. I send Bettis out on the field, and three plays later Staley is subbed in for him without the game even telling me. This drives me nuts. The frequency of penalties and injuries in NFL Challenge feels about right to me, and you have complete control over your roster.

Both of these games will be a pleasure for the "coach style" football addict. If you've never played NFL Challenge I suggest you try it. I give it the edge because it feels more like "actual football" than Madden. If you are seduced by the glitz and presentation of Madden, well, you won't be alone. It's a pretty game. But I think NFL Challenge is the deeper one.

Additional Resources

The Amber Spyglass

2005-02-10 · by peterb

One nice thing about not paying close attention to the bestseller lists is that when books come out in a series, I often don't even hear about them until all of them are out. That's what happened this year when I picked up The Golden Compass, the first book in Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials cycle.

I'm naturally suspicious of any books that are part of a series, and this suspicion grows when that series is part of a marketing genre (such as sci-fi mystery, romance, and so on). Genre, by this definition, is more about satisfying the psychosexual disabilities of the reader, and therefore guaranteeing authors and publishers a target market, than it is about good writing. A series of books, furthermore, suggests a sort of literary disorder that could be cured by a brutal editor. "Are you such a poor writer," part of me wonders, "that you couldn't say what you needed to in a more elegant and concise fashion? If Gabriel Garcia-Marquez could tell the entire history of the Buendía clan in Cien Años de Solidad why do you need an extra fifteen hundred pages to tell a story that is less interesting and less emotionally moving?"

This is of course unfair. One might as well complain that a play doesn't have music, or a ballet doesn't have breakdancing. The novel and the serial are essentially different media, and what is a transgression in one may be desirable in the other. I mention my distrust of the serial form only to give color and form to this discussion. In particular: when I mentioned that I was reading the series, the attitude I heard from more than one person was "Oh, yes, the first two books were great. A shame about the third one, though."

This didn't fill me with hope. I pressed on, though, and finished all three books. Despite (or because of?) the warning, I liked The Amber Spyglass more than the first two books in the series. I thought it was the strongest of the three. This seems to be the minority position. The reason why is a topic worthy of discussion. Please note I will be discussing details from all the books, so if you want to avoid spoilers, read no further.

What Pullman claims he was trying to achieve in His Dark Materials was to write a secular humanist fable. This has been done before, to varying degrees of success. All of Ayn Rand's works, notably Anthem, would qualify, as would Rushdie's Midnight's Children, or Haroun and the Sea of Stories. Pullman specifically invokes the not-so-crypto-Christianity of C.S. Lewis' Narnia books as his bête-noir: "it's propaganda in the service of a life-hating ideology."

The first book in the series, The Golden Compass, opens in an alternate-universe Oxford with a pre-Enlightenment feel. Dons in black robes patrol sconce-lit corridors, preparing decanters of Tokay and discussing "experimental theology." Lyra, the girl-child protagonist of the story, begins the trilogy living deep in the (not very warm) bosom of theological academia, with her dæmon. A dæmon is a kind of familiar that manifests part of a human's soul. Every human in Lyra's world has one. The story follows Lyra's awakening and escape from this environment. It is no coincidence that each step Lyra takes towards adulthood takes her further afield from where she began.

Pullman's description of Oxford is rich and multi-layered. It was his depiction of this world that drew me into the first book. I suspect, in fact, that this is why so many people don't like the third book in the trilogy. They feel betrayed: they wanted to read more about Church machinations and stern-faced Dons who quote Milton and talk about minor heresies with an aura of gravity. But this isn't the story Pullman wanted to tell, and it is apparent from the beginning. To dwell on the pornographic flagellations of Christianity is to let the enemy choose the rules of engagement.

Lyra and Will (who is introduced in the second book, The Subtle Knife) are both transgressors. Lyra transgresses by her urgent yet unfocused desire to rebel against any authority, and Will transgresses by repeatedly killing in self-defense. They are both on the cusp of adolescence. To be of this age is to have the constant feeling that, merely by existing, you are violating the rules. Pullman's portrayal of Lyra and Will rings true to me in this way. His Dark Materials is at its heart about Lyra and Will outgrowing the need for religion. For the third book to focus on the religious cloisters of Oxford would be a real betrayal. Pullman ignores Oxford because it is not relevant to the world the heroes need to create. Indeed, it is fitting that Lyra's parents, nearly too late, realize that they are morally obligated to deliver their daughter from the Church, rather than to it.

There are things to dislike about The Amber Spyglass. The plot is cluttered, which means that some of the characters are flatter than they should be. He resorts to a deus ex machina worthy of serious eye-rolling to defeat the Right Hand of God by making him really, really horny. And we never find out the science behind "Dust," or discover much about the biology (or psychology) of the dæmons. This is another thing I suspect many sci-fi fans don't like about the story; they want everything explained in excruciating detail until any mystery is dead. One complaint I've heard is "he left too many loose ends." I disagree. I think he did leave plenty of loose ends. The story is better for his having left them.

There may be some problems, but there is much to love about the book. The characters that Pullman does take the time to flesh out are wonderfully human and compassionate. His depictions of the carefree cruelty of childhood are crisp. He demonstrates the capacity of people to grow and to change in fundamental ways. And perhaps most impressive is his recognition that love and loss (and their children, longing and regret) are painfully and beautifully intertwined. That the trilogy so unabashedly leaves questions unanswered and abandons the faithful to the emptiness of their lives is not a problem with the book: it is a virtue. To wonder about how one resolves the sickness of religion is to miss the point. The book is Lyra and Will's search for humanity and meaning without God. It is a beacon showing that a meaningful life without God is possible.

The Amber Spyglass accomplishes its task well. Those looking for a different story will simply need to find a different fable.

I like this one.

Easiest Roast Pork

2005-02-11 · by peterb

This recipe is adapted from The Joy of Cooking. The main modification is that if you make it my way, it won't be dry and overcooked. The main virtue of this recipe is its simplicity. The only way it could be easier is if it just read "pick up the phone and ask someone to make roast pork loin for you."

Get a 3 pound pork loin. Don't cut the strings.

Preheat your oven to 450 degrees F.

Coarsely chop up a tablespoon or more of fresh rosemary. If you don't have fresh rosemary, dry is OK. In a small ramekin, mix the rosemary, a teaspoon of fresh ground black pepper, a couple of teaspoons of salt, and a generous tablespoon of extra virgin olive oil. Rub this mixture all over the pork loin. Put it in a shallow roasting pan (on a rack is best, but it's not a big deal if you don't have one). Roast for 10 minutes. Lower the heat to 250 degrees F, and insert your digital probe thermometer into the thickest part of the loin. Set the alarm for 148 degrees F. Go play your favorite videogames for a few hours. When the alarm goes off, remove the roast, cover with tinfoil, and let it rest for 10 minutes. Cut the strings before carving. If you did it right, the center of the pork should be slightly pink, and it should be juicy throughout.

You can make an easy pan sauce from the drippings by adding some wine and perhaps a little more salt and reducing it on the stovetop.

Serve with a simple salad, the vegetable of your choice, and a glass of red wine.

Call for Volunteers: Gli Amari

2005-02-12 · by peterb

I really like a class of alcohol that many people don't: Italian bitter aperitivs and digestifs, known in Italian as amari. Campari, Strega, Averna -- I find they settle my stomach and soothe my soul.

Often, I find that it's almost impossible to describe the taste of these drinks to those that haven't tried them. And, even with my travels, there are still many that I haven't tried yet.

So: I would like to call for volunteers to participate in a tasting panel whose purpose will be to taste, rate, and describe in detail a large number of these amari.

I haven't yet decided on the date, time, and place, although in the back of my mind I have a few bars and restaurants that usually have a good stock of these liqueurs. I'll probably try to get this sponsored by wherever we have the tasting, but if that fails, expect to pay a nominal fee to play (cost-based -- I'm not trying to make a profit on this, and since these are bitters, I doubt mass quantities will be required). I haven't decided yet whether it should be a blind taste-test or not.

Requirements: you must be at least 21 years old, live in the Pittsburgh area, and be willing to provide your own transporation there and back (which means a designated driver). You must not be an alcoholic or be allergic to alcohol. You should be talkative, and should be willing to be tape-recorded for later transcription. You do not have to like bitters (and in fact I think it would be kind of fun to have someone that doesn't offering their opinions), but you have to at least taste everything we're evaluating. I'll ask participants to sign a waiver and release giving me permission to republish their words in this space.

If you think you are interested in being on the panel, please send email to: bitters -at- tleaves.com. I think I only need a small number of panel members, so please don't be offended if you aren't chosen. But I promise to respond to everyone who offers to participate.

Baroque Works

2005-02-14 · by peterb

In the beginning was Ti Kan, who wrote a little CD player app for X windows called xmcd. Like some other players at the time, it had support for entering disc and track names, and remembering them later. Ti went a step further, though; he provided support in the application to submit track names to a central server, the CD Database, or CDDB. Users could download and install the entire CDDB on their hard drive, which would then allow them to magically get track and disc names for discs that anyone else had entered data for. Later, Ti added support to look up track names on the internet. I was an early xmcd user (in fact, I even distributed a binary version for BSD/OS, a fact that I'd completely forgotten until I googled for it.)

Eventually, Ti looked for a way to monetize the CDDB. I don't blame him. The database eventually ended up in the hands of Gracenote, where it remains to this day. Gracenote licenses an SDK and access to their CDDB to companies that want to include it in their product.

Many computer MP3 players that have support for ripping CDs also support looking up CD track names in the CD Database.

There are two interesting things about the CDDB (and really I mean "the CDDBs", since there are databases other than Gracenote's): first, the data in them is provided by the users, rather than by the music publishers, and second, the database is full of errors.

In the early days of the CDDB, I definitely got a thrill of pleasure in buying a new disc, putting it in the drive, and discovering that I was the first CDDB user to do so. Cool! I'd get to "contribute to the community" by entering disc and track information. As time went on, this of course became a rarer and rarer experience. One aspect of the database that I don't know much about is: what happens if two people send in different track data for the same disc? Which one wins? Many clients allow you to "submit corrections to the CDDB," but it's not clear that anything actually ever happens with these. So of course, there are errors. The information is being provided by end users. We make mistakes.

Now, it's not surprising that there are some errors in the CDDB. There would be errors, albeit perhaps to a lesser degree, even if the publishers were providing the data. But if you listen to a lot of classical music, the experience becomes frustrating on a whole new level. The number of errors in disc and track data are legion compared to what you find in more popular genres, like rock. And the type of errors you see are infinitely more egregious.

There are a few reasons for this.

For example, I just ripped the Chœur des Musiciens du Louvre version of Offenbach's La Belle Hélène to iTunes. The first disc, amazingly, only had one problem (listing the "year" as 1864, the year of the composition, rather than 2001, the year of recording). To only have one error is actually a rare enough occurrence that I'm considering declaring today a National Holiday and commemorating it each year. The second disc had the following problems: The title of the opera was wrong. Apart from not having the accents, the title of the opera includes "Disc 2" in it, even though there's a "disc number" field in the ID3 tags. There's no Composer tag. The "this is part of a compilation" field is checked. And finally, the piece de resistance is that every song on the disc is called simply "Act II" or "Act III" and the "artist" field is used for the actual title of the track. That's going to make "browse by artist" on my iPod super useful, since it will let me find every song by that superb band, "Ciel! Mon Mari!"

Truly, the mind reels.

Now, all of these issues are correctable in my music player, of course. I can just edit the hideously wrong CDDB data after the fact. But since the whole idea of keeping a centralized database of disk-to-metadata mappings is to *free us from having to do that,*I find it somewhat frustrating. ("Use a different player that uses a non-Gracenote CDDB" isn't a solution, both because I like everything else about my music player and because I haven't seen any evidence that the non-Gracenote CDDBs are free from this issue.)

I'm not sure what the right solution is, but the marginal cost for paying an intern to send the right data to one or more of the various CDDBs can't be more than a few bucks per project.

What do you think the right answer is?

Shadow Hearts: Covenant

2005-02-15 · by psu

Lately I have been trying to figure out why I keep playing Shadow Hearts. It is a "role playing" game in the Final Fantasy mode, which means it offers up a mostly linear series of small dungeon-like areas (even the towns are like dungeons) where you run around, pick up items you can't see (as in, they are not rendered on the screen, you only notice them because your clueless avatar gets a little "?" bubble when you pass one), meet monsters at random and generally just run from cut scene to cut scene while the various numerical attributes of your characters increase at random intervals. Overall the gameplay is repetitive and stultifying. The cut scenes are stiff and melodramatic with characters and voice acting that tends towards the humorous even if they don't mean to. You can't really say that the narrative, such as it is, is all that great.

But for some reason I keep going back to it. So I thought about it for a while. Here is what I like about the game.

Combat is Fun

The combat system is enjoyable for a number of reasons. First, it is entirely turn based, so you get plenty of time to fart around and think about how you want to kick the ass of your foe. Second, after you have decided what you want to do, the game presents you with a device that can make you feel like a bad ass: The Judgment Ring. The Judgment ring is timing gauge. You pick an action for a character and then you must time button presses as a sweeping hand goes around the judgment ring to determine how well your character does. Gladius has a similar attack gauge. In this respect, Shadow Hearts combat is basically like Gladius but without all the moving of characters around on a grid. Third, the combo system adds a certain amount of strategy and skill to the mix. Basically, you can chain actions from multiple characters into "combos" that do extra damage if you manage them successfully. Rewards for successful combos range from extra damage to bonus cash and experience at the end of the fight. The monsters are varied in design and are generally fun to look at. There are also a few that cross that line into the completely bizarre (the giant puff ball kitten comes to mind).

The main downside to the combat, aside from the repetitive animations and sounds, is the Sanity Point system. Basically, this is an artificial construct designed to make you need to stop fighting and babysit your avatars every few turns lest they go "Berserk" and lose control of their faculties and run over into a dark corner and wet themselves. I suppose this is supposed to add "depth" or something, but in practice it just makes boss fights longer and dumber. Luckily, it's only an issue in long fights.

In any case, combat is a big part of the game, and it is well done from my standpoint, which makes the game fun.

It's Not That Hard

In addition to fun combat, the game has a nice balance between the abilities of the characters and the difficulty of the foes that you face. Once you get the hang of the battle system, it's rare that you will lose fight after fight. This has the effect of allowing you to play through the game without a lot of repetition. This keeps the game moving forward at a good clip. Generally, the game is paced so that you can do one area every hour or two, which fits my game playing time slots well. This is in contrast to other games I've played recently.

Puzzles and other non combat aspects of the game are also not too hard, but interesting enough to not be completely tedious. OK. They are sort of tedious. But it goes by quickly. At least none of the puzzles are the Towers of Hanoi or depend on you being able to see the single tiny key in a large dungeon that lets you get past the door.

Fascinating Japanese Bizarre

Many aspects of the game are truly bizarre and surreal. You keep playing just to see the next thing. Along these lines the character models are generally comical. All the women, for some reason, have large chests and wear little in the way of covering. There is the huge wrestler dude who speaks like Dudley Do-Right and spends a third of his time in the form of a golden bat. There is the old guy with the magic puppet in the shape of a little girl. There is the S&M bitch boss monster. The list goes on and on.

Monster design has a similar sense of strange. For some reason, WWI Europe is populated by a bestiary from Hell itself. Exactly why this should be is never spelled out or justified. The world just exists this way. I think this is sort of cool.

There is a whole side plot involving one of the party members, which happens to be a white wolf. One mission in the game is a sneaky stealth level where you control the dog. How many games give you the chance to play a stealth mission as a dog? Metal Gear Snoopy.

Finally, of course, there is one side quest in the game that has been immortalized by Penny Arcade. It turns out that the magic dresses are useful, although the character they are attached to is somewhat weak. But, there are not that many of them and unlike the implication in the comic, collecting gay porn is not a huge part of the game.

Decent Navigation and Save Points

The savepoint system is tolerable. There are generally saves when you want them and you can always save from the world map mode. The game is good enough to give you saves before bosses and the save system doesn't randomly pick and choose information to throw on the floor without telling you. The game is pretty flexible about letting you back track to go and find things you might have missed. But this has limitations. In general, you can't go back and perform quest activities that you forgot about after passing any related milestone. It's a relief to save a game and not have to replay a whole level anyway.

Many Cool Items

Finally, the game appeals to any gamer's inherent obsessive compulsive collecting nature. The only time I have had any repetitive replays is when I either forgot to pick up a particular item or just didn't realize it was even there, and then ended up needing it later. I think you could drive yourself nuts playing every level twice to optimize the collecting side quests, but generally the game is balanced well enough that you can leave stuff behind and not cause any harm to yourself. I find myself reading the Internet guides to see what I missed, but I tend not to go back for things unless I really need to.

Happily, the game also does not require you to pick and choose what items to bring along or leave behind. The inventory system lets you carry as much as you want so there is no bin packing busywork. This makes me very happy.

Ultimately, I think Shadow Hearts succeeds by being well crafted rather than being spectacular in any particular way. You run, you fight, your numbers go up and then you watch some cut scenes. It's like a good summer movie with a lot of action and requiring not too much brain power. I think that having enjoyed this romp through Japanese RPG land, I'll have to go and pick up Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne now. I think I saw it on sale over at The Exchange.

Eggs à la Escoffier

2005-02-16 · by peterb

I haven't had much time to read lately, but the time I have had has been spent reading Gina Mallet's superb book Last Chance to Eat: The Fate of Taste in a Fast Food World. I hope to have a full review done next week, but for now I'll just tantalize you with my interpretation of a recipe that she mentions in passing, one of Escoffier's innumerable versions of scrambled eggs. I've made it several times now. I think I'm addicted.

This is funny, because I have always despised scrambled eggs. I've always considered them the worst item on the American breakfast table, barely fit for consumption. Apparently, this is because everyone makes them wrong. I might dislike steak, too, if everyone always burnt it to a crisp.

Start with 6 eggs. As with most egg dishes, you'll have better results if the eggs are near room temperature. Crack the eggs in to a bowl, and add salt and finely ground pepper. Combine gently.

Put a heavy bottomed pan (I use a square-shouldered stainless steel skillet) onto medium heat. When it's up to temperature, add the eggs (no butter or fat...yet) and begin immediately stirring gently and constantly. The goal is to have them smooth, not lumpy. Don't cook them too fast.

When they're starting to firm up (but are still nice and runny) remove them from the heat and add an ounce and a half of butter, and three tablespoons of cream. Combine until incorporated.

I eat them with a spoon. They're very rich, and are a satisfying meal any time of day or night. Invite me over if you make extra.

Axiom of Choice

2005-02-17 · by psu

I have been fortunate enough to get my hands on an iPod Shuffle. I was mostly seduced by the look of the item, but wasn't sure how the screenless shuffle-only interface would really work out in practice. Surprisingly, the Shuffle is by far my favorite iPod device for day to day use. In particular, its shuffle play is much more enjoyable in the car than shuffling with the normal iPod. This seems odd, since on the face of it there should be no difference between playing songs at random on a Shuffle and doing the same a normal iPod. However, it turns out that they are different in subtle and important ways, and therein lies the reason I find the Shuffle to be more enjoyable.

First, let's review the major differences between the two players. My 40GB iPod basically can hold everything that I currently have ripped on my current iMac. This is around 13GB of music right now, which works out to about 2500 songs or 8 days worth of music. As I add new material into the iMac, I just transfer all of it to the iPod. So, when I want to be able to pick and choose from everything that I own, the 40GB iPod is the thing to take. I love it on planes and other long trips where I have the time to scroll around in the interface and pick what I want to play. It's less than ideal in the car however, where interacting with the iPod is annoying and dangerous.

The iPod Shuffle is exactly the opposite. It is not large enough to hold everything I own, and the player has almost no user interface at all. However, iTunes has a system called "Autofill" for randomly downloading songs from a smart playlist into its 1GB of flash memory. The fact that it does this from an iTunes smart playlist is critical because it allows for a valuable level of selective filtering. You can filter the songs by genre, ratings, length and so on, so you avoid the problem of shuffle playing a whole audio book, or movements from a symphony. The autofill mechanism will also weight its choices by your own ratings, so you can make it pick from just your favorites. Once the player is loaded, the interface is simplicity itself. Hit play, hit pause, hit next, adust the volume. That's it.

On the face of it, you'd think that the iPod would be able to do this. That is, you'd think that the iPod would have a single button that you hit to get a random selection of the good stuff in your library. But you can't. Shuffling a playlist requires that you do no less than three or four actions at different levels of the iPod user interface. The result is, you never do it. This leaves you with picking something to play, which also requires more thought than I have time for while driving.

Ultimately I think the issue comes down to choice. While the iPod provides a sophisticated interface for choosing what you want to play, that same interface essentially compels you to always choose what you want to play. Even if you have it set up just like the Shuffle, the interface sits there in front of you, beckoning you to fiddle. The Shuffle, by doing away with this interface, leaves you in the comparatively blissful state of being at the mercy of your robot overlords. Since I can't fiddle with the playlist, I happily allow the machine to do its job. This removes a small but noticeable amount of tension from my life and ultimately is why the Shuffle makes me happier in the car and for most day to day use.

Admittedly this is a subtle psychological bit of sleight of hand that I am playing with myself. But I think the general principle about interfaces that is at play here is that sometimes choice is good and sometimes choice is bad. It is better in general to hit the common case perfectly than to allow (and thus force) the user to tailor the system on her own. Choice provides flexibility, but can lead to extra complexity and confusion that the user does not want. Outside the realm of music players, this is something I learn every time some bad ass punk assasinates me in Halo 2 while I'm standing there trying to choose between the shotgun and the sword.

Oh, the Shuffle is also wicked small.

Indie Game Friday: Neverball

2005-02-18 · by peterb

Neverball is an open-source version of Super Monkey Ball, which itself owes quite a bit to the classic Atari arcade game Marble Madness. It's quite fun, and challenging. It runs on Mac OS, Windows, Linux, and FreeBSD, so you have essentially no excuse for not trying it out.

Neverball

Neverball

The game requires quite a bit of CPU (and graphics card - hardware OpenGL acceleration is required) oomph, but the payoff is worth it. The textures are simple by dazzlingly bright, reminding me of the earliest of the Atari 800 chromaluma extravaganzas, but with more detail. Real-time reflections and shadows are part and parcel of the package, as is an amusing version of the game called Neverputt which is, as you might guess, a version of miniature golf.

The basic idea: you have a ball. It's on a course. There are coins, obstacles, and a goal on the course. You want to pick up the coins, avoid the obstacles, and reach the goal without falling off. So what's the best way to do this?

Why, of course. The rational thing to do is tilt the entire world.

Moving the mouse causes the world to pitch "downwards" in the direction in which you moved it. This in turn causes the ball to roll. My one criticism of the game is that it's a bit too difficult; the rebound when you smack into a wall is markedly stronger than in Super Monkey Ball. Which I guess make sense, since presumably monkeys are softer than metal balls.

Neverball is available, for free, on the web. There are over a hundred different levels to occupy you. Give it a shot. Happy rolling.

Now, if only someone would make an open-source, expandable version of Katamari Damashi...

Gran Annoioso

2005-02-21 · by peterb

Tomorrow, Gran Turismo 4 will be released for the Playstation 2. And, like a good corporate drone, I am probably going to buy it, even though I don't expect it to actually be good. Because the previous game in the series, Gran Turismo 3, really wasn't very good, either.

The Emperor, you see, had no clothes.

I'm going to buy it, of course, not only because of my well-documented obsession for playing video games, but also because I'm specifically a sucker for driving games. "I will never own these cars," I say to myself. "I will think about buying an Evolution VIII, and then at the last moment will realize that buying a car that gets 10 miles to the gallon isn't very practical, and I'll get something sensible instead. I will never drive on Laguna Seca," I say. But I can pretend. "Vroom! Vrooooom."

Perhaps GT4, as the well-greased hype machine spins it, will really be all that and a bag of chips. Perhaps it will change my perspective on driving games forever, the way Project Gotham Racing did. Perhaps it will be the best game of the year.

But of course, they said that about the execrable Black and White. They said that about the unplayably bad Ninja Gaiden. And they said it about Gran Turismo 3, which was, in the end, just a sort of vaguely OK driving game. So I'm not holding my breath.

I'm sure there are people -- most likely white wine drinkers -- who will take issue with my characterization of GT3 as just sort of vaguely OK. But the game's pathos was all too clearly on display from start to finish. The awful, anemic, and repetitive soundtrack served as the perfect counterpoint to a racing game that was so amazingly impotent that if you came to a complete stop in the middle of the race, the cars ahead of you would slow down to 2 miles per hour. Y'know. To give you a chance to catch up. Because it wouldn't be fun if your opponents actually drove the race to the best of their abilities. (Of course, this works in reverse as well, so that if you open up a substantial lead through transcendent driving, the chase cars suddenly are able to exceed their vehicles' rated top speeds. Maybe we should put these programmers in charge of Formula 1 races this year).

The graphics, which reviewers heaped praises on, were superb in "replay" mode, and hideously ugly in driving mode: PS2 developers seem to have huge amounts of trouble providing full screen antialiasing for their games, something the Dreamcast could do in its sleep. Even when a game is so desperately in need of it as blurry, jaggy Gran Turismo 3. It's been a few years. Maybe someone has taught Polyphony about that checkbox in their development tools. We'll see.

Most of the reviews complain a little bit about the omission of online play from GT4, but that doesn't concern me at all. Online play for the Playstation 2 is utterly dead. It is a nonstarter. No one who matters plays any Playstation games online. If you want to play console games online, you own an Xbox, and that's all there is to it. Xbox Live's user experience is so superior to the Playstation's online gaming mechanisms that it's just more polite to pretend that the PS2's online capabilities don't exist at all, just like you'd politely ignore it if someone farted at a wedding. There was a gunfight at the O.K. Corral, and poor, clueless Sony showed up with a knife.

So given the somewhat lackadaisical product that was GT3, I don't really expect much from GT4. If the Nurburgring and Paris tracks are good, and I can buy a Skyline without having to play for 36 hours, I'll consider it an OK investment. And who knows, perhaps I will be surprised. If I am, I'll write about it here.

And before you ask, yes, I plan on buying Forza Motorsport, as well.

Vrooooom. Vroooooooooooooooooom!

Shatner Addendum

2005-02-21 · by peterb

I asked William Shatner what he thought about my last article and he said:

The Sony Playstation 2! They spend millions of dollars slagging the Dreamcast, and then all the games are jaggy and ugly! And all the gaming magazines talk about how great the lousy graphics are! I can't get behind that!

Just thought you should know.

Things That Can Kill You

2005-02-22 · by peterb

For your podcasting pleasure, I present: Things that Can Kill You, Volume 1: Semiautomatic Handguns. It's one minute and nine seconds in duration, and I promise it will be the highlight of your day.

Next week: Aflatoxins.

Workflow Adjustments

2005-02-23 · by psu

It's been about a year, and every new year it's a good time to evaluate your digital picture workflow and try to streamline it. Well, that is, if you are a complete dork. Anyway, I test workflow tools so you don't have to.

I had been using two basic tools to process my pictures: iView Media Pro and Photoshop. iView is a great cataloging tool, and Photoshop is very good at all kinds of image processing. But, neither of them excels at quick proofing and editing of photos. I was finding it tedious to import 300 shots, generate my proof jpegs, proof them, and then edit both sets of files down. So, where would I find a good browsing tool? Reading www.robgalbraith.com, I found that they use a program called Photo Mechanic, so I tried it out. Turns out, it is really good at browsing, editing, and tagging.

Browsing

Once it loads your pictures, the Photo Mechanic browser is very very fast. It has a convenient import tool that lets you suck the pictures off the card, rename them the way you want and put them into a folder. For RAW files, PM conveniently lets you browse the pictures using the embedded preview thumbnails that are generally embedded in Nikon NEF files. For D70 files, these are full sized JPEG files, making browsing very nice. Generally I import pictures a few hundred at a time, which PM handles well, without bogging down.

So, where I used to bring my RAW files into iView just to run a batch conversion script, I can now browse the pictures directly in PM. This saves the import step and the conversion steps, and I can evaluate the pictures at full resolution. Which brings us to editing.

Editing

The editing UI in PM is great. As I said above, the browser is fast. It is easily 2 or 3 times faster than either iView or Photoshop. Also, it lets me edit full sized JPEGs and it has a nice side by side view for comparing similar shots. Love it.

Tagging

Finally, Photo Mechanic has a nice tool for tagging pictures with meta-data. This is different than iView, where annotating pictures in the catalog was easy, but applying those annotations to the files was a multi-step process. PM has a "stationery pad" where you can enter the meta-data for a bunch of pictures and tag them all in one batch. It's easy and fast and supports all the prevailing EXIF and ITPC standards. PM, like all the other tools, does have problems with manufacturer specific EXIF tags. But this is all part of the meta-data problem on which I have ranted before. This won't change unless the manufacturers stop deciding to screw users.

The only annoyance with Photo Mechanic is that at the time I started using it, there was no way to fire off a batch script to Photoshop to convert a large mass of high resolution RAW and JPEG files into the little thumbnails I use for my web site and auxiliary catalog. I spent some time trying to solve this problem with Photoshop scripts (The Dr. Brown script is nice), Nikon View, Nikon Capture and Capture One. I didn't like any of these tools. I wanted to be able to fire off my old droplets using my browser.

As if to read my mind, the Photo Mechanic developer added this functionality to version 4.3.3 of the product.

New Workflow

Here's what I do now:

This is pretty much the same as the previous workflow, but with only one iView catalog. I found I was always using the thumbnail catalog for everything anyway because none of it was ever offline. I keep everything else basically the same. Lots of backups, web site generation and so on can stay unchanged.

So there you have it. Photo Mechanic for import and editing, Photoshop for image processing, iView for cataloging. Someday someone will make one tool that does all three of these things well. But until then this toolset is pretty usable. Now if only there were a convenient way to link the thumbnail catalog back to the original files. Maybe next year.

No Free Silver Bullet Lunch

2005-02-25 · by psu

So Pete took me to lunch today with some fellow software engineering buddies. While munching our rather excellent Indian buffet food, one of the engineers related an incident that happened to him on vacation. He was walking back to his hotel room, and he overhears one side of a phone conversation that is going like this:

We can either fix more bugs to make the system more stable or we can develop new features but not both.

Anyone who has done any level of commercial software development is familiar with this conversation. What I do is very different from what Pete's buddies do, but the conversation was completely familiar to me. It doesn't matter if the project is the next PS2 game or the control system for the next Airbus airliner. If you sit in a room with the developers and the managers, they are probably having this conversation. My theory about the origin of this conversation is overly simplistic not filled with deep insight. But, here it is anyway.

Like most engineering problems, software projects can be thought of as being managed across three different constraint axes: new features, general quality, and time to market. The goal is always to ship out as much as you can as fast as you can and have it work as well as you can. I think where people get into trouble with software is when they begin to believe that the three constraints above are more flexible than they really are. In particular, it's easy to convince yourself that change is cheap. I think even experienced engineers who really understand software development can fall into this trap.

Consider the following thoughts that all of us have had:

I can't believe they didn't fix this simple bug

and

Just add this simple new feature. It will take you a day.

I've listed these two statements separately, but they are really asking for the same thing: a small, seemingly localized change that would make the product better. The problem is that in software, small localized changes almost always have non local effects that you didn't expect. To use a cliched analogy, it's like tossing a rock in a pond. The initial splash is small, but the ripples go on for a long time. While this seems obvious, software is still perceived as being flexible and easily changed. The reality is that every single change you make to a piece of code has a high probability of breaking something that someone doesn't want broken. Therefore, no matter how trivial it seems, it is likely to be expensive to qualify. In other words, all change is hard. There are no shallow bugs.

I think these two relatively innocent thoughts are the core cause of the phone conversation that Pete's friend overheard. When a team is put into the position of needing to deal with two streams of changes, life can just get intractable. Consider that on the one hand, the team has to deal with all the non-local effects of the bug fixes that they must make to keep the system running. On the other hand, they must also deal with the effects of the new feature development, and then on top of that, the effects of the bug fixes on the new features. So instead of just trying to handle the first order effects of fixing bugs, you have to deal with second and third order effects as well. Eventually, every new request becomes a fountain of pain and torture until finally the engineering team will threaten to storm out of the project in protest. This is when the conversation happens.

Being an engineer, my feeling is that at some level this conversation is inevitable because in software we just don't know how to specify what we want early enough to avoid the thrash later. Often it's the case that the only way to know if you've built the right thing is to build it and see. User interfaces (and computer games) fall into this category of project. As long as this is true, we'll have late changes and late cycle thrash, and people will be on their cell phones in Florida pleading with their managers to start cutting down the scope.

I think that the shrink wrap world is in slightly better shape with regard to this than other areas of software development. This is because in shrink wrap, the time to market rules. You must turn the product around every year on the year to keep the revenue stream coming in to keep the product alive. In this environment, it can be easier to explain why features need to be cut or compromised to make the ship date. Of course, the flip side is that shrink wrap software tends to also compromise on overall quality to make the ship date. But for now, users seem to be willing to take that tradeoff.

I think the software services industry has it harder, because there the time constraint is slightly looser, but the pressure to implement everything the customer wants is much stronger. Therefore, you end up with long deathmarches trying to patch together huge custom systems to jump through all the right hoops and still not be too late. That's a tough world to be in.

Finally, I think that the general principle here: that changing software is expensive, cannot be understated. People seem reluctant to accept this fact about software even though they are happy to accept it in other aspects of life. If you are having work done on your house, you don't expect to be able to change the requirements on the contractor without paying extra money. And yet most people, even experienced software engineers, have a hard time not thinking that just one more tweak to the code will be easy and cheap. Learning to estimate and accept these costs will go a long way to improving software, the development process, and thus reduce the number of times you hear the conversation.

Aflatoxins

2005-02-28 · by peterb

As you enjoy your breakfast today, please also enjoy Things That Can Kill You, Volume 2: Aflatoxins.

Er, hope you aren't having peanuts.

If you have suggested topics for future shows, feel free to send email to life - at - tleaves.com

Formula None

2005-03-01 · by peterb

A few months ago, in a fit of good sense, I cancelled my satellite dish service when I realized that I was paying about $40 a month for the privilege of not actually watching any TV.

And, for the most part, it has worked out. I've read a lot of books. I've played a lot of videogames. I haven't missed it at all.

Unfortunately, Formula One season starts this weekend. This puts me in a bit of a bind.

I'm getting some pressure to hook the satellite service back up. Some of it comes from my friends, who somehow have decided that I'm the one that has to pay for satellite service so that they can come over at midnight and drink beer and watch the race. But most of it is internal. The pressure comes from a hope, completely unjustified by any actual evidence, that this is the year that things will change. This time, there will be battles for first place, rather than third. This year the championship will be decided in the last race, instead of midway through the season.

I'm Charlie Brown, and Bernie Ecclestone is Lucy, holding that football and beckoning me over. Formula One is the latent sporting event.

Last year, I correctly predicted the entire shape of the season. Everyone thought I was joking. I wasn't:

Wanna-be footballer and six-time world champion Michael Schumacher, Inc, is still the lead driver for Ferrari, and is scheduled to win the championship once again. Don't look for any surprises here. About once a month throughout the season various F1 online magazines will post articles with headlines asking "Can Anyone Beat Schumi? At the risk of spoiling the season, I can reveal that the answer to that question is "No." At times, people will propose various theories as to how and why Michael might manage to lose. Perhaps Bridgestone's tires will fail to be competetive with Michelin. Fernando Alonso will develop further and be able to challenge Schumacher in every race. A meteor will fall from the sky and annihilate the Ferrari paddock. None of these things will happen. Ferrari will dominate again, and despite what many people wish, he's not about to retire.

I'm republishing this prediction, unchanged, for 2005. Herr Michael Schumacher will, once again, crush the field like a sumo wrestler stepping on a moth. The only drama at each race will be the question of whether he will deploy his "noble and magnanimous" face in the post-race press conferences, or his "snarky and condescending" one.

There are, for the third year running, significant rule changes that the naïve hope will somehow slow down the Ferrari juggernaut as it screams towards victory at 18,500 RPM. Engines must last for 2 races. New chassis regulations should reduce the amount of available aerodynamic downforce. Most significantly, tires have to last for qualifying and the race now -- the days of 23-man pit crews are gone. No tire changes during the race, except for dealing with punctures.

Understanding why the rule changes won't slow down the Ferrari Victory Parade is a simple matter of internalizing this fact: they really are that good. From the tiniest details of pit crew choreography up through the talents of the drivers, the selection of race strategies, and of course car and engine design and implementation, Ferrari's execution is, for all intents and purposes, flawless. People talk about how much money the team spends, but casually forget to mention that Toyota is spending even more cash on a team that fares much worse.

So that's my dilemma. The racing fan in me wants to see the races, because maybe something unexpected will happen. The dispassionate analyst in me knows that I will just be paying $40 a month to watch a race where the outcome is predetermined. And that feels dumb. There's no need to watch a race live if there's no drama. I might as well just be watching a highlight reel.

Hmm, now there's an interesting thought. I wonder if anyone will be disseminating the races on the Internet after the fact...

How to take Good Pictures.

2005-03-02 · by psu

The two best books that I've read about how to take pictures are Mountain Light by the late Galen Rowell and On Being a Photogapher by David Hurn and Bill Jay. The first is a book about landscape photography, while the second is a book about photojournalism. But I think both make essentially the same points about how to take good pictures. If you are really serious, put your computer down and go pick up those two books. They will tell you more than I ever can. But, here is a summary of what I think both of these books say.

The Big Picture

A good photograph is a compelling subject captured with good technique under the best light possible.

Subject Matters

This is the single most important aspect of good photography. My belief is that all of the best photography starts out with the idea of documenting a subject that is important to the photographer. That is, the photographer has an interest showing the viewer something about a particular subject matter. In Rowell's case, this interest was in capturing elements of the emotions that he felt while in the landscape. In David Hurn's case, this interest was in portraying the events of the time from a journalistic point of view.

What the subject is is largely irrelevant. Edward Weston started an entire artistic movement by taking large format photographs of green peppers. What matters is that you as a photographer is interested in showing me as a viewer something about the subject that I find interesting. Perhaps something I have never seen before.

It is no coincidence that the most photography happens on trips, or when we are with our children or pets. These are subjects that we can all relate to and which we all have a strong motivation to document. The challenge for the working photographer is to find other subjects that are similarly compelling to you, and make them compelling for me, the viewer. This is where knowledge, research, technique and hard work pay off. Knowledge and research are needed to put you in the right place at the right time to document the interesting aspects of the subject. Technique and hard work are needed so that when the picture is in front of you, you can capture it rather than watching it go past you while you fumble with the camera. Good technique is not hard to learn, it's just a matter of practice. Finding interesting pictures to take, that's hard work.

Galen Rowell spent a decade taking snapshots of his rock climbing trips through the mountains of California before finally landing an assignment to shoot rock climbers in Yosemite for National Geographic. In that time he developed his own style and technique of capturing his preferred subject. When he finally got his big break, he had the whole package: subject matter, knowledge, and technique, all ready to go.

Find Good Light

While you can take pictures in crappy light, it's much easier for the beginner or amateur to take good pictures in good light. Many otherwise marginal pictures can be saved because they have some interesting light in them. Here are some things to look for:

Directional light is good. The reason pictures taken with on camera flash look so flat and lifeless is because the light is coming completely from in front of the subject. Directional light from the side of the subject provides a more three dimensional look by molding the subject and providing nice shadows.

Low contrast light is good. Contrast is the enemy of the light recording medium. Whether you are shooting color slides, black and white or digital, the film or CCD can only record a limited range of values. In particular, your eyes can sense a much wider range than will be recordable by the camera. What looks like a group of people standing in the sunset to you looks like all white splotches and inky black shadows to the camera. You must always be aware of this.

Low contrast situations include light on a cloudy day (but don't include the sky), diffuse light coming in a window, flat fluorescent lights in an office, and so on. Contrasty situations include full sunlight mixed with dark shadows, interior light mixed with full sun coming in a window, the sky lit by sunlight mixed with the ground under clouds, bright light bulbs in a dark room, and so on. Look for flat light. It can be your friend.

Golden Hour. This refers to the window of time around sunrise and sunset when the sunlight is super warm and directional. This is the time to take pictures outside because you can get great mix of color while also really making the subject pop using the directional light. This is also when you can get great effects by mixing warm and cool colors in the same picture. Galen Rowell's book has dozens of pictures, all taken during Golden Hour.

Flash is no good. If it is so dark that you need to use the flash, then there are no interesting pictures to take. This is not a hard and fast rule, but it tends to be true. This rule could be restated as "there is no good light in the dark." The exception to this rule is if you happen to be carrying a whole studio lighting setup in your pocket. If that's the case, by all means, shoot away.

Shoot a Lot and Edit Well

This is not to say you should walk around with your camera shooting anything you see. This is to say that assuming you've done all the work needed to get in front of your subject with favorable light and in an interesting situation, you should take advantage of the situation by shooting a lot of pictures that you can edit down later.

Generally, people don't understand the scale of the number of frames you need to shoot to get the good stuff. Galen Rowell shot dozens of rolls of film for his first assignment for Geographic. The magazine said he should have shot more. Sports Illustrated shoots 16,000 frames during the Super Bowl for one magazine layout. Even Ansel Adams shot as much as he could, given the fact that he was carrying a 4x5 (or bigger) camera around in the mountains. When in a good situation, shoot more. This is especially true with digital, since editing digital pictures is so much easier and cheaper than film.

The flip side to this is to know how to edit the pictures and only show the good ones to people. This is not to say that you should throw away most of what you shoot. Just don't show it to people. If the difference between the keepers and the lousy shots are not immediately apparent to you, you need more practice.

There is a certain class of elitist cretin who will sneer at this approach as "run and gun" or "spray and pray" photography. The implication is that the only reason you would shoot a lot is to make up for the fact that you have lousy technique or are otherwise incompetent. These people like to think that Cartier Bresson just walked past that guy jumping over a puddle and shot that single famous frame off his hip. These people should be ignored. The idea is not to spray pictures praying that you get a good one. The point is to have your technique down and take as many good pictures as possible when the going is good so that you have as many choices as possible later.

Have Just the Equipment You Need, and Nothing More

Whenever I take a really good picture, Pete always goads me by saying "Wow, you must have a really good camera."

The general sentiment here is that for most purposes, you do not need fancy equipment to get better pictures. The fancy equipment just makes it easier. Whether you want to spend the extra money on all this stuff and spend the energy to carry the stuff around is a different question. Generally the camera you have is a lot better than the one you left at home.

There are of course, exceptions. If you want to shoot architecture, or make huge prints, you really do need a large format camera. If wildlife photography is your passion, in general you will need longer than normal lenses. If you want to work for Sports Illustrated, you probably want that huge digital SLR that shoots 15 frames per second for 5 minutes along with the bazooka sized telephoto lens.

But, these are all rare situations. A single camera with a single lens will be enough if you know how to use it. It's up to you to figure out the size and shape of this camera. My personal feeling is that these days, a good point and shoot camera with a reasonable lens is generally adequate for most purposes. If you are good with computers, the digital point and shoots are even more excellent. Whatever camera you buy, buy a good tripod before anything else.

Of course, it's generally the case that most "serious" photographers are equipment freaks. You can't really cure this affliction, you can only minimize its effects. I myself have a fancy digital SLR that I don't really need, but you'd have to pry it out of my cold dead hands. This is in addition to too many other film cameras that I never use anymore. So, do as I say, not as I do.

Resources

LensWork is a nice magazine about photography. They are a bit pretentious.

The Digital Journalist is a nice web site about the modern state of photojournalism.

photo.net/ is a good all purpose photo web site, although it's mostly about shopping and bizarre forum posts these days.

Mountain Light is where you can buy Galen Rowell books and pictures.

Gran Turismo 4

2005-03-03 · by peterb

My friend Nat and I were talking about Gran Turismo 4. He was saying that the vibe he got was that they had cut most of the cool features out of it when they realized that even without those features they would still sell a kerjillion copies of it:

Really, they could put a vaguely car-shaped turd in a box and people would not only buy it but write impassioned fifteen-page essays about how it was the best game ever and shriekingly deny any rumors of turdness.

This was after I had been playing the game for a few days. Upon reading this, I decided that my entire review of GT4 was going to be "It's a vaguely car-shaped turd in a box."

I've played a little more since then, and have a little more to say about it. But if you want the short version, it is this: Gran Turismo 4 is a stunning $50 argument for spending $12 on a used copy of Gran Turismo 3 and then using the $38 you have left over to buy pizza and beer.

There are things to like about GT4. Most of them, however, were things that one could like equally well about GT3. But let's not talk in generalities. Let's get down to brass tacks.

There's been much said about the graphics in GT4. All of it is a damnable lie. I'm one of those lucky people who has an HDTV, and the best you can say about GT4 is this: in 1080i mode, it is merely unimpressive, and not actually utterly hateful. It only shimmers a little bit. The textures are only somewhat fuzzy. The jaggies are not the worst I've ever seen.

When you step down to 480i mode -- the mode 95% of all players will see, day in, day out -- the full uglitude of GT4 is revealed. In 480i, the game is a dog, uglier than a Brittany Spaniel whose face has been half gnawed off by a badger. In all seriousness, the previous edition of the game looked better on a standard TV. If what you care about is good looks, this is not your game.

"But the screenshots look so good!" I hear you saying. Yes. They do. In a stroke of what can only be described as evil-scientist level genius, Polyphony provided a nifty feature in the game, "Photo Mode." This lets you take photos of "your" cars in various scenic locales -- most of which are not in the game, except for the photo shoots -- and then lets you export the photo onto a flash drive in super-high resolution. Then you post the photos on the Internet to deceive your friends into thinking that GT4 doesn't look like ass. It's a brilliant idea. But it's got nothing to do with how the game looks while you're actually driving.

Graphics aren't everything, though, and the game definitely plays somewhat better than the previous edition. Gone is the "driving through a vat of butter" feeling, replaced instead by ludicrous amounts of understeer on every vehicle (including front-engine, rear-wheel drive monsters) at speed. I was ready to declare that the handling in the game was psychotically wrong, when I decided to play around a bit with the settings. It turns out that the default settings for every car in the game have "active stability management" set to counteract oversteer at the highest level. This makes the cars handle like no car anyone has ever actually driven. If you turn off the ASM, the handling of the cars becomes much more accurate, and the game becomes much more fun.

I should say a little more about the ASM. It has independent settings for "protecting" you from oversteer and understeer, which doesn't really make a lot of sense. The basic implementation of ASM in the game is this: Let's say you're coming in to a corner a little too fast, and you hit the throttle too early. The ASM system says "OH MY GOD. If I let you turn this much, you might OVERSTEER! Then the car will spin out! HAVE NO FEAR. I WILL SAVE YOU." And it prevents you from oversteering by keeping you from turning so instead of spinning out you go in a straight line off the course, and hit a wall.

I'm not sure I have the words to accurately capture how completely brain-dead this is.

On the one hand, you could argue that "tuning the car" is an essential part of the game, and isn't it great that the developers let me discover this for myself? I can hear you getting ready to argue that. The problem with this argument is that it's silly for me to "tune" a car to make it act like it would when I drive it off of the dealer's lot. If anything, tuning is about making a car act less like its stock model, not more. So this is just a stupid decision on Polyphony's part. With ASM on the default settings, the game is completely unplayable (especially amusing are the license tests that encourage you to "drift" around turns on dirt courses, which you can't actually do well if the ASM is deliberately defeating your oversteer).

Polyphony replaced the boring and confusing single-screen menu system of GT3 with a boring and confusing side-scrolling menu system in GT4. 2.5 engineers probably worked full time on that menu system for 11 months. Their next project will probably involve little animated menus for DVDs that keep me from watching the movie as quickly as I'd like.

The menus are a mishmash of choices superimposed on a fairly abstract map of the world. So if you want to buy a German car, you go to Germany and navigate through the car manufacturers and find the new car dealers. If you want to race a specific race, you have to hunt around in various "stadiums" until you find the one you want, except for the races that are sponsored by manufacturers, which are somewhere else. It's not the worst menu system I've ever used. It does, I guess, get the job done.

GT4 has detailed information on every car in the game, but frustratingly presents that information via a side-scrolling marquee view that prevents you from actually reading the items in less than 10 minutes. So the game might have, for example, three paragraphs of text on the Mitsubishi Lancer Evolution VIII. And you really want to read them, because they're interesting and well-written, but in order to read them you have to suffer through their scrolling into view like a stock ticker, 6 words at a time. The Japanese version of the game just gave you a screenfull of text that you could read like a normal human being, but apparently because the localization team hates me I have to suffer. It is to weep.

There are more cars -- 700 in total -- but as in previous games, a large percentage of them are Skylines. I happen to like Skylines, but if you care more about, say, American muscle cars than obscure Nissan models, you might find yourself a bit chagrined.

Like its previous version, GT4 makes you trudge through too many license tests and too many entry-level races to "earn money" to make progress. The license tests themselves are interesting, but I wish they were optional.

One feature that is new since GT3 is the addition of "B-spec" mode. Essentially, you are directing a computer driver, gently suggesting that he try to pass an opponent, or that he ease up a bit, or that he come in for a pit stop. If you're one of the intrepid souls who was an early beta-tester of LawnMan 2: Watching Grass Grow, B-spec mode will be right up your alley.

One unquestionable plus about the game is its selection of courses. There are a good selection of city courses -- Paris, New York, Seoul, and Hong Kong have been added, although I do miss Rome. And in addition to Laguna Seca, you can now race on Motegi, Suzuka, Tsukuba, Fuji Speedway, and the Nordschliefe at Nürburgring. This, more than anything, is the best reason to buy the game if, like me, you need your racing games to have a good sense of place. There are also about 10 "original circuits" that are utterly bland and forgettable, but given the faithful rendition of Suzuka, I'm willing to cut them some slack on this issue.

The AI is indistinguishable from that in GT3, which is to say it is disgustingly horrible, an abomination of Biblical proportions. If there was an option to win races by simply turning off the stupid, irritating, useless, and utterly unchallenging computer cars and just racing against the clock, I would turn it on in a heartbeat. I have nothing positive to say about the rubber-band AI in the game. It is a complete travesty from top to bottom.

The rear-view mirror in the game is still useless in that the perspective it gives is somehow pointless -- cars look about 6 times further away in the mirror than they do when you look behind you. Can this possibly take more than 3 lines of code to fix? Gotham got it right. Gran Turismo doesn't.

So should you buy it? Well, if you want to buy my copy for $45 and save yourself about $10 on what it would cost you at Best Buy after tax, drop me a line. Otherwise: it depends on your motivation. If you're looking for car porn, and the USB photo feature sounds appealing to you, and you like the idea of having a semi-interactive catalog of cars from around the world, I think you can justify the purchase. If you're looking for a good driving simulator, I think you will be disappointed, and perhaps you should wait a few months until prices start to drop. If you're looking for a good racing game, no, you should not buy Gran Turismo 4.

That there are so many people who consider the Gran Turismo series to be the pinnacle of driving games just serves to reconfirm my prejudice that there are a lot of people out there who think they know how to drive, but don't.

Scrambled Eggs

2005-03-04 · by psu

Pete's recent rumination on creamy eggs got me to thinking about something that I don't understand. Why does no one who runs a restaurant these days know how to cook eggs? I can count on the first two fingers of my left hand the number of times I've had good scrambled eggs served to me in the last year or so. Once was at Dottie's in San Franscisco, and once was at the excellent Taco Loco Taqueria in Pittsburgh (I'm not kidding, it really is good Mexican in Pittsburgh). My bitterness stems from how easy it is to make scrambled eggs.

Leaving aside the French Creamy version, I give you my mom's staple breakfast food:

  1. 2 eggs
  2. 2 sprigs of scallion, chopped as fine as you care to.
  3. 1 pinch sea salt.
  4. Black pepper to taste.

Crack the eggs in a bowl. With a fork or chopsticks, beat the eggs until the whites and the yolks mix well. Mix in the salt, pepper and scallion.

Now heat a non-stick pan until hot, and add olive oil. When the oil is really hot, throw in the eggs. Stir the eggs around for 30 seconds to 1 minute until they start to get solid, but are still soft inside. The trick is to get the eggs hard enough but not too hard. Serve with toast, sausage, rice, chinese pickles. Whatever.

For more of a Chinese style egg, mix in soy sauce instead of salt. For omelettes, do the same thing, but flip the eggs over in one piece rather than mixing them around in the pan. For a dinner treat, add grape tomatoes and Fontina cheese to the mix, don't stir stuff around too much and then put the pan in the oven to get a nice frittata.

So, what's wrong with eggs I get when I eat out? They are universally overcooked, undersalted, and generally served to me in a cold chewy rubbery mess. The worst are the buffet eggs that sit out on a steam table for 3 hours becoming a completely solid yellow brick of pain and nastiness.

Anyway, be nice to your eggs. Keep it simple, keep it fast, and for god's sake put the salt in before serving.

Ohm Mani Padme Hum

2005-03-07 · by peterb

Resistance is futile! Today's high-voltage offering is Things That Can Kill You, Volume 3 - Electricity. Enjoy!

Learning From Xbox

2005-03-08 · by peterb

Editor's Note: An anonymous source dropped this in my mailbox. I cannot vouch for its authenticity, but I wanted to share it with my readers because I thought it was an interesting read. "Xenon" is the codename for the Xbox 2.

To: xbox-exec@internal.microsoft.com Cc: Ballmer, Steve From: Samuelson, Johnathan Subject: Things Xbox can teach Xenon

Team,

The Xenon product launch is rapidly approaching. Everyone on the team has been executing at 100%, and I have every confidence that the hard work we've put into this product is going to translate to meeting and exceeding market expectations. When you're pushing so hard to make sure we ship it's easy to lose track of the big picture. So I wanted to take a few moments to reflect on what we did right when we launched Xbox, where we missed the mark, and how that experience influenced our decisions on Xenon.

From the 50,000 foot level, the Xbox launch was an unqualified success. Our stated and actual goal was to establish Microsoft and our Home and Entertainment Division as a serious player in the game console marketspace. We accomplished that goal in record time. In a space where our main competitor had successfully bullied competing products off of the shelves, we established a beachhead and gained parity in presence in both online stores and retail outfits. (The marketing and sales guys deserve huge accolades for achieving this deliverable -- even today, holding a minority market share, you can walk into any retail outlet and we're holding nearly half of the shelf space. If your engineering leads complain about the tight schedule, remind them that the sales and marketing guys held up their end when it counted, and we need them to do the same.)

When we zoom in to the implementation details, the picture isn't quite as rosy. While our execution was completely to plan, the plan itself had a flaw. That flaw centered around the decision loop involving game developers.

Video game publishers are unreliable. A key aspect of the design cycle for Xbox involved focus groups with the game publishers and program managers to discover what features would induce them to develop for the platform before it was established. The developer feedback was incorporated into Xbox. Because we believed the developers, we got screwed.

The most obvious example is the hard drive. Game publishers swore up, down, left and right that if we could include a hard drive in the system, they would use it to bring entirely new, innovative forms of gameplay to the platform. There would be games developed for Xbox, they said, that wouldn't even be possible on competing platforms. On the basis of this feedback, we took a leap of faith and included a hard drive in Xbox. The hard drive increased the size and unit cost of the console, and decreased MTBF, which in turn increased our support load. Overall, it has been a huge cost drain.

And in five years you can point to only one single title that uses it in an interesting way.

Our friends the game developers have used this component, subsidized by us at great expense, as a glorified built-in memory card. Their games are developed to support the least-common denominator current-generation hardware.

It was an expensive lesson, but at least now we have enough market penetration to know that while we should always take game developers seriously, we should not bet the business on their being honest or competent. Those publishers that came to our platform early did it for a couple of reasons.

First, our development environment is light-years ahead of the competition. Anyone who could use the DirectX API -- which is everyone in the world -- could write a game for Xbox. Total Cost of Development for Xbox was thus significantly lower compared to the competition. We've all agonized over the Xenon guts being swapped out, but as you know, we are 100% committed to providing a completely transparent development experience for the publishers. Our APIs will continue to be easier to use, more consistent, and more powerful than our competitors'.

Second, they were afraid that we might succeed, and they'd be left standing at the station, watching us pull away.

We managed to push this second point a bit with our farsighted decision to strongly fund and support our own Microsoft Game Studio. In addition to the obvious financial consequence that our per-unit margin is higher on games we've developed in house, Microsoft Games represents our main stick for goading lazy game developers into actually using the features our platform offers. One successful game demonstrating that customers will buy a game with a given feature is worth two hundred developer seminars. The struggle with Electronic Arts over Live support reveals this clearly. It took a lot of work, but EA will never ship another Xbox sports title that doesn't support Live. Even though our own sports titles were not revenue leaders, we must not underestimate their impact on the market as technology leaders.

The other role of Microsoft Games is to act as market expanders. Our research shows that EA Sports, for example, sells to the same consumers over and over again. That's a nice market to have. Microsoft Games productions are designed not just to sell to the hardcore niche, but to expand the market. There are more people that don't play console videogames than do. The game publishers, and the other console developers, aren't seriously aiming for that market. We are. We think that given the right titles, we can find those consumers, sell to them, and bring them online with us.

Which brings us to Live, which is the crown jewel in our product line. It is no exaggeration to say that Live is the Home and Entertainment Division. Without Live, we are just another hardware and software vendor. With Live, we are an ISP that doesn't actually have to spend money to move packets. The current Live service is engineered to take us through our most optimistic Xenon projections. We will be about halfway through Jakarta's life cycle before we have to sink significant capital to increase Live capacity. Live requires traffic to flow on our infrastructure only during the meetup and resync phases of the protocol. In-game traffic is peer to peer. Live is our future: a continuing income stream that is almost entirely margin for a minimal customer support load. It's pure gravy.

Our goal for Xenon is, and must be: 100% attachment rate for Live. That's the brass ring.

You, I, and Steve all know that we won't actually reach 100%, but that's the goal. The hardware will make getting online easier than they can imagine. We're going to push the customers before they buy Xenon. We're going to push them when they open the box. The parameters of the offering are still up in the air, but as far as I'm concerned, 6 months free isn't out of the question. Every step of the experience is going to let the customer know that if they don't join Live, they will regret it forever. Live represents the difference between our product and the competition. Live represents an experience you share with your friends. The competitors' products are something you use to sit in your house and play with yourself.

Innovative games, easy development for third party publishers, and Live. That's the big picture, guys. That's the message we want to send over the next ten months. The gaming press will try to define the debate in terms of who can push the most pixels. Even though we'll win those comparisons, that's not on-message. While you're heads-down meeting your commits this summer, take a minute every so often and just repeat to yourself: Innovation, ease of development, and Live. If we hit those marks, we win the war.

That's the story. That's where we've been, and you all know where we're going: to the very top of the market. So let's get out there and execute, execute, execute!

R is not for Role

2005-03-09 · by psu

Lately, my game playing time has been mostly budgeted to games that the industry puts into the general genre of "Role Playing Game" or "RPG". Before Knights of the Old Republic I had mostly ignored games like these, but since that game I have delved into Mario and Luigi, Disgaea, Shadow Hearts and Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne. All this exposure has gotten me to thinking about the defining characteristic of this game genre.

If you ask the average dork on the street what an RPG is, he will say "Dungeons and Dragons". That is, role playing games are about a small group of dorks sitting around a table with a head dork running the game. Each dork takes the "role" of a character in the narrative that the whole dork party is collaborating to create. The dorkmaster provides the general framework within which this narrative evolves, but nothing is in general set in stone.

Of course, I'm being overly mean to people who play these games. But since I have been one of them, I think that's OK. In addition, I'm being overly kind to the intellectual quality of the games themselves. It's not really like this. In my time with D&D, the game was mostly about running around, getting kick ass powerful, beating the crap out of stuff, and then getting rich. The rest of it was just edifice on which to hang the fun beating up of things.

Designers of computer and console RPGs have learned this lesson well. Think about the list of games that have been on the top of the RPG heap over the last few years. I think it is pretty clear that they are structured around exactly the above mechanics. Run around, beat stuff up, get rich. Of course, this differs somewhat from the idyllic early days of the tabletop RPG.

Consider that in most cases, your character in the game is provided for you. Some titles make a big show about you being able to pick your race, or skin color, or the clothes you wear, but this is all just surface fluff. Sure you can pick your "class" and whatnot, but this doesn't really change how the game goes. Narratively speaking, in a state of the art RPG, you no more play your own "role" than you do in Half Life, where you are anyone you want to be, as long as it is Gordon. Also, the structure of the game is generally a fixed linear narrative, with some more open ended optional side branches thrown in. This is because computers are not as smart as human meatbags when it comes to making up narrative on the fly. Having a more open ended and flexible narrative is a holy grail of game design for some people, but I don't find the notion that compelling. I think basically linear narratives are fun.

So now the question is, what do we give our little avatar to do to reach the end of the game? If this were an FPS, that task would involve running around the world and making things explode until you get to the next cutscene, then repeat. As you play more, you might get better, and the levels can get marginally harder, but for the most part the challenge is in making a relatively repetitive task not get boring.

Traditionally, computer and console RPGs have solved this problem by devising a clever way to appear to mix up the game play while avoiding the requirement that the player have great reflexes. This is good for old guys like me. First, introduce a parameter in the game engine that I will call R. This parameter basically determines how good you, the player, are at the game. Second, arrange so that as you progress through the game, this parameter increases along various dimensions. You can take more damage, cast more spells, buy upgraded weapons, protect yourself with better armor, and so on. Third, have the game make a great show of informing you about exactly how much R has increased lately. As R goes up, you can fight monsters that also have a higher R. If the game does its job, it balances your abilities with the abilities of the enemy so you always get to kick ass in new and more powerful ways, and are never in any real danger of losing. This way, the game keeps you moving forward from cut scene to cut scene and everyone is happy. Once in a while, the game will miss and you have to run around and increase R so that you can get past the next Boss.

Ultimately, this is what a computer RPG is about. You run around, increase R and kick ass. This structure is so enticing that it has wormed its way into various other game genres as well. You can't open a gaming magazine without reading "with RPG elements" in the advertising copy. So we get golf games "with RPG elements" where your little clubs hit further as you use them more. We get platform/action games where you gain "hearts" as you play more and your weapons get more powerful as you use them. Even the most mainline of mainline sports games do this. In the Franchise Mode in Madden the stats for your players increase as they play well in simulated games, and thus make your team more bad-ass as time goes by. I don't even know what those stats mean, but I know the team gets better over time.

At this point, old time RPG purists and luddites are probably bemoaning the fact that so much of the "social and collaborative" experience is lost in the translation of the tabletop game to the computer. I don't see much to mourn. If you really want to do classic role playing, then go buy the books and find a small group of dorks to help you out.

Console and computer RPG fans are also probably mad at me for saying that their games basically boil down to a great quest for increased stats. To them I say, this is a feature, not a bug. I have personally been enjoying these mostly linear romps from cut scene to cut scene. Kicking butt is fun. Doing so while watching R go up steadily is also fun. I think this is a win-win situation.

So anyway, where was that copy of KOTOR II?

Halo 2 Vignettes

2005-03-10 · by psu

I like Halo 2 on Xbox Live. Since I am not innately talented at this sort of thing, I have to get by on single glorious flashes of brilliance to make up for my generally inept level of gameplay. This makes my online experience a sort of bipolar disorder, bouncing between the completely juvenile and the utterly sublime.

One Cool Trick

Here is a cool trick that even I can use fairly well. It is affectionately called the bitchslap. There are three variations on this technique:

Classic Bitchslap. Grab a plasma pistol and the battle rifle. Charge up the pistol by holding down fire but not releasing. As you approach your victim at medium distance, let the plasma bolt go and switch to the rifle. Aim at the head and let fly with the rifle. If you hit with both shots, it's a nearly instant kill.

Lazy Bitchslap. Basically the same technique as above, but dual wield the plasma pistol and the SMG. Let the plasma bolt go and then open up with the SMG. This works better in close quarters because if you get too far away, the SMG is completely useless. Note that this seems to work better than using the plasma rifle and SMG, assuming you keep the pistol charged.

Magnum Bitchslap. This is like the lazy variation, but you use the magnum instead of the SMG. Works well at all distances, but you need good aim with the magnum for a quick kill. The best thing here is getting a clean head-shot and watching your enemy spin in the air like a ragdoll.

This trick is easy enough to do that I actually manage to beat people with it, so it must be pretty easy. It won't work against people with much better aim and much better twitching than you.

May 2005 Update: The recent multiplayer update from Bungie has removed the bitchslap weapon combos from some of the Slayer maps in the main playlists. I guess it really was too easy.

Bad Ass Moments

When things like this happen, you feel cool:

Skull Bashing. In Oddball running into someone with a super powerful weapon, like the rocket launcher or sword, beating them down with the skull, and staying alive, is cool.

High Angle Shotgun. For some reason, single shot kills with the shotgun while airborne are fun.

Turnabout. Beating someone down after they have stuck you is fun. Running up to them and exploding in their face so they die too is also fun.

Switcheroo Assassination. Here is a trick from Sprang. Someone is shooting you from behind, so you run for cover, but when you turn the corner, you just stop. About half the time the guy chasing you will run right by and you can assasinate him.

One Time Only

Stealth Stickies. We were playing snipers on Burial Mounds. I ran up the tunnel into a base, and I saw Pete scanning the horizon trying to line up a shot. I walked up to him and softly stuck a grenade on his back. The last thing I heard in the headset before he blew up into little pieces was a short obscenity.

Long Range Rockets. Here's something that only happened to me once. I was playing Rocket Slayer on the Colossus map. This map is fairly large. I spawned, and I noticed a small body running in a straight line clear across on the other side of the map. I shot off a rocket in that direction and then forgot about it. About ten seconds later I got a "You killed XXX" message.

Airborne Sniping. Here's another thing that only happened once, also on Colossus. I spawned near the jumpy pad and saw Sprang and his friend Dan below me fighting near the pad. I jumped down to try and throw a grenade between them, but they both jumped onto the pad, shooting each other as they did so. I looked up and noticed that I was right under the airborne pair. I aimed carefully, and shot Sprang out of the air like a hunted duck.

Not So Bad Ass Moments

Radar Blindness. One of the most embarrassing ways to die is to get hit over the head with the butt of a rifle while you are just lining up a shot on someone else who you have been chasing all over the map. Five minutes of running followed by a quick death from one whack.

You Fell To Your Death. Spawning, runnning down the ramp, taking a blind jump right off a clliff does not make you feel cool.

You Just Plain Suck. This is how I usually die in Slayer games. I run down a hallway, I feel gunfire coming from behind me. I turn around and jump to try and shoot back, but before I even manage to aim my dead body is flying through the air, having been shot in the head.

Not so Instant Death. This is when you come face to face with someone and unload 2 full SMG clips into them and then fall over dead. Very demoralizing.

Losing with the Sword. Missing someone with the special energy sword attack twice and then getting shot in the head makes you feel pretty bad.

Instant Death. The last time I played with Sprang's friend Dan, he was practicing his Magnum Bitchslap technique. So, I would run up the ramp, see him, start unloading with two guns at once, and die in 1.5 seconds. This happened nine straight times.

High School Moment

Here is why you never play with the headset on. The team slayer game had just started, and we all heard in the headset: "Dude. I might have to randomly quit at any time, man, because like, I'm not supposed to be playing Xbox and if my parents catch me playing I'll be totally grounded. So, if I'm gone that's why."

It's better to not know this kind of thing, especially because the guy will probably beat you down ten or fifteen times.

My Single Best Shining Moment

The other night we got into a Team Slayer game on Midship. Midship is a tricky map because it is very tight quarters and it's hard to stay alive for a long time. I managed to grab the shotgun off the middle of the floor. One red ran out at me and I uncharacteristically managed to get a bead on him and shoot him down before he melted me with his plasma rifle. Red number two came down the ramp and BLAM. Two down. This was already going better than normal. I count myself lucky, in general, if I manage to get two people to fall down before I die.

Our blue teammate started yelling that we should move together, so I got in behind him and a red fell down near me and dropped the sword. So I picked it up and I had the two best weapons on this map (remember, close quarters). I ran up the ramp to the other side of the map and beat a red down. Turning around in a hail of plasma bolts, I saw two more red running up the hallway. Two swings, two more kills. At this point, the disembodied voice said "Killing spree!". This doesn't happen for me very often.

What followed was the strangest sequence of Halo 2 play that I think I've ever experienced. For the next five minutes I literally could not fall over dead. It was like the enemy fire was moving just slightly slower than it usually does. Instead of dying just before swinging the sword, I always got my swing off before my shield was gone. I ran from one side of the map to the other slicing every red I met in two while avoiding grenades, assassinations and long range sniper shots. Finally I ran into a group of three reds and took one hit too many. When I finally fell over, final stats for the game showed that my killing spree ended at 15. I wish I had heard the disembodied voice say "Rampage." I missed it in all the excitement.

How To Shop at Whole Foods

2005-03-11 · by peterb

Recently, a friend of mine who is new to Pittsburgh paid his first visit to Whole Foods. His comment on the experience was:

This is the place to shop if you enjoy paying a 50-100% markup over traditional supermarket prices so that you can feel good about how much you are doing for the native tribesmen of Mek-a-lek-a-ding-dong. Aside from that, they do have a good selection of international and esoteric foods.

I've heard this expressed by others, too. A common nickname for the chain around here is "Whole Paycheck." I have a complex and conflicted relationship with Whole Foods, so I thought I would share some of my thoughts on the place. In the process, perhaps some of my tips will help you shop there without paying 100% markup over Giant Eagle.

I feel like I should offer a disclaimer, in advance: you might read this article and think that I don't like Whole Foods very much. Nothing could be further from the truth. I like the excellent selection of just about everything. I like that their produce is always fresh, and that their staff is helpful, and the great selection of organics. I like that their very presence in Pittsburgh has forced Giant Eagle to try to improve in certain ways. The only reason I have such strong opinions about what is or is not "worth it" at Whole Foods is because when I go there, I feel like the proverbial kid in a candy store, because I want to buy everything. But that conflicts with my cheapskate gene, and so I have to develop value strategies to maintain my sanity.

If you're anything like me, you buy more or less the same things each time you go into a supermarket. So you end up spending around the same amount of money every time you shop in the same market. I've distilled this down to a formula I think of as the "ceteris paribus price-per-item." Think of it this way: except for some packaged goods and produce, the store has nearly complete control over the minimum quantity of whatever item it is they will sell you. In my experience, it's helpful to think that grocery stores have a target price per abstract item that you will pay, regardless of what the actual price of any given real item is. So the first thing to do is to figure out the target price per abstract item. As an example, Giant Eagle has a ceteris paribus price per item of about $3.50. Obviously, 3 pounds of filet mignon don't cost the same as a pack of gum, but the technique works surprisingly well: count the number of items in your shopping cart. Multiply by $3.50. That's how much you'll be spending when you hit the checkout line, if you're not actively trying to be a smart (or at least cheap) shopper. Using this technique, I've never been off by more than about 3%.

I thought of this calculation because of a trick my dad has. He uses a similar technique in nice restaurants. The accuracy of the results is uncanny. Murray's Law states that the per-person price of a meal (including wine and dessert) will be twice the cost of the most expensive entrée on the menu. It doesn't matter that you didn't order the most expensive entrée. The formula still works.

The ceteris paribus price per item at Whole Foods is about $7. So my friend's estimate of the markup is about right.

So first, you need to decide what it is that you're shopping at a given store for. You can go in to Whole Foods and just buy a pack of (organic, free-range) gum, and "only" spend $2.50 instead of $7. Life is full of tradeoffs. If you're insistent that the only way you can have a quality of life that satisfies you is to do all your shopping at Whole Foods, and don't want to sacrifice any indulgences, then there's not much I can do to help you. But you can get pretty far by being flexible and recognizing what is and isn't a good value at Whole Foods, and either avoiding the expensive items altogether, or obtaining them elsewhere, for less.

Basically, there are only two types of things you should be buying at Whole Foods:

There actually are a few good deals at Whole Foods if you know what to look for. Arugula, the best green in the universe, is usually only about $1.50/pound there (Giant Eagle sells it in little plastic jewelboxes for something like $5 for 6 ounces. I am not kidding.) In the produce aisles as you walk in, keep an eye open for specials. During the summer, they often use berries as loss leaders. Other fruits and vegetables are frequently put on sale. Organic milk prices are comparable to Giant Eagle — usually a little cheaper, in fact, as long as you avoid the glass bottles. Likewise with heavy cream and some of the yogurt products.

The meat department is worth checking for bargains — the specials are fewer and further between than in produce, but you can often find odd things in the cold case at clearance prices. Basically, there's something on sale every week, but you can never be sure what it is. So try not to get your heart set on anything before arriving and taking a look at what they're trying to unload that week.

You'd think the "bulk foods" aisle would be a place you could really clean up, but you have to be careful. Some of the items often cost more in bulk form than those packaged on the shelves just down the lane. Double check. Or better yet, go to the East End Food Co-op for that stuff, instead. Everything will be cheaper and fresher.

The loss leaders aside, most of the things in Whole Foods cost about the same or more than what you'd see at Giant Eagle. The goal of the store is to convince you of one of two things: that it's worth the price in convenience to pay twice as much for the same stuff you can get elsewhere, or that the things you'll find at Whole Foods are staggeringly unique and therefore are "justified" as a little extravagance. After all, you're worth it, right?

Well, no. Probably, you're not. Anyone who is willing to pay $19/pound for Roquefort Abeille when the same cheese is available just about anywhere else for $11/pound is definitely not worth a little extravagance.

The cheese counter is probably the biggest danger in the entire store. It provides a very wide variety of fresh cheeses, and the staff is super-helpful. There's an occasional "bargain," but at the Whole Foods cheese counter "bargain" tends to mean "only pay $1/pound more than you'd pay at Penn Mac, instead of $5/pound more." The main difference between the meat counter and the cheese counter is that the meat counter is selling some products — particularly the dry aged meat, and some of the organics — that you really, honestly can't get anywhere else in town. There are few things at the cheese counter at Whole Foods that you absolutely, positively can't get at Penn Mac, McGinness Sisters, or one of the various cheese wholesalers in the region. If you absolutely must have whatever item they've got there that you can't find anywhere else, go ahead and help yourself, but the only difference between the Mimolette at Whole Foods and that in the Strip is the $7/pound price gap.

The meat counter has many unique, expensive items — such as the aforementioned dry aged steaks and various organics — that you can't get (in person) anywhere else in Pittsburgh. So splurging on those on occasion seems reasonable to me, although whether they're worth the premium is a question you can only answer for yourself. The meat counter also has a lot of run of the mill junk that is just the same as what you'd find anywhere else, only it costs twice as much (such as the ridiculous yuppie sausages for $6/pound). And there's usually always something on sale that is cheap enough that I can use it to make stock without feeling guilty.

I have friends who swear by the fish counter because they find Benkowitz's hours inconvenient. This is a shame, since Whole Foods' fish costs twice as much and is only half as good.

In summary: keep your eyes open for items on sale. Know what things cost at other area stores, only buy items that are not stupidly overpriced, and don't get tricked into thinking that Whole Foods is the sole supplier for something that's actually widely available.

The best way to know what's available in Pittsburgh, of course, is to shop in the Strip District.

If you apply the tips in this article carefully, you should be able to save enough cash to buy at least 2 or 3 Xbox games each year. Shopping is about keeping your priorities straight.

Buon appetito!

Carbon Monoxide

2005-03-14 · by peterb

This week's Things That Can Kill You is carbon monoxide. I hope you enjoy it.

These were produced some time ago, and this is the last of them. Which raises the difficult question: should I make more?

Whether I do or not depends, in part, upon you. Since this might be the last one posted for a while, please share your comments below.

You are Who You Eat With

2005-03-15 · by psu

The restaurant experience can be a tricky thing to optimize. Sometimes you are just after a fun time with good company, and so the nature of the space (or the booze) is more impotrant than the food. More often though, especially for me, the goal is to both have a good time and to get the best food possible. This can be especially hard for those of us afflicted with a particular psychological malady which I will call "Trillin's syndrome", after the New Yorker writer who pointed it out to me. You know you suffer from this syndrome if, after ordering in a restaurant, you are overcome with an uncontrollable feeling of dread and terror caused by the thought that the other patrons have somehow obtained food that is much much better than what you have just ordered.

The real world often works to exacerbate this problem by placing artificial barriers in your way. The canonical example of this is the menu you can't read. Chinese restaurants have mastered this technique, generally putting an entire wall of food that I cannot order without a translator right next to my table, while making me stare at the dishes for the rubes and losers who can only speak English.

Many of my most crushing restaurant traumas came at the hands of Chinese restaurants, most often when I brought the wrong company along. I am as much in favor of having a good time with good friends as the next guy, but when you are after food and you have a limited number of chances to get it, you have to be very careful about who you eat with.

For example, once, during an unfortunate stint working in Pasadena, CA, I brought a fellow contractor who seemed to be a stand up fellow in most other ways to a fantastic Cantonese seafood joint in Monterey Park. I hooked up with this man primarily because he had a car and I did not. I probably should have been more selective.

For those unfamiliar with the LA area, Monterey Park is one oasis in the otherwise sterile concrete strip mall desert that is Southern California (for reference, two other such places are Zankou Chicken and Roscoe's Chicken and Waffles). Here, in the middle of an otherwise completely forgettable and soulless expanse of urban wilderness sits a sprawling suburban Chinatown. So we drove there, past the huge Chinese mall, the Costco-sized Ranch 99 Chinese Market, and so on and pulled into the parking lot of the restaurant.

The place had two huge rooms, with a wall-sized bank of fish tanks down the middle. In these tanks were various swimming creatures in all shapes and sizes. I craved to order something, anything, from the tanks, but the sight of the food still in its live form appeared to make my lunch partner a bit queasy. The situation was not improved when one of the staff walked over to one tank with a large bucket and pulled out what must be a 5 or 10lb gray/green mass with a clam shell on one end and brought it to a table near ours. Our eyes followed the bucket over to its destination. I'm thought, "I wonder where geoduck is on the menu". The look on my partner's face said "what the hell is that, and how do I get out of here"?

There were, of course, two menus, one of which iwass written completely in Chinese. The menu I could read featured General Tso's Chicken, Shrimp with Lobster sauce, and so on. So we ordered two lunch specials, and I sighed deeply as the food arrived at the same time as the table next to ours received a huge platter of shrimp which had been steamed live, shell and head on, like tiny little lobsters. I turned to my partner and said, "We should have ordered that." He looked a bit taken aback, and replied, "But the heads are still on the shrimp."

Don't let this happen to you.

Luckily, this story had a happy ending because I was able to return to the place the next week with my friend and his new Cantonese girlfriend. All lovers of Chinese food should know someone with a Cantonese girlfriend. The shrimp were awesome.

Code Reviews

2005-03-16 · by peterb

You might think I don't proofread my articles carefully before I post them. Every time I post an article -- every single time -- about 5 minutes after it goes up, one of my friends will point out a spelling mistake, or a typo, or some sentence where I left out a verb. But I do proofread. And I always miss some of the errors. I think the problem, in large part, is that I've written and read the article so many times in my mind that it's difficult to read the article on the screen before me. I'll read the sentence with the missing verb, and my brain will helpfully supply it. "No problem!" my brain says. "That looks great!"

This is why I like having all the code I write go through code review.

Code review means many things to many people. Every software development house has its own process. Some of them review every change. Others only review during crunch time. Some have "group" reviews where a bunch of developers read code together. Others just ship context diffs around between developers. When I say "I like having all the code I write go through code review" what I really mean is "I like having another intelligent programmer look at the code with an eye towards finding the places where I screwed up." I've certainly sat through code reviews that were useless. But they don't have to be.

And make no mistake — there will be screwups. Different research presents different numbers. I've seen claims as high as an average of 1 bug for every 20 lines of (unreviewed) code. Carnegie Mellon claims the average commercial product (many of which presumably underwent some form of code review) has between 20 and 30 bugs per thousand lines of code, which sounds like a low estimate to me. Basically, if you think that your code doesn't have at least this many bugs, it's a surefire indication that you're either not writing enough code, or not adequately testing your code.

With this in mind, there is more than one good reason to do code reviews. First I want to talk about those reasons (some are obvious, some aren't), and then I want to talk about the mechanics of what I think makes a code review effective or useless.

Reasons To Do Code Reviews

Catching the stupid mistakes. I discussed this above. Every programmer has blind spots, or is fatigued from staring at the same file for hours at a time. Problems that sneak past the tired developer often jump out in sharp relief to someone with a fresh pair of eyes.

Converging on Consistent Style. I think this is a huge reason to do code reviews. Typically, what happens in a development group of any size is this: early on in the codebase's development, someone writes up a document specifying the stylistic conventions to be used when writing code. This can go from the highest level ("Everything is in C, no GCC-specific extensions allowed") to the lowest ("If you write conditionals without putting braces around the block that gets executed, I'm going to come to your office and yell at you.") Then, for the next few years, everyone completely ignores the style guide; the only person who even remembers it exists is the person who wrote it. New developers are hired, and they begin writing code that is completely at odds with the style guidelines, and from then on, whenever any developer has to look at anyone else's code, she (or he) has to spend an extra few minutes acclimating to the subtle differences. Not because those difference are significant, but just because the code looks different. That makes the code less maintainable. Code reviews give developers a perfect opportunity to say to each other "Hey, the way you use tabs instead of spaces in these files? I hate that. It makes me want to die." This sort of gentle (yet loving) peer pressure is much more effective at achieving a consistent style across a large codebase than a document checked into the depths of CVS somewhere.

Find the Guru (or, alternatively) Find the Bozo. Developing software is an activity that takes long periods of intense concentration. The cost of an interruption is severe — a 5 minute question in the middle of the day can cost a half-hour for the interruptee to get back up to speed. If you're like me, that means there's a tendency to huddle in front of your monitor and try to not talk to people. If you don't talk to people, you can't get a good sense of their abilities, and having that sense will be important when you hit a tough problem and need to decide who you are going to interrupt. Code reviews provide a structured way (you can plan for the interruptions in advance) for you to talk to your coworkers about their code, or simply to see how their minds work. Along a similar vein, if there's someone who consistently writes lousy code, and never seems to improve no matter how often their problem patterns are discussed, that will come out fairly quickly as well.

Knowledge transfer. I've heard the following sentiment many times, in many places: "Oh, man, if [insert name here] ever leaves the company, we're so hosed. He's the only person who understands [heinously complex software component]." Sometimes people will say that because the employee in question is, say, Albert Einstein, and the component in question is the Gravity-Powered Relativity Time Machine. However, the common case is that the employee is just really, really smart, and is the only person who has taken the time to understand the component. If you're doing regular code reviews, then you have a natural chance to expose other people to the heinously complex (and not so complex) parts of your software before the crisis where the guru gets hit by a truck and no one else knows how the software works.

How To Do Code Reviews

The only real rule is "do what works for you and your organization." But I'll share my prejudices with you anyway.

Review everything, all the time. If reviews are only done during "special" times, you're just setting up another bit of process that will hit everyone at the most stressful time. Reviews should be soothing, because they are helping you insure that the bugs get caught in-house, instead of by the customers. Making them a regular part of your process will pay off in spades.

Review incrementally. There's a tendency, particularly when just getting the review process off the ground, to want to grab Alessio, pull him into a room, and ask him to go through 8,500 lines of code all at once. This will lead to utter failure. You'll get some good comments for about the first 100 lines of code, and then you'll get 8,400 lines of "Yeah, that looks good. Let's go on to the next section." Every checkin should be reviewed. If the developer is working in a branch, do the reviews in that branch as the developer checks in his manageable pieces. Don't wait for it to hit the trunk in one huge indigestible mass. There is a time and a place for the huge review of everything, but that's during the design phase. Mixing design review and comments about off-by-one errors is begging for failure.

Small review panels are better. There's a saying in the open source world: "Many eyes make all bugs shallow." This is bunk. Many eyes make only shallow bugs shallow. Having a large review group just lets the phenomenon known as diffusion of responsibility kick in. Plus, the collective cost to the organization of reviews goes up exponentially. One or two reviewers is fine. More than that is overkill. A good rule of thumb is: if you need a projector to do the code review, you're doomed. You can do your reviews in a meeting, or you can do them by email. Whatever works for you.

Track the review status formally. Your bug tracking system should tell you whether a given change has been reviewed or not. If you rely on developers' memories, the tendency will be for people to say "Uh, yeah, I think I looked at that. It was OK."

So: review early, review everything, review incrementally, and review in small groups. Do this, and your code will be better, more consistent, more maintainable, and your bug count will go down.

Now, if only I could develop a process for getting my articles reviewed before I post them.

Additional Resources

Darley J M & Latane B., Bystander intervention in emergencies: diffusion of responsibility. J. Personal. Soc. Psychol. 8:377-83, 1968. [New York Univ. and Columbia Univ., New York, NY]

Turkey Cutlets with Lemon and Capers

2005-03-18 · by psu

Here's a simple recipe for turkey. I think it's good because I made it once for a friend who doesn't like turkey, and he ate a pound of it. To this day his wife makes the recipe with chicken and calls it "Pete Su" chicken. I think I got the original version out of one of the Frugal Gourmet cookbooks. These days, thinking myself more sophisticated, I tend to look down on those books a bit, but that's just my own elitist arrogance. This recipe was surely one of the high points of the series.

Collect the following:

  1. Turkey breast cutlets, sliced thin. You can have the store do this for you, since it's hard to carve raw turkey breast unless you are a real man, as opposed to me.

  2. 2 eggs, beaten and mixed with tepid water.

  3. Flour.

  4. Bread-crumbs mixed with salt and pepper (and cayenne if you want).

  5. Olive oil.

  6. 1/2 lemon.

  7. White wine, capers, butter, garlic if you want.

Put the flour on one plate and the bread-crumbs on another plate with the egg mixture in the middle. Take each piece of turkey and go flour, egg, bread-crumbs to bread it. Put them on a third plate.

Heat the oil in a pan and fry the breaded turkey pieces for 3 or 4 minutes per side or until they are done. They should get nice and brown on each side. Put the cooked turkey in a warm oven.

Deglaze the pan with some white wine. Then squeeze the juice from 1/2 of the lemon into the pan. Throw in 2 spoonfuls of capers, salt, pepper and garlic if you have it. Mix it around. Reduce a bit. Then add a cold piece of butter and melt it in.

Serve the turkey with the sauce on top. Goes well with sautéed spinach or other greens and the bread, rice or pasta of your choice.

Sorry, no Halo 2 in this recipe.

Playable Classics

2005-03-21 · by peterb

I've talked before about my distrust of nostalgia. But, I like playing, reading about, and writing about old videogames. This presents something of a conundrum.

Many discussions of old videogames are colored by nostalgia. Gamers of a certain age have strong opinion on whether the Atari 800 or Commodore 64 version of a given game was better, and have been known to come to blows over the issue. Worse, though, is the tendency to only remember the good things about games we played when we were younger. So you'll hear people talking about how the games today aren't as good as something from 30 years ago, conveniently forgetting about how terrible the UI was on that older game, and how the older game didn't actually let you save your game, so if you wanted to finish it you needed to sit in front of your computer for 36 hours straight.

To try to prevent this from happening here, I'm introducing a concept I call "Playable Classics." A playable classic is a game that you could pick up today and play on your Windows or Mac box and enjoy just as much as if you picked up a new game off the shelf. I'll still talk about old games that aren't Playable Classics, but only the ones that meet certain criteria will get the label. If I say something is a Playable Classic, I give you my word that it's not just a memory-laden reverie, but a game you should go download and install right now.

The rules are very simple.

First, the game mechanics have to have stood the test of time and still be fun. This is a somewhat subjective judgment on my part. If the game's UI requires a printed reference card so that you can figure out that "move your man 3 steps up and to the right" requires you to type "s6m45,3" because there's no in-game help and if you type it wrong the game just beeps and prints a question mark, it ain't a playable classic. This eliminates a lot of games that were good at the time, but wouldn't be tolerated today. Fortunately, it also leaves a lot of games in contention.

Second, you have to be able to start the game on a Windows or Mac computer by just double-clicking on an application icon. In other words, it has to be a simple installable app. No emulators, no Apple ][ disk images, and so on (to be clear: it's fine if the app is "really" an emulator dedicated to running that one game, but the user must not need to know that or install third-party software to get the game to work). I expect some people might disagree with this criteria, but really: if you're the type of person who is dedicated enough to install an emulator and start fetching disk images or ROMs, you probably already know what you like and don't need my recommendations. This rule is designed to restrict the field to the true classics, games that were so great that someone looked at them and said "I can't possibly let this game die. I'm going to keep it alive no matter what."

So that's the plan. I'll be reviewing the first Playable Classic later this week. If you've got suggestions for games you think merit the title, feel free to send them my way.

Legendary Ease of Use

2005-03-22 · by psu

This month the Official Xbox Magazine included a demo of Jade Empire, the upcoming RPG that Bioware has been developing since they passed the KOTOR franchise to others. I mention this because for the last year or so I've had the following conversation with Pete a few times:

Me: This Jade Empire looks cool, but I don't know about this "real time" fighting system.

Pete: Don't worry, this is Bioware. Every game they ever made has a battle system that is turn based underneath but animated in real time. I will bet a case of beer that exactly the same dice rolling is going on behind all those kung fu animations.

Me: Well, I guess you know more about this than me, but those gameplay movies really look like a fighting game to me.

Pete: Nah, it'll never happen.

After playing the demo, Pete came to me this morning and said "I might have been wrong. It really is real time, and it's like a fighting game, only no fun." I could only reply, "Yeah, but at least they tried something different."

These days, trying something different is as thankless a risk as one can take. Whether you develop consumer software, games, or just the interfaces to every day devices, you stand to alienate everyone who currently loves you by making even small changes to how the user operates your product. The world is full of users disgruntled by arbitrary and gratuitous changes to tools that already met all their expectations. Consider:

  1. In the 1990s, modern electronic cameras evolved interfaces that were very fast to use, still provided total control over focus and exposure and only used three easy to reach dials. Of course, disgruntled old timers never figured out how these interfaces were better and continued to pine for cameras with tiny hard to reach dials on the top of the camera. A lot of people still think that the Leica film loading system is a great idea.

  2. Every major update to the Mac user interface brings howls of outrage from the hard core contingent. Dozens of times now, the Mac faithful have declared that Apple has lost its way, and that they should just bring back the Classic interface from System 7 or whatever, which represented the Platonic ideal for graphical desktop user interfaces. Google for "the spatial finder" to see what I mean.

  3. Getting back to the gaming context, one recent game which was excellent on many levels but derided by the hard core fans was The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker. Why did people make fun of this game? Was the design flawed? The story too short? The gameplay awkward? No. This game was hated because it was cell shaded, and to use the modern vernacular, a lot of people thought this was gay. Why did they think this? Because they wanted it to look like the old game, only with higher resolution textures.

What all this points to is the fact that the opinions of the installed base of users is a major factor behind the relative lack of innovation in user interfaces. Innovation is rare because users do not want it. No matter what users say, what they want is interfaces that work in the manner to which they have become accustomed. Which brings me back to my original story.

Pete and I both found the Jade Empire demo disappointing, because what we were hoping for was KOTOR but with Kung Fu. That is, we didn't really want Bioware to innovate in any way. We would have been most happy if they had just done the same game they have been doing for a decade, and pasted a new Kung Fu skin on it. We might bitch and moan about how no one makes innovative games anymore, and how everything is just a recycled franchise, but the truth is that this is what we want. We don't want exciting new gameplay. We want the gameplay that we know and love so that we can have another 40 or 60 hours of bliss on the console beating stuff up and increasing R. We want this in the same way that grizzled old Unix hackers still cling to Emacs key bindings, focus follows mouse and X11 style middle button paste, while most of the rest of the world has moved on.

This is why truly new interface mechanics rarely gain a wide following, while interfaces from existing and widely used applications live on forever. Users in general will inherently prefer awkward interfaces that they are familiar with to new interfaces that are unknown, unless the new way is incontrovertibly superior, which it usually is not. This is true for games as well, and as a result, most long running game franchises clutch on to their archaic conventions and gameplay like zombies to live brains. Whenever you are playing the license tests in GT4, or backtracking through an entire level to pick up a critical item that you missed, or find money in a plant in Zelda, or fight the ludicrous top down camera angles in Metal Gear Solid then just remember that it's like that because someone wants it that way. The next time you are watching the 30 second animated unskippable game-over scene for the fifteenth time because the current boss is too hard, you can thank the existing user base for your misery, because those are the people that would be complaining if the scene and/or the boss were taken out of the game.

The good news is that even though things change slowly, they do change. Every year more gamers enter the pool and force us to reconsider whether or not our beloved conventions make sense. Over time, this has the effect of improving things for everyone even if the hard core fanboys sometimes deride it as "selling out" or "dumbing down" the games. I haven't seen too many unskippable cut scenes, or annoying, drawn out game-over screens lately. Even the cameras in third person games are improving. This makes me uncharacteristically optimistic about the future. I'm even hopeful that Bioware figured out a way to make a real time combat system fun, rather than just button mashing.

Until then, I've got some Team Slayer to play after I kill some more Sith.

Spending The Marginal Dollar

2005-03-23 · by peterb

Recently, Thurston Searfoss, author of the superb strategy game The Lost Admiral Returns, dropped me a line. He's considering adding some features to the game -- online play, a scenario editor, more special missions -- and wanted my opinion as to which of those features I personally thought, as a gamer, would help with sales. I like Thurston, and I love his game, and so I wrote a detailed response to his questions. After sending it, I decided it made interesting reading on it's own, and Thurston graciously said he wouldn't mind if I posted it here.

Dear Thurston,

Thanks for your mail. Let me make sure I understand your question. You began by asking me "which of these three features (more bonus/different types of missions, a scenario editor, or online (hot seat) play) will draw people deeper into the game" but you ended up asking "which of these additional features will help improve sales of my game?" I think the latter question is actually a better one. So that's the one I'm going to focus on.

One of the web sites I read regularly is Ron Gilbert's grumpygamer.com. Ron was the creator of the Monkey Island games. What Ron said, recently, was that distribution really isn't the stumbling block in selling games. Marketing is. Marketing is what turns "this game is downloadable on the internet" into "this game is being bought by lots of people on the internet." (or "this game is on store shelves" into "this game is flying off store shelves.") I don't know a lot about marketing, but I know a little. My understanding of the discipline is that the rough flow is: (1) identify a target market, (2) craft a message that reaches that market that (3) convinces them that they need your product. To some extent, I see you taking what I think of a hacker's perspective towards the sales of your game. It's very analytical. "I'd like to sell more units. What technical features can I add to the game that will make it even more irresistable to my potential market?"

The problem I see is that in order for those features to make a difference, the people who care about those features need to hear about your game. Right now, I'm not convinced they are. So, without being flip at all, my gut instinct is that the best thing you could do to increase sales would not be to do more product development, but figure out how to better market the product you have.

But let's assume that you've already got someone thinking about those issues, and you want to do as much as you can on the product side to expand the target market. So let's talk about that.

I think we can eliminate "additional missions and content" from consideration. It really isn't a draw. Lost Admiral Returns already has a ton of different types of missions, and I can't see anyone saying "Whoah, there are 14 special missions, not 9 — I'm in!" As someone who favors single-player play over online, mostly what you want to know is that there is some degree of complexity. Above a certain point, more than "enough" is just gravy. So in terms of attracting more people to buy, I think this would probably not be time well spent. This is probably also the easiest to implement, so I realize it's a shame to say that it won't expand the pool of potential buyers. But I think that's the truth.

That leaves us with online play and a scenario editor. These have similarities in their effect on the customer base, but also some differences in terms of ongoing support.

I'm going to eliminate discussion of the technical aspect of these. Obviously there are technical challenges to making online play work well, and you are going to have to tackle them if you do it. Instead, I'm just focusing on "will it help make people buy your game?"

One thing that these features have in common is they have the potential to create evangelists for the game, although for different reasons. Online players are evangelists because they need to make sure there are other people to play against. Scenario builders are evangelists because they want to garner accolades and appreciation for their design talent. It's clear that both of these features can help create evangelists. You can look at Neverwinter Nights, which is really just a decent 3d engine wrapped around a vaguely OK set of D&D rules for an example of this. It ships with both online play and a scenario builder, and a quick look at user-created scenario archives like the Neverwinter Vault shows that people really have swarmed all over both aspects (although to be fair, I'll point out that the marketing behind the game was brilliant, aggressive, and ubiquitous — you couldn't open a web browser in 2002 without reading about NWN.)

My instinct about the tradeoffs between the two (assuming they are both implemented perfectly, etc) are as follows: a scenario editor creates more aggressive evangelists (because they want to "publicize" their work), but far fewer of them, because the cost of entry ("sit down, learn to use the scenario editor, and design a scenario") is fairly high. Online play will create less aggressive evangelists, because lots of games support online play, but more of them. Hell, I got Madden '05 just because psu wanted to play me online.

There are also compatibility and upgrade issues. No one really expects to be able to play LAR 2 online without buying it, but everyone who develops scenarios for LAR will be bitter if they don't import perfectly into LAR2 (maybe it's too early to be talking about a sequel, but it's worth thinking about). I also think that online play will give you more insight into the needs of your players. Eventually, you'll have to start thinking about the next product, and the online users are going to give you more feedback than the single-player users, by their very nature.

So between the two features — online play and a scenario editor — "all things being equal" I'd say go for online play. And if you want the get the scenario editor for free, tell people that you won't be mad at them if they reverse-engineer your file format.

The one thing about online play that concerns me is whether people would find "hot seat" play intolerable. What does a player do when it's not their turn? I worry that the hotseat experience won't be a compelling experience unless you come up with a good answer to this question. No one wants to stare at a "the other player is making his moves" status screen for 10 minutes. One suggestion a friend of mine made was "online co-op play". Two (or more?) allied players enter moves to a disjoint set of ships at the same time, all playing against a computer opponent (presumably being hosted by one player's machine). when they're all done, combat resolves and displays for all of them. Combine this with a decent chat interface and you'd have something compelling and, I think, unique.

But: right now, based on what I see on the Internet, I'd bet that the universe of people playing your game — including people who are just evaluating, not buying — is way too small. You know better than I do what your numbers are. Let's say you've only got a 1% conversion rate on "people who download the demo" into "people who pay for the full game." Adding a whole new feature to the game to try to bump up that number is indeed a viable strategy, but I think you should ask yourself whether there are viable (or cheaper) paths to simply get the demo into the hands of more people instead, and increase sales that way.

Anyway, those are my thoughts on the issue. I hope you find them helpful.

Kind Regards,

peterb

Additional Resources

The Pretension Quotient

2005-03-24 · by psu

There are a lot of ways to rate restaurants. The assumption is that most reviewers are there to rate the food, but really they are looking at many other aspects of the place. Therefore, in rating surveys like the Zagat's, you see multiple numbers written down and averaged and weighted: food, decor, "value" and so on. I was reading a ranty blog entry about a few local places and the thought occured to me to try and define a simple measure to summarize my feelings about a restaurant. Thus, I present to you: the pretension quotient.

Simply put, this quotient is derived by comparing how good the food in a particular place is with how pretentious you perceive a place to be. If you take the ratio of these values, restaurants then naturally fall into four general classes:

Low Pretension, Great Food

Here we have the best ratio of food quality to pretentiousness. These tend to be small places that serve simple regional food that is just too good to pass up. I would eat real barbeque off a picnic table before I'd sit down at most of the fancier tables in Pittsburgh and get served a "flame roasted pork loin with quinoa, baby spinach salad and a cranberry apple demi-glace relish" which ends up being a tasteless piece of white rubber with a red sauce, stale raw spinach with some fake cheese on it and that execrable fad grain that tastes like grass.

Locally, my favorite places hit this sweet spot. La Cucina Flegrea has some of the best Italian food in the city coming out of a place with barely two rooms and a dozen tables, and they let my kid run around near the kitchen while I eat. Similarly, Rose Tea Cafe has simply the best Chinese food in town but is utterly straightforward and lacking in pretense.

High Pretension, Good to Great Food

Of course, we go to fancy places too. The good ones have a quality level is at least as good as their pretentiousness. Locally, Dish and Vivo both aim high and generally hit their targets. Bona Terra is also a nice local place that easily justifies the amount of text they use to describe their food. Casbah is a place whose food exactly matches its pretension level.

Low Pretension, Mediocre Food

Here we have the places that equalize their quality to pretension ratio from the other direction. So they are not great, but they do not try to convince you that they are shooting terribly high. I find these to be tolerable because they basically serve you exactly what they advertise. Locally, a place like Atria and the chain places fall into this part of the matrix. Of course, one prefers to avoid chains if one can help it.

High Pretension, Mediocre to Bad Food

Finally, we get to the places that dominate my bad experiences in restaurants. These are the more up scale stores with big rooms, fancy menus, medium to high prices and completely generic, tasteless, unoriginal food. Here are some things you can do to gain yourself pretension points while not improving your food at all:

Food as Sculpture. Very few people do this well. In general, stacked food is not interesting to look at and is just harder to eat. It's hard to cut that rubbery pork chop when it's sitting on top of the cold mashed potatoes.

Weird Tableware. I don't need forks and knives that weigh eight pounds, or huge plates for small food items, or bowls that are crooked on top. This generally serves no purpose but to distract you from how utterly boring the actual presentation of the food is.

Novel Length Menus. Spare me the biography of every lamb leg you serve, or the trading routes used to obtain the rare olives in your salad. Too often the breathless descriptions of hand picked herbs and organic micro-greens are just an elaborate ruse to make you think the place is not just serving you a plain piece of frozen fish with a white sauce.

Fruity Sauces. You better know what you are doing if you are going to have me put fruit on my meat. Also, you don't gain my confidence by calling that reduced sauce "saffron jus".

Snarky Waitrons Dressed in Black. The customer experience is not improved when the pouty waitstaff dressed all in gothic black sneers at me through hip thick rimmed glasses. Also, make sure they can at least pronounce the food.

And, in case you were wondering, local places that I think fall into this class include Davio, where you can spend your whole college fund on pasta in red sauce, and The Church Brew Works which is great when it sticks to beer and pizza, but for some reason needs to convince me that a Grilled Strip Steak served over a roasted garlic orzo cake and topped with a wild mushroom Dunkel sauce is a good idea, when I know it's just going to be a grilled steak with some stale starch and cold vegetables. I'm sure I could think of a few others, but we've avoided them for so long that they escape me.

Summary

Here is a handy table to keep with you to figure out how to classify your own favorite (or not so favorite) places based on how I have classified the places described above (and a few others). Send in your suggestions!

Food Not Great Food Good or Great
Not Pretentious Atria, Chiodos Rose Tea, Cucina Flegrea, Chaya, Udipi
Pretentious Davio, Church Brew Works, Cafe Zinho, P.F. Chang's Vivo, Dish, Casbah

Pretention Quotient Peterb Remix

2005-03-24 · by peterb

For the record, here's my list applying the criteria that psu sets out.

Food Not Great Food Good or Great
Not Pretentious Chiodos, Dee's Hot Dog Shop, The O Il Piccolo Forno, Rose Tea, Tram's Kitchen
Pretentious Le Pommier, Mallorca, Cafe Sam, Church Brew Works. Baum Vivant, Chez Gerard

As a special case, as far as I'm concerned, if your menu says "hominy polenta" instead of "grits," you are automatically placed in the "pretentious / food not great" category.

Thank You

2005-03-25 · by peterb

Thanks to the alert readers who pointed out that the Captcha/security code text box was misnumbered, which made tabbing between the comment fields painful. It's fixed now.

Amari Update

2005-03-27 · by peterb

I am pleased to announce that Lidia's restaurant in the Strip has graciously offered to sponsor the amari tasting. The members of the panel have been chosen, the time and place are set, and all that's left is to sit down and actually taste the liqueurs, and write up our impressions. Expect pictures and commentary from the event soon.

In Defense of Starbucks

2005-03-28 · by peterb

Everyone loves to hate Starbucks.

You can understand why: they're everywhere, they're successful, and the experience from store to store is so consistent that they destroy even the pretense of local flavor.

There's an upside to Starbucks, though: they're everywhere, they're succesful, and the experience from store to store is so consistent that I can get a drinkable coffee in the middle of nowhere.

To those of us who live in cities, the idea that one would have to go to a Starbucks to get acceptable coffee is ridiculous. Can't you just go to a local coffeeshop? How about a diner? Can't you get good coffee anywhere?

The answer, of course, is: hell no.

I can already see people dashing down to the comments section, prepared to lecture me on how Starbucks coffee is overroasted and burnt and doesn't provide true satisfaction and yadda yadda yadda, to which all I can say is: sit down, Simone, I'm not finished with my rant yet. You don't know from bad coffee. You don't know anything about bad coffee. When I was a kid, I had to walk to school in the snow, barefoot, uphill both ways, and when I got there they served me sewer water with Folger's Crystals waved over it, so I know a thing or two about bad coffee.

The biggest criticism I have of Starbucks on the coffee front is that they are promoting the moronic, disgusting, Seattle-style cappucino. Cappucino is supposed to have a hood that is made from steamed milk mixed with the crema on the coffee. Instead, thanks to Seattle, we get two inches of air-filled foamed milk ladeled on top of our coffee. But it's every coffee-drinking cretin in Seattle, not just Starbucks, that is responsible for that moral tragedy. And Starbucks has, on the whole, done more good than harm. What sort of good, you ask?

I used to drive the length of the Pennsylvania Turnpike about six times a year, going back to about 1986. In 1986, there was no Starbucks. If you wanted coffee, you stopped at a rest stop, where there would be a McDonald's or some other fast food joint that had a five gallon jug of "Maxwell House" coffee that tasted — and I am simply being as descriptive as possible here, this is not hyperbole — like brewed cardboard. It didn't taste like coffee, just tannin. If you were lucky, it was only 6 hours old. That was the standard experience. That was as good as you could get when you were in, say, Carlisle, PA and didn't know anything about the area.

Now, more or less every rest stop along the way has a Starbucks. I can get coffee that, even if it's not exactly to my taste, tastes like something. So while I understand the various critiques one can make of this huge and growing megacorp, I think it's important to remember just how goddamn bleak things were in the hinterlands before they arrived.

None of this means that you should go to a Starbucks instead of that cool local coffee shop. If your town has a place as good as La Prima Espresso, and it's within easy reach, and you go to Starbucks instead, then you're a fool. But have you noticed how many fools there are out there?

There's a Starbucks not too far from my office (yes, I realize that in any major American city that's kind of like saying "today I was breathing air.") In addition, there are also at least 3 coffee shops within easy walking distance that have nice atmospheres, and coffee that tastes better and is cheaper than Starbucks'. The Starbucks is packed, all the time. Every hour they are open, people are fighting over parking spots, or walking past the other coffee shops on the way so they can get their fix at the Starbucks. Why is that?

It's tempting to just shrug it off and say "well, they're all stupid," but I think it's a bit more complex than that. I think part of the secret is to realize that Starbucks markets itself (and does it very well) to at least 3 completely different market segments at once.

Start by going in to a Starbucks and looking at the menu on the wall. In every one that I've been in recently, you'll see that it consists of three separate panels, each focusing on a different style of coffee. I call these panels "Giuseppi," "Joe," and "Josephine". The leftmost panel is Giuseppi -- it's all espressos, cappucinos, and other drinks. Students trying to look sophisticated, the artistic type with the Powerbook, they're all ordering from Giuseppi. Joe, the middle panel, is all variants of plain coffee — "house" coffee, decaf, tea, etc. Commuters on their way to work are all ordering off of Joe. On the rightmost panel, you've got Josephine, which I'll broadly describe as consisting of stupid girly drinks -- frappucinos and flavored coffees. Basically, the third panel is for people who don't really like coffee except in the form of a milkshake. (For some reason, the dreaded "caramel macchiato" ñ if I ever meet the Yuppie loser who misappropriated the name of my beloved tiny spotted coffee and slapped it onto that super-sized monstrosity, I'm going to spit on him ñ is on Giuseppi, presumably because what you call a thing is more important than what a thing actually is.)

Now, your local coffee shop surely has espresso drinks and regular American coffee also, and maybe even a girly drink or two. But what they don't do is market them towards the different types of customers with the same singleminded intensity as Starbucks. Watch people order from a Starbucks menu. Their eyes aren't wandering over all their choices. They go straight to the specific menu segment they're interested in, and then choose from that.

And Starbucks does the little things right, too. Their workflow is smooth and well-architected to deal with high volume. The clerks (I'm trying to avoid calling them "baristas") smile and aren't judgmental, even when you order something stupid like a caramel macchiato. There's overpriced and overportioned pastries of the type that are popular nowadays. If you want to sit there in their comfortable chairs for three hours with your laptop not buying anything, they let you. The lighting is subdued and not harsh. Their bathrooms are clean.

Maybe that's stuff that you don't care about. I don't really care about most of that, either. But apparently, lots of people do. What I think a lot of bitter coffee fanatics don't understand is that the success of Starbucks isn't about the coffee. The success of Starbucks is about the company convincing people who weren't spending $3.50 a day on coffee to make it a part of their daily lives. In the early 1990s, when Starbucks was opening on every corner and driving the weaker local coffee shops out of business, I remember thinking "They can't keep this up. There just aren't that many people who go out and buy their coffee at coffee shops." Starbucks secret is that they weren't just out to steal consumers from the failing coffee shops, but were working on creating new consumers. In retrospect, they didn't just steal existing customers. They expanded the market.

In the end, I think that's why Starbucks is a net benefit to coffee drinkers everywhere. The cost has been that a few local coffee shops that probably weren't that good anyway were driven out of business (the really good ones have adapted to the competition and have dedicated customers). In return, you can now get a decent cup of joe in the middle of Nowheresville, Kentucky, and the overall level of the United States' appreciation of coffee as a drink to be enjoyed, rather than simply endured for its medicinal properties, has risen. If you never leave the city, maybe that doesn't seem like a good trade to you.

But for as long as I still have to drive the length of the Pennsylvania Turnpike on occasion, I'll say it's worth it.

Additional Resources

Critical Mess

2005-03-29 · by psu

Driving home from work on Friday night, we noticed a strange sight for Pittsburgh. A couple of dozen young people decked out in the Pierced Goth look that is prevelant among today's "non-conformist" youth were riding down Fifth Avenue connected to bicycles via fancy clipless pedals and shoes which looked a bit out of place under their black jackets and rainbow colored leg warmers.

When they all ran the red light at Fifth and Bellefield, I realized what was going on. This was Critical Mass.

The Critical Mass propaganda is that they organize "events" to "raise awareness" about the relationship, or lack thereof, between cars and bicycles on the road. Mixed into this agenda is some mumbo jumbo about alternative transportation and a lot of self-important twaddle about how bike commuting will save the world. What they do to further their cause is ride in large clumps down the road, ignoring all the prevailing traffic laws and generally crippling whatever traffic corridor they happen to be occupying. Actually, the Pittsburgh crowd was too small to cripple anything, but I've seen larger groups in other cities pretty much bring rush hour to a dead stop. In Pittsburgh, they made do with running lights and doing donuts across Fifth Avenue. In other words, Critical Mass is a bunch of cyclists riding like complete morons in order to improve the relationship between bikes and cars on the road. Good luck with that.

Now, don't get me wrong, I love bikes. Over the last thirteen years in Pittsburgh, I have ridden my bicycles several thousand miles including a few century rides and light commuting. In my time I've had dozens of dogs yap at me through car windows and chase me down roads. I've been buzzed by teenagers on Meth. I've had fruit thrown at me from the pickup truck of some red-neck moron. I've drafted busses and choked on the fumes. In other words, if you are on a bike somewhere in the city, I know what your existence is like.

But, whenever I am in the presence of a Critical Mass event, the only thing that keeps me from rolling the windows down and screaming obscene epithets is young children in the area and my wife hitting me upside the head. I believe that I am as sympathetic a mainstream audience as Critical Mass could possibly hope for, and all I want to do is hurt them. Let me explain.

For decades, John Forester has been preaching the right way to mix cars and bikes in his excellent book, Effective Cycling. Anyone who has more than a passing interest in serious cycling should stop reading this page and go buy this book right now. It should be required reading for cyclists in the same way that the New Testament is required for Christians. Among other things, the book makes the strongest case that I have ever read that the right thing to do is to

  1. Treat bicycles as first class vehicular traffic (like motorcycles, say).

  2. Have cyclists obey the prevailing local traffic laws.

In the U.S., we seem to be constitutionally incapable of applying these simple principles. On the one hand we have drivers who are convinced that bikes belong only on soul-sucking recreational trails where we would be doomed to ride an endless expanse of crushed limestone at slow speeds, lest we run over the hordes of bladers, joggers and baby strollers who are sharing the space. On the other hand, we have cyclists who are completely ignorant about how to ride in traffic. What they should be doing is riding on the road, in the same direction as the traffic, as far to the right as practical, and following all relevant signs and lights. In other words, no weaving around on the road, no riding between the car lanes, no double pacelines, no jumping lights, no riding on the sidewalk. This doesn't seem like a lot to ask, but the majority of cyclists that I observe don't seem to be able to follow these simple rules. Even the cops on mountain bikes ride on the sidewalk.

You would think that members of a cycling advocacy group would try and do better in the hopes of showing the car driving world that they are mature adults that deserve equal standing on the road. Instead, they act just like the infantile assholes on Friday night, blowing through a red light at a busy intersection and then doing donuts across three lanes of traffic. My conclusion is that any hatred that drivers have for bikes is completely justified because the cycling community in general, and Critical Mass in particular, has done nothing to make drivers think that cyclists are anything more than a bunch of juvenile self-centered cry-babies. As long as this image persists, the sick moron who chucked fruit at me in Mars, PA will feel justified in his actions. Therefore, rather than helping me in any way, Critical Mass just makes my life, and the lives of decent cyclists everywhere, harder, and they must be stopped.

In his book, Forester suggests that the reason we discriminate against bicycles in our traffic laws is that we believe bicycles to be toys for children, and thus we don't expect any more than child-like behavior from the people riding them. Critical Mass certainly lives up to these expectations.

Links

Using Google, I found this guy who agrees with me. So I must be right.

Again, you must buy John Forester's Effective Cycling. Do it now.

Splinter Cell 3: Super Kudos

2005-03-30 · by psu

I picked up the new Splinter Cell game tonight at the Target. I've only played through the level that was recently on the Xbox demo disk, but I feel that I have to give Ubisoft a big wet sloppy kiss for listening to the forces of light and goodness and implementing quick saves, save anywhere and faster load times all in one fell swoop. This one act of kindness removes the only tedious and annoying aspect of the previous Splinter Cell games.

The quick saves are so good that I can even face replaying a level just to see if I can finish it with a higher "rating" (more sneaking, less killing). I can do this because there is no hateful savepoint system making me replay the level five times just to get to the end. Basically, there is no downside, and anyone who says there is cannot be trusted as anything more than a raving lunatic moron.

Bravo Ubisoft. Let's hope other developers follow their lead.

Amari Tasting (Part 1)

2005-03-31 · by peterb

This is the first part of an article on the Tea Leaves amari tasting panel. Today we will talk about the arrangements and participants, and tomorrow we will discuss the panel's reactions to the liqueurs.

Their names roll off the tongue: Fernet. Nonino. Averna. Their tastes — unusual, herbal, and exotic — can seem almost indescribable. They are the amari, powerful Italian digestifs.

My first exposure to amari came in Italy. Standing in a bar sipping a macchiato, a somewhat grizzled gentleman walked in and said, in a gravelly voice, "Averna". The barkeep poured a thick, dangerous looking liquid into a shotglass, the gentleman finished in a gulp, put the glass on the bar, and walked out. I asked the barista what it was, and he explained that it was a digestivo. "It's something you might drink if your stomach was a little unsettled."

Later in the same trip, after a long day of walking in the sun, I felt a bit queasy. "Obviously, alcohol is the solution to this problem," I said to myself. In the next bar I came to, I said "Averna," trying as best I could to sound like I knew what I was getting myself into.

It was not like other drinks. It was strong-tasting, but also subtle. It was sweet. And it was bitter. And it did settle my stomach.

Standing next to me at the bar was an older Italian man, staring at me. I nodded a greeting. "How can you drink that stuff?" he said, in English. I asked him what he meant. He shook his head sadly. "You people, you British, you Americans, you come over here and you drink all these awful things. I don't understand. We don't drink that stuff. We drink whisky." He gestured with his glass for emphasis. I shrugged, and he wandered away, tumbler of scotch in hand.

Something about the strangeness of that encounter left a mark on me. I was curious about these unfamiliar drinks. In Italy they are valued for their medicinal and digestive properties. In America, the only liqueur of this style that could be called popular is the German Jägermeister, a concoction favored by college students because of the apocryphal belief that the various herbs in it will have a cough-syrup like effect on the imbiber. Why are the amari so ignored here?

The theory I've come up with is: fear. Trillin's syndrome, the fear that someone else ordered a better meal than you did, applies to beer, wine, and liquor as well. In America, alcohol is very much a social lubricant, a prop, a badge of identity, and a point of discussion. Ordering a drink you don't like is more than just a let-down, it's actually a social faux-pas. "Are you so naive that you don't even know what you like to drink?" But of course, the only way to learn what to order, if you're not willing to experiment, is to mimic others. Which brings us to our present situation, where there are only five drinks (not counting beer, wine, and slurpees with booze in them) that most people ever order: gin and tonic, rum and coke, vodka and anything, whiskey, and the martini. And the martini has been so emasculated that most people who drink them still don't know what vermouth tastes like.

Fear can be overcome by knowledge. That, more than anything, was what motivated me to create a tasting panel for amari. The panel's goal was to taste some of the best Italian amari and describe them in enough detail that people could order them (or buy them at a liquor store) and have some idea of what they were about to try. With that in mind, I contacted Lidia's of Pittsburgh restaurant in the Strip District — they have the best amari selection in the region — and asked them if they were interested in sponsoring the tasting.

Dave Wagner

Dave Wagner

Dave Wagner, the managing partner at Lidia's, got in touch with me. When you float a proposal about an event like this, you expect that you might hear back from a store manager, or from the organization's special events coordinator. What you don't expect is for one of the owners to get a hold of you and say "Yes, this is a great idea. We're going to do it." But that's exactly what happened, which is one reason why I'm about to say some very nice things about Lidia's. The other reason is that I happen to love the place.

What consistently impresses me about Lidia's is that their ambition precisely matches their abilities, and they know it. From the decor straight down to the details of the menu, Lidia's manages to be both elegant and modestly understated at the same time. Every time I walk into the place I am confused by how they manage this. I imagine the restaurant itself speaking to me: "Oh, that chandelier that you can't take your eyes off of? That's just made from some blown glass. We apologize that it's not nicer." "These perfectly-executed ravioli? Why, the mixture inside is very simple, just spinach and cheese. We hope you like it." "Ah, yes, we have this wine list with some very unassuming wines. We figured we'd just charge $20 for each of them. Is that OK?"

You can walk in dressed to the nines and feel perfectly at home, but if you show up in jeans and a t-shirt they don't give you even the slightest whiff of attitude (I know: I've done it). I think the secret to the place is that the atmosphere is firmly focused on being a complement to the food, rather than the other way around. It's part of their presentation, it enhances the experience, but fundamentally what they are selling is well-executed, straightforward Italian cuisine. The dishes are not presented as more than they are, but neither are they dumbed down. And they love their own food.

It is this that came through when talking to Dave Wagner about amari. Lidia's estimates that they probably sell, overall, maybe a bottle or two of amari over the course of a year. That's how few people drink these liqueurs. And while I've no doubt that some people are going to try amari as a result of reading these articles, I'm sure Mr. Wagner doesn't expect the Amari Division of Lidia's to suddenly become a huge profit center overnight. They sponsored our panel tasting because they love amari, and think it would be wonderful if more people learned about them. They did it because they care about eating and drinking. The next time you have a lousy meal at a pretentious restaurant, ask yourself if you think they actually care about their food. And if you answer "no," then do yourself a favor and make a reservation at Lidia's, instead.

Based on his enthusiasm, his experience, and his interest, then, Dave Wagner was the first member of our panel. Allow me to introduce the others.

Lidia Bastianich

Lidia Bastianich

Lidia Bastianich

I was surprised and delighted that Lidia joined us on the panel. She's a chef, an author, a restauranteur, and a TV personality, and was preparing to celebrate her Pittsburgh restaurant's 4th anniversary. Her plate, so to speak, was absolutely full. I thought she might come, shake hands, say a few words about amari in general, and leave.

Instead, she sat down, ate with us, and spent two hours talking with us about food, amari, and culture. She was gracious and witty. It only takes about five minutes with her to understand the restaurant's attitude towards food. She speaks of food as something that isn't only sustaining and pleasing, but spiritually fulfilling as well. She doesn't just love food, she respects it.

But more than that, she listened. It would have been easy for her to simply assume the role of teacher and tell us which drinks we should like, and why. Instead, she was interested in seeing how our various palates reacted to the different amari, and how we felt about them. It was an honor to have dined with her.

John Barbera

John Barbera

John Barbera

John Barbera is an architect at the firm of Penner and Associates. John rescued us at the last moment when one of our panelists fell ill and couldn't make it. The thing about John is: he's a perfectionist. I have a feeling this is a trait that serves him well in his work. The other thing about John is that he wears these cool architect glasses. A few months ago, I read an article in the New York Times that, in summary, said "Architects wear cooler glasses than the rest of us." After reading that article, I started paying attention, and I realized the author was right. If I wore John's glasses, I would look dorky, but on him they look great.

I suspect that there must be some sort of fashion class in the last year of architecture programs where they teach you how to wear the cool glasses and still look good.

I need to take this class.

Kilolo Luckett

Kilolo Luckett

Kilolo Luckett

Kilolo Luckett has seven years of experience in arts and architecture management working in for-profit and non-profit sectors. Currently, Kilolo works at Cool Space Locator, a nonprofit community and economic real estate organization. She matches small businesses to unique spaces in urban neighborhoods. After earning her Bachelor of Arts in History of Art and Architecture from University of Pittsburgh in 1998, Kilolo worked as a summer art instructor for Manchester Craftmen's Guild. She was the curatorial assistant at The Pittsburgh Cultural Trust's Wood Street Galleries. She is actively involved in numerous civic and cultural organizations. Recently, she served on the David L. Lawrence Convention Center Public Art Committee, and was selected by the Pittsburgh Foundation and Heinz Endowments as a working group member for The Creativity Project.

Kilolo, in other words, is awesome. Any uncertainty about how the event would go evaporated once Kilolo agreed to be involved. It is a metaphysical impossibility for any event with which she is involved to go wrong.

Steve Posti

Steve Posti

Steve Posti

Steve is a librarian, a would-be farmer and a dad. Originally from Pittsburgh, he and his wife lived in South Florida for 12 years before returning to Pittsburgh in 2003.

Steve was, in fact, the very first person to volunteer for the tasting panel. I was a bit nervous inviting someone that I hadn't met to be on the panel, but Steve is a librarian. I like librarians. So for the record let me say: if you're going to go out and drink, you definitely want a librarian with you. Steve asked interesting questions, kept the conversation moving, and was a great contributor. I'm glad he was there.

Steve and his family live in Mt. Lebanon, where his wife Jo is running for a seat on the school board.

Ann Funge

Ann Funge

Ann Funge

"I'm just a chick from Jersey," Ann claims, but the truth isn't that simple. Ann strides the halls of the law offices of Wilder & Mahood, bringing hope to her clients and striking fear into the hearts of her opponents. Ann's sharp wit is matched only by her overflowing compassion for beasts and children. Balancing a nearly insatiable curiosity for the use of arts and sciences to bring peace and prosperity to all with a frankly down to earth sensibility about the efficacy of mangonels and trébuchets to forcefully end sieges of walled cities, Ann is a true renaissance woman. Perhaps her most significant character trait, though, is her nearly beatific willingness to not sue me for fabricating almost everything in her biography.

My biggest fear in inviting Ann to participate was that she wouldn't be able to find time in her schedule to make it. Fortunately, I was able to entice her by exploiting her fascination with my motives. "Wait, so you for write this weblog thing. And...how do you make money on it? You mean you just called up Lidia's and asked them to sponsor this? Why are you doing this, really?" I'm pretty sure that she still thinks I have some master plan to option the movie rights to "The Amari Tasting Story" and retire to Tahiti, but of course, nothing could be further from the truth. (Note to Hollywood: Have your people call my people. Let's do lunch.)

Laura Valentine

Laura Valentine

Laura Valentine

Laura is willing to try almost anything in the interests of science, as long as it is fun or presents a high potential for hilarity. Unfortunately, her husband will not let her dye the cats with Easter egg dye, but this is only a temporary setback in her research into rainbow-colored kittens. Other hobbies include smoking cigars, gardening, and frothing criticism of prepackaged foodstuffs.

Laura is also the author of one of my favorite food weblogs, Upside-Down Pear. She doesn't flood you with useless articles on everything she thinks of, but instead picks her battles, and is always right about everything.

I was sure Laura was a good choice because she's well-spoken, and while culinarily adventurous, she would not see the adventure as an end in and of itself. In other words, I knew that Laura would be willing to stand up and announce, in the face of peer pressure to be noncomittally nice, "This is terrible."

Laura also cares about words, an attribute that I think is generally admirable.

Peterb

Your Humble Narrator

Your Humble Narrator

And, of course, I was there too.

The guidelines for the panel were straightforward. Be bold in your opinions. Express preferences. Try to describe what you're drinking, not show how sophisticated you are. I wanted to take these vague adjectives people use about amari — "bitter," "assertive" and the like — and turn them in to specific descriptions, so that someone who hasn't tried them might have some idea of what they'll find if they try one.

The stage was set. The panel had arrived. Six bottles and forty-eight glasses waited on a nearby table.

But first we had to eat.

Amari are digestivi. They lie on that odd fault line between the sensual and the medicinal. At one point, I had suggested that we could dispense with a full meal, because I was eager to get to the drinks. Lidia's lips pursed ever so slightly. "They're meant to be enjoyed at the end of a meal," she said. There was the merest suggestion of a sigh. "But, if that's how you want to do it...." Immediately aware that I had just suggested something equivalent to ordering tiramisu as an appetizer, I quickly backed off and tried to recover. "No, no. We should do it, uh, exactly the way you just suggested. In every way. Uh, ma'am."

We spoke of the history of amari throughout the meal. People have been infusing alcoholic drinks with herbs since antiquity for reasons of both preservation and taste. Lidia traces the Italian amaro tradition back to the Romans, although our modern vermouth is probably closer to their drink than are today's distilled amari. One can try to guess at the ingredients, but they are typically many, varied, and kept absolutely secret. Dave Wagner told the story of the time he was visiting makers of Amaro Nonino, in Friuli, and asked them to give him at least a hint of what went in to their infusion. "Of course," his host smiled, "just as soon as you tell me the formula for Coca-Cola."

While you may never know the full list of ingredients for any one amaro, there are certain ingredients that appear again and again. Anise regularly appears, as do juniper berries. The flavor of wormwood can often be detected. In the fruitier amari, the most common starring role is given to the bitter orange (Citrus Auranium var. Myrtifolia, which the Italians call chinotto.) No two amari taste exactly the same.

The tasting begins

The tasting begins

We spoke also of the restaurant itself -- why Pittsburgh was chosen ("It's a manageable location, midway between New York and Kansas City,") and the constant quest for fresh local ingredients. We spoke of the work they've done with local farmers. "When we first arrived, we couldn't even find rapini. It was terrible. Now, fortunately, things are much better." I mentioned my delight at finding that their executive chef Craig Richards enjoyed Tram's Kitchen, one of my favorite unassuming local restaurants, which has great food but no atmosphere. Dave Wagner smiled. "Of course. Especially with chefs, you'll find that it's really all about the food."

As dinner came to a close, the plates were cleared away, leaving us with an array of empty glasses. The bottles were passed around, and we began to pour. The waiting was over. Now, after all the talk and anticipation, we would put our palates to the test.

In the next installment: the Tea Leaves panel tries to describe the indescribable. Please read it here.

No Sense of Humor '05

2005-04-01 · by peterb

In a world where it seems as if every web site has dumb and mostly unfunny pranks, some just plausible enough to make you do a spit-take before you've had your coffee, only Tea Leaves provides shelter from the storm.

Once again it is our privilege to present a simple, modest space with no April Fool's jokes. Enjoy!

E pur, si muove

2005-04-04 · by peterb

You know it's going to be a bad day when the first thing you read when you wake up is that the PA Legislature is considering a bill that reads, in part:

   Section 1.  The act of act of March 10, 1949 (P.L.30, No.14),
    known as the Public School Code of 1949, is amended by adding a
    section to read:
       Section 1516.2.  Teaching Theories on the Origin of Man and
    Earth.--(a)  In any public school instruction concerning the
    theories of the origin of man and the earth which includes the
    theory commonly known as evolution, a board of school directors
    may include, as a portion of such instruction, the theory of
    intelligent design. Upon approval of the board of school
    directors, any teacher may use supporting evidence deemed
    necessary for instruction on the theory of intelligent design.

The Scopes "Monkey Trial" was over 80 years ago, but we are still having to deal with fallout from people who feel it is a cultural imperative that we raise our children to be ignorant.

So, what can you do about it? Well, if you're a Pennsylvania resident, I think you should write your State Representative and tell them that you think this legislation is a terribly bad idea. You can find out your representative's name and address by going to this page and typing your zip code in the box in the upper-right corner.

Here's the letter I'm writing.

Dear [Name of Representative here]:

I'm writing to you to urge you to oppose House Bill No. 1007, which I believe will seriously compromise the quality of science education in Pennsylvania public schools.

Science is not simply the collection and categorization of facts, but is the practice of continually making observations, developing hypotheses, and then testing those hypotheses. Because Intelligent Design does not offer any empirically testable hypotheses, it is not science. Universities very actively rate school districts based on the quality of the education they provide. If Pennsylvania develops a reputation as a Commonwealth that provides a poor science education in its public schools, it will be that much harder for our children to gain admission to top Universities. This, in turn, will further degrade Pennsylvania's job market and tax base. Pennsylvania is already having difficulty attracting and retaining young families and skilled workers. If House Bill No. 1007 passes, families that care about the quality of their childrens' scientific education will have another reason to leave Pennsylvania.

Please help our schools stay competitive by keeping our science classes focused on science, not politics.

Very Truly Yours,

[signature]

Any readers who want to write to their Representatives should feel free to borrow from my letter, if you like. Of special interest to Western PA residents is that the sponsors of the bill include Representatives Bastian (Somerset County), Ellis (Butler County), and Petrarca (Westmoreland County). The bill has been referred to the Education committee (see below for details). I plan on sending my letter to all of the members of the committee. Perhaps you should, too. Pittsburgh readers should especially note that Representative Michael Diven and Thomas Stevenson, both members of the Education committee, are from Allegheny County.

Please contact your representatives before this gets out of the Education committee. Write them, email them, call them. Let's stop this before it exposes Pennsylvania to national ridicule, not after.

Update: it occurs to me that there's one other thing you can do. If you live in Pennsylvania, and you have a weblog, either link to this article or write your own article on the subject. I was shocked that this bill has gotten all the way to committee without a word in our local papers. We've got to shine a light into the dark corners of this legislation, and getting the word out about it will be a good first step. Thanks.

Additional Resources

Lazy Cycling

2005-04-05 · by psu

I've been on my bike for the first time this year. I generally ride when DST starts and stop when DST stops. While gasping for breath on the first hill of the year, I got to thinking about why I like cycling when it's clear that I am a lazy bastard. The reason for this is simple. Of all the ways you can hurt yourself in the name of fitness outside of team sports, cycling is by far the best for the lazy. This is because the point is to cover distance quickly, under your own power, while doing as litle work as possible.

Here are some tips on how to be lazy on a bike:

Buy a Road Bike

Mountain bikes are heavy and slow. They make you work too hard for any given distance. Often you have to put the mountain bike in a car to get it somewhere where it can be useful. This is too much work. I like to ride out my front door and back to my front door. My front door has a little ramp on it so I don't have to get off my bike before opening the door. I like that. You should do this for your front door. Carrying the bike into the house is a lot of work.

So, ride road bikes. The only thing mountain bikes have going for them is that the cheaper ones are cheaper than even the cheapest road bikes.

Get a Bike That Fits

The bike industry likes to convince you that bike fit is mysterious, almost mystical. Really it's pretty simple. The two key things are seat position and handlebar position. You want the seat high enough to pedal comfortably, and you want the bars placed so you can reach them comfortably without being too stretched out or hunched over. So, you want a bike frame that lets you get the seat and the bars in the right place without resorting to extreme measures.

To fine tune the fit, I prefer to sit a bit in back of the pedals and I like the bars to be about even with the seat so I don't have to bend over to reach them. This puts less weight on my hands. I can right the bike while laying my hands down lightly on the bars and still have complete control. In general, I think the simple guidelines that Grant Peterson favors are just about right.

Ride a Lazy Gear

You should ride in a gear that lets you spin comfortably at about 90-100 rpm. Spinning like this means you aren't fighting the resistance of a high gear and you are generating power with leg speed rather than sheer brute force. This is good for gimpy weaklings like me who don't want to do weights to build power. Of course, when you get on that hill that is too steep, you can't always manage a high cadence. Well, unless you are Lance Armstrong.

Coast Down Hill

You worked hard to get up the hill. Have fun going down. Unless you are chasing down that breakaway that threatens your lead in the overall, I see no reason to hammer down hills.

Suck Wheels

Find a friend who you can keep up with and the next time you ride, just stick to his back wheel like your life depends on it. Guess what? You can ride the same speed, or faster, than you usually do while doing less work! You'll find that you can take little breaks on the flats while he plows through the wind for you. This is great! Whatever you do, do not get on the front and take a pull unless you are threatened with bodily injury. Doing work means you are not being lazy.

When I'm in shape enough to keep up with a fast group ride over the rollers, I find that I gain about 2-3mph in average speed over what I can do on my own on a 30 mile ride. This is all because i sit behind my friend Bill while he does all the work.

If you feel bad about mooching off of others, watch Lance Armstrong in the next Tour. All he does is sit there behind his teamates while they do all the work. If Lance can do it, so can you.

No Fitness Data Collection

Generally, fitness gadgets are junk that cost money and time. You don't need a heart monitor to tell you if you are in better shape. And for God's sake don't download heart data into a spreadsheet and start calculating average power output. This will tell you very little besides the fact that compared to Lance your cardiovascular system is puny and weak.

The one device that is slightly useful is a bike computer that tells you distance and average speed. Now, to find out if you are getting more fit, just find a big hill and note if you can climb it faster. When I get more fit, I can climb hills at faster speeds in higher gears. You aren't training for the Tour De France here. You're just having fun. So spend the time riding, not data mining. If you want, you can keep a simple ride diary to track average speed. But that's a lot of work too.

The Best Way To Get in Shape

This isn't really for the lazy. But the best way to get better on the bike is to climb hills. Yes, it hurts, but trust me, making yourself ride time trials or do sprint intervals on a regular schedule is less fun and probably not that much more effective unless you are training to race, and lazy people do not race. So, go out and ride up hill. At least that way you get to coast (remember! lazy!) down the other side when you are done.

Next time: How to train for a century ride the lazy way.

Playable Classics: Fool's Errand

2005-04-06 · by peterb

One sunny day, a light-hearted fool strolled along a hilly path, whistling a merry tune. A long wooden pole was slung over his shoulder and attached to it was a cloth bundle which carried his life's possessions.

Fool's Errand

Fool's Errand

In 1987, Cliff Johnson, puzzle-creator extraordinaire, released The Fool's Errand for Macintosh, thus dooming an entire generation of computer game players to at least a few weeks without sleep.

Fool's Errand -- like all of Johnson's computer games -- is a collection of simple and not so simple puzzles connected by a story. As you solve the puzzles, more of the story opens up to you. Once all the puzzles are solved, you discover that there is a much larger puzzle waiting for you, and the clues to solving it are in the story that you've been reading.

This isn't just a game. It's heroin. And so it is with pleasure that I announce that the first winner of the Tea Leaves "Playable Classic" designation is The Fool's Errand.

There are actually (at least) 3 Cliff Johnson games that are worth trying. They have varying levels of challenge and interest. Fool's Errand has a gamut of puzzles ranging from trivial to extremely hard, and the final puzzle is great. The story is incoherent and disjointed, but it still somehow feels right. There's a reason the story is incoherent and disjointed, one that won't become apparent until the endgame. And given the metaphorical, archetype-resonating nature of the Tarot, which underlies the game thematically, its somewhat playful and wandering nature fits.

Someday, hundreds of years from now, there will be a sect of monks in orange robes who spend their days performing simple chores, fasting, and meditating for hours upon hours on the deeper layers of meaning in The Fool's Errand. You'll understand why when you play.

Puzzle Gallery: At the Carnival is, on the whole, a weaker game. The puzzles are easier, the plot nonexistent, and the humor in it is a bit sophomoric (Johnson uses the theme, At the Carnival, as an excuse to vent some of his bitterness about his own stint working at various amusement parks. It doesn't really gel.) One interesting attribute of Puzzle Gallery is that all of the various games are open from the beginning — you can jump around and solve whichever ones interest you. This puts me in a bit of a bind. This is the sort of setup that I would normally claim to like. I'd write long, snotty articles talking about how stubborn game designers insist on giving us boring, linear gameplay, and why can't they just let us choose how to manage our own happiness? But the truth is that without the choke points that are present in the other two games, it feels rudderless. The constraints in the other games, where you have to solve some puzzles to proceed, lead to more of a sense of accomplishment. Of course, the flip side of that is that it can be frustrating when you hit a puzzle you just can't solve. I'm not sure what the correct solution to that problem is, philosophically. Perhaps there is no perfect solution.

3 in Three is the strongest of the games. It has high production values (most of the story is told through semi-animated cutscenes), is well-written, and the puzzles range from low difficulty to fiendish. 3 in Three tells the story of a little numeral 3 that is dislodged from its cozy spreadsheet home due to an errant power surge. The 3 must travel through all levels of the system, fixing problems as she goes. Everything about 3 in Three is great. If there had been a Windows version, I probably would have declared this to be the Playable Classic, rather than The Fool's Errand. The endgame, in particular, is a logic puzzle in the style of Everett Kaser's deduction games, and is tons of fun. If your machine can play 3 in Three, I recommend it before the other two, unless you have some sort of creepy psychosexual fascination with the Tarot, in which case Fool's Errand will give you tinfoil-hat material for years to come.

The Puzzles

There are many different types of puzzles in The Fool's Errand, and there's a limit to how deeply I can describe them without spoiling them. But some discussion is possible. The most common type of puzzle — or at least, it feels as if it is — is the simple jigsaw puzzle. These are sometimes made a little tricky by the subtlety of the images overlaid on them, but by and large they are straightforward. After a while, you almost look forward to them as a break from the other, more frustrating puzzles. Similarly, there are word search puzzles, exactly like those from Games magazine that you did in the back seat of your parents' wood-paneled station wagon when you were a kid. Apart from those, most of the puzzles require more thought. There are several mazes with special rules that aren't obvious until you start trying to solve them. Many of the puzzles are word-based, such as crosswords (usually cryptic). There are several fun ciphertexts presented, and a number of what I think of as "machine" puzzles, where you have a bunch of buttons that you can press which cause transformations to occur to some word or picture, and you need to figure out the rules well enough that you can reach a sensible answer. And, of course, there's Thoth, a fun little two-player card game. Hmmm. I wonder how much work a standalone Thoth program would be.

There are also 2 puzzles in the game that depend on idiosyncracies of the original MacOS's user interface, subverting the player's expectations. These were playful and clever in 1988, but now they're just irritating. You'll know them when you hit them. If there was any one thing that nearly made me decide this game wasn't a Playable Classic, this was it. But given that these puzzles only represent perhaps 1.5% of the game, and given that they are actually still solvable today, I decided to view this as a wart rather than a tumor.

The puzzles in 3 in Three are more consistently clever, tending to focus more on English, numerical permutations, and machines. There are fewer pure crosswords and no word searches. If 3 in Three has a vice, it's that there is basically one puzzle too many of each type (the narrative obliquely recognizes this, too. Upon encountering the Nth "mesh" puzzle, basically a sort of 2 dimensional Rubik's cube, the 3 points her bitmap straight at the player and says "Ask me if I care." A risky question, that.) The first time I played 3 in Three, I found the meshes to be practically unsolvable, but when I came back to it after a few years their solution was obvious. Nowadays, it's the "manipulate the letters on a treadmill" puzzles that cause me angst. The best puzzles in the game, for my money, are those that approximate the deductive psychosis that subsists on all levels of the best of Everett Kaser's games. But you'll find your own favorite when you try it.

How To Get Them

The Fool's Errand is available for both Windows and Macintosh, freely and legally, at Johnson's web site. The other two games I mentioned are there as well. The Mac version of The Fool's Errand runs under OS X 10.3 (Panther) in the Classic environment (you'll need to set your monitor to 256 colors from the Classic control panel), and I've tested the Windows version on Win2k. The Windows version is a bit uglier, graphically.

If you have a Mac, I'd really recommend you try 3 in Three. There's no way to play that one on Windows without an emulator, unfortunately (but if you are willing to emulate, Basilisk II works well).

If You Like These...

I want this Tarot deck

I want this Tarot deck

Zarf (aka Andy Plotkin) developed a fantastic homage to Cliff's games, System's Twilight. I think it is as good or better than 3 in Three, and is now freeware and available on the web. Johnson's games are perhaps a bit easier for the new player to understand. Plotkin's puzzles are, on the whole, not only more challenging, but also a bit more refreshing. You will not have faced puzzles quite like these before, even if you've played the Johnson games. Most people I've talked to get stuck at some point in System's Twilight. But it's a game that's worth getting stuck on. System's Twilight is Mac (Classic mode) only, but works in emulation on Windows under Basilisk II.

Cliff Johnson himself is in the process of developing a sequel to Fool's Errand, tentatively titled A Fool and His Money. Perhaps ignoring the warning of its name, I have violated my usual "I don't pre-order games" policy and pre-ordered this one. There's just no question in my mind that it will be great. (No pressure, Cliff. No pressure.)

Resources

Collated for your convenience are some of the links from this article:

New Game Shorts

2005-04-07 · by psu

It has been a big couple of weeks for new games, so here are some short impressions of the new stuff flowing through the house.

Knights of the Old Republic: Sith Lords

Picked this up used at not quite full price. The best and worst thing you can say about this game is that it is more of the same light saber wielding force power throwing Jedi ass kicking. As before, the game starts out pretty slowly, and as before you will run through a series of mostly linear dungeons, er, planets where you get missions, kill stuff and generally engage in a lot of dialog and combat.

I've done the first two areas and then ran into a battle that kicked me hard, so I got distracted with other things. But, I fully plan to get back to this since it is my favorite RPG combat engine of all time. Also, games with save anywhere must be appreciated and savored.

Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory

Another game in this excellent series that offers more of the same. Gameplay, graphics, camera control and general balance have all been improved over the earlier games. But it all seems a bit easier. The new save anywhere feature makes the levels 10,000,000 times less tedious than in Pandora Tomorrow. You can spend just as much time playing the game, but it doesn't feel like suffering. It's super fun to experiment and play around with different ways to beat up the poor robot guards.

The co-op mode is a bit sluggish when the action is heavy, but is astoundingly well done otherwise right down to the fact that you can save the co-op game anywhere you want.

I haven't tried the multiplayer yet. I sucked at it last time. I assume I will suck this time as well.

Resident Evil 4

I got this "for free" at the Exchange, and it was worth every single game that I never play that I traded for it. Compared to Halo, or even Splinter Cell the combat system is sluggish, awkward, and generally sucky. Normally, I would throw this game away because it does not allow me to walk and aim my gun at the same time. But, RE4 saves itself by serving up an endless stream of slow zombies (oh sorry, "villagers") for me to mow down with my shotgun. The gruesome headshot animations alone are worth the price of admission. The graphics in the game look great, and the overall atmosphere is almost actually creepy. While the combat system does blow, your enemies are so slow that it is good enough to get the job done. So, my only real complaints so far are:

  1. Stupid savepoints.

  2. A sidegame early on that nets you a free weapon that turns out to completely suck.

  3. One of those hateful inventory systems where you get to carry a sniper rifle in a briefcase but to make the game "more realistic" or "strategically deeper" you can't just carry everything you see. I've never understood why games do this (this means YOU, Deus Ex: Invisible War).

None of these things has detracted significantly from the fun of blowing up zombie heads.

In This Day and Age

2005-04-08 · by psu

It's Friday and we're all tired here, so instead of the usual thoughtful and opinion filled piece of writing, I will just present a list of questions so vexing, so complicated, confusing or just plain stupid that I've never been able write a whole article about them.

  1. Why can't I aim my gun and walk at the same time?

  2. Why do people insist on eating rice, with chopsticks, off plates?

  3. Why did 2-d isometric games die?

  4. Just what is it about Elmo, anyway?

  5. Why does almost every game using a third person camera have camera problems? Why don't they all just use the scheme from the 2 or 3 that don't suck?

  6. When did they start packaging both hot dogs and the buns in groups of eight?

  7. Why do people keep developing dorky scripting languages? Don't they know that even if they made the world's most beautiful creation it really just doesn't matter anymore?

  8. Why do the plants turn into money when I hit them with my sword?

  9. Why do takeout food places make me order once, and then repeat the order again at the register?

  10. Why can't I buy winter clothes in February? Why do I have to buy all my winter clothes in August?

Amari Delayed

2005-04-11 · by peterb

No, I haven't forgotten -- the amari roundup is just taking a little longer to write up than I expected. Look for it in the next week or so.

Flying on a Jet Plane

2005-04-12 · by psu

I flew to California yesterday for some work meetings. I found this flight to be an interesting platform on which to ponder various aspects in our social makeup.

The Security Line

The security line is a funny place for me. Not really funny as much as hateful. Today in the security line, I noticed that one of the screens was playing a little animation about how to move through the line quickly, and about how The Government (e.g. the D.H.S.) was there to take care of you and make you safe. This made me think about two things:

  1. How the people who came up with this scheme to make me wait in a 15-mile-long line, and then making me unpack and take my shoes off at the end of the line, are always talking about how they are for less government.

  2. How utterly amateurish the production values were on the presentation.

I mean, these days I bet a third grader with Powerpoint or Keynote could have done something more compelling. Just who do we pay to make these public service announcements anyway?

Also, those "be sure to turn in people who seem to be acting strangely" signs were kinda creepy.

The Boarding Dance

While boarding the plane, I used to spend all my time wonder what, exactly, the tall, tanned, red-headed woman had packed into the footlocker that she was trying to heave up into the overhead. These days, I spend my time wondering what exactly the tall, tanned, red-headed chick is thumbing into her Blackberry that is so world-endingly important that she can't wait until she has a proper laptop on which to write the message. It seems to me that if there were a modern version of a slaver's yoke, it would be the Blackberry.

The In-Flight Movie

The in-flight movie has changed a lot too. Instead of one tiny screen at the end of the cabin that you can't really see, you get a dozen even tinier screens that are even harder to see. In addtion, at least half the people on the plane have laptops and/or portable DVD players and have brought their own movies and collections of TV shows.

It seems to me that the iPod, the GBA, and the laptop with bittorent have made the in flight movie completely obsolete.

Landing

Landing used to be quiet. The plane would land, we would get the announcement that we landed, and then the plane would peacefully roll towards the gate as everyone stared out the window and anticipated hauling their stuff down from the overhead. Today when we land, the wierd noises start. Soon, it sounds like I'm playing a never before released special level of The Legend of Zelda: The Frequent Flyer. What's going on? It's all the phones booting up.

Truly we are a nation of gadget dorks.

Rental Car

Entering the car rental place, there is a formation of business people spaced perfectly across the floor as if laid out on a parallelogramic grid. They are all in identical clothes with identically sized little rolling bags hanging off of their left sides, and laptop cases hanging off their right sides. They move forward out of the elevator and towards the pickup parking lot, almost in lock step. It's an amazing example of group synchronicity. I look forward, I look back, and I realize I'm in the crowd, with my travel clothes and my little rolling bag.

Ultrarogue

2005-04-13 · by peterb

In 1986, I nearly failed out of college because I spent so much time playing urogue.

That's not the game's fault, of course. No doubt if it wasn't urogue it would have been some other addictive little distraction that I found more interesting than my classes. But nonetheless, urogue ("UltraRogue v 1.03"), Herb Chong's little creation, was my bête noir, and so it has always maintained a barren little corner in my heart.

If you haven't played it yourself, that's not surprising. In the decades-long legal battles over who owned Unix, all of the rogue games became part of the collateral damage. There were a number of versions of the game, all descended from the original AT&T rogue, with varying names: UltraRogue. Advanced Rogue. SuperRogue. XRogue. You can think of them all as simply being "rogue, with More Stuff." Their legal status was uncertain. Even the people who owned them didn't really know whether distribution of them was OK.

The Game

Rogue, for those of you not familiar with it, is a text-based non-real-time role playing game. Your avatar on screen is a little at-sign, "@", who wanders around a crudely-drawn dungeon whacking monsters, represented by letters, on the head. Along the way your avatar will find magic scrolls, strange potions, magic rings, and the like. Your ultimate goal is to find that fabled artifact, the Amulet of Yendor.

UltraRogue (and friends) add More Stuff to this, such as character classes, so you can be a magic-user, or priest, or fighter. They add a much larger group of monsters, including greater gods and demons who are greedy for mithril and might summon you at a moment's notice. They add stores, where you can buy equipment. They add more and different types of equipment, and more artifacts in addition to the Amulet.

Compared to today's rogue-like games (Nethack, Angband, Diablo) the dungeons are simple; every level may have at most 9 rooms. Picture a tic-tac-toe board. Every section of the board might have a room (or, possibly, a dead end). All rooms are connected, although sometimes doors are hidden. This makes progressing through the game mindless in an extremely satisfying way.

The difficulty curve goes from insanely easy to insanely hard somewhere around level 20 of the dungeon. The deepest I have ever made it is to around level 50, collecting 4 artifacts along the way. It doesn't particularly bother me that I can't "win". Winning isn't the point of playing. It's like knitting. You play it just because.

The Source Code

The code for all of the Rogue Plus More Stuff games was nearly identical. Apart from subtle feature set differences, the main way you could tell you were looking at one rather than another was by who had ripped off and thrown away the AT&T TRADE SECRET copyright notice and replaced it with their own names.

Nonetheless, in the 80's I somehow ended up with the source code for both urogue 1.03 and Advanced Rogue 5.8. In the mid-90's, I ported both of them to then-current versions of Linux and BSD Unix, mostly so that I could play them.

Porting them is somewhat painful. All of the function signatures were (of course) K&R style, rather than ANSI C. They used ancient and long-obsolete forms of varargs macros, and deprecated interfaces to curses, the screen drawing package.

Perhaps the most evil portions of the code centered around save and restore. UltraRogue didn't really have data "structures" per se. They were more "data vague suggestions". Everything was a global. When you wanted to save the game, the program found the top of the data segment (using sbrk(0)) and wrote the entire data segment into a file.

Then when you restored later, the program read the file into memory and reset the data segment pointer to point to the blob of garbage you had just read in, using brk().

It is, in short, a minor miracle that save and restore ever worked at all, even at the time they were written.

I rewrote the save and restore code and got it working. I replaced the ridiculous memory management tricks with straightforward code that serialized all the interesting things in memory onto disk. Then at restore time, you just them back in in an orderly fashion. But it was still fragile, because I got bored about halfway through serializing every one of the hundreds of globals (per app), and decided to think of a better way to do it. What I eventually settled on — but never got around to implementing, because I had a day job — was that with about a day and a perl script, I could probably move all of those globals on to the heap. Once you have things on the heap, the technique of just dumping everything to a file and reading it back in again as a single lump becomes more reasonable.

On a whim, I decided to write to Herb Chong, putative author of urogue, to see if he'd let me release my patches to the 'net. Surely, I shouldn't be the only person to enjoy this bounty? Could I release the source to keep these relics alive?

Herb's reply, summarized, was: "No."

So that was that. In the end, It wasn't my code to give away, and while I felt no guilt about keeping copies for personal use, I wasn't about to stomp on someone else's copyright. Besides, I think it would be easier to reimplement the games from scratch than to completely salvage them.

I do still take them out and play them every so often, though.

And now, you can play them too. It appears that the Roguelike Restoration Project has succeeded where I have failed, in that they've manged to get clearance to distribute the source code. They've also done a lot of the same cleanup that I did years ago. There's still a lot of work left for them to do (particularly in save/restore), but I'm planning on offering them my changes. We'll see how it goes.

They've made a number of changes to the urogue interface that I don't like. But I suspect that most of my irritation with the UI comes from the fact that it's not exactly like I remember, which presumably won't matter to anyone other than me. Their version of Advanced Rogue is actually much closer to my Platonic ideal of urogue than is their version of urogue.

Try them all, and see which ones you like. And if you're not into knitting, you could always try letting the Rog-o-matic play for you. The Dungeons of Doom await you.

Crawl

2005-04-14 · by peterb

As long as I'm talking about rogue-like games, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention Linley's Dungeon Crawl. More baroque than rogue, but not quite so overburdened as (or, on the other hand, as polished as) Nethack, it's worth a look.

Death comes quickly in Crawl; at any given point, you are only two or three wrong moves away from an ignominious end. While on the one hand this sounds tiresome, it is actually a refreshing break from games like Angband, where the entire first 12 hours of the game consist of a walk in the park, and then the difficulty suddenly ramps up from "trivial" to "impossible" in the space of a few minutes. In Crawl, any time you see more than one enemy on the screen at once, you have to give serious consideration to running away as a viable strategy.

The game tries, with some success, to implement a Morrowind-like "gain proficiency in the skills you actually use" system, where practicing skills is more important, in an absolute sense, than what "level" you are. This creates a feeling of specialization in the characters that is somewhat lacking in games such as Angband and Nethack, where really the end goal is to acquire equipment that makes your character the all-singing all-dancing God of War. In Crawl, your character's skills matter much more than what he is carrying. This is exciting.

The only real downside to the game's relative immaturity is a crushing lack of in-game documentation (an aspect of gameplay in which Nethack is the gold standard). There's not a lot of "flavor" text here. It is a roguelike stripped down to essentials.

But sometimes the essentials are worth being stripped down to. People talk about the fact that Nethack literally has the kitchen sink in it as a virtue, but I think it's a vice. It represents, to me, a loss of direction, a nonsequitur if you will, like a fart joke in a Jane Austen novel. The entire existence of the Sokoban levels in Nethack are an example of something that would have been a good April Fool's joke — once — but now are regrettably baked in to the balance of the game, to the game's detriment.

Development on Crawl seems to have slowed down in the past few years. This is a shame. If there's anyone out there looking for a project to contribute to, I think you could do a lot worse than to contribute to this one.

In many ways, Crawl is Nethack without all the stupid junk in it. Anyone who loves the genre should give it a close examination.

The Dungeon Crawl website is here. There are binaries available for Windows and MacOS, and the game can be easily compiled on Linux or BSD. The wikipedia entry on Crawl has a nice description of some of the more esoteric aspects of the game, including its interesting skill and magic systems.

You Won't See Me Coming

2005-04-15 · by peterb

They nearly got me this time, with the pre-ordering thing.

Sometime around January, Bioware started sending me email (I registered with them, because I love them as a company and don't mind them marketing to me) about Jade Empire. They told me how that there would be a "Limited Edition," and somehow managed to imply, without actually saying, that if I wanted the Limited Edition, I would need to pre-order through them.

I came within a few minutes of doing it before my higher snark-functions regained full potency. "That's stupid," I told myself. "There has never been a videogame in the history of the universe where pre-ordering has served any purpose but to allow a vendor to draw interest on your money instead of you. Abide. The day the game is released, you'll be able to walk into any Wal-Mart or Target and buy it with no difficulty."

Of course, the snarky-me was correct. Yesterday I walked to The Exchange and bought it with no problems.

My transaction was very simple. It went something like this:

ME: "Hi, do you have the Jade Empire Limited Edition?"

THEM: "Yeah. $50, please."

ME: "OK."

THEM: "Have a nice day." My friend Nat forgot the Rule and went to the evil Electronics Boutique up the block. He told me about what buying the game was like. My (poetically licensed) vision of his transaction looks like this:

NAT: "Hi, do you have the Jade Empire Limited Edition?"

EB: "Did you pre-order it?"

NAT: "No."

EB: "You really should have pre-ordered it."

NAT: "..."

EB: "But yeah, we have it, here it is."

NAT: "Thanks. Here's my money."

EB: "You're really going to like it. Would you like a strategy guide with that?"

NAT: "No, thanks. Please take my money now."

EB: "The strategy guide rocks. It will really help you get past the plot twist."

NAT: "I don't want it."

EB: "It's wicked! You're walking along with your ally, when all of a sudden it turns out that Lan Di, the man who assassinated your father, is actually..."

NAT: "SHUT UP RIGHT NOW AND TAKE MY MONEY BEFORE I KILL YOU."

EB: "OK, OK, jeez, some people. Would you like a CD cleaning kit with that?"

NAT: [Dies of pulmonary edema]

The upshot of all this is that we will have a Jade Empire review sometime soon, and Electronics Boutique Delenda Est.

Jaded Empire

2005-04-19 · by peterb

As I mentioned the other day, I recently picked up Jade Empire . I've played it throughout the weekend and have some comments.

Jade Empire

Jade Empire

The game is, at its heart, Knights of the Old Republic only with Kung-fu masters and asskicking instead of Jedis and lightsabers. This is not a criticism. It's what every single person who buys the game is looking for. The summary is that Bioware has delivered exactly what everyone wanted, and I'm enjoying the game a lot.

On closer examination, the game improves on KOTOR in some ways but also (unsurprisingly) fails in some of the same places. Let's take a look.

As regular readers may remember, I wagered psu a case of beer that Jade Empire would use the same D20 engine, internally, as did KOTOR. I am lucky that psu doesn't actually drink beer, because I am willing to concede that I was wrong.

There's a lot here that feels like D20. There are still "stats" representing your overall power level, but they are far enough removed from D20 that they were clearly developed in-house. The combat system is completely new. Co-author psu referred to it as "Soul Calibur-like" but it's not as polished as that. Really, what you have here is a game that plays like an RPG but then, every so often, makes you play a round of Street Fighter.

Your character's stats (of course) determine his or her studliness in combat, as measured in three ways. Body feeds directly into the amount of damage you can take before keeling over and dying. Spirit determines the amount of chi you have. Chi can be used to heal yourself, to power magical spells, or to enhance physical attacks. Mind determines the amount of "focus" you have. Focus is used for attacks with weapons and also allows you to enter "focus mode" which slows the world down to a crawl, a la The Matrix (or as in the game Max Payne).

Instead of feats or skills, your character learns different fighting techniques over time and can power them up in different ways. There are bare-handed martial-arts techniques (effective against most enemies, including the undead), weapon techniques, magical techniques, and "support" techniques which don't deal direct damage, but instead cause special effects (such as slowing the enemy down, or draining their chi). Different techniques are more effective against different enemies, for different reasons. Learning to switch between them in the middle of combat is the key to success.

One way in which Knights of the Old Republic improved upon its Dungeons and Dragons predecessors was its unashamed elimination of drudgery. Inventory management? Gone! Carry as much as you like. Stat management? Click this magic button and the game will manage it for you. Save points? Surely you jest. Save every 30 seconds, if you like! (And I do).

Jade Empire brutally cuts the nonessential aspects of play even closer to the bone. Inventory management is reduced by getting rid of nearly every type of carryable item except weapons and "essence gems." You have character statistics, but the rock-scissors-paper nature of combat will require you to abandon subtle strategy and enhance them all at roughly the same rate. Your companions presumably have inventories and statistics as well, but you don't get to see them: the game manages them for you.

There's less drudgery. There's more fun, watching R get bigger. All of this is good.

What I'm enjoying the most is the plot. It has its cliché elements, but not to the level of being offensive. It follows the by-now-nearly-an-immutable-law-of-nature Bioware pattern: constrained sandbox beginning, wide-open "second chapter," and a more tightly scripted endgame portion. It turns out that your character — and I bet you didn't see this coming! — has a Mysterious Origin and a Very Important Destiny to fulfill.

You also get to decide whether you want to be good or evil. Oh, excuse me, I mean, if you want to "follow the Way of the Open Palm" or "be a disciple of the Way of the Closed Fist." This is one of only two areas in which the game disappoints. I understand the desire to provide an incentive to replay the game, but the implementation is clumsy; it shows me that the game designers were students of the Way of the Ham Fist. To be clear, I'm not complaining that the game offers the player the choice of being an insufferable puritan or a vile blackguard, I just wish they hadn't tried to formalize its effect on gameplay. It feels like they just wanted to reuse as much of the KOTOR design as possible, and in this one area I think that was a mistake.

The other (small) problem with Jade Empire is that, like its predecessor, it has terrible, terrible puzzles. As long as the game stays in its "find this person, and kick his ass" mode, it's fine. Occasionally, though, it tries to give you a puzzle to solve, and the puzzles are insultingly bad and trivial. The reasons for this are fairly obvious: Jade Empire is a mass-market game, and they are afraid that if they make the puzzles interesting "too hard" they will alienate a large number of players. This is a dumb attitude. Providing alternative routes around tough puzzles is one thing, but dumbing them down is just hurtful to everyone involved. If you really think that puzzles are going to ruin the game for your players, then there's an obvious solution: don't include any. Throwing in a few lame clunkers that can be solved through brute force just wastes everyone's time.

Since most of the puzzles are on optional quests anyway, this doesn't ruin what is an otherwise enjoyable game. It just tarnishes it a little.

Those complaints aside, I do want to reiterate that I'm having fun playing the game. I think you shouldn't believe the hype being heaped upon the game by, well, just about everyone. This is not a perfect game, by any stretch of the imagination, and the 9.8, 9.9 ratings being showered upon it by the gaming press simply demonstrate how meaningless such numbers are. Jade Empire is not a perfect game, nor an innovative game, nor a future classic. What it is, however, is a superbly balanced game. It is a game that most of its purchasers will play through to completion, and will provide a satisfying experience. I'm not trying to damn it with faint praise. Given how terrible most games (and specifically most RPGs) are, this is quite an accomplishment.

The cost of all this superb balance is that the game lacks daring. In places where the game's designers had opportunities to make something strong and sharp (such as the aforementioned puzzles), they instead intentionally made something soft and dull. I understand the tradeoff. Had I been producing the game, I might have made the same choice. But I can still feel some regret for the shadow the nonexistent, sharper game casts over the one I actually own.

If you have an Xbox, you should buy Jade Empire.

If you'd like a personalized Jade Empire name, be sure to visit The Inscrutable Denominator of Heavenly Glory, as well.

Signs of the Food Apocalypse, Part 1

2005-04-20 · by peterb

A real conversation I had at the grocery store yesterday:

Me: "Hi. Do you have any heavy cream?"

Employee: "Heavy cream? What's that?"And that was when I crumpled to the floor and wept like a jilted cheerleader. I know it was just one employee, but it's still depressing.

Evil in Residence

2005-04-21 · by psu

I never played any of the Resident Evil games before Resident Evil 4. From what I can gather, they were slow-paced with a weird camera system that made combat nearly impossible and a fairly bizarre story centered around an evil virus and zombies. The hype around RE4 was that it was different. Most of the rather enthusiastic press waxes lyrical about the new graphics engine and camera, the new combat system, and the interactive cutscenes. Every review also seems to make a point to claim that the game has no zombies. After playing through most of the game, I can agree with some of this, but anyone who thinks there are no zombies in this game must be partially undead in the brain.

Zombies, Lots of Zombies

Let's get one thing straight. This game is full of zombies. They may look like "villagers", or wear funny hats, or babble in Spanish. Most of all, they may not actually be dead yet, but they are still zombies. Strictly speaking, the story revolves around some sort of evil that has turned a huge number of otherwise normal people into mindless automatons of death. But don't let this fool you. They are still zombies. They shuffle slowly, they surround you, they grab you and wack you with weapons and most of all, when you shoot them in the head they explode in a rain of guts and blood and gore while they shuffle off to their ultimate fate. Then they fall over and turn into money.

You Shoot, Slowly

Here is how the game plays. You walk slowly into an area. You can only walk slowly, unless you hit the B key to move faster. You have to wonder about a game that dedicates an entire button for nothing but "move faster". Haven't they ever heard of an analog stick? You know, an input device that provides a smoothly varying set of outputs over a large range, which you could interpret as, I don't know, how fast I want to move. On the up side, the third person camera is fairly well done. It only gets in the way when you try to see around corners. The rest of the time it sits behind your shoulder, letting you peer into the creepy environments while still allowing scary creatures to surprise you from behind.

Anyway, you show up in an area, and some number of zombie bad guys appear. They shuffle slowly towards you. You stand in one place and slowly aim your gun. I gather that the aiming system is a lot better than the previous games. But it is still awkward, and I wish you could at least strafe. If the zombies were moving faster, or actually had any intelligence whatsoever, you'd be dead while you aim. Luckily, the game spares you by having most of the enemies move very methodically in your direction, allowing you to peg them repeatedly with the shotgun until they die. This process is a lot of fun, especially when you make heads explode in interesting patterns.

The game avoids becoming overly repetitive by changing up the nature of the combat once in a while. There are a few different kinds of scary beasts that chase you faster than the standard zombies. There are a few snipe and dodge missions, a couple of shoot things while rolling on rails sequences, and some stupid escort missions where you have to lead a girl around while she screams a lot. The hardest sequences in the game involve killing a lot of zombies while keeping the girl alive at the same time.

The game also does a great job of balancing fun and challenge. You find ammo and health packs when you need them, and there is this creepy merchant creature who follows you around the game and sells you new weapons and weapon upgrades. While the zombie hordes are always menacing, they are hardly ever completely overwhelming. This means that you get to spend most of your time blowing up zombie heads rather than worrying about resources, or replaying levels because you are dead. This means you spend most of your time having fun.

In summary, the meat of the game is the combat, and while it is awkward and sort of stupid, the combat is good enough to keep you coming back for more. But, this doesn't mean that the game doesn't do some stupid things.

A Lack of Puzzling Puzzles

Once in a while you have to solve a puzzle. There are basically two kinds of puzzles in the game: easy and stupid. The easy puzzles are of the form "find the key, unlock the door", or "turn a couple of knobs, unlock the door". The only trouble here is finding the right key or realizing which knobs are turnable. The stupid puzzles are annoying combinatorial problems that are not so much hard as just busywork. There is even a "move the 8 tiles around the 9 spaces" puzzle. Luckily, I came to the game late so all of the walkthroughs have the stupid combinations in them already.

Interactive Cut Scenes

One of the more interesting gameplay conceits in RE4 is the combination of cut scenes and action sequences. You'll come into an area, and a cut scene will start playing and suddenly the game will tell you that you have to mash the A button furiously or be crushed by a rolling boulder. For the most part, this mechanic provides a way to make you play the same cut scene over and over and over again until you mash the buttons in just the right order. As such, it is stupid and evil. There are a few places in the game where this mechanic is used well to provide a general sense of creepiness. But, I think Capcom were a little too proud of themselves, and the scheme is overused, especially in the boss fights.

You are not the Boss of Me

In between the fights, and the puzzles and the cut scenes that kill you are, of course, the bosses. Generally, the bosses follow the familiar pattern: the boss is big, the boss has a pattern of attacks, the boss has a single fatal weakness which you must read the walkthrough to discover and exploit. So, the boss fights go like this: run, run, dodge, run, dodge, shoot, shoot, die, die, get bored, read the walkthrough, run, dodge, shoot, kill the boss.

Some of the boss fights borrow the "mash this button combination or be destroyed" mechanic from the cut scenes. This can be annoying, since it's hard to do the button mashing if you are already holding down the right trigger and B to use your weapon and the buttons you have to mash involve either the B button or the triggers (which they always do). This is one of the ways that the boss fights ensure that you must repeat them at least 3 times, thus padding out the length of the game.

Even with all these complaints, there is at least one pretty original idea for a boss early in the game. And, there are a couple of boss creatures later in the game who are fun to kill with a single shot.

But ultimately these are still bosses, and bosses are stupid. So mark one more negative point.

Stupid Savepoints

The game has stupid save points. The only positive thing you can say is that they are at least close together.

Stupid Inventory System

The game has an annoying inventory system that allows you to carry a ludicrous amount of stuff, but not everything you find or buy. So you get to waste a lot of time shuffling things around in your box, and you get to waste money buying bigger boxes once in a while. Happily, this is only a minor annoyance, but you have to wonder why they bothered.

Back to the Good Stuff

While I have spent a lot of time whining about the stupid things in the game, I have to say that overall RE4 is excellent in spite of itself. In addition to the zombie killing, it does a lot of other things right. The environments have a great sense of scale, small or large, and at times they manage to generate an atmosphere of general creepiness and dread. This is pretty impressive considering that the game is well balanced enough that you are usually not in great danger of dying quickly (except for certain boss-like meanies). The rendering is stunning; as good as anything on the Xbox. There are even some pretty awesome lighting, fire and water effects. The game is courteous enough to attach a virtual flashlight to the back of your head so you can see while running around in the dark. The light isn't really there, but a certain glow does follow you around so you can see things. This is a nice touch. Finally, even with all the eye candy, load times are fast.

Overall, I have found RE4 to be a game that is superbly balanced, superbly produced, and a lot of fun. The fun that it provides more than makes up for the things it does wrong. If you have a GameCube, go buy it now. The upcoming PS2 version will probably play just as well, but it will look like ass.

Friday's Questions

2005-04-22 · by peterb

More musings on unanswerable questions that aren't actually significant enough to warrant their own long article:

Trivial as these questions are, they are the sorts of things that keep me awake at night.

What's Your Jade Empire Name?

2005-04-24 · by peterb

Like everyone else, we're currently absorbed in Jade Empire. A little while ago, my friend Nat was heard to say: "I could say Sagacious Zu over and over all day," to which I replied, "I need to write a little Javascript app for my blog that generates your Jade Empire Name. "

So I did. Without any further ado, I present What's Your Jade Empire Name (update: now, The Inscrutable Denominator of Heavenly Glory), the result of a good, oh, 10 or 15 minutes "work" writing some simple Javascript (don't look at the source. You'll go blind.)

Spread the meme!

The Breakfast Problem

2005-04-25 · by psu

In the almost 15 years that I've been back in Pittsburgh, the food scene here has for the most part expanded and improved in ways that I would not have imagined possible. I personally would not have believed that our humble city could now be the home of a Chinese place as good as Rose Tea Cafe, an honest-to-god Taqueria (Taco Loco in the South Side), or a Moule Frites place (Point Brugge Cafe in Point Breeze) in addition to several regional Italian establishments (Piccolo Forno, La cucina Flegrea, Lidia's). It seems to me that at this point in Pittsburgh's food history, we are finally seeing a growth period in great places specializing in excellent and authentic regional food.

So my question is: Why can't I get a decent "American" style breakfast?

It doesn't take much to make a good breakfast. All you really need are four things:

  1. Good eggs.

  2. Good potatoes or pancakes or some similar anti-Atkins food material.

  3. Good meat.

  4. Good strong black coffee.

The fact that these four things are rare in a place that serves breakfast is shocking, since none of these items is particularly difficult to prepare well. For some reason, most every place you try in the Pittsburgh falls down on one or more of these axes, the most common being either the potatoes or the pancakes. Most places can make an egg over easy without killing it, even if they can't do scrambled. However, it appears that there is an art to making pancakes and home fries that is just beyond the average cook. What you want in a pancake is something that is thick and airy without being heavy. What you want in breakfast potatoes is similar to what you want in perfect fries. Crispy on the outside, light and slightly starchy on the inside. Instead, we get a parade of thin and rubbery or thin and greasy or leaden undercooked pancakes to go along with stale, or cold, or boiled and burnt, starchy potatoes.

We have searched up and down the Pittsburgh area looking for the one place that manages it to put it all together, but we have never found a winner on a consistent basis. Here is a list of places in Pittsburgh that have failed me:

If you favorite place is on this list, don't feel bad. Mine is too. If you favorite place is not on this list, give me the address.

Nonexistent Games, Reappearing

2005-04-26 · by peterb

Last October I wrote about a Star Trek game for the Apple II that I remembered playing in the early 1980s. It had the somewhat disconcerting habit of spewing out page-long quotes from Marcus Aurelius's Meditations. It was so incongruous that I wasn't sure if the game actually existed, or if I was just remembering some sort of odd dream. The other week, to my surprise, someone wrote me saying: "Hey. I remember that game. In fact, I have it on a disk."

The problem is that this person's Apple II disk drive is completely broken, so he's not even sure if the disk is still readable. With luck, he'll be sending me the disk soon, and I'll try to recover the data from it and get it into a disk image form and onto the various Apple II archives on the net.

If that's the only good thing that ever comes out of Tea Leaves, I'll feel like it's enough.

In comments on that same post, Mark Josef asked about a game that eventually turned out to be Green Globs and Graphing Equations. I couldn't find a disk image of that game, but since that time, someone has written a simple Javascript version of the game. It's a little dodgy and doesn't run well in some browsers, but it at least gives a sense of what the original game was like.

So I am emboldened by this trend, and want to make more disappeared games return. So it's Stump the Game Geek time once again: pick a game that you used to play, that you can barely remember, whose name you've forgotten, and describe it in the comments below. I (or our Alert Readers) will try to identify it and tell you where to find it.

GT4: Final Notes

2005-04-27 · by peterb

GT4 Photo Mode

GT4 Photo Mode

Now that I have finally obtained a USB jump drive, I have been able to try out "photo mode," which means I have now tried everything Gran Turismo 4 has to offer.

My review remains the same: "meh."

DISH

2005-04-28 · by psu

In the South Side of Pittsburgh, on 17th about a block and a half south of Carson Street is a small house with a green awning. Under the awning is a door and a sign that reads: DISH Osteria and Bar. From the outside, the door is just another door in another blue collar Pittsburgh neighborhood. It's a skinny street with a beat up sidewalk lined with cheap looking row houses as far as the eye can see. But, if you walk through the door, you are transported to another place entirely. The place on the other side of the door is not of Pittsburgh at all. It is DISH, and it is fabulous.

Drinks and Specials

It's about 7:30 on a Wednesday night. We usually get there earlier, and with reservations, so we're not even sure we'll be seated. We end up sitting in the bar area rather than the main dining room. This is actually a feature, since the bar is where all the interesting people are anyway. Directly behind us is a large man and his girlfriend. The man's hair is an accidental sculpture of protein and gel, and his girlfriend's seems sympathetically rumpled, like how owners always look like their pets. They are having a good time with drinks and just a little food, a couple of appetizers. They are loud, but not obnoxiously so. In fact, this is true of the whole place. There is a general atmosphere of a lot happening, but not in the normal American way where you can hear all the conversations. Instead, they float underneath the music coming from the bar. The music is an eclectic mix of genres that I don't usually listen to. But, unlike most music in restaurants and bars, it does not make me feel like I have to hop over the bar and put a blunt weapon into the CD player. It's actually enjoyable.

One conversation that we can hear are two gentleman in black who appear to be ordering food to eat at the bar, since the dining room is too full. They commiserate with the bartender, the waitstaff, the chef, and anyone else close by.

Ten minutes in, we get drink orders and the specials menu. Hand rolled pasta with a saffron sauce, shrimp, tomato, maybe zucchini; a pork "t-bone" chop, and a halibut filet, pan roasted with a saffron seafood risotto and spinach on top. The food is described with a lot of words, but none of them are stupid.

We order appetizers and main course and then settle in to watch the show. The man couple at the bar have started act one of their eventual drama, delaying their food so they can run some errands. One leaves and begins an apparently endless cell phone conversation out on the street.

Appetizer

In a while, we get our first round of appetizers. A basket of bread and the house special mix of olives. These are presumably the same olives that you get at Penn Mac out of those huge buckets. We take them home and they taste like brine. DISH bathes them in some kind of magic elixir with oil, vinegar and dried herbs and they are transformed into little green and black works of art. We have to physically restrain ourselves from getting sick on the olives. My wife remarks that we never remember to come and just get the olives takeout. I remind her that ten years ago she didn't like olives at all.

The guy on the cell phone returns, and his partner gets up and runs outside, muttering something about cigarettes. Later we can see both of them out in the alley smoking. Our second round shows up. I have pan-fried shrimp with olive oil, grape tomatoes and a bit of basil oil in the middle of the plate. Karen gets a panzanella salad. Greens, ciabatta, oil, vinegar, tomatoes and cucumber mixed up in a bowl. Simple food, well-prepared.

As we finish the appetizers, the bar fills with people waiting for tables. An absolutely huge party gets up and starts filing out of the main dining room. Maybe 10 or 15 people, all young, all well dressed, all beautiful. They are from a dimensional reality that Pittsburgh has little contact with, but to which DISH seems to have a secret conduit. Even as they file out, one suspects that others from the same Eurohip clan will soon appear to replace them.

Entree

I get the halibut. Karen gets the strip steak, but with the sides from the filet because she wants the mushroom risotto. Her steak is a perfect medium rare. Not uncooked and raw in the middle like I got at Ruth's Chris. Not teetering on the edge of well done and gray like I got at the Lidia's brunch. Maybe I have bad luck with steak.

The fish is a calculated risk, as is all fish in Pittsburgh. But, for once the guy in the kitchen can make me a fish which is better than what I can do at home with the stuff from Whole Foods. I can't remember the last time this has happened to me in Pittsburgh (or in the rest of the country for that matter). I have pretty much given up on cooked fish in restaurants. But this halibut restores my faith. The risotto and the vegetables are also great, although, as always, the risotto is just a little bit undercooked.

As we enjoy the food, the man-couple returns to the bar. The cell phone guy puts his phone away and starts berating the cigarette guy. He finally slams the phone on the counter, mutters about how he can fucking argue with both of them until the end of time and stalks out of the place. His friend sits stoically at the bar and then just says "bring it on." The bartender assures the cigarette guy that his cell phone guy "will be back", she "just knows it." Cigarette guy despondently asks for the food to go.

Just as I have polished off my risotto, another huge crew of the pretty people file out of the main dining room. As they leave, a new couple shows up at the bar to replace them. Then a tall blonde woman appears and chatters into her phone in fast Italian. She sits down and has a cigarette. So, fair warning to all you people who are paranoid about secondhand smoke. The bar at DISH may not be your place. But, that's fine because it means more food for me. So, by all means, for the sake of your health, stay away.

It's at this point in the meal when we always wonder why they let us in. We guess that they have to have a certain quota of normal people to maintain the dimensional stability of the portal. Otherwise the whole thing would collapse and get sucked over to San Francisco.

Dessert

Our dessert arrives as the take out order is finally finished. The cigarette guy picks up his bag of food and hands over a pile of cash to the register. As he plods out of the place, the bartender tries to reassure him, but it doesn't seem to help. When he's out the door, she just sighs and mutters "unbelievable" under her breath.

Dessert is a chocolate bread pudding with raspberry sauce and some unfortunate strawberries on top. The berries are the only clear loser for the night and the only indication that we have not been dimensionally transported to some other city where there might be berries this time of year.

The coffee comes, and along with it yet another couple in the endless stream of fashionable people that appear and then disappear at a constant rate.

Both the pudding and the coffee are great. We pay the bill. We get up to leave and on our way out the door, we run into the Italian woman's friend. As you can probably guess, she too is tall, well dressed, blonde, and beautiful.

We go out the door, and we are back in Pittsburgh, on the South Side, walking up 17th street towards Carson. It's dark now and the lights are on in all the row houses, and the trash is out on the sidewalk for pickup tomorrow.

Welcome, Ineffable Tiger Wu

2005-04-29 · by peterb

Now that Mac OS X 10.4 ("Tiger") has been unleashed, it is only right and proper that I make available The Inscrutable Denominator of Heaven's Dashboard, ready for your Dashboard-using pleasure. It requires, of course, Mac OS X 10.4. Download, unzip, and double-click to install and run.

On the one hand, it's still the same garbage code, and the random number generator doesn't quite work right. On the other hand, I ported it in to Dashboard in just about 10 minutes, and most of that was spent dorking around with the background image. I didn't edit the code at all — it was a straight cut and paste job.

That, I think, convinces me of Dashboard's worth. It is so incredibly trivial to get something useful(*) in to Dashboard, that I have no doubt that there are going to more cool widgets than we can possibly imagine at this point.

(*) Yes, I understand that this particular widget is, in fact, not at all useful.

Tiger Launch Party

2005-04-30 · by peterb

So, it turns out that there are people who are really, really enthusiastic about Mac OS X, as I discovered at the Tiger launch party in Shadyside last night.

And now, I have photos to prove it.

Tiger Launch, With Actual Tigers (click to enlarge)

Tiger Launch, With Actual Tigers (click to enlarge)

Walking Feature List (click to enlarge)

Walking Feature List (click to enlarge)

Thanks to Jenny Ladd for the photos!

¡Taqueria Mi Mexico!

2005-05-02 · by peterb

In what is, I hope, another sign of Pittsburgh developing a thriving and growing Latin-American community, a new, authentic taqueria has opened in Squirrel Hill, on Murray Avenue near Hobart: Taqueria Mi Mexico. Today was the first day they were open the general public, so a group of us descended on it for lunch.

The summary: I will be eating lunch there every day for the rest of my life.

OK, I exaggerate. Taqueria Mi Mexico is nothing more than a decent taqueria with low prices and a wide selection of decently yummy tacos, tortas, and huevos. If we were in California, it probably wouldn't even be deserving of notice. It would be a decent taqueria swimming in a sea of decent taquerias. But this is Pittsburgh, where we have only ever had one decent Mexican place. Now we have two. That's a big deal.

And in my cosmology, cheap and unassuming eateries loom large.

I probably inherit this from my dad. I remember going out to lunch with him, looking for the Great American Hamburger. You never find that hamburger at nice restaurants. It moves around, frequenting bus terminals, train stations, greasy spoon diners, and the like. It's almost a truism that you can only ever find it at any given place once. Like a daffodil, the Great American Hamburger is ephemeral.

Taqueria Mi Mexico is not the equivalent of the Great American Hamburger, but it's pretty close. The tacos themselves are simple: soft corn tortillas, a little meat, some onion, and whatever salsa you choose to add. They've got a wide variety of interesting meats. In addition to what you'd expect (boiled pork, chorizo, etc.), there are also some more interesting choices: lengua (tongue), tripas (beef tripe), longaniza (a different sausage), cabeza (beef's head), and barbacoa (goat). They also have daily specials: today they had head cheese, and also cervellas.

So what separates them from Taco Loco on the South Side? Well, a few things. For one thing, they don't present themselves as a full Mexican restaurant. They're a taqueria. If you want rice and beans, go somewhere else. For another thing, the tacos are only $1.50 each. At that price, thanks to the famed Kielbasa-sandwich-at-Chiodo's principle, I'm willing to forgive a lot of mistakes.

But, fortunately, there aren't a lot of mistakes to forgive. On their first day of business, we got delicious tacos and interesting sodas in a nice, unpretentious atmosphere.

Let's get specific. Today, I tried the chorizo, the lengua, the barbacoa, and the tripas. The chorizo was spicy without being painful, and flavorful. It was probably the all-around favorite at our table. The lengua, which I was looking forward to, wasn't as good as what I've had at Taco Loco. In part, I think this is because it was a little too coarsely chopped, but it might have been cooked wrongly, also: it was a bit tough, which tongue shouldn't be. The barbacoa was enjoyable, but the real standout for me was the tripas. I'm not a huge fan of tripe, generally. It falls into that category of "foods I force myself to eat," except when it's in pho, where it somehow transcends itself. The tripe here was a revelation. Mostly, it tasted like the grill. That's not a bad thing. The consistency was like that of pan-fried calamari. Next time, I'm getting two of those.

They serve breakfast, but unfortunately for me open at 11 am. If I could swing by this place at 8 am and score some huevos con longaniza, I would be a very, very happy man (and also, let's be frank, probably dead of heart disease in short order).

Taqueria Mi Mexico. Know it. Love it. Go there soon. Tell them gracias for me.

Mechanical Narrative

2005-05-03 · by psu

Two things have stuck in my brain about games lately.

The first is a long thread at The Grumpy Gamer that starts out being about cut scenes in modern games, and quickly meanders off through long and interesting discussions about the nature of narrative and games. A lot of people in thread lament the fact that many modern games are really just linear slogs from cut scene to cut scene.

The second is a snippet from one of the "Making of Halo 2" documentaries that came with the special edition of the game. You see one of the Bungie developers playing Halo and the voiceover describes what he is doing. First he sneaks up behind an enemy and wacks him on the head, then throws a grenade, then cleans up the survivors with the machine gun. Finally, he snipes a few far away enemies to clear the area. The Bungie guy then says "the challenge in the game design is how to string together this same 30 seconds of gameplay over and over again for 10 or 15 hours and keep it interesting."

Putting these two thoughts together made me think about the structure of the games I've been playing recently. The thread on the Grumpy Gamer points out that most of the big ticket games these days really are just fairly simple journeys in a straight line through the "plot" of the game. It also made me realize even the best of these narratives are, when compared to other mature narrative forms, fairly infantile and juvenile. Consider:

Knights Of the Old Republic: Main character with mysterious past must travel forward through a series of areas in The Empire and discover her ultimate destiny, be it for good or evil.

Mario and Luigi: Save Princess Peach! Uh oh! Save her again!

Knights of the Old Republic 2: Main character with mysterious past must travel forward through a series of areas in The Empire and discover her ultimate destiny, be it for good or evil.

Halo 2: Bad ass space marine fights a one man war. Between battles, he watches cut scenes.

Jade Empire: Main character with mysterious past must travel forward through a series of areas in The Empire and discover her ultimate destiny, be it for good or evil.

Splinter Cell: Terrorists plan world ending mischief. Sam travels from locale to locale in search of the head terrorist to save the world!

Shadow Hearts: Main character with mysterious past must travel forward through a series of areas in The Empire and discover his ultimate destiny, be it for good or evil.

Of course, I'm not really being fair. It would be just as easy to take five or fix books, or movies, and paint them with a broad snarky brush the way I have done here. In fact, I seem to remember that it's been said that there are only three plots in all of fiction (or science fiction). But I think the main point stands. Many games follow formulaic narrative structures. The good games are crafted so the specific details of the game situation are interesting enough to keep the player engaged.

Similarly, most games depend on fairly simple and repetitive play mechanics:

Resident Evil 4: Shuffle into an area, shoot the zombies, find the key to the door so you can shuffle into the next area. After some number of areas fight a boss, repeat.

Splinter Cell: Sneak sneak, whack someone over the head, sneak sneak.

Jade Empire: Talk to people to find out where the bad guys are. Fight bad guys. Talk to more people to get side quests. Fight boss. Fly to next area.

Again, the good games craft their gameplay mechanics so that there is some apparent variety, or the core mechanics are so fun that you don't care if the game is repetitive (e.g. the Halo 2 Bitchslap).

So what is my long-winded point? I think it is that a lot of games combine repetitive game mechanics with enough of a simple narrative to keep the player moving plot point to plot point. The good games distinguish themselves by making the details of the narrative interesting, and by crafting the gameplay to avoid annoyance and repetition. In other words, good games give you something fun to do and then provide you with a little snippet of plot as a Pavlovian reward. This keeps you moving forward in the game.

The Grumpy Gamer generally derides the role of "story" or what I'm calling "plot" in games. But I think that however weak these game narratives are in some absolute sense, people do play games to see the plot play out. So, while many in the gaming community see the cut scene to cut scene structure as annoyingly juvenile at best and as a stifling straightjacket at worst, I think that there are good reasons for games to work this way. When well used, familiar formulas give the player clues about how far along she is in the current area and to some extent in the game as a whole. This sense of pacing and context can be an important factor in keeping the player interested.

This is not to say that this is the only way to make a game interesting. Many interesting games have no plot at all (e.g. tetris). Some of the best online games have almost no structure at all, but playing wth or against other humans keeps you coming back. Counterstrike is the best example of this kind of game that I know of.

But, even given all this, I don't think we should lament the formulaic structure of the plot heavy single player games. I think we should embrace the ones that work and strive to discover new ways exploit the strengths of the medium in that context. Meanwhile, I'll be happy to shoot some more aliens to get to the next cut scene.

Playable Classics: Star Control II

2005-05-04 · by peterb

I first encountered Star Control on the Sega Genesis. At the time, there wasn't anything to indicate that it would eventually lead to one of the best computer games I'd ever play.

"I must destroy you...for the children!"

The first game in the series was fun. Not Earth-shaking, not life-changing, but fun. It was, at heart, a dressed up version of the classic Spacewar game: meant for two players, each player controls a ship and tries to blow the other one out of the skies. They added to the classic formula by giving each ship unique weapons and powers as well as a unique look, handling characteristics, and a backstory in the manual explaining a little bit about the species that was flying it.

Combat in Star Control II

Combat in Star Control II

Each ship had a primary weapon and a secondary fire mode which often affected the enemy's mobility. For example, the VUX Intruder had a powerful but very short range laser. It's secondary fire mode was to release slow-moving blobs that tracked its opponent and, when it made contact, slowed him down substantially. The Chenjesu Broodhome fired long range missiles that could be detonated remotely and had a secondary fire mode where it released a device which sapped the enemy's power. The differing ships and weapons were not just graphical flourishes, but were significantly different. Choosing one ship over another had serious tactical implications.

Around this core mechanic they wrapped a trivial strategic game, a sort of glorified 3D risk. Each of the races in the game was considered to be on one of two teams: the "Alliance of Free Stars" or the "Ur-Quan Hierarchy." Players moved their ships through a hard-to-interpret rotating 3D map of star systems, and when two ships occupied the same system, they fought.

If you think this mechanic sounds similar to the superb classic Archon, you're right. And it's no surprise. One of the principals behind Star Control was Paul Reiche III, who was partially responsible for Archon. Reiche also worked on the seminal (though flawed) Starflight series of games. Starflight involved exploring a huge galaxy filled with interesting and amusing alien creatures and a dramatic, intricate, and slowly-revealed plot. It was engaging and exciting in 1986, but many aspects of the user interface failed to stand the test of time.

Star Control II takes the deep space exploration and epic plot style of Starflight, and marries it to the fast-paced, rock-paper-scissors arcade combat of Archon. The sum is better than its parts.

"Your behavior makes clear the very slight distinction between bravery and suicidal stupidity."

Star Control II starts with humanity defeated, crushed by the Ur-Quan Hierarchy, enslaved and confined to Earth. Through a series of fortunate events, you conveniently find yourself in possession of an immensely powerful alien vessel. You have just arrived in our solar system, and begin trying to find a way to free Earth and, y'know.

Save the Universe.

Scanning a planet

Scanning a planet

Saving the Universe, at least initially, involves traveling to many uninhabited planets and mining them for precious materials. Along the way, you'll find strange items. You'll see wondrous celestial objects. And you'll meet intriguing alien races who are by turns frightening, amusing, hilarious or irritating, and you'll kill some of them.

Your immensely powerful alien vessel can be used in combat, but if you lose it, the game ends. Fortunately, you can carry up to 10 smaller ships (with the aforementioned different strengths and weaknesses) to be used in combat on your behalf. This keeps combat interesting. Combat isn't, to my mind, the real point of Star Control II, though. The real point is talking to the aliens.

"It turns out that in their last lives, the Ilwrath were all shining beings of pure light and blissful love. They had reached the pinnacle of spiritual evolution and could go no further. They were perfection. And then, somehow they got just a tiny bit better and WHAM, they were all of a sudden totally evil. Wouldn't you know it, get too perfect and you wrap right around to evil."

It's difficult to talk in detail about the aliens in Star Control II without giving away details which would spoil the plot. There are a wide variety of them, vividly realized in very simply animated illustrations and enjoyable dialogue. The conversation trees are not unlike those you encounter in Jade Empire, although they're a little less safe. If you choose to be belligerent in the wrong place, the consequence could be losing a valuable ally in the war against the Ur-Quan.

The Ur-Quan (click to enlarge)

The Ur-Quan (click to enlarge)

The Ur-Quan themselves are superbly-depicted bad guys. They look a bit like Cthulhu, but somewhat meaner. They're highly intelligent, and highly motivated. This is one of the reasons I love the game so much. I love a game with enemies I can respect. The Ur-Quan aren't evil. They're just very, very motivated to prevent certain things from ever happening again, and have decided that conquering every sentient species in the Universe is the best way to achieve their goal.

The balance in dialogue is weighted towards comic relief early in the game and gets progressively more serious as the plot develops, although you can always find a bit of the absurd lurking somewhere, if you look hard enough.

The writing is good throughout. It ain't Dostoevsky, but it serves the tone of the game perfectly. The funny parts will make you laugh out loud, and the serious parts will make you think.

"Oh no! It's one of those ultra-gross humans again! Quick, hide your eye! AGGH! Look at the pulpy red thing in its mouth, how it wriggles and writhes like a wet blood worm and plays over the hard white nubs that protrude from its headbone! I think I'm going to be sick."

The universe of the game is immense. There are just under 500 star systems, all of which can be visited, most of which have planets, sometimes many planets. Many of these don't have anything to do with the main plotline, but the fact that they are there lends an open-ended feeling to the game that others have been striving (and failing) to emulate ever since. Yet the game is scripted such that it's almost impossible for you to simply be a lost wanderer, not sure of what you can or should do next. If you decide to disregard the plot and go noodling through obscure corners of the galaxy, it's because you are choosing to do so, not because you're lost.

The stars are all named after real stars, which is nice. Their actual locations have nothing to do with the real sky. I think I can forgive that.

The original game is not even remotely playable on Windows or Macintosh. How, then, can I designate this to be a Playable Classic?

In 2002, the creators released the source code to the 3DO version of the game as open source software. A group of dedicated fans took that code and created a fully-realized, multi-platform, OpenGL game called The Ur-Quan Masters (the Star Control name could not be used because it is trademarked). The game is available for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux.

The original soundtracks are available for the game, as are the recorded voiceovers for all dialogue, which are quite good. This adds an extra dimension over the MS-DOS version that I played in 1992. There are 50 slots for save games. You can save any time you're not in combat. You can play fullscreen, or in a window, at any number of resolutions. It works great.

"Now I am certain that you are an honest and friendly being who is forced entirely through unfortunate circumstance — the unreasonable hostility of the Universe — to travel the galaxy in a ship which, according to my sensors, is best suited for conducting planetary-scale genocide."

So in The Ur-Quan Masters we have a better than picture-perfect port of one of the best games ever developed, available for free, that runs on all major software platforms.

Truly, we live in miraculous times.

The Ur-Quan Masters can be downloaded for free at Sourceforge. (Update: psu was my Mac guinea pig and says that Mac users should download the "unofficial" version here, because it is a more turnkey install. Also, if you're on Mac OS X 10.4 ("Tiger"), make sure the "OpenGL" box is checked.)

If you are trying it for the first time, I truly envy you. You are about to play a game that you will remember for the rest of your life.

Enjoy!

Pan and Oven

2005-05-05 · by psu

Back when I first got my Tivo, I recorded too many episodes of a Discovery Channel series called "Great Chefs". What they did was to send a film crew into a restaurant kitchen and tape the chef making a dish or two or three off of the menu. Being something of a food geek, it was occasionally interesting to watch someone really brilliant making something really excellent. In retrospect though, the show was pretty annoying.

However, after watching a few dozen episodes, I did notice and learn one critical thing. Always use the stove and the oven at the same time, especially when cooking portion sized pieces of meat and fish. With this in mind, here is an easy way to make perfect fish filets every time.

First, you go to Whole Foods and buy a good piece of fish. Whole Foods helpfully wraps the fish in a sturdy paper that is lined with plastic. For my purposes, rich medium thick pieces of fish work best. This means snapper, salmon filets, halibut, red trout and so on.

When you get the fish home, unwrap it and put it on the counter next to the stove. Keep the paper underneath the fish and dust it on both sides with flour, salt and pepper. Turn the oven on to 350-400 degrees. When the oven is hot, put a pan on the fire. When the pan is hot, put butter and olive oil and throw the fish in the pan. Roll up the paper wrapping and throw it out. No dishes!

Brown the fish on both sides and then put the frying pan in the oven. Cook for about 3-5 minutes for each inch of thickness, depending on how well done you like it. You should not like it that well done. For longer cooking times, turn the fish once.

When the fish is done, pull it out of the oven and let it rest. It will continue to cook while resting, so it is best to take it out underdone and let it get just right.

Serve with pan fried spinach and Whole Foods tater tots (really, I'm not kidding).

The key to this technique is that the pan puts a nice brown sear on the outside of the fish but the oven provides even all around heat so you can get the fish cooked through without burning it.

You can, of course use this same trick for steak. It also works well for frittatas.

If you want to get fancy, you can also deglaze the pan with wine and make a nice sauce with some shallots, stock and butter. Red wine, demiglace, shallots and butter is an especially nice combination on top of that New York strip steak.

Scopes Redux

2005-05-06 · by peterb

I don't normally just link to other weblogs without a connecting article, but I think that Red State Rabble's continuing coverage of the kangaroo court trying to re-introduce creationism in Kansas is self-explanatory, and import enough to warrant a bare link.

Remember: if this sort of skullduggery succeeds in Kansas, it's likely that Pennsylvania is next.

Take This .sit and Stuff It

2005-05-09 · by peterb

Dear Mac Developers:

I know very well that software developers are creatures of habit. Given a tool that does roughly 80% of the job we need to do (such as Emacs, or the X Windowing System), we are inclined to grab on to it with both hands and refuse to let go until we are forced to.

Today I would like to try to force Mac developers to stop using Stuffit. Stuffit is evil, and must be destroyed.

First and foremost, Stuffit is an application that, under OS X, serves absolutely no useful purpose. Every single thing that Stuffit does is done better by services that are built in to the operating system. If you are distributing your software in .sit form, then every Mac user in the world has to do extra work in order to use your software. More to the point, you are doing unnecessary extra work to ship your software (and paying money that would be better spent on pizza and coke, to boot.)

It's so silly, so wasteful, so wrong. Even if you feel that creating a compressed disk image with Disk Utility is too much work, you can make a distributable archive that's more compatible, easier to use, and faster to both pack and unpack. Go to the Finder. Choose a folder. Control-click on it and choose "Make an archive of this folder." Congratulations, you now have a zip file that can be distributed to your users (and, since Stuffit will uncompress zip files, you're not even leaving your three or four OS 9 users out in the cold.)

Amount of extra money you had to spend to package and compress your software: $0.

Amount of extra money your users had to spend to uncompress your software: $0.

Number of additional programs your users have to download or purchase to uncompress your software: none.

Relying on Stuffit is even more foolish now that OS X 10.4 "Tiger" is out, because Stuffit Expander doesn't ship with the OS anymore. I don't know why, but it doesn't particularly bother me; as mentioned above, OS X supports the saner (and less encumbered) .zip and .dmg formats natively. Even after an archive install, Stuffit doesn't work out of the box — you have to reinstall. When I realized this, just for fun, I consciously decided to not install Stuffit at all to try to simulate the new user experience (after all, if my Grandma bought a new Mac, she'd have no idea that Stuffit even existed, right?) And what I've noticed is that there are a surprising number of applications that are distributed in .sit form (or even worse, BinHex) for no good reason whatsoever.

It's just force of habit.

So unless you're targeting your application for Mac OS 9 (in which case I hate you), using Stuffit costs you money (because you have to buy the packaging app), prevents some percentage of users from using your app at all (because they will never buy or install Stuffit), and makes those who do have Stuffit installed go through a little bit of pain (because they have to sit there while a comparatively super-slow Stuffit process forks and does its thing).

Furthermore, each successive edition of Stuffit has become more and more facehuggerware. If you go to Allume's web site and try to download the "free" edition of Stuffit, you'll end up downloading the time-limited demo of their full product, which nobody in the entire world actually wants. Basically, Allume deserves some sort of Annoyance Award for managing to craft an app distribution mechanism that is actually worse than RealPlayer's. Ask yourself: what conceivable justification does one have for installing an extension to run a user-level uncompression routine? After you upgrade to Tiger, Stuffit Expander stops working until you find (by hand!) the "Stuffit Engine" file and put it into the right magic directory (or, you can just give up and reinstall Stuffit from scratch). It's as if the idea that an application should be self-contained is repulsive to the authors of Stuffit. The only way they could possibly make their software less pleasant to install and use would be if, whenever I double-clicked the application, bees flew out of my Mac's USB port and stung me in the eyes.

Don't believe me? Here's a sample of the comments up at versiontracker on this issue:

Unbelievable: Allume are now up on my "most hated" list, surpassing Real. If you try and download StuffIt from their website you HAVE to give them a valid email address, so that they can spam you and try and persuade you to buy the "deluxe" version.

The thing that I find maddening here is that the makers of Stuffit are trying to facehug their way into getting you to pay for a service that already works great for free. And, apparently, they've done a good job of fooling people into thinking their format is essential, since lots of newly developed Mac apps (for example about half of these games) are compressed with Stuffit.

Once upon a time, Stuffit solved a real problem. Today, Stuffit is the problem. I appreciate that the guys at Allume have every right to try to make a buck. But I say sincerely, and without malice, that I hope they are forced to find some other way to make that buck. Write an app that does something the OS doesn't do for me, or that at least does it better.

Here's my challenge to you, Mac users. When you upgrade to Tiger, don't even bother reinstalling Stuffit expander. Spread the word to the people providing your apps that you'd appreciate getting them in a reasonable format (such as zip, dmg, or dmg.gz) that doesn't require you to download third-party software.

Additional Resources

There are some other things that lazy developers use even though they're really quite horrid. We've written about quite a few of them here:

¡Taqueria Mi Mexico! Redux

2005-05-10 · by psu

Since we live there part time now, I thought it would be fitting to provide a bit more commentary on the new Mexican place in Squirrel Hill.

The Big Picture

Go there, now.

Some Extra Details

In our previous episode, Pete recommended the chorizo, barbacoa (goat), tripas (tripe) and lengua (tounge) tacos. I can vouch for these recommendations and add that the longaniza (spicy sausage), carnitas (roast pork), and cabesa (cow's head) tacos are also yummy.

As nice as the tacos are though, three other items in the place stand out as my favorites.

First, the green salsa that they set out has evolved to be a truly fantastic condiment. It is a hearty mix of tomatillos, green chili peppers, cilantro, onion and maybe just a bit of avacado used as a thickener. Spicy without being overly hot. Thick and rich without being too heavy. It's perfect.

Second, the tortas are really good and are possibly an even better value than the tacos. You can get tortas with all of the same fillings as the tacos. In addition, they come topped with onion, avacado and jalapenos, and the whole thing is squished between thick slices of fresh bread. My favorite is the chorizo. It seems to strike the best balance, and the spice from the sausage really makes the bread taste good.

Finally, Jarritos Lime Soda. Yum. Too bad they've been out of it the last two days.

So there you have it. Go get some.

Amari Tasting (Part 2)

2005-05-11 · by peterb

The drinks are poured

The drinks are poured

The first part of this article can be found here.

As the drinks were poured, Lidia entertained us by talking about how they are made. Generally, amari are built on a base of strong alcohol that has been infused with herbs, roots, and sometimes fruits.

They occupy a strange space because of their dual role as both pleasurable and medicinal drinks. Italians are big on this. Pick up any bottle of mineral water in Italy, and somewhere on the label will be a little testimonial by a chemist from the University of Bologna (or wherever) stating that drinking L'Acqua di Cavilfiore is good for the digestion and urinary health. Because you need a chemist to tell you that drinking water will help you empty your bladder.

But make no mistake. They are drunk for pleasure as well. Bitter tastes are valued because they have a tonic effect, cleansing the palate between meals. As we were about to discover.

Amaro Nonino

Amaro Nonino

We decided to follow Lidia's advice and taste the liqueurs in order of bitterness, from mildest to strongest. First up was Amaro Nonino. This is Dave Wagner's favorite, but since he's a regular visitor to their distillery, he admits he might be biased.

Laura: I like it a lot. It's sort of orangey-liquoricey. It's not particularly bitter. It reminds me of some Mexican coffee I had recently that you make with sugar, orange rind, and coarsely ground coffee — it's actually similar in flavor to it.

Steve: Sort of a hint of white pepper, maybe? You have the orange that's sort of burnt, and there are warm spices as well.

John: It has very much a pine overtaste to it. The pine flavor is slightly similar to rosemary. It's subtle, not at all as bitter as I expected.

Ann: I, unfortunately don't have much new — it's sweet and its orangey and it isn't very bitter and there is a spiciness to it, with pepper.

Kilolo: There's almost a hint of cinnamon to it.

Ann: Yes, definitely.

Peter: I really like the texture. One thing I don't like about some amari is there's a syrupyness to them. With this one there's almost an effervescence to it, it almost evaporates off the tongue. The taste — I agree with John it's not whacking you in the face with its bitterness.

Lidia: At the end, after the alcohol and the pepper — the taste travels in your mouth. I would say in here there are perhaps 30 different elements. Cardamom, yes? Anise, which all of these will have in some amount. And many others. Trying to distinguish all these tastes is part of the pleasure.

David: I was visiting the Nonino distillery once and when I was alone with one of the distillers tried to get him to at least give me a hint as to what was in it. "Come on," I said, "you can tell me." And he just smiled and said "Of course! Just as soon as you tell me the formula to Coca-Cola." The distillers really do view their recipes as secretively as Coke views its formula. So while we can guess what's in these, we'll never know for sure.

Ann: I have to say, I'm really enjoying just smelling these and comparing them. One smells strongly of butterscotch, one smells like mint, others smell strongly of oranges. I didn't expect this variety of scents.

Amaro Nardini

Amaro Nardini

The second drink we tried was the Amaro Nardini, which has the distinction of being based on grappa, rather than a more traditional alcohol. Laura immediately took to it.

Laura: Wow. Just...wow. It flows right past the center of my tongue. It's an odd flavor, and odd location. It's like a stripe right across the center of my tongue.

Kilolo: This reminds me of being home in bed, and stuffed up.

John: Like Vick's VapoRub.

Ann: I don't know if I would necessarily choose this because it is too medicinal for me.

Lidia: This is from the region closer to venice, where the tradition is for a more assertive amaro.

Peter: The aroma would probably push me away from choosing to drink this, but I want to say something positive about it, which is that it is much less sweet. Much less cloying. The Nonino left an aftertaste in my mouth taste like caramel, and this left it a bit more refreshed.

John: It has a more pronounced lingering bitterness too. More like what you'd find in a Campari.

Laura: I actually like this. One of the reasons I seek out things like this is because they're giving me something new. This is giving me a completely fascinating sensation.

Lidia: What you're talking about is really the pleasure and the enjoyment of why we eat. It's not just to nourish us, although it is nourishing, but there is also something spiritual. To be in tune, to have different sensations awaken.

Peter: And this is built on a grappa base?

Lidia: Yes.

John: That's surprising to me. I don't like grappa, but I do like this.

Averna

Averna

Next up was one of the classics, the Sicilian bitter Averna.

Peter: I find this almost indescribable, but somehow this just shouts "chocolate" to me. I mean, it doesn't taste anything like chocolate, but at the same time it tastes exactly like chocolate. OK, that makes no sense, but it's true.

Laura: (laughing) It makes me sneeze! But I agree with Peter, it's very chocolate-feeling, somehow. It's almost tastes like a candy bar I get from a store in the strip which has candied orange peel in it.

Peter: It's sweet, but not really fruity.

John: It's almost more difficult to distinguish than the last one. It tastes like bitter butterscotch to me.

Ann: Yes, very butterscotchy. It's very full-bodied. I can feel it leave a tail down my throat.

Lidia: Averna is from Sicily, which I think is one reason that it has so much more fruit than the others. The chinotto, the bitter orange, is very evident here.

At this point, halfway through the candidates, I noticed that everyone seemed more relaxed, more animated. As the bottles were passed around, the glasses were being refilled more generously. A few cheeks were flushed as we moved on to Amaro Montenegro. The Montenegro was a glowing, crystal-clear amber, as compared to the other drinks which were mostly dark brown, drab, and opaque.

Peter: This one intrigues me because its color is so different from the others. So visually it's the standout.

Kilolo: It looks like a jewel.

David: In terms of our setup here, going from least assertive to most, this is what I really perceive as the turning point to the truly bitter ones.

Lidia: It's very elegant. It doesn't depend so much on the sugar, or the caramel. It's a nice extraction. It has a nice homogenized flavor.

Peter: This literally tastes like — you can just see some guy in your mind's eye with a bunch of alcohol and bunch of roots and sticks, mashing them up.

Laura: Yeah, the bitterness, the bitter herbal flavor here is quite in your face.

Ann Funge, tasting

Ann Funge, tasting

Ann: This is almost floral.

Laura: But it is a very bitter orange scent.

David: It all marries well

Lidia: Montenegro is made in Bologna. It is more of an herbal base. In Sicily, there are more oranges, fruits, and you can taste that in the amari. There is a scent of orange here, but not as strong as in the Averna.

Steve: It's almost an orange blossom aroma, rather than orange. I used to live in Florida, and the aroma of oranges was one of the best things about living there. You get that sort of lingering, heavy aroma that's really nice.

David: It reminds me of an Italian sunset, because that's when I first tasted Montenegro. I was in Montalcino, with a glass of Montenegro, looking out on a sunset over the hills.

Peter: There's almost an overtone to it that reminds me a little bit, although it is much more elegant, of Retsina.

Ann: Retsina is oily, though. This isn't.

Kilolo: To me it tastes like lemongrass.

Laura: If you wait long enough, it tastes almost smoky, in the very back. You have to wait for it to develop though.

Peter: The depressing thing to me is that I look at this array, and I know there are people that wouldn't even try these. If they tried them, they wouldn't like them, but that's a different sort of depressing. What really frustrates me is that they wouldn't even make it into the glass.

David: So you have to make it your mission to get people to try these.

Ann: I was saying to Peter earlier, before we began the tasting, that there is romance to all this stuff, with the image of it. Peter and I are both big romantics, and I have a feeling that that's why we both like this sort of thing. And I think that's kind of how you have to sell it — as this romantic thing, conjuring up an image of a lifestyle.

Steve: There's also the natural aspect, the old-fashioned honesty of the herbs, the mixtures --

Peter: And don't forget that if you drink these, you get to pretend to be a sophisticated Italian. That counts for a lot! "Ah yes, when I return to my farm in the hills of Umbria..."

Lidia: I think what Steve says is true. One of the things these really have going for them is they really are all natural. Most liqueures are made with chemical flavorings. Here, they really are steeping bark, herbs, fruits, and so on.

Steve: Today, people are eating things that are terrible that they perceive as medicinal. I'd think that this would be an easy sell.

Cynar

Cynar

Peter: And mentioning marketing brings us to Cynar. And I'm sorry. We need to contact Cynar's distributor. We need to invite their representative here. And then we need to walk them around the restaurant with the bottle to watch people recoil in horror at the artichoke on the label. It is the worst label I've ever seen.

Kilolo: Where did it come from, though?

Ann: Wasn't the artichoke symbolic of something to the Romans?

Lidia It's supposed to be good for the digestion. Like artichokes, it actually contains a little cynarin, which stimulates bile production.

Peter: The other problem for me is that I like artichokes, and so I'm always angry at Cynar, because it doesn't actually taste like artichokes. But enough from me on this.

Laura: The interesting thing about this is that I'm completely unable to identify the smell. It just doesn't register — it smells like Cynar. It doesn't smell like anything else.

Lidia: It smells like Chinotto.

Peter: Yes, wow, that's it! It smells like Chinotto. It's this soda made from the bitter orange. I like bitter sodas, but the Chinotto soda is truly foul.

Laura: You fed me that soda once! I should have never let you talk me into tasting it.

Peter: I was trying to get rid of it. I was desperate.

Ann: This makes a really fast transition from sweet to bitter.

Steve: And there's a real smokiness to it.

Laura: Yes.

David: It's interesting, it's like what is appealing in America or is not. The Cynar name, the label and the artichoke are all of great value in Europe. Why compromise them for Americans? It's a big subject in the rest of the world where they are adapting to the American palate because it's the biggest market. Look at the Mondavi effect, where the artesianal winemakers are losing out to the big, Wal-mart-ized wine makers in each country. It's a real shame.

Laura: I agree that Americanizing the flavor would be a tragedy, but I'm not sure that Americanizing the label would be such a bad idea in this particular case. I mean, even before I knew what it was, I'd see it in the state store and say to myself "What the...I'm not drinking artichoke liqueur!"

David: But you noticed it...

Laura: That's true.

Fernet (en ensemble)

Fernet (en ensemble)

We were down to our last glass: the archetypal amaro: Fernet Branca.

Peter: In Europe, this is famous, and I've never had it because the State Liquor stores here are terrible.

Laura: It tastes like Pine-Sol. It's itchy and piney. Not in a bad way, but it...hmmmm.

Peter: I always thought that Branca Menta, where you mix this with creme de menthe, was about trying to make it mintier, but now I realize the creme the menthe is to cut it or make it smoother. Or make it not hurt quite so much.

Ann: It has almost a powdery or a talcum-like aroma.

Laura: I think it would be nice to pour this over ice cream.

David: I think that tasting them as we are is appropriate, but if you were having this as a digestivo, it would be on the rocks.

Peter: I like it, but not without reservations. Some of these others, like the Montenegro, I would force a guest to try and then if they didn't like it I would yell at them and try to figure out what was wrong with them. But this is so over the top and intense that I would not insist that a guest enjoy it as much as me. Of course, this is my sixth drink, so maybe that's why I like it.

David: I think that for me the Nonino is the one that I consider the best introduction.

Lidia: Also, you can put this in coffee, in espresso.

Ann: For me the most notable aspect is the chalky aftertaste.

Laura: This just feels like it should go in cream to me somehow.

Ann: It's overpoweringly bitter.

John: This is not light. It's less mellow than all of the others combined. I'd like to give this to my dad and see the look on his face.

Having tasted all the drinks, we sat back and reviewed what we had experienced. The clear favorites were the Nonino (as a gentle introduction) and the Montenegro (as a somewhat more assertive and interesting choice). The Fernet was mostly eyed with fear and awe, even by those of us who liked it. Laura felt the Nardini was unique and loved it because of how it felt in her mouth, but the rest of us viewed it as tasting and smelling too medicinal too be enjoyable. The Averna, we agreeed, was balanced but perhaps a little too sweet, and fared worse from being immediately compared to the Montenegro. No one except Lidia was really willing to stand up for Cynar.

Hopefully, the designated drivers (and you, dear reader) will get a chance to try some of these soon. They are interesting, unique, and can be found or special ordered at most liquor stores.

Salute!

If you enjoyed this piece and would like to read more about amari, Laura Valentine has written about her experiences at the tasting with great eloquence .

Tea Leaves would like to thank everyone who made this possible: Lidia's owners Lidia Bastianich and Dave Wagner, and Lidia's of Pittsburgh manager Michael Fitzurka, as well as our panelists (John Barbera, Anne Funge, Kilolo Luckett, Steve Posti, Laura Valentine) and their designated drivers, who had to watch us drink delicious liqueurs and then listen to us talk about them incessantly for the rest of the day. Thanks also to psu, who took the photos, and Chetan Ahuja for videotaping the event, making this transcript possible.

The Consumer Rule

2005-05-12 · by psu

Buying shoes used to be easy. You'd go to the store, try on two or three pair in your size and pick the one with the closest fit. You could also count on being able to go to the same store a year or so later and get another pair of the same sort without too much trouble. In our modern economy, this has all changed in the name of maximizing choice. The forces of "fashion" and "competition" conspire to make shoes change more often than the mission statement of a late 90s new economy web startup in search of a buyer. The result is that on those rare occasions when you do find some pair of shoes which do not look like spotted pastel moon boots and also happen to fit your feet, the chances of you finding the same pair in the same store a few months from now is practically zero.

Therefore, I have formulated the following rule for dealing with this problem: When you find something you like, buy five (5) copies of it right now.

Of course, this problem, isn't limited to shoes. Almost any product that you can name has this problem. In recent months I have applied the rule to my purchases of

If I could afford it, I'd buy a couple copies of each of my digital cameras, the video camera I own and enjoy, but which is not in production anymore, my network basestations, and perhaps my laptop computer. In retrospect, it would have been nice to have been able to clone a few copies of our previous minivan, since the newer model has completely ruined the front panel interface. But, alas, the rule is not practical to apply to everything.

I find it baffling that the world has to work this way. I find it annoying that I have to worry that every single thing I buy will be gone in a week, after I decide that I like it. Finally, I find it sad that the companies that make these products are under so much pressure to "grow" that they will do so at the expense of having a consistent and predictable product line.

While I'm complaining, just why is it that you can only buy winter clothing in the summer?

The Best Review Money Can Buy

2005-05-13 · by peterb

Jane at GameGirlAdvance writes an apologia for game review puffery, as a result of Gamespy getting busted perverting the central message of one of their writer's reviews. The executive summary of her article is "editing game reviews is so very hard!"

Huh? No, it isn't. Why are some authors and editors so intent on pretending that it is?

Anyone who tells you that this is a difficult, thorny problem is telling you a bunch of apologist, industry-shill claptrap. They are part of the problem.

The idea that shilling for the industry is somehow only unethical if you make a change in a review because Nintendo calls you up and demands it is ludicrous. Part of being a professional reviewer is having credibility. Credibility means that the reader has reasonable confidence that you're not so overwhelmed by the "selfless generosity" of the content producers that your reviews self-redact. Gamespy (and Gamespot, and many other sites who rely on press releases for regular content) self-redact because they know full well which side their bread is buttered on.

Regardless of whether or not Nintendo picks up the phone.

There's not a single game writer at the major sites with as much credibility as the lowliest newspaper movie reviewer (I, in my infinite sagacious wisdom, of course, have that credibility, but I don't really kid myself that I have a significant audience. And I pay for most of my games, specifically to avoid this issue.) Who, exactly, should we blame for this state of affairs, if not the people who choose to publish stories without regard to their credibility? When Roger Ebert says a movie is great, no one — no one — thinks for even a second that he's saying it because he liked the shrimp cocktail at the reception after the premiere. Where's the mainstream published game reviewer with that sort of credibility?

Not writing for Gamespy.

The other aspect of this is that of editing the writer's work. There is, as Jane points out, absolutely nothing wrong with "editing." The problem is that there is a bright line between copyediting and completely changing the meaning of a piece. To pretend that not crossing this line is challenging or difficult is disingenuous and, dare I say it, dishonest. Anyone skilled enough to be editing a magazine (even an online one) knows full well the difference between editing for readability on the one hand and changing the adjective "terrible" to the adjective "awesome" on the other. One of those is the rightful province of an editor, and the other is a violation of standard journalistic practices, and requires taking an extra 5 minutes to pick up the phone and get the author's approval. Even if you, as the editor, have screwed up and not allotted enough time for a proper editing cycle.

Jane's questions about how to fix the problem are insulting. "Oh, how can we ever solve this terrible situation? Reviewing games is so very difficult. Surely, I can't imagine any way to untie this Gordian knot without a revolution."

Here on Tea Leaves, we don't rate games in terms of stars, or little mushrooms, or indeed on any sort of a scale. As psu eloquently said to me this morning "The whole idea of ranking games is stupid. We don't rank shoes."

All that's needed to write (and edit) great reviews is a commitment to clear writing, a desire to be something other than an industry shill, and the strength of character to keep your published words consistent with that desire. One easy (though not comprehensive) measure that I like to use is noticing what percentage of a site's reviews are devoted to undercovered games (such as excellent shareware, freeware, or those published by indie game studios) as compared to those that are devoted to the same old high-marketing-budget garbage. That's the package you need to write great and credible reviews.

Some of us have that package. Greg Costikyan has it. Gamers With Jobs has it. Curmudgeon Gamer has it. Gamespy doesn't. Gamespot doesn't.

Well, how about it, Jane? Do you have it?

Raise a Glass

2005-05-16 · by peterb

Today, the U.S. Supreme Court invalidated antediluvian and protectionist state laws that prevent direct sale and shipment of wine by out-of-state vendors to consumers, at least in states which allow direct shipment by in-state wineries.

The case, Granholm v. Heald, can be obtained online. It remains to be seen whether this will have any practical impact in Pennsylvania, since I'm uncertain if PA allows direct shipment of wine by in-state wineries to consumers.

But I'm in favor of anything which has even a chance of damaging the quite useless and offensive State monopoly on alcohol sales. Here's a toast to the hope that the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board is suddenly about to earn much less revenue.

Update: Eagle-eyed reader Julie Watt, webmaster of celiacnet.com, points to two articles in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette indicating that the rulings do affect Pennsylvania, and that the LCB is currently mulling over forbidding in-state wineries to ship to avoid having to allow consumers to have more choice. Read the articles here and here. Pennsylvania: cutting off its nose to spite its face since 1883.

Books in a Blender

2005-05-17 · by peterb

Tonight, we began playing with book titles, rewritten to include references to food. Or videogames. Or both. We very quickly settled in to a groove. Here are the results.

  1. The God of Small Things That Taste Like Chicken. [peterb]

  2. The God of Stupid Console Savepoint Systems [psu]

  3. Love in the Time of Super-sizing [peterb]

  4. One Hundred Years of Solitaire [peterb]

  5. The Moor's Large Fry [agroce]

  6. Haroun and the Sea of Splinter Cell [magus]

  7. If On a Winter's Night a Deep-Fryer [peterb]

  8. The Decline of the Civilization [fpereira]

  9. Perdido Street Savepoint [magus]

  10. Waiting for the Barbarians to Cook my Chicken [agroce]

  11. The City of Cod [fpereira]

  12. Pilgrim's Pancakes [magus]

  13. The Book of the Long Island Iced Tea [agroce]

  14. The Two Tacos [magus]

  15. You Shall Know Our Cholesterol [peterb]

  16. A Tale of Two Fritters [agroce]

  17. Goodbye To All Fat [peterb]

  18. To Saute A Mockingbird [magus]

  19. For Whom the Taco Bell Tolls [magus]

  20. A Clockwork Orange Julius [magus]

  21. The Malted Falcon [magus]

  22. Julia Childs and the Goblet of Wine [peterb]

  23. Atlas Lunched [magus]

  24. Imperial Chicken Earth [baird]

  25. The Island of the Meal Before [peterb]

  26. Slaughterhouse Fries [magus]

  27. Name of the Rose Tea Cafe [peterb]

  28. A Passage to India Garden [magus]

  29. The Unbearable Lightness of Souffle [sdavis]

  30. As I Lay Frying [magus]

  31. The Remains of the Snack [peterb]

  32. To Serve Man [agroce]

  33. Love in the Time of the Coleslaw [fpereira]

  34. Finnegan's Clambake [magus]

  35. Pride and Bread and Juice. [baird]

  36. The Postman Always Brings Rice [magus]

  37. Lord of the Fries [fpereira]

  38. The Buns of August [magus]

  39. Remembrance of Wings Past [fpereira]

  40. In My Father's Torte [fpereira]

  41. Do Androids Dream of Eclectic Sweets? [sdavis]

  42. Romaine and Julian Fries. [baird]

  43. Oryx and Cake [magus]

  44. Jerky Park [fpereira]

  45. For Whom The Boule Tolls [sdavis]

  46. The Archipelago of Goulash [fpereira]

  47. Mansfield Pork [agroce]

  48. The Mixer and Margarita [fpereira]

  49. Sandwich Personae [magus]

  50. Six Easy Peaches [magus]

  51. Tao Te Chicken [sdavis]

  52. Zen and the Art of Bakery [peterb]

  53. The Elements of Stirfry [magus]

  54. Twelve Hungry Men [sdavis]

  55. Fast Food Nation [tmwong]

  56. The Story of the O [tmwong]

  57. The Da Vinci Coke [magus]

  58. The Fridge [fpereira]

  59. The Da Vinci Cod [fpereira]

  60. Live and Let Fry [peterb]

  61. From Russia With Borscht [peterb]

  62. License to Grill. [tmwong]

  63. Life of Pie [magus]

  64. The Pizzan Cantos [agroce]

  65. In Search of Ancient Anchovies. [baird]

  66. The Reuben on the Rye [magus]

  67. R Is For Ratatouille [magus]

  68. A Candycane for Leibowitz [magus]

  69. The Latke of Heaven [magus]

  70. More Than Hunan. [baird]

  71. Free Liver Free [agroce]

  72. They Eat Horses, Don't They? [peterb]

  73. The Adventures of Sharkleberry Fin [magus]

  74. Starship Tapas [magus]

  75. Planet of the Grapes [jch]

  76. The First Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Sous-Chef [magus]

  77. Rendezvous with Ramen [agroce]

  78. The Bostonian Creams. [baird]

  79. The Book of the New Dumpling House [magus]

  80. Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad "Chicago-Style" Pizza [peterb]

  81. Green Eggs and Ham on Rye [magus]

  82. Alice in Wonderbread. [baird]

  83. The Bread Zone [magus]

  84. Harry Potter and the Half-Caf Latte [magus]

  85. The Lunchback of PF Changs. [baird]

  86. The Sandwich of Monte Cristo [peterb]

  87. The Three Musketeers Bar [peterb]

  88. The English Pot Roast [magus]

  89. The Polar Espresso [magus]

  90. Oliver Twist Bread. [baird]

  91. Cryptoyumicon [peterb]

  92. Burgers of Infinity [magus]

  93. A Civil Canape [magus]

Harry Up, Already

2005-05-18 · by peterb

Yes, I'm desperate for the sixth book in the Harry Potter series to be published, already.

I realize that in some circles this marks me as a rube, a sucker, someone sucking at the mass-market teat. The type of person who, if he wanted Chinese food, might go eat at P.F. Chang's.

I don't care. If Roger Ebert gets to like monster movies, I get to like Harry Potter.

I actually do agree with A.S. Byatt that J.K. Rowling does not, in fact, write beautiful sentences. She is not a writer's writer. She is, however, a superb storyteller who is crafting an intricate tale that is true enough to its archetypes to bestir recognition in most readers. And I like that she can flit back and forth between light humor and earnest seriousness so smoothly: that's a trick that other writers stumble over regularly.

So yes. I have the book pre-ordered at Amazon, and whenever I encounter an article about it, I read it. But that's not quite enough to fill the time, and the new branch of the Carnegie Library in Squirrel Hill just opened, and it turns out they have lots of books.

One of these books I picked up because Christina recommended it: Sorcery and Cecilia. Apparently, Susanna Clarke's Johnathan Strange and Mr. Norrell must have struck a nerve (or being cynical, must have sold fairly well), because suddenly you can't shake a stick without accidentally whapping a book about magicians in Victorian or Edwardian England. Thwap! Here's Sorcery and Cecilia. Smack! Here's The Bartimaeus Trilogy. One wonders what the next trend in light genre fiction might be. Religious cult leaders in 1920's Hollywood, perhaps?

In any event, I'm finding it an enjoyable, if somewhat silly, read. I'm often critical of fanfiction because I find it intellectually lazy: it feels to me like fanfiction writers are substituting someone else's developed mise-en-scene, characterizations, and overall setting and then grafting their plot onto it. And plot, generally, is the least interesting and unique part of a novel. To some extent, I feel like this epidemic of neo-Victoriana is similar: really, there are only so many Elizabeth Bennetts I can take before succumbing to despair. The fact that your Elizabeth Bennett is, say, evading a sinister spell in Covent Garden, or, let's see, having tea with Arthur Conan Doyle in Nevada, while helping Calamity Jane track down the murderer of her lesbian niece, Annabel Lee doesn't really improve the quality of the writing.

But, of course, I'm not reading Sorcery and Cecilia because I'm looking for superb writing. I'm just waiting for Harry. And in that respect, it fits the bill perfectly.

I've also been dipping into David Brin's Uplift novels, mostly because someone mentioned to me that they were the inspiration for the Star Control games. I'll have more to say about those another time.

Forza First Impressions

2005-05-19 · by peterb

Well, it's better than Gran Turismo 4, but...

Hmmmmmmmmmm.

I'm not feeling terribly optimistic today. I'll play it for a few more days before going in to more detail.

More Forza Thoughts

2005-05-20 · by peterb

I'm still not ready to give my full review, because I'm still evaluating the game.

That being said, I have spent the past 2 hours saying "well, just one more race," and my heart is pumping in a way that it hasn't been since the San Francisco tracks of the original Project Gotham Racing. So I would be remiss if the last thing I left you with for the weekend was my cryptic "Hmmmmmmm" from yesterday.

Visually, the game is unrivalled. Even though it obviously borrows a lot from Gotham 2 in terms of the game engine, it looks better. A lot better. The palette is richer than in PGR2, which was a game that was unremittingly swathed in the dark gray concrete of street racing. Good use is made of different times of day and sunlight and shadow. The cars are lovingly modeled, although they can look a little plasticky, at times.

Part of why I'm liking the game more than GT4, so far, has nothing to do with the game itself, but with the controllers. The Xbox controllers are a joy to use in driving games. The buttons on the PS2 controllers, while technically "analog" have so little feel that they might as well be digital. The Xbox has long triggers with deep throws, that are perfect for feathering through sharp corners. I'm convinced that the Controller S is the best possible hand-held controller for driving games.

The music sucks. But fortunately, it supports soundtracks, so I can drive to Los Straitjackets or Shadowy Men on a Shadowy Planet, instead.

But at this point, I think I'm on the verge of saying too much when I haven't played enough to be sure that I'm accurate. Rest assured, I'll be spending the weekend driving and writing, to give you the full scoop next week.

I just won a Lancer Evolution VIII from a hill climb race, and it's time to take it for a spin.

Ask the Audience

2005-05-23 · by peterb

Today I saw the first hour and 40 minutes of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith.

Instead of sharing my incomplete opinion of the part of the movie I saw, let me ask you: is it worth going back to see the end, or should I just wait for it to come out on DVD? Due to unforeseen circumstances, I left shortly after Anakin formally became Darth Vader.

So how about it? Shell out a few more bucks to see the end, or just wait until I can rent a DVD?

...Or Anything By Tom Waits

2005-05-24 · by peterb

In 1988, LSD was popular among some people at Carnegie Mellon. So much so that when a number of people had "bad trips," the administration released a public service announcement warning people: "The acid with the picture of the sunshine on it is bad, and has been causing bad trips. Stay away from the 'bad acid'". Then, of course, for the rest of the academic year, absolutely everyone on campus used "Whoah, bad acid!" as a catchphrase.

The April Fool's edition of the school paper that year published an article talking about how the Dean of Student Affairs, whose first name was Brad, was offering to "test" any drugs that students should come across, free of charge. The (fake) article concluded with the ditty the Dean urged students to remember at all times:

Drugs are yucky
Drugs are bad
Take all your drugs
and give them to Brad!

I was working as a computer consultant for the general computing department at the time, as was my acquaintance Chris Rapier. The graveyard shifts were always a strange mixture of mind-numbing boredom punctuated with moments of transcendent weirdness. There were the people pulling all-nighters to finish their assignments (they bathed), the people who just hung around the computer clusters all the time (they didn't), and people who would wander in and out for various other reasons. Meeting friends. Eating pizza. Picking up printouts.

Chris and I were working a graveyard shift once, and some Birkenstock-wearing types were wandering through, obviously baked out of their skulls, giggling and pointing and ahhhing over everything in that supercilious tripster way.

Now Chris — well, it's hard to describe Chris, especially because I didn't know him that well at the time. He had a mohawk, and wore the punk rock attitude, but somehow it wasn't annoying because you could tell, deep down, that he knew that he was just as full of crap as the guy wearing a suit and working at the bank. He understood that the regalia wasn't proof of a lifestyle, but just a costume with pretensions. He wore it well.

But Chris was always doing crazy, stupid things, because they were fun. And seeing the tripsters wander through made me wonder about something, and we had the following conversation:

Pete: "Hey, Chris?"

Chris: "Yeah?"

"I have a question. I've been wondering — have you ever done acid?"

"No, why?"

"How come? I'm not criticizing you for not doing it or anything, but it seems like the sort of thing you'd do, just because it would cause chaos." Chris took his feet down from the desk, got up, and began to file some printouts.

"You know, Pete, that's an excellent question. It does seem like the sort of thing I'd do. Let me explain the reason why I don't do hallucinogens. On the one hand, it's true that they might lead to interesting experiences and open my mind to new vistas. On the other hand I have to balance the fact that tripping people annoy me. They drive me nuts, and I always want to freak them out and scare them and make them have a bad time. And so I know that if I tripped, after a little while I'd start to irritate myself, and then I'd decide that I should freak myself out, and I'd go up to a mirror and try to convince myself that my face was melting, or that my brains were leaking out my nose, and then they'd have to admit me to the psych institute the next day."

This, it seemed to me, was a truly excellent answer to my question, and I went on with my shift, satisfied. I've always remembered his response, and thought about it from time to time.

And it is upon remembering that conversation again, recently, that I was inspired to come up with this simple thing: a list of songs to play to throw irritating hallucinogenophiles into bad trips.

Picking songs that accomplish this is trickier than you might think, because depending on how completely obliterated your target is, he or she might not actually have enough functioning neurons to listen to the words of whatever songs you're playing. So your choices need to not just have a liminal message that will mess with the addled mind when they think about the words, but also need enough power, dissonance, or force in the music to shake up the dumbest of droppers.

Listen to them. Love them. Keep them loaded on your portable music device at all times.

And by all means — suggest your own additions to the list.

1. Pixies - "All Over the World" from Bossanova (lyrics - iTunes)

The only question with the Pixies is which Pixies songs won't cause a bad trip. But "All Over the World" is the king of the castle. Evil vocoder processed voices? Check. Enigmatic lyrics with mysterious radioed-in messages like "Better call the ranger...got a train derailment"? Check. Aggressive yet addictive guitar riff that will echo in your target's head until they are doubled over in anguish, trying to claw the invisible spiders out of their eyes? Check. This is my pick for "Most likely to require several years of psychotherapy to recover from."

2. Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds - "Jangling Jack" from Let Love In (lyrics - iTunes)

"Jangling Jack" is a harsh song on a harsh album. Both the music and the lyrics are nasty, brutish, and full of malignancy. I think it's a great song, but more so than any other song on this list I have to warn you that I've never met anyone else who likes it: it seems to repel people on an almost subconscious level. But it's high on this list because underneath the driving noise is a pop song riff that will pull your high-flying victim down to earth to investigate. At which point they're toast.

3. Crosby Stills Nash and Young - "Cathedral" from CSN (lyrics - iTunes)

This one is a beautiful sucker play. It wins on several levels. First, it starts off gently, floating and melodic. You could close your eyes and bliss out to it. Second, the narrator in it is (it is implied) dropping acid. So there's a self-referential loop that will begin to disorient your el-salvadoran-non-exploitative-coffee drinking friend. Then the tone changes instantly to a full on religious-crisis panic, as the narrator starts obsessing about all the people killed in the name of Christ, so if the tripper has any cultural connection to Christianity, they're instantly punched in their spiritual solar plexus.

4. Negativland - Christianity Is Stupid (lyrics - iTunes)

A driving mechanical drone. A sampled repeated voice declaiming: "Christianity is Stupid. Communism is good. Give up." Look, I'm an atheist and this song somehow creeps me out (while at the same time, making me laugh). Fire it up and test out just how open a mind can be.

5. Nina Simone - "Sinnerman" from Anthology (lyrics - iTunes)

Finishing up our trio of religion-related songs, Nina Simone delivers "Sinnerman" with an angry intensity that can't be mistaken as anything but hostile, even if you're not paying attention to the words. If you'd like a secular choice instead, you could safely substitute Simone's rendition of the Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weill class-warfare saga "Pirate Jenny." For some reason, no one else has ever done this song justice, in either English or German. Simone captures the raw, unbridled, impotent hate in the libretto perfectly. (lyrics — iTunes)

6. Richard and Linda Thompson - "Shoot Out the Lights" from Shoot Out the Lights (lyrics - iTunes)

After recording Shoot Out the Lights, Richard and Linda Thompson divorced. If you make a happy tripping couple listen to this song, there are good odds that they'll divorce too.

7. Rollins Band - "Obscene", from The End of Silence (lyrics - iTunes)

This one is almost too easy, and I feel bad including it. But, y'know, what can you do? You just gotta have some Henry.

8. Roy Orbison - "In Dreams" from various albums (lyrics - iTunes)
This one really only works if the soon-to-be-cowering scapegoat has seen the movie Blue Velvet. It's the song you might remember as "The Candy Colored Clown They Call the Sandman."

9. Bob Mould - "Anymore Time Between" from Bob Mould (lyrics - iTunes)

Bob Mould plays every instrument on this incredible album, and despair just oozes out of every note: but the amazing production values will keep the dazed and confused mesmerized while they succumb to it. You could also substitute, more or less, any song by Mould's old band Hüsker Dü, but that might also be considered "too easy."

10. Jane Siberry - "The White Tent The Raft" from The Walking (lyrics - iTunes)

I've always had a soft spot for Toronto-area musician and songwriter Jane Siberry, who knew so little about production back in the day that she wasn't averse to just continuing to pile on layers of sound until the listener was drowning in them. Like "Cathedral," this is another song that will lull the target into a false sense of security, with its pastoral, almost lyrical opening. It's unlikely that they suspect that they'll shortly be jerking spasmodically, unable to make the pain stop as the syncopated schizophrenia of Siberry's music (and stream of consciousness, emotion-filled lyrics) fill their brain and leave no room for restful mandalas. The other nice trait of "The White Tent The Raft" is that it's about 8 million minutes long, so you can make the deep hurting last for a while.

Now, I'm not suggesting that anyone who ingests mind-altering substances should necessarily be subjected to this treatment. I'd probably save this sort of abuse only for those people who really deserve it. My rule of thumb is that if you use the word "entheogen" in place of "hallucinogen", or if you're wearing one of those stupid multicolored produced-by-indigenous-peoples knit caps, you're fair game. Everyone else is mostly safe.

That's my list. What's yours?

Additional Resources

Whine and Spirits

2005-05-26 · by peterb

Every so often, I think that I've reached some sort of plateau in terms of how much I hate the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board. Then I make some stupid mistake, like shopping at a Pennsylvania liquor store again, and I discover new vistas of animosity and contempt.

I drove up to Cranberry tonight to get a bottle of Amaro Montenegro, because the PLCB's web site indicated it was one of the only stores west of the Susquehanna that had any. The Cranberry store is promoted as a "Premium Collection" store by the Liquor Control Board. That means that it supposedly has a better selection, nicer atmosphere, and more knowledgeable staff than the other stores.

The Premium Collection store is better than what State Stores were like when I first arrived in Pennsylvania in the late '80s. Back then, a liquor store was basically a counter with a catalog on it, and a huge storage room. "Hi," you'd say to the cashier. "I'd like a bottle of #24601." The guy would then go into the back room for a while, leaving you alone. Ten minutes later, he'd come back out front to tell you that they were all out of #24601.

So the Premium Collection store is better than that. But since I haven't seen many advertising campaigns lately along the lines of "McDonald's! Our French Fries Don't Have Fingers In 'Em!" or "Coke! Sucks Less Than Diphtheria!", I'm going to say that's a pretty low target to be reaching for.

I found the Montenegro in short order and then remembered that sometime last year I had bought a very nice 3 point Tokaji Aszu at the same store. I looked around a bit, but couldn't find it. That's when the fun began.

I approached a clerk. "Hi," I said. "I'm looking for a certain Tokaji."

I got a blank stare in return.

"Tokaji," I said. "It's a Hungarian wine. It's spelled t-o-k-a-j-i."

"Hmmm," he said, leaning against the computer on which he could check his inventory to see whether he had any of the bloody wine, "I don't think I've heard of that. I don't think we have it."

"Oh," I said. "Well, how about Amaro Nonino?"

"Is that foreign, too?"

Now it was my turn to give him a blank stare.

"Yes," I said, very slowly. "It is, as a matter of fact, foreign."

"Well then, we don't have it."

I gaped in disbelief.

And then I gave up. I spent another 10 minutes or so searching the store, found the Tokaji I wanted, and left. Later, a friend suggested "You should have asked them if they had any Scotch. I hear that's foreign, too."

This is what is so frustrating about the PLCB: the problem is the people. I'm always hearing people phrase the problem in terms of state-owned stores versus "free enterprise." But that's not it. Ontario has state-run liquor stores that are a pleasure to shop in. The LCBO is exactly like the PLCB in every way, except it doesn't suck. The stores are beautiful. The staff are helpful, and care about the product. You can taste selected wines in some stores (for a price, of course, and in strictly limited quantities).

No, the problem isn't that we have a State liquor system, but that we have a State liquor system that employs people who could not care less about satisfying customers. I don't care that this guy doesn't know what Tokaji is. In a store with thousands of products, I don't expect every employee to know everything about every product. But when a customer asks a question, I expect the employees to give a damn. I expect them to want to try to help. Or, at a bare minimum, at least pretend to care.

Are there good employees who work for the PLCB? Sure. I've met a couple. But they are outnumbered by the thousands upon thousands of slack-jawed know-nothings whose only purpose on this earth is to make me rue the day that they ever got a job.

The PLCB, which claims that part of its mission is "to provide the best service to [their] customers," is an utter and complete failure when it comes to retail liquor sales. It's too late to save it. It should be dismantled, shut down, annihilated, and then cut up into seven parts, which should then be buried in remote parts of the State and left to rot.

The PLCB monopoly on liquor sales has to go.

Additional Resources

The Perfect Storm

2005-05-27 · by psu

If you ever find yourself sitting in the F terminal of the FilthyPhiladephia International Aiport waiting for a U.S. Airways Express plane to take you back home to Pittsburgh, you know you have had a bad day. Every single person at the gate had the same story to tell. There was the woman who had been four hours late getting out of Seattle and re-rounted half way around the world and back to the F terminal. There was the Westinghouse manager who pulled into the gate with the only food he had had all day, a large latte, and a story about how his international flight had lost an hour at takeoff. And there were several people who, like us, had been two hours late taking off from Paris and, having missed connections, ended up here.

It's hard to think of experiences more unpleasant than spending 11 hours on an Airbus A330, but really, that wasn't the hard part of the day. It was the two hours in that nexus of human suffering that we humans call the PHL International Arrivals area that put me over the edge. I believe that U.S. Airways, the city of Philadelphia, the TSA, and the architects who designed the international wing of PHL all should be given some kind of award for accidentally perfecting the optimally bad customer service experience. It must have taken a lot of work over a lot of years to do this, but they nailed it.

Note: I usually try to keep this a family blog, but the following entry is, as Lenny Henry once put it, the result of all kinds of rude words dancing around in my head trying to get out, so be warned.

Everything started out smoothly enough. Up at 7am, packed at 8am, out into the absolutely perfect warm spring Paris day to get our last coffees at 8:30, back for the taxi by 10. All according to plan. The trip to and through the CDG airport also proceeded without major incident. By 12:45 we were on the plane with all of our toddler toys, videos, extra food and water, and ready for the long haul back to Pittsburgh. By 1:15 the plane was loaded and had started to push back. At this point, we missed a departure slot and were told that we'd wait 15 minutes to get to the runway. Then we were told that the plane had a minor technical problem, then we had a long taxi to get it fixed, then they powered down the engines to save fuel, then they told us we had to wait 30 more minutes for taxi clearance, then they turned the engines back on, then we missed another takeoff slot. Toddlers and adults alike were getting antsy. Finally after two hours on the runway, we took off.

At this point, we should have made a strong decision that the connection we had booked was lost. We all knew this, and we told it to ourselves, but our resolve was not forceful enough. Anyway, nine hours passed on the plane with no major problems. I am here to tell you that if you think you have a good kid, there is no kid on the planet more perfect than mine. This is an objective fact. Name me the last time your toddler sat still on a plane for 11 hours non-stop making nary a peep. Yeah, I thought so.

We landed in Philly at 5:15. We had 45 minutes to get off the plane and make a 6:00 connection. In other words, we were completely doomed. Sadly, the crew planted the idea in our heads that we should hurry because there were 25 other people with the same connection, they might hold the flight, and besides, we needed to get to the rebooking line as fast as possible. As a public service to you dear reader, I am here to deliver the following message: When they say this to you on the plane or at the gate do not fucking believe one word of it because it is all fucking lies.. The truth was that we were more than an hour late on a two hour connection and no power in Heaven or Earth could have brought us to that connection on time. Four great trials stood in our way:

  1. Getting off the plane. An Airbus A330 is a big airplane. It feels like a small plane because the seats are so small (and I say this as a small person). But it's huge. If you have a seat near the front, you can get off the plane pretty fast. We did not have this luxury, and we had to wait for a couple of gate checked items. This means that we sat on the plane for 20 minutes waiting for it to empty, and then another 5 minutes while they actually found our stuff.

  2. International Arrivals. Out of the jetway we sprinted to the Immigration line. It's a couple of thousand feet from the gate down a long hallway with those walking paths that move. We even bypassed the whole crowed to get into the "wheelchair priority" line. But we could not avoid waiting there while the guy in the "wheelchair priority" booth spoke to a nice looking French man, no wheelchair or cane in sight, for 10 fucking minutes about the strange minutiae of PHL.

  3. The Great Claim the Bags and Recheck the Bags Dance. By now, if we had been smarter, our will would have been broken. But we kept hope alive, moving through the terminal as fast as we could. We were rewarded with a half hour wait at International baggage claim. But boy I got a good workout.

What I have never understood about dealing with connections on international flights in the U.S. is why they make you wait 20 minutes to pick up your bags so you can put them on a cart, haul them 100 feet past the customs guy who doesn't even look at them, and then another 100 feet to plop them back down on a belt.

A nice gentleman on the staff at PHL tried to keep us from ruining the rest of our day by putting the bags on a cart for us and taking them to the re-check area. When we reached the re-check conveyer, he tried to fight for the forces of good and tell us that our connection was dead and we should just sit in the rebooking line right there and then. This would have been the rational choice. If we had just rebooked, we could have rechecked the bags and made sure that they stayed together and knew where they were going and when. If we had rechecked, we would have given up the insane idea that we could get through the airport fast enought to make the connection.

Sadly, a tool of Satan himself was also there. He stood in the re-check area looking calm and competent informing people that if they hurried, they could just put the bags on the belt and make it to their connecting gates. So we stupidly complied.

  1. The TSA Shuffle, Remix. So we ran out of the re-check area looking for terminal A. It looked to be pretty close, but instead of hitting a gate, we hit the entire population of the plane we had just exited waiting in a TSA line having all their bags re-screened before they were allowed into the terminal. This, of course, was fucking insane. These bags were already screened before we got on the plane. In addition, the people doing the screening had big guns, and would shoot you if you did anything wrong.

I should be clear here: At this point our checked bags have entered the airport before we have because for some reason those bags don't have to be re-scanned. But, our carry on items, having been taken off the plane (which, as far as I know, had not blown up) and carried about a mile from the gate to this point, were now suddenly unsafe enough that I had to completely unpack half the bags, take my shoes off, and schlep 4 bags, a laptop, a stroller, my cell phone and a car seat through the x-ray machine because doing this makes our great and strong nation a fucking beacon for freedom and democracy around the world.

I say: fuck that. There is no fate too cruel and no punishment too grisly for the designers of this obstacle course, except they don't exist. This obstacle course was not designed. It evolved on its own through powers that we cannot control into a being of perfect customer service evil. It was bred carefully by multiple governmental and corporate agencies in the name of security, freedom, mom, and apple pie. But, instead of serving these goals in any way, it simply devours hapless travelers that venture too close to it, digests them and then spits them out on the other side of its gullet no closer to their goals than before entered.

After 1 hour and 20 minutes of frantic sprinting through this vortex of human suffering we finally got into the gate areas of the terminal, where we could find out that we missed our connection and the flight after it. It made me think: If only there were a global network of computers that could gather information about flight times, capacities and bookings and present this information at terminals remote to where it was stored, maybe when we got off the plane we could have already known we were fucked rather than running 3 miles through the airport to find out.

Final result: we boarded a U.S. Airways Express flight from Philly to Pittsburgh at 9:15, which was supposed to take off at 8:30, but didn't take off until 10:05. We got into Pittsburgh at 11pm, 21 hours after we woke up in Paris. As a bonus, only two of our three bags made it. I assume the third bag has flown back to France. We got home about 12:30, making the total transit time from Rue de Buci to Pittsburgh about 20 hours.

Acknowledgements

At this point, I would like to thank, and say a hearty fuck you to U.S. Airways, The FilthyPhiladelpha International Airport, the Transportation Security Administration, the FAA, and all the other great American organizations that made this story possible. I couldn't have done it without you. Keep up the good work.

Blueberries Spotted

2005-05-30 · by peterb

The pints of blueberries have arrived. I am happy, until late September.

Service with a Smile

2005-05-31 · by psu

Our last night in Paris, we found ourselves at Brasserie Balzar for dinner. This place is something of a landmark (even with its recent aquisition by a large corporation) in the center of the St. Germain area. The place is pretty popular, so it was with a certain lack of wisdom that we arrived sans reservations, much to the annoyance of the manager. We explained in our broken Junior High French that yes, we should have made reservations, but that we would be happy to take any table, perhaps the small one there on the terrace? Yes, that would be fine. Having made friends with the manager, we sat down to dinner and entertainment.

The terrace was being served by a single waiter. He was such a French Waiter that he could have been a stock character in a movie set in Paris where the main story goes through a café. He looked terminally frazzled and successively oppressed by his management and his clients.

There were two particular clients who were the main source of his pain tonight. They looked like an American couple of mixed race (Indian? Chinese?) who appeared to be in Paris for the first time. We heard the conversation in pieces, and it appeared to center around the existence, or not, of a "vegetable plate". The couple scanned the menu, asked the waiter about some dishes in fast English. The waiter attempted to explain to the best of his abilities, but the couple did not seem happy with this, and asked more questions. The waiter then fell back on just recommending one of a series of dishes on the menu that were salad-like. But the couple was still not satisfied. They did not want a vegetable plate, they wanted "vegetable dishes." Of course, such things were relatively rare. Through multiple iterations of this, the couple kept pressing until the waiter finally became patronizing and belligerent. But I was on his side. You need to understand two things about France to see why.

First, you have to understand that Balzar, like most traditional brasseries, serves primarily classic French dishes, heavy on meat, with a few seafood items in addition to coffee, dessert and drinks. The emphasis is on reasonably good food reasonably fast (by French standards). This means steak frites, various roast things, cassoulet, and so on. If you go to France, you should keep this in mind. A brasserie is not the place to find something off the beaten track. You go there because you know what you will be getting and you know they will do it well.

You do not go there for salad. Salad is a side dish that you might get along with your veal liver and fries, or your braised saddle of lamb or your steak tartare. What this couple did not seem to understand is that they had come to completely the wrong place for the meal they wanted. There exist any number of other places that will happily serve you a large salad (though generally not a vegetarian one) for dinner. But Brasserie Balzar is not that place. These people should have known this, or, having realized their mistake, should have rolled with it rather than being such a pain in the ass.

The second thing that you have to understand about France, and Paris in particular, is that if you are giving the service people a hard time, they will be rude to you. If you are self-effacing and especially if you admit to speaking bad French after a valiant attempt, they will treat you with some amount of sympathy. But if you blather at them from a position of ignorance, they will treat you badly.

This, in fact, is what happened to our happy couple. After one more iteration, the exasperated waiter started yelling and pointing at the menu. I had no sympathy. In my opinion, they were getting the service they deserved, expecting special treatment at a place they had chosen badly and giving the staff no reason whatsoever to give it to them.

At this point, the two gave in and ordered what he had recommended. He then turned his attention to us. Karen ordered a nice piece of lamb, and I ordered the steak tartare. He looked at me with astonishment.

"You know what this is?", he asked.

"Sure."

"It's not cooked."

"Yes, I know. A lot of people do not know this?"

"Yes. They order the steak tartare, or the andouillette (a type of sausage), and then they say, 'Oh, this is not what I wanted' and send it back. This happens all the time."

We knodded with sympathy, and assured him that we knew what we were getting. Although, I did misread the menu and I didn't get the salad I expected. This being my mistake, I snitched green beans off Karen's plate instead.

C'est La Vie.

NBA Street V3

2005-06-01 · by psu

One of my more beloved games on the Xbox was NBA Street V2. But, pulling off the advanced tricks with the Xbox controller was always too hard because the Xbox controller only allowed you three "turbos". Still, when you got in the right rythm, your little avatars could dance around, pass the ball off someone's head and then through the air to a thunderous dunk. This made for more fun in 3-on-3 than my other Xbox basketball experience.

So, when V3 of the game came out, I made sure to pick it up on the PS2 so I could use all four triggers for turbo dunking.

The new version of the game has a flashier look, more detailed character models, and a more complicated trick system. Rather than just holding down a trick button (square on the PS2), you can now hold the triggers down and push the right stick around to perform dribbling tricks. This seems cool, but in practice I can't remember more than 2 or 3 moves anyway. All the old dunks are still here, plus the magic head passes.

Minor complaints are that it seems to be hard to pull off the most advanced tricks without perfect timing on the turbos. Holding down the four triggers, plus circle and having your player move towards the basket is harder than it looks. Also, none of the camera modes are really quite right, which can make it hard to follow the game.

The other major gameplay change is the "interactive" gamebreaker. Here you make your player fly ludicrously high in the air, and if you are fast with the stick, and good with your timing you can throw the ball around and pass it to your teammates for a multiplayer alley-oop and rack up a huge combo that swings the score of the game up to 5 points in your favor. Again, this is flashy but too complicated for me, because I am old.

Overall, if you liked V2, V3 is more of the same, only shinier, and with online. I haven't tried the online, since my PS2 is not on the network. I wouldn't want to play this game with strangers anyway, since I'm sure to lose.

Fallout

2005-06-02 · by peterb

Apparently, controversy still rages about my article The Best Review Money Can Buy, which was included in the recent Carnival of Gamers.

In particular, Matt at cgonline.com was quite upset. He feels that I'm painting mainstream game reviewers with too broad a brush, and that my description of them as lacking credibility was not fair.

I stand by my article, hyperbole and all. Clearly, though, I'm going to have to start adding little smiley faces whenever I talk about how ultra-credible I am: some folks didn't get the joke. We all know that there are reviewers whose opinions we disagree with. And we can find examples of credibility problems in other fields, as well — for example, in Pittsburgh about 15 years ago, there was a restaurant critic who was revealed to have been taking payola in return for positive reviews.

But be honest with yourself. When was the last time you read a review at Gamespy, or Gamespot, or IGN, and simply said to yourself "Wow! I'm not at all worried that this review might be complete fluff." To use an old but perfect example — we are talking about a group of people who universally lauded the bug-laden, unplayable, and execrable Black and White as the apotheosis of a superb gaming experience.

And isn't this the crux of the problem? Even a movie reviewer with whom I always disagree with has some value. I regularly read Salon and say to myself "Oh look, Stephanie Zacharek liked that movie. I'd better avoid it, because it will be terrible." Stephanie Zacharek, therefore, has more credibility (in a sense) than a reviewer who simply pimps the games with the pretty graphics and the big budgets. Because I can't use that reviewer's work to distinguish between Jade Empire and Gran Turismo 4. He's just going to blather on about how great both of them are. Thanks, but no thanks.

Forget the conspiracy theories about collusion between the game reviewers and publishers. These game reviewers' lack credibility because of what they write.

The other issue I directly raised in my critique that none of the apologists have touched with a 10 foot pole is that of independently produced games (be they commercial, shareware, or freeware). The issue of industry freebies determining what games you review is important, no matter how much you protest, because it means that you are letting the marketing departments of the games industry guide your editorial process.

Spiderweb Software's Geneforge 3 was just released. Did Gamespot review it? Did Gamespy? Did you review it, Matthew? No. Did you review any of the games in last year's Interactive Fiction Competition? No. Any of Everett Kaser's superb logic games? No. Let's make it even easier. There were 78 entries in this year's Independent Games Festival. What percentage of them did the major sites review? Half? 25%? Even that many? CGM did interviews with the makers of Gish, and N, and Lux, and a couple of the other more well-organized entrants. Hey, that's a good start. But why aren't you doing more?

Let me back away from the criticism, and put this in completely practical terms that you might care about. Choosing a game that I enjoyed (and, to be fair, that I reviewed also) I don't need you to tell me about Jade Empire. Everyone and his goddamn uncle is telling me about Jade Empire. Microsoft's marketing department is doing an excellent job of ensuring that I can't even go to the bathroom without hearing about Jade Empire. What this means to you, as a game magazine publisher, is that as long as your agenda is being set by the marketing departments of game developers, there is absolutely no difference between you, and Gamespy, and Gamespot, or IGN, that is worth mentioning. You have no brand identity. Which one of your reviews I read is probably more dependent on which site I happen to have bookmarked than on any desire to read your special, unique take on the game.

Now imagine that Gamespy, Gamespot, and IGN have only cursory coverage of independent, shareware, and freeware games. And imagine that you have deep coverage. Imagine that people know that you have deep coverage. Sure, you're still reviewing Jade Empire, but it's not the marquee item. Your readers know that every time they visit your home page, they'll also read about the games other major media sites aren't covering. Every time I visit your homepage, I learn something new. Every time I visit your homepage, I learn about a game I hadn't heard of before.

Now that's a site that has brand identity. And that's what weblogs — even the lousy ones like mine — are bringing to the table.

Absolutely nothing is stopping you from doing the same thing.

Let me make an analogy that relates to another subject I care about, which is food. Imagine that you write restaurant reviews. If what I paint, admittedly with a very broad brush, as the "major game review magazines" were instead reviewing restaurants, we would have web sites and magazines filled with glowing (or critical) reviews of P.F. Chang's, Bravo Italian Kitchen, McDonald's, Panera Bread, and Starbuck's. If I chose where to eat based solely on Gamespy Restaurant Reviews, I wouldn't know that little hole-in-the-wall Chinese places or quirky independent coffee shops even existed.

Look, I don't determine your editorial policy, Matthew. You do. If you feel the most important contribution you can make is to focus on reviewing the big chain eateries, I can't stop you.

But don't get mad at me for pointing out that in so doing, you aren't as useful or as important as Zagat's.

Additional Resources

Better in Paris

2005-06-03 · by psu

For several years of my life, I have had a tag line attached to me that goes "Oh, those are better in Paris." While I believe that this tag is somewhat unfair, there are definitely a few things routinely available in France that seem to have no counterpart of comparable quality back here at home.

Cheese

Every single time we are in Paris we visit the cheese shop. Two particular varieties of cheese stand out here. The first is Camembert, a soft ripened raw cow's milk cheese. I have not found anything like this cheese anywhere on the North American continent. Even in Canada, where it is legal, the stuff that you can get just isn't any good. The Camembert from Marie-Anne Cantin has a depth of flavor that is hard to put into words. Where soft cheese in the U.S. always tastes like some kind of white paste, the French Camembert has layers of flavor, saltiness, nuttiness, and sweetness all rolled into one. It's like comparing fresh ripe tomatoes to the pink California ones at Giant Eagle, or Maine wild blueberries to frozen ones, or a dry aged New York strip steak to Steakums.

The second cheese we always get is St. Marcellin. This is also a soft raw cow's milk cheese, but is runnier and milder in flavor compared to the Camembert. Like the Camembert, it shows that soft cheese in the U.S. has about as much character as a wet piece of toilet paper. There is nothing better than some of this cheese spread thick over a warm piece of bread.

A note: You may find yourself in Whole Foods or your local yuppy food emporium and spy a piece of cheese labeled "Camembert" or "St. Marcellin". Do not be fooled. If you try one of these items expecting something like the real thing, you will weep bitter tears of pain and sadness. You have been warned.

A second note: The reason these cheeses cannot be found in the U.S. in any decent form is because they are made from unpasteurized milk, and are not aged all that long before selling. The FDA bans such foods because they are "dangerous" but they allow you to risk sickness and death every day of your life at McDonalds, where you can eat ground-up cow meat taken from cows that were also eating ground-up cow meat.

Mustard

I don't know why, but every crappy café in Paris has a little crock of this mustard at every table. It's mostly for the potatoes or salad that you might get with lunch or dinner, but it is better than any mustard I have ever had. It's strong, with a great wasabi-like kick. But it isn't overpowering, and tastes like something besides vinegar. In Paris, you can go to the equivalent of a Target and buy this stuff by the gallon. I've never found it in the States.

If you can find something like this for me, I'll be your friend for life.

Baguette

The baguette here are just not right. I don't know what's wrong with them. Not crusty enough, too chewey, tasting too much like sourdough. Something is just not right. I find this confusing, since there are good croissant here.

That's really all I have. I'm sure my old acquaintances will be surprised.

Antidecisionmentarianism

2005-06-06 · by peterb

I don't know a lot about coffee.

This surprises people who know how much coffee I drink (a lot) and who know how obsessive-compulsive I can get about other things I drink, such as tea or wine. With those drinks, I'm always branching out to try new styles, while simultaneously deeply exploring the styles I know I like, trying to discern and describe small differences in taste.

With coffee, though, I more or less just walk into a good coffee shop and drink whatever they hand me. The reason I think they're a good coffee shop is that I can do that, and get a good cup of coffee.

This posed an interesting problem for me the other day when I went into Coffee Tree in Squirrel Hill. On their board for brewed coffees were three that I'd never heard of. How should I decide which one to get? Do I pick the country that I want to support the most? Do I ask the server to describe their tastes and bodies in detail? Presented for your amusement is the entirety of my internal monologue and decision-making progress.

"Hmmm, I've never tasted any of these. Nothing in the names tell me anything about what they might taste like. Hey, one of them is named Sumatra Iskandar. Iskandar was the name of the planet the crew of the Argo was trying to reach in Star Blazers, that cartoon I watched in Junior High. OK, I'll get that one."

The Iskandar turned out to be really enjoyable — it had an earthy taste, and a very musky (but not unpleasant) aroma — but that's not really my point. This is the Axiom of Choice in action: presented with an array of choices first thing in the morning, I applied a nonsensical heuristic to just make a choice and get the decision out of my way. It would have been better, for that transaction, if someone had just handed me a cup of coffee that they picked, and said "Here. You're drinking this."

I'm not saying that choice in a coffee shop is bad, by the way, any more than I'd say such a ridiculous thing about choice in a liquor store. Surely, if I'd just said "house coffee, please" at Coffee Tree, they would have handed me a cup of joe instead of arguing with me about it. I'm just musing over this class of transactions, and wondering how one can maximize the customer experience for both the person who just wants "coffee" (or "tea" or, potentially, "booze") and for the person who knows very specifically that they simply must have Tanzanian Peaberry (or Keemun Hao Ya "A", or the Hetszolo 3-star Tokaji Aszu).

Perhaps I can turn "choose food products based solely on the TV shows you watched in Junior High" into some sort of nightmarish general principal. I wonder what I'd end up spending my money on.

Additional Resources

Sagacious Jade Golem Stupid Boss

2005-06-07 · by psu

After a short detour through the land of zombies and the land of slam dunks, I'm back into Jade Empire. Overall, I have found the experience satisfying in that KOTOR but with Kung Fu way. But I must complain about the recent boss fight.

Here we have a triple wammy of bad game design.

  1. The Boss is much much harder to kill than the entire sequence of enemies you just dispatched all at the same time.

  2. You cannot save the game just before the battle starts due to an unskippable cut scene.

  3. Every time you fail, you have to endure two ludicrously long load screens and two unskippable dialog sequences before you get to try the combat again.

While this isn't quite as bad as the Zelda brain death from before (btw, I gave up on Wind Waker for now), it sure was painful to do this cycle five or six times. A big raspberry to Bioware. They score a big win for save-anywhere, only to fall on their faces with this nonsense.

Additional Bitching

tilt's complaints about the Jade Empire combat system reminded me how painful this particular fight was.

The Dreamhold

2005-06-08 · by peterb

I'll start off with a disclaimer. I know Andrew Plotkin, the author of The Dreamhold. We've worked closely together. We run into each other at the library on occasion. I consider him a friend. So as I discuss the game, I'll wear my bias on my sleeve: I think Andrew's games are great. Despite (or because of?) that, I think I have some interesting things to say about it.

I like to think that I inspired The Dreamhold. This, of course, is a damnable lie, but I like to think it anyway. This thought springs from Andrew's reaction to my review of the independent game The Witch's Yarn. In that review, I characterized The Witch's Yarn as being in part a response to the inability of most players to enjoy the idioms and interface of the modern text adventure. In doing this, I fabricated a sample transcript from a nonexistent adventure game, trying to demonstrate the sorts of problems that, I think, turn people off of the genre.

I received two very different responses to that article. Andrew's response was disappointment that I had made up a transcript, because he felt that the specific examples I gave weren't really valid. If you start up a typical modern IF game, you won't encounter all the problems in my condensed, artificial example.

The other response I got, from several people, was along the lines of "Yes! That is exactly why I stopped playing text adventures."

I think both points of view are valid. My example might not be strictly accurate, but I believe it captures the overall sense of frustration you feel when you hit a rough spot in a text adventure game. It is a frustration that comes not from the difficulty of the puzzle, but from the difficulty of the interface.

When faced with a user interface problem like this, a game designer really only has a few options. One option is to change the UI in some way to try to make things easier for the user. The Spellcasting 101 series of games tried to do this by adding a menu of actions and objects that the user could select with a mouse. Graphical adventures such as Monkey Island managed this by reducing the number of actions to a minimum ("open", "use", "push") and by having the player use mouse gestures instead of typing.

The Dreamhold takes a different approach to this problem. Instead of changing the UI, it teaches the player how to use the interface. It is an introductory game which tries to show the player not only the mechanics of playing a text adventure, but also some of the common idioms and patterns common to the genre.

I don't want to discuss the plot of The Dreamhold in detail, for obvious reasons, but I can say that it begins with you, the protagonist, waking up on a cold stone floor, with no memory of who you are, or how you got there. The game is, in some sense, a story of self-discovery. And despite its being an "introductory" game, I had a lot of fun playing it.

It's hard for me to say whether The Dreamhold achieves its goal of being a good "teaching tool," because I've played a few hundred too many text adventures to be its target audience. It feels well-balanced to me. Right off the bat, the game tells you how to get help. As you play the game, an anonymous voice pipes up and makes helpful suggestions. For example, after you move out of the room you have woken up in...

You are standing in a short windowless hallway. To the east is the foot of a flight of stairs, which rises out of sight. To the west, the hallway narrows, ending in a small gap of a doorway.

[Looks like you've taken the first step. Well done.

Let me introduce myself. I am the Voice of this tutorial. Most games don't have me; but in this game, I will watch over your shoulder and give you some help. With a little practice, you'll soon be moving around the text adventure world in style.

Back to the story. Remember what's going on? Actually, you don't. As the introduction said, you can't remember who you are or what you're doing here!

Amnesia. Yes, it's a cliché, but it'll do for a tutorial.

I'll let you go on exploring. The west corridor leads back to the cell where you started, so you'll want to try up the stairs instead. Type "up" or "climb stairs".]

The game makes suggestions about mechanics, but doesn't spoil the story or puzzles unless you specifically ask it for help. Plotkin strikes the right balance here: the anonymous narrator will often point out puzzles as you wander through the game world, but it doesn't spoil them by giving you clues you haven't asked for. The game also aggressively tries to help you avoid both "guess the verb" and "guess the noun" problems, and introduces meta-game concepts at just the right points. For example:

It is dark, as dark as you could imagine -- a lightless dream beneath stone.

[Oh, dear. You've walked into a very dark place.

Going "south" probably won't get you back; you can't tell directions in the dark. So what now? One option is to type "undo". This will let you "back up" one move -- back to just before you walked in here. Everything will be the same, except that you'll be in the Natural Passage, and you'll be able to see.

In this game, you can only "undo" one move in a row. So if you do something else now (even "look" or "south"), you won't be able to jump back to the lit Passage. The "undo" command is intended only to fix immediate mistakes.

If you want to go back more than one turn, you'll have to use the "restart" or "restore" commands. Type "help saving" for more information.

Or you could stumble around in the dark, and try to find your way out. Since this is an introductory game, there is a way out. And maybe more to discover, as well.]

This is, I think, a perfect example. He explains the situation, he introduces some commands that might be relevant without demanding a specific solution, and he provides reassurance that there are several ways to solve the problem. The entire game is full of moments like this (and if you're an experienced player who finds such interjections distracting, you can turn the Helpful Voice off). All of this combines to allow novice players to feel at ease with the mechanics so they can concentrate on the story.

As regular readers know, I typically enjoy the narrative of a game as much if not more than its mechanics. I can't help it. I've read too many books. I'd rather play a game with a good story but poor game mechanics than a superbly designed game with a flat narrative. The Dreamhold takes a somewhat tired archetype (the amnesiac protagonist), puts it in a setting that could be clichéd (you'll see when you play it), yet tells a story that is both unique and eloquent. I loved the plot. I loved the way it was told. I will play it again, because I want to read it again.

My love of the game was not a foregone conclusion. Andrew Plotkin has a large body of work, and some of it is not to my taste. At his worst his prose can be affected and somewhat elliptical (I may be the only person who found parts of his work So Far to be artificial in a disagreeable way). But the writing in his games has continually improved. Where his early prose was sometimes as abstruse as his puzzles, he now writes clearly and directly. I don't think it's a coincidence that my favorites of his works are The Dreamhold, where he is writing didactically, and Hunter, In Darkness, which was pseudonymously submitted to a competition. In both of these, Plotkin consciously toned down the verbal frippery that marked some of his earlier writing.

Compare the opening of So Far...

Hot, foul, and dark. How did indoor theater become so fashionable? Well enough in spring rain or winter, but not in the thick, dead afternoon of high summer. And though Rito and Imita looks very fine, shining with electric moonslight in the enclosed gloom, you're much more aware of being crammed in neck-by-neck with your sweaty fellow citizens.

...with just the merest fragment of Hunter, In Darkness:

You are lying in cold still water. It licks at your cheek and arms, and across the backs of your thighs. The chill makes your bruised knees and chest hurt all the more; your neck screams from craning high enough to breathe, but there is no room to sit up. No room to turn. No room.

I'm deliberately omitting excerpts from The Dreamhold in this comparison because, hopefully, you will read them for yourself. But the feel is similar. Sometimes, it has felt to me as though Plotkin's more ambitious words were squirming out from under him, leaking into his text into places they didn't belong. "Look at me!" they would shout, and you would look at them, and in so looking lose sight of something perhaps more significant. In The Dreamhold, his words are under lock and key, and exist to serve the story he is telling. The text is stronger for it.

The Dreamhold has an interesting internal logic and geometry — in places it actually evoked certain moments of Ico — and an arc of character growth that is drawn with words that are precise, economical, and subtle. If it were a short story, it would be worth reading. As a game, it is worth playing. And it is worth discussing.

The philosophical technical premise underlying The Dreamhold is, it seems to me, correct: bring the players up to meet the game. Making major changes in interface (see the Witch's Yarn) may indeed make a game more approachable. But you can change the interface of a piece so much that you catapult it into a different medium. It doesn't make sense, in an artistic context, to destroy the village in order to save it.

It is clear that text adventures are, today, no longer commercially viable. That lack of viability may simply be due to a failure of imagination and marketing ability on the part of game publishers, or, more likely, to a real change in the requirements of today's game players.

It does seem odd to me that text adventures aren't viable. The common wisdom seems to be that gamers do not want to spend their entertainment time playing games that don't have graphics. While I'm willing to accept this as true (I'm not publishing games for a living, so I'm loath to argue the point with those who do), it does strike me as singularly strange. The publishing industry in the US is a $220 billion dollar industry. People spend a lot of money on books. I and many others pay the New York Times cold hard cash in order to be able to do their crossword puzzle online. Yahoo! games has an entire section devoted to word games; at the moment, I see 15,000 people online playing them. Other gaming sites devote similar real estate to them. Now, perhaps there are explanations for this. A word game such as Boggle is qualitatively different from a text adventure, if only because Boggle is competitive. But I think the pat answer "people won't play text adventures because there are no graphics" is not adequate to explain what's going on. I certainly don't have a good explanation. But my instinct is that this comes down to marketing, packaging, and development cost. It would be interesting to know if there's a successful business case that can be made on behalf of the genre.

Whatever the reason for the recent disappearance of text adventures from the marketplace, they are still being written. Just because we don't generally buy and sell text adventures anymore doesn't mean we can't write, play and enjoy them.

Art is enjoyed — at least in theory — because of what it is. Not because of whether or not it is for sale. You wouldn't (I hope) tell a black and white photographer he should switch to working in color digital video because more people will be willing to pay for his work. A well-written piece of interactive fiction is enjoyable art. The Dreamhold is very well-written.

There are, I think, some changes that could be made to text adventures that would make them more approachable without fundamentally changing their nature. That's really the subject of another article, but I'll mention one here: bundle the interpreter and the story file into a single application. Most of the games that interactive fiction authors are developing are distributed as story files, which are then loaded into the user's interpreter of choice. This is all well and good, but it automatically means that the bar is higher for any user that doesn't have an interpreter installed, let alone those who won't even understand what an interpreter is. The "play as a Java applet" links are a good start, but why stop there? Release your games as executables that the naive user can download and double-click to play. Yes, you're adding a few hundred kilobytes onto the size of every game. It's 2005. Disk space is free. Knock yourself out.

The other thing that needs to change is that these games need to be publicized more. How many years has it been since a text-based game has been reviewed in a major gaming magazine? How many gaming weblogs fail to even consider reviewing or talking about these games, not out of malice, but simply because they don't really understand that they are still being developed? Get one article about a text adventure on Joystiq or Kotaku every few months, and just maybe you'll reach a few people who'll discover that they love a text adventure game who otherwise would never have known they exist. It's worth a shot.

If you want to play The Dreamhold, for yourself — and you should — your best bet is to start at its home page. You can play there via a Java applet (without the ability to save or restore games), or you can download the game itself and an interpreter to play it on. And, knowing Andrew, despite my arrogant thought that I "inspired" the game, I have no doubt he was working on The Dreamhold for months before my review of The Witch's Yarn was even the merest glimmer of an idea. Whatever inspired this creation, I am glad it is here.

Additional Resources

Outage

2005-06-09 · by peterb

Our Internet provider suffered a significant outage today, just in time for our Carnival of Gamers entry. Sorry for any inconvenience.

I Saw the Best Critics of My Generation

2005-06-13 · by peterb

Stephanie Zacharek of Salon doesn't like the new Hayao Miyazaki film, Howl's Moving Castle.

I felt ambiguous at the prospect of seeing this film: Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke was epic, luminous, and put me to sleep, wheras the pacing of Spirited Away was just right. But Zacharek thought that Howl, based on the book by Diana Wynn Jones, was somewhat boring. Zacharek, helpfully, is always completely wrong about everything, so I'm taking that as a sign that Howl is probably pretty good, although not as good as it would have been had she thought it was a pile of unwatchable tripe.

Black and White Blues

2005-06-14 · by psu

Back when I shot film, I had evolved to shooting almost 100% black and white. There were various reasons for this, but ultimately it was just because I liked the look and I liked printing. One place I especially liked shooting black and white was Paris. I have hundreds of pictures in my files from there that I will hopefully get back to printing later in my life.

With the switch to digital, I hardly make any black and white pictures. "But wait", you will protest, "desaturate in Photoshop puts you just one button away from black and white." While technically this is true, it just doesn't work for me. I think that the reason for this has to do with how you interact with the picture after you push the button.

Here is how the flow goes in black and white film:

  1. Stare at the scene, imagine how it might look in black and white. I personally don't take this notion of "pre-visualization" too seriously. Really I just try to pay more attention to light, shadow and form than color.

  2. Set the exposure to make sure the dark parts of the picture won't be completely black.

  3. Develop the film, stare at the negatives. Good negatives have an encouraging psychological effect on you. You look at the picture all reversed and in your mind, you see the latent image that you had in mind when you shot it and you start to formulate how you will make the print bring out the strong aspects of the picture.

  4. Next you make contact sheets and proof prints. This is where you see the latent image made "real" for the first time. I find it's good to keep proofs around for a while and stare at them before deciding which ones to print.

  5. Finally, you make the "fine" prints. This is where the negative you originally shot turns into the picture that you "saw" in your head. Actually, it turns into the picture you thought you saw in your head while you are printing.

Contrast this with shooting digital:

  1. Stare at the scene and compose the picture.

  2. Set the exposure so the bright parts of the picture do not go white.

  3. Look at what you shot in the back of the camera (e.g. do some chimping).

  4. Download pictures into your computer.

  5. Stare at them in Photoshop, pick one or two to desaturate and manipulate into a "final print".

Aside from the technical issues around composition and exposure, I think the key aspect of black and white shooting is that from film to print, you are always evaluating the image in monochrome, and the key aspect of digital is that you must deal with the picture in color until you take the color away in Photoshop. I'm not sure why, but in the majority of circumstances, looking at a photograph in color makes it hard to interact with the image in black and white later. You have to have a really strong idea of the picture as a black and white image to fight through the color representation. Since this only happens rarely, you end up with a large collection of color pictures, with a few black and white sprinkled in. Making black and white pictures with a digital camera is like shooting shooting color slide film and using that as a basis to create black and white pictures. There is no technical reason why you can't work that way, but it's not ideal.

I think it would be "easy" for digital camera makers to fix this problem for me. Most digital SLR cameras capture a JPEG proof image along with their CCD RAW file. This image is used for previewing in the camera and initial proofing in Photoshop or other image browsers. My humble request is to have a setting that captures these JPEG files as black and white images, so that the initial proofing steps in my digital workflow could be done in black and white. Apparently, the Canon EOS-20d does this, as does one very nice niche camera. Most point and shoots give you the choice of capturing only a black and white JPEG. Sadly, my D70 only allows for color preview.

Of course, none of this deals with the real problem in digital black and white, which is that the images don't look like 35mm Tri-X and are therefore inherently inferior. Oh well.

Cocoa Rouge

2005-06-15 · by peterb

My chocolatier, Amy, said "I've got something special for you."

OK, so she's not just my chocolatier. She owns the store where I get most of my chocolate. For a while now, I've been getting most of my cocoa powder from Mon Aimee Chocolat in Pittsburgh's Strip District.

As it happens, I drink a lot of cocoa. So when it comes to this particular commodity, I'm what is known as a "value" shopper (or, as psu would call me, a "cheapskate").

I don't think the "cheapskate" label is actually warranted here, though. There's an awful lot of bad cocoa out there, and bad cocoa is not worth buying no matter how cheap it is. For purposes of this discussion, if the cocoa is not dutch-process, it is not worth drinking. So this automatically excludes Hershey's or Nestle's, or anything you might find in your local grocery store. If you can find any, that is. It's a constant source of vexation to me that every Giant Eagle has an aisle labeled "cocoa" which only has instant hot chocolate.

If your local grocery store is Whole Foods, they will have a nice selection of non-dutched, organic, fair trade cocoas, each of which costs twice what Hershey's does, but is just as terrible. Occasionally, they get Droste, which is a little pricey, but good. Droste is more or less the yardstick you can measure other drinking cocoas against.

As I said, I shop at Mon Aimee. Their standard dutch-process cocoa is from Guittard, in San Francisco. They typically carry two varieties, a medium-dark blend, and a full dutch process. At Mon Aimee, the full dutch runs about $4.50/pound, less than half what you'll typically pay for Droste. And it's comparable in taste and body. It's not a cocoa revolution, changing the way we think about chocolate forever. It's just decent cocoa at a price so low that it might as well be considered to be free.

What Amy wanted to show me was Guittard's "cocoa rouge," a different variety of cocoa with a darker red hue and a higher price tag ($8.50/pound). So of course I had to buy some of each and have a taste test.

The cocoa rouge is striking when compared to the full dutch. It's a deep, rich, red color with a scent that is a bit floral, almost candy-like, whereas the full dutch has an assertive, pleasantly bitter chocolate nose.

The big difference between the two comes out when you make them into drinking chocolate. I used a standardized recipe for both: 1/2 cup of cocoa powder, about 32 ounces of milk, and a pinch of salt to open up the flavors a bit. That's it. It is not a typo that there is no sugar in this recipe.

The first difference you can see almost immediately is that the cocoa rouge has a much higher fat content. Both cups will leave little blobs of cocoa butter floating on the top of your cup, but the cocoa rouge is full of them, rim to rim. The mouth-feel is a correspondingly silkier as well. It goes down easy.

Another major difference is in the sediment. The Guittard full dutch throws off a significant sediment, particularly if you make your drinking chocolate as stupidly strong as I do. I don't mind the sediment at all — like the little bits at the bottom of Turkish coffee, I think they're part of the experience — but others, who are used to corn-starch style chocolate, may not like it. The cocoa rouge was made for these people. Even the next day, the leftovers in the fridge had thrown off almost no sediment at all.

The flavor was good. Less bitter than the full dutch, it had a musky, full flavor, and the somewhat candylike aroma comes through in the taste as well.

Is it worth it? That's the question. It made a nice change, but since I enjoy more bitter flavors and accept cocoa mass participate as the best part of the drinking chocolate experience, I don't think I can justify paying twice as much for it. Your mileage, as they say, may vary.

Try it for yourself. Visit Mon AImee in the strip, right across Penn Avenue from La Prima, and tell them peterb sent you.

Going to the Movies

2005-06-16 · by psu

The office had a trip to see the new Batman movie. The movie itself, while flawed in some ways, was for the most part enjoyable. However, the whole movie-going experience itself has become tedious in many ways.

First, there was lunch. The theater is actually only close to a bunch of boring box restaurants, and one of the people in our group required gluten free food. So we ended up at P.F. Chang's. I see no reason to amend my previous comments on the place. The food was generic, expensive, too salty and generally completely lacking in any genuine character besides the color brown. Two points missing from my previous rant: they serve brown rice (ewww) and charge a ludicrous amount of money for pots of tea. But, even with all this going against it, it's really no worse than any of the other food down at The Waterfront where the theater is. Why can't someone put a decent place to eat close to the megaplex?

Second, we had the trailers. Of course, the first four trailers are now commercials, two of which must be for Fandango. They do this in France too, but in France I can't understand the dialog in the commercials, which makes them far more interesting. 'Nuff said.

The trailers themselves were for other films that Warner is releasing, and they mostly made you wonder why Warner is releasing the movies. Based on the trailers, I predict that Serenity will be too long, War of the Worlds will be overwrought and Spielbergishly manipulative, and The Dukes of Hazzard, if I watched it, would make me want to claw my eyes out and roll in the aisles of the theater screaming for my mommy. I think there was also a trailer for a cop film or some comedy with Jamie Foxx, but I can't remember it.

By this point in the proceedings, I was already worn out. And the movie hadn't even started.

Oh, the movie. I found the latest Batman to be a lot like the first "serious" Batman film with Michael Keaton, but with less style and higher production values. The film maker was eager to show us how hard he was working to, if nothing else, make a well crafted piece of summer film schlock, rather than just let the visuals carry the experience. These days, you have to be thankful for a film that sets up plot points in the beginning, and actually has them pay off 1.5 hours later. Most movies these days assume that the viewer doesn't have the intellectual capacity to remember three lines of dialog for more than five minutes after the fact. So, kudos there, even though the plot points were pretty obvious.

My main complaint about the film is that for all of its craft, production values, and cost, you would think there would be a single person on the crew who could shoot a fight scene. Every single fight in the film was shot close up, hand held, and with jump cuts every 10 to 15 frames. The result is that instead of a clear view of who is kicking whose ass, all you see is a blur of black, gray and brown along with sound effects that imply the carnage that should be visible.

Compare this with Jackie Chan's magnum opus, Drunken Master 2. The very first fight in this film happens under a train car with two people going after each other with poles (or was it spears). Every single attack, block, counter, jump and punch is perfectly framed and it's always clear who is going in which direction. And this all happens in incredibly close quarters and yet is never confusing. American directors have to go back to film school and learn to shoot fight scenes.

My secondary complaints about the film are that it was too long, and the sound was mixed too loud. Leaving the theater, my bottom was sore and my head was ringing a bit from THX-boosted bass-laden sound effects. If you can live with these things, this is probably as good an adaptation of Batman as you will ever see.

Wrath Unleashed

2005-06-17 · by peterb

It is well understood that there is nothing new under the sun in video games. I recently borrowed Wrath Unleashed from the local library, not knowing what it was.

Archon

Archon

What it was is a remake of Archon.

Archon, for those of you who have never heard of it, is on every old computer game player's list of The Greatest Games Ever Made. The basic idea is: it's chess. But when your pieces occupy the same square as your opponent's piece, you move to an "arena" and the two players fight it out in arcade-like combat. Each piece has different powers, so while one can in theory win any battle in combat, the strategic element is very significant: you really, really, really don't want to try to fight a Basilisk with a Knight.

Remaking Archon is something everyone seems to do, sooner or later. It seems like such a good idea. Archon itself is a remake in a manner of speaking, being clearly inspired by the "chess game" in the original Star Wars movie.

The fact is, remaking Archon is a bad idea. The game itself had some sort of magical, alchemical balance wherein it was only fun if you played it on an 8-bit computer. Even in emulation, it's not any fun. You need that big clunky Atari joystick to make the game playable. The authors even tried to remake it, twice. The first attempt, for the old 8 bit computers, was Archon 2: Adept. It almost worked, but the simplicity of the first game's chess board was replaced by a zone-based game of concentric rings, with odd rules about moving between them, and mostly what you thought when you played it was. "Huh. This is pretty neat. But I think I'd rather be playing Archon." SSI remade the game for the PC as Archon Ultra in the mid-90s. This remake got the mechanics right, yet it was soulless. I bought it, but felt empty inside, like a child whose ice cream cone has dropped in the middle of the street.

Wrath Unleashed, by Lucasarts, is Archon Ultra with even less soul. The game mechanics are nearly the same as those of Archon 2, down to letting your "wizards" cast spells in addition to sending your pieces in to combat. So I'm not really going to talk about the mechanics. I want to talk about the window dressing. I want to talk about the game's presentation.

Remember that guy in your homeroom, in high school? He wore denim everything and listened to metal and seemed sort of stupid, except he could draw these really bitchin' little cartoons of metal dudes riding motorcycles while smoking a joint with a naked chick in the pillion seat who was waving a chainsaw and killing zombies? Well, that guy did the production design for Wrath Unleashed. The game is so thoroughly a paean to arrested development that it can only be on purpose. Somewhere in Lucasarts is a Marketing Requirements Document that identifies the specific vertical segment they're aiming at as "morons with disposable cash and deep-seated issues with their sexuality."

Some of you may remember the movie Heavy Metal.  I suspect this movie had a similar MRD, and it specified that the viewer would be 17.  With an R rating, 16 year olds wouldn't be allowed in to see it, whereas 18 year olds might have met actual women by then.  With the customer base so ruthlessly narrowed, the authors were free to dispense with all manner of elements normally associated with the filmmaking art (plot, drama, a point).  Since I actually saw this movie at the age of seventeen, I thought it was cool.  Then I turned eighteen.  Then they made a sequel that failed on all counts, because fans of the original had long moved beyond the "puberty" phase of their lives. This game manages to be even more pointless than the sequel to Heavy Metal.

To make room for this garbage, they cancelled Sam and Max: Freelance Police. There is no justice in the world.

You thought I was kidding?

You thought I was kidding?

Two of the four Gods in the game are women. 2 of the four Gods in the game are wearing skimpy clothing. One of them, in particular, is wearing a bra shaped like a pair of hands that are groping her breasts. I'm sorry, but I just can't respect a goddess who is in an abusive relationship with her lingerie. The concept artists who came up with this have violated the Gamer's Bill of Rights Clause 3. They must be punished.

The four gods in the game are (basically) the gods of earth, air, fire, and water. This bothers me, for two reasons. First, this is the second Lucasarts game in 2 years to have gods of earth, air, fire, and water, and they have completely different names. You'd think that Lucasarts, of all companies, would recognize the importance of keeping a consistent cosmology in their products. And apart from the marketing aspects, consider the practicalities: what's going to happen to Lucasarts when the gods of earth, air, fire, and water discover that their names are being mangled? There will be a whole lot of smiting at Skywalker Ranch, let me tell you.

Second, why is it always earth, air, fire, and water? How about having some different gods for a change? Why not have us live under the dominion of the mighty Gods of Blood, Bile, Choler, and Phlegm? Weep at the mighty passage of the lords of Sweet, Sour, Bitter, and the apostate devil Umami? Think of the narrative possibilities of a game chronicling the mighty conflicts between the followers of Jo'n, Paül, Jorge, and Ring-o.

My point, to the extent that I have one, is: have you no shame? It's not like putting the zombie-hand bra on the game actually helped the game sell: Wrath Unleashed plopped into the marketplace with all the allure of a frog in a milkshake.

They say that sex sells, but not even sex will sell if it's sufficiently stupid.

So, Lucasarts, maybe you should look at the decisionmaking process that led up to green-lighting Wrath Unleashed. You're looking for a brand identity outside of Star Wars. You're not going to find it in zombie-hand bras and bombast; any junior-high school metalhead can do that.

Maybe it's time to see if smart might sell.

Additional Resources

One Gear Higher

2005-06-20 · by psu

I've actually done enough riding this year to progress past the "start gasping for air every time you come off the downhill" stage of fitness. More books than I can list here have been written about training for cycling. Certainly, the success of the more systematic methods used by Lance Armstrong and such to win the Tour De France over and over again have gotten a lot of attenion if for no other reason than they use cool toys. But, for normal people who are not racing bikes, there is a pretty simple measure of fitness that is easily applicable without any sophisticated data collection tools.

I think all of the training jargon and mumbo-jumbo translate into tracking two things while you are riding:

  1. How long can you ride before your legs hurt a lot and don't generate power. This is typically somewhat longer than the longest ride you have done recently. I do mostly 20 mile rides, so I expect that a 30 mile ride would make my legs hurt, especially if i did it fast.

  2. What is the low gear you use to climb most hills.

For as long as I've been riding, the main indication that I'm getting more fit is that I can climb hills in higher gears without blowing up. Pittsburgh is a nice area for this fitness measurement because while the climbs are not long, there are very few rides you can take without a bit of up and down. These rollers act like automatic interval training areas, and give you a constant indication of your fitness level.

So there you have it. The way you tell if you are getting in shape is if you can climb that hill one gear higher than you did before.

Reaping the Whirlwind

2005-06-21 · by faisal

So it's come down to this. Eleven years after Ayrton Senna's tragic death cast a pall over Formula 1 and made everyone rethink safety, Bernie Ecclestone and Max Mosley have put up a tent and made everyone rethink clown cars.

This weekend's US Grand Prix was the ninth race of the season, the first season of the millennium to not be so boring as to serve as a prescription insomnia cure. All seven teams running Michelin tires did not race, giving Michael Schumacher his first "win" of the season.

The official reason for the withdrawal was that the Michelin tires were not prepared for the Indianapolis track, which is somewhat cobbled out of the oval designed for our "go fast, turn left" style of racing. However, rules changes were offered that would have let the race go on as planned — changes that weren't accepted. This begs questions about Max and Bernie's respective grips on (market) reality. Are they mad, power-mad, or just plain desperate for Ferrari to win? Since Bernie and Max have made careers — and billions of pounds — by running F1 (into the ground), we can't assume they are idiots, but it's worth looking at the series of events which brought us to this point.

In the mid-nineties, when Ferrari couldn't win a race if their life depended on it, many people thought that Formula 1's fortunes were rather tied to Ferrari's. From all outward appearances, Bernie and Max joined the Ferrari team in an all-out attempt to make sure Ferrari was once again competitive, and by "competitive" we mean "dominant". This may not actually be what the Formula 1 powers-that-be set out to do, but it sure looks that way from the outside.

At first, Ferrari could use all the help they could get — their car was actually less reliable than Jaguar's. Yes, they had Michael Schumacher, but while he's quite good, there's a reason Wikipedia lists him with the passionless "statistically the most successful F1 driver ever". He's no Senna, and he's certainly no Fangio. Some days he isn't even a Damon Hill.

But, with Hill retired and the rest of the field relegated to teams who weren't willing to pour nearly as much money into winning, Schumacher and Ferrari's dominance was assured. Schumacher had a car he could drive the way he wanted, and Ferrari had a driver who would win races. Sponsorship revenues soared, fans went wild, and vendors started paying attention. And still, the F1 governing authorities seemed to do whatever was necessary to ensure Ferrari owned the field.

Over time, though, the shine faded. Who were the new drivers? Where was the excitement? Who cares? Of my four friends who would obsessively watch F1 at race time in 2000, only one still occasionally catches a race in replay. While he still makes the pilgrimage to a couple races a year, he now comes back with stories about the parties which are far more interesting than the stories about the race.

Still, the Ferrari-favoritism lived on, with no apparent end in sight. Yes, every year they rolled out new rules to make it look like Ferrari was at risk of losing, but every year Ferrari seemed to grow more entrenched.

Until, quite by surprise, this year. Suddenly, we were eight races into the season without a single Ferrari victory. Suddenly, Fernando Alonso was dominating the Drivers' Championship, and Michael Schumacher was third behind Kimi R‰ikkˆnen. Suddenly, Schumacher was taking home over three million dollars per race he lost.

What went wrong? Fingers point everywhere. A month ago, Ferrari President Luca di Montezemolo blamed Bridgestone for failing to make competitive tires. Yet Ferrari's tire problems were of their own making -- after years of pressuring Bridgestone to pay more attention to Ferrari, Bridgestone wasn't supplying any top-tier teams with tires. With this year's more radical rule changes, Bridgestone had no other competitive cars on which to test tires, and Ferrari was suddenly running inadequately tested tires.

Fans joked that Montezemolo was blaming Bridgestone for making the season interesting, but suddenly the season was, yes, interesting. Which brings us to another question: is Ferrari still competitive? They clearly know how to dominate, and they know how to keep winning, but have they forgotten how to win in the first place? Is Schumacher past his prime? And can he win again now that people realize he isn't invincible? It's worth remembering that Schumacher has won the championship by a close margin in the past, and on some days that margin put somebody else into a tire-wall.

Which brings us, then, to this past weekend.

During qualifying, Ralf Schumacher's tire blew in Turn 13, and Michelin realized that their tires were not safe for the speeds through that turn. Michelin is familiar with the United States' reasonably prudent person standard for legal liability, and warned everyone that the tires were not safe.

[queue dramatic music]

Michelin teams wanted a chicane installed right before the turn.

Ferrari didn't want the chicane.

The Formula 1 governing bodies — who usually seem willing to arbitrarily change the rules "for reasons of safety" whenever and wherever it furthers Ferrari's chances of winning — engaged in professional hand-wringing.

Eventually it was decreed that drivers running Michelin tires should slow down in turn 13.

Having told professional race car drivers to maybe not drive so fast, the FIA sat on its thumbs and waited.

Every team running Michelin tires withdrew from the race, citing safety reasons.

Ferrari and Jordan engaged in the ritual of "hey, free points". They were joined by Minardi, whose boss, Paul Stoddart, promptly went on Dutch TV and called the entire race "a farce", apologized to the fans, expressed sympathy for the Michelin teams, placed the blame squarely on the FIA's shoulders, and then switched to more colorful language.

Fans - many many of whom paid over $100 per seat, took time off from work, and flew in for the event - walked out.

Indianapolis Motor Speedway owner Tony George refused to wave the checkered flag, took a bath on the proceeds, and may not allow F1 back next year.

Other fans are suing everyone in sight.

And now, facing a backlash, Max Mosley — who apparently learned his management skills from his father — has summoned all Michelin teams to explain why they dared to consider their drivers' safety and the safety of the fans to be more important than the safety of FIA's pocketbook.

The unanswered question is: why did the FIA not adjust the race rules so there would be an actual race and not a farce? History and appearances would suggest that Ecclestone and Mosley were desperate for a Ferrari win, any Ferrari win. But, that may not be the case at all, and the decision was so bizarre that it's almost pointless to pontificate.

Instead we need to ask a different set of questions: why are the teams taking the heat for this? For all of the FIA's historically tense relationship with the teams, why did Mosley think the solution to this problem was a giant game of safety chicken with 100,000 fans in the middle? Why does Mosley still have a job? Is F1 dead in the US? When will the FIA management relent from the WWF style antics, put fans first and let competitors compete? And will anybody still care by the time it happens?

The clock is ticking.

Additional Resources

You are Not the Boss of Me

2005-06-22 · by psu and peterb

Video games, like all forms of entertaiment, have their own set of idiosyncratic formal conventions. All the Zelda games have a series of dungeons, broken up by exploration, where you collect items to defeat the final enemy. Horror games have a slow pace, shuffling zombies and stupid camera angles. Platform games have hateful jumping puzzles and take place in a strange world where whacking a box turns it into money. Conventions like this can be useful because they provide a formal framework in which the game designers can work. The form gives the player context and helps to set expectations, the same way the formal structure of a film or a piece of music informs the viewer or listener about what should be coming next.

However, while some gaming conventions are useful enough to have evolved into a sort of form, most head over the line into the territory of annoying cliché. There are too many such game design sins to list here: useless backtracking for keys, juvenile puzzles involving 8 tiles in 9 spaces or the Towers of Hanoi, and of course, stupid savepoints. However, the single most damaging game design crutch is the Boss Battle. We are here to say that Boss Battles are stupid and should be annihilated.

Bosses are a mainstay of action, RPG, platformer and shooter games. They tend to appear at or near the end of major stages of the game. The end of a game may also be structured around a climactic "final" Boss, which is usually like one of the intermediate Bosses, only more tedious.

Boss characters share a few common characteristics:

  1. They are very powerful. Typically, they take a long time to defeat but can defeat the game character very easily.

  2. In games with a narrative, they might be characters from that narrative transformed by some bizzare power into a huge deformed killing machine.

  3. While powerful and deadly, they are not smart. They generally have one or two patterned attacks that they use over and over again.

  4. There are usually only one or two specific ways to actually do damage to a boss.

Note that we want to distinguish between a "boss," who is simply a strong enemy who may provide drama and challenge, and a "Boss," who you can only defeat if you apply a set of nonsensical and arbitrary rules for a hideously long time. From now on, we will refer to the latter as a Boss with a capital B.

For the most part Boss fights are always the same. You figure out the pattern in which the Boss is moving. You therefore figure out how to dodge its attacks. Then you read the walkthrough to figure out how to do damage to the thing. Then you sit with your controller for fifteen minutes and dodge, hit, dodge, hit, dodge, hit until the Boss dies or you die and get to start over again.

In modern games, Bosses have become a crutch for both the game designer and the player. The "hardcore" gamer contingent wants Bosses because they are the traditional narrative hint that the end of a stage is approaching. They also feel like beating a Boss makes them bad-ass. Game designers use Bosses as an automatic way to change up the gameplay and thus provide some variety. Unfortunately, there are few fresh ideas in Boss design. This means that rather than creating a nice change of pace, Boss fights just replace whatever you might have been enjoying in the game with a task that inevitably boils down to a deathmarch of twitching and boring pattern matching.

Proponents of the Boss battle may argue that the Boss provides not only a climactic moment to finish off a stage of the game, but also a chance for the game player to utilize newly acquired skills or items. This happens in the Zelda games. You will go through a dungeon and pick up a couple of new things. The game then gives you some interesting things to do with the new stuff so you get some practice in using it. Then, just as you are really enjoying the game and your new toy, everything is ripped away and replaced with a huge stupid boss which you can only defeat if you puzzle out exactly how your new item can be used against the bad guy.

The question is: why not just stick to the fun gameplay that came before the Boss? Zelda is certainly not lacking for great gameplay. But rather than stick to it, the game leads the player into a boring twitchfest combined with boring puzzle solving. Why not allow the core gameplay to stand on its own terms?

Games that are true to their core gameplay are always better for it. For example, why, after providing 15 hours of high energy combat goodness did Halo 2 feel the need to throw in a completely redundant and unoriginal Boss fight at the end of the game? Did the designers lose faith in the meticulously tuned and balanced gameplay that had served them so well up until that point? Or did they just throw it in because the moron hard-core fanboys had complained about the fact that Halo did not have a "real" Boss at the end? They should have stuck to their guns, so to speak.

The Splinter Cell games never had any Bosses. The designers just made the final levels ratchet up the difficulty as you got close to the ultimate objective. This is just one of the ways that Splinter Cell is infinitely superior to Metal Gear Stupid.

RPGs lend themselves to a structure involving bosses, rather than Bosses. This is especially true in the turn based games since it is hard to design a Boss battle in a turn based battle system. If the combat is not in real time, stupid pattern attacks are easy to observe. And yet, a game with the stature of Knights of the Old Republic actually had a completely pointless final Boss, complete with puzzle combat.

On the other hand, more recent RPGs, including Shadow Hearts: Covenant and Bioware's own Jade Empire did a good job of — for the most part — avoiding pointless Bosses. Occasionally you would run into stronger enemies, but they were just that. They were not mysteriously powerful macguffins who you could only damage if you sliced them behind their left kneecap. On a day with a full moon. While spitting. Perhaps we can take the fact that KOTOR had a Boss, but Jade Empire didn't as an indication that Bioware agrees that the concept is outdated. As Corvus points out, below, Jade Empire did have some Bosses, but as they were (comparatively speaking) easy to dispose of, they were not as disruptive to the pacing of the game. Perhaps we can hope that Jade Empire II disposes with their use altogether.

Looking at platform games, we can draw a comparison between the best platform game ever made, Banjo Kazooie, and a later effort by the same company, Donkey Kong 64. There were a number of things wrong with DK64, but it's a fair approximation to describe it as "Banjo with Bosses." This is one of the reasons it is universally acknowledged as one of the worst platform games ever created. The other reason would be its "must backtrack through every level 5 times to win" nature, but that's the subject of another rant. The reason Banjo succeeds where DK64 fails is pacing. The player is always in control of their game experience, and is always applying their skills in a straightforward, measured way. New dangers are introduced at a steady rate. In DK64, at the end of every level comes a Boss who squashes the player like an insignificant bug, until they figure out the "trick," which takes the pacing and throws it out the window.

Sports games never have Bosses, and yet somehow they provide enough variety for people to finish all 5,000 races in the Gran Turismo or Forza career mode, or for would-be football coaches and armchair quarterbacks to run the Madden franchise mode for the better part of a simulated century. These games don't fall back on the Boss crutch because their core gameplay is designed to provide variety and also because they provide some variety in other ways (franchise mode, tuning cars, mini-games).

The following thought experiment may elucidate just how stupid Bosses are. Just imagine if Madden were designed in the same way that your average third person action game or RPG is designed. Just as you get to the final minutes of the fourth quarter in the Super Bowl, suddenly the quarterback on the opposing team (let's say it's Peyton Manning) runs out into the middle of the field and lets out a deafening gutteral scream as he raises his arms and transforms into a flaming blue lizard beast with 15 eyes. In order to win the game, you must now repeatedly run over to the ball-boy and grab footballs which you throw at the eyes. If you hit one, Manning's helmet temporarily opens up so you can bean him in the head with other footballs. Meanwhile, you have to watch out, because the lizard beast periodically whips his tail at you as you attempt to target him, so you have to be sure to dodge these attacks, since one or two hits are enough to take you out of the game. Once you destroy all the eyeballs and hit Manning in the head 20 or 30 times, he falls over, transforms back to his human form and is taken off the field on a stretcher and you can return to the rest of the football game.

It is understandable why designers want to use Boss fights: they want an event that provides a dramatic moment, similar to the climax of a movie. While this desire is noble, Bosses are a monumental failure in this regard. No game in recent memory is at its best during a Boss battle. The true highlights always spring forth from the core design and narrative of the game rather than some artificially constructed battle with an ultra-powerful beast from beyond. What we can hope for is that these "core gameplay" moments — consider how well most of Halo 2 worked with its "Sneak, assassinate, grenade, firefight" dynamic — will become more and more integrated into the dramatic climaxes of games, and the Bosses can be sent to some far off land and be retired forver. It's a noble goal to strive for because if we reach it, games will have been made better forever.

The Carnival of Gamers

2005-06-23 · by peterb

If you like the game-related articles you read on Tea Leaves, you should definitely visit the third installment of The Carnival of Gamers, a collection of some interesting gaming-related articles. Tea Leaves is honored to have been able to participate.

Berry Alert

2005-06-24 · by peterb

The first ripe wild black raspberries (rubus occidentalis) of the season have been spotted.

And eaten.

Playable Classics: Escape Velocity

2005-06-27 · by peterb

People have been making "space opera" trading games for 25 years. Among these is Ambrosia Software's Escape Velocity, first developed in 1992. It is the best game of its kind. The most recent version, Escape Velocity Nova, is available for both Windows and Macintosh, and provides varying levels of challenge for the novice and for the experienced player. It is a classic, and everyone with a soul will enjoy it.

I don't want to discuss the geneology of space opera games in detail here; I've already done that in my review of Star Sonata, and if you're interested you can read that article instead. The core thing to keep in mind is that there are tens of games that have essentially shared the same core gameplay (Elite, Galtrad, Privateer, EV), and most of them aren't at all playable any more.

Wing Commander

Wing Commander

I started thinking of EV when I recently learned about an open-source project to remake the classic Origin game Wing Commander: Privateer. It's a cool project; like The Ur-Quan Masters project to revitalize Star Control, the Privateer Remake project lets you play this ancient game on your modern Windows, Mac, or Linux machine. The port is good enough that I was considering designating it a Playable Classic. After spending some time reviewing the genre, I've come to the conclusion that Escape Velocity deserves the nod, instead, for a few reasons.

Part of it is that the EV games were published a bit earlier. But that's only a small part — if it was just a matter of picking the earliest possible still playable game, I'd be out here pushing Galactic Empire on you, which I'm not. The attributes which make Escape Velocity significant, to me, are:

Escape Velocity

Escape Velocity

Here's a brief walkthrough of the beginning of a typical game of Escape Velocity. You begin on your home planet with a little bit of money and a little shuttlecraft. Your shuttlecraft has a hyperdrive, some space for cargo, and a small gun that, on a good day, could be used to frighten very small children.

This little ship is, theoretically, capable of going anywhere (as long as it can find a place to land and refuel) and doing anything. In practice, you'll find it somewhat limiting. You can only carry so much cargo, mount so many weapons, and take so much damage. In order to upgrade your ship, you'll need to make money. In the early stages of the game, you'll make money by trading commodities, ferrying passengers from one star system to another, or by performing "special deliveries" of certain cargos to a certain star system within so many days.

One of the exciting things about Escape Velocity, to my taste, is that there is an ongoing galactic conflict beyond what the player is involved in doing. Star systems may belong to a given political entity, which will enforce the local laws. If you want to be a simple merchant, plying heavily patrolled space lanes, you can do that. Occasionally, your defenseless ship might come under attack, and often you'll see that system's police force swoop in to save you.

Eventually, though, you might feel brave enough to blow up a few pirates by yourself. And as you develop a reputation as someone that can defend themselves, an interesting thing happens: people will start approaching you in the spaceport bars, and offer you more interesting work than the standard missions. Often, this work will be on behalf of one of the various political factions in the game. Perform enough of these, and not only do you start visiting remote corners of the galaxy, but you start making friends — and enemies. Suddenly, the Galaxy gets a lot more complicated.

There have been three major revisions of EV: the original (now called "Classic"), EV Override, and the current incarnation, EV Nova. For anyone who hasn't played any of them, the differences aren't truly significant: simply put, the three games have nearly identical game mechanics, but tell different stories. If you own the latest version, you can install plugins to play ports of the previous versions.

But EV Nova has some improvements over the earlier games that make it worth trying first. Most significantly for new players it has an (optional) in-game tutorial, demonstrating some of the basic game concepts. Furthermore, there are quite a few "special" missions that are open to even new players, thus saving you from having to trudge back and forth across the galaxy hauling coal before you get to the interesting parts of the game. This works extremely well.

I've been playing some version of Escape Velocity since it was released in 1992. At one point, I obtained a low-end Mac LC just so I could continue playing the game after I moved to a (mostly) PC environment. This many years later, it's still fresh, it's still fun, and it's still memorable. It's a great game, and deserves the name "Playable Classic." If you try it, I'm sure you'll think so, too.

Additional Resources

NBA Basketball Returns

2005-06-28 · by psu

I have for the most part avoided watching pro basketball over the last few years. The main reason for this is the recent period of extended futility in which the Boston Celtics have found themselves trapped. But, I think there are deeper reasons for my distaste. It seems to me that the game has lost any sense of flow and grace. Instead, you watch a game and you see ten virtuoso athletes surrounded by their prodigious egos dribbling into an endless series of isolation plays and 2-on-2 pick and roll.

Then, against my better judgement, I watched game 7 of the current Finals last week. As the game stretched into the hours when I usually go to bed, I realized that here, finally, was the team game that I had been missing.

The last time I watched Quality NBA Basketball was the last good year of the Bird Era in Boston. I had moved to New Hampshire and could get all the games live on local TV. Here was a team that at its best, had everything. In Larry Bird they had a truly dominant superstar. The rest of the front line, Robert Parish and Kevin Mchale provided strong play in the low post. This meant that the offense could flow through any one of three players at any given time. Around this front line, various guards and backups rounded out the team. In the late 80s, the back court was Danny Ainge and Dennis Johnson.

When the Celtics played well, it was fun to watch team basketball, even when Bird decided to take over a game all by himself. While they primarily played a slow paced half court game, they excecuted the half court offense with flare and panache against even the most intense defensive pressure. Every set had three or four different options, and required moving the ball to a cutting Bird, or down to Mchale and then back out to the perimeter. There was motion of both the players and the ball, not just the dribble dribble dribble drive you see so much of today.

Watching Tim Duncan and the Spurs take over the game in the third quarter last night reminded me of my old team because they also did it with a spectacular display of half court offense against an extremely intense defensive team. The inside/out low post motion offense that the Spurs ran, combining Duncan down low with Ginobli slashing and good perimeter shooting mirrored the schemes that the Celtics ran back in the day. Of course, the Spurs also have a fast breaking open court dimension the Celtics never did, which is how they dismantled the Suns while allowing more than 100 points a game.

The one area where both Detroit and San Antonio were much more impressive than my beloved Celtics is defense. The Celtics had what you might call a reasonably strong team defense, but they were highy suspect one on one and didn't have the benefit of any legal zone defense at the time. The Spurs and the Pistons have no such problems. I don't think I've witnessed two stronger defensive teams, and that bodes well for the future of the sport, I think. Ben Wallace, in particular, was everywhere. Rebounding, blocking shots, harrassing the inbounds play, and generally making a pest of himself. But what was truly impressive is that the Spurs not only matched the Pistons defensively, but also looked into the face of a defense that good and moved the ball, set picks and hit shots anyway.

So, there you have it. One late basketball game, and at least part of the faith of one fan is restored by a team that can do anything. They can run and gun, they can make you work for every point you score, and they can slow it down and score against a stifling defense. You don't see this very often in a team. Bravo.

Notes

Another ode to the Spurs got me interested enough to watch one game until the end. I'm glad I did too.

Howl's Moving Castle

2005-06-29 · by peterb

Bear with me for a few paragraphs, while I approach a review of the Disney release of Howl's Moving Castle from a very oblique direction.

I'm one of the people who prefers to watch movies that are dubbed instead of subtitled, all things being equal. This is, apparently, a controversial position. I don't really understand how there can be any debate over this. If you have a movie with a superb dub, and a movie with great subtitles, the dub is the better movie. Period.

Now, it's true that there are many, many movies — particularly animated movies — that have dubs that are bad, or terrible, or completely unwatchable. That, as we like to say in the software industry, is merely an implementation detail. Of course it's possible to record a dub which ruins a movie. It's equally possible to lay down a subtitled translation that ruins the movie. And of course, we can imagine an actor's vocal performance that is so singular that no dub can capture it. But be honest: this is not an issue in 98% of the films we watch. Would you really cry crocodile tears if they dubbed over Kevin Kline's voice in Wild Wild West?

So what I'm talking about here when I say "dubs are better" is: the platonic ideal of a dub is better than the platonic ideal of subtitles. This is because popular cinema — and I'm deliberately excluding experimental film and formalist indulgence — is a medium which makes use of the written word but is not dominated by it. Subtitles dominate movies. Subtitling a movie takes a primarily visual experience ("watching a movie") and converts it into a primarily lexical experience ("reading the dialogue, while periodically flicking your eyes upward to see what happened.")

This is not to say that reading is bad. Reading is one of my favorite activities in all the world. Given the choice between a book and a movie, I'll usually choose a book. But that doesn't mean that I appreciate being distracted from a director's carefully created composition by being forced to read. Neither would I appreciate turning the page of the book I'm reading and encountering a full-motion video.

I'm bringing up this discussion of subtitles in part because I think it's an interesting discussion on its own, but primarily to use as an illustration for how small changes in presentation can transform a work. It's a common phenomenon to hear people who have read the book a movie is based on grumble "They changed everything! And they left out this Really Important Stuff! And my favorite moment from the book was missing!"

Howl's Moving Castle was adapted from a book. I've already read some criticisms of it along these lines.

Popular cinema is a medium. Books are a different medium. The two mediums place different requirements on how a story should be told. Just as putting subtitles on a movie changes its essential nature, so can other aspects of how we tell a story transform the nature of a work. In other words: if you tell the same story the exact same way in a book and a movie, you will end up with either a lousy book, or a lousy movie. The first Harry Potter movie is a great example of a film that would have been better if the director (well, if some hypothetical director with talent) had attacked Rowling's book with a carving knife and used only its heart. Instead, the film was a slavish page-by-page adaptation that removed all the joy from the text.

1230-3

Howl's Moving Castle

The reason this discussion of subtitles, audio dubs, and the nature of film as a medium is relevant is because I recently read the Diana Wynne Jones novel Howl's Moving Castle, and had the opportunity to see the Miyazaki film of the same name yesterday. Both works tell the story of a young woman named Sophie who encounters magic and is transformed by it. I enjoyed both immensely. I was therefore surprised when I read Christina's opinion that Miyazaki mutilates and abandons Sophie's story. I respectfully disagree with Christina. I think what Miyazaki is abandoning is the form of the fable, and in doing it he finds Sophie's heart. If the movie had been "true" to the book, it would have been a less interesting movie. The medium required a different view of the story.

Christina correctly points out that the book is strongly redolent of European fairy tales. The movie, unapologetically, isn't. Fairy tales are not personal stories, even though we treat them as such, or though we may feel possessive and intimate about them. Fairy tales, at their heart, are archetypal stories meant to scare children into behaving and listening to their elders. Little Red Riding Hood is a story about rape, murder, and cannibalism. Scratch a fairy tale, find a nagging parent: look no further than The Boy Who Cried Wolf. This is why the witch in Hansel and Gretel is so much more interesting than the protagonists, who by definition must be blank slates onto which children can project themselves.

Wynne Jones was telling a fable; Miyazaki was not. This is why Miyazaki's Sophie is so much more compelling than Wynne Jones's dreary young heroine. In the book, Sophie serves merely as a caricature against which the author can reflect the much more subtly realized Wizard Howl. In the movie, their roles are reversed: Howl is the caricature, composed of nothing more than hair and spun sugar, while Sophie is the emotional center of the film. The fact is, while reading the book I wanted to know what happened to Sophie. While watching the film, I cared about what happened to her. This is why if you told me I could only experience Howl in its book or film version (and both are quite good), I would choose the film without hesitation.

It is this empathy that is one of the strengths of film. Books have the luxury of being able to tell you about things. Movies have to show you things, or else be soul-crushingly boring.

On to specifics, without spoilers. The voice talent is of nearly uniformly high quality. There is one high point (Lauren Bacall as the Witch of the Waste) and one low point (Billy Crystal doing his tired-when-he-started Borscht Belt schtick as Calcifer).

Miyazaki, as always, incorporates his obsessions into the narrative: aging, the loss of family, the loss of humanity, war, industrialization, the environment, and above all (no pun intended), the beauty of the fantasy of flight. Some of these elements weren't in the book. But if you haven't read the book, you won't notice.

They used to say that Johnny Cash never did a cover. When he sang someone else's song he took it, changed it, and made it absolutely his own. If you've ever heard his cover of the Nine Inch Nails song "Hurt", you know this is true. Miyazaki, it seems, is much the same. This Howl is his own.

One thing I feared going in was the dreaded Miyazaki doldrum: as I have alluded earlier, I found some of the middle parts of Princess Mononoke to be slow enough to cause me to gnaw my own leg off, like a trapped wolf, in order to escape the theater. I needn't have worried. Howl has the best pacing of any of his films since Castle in the Sky. If I have any complaint about the film at all, it might be that it wraps things up rather quickly, and a bit too neatly. But this is just mere quibbling about plot.

At its emotional core, where it counts, Howl works superbly.

Immersed in Hype

2005-07-01 · by psu

The last few months have been filled with a steady stream of hype, drool, drool-induced hype and general nonsense about the coming of the next generation consoles. The "next gen", we are told, will bring us unprecendented processing power which will allow us to create fantastic gaming vistas full of particle effects, physics engines and environments that are normal-mapped and pixel-shaded out the ass. All of this, it is said, will provide an unprecedented level of "realism" and therefore "immersion" in future games.

This is, of course, stupid. Even without looking at the tech demos, I can safely predict that hardly any of the new games will be any more realistic or any more immersive than Mario and Luigi on my GBA.

First of all, the position that game worlds are in any way realistic is ludicrous on its face. I can easily think of two examples that support this fact. First, crates that contain health packs (or, if you prefer, plants that contain money). Second, consider The Chronicles of Riddick. This game takes place in a really crappy looking prison full of really mean people. So, do this experiment. Walk up to one of these mean people and do this: jump, jump, jump, jump, jump. At no time in the game does doing this cause your character to have the living crap beat out of him. In other words, game worlds are such a primitive model of reality that they can't even get basic interactions correct. It doesn't seem to me that a single hardware generation will be enough to bridge this gap.

Second of all, we don't really want the gap bridged. See, it's a game. Building a game world that models every detail of the real world would result in a game world that is really boring. Games are generally an escapist fantasy that we use to leave the real world for a while. The last thing that we want is to be put back into it. That's like putting people in THE MATRIX and telling them to have fun. The trick to designing a realistic game environment is to have just enough realism, but not too much.

This is because it is exactly the differences between the game world and the real world that make the game immersive and make you want to keep playing. You don't have to walk around the game world on your own, you push two sticks and various buttons to move at amazing speed over great distances. In the game world, a flick of your wrist and a couple of button taps are enough to send 15 really mean enemies to horrible bloody deaths. In the game world, a small green plant, or a little box with a red cross on it heals your injuries, because it would be pretty boring to have to go to ER instead of playing the game more. In the game world, it's easy to leap across huge chasms or high over the basketball hoop. It's even easy to jump into the air, and then jump again to go a bit further. In the game world, you never get lost because your GPS ran out of batteries, because a good game always shows right where you are on the map and how far you have to go to get to the next area. In the game world, you always have something interesting to do, some important mystery to solve, dozens of zombies to shoot in the head, or a galactic civilization to save from violent and war-like races.

In other words, "realism" and "immersion" in games are not only not correlated, they are actually working at opposite goals. Truly immersive games allow the player an escape from the real world by manipulating the reality of the game world in strategic ways so that the world is always fun and you never want to leave. This level of immersion comes from the game design and the implementation of the mechanics of the gameplay. It does not come from the game engine any more than great user interfaces come from the window manager rendering primitives. This is why, for all the fancy hardware, graphics engines, parallel processing engines and mega-memory bandwidth, hardly any of the games on the new consoles will be any more immersive than Mario and Luigi, which runs on hardware that would have passé in 1990. This is probably as it should be. New hardware comes around every few years, but truly excellent games are more rare.

Notes

This interesting presentation turned up in one of my google searches on this subject.

This philosophical rumination, and this discussion of immersion in games are also much more interesting that what I had to say.

Here are more thoughts on the subject.

Mysteries of Love

2005-07-04 · by peterb

Laurie Anderson and Lou Reed, a long-time couple.

How the hell did that happen?

Solitaire's Not The Only Game In Town

2005-07-05 · by peterb

In my family, growing up, the men played Pinochle and the women played Mahjong.

Later in life, this became a source of vexation to me, because the men so clearly got the short end of the stick. First of all, to play Pinochle you have to use a stupid Pinochle deck, which isn't any use whatsoever when playing War or Go Fish or other card games that normal people play. Secondly, there was some sort of unwritten law that said that in order to play Pinochle, you have to have at least one guy smoking a really stinky cigar, which is gross. Lastly, if you're playing Pinochle instead of Mahjong, then you don't get to play with the cool, clicky tiles that you can use to build pretend igloos if you tire of the game. Verbally, the games were about a wash, each with its own special brand of nonsense words ("meld" and "trump" versus "chow" and "pong").

Because of all this, and because, let's be frank, I was a mama's boy, I asked my grandmother to teach me Mahjong. She did. Thanks to Grandma, and thanks to the miracle of modern computer technology, I'm still playing today.

I don't actually play the exact same game today. As an adult, I've become enamored of the traditional Chinese rules which are much purer than the ones Grandma used. What I was taught by the bevy of very amused old Jewish women were "American" rules, which involve making hands that are published each year by the National Mahjong League. This version of the game has several innovations, all of which serve to make the game worse, in my opinion. First, in order to "really" play American Mahjong, you need the card that lists the winning hands, which change annually. So right off the bat, a game with simple winning conditions is complicated. Second, in American Mahjong there's a "trading round" where you pass off unwanted tiles, as in the card game Hearts. Most significantly, the American deck has jokers. I think all of these rules are bad on their face, so for the rest of the article you can assume that I'm talking about Chinese Mahjong (specifically, Hong Kong Old Style. There are many other variants of Mahjong. See some of the links below for more information.)

The simplest way to describe the game is "Gin, with tiles." A summary of the rules — and I'm omitting many details for brevity — is as follows. Each player's hand has fourteen tiles (more can be accrued during play). The Mahjong tileset consists of three "suits" (circles, bamboo, characters) with tiles numbered 1 through 9; there are four of each numbered suit tile, four dragons of three colors, and four of the four winds (East, North, West, and South). The goal is to compose a hand that consists of four "tricks" and a pair. A trick can be a numerical sequence of three tiles in one suit (a "chow"), three of any tile (a "pong"), or four of any tile (a "kong"). Tricks can be hidden in your hand or, if created by picking up someone else's discard, exposed. You can pick up a discard to complete a pong or a kong from any player. You can only pick up a discard to complete a chow if it was thrown by the player sitting to your left. You can pick up a discard from any player if it completes your hand (at which point it is considered proper etiquette to shout "Mahjong! In your face!" and do an amusing little dance involving pelvic thrusts. This dates from the Qing dynasty.).

Most of the complications in Chinese Mahjong come during the scoring phase, where there are many complex rules to determine how many "points" the winning hand was worth, which translates directly into how much cash everyone else has to pay you.

The biggest problem with Mahjong is that if you're not a Jewish grandmother or Asian, there aren't many people you can play with, in person. So that means you'll want to either play other people online or play against the computer. Or browbeat your friends into learning to play, but that's beyond the scope of this article.

Which brings us to the present day, wherein if you google for "Mahjong computer game," you will get approximately 8 billion hits for "solitaire mahjongg". This game, which I believe was made popular by the game "Shanghai," has absolutely nothing to do with Mahjong except that it uses the tiles. It is a variant of Concentration, where you match tiles, except the tiles are visible — let's call it "concentration for really, really stupid people." The only analogy I can come up with is that it's like people developing games called "poker" that involved building houses of cards with Poker decks.

There are, and I assure you I do not exaggerate, hundreds upon hundreds of these "solitaire mahjongg" games. There are so few true Mahjong games that you can enumerate them.

Hong Kong Mahjong in play

Hong Kong Mahjong in play

If you're on Windows, the gold standard is Hong Kong Mahjong (HKMJ), by Nine Dragons software. The game is highly polished, handles all the scoring for you, will optionally allow you to turn on penalties for false declarations. It provides a variety of annoyingly competent opponents with individual faces, voices, and play styles. I wish they'd port it to the Mac, but they're very straightforward about it on their site:

Q. - Will there ever be a version for the Mac?
A. - Sorry, no.

Nine Dragons has a demo of Hong Kong Mahjong available for download, so if you're on the Windows platform, you should check it out. The game also includes a very nice tutorial. Four Winds Mahjong also has a devoted fan base on the PC side of the room. I prefer HKMJ because of its wall-centric view — it feels a bit more like you're actually "there."

If you are on a Mac, you're out of luck unless you're able and willing to run in Classic or Java. There are a bunch of Classic applications, none of which are superb. The best of the lot is probably Mahjong Parlor, which amusingly lets you set the tile voice calls to English, Cantonese, French, or Spanish. Because the thought of being without Mahjong on my Mac is mortifying, I am working on an OS X native Mahjong app in my ample spare time. It should be done by about September, 2016.

There's also SmartMahjong, a Java application that runs on OS X as well as Windows. It lacks the polish of a native app and hasn't been updated in quite a while. And it wants to be run as root, which means I have to press two buttons to get it to work, which means I hardly ever do it.

If you lose, Creepy Girl will eat your brain.

If you lose, Creepy Girl will eat your brain.

Your best bet on the Mac is probably to play one of the online variants. I like the Yahoo! applet (see link below). It's not at all attractive, but it does a good job of clearly communicating what's going on at all times. The best looking online variant is the Java applet at Jade Dragon Mahjong. If you can get past the creepy looking chicks on the homepage and the overall sleazy Taiwanese gambling house aura, the applet is fairly attractive, if slow.

Mahjong can seem intimidating because of the number of tiles, and the scoring rules, but just remember this simple fact: If you can play Gin Rummy, you can play Mahjong. So the next time you encounter yet another uninspired reimplementation of Shanghai, why not spend some time playing real Mahjong instead? You'll be glad you did.

Additional Resources

No Bad Days

2005-07-06 · by psu

It's the first week of July, which means the Tour De France has started again. The Tour, of late, has taken on a certain sameness. Lance starts, Lance stays out of trouble, Lance wins in the mountains, Lance takes more time in the time trials, Lance wins the race. While some would want you to believe that this makes the race boring (and they are, to a certain extent, correct) one should always keep in mind exactly what it takes to be the guy that does what Lance is doing.

As we pointed out last year, the Tour is made up of three types of races, day by day:

  1. Flat road stages.

  2. Mountain road stages.

  3. Time Trials.

So, the first thing the guy who wins needs to be able to do is always do well in each type of stage. He doesn't have to win every stage, he just has to not lose time to anyone "important", that is, anyone else who might be able to win the race. He has to be strong enough in the time trials to either win or not lose time. More importantly, he has to not lose time on hills. Miguel Indurain won the race five times while never winning a road stage by doing these two things. But people who can do these two things don't come around a lot. That's why in the last decade, there have been basically two major strong men in the Tour: Indurain and Armstrong.

But, there is more to this than just the physical. To win the race, you also need to avoid the myriad of little things that can take you out of the race, or make you lose enough time that you may as well quit. You need to avoid bad days.

Don't crash

Now, if you watched the race at all, you know that this is easier said than done. The early road stages in particular are plagued by high speed crashes that will lose you the race immediately. Every single one of the major players who might have won the race in the last few years have crashed out of it in one way or another, sometimes more than once. If you think back, Ullrich has crashed in both a road stage and a time trial. Levi Leipheimer crashed out on the second day of the tour a few years ago and has never really made an impact since. Tyler Hamilton crashed and rode most of the race with a broken collarbone. Beloki crashed coming down a mountain.

Don't get caught in the back

A few years ago, half of the contenders for the GC got caught in the back when the field split in a vicious cross wind over a road that got flooded. They lost around ten minutes, and therefore the race, by not paying attention for a critical twenty minutes. Lance never does this.

Don't bonk

Lance has actually done this a couple of times. But each time, he managed to limit his losses and make them back later.

Don't get sick

Every year you hear about people dropping out because of food problems, stomach problems, or other health problems. Somehow Lance avoids this.

Don't have bad days.

So, think about it, in six races over (say) 15,000 miles and 120 days, Lance and company has only ever had maybe four or five bad days that I can remember. A few minor crashes, bonked on a mountain once and in a time trial once. He has had his share of good luck (i.e. being able to avoid Beloki that day), but for the most part, the most amazing thing about this run is the consistency of the Lance and his team in winning the race year after year. In the face of hundreds of potential problems every day, they pull through and manage to make it a race where all Lance has to do is ride faster than the other people. Nothing else gets in the way.

This, I think, is an amazing fact that the day to day coverage of the race doesn't really illustrate.

Six years, never two bad days in a row. That's how you win the Tour.

Forty-five minutes after I wrote the above text, Team CSC came within a few seconds of holding on to the race leader's jersey by almost beating Lance and Discovery Channel in the team time trial. But, coming into the last kilometer the yellow jersey, Dave Zabriskie, crashed. So another good day for Lance, another bad day for someone else.

The Legend of Zelda: Gamers are Morons

2005-07-07 · by psu

Today I have a simple question. I was playing the GBA port of Zelda: Link to the Past and was searching the interweb for clues into the flow of the game. What I found was a universe full of material about another matter entirely. You will recall that when Wind Waker was originally released, a lot of people complained about the "childish" look of the game. Having never seen any of the other games, I hadn't thought much about this, and figured the kids were just pissed off because the new game was different. But apparently I was wrong.

As always, I had completely underestimated the psychotic idiocy of the true fan-boy. So here is my question. The Zelda games all tell the same basic story of a small man/boy who wears green tights and runs around a fantasy land after a Princess who, apparently, has been kidnapped over 15 dozen times in order to find magic items and save the world from pure evil. In addition, as far as I can tell, Wind Waker is a game with literally dozens of little design problems. There is the stupid camera system, the awkward combat mechanics, the annoying inventory management, the endless sailing, the stupid jumping puzzles, the slavish adherence to the same old tired form and plot, the sloppy controls, the boring boss battles, and most of all, the evil and idiotic save system. And, in the face of all of this, the main complaint that you can muster is that the look of the game is not "mature" or "realistic"? Are you fucking nuts? It's a child's fantasy story, and all of the games look like just that, a child's fantasy story. Get over it.

Postscript

Yes, I realize I am a bad person for not liking this game that much.

A Short Commentary on Our Times

2005-07-08 · by psu

We drove from Pittsburgh to Burlington for a friend's wedding over the 4th. We drove through 3 states and stayed in 3 hotels and one cousin's house in 4 different towns. The towns ranged from medium sized college towns to a small Albany suburb, to a rural population center in the middle of nowhere in northern New York. This last place was small enough to not even have a Starbuck's.

Every single place we stayed had high speed network. Two of them wireless. Two out of three hotels gave us the service free (ok, the cousin's house doesn't really count). Surely this is a commentary on our times. A geek toy like the interweb, which only a few freaks had heard of a little more than ten years ago, is now more ubiquitous than a triple venti two pump decaf vanilla no whip mocha with sprinkles.

God of War

2005-07-11 · by psu

I worked my way to the end of this game last night. Action/Platform games usually are not my thing, but this one received nearly unanimous effusive praise both from the gaming press and sources you can actually trust (ha ha). I think the title is similar to Resident Evil 4 in that the core gameplay is really fun, but that core is brought down by a mindless adherence to annoying game design conventions that make the game less fun than it could be.

Note: This review contains minor spoilers.

The Good

The combat in this game is, in a word, awesome. The controls are tight and responsive, and every hit is solid and well-defined. Combos easy to pull off, and the most useful combos can be created from natural sequences of button presses. Different attacks are animated beautifully, especially the ones that involve grabbing enemies and breaking them into pieces. When you find a good rhythm playing this game, you turn the main character into a nearly invincible whirling cyclone of bloody death. I wish the combat in Jade Empire had been half this good.

The game also provides an interesting twist on finishing moves via a little mini-game mechanism. These are more of a mixed bag for me, because the timing required to both initiate and continue the mini-game is hit or miss, especially the moves involving the analog stick. Of course, the fact that I can't pull them off is more of an indication that I am old and slow, I suppose.

The magic system is somewhat less interesting, and in practice is more of a safety valve, to be used only when you would otherwise be overwhelmed.

God of War is at its bloody best when hordes of enemies surround you and force you to dance and weave and cut them to pieces. Luckily, you get to do this a lot.

The Bad

Unfortunately, you don't get to spend all your time in the good parts of the game. Mixed into the combat are platforming levels that range from reasonably fun to so frustrating that you feel your very soul being sucked away through your eyeballs. The most insulting part of this is when, after you've missed the jump for the tenth time, the game asks you if you want to switch to easy mode. This is especially insulting because the easy mode does not make the jumping easier. In the entire game, I can only think of perhaps one occasion where I died enough to want easier combat. Meanwhile, the record for the number of tries I needed to clear some of the more hateful jumping puzzles was greater than thirty.

I put the blame for the hateful quality of the platforming on the decision to give me a camera I cannot control, and to put this camera in places that make the jumping puzzles harder rather than easier. For example, if I'm inching across a thin wooden beam and jumping over rotating blades, and any hit from any object and any missed jump makes me die instantly, the last place I want the camera is on top of my head where I can't see my feet. It's hard for me to believe that a design team that can create such an incredible fighting engine could be so stupid about the camera. This is especially mystifying because it is clear that they know how to place the camera well. Throughout most of the rest of the game the camera does not get in your way. I conclude that they have done this sort of thing on purpose and therefore they hate me.

My two other complaints about the game are the same two complaints I have about most games: stupid save points, and stupid bosses.

The Bosses in God of War are classic old school weird puzzle Bosses. The fact that the combat is fun almost makes them not boring. But not quite. The savepoints in this game are too far apart. The checkpointing system helps, but not if you need to stop playing and come back to the game later. Also, while checkpoints are usually well placed, there are some mistakes. Save-anywhere would have been better.

The Ugly

The final Boss in this game is a classic example of Bad Boss Design. Make sure you have a good hour set aside before you start, because the fight is a three stage deathmarch with no saves between the stages. I will again claim that this is because the game designers hate me. The first stage also has a bug where the mini-game trigger fails because it first asks you to mash Circle, but to transition to the next phase, you have to instantly know when to stop mashing and hit a different button. This means you spend twenty minutes completely mystified about why the mini-game is not working.

The final insult is that when you get to the last stage, the gameplay is completely changed. Instead of the fluid, visceral combat that you get in the rest of the game, the last battle is nothing but a boring dodge and hack-fest. The only saving grace is that after you die a few times the game finally asks you to go to easy mode, which gives you a way to escape the brain-sucking hell that the game has become by that point.

The Rest

The game looks good, especially for a PS2 game. In general they avoided the normal PS2 "looks-like-ass" filter, although the in-engine Kratos doesn't look so good from the front.

The game is short. This is good. The game feels about the right length. I've played it for a couple of weeks and got to the end before I was completely burnt out. I could use nice leisurely turn based game now though.

Some of the monsters all make the same noise. That's a bit boring.

The game has some puzzles that are easy without being stupid. If that makes any sense.

After beating the game, you get to watch all the movies. I like this feature. The cut-scenes are pretty.

The story is reasonably interesting, though nothing great. The game re-interprets Greek mythology in the same way that Oliver Stone re-interprets American history in the late 20th century.

Overall, I think the fighting engine more than lives up to the hype, but the rest of the game drags it down. It's demoralizing to pulverize an army of enemies only to fall to your death over and over again because you can't jump from one perpetual motion machine to another or because the game decides to throw a mind-numbing Boss in your way. God of War is good, but not great. It's certainly not good enough to play twice, except maybe in Easy mode.

How to Win a Bike Race

2005-07-12 · by psu

If you haven't watched today's stage of the Tour, then move along.

On the other hand, if you have watched the race, and you want some insight about how bike racing is both a team and individual sport, then go and find video of the stage and watch the clinic that Discovery put on this afternoon in France. After a weekend where a lot of people where aghast and wondering what happened to Lance's team on that first stage in the hills, Discovery came out today and completely destroyed the entire field. Lance brought his entire train to the bottom of the final climb and then that team proceeded to just ride the entire race off their wheel. They then handed the race over to Lance, who rode even faster. 22K later, Armstrong leads the race again, and every other major contender is minutes back.

So the script from the last six years is on the way to be repated again. Still amazing to watch.

Formaggi Italiani

2005-07-13 · by peterb

I have this problem with cheese: very often, I'll encounter some super cheese, and then finish it, and then the next time I'm at my cheesemonger I have completely forgotten what it was that I was enjoying so much the other day. I have this problem with wine, too.

Of course, sometimes I have the opposite problem, which is that I try some cheese, and it's revoltingly awful not at all to my taste, but then I forget about it, and I see it at the cheese shop and say "Hey, I've never had that, I don't think. I'll get some." And then I bring it home and taste it and remember that I've hated it before, and then I'm bitter.

I have this problem with wine, also.

Obviously, the solution is to create a checklist of cheeses I've either tried, or haven't tried and need to try, and carry it with me at all times. I'm considering just tattooing it on my back, and then having a friend read it off to me. The only trouble is that then I'll need to carry needle and ink with me to fill in checkmarks in case I find a nice cheese when I'm out.

Fortunately, Piero Sardo has already created the checklist for me: Italian Cheese: A guide to their discovery and appreciation is a great reference, even if most of the time it just makes me upset that I will only be able to sample about half of these cheeses by visiting my friends in Italy.

Hmmm. On second thought, maybe that's not such a tragedy, after all.

Attention, Tea Leaves...

2005-07-13 · by peterb

If you find a URL that you think would be of interest to Tea Leaves, one way to bring it to our attention is to use del.icio.us, which I have written about in the past. Simply tag a link with for:peterb or for:psu, and we'll look at it when we get a chance.

I particularly encourage and ask for people to tag exciting indie games that they think we should be reviewing.

Road Food

2005-07-14 · by psu

For your edification, a few food places you should try if you find yourself on the road in upstate New York or Vermont.

Shwabl's: Buffalo NY

This is the original "beef on weck" place. Beef on weck is carved roast beef served on a bun that has caraway seeds and salt in it. The top half of the roll is dipped in the beef juice. The sandwich is given to you on a plate with slaw or potatoes or potato salad. The beef was really good. The sign says the place has been open since 1897. You should go.

The Beef and Barrel: Olean NY

This a "beef on weck" place (presumably inspired by Shwabl's) which started out as a single room over 20 years ago and is now most of a city block. They serve big roast beef sandwiches on salty rolls with various sides and various other American dishes which are nowhere near as good. Don't bother, just get a sandwich. I think Schwabl's is better.

Oasis Diner: Burlington VT

Here is an old style diner with a New England accent. Great eggs (they make their scrambled from scratch, no mix), good pancakes, good muffins, good coffee, nice coffee mugs. Home fries were only OK. They have an interesting single queue with an exclusive lock order processing system. Yummy. A bit expensive.

Penny Cluse Café: Burlington VT

Here is a breakfast place where you can observe the Burlington Liberal in their native habitat. Great omlettes, potatoes, pancakes and biscuits. Their famous gravy, however, is not made with sausage and so is sort of morally wrong, although it is peppery and tasty. It's a dilemma, but I'm not one to let such things get in the way of enjoying some biscuits.

The fruit plate was also wondrous.

Go George

2005-07-18 · by psu

The other day, someone was taunting me on our local chat system. He said something to the effect of "If Pete is so down on cliché and repitition, why does he watch the Tour de France year after year when Lance always wins the same way?".

First of all, in the years that I've watched the race, there have been four or five different winners (Indurain, Riis, Ullrich, Pantani, Armstrong). Second of all, while the three week race has been pretty much the same every year, every day is a different one day race. The race within the race is what makes the Tour interesting for me, even if the overall is following the same old script.

Consider two stages from this week.

In the first, we have an American named Chris Horner who gets into the breakaway and stays away for more than 100Km, only to be caught 300m from the line, just missing the stage win. Here is a guy who until this year was riding on some little-known American team for the last ten years and won a stage of the Tour of Switzerland to make the Tour de France team. In his first tour, he has managed not only to survive, but come within ten seconds of winning a stage, something that most riders spend their entire lives only dreaming about.

And, until yesterday, George Hincapie was one of those riders. Hincapie has been a support rider for Lance Armstrong throughout his current run in the Tour. In earlier years, he helped Lance through the flat stages, protecting him from wind and crashes, and just surviving over the mountains in the hopes of winning a flat stage late in the race. More recently, one noticed that George stayed on the front in the mountain stages for longer and longer periods of time, pulling Lance all the way to the last climb on many days. Every year, he seemed to get better in the big mountains.

So yesterday, Hincapie found himself 18 minutes ahead of the peloton in one of those breakaways that do not need to be chased. But instead of a flat stage, they were riding the hardest mountain stage of the Tour. In epic fashion, Hincapie stayed with the break, covered two or three different attacks, and was finally first over the line at the top of the last mountain. It was an incredible individual win for a rider who has always been the consummate team player. There is no one on Lance's team who deserves it more than George. Bravo. Go George.

Notes

If you ever go to the Tour, don't do what this moron did.

The Problem With Nintendo

2005-07-19 · by psu

A recent feature at The Armchair Empire takes the gaming world to task for accusing Nintendo of being "only for kids." I think the piece makes a series of good points, not the least of which is that the current crop of so-called "mature" games are really nothing more than juvenile power fantasies for the 17 year old set. This is not to say that I don't enjoy the odd juvenile power trip, I did, after all finish both Resident Evil and God of War.

I think, however, that the article misses the real point. The real point is not that Nintendo "just for kids". The problem with Nintendo is that they only make games for fans of Nintendo games.

This puts Nintendo into a sort of insular niche where they just keep cranking out the same games with the same characters in mostly the same situations. I mean, how many different sports do we need Mario to be playing? Admittedly, Nintendo does very well in the little area that it has carved out for itself. They sell games, and they make profit.

What they don't do anymore is excite anyone outside of their core audience. As this core shrinks as a percentage of the whole gaming market, it gives Nintendo less room to experiment. This results in an even stronger concentration on the core franchises, which in turn results in the Nintendo niche shrinking even further. Maybe this is OK. Maybe Nintendo can live and prosper in its own little world. But I think that the Nintendo fans, and maybe everyone else, would be happier if they could break out of the bubble and really do something new again. There ought to be a life after Mario and Zelda. I'm rooting for Nintendo to find that and then it won't matter if they are "just for kids" anymore.

This City is an Ogre, Squatting by the River

2005-07-20 · by peterb

Tonight, in a pensive mood, I did something I haven't done in a while: I picked a direction, started driving, and got myself good and lost. I ended up in Clairton.

Clairton is a burned-out husk of a steel-town along the Monongahela river, 8300 residents and dropping fast. If you approach it as I did, on route 837 from the north, you enter one of those curious areas created by Pittsburgh's hilly, riparian geography: a two-lane road with almost no turn-offs, a retaining wall on one side, and the river on the other. This may sound picturesque, but it is merely claustrophobic.

Once you've gone a certain distance down Route 837, you're going to Clairton. There is no escape.

A sign announces your arrival and introduces Clairton, without irony, as the "City of Prayer." The altar at which much of the praying is done is that of steel. On the edge of the river, sprawling across nearby islands like a metastasized tumor, is the U.S. Steel Clairton Works, the largest coke manufacturing facility in the US. The first indication that you are approaching the plant is the aroma, which weaves itself into your hair and clothes. You will carry the scent away with you when you leave. Next, if it's night, you'll see the lights. Finally, you will round a bend and see the plant, stretching for what seems like miles ahead of you and above you.

Next to the plant are two or three nameless bars, concrete bunkers with no visible names, but just a lone Budweiser or Miller sign in the window. Anyone who has ever worked in a plant has also been to one of these bars. The rules are simple: these are the places that will cash your paycheck. They will serve cheap food. There might be a local girl dancing for tips. And if you don't work at the plant, you are very much not welcome there.

I worked in a factory, long ago. I didn't go in to the bars in Clairton.

That is the heart of Clairton. The tattered streets lead away from the Works, a network of small appliance repair shops, funeral homes, shuttered hotels, and convenience stores. Up on the hills above the Works sit small houses (median value: $38,500) where the families (median income: $25,596) live. Some men lurk on streetcorners, making oblique gestures at cars that stop near them. The town is overshadowed by the Works. It is an afterthought. It is as if some small mammals have built a nest in a thicket of dinosaur bones.

The juxtaposition of the reality of places like Clairton and the party line that the Pittsburgh region is revitalizing (thanks to Pittsblog for the link) is jarring. Perhaps someday the Clairton Works will be gone, and something rich and strange will take its place. But for now, it is simply industrial carrion. It is a place that was.

There may be residents (about 20% of Clairton's residents are below the poverty line) who have dear and fond memories of growing up in Clairton.

But to me, it does not feel like a place to live. It feels like a place to drown.

Additional Resources

Stating the Obvious

2005-07-21 · by peterb

Those who can, write code.

Those who can't, wank about Open Source Licenses.

Here We Go Round The...

2005-07-22 · by peterb

...mulberry tree.

I always thought it was a mulberry bush, but apparently I was mistaken. I parked underneath one of these trees outside one of my favorite bars — The Sharp Edge — the other day, with hundreds of perfectly ripe (and overripe) berries of a kind I'd never seen before. They looked like blackberries. They looked really good. Risking instant poisonous death, I gingerly tried one. They tasted good.

Mulberries, Maybe

Mulberries, Maybe

As luck would have it, inside The Sharp Edge was Laura of Upside-Down Pear who instantly and fearlessly identified them as mulberries. (Later, at home, Wikipedia concurred, thus proving once again that Laura is always right.) I resolved to pick and eat some more. And, just in case, to save one for the emergency room.

Thus, as I left the bar, I stopped to pick some berries. This proved to be a small tactical mistake, because, ripe as they were, they were raining down on me like hailstones, and it turns out that mulberry juice is very red, very dark, and very, very hard to wash off. I did eventually get clean, but my car may never be the same again.

The taste was sweet, but gentle, with almost an orange rind aroma. The texture was less pleasant; the berries fell apart in my mouth like head cheese. I'd eat them again.

But next time I'm going to make someone else go pick them.

Addendum and Question

I decided that this article would be the first one in which I would serve the included photo from Flickr. Unfortunately, it has taken so long to upload the above photo to flickr that in the interim, I have written the article, postprocessed the jpeg by hand, uploaded that to the tleaves.com server, and posted it. And made some edits. And made tea.

Is this a common Flickr experience, or am I just exceedingly unlucky tonight?

The Second Lance

2005-07-25 · by psu

As anyone who isn't living on Mars probably knows, Lance Armstrong bowed out of bike racing this weekend with his unprecedented seventh straight in the Tour de France.

Back in 1995, in the Indurain period, the long time cycling journalist Samuel Abt wrote a book about the transition in U.S. cycling as Greg Lemond was getting ready to retire. At the time, Lance was quoted as saying that he was tired of being called "the next Lemond", and would rather be called "the first Lance." I think that history will now show that Lance was right about that.

At the time, the statement seemed apt for a different reason. Lance was a very different bike racer than Lemond had been. He won one day races, not the long tours. He had not yet developed the physical skills he now has in the mountains and in the time trials or the mental and tactical skills that he has used to dominate the rest of the race. His first few trips to the Tour had always ended in planned early exits although he did get the occasional stage victory. When he dropped out again in 1996 I remember thinking that this didn't seem too unusual, although the truth was, of course, much different.

I didn't follow his progress after that day too closely until July of 1999 when seemingly out of nowhere he won the opening time trial of the Tour de France. This, I thought, was strange. This was a different Lance. And indeed, the last seven years have shown us the second Lance. Meticulous, mature and a master of the details necessary to win the world's biggest bike race. Part of me still can't believe he can suddenly climb that well, but there it is.

But some of the old Lance was still in there. That look he gave to Ullrich before riding away from him on Alpe d'Huez in 2001 was a classic example of his attacking style. Here was the first Tour champion in a while who actually won stages in addition to the overall. A perfect mix of the old one day racer and the new stage race champion.

The next few years in the Tour will be interesting ones as all the riders who have been second to Lance all these years fight it out. It will also be interesting to see which, if any of the new crew of American riders, many of whom rode on Lance's teams, manages to come forward and compete for the top spots. Finally, it will be interesting to see whether Lance's preparation methods will be adopted by other teams, and whether they will be successful in applying them. I suspect that Lance's training works so well mostly because it is Lance who is doing the training.

I guess I can go get on my bike now that the race is over. But man, it's too hot.

Notes on Designing the Perfect RPG

2005-07-26 · by peterb

Random notes, from about 4 years ago, on peterb's theory of computer role playing games and why designing fun CRPGs is so hard.

"I don't consider anything the Japanese do to be RPGs. Those are movies with extra special boring parts put in the middle for obsessive-compulsives."

Why do most RPGs suck?

There are basically 3(*) elements that go into making a computer RPG.

1) Plot.

2) Conversations with non-player characters.

3) Combat mechanics.

4) General interactivity with the world.

(*) I said 3 because it sounds better.

I've ordered those elements from most to least important. Designing games where each of these elements is fun requires entirely different skill sets.

Plot

Plot, surprisingly, might be the easiest element to get right. A decent writer can create an interesting plot that isn't silly. There is a simple test you can apply to determine if the plot sucks:

If a chick in a chainmail bra appears in any of the box cover art or the magazine ads for the game, the plot will suck. I call this the "EverTest"

The only RPG with a truly superb plot in recent years would, in my estimation, be Planescape: Torment. And even that was probably incomprehensible to anyone who didn't grow up steeped in the minutiae of Dungeons and Dragons. The game suffered from its milieu, rather than flourishing from it.

Conversations

Conversations with non-player characters are tough, also, because you run the risk of confusing the player if you have lots of unrelated stuff. But the benefit of having lots of unrelated stuff is that you can create a more immersive world.

The best game of its type for conversation was Ultima III.

The worst games for conversation (of games that have any at all) are any of the Japanese games. The particular way in which they're horrible is they have a tendency to design where NPCs either say nothing useful at all or tell you something that directly advances the plot. There seems to be no middle ground.

Combat

Combat mechanics are the easiest element to screw up. This is where the Japanese RPGs both excel and fail, in different ways.

Designers are caught in a conundrum: if the combat mechanics are too simple, the player will not find the game interesting because it will seem too simplistic. But if they are too complex, then the game has the potential to be oh my God I want to die of boredom level boring. (This doesn't apply for "pure" combat games such as Final Fantasy Tactics. Presumably, anyone who buys a game whose entire raison d'etre is tactical combat knows what they are getting themselves into.)

The formula for determining boredom can be expressed as followed:

time required to resolve combat * number of non-plot-advancing combats = boredom

Probably my favorite way of preventing this formula from increasing the Boredom Quotient is to at a certain point just accept that the player is going to win stupid little combats and resolve them automagically. (To make up for how much bashing I'm doing of Japanese RPGs here, I'll point out that Earthbound for the SNES did this. Some day I'll write an article about Earthbound and how it transcended the boundaries of its medium by being self-aware in an almost postmodern way. But not today.) Of course, as a designer you should be asking yourself: if the combat is meaningless or the outcome predetermined, why bother subject the player to it at all? If the answer is simply "to increase R", then you have a fundamental design flaw. One idea I like is the thought that perhaps the enemies will recognize that the player is driving a Sherman tank and that their javelins won't hurt him much, so maybe they should run away.

Interactivity

A good game lets you do things that have nothing to do with the plot, and has some sort of log or reminder system to allow you to get back on track if you forget what you should be doing. Baldur's Gate (like all of the Bioware games) is pretty good in this regard. Examples of "bad" include most of the Zelda games(*) (which have "side quests" but no feeling of a world that exists independently of the player), Final Fantasy whatever, and Wizardry for the Apple ][.

(*): These notes were originally written years before Wind Waker, which did a slightly better job, narratively, of making the player feel that they were a part of a world, rather than the world's reason for being.

Some designers have chosen to interpret "interactive" to mean that the player should be able to break or steal anything. This is indeed one definition, but it's an unadventurous one. Like "realism" and "immersion", other loaded terms, interactivity is something that you only want part of the time. You want the exciting, fun things you'd like to do to be interactive. You want the boring, stupid parts of the world to not be interactive. As much as I personally dislike the Grand Theft Auto series of games, they seem to have a sense about this: you'll never have to stop to pay a toll to use a highway, or put gas in your Ferrari.

Any game that makes you replay a substantial portion of it when you die sucks and the designers are going to hell. Canonical example: all of the Zelda games.

Conclusion

The question of what a CRPG is is itself hotly debated. In the years since Wizardry first codified the D&D-style level-up progression form of play, little new ground has been broken. Most CRPGs are, for the most part, still about wandering around monster infested areas and hitting "fight fight fight parry parry parry" once a round. The future of the CRPG as a genre depends on those pushing past the "show the user a spreadsheet full of numbers that slowly gets bigger over time" model of interaction. The best possible case is probably the disappearance of the genre as a separate recognized class (except among retrogaming fans), and for its best attributes to simply be absorbed by mainstream games, leaving the drudgery, such as inventory management, behind.

Curse You Cartier-Bresson

2005-07-27 · by psu

Henri Cartier-Bresson has a lot to answer for. Renowned for a photographic style that brilliantly balances meticulous composition with apparently split second timing, Bresson brought hundreds of iconic images into the photographic literature. Unfortunately, his style and artistic rhetoric (The Decisive Moment) became so influentional that it inspired legions of would be photojournalists to march into the streets on a desperate and largely futile search for their own decisive moments. Sadly, these armies of would-be auteurs do not understand two fundamental principles: most of your pictures are crap, and you have to know how to edit.

Before the interweb, the fact that there were thousands of crappy photographers toiling in their little darkrooms producing thousands of inconsequential wastes of emulsion didn't really have any effect on our quality of life. But now, with digital cameras and easy web hosting, you can't turn around without being hit in the head with collections of "street pictures" shot by people whose lack of talent as photographers is exceeded only by their lack of talent as editors of their own work.

Gazing upon these collections, you can only wonder what their creators see in the pictures, and why they can't see past it to the truth: that the stuff is crap. Actually, not all of it is crap. There is one shining beacon of photographic talent stuck into this pile of otherwise craptastic creations. This is because Mr. Dixon actually knows a good picture when he sees it in the viewfinder and also has the sense to only show you the ones he got when he didn't miss.

So, don't let this happen to you. Don't let me get my hands on your crappy, crooked, out of focus, underexposed and barely composed drek. Shoot a lot, learn how to edit out the bad ones, and don't show them to me. If I only see your good ones, I'll think you are a genius.

Do Not Taunt Happy Fun Psu

2005-07-28 · by peterb

Yesterday's article by psu about the importance of only showing your best photos really struck a note with me. That's why I have added a Tea Leaves™ Decisive Moments™ photostream to the sidebar. This will let us subject you to unedited garbage share the immediacy of our vision with you.

First up: three weeks of cat pictures. Tally-ho!

For now, I'm using Flickr to host the pictures, until I find enough free time to write a proper template hosted at tleaves.com. Overall, flickr hasn't impressed me. As my friend Alex said, "It seems like the sort of thing that joshua would do in an afternoon, only he'd do it better."

Life is Too Short

2005-08-01 · by psu

These days, the average large scale action game is clocking in at between ten and fifteen hours of gameplay. This brings howls of complaints from the hard core gaming set and the gaming press. Over and over again, you hear people complain about the main failing of an otherwise excellent game: "It was too short". This is nonsense. Ten hours is, if anything, usually too long.

First, there are my own physical constraints:

I can't play any game in a set of long uninterrupted sessions. For me, a two hour session is pretty long. If I manage to get one of these per day, I can be guaranteed to annoy the other members of the household. So let's say optimisitically that the maximum amount of time I get to play is two hours per weekday. Also, remember that I am old and sucky. This means that if you include replay time due ot death, stupid savepoints, and other insults, my actual wall-clock time for a "ten hour" game is closer to twenty hours.

God of War provided the best recent example of the "I am old and sucky time dilation" effect. There was one area that takes 5 minutes of game time to clear actually required about an hour or more of real time to play because the goddamn camera didn't let me see the freaking jumps and I died 35 times. This sort of thing makes a game feel a lot longer. In any case, even the shortest of the short games gets me two full weeks of ultra-violent entertainment. I think this is a reasonably good value on a full priced game.

So, I don't really think game length is an issue, except that most games are too long. That is, most games, even the good ones, are not good for ten whole hours. Most recently, I could have done without the part of the second act and all of the third act of Riddick, which pretty much just stopped being fun and turned into a repititious maze of vents, shafts and really really horrible AI. Like many games, by the end the only thing that kept me going was wanting to see that last cut scene.

Large scale single player games have to work hard to hold on to your attention:

  1. They must construct a fairly large and complicated game world, and convince you of its fidelity.

  2. There must be enough content and variety for the game to stay interesting.

  3. Consistent pacing.

In the case of Riddick, the game has to make you believe you are in this huge space prison. In the early parts of the game, this was done very well. But later in the game the place lost its sense of inner consistency. Riddick also failed to provide enough variety. There really were only two or three different kinds of enemies (small and dumb, and large and dumb), and only two or three different ways to get rid of them. God of War did a nice job with the game world and variety (at least in my opinion). But, for me at least, some stupid jumping puzzles and gratuitous backtracking threw the pacing off. Prince of Persia also had a relatively awful pacing problem at the end of its first act.

Most games eventually fail along one of these dimensions and this is why so many games sit on the shelves unfinished. You start the game and everything is fine, but ultimately something in the mechanics or narrative or gameplay wears out its welcome and you put the game down. Once you put the game down, picking it up again requires that you reconstruct the world of the game in your head again, which means that you will reaquaint yourself with whatever wore out its welcome before. So you put the game down again. in addition, the more complex and rich the game world is, the harder it is to go back to it once you have left. This fact alone keeps me from retrying many games that I've put down (let's see... KOTOR 2, Thief, Zelda: Wind Waker, Beyond Good and Evil, etc).

What is interesting to me is to contrast this situation with games that I have spent much more than ten hours playing. Consider Counterstrike. Our local Counterstrike crew played off and on for maybe six months, mostly humans-on-bots, on the same set of a dozen or so maps that came with the game. Each round was about 5 minutes in length, and we'd play four to five rounds on each map before switching. I would estimate that that we easily played 60 hours of Counterstrike over six months.

I find this to be an interesting paradox. God of War , Riddick, and similar games combine multiple settings, diverse gameplay styles, embedded narrative and all the other tools of AAA game production, and yet can only stay interesting for about ten hours. How can Counterstrike, with its 12 maps that have been around for five years and bots that while fairly sophisticated are also pretty predictable, stay interesting for six times that length (actually, longer, I feel like playing more now)? I think three factors contribute:

  1. Short rounds in a simple world.

  2. Excellently tuned and consistent gameplay.

  3. Just enough variation.

The key here is that the game is designed for replay value rather than for a long initial campaign. A given round of Counterstrike is pretty simple. You are in an Office building, and you need to rescue the four hostages. You always spawn in the same place, with similar weapons, trying to get to the same goal. Within this framework, the gameplay is tight and enjoyable, and the game engine throws in just enough variation to keep the game from being repetitive. The short rounds mean if you are having a bad day, you get to try again quickly. All of these things make the game easy to play over and over again.

I find that sports games like Project Gotham and Madden also have this nature. You can play them almost indefinitely in short spurts, against either computers or real people, and continue to have fun. These games do basically the same thing as Counterstrike, but in a single player environment. Simple worlds (a race track, a football field), familiar rules, and good gameplay make the games easy to replay for long periods of time.

What we are observing here is two sides of a single design question: do you design the game to be a compelling and lengthy world, or do you design the game to be short and replayable? The best games manage to hook you in both ways at once. They keep you interested in playing by some brilliant combination of narrative, world design, and gameplay design. Thus, you'll hear of people playing both the light and dark side of KOTOR, twice. Or other people who might be playing through Zelda or Final Fantasy XXVII for the 18th time. For me, the two single player games that came closest to doing this were Halo 2 and Resident Evil 4, both of which I played twice.

But games like these are rare. Most games, like Riddick, ultimately fail to provide enough brilliance to keep you sucked in for their entire length. Long before their ten hours are up, you've put the controller down and walked away. Life is too short for games that are too long.

Resources

Originally I got to thinking about this issue because almost every review I read of *The Chronicles of Riddick*complained that the game was too short, and I found it to be about 2 hours too long.

As usual, by the time I thought up this idea, other people had already written it down first. Ernest Adams did a particularly nice job discussing both gameplay and narrative from the standpoint of replay value.

He also has a nice piece on the design of sports games.

Schadenfreude

2005-08-02 · by peterb

Allume, the publisher of facehuggerware product Stuffit has been acquired, for $11 million in cash and $2 million in stock. To put those numbers into context, realize that it is less than half of what Microsoft books in earnings, on average, every day.

Maybe there is some justice in the world, after all.

Crabs

2005-08-03 · by psu

The later part of the summer means there are no more fresh crabs to be had. Therefore, to make you suffer, here are my two favorite recipes for crabs and crabmeat, both of which I made up accidentally.

Pan-fried Soft-shell Crabs

When we lived in North Carolina one of our great pleasures in the summer was going to Tom's seafood shack and picking up the soft-shell crabs that he had just brought back from the east coast of the state. The first time we did this, I wasn't really sure what to do with them. I looked in a few books and found complicated recipes involving soaking the crabs in milk and various elaborate breading schemes. After some thought, here is what I did instead, and the recipe that stands as our favorite for the crabs:

Heat up a pan over medium high heat. When the pan is hot, add olive oil and then drop in one or two crabs depending on how many fit. Turn the heat down to medium or medium low. Cook the crabs 5-7 minutes on each side. They should get nice an solid feeling, but not dried out. You also want to tune the heat so the outside doesn't get scorched.

Serve on salad greens with a nice dressing and some bread.

Crabby Crab Cakes

It's hard to find good crab cakes, especially in Pittsburgh. Your average crab cake tastes more like the breading or the dressing than the crab. So when the local fish stores start to get the fresh crab meat from Maryland or Mexico, it's time to buy a tub or two and make your own.

Here's what you need:

Put the crab meat in a bowl. In a different bowl, beat up the eggs. Chop the green parts of the scallions and the parsley as small as you can make them. Mix the onion, parsley and egg into the crab meat. Then add the breadcrumbs and mix them in. If the mixture is still on the wet side, add some more. I like to add enough to provide a bit of crunchy crust, but not so much that the breading overwhelms the crab. Finally, throw in some salt and pepper and hot pepper to taste.

Heat up olive oil in a small frying pan. While things get hot, form the crab mixture into small patties. Drop two at a time into the pan and cook them 3-5 minutes on each side until each side is nice and brown and the cake is heated all the way through. The crab meat comes pre-cooked, so you don't have to worry about that.

You should get about 8-10 crab cakes from this recipe. Serve the same way as you serve the soft-shells.

Zombies = Profit!

2005-08-04 · by peterb

Lately, some friends and I have been playing a web-based massively multiplayer online game called Urban Dead.

The basic concept behind the game is that you are in a town that is infested by zombies. You either play a survivor (one of various different "classes" — policeman, soldier, fireman, scientist — or you play a recently animated corpse.

The thing about this game is: it isn't any fun. Not even a little. Nearly everything about the game is bad. The user interface is bad. The graphic design is bad. The game is paced super-slowly. Most of your time is spent waiting for "action points" to accrue. Or spending action points trying to hit someone, and missing. Earning a level can take a week. As we play it, everyone involved is complaining vocally about how almost every aspect of the game sucks.

But we're still playing it.

The only explanation I can come up with is: "Wow, we sure do love us some zombies!" This leads me ineluctably to the conclusion that the first company to deploy a zombie-based MMORPG that is actually fun will become rich beyond their wildest dreams.

The Hero With a Thousand Extra Lives

2005-08-08 · by peterb

There's no real point behind this, and we weren't very strict about the theme, but sometimes you just have to make a list of videogame titles crossed with famous works from other media. This is one of those times.

  1. Planescape: Yenta [peterb]

  2. The Chain-Gunning of Lot 49 [nlanza]

  3. Atlas Quaked [peterb]

  4. City of Lost Koopas [peterb]

  5. The BFG 9000 [fpereira]

  6. The Satanic Versus Mode [nlanza]

  7. Which one of these replicants doesn't belong? [psu]

  8. Gravity's Rainbow Six [peterb]

  9. Super Karamazov Brothers [nlanza]

  10. As I Lay Waiting To Respawn [nlanza]

  11. The Legend of Zelda Fitzgerald: A Drink in the Past [peterb]

  12. About a Boy and His Blob [rlink]

  13. Song of Savepoints [nlanza]

  14. Flashdance Flashdance Revolution [rlink]

  15. Sonic the Hedgehog and the Angry Inch [rlink]

  16. Far From the Team-Killing Crowd [jferro]

  17. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Gnome Artificer [nlanza]

  18. The Hero With a Thousand Extra Lives [jferro]

  19. A Winter's Cutscene [nlanza]

  20. Pikmonomicon [jferro]

  21. Heart of Eternal Darkness [nlanza]

  22. The Camera Controls of Our Discontent [jferro]

  23. STAR80Topia [jferro]

  24. I, Robotron [jferro]

  25. Nine Princesses in Another Castle [jferro]

  26. The Stars, Like Grains of Katamari [jferro]

  27. Kublai Ghost Rekhan [jferro]

  28. Mr. Smith Goes to Save His Game and Discovers His Memory Card is Full [jferro]

  29. Boss Battle on the Prairie [jferro]

  30. Lady Chatterly's Levelup [jferro]

  31. Uncle Tom's Cab Missions [jferro]

  32. Johnny Got His BFG [jferro]

  33. Daikatanetics [jferro]

  34. The Picture of Guybrush Threepwood [jferro]

  35. Jak and Daxter are Dead [jferro]

  36. Does Spyro Dream of Pixelated Sheep [jferro]

  37. If On a Winter's Night a Goomba [jferro]

  38. Everything That Rises Must Be Undead [jferro]

  39. The Rise and Fall of Sid Meier's Civilization III [jferro]

  40. Beowulf: Total War [jferro]

  41. American McGee's The Bible [jferro]

  42. I'm OK, U R the suXX0rZ [jferro]

  43. War and Robinett [jferro]

  44. Grand Theft Auto: A Tale of Two Cities [clamen]

  45. Summer of Sam and Max: Freelance Police [rlink]

  46. Dude, Where's My BFG? [jch]

  47. Run, Lolo, Run [rlink]

  48. Sim City of God of War of the Roses [rlink]

  49. How Stella Got Her ShadowCraft Gauntlets Back From That Fucking Looter Leeroy [jferro]

  50. Around the World in 10 Days in God Mode [jferro]

  51. If I Ran the Duck Hunt [jferro]

  52. A Fistful of Rupees [psu]

Editorial comment: It's clear to me beyond a shadow of a doubt that jferro won this round.

My Brain on Ico

2005-08-09 · by psu

When I got a PS2 last Christmas, the one nearly unanimous game recommendation that I received from the crack dealers friends I know who play games was Ico. Over and over I heard "You gotta get Ico". So I bought Ico. That was six months ago, and I finally got around to finishing it this weekend. For most of the this time, I've had a mixed relationship with Ico. As much as I wanted to love the game as a truly transformative experience, my brain would always get in the way, as illustrated by this inner dialog.

Me: What a beautiful cut scene. What an amazing sense of place. Wow, you can just soak up this atmosphere.

Brain: What the hell are we supposed to do? I'm completely lost. Why is the rendering all jaggy and shimmery? Let's go play Ratchet and Clank and blow stuff up, or collect gay porn in Shadow Hearts.

Me: Wow, these environmental puzzles really make you explore every corner of the world.

Brain: Where is my shotgun? Where are the zombies? There is nothing here. Bored now.

Me: The game presents such a strong bond between the two main characters. This is a unique and immersive gameplay mechanic in addition to being an effective source of dramatic tension in the game's narrative.

Brain: Why won't the bitch follow me?? I get twenty feet away to explore some puzzle and what happens? She lets herself get dragged away by those black dust clouds and I have to replay half the game. Jesus christ on a stick.

Me: Of course, the control mechanics are perfectly tuned to the requirements of the exploration and puzzle solving. There is climbing, jumping, scaling walls, and so on.

Brain: Wait wait.. jump now, no no no don't run off the cliff, JUMP. Oh jesus not again.

Me: I just can't get enough of these environments. It's astounding how many different moods the game captures.

Brain: Why can't I tell if I can make that jump or not? Why is the camera behind me when I need to judge horizontal distances and above me when I need more perspective? Why do I have to replay this 20 minute section over and over again because he fell off the chain instead of jumping to that platform? Why aren't there more savepoints?

And so the inner battle raged on. But, in the end, the game delivered. The end game was as organic and compelling as any gaming experience I have ever had. It was paced perfectly and evolved naturally from the gameplay elements established throughout the rest of the game. Even the end Boss did not offend, because the solution was clear from the environment and the setup. So, the last entry in the dialog is

Me: Wow, that was the most emotionally mature ending I've ever seen in a game.

Brain: Sniff, sniff, what a nice little girl, er, I mean, where the hell was the savepoint I needed halfway to the end boss?

False Nostalgia

2005-08-10 · by psu

I had a feeling of nostalgia come over me a few weeks ago and got out the old manual film camera to shoot a roll of black and white and send it to a lab I found that does process-and-scan.

Aside from the Leicas, there is no current production camera that is as old school as the Nikon FM3a. It has manual focus, manual wind, and that signature manual camera snick noise when you take a shot. It feels and sounds and works just like a real camera should.

But, don't be fooled. The truth is that old cameras suck.

Here's what you do to get ready to shoot some pictures with an older camera

  1. Open can of film.

  2. Open back of camera.

  3. Pull the leader out and stuff it into the little slot in the takeup spool that doesn't hold on to the tab quite right so the leader falls out when you try to wind the first shot, so you have to try three times before the film finally catches.

  4. Shoot a blank. Wind the film. make sure it is going on to the takeup spool.

  5. Close back of camera.

  6. Shoot 3 or 4 blanks to move the film past the leader.

It's easy and fast once you get the hang of it. Well, actually it isn't.

Here's what you do to get ready to take some shots with a digital SLR.

  1. Put in a memory card.

  2. Turn on camera.

To be fair, there are auto-load film cameras with nifty motor drives. But, these are not nostalgia items. People don't fawn over their classic controls and sleek metallic bodies. For the most part they handle just like digital cameras with their faceless and efficient electronic interfaces. Of course, this also means that they are actually usable.

There are three things you want to do with a camera to take a picture: frame, focus, and set exposure. The modern film or digital camera has three handy dials that do each of these things quickly without requiring that you remove your eyes from the viewfinder. Various auto modes can also make the process faster if you know what you are doing. The old stupid camera has a handy focus dial on the lens and a fantastically huge panoramic viewfinder that projects the scene into your eyeballs with the brightness of a thousand suns. That's where the beauty ends though. To set exposure, you are likely going to end up taking the camera off your face to find the tiny little shutter speed dial that is on the camera top that is impossible to turn with just a finger. You will paw at it with your huge fingers, straining to see the tiny little numbers that are barely visible in the low light. Don't worry though. This is the classic camera interface, and it's good for you.

If you use the automatic mode in the FM3a and you want to set exposure compensation (so that white comes out white), the situation is even more insulting. Not only do you have to turn a tiny little knob, but it has an even tinier little locking button that you have to push down before you can make a setting. This is so you don't turn the tiny little knob by accident because it is so easy to reach up there and accidentally grab it with your two smallest fingers in the death grip needed to actually make it move. This is the legendary ease of use of use of a classic camera. The camera keeps you from setting things easily, so you don't do it accidentally.

Having reacquainted myself with the wonders of the classic camera interface, I shot through my roll of film. I was surprised when I hit the end of the roll could no longer wind the camera. I must shoot in batches of 50 or 60 with my digital. So I flipped the rewind knob up to rewind my shots back into the can, and it did not turn. Worse, when I gave it a little nudge, I heard the film break off. It turns out that you can't rewind the film without first pushing a small button on the bottom of the camera to reverse the transport. I had completely forgotten that this button exists. More of that classic design helping me out.

So here is the last wonder of the film world that I will have the pleasure of experiencing: losing 36 frames because the fucking film transport system breaks the film out of the canister making it impossible to retrieve without going into a darkroom.

Yes, it is truly sad that the hallowed days of capturing images on emulsion are behind us. We are missing so many tactile pleasures now. Like opening up the back of the camera (in daylight) and ripping out the film we just shot so we can tear it up into little pieces on the driveway and stomp it into oblivion.

Nostalgia is a wonderful thing, especially when it is so easily cured. Anyone want to buy a slightly used Nikon FM3a?

Additional Notes

This commentary in Gizmodo is infused with the same false nostalgia that victimized me. I've use that Pentax body. It has stupid dials. His griping about exposure compensation is especially laughable, since that is the easiest thing to set on most modern cameras.

Madden Time

2005-08-11 · by psu

Another August, another copy of Madden NFL. I can't help it. People will mock me. The general public's evaluation of my intelligence will plummet. What little cred I had as a "cool" or independent-minded personality will go down the toilet. But that's OK, because nothing changes the fact that the game is fun.

With the exclusive license and other press around EA in the past year, it has become fashionable to decry Madden as a symbol of everything wrong in the modern game industry. EA, we are told, is the great Satan, churning out the same game year after year to great reward while crushing the creative spirit of the poor serfs who must toil under intolerable conditions in their slave-master's dungeon with a large masked man standing over them beating a drum. This is bunk.

If EA is somehow evil for franchising great gameplay, then why aren't people taking Rockstar, Bungie, Valve, id, and most of all, Nintendo to task for exactly the same set of sins? It is not rational to me that someone can tell me that GTA:SA, or Zelda:Minish Cap or Halo 2 is some great artistic achievement and in the same breath spit on Madden as mass-produced drek.

When I look at Madden, I see a large scale piece of application software that is released with relatively major changes on a yearly schedule. This is not an easy thing to do. You either have to use staggered teams on longer schedules, or a single team on a very short production schedule. Either way, it's hard.

And look at what is new in this year's game, just off the top of my head

Any one of these new features would be a large production effort for any development team. And you have to tip your hat to a team that can integrate all this together and keep the game feeling basically the same as before. Everything that makes Madden fun is still in the game. Some things work better now than they did before, other money play holes have been plugged up. There are still annoying bugs (hello, why can't I turn off the Tony Bruno show under my menus?) and many of the same strange glitches (bullshit long passes near the end of close games). But when you filter all that out, what you end up with is a simulation of the football experience which is just good enough to be believable once in a while, and a game that makes you feel like a genius several times a night. And that's just irresistable.

With that though, I'll bring this little EA ass-kissing session to and end, and look forward to swimming in a sea of angry anti-EA screed.

Next time: How Madden football is really a strategy/RPG in addition to a sports game.

Soba for Barbarians

2005-08-12 · by peterb

I have a superb Japanese cookbook, Japanese Homestyle Cooking by Suzuki Tokiko-san. I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with it. Love, because it's a great book with many delicious and interesting recipes. Hate, because most of those recipes require what seems like days of effort to make properly, and Suzuki-san is very insistent on proper procedure. "The rice must be washed eighty-seven times, until the rinse-water is absolutely clear." "Scrub the burdock root using a brush made only from the shinbone of a cow. The cow must be one that weighed no less than 550 kilograms, and no more than 650 kilograms. This is critical. If the shinbone is unbalanced, the dish will be an abject failure, and you will shame your family."

OK, I admit it. Suzuki-san doesn't actually say those things. But as I read her book, I feel like she's saying them. Because at the end of the day, I find the recipes to be too much work. I want them to be quicker. Easier. More convenient. I need recipes more suited to my swinging, space-age-a-go-go lifestyle. Something from a cartoon: open the packet, pour the water on to the powder, and poof! There is a cloud of orange smoke, and as it dissipates I find a full meal, beautifully presented.

In other words, I am a barbarian, because it turns out that I am willing to settle for food that is only half as good as it could be if that means I only have to do one-tenth the amount of work. (At least when I'm the one doing the work. If you're doing the cooking, I require nothing short of perfection.)

With that in mind, here is how to make soba noodles if you don't care a whit about authenticity. This is soba for barbarians.

Unfortunately, not every dish can be made with a side of beef, one carrot, and a magnum of cheap red wine. So you'll need to get some ingredients from your local asian store for this dish:

So the overall strategy here is to make something that vaguely approximates dashi, and then add soy sauce and noodles. Then, we will eat it.

better soba than mine

When done, your dish will look nothing like this

To make a true dashi, of course, you'd need to follow a careful and precise process, and use konbu instead of wakame. But konbu is a pain in the ass, and you can't really eat it without a lot more effort, and I like actually eating the seaweed, and I'm too lazy to spend the time to make a real dashi today. So instead we're going to make mock-dashi.

Fill a large bowl with hot water and start soaking the wakame; when it has soaked for about 10 or 15 minutes, pour the water down the drain and set the seaweed aside. In the meantime, put a medium saucepan of water on the stove and heat. Take some bonito flakes (I use two 5 gram packets) and put them in a tea strainer (or cheesecloth, if you're all fancy that way). When the water is boiling, turn off the heat, and when it stops boiling put the tea strainer into the water. Let that sit for 5 to 10 minutes. Take the tea strainer out and throw away the bonito flakes. Add soy sauce until it looks, smells, and tastes about right (it should have a pronounced but not overwhelming soy taste.) Bring the pot back to a boil. When it's boiling, put in the soba noodles and stir; they should cook for about 5 minutes. Don't overcook them. You can put the wakame in at any time after it's back at a boil; the earlier you put it in, the more flavor it will give. Personally, I just throw the seaweed into the pot at the same time as the noodles, because that's the laziest thing to do.

When the noodles are done, take it off the heat and serve immediately. It will taste great, and will get better in the fridge over the next couple of days.

My Robot Overlords

2005-08-15 · by psu

Back in the day, I served two useful purposes in the car: pick the next tape to play, and keep track of the navigational information on the road map. The iPod has long taken over the first of these duties, leaving me with nothing to do but dictate the next turn. Except for the occasional tendency to reverse right from left, I believe that i have always done a credible job. We've found obscure restaurants and other locations in places ranging from North Central PA to North Carolina to San Francisco. But now my last job in the car has been taken from me.

We originally had purchased a Garmin GPS/Palm device that tried to be an in-car navigation system as well as a Palm-based PDA. It sort of worked, but wasn't really optimally good at either job. As a Palm, it was overly large and power hungry. It ran down the its batteries quickly and IMHO was somewhat difficult to charge.

As an in-car navigation system, the unit also left a lot to be desired. Once you got the thing into navigation mode, it provided excellent and detailed directions, complete with lots of dorky stats like time of arrival, average speed, and the name of the next cross-street. On the other hand, I hated the interface you had to use to set up the navigation mode. To me, it was a maze of bad defaults, stupidly labeled buttons, and teeny leetle inscrutable icons. It was also hard to use while the car moved, especially if you needed to use the stylus to pick things on the screen. Also, you could only search in areas for which you had downloaded maps. Since the unit had limited memory, it could not hold detailed maps for the entire country all at the same time. Once in a while, you'll find yourself driving out of an area for which you have downloaded the maps, and everything just goes blank.

Finally, the power problems persisted. Woe betide the user who leaves the unit in GPS mode and then turns off the car. Rather than just shutting down, the thing drains the battery, leaving you with the empty husk of a zombie PDA.

I had not noticed any of these problems in the Hertz Neverlost units that we had used in rental cars, but Karen did not like Neverlost, so we came to an uneasy peace with her managing the Garmin and me pestering her to buy a Magellan every once in a while when the thing failed again. The upside of the situation was that I had not been replaced by automation.

But, last week, the unit failed for good, and I got the order to just buy a Magellan 700 for the trip back east to visit parents. This unit almost exactly emulates the search interface and navigation mode of the Hertz Neverlost. As such, I find it straightforward to use. I happily push a few buttons and the map comes to life telling me where to tell Karen to turn the car. There are some gripes compared to the Garmin: the address book storage area is ludicrously small, considering that the thing has a huge disk in it. The on screen display also has a much lower dork factor, not even displaying your current land speed. The thing also seems like it is a bit late in barking instructions for on-ramps, but that could just be the inherent slop in GPS accuracy.

Almost everything else is better. It has no power problems, it comes up quickly and finds the GPS system almost instantly. You don't need to load maps except for updates. Finally, it has a streamlined interface to search for street addresses and other landmarks. As far as I am concerned it is perfect for in-car navigation. The downside is that I have lost my last useful job in the car. I am now reduced to mindlessly repeating the instructions of a simple automaton to make sure Karen has heard them. When the robot overlords come to take over the earth they will surely do it in subtle ways like this.

David Mullich: The Interview

2005-08-16 · by peterb

When I had the opportunity to interview David Mullich, designer of some of the most unusual and quirky Apple II games I played in my youth, I was a bit anxious. Mullich, after all, has been working in the industry for 25 years. What are the chances he'd want to talk about his earliest works? Imagine you are, say, a writer. You've been writing for decades. Every year you put out a new book. How annoying would it be if people only ever wanted to ask you about your first novel?

My sensitivity on this issue might have been heightened because I had recently read an essay that infuriated me. It was an article by a very well-known game designer. This designer is influential despite having a track record of having created some of the most arduously, gruelingly unfun games ever created. The theme of the article was how the designers he knew in the past had, he guessed, moved on from the industry. The refrain of his overwrought meditation was that these once-famous designers had disappeared, like grains of sand in the wind.

A few things bothered me about the article, not the least of which was its tone, but probably the single biggest annoying thing was this author's section on Nasir. Nasir Gebelli wrote a string of hits for the Apple II back in the early 80's. Our drama queen designer opines:

And then, a grain of sand, a gust of wind, and Nasir Gebelli was gone. Sometime around 1983 or 1984, in the general collapse of the games industry and the specific collapse of Sirius software, Nasir Gebelli disappeared from the scene. I don't know where he is now.

Of course, Nasir was doing what he had always been doing. Writing games. You may have heard of The Secret of Mana or Final Fantasy or some of the other small games published by an obscure outfit named SquareSoft.

So this article annoys me on a literal level, because the only reason the author didn't know what Nasir was doing was that he hadn't bothered to find out. But it also bothers me on a more fundamental level, because it buys into a pathology that we see expressed from time to time: the idea of the game programmer as a celebrity.

The corporate game industry eats this stuff up, because it keeps a steady stream of naive undergrads streaming in to the industry willing to spend time working too many hours for not enough pay (or stock options) in the hopes that they'll be the next John Romero. But really, the world has changed: the only people who know the names of any game designers are game geeks. Do you know who Will Wright is? Or Sid Meier? Of course you do. Because you are a game geek. You are not the mass market. You are not who determines whether a game product is successful or not.

The reality, of course, is that modern commercial games are much more products than they are works in the artistic sense. I say this not as an insult, but as a bare fact: the technical realities of game production are that they are a complex software product, and the game industry is not yet as good at abstracting away the complexities of production as Hollywood is at abstracting away the complexities of movies. The game industry has had a few D.W. Griffiths. But it will be a few more decades before it has its Hitchcock. I don't think it's any shame to be a competent producer or software engineer who works on a large team putting together a complex product. But to the game designers who pretend to celebrity, having a role like that is as glamorous as driving a truck.

So when I talked to Mullich (remember him? I mentioned him about 10 pages ago), I was nervous about doing the same thing to him as the designer who I will not name did to Nasir. I didn't want to imply that the only works that mattered were the ones that he had the top byline on. But I still wanted to know about his earlier games, because I am, perhaps unjustifiably, fascinated by that era in software development. In the meantime, he'd been a producer on a number of top-shelf titles (including some of the products in the humongously successful Heroes of Might and Magic III series).

Hopefully, I managed to ask good questions about the early days without giving short shrift to his later work. You be the judge.

peterb: What have you been doing since 3DO/New World Computing folded? Mobygames says you worked on Vampire: The Masquerade. What was your role there?

After I and most of the Heroes team were laid off from NWC, I was hired by Activision to produce real-time strategy games based upon the Star Trek license. That was a real treat for me, since I had been a Star Trek fan since watching the original series premiere episode and later became a cartoonist for the Star Trektennial newsletter put out by Gene Roddenberry's secretary, Susan Sackett. However, with the box office failure of Star Trek: Nemesis and the cancellation of Star Trek: Enterprise, Activision felt that Paramount was no longer supporting the license and announced that it was ending its agreement. All work on Star Trek games halted at that point, which was a pity because one of the games I was producing was shaping up to be pretty spectacular.

I was then assigned to produce Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines, which was already a year or more into development without an Activision producer being attached to ensure that everything was running smoothly. As a result, things were in a pretty sorry state when I came aboard: an unfinished design and game engine, technical problems with the multiplayer code, many game levels that were created and then thrown out, and so on.

My job was to work with the developer, Troika Games, to get the game back on track and bring it to completion. I eventually wound up staying onsite at Troika, which required me to drive a 180-mile round-trip commute each day through the worst of Los Angeles traffic. I'd usually leave my house at 7am and often wouldn't get back home until 2am that night, and this went on for six months until the game was finished. It was a very grueling project, and I was happy when it was all over.

My three-year contract with Activision recently expired, and now I'm in negotiations for a new business venture that's a little different from what I've done before, and for that reason among others, it's very exciting for me. Unfortunately, I can't discuss it yet.

Let's be blunt. Heroes IV failed. What went wrong? If you could fix just one thing with the product (technically -- you're not allowed to say "better marketing!") what would it be?

I think that characterizing Heroes IV as a failure is overly harsh. While it wasn't the enormous critical and financial success that was Heroes III (which, I was pleased to recently learn, was named by PC Gamer magazine as the 25th Best Game of All Time), Heroes IV received good reviews and had its share of fans. The challenge with sequels is trying to make a game that has enough of the same things that made its predecessors fun, yet is different enough that it doesn't feel like the same old thing. Sometimes you strike the right balance, and sometimes you don't (George Lucas, anyone?).

However, things did go wrong on the project, and the two biggest problems were the Forge Town and Legends of Might & Magic. Allow me to explain.

New World Computing's two main franchises were the Might & Magic fantasy role-playing game series and its offshoot, the Heroes of Might & Magic fantasy strategy game series, for which I was the development team's leader for five years. Both franchises took place in the same universe, and their respective designers often worked together to make sure that there were no inconsistencies in the two franchises' storylines and to occasionally intertwine the storylines together.

When we got the green light to do a second expansion game to Heroes III, my lead designer, Greg Fulton, decided to build the game around the "forge" -- a machine capable of building weapons that could dominate the world and featured in the recently released Might & Magic 7: For Blood and Honor. His idea was to create a new type of town for the Heroes series, the Forge Town, where there would be a mixture of fantasy and science fiction elements. So, in this town, orcs would be armed with ray guns and minotaurs equipped with jet packs.

Now, while this mix of fantasy and science fiction had always been a staple of the Might & Magic RPG franchise, it was new to the Heroes series and there was an angry backlash from Heroes fans. As soon as we released the preliminary concept art, the fans became so upset, they immediately organized a boycott of the game and New World management ordered us to come up with a new concept for the expansion. One fan was so angry at us for even considering introducing science fiction elements into the Heroes series that he sent a death threat to Greg. Naturally, this rattled my designer, but when our management made light of the threat, Greg was so incensed that he quit his job.

This left me with no designer for our next big project, Heroes IV, and when I couldn't find a replacement for Greg in time for the project's start, I took the unusual step of giving Heroes III AI programmer, Gus Smedstad, the dual role of lead programmer and lead designer, since he understood the strategic elements of the game better than anyone except for Heroes' creator, Jon Van Cangehem.

As we began planning the design for Heroes IV, Jon (or JVC, as we called him) thought it was time to "completely reinvent" the Heroes series, and he encouraged us to rethink every element of the game. He also thought it was time to scale back the game by reducing the number of town and creature types available to the player.

With those marching orders, Gus completely revised the magic, skill, and town/creature system (my main contribution was the idea of moving the “heroes” off of the sidelines and onto the battlefield during combat). Gus also thought the game engine needed to be redone from scratch (some of the code was quite buggy and dated back to the game King's Bounty, the predecessor to the original Heroes game), although JVC didn't think the time was right yet to go with a real-time 3D engine.

Once JVC signed off on the design, I calculated that the project would require about 6 programmers and 18 months of work. Unfortunately, our parent company, 3DO, was having severe financial problems and ordered New World to begin work on a third franchise, Legends of Might & Magic, but without giving us any additional staff to work on it. Many of New World's best programmers — some of whom I was counting on to work on Heroes IV — were assigned to this new franchise, which also consumed all of JVC's attention for almost two years until it shipped. (Legends was the real failure. It was a total commercial and critical flop as well as being finished a year behind schedule, as I recall.)

So, instead of six programmers to program the game, I had only two — one of whom was also busy with the design work, while the other was also tasked with creating six new Heroes "mini-expansions" needed to supply 3DO with additional revenue. I tried for over a year to beg, borrow or steal additional programmers, but between 3DO-mandated salary and hiring freezes, I wasn't able to bring additional programming help onto the team. 3DO finally responded to our dilemma about six months before we were scheduled to ship the game, and I was given what I needed to hire on a bunch of new programmers in a hurry. However, the problem of the mythical man month (you can't have ten people do in one month what a single person can do in ten months) reared its ugly head, and as a result, Heroes IV shipped with underdeveloped AI and no multiplayer gameplay.

As for the one change I would make if I had it to do all over again, well, that has to do with another problem I experienced during the project. At the completion of Heroes III, my manager criticized me for being too "hands-on" during the game's development and ordered me to give the leads under me more latitude on future projects. While I disagreed with his criticism and thought that my leadership style on Heroes III had resulted in a pretty darned good game, my manager remained firm on the matter.

It so happened my lead game designer and lead level designer on Heroes IV didn't see eye-to-eye on a number of issues. Gus saw Heroes as primarily a strategy game but felt that the level designers were creating game levels that were more appropriate for an adventure game. While I sided with Gus — I thought that the game levels being designed had too much story text, too many artifacts for boosting hero attributes quickly to very high levels, and intricate storylines that conflicted with the premise that the heroes could now be injured on the battlefield — my orders were to let my leads make their own decisions within their own areas of expertise.

While my manager gave me a better performance review for my leadership on Heroes IV than on Heroes III, I felt that Heroes IV was a poorer game in large part due to the conflict between the game design and level design. So, if I had it to do over again, I would have followed the adage "to thine own self be true" and managed things a bit more closely as I did on Heroes III.

With regards to your older games on the Apple II: did you use any particular development environment for the games? Prisoner 2 appeared to largely be in Applesoft -- were you just typing code in to the shell directly, or were you using some early form of IDE, or were you working a design and code on paper beforehand?

I wrote the original The Prisoner entirely in Applesoft BASIC as Edu-Ware employee #4 in 1980, and I designed the game as I programmed it — all in about six weeks time, if I recall correctly. The following year, when we decided to remake the text game in hi-res graphics and call it Prisoner 2, I was Edu-Ware's development manager with several programmers working under me on several projects simultaneously. I would write a game design document and draw screen layouts for each game, and my programming staff would program them in Applesoft and use a graphics engine and text parser that I had written in 6502 assembly language using an assembler. Those tools, which I created some twenty-five years ago, were among the last programs I actually coded myself.

If you tried to make The Prisoner game today, you would stop at a very early point to secure a license to use the name and likeness. At the time, were you at all worried about trademark issues with The Prisoner (vis-a-vis the TV show that clearly inspired the game), or did you simply think it was a neat idea, not worry too much about the consequences, and run with it?

My idea was to create a game that was merely inspired by The Prisoner television series, and so I renamed The Village as The Island, No. 2 as The Caretaker, and so on to avoid copyright infringement. However, when Edu-Ware told me that they planned to call the game The Prisoner and use the television series' title font, I asked them to get permission from the show's copyright holder, ITC Entertainment. I later found out that all they did was call ITC and ask if they minded if they created a Prisoner-themed restaurant, and when they replied that they didn't care, Edu-Ware took that to mean that they could get away with releasing the game without acquiring the copyright. Nobody outside the game industry paid much attention to computer games in those early days.

Ironically, a few years later I joined Disney Software, where part of my job was to protect Disney's properties and characters. I've sinced worked with many licensed properties, from films ("Who Framed Roger Rabbit?") to television ("Star Trek") to literature ("I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream") to pen-and-paper RPG's ("Vampire: The Masquerade"), and things are vastly different now. The combined revenue generated by interactive titles is much greater than that by movies, and so copyright holders are very concerned about the use of their intellectual properties in computer and video games.

Who playtested the game? Was there any feedback?

Edu-Ware's founders, Sherwin Steffin and Steve Pederson, playtested The Prisoner. While they realized that it was a groundbreaking game, there were concerned that I had designed it so that you could win the game from the beginning if you knew what to do: visit the Caretaker and tell him "The Island is just a computer game." I argued that it was thematically imperative that you could win the game from the beginning, since your "imprisonment" was entirely due to the fact that you were freely choosing to spend your time playing this computer game. We argued all night about it, and I threatened to quit if it was changed, and so the game was released intact.

As it turned out, none of our customers reported that they won the game too soon, but for the remake, Prisoner 2, I changed things so that you could not visit the Caretaker until late in the game.

prisoner 2 boxcover

Prisoner 2 Box (click to enlarge)

Who did the cover art for the cool poster with the faceless man?

I don't remember who the art director or photographer were, but the faceless man was Edu-Ware president Steve Pederson.

Did Empire 2: Interstellar Shark and Empire 3: Armageddon ever actually ship? I've never seen these games, certainly not in stores and not even in disk image form in the present day. And if they did ship, where can I find them?

Interstellar Sharks shipped in 1982. However, when Armageddon shipped in 1984, Management Sciences America had acquired Edu-Ware and marketed our products through its Peachtree Software accounting software division, and for reasons that elude me, they marketed the RPG as being educational software. As a result, I doubt that the final installment sold many copies.

I do have a few copies of both games in my garage, but I don't know where else you can find them now.

What is the copyright status of your old Edu-ware games? Who owns the rights?

Edu-Ware Services was the copyright holder for all of the games I created as its employee. Management Sciences America acquired the rights when they bought Edu-Ware, but I don’t know if they later resold the rights or allowed them to expire. About a year after Edu-Ware was bought out, MSA closed down our offices and I got together with a couple of other Edu-Ware people to start our own publishing company, so I never found out what eventually happened with the Edu-Ware titles.

Empire I: World Builders seemed to me, if anything, to be even more elliptical than The Prisoner. I remember that the Missionary track seemed the "most playable" of the careers to me at the time. There were three religions (I guess 4, if you count the "Lord of Light), and I figured out the desired responses for the fertility cult and the death cult, but never really figured out the third. How was the player meant to determine what to do? Was there actually a way to win the game?

I remember very little about Empire I's gameplay — it's been twenty-five years, after all! I do remember getting a letter from fantasy author Roger Zelazny expressing concern that advertisements for the game made reference to The Lord of Light, which happened to be the title of one of his novels. It turned out to be just a coincidence. I wrote back to tell him that I hadn't read his book yet, but he never replied.

It's 25 years later. Imagine you have a budget and a team to work on the Empire saga. Knowing what you know now, having worked on big projects, would you proceed with it? Is there a market for that story, or has its time passed?

I don't have much interest in revisiting the Empire saga. I originally wrote it as a replacement to Edu-Ware's Space franchise, which the company's two founders had written based upon Game Designer Workshop's Traveler science fiction pen-and-paper role-playing game ;— without securing the license, naturally. (I did write an expansion to the initial Space game). GDW sued Edu-Ware, and I was tasked with writing a science-fiction RPG to replace Space.

I was given the assignment in the summer of 1981. Steve Pederson provided me with the basic story outline: the first installment would be about colonization of the galactic empire, the second would be about expansion and corruption, and the third would be about its downfall and destruction.

Since the first installment was needed in time for Christmas, I had about three months to design the RPG system and scenario gameplay, and to program it. The programming included the graphics engine that we used for all future Edu-Ware games, so the whole thing was very rushed. I didn't have much creative passion for that game series, although Empire I wound up winning Computer and Electronic Entertainment magazine's "Best Sci-Fi / Fantasy Game of the Year" award. This was the only one of my Edu-Ware games to win a major award, although I am best remembered for creating The Prisoner.

At the time you were writing games for the Apple II, did you play games yourself? What were your favorites?

I played lots of games during my Apple II days — many more than I can find time to play now. The games I remember spending the most time playing on the Apple II were Space Invaders, Wilderness Campaign, Ultima II, Wizardry I, and Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy.

Kate Bush describes the experience of being a songwriter and listening to Pink Floyd's The Wall and having the feeling: "Well, that's it. Time to stop making music. There's no point anymore -- they've done everything I wanted to do, only better." Eventually, she got over it. Did you ever have this moment when looking at someone else's product? Which one?

It’s funny that you should mention that Pink Floyd album. Edu-Ware president Steve Pederson always wanted to write a game based on “The Wall.” He never did it, so there’s a least one game that’s yet to be done.

I've never played any game that made me think, “Well, that’s it.” Every time I play a game that really excites me, I think, “I want to make a game just like that, only better.”

Thanks for your time.

Additional Resources

My Robot Overlords 2: The Rice Cooker

2005-08-17 · by psu

We all know the way to cook rice is with a rice cooker. For most of my life, I had used simple one button rice cookers. I had seen these "fuzzy logic" cookers, but never figured it was worth shelling out for one. On the other hand, I had also noticed that whenever you are served the really excellent Japanese rice, it comes out of one of these cookers. So last week, under the pretense of obtaining a non-stick bowl, we bought a ten cup Zojirushi. The thing is a miracle.

First, it sings. It plays a little tune when it starts and stops. Completely useless, but a nice touch of levity in an otherwise serious and mechanical undertaking.

Second, being able to set up the machine to provide cooked rice as you get home from work is a joy that is difficult to describe. No waiting an hour for food. The stir fry goes in the pan and we can be eating in twenty minutes with rice that is sushi-restaurant perfect.

But here is the thing. The first time I programmed it to make rice on a timer, I set the timer incorrectly and the cooker had to keep the rice warm for twelve hours. When we got home, the rice was still as good as fresh out of my old pot. I'm not sure what kind of bizarre liquid recycling technique the thing uses to do this. It should, it seems to me, be impossible to do this without drying the rice out.

Ultimately though, what sets this machine apart is the quality of the rice. Buy high quality short grain rice and properly calibrate the liquid to rice ratio and what comes out of this machine is just the right amount of sticky, soft and tender in the middle, and just a bit toothy on the outside. This is perfect rice, every time, ready made when you walk in the door. Who wouldn't be a slave to such a machine?

Get Out of My Head

2005-08-18 · by peterb

Currently eating away at my brain (in the good way) is Michael Penn's song "Walter Reed" from his new album, Mr. Hollywood Junior, 1947. An MP3 of this song is downloadable, for free, as part of the press kit for the album. Go forth and suffer as I have suffered.

If you have iTunes (and who doesn't?) you can also watch the video.

Michael Penn is married to Aimee Mann, and has done a lot of the production on her albums. More or less the song sounds like Aimee Mann. With a sex change.

Excuse me, now I need to go listen to Hyperballad 47 times to try to get this out of my head.

More Road Food

2005-08-19 · by psu

We did the drive from PA to Eastern New England again to visit the parents. Found a few more places to eat along I-90.

Charlie The Butcher, Buffalo NY

Another Beef on Weck place, but with a different style. The meat here is more roasted than the other places I've been. In addition, they actually have some interesting sides, and other types of meat worth eating. The roast turkey, for example, was excellent. They have various desserts as well, but we didn't try any.

Dinosaur BBQ, Syracuse NY

Here is a completely unexpected pleasure. When someone comes up to you and says "Hey, there is good BBQ at this place" and "this place" is north of Chapel Hill NC, you should look upon that someone with extreme skepticism. But, here is a case where that skepticism is wrong. This is the real thing. Don't get anything here but the pulled pork, because it is done correctly and their sauce is also excellent. You can tell it's done correctly because the meat has texture and character (as opposed to just being a chopped mess) and it does not need the sauce to be interesting. The place has dozens of kinds of beer too, but that's for someone else to try.

If you are driving within 2 hours of this place, it's worth the side trip. I'm serious. Be ready to wait in line.

Antonio's Pizza, Amherst MA

Pizza by the slice. Excellent crust. Crunchy and bready at the same time. A wide assortment of toppings, many of which feel like a Mexican restaurant fell on top of the pizza oven. Go here after spending your savings at For the Record which is across the street.

Tea and Sympathy

2005-08-22 · by peterb

There are certain items that I run out of on a regular basis, but am too stupid to pick up ahead of time.

I don't have this problem with some things, such as milk, or bread, or fruit. But some items I seem to be wired to run completely out of before going to get more. Cat litter, for example. Coffee, for another. Wine. I'll watch the stocks of whatever-it-is getting lower and lower. "Huh," I'll say to myself. "I really should go get some more before I run out." And then I don't, and I run out exactly five minutes after whatever store sells it has closed, and then I'm grumpy for the rest of the night.

I have this problem with tea.

And of course, there's absolutely no reason to ever run out of tea. My regular source is mail order from Upton Tea Importers, as I have discussed before. They make buying tea as easy as Amazon makes purchasing books via One-Click. I could just spend 5 minutes on the web and it will show up at my door a few days later, preventing my having a caffeine crisis. But I just can't plan ahead: I need the panic to motivate me to buy the tea, apparently.

I was in this state of utter tealessness the other day when I remembered that there was a shop in Squirrel Hill that sells tea, and coffee, and chocolate. I'd stopped in a few times just to check them out, and this seemed like a good excuse to try their tea.

Margaret of Wicks and Beans

Margaret of Wicks and Beans

The shop is called "Wicks and Beans", and despite the somewhat unfortunate name has a nice and eclectic selection of tea, coffee, European chocolates and candies, and assorted tea pots, coffee mugs, and other paraphernalia. I chatted for a while with Margaret, the owner, about how she started the shop, and how she decides what to stock. She also carries several lines of apparently fancy European skin products. But I haven't tried those, yet.

I haven't tried her coffee yet, either, because there are so many good coffee roasters in Pittsburgh already, and I'm set in my ways. But her tea selection was interesting and wide, and she understands how to keep the product fresh (the glass jars are mostly for show; there are sealed airtight packets on the shelves underneath.) And I like her selection of saucers and teacups.

The most unfortunate thing about the store is how hard it is to find. It's a storefront on Murray Avenue, next to Kazansky's Deli. I must have walked past this place ten times before I actually realized it was there. I only discovered it because one day I was desperate for chocolate and, well, a man in need of chocolate can transcend his limitations.

I'm always worried that the place will disappear because it feels more like a stimulant-based five and dime than anything else. This isn't Mon Aimee chocolat; there's a few well-chosen chocolate bars and a variety of candies, but not an encyclopedic array. There's a little of this. A little of that. In this age of specialize or die, I find something mulishly satisfying in a store that insists on offering a few well-chosen items in a number of categories. I love the dazzlingly array of choices that the specialist stores give me, but be honest: how many hundreds of types of single-plantation Venezuelan chocolate does one need to be satisfied?

Is Wicks and Beans' selection as good as Upton's? Not even close. It's a tiny little shop, their web site is just an eBay store, and the only employee (that I know of) is the owner. Pittsburghers spend a lot of time complaining that there aren't enough quirky local stores, and that the suburban mega-chains are constantly encroaching on our territory. Well, here's a quirky local store in the heart of Squirrel Hill that sells quality tea at reasonable prices.

Stop in and say "hi." Have some chocolate for me.

Things I like in Pittsburgh I

2005-08-23 · by psu

I have a reputation for not liking anything. I don't think I deserve this, because I rant at least as vociferously about things I like as things I do not. But, for some reason people still have a distorted view of my inner pysche, leading them to comment on my articles and ask questions like: "Is there anything in Pittsburgh that you like?"

Of course there is. In fact, there are probably too many to list in one article. So here the first of a few.

Since the comment that I mentioned above was on one of my food rants, I'll start with food places. Sitting down to list food places that I like, I find that most of them have been mentioned in these pages again, but I will mention them again.

La Prima Espresso: Simply the best coffee anywhere. I don't think I've had better coffee at retail anywhere else on the continent of North America.

Il Piccolo Forno: A sublime bakery next to La Prima.

Rose Tea Cafe: Finally real Chinese food in the city.

DISH: I think this is my favorite or second favorite place in the city for a fancy dinner.

Penn Mac: A great food store with a concentration on the Italian. Best cheese counter in the city.

Lotus: A good Asian grocery. More importantly, a good source for a lot of fresh vegetables that other places don't have. Don't buy ginger anywhere else. Good fish too.

Whole Foods: If you can't find it at the first two places, come here. A bit expensive, but the fact that they have a fish counter that is open past 5pm makes up for it.

Tessaro's: Yummy burgers.

Dee's and the O: Yummy hot dogs. I still like O dogs more, but the fries at Dee's are better (shhh).

Vivo: The other place on my short list for fancy dinners.

Taco Loco and Taqueria Mi Mexico: Good tacos. 'Nuff said.

Chaya: Decent sushi by any standard. The other Japanese food is also good.

Cafe Grand Canal: A great pasta place. Get the veal cannelloni.

Shenot Farm Market (Wexford): Really excellent corn. The best fresh corn in the area, that I know of. If I catch you buying "fresh" corn at Giant Eagle or even Whole Foods, I'll cut you.

I think that's a respectable list off the top of my head. For more food I like, look at the places listed on my restaurants page with two blue gumdrops. Any other questions?

Bundles of Whining

2005-08-24 · by psu

The Xbox 360 pricing and various bundles have been in the news a lot over the last week. The general mood among the fanboys appears to be a mixture of anger and betrayal. As usual, my feeling is that most of the traffic on this subject shows a startling lack of intelligence.

Whining about the 360 system pricing seems to take one of three attack vectors.

  1. Microsoft promised a hard disk based console for $300. Microsoft are dirty liars!

  2. Having more than one "SKU" (it's amazing how many people suddenly know what this means) will "confuse the market". Microsoft are stupid!

  3. The split tier will keep the hard disk from being well used in games. Microsoft are crippling my pony!

I think it's easy to refute each of these attacks. The first is, pure and simple, the result of wishful thinking colliding with harsh reality. Nothing in the hype running up to the pricing announcements indicated that there was any guarantee at all that Microsoft would be selling a $300 console with a disk in it. In fact, for reasons I will get to later, it was pretty clear that Microsoft was backing away from putting the disk into the console at all.

The second argument is just FUD. The market will not be "confused" by having two choices. The market will choose the one it wants and move on. I think most people are pretty sure already which one of these bundles makes sense for them. In addition, if they have a pulse, it's pretty clear that the $400 one is their choice. But, others have said this better than me.

The third whine, about the hard disk being underutilized, is the one that comes closest to having some justification in reality. In fact, it would be a pretty compelling argument except for one little problem. Think back into the annals of Xbox gaming history and count up the number of games that actually use the disk. Then subtract the ones that only use the disk to store game saves. Now subtract the ones that only provide custom soundtracks. Finally, subtract the ones that only use it to store content downloads that could just as well be delivered in some other way.

If my memory is correct, then there are two games left in the pile, and they are both called Halo. Pete says that Blinx also used the disk, and there may be a few others that no one remembers at all. What this says to me is that even if the disk is in every console shipped, game developers won't use it anyway. Therefore, I think the disk is in the 360 purely for the functionality unrelated or tangentially related to games (music, downloads, etc) and to provide backward compatibility. People who opine for some candy-colored land of instant level loads or gigantic transparently cached game-worlds should keep in mind that most games on the PC don't even do that stuff. In fact, the one game I've played that comes close to the transparent barely noticeable level loads that Halo and Halo 2 have was God of War on the PS2, which, as well all know, has no disk. What all this means to me is that as far as games are concerned the disk is a mostly non-issue.

I guess it's not surprising that people should be looking for something to complain about. This, after all, is what the fanboy gamer does. The arguments don't need to be rational or even peripherally based in fact. Almost any semi-coherent barely formed chest thumping will do if what you want to do is post on some 733t gaming forum. This leads to a general level of discourse which is probably below the median intelligence level of the average consumer. However, as misguided as all of this chest-beating is, it is nothing compared to how stupid Gamestop and EB think we are. An $800 launch day pre-order bundle? Who exactly do they think is that desperate? Just walk into Target. The hardware will be there.

Notes

Don't let something like this happen to you. Just go to Target.

Lights, Action, Camera

2005-08-25 · by peterb

The camera in Neverwinter Nights sucks. This article is about why. I'm telling you what the article is about up front, because I'm about to take a leisurely detour through many seemingly unrelated topics before circling back around to the actual point.

Jungian archetypes "Я" Us

Jungian archetypes "Я" Us

As I think I've mentioned before, my mother didn't like Dungeons & Dragons very much. When I would hang out at Junot Diaz's house and play all day, she'd always call me after a few hours and harangue me into coming home. This made me bitter, because everyone else got to stay there all day and most of the night playing, and I only got a taste of it. At the time, I was convinced that my mother didn't understand how cool D&D was, and how creative and fun it was, and she just hated me and didn't want me to have any friends at all.

Now, with the perspective of many years, I've finally come to understand that my mom didn't hate D&D. She didn't think it was satanic, or evil, or unbalancing, or immoral. In fact, she probably didn't know anything about it whatsoever. My mom applied a very simple and sensible test: anything a 14 year old boy is willing to spend 20 hours in a basement doing can't possibly be a good idea. I can't really argue with that. Mom was right.

There was at least one unintentional side-effect of this, though. By constraining my D&D experiences, Mom turned the game into one of my semi-permanent latent objects of desire. Even though I personally have never had all that much fun playing D&D, either in person or on a computer, I'm convinced that somewhere within the maze of rules, tables, and Erol Otus drawings lies the joyous heart of all ludic pleasure. So, years later, the 14 year old in my head still wants me to purchase Dungeons & Dragons-based computer games.

Mom did let me spend 20 hours a day playing computer games, presumably because of a misbegotten belief that computers would somehow make me smarter.

Eye of the Beholder

Eye of the Beholder

One of the games I spent hours and hours playing was SSI's classic dungeon crawl Eye of the Beholder. This game still holds up well (under emulation) even today. The rules were simple, the puzzles were surprisingly sophisticated given the limitations of its user interface, and it moved at just the right pace. Eye of the Beholder took everything good about Wizardry and imported it wholesale into a Dungeons & Dragons universe. The first two Eye of the Beholder games are the best computer-based dungeon crawls that have ever been made.

Recently, I heard about a mod for Neverwinter Nights that basically reimplements Eye of the Beholder in the NWN engine. So of course, I have to have it. It doesn't matter that it won't be as good as the original. It doesn't matter that I own the original and can still play it on just about any machine, under emulation.

It's shinier. I have to have it. The only problem is that in order to play it, I would have to buy the latest add-on pack for Neverwinter Nights, which I didn't yet own (and suddenly, the reason this module is being touted on Bioware's site becomes clear: now that's good marketing).

Since I have a job and the add-on pack isn't that much money, I bought it.

Before purchasing the add-on pack, I fired up Neverwinter just to refresh my memory. And that's when the trouble began. Now, I'm going to compare Neverwinter Nights to its console nephews, Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire. I'm well aware that those are later games, and that they were able to learn from the mistakes made by Neverwinter. But it needs to be said: the single biggest misfeature of Neverwinter Nights as a product is that the camera is terrible.

I don't work for Bioware. Despite the fact that they liked my little Jade Empire-inspired toy, The Inscrutable Denominator of Heavenly Glory, I've never hung out with them, drunk beer with them, or gone on press junkets with them (memo to Bioware: have your people call my people. Let's do lunch). Despite that, due to my amazing psychic powers, I can tell you exactly how Neverwinter Nights ended up with its lousy camera.

Early in the development cycle, one of the engine programmers produced an internal-use-only demo of the 3D engine. The demo had various 3D objects arrayed around a landscape. To show how cool and truly-3D everything was, he provided some simple controls to drive the camera around via the keyboard. At the same as time the engine was being developed, work on other parts of the product was advancing: 3D models were being created, scripts were being written, and levels were being designed.

Dramatic and unplayable

Neverwinter zoomed in: dramatic and unplayable

At some point, a year before the game was released, in mid-February — these things always happen in February, no one knows why — a meeting was held to determine what camera angle should be used in the actual game. The modelers and artists wanted a low, tight camera so that the beauty and detail of their work would be apparent. The programmers wanted a god's-eye view so that the player could plan their strategy. The producer wanted a view between those two extremes because that seemed the least likely to cause a mutiny in his ranks. The level designers were insistent that if the angle of the camera was too low, the player would never figure out where to go and their game would be ruined, ruined! The graphic designers pointed out that if the camera was zoomed out too far, the game looked like a much less attractive version of Diablo. Harsh words were said. Snarky emails were exchanged. Finally one of the engine programmers, figuring he has already spent the time making the flyaround functionality work, says "Let's just leave the demo controls in. Then the player can figure out the best view for himself."

The result, of course, is that despite its advanced graphics engine and nice shiny modeling, Neverwinter Nights looks terrible compared to Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire. It plays worse, too. I probably spend about 25% of my time in Neverwinter dorking around with the camera. I'm not doing that because I want to, but because I have to. The game's levels haven't been designed with a single fixed camera perspective in mind. Knights of the Old Republic and Jade both allow some camera control, but much less than offered by Neverwinter. And they are stronger games for it. (The game also loses dramatic potential because it doesn't have the over-the-shoulder medium shots during dialogue that the later games have, but that's a separate issue.)

Boring and emotionless

Neverwinter zoomed out: boring and emotionless

Worse, since Neverwinter has a three-dimensional camera, I have to worry about the zoom level. The part of me that wants pretty shiny toys wants to be zoomed in all the way. The hardcore gamer who only cares about "winning" always wants to be zoomed out all the way. Whichever one I choose, I have made a part of myself unhappy. Sure, I could try to set the wheel somewhere in the middle. But first, a UI element that requires me to hit a target "somewhere in the middle" is clumsy. Secondly, it would have been better if that view had been set for me, and then I wouldn't be obsessing about whether I have set it wrongly.

The camera in a 3D game needs to operate without the players' supervision. Whenever possible, it should give them a sufficiently close view of the action so that they can enjoy the pretty pictures. When a more strategic view is necessary, it should be presented to the players without their intervention. The best of all worlds is for the levels to be designed such that moving the camera around to achieve a strategic view simply isn't necessary. Level design should conform to the realities of the in-game camera, not vice-versa. Requiring the players to move the camera to play the game well reminds them that they are above the game world, and not a part of it. In the text adventure milieu, we'd say that this breaks mimesis.

Software developers see certain patterns of screw-ups again and again. Some of them are just coding mistakes, but some are more fundamental questions of design. One of the most common mistakes you see made by software teams, especially those that don't have the benefit of having their butts regularly kicked by competent UI designers, is what we here at Tea Leaves call "violating the axiom of choice."

The axiom of choice comes into play when software engineers on a team disagree about some fairly trivial but user-visible behavior of the product. They will have a few meetings about it, where they will make a lot of grunting noises, but won't be able to come to a decision. Eventually, one of the software engineers will say "Well, why don't we just expose this as an option to the user, and let them choose which behavior they want? That's easy." Everyone will be relieved at not having to make a decision, and the meeting will end.

The end result of this is an inferior product.

The hard part of software development is not, it turns out, writing code. The hard part is deciding in advance how the product is going to behave.

Lest you think I'm picking on Bioware, let me reiterate that the good things about the game overcome the lousy camera (by which I mean "I am obsessed with trying to relive my childhood"). The product is good enough that after all these years and all these complaints, I'm still giving them money. And it's not as if Bioware is the only group to ever release a software product with a lousy UI. Hell, axiom of choice violations are practically a time-honored tradition for open-source projects.

I just hope that when I line up to buy Neverwinter Nights 2 like a good little consumer drone, someone has actually made a decision and chosen a camera angle for me.

Additional Resources

Inferiority Complex

2005-08-26 · by psu

I feel somewhat self-concious about writing about games. I feel OK writing about my impressions of specific games. After all, those are just my observations. I feel like I am on shakier ground when writing about more general issues in games, gaming, or game design, if for no other reason than I only have my experience to go by and it seems like others have a lot more experience than me. But, since this site is mostly a place to experiment with writing, I have tried to write about some larger issues, and have had some success and some failure.

During this period, I had the following experience a couple of times. I would start writing a fabulous article with some witty insight about the nature of games or game design. Then, halfway through, I would look up the phrases in google and find that Ernest Adams had already written much the same article years ago in his game design column at Gamasutra. I found this to be frustrating, but would post my piece anyway, reasoning that I had taken a slightly different angle on the subject, even if this reasoning was usually wrong.

Mr. Adams did this to me when discussing immersion in games. He did it too me again when discussing game length and replayability. He even beat me to the idea that Madden Football is really more of a strategy sim than a sports game. He's also published most of my pet peeves against evil game designers in his classic set of twinkie denial articles. Of course, none of this should be surprising. He has spent more time building games than I've spent playing them.

Luckily, Pete is smarter than me. I am happy to report that for once Tea Leaves got the jump on Mr. Adams. In his most recent column at Gamastura, Mr. Adams lists a set of "Gamer's Rights", and lo and behold they overlap with Pete's Gamer's Bill of Rights from a while back while taking a somewhat different point of view.

It's pretty cool for the web space I share to get a mention like this, even if, again, it's a smarter guy than me doing the writing. As usual, Adams is completely right in every point that he makes, from the ability to control cut scenes, to the fact that games should tell you quickly if you have failed. But, what really warms my heart is the section in the piece on saving games: "The player's right to save the game is absolute". Amen brother and testify again. Truly this must mean that we are on the side of light and goodness here.

The only thing I see missing from the article is a heading that reads: The right not to have to fight a stupid Boss. On the other hand, I think the other items in the list point to the general truth that bosses are stupid.

Resources

The Game Designer's Notebook is absolutely required reading. Twice. The No Twinkie series is particularly enjoyable.

Welcome Joystiq Readers

2005-08-29 · by peterb

The "Gamer's Bill of Rights" article referred to in today's Joystiq entry is here

Things I like in Pittsburgh II

2005-08-30 · by psu

As promised, here is a second list of things that I like about PIttsburgh. Also as promised, no food places.

The PSO

The Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in the Jansons era was among the best in the country IMHO. We haven't been to Heinz Hall that much in the last few years, but I haven't heard anything to indicate that things are much different now that Jansons is gone. The only thing that keeps this band down is an apparent requirement for unimaginative repertoire. If you have any interest in Classical music at all, you owe it to yourself to go.

The Y Music Society

An excellent series of chamber music concerts at Carnegie Music Hall in Oakland. This is the other major place to see and hear great music.

North Park

North Park is a mile from my house and when I ride my bike at all, two out of three rides start out through the park. While not really a perfect place to ride, it does lead to what IMHO is the best road riding area in the Pittsburgh area. The park itself also makes for a great loop that mixes flat roads with some good climbs.

The Neighborhoods

As a city, Pittsburgh is not so much a sprawling urban metropolis as a loosely organized group of small neighborhoods, each of which has its own character. I like this about the place because each area of the city is somewhat self-contained with respect to activities, food, services, and shopping. You hear the joke about people who live in the area and never leave their neighborhoods, and such stories have a ring of truth to them.

Carnegie Library

A fabulous public library. You should go.

Filmmakers

Filmmakers runs three of the local independent movie theaters in town and in addition it also provides film, photography and related classes for the local universities and colleges. When I got back into photography as an adult, I took the three basic black and white classes that they teach here, and they were well produced in addition to being really fun.

Frick Park

A huge sprawling green-space right in the middle of the city near CMU. Apparently there is a huge cult of people who do nothing but train their dogs here. There is nothing quite like this in other cities I've been to. Other cities have parks, but they look like parks. Frick looks like the woods. A particular place of honor goes to "The Blue Slide" playground, with its huge blue slide built into a hill.

Downtown Light

I was working Downtown when I took those black and white photography classes, and I used the area as the subject for the the last portfolio that I did for that class. The city has a great quality of light, especially on cold winter afternoons. This makes for great urban landscape and architectural shots.

One of my favorite pictures is a shot I took just off of Grant Street for the class project. The picture captures the late afternoon light shining down on the side of a building, creating wonderful specular highlights on just the edges of the windows. I had seen light like this in Paris all the time, but could never get it on film. It took an afternoon in Pittsburgh for things to work out. Sorry, I don't have a scan of the print, so you'll just have to imagine it.

My House

My house has a huge floorplan and a huge lot and I can ride 100 miles on my bike from my driveway. What more could you ask for? One of the major reasons I will never move to California is because my house in California would cost seven to eight figures, and that's just stupid.

The Strip on Saturday Morning

Really, this isn't for the food. It's just a great place to sit and watch the world go by. Probably the most interesting area of Pittsburgh to just stand in on any given day.

Myst III: Exile

2005-08-31 · by peterb

I feel that since I mentioned that I recently picked up Myst III, among other games, for the Xbox, I should post a brief follow-up: I have finished the game.

I enjoyed it a lot; it was definitely worth the $9 I paid for it, and a bit more besides. Let me see if I can quickly outline what I liked and didn't like about the game. I won't spoil any of the puzzles, and I'll try not to reveal too much of the plot, beyond what you'll find out in the first few minutes of the game.

Likes:

Dislikes:

This game is on bargain racks all around the country, for a variety of platforms. If you like puzzle games it's an easy choice that will provide hours of thoughtful stimulation. Go down to your local non-chain game store and buy a copy tomorrow.

Wow Your Camera Takes Really Good Pictures

2005-09-01 · by psu

I like to think that in my time on Earth I have occasionally taken a good photograph. Once in a while I get a really nice one and show it to people, and if that person is Pete then he taunts me with that phrase hated by all photographers: Wow, you must have a really good camera.

Now, it's true that most photography dorks are also equipment nerds. Spend any time talking to most photographers, and the conversation will inevitably turn to gadgets, lenses, tripods and other miscellaneous items. I think in some sense taking pictures and buying things with which to take pictures go hand in hand. But, in this orgy of consumerism you have to keep one thing in mind: the camera has very little to do with the ultimate quality of the picture. The single good photograph comes from somewhere else.

As I have mentioned before, my two favorite books about photographic technique are Galen Rowell's Mountain Light and On Being a Photographer by David Hurn and Bill Jay. Each one of these books spends a lot of time discussing what goes into making a single excellent photograph, and I will try to summarize what they say here. My previous rumination on this subject was a more more general discussion about high level requirements for good photography. My focus here is different. The focus here is on the single excellent frame.

Assume that, following my previous instructions, you have found a nice subject and have situated yourself in good light. Here is what you do to get a single good picture:

Pick Your Frame

Composition is basically the act of cropping everything out of the viewfinder except that which is most important to conveying what you would like to show people about your subject. There are "rules" for composition that people will list. Compose pictures with your subject slightly off to the side. Get closer to your subject to reduce distractions in the foreground of the picture. Concentrate on details rather than trying to fill the frame with more information than the viewer can process. I think these guidelines are useful, but not while taking pictures. They are more useful to weed out the ones you shot badly.

When taking pictures, composition boils down to seeing something interesting and putting a good frame around it. If you take a lot of pictures, experiment a lot with different ways to frame things, and then critically evaluate what you get back and decide what you like and dislike, you can slowly learn what you like to point the camera at and how you like to frame a picture.

Focus and Exposure

Focus is important because you want the interesting part of your picture to be in focus and the boring parts to be blurry. Landscapes tend to want to be in focus from front to back, since the idea is to simulate the experience of standing on top of the mountain looking out into the distance. Pictures of people are different. You want the people to be in focus, but you don't want the background to distract. There is nothing worse than having a tree pop out of your mother's head like in some twisted horror movie.

What you want in focus also determines the aperture that you should use on the lens, since large apertures will blow out the background and while small apertures will keep more in focus. Having set the aperture, your light meter can now tell you what shutter speed you need for proper exposure. You will want to make sure that this shutter speed is high enough to not blur the picture due to either subject motion or your shaky hands. I have very shaky hands, so I always try to use short shutter speeds.

Push the Button

This is the last decision you have to make. Assuming everything else is set up perfectly, you have to choose when to hit the button. The world is not a static place, and what goes through your viewfinder is constantly changing. So, when taking pictures, the dynamic of the activity is to constantly evaluate what you see, and then refocus, reset exposure, or reframe the shot to come as close as possible to what you want to portray. This process is especially tricky if you have to juggle more than two or three variables at the same time. It doesn't really help to just hit the button and pray with the motor drive. You'll just get a lot of copies of the same bad picture.

But, this also doesn't mean that you should sit, paralyzed, waiting for the "perfect moment" and then taking a single frame or two. In general, all you will get this way is one or two bad pictures.

A good photographer has a sense for when a good picture opportunity is developing in front of the camera. When one senses a good situation, one should naturally hit the button a lot more than when nothing interesting is happening. I should say this again in more simple terms: when the going is good, you should take more pictures.

Developing this sense of when to hit the button is a matter of practice, experience, and knowledge of the subject. Using this sense well leads to the final important aspect of the single good picture.

Get Lucky

Suppose you are trying to take a picture of some interesting people walking down the street. The people are moving. The sun is low and coming in and out of clouds. Your distance from the people, and therefore the proper focus, is constantly changing. Finally, the background behind the people is in constant flux. In order for this picture to work out, all of these variables have to come together in one shining moment of perfect coordination, timing and inspiration on your part. This does not happen often. Therefore, the final aspect of the the good single picture is the luck you need to hit everything in the right place at the right time. Do not feel self-conscious about getting lucky. All good pictures have an element of luck to them. Feel thankful that you got a bit of it.

The mathematician Paul Erdös used to say that God has a book of theorems, and every once in a while he lets you have a peek at it. I think this is true of good photographs as well. You do the same things day in and day out to take pictures, but every once in a while it just all comes together, and you get to reach into the Book of Good Pictures and pull one out. I feel lucky to have grabbed a few for myself, and it's a lot of fun to go after more of them.

Psychonauts Impressions

2005-09-02 · by psu

There was a lot of general drooling over this game, especially among the game designer worship crowd. Most original design in years, they said. A constantly creative tour de force, they said. So I picked up the game at nearly full price to offset how I had given in to the man to buy Madden. After a couple of hours of play, here is my microreview: I'd rather be playing Madden.

Let the tar and feathering begin.

Here are some of Psychonauts' major and minor sins.

Minor sin: Long opening cut scenes. At least they were funny.

Major sin: Save anywhere! Just kidding! No matter where you save, you get the last checkpoint. Ha ha sucker!

Minor sin: Camera is only marginally stupid. At least you can move it around when you need to, except when you can't.

Major sin: The controls feel like they are about a half second behind me, and the little avatar dude is just too slippery. He loves to fall off cliffs and jump at ropes and ledges that he should stick to but doesn't. On the up side, the penalty for death is pretty light. Overall, it's like all the jumping puzzles from God of War without any of the fun carnage and with controls that are much worse than say, Jak and Daxter circa 2002.

Minor sin: Repetitive music and dialog when you have to replay sections over and over again because of the crappy controls.

Major sin: A tutorial level that I played for more than an hour and a half and didn't finish. I must just suck. I sat on one platform and fell off for twenty minutes before I noticed that a tiny little fissure in the wall behind me meant that I could punch it. Wow, what a moron I am to miss that staggering visual clue.

Anyway, I guess I've tagged myself as a heathen who just doesn't recognize good game design, but I just can't deal with a platformer with controls that are this sloppy when I could be playing Ratchet and Clank and blowing shit up.

This one goes back in to Gamestop, which makes me sad, because I was digging the whole Nickelodeon Ren and Stimpy sort of visual look. I wish they had put a good control engine around it.

Up and Coming

2005-09-06 · by peterb

Here are some of the articles currently in the works:

ï†Why Gladius is a superb game, and why it flopped. ï A Crazy Little Thing Called Beer ï "Biomass per penny" ï Measurebators ï End of the Summer: Indie Game Rundown

Look for them in the coming weeks, and thanks for reading.

Madden NFL: Hour of the Phantom Dark Fantasy Kingdom Tactics

2005-09-07 · by psu

My addiction to Madden is well known to long time readers. It was one of the first games I bought for the new Xbox, and I always manage to find a reason to buy it again. Now, being an average dork, I am by no means a rabid football fan. I can't really name more than a few players on the rosters of my home team growing up (Patriots) or of my current locale (Steelers). I like to watch either of those teams kick ass in the playoffs, but otherwise I'm not really that interested. I have the same basic relationship with most of the major sports, and yet Madden is alone among sports games in holding my interest at all. I think this is because football only forms the shell of the real Madden game. The real Madden is actually a tactical RPG that happens to use a football-like simulation as a combat mechanic.

For those not familiar with the game, Madden provides a variety of game-play modes, including quick games, various mini-games to practice combat, er, football mechanics (passing, running, and so on), and a few practice modes, including things like the two minute drill and various situation games.

A single game in one of these modes lasts between two minutes (two minute drill) and maybe thirty to forty five minutes depending on how you set up the game clock for a full game. As such, each is similar to a medium to large combat encounter in a strategy game. The mechanics of the football game itself are also similar to strategy games. You and your opponent take turns picking offensive and defensive plays, and a large simulation engine figures out what happens. During any given play, the human player can control one or more players on their team. For example, you might make the running back run or the quarterback pass the ball. This gives you some control over your destiny, but since football is eleven players per side, the outcome is mostly determined by what happens in the simulation engine.

For example, if you are on defense, and you call a defensive play that is designed to stop the run offense of your opponent, and your opponent calls a long pass play instead, the majority of the time you will be screwed. It doesn't really matter how quick you are with the stick, the pass will go over the top of your defense and you will lose. The power of the simulator becomes especially clear on defense, where it is particularly difficult (at least for me) for the human player to make the little football avatar people do anything useful. It's almost always more effective to call a good play and then let your minions do the work.

The strategic emphasis is also clear when you observe that most of the new game-play features that have been added to the engine in the last few years all involve making adjustments at the line of scrimmage before the play even starts. As of Madden '06, you can call audibles to a completely different play, change the defensive assignments of every player on the field, change the pass routes of every receiver on the field, quickly flip the direction of the offense, send people in motion, adjust the positions of the defensive line, linebackers, and defensive backs, and change the blocking assignments of the offensive line, all with just a few flicks of the analog stick and the face buttons on the gamepad. All of these minute adjustments can make or break any given simulated play.

This, of course, does not really reflect the reality of the game of football. The Madden engine generally overemphasizes the strategic setup of the play rather than its later execution. It also does not allow the actions of a single player to have as much of an impact on the result as they might in a real game. Rather than go for strict realism, Madden brilliantly packages the semi-turn based military simulation aspect of football into a game that occasionally gives you the feeling of running a football team, but doesn't spend too much time trying to make you believe every single useless detail. Therefore, while not realistic, Madden is fun.

I think the final version of ESPN NFL2k reached a similar level of refinement with respect to its football game-play. But, I never spent enough time with that game to really become familiar with what you can do. I also never worked through the Franchise mode in NFL2k, which is where our attention turns next.

If the single game in Madden is like playing a single scenario in a strategy game (think one map of Advance Wars, for example), then the rest of the "tactical RPG" structure of the game is in the franchise mode. Here, the game allows the user to create a team and play that team through multiple simulated NFL seasons. As the manager of the team, you can either start with the roster of an actual team, or you can hold a draft and populate the initial rosters from the pool of currently active NFL players. Then, each year, you gain new players from a simulated college draft and you can also build your roster by trading players and signing free agents. Roster management is analogous to party management in a more traditional RPG.

But wait! There is more. The franchise mode also tracks the performance of your roster in the various practice modes, pre-season training camp, pre-season games, and regular season games. At fixed intervals, your players will move through a progression and get steadily better or worse depending on how well you play them. In some cases, the simulation engine picks the effect that this progression has on their character attributes. In other cases, you can play mini-games and win points to assign by yourself. The combination of the huge spreadsheet of stats and control over how those stats progress over time is apparently exactly what all the hard core CRPG players live for. Well, in Madden you can play through up to 30 seasons of simulated football goodness, and get the cool "I won the Super Bowl and I'm going to Disney Land" cut scene for your trouble. The only major RPG element missing from this mix is a pre-written linear narrative that has any structure besides that of a football season. But given what I've seen in RPG narratives, I don't think the game is really missing that much in this department either.

So, the next time you are feeling that T-or-SRPG urge, and the shelves of the local Gamestop are stocked with nothing but shooters, fear not. Just head to the bargain bin and pick up Madden 2004 or 2005 and go to it. You'll have to work pretty hard to find a better stats-based simulated RPG experience, in my humble opinion. The football part is fun too.

This entry is part of the September, 2005 Blogs of the Round Table. Please visit the Round Table's Main Hall for links to all entries.

Measurebation

2005-09-08 · by peterb

Here's a little theory called peterb's postulate of preoccupation: "For every possible topic on which one may wank, there will exist a community of wankers that wanks upon it in the most obsessive and self-absorbed way possible." And yes, I am well aware that this very weblog is, in fact, perhaps the paradigmatic example of obsessive and self-absorbed wanking over videogames. Believe me when I say that it hurts me more than it hurts you.

Today's subject is photo equipment wanking.

At least two times now, psu has made reference to the fact that I love to needle him by saying "Wow, your camera sure takes great pictures!" I do this because we both know it's not true, but also because I hear it a lot from people who are, innocently, trying to offer a compliment.

And that's OK. Most people don't really have any idea how a camera works, much less have a grounding in art or photography. They look at pictures, they see one they like, and they want to say something nice. There's no reason to get too upset when someone says this. But there are people who should know better, people who should know that the creation of art is almost entirely due to the vision and determination of the artist, and only peripherally a matter of tool, but who at some point focus on the minute differences between tools instead of on technique. "Camera X has .3 more megapixels than Camera Y! Look at the differences between these two photos of a test grid when I look at them in 1200 times normal size!" The best word I've heard for these people, which I wish I had coined, is "measurebators".

Most of us have been that person at one time or another. There's a sort of absentminded, very male pleasure one gets out of talking about which car is fastest, for example, while conveniently ignoring the fact that even if you were driving a Ferrari, Michael Schumacher could probably beat you by driving a Toyota Corolla. Photo.net is full of these folks. I mean, check out this guy, who I can only assume is homeless and living under a bridge in LA with a laptop and wireless Internet, doing nothing but obsessively explaining to potential shoppers why they should buy Canon instead of Nikon digicams.

Recently, I decided to buy a digital SLR camera. So of course, I was inflicted with temporary measurebation sickness, worrying myself to death over the tiniest of details. "The Canon has a tiny bit more resolution! But the Nikon can sync the flash to a higher shutter speed? Whatever shall I do?"

Fortunately, I got better, because I remembered: for all intents and purposes, the consumer-grade digital SLRs are effectively indistinguishable. If you are a bad photographer, the features on the camera are not going to improve your composition, use of light, or timing. If you are a good photographer, for 99% of your work, the differences in interface are not going to make the difference between getting a shot and missing it. And if you're a mediocre photographer, like me, well, who the hell cares what sort of camera you want to spend too much money on?

I was deciding between the Nikon D70s and the Canon Digital Rebel XT. I went with the Rebel. I did this because I liked the JPEGs that I got out of the Canon more than the D70; they're a bit more saturated and the sharpness felt right. Of course, since now I'm only shooting in RAW, because otherwise psu will make disparaging remarks about the size of my penis, this turned out to be a silly reason. I liked the small size of the Rebel also, but not enough for that to be a deciding factor. It really doesn't matter. Effectively, whichever one of these cameras you buy, you will get nearly the exact same photos. If you believe otherwise, you are deceived.

For those of you who absolutely can't survive another day without me telling you what to buy, I will give you this handy chart. Obey its dictates and then you don't have to obsess over everything like I did.

Kneel before Zod and buy the camera I tell you to buy.

| If you... | ...then you should | | already own Canon or Nikon lenses | buy the same brand as your lenses. | | Like smaller cameras | buy the Rebel XT | | Hate smaller cameras | buy the D70s | | Will use flash often | buy the D70s | | Will shoot in low light with no flash | buy the Rebel XT | | Don't want to buy any extra lenses | buy the D70s | | Will only ever shoot in JPEG | buy the Rebel XT | | Don't know what you want | buy whichever one is cheaper |

One piece of advice that people give constantly that you'll notice is not on this chart is "you should visit a camera store and then buy whichever one feels better". I'm a bit of a contrarian in this: you can't possibly get the feel of a camera from just pawing it for a few minutes at a store, or even by borrowing one for a few days (I know: I tried). It just doesn't matter. Whichever one you get, you'll get used to it.

So there you go. Let me make perfectly clear, that in my opinion, the above chart is actually completely useless. If you're choosing between the Rebel XT and the Nikon D70s, unless you already have a set of lenses that fits one camera or the other, you should just flip a coin and buy one at random. You will save yourself a lot of time and second-guessing. If it turns out later that you don't like your choice, you can just blame the bad penny.

Or, if you really want, you can blame me.

BLT

2005-09-09 · by psu

The signs of late summer and early fall are everywhere. The weather is cooling off, if only marginally. The CMU and Pitt students are back in Oakland, turning the empty campuses into a sea of book bags, flip flops, t-shirts, shorts and sweat pants. And, in the food bin, the tomatoes are overflowing. Late summer always means tomatoes, and what better dish to make with a tomato than the BLT.

The key to the great BLT is in following four rules:

  1. Crunchy thick bacon.

  2. Good acidic tomatoes.

  3. Decent bread.

  4. The lettuce doesn't really matter.

I like to buy thick sliced Virginia bacon at the Giant Eagle and microwave it on a plate a few slices at a time. If you nuke it 4 to 5 minutes and then let it rest it gets just about the right texture.

Then, toast the bread, lay the bacon down, then the lettuce and one or two slices of tomato. I like mayonnaise on a BLT. Others disagree about this. I don't think there is a hard and fast rule.

Cut the sandwich in half and serve with fresh corn on the cob. There is no better meal for late summer than a BLT and corn.

The Game Geek is Stumped

2005-09-12 · by peterb

Periodically I publish a little feature I call "Ask the Game Geek", where I'll take a vague description of a game that someone provided, and come up with the name. For example, I did this with the old Apple II games Sabotage and AWACS. And the Game Geek Quiz was one of our more popular articles here.

I have faith in this sort of process, because "stump the librarian" web sites have solved my problems before: for example, from the description "gothic-seeming story about a girl living in Britain who has some sisters and there's this evil doll", a clever internet-based librarian was able to correctly identify Ruth Arthur's A Candle In Her Room for me.

So here's a game that has me completely stumped. Help me figure out what it is, and you will win a prize, and my undying gratitude.

The game was one that I saw at a computer fair sometime around 1980 or 1981. So most of the machines at the fair were probably Apple ][+s or Commodore PETs, with a smattering of TRS-80s. I don't recall which platform the machine was on. I was watching someone play an adventure/dungeon sort of game. It had a first-person view of the dungeon — sort of like the dungeons in Ultima — but very sparse: no animation, of course. The player had a party of different characters with different professions. As he travelled through the dungeon he had to use his characters to solve different problems.

The one puzzle I specifically remember was that the way was blocked by some pipes that were spewing out hot steam (this was explained in text, not graphically). The player chose one of his characters, who was an acrobat, and had him throw his juggling balls into the pipes, which blocked the steam from coming out.

That's it. That's all I've got. A fragmentary memory from a computer fair before most of us had computers.

Any takers?

Required Complexity

2005-09-13 · by psu

I was generating a new movie for a friend of mine this weekend, and got reacquainted with Final Cut Pro. When I started using FInal Cut, I always found the clip logging interface to be baffling. It seemed to me that Final Cut should emulate iMovie, and find the shots itself rather than make me do it. Having now made a few short movies with the software, I see that there is an inner logic to the logging system, and it turns out to be a net win in the long run.

The particular example I have for you today is short and sweet. But the general principle that it illustrates is, I think, important. Here is what happened.

Between the last time I made a short video and this week, Apple has released a new version of Quicktime. So when it was time to generate the final movie file, I fussed around with the exporter a lot to try and figure out how to make a decent file that would not require everyone to download Quicktime 7 to watch the movie. I figured I would want to save them the hassle. But, at the end of the process, I encoded the movie using the new H.264 codec and was astounded by the results. What I found was that I could encode a movie at around 1/4 the bit-rate with equal or better overall picture quality. This meant that a 10MB file for five minutes of footage looked as good, or better, than a 40 or 50MB file did using MPEG-4. Maybe I just didn't know how to tweak the MPEG-4 settings, but there you go. After looking at the H.264 file, I decided that I now didn't care whether my friends and family had to download the new Quicktime.

So, what does this have to do with logging?

Well, I had a two year old video that I really like, and I found myself curious about what it would look like encoded at a higher quality. Of course, I had long deleted the raw material for this video from my disk. I only had the tapes and my original Final Cut document. Luckily, I had carefully logged all the clips that I used. So, instead of needing to capture the whole tape again and reconstruct all the edits all I did was:

  1. Put the tape in the DV camera.

  2. Open the Final Cut Document.

  3. Select the sequence for the movie.

  4. Hit capture.

  5. Walk away and eat dinner.

When I came back, the entire thing was reconstructed as if by magic. I hit export, and a hour later the iMac had generated a new H.264 version of the movie.

The key thing here is that unlike more "friendly" software, like iMovie, Final Cut requires that you create meta-data on your raw footage. The actual disk file containing the footage is not that important, as long as you have the clip logged. This means that the interface is initially difficult to understand. You want to be working with your footage, but Final Cut is asking you to describe the footage instead. But, in the long run when you want to come back to a project and do something like re-encode it, you are suddenly very glad that you spent all that time writing meta-data.

Now, I'm sure that iMovie, or something else less complicated than Final Cut, could have handled the re-encoding task fairly easily. But it probably would have required that I store full resolution versions of all the clips in the final edit. The elegant aspect of Final Cut is that the project file is an comparatively compact representation of the clips and the edits that I made, and it does not require that I keep any media online at all. All of this is enabled by the seemingly complicated clip logging interface, because the clips form the basis of the representation of the movie. This representation also allows for uber-cool hacks like Offline-RT. Therefore, while the interface is complex, it enables a much more natural end to end workflow for many tasks, therefore the interface designers were correct in making this complexity explicit and encouraging the user to embrace it.

The interface design lesson is this: make your user interface as complex as is required, but no more so. In other words, if the task that you are modeling requires complexity, then the user interface should reflect that. But, the design should not layer on any more than is needed. The Final Cut logging interface is a good example of this. The interface is complex and intimidating on the front end, but turns out to be exactly what you want to do once you understand more about the process of putting together a movie. The initial complexity pays off in spades when you decide to come back to an old project, because it makes things that could be hard, like re-encoding a whole movie, almost trivial instead.

Excellent production tools do this well. The logging and capture features in Final Cut reflect the fact that the software is designed for professional production, where the same raw assets are used in many different ways. For me, it just means that it is really easy to regenerate my dinky little movies without needing to store all of the raw footage on disk. I just store my description, confident in the fact that Final Cut can reconstruct the movie for me.

My other favorite production tool is Photoshop. But, we'll leave the Photoshop example for later.

Wrong of Way

2005-09-14 · by peterb

It's part of my philosophy on this site to avoid the use of profanity. I'm making an exception today, as I relate an absolutely true verbal exchange I had driving in to work today.

Driving through Schenley Park, I passed a guy on a bicycle. This isn't unusual. It turns out that in my country, people sometimes ride bikes, and often they ride them in parks. The guy was riding in the right hand lane, with traffic, fairly close to the curb. Just as I get past him, I hear a blaaaaaaaaaaarn of a loud horn. I look around to see if I've killed someone, and behind me is a huge Expedition-sized SUV. He's honking at the biker. There is a completely empty lane to the SUV driver's left. I keep an eye on my rear-view mirror to watch the situation develop.

Sure enough, SUV Guy decides that Bike Guy has somehow offended him by existing. He gets in front of the biker, and proceeds to start weaving slowly in front of him, blocking his attempts to pass, sticking his hand out the window when Bike Guy gets close, yelling at him, and generally acting like a jerk.

This starts making me mad: the SUV Guy isn't just putting himself and Bike Guy in danger, he's putting the rest of us on the road at risk as well. I get up to the traffic light, which is red, and I can't take it anymore. I put on my hazards, get out of the car, and shout at the top of my lungs at SUV guy, who is about 50 feet away:

"Hey, asshole in the SUV — knock it off before I call the cops."

SUV guy looks up, surprised. He speeds up a little and pulls up next to me. Convinced that I just don't understand the situation, SUV guy decides to explain why he's acting like an asshole:

"He coulda killed someone! He's in the road!"

I gaped at him for a few seconds, before calmly explaining shouting at the top of my lungs:

"He's allowed to be in the road, you schmuck."

SUV guy drove away, yelling a parting shot straight out of Junior High School:

"Screw you, faggot!"

The biker glided past, gave me a nod, and went on his way. I got back in my car just as the light turned green.

Now, typically when you hear a story like this, it's from the perspective of a bike rider. Co-author psu is an avid rider, for example, and I'm sure he has many similar stories to tell. The wrinkle, in this case, is, well, I don't really like bike riding. I find it irritating and boring. I view wanting to ride a bike without an engine as a character flaw, akin to preferring white wine to red, or only wanting to eat at chain restaurants, or enjoying large weddings. In a world where according to a simple "us vs. them" philosophy I should have sided with the SUV guy, I did the right thing and stood up. For great justice!

So, bicyclists: you owe me one. The next time you see one of your compatriots run a red light, or nearly mow down a pedestrian, or thuggishly swing a bike lock at someone who they believe has committed some completely imaginary slight, call him on it. Don't let him get away with it just because he's a fellow bike rider. Stand up for what's right.

Call him an asshole. Do it for me.

Data Crystal

2005-09-15 · by psu

In every long running Science Fiction franchise, there is the notion of a tiny device that carries within it the capacity to store a ludicrously large amount of data by present day standards. Normally, you'll see some character pull one of these out of his pocket, holding it up to shine in the light on the set, and then someone will pop it into a reader and the complete schematics for an entire planet will appear on the holographic screen. In Star Trek, these storage devices looked like little plastic cards. In Babylon 5, they were crystal shaped. The notion of the data crystal always intrigued me because I grew up storing data on large floppy disks or even larger disk pack type devices.

I think with the arrival of the new iPod nano, the age of the data crystal is here in force.

At the beginning of this year, when i got my iPod Shuffle, I thought it was ludicrously small for a device that could store 1GB of data. I decided to see if a device that small could fit the largest single musical work that the Western World has ever seen: The Wagner Ring. It took a while to run the experiment, but this week I finally determined that the whole thing will fit in the shuffle with more than 200MB left over if you encode it at 128Kbps.

Armed with this evidence, I was ready to declare to the world that the age of the data crystal had arrived.

Then, the iPod nano arrived. Holding one of these in your hand, you realize that even though it is barely larger than the Shuffle (it's wider, but thinner)

  1. It holds four times as much data. In fact, I'd guess that the nano can store enough to hold the working set of most application developers who work on products of average size.

  2. Oh my god, it shines as if lit by a thousand suns. I always figured the color screens were useless, but they sure are pretty.

The nano, then, is a shiny device barely the size of a credit card that I could use to carry my whole job around with me. It is the very definition of the data crystal. Sitting on your desk, it looks like a piece of sculpture, almost perfectly smooth with a black metallic sheen. Hook it up to your computer, and you have four times the storage that my graduate school provided for its entire computer science program back in 1990.

Of course, the iPod is not a data storage device. It is a music player. As such, the nano works just like a full sized iPod. It looks, feels and sounds exactly the same. Get the black one.

Contest: Caption This Picture

2005-09-16 · by peterb

Today's entry is brought to you courtesy of Nintendo, who has given us all a first look at the controller for their upcoming home game console, the Revolution.

It's a pretty simple contest: caption this picture! If, in so captioning, you should happen to let slip what you think of the device, so much the better.

My entry:

From the company that brought you Virtual Boy.

(Really, once you see it "in action" it's not quite as bad as all that. But that was still my first reaction.)

Silent Hill 3

2005-09-19 · by peterb

Here's another entry in the "I play games that are 3 years old because I'm a cheapskate" series.

I've tried to describe my experiences playing Silent Hill 3 a few times now. Each time, I sort of trail off and fail. This is, interestingly, not unlike my experiences trying to get into the game. Somehow, it fails to grab me in the way the first two games in the series did. Why is this?

It's tempting to say that the main reason is because it's just a simple rehash of the first two games. There's certainly a kernel of truth to that: when you sit down to a Silent Hill game, you know you'll experience a few things:

Silent Hill 3 does indeed hew close to this pattern. But, really, that's what I was looking for when I bought the game. After thinking about it, I've identified some specific things about the game that made it fail to resonate with me. The reasons have less to do with how it followed the pattern, and more to do with some fundamental design decisions.

The first problem is the pacing. Both of the first two Silent Hill games — but particularly the second — were brutally slow in getting things going. Silent Hill 3 starts throwing dogs with split heads at you from practically the first moments of the game. And, almost without exception, it is the monsters that determine the pace and creepiness of the game. Compare this to Silent Hill 2, whose sense of the uncanny was driven largely by plot and character revelations. The sheer brilliance of Silent Hill 2 was that by the latter parts of the game, the zombies were the relaxing part. Some four-legged mannequin sex monster would appear and try to murder me, and I would breathe a sigh of relief. "Thank god!" I'd say to myself. "I now have a few minutes where I can just whack monsters with a baseball bat, instead of finding out about how the protagonist once drowned his dog after it saw him having sex with his cousin." (I fabricated that "plot revelation", but you get the idea.)

The monsters that eat us from the inside are scarier than the monsters that eat us from the outside. Silent Hill 3 has forgotten this.

Another aspect of design that differs in Silent Hill 3 is that the game is on rails, but the rails are visible. The ideal game design is one that channels you down a pathway, while convincing you that you have an infinite amount of choice. In the first two games of the series, you are wandering around a fog-filled town, making frequent forays into large creepy buildings. The games do channel you, but the aspect of running around the streets makes you feel like you have more choices than you actually do. In Silent Hill 3 you begin the game in a shopping mall. Then you go into a subway. Then you go into a sewer. Then in to another building. From a flowchart perspective, this isn't actually different from the previous games, but the psychological effect of spending the entire game in interior spaces is limiting. It does not work in the game's favor.

Paging Dr. Freud, white courtesy telephone

Paging Dr. Freud, white courtesy telephone

Most, though not all, of the creatures in the game feel uninspired. The first Boss monster in the game is a giant penis. There's no two ways about it. You walk your female avatar in to the center of a large room, and a giant penis pokes out of various holes and tries to eat you. Using visual and auditory clues, you try to determine which hole the giant penis is going to poke out of, so you can shoot the giant penis with your gun until it goes limp. I mean, give me a break. This is the first dramatic climax — pardon the expression — in the game. I saw this, and I knew what the rest of the game would be like. I said to myself "OK. They're just dialing it in now." The problem, again, isn't that they chose to make the reference. The problem is that they made the connection so obvious that it comes from outside rather than inside. And that, in my opinion, deadens the impact.

In some sense, one has to feel sorry for teams that are building sequels. If they create a product that is too close to the previous version, they're accused of "not innovating." If they create a product that diverges too far, they're accused of "not being true to the spirit" of the game. I'm trying to avoid either of those criticisms. I think that Silent Hill 3 is very much true to the spirit of the series. I simply think that they made some decisions that had a negative impact on the narrative of the game. And I wonder if they realized the import of those decisions when they made them.

I recently picked up Silent Hill 4. From just a few minutes playing it, I have a sense that they remembered that exploring the darkness within is more frightening then exploring the monster-filled city without.

There's never a map for the darkness inside you.

Daffy at the Supermarket

2005-09-21 · by peterb

I have a sort of a hate/hate relationship with my local supermarket. The Giant Eagle closest to my house has this annoying habit: they figure out the products that I am buying, and then stop carrying them.

This wouldn't be half as annoying if they never had the products at all. But instead, they carry them for a while, I spend hundreds of dollars on them over the course of a few months, and then they take them away from me. It's like they're sticking their tongue out at me. "Your money isn't good enough."

Inexpensive but reasonably yummy sushi? GONE. Organic heavy cream? GONE. Whole Bell & Evans chickens? GONE. Ground lamb? GONE.

Sure, I can get these things at another supermarket. I can even get them at another Giant Eagle. It just galls me that the one closest to me is, as near as I can tell, engaged in a deliberate and thorough campaign of persecution against me.

Today, I stopped by to pick up a few essentials, and discovered that they are no longer carrying Wyman's frozen blueberries. I've probably bought about 2 bags of these a week for the past 2 years.

Of course, you realize, this means war.

The Consumer Society Has Failed Me

2005-09-22 · by psu

I have a birthday coming up (no, I will not tell you when). And, I thought I had perfect timing. It's been a good nine months to a year since both the DS and the PSP launched, surely by now there would be something shiny enough to warrant a purchase. And yet it is not the case.

The PSP has the advantage coming in of matching my iPod Nano. The DS has the advantage of having a few more decent games. But ultimately they both fail. All that is here are puzzle games (ooo, Tetris but with shiny blocks), games I've already bought and not played (Advance Wars, excellent, but I never play it), games that will be coming soon (Mario and Luigi, anything for the PSP that isn't a PS2 port) and games that should be good, but appear to suck (Madden 06 for PSP).

I thought our great marketplace could not fail in this way. How is it that in 2005, I can have the cash and the desire for something shiny and small to game on and it not be available? What a monumental failure. I'll probably buy a PSP anyway. Maybe I can watch anime off a memory stick until there is a decent game.

The Taleggio Problem

2005-09-24 · by peterb

If only all my problems tasted this good.

Taleggio

I love Taleggio cheese, but here's my problem.

You want your Taleggio to be good and stinky, which means the paper on it should be soaked through and impossible to remove. But if the paper is impossible to remove, then you don't get to eat the rind. And I like eating the rind.

It's a conundrum. Am I the only person with this problem?

Perhaps I'm just being prissy. Maybe I should just use this as an excuse to eat more epoisses.

Salsa

2005-09-27 · by psu

They had tomatillos at the farmer's market this weekend.

Tomatillos means salsa. So here you go.

Start with:

4-6 medium-sized tomatoes, cut up. It's also fun to use 2 or 3 regular tomatoes and 2 or 3 roma.

However many tomatoes you used, use the same number of tomatillos, or however many you like.

1 jalapeno pepper, seeded. 2 if you like it hotter,3 if you like it hotter than that

salt

handful of cilantro leaves (1/4 cup)

juice of 1/2 to 1 lemon

4 scallions cut up, just the bottom half. You can also use sweeter white onions.

Pile all the stuff into a food processor. Run it until everything is in little pieces. pour into a strainer to leech off some of the water from the tomatoes and make the stuff thicker. Put in bowl. Let the bowl sit in the fridge for 15-20min so things get nice and mixed up.

Eat with chips. No baked chips allowed. Some day I'll learn how to make a cooked salsa.

Bagging It

2005-09-28 · by psu

Bags are a problem.

The modern dork has a lot of crap to carry around and protect on a daily basis. You have your laptop, cell phone, big camera, small camera, maybe a lens, a flash, Gameboy, PSP, sunglasses, various papers, wallet and lots of small things that you don't really want in your pockets, but which you don't really want to leave at home either.

The ideal bag does not exist. The ideal bag carries all of the above in a space no larger than the inside of your pants pocket. Therefore, life is reduced to finding the optimal approximation of this ideal.

In my lifetime, I've spent all too many hours in pursuit of this bag. I've tried big bags, small bags, briefcases, messenger bags, canvas bags, camera bags, camera briefcases, camera backpacks, fanny packs, laptop backpacks, regular daypacks, vertical bags, horizontal bags, convertible bags, padded bags, unpadded bags, sling bags, diaper bags, and padded lunch boxes. I've used bags made by Eagle Creek, North Face, Domke, Timbuktu, Jansport, L.L. Bean, Lowe Pro, Tenba, Tamrac, and god knows who else.

Every single bag I ever used has had problems:

And so on. No bag seems to capture just the right set of features and leave out just the right set of stupid bugs.

The two bags I've used most recently were a Timbuk2 Commute laptop bag and a North Face laptop backpack. Both bags are a good size, and are easy to carry when either full or empty. But each has a lot of problems. The North Face bag has a useless front pocket because it is just one large cavernous black hole. Stuff goes in, never to be found again. The bag is also a bit thin and floppy, so you worry about all that stuff you just tossed into the endless front pocket. The padding on the straps is also too short.

The Timbuk2 is perfect. It can hold a laptop and everything else needed on a 8 hour flight to France while keeping it all easy to find in just the right number of inside pockets. It was also the right size to carry around most of the time, whether full or empty. Too bad the stitching is coming apart all over the bag, the velcro is already dead, and the shoulder strap is uncomfortable. All this after only a year or so of heavy use.

I think the ideal bag would be a backpack with a small shoulder bag inside. Or maybe a large shoulder bag with a backpack inside. Or maybe a large backpack that morphs into a small shoulder bag when all I want is to carry my laptop. I want an insert that isn't there until I want to pull it out of the bag and carry it around. I want nice shoulder straps that are curved and just the right size to not chafe, but turn into a messenger style strap when I want to carry my cameras around and get at them quickly. But no matter which mode the bag is in, I want it to look like a great beat up old leather satchel like you see in Paris.

I'm not asking for much, I think.

Klatsch Warfare

2005-09-29 · by peterb

One of the items in last Friday's snarky list of one-liners was: '"Fair Trade" coffee means that I pay more for the coffee beans, but then to make up for it they taste like crap.' This (partly) inspired fair-trade coffee fan Green LA Girl (there's only one?) to write a couple of articles on fair trade vs. taste, including an interesting conversation with a company that buys a lot of fair trade coffee, but has not bothered to seek certification themselves.

The summary of the point of view of the coffee company was essentially "the desire for fair trade does not trump our duty to provide quality coffee." I thought it was an interesting read, and I wanted to elaborate on this a little.

"Fair trade" coffee is doomed, as long as the business model is for it to be marketed directly at the individual coffee buyer.

"Fair Trade", as currently envisioned and marketed, concentrates solely on the value provided to the supplier rather than on that provided to the consumer. As long as this is true, it will remain little more than a sad footnote in the history of commerce. If the primary message behind the marketing of a product is "buy this because of a moral imperative," rather than "buy this because it tastes better" or "buy this because it's cheaper," that product is doomed.

Consider the organic movement. Those of us who buy organic milk don't spend twice as much on it than we do on non-organic milk because we think organic farmers are somehow more deserving than the non-organic cooperatives in, say, Vermont. We spend twice as much on it because, rightly or wrongly, we have been convinced that it tastes better and is better for us. Whereas fair trade coffee is marketed solely on the basis of where the money goes rather than on the basis of what the product is. That's a losing proposition.

Not only don't I particularly care where my money goes when I buy a cup of coffee, but even asking me to think about it is demanding far too much of me, especially before I've had my first cup of coffee of the day. It's a cup of coffee. This is not exactly a high-ticket item: it's not a car, or a house, or a major investment in a mutual fund. Fair trade coffee as marketed to the consumer is doomed to eternal marginalization, fundamentally, because it is asking the consumer to evaluate a nonsequiteur when making a trivial purchase. Merely having to think about where the money goes on a cup-by-cup basis increases the transaction cost on the part of the consumer. Consumers will respond by telling you, with their dollars, that they don't care.

The way I see it, there are exactly two ways for fair trade coffee to make inroads among anyone other than people who don't actually care about how their coffee tastes:

(1) Have "fair trade" also imply a guarantee of some minimal standard of taste and quality, in which case the consumer may actually care. Some people will point out that this isn't the "purpose" of "fair trade." So what? The "purpose" of Whole Foods is to make money, yet somehow they manage to convey the idea that they have other corporate goals as well. Alternatively...

(2) Market fair trade at the corporate level. If your fair trade coffee isn't going to taste better then the average consumer won't care at all. But you might convince a coffee shop that they care, because they can then pass that on to the consumer: "Hey, we only sell fair trade coffees, and here are the ones we recommend." This increases the impact of the transaction on the fair-traders, and simultaneously eliminates the psychic transaction cost to the consumer of choosing between fair-trade coffee that tastes ok or non-fair-trade coffee that tastes better. All the consumer has to decide is whether she or he likes the coffee shop.Now, I can already hear the protests: "but there is fair trade coffee that is just as good as non-fair-trade coffee, at the same price!" To which the only reply is: poppycock. If fair trade coffee was as good as non-fair-trade coffee at the same price, then coffee shops would have to be insane to sell anything else.

We can analogize this to the decaf coffee market. Yes, caffeine is a flavor component of real coffee. Removing the caffeine changes the taste subtly. But the fact is that most decaf coffee tastes much worse than it needs to. Why? Because all decaffeination processes cost money. The good processes cost more. And consumers have demonstrated that they are unwilling to pay more for a cup of decaf coffee than for a cup of regular coffee. The nearly universal solution chosen by coffee roasters and packages is to use cheaper, lower quality beans for their decaf products, and present a lower quality (but "same customer price") product to the customer. I have seen no argument that convincingly explains why this same dynamic won't affect "fair-trade" coffee as well.

Another interesting analogy here, of course, is to vegan food, which is a phenomenon marketed solely at people who don't care if their food tastes good. There seems to be just enough of these people to make the market viable, with a number of firms competing for their dollars. But each vegan consumes much more food per capita than a coffee drinker drinks coffee. Are there enough people who are willing to purchase coffee solely on the basis of where the money goes to meet the needs of the business model?

For the sake of small coffee growers, I hope so. But as a consumer of the product, I suspect not.

I Apologize to the Consumer Society

2005-09-30 · by psu

Earlier in this forum, I dumped on the general state of the shiny useless portable gaming device market. Against my better judgement, I picked up a PSP and Madden 06 anyway, on the theory that I could return them if they did in fact meet expectations and sort of suck.

I'm happy to report here that I must apologize to the consumer society, and that the PSP and Madden are generally better than I expected them to be.

First, Madden plays pretty much exactly like you would expect Madden to play on a device that is slightly slower than a PS2 and only has one analog stick. The press reports on this game have complained bitterly about "load times" to menu screens. I find the menus to be slightly sluggish, but not ludicrously so. I adjust by turning off the accelerated clock, so I have more time to set up between plays. Aside from a few stuttery transitions in situations like interceptions and fair catches, I have seen no performance problem that is much worse than the PS2 version of the game. Since these same press reports have seen no need to report these problems on the PS2, I can only assume that they didn't play the game on the PS2 before writing their reviews for that platform.

Just about everything you want has been crammed into Madden for the PSP. All of the minigames and strange modes I never play are there. All the plays in all the playbooks are there, as are most of the important pre-snap adjustments on offense and defense. A few "playmaker" adjustments are missing on defense, but the all important playmaker audibles on offense are there. The wireless multiplayer appears to work well too. You can also transfer data between the PSP and PS2 versions of the game. This seems to work, but I haven't experimented with it yet.

After the snap, the game seems to play faster than the console version, maybe because they didn't have to slow it down for the QB Eye of Sauron cone.

I also obtained Hot Shots Golf. This is a great colorful cartoony crazy golf game with a nice "kick-meter" swing mechanic instead of the more annoying analog stick mechanic. It plays a lot faster than Madden and is clearly better designed as a mobile game. Nothing like winning tokens with which to buy clothes. See, it's really an RPG.

As a device, the PSP works beautifully. Even my wife noted the quality and brightness of the screen. The analog stick, to my mind, is a much more useful control device than the touch screen that no one uses on the DS. The only thing that would be better is if there were two of them. From a gaming standpoint, two things stand out as important about the PSP:

  1. Memory cards are big. I like this.

  2. Instant sleep. This allows any game to be suspended at any time and then picked up again instantly. On the GBA, this function required support from the game in order to work. On the PSP this is not the case, which is a much better way to implement this. On the PSP, you are never at the mercy of some moronic game designer and his stupid save points to tell you when you get to go to bed. Bravo.

The battery life is not as good as a GBA, but we knew that. I find that charging the battery every night or every other night (depending on the play to sleep ratio), is good enough to keep the machine going without too much worry.

For now, Madden and Hot Shots should keep me happy. I'm looking forward to crazy Japanese-style RPGs in the future. The notion of an RPG without worrying about savepoints makes me happy.

Anyway, consumer society, all is forgiven. Don't be angry with me, I need some stuff at the Target tonight.

Chinese Braised Ribs

2005-10-03 · by psu

This is another one of my mom's dishes. I grew up with this, but never really thought about how it was done. In college, I tried literally dozens of times to get this even close to right. Finally, with enough practice it just started happening. The keys are the ratio of soy to sugar and cooking the ribs for a long time.

Start with one rack of spare ribs or baby back ribs. Have the guy at the store saw the rack in half vertically so you end up with two racks each of which are only a few inches wide. When you get the racks home, cut them up into individual riblets.

You will also need one bunch of scallions, cut up into large pieces, and a couple of carrots peeled and cut up.

Heat up a medium sized soup pot (4-6 quarts will do). When it's hot, add oil and 3-4 tablespoons of sugar. Throw in the ribs and stir them around so they are coated with the sugar and starting to brown. Then toss in the vegetables and stir some more. Let the whole thing saute for a minute or two. Grind some pepper over everything. I have to resist the urge to reflexively add salt to the saute. But a little doesn't hurt.

Now combine about a cup of soy sauce and a cup of water. Pour this over the ribs. If there isn't enough liquid to cover, add some more water. At this point you might have to add a bit more soy to balance things. You can also add red wine if you like that kind of thing. The soy to water ratio should be about 1-to-1, but it's really more a matter of taste and discretion.

After adding the liquid, put 3-4 more tablespoons of sugar in the pot. Bring to a boil, then turn the heat down and get things to a simmer. Cover the pot and go play Halo for a while. After an hour, check the sauce to make sure it's salty and sweet enough. If too salty, add some water. or wine.

Now go back and play Halo for a few more hours, letting the ribs cook until they are infused with the sauce and the meat falls off the bone easily. In addition, the sauce should be a nice combination of "soy saucy" and sweet. This takes a few tries to get right, so experiment until you get it to where you like it.

Playable Classics: A Selected Ultima

2005-10-04 · by peterb

I have written in detail before about my obsession with the Ultima games. After much deliberation, Tea Leaves is designating one of the Ultima games as a Playable Classic. It joins the other classic games Fool's Errand, Star Control II, and Escape Velocity as a shining exemplar of the best that videogaming has to offer.

The Contestants

First, a brief review of the idea of a Playable Classic. "Classic" is fairly obvious: a game that has stood the test of time, and that was innovative or genre-defining (or busting). "Playable" is where we really winnow the wheat from the chaff. A game is playable if it meets two conditions. First, that the game mechanics are still fun (and tolerable) given modern standards. To use an example, the original Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord is surely a classic, but the fact that it more or less requires you to make a map with pencil and paper in order to win disqualifies it from being a Playable Classic. Secondly, the game can be played on Windows and/or Mac by double-clicking a single executable. If someone distributes a wrapper for an emulator to achieve this for a specific game, that's enough to pass this bar.

Arguments can be made for nearly any game in the Ultima series being "the best." Certainly, many of the games introduced innovations that are in use today. Ultima II, for example, introduced "moongates" as a means of travel, and cemented the game world as involving an odd mixture of medieval and futuristic technology. Ultima III introduced the idea of a separate combat screen and calculating line-of-sight dynamically to determine what was displayed, as well as the "name? job?" conversation tree that was used through the next three games.

Most of the Ultima games, therefore, have a strong claim to being classics. There are, however, only two that could reasonably be considered Playable Classics, and so we'll limit our discussion to those two games. They are Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar and Ultima VII: The Black Gate.

These two are eligible for consideration mostly because of the hard work of devoted amateur developers who created updated ports of these games for most modern operating systems. In the case of Ultima IV, that effort is called XU4. In the case of Ultima VII, the project is called Exult (links to both projects and other relevant downloads will appear at the end of this article, under "Additional Resources"). Both projects run on Windows and Mac (as well as other platforms). Both ports provide one-click launching.

I've been watching these projects grow for several years now, and I'm really excited by them. The very idea that there's more than one ancient Ultima game that I can run on modern hardware is cool. With luck, other teams will work on resurrecting other cool games from the past, and they'll make my job even harder.

But back to the issue at hand: from a usability standpoint, you can now play either of the two games on your modern box with ease. How can I decide which one to designate as a Playable Classic?

Ultima VII

Ultima VII

Ultima VII opens with a gruesome murder

The Exult team deserves extra credit for making their project work. Ultima VII was a DOS application that needed a ton of memory. Rather than use one of the already-available memory management schemes to accomplish this, Origin developed a memory manager called "Voodoo" that was extremely convenient from the point of view of the developer and absolutely, utterly, and didactically brain-dead from the point of view of the user. Many users had to reboot from a custom-made boot disk in order to play Ultima VII. The game was the paradigm of the hostile user experience. Or at least I found it to be.

Of the two, Ultima VII is surely more approachable for the player who doesn't know what he is getting himself in to. The graphics in Ultima IV are tile-based, and primitive — more iconic than anything — and the world the game takes place in feels much less alive, and more game-like. I complain about the memory management in Ultima VII, but its existence has a lot to do with the ambition of the game. It's easy to forget how primitive most other games were in 1992: this was before even Doom.

In 1992, most of us who bought Ultima VII experienced a buggy, crashy, and unless we had just bought a top-of-the-line computer, hideously slow (albeit attractive) game. Today, thanks to the Exult project, we can play the game as it was meant to be played. We see our avatar and the other characters in town wandering around, looking for all the world like small animated dolls. Non-player characters have routines and chores and habits. They work during the day, and they sleep at night. The occasional deer or squirrel will be found in the wilderness, minding its own business, and darting away if you get too close. The game world feels lush, verdant, and alive.

The plot of Ultima VII uses the framework of a detective story to drive the plot. You arrive in the world of Britannia after a horrific murder; the standard path through the plot is to chase two of the suspects from town to town. The plot is serious, and though preachy at times, is never intolerable. There are many optional activities and side-quests.

This is what Ultima VII brings to the table. A huge (and hugely detailed) world. The terrain does not seem at all tile-based. The environments are as richly varied as Diablo II, and the art is beautiful. The music is soft and textured, and the characterizations believable, at least within the confines of the medium. And Ultima VII is, quite simply, huge. It is the first of the series that I regularly got lost in. I think that's pretty cool.

The game has drawbacks, however. It is hobbled by an almost obsessive-compulsive attention to detail. You can pick up practically every rock and trinket in the game, which means that you will spend most of the game wondering if you should have picked something up that you didn't. There are also subtle rules about crime that don't make a lot of sense. Sometimes, you can pick up bars of gold without penalty, and then at other times you might idly eat a grape that you find in a tavern and suddenly all the members of your party will try to kill you for thievery.

The game tried to integrate combat into the main game engine; rather than decamping to a separate combat screen, and having "turn based" combat, it proceeds in real time. It works something like this: you see someone you want to attack. You click the "dove" button, indicating that you don't want to be peaceful anymore. The dove changes into a picture of a heart pierced by a flaming sword, which is of course the International Olympic Committee's symbol for deadly combat. Then all of the characters in your party rush headlong at the enemy and hack at them without any kind of organization and you all die. Then you go play a different game.

Ultima IV

A good choice for a different game, it turns out, is Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar.

Ultima IV

Ultima IV in XU4 (with updated graphics)

Originally published in 1985, Ultima IV stands out as the apotheosis of the series in terms of what may be the most underrated aspect of games: pacing. The game strikes just the right balance of aimless but interesting wandering, frantic combat, and determined searching. There are plenty of macguffins to search for, and a huge number of subquests. There's also quite a bit of dialogue, although the interface to engage in it is be a bit primitive (for years after Ultima IV it was a running joke within the series that the Avatar's main characteristic was that he walked around talking to every single person he met saying "Name? Job?")

From a narrative perspective, one of the most refreshing things about the game is its self-awareness of the clichÈs of the genre. All three of the previous games had been what are sometimes referred to by game geeks as "kill foozle" quests, meaning the only "point" to the game is "Bad guy over there. Go kill him." The overarching goal in Ultima IV is, not to put too fine a point on it, to become a messiah by exemplifying the eight virtues. All together now, people, let's recite them: Compassion, Honor, Justice, Valor, Honesty, Sacrifice, Spirituality, and Humility. (It gets more complex when you consider that each of the virtues are meant to represent one combination of "the three principles" of truth, love, and courage. More or less, my presumption is that Richard Garriott was reading about Buddha's Eightfold Path one night while he was really really baked, and decided to build a game around it. Right Understanding, Right Thought, Right Speech, Right Action, and...Right 6502 Assembler Coding?)

It would have been terribly easy for a game whose entire point was "one should be virtuous" to have crossed the line into preachiness. Ultima IV never ventures into the saccharine. The Bioware games Jade Empire and Knights of the Old Republic are great counterexamples. These games let you play as the bad guy but come across as preachier than Ultima IV. Part of this has to do with the eightfold path of morality in Ultima: the conflict, more often than not, is not "good versus bad" but "upholding one valued principle versus a different valued principle." The particular one that always messed me up was Humility. Characters in the game would constantly ask me "Are you humble?" And I'd sit there, for 2 minutes, not sure what I should say. "Yes! My ability to be humble kicks ass! I am the best at being humble in the world!"

So sometimes one can have multiple goals that are in total conflict. It turns out that even though I'm not saving the world, those are the sorts of decisions that I find difficult in real life.

There's another aspect of Ultima IV that I like, and that has to do with the nature of sequels. In each of the first four Ultima games, the locale changed. Ultima I took place on a nameless world with four continents. Ultima II took place on Earth. Ultima III took place on "Sosaria." Ultima IV takes place on "Britannia." By the time Ultima VII rolled around, the mythology of the world had been calcified and enshrined into canon. When Ultima IV was released, this hadn't happened yet. The game, therefore, goes out of its way to explain more about the world and what has come before. This makes it a bit more approachable to someone who hasn't played any other of the games in the series. Ultima IV is "just" a sequel. Whereas by the time of Ultima VII, the series had become an institution. As such, the latter game had to perform contortions to not contradict earlier tradition and upset rabid fans.

Ultima IV doesn't quite make combat optional, but you can advance very, very far without engaging in many battles, which is to my taste. If you prefer, you can try to kill anything that moves. Elements from the earlier Ultima games, such as moongates, are still present, and the game's tile-based nature will be familiar and understandable to anyone who has played Rogue.

The Decision

It's a close call. Both games, as I said above, have much to recommend them. If you have the time to play both, you should. But if you only have time to play one, then play Ultima IV.

The reasons are pretty simple.

Ultima VII is a fantastically ambitious game. As such, it does many things fairly well. It has multiple user interfaces for many different actions and behaviors. It represents a beautiful, richly detailed world, most of which you will never have the time or inclination to see. At times, it seems more like a primitive version of The Sims than a role-playing game. Ultima IV by contrast, focuses the same narrative ambition on far fewer game mechanics. There is less you can do, conceptually, in Ultima IV, but those things are easier (from a UI perspective) to actually accomplish. Ultima IV only does (comparatively) few things, but it does them very well.

In other words: Ultima IV is a smaller game, but it's more of a game.

Ultima IV

Ultima IV in XU4 (with original graphics)

The lack of realistic graphics doesn't hurt the game, any more than the iconic pieces in chess damage that game. I like the little icons waving swords. I like the little waiflike children that are depicted with what seems like only 10 pixels. I like the subtle way secret doors require you to actually notice a shift in the brick patterns of a wall. And, damn it to hell, I like walking up to random people and pestering them with "Name? Job?" over and over again.

And, lastly, for all of the seriousness of both of the games, Ultima IV has a worldview, a compassion, and an optimism that is I just didn't find in the later game. Both games exist in an intellectual grey area. Both strove to be morally and ethically complex, and they only succeeded to a very limited extent. Both throw tricky ethical situations at you, and, being imperfect, can be "gamed." Despite this, there is an ethos expressed in Ultima IV that striving to be a good person is a worthwhile endeavor in and of itself. And I think that's an attitude that should be respected, and honored. Ultima VII, from start to finish, batters you with murders, and poverty, and drug use, and questions of privilege. The moral ambiguity of pretenders to virtue is a worthwhile theme, but it's one that isn't played true in Ultima VII. The earlier, simpler theme — even if naive — strikes purer notes.

And sometimes, a simple tune is all one needs to have a good day.

Additional Resources

Putting the "A" in A.I.

2005-10-05 · by psu

I got to thinking about the A.I. in games while playing the first few levels of the new Xbox shooter, Far Cry: Instincts. By coincidence, I had also recently replayed a few levels of Halo 2 and my first impressions of Far Cry were that the A.I. was much worse than the A.I. in Halo. So, while I spent some time in the rain forest with the little Far Cry mercenaries, I also thought about why they were less effective as artificial opponents as the grunts and elites in Halo.

The A.I. in a shooter, it seems to me, operates on two levels. First, the enemies should be able to act in ways that are tactically appropriate. They should hide from you when you shoot at them. They should gang up on you and beat you down when they get the chance. They should snipe you from afar before you know where they are, and so on. Of course, the developer has to balance these smarts so that the game is neither too hard nor too easy. It would be no fun if the sniper on some level killed you every single time you stepped out in the open. This aspect of A.I. emphasizes the intelligence more than the artificial. You want the enemies to be smart enough to be challengiing.

The second aspect of A.I. in a shooter has more to do with the artificial more than the intelligence. Since it's not likely that we'll ever really build a real person simulator for the Xbox (or the Xbox 360 for that matter), it's not really feasible for a game character to seem believably real in a Turing Test kind of way. It is important that they be interesting enough to make the short interaction that you will have with that character fun.

In shooters, this means that you hope that the enemies have enough variation in their behavior to make you believe that they are not completely robotic in the minute or so that you will be with them before you blow them into the sky. They shouldn't always run in the same patterns or use the same attacks. They shouldn't always "spawn" in the same place. And, most importantly, if they talk, they shouldn't always say the same things.

This second aspect is really where Halo differs most from Far Cry. I think the tactics that the aliens use aren't all that much better than the jungle soldiers. They both run away from you, and both perform effective gang attacks. The enemies in both games are kind of stupid about actually hiding behind cover. You can easily run around their flank and beat them down, for example. The Halo enemies are a bit better with ranged weapons and grenades, and they will also beat you down more often than the soldiers will. But what really makes the enemies in Halo more interesting are the non-tactical things that they do. They are never in exactly the same place when you enter an area. They don't always chase you in the same way. And, most of all, they had much better writers for their dialogue. The effect of this should not be underestimated.

The early levels in Far Cry feel much more repetitive than Halo if for no other reason than in Far Cry you get really tired of the same voice yelling the same dialogue over and over again.There are only about four different lines ("I could use a little help here!", "You're dead meat now!", "I see you!", and "Why don't you come out and fight?", and so on) and they all speak with the same voice. And that voice is generic and boring. It's almost as if a member of the developmen team recorded the voice-overs in his basement with his brother and put a comment in the code like:

// XXX - replace with something better later XXX

But then they never got around to it. The interesting thing about this is that other Ubisoft games developed by completely different developers have similar problems with their A.I. Splinter Cell is like this, Rainbow Six is like this and Ghost Recon 2 is like this. I stopped playing both Rainbow Six and Ghost Recon primarily because both the enemy and friendly A.I. were so boring. To be fair, those games are more about their multiplayer modes than the single player campaign, but the similarity to Far Cry is what tickled this idea in my brain, because my main objection in every case had more to do with their bad dialogue than anything else.

In contrast, one of the best things in Halo are the literally hundreds of pithy lines of dialogue that Bungie wrote for the non-player characters. The marines and grunts have the best lines. The elites have less variety, but they still make sure to never taunt you in the same way twice when they kill you. This attention to a seemingly minor detail serves to make the game seem much less repetitive than Far Cry even as you replay the same area over and over again because of the stupid savepoints. As a result, the characters in Halo are more enjoyable to interact with even if they aren't really that much more believeable as people simulation devices.

The lesson to take away from Halo is that when it comes to A.I., getting the "A" right by faking the small things well can actually be more important than implementing any "real" simulation of intelligence.

Schramm Farms

2005-10-06 · by peterb

One of the odd things about Western Pennsylvania, as a region, is that there is an urban/rural divide that seems more stark than nearly anywhere else I've been. You can travel half an hour outside of town and find people that have lived in the area all their lives, but never been downtown. Likewise, you can find people who live in the city who never find occasion to leave.

This is a shame, because there are things in both places that are eminently worth experiencing. One of the highlights of getting out of town a little bit — especially in the autumn — is the fairly large number of small farms and orchards where you can find great locally-grown produce at reasonable prices. Today, I'd like to tell you about one of them.

Before I get into details, I want to talk a little more about the travel issue. It's not solely an urban/rural divide. The region seems to have this psychological trait where anything over 15 minutes away is "far." This is odd to me, because where I come from the threshold is one hour. If a destination is 65 minutes away, it's "far." If it is 55 minutes away, it's close. Here, if you suggest going somewhere more than about 15 minutes away, people look at you kind of funny. "Isn't that an awfully long way away?"

I can't say whether this is due to geography, or upbringing, or something in the water. But it interests me — is there a word for this psychological threshold? What is it set to in other places? — and I mention it because, if you live in the city, it's likely that it will take you more than 15 minutes to get to Schramm Farms, or any of the other local orchards. They're all worth the drive.

There are a number of farms like this dotting the area around Pittsburgh. North of the city you have Shenot farms and Kaelin's. In Bridgeville, serving the south and west, is Trax Farms. Further to the south, near Elizabeth, PA, you'll find Triple B Farms (which also has an enjoyable corn maze every fall). Schramm Farms covers the eastern region. These aren't your only options by any stretch of the imagination.

Schramm's is a 470 acre farm in Penn Township, but this wasn't always the case. It used to be located at Ross Park Mall. Or, rather, before there was a mall where Ross Park is today, there was Schramm's. In 1981, they sold the property and picked up the farm and moved to Penn Township.

Eugene Schramm (enlarge)

I asked Hillary Schramm whether "moving a farm" was as hard as it sounded, and he looked very, very tired. "It took about 8 months."

Schramm's has a store that is open year round, but it really comes in to its own in the fall. This is when the apples are harvested. Schramm's grows a ton of varietals that simply don't make it in to your local Giant Eagle (or Whole Foods).

"Fall is the biggest time," agrees Hil's daughter, Carolyn, 24. "Our regular customers are all from perhaps 10 or 15 miles away. It's people that want fresh produce, people that do a lot of home cooking, or canning, or things like that. In the summer especially, people will stop by to pick up whatever they know is fresh. Fall is the only time that we get a lot of people from Pittsburgh or further out."

This time last year I wrote about my late-discovered love for the Northern Spy apple. All the local fruit mongers tell me that you can't find them in this area. They're wrong. Schramm's Northern Spys come in in mid-October, and I'll be first in line to buy a bushel. If you show up today, you'll be able to buy Jonathans, Jonagolds, Cortlands, Honeycrisp, various Delicious varieties, Empires, and several other varietals that have slipped my mind. It is a festival of apples. I bought a peck of superb Cortlands for about $8.50. Schramm's cider is, regrettably, pasteurized — it is not even legal to sell unpasteurized cider anymore, it's actually easier to find raw milk — but it's quite good nonetheless.

It's not just apples and cider, of course: you can find many fruits and vegetables. Since this is Pennsylvania, and not California, you're not likely to find anything terribly exotic, but what you do find will be very good. Not all of the produce is local, but it's all clearly marked ("our own", "local", or other) so you can decide accordingly. The squash and pumpkins are great right now.

I know enough about farming to know a few things. I know that I would never want to be a farmer, and I know that I'm very glad that there are people who do. Carolyn Schramm says, "The worst part is the 24/7 job that it is — you can never really escape it, because one, it's a business, and two, it's farming. The best part is it gets in your blood. You feel connected to the earth, you feel like you're doing something useful. You feel that your work is worthwhile, and part of the community."

So when you buy apples at a place like Schramm's, you're getting produce that is fresh, interesting, inexpensive, you're supporting the local economy, and you're helping real farmers, rather than Archer Daniels-Midland, earn their livelihood. There is absolutely no downside to the equation.

Schramm's is currently in the middle of their Fall Festival now, all through October, so it's an especially good time to visit: pick up a pumpkin, drink some hot apple cider, eat a caramel apple, and generally enjoy the crisp fall air. There are activities and a small playgorund for kids, and an enjoyable atmosphere for everyone. Take a drive out east and buy some apples.

Just don't get between me and my Northern Spys.

Schramm's Farm is on Harrison City-Export Road near Jeannette, PA, and they can be reached at (724) 744-7320. For more information, visit their website.

The 2005 IFComp, Text Adventures, and You

2005-10-07 · by peterb

The 2005 Interactive Fiction Competition has begun. Let's talk about text adventure games.

Interactive fiction ("IF") games, to me, encapsulate all the potential of gaming. It is, almost, a hybrid medium, combining the best (and sometimes worst) features of games, short stories, poetry, and puzzles. What I find incomprehensible is that so few people play modern IF games.

You can go to just about any gaming magazine or weblog and read people complaining about the cookie-cutter, corporate nature of most releases. But when was the last time you played an IF game?

It's time to fix that. Here is my challenge to you. Go to the official IFComp site. Download the games. And play just one. Play more if you want to, but play at least one. If you're a game blogger, my challenge is a little more specific: play one IFComp game, and write about it.

The contest doesn't end until November 15th, and I don't want to bias the judging, so the challenge is to publish a review or article after the competition ends. So you've got plenty of time. Pick a game at random (if you register to officially judge, their web site will even present you with a randomized list), play it for two hours, write an article about it, and publish it on November 16th. Give me the URL, and I'll link to it.

I'll even extend this offer further: if you don't have a weblog of your own, write an article or review of one of the IFComp games and send it to me, and I'll publish articles that meet some minimum editorial standard on Tea Leaves. And I'll figure out some cool thing to donate to the IFComp organizers for use as a prize in the competition.

If you're interested in participating, please drop an email message to tleavesweblog -at- gmail (dot) com. Or, if you have a gaming-related weblog, tell your readers that the IFComp has begun, or link to this post.

But whether or not you decide to write about them, I urge everyone to get out there and try some of the IFComp games.

Why do I care about this? Think about the nature of modern amateur-written IF games. They represent the vision of one person. The very nature of how they are developed gives them a unique style and voice. None of this is any guarantee of quality, of course; every year there are plenty of games in the IFComp that are terrible. But when you find a gem — I've mentioned Hunter, in Darkness before, as an example — the memory will stay with you forever.

One of the weaknesses of modern commercial videogames, as a medium, is that too few of them represent individual vision. By and large, they are the product of teams. Teams are not bad; they allow you to create projects that are simply beyond the scope and ambition of one writer or software developer. But the nature of team development means that compromises are inevitably made. Team-designed games are not necessarily better or worse than a game designed by one person (dare I call them "auteur-created games?"), but they are necessarily different.

The IFComp is one of the best ways I know of to find games developed by a single person. Every year, the IFComp makes me smile. Every year, I'm glad it exists. If you play some of the games, I'm betting you'll feel the same way.

http://www.ifcomp.org/. Go there now, and download the games. It might be the best decision you make all week.

A Far Cry from Great

2005-10-10 · by psu

I had been wanting to play a shooter recently, and since they are never going to release Half-Life 2 for the Xbox (OK, maybe they will eventually) I had been putting up with Tom Clancy squad shooters in the interim. But those are not any fun. So when Far Cry: Intincts finally shipped, I figured maybe it was my ticket for at least the next couple of weeks. I heard the game was fun, and on the long side. Actually the game is pretty painful and on the short side. It's like the people who write reviews don't play the same game as the rest of us.

The Good

Here's what is good about the game: the visuals are great and the levels are huge. You play most of the game on the beaches and jungles of a tropical island and the outdoor areas are rendered with a sense of space and attention to detail that is second to none. In contrast to Halo 2 the levels here really feel huge in addition to being huge. Halo always had a way of making its huge spaces still feel like the same old alien hallways.

That said, the game pretty much puts you on rails and has you run in a straight line from waypoint to waypoint. Once in a while you fall off and wander aimlessly completely lost for half an hour until you find the right tree to crawl under to get to the next area. Oh wait. this part of the article is for the good parts of the game. Stay on target.

The shotgun is fun in this game.

The "feral" or animal abilities add a nice melee attack to your arsenal.

Load times are fast. There are no noticable load times except between levels, and the levels are huge.

No real Bosses. A few guys took more beating than others, but that's about it.

The game is short. I only played it for one week over two weekends. This is even shorter than Deus Ex: Invisible War which was uniformly denounced as being stupidly short.

I think that's it.

The Boring

Many of the reviews I read for this game complement the A.I. In my earlier obtuse attack on the game, even I claimed that the A.I. was not completely hopeless. Well, we were all wrong. I've had enemies walk right past me and stand there waiting for me to backstab them. I've had enemies walk one by one into a room only to be picked off with the shotgun. They run in a straight line towards your hail of gunfire, seemingly unaware that they will be cut to shreds.

But, the A.I. is not really the greatest sin in the game. After all, you can't expect that much from a computer anyway. The real sin is that the enemies are boring. There are only really two types of foes. They are always in the same places. They always say the same things. They only attack in two ways. And, there is really only one way to get through the game: run up to everyone and shoot them in the face with the machine gun. You can get through about the first 3/4ths of the game this way. After that point, the A.I. "improves" mostly by suddenly being able to headshot you every single time from across the map. This is also boring.

The missions in the game are strictly "move from point A to point B, maybe pick up thing C." The plot of the game, such as it is, is little more than a few connecting cut scenes between the fetch missions that make up the levels. Halo or Riddick look like pretty clichéd SF schlock until you watch a few of these cut scenes. At that point Halo comes out looking like the second coming of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings.

The reviews I mentioned earlier also drool over the "stealth" gameplay that is allegedly in this title. What they forget to mention is that unlike Riddick or Splinter Cell, the stealth gameplay in this game is boring. Set a trap, toss a rock, wait wait, listen to the soldiers speak their four lines of dialog. THWAP. That's all there is. You can't really sneak around the rest of the game because once you are seen, your only chance is to run up to everyone and shoot them in the face with a machine gun. The contrast with Riddick is instructive. In that game, your lack of any weapons forced you to sneak around, and the game was designed around this. There actually were places for you to hide. The melee attacks in the game worked well. The game even gave you a nice quiet weapon to use when you needed it. Far Cry does none of these things. It feels like the sneaky bits were tacked on after beta.

Finally, there are the "feral" abilities that you obtain as the game goes on. These give the rendering engine a cool new way to draw the world. Occasionally the melee attack comes in handy, although it's too slow to unleash in most cases. I might just be stupid, but I could never figure out what I was supposed to do with the other special powers. The game never gave me a reason to think of using any of them, and by the time I realized that they might have made a particular area easier to get through, I was either already done or I had already been shot in the head.

The Hateful

The game has stupid savepoints. Even more insultingly, you only get one, which is cleared if you accidentally decide to play a different level over again for some reason. Halo did this to me too, but at least in Halo 2 there are no load times.

The vehicles are both boring and useless. There really are not any combat situations that they are good for. They also drive worse than the Warthog in Halo. I never thought i would say that about anything. Running and swimming from place to place turned out to be a lot less painful than trying to ride the ATV bikes through the woods and flipping over all the time.

The stupid exploding mutant enemies are ripped off from Halo and emit possibly the most annoying audio ever attached to a video game character. It is annoying enough that not only did my wife ask me to play without sound, but I agreed with her. They are also much less interesting than the Halo version of the creature.

The cheap head shot AI at the end of the game provides for hours of replay time trying to get from one checkpoint to the next. Kill 15 soldiers one at a time, and the last one before the savepoint shoots you down from a bush two miles away from your position. This means you need to use "strategy" to memorize where the sniper is and pick him off ahead of time the next time through. This makes the gameplay "deep".

The last level is a lava level. This is where I put the game down, and then stupidly picked it up again for the last hour.

Ultimately, this is a game that encourages you to use any means necessary to get to the end as fast as possible. This was pretty easy in the early parts of the game, before the enemies get their cheap headshots. By the end of the game, the whole endeavor turns into a repetitive unforgiving deathmarch. Then you fall in the lava, and your will to live is completely gone.

But, even with all this going against it, it's still better than a Tom Clancy squad shooter (for single player) and it took a few hours before Karen decided it had to be off off off, as opposed to Brothers in Arms, which only took 30 seconds. By the time I couldn't take it anymore, I was already at the end. Which I guess is something.

I guess it's time to play RPGs until Half-Life 2 comes out, if ever.

Somebody Save Me

2005-10-11 · by peterb

Chris over at Only a Game published an interesting perspective on save games. He wrote a hypothetical dialogue between a game producer and his engineering, art, and QA teams on what type of save game system they should include on their game.

I think he raises some interesting points, but I think he misses the mark on some others. So I am responding with a dialogue of my own that I think more accurately captures what's at stake.

One of Chris's core assumptions is that only "hardcore" players care about being able to save anywhere. I disagree with this assumption. In fact, in my experience, it's the exact opposite. Hardcore players have been trained to put up with all sorts of stupid behavior from their games. The people who want to save anywhere are the casual gamers. Here's a counterexample:

WIFE: OK, sweetie, we're late for Thanksgiving dinner. We have to go now.

HUSBAND: Sure thing, hon, I'll be right there. I just have to get to the next save point. If I quit now, I'll lose the past 20 minutes I've played and have to do it again.

WIFE: How long will it be until you reach the next save point?

HUSBAND: Well, usually the save points are spaced about 15 minutes apart. Of course, sometimes they're 30 seconds apart. And then sometimes you'll have a deathmarch where you have to trudge through the lava level for an hour.

WIFE: An hour?

HUSBAND: But that's unusual. It should just be a few minutes. Well, assuming I don't accidentally walk past it and miss it.

WIFE: Why can't you just save the game?

HUSBAND: Well, the game designers worry that they might alienate part of their audience with complex concepts like saving the game.

WIFE: ...

HUSBAND: Why are you looking at me that way?

WIFE: My grandmother, who is 80 years old, knows that she has to hit "save" before quitting her word processor. There are people who seriously think that saving a game is a hard concept?

HUSBAND: Well, it's a very complex issue, sweetheart.

WIFE: And these are the people who are making me late for Thanksgiving dinner?

KIDS: MOM! DAD! WE'RE HUNGRY!

HUSBAND: Be right there, kids! I just have to get past the Plains of Pandemonium and defeat...

[WIFE shuts off console.]

HUSBAND: ...Hubris.

It's not that I think Chris is a bad guy. He's looking at this from a software developer's perspective and discussing the tradeoffs. I'm looking at this from a consumer perspective. The ability to walk away from a game at (nearly) any moment, to save at roughly any time and return later without substantial penalty, is of paramount importance. It is, if you will, part of the production values of a game. I believe that a commercial game that does not provide that ability is — as far as this aspect of production is concerned — unacceptably primitive, and unprofessional.

In other words, I'm not inclined to be generous about this. Traditional console game attitudes towards save points are antediluvian, wrong, and broken, and the entire idiom of the "save point" must be destroyed. If you want to save some money to create an unprofessional game, go ahead. But I think we should be creating the sort of consumer environment where people who try to sell games like that are mocked, just like people who produce commercial movies with poor production values are mocked.

Chris raises some objections to "save anywhere" that I think are somewhat tangential to the problem. First off, let's recognize that by "save anywhere" we don't really mean "store 100% of the game state at absolutely any time, including when I'm about to take a bullet to the head." Rather, it is a fuzzier definition that amounts to "allow me to save frequently enough that if I have to get up and do something more important, I can do so after no more than at most a minute." Or, more succintly, "allow me to save often enough that I don't feel compelled to hop on a flight to LA and hook the game's producer up to the face-slapping machine." I don't care (and won't complain) if the game had to reset some bits of state to ensure it wasn't in an unwinnable state, as long as it doesn't require me to replay the last 20 minutes of gameplay, which, let's be frank, probably weren't all that much fun the first time through anyway.

Second, there's cost of implementation. On the one hand, Chris talks about how save anywhere creates more work for QA, but on the other hand he agrees that a "let me stop playing now" checkpoint save is pretty much a requirement for reasonable games. Don't such saves present approximately the same QA load?

Lastly, Chris worries that the user interface aspects of managing many save games might be too confusing for users to handle. He's right. However, this is completely orthogonal to the issue of whether such UIs are on top of "save anywhere" or "save at save point" systems. Developers can (and have) created save point systems that are just as confusing as save anywhere systems. User interface is an important aspect of any game, but it shouldn't be used as an excuse to not do the right thing.

User interfaces are funny things. There are the patent aspects of user interfaces (this is a button, these are checkboxes, this is how I navigate menus), and there are latent aspects. Books, for example, have a fabulous save interface: put the book down, and then when you want to start reading it again, pick it up, find the page, and read. DVDs, likewise, use chapter markers and fast forward to allow the viewer to pick up where she left off. No matter how transparent a checkpoint save you provide, you still run the risk of providing a simple patent UI, but a horrible latent UI: every gamer, no matter what their level of sophistication, is capable of forming the thought "Why is the game making me play this? I already finished this part."

And when the players have that thought, it's the game designers, and their reputations, who are stuck in an unwinnable state.

Your Milk's Got a Little Machine

2005-10-12 · by peterb

I've always really enjoyed Alton Brown's Food Network TV show Good Eats. One of the things I enjoy the most about him is his raise-the-black-flag-and-start-slitting-throats attitude towards kitchen equipment. Specifically, if a device could only be used to make one thing, he hated it.

Recently, I've been eating a lot of this froufrou Greek yogurt, "Total." It's very nice, but fairly expensive. So I've taken to using my overpriced cups of Total to culture my own yogurt, using Alton's method for making yogurt without a yogurt maker. Here's how to do it.

You will need:

(1) A stockpot. (2) A spoon. (3) A saucepan. (4) A pitcher. (5) A little bit of plain active-culture yogurt of a brand you enjoy, to use as a starter. The fresher the better. Stonyfield Farms or Total both work fine. (6) An ordinary heating pad, like you might use for an aching back.

A probe thermometer with an alarm is a recommended addition.

Pour however much milk you're using in to the saucepan; I'd recommend making no more than a quart the first time. Turn the saucepan on medium low and heat to 180 degrees Fahrenheit. When it reaches 180, take it off the heat and let it cool in the saucepan. You won't touch it again until the temperature is down to 110 degrees Fahrenheit.

Homemade yogurt machine

Homemade yogurt make

While you're waiting for the milk to heat, take your heating pad and remove the fuzzy safety cover. Stuff it in to the stockpot (see photo), and plug it in. Take the pitcher and snuggle it down into the pad in the stockpot. Don't worry if the pad doesn't come very far up the pitcher. You're just looking for low and steady radiant heat. Turn on the heating pad, and put a tablespoon or two of yogurt into the pitcher. (You may need to experiment to find the right setting on your heating pad. I just use the top setting and don't worry about it.)

When the temperature of the milk is down to about 110 degrees, pour it in to the pitcher. Stir vigorously with a clean spoon. Cover with tinfoil and ignore it for about 8 hours. Because I'm lazy, I tend to start the process in the evenings and then just leave it overnight. It's OK if this "cooks" for more than 8 hours. You may end up with more whey, but it firms up somewhat in the refrigerator afterwards, and the whey doesn't bother me. Don't stir up the yogurt in the middle of the process to check on it. As with homebrewed beer, worrying makes the yogurt taste bad. When you've decided it's done, put it in the refrigerator to cool (you can eat it hot, but the texture improves after it cools).

This will end up being much cheaper than buying yogurt in the store, even if you use organic milk. The yogurt will be fresher, taste better, and be healthier for you. Perhaps most importantly, you'll have the pride of having created something delicious by yourself instead of having just purchased it. Enjoy!

Next week on Tea Leaves: slaughtering your own veal.

Additional Resources

Paul, writing about yogurt, titled a chapter of his story "The Good Machine". And I wish I had thought of that title first. So instead I mixed his title with that of a Pixies song. Everything is better when mixed with the Pixies.

Unfair Criticism

2005-10-13 · by psu

It is fashionable these days to gripe about the state of gaming journalism. The main complaint that is often lodged is that gaming "criticism" is limited to being a glorified buyer's guide to recent releases. I think this is a valid role for the gaming press to fill. After all, there are major publications in the areas of music, movies, theater, books and recordings of musical performances that are at their core a vehicle for telling you whether or not you should buy the items that they write about.

My complaint is that most game reviews don't really even fill this role well. They have almost nothing interesting to say about the game other than their final score. Looking at the Metacritic average score will generally tell you everything interesting that all the reviews of the game had to say.

Consider the normal template for a review of a fictional new game. Let's call this game Final Resident Condemned Devil Cry 7: Escape from the Mutant Swamp Navy Seals. The review will start out with material that establishes the genre in which the game works, perhaps with reference to earlier versions of the game franchise. This sets up the reader's expectations about whether or not the game will live up to, or improve upon, the earlier games in the series. Next there will be discussion of the high level gameplay. For example:

You take on the role of commanding a small squad of elite soldiers thrust into the role of defending humanity from the onslaught of the horrible swamp devil seals with the help of a small boy with a large sword and an unknown destiny.

The review will then launch into a long obligatory description of the technical performance of the game. The review will describe how well the game engine draws trees and such. Or it will provide you with an exhaustive list of all the weapons, vehicles and combat mechanics available in the game. You will read about the sound effects, the font used in the menus, whether or not the framerate is stable when you make the planet Mercury explode into tiny pieces, and what the teenage n00bs will talk about on the headset when you play the game online. If the game is by a 'famous' game designer, the review will be sure to mention how innovative and unique the game design is.

After all of this, you get a number between 1 and 5, or a slightly different number between 1 and 10 which is supposed to let you know if you should buy the game or ignore it.

Here is the problem: you never get any real idea of what it is like to play the game. Part of this is to do with the fact that it's hard to show gameplay video in a print or web page review. Here TV shows like X-Play have a bit of an advantage. On the other hand, well written reviews for other media, particularly music, can often draw a compelling portrait of the performance or piece being reviewed. When the writer is good, she is able to describe in fairly objective terms what she saw or heard in the performance and then give you her general impressions of its overall quality. This combination of objective observation combined with a personal and subjective value judgement is what makes good critical writing valuable.

Back in the realm of video games, I think X-Play does a good job of combining these things. The show makes up for its relative lack of sophisticated writing by making good use of its ability to utilize video. Is the gameplay boring and repetitive? Even if they don't come out and say it, the clip of gameplay that is repeated 15 times under the voice over will give you a clue that this is the case. More importantly, you get an idea of what the main game environments and mechanics are like just by watching the video.

It is admittedly a challenge to convey the atmosphere or personality of a game in text. But it seems to me that this is why you hire, you know, professional writers, for this kind of thing. If I had to ask the game journalism industry for just one thing this Christmas it would be to spend a little more time telling me how the game plays rather than how it looks or sounds, or how saturated the colors are in the foliage models. I'm not asking for any revolutionary change in the how we write game reviews. I'm not after a long and intimate treatise on how playing the game reminded the writer of cold, wet, winters growing up in Japan where he used to spend his lunch time running over to the arcade to blow his allowance on Pachinko. I don't care if interacting with the non-player characters in the Forest of the Night Elves reminds him of his long dead grandmother. I just want to know if the enemies in the game are worth shooting, if the side quests are plentiful and interesting to pursue, if the slam dunk shot mechanics are smooth or choppy, if the fog is really creepy or just a distraction that makes me motion sick. The ideal review should act as a proxy to my renting the game to try it out, and then tell me if the reviewer thinks that playing the game some more would be fun.

After all, it's only a game, and it ought to be fun.

Additional Notes

A couple of days after writing this, I realized that I had forgotten one important point. Lest you think that my expectations for good writing are too high, consider that the web comic Penny Arcade often captures the essence of a game more completely in 3 panels than most game reviews do in a thousand words. Consider these three classic examples:

Lumines God of War Shadow Hearts: Covenant

The text they write about the games is also excellent.

They're Heeeeeeeeerrrrreee

2005-10-14 · by peterb

Northern spy!

So get yourself over to Schramm's this weekend and buy some.

In addition to my favorite crunchy, tart, perfect apple, they have also unleashed the Stayman-Winesaps, which are a perfect apple for in-hand eating, and the Spygold, a hybrid that's fairly good for apple pies.

This weekend, I will be making apple pie. Oh yes.

Adjustment Layers

2005-10-17 · by psu

Most of the background I have in producing my own pictures came in the black and white darkroom. As most people know, when you do black and white printing, there are a wide variety of manipulations that you can do in the darkroom. Among other things, you can manipulate overall and local print contrast (when using adjustable contrast printing papers) and you can also manipulate overall and local "lightness" and "darkness" using dodging and burning.

For many years, when I tried to use Photoshop to do these things, I never really found a scheme that I could understand using the normal editing tools. In particular, the dodge and burn tools are nothing like dodging and burning in a darkroom. After I got more serious about taking digital pictures, I finally realized what I had been missing: Adjustment layers.

The Big Picture

Adjustment layers let you do almost everything you used to do in the black and white darkroom. In addition, they work equally well in both black and white and color. Finally, they are non-destructive to the original image data, infinitely adjustable after the fact, and persistent, so you can always remember what you did.

The Basics

Photoshop has a set of built in global adjustments that correspond pretty directly to global adjustments that you can make in the darkroom. For example, in the darkroom, you can adjust how light or dark a print is by increasing and decreasing the exposure of the paper under the enlarger. In Photoshop, you can do this by adjusting the levels of the image. Similarly, in the darkroom you can adjust the overall contrast of a print by using a harder or softer contrast grade of paper (or by using multicontrast paper and changing filters). In Photoshop, you can do this using the curves adjustment. Curves is actually a richer tool than just changing paper, but it's a reasonably good analogy. On the color side of the equation, there are adjustments for color balance, saturation, and so on.

Now, you can perform all of these adjustments on the image itself, or you can do it on a copy of the image that you make in a new image layer. But, Photoshop provides one further scheme. You can do the adjustment in an adjustment layer. Adjustment layers are special layers which do nothing but specify a transformation of the data layers that lie beneath them in a Photoshop document. The final bits you see on the screen are the result of taking the original bitmap data, pushing it through all the adjustment layers, and calculating the resulting bitmap dynamically.

The fact that the adjustment layer contains no actual data is a subtle but important point. While you can simulate the effect of a single adjustment layer on top of a single image by just making a copy of the original layer and adjusting it directly, you cannot use the same trick to simulate multiple adjustment layers that have been composed together.

Adjustment layers also provide one further important advantage over direct editing. While the adjustment layer stores no data, what it does store is the actual parameters of the adjustment that you made. So, if you make a curves layer, and you decide later that you got carried away, you can go back and edit the curve that you specified originally and back it off. Therefore, in their simplest form, adjustment layers are like a digital version of the little notes you make to yourself when making a black and white print about what exposure and filter to use. Except that they also provide a real time preview of the exact result of their actions. In other words, its a complete darkroom notebook that operates directly on your images for you. This is the first piece of major magic behind adjustment layers. An adjustment layer is a persistent, yet non-destructive specification of what you did to edit your image.

Example

Let's start with this pedestrian snapshot of Notre Dame. I'll go through the layers I used to make the picture look cooler. You can judge for yourself whether the end result is worth it. The original image, with no adjustments looks like this:

The first thing to do is to add a single adjustment layer that provides an overall adjustment of tone and contrast. This screen shot shows the adjustment layer I used (click to see a larger version):

The layer that is highlighted in blue is the overall curve. Whenever I decide I want the picture to look different, I just open up this layer and fuss with the curve. In general, you would probably use multiple global adjustment layers to deal with levels, contrast, color balance and so on.

Masking and Local Adjustments

At this point you are thinking, all of this is well and good, but what if you want to just burn the corners of a print, or just dodge that one shadow in the lower left hand corner there?

The answer to this problem is layer masks.

Each adjustment layer can store not only the adjustment to be made to the underlying image, but also a mask which specifies which pixels in the image the adjustment should affect. The simplest mask is a black and white image. White pixels are touched by the adjustment and black pixels are not. You can see the effect of this by selecting some subset of the image and creating a simple adjustment layer. When you look at the layer icon in the layers window, you will see that next to the adjustment icon is another box containing a tiny bitmap. This black and white bitmap corresponds to the selection that you made. White pixels are selected and black pixels are not. The adjustment in the adjustment layer will then only be applied to the white pixels in the mask.

But wait, there is more! The bitmap that makes up the layer mask actually stores 8-bit grayscale values. This means you can manipulate not only where the adjustment in the layer happens, but also the intensity of the adjustment at any given pixel. If a pixel in the mask is not all the way black or all the way white, then the percentage of the gray value determines how much of an effect the adjustment layer has on that pixel. The more clear the pixel in the mask is, the stronger the effect. Essentially, the layer mask is like a transparency value. The more transparent the mask, the more evident the adjustment in the layer is. Since transparency is also called alpha in the lingo, you will sometimes see these masks referred to as alpha masks or alpha channels.

This transparency behavior is the second piece of major magic behind adjustment layers because they allow you to effectively blend effects together the way you would by feathering your dodging and burning in the darkroom. Rather than waving a piece of cardboard around in the dark, you take your selection mask and blur it around the edges. In each case, you get a smooth transition from areas that are affected by the adjustment to areas which are not.

Example

In this more complicated example, we'll see how to use layer masks to adjust the contrast in the body of the church and to do some general adjustments.

This screen shot shows the curves layer I used to make the church not look so gray and washed out:

The curve itself is a slight adjustment to make the contrast slightly higher than normal. The icon for the curves layer shows a small mask next to the curves adjustment itself. To make the mask, I used the magnetic lasso to select the body of the church and then edited the mask by hand using the quick mask mode. To use quick mask, select the adjustment layer then open the Channels tab. Click the eyeball next to the layer mask and a red overly will appear on top of your image. The red areas of this overlay correspond to the black parts of the mask, while the clear parts of this overlay represent the clear parts of the mask. You can use the paint tools to add or remove red "ink" to change the shape and transparency of the mask.

After you get the mask pretty much right, you can blur the edges. In the Channels tab, click off all the eyeballs except the one for the mask itself. You'll be left with a black and white image. Now just do select-all and a Gaussian blur filter to blur the edges of the mask as much as you want. Play around until you get the adjustment to blend the way you like. Here is what the final mask for the adjustment layer on the church looks:

In the Photoshop file for the Notre Dame picture, I have a total of 3 masked adjustment layers that do various amounts of selective dodging and burning. The following screen shots show the other two.

One for burning the sky:

And one for making the foreground slightly darker:

Each of these two layers uses a blurred mask for blending.

After all that, here is the final picture:

My overall workflow for dealing with images that need finer adjustments is to load the initial image into Photoshop and then create multiple adjustment layers. The first batch deal with global adjustments and the second batch deal with local adjustments. Local adjustments take longer to do because they inevitably involve masks, and it takes practice to make masks quickly. The adjustment layers provide a handy reference to exactly what I did for most of the major manipulations in the picture and also provide a handy repository for all the masks. There is nothing worse than needing to rebuild a complicated selection.

Of course, there are things that you cannot do with adjustment layers. You can't do any direct editing, so things like the healing brush and simple sharpening are out. But, almost everything you ever need to do to a picture that has some direct analog in the darkroom world can be simulated using adjustment layers. So if your background is in darkroom printing, you should learn all you can about this technique. I can't stress this enough: it's like having a darkroom notebook that also remembers exactly how to edit your pictures for you. It really is magic.

How To Eat Prunes

2005-10-18 · by peterb

Tonight at the grocery store, I needed to pick up some prunes to make one of my favorite treats. It turns out you can't buy prunes anymore — instead, the major cooperatives want to sell you "pitted dried plums." Pitted dried plum, of course, is a longwinded way of saying "prune."

Why this not-so-subtle shift in marketing? For a long time now prunes have had a connotation, in the US, of being something that senior citizens eat to cure their constipation. This doesn't make a lot of sense. The same connotation hasn't attached itself to raisins, or figs, or granola, or any other number of high-fiber foods.

My conclusion is that the reason people think this way about prunes is because they don't understand the right way to eat them. Fortunately for you, I am here to help.

The right way to eat prunes is to eat them as pruneaux d'Agen. A literal translation of this is "prunes of Agen," Agen being a region in France. This translation is wrong. Don't be upset if you mistranslated it: French is a subtle, many-layered language, and it can take a lifetime to learn its complexities. The correct translation of pruneaux d'Agen is "prunes soaked in booze."

The booze, by tradition, is armagnac, a brandy from the region of the same name. You could use cognac, or calvados, or even a nameless brandy if you don't have any armagnac. But if you're going to do something, you should do it right, so I recommend a decent but not stupidly expensive armagnac, such as Armagnac de Montal.

The recipe, such as it is, is fairly simple.

(1) Take a smallish jar, such as a jelly or mason jar. (2) Fill it full of prunes. Pack them snugly, but not so tightly that there is no air. (3) Pour your liquor over the prunes until the jar is full. Seal it. (4) Stick the jar in a cool dark place for several months.

One drunk prune

The fruit will absorb some of the alcohol over time, so peek in periodically and top off the jar. Eat them whenever you feel like it. Periodically ask your friends if they like prunes, and when they say "no," go get the jar, open it up, put some on a plate, spoon some of the liqueur over them, and eat the prunes in front of them. Don't offer them any, either. Occasionally let out a cackle, for effect.

If you continually reuse the same liquid for multiple batches of prunes, it will eventually turn into an alcohol-tinged syrup, rather than a fruit-tinged alcohol. While this has its own attraction, I prefer to start with a fresh infusion of armagnac every time.

You can eat these straight, or you can serve them with tea, or brandy, or dessert. There are very few desserts that are not improved by putting a booze-infused prune on them.

Additional Resources

Tools of the Trade

2005-10-19 · by psu

If there is one inescapable fact of life in our dynamic technological society, it is that if enough people are interested in a given activity, the tools that enable that activity will change. I was thinking about this recently as I was presented with two press items about the film industry. One was a loving lament for and tribute to the last of the hand-drawn animation studios at Disney. The other was a review of the new Wallace and Gromit movie. Each piece drew the inevitable comparisons between hand-animated films and films animated by computer. The authors expressed their perfectly valid preference for the hand-animated style. Strangely though, each also came to the completely unjustified conclusion that computer animation is why they don't like computer animated films. This is a stupid thing to say.

If they don't like computer animated films, it is because the people who produced those films did work that they do not appreciate, or worked in a way that resulted in a bad film. It's not the computer that made a bad movie.

Admittedly, I have something of an axe to grind here. I work with computers every day and am overly sensitive to claims that creative work on a computer is somehow of less value than that done "by hand". But, I do think that the effect of the machines on art forms that until now had used more manual methods is somewhat misunderstood.

In the context of animated films, the argument went that the hand-animated films had a depth of character and individual style that was missing from the more modern work because in more modern works, there was not one artist dedicated to doing most or all of the animation associated with a given character. Because of this, the argument goes, computer animated films "can never" have the distinct stamp of that individual style. The logic, I guess, is that since the computer allows for mass production and automation of the animation to some degree, it must follow that the only animation that you can make with a computer will look mass produced and automated.

Of course, it is easy to find examples to counter this logic. In the abstract, one just has to note that it is perfectly possible to produce all the art for an animated film in a computer, but do it by hand, drawing the film frame by frame. Of course, people don't do this for various practical and economic reasons. But these reasons exist just as much for films drawn without using a computer. I don't really know that much about animated film production, but I will claim without proof that it is a rare and expensive film where every frame of animation for a given character is actually produced by the same artist. Even in the Wallace and Gromit short films, there were teams of people who worked on the shots in parallel. I know because I watched a documentary about it. I think.

Other examples abound, of course, in the Pixar films. I don't even mean the new shiny Pixar films that made millions of dollars. I mean the shorts that John Lasseter used to make as demos back when Pixar was a struggling software company. One famous one in particular animates a desk lamp with more character and appeal than 99% of the hand-drawn animation ever produced at any time in our history. Sure, every frame may have ultimately been rendered by a computer, but the animation was all Lasseter.

My main point is that it is ultimately the care and vision of the individual artist that dominates the quality equation in a work of art. The best artists achieve wondrous things in spite of the tools they use. Thus, Lasseter utilizes a tool which we associate with mass production and automation to produce singularly individual visions. It's as if he drew every frame by hand.

Another area that I know a bit more about than animated film production is the production of photographs. Here again, we are undergoing a drastic evolution of the tools and here again, these same new tools have become the whipping boy of anyone who has decided that all the new stuff is crap. The main argument that you hear is that the digital print cheapens the artistic value of the photograph since "anyone" can just "pick up Photoshop" and crank out perfect prints "automatically." This, of course, is nonsense.

To create great work in Photoshop takes just as much work, and knowledge and sweat as creating create darkroom prints. The only thing it does not take is a tolerance for breathing fixer. Most importantly, after you know how to make the print look how you want in Photoshop (or in the darkroom) the real challenge is always knowing exactly how you should apply this knowledge to each picture. This takes a combination of visual sense and good taste that takes a long time to develop, if it ever develops at all. Not surprisingly, this knack for knowing how to pick a good look for a picture is also completely independent of the tools you then use to produce that look.

Now, I have some sympathy for the position of the old time darkroom worker since I've made my share of black and white prints in any number of darkrooms. In fact, I can say with confidence that there are various ways in which black and white prints made lovingly by hand in a darkroom on fiber base paper (see note below about what fiber paper is) are superior to digital prints. For example:

  1. The paper feels better.

  2. The print smells better.

  3. It might last longer, if you know what you are doing.

  4. Certain girls will be impressed that you printed it yourself while sniffing weird toxic chemicals.

One thing that will not be clearly better in a non-digital print is the quality of the print itself. As much as I'd like to be able to believe that this is not the case, I have seen no evidence that a hand printed black and white fiber print has any real visual advantage over a well produced digital black and white print. In fact, there are even outfits that will print your digital files directly to fiber black and white paper.

So, if, like me, you love the way the old stuff looks, then by all means try and keep the craft alive. I hope I'll be able to start making prints again at some point when I have time. But don't fool yourself into thinking that the old stuff was in some way inherently better because of the tools that the old timers used to produce it. The tools of the trade do not make someone into a master. That's why my photos are still better than Pete's even after he picked up that fancy new camera.

A Short Appendix About Black and White Paper

By "fiber" paper, I mean traditional black and white paper where the emulsion is coated directly on to the surface of a paper made out of cotton or other fibers. This is in contrast to more modern papers which have a coating of plastic over the paper base which keeps the base from soaking up chemicals and whatnot. Fiber paper has certain tactile and archival characteristics which RC paper does not. In fact, there has been no lack of wanking over the relative image qualities of fiber and RC paper. For most of its history, RC paper was generally spit upon as an inferior tool for students and lazy dilettantes. Happily, this doesn't happen much anymore. People just complain about inkjet prints instead.

Wool Socks

2005-10-20 · by goob

I wanted to take a moment to put down some words about wool socks.

It is often been my experience that wool socks are maligned things. "They're itchy," I am told. "They look goofy," they say. The intimation is that wearing wool socks brings with it immediate and irrevocable membership in some nebulous club that cares about recycling, saves kitchen scraps for the compost pile and is likely vegan. Plus wears socks with sandals.

Ignore all that. Here's the thing:

Wool socks keep your feet warm.

There is more. Here in Pittsburgh, walking in the winter will, at least once, involve plunging a foot into an icy puddle. There will be traffic worth watching, and it will be dark, and that solid-looking pile of hardened snow will be but a delicate crust, through which a foot will go into several inches of remarkably cold water. I have a talent for this sort of stunt. It's a pretty poor experience. So here's the other thing:

Wool socks keep your feet warm even when they're wet with icy water.

I'm not too clear on how that works, exactly, but I frankly don't much care. Also, so help me, wool socks make sandals comfy.

Good winter!

Additional Resources

Sort of Poached Salmon

2005-10-21 · by psu

My friend Erik used to be a chef, and he also spent a lot of time in Alaska. Therefore, he has strong opinions about salmon. Chief among them is never to buy salmon in Pittsburgh. But, if you break this rule, for god's sake don't poach the fish. Poached salmon, to Erik, is like a boiled beef roast. You end up with a piece of fish that is certainly cooked, but is no longer really good for anything but carrying large spoonfuls of garlic mayonnaise from your plate to your mouth.

With Erik in mind, my normal way of cooking salmon is to sauté it and then roast it by throwing the sauté pan in the oven. This works very well for the fattier varieties of fish, but I always had trouble with the fancy and somewhat leaner Copper River and Coho salmon that shows up at Whole Foods every year. When roasting the leaner fish, I would always end up with a piece of fish that tasted OK, but was disappointingly dry and bland.

So, having first gone against Erik's admonitions and bought a too-expensive piece of Coho, I decided to risk his further wrath and semi-poach the fish in the oven, to try and keep the fish moist and tasty. It worked pretty well, so for your edification, here's what you do.

Start with:

1 filet of salmon. We had a whole side of the Coho, around two pounds. Sprinkle salt and pepper over the top. Rub olive oil all over it.

1/2 of a yellow onion cut up. You could use more.

1 handful of chopped celery.

If you are not lazy like me, you should probably also chop up a carrot really small. But I was lazy and did not do this.

Take half a lemon, slice it up.

Now heat up a sauté pan. Add olive oil and a bit of butter, toss in the vegetables. Sprinkle with salt and pepper. Sauté until the vegetables are soft. This will take 10 to 15 minutes.

Now get a baking dish as long as the piece of salmon you have. Pour white wine and stock into the pan. You want it to be maybe 1/4 inch high, but you don't want it to cover the top of the fish, just a bit on the bottom. Toss the fish in, put the veggies and lemon on top, and then top the whole thing with a tablespoon chunk of cold butter.

Put the dish into a 350 degree oven. After about 5 to 10 minutes, the butter should melt. Open the oven and scrape the veggies off the fish and mix the butter into the liquid. Baste the fish once with the results. Bake until the fish is cooked to where you like it. I like it at just past medium rare, which took maybe another 10 minutes. Be careful about this, you don't want to kill the salmon.

I'm going to claim to Erik that this is really a baked salmon, not poached. It did succeed in keeping the salmon tasting like salmon, while also keeping it moist and yummy.

Obligatory gripe

A big raspberry to Whole Foods, by the way, for the following sin. You'd think at the prices they charge for a filet of salmon, they could take out the god damned pin bones. I don't pay for a filet to bite down on huge pin bones. Get with it.

It'd Probably Work Better If It Were Run By Drunkards

2005-10-24 · by peterb

Certain topics come up again and again in this space. In videogames, we constantly talk about why save points are stupid. In photo we talk about equipment obsessions and how technique is more important than the camera.

And in the "food and drink" category, I always find some occasion to complain about the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board ("PLCB"). This is because, like a dog who returns to his vomit, I keep trying to go into their liquor stores to do crazy, wild, unexpected things, like purchase liquor.

This week's disappointment comes fresh on the heels of the horrific trolls at the PLCB banning direct wine shipments from Pennsylvania (and thus, out of state) wineries. This was their idiotic response to the recent Supreme Court decision. To his credit, State Senator Jim Ferlo is trying to undo their brain damage — write to the Senator and tell him "thanks".

The last time I stepped into a State Store, it was in a nearly-vain attempt to procure some Tokaji. Today, I wanted something a lot less ambitious: a bottle of armagnac to use to inebriate some prunes (and, hopefully, myself as well). As in our previous episode, this incident occurred in one of the LCB's "Premium Collection Stores," which I am assured "carry an outstanding selection of premium wines and spirits."

I didn't see any armagnac on the brandy shelf, so I approached an associate. Hilarity ensued:

"Hi. Do you have any armagnac?"

[With something of a sneer] "Armagnac? What's that?"

[long pause] "It's a type of brandy. Like cognac."

"Is that one of them flavored brandies?"

"No. It's just brandy."

"Sorry, I've never heard of it." [turns away].

Now, let me make myself perfectly clear. I'm not upset that they didn't have any in stock (well, I'm not that upset). Inventory management is tricky. Not every store can have every product all the time. I understand that. But that the supposedly best stores in the LCB system are staffed by people who don't know what a not-terribly-exotic spirit is, and worse, obviously don't care just kills me.

What drives me nuts about this is that this conversation is par for the course in one of the allegedly good stores.

A bunch of hateful bureaucrats have entrenched themselves between us and the twenty-first century. The LCB must be destroyed.

Update: In an "amusing" coda to this story, the State's online inventory system claims there are 3 bottles of Montesquio armagnac at the store I was in.

So, PLCB, once again: screw you.

Available Light

2005-10-25 · by psu

In an earlier article, I advised that if you needed to use a flash, there were no good pictures to be taken anyway. I realize now that anyone who has spent time reading the wankier photo forums, especially those related to Leica cameras could have taken this the wrong way. To clarify, my statement was not meant as a dig against flash or an attempt to uphold the ideals of "available light photography". If people want to gain a sense of nobility by shooting in crappy low light, that's not my problem.

The point that I wanted to make was that using the flash well is hard, and you should know some things before you try. Used well, flash can provide you with that "natural light" look anywhere you can plug a light into a wall. Used poorly, artificial light will turn that $10,000 full frame 16 megapixel digital body you just bought into something that may as well be a point and shoot.

The light you want in most photographs, especially photographs of people, usually has two basic characteristics:

  1. It is relatively diffuse and low contrast.

  2. It usually comes from the one side of the subject.

The first characteristic is desirable because it ensures that there will not be splotches of dark shadow or blown out highlights to distract you from the details of the picture. Everything will fit into the dynamic range of your film or digital capture. The second characteristic is desirable because light at an angle provides modeling and gives the subject a 3-d look, rather than the paper flat look you get with front lighting.

If you want to get an idea of what this kind of light looks like, sit your best friend down in front of a window on a bright cloudy day and take some pictures and take note of what the light is like. That is what you are after.

Alternatively, the next time you go to a movie or watch a well produced television show, pay attention to the lighting, especially in indoor scenes. Movies and television are almost always shot completely with artificial lights. But, motion picture photographers really know their lighting, so the characters always look as if they are lit by virtual windows strewn all over the set, even if there are no windows to be found.

At this point, we should be clear about one thing. Your fancy digital camera with its single dedicated flash is generally not going to get you this look. Without a handy window, the only way to get this look is to use multiple lights (to get the directional lighting) and a large array of devices like reflectors and bed sheets (to get the diffusion). This is too much for even the most dedicated amateur to carry around.

However, there are situations where your single flash can be useful, if you are careful.

If you are only carrying one flash, your dream situation is to be taking pictures in a small room with white walls and a short white ceiling. When you see this, you should jump for joy because it means you can bounce the flash into the walls and ceiling. What this means is that you pivot the flash to point either at the ceiling or a wall, rather than straight ahead at the subject. The result is that you get a nice diffuse light source (light coming off of the ceiling) rather than a tiny little point source flash. With most modern SLR cameras, bouncing the flash is easy because the exposure system of the camera will control the light for you. You just have to pivot the flash head to point up and shoot away. The difference between bounced and direct flash is immediately evident. Instead of flat white faces and lots of hard shadows, you get a nice flat overall light with diffuse shadows that go in the right direction.

You can also buy gadgets that attach to your flash that will try and bounce and redirect light in various ways. These can be helpful for those situations where the ceiling is a bit too high, but since they are in general not much larger than the flash, things like the Omnibounce or the various Lumiquest widgets can't really add enough diffusion to get nice lighting. So, if you walk into that stadium, or ballroom with high ceilings and all you have is your one pathetic light, don't even bother.

With some newer cameras, you can easily bounce the flash and bring it off the camera using the new-fangled wireless flash modes. Nikon and Canon both support this mode of use. What's nice about this is that you are gaining diffusion by using the bounce, and also getting the light at a better angle by taking it off the camera. My personal camera, the Nikon D70, has a delicious mode where the built-in flash on the camera can wirelessly control one or more compatible flashguns. So if you were ambitious, you could even do some multi-light setups. I generally use the wireless mode just to bounce my one flash all over the place at weird angles.

Finally, no discussion of working with a single flash would be complete without talking about fill flash. FIll flash refers to blending flash with ambient light to lower the contrast on the subject when you are taking pictures in harsh and contrasty lighting conditions. Basically what this means is that rather than using the flash as the main light in your picture, you can program it to throw just a bit of extra light into the scene to open up shadows that would otherwise go to black. It turns out that with modern flashes, you can tell the flash to calculate how much light it would put out to light the subject, and then put out one or two stops less than that amount. You do this by setting the flash exposure compensation on the flash to (say) -2 stops.

Flash exposure compensation works just like the normal exposure compensation dial on the camera itself. If you dial it up, the flash puts out more light and tones in the picture get lighter. If you dial it down the camera puts out less light, and the tones get darker. The difference is that modern cameras and modern flashes can meter light from the flash separately from the ambient light from the scene. It is this magical technology that allows you to effortlessly mix flash and natural light. Dialing the flash compensation to -2 tells the flash to put out 2 stops less light than whatever the ambient light exposure is. The result will be just enough light to fill in the shadows of the picture without making the use of flash obvious.

For example, suppose you are taking pictures of your girlfriend at the beach. The sun is right overhead and she has a huge hat on, so her face is in shadow. If you just take the shot, you will take a great picture of the beach and the hat and a dark splotch where her face is supposed to be. Ideally you'd like to get a bit of light into that area under the hat so you can actually see her luminous face. If you were resourceful and had a big bag, you'd be carrying a reflector that you could use for this purpose. You'd just have to grab some beer guzzling beach guy to hold it for you. Of course, all you have is your puny flash. So, you get out your flash, set the flash exposure compensation to -2 and shoot a picture. Here is what happens:

  1. The camera picks an exposure for the main subject based on the ambient light. This will expose the beach and the hat in a way that is pleasing.

  2. The camera fires the flash. The flash bounces off your girlfriend and back to the camera. The camera computes how long the flash must be on in order for the light bouncing off your girlfriend and her hat to be two stops less than the exposure that it picked for the rest of the scene. Again, this is what the exposure compensation setting does for you. The -2 setting is telling the flash to make all the tones in the picture darker than it would normally. This is perfect, because all you want is for the flash to light up the shadows a bit, which are dark.

  3. The combined light from the scene and the flash hits the film/ccd in the camera. The effect will be that the beach and the hat are well exposed, and your girlfriend's face has just enough light on it to bring it into the dynamic range that the film can hold. But, since we told the flash to underexpose, it won't look look like you have put a light on her face at all. In the picture, the shadow on your girlfriend will look like a normal shadow in real life: darker than the sunlit areas, but with detail. What you've done is use the flash to balance the contrast in the scene. This is something your eyes do automatically for you, but which the film or CCD in your camera does not know how to do.

To sum up, the trick to using a single flash wisely is to try and manipulate the situation so that the flash will look natural. Direct flash on a large group of people in a small room is not a great situation. Bounced flash in a small room with a small subject is a good situation. You will get pleasing light and no one looking at the picture will suspect a thing. Using the flash for fill is another perfect situation. Modern cameras and flashes are particularly good at automatic fill flash. In fact, that's all the built-in flash in most cameras is really good for.

So, next time you find yourself with no available light except your puny flash, you'll know what to try before giving up altogether.

Shadow of the Shadow of the Colossus

2005-10-26 · by peterb

Some of you may be wondering why there haven't been many gaming articles lately. I believe the reason is that both psu and I are playing Shadow of the Colossus, and are desperately looking for some angle from which we can claim that it does not contradict our long-held position that "Boss" battles are stupid.

We can't dodge the topic forever, though. Look for our comments on Shadow of the Colossus soon.

Choices I Don't Need

2005-10-27 · by psu

Buying socks used to be easy. You'd go to the store, buy 6 pair of lightweight Smartwool hiking socks, and go home. Smartwool used to only make about three kinds of socks: thin, a bit thicker, and really thick. But, as with all successful companies, they have been cursed with the diversification disease, and we are all worse off for it.

For example, I bought socks at the new REI store in Pittsburgh the other weekend. My delicious thin Smartwool socks had worn out, and I was after a couple of new pair for the winter. So I picked up one pair of tan socks and one pair of black socks. To the naked eye, they appeared to be exactly the same socks, just different colors. But, after some use and closer examination, it was apparent that the tan socks worked better. After washing they did not stretch as much, and as such they stay on my feet better. The black socks are also already starting to pill and unravel after only one time through the wash.

So here is the thing. I went to try and figure out two things:

  1. What kind of socks did I buy?

  2. What was the difference between the tan socks and the black socks, so I know to avoid socks of the black type again.

It turned out that these two questions are nearly impossible to answer. Smartwool now makes so many different kinds of socks, and changes their names and types so frequently that there is no source of information anywhere on the planet that can tell me what I want to know. In addition, among the literally dozens of sock types that you find at the Smartwool web site, it is almost impossible to tell the difference between products of a similar type. They differ only in the most miniscule and irrelevant aspects of their design, or in the exact breakdowns of the material used to build them. Sock A has horizontal zig-zag stripes, and is 10% spandex, while sock type B is exactly the same, but sort of off-white and uses 5% spandex and 10% nylon. This brings up the obvious question: Who cares!?

Who is sitting around on their couch scanning the Smartwool catalog and thanking heaven and earth and whatever gods they worship that hallelujah Jesus above there is a pair of socks that is taupe with vertical red stripes that also happens to use just the right mix of wool, nylon, and spandex (as everyone knows, the right amount is 75% wool, 10% spandex and 15% nylon) and is also 2/3rds calf height? Meanwhile, someone else is relieved that they can get the same sock, only 10mm shorter.

Other examples of this insanity abound. Consider the Chuck Taylor basketball shoe. Back in the day, it came in white and black. Some crack-head dorks might have found blue ones in the gutter somewhere, but those people were just wrong. Today, if you go to the Converse web site you can find something like 500 different types of sneakers. There are low tops, high tops, boot length high tops, red, green, and blue ones, tiger prints, black leather ones, pink ones, Hello Kitty ones, and God Knows what else. Who decides that we need this? These are useless choices that serve nothing but the ego of the people in the marketing departments who smoke various hallucinogenic drugs and then turn over the product line on the basis of the resulting fever dreams.

Meanwhile, I'm sitting here with one pair of comfortable socks on my feet and no way to find out how to get a few more so that I have backups for when these are inevitably discontinued to make room for the leopard print sequin-inlaid 25% silk urban lounge hiking socks that will come out next month. This is what the world has come to. When you find something that fits or otherwise works well, you are forced to buy five copies of it now because as a matter of routine, the ludicrously short product turnarounds of the modern corporation will dictate that the item will no longer exist by the time you need a new one. This is what I call my Fundamental Theorem of the Modern Consumer Society.

Life was better, and Smartwool was a better company, when all you had to choose from was thin, thick, and thicker.

A Fistful of Static

2005-10-28 · by peterb

Preamble

Somewhere in a distant time and place, a letter is delivered by runner:

From: Light of the World, Voice of Nur, High Priest Akh-na-Gog

To: Honored Slave Tinker and Inventor Euripaelus

Subject: Re: Industrial accidents.

Hear now the words of Holiest of Holies Great Nur, Light of the World, Peace be Upon Him, through his High Priest Akh-na-Gog, who says unto you: can we build the next colossus without any hair? The aboriginal barbarian hordelings are having a field day climbing these things by their hair and painting graffiti on them. Worse, half the time they are drunk on that disgusting fermented yak milk, and the janitorial slaves have to spend hours scrubbing to clean up their "accidents." And if they've sicked on the hair, the smell lingers just about forever.

So no hair next time, Honored Slave Tinker and Inventor.

So speaks Holiest of Holies Great Nur, Light of the World, Peace be Upon Him, through his High Priest Akh-na-Gog.

Apologia

I wanted to say a few more words about Shadow of the Colossus. I'm exactly halfway through the game, and I'm enjoying it very much. If you asked me whether I liked it, so far, I'd say "yes." Like psu, I want to finish the game before I review it in detail. But there is one thing I think I'm ready to talk about at this point, and that's the visuals in the game.

Shadow of the Colossus looks beautiful. It has moments of stunning beauty, awesome grandeur, and perhaps most importantly makes incredible use of light.

It also looks like absolute garbage.

Despite the beauty of its design, scenery, and lighting, the game still looks like garbage. Every movement causes every texture to blur and moire. When moving, you don't just lose fine detail, but coarse detail. Since half the game is spent on horseback, this means that half the game is spent watching moire patterns splay across your TV. I hope you don't have epilepsy.

Why does Shadow look so bad? Because it's on a Playstation 2, and making games on the Playstation 2 that don't look like crap is apparently nearly impossible.

Ico looked like this too. The effects weren't as bad, because in Ico the textured castle wasn't generally in fast motion. In Ico, you often viewed a room with the camera in a static position. In Shadow, the camera is a chase camera. The texture problems, in other words, are exacerbated by camera motion, and there is much more camera motion in Shadow than in Ico

Combat!

Best. Game. EVER.

Now, it is not a big surprise to discover that games on the PS2 have lousy low-res textures and generally look more jagged than a Houston hooker recovering from a three-day methamphetamine bender. We've all known it for years. Generally it's not that big a deal, because — as Shadow demonstrates — graphics are not the most important part of most games. Atari's venerable Combat is still one of the best player-vs-player tank battle games, 25 years later, even though it has the most primitive graphics possible. I believed that Ico looked like garbage (and, yes, looked beautiful as well) when I bought it. I purchased a Playstation 2 just to play Ico, even though I thought the quality of rendering was terrible. So please don't think that I'm saying "texture quality is the most important thing." I'm not bringing it up because of that.

I'm bringing it up because of history.

Thesis

When the Playstation 2 was released, Sony conducted press conferences and demos where they would show a pre-rendered movie playing on the PS2, leaving all comers with the impression that this is what the gameplay experience on the PS2 would be like: fine detail, lifelike bezier curves, all rendered in real-time. The Playstation 2 crushed the Sega Dreamcast. In part because of the already-huge Playstation back catalog, but also because of the belief, inspired by Sony, that there would be no comparison between the games on the two systems.

Five years later, we can look back and say: ancient Dreamcast games, generally, are better looking than the best PS2 games being released today, when judged by certain standards. The textures in Dreamcast games are less detailed. But they don't shimmer. They don't shake. And the system was capable of drawing a diagonal line without rendering it as a chunkily as a stairway in a football stadium.

Meanwhile, I ride across the desert plains in Shadow of the Colossus. Because one of the things I have been doing in the game is hunting geckos, I keep an eye open for them. About every 30 seconds, I'll see a rendering artifact that, from a quick glance, might be a gecko. So I have to stop and look, and then realize that, once again, I'm being boned by the terrible, horrible, awful, complete inability of the Playstation 2 to render a scene in motion that doesn't look like ass.

And now, it's 2005, and soon we will see the Xbox 360, and we will see the Playstation 3. Prerendered movies are already being shown. The same claims about system obsolescence are being made, by both Microsoft and Sony. And so the reason I bring up the graphics in Shadow of the Colossus is simply this: it's important that consumers stand up and say, out loud, that they notice when they are lied to. Some of us noticed that Sony lied to us about the PS2. And when we read the press releases and see the pretty prerendered videos for the PS3, I hope we remember that during the last cycle, they looked consumers straight in the eye, and lied.

Maybe both the 360 and the PS3 will be another Great Leap Forward. But if you think I'm pre-ordering based on your prerendered marketing presentations, you've got another thing coming.

I remember when I'm lied to. And I hold grudges.

Coda

In the words of our great President, "Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can't get fooled again."

How true that is.

Shine and Shine and Shine and

2005-10-31 · by psu

I picked up Lumines for the PSP and have been playing it between levels of Shadow of the Colossus. I don't have that much to say about the game. Others have already provided much more verbiage about this title without, er, illuminating why the game is fun and interesting. I can't possibly add many more words to that discussion. I have just noticed one interesting aspect of the gameplay: I do better when I don't know what I am doing.

To those who might not know, Lumines is like Tetris with a dance floor. Blocks fall from the sky and music plays. These blocks are made up of four sub-blocks which are one of two colors, and you can move them side to side and turn them in 90 degree increments. The goal of the game is to match blocks of the same color. When you land blocks together so that you get a 2x2 or larger area that are the same color, those blocks disappear sometime later. There is a sweeper line that picks them up and deletes them as it goes past. You have to be aware of this timeline, as it can both help you and hurt you in various ways. There are also special mega-blocks that clear not only blocks from the initial area, but also all other blocks of the same color that are connected to the initial area. This is all cool, but it is best not to think about it.

What you should be aware of is the rest of the game. The blocks shine with color and light and your actions have subtle effects on the rhythm and content of the background tracks. From time to time, the color scheme and music change as you progress from level to level. The different levels all present distinct moods and textures. The speed and rhythm of the music provide subliminal clues about how you should be playing the level.

My best games of Lumines seem to happen when I am completely oblivious to what I am actually doing, and the game just keeps going by itself. This has happened twice so far, and each time my maximum score in the game more than tripled. In addition, for a period of weeks after each of these games, I never came close to managing a similar score again. In fact, I believe that I may never match my current high score. I've managed to do a bit more than half as well, but not much better than that.

While trying to regain former glory, I have discovered a lot more about various strategies in the game. There are cool ways to chain bonuses together, there are ways the timeline can completely ruin your life, and there are various strategies for using the "special" blocks in the best way possible. But, none of this really helps, because it causes me to think about the game too much while I'm playing. So when I really need to act quickly and correctly, I'm doomed.

What I don't really understand is how to obtain that perfect insight into the game, where the rhythm of the music and the blinking of the lights automatically just automatically lead you to the right actions at just the right time. It seems like the only way to do it is to keep playing the game over and over and over and over and...

Which, I suppose, is a sign of brilliance in the game design.

Now I Remember Why I Don't Play PC Games Much Anymore

2005-11-01 · by peterb

These past couple of days I've been playing a certain fairly new Windows-based PC game, in preparation for an in-depth review. I won't mention the title right now. You'll probably be able to guess it, once the review is finished.

Within the space of two days I've gotten to experience: stupid copy protection schemes that try to interfere with my computer's operation when not playing the game, random crashes, poor performance, a generally poor user interface, modal dialog boxes that prevent me from using the in-game help system, and a host of other annoyances.

I guess this must be some of that "deep, complex gameplay that isn't possible on a game console" that I hear so much about.

One Word Tea Review

2005-11-02 · by peterb

Upton Tea's "Imperial Grade" Lapsang Souchong:

Ugh.

Colossus Knee

2005-11-03 · by psu

I have been working towards the end of Shadow of the Colossus the last few days.

Strangely, at the beginning of last week, my knee became sore for no reason. I went to see the doctor, who gave me some pills, and the pills made it better. Until last night whe, suddenly, the knee flared up again.

So here is the only thing I can trace it to: both flareups corresponded to particularly long bouts with a colossus.

I can only conclude that I have a video game injury, which is pathetic, and an indication that truly, I am old. Hopefully I can finish this game tonight and heal up over the weekend.

Yo Ho Ho

2005-11-04 · by peterb

It was just this past January that I published an article called What To Drink (Booze Edition), purporting to advise readers as to what liquors they should keep stocked in their houses at all times. One of the things I said was that, unless you had a specific need for it, you could easily get by without a bottle of rum.

I stand by that statement. But in the interests of better living through chemistry, allow me to share two recipes that will give you the specific need for a bottle of rum.

Since today was a particularly beautiful autumn day here in Pittsburgh, I'll give you one recipe suited for a nice summer day, and one more suitable for the darkest winters.

Making a drink with rum that tastes bad is easy. The omnipresent favorite of irritating chicks at frat parties everywhere, the rum and coke, is a great example. It's a simple drink that manages to make both of its ingredients taste worse. I'm not interested in giving you bad-tasting drink recipes. So here are two good ones.

The Real Daiquiri

"Daiquiri" has become a dirty word in the modern lexicon, having become associated solely with frou-frou strawberry milkshakes from Chi-Chis. Generally, if you say "Daiquiri" to someone, they'll envision a big glass of frozen ice and strawberry slush which has some amount of rum in it, generally not enough to actually taste.

The real daiquiri is a strong drink. The real daiquiri will make a grown man fall over and forget where he left his brains. Here's how to make one.

You need: limes, rum, and sugar. And some ice cubes. That's it.

Squeeze the juice of one lime, and put it into a glass with some sugar (use simple syrup if you have it, but my life is too short to spend making simple syrup). The sugar is "to taste" — I use no more than a teaspoon or so, but you might like more. Mix until the sugar is dissolved. Into this, add a shotglass-sized amount of gold or white rum. There are two rules of thumb here. First, you want to add as much or more rum than lime juice. The traditional recipe calls for half again as much rum. Second, don't use dark rum. It will just ruin the drink and make it taste bad.

Add a couple of ice cubes to the glass. Swish them around, and drink. If you drink it fast, it's probably a good idea to have something soft nearby to land on when you fall over.

That's the perfect summer drink. Here's the perfect winter one.

Hot Toddy

The first step is to develop seasonal affective disorder from not seeing the sun in 2 months because it's dark when you wake up and dark when you go to bed. Then develop a head cold. When all that prep work has been done, make a hot toddy.

Make a pot of good tea. Fill a teacup about half full. Into this, squeeze half a lemon. If you're motivated enough, you can cut off the outer peel (which will be bitter and have pesticide on it) and drop the lemon in the cup, but don't feel like you have to. Add a tablespoon of molasses (or, if you're me, more), and then a generous tot of rum. Sit near a fire and enjoy.

Those are the recipes that I'm giving to you. But now I need you to give one to me.

A Drink I Don't Understand

Some years ago I read a certain American magical-realist book that takes place in a mythical fin de siècle New York. One of the protagonists, in the coldest months, frequently finds himself at certain bars where they are serving roast oysters and hot buttered rum.

"Hot buttered rum." It sounds so intriguing, doesn't it? What could it possibly be? It sounds all spicy and Christmasy and elegant. So, armed with a search engine and a will to expand my horizons, I found a recipe for the drink, and made it. It tasted exactly as foul as butter and rum mixed together could possibly taste, which it turns out is extremely foul.

So either I simply don't like the drink — which is certainly a real possibility — or the recipe I got for it was terrible, or the most pernicious option: really, no one in the entire world actually likes this stuff, it's just talked about because it sounds all old-timey. My challenge to you is to give me a hot buttered rum recipe that you yourself have actually made and enjoyed. If you haven't personally made it, tasted it, and liked it, don't bother sharing your recipe here. If you have made, tasted, and liked it yourself, then tell me your secret. So that I can try it too.

I'll follow up in this space with the results of my attempt to try your recipe.

Cheers!

Things You Need to Cook, Addendum

2005-11-07 · by psu

Earlier, I made a short list of everything that you really need to cook. At this time, I need to add one small item. In addition to the stuff I that I listed earlier, you should head over to the Costco and pick up a "half sheet" pan. These are shallow aluminium pans that measure about 13"x18" that you can use to bake, well, almost everything.

Generally, I use them to roast things that I don't really want to use a roasting pan for. I have a bad relationship with roasting pans, and like dutch ovens or these shallow pans instead. They are particularly good for potatoes (toss the potatoes in olive oil, garlic, herbs, salt and pepper, toss them on the pan and into the oven for 40 minutes). They are also great for making that one guilty prepared food pleasure that no one should be without: tater tots.

I think I also used mine to do that oven poached salmon... and it would work equally well for oven roasted salmon. Basically, if you aren't roasting it in a pot or a pan, put it on one of these things and throw it in the oven. Apply the consumer rule and buy six, so you never run out.

Metapost: Opinions about Ads in RSS Feeds

2005-11-08 · by peterb

A quick poll for those of you who read Tea Leaves via a newsreader or bloglines. Please comment on advertisements in RSS feeds. Do you hate them? Are some types of ads OK and others not OK? Or do you not care at all?

My personal feeling is that I can easily accept (and ignore) a text ad that is a couple of lines, but if you make me follow a link to read the full text of your article, I hate you.

What do you think?

Shadow of the Colossus

2005-11-09 · by psu

There really isn't much to say about Shadow of the Colossus that is all that different from what I said about Ico. The two games share many of the same strengths and weaknesses, and are clearly cut from the same stylistic cloth. If I were as disciplined as the game's designer, I would just walk away now. But, I think there are some aspects of the game that current reviews have missed. And, there is the whole matter of the boss battles. I bet you thought I was going to try and squirm out of that one. No such luck.

Less is More

Shadow of the Colossus, like Ico before it, is a minimalist game. It places the player in an overworld which is large and yet almost completely empty. The gameplay mechanics are spare:  running, climbing, jumping, hanging on to various surfaces, riding the horse, wielding the sword, and using the bow and arrow. You are tasked with finding and destroying a series of 16 creatures. You ride out to each one, figure out how to climb it, and then take it down. This is the entire game.

I feared that the game would turn out to be a repetitive slog from colossus to colossus, but this is not the case. What happens over and over again in this game is that the designers manage to provide hours of variety from what seems to be thin air. For example, even though the game has you traveling through this empty world over and over again, every trip is new and interesting. The various areas of the game all have their own sense of space and mood and you can always shoot geckos if you get bored. The strength of the game's design is most apparent in the core of the game, the encounters with the colossi.

Puzzles, not Bosses

This game has been billed as consisting of "16 Boss Battles", but I think that this is misleading. It is true that your goal in the game is to destroy a collection of 16 huge lumbering creatures. It is true that occasionally these lumbering creatures will seek to do you harm. But, the core problem to be solved in each of these encounters is not figuring out how to beat the colossus. You beat every one in exactly the same way. Nor is the problem avoiding death by colossus. In general, if you are careful and understand the rules of the game, the colossus cannot kill you no matter how many times you are hit. Therefore, I don't think game consists of "battles." In fact, there is almost no combat in the game. Instead the game presents you with a variation on the "move from point A to point B" theme in Ico. Rather than fighting the colossus, you have to figure out how to climb the thing and then navigate to it's critical zone, and then hold on for dear life and hit it there until the creature falls. It is the climbing, navigation and holding on that are the hard problems. It's as if the castle in Ico got up and started walking around.

Since figuring out what to do takes careful study and reflection, the game goes out of its away to make sure you always have as much time as you need to study the situation and work out the puzzle:

  1. For the most part there are no cheap one hit kills. It is almost always possible to put yourself in a position where you can observe the situation without being damaged. In fact, as many of the reviews of the game have pointed out, some of the colossi won't even pay attention to you unless you whack them once or twice. This puts you in the interesting position of occasionally feeling guilty for doing what the game told you to do.

  2. If you rest, you heal automatically. This means that you can test strategies almost endlessly without worrying about restarting the fight because you died.

  3. When you don't understand the puzzle, the game will give you clues about what to do. In fact, the game explicitly tells you exactly where you need to go to dispatch the creature. It just doesn't tell you how to get there.

  4. In general you use the same mechanics and the same techniques to fight each each colossus. There is no special three eyed colossus that requires that you put a blue spike in each eye in order for a secret door on his body to open up so you can climb in and find the real colossus inside. The game designers only allow themselves to expand on things you have already seen, and they only do that once or twice.

Thus, Shadow of the Colossus presents the player with "boss fights" that have almost none of the hateful characteristics of a standard Boss fight. Where big fights in most games are a twitchy combat-based death-march, the encounters in this game are environmental puzzles that reward careful thinking and methodical execution. Once you solve the puzzle, the final result of the encounter is a given. You just have to proceed in a measured and patient manner to the eventual finish.

But the real brilliance of the game is the evolution of these puzzles into successively more intricate set pieces. These sequences do not necessarily become harder, but they do require you to combine elements of the game and its environments in more complicated ways. Again, the designers build great variety and depth from a minimal set of starting elements. The progression of the puzzles is paced perfectly, so that you are always ready to discover the next trick. The game's best moments come when you have executed everything perfectly and can sit on top of a giant creature and contemplate your inevitable victory for a few seconds before you bring the colossus crashing down to earth.

Small Annoyances

Of course, the game is not perfect. The main character often acts in ways which make you question his mental acuity. It's hard to make him run in a straight line, he likes to jump instead of getting on his horse, and he has an annoying habit of jumping off the ledge that he just reached after climbing for twenty minutes. This, combined with a sloppy camera makes some of the trickier platforming in the game harder and more punishing than it should be. Beware of Colossus Knee.

The horse is also something of a mixed blessing. While you can't help but develop an emotional bond to the horse, it can be difficult to move where you want, much like Yorda in Ico. In this sense, I think the horse shares in the mental feebleness of his owner.

Finally, the game uses an even more minimal savepoint system than most. In general this did not bother me, but as the encounters became more complicated and time consuming, I would have taken the ability to do a mid-level save as a sign that the game designers didn't hate me. Also, would it have killed them to give me save after I defeated the final colossus but before the final cut scene rolled?

The Rest

The rest of the main game consists of some extended cut scenes that set up the story, such as it is. These scenes add to the feeling of ambiguity about the tasks and goals put in front of the main character. After just a few of the early battles, one suspects that there is more going on than meets the eye. As the battles continue, this sense of doubt and foreboding builds, but you gain no additional insight until you get to the end of the game.

The end game presents you with the game's most complicated battle, and another long cut scene that shows you the rest of the story. The ending is satisfying, if a bit predictable. It does a good job of tying together the explicit narrative of the game with the "implicit" narrative of the colossus battles. In the end though, the encounters with the colossi are the core of the game and the emotional core of the narrative, and this is how it should be.

Shadow of the Colossus stands as a testament to how much a video game can achieve by using a small number of elements in the most creative way possible. The game combines disciplined design with astounding presentation. The occasional technical problems are forgivable because when the game works, it is breathtaking in its character, scale and grandeur. If you own a PS2 and played Ico, you should play this game because it is a wondrous extension of that world. If you own a PS2 and didn't play Ico, then you should buy both of these games and play them through.

Dancing About Architecture

2005-11-10 · by peterb

Today's subject is the game Shadow of the Colossus. In order to talk about it, I'm going to have to make some observations about how critics commonly review games.

Imagine if art critics reviewed paintings the way game critics review games:

Still Life with Plate of Cherries

Paul Cezanne's Still Life with Plate of Cherries is a clear evolution from his previous outing in the Still Life series, Apples, Peaches, Pears, and Grapes. The area of the canvas has more than doubled since the previous generation, allowing much finer detail to be discerned. Furthermore, the improved technique used by Cezanne now allows him to depict many more objects on the canvas simultaneously. Unfortunately, Cezanne's rendering technique still leaves a lot to be desired: in particular, the draw distance in his works tends to leave the backgrounds overly blurry, compared to some of the recent releases by Matisse, who somehow manages to squeeze tack-sharp imaging out of the same pigments.

Reviews of games, in other words, tend to be analytical. They typically break the games down into specific components and talk about those components individually.

This serves the needs of a few types of people. Reviewers like this format because it is easier to write to. You can sketch out an outline of your review without even having played the game, and fill in sections as you think of them. History. Overview. Graphics. Sound. Gameplay. Online features. Done.

The game publishers like this format too, because it gives them an easy target to aim for, particularly when making sequels. Just figure out what games your new product is similar to, and make sure it is a little larger and has better graphics. 95% of the reviews will then say "This is just like [some other game], but bigger and with better graphics," and many of the people who bought the other game will buy your new game without actually stopping to find out if your game is actually any fun.

The people whose needs it doesn't serve — at least sometimes — are the players. Or, if we're being crass, the consumers.

Shadow of the Colossus is a great example of a game where this analytical approach fails. I found, while playing it, that if I focused on any one aspect of the game, that aspect wasn't that good. There's a lot to criticize if you only focus on the details. But when I step back and look at the overall experience of playing the game, I simply have to sit and stare: it's the best game I've played this year.

So I want to take what Robert Pirsig, in his book Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, calls a "Romantic" perspective on Shadow of the Colossus. I want to talk about it in one piece, rather than by dissecting it until it is a lifeless husk.

Shadow of the Colossus

Shadow of the Colossus

Shadow of the Colossus is a game painted in broad strokes, on every level. The game mostly avoids the use of narration and verbal exposition. You have traveled to a forbidden land to try to bring a woman back to life. A supernatural being sets a task before you: destroy 16 lumbering colossi, each the size of a building.

Written down, it seems puerile. There's no "there," there. It reads like an excuse for a videogame. And yet, and yet, when seen, when experienced, when played, the very sparseness of motivation and character development work in the game's favor. The protagonist — Wanda is his name — is adolescent, not just in appearance, but in attitude. His single-minded focus and his disregard for his own life is something many of us have seen in our darkest moments. He seems to realize the utter futility of his task, and this makes his obdurate refusal to turn back all the more disturbing.

This is a dark archetype, and it is communicated through action rather than words. The art of videogames is in its infancy. The medium borrows narrative elements from writing, presentation techniques from cinema, and intellectual aspects from traditional games. Into this mix wanders the player, contributing his will. And as Wanda seeks out colossi and murders them, one by one, the player's complicity binds him tightly to the story.

In other words, this is a story that is more powerful because it was told in this medium. We care about the game because it is our hands that are unclean.

In order to proceed I have to — analytically — explain something very specific about the way the game works.The controls are fairly simple — move left, move right, jump, hit, and a button that basically means "hang on tightly to whatever it is I am on." When thinking about what I was going write about this game, I briefly considered opening with "Shadow of the Colossus is a game whose objective is to keep the 'hang on' button depressed at all times."

I have heard it said, as has everyone else, that the game is about combat and "boss battles." This is false. It's also been said that the game is a puzzle game. This is slightly more accurate, but also misses the mark. Shadow of the Colossus is a game about a single moment. The narrative, the scenery, the music, and everything about the game conspire to make that single moment matter.

You wander around the bleak landscape. You search for the next Colossus. You find him, and the scale of the challenge is revealed: he is the size of a skyscraper. You begin to fight him. Eventually, you figure out how to climb your enemy. You leap at him, find a purchase, and hold on for dear life. At some point, the Colossus realizes what you are doing, and begins to thrash around, trying to throw you off.

The only thing you — Wanda — can do is try to hang on. Wanda is thrown about like a rag doll, sustained by nothing more than his sheer bloody-mindedness and his refusal to let go.

That is the central moment of Shadow of the Colossus. Everything before that moment is a prologue. Everything after that moment is denouement. The moment is stretched out, as you crawl through a Colossus' hair like a head louse, right up until the point that you finally deliver the killing blow.

Killing the Colossus leads to another emotion: disappointment. There is the sight of grandeur destroyed, a feeling of being a barbarian, a sense of palpable loss that comes with each victory. Once the killing is done, there is nothing joyous about it. That every encounter with a Colossus can be descibed as consisting of anticipation, mounting, piercing, spurting, and exhausted collapse is, I believe, not accidental. That such a reading of the text is not in any way titillating is an indication of how carefully the game has been constructed.

A Boy and His Horse

A boy and his horse

These battles take place within a larger framework whose elements are as carefully composed as an ikebana flower arrangement. The world in which you move is desolate, but not empty. Life exists here, but you have to look carefully to see it. If you're not looking carefully, you won't even see the skittering geckos, the plodding turtles, and the other animals in the game. But they are all there, and their presence is meaningful. The main actors in the game are similarly carefully placed. Discounting the supernatural beings, the number of characters in the game are three. There is Wanda, there is his horse, and there is the dead girl. Without using any dialogue, the game manages to convey complex emotional nuances in the relationships between them. The horse itself has more sensitivity and character than anyone in a David Mamet play. I cared more about that horse than about the entire cast of Halo or Grand Theft Auto.

There are, as I alluded before, many problems with Shadow of the Colossus that will frustrate even the most forgiving players. None of that matters. The game is about exploring disparities in scale and the emotions that accompany them. Taken in that light, it is an absolute success.

If you own a PS2 go buy Shadow of the Colossus as soon as you finish reading this review.

Additional Resources

Tricks are for Kids

2005-11-11 · by psu

Sometimes you have to feel sorry for the gaming industry. Here we have a medium that is in the beginning of its life, struggling to be taken seriously. It has slowly scratched its way to the big time as a source of commerce, and you can almost see the collective strain on the faces of game developers as they strive to turn games into art, whatever that means. I bring this up now because the main subject of our gaming discussions this week was Shadow of the Colossus, which has the distinction, along with its predecessor, Ico , of being among the few games that actually succeeds in achieving something like art. Both games are rare in that they elicit an emotional response in the player that is more complex than the standard childish rush of victory.

This is important, because nothing enrages the average fan boy more than accusing his favorite game of being "too kiddie". This is a charge that is often incorrectly directed at Nintendo, and it always brings howls of defensive anger from the Nintendo faithful. I think this anger originates in some deep insecurities that we gamers have about games. We desperately want games to be thought of as something serious, something profound, and most importantly, something mature. The fact that the ESRB has an "M" rating for games has no real bearing on this question. While there are games that deal with subject matter that is not appropriate for children, games that you can actually call serious or mature are extremely rare, if they exist at all.

Games generally have a streak of adolescence about them. This is not surprising given the origins of the medium, especially in the home console arena. But while some would claim that games are evolving towards a more mature treatment of subject matter and presentation, the evidence indicates exactly the opposite. Aside from the odd cerebral simulation or strategy title (which, incidentally, is probably not as good a game as Advance Wars), the "mature" games of this generation are anything but mature. Where you might hope for games with a varied emotional palette and sophisticated narrative, we instead get and endless stream of gang members shooting cops, aliens attacking the earth, mindless zombies, mythological warriors skewering hundreds of faceless enemies, and the occasional martial arts hero tale that makes an old Hong Kong Jackie Chan movie look like a high British costume drama.

What exactly is mature about these mature games? The fact that when you shoot a Resident Evil 4 villager in the head it explodes into tiny little pieces and a giant insect-like flailing beast comes flying out and pokes you in the eye? The three-way mini-game, or better, the "drop the poor caged prisoner into the raging fires of Hades" puzzle in God of War? Collecting gay porn in Shadow Hearts? The fact that there are two narrative lines in Knights of the Old Republic that are cleverly intertwined to contain the same plot points? Or maybe it's how in Halo, you know you are playing as that Arbiter guy because everything on the your HUD is purple, not blue. It is not an insignificant fact that the games listed above are among the cream of the crop for the last few years. Even the good games do not reach for a very high level of discourse. Think back on all the games you've played and examine them with the same critical eye that you would a serious book or film. Do any really speak in a way that goes beyond "huh huh huh, cool, that boss is dead"?

Now, this is not an entirely bad thing. Games are supposed to be fun, and adolescent power fantasies, science fiction opera stories, and of course, stories involving jumping plumbers are a lot of fun. So it is not surprising that this is what designers go after and what we players slurp up like the obedient little lap dogs that we are. All I am saying is this: if the "industry" wants to get the serious attention that many appear to believe that it deserves, then I think that they have to start to rethink what it means to create a "serious" or "mature" game. Games have to look beyond the aesthetic sensibilities of the 16-24 year old, even though those sensibilities are apparently an almost endless source of easy revenue. Furthermore, game players and journalists have to stop giving juvenile games that happen to get that "M" rating a free ride with respect to alleged maturity.

This is my core objection to the notion that Nintendo only makes "kiddie" games. My objection is not that the statement is misleading and narrow, even though it is. Nintendo makes excellently designed games. It just so happens that many of them use characters that are appealing to children. This appeal is an incidental corollary to the fact that the games are excellent to begin with, and actually appeal to everyone with a pulse. My main objection is also not that the statement is derisive and filled with contempt, even though it often is. No one should mock, or hold Nintendo in contempt for what they do. My real objection to such statements is the implicit assumption that the other players in this industry are not making childish games. This is false. Everyone is making almost nothing but childish games.

If we want people to take games seriously, we have to make, and buy, games that deserve such treatment. In other words, everyone, not just Nintendo, has to start thinking about how to make games that are not "too kiddie".

How to Drink Beer

2005-11-14 · by peterb

Of all the foods that are acquired tastes, beer may be the most maligned and misunderstood. There are few foods for which you will readily find people who will boast, proudly, "Oh, I never drink beer. That stuff tastes terrible."

The problem with this statement is that beer is perhaps one of the most complex drinks known to man. Not liking beer qua beer is sort of like saying you don't like "vegetables." So my assumption is that anyone who says they don't like beer (as opposed to "I don't like this particular beer") just doesn't know how to drink it.

Today, I'm going to teach you how to drink beer. That means I'm going to teach you how to find a beer that you think tastes delicious.

Beer Goggles

I came to beer late. Growing up, I had only ever tasted standard American beers (ironically labeled "premium"), which are barely drinkable. The position of beer as serving sort of "check your pride at the door" philtre at college frat parties likewise made me look down my nose at it. It was at some point after college that a friend ordered me a beer, I tasted it, and said "Hey, wait a second. This can't be beer. It tastes good."

I spent several years completely obsessed with beer. I brewed my own, some of it pretty good, and spent lots of time seeking out interesting beers to drink.

The typical way to give advice on beer is to recommend specific brands or styles. But that doesn't really help you if you don't know enough about beer to understand why one might taste good to you, or why another tastes bad. Instead, I'm going to talk about the major flavor components of beer, and then I'm going to recommend specific beers that exemplify those tastes. Once you understand what you're drinking and how to describe it, finding something you actually enjoy is easy.

What You Need

First, you need a local bar with a decent selection of domestic and imported beers. Because I'm an effete intellectual snob, I will assert without proof that European beers are generally better than their American equivalents. There are plenty of good American beers, but the market for beer is so crowded that your chances of finding a classic, if you don't know what you like, are lower. So you want a place with a good selection of imports, and at least some beers on draft. The more beers they have on draft, the better.

Second, you want a talkative bartender who likes beer. Tell her what you're doing. Tell her you're on a quest to find a beer that tastes good. If she's a beer geek (and many of them are), you have probably just put yourself in a good position for a night drinking lots of free samples. Ask for what's fresh — stale beer is bad beer.

Lastly, you need some free time. Assuming you've found your talkative bartender, do him or her a favor and don't show up in the middle of the friday night crush and expect to be pampered. Show up in the late afternoon or early evening, before it gets busy. And tip well.

Malt

The single most important flavor component of beer is malt. It is also the most expensive component. Not coincidentally, the common American beers you find — Budweiser, Coors, and so on — have very little malt in them. This is part of the reason that they taste terrible.

When I say "malt", I really mean "malt sugars." Malt does not ferment very cleanly. When the yeast begin their work of converting sugars into alcohol, they can only convert some of the malt. This leaves a very distinctive residual sweetness. If you've ever had a malted milkshake (or malt balls, for that matter), you have some idea of what this tastes like. So let's say we have two unfermented beers, and one of them has more malt sugars in it than the other. When they ferment, we can know a few things about how the resulting beers will compare to each other. The beer that had more malt sugar will have a higher alcohol content. It will have more body, or mouthfeel — sugar is thick — and a deeper color. And it will be sweeter, or maltier.

Most other sugars are converted more efficiently by yeast than is malt. This means that they produce more alcohol, which means you need less of those sugars to produce a beer of a specific alcohol level, which means it will be cheaper to make. It also means that the beers have less body, and less flavor. In the worst cases, we can say these beers taste "attenuated." The best you can hope for in a standard mass-market American beer made with corn or rice is that it not immediately strike you dead with its horribleness.

So the first homework assignment is to go try a beer that is "malty", without a strong balancing hoppiness (more on hops in a bit). This time of year, you can still find some German Oktoberfest beers. Pschorr-Braü is a good starting point, as is the Ayinger Oktoberfest. If you're reading this article in the Spring, look for a Märzen, or a Maibock. If you're at a place that has a good Belgian beer selection, some of the Abbey ales are pleasantly malty (I particularly like the Westmalle Double or Triple). On the extremely sweet side, McEwan's Scotch Ale would be a good choice.

As you drink these beers, make a note of how they feel in your mouth, how they taste when they are on the tip of your tongue, and the aroma. When someone says a beer is "malty," now you'll know what they mean.

Hops

So you've tried a malty beer, and you liked it, because everyone does. Why, the question arises, does anyone drink anything else?

The reason is balance. Too much sweetness, by itself, is cloying. Brewers use hops, a small bitter flowering plant, to provide a counterbalancing aroma and taste to beer. The basic idea is not unlike what you would find in a good wine. As you drink, the malty beer washes over your tongue, bringing you body and sweetness. As you swallow, the hops hit the bitter taste buds in the back of your mouth, serving as a tonic, leaving (hopefully) a refreshing taste.

You hate beer — if you do hate beer — because most of the beers you've tried are unbalanced. All you can taste is hops. And with nothing to balance them, hops taste nasty.

The homework assignment for this section is to go drink some Pilsner Urquell, a Czech beer that should be fairly easy to find. This is the beer that all modern American beers are patterned on, in a sort of cruel, dadaist, mocking way. Think of Pilsner Urquell as Superman, and Budweiser as Bizarro-Superman, and you've got the idea. This beer will probably not be to your taste, if you're new to beer, but we're drinking it to find out about hops. As the beer goes down the back of your throat, you'll taste a somewhat spicy, somewhat floral bitterness. That's the Saaz hops, a specific variety native to Europe. Saaz is particularly subtle and distinctive, which is why I'm recommending this one to start. Most other varieties of hops will have a more aggressive, harsher, bitter bite, and (in my opinion) a slightly less interesting taste. But since hops in beer is meant to serve as a counterpoint to the malt, and not as the star, that's OK.

Victory Brewing Company, from Downington Pennsylvania, brews a beer called "Hop Devil," an extremely bitter India Pale Ale. I wouldn't recommend this to beginners, but if you decide you like the hops in Pilsner Urquell and want to see just about how bitter a beer can be, that's the one to try.

Other Common Tastes

Most of the beers I've mentioned so far are bottom-fermented beers, or lagers. Ales are beers made with top-fermenting yeast. They are generally fermented at a higher temperature. As a result, they don't taste as "clean" as lagers. When fermenting at a higher temperature, the yeast will produce more byproducts than just alcohol. The most important, for our purposes, are esters. The esters commonly found in beer produce aromas that can be described as fruity — smelling of apples, bananas, or orange. The effects of esters in beer are subtle, and hard to categorize. The homework assignment for this section is to try a Whitbread Ale. Make sure you don't drink it ice-cold. Esters are more noticeable as you approach room temperature. Be sure to smell as well as taste it.

A few beers can be described as phenolic tasting of diacetyl. These have a butterscotch-like aroma that in excess would be considered an off-taste, but in moderation can be pleasant. Samuel Smith's Pale Ale is the best example of this that I know.

Beers To Not Try (At First)

Here is a partial list of styles of beers that have complex tastes that will make it harder for you to figure out the relationship between malt and hops. You might consider avoiding these when just starting out. If I were you, I'd avoid stouts (which generally taste primarily of roasted barley), porters (which taste of burnt "chocolate" malt), rauchbiers (which taste like smoke), wheat beers (slight clove overtones), and any beer with more than one adjective attached to the name. If you must drink Guinness, at least get it on tap. The stuff in the bottle is not fit for human consumption.

I'll recommend a partial exemption for one particular type of fruit beer. Many beers have fruit flavors added to them. These are all for girls. I drink them anyway, but I drink them knowing they are for girls. Most beers with fruit in them are terrible, and should be avoided as a matter of course. However, the Belgian fruit-flavored lambics are quite good. Kriek, flavored with sour cherries, is incredibly fabulous and absolutely worth drinking. Some people prefer the raspberry-flavored framboise to kriek. These people are apostates, and must be destroyed.

Once you've found a beer that exemplifies the malt/hops balance that you like, you can (and should) branch out into these other varieties. Variety, after all, is the spice of life.

Add it Up

Hopefully, your homework assignments for this article will give you some hope that finding beer that tastes good to you is a real possibility. Go try some beers. Come back and tell us all about your experience: what beer you tried, whether or not you liked it, and what you liked or didn't like about it.

Benjamin Franklin once said Deus nobis cerevisiam dedit quia nos felices esse vult ("Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.") Go forth and be happy.

Dear Microsoft Games Employees

2005-11-15 · by peterb

I know there are one or two employees of MS's Xbox division who read (and hopefully enjoy) Tea Leaves, so allow me to take a moment to say:

Please find one of your mar-com people and get them to loan me an Xbox 360 and some games (Kameo?) so I can review them.

Thanks!

PS: And as long as I'm asking, how about a pony, too?

Half-Life 2 and Other Matters

2005-11-16 · by psu

Half-Life 2 for the Xbox hits this week. So, two years after the fact, one of the original reasons I gave to myself for buying the Xbox has finally come to pass. This means that I managed to get the game without buying a PC. On the downside, I already bought the PC version of the game, though I didn't play it all the way through (the only PC I had at the time was at work). In addition, instead of a PC, I bought an Xbox, a PS2, a Gamecube, a GBA, a PSP and a few dozen games, all of which probably add up to what a high end PC would have cost. But I got so much more value this way.

Of course, by value I really mean a horrible debilitating addiction that infects my every waking hour.

I should have seen it coming. I had consciously avoided computer games for most of my life because I knew that if my in-born OCD did kick in I would end up in a black hole of suffering and despair from which I would never escape. This is in fact what happened, but it hasn't been all that bad. The consoles and the games that run on them have changed in subtle ways to appeal to an older audience with more money than time. Games these days are playable without requiring 90 hours of your time in 8 or 16 hour blocks. I see this as a positive trend, and one that should continue as time goes on.

The fact that games are interruptible is their most appealing trait at this time in my life, when I am more often interrupted. So I guess it was inevitable that I'd end up becoming one of "them". Of course, I've had my share of annoyances, shameful neuroses, bizarre discoveries, and strange injuries. So, while it has not been completely smooth, my trip into the game world has mostly been fun. As we move into the next generation, I can only hope that the good stuff gets better, and the stupid stuff (hello, savepoints) slowly dies away. For now, I guess I'll go level some more and then try to kill that Boss in Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne again (I know, you told me not to buy it, but I did).

What the Internet is For

2005-11-17 · by psu

In the distant past, around ten years ago, there was a hallowed time when the Internet both defined and demonstrated its true purpose. Back then, there were vendors on the net, like Amazon.com, from whom you could order almost anything and have it delivered to your house just a day or two later for a small fee. The choices offered by these vendors was wide and deep, and the service that they provides was competent and timely.

Of course, time and money will eventually destroy all good things, and the net is no different.

This was on my mind because my morning surfing took me to a long rant by someone named Doc about how the net is being destroyed by all of the usual suspects: the monied interests who don't understand what the net is for or what the net should be. I think there are a lot of problems with the points of view expressed in the essay, especially when they drip with a palpable sense of entitlement, or with a desire to claim sole credit for building something that was actually the result of the efforts of a huge number of people, many of whom did not even (gasp!) use open source software.

These small issues do not concern me. They are merely the result of a nearly fatal case of latent object syndrome. The real Internet did not turn out how he believes to have envisioned it back in the day. This fact still apparently makes him bitter. What really concerns me is how he and so many others do not know what the net is really for. The Internet, after all, really has only one purpose. So as a public service, here, on this humble web site, I will let you in on the big secret.

The Internet exists for one thing: to tell me where, out of all the possible places on the surface of this great planet of ours, the package that I just ordered is currently sitting in a UPS truck, and when it will be delivered to me.

Of course, this core function is under daily attack by "super-saver" shipping programs and "free shipping" discounts that end up sending you your stuff via some cut-rate outfit that does not have online tracking. Worse, more and more of our items are being sent by US Mail, which means it is both slow and not trackable. With the bursting of the e-commerce bubble, and the resulting concerns about trivial things like actual profit, even the former gods of online commerce like Amazon have fallen in with the forces of darkness that would impose this great source of anxiety upon us. What was unthinkable just a few short years ago has now come to pass on our network: you can buy from Amazon and not know where your stuff is until it reaches your door.

Hopefully with this singular truth in mind, you will be able to return to your lives and fight for the glorious future of the network, and keep it doing what it was built to do. Hopefully, in the future, no one have to endure shipping via the USPS, or suffer through their daily lives with no idea where their packages are. Truly, the net has the potential to usher forth such a grand time of enlightenment and happiness, if we are willing to work for it.

The Mis-Design of Everyday Things

2005-11-18 · by psu

We in the computer business tend to have a complex about ease of use. "Computers are so powerful and yet so arcane" is a constant refrain in our lives. Well, I am here to say that I don't think that we should feel too bad. I have been investigating the world of HDTV because we are thinking about buying a big TV for Christmas. Compared to what you have to go through to get a decently usable TV, setting up a home wireless network is like falling off a log.

Let's review. Here's what you do to set up a home network:

  1. Buy DSL or Cable high speed network from someone.

  2. Plug Airport base-station into modem.

  3. Run the admin program to change the password on the base station. Make it configure its network connection automatically from the cable modem.

  4. Turn everything on.

  5. Start surfing.

At this point, all the laptops in the house will just connect to the basestation and have high speed access to a glorious world of automatic package tracking. You turn on the laptop and it does a magic dance with the base-station and the data just flows.

By comparison, setting up my home receiver was much more complicated, involving almost a dozen runs of audio and video and power cables. Furthermore, after all that work, it's still a lot of work to play Xbox. Here's what I do (assuming the TV and receiver are on):

  1. Turn the big knob on the receiver until the letters say "XBOX" on the main display.

  2. Turn on the Xbox

  3. Put in Halo.

At this point, the video and audio for the game come out of the TV and the speakers hooked up to the receiver. I only have two speakers, no surround sound.

Now let's consider throwing an HDTV and a single HD source into this mix. First, rather than only needing to understand one interconnect, suddenly there are three:

  1. Composite/S-Video

  2. HDMI (huh?)

  3. Component Video

Worse, most of the receivers in the world do not allow you to easily mix and match devices of different types. I only have devices of type (1) in my house right now. Also, my receiver can only handle either S-Video or Composite sources. So when I get my Xbox 360, my whole user experience above falls apart. I have to run the audio from the 360 to the receiver, and the video directly to the new TV. To play a game I would now have to do this:

  1. Turn the knob to "Xbox 360" on the receiver.

  2. Pick up the TV remote and hit some button I can't find until the TV says something like "Component Video 3", which I remember is where I connected the Xbox 360.

  3. Turn on the Xbox 360.

  4. Put in Madden 360.

It turns out that the extra few steps here are actually enough to keep anyone else in the house from being able to run the TV. This is because no one but a crazy techical dork can remember that "Component Video 3" is the Xbox and "Video 7" is the normal video from the receiver. TV manufacturers don't seem to realize this, since every big new TV comes with 15 inputs of various types, none of which will ever be used.

I also looked into what it would take to fix this issue at the receiver end. Surely I could find a receiver that gives me the "simplicity" that I currently enjoy. Reasonably priced receivers do not allow you to run a composite input to a component output and vice versa. This means you have to run two different kinds of cable between the receiver and the TV. And, after going to all that trouble, you get the same shitty interface described above.

To do better than this, It turns out that what I would need is a $500 receiver that can automatically route and up-convert composite video to component video or HDMI (huh?). In other words, to get a simple video routing device, I need to buy something that costs as much as an Xbox 360, and then I have to spend an entire afternoon rewiring everything behind it. The truly mind boggling thing is that even at that price, you can still find receivers that do not allow you to program custom source names. All that money, and they can't even keep 2K of persistent memory around to store a little bit of ASCII.

Finally, one has to realize that even my "easy" scenario for turning on the TV is really too complicated. Here is how it should really work:

  1. Turn on Xbox. Receiver notices that the Xbox is on and sets the input device correctly.

  2. Put in Halo 3.

I think we can all agree this scenario is a drug-induced fantasy world. And yet, and yet, this is exactly what happens with my wireless network. I turn on my laptop, and everything just hooks right up automatically. So, computer geeks rejoice! You have managed to build an end to end system whose user experience is significantly easier than turning on a modern television.

Additional Note: Don't tell me to buy a universal remote control. The universal remote is just an admission that the industry can't build the right thing. All of this stuff should just work. Anything less is unacceptable.

Bjˆrky Had a Little Lamb

2005-11-21 · by peterb

or, "Dear Whole Foods: Stop Pimping Iceland"

Being a middle class, white, liberal, urban-dwelling type with enough disposable income that I don't mind paying unreasonable prices for foods that are only moderately better than I can find elsewhere, I sometimes shop at Whole Foods.

Lately, Whole Foods has been pimping for Iceland. What's behind this? And more importantly, how can I get them to stop?

I first noticed this at the cheese counter. My friend works at the cheese counter, and I've learned to patiently bear it while he explains to me that I should be glad to pay $20/pound for the same Roquefort Abeille I can get at Penn Mac for $10/pound because Whole Foods is worker-owned, and is therefore a better place to spend my money. Accepting the patronizing way in which the Whole Foods Corporation (NASDAQNM:WFMI) tarts up their employment practices into a selling point is just part of the whole experience. You let it wash over you, and you go on. The cheese counter at Whole Foods has a lot to recommend it once you get past price, including a great selection, knowledgable staff, and an unending supply of samples.

My friend recommended a few Icelandic cheeses (the best of the batch was Hˆfingi, a soft cow's milk cheese not unlike a mild Brie). And he gave me a brochure to go along with it.

The brochure was written by Whole Foods, and had lots of information about Icelandic cheese, where by "information" I mean "marketing." The words "pure" and "unspoiled" appeared at least three times in each paragraph. (Incidentally, the CIA World Factbook entry for Iceland lists "water pollution from fertilizer runoff; inadequate wastewater treatment" as among their current environmental issues. But not to worry: surely it is pure and unspoiled fertilizer runoff.)

I put this brochure away and promptly forgot about it. There is, after all, nothing too unusual about featuring one country or another at a cheese counter. Cheese is an extremely varietal sort of food, and if you don't try cheeses from diverse places in the world, you're missing out on a lot.

The next time I was in Whole Foods, I encountered the lamb from Iceland. Here's a sample of their marketing:

Have you tried our Icelandic Lamb? Only available at Whole Foods Market, Icelandic Lamb is bred and raised in Iceland where they are free to roam the grassy hills and breathe pristine air.

Not only that, but each of the lambs is sung a beautiful lullabye as it is lovingly, gently slaughtered in an utterly cruelty-free environment. All of this can be yours for the low, low, low price of $18.99/pound.

Lamb. For $18.99/pound. Somewhere in Austin, Texas, a Whole Foods executive is laughing until he wets his pants.

It's not specifically the price that bothers me here. It's the contradiction inherent in the Whole Foods concept: a store that gives lip service to the "buy locally, support sustainable farming" movement, yet which flies in goods from around the world to supplant local alternatives when it suits their margin or marketing needs.

This weekend, at the last Farmer's Market in the Strip District, I bought some grass-fed lamb from Pucker Brush Farm, a farm near Indiana, PA. Their lamb is grass-fed; it tasted earthy, and herbal, and savoury, and delicious. It cost less than half what the Icelandic lamb at Whole Foods would have cost me. It was fresher, and of better quality, and the money went straight to a farmer, and there are no doubts or worries about the supply chain.

They're also pushing Skyr ("It's made with pro-biotic cultures passed down generation to generation in Iceland"). Skyr is Icelandic for "Cottage Cheese That Costs More Than The Stuff You Probably Should Have Bought" My assumption is that what has happened here is that Whole Foods has signed an agreement with the Icelandic equivalent of Archer-Daniels Midland. They get products at cut rates, they get to pimp the Icelandic connection for marketing juice (Pure! Unspoiled! Pristine! Virginal!), and they get higher margins.

I'm glad Whole Foods is here. It provides a great alternative to our local megachains, and they carry a number of products that I want in one convenient location. But in some ways, I find it more tiring to shop there, particularly when I wander near one of their obvious profit centers, such as the meat counter. I don't expect them to change their way of doing business radically, or to suddenly stop selling things that obviously make them a lot of money.

But please. Enough with Iceland. I'm begging you.

Additional Resources

You Can't Teach a New Wine Old Tricks

2005-11-22 · by peterb

You've got to hand it to the French. They have managed to turn what is traditionally a completely unimportant thing — the shipping of the season's first Beaujolais Nouveau — into an "event."

Beaujolais Nouveau is a cheap French wine that is meant to be drunk young. It is, along with straw-bottle Chianti, the definition of cheap wine. It's a good wine to have around, because even if you're not in the mood to drink Beaujolais Nouveau, you can usually put it to other uses, such as helping flush small items down your garbage disposal, or to bathe the cat in, or to degrease a bike chain.

I want to be crystal clear: there is nothing, nothing wrong with cheap wine. Cheap wine is good. I mock Beaujolais Nouveau because I love it. Or, loved it. Now because the start of the "season" is an "event," we live in a world where a bottle of Beaujolais Nouveau costs more than $10. This, more than anything else, is a sign that the world we live in has gone utterly, completely, barking mad.

The worst thing about this, of course, is having the conversation with my wine merchant about this. "$12? For Beaujolais Nouveau?" "Oh, yes, sir. It's very good. This is going to fly off the shelves." "It's Beaujolais Nouveau. It's best used to rinse your teeth after brushing." "Well, it's very popular this year, sir."

To be fair, and to show that for once I am not just picking on the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board like I usually do, I will mention that this first batch (the "air shipment") is priced extravagantly pretty much everywhere. If your state allows in-state shipping, you can save a few dollars by buying at a large wholesaler, such as Sam's, or by using my personal favorite mail-order wine store, Pop's Wine.

Despite my disbelief over the price, I took one for the team and bought a bottle of the 2005 George Duboeuf Beaujolais Nouveau. For $12 a bottle. Damn it to hell.

My capsule review is: that was $12 I will never see again. If there is any justice in the world, you will all feel sorry for me and click madly on the sponsored Google Links to try to help me recover at least some of that money. And also to compensate me for my pain and suffering.

The pain and suffering is not because the wine itself is somehow inherently terrible — it's really neither better nor worse than your average Beaujolais Nouveau — but for the opportunity cost that spending $12 on a bottle of this grape juice engenders. $12 will get you a fine cheap Rosemount Shiraz. Or a low-end Ruffino Chianti. Or three bottles of Charles Shaw, a.k.a. "Two Buck Chuck". All of which are better than this wine.

The color is the grape-juicey purple one expects from a wine of this type. The aroma is fruity and seems extremely tannic. On hitting your tongue, though, those fruit and tannins aren't actually there. You don't taste either. What you taste, instead, is just an in-your-face — and unpleasant — acidity. The wine is slightly effervescent, which is fine, but somewhat attenuated and chemical, which is not. There's no finish to the wine at all. I don't mean a "quick finish" or a "short tail," I mean none whatsoever. The wine gets to the back of your mouth and sort of teleports down to your stomach, leaving you wondering what the hell just happened.

So it's not a very pleasant wine to drink by itself, but then to make up for that, it doesn't match well with food either.

If this wine cost 5 dollars a bottle, you would shrug your shoulders and say "Hey. It's cheap wine. Whaddya want? Pour me another glass." But it didn't cost 5 dollars a bottle. It cost more than a number of perfectly drinky varietals. The wine doesn't leave a bitter taste in your mouth — it doesn't leave any taste in your mouth — but this knowledge does.

Did I mention you could buy 3 (or more, if you're lucky) bottles of Two Buck Chuck for the price of one bottle of 2005 George Duboeuf "air shipment" Beaujolais Nouveau? I'm just checking.

To add injury to insult, the wine left me with a hangover that made me feel like Robert Downey Jr. on his first day of rehab. I had another glass tonight because, apparently, I hate life, and the headache is back. Perhaps it is just my conscience, causing me psychic pain because I paid $12 for a $5 bottle of a wine.

In conclusion, don't buy this wine. Unless you are someone that I despise, in which case, ‡ votre santÈ! Buy an entire case!

He Tried So Hard

2005-11-28 · by peterb

Richard Burns

Richard Burns

I'd like to take a moment today to mourn the passing of Richard Burns, 2001 WRC Rally Champion. Diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2003, Burns passed away on Friday night. He was just 34 years old.

A section for memorials has been started on his web site. His family asks that in lieu of flowers, they would prefer donations to Cancer Research.

It's Like They Didn't Even Play the Same Game

2005-11-29 · by psu

I wasn't going say anything more about Half-life 2 on the Xbox. Lower resolution graphics aside, I think the game brings all of what is good about Half-Life 2 to the console. You can enjoy the game without spending stupid amounts of money on a PC. This is good. But then I spied a review of the game in this month's Game Informer. As is often the case, when I read the text of the review I could only conclude that they must have played a different game.

Both reviews of the game in this month's issue spend column feet of text complaining about load times. The claim, I guess, is that the Xbox is such a crippled piece of crap that the glorious continuous maps of the PC original had to be broken up into bite sized chunks that take literally minutes to load as you move from one area to another. On the face of it, this claim is plausible. The Xbox has much less main memory than the PC, and much of the loading has to read data off of the DVD player, which is a slower device. But, here is the problem: I played the game on a PC in my office. A decent PC with a 2Ghz processor and 1GB of RAM. Here is why the Game Informer people are either dirty liars or stupid: the load times on the PC sucked.

In fact, Half-Life 2 on the PC came up with an extremely creative set of devices with which to waste my time and keep me from playing the game.

Here is what you do to install Half-Life 2 on a PC:

  1. Put in CD 1.

  2. Wait 10 minutes while the PC copies data to your hard disk.

  3. Repeat for all 5 (or whatever) CDs

  4. Now fire up the Steam application and spend half an hour talking to the server and making a new account.

  5. Now wait as your computer reads every single file that it just copied all over again to decrypt it or some bullshit.

  6. Finally, fire up the Steam application again and wait an hour while it looks for patches and downloads them.

At this point, you click on Half-life 2 from the Steam user interface, and your PC starts doing something. What, you cannot tell. In a minute or two, you get a loading screen for the game. A few minutes later, you get the splash screen for the game.

Total time between opening the first CD and playing the game: maybe an hour or two, depending on how slow your CD drive is.

Total time between launching the game and getting to play the game: 3 or 4 minutes.

Imagine if Excel took minutes to launch every time you fired it up. Behold the glorious future of online game delivery.

Compare this experience with loading Half-Life 2 on the Xbox:

  1. Put disk in.

  2. Game fires up, writes some stuff to the Xbox hard disk.

  3. Start playing.

Total time: 5 minutes.

In addition, when you turn the game off and restart, the total time to get back to the main screen is about 30 seconds. Somehow, on this crippled Xbox, starting the game is easily four to five times faster than on the PC.

Now, it's true that there are a lot of mid-level loads. But they happen at exactly the same places that they did on the PC. In addition, the loading was no faster on the PC. Although loading from disk is faster, most of the resources were larger to support the "higher resolution" rendering that didn't really quite work right on the graphics card. But let's suppose that each load on the Xbox took 10 seconds longer than on my PC. There are about 15 chapters in the game, broken up into 6 or 7 areas per chapter, for a total of (say) 100 loads. Add in another 100 loads for where I go back to a saved game because i died. This makes for a total of about 200 loads in the 15 hours or so that I spent playing the game. Maybe I am being conservative, so let's call it 300 loads. In this case, the Xbox wasted about an extra hour of my time because of its "horrendous" load times.

Meanwhile, I burned two hours of non-play time just installing the PC version of the game. In addition, if I had played the game all the way through, I'd have to charge the PC game an extra few minutes of startup time every time I restarted the game, which I easily did 15 times with the Xbox. So, even with its "horrendously awful" load times, the Xbox version is easily two hours ahead.

Finally, I feel the need to point out that plenty of other games have had load times similar to the Xbox Half-Life 2, and I heard no complaining from Game Informer about them. Off the top of my head I can list: Riddick, which they called one of the best Xbox titles of all time, KOTOR, KOTOR 2, Jade Empire, and Deus Ex: Invisible War.

All in all, this makes me wonder what game the Game Informer people actually played. The game I played was a fabulous port of arguably the best shooter in recent memory. Everything that I remember from the PC game was there: the level design, the face animation, the gravity gun, the crappy vehicles, the seamless narrative, the voice acting and the beautiful spaces full of light and texture. As a bonus, it removed the stupidest feature of the PC version: Steam. It is almost as if Game Informer felt the need to write a review like this just to stoke the false flamewar that allegedly divides PC and console gaming. The last paragraph of the main review even alludes to this, suggesting that console gamers should "find their own" defining games. I guess you can't expect more from the people who thought Far Cry: Instincts had decent A.I.

How To Upgrade Your Computer

2005-11-30 · by peterb

There seems to be a lot of confusion among people who should know better about how to upgrade one's computer. I am here to help. I'm pleased to present The Tea Leaves Guide to upgrading, which can help even the most ten-thumbed person improve their computing environment for the most reasonable cost, in just four easy steps.

Step 1: Open your old computer (you will probably need a Phillips' head screwdriver to do this), and remove any add-on cards, disk drives, RAM, and (if removable) CPUs that are currently in it.
Step 2: Take all that stuff and throw it away.
Step 3: Place the old computer on your back porch. Come springtime, the hollowed-out chassis will make a fine decorative planter.
Step 4: Go to Apple's or Dell's web site, depending on your tastes, and buy a new computer. Make sure, when selecting a machine, that you choose one that doesn't have "expansion slots," or any other features that you will never, ever, in a million years, use.

I want to be crystal clear that I am not joking. I've been buying computers (and upgrading old ones) for years. Upgrading, in the sense of "replacing a component to increase performance", is almost never worth it. I'll carve a very narrow exception for installing more memory — most machines people buy are woefully underprovisioned in terms of memory. Everything else is a complete waste of your time and money.

It works like this: you want to play a new game on your PC, but it requires a faster CPU than you have. So you say "Aha! I built my machine to be upgradable! I'll buy a new CPU!" But you can't just drop in a new CPU, because by the time you decide you need to upgrade, the CPU manufacturers have changed the pinout specs, so you need a new socket type. That means a new motherboard. If you buy that new motherboard, it probably has a different socket type for main memory. So you have to buy new RAM.

If you're lucky, the new motherboard you buy will have a new-different-better slot for video (ISA was supplanted by VESA, VESA was supplanted by PCI, PCI was supplanted by six varieties of AGP, none of which actually worked, and AGP is currently being supplanted by PCI Express. This process will continue until you die.) So your old video card has to go. If you're unlucky, the new motherboard will have the old type of slot, at which point you'll find out that not only is your existing videocard too slow, but you can't actually buy one powerful enough, that supports your ancient video bus, to make a difference. So then you have to buy a second new motherboard, and sell the original one on eBay. About the only component you'll be able to preserve from your original machine is the disk drive. New disk drives are effectively free. Nice going, Einstein.

In the end, you will end up spending about what it would cost you to buy a new machine from Dell to "upgrade." In addition, you'll have the aggravation of dealing with multiple vendors, none of whom ever answer their phones — God help you if one or more than one component fails — and the final product will be less stable, less polished, and louder than whatever you would get from a vendor that delivers finished product (yes, I'm aware that you can buy quiet components and soundproof boxes. Double your cost estimates if you plan on doing that, instead of just talking about it.) You'll have no warranty, there will be little Phillips-head screws laced all through your shag carpet, and when you try to run the game you wanted to play, it will either play too slow, or cause your machine to lock up.

Then, six months after you spent all that money on upgrading, you will give up and buy a new computer anyway.

I suspect I'm preaching to the converted here when I talk about upgrading in this way. But what isn't always obvious is the hidden cost, which is buying for upgradability, rather than buying to upgrade. By this I mean: you are choosing your Apple or Dell machine, and you decide to buy one over another because it is "upgradable." You hear people, especially on Slashdot, complaining about this in the Mac Mini or iMac, or some of the Shuttle PCs. "What if you want to add a CP/M card? Hahn? Hahhhn? Then you'll be sorry!" You give in to uncertainty, and instead of the nice tiny quiet little box you were thinking of, you buy the five-foot tall tower that is mostly air so that you can install a gigabit ethernet card.

Listen: four years later, you are going to throw that computer away, or give it to your nephew, or at best, if you are wankier than 99% of the people in the world, turn it into a mail server. You will never buy a CP/M card. You will never buy a gigabit ethernet card. You will never buy a video capture card. You will never install a SCSI card (or, if you do, I will laugh at you). You will never replace the hard drive (unless it fails). And in addition to the higher initial cost of the machine, you will have squandered space on a machine that is larger than it needed to be. You will have squandered sanity on a machine that is louder than it needed to be. And you will have squandered visual pleasure on a machine that is uglier than it needed to be.

Those three attributes — size, sound, and visual appeal — are worth quite a bit of money to most people. Computers tend to be viewed in utilitarian terms, but the age of the computer as a purely functional device is, thankfully, dead and gone forever.

And good riddance, too.

Chinese Food In Pittsburgh

2005-12-01 · by psu

When I started eating Chinese Food in Pittsburgh, I can remember two sorts of places. There were cheap takeout joints like Ghengis Cones, which had Peking Duck sandwiches and soft ice cream. There were also "red plastic covered chairs" places, like Jimmy Tsang's, which fed many people at once, but whose food was not really identifiably Chinese. I also remember making the mistake of bringing my Northern Chinese mom to the old Szechaun House restaurant, and getting nothing but complaints about how the food was not fresh and vaguely stinky.

Given this background, it makes me happy that today you can pick up the Post Gazette and read an article about two Chinese restaurants that actually do serve food that reminds me of what my mom used to make.

It also makes me happy that the food writer picked exactly the two places in town that I would have chosen. You could quibble and say that Tasty or Chopstick Inn belong on the list, but both of those places retain the "double menu" structure that both Rose Tea and Orient Kitchen do not have. Since I grew up eating the Northern Chinese and Taiwanese style food that my mom made, I have a special affection for Rose Tea. That should not keep you from going after the Cantonese stuff at Orient Kitchen. Bottom line, give these people your money.

I have two minor quibbles with the article. First, the use of "Bean Leaf" as a translation for snow-pea sprouts is a bit literal and sounds strange to my ear even though it is literally correct. Second, the woman should have gotten the Home Style Pork Intestine with Duck Blood. She's missing out. She mostly makes up for it by mentioning the Chunk Chicken, which remains the single best East Asian dish available in Pittsburgh. Also, if you like the vegetable dishes she mentions, you can get all those greens at Lotus in the strip, the best produce store in Pittsburgh.

It's taken a long time, but I think Pittsburgh has finally gotten beyond Peking Duck and soft serve Ice Cream. Hopefully we can hold on to Rose Tea and Orient Kitchen. It would be a shame to lose them. Now, if only there were a single place that made good pot stickers.

Indie Game: Atlantis

2005-12-02 · by peterb

I've never had much patience for Tetris.

It's not just Tetris, mind you, but pretty much any game that falls into the broad category of "usually brightly-colored, abstract pattern matching games." (And Sherlock doesn't count. That's a logic game.) I don't get an almost-sexual satisfaction in making blocks of similar colors merge and vanish. Lumines doesn't call to me. It's just something in my nature; I think I need a plot to really enjoy a game.

The closest I've come to liking this class of game would be the little minigames in Yohoho! Puzzle Pirates, probably because the piratey goodness gave it enough flavor for me to be willing to put in the drudge work ("I'm not mindlessly playing Bejeweld! I'm, uh, pumping bilge! Yeah, that makes it. Um. Better.")

Despite the fact that I don't love this type of game, I'm still capable of recognizing a good one when I see it.

Enter Funpause Games. I recently read a review of their work, that compared them to Ambrosia Software. My love for Ambrosia's games is very well documented. So of course, I had to try some of their games.

And you know what? The comparison is fairly apt. Like Ambrosia, Funpause seems to have a "house style": shiny, lots of attention paid to music and audio cues, and simple gameplay.

Funpause calls Atlantis a "ball-matching game." I call it "Snood with more motion." Snood is a frighteningly addictive game with a quirky sensibility that is something like a cross between Space Invaders and Tetris. Essentially a port of the arcade game Puzzle Bobble, Snood is a strictly tactical game; there's no time element pressuring you to make a move.

Atlantis

Funpause's Atlantis

Atlantis has an implicit timer, yet is a much easier game than Snood. This isn't necessarily a bad thing in a casual game. Brightly colored marbles are pushed down a channel towards an exit. You have a gun that shoots marbles up at the incoming stream. When your marble hits another marble, it becomes part of the stream. If by shooting a marble you create a string of 3 or more of the same color, the like-colored marbles disappear (and the incoming stream slows down accordingly). If enough marbles reach the end of the line, you lose a life.

There is a system of upgrades and bonuses in Atlantis — clearly inspired by Arkanoid — but it doesn't really gel. It's more of a distraction from the core game than an enhancement. But the core game is good enough that I don't mind.

Atlantis is available for both Mac and Windows, and a free demo (limited to one hour of play) is available for both platforms. I think it's a fun little diversion. Will you? Download it yourself and find out.

Deal with the Devil

2005-12-05 · by psu

My friend Dave used to say that the exponential increase in hard disk capacity over time was sure proof that not only was the storage industry in league with the darker forces, but also that every disk platter was clearly populated with the souls of the poor industry employees who had signed the contracts needed to rev the latest generation of the hardware.

I have been shopping for a large screen television lately, and after becoming familiar with the prevailing technologies, I have to say that Dave is wrong. It's not the storage industry, but the TV people who have the true pact with Satan.

Even the oldest type of television has an air of magic about it. Consider: an electron gun at the end of a large vacuum tube shoots a beam of charged particles towards a large piece of glass. This glass is covered with light sensitive phosphors which light up where the beam hits them. By modulating the beam faster than you can see, the television scans the entire screen and generates an image line by line. At any point in time, the electron gun is only scanning one point on the screen. The only reason you ever see a whole image is that the phosphors stick on for a bit while the rest of the screen is scanned. That, and the fact that the screen is re-scanned a few dozen times per second. To generate color, you use three guns, one for each of the three primary colors. Broken down into its component details, it seems preposterous that displays like this should work at all. After 50 years of development, you can only marvel at the fact that along several axes the CRT still works better than all of the new screen technologies.

One of these new screen types is the LCD, seen in laptop computers, Palm organizers and Blackberries everywhere. These screens started out as those 12 segment displays on calculators that could display 0,1,2,4,5,6,7,8, and 9, but couldn't really make an "A" correctly. LCDs work by sandwiching a special liquid crystal between panes of polarizing glass. Normally, the crystal is oriented such that light passes through it and the polarizers, and looks clear. When you apply an electric field, the crystal twists and causes the polarizer to block the light so that the liquid appears dark. Shrink these cells, and the switches that run them small enough, and add color filters, and you get the modern color LCD display. Of course, it is completely preposterous that you can take some glass panels and squeeze special crystals and color filters and switching circuits all in between the panes and make something like this work.

Similarly, plasma displays are obviously impossible. Here again you have two panes of glass and some phosphor. Between them are millions of microscopic tubes that contain ionized gas. Run a control current behind the cells and the gas lights up the phosphor in front of the cell and you get a picture on the front of the screen. It's like each one of these cells is a tiny little CRT tube (although really, they are completely different), built in miniature, and they have collected them all together glued between two panes of glass to make a panel about 4 inches thick that displays images. It's really too bad that they have to trap the soul of an electrical engineer in each one of those plasma cells.

Having covered direct view, we can move on to rear projection sets. Confusingly, LCDs make another appearance here. Rather than making a huge panel of LCD material and switches and so on so you can look directly at it, you could shrink the panel down to a really small size. You then combine three of these panels, one each for red, green, and blue, and project a color image to the front of the TV using a powerful backlight. The TV takes a normal TV signal at its inputs, digitizes it, scales the picture from the normal NTSC resolution up to the resolution of the panel and projects the resulting image to the front of the screen for you to see. Magic.

Of course, this process can work in the opposite direction too, giving you a front projector. But I'm not going to get into that right now, because now I have to cover DLP.

The heart of a DLP television is an integrated circuit whose surface is covered with microscopic mirrors that are hinged. The control system can tell the mirror which way to tilt. Tilt one way, and the pixel is on. Tilt the other way, and the pixel is off. Make the mirror dance back and forth really fast, and you can get dithered gray scale values between 0 and 1024. To generate color, the image processing system spins a wheel with color filters on it past the chip so that you get a red, green, then blue image flashing past your face fast enough to look like a color picture.

So, just to be clear. The TV uses microscopic mirrors, that flash back and forth faster than you can notice. Yeah right. Those poor souls.

After all this shopping, the TV that I settled on actually uses a combination of LCD and DLP type technologies to get its job done. The Sony SXRD televisions uses a form of "LCoS", or Liquid Crystal on Silicon chips to generate a picture. Here, instead of a hinged mirror, you have a reflective substrate behind an LCD layer. Turn the pixel on, and the LCD is clear, and light reflects off of the substrate. Turn of the pixel off, and the LCD goes black. No light. LCoS combines many of the advantages of the LCD projection machines (3 panels, no color wheel) with the DLP sets (less space between pixels, because the switching hardware can be behind the glass, and they are reflective rather than transmissive, and thus have higher contrast).

Again, this is completely unbelievable. What is really going on is that the the souls of millions of poor electrical engineers are packed into the cabinet of that 50 inch diagonal back projection TV that you just ordered, and they are all shining tiny little flashlights at you to allow you to watch TV.

Or at least that's how it may as well work.

What Goes Around

2005-12-06 · by peterb

A number of Astute Readers pointed out that Atlantis, which I reviewed on Friday, is actually a reimplementation of an earlier game, Popcap's Zuma, and Mumbo Jumbo's modified Zuma clone Luxor.

I tried Luxor tonight, and I liked it. In the abstract, I liked it more than Atlantis, with the exception that the Mac version suffers from some slowdown when things get hairy. The experience of playing the two identical games got me to thinking about some of the structural stupidities of the so-called "casual game" market.

To use one good example, Phil Steinmeyer talks a bit about the saturation of the market with Zuma clones:

The past year in particular has demonstrated that a close clone of a hit game, albeit with a new theme, can sell quite well indeed (see the string of successful Zuma clones - Luxor, Tumblebugs, Atlantis, Beetle Bomp). None of these game were much better than Zuma, though Luxor introduced a new gameplay style (move along the bottom rather than in the middle), and Tumblebugs used 3D graphics to nice effect. There were only a couple of Zuma clones that failed, and those were markedly inferior in execution to the original Zuma and itís clones. So basically, if you released a Zuma clone in 2005 of roughly equal quality to the original Zuma, your chances of at least moderate success were right around 100%.

All of which raises some interesting questions.

First, at what point does one game infringe on another game's copyright? Copyright does not protect ideas, but it does protect the expression of an idea fixed in a tangible medium of expression, which includes videogames. One could argue that slapping a new theme or outer story on a game changes it enough to not be infringing. And most of the players in the market are content to observe a sort of detente where they all borrow from each other without suing, at least so far. But really: brightly colored balls, each about the size of a child's marble. Narrow channel. Similar sound effects. Similar powerups. Shooty things. A new background and a name doesn't cut it: sooner or later, someone is getting sued. Especially when larger companies decide to capture a piece of the casual gaming market for themselves.

Secondly, what's a game reviewer to do in this environment? Do we discuss each game in a vacuum, merely considering how well it is implemented? Or do we discount a game somewhat, to the extent that it is copied from somewhere else?

I think I will settle on a middle course. Realistically, truly innovative games are few and far between. And when a really innovative game hits, its publisher is rewarded by it utterly failing in the marketplace. So it's not really fair, I think, to think less of a game just because it has lifted its gameplay, in nearly every way possible, from an earlier title. Copy away, boys! More games for me! Go for it!

However.

If, in the marketing and promotional materials for your carbon-copy game, you dare to describe it as "innovative," then I think you've gone out of your way to qualify for a little eye-rolling scorn.

So, to whoever at Funpause described Atlantis as having "innovative" gameplay: here's looking at you, kid. You should feel ashamed of yourself.

The reason this irritates me, on some level, is that so many of the casual games market themselves as being "intellectual" challenges, because of course moving blocks to align colors is a very sophisticated, intellectually rigorous activity. Yet I don't see any consciousness on the part of the makers of the games that the customers have a wider view of the gaming ecosystem. So the marketing talks to the customers as if they're smart, but acts as if the customers are dumb.

What I'd really like to see is one — just one — of these casual game makers who steps up and, on a regular basis, admits that they copy the ideas, and embraces it. "Yes, our new game, Rly'eh takes many game elements from Zuma, Luxor and Atlantis. We think you'll like it even better than those games, because it's shinier, and has Cthulhu in it. In fact, here's a link to Popcap, to Funpause, and to Mumbo Jumbo. Try all of our games. Buy the one you like."

I'd really like to see that. But I'm not going to hold my breath.

I Sing the Dinner Eclectic

2005-12-07 · by psu

We spend a lot of time pontificating on food on this site. So much so that often we are accused of being "foodies" or "food snobs". I categorically deny this accusation. A more accurate representation of my position is that I am a "food hobbyist" or "food obsessed."

The main line of the "food snob" attack is to make the claim that I am picky about the food that I consume. I suppose this could be true, but then it becomes hard to explain some of the favorite foods of my life. Consider that for the entire time I had moved away from Pittsburgh, I had almost monthly cravings for a beef dog with chili and cheese sauce from the O. Consider that I spent a large part of my childhood eating sandwiches made from white bread, slices of American cheese and Helmann's "Real" Mayonnaise. I have eaten and enjoyed the mystery meat sandwich at Chiodos. Cup Noodles for lunch is a staple. No antipasti plate is complete without both Proscuitto di Parma and Mortadella, which, as we all know, is basically the Italian version of Oscar Mayer Bologna.

I have also been known to eat things that most people would not want to even look at. One of my pet projects on our trips to Paris was to always pick a new organ meat, or other nasty looking dish to try. While I have not managed to try Tête de Veau, I have had Steak Tartare a few times and liked it. Raw seafood and sushi, especially the nasty eggy stuff, is also a favorite. And, an hour after I read Fast Food Nation, I went out and got a Mcdonald's hamburger and fries. Take that anti-industrial food production elitists!

Another avenue of the "food snob" attack is usually the accusation that I only like food that is difficult to obtain, difficult to prepare, or just plain expensive. This stab hits a bit closer to home. It is true that I arrange special trips around favorite food spots. It is also true that I have spent a larger than average percentage of my salary on a meal. And, there is no denying that I enjoy an occasional trip to a place specializing in sophisticated preparations and perhaps overly artistic presentation.

On the other hand, many of my special trips were into some of the more out of the way places in North Carolina to sit down at a picnic table and consume barbeque off of plastic plates with those wedge-shaped sections in them. In addition, I'll go to any number of cheap takeout joints, hot dog stands, greasy burger bars and road side lunch trucks before I would spend too much money in the majority of the soulless cookie-cutter "fine dining" establishments in this great country of ours. Money and pretension do not lead to culinary happiness. You have to work harder than that for it.

A final line of attack usually accuses me of dismissing food which is not "authentic" or in some sense properly prepared. People might point to my apparently psychotic hatred of P.F. Chang's as an indication that I am mentally unstable in this way. But again, I think this is a mischaracterization of my opinion. P.F. Chang's is not bad because it is not authentic. P. F. Chang's is bad because it is bad. The food is made with no more attention to detail and quality than a drunk guy vomiting out in the back alley behind the bar. The fact that they also get the sauce on the twice cooked pork wrong is a fairly minor sin compared to what is going on in the rest of the place.

In the end, my relationship with food is more complex than just bucketing places into large classes mapping to "good" and "sucks". That, in and of itself, is not a very interesting activity, and does not form the basis for my obsessive behavior. If I had to pick one guiding principle for my relationship to food, it would not be some platitude about quality ingredients, sustainable development, or artistic and authentic preparations. No, all I would say is that I believe that there is more to food than a question of biomass per penny, and my ultimate interest is in exploring this more complicated relationship.

Food is interesting to me because it represents one of the most important defining characteristics of the culture and history of a place. At a personal level, my interest comes from the fact that I took a lot of the food of my childhood for granted, and then discovered that it didn't exist in the world outside of my mother's house. I wanted it back. Luckily, I had my mother to tell me how to do it and a lot of time to practice. While I can't do everything that she used to, I have a lot of the basics covered. I still haven't figured out how she does that thing with plain celery though.

This is what I mean by history and culture. All of the great food is passed down not in the huge reference cookbooks, but from mother to daughter (or son) because at some point someone makes the discovery that there is more to the stuff they loved as a child than just opening a can of soup. The act of searching for and finding these traditions, and tasting what results from them drives my apparently irrational obsession for doing things like smuggling cheese that smells like dirty socks through customs in my carry-on luggage. This is why we went to the Slow Foods Pittsburgh event at Lidia's last weekend and gorged on fish until we staggered out of the place, bloated and almost ill. This is why we drive to Toronto for Dim Sum, or DC for pulled pork, or why we head back to my mom's place to get another plate of her pot stickers, or stewed ribs. I'm pretty sure those ribs are one of the reasons I ended up marrying my wife.

This illustrates another aspect of my relationship with food, which is that many of the important experiences of my life have centered around food. A large part of the search for new food experiences comes from trying to replicate old food experiences. We don't go back to Paris over and over again for the great scenery, the art museums, or the awesomely attractive populace. No, we go there to eat. We go to recapture that sense of discovery that we had the first time. The giddy wonder that you could walk into a random place off the street and have fish that was perfectly cooked. The rush of trying something that you are not sure will be great, but having it turn out OK. The even greater rush of discovering some completely new way of doing things that is just incredible, like a poached egg and Hollandaise on an artichoke salad, or a rare piece of veal liver. Who would have thought? We go back to re-experience old wonders and to search out new wonders, because the French food traditions are both wide and deep. There are so many things to try, and so many places to try them that my only real regret is that we won't ever manage to get to Italy and Spain and Portugal to do the same thing. Life is too short to find all the great ways to cook organ meat.

So, far from being a food snob, I claim that I am a food eclectic. My goal is to run out and find good eating in as many different forms as is practical in my limited amount of time on Earth. I do not require that the food be fancy. I do not require that the food look good. I do not even require that food smell good. All I require is that the food is prepared with care and a personal connection to its origins and history. If you can do that, I'll even eat that Jell-O mold and Cool Whip salad that you bring to the pot luck. Jell-O molds are a great American tradition and not to be taken lightly. They also remind me that my mom used to make almond flavored gelatin cubes and put them in canned fruit cocktail. Now that is good eating.

There is always more good eating to be found. You just have to go out and look for it.

Games I Don't Get

2005-12-08 · by peterb

Lego Star Wars.

OK, so it's a postmodern fusion of the Star Wars movies with LEGO design sensibilities.

Alright. I can accept that.

Lego Star Wars

Oh, Lego Liam Neeson. How you entice me.

I can be a Hello-Kitty-style-Lego-Liam-Neeson, wandering around a ship waving a lightsaber. A Lego lightsaber.

I'm down with that.

Fun, lighthearted gameplay. Check. Generous savepoints and light-to-nonexistent penalties for death. Right up my alley.

But there's one game mechanic that is very, very odd, in terms of narrative. Just about every object in the game can be destroyed. When things blow up, they turn into money. You then use the money at the bar — it turns out that Lego Jedis are serious alcoholics, who knew — to buy upgrades and slaves.

So I can deal with being a Lego man. I can deal with being a Lego Liam Neeson. I can deal with being a cute little Lego Liam Neeson with a cute little Lego frowny face running around kicking ass with a lightsabre in his hand.

But I can't deal with being a cute little Lego Liam Neeson with a cute little Lego frowny face running around kicking ass with a lightsabre and trashing the place like I'm Keith Moon because I can take the twisted remains of the furniture and pawn them for cash. It turns out that that's where I draw the line.

Sell Out

2005-12-09 · by peterb

In addition to the writing I do for this weblog, and my day job, I occasionally get the opportunity to work on other projects. One of them has bourne fruit, and I am now a paid and published game reviewer. My review of Civliization IV appears in the latest issue of played.todeath.com. Please feel free to give it a read (PDF format).

Hopefully, you'll read it in time to take Civilization IV off of your holiday gift lists.

Which brings me, once again, to the topic of game reviews, game reviewers, and why so many of them are so absolutely terrible. I think that I'm in a position to explain this clearly now.

Some of you may recall that I addressed this issue earlier in the year, where I pointed out that Game Girl Advance was engaging in some unjustified apologetics for unethical behavior on the part of a game magazine. The howls from some paid game reviewers shook the rafters. Their defenses were many, but most of them centered around either recharacterizing my argument as claiming that they were all being paid off in cash in a parking garage somewhere, or by simply asserting that, since I was not a professional writer, I simply didn't understand the time pressures and tradeoffs involved in writing a quality review.

So now that I'm officially a professional writer — although, thank God, not one who has to write for a living — I still think these writers are deluded. Video game reviews, on the whole, are terribly written. Let's think about why.

It helps, in this context, to look at counterexamples from other media. Film is the example most people choose. But today, I'm going to talk about automobile reviews.

Your average, run-of-the-mill car review, found in your nondescript, middle-American newspaper, is of more use to the consumer than your average, run-of-the-mill videogame review. In part, this is because there is more at stake. Cars are durable goods that people evaluate carefully before purchasing, and if you engage in puffery people will tend to notice very quickly, and complain about it.

It also stems from a vehicle's nature as a functional item. This is not to say that cars don't entertain — as anyone who has bought one can tell you, aesthetics matter — but that every car can be described in terms of how well it does any number of tasks. How does the gearbox feel? Is it responsive when you step on the throttle? How much body roll is there going around turns? How much space is there? Are the seats comfortable?

Furthermore, everyone is very aware that different vehicles cost differing amounts of money. The key question we look to car reviewers to answer is not "Is this car good," but "Is this car a good value." A review that simply says "The BMW M6 is awesome!" without any reference to other vehicles you can get at the same price point is an utterly useless review.

Let's look at the BBC 2 TV show Top Gear. This show is incredibly addictive, and watched and enjoyed by a lot of my friends, many of whom don't even care about cars. The show's hosts are opinionated, to the point of being crushingly rude about vehicles that they don't like. But even in their most cruel and cutting reviews, they find time to mention that the car gets good fuel economy for its class, or that it has a lot of cargo space. Even in their most fawning, adulatory paeans to £400,000 cars, they find the time to mention that the fit and finish on the bodywork is garbage, or that the knobs on the radio are silly, or that the trip computer is hateful.

Game reviews — generally — are not written like this. Sure, they tend to divide the game into sections, and then purport to analyze them, but they don't, in my view, answer the fundamental questions. To pick just one example, none of the "best game EVAR" reviews of Civilization IV that you can find on Metacritic choose to mention that the game is amazingly crashy, or that it's user interface is worse than its predecessor. One excuse you find people making is that games are primarily entertainment content. That's sort of true, but sort of not. A game is not just like a movie. A game is like a movie, but it is also like a car. A game is entertainment, but it's also, in a very real and practical sense, a functional device.

It's not simply a matter of reviewers disagreeing with my opinion. More importantly, in none of the reviews I've read on Civ IV do I see a discussion of value. When discussing automobiles, it's easy to compare value because cars are sold at so many price points. Value is largely a matter of comparing the vehicle to other cars in its class, and to other cars at its price point. In games, the hidden variable is time. How much time will it take you to play the game? How many hours of enjoyment will the game offer, versus hours of mindless drudgery? How many hours will you spend on the tech support line, trying to find out why the sound stutters?

I'll reduce it to a simple rule of thumb. I don't care what game you're reviewing. I don't care how perfect (or flawed) it is. I don't care how pressed for time you are. If you can't find one bad thing to say about a game (or, in the case of a negative review, one good thing), then you are not doing your job.

So why don't most of the reviews of Civ IV condescend to mention that the game, as delivered in the box, is buggier than a prison cafeteria? I have a theory.

Game reviewers, like everyone else, are subject to the phenomenon of the latent object of desire. Most game reviewers are not software engineers. They don't see the meat that goes in to the sausage. As such, they are unreasonably optimistic about game publishers, particulary PC game publishers, ability to fix problems in patches. It's not just game reviewers. Everyone thinks that software engineering is easy. The other day I was visiting Slashdot and read an article whose thesis was, and I am not kidding, "Why doesn't Microsoft just fix the bugs?" I nearly choked on the sandwich I was eating, and several quarts of my own bile, out of sympathy for the person in Redmond who was going to read that and instantly have a brain aneurysm.

Game reviewers, I believe, approach games with this optimistic attitude, and they don't want to be a downer, so if there's a bug and if the game is by a reputable publisher, they just think "Hey, no big deal. They'll just fix that in the patch. Since the article I'm writing won't be published for another month, it might be fixed by the time people read it. Sure, the game doesn't actually work, but I'm sure that's just a simple matter of programming. I was having a lot of fun before the game crashed. I'll just think happy thoughts and say the game is a surefire candidate for Game of the Year."

I can't do that. I know you, Firaxis. I've been in your shoes. I was in the room with you when the architect said "Hey, I've got this great idea. Why don't we make all the objects in the game fully 3D?" I was reading the memo the junior engineer circulated that compared various 3D libraries, and recommended that you take the one that was cheapest because it had newer features, and besides, none of your customers would be using an old videocard anyway. I attended the presentation from the consultant who informed you that as long as your save game file format was XML, implementing it would take 3 days and it would be impossible for there to be any bugs. I was there. You dropped features, decided not to fix bugs, and skimped on Q/A because you had to make the Holiday season. I feel for you. I'm really really sorry you had to go through it, and I know that you don't feel any better about it than I do.

But there's one thing I can't do for you, Firaxis. I can't look at the pile of bugs you delivered and call it a good game. In the end, the choice about when to ship, and what to ship, was yours. And you blew it. So when people ask me what I think about the game, I have to be honest with them. I have to tell them the truth.

That seems, sadly, to make me an unusual game reviewer. If that also makes me a poor one, then so be it.

I approached the Civilization IV review, very deliberately, as an attempt to write a review about a game as if I was reviewing a car. I tried to write it as if I were one of the presenters on Top Gear.

I'm sure that my writing isn't as colorful as Jeremy Clarkson's. But I hope, in the end, that it is still fun to read, and that you find the review useful. If you have questions or comments on the played.todeath.com review, feel free to comment on it here, or send a letter to the editor.

One Shining Moment

2005-12-12 · by psu

One great grenade

Since I finished Half-Life 2 I have not been playing with the consoles much. I think this has to do with something in my subconcious that loses interest in games every time I finish a Half-Life title. But, this weekend I fired up Halo 2 and tried out the "Rumble Armory" playlist, which I had not seen before. Immediately, I ended up in a sniper game with jch.

For me, a sniper game means that I run around and try to sneak up behind someone and beat them down before I get shot. I suck with the rifle. There is no point in denying it.

So there I was, running through the rocky valley of the Burial Mounds, and I saw jch in close quarters with some other guy. They were circling each other, firing their rifles in a spastic dance of mutual destruction. I saw this from slightly above them and from very very far away. So I did the obvious thing. I heaved a grenade half-way across the map, over two huge rocks, and hoped that it would land somewhere near the two victims.

A few seconds layer, I got my payoff. The grenade exploded, I got the little "You killed" message on my screen, and I heard jch screaming bullshit into the headset. This shining moment is archived forever in the game viewer at bungie. The image above shows my little avatar with an arrow to where the grenade landed, killing jch's little avatar.

Small pleasures.

Lentil Stew

2005-12-13 · by psu

Here is a quick recipe to pass the time. We found a version in a cookbook or magazine that starts with a nice set of ingredients. So we decided to make it one night.

You start with around a pound, or 2 cups, of French green lentils. Clean them as you need to.

You also collect the following:

  1. 2 or 3 stalks of celery, cut up. The recipe said to "roughly chop" the celery. What they mean by this is to dice it small. You know. Slice the stalk in half lengthwise... twice if you need to. Then turn it and cut it into little cubes. Rough little cubes.

  2. 1 large onion or two medium ones. Cut these the same as the celery.

  3. 2 carrots, cut up the same way.

  4. A few pieces of prosciutto. The recipe calls for 4 to 6oz. What they mean by this is 4oz of the ham and at least the same amount of sausage, in little pieces.

  5. Salt, pepper, thyme, bay leaves, and so on.

At this point, the recipe says to put the lentils, meat, vegetables and herbs into a pot, add enough water to cover and then some, and then cook it for 45min or something.

What they mean is that you should sauté the vegetables in olive oil and salt and pepper until they get soft. Then add the meat and sauté some more. Then add the lentils and stir them around. Now add water, chicken stock and white wine to the pot until you have a bit of liquid above the solids. Then add the herbs and more salt and pepper to taste. Bring to a boil, then turn the heat down and simmer for as long as you need to to get the lentils soft.

The recipe then babbles something about taking some of the lentils out and putting them in a blender, and then putting them back in. I would skip that part and just put the stew over rice or bread and eat it.

It's a good thing we have recipes to tell us how to make food. Otherwise we'd be lost.

Dollars to Donuts

2005-12-14 · by peterb

It's hard for me to remember the first game I played on a personal computer. Arguably, "Dancing Demon" by Leo Christopherson, for the TRS-80 Model I might qualify; that would have been in 1979. I don't recall there being a lot of actual gameplay there, but I remember thinking it was very, very cool. On the heels of that would have been various text adventure games — Zork, certainly, among others — that I played while camped out at the local Radio Shack. Later in 1979, I remember seeing (and becoming addicted to) George Blank's Santa Paravia and Fiumaccio, a game that is still fun and playable on modern platforms, even today. This game is, ironically, the precursor to many of today's "God games." Such as Civilization IV.

NORAD

NORAD

The first game I played on a computer that I actually owned was, if I recall correctly, NORAD for the Apple ][. That would have been in 1982. It was pirated, of course. I'd send a tenner to the authors of it, but I can't, because I don't know who wrote it, and apparently neither does anyone else. If you know, please leave a comment and clue me in.

NORAD was a simple game. At its heart, it was a variant of Atari's classic Missile Command, but it had a style all of its own, a style that was pure home computer. You didn't just have three missile bases, you had ten, numbered 1 through 0, one for each city you were protecting. Cities could take several nukes before they were completely destroyed. To launch an anti-ballistic missile, you typed the number corresponding to the base you wanted. You could steer the missile, up to a point, with the arrow keys. And when you hit the space bar, the missile exploded, hopefully taking out the incoming enemy ICBM with it.

The audio in the game was masterful for 1983. Everything was scratchy and irritating, fingernails-on-a-blackboard, static and razor wire. The action was frenetic and the scenario devastating. It was, and still is, the perfect home computer arcade game. I spent many hours saying "Just one more game" over NORAD. In the end, isn't that one of the signs of a great game?

Incidentally, I never once had it lock up or crash. Welcome to PC gaming.

If you have an Apple ][ emulator (find one here, for Windows, or here, for MacOS), you can download and play NORAD today. Try it out and let me know what you think.

FOTR, TTT:EE, OMG The Pain

2005-12-15 · by psu

Why, you might ask, am I going to write about movies that have been out on DVD for two years?

Well, new TV in hand, we sat down to watch some big movies. The biggest movies that we have are the Peter Jackson Lord of the Rings trilogy. When these were released on DVD, I originally picked up the extended versions, not so much for the extra film material, but more for the commentaries and documentaries. I'm a sucker for that stuff. I neglected, however, to buy the theatrical DVDs, except for The Fellowship of the Ring.

Having worked through the non-extended FOTR, and most of the extended TTT, I have to say that with the benefit of hindsight and time, the theatrical cuts are unquestionably the better films.

Now, this should not be surprising. Jackson himself repeats over and over again that the extended versions of the films are not supposed to be a director's cut, or the canonical versions of the movies. The extra material was just there because they had shot it, and they thought that people would find it interesting even though for various reasons it did not make the final cut of the theatrical films.

When the extended Fellowship was released, it was pretty clear that the extra footage was glued on mostly for the fan boys and completist freaks than out of any consideration for the film itself. Every time you hit one of the extra scenes in Fellowship the film grinds to a deathly halt, and by the third hour you just want to get on with it already.

By comparison, the theatrical FOTR is tightly paced and while it is often leisurely, it never drags. The story always moves forward, rather than standing still. Exposition and development are deftly overlapped with the emerging story. You don't really appreciate how carefully and wisely constructed the theatrical cut of the film is until you see what was taken out. So, in this way, the extended cut does its job. While a weaker film than the theatrical release, it does serve to provide you with insights into the original film that you might have missed the first time through. But, I never found much reason to watch it again.

The Two Towers surprised me though. With two years of shelf time, my opinion has completely changed. Originally, I thought that this was the weakest of the theatrical releases, and that much of the extra material in the extended version made it better. After a run through over the last couple of nights, I have to say that I was wrong. There are entire scenes in the extended film that do nothing but summarize the film that you have just watched. There are a few of the additions that do add to the context and background of major characters and storylines. But, they do not add that much, and I think that on the whole, cutting them was the right choice. Finally, there are various additions that are just complete drek (scenes involving stew, for example) and were justifiably thrown on the cutting room floor and probably should not have been brought back.

Overall, my opinion of the extended TTT is now much like that of the extended FOTR. I think that Jackson has achieved his goal of providing fun bits of extra detail and insight into the characters that inhabit the movie. And, having watched them, you can bring this extra knowledge to your appreciation of the shorter versions of each film.

However, I will no longer tell people that the extended Two Towers is more enjoyable. Because we are not even to Helm's Deep yet, and I just want them to get on with it already.

Unrelated Note

The TV looks great with these DVDs, even using my crappy old 480i DVD player.

Status Report

2005-12-19 · by peterb

Current obsession: Travian, a browser-based MMOG. I am still in the honeymoon period, which means the game proper hasn't actually started, since I have a couple of more days before the pillaging hordes can destroy my village. I'll write a proper review then.

Travian looks like Settlers of Catan, but it isn't.

Speaking of which, if you want to play Settlers of Catan, you should try AsoBrain's Xplorers. Online Catan. They also have a fairly nice clones of several other games, as well.

The PC is Dead, Long Live the PC

2005-12-20 · by psu

Pete, as usual, has generated a lot of comment traffic with his recent rantings about whether or not it is the fault of the developer when a game on a PC is a crashy piece of crap. For the most part, the battle lines are drawn along the question of whether the PC as a platform is just too complicated and intractable to make an enjoyable and reliable vehicle for interactive entertainment.

The problem is that the PC is by its nature not a single platform. Every single PC is essentially its own unique platform with its own unique set of problems. This means that everything that you run on the average PC has the potential to become a crashy piece of shit, arguably through no fault of its own. What this means is that whenever one buys a game to play on a PC, it is implicit in the contract that one will also be beta-testing the driver and other system level interfaces between the game and the rest of the PC. As a result, even in products that are relatively bug free, a lot of people get crashes and other annoyances.

This may be a fact of life, and I can understand the engineering reasons that might make it a fact of life. But, one shouldn't be deluded into thinking that it is OK. It isn't OK. For example, I know multiple people who have had a game or the system crash while playing a certain game because of cooling problems in the PC. Why should I have to worry about the cooling architecture of the machine in order to play a game on it? I suppose some people want to engage in the meta-game of whack-a-mole to find the workable configuration on which many games do not crash. They can be my guest. I lost interest in that kind of thing around the time I graduated from high school.

Stuff should just work. If PC gaming wants to climb out of the grave that it is slowly digging for itself, it must come to terms with this issue.

But, I am not here to bury PC gaming. That's been done in other places by other people who are probably better at it than me. I am here to bury the general purpose PC as a computing platform. I used to be skeptical of the notion that the world would be populated not by the general purpose computers of my youth, but by special purpose machines that could only do one thing and could not be upgraded or reprogrammed. What a waste, thinks the brain of the engineer when confronted by this vision. All of that hardware and I can't even use it to write code? Why would anyone want that? Flexibility and programmability, it seemed to me, were the major leverage points that set my beloved machines apart from everything that had come before. Here was a machine that could do anything as long as you could find the right representation.

Of course, as we have all found out, flexibility is both the shining glory of the computing machine and the instrument of its downfall. We can hook the machines up on the network for instantaneous communication with others thousands of miles away. We can do the same thing and spread email worms and other pain at the same lightning speed. You can program the machine to be any kind of environment that you want, but what this means is that like PC games, what you end up with is a machine that not only never works, but will not tell you why it doesn't work.

The Axiom of Choice states that to fight complexity, you limit flexibility. But for computers, this has never really worked. Many organizations have a vested interest in keeping the general purpose PC alive. Also, many people who buy computers are not after simple machines that work. They are after toys to tinker with, things to fix. These and other factors play into the entrenched position that the general purpose PC has in the world. I don't think that most people who buy a computer to surf the web and look at pictures really want or need what we are selling them. But it's all that is there.

However, this does not mean that we do not have more and more single purpose computing machines in our lives. Even though the systems used for computing have not been evolving towards a simpler future, something has happened that my past skeptical self did not notice. More and more single purpose devices in the world are really just simple computers, designed to do a single thing well and not crash all the time. Off the top of my head, here are the obvious and not so obvious ones:

  1. Xbox, PS2, Gamecube
  2. DVD player
  3. iPod
  4. My car (although my car crashes more than my iPod).
  5. Tivo
  6. My oven (horrible user interface)
  7. My TV. Probably more raw image processing power here than in the game consoles or a high end PC. Does not crash as much.
  8. My cell phone.
  9. GPS
  10. The cash register at the Giant Eagle. Well, OK, these actually run Windows, but I bet you can't install software on them.

I also find that while my general purpose computers are as complex as ever, one way that I try to tame that complexity is by limiting what I do with them to a variety of narrowly targeted tasks. So, the iMac does nothing but run iTunes. My office machine is only used to write code, send email, and edit specifications. My laptop is mostly for photo processing, writing, and web surfing. And so on. This limits what I install on the machines and thus limits the complexity of the configurations.

It seems obvious to me that the next natural step should be to continue to simplify the general purpose computer to make them easier to use and easier to set up. An obvious place to be doing this is in extending the Tivo idea to the "living room computer" or "media center PC". Of course, since engineers and PC manufacturers are building these machines, this is not what happens. Instead what we end up with is machines that are very flexible, but hard to set up and hard to run. In the long term, if PC gaming is any indication, this is the wrong tradeoff. Hopefully in a few years, I'll be writing my blog rant on a special writing machine, and then reading it back on my web surfing tablet while playing Halo 6 on my Xbox 9. Dare to dream.

"What Were They Thinking?"

2005-12-21 · by peterb

To make any consumer product, thousands of decisions must be made. Inevitably, no one can get all of those decisions right. Even the best-designed gadget or toy will still have some mistakes in design or execution.

Despite this, there are certain moves some companies make that go beyond bad, into the realm of the bewildering.

If I was feeling snarky — and let's face it, when am I not? — I might use this space to take some cheap shots. For instance, I might opine that having Civilization IV — a turn-based strategy game played, largely, by old, slow people— require the latest, cutting-edge 3D video cards, was one such decision.

But there are better targets for my ire tonight. Because tonight, I screwed up. I tried to watch a DVD.

Over a year ago, psu wrote convincingly in this space about the stupidity of DVD menus. And that's all still true: film companies still spend tens of thousands of dollars producing fancy animated DVD menus that nobody, anywhere in the entire world, since the very beginning of time, has ever wanted. The animated menus serve one and only one purpose, and that is to make me want to fly to Los Angeles so I can strangle whoever designed them.

But the people who come up with the animated menus might as well be saints compared to whoever designs the parts that come before the menu.

Look. I'm a fair-minded man. I am a capitalist. You want to put an advertisement before the main menu? Fine. You want to put two ads before the main menu? Be my guest. You want to put sixty-two ads before the main menu? Knock yourself out.

But if you disable the buttons on my DVD controller while you're playing those ads, then it's all over. The terrorists have already won. Don't come crying to me when people all across the world are bittorrenting your movies. You deserve it. I hope they steal your stuff. I hope you don't make any money at all. I hope you starve to death.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got a DVD I need to take back to Best Buy.

Cookie Discoveries

2005-12-22 · by psu

I made two cookie discoveries in the Target today. This is a bit odd. You don't expect to go to the Target to find out stuff about cookies.

My first discovery is that Target is the last local outlet around here that gets the good Carr's crackers. I like the thick wheat crackers, especially with blue cheese (mmmm, Stilton). For some reason every local purveyor of overpriced yuppie food in town has stopped carrying them. Even the normally reliable Penn Mac did not have them the last time I was there except in the sampler pack. I hate sampler packs.

So I was in the Target picking up Fig Newtons for the trip home, and lo and behold there was a whole shelf of Carr's crackers. When did Target become a local purveyor of overpriced foofy food?

While standing there and hoarding the crackers, I noticed something else interesting on the next shelf. "Key Lime" cookies. This stirred memories of cookies from my childhood, when I used to eat these round cookeis out of a green box that had fake lemon powder all over them. I now want these cookies. Happily, the "Key Lime" cookies were almost identical to what I remember eating as a child, except they are stick shaped instead of round.

So the mystery remains, what are these round cookies that I remember?

Twenty minutes in Google digs them up: Lemon Coolers.

Who else remembers these cookies? Apparently, they have been discontinued. Another casualty of the cut-hroat competition in pre-packaged artificially flavored cookies.

At least Target has the same thing now. I think I will now buy all my cookies at Target.

Talents I Don't Have

2005-12-23 · by peterb

Wrapping presents.

I just wrapped a Christmas present, lumpily. I couldn't find any scotch tape, so I used surgical tape. It looks exactly as bad as you might imagine.

The Name of the Game

2005-12-26 · by peterb

I, like a number of people, have a few days of unexpected leisure at my disposal in the days leading up to New Years.

So instead of me helping you, here's your chance to help me: pick a relatively new "casual" game that you think it fun, and talk about it in the comments. Give me something new to play. Bonus points if it runs on both PC and Mac.

I'll start the bidding by telling you that you that if you like words, you should surely go download Bonnie's Bookstore. (I know a Mac version exists — I helped beta-test it — but it's not available from that page for some reason. I've asked the author to clarify).

Next Gen Meh

2005-12-27 · by psu

I just found out that like the PSP, the Nintendo DS has a delicious instant sleep feature.

Chances that either of the new next-gen home consoles have the same feature implemented in the OS and not in the stupid game: practically zero.

Chances that any of the next-gen games are really any better than Mario and Luigi: also practically zero.

My personal interest in buying a 360 to play anything but Madden 360: waning.

The Real Thing

2005-12-28 · by psu

The search for the true and authentic culinary experience occupies the mind of all of the food obsessed people of the world. Real Chinese. Real cheese. Real barbecue. Real sushi. The list goes on and on. Entire magazines and cookbooks dedicated to the objectively correct or best way to cook this or that. There is even a world-wide semi-political movement whose solitary goal is to preserve the traditional food culture of Europe and beyond against the attack of the faceless corporations.

But Real Food is hard to pin down. People disagree about basic facts. In Eastern North Carolina, Real BBQ sauce is tomato-free. In Western North Carolina, it has tomatoes. Northern Chinese food uses a lot of bread and baked goods. Southern Chinese food is spicier, and has more rice and noodles. Many people claim, incorrectly, that it is proper to put ketchup on a hot dog. Others would have you believe that when constructing a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, you should put the peanut butter and jelly on different slices of bread. This is, of course, stupid.

On the other hand, Real Food is certainly not some completely subjective relativistic construction. There are things which are just wrong. Vegan fake meat tofu roast "turkey" dinners are wrong. Experiments in "fusion" cuisine usually come out wrong. You know the sort of thing I mean. You look at the menu and see Spring rolls Alaska (smoked Scottish nova lox, served with neufchatel cheese and Australasian capers, on a sesame-infused roll) with a hominy polenta remoulade. Your heart sinks.

Outside of certain areas of the country, barbecue is almost always wrong. Most of what is served as "barbecue" in Pittsburgh, for example, is actually just braised meat that has been chopped up and then simmered in some kind of gravy for days on end. What then ends up in the sandwich has no real relationship to meat much less slow smoked pork shoulder.

Finally, who can forget the endless parade of single-brown-sauce "Chinese" takeout joints that cover almost every mile of our great country. It may be hard to pin down Real Food, but it's certainly easy to find the fake stuff.

I rambled earlier about how the search for new food experiences was at the core of my relationship with food and eating. I also think that this is the core of the answer to the question "Where does Real Food come from?". For me, Real Food comes from that experience of discovering that there is this whole other group of people who have been getting the good stuff for their whole lives and you've been missing out. Real Food experiences change you in ways that normal food experiences do not.

One time we had some friends and their family over for pot stickers. The family is from Italy, and did not have broad experience with Chinese food. So I did the best I could to replicate my mother's dumplings. I have gotten pretty good at it, but mine really still aren't close. Anyway, I remember that their young son was not all that impressed by the pot stickers. But then, a few weeks later, we ran into our friends, and they had gone out to a local Chinese joint of ill-repute and ordered the dumplings. At that point, the young son was much more impressed with mine. I can only imagine that if he actually had the Real stuff over at my mom's place, he'd be even happier.

I can remember dozens of food experiences like this one from my adult life. There was that first hit of a perfect cappuccino. The first time I got real smokey slow-cooked pork down in Carolina. Soft Shell crabs cooked just right. The bread pudding soufflé at the Commander's Palace. Real raw milk cheese. Fresh oysters on the San Juan islands. Steamed live shrimp in L.A. I could go on all night. In each case, my view of the food world was completely changed by taking one bite of the dish. I would say that outside of music, this is the closest thing to the sort of transformative experience that brings people to religion that I have had.

The only reason I bring up religion is a great scene in a great food movie called Big Night that actually makes the point for me. The Chef at a restaurant is hoping to obtain the affections of the woman who delivers the flowers. So he is cooking something simple back in the kitchen, a sauté of vegetables and tomatoes, I think. He tosses the stuff in the pan with some oil and seasoning, stirs it around and then gives her a taste, and all she can say is: "Oh my God. OH MY GOD."

His reply is something like: 'God is right, because to eat good food is to be close to God. "

This, I think, is where Real Food comes from. It is when you take that first bite of something new, and you are changed forever. It is the moment that separates the you that has not yet eaten the Real Thing from the you that has. It is the moment that you realize that while you might have missed out on the good stuff until now, next time you'll know where to find it, so you won't have to miss out any more.

If that is what it means to be close to God, then I'll take it.

Epileptic Fit Hot Chocolate

2005-12-29 · by peterb

My typical recipe for drinking chocolate involves cocoa powder, whole milk, a pinch of salt, and some vanilla. No sugar. Chocolate is supposed to be bitter. A pinch of cayenne pepper will serve, too.

But sometimes, once in a blue moon, on a particularly bad day, you have to do something different. Here's one way to do it.

This recipe sprang from a fundamental misunderstanding about hot chocolate in Madrid. You only ever eat churros and chocolate at 4 in the morning after being out drinking all night. So of course, when trying to replicate the recipe I used Drunk Guy Logic. It goes like this:

Yum. Chocolate good. Thog like chocolate. Chocolate thick. Thog like thick chocolate. Thog wonder how pretty Madrid seÃ’orita make chocolate so thick. Mmmmmmmmm, chocolate. Thog think pretty Madrid lady probably just put lots of chocolate in. Yeah, that it. Thog sure.

You see, it never occurred to Thog that they used corn starch. What can I say. It was 4 in the morning.

So, I eventually figured out how to replicate the experience of Madrid chocolate, without using corn starch. There are a few key differences between my recipe and the authentic one. First, and most importantly, it is not served to you by a cute madrileÃ’o or madrileÃ’a. Second, it's a bit more of a pain to make. Third, if you drink too much of it, you will go into a chocolate overdose seizure, and die.

Ingredients

Keep the chocolate wrapped in its paper. Have a friend hold the bar in mid air. Thwack the bar near the end with the ball-peen hammer, shattering it. Take off some large pieces — you're looking for maybe between a half pound and a pound of chocolate — and put them in your double boiler or bain marie. Heat on medium, checking every 5 minutes or so. Try not to mess with it too much.

Try to not get any water at all (including condensation from steam) into the chocolate. If any water does get into the chocolate, it will seize up and harden. If this happens, don't panic. The solution to water in your chocolate is, counterintuitively, to add more water and mix it in, until it flows again.

Once the choclate is soft and molten, add milk and stir. It should still be somewhat thick even after adding the milk; if you used a sufficiently stupidly huge chunk of chocolate to start with, and a small saucepan, you probably won't be able to thin it out too much. Heat it through. Serve when the little pieces of chocolate that re-solidified when you added the milk are melted again.

When drinking this with friends, always make sure at least one person abstains. That person can be the one to call 911.

You might die. But you'll die happy.

Because it is bitter, and because it is my heart

2006-01-02 · by peterb

Every time I've tried fair trade coffee, I've had bad luck. But Green LA Girl has good things to say about it, and I like the way she writes, so I will keep trying it until I find a good one.

Today the Starbucks downstairs from my office was selling CafÈ Estima, their fair trade blend, fresh. So I had to get a cup to try it out.

My initial impression was nice: it has a light body, and seemed to avoid the overburnt taste that many Starbucks blends have. The body is light, almost thin, but that's not such a bad thing. The front notes, in other words, were all good. The middle taste was not very daring, but that's ok. I like a bit of a sour note in my coffee, and this didn't have really any boldness on that front at all. But it was still drinky.

On the back end, however, CafÈ Estima loses big time. It's bitter. I don't mean bitter as in "coffee," which is good, but bitter as in "medicine," which is bad. The overall effect was that I was wondering who had snuck into Starbucks and dosed my coffee with stale quinine. Worse, the taste lingers for a long, long time. The only solution is to drink more, thus overwhelming the finishing taste, until you swallow, or to eat or drink something else afterwards. "I need to eat something else to get the taste of this coffee out of my mouth" isn't my idea of a fabulous taste extravaganza.

I'll keep looking for a good fair trade coffee. Starbucks "Komodo Dragon" roast is quite good. They call that a "pacific ring" coffee, which for all I know, probably means the raw coffee beans are picked by heroin-addicted sex-slave orphans in Myanmar. Therefore, my working theory is still "oppression and exploitation makes the coffee taste better."

WWDDOCD (World Wide Distributed Dork OCD)

2006-01-03 · by psu

Regular readers will recall that I have recently forked over a large amount of cash on a piece of A/V equipment. I gave up a small piece of my soul for a Sony television larger than my entire living room. Well, it's really only as large as one wall of the living room, but you know what I mean. I believe that this was a good purchase, and DVDs have never looked so nice.

Of course, I made the mistake of reading the Internet forums about the TV.

There is a force in the universe that binds the dork hobbyists of the world together in a giant hive-mind. This force is more powerful than any human emotion. More powerful than any level of rationality. More powerful than the millions of years of evolution that have guided our speces to the point where we can create moving images from an assembly of millions of microscopic mirrors. This force is distributed dork hobbyist OCD.

Imagine if you will the common dork in his (it's always a guy) natural habitat. He is sitting in his living room with his new toy. For the purposes of this article, we can assume that the new toy is a big screen television, but this detail is not important.

The toy has just been purchased and is being integrated into the web of toys that occupy the living room. What the dork most wants now is to sit down and enjoy the toy. Unfortunately, this enjoyment will never occur. Just as the device is hooked up and configured, the room will be filled by the call of all the other dorks in the universe pleading with our hero to provide an evaluation of the new toy so that all may bask in the glory of his new purchase. These messages will work at a subliminal level to make the dork critique the device, rather than enjoy it. He will feel the need to calibrate, test, and calibrate some more. Soon, the device will be used to do nothing but process the same "test" material over and over again, ad nasuem. In the end, even the smallest fault in the device under test will be amplified into a fatal flaw. Enjoyment of the device now impossible, the dork's only recourse is to search the world for another latent object which will perform better than the one he bought.

And that was before we had the Internet.

The Internet has acted like a parabolic dish that has captured and focussed the force of dork OCD into a single point of overwhelming power. The week that I bought my TV, I found a single set of forum threads about it that contained about ten thousand messages. The evolution of the thread is fascinating. The first few hundred messages are about where one might obtain the TV. The next few dozen are overwhelmingly positive messages from ecstatic owners of new televisions. Then, a couple of small questions appear about this or that small problem. A color balance error in the shadows, a strange non-uniformity in the color while the TV warms up, strange compatibility issues with the HDMI ports. These pass by almost unnoticed, at first, but at this point the seeds of future discontent have been planted.

Soon, the floodgates open, and the thread is inundated with messages from people who swear up and down that the blacks are not uniformly black, and this is a fatal flaw, and why isn't Sony doing anything about it and all you have to do to see this is watch the televsion in the dark while it is set to an input that has nothing hooked up. Some people see blue splotches. Some people see green. A few see other colors. People are soon taking pictures of their televisions set to an input with no active signal in a pitch dark room. The television is declared fatally broken because of a display artifact that appears when you are not watching TV.

This is the power of WWDDOCD. It can take grown men with advanced degrees and chew up their souls to such an extent that they are reduced to sitting alone in the dark watching a television that is hooked up to nothing but the power socket and the air around him. Truly the universe is a cruel place.

Kind of Blue Meanie

2006-01-04 · by peterb

Today, psu discovered that he had an extra copy of Miles Davis' seminal jazz recording Kind of Blue. So, he gave it to me. My last copy of this was a cassette tape that I lost some years ago, and I never got around to repurchasing it.

But I'm one of those people who always look a gift horse in the mouth. What I should have done was just say "Thank you." But I couldn't help it. Almost instinctively, my mind started generating responses to this gift that had but a single purpose: to make psu cry. He even helped, and contributed one. Here they are:

10. Miles Davis? He was the keyboardist for Duran Duran, right?

9. Oh, my favorite part of Kind of Blue is that drum cadence where the guys in the zoot suits all whirl their girls around, right before the "everybody start to swing!" chorus.

8. I remember exactly where I was when I heard that Miles Davis had died of a heroin overdose.

7. Bop has been so influential. I mean, the impact on Cyndi Lauper's classic "She Bop" alone is immeasureable.

6. Kind of Blue pioneered a trance-like "modal" jazz sound. Later, people decided that modeless interfaces were better.

5. Thanks so much for this album! In return, I want to give you this recording of the San Francisco Gay Men's Chorus performing their tribute to Blind Lemon Jefferson, Kind of Pink.

4. Oh! Wait! I know this "So What" song. The Kenny G version is smokin'!

3. I read the liner notes, but they were kind of boring, and I couldn't find the lyrics. What's up with that?

2. When I listen to this in my audio room on my Krell amp and my Martin Logan speakers, wired with Monster cable and using only the finest power conditioners to avoid AC noise, the soundstage lacks depth, and the transparency of some of the brass is a bit gritty. Overall, I'd say this recording is sub-par.

1. It's sort of weird — I heard this live, and it was as if it were a totally different song.

Additional Resources

No, Really

2006-01-05 · by peterb

It is just completely wrong that Shadow Hearts: Covenant has a "T for Teen" rating.

Surely, Mr. Sommelier alone is worth at least 2 months of therapy, all by himself. Click to see the picture, if you dare, but don't say I didn't warn you.

The Year in Games

2006-01-06 · by psu

Now that everyone else has already done their own roundup of the year in games, it's my turn to jump in, late as usual. At this point, there is not that much to be gained from just telling you that Resident Evil 4 was completely 733t or that Half-Life 2 pwns! So instead, I will declare 2005 the year that I became a crack-addled gaming zombie, and I completely blame peterb and tilt for doing this to me. In this spirit, here is a list of the top five games that I finished in 2005 which I would have completely ignored in 2004. Actually, what I mean is, if I saw the game on a shelf at my local emporium in 2004, and the guy told me he'd give me the game free, I probably would have turned him down and gone home and played Madden.

5. Shadow Hearts: Covenant (Japanese Gay Porn RPG)

Considering everything that this title has going against it (stultifying gameplay, long winded cut scenes with ludicrous dialog and horrific voice acting, juvenile "story", crazy collecting side quests involving porn), I can't believe I ever decided to pick it up. I must have decided that I had to make sure once and for all that Japanese RPGs were to be avoided. Of course, as we all know, I ended up really enjoying the game and buying more JPRGs. Life is pretty unfair.

4. Resident Evil 4 (Survival Horror)

Survival horror games are characterized by cheap scares, gameplay that is long on atmosphere and short on reasonable mechanics, stupid puzzles, crappy cameras and hordes of zombies that are hard to kill. Since I hate all of these things, I was hoping that Resident Evil 4 was different, and it was. This shooter wrapped up in a tweaked horror engine (moving and aiming are slow, there are still lots of stupid puzzles) is good for hours and hours of zombie killing goodness. And now you can play the "looks like ass" version on the PS2 as well!

3. God of War (Platformy combat game)

The first platform action game that I tried on my new Xbox was Ninja Gaiden. The game chewed me up and spit my ground up bones on the ground. And that was just the demo. Clearly I lacked the speed, coordination, and third-person camera decoding skills to actually play games like this. God of War is for all those old slow guys who want to pretend that they are 15 and still agile so they can beat the crap out of endless hordes of enemies. I had fun with that for a couple of weeks, but in retrospect the game is pretty disturbingly juvenile and stupid.

2. Lumines (Tetris puzzle game with a disco beat)

This one is a cheat because I didn't "finish" it yet. I don't like Tetris. I don't like puzzle games. I don't really like techno. I will play Lumines late into the night until my eyes bleed. 'Nuff said.

1. Ico (Platformy adventure/puzzle game)

Slow pacing, a crappy third person camera, and a seemingly endless puzzle-filled escort quest. I suffered a lot with this game. But reaching the end, I was surprised to find out that a video game can actually generate an emotional response more complicated than adrenaline filled euphoira. Since this is a list of 2005 games, I also have to include Shadow of the Colossus which provides a similar experience, though the game is drastically different in construction and execution.

An optimist would look at this list and declare that I have grown in my appreciation of the craft and art of the video game, and am now more open to new experiences, rather than being closed up in the narrow genres that I used to enjoy. They might be right. I even bought Indigo Prophecy, although I'm not that far into it yet. Madden and Halo are still more fun though.

Change is Bad

2006-01-10 · by psu

Earlier this week, I tried the Beta of the new tool from Adobe called Lightroom. The lesson I learned was: never try new tools.

On the surface, the beta appeared to work pretty well. Import was reasonably fast, and the application seemed to support my workflow well. It takes a bit more time to bring your photos in, but it keeps a preview image around in its library so that the library will stay usable as a meta-database even if the pictures themselves go offline. This allows you to keep the library on your laptop (say) and archive the pictures to other larger external drives or DVD. Perfect.

Then I tried to run Photoshop. Crash.

I quit Lightroom. Tried to run Photoshop again. Crash. Reboot. Crash.

I decided that I really should have tried Photoshop CS2 all those months ago for the new and shinier ACR 3. Install CS2. Crash.

I finally ended up rolling my disk completely back to an image of it that I made a couple of weeks ago. Then Photoshop CS2 launched fine. Then I hit round two of my torture.

I had hacked up a cool piece of Javascript in Photoshop CS to do my manual thumbnail generation. CS2 completely destroyed the operation of this script by making the file browser into a separate application called Bridge. This is painful because Camera Raw actually works much more nicely in Bridge than it did in the old file browser. It even lets me batch convert NEF files. But, now I have to go back to my old batch actions for JPEG files, which is clunky.

I almost got my old script working. But something about the interface between Bridge and Photoshop is not right on my machine. Whenever I run the script Photoshop crashes on quit. In fact, when I run the script that I based my work on (Image Processor), the same thing happens.

I wonder if rolling my disk back again would fix that.

Lesson learned: never change tools. Life is pain.

Slow Updates

2006-01-11 · by peterb

I am in San Francisco this week, so Tea Leaves may be updated less frequently than usual. We will return to our regularly scheduled kvetching on Monday.

DVD Heaven

2006-01-12 · by psu

Soon after picking up my shiny new television, my old Sony DVD player finally started to give up the ghost. I bought this player along with my first DVD, a copy of The Matrix. That movie probably sold more first DVD players than any other title from that time period.

The 480i component signal from this player looked great, but the transport was getting too picky, and would not play some disks that I needed to play. Since I had been getting tired about obsessing about games and needed a short break, I went DVD player shopping.

Like most consumer electronics, DVD players fall into three categories:

  1. Super cheap.

  2. Cheap enough.

  3. Almost stupidly expensive.

I have found two players in class 2 that I think are excellent.

When I first looked around, I picked out a player from Sony which had a digital video output (HDMI), and hooked it up. It looked like crap. The colors were all wrong, everything was too dark, and the picture was noisy, like someone threw sand at the TV.

Here was the first thing I learned: new DVD players don't seem to put out the same level for "black" as old DVD players. The TV had been calibrated to the higher black levels of the old player, making everything wrong with the new one. I fiddled with the TV until things looked much better. Then I fiddled a bit more. Then my wife hit me and I stopped. When it was all over, the Sony looked great. Maybe just a hair better than the old player.

This is all fine, but it got me thinking about picture quality from the DVD player itself. This is always a bad sign. I found this collection of DVD player reviews. Among other things, the page has a fabulous discussion of what exactly it is that progressive scan DVD players do. It also has helpful explanations of the kinds of picture artifacts that show up when they do it wrong. This site is a gold mine of information for obsessed DVD geek.

In addition, the latest batch of reviews spoke highly of a very interesting piece of hardware. The Oppo DVD Player was said to do an excellent job on deinterlacing and scaling. As a bonus, it can also play video files that you burn onto a DVD-R. So you can play video from your computer without bothering to author a full-on DVD.

For various reasons, I hate playing video from my computer. Hooking the computer up to the TV is just too painful. And watching them on the machine itself is no fun (small screen, crappy sound). I want to watch the video on my TV with my remote control and my nice stereo system. The Oppo would let me do this and be a great DVD player as well. But, it was from a company I had never heard of, and the player itself seemed a bit rough around the edges. I resisted. Then someone in the office got one. I resisted further. But to no avail.

The Oppo is about what I expected. What it lacks in polish it makes up for in performance. The picture is as good or slightly better than the Sony. It is softer, but smoother with fewer obvious scaling artifacts, especially on edges. In addition, there are little touches that are nice. Navigation through the player menus and DVD menus is much faster. Layer changes are not as obvious. The transport is quieter, and doesn't make as many little whiny noises as the Sony. Finally, playing my own disks is just great.

On the whole, I can happily recommend both of these players to those who are looking for this kind of toy. It's going to be hard to decide which one to keep.

Green Morning

2006-01-16 · by peterb

As I mentioned last week, I was out of town. Specifically, I was in San Francisco. Every day and night, I ate at fabulous trendy restaurants. I walked around a vibrant, young, exciting city. I gained five pounds. And when it was all over, I took the red-eye back to Pittsburgh on a cold, dark, wet Saturday, landing at 6 in the morning.

This felt pretty depressing.

I would have felt this way even if it wasn't raining. The fact that it was a dark and ugly morning just accentuated the mood. Now, I can't speak for anyone else, but I have this feeling when I return home from anywhere. It's the ultimate expression of "the grass is always greener" syndrome. It doesn't particularly matter where I go. When I go to LA, I think about moving there so I could have Roscoe's chicken and waffles every day. Every time I visit Toronto, I consider whether it would be feasible to get a work permit for Canada; then I could have breakfast at Bonjour Brioche all the time. And it's got nothing to do with how cool the places are: I've even felt this way after driving back from Toledo. I mean, really. Toledo.

So although San Francisco has real attractions and advantages over Pittsburgh, I have learned through experience that what I'm really feeling is an emotion that has nothing to do with how cool the place I just left was. It's simply that when you travel, it's easier to see (or remember) only the good things about a place, and not the other side of the coin.

Although I felt a bit down, I was prepared. I had anticipated this feeling. And I had a plan.

By 6 am, the Strip district in Pittsburgh is starting to come to life. By 6 am, La Prima Espresso is open. It's the best coffee shop in town and would be among the best if you transplanted it to any city in the world outside of Rome. I drove into town and hit La Prima at 7. A proper cappuccino — unspoiled by the asinine Seattle tradition of "pour airy foam on the coffee until it is ruined" — started the day. Antonio, next door, was baking sfogliatelle; I had one there, and took one to go. Napolitan sfogliatelle traditionally have this citrus-cheese filling that I despise. Often, they have little bits of candied orange peel in them that I don't like, either. Antonio's aren't like that: the filling is subtle, only a little sweet, and matches perfectly with the crunchy, striated shell. They're not traditional; they're merely perfect.

I walked down the street and into Penn Mac, where the Saturday morning rush at the cheese counter hadn't yet begun. A hunk of Rosso Sini, a medium-bite sheep's milk cheese, was the first choice. Danish fontina was on sale, so that went in the basket too, along with some French butter and oil-cured olives. Across the street, Sunseri's Sunrise bakery was in full swing. A loaf of crusty bread to go with the cheese and butter and, what the hell, a dozen hot bagels. I'll invite company over.

A line had already formed at Wholey's fish market (they open at 8 in the morning), but I've always preferred Benkovitz, on the other side of the Strip. It's a little more expensive, but something about the atmosphere there appeals to me. I dove into Prestogeorge to check out the specials, and then walked back up to my car. Passing Enrico's bakery, I stopped in to say hi to Larry, and get some of the best of all possible coconut macaroons, anywhere in the entire world. Larry's making sfogliatelle now, too, so of course I had to have one there, too. His sfogliatelle are larger than Antonio's, and cost more, and have the traditional napolitan filling that I can't stand. But right out of the oven, they're great, filling and all. If you can get them hot, get them from Larry, otherwise go back up the street to Il Piccolo Forno and Antonio.

With a steaming sfogliatelle in my hand (and mouth), the light drizzle of cold rain was no longer bleak and depressing. It was a refreshing counterpoint, a tonic, brisk and pleasant. If I was eating this sfogliatelle in a 70 degree summer, it would just be good. But walking down a dark street in a cold January, it was like a magic talisman, keeping me warm and happy.

I was feeling much better about living in Pittsburgh by this point, and the sun hadn't even come up yet.

Benkovitz had just opened when I arrived. I was carrying a dozen bagels. Therefore, I needed lox and whitefish salad and pickled herring to put on them. Bagels require fish. If you can understand this essential fact about bagels, then all of life's other mysteries will fall into place by themselves. You'd think that you'd be better off finding whitefish salad somewhere in Squirrel Hill, Pittsburgh's most prominent Jewish neighborhood, but this turns out to not be the case. Benkovitz's salad feels like it was made by hand, with huge chunks of smoked whitefish, rather than being purèed into submission in a food processor.

Laden with enough food to feed a peck of people for a weekend, I loaded up my trunk, got in the car, and drove home.

So this is what I think of as the best part of Pittsburgh. I like it here. Sure, the weather sucks.

But that just makes the pastries taste better.

What Am I, Chopped Liver?

2006-01-17 · by peterb

Here's an easy one for parties: liver paté to top crostini.

Liver is misunderstood and maligned. It can have a strong taste, but doesn't have to be completely overwhelming. Part of the problem is that it's served often just fried up in a pan, which is totally uninteresting. Instead, do just a little easy work and you can have a great appetizer in no time at all.

Pour about 1/4 cup of olive oil into a cast iron skillet. Chop up a medium onion (or a large one, if you're making a lot), and add to the hot oil at low-medium heat. Sweat them for 10 minutes.

To the pan, add a couple of anchovies, and some pepper flakes. Just a little bit of the pepper goes a long way in this recipe, because of how we're preparing it. A teaspoon is fine, two teaspoons will taste somewhat hot to most people.

To the pan add your liver. If you can afford it, and have them handy, use duck or goose liver. If, like me, you don't usually have duck or goose livers in your house, chicken liver is a fine substitute — it's cheap, easy to get anywhere, and is fairly light. If you want a stronger taste, you can use veal liver. Beef liver will be too strong for this recipe. If you used a small onion, add a half of pound of meat. If you used a large onion, add a pound. The first time you make this recipe, I suggest you start small.

You're going to cook the liver at medium heat for about 10 minutes total, turning every few minutes.

Normally, if you cooked meat this much it would dry out. But we have a secret weapon. After 10 minutes, add some cheap but drinky red wine, between 1/4 and 1/2 cup. You're going to continue cooking until the liquid thickens noticeably.

At that point, take it off the heat, and drop the whole mess in a cuisinart. pulse until you have a thick, rustic paté. Don't purée it into submission. You want to get rid of the obvious lumps, but not liquefy it. If you do it right, it should have the consistency of coarse, stone-ground mustard. While it's in the cuisinart, add salt and pepper to taste.

This will keep in the refrigerator for a day or two, but it is wonderful if you can manage to serve it hot, on crusty, stale, slightly burnt italian toast. If you're serving liver paté at a party you should probably also have something bland and tasteless around so that your vegetarian guests will have something more in line with their desires. Perhaps you could spoon some Old El Paso salsa from a jar onto some toast for them. That might work.

People will tell you that they don't eat liver because it's unhealthy. Unless you are planning to eat this dish every day of your life, or unless you have a preexisting cholesterol problem, you should ignore these people with wild abandon. Don't spend your life in fear. Eat dangerously. Buon appetito!

Happy Birthday, Scoble

2006-01-18 · by peterb

Just a quick note to say happy birthday to Robert Scoble who is 41 today, and whom I met tonight at the Pittsburgh Blogfest. A splendid time was had by all. Drinks were drunk, cake was eaten, and Cindy from My Brilliant Mistakes and I have an evil plan for holding a panel tasting of bourbon. Stay tuned.

A Happy Return

2006-01-19 · by psu

I have always had a personal rule about Chinese Food places. If they have pictures of the food, they should be avoided. This goes along with some other rules, like Chinese Restaurants in shopping plazas tend to be marginal.

These two rules kept me from trying Tasty in Shadyside for the first several years of its existence. This was my loss, because for the next several years, Tasty was the staple Chinese place near CMU in Pittsburgh. The dish that hooked me was the Scrambled Eggs and Roast Pork. This is the sort of thing my mom used to make at home, but which I had never seen in a restaurant. The rest of the menu was a great mix of Catonese dishes, good vegetables, noodles, seafood, lunch boxes and so on. They also had a standard American Chinese gloppy food menu, but I never ordered from it.

Then a year and a half ago Carol, the owner sold out and the place came under new management. Rose Tea opened at about the same time, so I had not been back to Tasty for a long time.

I am now happy to report that Carol and her food pictures are back. The new place is in Squirrel Hill and is called Ka Mei. It's where the freakish kosher Chinese Food and Shawarma place used to be. All in all, this is a good change.

The place serves the same home style Cantonese food as Tasty did. They've added a few new things, like Congee (rice porridge) and a wider assortment of vegetables. I was happy to become requainted with my eggs and pork. I had not realized that I had missed the dish so much. Squirrel Hill is now in the great position of having two distinct regional Chinese places. This is good news indeed.

Oh, the new place has the American menu too... avoid it.

Civsweeper

2006-01-23 · by peterb

Recently, I've been on a bit of a "casual games" kick.

The casual games market is on fire right now, and from the perspective of game design is kicking the tail of the "big box" hardcore PC games. It's like watching a bunch of nimble mammals dance around the legs of slow, lumbering dinosaurs.

I'm not speaking in terms of financial success here. I'm not a game publisher, so I don't know exactly how much money either of these groups are making. I can infer from the multiplicity of casual game developers that they are doing pretty well. But the more interesting point to me, as a player, is that the games are better.

Let's review. I'm about to paint in broad (very broad) strokes, here. Please stop and think before you post a comment saying that I am obviously a gay lamer, because Bladehunt: Deathspank 2: The Revenge was way better than some guy's freeware Visual BASIC "VBSudoku." Of course there are exceptions to every rule. I am comparing well-done casual games to well-done big box games in the abstract.

In my personal experience, the casual games:

One can ask the question "What makes a game 'casual'?" A snarky response is "Casual games are games marketed towards chicks." If this is true, then I'd say it is a leading indicator that women have better taste in videogames than men.

But of course, when I say "men" I really mean "teenage boys." The distinguishing feature, in my mind, that separates a casual game from a "big box" game is that it doesn't require a time commitment that only an obsessive 14 year old is capable of. I'd argue that, even though he would reject the label, Everett Kaser's puzzle games are all casual games, in the positive sense of the word. They are in no way lighter, easier, or somehow less "hardcore" than, say, Silent Hill 3. They just let me quit the game whenever I want, and don't punish me for having a life.

One common criticism of these games is that they lack creativity, that they are just rehashing some of the same concepts over and over. There's some truth to this. The line back from Atlantis to Luxor to Zuma to Puzz Loop, just to take one example we've talked about here before, is painfully obvious. But this isn't unique to casual games. To give an easy example, Knights of the Old Republic, an A-list game that many people (including me) enjoyed immensely, had a Towers of Hanoi puzzle, and it doesn't get much more derivative than that.

oasis

Oasis

All of which brings me to a game called Oasis. I'd heard it recommended, tried the demo, and liked it enough to buy it. From the 50,000 foot level, this game is to Civilization as Strange Adventures in Infinite Space is to Master of Orion. In Oasis, play moves quickly. The boring parts are all omitted. Regrettably, it's Windows-only. The developers indicate that they'd like for there to be a Mac port, but no port is yet scheduled.

On each board, you have to uncover squares to find resources, or deploy them. You can find cities, followers, ore mines, and a number of other items or terrains, and you can "spend" followers to work the ore mines to discover technology, or to build roads connecting the cities. At a predetermined time, the barbarian hordes invade. The better a job you've done connecting your kingdom and researching technology, the more likely it is to survive the attack.

I showed this game to a number of other people. Unfortunately for me, one of them was Jonathan Hardwick who, within 1 minute, observed "Dude. It's MINESWEEPER." I hemmed and hawed a little bit, and tried to dodge the bullet. But here's the thing: he's right. Is this game deserving of the "it's an uncreative knockoff" criticism I mentioned above? Have I been taken for a ride? Did I spend my hard-earned $20 on a humilating sham?

No, I did not. Oasis is "Minesweeper With Stuff", in the tradition of "Capture the Flag With Stuff". I was taken aback for a bit, but eventually settled down, and decided that there's no shame in this. The graphics, the music, the sound, the plot, the additional gameplay mechanics, and the difficulty all combine to make this more than the sum of its parts. I paid $20 for a jazzed up version of Minesweeper, and I'd do it again. I plan on paying $20 for Diner Dash, a jazzed up version of Tapper. That's the thing with jazz. Sometimes it doesn't matter if the theme is simple, as long as the improvisations are good.

I can't blame anyone for being impressed with the big box dinosaurs. There's grandeur in dinosaurs, and there's grandeur in the big box games, with their built-by-committee mis-en-scenes, their baroque, sent-from-1994 full motion videos, and their seemingly endless committment to supporting bleeding-edge technologies, even at the cost of shrinking their own market and degrading the average user's out-of-the-box experience. I play the dinosaur games, too, sometimes.

But if you asked me to lay my money down and guess where mainstream PC gaming is going to be in 10 years time?

I'm betting on the mammals.

Plane Reading

2006-01-24 · by psu

I took a trip out and back to California last week and spent more time than usual reading words off paper as opposed to in their more pixelated form.

Smartbomb

This is a book about the history of the game industry. The book covers a lot of standard ground from Spacewar to Atari to DOOM to the Xbox with a strange detour through the U.S. military. Along the way there are profiles of game designers and other industry characters. The general point of view is an examination of gaming as it reaches the cusp of the big time in the mainstream American entertainment industry. But, the book is not a comprehensive treatment. I found it odd that a book that is ostensibly about how gaming is so mainstream completely ignores some of the huge forces that pushed the industry in that direction. For example, in the almost 400 pages of text, Sony and Sega are barely mentioned. In fact, except for Nintendo, the book paints a picture of the industry that is nearly devoid of the Japanese influence.

Overall, the book is an entertaining read about some entertaining characters in an entertaining industry. But, I couldn't get past the feeling that the whole thing was just a little bit too shallow. Also, I couldn't shake the feeling that while all of these people had created interesting products, they just were not all that interesting as people. In particular, the book spends what seems like endless pages talking about "rockstar" game designer CliffyB. Apparently, this person had something to do with the Unreal games. But, I have never heard of him, and he doesn't sound particularly interesting either as a person or a game designer. Surely some of these pages could have been sacrificed to cover something more interesting, like how a game like Rez gets built.

American Record Guide

From my new hobby to my "classic" hobby. American Record Guide is a magazine that reviews Classical recordings and Classical music performance. If you have any level of interest in this music, I would recommend picking up a copy. Not only do they review a staggering number of records in every issue, but they do large compilation reviews that cover various well known parts of the repertoire. These show up in an "overview" every issue. For example, in the Jan/Feb issue, the subject of the overview is the Shostakovich symphonies. In about 20 pages of text, they break down a couple dozen of the literally dozens of available recordings, and give you a good start as to where to start looking. The value of an overview like this can't be overstated. This is because the market in classical recordings is paradoxical in that even though it is tiny compared to almost all of the other musical genres, the number of available recordings for popular pieces is ludicrously large. This puts the potential buyer in something of a quandary. On the one hand, you can dig through decades of archival reviews of every record that has ever been made. On the other hand, you can buy something like The Penguin Guide and get a couple of pages of text for the major work you might be interested in. Neither situation is ideal. This is why ARG is so great. They manage to be in-depth without being overwhelming.

This character extends to the rest of their reviews too. You will not find any pseudo-academic ramblings taken from the reviewer's Master's thesis on string performance practices in the early Classical period here. Rather than trying to show you how much they know about the music, they mostly just tell you if they liked the record and they do it in a way that makes it easy for you to figure out if you'd like it. I credit the editor, Don Vroon, for this straightforward style. Mr. Vroon is nothing if not a straightforward, almost blunt, personality. He begins every issue with editorial rantings on various subjects, and if you think I hate the world, you should read what he thinks of it.

I stopped getting ARG for a few years while my Classical music buying tapered off for various reasons. But, after enjoying this latest issue, I think I might pick it up again. After all, I have this issue to thank for both the Shostakovich overview and the valuable information that SACD is big in the Classical world. New justifications for purchasing hardware toys are always appreciated.

Eating Some (Fair-Trade) Humble Pie

2006-01-25 · by peterb

Lord knows that in my time I've said some mean things about fair-trade coffee. I've tried to like it, but every time I go buying it on my own I end up with something that tastes bad. Since my super power is the ability to generalize a single instance of disappointment into a scathing indictment of an entire industry, this led to some enjoyable ranting where I prove, using logic, that all fair trade coffee everywhere, by the immutable laws of the universe, must taste horrible.

The Green LA Girl, however, called my bluff. So now I will publically recant my earlier statements and say, without reservation, fair-trade coffee is awesome.

Monkey and Son Logo

Monkey and Son

The way in which she called my bluff was to send me and psu a package of Monkey & Son Krakatoa. It is without a doubt superb coffee, and I enjoyed every cup I've had of it. I'm getting more. Enough introduction: let me tell you a bit about the coffee.

Despite the super-cool logo, I was initially worried when I opened the package. The beans are a glossy, unearthly black, as if they are made from licorice, or obsidian. The smell — in the bag — is also terribly unappetizing. It's a bit of a mix between burnt rubber and new car leather. But coffee beans are not potpourri, and the real test is in how they smell after you brew them, not before. On these terms, the Monkey & Son Krakatoa succeeds perfectly.

This is a strong, dark roast, but not unpleasantly burnt or overroasted, despite the appearance. It is, in fact, one of the most perfectly balanced dark roasts I've had. It is medium-bodied. There's none of the unpleasant, medicinal aftertaste I found with CafÈ Estima. The flavor is complex without being overbearing along any one dimension. If I was forced, at gunpoint, to come up with a criticism, it might be that it might work better with just a tiny touch more sourness. But, seriously, I'm not sitting there thinking "Gee, I wish this was more sour." I'm sitting there thinking "Where did all my coffee go?" because it tastes good enough that if I'm not careful I find that I don't drink it, I gulp it.

So, barring some unexpected news item revealing that this coffee was actually picked by heroin-addicted sex slave orphans in the mountains of Myanmar: I was wrong, and I'm glad to admit it. There is indeed yummy, reasonably priced fair-trade coffee out there. Thanks for sending me the sample to find out. I will cease badmouthing fair-trade coffee posthaste. I have seen the light.

But I stand by all the mean things I've said about vegans. A man has to draw the line somewhere.

Criss-Cross

2006-01-26 · by peterb

I used to like buying books. Now I like giving them away.

Once upon a time — the story began — I had an empty shelf and very few books. Ah, the innocence of youth: I enjoyed buying books. I enjoyed reading them, and putting them on my shelf for all the world, or at least the part of the world that visited my apartment, to see. How clever, how sophisticated, how worldly! Look! Thomas Pynchon! This man has read Thomas Pynchon, or at least has his books on his shelf, which amounts to the same thing.

But the worm turns, and with age comes wisdom. And now, I am giving many of my books away.

Through hard experience I have, over the years, come to learn a few things:

So for a long time now, I have basically slowed my acquisition of new books to a trickle. This still leaves the problem of how to get rid of the many, many, many books that I have but didn't want. You'd think this would be easy, but I have a neurosis that makes this hard. You see, I cannot throw a book away.

I mean, of course, a book that is in good condition. If it's water damaged, or ripped up, that's one thing. But if it's in good condition, and readable, I cannot put it in the garbage, damage it, burn it, harm it, or through inaction allow the book to come to harm. Harlequin romance? Sorry. Can't throw it away. Crappy endless fantasy series with pathetic wish-fulfillment freudian plot treatment (and yes, Robert Jordan, I am in fact looking at you)? Can't throw it away. The collected speeches of George W. Bush? Well, OK, maybe I could throw that one away. But that's the exception that proves the rule.

I blame Ray Bradbury, and that I read Fahrenheit 451 as an impressionable youth, for this neurosis.

I tried bringing my books to the library and donating them, but they didn't want them. I briefly considered just shoving them through the night-deposit slot and making them suffer, but I decided that would be ethically bankrupt. I tried to sell the books for a penny apiece to the local used bookstore, but they weren't accepting new books.

So I had given up on getting rid of any of these books for a while. But recently, the perfect storm of a neat application and a neat internet service has allowed me to free myself from bondage to my paper masters.

The application is Delicious Library, which allows you to scan the UPC symbols on books, movies, games, and other media using the webcam or iSight on your Macintosh (or, if you don't have one, to just type in ISBN numbers). Once scanned, it fetches an image of the work from amazon, along with lots of other metadata, and lets you organize them and keep track of whom you have loaned items to. It'll remind you when you should ask for them back. It'll let you organize little virtual shelves, take notes, rate items. It's very pretty, and very slick, and I liked playing with it.

Now, most people might use Delicious Library to keep track of what they have and want to keep. I use it to keep track of what I want to get rid of. In addition to the aforementioned abilities, each item also has a convenient "Sell on Amazon" button, so if you have an amazon seller account, it's dead simple to list a lot of items.

At the same time I obtained Delicious Library, I also heard about Paperback Swap on NPR. The idea is one that has been pursued by others before: list books you want to get rid of, order books you want to obtain. Members send each other books directly, the sender paying the postage cost ($1.59 in most cases). The site provides convenient address labels for each "order" as PDFs, and if the book is small enough you can typically mail it without even using a storebought envelope — just wrap it in the printed PDF label.

Most of the other services I've seen like this charge a "service fee," which makes them not terribly interesting. At least for now, there are no fees associated with paperbackswap.com beyond paying for postage. I've so far managed to get about 16 books I didn't want shipped to other people, and have many more listed. The odd book that I've sold on Amazon has covered the postage. As an added bonus, I've managed to pick up a small number of books that I actually do want on my shelf (Italo Calvino's Cosmicomics, in addition to being a great read, is also wonderfully slim and light, you see). But for me, it's not really about getting new books. It's about getting rid of the books I don't want in a guilt-free manner.

My total workflow, now is: pick the books I want to get rid of. Scan them into a group in Delicious Library. Set a reminder for 60 days from now, so that anything I haven't managed to sell or trade can ("in theory") be thrown away guilt-free. List the books on Amazon and Paperbackswap. If it sells or trades on either site, delist it from the other.

Here's the list of books I currently have listed on the site. If you want any of them, feel free to send me email asking for it. If you decide to sign up for paperbackswap yourself, you can say you were referred by paperbackswap - at - tleaves.com. They'll give me a book "credit" for your trouble.

Book list

I should note that psu makes fun of me for this whole thing on a daily goddamn basis. His latest threat is to create an e-commerce site on which you can obsessively list all the books you own but don't want, and then every so often the site will send you an email for one of them, telling you "Throw this book away already, you dope."

To be perfectly honest, I might sign up for that.

Guitar Hero

2006-01-31 · by peterb

When we discuss the weblog with our friends, psu and I have a running joke. It's something along the lines of "Hey, man. We can gripe for 500 words about anything."

I haven't been griping much lately, because I've been too busy playing Guitar Hero.

Let me just get this out of the way: yes, Guitar Hero really is that good. If you own a Playstation 2, and you haven't yet picked up this game, you should put down the computer, drive to your local game store, and buy it. Today. Right now. You'll thank me. It might be the best $70 you'll spend this year.

I didn't expect to have this reaction to the game. At its heart, Guitar Hero is "just another rhythm game," like Samba de Amigo, or Dance Dance Revolution. I find most of these games to be "cute," but not terribly compelling. Guitar Hero is compelling.

The centerpiece of the game is the custom controller, shaped like a small guitar (or a large ukelele). Along the neck of the guitar are five colored buttons ("fret buttons") that you hold to choose what notes will be played. On the body is a single "strumming" button that can be moved up or down. Also on the body is a whammy bar that modulates the note being played.

Guitar Hero

Guitar Hero

The actual game is straightforward: notes fall toward you, and you need to hold the correct fret button (or buttons) and "strum" at the right time. Hit all the notes and the audience will cheer more and your score will go up. Miss enough notes, and you'll get booed off the stage. In addition to the standard controls, inside the guitar is a tilt sensor. At certain times during the game, you can lift the neck of the guitar up to the ceiling, and the audience will go wild and your score is multiplied.

Where the game shines is in its feedback loop. The guitar soundtrack is fairly tightly coupled to the buttons you are hitting. If you miss a button (or hit the wrong one), the guitar track will cut out until you get the next note right. The psychological impact of this can't really be overstated. While playing the game, my main motivation isn't explicitly to get a high score, but to just keep the song sounding good.

The other aspect of the game is that the "easy" level really isn't. The first levels of most rhythm games tend to be insultingly easy. Guitar Hero starts off at a respectable pace, and I haven't yet seen someone who got a perfect score on their first runthrough of any given song, even on the easiest level.

The combined effect of these two factors — the feedback loop, and the difficulty level — is that Guitar Hero manages to succesfully deliver the sustained illusion that you know how to play guitar, even though you don't. On a rational level, I know that even the simplest guitar licks are beyond my abilities. But when I make a respectable showing on Franz Ferdinand's "Take Me Out," on Hard, that is forgotten. The lizard part of my brain, Thog, tells the rational part to shut up and go drink more stupid chamomile tea. Thog know how to play guitar. Thog can rock out.

Reinforcing this is the fact that a number of semi-real guitar principles apply to playing the custom controller. You don't have to release a lower fret when playing a higher fret. You can hammer on and pull off notes. The side-effect of playing this game is that you will suddenly have more respect for real guitarists, when you realize how hard it is to "play" difficult songs with a mere five buttons and one "string."

The stiff difficulty of the game also allows you to improve with surprising rapidity. When I first started playing, I peeked at a few songs on "Expert" level, and they seemed like some sort of cruel joke. Now, although still far out of my reach — I'm working my way through the "Medium" level, with the occasional foray into "Hard" — they just look difficult, but not actually impossible.

The selection of music in the game is fairly varied. It's obviously slanted towards arena rock and heavy metal. There are 30 covers of songs by bands you've actually heard of. Out of these 30 songs, I'd say I actually like perhaps 7. Even though I don't like the other 23, they still "work" in the context of a guitar game. And that's OK — I can still like playing "Bark at the Moon even if I don't like listening to it. You can find a complete track listing here, along with samples. There are also 17 (unlockable) tracks by independent bands that range from atrocious to nifty.

I guess I should be glad, really, that this isn't an Xbox game, because I'm pretty sure that if I could pay to download more songs on Xbox Live, I'd be broke right about now.

A lot of work went in to the motion-capture for the avatars in your virtual band, but as in all games of this type, it's sort of lost on the person playing the game. At least when I play, my eyes are glued firmly to the notes coming at me. The caricature rockers are fun, but will mostly be enjoyed by spectators, not players.

You simply can't get an idea of the game from hearing me talk about it, although you can sort of get the gist from watching videos of people playing. In the end, you simply need to trust me on this: stop what you're doing, and go get the game, and you will be a happier person. You will feel stupid walking through Best Buy holding a huge box with a guitar and flames on it. If, like me, you're old, you'll feel stupid as teenage girls laugh at you on the checkout line. If you live with someone, you will feel stupid when you walk in the house and explain what it is you just purchased. And then the moment you actually start playing your first round, you will forget all of that and feel smarter than all of the people who are having less fun than you because they're doing something boring and stupid, while you get to play Guitar Hero.

Bill from Dubious Quality calls it an antidepressant in the form of a plastic guitar. That's about the size of it.

The Down Side of Guitar Hero

2006-02-01 · by peterb

Now my hands hurt.

Braaaiiiinnnnns

2006-02-02 · by psu

When I was growing up, every once in a while my mom would make this weird food. When it came out of the pan, it always looked like a big pile of steaming gray matter. It looked nasty.

Later, I found out that this was stir fried eggplant. Still later I figured out that it was actually pretty good to eat, so I asked my mom how to make it. Sure enough, when done well you can get to the same gray and goopy consistency, although these days it's gray and purple, since the purple asian eggplant are pretty easy to find. Me, I still can't resist calling the dish Braaaaiiinnnns. Here's how I do it.

The trick is to cook the eggplant twice to make sure it gets soft without sopping up huge amounts of oil. Eggplant is weird that way.

First, gather up the following:

  1. 1/4 to 1/2 pound ground pork, depending on how you like it.

  2. 4 or 5 of the purple eggplant. Cut this up into small cubes.

  3. Garlic, lots of garlic.

  4. Soy sauce, sugar, water, and Hoisin Sauce.

  5. Cilantro, chopped up (optional).

First, take the eggplant cubes and put them in a large bowl. Add a couple teaspoons of water and some oil. Mix it up. Put the bowl in the microwave and zap it for 4 or 5 minutes. Mix it up some more, then zap it for another 4 or 5 minutes. You want to nuke the eggplant until it is really soft. It's easier to do it this way than to do it in the pan.

When the eggplant is done, heat up a pan. Add oil and garlic and the ground pork. Brown the pork, then add the eggplant. Mix it up. Then add a bit of water and a bit (a teaspoon or two) of soy sauce. Finally, squeeze the hoisin sauce into the pan. You want about a teaspoon. This adds a bit of sweetness to the sauce. Another option for this is to use black bean sauce and sugar, or even just a bit of sugar and more soy sauce. Do what feels good.

If you didn't get the eggplant soft enough, turn the heat way down and simmer until the eggplant is soft. Make sure it doesn't dry out and burn.

Serve over rice. Put chopped cilantro and hot sauce on top if you want to spice it up a bit.

Soy Milk

2006-02-03 · by peterb

Next up is an item about ideological videogames, but before that, I just have to share my favorite comic strip's take on the "milk vs. soy milk" issue.

It's funny because it's true.

Stupor Bowl

2006-02-06 · by psu

First things first. Steelers win! Woohoo!! Yeeeaaaahhhh!!!.

Now that that's out of the way, I think we all have to admit that this was, on balance, a sub-par performance by everyone involved. Let's catalog our collection of complaints.

The Refs

While the refs did not blow it on the scale of the NE-Denver or PGH-Indy games, overall it was a pretty sad showing. A lot of boring ticky-tack bullshit. I don't think there was enough there to turn the outcome, and if you are going to win a championship, you have to win despite bad calls. Still, one expects more.

The Ads

Who can remember even one decent one in the whole bunch? I was a bit mesmerized by how pretty everything looked in HD. But, from a content standpoint I can't remember even one ad that made me break out in even half a giggle. There were even multiple lame repeats from last year.

Finally, I think there should be a moratorium on go-daddy ads. The next network I see one of those on should be fined for the price of the ad slot. Jesus.

The Game

Neither team played close to as well as they are capable of playing. Watching this game, you'd have no idea that Pittsburgh was known for a punishing blitzing defense, or that Alexander was the league MVP, or that Seattle had one of the highest scoring and efficient offenses in the league. Pittsburgh managed to win because they got lucky and they showed their real selves a few more times than Seattle. That, and they had Hines Ward, my favorite Steeler by far, to throw the ball to whenever they needed a big play.

So, I'll take the win for my adopted favorite team (go Pats!), and I will feel happy for my adopted home town of lo these many years (I've been back here almost as long as Cowher has coached the team). But, I have to say that I've seen better football. Two weeks ago in the Championship games.

Conclusion

Go Steelers! WOOOHOOOOOO!

Geniu$

2006-02-07 · by peterb

I received a review copy of Geniu$: The Tech Tycoon Game some time ago.

I should clarify: the publisher didn't give me the game. Rather, the publisher gave a review copy of the game to another reviewer, who decided it wasn't his thing, because it wasn't an adventure game. So he gave it to me.

In the hierarchy of game reviewers, I occupy a very special ecological niche. Like a crustacean or some other bottom-dwelling scavenger, I only get review copies of the games that other, better reviewers aren't interested in.

Bitterness aside, I was actually quite eager to try the game. Let me share a bit of text from the game's ad sheet:

Fame and fortune awaits GENIU$! Be the entrepreneur who can take a small start-up to a multinational company as you combine invention, innovation and luck. Witness the key inventions of the 19th and 20th centuries & see first hand how they changed the world as you implement them. Experience history through an all new kind of tycoon-style game.

Three Rivers

Note the lack of venture capital.

Of particular interest to me was that the game allows you to play in five regions around the world, one of which is Pittsburgh, PA. Having spent the past several years working for a high-tech startup in Pittsburgh, PA, I couldn't decide if the prospect of playing a game simulating working for a high-tech startup in Pittsburgh, PA filled me with elation or dread. ("Troll for resumes at Geek Night. Lose 1 turn!") But, obviously, I had to try it.

The game was not at all what I expected. It's quite good, and not a little bit strange.

Geniu$ is not really a sim game, as I expected. Rather, it is the shell of a game wrapped around a self-study course in physics.

On the surface, the game looks like Sim City. You're given an isometric view of your chosen starting city in the mid-1800s. The main effect the starting city has is to define the topology around which you can build your company's structures. The early part of the game revolves around building a power plant a factory (or factories), and housing for your workers. All structures must be connected by roads. Over time, you'll need to provide fire stations, water towers, and other Sim City-like services to keep things running smoothly. When all is going well, your factories produce goods (initially, bicycles), and you earn a little money to reinvest in the company.

This part of the game, however, is fairly shallow, and there really aren't many strategic decisions to be made. Where things get interesting is that every so often, an icon will appear above a building, and clicking on the icon brings up a problem to be solved.

One of the easier problems

One of the easier problems.

The problems tend to layer on top of each other in an intuitive way, and in a way that makes for interesting reading. For example, early in the game you might learn that the factory needs to store some goods in the second floor. To accomplish this, you might be shown a selection of different types of pulleys, and asked which one will provide the greatest lifting power. Pass this problem, and in a little while the foreman will be back asking you to calculate what length of rope is needed to lift a certain amount of material. A reference library — in the form of a number of science magazines, and letters exchanged with famous scientists — are always available from within the problems to help you solve the challenges.

If you solve the "quizzes," you earn money and other rewards. Failing to solve most problems simply results in failure to progress, and you can retry the problem later. In some cases, choosing the wrong answer can result in a penalty being assessed. The problems start off simple, but escalate in difficulty at a fairly steady pace. It was around the point that the game started asking me to calculate the average rate of acceleration of a piston with a displacement of 10 centimeters that rises and falls 50 times per second that I started to sweat.

I'm loathe to classify Geniu$ as an "educational" game, because that seems to me to be shuttering it into a box full to the brim with thoroughly unfun games. There's the odd exception of course (can I count the wink-wink-nudge-nudge section of Sam and Max Hit the Road where the lead characters were serenaded by talking heads reciting the history of famed naturalist John Muir, and a sign descends from the ceiling, blinking "EDU-TAINMENT"?) but on the whole, educational games are to games what tofurkey is to food. Geniu$ is an exception. I kept (and keep) playing it not because it is "educational," but because it is fun and challenging. On that axis, at least, the game is a great success.

There are a few minor complaints I have about the game, mostly centering around user interface. There is no notepad in the game, and no calculator. Particularly when answering the "quizzes", you are faced with problems that require a little bit of math, and it would be convenient to have a place to jot down notes and do simple calculations. "Why not just use the Windows calculator," you ask, and the answer is that the game doesn't play nicely with alt-tab. Eventually, I gave up and just brought a pen and pad of paper to the computer with me. This is somewhat irritating (not to mention messy).

Carl Zeiss

Carl Zeiss is watching.

Second, the game is clearly a German product — if you learned your science history from this game, you would conclude that every technological advance from 1850 to 1900 came from Bavaria — and some localization bugs slipped through. The great majority of the game was translated correctly, but a few mistranslations occur in some of the challenge questions, which is exactly the worst place for them to appear.

These problems are, overall, just quibbles. The game is fun, and manages to put physics questions in a practical context that is believable and interesting. If you aren't frightened of doing a little simple math, and you have a Windows box, $30, and a pencil and notepad, consider trying Genius out. Just remember not to blow all of your seed money on sushi and pinball machines.

Lull

2006-02-08 · by psu

I've been in a long gaming lull for the last few months. I think this is to be expected. After all, I finished a Half-Life title. The last time I finished a Half-Life title was in 1999 and I didn't play another game until, what, 2003. Those were the good old days.

It's also the case that this Christmas Season was pretty soft for games. Gone were the blockbuster franchise releases of last year. Also missing were any major releases in practically the entire month of January and on into February. I can't remember a longer dry spell, but it's probably normal.

Then there was the Xbox 360 debacle. Microsoft generates insane amounts of hype and demand leading up to the launch, and then can only deliver less than half the required units for the U.S. market, while in Japan, huge crates full of consoles sit unsold on the street, in the snow, with people spitting on them.

And where are all the smoking next-gen titles? They are nowhere to be found. Apparently, Microsoft thinks that what I want to do is stand in line for 8 hours in the snow at the Best Buy to buy the $1000 "Pro Xtreme Gamer's Bundle", take the bundle home and then do nothing but bask in the warm glow of the Xbox Live Community control panel interface while I spend my microtransactions on t-shirt decals and downloads of remakes of 20 year old arcade games. I think not.

Here's a hint: the console will sell better if there are games available for it. Online is a fun toy from time to time, but unless you happen to have a posse of a dozen or so of your closest friends who can all be in front of the box at the same time every few nights to get some of that Halo on, it is not the sort of functionality on which you can bet your console market share farm. I think people want more than a gateway into online multi-modal integrated digital media entertainment.

With that latent object knocked down a few pegs even before it reached my living room, I felt lost and confused. I would "browse" in the game store and I could find nothing more interesting than buying the PS2 version of Resident Evil 4, a game I had already cleared twice on the 'Cube. Since I need to save what little is left of my self-respect, I have managed to avoid this particular purchase. I tried to buy an RPG for the PSP a few times, but could not summon the energy. Every time I went to the store, I'd just end up back home playing Madden and Mario Kart. My Steelers have beaten up on the Seahawks more times than I can count, and boy can I drive the "Rainbow Road".

After about a month of this, I thought maybe Guitar Hero would shake me out of my gloom. But I can't even build up an obsessive energy over this undoubtedly excellent game. I watch the game go by, and I know it's great. But after a while I just put it down and go watch a movie.

Maybe it's just that the other shiny new toys in my life (oooo, HDTV, go Steelers!) have taken over my affections. Maybe my subconscious knows that several hundred hours of sitting on the couch, manipulating virtual worlds with 16 buttons and 2 analog sticks is simply not going to provide me with any deep sense of enlightenment. Maybe I think I've seen everything there is to see. After the shooter, the platformer, the RPG, the JRPG , the movie game, the rhythm game, the puzzle game the stealth game and the adventure game, where do I go from here?

In his books on photography, Galen Rowell used to write about a concept that he called "image maturity." His idea was that when you are presenting new subject matter to a viewer, something that they have not seen before, you can present the material in a straightforward and literal fashion and people will think that the pictures are amazing. Think of, say, the first pictures of the Earth from space. Wow! But, as viewers become more familiar with the subject matter, straightforward representations will no longer hold the viewer's attention. The bad news is that the easy pictures have been taken. The good news is that this opens up the opportunity to be more creative and abstract in how you construct images. Rowell advised that when working with a particular subject, the photographer should be aware of this effect and manage his image-making accordingly.

I bring this up now because I think my head and maybe the gaming industry as a whole are mired in a long period of "genre maturity." In about a year or a bit more of concentrated effort it's possible for the motivated individual to work his way through excellent examples of all of the major game genres. Having done that, it can be a long wait before something new and compelling comes along. I don't think this is some conspiracy of mediocrity. I just think that the industry is up against the problem of finding new ways to present games to the player. Just as with photographs, as the genres mature, you need more creative energy to make something that grabs the player's attention.

The result of all of this is a lull. I don't think I am alone in perceiving this. Even the New York Times is reporting that people are tired of games. While the current feeling of malaise is unmistakable, I think it will be short lived. Even in a "down" year like 2005, there was a lot to be happy about. I look forward enjoying the result of the labors of the next great design genius. After all, Shadow Hearts: From the New World is coming soon.

Meanwhile, I'm bored.

Curry Powder

2006-02-09 · by goob

The other day at the local food emporium, I had chance to witness a terrible crime. There, on the shelf just below eye level, sat a prim little tin of kosher salt, labeled with an honest-looking brown sticker in a respectable handwriting font. This little two and some ounce jar cost four dollars, pushing the price per pound up near thirty. At my feet: a big cardboard box of kosher salt, three pounds, two bucks.

It's a rock, after all. But I didn't come here to talk about that.

Instead: curry powder. I sometimes stop in the seasonings section of the supermarket and wonder at the little bottles of pricey spices that sit there, cheerfully labeled. Curry powder seems to be undergoing something of a market segmentation these days: there are kinds, now. The problem is that ground spices don't age well, and those little jars have usually been kicking around the distribution channels long enough to be well past prime. A little voice whispers that it would be so easy to use them, but I say instead: I can do better. You can do better. Here's how.

You will need a pot. I've got a pretty good pot, but pretty much anything will do, although the heavier the better. You will need some kind of grinder; I've got a cheap blade-style coffee grinder, and it works great. You will need whole spices from a reputable source. Put the pot on heat, toast the whole spices dry (you'll be able to tell when they're ready: they'll smell fantastic), and then grind them up in the grinder. Use soon (or immediately). That's it.

If I'm making a curry, I usually go with a bit of cumin, a bit of coriander, a bit of chana dal, and some black peppercorns. Sometimes I toss an untoasted clove or allspice into the grinder, too. When all of that is ground to powder with a little (kosher) salt, I add a bit of tumeric and fenugreek (I realize that I should be using whole fenugreek, but those things are murder to grind).

Using the spices this way perfumes the kitchen, the house, and on summer days a good part of the block. There is more oomph and depth in toasted whole spices, and the flavors settle down into a complex warmth. It only takes a handful of moments, and while the spices toast I can use the time to lop up an onion and peel the ginger. Best of all: if you do it right, each time out will be a surprise, and with practice, they will all be fantastic.

Additional Resources

Along with being an excellent source for spices, herbs, and other assorted flavorings (and we are blessed to have a storefront here in Pittsburgh), the good folks at Penzey's make a set of pretty good powder mixes for curries.

Games Lovers Play

2006-02-13 · by peterb

Let's talk about Valentine's Day. I'm going to take the long way around to get there. We're going to travel dangerously close to the confessional, but I promise we will eventually return to the subject of love, lust, and desire. Sit down. Make yourself comfortable. Have a piece of chocolate.

As some of you may be aware, I had a catastrophic hard drive failure on my gaming PC about a month ago. It wasn't the boot disk, so the main effect was that I lost most of the games I had installed on the machine. Most of those games, it should be noted, I never actually played.

I ended up reinstalling Windows, mostly to wipe the Starforce virus that the jerks who made Etherlords II infected my machine with. And after that, I began installing games.

I started with just the games I knew I wanted to play, either because I was reviewing them, or because I liked them. So: Oasis, Strange Adventures in Infinite Space, MS Flight Simulator 2004, Civ IV. And that was really about it.

This weekend I was cleaning up some computer discs. As I was putting the game discs away, I installed some of them onto the computer. At some point — when I started obsessively hunting through the piles of old disks for Mechwarrior 4: Vengeance, a game I knew that I had no intention of playing — the epiphany hit me, like a bolt from the blue:

I like installing most PC games more than I like playing them.

I mentioned this to psu, who accurately observed "You need help."

Spinning this so that it doesn't sound quite so horrible, I can claim that this feeling is like enjoying the opening of Christmas gifts more than the subsequent possession of the presents themselves. Really, though, my urge to install games is just another manifestation of the latent object fetish.

During installation, the latent object experience is at its apogee. The anticipation of acquiring the perfect thing is at a fever pitch. Satisfaction is nearly in your grasp. As you install a game, it is still perfect and unmarred by reality. You don't have to worry about the poor game design, or the crashing bugs, or the fact that it isn't fun. Once you actually launch the game, though, all of your illusions shatter. You are no longer playing the game that engendered all of your hopes and dreams, but instead you are playing the one that the developers actually delivered, which by definition cannot possibly be as good as the ideal of a game in your head. It's not the game that you're in love with.

We are in love with ideals because by their nature they are perfect. And not just ideal games, but ideal people. Around the world, right now, millions of people are experiencing the latent object fetish, where the latent object in question is "true love." You can, if you wish, transpose our frequent refrain about the desire for the latent object into purely Jungian terms. The latent object of true love exists before we meet the person we think we love. That poor person is, all too often, just a convenient surface on which to project our own desires. Succesfully projecting desires this way reifies our latent ideal of true love, and this makes us blind. When someone murmurs "You're the only person in the world who makes me feel this way," they are telling the absolute truth: the secret, of course, is that the person they are talking to is themselves.

Eventually, months or years later (always in August — no one knows why) the person you're projecting your desires onto fails to imitate your anima or animus one too many times, and the projection breaks. It has to break. It is inevitable. No one is as perfect as the "soulmate" who lives inside your head. That person that you've dreamed about, anticipated your whole life, the ideal: that person doesn't exist. When you discover that your loved one is not as perfect as the ideal in your head, you are hurt and disapointed. You feel betrayed. Alcohol is consumed. "I don't understand what I ever saw in him," you confide to your closest friends. And the next Valentine's day, you're murmuring in someone's ear "You're the only person in the world who makes me feel this way."

I have no great insight about how to break this cycle. The one thing I'll suggest is based on something somone said to me, once. "Love is not something you have. It's something you do." As long as we view love as a state we are in, or as something we own, we are, I think, doomed to failure by the thousands of quotidian disappointments that any relationship accumulates over the years. Real love, it seems to me, does not consist of being in a state of neverending infatuation, where everything is perfect. Such a state doesn't exist, and if it did it would be inhumanly boring. Real love is the sum total of the things we do every day to show the people we care about that we put their happiness before our own.

Have a happy Valentine's Day, everyone. Just watch out for viruses.

Classical Music: Not Dead Yet

2006-02-15 · by psu

We went to a PSO concert last weekend. This is the first show we have been to in about a year. In the past, I used my PSO experiences to show why the cultural position of Classical Music in our modern world is somewhat shaky. However, this is not the whole story.

The program last weekend did not appear to me anything special. A short string piece by Elgar, the Beethoven Second, and a concerto by Brahms for violin and cello which I had not heard before. The soloists for the concerto were Andres Cardenas, the concertmaster, and Anne Martindale Williams, the principle cellist. Both are popular players in the orchestra. I think many of their students were in the audience.

The first few bars of the Elgar snapped me to attention. It seemed to me that the string sound in Heinz Hall was a lot better than it used to be. It's probably just that I have not been to a concert in a long time, but the arrangement of the strings on the stage did seem different. I swear they used to use higher risers. In any case, the Elgar got the night off to a good start. Nothing like a good slow movement in a string symphony to get you interested.

But the surprise of the night was the Beethoven. Since I am an arrogant and jaded asshole, I had generally convinced myself that only the later, odd-numbered Beethoven symphonies are actually interesting. It turns out that I was wrong about that. It turns out that even back in his second symphony, Beethoven was already writing music that would fit well into his Ninth. I still get a bit lost in the long and meandering slow movement, but overall I marveled even though I was sure I would not.

I have this experience once in a while going to concerts with the Orchestra. Typically it will be with pieces of music that I have heard before. The live concert brings a piece into focus better than listening at home. First, orchestras today play at an unbelievably high level of technical excellence, and this is much more clear when you see it live. This does not necessarily mean that the music is always better, but it raises your chances. Second, the live setting forces you to pay attention. This is especially the case when things are going well. If the music is grabbing your attention, don't sit there and read the program notes and let it all pass by.

In fact, if I were writing a beginner's guide to appreciating a concert at the PSO (which, nefariously, I suddenly am), I would advise that before you do anything else, you do the following:

  1. Listen to the music in the concert once or twice on CD first. This is especially important for the larger scale works, which are really huge pieces of formal musical narrative and development. It really helps to have some idea where things are going before they get there.

  2. Pay attention. Do anything to keep focused on the performance. Some people like to watch the players very carefully. Do what you need to do but don't zone out and read the ads in the program.

  3. Do not, under any circumstances, ever in your entire existence as a human being go to a concert with an uncontrollable chest cold. Really, I mean it. One of these days someone will be physically injured over a coughing fit during the slow opening section of the Bruckner Seventh. Don't let it be you.

Happily, there were no cases of pneumonia in the audience this night, and the anticipation was high as the Brahms got started. The Beethoven had put everyone in the mood. We were not disappointed. During the slow movement, I mused about the difference between Brahms and Beethoven. Now, I know nothing about the technical details of music theory and composition. I only know what I have heard over the years. But it seems to me that Beethoven is about rhythm and harmony and development. Brahms is different. What Brahms will do is pull out a melody that makes you feel like you could just tear your own heart out of your chest, and since that melody will be the last thing you ever hear, you can die happy. That's just what I think.

By the end of the night, the concert had given me a warm feeling of optimism. It seemed to me that the music was in the safe hands as long as these people, who could play it so well, were able to continue to do so. The concert also put me into a bit of a buying frenzy. While shopping for a recording of the Brahms concerto, I found to my chagrin that I had no CDs of the Brahms symphonies. So I went to Amazon and looked up no less than two hundred recordings of the Brahms symphonies. I don't think there has ever been a time in the history of recorded music when so many classical recordings were so widely available for purchase. Maybe this is the strongest evidence that Classical Music is not dead yet. Someone must be buying all those records. Hopefully they were inspired to do so by a great performance by their local orchestra.

The Package

2006-02-16 · by psu

Firms spend millions upon millions of dollars conceiving, developing, building, marketing, and advertising their wares. They beg us to buy them. Their very existence depends on our whim and desire.

And then, when victory is at hand, and when the cash has been transferred, they show their appreciation for us by making it impossible to actually open the god forsaken package in which the item is stored. For this, someone must suffer.

I direct my wrath at the inventors of three banes of my existence, in order of the virulence of their creation.

  1. That form of shrinkwrap that is absolutely smooth and tight over the CD or DVD box. So smooth and so tight that it is impossible to tear into it without damaging the box.

  2. The mental midgets who seem to think it is necessary to cover every god-damned hinged surface of a box with a "security" bar code sticker. They don't do this in Canada.

  3. Finally, and with the most hatred, whoever invented blister pack. Hopefully this guy will end up in a special circle of Dante's hell, permanently trapped in a gigantic container for a PS2 controller, without the jackhammer he needs to escape.

There.

Friday Night in Sicily

2006-02-17 · by peterb

...and somewhere, someone is eating caponata di melanzana.

Melanzana, of course, is the beautiful Italian name for the fruit that the French call "aubergine," and which no one in America eats because it has the revolting name "eggplant." Caponata is a relish, of sorts, that uses eggplant to carry the flavors of the other items in the mix.

It's easy to make (except for one annoying part), delicious, and my version is good enough that it can make complete strangers want to hold you and gently sob tears of happiness.

Here's how to make it.

Things you absolutely need

Things you can add if you have them but you shouldn't stress if you don't have any in the house, in order of importance

The Annoying Part

Peel and cut the eggplant. It's overkill to cut it any smaller than about one-inch chunks, since they're going to shrink. Put the pieces in a colander and liberally pour some salt over them, mix, and let them sit for 20 minutes to half an hour. When that's done (they should be profusely sweating), rinse the eggplant very well. Then reach into the colander with two hands and vigorously squeeze the excess moisture out of the eggplant.

This step, along with the anchovies, is the difference between your vegetarian neighbor's caponata, which people just sort of politely taste, and my caponata, which results in shockingly inappropriate yet creative solicitations from dinner companions. By squeezing out the excess moisture, we're ensuring that the eggplant are going to absorb more liquid from the other things in the skillet.

The Easy Part

While the eggplant are sweating in their salt rub, put onto medium heat about 1/4 cup of olive oil in your cast iron skillet. Add finely chopped onion, garlic, and celery, and leave them on medium heat until the onions are turning translucent. Remove to a bowl.

Once the eggplant is ready, add more oil to the skillet, and add the following things in short order: the eggplant, the anchovies, and the tomato paste. Once it's all up to temperature, add some vinegar (not a lot). I usually prepare 1/4 cup of vinegar and add little bits as needed for moisture, and then add more at the end if it needds it. As you cook, the eggplant will start shrinking. When the eggplant has shrunk enough that you have room in the skillet, re-add your celery/onion/garlic mixture.

Now cook it until it tastes good. Maybe 15 or 20 minutes. Stir in olives, and capers and currants if you have them.

At this point you need to make judgment calls based on taste. If you used anchovies, you shouldn't actually need any additional salt. You'll have to mix in more vinegar, and sugar, and taste after each addition until you reach the right balance. Trust your tongue and you'll do fine.

It's typical that this will taste a little too crisp right out of the skillet. To be truly transcendent, you want to stick it in the refrigerator for a day or two. This will give the flavors a chance to soften and blend. Eat it with fresh bread.

Enjoy your caponata, and be sure to write me and let me know what shockingly inappropriate yet creative solicitations you get from dinner companions as a result of making it.

Dear Cooks Illustrated

2006-02-20 · by psu

I was interested to read the article titled Perfect Pot Stickers in your most recent issue. The beginning of the article, which described the pleasures of the perfect Chinese Dumpling put into words exactly why I have spent a large part of my adulthood trying to reproduce what I used to eat as a child.

I was disappointed to find that the recipe that followed this glowing description included a chart outlining which pre-fab frozen skins were best. Let me elaborate. If you have a Chinese store in your area that will sell you decent frozen dumpling skins, that same store, in the same freezer case, will have bags and bags filled with metric tons of frozen pre-fab... wait for it...Chinese dumplings!

Your recipe, which suggests making the filling and hand-filling the dumplings is basically telling your poor readers to do fully 2/3rds of the total work needed to create a tray of yummy hand-made pot stickers. But then they get none of the real benefit, because after telling them to do all this work, you then tell them to basically chuck it all and stuff their hard-won bounty into frozen skins.

If you want easy pot stickers, I have a better suggestion: just buy the frozen ones. They are zero work, and trust me when I say that you can find some that are good enough for you. My parents, who always ate the hand made ones (fully hand made), even eat the frozen ones now. They are even cheap. Buy five pounds and go nuts.

But, if you want perfect pot stickers (your magazine was unclear, on the cover it said "easy" and on the inside it said "perfect"), then read on. I have a few tips.

The key combination of factors that make for a good pot sticker are the texture of the dough and the taste and texture of the filling. The dough should be thin but substantial and just a bit chewy, but not doughy. Most of the frozen dumplings that you can buy come pretty close to this standard, but none are really as good as hand-rolled dough.

Making the dough from scratch is really not that much harder than using the frozen. It certainly is not an all-day affair once you have some practice. The dough is just flour and water, not too hard, not too soft. You divide this up and roll out each skin with a small pin. Think of it as a few dozen small pie crusts.

The second part of the picture, the filling, should be meaty, but not dense, and it should have a variety of textures and flavors in each bite. When my mom made pot stickers growing up, she would use about a pound of meat to make 50 to 60 dumplings.

Therefore, I'd suggest that using 3/4 of a pound of meat for 24 pot stickers might account for why you found your fillings to be too dense and meaty. I also noticed that you use a pretty small amount of ginger in your recipe. One and a half teaspoons is barely visible at all, and certainly will not have much impact on the flavor. I would suggest increasing the amount to three or four tablespoons for a little extra kick. A bit of sesame oil in the filling also helps the filling from becoming too bland.

Generally, you don't need eggs in your filling if you handle the cabbage correctly. The key to making the meat lighter is to not only squeeze the liquid out of the cabbage (as you figured out, good job!) but also to put some of that liquid back into the filling itself to loosen it up a bit.

The ideal filling will have the texture of a light meatball, but with the crunch of the cabbage and scallion. In addition, the soy, scallion, sesame and ginger should mix all around in your mouth, making a dipping sauce that is any more complicated than a bit of soy and vinegar almost redundant. Still, I like hot sauce to dip them in.

One more tip: put a tiny bit of vinegar in the steaming liquid when cooking the pot stickers. It makes them nice.

Finally, the real chinese dumplings are the boiled ones. Ask anyone, the boiled ones are better.

I hope you will take my suggestions into consideration and perhaps amend your article. I have the raw material for a recipe that is pretty close to what my mom does elsewhere on this web site. Feel free to take a look.

Maybe next time you work up a piece like this, instead of all that exhausting testing you could just call up my mom and she can show you how it is done.

Star Chamber

2006-02-21 · by peterb

It was perhaps a year ago that I tried the demo for an early version of Star Chamber. It was a promising game, a mixture of space strategy (a la Spaceward Ho!) and card play (a la Magic: The Gathering). It was clearly more of a proof-of-concept demo than a full-fledged game at the point at which I tried it, and more features were promised "soon." I set the game aside and forgot about it for a while.

The other week, I read an announcement that Star Chamber: The Harbinger Saga had been released for the Mac. Always interested in games I can play on my laptop on long flights, I took a look. And I would like to say to the authors of Star Chamber: "You've come a long way, baby."

The game is true to its original conception — space strategy game meets collectible card game — so there are no surprises there. What is surprising is the amount of polish that has gone into the presentation. And when I say "polish," I don't mean frills like full-motion video, or egregious 3Disms, but just in terms of a well thought out design, balanced gameplay, and consistent user interface.

Strategic view of Star Chamber

Strategic view of Star Chamber

The strategic part of the game is composed of a few simple elements that mesh into a pleasantly complex whole. The object of the game is to win. You win by outright military conquest (taking over your opponent's homeworld), cultural conquest (generating a 30 point "culture gap" over your opponent), or through political intrigue (winning 3 "power play" votes in the game's legislature). Players can build ships or citizens by expending build points. Players can own industrial planets (which generate build points), artifact planets (which generate "culture,"), or barren planets (which do nothing). One owns a planet by having more citizens (or "influence") there than one's opponent.

Complicating matters is that every 6 turns there is a vote at a special location called the "Star Chamber". Each point of influence you have there gives you one vote; winning votes at the Star Chamber can net you special ships, additional culture, or outright victory. Determining the right balance of citizens to keep on planets to generate military might versus citizens stationed on the Star Chamber to act in upcoming votes is one of the central challenges of the game.

All of these elements would make for an interesting game even without the card-playing element. But the card-playing aspect of the game improves it.

I am, to be frank, not much of a fan of collectible card games. I like looking at pretty cards, but I'm the antediluvian sort who wants to buy a game and then stop buying it. This is the same reason I'm constitutionally incompatible with multiplayer online RPGs. A lot of the effort in the new versions of Star Chamber goes into simulating the trappings of traditionally CCGs; you can buy "starter paks" of cards, or "booster paks", and you even get to see their labels or wrappers before you "open" them. Most of this is lost on me, but I appreciate the finesse with which it was done.

Looking at pretty cards

Looking at pretty cards

When you buy the game you get a few sets of cards with the price of the game so you don't have to bankrupt yourself to get started playing online. There is no required ongoing subsciption fee to play online, although Worlds Apart does try — in subtle, not at all tacky ways — to get you to buy more (for example, by sponsoring regular "sealed deck" tournaments, and so on). The game also comes with two sets of very challenging single player campaigns. The single player campaigns use their own built-in decks so if, like me, you are an antisocial hermit you can enjoy this aspect of the game without talking to another living soul.

The game itself is superbly balanced. The fear that one should have when hearing the game described is that it will not be a true strategy game, but rather the thin veneer of a strategy game wrapped around a collectible card game. Such is not the case here. It is a true hybrid. The best hand of cards in the world will not help you escape bonehead mistakes. The cards' strongest effects seem to be to increase momentum when one is playing the strategic game correctly. You're almost never going to win or lose a battle based on playing a card; rather, the cards typically influence by how much you win or lose the battle, which plays in to how many resources (ships, heroes, citizens) you have available to fight future battles.

I have a few minor complaints about the game. Although the UI is mostly good (especially while in the game proper), there are a few places in the pre-game setup where the navigation cues are inconsistent, and some of the naming is a bit odd (why choose "Gaming Lobbies" when the more accurate and easier to understand "Main Menu" is available?) But overall, I enjoyed the game greatly.

I purchased the Mac version on general principles, but Matrix Games and Worlds Apart graciously gave me a review license for the PC version so I could compare and contrast the two. They are for all intents and purposes identical, so you should not feel that you are getting short shrift by buying one or the other.

Star Chamber is a nice development for the strategy gamer: a game that is based on traditional mechanics, but which, through a little judicious genre-mixing, brings something new to the table.

The Star Chamber website has quite a lot of information about the game, and you can download a free demo for Macintosh or Windows. If you like space strategy games, it is definitely worth your time.

Resident Zombie Lull Killer

2006-02-22 · by psu

The lesson for today is: shooting zombies is always fun.

There I was, lost and directionless, staring at all the games that I was not playing. So on a whim I fired up Resident Evil 4 and started fooling around with the Mercenaries mini-game. I had given up on this before, because it seemed hopeless. I just could not see how to shoot enough zombies fast enough to gather the points needed to advance in the game.

But, after a few tries, I started to get into the flow of the game, and actually managed to make some progress. This taught me two things:

  1. Shooting zombies is always fun.

  2. The Gamecube controller makes my hands hurt.

So, discarding the last shreds of my self-respect, I shelled out for the PS2 version of the game, and I am happily playing through it again.

The upside:

  1. The PS2 controller does not suck.

  2. Real 16:9 for a nice big picture without zooming my TV.

  3. Same tight zombie-head-blowing-up gameplay.

The downside:

  1. Blockier characters.

  2. Lighting effects and textures are noticably worse.

  3. Some of that PS2 jaggy and shimmering "looks-like-ass" filter comes through. But not that much.

Having spent more time with the game, I think it's actually the best shooter that I've played in the last year. The only one I liked better was Halo 2. Even Half-Life 2 comes up short.

Resident Evil puts together everything you need for a good shooter experience: excellent pacing, nice weapons, lots of exploding heads, and a nice long linear path without too many obstructions. The stupid bosses are a bit of a downer, but I know how to beat them now (even using only the knife), so they don't bother me anymore.

Thank god for zombie killing. How would we ever escape our slumps without it.

Peter's Famous Biscuits

2006-02-23 · by psu

These are not my famous biscuits. This is a recipe I found in Peter Christian's cookbook, named for a tavern that we used to frequent when we lived in New Hampshire. Use them for sweet or savory dishes. But don't eat too many.

Here is what you do.

  1. Put 2 1/2 cups of flour in a bowl. Add a bit of salt, a little sugar (for dessert biscuits) and 1 1/2 TBL of baking powder.

  2. Cut 2 sticks of butter into small cubes. Add to the flour then cut it into the flour with a pastry blender or whatever. When it's ready, the flour mixture should have turned into little balls about the size of a small pebble. This means the flour and butter have mixed well.

  3. Measure out slightly more than 1 cup of light cream, or 1 cup of millk. It's better with cream. Add most of the cream or milk to the flour mixture. Mix with a fork. If it is too dry, add the rest. You want everything to stick together.

  4. Roll the mixture out onto a floured board. Gather up the mixture and make it into a big ball. Don't work it too much, just enough so it all holds together.

  5. Roll the dough out so it is about 1/2" thick. Cut circular biscuit pieces about 2" in diameter out of the dough with a glass or other circular thing of the right size. Or make them as big as you want. When you run out of space, roll it all up and do it over again until you are out of dough.

Put all the biscuits on a floured and oiled half-sheet. Or use on of those new-fangled SilPat things. Bake at 400F for 10-15 minutes until the biscuits are light brown on the outside.

You should get about 12-16 biscuits. This means that each biscuit has about 1 tablespoon of butter and 1 tablespoon of cream in it. Keep that in mind while you eat them.

Two Winners

2006-02-27 · by psu

We went to Ohio to visit some old friends who we knew at CMU. While there, we made two interesting food discoveries.

Mustard

First, we went to Trader Joe's. We in Pittsburgh are as as yet deprived of this "discount" froo-froo and prepared foods vendor, so we were happy to stop in to get some frozen foods for our friends and do some browsing.

You will recall that I have complaints about the mustard available in this country. In France, Dijon mustard is strong without being vinegary and has spicy kick from the mustard seed. Recently, I've been on a hunt for decent mustard on this continent. I've tried a dozen or so different kinds. Here is a partial list:

  1. Roland "Extra Fancy"
  2. Fallot
  3. Maille
  4. Whole foods Organic Special Label Dijon
  5. Delouis Fils

Without exception all of these mustards tasted like someone took a tasteless gloppy yellow emulsion and mixed it with vinegar and salt and called it mustard. Even the stuff that is allegedly made in France in the old French way is horrible. I can only imagine the people at the factories that make that stuff cackling with glee as they separate the good stuff from the tasteless yellow shit they ship to the clueless American rubes.

There is now a single exception to this rule: Trader Joe's Dijon Mustard. It has a very strong flavor, maybe even a bit too strong, and that wonderful kick that until now had eluded all other candidates. Since this is America, Trader Joe's will stop carrying this product tomorrow.

Wally Waffle

The next day of this trip, we made a trip to a great breakfast joint called Wally Waffle. Out in the middle of nowhere in Akron, this place has great eggs, good waffles and pancakes, and decent hash browns, ham and sausage. Therefore, it beats out every single local Pittsburgh breakfast joint that we've tried. Everyone who claims to make a decent breakfast in this town should go to Akron to see how it is done.

The big guy who came in from church with the light blue suit on, with matching shirt tie and shoes, also helped the experience a lot. What a great color. Highly recommended.

Well Equipped for Tea

2006-02-28 · by goob

You can spend a lot of money on stuff with which to make tea, if you want too. There are lots of kettles available in steel and copper. There are piles of teapots for purchase in all kinds and colors. There are all sorts of noodley, fiddly tea type things that invariably end up in the bottom drawer, unused and forgotten. I have a teapot, a nice little porcelain one, clean and white. I've stopped using it.

Tea needs room to swim as it steeps. My teapot has a little infusion basket to hold loose-leaf tea, and it cramps the brew (brewing without the basket makes the teapot painful to clean). Also, I can't see what's going on in there, and I often forget to set the timer. It's a lovely thing for serving tea, but it's somewhat unfortunate for brewing the stuff.

I've been taught these things by friends of mine who have been at the art and science of tea for quite some time now. My friends brew tea in a metal bowl with a plate on it, and then pour the tea out through a little strainer into mugs. It is worth noting, I think, that as their tastes in tea have grown more cultivated, their equipment has become ever more simple.

So: I was in the local cafe, eyeing the shelf of pricey things, and they had replacement parts for various sizes of french presses on display. One of them was the tempered glass insert, straight-sided and clear, and I thought: "that would be fantastic for brewing tea! If it only had some kind of markings..."

Well.

I bought some lab glass: a half dozen one liter beakers can be had quite cheaply, and make good gifts, besides. I can only make tea in metric amounts, but that's alright. The leaves swirl happily in there, and when covered by a saucer the beaker doesn't lose too much heat. I can see the tea, which is useful for those times when I forget to set the timer. It's also nice to have a touch of mad scientist littered about the kitchen.

Good tea!

Additional Resources

Lab glass is available all over the place; I had good luck with Lab Depot, Inc..

I have two kettles: a beat up ancient stainless steel kettle that I keep on the stove at home, and an electric kettle for work. The electric kettle came from Adagio Teas, and it's worked out great; the kettle has a thermostat, so I don't have to worry about the water being too hot.

The good folks at Upton will sell you tea as nice as you like.

Late to the Party

2006-03-01 · by peterb

Like everyone who suffered through high school English classes, I have always maintained a healthy disrespect for "the classics." What I learned from English class is that, for the most part, literature is a form of punishment, where drab and joyless works are held up as exemplars to be studied, dissected, and ultimately emulated. In college, our freshman English classes were run by disaffected Marxist TA's. They showed me that when examining a text — among grad students, even a cheeseburger is a "text" — worrying about the quality of the writing, as opposed to its political significance, was the sign of a stunted bourgeois mentality.

So it came to a shock to me when I read Treasure Island as an adult, and found that it was a thrilling, vibrant read: not simply a great story, but a well-written book. Where was this book all my life? Why subject students to The Scarlet Letter and stamp a boot into the face of their urge to read, forever, when you could give them a book they couldn't put down?

This month I began reading The Count of Monte Cristo and am having that same feeling all over again. It is a book that is so superbly crafted, so honed, so polished, that — to borrow a phrase from Douglas Adams — every few pages I have to suppress the urge to break into spontaneous applause.

"I mean to propose a meeting in some quiet corner where no one will interrupt us for ten minutes; that will be sufficient -- where two men having met, one of them will remain on the ground." Danglars turned pale; Cavalcanti moved a step forward, and Albert turned towards him. "And you, too," said he, "come, if you like, monsieur; you have a claim, being almost one of the family, and I will give as many rendezvous of that kind as I can find persons willing to accept them."

Gankutsuo

Gankutsuo

I came to the book, amusingly, because I had seen an animated version, called Gankutsuo, that I thought was quite good. My friend Dan, one of those infuriating people who speaks 6 languages fluently and can explain to you exactly why The Master and Margarita is not worth reading except in the original Russian, refused to watch it. This was odd, because Dan is addicted to all things anime. His explanation was simple: "It's the best book ever written. So they can't possibly do it justice." At the time, I enjoyed the animated version very much.

And now, having read the book, I see that he was right.

We are children of Hollywood. Any story can be pitched in 10 seconds or less. If the story has heart, and we can get Julia Roberts and Bruce Willis to star in it, it doesn't matter how shabby the writing is. Anger over this was, I believe, one of the factors underlying A.S. Byatt's blistering excoriation of the Harry Potter books in the New York Times. I enjoy Rowling's books very much. I think she's a wonderful storyteller. But being a wonderful storyteller is a different thing than being a wonderful writer. Rowling, however powerful her stories, does not write beautiful sentences. To give a more extreme example, Frank Herbert's Dune is a book with a compelling story but that is so badly written that you should read the Cliff's Notes version instead.

The inverse of this problem, to find a piece of writing with beautiful sentences but a stupid, dull, or boring concept, seems to me to be more rare. Perhaps this is because good writing, to some extent, is its own excuse. But it does happen, as in Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, which is an endless succession of beautiful sentences wrapped around a moral and intellectual vacuum.

Dumas writes beautiful sentences. That they maintain their beauty in English is to the credit not simply of the translator, but to the directness of his prose. He was a 19th century Frenchman who, with his ghost writers and collaborators, wrote clearly and simply, yet with great subtlety. Compared to his contemporaries (consider Dickens), Dumas' writing was as sharp-edged as Raymond Chandler's. Monte Cristo works today because it is the convergence of both great writing and a timeless story of love, loss, and revenge. Subsequent expressions of boyish id-birthed fantasies, such as The Scarlet Pimpernel, James Bond, and Batman, all have their roots in Monte Cristo's Edmond DantÈs. One hundred and fifty years after this book was written it still reverberates in Western culture.

"I am brutal, — I not only allow it, but boast of it; it is one of the reasons of my success in commercial business. Why did he kill himself instead of you? Because he had no cash to save. My life belongs to my cash. M. Debray has made me lose 700,000 francs; let him bear his share of the loss, and we will go on as before; if not, let him become bankrupt for the 250,000 livres, and do as all bankrupts do — disappear. He is a charming fellow, I allow, when his news is correct; but when it is not, there are fifty others in the world who would do better than he.

As I said, I began reading it about a month ago. I checked it out from the library, and about halfway through realized that I wanted to own a copy, because I will surely re-read it. Upon searching for one to buy, I noticed something odd. The book I was reading was just under 1500 pages. Nearly every edition I could find was about 500 pages. The version that most English-speaking people read is terribly abridged.

I have nothing against abridgements in general. There are many books that should only be read after they have been judiciously edited. For example, I'd pay good cash money for a copy of The Lord of the Rings that simply had all the poetry excised. And I wouldn't cry crocodile tears if, say, you erased every third word from Umberto Eco's Island of the Day Before. But I cannot for the life of me imagine how you remove a thousand pages from this book and preserve its soul. Perhaps one could tighten up the first few chapters a bit, but beyond that, I don't think I could remove fifty pages without feeling like I had done violence to it. Every page, once the story proper gets underway, is superb.

And the count burst into a laugh; a terrible laugh, that showed he must have suffered horribly to be able thus to laugh. However, the struggle still continued, and it was dreadful to witness. The people all took part against Andrea, and twenty thousand voices cried, "Put him to death! put him to death!" Franz sprang back, but the count seized his arm, and held him before the window. "What are you doing?" said he. "Do you pity him? If you heard the cry of `Mad dog!' you would take your gun -- you would unhesitatingly shoot the poor beast, who, after all, was only guilty of having been bitten by another dog. And yet you pity a man who, without being bitten by one of his race, has yet murdered his benefactor; and who, now unable to kill any one, because his hands are bound, wishes to see his companion in captivity perish. No, no -- look, look!"

I don't have any deep point to make here. Perhaps writing this paean to Dumas' finest work is my way of channelling all that energy created by repressing my urge to cheer while reading it. If you've never read The Count of Monte Cristo, do yourself a favor and pick it up.

Just be warned: you may have trouble putting it down.

Additional Resources

Curious George

2006-03-03 · by psu

I was going to rant and foam at the mouth tonight about the sorry state of the current battle in the consumer electronics industry over "convergence" of entertainment devices in the living room. Unfortunately, I'm just not interested enough in the problems to really build up to a good froth.

So instead, I'm going to write about something light, friendly, and enjoyable. A couple of weeks ago, we went to see Curious George. Here we have something rare in modern Hollywood: an adaptation of a well known and beloved character that is not so offensive as to make you want to disembowel the production team.

Adaptations like this must be really really difficult to do well because in recent years almost every attempt resulted in something that should have been melted down and turned into soda bottles. You have to applaud the people who made Curious George for doing several obvious things right:

No Live Action

You can't take a book that is illustrated in a cartoon-like style and turn it into a live action film. It just doesn't work. This seems obvious, but apparently someone as intelligent as Mike Meyers didn't understand this.

Happily, not only is Curious George not live action, it is drawn in a style that is a throwback to classic animation and fits perfectly with the style in which the books were illustrated. This is the first animated film in a while that actually looks like a cartoon. Seeing the pastel shaded little monkey get up and start walking around was just magic if you grew up with this book.

No Shrekisms

I'm going to unfairly pick on Shrek now. This is mean, but I think it is critical that someone hears this. I think this because the trailers that ran before Curious George started point out a disturbing trend children's cinema. People seem to think that all you need to do to make as much money as Shrek did is to take zoo animals and transplant out of their normal habitats on the flimsiest of narrative excuses and then equip these animals with a combination of utlra-detailed rendering and a constant stream of hip cultural references. I counted no fewer than four upcmoing movies in this batch of trailers that were cut out of this mold.

Apparently the thought is that if you render the animals in a way that is stupid enough, you will entertain the children. Especially if they make fart noises. Also, as long as one character spends the whole movie doing an Eddie Murphy standup routine, you will be able to keep the parents from remembering that they are in a room full of screaming children who are not really paying attention to the movie (because the movie is stupid).

Here is what I have to say: STOP. Instead of just making Shrek over and over again, you should find a story someone wants to watch and then build an art style around that story rather than just aping the latest Pixar or Dreamworks magic.

Respect the Material

Don't be condescending to either the audience or the original story. The audience are not morons and the original story has held up for longer than some of the filmmakers have been alive. Therefore, don't dumb it down or dress it up.

Curious George followed this rule well. Some aspects of the story that were anachronistic were adjusted, a few new details and subplots were added to make the film hold together, but the film resisted the temptation to add gratuitous "complexity" or "maturity" to the story. This made some critics complain that the story was shallow or simplistic. These critics are stupid. This is a children's movie. You don't need a complicated and mature plot in a children's film (see "No Shrekisms").

Use good music

Having done nothing horribly wrong, the place where the film does something extremely well is in the music. The soundtrack by Jack Johnson hits just the right tone, and is light, clever and swinging without being sentimental or saccharine. I love the music in this movie, and buying the soundtrack reminded me how much fun I had watching the film.

You should go and have some fun too. Bring a kid, or don't. Just sit there in the dark and let your feet dance to the songs.

Snip Snip Snip

2006-03-06 · by peterb

...And, in an amusing bit of synchronicity, my copy of the abridged version of The Count of Monte Cristo arrived in the mail today.

It confirms my prejudices. Read the full version of the book, or don't read it at all.

Reader Mail

2006-03-07 · by psu

Today two short notes based on reader feedback.

First, in the area of crackers, I was finally at the Geagle and remembered to look for the special British crackers that Kim mentioned in a comment on cookies. McVitie's Digestive Biscuits are, indeed, the real thing. They are slightly sweet, and wheaty without being grainy. They are also less crumbly than the Carr's knock off. I love this kind of cracker for blue cheese and such. You can pick your favorite application.

Second, thanks to Stephan for reminding me in email that the people who bought out Chopstick Inn opened a new smaller place in that space called China Star. Rather than Cantonese seafood, it looks like China Star has a mostly Americanized Szechuan and Mandarin menu. But, it also has a menu written only in Chinese with some specialties on it. I can't read Chinese, but Stephan was resourceful enough to provide translations. The twice cooked pork belly and the beef tendon in the Szechuan pepper and chili oil were both yummy, if a bit oily. I think they have that dish that is supposed to be tripe and lung in the same pepper sauce, although my mom says you can't really get lung in the U.S. You should go just to try the cool Szechuan "ma-la" sauce. It has a very distinct flavor and mouth feel.

China Star reminds me of a similar small place in Wexford called LUCKY which was open a while back but changed owners or something. It's not quite on the same level as Rose Tea, but good for a change of pace.

Coming Out of the Pantry

2006-03-08 · by peterb

We all have them. Maybe you wore a denim jacket all through Junior High school. Maybe you think, when no one is looking, that Cyndi Lauper is actually pretty cool. Maybe you memorized the order in which Star Trek episodes first aired. Whatever your particular secret shames are, rest assured that everyone around you has their own as well.

We spend a lot of time and effort on this weblog talking about food. In the process, we radiate megawatts of attitude about things that you should care about, such as authenticity, honesty, simplicity, and quality ingredients. We have even been called "food snobs" or "foodies", although I maintain I am actually more of a "chowhound."

Occasionally we try to defend ourselves by pointing out that we like hot dogs. But let's face it: the hot dog is too indie, too hip, too ironic a food to be truly shameful. Saying you like hot dogs is like wearing a Quisp t-shirt at a Fugazi concert: "Look at me, everyone! I'm so square, I'm hip!"

So today, I'm not going to screw around. Here, for your enjoyment and horror, are my real, honest-to-goodness, secret food shames. Most of them do not form a large part of my day to day diet; most of them I avoid for various reasons. But not eating and not liking are two different things.

  1. Port wine cheese food. I don't actually buy this, but every time I walk past it in the store I feel this tug, this pull to get it. Sure, it's crap. Sure, it is extruded from a space alien spore farm. But it has the salt, and it has the sweet, and it has the crazy colors, like a lava lamp that has been somehow alchemically converted to food. If you have this stuff at a party, I will wait until I think no one is looking, and then I will eat it.

  2. Ritz crackers. Well, you gotta have something to eat the port wine cheese food on. Oh, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil. How you fulfill me.

  3. Bacon-flavored textured soy protein bits. It's a very simple equation: one small leaf of iceberg lettuce + an entire bottle of Bac-Os Æ brand fake bacon bits = crunching until your head explodes from happiness. Normally I'm first in the line against fake foods, but I heartily endorse this use of astronaut technology to imitate the taste of bacon.

  4. Any sugared cereal with all three primary colors. But especially Fruity Pebbles. The fact that they're so tiny lets you maximize both the surface area which can be covered in sugar, and the rate at which the sugar hits your bloodstream, making you feel like a tiny god.

  5. Soft pretzels that have been injected with cheese food, and then deep fried. I'll die young, but I'll die happy.

  6. Donuts. Not boutique donuts, not beignets, not churros, not homemade donuts. American donuts. Donuts made in a store, by a megacorporation, by the millions. The more soulless and institutional they are, the better they taste.

  7. Coca-Cola. Yes, it's disgusting acidic sugar water. I used to drink three or four a day, and now I only drink perhaps three or four a year (typically, with pizza. It's the morally correct thing to drink with pizza). But it is, by this point, part of my DNA. I can't even imagine how many of my neurons are devoted to detecting the subtle, almost nonexistent taste distinctions between various colas.

  8. Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. I can more or less eat these until I go into a diabetic coma.

  9. Dairy Queen Blizzards. As cheese food is to cheese, so Dairy Queen soft-serve powdered and reconstituted ice cream product is to real ice cream. I don't actually like their ice cream cones very much; when it comes to fake ice cream, the east coast Carvel chain has my heart under lock and key. Is there any child from New York that doesn't know that in Heaven, you can eat Carvel vanilla cones with rainbow sprinkles all day long? I think not. But no one outside of the eastern seaboard knows who Carvel is, so I'll use Dairy Queen as my example, with their Blizzard shake, which was the answer to the question "Hey! How can we possibly get more sugar into this thing?"

Cheesy Poofs

Cheesy Poofs

  1. Cheesy Poofs. I haven't bought any of this entire class of product in, literally, years. But you can't escape what you are. Did you ever see an alcoholic quicken his step almost imperceptibly as he strode past a bar? That's me walking past the Infinitely Large Aisle Of Cheesy Poofs at the supermarket. Yes, I understand exactly how horrific these things are, from conception, through extrusion, and all the way through delivery into my filthy, filthy hands. But I can't help it. Even though I hate them, I love them. Somewhere deep inside me is an 8-year old boy who would absolutely jump at the chance to live in a world where everything was constructed entirely from Cheesy Poofs. And please, for the love of God, I beg you to click on that link.

All of this goes to prove a few things. First, what you like and what you eat are not necessarily the same things. Second, to some extent our taste (or at least my taste) for foods exists at least partially on a preconcious level. It doesn't really matter that I know that Fruity Pebbles are garbage — that doesn't make me not like them on that gut level. Lastly, it proves that the next time I recommend some hypersophisticated Italian cheese that costs $26/pound, you should snarkily comment "Oh, sure, right. Like I'm going to take advice on cheese from a guy who likes port wine cheese food."

Since I'm going to Toronto this weekend, and will buy cheese there, you'll probably have a chance to do that next week.

I am now completely out of the closet pantry. Those are my secret food shames. What are yours?

Figure of Merit

2006-03-13 · by psu

If there are two things dorks like to do more than anything else in the world, it's tell you why their favorite widget is the best one to ever grace human existence and why your thing is just barely better than the organisms breaking down the compost pile. They will back up their opinions with arguments that use repitition and vociferousness to make up for what they lack in facts. Usually, they all boil down to putting up a one or two aspects of a product's performance over all others as the sole determiner of quality.

Since I have, at one time or another, been an dork enthusiast about nearly everything, I have a humble list of examples here.

Imaging and Warmth

Back in the late 80s and early 90s when people still cared about LPs, I was a poor graduate student and bought a turntable and a lot of used records to build up a collection of jazz albums on the cheap. Of course, you can't chuck a rock an few feet from a turntable without hitting a a balding slightly overweight former electrical engineer who will declare to anyone who listens that digital is horseshit.

When pressed on the subject, the most important reason that he will provide for devoting your life to the church of the turntable and the tube amplifier can be summed up in two words: "imaging" and "warmth". Warmth refers to a combination of frequency response distortions in analog recordings, and most typically has to do with a gradual roll-off in the high frequencies. This does not interest me so much as "imaging" or "soundstage".

Imaging refers the mystical ability of a two channel sound system to recreate a sense of the space in which original performance occurred. The claim is that a particularly excellent two channel recording played back on a particularly excellent two channel system will have this magical sense of space.

They call it a "soundstage" because, well, you can't see it, you can only hear it. All those instruments perfectly localized right to left and back to front, right there in front of your ears. Of course, there is a problem with this. Do the following experiment next time you go to the PSO. While the Brahms fourth symphony washes over you, close your eyes and listen to the soundstage. Quick, where is the first cello sitting? I bet you can't tell. That's because without specialized training, we just aren't very good at localizing specific objects using sound alone. That's why we have eyes.

My advice: if you want imaging from your stereo, hire the PSO to play in your living room. It's probably cheaper on a one time basis than what the High End wants you to spend on that turntable and tube amp. Meanwhile, the High End guy should remember that whatever digital may or may not lose in terms of imaging, it more than makes up for in ease of use, portability and resilience against damage to the media.

Wow, That's Really Black

From audio, we move to video. The purchase of a large television has permanently damaged my brain, and I'm taking it out on you. Here is how I know. We took a long weekend in Toronto, and I put a video into the DVD player in the hotel room and was amazed by what the crappy hotel TV did when the screen went black. The screen went black. This is something my new TV doesn't really do. Actually, I am saying that wrong. The TV does go black, it just doesn't go totally black. A live black screen is more like a slightly non-uniform cloud of very very dark blue. This is normal for rear projection sets, because to go black the display engine has to block all the light from that bulb. CRT sets like the one in the hotel room can go all the way black because they just turn off the electron gun and send no beam whatsoever. The fact that I even care about this is clear evidence of my new insanity.

There are those in the home theater world who point to this one fact as the crucial reason why rear projection CRT displays are still superior to all the new-fangled big TVs. Never mind that I you can put a 50 inch digital projection TV into a space barely larger than my old 30 inch direct view. Never mind that you never need to fuss with the alignment of three CRT guns. Never mind that you can watch HDTV football in full daylight with the sun hitting the screen itself (something that doesn't work on my direct view CRT). Never mind that you don't have to call the calibration guy every few years to put everything that's drifted out of adjustment back into place. You simply must buy a CRT set for one reason and one reason only: it can really get black.

Now, don't get me wrong. I would love it if my fancy TV's blank black screen looked exactly the same as if the TV were off. But I'm not willing to give up its other advantages to make this happen. I want a screen that is larger than the 34 inch limit on direct view CRTs and I don't want a TV that takes up the entire volume of my living room the way a rear projection set would. Our new TV is already stupidly big, I can't see buying a larger cabinet.

So, there are two things you can do to make yourself stop worrying about this:

  1. Turn a light on. Any ambient light in the room, and I mean any, completely masks the blank screen black level advantage, especially if it reflects off the CRT screen.

  2. Don't watch the credits. Dark scenes in movies generally look good. It's just the completely black screen that is distracting. Just don't watch it.

Meanwhile, we can all wait for SED, which will give us thin, large, TVs that do blacks perfectly.

The Camera is just a Light-tight Box

I had a hard time choosing a camera fallacy, because there are too many. My favorites are this one, and the one where the guy who mostly takes pictures from a tour bus while on trips worries that his $4000 EOS-1D Mark II feels too "plasticky", and that maybe he should buy a Leica instead. Never mind that the toughest camera I ever owned was an Olympus Stylus Epic, which was mostly made of plastic.

Ironically, this statement is usually used to justify the purchase of a particularly expensive camera. The camera dork will examine his purchases and say to himself, "well you know, the important thing is these excellent lenses." The worship of lens tests is particularly strong among Leica dorks, since the alleged technical superiority of the lenses is the only thing Leica really has going for it since it forgot how to make camera bodies that anyone really cares about. But, the Leica people are by no means unique. The internet forums for all of the major brands are filled with people with much more money than photographic experience agonizing over whether the "L" series Canon lens is worth the 2x or 3x cost premium to get that extra half a stop for the dark places or slightly sharper corners, or less vignetting when wide open, or whatever.

Then they will go off with their new toy and shoot handheld, with direct flash, a noon, and come back to the forum and ask why their pictures don't have that pop like their favorite photographers. The truth is, the reason those pictures that they love are so great has nothing to do with the magic of the glass. The optics don't read the light, pick the angle, expose the shot at the right time, and finally make the print look good. The optics just sit there. The truth is that the best lens you have is the one that's on the camera when the picture is in front of you. The worst thing you can do is spend $2000 on that "Professional Caliber" zoom lens that has that delicious constant 2.8 aperture and works great wide open, only to leave it in the hotel room because it weighs more than your child.

These days, I have two lenses, a wide zoom and a not so wide zoom. I generally only carry one at a time though, and just take the pictures that work with that lens. That way, I think less while shooting, which is always good. The sage photographer/printer David Vestal always said, don't think while shooting, thinking is for when you are not shooting. I say that's good advice. I would add: when in doubt, don't agonize about lenses.

Get Your Filthy Hands Off My Kernel

2006-03-14 · by peterb

It was a game I had been looking forward to playing for quite some time.

When my review copy arrived, I was thrilled, simply thrilled. I felt like a kid on Christmas morning. That evening, I perused the manual as I installed the game on my PC, ready to be transported into an exciting new world.

And then, as the install process finished, a window popped up informing me that the "StarForce" copy protection software/malware had been installed, and that I should reboot to complete the installation process.

How quickly a tranquil Christmas can turn into horrifying Halloween.

"StarForce," for those of you not in the know, is a set of programs designed to interfere with the proper operation of your Windows PC. The stated goal is to prevent copying, but given that the company that makes it is based in Russia, I think we can safely assume that their real motivation is simply they hate freedom, and want to destroy us and contaminate our precious bodily fluids.

The truly pernicious thing about StarForce is that it is installed with kernel privileges, thus allowing it to do more damage than your average program. And it's not as if it's a shim program that runs only when you're running the game: it's a device driver that is in operation all the time. Now, whenever people criticize StarForce, their PR team shows up talking about how it doesn't decrease the reliability of systems it is installed on, how it is rock solid, and so on. This is a lie. Allow me to explain how this sort of thing actually works, drawing on my many years as a software developer.

  1. Every program that has ever been written since the beginning of time is a buggy pile of garbage.

  2. All modern operating systems run most programs in user mode, not kernel mode. This means that the lousy programs you run can, generally, only hurt themselves.

  3. When you run a program with kernel or administrator privileges, it can now screw up the other processes on your machine.

  4. And not only can it do so, it will do so, because it, like every program ever written, is a buggy pile of garbage.

Now that the StarForce infection was on my system, I had two serious problems. First, I needed to remove the malware. I'll explain how I did that, below. Second, I needed to decide whether to pan the game because it installed a virus on my system.

Occasionally, I read a hand-wringing article on gamasutra or elsewhere, lamenting that PC gaming is dying, and wondering why. Allow me to explain why: I am reasonably confident that any random crack written by a Ukrainian hacker, downloaded from gamecopyworld.com is less likely to sabotage my computer than simply installing a game off a storebought CD or DVD. I'm no marketing expert, but I think that this just might be part of the problem.

"But wait!" I hear the game publishers whine. "Game consoles have copy protection, too! Why aren't you criticizing them for it?"

That's a good question. There are two good answers. First, disc-based copy protection on a PC shrinks the market for your game substantially. Second, I use my PC for work. If your stupid game interferes with my work, I will rip your arm from its socket and beat you with the bloody stump until you die.

Let me explain what I mean by "shrinking the market." As compared to a game console, a PC has precious few advantages. PCs are heavier, more complex, and more expensive than game consoles. The one advantage PCs have is that many of us lug around laptops with us so we can do our work. When I get on a plane, I have to remember a lot of stuff. I have to remember my wallet, my keys, my passport, my laptop, my hotel reservation, and so on. If you think I'm also going to remember to lug around a case of CDs or DVDs so that I can play your game, which probably isn't all that good anyway, you are sadly mistaken. Game publishers (and, of course, StarForce) are fond of claiming that crack sites like gamecopyworld are intended to help people "steal games". I'm sure that some of this goes on. That being said, most of the people I know who use those sites use them so that they can play their legally acquired edition of your stupid game on their laptop without having to travel with their entire library of discs.

In other words, those of you in the PC gaming industry who promote disc-based copy protection schemes are trying as hard as you can to sabotage what may be the only advantage your platform has. This is so moronic that it practically defies comprehension. This, of course, is in addition to the fact that all of the disc-based copy protection schemes make your buggy, crashy programs even more fragile and less reliable. In our group of Neverwinter Nights players, for example, all of us at one point or another installed cracked binaries because it was the best way to make the product not fail so much.

The second reason copy protection is acceptable on consoles, but not on PCs, is equally simple: I use my PC to get work done. If a braindead copy protection scheme goes horribly wrong on my Xbox, the only harm done is that I can't play a game. If your kernel-privileged copy protection scheme is installed on my PC, you are threatening my livelihood.

Recently, I uninstalled a program — Etherlords II — from my system, and also removed the StarForce drivers that it left behind. I then rebooted, and one of my disks was trashed, and lost gigabytes of data (most of it backed up, thankfully).

Maybe it was just a strange coincidence. Certainly, it's not enough evidence to go around saying "StarForce trashes hard drives!" But whether or not it's rational, I absolutely believe on a personal level that StarForce is to blame.

My kernel is not a toy for you to screw around with. Keep your hands off. And game developers, stop wondering why no one buys PC games anymore. We don't buy them anymore because you keep fucking us over.

Here's a thought: spend less time and money deploying software intended to keep people from stealing a product that isn't worth stealing, and spend that time and money figuring out how to leverage the advantages of the platform you're using, rather than trying to cripple and defeat them.

And, of course, the funniest thing — I don't mean "funny ha-ha" but "funny pathetic" — is that StarForce doesn't actually work. Anyone who is actually motivated to pirate a given game will be put off for no more than five minutes. The main effects of StarForce (and similar schemes) as copy protection are twofold: they cost developers money, and they frustrate and punish the legitimate consumers of the product.

What To Do?

None of this dicussion, however, helps me answer the question of whether I should pan the game that installed the malware on my system. It is however engaged, in a roundabout way, with my other favorite question: "Why are video game reviews so uniformly terrible?" Returning to Neverwinter Nights as an example, I'd say about 1 out of every 4 people I knew had difficulties with it, early on, as a result of its Safedisc copy protection.

I cannot recall reading a single review that talked about this. Plenty of discussion about it on internet forums, plenty of discussion among my friends (particularly my laptop-using friends), but in commercial game reviews? Not a word.

So: either game reviewers are shining, magical beings made of pure light whose Quantum Luck Field prevents them from encountering problems such as these, or they simply don't think this matter is worthy of discussion. Whatever the case, it is clear that these game reviewers live in a different world from the rest of us.

So, here's my promise to you. I'm not going to automatically pan a game just because it uses StarForce. But from now on, every Tea Leaves review is going to at least mention the copy protection scheme used by a given game. If I had trouble with the game because of the copy protection, I'll mention that, too. I hope other reviewers will do the same. And if game publishers don't want to be criticized for using copy protection schemes that degrade the quality of their product, then I guess they'll have to make their choices a little more intelligently.

If you lay down with dogs, don't be surprised when people notice that you have fleas.

How To Remove StarForce

Here's how to remove StarForce 2 from your system, assuming you haven't rebooted after it has been installed. Fire up a command shell and remove these files: %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\sfsync03.sys, %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\sfhlp02.sys, %SystemRoot%\system32\drivers\sfdrv01.sys. Next, remove these registry keys using regedit: HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\sfsync03, HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\sfhlp02, HKLM\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\sfdrv01. Lastly, google for a "crack" for your game so that you can run it without having it try to reinstall StarForce on you. If you rebooted before doing these things, then the malware will have installed some device drivers that are a bit stickier to remove. You'll need to do some more work to get rid of those, but that tutorial is beyond the scope of this article.

My Next Gen: A Long Ramble

2006-03-15 · by psu

Here we are, six months into the "next generation" of game consoles, and what should be a headlong charge into a future of gaming nirvana now seems more like a head first dive into a concrete wall. Without a helmet. The Xbox 360 came out of the gate almost stillborn. There were shortages. There were hardware problems. There were no games. Sony's new machine is nowhere to be found, no doubt bogged down by Sony's quest to exploit "convergence" in the living room. What "convergence" means in this case is that you give Sony a lot of money for the right to have your living room stereo system be extremely difficult to operate. Microsoft is playing this game too, but from the PC side of the world, which means that their solutions are even more expensive and harder to use.

Sony and Microsoft appear to be convinced that the way to win the next round is to build tons of features that nobody really wants.

HD Graphics. Nobody really cares. Actualy, I should rephrase. Anyone who cares spends his time in his basement figuring out how to liquid cool his new AMD Superthong-64 and ATI Xtreeeeeme quad-screen SLI 800 video card. In other words, no one who really matters cares. Sony has sold 200 million Playstation 2 and Playstation consoles, neither of which can render a decent textured and antialiased polygon. They'll probably sell another 100 million PS2s before it's all over.

Online "Community". A place where 12 year olds call you their gay bitch.

Media Center. In a world where a device that is as smooth and well integrated as Tivo is still not easy enough for most people, what hope do these network streaming media boxes possibly have? None.

Downloadable Retro. I've griped about this before. Expecting me to be happy about spending $400 on a machine to download clones of 10 year old games is not the best business move.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the planet, Nintendo has shown a controller no one cares about. Who knows what they are thinking, but at least you can count on them to concentrate on, you know, games, instead of synergystic multimedia cross-licensed digital entertainment platforms. There is no doubt that the Revolution will do well in the traditional role of the Nintendo console: being a showcase for Nintendo's game production genius. Also, everyone thought the DS was nuts too, and look how that turned out.

The DS actually points out one way the next generation should be moving. This is because smaller machines are always better. Unfortunately, the industry at large doesn't seem to believe this. Despite the fact that sales of portables saved the industry from an overall down year in 2005, you can say with confidence that the next large scale AAA title is not coming out on your DS or PSP. Where is Final Fantasy 13 for the PSP? Where is the next great Zelda adventure for the DS? Why is it that, with a few exceptions, the handhelds are relegated to ports, smaller scale games and especially novelty and puzzle titles?

The problem can't be hardware. Both of these machines have graphics that are decent by home console standards. The PSP has decent analog control, and the DS has the cool touchscreen, so lack of good controls should not be an issue. Both machines have networking capabilities that are superior to any of the current home consoles. No wires needed! And, both machines have a true next generation feature that is so critical, and so important that the fact that the industry continues to ignore it defies comprehension:

You can start and stop the game instantly and at any time.

I've harped about this before, but system-provided instant sleep makes your gaming experiece so much better that once you have it you simply can't understand why you would play a game that doesn't support it. With all the copies of Madden that I have in the house, which do I play most? The PSP. Why? Because I can just pick it up and play it. I can start a game when I get home, flip the switch when I need to cook dinner, and then pick the game up again when the kid is in bed. No booting, no loads, no menus. I just flip the sleep switch and I'm back in the game. For once, I have complete control over my gaming experience.

I want all my games to do this. I want it more than shinier graphics, more memory and bigger hard disks. I want it more than more online modes. I certainly want it more than a controller that I can fish with. So my challenge to the industry is for you to get off your collective self-important asses and rather than making me games with higher resolution artwork and not much else, give me some real games for the handhelds. I don't want to hear excuses about platform limitations, control problems, or resource constraints. These are the best and most modern machines that I currently have for playing games. I'd like something big to do on them.

Eating Toronto

2006-03-16 · by psu and peterb

Why do we go to Toronto? Mostly to eat. Sure, there are other attractions and cultural activities. But we go there to eat. And we've been there enough to develop some favorites.

Bonjour Brioche (psu and peterb)

This is a French breakfast and pastry place which is a couple of miles to the east of downtown on Queen. The neighborhood is a bit iffy, but the croissant and baguette are not. Their tarts and other fancy breakfast items are also excellent. Somehow I have never managed to try their potato pacakes. Also, they are always closed on Monday when you want to get there on Monday for one last pastry orgy. This makes us bitter.

Despite the name, their brioche is only so-so. But their croissant can kill you with how good it is.

King's Noodle House (psu)

This is a Chinese breakfast and noodle joint at Spadina and Dundas. Excellent congee of all types. They also do the long rolled rice noodles stuffed with beef or shrimp or roast duck or roast pork. They have the deep fried dough that I like, but apparently you have to have grown up Chinese to like those. In the morning you can also watch the guy hang the whole roast pigs, ducks and duck parts in window. That rules.

LAI WAH HEEN (psu)

Simply put, this is among the best, if not the best, regional Chinese food and Dim Sum that I have had in North America. Yank Sing in SF might be as good. Nothing I've had recently in NYC or Boston even comes close.

There are no carts, which will keep the purist snobs away, and it is on the expensive side, but you cannot deny the excellence of the food. They serve up a wonderous assortment of dim sum standards and original dishes that are all perfectly prepared and wonderfully presented. The Shanghai soup dumplings have a tasty meatball and magical soup inside. The crab dumplings are shaped like crabs, and have tiny little fish roe eyeballs. There are dozens of different kinds of steamed dumplings. This is probably one of two restaurants at which I'll order pot stickers.

To go along with this, they also serve huge fancy multi-course banquets with a range of dishes that is too large to even start listing here. We always get stuck on the dim sum, and the last two times we had dinner there, we ordered Peking Duck for two, which, while luxuriously excellent, is too much food. So we've never managed a proper exploration of the rest of the menu.

When we told them we were from Pittsburgh, they said "Oh, no good food there." Given the level at which this place works, I think that's a fair statement.

Wanda's Pie in the Sky (psu)

This place is a few blocks north of Bloor in a little gentrified retail area. They have, as you might expect, really good pie. I don't know who Wanda is or how she got started in pies, but you can pick up her cookbook and find all that out if you want. Good crust, good fillings, good pie. I like the Lemon Meringue.

The Hot Dog Guy Near Sam the Record Man (peterb and psu)

This guy is grumpy and Russian, but his sausages are nicely grilled to a slightly burnt crust. This gives them a nice texture and character. He even has sriracha chili sauce to put on your dog. Avoid the similarly grumpy Russian guy on Bloor street. His hot dogs are lukewarm and have no character.

Nami and Hiro Sushi (peterb)

We've raved about Hiro Sushi before. Hiro's sushi is the best I've ever had in my life. But I eat there less than I like: this is because every time I come to town, Hiro goes on vacation back to Japan, and when he's not there the food isn't as good. Nami on Adelaide is an excellent alternative. The sushi is very good (although not on the transcendent level of Hiro), but the appetizers and the grilled dishes are what you should focus on here. Their "robata" menu offers various fishes and vegetables grilled to order: the black cod saikyo-style, marinated in miso, was particularly superb. So if you want sushi, go to Hiro. If you want a non-sushi Japanese meal, go to Nami.

Yummy BBQ (peterb)

On Yonge, a few blocks north of College, is a completely boring storefront that looks like every other vaguely asian eatery on Yonge, of which there are 8,315. Yummy BBQ is better than at least 8,310 of those. This place serves Korean food, specializing in barbecue. I don't really have the words to describe how wonderful it is. It is inexpensive, tasty, and every dish comes with a few banchan, or side dishes, that are great. One of the side dishes is inevitably kim-chee, of course, but as often as not you'll also get a little dish of macaroni salad that is disarmingly good. And the rice is great. This is one of those places where most of the clientele is Korean, so it's always a good strategy to just go in, sit down, and say "We'll have what they're having."

Ambassador (psu)

Strictly speaking, this isn't fair because Ambassador is out in Richmond Hill, a huge Chinese suburb of Toronto. But, you want to come out here to go to the surreal Pacific Heritage Town Shopping Mall and Food Paradise, and also to the Ontario Science Center.

Ambassador has dim sum on the level of Lai Wah Heen for much less money. All the standards are here. Ethereal dumplings, soup, seafood, rice noodles, and some simple kitchen dishes too. What's missing are the extra signature dishes that Lai Wah Heen has, and the huge fancy multi-regional menu of the more expensive place. Sadly, they didn't have the Shanghai Soup dumplings when we went this time, but the egg custard tarts made up for it. They were warm.

Oh. There are also no carts here. But that lets them pack more people into the place.

There are, to be fair, some problems with Toronto, too. Here are some things to avoid while you're there.

Every Restaurant in Little Italy (peterb)

After three separate trips, we have concluded that there is no good food in Little Italy in Toronto. How this is possible mystifies us, but it's true. If you ever think you might want to go to Little Italy, just go to the hotdog guy on Yonge and pay him $20 for your hot dog. It'll still cost less than a trip down College St., and the food will be better, too.

Don't Drink the Coffee (peterb)

We were just on the verge of writing an entire article about how consistently undrinkable the coffee in Toronto is. The lack of good espresso, in particular, is becoming somewhat infamous. As we were sharpening our pens, however, we found one place that makes an espresso (and cappucino, and so on) that is almost good (by which we mean: it didn't taste great, but they got the texture just right): Bulldog Coffee, just off Church St. about a block south of College. Unless you can get to this place, just don't bother with coffee at all, if you can help it. If you absolutely must have coffee somewhere else, your best bet is to just go to Coffee Time, or (gasp!) Starbucks. Everything else is undrinkable swill. Bonjour Brioche's coffee is OK too, but they don't count, since they're never open.

If you think we're wrong, please feel free to tell us where in town we should go for coffee, and we'll be glad to visit the next time we're there and find out that it sucks.

From the New World

2006-03-20 · by psu

I'm 4 or 5 hours into the new Shadow Hearts. Currently, I am breaking Al Capone out of Alcatraz, only Alcatraz is in Chicago and I'm with Al Capone's bodyguard, who is a gigantic talking white cat. Who knows Drunken Master Kung Fu. Did I mention the talking cat? I can't really say any more without spoiling the more unique aspects of the plot.

When I Think About You, I Quote Myself

2006-03-21 · by peterb

"With an iSight, some chlorine bleach, and two pairs of latex surgical gloves, nothing is impossible."

More context would just ruin it, I think.

Loving the Alien

2006-03-22 · by peterb

It was, quite arguably, the best game of its era: X-Com: UFO Defense. It had everything. A gripping plot. An approachable, iconic art style. Furious, deadly combat. An easily-learned user interface.

It spawned a number of official sequels, and a few imitators, but none of them had the impact of the original. And you can understand why: if you want to play X-Com, you can play X-Com. It's a game that comes so close to perfection that it's hard to argue that you even need a sequel.

I could probably write a long article on why X-Com is such a wonderful game. I'm not going to write that today. Today, I'm writing a review of X-Com's spiritual sequel, UFO: Aftershock. UFO: Aftershock both is and is not a sequel to X-Com. The developers clearly want to tread the line of enjoying the aura of the earlier product, while not actually getting sued for it. Judged as a substitute for X-Com, UFO: Aftershock (inevitably) comes up short. But judged on its own terms, it brings some intriguing things to the table. Let's take a look at what they are.

X-Com is a turn-based tactical squad combat game where you operate a secret intergovernmental authority that investigates and fights a growing space alien menace. Only one of your squad's soldiers (or the enemy aliens) can move at one time. Some time ago, I suggested that you could categorize strategy games by the intersection of their control quantum and how movement occurred. In that article, I said "I'd love to see more squad level games where combat is resolved simultaneously."

Well, UFO: Aftershock is at its heart a squad level game where combat is resolved simultaneously. It is the direct sequel of an earlier game, UFO: Aftermath, that was released several years ago to decidedly mixed reviews. The good news is that Aftershock is more interesting than Aftermath.

Combat is implemented as a curious mixture of X-Com and Baldur's Gate. On the one hand, you need to direct your squad members explicitly. By default, the game will pause when a squad member has no orders. On the other hand, you can also pause the game at any time and issue new orders for a squad member, adding to or superseding previous orders. Unlike X-Com, all movement and combat is resolved at the same time: you give orders to as many of your men as you like, unpause, and they go forth to conquer or perish.

Eric the medic

Eric is my medic. He likes show tunes.

Among the more successful aspects of UFO: Aftershock is the individuation of squad members. In this style of game, life for squad members is typically nasty, brutish, and short. I might feel some small affection for Kenji Masumoto in X-Com, but realistically I know that every time I send Kenji out on a mission, there's a damn good chance that he's going to get cut down in a hail of gunfire the moment he disembarks his aircraft. This means that I try not to get too attached to characters in these games.

In UFO: Aftershock, your squad members are a bit more resilient. They can take more damage, they can heal each other more effectively, and they are modeled with more personality. In X-Com or Jagged Alliance, it's perfectly common for one lucky shot to blow away a squad member. In UFO: Aftershock, it's more typical that either everyone in the squad survives, or everyone dies.

Furthermore, as the game progresses they level up, and you decide their career path and specialization. This starts happening almost immediately, at a much faster pace than in similar games, such as Jagged Alliance. So it's easier to create a vision in your mind of who the character is, and why you don't want him or her to get killed.

The Geosphere

The strategic game

Tactical battles take place in a strategic context. The game uses the "geosphere" graphic introduced in X-Com, but makes the strategic game more sophisticated. The player is confronted with a Risk-like map of territories. Each territory either houses a base (which can be developed to perform research and/or produce items), or provides one of three types of natural resources. Players conquer territories to gain access to these resources, but the act of conquering them also increases the upkeep required to feed your empire. Your base, a movable floating island called a Laputa, can project power over an area about as large as western Europe. Moving the base around takes substantial time, adding another strategic element to the game.

The strategic game shows promise, and is certainly more involved than that in similar games, but feels somehow tacked on. It's troublesome, because the strategic and tactical games are so different, the overall effect is that each feels like it is interrupting the other. X-Com had this problem too, but combat (at least in the early part of the game) happened much less frequently. This gave you some time to adapt to the strategic game and get some production underway. UFO: Aftershock, on the contrary, rarely allows a single day to pass before forcing you to send your exhausted marines out on another assault. The end result of this is that the strategic game was complex enough to intrigue me, but the game never allowed me to play it enough to feel confident that I was learning its subtleties.

A poor tactical situation

My team, in trouble

The tactical game is where you will spend most of your time in-game. Viewed purely in terms of game mechanics, it works well. You can apply standard squad assault tactics (two teams leapfrogging, one covering as the other advances, concentrated fire, and so on), and they work just like you'd want them to. There are a good variety of weapons and different skills. Your squad members' different skills are clearly reflected in combat. Unfortunately, some of the rigging in the tactical game detracts from it. The fact that there are no pre-set turns mean that the game pauses and unpauses wth a frequency that rapidly becomes distracting. The design decision to only have essentially one type of terrain (industrial sites) gives the game an oppressive mood. And anytime you have to go inside a building, or navigate your team under an overpass, you will curse the terrible camera management.

But, of course, a gritty, oppressive mood does not by definition make a squad combat game bad. Many designers strive mightily to impart just such a feel to their games. The problem here is that I — and, let's face it, everyone else — are comparing the game to its spiritual predecessor, which had a cartoonish, anime style, and a sensibility that came out of the British UFO TV series. Viewed as an attempt to recapture this feel, the game falls short. But viewed as a birds-eye alternative to games such as Rainbow Six, it works quite well. It's all a matter of perspective.

There are a few bugs that are annoying, though not crippling: ammo sometimes disappears, the geosphere screen will pause for no apparent reason, and teleporters and hot spots that were extremely finicky about where you had to be standing for them to activate. None of the bugs I encountered were crippling,

The bottom line? Hardcore fans of tactical squad combat games may very well want to try UFO: Aftershock for its unusual real-time combat resolution. Players looking for the second coming of X-Com are probably better served by a Gameboy Advance and a copy of Rebestar: Tactical Command.

Additional Notes

Metal Gear Solid 3: Ineptitude

2006-03-23 · by psu

I picked up the new Metal Gear Solid 3 special edition because the promise of playing the game with a real third person camera intrigued me. You have to give Kojima credit. If nothing else, he has a sense of style, and he does not take himself too seriosuly. Things happen in the latest Metal Gear game that you just can't imagine happening in, say, Splinter Cell because the latter game puts up a pretense of being a serious take on the action/stealth genre.

In Metal Gear, you can kill snakes and frogs and alligators and eat them later to heal yourself. You can do field surgery on bullet wounds in the middle of a firefight without taking cover. You can hide in cardboard boxes. The main bad-ass hero looks sort of like a green monkey when he runs through the jungle with his gun and knife. All of these things, give the game its own unique feel and style. And that's sort of fun. It makes the Splinter Cell games seem stiff and pretentious.

The same can be said of the cut scenes. And oh boy do you get to watch cut scenes. Here's what happens at the end of one section of the game:

  1. Short cut scene introducing a main character in the game.

  2. You walk out the door.

  3. Longer cut scene introducing major villan in game.

  4. You walk down a hill.

  5. Even longer cut scene establishing main plot conflict in the game.

  6. A 5 minute radio tutorial on field surgery.

  7. Another short cut scene.

  8. The opening credits roll, James Bond style, and thus you find out that the level you just played was the tutorial.

  9. Then, you start the first actual chapter of the game with another long cut scene.

In all, the gameplay content of this 45 minute segment of the game consisted of running across an empty field and using the surgery menu.

But, this isn't really the problem with Metal Gear Solid. The real problem with the game is that these cut scenes are more fun than the actual gameplay. I had forgotten that camera problems aside, the gameplay in Metal Gear Solid is just broken.

Here's how the introductory level played out for me.

  1. Come into an area.

  2. Look for enemies. Spot one over there.

  3. Crawl around in the grass to get closer. Stand up, oops, didn't stand up enough so I start crawling again. Stand up again. Move a bit. As I pass by a tree, I turn 180 degrees around and stick my back to it. Get unstuck, turn around, make too much noise, alert the guard who starts shooting me with a rifle. Run up to the guard, stick to the tree again, taking dozens of rounds to my body. Unstick from the tree, grab the guard and cut his throat. Hide in the grass until the alert music stops. None of the other guards seems to take any notice of the bloody corpse of their comrade lying there in the mud.

Lather, rinse, repeat. The stealth gameplay is not only completely hopeless, it's also completely pointless. You don't really need to hide, because you can be shot hundreds of times without falling over, and your health regenerates automatically. This gives you plenty of time to knife everyone in an area and then heal up after your killing spree. I can't decide if this is by design. It would be in line with the style of the game to sort of wink and knod at "stealth", and then make it possible for you to get to the next cut scene any way you see fit.

Of course, combat is no better. The only effective third person attack you have is the grab-and-knife thing. Using ranged weapons is just as tedious as in the previous games. You must use the first person view to aim your gun, but every time you do this your view completely resets in some random direction.

Targeting grenades is equally futile as there is no easy way to control the distance the object is thrown. Burning yourself up with your own grenade is depressing.

It's true that the new re-make of the game at least fixes the third person camera to not be actively hateful. It's too bad they didn't modernize any of the other parts of the gameplay engine. Just imagine if the main character in the game could really aim his weapon quickly and fluidly like he does in the cut scenes.

In the end, I used this "run and knife" strategy to make my way all the way to the first big Boss in the game. Strangely, it was very similar to the first Boss fight on the boat in Metal Gear Solid 2. There was the Boss, over there, running back and forth in a simple pattern shooting me. There I was, on the other side of the screen in an endless search for a way to both stay behind cover and actually aim my weapon so I could hit the Boss.

Eventually, after following the pattern a few dozen times I'd have shot him enough to kill him. But there didn't seem to be much point. I would have been really bored by then. And all it would lead to is another cut scene. I turned the PS2 off and went and found my copy of Madden.

Retrograde

2006-03-27 · by peterb

My new column, Retrograde, appears in the latest issue of Played To Death. Feel free to check it out (PDF, 42 Mb).

This issue's topic: everyone's favorite Playable Classic, Ultima IV.

Sloth, Ignorance and Denial

2006-03-28 · by psu

Over the weekend, the New York Times published this depressing profile of a growing service in the food industry where you pay someone to be your prep cook. Apparently, the way this works is that for a nominal fee, you are given use of an industrial kitchen space and told how to "assemble" your dishes from the vats of ingredients that are given to you. This article is just the latest indication when it comes to food, certain Americans suffer from three pathologies: sloth, ignorance and denial.

We can cover these one by one.

Sloth

The obvious motivation for using a prepared food service is that the client does not want to spend the time to purchase and prepare the food himself. I can understand where this motivation comes from. The modern life is a busy one, with multiple conflicting requirements filling our days. But, I have a problem with the claim that someone's life is so busy that he can't cook the occasional meal. The main argument I can make about this is a personal one. Anyone who knows me also knows that I am the laziest person on the planet and yet I manage to crank out a few meals a week for me and my family. Admittedly, my wife does much of the planning and shopping. But I do most of the preparation and cleanup. The main trick here is to replicate what the prepared food service would do for you, but in your own kitchen. Cook large dishes that amortize the work across multiple meals. Cook a lot of lazy food.

And, for those nights when you have to do something from scratch, fall back on quick and easy dishes, like Chinese meat stir fry (make the rice ahead with your Zojirushi). There are dozens of great dishes you can make in twenty minutes with some practice.

Finally, the NYT piece quotes some ludicrous statistic indicating that men still don't cook. I say, kick their ass. Make sure the load is shared. In this day and age, a man who can't cook is a pathetic creature indeed.

Ignorance

If laziness gets people in the door, then ignorance is what makes them pay the rent. Consider this quote from the piece:

So Ms. Robbins now goes to Dream Dinners in West Seattle, where she spends just under two hours assembling dishes like cheesy chicken casserole and Salisbury steak from ingredients that have been peeled and chopped for her. She does not have to pick up a knife, turn on a stove or wash a dish.

Chicken casserole? The chicken casserole that I used to cook when I was an undergraduate went something like this

  1. Put rice in a baking dish.
  2. Add cream of chicken soup.
  3. Mix in cream of mushroom and cream of celery soup.
  4. Put chicken pieces on top. Mix around.
  5. Bake.

I find it hard to believe that someone would need a service to make this dish for them. But I've been surprised before.

The Salisbury Steak is equally mind boggling. You will recall that Salisbury Steak is a mainstay of not only elementary school lunches, but also Swanson frozen dinners and such, where the nondescript meat is always accompanied by a white gluey "potato" product and some desiccated apple "cobbler."

The question I have is: how can anyone in their right mind pay prices comparable to what you would pay at the prepared food deli at Whole Foods for something that is basically what you can pull out of the freezer at the 7-11? Ignorance.

Denial

In the end, the value proposition for one of these prep-cook services is something like this: you pay them premium prices for food that you could probably buy at the deli for not much more. In return, you go to their house and help them finish the dishes for you. While paying hard-earned cash for food like this is confusing, I can understand the motivation. People are busy, they'd like to avoid cooking. That's fine. What I truly can't understand is the level of self-delusion that one needs to buy this fancy takeout, and then go actually to the place to assemble the food in some pathetic attempt to preserve the feeling of having actually cooked something. The truth is, no cooking happened. What happened was that someone took food, and put it in a box so they could then take it home and heat it up. This is denial of the highest order.

Let me be absolutely clear. I understand why people don't want to cook. I can even forgive people cooking crappy food or buying crappy food at the takeout counter to take home and feed their family. I would not prioritize my life this way, but people have disagreed with me before. What I cannot forgive is people lying to themselves about what their true motivations are.

If you want to avoid cooking, then avoid cooking and be happy with yourself for having done so. You should be at peace with your life decisions, and you should structure your life around your priorities not mine. What you should not do is deny that food and cooking are worth your time, while at the same time trying to convince me that you want to preserve the family meal as an institution. You are buying fancy takeout food. If you claim anything else, you are just lying to me and yourself. Stop that.

To Oblivion, And Beyond!

2006-03-29 · by peterb

There are a few funny things about my craving to play Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

First, I won't really like it. I had this problem with Morrowind, the previous Elder Scrolls game. I mean, I played it. It was "interesting." Mostly, I think I was in awe of the sheer audacity of the game — the scope and size of it, the varied environments, and architecture, and clothing styles. The intricate magic system and the wonderful, wonderful books scattered all throughout the land.

But, y'know. Let's be honest. As a game qua game, playing it was sort of like watching grass grow. I expect Oblivion to be more of the same, only with a higher polygon count. (If I'm wrong on this, feel free to correct me)

Next, I don't have a machine to play it on. My PC is woefully underspec, and I somehow, mysteriously, lack the motivation to drop $1500 to get something capable of playing it even marginally well. I was also holding out on buying an Xbox 360 until Oblivion came out, but now that the moment is here, I feel "meh." If I am going to buy another game machine, I want to buy a good one, which means a Nintendo DS, probably.

My best estimate is that I am doomed to not play Oblivion until someone gets 3d acceleration in Windows emulation working on the new Intel iMacs. Then I'll buy a copy of Oblivion, install it, and then complain bitterly that tilt mislead me with his praise of it.

So, in summary: I really don't want to play Oblivion, because my left brain tells me it will suck, but at the same time I feel like I have to play Oblivion, because my animal brain is afraid that I might be wrong, and then other people might be having more fun than me, which means I MIGHT BE A BAD PERSON.

Stupid brain.

Red Hot and Blue

2006-03-30 · by psu

For two years in graduate school, I lived in North Carolina. One of the things you learn about when you live in North Carlina is what good pulled pork tastes like. Good pulled pork is pork shoulder, or the whole pig, cooked over a low smokey fire for many many hours. In the part of North Carolina where we lived, the meat is also marinated in a vinegar and pepper sauce. The result is meat that is textured but tender, and is infused with the flavor of the smoke.

I moved from North Carolina to Pittsburgh almost 15 years ago, and have never had passable pulled pork in the city limits until tonight.

There were a few places that came close. But in general, what passes for pulled pork in this part of the country is chopped up tasteless meat dunked in liquid smoke and about a gallon of bad sauce. Good pulled pork has taste even if it is not sauced at all.

Tonight I went to the new Red Hot and Blue franchise at the Waterfront, and although they do not serve the most sublime BBQ pork that you can get, the stuff is decent, and it at least tastes like real meat instead of a mashed up saucy pudding.

Red Hot and Blue is a chain that originated in Washington DC and has several stores in that area and along at East Coast. There was even one in North Carolina that we used to go to. I had feared that the place would not be very good because the last couple of times I had eaten in the Red Hot and Blue in Rockville, the meat had been a bit marginal.

But tonight, the pulled pork was tender, and tasty. My only complaints are that some pieces were dry and overall the meat was not quite as smokey as the best stuff. The corn muffins were also stupid. These problems are easy to overlook, because at least we can now say that there is decent pulled pork in Pittsburgh. All lovers of well cooked meats should rejoice. But, if I catch you going to this place and ordering the chicken, I'll hurt you.

No Sense of Humor '06

2006-03-31 · by peterb

Once again, Tea Leaves is proud to be one of the few sites on the web that doesn't have a stupid and irritating April Fools' joke.

I say "Bah, humbug!" and I'm proud to do so.

You Can Never Be Too Rich, Or Have Too Many Pants

2006-04-03 · by peterb

It started, as it always does, with a random connection, a set of neurons in my brain that misfired in an amusing way.

Someone was talking about how someone they knew was wearing hideous pants. The word "hideous" made me think of a book by the execrable C.S. Lewis (yes, the Narnia one) called That Hideous Strength. This book is about the Asskicking Jesus. Earth is under threat from space aliens, so the Asskicking Jesus flies to Mars to beat them up until they stop.

No, really. That's what the book is about. I swear. God, I really hate C.S. Lewis.

Anyway, one thing led to another, and before I knew it, I had blurted out, as if it were the title of a book, "THOSE HIDEOUS PANTS". And we were off to the races. We changed the rules about halfway through, but it doesn't really matter. Even though we've done this before, it's still pure comedy gold.

Enjoy, and as always, feel free to add your own.

  1. C.S. Lewis, THOSE HIDEOUS PANTS [peterb]

  2. A STRANGER IN STRANGE PANTS [fpereira]

  3. THE MAN FROM P.A.N.T.S. [peterb]

  4. CONSIDER CHINOS [fpereira]

  5. THE USE OF PANTS [fpereira]

  6. THE LEFT PANTS OF DARKNESS [goob]

  7. DO ANDROIDS DREAM OF ELECTRIC PANTS ? [shafeeq]

  8. BRAVE NEW PANTS [fpereira]

  9. THE SHAPE OF PANTS TO COME [fpereira]

  10. I HAVE NO PANTS, BUT I MUST DRESS [psu]

  11. PANTS NINE FROM OUTER SPACE [sdavis]

  12. THE PANTS OF NAVARRONE [shafeeq]

  13. FORBIDDEN TROUSER [peterb]

  14. A STRANGER IN SOME STRANGE PANTS [goob]

  15. SUEDE RUNNER [mahim]

  16. PANTS ATTACK ! [shafeeq]

  17. METROPOPANTS [sdavis]

  18. PANTS-in-the-Mist [baird]

  19. PANTS ON A PLANE [sdavis]

  20. SOMETHING PANTSLESS THIS WAY COMES [goob]

  21. PANTSLAND [tomault]

  22. THE PANTS OF CTHULHU [tomault]

  23. THE PANTS MACHINE [goob]

  24. MURDER IN THE RUE PANTS [sdavis]

  25. SLACKERS [baird]

  26. THE REDISCOVERY OF PANTS [psu]

  27. THE DREAM QUEST OF UNKNOWN PANTS [shafeeq]

  28. LIKE WATER FOR GAUCHOS [peterb]

  29. THE MAN IN THE IRON DOCKERS [agroce]

  30. PANTS AND PREJUDICE [sdavis]

  31. A CLOCKWORK KHAKI [peterb]

  32. STAR WARS, EPISODE V: THE GAP STRIKES BACK [peterb]

  33. PANTZER BLITZ. [baird]

  34. THE ETERNAL SUNSHINE OF THE SPOTLESS PANTS [norm.z]

  35. CAT IN NO PANTS [sdavis]

  36. THE MAN WITH NO PANTS [shafeeq]

  37. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a pair of jeans hugging a human ass -- forever. [peterb]

  38. SHORTSCUTS [goob]

  39. PANTSLESS IN SEATTLE. [baird]

  40. "Call me Levi." [peterb]

  41. "My god, it's full of pants!" [sdavis]

  42. "As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams, he found himself transformed into a giant zipper." [peterb]

  43. "They were the best of pants. They were the worst of pants." [tomault]

  44. "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover denim." [peterb]

  45. "You can wear pants if you want to, you can leave your pants behind. But if you wear pants, and your friends wear pants, then you're no pants of mine" [sdavis]

  46. "Of all the pants in the world, she had to walk into mine" [shafeeq]

  47. Little Lord Corduroy. [baird]

  48. "In the beginning was the Slack." [peterb]

  49. "Midway upon the road of our life I found myself within some dark pants," [goob]

  50. Young CalvinKlein [baird]

  51. Doogie Trouser, M.D. [rlink]

  52. Weathering Tights [baird]

  53. Crocodile Dungarees [rlink]

  54. The Clother [baird]

  55. "Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor pants." [peterb]

  56. Merry Pantless, Mr. Lawrence [baird]

  57. "I say God damn, God damn the Pedal-Pusher man." [rlink]

  58. Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was pantsed. [tmwong]

  59. I pantsed a man in Reno, just to watch him dress. [agroce]

  60. Little Pants, Big Pants [baird]

  61. Big Trousers in Little Chinos-town [rlink]

  62. THE FLY [psu]

  63. THE FLY: REOPENED [psu]

  64. The Good, the Plaid and the Ugly. [baird]

  65. PANTS: INTERRUPTED [psu]

The ONLY Question I Want Answered Today

2006-04-05 · by peterb

Is: "How well does The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion run on an iMac (Intel) running Windows XP via BootCamp?"

Mouseketeers, discover this information for me, and report in!

Give Me a D! Give Me an S!

2006-04-06 · by claire

Ok, I admit it, I'm woefully susceptible to hype. Rant and rave about how great a game is and I'll be intrigued; get others to do the same and I'm convinced. So you can guess the effect a 10+ page thread extolling the virtues of Ouendan must have had on me. I was convinced I'd love the game even before I had it. But even if you weren't so predisposed to fall in love, Osu! Tatakae! Ouendaaaaaaaaan! really is amazingly charming. I can't help it if I seem to be a cheerleader for the game. It's a game about cheerleading.

At its most basic level, Ouendan is a rhythm game on the Nintendo DS. The gameplay is deceptively simple: numbered targets appear on screen and you have to tap them in order. The rhythm comes from the circles drawn around the targets. They start off very large and gradually converge onto the target. When the circle is the same size as the target, TAP! To add a little variety there are also sliders and what I like to call the spinning wheel of death. And that's it. You can do the tutorial in 5 minutes.

The charm is in the presentation. A note: if you can't stand any of the following you will not like this game: manga, Japan, J-Pop. Yup, as you probably guessed from the title, it's a very Japan-centric game. Ouendan can be translated as 'cheer squad' and that's what you're doing. You're not just tapping a screen in time with some music you are encouraging good study habits! Reuniting lovers! Saving the city from rampaging mutants? From rampaging robots (from outer space)? Saving the world !? All with the power of cheer!

Ahem. Sorry. I got a little carried away there. The point is, each song is a little scenario in which the cheer squad is called upon to help out some poor soul. The better you do in tapping in time, the more positive effect your cheers have. The top screen stays in story mode with little manga panels and animations to show the effect your cheers are having. The bottom screen is all about gameplay.

The only problem with the game is that the tracklist contains only 15 songs, which feels a little short. Though with 4 levels of difficulty and an obsessive-compulsive need to get the perfect 'S' rank on all songs, this may not matter much. And with only 15 songs to find it's a fairly simple task to create your own 'Ouendan Soundtrack' playlist so you can train while at work, at home, on the go... Er, not that you would ever get this carried away.

I just reread what I've written and realized that I have in no way captured just what precisely it is I love about Ouendan. There's just something about the combination of happy happy J-Pop, cute little manga scenarios (that only get more ridiculous as the game goes on), and the tapping that makes my face hurt from smiling while I play it.

Ouendan! It makes the Nintendo DS happy!

Oh, I hear it may be coming State-side... I'll be rebuying it if it does. If you're inclined to import, Ouendan is available from Lik-Sang

Ice Cream for Dinner

2006-04-07 · by psu

It finally appears that Spring has sprung. After some false warmth, followed by a pretty cool week, we came to a Friday afternoon with temperatures in the balmy 70s and pale blue skies.

By tradition, my wife and I wait for this first day of real warmth, and walk from our offices at at CMU into Oakland for dinner. Our destination is Dave and Andy's, because adults are allowed to have ice cream for dinner.

Dave and Andy's, if you don't know, is an ice cream shop in Oakland. They have another store somewhere, but I can't remember where. Their Oakland store opened around the time I started as a student at CMU, and it has been the best ice cream in Pittsburgh ever since. Don't talk to me about Rita's or Brusters or whatever. If you are going to go to the trouble to injest huge amounts of sugar, cream and milkfat, go to Dave and Andy's to at least make it worth it. Those other places are all second rate at best.

In any case, it's the perfect place to go on your first after-work walk in the warm weather. I know it was warm last week too, but the weather was better today. Cut me some slack.

Some New Music

2006-04-10 · by psu

We heard some good new music at the PSO this weekend. I can see all of you out there rolling your eyes. "New" Classical Music is assumed to be some soulless abstract exercise in collecting clever compositional tricks and throwing them out at the bewildered audience, while very little of actual interest happens.

Well, this piece is different.

Jennifer Higdon's Concerto for Orchestra is a five movement work that moves from sections for the whole band through solos in all of the major areas of the modern orchestra. The piece is designed to show off the talents of the players, and it does this well. There are features for all the principal players, even the second violins. The piece is more about rhythm and harmony than melody, so the main development is in complex cross rhythms and also in hearing sounds come from unexpected instruments. There is bowed percussion and percussive use of the strings, for example.

The movement featuring the percussion section was the most interesting. Percussion players don't normally get a lot of attention, much less an entire movement of devotion.

I don't have a lot more to say about this piece than it was consistently interesting to listen to for its entire half hour length. The music easily connects with the listener and keeps you hooked until the end.

The composer did a little video talk before the show started that they projected up on some screens over the stage. Normally I roll my eyes at this sort of thing, but this time the talk was to the point and not stupid. So I let it go. They didn't really need to partake in this exercise, the music that came after spoke for itself just fine.

Go buy the CD at Amazon.

Olives For the Perplexed

2006-04-11 · by peterb

A lot of Americans don't like olives. This is because the olives most of us are subjected to suck.

I probably didn't have a truly great olive until I was in my twenties. Now, they are almost a staple food in my diet. I'd like to share some of my opinions on the subject with you, and describe some types of olives that you might want to try, if you haven't yet. I'll also tell you what to avoid.

Why You Hate Olives: It's California's Fault

You hate olives because the olives you've been eating come from California. The industry moniker for these is, generally, "colossal black olives." These are the olives that come on pizza, in low-rent chef salads, and in cans on your supermarket shelf. There is probably some more specific term for them, but all you need to know is: these are the type of olives that suck. They have no redeeming features. Eating them is similar to eating a lump of black wax flavored with road tar, with the difference that the lump of wax tastes better. It's one thing to use these in a dish (or on a pizza), but if you like these black olives to eat out of hand, you are a bad person, and should feel ashamed.

I see people struggling with this. They'll be staring at the nearly-empty tray of crudites, eyeing the olives with a slight frown. "I should like them," they're thinking. "They're good for me. Maybe I'll have one. This time I'll like them." Then they eat one and their frown deepens.

I am here to spread the gospel: stop eating these things. They are bad for you. They have a bad taste. They have a bad texture. They will give you prostate cancer (even if you're female). Eating colossal black olives makes the baby Jesus cry. The next time you are faced with them just smile and say "no, thanks."

So what should you be eating, instead? There are over 800 cultivars of olive. Here are a few that I like.

Calamata olives

Medium, almond-shaped dark brown olives with a pleasant but not overwhelming meatlike, umami tang and a just slightly bitter finish. Although they taste yummy, the real win of the Calamata is in its texture. Their flesh is firm, not mushy, but isn't so firm that it's either crispy or waxy. If I wasn't sure if someone liked olives or not, this is the one I would try them on.

Sicilian green olives

Bigger than the calamatas, these taste better (saltier, bolder, less bitter at the end). The texture is firmer; you'll almost crunch through these when eating them. These are often served spiced or marinated with hot pepper flakes. If you get the spiced variant the quality will differ dramatically based on how well they are spiced. If I could only have one type of olive, this would be it.

Oil-cured olives

Small, black, wrinkled and leathery. The skin will get between your teeth, but the taste, once you've acquired it, is sublime. They're not simply salty, but smoky and concentrated, the way that a dried cherry has a stronger, more estery taste than a fresh one.

Maddalena olives

I get in the mood for these occasionally, although they're not in regular rotation. I suspect they're a sort of overgrown Gaeta. They have a disturbing vivid purple color in both skin and flesh, and are a little too vinegary. The texture ranges from loose to very loose; they'll practically drop off the stone. They're a nice change every so often.

A Word About Pitted Olives

Pre-pitted olives are a great convenience for those of us who cook with olives. Pitting olives by hand is a huge inconvenience. If you're cooking, you should absolutely use store-pitted olives without a second look back. For eating out of hand, it's more of a mixed bag. The inside of the olive will have a tendency to toughen up and dry out a bit when the stone is removed. If you're eating out of hand, stick to olives with pits in them.

Listen: I know. I am one of the prissiest eaters I know. I can't eat grapes with seeds in them. It's almost on the level of neurosis or phobia. I am traumatized when I find a pip in a navel orange. I have basically given up on watermelon as a cruel trick society is playing on me. I just hate having to eat around seeds or stones. I hates it, I hates it, I hates it forever.

But I can eat olives with stones. Because olives are special. If I can do it, so can you.

The Elderer Scrolls

2006-04-13 · by peterb

Lately, I've been playing a lot of Elder Scrolls.

Not Oblivion, mind you: I'm far, far too cheap to have purchased an Xbox 360 yet. Instead, I've been playing the previous game in the series, Morrowind. My initial thought was that this would be an effective way of curbing my urge to buy an Oblivion-capable PC, or an Xbox 360. You know. Kind of like how smoking lots of opium makes you not want heroin so much.

Well, OK. That part of the plan isn't working so very well. But it has been entertaining and instructive, nonetheless. It's given me some perspective on what in Morrowind — as a game — worked, and what did not.

I have played Morrowind on both the PC and Xbox quite a lot. Previous to this recent spate of playing, I had never managed to get very far in the game. I had logged many, many hours, mind you, but always found some excuse to throw away what I had done and start over from the beginning. I must have played the beginning parts of the game 20 or 25 times.

I initially started playing on the Xbox, and then switched to my PC because I wanted to use B. E. Griffith's beautiful facial textures, and because I liked the idea of the "quest log." Then, when I suffered a catastrophic hard drive failure on the PC, I switched back to the "Game of the Year" edition on Xbox. Having spent the last two weeks immersed in it, I've reached the conclusion that the Xbox version is superior, and I assert without proof that this superiority extends to Oblivion also. The console game may be inferior in every way from a technical perspective, and you won't be able to install any of the free mods available on the internet. But all of that pales in the face of this one, simple truth: playing on my couch is better than playing at my desk.

At my desk, I have enough stamina to play for an hour. Maybe two, if I'm engrossed. On the couch, I start playing at 10, and then I glance up at the clock, and it's 2 in the morning.

I am now further into Morrowind than I've ever been before. The reason it took me so long is, I think, because of a mismatch between the game's design and the way I want to play. I don't want to wait around for three years before I can tour the island. I want to go to potentialy dangerous places right away. But if you play the game the way it's "meant" to be played, this is nearly hopeless. This time, rather than simply "role playing" and getting sand kicked in my face like a 98 pound weakling at the beach, I have Developed A Plan. My plan involves abusing the game's levelling mechanism such that instead of my character getting just a little bit better at each task each level, he gets insanely better. Through techniques just on the ragged edge of cheating, I have become like unto a God. This means that R has increased just enough that I can wander around randomly and not get killed by the first wild animal I meet.

I will go so far as to say that this isn't just a mismatch between me and the game, but something of a fundamental flaw. The thrill of the Elder Scrolls games is that they provide a very large "sandbox" to play in. But at least in Morrowind, when you start out it is a very large sandbox staffed with bullies who can kill you by breathing on you. R increases so slowly that most of the sandbox is deadly to you. In the Japanese-style RPG, this problem would be solved by simply not letting you wander in to the dangerous areas. Here, you're free to wander up to Ghostgate and get killed any time. Exhilarating, yes, but also very frustrating.

My Morrowind solution, as I said, is to powerlevel. And now I can wander around, face moderate challenges, and not feel like I should be riding the Tamriel Short Bus. The Oblivion solution, apparently, has been to scale all enemies in the game to not be too difficult or too easy. This has caused some uproar among the "hardcore RPG fan." "Hardcore," in this context, is defined as "that segment of the market which, if every one of them bought your game twice, you'd still go bankrupt." While I understand their feelings, it seems to me to be a reasonable compromise to make their painstakingly constructed world accessible to all.

It's a truism among a certain sort of RPG player that the platonic ideal of a game is so large that most of it will never be experienced. As a software developer, I can't share this sentiment. Every bit of text you write that isn't read, every line of dialogue you record that isn't heard, every tree you place that isn't seen translates directly into man-hours and money wasted. What you actually want is a game that feels so large that it feels like most of it will never be experienced. Every player in fact plays through 99% of the game, but still believes there is an unexplored world just over the next hill.

Morrowind sustained the illusion of a huge, mostly unexplored world by creating a world that was huge and, for a large number of players, not really explorable without cheating. I suspect the level scaling of enemies in Oblivion was largely a response to this. It's not that they were trying to make the game easier simply for the players. It's that few designers like creating a large, detailed world that hardly anyone ever gets to see.

After all the hours I've put into it, I still enjoy Morrowind not for the game elements, but as a sort of extended travelogue. Even though I've been playing it for so long, I'm still finding entire towns I have never seen before, with completely different architectures. I visited a daedric shrine, and survived. I finally saw the Ghostgate. And yet I know I've only scratched the surface of the virtual landscape.

Morrowind's greatest weakness, of course, is still apparent: the utterly flat characterization of just about every NPC in the game. It is something of an achievement that the characters in the game manage to be less interesting than the books. I don't expect Oblivion to be substantially different in this regard.

But I still want to play it.

In summary: if I manage to not buy an Xbox 360 after dinner tonight, I will deserve a medal. Thank you, and goodnight.

Diving into Oblivion

2006-04-14 · by psu

As it turned out, one weekend after opining about the viability of the "current generation" consoles, the Xbox 360 finally appeared in reasonable numbers. Suddenly they were everywhere. Coincidentally, I was getting tired of low resolution Madden 06. Yes, my defenses are that thin.

There isn't much to say about the console itself.

  1. It's not really any smaller or better looking than an Xbox.

  2. It is a LOT louder.

  3. Wireless controllers are the best thing ever.

  4. Why is there only 13GB free on my disk?

  5. XBox live Gold: Meh.

  6. Madden 2006: Madden in high resolution. No real complaints, but I'm not used to the new controls.

Basically, the 360 is like playing on a decent PC connected to a 50 inch screen, with a nice gamepad, on my couch. Who would want more?

I also obtained Oblivion, because the shooters currently available on the box that are not Halo don't really seem worth it. Why is Half-Life 2 not on this console?

I remember in my previous life when I tried to play Morrowind. I ran through the first hour, made a character, walked out the door of the character making place and was instantly bored to tears and quit the game forever.

Oblivion is a similar, but much denser experience. Here are my short impressions:

  1. The beginning of the game and the tutorial level are very well done.

  2. It's not hard to find things to do in the game. This makes it harder to notice that you've forgotten what you wanted to do.

  3. I don't know what "radiant AI" is, but the NPCs in this game say the same shit over and over again just like the NPCs in all the other games. They even share their stock phrases with other people miles away. The difference is that if you put them together in a room, they say the same shit to each other until you talk to one of them to make them shut up. Not impressive.

  4. The visuals are excellent, except for two issues. First, detail doesn't seem to gradually fall off with distance. Instead, the world is tremendously detailed up to a certain threshold, at which time the detail falls off a cliff and disappears. Second, the humanoid face models are awful. Everyone in this land was apparently deformed in some horrible childhood accident.

I have not really made it far enough into the game to say anything more than this. I don't really have the combat system figured out, so anything scarier than a mud crab still seems to kick my ass more often than not.

The open sandbox nature of the game works against it here. It's not really clear to me where I should go to obtain the things I need to obtain to not be killed by crabs on the beach. This is made more complicated by the fact that the leveling system is needlessly complicated. In order to give you the impression that you are doing something "deep", they cut up R into a dozen or so components that all increase at varying rates. This makes you really think about how you want to play the game before you've seen enough of the game to figure out how you want to play the game. It seems like it would be easier to level everything at once for a while and then let me pick later, or not at all.

Last night, in search of more power, and figuring that it should be the hub of everything, I went to the Imperial City. I walked around the walls for about an hour. It was majestic and pretty. I talked to the zombie people there who said the same things over and over again. No one gave me any idea what I should be doing or where I could go. It turns out what I really wanted to do was to go to some small town out in the middle of nowhere where the guild halls are and I can pick up some more power items.

I guess I'll go try that tonight.

Anyway, I went back and crawled around in a cave for a while, only to be repeatedly killed by a female magic user who had more spells than me. What I really wanted at this point was a nice sniper rifle. The game has a lot of darkness to hide in, but it's hard to actually sneak up close to people and hit them. A nice rifle would fix this problem.

From Pete's descriptions of Morrowind, it really does sound to me like Oblivion is more of the same, but better tuned and with higher resolution textures. The tuning and overall craftsmanship make a big difference. They certainly got me to play for more than an hour this time. We'll see if the game can keep me on the hook.

Really though, a sniper rifle would be nice.

Living in Oblivion

2006-04-18 · by psu

I have not been posting because I've been running my Breton/Dark Elf Mage/Fighter/Thief guy around in the woods looking for all the different things to do. I think I finally have a good feel for this game, even though I really still haven't scratched the surface.

Therefore, it is time to complain.

To be fair, there really isn't that much to complain about. This is the most engaging "Western" style RPG that I've played since KOTOR.

Where KOTOR attempted the standard Bioware two-branched epic journey story, Oblivion to some extent punts the whole "main plot" question by filling the game with so much other content that there are really four or five full games on the disk rather than just one. You could spend your whole life running around the world finishing the various "side" quests.

Anyone who knows me knows that side quests are not my thing. Put me on the rails to get to the end of the game and just push me along is what I say. Oblivion's major achievement is breaking me out of this shell and making me embrace the side quest, and even love it.

Two things make the various quests in the game enjoyable:

  1. They are easy to find. You just walk around and they come to you. You can't walk 50 feet in the game without finding some dungeon to go into, or someone who needs this or that, or someone who needs someone else killed. I even found the Thieves Guild completely by accident.

2 Each piece of each quest is small. You can play through the ones I've found in one wage-slave night. You don't have to spend hours and hours of your life tracking down all the little keys and knick-knacks.

All that stands between Oblivion and gaming perfection are all the standard things that are stupid about "Western" RPGs.

First, the leveling system is stupid. It's not broken or fatally unbalanced or anything. It's just stupid. Rather than a few simple numbers, you have to keep track of 21 skills governed by a half dozen different core attributes (Strength, Intelligence, etc). If you manage your skills in the obvious way, your character will not progress as fast as if you manage your skills sort of backwards.

The way the skills/attributes work, you pick "major" skills that your character specializes in and the rest become "minor" skills that you would think would be de-emphasized. When you practice the skills, they slowly level up until some threshold at which time you gain a level. When you gain a level, you get bonuses to your core attributes based on the skills that improved. These bonuses are calculated based on all of the skills that increased, whether or not they were in your "specialization."

However, when you level is determined by how much your major skills improved. Therefore, it is actually to your advantage to never use your major skills until you are ready to level. So, building that uber-sneaky thief guy? Best to not sneak around a lot. You want to build your Willpower so you can create a fireball of death? Don't run around casting fireball or it will take you longer to get there than if you cast Healing spells on yourself a lot.

Basically, to maximize attribute gain per level, you want to specialize in things you don't do a lot.

There are two things to observe here. First, the real goal of any leveling system in an RPG is to get you to the max level in everything at some point in the game. Everything else is just show. Second, by making the show as complex and byzantine as possible, Bethesda has painted themselves into a corner where Fighter/Mage characters are running around in a cave with no clothes on punching things with their bare hands rather than fighting with swords and spells, all in the name of maxing everything out faster.

I say, just chuck it and replace it with R. Just make sure I get better and more bad-ass as I play the game. I don't really care about the details. I should be able to do everything well.

The other major complaint I have about the game is about inventory and resource management. My character can carry 5 changes of clothes, thousands in gold, a whole armory, a whole pharmacy, and ingredients for a state dinner. But, if I run across that extra book that puts my over that arbitrary limit, I have to suddenly do bin packing. This is stupid.

It's also stupid that it's hard to find money. It's not that hard, but it's hard enough that people resort to exploiting glitches to make sure they don't have to worry about money. The fact that people do this and still have a lot of fun indicates that this kind of resource constraint is not really needed in the game. It's just there so the old skool fan-boys don't complain about the game being "dumbed down". But, those guys will always have that complaint, so it's best not to listen to them.

That's pretty much all I have. The face animation and lip sync could be better (KOTOR was better, and KOTOR was creepy). Otherwise, this game is an enjoyable fantasy romp, as long was you don't get too caught up in trying to believe the world is alive, as opposed to pre-programmed. I don't think anyone has ever collected this much excellent pre-programmed content in one place before. You could play the game for years and never run out of things to do.

Pete should buy this game soon.

DaNGer! DaNGer!

2006-04-19 · by peterb

I decided to try Adobe's DNG converter for the same reason that I can't help picking at scabs: I'm always curious about how a new workflow will feel.

This, of course, is because I am a dedicated amateur and wanker. If I were a professional, the chances that I would risk my livelihood on a new workflow before it was tried and tested would approach zero.

DNG, for those of you not aware of it, is Adobe's new semi-open standard for "raw" digital photographs. The theoretical pitch is as follows: camera manufacturers are each promulgating unique raw standards. Many of those standards change from camera to camera, so a Canon Raw file from a 350D is different from a Canon Raw file from a 30D. Propietary formats are bad! Photographers should keep all of their raw photos in DNG, which will always be supported, and since the standard is open, even if Adobe goes out of business someone will write tools to read and write it.

That's the idealistic pitch. The practical pitch is as follows: "Adobe tools don't know how to write metadata into all of these raw files, so we store them in "sidecar" .xmp files that have to be in the same directory as your raw file. Having two files is messy and bad! Convert all your photos to DNG, and we can put all that metadata inside the file. That will be nice and neat! Also, we like puppies."

This was, to tell the truth, attractive to me: I have always hated those xmp sidecar files, and I have always loved cute little puppies.

There's just one problem: the idealistic pitch isn't quite true. For example, Photo Mechanic, a program that, as near as I can tell, is written by three guys eating ramen noodles in Washington state, can manage to write IPTC metadata into just about every major Raw file format without resorting to xmp files. Maybe it's unfair to expect the guys from San Jose to do the same thing. But as long as I have Photo Mechanic, it's a hard sell to convince me that I need to convert to a new product to read and write metadata in a single file.

But, as I said, I can't resist the allure of changing my workflow for no particular reason, and since I'm currently evaluating several cataloging tools it seemed like a good idea to try out the DNG converter, since it would let me see how the cataloging tools handled it. I picked a couple of small directories, configured Photo Mechanic to invoke the DNG converter, held my breath, and dived in.

In terms of core functionality, everything worked more or less as advertised. My files were converted. The DNGs could be read by the cataloging tools, and by Bridge, and by Photo Mechanic, and just about every other tool I used. However, I found two problems that have convinced me that DNG is not yet for me.

First, the conversion seems to have lost some of the metadata in the CR2 files. Most of this is Canon-specific data -- the sort of thing that you might lose, for example, if you converted to JPEG (white balance, serial number, etc). The truly crucial metadata (by which I mean "IPTC keywords and creation date") were copied over correctly. So this by itself isn't the showstopper.

Here's the showstopper.

Before:

After:

Now, let me be perfectly clear about what we're looking at. These are not the actual raw files. The fidelity of the actual raw file in the DNG is perfect: it looks exactly the same as in my original .CR2. What we're looking at is the jpeg preview that is embedded in the file. In simple terms, the DNG converter decided to "help" me by generating a preview that looks as if I opened it in Adobe Camera Raw and set all the checkboxes to "automatic."

While I understand the rationale behind giving me this "help," I really don't want it. By the time my photos hit the DNG converter, I have already done an editing pass: I decided which photos to keep by chimping at the camera. The preview in the CR2 is essentially the same as what I looked at on the camera. The DNG preview is garbage, regardless of how technically correct it may be, simply because it's not the same thing I was looking at on-camera.

I looked around for an option to just slurp over the CR2 preview, but it doesn't seem to exist yet. This, petty as it is, will probably keep me from making DNG an essential part of my workflow in the short term.

Kiss That Frog

2006-04-24 · by peterb

The little boy had been off by himself for a while while the rest of us were near the stream pretending to fish. When he came back had a net full of frogs.

"Now, you be sure to put those back," said his dad. "Well," the little boy said, "I have to keep one, because he peed on me. So I have to keep that one in the net, as punishment." Despite this, all six or seven frogs stayed in the net.

A little while later, I realized from conversation that some of the frogs in his net were mating. I heard the little boy telling some of the fishermen that the frogs "were on their honeymoon." "Lots of frogs seem to be on their honeymoon over by the woods," he said.

Two frogs in love

Frog Honeymoon (click to enlarge)

"Hey," I said. "Can you put those frogs on their honeymoon down, so I can take a picture of them?"

"Sure." He put them down. I got the photo.

The female frog began to hop away. The male stayed clamped on her back. The little boy scooped the two of them up and put them back into the frog orgy in his net.

It's not easy being green.

99 Side Quests On Rails

2006-04-25 · by psu

The inevitable backlash against Oblivion has started in earnest. With early reviews proclaiming that the game was something between the second coming and the invention of peanut butter on sliced bread, you can't be surprised that a few people are deciding to stand up and call the whole thing nonsense. But, just as inevitable are freaks who go overboard.

That review, and others like it, complain about the A.I. and various issues with "realism" and "immersion." It's true that the A.I. in the game is pretty pathetic. But this was completely predictable. Any time anyone claims with a straight face that they have built a realistic A.I., I know that what that means is that they've built something not quite as fun as the Grunts in Halo. Anyone who actually believed all this crap about "Radiant A.I." deserved whatever disappointment they received.

People are also disappointed that you can't interact with the NPCs like "real people". There are only fixed scripts with fixed options. This is because we don't live in a world where a "real people" simulator exists. I find it amazing that anyone would expect a game to implement some kind of natural language based dynamic narrative system to generate realistic NPC conversations. Although I have seen it claimed that Bethesda had such a thing and "dumbed it down" before the game was released. Because ya know, if you had actually built the world's most sophisticated A.I. system, you would not want to actually ship it. I also think these people are working too hard to find complaints. After all, if you want something to complain about the NPCs in the game, just look at the horrible facial models.

Finally, many complaints have been directed at the leveling system. Some hardcore RPG dorks hate that they don't need an Excel spreadsheet and optimization model to figure out how to max out their stats in the fastest way possible. This makes the system "shallow" and "simplistic", when if anything the system is too complicated and stupid.

Others don't like how the world levels with them. Running into bandits and goblins sporting awesome armor and weapons just ruins their gameplay experience because obviously they are the only ones who get to be bad ass. More whining about lost immersion tends to follow.

These people appear to be bitter that they read previews and advance press about the latent Oblivion and thought they would be getting some paradise of a game where completely open-ended gameplay was married with actual Turing-test-passing A.I. and a dynamic plot, thus creating the ultimate sandbox game where the player can do anything they want at any time and always get just the right amount of challenge and bad-assness at the same time.

Of course, the game is not like this. No one knows how to do make a game like that yet, and I don't think it's really that important.

What is important is that the game keep you immersed in what you want to be doing. This is what Oblivion does well. The game only seems like a sandbox on the surface. It's true that you can do the quests in almost any order. It's also true that you can interrupt the active quest and go do something else for a while, and when you come back everything will be waiting for you. But if you examine each quest on its own and in detail, what you find is that each one has its own small set of rails, and the game puts you on those rails and does not let you fall off until the quest is done. Whether you are traveling across the world to find a long lost artifact or just crawling through a dark pit of a cave, the Dungeon Crawl experience in this game is tuned and tweaked to perfection.

What Bethesda has done in Oblivion is to fit a few hundred linear quests into world that appears to be large and open-ended. You think you can do anything you want, when really you are just on one set of tracks or another. I think they deserve our applause for this achievement. If this is not what you are after, or if you can't make yourself care about these little tasks, then by all means avoid the game. Meanwhile, every night I can pick up the game, pick a thing to do, and go and get it done without a lot of fuss and worry. I can't think of any recent game that had this much content presented at this level of polish. You could probably play this game for the next year on the 360 without running out of things to do. Hopefully that's long enough to bring us to a time when there are other games worth playing on the system. For now, this game is enough. Well, except for the faces.

Moka Pot

2006-04-26 · by psu

In the wide landscape of available devices for turning ground coffee into an arguably drinkable liquid, the Moka Pot does not get its due. This strange device has the advantage of relative simplicity, and a long history of faithful service. I like them because they brew the coffee sort of inside out.

In the marketplace, the moka pot is trapped somewhere between the cheap plastic every day Mr. Coffee type machines and the high tech ultra-modern multi-hundred dollar espresso extractors that you can pick up at your local William and Sonoma store. I find its compromises to be perfect for my requirements. The coffee that it brews is stronger than the bitter thin product of a drip maker, but is not as potent as the thick, syrupy and often over-extracted shots that you get at your local coffee and takeout milkshake place.

I like to grind the coffee a bit finer than for drip, but not so fine as espresso, as I find that the device just can't push the water through in that case, and you end up with a mess. Mixed with hot milk, it makes for a perfect foamless "latte". Better yet, put the coffee in the fridge for a few hours and then mix it with cold milk on ice. When cold, the flavor of the coffee strengthens, and you get something much closer to the pure espresso experience.

I have had only two problems with moka pots.

  1. The stainless ones just don't work for me. I could never find a grind for the coffee that didn't make either brown water or a hopeless thick goo that never really escapes the bottom of the pot.

  2. I always end up burning the thing up on the stove.

My solution was to get a Bodum gadget that heats the water electrically on a dedicated stand, and is made of stainless steel and plastic which are both easier to clean than the aluminum. Yes it's overpriced, but in the long run it's cheaper than buying four regular pots a year.

So, if you want a decent simulation of espresso, and don't feel like putting out $400 on a stainless steel pump action double barreled nightmare machine, give up $20 on a Moka Pot. It'll get you close, and is much less fuss and worry.

Bonnie's Bookstore, Mac Version

2006-04-29 · by peterb

Phil Steinmeyer has released the Mac port of his word-hunt game Bonnie's Bookstore.

Bonnie is not wearing any pants.

Librarians: merely somewhat hot, or super-hot?

I might be biased, since I was a beta tester, but I found the game to be both pleasant and challenging. The art style is cartoony and fun. The game's graphic design has "marketed to chicks" written all over it, but don't let that stop you from playing — type in the right cheat code and you get to see Bonnie naked (footnote 1). The music is particularly relaxing and enjoyable.

The game itself is a word hunt. Find adjacent letters to spell words. When you spell a word, those tiles disappear and new ones drop in. The longer the words, the higher your score. Very long words will earn you "wildcard" tiles, and as you play new game mechanics (in the form of new types of tiles) appear.

In his blog entry on the subject, Phil talks a bit about the experience of porting the game to the mac, and wonders what kind of sales he'll see. All I can say is that when I have a choice between the same game on two platforms that perform equally well, I inevitably choose the Mac port. But I suspect I'm biased about that, too. I would be interested in hearing more from Phil about the experience of porting the game, and what he found positive (or negative) about the experience strictly from a software development perspective.

You can purchase Bonnie's Bookstore at Phil's site (although the link seems to be broken right now), or at PopCap Games.

Footnote 1: I am lying.

The Left Hand of Creampuff Caspar Milquetoast

2006-05-02 · by peterb

Updates have been slow lately because I played racquetball on Friday, forgetting that men in my family have about as much athletic ability as the average brine shrimp. While playing, immediately after thinking "Hey, I'm getting pretty good at this," I took a dive and landed on my wrist and elbow. Hard.

I didn't break the wrist, although from my completely pathetic fainting fits you would have thought I did. I eventually did end up going to the ER, and they say it's a very bad sprain. I can't lift anything heavier than about a couple of pounds with my right hand, and even using an Xbox controller for more than about 10 minutes is out of the question. I can type, but I shouldn't overdo it, so I'm saving most of my typing for work until I recover a bit.

Apart from that experience, racquetball is fun. Hopefully this will heal fast so I can play again soon.

In the meantime, I've been trying to train myself to use my left hand for everything. It is hard. If you have any tips, share them below.

West of House

2006-05-03 · by psu

You are standing in an open field west of a white house, with a boarded front door. There is a small mailbox here.

I am generally skeptical about the quality of narrative in video games. For the most part, the games we play don't provide a literary experience that is much above that of the simplest children's story. Hero wakes up. Hero kills a lot of shit. Hero saves the world.

For years, people have told me that Planescape:Torment was different. But until recently, I didn't have the chance to actually find out. I recently obtained a computer that can play the game, and in between my Oblivion sessions I've been poking around in The Hive.

I am not far enough into the game to have a full evaluation of the story, but while I was playing the game the other day, I did come to an interesting realization.

Recall that Planescape was released in late 1999 as part of a generation of classic PC Role Playing Games based on D&D rules. These games all used a similar isometric 2-d rendering system with hand-drawn backgrounds and sprite-based character models. By modern standards, this is not exactly what you would call a "highly immersive" rendering of the world.

Instead of walking around in a grand city like this:

you roam around in a fairly flat world like this:

On the face of it, it seems like Oblivion should completely crush the older game in terms of being able to create an actual sense of place, and atmosphere. And this is to some extent true. But, a funny thing happens when you actually talk to the people in this insanely detailed world. Here is what you get:

At that moment, as the NPC stares at you with those zombie eyes, and her stiff rubber lips start to move slightly out of sync with the dialog, the work that the hundreds of modellers must have done to painstakingly create every little detail in the huge world goes out of your mind, and all you can think is that you are talking to a robot.

The NPCs in Oblivion are horrible. The models are bad. The animation is bad. The dialog is bad. There are only five voice actors for the whole game. You only have to look at two Xbox games to convince yourself of how pathetic this game is. On the Xbox, Knights of the old Republic had repetitive models, but better lip sync and writing. Also on the Xbox, the face models and animations in Half-Life 2 completely destroy anything in the newer game, although the writing is nothing to get excited about.

In contrast, when you talk to a character in Planescape, you get a little text blurb:

The man before you looks to be middle of height and years. He is stout with a thick, bullish neck and his shoulders are hunched, as if a great weight was pressing upon them. He wears an impatient look as he stares at the black monolith in front of him.

Having digested the text, your mind's eye constructs a character that is decades beyond what the "next generation" will be able to bring us. The result is that it is much easier to let your disbelief suspend itself and stay immersed in the game world. In other words, the text does a better job of creating a world for your imagination than all the technology that Oblivion can bring to bear.

The written text in Planescape is the strongest part of the game. It consistently performs the miracle of making the game world seem real even in the face of relatively primitive graphics and sound design. Also, the deep conversation trees, something I always found pointless in other games, actually serve a purpose in this game. This makes me optimistic about the possibilities for future plot development.

Meanwhile, Oblivion is not really a game that concerns itself with compelling narrative. There are too many compromises made to enable the high level sandbox nature of the world. It just doesn't work to try and make an involving story if the main character in the tale can leave any time he wants. Instead of compelling you to go out and push the "main" plot forward, the game sits back and lets you find your own way. To its credit, the game is densely packed with things to do, but none of them really serve any narrative purpose. Instead, they are about accumulating power, status, or shiny objects. Any plot elements are an afterthought at best, so the result is that becoming the head of the Mage's guild and getting that +10 fire ball rocket launcher of death is all just more interesting than saving the world.

In this context, it's clear why the NPCs in Oblivion are so bad. They really have no purpose other than to push you forward through whatever quest you happen to have chosen at the time. Because of this, it's not really important for the characters to be at all memorable. Even the Emperor, voiced by Captain Picard himself, doesn't leave an impression much stronger than a wet kleenex stuck to your shoe.

The evolution of the RPG from games like Planescape to games like Oblivion (or World Of Warcraft for that matter) underscores larger trends in game requirements and design. The trend is toward more immersive presentation, but away from immersive narrative.

I think the trouble began with voiceovers. I guess the argument for voiceovers is rooted in the overall goal of increased "realism." Games want to be more like movies, and deliver a presentation that tickles all five senses. All I know is the first time I tried to play KOTOR, I had to turn the voice off and just read the dialog, because the voiceover combined with the marginal lip sync was just too jarring. By the time I returned to the game a year later, I had conditioned myself to not mind voice in video games so much. I'd still rather read the game, but I appear to be in a small minority. People don't like to read games anymore. They want voice, full character models, interactive environments and huge sprawling worlds. More importantly, they want the content fed to them via the graphics card rather than constructed for them one word at a time.

Game designers strive to provide all of this, and we can see the general trend in RPGs from KOTOR to Jade Empire, and Morrowind to Oblivion. Jade Empire had a fairly weak story in comparison to KOTOR (which was no great literary tour de force), but it had a bitchin' real time combat system. Morrowind and Oblivion share an overall weakness in their narrative, but Oblivion makes up for it by packing the world with even more to do and more to collect. Collecting stuff turns out to be enough to keep people playing the game. Finally, the whole MMORPG phenomenon points out how much people crave the idea of an interactive virtual world full of "real" people.

This move away from strong narrative is probably inevitable, but it is a shame that the market can't find room for games with stronger narrative and less "shiny". We can all mourn the loss of the more literary game. Planescape is the first "modern" game I've played that evoked the feeling that I had the first time I walked around in the Colossal Cave or when I found myself standing next to that white house. It seems like modern games very rarely dazzle our imaginations as much as our inner technology geek. This is too bad, because it's the imagination that remembers the game. I can still see that house in Zork, and I haven't picked up the game in twenty five years. I doubt that any locale in Oblivion will stick with me that long.

Big Universes and Tiny Games

2006-05-04 · by peterb

When it coms to computer game design, small is beautiful. Big is bad.

I've mentioned my recent foray into casual game addiction before. Today, I'm going to talk about it again, with regards to a specific game: Weird Worlds: Return to Infinite Space.

"Small is beautiful" is particularly true when it comes to user interface mechanics, where small things make huge differences. Recently I was talking to a friend of mine who just bought a $30,000 car, and the one thing he couldn't stop talking about was how the automatic windows would allow him to close a window with a single button press, as well as open it. I don't think he's being trite, either. Little interface changes can make a huge difference to our experience of a product.

You might ask, by the way, how I can claim "Small is beautiful" when lately this has turned into the Elder Scrolls: Oblivion weblog. You might argue that the Elder Scrolls games are huge, unbounded, complex games. I disagree. The game world may be huge, but the game proper is not. The game mechanics in Morrowind and Oblivion are trivial. You can move, hit, cast spells, jump, and use items. That's it.

Weird Worlds is a sequel to an earlier game, Strange Adventures in Infinite Space. The "casual game" moniker firts well. It is a joy to pick up — the typical game lasts no more than 10 minutes at most — and interestingly it's targeted right at the geek market. You have to be a space nerd to like Strange Adventures. It fits into what I would call the strategic space opera genre. Others refer to them as "3X" or 4X games — "explore, expand, exploit, exterminate."

The path down to Weird Worlds takes a slightly different path than that for tactical, ship-based games. It originates, as those games to, with Br¯derbund's Galactic Empires, but the form of the game we find today probably owes the most to the 1983 SSG game Reach For The Stars. SSG, who would later go on to create the Warlords series of games, created something compelling yet still a bit clumsy. Reach For The Stars was cranky, and difficult, and felt like it was meant to be played on a hex board.

Many, many games have followed on in this tradition. Most of them are terrible, boring slagfests which consist of the player clicking the "End turn" button 3600 times until his head explodes from boredom. A few are worthy of special mention. The apotheosis of the genre, the game which gets everything right, is Spaceward Ho!. The most important design decision to be made in most games is that of abstraction. Abstract away too many decisions, and you end up with something where the player is a mere spectator, such as Dungeon Siege. Don't abstract away enough and you end up with something obtruse, unplayable, and unfun, such as Master of Orion III. Spaceward Ho! is a conquer-the-universe game abstracted to a nearly perfect level: the player is constantly required to make important decisions, but never has to actually micromanage.

The first Master of Orion game succeeds so fabulously because it is, essentially, Spaceward Ho! with better graphics and sound bolted on. Sure, sure, there's a tactical combat screen, but who are you kidding: you know before every combat exactly who is going to win. Either you have more ships and better guns, or you don't. Subsequent games in the MOO series added on more and more game mechanics, which is why each successive game is less and less fun.

Strange Adventures in Infinite Space is Master of Orion writ small. There are only 10 or so stars, not 100. You don't research technologies, you trade for them. Combat involves two to maybe six ships, not thousands. And there is a hard time limit on the game: it's difficult to stretch a single game out longer than about 10 minutes. And, like Nethack, every game is different.

In other words, the game is absolute genius. It is pure, concentrated fun.

I've been meaning to review Weird Worlds for a while, and now that the Macintosh version has come out, I have a convenient excuse. And I have good news: they didn't make the game too big.

What Digital Eel seems to have done is to go even further into what I call the "Nethack approach." While keeping the size of each game the same, they have increased the number of possible ways that each game can develop. With a few exceptions, the items and enemies in each game are different, as are their reactions to you. So, like its predecessor, every game is different. Every game is unique.

I dare you to download the demo for Weird Worlds and stop after just one game. It can't be done.

Visually the game is prettier than its predecessor. This is not always a good thing. In particular, I could do without the constant zooming and unzooming of the main map. It also feels like a number of the UI elements (checkboxes, buttons, etc) were made smaller in this release, and I find myself missing the target more frequently. The soundtrack is appropriately atmospheric. The sound effects are of a crisp, early-80s vintage, and wouldn't be out of place in a game of Defender or Tempest.

Weird Worlds is available for both Windows and Mac OS X. It retails for a paltry $24.95 and probably offers as many hours of gameplay as Oblivion. Put that in your Xbox 360 and smoke it.

Road Bikes

2006-05-08 · by psu

Recently Jeff at work asked me where to go to buy a bike. As I recall, he didn't really ask what kind of bike he should buy, but being the self-absorbed dork asshole that I am, I could not help but provide my opinion.

My short answer to Jeff was: just buy a road bike.

The road bike is the perfect bicycle for almost all uses. The only use for which it really is not suited is riding around in the woods over ruts and logs and rocks. But only crazy people do that on purpose.

The road bike has several design features that make it the inherently superior animal:

  1. Drop bars. I cannot stress this enough. It is a fact that drop bars are a superior design. Unlike flat bars, they give you multiple hand positions on the tops of the bars. Therefore, with your bars at the right height, you can be comfortable and fairly upright and still be able to move your hands around so they do not get sore. The bars also give you the occasional option to tuck yourself down to go faster if you want. With modern shifting systems, you can shift gears without moving your hands off the tops of the bars, so mountain bike shifters have no advantage anymore.

  2. Light and Fast. Mountain bikes and hybrids are just too clunky and heavy. They don't accelerate. They don't handle well on the road. Riding them is like riding a bike chained to an iron ball. A good bike allows an old out of shape guy like me, who has not ridden all year, go 19mph with a tailwind over the flat without working very hard. This is the gold standard.

  3. Versatility. With the right frame, I can ride the same road bike on the road, in the city, in a century, in a race, on the rail trails, over to La Prima, on a fire road, and on light trails. A mountain bike is good on trails and nowhere else. A hybrid is good for slow rides in the city, and not really anywhere else.

In addition, I like road bike brakes better than cantilevers and other brake-types. But that's my problem.

Unfortunately, most of the road bikes made these days cater to the weekend racer Lance Armstrong wannabe. The road bike you want differs from a racing road bike in several ways:

  1. Relaxed fit. You don't need the fast steering and short frame of the average racing bike. You also don't need to ride around town all bent over and stretched out like pizza dough. You should be able to buy a road bike with higher bars, a more comfortable riding position, and a more stable ride. A person riding a good road bike and a good fit will be able to go longer distances in less time than on any other bike. There is a reason the Tour de France is 3,000 miles long. It's because the people can do it.

  2. Wider tires. Racing bike frames lack the clearance for comfortable tires. No one really wants to run 20mm tires in the city. 28mm or 32mm are better. Allowances for fenders are also nice, but I've come to realize in my later years that the idea that I would actually ride a lot in the rain is only theoretical.

  3. Better gears. This is not so much of a problem anymore. Thankfully, the road triple has made a wide gear range easy to find. Take advantage of this.

  4. Tougher wheels. You do not want these newer carbon fiber bladed spoke aero-wheels that only have 8 spokes. You want decently made strong wheels. My road wheels are old fashioned and a bit heavy, but I can hit a railroad tie or a Pittsburgh car-eating pot hole at full speed and not damage the wheels. The myth that you need huge, fat, heavy mountain bike wheels to ride in the city is stupid.

Over the last few years, as Lance won all those races and the mountain bike has receded a bit in the market, there are more sane road bikes commercially available. But they remain a limited quantity item and are thus more expensive than other bicycles. The low end of the market still seems convinced that people only want heavy mountain bikes or hybrids where you sit straight up in the air. The result is that you will inevitably pay more money for a good road bike. This was true when I bought my last one ten years ago and I imagine it will remain true. In any case, I suggest you look at bikes by Bianchi, Jamis, and REI. For more money, look at Surly. For more money than that, look at Rivendell.

What you get for your extra money is typically a higher quality frame, lighter materials, and a better parts set from Shimano. When I say "better" here, I mean better than the truly crappy stuff Shimano sells to the huge Chinese manufacturers to put on bikes being sold at Costco. What this means is that the parts will last you forever, or 15,000 miles, whichever comes first.

If you are looking to get a good bike for the city, or that century ride later in the summer, or the MS150, here is me pleading with you to give the humble road bike a chance. You will not regret it.

Next time on bike rants: clipless pedals and lawyer nibs.

360 Years of Solitude

2006-05-09 · by peterb

Well, that didn't last long. This weekend I gave in and bought an Xbox 360. Here's what you need to know if you've been considering one.

The Bad

The industrial design on the Xbox 360 is beyond bad: it is a goddamned abortion. There are absolutely no redeeming features to how the console has been put together. It weighs a billion pounds, has an external power brick the size of Finland, a power connector that would look at home on a 220v refrigerator, it sounds like an Airbus A300 when the disc drive spins up, and it puts out as much heat as a pottery kiln.

It sucks, from soup to nuts. Anyone who tells you otherwise is just suffering from Stockholm Syndrome and doesn't want to admit that they paid $400 for a game console that could be used, like a cast-iron skillet, for both murder and frying eggs.

In a previous job, I spent a lot of time obsessing over what we called "OOBE" — "Out of the box experience." The OOBE on the Xbox 360 is crap. If I didn't already know how to hook up a videogame console, the lousy packaging wouldn't help. My personal favorite here is that each set of cables comes wrapped in a green plastic sleeve which has something written on it in every language known to man. When you find your language on the package, after searching for an hour through the Japanese, Flemish, Farsi, Esperanto, Tamil, and Russian text, you discover that it is just some obscure, gnostic word (like "See" instead of "video cable"). Whatever art-school reject came up with this concept should be forced to clean Philip Glass's bathroom with a toothbrush for the rest of eternity.

The Good

I predicted a year ago that Microsoft's real goal with the 360 would be a 100% attach rate for Xbox Live. I think that has turned out to be true, and it makes me happy. Whatever you think about the Xbox as a machine, Live is the best thing since sliced bread. It is the cream in my coffee, it puts spring in my step, it gives me vim and vigor. The Live experience on the 360 is superb. I cannot imagine owning the box and not using Live, or not wanting to use it. Once I actually got the machine hooked up and turned on, I was able to transfer my Xbox Live membership over in a matter of minutes. I did, I will admit, snicker a little when the very first thing the machine did was download an update and reboot. But only a little — that's just life in the space age au go go 21st century. Instead of jetpacks, we get software updates. At least monitors made from huge vacuum tubes are finally on their way out.

The HDTV support is seamless and well done. If, during configuration, you accidentally switch to a video mode that isn't supported by your TV, it will switch back to the previous mode after a few seconds.

The Great

Wireless controllers. Completely wireless control of the console: I can turn it on and off from the controller. My ability to be lazy has been catapulted to new heights. I am a happy man. The controllers are much better designed than the previous iteration, and they have a magical glowing thing in the middle that I'm pretty sure has a genie in it.

2083

Robotron: 2083

One aspect of Live support that goes beyond the merely good into "great" territory is the Xbox Live Arcade concept. Xbox Live Arcade rocks my world. I hear a lot of people being snarky about the product. The typical line goes something like this: "Oh, sure, like you want to use your $400 HD-capable system to play Robotron: 2084." Well you know what? It turns out that yes, in fact, I do want to play Robotron from my couch. What people miss, I think, is how fabulous and seamless the transactions are. I can download free demos of the games, I know they're going to work, and I don't have to deal with some greasy rat at Electronics Boutique.

It even works better for online-only games. Let's compare. If I want to buy Popcap's Zuma Deluxe for the PC, I pay them $20 (somehow), then I download the binary, install it, and then I get to play their game on my PC at my desk with a mouse and keyboard. On Xbox Live, I can buy the exact same game for "800 points" (around $10). It's bought and installed with a single button push, and I can play the game from my couch, with a controller designed for arcade games.

Is PC gaming dead? We can only hope. I don't really mean that, but it's clear to me that Xbox Live Markeplace is a big part of how Microsoft will be competing with Sony in this generation. The likelihood that Sony will be willing to work with comparatively small software distributors like Popcap approaches zero. Basically, Xbox Live Marketplace brings some of the best shareware and casual games into the console market. It provides a massive incentive for small developers to hew the DirectX party line. It's good for Microsoft. It's good for those companies. And it's good for gamers.

The only thing I'd like to see happen is for the "microtransactions" to become even more micro. Instead of selling me Robotron for $10 (or whatever), let me play one game for $0.25.

I've talked to some people who are bothered by the constant whoring of products on Live. This is, indeed, an issue, and I can understand people finding it annoying. But after so many years of videogaming where getting a connection working involved sacrificing four goats (one for each player), I am so relieved to have an online game network that just works that I personally don't mind the whoring. Hey, Microsoft, you want to encourage me to "unlock" (read: Buy) Zuma Deluxe after each level I play on the free demo? Knock yourselves out. Just keep Live working smoothly, and I can ignore all the advertising you can throw at me. Since I grew up watching TV, I have lots of practice at that.

Yeah, Yeah, But What About the Games?

Games? You can play games on it? Oh, yeah, right. In dealing with the adrenaline rush of spending lots of money on a new toy, I forgot all about that part.

The only game I bought with the system was Oblivion. I'll have some notes on that later in the week, I expect.

On an amusing note, Tilt gave in and bought a 360 on the exact same day that I did. Sorry to disappoint you, tilt, but I got mine at Target, not Best Buy. Nevertheless, I still feel that in some small, special way, we have had a touching and intimate consumer moment. I will always treasure the special connection I had with you as we each handed over our credit cards at the exact same moment.

See you on Xbox Live.

Shooter Shorts

2006-05-10 · by psu

I took a couple of days off from Oblivion to play the two shooters for the 360. The two major franchise shooters currently available are Ghost Recon and Call of Duty 2.

Last night, I played the co-op missions in Ghost Recon with tilt. As others have already written, the rendering in the game is remarkable. There are thousands of little details that the artists must have toiled greatly over. Dust flies in the air, cars beep with alarms when you shoot them, the streetlights blink in a completely empty and zombified Mexico City. It's too bad that into this shiny shell, Ubisoft just poured the same tired sloppy, sluggish stupid Ghost Recon gameplay. I mean, Jesus, you can't jump.

The A.I. is horrendous. If they see you, they shoot you through the head instantly. If they don't see you, you can walk up to one of the bots and shoot it in the face point blank with a sniper rifle. There is no rhyme or reason to how the bots act. It's sad that three years down the line, no one has been able to make bots that are as fun to chase around and kill as the ones in Counterstrike. The bots in this game don't even look any better than the ones in Counterstrike since they all move in a strange way that suggests the motion capture is missing frames. They also all have the same face.

The rest of the game plays like Counterstrike in slow motion. Aiming is a chore that involves pushing the stick left and right, all the time fighting the "realistic" momentum that keeps bouncing the gun back in the opposite direction. Moving around the map is similar. It's like everything is stuck in quicksand. The result is that rare shooter that makes me completely motion sick. In addition, the HUD and map displays are so complicated, and the maps are so large that it is often impossible to figure out where the hell you are supposed to go next. I suppose this is designed to make the game feel "open" and "free", but the result is a lot of players running around lost.

The single player is no better, since now you have the stupid bots fighting for you and against you at the same time. I wish I had rented this, but at least I should be able to get enough in trade to get that baseball game for the PSP.

Call of Duty 2 is different. I bought it figuring that I should play at least one of these WWII games, and the last one I tried made Karen scream turn it of, turn it off, turn it off in 30 seconds. This game is doing better so far. But it's still too loud.

The controls, however, are tight and fast. No more quicksand aiming and the sluggish enemies. The A.I. in this game is not great, but at least it does not get in your way. Also, the character animations are smooth and not distracting. Call of Duty doesn't really seem to try and provide anything more than an on-rails experience where you shoot a lot of stuff, but at least it does this well. It's always fairly clear what you are supposed to do next, and if you are supposed to hit some waypoint, the waypoint is easy to find. In the middle, you pick up lots of different kinds of guns and fire them a lot. This is what a shooter is supposed to do, and so this game makes me happy even if it is a bit rote.

Summary: Ghost Recon goes back, Call of Duty is worth a quick runthrough.

Share a Gift, Share a Care

2006-05-11 · by peterb

Lately I've been in something of a food rut. A combination of too much to do and not enough time to do it has left me eating out for lunch a lot at work.

Typically, it goes like this: I tell myself I'll make lunch the night before and stick it in the fridge, but then I don't have time, and in the morning I only have time to pack something like a sandwich or some cold cuts, which for various reasons I find more depressing than spiritually fulfilling.

So: how do you, dear reader, solve this problem? Specifically, if you can suggest things that are a minimal amount of work to prepare in advance, and ideally can be stretched to cover several days, while still being yummy, I'm all ears.

I'm hungry. Feed me.

Say "Goodbye" to all of this...and "Hello" to Oblivion

2006-05-15 · by peterb

I've spent a couple of weekends playing The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and that means it's time to share my ignorant impressions of it with all three or four of my readers. The question is, since all of the cool kids have already discussed the game in depth, what more can I bring to the table?

Well, I have an angle. Let's see if I can run with it.

Actually, "running with it" is exactly what I want to talk about. One of the things people like to say about Oblivion is how incredibly huge the game world is — how it brings an entire province, a substantial portion of a continent, to life. "It covers an area of approximately 16 square miles," is a commonly heard claim.

Here's the thing: it's not true at all. Here's the other thing: that's OK.

Let's get this out of the way, first. You don't want to play a game that lets you travel across a continent. As anyone who has driven across Kansas can attest, travelling across a continent is something you should prefer reading about to actually doing. Travelling across a continent is an experiment in boredom, punctuated by occasional moments of pleasure or little travellers' epiphanies. When you get old, you only remember the good parts.

It turns out that those good parts are not enough to sustain a viable videogame. Consider True Crime: Streets of L.A., which merely modeled a single city, and which I found to be an excellent substitute for sleeping pills.

If you ignore rivers and mountains, you could probably walk from one end of Cyrodiil to the other in about 30 minutes of real time; the previous game, Morrowind, felt much much larger, even though it was supposedly only half as big.

The real achievement Bethesda should be lauded for here is not for creating a game space as large as a continent, but for creating a game space that feels both huge and interesting at the same time. The world in Oblivion manages to feel bigger than it actually is. Part of this is because of the density of encounters and interesting places to explore, and part is because of the subtle way the biomes and landscape types blend in to each other. Every time I walk to a new city, or set off across country, I am full of anticipation, because so far every single time I have done that, the game has managed to surprise me.

Trust me: you don't get that feeling driving across Kansas.

Lleyawin

Lleyawin

To give just one example: last night I walked from Lleyawin to Bravil. Lleyawin is a port town, a racially diverse town of some opulence in the middle of a swamp. The buildings in the nicer part of town are almost Georgian, solidly constructed, but with frescoed exteriors. Bravil is a frontier town that, apart from the inhabitants, could have been lifted from Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles: cheap clapboard shacks, flophouses, forts, and bars. As I left Lleyawin, I travelled along the river to search for plants to use in alchemy. Along the way I found a cave being used by bandits as a hideout (there are, approximately, 8 hojillion of these in the land of Cyrodiil). The cave turned out to be the site of a turf war between the Black Bows, who I have been hunting for bounties, and a group of marauders. So I could sneak in and pick them off as they fought each other. Further up the road (and past several bandit attacks), I came across the ruins of what might have been a small lighthouse on a tiny island. It had burned to the ground. No apparent plot significance, no great treasure to scavange from the ruins, but simply strange and beautiful in the evening light.

As I approached the walls of Bravil, I was attacked by a troll outside a ruin. Not having fought a troll before, I started to run, and had just changed my mind and turned to face him when a second troll came barrelling through the underbrush towards me. I ran back to Bravil with my tail between my legs and the trolls nipping at my heels, leaving the poor hapless guards to fight them off as I slipped through the city gates.

Bravil

Bravil

There are plenty of problems with Oblivion, and I will no doubt talk about them in irritating detail in the days to come. But it's important to not miss the forest for the trees. The game purports to offer a large and interesting game-world, and in this repect it meets and exceeds its promise. If the only thing the game had was empty cities with varied architecture, and different areas of the world with different ecologies, I would probably still play it. The fact that it offers a lot more makes that all the more compelling.

In the week I've owned my Xbox 360, I haven't once had the urge to put a different disc in the drive. A week may not sound like much to you, but to me, when it comes to videogames, it is an eternity. Whatever niggling issues I have with various game mechanics in Oblivion are dwarfed by the simple fact that I'd rather be playing it than any other game I own right now.

Lastly, for those of you who are waffling between upgrading your PC or getting an Xbox 360 to play the game, just trust me on this and spring for the Xbox. You're going to be playing this game for many, many hours. You'll want to be on the couch.

If you enjoyed this, be sure to read the next article in the series.

Da Vinci Blows

2006-05-16 · by psu

We were in the local Border's a couple of days ago. I guess we hadn't been there for a while, because all the books were in different places, and the store had cunningly replaced inventory with empty floorspace in order to maximize profit in some way that only makes sense to someone who has studied modern retail more closely than I have. I also noticed that the name of the store should be Borders BOOKS and Music because the selection of available CDs has been constantly shrinking over the last few years, replaced by new shelves of basically nothing, and more floor space.

However, on this night, neither of these annoyances were foremost in my mind. This is because from entering the store until I paid for the couple of CDs that I did manage to find, it was absolutely impossible to avoid eye contact with some piece of the Da Vinci Code hype machine.

There were Da Vinci Code books, Da Vinci Code movie guides, Da Vinci Code travel guides, various treatises on the "truth" behind the Da Vinci Code, Da Vinci Code documentary videos, Da Vinci Code quick reference guides and geneologies. There were encyclopedias on the Sacred Feminine, Pagan Worship Primers, and Symbology compendiums. Finally, there were many other non-fiction tie-ins to Da Vinci Code all dealing in some way with the Early Church, the Knight's Templar, or the role of Lee Harvey Oswald in the single bullet theory of how Da Vinci, no wait, Jesus, was assassinated by the CIA back in the day. OK, I made some of those up, but I bet they really exist.

Here is my question: why.

My wife and I listened to this book on tape on a long drive a few years ago. To call the writing pulp is to insult the great pulp writers of, say, the Golden Age of Science Fiction. The writing is just bad. Not bad in a funny ha-ha way. Bad in a way that indicates that the writer is really going after something that is not bad, and is missing badly. The plot is predictable and moronic, the characters are paper thin and not particularly likeable, the dialog is wooden and serves no purpose than to push the plodding narrative forward through the mud to its ultimately unsatisfying conclusion. The book is B A D. Even worse, on tape you actually have to listen to every word. This makes you notice little things, like how all the expository passages are repeated over and over again in the scope of a single short chapter in case you put the book down on the toilet and then forgot where you were when you come back the next morning to take another crap.

What I can't figure out is why we ended up listening to the whole thing. The book was objectively awful even while we were listening to it, but there is something in it that keeps you pushing the button to listen to the rest so you can get to the end. Your right brain tells you that in the name of all good things you should shut the thing off, but the rest of your brain just can't do it. The book has a hook like a bad pop song that just will not exit your brain (I'm thinking of Hungry Like the Wolf by Duran Duran). This makes it an entertaining romp, while also being a complete piece of shit.

Which brings me to my real question. Not why would you like the book. I enjoyed the book. What I can't figure out is why in the name of Jesus this book should become the center of a national obsession over some shady conspiracy that allegedly happened in the first decades of the A.D. Seeing the displays at the Border's just makes you want to scream at the world: it's just bad fiction. It is not history. It is not archeology. It is not anthropology. It is not some journalistic exposé on the early Church. It is just a piece of pulpy entertainment. That people can read this book and assign to it some kind of truth is mind boggling in the extreme. So my message to you this day is: get over it. There is no secret code, there is no grand mystery, there is no hidden truth. At least not in this book. This book is strictly what you see is what you get. Here endeth the lesson.

The Cycling Costume

2006-05-19 · by psu

All fitness hobbies require appropriate accessorization. In many ways cycling is one of the most accessory-intensive activities that you can be involved in. As a public service, I will provide you with a list of things you need, and the real reason you need them.

Gloves

There is no doubt that gloves are important. The gloves protect your hands from potential harm in a crash, and they have a thin and mostly useless layer of padding to shield your palms from too much pressure from the handlebars. But, none of these reasons are why you want the gloves. The truth is, you don't crash much, and if you are riding the bike correctly, you should not have a death grip on the bars anyway. So, you may wonder what the real reason for the gloves is.

It is this. All cycling gloves have a little patch of soft fleecy material on their back. You use this area to wipe the snot off your face. That's what the gloves are for.

Shirt

There are a variety of cycling specific tops on the market. These clothes seem to serve two purposes. The first is to make you look like an advertising banner. If you are female, the second is to give the males in the group something to stare at. Or at least that's what I assume the tightly cut sleeveless short mid-riff tops are for.

It is also important that the shirts are made out of plastic. This plastic is marketed as space age material that will suck the sweat and the wet off your skin and literally pour it out on to the road. Really it's just plastic that absorbs less water than cotton so you don't freeze to death in a cold rain.

Probably the only really useful thing that the cycling jersey provides is the pockets in the back. In the old days, these would hold tools, food, maps, and so on. These days, they can make the pockets smaller because all you need to bring is a cell phone and GPS.

Shorts

Bike shorts make you look funny. And, they have that padded area around your ass. The padding is not there to make your seat feel softer. Nothing will do that. The padding is there to be something slippery against your skin on longer rides, when something not slippery would cause, er, damage to your sensitive skin.

The truth is that if you are younger or you are not riding long distances (more than 20 miles or two hours at a time) you don't really need the shorts. But if you are going longer than that, they are really nice.

Shoes and Pedals

My first bike had plain pedals which I pedalled with plain shoes and no special attachments. Toe clips seemed tedious and annoying, and tricky to get in and out of. Then, one day I was riding to school, and my shoes were wet. My right foot slipped off the pedal, and an instant later, in one swift motion that I can still visualize in my mind, I landed on the top tube of the bike.

I got toe clips the next day.

There is a fundamental truth that it is more fun to ride the bike if your feet are bound to it tightly, and if you are used to this then having your feet dancing and slipping around on the pedals is just pure torture. These days, you can buy wondrous pedals that use spring loaded jaws to lock onto a special cleat and hold your feet to the bike like the it is an extension of the shoe. This is a great way to ride. You can get power into the pedals all the time, and clipping in and out of the pedals is much eaiser than toe clips. The nice ones even hide the cleats in the soul of the shoe, so you can walk around.

The only downside is that you need to buy special dorky shoes to take the cleats. You'd think that someone would make SPD compatible Birkenstock or something.

Shades

NIce sunglasses shield your eyes from the bright fireball in the sky that burns us. They also keep the wind and dust off your face and from getting into your eyeballs. These are all useful functions, but they are not worth shelling out the big bucks for fancy Oakley shades.

Really, people wear them so they can, er, observe the other people on the road and surrounding environment, shall we say, surreptitiously .

Final Thoughts

In addition to all of these items, you should pick up a helmet, for the obvious reasons.

With this information in hand, head out to the REI or you local bike store and load up.

Confusion and Disappointment

2006-05-23 · by psu

I took Madden '06 for the 360 to Pete's house the other day so he could get a look at the Zombie Peyton Manning. On a whim, I tossed in my controller, figuring that some head to head football goodness would be fun. After all, the controllers are wireless, they should just hook right up and go, right? Wrong.

One of the few good moments you have when opening and setting up an Xbox 360 is pushing the big button on the controller and watching the console light up from across the room. Some magic has happened, you reason, and the controller and console are just able to find each other in the ether. You then get to enjoy the freedom of playing with the gamepad, unhindered by any man-made constraints on your position or motion.

Naturally, after this, you expect that adding a second controller to the box will be similarly magic. So I sat down in Pete's living room, hit the big button, and watched as my controller flashed its lights, blinked, danced, and did everything but actually become usable as a gamepad. Were my batteries out? Was the Xbox confused? We turned the box off, and I hit the big button on the controller. Nothing. We changed the batteries. Nothing. Finally, defeated and demoralized, we did the unthinkable. We opened the manual.

It turns out that the console and the controller do not automatically discover each other. It turns out that you must power the console on, push a button on the console, and push another button on the controller (conveniently located on the back of the pad, where you can't see it, and labeled with, well, nothing intelligible), and only then will the controller and the console talk to each other. From an engineering standpoint, I can understand the edge cases that this mitigates. What if you have four controllers and four consoles in a room and they all power on at once? That sort of thing.

But, as a user, it is criminal that I need to read the manual to figure out how to hook up a second controller to my box, when the first one just worked. Surely, my inner user cries, there could at least be a user interface in the dashboard that would make the box discover a new controller. Surely there is some industry standard protocol for short range wireless devices that would allow the 360 and the controller to discover each other and pair up. Surely I don't have to walk all the way over to the box and hit a tiny little button on the front that isn't even labeled.

Then, an even more horrifying thought came to me. The controller and 360 in my premium pack had talked to each other immediately. Out of the box. How is this possible? As the answer dawned on me, my spirit fell. Somewhere in some back room of a dank Chinese factory, there is an army of people powering up a 360, hitting a button on the front, then hitting a button on the back of the controller, waiting for the lights, and then packing the console into boxes. All this, so the first time I hit that button, the console turned on. Maybe it wasn't worth it.

The Alchemy of Meat

2006-05-25 · by peterb

"I want a hamburger. A really good hamburger."

This is me, talking to psu.

"Go to Tessaro's. They have the best burgers in town."

That's psu, talking to me.

But Tessaro's doesn't have the best burgers in town. In the abstract, yes, a Tessaro's burger is almost the platonic ideal of a great hamburger. The meat is cooked perfectly, over a wood fire. It's big and juicy. It's perfect. Except...

Except they don't have french fries. Therefore, their perfect burger sucks.

This is, perhaps, an entirely pre-rational belief. Obviously, I don't really think that the Tessaro's burger sucks qua sucks. But when I crave a hamburger, when I need a hamburger, that's not a mere desire for a certain type of food. It's a spiritual thing; it's the quest for the Great American Hamburger. And listen, the Great American Hamburger does not come with potato salad. It does not come with disgusting, soggy home fries that are some sort of punishment for all my former sins. It does not come with broccoli and cauliflower.

The Great American Hamburger comes with french fries, and anything else is second rate.

This is beyond issues of mere taste. It is magical, alchemical: even bad french fries make a good burger taste better. It's just like transubstantiation, except it actually improves your life.

We ended up going to the new burger joint (part of a chain) called "Five Guys", in Oakland. They made a good burger — very good. The meat was thin and cooked through, but still juicy. The buns weren't too big. They had fried onions, and good relish, and good mushrooms, and other things to put on the burger. It wasn't as good as the $11 burger at Eleven. But then, it didn't cost $11, either. And, most importantly, they had french fries.

Their fries weren't that good, but they were there, and that made their very good burger taste better than Tessaro's great-but-fryless burger would have.

What I somehow need to do is convince Tessaro's and Dee's to open up a shack somewhere midway between the two places. They'd serve Tessaro's burgers, and Dee's fries, and they would make a million dollars every night.

But until then, see you at Five Guys.

Vivo

2006-05-26 · by psu

Six years ago, Karen and I heard rumors about a place in Bellevue that was serving up fancy food. For a long time, we regarded these rumors with some skepticism. Bellevue, after all, is a working class town that is pretty far out of the city. It seemed like an unlikely home for a wonderful high-end food experience. When we eventually hauled ourselves out there we found to our surprise that the rumors were true. Vivo served up an eclectic menu that was both varied and consistently excellent.

The place itself has an understated elegance. There is a bare iron awning over the door and a small sign in the window that says "Vivo". There is a large picture window that looks out on to the street. In the winter, this window is dark, but in the spring and summer it splashes the whole room witha nice diffuse light. There are nice tables and large comfortable chairs. The long wall in the back of the restaurant is covered with black and white photos which I assume are family snapshots from one or more generations back. As you sit down, Sam or Lori will say hello to you from the kitchen. If they aren't busy, they'll come over and chat about things. When we were in there last week, Sam asked about the Pittsburgh Magazine best restaurants party, and then kibitzed for 15 minutes about the state of the restaurant "scene" in Pittsburgh.

Later on, someone will come and recite the menu to you. Earlier in its existence, Sam had long hand-written menus with specials and all that. After a couple of years, he switched to essentially a weekly menu, filled with the interesting stuff that he found in the market at the time. Unusual ingredients is something of a speciality here. Sam does this in a matter-of-fact way that does not exude pretension. And yet this night we had great oysters on the half-shell, fiddlehead ferns, and the chance to order lamb with candied endive, which we had to pass up in favor of other things. Vivo is the first place in Pittsburgh that we ever had abalone, or halibut cheeks. There is always some interesting ingredient or preparation on the menu. But it is not presented to you as high art, or something that took a lot of inspiration and perspiration to create. It's as if you went over to his house, and Sam pulled the stuff out of the fridge.

The menus generally consist of five or six appetizers and five or six dinners. The dinners are a mix of meats and mild fish and other seafood. Each come with a pasta course ahead of the dinner and a salad course after. You can split dinners for an modest up-charge. The up-charge buys twice the grilled vegetable side dishes as the normal entree. This is a good deal, but does not really reduce the amount of food you have to deal with. The food is uniformly excellent. I think Sam's predilections for simple preparation and the use of the grill makes the meat dishes better than the fish. This might just be my imagination, or it could be a function of how hard it is to get fresh fish in Pittsburgh. In any case, I highly recommend the tenderloin, however he is making it. We had it with a simple red wine sauce, grilled mushrooms, fiddlehead ferns and taleggio cheese.

If, after all of this you still have room, the dessert menu is always populated with whatever Lori has recently concocted. She once made us a chocolate panna-cotta, a chilled, extra thick custard. We always forget to ask her to make some ahead of deciding to go to the place. There is also the obligatory four pound piece of flour-less chocolate "cake", a mix of gelato and sorbet, and anything else that she might have thought to make. The coffee isn't super, but it's made better by the large mug and the dessert.

Every time we go to Vivo, we seem to forget how good the place really is, and we come out of the experience almost as surprised as we were the first time. How can a place like this exist in a place like Bellevue? However they manage it, Vivo has been there for the long haul. What Sam and Lori have built here could survive in any food "scene" in the country. We are lucky to have them in Pittsburgh. You should go out there and thank them for it.

A Note

By Pittsburgh standards, Vivo is pretty expensive. The appetizers all go for about $10, and the dinners are in the $40 range for all three courses. I have seen complaints on the net that this is too much money, and that the portions are on the small side. The people who write such things are clinically insane.

Also, here is a map to the place.

Bitter Is Better

2006-05-30 · by peterb

It's gotta be 90 degrees here in Pittsburgh today. So here's a simple drink to beat the heat: Campari.

Campari

Campari

It's an odd drink, with a Shirly Templish bright red color and a citrusy, grapefruit sort of taste. Really, that taste is that of the chinotto, or bitter orange. But if it helps with your hipster friends, you can call it the Fresca of aperitifs.

You can mix it with soda, if you like. That dilutes the bitterness and turns it into something weaker, something fruitier, something lamer. Something French, in other words. Some people mix it to taste with orange juice. If you'll take my advice, just pour some on the rocks and add a twist of orange.

What Campari really tastes like, to me, is summer.

PS: Dear Cynthia: I stumbled across your entry on Campari while searching for images to use. So now you know three people that like Campari.

All-Clad Sale

2006-05-31 · by psu

For all of you out there who enjoy blowing that college fund on shiny pans that you don't need, here is a reminder that the twice-a-year All-Clad sale is going on this weekend, starting Friday.

You can typically get the same pans that you see in the mall at Williams-Sonoma for about half the price. The sale happens because the company is based in Canonsburg, and so twice a year they collect up all the factory seconds and put them in a big room in the South Hills. This year, the sale is June 2 and June 3 at the Washington County Fairgrounds. The directions are rather involved. But here is a google map.

Super-premium cookware is generally more about looks and the aspect of gratuitous consumption than any real advantage in functionality. But at these prices, the All-Clad stuff is a good value. My favorite pieces are the medium sized soup pots and the round saucier pans. The pans hold heat well and can take a beating and come back to life with just a bit of scrubbing. I've burned up my soup pots multiple times on the stove, and they always come back for more.

This year, I'm going to branch out and get a saute pan. I usually just use small non-stick aluminum omelet pans. But I've been feeling paranoid about the coatings that wear off, and I'm tired of not having any yummy brown bits to scrape off the pan when I make meat or caramelize onions.

Doors open at 9am. Be there with your small blunt weapons so you can get all the good stuff before it's gone.

The Beautiful People

2006-06-01 · by peterb

Today during lunch we were talking about style, and one of the gang opined that if only he was incredibly rich, he'd have more style.

I disagreed: you don't need money to have style. Having money doesn't give you style.

We all know someone that can't rub two cents together and yet somehow manages to always be the hippest person in the room. A similarly compelling proof that money can't buy you class can be found by looking at the in-crowd at last weekend's Monaco Grand Prix. The richest people in the world gather to be seen not watching a race. And, oh merde, are these people ugly. Not just a surface ugly, but a deep, abiding ugly that goes all the way to the bone.

Cash is nice. But it's not the solution to all your problems. It's a catalyst; a magnifying glass. If you have poor taste in clothes, having a sackful of cash just lets you have poor taste in expensive clothes.

Bill Cosby had a comedy routine where he was talking to someone about cocaine, who said "I love cocaine because it intensifies your personality." To which Cosby replied "Yes, but what if you're an asshole?"

It's a good question. And watching the Id Parade slouch its way through the streets of Monte Carlo, we see it answered.

Picoreview Haiku

2006-06-06 · by psu

It's been a busy time so our collective brain hasn't had a lot of room to generate content for the site. But, we have been playing a few new games recently, so, here are some short impressions, in the by now very clichéd Haiku style.

Final Fantasy X

Big hair, bigger sword Walk from cut scene to cut scene They never shut up

Call of Duty 2

Soldiers scream and shoot Head throbs, eyes do not see the head shot from nowhere.

MLB 06: The Show

The pitching meter moves back and forth, up and down But how does it work?

Commandos 2

Sneak behind Nazi Arterial spray gushes a warm summer rain

Oblivion: peterb

The thrill of combat Oops, I leveled up too soon Reload my last save

Oblivion: psu

It's a big wide world Things to do, people to see Their faces haunt me

A Fool And His Money

True believers know Cliff's release dates are cruel jokes Shut up and write code.

Shadow Hearts 2

Hooray! A new dress For my creepy little doll Now I must shower.

Nethack

I don't keep the dog That's why in twenty five years I have never won.

Guitar Hero

Hard and fast solos Hands throbbing, no star power It's Cowboys from Hell.

Three For The Road

2006-06-09 · by peterb

Volume 2, Issue 9 of played.todeath has been released, and within its labyrinthine PDF you will find not one but three of my articles. Read them, love them, and then send hate mail. They include:

The magazine is full of other brilliant writers as well, of course. It's quite worth the download.

I Shot Bambi

2006-06-12 · by peterb

Nature photography can be frustrating. It's typically very hard to get close to wild animals. Hardcore nature photographers thus often use tripods, blinds, and very long lenses. This combination lets them create images that seem impossibly close up from hundreds of feet away. I'm too cheap to buy any of these lenses. They usually cost thousands of dollars and are too heavy to lug around casually. So the only animals I can usually get closeups of are either dead, domesticated, or exceedingly stupid.

fawn

Fawn, hiding (click to enlarge)

In the "exceedingly stupid" category I would put the wild turkeys that have decided to live on Negley Avenue in the middle of Pittsburgh. I regularly walk (and drive) within a foot of these things, but unfortunately have never had my camera with me. But yesterday's lucky find makes up for my lack of turkey luck. I managed to get within 6 feet of a recently born fawn while carrying my camera and a reasonably long lens. It sat perfectly still while I took photographs of it. It was practically suffering fear-induced cardiac arrest. Had this been a full-grown deer, I never would have gotten within 40 feet of it.

So I got a good shot. The only reason I was able to get this close to it is that I saw it wandering around looking for its mama. As I drove up, it dove for cover in the underbrush and went to ground. That gave me plenty of time to park, get the camera, walk over, and calmly and methodically torture it with fill flash for voyeuristic purposes.

This particular deer, like all deer everywhere since the beginning of time, was mangy and starving. So before you start feeling too much sympathy for it, and get too terribly mad at me for torturing the deer, remember that in return for my great photo, I'll probably contract Lyme Disease. The fawn did eventually bolt when I got within about 3 feet. Had I been so inclined, I could have reached out and touched it.

fawn

Well-hidden? (click to enlarge)

Had I not seen exactly where the fawn had gone to ground, I would have walked right by it.

Later that day, I saw two more fawns gallop madly across an open field in the noonday sun. As they ran, they bleated for their mother. When they reached the woods on the other side of the field, they turned around and ran back to where they came from, bleating the entire time.

Apparently in Western Pennsylvania, it's been a bad week for fawns all around.

The Burr Under My Saddle

2006-06-13 · by peterb

This week I'm on vacation. While preparing for the trip, I had an interesting Shopping Moment that I'd like to share.

The moment involves coffee, as so many of them do.

coffee[Still Life With Coffee](/img/20060613-5097-1024.jpg)

I'm at the supermarket, and I'm going through my shopping list, and I get to the coffee aisle and realize that I'm going to need some. So I'm staring at my options — they even had a fair trade blend, which I ended up getting and may complain about later — and I grab a package of coffee.

Instinctively, I have picked up the whole bean coffee. I remember that the place I'm heading to doesn't have a coffee grinder, but I find myself standing there trying to work out how much effort it would take to pack my burr grinder and take it with me. Because, of course, the coffee will taste better if I grind it out in the middle of the woods instead of using pre-ground coffee.

It is then that the epiphany hits me like a wave. I am seriously considering packing a coffee grinder for a camping trip. I don't know how, and I don't know when, but at some point in my life I have apparently turned into a complete yuppie cock.

I put the whole bean back, and picked up a package of ground coffee.

(We will omit the discussion about packing the laptop and connecting to the Internet from the road. I lost that battle long ago, and am utterly at peace with it.)

Commandos Battle Pack

2006-06-14 · by peterb

I am an impatient soul.

This expresses itself in inconvenient ways when I am playing games that reward patience and timing. In grand strategy games, for example, I'll carefully marshall my resources, start moving troops into position, and then perhaps six or seven turns too early I'll get bored and say to myself "Well, maybe if I just send all my tanks rushing in I'll win." And, of course, I never do.

This is in part why I don't like the Metal Gear games at all — they are, by and large, games that reward you for sitting still and doing nothing until exactly the right moment, and that's just not my thing. As a reviewer, I make a conscious effort to not review those sorts of games.

I've made an exception to this rule for Commandos Battle Pack for the Mac. Mostly because, unlike the Metal Gear games, I actually liked it. This review may contain some minor spoilers.

The Battle Pack consists of two games packaged together: Commandos 2: Men of Courage and Commandos 3: Destination Berlin. Both games run well on a late-model Powerbook G4.

One of the best things Commandos has going for it is the plot. All men "of a certain age" will remember a World War II movie called The Dirty Dozen. It's been emulated and remade several times. The basic idea is "group of misfits who are too tough and independent for the regular army take on suicidal missions and, through stealth, ingenuity, and trickery, triumph. Also, they kill lots of Nazis along the way." It's a fair simplification to simply describe Commandos as an attempt to make "The Dirty Dozen Computer Game." The scenarios are drawn with relish. They deviate from history in noticeable ways, but always with a wink and a nod.

It's the fact that the Commandos games are squad-based that justifies them, in my mind. Your team of stereotypes and misfits covers a broad range of abilities. The Sapper, for example, handles the explosives, the Thief gets into hard-to-reach places, while the Green Beret is your man for close combat, the Driver handles vehicles, the Spy can impersonate enemy officers and distract sentries, and so on.

The interesting thing about Commandos — I'm going to use the collective to refer to both games here — is that if you're not careful you might think it is a war game. But it isn't. At its heart, it is a puzzle game, in some ways not unlike Sokoban or Chromatron. Each mission is basically asking you to figure out a way to apply your skills to reach your goal without getting caught. The game isn't turn-based, but the enemies move in patterns that are rigid enough that you can treat it like it is. While you can occasionally survive a firefight, your men are fragile enough that if they are detected, they're often dead. It is an odd sort of vibe. If you took away the World War II window dressing, what you end up with is something that feels like a cross between Metal Gear and Lemmings.

Commandos 2

Commandos 2

The first training level provides a good example of what I mean. One way to win would be to throw some cigarettes near a sentry. When he comes over to check them out, you knock him on the head, tie him up, and drag him out of sight. After taking out several other sentries in a similar manner, you have the thief shimmy up a telephone pole and shimmy on the wire over a minefield, on the other side of which he'll grab some wire cutters. Returning back to the first side, he'll give the wire cutters to the Sapper, who will cut the barbed wire around the minefield and then find and retrieve some buried mines. The Sapper can then place those mines near the entrance to the officers' bunker, whistle at the officers, who then run out and blow themselves up.

See what I mean? It's Lemmings.

But now that we've stripped away the WW II exterior, let's put it back on again and admire it. The missions throughout both games are plausible, exciting, and fun. Commandos 2 tends towards longer, more involved missions than its sequel. Commandos 3 provides more scenarios that let you brute-force your way through, rather than relying solely on stealth. The motion capture and animation in both games is arresting, and helps maintain the suspension of disbelief. The only sour note in the production values is the voice acting, which is uniformly wince-inducing from start to finish. Especially the Thief, who has a French accent lifted straight out of Monty Python and Zee 'Oly Graaahl.

The gameplay is clever and the puzzles are interesting. Regrettably, Commandos 2 has a UI that is needlessly baroque. It seems at times that there is a separate hotkey for every single action in the game. For example, A readies an attack, unless you want to use your fists, in which case you press Q. In the example I gave earlier, the Sapper would use the I key to cut the wires, D to detect mines, click on the mines to retrieve them, and then P to place mines. If the Sapper wanted to place a satchel charge, he uses the B key, but to throw a grenade, he'd hit G (but if his friend the Driver wanted to throw a molotov cocktail, he'd hit S). The keyboard guide (PDF) is like an exercise in existential despair. Separate keys for "put on uniform" and "take off uniform." Unique keys for eating food and applying first aid, both of which recover health. And, of course, you just have to remember at any given time whether you need to click, shift-click, or control-click. When learning the interface, you can't help but suspect that you are being made the butt of a very intricate joke. It feels like you use more keys than when playing a flight simulator.

In other words, the game was designed with an old-style PC game sensibility. And although it offends my delicate UI preferences, it really isn't that bad while you're playing. The techniques you use are introduced a few at a time, and there's an acceptable in-game glossary to help you navigate. Commandos 3, contrariwise, is designed with a much more mouse-based approach in mind, and is much easier for new players to navigate. But, if you just can't live without having special hotkeys dedicated to "Lipstick" and "Wear Dress" (note: I'm not kidding), you can set a preference to have Commandos 3 use the Commandos 2 keyboard map.

Commandos 2

Commandos 3

The games are strongest when they are outdoors. They use an isometric view that is manageable in the open, but becomes nearly intolerable once you go into a building. In this specific respect, between the two games, I actually think Commandos 2 is the better one. While the UI, as noted, is somewhat baroque, the game focuses on its strengths. Commandos 3 tries hard to address the weaknesses of the earlier game, but apart from the UI falls short of the mark. For example, Commandos 3 has plenty of multi-story houses, which just makes the indoor scenes that much worse. Instead of fixing the problems with the earlier engine, your attention is simply drawn to them.

But the interior-space issues aren't deal-breakers; indeed, the only reason I noticed them is because the exterior camerawork was so much better. I think it's important to focus on what Commandos does well: it takes stealth gameplay and puts it in a context where it doesn't seem ridiculous on its face. And it does so in ways that engage your brain. In a marketplace full of World War II games that reward you for indiscriminately shooting as much lead as possible while running and screaming, I think there's something to be said for games that take a less-traveled road.

In evaluating the Commandos games, the natural comparison is to compare them to the Jagged Alliance games, because they are both squad level games. That comparison is somewhat false. The Jagged Alliance games are really action games hiding behind a turn-based facade of strategy. The Commandos games are in fact clever puzzle games hiding behind a facade of real-time combat.

So, all of which leaves you with a simple question: should you buy the game?

I have a reputation, fairly, for being something of a jerk about user interface issues. I panned Civ IV for example, not just for its abysmal performance, but also because its user interface didn't live up to the requirements of its genre. I'm inclined to give the Commandos games a free pass for their awkward UI simply because they're trying to fuse genres in a novel way.

In the end, I think the deciding factor is whether or not you enjoy stealth games. As an avowed non-player of stealth games, Commandos held my interest and provided moments of drama, humor, and intellectual challenge. That suggests to me that if you already enjoy stealth games, you will overcome the UI issues to enjoy a depth of gameplay that is missing from other, non-squad based stealth games. If stealth games aren't your cup of tea, then I don't think Commandos will change your mind about the genre.

Commandos Battle Pack for Macintosh is published by Feral Interactive and retails for $40 in North America. Disclosure statement: The publisher graciously provided a copy for review.

A Real Conversation

2006-06-15 · by peterb

Both psu and I obtained Nintendo DS Lites this week, along with Animal Crossing. We actually had this conversation on iChat yesterday:

me: MY NOOK LOAN IS PAID OFF. But i feel empty inside.

psu: Me too. OK. We can sell the game now.

me: I keep going back to Nook's shop, but I can't find any weapons to kill the townsfolk. If that Chow talks to me one more time I'm going to stuff him and donate him to the museum.

psu: I guess it's because they dumbed the game down. I bet the classic Animal Crossing on the Gamecube is better

Torment and Friends

2006-06-15 · by psu

I've spent the last month dabbling with Planescape from time to time on the laptop. I'm not quite all the way through, but I think I've played enough to say a bit more. My overall opinion of the game has not changed since writing my first impressions. I think it's clearly the best of the classic "western" RPGs that I've played from the 1990s.

I've toyed around with these games ever since I finished KOTOR. I'm not really interested in investing heavily in PC games, but the fans of these particular games, Baldur's Gate, Fallout, and now Planescape tend to be so vocal in their support that I was interested in seeing what all the fuss was about.

I gave up on Fallout first, having only played for four or five hours. I enjoyed the atmosphere, but I couldn't find a great reason to put up with the tedious gameplay and the annoying combat system. After spending a night repeatedly getting killed by giant rats, I threw in the towel and went back to playing Mario and Luigi.

Baldur's Gate 2 lasted a bit longer. At a technical level, the game seems more playable to me than Fallout. Control over the party is smooth and intuitive, and there are no "action points" to keep track of. I really like the "real time, but round-based under the hood" control engine which is no surprise, since it's basically the same scheme used in all the Bioware games up to KOTOR. I also liked the narrative threads and character development in the opening parts of the game. There were only a few archaic mechanics that annoyed me. The constant shuffling of inventory got on my nerves. In addition, the need to obsessively rest the party so that the spell casters could refresh their memory grated. The game didn't lose me for good until I escaped the first area and got into the town. At that point, I completely lost the thread of what I was supposed to be doing. What had been a well paced plot was replaced with a huge area completely devoid of clues as to where I should go next. I tried to do a few of the quests in town, but I ultimately ended up bored and confused and put the game down.

Planescape improves on Baldur's Gate by emphasizing its strengths while pushing the annoyances more into the background. Although the game employs the ultimate RPG cliché of employing a main character with amnesia trying to puzzle out his true nature, the narrative is interesting enough and the pacing is good enough to keep you going anyway. The quests and the plot are intertwined and support each other in a pleasing way. Finally, the game has some of the best writing that I have experienced in a computer game. The text in the game is evocative and full of clever turns of phrase. Who could not like the idea of a "brothel" for the mind?

From a gameplay perspective, the best thing about Planescape is how it de-emphasizes combat. While it maintains the same smooth Bioware combat engine, the game does not force you to constantly worry about buffing your party and making sure you have all the protection spells case and magic armor equipped before every fight. Since the main character is immortal, if the fight goes badly you can just try again immediately. This brilliant gambit, along with the fact that you can score huge amounts of experience points just by talking to people make the game less of a kill and loot grind. It's refreshing to play an RPG actually just play the character rather than trying to navigate the optimal path through the character progression and loot procurement systems. It's odd that an eight year old game should be refreshing in this way. I find myself surprised that such a compelling system is not an overused cliché by now.

From the chapter titles on various walkthroughs, I would guess that I'm somewhat more than half-way through Planescape. I had to stop playing for a while because the license on the emulator that I am running on my Mac to run Windows expired, and I don't want to buy the software just yet. But, never fear. I won't be able to avoid getting an Intel Mac for home use forever, so when I do, I can dual boot it and finish the game. It's good to have something to look forward to.

Chris Crawford's Games Sucked

2006-06-16 · by peterb

Every so often I mean to write an article about how Chris Crawford doesn't know what he's talking about. It's pretty impressive, in some ways: his book on game design, for example, is practically a manual on how to write a sucky game. And Crawford keeps inspiring me to write this article because every time he opens his mouth (or uncaps his pen) he says stupid things.

Lots of people have weighed in on the meat of Crawford's latest musings on how the game industry is moribund and uncreative, and I'm not particularly interested in tackling them. Instead, I just want to say something that needs to be said:

Chris Crawford wrote games that weren't any fun.

I think that Crawford gets a pass on this from so many commentators because he developed games in an era when there simply wasn't as much competition. So anyone of a certain age who writes about games has played his games. Therefore, when people talk about 1985's Balance of Power, they're not actually talking about that game, but about their memory of playing the game as a 13 year old.

To take Balance of Power as an example: it wasn't "innovative"; it was basically a rehash of Bruce Ketchledge's 1984 game Geopolitique 1990, published by SSI. The main difference between the two games is that Crawford made some changes to suck all of the fun out of it. Specifically, in Ketchledge's game, making too many significant mistakes could result in a war, which the player then had to resolve. In Crawford's game, making a single mistake resulted in the game immediately ending with a snotty little lecture from the programmer ending with "We do not reward failure."

What. A sanctimonious. Prick.

Who can point me to a single game that Crawford did that had any real influence beyond handwaving? We are talking, after all, about the man who developed Scram, a "nuclear plant simulator," which has the distinction of being the first game to be so boring that it was literally more fun to go outside and watch grass grow. The only game Crawford has published that even deserves to be on the same page as the word "fun" would be his 1981 wargame Eastern Front. It's a good game. But not enough to justify his reputation.

Some have pointed out — correctly — that Crawford need not have developed excellent games (or indeed, any games at all) to proffer opinions on the gaming industry. Certainly, none of us opining here at Tea Leaves have a resume that includes professionally published games, and that doesn't stop us. But the argument is made, and made often in wanky, uncritical hagiographies, that Crawford's opinion is important because of his "seminal" games and his "genius." This is false. Crawford's ouevre is average at best and mediocre at worst, and anyone familiar with the game developers writing and publishing games in the 1980s knows this to be true.

Crawford is good at something, but it isn't game development. It is self promotion.

Additional Resources

The Soul of A New Machine

2006-06-19 · by psu

I read The Soul of a New Machine for the first time when I was in high school. It is the best book I have ever read about computers. It is one reason I ended up working in software engineering. If you have not read this book, you should go and buy it now, and read it, and then come back here. Ready? OK.

Since you have now read the book, I don't have to tell you that it chronicles the development of a mini-computer by a company called Data General at the end of the 1970s. This machine was built to compete with a machine called the VAX, which was also developed the last years of the 1970s. It happens that I used both of these types of machines when I was in high school in the early 80s and so the story of the development of one of them seemed interesting on the surface. I picked it up in paperback, and read it in bed in two or three sittings while trying to finish my applications to college.

Back then, the stories about engineers on the project, and the technical aspects of the machine they were working on really pulled me in. The company politics and the maneuverings of business seemed to me to be the filler between the high points of watching this machine actually come to life. I soaked up the stories of late night microcoding, the architectural design, and the months spent debugging the machine.

To this day I am still amazed that a journalist, presumably with a limited technical background, could have such an obvious understanding of the layers of abstraction and complexity in the system that he was describing. One early section of the book walks the reader down through the machine from a single line of BASIC that divides two numbers into the CPU to a divide instruction and further down into the micro-architecture, where there is another software layer to tell the hardware how to actually divide two floating point numbers. Another section of the book contains the single best description of how a machine that uses a virtual address space fetches and executes its next instruction that I have ever read. It's all there, the address translation, the instruction cache, the page fault handler, instruction decode, the microcode sequencer, all the way down to the bare hardware. He even talks about what might happen if the machine recursively page faults forever. No computer architecture book ever explained this basic pipeline in a way that is more understandable. Every new student of computer or software engineering should be required to read the book just for this reason.

I also love The Case of the Missing Nand Gate. I have often wondered how to teach people to debug complicated systems, be they hardware or software. I still don't have an answer to that question, but this chapter of the book would be part of the formula. After yet another beautiful tutorial on how the instruction and data caches of the machine are specified to work, the chapter launches into a case study in finding, isolating, and finally fixing an intermittent bug of the worst kind. Finally, in the end, when the engineers have figured out how to make the machine fail, they capture a picture of the error in one of their logic analyzers, and immediately the fix is clear. What I found amazing about this section in high school was the detective story aspect of the narrative. What I find amazing about the chapter now is how clearly it captures the process of observing a system that is failing and how you trick the machine into failing while you collect the proof. Twenty five years after the book was written, this process remains unchanged.

What has changed in that time is what the book means to me. Having worked in software engineering, both academically and commercially for many of the twenty or so years since I read this book, I now realize how much more there is to the story of this machine. It wasn't apparent to my high school self, who saw the engineers as the heroes and the company above them as an often malevolent force, working to crush their spirit and creativity and take credit for their hard work. I think this is the way young, naive, and/or inexperienced engineers see the world.

I've come to see the book as more concerned with how the project was managed than anything else. My younger self never really realized that Tom West is the hero of the book. Not even the engineers on the team seem to realize this until the very end. In a coda to the main story, one of the engineers finds a specification for a trivial piece of hardware that allows the machine to interface to some kind of third party peripheral. He realizes that no one on the core engineering team could have possibly designed the plug or written the specification. There are hundreds of details like this in the final machine and the book credits West with collecting the support needed from the rest of the company to make sure all of these little problems were found and solved. The book accurately observes that while the central act of creation is in the hands of the engineers, this act would be wasted without the coordinated efforts of dozens of other people working on behalf of the project in other parts of the company. In other words, the romantic myth of the lone engineer taking over the world in his basement is, for the most part, just a romantic myth. Products that ship are built by teams of people led from a shared vision, not a single genius working alone.

Through all of my re-readings of the book, Kidder's writing remains wonderful. He manages to package up all these layers of narrative and psychology while keeping the story moving forward. He captures exactly what I find fascinating about working on computers. Moreover, the book perfectly expresses the pain and torture of managing engineers: needing to trust the team, needing to shield the team from anything that is external to their core task, and, perhaps most importantly, needing to convince the team that the task they have been given is important and groundbreaking in some concrete way, so that they will "sign up" for the job.

I don't really have anything left to say that Kidder doesn't say better. You should go and buy it now, and read it. And then read it again.

A Hill of Beans

2006-06-20 · by psu

Recently, we've gotten a lot of feedback, both privately and on the site about the state of the local coffee scene. I am always happy to get this kind of information, since it never hurts to have new places to try. But, one aspect of these messages has been puzzling. Over and over again, the advocate of the new place will say "you have to go to Café XYZ, they use these special Moon Beans from the Outer Rings of Venus, which Rule."

With all due respect, this is nonsense.

I'll only say this once, because I've said it before in an article from couple of years go. Assuming a certain level of quality in handling and roasting, your enjoyment of the cappuccino that you have in your hand is determined by two things:

First, how good is the person making the coffee.

I've been going to my favorite coffee joint almost every weekend for more than 10 years. Over this time, I assume that the quality of their beans has stayed mostly the same. I have not noticed much variability in the coffee that I get at home when I buy these beans, for example. But, I have noticed that until this winter, there had been a drop in the quality of my weekend shot over the last three or four years. I never pondered why this should be. The answer was obvious.

Three or four years ago, all of the weekend staff slowly left for one reason or another. As each one disappeared, my chances of a good cappuccino diminished. If you observed the lines in the place during this period, you'd notice people jostling to try and make sure Elio or Dom made the coffee, because they know what they are doing and the new people did not. This, my friends, is much more important than which beans are going through the burr grinder. Always fight to get Elio.

The good news is that since then, La Prima has slowly hired new staff and this staff has slowly gotten better and better at pulling a proper shot of coffee. The result? In the last six months, I have not gotten a bad weekend cappuccino. I expect the situation to be stable until the current crew moves on.

Second, how fresh are the beans.

La Prima roasts its beans basically across the street from the caf�. In various communications, I have been told to obtain coffee from places that get their "fairer than fair trade" beans from various locales, all of which are further than 500 feet from the caf�. All things being equal, I claim that La Prima's beans are at least a day fresher, and therefore better. If you don't think a day in the truck makes a difference in how the coffee comes out, then I'm not really going to listen to you about where to go for coffee anyway.

So, the upshot is, if you are happy with your coffee, more power to you. I am happy with mine too, and I don't really see any reason to go chasing after a different shot, made by people I don't know using beans that came from some company way outside the city.

Besides, I'm pretty sure they'll just make the damn coffee too hot.

Advance Wars DS Picoreview

2006-06-22 · by peterb

Can't write — too busy playing Advance Wars DS.

Ice Cream Sandwich

2006-06-26 · by psu

One curious constant in the American food tradition dating back at least as far back as I can remember is the neighborhood ice cream truck. These small white vans are similar in shape to a mail truck, but much more festive. They play a happy song as they move down the street, and the colorful pictures on their bodies promise an irresistable selection of sweet confection. As far as I can tell, these trucks are the same everywhere. And, as far as I can tell, they've sold basically the same products for the last thirty or forty years.

Everyone has their personal favorites. I was always partial to the "strawberry shortcake" on a stick. It has a sublime combination of vanilla ice cream, and artificially red center with a generic sort of "berry" flavor, and a sweet crusty coating on the outside that I guess represents "cake". The brilliance of the thing is that it's just big enough so you get a range of interesting textures as the ice cream center melts, but it's never so big that you lose any of the bar in liquid form.

For me, the other iconic item carried in these trucks, and convenience stores everywhere, is the ice cream sandwich. I still get cravings for these chocolate cookies filled with a slice of vanilla ice cream. The proper ice cream sandwich has a variety of peculiar characteristics. Just as the bread around your barbecue can't be too good, there is no room in the world for a "premium" ice cream sandwich. Fancy chocolate chip cookies with nuts will not do. Thick bars of ultra-dense organic fair trade french vanilla bean ice cream are pointless. On the other hand, the cookie does have to have a pleasing softness, and the ice cream needs to at least reach the quality of a Breyer's or Hagan-Das vanilla. A bit rich, creamy, not too sweet.

The Klondike version of the ice cream sandwich fails on all levels. My wife picked these up by mistake when I sent her off to satisfy one of my cravings. They have a cookie that is too crunchy and ice cream that is all ice and sugar, and no noticeable dairy product. Whole foods, constantly fighting down market, has organic ice cream sandwiches that are almost right, but not really. They get the cookie part right. Unfortunately, the ice cream part is too dense and too sweet. It does not melt enough while you eat it, and it is too sugary.

Happily, the food store attached to my local gas station and Starbucks plaza sells the perfect product. The cookies are soft, but with a nice texture. The ice cream is vanilla, but not too vanilla. Most importantly, they don't get too hard or too soft in the freezer, so as you consume the item, the ice cream transitions from a firm, but soft texture to a sort of half-melted on the outside and almost liquid on the inside perfection. As you take the last bite, you think maybe you'll lose a bit of the product out the sides of the cookie, but like the sun coming up in the morning, the ice cream gods intervene, and it never happens.

The Witch In Love

2006-06-27 · by peterb

I took a few books with me on vacation. One of them was an Italian novel called La strega innamorata, ("The witch in love"). It's funny, and quirky, and easy to read, even for someone whose language skills are as rusty as mine. And every time I picked up the book, it did me the favor of reminding me that I should pour myself a glass of what might be my favorite digestivo, Liquore Strega.

La strega...innamorata

Strega is a bold liqueur. It has a bright electric saffron yellow color, and a typically Italian label full of busy little curliques, medals, and flourishes. It's 80 proof, but feels stronger. The aroma of Strega is that of atomized pepper, mace, and salty air. To taste, it starts cloyingly sweet, but this is quickly clobbered by a strong anise and cassia mixture. A pine and wintergreen taste scratches you lovingly on the way down your throat. Strega is not an amaro. It manages to suggest bitterness to the back of your tongue without actually being bitter.

When the liquor finally reaches your stomach, you will feel warm.

There are substitutes for Strega. Liquore Galliano is often shelved nearby, but it's not as good and the bottle (twice the height of any shelf you have available) is painfully stupid and inconvenient. The closest substitution would be Chartreuse. Secretly, I think that yellow Chartreuse tastes just a little better than Strega — it's less sweet, and has a bit more of a burn. But it's French, and named after monks, which means that it doesn't have as much romance as its Calabrian cousin. So I always drink Strega instead.

It may not seem totally rational to prefer something that I know, intellectually, doesn't taste quite as good as its alternative. But that's how I feel about it.

I guess you could say I'm bewitched.

DS Lite

2006-06-28 · by psu

I had pretty much decided to get a DS when the Lite hit earlier this summer. One of my co-workers had imported one a few months ago, and the new form of the device is pretty irresistible. Of course, I also had to keep up with Pete.

Where the original DS was fat, clunky, and full of sharp edges, the new DS is like an iPod that plays games. Soft lines, a shiny white exterior, and a new screen which is wonderfully bright indoors (although useless outdoors) round out the brilliant industrial design. The device finally competes with the PSP on the pure shiny level. However, unlike all the other "next-gen"-ish hardware I have, the DS has one cool advantage: it has games.

Don't let anyone lie to you, the PSP and the Xbox 360 are one game boxes. For the PSP and me, that one game is Madden. Your one game might be Lumines or some other sports franchise. But there is really nothing else. Daxter and Syphon Filter have a lot of potential, but both suffer from the same basic flaw, which is that by the time you manage to play a single level of the game, your hands have cramped up from the abuse of the tiny little analog stick and face buttons. Why there are not 15,000 little ports of Japanese RPGs for this thing I'll never know. But there are not.

The Xbox 360 has Oblivion and that's about it. Nothing else is actually any good. Even Madden fails to please, it actually plays better on the PSP.

By comparison, the DS has a dozen or so titles that are actually worth picking up. And, if you throw in all the GBA titles, there are dozens more.

Here are a few short impressions of what I have played:

Animal Crossing

A wage slave game about being a wage slave. In this game you play an opressed member of the proletariat, painfully scratching out an existence by doing odd jobs for the members of your "town", and also harvesting and selling the native flora of the area. As you obtain more material wealth, the game does nothing but drive you to obtain even more material wealth. It's like a recruiting video for unfettered consumerism.

You can also exchange fruit over wi-fi. That's really the main point of it. I'm still looking for a shovel.

Mario and Luigi

It was great on the GBA, and it's great on the DS too. I am concerned though, because the DS game uses the second screen to provide a map that greatly eases navigation through the various areas. This is a slippery slope towards seriously dumbing down the game for the noobs. Pretty soon it will be no better than a 2-d side scrolling hack and slash.

Advance Wars Dual Strike

It's Advance Wars but there are some new modes, tag teaming and the stylus makes picking units much easier. This means it is the best strategy title on the face of the Earth, only better. This is all you need to know. Buy it.

Trauma Center

My token entry in the gimmicky game play sweepstakes. This game makes you use the stylus to perform "surgery." There is an anime soap opera narrative going on too in between "missions." The game is hard, but the surgery mechanic is strangely mesmerizing and addictive. Recommended if you can find it.

Other notes

So there are four easy winners for you to look at. There are many more I have not covered. I started Phoenix Wright which is actually more of a novel where you stop the story to yell "OBJECTION" once in a while. I borrowed the Kirby game, and it seemed fun but too fast. Meteos is too hard.

I haven't even mentioned Mario Kart or both Super Mario games.

Finally, I can't stress this enough: the instant sleep when you close the machine is simply awesome, and all the games support it transparently.

It's too bad the thing doesn't really have a proper verison of Madden. Otherwise I could sell my PSP.

Little Games in Pretty Boxes

2006-06-29 · by peterb

As those of you who care may have surmised, I, along with psu, picked up a Nintendo DS Lite the other week.

The original DS was, unfortunately, not actually worth owning. It had some clever games and nice ideas, but was wrapped up in a package about as appealing as a Radio Shack employee's cash register. It was clunky, and too big, and the screen was too dim.

The DS Lite looks like something that was made by Apple. It's all rounded corners and smooth lines, and it's just (barely) small enough to carry around.

If you think I'm focusing on the design rather than the games, that's because the games are, without exception, nothing too special. I mean, some of them are good — I wouldn't trade Advance Wars or Ouendan (thanks, Claire!) for anything — but frankly the second screen and stylus are just curiosities rather than anything truly compelling. At least to me. The design of the machine, however, means that I want to carry it with me, which in terms of a portable gaming machine is really the beginning and end of the issue. A portable you carry with you is (or at least can be) great; a portable you don't carry with you always sucks.

One side effect of the excellence of the design in terms of playing DS games is that it neutralizes the "plays Gameboy Advance games" feature completely. When you plug in a GBA game, it sticks out of the bottom of the case like a wart on a witch's nose. This, unhappily, makes me not want to play any of the GBA games. It makes my nice pretty white box bulky and ugly. I'll probably end up going out and getting an actual GBA to play GBA games just to avoid ugliness-induced psychic distress. There's also the issue that you can't instant suspend GBA games — it's not fair to call that a negative of the DS, but going from playing a game that supports instant suspend to playing one that doesn't is like leaving a sane world for one populated solely by madmen.

In other news, neither the Xbox 360, nor the PS3, nor your desktop gaming PC support or will support instant suspend. That's really all you need to understand to know that the Nintendo DS Lite is better than all of them combined.

Next week: I review the imported "vibrator stylus" that just arrived from Lik-Sang.

On Earth As It Is At Dinner But Not South of Hadrian's Wall

2006-06-30 · by faisal

or: why the best restaurants in London are all ethnic food.

Cosby

You've been learning to actually cook food, with recipes that don't start with "remove foil wrapper from cup". Phrases like "gently braise" suddenly and inexplicably combine with a shocking lack of calls to Domino's Pizza. Yet half your cooking seems to come out like some demented cardboard pudding. I'm here today to explain the problem. The problem is the British empire.

230 years ago this Tuesday the founding fathers set out to "assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them."

They fought for their own government.

They fought for the rights enshrined in the Magna Carta.

They fought for remotely phonetic spelling.

And despite this we are stuck today with cooking practice descended from a barbaric Victorian era practice of cooking all your food for four weeks. And then an extra two just in case one of your dinner guests forgot his or her dentures.

This has to stop.

So here we present some baby steps: pasta and spinach.

Pasta

Pasta these days seems to always come with a note as to how long the pasta takes to cook. The time often doesn't correspond to how long the pasta actually takes to cook, so it's important to recognize and adjust for a key fact about the people who write these notes:

They are lying to you.

They are lying to you because they know every stove is different. They are lying to you because they know that "medium-high heat" means different things depending on what pot you're using. They are lying to you because they have no idea how long you let the pasta sit in your cupboard before cooking it. Most of all, they are lying to you because they're sadistic maniacs: the psychic screams of overcooked pasta feed not your palatte, but instead their dark desires for gustatory stupidity.

So, you ask, "when do I stop cooking the pasta?"

To paraphrase Paul Sedaris, I'm guessing you stop when it's finished.

For those of you who aren't Italian even in spirit, I will translate: The pasta is done 45 seconds before you think it is finished.

There is only one way to do this: about 3 minutes after you put the pasta in the water (2 if it's fresh) get a spoon and try a piece every 30-60 seconds. When it's still slightly uncooked you probably have 30 seconds or so left. Practice this and you'll get the hang off it.

Spinach

Spinach, the food of Popeye, has been the victim of more indignities at our hands than your average American Idol contestant. Coming to American homes full of goodness, spinach is promptly turned into a disgusting mush devoid of flavor, nutritional value, flavor, mouth feel, flavor, and also flavor.

The good news is: spinach is easy.

  1. Cut the stems off the spinach.
  2. Bring a potfull of water to a roiling boil.
  3. Throw the spinach in.
  4. Recite the Lord's Prayer (the half-Kaddish, Fatiha, two Hail Marys or three recitations of the 1st ammendment will also serve).
  5. Take the spinach out, drain and serve it.

Some people have pointed out that this is a fairly short time. They're right. If you have time to do something else you have time to bludgeon the spinach to the point that it can't even be identified via dental records because you'll be sucking it through a straw.

If you're wondering why these two examples matter, consider the case of ramen cups. They can afford the saturation bombing recipe ("remove cover of cup. pour boiling water into cup. let sit for 4 minutes. enjoy. do not complain about the use of 'enjoy' as an intransitive verb.") because they start with no flavor to eliminate. Apply this to real food and you'll have spent 20 times more to end up with no flavor. You might as well boil cardboard: at least that has some fiber.

Notes:

The Design of Everyday Games

2006-07-04 · by peterb

I've been playing a lot of Advance Wars lately. It is a perfect little gem of a game, and I'd like to use it to make some points about good game design.

Good game design increases richness, but eliminates complexity. Good game design emphasizes content over form. And, all things being equal, good game design favors mainstream technology over the cutting edge.

I actually travelled back in a time a bit, and played the very first of the series, Famicom Wars for the original Nintendo Entertainment System. It's an instructive comparison. Since that game was introduced in the late 1980s the game mechanics have not changed at all. Nearly everything about the game, except the graphics, is the same. And yet the Advanced Wars games are noticeably more fun than Famicom Wars. Why?

The answer is simple: the latter games are better because they became simpler.

Richness is Good, Complexity is Bad

If you've ever been involved in designing and implementing software, you've participated in the following conversation. Two engineers will disagree about some aspect of how the product should work. Implementing either behavior is easy. Both engineers will present their arguments, and are convinced of the rightness of their position. Neither can convince the other. Eventually — perhaps to avoid further conflict, perhaps just to get the issue behind them — someone will suggest "I've got an idea. How about we just put a knob on the product, and let the user decide which behavior they get."

This is almost always the wrong decision. But often, if all of the engineers are young and inexperienced, and there's no one around to issue a smackdown, knobs like this make it into the final product. The product is made uglier and more complex, the end user is presented with choices that she doesn't care about, and you sell fewer units.

A game is rich when it presents you with a lot of interesting choices to make. A game is complex when it presents you with choices that you don't care about, or when the mechanics of making those choices are intrusive. When designing a game, it's apparently easy to confuse complexity with richness. Richness is a valuable trait in a game. Complexity is the enemy of fun. The ideal game provides a maximum amount of richness with a minimum amount of complexity. Ernest Adams has written about this in some detail.

My favorite recent example of complexity in action would be a game I recently reviewed, Commandos 2. Let's review my description of the UI from that game:

For example, A readies an attack, unless you want to use your fists, in which case you press Q. In the example I gave earlier, the Sapper would use the I key to cut the wires, D to detect mines, click on the mines to retrieve them, and then P to place mines. If the Sapper wanted to place a satchel charge, he uses the B key, but to throw a grenade, he'd hit G (but if his friend the Driver wanted to throw a molotov cocktail, he'd hit S).

It's clear that when develping this title, a large number of tragiocomically poor UI decisions were made. This is a common syndrome in PC games; my working theory is that the developers assign keys to functions early in the production cycle. Then, due to time pressure or thoughtlessness, they never return to ask the question "How should these choices be presented to the user to make the game playable?"

Compare this to the UI in Advance Wars. In that game, to attack with a tank you hit the "A" button. To assault a city with infantry, however, you hit the "A" button. To launch an air assault against enemy bombers, you hit the "A" button, but contrariwise to use your own bomber to bombard enemy troops, you hit the "A" button. The odd man out here is shelling with artillery. I always keep a cheat sheet handy for that one; you have to remember to hit the "A" button.

One reason that Advance Wars has a better UI is that the constraints of the console require it: there's simply a limit to the amount of user interface inanity one can have when you've got only 4 buttons, a joypad, and a few triggers. This isn't to say that all console games are better than all PC games, or that PC games can't have a good UI (in fact, the core mechanics of Panzer General are very similar to those of Advance Wars). It's just that since PC-based games can have needlessly baroque UIs, the realities of schedules and software development tell us that they sometimes will.

The take-away lesson for software developers, I think, is this: in terms of user interaction design, unless you have a damn good reason to do otherwise, design your game as if it will be targeted at a Gameboy Advance. Protect richness, but destroy, annihilate, and eliminate complexity as if you are Genghis Khan. You provide richness in a game by increasing the number of interesting choices the player has to make. Complexity, on the other hand, is created by making it harder to make those choices, or by hiding the interesting choices in a sea of boring ones. Richness is a virtue. Complexity is just a vice.

Content Trumps Form

Returning to Advance Wars for a moment, the difference between it and its predecessors is clear: the maps are smaller. The battles are smaller. Concepts are introduced a few at a time. Yes, there are a few "systemic" improvements, such as the introduction of fog of war, but those improvements aren't used on every map.

In other words, the main difference between the earlier and later games is not that the latter games have better mechanics, but that the latter games have better content.

The importance of this can't be overstated. Let's look at one of my favorite genres, the RPG, specifically the Baldur's Gate series. When Bioware (and later Black Isle) poured time and energy into improving the content, they ended up with Baldur's Gate II and Planescape: Torment, two of the most emotionally engaging and memorable RPGs of their era. When Bioware poured the same amount of time and energy into the "system," they ended up with Neverwinter Nights, which for all of its bells and whistles is fundamentally, a scriptable multiplayer 3D mechanism for delivering hollow and empty experiences to players. There are things I like about Neverwinter. But an hour of Torment is better than 100 hours of Neverwinter Nights.

Conversely, the NWN engine only became usable with Knights of the Old Republic, a game that focused on content to the exclusion of everything else, and which took much of the user-visible flexibility of the NWN engine and tossed it out the window, strictly limiting what the user could do (for example, restricting the extent to which the user could reposition the camera).

We can see the same dichotomy in the Diablo family of games. Blizzard delivered Diablo II, which was more or less the exact same game as the first Diablo but with more plot and more items, and created one of the best selling games of all time. Microsoft delivered Dungeon Siege, emphasizing all of the improved features of their engine, and nobody — except, ironically, modders — cared.

There are groups of users — hardcore gamers, and modders — who care about the details of your game engine. But the average player just wants to be entertained. It's great that I can buy a DVD with a director's commentary on it talking about what camera, film stock, and lighting was used to make a certain shot. But we'd think any studio that put a discussion of that on a poster was unwise. If you find that you can't explain to the public why your game is worth playing without resorting to talking about the underlying technology, then you have lost.

The Cutting Edge is for Bleeders

Diablo II was the top-selling game of its era. When you look at the other games that were released in 2000 that didn't make enough money for their creators to roll around naked on huge piles of gold, an interesting observation can be made: from a purely technological standpoint, Diablo II was primitive. No true 3D rendering, for example.

The fact that Diablo was "primitive" and the fact that it sold 8 hojillion copies are related: it meant that anyone, even people with a somewhat out-of-date computer, could buy it and play it. Furthermore, Diablo II had longevity: as people realized that it played well, it continued to sell like hotcakes over the life of the product. This is atypical; your typical "best seller" game, like a hot movie, sells well when it is released and then declines over time. If you, as a game designer, are absolutely convinced that you have to design a turn-based strategy game that requires an eight-CPU system with a thousand-dollar videocard to play well, I can't stop you. But the lesson of Diablo II shouldn't be missed.

Sometimes, it's true, being on the cutting edge can make the difference between selling a game and not selling it; World of Warcraft is a great example of a game where the content and technology combine to create something greater than the sum of its parts. But the cutting edge, as they say, is also the bleeding edge, and being on it has two important side-effects: it reduces the size of the market you are selling to, and it increases the risk that you will ship garbage, or not ship at all. If your game doesn't require cutting edge features, then you're assuming risk in your schedule for an uncertain payoff.

As a hardcore PC gamer, I have a soft spot in my heart for the bleeding edge. Many of us remember the first time we saw Doom, and we instinctively want to root for companies that push the edge of the envelope. But for every game that pushes the envelope and succeeds, there are 10 painful, timewasting flops. Don't be one of those: unless you have an absolutely compelling product requirement to not run well on 90% of your customers' machines, use mature, well-tested technology for your game.

The Payoff

These are what I see as the main problems facing modern PC games: first, too much complexity, particularly in user interfaces. Next, there is too much design focus on form, and not enough on content. Lastly, games often use cutting edge technology for no sensible reason. In discussing them, I've sometimes phrased the payoff for developers and publishers in terms of sales. But that's just a crude approximation of the real issue: I'm a PC gamer. I want to play your games. I can't play your games if they suck. There is too much competition from too many other forms of entertainment for me to waste my life downloading the latest "Detonator" drivers to try to eke out another 1.5% framerate improvement in your product. I want to spend my brain power figuring out how to circumvallate Vercingetorix at Alesia, not trying to understand why in the world the developer thought I needed to use one keyboard command to move my Hastatii and a completely different one to move my Principes.

One final note, in closing. I've been using Advance Wars as my example throughout because it is a Game Boy Advance game. This handheld console, which has sold about 100 million units, is essentially a repackaged Super Nintendo system. In other words, the best turn-based strategy game on the market was created with technology that dates from 1990. Keep that in mind when sitting down to create the product requirements for your next game.

Not every game is a strategy game, but every game has to maintain a balance between richness and complexity. If your game isn't as good as it should be, maybe you shouldn't be asking yourself what you can add.

Maybe you should be asking yourself what you can cut.

Thanks to Peter Su and Nat Lanza for their suggestions on this article. The title was inspired by Donald Norman's book The Design of Everyday Things.

Whole Stupid

2006-07-06 · by psu

For tonight, a rumination on some old news. You may recall that a few weeks ago, Whole Foods announced that it would no longer carry any live lobster and crabs at its fish counters. The reason given for this new policy was that Whole Foods had painstakingly studied every aspect of the live shellfish supply chain, and they decided that it was inhumane.

This is exactly the sort of pudding-brained ethics that makes me glad that there is a Trader Joe's coming to town. At least when they open, I'll be able to find high quality food items without this sort of patronizing bullshit.

There are reasons you might not want to carry live shellfish far away from their natural homes. Maybe such shipping is expensive and therefore you lose too much margin to make it profitable. Maybe sending the stuff half way across the continent puts too much stress on the supply. Maybe they they don't sell enough of the fish outside the local markets to make the enterprise worthwhile. I could understand all of these reasons. But, the supply chain is inhumane?

Let's consider the supply chain for beef. Beef shows up at the store dead. That seems worse. The lobster are also better treated than the poor eel in Japan, where a traditional preparation is to take a live eel and nail it to the cutting board through its skull so that it stays still while you skin it.

Also consider that Whole Foods has no trouble foisting these horrific fake meat products like Tempeh and "I Can't Believe That's not a Thanksgiving Turkey" on an unsuspecting public. That's cruelty on the highest order not only to the poor soy proteins, but also to the poor saps who buy the stuff.

Whole Foods plays a tricky game. They sell more than the product. They also sell the idea that you are a better person for buying the product in their store. But Whole Foods has a large national food distribution network and as such it has many of the same problems as any store that uses a large national food distribution network. The only difference is that part of their sales pitch is that they do not have these problems, and that's not really true.

I think a more truthful picture is that Whole Foods is a high margin retail outlet that brings stuff in from wherever they can get it to your home so you don't have to live in California to get that stuff year 'round. There is nothing wrong with this, but it's a bit disingenuous to do this while preaching the gospel of local food products.

As for me, I'm just sad that I'm losing the last place in Pittsburgh that will sell me an actual live soft-shell crab. I always felt a bit guilty for eating Blue Crabs way out here, far away from where they are fished. But they are tasty enough that once or twice a year didn't seem like much of a sin. Maybe I'll call up our old fish guy Tom Robinson in North Carolina and see if he'd ship me a few on ice.

Advanced Stage Hobbyist Consumption Syndrome

2006-07-10 · by psu

I've been buying games I probably won't play lately. I should be clear. It's not that I might play them. I won't.

To you, this might seem irrational, even insane. But I recognize that it's the natural progression of my psyche through the stages of my latest hobby of consumption.

Stage 1: Denial

Things always start slow. I tell myself I'm not really interested and don't have the time. For example, I tell myself that a point and shoot is a fine camera, and I don't need the complexity of a real camera. Or, I tell myself that games really aren't worth the time, except every once in a while when the next Half-Life comes along, and besides, I don't have a PC.

This stage can last for a long time, years even, but forces stronger than one's internal resistance will break in. It's inevitable.

Stage 2: Casual

Of course, we all know that eventually I did break down and enter the video game world in earnest. I did so pretty casually. I had a couple of sports games and the odd shooter. My console profile pretty much matched my previous attitudes about computer games.

I tried to make this situation last, but at some level I knew I was doomed. I had been here before too many other times. I had gone from a few Jazz and Classical CDs to a collection of turntables and hundreds of vinyl albums (they were cheap) and later hundreds more CDs. I had gone from no cameras to several "serious" cameras, and a whole darkroom. I knew I was in for more.

Stage 3: Shopping

It's always shopping that does you in. Shopping encapsulates everything the true geek loves about hobbies because at its core it is a game of collecting information. It is no coincidence that the majority of Internet Forum activity is about shopping.

Shopping is insidious because it naturally leads to a situation where you learn more and more about things you do not have. Younger geeks are safer from this, because they do not have the resources to actually go and acquire things they don't have. I spent half my childhood scheming about how I could obtain equipment for amateur astronomy, but I never had the money to buy any of it.

Hobbies for adults are different. We have the money. The march of consumption moves inescapably forward.

Stage 4: Hardcore

The problem with constant consumption is that there is only so much content to consume. Eventually you have to branch out. You can try to collect (say) only classic recordings of old Classical Warhorses, but you'll get tired of that soon and find yourself in 20th century aisles looking at George Crumb records.

With video games, wasn't too hard to plumb the depths of my favorite genres. All you need is to collect one football game and the two shooters that are actually worth playing. Therefore, I was forced to go sideways. First there were the RPGs. I even learned to listen to the crappy voice-overs to get to the good parts of the game. Then there were platform and action games, which I can manage as long as there is an easy mode. Horror games? Check. Novelty adventure titles? Tried that. Artistic Japanese design pieces? Did that.

Soon, I found myself at The Exchange having lost that feeling of constant discovery. Had I really covered everything? The only decent title recently for the Xbox 360 is a ping-pong game. The DS was pretty snazzy for a while, with its lawyer games and surgery sims, but it's really just more of the same old Nintendo being Nintendo.

If new won't do it, the only direction to go is back in time. So I've been picking up older titles that I feel like I should have because of their status in the gaming "literature". These games are important, even if they aren't enjoyable anymore. There are PS1 games, SNES games (emulated on the PS1!) and some older PS2 games (you know, the people in Final Fantasy X just never stop talking). I tried some old PC games under emulation. The chances that I'll actually play most of these games is vanishingly small, but one is compelled to collect. Luckily, I know where this is going.

Stage 5: Jaded

The end of the road is an extended lull. I'll soon find myself sitting on my couch, bored with all the games, but also feeling guilty for being bored with all the games. I will wonder to myself about why I bought that comprehensive collection of historical Japanese samurai games. I'll have to face facts, spend less time with the console, and maybe watch a movie. Life might return to the regular pattern of Halo and Madden, or I might inch through some old platform game involving a cartoon rodent with big guns. Either way, intense enthusiasm will give way to a more jaded sense of balance.

Of course, I could try to keep the ball rolling. There are all those historical consoles I don't own. I do have a spare room in the house that would be a perfect retro game den. Also, I never did find out what all the fuss was about World of Warcraft. I think I have just enough self-respect and inner strength to avoid these fates though.

Instead, the pathological addiction will subside and games will take their rightful place next to the bikes and cameras and vinyl albums. They will be something to enjoy when I feel like enjoying them. They will be one of the many topics on which I can pontificate uselessly for hours. They will be one more activity that keeps me busy when I would otherwise be idle.

The Sick-In-Bed Reading List

2006-07-11 · by peterb

I've been laid up with a bug for the past few days. This, coupled with my recent vacation, has allowed me to catch up on my reading list. Here's what I've been reading recently.

Cory Doctorow, Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town. Yeah, yeah, I know. Doctorow is a sanctimonious prick on his weblog, but this was actually pretty good. It would have been better if he had just eliminated all the chapters on wireless internet, though. I was probably more inclined to enjoy this book simply because it takes place in my favorite city.

Orson Scott Card, Magic Street. I found the first half of this to be absolutely compelling, and then about midway through, the wind went out of my sails. In the afterword, the author discusses how when he started writing, he didn't know who various mysterious characters "were," in the mythological sense, and then midway through he realized who the archetypes could be, and from that point on writing them got a lot easier. That's the part where I got bored. For a long time, this sort of thing has been underlying my belief that, all things being equal, sequels are bad, because a fictional world is always better when you haven't killed it dead with overexploration. Despite this, Card understands that the underlying essence of fiction is character, and not narrative, and thus this is still worth reading.

Tracy Kidder, The Soul of a New Machine. Some random blogger recommended this, but reading it was too much like work.

Scott Westerfeld, Peeps. There's this webcomic about a library called Unshelved. Every Sunday, he recommends a book. His tastes trend towards sci-fi and fantasy, which is really a shame. Peeps is a take on vampires, with lots of icky description of parasites. The writing was fairly tepid, which was not the case with another Unshelved recommendation...

Lois McMaster Bujold, The Warrior's Apprentice. Yes, it's cheesy sci-fi, but enjoyably tart nonetheless.

John Ledyard, The Last Voyage of Captain Cook. Ledyard was a rake and a roustabout who travelled with Captain James Cook on his ill-fated final voyage. This memoir — parts of which were plagiarized from other works — made for interesting reading, especially paired with Google Earth.

Another Day, Another Bad Game

2006-07-12 · by psu

I picked up Condemned: Criminal Origins a while back, and gave it another try tonight. This game was written up rather favorably when the 360 launched. Yet more evidence that the gaming press has their head up their collective ass.

Let's list the number of things that this game gets wrong.

  1. So dark I have to run with the flashlight 100% of the time. OOOooooo, such creepy atmosphere.

  2. Number of different enemy types in the first two hours of gameplay: 1.

  3. How combat works in the first two hours of gameplay: hit, hit, block, dodge, hit hit. Next.

  4. Control scheme has a sprint button. By sprint, they mean walk. When you aren't sprinting, you move at a snail's pace, noticing the whole time that this room looks just like the previous room. Anyway, to "sprint", you have to click down on the left analog stick while you use it to move around. Brilliant! Or you can try to configure this to be on a trigger. But then you have to click down to block, which makes combat impossible. Way to go.

  5. Boring repetitive "evidence collection" mechanics mean it takes you 15 extra minutes to get to the next exposition point.

  6. Maps make you run in circles because all areas look exactly the same.

On the up side, you can save anywhere when you get so bored you want to cry.

This leaves the number of titles worth playing on the 360 in the first nine months since launch at a staggering: one and a half (I gave up on Call of Duty).

Maybe I'll go play Half-Life 2 over again under emulation, or just stab myself with a pen.

Distinguished Peters

2006-07-13 · by psu and peterb

Recently we have become aware that some readers of the blog have difficulty telling the two Petes, peterb and psu, apart. Here's a handy reference guide for when you have trouble.

peterb: Wannabe Italian poseur. psu: Wannabe French poseur.

peterb: Pokes fun at himself. psu: Pokes fun at peterb.

psu: Buys too many videogames and then doesn't play them. peterb: Buys too many videogames, installs them, and then doesn't play them.

psu: Thinks Cory Doctorow is an insufferable prick. peterb: Thinks Xeni Jardin is an insufferable prick.

psu: Prefers to buy and not actually play Japanese RPGs. peterb: Prefers to buy and not actually play Western RPGs.

psu: Enjoys the Tour de France, thinks F1 is stupid after the first five minutes. peterb: Enjoys F1, thinks the Tour de France is stupid until the last five minutes.

peterb: Can't subscibe to NetFlix because he's too cheap. psu: Subscribes to NetFlix, but never watches any of the movies.

peterb: Dislikes exercise and the outdoors. psu: Dislikes exercise and the outdoors, but feels guilty about it.

psu: Thinks peterb's Canon DSLR has lower noise and better JPEGs than his Nikon peterb: Thinks psu's Nikon DSLR doesn't sound gay like his Canon.

peterb: Likes Chinese food because he is Jewish. psu: Likes Chinese food because he is Chinese.

Wheels On Fire

2006-07-17 · by peterb

Tonight I helped a friend change a tire on his car. I was calm, efficient, and helpful, and we got the tire changed in under 10 minutes.

The funny part about this is that I know that if it had been my car, I would have anxiously dithered around for a half hour before working up the will to fix the problem.

Car repair is a talent, and I don't have it. I understand it in theory, but in practice I find that I lack a certain something that makes it practical. Patience, perhaps, or just sheer stamina.

A few years ago I had a motorcycle, a 1982 model Honda CX500. I say "motorcycle," but for those of you who have seen these rhinos, it's really more like a tractor on two wheels. It had a small oil leak, and I noticed it getting worse over time. Eventually, I traced the problem to the crankcase gasket which was rotting away. And, in a fit of optimism, I decided to replace it.

My friend George had a good garage; I had the service manual for the bike. What could possibly go wrong?

In fact, nothing went wrong with the repair. That is, nothing tangible. But there was something ethereal that went sour, and the experience has stayed with me forever.

The gasket I needed to change was on the front of the engine. That means that you can't reasonably just pop the front of the crankcase off. Essentially, I had to completely dismantle the bike to get at the engine, and then I had to dismantle the engine to get at the part I needed to access. Off came the seat, the gas tank. Drain the lines, remove the carburator — so far, that's all pretty easy. From there, things get sort of hazy. Each part was carefully put on the floor in roughly the order I took it apart, with notes to help me get it back together.

Eventually, I replaced the gasket. That part was particularly annoying, because the part of the engine I was putting the gasket under couldn't actually be physically removed without taking the forks off, which I didn't want to do. So I had to perform the operation with acrobatic contortions. But perform it I did. The gasket was on.

Then, I turned around.

Spread out before me on the floor were several hundred parts, ranging in size from large to miniscule. My clever organizational system seemed like a vanished mirage.

The prospect of bringing my bike back to life seemed as unlikely as that of resurrecting a frog after dissecting it in Junior High School. I felt anxious. I started breathing fast. A thought entered my head, and I couldn't help myself: I said, out loud, "I will never be able to put these pieces back together in a million years. I can't do it."

At that point, George walked in to the garage. He didn't say anything. He just pulled up a chair, and read his book, and sat there. "George, there's no fucking way I can put this bike back together, man." He looked up. "Sure you can. Just start at the end and work your way back. You can do it."

That, it turns out, was all the help I needed. I started at the end, and worked my way back, and although the sun had gone down and it was way past the time that all decent people had gone to bed, my two-wheeled tractor was back together, and running.

For some reason, changing that tire tonight made me remember that story. I'm not sure why. The interesting thing to me is that everyone has their own comfort zones. I have a cousin who, if he encountered a torn-apart engine, would gleefully jump right in. Conversely, a tangled computer or software problem would aggravate him, but to me that's an exciting mystery. You'd think that car repair and computer repair would be similar enough that people would react the same way to both. But somehow — at least for me, and at least on the emotional level — they're not.

But I have to admit, during tonight's tire change, I was glad to have had the chance to be George for once.

Secrets of Da Vinci

2006-07-19 · by peterb

Most games are mediocre.

This isn't, I think, a huge surprise to anyone, but it does at least offer one great hope: that you'll start playing a game and find that it's better than you expected it to be. This happened to me recently with Secrets of Da Vinci: The Forbidden Manuscript. Not to be confused with the book, movie, and game The Da Vinci Code.

As I believe I've let slip before, I'm a sucker for the Myst series of games. Da Vinci is very Myst-like in interface and presentation, with elements of the old LucasArts adventures in the way you interact with objects.

One problem I've always had with Myst and its ilk is just how abstract the puzzles are. "Pressing this button causes these oblong shapes to roll down a tube and fly into the air. If you've aligned these Three Mysterious Dials just right, the oblongs will smash against the Big Machine With The Levers. If you had previously set the levers right, the Big Machine With The Levers will let out a blast of steam. That will disturb the nest of pterodactyls who live in the Big Stripey Rock Thing, who will fly out and accidentally trigger the Blue Glowy Thing That I Guess Must Be A Big Stripey Rock Thing Key, which causes the Big Stripey Rock Thing to open, revealing the next world.

Yes, I realize that the reason the puzzles in this sort of game are this way is because figuring out what these mysterious things are is as much fun as figuring out how to advance in the game. And when it's done well, it's great: mysterious, enigmatic, yet compelling. But sometimes, when done poorly, "mysterious and enigmatic" isn't compelling, it's just pretentious and irritating.

The puzzles in Secrets of Da Vinci, contrariwise, are refreshingly concrete, while still being challenging. To take just one example, you find a metal plate, and a printing press, but no paper or ink. So, you need to make paper. Also, ink. As well as figuring out, along the way, how to repair and operate a watermill and a printing press.

All of this takes place in a well-fleshed out storyline: it is shortly after Leonardo Da Vinci has died. You're a disgraced and discharged apprentice of Count Francesco Melzi, who has been hired by an anonymous benefactor. He has sent you to Da Vinci's chateau, Clos Lucé in Amboise, France, shortly after his death. Your mission is to find Da Vinci's notebooks. Seducing the Countess along the way is strongly encouraged.

Secrets of Da Vinci was originally a European game, and there are a few very small localization bugs. But they're truly minor. The puzzles are engaging, clever, plausible, and the subject matter is entrancing. The exterior of the mansion is that of Clos Lucé; I can't say how authentic the interiors are, but they certainly feel right.

As your character progresses through the game you will make choices that will influence your moral standing. Your morality, in turn, will allow or disallow certain other actions. This adds a little more depth to a game which, if it simply had the puzzles, plot, and scripting that it already had, was already quite deep.

I didn't seek out this game. It came to me. But I like it a lot, and I'd recommend it to anyone who has been wondering "where have all the good adventure games gone?"

The game is published by Tri-Synergy, and is Windows-only. It retails for $29.99, and is available from Amazon.com for a bit less. Disclosure statement: the publisher graciously provided me with a review copy of this game.

Going Solo

2006-07-20 · by psu

Yesterday Floyd Landis was cooked. 10K from the top of the last climb, he looked up the road completely helpless as the group he was riding in rode away from him. You could see in his face and his body that he had no way to follow, no energy left in his legs. The bike practically stood still. He lost 10 minutes in those last 10K, and, it seemed, the Tour.

Today Floyd Landis rode away from the whole race and stayed away for 125Km. At the end of the day, he had regained almost all the time he lost yesterday. I think it's the most amazing thing I've seen in the Tour since I started paying attention to the race 15 years ago, and not only because Floyd was completely cooked yesterday.

Modern bike racing, especially in the Tour de France is dominated by team tactics that allow for great individual performances. The tactics are generally defensive, and designed to conserve the energy of the best riders so that they can win the race in the final climb or the final time trial. What you never see, or at least I've never seen, is a rider who can contend for the GC riding away from the Peloton at the start of the day and staying there. The teams always work to bring him back, because the defensive tactics dictate that one must never lose time. The result is that long solo wins tend to only be given to riders who can't possibly take back enough time to threaten in the GC.

Against this backdrop, what Landis did today is even more amazing. He rode away from everyone, and they couldn't do a thing about it. The Peloton which had used those same team tactics to crush him so badly yesterday was utterly helpless to stop him today. So, for one glorious day in the mountains, cycling was dominated by an individual performance, not defensive team tactics.

I remember reading a story about Eddy Merckx, the great Belgian bike rider who won every race there was to win at least twice. In the story, Eddy reminisces over a photograph taken of him in a stage of the Tour. He is riding away from everyone at the beginning of a hard mountain stage, and presumably taking huge time on the way to winning the race. "Boy was that fun", he says, as if he would never witness anything like that again.

Until today.

Small Details

2006-07-25 · by psu

Today I am happy because I can again use a utility that I had been deprived of for the last few months. Liteswitch X has always been a fixture on my Macs. Originally, it provided features in a keyboard app switcher that the Dock did not. Later, I kept using it just because I was used to it. But I stopped using it when I got an Intel Mac because there was no Universal version of the Preferences panel, so I had to wean myself off of the tool.

Liteswitch does three things that I like that the native switcher does not do:

  1. To move backward in the icon list, you only have to hit cmd-shift, not cmd-shift-tab or cmd-arrow. I find this convenient.

  2. It has a quick key to force-kill any running app (cmd-f-f).

  3. It provides custom window layering modes. The one I like brings all the windows of an application forward if I bring any of its windows forward.

I thought I would miss all three of these things, but it wasn't too bad. The native app switcher is really not that different from LiteSwitch. I ended up really missing the last item on the list though.

With the normal Dock, if I switch to an app using cmd-tab, all of the application windows come forward. But if I pick the application in any other way, I have to tediously find all of the other application windows in order to see them. The most glaring problem here is that Exposé does not bring the all of the application windows forward, only the one I picked.

I found this single small detail to bother me tremendously in my day to day work. I must have spent and extra ten minutes each day bringing windows forward that used to be there as if by magic.

Now my life is back to normal. It's good to not have to think about these small details.

Flop Shot

2006-07-26 · by peterb

A few years ago I flew from New York to San Diego. I was travelling a lot for work at the time, and had amassed a Croesian number of frequent flyer miles, so I turned them in for an upgrade to first class. This resulted in my sitting next to a doctor, a surgeon. True to the stereotype, this surgeon loved golf.

How do I know that this surgeon loved golf? Did he tell me about how he loved to play golf? No, he did not tell me how he loved to play golf. Was he wearing golf shoes? No, he was not wearing golf shoes.

I know he loved golf because he had a golf magazine, and he read it for the entire flight. For the entire seven hours that we were in the air, il dottore read and re-read his golf magazine. He read it while eating. He read it during takeoff. He read it during landing. And for all I know, when he visited the lavatory and flipped the sign to OCCUPIED, he took that golf magazine and stuffed it down his pants, enjoying the rich, smooth feel of its turfy goodness.

So there are people in this world who really like golf. I'm not one of them. I played a little bit in high school, and more or less view golf as a way of ruining a perfectly good walk. The only thing more boring than playing golf, to me, is watching golf on TV. I am thoroughly convinced the only reason men love golf is because of the subtext of a man walking around in the woods trying to use his stick to get into 18 different holes.

And yet, and yet, I love golf videogames. They provide the illusion of skill without the effort, and combine all the good attributes of golf (nice scenery, clever physics problems, goofy clothing) while eliminating the bad attributes (having to talk to and be around golfers, the interminable waiting in between every shot, having to keep score yourself).

Which brings me to EA Sports' new game, Tiger Woods PGA Tour '06 for the Xbox 360. Which, not to put too fine a point on it, sucks.

Let me be more specific: when compared to the 2-year-old Xbox release Links 2004, Tiger Woods looks worse, plays worse, has a stupider user interface, and is less fun.

Golf videogames don't have to look stunning to be fun. Hot Shots Golf, for example, is a blast using only an iconic, cartoony style. Qualitatively, when static, the art in Tiger Woods looks about the same as that in Links 2004 But since it is OH MY GOD HIGH DEFINITION, they have (I assume) upscaled the texture maps for no particular reason. The upshot of this is that when a model with many polygons, such as a golfer, moves around their movement is jumpy and stuttery, and not at all smooth. So, you can play Links 2004, or you can spend $400 on your next-gen console to get something that looks worse.

If this were the only issue, I wouldn't even mention it. The user interaction model is enough to make a grown man weep. Here's a typical interaction with Tiger Woods PGA Tour '06: Please Press More Buttons, Thanks. Let's say I'm just finishing up a skill event. The game will display the score and ask me to press "A" to continue. I press "A".

Now, after that I used some skill points to increase my putting skill. I navigated to a menu and spent the points. That took about 3 seconds. And when I left that menu.... "Would you like to save your progress, Jeremy Clarkson? YES/NO". And then I shot myself.

The interface on the course isn't too terrible. I generally think that Links had a slightly better UI interaction, but not so that you would make the decision for one or another based solely on that. The one in-game UIism that doesn't work well is the one that lets you steer the ball after you hit it.

Oh, didn't I mention? You can steer the ball after you hit it. Did you ever go bowling with a group of 8 year olds? They will roll the ball down the lane, and as it heads toward the right gutter they will lean their bodies and twist left, trying to make the ball go left through sheer willpower. Apparently, Tiger Woods PGA Tour '06 was made for these people. This is so stupid that it sort of leaves me wondering why they didn't just go whole hog and give the player a "shotgun mode" where you can snipe other players' balls out of the air. That has as much to do with golf as steering balls after they've left your club.

As with all of EA Sports' recent sports/RPG hybrids, you are given detailed, precise control over the appearance of your avatar. You can apply all sorts of fine bone structure and facial details giving the character whatever appearance you desire, as long as they end up looking like a vaguely halfwitted mentally-impaired troll.

The presentation of the game, which is intended to mimic a TV broadcast, is subtly wrong, and offputting. The announcers are sarcastic and biting in response to poor play in ways that ring false.

The game is, in short, an embarassment from top to bottom. This is the second EA Sports game I've reviewed this year that was in this sort of condition (you'll read my review of NFL Head Coach in the upcoming issue of played.todeath magazine), and it has me more than a little worried. Something is amiss in Redwood City, and it doesn't look easy to fix.

Even golfers deserve better than this.

Beyond Alton Brown

2006-07-31 · by peterb

A while ago I posted my recipe for making yogurt, in which I slavishly imitated Alton Brown's stern admonition to not heat the milk past 170 degrees Fahrenheit.

Last week I made a bonehead mistake while making my regular batch of yogurt; I turned off the alarm on the probe thermometer, but forgot to turn off the heat on the milk. As a result, I ended up boiling my milk and cream mixture for about 15 minutes.

It turns out that this makes your yogurt a lot better.

It does this in two ways. First off, it denatures some of the proteins in the milk so you end up with a lot less whey to pour off. I suppose somewhere there is someone whose biggest thrill in life is drinkin' a nice tall cool glass of whey, but that someone is not me. The texture of the yogurt when you boil the milk is more uniform, and less gelatinous.

Second, you can tell by taste that the milk has been boiled. The finished yogurt acquired a very subtle, but noticeable, panna cotta flavor.

I tried to convince myself that having yogurt that tasted a little like panna cotta was somehow a bad thing. I failed. It's awesome.

So, less wastage, a nicer texture, and a more interesting taste. There is only one rational conclusion: when making yogurt, boil that milk, chowhounds!

Developer Interview: Auto Assault MMO

2006-08-01 · by peterb

In May, I reviewed the Auto Assault Trading Card Game for Played To Death. As part of the prep for that, I interviewed Scott Martins at Worlds Apart.

Questons are in italics.

Auto Assault shares a lot of visual similarities with Star Chamber. My presumption is that there's some degree of code-sharing going on, but often in development code-sharing is easier to talk about than to actually do. How abstracted is the engine underlying both games? Were you able to focus on game mechanics and assets to create Auto Assault, or did you have to rewrite significant portions of the underlying engine?

We've actually created a very modular and extensible infrastructure for creating digital-property style games.

That allowed us to really focus on the game and the gameplay of Auto Assault itself, rather than the tech. Frankly, for TCG design and development, a digital development environment can be a lot more efficient than paper-based iteration and playtesting.

Our overview at: http://www.worlds-apart.com/company/tech/ covers this in more detail.

Star Chamber is cross-platform. Are there any plans for an Auto Assault port to the Macintosh?

Yes, we'll be releasing a Macintosh build of AATCG here within the next week. (Editorial comment: We're still waiting.)

What was the hardest bug you had to track down in development? How did you eventually figure it out (if you did).

Because of the existing infrastructure, there weren't any particular technical challenges with Auto Assault TCG, per se.

Again comparing Auto Assault with the earlier game, one major difference is that Auto Assault is a "more pure" card game (eg, there is no strategic "star map" portion of the game). Was that designed in from the beginning, or was it something that developed as you refined the game.

That was a part of the design of AATCG from the beginning. We particularly were looking for a design that would also work well on paper for this game, because of the possibility of printing it as a physical TCG.

How many of your customers buy additional cards after the starter pack? Do you expect that to be significant ongoing revenue, or do you expect most of the revenue to come from new players buying the core game?

In general, most of the revenue on the online TCG business model comes from incremental purchases and microtransactions from existing customers. This is particularly true for Auto Assault TCG, which has significant promotional tie-ins to the Auto Assault MMO that allow MMO players to sample AATCG for free.

One obvious advantage to publishing a CCG on a computer is that there after cards are created, there is little or no marginal cost (read: printing and packaging) to selling each additional one. Do you plan on printing real cards? Do your customers seem interested in that?

We are exploring that possibility, and there is some interest in it. We think the design of AATCG has the potential for pretty strong among customers who play other TCGs in the hobby market.

What games, other than Car Wars, inspired Auto Assault? Are there any odd inspirations that wouldn't be immediately obvious?

Well, for Worlds Apart, our primary source of inspiration for the TCG design was the MMO itself. We played it and went through a number of early design iterations trying to come up with a game engine that was true to the experience of playing the MMO. The most important elements that we were looking for were that it be fast-paced and destructive, and we think we acheived those elements with this design.

What's the best mechanic in the game, the one cool thing that you think makes the game "click"? Conversely, what one thing in the game feels wrong or clunky to you? ("Nothing feels wrong, the game is perfect" is not an acceptable answer here.)

The thing that really "clicked" for me for this game over previous design iterations was the speed attribute and its display using the speedometer graphic. And while the display of that attribute is key to the feel of the game, it's multipurpose function (defense vs. scoring missions) and the decision points and tradeoffs therein really became the core of the game engine.

Nothing feels "clunky" to me, but if I had to pick one place where I wish we'd put a little more time and energy, it would be in making the base vehicle stats a little more varied.

Exchange Addiction

2006-08-02 · by claire

I have a problem. I've gotten into the habit of killing time in Squirrel Hill by visiting The Exchange, a local store mentioned before. Harmless, right? On its own it would be, except that every time I enter the store I find something that I just have to have. In my last 4 visits to the Exchange I have not once walked away empty handed.

A few recent acquisitions: 1) A blue PS2 controller. Rationale - I need a second PS2 controller? Actual reason - It's a freaking first party metallic blue PS2 controller! (I eventually found out it's probably from a special edition Japanese PS2 system. I love it so.)

2) Final Fantasy 1 & 2: Dawn of Souls. Rationale - It was $20? Actual reason - It was $20?

3) Silent Hill 3. Rationale - I want to play through the Silent Hill series. Actual reason - Actually, yea I want to play through them all and I didn't have SH3.

4) Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. Rationale - I'd played an hour before and it was enjoyable. Actual reason - It was $10.

I just can't stop myself. Every time I have some time to kill in Squirrel Hill I hear the siren song of the Exchange and their bargain priced wares. I hear, and I succumb and before I know it I find myself exchanging money for goods. Oh Exchange, why must you tempt me so. I am powerless against you.

No Lawyer Nibs

2006-08-04 · by psu

For this afternoon, a short meditation on one of modern life's stupidities. I write this rant in my head every time I have to take the wheel off my bike. Here is why.

All modern bicycles use a quick-release mechanism to attach the wheel to the bike. By modern, I mean all bikes made after 1930 or so when a small company called Campagnolo in Italy invented it.

The quick-release works using a spring-loaded lever. You adjust the spring tension so that when the lever is closed, the wheel is very secure. How secure? If you watched the Tour De France, you may have noticed the fleet of cars that follow the race, one for each team. On top of these cars, you may have noticed half a dozen bikes or so, each attached to a roof rack. These cars drive at crazy speeds up and down mountains and around hairpin turns for 2500 miles over three weeks, and no bike ever falls off the rack. They are attached to the rack using exactly the same quick-release as you would use for your wheels. One can say that for all intents and purposes, a properly adjusted quick-release will be more than sufficiently secure.

For decades, cyclists lived in a time of bliss and wonder. To remove the wheel, you just pop the quick-release and take it out. To put the wheel back, you just stick the wheel in the frame and close the lever. There was generally no need to actually adjust the lever itself. Thus, the quick-release lived up to its name, making wheel attachment fast and easy.

Then, somewhere, someone crashed a bike because a quick-release was not well-adjusted, and some lawyers got involved and ruined everything. Now, on every production bike frame you can buy in this country and perhaps the world, when you pop the quick release open, the wheel does not come out of the frame. Instead, it just jiggles there against two little protrusions at the end of the fork which I, and many others call the lawyer nibs, or nubs, or hooks. I have heard people blame Ralph Nader for these offences against God. If this is true, then that's as good a reason as any to never elect that nut-ball to political office.

The lawyer nibs are a "safety" device. The theory is that if you don't adjust the q-r correctly, and you take the bike out on the road anyway, the nibs will keep the wheel from falling out. This might be true if you happen to enjoy riding a bike at 5mph on nothing but flat roads. If you were stupid enough to get up to full speed or go over a bump, you would instantly crash and hurt yourself badly. They are in fact useless for actually holding the wheel on the frame. All they do is make it impossible to remove the wheel quickly.

Instead, they force you to adjust the quick-release every time you put the wheel in the frame. Rather than a quick flip and pop the wheel out, now you have to pop the quick-release and turn-turn-turn-turn-turn-turn-argh-turn-hate before the wheel comes loose. On the way back in it's the same thing, but you have to make sure you adjust the quick-release just right. Every time you do this, you have a chance of doing it wrong. Therefore, every time you take the wheel out of your frame, the lawyer nibs force you to do something that you will eventually screw up and then you will crash.

In other words, what the nibs do is completely destroy the perfect utility of a fantastic piece of human invention and replace it with something that is both less safe and completely useless! Clearly this calls for a round of applause. Way to go.

I Tried

2006-08-07 · by psu

I tried. I gave it my best shot. I believe I have given the game a fair shake, a reasonable evaluation window, a nice long looking over. Intelligent people who generally seem right about these things told me it was a good game, and I desparately wanted to agree with them. But I can't. The plain, hard, awful truth is, no matter how hard I try, I can't like NCAA 2007 on the 360. It's crap.

I've always said that the job of a good football game is to let you win while not letting you notice that it is doing so. I'm not a player who is interested in an "realistic" simulation of an actual team. I want a fun "simulation" of taking a team to the Super Bowl and winning every year. But it has to feel like I worked for it. Over the years, the mature football engines have been tuned to the point where this is possible. They have bugs and glitches and money-plays, but these concerns are fairly minor because the overall package plays well, and I get to win a lot. What's the point of playing a football video game and having a .500 season?

NCAA 2007 is not like this. The game is cheap and random, and the gameplay is glitchy and hard to predict. Then you lose. The result is a frustrating mess.

Passing is like flipping a coin. If you hit a good coin flip, your QB (or the CPU) can thread the ball between three defenders, and your receiver will dive backwards behind himself to catch the ball. If you hit a bad coin flip, that pass over the middle into wide open space will be picked off by a DB sporting magic warp drive shoes.

Running the ball is a bit better. The running backs handle more like the PS2 Madden than the Xbox 360 Madden, so it doesn't feel like they are running through quicksand. You can occasionally change direction. Still, sometimes you will be moving along and the avatar will suddenly spring into some random animation that you can't control. That's weird. The old problem of running into your lineman and getting stuck also persists.

Other on-field gameplay glitches abound. You will see players warping 15 yards across the field to make a play. You will be sacked by linemen who never touch your quarterback. The CPU team never misses a field goal, unless it is blocked and they recover their own blocked kick and run with the ball 30 yards to the endzone. Every game I play seems to have 4 or 5 INTs or 2 or 3 fumbles, or both. Every game.

The "jump the snap" feature is also heinously unbalanced. Jumping the snap allows the defense to jump into the offensive line with extra force if you time the button press just right. However, if you jump the snap, your lineman falls over his feet and shuffles to the side in a harmless manner. When the CPU jumps the snap, the lineman clips through your center and smashes the QB to the ground before he has even gathered the football.

I dislike the new play calling screens. I didn't really like them in Madden 06 either. They seem great in theory, except that the system is actually slower to use because you have to pick the exact play and hit A, rather than picking the group of three plays and hitting A, X, or B. It also does not help that the UI spazzes out and flips to the next or previous page of plays seemingly at random. The UI is also buggy in other ways. I've had defensive formations disappear (where did 4-3 Normal go?) and offensive play groups suddenly be named "text text".

The graphics and presentation are also disappointing. There are noticable anti-aliasing problems when the players are small. Also, the football is too dark and hard to find on the screen. The on screen tickers and scoreboard displays are horrible. They flash and dance for no reason. They don't really tell you much about what is going on. They are also missing those helpful messages that indicate whether you have made a first down, or whether there was just a touchdown, or whether your stupid moron running back just coughed up the ball again, which is why that cloud of players are all running down the field the wrong way. The audio is boring and repetetitive. I don't know who Lee Corso is, but if he says "Scooter special" to me one more time I'll go insane.

As a final insult, there are obvious bugs of a fatal nature. In one game, I recovered a fumble for a touchdown. The touchdown appeared in the scoring summary of the game, But I got no credit for the points, even though I kicked off on the next play, as if I had scored. Go team!

My summary: it's barely better than Madden 2006 for the 360, but if Madden 2007 is not better than this, I'll have to get the PS2 game again. NCAA 2007 is a glitchy, buggy, frustrating mess. Oh yeah, the new kick mechanic is stupid too. And I hate the option play. So there.

The Cars Make the Man

2006-08-08 · by peterb

What we drive speaks volumes about us. But sometimes, the message that we think we're giving off isn't the message everyone hears.

The Car The Owner Thinks Everyone Else Thinks
Any minivan "I am a responsible mother, dedicated to the safety of my children." "These annoying breeders are everywhere."
Any SUV "I am not driving a minivan. See this car? Not a minivan. It cost twice as much, because it is definitely not a minivan." "Great. Now the really stupid breeders are everywhere too."
Toyota Prius "I care about the environment" "If he really cared about the environment, he'd be using public transit."
Honda Element "How come the guy in the Prius is getting dates with all the hippie chicks?" "Clowns are scary."
BMW Z3 "Ahhhh, German engineering." "You are driving a chick car."
Porsche Boxster "I am sporty, yet sophisticated." "He couldn't afford a Porsche 911"
Porsche 911 "I have an 8 inch penis." "He is bald."
Ferrari 360 Modena "I don't care what you think of me, because my trophy wife is 40 years younger than me." "I got nothin'."
Camaro "I'm gonna go down to Donzi's tonight and score." "I thought dinosaurs were extinct."
Ford Escort/Focus "I am economical." "He is cheap."
Subaru WRX "Check out my Rallisport style!" "At least he doesn't have those spinning hubcaps."

Feel free to add entries in the comments as appropriate.

P.S.: On one final note, I couldn't find a place for the Porsche Cayenne in this table, because I can't imagine what anyone who buys it could possibly be thinking. But I just wanted to assure all of you Cayenne owners out there: the rest of us think you're utter cocks.

P.P.S.: I humped your hummer (via green la girl).

PTD #10

2006-08-09 · by peterb

Issue number 10 of played.todeath is out. I have a few articles in this month's issue:

...and there are, of course, hundreds of other articles by people who are almost as good looking as me. Download the magazine here (PDF, 20 Mb).

Fried Rice

2006-08-10 · by psu

Fried rice, to me, is the Chinese American Macaroni and Cheese. When I think of the quick and lazy food of my childhood, it's always fried rice. Egg fried rice, fried rice with the little Chinese sausages, fried rice with sliced up hot dogs (really!). The sad thing is, I was never very good at making it, and restaurant fried rice usually is not the same.

Lately though, through no concious effort on my part, my fried rice has gotten better. Here's what I've been doing.

  1. First you need 2 or 3 cups of cooked rice, preferrably a day old. You should not waste fresh rice on this. It's a dish for leftovers.

  2. 4 to 6oz ground pork.

  3. One small onion. Optionally, one green onion.

Dice the onion and brown it in a pan in olive oil. Add salt and pepper, cook for a minute or two. Add the ground pork, tearing it up into small pieces. Stir this around, add more salt and pepper. Now put in a teaspoon or two of soy sauce. Mix this around until the pork is mostly done.

Heat the rice in the microwave (1 or 2 min on high), then dump it into the pan and break it up so there are no big lumps. Stir it around in the meat. Add a bit more soy sauce to season the rice. Then mix and cook on medium heat for 5 or 10 minutes, until the rice gets starchy. Add more salt and pepper to taste.

Add an egg if you feel like it. Or hot sauce, or whatever. Another classic addition is frozen peas and/or carrots. Just toss them in and mix them up so they heat up with the rice.

I think this has been working better for me lately for two main reasons.

  1. Better rice. The fancy rice cooker and fancy Japanese short grain rice make for a great base. You get a nice starchy texture that I was always missing.

  2. Oil and pork fat and rice mix well.

Note. You need a pretty big pan to do this right. A 12 inch saute pan, or the medium sized wok that I use. Non-stick helps.

Cointreau vs. Grand Marnier Knife Fight

2006-08-11 · by peterb

In preparation for an article on making a decent Margarita, I picked up a bottle of Cointreau (pronounced [kwan'-tro]). Since I can talk about booze for hours on end, let's divert from the Margarita discussion to talk about orange flavored liqueurs.

I had actually never tasted Cointreau "bare" before, whereas Grand Marnier is an old favorite of mine. It was interesting. For drinking neat, the Grand Marnier Cordon Rouge wins hands down: it's silkier, and has more body, and the cognac base gives it a more complex flavor.

These same factors, however, make Cointreau the better mixer. Cointreau has a bitter orange bite that is missing from its wealthier, more attractive cousin. It's harsher, but that makes it stand up better to being in a mixed drink. I've been at various bars that offer a top-shelf margarita by using Grand Marnier, but this seems to me to be a bad deal for both the mixed drink and the liqueur.

Cointreau bills itself as "the original triple sec," but most of the products you can buy that call themselves "triple sec" are undrinkable and unmixable (yes, Jacquins, I'm looking at you — how does that company stay in business?).

There's only one type of Cointreau. Grand Marnier comes in a number of variations, from the difficult-to-get-in-the-US-but-that's-OK-because-it's-not-very-good Cordon Jaune up to marketed-to-yuppie-philistines Grand Marnier Cuvée Speciale Cent Cinquantenaire. (Actual quote from the owner of the ad agency promoting this $220 booze: "The more obscure and more expensive, the harder it is to find, the better it is." I guess it's nice to know that money doesn't buy brains.)

Coming soon: tequila, the gentrification of liquors, and Margaritas as a serious drink instead of as slurpees for stupid drunk sorority chicks and frat boys.

Worms: Open Warfare DS picoreview

2006-08-14 · by peterb

It took me exactly 3 minutes to decide that I hated this game and never wanted to play it again.

Short Food Questions

2006-08-15 · by psu

I find myself confronted by the same food questions over and over again. Here are a few that have been bothering me lately.

  1. I was in a rest stop on the turnpike yesterday. I bought a coke out of a vending machine. The coke was warm. This is not an uncommon occurrence these days. What kind of cruel world do we live in where cokes you buy out of a cooler or vending machine are warm? Shouldn't they lock the damn thing down until the drinks are cold?

  2. This has always bothered me: why is flour-less chocolate cake considered cake? It has no flour. It has no texture. It's just a brick of brown sludge. What's the point?

  3. How does Starbucks make a 2 shot iced latte that tastes like nothing but milk? (Yes I was at Starbucks. I was on the turnpike).

  4. What kind of mutant actually likes that super sweet ISO standard American birthday cake icing? In a world where you can cover a cake in butter cream, this icing shit should die and never come back.

  5. Why do people think that undercooking apples in pie and tarts is a good idea? Here's a hint: the apple in the pie should not have texture or bite or even the tiniest hint of crunch. If it does, you have failed.

  6. The last one is not a question. Krispy Kreme donuts suck. A proper donut is cakey and substantial. For example, the New England style cider donut. Don't argue with me. You know it's true. That is all.

i digestivi funzionano bene

2006-08-16 · by peterb

Some time ago, you may recall that we reviewed Italian amari, liqueurs that are believed to help aid the digestion. Our panel reviewed these beverages solely from the perspective of taste.

Tonight, I had a somewhat overwhelming dinner, and I can report that, in fact, amari do work wonderfully as digestivi. So three cheers for the ragazzi buoni who make Amaro Montenegro.

For the Record, RIP

2006-08-18 · by psu

I found out today that my favorite record store of all time closed last month.

For the Record in Amerhst MA was everything a local record store should be. It had good prices (always cheaper than retail), a wide selection in all areas of music, not just the usual mindless micro-genres of pop music that most places have. You could walk in on any given day and find something unusual and wonderful no matter where your interests might lie. This is because the people who ran the store knew good music. They also knew every inch of their store, and could find any record they had in stock in 30 seconds if you could describe three bars from the first cut.

For the Record was a great place to go and hang out and browse and be surprised. It has fallen victim to other forms of music commerce that may provide you with the bits that you want, but do not have this level of personal contact. After more than 30 years in business, they are gone, and the world is worse off because of it.

Booze: Orange Creamsicles

2006-08-21 · by peterb

The problem with White Russians is that they're very 1986. The other problem is that to make them, you have to buy a bottle of Kahlua, and now you have a bottle of liqueur that you can only use for White (and Black) Russians.

I was thinking about this today, and realized that I wanted something White-Russian-like (in the sense of "somewhat sweet, somewhat girly, likely to be served in a casino"). But I didn't want a drink that tastes like coffee. The fact is that I like coffee enough that if I want a drink that tastes like coffee, and yet has alcohol, I will make coffee and then put booze in it.

At that moment I realized that I still had a bottle of Cointreau in the cabinet, and thus this drink was born. I'm sure it's been independently invented in a thousand places, but mine was created to explicitly mirror the taste of the Good Humor truck orange creamsicles you had as a kid.

The recipe is simple:

Serve (of course) over lots of ice.

There are people who will blanch at the thought of heavy cream in a drink, and will want to substitute half-and-half or milk. If you are one of these people and are not at imminent risk of heart disease the only thing I can say is: you are worthless and weak.

Now if I can only figure out a way to mimic the taste and texture of those Strawberry Shortcake ice cream bars in a cocktail. Hmm. I wonder how well Strawberry Quik, vodka, and wheat germ would work together...

Planetary Mnemonic Update

2006-08-21 · by peterb

Since they're changing the rules on me, I need a new mnemonic to remember the names of the planets. This one is mine and mine alone.

"My Very Earnest Mother, Camille, Just Served Us Nine Pickles (Cornichons, eXactly)."

(Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Charon, Xena)

Revised Planetary Mnemonic Update

2006-08-25 · by peterb

Dear Astronomers:

You seem to be having some trouble making up your minds deciding which of the celestial bodies orbiting our star is a planet. I read your revised definitions where you explain that Pluto is "not a planet" but is a "dwarf planet" (could you make that any more confusing?).

You are lost. But do not fear. I am hear to lead you to the truth.

What you have is a complex document that was hammered out based on political considerations. What you need is a definition that is simple, crisp, and conforms to basic scientific principles. Thanks to my 35 years as Professor Emeritus and head of the Astronomy department at Universität Göttingen (footnote 1), I can succeed where you have failed. Here is the definition you should use:

Planet — A planet is any celestial body orbiting around the sun that is mentioned in the Schoolhouse Rock song and video Interplanet Janet.

You're welcome. I hope that clears things up.

The video for Interplanet Janet is available on iTunes.

Footnote 1: I am lying.

Things That Suck About Pittsburgh, #43

2006-08-26 · by peterb

Pittsburgh doesn't like one of my favorite bands, Me First & The Gimme Gimmes.

(via Pittsblog)

PS: It occurs to me after the fact that this could simply be something that sucks about baseball. Somehow I can't imagine the band getting a better reception in whatever they're calling Candlestick Park now.

Civ IV, Revisited

2006-08-28 · by peterb

Late last year I wrote a review of the then-new game Civilization IV for Played.todeath magazine. It was a hard review to write: Civ IV was a brilliantly designed game that was crippled by performance and user interface issues that made it, in my opinon, virtually unplayable.

At the time I opined:

[The developers are] rumored to be working on fixes for some of the issues in their release. If the patch is better engineered than the retail release, I might be willing to revise my opinion.

It is, and I am. I've recently been playing Aspyr's Mac port of Civilization IV, and it is a much more enjoyable experience than the original Windows release. Here's what you need to know.

Most of the improvements to the codebase have been incorporated in recent Windows patches as well, so you don't have to go the Mac route. That being said, a number of aspects of the game seem to just work better in the Aspyr version. Most notably, alt-tabbing back to the desktop is quick and painless in the Mac port, whereas when trying the same thing on Windows it always seems just too darn slow. On the downside, both the Mac and Windows versions of the game require that you keep the CD in the drive while playing, because no one ever plays games on a laptop.

The most noticeable improvements in the updated version of the game are in how it performs. No more do you suffer from intolerable slowdowns on large maps. The game moves along at a brisk pace, which allows you to enjoy the strategic improvements to the franchise that much more.

And the improvements here are not small. It's hard to describe them adequately without getting marred in minutiae: many reviewers like to discuss the intricate system of religions, for example. I prefer to describe the matter in broad strokes. The game allows for a certain degree of strategic flexibility that was abjectly missing in Civ III. Playing Civ III was like building a house out of playing cards. Cards that had been dipped in oil. Also, you were trying to build the house on the deck of a ship, during a storm. What I mean by this is that you could spend 4 hours playing a perfect game of Civ III, and then you'd make one wrong move and your country would be annihilated in under 45 seconds.

Civ IV is more sensible, and has an arc of play more appropriate to the game's timescale. You can still run things into the ground if you're not careful, but through commonsense gameplay and forethought you can almost always salvage some dignity, if not an actual victory.

In other words, it's a better game. A more balanced game. A game that, now that we can actually play it, is more fun to play.

The other issue I had with Civ IV was that I found certain aspects of the UI to be tragic. What particularly enraged me was the in-game help system, the Civilopedia, which I described as "not there when you need it, and when it is there, it's hard to use." The patches have solved the latter problem: they have thrown away the useless "icon view" in the Civilopedia and replaced with a simple, easily navigable hierarchy of English text. Let's hear it for blessed simplicity. I'm still unhappy with the haphazard way the game targets tooltips, but I can live with it.

On my MacBook Pro, with all detail knobs cranked up high, I didn't have many performance issues. When you zoom out to a great height and the game chokes for a short while trying to swap the ridiculously huge cloud texture to and from the graphics card. This same interaction brings the Windows version of the game to its knees, also. The Mac version was compatible with all of the mods I tried. The game was noticeably slower on the G5 I tried it on, and is effectively unplayable on a Powerbook G4. I'd be interested to hear from readers who have played the game on a MacBook as to how the game performs.

I'm well aware that there are many people who bought the original version of Civ IV and had absolutely no problems with it. I wasn't one of those people: for me, and for many others, the game was a whirling nightmare of bugs and slowdowns. I am truly happy that a few months of extra engineering has resulted in a game that I can enjoy, now, too.

Disclosure statement: Aspyr graciously provided Tea Leaves with a review copy of the game.

The Proper Road Bike

2006-08-29 · by psu

I've had my current road bike since I moved back to Pittsburgh in the early 90s. So, I imagine that it is almost 15 years old. In this time, I have spent a lot of time shopping for my "next bike", the perfect machine that combines versatility with technical and aesthetic excellence. The problem is, whenever I ride my bike I realize it's perfect (except in the rain).

This didn't stop me from building a list of attribtues in the perfect road bike. This piece overlaps a bit with my previous rant about road bikes, but not too much.

  1. Steel

Here is the thing. Aluminum is cheap and light, but it's a crappy way to make a frame. Stuff just breaks off if you are not careful. Carbon fiber is just a fancy way to say "plastic". Would you ride a plastic bike after you crashed it? Titanium comes the closest to being a real contender. It doesn't rust! The only thing going against it is cost. But custom bike frames are primarily yuppy toys anyway. Still, you can't get a nice lugged Titanium frame. So steel wins.

  1. Lugs

Lugs look nice. They can be a bit overblown, as in the Rivendell bikes. And, people can be a bit too ardent about defending them with foofy statements about Bike as Art. That's stupid. Lugs just look nicer than those stupid huge bubble welds in the average aluminum mountain bike.

  1. Fat Tires

Bikes as transportation people make a big deal about wanting a frame with clearences so that they can fit fenders for rain riding. I used to think this way. But, over the last few years I've come to the realization that I will never ride in the rain unless I happen to get caught in a freak all day thunderstorm on a century ride (this happened once). I mean, my favorite saddle is a Brooks, made out of leather, which hates rain. 'Nuff said.

Fenders aside, the bike should be able to take 28-32mm tires without using stupid cantilever brakes. I don't like cantilevers. They squeal, they are hard to open, they are weird to adjust. I realize this is my particular problem.

  1. No Lawyer Nibs

No lawyer nibs.

  1. No Stupid Colors

It is a fact of life that companies that make bikes and bike related equipment employ people who are colorblind. The shoes from Sidi and Carnac are the best proof of this. But, the paint chosen for most production bikes and frames makes the case almost as well. You generally have a choice between industrial gray and black or some hideous two tone striped pastel mixed with blazing green.

Everyone knows that the proper color is a single paint and any color you want as long as it is blue, burnt orange, or red. Solid black is also OK. If you must have white panels around the lugs, I can forgive that.

  1. Higher Handle Bars

Drop bars are for keeping your hands comfortable. This means you should not lean way over and put too much weight on them. If you want to crouch, get in the drops.

  1. Bikes I like

I like my road bike a lot. Its only real failing is a lack of clearence for fat tires. I tried to run 26mm tires once, and for a year the tires rubbed against the frame whenever I was in the big ring. For the most part, I can forgive the bike this one sin. But, in looking around, I have found a few almost perfect bikes to replace it:

Surly Pacer. This bike is all business and no nonsense. No lugs, but no stupid welding either. I like the black and the fact that it's cheap.

Bianchi Volpe. This bike is great except for the cantilever brakes. Unfortunately, the same frame with decent road bike frames will only take skinny tires. Pick your poison.

Rivendell. This is the cheaper production of their road frame. I rode one of the custom road frames back when they only cost this much. These bikes are great, but I think the lugs are overdone and I don't like the paint panels.

Ebisu. I rode one of these a few years ago in Berkeley. I think this the current favorite on the "bikes I shop for but never buy" list. I like the understated styling.

Jamis. Jamis makes some nice cross bikes (Aurora, Nova) whose only bug is cantilever brakes. They used to have a bike that was the perfect orange, but they changed to stupid colors instead. I still haven't gotten over that.

Downsizing

2006-09-05 · by peterb

I've written about my need to get rid of books before. Tonight I made another pass, and achieved my short-term goal: I've taken enough books off of my shelves to free up one entire bookshelf. Which means I can move that bookshelf out of the room it is in.

The amazing thing to me is that even after I've made several passes, I still find enough chaff to bury an ox. Four copies of Homer's Odyssey. Four! Two copies of Black's Law Dictionary. One copy of James Gleick's Faster, which I ironically never found time to read.

The books I am going to give away fall into two categories: books I've read and have no intention of reading again, or books that, despite my honest intention to read, have sat on my shelves unread for 10 years.

Here's a quick inventory I took (I apologize for the tragic format). If you want a book, let me know and it's yours for the current Amazon value (meaning "whatever Delicious Library tells me the going rate for a used copy is") less a buck, plus postage. Everything else gets sent to paperbackswap or the local library.

Most of the books are in good condition. "The Illustrated Longitude" has a torn slipcover, so that's half-price. If you see something you want, drop a line to tleavesweblog - a t - gmail dot com.

Neighborhood Food

2006-09-06 · by psu

Earlier this year, my employer moved our offices from a building in the Squirrel Hill neighborhood of Pittsburgh to an area close to the CMU campus in Oakland. Being at CMU has a lot of advantages. It's an easier commute, and I'm closer to various people who I know at CMU. These things are good.

I miss Squirrel Hill though. I miss the lunches.

It's not like the food in Squirrel Hill is particularly superb. But there are several places that are almost without peer in Pittsburgh, and many of these places are also relatively cheap. Consider that within a reasonable walk of our old offices we had

And several others I'm forgetting. In the new location, it's hard to get up the motivation to walk all the way to the heart of Oakland, so you find yourself picking from

If you make it to Oakland, there are few great landmarks

And a few new places that are good

But the hike to this area is too far for a daily trip, and the range of available choices is still not as wide as our old neighborhood. It makes one sad.

I find myself craving food I was tired of when we worked on Murray Ave. I guess we'll just have to organize massive takeout runs for the whole office. You can only go so long without Zaw's for lunch.

Epitaph for the First Person Shooter

2006-09-07 · by peterb

It's time to stop blaming myself for not liking first person shooters.

"I'm too old," I used to say. "I'm too slow," I used to tell myself. "My gaming machine isn't über enough," I'd say. But the truth is that the genre is creatively dead.

What motivated me to write this article is that I played two first person shooters for the Xbox 360, Perfect Dark Zero and Prey.

Both of these games were well-crafted and carefully planned out.

And both of them bored me to tears.

I'm particularly depressed by Perfect Dark Zero, by one of my favorite developers, Rare. I briefly considered suggesting to them that this was indicative of a curse that they are under, and that the only way to dispell the curse is to create and release Banjo Threeie for the Xbox 360, already. But why kick a man when he's down? Especially when I'm pretty sure he reads this weblog.

In an interview on the Halo 2 making-of film, one of the Bungie designers talks about how they came up with 30 seconds of great gameplay: snipe distant enemies, sneak up and bop one on the head, throw a grenade into a group of others, clean up the stragglers. Then he says something like "the challenge in the game design is how to string together this same 30 seconds of gameplay over and over again for 10 or 15 hours and keep it interesting." Couple that with the solid screenwriting and quality production design of Halo 2 and you have a bestseller, right?

Well, maybe you only have a bestseller if you get the sort of marketing launch that Halo 2 had.

Perfect Dark Zero was visually stunning, with an intricate UI, lots of clever sub-missions, and music by Skunk Anansie. But it lacks a certain ludological center. In Perfect Dark Zero a lot of effort was put into the overall story arc, but — in my opinion — they never really nailed that core 30 seconds of super gameplay. Consequently, I felt pulled in a hundred directions at once. Plot developments and new gameplay mechanics that were supposed to surprise and interest me just served to confuse and upset me. The game designers were trying to throw me off balance through innovation, and they succeeded. But they succeeded before I was able to actually find my balance. So it just felt disorienting. I liked Joanna Dark, and I wanted to know what happened to her. But I didn't actually want to play the game to find out.

Prey was likewise very finely polished. The tactics felt right. The production design was of high quality. The level design was clever. The portals and gravity puzzles were very clever. They even solved the "How do you deal with the player's death" problem in a smart way. But despite all of this, the game left me feeling hollow and empty. I expect that Valve's upcoming Portal will be similarly clever, and that I similarly will have no interest whatsoever in playing it.

My co-writer psu and I agree on many things, but this is one area where our opinions diverge. He thinks that what made Halo 2 — though not the original game — great were the finely tuned mechanics. And I agree that that's part of it. But I think it's impossible to overestimate the importance of a game having a gripping emotional dynamic. What kept me playing Halo 2 was that the level design and story reinforced each other, creating an authentic feeling of panic and urgency. This is what kept me playing every good shooter since the original Doom. The apotheosis of this, for me, is the indescribably fantastic System Shock 2 — which, to my unending bitterness, won't play on Windows XP — where every element of the game combined perfectly. System Shock instilled a constant sense of dread and panic in me so strongly that sometimes I'd have to stop playing because I was shivering too much.

You have to work to create that kind of emotional intensity. You can't just slap together some generic alien models and put them into some generic hallways with crates. You can't then just slap some deathmatch and capture the flag on top of that and expect the online mode to save you. This is especially true since Counterstrike already exists, and is the perfect online shooter in every way.

So this brings us to the current situation, where the best first-person shooter for the Xbox 360 is The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, which combines adequate game mechanics with a world that's more interesting than that in the competing games. And it makes sense: if you build a game whose entire gameplay mechanic is "kill everything you see until you reach the next cutscene," that doesn't leave a lot of room for true drama or narrative surprise. Oblivion works because there are things to do in between the shooting. What was the last shooter you actually finished? When a pastoral, generally lyrical RPG makes for the best shooter experience on a console, then we have to start asking ourselves: Why are these games still being made?

The answer, of course, is habit. The game industry is by and large overly conservative. This is why they leave vast portions of their potentially market not only underserved but completely untapped. So, like a hamster in its exercise wheel, every company in the industry continues to compete for the allowances of the same group of 15 year old boys.

The first-person shooter had its heyday, once upon a time, because the technology made it possible. And now we've all played that game, and we don't need to play it anymore. Trying to produce something brilliant and innovative in the FPS genre sounds, to me, like trying to cook and serve a gourmet meal while wearing bondage leathers and gimp mask. Possible, yes, but not exactly appetizing.

I realize that to some extent I am describing a problem, and not presenting a solution. For that, I am sorry. But I can't help comparing these games to Shadow of the Colossus.

Perfect Dark Zero and Prey had brilliant graphics, clever design, and responsive gameplay mechanics, and i just couldn't bring myself to play them. Shadow of the Colossus had hateful graphics quality, hateful controls, and hateful pacing, and I was absolutely compelled to play it every night for a month until I finished it.

What I"m trying to get at here, clumsily, is the idea that perhaps game publishers need to start thinking about technology last instead of first. There was a time in Hollywood's history when a film pitch might have begun "We've got this great idea: we're going to shoot a film, and it's going to be in color." But make a pitch along strictly technological lines today, and you'll get thrown out of the Universal lot faster than you can say "Bruce Willis."

I think we've reached that point in game design. Don't focus on giving me a first person shooter, or an RPG, or an adventure game. Focus on making characters as evocative as the horse in Shadow of the Colossus. Focus on scaring me as well as System Shock 2 (or, using another example of a game with great atmosphere and lousy game mechanics, Fatal Frame 2) did.

I want you to make videogames. I even want you to make money doing it.

Just make sure you write the game before you start writing any code.

The Accidental Sauce

2006-09-08 · by psu

Over the years, I have experimented with making my own tomato sauce. For a long time, this just didn't work. I'd get some bland, runny, tasteless mess that didn't stick to the pasta. Recently, for reasons I don't completely understand, it's been working better.

Then, the other night, completely by accident, perfection.

One thing I have learned is that everything I was taught about cooking pasta was a dirty lie. First, very fresh sauce made from fresh tomatoes and not cooked that long generally works better not on long pasta, but on pasta that comes in small pieces, like penne. Penne has more surfaces to which the sauce can stick, which is pleasing.

In particular, I reserve angel hair as something to be used primarily for sauce from a jar poured over sauted ground beef meatballs. This dish is a staple of my college psyche, and I will never escape it, so I may as well accept that. Pete tells me that I am supposed to say that it is stupid for all other applications. And I can't disagree.

Second, to keep the pasta from sticking to itself, you do not do some bizzarre ceremony at the sink, rinsing with hot or cold water. You return the pasta to the pan and get some sauce on it. If you can't get the sauce on it immediately for whatever reason, sprinkle on salt and pepper for taste and drizzle it with olive oil. Then mix that up until you can sauce it.

The corollary to this is you put sauce on the pasta while it's in the pot, not when it is on your plate.

Finally, the sauce itself. Here is what I did

  1. 4 or 5 gloves garlic.
  2. Half an onion.
  3. 2 handfuls of fresh basil leaves
  4. 6 or 7 tomatoes. A mix of roma and not roma.

Cut the tomatoes into large cubes and then run them through the Cuisinart for a few spins. You can also just squish it with your hands, but this makes the skin on my hands peel away from the bone, so I avoid it.

Meanwhile, heat up a pot. Add oil, put in the garlic and onion. Add salt and pepper. Saute until the onion is soft. This is very important. If the onion doesn't get soft, it will be crunchy in the sauce.

Throw the basil on top, mix. Throw the tomatoes on top of that. Mix. Now put in 2 or 3 large pinches of salt to get the acid out of the tomatoes. Pepper to taste. If you want, add wine.

Bring to a boil and then cook it 20-25min on low until the tomatoes reduce down. Thicken with corn starch and water if you want (old trick from my Mom).

When the penne is cooked, drain it and put this sauce on top and mix.

I'm not sure this text will capture whatever accident happened last week to make the sauce a sublime perfection. But, we can always hope for the best.

System Shock 2 on a MacBook Pro

2006-09-11 · by peterb

In case there's anyone else out there who wants to play this game, here's how I got it working on my MacBook Pro running Boot Camp. Thanks to the various commenters who made suggestions and helped convince me to not give up.

(1) Install from the CD. The cut-down version on the-underdogs isn't good enough. The game is cheap. Buy it.

(2) You can install daemon tools and make a virtual disc image if you don't want to keep the disc in the drive.

(3) Patch the game to version 2.3

(4) Apply the Windows NT fix.

(5) Put the line "safetexturemanager" in shock.cfg

(6) Start the game.

(7) When you reach the main menu, alt-tab back to the desktop. Bring up the task manager. Click on "processes", right-click on "SHOCK2.EXE", and choose "set affinity". Set the game to run on only one CPU. There is a "multithreading patch" that people claim solves this same problem, but it didn't work for me.

It's that last step that seems to make the big difference.

Once you've got it up and running well, consider applying some of the texture map enhancements to improve the graphics.

For any other game, I'd say this wasn't worth the hassle. I'll explain later in the week why it's worth it for this one.

The Pizza Problem

2006-09-14 · by peterb

In 1986, a girl fell through the skylight of a building at Carnegie-Mellon. She had been drinking on the roof with her friends, and lost her balance. On the way down she straddled a water pipe, which broke her fall and probably saved her life. She hit the ground pretty hard, and was knocked out.

When the ambulance arrived and the paramedics started to move her, she regained consciousness. She opened her eyes and said, very groggily, "Are you from Capri Pizza? You must be, because you're slow and stupid."

I never heard what happened to the girl after that — I like to think that she perished in a freak eyeliner accident — but the incident stuck in my head because it reminds me that anyone will eat lousy pizza, if it's cheap enough and the pizza place delivers

Most people have never had great pizza. Most people like pizza that sucks. So I'm going to give you a brief guide to great pizza, what makes it great, and how to find it.

Typically when a foodie talks about pizza, they'll rant about Napoli, and how the pizza there is transcendent and delicate, "totally unlike anything you've had before." These are damnable lies. Pizza, as everyone intelligent knows, was invented in New York. Pizza in Napoli is a different thing entirely. Napoli is a fascinating city. It is crowded, filthy, beautiful, dangerous, and decadent. Apparently as some sort of apology for that whole Pompeii thing, the Gods have blessed Napoli with the best soil in the entire universe. The produce from the area around Napoli is better than anything you have ever tasted in your life, especially if you're used to anemic California vegetables.

In Napoli, you can go to the dingiest vegetable stall in the city, pick up a tomato, and eat it like an apple. They're that good.

So when people try to make Napoli-style pizza here, they usually fail. Because we're not in Napoli, and we don't have those damn tomatoes. So let's be clear: good pizza in the States is a different sort of thing.

There are two attributes that make up a good pizza: texture and taste. Here are two simple tests to help describe what they should be like:

Texture — You should be able to pick up a slice, folded, in one hand, without the entire thing breaking and pointing downwards. Only the first bite is allowed to droop.

Taste — truly great pizza doesn't need any toppings beyond cheese and sauce.

That second point is key. Take a moment the next time you're about to order a pizza. Ask yourself "How would I feel if instead of getting a pepperoni-mushroom pizza, I just got a plain cheese pizza?" If you feel excited, happy, or at least OK with the idea, you may be ordering from a good pizza place. If you feel vaguely disappointed and sad, you should hang up the phone and find a different place. You might think this is a matter of taste, but it actually isn't; your body has tiny structures called Langerhans cells that emit certain chemicals when they anticipate contact with bad pizza. By meditating on the primordial cheese pizza you are allowing your subconcious to open up to the messages these cells are sending. Listen to your subconcious. Stop eating bad pizza.

I'm not saying, by the way, that you should never eat pizza with things on it. I'm just saying that if a place doesn't make good cheese pizza, they don't make good pizza-with-other-stuff-on-it, either. Just make sure you don't put so many toppings on the pizza that you cause it to violate the texture rule. Pizza shouldn't be eaten with a fork. You have to be able to one-hand it.

My description of the proper texture, above, is intended to be a rule of thumb. There's a special case, however, that is worthy of attention. I call it the Detachable Cheese problem, and it's a guaranteed detector of bad pizza. Great pizza has the three elements (bread, cheese, and sauce) in perfect harmony. When cooked correctly it all merges, along with the toppings, and sticks together until you bite into it. Bad pizza has too much sauce and too much cheese. What happens to these pizzas is the sauce forms into a little lake, and the cheese seals it in. The overall effect is that the cheese is floating on the sauce like a duck on a pond, so you take one bite of the pizza and the entire inch-thick solid layer of cheese slides off the slice like a hockey puck. It's a true tragedy.

You can also divine a little bit about a place from their topping selection, although this is closer to phrenology, and not always reliable. My two guidelines that I feel comfortable sharing are: good pizza places have anchovies, and good pizza places don't use breakfast sausage on their sausage pizzas.

Pizza in Pittsburgh

Turning to our local market, we can apply these principles to find the best pizza in town. My personal favorite is Sorrento's on Atwood Street (currently in the process of a rename to "Pizza Roma Sorrento's", apparently — but it's the same owner). Sorrento's is the ideal pizza in nearly every way. The crust is thin. The bread tastes good. The sauce is yummy. They don't use too much cheese. It's inexpensive. You can one hand it. And their plain cheese pizza is great. They have a nice selection of toppings. Their sausage is especially interesting; they cut it like pepperoni instead of crumbling it chopped-meat style, and it's quite good. If you can only get pizza from one place in town, get it from Sorrento's.

Squirrel Hill has a few pizza places with cult followings, for reasons I've never been able to discern. Most people's favorite is Mineo's, which is more proof that people have no taste, because Mineo's is terrible. I've never had a pie from Mineo's that didn't suffer from the Detachable Cheese problem. If I'm in Squirrel Hill and need a slice, I'll usually go to Napoli's. They're not actually great, but they get the texture right, they're consistent and somewhat reliable, and I like their red sauce, which goes a long way.

If you're in the Strip district, stop by Piccolo Forno next to La Prima. This is the perfect compromise between "authentic Napoli pizza" and the New York style we know and love; ask for one with spicy green olives on it, and you're in heaven. Other people rave about Regina Margherita, but they suffer from the Not Actually In Napoli problem I outlined above. His technique may be flawless, but the end product just doesn't gel.

The Thing About The Vinnie Pie

The other local pizza tradition is to crow about Vincent's Pizza, home of the fabled "Vinnie Pie." This is a monstrosity born of hell. A Vinnie pie is approximately the size of a small fawn, and has the consistency of gloopy beef stew on the inside, but makes up for it by being nicely burnt on the outside. A typical Vinnie pie is a structural mess, with several cups of grease pooled in the middle, eating through the box and the table underneath. Vinnie himself is a local legend, 300 pounds of heart disease and moustache, giving rise to the claim that the pizza tastes better when Vinnie accidentally drops some cigar ashes into the pie.

Here's the thing about the Vinnie pie: it isn't good pizza. Here's the other thing about the Vinnie pie: it's actually a pretty good whatever-it-actually-is. So enjoy it without guilt. Just make sure you have your health insurance is paid up, and don't tell me it's the "best pizza in town."

PTD #11

2006-09-19 · by peterb

Issue #11 of Played.toDeath magazine is out, and the PDF can be downloaded here.

My contributions in this issue include:

There's lots of other good stuff, too, including a review of one of my favorite SNES games, Earthbound. Check it out.

Loot

2006-09-20 · by psu

Today at lunch, Pete was talking about how he had bought a house in Oblivion and how he had amused himself for a few minutes collecting things to put into the house. He had found the odd trophy, various books, but of course no candles.

Item collection is a dominant gameplay mechanic in almost every major genre of video game fantasy. We collect coins, clothes, money, weapons, health packs, experience points, gay porn cards, magic items, racing medals, houses, pets, keys, and plants. The list is too long to complete.

I think it's no surprise that collection is such a major form of gameplay. After all, gamers themselves have an in-built compulsion to collect things in the real world, so it's obvious that they would be attracted to the same kind of behavior in virtual worlds.

It is also no surprise that there are entire games which, when you get down to it, are about nothing but collecting. Animal Crossing and The Sims are the prime examples of these "sandbox collecting" games.

But, what about all the other games? Why is it that while you are saving the world, you find yourself needing to stop off to pick up that purple velvet suit of +5 speed, or that nice gay porn card which you can trade for a magic dress?

Often, the items are just a different way to keep score. Rather than the more mundane and abstract accumulation of "points", the player instead accumulates something that is more like an actual concrete object, like money, or zombie heads. It's amazing how compelling even the simplest collection mechanic can be. Just think about the "brain" levels in Robotron, where you would risk throwing away a whole quarter's worth of lives just to collect a couple more of the pink humans.

The next logical step is to tie the collection of objects to actual progress in the game. Platform games, for example, will often require you to collect a certain number of widgets to clear a stage. Or, you might have to rescue a certain number of humans to progress to the next mission.

In these settings, collecting can also be a smokescreen for the in-built linearity in the game. You really can't do anything but progress from area A to B to C, but along the way you have to do a lot of "free" exploration in the name of finding the required number of coins.

Other games allow you to trade in what you have collected. Here is how it goes: you walk into an area, you defeat some enemies, the enemies turn into money. You can then use the money to buy things that allow you to defeat more powerful enemies and get more money. And the game goes on. This is just the ever-increasing R in a different form.

This pattern is everywhere. In action games like Devil May Cry or God of War you get Orbs which you use to upgrade your abilities and weapons. In Resident Evil 4, when the zombies die, they leave money and items behind. In Zelda, you chop stuff up and it turns into money, or healing potions, or magic points, or hearts. In racing games, you win races for medals and money, and use these things to progress in your "career" and buy new cars and upgrades for cars. In Madden you collect bonus points that you can trade for cards that let you cheat. And, of course, in Lego Star Wars you blow stuff up, collect the lego blocks, and trade them in for various unlockables.

But, of all the genres, the RPG, and in particular the so-called "Western" RPG takes collecting the most seriously. Where other games conveniently make their treasure big and shiny and easy to find, Western RPGs make you scour entire dungeons for a meager few coins and piles of dirty clothes.

Consider the typical encounter in one of the most widely acclaimed RPGs of all time: Knights of the Old Republic. You have been tipped off that 4 beasts of great power are hanging out in a nondescript square room. You approach the room. You spend five minutes in the menu system turning on all your armor and various force powers. You dive into the room and vanquish your foes with your overwhelming tactical advantages. As a reward, the game then makes you

  1. Walk up to each of the dead bodies, hit A, find out that they are carrying a few bones.

  2. Walk around the room to each of 5 barrels of identical construction (sometimes the barrels are trunk shaped, or basket-shaped, but they are always the same).

  3. One of these will contain money.

  4. One of these will contain a useful item or two.

  5. Two of these will be empty. The other one will be locked, and require you to either win a roll of the dice to open it or play some lock-opening mini-game. Then you'll find out that it's empty.

Oblivion puts you through a similar level of torture. As an added twist, your four pieces of copper will often be in a hole you can't see because you are in a cave with no light! What fun!

You are then left to consider that without all this useless looting, the game might take half as long to play. But wait, there is more.

Half the time, the game won't even give you money. It will give you some item that you already have, but which you must schlep around until you can find some store in which you can sell it for some tiny amount money. In other words, not only is the game insulting you skimpy rewards, it makes you do an extra level of indirect work to collect on them.

The Japanese RPG, in general, handles this better. You beat up some thugs and the game just drops money and stuff you will actually use right into your pocket. Your pocket also tends to be infinitely large, which is another great feature. This is because the only thing more boring than selling stuff in a game's store is the inventory management required to get the stuff to the store. Finally, when the game does make you open a chest, it's hardly ever locked or empty.

My suggestion to game designers, and especially RPG designers, is this. After each encounter, I should be able to hit the A button and have everything in the room that I can collect instantly turn into money. Then I can trade the money for whatever I want.

Of course, if you actually made this improvement, it would lead to howls of rejection from the hard core simulationist RPG contingent. These are the people who think it's fun to go to an in-game weight room and do "curls" to increase their character's strength. This is "fun" because it is so "realistic". No amount of tedious busywork is too much for them. Faced with this streamlining, they will undoubtedly fill the Internet with forum posts about how your game is a stupid dumbed down sell-out to the mass market.

Don't listen to them. The rest of us are all tired of running around looking into empty barrels and locked chests. We want move on to something more interesting, to see the next dungeon, or explore the forest that is on the other side of that hill. It would be a shame if your game kept us from that because we were stuck in a cave looking for those candles we accidentally dropped because the +5 Sword of Flensing was too heavy for us to carry back to town. Those candles were gonna look great on Pete's fireplace. But now they are lost forever.

Margarita Amateur Hour

2006-09-21 · by peterb

You'd think, since I'm always bossing people around and telling them what booze to drink, that I'd have strong opinions on Margaritas and tequila. After all, I have already written booze-snob instructions on how to make the perfect daiquiri.

But here's the thing: I don't really know anything about tequila.

This lack of knowledge probably stems from university traumas. Sure, sure, I've heard people talk about "sipping tequilas," but I was more familiar with what I call "gulping tequilas." Or, to be perfectly accurate, "puking tequilas."

Despite that, I've done a little research and can say a few things about margaritas. They're probably all wrong, but if you were looking for sober reflection and informed opinion, you wouldn't be reading a weblog, now, would you?

The canonical Margarita recipe is simple:

For the tequila, the only thing that really matters is that it be 100% blue agave. I settled on the Cuervo Tradiçional, a reposado, as giving a good flavor at a very reasonable price — about $20. In talking to tequila snobs, I've discovered that José Cuervo eats wolf babies and grinds up cute little bunnies for fun, and all of his alcohol is terrible and I'm a bad person for using it. But I stand by it as a reasonable choice for someone who doesn't want to spend $50 on a bottle of tequila for mixing. It has a nice tang, and doesn't have the attenuated, breathless taste that the bottom-end tequilas have.

I took the recommendation of a friend and also invested in a bottle of El Tesoro añejo, which ran me about $45 (note to faithful Tea Leaves readers: thanks for reading the google ads that appear on these articles, since they are funding my drinking. I'm not sure what my liver thinks about all this, though.) The El Tesoro was interesting — very smoky and full bodied. I liked drinking it neat, but it seemed wasteful in my Experimental Top Shelf Margarita. The smokiness was lost, and it wasn't quite as bold in the mix as the younger reposado. So I'll stick to the Tradiçional for mixing until I get a more economical good recommendation.

For the orange liqueur, use Cointreau. Using Grand Marnier is both wasteful of an excellent liqueur that should be drunk on its own, and it doesn't really give the right tang to the drink. I actually tend to be somewhat generous with the Cointreau — my ratio is more like 3:2 tequila to Cointreau. Don't use triple sec. It lacks joie-de-vivre.

A word about limes. The type of lime you use will have a major impact on the drink. When I have very bitter and sour limes, I tend to use less; when I have sweet and lemony-tasting limes, I tend to use more. I haven't tried this with key limes yet, but given that my key lime daiquiris were much better than my persian lime daiquiris, I have high hopes.

Shake over ice. Pour into a glass. Drink. Post your results here after having a few glasses.

Richard Hammond

2006-09-21 · by peterb

Hammond

Richard Hammond

I don't usually do this, but I wanted to take a quick moment to say that Top Gear presenter Richard Hammond who has been seriously injured in a jet-powered car crash, is in our thoughts today. Our hopes go out to him and his family.

Top Gear might be my favorite show on TV right now. I certainly enjoy their wild stunt segments, many of which Hammond hosts. I've always thought that they were stunts that looked more dangerous than they were. Evidently, I was wrong. I think I speak for all the fans of the show when I say that I'd give up those segments forever with no regrets if it means that Hammond's two daughters, Isabella and Willow, can have their daddy back safe and sound.

If you're so inclined, donate a few dollars online to Yorkshire Air Ambulance in his name.

Heigh Ho, Heigh Ho

2006-09-25 · by peterb

Recently, Bill Harris of Dubious Quality has been raving about a game called Dwarf Fortress. And let me be clear, when I say "raving" I don't mean "saying nice things about it" but actual raving. Like, he saves the game to CDs, gets naked, and rubs them all over his body. Bill doesn't just like Dwarf Fortress, he has gone completely around the bend over it.

So of course, I had to check it out.

Now, I like Bill just as much as bagels like lox, but he's overselling the game. Or rather, he's overlooking its flaws because he is blinded by its brilliant parts. This happens to all of us, from time to time. For example, I myself felt very strongly that The Lost Admiral Returns was the best game of 2004 by a mile. Unfortunately, I was also the only person in the entire world who bought it. I understood why: the interface was a bit clunky, and the graphical trim hadn't been smoothed down quite enough. We can talk about gameplay over graphics all we want, but the truth is that rough edges raise the barrier to entry of a game.

Dwarf Fortress has a lot to recommend it. It also has a lot of rough edges.

In fact, my first impression when I started the game was "Is this some sort of joke?" The game's full title is "Slaves To Armonk: God of Blood Chapter II: Dwarf Fortress," which is just a little too close for comfort to Bladehunt: DeathSpank 2: The Revenge. The game begins with a 30 second cinematic, multiple-scene ASCII-art animation, of a sort that I haven't seen for 15 years or more (view it yourself here). What the hell? It's a joke, right? It has to be a joke.

Jobs

Farming with floodgates.
Click to enlarge.

It's not a joke. The game has the look of a roguelike. But it isn't a roguelike. The closest I can come to describe it is to say that it's like Age of Empires with text-style graphics from Nethack. But in many ways, it's better.

For quite a while now I've hated that gamers have settled on the term "real-time strategy" to describe games like Warcraft and Age of Empires. Strategy is about making large-scale decisions that affect events, usually through logistics. Almost by definition, any game where you say "Lugdush, go chop that tree over there" or "Lugdush, go bash Frank on the head with an axe" are not strategic. Dwarf Fortress comes closer to the strategic ideal, although there is still micromanagement in the early part of the game.

So, let's talk about the good parts. We'll start with the setup: you have a party of a small number of dwarves who are setting off to find their fortunes. You choose what skills your dwarves will have (the skill list is incredibly long, ranging from mining, carpentry, farming, down to details such as lye and potash production). You pick what supplies you are going to take with you. And then, you pick a wealthy-looking mountain, and prepare to build a settlement.

You don't directly move dwarves around or tell them what to do. There are two main ways you influence what happens. First, you can tell dwarves what sorts of work they should be doing. So you can tell your metalsmith, for example, that he should also be willing to help out with the farming or hauling trees. Then, you designate areas where work can happen. So you say things like "This area over here is for cutting trees. The garbage dump is here outside the cave. I want to build a mineshaft going this way for 30 squares, and then carve out three 6x6 rooms here. Store your food in the first room, build a masonry and carpentry shop in the second, and we'll put some beds in the third.

Then, you just sit back and watch.

Jobs

Jobs, and who is doing them

The priorities you set create a pool of jobs, which the dwarves try to fulfill if they are within their brief. Dwarves that perform jobs gain experience, and become better at them over time; they can change professions. The strategic challenge of the game is that at any given time there are more jobs than their are dwarves, and they're all important. Most people's first game ends in all the dwarves starving to death sometime in the deep midwinter.

The most interesting part of the game is watching your dwarves decide what to do, and I say that as someone who absolutely despises the Sims. The dwarves are just incompetent enough to keep things interesting, but generally are not so irrational that you want to strangle them. Unless they get sad, or go insane. Dwarves have wants and needs — food, shelter, fulfilling work, alcohol, and companionship — and a sad dwarf with an axe is someone to stay away from.

Your initial challenge is to survive. That means figuring out a way to get enough food to make it through winters, which means learning how to farm (and, most likely, build an irrigation system and create fertilizer). It means finding a source of fuel. It means learning how to mine ore and smelt it into metal, and working that metal into weapons, and working stones and metal into crafts which can be traded to occasional travelling caravans for food and cloth. It means fighting off wild animals from outside your mountain demesne and fighting off horrible creatures from deep within the heart of the mountain. It means preventing your own people from starving, or becoming so morose they commit murder and mayhem.

There are a few drawbacks to Dwarf Fortress. The game is currently described as an alpha test, so some or all of these may be fixed by the time you try it. But if you try it today — and you should — you'll need to go in with your eyes open about these issues.

One drawback is that at present it is a Windows-only game, although the author is currently looking for some assistance to port it to SDL, so there is hope for a Mac and Linux port down the road.

A more serious problem is the user interface, which is ad-hoc in the extreme, and somewhat tragic. Just to take one example, the game uses three completely different sets of keys to mean "next choice" and "previous choice" on menus, depending on which menu you're on, using some heuristic I don't actually understand. Likewise, at various points in the game you have to size regions. Sometimes you do this by setting a mark and region at two corners of an area, using the arrow keys to move a cursor and "enter" to mark. Other times (for example, when building a bridge) you use a completely different set of keys to specify the length and width of the area covered. And then sometimes you use a third set of keys to define a diamond-shaped radius around an object. I'm sure there are rationales for all this interface, but I don't think they were worth the trade off.

The in-game help is minimal. At one point, I hit the magic key that made the on-screen cheat sheet disappear, and I haven't been able to get it back since. Fortunately, there's a wiki devoted to the game that helps fill in a lot of the gaps.

Is Dwarf Fortress, as Bill Harris claims, a paradigm-changing game? Will it disrupt the game industry and bring about a new Golden Age? Absolutely not. I think, to be blunt, that Bill has simply been playing so much Madden lately that he's forgotten exactly how good a computer game can be when it's not designed by committee. What makes Dwarf Fortress worthwhile are its quirks, which come from it being the product of one person.

Despite the fact that it won't change the industry, it doesn't need to. I stayed up until 3 in the morning on Saturday night, literally unable to put the computer down, because I had to continue to help this little microcosm develop.

It's been a long time since any game has kept me up until 3 in the morning. Not everyone will have the stamina to get past the interface and appearance of Dwarf Fortress and give it a serious go. But those who do will be rewarded with a game that has depth beyond their most optimistic expectations.

Dwarf Fortress is availble — for free — from Bay 12 Games.

They are Both Stupid

2006-09-26 · by psu

Reading through my daily list of online "media", I've lately felt a low, almost background level of annoyance with the subject matter and tone of some of the content that has streamed my way.

Here is the problem: pick any of the current questions of our time, and listen for a while to the debate that rages in the various media. The only conclusion you can come to is that everyone is stupid.

The particular trigger this time around was the most recent cycle of "blame the gamers." You know the drill. Some violent event happens in North America (violence in, say, the Middle East is never caused by video games, it's more complicated there) and various chest-thumpers start stamping their feet and shaking their fists and screaming about how the minds of our youth are being turned into a bloody jelly by urban crime games.

Because, really, the only game where there is juvenile and gratuitous violence and mayhem is Grand Theft Auto. There aren't entire genres of games that are just a huge boxing ring where the winner gets to pull the arms off the loser. There aren't games where the sole purpose of the entire enterprise is to headshot as many people dressed in the wrong color clothing as you can. There aren't games where you kill zombies with a lawn mower. There aren't games where you use your psychic powers to make people's brains melt into a puddle of liquid.

Nope, the evil on this planet radiates from a single center, and that center is in the development offices of Rockstar Games. A little bit of that evil is used to burn each GTA DVD before it goes out into the stores to corrupt your children.

OK. So I am overstating the case for dramatic and sarcastic effect. But I can't escape the feeling that this side of the argument is starting from a position of ignorance and choosing a target at random.

However, these people don't bother me that much. They don't really know what they are talking about, and they don't have any interest in actually figuring out that they are ignorant boobs, but other than that they have commited no great sin.

What really bothers me is the vociferously defensive response from the gamer community. First, it's not really clear to me that one wants to be in a position of defending violent games in general, and GTA in paticular, as some kind of cultural treasure. I realize that people find the games enjoyable and entertaining. But this by itself is not enough to justify their existence. There are all kinds of things that people find enjoyable that you do not want to defend as artistic. It seems to me that if the game industry wants to gain any credibility at all, they should start their arguments from a more realistic position: GTA and games like it are juvenile escapist fantasies. They don't really have that much to offer from a cultural point of view. They are not intelligent or mature. They are not, for the most part, even that well written.

They are an entertaining diversion. Nothing more, nothing less.

Of course, this is not what is said. Instead, we get a series of badly argued ruminations from a variety of different angles, each one of them stupid.

You can't prove that game are bad

The reasoning here is usally something along the lines of "millions of people play the game and don't go crazy and shoot up their school, so how bad could it be?".

Well, millions of people smoke cigarettes and only a relatively small percentage die a horrible and painful death as their lungs rot away inside their bodies. But that doesn't make it a good idea.

It's clear that people like to play these games. I don't really think we should stop them. But that doesn't mean we should say it's a good idea.

The games are actually good for you

This is an extension of the argument above. If it doesn't kill you, it must make you smarter. I suppose it's true that at a minimum games can give you really good twitch response. The nuttier arguments in this space try to convince you that GTA teaches you the wonder of exploration, or how to experiment with your environment a la the scientific method. The most pathetic arguments try to claim that the games carry a deep and political message and therefore will teach the more observant little 10 years olds among us about their own world and history.

I think it's stretch to claim that driving around a fictional city offing hookers is teaching kids a deep and reflective lesson on the modern socioeconomic problems of the modern urban environment. But that's just me.

Help, Help, I'm Being Oppressed

This is a new and interesting angle that plays to the dork community's inbred persecution complex.

The most recent example of this psychological tic was a piece in that bastion of intelligent journalism: Joystiq. The article shows an idyllic scene from Tokyo of a Japanese father helping his son out with some handheld game, and then speculates about what a wonderful world it would be if only we could lift the "stigma" of gaming from the shoulders of the downtrodden geeks of the West.

I think two facts argue against the idea of the oppressed game player. First, EA sends two bojillion copies of Madden into homes everywhere the at roughly the same time every year. You don't do that by pandering to just the hard core. Second, most of the rest of the industry has not figured out how to escape pandering to exactly this set of people. How else do you explain something like DOAX2, a game where you make bouncy women drive jet skis.

It's hard to look at what the hard-core gamer asks for from the world and not come to the conclusion that if indeed they are being oppressed, it's because they were asking for it.

In the end, my advice to the people on both ends of this tug-of-war is to try and argue from a position of intelligence rather than one of either ignorance or stupidity. On the one hand, those who would rail against the destructive video game culture should perhaps play with the machines some more before coming to a summary judgement. I suggest they try out Mario Kart: Double Dash or Guitar Hero.

On the other hand, I think that the gaming community should take a more realistic look at itself and come to grips with the fact that it is still dominated by the aesthetic sensibilities of Beavis and Butthead. If you really want to convince people that games have more to offer than drive-by shootings, urban warfare, and misogyny, then maybe you should stop defendng that sort of content and show the world that you have something more worthwhile to offer. I suggest demoing Mario Kart! or Guitar Hero.

Personal to Andy P

2006-09-28 · by peterb

You adorable little minx. Now if I can just convince you to get me a sneak preview of Banjo Kazooie 3 beyond what's in the trailer, I'll fill you so full of Belgian beer your friends will want to put a tap in you.

For those of you who haven't played the previous editions, Banjo Kazooie is only the best 3D platform game ever made since the beginning of time, ever.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you, about goddamn time, thank you, thank you, thank you.

"Keep Playing, It Might Get Better"

2006-10-02 · by peterb

I'm currently having an "I wish I had written that" moment over Andrew Smale's article "Keep Playing, It Might Get Better."

The best line in the article doesn't actually appear in his article, but on Andrew's blog where he says about Prey "I knew it was awful the moment I stepped through the asshole." I wish I had said that in my review — because at that exact moment in the game, I actually thought to myself "Uh oh. They have no ideas." Instead I got wanky and philosophical. Andrew's article is better.

The NPR I Want

2006-10-03 · by psu

When I drive to visit my extended family, we take a route from Pennsylvania to Massachusetts that crisscrosses through upstate New York. It's not a long drive, but it is not a trivial one either, so it's important to have distractions in the car.

In the past, this has meant radio, but there is a problem with radio. There are large patches of the route that are, for all intents and purposes, radio-free. In these areas, the only strong signals are filled with strange genres of pop/country music or people preaching the true word of the Lord.

We would hit one of these dry patches, and daydream about a Utopia where the national NPR is available everywhere. Then we resign ourselves to playing tapes (a long time ago), CDs (not so long ago), or more recently, the iPod.

The iPod, as a device, brings with it a heady promise. The promise is that you can carry your audio (and to a limited extent, video) entertainment with you at all times, and call it up at will, whenever you want, wherever you want.

Sadly, the available media have not quite come to grips with how to provide their bits in a form that can be placed on the iPod. There are licensing issues, production issues, and a myriad of other complications that make it impossible to fulfill what seems like a simple request.

This is all I want:

I want the national feed of either of the major NPR news shows (ATC or Morning Edition), downloadable to my iPod, without any of the local interruptions. That's all.

I realize that NPR is both ethically and legally bound to the pursuit of supporting local broadcasting, and that a certain percentage of the stories in the national shows are produced by local affiliates. However, I am a cynical and selfish bastard and I really just don't care. The problem with local NPR stations is that they mostly suck. Hardly any manage to hire competent staff. If they do manage this feat, much of the staff is wasted covering the latest regulations regarding the use of the bed of a pickup truck to haul passengers, or the most recent reason why the city government is going bankrupt. This is nothing I want to listen to.

I also don't really care about the newscast or other segments that might be produced live and would therefore be difficult to quickly convert into MP3 format. I can get the headlines from anywhere and I don't need NPR to repackage them for me. The national headlines tends to be where NPR is weakest anyway. Inevitably they fall into the moron pack mentality that characterizes most of modern journalism. They must report anything and everything 24 hours a day even if they have no facts and nothing interesting to say about the no facts that they have.

No, all I want are the nice stories that NPR produces for the national feed in a single audio file somewhere that is easy to download and transfer to my iPod so I can listen to it whenever and wherever I happen to be. I would be willing to pay a reasonable fee for this service. Probably more than I give to the local NPR station for the privilege of listening to their nasal, scratchy voices, stuttering delivery, and the traffic reporter who is never on the other end of the phone. Almost any price would be a bargain.

I'm not holding my breath.

Shopping Angst Averted

2006-10-04 · by peterb

The other day I decided I needed some tea, so I decided to stop off at Margaret's shop, which I've written about before. Imagine my dismay when I discovered that it was nowhere to be seen.

Oh, calamity! I hadn't shopped there often enough. I hadn't bought enough stuff. She was broke and living on the street and it was all my fault.

The next week I discovered that she hadn't closed, but simply moved a few blocks away to Forbes Avenue, right next door to Rose Tea Cafe. The new location, now named Margaret's Fine Imports, is much larger than the old space, and has a nice, open, airy feeling.

You should stop by and check it out if you are in the market for a new brown betty or coffee mug.

The Right Honorable Professor Fizzwizzle

2006-10-05 · by peterb

I'm strongly in favor of so-called "casual games," but I am violently opposed to the moniker.

I understand the need for something that quickly and concisely expresses to a publisher what you think the market for your game is. So I understand why "casual" is the word of choice. The simple fact is that "Games that are designed for people that aren't total and complete dorks" is just too long to fit on a business card. But "casual" implies that the game isn't serious, or isn't seriously fun. Which, as the game I'll be reviewing tonight demonstrates, often isn't true.

So here, we prefer the name "wage slave games."

There are two essential attributes that I assert make a game a "wage slave game": appearance and accessibility.

''Appearance'' is the less important of the two. Since only women play games that are fun, casual games must have a bright yet girlish color scheme, big friendly buttons, a cartoonish yet world-weary art style, and a jazzy yet unthreateningly non-ethnic soundtrack. If the game has a theme dealing with an ancient culture (for example, if you are helping to build statues of the Pharoah by playing Solitaire), then the sound of drums is permitted.

More seriously, and with less snark this time, casual games are about accessibility. First and foremost, the games must be downloadable. They should run and perform well on a wide array of systems, to maximize the potential customer base. Ideally, they should be implementable in Flash, so that you can offer customers a non-time-limited free demo while minimizing the risk of piracy. Because they're going to run in Flash, the controls must be simple. No function keys. No right-clicking, if you can help it. Four arrow keys and the spacebar, or just mouse controls. The games must start quickly and stop quickly — the market you're selling to works for a living, and may have to go change a diaper. There should be no penalty for quitting in the middle. The idea of a "save game" shouldn't even exist. When you quit, the program should remember where you were, and when you come back, it should pick up where you left off.

In other words, casual games are exactly like the "hardcore" game experience, except that they are better in every possible way.

Both the casual and non-casual game markets are filled with games that are boring and utterly derivative. So it's always nice to find a game that brings something new to the table. Today's game in that category is Professor Fizzwizzle.

Professor Fizzwizzle

Professor Fizzwizzle

The plot of Professor Fizzwizzle somehow involves RageBots that look like they came straight out of Bob the Angry Flower, so I'm already inclined to like it. But the real meat on the bones here is the game itself. You can view it as a combination of Mario vs. Donkey Kong and Sokoban, if you like, but really it's its own thing.

The object of the game is to win. You win by travelling through a certain number of levels. You win each level by reaching a certain location. The mechanics of the game center around how you reach that location.

Between you and the goal will be various hindrances, such as closed gates, air gaps, or angry RageBots, and varying terrains, such as grass, sand, and ice. There are also objects placed carefully around each level. Fizzwizzle can push (and walk on) crates, barrels, and magnets, and in some cases he can place new objects. Everything in the world obeys consistent physical laws, and there is generally only one way to win each level.

In other words, it's a puzzle game. The levels range from trivial (there's even a section of the game just for children) to diabolical. At any time, you can ask the game to show you the solution to a level. Far from ruining the game, this serves as a safety valve. Just knowing that I have the option to see how it's done makes me much less likely to give up.

The appearance of the game isn't my cup of tea. In terms of graphic design, I'm much more of a Strange Adventures in Infinite Space sort of guy. But behind the obligatorily jaunty graphics and music is a game with thoughtfully designed puzzles and a pleasantly simple user interface that will give you hours of entertainment.

There's also a level editor shipped with the game, which is brilliant in its simplicity. So once you've conquered the game, you can make your friends hate you by designing puzzles of your own.

Professor Fizzwizzle runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and is a paltry $19.95. A free demo is downloadable from the Grubby Games website.

Disclosure statement: the publisher graciously provided a copy of the game for review.

Just use sRGB

2006-10-09 · by psu

Color is confusing. This is a fundamental truth in the photographic universe. You can't count on color to be a reliable constant. The film and the CCD capture color differently than you see it, turning scenes which look perfectly fine to your eye into seas of over-saturated orange, or veiling everything in sickly pale green. The gray shady day becomes a blue mess. One of the reasons I shot black and white film for so many years was to avoid problems with balancing color film for various lighting conditions. Digital cameras make this a bit easier when the automatic white balance works, but manipulating pictures on a computer screen brings up its own set of issues. Eventually, you have to deal with color management.

Color management is a maze of confusion for anyone who uses computers to create and manipulate pictures. You read about color profiles, color spaces, device profiles, gamut, profile conversion, color calibration, but you gain no real enlightenment.

Here is the lazy guide to all the color management you need to know about to make decent looking pictures for the web and prints.

The Big Picture

Just use sRGB.

A Bit More Detail

Unless you can write a coherent document about the requirements you have that would make you do otherwise, just use sRGB for everything, and don't worry too much about calibration.

To most serious digital photographers, the above statement amounts to the highest form of heresy. You can't make quality prints, they will say, without a workflow that is calibrated and color managed from end to end. To them I reply that the reality is that color management is complicated and expensive and not really worth it for most users. Most consumer imaging devices deal with pictures using the sRGB color space. This includes printing machines, web browsers, the screens on most personal computers that run Windows, and so on. Therefore, if you just follow my advice, you are in some sense "automatically" calibrated. It won't be perfect, but it will work well enough.

Meanwhile, the rest of you are wondering exactly what sRGB is in the first place. I'm here for you, too. The next time a gang of photo forum calibration weenies attacks you in an alley, here is what you tell them.

Representing Color: Color Spaces

In simple terms, color management systems try to compensate for the fact that different devices interpret and display color in different ways. Colors generated by mixing phosphor look different than colors generated via filtered LCDs, and LCD colors look different than colors generated by mixing ink. The goal of the color management system is to provide you with information about how the bits you have collected will look on the target device when you look at the file on your working device. In theory, if you are managed end to end, you can be working on your laptop screen and adjust the color so that there are no huge surprises when you ship the picture to your large format ink jet printer for final output.

It turns out that a large international standards body called the ICC thought about this problem for a long time, and came up with some standard mechanisms for describing the characteristics of different devices for displaying color images.

The first thing you need to do this is a reference space of colors. Back in the day, the CIE color space was defined for this purpose. Every color in this space is defined as three floating point values. Color profiles are then defined in terms of mappings into and out of this space.

This brings us to sRGB. The sRGB color space is defined as a mapping from one triple of values (R,G,B) to a point in the CIE color space (X,Y,Z). The details are not that important. The key thing is that the mapping assigns a specific color value in the CIE space to each RGB value. In other words, given an RGB value in a digital picture (a JPEG file, for example), the sRGB color space provides information about what color that RGB value represents.

The actual mapping defines the range of colors that can be represented using sRGB and things like the default gamma (2.2). The idea was to model the color response of a CRT monitor. Given this, it is easy to see why the hard core photographers sneer at this color space. They are interested in prints. They make prints for display, prints for books, prints for sales, and so on. Therefore, the professional photographer requires two critical things from his color management system:

  1. A working color space that can represent "enough" colors, at least as many as the printer can reproduce.

  2. A way to preview what a given file will look like on the output device in question without making a proof. Proofing might be expensive or impractical, so pre-proofing is critical.

The first requirement is why you hear people carping about Adobe RGB or whatever. That color space has a wider gamut than sRGB, so it is more useful when dealing with subjects that have a wide range of colors, and printers that can reproduce those colors. Most users do not have these requirements and so don't really need to care about Adobe RGB.

The second requirement is what the rest of the color management system is for.

Color Profiles

Color profiles are like color spaces, but rather than defining the behavior of some abstract device, they are built by measuring an actual device and building a mapping from an ideal color space to that device. In other words, you can think of a color profile, or device profile as a mapping from the CIE color space back to the RGB that you should send to the device in order to get something close to the color you wanted. I say something close, because you can never exactly match these things. We'll see why later.

There are two devices that most photographers need to deal with. The first is the screen on the computer that they use to edit their pictures. The second is the printer (or printers) that they use for output. Given a source color space and a device profile, the color management system can figure out how to display a given RGB value in an image file on the given output device. First, you use the color space to map to CIE, then you use the device profile to map back to RGB.

You build a device profile by sending the device a series of reference colors and then measuring its output in response to these reference colors. After you collect enough samples you can use some standard statistics to build the mapping that you need. When someone tells you that you need to "calibrate" your screen or printer, this is what they mean.

So, in practice, suppose you have carefully calibrated both your screen and your printer. What does this buy you? Well, suppose you want to print some picture, and you open it up in Photoshop on your screen and you think it looks too blue. You ask yourself, will it look too blue in the print? One way to find out is to just print it, then tweak it in Photoshop, then print it again. But, this is tedious and difficult because you are not even really sure how what you do in Photoshop will map to the final print.

Here is where Photoshop can rescue you. Photoshop has a special preview mode that will make your screen pretend that it is the printer, so you can see an approximation of the final print on the screen without wasting paper. The catch is that it needs those two device profiles that we talked about before in order to work. What it will do is first run the original image through the printer profile to see what RGB it would send the printer if it were printing. Then it will take that value, and display it using the profile for your screen. Here is the full pipeline:

Image RGB ----> Printer profile ----> Printer ----> Screen profile ----> Screen

The result is an approximation of the final printer output on your screen. You need both profiles so that you can correctly compensate for the particular characteristics of both devices. Also, the results are never perfect because screen phosphors and printer ink do not behave the same way when mixed. Still, even though the system is imperfect, if you really need to match colors, it's a lot easier to have this than do just do it by eye and trial and error.

Why You Should Just Use sRGB

From the above commentary, you might be thinking, "Wow, I should really calibrate my system from end to end, it will be so much easier to adjust my pictures to look great!". To an extent you are correct. However, how often do you print to an arbitrary output device?

Think about the last 10,000 pictures you have taken. Oh wait, you've only taken a few hundred? Well, whatever. How many did you have printed to your special Epson Photo Ink Jet printer with the fancy and expensive pigment-based permanent color inks? What? You just put pictures on the web and get prints at Costco?

If this is that case, here is why you should be using sRGB. First, for web pictures, it is the only way to know that what the web browser on the other end of the internet will be looking at something that looks anything like what you were editing in Photoshop. There is one simple reason for this: Web browsers do not use color management. Neither Internet Explorer nor Firefox pay attention to the color space of a JPEG file when displaying it. They just default to whatever the default color space of the operating system is, which means they just default to sRGB.

Recall that a lot of people like to use Adobe RGB when working with pictures professionally. Suppose you put a lot of pictures up on the web and they are all in JPEG files that are tagged with the Adobe RGB color space. What will these pictures look like in your grandmother's web browser? They will look like shit. The color spaces define different contrast and saturation curves, the result being that the pictures typically look washed out flat. Therefore, the rule for web pictures is clear: everything you put on the Web should be in sRGB or your pictures will look like crap.

Now, you could work in Adobe RGB and do you own conversions later when you post pictures to the web. But if your main target is web pictures, what's the point? (See the wanky side note below).

For printing, the situation is similar. Almost all consumer output devices, including those huge digital printing mini-labs that they have at Costco assume that the incoming file is in the sRGB color space. If you give them anything else, the picture will look like crap. Home inkjet printers, even the fancy ones, have also been engineered to automatically make sRGB pictures look decent without much work on the part of the user. Of course, these devices will let you bypass this processing if you want to send raw bits processed with Photoshop's color engine or Colorsync or whatever, but their default mode is to just print sRGB and do a decent job of it.

Therefore, my original advice stands. Just use sRGB for the web. And, if you do decide to make prints, use sRGB at first. If you can then point out exactly how this is failing for you, you can decide to start using Adobe RGB or whatever later. I will bet you a case of beer that for 90% of what you do, sRGB will work just fine.

Wanky Side Note for the Geeks in the Audience

The truth is that most digital cameras make this choice for you anyway. You shoot, you get sRGB JPEG files. The main exceptions are the up market point and shoots and the digital SLRs. With these cameras, you have more flexibility because you can either shoot RAW and put off the final choice of color space until later. This is what I do, but it's pointless because I hardly ever work with anything but sRGB.

Alternatively, with many of these cameras you could also shoot Adobe RGB JPEG files and then convert them to sRGB for the web, and use the Adobe RGB for prints, but then you have defeated the one step convenience of shooting JPEG files, so you might as well be shooting RAW again anyway.

Summary

Don't let the color management problem get you down. This does not have to be a complex brain-imploding process. Just like everything in photography, you can get away with being lazy as long as you understand a bit about how things work. sRGB works well for most of the pictures you will take. I have the 12x18 prints from Costco to prove it if you don't believe me.

Lost Talent

2006-10-10 · by peterb

"Hey," I said to Nat. "I got my Gamefly queue a little confused, and ended up with Lost Magic for the DS. You have that, right? Will I like it?"

"It's interesting," he said, "but the difficulty curve is a little high. Play it until it gets hard, and then send it back."

I played through four interesting tutorial battles, and then on the first "real" battle ("Windmill Plains", if you must know), lost 5 times in a row. Each time I lose, of course, I have to endure the unskippable cutscene yet another time.

So I guess it goes back to Gamefly tomorrow.

A Short Take on Self-Deception

2006-10-12 · by peterb

I can't even summon the energy to write about Neverwinter Nights 2. I suspect this means I won't be able to summon the energy to actually play it, either.

Mind you, I'm sure I'll purchase it. I bought every NWN expansion like a good citizen, but the game lacked snap. It was a victim of its own compromises.

We can mock John Romero for his long hair and his broken promises. But if ever there was living, breathing proof of his dictum that "Content is King", it is that Jade Empire was compelling from start to finish, and Neverwinter Nights makes me feel narcoleptic. They are built on the same basic technology. But one is fun, and the other isn't.

This is above and beyond the other issues — the fact that whenever I wanted to play online with my friends, we all had to spend an hour and a half synchronizing on the right versions, getting the server configured, and so on. The fact that browsing the thousands upon thousands of fan-created modules is more fun than playing them. The tragiocomically bad camera. Neverwinter Nights fails to be fun in a particularly frustrating way. This isn't an obvious stinker like, say, Dungeon Siege. Everything about Neverwinter radiates fun. Everything about it sounds fun. Everything about it looks like fun. For the love of all that is good and holy, it should be fun.

But it isn't fun. Why?

The politically correct attitude among gamers — by which I mean "people who have so little to do with their time that they're willing to install and play games on a computer instead of a box hooked up to their TV" — is to pretend that user created content is the apotheosis of cool. Witness the recent bloggy wanking about how modders "saved" Oblivion, a game with an original story line, stunning graphic design, and intriguing gameplay because they created mods like "made the water more transparent."

The thing is: it isn't true. Neverwinter for example, has many user-created modules that are "fun" on some abstract level. Nice plot. Good scripting. Clever puzzles. But the sense of you've-been-here-before ennui is strong throughout. It's not a fair comparison. The simple fact is that no matter how good a module Jeb and George write, the hundreds of artists, writers, musicians, set designers, modelers, and QA personnel who worked on Jade Empire make a real difference. Both Knights of the Old Republic and Jade Empire have a quality about them that the Top Gear guys, when talking about cars, call "bespoke." That's what's missing from the best user-created Neverwinter Nights modules. I think it's the need to create something that could be used by Jeb and George to create Generic D&D Module G6: Against The Vault Of The Drow On The Borderlands that forces Neverwinter into a very cookie-cutter sort of design sensibility. And it shows.

To be frank, I haven't paid very close attention to NWN 2, simply because I have an assumption going in that however good it is, it (and the user-created content for it) will lack this bespoke quality. Maybe someone at Bioware can set me straight. I figure they still owe me a favor for the Inscrutable Denominator of Heavenly Glory.

We'll see.

Industrial Disease

2006-10-13 · by psu

The other night, we visited one of our favorite local places, the Grand Canal Cafe. For years, they've done straightfoward Italian food with a particular emphasis on pastas. Karen had a craving for their speciality: a ground veal and spinach cannelloni with a tomato and bechamel sauce.

So we walk in the place, ready for happiness, and they don't have the cannelloni. They have not had it for a couple of weeks because of the spinach scare.

In an unrelated incident a couple of weeks ago, we went to the Costco. Two images always stand out when I go to the Costco. The first is the floor to ceiling bins of electronic entertainment products (PS2, Xbox, Gamecube) that in some cases people were standing in line to buy on Ebay just a few months ago. For this particular trip, there were Guitar Hero guitars stacked up as high as the eye could see.

The second image that sticks with me are the industrial sized packages of "specialty foods."

What Costco and this spinach scare have in common is that they bring the nature of our food distribution system into stark relief. Back in the day, the "organics movement" liked to wrap itself in a lot of rhetoric about sustainable practices, small volume farming, personal service and a generally high level of quality (and therefore cost). This was convenient when there was money to be made and niche luxury markets to grow.

But now organics are Big Business. And I think what we have learned is that Big Business is Big Business. Horizon and Organic Valley are everywhere. Dannon owns Stonyfield Farm Yogurt. Bags of organic spinach are everywhere except when they are pulled off the shelf for making people sick. Five years ago, in Pittsburgh, dozens of people got sick after eating contaminated vegetables at Chi-Chi's. Today, it's organic spinach. Organic food poisoning isn't any better than the kind with pesticides

The lesson is, if there is money to be made as a niche luxury, there is even more money to be made by centralizing distribution, increasing volume, and generally pushing the product into the largest possible distribution channels. This means the huge restaurant purveyors (Sysco) and the huge retail outlets (Costco). This, more than anything, is the American Way. There is nothing that is specialized enough to avoid being turned into a supersized Costco Commodity if there is enough money to be made.

But, as we learned in Fast Food Nation, this kind of distribution is the ideal way for the bugs to get us. The fact that the organic food industry has fallen to into the same traps as the fast food industry must be a crushing blow to all of those self-important boomer granola munchers at the Whole Foods.

I think we can't have our cake and eat it too. We can't espouse the ethical high ground of local food production and local distribution and still want conviently packaged inexpensive organic spinach year 'round at the food store. The reality is that smaller scale local food is more expensive and more limited. So, if you really want to take the high ground, you have to be willing to pay more and get less. There is no way around that.

Meanwhile, all I want is my god-damned cannelloni. Hopefully it will be back by next month.

Baseball ... Button ... Mashing

2006-10-17 · by psu

A while back, I picked up MLB 06: The Show for the PS2 in part because the guys over at the Sports Gamer Blog and Bill Harris loved it and in part because I was bored and curious. Baseball, it seemed to me, was a hard game to convert over to the video format because of the need to potentially control so many players.

On the PS2, the game never really connected with me. I couldn't figure out the hitting. The pitching interface seemed random. It was also tedious to get into and out of games, what with needing to dance back through all the startup screens and file loading.

Still, the Career Mode was intriguing. You can make a pitcher, play some games, go into the "Training" screen to bump up some stats and then go again. This seemed like an obvious way to take up time on the PSP.

Eventually I gave in and got the portable version of the game. And I have learned something nice about baseball video games.

First, start the Career Mode.

Second, set the game up with the old style pitching interface without the kick meter.

Third, set the game up with automatic fielding and base-running, so you don't have to worry about that crap.

Now here is how the game works:

To pitch, mash the X button. Wait a while. Hit it again.

To hit, mash the X button, wait a while, hit it again.

Once in a while, go to the training screen and increase your R. Repeat.

It's the perfect game for where my head has been lately, which is in a place where I don't want to think about plot, puzzles, complicated jumping, or anything requiring coordination of lower and higher brain function.

The Show also has some of the best audio in the sports game that I have experienced. The announcers do repeat themselves, but not as much as in other games, and they never sound stupid. The other night, Karen even thought I was listening to a real game. The player A.I. gets the job done. The only real complaint is the load times on the PSP. But that's not too bad, since it can take a session or two to get from load to load.

The game has managed to replace Madden in the PSP, and is the perfect companion to whatever else I might have in the DS, which, right now, is Super Mario in semi-permanent suspension as I try to figure out how to clear the next world.

Recommended for anyone interested in baseball, or anyone looking for a nice slow paced X-button mashing game.

CFP: Porting Dwarf Fortress to OS X

2006-10-18 · by peterb

I'm continuing to play Dwarf Fortress on a fairly regular basis, at least when I have time.

I've reached the underground lava river, set up a magma forge, and my latest wave of immigrants included a number of nobles — a broker, a manager, a sheriff, and a representative of the farming guild. They showed up and immediately began demanding luxuries (for starters, each wants their own personal dining room, sheesh). But they clearly make a difference: when the human caravan showed up to trade, having the broker really made things much easier. It's not all wine and roses, though. There have been a few tragedies. The most recent was when my legendary miner was attacked by a lone fire imp. He burned to death, and died weeping.

The big problem with playing Dwarf Fortress, though, is that I have to reboot into Windows to do it.

So I am putting out a call for participation, on behalf of the developer: help port Dwarf Fortress to Mac OS X and Linux.

This has to be done in a fairly indirect way, since the source code isn't open source. But it can be done. Tarn Adams, the developer, has released the source code to an earlier game, Kobold Quest, under the BSD license. Click here to download the source code. Kobold Quest is a much simpler game, but uses basically the same display engine as Dwarf Fortress. His basic idea is that if someone gives him a rewritten Kobold Quest, he could use that to get Dwarf Fortress SDLified.

So the challenge here is to grab Kobold Quest and rewrite it to use SDL instead of native Windows calls. I've taken a look at the source code, and I believe this could be done in two or three days, at least for a basic command-line port.

I'm not doing it myself because, frankly, I don't have those two or three days to spare right now.

If you're up to the challenge, there are many Dwarf Fortress addicts who would be in your debt. And if you're in the Pittsburgh area, I'll buy you a six-pack at Dee's.

As for why I care about having this game on Mac OS, the best I can do is quote from this post on the forums (in response to someone asking why dwarves who want to build an artifact, but can't, go insane):

You have to look at it from their perspective, though. It's easy to say that they're snapping easily when you're just looking at things from outside the monitor and reading events in lines on the screen.

When a dwarf gets a serious wound, though, they are likely to be maimed for life. It's not so strange for extremely tough, previously self-relient types of people to completely flip out when faced with that sort of thing.

And we're not talking about 'seeing a rat'. We're talking about having the fortress that you slaved to create crawling with rats. We're talking rats and vermin crawling over you while you sleep and eating the food out of your hands.

And don't forget the other things. Portions of the fortress are covered in noxious, wretched miasmas of decay so thick that they actually obscure your view. Friends and relatives die regularly and are sometimes just left to rot on the ground. Wild raccoons and other horrible monsters are just waiting for the chance to rip out your throat. If you make a mistake or fail to meet a production order, the sheriff cuts you to pieces with an axe. Horrible creatures regularly crawl out of your drinking water and try to murder you in your beds. Filthy new immigrants are constantly being shoved into your fortress' cramped quarters, forcing you to work yourself down to the bone to get new quarters ready and leaving you with barely enough food to get through the winter. And when food runs out, you're reduced to grubbing for rats, beetles, and worms in order to survive.

And then, when inspiration finally strikes--when you finally a chance to do what you've been dreaming to do for your entire life, the one reason you really went through the hell of this horrible fortress, the one true Dwarven dream--when you finally feel inspiration strike you and can see the form of your artifact in your head, you end up wasting three months doing nothing as your incompetent leaders fail to provide you with the necessary materials. Eventually, the vision begins to fade and you realize you can no longer remember what the artifact you'd waited your entire life for even looks like. Wouldn't you go mad, too?

Don't ask why your dwarves go insane or throw tantrums. Ask how they manage to stay sane the rest of the time.

Yeah, move over, Bill Harris. I'm around the bend about it too.

In Soviet Cupertino, Apple Portable Music Player Owns You

2006-10-23 · by faisal

Just over five years ago today, Apple Computer invited members of the press to an event in which Apple would introduce "a breakthrough digital device". The all-knowing Mac rumor mill quickly swung into action, revealing that the device would be a music device, possibly a portable MP3 player, not a portable MP3 player, a wireless standalone cd-writer, a floor wax, and a dessert topping. Six days later -- five years ago, today -- Steve Jobs finally got on stage and introduced an overpriced MP3 player, and everyone yawned. Hindsight being 20/20, I'd like to put on my product manager hat and opine on why it's something anybody cares about today.

1st generation: Oct 23, 2001
c/o: Rjcflyer@aol.com cc

Before I do that, I should clarify something: I do not work for Apple. I have never worked for Apple. I do have friends who work for Apple and they don't tell me squat about what goes on there. I didn't bother to talk to any of them about the contents of this article -- they'd just refuse to comment. This article reflects my opinion only, and not the opinion of anyone else who writes on this site, nor the opinion of any of my past, present or future employers.

For those who have just returned from 6 years in Subrockistan, the iPod is a portable MP3 player with a few notable qualities:

  1. You can update the contents of the iPod, and charge the battery, merely by plugging the iPod into your computer.
  2. It has a staggeringly simple interface -- some might say too simple.
  3. You can find them for sale just about everywhere.
  4. You can generally have someone else's when you pry it from their cold, dead hand.

The iPod is a wild success today, but its introduction met with skepticism. It was derided as silly looking, too expensive, too feature-poor, and called a number of things that we can't print here. Every revision was expected to fail, and every passing year brought claims that this was a fad like the Walkman (only 100 million Walkmans sold in the first 20 years). In the early years of the iPod, no article was complete without a quote from a competitor claiming they would best Apple with more featureful offerings. Meanwhile:

That last item bears consideration:

Many people consider the success of the iTunes store as key to the iPod's success, since music industry lobbied congress to make it illegal to use iTunes music on any non-iPod portable MP3 player. It may make it easier for Apple to retain iPod users in the future, but I know only one person who purchased an iPod and then went on to purchase a non-iPod player. He claims his next unit may be an iPod again. The iPod market is still in wild growth mode, and Apple isn't worrying about retaining the early adopters -- it's worrying about getting units as possible out the door as fast as possible.

So what has made the iPod successful? I can think of a number of factors. Whether these were intentional or accidental, all of these contributed to the success of the product:

Which brings us to today: the iPod is well entrenched, the iTunes store is starting to worry Target and Walmart (who sell iPods after famously failing to negotiate lower iPod prices with Steve Jobs), Apple just launched movie downloads, and it costs less to buy the two TV shows I ever watch from iTunes than it costs to get cable TV.

What's on the horizon? Steve Jobs claims this year "is likely to be one of the most exciting new product years in Apple's history". Apple has already pre-announced the iTV iTunes/TV bridge-box. The rumor mill predicts an iPhone iPod-telephone combination. MacOSRumors predicts that they will be working on an article about exciting developments in writing new articles. And Microsoft is launching the Zune -- a new portable media device dubbed by some as an "iPod killer" -- by going after the capabilities the iPod doesn't have. Some people think it's already a flop. Others think it's the only thing out there that can seize the iPod's momentum. I'd offer a guess, but there's a funny thing about predictions: if I could predict the future I'd have written this five years ago.

Dominions 3

2006-10-25 · by peterb

"You will not find it difficult to prove that battles, campaigns, and even wars have been won or lost primarily because of logistics." -- Gen Dwight D. Eisenhower

I have been jonesing for a replacement for Warlords 2 for a long, long time. Ilwinter Design's game Dominions 3: The Awakening comes tantalizingly close to being that replacement. Today, I want to take a look at the game — available for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux — and talk about its high and low points.

I had tried the demo for its predecessor last year, and been impressed. There were a lot of rough edges, it's true, particularly around the user interface, but it was an ambitious game with strategic depth.

Dominions 3 map

Dominions 3

On the surface, one could be forgiven for thinking of Dominions 3 as being yet another Risk-like game. It has a map, and the map is segmented into territories, and territories generate resources which can be used to buy armies or units. That's where the similarities end. Dominions bears as much resemblence to Risk as Capture The Flag With Stuff bears to Tag.

The conceit of the game is that your nation is led by a Pretender God whose goal is to ascend to the seat of heaven. In order to do this, you must spread your influence, or Dominion, over all the territories in the world. When you have more influence in a given territory than any other Pretender God, it is said to be under your dominion.

Dominion spreads outward in a radius, in varying strengths, from several sources. Your Pretender God radiates Dominion, as do his or her (or its) priests and temples. Since opposing units and temples interfere with your Dominion, you must conquer their territories, rout their armies, pillage their women, sexually assault their cattle, and generally act in a way completely consistent with the history of many monotheistic religions, which is to say "with overwhelming brutality."

Armies are purchased with both money and "resources." Money builds up in the treasury and can be saved from turn to turn; resources are use-them-or-lose-them. Both resources and money are multiplied by and collect in fortresses, at the cost of draining the surrounding regions of both.

"Gentlemen, the officer who doesn't know his communications and supply as well as his tactics is totally useless." -- General George S. Patton,

Dominions 3 combat

Combat

When opposing armies meet, the battle is resolved automatically, by the computer. You'll receive a report telling you who won and how many units were killed, and be given an option to watch a replay of the battle. Choosing to do this takes you to an animation of your two armies clashing, demonstrating exactly who killed who and with what weapon or spell. Large battles are quite impressive to watch. The immediate goal of a battle is not to kill every unit, but to force all of the opposing armies to rout. One does this by either inflicting heavy enough losses, or by killing their commanders.

Spellcasting is a major part of the game, and can influence battles greatly, especially since many of the spells in the game improve the skills of your soldiers, or degrade those of the enemy's. In order to cast a spell, you must first research it. Since most of the units that are powerful spellcasters are also the best researchers, and since you can only research spells in certain locations, this creates a challenging tension where some of your best units will be far away from the front lines, hunched over books, studying instead of fighting. Now that's my kind of job.

Your control over units in battle is oblique and subtle. Once a battle begins, you have no input whatsoever. Armies can only move from one location to another when grouped with a commander. You can (and must) group units into cohorts that act as a single unit. You position these groups relative to one another, and then give each cohort (or commander) a set of standing orders that they will try to follow to the best of their abilities: "fire arrows at the closest enemies", "fire arrows at the rearmost enemies," "stay in the back and cast spells," "advance up the side of the battlefield and try to flank the enemy." If you give no orders, the cohort will simply try to figure out what it should be doing.

"The line between disorder and order lies in logistics" -- Sun Tzu

Dominions 3 units

A typical military unit

This conundrum, in one form or another, forms the core of the strategic challenge of Dominions. Your armies are recruited in a multitude of territories, and by and large the challenge isn't "recruit enough troops to win battles" but "get those troops to the right place so they can win battles." In my first few games, I found myself sweeping up large swaths of territory. Then, without any effective recruitment and deployment strategy, the game ground to a halt as the computer players and I swapped ownership of some central territory every turn. Winning the game isn't so much a matter of conquering territory, but of conquering territory that you can defend while still being able to attack the opponents' weak spots. This gives it a strategic depth that is missing in many games.

All is not wine and roses. While more polished than its predecessors, Dominions 3 is still somewhat roughly-hewn. The graphics assets are fairly primitive, though this is a forgivable sin in a turn-based strategy game. The user interface, while not actively awful, is merely "just good enough." This affects gameplay somewhat because one's territories and armies quickly multiply to the point where you simply can't keep track of them. I would desperately have loved to have some facility equivalent to the "vectoring" of armies in Warlords 2. Instead, at some point on the larger maps the number of balls in the air becomes too great to manage. My solution to that is to shut down my higher brain functions and leave some potentially useful army halfway across the world, forgotten. I'm sure there are ways of dealing with this problem, but the game doesn't make them obvious.

Dominions 3 spells

Part of the spellbook

On the plus side is the nearly obsessive-compulsive level of detail that has gone into the game world, the spellbook, and the game balance. There are 50 playable nations, over 1500 units, 600 magic spells, and 300 magic items, all of which have detailed descriptions and a real sense of character. The music is melodic and arabesque, and is enjoyable on its own terms.

And there's one detail that maybe doesn't matter to a lot of people, but that I think is a very nice touch. The game comes with a 300 page printed manual. So a tip of the hat to Ilwinter and Shrapnel for not making me fire up a PDF reader to find out how to play their game.

The game supports both hotseat play and play by email, but I don't have any friends other than psu, and he won't play any game that requires him to hit anything other than the "x" button on his gamepad. So I'll leave the multiplayer part of the review to someone else.

Dominions 3 is a traditional strategy gamer's game. The casual gamer, or the gamer who prefers a purer and more streamlined game, will likely find it too baroque and involved to enjoy. In many ways, it is the very antithesis, philosophically, of Advance Wars, a game I've lauded for combining ruthlessly crisp strategic and logistical considerations with a drop-dead simple user interface. How, then, can I explain the fact that I like Dominions in spite of the 1500 units, and the 600 magic spells, and the detailed setup required for combat preparedness? The answer, I think, lies in vision. Most games that are too big feel like they are designed by committee. Dominions 3 on the other hands, feels like a story grabbed hold of its two Swedish developers, and just wouldn't let go. Yes, it's too big. Yes, it's a bit unwieldy. Yes, I wish they would license the battle visualization engine from the guys who made Legion Arena. But there's something authentic about the game. The designers made the game that they really, really wanted to play. And that is somehow infectious.

Dominions 3 is available for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux for $54.95. Free demos for all three platforms are available from the publisher's website.

Diclosure statement: The publisher of Dominions 3, Shrapnel Games, graciously provided a copy of the game for review.

Trader Joe's

2006-10-26 · by psu

All the foodie people in Pittsburgh probably know, but Trader Joe's is opening tomorrow in East Liberty. Some people I know were saying "meh" about Trader Joe's, what with Whole Foods just down the street. I, for one, am excited because finally there will be a place in town to get fancier foods without all that attitude.

We got the flyer today at home, even way out here in the 'burbs. I figure the place will be mobbed much like the Whole Foods was when it opened. Pittsburgh has no lack of pent up demand for this sort of thing.

I look forward to the rice crackers laced with crack, the frozen chocolate cake, and the mustard. Most of all though, I look forward to shopping for food that is a bit cheaper and has not wrapped itself in a political and moral agenda. This is not to say that I am annoyed that Whole Foods exists in Pittsburgh. I love the place and happily put up with its foibles in order to obtain the excellent products that they bring to us from all over.

But, the place does get tiring. Trader Joe's will be a nice break. I'll be happy to be able to walk through a store and not have to ponder the lack of any real hot dogs, the piles of bacon made out of poultry, that whole meat case filled with 50 flavors of sausage, all tasteless, and the huge freezer cases full of "Tofurkey" and other crimes against humanity. The frozen chocolate lava cake will just be icing on, well, the cake.

Now, if only we could get the liquor laws out of the Eighteenth Century, we would not be deprived of the Two Buck Chuck.

The place opens at 9am tomorrow. You better get there early if you want to get in.

Splintered Cell

2006-10-30 · by psu

No more Ubisoft games.

Earlier this year, I was treated to the tedious train wreck that was GRAW. Now we have the new Splinter Cell on the 360. The game does have the signature Splinter Cell stealth mechanics. Sneak sneak, grab, kill. Unfortunately, this core engine is wrapped up in shell made of crap.

For me, Pandora Tomorrow was the quintessentially perfect third person sneak game. The camera was right, the missions and levels were well laid out. You didn't spend a lot of time lost. The only problem with that game was the moronic checkpoint system.

Chaos Theory fixed the savepoint problem, but tweaked the game engine in a couple of ways that were annoying. The camera was pushed in closer to Sam, and when you tried to push it out of the way, it would bounce back to where you didn't want it. This was moderately annoying.

What was really annoying was how Ubisoft tried to open up the maps to give you multiple paths from point A to point B. This made the maps difficult to navigate. The "3-d map" interface was supposed to make this easier. Unfortunately, the 3-d map was utterly useless for, ya know, actually navigating. The result was that Chaos Theory played out as 15 minutes of tight sneaking followed by 45 minutes of running Sam around the map trying to find one of the magic corridors that get you to the next section of the map. It was like a stealth game combined with having lost your parents at the mall.

The latest game, Double Agent takes these two problems and amplifies them enough to make the rest of the game not worth playing. The useless 3-d map is back. The camera is even tighter and bouncier. And, they have replaced the 2 or 3 hidden paths from area to area with a single invisible door, making it even easier to lose your parents.

I've played through three of the missions. In the first one, I lost my parents in a prison, and could not figure out which floor to take the elevator to to escape. Once on the roof, I had to search for 10 minutes to find a single steel beam to get over to that other part of the map where the exit is.

I didn't get lost in the second one, although I had to run through the same room over and over again. I also had to play a target practice "mini-game" for "training". The only good target practice mini-game is one that is optional.

In the third mission, it took me 30 minutes to find my parents on a supertanker, when it turned out that they had gone down a 2ft by 2ft manhole. It was tricky to find this manhole on a tanker whose deck is about two square miles in area, especially since the level takes place in a blinding snowstorm.

After finding the the hidden hole, I had to spend another half an hour in the engine room finding the single door that lead me to where I was supposed to go.

As I ran around the deck and the engine room, the camera trailed behind me, hiding my feet from view. The result of this is that the world's greatest underground superspy can't go up a flight of stairs without missing once or twice and needing to backtrack. Every time I spun back around to get back on the stairs, the camera would spin and bounce and make me more and more motion sick. Finally, down one hallway that the 3-d map didn't show me, I found the door over to the final area. Then I got to trial and error the end of the level six times to figure out how to shoot the final boss without him seeing me. Then I had to get out of the ship, but I had completely forgotten my path down, since I had mostly been running in ever sickening circles to arrive where I was.

So I turned off the Xbox and watched the ninth inning of the series. The Cardinals win! Back to baseball for me.

No more Ubisoft games.

Addendum

I have now come to find out via various sources that the version of this game for the decrepit "last gen" original Xbox has 12 co-op missions in it. That was by far the coolest thing about Chaos Theory and yet it's not in the 360 game. The best thing about next gen is how the gameplay has so far outstripped what is available on the previous machines, except that, ya know, that's completely not true.

Trader Joe's In One Paragraph

2006-10-31 · by peterb

Buy the yogurt, the chocolate, the mustard (sometimes), and the olive oil. Pete says that the frozen dinners are good. The cheese is hit and miss; it's a much more restricted selection than you'll find in either Whole Foods or the Strip, but on the other hand it's very affordable. The deli case is a travesty, particular the box meat presumably distributed from the same place that supplies Wal-Mart. But the prices on Nova lox can't be beat. I'm still bitter that I can't buy wine there. But that's not their fault.

In summary, anything that makes Giant Eagle paranoid is, on balance, a good thing.

Selected Problems in Computability

2006-11-01 · by peterb

Sometimes, we do hardcore research in computer science. It's in our blood. Here are some of the papers we have submitted to various academic journals at the moment.

  1. The Travelling Salsman problem (peterb)

  2. Mutual Exclusion in the Men's Room (psu)

  3. "Given a description of a program and a finite input, decide whether the program is a lousy piece of fucking garbage." Also known as the Hating problem. (peterb)

  4. Compute the value of pie to an arbitrary number of diners. (peterb)

  5. Finding an assignment of substitute teachers that makes any 3 variable logical formulae true, also known as 3SUB (psu)

  6. For any non-trivial property of partial functions, the question of whether a given algorithm computes a partial function with this property is irritating. (peterb)

  7. The Unstable Marriage problem (psu)

  8. Redundant Array of Idiot Developers (peterb, with props to sdavis for the assist)

  9. All Cretans are liars. No, seriously. Have you ever been to Crete? I mean, Jesus. (peterb)

  10. Automatic Path planning in hostile environments: the Blood Gulch case study (psu)

  11. The Speculative Dining Philosopher's Problem: Eat dessert first. (psu)

Out I Never Did Figure It

2006-11-06 · by peterb

When I still used to DJ regularly, I conformed to all of the college radio stereotypes. I spoke in the obligatory disinterested monotone (MP3 recording of a simulation here), played obscure bands on minor labels, and inflicted unlistenable electronic garbage upon my listeners.

I was sophisticated. I was hipper than thou. I was, in short, a complete jackass.

As I've gotten older, my tastes in music have both expanded and calcified. I'm willing to listen to almost anything, but there needs to be some hook, some immediate accessibility to let me in to the music. Noise and industrial soundscapes are simply not in the equation: when someone asks me to listen to something inscrutable, I ask myself: why am I wasting valuable time that could be spent listening to Tom Waits, instead?

While I'm sure this might deprive me of a lot of exciting new music, all is not lost, for there is one side door I have left open: I'm an absolute sucker for covers.

The cover is accesibility personified. It's a chance to witness the conflict between authorial intent and artistic reinterpretation from the front row. They can range anywhere from straightfoward and mundane, like Lana Lane's cover of "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" (iTunes link) to profane and funny mockery, as in Oizone's cover of Tracy Chapman's ballad "Baby Can I Hold You" (iTunes link). At their best, covers can completely subvert and coopt their source material. Johnny Cash's cover of the Nine Inch Nails song "Hurt" does this so completely that even Trent Reznor agrees: it's not his song anymore. It's Johnny Cash's song now (watch the video here).

Finding covers before the Internet was a fairly haphazard activity, but today you can just subscribe to Copy, Right?, who regularly posts excerpts from covers so good (or, sometimes, so bad) it will make your head explode.

The other thing that has changed recently is that with the advent of better and easier to use computer music tools, it's now amazingly easy for rank amateurs to create and distribute their own music. And sometimes, that music is a cover. Which brings us to an odd little project called Look What the Fans Drug In.

Look What the Fans Drug In is a project to record and distribute fan-remakes of nearly every song recorded by pop artist and producer Michael Penn, Sean's older brother. Most people know of Michael Penn for his greatest achievement, which was marrying Aimee Mann. But it turns out that he has recorded some music too. His production values are very similar to Mann's, leaning towards syncopation and combining sparse leads with layered backgrounds. His lyrics tend towards literary self-indulgence, but are emotionally sincere.

I'm somewhat fascinated with this fan-made tribute project for a few reasons. First, I know most of the music, which surely makes it more interesting. But it's also audacious in terms of its sheer scope. The performances range in quality from somewhat embarassing to professional-sounding and fun. I won't pick on the bad ones. These people aren't trying to sell anything, and I see no reason to put down a sincere effort. The songs I didn't like tended to have two things in common. First, an overly rigorous reliance on a click track or drum machine. You want to have some rhythm, but many of these just sounded too mechanical. The second problem is, quite simply, that some of these artists are trying a bit too hard to sound like Michael Penn, to the point of matching accents, intonations, inflections, and so on. I think a number of these songs would have been much better if the artists had been willing to bring the song to themselves, rather than simply immersing themselves in it.

Some of the high points of the collection were Michel Drucker's cover of "Macy Day Parade" (mp3), Allen Walker's rendition of "Drained" (mp3), and Andrea Zils' "O.K." (mp3). You can download the entire collection — including liner notes and album covers for CDs, should you wish to burn them, here. The project apparently has Penn's blessing, so download without guilt. Then come back here, and share which ones you particularly liked.

Incidentally, Penn has done the odd cover himself — on the Badlands tribute album, he and Mann covered Bruce Springsteen's "Reason to Believe" (also known as "The only song on the Nebraska album that doesn't make the listener want to slit her or his wrists.") A sample is here, courtesy of Heartache with Hard Work.

So someone should let me know when the Nick Cave cover project starts. I've got this idea for this doo-wop/a capella version of "Red Right Hand"...

The One True Index

2006-11-07 · by psu

There is a great scene in the film High Fidelity where one of Jon Cusack's buddies comes over to see if the wants to go clubbing, and finds Cusack on the floor of his apartment surrounded by piles of records. He asks how he is filing the albums, and after some discussion, Cusack spills the beans: "Autobiographical."

I don't think I own as many records as the character in High Fidelity, but in my few decades on this Earth, I have accumulated a small pile of albums and CDs. I don't find storing the albums much of a problem. The records don't take up that much horizontal space, and it's easy to keep them in roughly alphabetical order.

However, I've never had any luck finding a nice filing system for CDs. Multiple factors play into this.

  1. I hate jewel boxes. They are ludicrously large for what they do. But without them it's hard to browse the disks by the spine of the box.

  2. No good shelving.

  3. Internal fragmentation. I always find myself running out of one sort of room or another and needing to shuffle the disks around and constantly refile them.

The result of this is that for the last eight or nine years, I've just put my CDs in a big pile.

To make things worse, the advent of iTunes means that I now spend most of my time interacting with my CDs via their ripped representation in the computer. The computer makes it easy to find the music, you just type in the search box. But now I have a tendency to rip a disk and completely forget about it, and then it is lost forever. You really need to keep the disk around for the little liner book and other information that iTunes misses.

Then, one afternoon, I found the perfect solution. It is axiomatic that there is one true way to keep track of information in a computer. You store your database as a collection of items, each of which has various distinguishing attributes. Relational database technology teaches us that organizing the information by any given attribute is suicide, since it makes reorganizing based on other atttributes hard.

Therefore, take your item and give it a single unique immutable serial number. Then, on the side, build a bunch of indexes that map the various attribute values to the serial number.

We practice this method on this here weblog. Each article gets a number and then google maps keywords to article numbers which happen to be encoded in the URL.

For CDs, the logical way to apply this principle is:

  1. Give every CD a number as you rip it.

  2. Put the number in iTunes. Then you can find any CD you own just by searching iTunes the same way you always do.

  3. Store all the CDs in a box, ordered by serial number.

This system avoids most of the problems that used to annoy me. I never have to shuffle the disks to make room, because I'm only ever appending disks to the collection. I can store the disks in handy little plastic sleeves because I don't need the jewel box spine to allow me to find them anymore. Finally, I can fit most of my CD collection into a relatively small space. A couple of dresser drawers.

There are only two disadvantages, one of which is inherent in CDs as a medium:

  1. You can't spend an afternoon running your finger along the spines of your records and looking at the nice huge covers. This is because CDs only come with teeny little thumbnails.

  2. The index is stored in iTunes, so I have to be careful not to lose it.

These are minor annoyances at best. The new album view in iTunes is like a little virtual bookshelf that never runs out of room, and I still have my actual LPs to fondle when I get the urge. I also have to back up all those songs anyway, lest my iPod become as a brick.

So, there you have it. For better or worse, database engineering intrudes into yet another aspect of daily life. I've been slowly ripping, numbering, and filing my disks over the last few months whenever I have a few free minutes. At the current rate, I should be done in a few years.

Addendum

I should note that this scheme was not entirely of my devising. A similar idea came over the chat system (thanks pdinda) one afternoon.. My only real contribution was buying the dresser drawers.

The Camera I Want

2006-11-08 · by psu

Back in 1998, I was shooting black and white film and printing in the darkroom and generally talking trash about how crappy digital capture was at the time. I put the digital takeover at least ten years out, although later I would update my estimate to only five years on the outside. For various reasons, I turned out to be wrong about that. Less than ten years later, digital capture has all but killed film not only in much of the mass market, but in almost all of the pro market as well. Which makes me wonder: with the digital camera marketplace so mature and dominant, why has no one made the digital camera that I really want?

Back in the good old days all cameras had a pretty standard shape that was compact without being too small, and hefty without being too heavy. Canon, Nikon, Pentax, and especially Olympus all made small-body SLR cameras that were nice to use and not much bigger than the king of the elegant small camera: the Leica. The result was that normal people could carry a nice camera and a single focal length lens in the top pocket of a small bag or backpack without worrying about it too much.

By the 1990s, this type of camera had disappeared. It was replaced on the low end by plastic point and shoots and on the high end by 5 pound motorized semi-automatic cannon, able to shoot a whole roll of film in 10 seconds. The Leica became just a boutique museum piece, and aside from the occasional Nikon FM2, you didn't really see small "serious" cameras anymore. To some extent this probably makes sense. The point and shoots work better for their intended audience, as does the 5 pound war machine.

The digital camera marketplace is a mirror of this world. On the low end, there are a myriad of point and shoot type cameras that come in sizes starting at the size of your pinky finger all the way up to the size of a real camera. They attempt to emulate the size and convenience of film point and shoots, but they mostly get it wrong. The little computer inside them makes it too easy to add stupid features and make the machine too complicated and therefore useless. They tend to have slow and error-prone autofocus because for some reason they use "passive" ccd-based systems rather than more reliable active systems. Finally, they are too slow from shot to shot.

On the high end are digital versions of the standard NikoCanon automatic pro SLR circa 1995. Big bodies, big lenses, and a big flash to go along with it.

What's missing is the camera to sit between these extremes. Yes, Leica has finally made a digital M camera, and there is no doubt that it will be beautiful. But it will also cost as much as a small used car, and for that price you don't even get a lens.

What I really want is a digital Konica Hexar. In the film world, this was a small camera that was fast to use, had a great viewfinder, good autofocus, and it was relatively inexpensive. On the surface, the Hexar doesn't seem that different from the current crop of high end point and shoot digicams. But for me, the camera has to do four things that the digitals don't.

  1. I want the fantastic optical viewfinder. Shooting with a dinky LCD screen sucks. Electronic viewfinders suck. Most low end digital SLR viewfinders also suck. The Hexar viewfinder was big and bright, making it easy to frame your shot, even in the dark.

  2. I want better focus. Either give me autofocus that works or let me focus myself in the fantastic viewfinder. The Hexar used infared beams to focus. It could hit focus in the dark with a high degree of reliability. I would be happy with this, or with an SLR-style focus system with a single high-performance sensor. But really, manual would be OK too.

  3. I want digicam size but with a D-SLR imaging pipeline. There is no reason why, these days, the imaging pipeline in a camera the size of the Hexar can't be as fast as a D50 or something.

  4. I want a fast single focal length lens. Please please please give me a 35/2 or 50/1.4 equivalent lens. I don't care if it's glued there like on the Hexar. I don't need to change lenses anyway, it just gets the camera dirty. Just don't put another useless 35-600 f4-10.8 zoom lens that I don't care about on this camera. I think nothing has done more to destroy the general state of causal photography than the point and shoot zoom lens.

Panasonic and Olympus have both come close to building me this camera. Sadly, they both just miss. The Olympus SLR bodies are too SLR-like. The Panasonics are shaped right, but have questionable handling and slow image processing. The Panasonic L1 claims to handle like a real camera, but has a teeny tiny viewfinder that isn't even as good as the cheap viewfinders in the cheaper consumer DSLRs. Also, neither Panasonic or Olympus seem to think that making a high quality single focal semi-wide lens is worth their time.

The Epson/Cosina RD-1 is also a possibility, but it also has questionable handling. Needing to wind the shutter by hand is a nice retro touch, but for what this camera costs they could have put in a motor to do this for me.

So, as crazy as it seems, in the entire modern marketplace, the only camera I've found that comes close to this specification is the new Leica M8. I guess one way to look at it is, the camera is only 1/20th the cost of a Porshe 911. That's not too bad.

We Have Always Been At War With Mesopotamia

2006-11-08 · by peterb

When briefed on election results, President Bush declared that the Republican Party was on a path to victory. He further chided media reports that emphasized results in House races.

Tip of the hat to Rochberg for the joke...

Guitar Hero II: First Impressions

2006-11-09 · by peterb

Like everyone else with a PS2 and even a little bit of soul in them, I bought Guitar Hero II this week.

I'm still getting used to it, but here are some quick impressions.

Likes: They seem to have increased the overall difficulty of the songs, but they coupled it with making the overall mechanics noticeably easier. The game is much more forgiving now, and much more likely to spot you "almost" notes. Hammer ons and pull offs are a thousand times easier, since they got rid of the requirement that you have all the notes held down when you start them. And "Trogdor" is a bonus song. The red guitar is nicer looking than the black one. The new multiplayer cooperative mode, which lets one player play lead while the other plays rhythm or bass is also a nice touch, although I think it's dumb that you can fail the song. And, of course, the practice mode is essential for old, slow guys like me.

Dislikes: as in the previous game, the indicator that a note is hammerable-on is way too subtle for my tastes. I want something obvious. Like perhaps a glowing electric gopher holding a neon sign that says "DO A HAMMER ON ON THIS NOTE, SCHMUCK ---->" I also don't like the new model for Pandora.

Neutral: I'm not thrilled with the song selection; I wanted more power pop and less metal. But I recognize that that's not really a reasonable request for a game about being a guitar rock god. Fortunately, there are Guitar Hero clones for the PC (and, apparently, for the Mac also!), so if I really want to play guitar along to Code Monkey, I can. Albeit with much less polish. This, more than anything, was why I didn't wait for the Xbox 360 version, along with its innumerable opportunities to spend more money on music I already own.

In summary, if you are one of the people who would rather play Final Fantasy XII instead of this game, you are clinically dead.

Live in Your World, Pay in Ours

2006-11-13 · by psu

I saw a Playstation 3 kiosk at the local Target tonight. It looks like for $600 you can buy a box that renders a desert and a motorcycle with a remarkably high level of detail that is also remarkably free from the standard flickery jaggy "looks-like-ass" filter that the Playstation 2 adds to all of its pictures. As far as I could tell, the object of the game was to drive the motorcycle over a cliff repeatedly and watch the character fall through the air while making a very loud noise. Yet another reason to never buy a console before 1 year after launch day.

I followed this rule for all of my current-gen consoles, and it has served me well. You get mature hardware and more importantly, a mature game library with a good mix of new and old, expensive and cheap.

I followed this rule with the hand-helds. The DS and GBA being pretty big wins and the PSP being a bit more iffy.

I did not follow this rule with the Xbox 360. The box has sat in my living room waiting for another game to play after Obvlivion, and has only found spotty support. Even now, a full year after launch, I barely got up the gumption to buy a new shooter that has been hyped to the moon, but still doesn't seem that promising.

At least when this one sucks I'll be able to sell it on Ebay for $50 like the last new 360 game I bought. That works out to less than the Gamefly rental fee for the month. Thank god for having a friend who ebays stuff for you.

The Computer Science D&D Spellbook

2006-11-14 · by peterb

We can't help it. We're doubly cursed: we program computers and we spent all our time in Junior High School playing D&D while you were having sloppy makeouts at the good parties we weren't invited to.

So let's do this thing.

  1. Detect Lie Algebra (agroce)

  2. Osterhaut's Ostentatious Optimization (peterb)

  3. Summon Dire Knuth (peterb)

  4. Prismatic Assert (peterb)

  5. Detect Dijkstra (psu)

  6. Ready, Set, Unify (psu)

  7. Comprehend O-Notation (peterb)

  8. Triple Convex Hull Tanker (psu)

  9. Patch (peterb)

  10. Cause Carpal Tunnel Syndrome (peterb)

  11. Cure Serious Bug (roc)

  12. Unwind Stack (psu)

  13. Dispel Bubblesort (jch)

  14. Create Illusion (Of Progress) (roc)

  15. Power Word Kill -9 (baird)

  16. Bigby's Finger of Blame (jch)

  17. Collect Garbage (psu)

  18. Virtualize Self (baird)

  19. Polymorph Args (baird)

  20. Decompose Singular Value (psu)

  21. Tenser's Floating Heap (peterb)

Small Favors

2006-11-15 · by psu

Winter in Pittsburgh can be a cold and cruel time. The weather turns gray, with a chilly wind and the occasional slushy rain. It has been this way this week in Pittsburgh, but I haven't let it beat me down because I have made two small but uplifting discoveries.

At work, we have this superautomatic espresso machine. You pour beans and water in one end, and shots of black espresso come out the other. The problem is that the shots are too small and the espresso is not that good. I'm tired of it.

I have also been searching for a solution to the problem of making coffee for groups at home. Normally, I use a single cup filter scheme or a Moka Pot, but neither of these work for 3 or more people. Then, last week in the strip I spied a dusty box sitting on top of one of the shelves. It was an 8 cup carafe and a really huge version of the single cup filter that I have used for years. Perfect!

One problem remained. The thin glass carafe does not keep the coffee hot.

To the web I went, listing insulated containers of all shapes and sizes. The carafe-shaped ones cost ludicrous amounts of money. The thermos shaped ones were not that much cheaper. I stared at amazon.com a crushed and defeated man.

Then, the other day, I was at the Target buying Gears of War, and I saw what I wanted on the shelf. A two-layer stainless steel vacuum insulated bottle. Big enough to hold coffee for 4 and keep it hot for a nearly arbitary amount of time. As a bonus, it was much cheaper than any of the failed products at Amazon. Yay for Target.

The bottle has also solved my coffee-at-work problem. I can make a whole bottle full at home in the morning and bring it to work for the whole day. Since drinking a whole liter of coffee every day would kill me, I can also share it with my co-workers and gain their esteem as a man of culture and taste. "What is this excellent coffee" they will ask me, my ego inflating the whole time.

As a bonus, against all expectations, Gears of War turns out to not suck. It only took a year, but finally the Xbox 360 has a core shooting game to call its own which is not some piece of shit from Ubisoft.

So, as winter approaches and the cold rain falls outside, all I can say to the world is: thanks for small favors.

Don't Be A Stupid Girl

2006-11-16 · by peterb

[Pink

Pink isn't a stupid girl](/img/stupidgirl.jpg)

I'm sure J.K. Rowling gets enough acclamation from everyone in the world that she doesn't need my approval as well. But nonetheless, here's a tip of the hat to her for writing this short essay on the common obsession of worrying about one's looks and, specifically, fat.

It's not simply for the content of her essay, which is typically simply written, personal, direct, and to the point, but because she pointed me towards the artist "Pink" and her song "Stupid Girls" (iTunes link).

The song is good.

The video, however, (YouTube link, iTunes link) moves beyond the realm of "good" into "magically awesome." (Used in a sentence: "Gabriel Garcia-Marquez's novel 100 Years of Solitude is an example of the literary style known as magical awesomeness.")

Launch Day

2006-11-17 · by psu

Having observed three or four launch days in my short time dabbling with computer games, I will never quite understand the psychology of it. It seems like gamers have a sort of bi-polar passive agressive OCD when it comes to product launches.

On the one hand, in the lead up to the big day you have article after article about how supply is bad, the launch titles are bad, the hardware is overpriced, the bundles are stupidly expensive, the accessories are lame, and the pack-in extras nearly worthless. None of this is surprising, because it's all true. Launch titles are notoriously bad. For some reason, the hardware manufacturers think it's a great idea to launch even though they don't have enough to sell and, you know, make a profit. Retailers have a captive audience to which they can attach arbitrary numbers of useless items while filling their coffers with the extra margins.

The thing is, everyone knows this. We all know it's a scam. We all know it will be months or years before the hardware is really worth buying. So here is my question: given this, and given that the weeks before the launch are spent whining about exactly these problems, why is it that on the day itself, you find people waiting in line in the snow, in the rain, in the cold, in the mud, 9 months pregnant, and then getting shot just to get this piece of hardware that apparently no rational being on the face of the earth should have any interest in actually purchasing?

Why then can you flip a new PS3 on Ebay for $2500?

Why all the collective suffering over something that according to the news reports two weeks ago, nobody wants?

Can anyone answer this question for me?

Anyway, good luck on Sunday with the Wii.

Susan Stamberg Delenda Est

2006-11-21 · by peterb

I've written about it before, but every year around Thanksgiving, Susan Stamberg gets on NPR to pimp her family's disgusting cranberry relish, and so I feel that it is my duty to protect my readers: Mama Stamberg's cranberry relish was revolting the first time it was made, it was revolting the last time it was made, it is an inherently revolting recipe and if you make it, and claim to enjoy it, you are an overprivileged and self-deluded yuppie wretch.

Make my relish instead. Happy Thanksgiving!

Off the Online Wagon

2006-11-22 · by psu

Clearly the end of the world is upon us. Not only did the New York Times review the new PS3 this week, but in doing so they quoted that bastion of high quality online gaming journalism: Joystiq. The rest of the review went on to skewer the machine. The main complaint? The online service is clunky and hard to use.

I found this odd. Now, I'm as much of a fan of online interactions as anyone. I buy most of my CDs and books online. I sit and chat with my friends online. I spend too much time wanking on this web site. But as far as games are concerned, I just can't get excited anymore. It's pretty rare for me to actually take advantage of multiplayer gaming in Xbox Live these days. This was not always the case.

When I got the first Xbox, XBox Live was a great thing. Every couple of nights, eight of us would get on and kill Counterstrike bots for a few hours. The integrated friends list, private servers and the nice invite system made this easy.

After about six months of this, the whole thing died down and has never picked up again. There were two basic reasons for this.

  1. People moved. A core group of Counterstrikers now live in the wrong time zone. This makes it hard to pick up a game.

  2. People bought different games. Halo 2 and Splinter Cell were the big ones. But not everyone liked to play these games in the multiplayer. Splinter Cell in particular is hard to get into. You die a lot. A lot of people now spend most of their time online playing WoW. I bet this is not an insignificant effect.

As a result, I stopped playing games online. This is because of the Fundamental Theorem of Online Gameplay:

Playing online with people you don't know sucks.

This cannot be overstated. Sturgeon's law applies here in triplicate. 99.99% of everyone you meet in a random online game are racist, immature, illiterate assholes. Therefore, it is only worth playing with people that you know or have had previous interactions with to indicate that they are not racist immature illiterate assholes.

The result of all this is that while I appreciate the design and execution of Xbox Live, and the friends list, and the invite system, the truth is I hardly ever use it. Even when there is a great game to try out with my friends (Gears of War), it hasn't really come together. I did manage to participate in some chainsawing goodness with the people over at GWJ, thus avoiding the fundamental theorem. But even though some in the old Counterstrike crowd have had the game for more than a week, we have not been able to try out the co-op or get into a nice team killing match.

These days, my main use for Xbox Live is downloading game demos so I am sure to never buy another Ubisoft Shooter. All I really need for this is a net connection and a browser interface. No friends list, no online co-op, no developer time wasted on multiplayer modes that are nowhere near as good as Halo anyway, no "gamer points", no "achievements". What the hell are achievements anyway? In other words, it seems to me that most of the extras in Xbox Live are just fluff around a core functionality that is hard to care about anymore.

So while there are many reasons to not buy a PS3, a clunky online interface is not one of them. Both Nintendo and Sony will have time to put some polish on their download systems, and that's all most people will really care about in my opinion. Because ya know, everyone has exactly the same needs as I do.

Football on TV

2006-11-27 · by psu

I've been watching some football in HD on my big TV this year. Since all HD broadcast options at this time in our history are about as appealing as drinking sewage for lunch, I've been doing it over the air. Today my antenna would not pick up FOX, so I watched the game on my Tivo instead. As a result, I missed much of the experience of the live broadcast.

  1. The 10 minutes of commercials on either side of a score as they cut away after the extra point and after the kickoff.

  2. The interminable video reviews due to challenges or "booth" reviews. The replay rules in the NFL are the dumbest thing to be added to a sports rulebook since they made zone defense illegal in the NBA. They fixed the zone rules in the NBA, the NFL should fix this too.

  3. The "reporter on the field" segments. Who are these reporters on the field? This has to be the dregs of the dregs as far as a position in sports broadcasting is concerned.

  4. Promos for intellectually offensive series TV on Fox (or CBS). The best are the ones that involve decapitated bodies and bloody stumps in the promo during "family" viewing time.

  5. The dozens of on-the-field time outs. The recent fashion here is to call a time out milliseconds before the opposing team snaps the ball for a field goal, so they have to set up and run the whole play again. In the future, doing this should result in an automatic 3 points for the team kicking the field goal and they should be able to run the play again.

  6. Bud light commercials.

  7. Random booth chatter between plays and after the TV timeouts.

  8. The two minute warning. What is this for? Are we really saying that 60 grown men can't figure out that there are two minutes left in the game?

  9. The endless animations of the some combination of the NFL logo and the network TV logo.

  10. Those touching "get to know" the player segments where we find out that the quarterback's favorite band are the Dixie Chicks and he hangs out in leather S&M clubs with his wife and mistress in his spare time. I made that up.

All of this probably accounted for an hour out of a 3+ hour broadcast. It's really too bad that I lost all of this because my antenna didn't work right. I wonder if it's working now. I wonder when there will be an HD Tivo solution that doesn't require a budget the size of the Department of Defense to acquire.

Capitalism has failed me again.

Monkey!

2006-11-29 · by peterb

Some weeks are made for long and thoughtful articles. And some are just made for top 10 lists.

In the queue: Nintendo Wii, ¡Viva Piñata!, and an assortment of other games. But for tonight, we have monkeys.

  1. The dominant monkey (pdinda)

  2. The favorite monkey who's friends with the dominant monkey (pdinda)

  3. The monkey who's right (pdinda)

  4. The monkey who makes sure all the other monkeys around them are happy (jch)

  5. The monkey with the Stilton (psu)

  6. The monkey with the biggest, brightest fluorescent ass (scottd)

  7. Monkey at the top of the tower with the sniper rifle (jch)

  8. Monkey who has to pretend to know everything (jch)

  9. The monkey with the Covenant energy sword (psu)

  10. The monkey that stole my lantern (peterb)

  11. The nameless monkey (psu)

  12. Heartwarming monkey with Down's Syndrome (jch)

  13. Code monkey (peterb)

  14. Shit-flinging monkey (jch)

  15. Monkey who reads my weblog and finds a comment written by a chick he doesn't know and then sends her email asking her out. I hate that fucking creepy monkey. (peterb)

  16. The monkey whose smile always seems just a little too forced (roc)

  17. Naughty monkey (peterb)

  18. The giant invisible and omnipotent monkey in the sky who loves you but needs money (pdinda)

  19. Peter Nesmith (dlc)

  20. Grammar monkey (psu)

  21. Free monkey in the box of cereal (jch)

  22. The monkey who replies to your email in under a minute, proving he has nothing to do except check email over and over and over again in the hope of receiving tasty pellets (roc)

Because I am Stupid I Make Myself Suffer

2006-12-05 · by psu

My rag-tag group of adventurers had just prevailed over the ghost-like sewer monster. The fight had not been too tough, although it did require some careful tactics. Having come all the way here, I figured I'd have a look around. Just around the corner from our fight was another network of sewer pipes and water ways, so we took a few tentative steps that way. From the shadows, a brown lumpy form appeared and took a swipe at me. The blow landed on my head and with one hit, the game was over. My last save was from 45 minutes back at the entrance to the sewers.

Welcome to Final Fantasy, I thought.

My esteemed gaming buddy tilt has often commented on the notion that games have large scale mechanics and organization that make up an "outer loop" along with small scale mechanics that make up their "inner loop."

Madden is a football simulation wrapped up in a large scale management simulation. In Zelda, you crawl through dungeons, solve clever puzzles, find interesting items, and fight tedious boss monsters while at the same time working towards your ultimate destiny as the periodic savior of Hyrule. The Elder Scrolls games are a collection of linear quests that are hard to find wrapped up in a min-max leveling game. Halo strings together a chain of thirty second pieces of combat as you journey from cut scene to cut scene. I could keep this up all night.

It's no coincidence that game franchises work hard to maintain their core mechanics from version to version. Fans of the franchises became fans because the gameplay was enjoyable. They eagerly await the new Bloodspank game because they want the same experience as the old Bloodspank game but a new setting, or new characters, or higher resolution textures. Therefore, to keep their fans, developers strive to remain faithful to the original experience.

Which brings me to Final Fantasy. Final Fantasy, it seems to me, has a very clear two level structure that has basically remained unchanged through all twelve instances of the game. On the one hand there is the standard RPG inner loop: you fight stuff, you collect loot, you gain levels and abilities. Each game tweaks these mechanics, streamlining some while making others more complicated.

The large scale organization of the games are also similar in that they are a linear jaunt from dungeon to dungeon. Each dungeon is designed to be encountered when your party has been appropriately developed and buffed. In between dungeons, there are cut scenes.

This combination of content: the fighting, the dungeons, the cut scenes, is what keeps people coming back to the game. For whatever reason, people like working through these little obstacle courses in a quest to watch the next cartoon.

The tricky thing in this game is that sometimes difficult areas are interleaved with the areas that are safe, and it's hard to tell when you've gotten yourself lost and are about to be punished for it. This happens repeatedly to me in FF12 whenever I venture even the tiniest bit off the shiny rails that the developers have built for me to follow.

What I discovered this week was that this problem seems to have inhabited every FF game ever built. Because being punished over and over again on my PS2 wasn't enough for me, I picked up the recent reissue of Final Fantasy III for the DS.

I played through the intro. No problem. I got into the first town and looked around. No problem. I walked out into the overworld and ventured north, not knowing that I had missed the cut scene that told me to venture south. Thirty seconds later, two wolves in the woods crushed my head like a grape. Even after almost twenty years of development, if you are playing Final Fantasy, you are never more than a few steps away from a one hit kill.

Besides this long standing structural problem and an annoying lack of savepoints before boss fights that I tend to lose, I have generally been enjoying FF12. The streamlined combat takes a lot of the tedium out of the RPG inner loop. For once the writing, and overall production of the outer loop isn't cringe inducing. Even the voice acting is pretty tolerable.

So, I'm looking forward to spending the next few weeks beating up creatures from the nightmares of Japanese children, picking new abilities out of a large checkerboard, trying to min-max my character development and watching cut scenes. I think I'll put off the side quests for now though. In Final Fantasy, you can't be too careful.

Played to Death #12

2006-12-06 · by peterb

The Holiday issue of Played To Death magazine is out. Download the free PDF now and you can read my reviews of the Nintendo Wii, The Wii's online service, Wii Sports, The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess, and Xbox Live, as well as many other fine articles.

The Internet Is Full. Go Away.

2006-12-10 · by peterb

My dad used to tell a groaner of a bad joke about a guy he knew opening a cheese shop in Israel. The name? Cheeses of Nazareth.

I thought of that joke today, and on a lark typed "cheesesofnazareth.com" into my browser...and then name is owned by a domain name squatter, offering to sell it.

The Internet is full.

When to go Wide

2006-12-11 · by psu

Wide angle lenses, roughly speaking, are lenses that for a given image size, provide a wider than "normal" field of view in the final picture. For 35mm cameras, we generally consider lenses with a focal length of 35mm or less to be wide. Back in the day, I asked my photo expert buddy whether I should buy a 24mm lens or a 20mm lens for my wider-than-35 wide angle needs. He said if I knew what I was doing, I should get the 20, otherwise, I should get the 24. This was very wise advice.

Generally, you should not buy a lens unless you have some idea what you are going to do with it. If you are considering buying a wide angle, you should ask yourself why you need to go wide.

If you ask a beginning photographer this question, they will sometimes answer "I need the wide angle for those huge vistas in the landscape." Sadly, this answer is almost always wrong.

If you really want to isolate a huge vista and get that grand Ansel Adams feeling, the best thing to do is to be a few miles away from the subject and use a telephoto lens to get the picture. For example, consider this shot:

I made this picture while standing in a parking lot that was right next to the great expanse of desert and rock. If I had shot it with a wide angle, the mesa would be a little dot in the distance and the foreground would be all parking lot. You never want that.

Here is a good example of shot where the wide lens has been used to "get the whole picture", with the end result being that there is nothing of interest in the frame:

Notice how everything that might be interesting in this picture (the building, presumably) is tiny and in the background. Meanwhile, your eyes immediately focus on the foreground which is nothing but an empty green blob. There is basically nothing to look at in this picture.

This sort of mistake is easy to make because wide lenses distort front to back perspective. You must remember this: wide angle lenses make stuff close to the lens really big and stuff far away from the lens really small. It's like those rear view mirrors on cars, only a lot worse.

You use wide lenses when you want to take advantage of this distortion. For example, you might want to show the viewer something small and intimate in the foreground and but lead her eye to the background where there is a familiar setting:

Or, you might have figured out how to arrange a shot where the foreground and the background are interesting:

Finding an interesting subject and an interesting background is twice as hard as just isolating your subject against a blown out background. This is why wide angle lenses are challenging to use. Whenever you are trying to control more than one main element in a picture, you will have a harder time.

The wide angle perspective also comes in handy when you are indoors. You might be trying to take a picture of a group of people at your house for dinner. They are all sitting around the table. You grab your trusty normal lens and start backing up to get the whole table into the shot. You have about half the people in the viewfinder when you find that you have walked into the stove and your pants are on fire.

This is when you need that super-wide angle zoom:

Of course, all the standard wide angle challenges apply. Watch out for empty foregrounds, and remember that since you will be placing so many different elements into the frame, you have to be careful to arrange them in a way that is pleasing rather than just confusing. I don't have any great insight on how to do this. I might say that in my pictures, I tend to try to maintain a strong front to back perspective with lines that lead the eye from one side of the frame to the other, but that would just be self-concious wanking. The truth is that I fool around with a lot of different things and then I attempt to remember what worked well and what didn't. Over time, you get better at doing the stuff that works and avoiding the stuff that doesn't.

Finally, here are a few other random tips:

  1. Don't take close up portaits with a wide angle, unless you like making the person look like a distended freak.

  2. Do take portraits with wide angle lenses if you want the background environment to be part of the portrait.

  3. Remember that with wider lenses things that you place at the edges of the frame will look distorted. This can be a bit disturbing when you put your Aunt Betty in the wrong part of the picture and she gets all stretched out.

  4. Be careful whenever you tilt a wide angle lens up or down. It makes the world look funny.

  5. Practice, practice, practice. Edit, edit, edit.

Princess Zelda and the Childish Adult

2006-12-12 · by peterb

Several years ago, one of my favorite authors, A.S. Byatt, wrote a scathing review of the Harry Potter books called "Harry Potter and the Childish Adult." In this review she roundly criticized not Rowling, but the adults who chose to read her books. She said, essentially, that there was something fundamentally misshapen about adults who would choose to invest so many hours in a work created for children.

Byatt took a lot of heat for this review. I was disappointed because it was clear that Byatt couldn't correctly articulate her problem with Rowling. She wrapped her critique in some fairly sophomoric Freudian analysis before getting to the real point: Byatt observed — correctly — that Rowling's prose is somewhat drab and clumsy. Rowling does not write beautiful sentences. It's clear, at least to me, that if Rowling wrote with the precision and playfulness of someone like Terry Pratchett, Byatt would have overlooked the subject matter and approved of the works.

This is the sad truth behind literary criticism: there's a widespread belief that the craft of storytelling is not as important as the craft of writing. This is, of course, ludicrous. For the novelist, both skills are important, but I'll take a clumsy storyteller over a brilliant but boring linguist every time. When you have a great storyteller with a superb gift for words you end up with Martin Amis. When you have a great storyteller who doesn't construct brilliant sentences, you end up with Rowling. When you have a stunning linguist who can't tell a story to save her life, you end up with Donna Tartt.

Frankly, I'd rather be bludgeoned about the head with Rowling's entire body of work than have to sit through another page of one of Tartt's sickening apologias for the overprivileged. There is more depth in any one page of Rushdie's "children's book" Haroun and the Sea of Stories than in the entire body of the latest vapid favorite of the overeducated-but-shallow, Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

All of which is a preface to the point that one can have a great story and tell it in a bad way, or vice-versa, and that things written for children can be enjoyed by adults without guilt.

Which brings us to The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I've been pondering this game for a while now, as I play it. I won't be reviewing the game in this space — you can read my review in the holiday issue of Played To Death— but I found some aspects of the way it is constructed to be interesting, and it reminded me of Byatt's essay. Not because it's poorly written, or a bad game — I'm enjoying it immensely — but because I find the maturity level of the game to be so confusing. This isn't a game written for children. This is a game written for adults who played an earlier Zelda game when they were children.

The games in the Zelda series have always treated unapologetically in adolescent and heroic archetypes. The story of every Zelda game is this: an evil power threatens the land of Hyrule. An orphan boy, Link, is drawn in to rescue a friend. In doing so, he acquires various weapons and tools of legend (a boomerang, a magic bow, a magic sword, a grappling hook, and so on). In overcoming obstacles, he inadvertently delivers the power of the godhead to the villain. Link must then confront the enemy and defeat him to save the land.

[Wind Waker

Wind Waker (click to enlarge)](/img/zelda-ww.jpg)

The details in each game change, but the pattern is the same, which is fine. The previous game, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, was beautiful to look at. The characters were cartoony and iconic. Backgrounds were rich, saturated, and looked like they came straight out of a 1940's-era Warner Brothers cartoon. From a purely graphical perspective, Wind Waker was designed with a bold, uncompromising vision.

I thought the Wind Waker art style was daring and wonderful. It fit the ideals underlying the world perfectly. But among many fans, this gutsy art style was a complete flop. My understanding of why is somewhat limited, but it seems to have something to do with the misapprehension that playing with things that look like children's toys will shrink one's penis. Regardless of the reasons, many people complained about this style, and one can't help but worry about the possibility that the stylistic decisions made in Twilight Princess were a direct result of this feedback.

Twilight Princess takes the basic pattern of Zelda and puts it in a "dark" world, drawing elements from a number of other games including Shadow of the Colossus, Ico, and Silent Hill.

[Twilight Princess

Twilight Princess (click to enlarge)](/img/zelda-tp.jpg)

The end result is a game that is too scary for children to play, but not scary at all to adults. The fear in Silent Hill, for example, came not from the eerie music and atmosphere, but from the fact that the rusted, fecal exteriors in the game were so patently signposts pointing to the sexual and violent elements of the player's psyche. Shadow of the Colossus was disturbing because it cast the player, implicitly, in the role of a villain, of someone who becomes his own Shadow. Such possibilities are never even remotely imaginable in Twilight Princess. Link is a good guy. His Shadow is not something he would even think about becoming.

As I said, my theory is that Zelda ends up in this stylistic bind because their platonic Zelda player is an adult who has played the other Zelda games. What they're trying to do, I think, is present the story as "dark" or "serious" to avoid the player shunning the game for fear of being infantilized. At the same time, they have to maintain the essential innocence of the characters, because that's what the archetype requires: evil, even evil that has tainted us, must always come from the outside. I think that the tension between these two goals resulted in a visual design that doesn't quite sit snugly on the shoulders.

Perhaps I'm simply wrong, and projecting, and really a whole new generation of 7-year olds are encountering and loving Twilight Princess. As a game, I think it is clearly the best of the series. But stylistically the game looks like a compromise to me, and it is weaker for it.

Web 2.0 Picoreview

2006-12-15 · by peterb

"All the power of WordStar with all the hardware requirements of Windows 95". And all the flexibility of VAX/VMS.

Computer Scientists and Cruciverbalism

2006-12-17 · by kosak

It seems to be a reasonable childrearing principle that you should give kids a break in order to foster their creativity.  "Look, Mummy, I've made you a dinosaur out of cotton balls and toothpicks!"  "Oh Billy, that's so precious."  And it is.  But at some point, say after Billy has gotten his PhD in computer science, you need to finally expose him to the idea that the world is a competitive place and he needs to be a harsher critic of his own stupid ideas.

Every computer scientist in the world has, at some point, decided that he is going to write a computer program to generate crossword puzzles.  (That was my generation... today's crop of top graduate students wants to write computer programs to generate Sudoku).  Just to be clear, the problem of crossword puzzle construction is different from that of crossword puzzle solving.  Solving, at least according to the TV ads, is what you do when you want to spend a lazy Sunday afternoon in bed with your hot boy/girlfriend, a pencil, your chrome/glass furniture, and a copy of the New York Times.  Construction refers to what the poor shlubs have to do to create those puzzles.  Specifically, it means starting with an empty grid (containing a smattering of black squares which define the boundaries between words), and then filling it with letters such that all the across and down slots contain different, valid words.  There are numerous technical conventions as well: the grids are typically square in shape, have a size of at least 11x11, and have rotational symmetry.  Experts try to keep the word count low (lower word count implies fewer black squares which implies a lot of interlock).  Before you publish such a puzzle you would also need to provide clever yet precise clues, but so far clueing is considered outside the scope of what a computer can do.

While reasonable people can differ about whether it makes sense to use taxpayer-funded defense money to pay a bunch of slackers to jerk around, the real problem is that every single person approaches the problem anew as if they were the first person to ever consider it.  You may be wondering what such people do when they graduate and get research jobs.  Give a computer scientist his first $500K grant, and I can guarantee you exactly what will happen:  "Look Mummy despite being ignorant of forty years of prior art I've built you a videoconferencing/telepresence system".

But I'm talking about crossword puzzles.  If you want to be just like these computer scientists, here's what you do.

This actually happened to me.  I found some guy who built such an automated crossword generator and showed it to me.  (By the way, he's a friend.  Yes, I mock my friends.  And yes, after a few turns of the crank I have more mockery than friends.)   I took one of its output grids and gave it to another (not-yet-mocked) friend of mine, who happens to be a world-class crossword puzzle constructor.  Remember, I'm not talking about solving here.  I'm talking about construction: taking an empty grid and filling it with stuff.  It took him less than five minutes and I think he used his pencil eraser twice.  In other words, he filled the thing longhand almost as fast as he could write and did almost no backtracking.

Congratulations, you tragic little man, you have just built a computer program that quickly solves a problem that most practitioners would find trivial.

Because my gnomish anger is exceeded only by my thoroughness, I then asked my friend to provide me an example in the reverse direction: with a grid that he was able to fill successfully (so a solution is known to be possible) but that he found difficult (it had taken him several hours to do so).  I gave it to the other guy and asked him to feed it to his program.  It failed.  Horribly.  It was a total nightmare.

(One must take care to be precise when one is talking about with programs that run for a long time, especially those you suspect may never terminate.  To use a metaphor: strictly speaking, it is not correct to say that Matt Damon will never go on a man-date with me.  Perhaps Mattie and I will both go on severe calorie restricted diets and live to be 150; perhaps a thousand years from now, an insane alien computer will regenerate our personas from, in his case, footage from the film "Stuck On You", and in mine, some DNA I may have left on a towel at the Holiday Inn).  My point is that the best you can say in these cases is that "Matt Damon has not gone on a man-date with me YET".

Or, in the instant case, if a computer program correctly implements exhaustive search, sooner or later it will try all possibilities in the puzzle space.  Just realize that "later" can be, like, "way" later, as in, dude! the sun just blew up and melted my 'puter!."  In cases like this you basically have to pick a cutoff time and if the thing isn't done by then, you pull the plug.  That's what happened here.  He ran it for a few hours, maybe overnight, and then admitted failure.

I need to add a little postscript here.  Initially I wasn't sure how this piece wanted to end.  Coming back to it after a couple of days, I realize that, I actually think doing research is a worthy endeavor.  And I think it's quite common that some young punk comes along with an insight and shows a bunch of crusty old fools how things should be done.  So if you are a young punk, now that I've told you what NOT to do, I really ought to tell you what TO do.  One suggestion is this: because the search problem is, as they say, "embarrassingly parallelizable", I'd like to take one of the open problems (an open 8x8 with no black squares) and see if you could find a fill for it using, like, some vast grid of 1000 CPUs.  Maybe you'd have to make a friend with access to a farm at MIT or Sandia or Google.  And remember, no words can repeat in the grid.  Allowing for repeated words makes degenerate grids that are very easy to fill.

Another suggestion is to study how humans create these puzzles.  They generally don't use exhaustive search; they use insight, see patterns, know a bunch of tricks, and basically do a bunch of rejiggering when they find themselves painted into a corner.  It would be interesting to formalize this approach and see if you could get a computer to do the same.

Transition nearly complete

2006-12-18 · by peterb

We've cut over DNS, and so you are viewing the new site. Our old articles are still available at their original URLs, so any direct links you had to them previously should still work.

For the time being, we are requiring logins to leave comments, until we better understand our spam-fighting options. But don't think of it as yet another annoying password to remember: think of it as a chance to join our community (by remembering yet another annoying password). (psu informs me that we've turned off requiring logins, but I encourage regular posters, particularly those who might want to write for Tea Leaves, to go ahead and register anyway.

While you're here, please enjoy Corey Kosak's article Computer Scientists and Cruciverbalism".

It's good to be back.

Dork Nation

2006-12-19 · by psu

When I was in high school, I was a bit of a dork. No really, it's true. Back then even a passing interest in the emerging digital technologies was looked upon with suspicion and would get you beat up during study hall. We geeks were antisocial outcasts relegated to self-created school ghettos while the normal people did normal people things while dressing better.

Over time the things that used to amuse us dorks have slowly wormed their way into the everyday lives of normal people. So while they may still be better dressed, a sociological flip-flop has occurred. The evidence is all around us. Normal people have turned into bigger dorks than any of us could have imagined possible. Collectively, we have become Dork Nation.

The roots of this Borg-like assimilation of the normals were starting to take hold during my college years. It was during this period that modern user interfaces and modern networking technology were developed in the basements of university buildings, research labs and a few obscure computer companies. It would take ten more years before graphical interfaces and easy to use networking were polished into the shiny perfection of the Internet.

It was at this point that everything tipped. I had just moved back to Pittsburgh after finishing graduate school. Strange things started happening. The CMU coke machine was in the news as an Internet Appliance. NPR started giving out an e-mail address for listener comments. They couldn't quite figure out how to read an e-mail address with the right cadence though. At one point, I got in an elevator and perfectly normal looking people had a conversation about how their Mapquest directions had steered them wrong. Pretty soon, the net had taken over.

These days people can't be away from their e-mail long enough to collect their carry-on luggage. You'll see them standing in the aisle, thumbing away on the tiny little keyboard like a 13 year old Japanese schoolgirl. Then, in the next seat over will be a 50 year old business man talking into one of those wireless cell phone headsets that make you look like Jean-Luc Picard after he has been assimilated.

Every square inch of our public spaces seems to be filled with networking and laptops. The worst thing that can happen on a business trip is for you to lose your Internet. You can't even escape laptops in bed.

It's suddenly hard to tell the difference between normal people and dorks. The guy you are partying with at the local hip dance bar could, the very next day, be writing code next to me and doing a better job of it. Dorks come with all sorts of different talents and interests now, not just the technical toys that sucked me in. There are dork musicians, dork writers, dork filmmakers, dork artists of all kinds.

You can't turn around at the movies without running into a dork on the screen. Dork action heroes type search phrases into their laptops and watch progress bars with nervous anticipation. This year, we even found out that James Bond, in addition to all of his other talents, is an expert at cracking the highest levels of computer security.

There are real world dorks in the movies as well. WordPlay, which ran in theaters last year and was somewhat successful, is a heartfelt and loving ode to the crossword puzzle solver. Here we follow computer technicians, librarians and professional puzzle people as they travel to the national crossword puzzle tournament. The tournament provides all the highs and lows of any great sports movie. And as if to show how mainstream the whole thing is, the film interleaves this story with interviews from real famous people who are also crossword geeks. Jon Stewart! Bill Clinton! The Indigo Girls! Mike Mussina! Even the jocks have turned out to be dorks.

In recent years the Christmas season seems to bring out the dork in all of us. This year was no different. Costco, Wal*Mart, and Target were all filled to capacity with TVs that use the souls of engineers to generate a picture. The Apple store had tables with literally several dozen pre-boxed iPods ready to become gifts. Right next to them was another table with pre-boxed laptop computers. Well-dressed people walked through the store mesmerized by the shiny bounty.

But the hottest items of the year were the things you could not find in stock. Regular people lined up in droves to try and find a Nintendo Wii or a Playstation 3. Twice now I have arrived at my local Target at 8am in a failed quest to get a Nintendo box for myself. Twice I have observed something amazing. Near the head of the line were multiple generations from the same family waiting together for their chance to obtain the glowing white box. The kids I can understand. The college students I can understand. The 45 year old camping out all night I have a hard time with. And yet there they are.

And we know they are everywhere because the next morning they get interviewed on NPR. Just ten short years ago this group of people couldn't pronounce an e-mail address with the right cadence. Today they don't even read paper letters on the air anymore. Only e-mail. A couple of years ago they ran an infuriating piece on how the digital generation is simply inscrutable to the poor normal people of the world. Now you can catch them running interviews from inside an online multiplayer video game.

The rest of the news media have nothing to be proud of either. The New York Times quoted Joystiq, a haven for geek news of questionable accuracy and even more questionable editorial standards, in their review of the Playstation 3. Time magazine has proclaimed 2006 to be the year of You Tube, with runner up prizes going to del.icio.us and Technorati. I am not even sure what Technorati is for, and there was a link there from the front page of this very site for the entire time I have been contributing.

In the larger view I don't really know what to make of this. I am not an observer of larger social trends. I just know how these trends affect my daily existence. All I know is that I grew up loving this stuff and now I have an uneasy feeling about never being able to escape it. I can't escape it in the news. I can't escape it in my escapist entertainment. I can't even escape it at home. The other month I went home to discover that my parents had been using Skype and a Skype router at home for what must have been at least a year. There I was with only a passing notion of what Skype even was (although I did think iChat was pretty cool). My parents had out-dorked me.

Maybe this is where the root of my anxiety lies. For all of my life my identity has been wrapped around the notion that I was out on the bleeding edge of the geek universe. But as I have grown older and more mature, this has become less and less true. Everything that I used to think was pretty cutting edge has become so mainstream that even the wankers at center-left news radio stations understand it. This leaves me in an uncomfortable personal position. I have lost my edge. I have been left behind. When the next wave of cool toys hits I'll be sitting on my porch screaming in a raspy voice at the local kids wondering why they need to play with such a darn fool device when in my day a normal computer with a god-damned keyboard was just fine. The kids will look back at me and try to figure out just how someone can get so old and clueless.

Productivity

2006-12-22 · by peterb

Today I got tons of stuff done at work, finished editing three articles for Played To Death, did the Christmas shopping, and began work on a gift I'm making for someone.

But I didn't write a real article for the weblog. My apologies. Anyone have a time machine?

Wiiblogging

2006-12-24 · by peterb

Surely, I must be one of the first people to post to their blog from a Nintendo Wii. I've only found one other Wiiblog entry so far.

To type, you use the Wiimote like a laser pointer. It's a bit ponderous. But editing is quite easy.

Hmmm. I wonder how much work it would be to attach little Mii icons to each post...

The user-agent comes across as “Opera/9.00 (Nintendo Wii; U; ; 1309-9; en)”

Happy festivus, everyone.

"Number of Comments" in XML feeds in Wordpress

2006-12-26 · by peterb

I got this working today in the Atom, RDF, and RSS 2.0 feeds. It's not working in the RSS 1 feed, but WordPress's RSS 1 feed sucks anyway, and if you're using that feed you should change to a different one.

Using the RDF feed as an example, all I did was change this line:

<content:encoded><![CDATA[<?php the_content('', 0, '') ?>]]></content:encoded>

to this:

<content:encoded><![CDATA[<?php the_content('', 0, '') ?><p><?php comments_popup_link('Comment now »', '1 Comment »', '% Comments »', 'commentslink'); ?></p>]]></content:encoded>

Hope that helps those of you who were looking to do something similar.

Of the Year

2006-12-27 · by psu

It's the time of year to do "best of the year" or "most of the year" or "worst of the year" lists. I couldn't focus on any one theme, so after spending some time in a food-induced coma, I came up with the following hodge podge of "of the year" topics.

Sports Gaming Console of the Year

The Sony PSP. Between Madden '07 and MLB 06: The Show, I've logged dozens of hours playing sports on this shiny black wonder. Both games play at least as well as their PS2 counterparts and neither is particularly stripped down. Madden in particular is better in every way when compared to the same game on the 360. The only real negatives are the load times in each game, but the instant-sleep more than compensates for this.

Moron Launch of the Year

There is a tie in this category. First, Sony gets the nod with the PS3. The only people who appeared to care about the PS3 launch were the Ebay scalpers. High price, a launch lineup that made the 360 look rich and the whole "looks-even-more-like-ass" emulation snafu didn't help matters. The result is that in stores everywhere, people are stampeding past in-stock PS3's to look at the empty Wii shelf.

Tied with Sony is Microsoft, with the Zune. The Zune is a cunning combination of an integrated user experience that barely works and completely screws all of the third parties that Microsoft signed on to their "open" DRM system. Way to go.

Unexpected Ass-kicking of the Year

Nintendo Wii. I still don't have one. Everyone I know wants one.

Most Infuriating Of the Year List

The normally excellent NPR interview program Fresh Air ran a list of "Cultural Defining Moments" the other week. In addition to having a title of questionable grammatical correctness, the program appeared to define "cultural" as "anyone famous being an asshole". Topping the list were Borat, Mel Gibson, Michael Richards, George Allen, the cartoons involving the Prophet Mohammed, and Stephen Colbert pissing off the uptight journalists at that special dinner they give to themselves.

What strikes me about this list the paltry amount of cultural content that it contains. Colbert and Borat are nearly sophisticated satire, but the rest of the list contains nothing that indicates the use of higher level brain function. To me, it seems to be more of a list of wet dreams for the people in the media who cover the media. It gives them a lot to talk to themselves about, while we look on and wonder why in the world anyone would care.

Left-Center Hard-on of the Year

NPR actually allowed the term Obamamania into the national news cast and then allowed their senior political reporters to go to NH an drool all over the annoited one and behold his supernatural glow. I feel sort of sorry for Obama, because he has obviously been annoited too soon, which means that at some point between now and 2008 he will become the new Howard Dean, and flame himself out in spectactular fashion.

Dork Nation Event of the Year

NPR has now run no less than three full length stories populated by people hanging around in Second Life. God what a bunch of geeks.

Game that Generated the Most Comments of the Year

This one is easy. No game generated more text on this site than Oblivion. I count eight or nine actual articles about the game. And, who can forget this classic collection of comments where we met an obscure yet brilliant Computer Science researcher.

Accidental Food Product of the Year

Karen made chocolate truffles. She forgot the egg yolks because she was having a busy day, full of distractions. As a result, the truffles taste like butter infused with dark chocolate. Or dark chocolate infused with butter. I can't decide. Still, it's a truly unique food sensation.

Next-Gen Raspberry of the Year

Ubisoft gets this one because the best way to play the new Splinter Cell game on an Xbox 360 is to buy the version for the Xbox and play that under emulation. The graphics are a bit worse, but you get actual co-op missions, much faster load times, a camera that is backed off a bit so I can see my feet, dialog with subtitles, and more depth in the game's narrative. It's sad that creating all those high resolution textures for the 360 game ate up so much schedule that they couldn't actually, ya know, finish the game.

Most Tortured Camera Launch of the Year

The Leica M8. Following on the heels of the ten pound digital back that they produced for their already five pount behemoth SLR, the R8, Leica finally answered the prayers of small-handed photographers everywhere by producing a digital body with the form and mechanics of their M series rangefinders. By all accounts, this should be the perfect digital camera for the guy who does not want to carry a bazooka-shaped professional SLR. Of course, this being Leica, they outsourced the sensor development to that other old world photographic power, Kodak. And, together, they botched it. Because of insuffciently aggressive IR filtering, the camera has color balance problems, especially in the dark tones.

In a fabulous twist of irony, the proposed fix for this problem is for Leica to give you a cheap IR filter to put on each of your lenses. You know, the ones with the glass of magical and mythic status. To get correct color, you have to put a cheap filter on your $4000 lens. Leica truly knows how to torture its faithful cult members.

Surprised At Sea

2006-12-28 · by peterb

When the remake of Sid Meier's Pirates! was released in 2004, I completely passed it by. I was thoroughly addicted to the original 1987 release. I simply assumed that the major effect of any remake would be to embitter me by wrapping the trappings of the franchise around a sucky game.

I recently rented the game from Gamefly, out of morbid curiosity.

I was wrong. The Xbox version of *Sid Meier's Pirates!* is a rare bird: it updates the earlier game to the modern era while maintaining most of what made it unique.

The game has gotten a graphical overhaul, as you'd expect, but the improvements go below the surface. The clever-but-clunky combat system (which always reminded me of combat from the Apple ][ game Moebius) has been streamlined and improved. It maintains the same basic mechanics — attack or parry low, middle, or high — but feels more cinematic. More dramatic. More piratey.

Sailing has become much easier, a development about which I feel conflicted. On the one hand, no one can deny the essential boredom of trying to sail East in the original game. Going from Cartagena to Barbados was an exercise in frustration, and it felt like it took hours. In the new game, sailing with versus against the wind is largely a distinction between "your ship sails incredibly fast" and "your ship sails only somewhat fast." On the one hand, that's a crime against "realism", so perhaps it should bother me. On the other hand, we're talking about a game where none of the daughters of the colony governors have smallpox scars on their face, so really worrying about "realism" at this point is silly. On the whole, I think this was a good call. When you get into ship-to-ship combat, the direction of the wind has the expected (and, dare I say it, realistic) effect; it's just on the overmap that it becomes a nonissue.

Speaking of pox-ridden daughters, one new addition to the game is a "romance mini-game" where you dance a minuet with, apparently, one of Elizabeth Bennett's less intelligent sisters. On the Xbox it's fairly mechanical and easy, but I'm told that in the Windows version of the game it is diabolically hard.

The game maintains the various "missions" available in the earlier title, although it's much easier to encounter them now. You are perfectly free to ignore the game's main quest and practice life as a peaceful trader, a nationalist privateer, or as a rogueish marine freebooter. The original Pirates!, along with Elite, might have been one of the first "sandbox" games. The remake honors that tradition.

You'll find the Xbox version of Pirates! on discount shelves in used game stores everywhere. This is, it seems to me, a no-brainer acquisiton. It provides most of the fun of playing the original version with none of the annoyances. It's a fine addition to anyone's game library. I'll be buying a copy shortly, and you should too.

Why I'll Never Write For IGN:

2006-12-29 · by peterb

I'm not retarded.

Courtesy of the forums at Quarter To Three comes this little gem: IGN declares the Playstation 3 to be the "best new game console" of 2006. Their rationale? The PS3 plays DVDs and you can install Linux on it. And maybe there might be a good game or two sometime next year.

Played To Death: Sam & Max Edition

2007-01-02 · by peterb

The January issue of Played To Death is out now and can be downloaded for free. In addition to the magazine's fine content, you can write in for a free beta key for NCSoft's new MMORPG "Dungeon Runners."

My reviews this month include Railroad Tycoon as this month's Retrograde, Trauma Center for the Nintendo Wii, and a review of the long-awaited PC adventure game Sam and Max Episode 1: Culture Shock.

You can also read my paranoid rantings about how "PC vs. Console" is the wrong question in the "Vertical" op-ed column.

If you're so inclined, you can help us whore PTD at Digg. You get absolutely nothing for doing this except my undying love.

Enjoy.

This Is What I Do

2007-01-03 · by psu

Once in a while, in the midst of casual conversation, someone will ask me what I do. When I was a graduate student, I would mutter something about computer science research, algorithms analysis and by the time the word "geometry" came out of my mouth after "computational" their eyes would glaze over and they would back away slowly. When you work in research, you can scare people away with the power of your abstraction.

I don't work in research anymore. I work in software production and once in a while I will spend some time trying to figure out how to boil the essence of the job down to a simple sound bite. With a few release cycles behind me, I finally came up with the right catch phrase. If you work in software engineering, and you are actually shipping something, you spend most of your time doing one thing: fixing bugs.

This insight is not surprising. After all, software is complicated and notoriously difficult to specify and design. The number of flows through the state machine that represents your average application with a GUI is staggering, and you can't really account for all of them ahead of time. The reality is that even though we try to do a lot of up front design and specification work ahead of the implementation, we can't escape the inevitable fix then test then fix then test some more cycle between when we think we have implemented all the features and when we can actually ship the final product.

I've been debugging code for more than 20 years now, and it's always been basically the same process:

  1. Find a sequence of operations that fails or produces the wrong answer or the wrong behavior.

  2. Make sure said operations produce exactly the same failure every time.

  3. Watch the application fail over and over again performing this sequence of operations.

  4. Isolate the failure to a particular piece of logic going haywire.

At this point, you generally know why the bug is happening. The critical activity here is between steps 3 and 4. If you think of the application under test as a gigantic state machine, what we are trying to do here is tease out the small subset of the application state that becomes incorrect in the particular case we are testing. Then we need to figure out how the state has become incorrect. The dance you do is generally the same.

  1. You run the test case right up to where the application is about to fail.

  2. You query the application about its state.

  3. You run a a bit more.

  4. You look query the application about its state.

And so on until that magic moment when between two program steps you see the state transition from being correct to being wrong. At this point you have essentially recorded the failure for posterity, and you are ready to fix the bug.

In all the time I've fixed code, the basic tool that you use to perform the above task has remained basically the same. You run the code in a debugger, which allows you to control the program's execution so that you can pause it at any time and look at the state you are interested in.

I have never liked debuggers. I don't like them because it's hard to get them to tell you what you want to know at the exact time you need to know it. I always end up in one of two scenarios: either it takes too long to single step all the way to the failure or I have to play whack-a-mole with breakpoints until I get lucky and manage to break at just the right point. Interactive applications also present some special problems because sometimes it can be hard or impossible to set breakpoints at certain places in code, because doing so lands you in the debugger after every event loop and the application can never make forward progress.

One alternative to debuggers is to put a lot of tracing code into the application itself, so the application essentially records its state to some external file over and over again while it runs. Then you slog through all of this trace to find the proof you need. This can work some of the time, but without some systematic way to format and analyze the trace, it's hard to glean any information from it. It is also notoriously difficult to effectively instrument the program to spit exactly the state you need and nothing more. The result is that rather than sitting in front of the debugger going step step step you sit in front of your trace, reading all the text to find the bits that tell you what went wrong. It's not necessarily any easier.

It always seemed to me that the ideal tool would be a debugger that let you run the failing test case once and recorded everything that the program did into a single place. You could then load this trace into a debugger and play it backwards and forwards, up and down, left and right, stopping and starting however you please. The debugger could also let you query and display any piece of state that draws your fancy as it plays the trace back. Since the trace captures absolutely everything that the program did, you can imagine an arbitrary level of introspection. In other words, such a debugger would combine the incremental step step watch watch aspect of a traditional debugger with the convenience of having tracing, but without the disadvantages of either. You don't need to actually run the test over and over again, you just play back the trace. You don't need to strategically instrument the code by hand, you just need to query the state of the application for the pieces you need to know about.

In other words, it would be the perfect tool for what software engineers do most. This tool would take pictures of programs failing, and allow us to discover those pictures in a way that is much less tedious than before. Happily, a friend of mine has been working on a system which does exactly this. Robert O'Callahan's Amber system promises to provide most of what I outline above. You can capture full trace and then play around and query that trace for the proof that you need. Of course, the capture part is pretty slow, but this is offset by the fact that you only need to do it once rather than dozens of times like we do now.

Rob deserves great fame and glory showing us that this can be done. Here's hoping that people figure out how enormously cool this tool could be. Maybe sometime before I retire we'll finally build a debugger that doesn't suck.

Play Me Some of That Old People Music Baby

2007-01-08 · by psu

Left to my own devices, I tend to listen to older music which is arguably for older people. I like Classical music, especially from the late Classical through the Romantic periods. The more modern stuff is OK, but you have to pick and choose carefully. I also like a lot of old Jazz, up through the classic period of the middle to late 1960s. I also like modern recordings of modern groups that are stylistically similar to music like this.

This leaves me in a bit of a bind with respect to pop music. I don't pay attention, yet I need a certain density of the stuff for car trips and whatnot. Well, with the aging of the Baby Boomers, I have found my happy medium, so to speak. I only buy pop music that I hear about on NPR.

This didn't start as any conscious plan. I think I was in college when I just stopped having time to pay attention. The last contemporary band that I can remember following was Talking Heads, but really only up through their Little Creatures album. They had already long since peaked anyway. In graduate school, I bought primarily highbrow LP records of serious music. Pretty soon, I hadn't bought a pop record in several years.

Over time, I noticed that occasionally NPR would do a story about some band somewhere, and by some miracle they could actually play music. For example:

In retrospect, it was inevitable that NPR would become my pop music source. Unlike Jazz or Classical, I don't have a compass for pop music. I don't have a feel for the various performers, song writers, and performance styles. I don't know what I like and don't like. I also don't want to have to "explore" and "discover" the acts I like on my own. I don't have the patience to deal with Sturgeon's law to find the occasional record that I can listen to. In other words, I want NPR to help me out in the pop music realm the same way others might want for Classical. I want them to digest the material for me and then spoon feed it to me in a series of small digestible bits.

They do this very well. From time to time, each of their news shows will profile some band. These interviews are usually boring and pointless because musicians play music, they do not speak intelligently on a wide range of subjects. In between the boring interview bits, they will play clips from the record. If I can stand to listen to the all of the clips in the story, there is a good chance the record will be good. This happens maybe one time in ten. For some reason most band profiles you hear on the radio are breathless interviews with artists of oh-so-deep integrity who unfortunately can't play an instrument or sing in tune.

However, over the last few years, the hit ratio seems to be increasing. This makes sense. Since NPR is run by old people, they have started covering more and more records that are actually good! The longer they go, the older they will get. Just this week the morning show ran an extended interview with the son of George Martin, Giles. The subject? The soundtrack for a Las Vegas circus show featuring mashups of original Beatles songs mixed and merged and mashed together from digital versions of the original four track tapes. Of course I had to buy that. Who can resist such a thing.

Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron

2007-01-09 · by peterb

"Nobody owns life, but anyone who can pick up a frying pan owns death." --William S. Burroughs

Last night while cooking on my ancient, somewhat crappy electric range I heard an ominous "pop!" Some magic smoke came out, and the circuit breaker tripped. I switched burners, reset the breaker, and went back to cooking. But afterwards, I wondered if this was a Sign that I should be looking at a new range. So after dinner I did what any right-thinking American would do. I did some online window-shopping.

For those of you who haven't shopped for a cooking range recently, there are basically three options. Putting aside the question of gas vs. electric oven (the answer is "you always want electric"), you still have to pick a stove top. The three reasonable choices are gas, electric coils, or electric-heated ceramic.

Gas stoves are a little more efficient, but generally have dodgy heat control (the lower the heat you want, the dodgier), and are annoying to clean. Electric coils work wonderfully at low heat but are also annoying to clean, and often look cheap. Ceramic stovetops are attractive and are very easy to clean.

I was leaning towards ceramic when I discovered an amazing fact: most manufacturers recommend that you don't use cast-iron cookware on ceramic stovetops. This, for me, is enough to eliminate them from consideration. I can cook over electric, gas, steam, wood, charcoal, or the scorched flesh of my enemies. It doesn't really matter where the heat comes from. But you'll only take away my cast-iron skillet from my cold, dead hands.

If I had to pick only two pieces of cookware for my kitchen, they'd be a cast-iron skillet, and a stockpot. Everything else is negotiable.

Cleaning the Skillet

For a number of years, I was confused about how to clean a cast-iron skillet. It seemed like there were so many rules! Don't use water! Don't use soap or detergent! Don't use steel wool! Anything which violated the sacrosanct and mystical act of seasoning the skillet is verboten, and will subject you to the mockery of sophisticated people. Most of those people can explain in detail how you shouldn't clean it, but never deign to tell you how you should clean it.

Eventually, though, the magnificent Alton Brown explained how to do it in simple terms, which I will pass on to you:

Heat the skillet a little bit if it is cold. Dump a generous amount of very coarse kosher salt into the skillet. Get a paper towel and scrub the skillet with the towel and the salt. This should take care of even the toughest sticky goo in the skillet. Then you dump the salt out and rub it with another paper towel with a little bit of a neutral-tasting oil on it. That's it.

Have fun in the kitchen!

*The title of this article comes from a graphic novel by Daniel Clowes that has nothing whatsoever to do with stoves. Or skillets. Unless you're cooking fish roe.*

Buona notte, Antonio

2007-01-10 · by peterb

Ti mancheremo molto.

iTunes Rules

2007-01-11 · by psu

iTunes told me today that it has 440 albums in its database. That number seemed high to me, but I have been ripping the occasional disk once in a while ever since I got my iMac two years ago. And, every new disk I buy generally goes into the machine. After bootstrapping the one true indexing system, I have been more motivated to actually rip and catalog the disks. While iTunes is not the ideal catalog database, you can muddle through by following some simple workflow rules. The goal is to have the music be easy to browse and search on both the main iTunes machine and in the iPod.

The first rule is that there are only three genres of music:

  1. Pop

  2. Jazz

  3. Classical

I reject the ludicrous and neurotic over-categorization of music. Especially popular music. So, R&B is pop. Blues is pop. Electronic Trance Drool Dance Laser Techno Jerk-Off Ska Vocal Sampling ... is pop.

The reason for this is simple. It makes it easy to construct shuffle playlists, party shuffle lists, autofill lists, and so on. I don't have time to sit there and write complicated queries to match against every freak's idea of what the correct set of genres is. Having only three makes this easy.

The second rule is: the iTunes data model is fairly simple, so aggressively de-normalize the data. This is especially true for Classical music where the single artist single song model really breaks down. If you are not careful, you'll go and browse albums or songs on the iPod and see 50,000 titles called "String Quartet XYZ in B Major" and so on. This is useless. The solution is to put the key artist or composer in every field of the database so they will show up in all major views in both iTunes and on the iPod. Of course, you have to do some work to be careful and keep your de-normalized formats as uniform as possible. Life is hard.

Sadly, almost no one who uses the CDDB follows these rules, so for most Classical records, you have to completely rewrite the meta-data.

The third rule is: Multiple disk albums count as one album. Do not put the disk number in the title. This will make iTunes think it's a completely different album, which is sort of stupid. Instead, use the "Disk N of M" meta-data fields. I forget about this rule from time to time and have to go fix things.

The final rule is: if you have a filing system for CDs, put the CD into the filing system immediately after you rip it. I never follow this rule, so my disks are all over the house in little piles and I can never find anything. It's getting better though. I have about 140 disks filed now. So I guess I have about 400300 to go to catch up to my iTunes database.

Return to Return to Infinite Space

2007-01-12 · by peterb

I've written about Weird Worlds: Return To Infinite Space before. But I simply wanted to say:

It's been about a year, and I'm still playing it. It lacks a little bit of the approachable lickability of the earlier game (simply by having a "large" map option), but it's still a fantastic game. I am rapidly becoming a Shrapnel Games fanboy, even if they're just the publisher.

Weird Worlds: Return To Infinite Space. $25 and a Mac or PC will get you more fun than you'll have with pouty androgenous antiheroes all year long.

Saturday in the Strip

2007-01-15 · by psu

It was another Saturday in the Strip. La Prima and Il Piccolo Forno were as full as always. Actually, they were even more full than usual, especially for a weekend in Janurary. There was coffee coming out of the cafe. There were baked goods and other food in the bakery. People milled around outside. People shuffled in and out of the doors. People enjoyed each other's company in the presence of the best combination of coffee and baked goods that the city has to offer. But this Saturday was different. The pastry wasn't right. The pastry wasn't right because Antonio passed away last week. The pastry will never be right again.

I first experienced the magic combination of La Prima espresso and Antonio's pastry in the U.S. Steel building. This was in 1994 when I had my first job Downtown. La Prima had set up a stand in one of the lobby areas of the building. I recall that it was next to a sprawling coffee stand that took up most of the rest of the lobby, complete with a service counter, tables, and so on. The stand seemed overmatched, but it had two things that the other place didn't:

  1. Good coffee.

  2. Antonio's mele.

The mele are hard to describe. They are substantial, yet not heavy. They are covered in a sugary syrup, but they are not too sweet. The pastry has the perfect combination of a flakey outside and a chewy inside. The only person on earth that I know of who doesn't love them is my wife. I never figured that out. But life has to have some mysteries.

The cart stayed up in the lobby of the tower for a while, but eventually it was gone, unable to compete on a volume basis with its neighbor, who could sell metric tons of soupy brown water to the ignorant bankers and lawyers until the end of the world.

Later, I found out that La Prima had a retail location in the Strip and that Antonio and his wife had set up shop next door. We started going on Saturdays, and the occasional weekday morning. Initially, I would get coffee and Karen and I would share some combination of the whatever was available. There were mele, but there was also the temptation of the muffins (chocolate chip!), the sfogliatelle, the cream puffs, the peach cakes, the olive bread, the fritatta, the tortas, the cookies, twists, and the pizza.

The pizza deserves special mention. My single greatest food dilemma at Il Piccolo Forno in the morning is pizza or mele. The mele are the perfect sweet pastry to go with your coffee. The pizza is simply the best pizza that there is on this earth. Sam said it at the memorial service on Saturday and Sam was right. The crust is thin with just the right combination of crunch and chew. The sauce is something you could eat by the spoonful by itself. The cheese never falls off. My personal favorite are the the plain, the pepperoni, the anchovy, and most of all, the green olives.

Over time, Saturday at Sam and Antonio's place became a ritual so ingrained that missing it for more than a week or two became painful. We came to know the regulars who showed up at the place around the same time we did every week. My son does not recognize any baked muffin product that did not come out of Antonio's oven as a correct and edible food item. He's young but he learns fast. Pete and I probably ended up writing this humble web site together because we used to meet up in the Strip on Saturdays for a while a few years ago. In my own ignorant self-centeredness, I thought I was at least familiar with most of the people who went through that place in the mornings and on the weekends.

Now that Antonio is gone, I realize that I was wrong. I barely knew any of the people he served and befriended on a daily basis. The memorial service on Saturday showed this to me. There were hundreds of people there, all of whom cared about Antonio and his family enough to come out to the Strip on a rainy afternoon and stand in the chilly air to celebrate his life and everything he had given us. The best measure of the impact that this simple bakery and its owners have had on the city around them is the crowd that was at the memorial service on this Saturday afternoon.

I didn't really know Antonio that well either. It is not in my nature to strike up that sort of personal relationship on a regular basis. It's a regretful failing. I do know that he was kind enough to let me take pictures in their place for a student photography project that I was working on. He was even kind enough to tell me that the pictures were good. I know that he and Carla loved to play with my son, and they would even give us pizza for the right to do so. Both he and Carla have fed us extremely well at certain times when we desperately needed it. But I don't have any great Antonio stories, not like the people at the service had.

My best story is actually about Carla. When I worked at my second startup downtown, we would sometimes take long lunches in the Strip because we were running on funny Internet Bubble VC money and we didn't need to work. Il Piccolo Forno had recently started doing their pasta lunches and the special pasta that day was lasagne. They make this wonderful lasagne with ground beef and bechamel sauce. One of the guys we had with us, Joe, saw this on the menu and ordered it without thinking. Then, a minute later, he realized that he forgot to ask if it was vegetarian. He tried to get Carla's attention a few times, but failed to do so before the food came out. The place was very busy, and Carla put the plate of food down and zipped off to get more. In one final desperate act, Joe flagged down Carla and asked if they had any vegetarian lasagne or if he could trade his dish for something else. He was about halfway through his question when Carla ran out of patience and just blurted out, "Lasagne has MEAT IN IT" and stormed back into the kitchen to finish the next set of orders. This sums up the style of the place. There are simple rules. You follow these simple rules and you get great food.

After the service, we went back to La Prima, where they were serving coffee and food. I doubt if I could have named a tenth of the people in the place. All of the regulars that I was familiar with were there. The old Italian guys, Craig Marcus, that kid who is always there with his mom, the various bakery helpers, and on and on. Even if the pastry wasn't right, we could all sit there and remember all of those other Saturdays when the coffee was perfect, the mele and pizzas still warm and the tables and sidewalks full of people being enriched by this bounty.

Legion Arena

2007-01-16 · by peterb

I have a stack of strategy games I've been meaning to review recently. I was talking to psu about this just the other day. He was saying how he always thinks they sound great, but when actually faced with the prospect of playing one, he tends to lose interest fairly quickly. I, in my turn, said that I tended to play them until the computer defeated me in a particularly offhand and crushing way, at which point I'd throw the game across the room and yell at it for cheating.

[Legion Arena

Legion Arena (click to enlarge)](http://wptest.tleaves.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/01/legion1.jpg)

A fairly common attribute of strategy games is that they tend to be time consuming, and they tend to require sustained concentration. In today's space-age-au-go-go world, it's pretty rare for me to find enough free time to focus intently for, say, 4 hours -- friends come visit, the phone rings, or what have you. This means that the only strategy games I can truly enjoy anymore are those which, through smart design, let me enjoy the good parts of strategy games ("Ah, a clever problem. Let me try this solution. It worked — I'm a genius!) while avoiding the bad parts ("Since I lost my job at the Taco Bell, I've been carefully modeling the effectiveness of artillery suppression at the Battle of Antietam, using this scale model I've built in my mom's basement. Want to see my combat tables?")

I've written about some of the better games of this genre before. Here's another one. It's called Legion Arena.

Legion Arena is a fast-playing yet thoughtful tactical-level game that simulates field encounters between armies in the era of the middle Roman Republic. It also borrows some concepts liberally from role-playing games. The game is presented as a series of encounters between your legion and various enemies. The most important tactical choice you make is how to deploy your troops, and what their initial orders are. Terrain is critically important: lightly armored troops have a strong advantage in wooded, rocky or boggy terrain, while heavy infantry and cavalry perform best on an open field. Troops can be given a set of initial orders, such as "short hold," "advance," "flank," and will try to carry them out faithfully. When one of your centuries comes into contact with the enemy, they rush each other and clash swords.

[Legion Arena

Utter chaos (click to enlarge)](http://wptest.tleaves.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/01/legion2.jpg)

It's at moments like this that Legion Arena shines. It feels a bit like being able to control the camera in one of the battle scenes in the Lord of the Rings movies. Each of the troops in your legion is individually animated, and this helps eliminate some of the abstraction that can afflict military games. While you can issue orders during a battle (allowing for a substantial delay for a runner to deliver your new orders) there's a sense that the chaos of the battle is, once joined, nearly beyond your control. This is a great incentive to get your battle plans right the first time.

Battles are generally not won by killing every enemy, but by making enough of the enemy's units rout. There are few sights more satisfying than watching 70 soldiers drop their weapons and flee headlong from the field. As long as they're the other guy's.

Battles earn you gold and prestige. You can spend prestige on replacement soldiers for your legion, and you can spend gold on additional troops of varying types, as well as equipment that improves your troops abilities. Likewise, your centuries earn experience points which can be spent to learn more skills. You can quickly develop and personalize various armies; creating anti-infantry or anti-cavalry specialists, for example, or marksmen, and so on.

The game ships with three campaigns: a short tutorial campaign, a very involved Roman campaign, and a smaller but still lengthy Celtic campaign. An expansion pack called Cult of Mithras is already out, which has Romans and Zombies. I'm telling you, Zombies = Profit!.

It's a great game, though, even without the zombies. The game is, as I've discussed, tactical in nature. Those who are looking for a grand strategy game won't find it here. Rather, Legion Arena focuses very intently on doing one thing, and doing it well. In this they succeed grandly; I can think of a number of other recent games that tried to straddle the border between strategy and tactics and failed at both. With this game, I can decide to play for only 15 minutes, play one battle or two, but still be engaged and challenged. Try doing that with, say, Civ IV. The decision to focus the game firmly on the tactical level was a smart one.

Now if I can just convince them to license the battle visualization engine to the guys who made Dominions 3..

Legion Arena was developed for Windows by Slytherine Software. The Mac version is available from Freeverse Software. Demos are available for both platforms. Freeverse Software graciously provided a review copy.

Whole Flax Seed Crackers

2007-01-17 · by peterb

Lately I've been trying to limit my intake of white starch. Most whole grain crackers seem to be 1% whole grain and 99% white flour. But the other day at Whole Foods I found a yummy little package of flaxseed crackers. They were crispy, flavorful, they held up well to cheese, and were otherwise nearly perfect. The only problem was that they cost something like $6 for a tiny little package.

So I figured out how to make them myself.

I searched the net for a while, but most of the recipes I found use a combination of whole flax seeds and flax meal. The purist in me, once he knew that crackers with whole flaxseed were possible, would settle for nothing less. So here's how to do it.

Ingredients: -some flax seeds (try between a 1/2 cup and a cup for your first batch) -some water -a couple of teaspoons of salt.

Put the flax seeds in a big bowl and add fresh water until they're just about covered. Leave them alone for 15 to 20 minutes. When you come back, most of the water will have been absorbed. Add more water (about the same amount as you did the first time) and stir. Go away for another 20 minutes. When you come back, the flaxseeds should be thoroughly slimy, covered in a substance that looks and feels just like eggwhites.

Preheat the oven to 200 degrees.

Cover a pan with parchment paper. Dump the mixture out on the pan and spread it out with a spatula. You want a "thickness" of about 3 flax seeds or so. Precision is not critical here. Put the pan in the oven and ignore it for 45 minutes or so. When it comes out, it should be mostly dry. Peel the mixture off and rip it into manageable chunks on a plate (they will still be somewhat soft, but shouldn't actually be wet -- if they're still wet, put them back in the oven, and possibly turn up the heat). Leave the chunks out to air-dry.

Congratulations. You now have yummy flaxseed crackers, with no gluten, very few carbohydrates, and a better taste than most of what you'll buy at the store.

A Day in the Strawberry Mashup Walrus

2007-01-18 · by psu

As a general rule, I don't like covers. This makes me Pete's mortal enemy. Part of the nature of modern music is that much of it is performed and recorded by the people who wrote the music, and these recordings form what I perceive to be the correct way to perform the piece. There are exceptions to this small psychological tic, but not that many.

I particularly dislike covers of the Beatles. There is a famous family incident wherein Karen's grandfather asked her in hushed tones if I disliked music because a MUSAK arrangement of Eleanor Rigby came on over the radio, causing me to slump my head into my hands and sob like a little child. The Beatles should sound like The Beatles. It's just wrong if they don't. With this in mind, I find it amazing that I have enjoyed this new record, Love, which mixes and matches and layers and deconstructs the classic songs in unexpected ways.

To give you an idea of what's going on here, the second track on the record starts with the opening chord from A Hard Day's Night. It then jumps into that drum solo from The End on Abbey Road. Under this you hear the string buildup from A Day in the Life layered over the opening chords from Get Back. Then there is bit of guitar solo from The End and finally it all drops away and we are into the main body of Get Back.

I should hate this shit, but on this record it works.

The producer of the album, Giles Martin (son of George Martin), worked from the original session tapes which were digitally recorded for ease of manipulation. The arrangements are done with a careful thought and attention to detail. There are unexpected juxtapositions, different versions of familiar songs, and there is the fun of trying to guess where everything you are hearing comes from originally. Ultimately, I think the album works because through all of the digital trickery, it sounds like The Beatles. The style, energy and creativity of the originals all come through in these mashups, no matter how thick the mash gets and you can't help but get addicted to it. Finally, as others have said, the record sounds fantastic. The remixed tracks pop out of the speakers, even after they've been encoded into an iPod.

The fact that a project like this can succeed illustrates an interesting difference between modern musical performances and those further in the past. As I said before, the recording is at the center of much of modern music. While much of The Beatles original genius is in their sheet music, almost as much is in the recording and the production of those classic albums. What this record made me realize (years late I'm sure) is that in the digital age we are also now free to interpret recorded music in ways that are similar to how performers in the past used to interpret sheet music. The original session tracks can serve as raw material for any number of different musical statements. Inevitably, some will be more worthwhile than others. For me Love is a testament to the talent and taste of both its original creators and their new interpreter.

Birth of America

2007-01-19 · by peterb

Next up in my Huge Pile Of Wargames is AGEOD's Birth of America, published by Matrix Games.

Google informs me, although I find it hard to believe, that I have not written any articles on Tea Leaves that use the word "grognard." Grognard, as I've heard it used, is a word to describe a hardcore player of "board" wargames. The sort of person for whom a night without calculating the percentage chance that an assaulting tank will overrun dug-in infantry is like a day without sunshine.

Birth of America is a game that could have been written by a grognard, yet it's playable by the casual gamer. That, in my mind, is a bit of an achievement.

My first exposure to grognard-style war games came in the late 1970's, when I was about 9 or 10 years old. My dad picked up a game for me at a flea market called Battle Fleet Mars, by a company called SPI. He figured hey, Peter likes space. He likes board games. This is a space board game for two players. Maybe it'll be fun!

The game came with a bunch of really cool boards and a ton of cardboard squares, which I eagerly punched out. I read the instructions, which began with a nicely written dramatic summary of the start of a rebellion by the Martian colonies against an Earth-based oligopoly called the Ares Corporation. After that, the game described the rules. I went to my dad and said "I don't really understand this. How do we play?" Dad spent an hour reading the game manual, after which he put it down, looked at me, and said "I have no idea how to play either."

That's a pretty typical first exposure to a grognard game. Old-school grognard games weren't really designed for fun the way you and I understand it. Some people played them because of fascination with a particular historical period, while others played them specifically because they enjoyed a particular type of "game as simulation."

There are two things about this type of game: first, they all assume that you already know how to play war games, and they're usually built around a unifying idea. The unifying idea behind Battle Fleet Mars was to simulate 3-dimensional ship-to-ship combat. To do that, they provided two boards with empty grids on them, one labeled "X-Y" and one labeled "X-Z". "I'm firing a missile" you might announce. Then you'd count off impulses and every so often, based on the speed of each ship and missile, move the appropriate chits on both the X-Y and X-Z boards. In other words, the game was completely barking insane(footnote 1), and being able to figure out how to play it is more a sign of fairly well-developed mental illness, rather than an indicator of any sort of deficiency.

The arrival of computers made grognard-style games infinitely more playable, although it took a while for designers to fully adapt to the advantages that modern UIs offer. In the better designed games, the plusses of grognard-style games (attention to detail, nice maps, intriguing "what-if" scenarios) are still there, while the minuses (looking up numbers in tables, realizing you've lost three of the most crucial of those goddamn stupid square cardboard chits, having to smell the guy next to you) are gone.

[Birth Of America

I love a good map](http://tleaves.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/01/s339_washington.jpg "Birth Of America")

Which brings us to Birth of America which is, as I said, a grognard game with a very non-grognard interface. The game's unifying theme is the idea that during the period of the American Revolutionary war, great swaths of territory were being patrolled and controlled by a minimal number of military units.

This theme focuses the game in some very interesting ways. Many older computer games think of war games as being like Chris Crawford's Eastern Front, or Gary Grigsby's War in Russia — static battle lines of seemingly endless units reinforcing each other and slowly pushing like sumo wrestlers. Birth of America, contrariwise, is more like a game of New World Whack-A-Mole. For example, in my first crack at the French and Indian War scenario I force-marched Braddock's army out through the Alleghenies and took Fort Duquesne by storm before the first winter, only to find that French raiders were able to burn fields all the way from Virginia to Philadelphia, unopposed except for ineffective local militia. In a more typical wargame, you would probably have had the option to recruit more units and set up a picket defense. In this game, that's not really practical: you're a few thousand Europeans on a huge continent, most of which consists of dangerous wilderness.

The game is strategic, rather than tactical, which is to say logistics are of significant importance. Operating in enemy-controlled territory will quickly deplete your troops of supplies. Contrariwise, taking strategic towns will impact the level of support you receive from the local populace, which will in turn affect your militia levies. Each scenario lets you play as either the British or American (or, if appropriate, French) sides, and indicates before you start which side is favored to win. Most of the scenarios are fairly evenly balanced. The British, generally, have better troops and more mobility, while the Americans have greater local support and a more consolidated position. The French can sabotage enemy forts by hiding extremely stinky cheeses in their larders.(Footnote 2)

Each turn simulates a month of real time. You issue orders to your commanders and their armies, and when you hit "end turn" each day is simulated. In addition to movement, you can order troops to maintain one of four "postures" -- assault, aggressive, defensive, or passive. If two units are in the same region and at least one is in aggressive or assault posture, combat occurs. Combat is resolved automatically, and on the next turn you'll receive a report of the result of the carnage. This is in some respects the weakest part of the game; even after playing a few full games, I have trouble interpreting the after action reports of battles. It's never exactly clear to me why I won (or lost) a given battle. That in turn makes it hard to plan future operations.

Weather is simulated — woe betide the army that finds itself in a wilderness area in winter, when the map is covered in white — and armies will suffer more attrition when in the backcountry as opposed to the more developed areas. You will have the assistance of various native tribes in different scenarios. Since the natives aren't idiots, they always return to their home settlement for the winter. Your regular troops aren't quite so lucky. In addition to regulars and militia, there are also artillery, supply, and various types of naval units at your disposal.

The game ships with a straightfoward tutorial which introduces the interface, although not the strategies. The polish on the game is fairly high. There are a few unfortunate UI interactions, but for a game of this type the overall quality is satisfying.

So, should you get it? I think there are two types of people who would be entranced by this game: those who are fascinated with this period of history, and those who think the specific strategic challenge of fighting in a large area with only a few troops is interesting. For the casual gamer with no interest in early American history, Birth of America is probably a little too abstruse. For those who are interested in the colonial period (yes, re-enactors and everyone who enjoyed Colonial Williamsburg, I'm looking at you), you should definitely download the demo and check it out.

Birth of America for Windows, $39.95. Developed by AGEOD, published by Matrix Games. A free demo is available. The publisher graciously provided a review copy of this game.

Footnote 1: ...and boring. Footnote 2: OK, I'm lying about that last one.

New Ratings System

2007-01-22 · by psu

We here at Tea Leaves don't rate things that we review. In particular, we don't rate the video games that we review. After all, we are self-absorbed wankers with an inflated opinion of the quality of our own writing. We would like to think that we provide insightful, almost literary commentary rather than a simple consumerist analysis. We want to tell you what it's like to play the game, and maybe a little bit about what the game means. Of course this is all just pretentious nonsense. We play the games and then we write down the first random thought that pops into our heads.

In this spirit, today I present a new ratings system for the video games that we write about. I call it the "Ebay" rating system. The principle is pretty simple. I buy a game. I rate the game according to the number of times I play the game before I give up on it and sell it on Ebay. The scale is from 1 to 5. If I make it to 5, then the game is at least worth keeping. These days, that's about the highest praise that I can muster.

This system is inspired by my most recent scheme of avoiding Gamefly. The scheme is also simple. Find someone who will sell your games on Ebay for you for free. Then, whenever you get the urge to try a new game that you are not sure of, don't worry. Buy the game at full price and play it for a week. If you can't make it through five sessions without avoiding that seething hatred and general frustration, have your Ebay friend list it. Inevitably, some moroncustomer out on the interweb will show up and pay you apromixately five dollars less than retail to take your game away from you. Why these people don't just walk down to the local Target and buy the game for five dollars more is a question that will never be answered by God or Man.

Anyway. The first game I used this system on was the 360 version of NCAA Football. Man, I tried to like that game. I played it every night for a week, and every single session ended with me staring at the television with a look of complete confusion and disbelief on my face. I simply could not fathom how a game could be so completely frustrating to play.

Later, I picked up the 360 Splinter Cell, which I reviewed here. Under the new system, the game would rate about a three. I got $55 for the thing.

For reasons that still elude me I bought Rainbow Six Vegas sometime after this. I think I also bought Final Fantasy XII at the same time. Rainbow Six lasted 3 nights. FFXII is a solid 5. I played it for a good month and plan to keep playing it for at least another week.

I believe I used the proceeds from the Rainbow Six sale to buy the Xbox (not 360) version of the new Splinter Cell game, which I have enjoyed. It's at about a 4 now, but if I make it into the second set of missions I think it will reach the plateau of a 5.

So there you have it. Never let it be said that we here at Tea Leaves can't occasionally distill our content into easy digestible bits. Plus, it's cheaper than Gamefly!

My Wii and Mii

2007-01-23 · by psu

I found myself awake on Sunday morning at 6am. I couldn't get back to sleep, so I did what everyone else is doing these days. I went to the Target to see if there was a line of people waiting to get a Wii. It was cold on Sunday, so there were only about 10 people there. I waited about ten minutes, got a ticket and then 45 minutes later walked into the store and picked up the machine. Since I got there before the store opened, this breaks the letter of my usual rule, which is to never buy anything during a fake shortage. But, since the Target did not sell out before I left, I think I maintained the spirit of the rule.

So here is a first impression: the machine is not quite magical, and Madden sucks. I might get rid of it.

OK I lied. I probably won't get rid of it. I already bought some Wii points after all. However, it is true that the machine is not quite magical and Madden does suck.

Pete has alluded to the fact that the Wiimote seems both more precise and less precise. I think I can be more specific. The Wiimote is fantastic at gesture recognition, but it is a craptastic pointing device. I will use an old-skool analogy here. Back in the day, there were games that used the old Apple II paddles for control. These games worked in one of two modes. Some games would position the square that represented you on the screen by reading the absolute value out of the paddle. Others would read deltas from the paddle and move you to the right place based on the deltas. Pointing at things with the Wii feels like trying to play the first sort of game. This is ironic since it's almost surely the case that the machine is using a combination of triangulation and interpolation to run the pointer.

All I know is, it's impossible to hit small targets or move the pointer a small distance without it jumping around and missing. The UI of the machine seems geared for this, since the buttons are all very large.

Which brings me to Madden.

I like to play Madden as more of a tactical strategy game than an arcade football game. Sadly, some interface choices on the part of EA make the Wii version of the game nearly impossible to play this way. In order to beat up on the computer team effectively, you need to be able audible out of the play you picked and into something that will work better against the opponent's defensive alignment. To do this on a PS2 you do this:

  1. Hit square, hit one other face button to pick a play you previously stored as audible.

  2. If you audible to a pass play, you can further change the routes of your receivers by hitting the Triangle button and a couple of other face buttons.

The result it that you can completely change up what you do in about 2.4 seconds.

Here is how you do it on the Wii.

  1. To audible you point the Wiimote at the screen. Then you wave it around to figure out where the cursor is. Then you slllooooowly push it around to try and get the little orange dot under the QB, who normally already has an orange circle under him. You can't hit the O-Line which is 2mm in front of the QB, because then something else happens. You can't hit the RB 2mm behind the QB because then something else happens. Then you hold down the A button, then cancel because you missed. Then you try again. And hit cancel because you missed. Then finally you get the menu .5 seconds before you get a penalty for delay of game.

  2. Changing receiver routes is almost as hard, but not quite. First you have to bring up the play-art screen. Then make the receiver you want to change the primary receiver. Then you can audible his route. Then maybe you need to pick some other receiver as the primary.

The result is that it's nearly impossible to set things up at the line before the play clock runs out. Not surprisingly, I find this frustrating. The game's play calling screen also requires that you use the pointer to pick formations and plays. This is also remarkably error prone and annoying. In general, it seems like EA decided to try and use the Wiimote as a surrogate for a mouse, and this fails spectacularly. Thus, my dreams of a Madden that has the gameplay of the PS2 version but with slightly better graphics are dashed again. So far every single version for one of the new consoles is crippled and awful in some way.

Meanwhile, most of the gesture controls are more effective. Passing, stiff arms, and so on are all not that hard to pull off. I can't figure out kicking, but I can never figure out kicking.

The gesture controls also make Wii Sports about 50 times more fun than Madden. No pointing at tiny targets that you just can't hit. Wii Sports is pure swinging flailing dancing fun. I'm sure that some will claim that's it's just a tech demo lacking in "depth". These people should be ignored.

Finally, I couldn't walk out of the store without Zelda. I ran Link around the opening village a bit. I only have two things to say before playing this game more:

  1. People complaining about the graphics are morons.

  2. The controls are kind of sloppy and hard to get used to, but then that's exactly how they were on the Gamecube too, so no real complaints.

The Wiimote targeting in Zelda is a bit better than Madden. There is a setup screen that lets you calibrate the sensors to be a little less spastic. But even with all that, targeting the slingshot without auto-aim is still slow, no faster than the old analog stick. Meanwhile, the gesture mechanics all work pretty well. It's too bad every swing gets you the same kind of swing though. You swing up, Link swings sideways. Boo.

While Madden is something of a bust, Zelda and Wii Sports and the virtual console are more than enough to justify the hour or so that I waited to get the box. Overall one has to marvel at how shrewd a tactical move the Wii has proven to be. Rather than pile features that nobody wants into a huge and expensive behemoth, Nintendo has delivered a nice little white box with a few new twists that most everyone will enjoy. And, they can make money on every box they sell for around half the price of the competition. Here's hoping that there are a few good games next Christmas so they can keep up the momentum.

Game Publisher To Release Game Soon; We Reprint Their Press Release Here

2007-01-24 · by peterb

Tea Leaves has learned that PR Games' new title, Hype V: Revenge of Hypenos, has gone pre-gold. Hype V, the fifth entry in the ground-breaking Hype series, has been eagerly awaited by gamers everywhere. In an interview, included in the press release, PR Games president Barry Womble said "I am pleased to make a statement that will make sure that all news coverage of Hype V will be 'on message': Bump mapping. Online multiplayer. Exciting downloadable content."

PR Games Liason to Online Amateur Press, Judy Nails, concurred with Womble's analysis. "We think that Hype V, with its bump mapping, online multiplayer, and excitable downloadable content, is going to be warmly received by the online community, the 'early adopters' and the 'hardcore'. In fact, we know it will be, because they have no choice. The gamers who read gaming websites religiously visit sites that update regularly. The gaming websites themselves are therefore driven by a need to publish many articles a day, in order to appear current. But who wants to generate that much original content? No one! Consequently, we send out our press releases and the gaming websites publish them practically verbatim, sometimes just prepending '[Site name here] has learned that...'" God," Nails gushed, "it's almost like a dream come true."

When asked by herself whether any gaming sites might decline to print the release, or whether sites might publish details not included in the release to get exclusive content, Nails smiled ruefully. "That doesn't really happen very often. First off, most people reading the web are just skimming articles, not reading in depth. So if 8 gaming magazines print a press release, and a 9th one doesn't, the conclusion the casual reader reaches is that the 9th site isn't as up to date as all the others. So you have to print something. And as for doing research and getting a scoop: what is there to say other than 'Hype V, with its bump mapping, online multiplayer, and exciting downloadable content is coming out soon?' No, we fully expect that everyone will be on message. Hype V will be in stores this spring. Pre-order your copy today!"

News of Hype V's imminent release has spread quickly throughout the blogosophere. Hundreds of gaming news sites are lauding it for its impressive bump-mapping, its online multiplayer, and its exciting downloadable content. To learn more about Hype V visit our "media" area, where you can find PR Games-provided screenshots onto which we have placed a Tea Leaves watermark. You'll also find movies in several video formats, none of which are supported by your browser, and an area to download demos that will make you register with our site, click on 13 pop-up ads and wait in line for 20 minutes before downloading the file, during which the download will hang halfway through. Users who pay for our "Platinum Account" will only have to wait for 3 minutes.

Uncritical, fawning "previews" of Hype V based entirely on press packet materials are expected in the March issues of all gaming magazines everywhere. Tea Leaves looks forward to intially declaring Hype V to be a "must buy" and "Game of the Year," and only using it as an example of one of the 10 worst games of the decade about 18 months from now, when most of our readers will have forgotten that they purchased the game based on our recommendation.

Carrots with Honey Butter

2007-01-25 · by psu

Tonight my brain can only handle writing down a small recipe. I've never had much use for carrots outside of using them as a partner to potatoes in stew. But here's a fun way to do them. I must have stolen the recipe from someone, but I can't remember who. My wife says it was Bittman, so I must have changed something because I don't like Bittman.

Start with about a cup or two of cut up carrots. Not too big, not too small. Steam these in a basket for about 10-15min, or until they get tender but not too soft.

Now get out your frying pan. Put in some butter and a bit of oil, whatever you usually do. Toss in the carrots, mix it around. Add salt and pepper, mix it around. Finally, drizzle a small bit of fresh honey over the top. We found honey at the farmer's market this summer, which inspired me to try this.

Let everything stew a bit, then toss the result on a plate. If you do it right, you should get the nice sweetness and softness of carrots in stew without the need to spend three hours making stew.

Out, Damned Spam!

2007-01-26 · by peterb

Due to some aggressive spamming, we've tightened up our filtering on comments recently. If you're a regular commenter, you might want to consider registering an account and posting as a logged in user. It's free, and we won't give out any information about you to anyone.

We'll continue to approve legit comments as we notice them, even if you're not logged in, it just may take longer for them to appear if our robot overlords don't trust you.

Hii and His Wii

2007-01-26 · by peterb

When I told him about the blue-nippled chicken-woman in Zelda, psu thought I was exaggerating.

But now he has to suffer through it himself.

Not Just Coding

2007-01-29 · by psu

We were driving home tonight, and NPR was interviewing some Robert Frost scholar about the publication of a book of Frost's cryptic notebooks. It took the guy five years to put the thing together. I was drifting into a nice NPR doze while they droned on and on, when suddenly the host went from relating a story about Frost at the Kennedy innaguaration to talking about a talk that the book editor had given at the dedication of the Robert Frost library in "Am-Hurst." At this point my ears perked up. The Robert Frost library is in Amherst, MA, the town in which I grew up. You pronounce the name with a silent H. Pretend you are saying "Amerst". To this day it pains me physically to hear people say this the wrong way.

As I've gotten older, a lot of my old peeves have fallen by the wayside. However, some of the world's indiscretions still slice at my psyche like a brand new mandoline julienning a piece of zucchini. Just this weekend, there was a fluff piece about that crazy Hungarian Charles Simonyi and his silver bullet for solving the software problem. I read much of it without getting upset at all. There was a lot of complete nonsense about the paradise of "intentional" programming. This paradise has been at least 10 years in the making with no product in sight. This was not the cause of my distress. I ignored the rhapsodic prose about a system so sophisticated that the non-technical "experts" who just want to "get something done" can interact at a magic "workbench" and build what amounts to a perfect specification of exactly what they want, unless it isn't in which case they can hack up another iteration of the perfect specification with almost no difficulty at all.

This sort of hype does not bother me anymore. Our modern world is all about instant gratification. If people want to delude themselves into thinking that difficult technical problems have magic solutions, then more power to them. It's common to think of the general-purpose computer as a machine that can be told to do anything. But the real nature of the machine is that it can be told to do anything provided that you have sufficient time and money. If you are lacking in the other resources, you need to compromise on the specification. Anyone who thinks otherwise is delusional, but I don't have time to fight that educational battle anymore.

I also was not bothered by the boilerplate text bemoaning the sad state of the software industry. If experts are to be believed, there is almost no modern endeavour more doomed than that of software projects. They ship late. They go over budget. They fail entirely. They are the epitome of incompetent management. I've heard this before. I find that these days I like to emphasize the positive aspects of the software industry. The modern consumer electronics industry has software at least partially to thank for its continued riches. Almost every major appliance or device that you interact with these days is running some of this software stuff that never works and is never shipped on time or on budget. Software is what transformed the Internet from a pile of wires to something that people want to use every night to talk to their parents on the phone. People don't seem to realize this. That's OK. I understand.

I also did not let myself be bothered by the fact that the New York Times spent so much copy profiling the man who inflicted "Hungarian Notation" on an unsuspecting software engineering world in the 1980s. It's amazing to me that they let him near a machine anymore. But that's not the main subject of my wrath.

No. What set me off was the reason that the Times writer offers for the so-called software problem:

The reasons aren't hard to divine. Programmers don't know what a computer user wants because they spend their days interacting with machines. They hunch over keyboards, pecking out individual lines of code in esoteric programming languages, like medieval monks laboring over illustrated manuscripts.

This is certainly a popular depiction of the software engineer. In fact, a different piece in this same paper about six months ago had this classic:

Jamika Burge is heading back to Virginia Tech this fall to pursue a Ph.D. in computer science, but her research is spiced with anthropology, sociology, psychology, psycholinguistics - as well as observing cranky couples trade barbs in computer instant messages.

"It's so not programming," Ms. Burge said. "If I had to sit down and code all day, I never would have continued. This is not traditional computer science."

My pet peeve is this notion of "just programming", or "just coding". It is hateful and insulting. It implies that what we software people do is completely rote and lacking in any creativity whatsoever.

Consider that Computer Science, while still young, has managed to keep some of the best minds of the last century (Turing, Gödel, von Neumann, Erdos, Newell) busy with its intricate mysteries. It's an area that is a fascinating juxtaposition of mathematical theory and engineering practice. It has not only introduced a pile of new ideas into the Academy, it has at the same time built a commercial industry that has completely changed how we collect, store, manipulate and communicate information from the world and to each other. And with all of this as background, this clueless second year graduate student is still characterizing "traditional" computer science as "just programming." The field was never just about programming, even if its deepest problems are ultimately motivated by the toil of the humble programmer. Anyone with half a clue should know this.

The quote in the piece on Simonyi is insulting in a more personal way, because it makes a profoundly incorrect generalization about the very profession in which I work. This generalization is really the same "just coding" sentiment but with bigger words. Because software people spend a lot of time doing something that is complicated and mysterious, it is apparently popular to think that this is all they do to the exclusion of everything else. The picture goes further than that. It's not just that we do nothing but this weird stuff at the keyboard. No. Programmers, in fact, are not capable of doing anything else. In other words, besides coding, they are not able to

  1. Communicate with other humans in a language that the other person can understand.

  2. Absorb and understand the desires and problems of a non-technical person, and think creatively about how to solve these problems.

In other words, without Simonyi's magic tool, programmers, being crippled in the particular way that they are, are completely unable to understand the needs of their clients and are therefore doomed to failure.

Hogwash.

What everyone involved in the production of this piece of goat excrement in the shape of a newspaper article fails to grasp is that the paragraph that they have written down above describes a particular sort of software engineer. Here's the word I use to describe this sort of software engineer: bad. These people should not be hired. If you have people like this on your staff, fire them. The reason this quote infuriates me should now be obvious. It basically says that all software engineers are people who don't know how to do their job.

We should know better by now. We should realize that the things that I have listed above are exactly what a good software engineer needs to be able to do day in and day out in order to be successful in the modern marketplace. You have to be able to understand the problem you are trying to solve. You have to be able to communicate that understanding to the rest of the team, many of whom may not be fellow software people. You have to keep communicating this understanding until the others understand it as well.

A software project is, at its core, an iterative collaboration that translates initially vague requirements into the relatively rigid confines of the computing machine. The job of the software engineer is to facilitate this translation and at the same time to be able to guess how long it will take to implement it in code and then spend the long hours needed to debug that code so that the project can ship something that is as close to what was initially desired as possible.

Then we have to do it all over again for version 2.

In this environment, it's obvious along with everything else they have to know how to do, two skills are critical to the success of a software engineer:

  1. Plays well with others.

  2. Communicates effectively.

These are exactly the two skills that the New York Times thinks we poor progammers don't have. This is why they have tickled my pet peeve. This is why, for tonight at least, I hate them.

Afterword

Later in the same issue of the paper, there is a great piece about "nutritionism" and how it has ruined food. So I guess I will forgive them. Eventually.

The Glorious Return of Sam and Max

2007-02-01 · by peterb

Sam: "Where should I put this [bomb] so that it doesn't hurt anyone we know or care about?" Max: "Out the window, Sam. There's nobody but strangers out there."

For many years now there has been no shortage of commentators willing to opine about the death of the adventure game. This, of course, is despite the fact that there have been no shortage of adventure games continuing to be made, from amateur text adventures through to graphical indie efforts and even A-list titles. What people mean when they say "adventure games are dead" is that LucasArts-style adventure games are dead.

In other words, they really mean "Nobody is making Monkey Island V: BladeHunt: The Revenge".

Sam: Aww... It's a cute hypercephalic kitten. Max: I'll call him "Mittens", 'cause I think he'd make a fine pair of them.

The LucasArts games all had style, were professionally produced, and promised many hours of involved entertainment. They were engrossing and unique. One of the crowd favorites of the genre was Sam and Max Hit the Road. Based on the comic book by Steve Purcell, Sam and Max were a phlegmatic dog and a hyperviolent bunny rabbit whose adventures might have been scripted by the love-child of Salvador Dali and Lucille Ball.

Max: I feel lightheaded, Sam. I think my brain is out of air. But it's kind of a neat feeling.

Sam and Max was not actually a very good game. It had some of the worst puzzles ever seen, even today. Despite this, it was so strongly written that, at times, it could have you doubled over in pain from laughing so much. To this day I can't think of the words "Cone of Terror" without giggling. Let alone "Trixie the Giraffe-Necked Girl."

For years rumors of a sequel to the Sam and Max game swirled. LucasArts formally announced that a sequel was in development in 2002, but then announced that they had killed the project in 2004.

[Sam and Max

You crack me up, little buddy](http://wptest.tleaves.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/samnmax.jpg "Sam and Max")

Now, Telltale games has brought back to life a franchise that many of us thought was gone for good. And they're doing it in a particularly interesting way: episodically.

The first episode of what Telltale calls "Sam & Max: Season 1" was released late last year (you can read my review of the first episode in Issue 301 of Played to Death, and the second episode in this month's upcoming issue). Three of the six planned episodes have been released, with more on the way on a monthly schedule. You can buy the game in several ways: a subscription to all 6 games is $34.95, a single episode is $8.95, or the game is available "for free" to GameTap subscribers. Telltale has release episodic games before — their games based on Jeff Smith's Bone comics are available on both Windows and Mac — but the scope and ambition of the Sam and Max games is, at least to me, exciting, for a few reasons.

Max: Mind if I drive? Sam: Not if you don't mind me clawing at the dash and shrieking like a cheerleader.

First, the games themselves are well-polished and show off Telltale's 3D adventure engine superbly. The music is enjoyable. The UI is simple and easy to use. I don't have to manage the camera (the wonderful, cinematic camera movements during transitions is just one of the nice little bits of polish that shows they thought about this).

But more importantly, to me, is that Telltale is doing something unspeakably great: they're making small games that don't suck. I've heard a few people grumbling that $9 is too much to pay for a game that "only lasts a few hours." All I can say is that I feel pretty damn good about the idea of spending $9 on a fun game whose ending I will actually see. Especially compared to spending $50 on a 36-hour drudgefest of pouty teenage avatars and random encounters with cave rats that I will stop playing and sell on eBay after the second miserable hour.

Think I'm exaggerating? The trailer for the third episode, below, gives a pretty good feel for what the game is like when it's firing on all cylinders.

There are things about the games that one can critique. The first half of the first game tries a little too hard to be funny at every line and doesn't always succeed. But of all the criticisms that one can make, "It's too short" has the least resonance with me. It's a better game than its spiritual predecessor, and now that they're in their writing groove I'm actually enjoying it more than the original. The puzzles are generally clever — no Towers of Hanoi here — and they're told with style.

It's hard to talk about Sam & Max in too much detail without giving away the jokes. Nonetheless, one thing that makes this game work as a series is a strong supporting cast. There's Bosco, the paranoid genius who runs the corner bodega, and Sybil, a woman clearly modeled on my friend Elise who has Multiple Career Disorder. Both Bosco and Sybil develop and change in each episode, something that really wouldn't have worked had they told their story in one monolithic game. And they've been given lines just as good as that of our gleefully thuggish protagonists.

Max: That story warms the cockles of my heart. Sam: So do car crashes.

The first episode, "Culture Shock", and the second episode, "Situation: Comedy" are available to everyone now. The third episode, "The Mole, The Mob, and the Meatball" will be available for download on February 8th. If you want to try the game out a free demo is available. The games are currently available for Windows only. When asked about a Mac port, the company's response was straightforward: "We are considering a Mac port of Sam & Max but haven't made any decisions yet. The success of the Out from Boneville port will probably influence that decision." So all of you Mac users who want Sam & Max on OS X have your marching orders.

Additional Notes

Call For Writers

2007-02-02 · by peterb

I'm preparing to undertake another project.

I'm looking for a number of aspiring writers who are interested in being published in a print magazine. I'm looking for writing about people who play videogames. This doesn't mean you need to be a gamer yourself; I'm looking to do something a bit more interesting than simple game reviews.

Here are the essentials:

I'm being coy about the exact subject matter in this posting, but if you are interested send mail to tleavesweblog - a t - gmail (dot) com with a brief description of yourself, and we'll talk more. If you have a writing sample, that would be great, too.

Digital Schmigital

2007-02-05 · by psu

I was feeling pretty good about myself last week. I was able to read an infuriating article in the New York Times and because I am more mature and grounded these days, I was able to see past all of the little peeves in the piece and write an impassioned critique of the big picture problems.

No such luck today. Today the drooling mega-pedantic nerd returns.

There have been a lot of news reports lately about the state of the music industry. MP3 players and various online download sites play a big role in these stories because they represent a shift away from music sold on some piece of physical media and to a world where what you are purchasing is in principle more ephemeral. Here is my plea: please stop calling this stuff digital music or digital books or digital video.

Two stories tonight on NPR tonight triggered my drooling. The first was covering the audio book industry and talking about how downloads of "digital" books had started to cut into the market previously dominated by CDs. The second piece was about the recent Apple/Apple deal with the Beatles, and how the Beatles have not made their music available in "digital" form for download online.

Here is the problem: CDs, as we all know, store sound in digital form. So, along this axis, there is no difference between books or music on CD and books or music that you download. Same for video and DVD. Bits are bits.

The correct distinction to be made is whether you are buying these bits at a store, in a box, stored on disks, or whether you are sucking them down the tubes that make up the Internet. Either way it's all digital. Please get this straight. Please please please.

There. I feel better, a little.

Next week on the drooling mega-pedantic super-nerd: the phrase software program. Jesus, I hate that one.

Dead Trees and Played To Death

2007-02-06 · by peterb

The latest issue of Played To Death is out, and there are a few changes. First off, the official name is now PTD Magazine, and we've moved to a new web address: http://ptdmagazine.com. Your old URLs will continue to work, of course.

Second, PTD is now available in print format. Each issue is delivered to subscribers in a slimline case that contains the print edition, along with a disc containing the full PDF as well as demos and other material. If you're not into dead trees, you can subscribe to the online edition of PTD, downloading a full PDF every month. Lastly, if you don't want to pay anything, we'll always have Paris — and the freely-available "digest" PDF.

In this month's issue of PTD, you'll find my editorial Design Matters (page 6), and my reviews of Dwarf Fortress (page 14), and ToeJam & Earl (page 16). All of those articles are available in the free "digest" version. Those of you who upgrade to a full subscription will also get to read and, I hope, enjoy my reviews of Viva Piñata and Bookworm Adventures, as well as many other reviews by other writers.

Enjoy!

Inside Shoes

2007-02-07 · by psu

I like to wear shoes inside. I didn't used to be this way, but over the years the fact that my parents always used them and the desire to keep various sorts of mess off my socks made me a happy user. For years I used an old pair of L.L. Bean deck shoes as my inside shoes. The leather had broken in nicely, and they were heavy enough to take outside if needed, but light enough to not be a burden.

A couple of years ago, my beloved inside shoes fell apart. And then I was screwed.

The first thing I tried was to find a new pair of moccasin-type shoes much like the original. Unfortunately I didn't want to spend another ten years breaking them in. Result: all new shoes of this type were too stiff an uncomfortable. I'm not even sure how I ever liked the original ones from Bean's.

The next thing I tried were a pair of fuzzy slippers. I got them at the new REI store in Pittsburgh. They worked OK, but the insoles started to wear out in less than six months. They also were too squishy. You could not wear them outside to go get the paper if it was wet.

I then tried some Keen clog-ish shoes. These worked a lot better, and were wearable eveywhere. However, their soles were a bit too stiff and loud for use at night when the rest of the house is asleep. Also, their insoles wore out in less than six months. Unacceptable. Even worse, Keen will not sell you new first-party insoles. I gave up on them and took them to the office.

Having given up on the Keens, I thought harder about what I really wanted. I realized that what I really wanted were Birkenstocks, with their durable cork soles, but in a clog-ish form factor rather than sandals. You can't cook with hot oil in sandals. I could not find anything quite like this, and the Birkenstock clogs didn't look quite right. Too floppy on top. I stupidly tried more leather shoes, this time from Israel, but the uppers didn't fit and scraped my feet in bad places.

Then I spied two companies that make clogs with cork soles and wool uppers. One is Haflinger. They haven't been around that long. The other was Stegmann. They have been around a long time.

I thought about whether I should continue my wanton spending. Karen had started to look at me and sigh in that way that means I'm obsessed with something stupid. But, over Christmas her cousin had a pair of the Stegmann, and they looked perfect. So I found them on sale and ordered some on the web. And they are perfect. They are fuzzy on top and stiff on the bottom. Solid enough to wear as a shoe, but soft enough to pad around at night without waking anyone up. They are a Birkenstock surrounded in a fuzzy fleece lining. The wool is also superior to leather for this purpose because it breathes better. You can wear the slippers in bare feet without making a sweaty mess. I guess my old leather deck shoes didn't have this problem because they were falling apart for most of the time I used them.

If the current slippers hold up for a few more months, I will apply the consumer rule and buy 4 more pair. Just in case.

Flax Seed Cracker Addendum

2007-02-08 · by peterb

I've been doing more experimenting, and I've made the following modifications to my earlier recipe:

(1) Use a nonstick cookie sheet instead of parchment. (2) Spread the flax seeds thicker (3) 275 degree oven (4) Leave them in for a much longer time, around 3 hours.

This is yielding me crackers that are a lot snappier and better stand up to the pressure of spreading stinky cheese on them.

Give Me Convenience or Give Me Death

2007-02-08 · by peterb

A few years ago Valve rolled out their "Steam" service, a form of direct download for their games. The idea behind Steam is that when you want to buy a game, you pay money for the right to buy a game, and Steam downloads it to your hard drive, no CD involved. It's more than just an online purchase, because Steam is doing some sort of authentication to try to avoid piracy. There are lots of services like this now (Stardock's totalgaming.net service, and direct2drive, for example). You can think of Steam as being an attempt to make something like iTunes for AAA games.

I tried it out at the time and gave it my key for the original Half-Life, which I had bought at retail. I was fairly put off, mostly because the Steam application is such a sham and a travesty — it's one of those Windows facehuggerware programs. It starts itself up automatically on a reboot, it opens dialog boxes at inconvenient times, and worst of all — this should be a firing squad offense, by the way — when you click the "Quit" button it minimizes to your taskbar and puts up a dialog box telling you "I didn't really quit! I hate you and I hate freedom! Tee-hee!" I more or less ignored the broader debate going on about Steam: it was clear to me that anyone who didn't like it must be right, because it was so obviously bad. The broader debate, it seems, focused what it means to "purchase" a game. The "Out of the Box Experience" for Half-Life 2 was apparently terrible, because of Steam. You would go into a store and pay them real money for a sticker with an activation key and a real CD, which apparently contained a 20kb Steam installer and a few hundred megabytes of porn. Then you would wait for 36 hours while Steam actually downloaded the real application, browsing the porn while you waited. Eventually, the servers would time out, the download would fail, and you shot yourself. This is why everyone who enjoyed Half-Life 2 played it on the Xbox.

This install procedure, purportedly, was traumatic enough that I could imagine it permanently scarring anyone who went through it. I don't know; I didn't buy Half-Life 2 because my computer at the time wasn't expensive enough. I believe psu did, however, which would explain why, when I told him I was writing this post, he gently reminded me that anyone who says anything nice about Steam is his mortal enemy.

The other day a publisher set me up with a CD key for use with Steam to review a game. So I downloaded Steam onto my Windows box, and started it up. Incredibly, I remembered my username and password. And there, waiting for me, was a menu item with all of the old Half-Life games that I had registered with it.

Now, you need to understand the context here: I am not what you would call an organized person. I lose games. I lose CDs. I lose those little goddamn stickers with the CD key on them. If you held a gun to my head and asked me where in my house the Half-Life discs are, I would not be able to answer you. So for Steam to have remembered this for me and made it possible for me to play these games again, on a new computer, by just clicking a button seems to me exactly the sort of wonderful thing that technology should be doing.

There are downsides to systems like this. Obviously, it just about squashes your ability to resell games. But since I have an irrational habit of installing old games, I never do that anyway.

So sign me up for the lock-in, fellas. If it means I don't have to remember where I put those stupid discs, I'm all yours.

When Fanboys Attack!

2007-02-09 · by psu

Any moderately successful game will be played and enjoyed by a large number of people. Many of these people, who I will refer to as "normal", will enjoy the game for what it is, and then put it on their shelf of past experiences and get on with their lives. Others, who I will call "a bit freaky", might express their deep thoughts about the game on an online or print forum of some kind. But, in the fringes of our existence, out there on the very edge of insanity are those who allow the game to take over part of their consciousness. It becomes like a parasite on their nervous system, and they are henceforth unable to form thoughts that are independent of the game and its world. For these there is a special word in our modern vocabulary. We call these people "fanboys".

Gaming fanboys have an almost supernatural obsession with detail combined with an irrationally narrow perspective on what I will call canonical correctness. RPGs seem particularly prone to this treatment. Fans of RPGs seem to place the most stringent requirements on what must be present in the gameplay mechanics of any particular title before it is allowed to be called an RPG. Any or all of the following apply:

If you google around, it's easy to find multiple manifestos about defining a "real" RPG, and they all contain various amounts of blather similar to the list above. You don't find people this obsessed with the definition of, say, shooters or platformers. There are no earnest thousand word web page postings outlining the acceptable design parameters of a canonically correct Mario game.

Which leads me to the third axis of the fanboy psychology chart. Fanboys crave acceptance, but marginalization drives them. It's always the fans of the less popular genres that are the most vociferous and bitter. The single player Western style non-fantasy RPG. Adventure games. And so on. No one worries about shooters and platformers and action games because there are more than enough good games in those genres to go around.

But try to find a decent single player RPG that didn't come from Japan.

Lacking any real games to play, the sad and bitter fanboy can only wallow in nostalgia and replay his favorite game over and over again. Soon, the details of the game are so familiar that it's as if they were in his own life. Later, the design of the favorite game becomes the canonically correct design for all games of this type. This is where all those crazy rules come from.

In this state of mind, no new game will ever hold up. All the new games are shallow and stupid, with no real "freedom", or multiple lines of narrative, or worse: real time combat. Never mind that the old games didn't really have any of this either. The fanboy's distortion field projects a platonic perfection on their favored game that no actual game can hold a candle to.

This nostalgia-driven delusion can be a problem for the developer of new games in the genre. Oblivion was skewered by the hard core fans of various earlier instances of the Elder Scrolls games because it was not "as perfect" even though it was better in almost every way. Bethsoft has now set themselves up for even more fanboy wrath by taking on the Fallout 3 project. It seems like they have a masochistic streak in them. Anyone building RPGs in the current fan environment either has thick skin or a love of punishment.

But the truth is, the older games were not that great. The sophisticated turn-based statistical combat engines that the dorks love so much are, in fact, simply tedious. The attempt to mimic the table-top combat rules only results in the player falling asleep as she spends another 15 minutes watching virtual dice roll while she kills her 50th giant rat. The games also tend to feature hideously archaic inventory management and other useless gameplay conventions. And, who can forget the endless dialog trees. Sure, there are some exceptions. The wonderful writing and relatively streamlined gameplay in Planescape comes to mind. But if I'm going to back in time and play a retro RPG, I'm more likely to pick up Chrono Trigger on an emulator than try and play Fallout again. At least the combat in Chrono Trigger doesn't take hours.

In the end, it's probably best to treat the hard-core genre fan like the crazy uncle that you don't talk about much. Let them have their community web sites. Let them have their self-important pontifications. Let them vastly overestimate the value and power of their little clique. But in the end, if you are designing a game in their favorite genre, my advice would be to perhaps listen, nod, and then back slowly out the door and go build your game for normal people.

Where Old Games Go To Die

2007-02-12 · by peterb

The good folks at Gametap comped me an account for a short while, and I've spent a few days playing with it. It's...interesting.

First off, despite my self-professed love for direct-to-drive systems, the very proliferation of them is somewhat astounding. On one machine I have Stardock's totalgaming.net, Steam, and now Gametap. I'm waiting for them to start playing Corewars on my machine, each trying to sabotage the others.

The value proposition underlying Gametap is a subscription model. For about $10/month, you gain access to their library of games, which spans a good variety of titles from a number of platforms, from the Atari 2600 up through Windows. Presumably, if you stop paying them their $10/month, you lose the ability to play those games — just like Xbox Live.

When Gametap first launched, they placed a strong emphasis on their back library of retrogames. This, oddly, had the effect of repelling me from their system. After all, I already owned most of those games, and wasn't paying anyone for the privilege of playing them. Over time, their library of modern and semi-modern Windows games has grown substantially. At this point, they have a significant enough library of Windows games that for some people it's probably worth signing up just to get access to them.

Really, though, I think the Gametap marketing manages to completely misrepresent their product. There are some critically great things about the system that they manage to not explain well. Fortunately, for them, I am here to explain why it's worth it to pay a subscription for access to these games, instead of just doing it for yourself a la carte.

1. No Stupid Installers

All the games in Gametap seem to run from within the Gametap application, which operates as a simple shell. Consequently, every game is installed in exactly the same way: click a button to get the game.

2. No CDs to lose.

Amusingly, earlier on the very day I installed Gametap, I had installed Jagged Alliance 2 from CD. And, of course, the game won't run without the CD in the drive, because apparently, computer game publishers are gibbering morons who are intent on pissing away one of the few advantages their dying platform has. Gametap saves these publishers from themselves. All of the copy protection is rolled into their authentication scheme. When I installed Gametap later that evening, I saw they had Jagged Alliance 2 Gold and immediately trashed my CD-based version.

3. Nice visual browser

Sure, it's whooshy and pointless, but I like the visual overview of the game library.

4. Sam & Max, Freelance Police

Gametap is helping sponsor the new Sam & Max games. So if you were going to buy them anyway — and you should — a Gametap subscription is arguably the cheapest way to get them. Sure, you won't be able to play it once your subscription runs out but c'mon. When was the last time you replayed Grim Fandango, anyway? Be honest: never.

5. Seamless Emulation of Old Platforms

Yes, I have a Genesis emulator, a Nintendo emulator, and so on. I have games for the various emulators. But you know what? It's sort of irritating to set up, and I have to keep everything organized just so for each emulator, and either remember the different keys they use or reconfigure them, so the end result is I don't actually play any of those games because the psychic cost of entry is too high. Gametap lowers that psychic cost of entry, in return for cash.

There are a few disadvantages that are worth mentioning.

1. Video Commercials For Games With Slutty Chicks That Play When Your 5 Year Old Niece Is In The Room And There's No (Obvious) Goddamn Pause Button

I think this one is pretty self-explanatory.

2. It's Diskariffic!

If you're playing on a machine without that much disk space, you may as well kiss your free space goodbye. Since games don't tell you how much space they require, this can be troublesome. Probably not a serious problem for people playing on desktop systems.

3. Windows only

In my fantasy world, I could be playing Jagged Alliance 2 Gold on my MacBook Pro running Mac OS X. While riding my flying pony.

These drawbacks, it seems to me, are not serious enough to harm the value proposition. If you can live with the idea of "renting" access to a game rather than owning shiny pieces of plastic, then I think it's a sensible and worthwhile system.

It Ain't Just Alabama

2007-02-13 · by peterb

I want to go on record saying, publically, that season 9, episode 3 of Top Gear might be the finest thing ever shown on television since the medium was invented.

And not just because of this segment.

Well, OK. Mostly because of that segment. But the political commentary about New Orleans is spot on as well.

I'm sure many of my urban liberal friends will think "This is unfair. It's Alabama." But the truth is that I can drive 30 minutes outside of Pittsburgh and find towns which would have given the Top Gear boys the exact same reception.

A Few Food Shorts

2007-02-14 · by psu

Tonight a few recent discoveries, none all that long, but each very pleasing.

The Vacuum Insulated Thermos

These have changed the nature of our domestic hot drink management. After the initial purchase we went on to obtain three more of various different sizes. Combined with a nice electric pot for boiling water, these things will keep you in hot tea and coffee all day without a lot of sweat and bother. Highly recommended. Note: eventually we settled on the 16oz/.5 liter bottle as the best size.

Goulash

When I was at Dartmouth, there was a guy there named Rudy who sold bratwurst and kraut sandwiches at the local farmer's market. He cooked his kraut for like 48 hours before market day. Those were really good sandwiches. Rudy also made goulash. He would reduce the liquid in it to almost nothing and then freeze it and sell the blocks, telling you to add a bit of water to bring back the right consistency. He didn't want to sell you the water.

Since then, I've tried to make goulash once in a while and always failed. Then Karen found a recipe on the net. If you read the page, the guy is so sure that he's right you just have to try the recipe because it'll either be great or completely awful. Either way you will have learned something. In this case, the recipe was top notch.

But, learn from our mistake. You might be buying paprika at the spice store and notice that there is something called Half Sharp paprika. You might wonder what that means. You might use some in your goulash. Be very careful. This stuff is like a hot chili powder, but with more kick. It makes great goulash, but you must be aware of your limits.

Pressure Cooker Chickpeas

A pressure cooker is one of those appliances I try to avod because it only really does one thing. But, when we got ours we reasoned that maybe we'd learn how to do those Indian lentil dishes in it like we saw my friend's mom in DC do. This never happened. There is actually only one dish we do in the pressure cooker, which means every time I make it I have to remember how to use the device. Here is the outline. You take this stuff:

  1. 2-3 sweet potatoes, cubed.
  2. 1 small can of tomatoes.
  3. 2 cans of coconut milk (remember to shake before opening).
  4. Cayenne pepper.
  5. Curry powder. I use a weird mix of stuff.
  6. Salt and pepper.
  7. 1 1/2 cups dried chick peas, soaked overnight.

Put it all in the cooker and mix. Put the cooker on heat. Cook at pressure for 15-20min. Open up the cooker and throw in chopped cilantro and test to see if you need salt and pepper and more hot sauce. Stir it around and mash up the potatoes.

Serve over rice. My friend Jim told me how to do this. Jim got the recipe from this book. Thanks Jim.

First Impressions

2007-02-19 · by psu

Pete used his Gamefly account to get me a copy of F.E.A.R. for the 360. This is a shooter of relatively high reputation, mostly on the strength of its special rendering effects and yet another implementation of "bullet time" slow-motion massacre technology.

Unfortunately, I am not feeling very motivated to continue with the game after my first impression. I know this is shallow of me, but I have a lot of games and little time, so if a game is not good immediately, there is little point in going on.

Here's how the first 20 minutes of F.E.A.R. played out.

  1. One minute of various logo sreens.

  2. Press start.

  3. Five minutes of opening cut scene with a spooky little girl, name credits, and some more logos.

  4. Second opening cut scene to set up first mission.

  5. Arrive by car at a building with many gray hallways. Run around in the hallways for about five minutes. Shoot one rat, woohoo!. Meet up with your partner. Spooky out of body experience. Run around a bit more.

  6. Partner tells you to go look around. Run around to the roof of the building for about five minutes. Some guy jumps you, setting up another expository cut scene with a lot of dialog you can't quite make out. You can't make it out because you have to play after the kid is in bed with the sound turned low and the game has no subtitles. Therefore, you have no idea what the exposition was about. No matter. It was probably stupid anyway.

  7. Helicopter ride to the next mission. 2 minutes.

  8. Play "find the switch" game for 2 more minutes.

  9. Spooky cut scene, run into another old building with gray walls. WHOAH! Drone soldiers! Finally the shooting starts.

Let's summarize. In the first 20 minutes of the game, I shot a rat. 20 minutes into Resident Evil 4 I had already been mauled by a mob of flesh eating zombie people. 20 minutes into Halo I was on a ship being attacked by aliens who were on fire. No wait, the ship was on fire. 20 minutes into Half-Life 2 I was running for my life on the roof of a building. You get the idea. 20 minutes is a long time in a game like this. You have to have something set up by then or I will put your game down and never pick it up again. We who want to shoot things in the head are not patient.

I realize that the developers were attempting to set up a compelling atmosphere and plot. What they succeeded in doing is making the first 20 minutes of their game really boring and tedious. F.E.A.R. did not help its cause by not really improving once the action began. The NPC dialog is all the same. The heavily hyped A.I. is sluggish and not very fun to fight against. The environments are all the same gray buidings filled with metal barrels and wooden crates. I expect the game to become even more repetitive and tedious as time goes on. I might try to tough it out for another hour, but so far I think that my first impressions of this game will be my last.

Good shooters seem rare these days. I wonder if the genre has lost something or if I've just become too jaded to deal with its conventions. It's probably some of both. Maybe playing too much Final Fantasy makes it impossible for you to enjoy a shooter. Maybe Halo 3 will fix everything. Here's hoping it starts out better than this.

Pigs In Space

2007-02-19 · by peterb

This week, I'll be surveying a number of space strategy games, from old classics to recent entries in the field. Often known as "3X" or "4X" games (for "Explore, Expand, Exploit", and sometimes "Exterminate"), this is a genre that has been around for years, and has remained popular.

Up for consideration this week are Delta Tao's Spaceward Ho!, various iterations of Master of Orion, Stardock's Galactic Civilizations 2, Reach For the Stars! from SSG and Matrix Games, and Space Empires V from Malfador Machinations and Strategy First. I'll be covering each of these in their own articles.

There are a few strategic elements that are common to most of these games that distinguish them from other types of wargames. Most of them derive, in some sense, from the truly ancient Brøderbund game Galactic Empire.

As you might expect from games marketed towards people who think that outer space is nifty, all games in this genre deliver massive amounts of technological pornography. Giving money to scientists, in these games, always results in spaceships that are faster, fly farther, shoot bigger bullets, take more damage, are cheaper to build, and never result in the scientists scheduling lots of boondoggle conferences in Honolulu while their grad students decide which model PC will be best-suited to playing 3D Tetris. I guess that's why they call it "science fiction." In any event, it's a truism that in addition to spending money on your fleet, you'll be spending money on weapons research.

One World Or None

Every empire needs a good logo

Secondly, 4X games have a hopelessly colonial model of government. You send hapless citizen-slaves off to distant hostile planets and whip them with taser-rods until they start making money for you. Since games are often won or lost on the basis of resource acquisition, choosing not to emulate this model is, essentially, the same as choosing to lose the game. Some of the games model colonization in an abstract way ("This colony will lose money for 130 years, and then will become more and more profitable over time,") whereas others get down to a level of detail requiring the player to decide what buildings are constructed. This, more than almost any other aspect of the games, controls the amount of micromanagement the player will be doing.

Thirdly, most of these games involve space combat. This is often the place where the games distinguish themselves from each other. Some of the games resolve combat automatically, some have the player move pieces around a board, and others choose a middle path and have the player make operational fleet decisions in between combat rounds. Some of the games model diplomacy, which is the question of whether you and an opposing civilization will be killing each other today, or tomorrow.

With that introduction, I think the stage is set, and we are ready to talk about which of these games will provide the most satisfying simulation of brutally murdering your way across an entire galaxy. See you tomorrow.

Read next article in this series, 4X: Spaceward Ho!

4X: Spaceward Ho!

2007-02-20 · by peterb

This is the second in a series of articles about 4X games. Read the introduction, here.

"Keep It Simple, Stupid." It's a principle that, in games, is more honored in the breach than in the observance. I've written before about how user interface is critical to a game's playability. But beyond UI is a principle that many developers don't seem to be able to grasp:

Have me make decisions about things that are important. Don't bother me with things that aren't important.

Spaceward Ho! is a 4X game that is entirely designed according to this principle. When it was released, it was the best game in its class. In my opinion, it's still the best today.

What Spaceward Ho! does so well is abstract away complexity while still managing to maintain character. The game is simple, almost sparse. The object of the game is to take over the galaxy.

[Spaceward Ho!

Spaceward Ho! (click to enlarge)](http://wptest.tleaves.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/ho.jpg "Spaceward Ho!")

The galaxy in the Ho! is a simple place. It consists of a number of named stars. You can choose for a galaxy to have a specific arrangement, such as a cluster, or spiral, or have the stars spread randomly. Each star has one planet. Every planet is inhabitable, although some are more or less hospitable to your race, which is expressed in terms of gravity and temperature: your people like planets close to 1.0g and 72 degrees Fahrenheit.

You begin the game with one planet. Each turn, you accrue money based on the number of people on a given planet (planets with few citizens provide no income, and in fact cost money to maintain). Money can be spent in exactly four ways: you can spend it on building ships, you can invest in your planets (terraforming them to be closer to your ideal temperature, or mining metal for use in building ships), you can invest in technology, or you can save the money for another turn. Each turn you decide how much money to spend on each activity. Money is a renewable resource.

Metal is a nonrenewable resource: it is mined from planets, and used to build spaceships. When you run out of metal, you can't build any more ships. You can scavenge metal by scrapping old ships, or by destroying enemies in battles at planets you control, but generally speaking, once you run out of metal, you're screwed. The mid to late game of most Spaceward Ho! games tend to be fierce battles over metal.

Technology research can be split among six areas: weapons, shields, speed, range, minaturization, and "Radical". The first five areas allow you access to marginal improvements in their respective areas, while "Radical" techs may be useless or game-changing. Technologies have a variety of whimsical names ("You now have Topping Off the Tanks range technology."). When you go to design ships, newer technologies are displayed on the image of the ship being built (for example, a faster ship might have more engines. A ship with higher weapons tech might have ominous looking missiles dangling from it. Or a big boxing glove.)

There are a few basic ship platforms. Fighters are the standard ship type, existing at your "official" technology level. Scouts can fly farther than your other ships, but are weaker. Colony ships can conquer new worlds, but are hideously expensive in terms of both dollars and metal. Tankers can refuel fleets even away from your colony. Satellites cannot move, but can attack and defend enemy ships. And Dreadnoughts are, essentially, ridiculously powerful (and expensive) fighters. There are also a few odd variants, such as decoy or biological ships, that add flavor to the mix.

What separates the Ho! from other games in the genre, I think, is that it is a fast game. Even in a huge game, the decisions you have to make are crisp and clear: decide where to spend your money, decide how many ships to buy, and decide where to send them. That's really all there is to it.

Of course, saying "That's really all there is to it" is deceptive in a game whose playing field is an undirected graph. The other thing that sets Spaceward Ho! apart from the field is its excellent AI. Perhaps it is a consequence of the simplicity of the game, but the computer opponents here are no pushovers. Lower difficulty levels provide a great diversion for the gamer who is just looking to noodle around. At the highest difficulty level the game will challenge even the most jaded tactical genius: the AI fights hard, reacts quickly, and has a knack for leapfrogging your defenses.

Battles are resolved automatically whenever two hostile ships are at the same star. There's a brief animation that plays to show you how the combat played out, but it's easily skipped. Both technology and overwhelming numbers can make a difference in any particular battle. Higher tech ships are massively powerful, but also tend to be massively expensive. Furthermore, monetary investments in technology tend to give diminishing returns after a certain point. Lastly, prototype ships are extremely expensive compared to production ships. This means that the first ship you build with any technological change will drain your treasury. Thus, there's an incentive to not rush new technology out to the front lines immediately, but to wait "just one more turn" to see if you can save on prototype expenditures. This tension between spending your money to develop more powerful ships and saving money to buy more powerful ships drives the late game.

The game's simple UI lends itself to quick play: it is, quite simply, the Advance Wars of 4X games. You won't need a manual. You don't have to stare at on-screen icons wondering if that thing over there is a button or a depiction of an alien ballet dancer intended to increase your "immersion". There is no full-motion video. Most UI actions are accompanied by audio confirmations. These also are whimsical: move a ship to another planet, and you'll hear a cowboy shouting "Hyaaaah!" Status messages come with a brief but satisfying "click" to let you know they've registered.

The game supports internet multiplayer, as well, but I find that the Ho!'s quick-playing nature lends itself to solo gaming sessions.

People play 4X games for different reasons. I have no doubt that truly hardcore science-fiction fans might be put off by Spaceward Ho's whimsy, by its iconic rather than representational graphics, and by its focus on gameplay rather than on the Very Serious Business of Intergalactic Political Relations. But from a pure gaming — or, dare I say it, ludological — perspective, Spaceward Ho! is the gold standard against which all other 4X games should be judged. If I could only take one 4X game with me to a desert island, this would be the one.

Spaceward Ho! for Windows (version 4, $24.95), Macintosh (version 5, $39.95), or Palm OS ($19.95) is available from Delta Tao.

The next article in this series is about the classic 4X game Master of Orion.

4X: Master Of Orion

2007-02-21 · by peterb

This is the third in a series of articles about 4X games. Read the introduction here and the previous article here.

Perhaps the most well-known of the early era 4X games was Master of Orion. Master of Orion was developed by Simtex, who engendered a cult following with their overrated game Master of Magic. Orion was published by Microprose in 1993. This meant that it had real marketing muscle—Microprose was one of the giants in its day.

I'm going to talk (briefly) about all three games in the series, which might be a bit unfair, since for the most part the three games have nothing to do with one another. Life is tough sometimes. Let's start with the first one.

Master of Orion is a very playable game. It can fairly be described as Spaceward Ho With Stuff. But the Stuff it adds is not trivial stuff, and shouldn't be dismissed out of hand.

[moo-map

MoO strategic map](http://wptest.tleaves.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/934575943-00.gif "moo-map")

The basic mechanics of exploration, shipbuilding, and colonization are similar. Instead of Spaceward Ho's straightforward "fuel unit" limitation on range, Master of Orion lets you explore any system within so many parsecs of any colonized world, which frees you up from having to micromanage your travel. This is good, because I hates micromanagement. I hates it, I hates it, I hates it forever.

The game brings a lot of color to the genre. Each team in the game is a different species, and each species has certain advantages or disadvantages. For example, the dog-like Bulrathi are more effective at ground combat, while the Psilons are superior at researching new technologies, and the bunny-lizard Sakkra hump a lot breed faster.

As in Ho!, the qualities of a world are unknown to you until you visit, but you can glean a little information from the color of the star. There are no guarantees, but certain star colors are more likely to have habitable or interesting worlds. That adds a nice bit of flavor to the exploration. In addition to suitability for colonization, worlds may provide you with a technology, economic, or other bonus.

You can spend your money in many ways. You can develop the industry on the worlds you have colonized, or their defense, or invest in technology, or build ships, or spend money on espionage. Technology and ship production are both done on a per-planet basis, which makes juggling the money a bit of a chore, comparatively. I tried collecting all of my money into a big pile and jumping into it naked, but it scared my advisors and, to be honest, it sort of chafed.

[Tech display

Researching technology](http://wptest.tleaves.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/orion_005.png)

Technology research is both interesting and ponderous; the research tree branches in several places, and no given species can research all available technologies. Making certain decisions early on can foreclose other options later. When you do succeed in discovering a new technology, you get a very satisfying little splash screen where a species-appropriate scientist looks smug and explains the implications of the new find. Technologies have a somewhat rock-paper-scissors relationship to each other, so it's entirely possible to spend many centuries chasing a certain technological thread only to find you've tied yourself up in knots and spent tons of resources on something useless. That's not so fun when it happens.

Master of Orion has a much richer diplomatic game than many others. You can trade worlds, money, or technology with other species, once you've established diplomatic relations with them. You can bribe other races, which is a satisfyingly effective way to stave off an impending attack. You can also begin spying on them, spending part of your GDP on espionage. Once you have spies in place, you can use them to steal technology, perform sabotage, or engage in counter-espionage activities. A well-placed spy can tip the balance of a close game.

There are a few differences that make Master of Orion a bit easier, strategically. In many 4X games, you need to conquer an enemy world before you can colonize it. In MoO, if you conquer a world with ground troops, the "excess" ground troops become the planet's native population after the victory. Thus, after the early part of the game you'll almost never build a colony ship: bomb them from orbit, send in a huge troop transport, and you have a fully-functioning and profitable colony. Worlds can fall like dominoes in this part of the game. Especially if you're playing as the Bulrathi.

The one part of Master of Orion that doesn't work is the ship-to-ship combat. It's a turn-based move-your-mice-roll-your-dice sort of affair that gives the illusion of tactical choice. In reality, there is almost no situation in which the moves you make in tactical combat make any difference whatsoever. In other words, the whole tactical combat screen is nothing more than a humiliating sham that wastes your time. There is an "auto resolve" button where you can have the computer make the moves for both sides. I suggest you press that button the first time you get to the combat screen, and forget that any other option even exists. You'll like the game more for doing this.

So zooming back up to a high level, I view Master of Orion as a game that lifts most of the good ideas from Spaceward Ho!, and then adds a ton and a half of mise-en-scène to them. The game is an unqualified success, and is probably more attractive to those who seek this sort of game for the setting more than the game itself. If the play is a little less crisp than its immediate predecessor, we can forgive it because it has so much style.

pass.jpg

Insert sophomoric caption here.

Hoping to capitalize on the name, Simtex released Master of Orion II: Battle at Antares in 1996. A much weaker game, MoO2 was, from my perspective, an attempt to graft the MoO mise-en-scène onto their earlier game, Master of Magic. The city-building parts of that earlier effort were shoehorned into MoO2, and it works about as well as putting a sausage inside a piece of strawberry shortcake: you might want to eat both of them, but, for the love of God, not at the same time.

The reason this doesn't work, I think, is that there's a fundamental difference in scope, conceptually, between running a feudal serfdom and a galactic empire. At some point, after the eighth time you've told some new planet to build some farms or, y'know, goddamned houses for their citizens, it stops being fun and starts being irritating. "Why am I doing this?" you wonder. "Why am I doing this for these idiots? They don't deserve my leadership. I should just let them starve to death. Schmucks." In fairness, there is a "governor" option, but as in most cases, it doesn't work for me: once the game asks me to make the decision, it has asked me to care. And I can never get those neurons back.

In 2003, Infogrames published Master of Orion 3, a game so stunningly bad that it's not even worth playing for free. I won't go into detail here because it's too depressing to write about. I just wanted to confirm, publically, that it really is about as bad as you heard it was. It's actually worse. The word "unplayable" doesn't even come close to describing it: it's the worst game I've played that didn't actually cause my computer to explode.

The original Master of Orion is clearly the best of the three: it's fun to learn, pretty to look at, and if you don't get bogged down in the pointless tactical combat, quick moving. It can even still be bought new at Amazon. It runs very well in DOSBox on both Windows and Macintosh.

The next article in this series is about Stardock's Galactic Civilizations II.

How to Own the Universe and Then Give it Away

2007-02-26 · by psu

Back in the ancient times (you know, 2001), there was an entertainment company that owned the video game universe. Their lock was so tight that even people who were not originally impressed with the technical prowess of their hardware or the aesthetics of their games were still compelled through sheer force of will to buy the system.

This is a story about how a company can own the universe and give it away. I speak, of course, of Sony and the Playstation 2.

I should note at the beginning that Sony is a long way from having literally given up ownership of the video game market. One might argue that the PS2 is as strong as ever. There are 100,000,000 units out there, and they're not going into the dustbin anytime soon.

That being said, the ruling position of the Playstation 2 has never really been in question since the beginning of its lifetime. It started strong, it crushed everyone, and it continues to crush everyone. Microsoft and Nintendo made a good show of competing, but there wasn't really any competition there. Consider that within one year after the American launch of the system, the following games appeared:

And on and on. These are not all my favorite games. These might not be all your favorite games. But they are all someone's favorite games. Just about a year after launch, the machine already had a game lineup that crushed all comers when it came to sheer breadth, even if the absolute quality of every title was not world beating.

The PS2 was arguably a conservative hardware design. The only thing edgy about it at the time was the inclusion of a DVD drive, but even there, the format was mature and hardware readily available. Sony could crank them out and sell to all comers, and there were so many customers that there were still shortages anyway. The PS2 also incorporated a fairly radical approach to backward compatibility, which gave you something to do in that first year before the games came out.

The contrast with the PS3 is startling. From the beginning the PS3 appeared to be the place where every questionable emerging technology that Sony wanted to foist on an unsuspecting world had rented an apartment and set up housekeeping. The front-runners in this race of technical stupidity are the Cell and the Blu-Ray drive.

The great thing about the Cell is that Sony has to figure out how to make enough of them and teach people to program them at the same time. This, along with the other realities of higher resolution game development means that games come out more slowly after the launch of the machine. Microsoft had this problem to a certain extent with the 360. There is still a relative shortage of really good original titles on the 360 more than a year after launch, and there is certainly nothing to go up against that list above from the PS2.

The great thing about Blu-Ray is that it drives the price of the machine up and no one gives a shit about it. As a bonus, since the technology is not yet mature, Sony can't make enough of them yet. You can see how this is a winning bet on all fronts. It makes the machine more expensive and it provides no functionality that anyone really wants. Both of these things make people want to buy your hardware.

Because of these two technology gambles, the status of the PS3 was pretty risky to begin with. Even so, a well-managed launch with a few good games and no major mistakes would have locked Sony's position in the marketplace. This is not what happened. There were supply problems, a truly anemic lineup of games at launch, people beating each other up so they can flip the box on Ebay, embarrassing bugs with the video processing and upscaling, and on and on. Gamers With Jobs has a long running thread with devastatingly comprehensive coverage of the "haterade".

In its latest gaffe, Sony has announced that it will be crippling the previously much vaunted hardware backward compatibility in order to "save on manufacturing costs." Given that the only thing you might want to do with a PS3 right now is play Final Fantasy XII this seems like a strange decision. Backward compatibility has traditionally been one of Sony's strongest selling points. Why take an already marginal machine and cripple it even more?

Watching all of this fills you with a sense of awe. Sony's previous launches, through the glasses of hindsight and nostalgia were controlled and precise, with very few mistakes. They lined up the hardware, the games, and the developers into neat rows and then just marched over Nintendo and Sega on their way to world domination. It makes you wonder how they could get it so wrong this time around.

I think this is the second system effect writ large, even though this is the third time around for the Playstation. The first two Playstations were, to some extent, built by a small subgroup of the company working under constrained conditions. The PS3 was essentially built by all of Sony to be the foundation of future revenue and earnings in several different parts of the company. When you look at the hardware, you can almost see the drool from the engineers who got to participate in this groundbreaking from-the-ground-up redesign of the gaming console. They were told that they would conquer the world and with it be the salvation of the company, and they were given free reign and infinite resources with which to do this. The predictable result is an expensive elephant of a machine with features no one wants and technologies that no one cares about. Rather than studying what they did well in the last two rounds of the console "wars", Sony seems to have assumed that they are geniuses, and proceeded from that position of hubris to screw the pooch.

Of course, they haven't lost yet. They probably won't even lose in this generation. We'll know how bad things are next Christmas. If the exclusives and third party developers are on board and shipping, the PS3 will be just fine. But I think that chances are good that Sony has lost some of that critical support. The launch screwups, the risky hardware, and the relatively low sales will have people writing games for the PS2, the Wii, or god forbid, the Xbox 360. In any case, it should be an interesting year for those of us who are dorky enough to think this stuff is interesting. Hey, it beats watching politics.

4X: Galactic Civilizations II

2007-02-27 · by peterb

This is the fourth in a series of articles about 4X space games. Read the introduction here and the previous article here.

Stardock's Galactic Civilizations II is a great game. I can't stand it.

It appeals to a lot of players, has simple game mechanics, an acceptable UI, and a very high degree of polish. There are many people whose opinions I respect who enjoy it immensely, and you might be one of them.

I am not one of the people that enjoy Galactic Civilizations. It bores me. It bores me to tears.

I suspect I'm not the only person who has a list of games they think they should like, but don't. If I simply didn't like GalCiv I would have played it once and ignored it. But instead, every so often I forget that I don't like it. It's simple to learn, hard to master! It's polished! It's shiny! I'll play it again, and maybe this time I'll like it!

The original GalCiv had a little cachet as, more or less, the only game ever developed for IBM's OS/2 since the beginning of time. The game has what I think of as a fairly low-level nature: it's a 4X game that owes more to Civilization II than to Spaceward Ho!. Some of the similarities include a tech tree that is broad, deep, and involves making tradeoffs, a map where you move your pieces slo-o-o-o-o-w-l-y across the universe, one "space" at a time, and cities that you develop by building structures.

[Cheesy Poofs

Not Actually The Author](http://hypnox.com/reagan/imagepages/reagan34.html)

I was talking to my friend Nat the other day, trying to encapsulate what it is that I hate about GalCiv. I explained it like this: "First I spend an hour hitting 'end turn' excited to see what happened next. Then I spend an hour hitting 'end turn' wondering why I'm bothering, because this is getting sort of boring. Then I realize that I have spent two hours in a trance, compulsively hitting a button hoping for a piece of cheese." It's a bit like waking up in a strange hotel room, naked, in a bathtub full of cheesy poofs: you might have enjoyed it at the time, but afterwards you just feel sort of disgusted and ashamed.

In terms of presentation, GalCiv shares similarities with the original Master of Orion. The game has, simultaneously, more polish and less flavor. Perhaps it's because MoO had more cartoony, less representational graphics, but I found all of their alien races more memorable and elemental, whereas GalCiv's array of Arcaeans, Altarians, and so on seem much more interchangeable to me. The technology discovery screens, which are meant to sound jaunty and irreverent, instead sound somehow cynical and dialed-in to me, as if halfway through the project someone got bored of writing color text. That the robot delivering the text looks like Joan Rivers in Spaceballs doesn't help matters.

[Altair

Building a ship](http://wptest.tleaves.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/02/altari15.jpg "Altair")

GalCiv has lots of management. You decide what structures to build on colonies. You design ships (including a mode where you can construct and paint lovingly-rendered 3D models of said ships). You move those ships through the universe, one square at a time. All of this management — which I acknowledge is done through a simple and clear UI — puts on upper limit on the size of empire that I, with my tiny simian brain, can actually handle. I am running the most powerful galactic empire ever created: can't I afford an administrative assistant who can figure some of these things out for me?

(Actually, you can turn on such assistants; ships can be set to "auto-survey" mode, and planets can be assigned "governors", but by the time you think to turn these on, the damage is done: things that are fun when building your first two planets are not fun when building your twentieth.)

One aspect of GalCiv that I do like, unambiguously, is the ability to build space stations. The galaxy is sprinkled with interstellar resources that can be mined. Once built, space stations can be upgraded (at great cost) by sending constructor ships to them. This gives players the ability to project power into their enemies spheres of control even when there are no colonizable planets left. The scramble for space stations and resources is probably the most interesting part of the mid-game, to me.

The game also periodically presents you with moral dilemmas. Typically, you can resolve these by being "good" (for a small penalty), "neutral" (for a small bonus), or "evil" (for a large bonus). Over time, the choices you make will influence your empire's reputation and the technological paths available to you. While they break up the monotony a bit, I didn't find these to be life-changing.

The game's AI is devilishly aggressive, which is a welcome change from most games of this sort. Furthermore, GalCiv does have a lot of flexibility — you can win by fulfilling any one of a number of victory conditions, as in Civilization, and unlike most games in the genre you're not forced to commit genocide to keep playing. It's perfectly possible to play a conservative and defensive game in GalCiv and still have a chance at victory.

It's hard to explain why I don't like GalCiv II, and that's why I want to emphasize how polished the game it. The graphics are attractive. The UI is nice. The music is great. It's endlessly configurable. It gives you a wealth of strategic options. But at the end of the day, I find even the most challenging of GalCiv games to be soporific. My only theory for this is that I simply don't like the scale of the game. When playing Advance Wars, a game with theoretically much less at stake, I often find myself, quite literally, on the edge of my seat. I have a sense, playing that game, that every move matters, and if I screw up, I'm going to find out in short order. In GalCiv I might make a mistake and not discover it until 45 minutes later, after endless animations of my survey ship creeping across the Galaxy. For all the flexibility built in to the game, it just doesn't feel dynamic to me. When I finish playing GalCiv, it is as if I am waking up from a deep slumber. I feel that I have squandered time. And no matter how polished the presentation or how thoughtful the game design, I can't ignore that feeling.

Galactic Civilizations II: Gold Edition, by Stardock, is available for purchase on their website. $44.95. According to the publisher, a demo of the game will be available soon.

Thoughts on Digital Cameras, 2007

2007-02-28 · by psu

A few years back one of the first things I wrote and "published" online was a thought piece on the state of digital cameras at the time. I had just started using the things heavily, and being pegged as a photo dork, people kept asking me for shopping advice. Recently I rolled the page out to my dad when he asked me some questions and it occured to me that in these modern times of short product cycles one must constantly update and reorganize this sort of thing. So here is an updated version for 2007.

The Big Picture

The old article is basically correct. It all depends on what you need.

General Details

If you spend any time looking at information on digital cameras, you will note that there are basically two kinds of cameras that are interesting:

All of these devices work in basically the same way. There is a box with a lens on the front and a some kind of light sensing device on the back. This sensor is made up of millions of light gathering sites. The sites capture brightness information for one part of a scene and convert this information into a single digital value that is usually 12 bits long. So, the sensor looks at what you pointed the camera at and converts it into a large collection of numbers between 0 and 4096. The camera then takes the image data and processes it to reconstruct things like color information and whatnot.

The nominal "resolution" of the camera is usually quoted as the number of pixels in the final image. This number is also usually fairly close to the number of sensors in the chip that the camera uses to do capture. Each sensor corresponds to one "pixel" in the final image. Except, this is sort of a lie. Each sensor in the array can only capture black and white information. The most common way to get a color image from such a device is to overlay a color filter array over the sensor. The filter is usually a single piece that sits over the sensor. It puts a single color filter passing Red, Green or Blue over each pixel in a particular pattern. Each light gathering site now captures a single number that indicates how much Red, Green, or Blue light hit it. The image processing hardware and software then read this data and construct an image file with three numbers, one for each color, at each pixel. So, somehow we've gone from one color value at each pixel to three. Where did all that new color data come from? The simplistic answer is that the the software guessed. The more complicated answer is that there are algorithms that can reconstruct the color data very accurately under most circumstances. Of course, nothing is perfect, and there are simple cases where these algorithms fail.

With this background, we can cover the two main kinds of available cameras.

Point and Shoot

Point and shoot cameras cover a lot of ground in the digital world. They range in price from around $100 to around $1000, and they range in resolution from 1 to upwards of 10 megapixels. However, all point and shoot cameras have basically the same characteristics, which can be summed up as follows:

A small sensor.: Regardless of the resolution of the camera, most point and shoot cameras use a sensor that is something like 1/4" to 1/2" on its long side. The sensors are referred to using a weird and confusing naming scheme that has more to do with aspect ratio than actual size. Most of these sensors are made by Sony, although Fuji appears to make their own as well. The small sensor is significant because it limits the camera in two ways: performance in low light, and performance related to noise in the picture. Small sensors need a lot of light, and small sensors are noisy. I don't really want to get into why this is the case. But in general it is. A bad viewfinder.: Bad viewfinders. Point and shoot cameras generally have either a reverse telescopic viewfinder or an electronic viewfinder like a camcorder. Both of these suck. Of course, film point and shoot cameras suck the same way. Luckily, with digital point and shoots, you can use the LCD on the back. It doesn't tell you a whole lot about things like focus, but it's better than nothing. And, the swively ones can be handy for waist level shooting. LCDs don't work well in full sunlight. A slow image pipeline: Do the following experiment. Pick up a point and shoot digital camera. Point it at a second hand and hit the shutter button. Then bang on the button until it takes another picture. What you'll find is that the delay between the two pictures will usually be somewhere between a little more than a second to several seconds. The most common value is about a second or two. Note that I am not talking about shutter delay here. Most point and shoot cameras have shutter delay, but it can be minimized by prefocussing or whatnot. What I am talking about is how fast the imaging pipeline resets itself so you can take another picture. In general, the imaging systems in point and shoot cameras are simple and slow. They do not allow the camera to snap another shot while still chewing on a picture. You have to wait until everything is done before the camera lets you shoot again. This makes taking pictures of things that are moving or otherwise changing quickly sort of frustrating. More on this later. A small battery: You tend to get a hundred to a couple of hundred shots out of a battery. You can't really hope for more. There are exceptions, mostly in point and shoots that are larger.

That about sums it up. If you plow through all the camera review pages, you will find that all the specs basically add up to the same thing.

Taking pictures with a point and shoot is all about working around the limitations of the machine. Since the viewfinder sucks, just don't use it. I find it easier to compose roughly in the LCD screen than to try and use the viewfinder for anything. Since the AF is slow, pre-focus the camera ahead of time by holding the shutter button down halfway (almost all cameras let you do this). Finally, since the frame to frame speed is usually too slow to capture a changing situation, leave the camera in "continuous drive" mode all the time, and when just the right situation happens in front of your pre-focussed lens, jam the shutter button down and take a bunch of frames. This gives you several chances to catch a good picture that you'd lose if you waited for the camera to cycle through its focus, set exposure, write picture to card routine after every shot.

The importance of this can't be understated. Most point and shoots can fire off two or three frames per second for a second or two if they don't have to reset focus and exposure after every shot. You should take advantage of this. Many wanky photography buffs will look down their noses at you for shooting this way with inferior equipment. You can laugh at them when they don't have the energy to haul their 10 pounds of gear to their kid's next birthday party and therefore end up with zero pictures rather than what you manage to get.

My final piece of advice for point and shoot work is to never use the flash except under extreme duress. It will slow you down and drain the batteries. Speaking of batteries: always have spare charged batteries. There is nothing more humiliating than getting to a great photo situation and not having batteries.

Digital SLR

Digital SLRs trade size and cost for performance (although the new Canon Digital Rebel is nearly the same size as some point and shoot cameras). Comparing the SLR to the point and shoot you will find that:

The viewfinder is a lot better.: Look through my point and shoot and then look at the same scene through a Nikon D70. The P&S shows you what is sort of in the top half of the scene, with a lot of junk that isn't really in the shot. And, you can't tell what is in focus and not in the viewfinder or even in the LCD. Also, you can't see the LCD in sunlight. The D70 will show you what is in the shot with proper framing and a pretty good indication of what is in focus and not. For an even better experience, look through an FM3A film camera. The sensor is a lot bigger.: The sensor in the average digital SLR is usually around 1" long on the long side, which means that it is much much larger than the sensor in the average point and shoot. This means that pixel for pixel, pictures look better. If you take an identical shot using a Nikon D70 and my Canon point and shoot, both of which capture about 6 megapixels, you will find that the Nikon always does a better job. At equivalent settings, there will be better color, less noise, and maybe even more detail in the shot from the Nikon. I can shoot at ISO 400 with the D70 and get barely any noise at all. At ISO 400, the Canon makes images that are barely usable. Everything is faster.: I can turn on my Nikon D70 and take a shot in less time than it took you to read this sentence up to the word "shot". At the same point in time, my point and shoot will still be turning on. Also, the image processing pipeline in the D70 is much smarter and faster. Assuming there is enough memory left, it will overlap processing images with further shooting, so I don't have to wait for the camera until I fill the shot buffer, even if I'm not shooting continuous frames. The D70 only has room for 4-6 pictures, but newer cameras can shoot 10 or even up to 40 pictures before giving up. Using the D70 is pretty much just like using a film camera, except the viewfinder isn't quite as nice. What you pay to get all this luxury is about $500 to $1000 extra dollars, and a lot of size and weight. I don't have a workarounds section here, because you don't need any. The thing just works like every camera you've ever owned, except there are no film costs. Anyone can get good pictures with one of these things if they just follow a few simple rules

Shopping Advice

Aside from the general principles above, I don't really have much shopping wisdom here. My general rule has been to buy Canon point and shoot cameras, because I think Canon knows more about getting decent JPEG files out of crappy sensor than anyone else. Also, I think the Canons represent the best overall features/price/performance tradeoffs.

I use Nikon SLRs, but that's just because I already have Nikon lenses. If you have something else, buy something else. All of the major lines make good cameras.

My only other rule is to never buy a Sony camera because of the evil memory stick.

Parting Thoughts

There isn't too much more to say than this. Both my P&S and my D70 are a couple of years old now, and have been replaced by bigger, faster and shinier cameras. But I think the market split still holds. Even the new quicker point and shoots are still clunky compared to even a first generation DSLR.

You should figure out a good overall image management workflow. You should get tools that support that flow. They don't have to be powerful or complicated, they just have to work well for what you want to do. I'm not going to make any recommendations here because my tools are always changing around because I'm a tool geek. Set up a system and stick to it.

Finally, for god's sake, back up the pictures. Digital files are fragile and ephemeral. Make sure you have at least three copies of everything. Hmm, I wonder when I'll have time to burn 2006 to DVD.

Status: Bitter

2007-03-02 · by peterb

...because my ancient laptop, through an unfortunate misadventure involving a Senegalese circus troupe, now has a cracked LCD.

My plan is to spend the rest of the weekend obsessing over whether I should try and fix this thing myself, or just give up and buy a new machine.

The Stupid Rich Parents Pages

2007-03-05 · by psu

The decline and fall of civil society is not the sort of thing that will be immediately obvious to someone observing the process on a day to day basis. It happens in a series of small steps, none of which seem all that fatal on their own. In these "new media" days, one of these small steps is the slow decay of the American Newspaper in the face of new forms of information delivery that cater to those with the attention span of a small house fly.

In what I can only imagine is a strange and pathetic attempt at holding on to a neurotic and affluent reader base, there seems to be an increasing number of stories in, of all places, The New York Times these days that I can only characterize as "rich parents in NYC do stupid things."

Growing up, my dad always read the Times from front to back on the couch every afternoon and evening. I would pick it up occasionally and skim the sports pages. To me, the paper was the ultimate adult literature. Even the sports pages had an atmosphere of overwhelming seriousness. I could never have imagined that the sections that I ignored might contain this sort of frivolous pap. Maybe they've published this sort of thing since the beginning of time and I've only started to notice it now, but I'd like to think the paper was better in the past.

For whatever reason, these stories pop up on the NYT web site with alarming regularity. Their highest concentration is in the "style" type sections. Why stupid people are fashionable is, I'm sure, a deep philosophical puzzle that we'll be mulling over for ages.

From the coverage in the Times, it would appear that parents are simply overwhelmed by the complexities of raising a child in our modern world. This book review contains this choice quote:

Try giving your 3-year-old an old-fashioned cake-and-balloon birthday party at home, with neither facilitator nor gift bags, and you'll see that Warner's onto something, and that it's harder to opt out than you'd think.

To which all I can say is, in the style of Jon Stewart, "whhhhaaaaaaa?". How was I not informed of these minimum requirements for a proper birthday party? I've gone through my life under an apparently false delusion that all you need for birthdays are a few friends, a couple of relatives and maybe some cake as a bonus. I guess this makes me an abusive parent, not providing enough in the way of material goods even though they might be within my means.

The notion that it's impossible to "opt-out" of this kind of nonsense is at the core of the NYC stupid parent syndrome. I suppose I can see where some combination of excessive material means and guilt over the work needed to obtain those means could lead one into this kind of death spiral. But frankly I'd expect more from, you know, adults.

Consider this recent article about parents who have seen the need to hire outside psychological counseling to help their kids sleep in their own beds. Again, all the signs of the affluent parent syndrome are here. There is an excess of money and a distinct lack of realistic perspective. Most importantly, these people don't seem to understand the most fundamental rule of parenting: they are not on this earth to service the children. They remind me of pet owners who are owned and completely controlled by their pets. I realize that getting the kid to sleep can be an experience filled with a combination of terror and frustration. I realize that there is a certain amount of luck involved in getting a kid who is amenable to behavior modification. But, there are limits to how much I can sympathize with the plight of my fellow parent.

Then there are the people whose goal, it seems, is to turn their kids into little clones of themselves. Consider this appalling article about foodies who spend their days inflicting their hobby on their young children. The best part of this piece is the quote from the moron who fed his 18 month old daughter medium rare hamburger, because he "didn't want the kid growing up on well done." I remain unable to to fathom how someone would think this is a good idea. Speaking from experience, kids don't think about food the same way we do. And, there is plenty of time later in life to develop the skills of a true food obsessive. There is no reason to pollute childhood with this nonsense.

Not to be outdone by their sister New York paper, the Wall Street Journal this week published this piece about the "required" costs of raising a child. This article has everything. There is the distasteful purely economic analysis of child-rearing. There is the woman who proclaims that she tries not to overload her kid, and then has her seven year old in a dozen different after school classes and activities. There is the notion that private school, $5,000 vacations and $1,000 birthday parties are all "necessary costs." I'm sure they are nice to have, but nobody needs them.

I think this is the point that people have to sit back and examine. People are losing the ability to tell the difference between what they want and what they need. All of the people portrayed above suffer from this confusion. Some have lost track of the important fact that they need a certain level of control over their kids and their lives no matter how much they want to just give up. Others have lost track of what their kids really need to learn and know and do early in their lives. They don't need cooking classes, dozens of after school activities, and vacations to fancy foreign lands for "education."

Distinguishing what one wants from what one needs is the sort of skill that parents are supposed to teach their kids. Apparently we've been falling down on the job.

As evidence of this, let me end by presenting you with this story of two lovely people who are also the two most self-aborbed assholes in the entire universe. You should be afraid to read that page, so I will summarize and save you the full trauma. Here, in an article in a national newspaper, is the story of two people who cheated on their former spouses while courting each other, then each got a divorce, and then got married and had a national newspaper write a long story about their wedding. The level of self-importance and arrogance needed to pull this off is simply staggering. I find it surprising that these two egos can even fit in the same universe as the rest of us.

Praise the Lord and Pass The Ammunition

2007-03-06 · by peterb

When you live in a place for a while, your mental map of that place starts getting annotations. Specifically, I find that I start coming up with names for places that are better than their actual names. On Fifth Avenue, across the street from WQED, is a church; its given, wrong, name is "Holy Spirit Byzantine Catholic Church."

I used to walk past this building every day on the way to class. The front of the church is covered with a huge mosaic:

Holy Spirit

I never thought much of it, not caring much about religious iconography. One day, however, I examined the mosaic a little more closely.

As I did so, I realized it had a particular detail that I found not only jarring, but downright disturbing. Here's a close-up shot of that detail (click to enlarge):

nagasaki

To the person who created this particular work of art, I ask the question: what the hell?.

Ever since noticing the World War II-era bomber and the fighter jet on the mosaic, I've always thought of this church by its secret True Name: Our Lady of Nagasaki.

PTD Magazine #303

2007-03-07 · by peterb

The latest edition of PTD is out! In this month's free digest you'll find my review of one of the most revered games of all time, X-Com: UFO Defense, a review of indie entry Arctic Stud Poker Run. You'll also find the record of how I utterly dominated Lorien at Sid Meier's Railroads!, and an editorial in which I urge game designers to avoid 3D just for the sake of 3D (I'm not holding my breath on that one).

The print magazine has all this, and also my review of Sam and Max Episode 3, as well as many other articles by talented writers. Both the digest and subscriptions to the full edition are available at the ptdmagazine.com web site.

What I Think I Like

2007-03-08 · by psu

I love strategy games. At least that's what I tell myself. One of the first games I was ever seriously addicted to was this FORTRAN monstrosity called EMPIRE that ran on a VT100 terminal on your neighborhood Vax in the late 70s. I remember wasting away many afternoons in the terminal room conquering the world with my armies and boats and aircraft. This game was classic turn-based strategy. You give orders to your dozens of units. The computer moves his dozens of units. Eventually, one side is out of units and loses.

Later on, I played Strategic Conquest which was EMPIRE reborn on the Mac with cute little icons and funny sound effects. Exactly the same game though. These days, this type of tactical game is nearly impossible for me to resist. I bought a GBA for almost the sole purpose of playing Advance Wars. Of course, Advance Wars is also on the DS, along with a turn-based version of Age of Empires. Then there are the all of the great Japanese tactical RPGs: Fire Emblem, Final Fantasy Tactics, Disgaea, Phantom Brave and on and on.

My gaming life is apparently filled with an overwhelming buffet of different strategy games. I could sit on my couch and move units 24/7 for the rest of my life and probably not finish them all. I could, but for one problem. The truth is, I can barely play them at all.

Let's take Disgaea as an illustrative example. I've had this game for about two years. So far, I've worked my way through the first four missions a couple of times. Here is what happens when I decide I want to play the game again:

  1. Find the disk.

  2. Stare at the idle PS2 and consider what I'm going to do.

  3. Remember that the game is a byzantine combination of combat missions, RPG spreadsheet processing, weird combat mechanics that I can't remember, and that slightly grating anime-style art and writing (the penguins say "d00d" and explode when you throw them).

  4. As I consider booting the disk, I can feel the residual energy slowly leak out of my brain, leaving me unable to deal with any game that requires more thought that "X-button! now!"

  5. Once in a while, I put the disk in and remember just enough of the game (using the walkthrough) to play the next map once or twice.

  6. Then I put the disk back and play Madden or Final Fantasy for a few months.

Just last month, I thought about playing Disgaea and instead I decided to see how many rushing yards you can gain with a single running back in one season. It turns out if you work at it, you can get at least 3,500 yards with one player. What you do is trick the defense into a Nickel formation, and then lock it there by going hurry-up. You can then run at will for as long as you need to. Anyway, when I got tired of that, I ran my FF12 people around some and let them fight by themselves, which was less work than moving the weird exploding penguins around the battle map.

Soon after picking up Disgaea and not playing it much, I bought Phantom Brave, which was developed by the same company. I can't remember if have even cut the shrink wrap off of that game.

I have the same relationship with my portable strategy games, even though the hand-helds should be perfect for the genre. Start a map, play a few turns, sleep the machine, repeat. I was told that Final Fantasy Tactics Advance was a great game, but the half-hour opening cut scene sort of put me off of it. I might have played one or two of the opening missions, but then I sort of lost the rhythm. Same with Fire Emblem. I think I own both of GBA Fire Emblem games, and I have thought about buying the Gamecube version. It would be a great thing to go with Disgaea!

The one almost-exception to my general rule about strategy games is Advance Wars. Here I have actually made decent progress through every entry in the series. I think I've played about half of the story mode of each. In other words, I played through most of the easy maps but quit once the game got more complicated. By this measure, it should be clear that Advance Wars is by far the best strategy game on the planet. I've played an order of magnitude more of it than any of the dozen or so others I've tried.

I think I buy tactical and strategy games in an effort to convince myself that my interest in video games is not purely driven by an infantile need for escapism. In other words, I think they are good for me the same way serious books or music are good for me. The difference is, I actually read... well, I actually do listen to..., well, I used to anyway.

For better or worse, the truth is just the opposite. My interest in video games is almost completely about an infantile need for escapism. What is the point of a good game if you are not being the hero, or shooting the bad guys, or swinging that huge sword mindlessly in the air. Games are not the place where I want to be exercising my higher brain function. I'm willing to read some text to avoid horrible voice-work. But that's about as far as I'll take it.

I like dumb games for dumb people. I'm a dumb gamer.

Still, maybe tonight I'll play a couple maps of Disgaea. I'm just starting to get the hang of the combat system and am really starting to groove on some of its more unique and flexible features.

The Deeds Make the Man

2007-03-12 · by psu

We have mentioned on occasion that the main reason that the Xbox 360 exists is to deliver the Xbox Live service to your TV. There is something in Xbox Live for everyone. For people who care to play games with others on the Internet, something that I don't really understand anymore, the friend tracking and online matchmaking in Xbox Live puts all other such services to shame. For people who want to not have to buy the next Ubisoft shooter to find out that it's crap, the Live service provides downloadable demos and other content that make this easy. For those who like to spend their extra money on retro games they played 20 years ago, the Live Arcade is just the ticket.

Finally, for the marketing geeks in the audience there is the Xbox Live Achievements system. This attaches a persistent online profile to every Xbox Live customer. This profile tracks every single thing they do on the console, thus providing you the salesperson with perfect information about all of our gaming habits. Who could ask for more?

I understand why Microsoft would put something like this in the system. It gives them a way to collect information about who is playing what and for how long, and they can feed this information back to the publishers. This all makes sense. What I don't understand is why anyone else cares.

In the first Xbox Live, a few games had online tracking of in-game achievments. The online scoreboards in Project Gotham and links to the online game records at Bungie in Halo 2 come to mind. The online information that Halo and Project Gotham collected on you made sense in the context of those two particular games. If you are playing a racing game, you probably care a bit about how fast you drive a particular car around a particular track as compared to other people on the planet. Similarly, if you are playing online deathmatch in Halo, it is nice to have a record of such games, in case you want to look back on old victories.

The Achievements system lacks this concrete connection to the gameplay. Instead, achievements are little abstract cookies like "You made it past level 2!" or "You killed the purple three-eyed boss monster with just your knife!" I know I did these things, I was playing the game while I did it. I probably did it to get to the next cut scene, and beyond that I really don't care and I don't understand why anyone else would care. Sure, you get "points". But as of yet these points are even more useless than the other Xbox Live points you can get just by giving Microsoft money. Besides the utility of recording my actions for the demographers, I still don't see the utility here. Achievment points are like Microsoft the crack dealer giving me extra kudos for getting high

Apparently, I am alone in my confusion. This sort of virtual trophy case is important to a lot of people. The sum total of good news for the PS3 in the last six months was the announcement of this "Home" system which appears to be nothing more than a 3-d room where fake people can walk around and look at each other's fake loot. Come to think of it, Second Life is a whole pyramid scheme based on the idea that people will pay just as much money for fake stuff as real stuff. I gather that there are entire side industries that generate real money for fake stuff in World of Warcraft. In fact, this business is big enough to have gotten coverage on NPR, your Dork Nation news source.

Observing all of this brings me no closer to understanding what motivates people to pursure these strange virtual measures of their own self-worth. I understand why people enjoy playing the games. I understand many sources of pride related to playing games. There is the satisfaction of the final cut scene. There is the acquisition of mad skillz. I can understand these things as they are directly connected to the experience of the game itself. Achievements are an external and artificial meta-game. They are like a side-quest with no in-game payoff. You only notice them when you've turned the game off, and by then you don't care anymore.

True Conversation

2007-03-12 · by peterb

Me: "Hey, Nat, do you know what this 'Azureus magnet link' thing is?"

Nat: "Oh, I think of that as 'That thing that when I click on it, doesn't work."

Me: "Hey, me too."

Service With A Scream

2007-03-13 · by peterb

Travelling to Europe ruined me in several ways. One, of course, is that I'm compelled to constantly demonstrate what an insufferable poseur I am by placedropping ("Oh, yes, there's this little bar in Madrid just north of the Gran Via that specializes in Vermouth. They serve anchovies and olives as tapas — you really should go, dahling..."). The other is that I can't enjoy a meal at a restaurant any more, because I can't stand being interrupted while I eat.

The intra-prandial checkup seems to be a thoroughly American phenomenon. It's one that you don't even notice until you've eaten somewhere that doesn't do it. Try this: the next time you're out eating with a friend, keep track of the number of times a waiter or waitress comes over and interrupts your conversation to ask "Hi! Everything OK here?" This typically happens to me at least 3 times when eating dinner out.

I want to be clear that my ire isn't addressed at the servers, who are just doing their job and meeting cultural expectations. Rather, I'm bemoaning that this has become our cultural standard. When I first started travelling abroad it actually made me nervous, on a subconcious level, that the waiters weren't checking up on us. Were they ignoring me? Well, yes, but only because that's part of what it means to be polite in Rome: you don't interrupt someone's meal without a really good reason (note that "bringing more food" is one of the good reasons). Eventually, I not only got used to it, but started to enjoy it. To eat out is not a big deal, but to eat out and actually feel unrushed and unhurried is a true luxury. In the US it almost feels like the service expectations of fast food have leaked into the standard restaurant culture. Hi! Welcome! Please sit down. What would you like? Everything OK? Everything OK? Everything OK? Please leave now.

Bizarro

Welcome to America

I don't see any real hope for changing the practice here. Our tipping culture encourages wait staff to be more attentive rather than laid back, and restaurants, as businesses, want to turn tables over more quickly to get high volume. I do find it somehow amusing that our coffee culture is also the inverse of the Italian coffee culture, specifically, with Starbucks encouraging you to sit and relax with your espresso, which is a drink that God clearly intended you to gulp down at the bar in 10 seconds shortly before striding out of the door of the bar stuffing a cornetto in your face on the way to work.

I don't want to make the situation seem more bleak than it really is. There is great food culture in the US, even in Pittsburgh. It's just not the norm. You have to work to find it. Maybe that's not such a bad thing.

And, in the worst case, I guess I can just look at this as another excuse to go back to Rome. See, I know this little bakery hidden away on Via di San Teodoro! They're only open 2 hours a day, and...

God is In the House

2007-03-14 · by psu

To my way of thinking, every major genre of music has its quintessential forms. There is the three minute pop song sung by a group of three or four young freaks with long hair. There is the large scale Classical/Romantic Symphony. And in Jazz, there is the piano trio or quartet. With all due respect to the other instrumentalists, there is something about the piano trio that connects with the part of my brain that enjoys Jazz and just makes it tingle in a particular way that other records don't.

I own a lot of piano records. I have the classic Bill Evans groups. I have the pre-Columbia Monk recordings because I'm a snob. I have the Monk-like Jessica Williams. I have the post-Coltrane uber-hard-bop Mccoy Tyner. I have the the Sun Ra records from Saturn and the Cecil Taylor records that sound like a hallucinogenic drug on tape. I have the completely original and unlike anything else Herbie Nichols records. And of course, there are the small group Ellington and Count Basie records. There are dozens of others.

I would recommend any of these records to anyone who will listen, and if you send me email I can give you a list of the best ones. But, for the pure pleasure of performance art, there is one artist that you should investigate first. Stop reading this now and go pick up some Oscar Peterson records. Then just put the CD in the player, or the iPod headphones in your ears and just let the pure unadulterated swing, drive and absolutely unbounded virtuosity wash over you. Consider this humble clip:

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?playlistId=212191357&s=143441&i=212191382

And that's before they really get cranked up. Peterson combines three phenomenal abilities into a single unmatched package:

  1. He can play fast. He plays faster than should be physically possible. He's so fast that even after he had a stroke in the early 90s he's still so fast you can't believe it.

  2. He seems to effortlessly generate and endless stream of interesting ideas.

  3. He has an unfailing sense of swing. You cannot listen to this music without your feet wanting to move around in a happy dance.

I don't have any specific recommendations. I would say that you should buy everything he ever recorded in whatever order you like. I will say that the above clip is from a trio recording featuring Peterson, Joe Pass and the bassist who has recorded with everyone: NHOP. I think the original set was on Pablo. It's as good a place as any to start. You'll be hooked.

Why No Real Post Tonight?

2007-03-15 · by peterb

Because I have the plague.

I blame psu.

They Just Don't Care

2007-03-19 · by psu

This weekend a story with horrifying implications came over the airwaves of the Internet Gaming Forums. This story is of such gravity and importance that I decided to delay my usual Monday morning semi-philosophical wanky gaming article for a day and inform you, our dear reader, of its existence so you can gird yourself for the impending doom to come.

So, without further delay, here is the terrible news: Nintendo's online service will continue to require separate friend codes for every different game. That's right. There will be no unified friends list. Ok. You can sit down and catch your breath now.

This story about Nintendo game over one of the two forums I read. Let's see, one of the first replies was something along the lines of

... fuck you for this, Nintendo. Fuck you very hard.

This took me a bit by surprise. On the one hand, it makes sense that people reading an online forum about video games would would think that online gaming is important. Therefore it would make sense that the people on the forum would be disappointed that Nintendo has stuck with their tedious friend code system.

On the other hand, it is astounding to me that anyone would make a unified online profile and matchmaking system the single feature from which their entire view of a particular system is drawn. It's just not that important. Yes, Microsoft makes a lot of revenue off of Xbox Live. Yes, Blizzard prints money. But those are just two companies with online customer bases numbered in the tens of millions. There are something like 200 million active console gaming devices, and who knows how many hundreds of millions of units of offline games sold for that hardware. Even the bathtubs of money that Blizzard has with World of Warcraft pale in comparison to the total amount of money in the whole industry.

On the third hand, it's also safe to say that it is an area of future growth. More people are connected every day. If you want to survive through the next few product cycles, you have to figure out how you are going to exploit this for money.

Microsoft has decided that a good long term strategy is to aggressively pursue the online gamer. They have spent the last five years building a unified hardware and software infrastructure for Xbox Live. In addition, they have required that games on the system use this infrastructure for all of their online needs. They even make the publishers make up those stupid achievements so we can all get our pavlovian online treats. This strategy make a lot of sense for Microsoft.

I can't really tell what Sony is thinking. They are sort of out to lunch lately.

Nintendo has taken a cautious approach. Basically, to play games with your friends online, you have to spend a few minutes tediously writing down some numbers and entering them into your machine. You can then try to jump into a game with them. Apparently, this is an unforgivable sin for a few different reasons.

First, there is the claim that the system is somewhere between tedious and clunky and completely crippled and unusable. I would agree that the system is inconvenient. I don't know that I'd call it crippled or retarded.

Second, there is the claim that since Nintendo was building an online gaming system anyway, they surely could have built something equivalent to Xbox Live "while they were at it." This ignores a very important fact: no one has been able to build an online matchmaking system as good as Xbox Live at its best. Even on the Xbox 360 itself, only Halo 2 gets this completely right. Most of the others, even big titles like Gears of War, don't come close. I don't know what the current state of the art on PCs is, but the last time I tried to play online using Steam I wanted to put an ice pick through my aorta because it would hurt less.

So, yes, it is true that what Nintendo has built for online gaming is not as nice as Xbox Live. But, the claim they could just roll out an Xbox Live killer from their back pocket is one that only someone with a very loose connection to actual reality could make. In reality, building such a service would cost Nintendo a lot of extra time and money. This is not time and money that Nintendo wants to spend. I don't really know anything, but I think Nintendo has analyzed the situation and decided that people who buy the Wii may want to use an online service to do things like download virtual console games or read the world news, but that online gameplay is not a high priority. Given this, they have decided to build something more limited and cheaper than what Microsoft built.

All of this makes sense to me. But then, I am not much for online gaming, so I guess it makes sense that it makes sense to me. Nintendo is basically doing what I want them to do. They are providing some interesting online services, but they are not wasting a lot of money trying to ape Xbox Live. This meets my needs and expectations perfectly. Since my needs are obviously exactly what the mainstream wants, Nintendo is obviously doing the right thing.

Of course, the angry forum-boys are angry precisely because their needs are the most important and Nintendo is ignoring them. This is what I call the "I am the most important customer in the whole world" fallacy. We all like to think that we are the only market that matters, and that our tastes drive the desires of the whole nation. I think this fallacy is what drives the anger of the forum wrathboys. They simply cannot understand why Nintendo would so blatently ignore their needs and desires when their needs and desires are so clearly the most important. They don't understand why Nintendo does not care.

And here we hit an impasse. I can try to calmy explain why Nintendo doesn't care, or at least why they have higher priority products to build. Nintendo doesn't think that this part of the online service is that important to their users. Nintendo might be right or they might be wrong. I don't really know, although I suspect they are right. This leaves the angry people in the forum without satisfaction. To them, Nintendo is obviously doing the wrong thing. They can only conclude that Nintendo doesn't give a shit about what they want. This is a harsh reality to live with, but sometimes it's true. Sometimes they just don't care. Sometimes what you want just is not that important.

In Between

2007-03-20 · by psu

For the last two months or so, I've been in the enviable position of not having to think about games. I've had a "one game" that I can just leave in the machine and fire up every time the urge hits. I hear that this is one of the reasons people are so happy about World of Warcraft.

Sadly, all good things must reach the final Boss. And thus my run through Final Fantasy XII finally came to an end. This leaves me in the difficult situation of being in between games.

But first, a couple of thoughts about Final Fantasy. This was the first game of the series that I managed to play to the end. I've messed with some of the older ones for "historical research" purposes, but found them too stilted to actually play. I tried to play Final Fantasy X during my post Shadow Hearts JRPG binge. The water polo mini-game and the voice work both sucked the life out of that game for me.

XII is different. As I said before, the one thing you can't complain about is the production values. The art direction, level design, character design, sound design, voice work, writing and cut scene production are all top notch. Even the rendering engine almost manages to make you forget about the PS2 looks-like-ass filter. While there is no progressive scan, playing the game in widescreen is a pleasing audio and video experience. I found the game compelling and easy to play for a long time. Which is good, because it's a damn long game.

A lot of people have complained about the robot combat system. I like it. It is easy to get yourself killed with buggy scripts. But the scripting and auto-combat are not that different from what Bioware has done its KOTOR games, except that you can actually make the characters smart enough to take care of most fights on their own. It's especially convenient that you can set up scripts to auto-buff your party so you don't have to cast the same tedious series of buffing spells for every damn fight. This makes grinding for levels almost fun. Which is good because if you play this game to just do the main story, you'll find yourself feeling chronically weak until near the end of the game. I think the game is designed with the idea that you will actually do the boring hunt side-quests and therefore level your characters and collect cash fairly quickly. Sadly, the hunt quests are boring and frustrating. More sadly, you must do at least a few of them to get a few spells and devices that will make your life a lot easier in the later parts of the game. This goes against my streamlined theory of RPG design, which is that I should never have to do any extra work to get the all the killer stuff I need to beat the game easily. Boo Square-Enix.

The result of all of this is that it takes longer than you would like to be of the right level and have the right stuff. Being relatively weak means you end up engaging in what I call the "flee to the savepoint" tactic whenever coming into a new area. I found that usually the creatures in any new place would pummel me into jelly if I hung around too long to fight them and they ganged up on me. So instead I would just run away to the next save and then backtrack from the save back into the area to slowly defeat things and level up a bit. This works OK until you get into the final few areas where the game decides that it should subject you to chains of bosses at the end of a dungeon with no intermediate savepoint. This happens a few times during the game and most egregiously at the end of the game. The final area is a soul-sucking chain of multiple bosses, each one of which will sap your party of the resources it needs to fight. But, if you manage these resources well, and have some way to restore them near the end, the fight itself is not very interesting, just long and boring. Happily, the final cut scene is pretty.

In all, I found FFXII to be greatly entertaining with only a couple of minor annoyances related to balance and a sparse matrix of savepoints.

But now that I'm done, what do I play? There aren't a lot of compelling options on the horizon.

On the Xbox 360, there is the brainless sandbox cop game (Crackdown) and yet another Ubisoft shooter (GRAW 2). No thanks. The good games for the 360 still appear to be a few months out. Maybe Bioshock won't suck.

On the PS2, there is God of War but I can't see that being any more interesting or less offensive than the first one. Karen hated the first one. I could get the new MLB:07 game, but I just got my RPG pitcher a $32M contract in MLB:06, and I can't see starting that whole thing over again.

I guess I could play more Zelda but that tends to hurt my brain.

When no new games will do, the back catalog comes to the rescue! Standing in the Exchange yesterday, I saw two games I could pick up without hating myself. First, there was a badly reviewed JPRG for the 360 called Enchanted Arms. It was cheap and the guys over at Penny Arcade liked it, so it's worth a shot. I also saw a very cheap copy of that old peterb favorite Beyond Good and Evil. I never managed to finish this game on the Xbox because I found the controls too tiring, but I find these games much easier to play on the PS2 so it's worth a shot.

If these don't work out, I guess I could work my way through my own back catalog. There are the old PS2 platformers I've never finished (Jak, Sly, Ratchet). There is my stable of sports games (Madden, MLB, NBA Street). There is my collection of unfinished JPRGs and strategy games (More Shadow Hearts, Disgaea, etc). And finally, there are the odd horror games that I never get through (Eternal Darkness, Silent Hill, Fatal Frame).

Of course, I never finished these games before, and there isn't any evidence that they will grab me harder this time. This is not really the fault of the games. That catalog unquestionably contains titles that are almost universally praised. This is just the nature of being in between games. You bounce from product to product until you manage to find another one game. Games that really grab you are fairly rare and really great long games are even more rare. I think the fact that we spend so much time between games tends to make us gamer nerds overly pessimistic about the state of the industry. We want every game to recreate that combination of a great buzz and the feeling of security and well being that the "one game" brings. When it doesn't happen, we lash out at the developers and publishers for "not innovating" or always subjecting us to stale mediocrity. We should probably be more forgiving. It's not likely that I will ever have another year like 2004/2005 where there was a chain of great games to play for 11 out of 12 months. The key to inner peace and happiness is to accept this as the natural state of the world and just bide your time until the next great game comes along. Then you can enjoy a month or two of stability before bouncing back out into the state of being in between.

Reverberations

2007-03-20 · by peterb

One bit of fallout from the Wii "Everybody Votes!" channel is that you'll find yourself going along through your work day when suddenly you're overcome with the inability to comprehend: who the hell are all these people who aren't mad when they get stood up on dates?

Or the people who don't brush their teeth right before going to bed. You people sicken me.

Eating Unique on Craig Street

2007-03-22 · by peterb

Since our office moved closer to Oakland, Craig Street is the most convenient place to get a bite to eat or a cup of coffee. This is somewhat tragic, since Craig Street has always been covered with a miasma that makes food served in the area merely adequate. The best example of this is the Coffee Situation.

Coffee on Craig St. is an unmitigated disaster. There's Kiva Han, which for all its hip aura sells coffee so unremittingly and gruellingly terrible that I've actually poured it out after one sip. There's Starbucks, about which we know all there is to know. There's the crêpe place, which sells decent coffee but charges you $5 or something, and the atmosphere is all wrong. There's the new place in Mellon Bank which I haven't tried but which looks like a chain. And there's Eat Unique.

Eat Unique, formerly Craig St. Coffee, sells adequate coffee. It's not overpriced. It doesn't taste terrible. It's not actually good, either: I've driven a half hour out of my way to have a macchiato at La Prima Espresso, but I wouldn't detour five minutes for an Eat Unique coffee.

Eat Unique wants to be a lunch place. Here, they do a little better: every time I go there for lunch, I have a yummy sandwich or interesting soup. The problem, of course, is their throughput. Going there for lunch basically means I have to wait about 20 minutes longer than I think I should to pick up my meal. It's usually worth the wait, but the wait still often discourages me from eating there at all.

Lately, however, they've been paying more attention to breakfast pastries. Now, they're no replacement for Antonio — no one will ever be a replacement for Antonio — but they are bringing some interesting options to the table. Their cinnamon rolls are excellent, but what is particularly interesting is that they are now serving a line of savory scones that are actually unique: this morning I grabbed a fig and blue cheese scone. It's excellent. The seeds in the figs give a nice crunch, and the blue cheese is really more of a suggestion than anything, and doesn't overwhelm. This probably makes them the breakfast place of choice on Craig St., in my book, at least for now.

I'm still working up the courage to try the maple syrup and bacon scone, though.

Does this improve the coffee? Not really. But it does help to have something yummy to wash down.

Telerama: Standing Eight Count

2007-03-23 · by peterb

My internet provider of choice (and former employer) Telerama has been having a few problems lately. This has engendered some morbid conversations, Irish wake-style, among some folks about whether and when the business will completely give up the ghost.

Regardless of what happens to Telerama — and I hope it's around for a long time, and regains a solid financial footing — I think it brings some lessons that are of interest to anyone who wants to run a small business. I'm going to wander far afield and talk about some of these, and also talk a little bit about Telerama.

A friend of mine asked me yesterday whether I had switched my DSL over to some other company yet. "No, not yet," I said. "I'm going to ride it out for a few days and give Doug some time." "Is that an emotional attachment, or a financial calculation?" she asked. "Neither. It's just, well, having my DSL through these guys keeps things interesting."

Now, the unfortunate thing for Telerama is that "interesting" is not really what most people want out of their service providers.

The intriguing thing about Telerama as a case study is that it was clear from around 1995 or so that it was in the wrong business. Small businesses can't make money and grow selling internet services to end users. Yes, I'm aware that there are a number of other providers in the Pittsburgh region in this market, but that doesn't make the statement any less true: unless you are offering some substantive service that isn't available elsewhere, you'll eventually be pushed out of the market by larger players, who will offer better service for lower cost.

So the key question for Telerama in the early 1990s was: how could the company exploit its early start and find new markets? That's what never happened. Why not?

Unwanted Guests

Most of the people who started internet companies in the early 1990's had, to put it mildly, strong personalities. This is not coincidental. The Internet in 1990s was largely controlled by an oligopoly of entities that worked on behalf of universities and research institutions. For-profit network operators were unwanted. Early on, your ability to resell service lived or died at the pleasure of someone who had no interest in actually selling you bandwidth. The only people who started ISPs were those who were prepared to take risks that others were not willing to take.

In order to start an ISP in the early 1990s, you had to be willing to look your upstream provider in the face and lie to them about what you were doing. That really meant that only a certain type of person could start a succesful ISP.

This very attitude let Doug, Telerama's owner, do some things that others were unwilling or unable to do. Doug was a superb judge of technical talent, as distinguished from technical knowledge. He was constantly hiring people who had very sparse technical resumes, but who would prove to be sharp, quick-learning, and adept. I know of many people working as software developers, networking researchers, and network operators today whose careers were launched because Doug gave them a chance before anyone else did. The importance of his ability to recognize this kind of talent can't be overstated.

It's also important to note that Telerama has been an ISP for 16 years. In that time, countless other ISPs have started and gone bankrupt. Keeping an ISP afloat in the marketplace for this long is no mean feat.

The Control Paradox

The key paradox in running (and growing) a small business is that you can't grow without dividing up control and responsibility, but there's incentive against doing so. Giving the wrong guy too much control can result in someone taking the company you worked hard to build and driving it into the ground. But in my experience, failing to find the right people to give control to will result in the same end — it'll just take longer. You can't do it all yourself, and you shouldn't try. Finding the right people to give responsibility to will increase your control over the company.

This can be summed up as follows: as an entrepreneur who owns a startup, your number 1 priority should be hiring your replacement.

You need 4 good people to have a hope of managing any business:

  1. The Guy Who Manages People. This is the person who hires the people who do the "real work", and whom they report to.
  2. The Guy Who Sells Things. This is the person whose job is to help you plan where you will make your money, and to help you execute that plan (yes, I am well aware that I am mixing marketing and sales together. You will unmix them as you grow).
  3. The Guy Who Watches The Cash. This is the person who can, at a moment's notice, answer the questions "What are we spending money on?" and "What can we do to improve our cash flow?"
  4. The Idea Guy. This is the person thinking about products or services that you can be selling several years down the road.

In most of the successful companies I've seen, the founder ends up being The Idea Guy, since that's how he came up with the idea for the company in the first place. If you actually plan to grow, and not just maintain your business, you'll very quickly need an HR person ("The Guy Who Keeps You From Getting Sued Too Much").

The road to failure is littered with the corpses of companies who let their Idea Guy also be The Guy Who Watches The Cash or, for that matter, any of the other guys. One or more of these people will also be your Guys Who Raise Money, but that's a subject that's beyond the scope of this article.

The thing I'm trying to make clear here is that it is in your business's best interest if these are all physically separate Guys. There are a number of reasons for this, but it boils down to two things. First, the most important part of fixing a screwup is figuring out that the screwup exists. Second, you want accountability. You want to be able to make the minimum number of staff changes needed to fix the problem, and no more.

My impression at Telerama is that at any given time they really only had 2 Guys: "Doug" and "This other guy that Doug hired to do everything."

That's not enough Guys.

An Illustrative Story

In early 1994, Doug and I were in our early 20s. Neither of us had a lot of experience running a business. When things at Telerama needed to be done, we just did them. The idea of hiring (for example) a Sales Guy didn't really occur to us.

Once, we showed up for a sales call on a local Internet startup (motto: "We don't produce anything of value!"). These folks were looking to lease a modest amount of high speed internet services. The local phone company was still charging usurious rates for DS1 service, and the expertise to operate the lines was still fairly specialized. Telerama had already demonstrated competence at operating such services, and was quoting a price significantly less than our closest competitor.

I wore a suit. Doug, who was used to dealing with techically savvy people who didn't trust people who wore suits, was wearing very casual street clothes.

Since this potential customer was a very "straight" company, that's really all you have to say. The numbers we put up, the value proposition, none of that mattered. To this company, Telerama had just become the oddly-dressed guys, and there was no chance of making the sale.

On the way out to the parking lot, Doug said "Huh, that didn't go so well, I guess." I looked over at him. "You're buying a suit." "I can't afford a suit!" he said. "The company is buying you a suit," I said.

We got Doug a suit. We started making sales after that. This particular potential customer went bankrupt in 1997, so at least some good came out of the meeting.

The interesting thing about this story, to me, is that it could have gone either way: had the client been a different sort of company, the sale might have been lost because I was wearing a suit. "Why should we trust these guys? They're a bunch of suits."

If you have a Guy Who Sells Things, she knows exactly what the customer expects her to be wearing before she shows up.

100% of $0 is $0

One thing about Telerama that I think most people don't realize is that it mostly grew by its bootstraps. Most of the money invested in the company came from its customers. This is unusual. Many companies, especially tech companies, choose venture capital. The most egregiously unselfconscious of entrepreneurs even choose VC and then whine about how they had to sleep in the bed they made. VC comes with strings, and for many businesses those strings are very helpful. But the secret of VC is that the real value it brings isn't cash, but expertise — expertise in running a company. A good VC helps you hire your replacements. That will help your company grow.

All of this sounds obvious, but the missing link is that founders are not always rational about money. Many of them don't view the company as an intangible holder of value, but as an emotion-laden opus into which they've poured their hopes and dreams. And so the rational argument "bringing in more expertise will help the company grow" sometimes can't outweigh the desire to keep tight control on "their baby." All you can do as an employee is learn to recognize when this is happening, and run in the opposite direction as fast as you can.

Memento Mori

In Republican Rome, when a victorious general would receive a triumph, a slave dressed in rags would be perched behind him. That slave would periodically lean over and whisper in the general's ear, reminding him that he was merely a man. In a business, that role is served by your partners, by your board, and by your shareholders. If you have no partners, no board, and no shareholders, then you are navigating a very strong current with only a very weak rudder. I think that, more than anything else, is what has put Telerama into its present dire strait. No matter how good Doug's judgment is, he's just one guy, and without a group of people with brains, experience, and a vested interest in the matter, he'll continue to struggle.

I don't know how one can salvage the situation. But if there's one thing I know about Doug, it's that he's not afraid to try new things. If he can find the fortitude to find funding, gather a competent team, give them responsibility, and execute a plan, then who can say where the company will go. This is Telerama's standing eight count. "Down and out" may seem likely, but it's not a certainty. Not yet.

Some Monday Shorts

2007-03-26 · by psu

There was a break in the bleak weather and a small break in the workload at work, so we spent the weekend doing weekend things instead of surfing the web and finding some dork topic to spout off on. Instead, I have some short thoughts on things that are not worth a whole article.

Yupcakes

Recently, Pittsburgh has joined a socioeconomic and culinary trend that has been sweeping through the neighborhoods of the intellectually less gifted. I refer, of course, to the foofy cupcake shop. Now, I am never one to critcize those who are willing to spend stupid amounts of either time or money in the pursuit of culinary delights. My problem with the foofy cupcake is not with the theory, but the practice. If I am going to pay $2.50 for a small confectionary pastry, it better have more going for it than half a pound of butter creme on top.

In Pittsburgh, there are two new local instantiations of this new way to separate those with too much money from some of their cash. I have tried the one in Shadyside that is of higher repute, at least among the people I know. What I have to say is, if you want to spend $2.50 on cake and butter creme, I suggest you go by your local Giant Eagle and pick up some butter creme Gobs. Not only is the cake better, so is the butter creme. We tried three or four different kinds of cakes. They were uniformly dry, crumbly, tasteless, and generally lacked anything to recommend them except for the fact that they each cost as much as two and a half songs from iTunes.

And, lest you think I'm just being a grump, even the Pittsburgh Post Gazette agrees with me. You have to feel bad for anyone who apsires to make fancy food and gets dumped on by the Post Gazette.

Note: my friend Francisco (or it could have been Ray) came up with the term "yupcake." I could never think of something that funny on my own.

Grade Inflation

We went to our first PSO concert in a while. It was very enjoyable. However, the show did point out a strange behavior of the PSO audience. This particular night, the young piano soloist gave what appeared to be a spirited performance of a concerto by Robert Schumann. I am generally bored by Schumann, and the performance here was not strong enough to shake me of my convictions. The band itself didn't seem all that excited by it either. But, reaching the end of the piece, the audience members sprang up roaring their approval, eventually making the soloist walk out four or five times.

This ritual standing ovation has always puzzled me. I think it is fine to express appreciation for a performance that is particularly momentous. But to stand up at the end of every show and make a big show out of giving a standing O for even pedestrian performances of the odd warhorse seems to me to just cheapen to the whole enterprise.

Of course, when I stood up after the Sibelius Fifth Symphony that ended the concert, the woman sitting behind me huffed a bit about how she liked the piano player better.

First Ride

Took my first bike ride of the year this weekend. It's been too cold or wet or busy before now. After fifteen years of this I've finally learned the core lesson of the early season ride. Anyone, no matter how old or feeble, can use their legs to drive a bike at 15-17mph on a flat road with favorable wind. But don't be fooled. The second you hit that little rise, you will not feel as good as you did last year. So if you want to avoid that sick dizzy feeling that you can get from working too hard, just suck it up and take the hills slowly.

With this lesson, I successfully avoided feeling like I had to puke for an hour after the ride.

Parking Denied

Streets with parallel parking on them make drivers dumber. I have proof. How often has this happened to you?

You are creeping up the road looking for parking. You see a spot near the curb. You line yourself up to back into said spot. Just at that moment, the mental midget in the car behind you decides that he needs to creep up your tailpipe so that the whole line of cars can make progress. The result is that you can't park and you have to spend the next fifteen hours driving in circles looking for parking. What the hell?

Ad Sense

The people who program the nationally broadcast advertising time slots for sports events at the major networks seem to me to lack a reliable sense of time. Apparently, they think that three in the afternoon is actually in the middle of the night when the kiddies have all gone to bed. I say this because all through the football season I had to endure promos for the horror and crime fiction shows on CBS and NBC, flipping the TV off if the child was in the room.

Then, this weekend, the Pens were on TV. I haven't seen the Pens since they got good, so I watched a bit. Lo and behold, a promo for some movie that tells the touching story of how Spartan warriors disembowel their enemies came over the wire in between periods. Speaking of Spartans, just few minutes later, there was an extended ad for God of War, showing everyone's favorite pale Spartan doing those God of War things. I guess blood in the afternoon is the new thing for the kids who like to watch sports.

Good show TV networks. Well played.

Teaser

Speaking of God of War, I caved, so it's time for my nightly ritual slicing and dicing of faceless enemies. More thoughts on God of War later this week.

Expose Yourself

2007-04-02 · by psu

The subject of exposure in photography is filled with confusion. On the one hand, automatic exposure systems have largely freed the general public from ever thinking about the problem except under dire circumstances. On the other hand, beginning photographers who aspire to become serious workers in the medium are usually overly obsessed with the technical aspects of "correct" exposure. Even the idea of correct exposure is hard to pin down. You could argue that you can't know the correct exposure for a picture without knowing what the subject is. And yet mostly automatic cameras mostly do a good job. How does this work out? Are they just guessing well?

The truth is, the more you understand about exposure, the less you should have to think about it. It's as close to a zen paradox as you get in photographic technique.

Setting things up

In general terms, the exposure for a picture is how much light is allowed to hit the film or digital sensor. If you imagine that a camera is a box with a hole on one end and a light-sensitive material on the other, then three things determine the exposure for any given picture. First, there is the time, or how long you hold the film or sensor in front of the hole. Of course, a modern camera has a shutter mechanism that opens and closes in very precise intervals, so the time component of exposure is usually called the shutter speed. The longer the shutter stays open, the more light hits the film. Second, there is the aperture or the size of the hole. This size determines how much light per unit time is hitting the film plane. Aperture is generally denoted using a weird notation called an "f-stop". You will see markings on lenses like "3.5 4 5.6 8" and so on. These are called "f-stop" numbers and are a relative measure of how wide open the diaphragm inside the lens is. The smaller the number, the more light is reaching the film plane of the camera.

The modern fancy camera has two dials with which you set exposure, one for shutter speed and one for aperture. Any given pair of settings allows a single and unique amount of light to hit the film plane. To increase exposure, either increase the shutter speed or you open the lens wider. Similarly, to decrease exposure you either decrease the shutter speed or close the lens down. The controls have been standardized so that the shutter speeds and the apertures progress in factors of two. When you exactly double or halve the exposure, this is referred to as changing the exposure by a "stop". Now that I think about it, the origin of this terminology is unclear to me, but it's probably related to the f-stop numbers on the lens. Electronic cameras usually also allow you to change the exposure in intervals of 1/2 or 1/3 of a stop for finer control.

For the purposes of this article, I'm going to ignore the other effects that aperture and shutter speed can have on a picture. For now, all that we are concerned about is that they are the two numbers that you set in the camera that determine how much light hits the film or the sensor.

The third factor needed to determine the exposure for a picture is a measure of the sensitivity of the film or sensor you are using. Here is where we take a bit of a technical digression.

Middle Gray

In the old days, what we would do is expose film to light and then run it through a series of chemical baths. At the end of this process, we would have little pieces of plastic with negative images on them. The parts of the film that got more light would be darker, whereas the parts of the film that got less light would be lighter. On the print, the effect would be reversed. Therefore, if you expose the film to more light, the final picture comes out lighter. This seems obvious, but it's important.

The final piece of the exposure puzzle is this: how can you systematically express how bright the photo will be for a given exposure? It turns out that an international standards body has defined this for us. The ISO rating of the film, also referred to as the "speed" of the film is a number that essentially tells you how much light you have to give the film for it to reach a standard average density. This standard density is usually referred to as "middle gray". It's a pretty dull color, not really a nice light gray, not really a nice dark black. It's just average. The higher the ISO number, the "faster", or more sensitive, the film is. Fast film needs less light, slow film needs more light.

So here is the answer to how the camera chooses exposure for you. Assume you have told the camera the ISO rating of the film. Inside the camera body is a little chip that is sensitive to light. What the camera does is use this chip to figure out how much light is hitting the film plane. The camera now combines this information with the film speed and makes up an exposure that will result a middle gray picture. That is, it gives the film enough exposure so that if you had pointed the camera at a sea of middle gray, the resulting picture would come out middle gray.

At this point, I can hear the non-photographers objecting. You didn't point the camera at a gray card, you pointed it at Aunt Betty or Grandma, or the new baby. How can this possibly work? It turns out that most of the scenes that we point cameras at have a distribution of tones in them that averages out at middle gray. That is, parts of the picture might be brighter and other parts of the picture might be darker, but in general you get lucky and everything averages out. There are notable exceptions, but given how well most all-auto cameras work, they are fairly rare. Luckily, there is a simple rule to compensate for this:

  1. If your picture is dominated by light tones, the camera will expose the picture so these tones are gray, not white. Therefore, tell the camera to expose more. Compare these two pictures of a truck. The first one is exposed at the suggestion of the camera meter:

DSC_20070402-01014

After telling the camera to give a couple of stops more exposure, you get this

DSC_20070402-01013

Now the truck is a nice white like it was when I walked past it.

  1. If your picture has a lot of dark stuff, then the camera will make it middle gray instead of dark. Therefore, tell the camera to expose less. Again, as an example, I took this shot of a black rug I have in my house. It's blurry because I didn't have a tripod. Notice that at the exposure the camera suggested, the black rug is the same tone as the white truck was above:

DSC_20070402-01062

Tell the camera to expose a couple of stops less, and you get a nice dark tone closer to black:

DSC_20070402-01064

So remember, to make light stuff light, expose more. To make dark stuff dark, expose less.

One final digression: One of the best things about shooting with digital cameras is that the your "film speed" is not fixed. The camera manufacturers have calibrated their sensors to follow the ISO scale, but the camera lets you set almost any speed you want whenever you want to. You usually trade off image quality at the highest speeds, but it's usually worth it. Some cameras, like my favorite Nikons, also have a delicious auto-exposure mode that shift the ISO higher for you to maintain shutter speed or aperture. This means you can go from taking pictures outside to in your house without forgetting to reset the ISO. This is good for old forgetful people like me.

Contrast Kills

At this point, we might think that we have the exposure question licked. All you need is a calibrated film speed, a calibrated meter and some smarts about when to override the camera. This would be true, except for one more tricky problem: contrast.

As I write this, I'm looking out my window. The room is lit only by the indirect dusk light. The yard outside is in shadow, and the sky above the yard is lit by the setting sun. To my eye, the whole scene is pretty flat and it's easy to see detail in both the darkest and lightest parts of what I am looking at.

Here is the problem: you can't capture this contrast range on film or in a digital file. If you get the dark room light enough, everything outside will be a bright white. If you get the sky the right color, everything in the foreground will be black.

I took a picture out my window of the nice sky:

DSC_20070402-01007

Notice how everything else in the shot is black.

In a situation like this, the photographer has to pick what part of the picture is the most important and set the exposure appropriately. So, if you want detail in the dark parts of the picture, you expose for the shadows and just live with the fact that the bright parts of the picture will be white. Conversely, if you want to capture the fabulous light in the sky, you will have to give up detail on the ground. Of course, there are ways to cheat. If you do your own black and white printing, sometimes you can balance the contrast when you make the print. Certain extremely skilled landscape photographers have also mastered the use of special filters that can balance the sky with the ground. Finally, in the digital age, you can take two pictures of the same scene, one dark and one light and then stitch them together later.

The fact that your film or digital sensor has a limited dynamic range is something that you will find yourself fighting a lot. It's important to know where you have more leeway. For example, old style print films (and black and white) tend to forgive overexposure more than under. That is, they can hold detail in the bright parts of the photo but not the dark. Slide film and digital sensors tend to go the opposite way. They can hold detail in pictures that are too dark, but if you blow the highlights out you will just get large areas of blank white. In either case, the important thing to remember is that you expose the picture so that the subject you care most about is well within the available contrast range. If you let drift too far one way or the other, you will lose detail.

Summary

Since I am an engineer by trade, I have given you an overly complicated and technical explanation of what is going on here. There are three things you need to remember:

  1. The camera exposes for middle gray.

  2. If the subject is not middle gray, you need to compensate by increasing or decreasing the exposure appropriately.

  3. You need to take scene contrast into account when picking your exposure.

With enough practice, you will get used to reading the light in front of you and doing the right thing by reflex. Then you can forget about all the complicated details in this article and just shoot pictures.

Quick Review: Cachaça

2007-04-03 · by peterb

Cachaça, a foul-tasting sugarcane based spirit, may be the best reason yet to go to war with Brazil. I have had homemade moonshine made from cat barf that did less damage to my psyche (and liver).

Sam and Max 4: Good Script, Bad Game

2007-04-03 · by peterb

Those of you who have been following my reviews know of my infatuation with Telltale's Sam and Max adventure games. The thrilling thing to me about these games is that they have been consistently funny and playable games.

The fourth episode of their "episodic series", Abe Lincoln Must Die! has been released. It's strongly written. It has clever writing, brilliant situations, and is funny enough that it had me, quite literally, crying tears of laughter.

But it's a pretty bad adventure game.

It's hard to say why this should be. The game mechanics, for example, don't vary at all from the other episodes. Part of the problem is that the puzzles in Lincoln Must Die require a bit too much drudgery to actually solve. To take one example, at several points in the game you need to get past someone who is standing in your way. The way to do this is to travel to a completely different location to use a certain object. You can't bring the object with you, and you end up doing this several times.

In a cleverly designed game, you can solve a puzzle the moment you figure it out. In this game, you get the "Eureka" moment but then have to spend a subjective eternity travelling to a distant location to try out your theory. That really took the wind out of my sails. I know they were trying to reward "thinking out of the box." I just wish the box was somewhere more convenient. If this happened just once during the game, I could forgive and forget. By the third time, it was making me roll my eyes in irritation.

This is also the first time in the series that I've felt flummoxed by a "move the mouse around the screen to find the magic pixel" sort of puzzle. That this happened near the climax of the game didn't make me any happier.

So, should these objections stop you from getting the game? Not at all. The humor payoff makes up for the game part of the game being less than stellar:

And all of the other episodes in the series (including the followup to this one), are of generally higher quality. But if all the games in the series played like Lincoln Must Die, I would have a hard time recommending them.

Let's just hope that Telltale's customers give them honest feedback, and that they listen.

God of War 2

2007-04-05 · by psu

God of War 2 is God of War turned up to 11.

That's pretty much all you need to know. If you liked the first game you will like the second. If, like my wife, you thought the first game was juvenile and offensive, you will not think the second game is any different. Me, I liked the first game, but I also thought it was juvenile and offensive. I bought God of War 2 anyway because I was in the mood to run around in some huge levels and beat the crap out of a lot of faceless monsters.

Here is the rundown:

  1. Gratutiously brutal violence: check.

  2. Even more gratuitously brutal "finishing move" mini-games: check.

  3. Complete mashup of Greek Mythology distorted and pulled apart to suit the plot, such as it is: check.

  4. Offscreen three-way sex minigame: check.

  5. Human sacrifice puzzles: check.

The whole package is here, and if anything it's even more refined and polished than the first time around. The combat is basically the same fluid slicing and dicing as before. The levels are enormous and interestingly designed. They have thankfully removed the jumping puzzles involving spinning blades and replaced them with jumping and rappelling puzzles where you fly through the air while structures that have stood since the beginning of time for some reason decide to crumble and fall down just as you reach them. There are the same "drag block from A to B" puzzles. There are keys to fetch, levers to pull, pools to swim through, and timed locks to beat. As I mentioned before, there is a new rappelling mechanic. There is also a new gimmick where you can slow down time. That pretty much sums up the gameplay. You run and jump from place to place and you kill anything that moves.

As the game begins, our resident bad-ass Kratos is stripped of his status as God and skewered through the belly by Zeus. With the help of Gaia and the Titans, your mission is to fight and claw and scratch your way to the Sisters of Fate so that you may take your revenge on the Gods that have beat you down. In other words, it's basically the same script as the first game. Kratos is beat down, Kratos gets back up again and gets his revenge. It's a reasonable narrative skeleton on which to hang the gameplay and it is certainly interesting enough to keep you playing from cut scene to cut scene. The cameos from various figures in Greek Mythology are also amusing, even if they don't make any sense.

Unfortunately, the context of the plot is a little bit different in this game than in God of War. The Kratos character in God of War was tormented by his own earlier failure and his desire to be free of this torment was what motivated his insane rage and brutality. You could almost identify with the core motivation of the character, even if he was a complete psychopath. He almost manages to come off as a tragic figure driven by his own inner demons.

In contrast, in God of War 2 Kratos comes off more as a petulant teenager storming into his bedroom and declaring with great melodrama that his parents hate him and just don't understand his life. He spends the first couple of hours of the game just strutting around, challenging anyone to DEFY THE GOD OF WAR. It's tiresome and annoying. But it's an emotional tone that the core audience of the game can probably identify with.

Luckily it's easy to ignore the fact that the main character is an emotional and intellectual cripple and just get on with the smashing of enemies. This time through I played on Easy so I wouldn't have to replay long stretches of tiring combat. I still had to deal with long stretches of tiring jumping puzzles. But, this strategy was invaluable in surviving all of the tedious Boss fights. The game is nice enough to throw you small amounts of health and magic powerups every few times you hit the Boss, so I never got killed trying to figure out what pattern I had to dance around in to dispatch the latest oversized enemy. I even enjoyed the ending action sequence of one of the fights. It had a pleasing rythm to it, and ended in an enjoyable wad of gore.

Aside from the decidedly juvenile tone of the game, my only other real complaints are the things I always complain about. The fixed camera was still annoying at times. The savepoints are too far apart. The final Boss ends with a soul sucking "mash the button when Simon says" action sequence that seemed very unforgiving of the most minor error in timing. Maybe my TV has a tiny bit of lag that caused this trouble but I had to hit the damned buttons a dozen times to make it to the end. Why do the game designers hate us?

My overall opinion of the first game was "good but not great". I'll stick with that assessment for the second game. God of War 2 game is bigger, louder and Bossier than the first, but it's not really different or better. But that's OK, because if nothing else, Sony has given us a version of God of War that we can enjoy without being tormented by the spinning blades of death from Hades. If that's not something to be thankful for, I don't know what is.

Having survived this latest mash-fest, it's time to slow down again. Maybe I'll go get that Oblivion expansion pack.

Fixing the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board

2007-04-06 · by peterb

I'm an adult who, on occasion, enjoys drinking in moderation. Since I live in Pennsylvania I am forced to purchase liquor through what is charitably described as the very worst state-owned liquor monopoly in the entire universe.

I've written about this in detail before: the painfully unhelpful staff at many stores, and that the system seems more interested in punishing you for wanting to buy liquor than in trying to sell it. I've used some fairly immoderate language, because I think the State Stores deserve this sort of intervention: Pennsylvania clearly doesn't want to sell wine and spirits, so they should do us all a favor and get out of the business of doing so.

But given the amounts of money involved in this gigantic government jobs program, I don't really expect that to happen. So, in the interest of trying to help them do a better job, I'm going to explain how they can make one simple change to the system that will fix it. It will make the system easier to use and will help them sell more product, all at the same time.

It's really simple: let me special-order wine and spirits on the web.

I was discussing this with a manager at a State Store the other day. "It's really inconvenient to have to order things here," I said. "It's like going to the library or a record store: the moment I walk in to the store, I've forgotten what I need."

"Well," said the manager. "You can place orders over the phone."

[Amaro Nonino

PLCB: "We Make Shopping Hard"](/img/DSC_20050330-01621.jpg)

It's true that you can place orders on the phone. But there are a few problems with this. First, and most importantly, any interaction with the PLCB where I have to talk to a human being is a bad interaction. Yes, I know that there are some stores where the staff is helpful, knowledgable, and friendly — the Centre Avenue store is particularly good — but on the whole talking to anyone at the PLCB is a bit like playing Russian Roulette. It's not the sort of risk that offers good odds.

Second, even when the staff is helpful and friendly the process of making a special liquor order is super-painful, involving digging through reams of paper printed on a 1985-era dot-matrix printer until the employee can find some obscure code. The transaction cost of putting in an SLO is so high that I have, at times, put it off for weeks just to avoid the pain.

Lastly, I work for a living. Very often, I don't even think of things like buying obscure liquors until long after everyone manning the phones at the PLCB has gone home for the night.

The PLCB does have an online store, but as near as I can tell it only stocks a small subset of their catalog - no "SLO", or special liquor orders, at all. The PLCB's entire product catalog, including SLO's, is online also, but I can't order any of the interesting stuff. Give me a web form where I can type in your SKUs, give you my credit card information, and tell you what store I want to pick the product up at, and I will be putting in orders tomorrow. I assure you I'm not the only one.

So please, PLCB. I know you hate liquor. I know you hate making money. I know you hate all of your customers in a very deep and personal way. But help me out. Let me place these orders on your web site. Make it easy, make it quick, and make it painless. Otherwise I may never get to try Cachaça Fazenda Mae De Ouro.

Dead to Me: The A/V Receiver

2007-04-09 · by psu

I used to love my receiver. It gave me a sense of dork pride to know that sure, I had suffered great pains to get everything hooked up, but my reward was a rich stereo sound experience that the other losers in the audience were missing. No TV sound for me. Like most things though, as I got older, the inconvenience of dealing with the machine started to overtake the enjoyment of the result.

When we got a new TV stand this week for the big TV we bought last year (the old cabinet had the TV at the wrong height) I realized that there was almost no activity in the universe worse than rewiring the receiver.

Receivers used to be fairly simple. There were four or five stereo inputs in the back and one or two speaker hookups. You run the wires, turn everything on, and listen to music. Video, and worse, surround sound, have made the modern receiver into a huge frankendevice that costs as much as a PC and weighs three times more.

Even the relatively primitive Sony thing I bought almost ten years go is terrifying to behold. It weights about 20 pounds and has an array of holes in the back that make it look like an old patch-board for one of those vacuum tube computers you see in the movies. My receiver only deals with the audio and video interconnects that were available at the time:

  1. Normal or S-Video
  2. Stereo sound
  3. Digital surround (I don't remember which one).
  4. Analog 5.1

These days, you also have to deal with

  1. 18 kinds of digital surround encoding, after you've figured out what kind of interconnect to run.
  2. HDMI
  3. Component video
  4. Analog surround
  5. Multi-room interconnect

And so on.

In addition, for all their size and terrifying nature, the average A/V receiver doesn't come close to having a sufficient number of inputs to handle the devices that your average dork might own. Game consoles, cable boxes, Apple TV, Tivo, Airtunes, DVD players, media center TVs? All of these run video and audio. If I wanted to take "full advantage" of everything I might own, I would need a box to switch around seven video devices, all of which have component or HDMI output and surround sound capabilities.

Even the high end receivers with those huge backpanels can manage at most five HD sources with surround sound. The huge backpanels mostly hold jacks for stereo and RCA or S-Video, which in theory no one is interested in anymore. Therefore, even if I went out and bought a $1000 receiver, I still have to go out and buy a another box to switch everything, even though the main use for the receiver is, you know, switching. Then I have to figure out how to run all the wire between two boxes, and which digital surround interconnect to buy, and how to run 5 sets of speaker wire out to all the speakers. Did I forget to mention that the single worst consumer electronics user experience in the entire universe is hooking speaker wire into those retarded binding posts on the back of a receiver? Surely someone in the last fifty years could have thought up a better way to do this. This is why I've never bothered with surround. That, and the only time I can use the video system is at night when half the house is in bed... not a a great time to crank up the subwoofer demo.

So let's review. The A/V receiver does two things:

  1. Surround sound processing which is too complicated to set up, and which I will never use.

  2. Video switching, only it sucks and you have to buy something else to do that.

All of this pain flooded into my head because the furniture people did not deliver the shelf pegs for my new cabinet. This meant that I could not really set everything up the way I had it before. So, on a lark I just connected all the video and stereo sound right into the TV. What I found was that this was infinitely easier than running audio and video into the receiver and back out again. The 4-way video switchbox that I have can sit behind the TV rather than inside the cabinet, making the wire runs easy. The back to the TV is much easier to reach than the back of the receiver. All in all it took maybe half an hour to hook everything back up instead of the normal hour or two of pain with the receiver.

My takeway from all of this is:

  1. Surround sound is still not worth the pain.

  2. Buy a cheap video switchbox and run everything into the TV.

  3. If your TV has speakers that suck, run the stereo out from the TV into a two channel amplifier and buy some nice speakers. The two channel amp can also be used for Airtunes.

After playing around with this new hookup scheme, I decided that what the world needs is a simple and cheap surround processor/amplifier that takes a digital input or two and puts out 5.1. Let me restate this for extra clarity. The box would one thing: decode the digital signal into 5.1 surround and feed that to a multi-channel amplifer. No switching, no video scaling, no remote control, nothing. One wire in, six wires out. That's it. I would hook this up behind my video switcher or television. Then you can get surround without a useless receiver in the chain. The auto-switcher is better at switching than the receiver anyway. Of course, no one makes such a thing. There are only expensive dedicated surround processors that are like receivers without the power stage. There are also expensive dedicated multi-channel amplifiers that don't have the right interconnect. It's great how you can spend arbitrary amounts of money and still get the wrong thing. Maybe sometime in the near future someone will make the right device and surround sound won't be stupidly painful to set up anymore.

Meanwhile, it was dead easy to set up my spare Airport Express as a wireless bridge for the Xbox so I could get rid of the extra Linksys router that I had been using for nothing but the Xbox. Yet again computer networking proves easier to deal with than home video.

Why Cooperation With RMS Is (Still) Impossible

2007-04-10 · by peterb

It's not just the free software song, but that every interaction with the man is like playing Simon Says with a malicious 6 year old.

I remember once, many years ago, a friend of mine logged in to RMS's account to show me some funny things (RMS used to be anti-password, and so when they forced him to use a password, he chose an easy one and told everyone about it, so I don't think he'd view this as illicit). The thing that impressed me the most was his huge collection of emacs abbrevs.

I guess RMS got a lot of mail from people wanting to discuss things with him. So he had this gargantuan list of abbreviations to use in his email responses. So, for example — and I'm making up the exact words here, but I'm keeping the spirit true — someone might send him mail saying "But shouldn't developers be compensated for their efforts?" and he could reply by typing "compensation" and that would insert into the email the paragraph "If we eliminate copyright as a means of encouraging people to develop software, at first less software will be developed, but that software will be more useful. It is not clear whether the overall delivered user satisfaction will be less; but if it is, or if we wish to increase it anyway, there are other ways to encourage development, just as there are ways besides toll booths to raise money for streets."

My friend showed me an email message RMS had sent him. Sure enough, it was nearly all straight out of his abbrevs file.

I guess one could view this as a clever time-saving device by someone who received hundreds of email messages daily and who wanted to answer them all. And yet, over the years, I've grown to view it as somehow disrespectful, as a sign of someone for whom communication was a one way street, facing outward.

I was reminded of this topic by jvm's recent news item about RMS's views on console games over at Curmudgeon Gamer. Be sure to read the comments. Plus ça change, plus c'est la meme chose.

Bigger, Faster, Stronger

2007-04-11 · by psu

Tonight a lesson in dork shopping. I bought a new Nikon D200 digital SLR last month. We are taking our first vacation in a while, and it seemed like a good excuse to upgrade the picture taking machine since you always take a lot of pictures on trips. After a lot of angst over whether the more expensive body was worth it (the D80 is not much of a downgrade feature-wise) I finally decided to spring for it.

Make no mistake, the camera is wonderful. It basically meets my expectations in that it fixes every major complaint I have about the D70. The AF is actually useful in action situations now. The metering is good. The viewfinder is much better. High ISO performance is a lot better. The continuous shot buffer is five times larger, so I never have to worry about the camera locking up as it decides it needs to flush stuff to the card. The only way they could possibly improve it is to make it into a D2x, only half the size and a quarter the cost. The minor gripes are

  1. Battery life is not nearly as good as the D70.

  2. The camera is a bit heavier.

So, I haven't had any problems with the camera itself. Well, except that some of the shiny new features are pretty complicated, and the camera's interface is different in subtle ways. In picture review mode, you move from shot to shot with the left/right parts of the D-pad rather than up/down. The metering mode is now on a switch rather than a button and dial. I love that I can change AF modes without opening the custom setting menus, but I hate the orientation of the switch.

Some of the default camera settings are a bit different too. I think the in-camera JPEG engine pushes the colors a bit more than the D70. The result is that unless you dial back the saturation a bit, if you use Adobe Lightroom (or Apple's Aperture, or for that matter, anything but Nikon's software) to do RAW processing your pictures will have a color that is very different from the original preview image embedded in the RAW file. I had this horrifying experience where I imported 100 pictures into Lightroom and watched as the color was sucked out of each and every one of them as the initial RAW conversion finished. It took a while to setup the camera to perform more like my old D70, where this was not as noticeable. Still, I now have an annoyance I didn't have before I noticed this problem. Default color balance settings are like watches, if you have one you always know where you stand, but if you have two you never know.

Even the new AF system is not without its pitfalls. There are now 57 different autofocus rules. Before I had gotten by with two:

  1. Always use the center sensor.

  2. Once in a while, turn on "continuous focus" because you think it will be useful for moving objects, but turn it back off again in 15 minutes when you realize it's not really working.

The D200 now has 11 sensors scattered all over the viewfinder such that there are some in places that are really useful even for off-center shots. That, combined with the fact that the focus tracking actually appears to be able to keep up with moving children has tempted me to really learn how to use the AF system. But it's a lot to internalize. There are different ways to group the sensors together or not, different tracking modes, and a weird wide area sensor mode that I don't really understand. This means I've filled up a lot of memory cards with pictures that range from slightly off to completely out of focus.

Speaking of memory cards, the files that come out of this camera are about twice as big. I had just bought a new 2GB card for my D70. This got me used to around 300 shots per card, but then the new camera dropped that immediate back into the 150 range. Since you can never go back, I ended up buying two new 4GB cards, especially after I found out that for some reason you can buy 4GB cards of one type that seem identical to 2GB cards of another type in almost all ways, but cost half as much per GB.

The big new files bring with them added resolution. Since starting to use digital cameras I have mostly shot handheld, although in my film days I used a tripod a lot. I just haven't had the energy to carry the thing lately. But now I got thinking, maybe this trip I'd break out the tripod again, try and work on some of my old cityscapes.

Tripods are one of those things you have to be careful about to because only you know how much tripod you need. So if you go and ask some guy what you need, and he happens to (say) shoot wildlife in Africa for a living with a collection of lenses all of which weigh 15 pounds, he'll tell you to buy the wrong tripod. In particular, he will tend to tell you that you need a large expensive tripod and a large expensive ballhead to have any hope of taking a decently sharp picture. Further, if you buy less, you are stupid because you will just end up coming back and buying what he told you to get in the first place. But the truth is, you might know that you are never going to shoot wildlife in Africa, or sports at the Super Bowl. If you know this, then buying too much tripod because you think you might be wrong would also be stupid.

I have always tried to get away with the smallest tripod possible, because I shoot mostly with small cameras and small lenses. A few years ago, I did try out one of the fancy 2lb ballheads that cost $400. What I found was that a 2lb ballhead weighs too much. So I sold it. If, in the future, I ever find myself in need to using a 15lb telephoto lens, then won't feel too bad because the $500 I'd spend at that point for a head would only be 1/20th the cost of the lens itself. Let that be a lesson, they may tell you that you'll end up with that fancy 2lb ballhead, but that doesn't make it so.

However, I did need a tripod plate for the new camera. These days, they make these awesome new L-shaped plates so you can shoot horizontals and verticals without flopping the head over. I've wanted one for a while, but figured since I wasn't using the tripod much it would be stupid to buy one. No longer. So I mosied over to the Really Right Stuff web site. Really Right Stuff makes custom machined metal plates that attach your camera to their custom machined metal clamps. These pieces of metal are horrifyingly expensive, but beautifully made. I showed my new plate to my boss, who is a machining geek and he couldn't believe how nice it was. He didn't even care what it did. He wanted one.

RRS had a surprise for me. New ballheads. And small ones. Now I felt was truly doomed.

The only thing that saved me was that the jewel-like perfectly machined ballheads were even more expensive than the plates (and the carbon fiber tripod), so what's left of my cheapness kept me from ordering. I'll probably cave later. But the web site lead me further into my shopping quagmire.

Gitzo has updated the tripods. There are now smaller and lighter carbon fiber 'pods fold up even smaller. Also, they have fixed the one long standing problem with Gitzo tripods: the new legs have locking collars that let you open the legs in any order you want, instead of the Gitzo-standard order. I won't get into the details, but suffice to say that you have to remember to always open a Gitzo tripod from the top down and shut it from the bottom up. Otherwise the you can't loosen and tighten the collars that hold the legs together. This was always a source of pain, and they have fixed it.

Again I was saved by the fact that the damn things are too expensive. I'd pay a lot for a tripod that is just about as sturdy as the one I have but weighs a pound less and folds shorter and more quickly. But not what Gitzo wants me to pay.

So, as always, a tool purchased for the purpose of making my photography more enjoyable has inevitably turned into a springboard for neurotic Internet research and iterative shopping. I'm lucky to have escaped having just bought the fancy L-plate. This is especially true because this little episode overlapped with my recent bout with setting up my TV over again. As a result I also spent some time shopping for new audio accessories.

Why the hell is it, by the way, that you can't buy custom lengths of custom-terminated speaker-wire without giving up your children for adoption? It's criminal.

In all, there are three lessons to be learned here:

  1. Be careful when you decide to buy that new toy.

  2. Photography and home audio are more expensive than gaming. I should stick with just buying those $50 games. Much easier.

  3. I shouldn't have written this, because now I've followed the link to the RRS site again, and damn those ballheads look nice.

Doomed.

Two Quick Browser Games

2007-04-12 · by peterb

Here are two games to play in your web browser and destroy your productivity:

Desktop Tower Defense. Action! Guns! Squirt Towers! Recommended by Jeremy Zawodny.

MathsNet Interactive Geometry. Three dimensional puzzles! Tip: Puzzle #1 is the hardest one by a mile. Recommended as retaliation for the earlier link by fpereira.

Go play them! Just don't blame me when you get fired.

Old Friends

2007-04-16 · by psu

For various reasons, we hadn't been getting to the Strip as much as we used to. Maybe it was some stress at work. Maybe it was the worse than normal patented Pittsburgh early spring freeze. Maybe it was that when we did go things weren't really the same. But the last two Saturdays, we finally made it down there again became reacquainted with some old friends.

The main motivation for our trip last week was to check out the Penn Avenue Fish Company. I have long been of the opinion that the two reliable places to get fish in the Strip were Benkovitz and Lotus. Benkovitz has had some trouble over the last year or so, and is now apparently under new management. But fear not. A few former Benkovitz employees have set out on their own and opened the Penn Avenue Fish Company on Penn near the Firehouse, and it has everything that you used to get at Benkovitz. Or rather, it will whenever they manage to get it all set up.

The day we went we found some stupendous fresh halibut. It was just as good as the what we were getting this summer straight from Alaska. It was just as good or better than the same stuff at Whole Foods. Unlike the stuff at Whole Foods, the filets were free of any pin bones. For all the money we put into the Whole Foods fish counter, you'd think they'd learn to clean out the pin bones. Now it's not a problem. There is no reason to go back.

In addition to the halibut, we also got a sample of one of their soups, an excellent tomato and seafood chowder. In addition, they were serving hot sandwiches and sushi. Anyone reading this from within the Pittsburgh city limits is now required to head down there and spend all of your food money in the store.

Seafood loot in hand, we strolled down Penn to Enrico's for the first time in a long time. Previously, the newer upscale feel of the Strip cafe had put us off, but in a happy coincidence, this day Larry's printer had broken down and they were yelling out the menu like in the old days. Roy was there with his etouffe. There was the heavy fresh bread and a big fat salad. We even paid on the way out like we used to. It was as if we were back in the spring of 2001. The only thing missing was the ubiquitous cloud of CMU graduate students being all hipper-than-thou.

Finally, and most importantly, the best news of the week was the reopening of Il Piccolo Forno next to La Prima. Carla has made a heroic effort to restore the coffee and bakery and experience that has been tragically incomplete for the last few months. We were there bright and early this past Thursday and again on Saturday. The muffins and breakfast pizza were there. The transcendent sfogliatelle were there. The mele were there, although they are a little different. She also has some new things, including a completely to-die-for lemon tart. There is no salutation that can express the appreciation that I feel for the people involved in bringing this place back. Any money you did not spend at Penn Ave. Fish earlier you are now required to hand over to Carla. They didn't change their prices and they have never charged enough for what they do ($1.25 for a muffin! A muffin which is twice as large and incalculably better than one of those god-damned shitty frosting-drowned atrocities against the baking arts that the yuppy cupcake places have been inflicting upon an unsuspecting public).

Go. Go a lot. Then go some more.

Requiem for the Latent Image

2007-04-18 · by psu

I have a drawer in my house. I call it my "photo junk" drawer. Eight or nine years ago, it started out as an empty hanging file drawer where I started to file away the PrintFile slide storage pages that I had been collecting since buying my first real camera. There are a few folders of slides in the drawer, but it is now mostly overrun with small piles of print envelopes and small accessories that I had no use for. So I decided to clean the drawer up.

When I first bought a "real" camera back in the 90s (a Nikon 8008s, love that camera), I spent a couple of years shooting slide film. I reasoned that this would be the quickest way to learn "good technique." Like thousands of others before me, I shot my film, and put the cannisters into a little envelope to send to Kodak. In a week or so, I would get a yellow box back in the mail containing tiny little cardboard mounts, each with a picture in it. Then I'd spread the slides out on a light table, pick the good ones and stick them in the pages. Once in a while, I'd get the pages out and stare at them. After a trip to France, I bought a nice loupe so I could stare at a somewhat enlarged version of the slide. There were no web sites, no grandparents to instantly share the pictures with. I just had my own little archive of images sitting in those pages, in that drawer.

To me, color slide film is one of the greatest achievements of modern engineering. In many ways it is even more interesting and astounding than the more recent digital capture systems. Digital capture, in my naive layman's view, is a fairly straightforward application of existing computer technologies. It just took some time for the performance to scale the right way.

Color slide film is magic. You coat multiple layers of silver-based chemicals, dyes, and gelatin onto a piece of plastic. When you expose this plastic to light and dunk it in the right sequence of chemicals at the right temperature, you end up with three separate silver images, one for each of the primary colors. But that's just the start. Where the final step in the black and white process "fixes" the silver image into the film, the color process replaces the silver image in each layer with dyes of the appropriate color. Exactly how this happens varies with different film types. But in the end the same thing happens. The chemicals in the film and the processing bath figure out how to put the dyes into the parts of the picture that were exposed to light. This is what always boggled my mind. The color dyes know where to go, or maybe more accurately in the case of slides, where not to go.

The result on the light table is the same: a perfect little color frame containing a small piece of reality, as captured by the camera at some point and time in the past. Color slides have a physical immediacy that sets them apart from black and white negatives which you need to print to really see or digital pictures which, even when displayed in all their glory on a huge TV screen still do not seem real since they are made out of bits. I realize in the rational part of my brain that this is partly nostalgia and partly my jaded software engineer's view of the computer world.

All I know is, when I cleaned out that drawer, the first thing I did was pull out some old boxes of slides. These were the last rolls of film that I shot before I started using digital cameras. I put them in the pages. I threw them on the light table and the images jumped out at me the same way slides on a light table always do. You can't not look at them with the loupe. There were some test shots that I had taken when I bought my Nikon 24mm lens. There were some pictures of Klavon's Ice Cream parlor and soda fountain in the strip. There were some pictures I took the last time I visited a friend of mine in San Diego more than six years ago. And there were some shots from the last couple of trips to France, which had been forgotten because I was paying more attention to black and white or digital, depending on the time period.

I spent a couple of hours sorting through them, putting them into pages and putting them back into the file drawer. Then my nostalgia got the better of me and I looked around on the net for that place that had made me some photo CDs back in the day. They were closed. My favorite lab in Pittsburgh, Suksolsky-Brunelle, was closed. Kodak also closed the last of its Kodachrome processing plants and discontinued all but one type of the classic Kodachrome film. Kodachrome's days have been numbered for the last fifteen years or so since Fuji released Velvia, but it's sobering to think that one of the oldest continuously available consumer products in the history of the world will soon be gone.

It is also sobering to think how fast digital has taken over. I bought my first DSLR only about four years ago. At the time there were still three or four reputable places in town to get slide film processed. At the time it would cost you about $5000 to get a digital camera that performed as well along all axes as the best 35mm film cameras. At the time, all of the major commercial photography workshops were film only. They might have had a few short courses on things like running Photoshop, but none of the workshops expected you to bring a digital camera. Now a large number of them are digital only. Pittsburgh, as far as I know, now has no reputable lab that will process your slides for you overnight. Oh you can drop the stuff off at the local Costco, but they send it all somewhere else. Even Fuji, which took over the world with Velvia, has closed its big labs and farms the work out. In a few years, I expect that anyone processing film will either be sending it to one or two large labs that can keep up the volume or they'll be doing it on their own with a machine in the basement.

I find myself surprised by the pangs of grief and regret that I have for the quick demise of color slides. I think I am more worked up over this than my beloved black and white film because I imagine that black and white film will always be around as a specialty fine art item, whereas high quality slide film requires a large scale industrial base that will be hard to support at low volumes. In a pinch, you can almost make your own black and white film, but to make color slide film, you have to understand that magic about dye couplers.

What I plan to do, and you should too, is pull out one of my old film cameras, load it with some Velvia or Kodachrome 64 and go out and shoot a few rolls of pictures. Then I'll mail the film away, and if it doesn't get lost I'll get back my yellow (or green) boxes and spread the miniature pieces of reality around on my light table again, and just sit and look at the photos. It'll be a nice way to recall the "old days" of the mid-1990s. Maybe I can show the film to my kid and explain how things used to work.

Of course, I'll get a Photo CD made at the same time. I'm not that nostalgic.

A bit of research indicates that Dwayne's Photo in Kansas is where all the mailer business is going for both Kodak and Fuji. It's also the last place on earth you can get Kodachrome processed. The one other big lab I found that I remember is A&I. B&H still sells mailers. But they cost twice as much as they used to.

Slowly Goes The Night

2007-04-24 · by peterb

Due to circumstances beyond our control, updates will be slow this week.

Coming soon: The Great Tequila Tasting. 4X: Reach for the Stars! And more. See you soon.

Point and Shoot

2007-04-30 · by psu

This week I found the first photographic web site to pique my interest in a long time. For a while now I had been ignoring most of the photographic web because there just wasn't any content at an appropriate level of maturity. What I mean by that is that most sites are either just a big shopping catalog or a collection of articles providing shallow tutorials on various subjects like how best to put the $5000 digital camera you just bought on a tripod.

So I am happy to share a link to The Strobist, a site that does not suffer from either of these problems. Yes, there is technical dorkitude. Yes, there is advice about things to buy. But by and large the site is dominated by photographic content and content about photography that is actually interesting to read because they cover an area of photographic work that is generally mysterious to we who only dabble. The site is about lighting.

My usual position about lighting is that I try to use the light that is there because I'm too lazy to learn how to create my own. I came to this conclusion after reading an excellent book about how to bring your light with you and deciding that it was just too much work.

The Strobist is written with the point of view that you can't count on the light that's there to get you a usable picture, so you better know how to create your own. The site is the creation of one David Hobby, a pro photojournalist based in Baltimore. The job of the photojournalist is to take good pictures very quickly under conditions that you cannot easily control. A large number of the articles fall into this "On Assignment" bucket where he shows you the techniques and tricks he uses to pull pictures out of these situations. These are the pieces I like, and not only because they are about clever things that you can do with a couple of small flashes. I like these articles because they illustrate a truth about photography that the general public doesn't really understand:

You don't get good pictures by just pointing the camera at the thing and hitting the button.

If I were to write a book that could only contain one sentence about photography, and so I had to write down the most important fact that you, the aspiring shooter had to know in order to become successful, it would be: You don't get good pictures by just pointing the camera at the thing and hitting the button. Every excellent book that I have ever read about photography has this fact as its core message.

I bring up this point because of this guy who works in my office. Every once in a while, I'll buy a big photo book from Amazon.com. In recent memory, I have picked up the excellent Linda Butler collection on the Yangtze River in China and more recently the phenomenal Galen Rowell retrospective. I would show these books to the guy, and he'd flip through them and say something like, "What's the big deal, anyone with a camera who was in those places could get those pictures, what's so great about these pictures."

The frustrating thing is that it is hard to explain what the big deal is. You can't tell from a reproduction in a book that Butler spent four or five years carrying a 4x5 camera around the rural river valleys of China, often evading government officials, in order to document the villages that would be flooded by the damming of the river. It is impossible to convey to someone who hasn't had the experience how hard it is to capture a nice portait of someone in good light even when you are carrying a modern 5fps bazooka camera, much less a camera that can take one frame every two or three minutes. Finally, it's hard to express a photographer's appreciation of a perfectly composed frame of some out of the way detail that a regular person never would have seen, in light that a regular person never would have noticed. So instead of an impassioned defense of the integrity of my photographic heroes, I just look stupid and grunt.

Luckily, I have Galen Rowell to do my work for me. His classic Mountain Light eloquently explains the difference between a literal snapshot of what is in front of you and a real photograph. Many of Rowell's pictures are such stunning juxtstapositions of landscape forms and once-in-a-lifetime light that even the layman can't help but be impressed. Others appear to the untrained eye to be fairly literal snapshots of exotic far away lands. But do not be fooled. You might think that if you just happened to be standing in his shoes on top of that mountain, or in that valley at sunrise, that you'd be able to capture the pictures that he did. You won't (unless, of course, you are a genius photographer). You won't because you won't know where to point the camera, how to take advantage of the light, how to tame the contrast, how to juxtapose warm colors against cool, and how to arrange the randomness of the natural world into a neat pattern that is pleasing to the eye. In other words, you won't because you don't know what you are doing.

You shouldn't feel bad or insulted to find this out. After all, Galen worked on his craft and vision for decades to get as good as he was. How many awesome landscapes have you taken recently? You should not be surprised that if you stood there at the tip of some ice flow near Everest and pointed your camera at it and pushed the button that you'd get a bad snapshot. That's why he's a photographer and you are not.

Which brings me full circle to The Strobist. I was impressed with this site for a few reasons. First, it was apparent from the content that this guy knows what he is doing with lights, and this makes me even more aware of how little I know about taking advantage of artificial light in difficult situations. Second, this was one of the few photographic web sites that I've been to lately that wasn't designed by a mental cripple who loves Flash and hates usability. You would think that photographers, who are presumably people with a keen visual sense, would know better than this, but they don't. Every site you go to is filled with ugly and unusable Flash galleries that wrap what I would think are excellent photographs if only I could actually navigate to one before having a seizure. Third, the site has an associated photo group on flickr where readers post their strobist experiments. The amazing thing about these pictures is the extent to which they do not suck. I didn't think it was possible to put five people in an Internet photo group without generating dozens of miscomposed out of focus disasters that lack any redeeming value whatsoever as photographs. Here is proof that I'm wrong.

Finally, the best parts of the site are a fabulous illustration of my fundamental principle of photography: You don't get good pictures by just pointing the camera at the thing and hitting the button. I love how he tells us how much knowledge goes into getting a decent shot of some guy standing next to his computer, or a simple portrait of an athlete. Here are great examples of how it takes work to make the picture look to the untrained eye like you just pointed the camera and pushed the button. It makes me happy to read and learn. Maybe some day I'll get good at using my flash.

Rehabilitating Vermouth

2007-05-01 · by peterb

I mentioned it as a one-off joke in an earlier article: "Oh, yes, there's this little bar in Madrid just north of the Gran Via that specializes in Vermouth. They serve anchovies and olives as tapas – you really should go, dahling!"

But here's the thing: I wasn't kidding. That bar really exists. You should go there and drink sweet vermouth. But if you can't go there, you should drink sweet vermouth anyway.

Vermouth, at least here in the States, is the black sheep of the bar. Everyone has had it at one point or another, typically in a Martini. Incidentally, can I say how irritated I am by the euphemism "very dry Martini"? If you've gotten to the point where you just want to drink a big glass of gin, then just order a big glass of gin and spare us the jargon (footnote 1). I would be willing to bet that 95% of the vermouth bought in the US is used solely in Martinis and Manhattans. And so, relegated by thuggish snobs to the ignoble role of "just a mixer," I daresay that most people would never think of drinking it on its own. Which really is a shame, because it's a wonderful drink.

For drinking straight up, I prefer the sweet variety. I usually drink it neat, but occasionally will cut it with a little soda water, which opens it up nicely and makes it a great aperitif. It has a spicy, sharp aroma, but the taste itself is quite round and woody. It's closer to wine than to a spirit. Some people favor other wine-like or wine-based aperitifs (such as Lillet, which to me has never been anything other than vermouth tarted up in a frock), but for my money, it's hard to beat a good vermouth.

And it goes great with green olives and anchovies. Mmmmmmmm.

Random link: because I love robots, I also love The Mixilator. It has yet to give me a cocktail that I can actually make — by sheer coincidence, I'm all out of loganberry juice, mandarin liqueur, pastis, and peach bitters, can you believe it? — but I still love the idea.

Footnote 1: Let me be perfectly clear: there's nothing wrong with wanting to drink a big glass of gin. I just don't want to have to listen to you try and be all cutesy about it.

A Short Plea for Mercy

2007-05-03 · by psu

Dear NPR:

It's 18 months before the election. Only a true mental cripple would actually have more than a microscopic level of interest in what is going on in the Presidential "race". And yet you find it necessary to waste literally hours of your expensive broadcast time "covering" this story which does not exist yet, analyzing events that have not happened, and "predicting" results that, given your complete lack of meaningful data, have no possible link to any future reality.

Please stop it. I'm begging you.

Pete

The Only Reviewers Worse Than Game Reviewers...

2007-05-05 · by peterb

are wine reviewers. Imagine if game reviewers wrote game reviews the way that thesaurus addled hack Robert Parker reviews wine:

Shadow of the Colossus has a certain je ne sais quoi in its coding, a whiff of east-coast style that reveals that this Japanese game's native terroir is really Bell Labs. The structure is simple, yet baroque, not unlike the original sed, or awk. Redolent of Gosling Emacs and perhaps even a note of Crowther Adventure, the color palette is subdued, yet puckish. There are simply gobs of Mario lurking in the jumping parts of the game, with a subtle undertone of Zelda and a rich base of Devil May Cry pathos underlying it, which anticipates its heady, yet stolid conclusion. 87 points.

Of course, the flip side of this coin is: what if wine reviewers reviewed wine the way game reviewers review games.

Domain De Villeneuve 2007: OH. MY. GOD. Everything about this wine is improved from last year; it makes the previous 32 outings look like complete garbage. Everything from the fine graphical detail on the label to the quality of the cork has improved. The wine itself was OK, and suffered from a few minor tannin glitches, but the producer indicates that this is because we had a "pre-release" bottle, and those glitches will be ironed out by release time. With those problems fixed, this is the best wine we've ever tasted. Better pre-order your bottle now, because this is going to fly off the shelves! An instant classic! Wine of the Year! FIVE STARS.

...

Hmmm.

OK, so maybe the wine reviewers aren't actually all that much worse.

Never mind.

A Flash about Flash

2007-05-07 · by psu

Having buried myself in the Strobist for the last couple of weeks, I came up for air over the weekend and reflected on what I had learned. First, I learned that buying a lightstand and umbrella can be a bit stressful and complicated. But that's not important or interesting. What is interesting to me is to compare the techniques at the Strobist with those in the excellent Bob Krist lighting book I read a few years ago. The differences can be summed up in just a few words: digital lets you see the flash.

I don't know why it took me this long to realize this extremely important and also extremely obvious fact. It's probably because I spent too much time writing off flash as too hard to previsualize when using film. I never felt like losing frames to my own inability to visualize the effect of flash on a picture, or the TTL flash system getting fooled by some bright reflection.

Metering for flash is different than metering for ambient light. To set exposure for ambient light, you just point the meter at the important part of the picture and twiddle the knobs until the meter says the right thing. With flash, all the light is dumped out into the world in a short, well, flash. You never actually get to look at it. Moreoever, the actual affect of the flash on the picture is primarily determined by four things:

  1. The aperture setting on your camera.

  2. The power output of the flash.

  3. The distance from the flash to the subject being lit.

  4. The ISO setting on your camera.

Note that shutter speed means nothing as far as the flash is concerned. The flash turns on and off again long before longer shutter speeds are over. Again, this is more complicated ambient exposure, where all you need to set is aperture and shutter speed (and more recently, the ISO "speed" of the digital sensor). Moreover, ambient light is observable. You can spend all day looking at it and thinking about how it will affect your pictures. Flash is over in a fleeting moment, and in the old days, you wouldn't find out what you did wrong until the film came back.

The Krist lighting book has a few workarounds for this issue. He carries a flash meter, which perhaps helps a bit with practice. He uses polaroid backs, which seems like a lot of trouble to an enthusiastic amateur. Finally, he's learned how the light works through years of practice, so he doesn't have my level of flash anxiety. Krist also describes lighting setups that require huge studio heads, 1500 watt-second power-packs, all packed into multiple heavy rolling cases. It wasn't hard to decide this was all too much work.

But, as I said above, digital has changed all this. The obvious change is that now you can see the flash. TTL flash giving you fits? Say you are in your living room with that nice 8 or 9 foot ceiling. Set your camera on manual at 1/125th and (say) F5.6 at ISO 100. Set the flash on any old power setting, point it at the ceiling and pop a picture. Look at the screen. Overexposed? Dial the flash down or close the aperture. Underexposed? Open the aperture up. Already wide open? Crank up the ISO. Presto. You have now set the perfect flash exposure for everything in the room in front of you. If you want to change the ratio of ambient to flash, you can do so by manipulating the flash power and the shutter speed. Longer shutter speeds will bring in more of the ambient. More flash power will bring in more flash. Turn the dials, pop a test, look at the screen.

In the old pre-digital days, you could do this kind of thing with a flash meter and polaroids, but it would be too time consuming and tedious for the average user. Thus, the major camera makers put more and more automatic exposure schemes into their flash systems. For me, the be-all and end-all of this evolution is the Nikon i-TTL and CLS system which combines smart metering with wireless triggering that lets me easily hold the flash off the camera. What the Strobist helped me realize is that with my magic digital box, all I really care about is the wireless trigger. I spent the whole weekend at a friend's house with my fancy TTL flash set on manual at 1/8th power, happily flashing the room over and over again, every picture exposed perfectly. For relatively static setups and subjects that never get too far away from the lights, you just can't beat this way of working.

The other change that digital has brought upon the world is more subtle. With a modern digital camera and a good exposure, you can take a picture at ISO 800 and print it big. Hell, even my ancient D100 could make a stunning 12x18 print at ISO 640. This simply was not possible back when slide film ruled the book and magazine industries. If you look at the pictures in Krist's book, almost all of them are on ISO 64 or iSO 100 film. The few exceptions are the ones where he used Velvia, at ISO 50. If you look at a lot of the examples at the Strobist, he's working at a minimum of ISO 400, and more often than not he's up around 640 or 800. That's two or three stops more speed, which means you can get by with four or eight times less light. This is a big deal.

My buddy's living room from this weekend was about 20 feet long by 15 feet wide. With my camera set at ISO 400 or 800, my dinky SB-600 flash can light most of the room bounced off the ceiling or a wall with power to spare. At ISO 50 or 100, I'd drain the flash for every shot and the back of the room would be dark. In other words, the high ISO performance of the camera allows me to get good flash shots in a pretty big space. It worked well enough that what it made me want to do is get a second light so I could play around with different angles and fill the shadows a bit.

So, of course, I went out and bought a light stand and some other stuff. It's always good when your hobbies lead to commerce.

Anyway, here's what to remember: your digital camera lets you see the flash, giving you ultimate control. Your digital camera also lets you use small lights where you used to need big lights. This purely technical advance probably has more potential than any other for getting you better pictures. But you don't need me to tell you that. The success of the Strobist speaks for itself.

Put a Cork In It

2007-05-08 · by peterb

Wine is a funny business. There are plenty of tangible resources that go into producing the bottle of wine that lands on your kitchen table: land, grapes, yeast, glass, and so on. And there are plenty of intangibles that go into making a good wine: knowledge, patience, and most importantly, process. But many people (or at least, many Americans) who buy wine are really trying to buy something else: romance.

This puts the industry in the odd position of trying to protect the public from finding out what really makes great wine. Yes, there are still artesianal wine makers (and home-vintners) for whom the process is messy, uncontrolled, and in the hands of lady luck. But by and large anyone who has managed to get a bottle on a retail shelf (much less get a bottle on a retail shelf on another continent) has done so through, first and foremost, good business practices. That means a devotion to market research and sales, and it means a devotion to careful, scientific, controlled processes in the creation of the product.

At the end of the process, if you have a truly great wine, you put it in a bottle, and then — because you are selling romance, not wine — you screw up your product by sticking a piece of wood in the neck of the bottle. You then ship the wine around the world. Eventually, I buy the wine, by which point the piece of wood you used as a stopper has rotted, and I have paid $30 for an undrinkable bottle of corked wine.

Cork industry advocates claim that only about 1% of all wines sold with natural corks are "corked". Anyone who buys a lot of wine knows that this is a damnable lie. A study by the Wine Spectator found a much higher rate of 7%, which is more in line with my experience. Of course, your experiences will depend on how much wine you buy, where from, how it is stored, and what vintage. But the paradoxical end of this is: the more expensive the wine you buy is, the greater the likelihood that it is already ruined by the time you purchase it. When I am in the store holding an expensive wine that I've never tried before, in the back of my mind is the thought "What happens if I spend $70 on this, and it's corked?"

People more organized than I might say "Just bring it back to the store!" Fat chance. That might work well enough if you grab the offending bottle on your way out the door to dinner, but if you have even a modest wine cellar, or buy things mail order, the chances that you can do this reliably are slim, and the psychic transaction cost is high.

There is no technical roadblock to reducing the amount of fine wine that is ruined. The solution is clear: stop sticking stupid, rot-prone pieces of wood in the bottle. There are any number of reasonable ways to address the problem. Crown caps or screw caps are the best solution: cheap, easy to use, and they do the job perfectly. The silly synthetic corks work well, too, although I'm not convinced they're worth the trouble.

I'm well aware that the use of natural corks is not going to stop any time soon. Despite that, I have to point out that by choosing to put a natural cork in your wine, you're making a clear statement about what you think about your wine, and about the people who drink it: you think they deserve mediocrity.

Maybe if enough people realize that, the natural cork will stop seeming romantic, and will simply be seen for what it is: a shabby artifice.

NBA Street

2007-05-09 · by psu

I have a weakness for the NBA Street games. I like them because they do not try to simulate basketball, rather, they let you play a type of basketball that is completely ludicrous and unhealthy. I think the series peaked with NBA Street 2, which is still fun to play even today. Hoping to recapture some of that magic, I picked up a used copy of NBA Street: Homecourt at the Exchange the other day to see if it would make it through the Ebay Review System.

The first bad omen was that the Xbox would not read the disk. Luckily, after wiping it a few times with my shirt it seemed to start working again and I haven't had any trouble since.

Homecourt does not change the nature of the game in any drastic way, but they have tweaked the gameplay and the overall balance a bit. Trick moves have migrated back to the face buttons, where they were in NBA Street 2 and the dunks have gotten even more outrageous. In addition, it's nearly impossible to score jump shots because everyone in the game can leap 50 feet into the air and grab the ball out of the air just as it enters the hoop. This is perfectly legal, it is not goal-tending.

The two major gameplay changes are the addition of a "double dunk" mechanic and a rebalancing of the Gamebreaker system. Double dunks are fun. The idea is that when you go up for a dunk, you hold the B button down for a while, and in the easier difficulty levels, a meter shows up. If you fill the meter just right, rather than scoring one hoop your player will catch the ball after one dunk and flip up in the air and slam the ball down again, thus scoring two points. This is pretty fun to do. Don't think about the physics.

The new Gamebreakers are also an improvement. You collect trick points by doing tricks and fancy dunks. When the your trick point meter is full, you can trigger the Gamebreaker and then do some outrageous dancing around and in the end score two or three points while knocking your opponent down by one. The improvement that the new game makes is that while the Gamebreaker is active, the defensive team can still steal the ball and thus collect Gamebreaker points for itself. In the past this was not possible, a GB was basically guaranteed points for the offense. The new system feels more balanced and fun to me.

With the new dunks and the rebalanced Gamebreaker system, I was ready to really enjoy this game. Unfortunately,the game's difficulty curve is a square wave. On Easy and Medium you can win by 10 points every game just by continually stealing the ball and scoring back on your own side. This is fun for about three days, but then you'd like the game to be just a bit more challenging. Not much, just a bit. Unfortunately, on Hard and Expert, the game is cheap and impossible. All trick moves result in steals for the defense and all dunks are blocked except when the player is completely alone. The harder difficulties also remind you that the controls are actually kind of sloppy and sluggish, which didn't really matter on Easy, because you barely needed to use them to win. Finally, starting on Hard, the double dunk meter goes away, so you don't get as many of those moves. This makes the game less fun.

The result of all of this is that after making my custom player and pushing his R up for a few days on the easier levels, I got bored and tried Hard. Then I felt abused and punished. Therefore, the game gets an Ebay rating of 4.5. I'm on the fence about whether to send it into Ebay-land. I want to like the harder difficulties, but I don't know if I want to spend the time to figure them out.

I guess I should go play more Shivering Isles. At least there I can collect some giant orange mushrooms. Mmmm, mushrooms.

Margarita's New Toy

2007-05-11 · by peterb

Early this week, Tea Leaves' industrious panel of dedicated tasters converged on Mad Mex in Oakland to try a variety of wonderful tequilas. I'll be writing about that in detail, in the next few weeks.

In addition to discovering some new favorite tequilas, I got a peek at the best hand-held lime juicer I've ever seen. Half of a lemon or lime goes in, you give it a quick squeeze, and the juice just flies out in under a second. "I have to get one of those," I said. "You like it?" said our host. "Williams-Sonoma. About $15."

Now I own one. It's heavy enamel-coated aluminum, is easy to clean, and works like a charm. I am in love. I thought my previous lime juicer was convenient, but I now see that I was a deluded fool.

You might ask "What's the big deal? How good can a lime juicer possibly be?"

Worth. Every. Penny.

(In answer to some questions I've received: that's half a key lime being juiced, the reason you should care is that this makes making mixed drinks with fresh lime juice infinitely easier, and they also sell a larger juicer "for lemons," although this one worked just fine on the small lemons I tend to prefer).

The Camera Bag Problem

2007-05-14 · by psu

When I bought my first SLR film camera, I didn't give much thought to bags. I needed a small bag to fit the body and two lenses that I had bought, so I went to the store and picked out the smallest Domke (the F-5) which seemed to be big enough. It could fit the camera ready to shoot and the extra lens, and it wasn't that big. I could get the camera in and out without putting the bag down. When I got a few more lenses, I bought a slightly bigger Domke bag (the F-6) that had extra room for the lenses. That was the last time I was happy with a camera bag.

Once in a while, when I'm bored, I indulge in one of my periodic surveys of the camera bag landscape just to see if anything new has come along. What I always find out is that:

  1. Something new has always come along.

  2. The something new always sucks.

More than any other part of the industry, the camera bag world is populated primarily by designs that completely fail in one way or another. This is especially true when considering bags for travel. In my mind, the failures are usually for the same basic reasons.

Too much Padding

Under the conditions in which most of us work, you don't need a lot of padding to protect a camera. When I take my camera to work to take the odd snapshot, I put a towel into the main compartment of my laptop backpack and rest the camera there. That's really about all you need if you aren't heading out into a war zone.

People who make camera bags don't think this is true. They think you need a thick layer of closed cell foam around the outside of the bag, and then they think you need to fill the bag with about 5 pounds of little closed call foam dividers. This exercise in keeping the foam industry in business means two things for your bag:

  1. It's huge and heavy.

  2. You can't get anything in and out. This is especially true if the foam inserts are designed to fit snugly around the lenses. If the fit is too tight you can't get your hands in there to take the lens out. Brilliant.

The Domke bags don't have this problem. They use thin canvas and thin foam. It's too bad the nice little inserts are just a bit too small for my new fat zoom lenses.

Vertical Camera Placement

This seems like a good idea in principle, but in practice it never works out. The idea is to store the camera with the huge zoom lens on it in a "ready to shoot" position by jamming it into the bag vertically. I've never used a bag where this worked well. Here is what happens. You push the camera into the bag and it's all going well until the body of the camera hits the mouth of the bag. Then mouth of the bag is never quite wide enough or tall enough or deep enough or something so that you can clear it, and the foam and all the zippers and get the god-damned camera back in the bag. At this point you give up and throw the bag in a river.

I realize that there are some who will argue that the whole idea of holding the camera in the bag ready to shoot is stupid. You should have the camera out and about if you think you are going to be taking pictures. I understand this point of view. But as an amateur poseur on vacation, I tend carry the camera more than I shoot with it. I need the camera around for when opportunities arise, but I simply can't function in a mode where the camera is hanging off of one shoulder or around my neck most of the time. That makes things like chasing family members, buying drinks and snacks, and other every day activities impossible. Therefore, what I need is a bag that can store my camera with the lens on it, and make it easy for me to get the thing in and out when I want it.

Vertical bags make the in-and-out hard, and to make up for it storing the camera stuff I'm not using now (flash, short lenses, etc) is also hard because the vertical orientation tends to waste a lot of space. Avoid.

Holds only Cameras

Camera bags are designed around the idea that if you are really serious, you are willing to carry a bag that is dedicated to nothing but camera equipment. While this is a noble sentiment, in these days of limited carry-on capacity it's not that practical. I want a carry-on bag that can hold my cameras along with all the other stuff I need on the plane (laptop, music, books, kid stuff, extra clothes). You don't get a lot of extra space in camera bags for this sort of thing because the designers assume that if you had extra room, you'd put more camera stuff into it. So all of that extra room is filled with more closed cell foam compartments that are great for holding another lens or that third flash, or a power supply, but are completely useless for anything else.

Too small and too big

On a related note, most camera bags are both too big and too small at the same time. This is related to the padding problem. Many bags are so full of padding divider "systems" that they don't actually have any room inside them for the equipment. The result is a bag that is (say) 14 inches long and 9 inches deep and can still only hold a single body and one extra lens in a way that is actually comfortable to use. As a result, you end up buying a huge bag in order to be able to carry all your stuff to where you are going, but once you get there the bag is too big to actually carry around.

The camera backpacks are the best example of this problem. Almost all of the camera backpacks I've looked at make the same basic mistake. They provide you with a single 5 or 6 inch thick layer of closed cell foam compartments in which to put your camera gear and nothing else. Therefore, you end up with a pack on your back that is a constant 7 or 8 inches thick (remember, outside foam too) and yet holds nothing but a camera body and a few lenses.

If you want to take more stuff, you have to buy a bigger pack. But then the bag is much too big to actually wear around when you get where you are going. When I travel in Europe I already have a complex about being a badly dressed fat American. Wearing an expedition-sized backpack around isn't going to make that better.

You need two bags

I ultimately came to the conclusion that you want to carry two bags, one to get to the location and one to work out of once you are there. Unfortunately, I haven't worked out which type of bag should fill each role, and I'm still not clear on how to avoid needing to carry both bags on the plane.

I think what I'd really like is a small camera bag that I can stuff into a larger rolling carry-on. Unfortunately, all of my small camera bags had fallen out of favor in the last year when I started to use messenger bags for both cameras and other incidentals. My beloved old Domkes were sitting on the floor of the closet holding the film cameras that I have not yet sold.

This whole exercise had its start because I needed a small bag to take on a trip and my new D200 won't fit into the smaller Domke bag in which I carried my original one camera and two lens kit. It kind of fits, but it doesn't really want to go in and out. I looked all over the net and could not find a bag that works as well as the Domke while being only slightly larger. Well, there is actually one. The original slightly larger Domke that I used to for my old film camera and four lenses. The larger body and the bigger zooms don't go into the old bag quite as well, but it should be usable. And, the bag is very small and light compared to the messenger. I should even be able to stuff it into the rolling carry on bag for the trip over so I don't have to figure out how to carry on the camera bag, the carry-on bag and the computer bag.

So I have come full circle, and I can end all of this by resurrecting my old rule:

If you can't fit it into a Domke F-6 camera bag, you don't need to bring it with you.

It has served me well until now. Hopefully it will continue to do so far into the future, now that I've given it a new lease on life. I never should have sold that second F-6. On the other hand, it was blue. That's not a good color for a camera bag.

As a final note, I did find one company that seems to be designing bags that avoid some of the normal stupidity. ThinkTank photo makes a series of products aimed primarily at photojournalists and professionals that seem to be well designed and well made. They don't seem to be too big, and they seem to be able to hold a lot of equipment. I'm going to try one of their new shoulder bags to see if it handles as well as the Domke. I want to try it because the bags appear to fix my main complaint about the Domke: the shoulder strap is replaceable and more adjustable. My hopes are high but my expectations are low.

The Ludlum Demonstrative

2007-05-15 · by peterb

I was at the library the other day and realized that I still hadn't seen The Bourne Identity. So I said to myself "Hey, I'll just pick up the book instead." Perusing the shelf of Robert Ludlum titles, I realized they all had these very stilted, cold war, nouny sort of names. The Osterman Weekend. The Holcroft Covenant, The Chancellor Manuscript.

So I wrote a little script to autogenerate Ludlum titles for me, just in case I should ever need to ghost write a book for his kid.

Here is your randomly generated Robert Ludlum title. To get another one, just reload the page. If you enjoy it a lot, consider clicking on one of our convenient ads to help sponsor the site.

Your next Ludlum book is:

A Season with Sam & Max

2007-05-17 · by peterb

And so with the release of Episode 6: Bright Side of the Moon, Season 1 of Sam and Max has come to an end.

So, how did they do? Pretty damn good. Let's talk about what this means for the future of adventure games.

Silhouettes

Sam and Max

I don't want to turn this into a blow by blow review of the games in the series. There were high points, a few puzzles that were really clever, a few others that were really stupid. In other words, the series as a whole was about par for the course for a long, fairly well written adventure game.

What Telltale has done that is really impressive, I think, is that they have (apparently) come up with a sustainable way to write and sell adventure games. Profitably selling adventure games in today's marketplace is an activity that some respected commentators have said is so hard as to be impossible. So how did Telltale pull this off?

Screw Retail

To the best of my knowledge, the new Sam and Max series is a digital download only. No boxes, no discs, no fighting for shelf space at Best Buy. One can only imagine that this let them focus on selling to the small pond that makes up their core market (because, let's face it, only someone who already likes adventure games is going to download and pay for one) rather than just jumping into the ocean and drowning.

They are going to ship a box set in August. I'll be curious to hear whether they sell more boxes or bits. I'm betting a good bottle of Belgian beer on the digital downloads. Anyone at Telltale want to take me up on that wager?

Have A Partner With Deep Pockets

Sam and Max was co-sponsored by Gametap as a way of promoting their service — the games are included in a Gametap subscription. This clearly gave them some breathing room. Having a partner can be a mixed blessing, but it certainly seems to have helped them out in this case, especially in terms of marketing.

Leverage Existing Content

The episodes take place over a long period of time, both in-game and in real life. This means that you can rely on players' distance from the previous games to let you get away with more asset reuse than you could in one "in the box" game. Throughout the series we see the same incidental characters show up and get pressed into service for different roles.

I'm not just talking about the supporting cast. Consider TV show hostess Myra Stump from Situation: Comedy who shows up in Reality 2.0 as the avatar of an anti-virus program. If Sam and Max had been one 12 hour game instead of 6 2-hour games, the designers would probably have felt obligated to design, draw, render, and find a voice for an entirely new character. But in little doses each month, the reuse is not just effective, it's actually charming.

This applies not just to characters, but to locations, many of which are reused throughout the series. All of this reuse probably reduced the cost of creating art assets, and also probably helped the design team meet their deadlines.

To Hell With Hardcore

Sam and Max was designed with the casual player in mind. The game autosaves generously. You can save whenever you want. The game is forgiving — there's no way to "lose". There's a well integrated (and non-spoilerish) hint system built in to the game. Lastly, the episodic form lends itself well to enjoyment by gamers with jobs.

Let me tell you a story. Every so often, my co-author psu lends me some weird PS2 Japanese role-playing game involving gay porn and pouty boys with a lot of product in their hair. Some of them I've even sort of enjoyed (particularly Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne). I will typically play these games for, say, four to five hours over the course of two weeks or so.

Then, something happens. I'll have a deadline at work, or I go on vacation, or some similar interruption. I ignore the game for a couple of weeks. Then, I come back, put the disk in the drive, and have no idea what the hell is going on. Where am I? Why is the earth turned inside out? Who is that guy? Why is he naked? How did all that product get in his hair? What's with the ostrich?

Then I realize that not only have I lost the thread of the game, but that there are still another thirty-four hours of gameplay to go, and I give up, put the game away, and never play it again.

Many people who play games today also played them when they were teenagers. As such, we remember when video games were an excruciatingly expensive investment. The thought of spending $30, $50, $60 on a game that you could only play for a few hours was outrageous. We wanted the game to be padded out. We wanted the game to last for months and months, so that we could ignore our homework for the entire school year. Presumably, this is still true for a lot of younger people who buy games today.

But here's the thing: many of us have grown up. For myself, I've decided that life is too short to play bad videogames. I have more money than I have time. I would much rather pay $30 for a game that gives me 10 hours of enjoyable gameplay than $10 for a game that gives me 600 hours of repetitive and pointless button clicking.

That's who Telltale is writing Sam and Max for. And I suspect that they are making money hand over fist. Good for them.

"Adult," meaning "For Adults"

That the developers of the game are writing for people with real lives is also apparent in the scripts. Too often, "mature" in videogames means blood, boobs, and lots of pointless use of the word "fuck." Sam and Max isn't above toilet humor — we are talking about a game whose protagonists are a phlegmatic dog detective and a gleefully psychotic lagomorph, after all — but the writing in the game is generally directed towards adults. Kids will get the occasional laugh, but anyone not solidly literate is going to miss half the fun.

In what is perhaps another side effect of digital-only distribution, Sam and Max is not rated by the ESRB. I approve of this. More publishers should blow off the ESRB.

They're will be asking the ESRB to rate the boxed version. That's another reason why the boxed version will be inferior.

The Future

So what's next?

The first question is whether there will be a Season 2. If there isn't, then you know that all my pontificating about how brilliant Telltale was in picking their market was wrong. But I don't think that's going to happen. Every single person I've talked to who has played the series has loved it.

I have no particular advice for Telltale in terms of game design. I think they did a fine job, and if I have quibbles about this or that puzzle, that all falls within the realm of authors' privilege. The one thing I'd love to see is a Mac port of episodes as they are released. As their Bone series demonstrates, Telltale's game engine runs great on the Mac, and I know that I'm not the only person who grows weary of rebooting into Windows just to play Sam and Max.

Crisp art, amusing and witty writing, a jazzy soundtrack, and a commitment to the gamer who has a life. Whatever Sam and Max games we see from Telltale in the future, I'm sure they will continue to bring these to the table.

And I'll keep playing them.

Additional Resources

Fishy Fishy

2007-05-18 · by psu

Fish is not hard to cook. We are just trained to think it is. Early on in my cooking "career" (graduate school) we picked up a large cookbook about fish that meticulously broke down multiple techniques with several examples of each and hints about which kind of fish which technique was suited for. I remember bringing the odd piece of fish home, thumbing through the book to try and figure out what to do and then throwing up my hands when I couldn't find the right set of instructions out of the right list. Then I'd make the fish and it would come out overcooked and tasteless.

My fish epiphany came during my first trip to Paris. I sat down in a semi-upscale bistro run by a famous chef and ordered a simple piece of white fish in a white wine and butter sauce. It was like no fish I'd ever had before. The fish that I was used to encountering came in one of two states: a sort of seared medium-rare almost sushi texture in the middle, which really doesn't work with anything but tuna or salmon, or horrendously overdone, flakey, and dried out, the standard configuration for the thin mild fish in the U.S. This was different. It was soft and not overdone, and yet it flaked apart easily. It was tender but firm. And most of all, it was perfectly infused with the moisture and taste of the sauce. A true wonder.

I have not, in fact, learned to make fish like that, although I come close once in a while. What I have learned is that in the home kitchen there are three high probabilty schemes for making fish come out well without too much work.

  1. Pan fried. Do this with a nice snapper filet if you can get it. Salt and pepper the filet and then bread it lightly with flour, egg wash and bread crumbs. Then toss it into a frying pan with enough oil and cook on both sides for two or three minutes each, depending on how thick the fish is. You want the fish to start to flake apart but you do not want it to dry out. This general scheme will work well with any thin filet as long as the fish is firm enough to hold up in the pan.

  2. Pan roasted. Lightly flour the fish on both sides. Season with salt and pepper. Then sear it in the pan with some hot oil on both sides. Maybe a minute on each side. Then throw the pan in the oven to finish it off. You want to do this with thicker pieces of fish like salmon, halibut, and so on. Thicker pieces work better in the oven because everything cooks more evenly and at a slower rate, giving you more latitude. Keep and eye on things every three or four minutes depending on how thick the fish is. After a while you will develop a feel for when the fish is done. It will call to you from the oven: "Hey! Time to let me out now!" A nice side effect of the pan roasting is that sometimes get cool burnt bits to make a simple sauce with. Deglaze the pan with white wine and add sauteed shallots and butter. Yum.

  3. Semi-poached. I've written this up before. The idea here is to cook the fish in a pan, either on the stove or in the oven, in a small amount of liquid to keep things moist and yummy. I like to do this with small whole fish (trout, bass) that is very fresh. It cooks the fish gently and you can check on it a lot to make sure you don't kill it. Standard liquid mixes include:

  4. White wine, butter and some water. Salt and pepper.

  5. Wine, soy sauce, green onions, ginger. Salt and pepper.

  6. Onion, carrots, celery sauted in olive oil, etc, along with some water and white wine. Salt and pepper.

You get the idea. For the oven, put the fish in a shallow pan, pour the liquid mix around it and then just bake it. You can cover the fish or not, do whatever you like.

Sticklers for detail will now complain that I have left out their favorite method. I left out grilling because it never works for me. I left out steaming because I am too lazy to pull the steamer out of storage every time I happen to find a fresh bass at the store, and the wet oven scheme above works almost as well. Finally, I have not mentioned seared tuna, partly because everyone and their mother is doing "seared ahi tuna" with frozen tuna steaks from Costco and I'm tired of it, and partly because whenever I try to make seared tuna I end up with either an overdone tasteless mess or an underdone tasteless mess. Also, everyone knows tuna is best as sushi anyway, so what's the point of cooking it.

With these three main techniques in mind, here are a few other tips that I find useful:

That's all I know about fish. Go buy some cheap stuff and practice. Then get some halibut from Alaska and go nuts.

Halo 3 Beta Minireview

2007-05-21 · by peterb

I'm basing this minireview on three game sessions.

Step 1: Insert Crackdown disc. Step 2: Choose "Play Halo 3 Beta" Step 3: Watch pretty opening screen. Enter multiplayer lobby. Step 4: Start matchmaking process. Step 5: Wait 15 minutes while the game tries, and fails, to find a match. Step 6: Give up and go do something interesting.

Color me unimpressed.

Travelogue 360 Paris

2007-05-28 · by peterb

While I remain hidebound here in Pittsburgh, co-author psu is taking a few weeks in Paris. But I'm not jealous: I have Travelogue 360 Paris, just released for Windows and Mac. And my Paris has a rhinoceros wandering around the base of the Eiffel Tower.

Travelogue 360 Paris is a bit of a strange beast. I went into the game not knowing anything of its provenance, and was expecting a sort of dreary "virtual room" tour of the French capital. I was pleasantly surprised to find a much simpler and quite addictive game: it's sort of a videogame version of "Where's Waldo", or more accurately the perhaps less well known "I Spy" childrens' books.

That the game takes place in Paris is somewhat incidental, a framework on which the game designers could hang a riot of color and a map around which to roam. In each location, you are given a list of objects to find. You scroll and zoom around the panoramic photo of your location and try to find the named objects before the timer runs out. After every few locations, you're given a different minigame (most in the nature of jigsaw puzzles) to solve.

This is the sort of puzzle game that any veteran of Fool's Errand would feel comfortable playing.

[Paris With Junk

Paris with Junk](http://wptest.tleaves.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/picture-22.png "Paris With Junk")

One supposes that Paris was chosen as an exotic and interesting location. This works both for an against the game. It's a bit disarming (and somewhat giggle inducing) to be standing in the nave of St. Sulpice and start looking around for a boat, a violin, a pretzel, a cherry, a footprint, a book, a dinner fork, and a protractor. It's made all the more surreal by all of the other objects that litter the landscape as red herrings. I found myself engaging in an ongoing interior dialogue. "Let's see, where's that protractor? It's not near that orangutan next to the altar, or the piece of raw meat on the ceiling. Maybe it's above the confessional?"

The objects in the game suffuse and infest the panoramic photos that make up each level. Some of them are in plain sight, while others are cleverly melded into the backdrop (for example, a bunch of grapes might be simply sitting on the floor, or they might be in the form of a decorative marble-colored frieze on a pillar.) After a time, I began to think of the game not as Travelogue 360 but as "Paris With Junk." Everywhere you turn, there is random garbage filling the streets. So, in other words, it's just like the real place.

The game re-uses locations many times, giving you a different inventory of things to find on each visit. Since the actual images (and objects hidden) don't change from visit to visit, there's a tendency to complete subsequent visits faster. If you get stuck there's a clever hint function which gives you "cold, warm, hot" sort of clues via visual and audio indicators. In the standard game you can use the hint function as much as you want but there's a fairly long "recharge time" between uses, which in practice helps you not feel too guilty about resorting to it when you're completely stuck. Levels of the game are times, but the time limits are extremely generous. I never felt like I was in danger of losing due to running out of time. There is also an untimed "tourist mode", which is appropriate for younger kids.

Travelogue 360 Paris is the sort of game that I often talk myself out of liking. It is, at heart, a one-trick pony. But the thing is it's a really fun trick, and it's performed with great polish. Sometimes the simplest pleasures are worth enjoying.

Travelogue 360 Paris, published by Big Fish Games, $19.95. Available for Macintosh or Windows.

Disclosure statement: the publishers graciously provided us with a review copy of the game.

When The Tripods Came

2007-05-29 · by peterb

30 second exposure at f/5, ISO400 equivalent. The sky was nearly completely dark, so most of the illumination came from the sodium vapor lights at the nearby dock.

My favorite thing about the picture is how the long exposure smoothed out the waves on the water, making it look like a sheet of textured glass.

Click the image to see a full-size version (warning: large).

Long exposure

Here's a 16 second exposure at f/8, taken a bit earlier. I like the invisible boat effect, and I like how the dock looks like it's on fire.

Invisible boat

In summary: a good tripod is worth its weight in gold.

The Paris Reviews

2007-06-04 · by psu

Pete mentioned last week that I was in Paris on one of my periodic visits. These started over ten years ago when a friend of mine got a long term consulting gig over there and we went and visited and got hooked on the place. Now I try to take a trip once every year or two. This trip was much like the others. Mostly what we do is walk around, sit in the gardens, and eat. On the other hand, there were new things too.

Camera Review

A few months ago I bought a shiny new Nikon D200 mostly to bring on this trip. I was hoping it would help out with some action shots that I had missed on my previous trips. In many ways, the D200 is the digital camera I've been waiting for. The viewfinder is great. Unlike the D100 and D70, you can actually evaluate focus by eye. The controls work well and are fast. Dedicated buttons and switches make setting many operations that were tedious on the D70 quick and easy. There is a nice B&W mode. Finally, the camera is fast. The D70 was generally fast enough, but had a small memory buffer that tended to fill just as you wanted to squeeze off one more shot. For me, the D200 can essentially shoot as many RAW frames as I'll ever need in a continuous 5fps burst.

In every way, the D200 is essentially a Nikon F100, or N90s, or 8008s for the digital age. It's the smaller, lighter alternative to the full on pro body that does most everything anyone ever really needs. Smaller is always better. Unfortunately, the D200 doesn't quite take this principle far enough. My only real complaint is that it's too big. For some reason, the body is noticeably larger than either the N90 or the 8008s, even though it has a smaller viewfinder and has no need for a film transport. I'm not sure why this should be. So while I'm thrilled with the AF and the handling and the speed, i found myself looking longingly at all the tourists with their D-Rebels and their Nikon D40s, wishing my camera wasn't so large.

Camera Bag Review

Because the camera was too big, I bought a new belt bag to try on the trip that can hold the camera and another lens. The ThinkTank Photo Changeup is a shoulder/belt/chest bag that is designed as a compact way to hold a body and a couple lenses or just a few lenses if you have the body out all the time. The bag is a top notch design and very well built. I could get the D200 (with an L-bracket tripod plate I never used attached), 18-70, 12-24 and a flash into it and walk all day without much trouble. It only suffers from one problem: I hate belt bags. You can't really say this is ThinkTank's fault.

My problem with belt bags is the belt. It's always too tight or too loose. If too tight, I can't spin the bag to get the camera out. If too loose the bag hangs down on my ass and bounces as I walk. I hate the feeling of the bag sitting there on my hip bouncing up and down as I walk. Somehow the bag in the same place hanging down off my shoulder is not as annoying. The belt on this bag had the same problem, and it was made a bit worse by the fact that the shoulder strap was too skinny to really work well.

I think I'll go back to my Domkes, or maybe I'll try and rig something up in my North Face backpack.

Food Reviews

We found out this trip that one of our favorite local eateries, Les Fontaines had changed owners and no longer had the same great menu of meaty traditional French dishes. This made us sad. On the other hand, it also meant we had to try lots of new places to find a new place to go for meaty traditional French dishes. This turned out to be a fun task. We tried several new places this time around, and they were all winners. Here are the highlights.

  1. Chez George. This place had the best steak ever. It was the subject of an NYT feature on steak places in Paris. Perfectly cooked and tasty meat combined with great fries combined with a wonderful old school atmosphere made for a great time. Karen also scored a language coup here, correctly using a past imperfect verb conjugation to win us some fraises du bois, the wonderful little wild strawberries that were in season. This illustrates the first fundamental principle of eating out: you always get better food if you can speak the language.

  2. Bistro de l'Olivier. We ducked in here on a rainy day for lunch and had a great time. Nicely prepared provencal dishes, suprisingly friendly service for clueless tourists, and a winning chocolate fondant cake. It also has a cool looking bar.

  3. Cafe Constant. This place is close to the cheese shop. We got there early for lunch on sunny afternoon and watched all the locals stream in ordering the special of the day: grilled fresh langoustines. This was the best seafood I have had since the first time I got steamed live shrimp in a Cantonese seafood joint in L.A. We remarked to our table neighbors that these were actually better than the fancy langoustine ravioli I had gotten at Joel Robuchon for much more money a couple of nights before. The nice old French man knodded and said that this was called, in English, "value for money".

Wine Review

That aformentioned trip to the Robuchon restaurant also provided us with the mystery of the trip. In the past, we had never been much for ordering wine. There are various reasons for this that are complex and boring. This trip we made an effort to order at least a glass with every meal. We got a red wine at Robuchon called "Coteaux du Languedoc, Chateaux Sergnac." It was awesome. If anyone can find it for me I will obtain some illegal Camembert for you the next time I am in Paris.

Mustard Review

We got four jars of Amora Dijon mustard. They cost 0.85 Euro each. They are better than any mustard I have bought in the U.S. at any price.

Airport Review

PHL has improved a bit since the last time I was there. Now it's merely horrible instead of a being a spinning vortex of unbearable suffering. I still felt sorry for the couple traveling with the two toddlers and a double stroller though.

I think that just about covers the whole trip. The gardens and cafes and the rest of our normal haunts were their normal wonderful selves. I even took up a new photographic hobby: taking pictures of people taking pictures of themselves in front of famous things:

Maybe over the next ten trips I'll shoot enough of that sort of thing to make a book.

The Camera We Want

2007-06-05 · by psu

I like Thom Hogan. He is an intelligent writer, photographer and fellow technical geek and his web site is one of the better collections of information about Nikon cameras. As a bonus, the overall design and layout of the site shows a lot of taste and restraint, unlike almost every other such site in the universe.

This week, Thom posted a nice rant about the sad state of the compact digital camera. This is a subject that is close to my heart. I love small cameras but very few are well executed. In fact, one could argue that no one has yet built a nice small digital camera.

I don't really need to repeat Thom's main points here, but I will anyway. Compact digital cameras suffer from a proliferation of useless differentiation. The result is that they do not serve any of their potential markets all that well. People who want simplicity get a choice between hundreds of models all of which have complicated user interfaces supporting dozens of complex features. Photographers who want a useful tool get a choice between hundreds of models all of which have complicated user interfaces supporting dozens of features which are all useless photographically. I would suggest, for example, that no one who wants to buy a useful camera really wants any of the following features

  1. Face detection.

  2. A zoom lens that is a 400/F11.2 on the long end.

  3. 18 bazillion point autofocus.

  4. Digital Zoom (e.g. automatic stupid cropping).

  5. Auto modes that generally do nothing but pop the flash when you are taking a night shot from the top of the Eiffel Tower.

Not only do people not want this, they don't want to have to decide between 50 models of cameras at various price points all of which appear to have this same list of features that they don't want. This is especially true when the people you are talking about are enthusiastic photographers.

What we want from a camera is an effective tool that is predictable and easy to control. We want

  1. Good focus and exposure controls.

  2. A good viewfinder.

  3. A good fast lens.

and most of all

  1. A good sensor with a high quality fast imaging pipeline.

Thom's extensive feature list basically boils down to these four points. You put these four things into a small camera and you would basically have a digital version of some classic point and shoot cameras like the Olympus Stylus, Ricoh GR-1, or the king of them all: the Konica Hexar. All of these cameras had the ability to capture pictures every bit as well as a big Pro SLR if you knew how to use them.

Instead what we get are cameras like the dozens of Canon SDXYZ, the Panasonic/Leica point and shoots, 50 different ugly cameras from Fuji and 89 different cameras in various odd shapes from Sony, Casio, Samsung and all the rest. A few of these come tantalizingly close in terms of lens quality and controls. The Ricoh GR digitals are nice. The PanoLeicas are OK. Sadly, few of these cameras can generate a decent ISO 100 JPEG file and none have an image pipeline that is even 1/10th the speed of a D-Rebel shot to shot.

This, in the end, is the ultimate insult of the digital point and shoot. Even if you learn to work around the control and interface problems and you get a decent shot, in the end the sensor will let you down because the manufacturers have spent the last five or six years in an irrational penis waving contest to see who can get the largest number of noisy pixels onto a thumbnail sized sensor, rather than building a machine with a decent imaging pipeline in it.

I've whined about this before, but Thom's article depressed me even more than usual, and led me to think that we who want decent sensor performance at ISO 400, or a fast shot to shot time are doomed to carry big cameras (even as small as it is, you can't fit a D-Rebel in your pants). He made me think this because here he was laying out an intelligent design agenda for a compact camera any photographer would love to use, and any point and shooter could just point and shoot, but he had made one fatal mistake which all intelligent engineering types tend to make. He assumed that his interests were those of the mass market, and that building such a camera would bring people and money in droves.

I don't think this is true. The market for an intelligently designed, relatively expensive, enthusiast camera is vanishingly small. Most people don't want an easy to use photographic tool. They want a box with a single button that takes pictures. It doesn't really matter to them that the latest Canon PowerSnoot SD5867 IS VR AFS also has 59 other buttons and takes video that can be sent directly to Youtube. They just put the camera into the "this button takes a picture" mode and go off and start hitting the button. When they hit the button at the right time, they get a JPEG file that can make a print at Costco that is approximately 15,000 times better than what they used to get from the film mini-lab. And thus, they are happy.

Where this leaves the poor photography enthusiast is with hundreds of models of compact cameras all of which have complicated user interfaces supporting dozens of features which are all useless photographically. The feature sets will not go away, because the camera companies think that it's the lists that sell. The badly designed cameras will continue to sell, because most users will just work around the bad design by ignoring it and hitting the one button. What this means for the photo geeks is that there will never be a small camera that makes us happy because the industry does not know how to manufacture and market such a device. It requires that you make a camera that does "less", but is better in a way that is difficult to explain. All such products are usually doomed, although there are a few exceptions (hello iPod).

All of this, in the end, leaves me melancholy. I would actually be willing to pony up a lot of cash for a high quality fast small camera. I'll be the first in line if the heavens open up and deliver such a miracle to us. But I'm not holding my breath.

The Retro Issue

2007-06-06 · by peterb

A while ago you may recall that I posted an enigmatic call for writers to assist in some-project or other, without saying exactly what.

Now I can tell you what that project was: PTD Magazine's latest issue is devoted to retrogaming, edited by your humble narrator. You can download the digest version here, or subscribe to PTD for a mere 99 cents per issue to read the rest.

If I do say so myself: it's awesome. In addition to making lots of complaints about how game writing is hidebound and formulaic, I also hear other people making those complaints too. Here's an attempt to break out of the mold.

Chase the Light

2007-06-07 · by psu

Our first full day in Paris was gray, wet, and cold. As a result, I didn't take a lof of pictures of the city. It's hard to make nice landscape or cityscape photographs when the sky is white. But, I dutifully carried my camera into the early evening just in case. You never know what might happen.

What we did this evening was walk over to Joel Robuchon's restaurant to see how long we'd have to wait for a table. This was at 6:30pm. At about 6:45 they told us to come back at 9:30. It turns out that at this time of year in Paris, it is still light out at 9:30, so we spent some time walking the streets. For the most part, the sky remained white and boring:

I forget why, but we went back to the apartment we had rented to drop some stuff off and pick up a warmer jacket. I also dropped off my heavier zoom lens and put the 24mm/2.8 on to the camera. This would limit me to some extent, but it makes the camera a lot smaller. We walked back out into the early evening, and Karen noticed a splotch of blue sky above the buildings to the West. Since we had time, I figured we could walk out to the Seine, where there are great unobstructed views both East and West just in case the sun peaked out and gave us some nice golden light.

When we got out to the river, we walked down the Quai towards the Museé D'Orsay where there is a nice pedestrian bridge. By now the sky had cleared up but there was still no direct sun on anything. This lets you make boring pictures of buildings, but at least there is blue behind them.

DSC_20070527-02867

I spent ten or fifteen minutes dorking around with the side of the Museé when we got what we wanted. The sun came streaming out from a bank of clouds. Now I had a two more problems though. While the light was that fantastic warm late afternoon light that you want, all I had with me was my semi-wide lens. This means two things

  1. I need something in the foreground.

  2. With the bright sky in the shot, I'd have contrast problems.

It turned out that the bridge we walked to was close to where the river tour boats start out, and all of the dinner cruises were happily motoring down the river. This solved my foreground problem. I shot a picture of a boat coming down river looking into the sun. This picture made it clear that even if I had a nice big boat in the foreground, I'd continue to have contrast problems:

DSC_20070527-02871

Without some adjustment, I'd have a choice between a blown out sky or a black boat with no detail. Neither of these choices works. In the past, this is where people might use an ND-grad filter to darken the sky, but I've never learned how to use those. I do know a bit of Photoshop though, so I had planned for this situation.

The D200 can shoot 5 frames in one second. In addition, you can program it to shoot each frame with a different exposure. So, I lined up one of the river boats with the bank of clouds that was quickly dissipating and shot off 5 frames between -2 stops under to +2 stops over. I figured if the frames were well enough aligned, I could glue them back together in Photoshop to balance the contrast. Luckily, the boats don't move too fast. With a bit of Photoshop work the next day, I got what I could have gotten if I knew how to use an ND-grad. I'm happy either way:

After shooting some more into the sun, I turned around to catch the light off of the buildings in the area. One reason Paris is such a great place to take pictures is that when the light is good, there is always good light on all the architecture. The Museé was much more interesting now with some good side light:

DSC_20070527-02888

And the bridge we walked past on the way over looked good too:

DSC_20070527-02896

At this point, I had shot about 60 or 70 pictures, and it was time to get back to the restaurant to see if the table was free. We ended up waiting another hour before we could sit down, which means I missed out on the sunset. But these are the things you give up to get into Joel Robucon's place.

Anyway, all was not lost. At night in Paris, you can always count on the shop windows:

Lessons learned:

  1. Eat dinner late if you want the good light.

  2. Be aware that just because the light isn't there now doesn't mean that it won't show up later. Don't give up, chase the light anyway.

  3. Have a plan to deal with high contrast.

  4. Bears and sunflowers are cool.

Children's Zombie Books

2007-06-08 · by peterb

  1. Clifford The Big Dead Dog (peterb)

  2. If You Give A Mouse Some Serum (peterb)

  3. Horton Hears His Doom (peterb)

  4. Goodnight, World (peterb)

  5. Where The Dead Things Are (kosak)

  6. Bedknobs and Boomsticks (peterb)

  7. Olivia's Favorite Flesh Eaters (psu)

  8. One Vein, Two Vein, Red Vein, Blue Vein (peterb)

  9. Click, Clack, GGGGgggaaaarrrrrrrgggghhh (psu)

  10. Green Eggs and Hand (peterb)

Please feel free to pile on with your own suggestions in the comments.

When Is The Best Not The Best?

2007-06-11 · by peterb

I had what started off as an extremely productive weekend. I got a lot of work done at my job, did some house stuff, changed the oil on the car, and was otherwise efficient and in a good mood. As a reward, I decided to play some more Forza 2, a game I'm reviewing for PTD Magazine. I've been enjoying Forza, and approached my Xbox 360 with some enthusiasm. This should have been a warning sign. Because, inevitably, as soon as I turned the machine on, 3 blinky red lights appeared, and the machine was officially as dead as a doornail.

The machine was one year and one month old. Translated, that means the machine was one month out of warranty. 45 minutes on the phone with Microsoft customer service in Durban or Chennai or somewhere resulted in them agreeing to drop the repair fee from $140 to $65.

Now, there are a few directions in which I could take this article. First would be the observation that I would rather simply not use an Xbox 360 than pay $140 to get it fixed, and that from Microsoft's perspective, asking for that much seems sort of, well, goofy. You're already losing money on the console. The only way you reach profitability is if I buy games. But this isn't really a topic about which there's very much to say. Philosophically, it's not actually surprising to be asked to pay money to fix a machine that's out of warranty.

Perhaps a little more interesting is that they dropped the price simply because I bitched about it. That seems to me to be a poor customer service experience by definition. It's used up 45 minutes of their support time, and I'm left with that "just negotiated to buy a new car" sort of feeling. Maybe if I'd stayed on the phone for an hour they'd have dropped the price by another 25%? Will someone who reads this article who did pay $140 to fix their machine now be furious and feel ripped off by Microsoft? It just seems to me that by removing certainty from the equation you're making the entire experience more hateful, and squandering company goodwill on something that, in the long run, is pretty picayune. Either make the transaction completely painless from the beginning ("Here's your new Xbox 360,") or stick to your guns ("We're sorry that you don't want to pay the repair fee, sir. Have a nice day.") But making the transaction turn into a negotiation worthy of an Algerian souk just seems pennywise and pound foolish.

But the most interesting question to me is that of consumer electronics and reliability. Now, I'm picking on Microsoft here because I own a console that blew up, but I presume that once 10 or 20 people buy PS3's we will see similar reliability problems with those machines as well. Consider how unusual it is to hear of nonportable consumer electronic devices that just stop working a year after purchase. How old is your DVD player? How old is your stereo receiver? 2 years old? 5? 10? I still have VCRs that work after 20 years, and those have more moving parts than an Xbox. As long as we're talking about game consoles, I still have Atari 2600s that work just fine. Yet the Xbox 360 has developed such a reputation for bursting into (virtual) flame that its failure mode has garnered a nickname and a Wikipedia article.

This is the collision of two worlds: the world of computer hardware and software, where the people developing on the "bleeding edge" expect some number of problems, and the world of consumer electronics, where things are supposed to just work. I'm extremely unimpressed with any company pushing products that lean towards the former rather than the latter.

I understand the technical reasons why the Xbox 360 is prone to hardware failure: Microsoft chose a design where they crammed a bunch of extremely high end equipment into as small a case as they could manage. Their engineering decisions create unreasonable amounts of heat, and unreasonable amounts of heat lead to an unreasonably low mean time between failures. That there are technical reasons for the console bursting into flame whenever a goldfinch looks at it sideways doesn't make it acceptable.

In the meantime, we can compare this to the Nintendo Wii, which, through conservative design and engineering puts out nearly no heat, and certainly has not (yet) garnered a reputation for being unreliable.

All of which leads me to the question: what good is the most advanced graphics subsystem in the world if you're incapable of packaging it in a way that performs reliably for an acceptable period of time?

Lull 2: The Return of the Lull

2007-06-12 · by psu

In what has become something of a yearly ritual, the time between early Spring and the next release of Madden brings with it almost nothing of interest to play. Last year, I was saved when Oblivion hit and kept me busy for a couple of months in this normally empty time. This year there is no such white knight to save the gaming industry from my disinterest. Worse, some new equipment and a nice overseas vacation have awakened other obsessions that have for the most part been dormant while the gaming obsession has taken its course.

It was probably inevitable that the lull this year would be worse than last. We are, after all, in the middle of an awkward, lurching transition into the latest generation of new hardware. There are not many good new games. Even Nintendo, the current darling of the universe, has only a few real titles for their adorable little box. Meanwhile, Sony is still selling stupidly expensive boxes that no one wants and Microsoft seems to think that the way to beat Sony is to do exactly the same thing. As a bonus, the Microsoft boxes also break all the time.

I think at some point the army of Sony first/second/third parties will step up to the plate and provide the machine with the library that it needs. I think when this happens the only thing the Xbox will really have going for it will be Halo 3, which I will play for a few months. Then maybe my 360 will melt and I can get just get rid of it.

All of this leaves me bored. I should be happily curled up with my copy of Puzzle Quest, or Pokemon Diamond or Paper Mario or Zelda instead of writing about how I'm not playing anything. Instead, I have found that I just don't have the mental energy to invest right now. There are other things occupying those slots in my brain. Luckily, I can still get my gaming fix. I just let others do the playing for me.

Every week, I download the Gamers With Jobs podcast. Then I listen to these guys tell me what all they have been playing. It's mostly a lot of obscure PC stuff (like World of Warcraft, ha ha just kidding) with the occasional console title or downloadable game tossed in for variety. They cover a lot of ground, and I get to hear about games that I probably would never attempt to play (I don't own a PC). What the podcast does is allow me to vicariously consume some of the content of these games while never actually having to pick them up and play them. Thus, they remain latent objects, and as such can be somewhat idealized, and yet I still find out a bit about what goes on. The best of both worlds. It's like reading a very detailed review or synopsis of the final season of The Sopranos. You get to find out roughly what happens, but you don't have to sit through, or pay for, 20 hours of HBO content to do it.

For years, I have had a similar relationship with World of Warcraft. For various reasons that are too boring to go into, I will never play this game. Luckily, I don't really need to because everyone else on Earth has already done so and told me what it's like. I have one buddy who shall remain "anonymous" who has had his entire gaming life replaced with WoW. Where he used to play two or three different games each week, I believe he's basically done nothing but WoW since the game launched. Whenever I need any new poop on the game, I just ask him. And, if I really need to be immersed in the WoW culture, I can go and watch that episode of South Park again. Really, that's all I need to know.

The result of all of this is that I'm not feeling too bad mired in my little lull. The combination of other activities and these indirect gaming streams will keep me busy until the next thing comes along. Meanwhile, the occasional bout with the DS and a few innings of baseball on the PSP have been enough to keep my gaming brain happy.

Note

As a side note, if you don't know about Gamers with Jobs let me encourage you to go over there. It has the distinction of being the only place on the Interweb that I am familiar with that has a "message forum" where nitwits and assholes are largely absent (except for me). This is nothing short of a minor modern miracle.

Fresh Figs are Back

2007-06-14 · by peterb

...and tonight, I will determine if it is possible to make a cocktail with them.

Fig Daiquiri

2007-06-15 · by peterb

Ingredients:

-Juice of a lemon -6 fresh figs -lots of rum -ice -about a tablespoon of sugar (depending on how sweet the figs are, adjust to taste)

Instructions: blend everything and pour into a frosted glasses. Makes 2 big drinks.

The good: The fig texture works with the ice to create a drink that will stay frozen for a while, even when there is a ton and a half of rum in the drink. It tastes like fresh figs. It's refreshing. The bad: Boy, this sure is expensive for something that isn't that much better than a standard girly-drink strawberry daiquiri.

Summary: An interesting experiment, but not one I'll do again.

Make a Note Please

2007-06-18 · by psu

When I was a graduate student, I lived in North Carolina for a couple of years. I didn't personally enjoy the area, although I can see why others might. One thing though. The fresh fish was fantastic. There was this guy just outside of town who would go to the coast every week and bring stuff back directly from the boats. In the summer, we'd gorge on snapper and live soft-shell crabs. Back in Pittsburgh, it's been hard to find stuff that good. Until now.

Since they opened, I have had the pleasure of obtaining consistently excellent fish of all kinds from the newly opened Penn Avenue Fish Company in the strip. Everything I have gotten there has been uniformly excellent, but I feel I have to express extra appreciation for what they have done for me in the last couple of weeks.

First, they have become the only decent place in town where one can find live soft-shell crabs. These are almost as yummy as the NC ones.

Second, the snapper I got there this weekend was as good as any fish I have ever consumed anywhere on Earth.

Therefore, for you all reading out there, I have this ultimatum:

I don't want to catch any of you buying fish in the city at any location in Pittsburgh other than the Penn Avenue Fish Company. Don't make me cut you.

Back from Vacation...

2007-06-25 · by peterb

...and I sort of suspect it's a bad sign that the planned highlight of my week is likely to be the release of Pokémon Battle Revolution for the Wii.

More on that soon.

What's Old is New Again

2007-06-26 · by psu

Today a discussion of two games that have been around for a long time, and are still more interesting to play than most of the new games. I suppose it's possible that my current state of mind makes me more inclined to stick with the familiar. I think it's more likely that these games are just better.

First, Resident Evil 4 again. For some reason I just can't stop playing this game. This time it's on the Wii, and this version of the game combines what was best about the previous two releases into a single package of enjoyable zombie slaughter. Now that I'm in the habit of buying this game once a year, I wonder what they'll do next year to make me buy it again? Maybe an Xbox 360 port with multiplayer?

So, here is what to like about the Wii version:

  1. 16x9 progressive scan graphics without the mushy jaggy PS2 "looks-like-ass" filter. This is a slight upgrade from what was on the 'Cube and what was on the PS2.

  2. Same great zombie head exploding gameplay.

  3. Same great pacing.

The Wii controls are hit and miss. I find the nunchuck to be a poor substitute for the left analog stick on a regular controller. It is tiring to hold it in place and push the stick around to move. Also, the gun aiming mechanic in this game is wierd. You use the pointer to aim the gun, but the pointer cannot actually move the camera. So really you have to use the Wiimote and the stick on the nunchuck to aim. This works OK when the zombies are on the other side of the map and you are sniping them. It doesn't work so well if they get too close. In fact, the best way to use the new control scheme is to just hold the gun target near the middle of the screen and aim with the nunchuck stick. But if you are doing that, you might as well just be using a Gamecube controller.

Happily, if you want you can do just that. I plugged in my Wavebird and unplugged the nunchuck from the Wiimote and the game instantly switched the controls back into the classic GameCube configuration. I might spend one more session trying to acclimate to the new way, but I'm pretty sure I like the old way better.

No matter which control scheme you pick, RE4 on the Wii is still better than every single shooter that has been released for the Xbox or the 360 in the last three years. This will continue to be true until Halo 3 comes out.

The second game takes us from the world of bloody zombies to the world of adorable and cuddly pets that also engage in fierce turn-based combat. Four or five years ago, I had a fellow parent tell me that the Pokémon games were really some of the best RPGs out there. At the time my eyes glazed over and I sort of stepped away slowly. I was only dimly aware of Pokémon as some kind of card collecting game.

So I was surprised to get an IM from Pete a couple of weeks ago that went something like:

Pete: You know, this Pokémon game is just like a JPRG, only not annoying. psu: Huh. Maybe I'll try it.

In the end, I got Pearl and he got Diamond and he and my other buddy were right. Pokémon has distilled the three basic activities that appear in any RPG into a single streamlined game and stripped it of all the pretentious extras that RPGs usually try to layer on top of the gameplay. There are no heroes with amnesia, no worlds to save, no intricate yet juvenile narrative, no cut scenes, and no whiny NPCs who you would rather just kill. Instead, you do three things:

  1. Go there and fight that.

  2. Collect those.

  3. Increase R.

I'm about 10 hours into the game and I don't think I've even scratched the surface. I can see myself playing this game in 20 minute snippets and one or two hour extended sittings for the rest of the year. Plus, there is the online battle angle and the integration with the upcoming Wii title. If they made a World of Pokémon MMO, I could probably not buy another RPG for the rest of my life. Hmm, perhaps that's over the top.

Anyway, if all the sucky new games are getting you down, here are two alternatives. One is actually old, the other is only old by association with a long-standing franchise. But that's close enough for me. Older games are always better.

Hope is the Thing With Pokéballs

2007-06-27 · by peterb

As psu mentioned yesterday, Pokémon on the Nintendo DS is the new obsession.

Being a consummate joiner, I am not afraid to admit that my descent into the Pokéworld was due to Penny Arcade's ungrudging respect for the game, coupled with a purely base financial motivation: I'm reviewing Pokémon Diamond and Pearl for PTD Magazine. After just two days playing the DS game, I found myself scrounging the local used game stores for the older GBA games so I could understand exactly what I had been missing all these years: the best Japanese RPG since Earthbound.

I consider myself a gamer with a particularly broad background, but I was an adult long before Pokémon became popular. Perhaps to avoid even the appearance of creepiness I just never bothered to find out what Pokémon was about. I knew it had something to do with monsters, and collecting, and battling, and it was marketed directly at grade school children. And that's about it.

So what is Pokémon, really? Quite simply, it is a traditional Japanese style RPG with a collecting game built in. In the prototypical JRPG, your character has "stats", and can pick up items which enhance those stats, allowing your avatar to kill bigger monsters. In other words, RPGs are games about making a number — here at Tea Leaves, we call it "R" — bigger. In Pokémon, your character has no "R" of her or his own. Instead, you carry around little balls with monsters in them. The monsters have "R".

The game is superbly designed and balanced. At almost every point when you are uncovering "new" territory, battles are challenging without being impossbile. This means the game feeds you a constant sense of achievement. Healing for your little monsters is freely available practically everywhere. The game allows (and even rewards) iterative play (fight the first foe in an area, go heal up, return to fight the next guy). You can save anywhere, when not actually in the middle of a battle (so it's already better than most other JRPGs out there by default).

There are times that I wish I could turn down the random battle encounter rate, yes. But to paraphrase the great jazz saxophonist Cosmo Jacobi, "With chicks like Shalimar, there's just some things you gotta put up with." Random battles are, to a large extent, what the game is actually about.

Different people get into different aspects of the game. Last week on vacation I was playing the DS when my friend's kid asked what I was doing. When I told him "Pokémon Diamond", he commenced to chatter for an entire hour, quizzing me in great detail about exactly which pokémon I had caught, and whether I liked Pikachu or Raichu more, and did I have this one, and he knew this guy who finished the whole game by catching every Pokémon. For this kid, the RPGness of the game was nothing more than a superstructure on which to hang the very serious work of catching them all. For me, catching them all is just another task I need to undertake to complete the game.

This latest version of Pokémon comes with substantial online features. I need psu to hurry up and level up his little monsterlings so that we can have a proper battle which results in more than his quick and ignominious defeat. In a nice twist, pokémon that you trade via the wireless connection gain more experience than pokémon that you find in the wild, which provides a nice incentive to interact with your friends in homeroom. Uh, I mean, on the internet.

The one thing about the game that I find disturbing is the somewhat relentless self-reference of it all. In the world of Pokémon, everything revolves around the little bastards. If you need to open a can, there's a can-opening pokémon somewhere that can do it for you. There are even churches where little characters sit around and make poetic comments about how important peace and love is between man and pokémon. It's a bit like wandering into a world populated by the sorts of people who go to Star Trek conventions. This, in turn, makes me realize that somewhere out there there is probably Pokémon "slash" fiction, which in turn makes me want to curl up into a fetal position and weep (update: oh god, it's true).

All that being said, complaining that a game marketed to children takes itself in earnest is a bit unfair. So if you can get past that bit, and past a slightly clumsy user interface, what you'll find is a game with intricate, yet easy to grasp, rock-paper-scissors mechanics that are more absorbing than they have any right to be. And that's for half the price of the latest boring World War II Xbox 360 shooter. I have already spent more time walking through the virtual wilds in Pokémon Diamond than I spent playing most of the PS2 or Xbox games I bought last year. This is in part because the game is constantly giving you little micro-rewards (through collecting new pokémon, or through other mechanics), but also because there is no flailing. It's always crystal clear to me what I need to do next to progress (compare this to, say, Viva Piñata, which for all its beauty always leaves me saying "Huh? What did I just do to make that happen?")

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go read a walkthrough so I can find out if this Pachirisu I caught will evolve into another form if I train it enough.

The iPhone in Pittsburgh

2007-06-28 · by peterb

In Shadyside tonight I noticed that the queue for the iPhone has already started:

Waiting for iPhone

I took the opportunity to do a quick on-the-spot interview with the guys who dared to be first. The video and audio quality is pretty poor, but nonetheless...here it is.

Pokémon Battle Mehvolution

2007-07-02 · by peterb

Still in the throes of my newfound Pokémon addiction, I went overboard and picked up Pokémon Battle Revolution for the Wii.

Meh.

To be fair, this is one of those cases where I have no one to blame but myself. The ad copy for Pokémon Battle Revolution makes perfectly clear what it is: it's essentially a "visualizer" for Pokémon battles. So the battle mechanics are the same (or nearly the same) as the handheld Pokémon games, but instead of just getting a modest shake or a small animation, you get a beautifully modelled 3D depiction of one Pokémon kicking another Pokémon's ass.

So the Nintendo restaurant delivered exactly what it promised. It's just that once the meal was on my plate, I realized that I had ordered a plate of pixy stix. Sweet and colorful, but not all that satisfying.

The most clever parts of the game? You can transfer your little creatures, wirelessly, from your Nintendo DS copy of Pokémon Diamond or Pearl, and you can use the DS to control the game in a multiplayer battle mode. The least clever parts of the game? The complete lack of any interesting Wii-like controls, and the fact that the UI locks up whenever your onscreen hostess bows. It's a Japanese game. She is bowing all the time.

In summary, either of the DS Pokémon games offer ten times the fun for half the price. Don't bother with Pokémon Battle Revolution.

The 80 and the 20

2007-07-03 · by psu

The 80/20 heuristic states that in most computer systems, you spend 80 percent of your time in 20 percent of the code. Another way to say this is that 80 percent of your users will spend most of their time using about 20 percent of the application that you have so painstakingly constructed for them. This leads to a lot of meetings where we spend time trying to guess which workflows we must support in order to please the "80 percent" users. In my experience, concentrating on the 80 percent users allows projects that have limited resources and short schedules to get done and ship something that most users will be happy with.

Having watched this process a long time, I have noticed one paradoxical difficulty with applying this heuristic. The problem is this: many users (mostly the dorks) are convinced they are in the "special" 20 percent rather than the happy 80 percent, and you can't do anything about it.

I have a lot of experience with the mindset that self-selects into the special 20 percent because I spend a lot of time in indulging in dork hobbies. In fact, this particular sort of delusion is related to the OCD that also afflicts those who buy technical gadgets.

In general, what I will call "the 20 percent delusion" is a syndrome in which the dork dreams up requirements that fall outside those of the 80 percent workflows that are absolutely critical to whatever it is they think they want to get done with the device. You see this all the time.

For example, in photography, there is the creature who is completely paralyzed when he needs to decide what equipment to carry for a particular photo project. He thinks he must be ready for everything because he really has no specific purpose in mind. Therefore, instead of the single body and one lens that he needs, you will find him walking around Paris pulling a rolling suitcase with the EOS-5d, a Rebel for backup, 3 huge zoom lenses, 4 "fast" prime lenses, macro equipment, two flashes, a light stand, umbrellas, radio remotes, and a tripod strapped to his wife. I saw this guy once. He had just set up his Pentax 6x7 (which is in the roller along with the digital stuff) in front of the Arc de Triomphe at noon taking a bad shot of the Arc with a white sky behind it.

The photo neurosis takes people in other directions too. The internet forums are full of people who are convinced they need the most robust, most flexible, most expensive and heaviest "pro" equipment. There are usually one of several rationales presented for this need for "pro" equipment. For example:

  1. I take pictures in manly man environments and no wimpy-ass plastic body will hold up. I need my camera to be a solid 15 pound chunk of metal. Also, there should be no electronics in it, because I might get stuck in a cave 2000 feet underground where there are no batteries.

  2. All my favorite pro photographers use German lenses, so my camera must use German lenses. Also, it must be able to run for 5 years without needing to change the batteries for the light meter.

  3. I take pictures of such a wide variety of subject matter that I must have a completely modular 18-piece camera kit that I can "configure" any way I need. Also, it must be able to run without batteries, because I might be in the desert away from human contact for months at a time.

The neurotic need for configurability comes up in other contexts besides photography. You see it all the time in computing. One favorite target of my hatred, the X11 window system, is so configurable that they didn't even specify the user interface that it presents to the user at all. This is great for a research system on user interfaces, but it pretty much sucks for everything else. The problem is that for more than a decade now, the design discipline that puts flexibility before functionality has resulted in huge amounts of work going into X11-based desktop systems that are very configurable but completely unusable.

This attitude extends naturally into the realm of computer hardware. Historically, computer hardware used to be something that you tinkered with. I knew people in high school who built single board computers from parts, because at the time this was the only way to get something cheap. This led naturally to people who tinkered with the insides of their Apple II, or IBM PC. If you wanted to tinker, things like expansion slots, prototype boards, and user editable operating system kernels made a lot of sense. In those times, that was what the 80 percent user wanted to to.

Of course, all of this has changed. Computer systems these days want to be a turnkey commodity; something that you just turn on an use. And yet the hardware design is still driven by the people who think they want to tinker. Marketing literature that speaks of expandability and flexibility still tries to drive the purchasing decision from the mindset of the guy with the soldering iron, even though only a tiny fraction of users actually care about that stuff.

The truth is, most people would be happier with a box that they could plug in, turn on, and use. Of course, when companies try to actually build a machine that can do this, they get slammed by the 20 percent crowd for building an underpowered, inflexible piece of crap that you can't upgrade. The result is that the industry is still dominated by hardware that has a lot of useless flexibility built-in, even though no one really wants it.

So, how can you tell if you sometimes fall into the delusional 20 percent? When was the last time you saw a really excellent tool that would make a big difference in your life, only to reject it out of hand with a sentence that begins with the words "if only". Yeah, I've done that too. It's OK. There is still hope. Here is what you do.

First, deconstruct the "if only" sentence. Then sit down and really evaluate what you are asking the tool to do, and decide if you really really need it, or if you just think you need it. It can be helpful here to collect some quantitative data. Mark down the number of times you really need the "if only" feature over some period of weeks or months. My experience is that usually this number will be close to zero, and you will find that the tool in question really does do everything you actually need it to do.

For example, one of my "if only" hang-ups is that I can't stand the idea of the meta-data in my digital pictures not being stored in the picture files themselves. I used to have a really well-argued rationale for this, but I can't remember it anymore. The result was that I resisted moving to an integrated photo workflow solution like Lightroom even though the app is fabulous to use and much faster and simpler than what I used to do. Having thought about this harder, I think I have convinced myself that I don't really care about this problem anymore. So now I can be happy using Lightroom, and I have reduced the number of tools I use for my photo workflow significantly (truthfully: I still use Photo Mechanic for import and initial tagging, but that's just because I've paid for it and I haven't figured out exactly how to remove it yet).

There you have it. One small secret on the path to happiness: analyze your life, and figure out how to get yourself out of the 20 percent and into the 80 percent. I have worked hard over the last ten years to apply this principle in my computing and to some extent my photography and it has served me well.

Hodo Kwaja - now on YouTube

2007-07-05 · by peterb

It's been a few years since I made a video of the fantabulous walnut pastry ("hodo kwaja") machine in Toronto (see À la recherche du temps à noix, from 2004). I figured it would be a generally good idea to get the video on YouTube, just to make it easier to find and view. Enjoy!

One BILLION Dollars

2007-07-06 · by peterb

It seems like just the other week that I ranted about the Xbox 360 design being unacceptably fragile. And what's the news this week? Microsoft is extending Xbox 360 warranties for the "red ring of death" to 3 years (even retroactively!), refunding service fees for that repair already paid by customers, and taking a one billion dollar (plus) charge to cover the costs

Without any schadenfreude or sarcasm whatsoever, I'll just say "good job, guys." This is the right way to address a serious customer-facing problem. I will confess to wanting to be a fly on the wall in the postmortem where they figure out how this ended up happening, though.

You're Only Going Through The Stop-Motions, Baby

2007-07-06 · by peterb

iStopMotion is a wonderfully simple little Mac app that helps you make stop-motion movies. I made the below movie with a tethered Canon Rebel XT, because I'm an abject, hopeless wanker. An easier (and probably more correct) way to do it, however, is probably to use the program's excellent support for the iSight camera.

OK, OK. As you can see, I'm not Martin Scorsese. I'm probably not even Ed Wood. But I still had fun.

I wonder how much work it would be to redo Spartacus with Fisher-Price figurines. The hard part will probably be getting the lead character's shirt off.

Hold that Recipe

2007-07-09 · by psu

Today I am inspired by the sauce I just ate. But I'll get to that later. My story begins with a long standing conflict that I have with my lovely wife. Karen, in general, has the role of telling me what to cook. Left to my own lazy devices I'd just eat ramen noodles and hot dogs every night. Thus, Karen spends her time making up shopping lists and handing me recipes for the dishes that she'd like to have that week. Then I look at the recipes and make the food however I want. This causes a certain amount of friction.

In my defense, all I can say is that I do this because in my experience the recipe is almost always wrong in various ways.

Now, I am by no means some kind of cooking genius. I know how to cook a few fancy Chinese dishes handed down to me from my mom. I know a little bit about Italian food. I know how to put butter into the sauce at the end to give it that French Bistro richness. Everything else that I can do comes to me not from any sort of innate talent as much as a lot of rote practice over the last 20 years or so. If you go through the motions enough times, you get a feel for what will work and what will not. This is all I really bring to the table, so to speak. I have no deep universal culinary insights. I'm not as good as Remy in Ratatouille.

Having said that, when reading a recipe, keep these things in mind:

  1. Never use raw "seasoning" vegetables as the base of a dish. If there are onions, carrots, celery, peppers or whatever, always saute them. Always beware of recipes that start with something like "take vegetables A, B and C, mix with meat D and dump this into a pot with water and turn the heat on".

  2. If you are sauteing something, season it. Don't dump a pound of salt on everything. Just a small pinch of salt and pepper to get the taste out and into the food. Never put all the salt in at the end. What you have done then is just added salt to something that is tasteless. The recipe will never tell you to do this. But this is what you should do.

  3. Don't use plain water when you have stock and wine around. Whenever a recipe calls for water, I at least mix water and white wine. Ideally you'd use stock because you are presumably making a soup or something. But, the rigors of modern life often dictate that there isn't an ample supply of fresh made stock around, and if you use the canned stuff I'd have to kill you.

  4. Many food magazine recipes put in little foofy flourishes that might make sense in a restaurant, but are useless to you and I. If I'm just making dinner, I don't bother with garnishes, colored sauces on top of the soup, multiple blender stages with some of the beans but not others, and so on. I try to streamline things to be more convenient.

  5. There is no meat stew on earth that takes less than two hours to cook. Don't believe the recipe when it tells you to simmer the meat for 45 minutes and then claims that it will be tender. These people are lying to you.

  6. Be wary of instructions that tell you to cook thick pieces of food in a frying pan. What they almost always really want you to do is finish the damn thing in the oven.

  7. If the recipe calls for more than about 20 minutes of total prep work and the result is no fancier than a piece of fish on a plate, or a nice stew or something, they have done something wrong. If you have the right stuff in your kitchen, there is very little that you can't do in 20 minutes, not counting things like simmering time. After all, that's how long you wait for even the fanciest dish at a nice sit down restaurant where they make everything to order.

Finally, the best way to learn how to make a certain dish is to go over to someone's house and watch their mom do it. This is the one universal culinary truth that I will offer up. Which brings me back to the sauce.

I wrote down a recipe for a tomato sauce that I made sometime last year, and made the regrettable mistake of mentioning that I thickened it with the old Chinese corn starch and water trick. I know for a fact that this horrified many of our readers. All I can say is I wish I hadn't written it down, and I didn't mean for people to think that I do this on a routine basis. I was in a hurry and I got desperate.

Anyway, last night a good friend sent us home with some proper red sauce and meatballs, which inspired me to formally apologize for my little gaffe from before. With any luck, I'll be able to go over to their house and watch them make the stuff so I can do it right in the future. Without the corn starch. Sorry about that.

Poor Fractured Tantalus

2007-07-11 · by peterb

Snippets from a real conversation I had this weekend with my friend Nat:

Me: "Hey, you remember that game Exult, the re-implementation of Ultima VII?

Nat: "Sure I do."

Me: "I've been not playing it quite a bit lately. I grabbed the sources from CVS and built it so that I could have a Universal binary to be not playing."

Nat: "Did it build easily?"

Me: "It wasn't too bad. There were some hidden dependencies that I needed to tease out. I probably spent maybe a half or or so getting the thing built, which isn't that bad for something that I spend so much time not playing. And I didn't like the idea of not playing the PPC version on my Intel box."

Nat: "Huh."

Me: "The most interesting thing is that there's a concurrency bug in the midi thread. I spent about an hour debugging it and sent in a patch, so that the fan doesn't spin up and the CPU doesn't get hot when I'm not playing. I hate not playing games that make the fan spin up. They're so loud, y'know?"

Nat: "You realize that this is the logical conclusion of "I like installing games more than playing them."

Me: "Yeah, I know. I just really like not playing the Ultima games, though. There are so many of them that they really give a lot of bang for the buck. Not all of them, though -- I tried not playing Ultima VI and it didn't really grab me. Martian Dreams is great, though. I've also been not playing Flight Simulator, but that's just a one-off."

Summary: What the hell is wrong with me?

Additional Resources

Hyped Definition

2007-07-12 · by psu

Almost everything about the "new generation" of gaming has revolved around High Definition. High Defintion allows console games to look as "good" as PC games. These same consoles, at least the two that aren't selling that well, are being used as a wedge to try and own the High Definition movie market. Over the last couple of weeks, I have been watching Planet Earth in HD. I have also been re-playing Resident Evil 4, which is decidedly not in HD. While you can't really compare these two experiences directly, my conclusion after having had both experiences is that the H in HD is more about hype than about reality.

Let's get one thing straight first though. Planet Earth is absolutely stunning. I am not what you would call a "nature buff". I would much rather have a nice hot shower and sit at a coffee shop than search out my spiritual connection with the land. One of the reasons I stopped actively seeking out landscape photographs was because I found myself much more interested in cities and architecture than plants, rocks, grass, and worst of all, animals. Even given this context, Planet Earth causes me to drop my jaw on the floor and stare in amazement. There are crazy time lapse shots that span weeks and months, and are sometimes taken from space. There are tracking shots that move the camera down the vertical wall of a cliff that is hundreds of feet high. There are shots in pitch black. There are shots from the air. There are shots from the ground. It's just amazing to look at. I am also pleased by the HD presentation, but like all of my experience with HD, the differences between "high" and "standard" are more subtle that you would think.

If you spend any time in the TV store, or reading the TV press, you tend to get the idea that the HD screen will be akin to the second coming of Jesus, motherhood and apple pie all at the same time. HD, they say, is so detailed and so stunningly beautiful that it is "like looking out a window out into the natural world". I say: horse shit. The HD picture is nice. It is even on occasion almost as nice as looking at a decent color photograph. But don't let anyone fool you, it is not life-changing. High def. tends to come into its own only in certain kinds of shots. If the shot is a wide vista with a ton of small details, then HD manages to hold those details better than a standard DVD. On the other hand, the majority of tight shots and close-ups probably do not benefit, because as you move in everything gets bigger and more clear anyway. This is certainly what I have found when comparing SD sports TV to HD, and also with the few HD movies that I have watched.

This is a problem for the consumer industries trying to sell people on HD. They want Joe Consumer to walk out of the store with equipment that costs an order of magnitude more than the television (and dvd player, and sound system) that he is replacing. They can't do this very well by telling Joe that his spiffy new television will be somewhat better some of the time. The sales pitch thus tends to be heavy on the "like looking out a window" sort of nonsense. If you are buying a big TV, my advice is to keep your wits about you and evaluate everything carefully. Personally, I was mostly after size so that movies would be bigger and more watchable. My large TV is, in fact, large. So I am happy. The whole HD resolution game was only of secondary importance to me, so I am happy.

The new game consoles from Sony and Microsoft have a similar marketing problem. I think one of the reasons why Sony, and to a lesser extent, Microsoft have not made a huge splash is that they are asking consumers to pay unprecedented prices for a game console on the promise of a huge leap in graphical fidelity, and that leap just is not there. For example, the last game I really played on the Xbox 360 was Gears of War. The style and mechanics of the game are at least partially inspired by Resident Evil 4. I have been replaying RE4 on the Wii lately, and comparing the visuals in the two games illustrates my point. Microsoft and fans of the game would have you believe that Gears is an order of magnitude leap over what the poor Wii can achieve. The real jump is smaller.

Just as HD movies mostly stand out in shots that have a lot of small details, the graphics in Gears stand out when you have time to really stare at all the tiny details in the textures and art design. Once the two games are in motion, or if you are trying to stay alive rather than staring at the environments, the differences are harder to see. I'm not saying that RE4 looks as "good" as Gears, because it doesn't. I'm just saying that when you are actually playing the game you don't really care that you can't see every little brick in the textures on the sides of buildings and such. You are more worried about the zombie people than the low-res textures.

In other words, while Sony and Microsoft would have you believe that their HD graphics are worth a significant premium over the "weaker" rendering engine in the Wii, I think that most people have correctly decided that the premium is not worth it. As a result, they stand in line for the Nintendo console or they go out and buy a PS2. Since I'm a gadget and media whore, I'll probably buy a PS3 anyway. I appreciate the HD graphics, but I am realistic enough to realize that it's just not that different from the previous generation. Don't buy into the hype. Go and look very carefully for yourself.

World War UI

2007-07-16 · by peterb

I don't read game manuals.

I should qualify: I don't read manuals for games first. After I've been using a program for a while, sure, I might look up a specific task in the manual. Or if I'm truly obsessed with the game, I might read it later, for recreation (really, everyone should keep a copy of the manual for Dominions 3 in their bathroom). But I never read a game manual before actually trying the game out.

I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in this behavior. That leads me to a very simple conclusion: if I can't figure out how to play your game without the manual, it is a bad game.

This topic comes up today because I have recently been playing two games in the same genre, by the same company, that offer two completely different user interface experiences. One of them was reasonably intuitive and self-documenting. The other was a whirling nightmare of incomprehensibility. Guess which one I liked?

The company in question is the Strategic Studies Group (SSG), and the games are Carriers at War and Battlefront, both published by Matrix Games.

SSG is an Australian wargame developer with a storied history. They made some of the most well-loved wargames for the Apple ][ and other 8-bit microcomputers. In other words, they're a company with a history of making grognard games. As such, I have a tendency to want to give them a pass on UI issues. That tendency must be sought out and destroyed: I wouldn't cut BMW any slack if they started manufacturing a horse-drawn buggy, either.

First, some definitions. "Good UI" doesn't mean "has pretty graphics," although those who don't understand UI design often think it does. It simply means that the user can sit down in front of the UI and easily discover how to work the damn thing. The Infocom text adventures, for example, have a perfectly transparent UI, despite their lack of visual glitz.

Carriers at War has a good UI. Battlefront has an abysmal UI. Both are simulations of World War II-era warfare. Carriers at War is a task group level game focused primarily on aircraft carriers, locating a hidden enemy, and executing air strikes. Battlefront is a battalion level game focused on strategic manuevers, bombardment, and close combat.

Each games has a different turn system, but neither is real-time. How did these two games end up having such widely divergent user interfaces?

User interface is largely concerned with three questions:

Battlefront

Find the button!

I've long been an advocate for games that use standard UI elements ("UI element", here, is a fancy way of saying "button"). I have learned to accept that I am in a tiny minority on this issue. Most people are perfectly happy to use decorative buttons, and in most cases it doesn't really matter. Frequently, however, developers make games that prove my point; Battlefront is one. The main UI is an interface composed of innumerable controls and displays. I found it completely impossible to determine which elements were buttons from simply looking at them. The tooltips don't help, because they don't exist. The in-game manual doesn't help, because it doesn't exist. The in-game tutorial doesn't help, because it doesn't exist. Even if you know what buttons to press, you immediate run into the next problem, which is that the game does a terrible job of answering the "What the hell just happened?" question.

There's a strain of thought that says that games with poor UIs are necessarily complex. They have so many buttons and controls, the theory goes, because they are intended for smart people, like me. You know. A guy with a huge brain and a gigantic penis. This couldn't be further from the truth. It's got nothing to do with the potency of one's brain, or other body parts. It's simply that the guy who has free time to spend on a game with a poor UI is the guy who has nothing better to do with his life.

Solomons

CAW: Buttons!

I went into Carriers at War wth some trepidation, afraid I'd encounter the same sort of muddled design that Battlefront suffered from. That turned out not to be the case; CAW is fairly straightforward, and succeeds where Battlefront fails on multiple levels. There is an in-game tutorial, so right off the bat the game is already miles ahead of its sibling. Secondly, a little more thought went into the design. Buttons look like buttons, and readouts look like readouts. I haven't found myself hopelessly clicking on something that turns out to not actually be a control in CAW.

The upshot of this is that Carriers of War has been a fairly engrossing experience for me. Instead of forcing me to focus on the vagaries of its user interface, the game invites you to think of things in strategic terms. Instead of thinking "How do I move this task group closer towards Wake Island?" I'm thinking "Where has Admiral Nagumo deployed his carriers? And has he found mine yet?" That's what a good UI accomplishes. It allows you to focus on the things that matter, instead of the things that don't. Good UI can help save an otherwise marginal game. Bad UI can annihilate an otherwise good game. Please, please, please, developers: make having a straightforward user interface one of your top priorities. Your customers — and your bottom line — will thank you.

Hornet gets torpedoed

Hornet torpedoed

UI isn't only about control, but about feedback. Consider the way combat is resolved in our two games. In Battlefront, when you attack, you see a couple of dice roll, and a line in a little table is highlighted. What the various abbreviations on that line mean is not at all obvious. in Carriers at War, there is a brief animation of planes flying over some ships, dropping bombs or torpedoes. When a bomb or torpedo hits, there is an explosion. When a plane is shot down by chaff, it explodes. So Carriers at War actually makes the answer to the question "What the hell just happened?" fairly obvious.

One aspect of Carriers that it accomplishes grandly is playing the "What if?" game. The included scenarios — Pearl Harbor, Midway, Wake Island, Coral Sea, Eastern Solomons, Santa Cruz, and Phillipine Sea — cover the breadth of the war in the Pacific. A number of the scenarios also have variants (for example, a version of Pearl Harbor where the US was expecting the attack). The game drives home exactly to what extent warfare in this era was about information. It's impossible to play as the Japanese in Midway, for example, and not be aware that there are three American carriers out there, somewhere, looking for you. Needless to say, this can lead to dramatically different outcomes than were seen historically.

My summary: if you like naval combat games — and let's be clear, I do — then Carriers at War is a slam-dunk. It's easy to get started, and provides enough depth to encourage many, many replays. In contrast, I'd have a hard time recommending Battlefront to even the most experienced wargamer. Its tragic interface is simply too intrusive. Where it should sit back and let you enjoy the game, it is instead interposing itself between you and fun.

Both games run under Microsoft Windows.

Additional Resources

The Irrational Consumer

2007-07-17 · by psu

There is a prevailing line of thought in the circles of economic theory that consumers will act in a manner that is in their best interest. This is the idea of a rational consumer. The notion is that consumers will evaluate the choices given to them in a manner consistent with logic and reason and the pick the choice that maximizes whatever it is that consumers want to maximize. Not being an economist, I'm sure I'm doing violence to their elegant theoretical thinking. The trick to making this idea work must be in defining the function to be maximized in a clever way. After all you don't need to look too hard at how people buy games and gaming hardware to throw out the idea that they are acting rationally.

I think the behavior of the average consumer is more complex than a cold state machine driven only by logic and carefully calculated utility functions. I come to this conclusion based on extensive study of a consumer that I know very well, me. Generally, my state of mind about purchasing any given item goes through three phases:

  1. I don't know what it is.

  2. I know what it is, but the BUY IT bit has not been flipped.

  3. The BUY IT bit has been flipped.

The two interesting states are obviously the last two, and the interesting question is how this magic bit in my head gets flipped. Before the bit flips, I am perfectly capable of making a completely reasoned and logical decision. I can take on a detached demeanor, and compare all the choices at hand without any regard to my shallow emotional problems. For example, the rational-me will be able to trumpet the idea that one should wait (say) two years before buying a new game console, because then the library will have filled out and games will be comparatively plentiful and cheap. There are always plently of games to play until the new stuff comes around. Waiting on the new console avoids that empty period between launch and when the good stuff finally comes out. The rational-me comes to this conclusion and everything goes smoothly.

But then the bit flips.

The bit flipping is a strange and unpredictable event that is not really tied to any sort of physical reality. The state of the external world before and after the bit flips is usually pretty much the same, although I will try and come up with retroactive rationalizations for why the bit flipped. For example:

Well, ya know, Obvlivion came out, so it was time to get the new Xbox.

or

The Wii is the hot new thing! It's so innovative!

The truth is, I saw an Xbox 360 at the Best Buy, and the bit flipped. I still haven't figured out why the bit flipped on the Wii. I think it had to do with an inner delight that Nintendo was finally giving Sony a bit of payback. In any case, once the bit goes over, the purchase is made. Having had some experience with this behavior, I can usually tell when my state of mind on something is about to flip over. I get a little tingling sensation in the back of my head, just under the skin. It's especially strong if I happen to see the item in the store. This is the usual sign that I should make sure I have room on my shelves, money in my bank account, and that certain parties in the household have been properly informed. I now know to make these kinds of arrangements no matter how ludicrous the particular purchase is on any rational level.

The astute reader will have figured out where this is going.

I had been following the saga of the PS3 as a mostly detached and amused obvserver until last week, when they finally dropped the price, then didn't drop the price, then said they were phasing out the current model, then said they weren't, then said they were. This would have just been one more notch in the soap opera, but something about the price drop pushed my inner bit about halfway over. There was a tiny little voice inside my head trying to tell me that I needed to get the machine before they took out the PS2 emulation hardware. This is, of course, nonsense. I have a perfectly good PS2 emulator sitting on the shelf under my TV. It's a PS2.

But then it happened. We had to cancel our long weekend in Toronto because of another failure with our piece of shit Chrysler car. Faced with a whole weekend at home rather than basking in the dim sum and sushi, my fragile inner defenses collapsed and allowed the bit to flip the rest of the way over. This did not upset me. I saw the warning signs. As before, the bit was not controlled by rational forces but I was ready for it. I had allocated the necessary mental and monetary capital. What came next is what upset me.

I looked around my local city for one. There were many to be had, but there was a problem. The Exchange had a used machine and some used games. But I didn't want a used machine, I wanted shiny newness. The local Target had the machine, but it did not have the game I wanted or the HDMI video cable that is the best way to hook the machine up to the TV. Best Buy would probably have the machine and the game, but a quick check on their web site indicated that they would only sell me an HDMI cable for approximately 10x the cost of what I could get on the web at monoprice. So I ordered the cable from monoprice and the machine from Amazon.

This, I say, is the truly irrational consumer at work.

I should explain. The HDMI cable I bought costs $5. This means the one at Best Buy costs about $50 or a bit more. This is less than 10% of the total purchase price of the item that we are talking about (PS3 plus one game). In order to avoid this staggering cost, I ordered the PS3 at Amazon instead, and am waiting four entire days for the machine to be delivered to me rather than overpay for the cables. I could have just bought the PS3 at the Target and used it with the crappy cables until the good ones came, but I didn't think of that because my brain was fogged by the "anal-retentive dork will not get reamed" syndrome. So I one-clicked on Amazon instead, and I was instantly afflicted by "Amazon remorse." This is when you realize that for the next four days you'll be reloading the status page on your Amazon order instead of unpacking and playing with the PS3.

The irrational consumer is a really stupid and hateful beast. At least Amazon is sending me a free movie (Resident Evil Apocalypse) and remote control (a $25 value!).

Xbox 360 °F

2007-07-18 · by peterb

For those following along at home, my Xbox 360 Died The Death about a month ago and I shipped it off to Microsoft for repair service. When I sent it they had not yet announced the repair program, so they billed me $70.

A package with an Xbox 360 arrived yesterday. I don't know how they plan to refund my money, but hopefully it will just magically happen. Anyway, there are a few things worth discussing in terms of the machine that came back.

The moral of this story is that those of you who have an original heavy-and-hot Xbox 360 should probably hope that it fails with the red ring of death so you can score one of these nice new units.

Update: Here's a nice copy of the letter they sent with the unit. Click to enlarge.

Xbox letter

If I'm Grumpy

2007-07-20 · by peterb

...it is because I appear to have lost my precious Nintendo DS, along with the game that was in it at the time.

Curses.

Update: The missing lamb has been located. The crisis has ended. Shop as usual.

Yo Ho Ho and a Bushel of Blueberries

2007-07-23 · by peterb

This weekend I went to heaven. It turns out that in heaven there are lots of blueberry bushes.

Heaven is just north of Ligonier, at The Berry Patch, a pick-your-own blueberry farm. The same week that Whole Foods raised their prices to $4/pint for berries shipped halfway around the country, I was picking fresh berries off the shrub for $2.50 a quart. I have a few quarts now. Quite a few.

The atmosphere at The Berry Patch was relaxed and friendly. The current owners have been operating the farm for 3 years. The berry shrubs are lined up in rows, with a small colored flag indicating which variety (Blueray, Berkley, Herbert, Jersey, Early Blue, Bluetta or Colville) is in a given row. I started off trying to keep my varietals segregated, but after a while just began throwing everything into the same bucket with abandon. Based on my tastings off the vine, I liked the Berkleys the best, so that's the lion's share of what I got.

The best side effect of having so many blueberries is that I can do this:

Blueberry Daiquiri

Put a cup and a half of blueberries, a shotglass of Cointreau, two shotglasses of decent rum, and some ice in a blender. Blend until it is slush. Pour in a glass and serve to your friends. In about 15 minutes, you should find it pretty easy to take advantage of them.

This drink is remarkably similar to the fig daiquiri I pushed on you earlier in the season, but I've learned from experience. The fig daiquiri ended up tasting a little too strongly of lemon, so I eliminated the citrus entirely, substituting Cointreau instead. Blueberries are already tart enough to not need the lemon juice, anyway. This substitution has two effects. First, it makes it taste better. Second, it increases the Booze Quotient even more, turning what is already a powerful drink into a sort of eternally powerful alcohol delivery system.

Some people might say "What's the point of making a hugely powerful drink with lots of fresh fruit?" To those people, I simply have to say that I'm not shome kinda thingmabobby wittha linoleum lawnmower shugrit vashhhhhznil afsa 89RU*(QU@#HOIASNFFIJFFzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Degree of Difficulty

2007-07-24 · by psu

I've been happily playing through the opening chapters of Resistance. The game is as good a straight up shooter as I've played in a while. The presentation is strong, the level of polish is high. Even if the game doesn't quite reach a Halo-like sense of place and atmosphere, the game does present enemies that are enjoyable to shoot in a world that is mostly enjoyable to look at. Here is the one problem though.

I started on Medium, and I should have started on Easy.

This happens to me with action games and with shooters. The problem is that at the beginning of the game, I am overconfident. Even though I know I'm really not that good I think I will be better this time. But it is never the case. So I start the game on Medium difficulty and I'm OK for the first two or three areas and then I start getting stomped. If the game is a checkpoint game, I find myself playing the same area five or six or ten times. Then I wish I could change to Easy. This is where I am with Resistance. I got there with Halo, although I made it through that game on Normal. I got there with God of War and slogged through. With Devil May Cry and God of War 2 and Gears of War I got smart and went right to Easy.

The developers of Devil May Cry and God of War 2 were at least perceptive enough to put code in to insult your manhood and offer the Easy mode once you died a few times in the same area. Macho insults aside, I found this to be a gracious gesture. Most games are not so nice to you. Resistance gives you two choices. Either slog through to the end, suffering with a difficulty level that is ok most of the time but very frustrating on occasion or start the entire game from the beginning in order to reset the difficulty. This seems terribly inflexible, and this lack of flexbility might make me give up on a game that I am otherwise enjoying. To me, this is too bad.

This problem with difficulty seems to me to be isolated in the Action Game genre. I guess the marketing people think that only the hard core guys like action games, and so they make their games "challenging" so that the hard core player can wave his penis around when he beats the game. Resident Evil 4 is a happy exception to this rule. It only has one difficulty level and it is perfectly tuned. Maybe that means normal hard core players find it too easy. That's too bad for them. They probably figure that since it was originally a GameCube game, it's too kiddie anyway.

For some reason most RPGs don't suffer from difficulty problems. The only one I can remember having trouble with was Oblivion and it was easy to tweak the sliders to fix that problem. I seem to recall that a lot of people look down their noses at such shenanigans. These people are either masochistic or stupid and should be ignored. Many RPGs and other games that feature a progression of player power also have a built in manual way to tune the difficulty. You can just grind until you are more powerful and then the game is easier. My other favorite Insomniac game, the Ratchet series is a good example of a non-RPG that does this.

Ideally, of course, the game would tune itself. If I die too much in a given area, the game could make the enemies imperceptibly easier to kill, or slightly slower, or make my armor or weapons slightly more effective until I manage to survive. This is easier to say than to do, but it's surprising to me that more games don't at least take a shot at it. The trickiest part is doing it in a way that is not noticable to the hard core set. It seems to me that nothing upsets them more than little in-game assists like auto-aim or adjustable difficulty. Such devices make your penis smaller, you see.

Meanwhile, I think I'll take a night off from the fight against the alien hordes and watch The Fifth Element again in Blu-Ray. Maybe while I watch the movie I'll figure out how to start the game from my previous checkpoint in Easy mode.

They Are Both Stupid, Redux

2007-07-31 · by psu

Just when you thought it was safe to browse your internets, the intellectually challenged have come out to play again. This seems to happen once or twice every year. Or maybe it only annoys me this much once or twice a year. This year, I come to the partial defense of the current punching bag of the defensive gamers everywhere: Roger Ebert. You may recall that he said some stupid things about games versus art last year and like a kid in an Internet Forum, he is back to troll again.

First things first. I don't really agree with what Ebert has said about games. I believe that video games as a medium have the potential to provide a rich and varied emotional response in the player. I think we have seen flashes of this possibility from time to time, but I am hesitant to say that any one game has put it all together.

I believe that Ebert isn't really interested in the question at hand at all. To him games are a diversion for kids, and in this sense he is showing a shallow and prejudiced point of view. I believe that he is overstating his case for purposefully dramatic effect. He is, in fact, trolling the entire gaming press Internet nexus and waiting for the flames to come back to him.

And he's done a pretty good job. The hue and cry this time around has not been as voluble, but many of the same tired arguments have again been trotted out by those who would defend their beloved medium. Most of the time they boil down to calling Ebert an ignorant fool while providing no evidence whatsoever that he is wrong. For example, this noted critic takes Ebert to task, but then puts up Half-Life 2 as one of his pinnacles of gaming narrative. Now, I love HL2 as much as the next shooter fan, but here is how you sum up the narrative:

You start on a train. You shoot a lot of stuff. The guy with the beard talks a lot. You end up back on that train

Strangely, that was the story in Half-Life too. It winds around and goes nowhere precisely so Valve can take you on the same ride again in their next episode. The strength of the game was never the narrative, it was the hallways full of aliens, and those marines.

The normally more intelligent Escapist magazine has also chosen to take on Ebert this time around. They trot out the help, help, I'm being oppressed defense. See, games can't be art because the poor developers can't follow their true vision unless they are allowed to let you cut people's balls off with a hack saw. The fallacy here is that for games to achieve an artistic status they must be edgy and subversive. This is patently false. The other fallacy here is that the road to edgy and subversive is paved with the corpses of the NPCs that you have dismembered as part of the emotionally compelling gameplay and narrative in your new work of art. This is also patently false.

No video game that had over the top levels of violence or so-called sexual content ever made it past the children's pulp section of the artistic pantheon. There are certainly a lot of vehicles for fantasy and diversion there, but no one will ever convince me that any of them had anything more intersting to say artistically than "dude, you totally killed a hooker."

The one intelligent beacon that I found in all of this mess was this critique which actually manages to make a couple of intelligent points while also taking the standard route of calling Ebert and ignorant buffoon.

My only complaint is that Croal gives the gaming community too much credit for being an intelligent and erudite group of people who are just misunderstood and beat down by the man. He cares too much that Ebert is dismissive about "the entire medium", and again he provides no real evidence that there is anything in the medium that Ebert should care about. I love to play that game where we dismiss critics from the past for saying stupid things about great works as much as any self-important elitist snob, but it doesn't really advance the discussion of the artistic impact of video games as a medium.

My humble contribution to this discussion would be to encourage gamers to get over the obsession with competing on narrative. Game stories just are not that good, get over it. But that's not what I am here to talk about.

There is this notion in the gaming orthodoxy that the true strength of the medium is in its potential to provide a truly interactive story. Games, they say, will finally kick the ass of traditional "passive" media when we can give the user a interactive simulation of some alternate reality that will react to the player's actions and adjust reactions of everything from the other characters in the game to the game world itself in response.

Almost every comparative discussion of video games brings up this notion. Even when they are beating on Ebert, they take a time out to put out this utopian vision of future gaming excellence, for example, in the articles I linked to above, we have

The truth is that videogames' interactive nature allows their creators to craft experiences that can evoke a much broader array of emotional responses than any passive medium, because the story can change as the player interacts with the game -- leading each time to different consquenses, different resolutions, and different revelations.

and

Others, like role-playing games, have a similar improvisatory element, but because they place more emphasis on narrative, they're more like a novel or a play that is co-written or rewritten with every play session. Alternately, actors were called "players" in Shakespeare's day; perhaps we players are the actors in today's videogames. Massively multiplayer online games could be seen as improv theater.

I think there are several points to be made about statements like this. First, they are ludicrous on their face because no game has actually done this. Any narrative that there is in a game is put there by the designers. Some games allow player actions to change some small aspects of the in-game narrative, but no one has ever come close actually making the story react to what the player does in any significant way. I am also skeptical that any game in the future will ever do this.

Second, if the future of games is to allow the player to craft the experience, then I'll get off the train now. Any experience that I craft for myself would be really boring, and involve a lot of writing code, or writing strange incoherent rants on the Internet. I'm not good at crafting game experiences, that's why I want a game designer to do it.

Finally, the alleged malleability of in-game narrative is exactly what Ebert objects to when discussing video games as art. And I think he is right about that.

I think video games will truly reach their pinnacle when designers learn how to create experiences that are at the same time interactive and perfectly controlled by the designer. This would be the gaming equivalent of authorial control. The author of the game should be able to control the player's response to the game even in the face of providing the player with an interactive landscape.

I think Ebert thinks this is impossible. I think he might be right, but I would also note that a few games have shown flashes of being able to do this. It will seem clichéd to bring up Shadow of the Colossus but I have to because as my esteemed colleague peterb wrote about the game:

In other words, this is a story that is more powerful because it was told in this medium. We care about the game because it is our hands that are unclean.

Those gamers that wish for games to really reach the narratve quality of film, or literature, or even to some extent music, should be looking to this sort of design for their wishes. Here is a game, I think, that would interest Ebert precisely because it has the control of the author that he so craves.

But games don't need narrative to have this effect. Many of the classic Nintendo games do an admirable job of providing a precisely controlled and uniform response in a wide range of players even though they are primarily interactive puzzles with no real story. I think I could probably play Mario 64 forever, and so could my son, who isn't old enough to really know what's going on yet. You can just sit in the world and marvel at the design and the pretty colors. But most of all, you can make the the little man run and jump and slide and collect things and fly out of cannons and do literally dozens of other things. And, over the whole of this richly interactive world there is the strong authorial hand of the game designer making sure that everyone who plays has a strong and controlled response to the game: they have fun.

The fact that video games offer experiences like these make me optimistic about the future of the medium. I think it's true that for the most part video games have produced a lot of pap that isn't really worth a second thought. But it seems to me that the potential for more is there if you look in the right places.

Yuppie Egg Cream

2007-08-01 · by peterb

The egg cream, as anyone over a certain age who grew up in New York will be happy to tell you, is a transcendent soda fountain drink that contains neither egg nor cream. A strict interpretation of the egg cream contains seltzer water, Fox's U-Bet chocolate syrup, and milk. It invokes summers in Coney Island, open fire hydrants, and Steeplechase Park.

The dirty little secret behind the traditional egg cream, however, is that it doesn't actually taste good: imagine carbonated Yoo-Hoo, and you're not far off the mark.

But tonight I wanted an egg cream anyway. Fortunately, I didn't have any Fox's U-Bet chocolate syrup, so instead I made an egg cream that tastes good.

I'm sure there are people (including my father, who will disown me if he ever reads this article) who will argue with me that a real egg cream, like the one from that soda shop in Canarsie, actually tastes good. I can't know for sure, of course, because I wasn't there, but for the most part I don't believe these people. I think they aren't remembering the taste of the egg cream, but the taste of their evanescent and distant youth. The taste of the memory of youth grows sweeter over time. But the traditional egg cream, that just tastes nasty.

Drink this one instead.

Ingredients:

Put the cocoa powder and sugar (if you want it sweet), in a saucepan. Pour some boiling water on it and stir it until it is liquid. Pour a little — about 2 tablespoons — into a huge glass. Add an equal amount of the milkfat of your choice. I used heavy cream, just to be a jerk about it. But secretly, anything richer than half and half is a little wasteful, since it will be diluted and overwhelmed. Pour in the seltzer water. Get the bottle really high and splash it around a bit to work up a good head of froth.

California Ãœber Alles

2007-08-06 · by peterb

Both of the Peters are out of town this week, so updates will likely be slow for a while. Our apologies.

On Donuts

2007-08-13 · by psu

This past week the Petes were both in Cupertino for a visit. The last few times I've been out there, I've been told to find a donut shop called Stan's that is close to our normal Cupertino hotel. Because I am lazy and morally suspect, I never managed to do this. On this trip though, we girded our loins and made ourselves get out there one morning. So here is a shout out to Stan's. If you are in the Bay Area and you don't get donuts there, you are a fool.

I am normally on record as saying that the canonically correct donut is a New England cake-style cider donut. Some of the best examples of these come from the beloved donut and pie store of my youth: Atkins Farms in Amherst.

Stan's, however, elevates the raised and glazed donut to a new level of artistry. Pete and I each got one of their "twists" or cruellers right out of the fryer with a fresh coat of glaze. They were hot, crunchy on the outside and chewy on the inside. Overall, these take those little bullshit Kripsy Kreme sugar covered air pockets and kicks them in the ass back into the little sewer hole out of which they crawled to pollute all that is good and proper about real donuts. If nothing else, Stan's emphasizes the fact that KK donuts are morally wrong in every way.

The cake donuts were good too. Lighter than the East Coast version, but crusty and yummy anyway.

Two donuts were enough food for the whole day. Keep that in mind when you drop by.

SLO as in "Slow"

2007-08-16 · by peterb

While on my recent trip to California, I visited a couple of liquor stores — the venerable BevMo, of course, and also the little diamond The Coach House, in Cupertino, where one can find Tequila Los Abuelos. While at the latter facility, I stumbled across a bottle of Amaro Nonino, perhaps my favorite Italian amaro. I considered bringing it with me, but I knew that Nonino was available via Special Liquor Order — aka SLO — in Pennsylvania. "I'll just order it when I get home," I said. "It's been years since I've special ordered anything. Surely they've improved the process by now. How painful can it be?"

It turns out the answer is "Embarassingly painful"

I had a few items that I wanted to special order. In an effort to give the LCB (and myself) every possible advantage, I did some homework before visiting the store. First, I picked a store where I knew the staff was helpful and polite. Second, I visited the PLCB's website beforehand and wrote down the SKU numbers for the products I wanted, so we wouldn't have to spend time looking them up at the store. Lastly, I visited the store about 20 minutes before they closed, to give the staff that extra incentive to get it done quickly.

The initial encounter went well. I told the manager that I was shopping for a few items (including a bottle of Grand Marnier's new "Navan" product, about which I'll have more to say later in the week), and that I also wanted to special order some things. "I have the item numbers right here," I said. "Great," said the manager. "Just give those to me and go do your shopping, and I'll meet you back here when you check out." I was the only customer in the store. This certainly seemed promising.

I spent about 15 minutes making my choices, and came back to the desk. "Umm, go ahead and pay for those things," said the manager, "while we get this paperwork finished."

As I paid for my booze, I kept an eye and ear on the process for completing an SLO in the store. It goes something like this. On one computer, the clerk or manager types in the SKU number of the product you want. That computer then displays the product name, bottle size, and so on. Then, there is a second, separate computer for actually entering the special order. You type the SKU number into that machine, and then read the name off the first machine, which is loads of fun if you're ordering something with a long, complicated name. You type the name into the second machine. You also copy the bottle size and some other data from the first machine as well. Presumably, connecting these two machines together, or allowing the second machine to do the lookup itself is beyond our primitive Earthling technology.

After a while, they were ready to take my deposit for the specially ordered booze, but had forgotten to tell the system what the deposit amount would be. That can't be changed at the register, so they had to go back to the special SLO machine, cancel the first order, create a new one (typing all of the information in again), and put in the deposit amount.

Elapsed time from the time I gave them the three SKU numbers to the time they were ready to check me out: 40 minutes. This is beyond bad. This is pathological.

I want to emphasize here that I'm not slamming the employees who were processing my "Special" Liquor Order. The people checking me out were the competent ones. Imagine if I had gone to a store with a more typically unhelpful PLCB employee (say, the Squirrel Hill store with the nasty old crone who cards everyone, even if they're 60 years old?) Imagine how long it would have taken if I hadn't collected the SKU numbers in advance, and needed the have them look it up? (I tried that once at the "Premium Collection" store near Whole Foods, and was stunned into silence as the nice but bewildered clerk began pawing through a drawer containing big books of dot-matrix printed paper in order to figure out if it was even possible to SLO the product I wanted.)

The PLCB has an online store which, in theory, allows you to use a series of tubes called "the internet" to place an order yourself and have it show up at your local store. Exactly none of the items I wanted to order are actually available via that store.

Now I get to wait for a few weeks, at the end of which I will get a call, go to the store, and probably find out that they've shipped me the wrong products.

So, in summary, Pennsylvania has managed to create a liquor sales system where it is actually less emotionally painful for me to fly to California to buy booze than to special order it in my home state.

Way to go, guys. Way to go.

Additional Resources

We've written many other articles about how Pennsylvania's Liquor Control Board is simply horrid:

Max Roach

2007-08-20 · by psu

The news came last week that Max Roach passed away in Manhattan. I was lucky enough to see Max Roach play live a few times while I was a graduate student at Dartmouth College. My most enduring memory of the man would have to be Max and the drum kit alone on the stage while he completely captivated the audience for five or ten or fifteen long minutes. It was a shame to see him stand up and exit.

Roach was never one to stick to one style or one particular way of working. A few years after graduate school I happened to catch him playing the Regatta Bar in Cambridge where he brought with him a trio that consisted of the drum kit, a piano and one of those strange sounding Chinese violins.

One of my great regrets in life is that I didn't find out about Max Roach until well after I had left Amherst and gone on to school. I was in graduate school when I discovered the quintessential record that he made with Clifford Brown: Clifford Brown and Max Roach At Basin Street, and it was at this time that I first saw him live at Dartmouth College. Later I found out that for most of my life up until that time, Max Roach had been a professor at UMass in Amherst. He had been right under my nose for my whole life and I was ignorant enough to not realize it until I had already left town. Typical.

Anyway, if you have not found Max Roach yet, I suggest you start with the record above and then go and get everything else he ever did. It will be the most interesting time you ever have listening to a drum kit, I guarantee it.

Final Fantasy XII update

2007-08-21 · by peterb

After being killed by a cactus with a flower on its head, I restarted the game and used a cheap technique to quickly level up to level 15 before progressing with anything.

I'm much happier now.

Bioshock: Day 1

2007-08-22 · by psu

Like at least half of the rest of the gaming universe, I picked up Bioshock this week. Most of the industry appears ready to pronouce it to be the orgasmic second coming of gaming nirvana. This may or may not be the case, I don't know. What I can say for sure is that the game knows how to begin with a bang.

You might recall that earlier this year I ruminated about how not to start a game. To summarize: don't make me look at boring exposition taking place in a generic environment for a full 20 minutes without giving me anything to do but shoot a rat. Whatever else you might think about Bioshock, you can say it does not waste your time. You are literally thrown into the game and instantly given tasks to perform, scenery to look at and a reason to move forward and find out what comes next. In other words, you are given a reason to care about the game.

What is sad is how few games do this right. You'd think people would have learned by now that if I have no immediate reason to care about the game, I have no reason to play the game.

I can only hope that the rest of the game manages to maintain the standard set by the start. This might finally be a shooter that can stand against Resident Evil 4 in my conciousness.

So far my only complaint is, as usual, that Medium might be too hard again. I never learn.

I Praise the PLCB

2007-08-23 · by peterb

After harshing on them last week for how clunky their SLO system is, I will take a moment to say something nice about them: my Special Liquor Order arrived today. That means that it took them less than a week to get 3 fairly exotic bottles of liquor into my local store, and they got the order exactly right, despite my snark.

So while it may be a painfully slow process to place an SLO, I have no complaints at all about the actual delivery process. I'll just say "Thanks, PLCB!"

Videoblog: Fazenda Mae de Ouro and Caipirinha

2007-08-27 · by peterb

Cachaça is a Brazilian rum-like sugarcane based spirit. Earlier this year I slammed Cachaça in an offhand manner, based on my experience in trying one brand. Dave Catania, aka "Cachaça Dave", commented and challenged me to try the brand of Cachaça that he imports, "Fazenda Mae de Ouro".

I've accepted the challenge. Here's the full review:

I'll be honest: the only reason I did this in a videoblog format is that a certain friendly company loaned me an HD-format dv camera, and I wanted to try it out. I apologize in advance for the poor lighting, the bad editing, and the general ugliness of my face, body, and spirit.

I also apologize for my tragically consistent mispronounciation of "cachaça", which my friend Francisco tells me is in fact pronounced "cashassa", and not "catchassa." I guess this is my comeuppance for giving people grief about mispronouncing the italian appetizer as "brushetta," rather than "brusketta."

Bioshock for the Chronic Underachiever

2007-08-29 · by peterb

Despite the common misconception that both Petes on Tea Leaves are the same person with multiple personality disorder, we actually lead separate, fulfilling lives. This is especially apparent when it comes to games. Here is the typical Pete To Pete Pattern when it comes to "What we're playing lately."

Polarity: peterb-to-psu

peterb: Hey, you need to try this game, Morrowind. It's the best thing ever. psu: I don't play Windows games. peterb: Here's the Xbox version.

[...time passes...]

psu: I got off the ship and I couldn't tell what I was supposed to do so I sold the game on eBay.

Polarity: psu-to-peterb

psu: Here, try this PS2 RPG. peterb: What's it about? psu: High school girls who sell gay porn for dresses that give them magic powers. peterb: ... psu: They use the magic powers to buy guns and shoot themselves in the face to summon demons. peterb: ... psu: Then the demons have sex with Peyton Manning and give the girls XP.

[...time passes...]

peterb: I got the Student Council President's pornomancy spells up to level 11, but then I played Pokémon for a week and when I came back to this game I couldn't remember what the plot was so I stopped playing. Here's the game back.

The interesting thing here is that with a few notable exceptions, we hardly ever play the same games at the same time. Usually we cross-pollinate our interests, instead.

Last week, however, we both picked up Bioshock at the same time, like every other Xbox 360 owner in the known universe. It has been interesting comparing notes with him as we've both progressed through the game.

The really interesting thing about this is that I've been watching his (and my) "achievements" as we progress through the game. Achievements, for those of you who don't know about them, are stupid little Xbox Live Merit Badges that you get for being a good little hamster and slogging your way through the a given game.

Both psu and I have been (and still are) fairly dismissive of the achievement system. It's not actually connected to anything in real life, or in fact even in the game: the sole thing that achievements enable are bragging rights. I remember in the original Project Gotham Racing they had an in-game achievement system that unlocked certain features (for example, if you drove a car for 50 miles or some such, you might get a new helmet). That, to me, was at least an actual reward. Merit badges aren't very rewarding to me. I spent years recovering from the trauma that the Cub Scouts inflicted on me, so I certainly am not going to begin squandering psychic effort on acquiring merit badges at this point in my life.

All that being said, I will admit, to my shame, periodically comparing our achievements in Bioshock. On at least two nights last week, I ended up staying up an extra hour playing the game because of the feeling I was "falling behind." At least at the time of this writing, I have caught up:

peterb

I don't think my fascination with the achievements is a generalizable one. The specific question that was mesmerizing me was "How the hell is he getting through these levels so quickly?" This ties in, I believe, to style of play. I'm a creepsaver. I've been abused by bad computer games for so long that I end up saving the game just about anytime I do anything significant. Defeat a boss. Find a powerful weapon. Pick up some dryer lint. Walk five feet. It's a sickness. Plus, I definitely have a problem where I feel like I "have to do it right." This leads me to compulsively reload the game when I die, even though Bioshock provides a perfectly reasonable and non-punishing respawn system that is more or less penalty-free.

Psu, I suspect, is simply less type A about this than I am. My guess is that he is playing the game to progress to the next cutscene, and isn't as neurotic about approaching "perfection."

Last night, I believe I reached a key point: I reached the point where I was still interested in the plot of the game, but not actually interested in the mechanics. There are some mild spoilers ahead, so those of you who are hypersensitive to that might want to leave off here.

Bioshock's spiritual predecessor was System Shock 2, which I have talked about here before. System Shock made heavy use — arguably, heavy overuse — of a specific storytelling technique that I have come to think of as the La Paloma Gambit, after its use in Dashiell Hammet's novel The Maltese Falcon. The goal of the gambit is to give the protagonist their next narrative goal, and introduce some pathos, while avoiding having to depict a new character in detail.

In System Shock this played out by your having radio conversations (or other distant visual or audio contact) with a friendly character, who asks you to meet them in such-and-such a place. When you get there, you are just in time to watch them be horrifically murdered, with you behind a locked door, unable to help. The very first time someone in Bioshock said to me "I'm just down the hallway, come in." I turned to the other people in the room and said "Watch this. I will get to a locked door with a window and will watch them be killed."

Despite the predictability of the plot arc, it is executed superbly. The voice acting, the screenwriting, and the pacing are all about right. But midway through the game, I'm frankly fatigued by the actual combat. And last night, I walked right up to the brink of a dramatic confrontation whereupon I discovered that, once again, I needed to go clear across the map and fetch a MacGuffin or two, I suddenly had the thought: maybe I can just run there, ignoring all the enemies, and get to the next cutscene a little more quickly.

Perhaps I should look at this as a good thing. Maybe it's not the game after all.

Maybe I'm just becoming less neurotic.

Welcome to Rapture

2007-09-03 · by psu

I was skeptical about Bioshock. I remember watching some demo reel that Irrational had put out on the game. While the demo footage panned over a claustrophobic and chronically damp interior setting, the voice of Ken Levine spoke over the film, declaring that in this game they wanted to redefine the shooter, and provide the player with a combination of visceral action and and a deep web of possible tactics. This kind of talk always makes me skeptical.

The critical reaction to Bioshock would also make you skeptical. For the most part the game has been hailed as an instant classic, a brilliant tour de force, a fantastic combination of killer gameplay and compelling narrative. Of course, there are the inevitable nay-sayers who think the game is a crippled version of System Shock 2, dumbed down for the masses. I don't think either of these extremes is true. But I do think Bioshock is excellent. While the game is not without flaws, none of them diminish my admiration of game's polish and craftsmanship.

I have already praised the pacing of the beginning of the game. This praise holds up for most of the rest of the game, with a couple of notable exceptions that I will complain about later. The presentation of the narrative was also interesting. I like how the short audio diaries were juxtaposed against the plot arc of the overall game. The diaries and the radio communication do a better job of fleshing out the various characters and their back-stories. They do this while cleverly avoiding the problem of doing believable character animation for extended periods of time, and so you don't have the problem that you had in Oblivion, where you had to constantly talk to deformed humanoid robots to find out how to find the next plot point. In fact, my main complaint about the presentation of the game is that the character models and animation were particularly weak. In addition, the animation, spoken audio, and subtitles were constantly out of sync.

I have no complaints about the rest of the presentation though. Rapture is as atmospheric a game setting as I have ever witnessed. It is dark, cramped, creepy, claustrophobic and surreal. Vending machines with clown heads play circus music or scream in Spanish as they sell you ammunition. Huge neon signs illuminate the decrepit rotting shell of the city while water streams in from almost everywhere. The areas are great to just stare at, which is a bonus because the game rewards thorough exploration in various ways:

  1. You have to do a lot of digging to find enough ammo if you tend to just blast away.

  2. You can reprogram the various security devices in the city (cameras, turrets, and the flying bots) to fight for you rather than against you.

  3. There are usually inanimate objects lying around that you can use effectively in a fire-fight (water, oil, drums of various kinds).

The integration of the environment into the combat is where I find my true joy in Bioshock. The game pays off handsomely when you can scope out the next area, carefully set a series of traps for the enemies you know are just around the corner and then sit back and relax while the traps trigger and the city does your killing for you. Although much of the pre-release rhetoric harped on the goal of creating a "kick-ass shooter", I don't think Bioshock plays that well if you limit yourself to straightforward combat. The game rewards you for taking a more tactical approach to the combat and combining the tools that it gives you in creative ways. This is normally not my thing. I like to figure out how to blast through a game with one or two different weapons. But Bioshock is different. Where in other games stealth and environmental traps are just cheap prefunctory gimmicks, in Bioshock they are actually effective. Where other games only give you a few weapons that are fun, Bioshock gives few dozen abilities and weapons to mix and match. By the later parts of the game, I found that I had actually used three or four different styles of combat to get through, which is rare for me. The strongest compliment that I can give the game is that it made me play outside of my normal style.

I will mostly repeat what peterb said about the narrative. While the plot arc itself is pretty standard stuff, it is for the most part superbly executed. Where the game suffers is in dealing with the standard problem of providing 15 to 20 hours of gameplay in a narrative that can't support it. The result is that while the story tells you that you must hurry with all your might to the next plot point, the game shuffles you back and forth across the map in a series of seemingly endless collection quests. The fact that the areas are hard to navigate and the map UI is hard to read just means you also spend a lot of time lost. Finally, as you stumble around trying to find your way, what I will call the "ambient" combat constantly gets in your way. It seems like every time you come back to an area there is a new enemy waiting for you. This just slows you down even more. This can lead to a frustrating sense of fatigue. I found myself rushing through levels and missing important items because I became impatient for the plot to move forward.

Happily, a couple of well-produced Big Events serve to pick up your enthusiasm just when you are ready to give up for good. That, and the fact that you can become ludicrously powerful make up for the fact that the the later areas are just not as interesting. In the end, the tedium of collecting N copies of item M wears off quickly, and you are left to ponder the implications of what you have just played through. The fact that the game makes you think about it at all after finishing the final boss is something of an achievement, I think.

Some people have complained that the final boss is prefunctory and boring. I think easy final bosses are a fine thing and should be encouraged. Others have complained about the vita-chambers, claiming that they "break" the game by removing any penalties for player death. This is especially offensive to the "I play games for the challenge" crowd. To this I say that two of the best games ever, Planescape and Lego Star Wars also work this way, and I don't see what the problem is. I thought that the vita-chambers were a great mulligan. They let me make small screwups without requiring me to go back and replay a whole area. Yes, you can abuse them. But it's just as easy to not abuse them, so what's the problem?

Finally, as it turned out, playing on Medium was not too hard. It just took a while to figure out what the game wanted me to be doing, and adapt my style. I even replayed some of the early areas on Hard, and it's not that bad.

Bioshock is as good a game as I have played since the "Golden Year" of 2004/2005. It gets a huge number of things just right, and does very little wrong. I even like the achievements in this game, and that never happens. I have to go check out that crazy "high school kids blow their heads off with guns to summon spirits" RPG now, but I'm pretty sure I'll make another run through Rapture fairly soon. If nothing else, I have to get that last stupid achievement before Pete does.

Videoblog: Navan Vanilla Liqueur

2007-09-04 · by peterb

Continuing my discussion of booze-related videos, here's a review of Grand Marnier's latest monstrosity, "Navan":

You can find a higher-resolution version of that on .mac. Marvel in the HDness of being able to count the number of hairs on my chin! Or something.

Security Device Enclosed

2007-09-06 · by psu

What is it with these stickers that come stuck on the boxes of CD, DVD, video game and other media disks? I notice nothing in the damn box. The box is full of nothing but the disk and various flyers and advertisments begging me to buy other shitty movies that happen to be made by the same company that just pissed me off by putting this sticker on the box so I can't open the god damned item to watch the movie or play the game. Why are retailers such clueless, mean-spirited bastards?

The One Minute Sidecar

2007-09-10 · by peterb

I'm experimenting with trying to make these videos generally shorter, quicker, and tighter. Any comments would be appreciated.

I have to send the nice HD camera back to Sony soon, so expect a drop in video quality if I go back to plain old miniDV.

Baker Street

2007-09-12 · by peterb

"Baker Street is a game of logic and deduction," says the web site, modestly. It is more than that, though. Baker Street is a life-destroying timesink of addiction and pure puzzle-solving pleasure.

I rave about Everett Kaser's games about once a year, and it's about time for this year's installment. Kaser makes essentially two types of games: logic and deduction games (where you are given a set of clues and from them must deduce each position in the board), and a bunch of other games that I don't play. In the deduction class are his classic Sherlock (which by my reckoning I've been playing since the early 1990s), Dinner with Moriarty, Honeycomb Hotel, Watson's Map, and now Baker Street.

Baker Street includes the best aspects of Honeycomb Hotel – deducing the positions of walls and paths as well as tiles – without the irritating "what ifs" – guessing long chains of possible solutions to find the right one. The frazzled layouts of Watson's Map are eschewed here for a more regular grid pattern. Despite this, Baker Street manages to be more challenging than Watson, while simultaneously feeling like a much fairer game. In Watson I was constantly making errors because my eyes played tricks on me. When I screw up in Baker Street, I can blame nothing other than my own brain.

The twist in Baker street is that on the harder levels it is impossible to fill in the tiles without simultaneously making progress on the walls and paths. Once you exhaust the obvious clues, it takes effort to winnow down the possibilities such that you realize that there is only one possible set of positions where Fat Sort-Of Hercule Poirot Looking Guy is three steps away from Stupid Blue Hat. (By the way, beware discussing Kaser games with other aficionados. You'll quickly discover that the difference in nomenclature will convince you that the other players are all crazy. How could they possibly call that one guy anything other than Martin Van Buren?)

Kaser games are, regrettably, only available for Windows. They play fine under Parallels, and Kaser has a long explanation about how he was tired of Microsoft jerking him around so he wrote his own VM and all you have to do to port his games is to port his VM to your platform. I wish he'd port his games to Mac OS X so that I didn't have to run them under emulation. Seriously, Everett: there are fewer of us, but we buy a lot of games. Give us a shot.

You can download a free demo of Baker Street here. The full game costs less than 20 bucks. It may be the best $20 you spend all year.

The Fifth Element Effect

2007-09-13 · by psu

I don't recall when I watched The Fifth Element for the first time. However, I distinctly recall that I didn't think it was that great. Over the years, however, my wife and I happened to catch the movie from time to time on HBO or whatever, and a funny thing happened. After watching the film the equivalent of five or six times, suddenly it became the one of the best films ever made. Repetition made it better.

I pondered this phenomenon after buying the Blu-Ray edition of the movie for the PS3 and enjoying it all over again. We sat through all of our favorite moments again, and they were all just as fun, but at a higher resolution. The reason, in my mind, that the movie is great is not because of the dialog, the plot, or, in particular, the characters. What is great about the film is that it establishes a pleasing rhythm in your brain, and doesn't let go of it until the movie is over. The main technique that Besson uses to establish the feel of the film is through editing, dialog, and music. He cleverly interleaves multiple shots from multiple locations during expository dialog to keep you from getting bored. He also takes multiple pages from the MTV school of hyperactive jump cutting to make the action sequences into violent little dance numbers from a music video. I really like this.

Finally, there is the irresistable scene where Bruce Willis gets cold cocked by Ian Holm. This shot is brilliant on so many levels that I don't have room in one post to go over it all. You have to watch it for yourself.

Another one of my favorite "rhythm" movies is Ocean's Eleven. Again, this is no masterpiece of storytelling and deep characterization, but from the very opening scene of the movie, the beat of the awesome David Holmes soundtrack and the nonchalant gait of George Clooney melt together into a kind of uber-coolness that you can't help but enjoy. After that, the movie just flows effortlessly over your eyeballs at just the right pace, with just the right beats. How many movies have a shot of a guy riding up an escalator that you can't take your eyes off of?

Coincidentally, right after watching these two films again, I picked up a game that I have played repeatedly, and played it again. I refer to Resident Evil 4 on the Wii. Yet again, this game sucked me in and made me run from one end of that damn island to the other and not rest until the zombies were dead. Also coincidentally, I found that what I enjoy in RE4 is that the game sets up and maintains a rhythm that is comforting and enjoyable to return to. When you get good at RE4, you realize that the way to survive the mob is alternate your shooting with your moving so that you can keep everything visible and far enough away that you have the time and visual range you need to target the next few zombies. The best fights have a sort of blam!, shuffle shuffle, blam! meter to them that is not entirely unlike the pleasing dance beats of the O11 soundtrack.

Most games that I have finished more than once, or played obsessively for some period of time, have this nature. Madden, Counterstrike, Halo, and most recently Bioshock. The rhythm was hard to find in Bioshock, but near the end of my first time through I finally discovered the Zen of the Wrench. Bioshock also has some set pieces that are set to swingy music that give the whole experience a sociopathic edge. You wouldn't think that would hold up to repitition, but the wrench is fun.

I find this experience with repitition in gaming interesting. The conventional wisdom is that games create "replay" value by providing a lot of variety and avoiding repetition, but my experience is just the opposite. The best games provide enjoyable repetition. Repetition makes them better, and makes you want to play them more.

Of course, the flip side of this are the games that provide frustrating or boring repetition. Sometimes the the game is too hard so you have the wonderful experience of simply failing over and over and over again. That's never fun. Sometimes the game is just annoying and boring, so you are annoyed or bored for ten hours, which is no fun. The single player parts of the Ubisoft tactical shooters are notoriously annoying and repetitive for me. Finally, there are the games that do nothing horribly wrong, but they do nothing really right either. For me, Far Cry on the Xbox was like this. I slogged through it, but the mechanics just never clicked.

It's hard to say that there is any objective difference between a great game and one that is just repetitive. I suppose if I understood that I'd design the games rather than just playing them on my couch. In practice though, it generally doesn't take that long for the game to make its impression on me. If things click and I can find a pleasing rhythm in the game, I'll usually pick it up again tomorrow, and the next day, until I'm done. More often than not though, this doesn't happen. And unlike The Fifth Element you can't sit through a game five or six times to discover that you really liked it all along. These games go back on the shelf, and generally become the eternal queue of unfinished business. We all have one. Now it's clear that it's nothing to be ashamed of.

Videoblog: Guinness Ice Cream

2007-09-19 · by peterb

Today I met my friend Kilolo at the newly-opened "Oh Yeah Ice Cream & Coffee," on Highland Avenue in Pittsburgh's Shadyside neighborhood. While perusing their offerings, I noticed they had something they claimed was "Guinness Ice Cream (Adults Only)". Skeptical as I always am, I asked for a taste.

And it was good.

I didn't have a camera. I didn't have a mic. But I had my MacBook Pro, with its built-in iSight camera. I grabbed it and started recording.

I liked the atmosphere and the approach of the place (even if -- sorry fellas -- I won't be mixing hemp fiber into my ice cream for breakfast any time soon). Oh Yeah! is clearly trying to do something a little different. I'll be curious to see if their marketing push to convince people that ice cream is an awesome breakfast food will pan out. But in the meantime, they're open from early in the morning until late at night, 7 days a week. They even keep somewhat late Sunday hours, which is almost unheard of in Pittsburgh.

The ice cream, it should be noted, isn't made there. It comes from several sources, including local ice creamery Dave & Andy's, as well as an excellent source in Ohio. As the owner began singing the praises to me (part unpasteurized milk, Amish cream) my mind began to wander. How do they make Guinness ice cream? Am I corrupting the innocent Amish who are being forced to handle alcohol? I eventually decided that the likely hypothesis was that the Guinness ice cream was being made only by youths in the midst of their rumspringa, and thus was ethically OK.

In the video, I diss the vegan ice cream ("ku fu") on general principles, but it wasn't actually half bad. I just have an idiom to maintain.

This summary of the place, written a day after they opened, is another interesting perspective on Oh Yeah! as well. Give it a read.

The Digital Archive of Everything

2007-09-20 · by psu

I was walking around in my local Borders a couple of months ago just after they rearranged the Music and DVD section. My eyes scanned through the shelves of DVDs, and I realized something that was at once horrible and amazing. There, on the shelves, was most of the history of broadcast television archived in little boxes of silver disks. You could get anything, almost no show was too obscure or too low quality to miss the cut. All of this is made possible by the digital encoding of the content. With enough storage, you can capture anything in bits and then instead of being available only at the whim of the content producer, you can watch it anywhere.

Of course, storage is a tricky problem. For most of my lifetime, the cost of storage made it impractical to manipulate large amounts of video in an affordable computer. But things change. 25 years ago 1GB of storage took up a 8 by 20 foot collection of rack mount disk drives in a machine room somewhere at CMU. Today, I can easily lose a chip holding 1GB of storage in a pile of lint in my pockets. When DVDs were introduced, the amount of storage (4GB) that each disk represented was much larger than what you carried with you in a typical computer. These days, a single DVD is a tiny fraction of what you find walking around in a cheap laptop.

Given this, it's not hard to imagine a future where a single computer, or at least a single external disk drive will be able to hold all the music and video that you might ever listen to and watch. In fact, you could probably store all the music and video ever produced without that much trouble.

Essentially infinite storage also leads to other obvious ideas. For example, many of us like to keep journals and diaries. Others record their experiences with still or video cameras. Since disk isn't really infinite, these records are usually fairly selective. But, you might ask, why be selective? The New Yorker recently published a profile of one Gordon Bell, who has been thinking about this very question. The article is an interesting look at an interesting person, but I found the conclusions to be disturbing.

The article correctly points out that a complete archive of everything brings up tricky questions of privacy and civil liberties. They also correctly realize that a raw archive of everything we see will never be that interesting. Therefore, they avoid the naive notion that if you strap a microphone and video camera to your person and record everything you see, the result will be like your own personal episode of Seinfeld. You might hope that your life archive would be an entertaining series of little stories full of humor, or drama or deep insights into the human condition. This, of course, ignores the essential fact that almost all of our lives are a banal exercise in tedium. The reason television stories are interesting is that all the boring stuff has been edited out by the filmmaker. The full archive of everything lacks this editor.

Of course, maybe you could build a computer system to find the interesting stuff for you. This is where I think the article goes wrong. There is this quote:

Similarly, Bell and Gemmell would like software that organized the contents of the archive into movies--something, at least, to compress and shape it, to summarize its parts. "Auto-storytelling," Gemmell calls it. "My dream is I go on vacation and take my pictures and come home and tell the computer, 'Go blog it,' so that my mother can see it. I don't have to do anything; the story is there in the pattern of the images."

Personally, I find this vision horrifying. It's good that the article picked photography as an example, because it's easy to use photography to explain why I hate this idea so much.

Photography, more than any other artisitic endeavor, is at its core an exercise in selectivity. You look at a subject, you choose how to frame the subject in the picture to capture what you find interesting about it. You wait until the context is just right. You hit the button. Later, you look through all the pictures and filter them again. This time, you are picking out the ones that "worked", meaning that the picture actually captured what you originally visualized when you were shooting. The resulting set of "select" images (even the jargon of the field emphasizes selectivity) are the ones that you personally feel are the strongest pictures.

All of this selection is important. Not only does it serve to ensure that you don't show your weak pictures to people, it is also at the core of photographic style. Style can best be defined as systematically capturing pictures that you like. Part of cultivating your own personality in your pictures is to be able to pick the best ones out of the pile and make people pay more attention to them. In other words, the selectivity is at the heart of photographic style.

Now, imagine that the machine is making these choices for you. Why would you want that? I think that the key thing that makes important memories important is that I picked them to be important. I want to sift through my life on my own. I want to look at it all and pick out what I think is interesting by myself and then synthesize it into some story that I can go share with the world. Outsourcing this to a machine is tantamount to calling down the robot holocaust and replacing all the people on earth with little a collection of machine learning robots. No thanks.

Run My Drink

2007-09-21 · by peterb

This excellent web site cataloging and reviewing Japanese malt whiskies is making me want to try some. But the only Japanese whisky carried by the PLCB is Suntory "Yamazaki" 12 year, and it's an SLO. Does anyone from a more civilized state want to help me obtain a wider variety to sample?

Monday Shorts

2007-09-24 · by psu

For today some short items that I never found the energy to turn into one of my normal-length wank-fests. These sit, like un-played games, on the pile for a while, and then I decide to just give up.

Mio Kitchen and Wine Bar

This is a new restaurant in Aspinwall that you should try. The chef used to work at Veritas in New York. Prices are high for Pittsburgh but for once the entrees are as good as the starters. I can't comment on the wine list, I know nothing about wine. We've only been once so I can't provide specific menu recommendations, but everything we had was good and everything we saw looked good. My only complaint was that the room is molded in the "if it's really dark, the food will taste better" design style.

Coteaux du Languedoc

As I wrote in one of my Paris articles, we got a wine from this region of France at one of our fancier dinners on the last trip. I have so far been unsuccessful in finding anything like that wine in the humble state of PA. If anyone can help me, I would find a way to compensate you.

Halo Day

Tomorrow is Halo Day. I plan to have fun playing the game, and I suspect the game will be the foundation on which the Xbox 360 will stand for the next few years. I have been observing the collective orgasm that is standing in for "reviews" of the game. This will inevitably lead to the backlash against the game, where PC elitists call it a dumbed down shooter for console 'tards and self-absorbed Left-Bank pseudo-intellectuals call it a cartoon kiddy game compared to the artistic pinnacle that was Bioshock because ya know, Halo doesn't take place under water and doesn't make fun of Ayn Rand.

I think that all of this misses the point. Halo 3 will be a grand old time, because Bungie is good at making Halo games. But we should not be deluded into thinking that this is some important cultural event. It's just a good excuse to sit down with some pizza, shoot some aliens and save the god damned planet. This is what I plan to do.

On the other hand, to the bitter crack-babies who want all their games to do "more", it should be pointed out that all Halo needs to do is be Halo. It doesn't need to be HaloShock or Half-Halo 2, Episode 5, Max Payne Returns to City 17. People who pine for Bungie to go in a new direction with this game sound to me like people who want EA to make Madden into a pure management simulation rugby game or something. Going in a new direction is not the point here. Giving me a shiny new Halo game is the point. I like Halo, and I like it to sit on its own, over there being Halo. Doing anything radically differently would be like making a Mario game where you can't jump. OK?

The only real question is why they allowed the 360 to ship without this game.

High end food stores in Ohio

We visited out friends in Akron again recently. I have a question. How is it that the density of froo-froo high end food stores in the Akron/Cleveland/Columbus triangle is so high? I count something like six or eight stores in the immediate area, whereas here in Pittsburgh we have Whole Foods and a couple of small independents that aren't really that good (sorry). Why?

7-11 Vignette

I pulled in on my bike yesterday afternoon to get a Gatorade. In the parking lot is a woman sitting in her running Hummer H3 talking to her daughters and someone else, giving directions. The engine is running, the AC is on, the whole shebang. She probably burned several ounces of gas just sitting there while I got my drink. Then her daughter dribbled a bit of her bottled water on her hand to rinse it off. I have done this in the past. From over by the H3 I hear "We do not buy water to pour it on the ground." Clearly people need a sense of perspective.

Klavons

You should go here and get a milk shake. Really. Just go.

Ferris Bueller's Day Offing Himself

2007-09-25 · by peterb

It is a disturbing and compelling image. The young man is wearing his school uniform and a slim pair of headphones. He reaches into a pocket with his right hand and pulls out a gun. He flourishes, twirls the gun, and points it at his own temple. There's a sharp report as he fires, and a fountain of glittering shards spray out of the other side of his head.

Persona still

It is a compelling and disturbing image. In the course of a game of Persona 3, it is an image that will assault you thousands upon thousands of times.

Shin Megami Tensei: Persona 3 is a game that exploits this transgressive — and powerful — image to the fullest extent. There are complex in-game explanation as to why the teenagers in the game are not really blowing their brains out, but those are post-facto explanations. Fundamentally, the game was developed as an excuse to use this provocative image.

That Persona 3 is a Japanese game makes the suicide theme all the more disturbing. Japan has had an alarmingly high suicide rate for some time, and it has been increasing dramatically lately, especially among children. One could try to view Persona as a meaningful commentary on this situation, but that reading isn't reasonably sustained by the game's narrative or leitmotif. It feels to me at best crudely insensitive, and at worst a cynical attempt to profit from the phenomenon. Persona 3 is troubling not only because of the subject matter, but because of its reimagining of suicide as a heroic act. The game's introductory video, for example, makes it seem downright romantic:

The Shin Megami Tensei (literally translated: "True Reincarnation of the Goddess" or "True Goddess Metempsychosis") games have always been transgressive and edgy. It's not clear that this game's suicide theme is substantially more grim than the themes of previous outings ("You turn into a demon and destroy the world,") or indeed of other games. What is different is the riveting nature of the game's central image.

In the US market the game has an "M" ("mature") rating, giving the publisher plausible deniability in the event of lawsuits. Despite that, the game is aimed firmly at high school children. Without going into too much detail about the game mechanics, the parts of the game that don't involve shooting yourself in the head involve becoming popular at high school. This portion of the game plays like any number of Japanese games in the "dating sim" genre. I view this as another indication of the target audience of the game: teenagers. The game also has a brutally punishing save system where you have to slog ahead for a long period of time in order to reach a save point. Only people without responsibility — kids — can tolerate such broken save systems. So this is a game labeled as being for adults which is really intended for children. The world already believes that all videogames are for kids. We don't need this sort of mislabeling helping the idea along.

Some may argue with my assertion that the game is intended for the teenage market. But the alternative hypothesis is that Atlus believes there is a huge desire in the 18-24 demographic for a game where players get to pretend to go back to high school and be popular. That, if true, is disturbing on a completely different axis.

The game is liberally larded with Jungian jargon, retrofitted into Japanese pop culture giant robot sensibilities. (This is a fairly common occurrence when East meets West; think of it as the inverse of Edward Said's conception of Orientalism. Western cultural notions are often appropriated for anime for exotic flavor, e.g., Christianity is often used whenever a plot calls for a gothic milieu.)

In game terms, the protagonists fight (given-as-evil) "shadows" through a power called "persona". When battling a shadow, the characters may take out a gun and shoot themselves in the head (extinguishing the ego?), thus summoning a masked spirit, or "persona", who then whacks the shadow on the head a few times, or burns it, or freezes it, what have you. I'm only a few hours in, so I don't know how the game's plot will play out. In purely Jungian terms, the objective of the game is a bit perverse. One would properly describe the persona according to Jung as an outward-facing construct, while the shadow is a part of the self that exerts control subtly, albeit pervasively. Interactions with one's shadow can be complex, but most would say that trying to simply overpower it by whacking it over the head will more likely lead to constant unhappiness, rather than self-discovery.

Self-discovery, though, seems less a concern of Persona 3 than does style. Teenagers have already grabbed on to Persona 3's irresistable combination of high school angst, OCD collectability and guns with both hands: you can already find Persona 3 hentai (mildly or deeply pornographic comics) all over the net. I suppose I should be glad that the sexism in the game itself, while present, is not quite as bad as it could be.

Persona 3 is problematic commercial art. To be blunt, if I lived with a depressed teenager (aka "any teenager"), I would do everything in my power to prevent him or her from even learning of Persona 3's very existence. That such an exercise would be futile is beside the point.

Difficult, challenging, or transgressive art is not something to be reviled. Just because I am troubled by the game's central image is no reason to denigrate it. But whether the game's creators intended it as challenging art or merely the cheap exploitation of grief is not a tangential question. It is the central question. I can admire love as an abstract ideal, and still be repulsed by the 30 year old man who gropes at a high school student. I admire the boldness and stark power of Persona 3's visuals, but see behind those visuals a carelessly groping hand.

A hand that doesn't care who it hurts on its way to your wallet.

It's Finished

2007-10-01 · by psu

I finished the single player campaign in Halo 3 this weekend. There is almost no point in writing anything about the experience because the game has taken on a life separate from normal critical evaluation. There is really only one thing you need to know about Halo 3 and it is this: Halo 3 is Halo, only bigger.

I was going to deploy the standard Spinal Tap reference at this point, but I've already used that line this year and it would be ironic to repeat myself in this context. Still, the statement applies here probably more than anywhere else. Everything about the game is really just more Halo with the knob turned higher:

The set pieces are set on bigger platforms with more enemies shooting more bullets at a faster rate as you frantically try and find any tactic that will keep the fight in front of you. Instead of throwing grendades into groups of two or three grunts, you instead toss them into a group of five or six who then fly though the air, all their limbs flailing independently. Where you might have fought one or two banshees at a time before, you know how to deal with half a dozen at once, plus a couple of extra tanks.

There are more vehicles to drive over more extensive pieces of terrain. There are bigger tanks to defeat, and you are rewarded with fatter, more satisfying fireballs when you do so. There are more frenetic runs through burning structures that are on the verge of total collapse. They seem to know instinctively that we love that shit.

There are more brutes. More Flood. More backtracking. More identical hallways (except at strange angles, you'll see what I mean). More multiplayer modes. More annoying and confusing checkpoints. More more more. There is more of everything, except flying. There isn't more flying, because flying sucks, so they got rid of some of it. That's good.

There are more cut-scenes, but fewer well-written lines of dialog. The game ties up the plot in a reasonably satisfying fashion, but the level of the narrative never quite makes it past High School Comic Book. On the other hand, this is a video game, so what do you expect (hint: Bioshock didn't do it either. We can argue about that later).

What shines through it all is the same excellent combat engine. When you are really tuned into the game, you circle strafe and bunny hop and shoot and beat down your foes in a beautifully rhythmic dance. Then you chuck a grenade into the fray and watch the stragglers scatter and start the whole thing over again. The reward for your work is hearing your enemies scream in pain and then watching them fall on the ground accompanied by the occasional limb flying through the air. This is what I play the game for, and this is what Bungie has delivered.

If you love Halo, there is more to love. If you don't really care, there is nothing here that will make you care. The game is not the best game EVAR. Neither is the game just a shallow refinement that is more like an expansion pack than a standalone game. The game gives you more Halo goodness without ruining anything that made Halo good. I think this something of an achievement given how many other games have tried to follow the "better graphics, bigger everything" formula and failed miserably to preserve the core gameplay (I'm looking at you Madden Football).

The bottom line is that the graphical improvements, the cool new features (online co-op!), the movie capture mode, and the refinements to the multiplayer all add up to a fantastic upgrade to a game that was already one of my favorites. There does seem to be a contingent of the "Gamez R Artz" crowd who like to gripe that Bungie didn't try to push the gameplay or narrative in some different directions. I think these people are delusional. As I said before, the Xbox and the people who play Halo do not need Haloshock or Halo 6: Mexican Tactical Combat. We just want Halo, but with more Haloness. This is what Bungie has delivered and for this they should be congratulated.

Here's hoping it's really finished. I'd love to see where Bungie could go given the freedom to actually try something new.

Twenty First Century TV

2007-10-03 · by psu

I finally couldn't take watching HD sports over the air, so I dropped some cash on the new Tivo HD. If you weren't paying attention, this is the $300 box that does most of what the previously $800 and now $600 Tivo Series 3 does. You can get dual HD tuning, a disk big enough for all the programming I'll ever need, and that same stylish and streamlined Tivo interface.

Of course, there is only one problem with this vision of Nirvana. You have to get the cable company to your house to set up the CableCard. And the cable companies hate CableCard.

CableCard, you may recall, is a standard that essentially puts the security and tuning hardware from one of those old cable boxes into a little card about the size of a PCMCIA expansion card for a laptop. The cable companies were mandated to allow the use of these cards in third party hardware so that you as a consumer are not locked in to their cable box hardware, at least in theory. In practice, the cable companies hate these things. They would like to be providing the complete cable TV experience end to end. And in theory I am sympathetic to this cause. Controlling the whole user experience can be a good thing if you are competent enough to be able to build a good user experience in the first place. Unfortunately, the cable companies are not so competent. Therefore it falls to companies like Tivo to make TV usable again.

So we called a couple of weeks ago after one-clicking the box on Amazon. Right on time, well, right within the alloted four hour window, the guy shows up. Right away things go bad. His work order is for the wrong cable package, the wrong wiring (we needed one more wire), and for the Piece of Shit Comcast DVR instead of two CableCards. This is because it is too expensive for the cable companies to either

  1. Hire phone people who can take your order and transcribe it correctly.

  2. Hire Web people to build a web site that can in fact tell you what packages are available in your area and allow you to order those packages online so some barely literate minimum wage lackey can't fuck up the order.

Anyway. The cable guy goes back out to his van to find the cards. He comes back in and starts going on and on about how the CableCard hardware never works right and how he's barely ever done any installs and who knows how it really works. I can't tell if this is just an act to make me break down and use the Piece of Shit Comcast DVR or if he is truly intimidated by this hardware.

The actual install of the cards went fairly well, except that the home office had to completely rewrite the order and our account status to be able to activate the cards. There was a lot of reading of numbers over the phone and some waiting on our end while the phone operator also opined about how complicated CableCard is and how she didn't know how it is supposed to work. It's like they don't want you using it.

Once activated, I didn't realize that I could test all the channels coming over the wire without redoing the Tivo setup, which takes about half an hour. The result was that while we are receiving the HD channels fine (woohoo! go Patriot...er, go Steelers!), I didn't notice until after the installer left that we had been given the wrong cable programming package, so the kid channels that are nearly the entire and only reason to have the Tivo in the first place simply don't exist according to our tuner. Hopefully one more call to Comcast will fix this, assuming they can understand our moon language instructions and write them down correctly.

Think about this for a second. After a long phone call and an hour with the guy in my house, I still ended up with the wrong set of channels. This, combined with the fact that the Tivo Guide data is always buggy and the fact that no one seems to be able to build a web site that can confidently and correctly tell me what is on TV at any given time at my house is, to me, an obvious and deep reason why the broadcast TV industry just doesn't get it.

They think that the data model for what is on TV is made up of a four values: title, location, time, and channel. Really, all any end user cares about is the name of the show. Why should I care that The Bionic Woman meets Paris Hilton in the Simple Life comes on at 10pm on channel 437 in Pittsburgh but at 8pm on channel 577 in San Jose? Why should anyone need to keep track of this? You should just be able to talk to some TV oracle, type in the name of the show, and have it appear on your television at some point in the future.

Instead, you have to fight a byzantine maze of local channels, premium packages and special broadcast deals with the various sports leagues only to end up in a situation where the Red Sox game starts at 6:40, but the Tivo will only start recording at 5:30 because some nitwit typed in the data wrong a week ago and now they can't fix it.

Which is all to say, I'm happy with my Tivo. I think it's probably the best user experience that you can have with modern television. But at some fundamental level it's still completely wrong and stupid. This is a sad sad reflection of how badly the TV and consumer electronics companies have screwed the pooch.

How to Buy a TV

2007-10-08 · by psu

Here's what you used to do to buy a TV. You would go to Sears, look at the TVs, pick one that seemed to be the right size, take it home, plug it into the cable or antenna, and turn it on.

Because the consumer electronics industry has your interest and convenience as its highest priority, today I can write a 1500 word essay on how to buy a TV in the modern world. That's called progress.

The Easy Way

There is really only one question you have to ask yourself to navigate the TV purchasing maze:

How big a screen do I want.

There are various ways to answer this question which I will not get into. Most people know the answer instinctively. Now, if your answer is 50 inches or larger, then what you want is a big rear projection set. If your answer is smaller than 50 inches, then what you want is an LCD or Plasma. That's all you really need to know.

The Hard Way

The first thing to remember about the HD standard is that all HD televisions come in a standard resolution. The best thing about this standard is how there are actually around five standard video formats and how their names don't really make any sense. Let me summarize:

  1. 480i. This moniker is generally used to refer to the resolution of a standard TV. The 480 refers to the number of "lines", or scanlines, on the screen. The "i" means that what you actually see on the screen is two interlaced images of 240 lines each. DVD playback is generally at this resolution. On a DVD, each line is 720 pixels of resolution. I'm not sure if this is relevant to the analog broadcast format or not.

  2. 480p. This is the same resolution as the above, but no interlacing. Each frame is generated all at once, rather than by flashing odd and even lines at you quickly. Many DVD players will convert the 480i signal to 480p on playback. This sounds simple, but is in fact a whole subject for technical dorkery.

  3. 720p (1280x720). Some LCD, Plasma and related rear projection sets use this as a native resolution.

  4. 1080i (1920x1080). This is what most people think they mean when they say "HD" these days, and it's the highest resolution broadcast format. Note that in deference to CRT televisions, this is an interlaced format. Most of the new digital TVs (LCD, Plasma, etc) are inherently progressive, and so convert the signal internally to "1080p".

  5. 1080p (1920x1080). I'm not clear on what this means. There are multiple interpretations and multiple standards. According to the obsessed, the Sony PS3 is the only real HD game machine, since it will output this signal even though no games can render at this resolution at full frame rate.

Broadcast HD is generally in a 16:9 aspect ratio, while the old broadcast format was in 4:3. This confusion causes people to do strange things like insisting on watching the 4:3 material stretched out to 16:9. I guess if you like all your people short and fat this is OK. To add to the confusion, most movies don't use either of these formats. This leads to people posting to the support formums asking why their copy of The Matrix has black bars on it, and wasn't their HDTV supposed to get rid of that. Don't let this be you.

The next thing to remember is that there are several competing technologies for taking a video signal and showing it to you on a screen. These break down into three buckets:

  1. Direct view. These are the CRT, LCD, and Plasma screens. These tend to be bright and quick sharp, but they also tend to be expensive or impossible to build in large sizes.

  2. Rear Projection. These generate a tiny picture and then project that picture to a big screen that you look at. The digital version of this uses small chips to generate a high resolution image which is then projected. Because you don't need to build a huge solid state panel, these are much easier and cheaper to build in the larger sizes.

  3. Front projection. Like RP, but you hang the screen yourself instead of having the screen be attached to the TV. This is for people who are into this sort of thing.

Generally, for a given screen size and resolution, projection sets are much cheaper than direct view sets. This is the basis for my purchasing rule above. A 50 inch rear projection set will probably be about half the cost of an LCD or Plasma panel in the same size and resolution. You can't even buy a CRT in that size, and CRT rear projection is all but dead, much to the chagrin of the old timers.

The Rest

Having picked a TV at the right size, the last puzzle is deciding how to feed the TV with HD content. Currently there are several sources of HD content:

  1. Live TV. You can pick up many local broadcast stations in HD with an antenna at very high quality if you are close to the center of a city with several such channels. I personally could only reliably get CBS in Pittsburgh. To actually understand how to receieve these broadcasts, you have to learn a lot of weird acronyms like ATSC, QAM, OTA and such. Buying a Tivo is easier.

  2. Cable, DirecTV, DISH. All of these services have HD channels. All of these services also have out-dated and archaic delivery models, weird pricing schedules, and shitty customer service. To make up for it, DirecTV and DISH both make you pay ludicrous sums of money to upgrade your existing hardware to receive HD channels. I've been a DirecTV customer for more than ten years, and my reward for this is having to pay for a new dish and HD receiver, whereas most cable companies will just give you a new set-top box, assuming you can get them to your place.

  3. HD DVR. I can't watch TV without a Tivo. Any DVR which is not a Tivo is probably some piece of shit that the cable or satellite company wants to lock you into. Don't fall for it. Of course, getting your HD Tivo set up can be something of a trial. But it's worth it.

  4. Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. These standards are both cynical power-grabs and generally retarded. Players and media are expensive. Selection is non-existant. There are also no ripping tools, so you can't, ya know, do the thing, at the place, at your convenience. Yet.

  5. Upscaled DVD. Upscaled DVD looks almost as good as "real" HD, but with normal DVDs that are more convenient in various ways. The upscaled picture will tend to be noisier, especially in dark scenes, but it's really not all that much worse for most purposes. Plus, ya know, the thing.

  6. Game consoles. Unfortunately, the two consoles that put out an HD level signal are both crippled pieces of crap that either completely fail after a while (my Xbox 360 just died) or don't have any actual high resolution games that are any good (hello, Sony). At least the PS3 makes a decent DVD player and doesn't sound like a jet engine.

So there you have it, the simplest guide that I can think of for how to buy that new TV you need. My advice for you is to only have read the first section of this article, and also to think twice before wasting a lot of money on something this complicated. You could always just buy a computer instead. Computers are pretty simple machines by comparison.

Seeing Red

2007-10-09 · by peterb

Early on Saturday psu let me know that his Xbox 360 had given up the ghost. He had been hoping to get the Red Rings of Death at least since mine died a few months ago, and they sent me back a cooler, quieter model. Still, he was a bit nonplussed, and at a loss as to what to do without his beloved Halo 3. "Maybe I'll play Banjo-Kazooie," he joked. "Of course, I'll need to buy an old Nintendo 64 first."

Little did he realize that I never pass up a chance to get another piece of obsolete computer equipment out of my basement. I packed up the N64 (along with Banjo-Kazooie and a few other games), and brought it over. And while I was packing it up, a funny thing happened.

Last Christmas my nephew (let's call him "Vaan") was visiting my house. He was too young to play BladeHunt: DeathSpank 2: The Revenge, so instead I showed him how to operate the N64, hooked it up to an old TV, and promptly forgot about it.

When I went to pack up the Nintendo this weekend, I noticed it was a little warm. You see, Vaan, being a youthful little scamp, had irresponsibly left the device on. I, being lazy, had not bothered to check to make sure that it was off. So this Nintendo, which is more than 10 years old, had been left powered on 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for the last 9 months.

I didn't even turn on the TV to make sure it still worked. I yanked the cables, stuffed everything into a shopping bag, and went to Pete's house. Where, of course, we plugged it in and it worked just fine. I never experienced even a moment's doubt about whether it would work.

Now, I'd like you to think about this for a few minutes. I have several co-workers who have held off on buying an Xbox 360 because they are waiting for Microsoft to make one that won't melt down. When I owned my original 360, I would never play games on it with the media cabinet closed because I believed in all seriousness that if I did, it might burn down my house. I put it to any Xbox 360 owner out there: does anyone believe that if they left their Xbox powered on for 9 months straight that it would still function? No. No one believes that.

I've written at length about the competitive advantages consoles have over "gaming PCs". There are a number of variables here, not the least of which is cost, but if I had to boil it down to one simple factor, it is this: the game console is an appliance. Its value proposition subsists largely in the fact that it is supposed to just work.

Some console manufacturers, in their understandable quest to encourage hardware turnover, have placed a bet on HD-capable machines, systems that can render and display incredible graphics. Software publishers have embraced these platforms, enjoying the benefits of republishing the same games with higher resolution art assets. But it's worth taking a moment to reflect on the simple truth that HD gaming in 2007 comes at a cost higher than simply adding together the price tag of the hardware and software. We pay a price in convenience. We pay a price in power consumption, shelf space, and revoltingly ugly industrial design. We pay a price in noise pollution in our living rooms. Most of all, we pay a price in peace of mind. Imagine if every time you turned on your oven, you had to worry if today would be the day that your oven would stop working. That's what everyday life is like for an Xbox 360 owner.

The Xbox 360, the PS3 and the Wii are all obviously more complex devices than the Nintendo 64; at a minimum, they have moving parts. I'm certainly not saying that I want the architecture of game consoles to be frozen in 1996 forever. The key point is this: industrial design and computer architecture have something important in common. They both require making intelligent tradeoffs. I'm sure that the designers at Microsoft and Sony were acutely aware of what they were asking consumers to give up in the name of pushing a few more pixels and gaining a foothold in the living rooms of HD early adopters. The gaming press, intriguingly, doesn't seem to discuss these tradeoffs in any continuing or rigorous way. They simply take it as read that the only option is to buy newer hardware, even when that hardware is defective.

The ongoing success of the more conservatively and cleverly designed Wii (and the continued success of the PS2 even while its successor languishes on store shelves) suggests that the average consumer understands these tradeoffs, even if no one in the industry or its vanity press is willing to acknowledge them.

Design matters. In the marketplace for personal items and appliances, design can matter even more than a list of features. Competitors in the portable music player industry learned this the hard way.

The game console manufacturers are learning this hard lesson now.

Raging Red Ring Reaction Rant

2007-10-10 · by psu

As we hinted at yesterday my Xbox 360 melted over the weekend. I had happily worked through the single player of Halo 3 and was playing the occasional multiplayer match when the box started crashing randomly. Then it booted to the red lights. Then it recovered for a day. Then it booted to the red lights again.

After that, the worst part of the experience came: I called Microsoft. Don't let this happen to you.

Actually I lied. My wife called Microsoft for me. She does some of this legwork on occasion because she has more experience dealing with customer service organizations than I do. I knew we were in trouble when I got to her office about 20 minutes into the call and she was still on the phone. Worse, she looked like she was ready to reach through the handset and strangle whoever was on the other end. See, Karen is basically a professional support script navigation expert. Nothing fazes her, and here she was in a complete red faced fist thumping frothing at the mouth rage. This meant only one thing: the creature on the other end of the phone was a creature of pure malevolent evil.

I thought maybe the support person was giving her crap about the Xbox not really being broken, so I valiantly intervened and picked up the phone and explained very carefully how the machine had failed. This seemed to placate the exceedingly polite but completely incomprehensible Indian woman on the other end of the phone. She then launched into the rest of the call script. Remember, at this point we had been connected for about twenty minutes. By the time I hung up the phone, I had talked to her for another twenty minutes.

In this time, we passed the following 45 bytes of information to the nice woman in India:

  1. Serial # of the Xbox

  2. Shipping address for the coffin.

  3. A phone number and email address for contact.

That's a rate of about one byte per minute.

Meanwhile, I had the pleasure of listening to what must have been 80 pages of canned dialog in her script.

  1. She told me that my shipping address was some street in Pittsburgh whose name ended in the word "newline". I couldn't figure out what Newline Studios had to do with my Xbox. Finally, I realized that reading me the literal newline in her address record. But, even after five tries from Karen she still had the street name wrong. I gave it to her again.

  2. We verified that I had called about my Xbox having hardware failure and that we had gone through the troubleshooting script. She checked this with me four or five times.

  3. I would send my Xbox to Microsoft, and if it was found that the hardware failure did not occur, they'd send it back to me unrepaired.

  4. If they found something else wrong, I'd have to pay for a repair.

  5. If they found that I had modified the Xbox in any way, they'd send it back to me unrepaired.

  6. She gave me a reference number that I should use to refer to the repair. I should include this reference number in the shipping box. She then told me various things that I should not write on the shipping box. Words like "Microsoft" and "Xbox". She repeated this a few times to make sure I had heard.

  7. She then re-verified all the steps, waiting for me to acknowledge each paragraph of text.

  8. Then she talked for another 10 minutes about subjects that I no longer remember. I think maybe I had stopped listening at this point, and just set the phone down on the desk, saying "uh huh" once in a while into the handset. I know this is rude, but I had reached the end of my tolerance.

Here is what is astounding to me about this. Sony has given Microsoft a free run at the hard core game console market. They have left the door to the frat-house open and provided all the hookers, booze and coke needed for a huge kick-ass victory party. All Microsoft had to do was walk through that door, and yet they have completely failed. Not only did they release hardware into the market that fails more often than the graphics drivers in a Windows PC, they have added to the insult by making the process required for replacement the most painful customer service experience that I can recall in the last ten years. And this includes dealing with the god-damned phone company.

Way to go Microsoft Entertainment Division. You deserve a pat on the back. Maybe when my Xbox comes back all fixed, I'll sell it on Ebay. Meanwhile, I have some Notes and Jigsaw pieces to collect.

In the style of...

2007-10-11 · by peterb

The two Petes collaborated on this article. If you can guess who it is written in the style of, you win nothing, but may feel either proud or ashamed, at your discretion.

It was in a karaoke bar in Saitama that I first met Kobayashi Hikaru-san. This was not your high-end bar, like you'd find in Shibuya, or Harajuku, or any of the other hip spots. This was a thoroughly middle-class establishment. That didn't stop us from proceeding to get very, very drunk along with a couple of his friends. I spent most of the night ignoring the interview and getting hit on by two very cute girls who gave me their keitei numbers.

It turned out that one of the cute Japanese girls had recognized me from the publicity photos for my band. I had started the band with a few buddies who noticed me jamming absentmindedly in the hallway of my apartment building in Harajuku. I was playing on the old guitar that I had left over from my punk-rock days. I had brought the instrument over here on a lark having felt pangs of nostalgia for my high school days and simpler times as I packed my suitcases to make the trip across the sea. So now, here in Japan, I have a cool band and this makes cute girls recognize me and hit on me even in dumpy karaoke bars. This is one of the reasons that I am so lucky. I live in Tokyo and relate the highlights of my wonderful life to you back in the States.

I hummed the first few bars of the victory theme to Dragon Quest III in Kobayashi san's ear, and he smiled knowingly. "Yes," he said. "This is why Microsoft will never succeed in our market. They just don't understand us." I smiled knowingly and sipped my vodka and Pocari Sweat. It's a good piece of music; not as good as if it were sung by Nomiya Maki, formerly of The Pizzicato Five, but serviceable. It always made me feel somewhat sad, a little wistful. In the midst of the victory theme there is an element of sadness, sadness like I experienced when I was back in Illinois and I got into that fight with Billy Connor over whether Tekken or Virtua Fighter was the more realistic fighting experience. Bill punched me in the nose, and I ran home bleeding, vowing to escape Illinois and all that it represents. He's probably selling used cars in Skokie, while I spend my afternoons playing pachinko in Akihabara. Yeah. Even if bittersweet, it's still a victory.

"We will be playing golf next Wednesday and would be honoured if you would join us," said Kobayashi san. "What is your handicap?" This would be delicate. While I have nothing but respect for Mr Kobayashi, lead designer of Jack the Giant Killer, I had already committed to direct a cosplay drama depicting the redemption of Bowser. "I'm a 72," I said. "But only on Congo Canopy." There was a long silence, and he sipped his scotch. "Congo Canopy, I see. Perhaps another time." Kobayashi san was letting me off easy. Sometimes what is left unspoken has a power stronger than a thousand shouted words. His game, seemingly just a cheap Donkey Kong knock off, shows this wisdom. The first level, where Jack climbs the entangled vines, at first seems baroque and labyrinthine, but that is just on the surface. Beneath the Aubrey Beardsley veneer ("the curves intuitively know / Which aspects of nouveau to save") is a sparseness and a power that, in the end, are nothing less than a metaphor for the world in which we move: the birds and snails nipping at our heels, trying to make those of us who are trying to ascend plummet to our failure. Hikaru Kobayashi understands the fear of failure. So do we all.

Feeling full from the drinks, I excused myself. In the bathroom, I sidled up to a urinal and voided my bladder, thinking about Mr. Kobayashi and our conversation. Suddenly the full weight of it hit me: I had insulted him. Jack the Giant Killer had always been viewed as a knock-off of Donkey Kong, and this always overshadowed its brilliance. He thought that my thoughtless mention of Congo Canopy was cruel mocking. I shook, washed my hands, and rushed back to the bar, but Kobayashi-san was gone. His friend with the bleached hair, the one who looked a bit like Vaan from the brilliant (and completely unacknowledged in its brilliance) Final Fantasy XII shrugged and gestured vaguely toward the door, then walked through it. I wandered out into the chill autumn Saitama night.

In the second level of Jack the Giant Killer, Jack wanders through the clouds trying to cross the bridge to reach the castle, but lions and birds get in his way. Boorish schoolgirls in seifuku block my path. I gently nudge them out of my way without even a gomen. Did they understand what I had done? No. Completely ignorant of their own culture, they had probably never even played Dragon Quest III, had never once visited Baharata or Portoga on a quest to defeat the Baramos. Being rude wounded me, but I had need of haste, as much haste as I needed when Zoma opened the pit to the Dark World. Pushing my self-consciousness down, I squared my shoulders and ran.

As I pushed my way through the throng, a soft rain began to fall. It was a mist at first, but as I was able to gain speed, the cold drops pelted my face, each a painful reminder of my earlier insolence. I leaned my head forward and gained a measure of relief from the onslaught of cold dampness. I ran for perhaps two or three minutes this way, and the rain grew only more insistant. Then, as I looked up, I realized that the bleach haired marker that had been my beacon was gone, having melted into the crowd like Solid Snake in the shadows. I stopped and tried to regain my bearings, my gaze darting back and forth across the street, but in vain. Kobayashi-san and his companion were lost to me, and with them any chance I had at redemption. How long I stood there I can't say, but later, chilled to my bones, I turned around and shuffled slowly back to the bar, hoping to drown my sorrow in drink and the false merriment of karaoke.

The last time I met Mr. Hikaru Kobayashi was at this year's Tokyo Game Show, a fractured morass of gift bags and courtesy hostesses wearing corporate logos on their metallic underwear. Apropos of the atmosphere, we spoke of nothing but empty courtesies, brief platitudes on the high quality of his company's releases, and commiserated over how hot it was, "Atsui, kyo mo atsui desu, neh?"

When at last a break in the crowds left us, mercifully, alone for a moment, I quickly leaned over and looked him in the eyes. "Mr. Kobayashi, I just want you to know that I have always greatly enjoyed your games. They are as dear to me as Dragon Quest III."

He smiled, murmured a polite thank you and protested that I was too kind, and then turned and walked away.

Keyboard Perfection

2007-10-15 · by psu

I've used many keyboards in my time on this Earth. I think the very first one I used was attached to an old manual typewriter that I used to use to type up certain homework assignments in junior high. The first one that I used that was connected to a computer was the collection of square calculator keys that Commodore called a keyboard on the PET 2001. After that, there were the TRS-80s, the Apple II, the VT-100 in the high school, the Adm-3a, Tektronix, and some horrific unified APL terminals at Umass, and who can forget the Concept 100s at CMU.

And all these before I ever owned a computer of my own.

Over the years I've had some favorite keyboards. I think that the original IBM RT workstations had the best keyboard that I used while in college. The Sun keyboards were also a favorite because for a long time they held out against the evil of the "business" keybaord layout which moved the CTRL key down into a hard to reach corner rather than placing it above the left shift key where God Himself intended it to go. Over time, I have come to peace with this mutilation of the perfect layout, but only after I trained myself to stop using Emacs for everything.

Later on, after a few bouts with wrist tendonitis I went through a phase where the only keyboard I would use was made by a company called Adesso and had a track pad stuck into the wrist wrest so that I didn't have to use a mouse. At the time, the buttons on most mice were on the stiff side and aggravated my hands. This was also my "split layout" phase. Eventually I concluded that split keyboards just make it harder to commit the crimes against touch typing that are my normal mode of working, so I stopped using them.

I have always liked wireless keybords, and used nothing else for a couple of years starting in 1998. I stopped using them around the time Bluetooth was foisted on the world and could never make myself happy with all that pairing and unpairing. I started using laptops almost exlusively for several years. The Dells at the time had nice keyboards. There were always the ThinkPad enthusiasts, but I never liked the exaggerated depth of those keyboards, not to mention the stupid pointing stick.

During my latest Mac phase, I've had to put up with generally inferior keyboards. I used a couple of Ti Powerbooks as my only computing machines for a couple of years and eventually got used to the square mushy keys, but I never really liked them. The Aluminum Powerbooks and Macbook Pros were an improvement, and the cute little semi-chicklet keyboard on the Macbook is also pleasing. The Apple desktop keyboards have traditionally been abysmal. I have several complaints about them, some of which are specific to the Apple product and some of which apply to desktop keyboards in general:

  1. They are too wide. I never use anything on my keyboard to the right of the right shift key. As far as I'm concerned that whole area and just be chopped off. I've always hated desktop keyboards because they put my mouse too far away, and I like using my mouse. Laptops made me happy for a long time partly because I like trackpads and partly because when you use a mouse it's not too far away.

  2. The key feel is mushy. I'm not sure what kind of membrane switch they use, but I could never get used to it when typing fast.

  3. They have this clear enclosure underneath the main keyboard assembly that does nothing but collect dirt, hair, and other gross bodily detritus. It's really disturbing.

What I always wanted in a keyboard was something that used a laptop layout, so it wasn't too wide, and which had light but positive action so it's easy to type on without tiring out old fingers. I tried the Happy Hacking keyboard for a while, but didn't like it. The key action is unpredictable and the keyboard doesn't have the function keys, which I don't like. For the last few years, I've been compromising with the Matias mechanical switch keyboard. This thing has the stupid too-wide desktop layout, but it makes up for it with the best key action that I've ever experienced. The keys take almost no pressure at all to activate, and when you hit bottom there is a reassuring mechanical . Unfortunately, I work in a fairly open office, which means that everyone on my side of the bulding can hear me type. I decided that these problems were worth the great key action, and I stopped looking at keyboards for a long time.

Imagine my surprise and delight when Apple, of all companies, revamped their Bluetooth keyboard and made it nearly perfect. The keyboard uses switches that feel like the ones in the current Macbook laptops (not the Macbook Pro). I like the key tops and the switches, but others might not like their semi-chicklet nature. For me, the action is light enough to not tire my hands, and even if the tactile feedback is not as sure as the Matias, it's good enough. What is finally perfect about this keyboard is the size. Finally, the useless keypad boat anchor on the right side of the keyboard is gone, replaced by what feels like ten inches of reclaimed desk space. Better yet, the huge clunky transparent enclosure is gone. The body of the keyboard is about as thick as two or three credit cards and is covered in that new shiny Apple metal skin. Finally, the battery tube on the back tilts the thing at just the right angle and in a final design flourish, there is a hidden green LED that tells you when the keyboard is on and when it is doing the dreaded Bluetooth pairing dance.

So far, I only have two minor complaints:

  1. The "media" keys are not laid out the same way as on the laptops. Oh well. At least the fn-key row is there, so I don't have to lose my precious Exposé key, even if it is on F3 rather than F9.

  2. The square CTRL key is hard to hit. I have this problem sometimes on the Macbook too, but it's not too bad.

Overall, I think this keyboard is a design triumph for the small-handed keypad hating users of the world. The thing is shiny, small, thin and superbly functional. The Consumer Rule dictates that to hedge against the future, I should purchase five of these, once I make sure that the keys break in well.

Walk the Walk

2007-10-16 · by peterb

My hands are still a bit chopped up from this weekend, and I'm still in a bit of pain, so pardon me in advance as I prepare to overstate my case.

When I moved into my house, one of the things I liked about it was the cute little brick walk leading up to the front porch. It's a bunch of concave bricks tiled next to each other, with no mortar or anything holding them in place. Very natural looking, very nice.

But, as I believe I have mentioned before, I'm not quite so good at maintaining my yard. In fact, I suck. In my neighborhood, I'm "that neighbor." Oh, my neighbors don't actually hate me, they're all way too nice for that. But let's just say I'm sure they would all love it if something really nice happened to me, like say I got a very lucrative job far away, forcing me to sell the house to someone who actually knows the first thing about maintaining his yard.

So now, several years after moving in, my nice brick walk is full of weeds and grass. And unlike the rest of my wild-grown yard, this particular thing sort of bugs me.

It's been this way for a few years, although not as bad. I've made halfhearted attempts to fix the problem, but none of them have proven to be long term solutions. A while ago, walking through the neighborhood, I noticed a local couple removing all the bricks on their walk; it was the same type of walk as I had. "Hi, can I ask what you're doing?" "Sure," they replied. "We have trouble with weeds growing in the cracks here. You see, when these walks were first put in, the bricks were laid on a sort of barrier. Well, over time, that barrier degraded and broke down. So we're taking them out and lining the underlayer with this awesome material, then we put the brick back. So no more weeds."

I walked away impressed at the perspicacity of these fine people, the ants to my lazy grasshopper. "If only I had that sort of motivation," I thought to myself, "my house would look so much nicer." The next spring, I walked past their house with the newly lined walk. Weeds had sprouted all through their newly lined walk. My step lightened by the spring of schadenfreude, I returned home relieved that I hadn't slaved over putting a new liner in.

The core problem is that there is nothing in between the bricks except air. This means that, over time, dirt will flow in with the rains, and then once you have dirt seeds will sprout. So a lining underneath the bricks won't help. There is only one permanent solution to this problem, and it is called "concrete."

I'm not ready to pour concrete yet -- that's just as much work as weeding, really -- so today I went out and weeded a goodly portion of the walk. Pulling the grass and weeds isn't really an option. The only way to do the job is to lift out the bricks in a row, clear out the grass and dirt that has grown in between, scrape out the dirt that fell onto the bottom so the bricks don't stick up, put the bricks back, and then optionally put dirt or sand back in the gaps so it looks nice.

There are people who thrive on this sort of thing. They write 6,000 word articles for the New York Times Magazine talking breathlessly about the thrill of getting their hands dirty, of the feel of the terroir and the resonance of childhood summers spent on the coast of Maine. They speak of life lessons learned that they hope to pass on to their innumerable children -- inevitably named Tyler or Cody or Dylan. They speak of the satisfaction of building something with their own two hands, and of the raw physicality of manual labor. They speak, above all, of the Good Earth.

I am here to reply to these people. On behalf of the geeks, introverts, technophiles, naturephobes, and all of those who don't enjoy these sorts of activities, I am willing to stand up proudly and say: Fuck the Earth. The Earth is home to all sorts of stinging ants, filthy soil, germs, and children named Dylan.

There are those who say that what we need more of is science. I respectfully disagree. What we need more of is paving.

Returning Red Ring Rage Redux

2007-10-19 · by psu

You will recall that last week my wife and I called Microsoft to get a shipping box for my dead Xbox. That converstation lasted 45 minutes and included no less than six corrections to the shipping address as read back by the woman on the other side of the phone who apparently did not really speak english at all.

Well, the box arrived that the beginning of this week. The only problem: it arrived at the wrong address.

We found this out when the poor person who received the box called left a message for us at home in the middle of the work day. Sad to say, we didn't get back to them her in time, and she mailed the box back to Microsoft before we could get in touch with her again.

But my intrepid wife called them back, being the only one I know who is both brave and stupid enough to navigate those waters again. Incredibly, she got someone who speaks English and had them read back the shipping address that was in their system.

Let's say the correct address was something like this:

Peter Blogger Google Hall, room 475 3500 Forest Street Pittsburgh PA

Here is what would have been in their system:

Peter Boggler Newline Google Hall 350 Fords Street -475 Pittsburgh PA

Brilliant. She spent 10 more minutes giving him the correct address, and with any luck my service box will be here next week.

Assuming they fix it, I'm not really sure what I'll do with the Xbox when I get it back. Part of me wants to fire up TF2 and Portal to see what the fuss is about (no, I don't have a PC, and no, I'm not using Steam). But, part of me is ready to just cancel Live and put the box on Ebay. I can probably live without TF2 or Mass Effect, and it seems to me that if Microsoft doesn't give two shits about me, I really shouldn't care about them either. I mean, first they don't care enough about their hardware to actually make it work. Then when they acknowledge that it's broken, Microsoft doesn't even care enough about the quality of the customer service experience to hire English speaking phone support people to service their English-speaking territories. My pent up dork anger makes me want to tell Microsoft to go to hell. But, my overly realistic pragmatist side says that they've already gotten their attach rate out of me, so what's the difference.

I guess all of this rumination of premature anyway, since I still don't actually have the service box yet. More later on this channel.

I'll Take Manhattan

2007-10-23 · by peterb

I've been wanting to do this recipe as a video blog, but due to an uncharacteristic bout of responsibility, I sent Sony back their loaner HD camcorder and I just haven't been able to work up the enthusiasm to use my somewhat dilapidated Canon. So this is a story I will have to tell in words.

Earlier this spring, in my article Rehabilitating Vermouth I extolled the virtues of vermouth, particularly sweet vermouth. Too many people who should know better refuse to give vermouth its due. The proper martini is as much about good vermouth as it is about good gin, and if you believe otherwise you are a visigoth.

The problem, of course, is in finding good vermouth. Cinzano is serviceable on the sweet side, but not really transcendant, and Noilly Prat is the standard great dry vermouth. But can't we do better than that?

[Ingredients

Ingredients](http://wptest.tleaves.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/2007-10-23-at-22-01-18.jpg "Ingredients")

It turns out we can. I'm happy to report that, at least as far as sweet vermouth goes, the solution is to buy American. Quady winery's Vya sweet vermouth is a revelation. Redolent of cinnamon, herbs, and properly balancing sweet and bitter, it brings a much needed freshness to this oft-neglected class of drink.

The Vya is a bit expensive ($17.99 for a 750 ml bottle at my local liquor store), but if you taste it side by side with one of the European brands you will agree that it's worth it. It stands up on its own over ice (as always, I suggest a glass of vermouth and a small plate of anchovies and good green olives to really open your eyes.) But it works well as a mixer, too, and the classic drink we think of when talking about sweet vermouth is the Manhattan.

The Manhattan, like the Martini, has suffered from spirits inflation over the years. Perhaps because the vermouth on most people's shelves is stale and syrupy, the typical Manhattan you'll find in a bar is really a big glass of bourbon with a few drops of vermouth and a disgusting maraschino cherry. We can do better than that. Here's my contribution.

[Manhattan

Manhattan](http://wptest.tleaves.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/10/20071023-09883.jpg "Manhattan")

Peterb's Manhattan

Stir with ice. Serve (optionally, strain after stirring into a glass without ice, and garnish according to your preference).

There's a school of thought that thinks a manhattan should be served with an orange slice. I've never liked this. It's inappropriate and utterly beside the point; I can only imagine that the person that came up with this also dreamed up the idea that one should put a sprig of parsley on a steak. If you think you would miss the orange, however, let me suggest an alternative: add to the finished drink the merest splash -- just a drop or two -- of Cointreau.

Enjoy!

Seattle Shorts

2007-10-24 · by psu

We were in Seattle for a long weekend this past week. This is the first time I've been back since a trip about ten years ago. As before, Seattle is a great food town, especially for seafood. And, in the last ten years they have finally learned how to make a cappuccino. Here are a few places to try.

Coffee

First things first. Seattle has this reputation for bringing "good coffee" to the rest of us barbarians in the rest of the country. I don't know about that but I do know that the last time I was there you couldn't get a good cappuccino. All you could get are what I will call "Seattle" cappuccinos all of which involved some super hot coffee at the bottom of a foot tall column of milk foam.

Happily, this has all changed. Just toddle your way over to Victrola Coffee Roasters and get one of these:

DSC_20070930-07515.jpg

Not only do they have some espresso blends that are as good as I've ever had, they also know how to make a cappuccino. They do have the arrogant temerity to call it a "traditional" cappuccino instead of a "canonically correct as God himself intended it" cappuccino, but I will forgive them this for the quality of their coffee. They have nice mugs too.

The Uptown still has better girl/boy watching though.

Ramen

After your coffee breakfast, you should head over to the International district via the REI store and go directly to Samurai Noodle. All you need to know is this: at this place you can get a bowl of pork broth filled with noodles. That by itself would be perfect, but then you can top it with pork slices and green onion, then some extra pork slices, and on the side, pickles, an egg, rice, and more shredded pork. If there is a better definition of heaven I don't know what it is.

They have some other stuff too, but I was too mesmerized by the pork to notice what it is.

Cameras

Full of ramen, you can hop a bus over to Glazer's Camera shop. Here you can play with all the hardware that you can only look at pictures of on the web. You can see if that EOS 5-d will fit in the Domke 803 bag comfortably (answer: yes). You can go through all of the Gitzo carbon tripods and open and close the legs to see how they feel (answer: sticky). Finally, you can fondle the Leica M8 and think about what it costs (answer: as much as an EOS-5d outfit plus a custom road bike).

I also looked at the new Canon G9 point and shoot. This thing handles nicely, although the time between "point" and "shoot" is still a bit high. The more exciting thing about the camera is that somehow Canon have figured out how to get decent high ISO performance out of the shitty small sensor. Or at least I think they have, from the limited number of sample images I tried.

Tea

Tired from camera browsing, you can hop a bus back to the Ballard area and sit down at Floating Leaves for an hour or so and linger over a couple of pots of tea. This place has a wide assortment of great Chinese tea and others that aren't as good (OK, I'm kidding. OK, really I'm not kidding). I like the House Oolong a lot. It's a green oolong and is fragrant and velvety smooth. Yum.

Oysters

After tea, you can head back over to Happy Hour at Elliot's Oyster bar. This is something of a tourist place, being on the waterfront and all. But it's a bar with about two dozen different kinds of oysters plus a big and foofy drink menu. We got a couple dozen oysters and chatted up the shucker for a few more free samples. Go go gadget Baywater Sweet. I also got a sickly sweet girly drink that they call a "rum sidecar" which Pete informs me is really a "daiquiri" in the same way that I sometimes sneer at him and inform him that jesus, the running is in Madden 2006 is much easier than Madden 2004.

I can't say whether the drink was any good, but it was sweet enough for Karen to drink some and not spit it out. I suspect it was too girly.

Pike Market

There is not much to say about Pike Market except that if you like food you have to walk around this area. There is food everywhere. There are Russian meat pies at Piroshky Piroshky. There are French pastries at Le Panier. There is the lovingly crafted cheese and such at Beecher's. There is Uli's sausage, the fresh salmon, the smoked salmon, the crabs, the fresh donuts at Daily Dozen, the oyster omelet for breakfast at Lowell's, and finally, surprise of all surprises, real Chinese pot stickers at Mee Sum Pastry just outside the market. I could go on all night.

The best time we have in Seattle is taking advantage of the East Coast jet lag to walk around the market as it gets set up. As the sky turns from dark maroon to blue, the Chinese women put out flower arrangements and bok choy, fish go out on ice, rounds of cheese are stacked in tight columns, the guy at the Chukar Cherry stand puts out the samples and the grills and fryers start to fill the hall with the odors that will tease and tempt the throngs of tourists and locals in a few hours. You can watch it all unfold for a while and soak it all in, then head over to Lowell's for their homemade corned beef hash and go into a carb coma. No better way to start the day.

Adventures in TV Part 6: Comcast Still Sucks

2007-10-26 · by psu

I was trying to record the new PBS series The War in HD on my shiny new HD Tivo. The first few episodes came in fine, but the most recent repeat only recorded in SD even though the program guide said it was on the HD version of WQED. So I tried setting up a single recording by hand, and after it finished, I looked at it and it was a completely different program than was listed in the Guide. Some cooking show. No Ken Burns.

So tonight I am flipping around, and I compare what is on the TV with what is listed in the guide, and I realized that my Tivo is showing the programming listed for WQEDDT (200) on channel 220, which is WQEDDT2. Meanwhile, channel 200 is showing what should be on 220, or maybe the regular analog channel 13. I can't really tell. In any case, this renders the Tivo service completely useless since you can't actually record anything that is listed, you get the wrong channel.

I want to know who I should kill for this.

Perfect Sports Weekend

2007-10-29 · by psu

The Steelers beat up the Bengals.

The Patriots completely crushed the Redskins.

Finally, the Red Sox finished off the Rockies to win the World Series again. Who would have thought.

"Backing up 998,532 files."

2007-10-30 · by peterb

I bought a new disk drive to use with my shiny new iMac, specifically for use with Time Machine. Picking out the right drive to buy was itself educational.

There's a tendency in geek circles to succumb to what I call measurebation, which more or less means to compare products solely by their feature lists. You pick the product at your price point that has bigger numbers on it, and you're done. The problem is that this approach often ignores the tangibles.

Yes, tangibles. Some commentators like to refer to attributes such as industrial design or build quality as "intangibles." That is because they are stupid. Build quality is no less tangible than, say, CPU speed. It's just harder to put on a box.

When selecting my backup drive, I had two specific tangible qualities, apart from price, in mind:

(1) It had to store "enough" data. How much data is "enough" was negotiable. (2) It had to be perfectly quiet. This was not negotiable.

The sweet spot in external hard-disk based storage right now, if you're only looking at price and capacity, is a terabyte. Nearly every manufacturer makes a terabyte unit at what can only be described as an astonishingly low price. You can walk into your local Best Buy and walk out with more storage than we ever dreamed of in 1990.

The problem with these terabyte units is that most of them are really little RAID arrays of 2 500 Gb disks. 2 disks in one assembly means they put out more heat. That means they require more active cooling systems, such as fans. That means they are all, as near as I can tell, too loud for my purposes.

I eventually settled on a Seagate FreeAgent Pro 750Gb drive. Manly men feel offended by this drive's creative industrial design, decorative orange light, and trying-a-bit-too-hard "friendliness." All I know is: it is dirt cheap, physically small and elegant, it worked out of the box with a minimum of fuss, and it is absolutely, beautifully, perfectly quiet.

If I wasn't worried about getting saliva on my data, I would kiss it.

Amusingly, now that my monster video editing station is set up and configured, my camcorder has finally died the death. So it will be a little while before I can pick up a replacement and start making booze videos again. Sic transit gloria Canon.

Boo!

2007-11-01 · by peterb

Everything you need to know about America's relationship with its food, its children, its culture, and itself is encapsulated in this photo, taken on Halloween night.

Take 2

Boo Too!

2007-11-02 · by peterb

...And on the other side of the block is one of the better Halloween displays, complete with tombstone lit in that particular color that cannot be captured.

One More Colour

Up and Coming

2007-11-06 · by peterb

The problem with having (and writing about) diverse interests is that it's too easy to get behind the 8-ball and build up a pile of article concepts but not actually have the time to execute them. This is where I find myself today. To buy myself time, let me share what I'm currently planning on getting written and/or filmed this month.

Let's see how many of those I can get out in the next two weeks.

New and Old

2007-11-07 · by psu

Tonight we begin with a couple of different links. First, I have to give a shout out to Yahtzee, that writer of flash-based animated video game reviews who brings a heretofore almost unheard of level of bitterness to the game. The target of his ire this week is close to my heart since he takes Zelda and literally skewers the game headfirst on a pike.

As Mr. Yahtzee says, if any other developer (except perhaps Valve) spent their days repackaging their "IP" the way Nintendo does they'd be taken to task by an almost uncountable number of interweb forum dorks for being no better for "the industry" than that decrepit punch toy of the gaming forum bully: EA. And yet it doesn't happen. Every new Zelda game is hailed as the next in a series of nearly orgasmic experience of sheer pure Nintendo gaming bliss. A while back, Gamespot tried to call the most recent Wii Zelda a little bit stale and the site was nearly destroyed by the fanboy backlash. I have no love for Gamespot, but surely everyone can see that they were right about this one.

Anyway, as the subject of repackaged classic games rolled around in my head, I remembered that it came up on the latest Gamers with Jobs podcast. Here they read an email about how frustrating it can be to play older PC games on a modern PC with a modern version of Windows. As these things go, they were soon talking about whether old games should be remade or repackaged to be more playable on the new hardware. As usual, the GWJ people, like most gamers, I think, would rather developers concentrate on the new. We are often taught to think that variety and novelty are the engines that drive the video game development industry. But I disagree. There is evidence all around us that while the work may not be the most glorious, there are genuine opportunities to be had in concentrating on the old.

Consider that the current darling of the gaming industry, Nintendo, aside from a few clever hardware hacks and novel control schemes has basically weathered two console cycles and is looking to kick unholy ass in a third while basically coasting on a nearly unchanged set of core franchises that allow them to build games just by pouring new content into existing templates.

Consider that even those novelty-loving scamps at Gamers With Jobs who themselves admit to being high falutin' gaming snobs are all completely in love with GameTap, a service that allows them to play old games without hassle.

Consider how much money Square has made by remaking every Final Fantasy game 12 times. Because they did this I get to play the first ten missions of Final Fantasy Tactics on my PSP on the road. How great is that?

I think people like playing their favorite games over and over again. They get attached to the mechanics and the little rushes of satisfaction that the familiar brings. After all, why would you play WoW if you didn't like repetition? Also, while the history of video games is short, not everyone has been in on the whole timeline. Therefore, there is a lot of utility in bringing older classic games up to the modern platforms where they can be enjoyed again by literally thousands of new addicts, er, fans, who missed out the first time and don't want to go digging up a lot of hardware by buying it from peterb's basement.

Therefore, I have to say that I am fine with people making old games again. After all, one of the best games of this year, Bioshock, is arguably a remake. If the work is done with the love of the original as a first priority and it is done by people who are talented and competent enough to do a good job, I see no problem with it at all. After all, there is no difference to me between a new game and an old game I never played before. As long as they are both good.

Martini Glasses Are Stupid

2007-11-08 · by peterb

Finally, one of the videos we've been planning for a while is put to bed. Please enjoy our demonstration of why martini glasses are stupid (video after the break).

As always, higher-quality versions of the video can be found here at .mac. I showed this to bbum and his first entirely correct comment was "You didn't break the glass!" I actually had that in the script, but due to the location that proved infeasible. Maybe I'll do a sequel.

I'm pretty happy with how this turned out, with the exception of the sound quality. I have mentally budgeted for the necessary equipment to make our soundtracks much better, but it's hard to bring myself to pull the trigger. Therefore, this might be a good time to remind everyone who enjoys these videos that if you want to support them and help us improve the quality, please visit our sponsors. It's a lot easier to drop $400 on audio equipment if I know it won't have to be paid for entirely out of my own pocket.

Enjoy!

Ice Station Santa!

2007-11-09 · by peterb

TellTale has released the demo for the first game in Season 2 of their Sam and Max adventure games: Ice Station Santa. A full review will be forthcoming, but let me just say this: if you own a PC that you play games on you must buy Sam and Max. It is more than just a good idea. It is a moral imperative.

Grenadine Grenade

2007-11-13 · by peterb

So I have been following, with a mixture of horror and admiration, a thread on a certain internet forum called Stomping Through the Savoy. The Savoy in question is The Savoy Cocktail Book, a fascinating manual full of cocktails from the American Bar at the Savoy Hotel in London. The most interesting aspect of these drinks is that they are all, without exception, utterly undrinkable garbage.

OK, OK, I am exaggerating. There are a few good drinks in there, but many of them are perfectly horrid. The interesting part, for me, is reading the thread's protagonist explain how he makes the cocktails, many of which have outdated or hard to get ingredients. One of the items that keeps coming up is "homemade grenadine."

I'd picked up a bottle of Rose's grenadine recently, and made the mistake of not looking at it closely until I got home, at which point I realized I had paid for a mixer made with corn syrup, which I won't serve to people I like. So the idea of homemade grenadine appealed to me.

Grenadine is named after the French word for pomegranate, which is "grenade" (the explosive, needless to say, was named after the fruit, not vice-versa). Paleolithic grenadines were simply pomegranate juice and sugar, made into a syrup.

There are, essentially, two schools of thought in making grenadine at home. The first school recommends combining pomegranate juice and sugar, and then reducing on the stove until it is a syrup. The second school thinks that the first school has a little too much time on their hands, and instead recommends just mixing pomegranate juice with sugar, shaking really hard, and then calling it a day, preferably with a stiff drink. Some recipes call for a touch of lemon juice, as well. There are tradeoffs, allegedly, to each version: the cooked version has a deeper color and a more complex flavor, while the cold version tastes fresher and more fruity.

So of course, I tried to make both.

Now, I say "tried" because I have this problem. I fancy myself a pretty good cook and an adequate baker. I can make great bread from scratch. I understand eggs, and can make an awesome custard without breaking a sweat. I know how to not overcook fish, and meat. But I've never, never, never been able to get the hang of sugar. Sugar eludes me.

Which is why when I tried to cook down the grenadine into a nice syrup, I overshot and ended up with soft ball pomegranate candy.

Pomegranate Candy

The taste is actually pretty fabulous: my co-conspirator and I sat there tasting and retasting it, trying to pin down why exactly we were both convinced we had tasted this precise flavor before. We eventually decided that the taste evoked the old Smith Brothers soft cherry cough drop. Deep, almost musty, and not at all cloying.

It was pretty good. Not usable in mixing drinks, mind you, but I do still have the "cold" grenadine for that, which seems to serve nicely (and, between you and me, was a lot less trouble).

Now I have a bottle of soft-ball pomegranate candy in my refrigerator. Which brings up the question: what interesting things can I do with it?

Internet Forum People: A Taxonomy

2007-11-14 · by psu

Spend any time on the Interwebs these days and you will inevitably end up reading one kind of forum or another. These days there seems to be one of these for every normal human interest and probably the interests that aren't all that normal. I have two observations to make about these forums, one short and one long.

First, for some reason, they all use the same sort of shitty PHP forum software. What's up with this software anyway? Readers old enough to remember the original USENET will also remember a terminal-based message reader called "trn" which, while primitive did three basic things that all of these shitty forums do not:

(a) Keep track of what I have read and only show me new messages. (2) Organize the messages into a nice threaded tree of messages and replies. (c) Let me edit my own messages in an interface that does not blow.

Almost 20 years of web forums and almost none of them do even one of these things correctly. Let's hear it for the march of technology.

Second, for the most part, they are populated by the same types of people.

Here then is my humble and no doubt incomplete taxonomy.

Smugly Superior

This guy is smarter than you, better read than you, knows more about food than you, and in general is just better than you in every way. Most importantly, he has better taste than you. Just ask him. He will pontificate in the most pompous and self-important way about any subject while at the same time steering the subject of the conversation to why his sense of taste is refined and erudite while your preferences are no better than the drunk homeless guy lying near that sewer grate across the street.

Douchebag

Very common in the forums, but is really native to the Xbox Live service. Never has anything interesting to say, but does have a large catalog of racial slurs, sexist attacks and generally just mean things to say. Would call his own mother a gay useless n00b without a clue about life if it would make him feel more like a man on the Internet.

Mr. Can't Let Go

Here is the conversation that you will regularly have with this guy:

You: I like marbles. MCLG: No way man, oranges! You: What do oranges have to do with marbles? MCLG: No way man! ORANGES You: Ok. You win. MCLG: NO WAY MAN, ORANGES!!

You get the idea. This guy is so on message that he can't tell when people have given up listening to him anymore.

Too Much Information Guy

Posts to Internet forums for dating advice, or legal advice involving his divorce, or to rail against his idiot co-workers, or to come out as a moonlighting prostitute. You get the idea.

Knows it All

This person's entire self-worth is tied up in a single activity: correcting factual errors, no matter how small, in any forum post on the entire planet. You used to need a fantastically huge library and a good memory to be able to do this, but these days all you really need is google.

Reflexive Contrarian

Constructs all of his opinions by simply reversing whatever the current consensus is. If the majority of people decided that the sun comes up every day, this guy would decide to be against that position just so he could avoid being lumped into the "mass market" bucket of dweebs and morons.

The Persecuted Idiot

Finally, the true inspiration for this catalog and the probably the single most common driving personality in your average active forum. Everyone is against this person. No matter what the subject, any discussion with him will eventually turn into an argument over how many times he has been abused, attacked, mischaracterized, patronized, misunderstood and in general, well, just persecuted.

The problem is that the guy will consistently make indefensible statements and then dig himself into a trench and defend them against all comers until the heat death of the universe. Of course, this just adds to his persecution complex.

Usually this person mixes parts of all the other personalities in the list into his overall "forum persona". God help you if you get two of these guys at once talking to each other. I'm fairly sure that the known physical laws cannot yet model what would happen to the Internet if this happened.

Hopefully this guide will help you in your interactions with the various personalities in the Internet forums. It can get ugly, so be careful out there.

Mission Tenpossible

2007-11-15 · by peterb

I recently played the first eleven missions of Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn for the Nintendo Wii.

This breaks something of a tradition for me. I recently played the first ten missions of Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance on the Gamecube. Last year I played ten missions (each) of Fire Emblem and Fire Emblem: The Sacred Stones on the Gameboy Advance. I abandoned all of those games after ten missions.

Why only ten missions?

Because – with the exception of the new Radiant Dawn game – the Fire Emblem games are a great example of games written by small-minded people who hate humanity, because they have completely punishing and broken save point systems. After 10 missions, the games got hard enough that I had to interact with the broken save system. So I stopped playing.

The Fire Emblem games are turn-based strategy wargames. They're developed by the same house that creates the superb (and life affirming) Advance Wars series, and shares some similarities in that franchise. There's a central difference, however. In Advance Wars the loss of a unit is not game-killing. It's expected that units will suffer some attrition, and that you will build replacements. In Fire Emblem the members of your army have some individuality and character. That's good. And in Fire Emblem, death is permanent. If one of your favorite characters dies, you will have to finish the game without him. At least, that's how the system is usually described. I prefer to describe it a bit more accurately:

"If a character in Fire Emblem is killed, the player is forced to reset their console and replay the entire mission from scratch until she or he can complete it without getting a character killed."

Reggie Fils-Aime

There are some people who will insist that I am overstating the case, that no one is forcing players to reset their games, and perhaps there are some players in various halfway houses, mental institutions, and bondage clubs that like to continue playing after their favorite Myrmidon has been slaughtered. These people are lying. I recently spoke to Nintendo of America COO Reggie Fils-Aime, and he confirmed for me that Nintendo research shows that no one, anywhere on the entire planet, has ever continued a game of Fire Emblem after losing a favored character. (See footnote 1)

Since Fire Emblem missions tend to have bosses, and since the bosses are inevitably at the end of a map, the common failure mode for the older game is that you have been playing a mission for an entire hour, and lose a character in the last 2 minutes of a battle. So if you want to keep playing, you have to go back and replay the entire hour-long battle.

This mechanic is game-breaking because it harshly punishes the player for even the most modest experimentation. For me, the interesting part of a wargame is trying out different strategies. Previous Fire Emblem games made that so painful to bear. How painful? So painful that, after buying the Fire Emblem GBA game on eBay, I put it on my shelf and instead played the game on an emulator so that I could use the instant save/restore features in the emulator to work around the game's pointless cruelty.

Which brings us to Radiant Dawn, which improves the situation substantially by allowing you to save the game at any time during a battle. There are still some restrictions placed on this. While you have a number of save game slots, you only have a single "quicksave" slot that can be used during a battle. You can save after every move, if you like, but you can't keep a whole library of saves going back to the first turn. In other words, you can still hose yourself, but the situation is much improved: experimenting is at least possibleAt this point it would be traditional to talk about how much improved the graphics in Radiant Dawn are, but let's face it: this is the exact same game that they've been making for 20 years, and if you're playing it it's because you enjoy solving tactical puzzles, not because you want to admire lighting effects. So let's just take all that as read and cut to the chase: finally, Intelligent Systems has made a Fire Emblem game that I can play more than 10 missions of. Maybe this will let psu play more than 10 turns too

It's about damn time.

Footnote 1: I didn't actually speak to Reggie Fils-Aime. I completely made that up. But it turns out it's still true.

Trying 'Til You Run Out Of Cake

2007-11-20 · by peterb

I don't have a lot of time for games.

This may seem strange, given how much I write about them, but the fact is that I work a day job, and have a social life, and games basically fit a slim slice of time between the time I'm done with everything else – usually around 10:30 or 11 pm – and the time I go to bed.

That has some interesting consequences. First, it means I tend to dream about whatever game I was last playing (perhaps this is why I was so hard on Persona 3). Second, it means that to a fairly good approximation, I can estimate how good a game is by how late I stay up.

An average game will keep me up until around midnight. A game that is particularly well executed, such as Bioshock, can stretch that until 12:30 or 12:45. If a game is well executed and it's a type of game I'm obsessed with, such as Fire Emblem, I might push that until 1 am or so.

On Friday night, I played Portal until 4:30 in the morning, and dreamed of blue and orange holes in space until morning.

[Portal

Portal](http://wptest.tleaves.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/11/portal_screen05.jpg "Portal")

Portal is a game for the PC or Xbox 360, most easily purchased as part of a package deal in the so-called "Orange Box". To be frank, I haven't the slightest bit of interest in playing Half-Life 2 at this point, and I only fired up Team Fortress 2, the other game in the Orange Box once. Portal is worth more than all of the other games in the package combined. I played the Xbox 360 version, because it lets me play from the couch.

At first glance Portal looks like a first person shooter, but in reality it is a puzzle game. It's nothing like Halo or Half Life. Instead, it's more similar to Sokoban or Chromatron, or perhaps even Ico.

I won't go into painful detail on the mechanics, but a brief summary is appropriate. The objective of Portal is to escape each level, as part of an experiment (think "rat" and "maze"). To accomplish this, you are given a gun that can shoot two types of holes onto walls, ceilings, and floors: orange and blue. When an orange and a blue hole are placed, they are connected. If you shoot an orange hole in the ceiling, and then shoot a blue hole into the wall, and then walk through the blue hole, you will fall out of the orange hole in the ceiling. The game's trailer does a good job of demonstrating how the mechanic works.

When Portal is at its best, which is always, it keeps you engaged by simultaneously leading you by the hand and silently stroking your ego. It accomplishes this through what can only be described as inspired and thoughtful industrial design. The game always gives you subtle visual cues that help you figure out the puzzles in a natural, organic way. They are so subtle, you may not even notice them consciously if you're not focusing on them. The result is that after you solve a particularly tough puzzle, you experience not just the thrill of victory, but also the feeling that you are a genius, and probably the first person to ever figure out this brilliant solution.

That's the magic of thoughtful design. Forget about the mechanic of placing portals; I can think of a thousand ways to design a game using that mechanic that would be unplayably bad. What makes Portal work isn't the core game mechanic, but the time and effort that went into crafting and balancing the game.

Design is one element of Portal's success. The other element is pacing. The game draws you in so gradually and steadily that there is hardly ever a moment that you wish something else would happen (compare this to the dreadful post-Ryan slog in Bioshock, where I was mostly wishing that the game would just end already).

There are some who complain that the game is too short, and that if only it had offered, say, 10 hours of "gameplay" instead of 4, it would be "better". There are a couple of problems with this argument. First, it implicitly assumes that players play games like game reviewers do. I easily spent 6 hours on the main Portal game, because I was lingering and trying different strategies. It also ignores the copious bonus content in the game – fascinating developer commentaries, bonus challenges, and advanced levels.

But let's factor all of that out. Let's pretend, for the sake of argument, that Portal only offers 4 hours of gameplay. The analogous culinary argument would be "I didn't enjoy eating this piece of $10 cake because I could have eaten $10 worth of twinkies instead, which would have had more biomass and been more filling." Even though the twinkies wouldn't have been as good. And would have made you feel sick. Portal's pacing is, in my opinion, just about perfect: had they tried to stretch the main game any further, it would have been at the price of making the midgame either more boring, or less carefully balanced. The developer commentaries make clear exactly how much tuning, based on user feedback, was needed to make the game as polished as it is. I would not trade away any of that polish for even an extra 5 minutes of gameplay. The polish is the game.

If I haven't talked about the plot of Portal proper, including the absolutely stunning voiceover work, it's because there is nothing to say other than it is a triumph. But you'll discover that for yourself within 5 minutes of starting the game. The writers clearly had fun creating the script, and you'll have fun hearing it.

Portal is interesting, fun for both sophisticated and naive players, and superbly polished. It is, at the moment, the best reason to own an Xbox 360 or gaming PC, or to have a Boot Camp partition on your Mac. I can only presume that the team that created such a well crafted game is going to do great things in the future.

I can't wait.

I Like Cake Too

2007-11-21 · by psu

I originally planned to pick up The Orange Box on the strength of the Team Fortress 2 trailer videos. Here was a multiplayer game with some character, I thought. I was excited about it. The people who play games for me played a lot of the beta and seemed to love it, but then they all ended up playing the multiplayer on Steam instead of the Xbox, and then my Xbox melted. No Team Fortress for me.

Then a surprise happened. They all told me to play Portal. So when my Xbox came back I picked up the whole Orange Box to see what the fuss was about.

Note: Spoilers ahead. There are spoilers ahead, so if you have not played the game, go do that first then come back. It won't take long.

For those who don't know, The Orange Box is a collection of five games. I will now unfairly review each of the games, even though I have not played all of them yet:

  1. Half-Life 2. Played this on the Xbox 1. In retrospect, it had a great opening but my memories of the middle and late acts are now tainted with boredom. Too many physics puzzles, not enough shooting. The new version is just like the old one, right down to where all the level loads happen, but with higher resolution textures.

  2. Half-Life 2, episode 1. In Valve's crack-baby lingo, this is the first part of a sequence of sequels to Half-Life 2, not the first part of a remake or a prequel or something. I don't think anyone understands it. So far it's more of the same: too many physics puzzles, not enough good shooting. Here's a hint to all future game developers: those levels where all you can see is what the flashlight shows you and you need to shoot a lot of zombies are not fun, they suck. Stop it.

  3. Half-Life 2, episode 2. The second part of the not-prequel. Haven't started it yet. I assume it's just like episode 1, only more so.

  4. Team Fortress. I played a few games with randoms. And they sucked. Hopefully we'll be able to get a group together soon. The whole problem with multiplayer games is you need multiple players who are not douchebags to make them good. This seems to me to be a major design flaw.

Which brings me to Portal.

Everything Pete said about Portal is correct and I agree with it all. It is one of the few games I've played that wins on every dimension. The core mechanic is fun. The level design is stellar. The pacing is perfect. But my favorite part of the game is none of these things. The best part of the game is how the writing and the game actually work together instead of against each other. The game helps the writing by being short. Because the game is short, the narrative can actually fill the whole game rather than only about twenty percent of it. There are no long tedious slogs through endless collection quests to get to the next clichéd plot point.

Let me repeat for emphasis: short games are good for narrative. They allow you to actually tell an interesting story and get to the end of it before I grow tired of your repetitive combat, your boring A.I., your tedious quest structure and your frustrating bosses. Portal is one of the few games whose story elements are not completely crippled by the archaic notion that the only way to measure gaming "value" is in the wall-clock time required to finish the game.

Predictably the main complaint that the "gaming press" has levelled against Portal is that it is too short. These people are stupid. Don't listen to them. Portal is the perfect length, unlike this article, which is too long.

The writing in Portal helps the game in several ways. First, it is not about you. Second, it is not about the larger world around you. Third, it is absolutely fantastic, and fantastically presented. Like the length of the game, the writing is tightly constrained. It is also primarily focussed on one character: your tormentor, GLaDOS. She is the computer that controls the "training facility" that you are trapped in. As you play through the levels, a brilliant series of voice-only interludes and a few subtle visual clues make it clear that GLaDOS is insane.

Focusing the main story arc on GLaDOS instead of the player frees the gameplay from having to fit the narrative. That is, it allows the narrative and the gameplay to be independent while still progressing at the same rate. With the exception of a few events that happen on timers the game allows you to work through the levels at whatever speed you see fit. But your pace does not effect the pacing of the story. The little snippets of dialog in each level slowly flesh out psychosis of the main character as you finish each of the challenges. Instead of feeling awkward and strange, it feels just right. Thus, the player to figures out the game and the game's main character at the same time. It is rare that a video game manages to integrate narrative with gameplay progression this smoothly.

By the end of the game, it's clear that your task is not to escape each of the puzzle levels, but to escape, period. Even the final boss sequence (which was a nice boss fight, by the way) adds a few more humorous touches to the development of the main character. Frosting on the cake, if you will.

All of this combined together turns Portal into the best five or six hours of gaming awesome that I have experienced since the first five or six hours of Bioshock. And the best part about it was that it was not followed by 14 hours of relative tedium.

Out of the five experiences available in the Orange Box, Portal is clearly the one carrying the show. I hope developers all over the earth study the lessons of Portal well and learn to give us more of these tight, concentrated experiences. That will be a great reason to have a party. With some cake.

A Small Milestone

2007-11-26 · by psu

Today I installed Leopard on my home laptop. As usual, installing a new version of the OS broke the Xemacs build I keep around for the one thing I do with Emacs. Normally I have the fortitude to get it working again, but not tonight. In a final step away from the brain damage of Emacs as a tool to use every day, I deleted the install and will not bring it back. It turns out that for what I needed to do, I don't really need to carry Emacs around with me anyway. So it's gone.

Note: yes I know that there is a built-in version of GNU Emacs in Leopard. For reasons that are too painful and stupid to go into, it really isn't usable for this particular application.

Persephone Descending

2007-11-27 · by peterb

My experiments with homemade grenadine have paid off. First, let's talk about how I did it, then let's talk about what to do with it.

With this batch, I started with a fresh pomegranate, because I happened to have one. Having tasted it side by side with the POM brand juice, I feel confident in saying: there's absolutely no difference, just use the bottled juice. It's less work, and it will taste exactly the same. (Sometime last year I bought a bottle of R.W. Knudsen "Just Pomegranate" juice, and it tasted like iron filings and moldy socks, utterly vile and unforgivably rancid. I suppose it's possible that I just got a bad bottle, but I'm not inclined to repeat the experiment. If there are any R.W. Knudsen advocates out there willing to do a side-by-side taste test with POM, I'd love to hear your results.)

In a saucepan, over medium heat, mix one cup of pomegranate juice with one cup sugar. Stir. Heat until your trusty probe thermometer reads 230 degrees F. Remove from heat and cool, then transfer to a clean bottle for storage.

The taste is incomparably better than the "mix fresh juice with sugar and shake" version that some recommend -- deeper, richer, and more interesting. Heated to 230 you will end up with a syrup a bit thicker than Rose's, so some stirring will be required to incorporate it in whatever drinks you make.

I found that once I made it, it turned into a useful general kitchen adjunct. It matches pork and chicken very well, and I have plans afoot to make Chinese-style spare ribs using grenadine as part of the marinade. It's fruity, yet not immediately identifiable.

But the primary reason one has grenadine is for drinks. So let's review two possibilities.

The first thing I tried, straight out of the Stomping through the Savoy thread, was the Belmont Cocktail: 1/3 grenadine, 2/3 dry gin, 1 teaspoon of cream, shaken vigorously with ice. I expected this to be utterly vile, and to my surprise it was not. Neither, however, was it awesome: the gin just doesn't mesh with the grenadine (and, truth to tell, I don't love gin). So instead, I will present to you the Belmont's Cuban cousin:

Bonitamonte Cocktail

2/3 gold rum 1/3 homemade grenadine 1 teaspoon cream

Shake over ice, serve in a jelly jar.

It's a complete girly drink, but it's quite nice.

This grenadine works well in almost any drink that calls for sugar or simple syrup. With that in mind, let me present another alternative, perhaps a bit less girly:

Persephone's Old Fashioned

4 cl Rye whiskey 1 cl homemade grenadine (or less, to taste) 2 dashes angostura bitters 1 dash Fee's orange bitters

Serve on the rocks.

Enjoy!

Boycotting MacHeist

2007-11-28 · by peterb

...or "Good software is worth paying full price for."

Around this time last year a package of products was marketed and sold to the Mac community under the name "MacHeist." From a purely consumer-centric point of view, the package represented good value for money: a number of excellent apps for a bargain-basement price. What was a little bit irritating to me (and to others, such as John Gruber) was that the package was marketed as being half a celebration of indie mac development and half a charitable enterprise, when in reality the promoters raked in the mad cash for themselves, to the tune of (according to Gruber) around a half-million bucks.

Fast forward to this year. MacHeist 2 is being planned, and a number of notable Mac sites have seemingly been "hacked" by someone allegedly calling themselves "malcor". In actuality, it was a publicity stunt pulled by the MacHeist impresarios and their cronies. In the course of the stunt they maligned, explicitly or implicitly, a number of hosting companies as well as a number of software packages (perhaps most notably WordPress). The reaction from the community has been fairly negative, but the attitude of some of those participating in the hoax seems to be that they're really, really sorry that they got caught. From a purely personal standpoint, I suppose I should be glad about this: there are simply too many mac-focused news sites to read them all. Now I know which ones to avoid.

I don't seem to be alone in reaching this conclusion, either. I think it's nice to have a demonstration so stark that it goes beyond "stop reading some websites, but that others are realizing that MacHeist is something they don't want to be associated with either.

I'm against MacHeist philosophically. Not simply because the people who organize it arranged such a sophomoric publicity stunt, but because it's bad business and bad for the Mac community.

TextMate is worth 39 euros. I don't have to purchase it as part of a bundle; I don't want to purchase it as part of a bundle. I want Allen Odgaard to get the cash, not some somewhat tawdry web 1.5 promoter preying on the naivete of independent software developers.

If you're a developer, and you're thinking of participating in this year's Heist, I urge you to stop and think twice. It's (of course) your right to sign any contract you want to, but consider two issues. First, what are you saying about the value of your product by giving the revenue to someone else? If the issue is that you're having trouble marketing the product, pay a marketing guy to help you out. Second, there's more than revenue to consider, but your own name and goodwill, which in the long term is worth more than any one product. Do you want to associate that name with people whose judgment is this poor? There's an old but wise saying:

Lay down with dogs, and you'll wake up with fleas.

You can make your bed wherever you like, but from this user's pesrpective, MacHeist is a kennel.

Marketeaing

2007-11-29 · by peterb

Being something of a tea snob, I've always been fascinated by the over the counter supermarket tea market, where companies like Celestial Seasonings can sell exactly the same junk product as Lipton but, through the power of a nice box design and some flavor text, command a huge premium in price.

Today it struck me: this is how I will get rich. I will market low quality teas in fine packaging. They will all have names that are sort of vaguely sexually suggestive without being actually crude. The mad cash will roll in.

I mentioned this scheme to some friends of mine, and one thing led to another and, well -- I bet you know what's coming next.

TOP FIFTEEN VAGUELY SEXUALLY SUGGESTIVE TEA NAMES

  1. Morning Afterglow (peterb)

  2. Afternoon Delight (peterb)

  3. Hot and Bothered (rlink)

  4. Rooibush (fpereira)

  5. Keemun-a-my-house (peterb)

  6. Sweet Caress (clamen)

  7. Evening Repose (peterb)

  8. Carpe Noctem (peterb)

  9. Assam (sdavis)

  10. Pearl Gray (fpereira)

  11. Sensual-cha (psu)

  12. Rose Hips (bhudson)

  13. You-n-ann (bhudson)

  14. Ginger Honey (bhudson)

  15. Monk's Blend (bhudson)

This Old Nog

2007-12-03 · by peterb

Every year I make some homemade eggnog, which always sounds disgusting but ends up being pretty good. I've made versions with both raw, pasteurized and cooked eggs, depending on to whom it will be served. The raw egg version does taste noticeably different from the pasterurized or cooked versions, and has a thinner and more pleasant texture, but does carry a higher health risk. Life, of course, is full of tradeoffs, and this is one of them.

This year, I was doing a little research and came across a number of recipes for "George Washington's Eggnog". But something bugged me about this recipe.

It's not the taste, or the prodigious amount of alcohol, but one of the claims being made on the recipe's behalf. This recipe calls for the ingredients to be mixed and then left to sit for "at least five days" to "cure." Some commentators on the recipe claimed that this had an important health benefit, namely that it would give the alcohol time to neutralize harmful bacterial, such as salmonella, that might be in the nog.

This, it seemed to me, was ridiculous. My intuition says that a given mixture of ethyl alcohol and other materials is going to be either sanitary or not after a few minutes; it's not going to get cleaner over a period of several days. If anything, I'd expect that waiting period would serve as a growth period for any potential infections. I could imagine that the curing would make the drink taste better, but not that it would make it any healthier.

I, of course, am not a food scientist or biologist. But I know of someone who is: Shirley Corriher, author of the superb book Cookwise: The Secrets of Cooking Revealed (which everyone should own), and semi-regular guest on Alton Brown's Good Eats. I wrote to Ms. Corriher and put it to her: does the alcohol in this eggnog recipe make it safe to use raw eggs, or is it just wishful thinking? Her reply was to the point: "I've seen the "cured" eggnog recipe and though it sounds like a good thing, the alcohol is not sufficient to kill the salmonella." She suggests using pasteurized eggs from the dairy section of your supermarket instead.

With that, I wish you all well for this upcoming holiday season. Feel free to share your eggnog recipes in the space below, and let us know your tips and tricks. If you've never tried a true raw egg eggnog, I think it's worth a little risk to try it. Use the freshest and cleanest eggs you can find, and of course please don't serve it to children, pregnant women, or people who are ill or have compromised immune systems. And if you have any extra, feel free to invite me over for a cup.

Cheers!

Dear ESPN Monday Night Football

2007-12-04 · by psu

I watch too much football these days. Aside from being one of the few things that makes HDTV actually worth the trouble, I am also blessed with being able to follow two teams that are playing at a high level: The Patriots and the Steelers. Which brings me to Monday Night Football.

My beloved Patriots came within a few feet of losing their first game last night. I have nothing really to say about that. You can read about it in the papers. I do have some questions about how football games, and really all sports, are produced for television though.

  1. Why is the game on so late? Why should us poor East Coasters need to suffer until almost midnight just to watch a football game? Baseball is, of course, worse.

  2. Why is he game so long? We all know the answer to this. But it's too bad anyway. The best is how you get a 15 minute TV time out so they can get the punt teams on and off the field.

  3. Did you know that the last team to go undefeated was the 1972 Miami Dolphins? Just checking. This is an important fact to bring up in every Patriots game from now until they lose.

  4. Why did they waste what seemed like 45 minutes of my time continually talking about the tragic death of Sean Taylor while at the same time adding absolutely nothing to the content or texture of the story? Just saying "Hey! did you know Mr. Taylor was shot?" over and over again is both in poor taste and kinda boring.

  5. Did you know the Patriots might be the first team to go undefeated since the 1972 Miami Dolphins?

  6. I have to ask this again. Why do they have reporters on the field? What are these people for? The most comical part of last night's production was not the Ravens defensive coaching staff completely losing the game for their team, it was watching the wardrobe, hair, accessories, and the sheets of paper stapled to the set blow around in the 35mph wind. Here is a hint ESPN: digital compositing, look it up.

  7. Did you know that the 1972 Miami Dolphins went 17-0 in 1972?

  8. If I ever, ever, see that Flashdance car dealer commercial again, I'll have to poke my brain out of my skull with a pen knife.

  9. I wonder what Don Shula thinks of the Patriots being this close to going undefeated for the first time since the 1972 Dolphins. Oh wait. No I don't, I don't care at all.

  10. Is there a more annoying TV sports personality than Chris Berman? Oh that's right, Dick Vitale. Never mind.

Gamespot, Gerstmann, and Gratuitous Grandstanding

2007-12-05 · by peterb

I'm not going to link to any of the handwringing articles over this because I don't want to bore my readers to death. For those of you who are already following the situation, here is my take:

(1) No one who is talking actually knows why Gerstmann is no longer working at Gamespot. (2) Everyone who is talking is speculating. (3) All of the various posts people are citing that 'confirm' the rumors, don't. (4) In 2 or 3 weeks, everyone claiming that they are boycotting Gamespot because CNET eats babies and rapes puppies will be happily reading it again, and bitching that their new favorite Zelda game didn't get a high enough numeric score. Every so often someone will ask "Hey, remember Jeff Gerstmann?" and someone else will reply "No?"

But hey, for the sake of argument let's assume the most scurrilous, scandalous rumors were true, and the guy was fired for a single bad review based on an angry phone call from a cigar-chewing fat guy at Eidos. The bigger issue here is that everyone knows that nearly all "enthusiast" coverage of gaming is awful. All "enthusiast" coverage of everything is awful, whether the topic is stereos, photos, knitting, or what have you. So what's with the Captain Renault act all of a sudden? "I'm shocked, shocked to discover that there is a feedback loop between publicists promoting games and writers looking for things to write about."

If Jeff Gerstmann hadn't been fired, would you think that Gamespot's ass-kissing coverage and laudatory reviews of terrible games were any more accurate? They -- and every other gaming magazine that gives numeric scores -- have been doing this for years. If you really think this represents some sort of sea change in the magazine industry, what desert island have you been living on? The tragedy of this kerfuffle is that it prolongs the polite fiction that, were it not for Evil Publishers, game magazines would somehow be bastions of integrity. But as any freelance writer will tell you, you don't need any sort of formal system of rewards and punishments to learn that biting the hand that feeds you is an activity best left to other, more unemployed writers.

Look: in the long run, readers get the sort of writing they deserve. Gamespot's reviews are twaddle not because CNET hypothetically sacrificed one heroic editor before the altar of some shambling corporate presence, but because that's the sort of review the site's readers want.

Shooter Fatigue

2007-12-06 · by psu

I have always liked first person shooters. For a long time they were all I played. Every couple of years I'd pick up a new one and play it for a while and then go dormant again. Being slow and uncoordinated, I have never been particularly good at shooters. In online games I am particularly useless, and my main goal is usually to not be shut out.

After the last flood of major releases in 2004, the last few years have been off years for shooters. Most of the releases have been second string franchises or remakes of second string franchises, or ports of other second and third string franchises from the PC world. This year, however, has been different.

Beginning in August, with the release of Bioshock and moving right along into November, our gaming conciousness has been under almost constant assault by shooters and action games. For all the talk of this being the year of the widened demographic, the majority of new releases and new franchises this year have been in the shooter or action genres. Let's list them, shall we: *- Bioshock

Having had my Xbox melt at the height of this madness, I found myself in the middle of November trying to deal with three multiplayer shooters at the same time on the 360. I never did get back to Halo after the machine came back. Our Halo crew has long since broken up and I tend to only play it when I feel like a bit of mindless deathmatch abuse.

I picked up The Orange Box, but ended up only enjoying Portal. I tried to enjoy the two Half-Life episodes but found them to be full of the same boring physics puzzles combined with the same soulless drone-like combat sequences. In addition, I realize that Alyx is supposed to be a bold new experiment in the development of first person shooter narratives, but at this point she is mostly just creepy and gets in my way when I'm trying to navigate the mine shaft. I have long since stopped caring whether she actually lives or dies, and as a final insult I can't shoot her in the head like I could with the marines in Halo. I finally gave up after a couple of hours of episode 2 while I was lost in the Flood mothership... no wait, I was in a mine that looked just like the Flood mothership. Whatever.

I was hoping that TF2 would save the day, but it does not. First, it's obvious that this game's first love and main development target is Steam and the PC platform. There is nothing wrong with this, but the result is that the Xbox Live multiplayer is tragically crappy.

In larger matches, the lag is nearly intolerable. To make up for it, large matches with your friends are almost impossible to create because instead of stealing the lobby system from Halo, which by the way, every single multiplayer shooter should be required by law to do, the TF2 lobby is just the same crappy code from the original Xbox Counterstrike done up in cartoon colors. But it's a bit worse. Only the host of the game can invite others to the game. And, it is difficult to make any changes to the configuration of the match without just kicking everyone out and re-inviting them. The result is that whenever I decide I want to play TF2 I spend half of my time either waiting for an invite from a friend or half of my time joining and getting kicked from servers. Then, when I get in game, it's almost always so laggy I have to quit in five minutes and do the whole dance again. It's a pathetic mess.

The second issue I have with TF2 is that I suck at it, and I can't tell if it's my fault. None of the classes really work for me, and no matter how hard I try, the controls just feel a little bit "disconnected." Every weapon seems to have a little bit of a delay before it fires, or range limitations, or power limitations, or some combination of all of these issues. The whole thing strikes me as too complicated to make second nature. Even after several hours of play, I can't shake the feeling that everything is happening by accident. I cannot remember one time feeling like I actually managed to manipulate the game world to my advantage through explicit action on my part. It's always more like there is someone behind the curtain rolling dice and then shooting me in the head.

One thing I do know is the game's fault is the tedious and boring way it always respawns you in your base. On the larger maps, this means you spend more than half your time running from the base to the action, and then dying, then running from the base to the action, then dying. This makes it hard to get better because you don't get much time to practice playing the game while you are playing the game.

This is a general problem with all of the current crop of shooters. You can't practice. I would kill for these people to implement bots to practice against so I could learn the maps and get used to the controls and the feel of the weapons. In retrospect, I think this is what I liked most about the old Xbox Counterstrike. TF2 has a dire need for a deeper tutorial than the little movies that play before the maps start. The learning curve on this game seems steep and full of many humiliating deaths.

By last Friday I was ready to send the Orange Box to eBay, since it had failed to provide me with any more enjoyment after Portal. But, I might give the GWJ TF2 group one more try and see if I can find some kind of connection with this game before I give up for good.

This situation left me in a funk. Here I was, reunited with my Xbox and without a shooter to play in the middle of the biggest glut of online shooters the world has ever seen. Rescue came from an unexpected source. In a moment of weakness, I bought Call of Duty 4. You will recall that Call of Duty 2 was one of the few Xbox 360 launch titles that didn't suck. I didn't make it all the way through that game before getting tired of the setting and the general mechanics, so I was not planning to get the new game. But, people told me that multiplayer was excellent. I didn't believe them. Then I read somewhere that the lobby system was copied from Halo, which, as you know, should be required by law for every online shooter. So I bought it, and I have been saved.

At a game design level, Call of Duty 4 is not as innovative, or interesting, or distinctive as TF2. Your little drone soldiers run around maps that are mostly gray and blue and green and you target and shoot other tiny little drone soldiers from very far way lest they shoot you in the head first. On the surface, there does not seem to be much going on here that is interesting. Where Call of Duty 4 wins is execution. The lobby and matchmaking system is indeed copied from Halo, which, as you know, should be required by law. Games are quick and respawns are nicely balanced in that they let you get back into the game quickly while never putting you right next to a deadly enemy. When you die, the game shows you your death from the perspective of the player who shot you. I'm not sure if this really helps me to get better, but it does show me in a concrete way what I know I'm doing wrong in the abstract (I run in straight lines with my head up). In any case, the result is that I do have the feeling that I've been able to slowly improve.

But here is the game's most brilliant move: In every match you can collect experience points, even if you are completely useless. These eventually accumulate to the point where you unlock weapons upgrades, more interesting game types, extra abilities and all sorts of other RPG-like rewards. I think this is a stroke of minor genius. It gives the game a feeling of connectedness and progression that I've never had in a shooter. Most impressively, even though you start out as a gimped cripple, the game is carefully balanced to allow you to still make progress and obtain all the cool gear the other kids already have. I think in less capable hands, this leveling system could easily have left me at a permanent level zero, but instead I've been able to slowly make progress towards some of the shinier rewards, and I've only played a few hours during the last week.

I probably still suck, but at least now I can suck with a more powerful weapon that has an uber-auto-aiming laser sight on it. I really like it. I like it enough that I haven't even started the single player mode in this game yet. It's also the first game in a while that has taken up permanent residency in my Xbox the way Halo used to.

So, in the spirit of the retail season, I'm here to give thanks to Infinity Ward for giving me the game that has allowed me to not totally give up on the online shooter. At least not this year. I wonder if I will manage to survive until three years from now when the next flood hits.

This is Not a Game Review

2007-12-10 · by psu

I have a peculiar, but probably not particularly unique, habit. I like to read reviews of things after I have otherwise consumed them. I do this a lot with movies, music, books and other such "artistic" media. I think part of this activity stems from the engineer/dork need to search out validation for one's opinions. For example, I was once thrilled to find out that the Trader Joe's red wine that I had bought was also enjoyed by the wine critic on The Splendid Table. We are creatures of ego, we can't help it.

This is not the only reason I engage in this behavior though. The main reason is to read interesting writing about something that I enjoyed, or didn't, as the case may be. Of all of the media that I consume, what saddens me the most is how little interesting writing there is about video games.

This fact was brought into stark relief by the recent gnashing of teeth about C|Net and Gamespot. What was most upsetting about the whole blowup was that nobody seemed the last bit interested in the quality of the content under discussion.

Let's not kid ourselves. When you strip away all the pretention and self-importance, the economic interests, the difficulties of working on such huge collections of content under a time deadline and all the rest, one basic fact remains: almost all of the writing that you can find about video games is horrible. And I don't mean this in a Sturgeon's Law way, where we wink and nudge each other about how most of everything is bad. I mean that almost none of it could even survive as a term paper for a freshman writing class at the satellite campus of a second tier state university.

I have a modest collection of examples. I started playing Assassin's Creed this weekend, and managed to get enough time in to form some basic first impressions. Curious, I surfed on over Metacritic to see what the collective of Internet Game Critics had to say about the game. You can read the blurbs for yourself here.

I will now unfairly cherry pick some of the most egregiously terrible excerpts from the page above. From Gamer 2.0, we have:

Assassin’s Creed is remarkable in every aspect it performs. From the sprawling city life to the dual-vision storyline, everything blends together to offer one of the most complete and satisfying experiences so far this year.

Deeko says:

Assassin's Creed is one of those games that could be considered for the "games as art" debate. A lot of times you'll stop for a second and just stare in awe at how beautiful and graceful the game is. The game is by no means perfect, but it does start to head into the right direction that most sandbox games should.

Meanwhile, Daily Game opines:

The open-world genre has never looked so good, but it could've played a bit more realistically given the subject matter. A few fewer Biblical references would've been nice, too.

Even the stuff that would not have failed in freshman english class has its problems. Over at Gamecritics, we find a review that takes hundreds and hundreds of words to tell us that the reviewer found the game boring and repetitive. Then, as if to emphasize his bitter contrarian nature, he trots out that favorite clichéd phrase of death: tech demo.

Everything except Altair's athletics feels underdeveloped and painfully shallow, making the end result an overhyped attempt to recoup the development costs for something that's little more than an extended tech demo.

I would like to pass a law that forbids the use of the phrase tech demo in any writing about games.

Almost all of the writing on this game follows the same general patterns:

All in all, a depressing collection of mediocrity. But, I did find some better writing about the game. First, buried in the inside pages of the New York Times, there are a few dozen tightly chosen words that, even though they are only one third of the text of the whole article, have more to say about the game than anything you can find on the Metacritic page. Second, Gamers With Jobs wins creativity points for framing their complaints as a list of lighthearted bug reports and patch requests to the developers. Finally, Yahtzee maintains his high level of entertainment value, and his status as the best thing the Escapist ever accidently found and published.

I think each of these pieces illustrate what is missing from almost all of the enthusiast press in video games: creative and interesting ideas about video games and a professional level of execution on those ideas.

Of course, we here at Tea Leaves, and I, psu, in particular, fall into this same trap. Here is how I write a new page about some game I am playing:

  1. First, write some pithy semi-personal statement about a strange and annoying habit I have.

  2. Tie this habit somehow to the item under review. Try and describe how the game plays.

  3. Complain a lot.

  4. Say something nice. Then write some self-centered pithy filler.

  5. Make fun of hardcore fanboys.

  6. Tie it up with a pithy ending that is hopefully insulting to hardcore fanboys.

It almost writes itself. Of course, we here at Tea Leaves are just a part time weblog. I write most of this stuff while dinner is on the stove because I can't play Halo while the kid is awake. Under no circumstances would I presume to put up my writing as anything that could survive in a real commercial marketplace. But there is one thing that I do try to do consistently, and even succeed at occasionally: I try to write something about the game that is more interesting than how they used shaders in DirectX 10 to do the water effects.

This happens too rarely in the enthusiast press about video games. The writing is rarely creative, and when does strive for a higher level it is often poorly executed. Which brings me back to the Gerstmann mess. Over at Newsweek, a publication that you would think would know how to hire a competent writer, we have this guy N'Gai Croal going off on how the poor writers are again being crushed and enslaved in the sewers by the evil monied interests. Actually, I'm not sure what he's talking about because I can't follow his writing for more than a couple of paragraphs. All of the shiny hip blinds my ability to understand the text. No that's not it, it's because the writing is completely incomprehensible. If I were the interest behind his money I'd suggest he find a new editor, or figure out where the delete key is on his keyboard.

The depressing conclusion that I reach from all of this is that there must be no market that is wiling to pay cash for mature and intelligent writing about video games. The inevitable truth is that the writing is the way it is because that's how gamers want it. I'd like to be optimistic and think that within my lifetime the medium will have matured to the point where it can actually support professional and creative criticism. But I'm not that young anymore, so I'm not holding my breath.

Descending Further Into the Item World

2007-12-13 · by peterb

I visited The Exchange last night, and ended up walking out with two other Nippon Ichi games, La Pucelle Tactics and Rhapsody, A Musical Adventure.

I am so very doomed.

An Ongoing Sickness

2007-12-17 · by peterb

...and now I've picked up Disgaea 2 via eBay.

STOP ME BEFORE I BUY AGAIN.

Cheese With My Whine: Peggle for Mac

2007-12-20 · by peterb

Karl Hendricks, a Pittsburgh indie-rock local legend, released an EP in the early 90's called I Hate This Party which perfectly encapsulated teen angst, the feeling of simply not understanding the things that other people like to do, and the shame that can sometime go along with it.

party.jpg

I hate this party. I hate all your friends. I hate feeling stupid. I always do in the end.

This, not to put too fine a point on it, is how I feel when people talk about what a superlatively awesome time they are having playing Popcap's pachinko-on-crack game Peggle.

Peggle -- which, along with its disturbingly named stablemate Chuzzle was just released for MacOS X-- is a game that combines simple game mechanics with beautiful, compelling production values. This is par for the PopCap course: everything they release has a certain polish, a certain sheen that shows a fanatical attention to detail. That's a good thing.

The graphic and sound design sensibility in Peggle closely mirrors that of Bookworm Adventures, a game I loved to the point of obsession. The game itself is simple and easy to understand: it is Pachinko merged with Breakout. You shoot balls into a field full of pegs. The ball bounces amongst the pegs, which earns points. After each ball falls off the bottom of the playfield, the pegs that it hit disappear. Clear all of the pegs from the board and you advance to the next level; use up all your chances, and the game ends.

Here's a video demonstrating some of the gameplay:

Popcap's attention to detail and production values has been rewarded. Everyone loves Peggle. Everyone. You love Peggle. Lorien loves Peggle. For crying out loud, even Yahtzee loves Peggle. Everyone in the entire world loves Peggle and, probably, wants to go to the prom with it. Everyone except me.

Why don't I love Peggle? My theory is: I am a bad, bad person.

[peggle1.jpg

Peggle](http://wptest.tleaves.com/wp-content/uploads/2007/12/peggle1.jpg "peggle1.jpg")

Well, perhaps there's another reason. Peggle is a game of chance. Once you've mastered the basic rules of "where should I send the first shot," whether you win a given board or not is largely a question of luck. This means that I don't always win. As we've already established, I'm the sort of player who would rather reload a poorly designed strategy game rather than accept the permanent loss of a character who has much importance as a piece of moldy cheese. So Peggle makes me feel inadequate, meaning that because I can't predict where a ball is going to carom after hitting 30 bumpers, I feel like a moron. In other words, to channel the spirit of the girl you had a crush on in 8th grade: "Oh, Peggle, it's not you, it's me." The only modification to Peggle's design that would make me truly happy would be if I could replace the yawning chasm at the bottom of the game board with a springy trampoline, which would cause the first ball fired to continue to carom around until, eventually, it cleared the board, giving me the palpable feeling that I am a trigonometric genius (memo to PopCap: my consulting rates are quite reasonable. Let's chat -- I want to pitch you my idea for a color-matching game where all the tiles are red.).

If making brilliant beautiful simple games that I don't like wasn't already unfair enough, PopCap is making things worse by selling their individual download games for half price until January 3rd. So if you're curious to see just how removed from the zeitgeist I truly am, you can pick up Peggle for $9.97 at the moment, or, in other words, effectively for free. Even though I already have a license for the Windows edition, I might buy the Mac version solely to make a political statement. Then I can complain about how it makes me feel dumb without having to run Parallels or Boot Camp. And who knows, perhaps that will encourage them to port Bookworm Adventures, also.

Disclosure statement: Popcap graciously provided me with a review copy of Peggle.

Update: My contact at PopCap takes serious issue with my claim that Peggle is largely luck, and is staging an intervention by sending me remedial courses in Peggling. Perhaps there is hope for me yet.

Dwarf Fortress, Now in 3D ... sort of.

2007-12-26 · by peterb

I've made no secret of my love for Bay 12 Games' Dwarf Fortress. I've returned to it this holiday season only to find there's been a significant change: the game is now 3D.

It's still a roguelike, mind you. But the environments now encompass a huge number of z-levels, which you can step through with the < and > keys.

I'm of two minds about this development. On the positive side, it brings a lot of freshness and variety to the game, and opens up a lot of interesting possibilities, particularly with respect to moving water and magma about. On the other hand, the user interface of Dwarf Fortress was already fairly punishingly bad, and this isn't helping.

Perhaps a more significant change is that sites are more varied now. In previous versions of the game, every mountain was (essentially) guaranteed to have an underground river, a chasm, and a magma river. Now, you have a lot more flexibility. You can build your settlement on a mountain, or the plains (digging underneath the surface, naturally), or a glacier, or on the shore. It's entirely possible to choose a site with no magma (or, as I have discovered in my current game, no unfrozen running water. Talk about a challenge).

For added niftiness, someone has created a 3D visualizer for Dwarf Fortress maps.

I'm currently playing it on my Mac via codeweavers' CrossOver, and it works great. The author of the game, Tarn Adams, is currently trying to get it working under MacOS X natively. I can't wait.

The Assassin Prince of Metal Splinter Cell Gear in Persia

2007-12-27 · by psu

At my request, my co-writer and game pusher peterb used his Gamefly powers to obtain Assassin's Creed for the Xbox 360 the other week. I've spent a couple of weeks playing it in between my long sessions of getting repeatedly shot in the head playing Call of Duty 4. To say that Assassin's Creed is a mixed bag does not really do the game justice. After all, the game has far loftier goals than usual. So, I can't say that my impressions of the game are merely mixed. No, Assassin's Creed is more like an exquisitely crafted ceramic dish that someone has covered with dog shit. It is by far the most finely crafted crappy game I've played.

First the good stuff. Everything about the game is big. The areas are huge and seamless. You can spend a lot of time in the game climbing up on high towers and looking down at the city or forest below you, and then set off and walk there. These large areas are filled with hundreds of NPCs, both friendly and hostile. Your goal as the main character is the game is to walk through these cities, among these people and complete a set of assassinations to restore your status in the order of the Assassins. In this capacity you have dozens of bad-ass abilities that encompass combat, stealth, thievery, eavesdropping and running, jumping, and climbing over anything that doesn't move.

By far the best part of the game is running around the cities and climbing on things. Your little puppet runs up walls, grabs on to the tiniest crevices like Spiderman in a white robe. When you get to the top you are treated to a sweeping spinning panoramic shot of everything around you. You can just sit and stare at it all and marvel at the work of hundreds of designers, artists, 3-d modelers, motion capture technicians and animation experts. They have all done their work impeccably. Everything from design and rendering of the cities to the animation of the main character are as completely realized as anything I've seen in a video game. And this fact is most clear when you are sitting at the top of one of these eagle-eye viewpoints. Then you can hit a few buttons on the controller and dive head first into a conveniently placed pile of straw.

At this point, the part of your consciousness responsible for suspension of disbelief has a little spasm, and that's not the last time this will happen. Over and over again Assassin's Creed makes you want to bury yourself in its premise, only to forcibly tear you out again by reminding you that you are playing an Ubisoft stealth game. Here the checklist:

  1. Only 5 NPCs with only 4 lines of dialog each. Here they replaced "I must be seeing things in the shadows!" with "Die! Infidel!".

  2. Complicated context sensitive controls that often leave you jumping off of a wall instead of continuing to climb upwards. I think this is more my problem than the game's problem though.

  3. Although the animations for "counter-attack" kills and assassinations are fantastic, the sword-play still feels a bit disconnected and sloppy to me. I probably just suck.

  4. Stupid A.I. Guards will go into a red alert if you walk past them at the wrong speed. But, you can walk down the street and leave a trail of beggar corpses and no one bats an eye. This is a great feature beause it means you get to watch the fantastic assassination animation over and over again.

  5. Finally, there is the Metal Gear Solid cardboard box gambit. Given that your stealth cover can be broken just by walking past the wrong person at the wrong speed, you have to have a way to reset the perceptual state of the guards. In Assassin's Creed you do this by climbing up on the roof of a building and jumping into a cardboard box cabana or a handy pile of straw, at which time everything resets.

Fans of Metal Gear will recognize this mechanic as a time honored way of surviving an alarm state when guiding Solid Snake through an enemy military installation.

I find this gambit more annoying in Creed than in the Metal Gear games because Ubisoft wants you to take the setting and premise of the game seriously, whereas I don't think anyone on Earth really cares if you believe what is going on in the Metal Gear games.

For me, these problems make performing the core missions of the game almost the opposite of fun. Each of the missions involves some minimum amount of "investigation" time, by which they actually mean a lot of busywork that isn't climbing cool buildings. Then you track down the victim, watch a long cut scene, put a knife in him, watch another long cut scene, and then if you weren't lucky you get chased by a dozen guards screaming "You won't get away from me!" or "You can't run forever!" or "Die! Infidel!" for about 15 minutes until you finally manage to jump into a cardboard box.

I'd rather just walk around the cities and stealth-assassinate all those annoying beggars who are constantly asking me for "Just one more coin!?!?!?". But you have to do the missions to open up more world to run around in. Worse, all the new areas are just like the old areas anyway, and they are filled with the same 5 NPCs with the same 4 lines of dialog. The overall effect is to convince present you with a dead world populatd by zombies in which there is nothing at all interesting to do.

Trying to fight my way through this, I managed to complete three or four missions and convince myself that I was having an OK time. I was trying to give Ubisoft credit for at least trying something new. Then I ran into a guy who wanted me to collect 20 widgets in three minutes in order to get to the next plot point. I took one shot at it, but ran into a guard the wrong way and had half the city chasing me screaming one of three lines of dialog. At this point, I turned the Xbox off and put the disk back in the Gamefly envelope.

I think the Penny Arcade defense of this game had it right. If you buy this game and play it once a week for a couple of hours and get one or two tasks done per session, I think the game would be enjoyable. In small doses over a long period of time, the gaping holes in the game's world are not as obvious because you shield yourself from all of the crippling repetition. Unfortunately, this means I'll never get to the end of this game. First, I feel like I should give the Gamefly disk back to peterb in a reasonable amount of time, so I can't just set the game on the shelf and get back to it once in a while. Second, even if I were to pick up a cheap copy of the game later, some other shiny distraction will inevitably keep my from actually playing the game. It will join the pile on that high shelf of games I tell myself I will play, but which I should really sell on Ebay.

As much as I want to enjoy the result of what was obviously thousands of hours hard work by hundreds of people, there just isn't enough there to keep me going. This makes me sad, so I guess I'll go get shot in the head some more to make me feel better.

Random Thoughts at the End of the Year

2007-12-31 · by psu

As is traditional at this time of year, our brain capacity has been severely limited by a all the blood rushing to our stomachs. I can't really remember what I was doing a week ago, much less a year ago. Still, here are a few thoughts that I can manage to locate in the fog.

Pittsburgh Food Events of the Year

The beginning of this year saw the sad loss of one of the iconic food locations in Pittsburgh. But, on the bright side, we've gained a lot too. First, there was the addition of the Penn Avenue Fish Company to the Strip. Then, the latter part of the year saw two new places open that we can only hope will endure: Mio Kitchen and Legume. These two places instantly join my list of local favorites. In addition, a small miracle has happened over at the Post Gazette in that they appear to have finally hired a restaurant critic, one China Millman, who is worth reading, and not only because she agrees with me all the time.

Game System Secret Shame of the Year

So here is the thing. Nintendo is kicking ass. They own the world. The DS and the Wii are selling at PS2-like rates. But, when push comes to shove what do I spend most of my time playing? PSP and PS2 games. While I respect and acknowledge the brilliance and care that goes into the Nintendo titles, they just don't connect with me, especially on the DS. Instead, I find myself on the couch with Disgaea or MLB 07, happily poking away at my d-pad and face buttons, instead of whatever innovative yet crappy control scheme Nintendo has dreamed up. I always knew I was a bad person for not liking Zelda... but it turns out it's all much worse than I had let on.

Sports Convergence of the Year

Red Sox, Patriots, Celtics. Who would have imagined it.

Smug Assholes of the Year

The 1972 Miami Dolphins. Hey! Did you know they were the last team to go undefeated in the NFL?

Technological Non-Convergence of the Year

Broadcast television continued its slow slide towards terminal crappiness. It's difficult for me to imagine a more byzantine, overengineered, complex maze of interdependent customer service nightmares than setting up a modern television. And it just gets worse every year.

Maybe the Best Games I Played of the Year

In order of confidence: Portal, Final Fantasy 12, Bioshock, Ratchet and Clank Future, Mario Galaxy, Rock Band, Call of Duty 4, Disgaea PSP. Yes I know FF12 was from last year. I played it this year.

Most Infuriating Media Story of the Year

The "coverage" of the so-called "Presidential" "Campaign". This has gotten so bad that I turn the radio off the instant I hear any of the normal NPR political reporters come on. I don't understand who they think gives a shit about this now, but they are pretty sure about it. Personally, I think we should get rid of the entire primary system and go back to smoke-filled rooms. At least then I don't have to hear about it until the conventions.

Kitchen Appliance of the Year

I got a toaster for Christmas. It has a dial, one button, and a lever on it. You push the lever, it makes toast. It replaces a ridiculous "toaster oven" which, I'm sure, was really good at something, but took ten minutes to make a under-toasted piece of crap that you then could not retrieve from its innards without burning the tops of your hands.

Yes, this is even more exciting than the coffee machine.

Best Things I Learned How To Cook this Year

A decent cappuccino, and that tomato sauce.

Interweb Miracle of the Year

Karen and I bought a drum kit for a certain small child this Christmas. We then found ourselves in our living room with three or four dozen drum kit parts strewn on the floor and no idea how they were supposed to fit together. And no manual. The kit came with no instructions.

So to the nets we went, and in a true Christmas miracle, we found a video on YouTube that explained everything. Thank you Aaron Swearingen at World Music Supply, whoever you are. Truly this is a wonderous age in which to be alive.

The Grinch Who Stole New Years' Eve

2007-12-31 · by peterb

Y'know, I pretty much stay awake until 1 or 2 am every night of the year. Every single night. But something about the hype and circumstance surrounding New Years' Eve makes me want to go to sleep at 7:30.

Bah, humbug.

Pot Sticker Update

2008-01-01 · by psu

Recently my pot stickers have been bothering me. It was a texture problem. The filling tasted right, but was not solid enough. Ideally the filling of each dumpling is an independent little meatball that just happens to be sitting inside the doughy skin. Mine were not like this, they were sandy and insubstantial. Clearly I had to ask my mom what was going on.

So when my parents visited over Christmas this year, we investigated my methods, going over each step of the process. It turned out that the problem is outlined in my original post on this subject, here:

  1. Put some cabbage into cheese cloth and squeeeeze as much liquid out of it as you can. This is critical. Keep the juice in a bowl. Salting the cabbage a bit will draw out the moisture and make this easier. Repeat this until you have worked through all the chopped cabbage.

When you have all the cabbage squozed, and you are ready to start filling, start mixing the cabbage into the pork. The mixture will dry up a bit. Add a couple of tablespoons of the cabbage juice back into the pork.

We had been chopping the cabbage too small, but that was not the main issue. The main issue was adding the cabbage juice and the cabbage at the same time. You don't want to do this because the liquid will not have time to be absorbed by the meat and the filling will be too wet. You want to add the cabbage juice to the original soy sauce marinade and then make sure the pork sits long enough to soak it up. Let it sit in the fridge this way for a while, at least half an hour or so. If you do this, then the pork will not be too wet when you fill the dumplings and will hold together better after cooking.

Using less cabbage and cooking the meat a bit longer also helps. But we tend to prefer more cabbage than less. So it's a tradeoff.

Happy new year.

Assassin's Creed Picoreview

2008-01-03 · by peterb

It's awesome, except for how it sucks.

And Now the News

2008-01-04 · by psu

In a special report, here is a summary of the breaking news over the past few days:

Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Obama Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Edwards Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Money Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Clinton Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Huckabee Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Romney Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa Iowa

Can someone please explain to me why every few years the "news" people engage in this collective mutual masturbatory spoogefest over the opinions of a couple of hundred thousand people in the middle of nowhere?

We now return to our regularly scheduled weblog.

Beautiful, Sharp, and Mine

2008-01-07 · by peterb

Thanks to the generosity of my dad, I now own a really nice chef's knife, a Kumagoro 210mm gyuto.

kumagoro

Gyuto - "Cow knife"

Dad decided to give me the gift of a sharp cooking implement for my birthday, on the condition that I research it and pick it myself. I suspect this was his own way of defusing his own lust for an ever-increasing number of knives.

There are a number of internet forums (of course!) discussing cooking knives, knife sharpening techniques, and accessories. At knifeforums.com you'll meet any number of folks whose passion for collecting knives is exceeded only by their passion for talking about them. The forums at egullet.com are equally helpful.

Particularly useful in my search was the knives section of cookingforengineers.com, although I ended up going off their list; I wanted a "wa" style handle, and I'm a total sucker for the hammer finish on the Kumagoro. I was also intrigued (read: hypnotized) by the Damascus layers on the Hattori HD, but the particular model was want is out of stock.

The common wisdom is that European style knives have a symmetrical bevel, or edge, whereas Asian knives often have an asymmetrical, or sometimes just a single bevel. For this knife, I selected a Japanese-made knife that (apart from the handle) still has a very European form factor. I've been cooking with a modest Henckels set for years, and don't want to throw my technique out the window. For my next knife – as if there's any question that I'm getting another? – I'm considering something with an assymetrical bevel. I'm also thinking about the Shun Santoku that Alton Brown recommends.

There are those, including the New York Times, who claim that the only knife you need is a cleaver, but this just doesn't seem to work out for me. I'm used to chef's knives. And it has to be an 8" chef's knife. 10" knives are for poseurs.

Yes, I'm joking. What knife one uses is, in the end, largely a matter of personal taste. But I am never one to pass up the opportunity to engage in overly detailed discussion on the minutiae of whatever is obsessing me at the moment. So with that in mind, let me throw this open to the floor. What's your favorite knife? What are you using in your kitchen? What, if money was no object, would you like to be using?

Bonne cuisine!

Hot Buttered Rum Triumphant

2008-01-09 · by peterb

I wrote, some years ago, an article about rum and its many uses. In it, I mentioned that I don't understand hot buttered rum, because I've never found a recipe for it that resulted in something even remotely drinkable.

Nat provided me with a recipe at the time, but it just didn't work for me somehow. This week, however, he lent me a copy of David Wondrich's awesome book Imbibe! From Absinthe Cocktail To Whiskey Smash, A Saulte In Stories And Drinks To "Professor" Jerry Thomas, Pioneer of the American Bar. While flipping through, I saw his recipe for hot buttered rum. "Worth a shot," I muttered to myself.

It's fantastic.

The recipe is simplicity itself:

  • 1 teaspoonful of sugar
  • 1 Wine-glass [2 oz] of Jamaica Rum
  • 1 Teaspoonful of spices (allspice and cloves)
  • 1 piece of butter as large as half of a chestnut

Fill tumbler with [3-4 oz] hot water.

I've tried to make this drink tens of times based on various internet recipes, and it's clear that it's one of those alchemical mixtures where getting the proportions even a little wrong results in something horrifying. This recipe works. It's balanced, has a nice texture, and is delicious. Thanks to David Wondrich, Jerry Thomas, and Nat for setting me straight.

I'll be picking up my copy of Imbibe! this week. It's a wonderful reference, and the historical discussion of the evolution of the cocktail from the protoplasmic punch through slings, fizzes, and cocktails makes for fascinating reading.

If you buy the book via the Amazon link above, Tea Leaves gets a kickback, which I promise we will spend only on booze. That's how dedicated we are to you, our readers.

Since I'm discussing one hot drink here, let me mention another: oyawari. Simply hot whiskey and water (itself mentioned in Wondrich's book), you can read step by step instructions on how to make it at one of my favorite liquor-related blogs, Nonjatta. I read Nonjatta to torture myself, since of all the hundreds upon hundreds of fine Japanese whiskeys they discuss, only one is available in the United States. But distance lends enchantment, and someday, perhaps, the global economy will come to my rescue.

The Shopping Virus

2008-01-14 · by psu

Tonight I am upset with my co-writer, although it's not really his fault. It all started when we had an innocent conversation over lunch where peterb told me his dad was going to buy him a cooking knife for his birthday. Until that point and time, I had thought about cooking knives perhaps three times in the last fifteen years, and each time it was to plot how to make my friend Erik sharpen my knives for me. For these fifteen years, I have used a nice 8 inch chef's knife for everything in the kitchen, and it has always performed well without complaint. There is arguably nothing in this world I need less than another knife.

But, I had contracted the shopping virus from Pete, so now I am doomed to shop until it either dissipates on its own or I buy a nice Shun Classic Nakiri that I don't need.

And I'm not the only one he got either. At least one other guy at work saw Pete's post and the only way he could make himself stop reading the knife forums was to buy two knives. Apparently some of our other readers had this reaction too. The shopping virus propagates easily from dork to dork. The average dork is already inclined to shop for things he doesn't really want or need, and all it takes to push him over the edge is for someone he trusts to put a shiny picture and some effusive text in front of his face.

This is how I found myself surfing around trying to figure out whether a Nakiri is a single bevel or double bevel knife, and trying to find one with a nice classic style round handle and that almost painfully shiny "Damascus" finish. I mean, just go look at this knife porn and tell me you can resist it.

As in most aspects of modern life, the Internet, makes this worse. The Internet, as we have seen before harnesses and amplifies the power of the dork hivemind into a force of overwhelming power. While they tell you that it is the most powerful information repository that our civilization has ever seen, the truth is that the whole thing is about collecting the shopping virus into various concentrated areas and infecting the innocent passer-by. While they tell you that what they are building are rich online communities for people that have common interests to gather and share knowledge, it's really all about kibitzing and a shared shopping experience. This is true across the spectrum of dork and non-dork interests. Pick any large scale "community" web site (photo.net, the knife forums, Gamers with Jobs) and what you will find there are people all interested in buying the same stuff. Why do you think Microsoft is so hot to push Xbox Live down your throat? So you are impelled to buy the same game as all of your online friends at the same time so you can "meet up" online for the multiplayer. Why do you think Amazon is so hot to constantly build and rebuild their "community" features? It's all connected.

So I tried to resist but failed. The final straw was when my mom noticed that the Chinese cleaver I hardly ever use, but keep around because I've had it since I was a kid, was in fact worn out. Now I could convince myself that I "needed" a replacement Then I saw one of the Shun Classic knives at a store, and it was shiny and beautiful and just the right size. And then my doom was upon me. It's probably only a matter of time.

But, on the bright side, at least I can show the knife to Pete. He's been bugging me about trying it if I buy one, ya know, just to see what it's like.

Please, God, Don't Let Me See Etna Naked

2008-01-15 · by peterb

My co-writer may complain bitterly that I infected him with the shopping virus, but from my perspective, turnabout is fair play. I have spent the past month mostly ignoring any game that doesn't have "Disgaea" in its title, and it's all his fault.

I finished the main storyline of the first Disgaea game, and then switched to the second game. It's time to talk about it a bit. But first, let me tell you a little something I've noticed about our web traffic. A few months ago I wrote a fairly in-depth and critical review of Persona 3 called Ferris Bueller's Day Offing Himself. Tweaking the nose of the world a little bit, I gave the article the slug "Persona 3 Hentai", because of a throwaway comment late in the review.

That article has inspired more comments than any other in recent memory. Much of that article is from people who disagree with my review. Nearly all of that traffic, including the comments from people telling me that the save system is perfectly reasonable because "You can [save the game] within 30 minutes if you run past the enemies[...]" comes from people who followed the cheesecake picture from a certain search engine's image search.

[etna-hentai

Yes, I'm bad.](http://wptest.tleaves.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/normal_9b57b6373290b87eace1054f435b01e8saha-makai.jpg "etna-hentai")

So because of the immense amusement value provided by this steady stream of passers-by, let's just take a moment to admire this cheesecake image of semi-protagonist Etna. There. Now that that's out of the way, let's talk a bit about Disgaea 2.

On a purely technical level, it is a "better game" than its progenitor (which I initially discussed last month). The same basic turn-based game mechanics from Disgaea: Hour of Darkness are carried forward, but everything has been supercharged to be even more ridiculous. Characters level up faster. There are more optional areas and "extra stages," and new mechanics have been piled on top of the old ones. I'm nearly done with the main story, and it is already apparent to me that this only covers perhaps a tenth of what the game has to offer. You could play Disgaea 2 for a year and still not have time for anything else.

And yet...and yet. There's something about Disgaea 2 that leaves me a bit cold compared to Hour of Darkness. I don't like the story quite as much, or the characters, and somehow the additional brightness and sharpness of the rendering has the completely unintuitive side effect of making it harder for me to see what I'm doing. I don't quite know how to quantify this: taken individually, each element of the game looks better. But when they're all put on the screen at once, my eyes simply slide off of them, like a patient's body rejecting an organ transplant. This might simply be because I had been playing Disgaea 1 for several weeks, but I'd think if that was the case I'd have adjusted by now. I haven't. Parts of the game, particularly the "birthday cake levels" in the item world, are so unwatchable to me that I just want to finish them as quickly as possible, and then avoid ever having to see them again.

Counterbalancing this is a very attractive truth: Disgaea 2 is, in some ways, the anti-Fire Emblem. It's a turn-based strategy game that very, very explicitly allows you to choose exactly how difficult your next battle or set of battles will be (Literally. Don't think a given map is challenging enough? Visit the Dark Assembly and pass a "Stronger Enemies" bill.) Apart from the somewhat inconvenient save system -- you can't save while in a battle -- they nailed nearly every aspect of what makes games of this type addictive. Fun character design, challenging strategic gameplay, and a seemingly limitless ability to increase R. It turns out I'm willing to forgive a lot (including the ugly visuals) in return for those virtues.

In conclusion: hey, Pete, you should totally buy that Hattori HD Damascus Santoku. Buy two. They're worth it!

The New Iron Chef

2008-01-18 · by peterb

I'm not too much for spreading around YouTube memes, but I can't let this one go without comment. It has to be seen to be believed.

The missing context is that the star of the show, "Ramon Razor Hard Gay", is actually a fairly well known comedian and professional wrestler. So that makes it all OK and not at all sick.

I think.

Building a Better Grasshopper

2008-01-21 · by peterb

The grasshopper is a classic sweet cocktail that, typically, sucks. If you order it at a bar, you'll get a concoction made from bad green creme de menthe, worse white creme de cacao, and cream or half and half. It will be undrinkably sweet, but to make up for being too sweet it will also taste bad.

The mystifying thing about the grasshopper is that it should be good. Chocolate and mint is a great combination. So we here at Tea Leaves have come up with an alternative recipe that is, we think, infinitely better.

Ingredients:

Put all ingredients in a cocktail shaker with lots of ice and shake vigorously for 30 seconds. Pour and serve. You'll end up with something that looks like cocoa, but tastes like a mint sundae. This, it turns out, is not a bad thing.

The goal here was to avoid using crème de cacao, which is always, under all circumstances, disgusting. When I conceived of using cocoa powder as a replacement, I was fairly sure that it couldn't possibly work. "The cocoa powder won't dissolve," I thought, "it'll be all grainy, and if it does dissolve it will just precipitate right out." At least in my test run tonight, that didn't happen. The texture was pleasantly thick without being sludgy or grainy. As for precipitation, all I can say we ended up drinking this so quickly that it wasn't a problem. You will end up with a residue on the glass which could, I guess, offend the delicate sensibilities of your friends.

If that happens, you need new friends.

Enjoy.

In Libris

2008-01-22 · by peterb

I've contributed a chapter to an upcoming book, ''Computer Games as a Sociocultural Phenomenon: Games Without Frontiers - War Without Tears'', edited by Andreas Jahn-Sudmann and Ralf Stockmann. The book can be ordered directly from the publisher, or you can pre-order it from Amazon.

My chapter is titled "There and Back Again: Reuse, Signifiers, and Consistency in Created Game Spaces", and builds on some ideas you've seen on this very weblog. As for the fancy title, well...just call me Umberto.

Are You Going to Wear That?

2008-01-28 · by psu

Long time readers of our humble writings will recall that we have no love for the Metal Gear Solid games. Pete says, and he is not wrong, that the games implement gameplay systems that are actively hostile towards the player and he doesn't have time to play games designed by people who hate him. A couple of years ago, I had tried and given up on Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence for that exact reason. Then, while scanning my pile of old games looking for something to play after the holiday rush, I found I wanted to give the game another chance to see if what I liked about the game might triumph over what I hated this time. As it turned out, this is exactly what happened.

Playing the game again, I found myself confronted by the same evidence that Kojima hates me. Even with the new third person camera, the game is archaically difficult to control. I compensated for this by playing on Easy and either sniping or stabbing everyone to death as I traveled from area to area.

As the game progressed, I began to remember what I liked about it. In my mind, what makes Metal Gear fun is that in its design and construction it is always aware that it is just a game and it makes this clear to you too. The game makes almost no effort to integrate the game and the story. In the story, all the characters move smoothly and with great agility. They juggle revolvers, shoot enemies using ricochets and utilize various martial arts with great expertise. In the game itself, Snake doesn't act coordinated enough to hold his pants, stand, and piss at the same time. He runs around hunched over with his arms folded up, so his hands sit near his face. Like a squirrel cracking open a nut.

The game is also full of "systems" that don't make any logical sense. The surgery system comes to mind. The field surgery menu is like a deconstructed health pack. You hit A on top of the various items and your injuries magically go away. You can even cure yourself while under attack by hostiles, as if you could hunker down behind a rock and extract a bullet from your shoulder and then get right back into the fight.

Many players find this sort of thing unforgivable, but I found that in my second time through the game I was willing to embrace the game's quirky design sense. I like it because it goes against the so called "no-crates" doctrine that dictates that the highest possible goal in the design of a game is to try and create an experience that doesn't feel like a game at all. Rather, you hear designers go on and on about how they will completely integrate gameplay and narrative, or how they will build a "living" world full of freedom and emergent gameplay. I'm tired of slogging through dead living worlds and boring emergent gameplay. If I want that I'll play Madden.

Metal Gear is refreshing because it throws these ideas out the window and gives you a game to play on the one hand, and a movie to watch on the other. Never mind that the gameplay is stunted and hateful and that the movie makes no sense and has bad voice acting. At least they are doing something different. In the end, rather than giving up on the game this time, I just let the incongruousness flow over me. I turned off my brain, gloried in the over the top B-movie stinky cheeseball cut scene collection.

My change of heart about Metal Gear illustrates an obvious point about critical writing that is too often ignored by the video game industry. The point is that a good critique should combine objective observations (e.g. you cannot aim your gun and walk at the same time) and subjective conclusions (e.g. Kojima hates me). In addition, it should be possible to come to different conclusions about a game even given the same objective observations about how the game plays.

My other recent experience with this idea came when my buddy tilton called me out for unfairly bashing Half-Life 2. I have generally found the Half-Life 2 series to be faithful to the elements that made the first game great, but for some reason the new games just don't connect with me. I find it hard to care about the HL2 world and its characters, and I get bogged down in the tedium of it all. Interestingly, tilton feels the same way about a game I love: Halo. When I went to beat him up about what a gay lamer he is, it turned out we agree almost completely about how the games work in terms of combat, overall game design, and production values. These are objectively observable facts. Where we differ is what we conclude from observing these facts: I'd rather be in the Halo world, tilton would rather be fighting the Combine. I already knew he was a freak anyway, since all he really plays is WoW.

Ultimately, I think too much critical writing about video games is wedded to the idea that game reviews be an objective evaluation of the game as a commodity. No critical evaluation of anything is completely objective, and setting up an expectation of objectivity serves no useful purpose. In addition, too many consumers of video game writing expect reviews to be nothing but a feature checklist and a score. The result is that most writing about games tends to read like advertising copy from a catalog with endless droning about graphics engines, sound design, normal maps and texture resolution.

What we should be looking for is writing that precisely describes the experience of playing a game in a consistent and predictable voice. From these objective observations, the game review can then veer off into the land of creative opinion. This is something that Zero Punctuation does extremely well. In fact, his reviews work at multiple levels in parallel, combining little animations that both illustrate and make fun of gameplay that he doesn't like with spoken text that eviscerates the crappy game design all at the same time. Yahtzee constantly makes me jealous because he works at a level that I will never achieve, and I hate him for it. Pete told me that he hates him too. But we were both kidding.

In the end, I have come full circle back to the same old complaint I always have about video game writing. Most of it is bad, and most of the rest is boring. I would like to see more game writing that is willing to throw off the chains of objectivity and take a strong point of view. Maybe go out on a limb and not discuss the quality of the physics engine just once. Who knows, maybe then even professional reviewers will be allowed to change their minds once in a while and embrace a game that they once gave up on. Why should I have all the fun.

Guns, Germans, and Steel

2008-01-29 · by peterb

Pity the PC (or Mac) gamer. We spend thousands of dollars buying or worse, upgrading our computers so that we can play the latest high end games. Then we spend our time with those computers seeking out remakes of the classic games that we actually liked, but which don't work on modern hardware or operating systems anymore.

The poster child game for this effect, for me, is Panzer General (and its fantastic sequel Panzer General 2). I suspect this game occupies that role for most of us who have been wargame fans (wargames are a fairly esoteric niche in the already marginalized world of PC games. For those of you unfamiliar with the genre, I wrote an explanation of the genre last year). There is virtually no turn-based strategy game that comes out that I don't buy, because I am -- perhaps out of some desire to reclaim my youth -- trying to return to 1997. I am typically disappointed. When I heard people talking about Commander - Europe at War, I experienced a familiar sense of dread. I was sure I was going to see another Panzer General clone, and I was going to be let down again.

Here's the good news about Commander - Europe at War, a strategy game available for both PC and Mac. It's not really anything like Panzer General. Here's more good news: it's really quite good.

Commander gives the player control of the Allied or Axis forces in 1939, and offers you a chance to lead your troops throughout the entire war. Whereas Panzer General presents combat in small, digestible (and brilliantly designed) scenarios depicting specific battles, Commander gives you a more-or-less uninterrupted picture of several theaters of operations, from the East Coast of the United States through North Africa, Europe, and Russia. This, to my mind, makes the game a different beast entirely.

[I Love Paris

I love Paris](http://wptest.tleaves.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/01/picture-1.png "I Love Paris")

It is however, strikingly similar to another game that was released a few years ago, Strategic Command, published by Battlefront. StratCom was, to me, a singularly frustrating game because it felt almost perfect, and that feeling of near-perfection masked (for a while, at least) what I considered to be serious flaws. Games that simulate historical periods walk a fine line: blow off historical realities and the grognards will criticize you for not being "realistic," but hew too closely to them and you can end up making a boring game.

StratCom, I felt, bound the developing war so tightly to the historical narrative that I felt less like I was making strategic decisions, and more like I was playing with a slot car set with an "end turn" button. Commander overcomes this flaw swimmingly. I played through the opening years of the war and each time tried different strategic paths. Some of them worked out better than others, but it was fairly rare that I felt like i simply couldn't succeed because, say, the game was designed so that I had to invade Belgium before capturing Paris. It's a historical game, but one that gives you some flexibility. By pulling this off successfully, the game makes itself worth serious consideration by any fan of wargames.

The developer of Commander also created Legion Arena. I don't think this is a coincidence. Like Commander, Legion was in a genre that is nominally overpopulated and, to be frank, moribund. Like Commander, it managed to achieve a surprising degree of freshness through simple and approachable UI and putting playability before historical accuracy. These are tradeoffs that some might disagree with, but I think they made the right call.

The game is good, but not perfect. In particular, the tutorial is sketchy to the point of being insulting, and the game's UI, though simple, suffers from a lack of visual feedback for certain important actions. Despite this, the game accomplishes what it sets out to do. In my view, this is the fulfillment of the promise of Strategic Command.

It's not Panzer General. But then, it's not trying to be.

Commander - Europe at War, by Slitherine and Firepower, is available for the Mac, by Freeverse and for the PC, from Matrix Games. Both versions cost just under $50, and free demos are available from each publisher.

Disclosure statement: Both Freeverse and Matrix Games graciously provided review copies of the game for their respective platforms.

Peng Shui

2008-01-31 · by peterb

We're going to talk consumer home products today, because I have a story to tell, and a recommendation to make.

Slate had an interesting article today where they reviewed a number of warm mist, cool mist, and ultrasonic humidifiers.

This topic is of interest to me because I bite my lips. And so, every winter, when the heaters kick on, the air dries out, and then my lips dry out, and then I have to walk around for a month with dry, cracked lips. I recently did the same analysis of humidifiers as did Slate, and came to a different conclusion as to the best possible product.

Most of the humidifiers Slate looked at were fairly high-end, like this Honeywell 3-gallon model. The idea, I suppose, is as follows: you have some friends over for a wine and cheese party after the Obama fundraiser at The Bedding Works, an avant-garde gallery located in an up-and-coming, if still a bit rough, neighborhood. After serving the last of the macchiatos and bidding farewell to most of the guests, it's just you and that one special person you've been hoping to spend some time alone with. The one with the chunky glasses, and the half-cynical, half-naive bowl haircut that looks boyish, yet somehow feminine. Their day job is in graphic design, but their real passion is for community outreach. God. How I hate both of you.

Well, anyway, you and your new friend have a few drinks, and one thing leads to another, and the next thing you know you've stumbled into the bedroom, where your new hipster paramour takes one look at your distinctly downmarket humidifier and realizes that, well, maybe you're just not a very good match. Slate's plan for avoiding this problem is to drop $100 or more on a humidifier with good "feng shui." That's one way to do it, I guess.

My solution to this problem is to buy a penguin-shaped humidifier. The ad copy calls it "adorable", and I am here to tell you it does not lie. It's ultrasonic, quite quiet, dirt cheap, and easy to clean. Most importantly, every time I walk into the room and see it, I involuntarily get a smile on my face. Call it peng shui.

It doesn't come with a filter, but I've been using filtered water and am very happy with the results as-is. My lips are no longer dry.

I suppose it's possible there are people who would be annoyed by this humidifier's level of kitsch, but I think its modern lines and clever industrial design obviate that. Besides, you don't really want to be friends with people who don't like penguins, anyway.

Personal to bbum: For just a little extra cash, you can get a Hello Kitty humidifier instead. But I think the penguin is cuter.

In the End, No Final Victory

2008-02-04 · by psu

I was really hoping that I'd be able to tell the 72 Dolphins to Suck It.

I guess I thought about that a little bit too much this past week.

Imbibe!

2008-02-05 · by peterb

My personal copy of Imbibe! arrived from Amazon today.

Posts in the coming days may contain many misspellings and seem somewhat inebriated. I apologize in advance.

And, let's face it, if the last 8 years have taught us anything, it's that election night is a good night to start drinking heavily.

Legume

2008-02-07 · by psu

Legume is a new bistro-style restaurant in that increasingly glorious food corridor of Braddock avenue between the Regent Square theaters and the entrance to the Parkway East. I was suspicious of the place because the name conjures up images of a prison run by terminally smug pot-smoking NPR-listening hippy types whose mission in life is to convince me that quinoa (it's pronounced "keen-waaah", apparently) is a reasonable substitute for Japanese short-grain white rice. Happily this is not the case. Despite the name, the thing to get at Legume is the meat. The vegetables are OK too, but the thing is the meat.

Legume is a small place with a small menu. The menu changes every night, and every night they upload the current one to the web site. Unlike a lot of Pittsburgh places which are big and have big menus, everything here is a winner. Over the past few months, we have been back three or four times and ordered a large range of different dishes and none have registered any of my normal complaints about fancier food in Pittsburgh. Salads are not overdressed. There are no pretentious but ultimately shallow appetizers. There are no entrees that are too ambitious for the kitchen to actually prepare. Even the baguette are baguette-like with a crunchy crust and airy, but not doughy, inside.

But as I said above, my favorites here are all meat all the time. They've made me a perfectly medium rare hanger-steak on top of risotto that for once wasn't undercooked. There was that cassoulet with duck confit and pork sausage. There is almost nothing better than food cooked in duck fat. They also make a pork terrine which is a rich and fatty treat that would not be out of place in your favorite Paris bistro.

But when we went this past week we had a veritable carnivorous feast. First, we had the lamb's tongue on top of a potato salad dressed in a light vinaigrette. It was tender and yummy and again, not too much dressing. The second starter was roasted beef marrow bones. You scoop the marrow out of the bone and spread it on toast with salt. This is more a texture than taste sensation. Between the starters and the main course we had what I think is the best thing I've eaten in a restaurant in the past six months: a perfectly braised piece of veal cheek on top of polenta. The meat was tender, rich, and buttery smooth. I can't remember what the sauce was, some kind of red wine and veal stock reduction I would assume. I was too busy trying to keep the stupid grin off my face every time I had another bite. It was like eating warm meat ice cream.

The main course was chicken roasted under a cast iron pan with mashed potatoes, or something much like mashed potatoes. I'm not usually much for chicken in a fancy restaurant, but what they do here is take half a bird and roast it all in one piece so you get to tear into the seasoned crispy skin before enjoying the meat underneath. Again, a winner.

By this time I was in a good enough mood that it didn't even bother me that the chocolate truffle "cake" was a bit more like one of those stupid flourless monstrosities than real cake. I would rather have had the caramel pots de crème that we got the first time we went. But, the truffle cake had a light fluffy texture and nice whipped cream, so I could not complain.

So, in conclusion, get your veggie friends here by fooling them with the name, then make them eat meat. This place joins Point Brugge and DISH as fabulous neighborhood eateries with distinctive style and excellent execution.

RiffTrax, Cinematic Titanic, and Me

2008-02-11 · by peterb

For many years I was a fan of the cult classic TV show Mystery Science Theater 3000. When I say "fan", I mean this in the most derisive and dismissive way possible: I'm an utter fanboy. My love for the show was, and is, beyond any sort of rational analysis. So as I prepare to discuss two projects that the shows' various members have launched, Cinematic Titanic and RiffTrax, the reader would do well to remember that the projects' creators would probably have to drive to my house and literally pee in my cornflakes before I could bring myself to say anything bad about their work.

A Brief History of MST3k

The MST3k scenario was simple. A young man and his two robots sat and watched a really, really bad movie. You, the viewer, watched them watching the movie -- their silhouettes were visible onscreen as the movie played. Throughout the film, the man and his robots constantly chattered at the screen, humourously riffing on what they (and you) saw. Here's a brief sample to give you an idea:

Writers and actors came and went over the show's history, but there were basically two "faces" of MST3k: Joel Hodgson and Mike Nelson. Joel was with the show when it aired on Comedy Central, and Mike spent most of his years on the show while it was hosted on the Sci-Fi Network. Each of them had a unique style, and both of them, I thought, were funny. Mike was hobbled a little bit because when the show transitioned to the Sci-Fi Channel, the network required that all the movies they mocked be science fiction movies. This was a huge mistake.

Part of what kept the show (and its jokes) fresh was that you never really knew what you'd get. One week, sure, it might be a potboiler about spacemen invading the Earth. Or you might end up with a biker movie, or a late '60's Beach Blanket Bingo extravaganza. When the genre of the targeted films was limited tightly to sci-fi, it seemed to me that a lot of the joy went out of the series.

Two New Projects

In the past several years, both Mike and Joel have started interesting new projects based on the same premise, each working with various folks from Mystery Science Theater's original run.

Joel Hodgson has started Cinematic Titanic. In many ways, Cinematic Titanic is the more conservative of the two projects. It has a great structural similarity to MST3k. Joel and his collaborators -- Trace Beaulieu, J. Elvis Weinstein Mary Jo Pehl, and Frank Conniff, among others -- obtain the rights to a movie and then make fun of it, projecting sillhouettes of themselves onto the screen as they do so. The silhouettes allow for visual as well as spoken-word jokes. The finished product is then sold as a DVD (and, soon, as a digital download) for $15.94. The first project released by Cinematic Titanic was a terrible 1972 horror film called The Oozing Skull.

Mike Nelson's project, called RiffTrax, is to my mind a bolder experiment. Mike and his collaborators (there are several, notably Kevin Murphy, Bill Corbett, and Weird Al Yankovic) take a movie that they don't have the rights to, but that you probably already own, make fun of it, and sell you an mp3 audio recording of their riff. The customer watches their copy of Harry Potter, or Lord of the Rings, or The Matrix (or whatever the riffed movie is) on DVD, and hits "play" on their MP3 player at the right moment. When all goes well, the riffs sync perfectly with the movie, and hilarity ensues. Prices for RiffTrax vary, but most are $2.99, or about the price of a typical movie rental.

A Rising Tide Lifts All Ships

Both projects have their fans and partisans, and if you visit the forums on each company's website you'll no doubt find any number of forum denizens who think that their favorite project is the best thing ever, and the other one is just a bunch of lousy poseurs.

My own observation is that I've known about RiffTrax for nearly a year now but never really found the time to investigate it. The release of Cinematic Titanic not only inspired me to buy their DVD, but also inspired me to pick up a RiffTrax title as well. I suspect I'm not the only person who did this. There's clearly enough room in the world for both projects, and I think the existence of each helps the other more than it hurts.

When discussing these projects, I'm not going to focus on individual jokes. You can take it as read that I think both projects are uproariously funny, the product of a number of talented writers, actors, and comedians. Rather, I'd like to focus on more fundamental, structural aspects.

Cuts Like a Knife

I sat down with the DVD of The Oozing Skull this weekend. Cinematic Titanic's strengths, as a project, are illustrated by this: it's a DVD. I put it in my DVD player and pressed "play", and it worked.

It is truly a terrible movie, full of brutally gory surgery sequences early on, which nearly kept me from watching it at all. The commentary from Joel and the crew was funny, and the use of physical comedy via the silhouettes was more wide-ranging than in a typical MST3k episode. The performance seemed a little stiff, overall, but it's only the first release. Presumably as they find their groove they'll settle down a bit.

There are a lot of riffers on screen, surrounding the borders of the screen like a sort of human proscenium. As performers speak, they sometimes move or strike a little pose so that you have some idea which of the them is speaking.

Here's a promo for Cinematic Titanic that should whet your appetite:

The same thing that lets Cinematic Titanic be convenient is also its drawback. Fundamentally, I don't want to watch The Oozing Skull, even to hear it mocked. The best of the MST3K episodes leveraged the ambiguous love-hate relationship most Americans have with B movies. Sure, we might talk about how Godzilla vs. The Sea Monster was really just a Mexican wrestling movie with a guy in a rubber lizard suit, but deep inside many of us still have an inner 8 year old that's happy, or even thrilled, at the prospect of watching Godzilla. Not all B movies have this nature, but hopefully Cinematic Titanic will be able to license some properties that are a little less hateful than this one was.

The Bigger They Are, The Harder They Fall

Which brings us to RiffTrax, which is a project that makes fun of (mostly) A-list movies. The first RiffTrax I bought, last weekend, was of the recent remake of the Bond film Casino Royale. My logic went something like this: the Bond films lately have been tepid. They've been watchable, but mostly predictable. I wanted to see the movie to maintain some illusion of being culturally plugged in, but I wasn't sure I wanted to sit through it if it turned out to be a stinker. So I bought the RiffTrax, rented the DVD, and watched it.

And it was great.

I don't just mean the riffing was great (and it was; Kevin Murphy especially seems to be on my wavelength). I mean Casino Royale was great, and I still enjoyed it as a movie, even while laughing as I listened to people make fun of it. It was as if I sat through two completely different movies at the same time, and both were awesome. This wasn't an outcome I expected. I thought that either the movie would be terrible, in which case I'd enjoy the mockery, or the movie would be good, in which case the mockery would annoy me. But that didn't happen. The mockery just made an already good movie better:

And so, in rapid succession, I've picked up the riffs for Lord of the Rings, the first Harry Potter movie, all of the Star Wars prequels, and Eragon. These are movies that range from excellent to terrible, and so far, although they've all been funny, the good movies are more fun to watch with riffing. I think this represents something of a structural advantage in RiffTrax's favor: they can riff movies that people actually want to watch. The bad movies work, too: I wanted to see Eragon, even though I had heard it was awful. RiffTrax gave me an excuse to rent it without turning the night into a total waste.

The other structural advantage is that of price. With an average cost of $2.99/riff, I'm finding it hard to come up with reasons not to simply buy all of them. Their focus is on first-run feature films, but they've also covered a number of classics (such as Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory) and popular TV series pilots (including Lost and Heroes).

All is not wine and roses. In order for the RiffTrax experience to work, the downloaded MP3 file has to be in sync with the DVD you're watching. RiffTrax provides a couple of mechanisms for this, but none are completely seamless (and, unless you're going to go to the trouble of burning your own DVDs, you're committing to the idea of watching a movie with your computer somewhere in the A/V food chain). They have provided a standalone player for Windows that handles all the syncing automatically, but it's not quite perfect, and if you're on MacOS it's not an option at all. Even with the standalone player, I found myself spending a few minutes at the beginning of each film futzing around with the relative volume of the film and the riff more than I would have liked.

These are not serious complaints for someone like me who is, let's face it, a completely irredeemable nerd. I do see it making it hard for the RiffTrax folks to penetrate deeply into the mass market; most of my non-nerd friends, for example, could never be bothered to mess with syncing an MP3 track to a DVD track just for a few laughs. But then, most of them probably wouldn't buy The Oozing Skull, either, so perhaps this is a distinction without a difference.

And even with the minor annoyance of having to sync, there's just something bold about RiffTrax. The fact that they're doing this sort of thing without permission of the studios, that they've basically figured out a way to sell their remixing of popular culture without getting sued -- yet -- is exciting to me. I roll my eyes whenever I hear anyone talking about The Long Tail, but this is the first business model I've seen where I could actually imagine it working.

In The Not Too Distant Future

Both RiffTrax and Cinematic Titanic seem to have their share of strong supporters. I'm looking forward to seeing (and buying) more of their work as time goes by.

Should you shell out your own cash for these projects? Well, as I noted in the opening paragraph, I'm not an impartial judge. For me, supporting both of these projects is not only a way of consuming media I enjoy, but also something of a political statement: I want to support independent artists. But not everyone feels the same way, nor would I expect them to.

There are plenty of samples of both projects on YouTube and on each projects' respective web sites. Watch some of the clips, see what fits your taste, and make your own decision.

And if you end up buying a RiffTrax, or a Cinematic Titanic DVD, tell them peterb sent you. They won't have any idea what the hell you're talking about, of course. But tell them anyway.

It's my little way of saying "thanks."

Mass Effect and the Magician's Choice

2008-02-13 · by peterb

I've written before, disparagingly, of the use of the Magician's Choice in games. The magician's choice, reduced to its simplest form is: "Pick a card, any card." And then, whatever card you pick, you've picked the one the magician intended you to pick.

When done poorly, this feels like a clumsy and ham-handed attempt at interaction. When done well, it's seamless. Mass Effect is a good example of what happens when the choice is forced on you by a really good magician.

The typical branching conversation tree in an RPG works something like this:

Young lady: "Help! Help! My kitten is stuck up this tree!" Hiro Protagonist: Choose between:

  1. "Don't worry, I'll save your little kitten!" [You save the kitten.] (+50 cash, +200 experience, +5 alignment points.)
  2. "How much will you pay me to get your kitten?" [You shake the girl down for cash, then save the kitten.] (+150 cash, +50 experience, +0 alignment points.)
  3. "So, you're all alone, eh?" [You assault and rob the young lady. Later, you kill and eat the kitten.] (+150 cash, +200 experience, -5 alignment points.)

Mass Effect has some situations like this. But it has far, far more situations like this:

Young lady: "Help! Help! My kitten is stuck up this tree!" Hiro Protagonist: Choose between:

  1. Oh my gosh, that's terrible. You must be so upset.
  2. Maybe you should have watched him more closely.
  3. I think people who let their cats run outside are stupid. And I think you're stupid, too.

[You select an option, and no matter what you choose, your character than says...]

"Don't you think it was a bad idea to let your cat run around this space station?"

When you read this on paper, it looks pointless. But when you are playing through the game, the psychological effect is that you refer the emotional stance you took in the conversation tree into the spoken "filmed" dialogue. The filmed dialogue is exactly the same, but because you made a choice it is given more color and depth. Even though in terms of pure gameplay "nothing happened."

I'm sure there are other games that have used this technique before Mass Effect. But I've never before seen it used so consistently, and to such great effect.

There are a lot of things I don't like about Mass Effect. But even while thinking about (and complaining loudly to my friends about) the things I didn't like, I came home every night for two weeks and played nothing else, because I had to know how the narrative turned out. Given that, I'm not sure that any criticisms I might have about the game are terribly apposite.

A Short Ribs Rumination

2008-02-14 · by psu

From time to time I try to get ribs around Pittsburgh, or anywhere in the Northeast for that matter. I am usually disappointed. Now, I like ribs in many different styles. There are the Chinese ones my mom made. There are the slow cooked barbeque ribs in the South. There are the braised ribs at fancier restaurants of various types.

Tonight I got the ribs at Tessaro's. Normally I would only get the burgers there, but you have to change up once in a while. They were tasty and satisfying, but one thing was wrong, which is the thing that always brings me disappointment. They weren't cooked long enough.

A while back at lunch time Pete got ribs from that shop on Centre Ave called Food 4 the Soul. They had the same problem. To my mind ribs are only really right if you can eat them off the bone with the barest of utensils. You should not have have to gnaw the meat off. You should not have to cut the meat off. You should be able to get the meat off with a plastic fork, or a dessert spoon, or a pair of chopsticks. The meat should fall off on its own when you pick up the bone.

If I'm sitting there in front of my plate actually working to eat your ribs you have failed.

I find myself confused as to why people don't understand this simple fact. You have to cook the ribs for a long long time in order for them to be right.

Mark Bittman understands. Don't let this truth pass you by. Cook your ribs until they are done. Cook them for a good long time.

Accidental Discoveries

2008-02-18 · by peterb

Here's a dirty little secret: I am kind of a sucker for Bailey's Irish Cream.

Yes, yes, I know. It's too sweet. It's a girly drink. It's like an alcohol milkshake. It's sort of gross. I know all these things, and I agree with them, but I still kinda like it. What can I say: i have my guilty pleasures.

But, truth to tell, I never drink Bailey's anymore, because I am embarassed to be seen buying it. So my overactive superego has thwarted my own pleasure principle. Until now.

I picked up a bottle Drambuie the other day, along with (on the recommendation of an acquaintance) a bottle of Dewars White. I have strong opinions on single malt scotch, but I know next to nothing about blended scotch. The Dewars was reasonably inexpensive and works well in mixed drinks. Anyway, while drinking a Rusty Nail (2 parts scotch, 1 part Drambuie), a strange thought occurred to me: "I wonder if putting a little cream in this would make it better, or ruin it?"

It turns out that if you put a little cream in a rusty nail and shake it up, you end up with something that tastes almost exactly like Bailey's. It lacks a hint of chocolate, but I'm sure one could fix that up with a dusting of cocoa powder.

So problem solved. I can now have my cake and drink it too.

Rage: Interrupted

2008-02-19 · by psu

We spent the weekend visiting some good friends in New Jersey. Since the route home sends us right past Philly, I figured I would take advantage of the opportunity to enrich myself with the erudite discussion of the day's issues at that landmark NPR station WHYY.

Instead, I was assaulted with this show about Second Life run by some psychologist named Dan Gottlieb, PhD. You always know something is going to go badly when the guy makes sure to put "PhD" on the end of his name. None of the smart ones are that proud.

So after an interview with an enthusiastic consumer of Second Life the discussion on the show began in earnest. Dr. Dan first started talking to some dude from Stanford who had done an extensive survey of people who are heavy players of online games. The first question out of his mouth?

First I'm thinking about the creators in Linden Labs, where these ideas come from. I wonder how many of the creative minds in Linden Labs have Aspergers or social anxiety disorder... kind of isolated people who are more comfortable with screens than people...

Now, I have no love for MMO games in general or Second Life in particular. But I do work in software and am perhaps I take too much personal offense when the old stereotypes are trotted out. I found this to be an infuriately stupid turn of phrase, especially for someone who apparently fancies himself to be an educated and somewhat sophisticated intellectual. I felt the dork rage welling up from my dark reserves of bile. The phrase "moron shrink asshole" passed over my lips.

But, I restrained myself. Ultimately I found it impossible to dig up the angry energy necessary to come to the defense of my various identity groups. Maybe I've just been beat down by the man over the years, but at this point the whole exercise seems pointless. Others in the dork and gaming communities obviously do not feel the way I do. The poor oppressed gamer has become a subject of wide discussion again as Fox decided to drum up ratings by picking on Mass Effect a few weeks ago. This latest incident has lead to much hue and cry, including a two parter by our old friend N'Gai about whether games will always be thought of as infantile amusements for overgrown children.

I have two opinions on this general question. The first is that video games in fact are infantile amusements. If the video game industry wants to escape this pigeonhole they have to figure out how to assess what they do a bit more realistically.

The second is that if the current generation of moron PhD assholes and media types want to sit around and stare in wonderment at the people playing Second Life and conclude that they are all mentally ill, nothing that we do is going to change their minds. Their attitudes are pretty much set. They might not even be wrong. But, one thing is for sure. They will eventually die. At that point, video games will no longer be seen as a strange fringe element. When the next generation takes over everyone alive will have been playing them for their entire lives.

Being the lazy sort that I am, I'll just sit and wait, rather than working up a sweat right now.

Demi-glace

2008-02-22 · by psu

Back in the distant past before Tony Bourdain was a TV personality jetting all over the world eating the more questionable parts of animals, I heard an NPR interview with him discussing Kitchen Confidential, the book that turned him into a TV personality who gets to jet all over the world and eat the more questionable parts of animals. He pontificated about kitchen knives, what pans you need, when to order fish and so on. Then he gave a radio recipe for something that is easy to do and makes people think you are brilliant: demi-glace.

Demi-glace is simple. You make beef stock. I don't really know how to make beef stock. I usually just buy some random pieces of bone at the Whole Foods or the farmers market. Then you roast them in the oven for a while (maybe an hour?). Saute the standard stock veggies... some onions, some carrots, some celerey, some peppercorns, and a tiny bit of salt. Add the bones and enough water to cover. Cook this for several hours while you play Halo.

Now comes the good part. Take the stock you just made and drain it into another pot. To this pot add some sauteed shallots, a bit of pepper, some red wine. Tony also suggested thyme and peppercorns. Knock yourself out. Cook that over a low heat uncovered. Reduce, reduce, reduce. Play more Halo, but keep an eye on the stove. It just wants to sit there and bubble and get thicker. At some point, drain out the liquid to remove the shallots and reduce it some more. You know it's right when it sticks to the spoon like a thin chocolate sauce or maple syrup.

If you start with a few quarts of beef stock you should end up with 6 to 8 ounces of the final product. Freeze this. You have now banked four or five opportunities for people to think you are brilliant.

The next time you make a steak, take the demi-glace out of the freezer and swish it around in a pan with some more shallots, water and red wine. Reduce it back to a nice thickness and put it on top of the steak. People will wonder where you trained as a cook.

Now any time you want a nice sauce and you don't have time, just pull out your dark brown cube of goodness and you'll see how all the time playing Halo pays off.

Dwarf Fortress for Mac!

2008-02-25 · by peterb

I don't have a lot of time tonight, because I am playing Dwarf Fortress. On my Mac. Under OS X. Without emulation. That's right, after years of trial and travail, Dwarf Fortress, one of the most interesting games of the past few years, is finally available on my computing platform of choice. This was the single game that had me keeping a Boot Camp partition on my machine. Now I can get rid of it. I don't kid myself that my call for porters had anything to do with it. But I can lie to other people and tell them that it did!

I had promised, publically, to donate a fairly ridiculous sum to the publishers should they do a Mac port. They have called my bluff, and I have given the gift gladly. I won't name an exact amount, but it was certainly enough to buy at least a couple of console games at retail. I may be poor, but at least I'm morally pure. Well, at least as regards this particular issue. It feels good to support a truly independent game, good to support the Mac as a gaming platform, and good to pay for software.

Will Dwarf Fortress take the Mac community by storm? No, clearly not. Dwarf Fortress is a hard sell to anyone, and to anyone who cares about user interface issues it's an even harder sell. The interface isn't just bad; it's tragic on an almost Bulwer-Lytton level. It's a bit like finding a sweet and glorious fruit that is encased in a shell made of shards of glass and porcupine quills.

If you can make it past the UI issues -- and let's be clear about this, there's no pride to be gained from that achievement, it's just the price you have to pay to play -- you'll find a game that is by turns hypnotic, engaging, disturbing, and thought-provoking.

The Mac version is still in alpha, and is still fairly slow compared to the Windows version. But it's playable, and we can expect performance to improve over time.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to finish tunnelling under the river before the Spring thaw so I can reach that hematite vein. I'm located right near a goblin city, and going outside to mine it isn't safe.

You can download Dwarf Fortress (for Windows or Mac) at the Bay 12 Games web site. The game is currently free, supported only by donations from players. The Dwarf Fortress Wiki can help you get started.

Short Clips

2008-02-27 · by psu

I haven't had anything long form to write about games recently because I have not been sufficiently in tune with my own sense of self-absorption to come up with much of an extended thought. But this does not mean I haven't spent some time with the old electronic crack.

What Your Mother Will Never Learn

My parents visited over New Years. Mostly this meant my mom cooked and we ate a lot. Having run out of available DVD movies one night, I made the mistake of firing up Call of Duty multiplayer with my parents in the room. Now, I'm not good at this game. I die a lot. The experience is sort of like this:

  1. Walk out on to map.

  2. Get shot in the head.

  3. Walk out on the map, hide behind a wall. Get shot in the head.

  4. Walk out on the map, spy someone in the distance who is both in line of sight and not moving. Line up the... get shot in the head.

You get the idea. It usually takes me five or six games just to figure out how to even see where the enemies are, much less react to them in any sort of intelligent way.

Now imagine me playing the game while simultaneously trying to parse the scene before me for my mom the spectator. Now it went like this:

  1. Walk out on the map.

  2. "Are those guys on your team?"... "Yes".. get shot in the head.

  3. "Why do you keep dying?" "Do you control those guys?" "Why can't you see anything but that one gun?"

  4. Well, you see, it's an Internet game, those guys are all other... get shot in the head.

I finally had to turn it off. Don't be fooled by the current industry infatuation with the idea that games are a mainstream experience. There are still wide conceptual chasms that we are not likely to cross.

Levels "R" Us

I've been playing through Disgaea on the PSP. The PSP is great because it lets me put the game down whenever I want and get back into it later. Disgaea is great because it has distilled the nature of the RPG down to its essential essence. Behind all of the tactics, crazy gameplay mechanics, and shallow anime plot, what this game is really about is leveling. In fact, the most painless way through the game is simply to level the main character by some ridiculous amount and then just plow through a few dozen story maps. When you hit a wall, go back and play some of the side games to level some more.

Not leveling fast enough? No problem. Just win one mini-game and the level of the monsters on all the maps goes up. Then you can level faster.

Need better stuff? Travel through the item world and level your stuff up. This will also generally result in more levels for your characters too.

Even the game that lets you manipulate the "politics" of the game world is really designed to be a repository of harder monsters that let you level more.

This game could live in my PSP forever. Just open it up once in a while, gain a few levels, put the machine back to sleep. I'm sure at some point I'll finish the plot, but what's the point?

Rez HD

Back in the day, Pete showed me this game on his PS2. I forget where he scored a PS2 copy because they were notoriously hard to find. I remember staring at the TV and thinking "waaaahhh?".

A couple of years later, some outfit on the Internet reprinted the game for the PS2, so I picked up a copy because I was in my extreme game shopping phase. I tried to play it a few times but I could never figure out what was going on.

So of course I had to pick it up on Xbox Live. After all, if you don't connect with a game, you should always buy it again. You never know.

The new Rez is pretty much the same as the old Rez, but the jaggies are finally gone. I still don't know quite what is going on. I also found the third and fourth stages to be punishingly hard. They were almost throw the controller at the TV frustrating. But then, I suck. Normally, I'd have just given up, but someone had told me that I just had to hold out for level 5.

That someone was right. The fight was worth it, and playing through the fifth level was a blast. It's like they saved all their design juice for the end of game unlockable that they knew people who sucked would never find. This is because game designers hate us all. Still, work your way through it. You'll have a good time if you can keep yourself from throwing the controller.

The Funeral Mini-game

After the cramps in my hands caused by Rez subsided, I was in no mood for any game that required reflexes. Therefore I bought Lost Odyssey. If you are wondering what this game is about, all you need to know is that it's Final Fantasy 10.5, but in High Def for the Xbox 360. Here's the checklist

  1. Main character with weird hair and a big sword with no memory of his past: CHECK.

  2. Annoying sidekick comic relief guy who whines a lot: CHECK.

  3. Chick who fights in a mini-dress: CHECK.

  4. Extended cut scene remix action: CHECK.

  5. A-A-A-A-A combat system with a timing gimmick: CHECK.

I like it anyway. For the most part the game hits just the right mix of goofy JRPG combat, collection OCD, nice maps, and well-produced cut scenes to keep you playing. I wish the walkthroughs were more complete though.

I do have one complaint though. In the last half of the first disk, you are treated the most horrible nexus of cut scene and mini-game pain that I have ever experienced. It made Metal Gear Solid feel well-paced. As far as I can remember, it went like this:

  1. Meet two new characters. Long cut scene.

  2. Big bad soldiers show up. Another long cut scene.

  3. Fight soldiers. Walk back to home of the new characters.

  4. 25 minute major plot point cut scene that was so badly produced it reminded me of the horrendous Taiwanese melodramas my parents used to watch on VHS when I was a kid. Suffice to say, video game characters do not do crying well. It always looks more like they have a tumor growing on their eyeballs.

  5. 10 minutes of "run through the map and collect 5 of these and 10 of those". It's not like they were even hard to find. You just had to run there.

  6. A 20 minute funeral mini-game. I kid you not. You are controlling an auxilliary character who is in control of an ancient burial ceremony. You have to do this thing where you make the kid's torch point at things on the screen. Only the hit testing didn't work, so I sat there for half an hour trying to figure out how to make progress. I was sure I was doomed and I'd have to turn the game off and so this entire 90 minute sequence again.

Then, in a sign that I now must finish this game, God himself intervened and fixed the hit testing code so I could escape this circle of JRPG hell. It was a miracle!

  1. 10 more minutes of cut scene before you get to make your way to the next dungeon. I have never been more relieved to be back in the random encounters zone.

If you can't stand the J in JRPG, just stay away from this game. But, if you have ever enjoyed one of these games, this is the best example of the genre I've played for a while. Well, except for that 90 minutes of my life I'll never get back.

And Another Thing...

2008-02-29 · by psu

You have to give the Japanese credit for two things. They know about knives, and they know about rice. After spending more time than is actually healthy for an responsible adult lurking in the insane asylum we call the knife forums, I finally gave in and picked up the relatively pedestrian Shun Chef's Knife. You can already tell that I am suffering from forum brain damage because I feel the need to call this knife pedestrian.

It's true that the Shun is not the most exotic knife that you can buy. It's shape is more Germany than Japan, but the materials and the handle hint at Japanese construction. The thing is, the dork forums have a hypnotic effect on dorks, making them obsess over the most trivial details (flat blade or more curved? Damascus finish? Western or Japanese style handle?). Most of all, the forums give you the urge to obtain something unusual, offbeat, and a bit rare. They convince you that you must rise above the mass-produced drek that joe-average would buy at William Sonoma, even if it happens to be the perfect fit.

So, while I apologize to myself that I did not end up with something even quite as edgy (if you will) as a hammer-finished carbon steel wa-handle knife, I also realized that the Shun is two things:

  1. Superbly shiny.

  2. Perfectly balanced and easy to handle in my hands.

It works so well it makes me sure that I've been abusing my poor German knife all this time, using it with an edge that is more like a mousepad than a knife. I guess it's time to rectify that. But first I have to go slice some see-through pieces of apple or chop some more microscopic cubes of carrot.

Of course, now I'll have to figure out how to keep the knife sharp, which is a whole separate circle of doom.

Now, about rice.

There are only two kinds of rice worth eating. Risotto is OK if you are into that kind of thing, but short grain white rice is the real stuff. If rice were cheese, the high end short grain white rice would be Stilton. While I am willing to admit that there is a brown rice-shaped food that people eat for general nutrition, don't expect me to believe that anyone actually enjoys it. And those people making brown rice sushi rolls should be taken out in back of the Whole Foods and summarily executed.

Anyway, a couple of years ago, Julie told me I should buy some Tamaki Gold short grain rice. I looked around for it in Pittsburgh but didn't find it at any of my normal haunts and I ended up forgetting about it. But, this weekend we were in Lotus in the strip and lo and behold there was a bag of the stuff.

To continue to extend a bad metaphor, this is truly the Colston Basset Dairy of short grain white rice. Out of the cooker it is sticky but not gluey, soft but with just enough toothy texture to make you know you aren't eating oatmeal or something. I made fried rice the next day with it and it took on an even softer texture, almost like a dry risotto. If you like rice, and you should, you owe it to yourself to get 20 pounds of this stuff and put it through your rice cooker.

Yes I know this rice comes from California and not Japan. It's the original thought that counts, so get off my back.

Chocolatier

2008-03-03 · by peterb

The good thing about PlayFirst's Chocolatier is that it reminds me of Taipan!. The bad thing is I've gained five pounds this week from playing it, because it makes me crave chocolate.

Art Canfil's Taipan!, for those of you old enough to remember it, was a sailing-and-trading game. You travelled from port to port in the Orient trying to make money, and to stay one step ahead of the moneylender and pirates. Several years later, the game was remade for MS-DOS as "Dope Wars", where instead of travelling around Asia by boat you were jetting around New York City by subway, trading marijuana instead of weapons, cocaine instead of silk, and heroin instead of opium (some things never change). Either way, the game was the same: buy weapons, buy cargo, buy low, sell high.

There's no shame in remaking a good game, and the success of Tradewinds and Tradewinds Legends shows that there's ample mining to be done here. Chocolatier takes a few pages from the Taipan! book, and adds a few twists of its own.

chocolatier

The goal of Chocolatier is to build up a chocolate-producing empire, selling bars, squares, infusions, and truffles by the boatload. Interestingly, the scarce resource in this game is not money. Strangers are constantly accosting you on the street, stuffing thousands of dollars into your pocket. Rather, the scarce resources are time and recipes. You earn new recipes by performing custom production runs for people you meet. You perform those runs by travelling the world looking for a market that sells the correct ingredients, buying them, and then setting up one of your factories to produce the finished product.

The factory production is "set" via a minigame that should remind anyone over a certain age of Lucy in the candy factory. It's a slightly easier, radial version of Snood (or, more recently, Venice Deluxe) where one must shoot ingredients into the correct slot on a series of rotating panels. Fill a panel completely, and one item is created. The more you can fill, the faster your factory will produce in subsequent weeks, which means you have more stock to sell as you jet around the world.

choc2

The challenge in the game is not apparent at first. By the time you have your third factory up and running you'll be half-convinced you have it beat. But, like running a real business, the real complexity doesn't become apparent until you reach a certain size. When you're juggling 5 factories, 25 recipes, and countless ingredients, suddenly you find yourself wishing for a competent administrative assistant to help you keep track of it all. The key strategic question in the game is how much of your income do you sink into inventory. Too little, and you can't meet demand for a hot new product. Too much, and you end up holding on to (say), a king's ransom in fresh mint when really all the public wants is candy with almonds in it.

It's a good game. It is part of what is dismissively called, by the hardcore, the "casual games" market. "Casual" is a term of art that, it seems, means "fun, and doesn't suck".

Chocolatier, in other words, is just more proof that the casual game makers spend more time thinking about game balance than their brothers making "real" PC games do. And at a time when so-called "real" game makers are spending time and energy claiming that making money in the PC market is impossible due to piracy, the casual game makers lay their heads each night on a pillow made of the most delicate cloth-of-gold, stuffed with only the finest, uncut turkish heroin, while their vast armies of servants feed them grapes and waft air at them, gently, with large palm fronds.

Maybe the "AAA" game manufacturers should take a break from making lovingly detailed simulations of walking from Damascus to Jerusalem and try to make some "BBB" games instead. It seems to me it could only improve their bottom line.

Chocolatier from PlayFirst, for Mac OS X and Windows. $19.95. A free demo is available from their web site.

Disclosure statement: PlayFirst graciously provided Tea Leaves with a review copy of this game.

No More Like This

2008-03-04 · by psu

I spent my third day with this year's flu today. In my fever induced haze, I did manage to read some books I've already read, and I made a tiny bit of progress in the video games that I've been playing. I have to say, Lost Odyessey is great fun and all, but the costumes on the female "leads" are a few levels past chainmail bras. These chicks go into fights in Full Victoria's Secret +4 Battle Underwear. This made it hard to concentrate, so I tried some Call of Duty, but even on Easy this game is too hard. Defeated, I laid down in bed and watched YouTube clips at random.

So, courtesy of Bill Simmons over at ESPN, I found this collection of Larry Bird clips. Check out the fake behind the back spinning bounce pass of death at about 1:50 into the movie.

The video really stands on its own, but while I lay in bed watching it through glazed eyes, I realized that since the 1990s, in the intermittent times when I had watched the odd game of hoops on TV, I had not seen anyone make a pass even 1/50th as good as any of the passes in this collection. Maybe I just missed it?

If not, it seems to me the game as we know it is truly dead. If so, I guess I'm just an old coot.

Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

2008-03-06 · by peterb

I've been making real progress in the past year, giving away and donating books and DVDs, even finally getting rid of some of my most ancient and decrepit computers (somewhere, in a Goodwill building, are an IBM RT and a Decstation 3100. Good riddance.)

Tonight, I opened the door to The Room I Don't Go Into for the purposes of throwing away a few things.

The Room I Don't Go Into is worse than I remember. Apparently, in the course of cleaning up the house I might have, er, made it worse.

So, this weekend will require another Goodwill run. If I don't update for a while, it probably means I've fallen in to The Room I Don't Go Into and can't find my way out.

Coming soon: I interviewed Mike Nelson from RiffTrax. As soon as I have it transcribed, I'll post it here.

Game Developer To World: Please Revolve Around Me!

2008-03-10 · by peterb

Today I read an interesting interview with Tim Sweeney of Epic whose tag line is "PCs are good for anything, just not games”.

Summarizing the interview perhaps a bit unfairly, here's what he says:

(1) People aren't buying expensive enough PCs. (2) Even the expensive PCs aren't good enough to run his games. (3) People who buy cheaper machines with Intel integrated graphics are giving their money to Blizzard instead of Epic. (4) This aggression cannot stand. The solution is that everyone except us should change what they're doing and buy machines with more expensive graphics hardware.

What I find sort of amusing about this discussion is that the only time the word "stability" enters the discussion is when Sweeney talks about Epic's development environment ("Do as we say, not as we do!"). This reveals a fascinating truth that doesn't get a lot of wide discussion among hardcore gamers: cutting edge graphics solutions tend to make your computer crash more.(footnote 1)

The upper end of the videocard market is a dog-eat-dog market where the margin is high. Both hardware and drivers are revved frequently, more frequently than the marketing names of the cards might indicate. As a developer, if I had a buck for every time I encountered a situation where software behaved differently on two allegedly "identical" videocards, I'd be rich. Likewise, I've heard my friends in the Microsoft OS group talk about graphics drivers negatively impacting system stability in great detail (this detail usually involves phrases like "utter and complete garbage", sometimes coupled with words that I won't use in this space).

All of which is a way of saying: complain about integrated graphics all you want, but computer and electrical engineering is, inherently, all about tradeoffs. What Intel is selling in their integrated chipset is more than just "crappy performance and low cost". They're selling some specific level of performance ("Good enough for some percentage of PC users to accomplish everything they need."), along with low cost, low space, low power usage, low heat, and a certain level of stability.

Games are, for most of us, only a part of what we use our computers for. It's not clear to me that a computer manufacturer — or a consumer — who accepts the tradeoff offered by an integrated chipset is making a bad choice. And if you insist on defining "the PC games market" as "those consumers who are willing to pay more money for a faster but louder, hotter, larger, less stable product," then no wonder you think the market sucks. The market you picked sucks. Instead of plaintively wishing that perhaps the market will change, you should change your business plan to match reality.

In summary: I wish Epic was a publicly traded company, so that I could short them.

Footnote 1: Cue response of "Well, my computer has never blue screened, so you must be doing something wrong."

Smart And Dumb

2008-03-11 · by psu

Today I got home from dinner and sat down to do some coughing while I surfed up some of my regular web sites on the couch. Today was a good surfing day because I came across two links worth sharing with you, our beloved readers. One is a smart article, one is a stupid article.

First the good news. There's been a lot of traffic at the game boards on the role of piracy in the PC gaming industry. I have no real opinion on this since I don't play games on my PC. First, my PC is a Mac. Second, if I felt like playing games on my PC I could just go in the kitchen and cut my fingers off with a kitchen knife. It would be more enjoyable. I'll stick with my consoles and hand-helds. Thanks. Still, the smart article I found today is about piracy and PC gaming. Since I mostly agree with it I'll let it speak for itself. I think it is a perceptive commentary on the nature of PC development, PC development houses and the general mentality of the "hard core" PC gamer.

Now the dumb news. As usual, The Escapist is trying to be erudite and literate and instead just comes off as your friend who never managed to completely shed his adolescence. Even the title of the article has a frat-boy sensibility to it.

The premise of this piece is something like "sure, we'd all love to be playing serious games, but that shouldn't keep us from being juvenile assholes once in a while." He uses The Witcher as a basis for his arguments, claiming that even though the game is puerile and borderline misogynistic, it's all in good fun.

Now, I would normally agree with the sentiment in this piece. I, for one, am not one to take anything too seriously. But here is something I think the gaming industry needs to wake up and realize right now. All of those complaints from people that games are in general about nothing but being a juvenile asshole come about because the content in your beloved video games is, for the most part, about nothing but being a juvenile asshole. We've ranted about this before, but for some reason no one except our ten readers seems to hear the message.

The quality and maturity of gaming as a medium will ultimately be judged by the quality and maturity of the content and with very very few exceptions there isn't really a lot of content to be proud of, yet. I think that this will improve over time, but it will not improve if the very people who are supposed to be holding the industry up to a higher critical standard continue to be so delusional. The only way to get better content will be to demand better content and to call out the developers who create crap as the crap peddlers that they are.

Maybe I can help. Here are some things that video games don't really need any more of:

  1. Vaguely racist "crime fighting" games where you shoot minorities for fun and profit.

  2. Hooker assault simulators.

  3. Games where you collect sex cards.

  4. Three-way sex with a God mini-games.

And on and on and on. The problem I have with this article is not the idea that we shouldn't have some juvenile fun once in a while. My problem is with the claim that there is any content at all in out in the video game landscape that really rises above the level of juvenile fun. I haven't seen it. I think the Defenders of the Glory of the Mature Video Game are going to have to work a lot harder to convince me that it's there.

PC to PS2

2008-03-12 · by peterb

I fired up Shadow of the Colossus last night only to find that I had somehow managed to overwrite my "You beat the game" save file. The last save I have is right before the final battle with the last Colossus. I'd rather pull out my own teeth than jump straight into that battle just to unlock Time Attack mode -- again -- but I see there are all sorts of save files for the game on GameFaqs. Do any of our Alert Readers know the easiest way for me to transfer one of these saves from my PC to a PS2 memory card? Inquiring minds want to know.

There Is A World Inside The World

2008-03-13 · by peterb

For a while now I've wanted a microscope for performing various silly home science experiments. This week, I found one.

It's marketed as a children's toy: the "My First Lab" Duo scope. "Duo," in this context, means that it has two lights, one above the stage and one below. I had a microscope when I was a kid. I used microscopes throughout college. This silly little thing, at just over $50 -- FIFTY DOLLARS -- is better than any microscope I've ever used. Now, I didn't major in the life sciences or work in any of the labs with the neat equipment; I only have the beat up, abused freshman equipment to compare against. But as far as I'm concerned, this thing is a god-damned revelation. I've spent more on dinner than I have on this thing, and it is awesome.

It comes with everything you need -- other than AA batteries -- to get started. A few prepared slides, a few blank slides, a petri dish, various probes, plastic forceps, a little scalpel, and a couple of different dyes. I've spent the whole night preparing different samples to look at, just for fun (pray for my cats. They are terrified, and rightly so.) The eyepiece is 10x, and the objectives are 4x, 10x, and 40x. The LED lights (you can only use one at a time, above or below) do a better job of illuminating the subject than my pathetic childhood incandescent-and-mirror setup ever did.

This is not heavy duty equipment. It's very light, and feels relatively fragile. But the one thing is, it does the job and the other point is it was only $50. If you've wanted an excuse to own a microscope, here it is. Take two. They're cheap.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to obsessive-compulsively search the interwebs for a 20x eyepiece.

Apologies to Don DeLillo for lifting his phrase for the title of this post.

Chicken Noodle Soup

2008-03-17 · by psu

The flu hit the household a couple of weeks ago, so just before I was taken down with fever, chills and that whole body ache, I stocked us up on the main defense against this sort of thing: chicken soup.

psu_20080308-00878.jpg

This soup is similar to another lazy recipe I talked about before but it's been refined a bit and is slightly more work. The basic idea is the same. First you spend a day making a nice chicken stock. Then the next day you combine this stock with more fresh vegetables and roasted chicken meat to put the final soup together. So, on to the details.

Basic Chicken Stock

This is the easy part. First, buy a two or three pound package of chicken wings, necks or whatever. Now make a about a cup or two of diced onion. I find that one of the huge onions at Whole Foods is enough. If you have smaller onions, use two. Do the same with 2 or 3 carrots, and 2 or 3 stalks of celery. Saute the veggies in a soup pot with some olive oil and salt. Then add the chicken pieces, peppercorns, a bay leaf and water to cover or a bit more. Bring the liquid to a boil, then turn the heat down to get a simmer. Simmer uncovered for a while then covered for a while for a total of three or four hours. Play some Halo.

You should end up with a couple of quarts of strong stock. After a night in the fridge it should look like chicken stock jello.

Roasted Chicken

This is the fun part. Get yourself a small roasting chicken. I found the horrendously expensive free range chickens at Whole Foods to be the right size. Regular Purdue chickens or whatever tend to be too large. Chop a clove of garlic and stuff it into the cavity of the bird along with a couple of pinches of salt. Then rub the outside of the chicken with olive oil, salt, thyme, rosemary, and whatever else you like.

Put this in the oven in a shallow pan and roast it for around an hour or a bit more depending on how big the bird is. Take it out, let it cool off and then pull the meat off. Eat some of it for lunch, and then chop up the rest for the soup.

Chicken Soup

This is the last part. Start with your chicken stock and the pieces of meat you made. Then take another onion and dice it as small as you can. It helps to buy a hideously expensive Japanese knife for this. Do the same with two carrots and one or two stalks of celery.

Now get that soup pot out again and heat up some more olive oil. Add the veggies and some salt and pepper. Mix that around for five or ten minutes until the onion is soft. Now add the chicken, a quart or a bit more of stock, about the same amount of water and some white wine. The only thing you really need to worry about is balancing the amount of liquid with the solids. Just do it until it looks like soup. Simmer this for a while, add more salt and pepper to taste. To give it a Chinese feel, add Chinese cabbage and white pepper.

If you want noodles in your soup, cook them separately in another pot, then put them in a bowl and serve the soup on top. Noodles in the soup are pointless because the next day they'll get nasty.

Matzoh balls are also nice.

So there you have it. This basic scheme works for almost all soups. Try adding bacon in the last part. Bacon makes all soups nicer.

Credits

The idea for adding the roasted chicken was stolen from the cookbook we got from my son's school. Thanks to Brenda for this idea. I don't know why I never considered it before.

Kyoto By Way Of Kansas City

2008-03-19 · by peterb

Those of you following me on Twitter know that I managed to find not just one, but three of the types of booze I've been looking for last night. This is one of the nice things about travelling out of state: I get to shop at liquor stores that aren't run by people who are profoundly uninterested in selling liquor.

Here in Kansas City, Missouri, for example, there are at least two local chains that are worth visiting: the larger Berbiglia, and, my new favorite, Gomer's. Why I like Gomer's so much can best be illustrated by a short story.

A couple of months ago, I went into a PLCB store -- one of their "premier" locations -- and asked for a bottle of maraschino liqueur. I needed maraschino in order to make some of the drinks in the Savoy cocktail book, because I was following along with the (somewhat train-wreck-like) Stomping Through The Savoy "make one of every drink" discussion at eGullet. There are a couple of brands of this type of liqueur. There's Luxardo, and Maraska, and probably a few others. When I asked the clerk for some help, her response was to simply look up and say "There's no such thing."

[luxardo

It exists.](http://wptest.tleaves.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/18535.jpg "luxardo")

"There's no such thing." It's hard to capture the wrongheadedness of this response to a customer. First, it's inaccurate. Second, it's insulting. Third, it evinces an almost pathological fear of improving your inventory. Now, one could be generous and assume that what she really meant was "We don't have it," but you know what? I am completely done being generous to the PLCB. When a customer walks in to your store and asks for a product you don't have, you should find out what the product is so that you can obtain it (or, at least, consciously decide not to obtain it). Somewhere deep in the bowels of a building in Harrisburg the PLCB has a buyer, who is probably a very nice person, who has to decide what spirits they carry. That person, unfortunately, has no goddamn idea what their customers want, because when customers walk into stores and ask for a product, the idiots at the counter tell them "Sorry, it doesn't exist," and then never mention it to the store manager or the buyers in Harrisburg.

The PLCB is a large retail operation. Large retail operations succeed or fail by creating processes that their employees must follow to remove uncertainty from the transaction. When I walk into a PLCB and ask for something they don't have, I always get a different response. Sometimes I get the unhelpful brush off. But not always. Sometimes I get well-meaning but ineffectual assistance from some nice employee who spends 15 minutes trying to look up the product in a huge book that doesn't have it. Sometimes I encounter someone who knows what the product is, but not how to obtain it. And then, the best case is that I encounter someone who knows what the product is and can help me special order it, which means I only have to spend 15 minutes at the store helping him fill out a form and giving them money, and then coming back later in the week to pick up my product. The point here is that the very uncertainly in how my requests are going to be processed creates a huge disincentive for me, the customer, to even bother asking. I start from the assumption that it's going to be too painful to get a bottle of liquor from the store that sells liquor.

Here's what happened when I asked for the Luxardo Maraschino at Gomer's: the clerk said "Oh, are you making Aviations?" Then he asked for my phone number, scribbled it down, and said "OK. We'll have it here by Friday. We'll call you. Bye!"

Feeling lucky, I then asked "Do you have any creme de violette?" The clerk said "Well, there are a few brands of that, but most are pretty bad. I think we can get you the Marie Brizard, though. Let me check." He spent about a minute typing into a computer, and confirmed that he could get it. I added 2 bottles of that to the order. All of this took less time than it took me to explain to a clerk at a PLCB "Premium Spirits" store what Armagnac was.

In summary: the next time you need to buy liquor, you may find it more convenient to drive 15 hours to Gomer's in Kansas City than to go to your local PLCB store.

Gomer's also had a bottle of the Suntory Yamazaki single malt whisky. I've been a bit obsessed with Japanese whisky ever since I started reading Nonjatta, but this is the first time I've managed to taste any. The Yamazaki is a product that the PLCB does actually carry, but only as a special order, and as I've detailed before, placing special orders with the PLCB is too inconvenient to bother with.

I expected that, in the name of experience, I was simply paying too much money for a bottle of whisky that was going to taste like a mid-tier blended scotch. I was wrong. The Yamazaki is absolutely fascinating, and I highly recommend it to fans of single malt. It has a clean, almost aggressively clean highland-like taste, fresh malt and just a hint of peat. The strangest thing about it is the body; most Scottish single malts I'm familiar with have a certain weighty mouthfeel. "Oily" isn't quite the right word, but they definitely have a heft and presence that is distinctive. The Yamazaki was feather-light and delicate. Normally it's a mouthfeel I'd associate with liquors that are overly attenuated, but attenuation carries a host of unpleasant flavors with it, and this had none. It is, truly, a superb whisky, and one that I will buy again, even at its given price, which compares to that of mid-range Scottish single malts. It also makes me regret that more Japanese whiskys aren't imported into the US: it's clear to me that we're missing out on quite a phenomenon here.

Size Matters

2008-03-24 · by psu

Tonight a simple tip: size matters, so make sure you give the food enough space. This tip comes with a story.

Back when I was younger, I used to actually ride my bike regularly in the summer. Wednesday nights. So one Wednesday I left to do my ride and I left my lovely wife with the task of prepping some aromatics for whatever we were making that night. The recipe called for her to cut up and saute off some celery. This should have gone well, but I forgot to give her tonight's tip.

I got back from my ride to find a pan full of about 2 pounds of celery at various levels of doneness. She had not used the right size pan, or, if the right size pan did not exist, had not done the celery in batches.

So: give the food enough space. Make sure that when you put the food in the pan you still have enough room to swish it around, stir it, toss it in the air. For most saute purposes, you don't want the pan to be much more than half full unless the food is going to shrink a lot, like greens do.

This doesn't just apply to pans. I can't count the number of kitchens I've been in where they expect you to cut up food on a board that is smaller than the screen on this laptop. Such a device leaves you no room to move the cut food out of the way. It barely leaves you enough room to even have the food and the knife on the board at the same time. Don't let this happen to you. Get the biggest board you can possibly carry. Which brings me to a tangent about cutting boards. Leave those crappy glass and soft plastic boards in the store. They will ruin your life. The commercial style plastic boards are OK. Various synthetic/wood mixtures are OK. But for me, wood cutting boards are by far the best. Ok, end of tangent.

Finally, this tip applies to the dark arts of cooking pasta correctly. It's taken more than 25 years, but I think I'm finally learning the basics. The most basic basic is: use a pot that lets you have enough water around the pasta. Then it won't stick together and it won't sit on the bottom of the pan and become a mess. A 6 quart stock pot with 3-4 quarts of water is the minimum you need for (say) around half a pound of pasta. For up to a pound, I use an 8 quart pot with 5-6 quarts of water in it. That's pushing it though, bigger would be better.

So there you have it. A simple and obvious pointer that will save you time and aggravation. Give the food enough space.

1000 Years of Popular Music

2008-03-26 · by peterb

I've returned from my sojourn across half of the nation. Along the way, there were plenty of adventures: the Priceline reservation that turned out to be in a crack den, the fabulous KC barbecue, delicious and hard-to-get booze, and, of course, the disaster that ended in my being stranded in Indianapolis for an extra day. All of that will be written about in good time, once I've collected my thoughts.

But for today, I'd just like to share one discovery that has nothing to do with the trip other than it was an album I bought to keep me company: Richard Thompson's 1000 Years of Popular Music

Thompson does a great job of explaining the concept, so I'll take the liberty of quoting him here:

The idea came from Playboy Magazine -- I was asked to submit a list in late 1999 of the 10 greatest songs of the Millennium. Ha! I thought, hypocrites, they don't mean millennium, they mean 20 years — I'll call their bluff and do a real thousand-year selection. My list was similar to the choices here...starting in about 1068, and winding slowly up to 2001.

The album is, simply, breathtaking, combining an incisive editorial sensibility with Thompson's virtuoso guitar and willing, if not always appropriate, vocals.

I can be forgiven, I hope, if I find the earlier tracks more compelling than the more contemporary material. Everyone, it seems, is familiar with his cover of Oops... I Did It Again. For my money, the standout track is Bonnie St. Johnstone, a murder ballad whose structure will be familiar to anyone who has heard Nick Cave's interpretation of Henry Lee.

Thompson is accompanied by Judith Owen on keyboards and Debra Dobkin on percussion, and each of those performers get a turn at the vocals on appropriate songs. The simple instrumentation works extremely well for the breadth of the album.

To give you an idea of some of the breadth of the material, here's a brief promotional sample from YouTube:

The album is available on iTunes, but I couldn't resist paying just a bit more to get the DVD and CD combined set. The DVD/CD set comes in a lovely little case with an integrated booklet giving a little information on each song. It's nothing you couldn't find on the web, but it's a nice package in and of itself. And although I shouldn't have to say this, given Thompson's role as an independent artist, I'll say it anyway: don't steal this music. Buy it. Although as Michael Collins notes, "Thompson's an artist who has spent most his career figuring out how to accomodate bootleggers - his major revenue stream is now a collection of authorized bootlegs (Celtschmerz, Ducknapped and the like) that are only available off the website. Looking at this disc, it's the most "fan-friendly" thing I've seen".

Most of Richard Thompson's music can also be ordered from his web site, where he shows a wonderful degree of communication with his fans.

1000 Years of Popular Music by Richard Thompson. If more artists were creating albums like this, more people would be buying albums.

Brown's Eats

2008-03-27 · by psu

I'm probably the only food dork who hasn't been watching Alton Brown for the last 9 years or so. He became a fixture on the Food Network just about the time that I felt that I had learned everything I needed to learn, for the moment, about the whole food and cooking hobby. So it wasn't until a couple of weeks ago when we were filling the Tivo at random while the flu rampaged through the house that I happened to watch Good Eats for the first time.

And I like it. It's not so much the content or the recipes themselves I like. After all, he has at least one show where he tells me that brown rice tastes good (bah!). No. What I like is the visual and narrative style. Narrative style in a cooking show? Well, yeah.

It took a few shows for me to figure out what it was that I found refreshing and enjoyable in this series. The first thing I realized was that the man never uses that ANSI standard boring straight on or three quarter shot of the cook standing behind his stove. He also never uses the standard above the pan mirror shot. In fact, he hardly ever uses a regular shot at all. There are goofy wide angle shots, off kilter tilted shots that dance back and forth as he talks, point of view shots looking out from the oven or up from the bottom of a pot of boiling water and on and on.

I also like how this show has characters, rather than just the personality of the host alone. The food police show up from time to time. There is the "nutritional anthropologist" and the "culinary scientist", both of whom are light-hearted caricatures rather than dry academics types with a tendency to drone. Finally, there is the "hand" that is always taking stuff off the set or bringing stuff on the set.

The hand is also one of many ways the show manipulates time during the presentation. Most cooking shows just present the execution of a recipe as if the cameras were rolling on the cook working live. Good Eats is produced so that some important techniques in real time for illustrative purposes, but the progress of the cooking is accelerated via judicious editing. This allows Brown to concentrate on teaching you techniques or general principles rather than the particulars of a specific recipe. Being an engineering dork, I like the way he abstracts away the details to tell you about what is more generally applicable.

Since he skips the boring parts, he can fill the rest of the show with his unending patter about the trivia surrounding various ingredients and techniques. This often takes the form of Alton Brown talking into the camera, usually with some sort of outlandish prop that looks like something he stole from a preschool. But just as often it is fed to you in what can only be called a series of scenes, with "actors" playing characters. Each show comes off more like a short film with a little narrative centered around food. This is a refreshing change from the literal style in the rest of food television.

There was the show where he repeatedly takes different kinds of cookies to his sister, only to be rejected over and over again. There was the show where he works on getting okra a TV deal. There was the show where a giant monster made up of green leafy vegetables invades his kitchen. There was the show where he gets busted by the church ladies for stealing casserole. And so on and so forth.

After collecting about half a dozen episodes of the show, I found myself curious as to where this production style came from. It surprised me that a food guy would do something so different from all of the other drek on the Food Network. It turns out that the style of the show makes perfect sense when you find out that Alton Brown got his start in the film industry and not the food industry. For me, this approach serves to keep my interest in the show even if I am pretty familiar with the food ideas that he is discussing.

So, I say, do not fear the fact that he populates the Food Network. Put this stuff in your Tivo. It's good TV and as a bonus, will lead you to good eats too.

But, he is lying about the brown rice thing. You can't trust anyone who gets long grain white rice from his chinese takeout joint.

Mike Nelson Interview

2008-03-31 · by peterb

A couple of weeks ago, after reviewing RiffTrax and its cousin project, Cinematic Titanic, I had the happy opportunity to speak with Mike Nelson, the face of RiffTrax. In particular, I was most interested in talking to Mike about some of the business model issues I raised in that earlier article. He graciously agreed to discuss them.

You started RiffTrax in 2006. How long did it -- let me just ask this very bluntly. Is it a living?

It is, yeah.

And how long did it take to become self-sustaining?

It's interesting that you ask that, because it's a topic that...I want to be careful about this. I think there's a point where people think "If someone else is making money, they're doing something wrong or they're exploiting me" and we are not to that point, believe me. It is a living. But I also try to insulate myself from the financial part of it, and that's why I teamed with a going company to create it.

So, you don't want to be deciding what jokes to make based on popularity or something like that.

Yeah, to be poring over a financial statement is not what I do, so that is why teaming up with a company that was already in existence made sense to me.

How much has the ability to riff on current movies, "A-List" movies for lack of a better term, made a difference to you? One of the things that excited me about RiffTrax was that I could hear people make fun of a movie I loved, rather than a Roger Corman B movie.

That was part of it. I had always thought that this process of riffing on stuff will make sense with movies that are good as well, because we certainly had plenty of people at Mystery Science that thought some of the movies we did were good and instinctively went "Oh, how could you do that to that movie?" and it's like "Well, y'know, the movie exists without us on there. We didn't go paint a moustache on the Mona Lisa. You can watch the movie without our commentary." And so it's kind of a metacommentary that can add to and make the movie funny, but it's also -- when the movie deserves some ribbing it gets it, but otherwise it's just kind of floating on top of the experience, if that makes any sense.

Yeah, it does. Actually, One of the things I like about the audio-only experience is that it feels much more like people in the room with you rather than watching a performance. Obviously, it is still a performance, i'm sure you rehearse a lot, but it feels like less of a performance to the audience.

We work really really hard on the script, and then the moment where we perform it is just like it sounds, where we're having a lot of fun, and it is a bunch of guys and now we can relax because we've done all this work in advance and perform this thing that we now really all agree upon that we like. Hopefully, that feeling comes across that we're not laboring in the recording studio. It's fun, at that point. We've done all the work and labor up front.

How did you end up working with Weird Al? Did you find him or did he find you?

We found him, actually. He was one of the people that I've always wanted to work with. I've admired his work ethic. He seems to have a philosophy — and he sort of confirmed it for me — that he just wants to make people laugh, he wants to make them happy, and he wants to make as many people laugh as possible. And I share that. So I was really happy to get him on board. And then to find out that he was just an amazing performer and really enthusiastic in the studio was fantastic.

Do your relatives watch RiffTrax? Have any of them had trouble getting it to work?

I have a lot of nieces and nephews of the age that would be interested, and they had been spontaneously listening to it and knew more about it than I had ever imagined. I've always been one of those people that loathed working in front of my family. In fact, I hated it whenever any of my family members came to see any of my shows. "I don't stand over you at work, please don't think you have to come see me." But several of them have started to get on the RiffTrax bandwagon. None of them have had any trouble getting it to work.

If there is any fly in the ointment of RiffTrax, it's that there is this process of synchronization. How much do you think that impacts -- not sales, so much, but the experience?

I think -- you can only know anecdotally, but it's definitely a factor. Before we even started the business we wanted to make sure there were a number of people who understood the concept and were comfortable doing it. But yeah, you meet plenty of people who just immediately shut off to the process and that's a problem, and we're working all the time to get it working for those people. And it does no good to explain that it's not difficult. There's enough people (obviously, along age lines and along tech savvy) who are able to do it without any problem or explanation. So, it's a problem and we're working on solutions, yet at the same time the number of people who have no problem with it is growing all the time.

There's a phrase that people bandy about called The Long Tail. One way to look at that idea is that you have a large back library of things, and you may only sell a few of each one, but that the depth of the library leads to many sales, which adds up. Have you seen that in effect for you?

Yeah, it is helpful. And one of the things that almost directly correlates to sales is availability of the movie, that's a component of it. But having a bigger library and appealing to tastes that are just slightly outside of the mainstream is a goal of ours. And having a varied library is important so that when a big title is released, people will come to check it out, but then say "Oh yeah, here's this movie that nobody else knows about." It may not sell many on its own, but it will cause an up-tick over time. Having the library definitely does help, and makes it a a richer experience. Some people don't want to see Star Wars at all.

You did a commentary on someone else's DVD -- I believe it was Night of the Living Dead. Do you anticipate that happening again, or does it take a particularly open-minded director to allow someone to make fun of his movie?

You know, it's funny. I pitched a network show called "What The Hell Were You Thinking?" where you bring in someone who has had a long and successful career and you look at their less-successful things and you get them to open up about why they failed, and what they were thinking, and what were the pressures, and I just got all these responses that there would never be anybody who would do that, and I just don't believe that for a second. And I think they were just saying that because they were afraid of talking to these people. I think it would be a fascinating show. So, my point being, I think there's plenty of people who would like that, and would enjoy commentary where you actually talk frankly about critical and financial failures in the industry, in a fun way, and in a funny way, without trying to tear the person down. So I think it's quite possible, and I'd love to do it.

I have one question that I'm sure everyone asks you. Out of all the riffs you've done, do you have a favorite?

They all have their fun side. I'm partial to the movies of the '80s, the Over the Tops, the Roadhouses and yet I really got a lot of joy at grinding away at movies, to solve the movies that are troublesome. To get through a section where there's nothing and turn it into something. So that said, I like the more action-oriented movies. Of those movies that I've done with with Kevin and Bill, the big blockbusters yield the most fun for people. So that's my wormy answer. Personally, I love to do the '80s movies, but on a satisfaction level I love "solving" the action movies.

Thanks for your time.

Thank you.

April Fools' Day: Still Not Funny

2008-04-01 · by peterb

Seriously, everyone, your little April Fools' Day fake news articles aren't funny and you're killing me. Let this holiday die. Please. I beg of you.

Obama, Clinton, and Hobgoblins

2008-04-04 · by peterb

I typically avoid making political posts because, first, they tend to be boring, and second, they violate Peterb's First Law of Human Nature, which, expressed concisely, is:

"You can never tell anyone anything."

Lately, however, it has become impossible to turn a corner in Pennsylvania without hearing people discuss politics, and in particular the politics of personality that surround Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. I think that these discussions are emblematic of a particular failure of the Democratic party, and will be the proximate cause of their close-but-no-cigar heartbreaking loss to John McCain in November. Since I'd rather not live under another 8 years of Republican misrule, I'm going to violate my own no-politics guideline and spend a few minutes talking to the world at large, and hope that it makes some small, hopefully positive, difference.

First, let me show my own personal biases: I do not care whether Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama is the Democratic nominee. I would, happily, vote for a moldy wheel of cheddar cheese if it was running against the Republicans.

Some partisans and fans of Obama and Clinton devoutly, and honestly, believe that only their candidate can triumph in November. These people also seem to believe that John Kerry lost to George Bush because he performed poorly as a candidate. Both of these beliefs are false. The election, such as it is, will already be won (or, more likely, lost) well before the party convention blesses one or the other candidate. The Kerry election was lost long before the party convention blessed him as a candidate.

The issue causing the Democrats to fumble ineffectually for their car keys in the zombie-infested parking lot of modern American politics can be reduced to a single sentence: The Republican party, and its operatives, have a clear and consistent message, and the Democratic party, and its operatives, are busy having arguments with themselves.

Note that the argument I'm referring to is not "Clinton vs. Obama." The Republicans have (and have always had) plenty of vicious infighting about which dog will get the choicest bone. Rather, I'm saying the Democratic party still has not figured out its message.

In political terms, this is absolute death. Voters, like bees, can sense fear. Obviously there are certain political third-rails that even the Republicans dare not touch, but by and large the average voter does not feel too strongly about most issues. For those issues, the average voter cares less about what your position is, but just that you have a position at all, and that he knows what it is.

Let's pretend that there is a brand new Republican mayor in your town. His name is Wilford Q. Forsythe. That's all you know about him. Where do you think Wilford stands on the following issues: abortion, what to do about the War in Iraq, tighter regulation of the airlines, NAFTA, school choice, and gun control?

Go ahead. Take a minute and answer those questions in your head. They're easy questions to answer, aren't they?

Now imagine that there's a Democratic mayor, Marilyn Q. Impatiens. Where does she stand on those same issues? The answer is obvious: you have no idea whatsoever.

The point here is not that Republican candidates are hopelessly, tragically evil in all of their political beliefs (although, of course, they are). The point is that -- for the most part -- those positions are part of the package, and that frees Republican commentators and partisans to work on targeting and shaping their message years before the Democrats have even decided whether, say, they intend on supporting free trade this month. And yes, I'm aware that one can always find a Republican candidate who is an outlier on one issue or another. But compared to the utter chaos on the other side of the aisle, those are mere eccentricities and outliers.

This consistency of message is something that resonates very deeply with the American public. George Bush didn't win because John Kerry was an idiot. He won because the American people had a perfect understanding of the nature of the pig they were buying. The Democrats -- not Kerry -- were unable to explain why America should buy their soy protein pig instead. Bill Clinton was able to close the sale on his candidacy by focusing the entire Democratic party on one singular, simple, easy-to-understand question: "How much money is in your pocket?" and constantly hammering home the easy-to-understand answer: "I'll make sure you have more."

I can't say for sure what issue will electrify the electorate this cycle. Perhaps it will be the war in Iraq. Perhaps it is our collapsing economy.

What I can say for sure, however, is that the Democrats are doomed to yet another humiliating and ignominious defeat unless they stop trying to convince people who to support, and start trying to convince people why the Democratic party is the right choice.

I didn't mention it earlier, but this post has a soundtrack. Enjoy. See you at the wake in November.

Fried Red Snapper

2008-04-09 · by psu

This is a favorite that started out as an accident in graduate school. Obtain 2 full snapper filets. The best way to do this is to go to a good store and have them filet a whole snapper for you. In Pittsburgh, this means you should go to the Penn Avenue Fish Company in the strip, because no other store in Pittsburgh is even half as good. When you get the fish home you will note that it is in two filets, each about 4 or 5 inches long. The pieces have a V-shaped indentation on one end. Use a knife to cut along that indentation to get two or three pieces out of each filet. Go for pieces of uniform thickness.

Now we're going to bread the fish and fry it.

Bread the fish as follows: flour on a plate, 1 beaten egg mixed with tepid (not warm, not cool) water, bread crumbs on a plate. Dredge in the flour, then dip in the egg then dredge in the bread crumbs.

Fry the fish in enough olive oil to cover the bottom of the pan and come up a little on the fish. Do this on medium to medium low heat. You don't want to burn the outside, but you want it to brown nicely and leave some brown bits in the plan.

Three or four minutes per side should be enough depending on how thick the fish is. I do this in a 10 inch frying pan, so it takes two batches to get all the fish done. Store the fish in a warm baking dish or something to keep it warm while you do the second batch.

After the fish is all fried, deglaze the pan with white wine. Add a chopped garlic glove, a bit of salt, a little water or broth, and a few grinds of pepper. Turn the heat to high and let this reduce then melt a small chunk of butter in the mixture and mix it around to emulsify it.

Serve the fish with the sauce and whatever you like. I like Bok Choy and Whole Foods Tater Tots (really!). Pasta also works. Rice also works (and is better than pasta, because I'm Chinese).

Rice Rice Baby

2008-04-10 · by psu

In the past few weeks the Tivo appears to have exhausted the current stock of Good Eats shows that are in heavy rotation. Rather than three or four a night, we are down to just a few per week. My original impressions of the show still stand, but I have one relatively minor complaint. He really doesn't know anything about rice.

Maybe it's his upbringing. Maybe it's because there are no Chinese restaurants of any quality in The South. Whatever the reason, one is forced to this conclusion after watching his show about rice. The show begins with a loving tribute to risotto, a tribute which is well-deserved. Risotto is one of the few Western rice dishes that is actually worth eating. He then takes a bizarre tangent into brown rice salad. Why I don't know. Why eat brown rice? More importantly, why eat it cold? The only discussion of proper white rice comes when he dismisses the rice that you would get at a Chinese takeout joint as "tasteless long grain white rice."

Now, I don't know what passes for Chinese food in Atlanta, but if you get long grain white rice at a Chinese restaurant I suggest you find another Chinese restaurant. Such a thing is unthinkable. That's like getting Olive Garden pasta and declaring that the Italians don't know much about noodles. Good rice is short (or medium short) grain and cooked so it sticks together but is not mushy.

The pinnacle of good rice, in my not so humble opinion, is sushi rice, which gets no mention at all in this show. Note, I don't mean the gluey crap that you get at most places in the U.S. I mean, in the U.S. people make sushi with brown rice. We are not to be trusted. I mean the ethereal little balls of perfectly cooked rice, seasoned with whatever they season it with and rolled lightly under a perfect piece of fish to add just that little bit of zing and texture. You bite into it, it's there, and then it just disappears at the same time as the fish.

Good sushi rice is so important that you have to apprentice for years in sushi restaurants in Japan before you are even allowed to touch the rice. This, my friends, is the most important ingredient on the plate. Not just some "tasteless" white side dish of limited character. It is the main attraction!

So, I'm tired of the abuse that white rice gets from the food industry at large. I'm tired of "alternative grains". And most of all, I'm tired of being served really bad rice. I think Alton and the rest of the U.S. food industry could stand to do a little more studying on this subject. I'm hoping he has covered these issues in a show that I haven't managed to see yet. After all, if we can't spread a true understanding of good rice to the public at large, the Italians might take over with their fancy pasta, in all those strange awkward shapes. And we can't have that.

For Sale: One Cat. Cheap.

2008-04-11 · by peterb

My cat just gnawed through the wire to my Wii sensor bar.

Good thing you can find replacement sensor bars everywhere! Oh wait. YOU CAN'T.

Edit: It looks like I can order a replacement sensor bar from Nintendo for $10, or pay $20 at a local Gamestop for a battery-powered one with no wire. Guess which one I'll be doing.

Marginal Added Value

2008-04-14 · by psu

There are two universal rules about people who work in software:

  1. Inexperience breeds an unrealistic optimism towards the power of new tools.

  2. To offset (1), experience breeds an unrealistic hatred of all tools.

We have seen this cycle play out over and over again in the design, implementation and adoption of instruction sets (remember when those still mattered?), programming languages, operating systems, and end user applications. Back when I was younger and more optimistic about the power of new tools, I used to tinker a lot with scripting languages of various kinds. Over about ten years or so what this experience taught me was very valuable in my later career. The main lesson was this: pick one, learn it, and then stop paying attention. The one I picked to use most at the time was perl. Since then, perl has become a popular punching bag for newer and shinier scripting tools, but I have stuck to my guns. I know perl, therefore there is no reason to learn another scripting language.

Most of the languages that I am concerned with come from the tradition of batch systems on time sharing computers. These allow users to create simple scripts of tasks that they may want to run over and over again and submit them as a whole unit, saving a lot of typing and waiting in front of the terminal. The UNIX shell languages and the scripting tools that evolved from them certainly have this heritage.

Perl, in particular, is nothing if not a utility that combines the functionality of what were historically separate tools (sh, awk, sed, grep) in the UNIX world into a single more efficient and easy to use package if what you needed was a tool to scan and process huge amounts of text in various forms in order to transform it into text in some other form. Perl follows a few simple rules:

  1. Don't get in my way with a lot of extraneous glue that I don't care about. Perl is very direct. No compilers, no linkers, no type checking.

  2. Process text well. This is my "equal twiddle" rule, referring to the operator in perl (=~) that triggers regular expression matching and replacement of text. In my mind, a script language must have a concise way to do this. I don't want to have to type out regularExpression.matchThisStringPlease() when I mean =~.

  3. Handle iteration and files well. Most tasks that perl is well suited for involve processing large areas of the file system. Make sure this is streamlined.

  4. Simple general purpose data structures. In other words, hash tables.

  5. Make every feature useful. I'm not going to learn how to use all of them, but if I do there should be a good reason for it.

At their core, scripting languages are all designed around one idea: making writing quick programs easier. A high level of utility is prioritized over cleaner syntax, rich type systems with rigorous type checking, and features that are needed to scale the size of programs or the teams working on them. In my opinion, the designer of perl understood these tradeoffs almost intuitively and usually made the right choices in the core of the language itself. Yes there are warts, but find me any system without them.

With this background, it is clear why I stopped paying attention to scripting languages. They are all designed with these tradeoffs in mind. Therefore, they all make weird compromises to increase the utility to code density. Therefore, you are guaranteed to have to learn some idiosyncratic way of thinking or working in order to deal with these tradeoffs. Therefore, you should only do it once.

There are certainly many other scripting languages. Some, like tcl, are not worth mentioning except to spit in the face of anyone who ever worked to propagate that particular demon seed. Others, like python and ruby claim to be "like perl only cleaner". And yet these claims never hold up. Once the rubber hits the road, every one of these newer tools has some brain damage of its own, and each of them falls backwards on the utility scale by breaking one of the rules above. In particular, most fail the equal twiddle rule, but there are other examples. Python has its psychotic use of white space to determine lexical scope. Ruby has a lot of useless tinkering with modern language features like closures and continuations, except that it does not get them right. So why bother?

But, don't let me make your decisions for you. I picked up perl because at the time I did there was nothing else that did as much as easily. You young people have a wider variety of choices to make, so go out and pick something that appeals to your sense of aesthetics and design. Just make sure you remember two things:

  1. When push comes to shove, not having =~ will piss you off.

  2. Whatever you do, only learn one. It's just not worth the time and the brain space to do more.

Memo to Herr Mosley

2008-04-15 · by peterb

While there are many German words that I know, the one that I think is most apropos here is schadenfreude.

Auf wiedersehen, liebchen.

How to Not Be a Software Pirate

2008-04-18 · by peterb

Because I'm a glutton for punishment, occasionally I'll read a thread at some internet forum or other. Often in game forums, but also in more surprising places like this, the topic of software piracy comes up. These threads inevitably result in 20 pages of back-and-forth involving hundreds of people which reduce, in the end, to this exchange:

Person 1: "Hey, stop stealing software. That's wrong."

Person 2: "Don't call me a thief! Copyright violation isn't theft. Anyway, I really need to use this software, so that makes it OK."

Beyond the obvious observation -- that Person 2 is a dickhead -- there's something more subtle going on here. Today, it dawned on me. The Person 2s of the world aren't just pirating software because they are bad people. They're pirating software because they haven't learned how to not pirate software. It's not simply an ethical issue, it's a personal failing, sort of like not knowing how to stop after one or two drinks.

Therefore, today, I'm going to teach you how to not be a software pirate. Let's call today "Come Clean Friday". Today's the day you're going to become a better person. I'm going to help.

Step 1: Take Inventory

Take a look at the list of programs you have installed on your machine. For each application, ask yourself: "Was this commercial (or shareware)? Did I pay for this?" Jot down the names of any (commercial) software that you haven't yet paid for.

Step 2: Do You Need It?

For each unpaid program on your list, ask yourself: "Have I ever actually used this, other than starting it up once after downloading it to make sure it works? How many times have I run it? Do I use it on a regular basis?" On your list, mark down "Yes" next to each program that you actually use.

Step 3: Delete What You Don't Need

For every program on your list that you didn't actually use, delete it. Should the need arise for that program some day, you will have an opportunity to purchase it then. In the meantime, deleting the program not only improves your life ethically, it saves on disk space and organizational clutter as well.

Step 4: Make Right What You Do Need

Now you're left with a (hopefully small) list of for-pay programs that you haven't paid for but that you really, honestly need. For each of the programs on your list, do one of the following things:

Option A: Search for a free alternative to the program in question. Download that alternative, delete the commercial program, and use the alternative instead. For example, if you've pirated Photoshop, download the GIMP instead and delete your illegal copy of Photoshop.

Option B: Order a copy of the commercial program in question. Now you have every right to use the program, and can stop acting defensive on internet message boards.

Option C: Delete the program even though you feel you "need it". Go without. If you don't actually want to pay $19.99 to some shareware developer for his game, then you should seriously consider not playing it, for reasons I'll go into in more detail below.

"But I really need Photoshop, and I don't have the money to buy it!" some people say. For those people, I offer options D and E:

Option D: Seek a cheaper version of the program. If you are a student, you may qualify for an educational discount. If you have a friend who works at the company, they may be able to get you a discounted copy at the company store. You may be able to find older versions of the program in question on eBay.

Option E: Delete the commercial program in question. Start saving money each week; set a budget, put away a specified amount of money, and when you have enough, buy the program. There's a hidden bonus to doing this: you may find, after you've amassed the $1999 necessary to buy Autodesk Maya Complete 7, that you would rather use the money for something else, like a mortgage payment, or a lot of grilled cheese sandwiches. In this case, you've not only improved your ethics, but you've learned something valuable about the meaning of the word "need". Sometimes learning to do without presents us with valuable opportunities for personal growth.

Stupid Arguments That I Absolutely Guarantee Will Be Made In The Comments Section, Below

"Copyright violation isn't theft!"

When someone makes this technically true but completely-missing-the-point sort of argument, I can only assume that they're the sort of dickhead who will argue "Lo, but I am not actually the glans of a penis!" when someone correctly informs them that they are a dickhead.

"I only use this because the Evil (Microsoft/Adobe/Apple/Beagle Bros.) Monopoly forces me to do it."

We are each, all of us, responsible for our own actions. No one made you do anything. To the extent that there is any justification that drives me up a wall, this one is it. (To the extent that there is any justification that I'm almost willing to say "OK, at least you're honest", it would be "I pirate software because I don't feel bad about taking things that aren't mine and I'm pretty sure I won't get caught.")

"I would buy this software if it was cheaper, but it's just too expensive!"

The first response to this is: it isn't true. You wouldn't buy it if it was cheaper. The second response is to observe that life is full of difficult ethical choices, and in our world it's generally sellers who have the privilege of setting the price of a product. Not buying a product that's too expensive is a perfectly reasonable way of applying market pressure to encourage the seller to lower the price. Stealing the product is not reasonable.

"I pirate programs to decide if they are worth buying. I need to try them out first."

This response is especially poignant when it's offered to justify copying applications and games for which the publisher already offers a free demo. The claim then morphs to "Sure, there's a demo, but it doesn't support all the features", or else "The time limit wasn't enough to evaluate it properly," at which point we're clearly in the land of ex post facto justifications for bad behavior.

But let's say the publisher doesn't offer a demo. Surely, there are programs out there for which that is true. Is stealing the product really your only response? Off the top of my head I can think of other, less ethically challenged responses. You could write to the publisher, explain the situation, and ask them for an evaluation version for a limited time (and yes, I've found that many software developers and publishers are happy to do this.) You could find a friend who has already bought the software, and ask to try it out on their machine. Stealing something just to "try it out" is, in my mind, the pinnacle of lame justifications.

Why This Matters

Neither I, nor anyone else, can force you to not pirate software. The odds are good that the Software Police are never going to break down your door and bust you for stealing something that you don't have the right to use. At the end of the day, the issue is purely one of personal ethics: do you want to be a good person, or do you want to be a bad person? Good people pay for the (commercial) products they use. Bad people don't.

Paying for all the software you use may seem like a hardship, especially if you've spent years becoming used to, as they say, "riding in the black". I grew up at a time when pirating Apple II games was the norm, so I'm not unsympathetic to the feeling of wanting to "collect" every cool program in the world, but not having enough money to buy them all. But in the end, each day we wake up and ask ourselves "What kind of a person am I?" I want to suggest to you, dear software pirate, that being the sort of person who pays for what they use is a better kind of person to be.

I'm not saying you should pay for your software because it's better for the software industry.

I'm saying you should pay for your software because it is better for you.

Egg-Flavored Booze

2008-04-23 · by peterb

I had to place a special order with the PLCB the other day to get a bottle of something for my mom. So, as long as I was placing the order, I ordered a bottle of Advocaat. Egg liqueur.

When you say the words "egg liqueur" most people will, instinctively, recoil in horror. There's no need to do this: the liqueur can't actually get you if you don't open the bottle.

I've had egg-based liqueurs in the past. In Italy, several of the popular egg liqueurs don't really taste anything like egg. They're more like zabaglione in a bottle. This is not such a bad thing.

Advocaat is a bit simpler. When the drink was first made in the New World, it was made with avocado, which gave it the requisite thickness. Avacados being in short supply in Spain, some enterprising experimenter substituted eggs, and the name was changed, over time, due to misunderstanding. The flavor profile is, essentially, eggs, brandy, and sugar. There's a slightly medicinal tang which I found to be a bit unpleasant, but not overwhelmingly so. It's an interesting drink. I could imagine breaking it out around the holidays. But the real question raised by the existence of Advocaat -- a question raised by so many liqueurs -- is "why not just mix the source ingredients yourself?" If you did that with eggs, brandy, and sugar, you'd have a wonderful-tasting (and fresh) egg nog.

As thoroughly OK as Advocaat is, there's no avoiding the answer: "if you did it yourself, it would taste better." So there you have it: I drank some Advocaat so that you don't have to.

And now, a word about the process of actually getting the stuff.

Mindful of the suggestion some have made that special ordering via phone is easy and convenient, I gave it a shot. Out of the 4 things I wanted, only 2 of them were available unless I was willing to order 6 bottles. One of the items I wanted had a 7 bottle minimum if I wanted to pick it up in Butler county, but only a 1 bottle minimum if I wanted to pick it up in Allegheny county.

Color me unimpressed.

On the plus side, the nice lady taking my order was polite, competent, and the entire transaction was completed relatively painlessly, once we slogged through answering the difficult question of what, exactly, I could and could not order.

So, like Advocaat, the online special ordering system was not an abject failure, but not as satisfying as I wanted it to be.

Somehow, that's apropos.

Dottie's True Blue Cafe

2008-04-28 · by psu

Dottie's True Blue Cafe is a small place in San Francisco that sits right where the gentrification of Union Square ends and the Tenderloin begins. It is a neighborhood place that has become a destination through well-deserved appearances in every publication that has an opinion on where to eat in San Francisco. As such, you don't really need me to tell you to go there. But I will anyway.

The next time you are staying the night in downtown SF, you should get up early and get to Dottie's door by 7:20am so you can get in with the first group. Kurt, the owner and chef, will then serve you the best American breakfast you have ever had. If this does not happen, I will personally pay your bill.

As I have pontificated before, good breakfast is deceivingly simple. All you need to do is combine good eggs, good meat, good starch and good coffee together into a synergistic mix of calorific ecstasy. Unfortunately, it is exceedingly rare to find a place that does all of these things well. Dottie's is one such place, but it is much more than this.

First, Dottie's not only gets the basics right, but also manages to keep up a constant stream of interesting specials that are all variations on the eggs, meat and starch theme. Once in a while, one of these may sound overly pretentious (e.g. a scramble with whiskey fennel sausage, spinach, and roasted garlic), but they are universally excellent. Where others pile too many stupid ingredients on top of overcooked eggs, Dottie's gives you just enough on top of eggs that are cooked perfectly. Not runny, not tough, and not bland. I even had chicken-apple sausage at Dottie's once before it became a sad Whole Foods cliché. I'd do it again too.

If you want something more down to earth, you can get hamburger, sweet peppers, onions and salsa. Or smoked trout. Or get your eggs next to those black bean cakes with a couple of tortillas. Not only is there toast, but also the wonderful grilled jalapeno corn bread, or muffins, or coffee cake. In addition to the transcendent buttermilk pancakes (with just a touch of ginger and cinnamon), there were also cornmeal blueberry pancakes when we were in there last week. The list goes on and on.

psu_20080425-02181.jpg

Dottie's

Second, not only is all the food executed perfectly, but this ballet of short order cooking perfection happens in a space that is no larger than your master bathroom, only stuffed with a full cook top and griddle. Get lucky enough to sit at the counter, and you can watch miracles happen in this tiny space. One minute the stove is empty. The next, there are two pans of omelet fillings, and one with sunny side eggs on the stove next to three pancakes on the griddle. Next, the eggs go into the omelets, there is some stirring, some mixing, some shuffling of pans. Then, one by one the eggs, omelets and pancakes are off the stove and on to plates next to a scoop of home fries off the grill and whatever other sides belong in the order. All at once, four plates of food are ready for a single table, all finished and delivered at precisely the right time. Kurt and his crew do this hundreds of times a day, six days a week for as long as I can remember. It's simply inspiring to watch if you are any kind of food dork.

Third, and finally, Dottie's is a place and an experience. A lot of little things go into this. The coffee mugs are a pleasing shape and neither too big nor too small. There are interesting things to look at on the walls. The service protocol is well defined and well understood by the staff, so you always know where you stand. The music never sucks. In fact, the music is always excellent. I think it's one of two restaurants on Earth where I have actually enjoyed the background music after I started paying attention to it.

Put all these things together and you get a place that you will go back to repeatedly over the long haul. We've been going every time we are in San Francisco for about the last 15 years. We stay in hotels that are close by so we can get there at opening to get the counter seats. Of all the places we love in SF, there are only two places that we absolutely cannot miss whenever we visit: Dottie's for breakfast and Yank Sing for Dim Sum.

If forced to choose, I'd probably go to Dottie's first. I know how to make good pot stickers, but I can't make breakfast as well as Kurt. Not even close.

GTA Bore

2008-04-30 · by peterb

Here's how it works:

  1. Previews of GTA IV appear in every magazine and weblog on the internet. Afraid of being attacked by mobs bearing torches and pitchforks, they universally give it 10/10, 5 stars, whatever the rating is that means "Jesus has returned to earth in the form of a videogame."
  2. Everyone buys GTA IV, including all of your 12 year old cousins.
  3. Eventually, you give in to the hype and buy it too.
  4. At this point, you realize that the "innovative" gameplay all of the reviewers in Step 1 talked about is, in fact, nothing more than the exact same gameplay from the past 5 games, only now with more pixels.
  5. After about a week, you put the game down and never play it again.

Lather, rinse, and repeat with whatever other hit titles our corporate masters want to sell you in a given month.

I suppose people are probably expecting me to tear into the ethics behind GTA IV. I've certainly done the same with respect to other games. This time, I won't bother for a few reasons. First, I haven't played the game, and have no intention of playing the game. Second, and more importantly other people are making the argument for me, which I take to be a very healthy sign.

The more interesting question, to me, is: should I pick up Mario Kart for the Wii?

Mario Kart

2008-05-02 · by peterb

In case you're wondering where tonight's post is, my Mario Kart Wii code is 1032-1807-7532. See you on the track.

Cinco de Agave

2008-05-05 · by peterb

Several years ago, with the help of Lidia's restaurant we organized a tasting of Italian amari - bitter digestifs. It was a fabulous event, both informative and fun, and we immensely enjoyed writing about it in this space.

It was so much fun, in fact, that we decided to do another group tasting. This time, however, we chose a spirit from a little closer to home: Tequila.

Our host was Gene Mangrum, the Director of the Ministry of Culture at Mad Mex (note to self: I need a better job title.) Gene, like many other people I've known, is obsessed with great tequila.

Joining us were our crack team of tasters:

John Barbera, architect. Cynthia Closkey, blogger and local PR maven. Yaniv Gur, manager. Kilolo Luckett, realtor. Laura Valentine, writer. and psu brought his camera, and took all of the photographs you see here.

A word about Mad Mex, and about these tastings in general. As I mentioned above, our last tasting, of amari, was at Lidia's in the Strip. Many people have written in asking why we haven't done these events more often. Part of it is simply the complexity of scheduling events like this, but there's something more important: finding an appropriate partner for the event.

For a while now I've looked on with envy as my co-workers in the Bay Area arranged to meet at Tommy's in San Francisco after work. Tommy's is Julio Bermejo's restaurant. Julio, called "the epicenter of Tequila" by the Wall Street Journal, can talk for hours about true, 100% agave tequila, and is perhaps the most well-known ambassador of the spirit. I wanted to find someone in Pittsburgh who could evangelize the distilled agave liquor to Pittsburgh with the sort of enthusiasm that Julio brings to Tommy's. With that in mind, I contacted Big Burrito, the owners of Mad Mex, and outlined my plan. They responded quickly and enthusiastically; that told me everything I needed to know.

Having a partner like this is important. Yes, we could have gone to the liquor store, bought a few bottles and had the tasting in someone's house. But in doing that, we'd miss out on the opportunity to have an expert and enthusiastic guide. This is the connection between Lidia's, with their love for Amari, and Mad Mex, with their love for tequila. What excited both of these restaurants wasn't the opportunity for marketing, but the chance to evangelize about something they love.

Gene began the tasting by walking us through the process of tequila making, from farm to autoclave to fermenting tank to bottle; he had actually provided us ahead of time with a primer on tequila that he had used at an earlier tasting.

[Tequila-two

Gene](http://wptest.tleaves.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/dsc_20070507-02279.jpg "Tequila-two")

Warming to his subject like an enthusiastic science teacher, Gene continued: "Wine is made from fermented grapes. Gin is made from fermented juniper berries. Tequila comes from the agave plant." Swinging around his MacBook, he showed us some photos from his recent trip to the Juarez plantation in Mexico: workers harvesting the huge agave piñas. "You look happy in those pictures," I said. "You have no idea," he replied.

We began with a "lowland" tequila, the Herradura Silver. The distinction between "highland" and "lowland" is not, as in scotch, primarily one of intentional style. "Tequila is affected by the fermentation and distillation process," Gene explained, "but perhaps the major factor is where the agave was grown." The soil in the lowlands, according to Gene, absorbs more run-off and other particulates from the surrounding air, creating a more earthy flavor. I found the Herradura to be sweet, just barely short of being syrupy. Our other panelists agreed. "I like this," said Kilolo. "You can really taste the agave." "Wow, that is fruity," said John.

[john

Tasting](http://wptest.tleaves.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/dsc_20070507-02280.jpg "john")

Next, Gene poured a "highland" un-aged tequila, the Don Julio blanco. While also a blanco, like the Herradura, the difference was palpable and dramatic. I found it to have a medicinal, almost phenolic smell. "I know this doesn't make any sense," I said, "but it tastes like I'm drinking the smell of a new car." "No, I completely understand," said Laura. "New car isn't how I'd put it, but it's a very chemical taste." Yaniv chimed in: "I think this is a lot more interesting than the first one. It's not as sweet, and there's more going on as you swallow."

"Now we're going to move on to a 'vertical' tasting," said Gene. By that he meant that we would try the reposado and añejo tequilas from Don Julio. With luck, a vertical tasting lets you ignore differences between houses and focus instead on the effect that aging in oak barrels has on tequila.

The reposado, to my taste, was much more sophisticated than the Don Julio blanco. Our panelists agreed that the aging had softened the spirit substantially, imparting a slightly oaky taste, and changing the mouthfeel. Kilolo leaned over and whispered at this point, "I feel guilty sitting here drinking straight tequila in the middle of the day." "Don't feel guilty," I assured her. "This is all in the interests of Science."

[Tequila-one

Cynthia, tasting](http://wptest.tleaves.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/dsc_20070507-02263.jpg "Tequila-one")

The Don Julio añejo was up next. This had a more pronounced caramel color, and a strong, oaky flavor. "I like this much more than the reposado," Yaniv chimed in. "It's more refined." Laura enjoyed the añejo, but thought the aging was, on the whole, detrimental: "I probably wouldn't choose to drink this on its own. It's very nice, very scotch-like, but fundamentally if I want to drink something that tastes this much like Scotch, I'll drink Scotch."

The vertical tasting done, we moved on to try some other data points, going both high and low. The high end was represented by the Don Julio "1942" añejo. Unapologetically sophisticated, this bowled us over with its subtlety. The mouthfeel was almost silky, and the typical oak flavors -- vanilla, melding with the agave to give an almost honey taste -- were strong, but not aggressively so. It was a finely balanced spirit, which will set you back, on average, just over $100 a bottle.

Perhaps emboldened by the seemingly endless parade of wine glasses in front of us, I inquired "What about mixtos?" A mixto is a tequila that is less than 100% agave, but more than 51%. Tequila snobs (including your humble narrator) will often turn up their noses at mixtos, but there is a countervailing and quite reasonable school of thought that says that they are perfectly appropriate, especially in mixed or frozen drinks. Gene pulled out a bottle of Mad Mex's house tequila, made from agave from the Juarez Plantation. We all crowded around with interest. The mixto was not bad; simply different. It had a much more attenuated and thin taste than any of the 100% agave tequilas we tried, but was not at all unpleasant.

[Yaniv

Mmmmm](http://wptest.tleaves.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/dsc_20070507-02347.jpg "Yaniv")

Apparently determined to ensure that we wouldn't be able to walk back to our respective offices, Gene decided to sober us up by making a variety of margaritas. It is at this point, reviewing my notes, that my handwriting goes from merely bad to thoroughly amusing. We sample a mix of higher- and lower-end margaritas. The crowd favorite was the Silver Coin, a straightforward classic margarita made with Herradura Silver and Cointreau. While everyone liked the margaritas made from the higher end tequilas also, there was a general consensus that we'd rather drink the añejos, for example, neat.

We thanked Gene profusely for his expertise and his help, and returned, ever so slowly, to the quotidian world, our steps lightened, ever so softly, by the lingering taste of the nectar of the blue agave.

A Simple Link

2008-05-13 · by peterb

It's a rule of this weblog that we don't post bare "Hey, look at this" links. I'm breaking that rule for this heartwarming (and heartbreaking) story of a man who introduced his ailing mother to Animal Crossing.

Pan of Steel

2008-05-15 · by psu

Everyone has their favorite pans. Mine are restaurant-style aluminum non-stick pans. I've used these for years, generally just buying another one when the coating on whichever one I had started to go south. The pans are durable (except for the coatings) and perfect for lazy people like me who don't like cleaning frying pans. They are also really good for cooking eggs. Always important.

Lately though, I've started to think that maybe I've been too lazy if such a thing is possible. A lot of people have been expressing worries about those non-stick coatings burning off and poisoning the air and your food. I think such worries are probably overblown, but it did get me to thinking that I should perhaps restrict my use of the Teflon pans to medium/low heat work and find something better for sauté jobs and that "sear in pan then roast in oven" dance that I enjoy so much.

So I started looking around. The natural first thing to try would be cast iron, but I can't go there. My hands are too tired and wussy, beat up as they are from twenty years of supporting my computer work at the keyboard. The weight of the iron pans is just too much overhead.

Everyone seems to love those All-Clad stainless pans. I love the medium sized soup pots for making, well, soups and stuff.

So at the last All-Clad sale I picked up a sauté pan to see how it works. It did not make me happy. What I found is that there is a curious psychological problem with stainless pans. People want to keep them shiny. So they are really designed to stay shiny rather than actually cook at high heats and in the oven. Get the oil too hot and you get a brown polymerized mess permanently bonded to your previously shiny silver pan. And unlike a nice steel pan, this brown mess does you no good. Everything just continues to stick to it and you are left to stand over the sink and scrub it off with powder so that even if the food sticks, at least it sticks to a shiny silver pan. This is too much overhead for my lazy self. I could care less what the pan looks like as long as it does its job well, and what I found is that a stainless frying pan is just too frustrating.

Then a couple of weeks ago at Sur La Table, a place you should never go if you want to keep money in your pocket, I spied a pile of those De Buyer carbon steel pans. These were mentioned by many people as an excellent tool, especially for high heat work. So after due consideration, I picked one up.

It is almost too heavy, but not quite. So I put it on the stove and proceeded to burn some oil into it. For those who don't know, what you do with steel (and cast iron) pans is to "season" them by getting them hot and brushing a thin film of oil in the bottom. Then you let the pan smoke for 10 or 20 minutes and bake this oil into the surface of the pan. The oil bonds with the metal and leaves a very nice non-sticky surface to cook on. It also makes the pan a delicious black/brown color on the inside which projects the idea that you are a bad-ass that cooks a lot:

psu_20080511-02405.jpg

For some reason, baked oil makes a carbon steel pan great and a stainless steel pan worthless. I looked into it but I don't really know why. I assume it's because the sticky oil just sits on top of the stainless pan's surface rather than getting inside of it and doing some good.

In any case, after about a week of use and a few passes of seasoning I can say that this pan is nearly as good as my old Silverstone pans even for Silverstone pan stuff like eggs and omelets. And for pan-seared oven roasted steak on Mother's Day, the thing is the perfect tool. It holds heat well enough to get the steak nice and crusty and leave the nice brown bits behind that you need for pan sauce. I could never really get that effect with my old pans, but I would usually shrug my shoulders and just live with it because I'm a lazy bastard.

Finally, since the food generally doesn't stick, cleanup is easy. Just wipe it out with a paper towel, rinsing if needed. Then dry over heat on the stove and wipe a thin film of oil into the pan if you want.

Overall, a thumbs up. Be careful with the metal handles though. They get hot when the thing is in the oven.

Notes

If your local store does not have these pans, you can find them at Broadway Panhandler. Amazon also has pans made by an outfit called "World Cuisine" but I don't know if they are the same. Internet opinion seems mixed.

The next thing for me to try will be the crepe pans... for pancakes and omelets.

Mass Effect: It Didn't get Better

2008-05-19 · by psu

I was a bit skeptical of Mass Effect so I didn't pick it up until I found it at the Exchange at something of a discount. I called Pete, "Is Mass Effect worth $40?". He said he thought it was. I'm not going to say he's a liar. Reasonable people can disagree about these things. I thought that the experience started out slow, had a slow middle, and ended, well, slow.

Mass Effect follows a fairly standard RPG structure. The game interleaves mission episodes that are mostly combat with a combination of interactive and non-interactive cut scenes. We can cover these systems one at a time.

The combat missions in the game start badly and get more and more tedious as the game progresses. They start badly because the NPCs you are given as squad-mates all have different strengths and weaknesses, but you have no way to know which ones to bring on any given mission until you are already and on the ground and you can't switch them out anymore. Then you can choose between starting over again or just slogging through. The game makes up for this insult by making the combat really boring.

Bioware has spent their last few games trying to move the standard Western RPG combat system away from turns, dice rolls, and little floating messages with hit points in them. In Jade Empire they were inspired by Kung Fu movies and fighting games and created a combat system that played like a really crappy Kung Fu movie or fighting game. In Mass Effect the paradigm is the science fiction squad shooter. The result plays like a really sluggish science fiction squad shooter.

Combat is split between weapons and force powers, er, "biotics". The problem is that the weapons are slow and wimpy and the force powers, er, "biotics" have nearly no effect on your enemies as far as I can tell. I found I spent most of my combat time trying to figure out

  1. Who the hell was shooting me and where they were standing.

  2. Where the hell my squad went and what they were doing.

  3. Fighting the radial menus instead of filling my enemies with hot lead and watching them meet a horrible bloody and violent end.

I was pretty much bored after 10 minutes of this and immediately dialed the combat difficulty back to Easy so I would not have to think about it.

The vehicle combat is even worse. The Mako handles like a Halo Warthog whose suspension and steering system have fallen out on the ground. It is nearly impossible to drive the vehicle in a straight line, as it prefers to swing wildly left and right and then flip over in the air after hitting almost any small obstacle. It is doubly impossible to hold the vehicle steady and shoot things at the same time. So here is how you end up fighting in your bad-ass space tank. Drive to point A. Park so you can aim. Shoot some stuff. Do this until the shields are low, then go hide to let the shields charge up. Lather, rinse, repeat until you want to die.

Mixed in with the main plot missions are a bunch of side missions that you find by exploring random planets until you find something do to. Then you land on the planet and do a tedious collection mission. If you are really lucky, you'll have to drive the Mako to finish it. In the best of these missions, you have to make your way through three identical bunkers to collect and shoot three identical sets of items to achieve three identical outcomes before you are allowed to leave. After doing this mission I stopped doing any of the side quests whatsoever. I bet that's a good ten or twenty hours of mindless repetitive tedium that I missed out on.

At this point, I really should have just stopped playing the game. But, the one small beacon of hope shining through this fog of mediocrity was that playing the interactive cut scenes really was enjoyable. The dialog system really is as good as everyone says it is. Sure, at the bottom it is pretty clear that these are the same old NPCs with the same old branching dialog and that if you walk up to them 500 times in the game they will say exactly the same thing to you 500 times. Also, it's pretty clear that Bioware has reduced the actions of the player in choosing the next line of dialog to something akin to the classic "Name! Job! Health!" system in Ultima. But the end result is more than the sum of its parts, and every once in a while you can almost fool yourself into thinking that there are actual animated actors up there on the screen reciting the lines that you have written for them. That's pretty cool.

Of course, whenever you get close to this state of nirvana, you notice that the actor's faces look all splotchy and their skin sort of shakes and shimmers like a TV with bad cable as the rendering engine tries and fails to deal with real time lighting and texturing. I'm not sure why lighting models on faces are so hard, but I've never seen a game try to do sophisticated face modeling without failing in this particular way. The problem was really bad in Oblivion. It's noticable, but not egregious here.

The game has other well known technical problems as well. Frame rate is spotty, there is a lot of draw-in. The environments all have that same "KOTOR industrial planet oil refinery" sameness to them. It's not clear to me what all the cycles are trying to draw, but they are obviously working hard to do something which is then completely hidden by the underwhelming art design. Also, the corridors that you run through in this game feel cramped, and they are separated by long loading screens that look like elevators.

Ultimately, everything I'm complaining about here exists to service the plot and narrative of the game. So I guess I should complain about that too. Never, I think, have so many people worked so hard to create so many cut scenes and so much dialog in order to tell a story that is so utterly pedestrian. Yet again we must save the galaxy from an unseen enemy that reappears every few thousand years to do nothing but utterly destroy every living thing in the galaxy for no apparent reason at all. Yawn.

There is nothing here that even reaches the level of a by-the-numbers boilerplate Star Wars or Star Trek novel. The game is laboring so hard to be epic in scope that the whole enterprise spends most of its time collapsing under the weight of its own world building requirements. The writing and dialog start out at a high level, but pressed for time near the end of the game it degrades to something you might see profiled on Mystery Science 3000. And then, when you finally slog your way all the way to the end you find out that all of this was, in many ways, just a bloated prolog. The real fight will come in the inevitable sequel, or the game after that, or maybe in "Mass Effect 2010: Commander Shepard Meets Mork from Ork".

As a final parting thought, I must catalog the last two unforgivable sins that this game commits.

First, it makes me spend a lot of time running through long hallways, or expansive sewers, or the great plains and there is no jump button to pass the time.

Second, it has dancing NPCs. Dancing NPCs should be summarily banned from all video games, with grave suffering inflicted on designers who violate the rule.

If I had known what was good for me I'd have quit then I found these two problems. But I thought the game would get better. It didn't get better.

Pick and Roll and Pop and Pick and Roll and Pick

2008-05-20 · by psu

Today a short basketball rumination and tutorial. With the Celtics in a serious playoff run for the first time since I was in college (yes, they made the East Finals in 2002, but that doesn't count because even if they won they'd have been crushed by the Spurs or whoever) I've been watching some NBA basketball on TV lately. One thing I have come to realize is that I'm really tired of watching the pick and roll.

The pick and roll is to basketball what 4/4 time is to pop music. It is foundational and yet infinitely varied. When run with creativity and flare it is a beautiful thing to watch in addition to being nearly impossible to defend. The basic principle is to set up the guy with the ball in a spot on the floor and bring one other player over to set a pick, or a screen. The ball handler moves so that his man runs into the screen. Timing is important. The screen can't set up too early, or the defender can just run around it. It can't set up too late, because then the defender will draw a foul.

OK. So let's assume that we get a good screen on the ball-handler's defender. Now here is the situation. You have two offensive players and two defensive players. The screen has just knocked one of the defenders off the ball. At this point, the defense has essentially three choices:

  1. Have the defenders switch. Often this results in a big guy guarding a small guy or the other way around. In either case it makes scoring easier. The offensive team can, at this point, take advantage of this mismatch and force the defense to help, which leaves someone on the floor open for a quick pass and a good shot.

  2. Trap the ball. In this scheme, both defenders jump out on the guy with the ball hoping to tie him up. The problem here is that typically you run this play with a guy who can pass. So, when the double team happens the guy who sets the pick is now free to cut to the hoop (if the double went to the outside) or step to open space to the outside (if the double team went inside). In either case he gets a pass for a wide open shot, often a dunk.

  3. Fight over or under the pick. Here the guy being screened will fight through the screen and try to stay with the guy with the ball. This will take some time, so the second defender must rotate out to the guy with the ball then back to his man. This is like a soft double team, and if done badly leaves the ball handler with a free shot, or a free lane to the hoop.

There are endless variations on these options. You can pick and by design roll to the outside or inside and set up a give and go. You can fake the pick and cut back door. You can split the double team and score or pass off for an open dunk before the help defense arrives. There are infinite possibilities, if you are good at this. When set up and executed well, there is really nothing the defense can do against it. You need an alert and fast team defense to keep every pick and roll from being a sure score. So, what's not to like? It sounds like a sound tactic for the offense to use every chance it gets.

There are three problems.

First, team defenses in the NBA are good enough that you have to be really good at the pick and roll for it to be effective. Help defense and quick rotations from the weak side cut off those easy cuts and step back jumpers. Quick hard traps make it difficult for the ball handler to actually make a move or a pass against the defense.

Second, hardly anyone is really good at running this offense.

Third, some teams run this play almost every trip down the floor, making themselves predictable and easy to defend.

Take Cleveland in their most recent series with Boston. They played entire games where the only half court set they ran was "Give the ball to Lebron 25 feet from the basket and watch him dribble for 15 seconds or so. Then run a high pick and roll with one of his stiff big men who can't shoot or move and then let Lebron try and score 1 on 5." Sometimes they changed it up and ran the high pick and roll with a small guy instead. This is not only bad basketball, it's horrendous to watch as well. No wonder they shot something like 40% from the field for the entire series.

Even in the "classic" game 7, most of the offensive sets on both sides of the floor were pick and roll plays with Lebron or Paul Pierce. Once in a while the ball would be moved without being dribbled, but not often.

My question is, where has the creativity gone on offense? Are team defenses just so good now that the creative half court offense with a lot of motion and ball movement has died?

Back in the day (he said, pulling out his walker and cane) the Celtics (say) had four or five distinct offensive sets. There were isolation plays, pick and roll, the low post inside/outside stuff, and various plays that would run Bird or whoever off a series of picks along the baseline or up and down the lane. Back then we used to make fun of Utah because their only offense was the pick and roll with Stockton and Malone. Utah never won it all because their only offense was that pick and roll.

These days it seems like every team is Utah. There are exceptions. I actually saw Boston run a few different things, especially for Ray Allen, which didn't really work. The Spurs play a thuggish and clunky offense, but it does feature effective ball movement and a few different sets rather than the endless dribbling that is indicative of the game these days. I'm sure New Orleans has more in their bag of tricks than the sorry offense they showed in their game 7 tonight, but I haven't seen it.

Anyway, don't get me wrong. The pick and roll is a wonderful thing and a classic distillation of offensive basketball tactics. But it's boring to watch 80 pick and roll plays a night. This is me begging the NBA for teams that do something else once in a while. Otherwise the NBA will become a place where nothing but boring happens.

An Experimental Forum

2008-05-21 · by peterb

As something of a test, we've set up a web forum, here. If you're a regular reader, please consider registering and trying it out.

We're not sure whether this is something we want to support, but I figured it would be an interesting experiment to set it up and see if there's enough of a community that's interested in using it. The choice is yours.

A Slight Apology

2008-05-22 · by psu

The Celtics finally lost a playoff game at home tonight, even with Ray Allen finally showing up. Why did they do this? They couldn't defend the Pistons. Why couldn't they? Well, because Detroit actually has a lot of different offensive sets rather than just playing a two on five pick and roll game. Therefore, I apologize to them for my earlier outburst. I guess I was wrong.

Note: I was probably unfair to the Lakers and the Spurs too.

Irony, Thy Name Is Niko

2008-05-29 · by peterb

So, what have I been doing for the past week?

In what can only be described as a perhaps inevitably ironic turn of events, immediately after posting my snarky item about how I had no intention of buying or playing Grand Theft Auto IV, the editor-in-chief of a game magazine informed me that he was sending me a copy to review.

So, I've been playing the hell out of GTA IV. You'll see my real review in PTD in a few weeks, but I'll say up front that the game has surprised me in more than a few ways.

Damn it.

Acausal Connecting Vehicles

2008-05-30 · by peterb

An enjoyably weird moment of synchronicity. As those of you who follow me on Twitter already know, I woke up yesterday morning and was immediately assaulted by the image of the giant vagina bicycle taxi. (Protip - the comments are the best part of the link).

Shortly thereafter, on the way to work, I encountered this:

Vangina

Who knows. Maybe it's just Gina's van.

Wii Fit Acquired

2008-06-01 · by peterb

A full review will be forthcoming, but I've spent a day with the Wii Fit, and you can read my first impressions on the forum. Feel free to register and ask any questions there, and I'll be happy to answer to the best of my ability.

The French Fry Problem

2008-06-02 · by psu

Back when I was a college student, french fries were easy. You got four or five of your friends together and walked to the O, where you could pick up a few pounds of deep fried potatoes for around $5. What the fries lacked in quality they made up for in quantity and cheese whiz. Life was good.

Now life is more complicated. The O is still down in Oakland, but three pounds of fries are not such a pleasing proposition. Other classic sources of french fried pleasure have also fallen by the wayside. McDonald's doesn't use beef fat anymore, so even that last ditch outlet is gone.

I have now come to realize that there is something of a French Fry crisis in Pittsburgh. I hadn't really thought about it until we had a new guy, let's call him "Joe", move from CA to Pittsburgh to start work in our office. "Why can't I get decent fries", he would ask from time to time. We took him to all the best local places: D's have pretty good fries with their dogs, but they are not french. Point Brugge makes fries from scratch, but they only really get it right 75% of the time. Five Guys have gotten a lot better after a slow start, and might be the most consistently decent fries I've had in a while. After all this time after college, the O is really more of a mass of onion-ring like material in the shape of a mound of potatoes.

Today we were discussing the problem again at lunch and Joe presetned his new measure of fries quality, and I realized he was totally right. Here is what he wants:

He wants a place that does fries that are better than Ore-Ida frozen french fries that he bakes in the oven at home.

I actually have a similar measure, only with Whole Foods tater tots.

So this is your challenge tonight: find me a place where I can get fries better than either one of these two mass produced products every single time I order them. I've eaten all over the city and have never found a joint that could pull this off.

Five Guys in Oakland almost manages this. But it's a chain, and that's no fun.

Surely there is a local place that can do better.

Down and Out in Liberty City

2008-06-09 · by psu

Against my better judgement, but driven by Pete's positive impressions, I used some game trade money to get a used copy of GTA IV last weekend. By the convention of the Ebay Rating System the game is a high 3 or barely a 4. I have already listed the game on Ebay to raise funds to maybe continue my self-hating suffering with the next Metal Gear game. Since it is pointless to write a direct critique of this title, I will complain about the game indirectly. Here are some reasons why MLB08: The Show is better than GTA IV.

Better Camera

The camera in MLB08 is straightforward. It generally sits behind the player you are controlling, allowing you to see the pitch you are throwing or the pitch that is being thrown to you. It moves in a regular and generally predictable fashion with the player if you are running the bases or running around the field to make a play. For the most part you don't notice that the camera is there. It just does the right thing. This is how a game camera should work.

In GTA IV the situation is different. The camera seems to have a life of its own. It swims and dances and bounces as you move around. If you are indoors it constantly runs into walls, which makes the swimming and dancing motions even worse. In one notable mission, I had to run up 4 or 5 flights of stairs, the camera trying to follow me but constantly running into the stair rail, the door jams, the walls and the floor. The one thing the camera never did was stay still and track my motion in addition to showing me what I wanted to look at.

Instead, the constant motion gave me a headache and nearly made me physically ill. It's a good thing that the press has told me that GTA is such an innovative and technically brilliant franchise, full of an incredible amount of real life detail, because while I was playing all I noticed was how I couldn't see anything because my vision was swimming around with the retarded camera.

Better Gunplay

OK. This one isn't really fair because there are no guns in MLB08. On the other hand, GTA would be a much better game if Rockstar got rid of the horrendous half-baked barely working obviously tacked on gameplay system that they claim allows the player to shoot things. The mystical camera shooting system in Fatal Frame II is downright responsive compared to what you get in GTA IV. The only game I think of that is worse than this is Metal Gear. But in Metal Gear you can forgive the combat system its foibles because you spend most of your time watching cut scenes.

As I said before, MLB08 has no guns, but it does have gameplay systems that make sense and work smoothly. You can pitch, you can hit, you can run, you can throw the ball. So on core gameplay, MLB wins again.

Better Characters

In MLB08, the characters, like the camera, are straightforward and to the point. There are players and coaches and fans. The players play the game. The coaches coach the game, although they don't have much to say. The fans watch the game, although again, they don't have much to say either. Sometimes a player and an umpire will get into an argument, although these scenes are not voice acted so you are never really sure what they are arguing about. In all, what you have is a collection of mute cyphers that get out of the way and let you play baseball.

In GTA 4 there is a veritable Hollywood Lot full of characters, mostly either psychopaths or offensive ethnic stereotypes. They provide hours of voice acted cut scenes whose main purpose is to tell you one of two things:

  1. Where in the city you should go to shoot someone.

or

  1. Where in the city you should next be driving your taxi to pick someone up or drop someone off.

I've been playing the game for I would guess seven to eight hours and so far that's all the characters in the game have done for me. They barely serve any purpose in the narrative of the game at all. But to make up for it, they are mostly loud and annoying.

Better Pacing

Which leads me to my next major complaint about GTA IV. The pacing is horrendously slow. I've played four disk JRPGs that deploy their story, such as it is, faster than this game. As I said, I've been though nearly eight hours of game and as far as I can tell I'm still in the tutorial.

The pacing problems in this game stem, I think, from two structural problems. First, Rockstar is overly enamored of its "living city" environment and thinks that you should be too. Therefore, you spend a lot of time with nothing to do when, I suppose, you are supposed to drive around the bitchin' city and find stuff to do. Too bad most of the city is locked up until you finish the story missions, which are the second part of the problem.

The story missions go like this:

  1. Drive 10min to get to the quest giver.

  2. Watch an annoying cut scene with a lot of ethnic stereotypes screaming at each other to find out where you are supposed to go.

  3. Drive 15min to get to the mission location.

  4. Fail at the mission because the combat system is about as smooth as a seven year old with ADHD who is also on meth.

  5. Goto 3.

The point at which I gave up on this game for good was the tutorial mission for the motorcycle. I crashed that god damned bike about eight times and then listed the game on Ebay.

MLB08 does not have these pacing problems. You play a whole season, or a few seasons, one game at a time. In the RPG-like "Road to the show" mode you make your own character and you only have to play the bits that involve your character. If Rockstar had built the MLB game, I'd have to drive to the airport and then fly the plane to away games before I got to actually play baseball. And then if I lost, I'd have to do the driving and flying all over again.

Better Audio

The play by play announcers in MLB08 are great. They are almost always saying something meaningful, and they are never so repetitive that you need to turn them off.

Everyone says that the radio stations in GTA are the best gaming content short of a live-action first person porn simulation. I don't get it. Mostly the radio in GTA does to me what the radio in real life does. It makes me want to kill people and turn it off as soon as possible.

The cut scene dialog isn't much better.

Summary

After suffering for about a week of this, I put the game on Ebay. I give it 4 horrendously painful gaming sessions out of a possible 5 before I decided I didn't hate myself enough to keep going. Although I think the correct score is more like a high 3, I hated my last session with the game too much for it to count.

Cymbalom

2008-06-16 · by peterb

I spent last week in San Francisco and the Bay area, which is why updates have been infrequent. Allow me, however, to share one of the niftier things I saw while there: a busker playing the cymbalom, a Hungarian dulcimer, using tools of his own design:

The performer is named Michael Masley, and his web site is here. When I first saw him, I momentarily thought that he had grown his fingernails out to a ridiculous length. On closer inspection, the extensions on his hand are a tool he has created. The cymbalom is normally played with two hammers, one in each hand. Masley's "bowhammers" allow him to strike, bow, or pluck the strings with all of his fingers.

Crème de Violette

2008-06-18 · by peterb

Blessings and salutations on the head of Nat, who returned from San Francisco with a bottle of Rothman and Winter Crème de Violette for me. May his head always be the unit by which the size of libations are measured.

Click to enlarge

Click to enlarge

I mentioned several months ago that I thought I had found some crème de violette in Kansas City. I was mistaken. What I actually found was a Marie Brizard concoction called "Parfait Amour". Some people have maintained that this is an adequate substitute for violette in an Aviation cocktail. They're wrong. The only thing the Parfait Amour has in common with crème de violette is the color, which is indeed identical. Everything else is different. Where the crème de violette is only somewhat sweet (surprising for a crème), the parfait amour is cloying. Where the violette smells and tastes floral and a bit musty, the parfait is citrusy and tastes like an oversweetened blue curaçao. Where the violette is fairly thin and liquid, the parfait is thick and syrupy.

Of course, I immediately used my newfound acquisition to mix an Aviation cocktail, using this recipe. This tasted much better than the version I tried to make with the Parfait Amour. The result? Drinkable. Not the holy grail, to my taste, but then I'm also somewhat infamous for having very little interest in gin-based drinks generally. Still, I'm excited to have finally gotten to taste a real version of this legendary (and largely forgotten by the wider world) cordial.

Beat L.A.

2008-06-19 · by psu

If there are two strong memories from my high school years watching the Bird-era Boston Celtics, the first is the series in 1981 when the C's came back from 3-1 down to beat Andrew Toney and the hated 76ers. The other was the very next year when it was clear that the hated 76ers were going to beat us to go to the Finals against the hated Lakers. The crowd at the Garden broke into a spontaneous chant of "Beat L.A.! Beat L.A.!", because they all knew that local skirmishes were one thing, but beating the Lakers was everything.

This year the Celtics have treated their fans to an unlikely turnaround of enormous proportions, climbing up from a 24 win season a year ago to 66 wins and a championship. But what makes it especially sweet for me is that they not only beat the Lakers, they obliterated them.

I was skeptical from the beginning. Paul Pierce had never impressed me. He seemed too immature to carry a team. I wondered why they traded a high draft pick for a 32 year old shooting guard with bad ankles. But when the KG trade happened, it was clear that the Celtics would be good, although no one could know how good. Even after 66 wins in the regular season there were still questions. The team had no playoff experience, and they did not impress the early rounds of the playoffs, needing 14 hard games to get rid of Atlanta and Cleveland.

The team started to show some life in the Detroit series, particularly the strong game 6, but they still seemed to play in spurts. A strong quarter or two here, then a few weak ones. And so it went into the Finals. They almost gave away a 24 point lead in game 2. They played two incredible quarters of basketball to erase a 20 point lead and humiliate the Lakers at home in game 4. But in the very same game they spotted the Lakers that lead in the first place by playing a horrible first half. Then they threw away a great opportunity to steal game 5, again spotting the Lakers big leads. They just didn't seem to be able to put a whole game together to put the Lakers away. And, they had started to look a bit worn down from the long season and various nagging injuries to key players.

It all changed in game 6, where they played great for a whole game. It was fitting for this team in this season to play their best game of the year to clinch the championship. For once there was offense to complement that swarming hive-mind defense that made Kobe look so human. The Lakers tried to hang tough for a while, but by the middle of the second quarter the constant pressure from the Celtics combined with the euphoric energy from the crowd seemed to intimidate them to the point where they simply gave up. Pretty soon, they wilted away and the Celtics got anything they wanted. Some favorite highlights from the game:

  1. KG getting a jump ball on Pau Gasol with one hand.

  2. KG hanging in the air, getting mauled by Odom and the throwing it in anyway off the backboard.

  3. Ray Allen hitting three pointers from all over the floor. At times he was so open that he could have done a dance number after catching the ball and before shooting it. I feel I must personally apologize to Ray Allen for all the mean things I said about him earlier in the playoffs. He truly came back from the dead. Owning Sasha Vujacic and making him sob on the Laker bench in Game 4 was icing on the cake.

  4. Posey standing Kobe up one on one and then stealing the ball.

  5. Rondo stealing the ball from everyone.

  6. The Boston fans taunting Kobe Bryant when he went to the bench. The Boston fans performed at a high level throughout the playoffs. You could not say the same for fans in other cities. In Cleveland, the PA announcer had to prompt the crowd to chant "DE-FENSE". In Detroit the PA announcer was perhaps the most annoying performer that I have experienced since Chris Tucker. And in LA the fans seemed almost as lost as their team. In Boston, the building sounded much like the Garden of old, except for the annoying dancers and the fireworks and light show during the player intros. Whoever made those up should be killed.

While I'm complaining, I have some raspberries to send towards the hard working TV people who do their best every night to keep me from enjoying a good basketball game.

  1. Stop with the slow motion HD replays of players talking trash to themselves after a big play. I lip-read more people saying the long form of "mo-fo" than I care to count.

  2. ESPN should consider hiring a studio team that actually has something interesting to say. TNT at least has Barkley, who is humorous and seems to realize that the whole studio pre-game and half-time shows are stupid, but he has fun anyway.

  3. Putting a microphone on the coaches while they wheeze to their players on the bench or in the locker room is not good television. It's boring.

  4. ABC should fire whoever did their opening Finals show montage. It was a horrible mish-mash of poor Photoshop work applied to a lot of archival file footage which would have been more compelling if they just left it alone.

  5. Mike Breen is the devil himself. 'Nuff said. I like Van Gundy though. He was the only bright spot on the entire team.

  6. Finally, 9pm start times and 3 hours of total run time is complete horse shit. Kids on the East Coast used to be able to watch all of the playoffs. Even the night games. It is a telling commentary on the soulless commerce of our modern age that the NBA and the TV networks are willing to basically say "fuck you" to the practically the entire East Coast so those California people, who don't care anyway, can watch the game closer to dinner time.

To sum up, I was wrong about this team. I figured that according to various conservation laws of Playoff Experience you can't put a team together in one year that makes a run for all the marbles and wins. But I was wrong. I was also wrong about Pierce, who has clearly matured from the somewhat petulant and out of control guy in 2002 to the clear leader of the team in the Finals here in 2008. It was a great thing to watch. It was great to see that the NBA has been resurrected back in Boston. It's been a long time.

I Am Un Chien Andalusia

2008-06-26 · by peterb

In my review of Guitar Hero, back in January of 2006, I wrote what can only be considered to be a prophetic sentence:

I guess I should be glad, really, that this isn’t an Xbox game, because I’m pretty sure that if I could pay to download more songs on Xbox Live, I’d be broke right about now.

Well, I now own Rock Band for the Xbox 360, and I can pay to download songs on Xbox Live. And so I am broke.

I exaggerate, of course. The only thing I have bankrupted is my petty supply of "Microsoft Points", the Xbox's demeaning company scrip that is intended to make you not know how much money you spent on their products. Yesterday, for example, I spent about $19 to buy the entire Pixies' album Doolittle for Rock Band.

Worth. Every. Penny.

The brilliance of Rock Band is in its guitar (and drum) tabs. Whoever writes these is, quite simply, a genius. Never simply punishing for the sake of being punishing, their tabs seem to be written with one goal in mind: convincing you that you actually know how to play a song, when you really don't know how to play an instrument at all. Here Comes Your Man plays so perfectly you'd swear it was written for the game.

In summary:

Dear Harmonix,

More bands like the Pixies, less bands like Judas Priest.

MGS-Tastic

2008-06-27 · by psu

This week I finally managed to finish a Metal Gear game on the first try. I tried and failed to play Metal Gear Solid 2. I also failed on my first try with Metal Gear Solid 3, although the second try was successful. If it had not been for my second playthrough of Subsistence I probably would not have even tried Metal Gear Solid 4. But I did, and for the most part I am happy that I did. Be warned though. All of my comments about the game assume that you are willing, for the most part, to take the MGS genre on its own terms. Except for some marginal gameplay improvements, this game is all MGS all the time. I think that as long as you are prepared for that, you can let go and enjoy the ride.

Metal Gear Solid 4 is a continuation of the events last chronicled in Metal Gear Solid 2. You will recall, or maybe you will not recall, that Metal Gear Solid 3 was an examination of events much earlier in the timeline of the MGS universe. The basic story here is that you are fighting guy who is using the name of "Liquid", which is the same name as Solid Snake's twin brother, and who like Sollid Snake is actually clone of some other guy named Big Boss, who was the Snake character in Metal Gear 3. But this guy isn't really Liquid Snake because Liquid Snake is dead. Instead he is actually Ocelot being controlled by Liquid's arm, and he is plotting to take over the world by crippling the satellite information systems that run the military industrial complex. The player, as Solid Snake, must thwart this plot. At this point it should be clear that even the surface of the narrative of this game is completely ludicrous. Don't try to understand it, just let the cut scenes flow over you. They are strongest when they are fight scenes. They are at their cringe-inducing worst when they attempt to create an actual sense of "drama". But they are part of the rhythm and atmosphere of the game, so it's best just to accept them without absorbing them too much.

About half of the "play time" of the game is taken up in these cut scenes. Nearly every major character that appeared in any of the previous four games shows up here for a cameo. I think. I can't keep track. All of the standard Kojima inside jokes and "style" are in full force. There are monkeys, boobs, fart jokes, diarrhea jokes, and Playboy Magazine.

When you actually do pick up the control pad and play the game, you will find that a lot of things are better. In particular, the game has moved into the 21st century by allowing you move and aim your gun at the same time. Both the third person and first person controls for guns actually work well. If you didn't know any better, you would think you were playing Splinter Cell. This makes it much easier to "sneak" through areas by creeping around and sniping everyone you see. I also managed to actually sneak through some places without killing anyone, which I could never do in the previous games. The high tech camo-suit also makes this easier, as does the old standby: a cardboard box.

The action sequences are split between scripted set pieces and Boss fights. The Boss fights are generally boring, but since you can actually aim the gun, they are at least a lot easier. Environments vary from a hallway disguised as a city in the "Middle East" to hallways in a jungle to hallways in Eastern Europe at night. Just for good measure, the setting from the original Metal Gear Solid is brought back to life. And, you also get to sneak around on a ship again.

The basic flow of the game goes like this:

  1. Install next mission.

  2. Long cut scene to describe the next mission.

  3. Long cut scene to begin the next mission.

  4. Some gameplay.

  5. Long cut scene. Maybe a Boss.

  6. Long cut scene to end the mission.

There are five top-level missions. You have to do a mini-install before each one because Blu-Ray apparently sucks as a data streaming medium.

Gameplay varies from stealth areas to action set pieces to one bitchin' bullet-time filled rail shooting sequence on a motorcycle. I have three main complaints about the gameplay:

  1. Same stupid Metal Gear A.I.

  2. Same stupid Metal Gear savepoints.

  3. Not really quite enough of it. The last act seemed especially sparse. I had finally started to get the hang of things, and got stuck playing mostly an extended cut scene. But hey, this is MGS after all.

I can't say that I'm unhappy with how things turned out. I could see myself going back and trying to do actually do the levels without killing anyone.

One thing I do find strange about this game is the critical reception that it has received. There appear to be two classes of reviews. On the one hand there are those put the Metal Gear series on high in the pantheon of human artistic achievement, on par with the great works of literature and film. On the other hand, there are the reviews that make the game out to be so self-indulgent and so poorly paced as to be unplayable trash.

I think both of these groups are making one critical mistake: they appear to be taking what Kojima is showing them at face value. They think that the content is meant to be taken seriously and literally. One group absorbs this information and proclaims that Kojima is the next Shakespeare. The other does the same thing and proclaims Kojima to be the next Ed Wood.

I think you can't play the game this way, and I don't think that Kojima really expects you to take the game and its convoluted plot seriously. As a nutty anime inspired action game with stealth elements, Metal Gear, at least in its fourth installment, is finally a game that can be played and enjoyed. Yes, the cut scenes are long and self-indulgent, but you don't really have to pay close attention to them. And, for all of his verbal diarrhea, Kojima does manage to construct a few interesting characters and some visually arresting animation. Personally I found it more interesting than GTA 4, but that's mostly because the camera wasn't making me physically ill.

I say, turn your brain off, get that twitchy trigger finger going, and romp through the game like its the romp it is meant to be. The less you worry about how an arm can contain someone's soul, or how genetically engineered nanomachines can end up enslaving humanity the better.

Amiga 500 (and Assorted Stuff) for Sale

2008-06-29 · by peterb

Allow me to take a moment to pimp this eBay auction wherein I am selling an Amiga 500, various accessories, and pieces of software. Help get this stuff out of my basement by getting it into yours.

Most importantly I should note that among the items I'm including in the package is an original cloth map from Ultima V. I suspect that to some people, that cloth map is worth more than the Amiga.

An Entirely Different Game

2008-06-30 · by psu

One of the networks that my "Comcastic" cable system picks up is a repository of HD content called "Mojo". I don't know what this network exists to do, but I perked up because it's only two clicks away from ESPN (NBA playoffs, don't ya know) and it broadcasts a food show called "After Hours with Daniel" where noted New York chef Daniel Boulud gathers a bunch of food people at various places around the country for "parties" that are then filmed for the television audience. While the setting is a bit contrived, the show plays to every foodie's fantasy, which is that we have it within ourselves to get closer to the "inside" of these kitchens and really understand what goes on in them.

Don't be fooled. I think restaurant kitchens are something that even the avid home cook simply cannot visualize or understand. It reminds me of playing volleyball in High School gym, and then watching Olympic level volleyball on television. The court was the same. The ball was the same. The net was the same. But it was an entirely different game.

Bill Buford is one home cook who set out to find out what a restaurant kitchen is like, and he wrote a book about it. After a chance meeting with Mario Batali he ends up spending a year working as a kitchen slave and line cook. His book is full of stories of the various mishaps that befall him as he tries to become a useful member of a professional kitchen. See Bill as he can't dice carrots well enough to be used in the stock pot, or slices his hand open cutting something or other in the prep kitchen, or sets himself on fire. What was amazing to me about the book was not so much that the guy manages through sheer intestinal fortitude to become a useful line cook (I don't think I would have made it) but that he clearly had no idea what he was getting into when he started the project.

The food aside, people don't seem to realize that the mechanics and scale of a real kitchen is difficult to imagine. For example, a dish that I make a lot, like a beef stir fry, I might have done a few hundred times in my lifetime. I like to think I'm pretty good at it. At Babbo, where Bufurd was working, you might cook a particular dish on the menu that many times in one week.

But there is more to it. Every time I make my beef stir fry it always comes out just a tiny bit different. Too much soy one night, a bit too little the next. Sometimes it's just the right texture, sometimes it's a little chewy, and so on. In a good restaurant, every one of the 500 grilled whole fish you make have to be exactly the same. One of the toughest scenes in Buford's book is when he gets taken off the line for one overcooked piece of lamb and one undercooked piece of pork. Two mistakes out of one night of hundreds of covers. Of course, the repetition means you get a lot of practice. I bet if I had to make my beef stir fry 500 times in one week I'd get better at it.

Buford's tales illustrate one aspect of how the professional kitchen differs from what we do at home. You have to be able to make a phenomenal amount of food at a consistently high level in order to survive. The After Hours show deals with an entirely different aspect of restaurant people. After watching this show for a while I realized that mechanics aside, these people just think about food in a way that is completely different from the rest of us. This shouldn't be surprising. After all, all they do all day is think about food. But here are a few examples that left me in a state of startled wonderment:

  1. In one episode, Daniel makes a pork and ham meatball concoction where each ball is about the size of a baseball and has an entire golf-ball sized black truffle stuffed in the middle. That's a $200 meatball.

  2. There was the paella for 40 cooked all at once in a pan with a custom gas burner that measured six feet across. Where do you even buy a six foot paella pan?

  3. The pan of live prawns that were then roasted under a 20 pound mountain of 500 degree salt.

  4. In response to the horrendously decadent "DB" burger, which you can get at Daniel's Restaurant in NYC for a mere $32 or so, the staff at the Commander's Palace constructed a similarly structured Po Boy sandwich with duck, a foie gras dipping sauce, truffle french fries and a sunny-side up egg, which they sell in New Orleans for a mere $29 (I think). The sandwich sells too.

  5. A whole pig roasted in a box in the ground.

  6. The 4 foot rondeau (it's like a big shallow soup pot, but bigger) pan filled with pounds of root vegetables, a gallon or two of stock and wine, a half a dozen whole lamb shanks, blood sausage, pork sausage, and who knows what else being tossed in an oven as casually as a pot of beef stew.

  7. The live lobster trying to eat a piece of raw Kobe beef.

You get the idea. These people can not only cook you under the table, they can think of things to do with food at a level that you can't even dream of, because it would never have even occurred to you to try. These are the people who, hundreds of years ago, would have been the nuts who tried the first piece of rotted milk that turned into blue cheese. Or discovered that when you soak field corn, which isn't great, in lye, you get something wonderful. Or decided to try and eat the preserved fish a little earlier, before the rice on top rotted.

I come away from watching this show knowing one thing: I am not these people. I have gotten pretty good at cooking a few traditional recipes that make me happy. I have gotten to the point where the food in the oven will often tell me that it is done so I don't have to go check it. But I will never be good enough and fast enough to work in a real kitchen. And, I certainly will never have a relationship with food that lets me think of something like cooking a whole salmon inside clay in which you have inserted sticks from a fennel plant. Or poaching a whole calf's head, and then rolling up the insides into a sort of meatloaf-like object.

That sort of thing is just an entirely different game.

A Blizzard in July

2008-07-02 · by peterb

Different people do different things with their vacations. Some people ski. Some people windsurf. Me? I catch up on all the videogames I've been meaning to play.

I realize that this may confuse my readers. Don't I already spend all of my free time playing videogames? The answer is: no. I am, regrettably, an unrepentant workaholic, and as much as I enjoy playing games (and writing about them), it ain't my day job. That takes priority, then come reviews that I'm paid to write, and then comes this blog, along with several other hobbies and artistic outlets of roughly equal priority. The truth is, lately it feels like I've been writing about games more than I've been playing them.

So now that I have a chance to breathe, I've been catching up. A number of publishers sent me some games to review, and I have a few longer-running games that I wanted to dig into. Then something curious happened that made me pensive.

There's a game developer and publisher called Blizzard. This is the company whose World of Warcraft enables their employees to spend every day rolling around naked in fat sacks of cash. Blizzard has always been an intriguingly non-evil company. They have a stable of games that are developed around their own properties, rather than just licensing titles. Their games are always very finely polished and well-supported. And they nearly always release their games simultaneously on Windows and MacOS, which has made them near and dear to my heart.

Blizzard just announced the latest installment of their Diablo series, Diablo III. Along with this, they made Diablo II available for digital download, at a price competitive with what you'd pay in the stores. Back in the day, I didn't own these games — my roommate did. So I bought Diablo, and the expansion, and Starcraft, and have been happily playing them.

So here I am, on vacation. I am 500 miles from the nearest Best Buy, which might be out of stock of the games I wanted anyway. I can make a snap decision, at 10 pm at night, to buy a game, and three clicks and one longish download later, I have achieved gratification. The publisher gets paid. The consumer gets satisfied. Everyone wins.

There's just one question left to be answered. I direct this question to those of you who are publishing games that are not available for digital download. I direct this question to those of you who publish games that, idiotically, require me to keep your stupid CD or DVD in my drive while I play. I direct this question, in other words, to the other 90% of the "PC gaming" market. The question is: What the hell is wrong with you?

This transaction with Blizzard leverages several of the advantages the PC has. It uses the hard drive so that I don't have to have a physical token (beyond the machine) to play the game. It uses the network to deliver the game to me, so I don't have to drive around to three different GameStops before I find the product I want. Meanwhile, on another planet, Atari is still selling games with cd-checks and Securom in them because, apparently, they don't want to sell games that run in laptops on an airplane. Or in VMWare virtual machines on Macs. Given this attitude, I can only presume that when the CEO of Atari wants to fry an egg, the first thing he does is look for two sticks to rub together so he can make a fire.

Copy-protection shills and industry apologists will throw around excuses for this incredible business failure. They'll natter and whine about how Diablo II is an old game, anyway, and that's why they don't have to worry as much about piracy. But as a consumer, let me tell you: the fact that the game was old was not an issue. If this had cost $50, instead of $20, I still would have bought it. You can find Diablo II on any Bittorrent search engine, but given how easy it is to pick up a legal copy, why bother stealing it?

When talking to dyed-in-the-wool PC gamers, there's an attitude that would be charmingly naive if it wasn't so corrosive: it's the idea that, in the end, winners and losers in the marketplace will be determined by "the best technology," where "technology" is narrowly construed to mean the most pixels pushed per second, or the best physics simulation, or what have you. What the companies that are actually winning in the marketplace have figured out is that taking care of their customers is just as important as pushing pixels.

Treating your customers like enemies might have worked OK when most people who bought video games were teenagers. In today's game market, it's simply a recipe for disaster.

Click-Click-Click-Click-Click-Click-Click

2008-07-03 · by psu

First, I would like to take credit for peterb's little epiphany about Internet distribution in our last episode. I found the Blizzard download store while poking around for Diablo 2. Generally I try to avoid Blizzard because they make The Game I am Not Allowed to Play(tm). After watching the completely incredible demo video for Diablo 3, I was intrigued by the idea of a polished dungeon crawler. But one thing still stood in the way: I generally don't like to play games on my computer. It's not worth the hassle.

I figured I would give Blizzard a chance because Blizzard is not just any PC gaming company. They have a long track record of producing incredibly polished games that are also well supported in the long term. Sure, they make an infinite stream of money with World Of Warcraft but the original Warcraft, Starcraft and Diablo series are all still supported and all enjoy a reasonable level of sales even 15 to almost 20 years after their release. I think this is unusual.

Blizzard's new download store is also unusual in the industry because the downloads do not have any aggressive DRM on them. Unlike Steam, I can download the binary and then play it wherever the hell I want without the spirit of Gabe Newell watching over me.

Blizzard also has a reputation for using art direction to make their games look good instead of trying to rely on high end technology. The result of this is that they tend to be extremely conservative in the hardware that they require for their games to run. Even their newest games usually have relatively mild hardware requirements. I think WoW would even run on my crappy Macbook with no real graphics card, for example.

Finally, Blizzard is unusual in that they release all their stuff on the both the Mac and Windows platforms at the same time. They should get some kind of "long suffering developer lifetime achievement award" for sticking with Apple for as long as they have. It can't be easy.

I was willing to give Blizzard a chance with this game because they have met what would be my minimal requirements for proving that a gaming company doesn't think I'm a drooling moron:

  1. The game is easy to purchase.

  2. The game does not have any stupid copy protection that will fail in some stupid way.

  3. The game will run on my hardware and my operating system.

  4. The game is well produced and polished, not some piece of shit that needs 15 patches before it is any good.

Even with all this going for them, the whole enterprise still almost failed. I found out the morning after I downloaded the Diablo 2 installer but before I could play the game that the new Apple operating system had broken the game on some machines with some hardware. It looked for a moment like I was doomed. But then a miracle happened. The change in the operating system apparently did not affect my graphics card, so rather than crash immediately, the game allowed me to run around the countryside smashing enemies to bits with a click of my mouse.

I happily click-click-click-click-click-click-click-clicked by way through a few areas. Satisfied with my achievement, I then closed the game for the night.

All of this brings up two final questions in my mind. First, as Pete asked in his piece: if Blizzard can do this, what exactly is the rest of the industry doing while they gaze at their navels and drool over new shader programs? Second, if even a company as good as Blizzard can nearly get screwed by any minor OS update, what real hope is there for the general purpose computer as a gaming appliance? I would be sad to have to give up this particular game at this particular time. But I will drop it in a heartbeat if the game makes me do any work to play it.

I guess might go get Starcraft and maybe Warcraft III as well.

Cream Puff-based Travel Note

2008-07-08 · by peterb

If the freakish and wonderfully single-minded "Beard Papa" chain of Japanese cream puff shops had any locations in the Pittsburgh area, I would weigh about half again as much as I do today.

That is all.

Boxing Day

2008-07-14 · by peterb

Those of you who know me well know that as far as I am concerned, the entire point of software development is to enable me to be as lazy as humanly possible:

This has presented a problem when wanting to use DOSBox to play great old DOS games, such as The Summoning. In order to play them, first I have to start DOSBox, then I have to type something. Whenever I think about doing this, there's a little voice in my head. The voice is saying: two buttons?

Fortunately, someone has come to my rescue, and released Boxer, which bills itself as "Mac-friendly DOSBox emulation". And it works.

Essentially, for each game that you want to Boxify, you tell Boxer the path to its directory (once). Then you rename that directory in the Finder -- say, from "RRTYCOON" to "RRTYCOON.boxer". That associates the directory with Boxer. From that point forward, when you want to play Railroad Tycoon, you just double click the icon over RRTYCOON.boxer, and Boxer takes care of the rest. It's a neat little hack. And I was playing old DOS games -- mostly The Summoning and Warlords II -- all weekend long.

Hits and Misses

2008-07-15 · by psu

It's been an up and down time at "Chez Les Deux Petes" and one of the things on the downswing has been my motivation to actually write anything, good or not, to put on the site. So as I tend to do in these times, here is a collection of short thoughts that I never managed to turn into full on wank sessions.

Hit: Decent Potato Salad

I've never been able to make potato salad. There is something about it that just eluded me. But then I was half paying attention to the latest Alton Brown episode on the TV and I saw him drizzle vinegar on the cooked potatoes and stick them in the fridge for a few hours. Brilliant! Potato salad has been solved. Just have to try it with a Cuisinart-made garlic mayonnaise next time.

Miss: Chicken Fried Steak

Tried to make chicken fried steak. Instead I got sort of a soggy chewy mess. Clearly this is going to take some more research.

Hit: Grinding Diablo

Part of the reason I have not written anything is that my thumbs are too sore from clicking on the trackpad as I slowly grind my way through Diablo. How many games make it possible to replay areas just for the fun of turning more bands of minions from hell into jelly?

Miss: Costco Chicken Packs

We were told to bring food for 20, which was a bit of an overestimate. As usual, we overestimated how much 20 people could eat. So we ended up with three huge cases of plastic encased chicken parts. This is the first time I've seen food wrapped in blister pack. In addition, the chicken is not of this earth. It comes from some strange alien chicken world where the humans and chickens must be much larger. I am never buying chicken at Costco again.

We didn't even crack open the "emergency" steaks.

Hit? NCAA 2009 Demo

The demo seems to play OK. They've fixed, almost, the play calling screens. The hot route and audible UI is fixed. The game almost feels responsive. But I've been fooled before. No conclusion here until Madden comes out.

Miss: Nerdcore response to E3 Presentations

Every year now it's the same thing. The intertubes are full of streaming video of the E3 presentations and all you can conclude is that none of these companies knows how to do a product rollout as well as Steve Jobs. It's really sad.

But what is worse is the constant whiny river of vitriol that flows out of the "hardcore gamer" set about how lame the E3 announcements were. What do they expect? Do they expect all game companies to be as good as Blizzard? Do they expect ponies?

Most of the recent wrath is again aimed at Nintendo, who for yet another year have "abandoned" the important core gamer set in favor of making bathtubs full of money by creating products that everyone likes, not just the male 18-34 year olds who already spend all their time on Xbox Live or playing World of Warcraft. We've gone over this before so I won't repeat myself any more than I already have.

Hit: Pancakes

Take this recipe. Make sure you mix the dry ingredients really really well. Use a bit less buttermilk and replace it with a bit of low fat milk. Avoid shitty electric griddles that don't get hot enough. The result will be thick, light, fluffy pancakes that soak up syrup like a sponge. Pancake heaven. Now if I only knew what Dottie's used for a spice mix.

Miss: Adventures in Data Loss

My laptop hard disk decided to head crash while I was cloning it to my standard backup clone drive. As a result, I also had no backup clone drive at the time. Thus, I had to spend an excruciating weekend laboriously reinstalling everything I normally use on the laptop and setting it all up again. Usually the MacOS migration utility does this work for me, and I like it that way. It's by far the most useful thing that MacOS does. I've only done this sort of rebuild twice in the almost 7 years I've been back on Macs.

Hit: Paranoid Redundant Backups

Happily, the head crash did not wipe any data I really cared about. The music is somewhere else. The work stuff is mostly at work. And most importantly, the photos are periodically backed up in at least three places at any given time, so the week of pictures I thought I lost were actually in backup disk number three in my office. Let this be a lesson. There is no level of paranoia too high for your picture archive.

I also bought a second pocket drive for laptop Time Machine use. And made a second clone disk in case this ever happens again, so I can at least try to boot the laptop the next time I am completely screwed.

Hmm, now that I have written this little missive, I guess I'll go back up my photos again. See ya.

My Mom's Peanut Sauce

2008-07-21 · by psu

Tonight a recipe that will do you no good at all. The Penn Avenue Fish Company has had head-on shrimp lately. These are huge shrimp which are for once sold whole. This means you can cook the shrimp with the head still on. They taste better that way. What I did was just drop them in boiling water until they told me they were done. The second time I got nervous and left them in a bit longer and they were overcooked. Don't let this happen to you. When the shell changes color they are pretty much done.

So I needed something to dip the shrimp in.

Cocktail sauce is not my expertise. I decided to make my mom's peanut sauce. She used to make this for cold noodles a lot, but you can do other things with it.

Start with a couple of tablespoons of hot water. Add to this a couple of table spoons of peanut butter. The best kind to use is JIF or Peter Pan or something. You can't use the stuff that is nothing but organic ground nuts because the fake stuff has emulsifiers in it that hold the sauce together. If this bothers you, get the Whole Foods version of JIF. It works about as well.

Get a whisk and whisk in some soy sauce. How much? 2 glugs. Enough to give the sauce enough soy sauce flavor. Enough so that the consistency is right. Not so much that things get too salty or you kill the taste of the peanut butter. The finished product should be thick enough to stick the food, but still more like a liquid than a solid. You just have to keep mixing and adjusting until it looks and tastes right. Of course, you've never made it or tasted it so you don't know. Thus, this recipe is useless.

In any case, for dipping sauces that want a bit of sweetness, you can now add Hoisin Sauce. This will thicken the sauce a bit and give it a sweet aftertaste. When you get those fresh spring rolls the dipping sauce they come with tastes like my peanut sauce with Hoisin in it and peanuts on top.

Adding chili oil is also a good variation.

Adding citrus or a bit of vinegar also works well.

For the shimp, I added a bit of hot sauce and some lime juice. I liked it. Karen thought it was a little too strong for the shrimp. It would have been great on spring rolls though.

For the classic cold peanut noodles, take the base sauce without the Hoisin and add a bit of sesame oil mix it up to coat cold cooked noodles. My mom used to use spaghetti. Any sort of similar noodle will work. Add scallions on top and maybe cucumber cut into thin sticks if you are not lazy.

Now what always confused me is why people are always calling that dish "sesame" noodles. I guess there must be a way to make it without peanut butter. Oh well.

A Liquor Store Grows in Iselin

2008-07-22 · by peterb

While in the mystical land of New Jersey, I went to a wonderful liquor store: Joe Canal's.

There are strict rules in Pennsylvania governing purchasing alcohol in other states. Therefore, believe me when I say that this was merely a visit for entertainment. I did not purchase many bottles of wine at reasonable prices. The wine that I did not purchase was not of a staggering variety from around the world. I did not take advantage of the discount Joe Canal's gives when not buying my mixed case of wine. Nor did I peruse the wide selection of fine beers at reasonable prices, which you could buy one bottle at a time instead of in a case. I certainly did not bring back several bottles of Luxardo Maraschino for my friend Nat.

[Joe Canal 1

Michael Brenner](http://wptest.tleaves.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/20080720-12948.jpg "Joe Canal 1")

I did chat briefly with one of the store managers, Michael Brenner. I am still trying to integrate our conversation into my understanding of the world. For example, when I mentioned some comparatively esoteric spirits, he knew what I was talking about, and knew where they were. He even was able to talk intelligently about what they tasted like, but this would imply that there are liquor store employees who are educated about the product they sell. Isn't that crazy? It's almost like I wandered into a Bizarro world: a store that is interested in the product they sell.

I spent, all told, about an hour at Joe Canal's, picking up and lovingly caressing the bottles that I would have bought, if I didn't live in Pennsylvania. The staff was quite understanding. They even let me take a few pictures.

Let me give you another quick example: in Pennsylvania, you're basically lucky to find one ruby port in any given store. (You'll find several "late bottled vintages" and more expensive Portos, but I subscribe to the theory that the "middle tier" of Portos is actually overpriced and mediocre. I've hinted at that before, but it's really the subject of another article.) In a Pennsylvania State store, the only ruby port you'll find is Cockburns, and at $12.99/bottle it's overpriced. You can special order a few others, but there's a 6 bottle minimum, and they're also overpriced at $13/bottle.

[Joecanal 2

Selection!](http://wptest.tleaves.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/07/20080720-12961.jpg "Joecanal 2")

In addition to a nice array of late-bottled vintages and vintage ports, Joe Canal's had 4 different ruby ports on the shelves, and at least two white ports. All of them were $10 a bottle. I did not, of course, buy one of each of the ruby ports, planning an upcoming orgy of inexpensive but quality Porto and stinky blue cheese. Why would I do such a thing? Just because it would mean that I could try each of them in turn, and then plan to buy a case of the one I liked when I returned to New Jersey next month? Such thoughts are beneath me. They never crossed my mind. Even now, I feel slightly sick at the implication that anyone might drive across the border from Philly to shop at a liquor store with a better selection and lower prices than a PLCB state store. Pennsylvanians are above that sort of chicanery.

When I mentioned my recent fascination with Japanese whisky, Michael said "Well, we have the Yamazaki; it's the only one you can get from wholesalers." Walking through the aisles, we soon came to the display with the Yamazaki 12 and the Yamazaki 18. The Yamazaki 18 retails for $121 at the PLCB, and is only available by special order. At Joe Canal's it was an impossibly-inexpensive $80, and available on the shelf. Of course, gentle reader, I don't need to tell you that I didn't buy it. I didn't drink deep its peaty resonance, reveling in both the luxuriousness of the liquor, and in the fact that I had just saved $40. No. I could have done that. But that would have been wrong.

As I drove away from Joe Canal's, my trunk completely empty and not filled to the brim with inexpensive wines that were tasty and a good value for money, I sighed a deep sigh. Perhaps some day I can come back again, to that magical land of tasty wine, and intelligent people who know how to talk about it: New Jersey.

Alpe D'Huez

2008-07-23 · by psu

Wow I love this stage. And who can't appreciate the brilliant tactics that CSC used to completely obliterate the rest of the race. They put on a clinic in team bike racing. Go watch the stage to see how it's done.

A Road Less Travelled

2008-07-24 · by peterb

Today I took Route 48 south from McKeesport, a road I've been meaning to drive for a while, just to see what was there. And I managed to find some great images.

Versailles

Works

Click on the next one to enlarge:

Marilyn photo

I'm still deciding whether they're good enough to warrant going up onto Flickr.

The Abstraction Distraction, Part 1: Abstraction

2008-07-28 · by psu

Abstraction is the activity that lies at the core of much of computer science, and computer hardware and software engineering. Understanding what the word means is thus at the core of understanding both how and why computing systems are are put together and evolve the way they do. It is also a large part of the key to understanding the mind of the engineer, because more than anything an enthusiasm for clever and aesthetically pleasing abstractions is what drives people to become engineers in the first place.

So what is abstraction anyway? In my mind the you can boil it down to the following overly simple definition: Abstraction is the act of giving a short and easy to remember name to something that is long and complicated. By doing this, you absolve yourself of needing to remember the long and complicated stuff.

The Internet provides a convenient example. Suppose you want to explain to people what "Abstraction" is. You could do a lot of research and thinking and then write several hundred words down on a piece of paper. Then, when anyone asks you could read the paper to them. But this can get long and tedious. So, instead, what you could do is post your several hundred words on the Internet in a special place and then just hand out this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abstraction

or maybe

http://tleaves.com/?p=1081

Then people can just keep the link around and read the words by themselves. This, I claim, is abstraction at its core. We have taken something long and complicated and turned it into a single easy to remember name so we don't have to think about the other stuff anymore.

If you spend any time around computers, you see abstraction everywhere. Building a circuit to perform arithmetic on 32 bit fixed point numbers is complicated and hard. So we build the circuit and then hide it behind a few dozen bit patterns that represent instructions for load, store, add, multiply, and so on. Bit patterns are hard for humans to remember, so we further encode them as assembly language mnemonics. You will soon find yourself writing the same sequences of assembly language over and over again, so we package these up as a set of libraries and functions that all applications can use and call that an "operating system".

Operating systems further abstract the physical hardware that might be connected to a computer so as to make it more easily shareable by multiple applications. The most obvious example here is virtual memory. Most people think of virtual memory as "paging", but it is really something deeper. All physical hardware defines a fixed set of names at which we can store program data. These are "physical addresses". If application programs were forced to always use physical addresses they would constantly have to argue with each other over where they could be loaded and which areas of memory were free for use or not. This is tedious and error prone.

Virtual memory allows every program to pretend that it has some fixed set of addresses that start at zero and go up to whatever. Further, they can pretend that they have this whole address space to themselves. The operating system then takes care of making sure that programs don't end up using the same physical memory or otherwise destroying each other. Again, we simplify high level code by introducing an abstraction layer that essentially does name translation.

The higher levels of software applications also have their own collections of abstractions. Some are important enough to have special names. I work primarily in desktop software with a fancy graphical interface. These applications tend to be constructed out of three abstractions that like to think of each other as black boxes, although it never works out.

  1. Model: how the application stores the basic units of the user's data. In a text editor, this would be text and layout. In a video game, this would be the models and assets that the engine uses to represent the state of the game. You get the idea.

  2. View: how the application displays data for the user. This is the visible part of the user interface.

  3. Controller: how the application responds to user commands. This is the less visible part of the user interface. It determines which sequences of actions are legal in a user interface and thus what workflows it can support. A good rule of thumb would be to say that the view side draws the button and the controller defines what the button does to the model.

Thinking about applications in this way allows software engineers to not have to consider every single possible detail whenever they sit down to solve some problem or fix some bug. First, you can isolate it to the black box you need to work in. Then you can work on only the concerns that are relevant to that box.

Of course, abstraction boundaries are not perfect, and the details of the boxes tend to leak out, which is what makes fixing software complicated. Still, it is amazing the extent to which people that work on different parts of the system can be completely isolated from each other. The model guy might understand hundreds of details about how the application encodes the various data on disk, but know nothing about how it is later rendered on the screen for the shiny demos. Similarly, the graphics guy just knows how to write code to draw. The stuff he needs to draw is always just there, because the model guy has taken care of it for him. This isolation can be strong enough that people can work for years on applications and not even know what the basic feature set is. I've seen it.

The essential service that abstractions provide is that they allow you to be lazy. Rather than remember how physical memory is managed in a machine you just ask the operating system to take care of you. Similarly, instead of knowing how you write the blue and red widgets to disk, you just call into some API defined by someone else on your team and then go scream at them when the code does not work and starts to show up on crashlogs in the bugs you have been given to fix.

This capacity for increasing laziness is a wondrous thing. But, it can also get us into trouble. We can be blinded by the power of our wonderful abstractions and lose track of the problems we had set out to solve in the first place. Worse, we can surround ourselves with abstractions and, assuming they will solve all our problems, not really think about the problems at all and thus never really solve them. As incredible as it may seem, I am writing here that it is possible to be too lazy.

But, we'll leave those thoughts for the second part of this long winded pontification, which will explain the Distraction part of the Abstraction Distraction.

Green Tea Mixed Berry Ice Cream

2008-07-31 · by peterb

Honestly? I didn't think this would work. But I tried it anyway, and it is six kinds of awesome.

Whip for a bit in a blender before adding it to your ice cream maker (if, like me, you are a cheap bastard and have a cheap ice cream maker).

The odd thing about this recipe is the purple berry juice cancels out the green color of the tea slurry, and you end up with something that is sort of an unearthly glowing ultra-white. It has the bracing bitterness of green tea, mixed with the tartness of the berries. It's great.

Irons in the Fire

2008-08-05 · by peterb

Unfortunately, I'm a bit overcommitted at the moment, which means my leisure writing has taken a back seat. Here's a nice image to hold you over.

jumping

Thanks to the model for posing for this photo, and to Nikon for lending me the camera with which to take it. I've gotta say, this camera takes really good pictures!

The Abstraction Distraction, Part 2: Distraction

2008-08-06 · by psu

Previously on this channel we discussed the role of abstraction in the context of constructing software. Abstraction enables laziness by hiding details that are unimportant or irrelevant to the problem at hand. This is a powerful and beautiful idea because it gives the appearance of providing programmers with a great deal of leverage against complexity. Of course, nothing is ever that easy. The problem is that at some point if you are going to ship anything someone has to worry about all those hidden details. And this is typically when people get into trouble.

In software, details are the enemy of simplicity and calm. In my experience, the place where details do the most damage is in the controller layers of the application. Armies of engineers have worked for decades to provide reusable tools for building the controller layers of custom applications. The temptation is to say "Hey, we can just make a generic rule engine to control these things and then everyone can define their own custom flow on top of the some data model and UI abstractions". But that never works, because when you get down to the critical details, the control requirements for most applications are all different. Thus, while you can gain a lot of leverage in sharing the generic parts of the UI presentation and the data model, it's almost impossible to actually make customizing the control easier.

So you end up writing everything from scratch every time or encoding every possible option into the generic rule engine. The short way to characterize this syndrome is: "you can't share the controller".

Anyone who has worked in software for any amount of time will recognize a whole class of systems for which this statement holds. These tend to be "workflow" applications that try to encode the existing technical or business processes of an organization into a shiny new computer application to make everything more efficient. Some consultant will come in and tell you to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars and buy an application engine from Oracle or SAP or Peoplesoft which has "modules" that encode "business logic" that let you specify exactly what it is you need. Except it only works if you then also hire a dozen or two dozen engineers from Oracle or SAP or Peoplesoft to come in and collect your specifications and write the all the control from scratch.

Of course, this process is tedious and error prone so more often than not the result is a buggy and bloated mess that completely fails. Hooray for abstraction!

There are similar problems in desktop software, which is why it is so much harder to build a framework for building applications than it is to build and ship a few individual applications by themselves. In both cases you have to deal with all of the annoying control details, but making an SDK means you then add the extra overhead of trying to anticipate and deal with everyone else's details as well. Remember: it's always better to avoid vague generalities when you could work on concrete requirements instead. Avoid premature reuse.

Unfortunately, engineers find it difficult to follow this rule. It is in their nature to think about everything at a generic abstract level instead of at a level of detail that is useful for the end user. Abstractions are an enjoyable distraction from the every day reality of dealing with messy details. Left on their own they would go and build a cool new way to structure an operating system kernel (say), rather than something that makes editing photos easier for end users. The reason is because if they are building their own abstraction, then they have control over the details of the requirements. This makes their code fun to work on because they are only solving problems that they find interesting. It also makes the end product completely worthless because no one wants to use an abstraction to get work done. Users want to use applications.

There is also a tendency to allow abstraction to distract us from all the details rather than just the unimportant ones. We then talk about a system or a feature as a black box that is already implemented, rather than as a placeholder for the real work that we'll eventually have to do. One sign that you've entered into this danger zone is when you ask the question "how hard could it be?" For example, "That feature seems straightforward, how hard could it be?" No matter how tempted you are, you should never ask this question about a system you do not understand intimately. The answer is almost always "harder and more expensive than you think." Unless you understand the details, you really have no way to know. If nothing else, in the crunch of a tight schedule, every new detail that you decide to implement adds complexity, risk, testing costs and unexpected bugs. Good software comes from understanding which details are the critical ones and building the right abstractions to deal with the those problems. In other words, you need to solve the right problems in the right way at the right level of abstraction. Don't let yourself get distracted.

First Impression: Richard Chen Asian Cuisine

2008-08-07 · by psu

When I go to other cities, especially cities that have large Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese or other East Asian communities, I tend to shit on the so-called "Pan Asian" style restaurants. My opinion of the iconic Vietnamese place called The Slanted Door in San Francisco is typical. I couldn't see why I just spent all that money to get typical Vietnamese takeout food on fancy plates with a bar in the background (we went to the original, not the new one).

Now that the Richard Chen restaurant has opened in East Liberty in Pittsburgh, I think I understand why people would be excited about a place like that. This is the best new Asian restaurant to open in the city since Rose Tea Cafe started serving food. But, it is a lot of money and very fancy plates.

Here is the thing. This place is a Chinese Restaurant in Pittsburgh that serves a credible Pot Sticker. I've never had a credible pot sticker outside of Toronto or SF. It's like I've been shuttled into an alternate dimension where Pittsburgh has real Chinese Food. I've been waiting for this so long that I'm willing to cut a place that can do it a lot of slack.

Not that Richard Chen needs it. Here are some of the dishes we got:

  1. Braised Pork Belly with steamed buns. Perfect little plain steamed buns. Soft tender pork belly with just enough of the rich fat and a rich, yet light, brown sauce with a touch of anise.

  2. Tuna Sashimi with Marinated Jellyfish and Ponzu Sauce. This was the best appetizer of the bunch.

  3. The pot stickers. An almost perfect filling (which I can't really do yet). The skins were slightly chewy and might have been wonton skins, but I'd like to think not.

  4. Bean Curd Sheet stuffed with mushrooms. Very good, but again the fried skins were slightly chewy.

  5. Spicy Beef Salad. This was lettuce, grilled flank steak (I think), a sweet vinegar dressing and watermelon cubes hiding chili peppers to go with the dressing. Not overdressed and it had the perfect balance of sweet and sour and spicy.

For one entree we got Chili Prawns with Broccoli Rabe. The prawns were fresh and snappy and perfectly cooked. The sauce and the broccoli rabe were a great variation on the standard Chinese greens or broccoli. We also got Baby Bok Choy with Mushrooms and Bamboo Shoots. Hey! The bamboo shoots were great! I hate bamboo shoots.

The entrees both came with sauces that were too salty. This threw off the balance of things and was a bit confusing considering how well executed the appetizers were. This is the only comment I have about the place that is almost a complaint.

There were a few other off notes as well, but nothing major. I find the Western service style a little disorienting, but that's OK. There are only three kinds of rice on the menu: Jasmine, Brown Rice, and some sort of Red Rice. None of these are right. But the Jasmine rice is at least well cooked. The menu is a strange mix. On the one hand there are ethereal dumplings, creative variations on standards and a few really new things. On the other hand are some dishes that are almost standard "American Chinese takeout", although to be fair I have to reserve judgement until I try them.

At this point, none of these things are unforgivable because the existence of this place in Pittsburgh is so astounding. I guess this is how the people felt when the Slanted Door opened. I guess I'm getting soft.

Other things on the menu we could not order, but which looked good: Crystal Prawn dumplings, Seafood Mousse Dumplings with Pea Leaves, Wok Fried Cod in a clay pot, Lobster in "XO" Sauce, Beef Tenderloin with Vegetables, Five Spiced Duck. That's all I can remember.

Funniest menu item: Free Range Kung Pao Chicken. It looked good.

Funniest service moment: In the middle of the dining room is this striking white table with a vase and a large orchid. It's bright and shiny and hides service items like forks and knives and such. At one point one of the servers put a stack of menus on this table. The manager instantly appeared and quietly told the server to never do that again, ever.

I am optimistic about this place. It is more expensive than people are used to for "Chinese Food". You will pay as much here as any of the fancier places in Pittbsurgh: Mio, Vivo, Eleven, Dish, and so on. But they are doing a lot more than just Chinese Food. I realize that it might be a stretch to expect people to appreciate that, but I'm hopeful.

I plan to go and run the whole menu. I hope you go too, and pay the prices, and appreciate what they are doing, because it's really good.

I Woke Up And One Of Us Was Crying

2008-08-11 · by peterb

I'd like to watch the Olympics opening ceremonies, please.

This sounds like a simple request, but apparently is akin to asking a soiled, drunk nun to perform brain surgery on an epileptic chihuahua on the roof of a moving car: not only won't things turn out OK, but the nun probably won't even understand what the hell you're asking her to do.

Like Formula One racing, the Olympics broadcast is a feed exclusively licensed to a single broadcaster in each country. That broadcaster then -- I'm assuming this is written into the contract -- is obligated to muck up the broadcast by talking over it inanely and incessantly. I think this is really an idea that should be applied in more places. Just the other night, I went to the symphony, and right about the middle of the first movement of Shostakovich's 7th, I started to get bored. "You know what this music needs?" I thought. "Color commentary".

"Now, Marv, it looks like the timpanist is starting to limber up a bit."

"Yes, Katie, that's right. The drums represent the approach of the Russian offensive, in response to the destruction of St. Petersburg. The timpanist has practiced for over 400 hours waiting for just this moment...now! Wow, Katie, isn't that something?"

"It sure is, Marv. The precision with which he hit those notes is a testament to the hard work and dedication that this symphony orchestra has put in over the past 6 months, all waiting for this big night. In a moment, the violins will enter, signifying how life must go on even in the midst of sadness and tragedy, but right now we have to break for a commercial. We'll be right back."

Complaining about the quality of TV coverage of the Olympics is, of course, a time-honoured tradition that has gone on for many years. That's not really what I'm complaining about here. What I'm hot and bothered about is that I can't get better coverage, even if I am willing to pay for it. Look. It is the year 2008. I wake up in the morning, eat my protein-pill breakfast and then fly to work with my jetpack. I type into a magic box which can perform arithmetic faster than God, and which sends my words across the globe in near-real time, and I have the entire works of William Shakespeare and Groucho Marx at my fingertips. But the people running the Olympics can't figure out a way for me to pay them money to download a simple video feed of the opening ceremonies. I don't need commentary. I don't need commercials. I want to give you cash, and see the pretty pictures.

Oh well. Maybe in 2012.

A Wee Dram of Hokkaido

2008-08-14 · by peterb

I've alluded, once or twice, to my growing interest in Japanese whisky, and talked about the bottles that I absolutely, positively, did not buy out of state and certainly did not bring back to Pennsylvania, because that would be wrong. I have, it seems, taken it to a new level: friends have started not bringing me whisky directly from Japan.

First, you may recall, there was the bottle of the Yamazaki 12-year that I totally did not buy at Gomer's in Kansas City. Then, last month, I absolutely did not buy a bottle of the Yamazaki 18 in New Jersey. By not buying those two bottles of whisky, I had not bought all of the Japanese whiskies one can potentially buy in the US.

But now a friend — a wonderful friend — has done something wonderful for me. She has not brought me a bottle of Nikka's Yoichi 15-year whisky. Through the magic of Photoshop, here is a computer simulation of what the bottles of Japanese whisky that I don't own might look like:

Yoichi

Since I have tried all these whiskies before, while travelling, and not just now with my friends, I can tell you a bit about them. The least expensive, the Yamazaki 12 (cost: $40 - $50), is actually my favorite of the three. It's smooth like silk, with just a hint of peatiness and not at all aggressive. It's perfect for drinking as an oyawari, mixing the whiskey with a little bit of hot water, almost like alcoholic tea. It opens up nicely in water, and is a perfect every-day sort of drink.

The Yamazaki 18 (price: $80 - $120, depending on where you are) continues the essentially sweet flavor profile of the 12, but adds to it a weightiness, a thicker mouthfeel, and loads of a deep peaty taste. Even though I personally prefer the 12, I'm bound to tell you that among my friends I'm the only one who thinks that way: everyone else found the 18 more sophisticated and tasty.

The Nikka Yoichi 15 (cost: $100, plus airfare to and from Tokyo) is a horse of a different color. Suntory is renowned for making very Japanese whiskies: they pair well with food, and play nice with everything else at the table. Nikka, I had heard, made much more Scotch-style whiskies, in that they want to be consumed by themselves. The Yoichi 15 matches this description. It's distinctive, a bit rough, and not at all a shrinking violet. The nose is all iodine and seaweed, and it scratches peat and sea salt down your throat like a tea clipper sailing from Hong Kong. This is not something you would drink with dinner, but rather something to be sipped while sinking into a deep leather chair.

So, is Japanese whisky worth going out of your way to get? It depends on your interests. It is, to be sure, very good. It is also (even if you factor out airfare), quite expensive. But I would venture to say that no scotch aficionado's liquor cabinet is complete without at least one of these honorable drams on their shelf.

For those Tea Leaves readers who should chance to visit Japan in the future, please drop me a line before you go. I'd love to have you not bring me a bottle.

Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner with Moriarty

2008-08-20 · by peterb

I just paid $90 for a set of games that, purchased separately, would cost nearly $500.

Long-time readers know of my love, bordering on irrational, for the games of Everett Kaser. From his first great game, Sherlock, through to what I consider the apogee of the deduction game, Baker Street, Kaser's games have kept me company for upwards of 15 years. There has always been one problem: his games didn't run natively on Mac OS X.

Until now.

All of Kaser's games now run natively on OS X. You can see the complete collection on his web site and buy them for immediate download for $20 each (all of the games have free demos available for download). Or, you can mail, e-mail, or call the guy up and order a full CD of all 22 games for just $90. I rang the number up early one morning to order, and he picked up the phone. "Everett here." I am not ashamed to say that I was giddy like a love-struck cheerleader. We chatted about the games, and about the process of porting to OS X — Brad Oliver of MacMAME fame did the heavy lifting of porting the KINT interpreter — and how his games had probably absorbed about a full 9 man-months of my time over the years.

Kaser gave me some caveats about the games. He's new to OS X as a platform, and the games are in some sense not native: they're written to target his own custom-designed virtual machine that he wrote to protect himself against changes in Windows APIs. So they are not truly Mac-like. Likewise, the CD just comes with the games zipped up; there's no installer or the like. No matter. Normally this is the sort of polish issue that I'd take someone to task for, but in this case, I'll just let it slide. To borrow a phrase, "With chicks like Shalimar, there's just some stuff you gotta put up with."

Why am I so obsessed with these games? And why should you get them? Because they are the best logic puzzles on the planet. To demonstrate, I'm going to walk you through the simplest version of his simplest deduction game, Sherlock.

I'm using the 3x3 grid to keep this article manageable, but Sherlock scales up to an 8x8 grid. This game took me about 90 seconds to solve, mostly because I had to pause to take screenshots. An 8x8 Sherlock game usually takes me about 20 minutes if I'm pushing. The other games in the series introduce more complex deduction types and other elements (such as paths and walls). But this should be enough to give you a taste.

First, let's look at the field of play as the game starts:

Sher1

The actual "game board" is the square inside the blue area. Arrayed around the outside are the clues you are given to solve the puzzle. This is a simple puzzle, so there are only three clues. Each square inside the game board contains small icons, which are possible answers or a single large icon, which is a chosen answer. You can have the games notify you immediately when you make a wrong deduction (with an infuriating audio cue), or you can have it silently allow you to blunder towards a dead end. In this puzzle, the top-center square already has a picture of the blonde woman ("Blondie") selected. That answer has been given by the game as a handicap. You can adjust the handicap level to suit your taste.

Now, let's look at a clue:

Sher2

The arrow over the red house means that it is between the 3 and the yellow house. The order is unimportant: the 3 might be on the left, or it might be on the right. All you know is that the red house is between them. There is a status area which explains each clue as you hover the mouse over it. Clues sometimes have corollaries; for example, you can also deduce from this clue that the 3 is 2 columns away from the yellow house.

Since we know the red house must be between two other clues, we know it can't be in the left or right columns. Therefore, it's in the middle. Left-clicking on the red house in the middle column selects that answer, and removes it from the list of possibilities for the other columns.

Sher 9

This next clue tells us that the number "2" has to be somewhere to the left of Baldy:

Sher8

Therefore, Baldy can't be in the leftmost column. We can right-click on his little picture there to make him go away:

Sher4

A clue that I missed when solving this puzzle is that since according to the first clue, 3 had to be 2 columns away from the yellow house. Therefore, it couldn't be in the center column, leaves 2 as the only possibility for the center column. But often you can arrive at deductions through different paths, and that's what I did in this case.

Notice that there's only one place left for Baldy to be, so we can left-click on him to choose him (you can have the game automatically fill in "last choices" like that for you, if you like).

Sher5

The next clue means that Egyptian Guy (and no, I have no idea why I call him that) is in the same column as the yellow house and the number 1.

Sher 3

Given that the only 1 left is in the leftmost column, we can start filling in the answers quickly:

Sher6

...and before you know it, we've solved the entire puzzle... Sher7

...and are treated to a little bit of victory music and some happy graphical flourishes.

It may not be obvious, from this little example, that these games are the most addictive games you may ever play. But, I assure you, they are. You can pick them up at any time, save the game at a moment's notice if you have to stop, and return to them later. They will haunt your dreams and occupy your idle moments. There are free demos available for each and every one of the games, and the demos are full featured -- just limited in the number of puzzles available -- so you can find the one you like (if you were only going to buy one of them, I'd probably recommend Honeycomb Hotel, although Sudoku addicts might find Latin Squares or the slightly easier Greek Squares, instead).

It has been years in the making, but the Kaser games have finally arrived on OS X. And if you do not buy at least one of them, you are a fool.

Happy puzzling!

From Canon to Nikon

2008-09-02 · by peterb

Amazon.com Widgets

Several years ago I entered the digital photography age and bought a DSLR. The other principal at Tea Leaves, psu, is a dedicated Nikon shooter and lent me his Nikon D70 to play with, and another friend of mine lent me a Canon D350 ("Rebel XT"). Both were fine cameras, but I liked the "out of the camera" JPEGs from the Canon a little more, so I went with that. Since that time, Pete and I have developed a friendly rivalry where he has been "the Nikon shooter" and I have been "the Canon shooter."

Recently, I've been mulling over a new camera purchase. I've abused my faithful Rebel quite a bit, and although it still works fine, I've sometimes chafed at some of the tradeoffs I made. For example, it's wonderfully small, but the viewfinder is unusable. I was, of course, considering trading up to one of the higher end Canon models, but then I sat back and surveyed what I actually own and I realized my investment is pretty small. My favorite lens is the 50mm f1.8, which was a mere $70. I have a $400 28-135 IS lens which has been dropped on the ground, repaired, and which doesn't focus so well anymore. And I have a low-end flash unit. With no huge investment in quality glass, why shouldn't I at least look at Nikon?

"It'll never work", said Pete. "You've spent three years living, breathing, and thinking Canon. You can't rewire your brain to a completely different user interface. You'll hate it." But I was curious to try the experiment anyway. I contacted Nikon, and they graciously agreed to loan Tea Leaves a Nikon D300 and a very nice lens. I'd like to tell you a bit about my experience.

Before we begin, let me talk about my intention here. My goal is to compare the Nikon user experience to my Canon experience. I'm not, therefore, going to bombard you with zoomed-in crops of photos from cameras by each manufacturer and compare them. The most important determinant of a successful photograph is the photographer. A great photographer can take great photos with a Nikon, a Canon, an Olympus, or a disposable Kodak camera. Higher end cameras open up more options, but don't change the nature of the activity.

For those of you who are interested, clicking on any of the images here will bring you to a full size version of the image: each is around 10 Mb, so be warned. Or, you can just go to my Flickr page and look at them there.

First Impressions

D300 The D300 is solidly built, heavy, and large. It has a weight and heft that will require positive attention when carrying it. Furthermore, it's conspicuous: I literally can't count the number of comments people made about the camera, whereas I've never had anyone say anything about a D70 or a Rebel. If you're looking to fake your way into a press conference without shelling out $5,000 for a Nikon D3, the D300 might be a good choice.

Despite being heavy, it's an easy camera to one-hand. The shape of the right half of the body combined with the texturing of the external plastic is just about perfect. It fits in your hand like it was meant to be there.

Some "prosumer" photographers seem to have a bee in their bonnet about camera sizes. Lots of people, for example, complain about SLRs that are too small. This has never made sense to me, and it still doesn't today. The argument seems to go something like this: "I am really, really manly. I have big hands, and if I pick up a little girly camera, my overwhelming masculinity might cause me to accidentally crush it like a bug." A lot of the people who make this claim will even go out of their way to pay extra for a "vertical grip" that makes their camera even bigger and heavier.

Here's the thing: I have huge hands. And I've never had any problem holding even the most delicate camera. I think this entire topic is one where insecurity issues predominate, and that some people are, shall we say, overcompensating.

I have, however, held cameras that were too big. "Big" in this case doesn't generally refer to size, but to weight, and to the amount of space it takes to pack it. The D300 with the 17-55 f/2.8 lens was almost too large to fit in my compact Domke F-5XB camera bag, but it just made it in. Although it has a noticeable heft, it was not at all unmanageable. You can wear it around your neck. You can carry it around with you. You can quickly swivel and take surprising shots of passers-by while they're still reacting:

[Jill F

Jill. f/2.8, 1/3200, ISO 800](http://flickr.com/photos/pgberger/2808931537/sizes/o/ "Jill F")

The other aspect of the D300 that hits you in the face, literally, is the superb viewfinder. Both Canon and Nikon have been guilty of creating cameras with viewfinders that were so bad that you were better off just vaguely pointing the camera in the direction you wanted to shoot and firing blindly. The D300 has a real viewfinder. You can compose with it, you can tell what is in focus and what is not, and you can do all of this without killing your eyesight. I suspect that for some people, the viewfinder by itself is enough reason to get one of these.

Imagined in Your Philosophy

The most frustrating thing about switching, for a Canon shooter, is this: everything is backwards. Everything. The lenses thread the wrong way onto the body. The exposure compensation controls are reversed, with plus being to the left, and minus being to the right. The first day I used the camera was spent (mostly) cursing, because I kept rotating every control the wrong way.

But you know what? By the third day, I had mostly forgotten about this issue. For the most common tasks (taking photos, and setting aperture and shutter speed) both cameras are essentially identical: both provide a simple shutter release button, and both have small scroll wheels to adjust the settings along with an LCD display on the top of the camera as an indicator. Likewise, both cameras have exotic custom functions which are tucked away deep inside the menus, accessible through the rear display. Like learning to drive a new car, you quickly adjust to the differences.

The car analogy, however, isn't quite right. The modern SLR is more like a small home computer. There are tasks you do all the time, every time you pick up the camera; there are things you only do a few times a shoot; and then there are things you might do only once in a blue moon. The difference in philosophy between Nikon and Canon shows up in how they divide up these tasks.

Nikon, however, seems to offer more options via semi-direct means. To take one example, if you want to turn on auto-exposure bracketing on a Canon 40D, to the best of my knowledge you have to go into the menu system to do it. On the D300 you can use the menu, or you can press the practically invisible button on the lower-right of the body while spinning the quick control wheel. The D300 makes heavy use of this sort of "chording" throughout the UI. It's both good and bad: once you know it's there and devote the brain cells to remembering it, you can set things like this very quickly. On the other hand, it means the body is studded with mysterious buttons that are enigmatically labelled.

Perhaps because of this ability to rely on the semi-direct access, I found that even after a month of shooting, I still don't like the menu system on the D300: it gives equal priority to everything, meaning that finding the really important settings (such as auto-ISO mode) is inevitably a chore. So you can avoid going to the menus as much with the D300, but when you have to go there, it's not quite as nicely organized as on the low to midrange Canon bodies.

Although I'm skeptical of the "large cameras are easier to hold" philosophy, I cannot deny that the sheer physical presence of the D300 made it noticeably easier for me to convince complete strangers to (a) pose for photos and (b) sign a model release.

[Christina

Christina the Astonishing. f/5, 1/60th, ISO 560](http://peterb.tleaves.com/weblog/photos/d300review/20080731-13387.jpg "Christina")

Our next section focuses on lighting.

From Canon to Nikon: Lighting and Exposure

2008-09-02 · by peterb

Amazon.com Widgets

(Part 1 of this article explains my rationale for answering the question "How hard is it for a Canon shooter to go Nikon?" After a month with a D300, I'm ready to answer that question. If you buy equipment from Amazon via links on this page, or click on the ads, we get a little cash, which helps us maintain this site.)

Flash

When I first began shooting, I didn't have any interest in flash photography whatsoever. Now I do, and that's one of the things motivating me to look at switching. Nikon has a reputation for having a superior flash system. After shooting with the Nikon D300, I believe it.

The D300's built-in flash can be used, out of the box, as a remote trigger for Nikon's speedlites. This is life-changing. It means that without any additional hardware beyond the camera and the flash, you can create interesting and dramatic lighting effects using an off-camera flash, such as the Nikon SB-800:

[Communist

Long Live the Indissolute Union of the Working Class, the Peasantry, and the Intelligentsia! f/8, 1/250, ISO 200. KatKat B was standing just out of frame to the left pointing the snooted SB-800 at Katie's face.](http://flickr.com/photos/pgberger/2808908125/sizes/o/ "Communist")

The flash compensation also seemed to work a bit better on the D300 than I've experienced with other cameras. Generally speaking, I've found the flash on my Canon to be a bit too aggressive, even when applying negative flash exposure compensation. The shots I took with the Nikon seemed to be balanced a bit more conservatively. This may simply indicate that I'm using the Canon flash wrongly, but from my perspective it boils down to "I got better results while doing less work using the Nikon." That matters.

I should observe that one can do wireless off-camera flash in the Canon universe too by buying the STE2 Speedlite Transmitter which presumably contains about $5 worth of circuitry and an IR transmitter, for a mere $200. Buying this device has never been an option for me, because its very existence is too insulting. If you intend to use a vendor-supplied flash unit, it's very hard to argue with the Nikon value proposition.

The maximum flash sync speed of the D300 is 1/250th of a second, compared to 1/500th on the D70, which seems to me an odd change. The minimum ISO is an ASA 200 equivalent. There is an "ISO extension" mode on the low end that you can use in bright sunlight to get down to about ISO 155, but the classification of this as an "extension" mode confused me, and always made me feel like I was perhaps doing something that Man Was Not Meant To Do. Thus, when shooting with large apertures in bright light with fill flash, I often wished I had either a lower ISO available, or a higher sync speed. I still got decent results without them, though.

[Sun Salutation

With off-camera flash, f/4.5, 1/80, ISO 200](http://flickr.com/photos/pgberger/2819017767/sizes/o/ "Sun Salutation")

If you've been wanting to get into a little bit of Strobist-style off-camera photography without shelling out cash for a few Pocket Wizards, then this is a no-brainer: you want to go Nikon. You can still do this sort of work with Canon, of course, but you'll have to spend more on equipment than you would if you went Nikon.

Exposure

The D300's "scene recognition system" is a set of technologies that is intended to improve the camera's auto-focus, auto-exposure, and auto-white balance behaviors. The D300 nails the proper exposure in most unchallenging (and mildly challenging) situations. I began using the camera with my standard "underexpose by a few stops, for when the camera gets it wrong" technique, but after a couple of days of shooting found that this was usually unnecessary. That was a refreshing change.

[shadows

f/8, 1/500, ISO 200](http://peterb.tleaves.com/weblog/photos/d300review/20080731-13311.jpg "shadows")

When things get really tricky, I didn't find the D300 to be significantly better or worse than my Canon. Nikon and Canon seem to have slightly differing philosophies with what to do when confronted with a scene that is impossible to expose correctly. Let's take this photo -- which was taken with a Rebel XT, not with a D300 -- as an example.

Tattoo

The subject was terribly backlit, but there was plenty of detail in the glass behind her. I didn't do any special metering for this shot, but just used the evaluative "whole picture" metering mode. In this situations, the Rebel chose to meter for the foreground subject. The D300 in the same situation, using the equivalent Nikon metering mode, would have chosen to avoid losing the highlights in the background, and left the subject underexposed:

[AimeeG

Aimee. f/2.8, 1/5000, ISO 200](http://flickr.com/photos/pgberger/2810541937/sizes/o/ "AimeeG")

Neither camera's predilections are "right" or "wrong" in this situation: sometimes the camera is going to need you to tell it what to do, through spot metering or exposure compensation. But I wanted to call out this difference in exposure philosophy as just one of the things you'll have to get used to if you decide to switch one way or the other.

The next section of this article discusses autofocus.

From Canon to Nikon: Focusing

2008-09-02 · by peterb

Amazon.com Widgets

(Part 1 of this article explains my rationale for answering the question "How hard is it for a Canon shooter to go Nikon?" After a month with a D300, I'm ready to answer that question. If you buy equipment from Amazon via links on this page, or click on the ads, we get a little cash, which helps us maintain this site.)

Focus

Nikon's auto-focus system UI differs from Canon's in the particulars. In its default mode, the Canon focus system tries its best to focus, and then lets you take the photo. The D300 in "S" ("single-servo AF") mode will refuse to take a photo if it thinks it isn't focused. The camera goes to great lengths to make sure that you, as a photographer, know what's going on with the focus system. In "S" mode (which I think of as equivalent to Canon's "one shot AF" mode), half-pressing the shutter causes the lens to focus, the selected focus sensor to flash in the viewfinder, the camera to beep (unless you tell it not to), and a small dot to appear in the viewfinder, which means the camera believes it is focused on something. Squeezing the shutter release the rest of the way takes the photo. Overall, I found D300's focusing to be superbly accurate, but slightly slower than Canon's. We're not talking a huge difference here. Subjectively, it feels like about a hundred-millisecond difference. For most non-sports situations, that's enough that you notice, but not enough that you miss the shot. For my money, this is a good tradeoff: when the focus system works, which is most of the time, you get superb accuracy and tack-sharp results. That means more keepers.

Steelmill

Now, it's worth noting that I wasn't using the kit lens, but the superb 17-55 f/2.8 designed for DX cameras. The difference in contrast and color reproduction between this lens and some of the others I tried was nothing short of dramatic. On the one hand, as someone who doesn't sell photos for a living, $1200 for a lens seems like a lot of money. On the other hand, given the month of shooting I've just had, I'm not sure it's a lot of money for this lens.

If I may digress for a moment, I should note that I'm well aware some will think I'm comparing apples to oranges here; after all, I'm using what by reputation is one of Nikon's best lenses, and the Canon lenses I have shot with are, comparatively, low rent. While that does speak to certain image qualities such as color and contrast, and probably also to focusing speed and accuracy, it's worth keeping in mind that what impresses me most about the D300 are the excellent viewfinder and its intelligence in choosing exposures, which should be the same across all lenses of a given aperture. It's worth remembering, though, that what I'm actually reviewing here is the combination of those two pieces of equipment.

The D300 has two ways to switch to manual focus. First, most autofocus lenses will have a small switch that changes them from automatic to full-time manual focusing. The body also has a small three-way switch that lets you choose between "S" mode (the camera will insist on focusing before allowing the shutter to be released), "C" mode (for quickly moving subjects, the camera tries to anticipate the best focus point and lets you release the shutter at any time) and "M" mode (manual focus).

[detail d300

My nemesis.](http://tleaves.com/w p-content/uploads/2008/09/20080901-13952.jpg "detail d300")

This switch is located just to the lower-left of the lens (from the perspective of the photographer). In other words, the switch is located in a place where I am likely to brush against it with the heel of my left hand while manipulating the focus ring or zoom ring on the lens. When shooting with the D300 I accidentally flipped this switch, without realizing it, more than once. Usually I would knock it from "S" into "C" -- continuous -- mode. That's not the end of the world. In the midst of a carefully planed shoot, however, I accidentally flipped the camera into "M" mode. There's nothing more frustrating than having the perfect light and realizing that you haven't been correctly focusing for the past 20 shots. [Focus

Missed opportunity courtesy of the S/C/M switch.](http://peterb.tleaves.com/weblog/photos/d300review/20080815-14139.jpg "Focus")

"C" focus mode is meant to be used for quickly-moving subjects, the equivalent of Canon's "AI SERVO" mode. The accuracy of focus here was noticeably less perfect than in "S" mode, but then tracking moving subjects is a much more difficult task. From a practical perspective, I stopped thinking of it in terms of its intended function, and just started treating it as a "focus faster, I don't mind if I miss a few" switch.

[Jump

Jump! f/4, 1/800, ISO 500](http://flickr.com/photos/pgberger/2808907763/sizes/o/ "Jump")

Something that must frustrate camera designers is that many photographers don't use the more advanced features of their autofocus systems. A traditional issue with SLRs is that the focus sensors in the center of the frame are more accurate than those on the edges. So after getting burned by missing photo when using all the sensors, some of us — and I've certainly done this at times — resort to what's called "focus and recompose": you lock the focus by pointing the center of the frame at what you want in focus, then you reorient the camera while holding the shutter half-pressed.

For most of my time with the D300, I left it in its magic autofocus mode, where it dynamically decides what parts of the scene I probably want in focus. It then flashes those sensors so you know what it thinks it is focusing on. If it gets it wrong, you can release the shutter and half-press it again, or you can switch to a center-weighted focus mode, or you can specify a single focus sensor to use. The dynamic full-frame focus mode worked great for about 90% of my shots. This worked in part for one reason: the wonderful viewfinder. With a nice large viewfinder, you can immediately tell when the camera has focused on the wrong thing. This, more than anything, is why I'm OK with carrying around a camera this large. The viewfinder is clear, bright, and covers 100% of the sensor area. When I compose a shot in the D300's finder, I know exactly what composition I'm going to get in the final frame. I used to think that this didn't matter, but now that I've lived with it for a while, I have no idea how I'm going to go back to anything less.

Our next section focuses on performance in low light.

From Canon to Nikon: Noise

2008-09-02 · by peterb

Amazon.com Widgets

(Part 1 of this article explains my rationale for answering the question "How hard is it for a Canon shooter to go Nikon?" After a month with a D300, I'm ready to answer that question. If you buy equipment from Amazon via links on this page, or click on the ads, we get a little cash, which helps us maintain this site.)

Noise and High ISO performance

Nikon DSLRs have traditionally lagged a bit behind Canons in terms of digital noise at high equivalent ISO settings. The D300 levels the playing field to the point where this is, effectively, no longer a useful distinction between the two systems.

[Ballet

ISO 640](http://flickr.com/photos/pgberger/2808929445/sizes/o/ "Ballet")

Some people aren't bothered by ISO noise, others find it intolerable. I fall somewhere in between. If a photo works in a black-and-white treatment, often you can leverage the ISO noise into something that adds character and grain. In color photographs, I find it a bit more distracting. The D300 gives you a number of tools to deal with sensor noise. At low ISOs, the noise profile of the D300 is indistinguishable from its Canon counterparts. The D300 allows the user to set the noise reduction level used at higher ISOs. When this is on, the D300 is arguably less noisy than its crop-sensor counterparts:

[whisky

ISO 1600, 1/125th, using Auto-ISO](http://flickr.com/photos/pgberger/2810835125/sizes/o/ "whisky")

All of the Nikon cameras also have a wonderful "Auto-ISO" mode. You tell the camera what the minimum shutter speed you want to allow is (I use 1/125th, because I can't hold a camera steady to save my life), and you tell it what the maximum ISO you want to go up to is, and it will adjust the ISO dynamically as you shoot in order to preserve your minimum desired shutter speed. The medium-level Canon cameras either don't have an Auto-ISO mode, or, like the 40D, have one that has various restrictions and limitations (you can only use Auto-ISO on Thursdays when the moon is full, in towns with more than three syllables in the name).

The best way to avoid ISO sensor noise, of course, is to light your shoots such that you don't need to use high sensitivities. If you're me, that simply isn't possible. Your next best alternative is to have a camera that can use high ISOs while still not having a distracting level of noise. The D300 does this, and it does this impressively.

[Marilyn

ISO 1600, 1/50th](http://flickr.com/photos/pgberger/2811196600/sizes/o/ "Marilyn")

ISO 6400

If you meet a cow that can ride a unicycle, you don't nitpick about how clumsy she is while doing it. The impressive thing is that she can do it at all. That's sort of how I feel about the ultra-low light performance on today's cameras.

The D300 has an ISO extension mode that lets you get two full stops past ISO 1600, up to ISO 6400. As you could guess from the "extension" label, this isn't intended for everyday shooting. But it's worth talking about nonetheless.

Here's the only 100% crop I'm using in this article. This was taken at a wedding in near-complete darkness, at ISO 6400, f/2.8, 1/20th of a second exposure:

ISO6400

Yes, it's noisy. But the fact that I could take this picture at all is nothing short of amazing. There are going to be moments when having the ability to shoot at this sensitivity is the difference between making a shot and not making it. It's a good tool to have in your back pocket for emergencies.

Next, I'd like to share my conclusions with you.

From Canon to Nikon: Conclusions

2008-09-02 · by peterb

Amazon.com Widgets

(Part 1 of this article explains my rationale for answering the question "How hard is it for a Canon shooter to go Nikon?)

Conclusion

I set out to answer the question "can a Canon shooter go Nikon?" The best answer I have for this question is a personal one: in writing this article, I've been packing up the D300 to send back to Nikon, and I'm mentally tallying up my bank account to see if I can come up with the cash to buy one -- and the 17-55 f/2.8, and an SB-800 -- for myself.

This is not to say that one can't get good results out of a Canon. Rather, having decided to address the "what should I upgrade to?" question squarely, I can't unring the bell. The D300, with the accompanying lens, is a combination that, out of the box, made composing and exposing compelling images practically effortless. When I last used a Nikon — a D70 — I felt like I was quite literally fighting the camera tooth and nail in order to get an image of acceptable quality, an image not overwhelmed by unpleasant ISO noise. Those days are gone.

Are there things I don't like? Yes. The camera is a just a bit too large, and, with the 17-55/2.8, a bit too heavy. That's the most serious complaint, since if you don't carry the camera with you, you can't make the shot. My other complaints are mostly errata. The focus mode switch on the body is in the worst possible place. I don't like that the CF card slot door requires me to flip a fiddly little switch to open it, instead of just being a friction door. I don't like that the icons on the camera body for exposure modes and focus modes are practically indistinguishable. And although I'm willing to learn to thread the camera lenses the other way, God and Rene Descartes intended minus to be on the left and plus to be on the right, which means the exposure compensation controls work opposite to the way they should.

But all of these are minor complaints, and instead of a thousand-word counterargument, I'll just use a picture:

Cityscape

Acknowledgements

I'd like to thank Geoff and Matthew at Nikon for their help in setting up this test. I'd like to thank psu for providing a guide to the perplexed when I stubbornly refused to look at the manual, and Ian McCullough for loaning me his SB-800 and various lenses. I'd like to thank our models, Jill, Christina, Aimee, and Katie. I'd like to thank KatKat B. — who takes much better photos than I do — for helping manage the lighting on the riverwalk shoot. And I'd like to thank those of you who commented on drafts of this article, which was a great help.

If you enjoyed this article, please take some time to visit our sponsors. We get a small payment when you do so. Likewise, if you purchase any of the equipment linked in this article from amazon.com, we get a (modest) kickback as well. Those payments help keep this site afloat.

Thanks for reading.

Nikon To Canon: Not

2008-09-03 · by psu

Camera dorks, like most dorks, are obsessed with "systems." You only ever hear dorks talk in hushed tones about how the most important thing to consider is not the individual purchase, but how all of your purchases should meld together into a cohesive whole that is a larger synergy. You hear this a lot when you ask camera dorks for buying advice. "It's not the single item that matters, it's how the whole system fits together" they will say. They make sure that before you go out and buy that Nikon D40, you have duly considered whether or not the Nikon system has the lenses and accessories you will need to handle all of your photographic requirements from now until the end of time. You get similar sorts of lectures when asking for buying advice about computers, stereos, maybe cars, bicycles, etc. These are all dork system hobbies. You should smile and knod, and ignore them.

In the photo world, the two major systems are Nikon and Canon. No one really knows why this is, but it's been this way for a long time. Starting in the 50s and moving into the 80s Nikon dominated the professional 35mm markets with a series of bodies whose names all start with the letter "F". Canon did well in the so-called "consumer" markets, but didn't hit it big with the Pros until the advent of autofocus. Nikon was slow to implement autofocus well and as a result Canon slowly ate into their market share. Canon's pro digital bodies have done similarly well, to the point where at many sports events you might see nothing but white Canon lenses out in the field.

In the various photo forums on the intertubes, there is constant discussion of Nikon vs. Canon, Canon vs. Nikon. Even in this humble weblog, Pete has written many hundreds of words about a Nikon camera as compared to the Canon camera that he is used to. In constrast to that piece, I will now tell you why I always look at the Canon cameras with admiration, but I have never bought one.

I've used Nikon cameras for a long time. I originally picked up a Nikon because I liked the viewfinder in the thing and because my friend had a Nikon F5 and a ton of lenses. This would allow me to borrow things. Although I never did borrow things, I still liked the viewfinder in the thing. I tried a couple of Canon bodies from the time and loved how quiet they were and how the autofocus actually worked (it wasn't until the late late 1990s that Nikon had good AF). But, I could never tell if anything in the viewfinder was actually in focus. So I went with the Nikon.

When I switched from film to digital bodies, I stuck with Nikon mostly out of initeria and because I liked how the bodies handled. At the time I told myself it was because I didn't want to replace "all of my lenses" even though all of my lenses are cheap, and I bought new digital zoom lenses anyway.

Still, I am an engineering geek and I like shopping. So I always keep up with what Canon is doing. Every year starting at Christmas and going until around the middle of Janurary I make a list of everything I would need to pick up a new Canon "system." It's not a lot. A body, a couple lenses, a flash. In past years there have been many reasons to consider this. The Canon sensors and imaging pipelines have had a reputation for higher quality, especially with regard to noise performance, than what Nikon has built. There are a few lenses in the Canon lens line (70-200/F4 L, the tilt-shift stuff, prime lenses with the fast AF ring motors) that Nikon lacks. Until this year Canon had the only affordable "full frame" body on the market. That would have been cool to have.

But, I never pulled the trigger. I'd go to B&H and collect everything up in my shopping cart on the web site and then delete it all. I had three reasons for this, none of which is really a "system" reason. I would have no problem changing "systems". I could get used to the different UI. I have no problem replacing lenses and flashes and stuff. No, my reasons are simpler.

First, I don't like the Canon viewfinders. For whatever reason I have never picked up a Canon body where I can really tell what's in focus in the viewfinder, especially with wide lenses. Even the most marginal Nikon finder, like the one in the D100/70/50, was better for me than the Canon stuff. I've never figured out exactly they they don't work for me, but they don't.

Second, the Nikon wireless flash lets me slave off of the built-in flash.

Third, the chimping UI on some of the Canon bodies confused me the first time I tried it. I found this annoying. OK. This isn't really a reason. I just wanted to have three items in the list.

That's basically the whole story. Whenever I try to buy a Canon I get right up to the part where I hit the button and I remember these things. And then I'm sad that I won't get to use that great 70-200/F4 L lens.

I wish Nikon would make that lens already. Maybe I'm in the wrong system.

The State of Mac Gaming: Summer 2008 Update

2008-09-04 · by peterb

As regular readers know, I'm not only a gamer, but I'm a gamer who lives primarily on the Mac OS X platform. For years, this has been an insufferable position, akin to being seated at a restaurant where all the other customers were being served but where you couldn't flag down a waiter. There have always been unique games for the Mac platform, and the occasional game like Diablo 2 that was on both PC and Mac. But for the most part, the hot new games would come out on Windows, and we'd have to wait until it was ported, 2 or 3 years later. If we were lucky.

I think 2008 is the turning point. When we look back, we'll recognize this as the year it all changed.

This is due to a convergence of factors.

The rise of the Intel Mac in 2006 and 2007 has given Mac gamers some last-resort options. Boot Camp lets us run the greatest new Windows games at full speed. For older games, or for less graphically demanding ones, VMWare Fusion and Parallels Desktop gave us options to play them without rebooting.

But I found that I, personally, don't like rebooting. I don't even like starting Parallels. It disturbs the harmony in my soul. Fortunately, there are even more options open to us now.

This is the year, in my mind, that the Wine emulation layer project really took off. It's been possible to jury rig some Windows games to run on the Mac for a while now, but the bar is finally at a level where mere humans can get the job done. Code Weavers' Crossover product packages up Wine in an easy way — I purchased it to run Dwarf Fortress before that was ported, for example. People are even using it to run Team Fortress 2 on OS X.

But Crossover, like Boot Camp and Fusion and Parallels, requires the end user to do some work. The more interesting developments are those that free the user from having to do anything other than double-clicking an icon.

Cedega's "TransGaming" technology uses, essentially, the same technology that underpins Crossover. But instead of being marketed to end users, it's marketed to game developers and publishers. In theory, this allows trivial porting to the Mac platform. Indeed, we've seen a few AAA titles ported using TransGaming: Heroes of Might and Magic V, for example. Electronic Arts has already announced that TransGaming is their porting technology of choice, so it's likely that if you pick up Madden NFL '08, you're using TransGaming without even realizing it. Smaller games have been ported too: the Mac version of the awesome DS game Puzzle Quest, for example, is a TransGaming title.

What I've seen more and more of in 2008, though, are native games. Games which have been ported to the Mac without the use of a "shim" technology like TransGaming. Many of them, like Dwarf Fortress, are using multiplatform APIs like SDL. But whatever the underlying technology, the point is that more and more publishers have decided to no longer leave our Mac-flavored money on the table.

Part of this, ironically, is because Windows gaming is no longer the growth industry that it was. Much of the growth in gaming has shifted over to consoles. Thus, publishers who target home computers are having to compete harder for fewer dollars. Why is targeting the Mac platform a smart move? There are a few reasons.

Mac is a growing platform. Interest in targeting the iPhone as a gaming platform makes targeting the Mac a more palatable choice. And Mac users, per capita, buy more software.

The growth of Mac marketshare is a matter of public record, and I don't need to go into detail here as to why that makes selling on the platform a more reasonable choice.

The iPhone (and the iPod touch) and the Mac are different platforms, but they share a development environment and many underlying APIs. Put simply, if you can write software for one, you can write software for the other. I think many developers are honing their iPhone development skills by also working on the Mac platform.

Lastly, Mac users, per capita, buy more software. Let me be clear: I have no research to back up that statement, no evidence, no proof. it is based entirely on my instinct, and on my observations of Mac users as being more likely to want something perfect. Pirated software is not perfect; it is software with a flaw, with a taint. Of course there are people who pirate software on the Mac platform. It is my instinct that Mac gamers are more likely to buy software rather than steal it. I think the general lack of intrusive DRM on commercial Mac games is circumstantial evidence of this.

The ability to run games that are native to other platforms, an increasing number of ways to run those games, a renewed interest in OS X driven by both technology innovations and commercial interest, and a realization that the Mac is a platform on which people actually like buying and paying for good software. All of these factors are combining to bring the Mac gamer from years of famine into what, I believe, will soon be a feast.

Mark your calendars. This was the year that everything changed for Mac gamers.

Don't Buy Spore (Yet)

2008-09-07 · by peterb

Once again, I suffer so that you don't have to. This morning I picked up Maxis/EA's new Spore. Apparently, though, the online part of the game -- which is to say "most of it" -- is completely broken and doesn't work. At all.

I'm sure I'll hear from the "works for me" contingent any moment now. But for those of you who haven't yet bought the game, you might want to peruse this 39-page thread on EA's support forums. Many people, evidently, are getting messages upon their first login along the lines of "The code for this installation is invalid and cannot be used to link this product to your account", or "You do not have the proper spore.com privileges to use this product's online features".

These problems are impressively troublesome because they're part of the out of the box experience. As I described to some of my friends on Twitter and elsewhere, the overall tone of the experience is "Hey, thanks for buying our game, you goddamn criminal."

Playing offline on my Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro, the game is playable, but noticeably slow. I'll try it on the iMac later and report on that in a bit.

Lie Down With Dogs

2008-09-08 · by peterb

Item: a seemingly huge number of people (including me) can't play Spore online because the copy protection breaks the game.

Item: as of this writing, the average review score for Spore on Amazon is 1.195: 27 5-star reviews, a smattering of 4s, 3s, and 2s, and nine hundred sixty-three 1-star reviews. Most of the 1-star reviews focus on the copy protection of the game.

Item: the average score of the Metacritic user reviews of Spore is 6.8, stunningly low for a AAA title.

All of these items are completely orthogonal to whether Spore the game is a fun game to play. But they are an indication of two things: customer dissatisfaction with the out-of-the-box experience, and a level of frustration at publisher incompetence that has reached, perhaps, a tipping point.

A frequent refrain I hear from developers is that they have no power to influence their publishers' decisions on copy protection. In a word: bollocks. If you put your name on the box, your reputation is on the line. Maybe you don't get to decide, but to just throw your hands up and claim you have no influence is false. Anyone who develops software should be concerned, and, indeed, completely obsessed with the "out-of-the-box experience". Those first five to fifteen minutes with your product are the most important part of your product's life. Those five to fifteen minutes determine whether your customer is going to keep using the product, or take it back to the store and say "You know what? This isn't really what I wanted after all. Please give me my money back." So if you are a game developer, and you are not actively discussing how copy-protection is going to impact the OOBE with your publisher, you are not doing your job.

Let's be clear: copy protection has existed for years, and most customers are willing to accept it, up to a point. The issue with the schemes in Spore, BioShock, and others, is not that they aren't simply copy protection, but they are copy protection that degrades the user experience. For comparison, look at Steam. There was a great hue and cry when Steam was released, mostly from people that were upset that they bought a Half-Life 2 box but still had to download gigabytes of data. Yet in the long run, Steam — which is unarguably a form of digital rights management — is appreciated by its customers. Not only does it not degrade the user experience, it enhances it. I install Steam on a new computer, and it reminds me that I have purchased some games, and would I like to install them?

Now that's putting the customer first.

As a platform, the PC has a number of challenges to overcome. The damnable thing about Spore's DRM is that it gives up some of the platform's few advantages for...what, exactly? Is protecting yourself against pirates who are not and will never be customers really worth infuriating your paying customers and squandering your company's goodwill? What's the value proposition here? What can they possibly be thinking?

I think the most interesting question here is: how much crack and whores did SecuROM's salesmen provide to EA to convince them to use their system? Because being high and syphilitic is the only explanation I can come up with why a company would, after drawing a deep breath, take slow, careful aim and then proceed to blow off its own foot.

Why I Don't Write

2008-09-11 · by psu

I sat down a few times this week to try and crank out my weekly or twice weekly little rantlet about nothing in particular, but I have not been able to summon the interest and the energy necessary to type the letters in the computer. In contrast, I just listened to the 100th GWJ podcast, which was the very definition of a guilty dork pleasure. How they managed to maintain the energy needed to fill that many hours of content with a relatively intelligent level of discussion about video games is almost beyond my comprehension. The lesson is simple: the difference a real writer and someone who just dabbles uselessly lies not only in their ability to generate pleasing sequences of language. At least as important as the talent to write well is having the energy and the interest in a subject to keep writing about it even when your motivation wanes.

In writing, this state of mind often eludes me. I keep a mental list of single sentence subjects about which I might write an article, but unless the fancy strikes at just the right time I am just as likely to forget my lists as actually write anything about them. I think a real writer would probably be more organized about keeping lists of lists, and not losing them, and not forgetting about them. I don't know.

I also cannot make outlines to be filled in later. I can only write something that basically streams itself from my brain fully formed. Usually I just have to sit down and type it out with minimal editing. In writing articles for this web page, one of the more interesting experiences I have had is finally coming to understand a little bit about what those novelists mean when they say that their characters "take over" the book and dictate how the story should progress. I used to be skeptical about this, but I've actually had my non-fiction do this to me. I will sit down with what I think is a certain idea in my head and discover that the actual text that is there is something different. Usually it's just a different angle or perspective on the subject than I expected. But sometimes it's actually completely different. Often I set out to get to a cool catch phrase (e.g. Dork Nation) but where I end up is not quite the location that I imagined.

By far the largest barrier to actually posting here is self-editing. I will start to write pieces in my head and decide that

  1. I've already written it three years ago. Never mind that no one read it then and no one would notice if I wrote it again.

  2. Someone else already wrote something slightly similar over at some other web site. So why bother.

  3. The subject matter is too self-indulgent of naval-gazingly boring. This page has that problem. But I pushed past it.

  4. peterb already wrote the same piece last week.

And on and on. There are certainly more reasons not to write something than to sit down and actually do it. I recall an article I read in graduate school by the Professor Ivan Sutherland (of Evans and Sutherland fame) about courage and research. He said that the major barrier to getting published academically is the self-editing that happens due to the fear that your own work is not worth publishing. His article made the point that it's your job to do the work and write about it. It's someone else's job to figure out if it is good. So just do it and don't do the other guy's job for him. Google found me a more evolved version of this paper, so now you can read it too.

I guess I didn't have to write this piece after all, since Mr. Sutherland did it for me. Oh well. Too late now.

A Good Rule of Thumb

2008-09-11 · by peterb

"Any game that has the language it is written in in the name is going to cause deep hurting."

And yes, authors (or packagers, whoever deserves the blame) of PySolFC, I'm looking at you. The thing where installing the cardset images also slapped a full-on Fink installation onto my mac was particularly poignant. This is like buying a cup of coffee at a 7-11 and the next thing you know the cashier moves into your basement.

Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened

2008-09-15 · by peterb

Children have their heroes: Luke Skywalker. Indiana Jones. My hero was, and is, Sherlock Holmes.

Happy are we to be living in the era when Arthur Conan Doyle's copyright has expired, freeing up the name and likeness of Holmes for the use of other creators: in stories, in books, and even in video games. One such game is Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened, or, as I like to call it, "Sherlock Holmes vs. Cthulhu".

The Awakened stars not just any Sherlock Holmes, but my favorite: the game's Sherlock is clearly inspired and informed by Jeremy Brett, of the BBC Holmes movies. Intense, mercurial, and moody, the writing and voice acting in the game consistently surprised me for being true to the tone of the source material. There are so many ways the writing in a game of this sort can go wrong, but this game is spot on. Time after time, plot twist after plot twist, I'd exclaim "Yes! That's just the sort of thing Doyle would have written." I don't want to give anything away, but I can say that the plot is an enjoyable mash-up of Doyle and H.P. Lovecraft, and is exactly as awesome as it sounds: the world's greatest rational thinker challenging a world of mystery and madness.

At its heart, The Awakened is an adventure game, which means it involves picking up everything that isn't nailed down and finding ways to mash items together to solve problems. The weakest aspect of the game is its user interface. I found that even when I knew exactly what I wanted to do, I often had to do it three times in order to make sure I was hitting the right pixels. With a better UI, this game would have been a classic, instead of being merely enjoyable and clever.

Furthermore, the game is linear to the point where it won't even let you pick up an object before you "need" it. At one point the game rejected my attempt to answer a riddle because I typed "The" before it. This is definitely the sort of game you play with a walkthrough next to you: not so that you can solve the puzzles, but so you can figure out how to tell the game that you have solved the puzzles.

There is quite a bit of gore. Although not intolerable for even a squeamish adult such as myself, think twice before letting children play the game.

Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened has its flaws. But even with the sketchy UI and a somewhat wandering second act, I still kept playing to enjoy the good voice acting and the clever story. I'd recommend it to anyone who enjoys adventure games. It's nice to see that the genre isn't dead.

Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened for Windows, by Frogwares, Focus Home Interactive, and CDV. $19.99. The publisher graciously provided a copy of this game for review.

Five Things I am Too Lazy to Twitter

2008-09-16 · by psu

I signed up for Twitter last week even though I have no idea why. Apparently you use this service to post things that are too useless or trivial to even write into a weblog. Of course, here at Tea Leaves, nothing is too useless to post. So here we go.

Shazam!

The Shazam app on the iPhone is perhaps the best encapsulation of modern dork convergence ever to be conceived by man. I was in the local used record store and they were playing some Rap tune. I don't really like or know anything about Rap, but this song was catchy. On a lark, I turned on Shazam and just held the phone there in front of me, and presto. In ten seconds it told me that they were playing The Humpty Dance. It worked on the next song to come on too.

Twitter and Food

Why is it that over 50% of the twitter traffic, even among people who know this factoid already, is about what people are eating or just ate. By the way, I had these great pork chops for dinner, topped with peaches that had been poached with mustard seed or something. Yum.

The Inner Loop

Who knew that it was in Diablo 2 where Blizzard perfected the "click-click-click-kill-kill-kill-ooooo shiny loot!" inner loop that would form the basis of millions upon millions of long term $15/month addictions in the future.

The Matt Cassel Era

I wonder. If the team does well, and continues to win, what happens when Brady comes back? Careful what you wish for.

Real Work

If I wasn't a selfish materialistic hypocrite, I'd move to Harlem and work for this guy.

Extra Bonus Track!

DVD movies at the Exchange all seem to cost around $5. This means that it's cheaper to buy three movies a month and then just give them back for free than to belong to Netflix. I cancelled my Netflix six months after realizing this.

Breaking news: Canon 5D Mark II

2008-09-17 · by peterb

I don't usually republish press releases, but this is so fresh that I'm taking liberties:

Canon U.S.A., Inc., a leader in digital imaging, today introduced the EOS 5D Mark II Digital SLR camera, the long-awaited successor to Canon’s highly popular EOS 5D, introduced in 2005. Building upon the qualities that made the EOS 5D camera so successful, Canon has coupled the creative power of a full-frame CMOS sensor in a relatively compact and affordable camera body, together with groundbreaking HD video capture that opens the door to a much wider range of imaging possibilities for photographers. Along with the ability to capture full HD video clips at 1920 x 1080 resolution, Canon’s EOS 5D Mark II Digital SLR camera features a 21.1-megapixel full frame 24 x 36mm CMOS sensor, DIGIC 4 imaging processor and significantly lower noise, with an expanded sensitivity range from ISO 50 to ISO 25,600.

There's more, of course, but let me summarize the highlights as I see them:

Price? Body-only retail price is announced at $2699, available by the end of November. They also announced a 24mm f/1.4L lens at the same time.

One other feature that Canon called out that I thought was interesting was the availability of "small RAW" modes. Anyone who has shot with a higher-megapixel body knows how they can bring even newer computers to their knees when processing the RAWs. You can always shoot small JPEG, of course, but then you lose some flexibility. So the 5D Mark II has, in addition to its standard 21.1 megapixel RAW format a 10 megapixel and a 5.2 megapixel mode: smaller file sizes, but retaining all the advantages of RAW; perfect for when you don't need a full size file but still want to retain maximal flexibility in dealing with white balance and exposure. I think this is a great idea.

Here's a picture of the new camera (Photo courtesy Canon USA):

5dmark2

I'd say this exceeds the expectations people have had for the 5D Mark II, and is an exciting answer to Nikon's D700. Nikon has been on fire lately, and some commentators have wondered if Canon had anything interesting to offer in reply. I think that this combination of features, and especially including HD video recording, qualifies as extremely interesting.

We'll have to wait until we can get our hands on one to see how it performs compared to the Nikons, but at least on paper this is a very credible contender.

Message Unreceived

2008-09-18 · by peterb

As sometimes happens, I began writing a long and detailed article about how I have given up on having my stereo receiver be part of the "AV" system my TV is hooked up to. Quickly I discovered that psu wrote the same article a year and a half ago, in more detail and with better reasoning.

So I'll just say that tonight is the night I gave up. I unhooked the receiver and speakers, decommissioned the classic Xbox and the DVD player (anything I want to watch anymore I stream from iTunes, and I can use the 360 as a DVD player in a pinch), and moved them out of the room.

The results are interesting. First, my cabinet now has space for games. The room has more space. The wiring in the cabinet is 250% less tangled.

There are other side-effects, though, too. The receiver was always on when I played games. This meant it was always warm. This means the cat slept on it. So in addition to being a fire hazard, it was probably contributing to a substantial portion of my electric bill, not to mention global warming.

I tried Rock Band through the TV speakers. No, it didn't sound as completely awesome — but it was good enough that I'm willing to pay the small cost in sound quality to regain the use of my living room.

Now if I can just replace the stupid Rock Band controllers with wireless ones, I'll really be cooking with gas.

The Cold Hard Reality of Perspective

2008-09-22 · by psu

There is a classic scene in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy where it is revealed that the best way to destroy the mind of the average intelligent being is to put them in a room that shows exactly how insignificant they are with respect to the rest of the universe. In other words, the last thing people need is a sense of perspective.

I felt this way the other week when we landed in San Francisco and got some Dim Sum.

We were in SF to go to the Slow Food Nation show which happened at the beginning of September. But that's another article. It so happened that we got lunch at the Hong Kong Flower Lounge. This is a good, but to my mind distinctly second-tier dim sum place that happens to be very close to SFO so it's convenient if your plane lands near a meal time. We sat down and got five or six batches of dumplings, sticky rice, the thick rice noodles, and so on. As each dish arrived, I thought back to the last big meal we had in Pittsburgh at the Richard Chen restaurant and I could not help thinking that at least in the area of dumplings, this place had Mr. Chen beat.

Then the bill came: $26. I think we might have been under-charged. But even at twice that amount one might say that on a "value for money" scale the HKFL completely destroyed Richard Chen. Of course, the comparison is not completely fair. The level of service and polish at Richard Chen is much higher. They have some fancy dishes made from fancy ingredients that the Flower Lounge lacks. They have a wine list. And so on. But I still felt smacked hard in the face with the cold hard reality of perspective. While the state of Chinese food in Pittsburgh has undoubtedly improved, it is a fact that at some level it will never compete with larger cities especially on the West Coast.

On a related note, people often ask me why there is no good dim sum in Pittsburgh. There is some stuff that is OK. But not really good. Later in the trip we went to our favorite Dim Sum place in SF: Yank Sing, and was presented with an easy answer for why. We went to Yank Sing on a Sunday. On a Sunday, Yank Sing not only serves people in their normal 50 to 60 table restaurant space in the RinCon center, they also fill the food court outside their restaurant with another batch of tables. I took a picture:

Yank Sing Sunday 2

So my answer is simple. We don't have enough people for a place like Yank Sing to exist. By the way, if you are ever in SF, go to Yank Sing and ask specifically for the Pea Shoot Dumplings. If they are not the best dumplings you have ever had in your life in North America, I'll pay for your meal.

Parting note: I am still happy with my experience at Richard Chen. I think it's safe to say that they could be doing better on their dumplings though. They remain my only major disappointment.

Spore: Turning Gold into Lead

2008-09-23 · by peterb

What's wrong with Spore?

This is the question that's been occupying me this week. With the help of about an hour on the phone to India I managed to resolve my DRM issues and played the game for days and days. It leaves me a bit cold.

But frankly, I expected Spore to leave me a bit cold, since I'm one of the 2% of the population that doesn't like The Sims. The interesting thing is the particular way it leaves me cold, which I didn't expect, and that I've noticed is that it's leaving other people a bit cold, people who should like it. I think this is worth examining in some detail.

Early previews and PR surrounding Spore pitched it as a sort of "sim to end all sims." You didn't design creatures, you "evolved" them. The implication, or at least the inference many of us made, was that Spore was primarily about designing species and then watching them do their stuff; in other words, more like Sim City than Space Invaders.

The truth is, sadly, more mundane. As Yahtzee noted in his brilliant video review, instead of being a unified simulation, Spore is actually 5 old games remade and stuffed into one package. For my purposes, I'll call them Pac-Man, Street Fighter, Dune II, Civilization, and Master of Orion.

In the Pac-Man segment of the game, you swim around an oceanic maze avoiding ghosts ("carnivores") and eating pellets. In the Street Fighter phase you wander around a lanscape and either beat up other races or charm them into allying with you. Dune II is a sort of real-time strategy segment where you destroy (or, again, charm) other tribes by moving your tribe members around, and Civilization involves conquering other cities around the world. Lastly, in Master of Orion (Yahtzee compares this part of the game to Star Control, which is also fair) you try to conquer the universe through means fair and foul, by flying a ship around, talking to other species, and settling and terraforming other planets.

Skeximoose

Skeximoose

Throughout all of this, you are constantly designing creatures, buildings, and vehicles, so Spore probably holds great appeal for those who love tweaking the visual appearance of on-screen creations. I am, alas, not one of those people. But I don't hold that against the game.

What I do hold against the game, however, is how quotidian each of the segments is. The common thread, the unifying missed opportunity is that in each segment of the game you are in complete control.

Your creature isn't swimming around the ocean looking for plants to eat: you are steering it into the plants.

Your creation isn't wandering the primal landscape dancing with (or fighting) other creatures, you are telling it "Dance. Now sing. Now pose."

Your civilization isn't trying to conquer an enemy city through propaganda, you are ordering them to build the trucks, then telling the trucks to move to this spot, then telling them to broadcast.

The promise of Spore was, in my mind at least, a world of automata, where there's always the chance that your creations may do stupid or boring things, but where there's a chance that, every so often, they might do something rich and strange. But in Spore, there is not richness in the gameplay. There is richness in the player-created art — and let's be honest, that's really all we can call the creatures and houses and vehicles, visual art — but there is no richness in the gameplay. Anyone who wants that sort of, dare I say it, numinous experience should put down Spore and pick up Dwarf Fortress instead. More surprising and interesting things happen in 10 minutes of Dwarf Fortress than happened to me in a week of Spore.

When I reached the Space stage of Spore, I had to confront my extreme sense of non-achievement. Talking to a friend about it, I said "The Space stage is probably the most interesting part of the game, but by the time I reached it I felt like the game had sapped my will to live."

The craft of game design is something akin to alchemy. And, unfortunately, it seems to me that the creators of Spore have transmuted their raw materials in the wrong direction.

DRM and Me

2008-09-24 · by psu

I've had some bad luck with hardware this year. For the first time ever I had a disk fail in one of my computers. And then after getting my laptop rebuilt my iMac's power supply went south and I had to get that machine rebuilt as well. When the laptop came back, I had to install all my old tools one by one, something I haven't had to do for three or four years thanks to the wonderful Apple magic brain transfer function which makes imaging old machines into new machines easy and painless. For some reason, in doing all this work I didn't reinstall Photoshop... until this weekend when I wanted to do some panoramas. Therein lies my story.

The install on my laptop went fine. I went to Adobe's web site, downloaded the binary again and ran the installer. After all of that the app came up, asked me for my various keys and then made me hit a big blue Activate button and everyone was happy. However, I found working with the panoramas to be a bit painful, so I thought I'd fire the whole thing up on my iMac to take advantage of the 4GB of RAM and big screen. This time, I got to the big blue Activate button, and instead of warm happiness I got a message about how I had too many activations of the software.

No problem, I thought. I'll just go to the web site and deactivate my previous installs the same way you can do at the iTunes Music store. Unfortunately, there is no such facility. Apparently Adobe expects you do know when your hardware is going to fail so you can preemptively make room for more installs on your Photoshop license.

I had only one recourse, I had to call Adobe on the phone, explain what happened, and get another key that allowed me to use Photoshop on the iMac. This all took only 10 minutes and went very smoothly, which just goes to show that Adobe at least does not hire the same incompetent drooling monkeys that Microsoft or EA do. Still, I don't think this is good enough.

And this brings me to my philosophy about DRM. At my core, I don't really care about Fair use, deep legal philosophy, or my inalienable consumer right to do what I want with a product that I have bought with my hard earned cash. Software piracy is a problem and people that work hard to deliver expensive applications and content have a right to try and control that content as they see fit. I think that there is a much more pragmatic ideal to be pursued here. And it is this:

If I have to call you on the phone in order to be able to use your software, then you have failed in a fundamental way to provide a decent out of the box user experience.

That's all I have to say. Do whatever you want, just don't make me call you on the phone.

Post-Consumption Glow

2008-09-26 · by peterb

I am not given to declarations of consumer affiliation (subliminal: buy !) But last year I waxed rhapsodic about Seagate's FreeAgent Pro external drives, and tonight, well, I'm going to do it again. I needed more storage, and I couldn't quite convince myself to shell out the cash for a Drobo storage robot (mostly because I was afraid it would be loud) so instead I just bought another FreeAgent. Specifically, I picked up the 1 Terabyte model

Every good thing I said about the 750 Gb model holds true for the 1 Tb. It is perfectly quiet. I can't hear it unless I put my ear up to it. In some ways, it's even better. They toned down the manically happy packaging to a purely functional level. The firewire interface, which used to come in a sort of offboard daughtercard that needed to be swapped out with a screwdriver, is now built in: the unit comes out of the box able to do USB or Firewire 400 with either full-size or mini-connectors. It also comes with both Firewire and USB cables, so no panicked trips to Fry's or Best Buy for the cable you forgot are necessary.

They're little, they're quiet, they work great, and I sort of dig the orange light (which you can turn off with a Seagate-provided utility if it bugs you). I've heard through the grape vine that this model is soon to be discontinued, so buy five copies of these, per the consumer rule, before they mess it up.

(OK, actually, buying 5 of any disk drive, given the rate at which storage technology advances, is probably not a winning strategy. But I've noticed that even with all my 21st century space-age-au-go-go applications, like HD video editing, 1 terabyte feels a lot "bigger" to me, in terms of my storage needs, than 1 gigabyte felt when the first gigabyte drives were released.)

Teacher. Wordsmith. Blowhard.

2008-09-30 · by peterb

I will allow myself a brief comment on the little local blogging drama. I will keep it short and sweet, and anyone who doesn't already know what I am talking about can safely ignore this.

My comment is "Don't let the door hit you on the way out."

Good Press

2008-10-03 · by psu

I spend a lot of time complaining about the press to peterb. I will storm into his office and start drooling and ranting about how so much radio, TV and print coverage about so many subjects is so vapid, shallow, ill-conceived and flat out factually incorrect. Then he reminds me that I work in software, where time to market is everything, and I shut up.

So I'm happy when every once in a while I come across something in the press that is not vapid or shallow or ill-conceived or simply wrong. With the week that just was on Wall Street, I thought it would be appropriate to call out to This American Life and their show, The Giant Pool Of Money. Here is a piece of journalism that does everything that journalists say they are supposed to do. Anyone who is interested in understanding the mechanics of what got us into this mess must listen. Then listen to the followup show this weekend.

Ring of Red

2008-10-06 · by peterb

A tip of the hat to Michael Collins who, knowing my weakness for turn-based strategy games, suggested that i check out Ring of Red, (or, in Unicodese, Ring of ?ed), a PS2 tactics/action hybrid.

There are advantages to not buying a game until 8 years after its release, and one of them is this: I was able to pick this up at The Exchange for a mere $7. Given the current state of the stock market, that's about all I can afford.

Ring of Red takes place in an alternate-history universe where the United States did not drop the atomic bomb on Japan. Instead, the United States committed to Operation Downfall, the full-scale invasion in Japan. When the smoke cleared, Japan was divided between a Russian-controlled Hokkaido, a communist Japanese north, and a democratic Japanese south. In this world, weapon development trends took a turn for the Thoroughly Japanese, and created giant fighting walking mechs.

Now, when you say the word "mech", the natural inclination is to imagine *Voltron-*like robots, leaping and jumping around with swords and pulling off finishing moves. And, to tell the truth, there is a little of that. But not much. What's most enjoyable about the game's mise-en-scene is this: the explanation for the mecha is that they are artillery designed to navigate difficult terrain. So for the most part, to borrow a phrase from Michael, they look and feel like huge cannons that someone bolted a couple of legs to. And the legs don't work that well.

The turn-based portion of the game is mostly concerned with manuever warfare and taking (in effect) victory points, which reward you with some mech repair and, sometimes, additional combat troops. There are several different varieties of mechs (in game terms, "AFWs"), each of which wants to engage from a different distance. So you might try to move pieces around the board to match up your long-range 4-legged mech against a short-range light mech, from a distance.

Once you enter combat, the game changes to a semi-arcade mode. You have your weapons platform, and three squads of troops with you. Two of the squads are on the ground, and a third crews your mech. You can issue orders to the squads, having them attack the enemy mech or the enemy soldiers, or use various special powers (if they have them). The crew on your mech spends its time loading the AFW's guns. When the load gauge is full, you can fire. This moves you into a first person "sniper rifle" sort of view, with the targeting reticle swinging wildly around the screen. To shoot the enemy and damage or destroy him, you have to time your shot.

The interesting tension here is that the longer you stay in targeting mode, the better your aim gets (and the less the reticle sways). But you only have a limited amount of time (around 90 seconds) per battle, and the enemy is trying to shoot you, too. So there is an incentive to take the shot as early as you can.

I haven't decided yet if I will see Ring of Red through to the bitter end. It suffers from a few problems that are typical of 8-year old PS2 games. You can't save a game in the middle of a sortie, and believe me, sorties can last a long time. The action combat is full of beautiful and dramatic combat animations, all of which you will desperately want to skip after the third time you see them, but you can't. As near as I can tell, you can't even pause the game while in the middle of a battle. I sort of imagine myself putting the game down and never playing it again the first time that actually inconveniences me.

But for $7, it's hard to complain too much about these little drawbacks. If you're a tactics junkie, look for it at your local used game store. If nothing else, I enjoy the scenario and the art style.

Name That Tune!

2008-10-07 · by peterb

I can't get this song out of my head. I don't have a copy of the original. I'm pretty sure it was from a commercial for color film from either Fuji or Kodak in the late 1970's or early 1980's. But I could be misremembering.

I jotted down the notes and made a brief MP3 fragment of the melody here. Please take a listen, and if you know what this is called, tell me. First person to correctly identify this song wins a beer or a cup of coffee, at their option.

Update: A million thank-yous to reader ErinK for identifying the song; it's a Vivaldi Largo in D-major.

Originally aired on Sesame Street (also known as "my other mother"), many people remember this video as being about a Sunflower, although it looks more like a variety of daisy to me. Nice view of the Brooklyn Bridge from the window.

Camera Shopping Update

2008-10-09 · by psu

It's been about a year, so it was time to look around at the current round of compact digital cameras, since I grow tired of lugging my D200 around so much. Conclusion: they still all suck. So, dear photo industry, please get with it and make something good. Thanks!

Unplayable Classics: Balance of Power

2008-10-21 · by peterb

This is a brief review that will appear in next month's PTD Magazine. Thanks to PTD for graciously allowing me to pre-publish it here.

We've all seen that guy. The one out on the dance floor, doing that shuffly dance guys do. The guy is convinced of his own savoir-faire. He's convinced he's talented. He's convinced he's irresistible. To everyone else in the room, however, he looks like a clumsy, embarassing dork.

In the world of computer games, that guy's name is "Chris Crawford."

Crawford was the author of a number of fair to middling games in the 1980s. The most notable aspect of his games it that he is willing to tell you, in soul-crushing detail, exactly how brilliant he thinks they were, in various media outlets, books, and articles. Somehow the fact that most of his games aren't actually any fun to play has managed to elude the man for over 20 years now.

Balance of Power, for various platforms, is yet another Crawford game that takes someone else's great idea and makes it boring. The idea of a superpower game of brinksmanship, risking prestige and war, had already been done right by SSI and Bruce Ketchledge in their gripping game Geopolitique 1990. Crawford took this basic idea and added a few things: an arguably better user interface, more minor nations and random events, and an insufferably preachy tone ("We do not reward failure," the game lectures you when you lose, which is clearly true, since I was never rewarded for the epic failure of purchasing it). Every moment spent with the game is a moment you miss doing something more entertaining, such as clipping your toenails.

If you hate yourself and your life, you can subject yourself to Crawford's java-based beta of "Balance of Power: 21st Century" at his web site, storytron.com. The graphics and user interface aren't as good as the original game, but to make up for that, it's even less fun.

Balance of Power: The 1990 Edition by Mindscape. No score given for this game: We do not reward failure.

Minimum Standards

2008-10-22 · by psu

Ever since Fresh Air started putting up a daily podcast I've spent entirely too much time in the car listening to Terry Gross or one of her cohorts interview various people who are famous for various reasons. I have noticed something interesting about the "entertainment" related shows. Often they will perform a friendly interview with the director or star of some new TV show or movie. Everyone will sound intelligent and thoughtful, it will make you want to see the film. Then, later on, you will find out that the film is crap. After this happened a few times a little bulb went off in my head. That's just like video game reviews.

I have noticed something else about Fresh Air that is similar to the video game press. I call it the "enthusiast distortion field". Often the TV critic will wax lyrical about some brilliant program in the current "season" (or whatever they are calling that artificial time-based construct the TV networks use to make it less convenient for you to obtain and enjoy their content). You will listen to the review and think to yourself, "this guy seems intelligent and well spoken, maybe this show is interesting". Later on you might accidentally run across the show on TV. You might even actually go and find it on the iTunes store or something. However you come into contact with the content the result is almost always the same: after five minutes you think: How can anyone not think this is complete crap?.

This has happened to me on multiple occasions. It's to the point where I've basically given up on series TV altogether. The last time I can remember really enjoying a TV series was the first season of The Sopranos. By the middle of the second season of the show it was clear that Chase was pretty much done. By the middle of the third season it was clear that one should just disconnect the HBO lest you accidentally watch more.

My theory is that enthusiasts in any given area of endeavor: sports, television, video games, genre fiction, comics have a tendency to overestimate the quality and entertainment value of the target of their enthusiasm. This makes sense I suppose, it is what makes them enthusiasts. However, what this means for you and me and the other normal people is that we have to be very careful about asking these folks for objective information about what they love so much.

What I realized after my latest adventure following up on TV recommendations from Fresh Air was that one must establish personal minimum standards for these things so that you do not waste your time on something you will end up hating. So for TV my new standard is that I will not pay attention until the next show comes around that is as good as Season 1 of The Sopranos. Otherwise I'll stick to food shows and sports.

This scheme also applies to video games. For example, I generally avoid playing games on my computer because there tends to be a whole metagame associated with this activity that I call "spend you entire life building and maintaining a machine that can play the game". I am not interested in this game.

The minimum standard technique comes to the rescue again. Over the last couple of months I have actually played more computer games than I have in the past ten years. First, courtesy of Blizzard I spent a few weeks attacking the minions of Hell. Second, on peterb's recommendation, I tried out Crossover Games and discovered to my glee that Valve still thinks I own Half-Life 2 on Steam.

In the past I have said unkind things about Steam, but in its current incarnation and from the comfort of my modern Mac and networking world, I think things have greatly improved. I could not help but be impressed that four years after I touched Half-Life 2 on any PC in the entire world Valve would let me login and just say "OK here you go" and happily deliver the bits to me all over again. And there I was playing the game on a Macintosh, not even running Windows. I found this to be a stunning turn of events.

In any case, the Diablo 2 and Half-Life 2 experiences point to a clear set of minimum requirements for a game to be playable on my computer:

  1. Works out of the box 100% of the time on the hardware I own.

  2. No stupid optical disks for either installing the game or proving that I own the game. Just authenticate me on a web site, or equivalent, once in a while.

  3. Works out of the box 100% of the time on the hardware I own.

  4. The game is actually polished, relatively bug free, and well designed.

  5. I am allowed to install the game on a reasonable number of machines that I own without undue difficulty.

From what I know of the PC developer landscape these minimum standards boil down to a pretty easy rule: play games made by Valve or Blizzard. I often wonder why other developers don't follow Valve and Blizzard formula for game production, but that's another article.

This set of realizations has helped me to immensely simplify a large part of my life as a content consumer. I should probably try to extend the rules into other domains like sports teams, food, console games, and books. But you can't rush these things. You have to let them develop at their own pace.

Pancakes

2008-10-24 · by psu

I like pancakes.

I like them thick and fluffy and full of maple syrupy goodness. Unfortunately, it's hard to find good pancakes. So finally out of desperation, I stole a recipe from Alton Brown. So now I get pancakes like this:

Pancakes

Every Sunday.

Luckily, good pancakes are fairly simple. It turns out that the fluffiness that you want comes from combining just the right leavening agents with the right amount of heat.

Here's what I do: the following scheme makes between six and eight pancakes depending on how big you make them.

In bowl #1, mix:

2 cups flour between 1/2 and 1 teaspoon of baking soda between 1 and 2 teaspoons of baking powder 2 teaspoons of sugar 1 teaspoon of salt

Mix this up with a whisk so that everything is combined very evenly. This is important.

Next, in bowl #2 beat up 2 eggs. Then melt 1/4 stick of butter and mix that in. Then measure about 2 cups of buttermilk and mix that in. I do this differently than Alton, who separates the eggs to make them mix better, because I am a lazy bastard.

Now pour the contents of bowl #2 into bowl #1. Get your whisk and mix it about 10 times. All you need to do is get the dry ingredients wet and mixed together. It's OK if it's lumpy, the lumps will cook out. If the mixture is too thick (it usually is for me because I measure the flour too aggressively) then add a tablespoon or two of plain milk to thin it out. It's important not to overmix here because it makes the pancakes chewy.

Now heat up a pan or griddle. The cooking surface should be between 350 and 400 degrees. Put one scoop of batter in the pan. I use a small soup ladle for this purpose. Let the batter cook on one side for about two minutes. When you see bubbles on the top side, flip the pancakes over and cook them for another two minutes. Don't get impatient here, or you will get goopy wet pancakes. Those suck.

If you did everything right, when you flip the pancake it will puff up like this:

griddle

If it doesn't do this, your pan is not hot enough and the leavening in the batter is not activating. The result will be thin rubbery pancakes that no one will like, so turn the heat up a bit. I had this happen when I tried to use a shitty electric griddle to cook pancakes on. I have since gone back to using my trusty steel frying pan or the cast iron griddle.

When the cakes are done, put them on a plate and pour some maple syrup over them. If I catch you using that brown corn syrup crap on your pancakes I will hunt you down like a dog. If you did everything right, the syrup will fill up the little air holes in the pancakes with mapley goodness. There really isn't anything better to eat for breakfast.

I have been experimenting with adding cinnamon and ginger to the dry mix above to try and get closer to the spicy flavor in Dottie's pancakes. But I'm not there yet.

Nama Sake

2008-10-27 · by peterb

As I've mentioned recently I've been on a Japanese liquor kick, enjoying the hell out of various hard-to-get-but-delicious Japanese whiskies. Whisky, of course, is a comparatively new import to Japan. Their classic liquor production tradition subsists in two drinks: shochu, a distilled spirit probably first imported from the Asian mainland, and sake, a type of rice wine or rice beer.

A friend of mine recently stopped by Astor Wines in New York and asked me if I wanted anything. So I decided to peruse their web site and saw that they had a sake collection beyond my wildest dreams. I've always liked sake, but never been wild about it. Given the chance, I decided to take a risk and get a sake that was slightly more upscale and different from what I could find here in PA. My gamble paid off.

The terminology surrounding sake is imposing, as it is with most mature liquors. For our purposes here, the three terms that matter are junmai, ginjo, and daiginjo, in increasing order of likely expensiveness. Literally each of these specifies the amount of rice that must be polished away before fermentation, but I have a simpler explanation: if the sake contains one of these terms, you're guaranteed (in theory) that no additional alcohol was added after fermentation. In other words, you can think of this as the sake equivalent of tequila's "100% de agave" designation.

Second, it turns out there is a fairly fragile variety of sake called "nama". Nama sake is unpasteurized, is highly perishable, and has a short shelf life. It needs to be refrigerated at all times until the bottle is opened, and then you should finish the bottle quickly. Since I have a prejudice, perhaps unjustified, that younger, fresher liquors are a better way to understand the true nature of a given type of booze, nama sake sounded like just what I wanted.

[Nama sake

Ohyama Junmai Nama sake](http://wptest.tleaves.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/10/20081027-14508.jpg "Nama sake")

One of the nice things about nama sake is that there aren't that many to choose from, so it made the selection (done through a complicated process I call "choosing completely at random") simpler. I ended up choosing "Ohyama Sake, Junmai Nama Tokubetsu". Ohyama is the name of the producer. Junmai means the rice was milled to at most 60% of its original size. Nama means it was unpasteurized, and "tokubetsu" just means "special", so there's no particular meaning behind that. I paid $34 for a 720 ml bottle. It was properly refrigerated at Astor, and they warned my friend to keep it that way, which is a good sign.

I've always liked sake, but never felt most of the sake I've had was particularly spectacular. The Ohyama junmai nama is spectacular. It's slightly on the sweet side, with a very beer-like character. The sweetness isn't cloying; to the contrary, it nicely counterbalances the slightly astringent finish. When we drank it with dinner, immediately after opening, it was what beer tasters would call "estery": full of volatile fruity-tasting compounds. Esters don't actually taste like fruit; rather they hint at the aroma of fruit. I tasted melon and citrus esters in the Ohyama, along with a very faint, almost undetectable effervescence. This is what separated this nama sake from all of the other sakes I've tried thus far: it was clearly alive.

We finished about 3/4 of the bottle that night. By the next evening, much of the life had gone out of it. It was still a pleasant drink, an enjoyable drink, but it was no longer alive, and thus no longer seemed unique. So the admonitions about drinking it quickly are, I regret, true.

But perhaps this is part of its appeal. It's the moments that pass quickly that we remember.

A Force for Good

2008-11-03 · by psu

In an astounding blow to the forces of darkness and evil, Amazon has introduced what they are calling Frustration Free Packaging. This does away with all of the extra bullshit that manufacturers like to surround their products in for the sole purpose of making sure that after you buy product you cannot use it. Jeff Bezos I salute you. Truly you are using your superpowers to fight for truth and light.

Maybe next they'll take on something else that is important, like DRM in PC video games.

Watching the Election on the Web

2008-11-04 · by peterb

I have no broadcast TV antenna in my house. I have no cable. I have no satellite feed.

So for me, the most fascinating part of this year's election is that I am able to choose from among multiple professional webcasts of election coverage to watch, live. I have ended up going with the BBC coverage as the most interesting. Tip of the hat to Cynthia Closkey for the recommendation.

News of the World

2008-11-05 · by peterb

Meanwhile, it's pretty clear that someone at Amazon.com's mp3 download department is happy about the election results..

Distance Learning the Blues

2008-11-10 · by peterb

This week, on a whim, I bought a harmonica. It always seemed like a fun instrument to play, and you can get a quality instrument for just a few bucks.

There's only one problem: I don't know how to play the harmonica. I dug around a little on the net, and found a series of instructional materials on YouTube. As soon as I started watching one, I realized there was something crazy going on here:

The guy teaching the lessons was Adam Gussow, of Satan and Adam.

Satan and Adam was a blues group that was in heavy rotation at WRCT in the early 1990's. The story, so it goes, is that Adam Gussow began jamming on the streets of New York with Sterling "Satan" McGee, a session-turned-street musician who played guitar and percussion at the same time; the documentary about them describes him as "Parliament Funkadelic meets Robert Johnson," and the description is pretty good.

So, from his web site, modernbluesharmonica.com and on YouTube, Gussow has published over 150 video lessons for the beginning, intermediate, and advanced harmonica player. That this resource exists is so wonderfully ridiculous: it's as if you decided to take up painting and you google for "painting lessons" and found Monet on YouTube, giving tips.

And even if you don't want to learn how to play the harp, you can just listen to the amazing music:

Most of Satan and Adam's music is available for purchase on Amazon. If you like straightforward and intense blues, you can't go wrong with any of their albums.

If You Can Read This...

2008-11-14 · by peterb

...it means that our transition to the new hosting service was successful. Here's to another few years of game reviews, chowhounding, and bitterness!

I think one or two of the most recent comments on posts might have been lost. I'll try to move them over later today. In the meantime, consider visiting our forums and commenting there instead, while things settle down here.

Art is Where You Find It

2008-11-18 · by peterb

As regular readers know, this past summer I undertook an in-depth review of the Nikon D300 camera. My initial plan was to shoot the sorts of photos that I know I'm good at. But shortly after taking my first set, I resolved to push past my comfort zone and shoot subjects that I normally wouldn't think of as "mine."

This worked well in a few ways. First, of course, I got some great images. But perhaps more importantly, I came into contact with people and situations that I normally wouldn't. And out of that came some good stories. Here is one of those stories that illustrates what I'm talking about.

Jennifer ConeybeerJennifer Coneybeer is a ballet teacher. Formerly of the Pittsburgh Ballet Theater, and more recently Seton Hill's community dance program, she opened up her own school, the Ballet Academy of Irwin. A mutual friend suggested I stop by to talk to her about my photo project, and I did.

Her studio in the basement of an old school was busy with eager students, and I was wary of taking up too much of her time. But I managed to catch her between classes and explained my project.

Ms. Coneybeer immediately understood what I was trying to accomplish and graciously invited me to photograph some of students. We chatted for a while about dance and about art. When I say "we chatted about dance," I of course mean "I listened to the person in the room who knew something." I am only familiar with the concept of "grace" as something that other people have.

Dancer 1And yet, there's a connection between the dancer and the amateur photographer, between the musician and the writer: the decision to undertake an activity that is, fundamentally, not about making a living, but about the desire to do something for its own sake. Art.

This is not to say that a great photographer, dancer, musician, or writer must never get paid well. It's simply to observe that never, in all my years on this planet, have I encountered a young man who eagerly tells me, over coffee, "Yeah, and I'm learning to do some double-entry bookkeeping in my spare time, for fun."

As someone who programs computers for a living, I realize that I am on thin ice. I am one of those people who will learn a new programming language simply for fun, which many people probably view as madness. Presumably somewhere on the internet there is an accountant who is reading this and is offended. I beg your forgiveness; call it artistic license. But even computer programming, in its best moments, shares something with dance and music: it is an act of creation, of expression, and (when fueled with sufficient coffee and panic) improvisation.

DancerI thought about this as I took photos of Ms. Coneybeer's students. The mood in the classroom was serious and determined. If they were uncomfortable with my presence as an interloper, they were able to ignore it by focusing on the work at hand.

When you're 6 foot 1, there's no real way to be in a room with ballet dancers and not feel like a hippopotamus. Being in that situation with 7 pounds of camera equipment made me feel like a hippopotamus playing the bagpipes. I'm pleased with the results, though.

Photographing dancers is not my forté. But I still was able to get a few good images I wanted to share with you. Thanks to Jennifer Coneybeer and the Ballet Academy of Irwin for the opportunity to share our respective arts with each other, and with you. Dancers Dancer

Kivi's Underworld: Mac Game Development

2008-11-24 · by peterb

I recently had the chance to try out Kivi's Underworld, the new "casual hack-and-slash" game from the developer of Depths of Peril. One of the things I thought was interesting about Kivi is that it was released simultaneously on OS X and Windows. Steven Peeler of Soldak graciously consented to be interviewed on the development of Kivi's Underworld, and the experience of targeting the Mac as a platform.

Kivi's UnderworldI've been enjoying Kivi's Underworld quite a lot. It's groovy.

I'm glad you like it. For those that haven't tried Kivi's Underworld yet, you can learn more about the game or download the demo from http://www.soldak.com/Kivis-Underworld/Overview.html.

Can you speak a bit about your experience developing it for the Mac? Was this essentially a straight port?

Actually for Kivi's Underworld I had to do almost no extra work for the Mac version, because I had already ported our previous game, Depths of Peril.

I was hoping to eventually do a Mac port when we started Depths of Peril, so we planned ahead and used OpenGL and OpenAL. This ultimately made the Mac port (2 ½ years later) much easier. In mid March of this year (2008), I finally decided that it was a time to do a Mac version of Depths of Peril. It took about a week to finally decide this, order a Mac, and receive it. At that point in time, I had really never used a Mac before. Even with ramp up time on a completely new computer and OS, it took only a tad over 2 months from the day I received the Mac to when we were selling the Mac version of Depths of Peril. To me that shows how easy Macs are to use.

Did you use the Xcode toolchain, or did you build using some other tool and then repackage it?

I did use XCode and some of its other associated apps for all of the Mac development. XCode was pretty easy to work with so I never really thought about using anything else. I still like Visual a bit better, but that's probably because I'm used to it more (I've used it for over a decade).

How much did using existing libraries (eg, ogg/vorbis) help or hinder the process?

For the few libraries that we use, they were all pretty much already setup to work on the Mac. Some of them were a bit tricky to get setup correctly, but other than that everything went pretty smooth.

Are there any aspects of developing for the Mac that were either particularly enjoyable, or frustrating, or simply different from targeting Windows?

Um, yes.

Some things were a lot easier. For example, the icon composer and disk image tools were nice. Windows has many similar tools but they are not part of the dev kit or OS, so you have to search through the ton of options to find something that is suitable. This searching, many times takes longer than the actual task does.

One of the hardest things (well time consuming and tedious is probably more accurate) to do was to get the game to work on the older PowerPC computers. Tracking down all of the places to byte swap is not terribly fun. For other developers, this will become less and less of an issue as the older PowerPCs move below their minimum specs. I'm pretty happy that both of our games still support PowerPC Macs though.

Overall though, most of it was just different. Microsoft and Apple have different philosophies on a lot of things. For example, it even took a while to get used to where the minimize and close buttons are on Mac applications since they are basically the exact opposite of Windows apps.

On the business side of things, has targeting the Mac proven to be a worthwhile decision as a publisher?

From the beginning I viewed porting to the Mac as a calculated risk. I was hoping that if Depths of Peril didn't pay back the hardware and development cost then at least the next game (Kivi's Underworld) would. Looking back at it though, it was a very wise decision. The Mac version of Depths of Peril is nearly 40% of out direct sales now and paid back all of its costs a while back. The Mac version of Kivi's Underworld on the other hand is actually outselling the Windows version so far. I don't suspect that this will last, but it's interesting. So yes, I would have to say it has been a worthwhile decision.

Do you have a sense for whether the conversion rate from demos is lower, the same, or greater than on the Windows side?

Unfortunately, I don't have separate conversion rate information for the Windows and Mac versions. I would guess that the Mac conversion rate is higher, but that is just a guess.

Any advice for other game developers considering adding OS X to their list of supported platforms?

For indie companies that are already using fairly portable engines, I would definitely say it is worthwhile to support the Mac. On the other hand, I don't need any more competition so stay far, far away! Seriously though, I know of many other small games companies that have had very good luck with the Mac. Of course, Blizzard still ships Mac versions of their games. Who can argue with a company that has 11 million subscribers? I am very curious how many of those are on the Mac.

Wandering The Wasteland

2008-11-25 · by psu

We've all been playing a lot of Fallout 3 lately. I had not decided to write anything about until now for a couple of reasons. First, I am lazy. Second, I think that if I like a game, I should give it a chance to become hateful before I write down how much I like it. Hating a game is different. If a game sucks in the first few hours, it hardly ever gets better.

So, Fallout 3 is good. Here are a couple of reasons why.

First, a short digression. One of my favorite games of all time is the first 2/3rds of Half-Life. Before you go to the psycho alien parallel universe disco, it was as pure a wonderful shooty experience as could be had before the year 2000. Of course, then it got hateful.

One of my favorite things to do in Half-Life was to sneak around with the crossbow. The trick was to creep carefully around a level and stay just outside the trigger radius of the creatures so they would not attack. Then I'd zoom in with the scope and thunk; one shot kill. This never got old.

Fallout 3 is the first game in memory to bring back this wonderful mechanic. Let me explain. The regular combat system in Fallout is much like Obvlivion where you can run up to the creatures and beat on them in real time. Happily, for those of use who are old, slow and uncoordinated, they have also implemented a system they call V.A.T.S. which is "turn based".

What you get to do in V.A.T.S. is methodically target your weapon on whatever part of the enemy you wish to cripple. You can queue up a limited number of shots based on yoru character's abilities. Time stands still while you do this, so you don't have to worry about any embarrassing death while you think. Then you hit a button and your character unleashes hot lead in a perfectly choreographed slow motion bad-ass bullet time mini-cut scene, and your enemies die in horribly graphic ways.

It's great.

More importantly, you can sneak up on enemies and do this to them. Therefore, Bethesda has inadvertently built a system that does an uncanny simulation of my favorite activity from Half-Life. Bravo. I could, and have, spend dozens of hours doing this.

There is a lot more to like about this game though. They have streamlined and fixed the leveling systems from Oblivion and made them much less min-maxy. The art and environmental design is for the most part spectacular. Although the endless subway stations sometimes seem too much the same. As is usual in Bethesda games, the world is full of delicious bite sized quests which you can do or leave alone at your whim.

Some may accuse Bethsoft of "merely" creating "Oblivion with guns", a charge that always confused me because it assumes that such a thing would be a bad deal. I think a more accurate statement would be that they have created a much improved and polished version of something like Oblivion, but in a more interesting setting and with better game mechanics. Not a bad thing at all.

And yet, many of the standard Bethesda problems remain:

  1. Main quest is not as interesting as the rest of the world: CHECK.

  2. Dramatic cut scenes populated by animatronic robots: CHECK.

  3. Creepy, almost inhuman face animation during dialog: CHECK.

  4. Dialog trees full of the same expository text over and over again: CHECK.

  5. Tedious and boring inventory management: CHECK.

Overall the NPC interactions have not improved a lot since Oblivion or, for that matter, since the last Fallout. But that should surprise no one. We still don't know how to simulate people.

The quality of the dialog and character development is something of a mixed bag, varying from great to completely pedestrian. Bethesda seems to be at their best when they set up a short and sweet sidequest that is narratively contained and doesn't require a lot of back story. My observation has been that the longer the quest goes, the more likely I am to feel bored near the end.

But overall I can't complain too much. I have played more than two dozen hours and only a small amount of that time has felt perfunctory or tedious. I've seen a lot of commentary on the internet boards this week that can be summed up as:

"Man, this game starts to get old after you plow sixty hours into it, Bethesda really don't know what they are doing."

There seems to be a strange mental disease that infects the hard core gamer set that allows them to convince themselves that they have hated a game even though they played it for more time than they spend working in a week. These people are, of course, insane. If you play any game for multiple tens of hours, you have no right to claim you didn't like it. Any rational being would give up on something they don't like before the ten hour mark.

Happily, you will not have this problem with Fallout 3. The game is filled with a ton of content and will reward you if you wander around and seek it out. I say go ahead. You've got nothing to lose.

Duck...and Cover!

2008-12-01 · by peterb

I like Fallout 3 quite a lot, so much so that I'm going to review it even though psu already did. This article might contain minor plot spoilers, but I don't think they are anything you won't figure out in the first 15 minutes of playing.

"Fallout 3 is great" is not exactly a controversial opinion. Apart from a few irredeemable nut-jobs, everyone in the entire world agrees that in Fallout 3 Bethesda Softworks accomplished what it set out to do: deliver a compelling game set in the post-nuclear Washington, DC.

What's surprising to me is that some of what makes Fallout work are things I thought would work against it. Pete and I were chatting before the release, and I opined that I expected it to be, essentially, "Oblivion With Guns" and that the only question was whether Oblivion With Guns was fun or not. To a large extent, I was absolutely right: anyone who has played Oblivion is going to recognize Fallout as the exact same game with different trappings.

Perhaps the lesson of Fallout 3 is: trappings matter. A lot.

We're pretty harsh here at Tea Leaves on people who claim to want realism in their games. Generally speaking, realism sucks and can only hurt a game. But some degree of contextual plausibility is vital. One of the things in Oblivion that always frustrated me was that the game's narrative and its mechanics were constantly at each others' throats. You're in the seat of a world-spanning empire with a huge disciplined military and police force, and you take three steps out of the capitol city and can be mauled by a bear. It's not just that getting mauled by a bear isn't fun. It's that getting mauled by the bear makes the narrative less plausible.

In Fallout, the mechanics of the larger world haven't really changed: take three steps outside of a settlement, and you might be mauled by a 12-foot long scorpion. But the settlement itself is located in the irradiated ruins of a Washington, DC suburb, and its residents are locked in a daily struggle just for food and water. The narrative and the mechanics work together: the monstrous radioactive scorpion makes the plight of the wastelanders more plausible, not less.

There are a few mechanical distinctions from Oblivion that are worth mentioning. The psychotic skill-based leveling system from the Elder Scrolls games is gone, replaced by a much more straightforward system of stats, skills, and "perks", bonus powers that range from useful to intentionally hilarious. More importantly, combat overall is much easier. While I suppose it might be theoretically possible to create a Fallout character who is bad at combat, you'd probably have to do it on purpose.

But I don't want to get bogged down discussing the mechanics of the game. In the end, they're not what makes it compelling. What makes the game compelling is the setting, art design, and writing.

Fallout 3 takes place in a future America that is different from our own, yet recognizable. The sensibility could have been lifted straight out of one of the pamphlets of the Church of the Subgenius. Imagine a world where technology advanced as in our own, but the culture, politics, architecture, and overall design sensibility were frozen in the 1950s. In the wreckage of Fallout's Washington, D.C., we see the reflection of America as paranoid, patriotic, militaristic, and where apple pie, baseball, and the 3-martini lunch are sacraments. It is our own face, as seen through a glass darkly.

Younger readers, I hope, have never seriously had to worry about nuclear war. But when I grew up in the waning years of the cold war, this was something that still scared children, or at least me. Third graders of my generation believed that there were evil communists who might, at a moment's notice, decide to blow us all to kingdom come.

The terrors of today are no less frightening, but are perhaps not quite so all-encompassing. When Fallout is firing on all cylinders, it taps into those fears deeply, and effectively. Often without words.

One of my favorite moments in the game takes place in a small suburb now called 'Minefield". A crazed sniper has generously larded the town with mines, which might explain why it is comparatively intact. After taking out the sniper and disarming the mines, the natural thing to do is to explore the ruined houses. Inside, the scenes are dark indeed: a child's room, his toys littering the floor, the skeleton of the young man himself in bed. In the next room, you'll find the remains of his parents in their bed; they are spooning, the husband's skeletal arm draped casually over his wife's pelvic bone. Next door, you'll find someone met their end in the bathtub.

There is no dialogue here, but this is writing, and strong writing at that. It is the accumulation of these details that gives Fallout its brutal beauty. There is typically no game-driven reason to seek out these tableaux. Early on there is some incentive to explore to find guns and ammo, but I found that within a few hours I had enough weaponry to singlehandedly take on the Chinese army. The game rewards exploration simply by sketching out story after story, usually in an intentionally incomplete and mysterious fashion. The mystery doesn't make these stories frustrating. It makes them compelling.

There are three competing sensibilities reverberating throughout Fallout 3. The first sensibility is the ironic, winking, ha-ha-look-at-the-silly-1950s-graphic-design vibe that the game inherited from its predecessors. The second is the Mad Max-like post-apocalyptic wasteland vibe. Both of these existed in the previous games. What Fallout 3 adds to the mix is the third sensibility: a sense of simple horror and loss, of empathy with the dead. This, to me, makes the writing in Fallout 3 much stronger than that of its predecessors. The acknowledgement of loss, without irony or mockery is, to me, the difference between adolescence and adulthood.

There's one fault line in the writing that is worth mentioning. Fallout 3 essentially consists of two games in one. The first game is an open-ended post-nuclear world where you can wander anywhere and do anything in any order. Sometimes this may get you killed, but it's your choice. The second game, which I'll call, in a very minor spoiler, The Quest To Find Dad, is a linear series of quests that send you around the world in a very specific lockstep order.

The open-ended game is more interesting than the main quest, to the point where I spent a solid 2 weeks ignoring the main quest and wandering randomly. Several times, however, I ended up stumbling on to major clues or elements of The Quest To Find Dad way before I "should" have. Because I'm type A about not missing plot exposition, this usually resulted in my reloading an earlier save so I could avoid finding dear old dad before I was supposed to. This is the most visible seam in what is otherwise a fairly cohesive world.

Fallout 3 is not without its flaws, but dwelling on those flaws would miss the forest for the trees. It's not the best game ever made — that honor goes to Portal — but it's certainly a significant game well worth playing. How much you get out of it is related to how much you put into it.

There are comparatively few games that invade my dreams. Fallout 3 is one of them.

Oh, one more thing: several add-on sets have been announced for early next year. The second expansion, due to hit in February? That takes place in an industrial wasteland called The Pitt: the ruins of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

As far as I'm concerned, February 2009 can't come fast enough.

New Xbox Experience, Picoreview

2008-12-04 · by psu

  1. The little Xbox "Mii"'s are pretty lame compared to the Nintendo ones.

  2. What exactly is the point of the large dashboard? It appears to almost, but not quite, duplicate the mini-blade interface you get when you hit the big green button. So you think everything is there until you can't find something and you remember go look at the mini-interface again.

  3. Still nowhere to cancel my credit card renewal payment without calling Microsoft.

Here's a good thing: the little mini-blades come up fast. And it's only one button push to start the current game I'm playing.

Still, it makes you wonder, if this is the best Microsoft can do, where exactly is its "advantage" on the software side?

Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People

2008-12-08 · by peterb

It's easier, in some sense, to review bad games than good ones. Good games often succeed by just unobtrusively doing what they are supposed to do. Bad games, by their nature, can be held up to mockery and ridicule. It's harder to be witty about a game that is, simply, fun.

One of the subjects I've been known to harp on is the adventure game genre. For a few years in the early 1990s, the entire genre was basically abandoned by the commercial game industry. Apart from a few notable exceptions (The Longest Journey comes to mind), the only people seriously committed to adventure games were those in the amateur text adventure community.

Ron Gilbert, the creator of the Monkey Island games, wrote an interesting article on this subject in 2004. Focusing on "2D graphical adventure games", which is what the average consumer thought of as an adventure game in the 1990s, he summarizes it thusly: the market for adventure games was always small. The cost of producing high-quality artwork and animation dominates. By his back-of-the-envelope calculations, a 2D adventure game would need to sell between 160,000 and 300,000 units to recoup development costs of about $1,000,000.

Since Gilbert wrote his analysis, a few things have changed. First, perhaps most significantly, the online sales channel has matured. While it hasn't (and probably never will) completely displaced the retail sales channel, "we're going to sell our product primarily online" is now a valid alternative, rather than a completely insane pipe dream. Second, the tools for and availability of people with skills in 3D modeling and animation have matured to the point where one can reasonably produce (simple) 3D animated models for less than the equivalent 2D artwork and animation. Lastly, the emergence of a few online stores targeting specific large communities (the Xbox Live Marketplace and WiiWare) have to some extent reduced the complexity of the distribution problem.

So now adventure games can be made more cheaply and distributed more easily to a larger audience. And sure enough, we've seen a few good games come along.

Leading the pack is Telltale Games, who launched their Sam and Max series of games in late 2006. For those of you without PCs or who aren't into downloading, they just released a boxed copy of Sam and Max Season 1 for the Wii this fall.

The episodic nature of the Sam and Max game multiplied the upside of Telltale's business case. While each episode told its own story, the packaging of them as a "season" allowed heavy re-use of art assets, voice talent, and other expensive resources, while letting them (potentially) realize income over a longer period of time. It also provided a justification for each individual episode being shorter. Shorter episodes mean (if all goes well), shorter development cycles, a simpler testing regimen, and less time until they start recouping costs.

Telltale has stuck with its strategic use of licensed property, this time with the characters from Homestar Runner, a popular web cartoon. The result is a series of games called Strong Bad's Cool Game for Attractive People. I've been playing them throughout the year, and in terms of the sheer enjoyment I get when I reboot into Windows, these games are near the top of the list.

My main worry when I began playing the games was that they would be too "in-jokey". Sure, I watch all of the Homestar cartoons when they come out, but would the humor translate to someone who hasn't been exposed to them? Fortunately, it seems pretty universal: whenever I fire up the game, visitors in my house end up mesmerized by the pure weirdness on screen. I shouldn't be surprised. Even The National Review likes Homestar Runner, and if I can have something in common with them, then it's clear that this has pretty widespread appeal.

Compared to the Sam and Max games, the Strong Bad games are both better and worse. For one thing, the games are much less linear. So in addition to whatever plot each game has, you can also spend your time engaging in treasure hunts, collecting hidden items, taking photographs, dressing up in costumes, or trying to create the funniest possible Teen Girl Squad cartoons. But the games do have an end, so more than once I found myself deferring some of the side activities until later, only to find that once the game ended I had lost the opportunity. Yes, one can reload from an earlier save, but it was jarring.

Calling them "mini-games", though, minimizes their achievement. One of the recurring elements in the game are the Videlectrix-branded games for Strong Bad's "fun machine", which looks suspiciously like an Atari 2600 with a Nintendo controller attached to it. The games for the machine (there's a different one in each episode) could have come straight out of 1982. They nailed every aspect of the presentation: the graphics, the sound, but most importantly the pure addictive fun of simple gameplay. It would have been entirely possible (and, indeed, likely) for the Snake Boxer game-within-the-game in Episode 1 to have been all snark and no substance. But it's actually about as fun as David Crane's original Atari 2600 Boxing. I'm sure that everyone under a certain age won't see this, but it's clear to me, at least, that these little games are designed with just the right amount of nostalgia and love. That vibe, in fact, pervades the entire product.

Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People, by Telltale, for Windows and Wii. $8.95 per episode, or all 5 episodes for $34.95.

Disclosure: Telltale Games graciously provided review copies of these games.

New Heights of Mediocrity: NWN 2

2008-12-09 · by peterb

As I predicted in 2006, I finally gave in and bought Neverwinter Nights 2. But I have an excuse: I was able to expense it to write a review.

I had one major complaint with the original Neverwinter Nights, which was that the camera management was intrusive. As far as I was concerned, to have a decent launch for NWN 2, Obsidian needed to do two things:

  1. Add new campaigns to basically the same game.
  2. Make the camera less annoying.

Instead, Obsidian added new campaigns to a slower, crashier version of the same game and made the camera the worst to ever appear in a game.

For now, let's set aside the bugs and the crashes and the performance problems (although I'll return to this later). Let's just talk about the game that producers at Obsidian, who apparently hate America, intended to make. Let's talk about the camera.

The camera in NWN 2 is so bad that it may indirectly cause the downfall of Western Civilization. If you set out to design a video game with the worst camera possible, you could not design one as bad as the camera in Neverwinter Nights 2. To put this into perspective, if you designed a game where the camera was forced to point at a brick wall in some city and stay there while your party went off and adventured through the countryside several hundred miles away, that camera would be better than the one in Neverwinter Nights 2.

The camera is completely uncontrollable. The most sensitive mouse movement will send the camera spinning off into Neverland. Each camera adjustment has to be approached carefully, like a weasel to which a snake's poison fangs have been added via horrible, unspeakable surgery. "Hmm," you tell yourself. "I want to make the camera point to the east." So you move the mouse around, and the camera swings to the south, then the north, then the southeast, then the northeast, and eventually it is pointing south-southeast and the thing you want to look at is half on screen and you decide that you're going to leave well enough alone and live with it. So you let go of the mouse, which causes it to shake by half a millimeter, and the camera moves again so that your entire field of view is blocked by a wall.

Ironically, all of this forced fiddliness is enough to distract you from the realization that, likely as not, the camera can't point at what you want it to point at. There are three separate camera modes, each of which changes the meanings of every possible mouse gesture, and changes the rules by which the camera can be moved. In one mode, for example, you can rotate the camera but not translate it, so any attempt to look forward trains the camera primarily on your character's bald spot. In another mode, you can't rotate via the mouse at all, but you can translate a small (read: useless) number of feet in any direction. In the third mode, you can both rotate and translate, which you accomplish by throwing your mouse through the goddamned computer screen and shouting obscenities at it until you die.

Now here's the real punch line: remember what I said before about performance problems? Apparently this is one of the complaints many players have had about the game (it runs fine for me, if I ignore the crashes, on my Windows box). Presumably the game performs poorly because of the expense of rendering the more detailed player and monster models. Models which you can't appreciate, because the only way to make the game even remotely playable is to zoom the camera out to Diablo 2 distances or beyond. So as near as I can tell, Obsidian has made the game literally unplayable on some people's systems in the interest of rendering graphics that no one can actually see.

What makes this even more poignant is that each additional expansion pack for NWN 2 has introduced completely new major gameplay features, but not (in my opinion) substantially fixed the camera problems. (I'm told they're "better" now, but I presume this is some "Here we are in Chernobyl drinking radioactive water — at least we're not in a forced labor camp in the Gulag!" definition of "better"). I'm imagining a world where every year car manufacturers introduce a newer, bigger Pinto with leather seats and GPS that still, every so often, bursts into flame. (Consider this wiki's explanation of how to "improve" the camera. And you thought you escaped from this sort of thing when you stopped running X Windows).

What's mystifying is that this isn't a failure of some unimportant, peripheral aspect of the game. This is part of the game's core user interaction model, and it's an abject failure. Fans of the game will argue that the game is full of well-scripted, dramatic moments, interesting plot twists, and lovingly modeled RPG mechanics. I have no doubt that these fans are right. But none of that can change the fact that, at least as I've played it, 80% of my time is spent managing the part of the game that is, quite simply, completely broken. And that's more tragic than anything in the game's plot.

Additional Resources

Eat Small

2008-12-10 · by psu

Locavore (n): A person who eats local and fresh food, and is particularly smug about it.

This fall we happened to book a trip to San Francisco, where we planned to drop in on Slow Food Nation, the convention of the national Slow Food geeks. So we found ourselves in the middle of our favorite food town surrounded by a national population of the food-obsessed. It should have been a fantastic feast for the senses and the palate. But it wasn't. I finally boiled over when I got to the front of the line at the one food pavilion and was served a mediocre tamale.

Instead of a rich, soft, sweet substrate of fluffy corn-filled goodness, there was just this yellow lump covered in a non-descript salsa. Salsa, I will add, because I am egotistical, that wasn't nearly as nice as the stuff I can whip up occasion out here in the wastes of Pittsburgh.

The monotonous entree brought all my misgivings about Slow Food into focus for me. I think the crux of our philosophical differences is that all I care about is whether the food is good, and I don't really care where it came from or how it got that way. Meanwhile, all of the displays and rhetoric at the Slow Food gathering obsessed over origins and processes and obscure local ingredients that for some reason I was supposed to be impressed with just for the very fact that they existed and someone had bothered to dig them up again. However, all of this bluster and advocacy had failed in one important task. None of it demonstrated that the product they were trying to sell me was any good at all.

A few blocks away at the Farmer's Market at the Ferry building the situation was completely different. This market consistently astounds me in that jaw-dragging on the sidewalk way, especially if you visit in the middle of November and note that it is basically no different at all from how it looks at the end of August. There was simply nothing there that was not beautiful, and fresh, and tasty, and incredible. There was the one vendor who sold nothing but peppers:

Farmer's Market at the Ferry Building

There was fruit:

psu_20080830-04200

Tomatoes of all shapes, sizes, and colors:
Farmer's Market at the Ferry Building Farmer's Market at the Ferry Building

and on and on. Here were 3 or 4 square blocks filled with samples of simply the best product you can buy anywhere. When confronted with this display, all I can ever think is why exactly does California get so much credit for the "local" food movement when it is the easiest place on earth to cook and eat this way? If you can make food like that in the middle of November in Pennsylvania, you have really achieved something. But in San Francisco all you really have to do is just show up. The stuff you need is there literally all the time.

Which brings me back to my tamale. How was it possible that ten blocks from this eden, this ludicrous display of organic plenty, I could get a mediocre tamale? In retrospect the answer was simple. The poor people at the food booth were making tamales for 10,000. They were stretched thin for materials and man power, and whatever could have made the dish great was sucked away by the sheer scale at which they had to work. More than anything else, what always kills good food is production on a mass scale. Something cooked for thousands will never be as good as something cooked for hundreds, or dozens. So when given the choice, always eat small. Find small restaurants, small bakeries, and small cafes. Places where the people care about taking what they have available and making into something great each time they do it, and where they are working at a scale that allows them to keep caring.

This lesson was brought home to me again the next morning when we went to Dottie's for our final breakfast in the city. As usual, we had to wait a bit to get into the place. But it was all worth it to get those pancakes that Kurt makes every day in small batches, to the few dozen people who bother to seek out the place. We all go there and stand in line for a big meal, cooked excellently, in that wonderfully cramped small space. It would be terrible if they ever expanded.

And Jump Off Of The Dock And Watch The Winter Waste Away

2008-12-11 · by peterb

I'm reviewing the Wii game Animal Crossing: City Life for PTD. Any Tea Leaves readers who would like to explore the online component with me should feel free to drop by "Idletown", at 4468-4770-4775. Leave your name and friend code in the comments section, and I'll cross-register you.

Just make sure not to tell anyone the terrible secret of Animal Crossing!

Wii Bitter

2008-12-12 · by psu

The sales figures that the NPD group (who exactly are the NPD group anyway? No one seems to know) came out this week and the result was yet again the same. Nintendo sold more units of their stuff than Microsoft and Sony combined, leaving Microsoft and Sony to fight over an increasingly small remaining share of the hardware market. This share is mostly made up of the so-called traditional gamer, whose reaction to this turn of events was as predictable as the events themselves.

The core gamers have a case of "Wii Bitterness". But really, who cares?

The litany of complaints is familiar. The Wii is just a fad. All the games are just shallow mini-games. People buying the Wii are not "real" gamers, just "casual". Really it's just all so kiddie, and not deep and mature like the real game platforms.

I will admit that I, personally, don't use the Wii that much. I will drop into the occasional bout with Mario Galaxy. I might go around the track once a month or so in Mario Kart. And who can resist the occasional session with the Bowling game. But it's not really my main box. For the big sprawling games full of guns and blood and gore, the Xbox or PS3 better fits the bill.

We have to keep in mind, however, that these two types of gaming experiences are not directly comparable. As the sage Brian Hook once commented on this site, games are generally concerned with either content delivery or execution. Some of the best games combine these two concerns into a larger whole. But in general it has been my observation (since I read the comment) that you really can divide video games into content games and execution games.

These days, games, and especially "serious" games on the "serious" platforms are almost completely concerned with content delivery in the form of writing, characters, narrative and world building. With few exceptions, everyone assumes that the so-called "AAA" games will be structured in this way. Let's look at the big games over the last few years:

and so on. Meanwhile, the best of the Nintendo games these days are arguably more concerned with execution than content. Even a bigger game like Mario Galaxy is really just dozens of small levels that you can play quickly and are mostly just a way for Nintendo to show off their creativity in level and gameplay design.

The core gamers, always craving content games, look upon these designs with scorn. They are called shallow, casual, "mini-games" or any number of other derogatory names. All this means to me is that the core crowd has made two mistakes. First, they equate "big" with "good" (or even more damning, they equate big with "deep"). Second, they have made the classic assumption that what they like is good for the industry. In other words, Nintendo is doing harm to video games as an "art form" by making a lot of money building game experience that they are not interested in.

But it turns out they were wrong on both counts, and the best evidence of this is that Nintendo is rich. Microsoft and Sony have built expensive machines that concern themselves primarily with the delivery of more content. More resolution, more graphics, more sound, more A.I., more dialog. Nintendo built a cheap machine on which they can execute. The Wii is perfectly able to support a bigger content game like Zelda, or a good PS2-style RPG. But where the machine shines is in executing more interesting game mechanics.

What Nintendo has realized is that the market for those big sprawling games with their huge worlds, epic narrative, and dozens of hours of content is inherently limited. Most people, even people with an interest in video games, have neither the interest or the time to invest in such adventures. Game experiences with less content and better execution fit today's busy lives in a more practical way. And this is what Nintendo has delivered.

I, for one, find the trend towards better executed small games to be refreshing. Whether it's on the Wii, or the DS, or most recently the iPhone, it's great to able to pick up and play something enjoyable no matter where you are and no matter how little time you have on hand. If, for some reason, a small percentage of the gamer market can't see this for the gift that it is then it's their loss.

A Quick Political Snark

2008-12-22 · by peterb

CNN reports that a recent poll "suggests that one of out of five Americans think that Dick Cheney is the worst vice president in American history."

My question: what the hell is wrong with the other four?

Waste Not

2008-12-23 · by psu

Dear crust-hater who was eating at Dinette tonight: Good lord what are you thinking? You are throwing away the best half of the pizza you just ordered. I can only conclude that you were raised badly.

For the rest of you who I am sure enjoy pizza crust, Dinette is the best pizza in town since Antonio left us. While it is a bit pricey, I think the value is good. Get any pizza with bacon or eggs on it. Really all of the pizzas should have bacon or eggs on them. But you can't have everything.

Achievement Unlocked

2008-12-24 · by peterb

To keep you busy at the in-laws' house over Christmas, try this brilliant little web browser game.

You're welcome. Have some eggnog.

In the Dark

2008-12-26 · by psu

It's been a while since I went to see a movie. In fact, I think the last one I saw this year was The Dark Knight, a summer blockbuster to end all summer blockbusters. This was a popcorn movie with a difference. It was alleged to have a gritty and realistic style and was also taken seriously in the critical community as a movie with "mature" themes. After two and a half hours and change, all I remember thinking was that the film was too long and badly edited.

I was reminded of this on our annual Christmas drive to the 'rents as I listened to the Fresh Air film critic muttering about his ten favorite movies of the year. It came out that he also did not enjoy the Batman movie and his comments reminded me of the many aspects of the film which I found annoying. I think the second biggest failing of the film is that Christopher Nolan does not know how to shoot action. In his first Batman movie he used the standard American crappy action director gambit of trying to fool you into thinking that something interesting was happening by shaking the camera a lot in random directions. This doesn't make for good action, this just makes you ill.

I think all American directors of action movies should be forced to sit down and watch The Legend of Drunken Master over and over again until they learn how to choreograph a fight. In particular, they should pay attention to this fight which takes place under a train. Even in the cramped quarters and even though the combatants are using poles and swords, you can still see every move, every counter and every hit in an order which makes perfect sense. Watch and learn. I'm looking at you Doug "shaky hands" Liman, who directed the Bourne movies.

With that mini-rant out of the way, we can move on to the real problem with the movie. The real problem with the movie is that it plays the "dark" card for what amounts to cheap laughs. While doing this, it arguably wastes an astounding performance by Heath Ledger who almost single handedly makes the film interesting. Instead, the film just gets stupid and too long.

The problem with the "darkness" in The Dark Knight is that the film is nothing but darkness. It starts out dark, the middle is dark, the end is dark and the boring overlong coda is dark. But here's the thing, if the whole thing is dark then there isn't any reason to give a shit. For dark to be dramatic it must threaten something that we care about and in this movie there is nothing to care about. On the one hand there is a psychopath running loose in the city causing chaos and havoc. And on the other side, there is a psychopath running loose in the city causing chaos and havoc. It is to yawn.

The Dark Knight, like most adolescent popular entertainment (and, not coincidentally, most video games), is trying to sell you on the idea that "dark" and "mature" are the same thing. So if you just shoot your movie without enough light people will decide that you are a deep auteur, with a head full of interesting philosophy about the evil that lurks within the world. Unfortunately, constructing a bleak story that actually has emotional impact is a lot more complicated than this. Dark is not enough. You need the darkness to threaten something, and too often all we have are layers of darkness covering a great emptiness.

I found myself thinking about this again while watching a few episodes out of the first season of the AMC series Mad Men. I have to say that four episodes in I'm again feeling a bit duped by the people who like TV too much, but I'm going to give the show a bit more time, because TV shows sometimes take time to develop. After all, Babylon 5 sucked for at least two and a half whole seasons before it got decent.

Mad Men is another dark contemplation on the nature of man and society, and for now the reason it annoys me is that it wants me to feel sorry for characters who, for the most part, are completely unsympathetic. It seems to me that everyone on the show has created all of the problems they have on their own, and that the show would be more dramatic, and at least more interesting, if the pain were being inflicted on nice people instead of jerks. This is the same problem that we saw in The Dark Knight. There isn't much to get excited about in a dark world populated by people you didn't like anyway. You just end up rooting for the movie, or TV show to inflict pain on them. And when it does anyway, what have you gained?

Mad Men was, of course, on the favorites list of the Fresh Air TV critic, who also spent much of his time lamenting the death of scripted series TV in the current competitive climate. I have some sympathy for his position, although he sounded a little bit too much like the "hard core" gamers complaining about Nintendo. I think he misses the core truth about TV which is that the only programming that is really worth paying for on TV is sports. In sports you have the light and the dark playing in perfect harmony. The Celtics and the Lakers on Christmas day, and the Lakers winning because the Celtics didn't play good defense, and because they got a lot of cheap calls down the stretch. That's certainly more interesting drama than any script I've listened to this year.

Name That Tune (Scooby Doo Edition)

2008-12-30 · by peterb

Since the alert readers of this blog were so helpful in identifying the Vivaldi Largo in D minor that was tormenting me, I am turning to you to solve another musical mystery.

Here it is (possibly in the wrong key):

(if you don't have flash installed, you can download the small MP3 snippet here)

I first heard this little intro/trill on Leon Redbone's cover of the old Emmett Miller tune "Ghost of the St. Louis Blues", but I find it hard to believe that it originated there. I'm positive I've heard this in more than one old haunted house movie, and likely in Bugs Bunny cartoons as well.

Anyone know where mysterious little phrase originated?

Update: Alert reader Ray Link told me he heard this riff on a 1974 album by The Wonderland Singers, along with the lyrics "We are here to scare you-hoo-hoo-hoo-hoo!". That's not the origin, but googling for the Wonderland Singers brought me to someone who identified the riff as being from the 1930 Walter Doyle song "Mysterious Mose". (You can hear a few other versions here and here.) The song was the basis of a proto-Betty-Boop cartoon, as well.

I'm still not sure this is the absolute origin, but it seems plausible. Can anyone find an earlier source for this musical phrase?

Painscape: Tormented

2009-01-05 · by psu

Long time readers will remember that a couple of years ago I worked my way through the first half of Planescape:Torment using a Windows emulator on my Mac. Since then I've dabbled in the game every once in a while, and then over this past Christmas break I decided to finish it off for good. Since my previous article on the game covered most of what I liked about it, now I get to complain.

For the most part the game's strengths carry over into its second half. What I wrote before still holds:

The written text in Planescape is the strongest part of the game. It consistently performs the miracle of making the game world seem real even in the face of relatively primitive graphics and sound design. Also, the deep conversation trees, something I always found pointless in other games, actually serve a purpose in this game. This makes me optimistic about the possibilities for future plot development.

The plot develops in generally interesting ways and is populated with characters who remain interesting to talk to. But, there are also some annoyances. You are constantly presented with situations where you find out later that you left half the game on the floor because you missed some critical branch of the dialog tree. Then you have to fight your inner gamer OCD engine to keep yourself from replaying entire chapters of the game.

The game also executes the what I now call "The Bioshock Gambit", where the game keeps you from discovering the last major plot point or two by throwing what seems like dozens of tedious fetch quests in your way. Therefore, you spend a week of your life running from one side of the map to the other to get the final "key" that lets you move forward.

Finally, the last third of the game is an almost completely pointless tunnel between you and the final boss where the game throws away everything it had going for it and makes you crawl from one dungeon to the next killing bad guys for loot and experience. They even threw in a mini-boss fight with a 15 minute long dialog sequence that you can't skip. Since the dialog sequence ends in a fight, you can't even save after it's done. Finally, the dialog itself branches endlessly around and can actually net you an extra level or two if you do it "right", which means you will be playing it two or three times after studying the walkthrough.

The dungeon crawling would be OK except that dungeon crawling implies combat, and combat is where the whole game falls apart.

My preference would be to play as a fighter and just tank my way through everything. Except this doesn't work well because the weapons all kind of suck, only the Nameless One gets the free pass on death, and the game almost begs you to switch to using a spell caster. Being a spell caster might be great except that:

  1. It takes 15 clicks to pick the spell you want to use.

  2. After you use it once or twice you have to find a town and go to sleep before you can get your spells back.

  3. Half of the enemies in the later parts of the game seem to have a high resistance to magic, which I guess makes sense, given the setting. But given this why didn't they make it easier for me to just fight them straight up with a +15 Sword of One Hit Kills.

To add insult to injury, after you kill stuff, grabbing the loot is a frustrating exercise in carefully positioning the cursor on the exact pixel that you need to hit to pick the stuff up. To make up for it, the drops are always one of the same five items. And you have to play the tedious inventory bin packing game to carry them anywhere. All in all the kill-and-loot experience in this game is pretty useless. Given that most of the game is primarily concerned with dialog and narrative, this isn't surprising. So why bother? Why not stick with that the game did well?

I finally got tired of it all and just dialed the combat to Easy. Then I found a cheat that let me buff my stats to ridiculous levels. Even then you can still manage to die if the mob is large enough. But I eventually got to the end of the final hallway and got the last few bits of plot. Although there are probably 57,000,000 other dialog branches that I missed. No I'm not going back to find the rest.

My feeling about this game is mixed. It has some of the best video game writing that I have ever experienced. Parts of the game are better at building a sense of place and atmosphere than much more modern games using much more modern tools. Unfortunately all of this greatness is brought down a bit by an engine that is crippled by its undying love for D&D and the developer's need to ruin the pacing by padding out the game with too much useless filler.

Still, I think the game deserves its classic status in the pantheon of Western RPGs. It sets a high bar for the quality of writing and narrative that can be packed into a game. Make the game ten hours shorter with tighter pacing and a better UI and it would be the best RPG that I've played.

Moore and Me

2009-01-06 · by psu

One of the many ways in which I've had a lucky life is that I grew up with Moore's law. I became aware of computing hardware just about the time the integrated circuit came on the scene. From high school to college to graduate school and into my work life I have for the most part ridden the curve that the hardware people have so generously provided for those of us who work in software.

Every once in a while when I am feeling nostalgic I think back on what all of this means, and the power of the exponential function never fails to amaze. But what amazes me even more than how chips have scaled is how storage has scaled, especially since storage usually involves moving parts. Advances in disk storage have probably been more responsible than anything else for expanding the ways in which we use the machines, especially for media applications.

So here are a few random comparisons:

  1. When I started at CMU as a freshman in 1983 (it might have actually been 1985), 1GB of disk space took up eight racks in a machine room. Twenty five years later, 16GB of disk fits on a keychain. This can store enough video to keep someone busy for a ten hour car ride. That's around 10 to 15 full DVD movies if you don't need to store anything else.

  2. Back in one of my early jobs in the mid 90s, we studied a book called Managing Gigabyes, as if a gigabyte was a huge amount of storage. These days, when I pack for a trip, I put more than a terabyte of storage into my backpack to hold pictures, music, video and so on. For the record, here is the list: 320GB disk in laptop, 320GB external USB drive for backup, 500GB external USB drive for backup #2, point and shoot camera with 8GB flash card, digital SLR with 8GB of flash, 8GB of storage on iPhone. Total storage: 1164GB.

  3. Twenty years ago you'd have to carry around ten or twenty pounds of bulky video equipment to record an hour of crappy home video on tape. And then you had do deal with the tape. Now you shoot that same video with an HD video camera that fits in your pocket and when you are done it will upload the movie to Youtube for you.

Storage has gotten so ubiquitous and so large that we barely think about it anymore. We take it for granted that we can walk around with 100GB of data in our pants. A few more generations and a laptop will have enough disk to allow you to store your entire life without ever deleting anything. Well, maybe not if you record every waking second in HD video, but close.

People have said for a long time that this ride was going to end soon, and although we are starting to see some of this with respect to CPU clock speeds, storage doesn't seem to be slowing down. I wonder what I'll be able to store on a keychain in ten years. Maybe the whole web, and the google index to go with it.

Camera Enough

2009-01-08 · by psu

If there is something that photographers like to do more than shop for cameras it is this: photographers love to tell you why a given machine is not good enough for what they do. Cameras are too small, or too big, or too slow or too loud, or too "plasticky". The flash system might be no good. Or the lens system might be missing that one critical lens, usually an expensive fast prime. Another popular reason not to buy a camera is that it's not a Leica.

Point and shoot cameras probably come in for the most abuse. Even the phrase "point and shoot" usually comes out of your mouth in a condescending manner. As in, "Oh, I could never use a point and shoot, I need a serious tool." I am as guilty of this as anyone. I have spent my share of time denigrating these machines, and I was not entirely wrong. The compact camera sector is for the most part full of redundant features, poor performance and mushy image quality.

But the truth is that this is all most people really need. More surprisingly, around 90% of the time it's all you and I need too.

I first suspected this on the first trip to Paris that I took with a digital camera. I had my "serious" gear with me too and shot my usual ten or twenty rolls of film. I also took a few hundred shots with the small digital point and shoot that I brought "just in case." Those are the only pictures I've looked at from that trip.

While I went on to buy bigger and faster cameras, the pictures have not really gotten much better. They are sharper. They have better color. They have better noise performance at high ISOs. They might have been easier to capture. But they are not better pictures.

However, even with this evidence in front of my eyes, my use of my small camera waned. It was always clunky and slow, and the much faster D200 made this fault even more annoying. It was also always kind of useless in marginal light. More and more, the point and shoot stayed at home and I annoyed myself by carrying the 2lb monster all over the place whether I needed to or not. This made me sad because often I would not have a camera when I wanted one.

The problem with buying a new compact camera is that the market sector is full of cameras with redundant features, poor performance and mushy image quality. But even so, the last year has seen at least two interesting models come around. The Canon G10 and the Panasonc LX-3 (and its twice-as-expensive-but-identical-except-for-the-red-dot Leica twin). After a lot of wanky and useless deliberation I violated my "always buy Canon point and shoots" rule and picked up the Panasonic. It is smaller, a bit quicker, has a more interesting lens, and most importantly it still has the flash shoe so I can use it with my trusty flash in bad light.

The camera has been a happy surprise. While it's true that even at base ISO you can't really get a nice sharp edge out of this thing, you only notice this if you are staring at the picture at 100% magnfiication. Therefore this doesn't really matter. What I am most impressed with is that fact that the machine can focus, shoot and then focus and shoot again quickly enough that it doesn't piss me off. Is it DSLR fast? Not quite. But it has at least reached the speed of that benchmark of small point and shoot cameras: the Olympus Stylus.

Other things to like: the wide lens and the black and white mode:

Penguins at Faces

Finally, I have a completely irrational amount of fun attaching my SB-800 flash, which is four times the size of the camera, and lighting up those dark corners with bounced flash coming from the left of the camera. It's great to be able to use flash effectively with a small camera. All I need now is wireless triggers and I could practically leave the big camera at home unless I want big prints.

My inner girly man has always suspected that my ceiling as a photographer could probably be reached with marginal equipment. I've generally suppressed those thoughts in order to keep the consumer economy going. But the Panasonic has changed my thinking and expectations about what compact digitals can do. I'd still like a quicker camera. I'd still like a faster and better sensor. But I'm now more optimistic that at some point these features will be delivered in a small package that won't hurt my shoulders and back to carry around.

I should really try and find one of those Panasonic G1s to try.

Coffee Time

2009-01-12 · by psu

Coffee is perhaps the most mysterious of all the hot drinks. Sure tea comes from the Far East and can at times be shrouded in ceremony and complicated cultural codes. But as a drink it's simple. You take leaves, you put them in water that's not too hot. After a while, you remove the leaves and enjoy your tea.

While coffee works on this same principle, I think what makes it an endless puzzle is the literally thousands of devices that man has thought up to do the job of soaking ground coffee beans in water.

Off the top of my head there are hand drip pots, auto-drip pots, moka pots, turkish coffee pots, french presss, various types of espresso machines, percolators, vacuum pots, vacuum press pots, pod machines, and god forbid, coffee bags.

The range of available products can be intimidating to say the least. So I am here to help with my guide to coffee makers that make me happy because they appeal to my particular tastes. Like most food opinions, these are only my opinions, but I'm still right.

When making coffee, what you have to keep in mind is that there essentially four variables that you have direct control over. For these purposes, I'm assuming you're not going to home roast beans or something. Although I know people who do that. Anyway, these four things are:

  1. How much coffee and how much water you are using.

  2. How fine you grind the coffee.

  3. How hot the water is.

  4. How long the water sits in the coffee.

Except for espresso, where the size of the portafilter is fairly standard, the first variable is completely up to you. You might like your coffee to have a consistency similar to brown dishwater. I guess that's your prerogative. You freak.

A great way to control the other variables is to buy a fancy coffee grinder and espresso machine. The key to using these machines well is practice and consistency. You should practice and adjust your espresso ritual until you can do the same thing in exactly the same way every time. I get a bit anal about it, but I have found that if something or someone gets in my way in the middle of putting together my favorite coffee drink it doesn't come out well and then I get annoyed.

One problem with espresso is that it can be hard to obtain the proper mental state for doing it well first thing in the morning, especially if you have not had your coffee yet. This is like the barber paradox, but for coffee. Maybe we should call it the barista paradox. Who will make the barista's first shot of coffee in the morning so the barista can make espresso?

When I have this problem I fall back on drip coffee. Almost all of the devices that I listed at the start of this article are really drip coffee pots. You take the coffee and put it in a filter. Then you take the hot water and pour it over the coffee and let the nourishing drink drip through the grounds and the filter into a receptacle of some sort. The main differences between the various devices are the physics they use to put the water and the coffee together and then to separate them again.

My favorite drip coffee device is a big plastic filter cone with a pot or thermos under it. You put a paper filter into the cone, put the medium-fine coffee grounds in the filter, and then pour hot water slowly out of an electric kettle into the filter. When you have filled the filter with enough water you just let it drip through the coffee into the pot below. I like the hand drip device because I already have an electric kettle and I don't want to waste more counter space on an auto-drip coffee machine. I also don't trust the auto machine not to pour boiling water into the coffee grounds, which would be evil.

The filter cone has the twin advantages of simplicity and ease of use. There are no moving parts. You don't have to figure out how to open the machine up to clean it. You just toss the filter away and rinse out the cone. It's also less fussy and fragile than something like a vacuum pot. Finally, we can write off the industrial drip machines and percolators out of hand as devices that murder poor coffee beans.

However, for the occasional change of pace, I do enjoy press pot coffee. This is the polar opposite of espresso in that you use a very coarse grind a very long steep time (minutes, rather than seconds). When done well you get much of the richness of a nice espresso combined with the pleasure of being able to drink a huge mug of hot black goodness. The only down sides from my point of view are that french presses are fussy to clean and you have to be careful to avoid a sort of fine sludge at the bottom of your coffee mug. Both of these concerns are fairly minor.

No matter how you choose to indulge your coffee habit at home, always remember that while all of these coffee machines seem different, they are all really doing the same thing. It's just up to you to experiment until you find the combination that you like best, and then stick with it. Of course, if you don't agree with my favorite way, you are just lost anyway, so give up now.

A Tourist in Azeroth

2009-01-19 · by peterb

This story is about World of Warcraft.

I say that up front so that you can bail early if you like. There seems to be a pattern where an otherwise interesting writer will develop a World of Warcraft addiction and decide that everyone in the world wants to hear the details of his character's armor. (This happened to Joi Ito, for instance, who tried to bring to WoW the same insufferable gravitas that he brings to everything. It didn't work.)

There are a few things that prevent me from developing this addiction (most notably my attention deficit disorder to anything that doesn't make me money), but I have been enjoying the free 10-day trial of the game. And in the process, I have some observations to make about the game design that I hope are interesting to those of us who play games that don't require a monthly fee.

I have had two other experiences with multiplayer online RPGs. In the early 1990s I helped test and played around with James Aspnes' TinyMUD, and in the 2004 timeframe I tried out City of Heroes at the urging of a friend of mine. From a high enough level, if you squint, all of the modern multiplayer RPGs are simply Diablo II grafted on top of TinyMUD.

One thing that surprised me about World of Warcraft is how weak the first few hours are. City of Heroes leads with its strongest punch, giving you the best character creator ever made, and then throws you into the middle of every comic book you ever read. World of Warcraft, on the other hand, drops you in front of a quest-giving robot and practically begs you to "grind" – kill meaningless enemies – for several hours before getting to anything interesting. City of Heroes made the player feel important from the get-go.

The complexity in World of Warcraft only opens up after you've been playing for a while.

To me, the most impressive technical achievement is that the world feels seamless. Throughout the parts of the game that I've seen, never once while in-game have I had to sit and wait for a "Loading..." screen. If you have to descend into a cave to search for loot, it flows smoothly from the outer world. Fly across the ocean to another continent, and you watch the scenery below you as your griffin beats his wings beneath you. Surely there is some sort of loading or paging going on under the hood, but the user never feels it.

I describe this achievement as "technical", but its impact on the immersiveness of the game can't be understated. Like so many other people, I have a short attention span. "Loading" screens do more than provide entertainment while the computer gets work done, they provide a cognitive break. When I'm playing a game and a load screen appears, more often than not I will look away. Maybe I'll go get a cup of tea, or pause the game, or check my email. World of Warcraft doesn't have these cognitive breaks, except for those that the player makes for him or herself by retreating to a safe place. The end result (at least for me) is a sort of tunnel vision composed of equal parts concentration and fatigue. You eventually look up and find that several hours have passed, and you hadn't noticed.

This is made worse because the game is online, and thus, "always live." Take Diablo II as a counterexample. As an offline game, it is perfectly interruptible. The phone rings, or your dog barks, or your boyfriend asks you a question, and you can quickly tap the "Escape" key and refocus on whatever needs attention. When you're ready to begin play again, choose "resume game" and you pick up where you left off, with no in-game penalty. In World of Warcraft, no such safety valve exists. The game's very mechanics require you to make a choice between real-world concerns or in-game penalties.

Penalties, in World of Warcraft, can be expressed in terms of time. Death is no more than a minor inconvenience, which is on the whole a brilliant design decision. You either must run back to where your corpse was (spending time) or suffer some slight degradation in your equipment which can be fixed with money (which takes time to acquire). Since the world is live (and monsters constantly reappear) taking a break feels like putting down a book with no bookmark. Or being halfway into writing an essay with no way to save your work. The inability to take a cognitive break on the micro level (no pausing) is echoed on the macro level (interrupting a 'mission' to teleport back home puts you back where you started).

All of these factors are in place before you even consider social interactions. They are dictated, perhaps, by the game being an online multiplayer game. But you feel these pressures even as a solo player. I haven't done much playing with other people, since as is well-documented, both psu and I sort of despise online games, although we carve narrow exceptions for games we can play with the small group of people who can stand to be around us. I can only imagine that the pressure social players feel to play continuously is massive. In addition to being somewhat punished by the game mechanics, they feel that they might let down other players.

Compared to City of Heroes I found the character development to be comparatively boring: for all of the Diablo-esque skill tree management, most of the characters I met in World of Warcraft felt fairly interchangeable. To this day, I can still tell stories of characters I met in CoH, because they had been skinned with creativity and with a great concept. I haven't seen that latitude in Azeroth. This is largely balanced out by the fact that the larger world of Warcraft is more fully developed and realized.

Much has been said by others about the "grinding" mechanics and the time commitments required from World of Warcraft. I have two observations on this topic. The first is that the game very deftly forces players into multiplayer collaboration by increasing their combat abilities linearly, but not their, for lack of a better term, refractory period between battles. Thus more and more collaboration is required as the player advances through the game, especially in the face of larger groups of enemies.

Lastly, I'm reminded of the cynical take on John F. Kennedy's famous "Ask not what your country can do for you," speech. Simply put, it's that people double down on their bets, and the best way, as a politician, to get votes is not to promise things, but to ask for them. If you get a vote by giving something to a voter, he'll vote for the next politician who gives him more. But if you get a vote by asking for something, he's yours for life.

The relevance here is that World of Warcraft, a game that costs $15 a month to play, comes in a box that by itself costs around $40. I have to wonder how many people have dived in as deep as they have simply because, in that first month, they were determined to not let that $40 sunk cost "go to waste."

World of Warcraft is a brilliantly designed game, with a number of intrinsic game mechanics that require the player's complete attention for extended stretches of time. I'd love to fly around and explore Azeroth with no such requirements, at my leisure, and with no other players to interrupt or distract me. But I realize that in saying that, I'm actually saying "I wish they had made a completely different game."

My trial account runs for another week or so. Though I'm not likely to have a lot of time to play, feel free to drop me a line in the comments area below, or on Twitter if you feel I've misrepresented (or perfectly captured!) the spirit of the game.

Stir Fry Rules

2009-01-28 · by psu

Today I made a perfect stir fry. This doesn't happen often, I usually get some small detail wrong that throws the whole enterprise off. I thought I would celebrate by imparting upon you, my dear readers, the rules you need to keep in mind to make the perfect stir fry happen more often. As is usual with my recipe advice, it will do you no good at all.

Make the rice first

Have the rice ready half an hour to an hour before you start cooking. This way you make sure that it has had time to rest and obtain its perfect texture. This works especially well in rice cookers which can keep the rice warm and perfect for you while you work. I don't know what non-rice-cooker-using barbarians would do.

If I catch you using brown rice, minute rice, Uncle Ben's rice, or other objectionable inferior grains I will cut you.

Less is more

Stir fry recipes often turn up in mainstream cookbooks or TV shows as a vehicle for cooking vegetables in a way that is not completely psychotic. Unfortunately, the people who write these recipes seem to think the the wok is a place where you should mix huge numbers of different vegetables together to make a hot tossed salad or something.

This is garbage. Don't do it.

If you look at the best dishes in any reputable (say) Chinese restaurant, you will always find that they combine three, maybe four ingredients that work well together into a pleasing whole. You should follow this advice. You should typically combine an aromatic or two (such as ginger, garlic, scallion, onions, shallots, celery, carrots, etc), a main vegetable and a main meat or other accompaniment and then some kind of sauce substrate.

No one wants to eat a mashup of tofu, sweet potatoes, bok-choy, bell peppers, mushrooms, red onion and blue cheese dressing. It's not even good as a salad, it won't be good as stir fry.

Don't fill the pan

Never cook more food than will fit in your pan with enough room left over to toss it around. This is very important. You have to be able to move the food around while it cooks in order for anything to work. Always adjust all quantities with the size of your pan in mind. Even if the final product will fill your pan, you can always do the intermediate steps in stages so things fit, and then just mix it together at the end.

Heat is nice, but not necessary

My mom made better stir fry than you have ever had in almost any restaurant you ever went to. She used nothing but an anemic electronic burner and a cast iron skillet. A flaming 50,000 BTU gas burner is cool to play with, but you don't need it.

Harmony is important

Not only should your ingredients taste good together, you should make them look good together. You should cut the food into the same size pieces. You should cut the food into similar shapes. This has a practical as well as aesthetic value. Food that is more uniform in size will cook more uniformly. This makes it easier to get everything done at the same time.

Timing

Have everything prepped before you turn the stove on. Cook things that take a long time first. Cook things that cook instantly last. Cook meat (especially beef) almost all the way through in a separate pass from the vegetables and then mix it together at the end. Integrate the sauce only in the final few seconds before you dish it out.

Practice

Practice makes perfect. Make the same dish dozens of times and you will get good at it.

What I made tonight

For reference, what came out perfectly tonight was as follows: beef and broccoli with a bit of black bean sauce.

  1. Cut up a head or two of broccoli into uniform pieces about half an inch to an inch long. Peel and cut up the stalks if you like. I'm usually too lazy. You should end up with around a cup and a half or a bit more, depending on how large your pan is.

  2. I had 10oz of flank steak. You cut this across the grain into thin slices about half an inch long. Put the slices in a bowl and marinate in soy sauce, sherry or red wine, salt and pepper. I think I had about 2T of marinade that was half and half soy sauce and wine. If you want to be fancy you can add grated fresh ginger. Let this sit for 45min while the rice cooks.

  3. Heat up your pan. Mix 2 tsp. of corn starch into the meat. Put oil in the pan. I use olive oil because that's what I have. Add the meat. If you are less lazy than me, also toss in chopped garlic and ginger. Stir the meat around for 3 to 4 minutes until it's brown almost all the way through and it's starting to let out its yummy juices into a pan sauce. Take it out of the pan and put it on a platter.

  4. Add the broccoli to the pan along with a pinch of salt and pepper. Toss it around then add a couple of dashes of broth and cover the pan to let the broccoli cook. After a few minutes it should turn bright green and soften up a bit. Then you know it's right.

  5. Put the meat back in the pan and toss it around. Add some of that fermented black bean goop you can buy at the Chinese store along with a tiny bit more broth (or water). Toss it around to distribute the goop. Check for salt and pepper.

At this point, if you added too much liquid and the sauce is watery, you can add a mix of cornstarch and water to the pan to fix it up. But you should have had enough corn starch on the meat itself to get things right.

Pour the food on a platter. Eat it with the rice. I ate it all before I could take a picture. Sorry.

Tater Loss

2009-01-30 · by psu

The Whole Foods tater tots are gone. This is a great tragedy in the area of foods formed from shredded potatoes. For some reason the Whole Foods ones had just the right balance of starch, oil and salt so if you roasted them at 400F for 20 minutes or so they were little cylindrical bundles of crunchy joy.

But they've been gone for a couple of months. I think this bodes ill. What am I going to do for lazy potatoes now?

SixBurgh

2009-02-02 · by psu

I am lucky enough to have two NFL teams to root for. The one that is local to where I live now (WOOOOO SIXBURGH, WOOOO) and the other one of my youth, which was never any good until recently, but who missed the playoffs this year even after beating the Cardinals by 40 points. You know the one, they are the new face of evil and all that. So, six thoughts on the Super Bowl.

  1. The Steeler Defense only made one major mistake the entire game. Unfortunately that mistake allowed Larry Fitzgerald to run the entire field for the go-ahead score and gave the entire city a case of what I now call the "helmet catch heartburn." It looked like the game was done, except that Arizona left too much time on the clock.

  2. I can officially thank Ben and Santonio Holmes for almost removing all of my residual helmet catch heartburn from last year. What a throw into triple coverage, and what a catch staying in bounds.

  3. The time to rise up against the tyranny of the sideline reporter is here. I have to say that Alex Flanagan reaches a new low in this category, except maybe for that goon Tony whatshisname on Fox. I guess the poor woman is from Arizona though, so I should have some sympathy. Well, it's too late for that.

  4. It's good to see that the NBA now has such strong competition in the category of crappy officiating. The NFL refs have finally been taught that it's not so important that you get the calls right as long as both sides feel equally screwed by the end of the game.

  5. Ads: mostly sucky. Very disappointing.

  6. Finally, James Harrison. Wow. Never seen anything like that before. Don't expect to ever see anything like that again. Of course, later on he picked a guy up and decked him on camera. I guess that's football for you.

Disneyworld For The Soul

2009-02-03 · by peterb

I've written before about how much I love the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh. Tonight, I'm going to do it again.

3 floors of open stacks. 9 floors of closed stacks. Books, magazines, CDs, videotapes, DVDs, video games, audiobooks, graphic novels, downloadable books-on-MP3, as well as a variety of other online resources. Research librarians who can answer just about any question. An electric piano that you can play, with headphones. Coffee. A window that looks out into a room with dinosaur skeletons. It's like someone sat down and specifically designed the building in which I would most like to be trapped overnight.

The amazing thing about the Carnegie, to me, is that whenever I feel the urge to look, I find some resource they have that I didn't even know existed before.

My latest follyI tend to rotate hobbies through my life every few years. My most recent hobby has been trying, probably in vain, to learn to play the guitar. I knew, in the back of my mind, that the Carnegie Library had an entire room of stacks devoted to musical scores. So as I've been learning, I've been trying to use the stacks to find pieces that I like, such as the recently-mentioned Vivaldi Largo in D-Major for Lute.

On the way to the stacks this weekend, I saw a set of shelves off to one side, with a modest collection of what looked like scores. But why were they off to the side? I went to investigate.

They were indeed musical scores. But not on paper. Instead, they were folders containing scores on CD-ROM; for example, I'm looking at the moment at a CD-ROM that contains the complete violin parts to 81 orchestral pieces by Mozart and Haydn. This is part of The Orchestra Musician's CD-ROM Library.

Now, true, there is nothing about this collection that is technically specific to the library; you can buy these sorts of things at Amazon, and presumably have been able to for years. If anything, it's yet another indication that I'm ignorant of many, many things. But the point is that the library is where I learned these things exist. The library is a nexus of serendipity, a building created to allow happy coincidences of discovery to occur.

It is an amusement park for the mind, and I am madly in love with it.

Zombies Are People Too

2009-02-12 · by peterb

A little while ago, psu wanted to shoot zombies in Left 4 Dead with me so badly that he bought me the game.

Zombies, you see are an eternal source of friction between the two of us. Put simply, he loves zombie games, and I do not. I'm pretty sure that if he's playing any game — say, Tetris or Lumines — he's secretly thinking to himself "Y'know, this is pretty good, but it would be better if it had zombies." I, on the other hand, am alternately repulsed, horrified, and bored by zombie games. Most of that repulsion comes from the obligatory tropes that the games have: terrible cameras and can't-run-away-just-like-in-a-nightmare manueverability.

So it took a while before I was willing to even try Left 4 Dead, and it took a second session for me to realize that it was a pretty good game. On the third session, I realized why it was a good game.

Left 4 Dead is not a zombie game. Left 4 Dead is Counterstrike where the co-op mode has been made more fun by adding more terrorists but removing their guns.

We've been playing about every other night, and I'm thoroughly enjoying it. The game, at least in its co-op version, which is all I'll play, is about a few simple principles: stick together, have fields of fire with broad coverage, and be able to concentrate fire when it matters.

The difficulty of the game varies widely within a session. I think this is an intentional decision. The "basic" enemy zombies, who satisfyingly all look like people I hated in high school, are all trivial to defeat at almost no risk, even when there are quite a few of them. This lures you into a false sense of security. The "boss" zombies, each of whom has a different (and usually gross) attack can all incapacitate a single player. So the typical death scenario comes when you get too cocky and allow yourself to be separated from your teammates.

Personally, I find Left 4 Dead to be a more satisfying shooter than Halo. This is almost certainly because I prefer cooperative play to deathmatch, since I have no first-person shooter talent. My only complaint is that the typical session lasts about an hour, which is perhaps 15 minutes too long for me. To put that into context, however, that's an hour where I kept playing the game, which I think says something about how good it is.

If you're interested in a game sometime, feel free to find me on Twitter and send me your gamertag.

Anyway, I just wanted to say: thanks, psu. You have convinced me that there are at least two good zombie games in the universe.

PS: Long-time readers are invited to guess at what I think the other good zombie game is.

Audience Service

2009-02-16 · by psu

I am a fan of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. I know that at times I can sound ambivalent about this, but that's more a reflection of the generally declining state of Classical Music as a cultural compass. In reality, I have no ambivalence about the PSO. I think they are consistently one of the top bands in the country, and it's readily apparent at the shows that they have a strong connection with the audience and the community.

These days the majority of my contact with the orchestra has been at various kids concerts they do for the local schools and as part of their "Fiddlesticks" series. You get a true measure of the professionalism of the organization when you can observe them playing their hearts out for an audience that is mostly trying to escape their seats and crawl around on the floor.

On the other hand, maybe not. Often, even the adult audience will demand a performance from the orchestra that goes beyond the pale. In the language of the incomparable Paul Sherwen, the musicians can be called upon to dig deep into their reserves of courage and find a way to endure their suffering. OK, that's a slightly melodramatic way to put it, but consider the concert I went to the week before last.

It started out with a rousing performance of the Beethoven 8th Symphony. This is the second time in a few years that the PSO has surprised me with a great performance of one of the even symphonies, which everyone knows are worse than the more important odd-numbered ones. But I could not escape the evidence. I kept grinning with delight as I heard little details and snippets that I had always somehow missed. We went into the intermission feeling good.

The second piece of the show was the Lalo Symphonie Espagnole. This is a typical showcase for the virtuoso soloist. In this performance, the soloist was the regular concertmaster, Andres Cardenes, who the night before had apparently lost his place in the final movement. This added drama to the performance ("will he make it?!?") but not enough to keep my attention. I should study that piece more in case they play it again. It always pays to know the music before you go to the show.

Before I talk about the last piece in the show, I will indulge in a short digression. Several years ago the PSO did a series of pre-concert lectures where a guy would talk about the music about to be played so you knew what was coming (see above). Once in a while they would also bring out someone from the orchestra to provide extra insight about this or that. I went to a few of these and always enjoyed them, but I never had the guts to ask the question I was really interested in: "What's the piece you hate playing the most?" Everyone must have something that they really just despise playing. But they are professionals, so they must.

I think I now know at least one answer to that question. It was the final piece that they played during the concert on 2/7/2009: Bolero. If you are of a certain age, you probably know this piece as the music that played behind Dudley Moore while he was getting it on with Bo Derek. And really, let's be honest, the only way to make this piece interesting would be to put Bo Derek in front of it.

If you can't remember what it's like, let me remind you. The piece starts out with a single melody and a single march rhythm on the snare. This melody (and drum pattern) repeat approximately 15,768 times over the next 13 minutes or so and the only two things really change during the entire torturous exercise:

  1. The instruments that play the melody.

and

  1. The volume. Which gets louder.

Just when you think your entire brain is going to melt from the boredom the piece finally modulates a bit and then ends in a flurry of horn bleating.

As much as you might suffer while listening to this piece, your plight is insignificant compared to what the muscians are going through. The poor bastard on snare has nothing to do for thirteen minutes but tap out that endlessly repeating rhythm. The melody spends most of the first part of the piece bouncing around the wind instruments. This leaves the strings to either sit in the chairs and count, or to pluck or strum the occasional completely inaudible pizzicato. I actually saw the entire violin section visibly sigh in unison as it became their turn to join the deathmarch to the end of the concert. Even when they finally got to pick up their bows, all they were given to do is play one or two of the same boring patterns louder and louder for the next seven minutes. It was excrutiating.

I conclude, therefore, that the most hated orchestral work in the canon, at least for string players, is Bolero. My curiosity, for now, is sated.

As a final note, the audience reaction to this piece was the strongest of the whole show. They reflexively bounced up out of their seats and started hooping and hollering, the bravos echoing into the back of the hall for a good five minutes. Never let it be said that the PSO does not suffer for your benefit. This was truly audience service at its best.

Like a Fool Returns To His Money

2009-02-19 · by peterb

The first time I mentioned the game The Fool and His Money on this site was in 2004. This game is the long-awaited sequel to Cliff Johnson's classic puzzle game Fool's Errand. In that article, a review of Everett Kaser's Sherlock, I optimistically said something about the game being released "later this fall."

At the time I wrote those lines, I had already paid for the game. Johnson has indicated he will list the names of people who pre-ordered the game in the game itself, in the "Compendium of True Believers." I bought the game, if I recall correctly, shortly after it was announced in 2003. I am, in fact, True Believer #14.

About every 6 months or so, Johnson would give an update about the game, and (often) push back the release date a bit, often accompanying that with a new target date. The Wikipedia article on the game gives the painful details. After a while, some of us who followed the progress of the game began to suspect that the game's title, The Fool and His Money was more of a commentary on those of us who bought it, than on the game itself.

In 2006, Johnson pushed the game back again, promising to deliver it by "December 4th". At this point I wrote to him:

Cliff,

As one of your early true believers, who loves you like Scooby loves Shaggy, I have some unsolicited advice for you. For the love of god, STOP. GIVING. NEW. RELEASE. DATES. Just stop. Cut it out. Cease. Desist. Send out a new newsletter today, retract the December 4th date, and say "It'll be done when it's done."

Good luck,

Peter

It lives!

Now, 6 years after the project was announced, something has happened that I thought was unlikely: Johnson has released a demo (or, as he calls it showing an incredibly tin ear to his position, a "teaser") for the game. You can download it. You can play it. It's available for for both Windows or Macintosh.

The game itself feels like exactly what I was hoping for: more Fool's Errand. But prettier.

I'll go into more detail on the actual content of the teaser next week. But its release is worth an article all by itself. The temperature in Hell is dropping, and dropping fast. Grab a copy of the teaser yourself before, like a mirage at the edge of the desert, it vanishes.

Guns, Lots of Guns

2009-02-20 · by psu

Whenever there is a lull in my game playing you can count on two things. First, I will find something to shoot. Second, I will happiest if what I am shooting are zombies, or aliens. So, today a round up of what I have been shooting lately.

Left 4 Dead

On the zombie side, as Pete mentioned, we have been playing Left 4 Dead. I don't have a lot to add to his impressions of the game. As he said, the thing here is the multiplayer. And, for us anyway, the thing in the multiplayer is the co-op. What the co-op does is almost perfectly replicate the feel of the Counterstrike games we used to play except with zombies. This can only be a good thing.

The game is also filled with small touches that reflect the amount of polish that Valve must engage in before putting a game out into the wild. For example:

  1. Even when you are playing a full co-op team, the game still plays the recorded dialog of the in-game characters. This both helps the co-op along, because the dialog gives you hints provides information ("ammo here!") and is also great fun because some of the throwaway lines are hilarious.

  2. I love that the opening teaser cut scene is really a tutorial.

  3. The credit roll that you get when you beat a level is inspired.

  4. The "A.I. Director" changes little things up every time you play a given map, so you can play the maps over and over again just like in Counterstrike. This is something I always liked about the Halo games that I have not seen done this well in a while.

L4D has taken up permanent residence in the Xbox and will continue to do so until the next zombie game comes along, or maybe the next Halo game.

Resistance 2

From the sublime to the serviceable. In Resistance 2 you go from place to place and shoot aliens. You will have a good time doing this, but you won't remember much about it in the end.

There is nothing that horrible about Resistance 2. But, in the single player game anyway, it has the feel of a title that was rushed out in a short cycle before there was really time to iterate and polish the content so that it was just right. With a few exceptions, I can forgive the generally generic environments and the repetitive enemies. But

  1. The combat just has no joy in it. It feels a bit rote and predictable.

  2. I remembered to play on Easy this time, after Resistance kicked my butt. And the game still kicked my butt. Boo.

  3. Cloaked one hit kill monsters are not fun. Especially when they spawn from random directions so you can't get a bead on them until they have already one hit killed you.

In all, this was a good short romp, but not worth keeping around. I didn't try the multiplayer because I don't know anyone who owns a PS3 that might also want to play a few rounds of multiplayer with me. Besides, there is no way it could be as good as L4D.

Halo

No I didn't really pick this up again and play it through from the beginning, but a discussion of music in games reminded me how much I like the opening sequence in this game. So I popped it in the Xbox and in ten short minutes I was experiencing the joy and exhilaration of that fast Halo combat. There is just something there, a propulsive energy that compels you to keep playing. Or maybe I've just played the game so much that I imagine it's there. In any case, slightly lesser games, like Resistance (or Halo 3, ha!) seem to lack this energy.

For example, I was working my way down from the bridge in the first level as the Covenant take over that ship. And I'm plugging away from behind some wall. Then I pop out and put a few rounds into an Elite and he falls over, and one of my Marine buddies exclaims, "Hey! That one was mine!". The A.I. was complaining that I stole his kill.

Little details like this are what I enjoy most in games, and especially shooters. Halo has them, L4D has them. The guys who did Resistance 2 just didn't have enough time to get them in there.

Wii Fat

2009-02-25 · by peterb

A few months ago, my Wii died the death, and I had to send it back to Nintendo for repair. When it came back, all of my data had disappeared, including several months full of Wii Fit user data.

Now, obviously I hadn't been playing Wii Fit during the several weeks that it was in the shop. And losing the data sort of took the wind out of my sails, so I didn't really start up again until this week. At which point I feel somewhat relieved that I don't have the historical data, because believe me, I'm in a lot worse shape now than I was in October.

I'm definitely ready for winter to be over.

I Do Fusion

2009-03-02 · by psu

Everyone who knows me knows that I hate fusion food. This isn't actually true. I tend to hate East/West fusion food when cooked by Western cooks who don't know shit about the Eastern cuisine they think has influenced them. Meanwhile, my experience is that West/East fusion cooked by Eastern cooks who know what they are doing tends to work better.

So tonight, just to amaze you, I present my perfect West/East fusion Pittsburgh bar food: Chinese mini-steamed bun curried turkey burger sliders.

OK. First, you don't need to do this with turkey. In fact, pork, beef or lamb are probably all preferable. But, the wife likes turkey burgers. So...

  1. Start with some ground meat of your choice. Around half a pound.

  2. Season with salt, pepper, and a bit of olive oil. I also add Rogan Josh spice mix from Penzey's. It's very Chinese to use fake curry power in Chinese food.

  3. For a more Chinese feel, you could add ginger, scallion and a tiny bit of soy sauce to this.

  4. Mix it all up, make 5 or 6 patties.

  5. Buy some frozen plain mini steamed buns at Lotus or your favorite Chinese store. These are about 2 inches long per piece and come in a bag of 20 or 30. Heat some water and start these steaming. They'll be done in about 5 to 10 minutes.

  6. Pan fry the small patties until they are done. Just before they are done melt your favorite cheeseburger cheese on to them. Pepper jack, say.

  7. Cut the patties so they'll fit on the mini-buns. Slice each bun in half and put the burger in between. Top each one with ketchup if you want, or BBQ sauce if you want to be perfect.

Serve with anything you want. Now go munch them and play Halo.

Next week: Chicago Hot Dog Fried Rice with Eggs.

Coraline

2009-03-03 · by peterb

Stop what you're doing and go see it right now.

Seriously. It's that good.

You probably want to watch that instead of A Lonely Cow Weeps at Dawn:

Killzone 2 Picoreview

2009-03-04 · by psu

A couple of days ago I talked to Pete on iChat:

psu: Hey, should I buy Killzone 2, or should I just pretend I bought it and sold it again on Ebay after a day and then just go back to playing Halo?

peterb: (b)

My picoreview of Killzone 2: I should have listened to peterb.

My main gripe with this game is that it comes from the school that thinks that it's a good idea to bounce the first person camera around while you run and turn. Every single game that has ever done this makes me motion sick and gives me a headache in about 15 seconds. The Killzone developers liked this mechanic so much that they even make the menu screens bounce around. I can only imagine that they focus tested this with teenagers who were either completely high or half asleep or both, and thereby didn't notice the screen dancing around all the time.

What I saw of the game before I had to put it down to keep from throwing up on the floor seemed competent, if overly brown and gray. Brown allies, brown ground, gray sky, gray ships, brown enemies. The only exception is the glowing red eyes of the enemies. Without them there would be no way to pick who to shoot out of the sea of brown and gray.

For about an hour I moved from one brown corridor to the next, shooting enemies with guns that didn't quite aim right in a world that bounced a few extra times to the side whenever I turned my head. Then my head hurt and my stomach started to turn over so I put the game on the ebay pile. I'll go back to playing Halo.

Avoid. Unless you like brown.

Kivi's Underworld

2009-03-05 · by peterb

Several years ago Soldak Entertainment released Depths of Peril, a game that took some of the addictive elements of Diablo II and married them to a framework for inter-player competition. The graphics were simple but effective, and the controls were instinctive. I ended up not playing it as much as I'd have liked to in part because it has a "kitchen sink" feel. There were so many options in the game, available from the very start, that I ended up not motivated, but paralyzed.

Kivi's Underworld is a similar game, with the fat trimmed out. It is a better game for it.

The game begins with the story of a young warrior, Kivi, who sets off on a quest to save his people from the threat of annihilation by Dark Elves. As the game progresses, you can unlock levels and additional character types. Each level in the game is like a cleverly designed level of Diablo: there are enemies to kill, treasure to loot, and secrets to discover. Use move (and fight) by pointing and clicking.

One change from Depths of Peril that has already upset the hardcore gaming class is that lack of inventory management. In Kivi you don't seek out new armor or weapons; all enhancements to your character are via skill points spent at level-up. You can pick up up to a few items that can be used as needed to give you a temporary advantage, but that's it: no more lugging around an entire armory's worth of plate mail and axes. I'm of the opinion that this is a brilliant improvement, simplifying and streamlining the game down to its essentials.

Kivi shares the isometric view of its predecessor, but I found the palette in the game somehow more attractive and functional. Like Diablo, it will run on systems with even fairly modest hardware, while still looking good. Why more publishers don't commit to making the tradeoffs needed to make that happen I may never understand.

Kivi's Underworld is simple to play and offers hours of engrossing straightforward entertainment, for both Mac and PC.

Disclosure: Soldak Entertainment graciously provided a copy of Kivi's Underworld for review.

Lightroom 2

2009-03-09 · by psu

In the bad old days, I used to use three programs to import, process and catalog my growing collection of digital pictures. I didn't really want to use all three, but I did for two reasons. First, each program in the set did its job better than the other two. Second, each program was barely adequate at doing its job at a reasonable level of usability.

Photo Mechanic was good at importing and really nothing else. Photoshop was good at processing and editing and really nothing else. And iView was OK at cataloging. I only used it because it was better than nothing.

These days things are easier. First, computers have gotten fast enough and big enough that a laptop of recent vintage can work with "RAW" images at full size and at full speed. No more databases of thumbnails for me. Second, there is now a single program that can replace the three above in almost all circumstances. Well, really there are two, but I only use one of them: Lightroom from Adobe. If you take more than 100 digital pictures a month or you routinely use RAW formats, you owe it to yourself to look into this application.

If you are not familiar with Lightroom, here is what it does. Lightroom does three things:

  1. Import. Lightroom lets you copy your pictures from a card or disk into whatever file hierarchy you choose. It then keeps track of the location and metadata for each picture in its catalog.

  2. Edit. Lightroom has all of the picture adjustment tools that are in the Camera RAW module of Photoshop and lets you make non-destructive adjustments to your pictures. This works with either JPEG or RAW files, but you have more latitude with RAW files.

  3. Catalog. Lightroom keeps a catalog of picture data and metadata and has rudimentary search and destroy^H^H^H^H^H^H capabilities. This, by the way, is by far the worst part of the application.

In the past I would find myself still using other tools for either stage 1 or 2 of this process. I'm not much of a cataloger. So LR does the job I need there, even if its not too good at it. However, I used to find that Photomechanic was stil faster at import and tagging, and that I needed Photoshop for complicated local adjustments.

Well, not anymore. The import and tagging in Lightroom has improved, and performance is not as critical now that we have 2Ghz dual core laptops with 4GB of memory.

But the big news is that Lightroom 2 now has local adjustment tools. You can have your healing brush, local dodge and burn adjustments, gradient masks, and a lot of other toys that you used to need adjustment layers for, but now you can do it without leaving the Lightroom workflow.

Take this picture as an example.

It has a few huge spots because I never dust my sensor. The color saturation is too weak, the foregorund is too light and the sky is too bright. No matter. A few passes with the healing brush and a local burn on the sky along with the normal global adjustments for contrast and color and you get this:

psu_20090227-00977

No Photoshop needed. Lightroom 1 could do about 80% of the adjustments that I ever do to a picture. With these new tools, Lightroom 2 is probably up to 97%. If I really need a precisely shaped mask for some adjustment, I might fire up Photoshop. But more likely I'm too lazy to do the work for that picture anyway.

It's good to only have to use one program for this. Recommended.

Dangerous High School Girls In Trouble!

2009-03-10 · by peterb

In a world where gamers complain that "there's no innovation anymore!" but still always spend their money on the latest Bejeweled or the latest sequel to Prince of Grand Theft Halo, a game company that releases an innovative game is a rarity. A developer that releases two innovative games is almost unheard of.

A few years ago, Mousechief published The Witch's Yarn, proving that there was something new under the sun. This game was, at heart, a "choose-your-own adventure" book, with the feel of a high school play performed by Colorforms toys. The writing was good, if at times a bit overwrought, and as near as I can tell, exactly no one bought it.

Part of this may have been that it didn't feel like there was any game there; the experience was so much like a choose-your-own adventure book that perhaps people just chose to read one instead. If this is the case, it's a lesson Mousechief has learned, because Dangerous High School Girls in Trouble (let's abbreviate that as DHSGT) is all about integrating games into the story.

Dangerous GirlsThe conceit of DHSGT is played on a board, with art and music lifted out of the 1920's. You pick one of a number of girls (dressed like flappers!) and have her explore the school and form a gang. Each of the girls has different attribtues, such as popularity, rebellion, or glamour. As they move around the gameboard, they reveal plot events, which can be handled by misbehaving. You can taunt, or lie, or engage in other sorts of absolutely reprehensible behavior. Each type of interaction has a minigame associated with it. "Fib," for example, is resolved by playing a variant of Liar's Poker, while "Taunt" uses a minigame reminiscent of the Sword Master insult sequence from Monkey Island. Successfully being a bad girl can increase your stats, making that minigame easier as you advance.

The games are all quickly resolved and the plot moves at a brisk pace. The game can be played in small doses, although I found myself getting sucked in for longer than I'd like to admit. As in The Witch's Yarn, the writing is literate if sometimes overly baroque. But this serves the self-aware and ironic setting of DHSGT better than it did that earlier game.

If your constant lament is that there is nothing new under the sun, then stop crying. DHSGT is the answer to what ails you. Available for both Mac and PC, it's a steal for a mere 20 bucks. You can download a free trial of the game here.

This Machine Kills Fattists

2009-03-12 · by peterb

Ed note: This article originally appeared in the pages of PTD Magazine

"That's obese!" the voice happily chirps.

The voice, belonging to an anthropomorphized bathroom scale, is my nemesis. It is Wii Fit, and every day it tells me I am overweight (or, after a night spent drinking too many margaritas, obese).

The Wii Fit has been received by the mainstream media as a novelty fitness device. And I guess it is that, but only time will tell if it proves effective as a way of promoting exercise. What we can say now, however is that it's a cleverly designed set of games that, in my opinion, are a ton of fun. The snowboarding balance game alone is worth $50.

The fascinating thing to me is that hardcore gamers have, incredibly, ignored the device. The number one selling item on Amazon? Not a word. Perhaps it's just because they're hard to find. But I would never choose the simple answer when a complicated conspiracy theory is available. The Wii Fit, I think, falls outside of their comfort zone. It's approachable, it's not punishing, there's no penalty for failure (other than the crushing despair of watching your filthy, lard-filled, corpulent belly grow ever larger, like Tetsuo in the final scene of Akira).

Wii Fit has four areas: Yoga, Strength Training, Aerobics, and Balance Games. The former two areas are led by two animated, impossibly toned fitness instructors who I immediately despised. The latter two areas star the cute, pudgy little Miis from your Mii channel. Guess where I spend most of my time? Jogging around Wii Fit Island, with my cats looking at me as if I am a madman.

The aerobic activities include the hula hoop, step-aerobics, jogging, and the surprisingly addictive "rhythmic boxing." The balance games include a soccer heading contest, a number of winter sports (including skiing, snow boarding, and the ski-jump), as well as a number of more abstract balance games similar to Super Monkey Ball. All of them are approachable, and all of them are fun, with the possible exception of the goofy "zen meditation" game, which no one needs to play more than once.

Like its kissing cousin Brain Age, Wii Fit invites you to register family and friends, and encourages subtle competition and interaction between those who are registered. Whether this enhances or detracts from the game probably depends on the player and how grumpy they are on any given morning.

Anyone who ignores Wii Fit because it "isn't a game" is, in addition to being wrong, a fool. This is a thoughtfully designed, engaging package of clever technology and polished software. If you can find one, buy it. It's that simple. In a world where Microsoft and Sony are spending billions of dollars of fragile hardware platforms to push a few extra pixels, only Nintendo seems to have remembered that video games are about games.

The Zombie Jamboree

2009-03-16 · by psu

As a great fan of zombie games I feel I have to point out the momentous turn of events that we are currently experiencing in this generation of game consoles. I refer to the fact that there is now a major new zombie game out for every major console console platform. How can one be anything but happy about this?

On the Xbox we have already talked about Left 4 Dead. Suffice to say that the fun in the co-op continues unbated. Consider the following story from the other night. We had a group of three consisting of me, peterb and a beginner. So we set up a three-way co-op session with Louis as the bot. Louis, as we all know, is a god among men. Throughout the round, he consistently saved us from far away smokers and hunters with his insane sniping skills. He put up with our friendly fire. He kept the hordes at bay while we stumbled around the way we usually do. He consistently recorded the highest scores.

And how was he rewarded? At the end, he left the boathouse a bit too slowly, no doubt defending a position until one of us could safely exit. On the way to the boat, he was overrun by the last wave of grunt zombies, and then beat to death by a hunter. While we sat on the boat and escaped, the credits rolled with the words: In Memory of Louis. In memory of Louis indeed. He was truly the best among us.

Left 4 Dead has often been called a zombie movie simulator masquerading as a multiplayer shooter. If that's the case, then House of the Dead: Overkill for the Wii is the out-takes from a B-level zombie movie rolled up into a single player rail shooter. The game is unabashedly moronic, marginally racist and sexist, overwhelmingly gory and a whole lot of completely mindless fun. But don't take my word for it, even Yahtzee likes it. Zombies appear, you shoot them, you watch a horrendously stupid cut scene, you go to the next room. The two player co-op is apparently a laugh-riot as a party game. I am unfamiliar with this sort of social gathering, so I don't have much else to say about it.

Finally, on the PS3 (and Xbox), this weekend saw the release of the latest Resident Evil zombie fest. This game has caused some controversy because of its allegedly racist imagery. I find it curious that this game has been singled out as insensitive and ignorant while hordes of gamers have been happily playing, for example, the "escort the hos" mini-game in Saints Row or collecting sex cards in The Witcher. Video games as a medium are overwhelmingly juvenile, insensitive and ignorant. By prevailing standards, RE5 is no worse than most.

Resident Evil 5 continues where RE4 left off, and generally presents you with the same run away, shoot, run away, shoot the mob, sort of gameplay that RE4 perfected. The controls are still a little wonky, but you managed to reprogram your brain to enjoy RE4 you will do fine here.

The only major twist is the addition of a female sidekick who forms the basis of the co-op gameplay. Other games that assume you want to play with others have tended weighed us down with A.I. partners that just die a lot and slow things down. Sheva has this problem to some extent, but I have found that if you equip her with limited weapons and a lot of healing items she can be pretty handy. She can kill things with the SMG, which is something I never figured out how to do. And, when things get hairy, she will deploy the healing spray without requiring that I break my concentration to do so.

So while I'm theoretically unhappy about the assumption that I will want to play this game co-op (none of my friends seem to want to lower themselves to buy the game at all, much less on the Playstation), in practice it is working out pretty well. There are zombies, there are shotguns, there are zombie dogs that you kill with shotguns. Therefore, life is good.

Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Bugzir

2009-03-18 · by peterb

How many software engineers does it take to screw up a beloved franchise? The answer is "However many work at Obsidian Entertainment."

Neverwinter Nights 2: Storm of Zehir is the second expansion pack continuing the ongoing disaster that is NWN 2. As those of you who bought the original game know, Neverwinter 2 took the original formula of the first game, and added to it ridiculous system requirements to draw graphics that weren't that good, which you wouldn't see anyway because the camera in the game was completely unusable. On top of that, they heaped a passel of crashing and hanging bugs, put the turd in the box, and shipped it to retailers all around the world.

Storm of Zehir preserves everything bad about NWN 2, but then adds new game modes and gameplay, proving once again the game publisher's mantra: "Millions for new features, but not a penny for bug fixes."

It's a shame, too, because the new features, if they were implemented in a game that actually worked, would be compelling. First off, you're given direct control over an entire party of characters that you create, rather than just a "main" character and NPC henchmen. More importantly, the game adds an "overland" exploration mode, similar to what was seen in the console title Gladius, where random encounters are spawned and can be sought out or avoided. Generally speaking resting must happen in this overland mode rather than in the actual "dungeons", removing one of the "exploits" that made the game, in the past, seem a bit stacked in the players' favor. These additions had the potential to be intriguing and thought-provoking. But set as it is in the context of a game which, at any moment, is as likely to crash, or to position the camera behind a brick wall, it just ends up being nothing more than useless beauty.

There is no franchise that can't be killed by incompetence. The tragedy of Neverwinter Nights 2 is that the writing and imagination is still as good as it ever was. The game's failure is a failure of engineering. One that could have – and should have – been avoided with just a little planning. I can't, in good conscience, recommend this to anyone without a superhuman tolerance for frustration.

Tater Boss

2009-03-19 · by psu

The Whole Foods tater tots are back. They are almost as good as before, but a little bit different.

Phew.

Ninja Town

2009-03-25 · by peterb

Dripping with style and almost aggressive cuteness, Ninja Town for the Nintendo DS puts the "aw!" in "kawaii".

Ninja Town

Ninja Town

The game takes place in a town of adorable, fluffy little death machines called "Wee Ninjas". As Ol' Master Ninja, you're in charge of organizing the defense of Ninja Town against a seemingly unendless group of enemies hailing from nearby Mount Feroshi. Fortunately for you, the enemies come in waves, which gives you a chance to prepare.

Ninja Town is essentially a simplified (and hyper-cute!) version of the Desktop Tower Defense games. Enemies march through each level, following a set path, and you have to build structures which will slow, damage, and hopefully eventually kill them. Using the currency of the realm, which happens to be cookeis, you can build new structures or upgrade existing ones. Destroying enemies gives you more cookies (if only real life worked like this).

There's a constant balance between building new structures and upgrading existing ones. Weaker enemies tends to come in larger groups, so you'd like as many houses as possible to give you many Wee Ninjas to take them out quickly. But stronger enemies can't be taken out by a horde of weak ninjas, so there's pressure to upgrade the houses instead of building new ones. There are other tradeoffs as well. For example, Wee Ninjas can't hit flying enemies; for those, you need your crack team of Wasabi Pea Shooters, but they are vulnerable to physical attacks from ground-based enemies.

The ninjas are cute. The houses are cute. The balloon in which you survey the battle from is cute. The enemies are cute. Even your ninja's poop is cute. This is a game which is infused in a level of cuteness that will probably not be seen again until Hello Kitty becomes President. It is, in a word, unrelentingly cute, and manages to do that while still providing interesting strategic choices. I liked Ninja Town, and unless you have an unresolved masculinity crisis, I think you will too. It sells for about $30 at Amazon.com.

The Rose Tea Effect

2009-04-01 · by psu

Long time readers will no doubt remember that my favorite Asian food restaurant in Pittsburgh is Rose Tea Cafe in Squirrel Hill. Rose Tea is so good that you can come back to Pittsburgh after a week in a city with a real Chinese Food community and eat there without blinking. If this was all they had achieved, the place would represent a true watershed in the food history of our fair city. But, Rose Tea has actually achieved much more than this and is therefore an even more important entity in the city. The reason is simple: they are teaching the locals how to eat real Chinese food by only serving them real Chinese food.

Serving people what they should be eating instead of what they think they want to eat can be a tricky business. There is that famous scene from the movie Big Night where the two Italian brothers, trying to make a living by running a restaurant in New Jersey, are completely befuddled by the idea that someone would order a side of pasta with their risotto. It's not easy to break free of food inertia.

American Chinese food is full of tropes like these. The landscape is filled with "Pick your meat, pick your sauce (as long as it's brown), pick your rice plus wonton soup and egg roll on the side" places. There are big ones and small ones, cheap ones and expensive ones. This template is so ubiquitous that it is almost impossible to escape even in places that also try to serve an audience after more authentic fare.

Rose Tea is different. Most Chinese restaurants that serve both a Chinese and American audience have two different menus, one of which you are familiar with and one of which you can't read. Rose Tea does not do this. The only menu they have is a wide mix of Taiwanese-style dishes, starting with their "meat and rice on plate" specials, none of which come with a complimentary soggy egg roll or gelatinous hot and sour soup on the side. That the menu happens to contain a few standard fried rice and lo mein dishes is just a happy coincidence. Those dishes fit the style of the place, which is "fast food." That is, mostly simple dishes that are quick to prepare to order. Not cardboard food in cardboard boxes prepared by robots.

If you grew up in the sort of Chinese-American household that I did, the rest of the menu is a familiar set of dishes that your mom might have made, plus some more unusual delicacies that most places assume will not be to the taste of the local non-Chinese population (e.g. the fermented tofu, or the spicy soup with intestines in it). But Rose Tea makes no such assumptions. They show you these items in English so you can read and ask about it. Then you can have Helen the manager tell you with all the force of her personality why you should try it. This is why Rose Tea is important. Because Helen sells the food hard and gets people to go outside of their normal food boxes and try things that they would not normally consider.

Every time I go in the place I am struck not by the fact that the standard set of CMU or Pitt students of East Asian descent are in there eating their regular set of great home style dishes. I am struck by the fact that the rest of the place is filled with families from Squirrel Hill who have also learned to adopt some of these great home style Chinese dishes as their own. Certainly many had already discovered these pleasures, but I think just as many have been introduced to this food by finally seeing it on an English menu in a place that is willing to sell it to them. So it warms my heart that Rose Tea can serve these people the shredded pork and pickle soup instead of more gloppy hot and sour. Or the pork chop on rice instead of that oily and too sweet orange beef. Or the heat and garlic and basil in the Taiwanese chunk chicken instead of that anonymous brown sauce "Kung Pao" chicken with soggy peanuts.

We who love Chinese food and live in Pittsburgh all owe Rose Tea a great debt not only for serving us food that can stand up against similar places in other "real cities". We also owe them a debt for showing everyone in Pittsburgh what a really good Chinese place should be offering and how it should be prepared. They have managed to do what the poor Italian brothers in Big Night could not. They are able to succeed in their business and do it with a limited amount of culinary compromise.

Car Shop For Me

2009-04-06 · by psu

I've been looking at cars lately. I have never really shopped for cars in the past because for reasons that are too complicated to get into we've always just bought minivans. But, the current van is reaching the end of its useful life and for various other reasons that are too complicated to explain, it's time to find a car for me to use as a commuter. I have found the experience to be both enlightening and confusing. Maybe you in the intertubes can help with the confusing parts.

I think the first thing to say about me and cars is that I'm not much of a driver. I didn't learn to drive until late in life. I don't find any particular fun or enjoyment in the act of driving. For me, driving and recreation are related in this way: driving is the thing you do, if you have to, to get the bike to the start of the bike ride. My other idea of a fun drive is one where the car is never so noisy that I can't hear the podcast.

I am using the car primarily to get to work which involves one stretch of suburban strip mall road and another stretch of highway followed by a little jog through the Oakland area of Pittsburgh. This is not somewhere that is "fun to drive" no matter how much you spend on the vehicle. So I want the car to go in a straight line, turn when I tell it to, and otherwise basically be invisible. Quiet, smooth, big enough to fit my bike inside, and invisible. Note: the bike must go inside the car. Bike racks are for insensitive monsters who like to get dirt and crap all over their bikes.

The second thing about cars that are important to me is that I never have to take them to the dealer for any reason any more often than once a year. I take my bike to the shop about once a year if I don't crash it. I have the same threshold of laziness for the car. The only reason I'm looking for a new car is because I've had to take the old car to the shop a lot the last few years, and it's getting annoying.

After these two priorities, I am mildly interested in good gas mileage. This is where the confusing things start, because as far as I can tell, gas mileage has not improved at all in the last 25 to 30 years. For example, the Prius gets all this press for doing 40-45 mpg (yes I know yours does better), but it seems to me that back in the day the little compact go-kart cars used to do at least as well and didn't need a gigantic NiMH battery to do it.

This leads to a second confusion: why are all the cars so huge? With only a few exceptions, cars have bloated to ridiculous sizes. The Prius, for example, is a "small" car, and yet it's not really that much smaller than some of the SUVs that Prius drivers make fun of. Compact hatchbacks of today are as big as small wagons of yesterday. The RAV-4, which used to be a tiny pastel matchbox car is now as large as a Jeep Cherokee. The Honda Civic is now as big as an Accord and the Accord is as big as a really large BMW.

The whole size issue is frustrating because there are very few cars that are actually small that will also hold my bike in a convenient fashion. The best ones are the mutant cross-breedings of cars and SUVs (Honda CR-V), but none of these are all that much smaller than the minivan that I drive now, so what's the point?

Probably the best current small car for bike hauling is the Honda Fit. But considering that you have to put up with a cheap interior and a buzzy loud engine you'd think that you could get more than 35mpg on the highway.

The Mini Cooper fails the bike hauling test completely, and I conclude that it is more for people who actually like driving. The automatic transmission costs too much.

I should probably consider the VW Jetta TDI wagon. But then I'd have bought a VW. Rounding out the list of possibilities are the Volvos, which are too expensive, and the Mazda 3 hatchback which is well-liked mostly for being "sporty". The gas mileage on the Mazda is pretty bad though.

In the end, I will probably end up with a Prius, even though it's a bit too big, a bit too expensive, and a bit too annoying to get a bike into. I think it does the rest of what I want better than the other cars. It won't use that much gas, and it will be quiet and no fun at all to drive. I'll be able to enjoy those podcasts as I sit in stop and go traffic and stare at the little graphic that shows you where the power comes from. It'll be great.

Maybe I'm missing something though.

The Other Green Fairy

2009-04-07 · by peterb

Cocktail-making is as close as most people get to alchemy.

One might think that cooking or baking qualify, as well. But in both cooking and baking, technique can tend to predominate, and it's rare that you end up with something inexplicably numinous. In the cocktail, however, more often than you'd think, you can put three ugly ducks into a shaker and end up with a swan. The sum of the ingredients is greater than its parts.

I don't want to oversell this: as epiphanies go, a good drink is pretty low-rent (and comes with potential drawbacks up to and including drunkenness, alcohol addiction, and cirrhosis of the liver). But it's a pleasant way to end the day to be able to mix a few things together and create a revelation.

ChartreuseOne of these revelations came last week, when I mixed a drink by the name of The Last Word. Devastatingly simple to mix, The Last Word consists of equal parts gin, lime juice, green Chartreuse, and Luxardo Maraschino liqueur (not to be confused with the syrup from maraschino cherries, which is quite different.)

I don't keep green Chartreuse in the house, so I used Liquore Strega, which is quite similar in taste to yellow Chartreuse. Chartreuse, Strega, and Galliano are all aggressive herbal decoctions that have a taste that approaches indescribable. They are spicy, woody, and hot, full of cinnamon and anise and myrtle tastes.

In my house, Strega is an after-dinner drink. The food has been cleared from the table, everyone is sitting around lazily, and someone puts the bottle of Strega on the table with some shotglasses, and we sip and talk and sip and talk. If you asked me if it would make a good mixer, I would say "no": it's just too assertive, too unique to play nice with anything. And yet, I keep finding cocktails that Strega works well in, as with the drink I dubbed the Orange Witch, discussed in my review of Navan liqueur.

When I made The Last Word I didn't expect it to work well, but somehow it did. The Maraschino, I think, played a key role here, binding and melding the spicy strega to the citrus juice. My friend Nat had just picked up some green Chartreuse, so he let me siphon off a bit to try another experiment.

First, a digression about green Chartreuse. There are people who claim that, like Absinthe, Chartreuse is psychoactive in a "more than alcohol" sort of way. Green Chartreuse does share at least two similarities with Absinthe: it is green, and it has a whopping 55% alcohol by volume. It also shares a key difference with absinthe, in that the two drinks taste nothing alike: I find Absinthe to be unbearably unpleasant, whereas Chartreuse is to my taste. Your mileage, of course, may vary.

Put simply, I think the claims of Chartreuse's "thujone-like" psychotropic effects are, at best, ridiculous garbage believed only by the hypergullible. I think that one doesn't need to posit any strange mystical herbal-induced psychosis when a far simpler explanation ("You're drinking something stronger than the strongest vodka you've had!") suffices.

Using the excellent Cocktails+ for iPhone application (which, by the way, is free until April 12th), I found what seemed like an interesting recipe: the Beuser & Angus Special. Essentially, this is a Chartreuse Sour. It combines green Chartreuse, Luxardo Maraschino, lime juice, some sugar, and an egg white. It's a fair approximation to describe this as a "Last Word" without the gin. As with The Last Word, it was surprisingly drinkable, even with what I considered to be an excessive amount of Chartreuse. The proper Last Word was a bit more balanced, I thought.

Based on my experiments, I'd say Strega is a perfect substitute for Chartreuse in terms of taste; in cocktails, adjust the recipes accordingly for your preference in terms of the amount of alcohol. It's also a bit less expensive. The only drawback is if you value the unearthly green tinge that green Chartreuse gives to your drink.

If you've never had it, try some Chartreuse (or Strega) the next time you're at a well-stocked bar and see if it is to your taste. Perhaps it will end up being a potion in your alchemical cupboard. Feel free to let us know how you liked them in the comments section below.

On Another Note...

Driving home from work this evening, I heard this story on NPR: ISSU Angered by Liquor Control Board. Basically, the Independent State Store Union is complaining about the PLCB's latest ad campaign. Can someone explain to me what possible horse the ISSU has in this race? The only hypothesis I could come up with, in my cynicism, is "Hey, if this advertising campaign is effective, we might have to work more! That would be terrible. We hate doing our jobs because we are shiftless and lazy." I'd love to hear if anyone else has another theory.

Belly Up

2009-04-08 · by psu

We were in Dinette the other night getting ready to tuck into one of their excellent pancetta and sunny-side up egg pizzas when we spied a plate of prosciutto go by to the table in the back. It was placed in front of a young girl, maybe 8 years old. "That's a lot of ham", I thought. A while later, having polished off the pizza we looked back over and the plate was empty and a second plate of ham was being placed in front of the young girl. Now, I'm sure she had some help from dad in polishing this off, but she still ate most of the second plate as well. My heart was warmed and I thought to myself that here was a rare child whose dad was nurturing a healthy future love for that perfect food: pork

You see, in America, we have a problem with pork. I think we are brought up and conditioned to be afraid of it. I blame the insidious campaign by the national pork trade board to turn pork into chicken. Not only are they responsible for that offensive "the other white meat" slogan, they have systematically bred all of the taste, character and wonderful wonderful pork fat out of pigs that are sold for meat. These people have corrupted our expectations for pork. We now expect pork to be bland cardboard instead of a rich and bountiful feast for the mouth. We want it to be low fat instead of reveling in the rich goodness of the crispy roasted skin with with layer of fat underneath it. Pork should not be white, or gray, or brown. It should be gloriously red and dripping with juicy fatty, porky goodness. Like this:

psu_20090227-01039

See, in Hong Kong they understand food.

I sat at my table pondering all of this while grinning at the sight of the pork-loving child. Then my happpiness was replaced by confusion and rage when I remembered that Legume had recently taken one of the best appetizers that they ever did off the menu due to lack of demand. Said dish started with pork belly with which they made a confit. Confit, of course, is when you preserve fatty meat like duck or pork belly in more fat. They then roast the meat for service and put it on top of one of their signature perfect green salads with a simple but great vinegar and oil dressing.

Here is what the Chef/Owner at Legume had to say about this:

Something much less popular but equally as good is the oven roasted pork belly appetizer. We prepare this much like our duck confit - curing it overnight, cooking it slowly in duck fat for several hours, and letting it cool and age in the duck fat until it is roasted in the oven to order. As much as we love it, this will be its last week on the menu due to its unpopularity.

So here is my question: how can this fabulous dish be unpopular? How can people possibly not be beating down the doors to order and consume this? It is a tiny little piece of heaven on a plate and now I can't order it anymore because the rest of the population in this god-forsaken two bit loser town can't be bothered to figure this out and order the damn thing? This cannot stand. The people who have brainwashed our population into their irrational fear of pork fat must be made to account for their sins. We need to take action now to restore the pig to its rightful place at the top of the favorite foods list of all of our kids and our kid's kids. Nothing less than the future of good food is at stake. Make your voice heard now. Stand up for what all that is right and good in the world. Do it now before it's too late. The next thing you know, there will be nothing in the store but turkey bacon.

Notes

For the record, the two best appetizers I ever had at Legume were the lamb's tongue with potato salad and the braised veal cheek on top of polenta. I raved about these before.

Also, I feel the need to note there that the pizza we got is the most perfect pizza of all time. It's a bacon and egg breakfast on a pizza. That is all.

In Praise of Braise

2009-04-13 · by psu

Lately I've been trying to get a handle on a few basic techniques, one of which is braising meat. I've always had good luck with making stew but mixed luck with braising. After gaining some insight through failed practice sessions, I think I finally cracked the code this weekend. So here is what you do.

First, buy a big heavy soup pot. I've had the best luck with my old Le Creuset enamel on cast iron dutch ovens. I tried to use my beloved light weight All-Clad pots to do the same thing but they don't work as well. The Le Creuset pots are heavy and a bit small, but they seem to hold an even low temperature more effectively and their lids aren't warped like my All-Clad seconds sale lids.

Next, buy your favorite cut of cheap meat. Whatever you get should have

  1. Bones.

  2. Some fat.

  3. Some tendon and other connective tissue.

Short ribs and any kind of shank are great for this scheme. This weekend I did lamb shanks. I had six. You can adjust the quantities for however many you have.

Put your meat in a large bowl and season it with a liberal amount of salt and pepper. One or two pinches of salt per shank and a few turns of the pepper mill. Now heat up your pot on medium to medium low heat and when it's hot, add some olive oil. Put the shanks in the pot two or three at a time, depending on what fits without stacking. Brown the meat until it's a nice golden brown on all sides. This will take 10-15 minutes per batch. Don't rush it. Set the browned meat aside until you get all the batches done.

While the meat browns, pour most of a bottle of red wine into another pan and start it simmering. You will want to reduce it by around a half, but the exact amount is not critical.

Now dice one large onion or two smaller ones, two carrots and a couple of ribs of celery. Add more more oil to the pan and throw in the aromatics. Add salt and pepper, two or three bay leaves and your favorite fresh or dried herbs. I happened to use some thyme.

After about ten minutes the veggies will be soft. Add the wine, and a cup or two of chicken stock. Let that cook a while then put the shanks back in the pot. Add a bit more water or wine to get the liquid level to go most of the way up the meat. If all the shanks don't fit conveniently in one pot, you can split things and use two. This is what I ended up doing with my smaller Le Creuset pots so that I could fit all the meat on the floor of the pot.

Put the pots into a 250 degree oven. Set the timer for one hour. At the end of each hour, turn the meat over and add some water if the liquid level is getting precariously low. After about four or five hours you should be able to take the meat apart with chopsticks. That's when it's done. Don't forget to use the time to practice your Halo skills.

Take the meat out of the pot and pour the left over liquid into another sauce pan. If you want to get fancy at this point add some chopped shallot and cook the sauce for fifteen minutes. Then pour it through a strainer then back into the sauce pan. Put the pan on the stove and reduce by at least half or until it coats a spoon. Add a pat of butter and whisk it in for that extra something special. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

If you've done things right the sauce will be a wonderful alchemy of the wine, the aromatics, the stock and the gelatin from the bones. When cold it should turn into a nice red wine reduction jello.

This is best when served with some kind of soft fluffy starch like mashed potatoes, polenta, or those fashionable purees you get at fancy places. Just put each shank on a plate and pour the sauce over it and the starch of your choice.

You'll also need a vegetable for this. So here's one:

  1. Get a bag of brussel sprouts from Whole Foods (really, trust me).

  2. Cut the sprouts in half, add to a pot of cold water. Bring the water to a boil, cook for six to eight minutes. Drain.

  3. Meanwhile, chop up about 1/4 pound of bacon or pancetta into tiny pieces and cook them until they are crispy.

  4. Mix the sprouts with the bacon and however much of the bacon fat you want. Sprinkle some dried thyme on top. Add a bit of chicken stock and cook for five minutes.

Done and done.

Pasta Con Le Sarde

2009-04-14 · by peterb

Consider the humble sardine.

Yes, yes, I'm doing it again: rehabilitating foods that odds are you, for some godforsaken reason, don't eat. Even though these foods are awesome. I'm not going to stop anytime soon. You don't eat prunes, so I tell you to eat prunes. You don't eat olives, so I tell you to eat olives. You don't eat liver, so I tell you – at least those of you without heart conditions – to eat liver.

You don't eat sardines. You should eat sardines. Here's a recipe that is better than most of the pasta recipes you've made in the past year. Unless you're Lidia Bastianich. In which case you already know that you should be eating sardines.

This is a traditional Sicilian dish, called Pasta con le sarde, which translates to "Sardonic pasta trick" or, if you want to be accurate instead of interesting, "Pasta with sardines".

A word on the sardines themselves. Fresh sardines are superb, light, delicious, and completely unavailable to most of us. This recipe is formulated to use store-bought, olive-oil packed sardines that have been sitting on the shelf for God knows how long. Feel free to make it with fresh sardines and let me know how it goes. But I bet it's better my way.

To make this, you need a couple of cans of sardines, an onion, a bulb of fennel, some currants (or raisins if you don't have currants), olive oil, some anchovies, and of course pasta. Traditionally, you'd also use some pine nuts in this recipe, but pine nuts tend to go rancid very easily: if you have a choice between using rancid pine nuts and no pine nuts at all, just skip them. Also traditionally, you would soak the currants in water for a while and then drain them before using them. But I always skip that step because I'm lazy, and I frankly don't notice the difference.

The recipe goes like this: take the sardine oil from the can and put a few tablespoons in a saucepan. Heat it on high and toast some stale bread (1/2 cup to a cup) in the hot oil until they're nicely browned. Remove the croutons from the oil and save for later. Lower the heat to medium.

Dice an onion and a bulb of fennel.

Add 1/2 cup of olive oil to the pan and keep the heat up. Dice an onion and sweat it until it gets soft. Add the fennel and saute for a few more minutes. Add the the currants, the anchovies, but NOT the sardines, and sauté for another 10 minutes.

While this is going on, cook some pasta. This sauce has a weird nature: it's heavy, and it will stick nicely, so you don't want anything too light. Spaghetti is always a good choice, but I could also see this working with bucatini. Personally, I usually use spaghetti because it will catch up the little bits of sardine and the croutons in the tangles perfectly.

A few minutes before the pasta is done, add the sardines and the croutons to the pan and give it a couple of good stirs. When the pasta is finished, drain it, add the pasta straight into the pan with your sauce, toss it, and remove to a serving bowl. Serve and eat immediately.

See? Just like that, now you like sardines.

The Car Questions

2009-04-20 · by psu

I'll keep this short, because no one could possibly be less interested in my continuous car shopping than you guys. But in my previous missive I forgot to list the questions brought up by this exercise. So here they are now.

  1. Why do Americans hate hatchbacks?

  2. Why is the station wagon dead?

  3. Why don't the car companies make an enjoyable luxury hatchback that is practical, spacious, and comfortable to drive? Instead the sector is dominated by useless performance boy-toys and price-point econoboxes. Maybe that's why Americans hate hatchbacks.

  4. Why are SUVs so popular? They are worse to drive, a lot uglier, and more difficult to make out in the back of than a station wagon.

  5. Why is the fundamental relationship that you are supposed to have with your dealer an adversarial one? Wouldn't it be much more commercially efficient to fix this? I have some theories about this which I can summarize by saying: it must be because a certain number of men are assholes with OCD.

  6. Finally, a non-question question. It's interesting to me that within a few inches cars seem to come in only three sizes. Small, medium, and too big. In the U.S. almost everything is either medium or too big. And the nice small ones are either too cheap or too expensive. Now go back to question 1.

Uniwar

2009-04-22 · by peterb

Possibly the best game currently available for the iPhone/iPod Touch platform right now, Uniwar fulfills pretty much all of your "Hey, I'd like to play something like Advance Wars" needs.

The polish is sort of stunning - multi-player online games, with multiple players per team (2v2, 3v3, or 4v4), email notifications when it's your turn, a computer opponent that's not too shabby, and best of all, it's in your pocket wherever you go.

I have seen the future of gaming, and it isn't the Nintendo DS.

Eyes on the Prize

2009-04-27 · by peterb

I hate my optometrists. Or should I say, I hate my *ex-*optometrists.

I've worn glasses since I was in fourth grade. I've never been able to handle contact lenses, and to me there's also something refreshing and liberating about having a little mask that I put on when I wake up and take off when I go to sleep. Eyeglasses are, perhaps, my only concession to the world that there is this constant public dance called "fashion" and that I participate in it.

The problem with glasses isn't in the objects themselves, but that buying them is such an exercise in consumer frustration.

Most vendors of eyeglasses also have an ophthalmologist doctor of optometry on staff. In the old days, before we discovered fire and the wheel, you went to a place that sold eyeglasses, and, if you wanted to, you had the doctor give you an eye exam. If you didn't want to, you just told the salesman "I like these frames. Give me lenses that match these specifications."

Now, things aren't so simple. In what appear to be protectionist laws crafted to interfere with consumers' ability to buy glasses over the Internet, lens specifications are considered "prescriptions" and they "expire."

I broke my glasses today. Now, here's the thing. I love my prescription lenses. They're perfect. And reading the prescription off of the lenses themselves is a trivial exercise: any monkey can do it with the help of a machine. When I visited my optometrist, I had the following conversation:

Me: "Hi. I'd like the same glasses with the same lenses please." Them: "Sure, we'll set you up for an eye exam." M: "I don't want an eye exam. I want the same lenses." T: "That's against the law, sir! You'll need an exam." M: "I won't get an exam. Either sell me new glasses with the same lenses, or I'll take them somewhere else and have them read the script off the lenses."

A very, very long pause ensued. I had moved from being a customer to being a Difficult Customer.

This "it's against the law!" line is frustrating, because it is, of course, only against the anticompetitive law that the optometrists lobbied to get passed; in Pennsylvania it's the Optometry Practice Act. Many other states have similar laws. For a good time, try asking your optometrist for a written copy of your prescription so you can buy your next pair of glasses on the Internet. Their refusing to do that is against the law in some states, but it turns out some people are more willing to consider ignoring regulations when it hurts their bottom line. So it goes.

Our conversation continued:

T: "We can put the old lenses in new frames..." M: "This is not rocket science. The prescription is fine. I don't want to change it." T: "Look, if you like the old prescription, we can explain that to the doctor and after the exam we can...work something out."

And here, to misquote William Burroughs, we see the naked lunch at the end of the health care spoon: they're willing to give me an exam, and then write me the prescription I want regardless of the results, as long as they get a bite of my health care dollars through an exam. At least, that's how I read the conversation.

M: "OK, thanks," I said, taking my glasses back. "I guess I'll call you if I decide to do that."

Then I drove to several other eyeglass stores. Some of them were perfectly happy to sell me glasses based on the existing lenses, whereas others wanted to make me get a new prescription.

I eventually bought a pair from a friendly local chain at a reasonable price. And I can guarandamntee you that every pair of glasses I buy from now on will either be bought at that location, or on the Internet. And if I get an eye exam, it will be because I want one. Not because a doctor's organization bribed a state legislator so they'd have a guaranteed income stream so they could buy a Porsche.

Overtime!

2009-04-30 · by psu

As I type, the Bulls and the Celtics are going into their fifth overtime period in the series. Whatever the outcome of this admittedly excellent series, one thing is for sure. If the Celtics can barely beat this team there isn't much hope for them in the later rounds. The D has been spotty. The bench is the worst since Greg Kite was their "sixth man". It's actually been hard to watch.

Oh well, at least it's not pick and roll pick and roll every damn time down the court.

I Become My Parents

2009-05-04 · by psu

Good news! This will be (probably) my last post that mentions cars. While the whole car exercise has opened up entirely new and previously unmined avenues of comparison Internet shopping, you just can't keep up that kind of enthusiasm for a consumer item that you only buy once every five to ten years. And no, surprisingly enough I did not get a Prius. But therein lies the story.

If there is one dominant philosophy that has governed my life up until now, I would summarize it as: "live life by standing around and watching, but when you get lucky be ready to take advantage of it." I picked my college this way, as I had a friend whose sister went to the same school, and I noticed that it seemed like a cool place. I managed to finish my PhD this way, as I ran into someone at a conference who gave me the funds to keep going, even though I was a bad graduate student and never generated the paper that would have made the endeavour worthwhile for him. I have even gotten most of my good jobs this way, running into various people in the right place or the right time. The trick is to be prepared and confident enough to take advantage of the good situation when it comes your way.

So it makes sense that I should happen upon the right car this way.

Having digested all of my wonderful reader feedback, not to mention reams of snarky Internet commentary, I had concluded that all my whining aside, there were quite a few possibilities:

  1. The Prius, of course.
  2. Mazda 3 hatchback/wagon.
  3. Hyundai Elantra Touring Hatchback/Wagon
  4. Nissan Versa (probably too cheap)
  5. VW Rabbit/Golf/GTI or Jetta Wagon
  6. Subaru Impreza or Outback
  7. Finally, the Volvo C30 or V50, but these are too expensive.

So of course, when the weather was nice last week I immediately went off to test the cars I was pretty sure were too expensive: the Volvos. I forget how I rationalized this, probably something about "getting a baseline". Anyway, I ended up at the local Volvo dealer.

To summarize: the C30 is a fun little car, but it's a bit too fun and a bit too little. If it had four doors and a bigger hatch, it would be more perfect. Enter the V50 wagon. Built on the same platform as the C30, Mazda 3 and the European Ford Focus, this car has four doors, and a bigger hatch in the back. The bike goes in with only one seat folded down. The ride is quiet and smooth. The interior doesn't look cheap and rattly. There is a cool device that tells me when cars are in my blind spot! And the seats are really really comfortable. If it could do 30mpg instead of 25, it would be perfect. Even the snarky Internet people like it. Unfortunately, you can't really get one for much less than $30K.

So what you should do, of course, is find a slightly used 2009 model on the dealer lot that someone bought and traded in with only 2,000 miles on it. Who does that? Someone who subconciously knew that I wanted a small station wagon and helpfully provided it for me. Standing around and getting lucky wins again!

Of course, the urge to keep shopping is strong, especially after you've become addicted to snarky Internet commentary sites. What if I didn't properly compare everything? Maybe that Hyundai is quieter. What if the new Prius Solar Sun roof is really something I can't live without? Here is where knowing when you're ahead is critical. The thing is, for the price I was going to pay, the probability is high that mileage aside, the Volvo is better at everything I want than any of the other cars on the list. More importantly, the car fits my current "residual self image", which is really the trick when buying a car. The car is just like a compact to mid-sized car like the Honda Civic (or Volvo C30) but it is also slower, fatter, and "older". Ultimately I think people buy the cars that reflect the image they project to the world. The Volvo says "I am older and too practical but quicker than a minivan." I can live with this.

Therefore, the thing to do was to pick a price, head to the dealer to see if they would take it, and quit while I was ahead. So that's what I did, and they took the price, and I have stopped thinking about it.

Except to write this article.

And to complain about the placement of the iPod auxiliary jack.

And maybe next time I'll learn how to drive stick. (Just kidding).

Buyer's Premorse

2009-05-04 · by peterb

I am, once again, a car owner. Yes, while co-author psu was looking to buy a car, so was I. But unlike his rather straightforward and serendipitous journey that ended with his luckily finding a lightly used Volvo, I had a lot more (self-inflicted) drama.

I'd been driving a Ford Escort ZX2 coupe for 11 years. While this is the sort of statement that tends to make small children laugh and point, they can kiss my grits: I loved that car. It was tiny, it was agile as all get out, it accelerated like a bat out of hell (because it weighed nothing), and it worked without major malfunction for many many years. And all this for $13,000, which even in 1997 was a pretty low price for a car. It's been paid off for years, which means that every month, instead of spending money on my car payment, I could spend it on video games responsibly put it in my savings account.

Somewhere around the 6th year of the car's life, I realized that it was sufficiently valueless that I would not really get any money by trading it in. I resolved to drive it until it stranded me, and then buy a new car. It wasn't until just last week, 5 years later, that it finally died. I probably could have kept it alive through heroic measures, but it was time. So I started the search for a new car.

It turns out that my answer to the question "What car do you want to drive?" changes dramatically when I'm faced with the prospect of actually spending the money. For a while now I had target-fixated on the Mazda Mazdaspeed 3, a rocket sled for men who haven't figured out that women mostly don't even notice how much horsepower the car we're driving has. The Speed 3 is awesome fun, handles like a dream, is a bit spartan inside, and gets 19 mpg.

When I thought about living with the car, and commuting to work in it every day, the bloom sort of faded off the rose. I dismissed the Mini Cooper, after test-driving it, for similar reasons: a complete blast to drive in every way, but I just don't think I would want to book 40 highway miles a day in it.

I test-drove a Volkswagen Jetta TDI, a turbodiesel with some cachet. And you know what? I liked it. More than liked it: I loved it. The diesel is all low-end torque, the road handling is taut, the interior (while not excessively cushy) is polished, and it gets fabulous gas mileage, not to mention some good tax breaks.

There's just one problem with it: it's a Volkswagen. Now, I know there are plenty of people who have owned VWs and had no problems. I'm not one of these people. Every VW or Audi I've owned has, after a few years, developed weird electrical problems that can only be fixed (for 6 months) by purchasing very expensive Bavarian German pieces of electronics. Lather, rinse, repeat. The dealers insist that these quality problems have all been fixed. But then, what else would you expect a car dealer to say?

So here is where I was this weekend: I had a good deal available on a car that I love, but which in my heart I feel is unreliable. It's like contemplating beginning a relationship with that really crazy boy or girl: it'll be really awesome when he or she says "Let's take a road trip to Vegas! On mopeds!" but the great stories you accrue will have to be counterbalanced by the number of hours spent in the waiting room of the psych hospital when you have to involuntarily commit them.

In short: even before spending a single penny on the VW, I had already envisioned all the bad things that would happen once I bought it. I would drive off the lot and the door handles would fall off. I'd go back to the dealer and they'd tell me they didn't have the door handles in stock, but that they would order them from Germany. They'll arrive in 3 weeks, but aren't covered under the warranty, and so I'd need to pay $1500. Or I could just leave them off for now and use the sunroof to get in and out. Each and every scenario made me feel worse about buying the car that I hadn't yet bought. It's my own personal phenomenon: buyer's premorse. The regret that comes from having made a purchasing decision, but before you've actually completed the purchase.

On a whim, I stopped off at an Acura dealership. This was very, very unplanned, because everything I'd heard about the Acura TSX had been negative. In our search for our respective cars, psu and I have been addicted to various motoring websites, such as The Truth About Cars. According to these sites, the TSX is sluggish, underpowered, has no road feel and you should absolutely buy a BMW 3 series instead. I drove the TSX and found it absolutely charming: responsive, nimble, certainly not a street racer but not slow by any stretch of the imagination. What car were these people reviewing? What gives?

Herein lies the rub about comparing cars: often, people tend to compare cars to other cars that are in completely different classes. An Infiniti G37 or a BMW 328i, configured similarly to the Acura TSX, will drive the pants off of it. And will also cost $10,000 more. As a car wanker this sort of comparison might be useful: most car wankers are boys, and it's a time honored pastime for us to have long and involved conversations about whose wang is longest. But as a car buyer it's extremely unhelpful. You can play the "...but this better car is just $4,000 more!" game all the way up to an Aston Martin Vanquish, at which point the bank comes and repossesses your house.

The other aspect, of course, is that "better", according to the car enthusiast, often seems to be defined entirely by "which one goes from 0-60 in the least amount of time." In the computer world, these are the people who tell you not to buy an iMac because you can't replace the video card.

With respect to the TSX specifically, the dynamic you see between reviewers and purchasers is especially fascinating. The TSX is, essentially, a luxury version of the European Honda Accord. Car reviewers approach this from the attitude of "Ewwww. It's just an upmarket European Accord." But buyers approach this as "Cool! It's an upmarket European Accord!"

It turns out that I, at least, find an upmarket European Accord to be a pretty compelling value proposition. I got a great deal on the car (thanks, Edmunds!) by sending it out for bid to a bunch of dealers over the Internet. From my perspective, I got a car that drives just as well as the TDI, and paid a small premium for a 4-year instead of a 3-year warranty, and for Honda engineering and service ("Oh, hey, your car has 100,000 miles on it. You might want to change the oil.") versus Volkswagen engineering and service ("The engine is in perfect mechanical condition, but you can't close the window or sunroof without shorting out the alternator. We replaced the window switches that were wearing out. They look nice now, but they still don't work. That will be $679, please.")

Despite the fact that I would have paid the price premium just for the perceived improved reliability of the Acura, it's also undeniable that it has a much more well-polished interior. It's luxurious without being cushy or soft. The car is a bit heavier than the Jetta, so it's not quite as sprightly, but it has a taut suspension and is still very much a driver's car. I'm really pleased. If you can afford to spend over $30k on a car, there are probably better alternatives to the TSX. But if you, like me, have an invisible line in the sand that keeps you in the $20s, you should give the TSX serious consideration.

I guess I can have nice things after all.

A Short Public Service Announcement

2009-05-05 · by psu

Popcap has released Plants vs. Zombies for Windows PCs and Macs.

You should go pick it up now.

That is all.

Did you go yet? Because if you didn't you are a fool.

Most Consistent, Least Astonished

2009-05-06 · by psu

I was duped. Tricked. Conned. I was not going to join the zombie Facebook hordes, but it happened anyway. But I am not here to whine about the fact that I've been dragged kicking and screaming into the 2000s from the dark ages of the late 1990s. Facebook is actually kind of cool. It's like Twitter, except everyone is using it instead of just the dorkiest people you know. My main problem with the system is that they have designed it so I never see the same thing when I load the main page, even when nothing has changed.

Coming from Twitter, my assumption was that the News Feed supposed to reflect a stream of updates from two sources: me and my "friends." For the first week or two of use this assumption held up. Stuff came in from the people I knew. I posted stuff and it sat on the home page until new stuff replaced it.

But lately I've noticed that the news feed is not what it seems. I would post things and sometimes I'd see them and then sometimes they would disappear, and then sometimes they would come back. There was little rhyme or reason to how the content on the home page behaved.

What I imagine is going on is that the News Feed is using some complicated and no doubt extremely clever heuristics to show me content that I "want to see." In general, unless you are google, you are going to get these heuristics wrong and occasionally the system will either show me something I'm not interested in or it will fail to show me what I actually wanted to see. This is OK as long as the behavior is predictable. But whatever Facebook is doing on their front page is so complicated and so clever that it has failed in two ways. Not only does it not do what I want, it also does not let me guess what it's going to do so you can work around its failings. This illustrates the second most important principle of user interface design:

If you are going to try and be smart, be sure you always get the answer right. And if you can't get the answer right, at least get the answer wrong in a consistent way.

Astute readers will recognize this as a version of the "principle of least astonishment." What I am asking for is something slightly different though. I don't care if I am initially surprised by how a system works as long as I can eventually deduce what the correct behavior is supposed to be. The only thing that is really unacceptable is non-determinism.

Luckily, all is not lost. Whoever built the Facebook client for the iPhone knew what they were doing. It also doesn't show me exactly what I want. It seems to show me my most recent post but after that only posts by my friends. This is not ideal but I can live with it because at least it is consistent. Every time I load the main page it shows me the same thing, so I know what to expect.

I encourage for the developers of the News Feed feature on the front page talk to their cohorts on the iPhone team so that its behavior is more predictable. Meanwhile I'll just pretend that the feed is never supposed to show anything that I post, since it usually doesn't anyway. At least then I can be happy in my imagination rather than just constantly confused.

Now if I could only figure out why my posts also disappear for other people I'd finally be able to sleep at night.

Market Day Eggs

2009-05-11 · by psu

This weekend was the opening weekend for the Farmer's Market at the Firehouse in the Strip, our favorite place to go for this sort of thing. The market is run by the Slow Food Pittsburgh people and has gradually grown to be a fantastic source for local organic produce, meats, and other products. This week we got wild leeks (ramps) and morel mushrooms. So to celebrate, I made eggs for breakfast on Sunday.

So you take 4 mushrooms and cut them into small pieces. Then take 5 or 6 leeks (they are small, smaller than green onions) and wash them, cut the white part off and dice it. Then cut the green part in halves or quarters length wise and then chop it into little pieces.

Heat up non-stick pan #1 and add some olive oil, the mushrooms, the ramps and some salt and pepper. Toss this around until everything is soft.

At this point you can make four scrambled eggs however you like.

I decided to try and make double boiler eggs, but I don't have a double boiler. So I brought a small amount of water to a simmer in a small sauce-pan and put a mixing bowl on top. I poured in the beaten eggs and mixed for 5-6 minutes or until it they looked like scrambled eggs. I probably should have added a bit of milk to the eggs and butter in the bowl. I think I also had the heat too high because the eggs cooked faster than the Internet told me they should cook. They also spent a lot of time permanently bonding to the mixing bowl, which ended up being very hard to clean. Even so, the eggs tasted great and had a rich custardy texture that you don't get with scrambled eggs in a pan.

Anyway, however you get the eggs made, mix in the leeks and the mushrooms just as they are finished. Season with more salt and pepper. Mix some more and serve.

Sorry, I forgot to take a picture. My food photography never works anyway. Correct compositional technique just eludes me.

Rather Caching

2009-05-12 · by peterb

The biggest problem with buying a car is that once you buy it, you have to stop shopping.

This is problematic for a couple of reasons, not the least of which is that, having dropped so many thousands of dollars on a durable consumer good, suddenly other items seem a lot cheaper. So consumer electronics that, if you were sane, you'd dismiss as "too expensive" suddenly become little things to be casually picked up with pocket change.

This is happening to me now, because I'm looking for a GPS to use for Geocaching, even though I don't really need one.

I have, to date, found exactly one (1, as in singular) cache, using a borrowed iPhone 3G and the awesome geocaching.com app. But since some of the caches I'm going to be looking for are in pretty rugged terrain, I was thinking about picking up a dedicated GPS, ideally one with topo maps and an electronic compass.

I'm currently leaning towards the Delorme PN-40 over the highly-regarded Garmin GPSMap 60csx. This mostly stems from my previous experience with both companies. My impression is that Garmin is a GPS company that happens to have some maps on their units, and Delorme is a map company that happens to sell GPS units. Which one you prefer is probably largely a question of taste.

Of course, the other solution to the problem would just be to buy an iPhone 3G.

Any recommendations from the experienced GPS users out there?

The Dragon Age of Benny Hill

2009-05-14 · by peterb

Since everyone else is remixing the Dragon Age "Sex and Violence" trailer, I'm throwing my hat in the ring too:

DeLorme PN-40 and Topo USA 7.0

2009-05-21 · by peterb

This post can also be called "In Which I Ignore Kelly's Advice To Buy A Garmin And Pay The Price".

I just got my DeLorme PN-40 last night. I went for the PN-40 instead of the Garmin because I was lured by the promise of awesome topo maps and easy-to-obtain-and-load aerial photography (and because there was a fire sale on them and I got one at a very good price). There was some criticism on Amazon about the software being not that great. I am here to tell you that criticism is not at all exaggerated.

First off, some disclaimers: I haven't used the unit in the field yet. And, I am using Topo 7 at this point, rather than the new Topo 8 because that's what I have. The unit comes with a card to fill out that you can mail in for an upgrade to Topo 8 (DeLorme, apparently, has yet to discover The Internet.)

It seems to me likely that the unit itself is about as easy to use as other units, excepting maybe the iPhone 3G, which is a different sort of thing.

In terms of basic functionality/mapping, the unit came with disks of "pre-cut" topo maps for various regions at 1:100. Loading those was perfectly simple, and should be easy for anyone.

Then there's Topo 7.

While Topo 7 is not, in fact, the worst designed piece of software I've ever used, it certainly comes close. The user interface of the thing is so terrible that you have to wonder if it was intentionally designed that way as some sort of sophisticated joke. Much of the UI is "implicit", in the sense that you use various gestures to navigate around the map and change zoom level, and it's easy - especially at first - to inadvertently change your location or zoom level without even understanding how you did it. The application is full of what I'll call "post-modal" dialog boxes. So you click some box or make some choice, and then, a few seconds later, after you're trying to do something else, a dialog box or some other interrupt will appear related to the thing you did about 5 seconds ago.

The best example of this is in the "integrated" feature that lets you buy maps online. "Integrated", in this context, means "not really all that well integrated". In order to buy color aerial, USGS, and satellite maps of a single region, here's what I had to do:

(1) Find the area I'm looking for in 'NavLink' mode. (2) Click the grids I want to buy for. (3) Realize that clicking the grid doesn't do I what I want. Find the "Select/Edit" button, which is mysteriously off to the left somewhere. (4) Click the grids I want. (5) Pull the dropdown to "Color aerial". (6) Click "Add to selection" (7) Pull the dropdown to "USGS" (8) GET INTERRUPTED because 5 seconds later an IE window opens telling me "OK, sir, I added those maps. Could you name them?" No indication of what the name means. (9) Type "Townname." Click submit. Window goes away. (10) Move mouse back to add things to my selection (11) Get interrupted AGAIN for some confirmation dialog. (12) Click "Add to selection" to add the USGS maps. (13) Repeat steps 8 through 12 once for each map type I wanted to add. (14) Except now I can't call the next group of maps "Townname", so I call them "Townname-1", even though conceptually I wanted all these maps to be part of a single order. Maybe there's a way to do that. It's not obvious. (15) Eventually, I actually get to purchase my maps. That took about another 4 clicks. (16) Then another 5 clicks to download (find download tab, click checkbox next to each map, then download). (17) Get interrupted by the download window. (18) In case I didn't make this clear above, any time you're doing anything with NavLink, there's a delay of a few seconds because presumably you're talking to a remote server somewhere.

So to do the workflow "buy 4 types of maps for a set of regions," I would estimate that I had to use about 48 separate mouse gestures, and I'm being generous and not counting the "purely local" ones, like selecting the quads that I wanted.

Adding the maps to the PN-40 is not quite as horrific as using NavLink, but it's not a bright shining star, either. My favorite part of that moment is when you enter the transfer UI and after you try to begin a transfer a dialog box appears with an entire paragraph of text suggesting that you might want to change the GPS into one of two other modes which might be faster to use. If you change the GPS into those other modes at that moment, Topo 7 will lock up for 10 seconds while the USB bus is reconfigured. But if you try to put the GPS into that mode before beginning the transfer, the transfer UI won't discover it (or at least, it didn't when I tried it).

One could argue that this isn't "hard." It's not as if it's rocket science. But I think when people say that Topo 7 has a "steep learning curve" what they are really trying to say is this is a really incredibly annoying program to use. Put another way: if the amazon.com web site was as annoying to use as Topo 7, they would never sell any products ever. The only reason people are putting up with Topo 7 is because it's offering something hard to get otherwise.

Now, maybe it's possible that all of these problems are magically fixed in Topo 8. I'd love to hear from someone who has used Topo 8 to on this topic. But the software developer in me is asking the question "If they couldn't get this right in the first seven versions, why do you think they'll get it right in the eighth?"

I wonder if I should take advantage of the 30-day return policy to give up on this now, or if I should stick with it on the theory that loading maps isn't an everyday activity.

I wonder if I can convince someone at Garmin to send me a unit to try their software and see if it's any better.

This is Not a Video Game Review: 2

2009-05-22 · by psu

The title of this piece will give astute readers a sense of deja vu. You will recall that more than a year ago, disgusted with the state of writing about video games, I called on the industry to do a better job and find something interesting to write about our beloved medium. The response has been decidedly tepid. I guess people were confused about what I meant by "interesting writing" or "an enjoyable review." While one can find the occasional example of what I am after, I don't think the situation has improved that much.

But I have moved on. Video games are no longer the subject of my obsessive internet browsing. I've been reading reviews of cars instead. Yes, I promised that I would not write about cars anymore, and I'm not. Instead, for all you aspiring video game reviewers out there, here is how it should be done. Watch and learn from what is perhaps the most inspired and sublime review of a commodity consumer object that I have ever seen. I give you the Top Gear review of the Ford Fiesta:

This review, it seems to me, is structurally perfect. Instead of just droning on through a mechanical series of objective tickmarks, the piece turns the whole scheme on its side. While appearing to discuss the car's practicality, or gas mileage, or performance, Clarkson actually lampoons the whole notion of measuring a car by such shallow and useless single numbers. Then you get to the delicious sequence where Clarkson, being chased by "baddies" in a Corvette, drives the car all over a shopping mall. Inside. Through the stores. And it just gets stranger form there.

In addition to all this, the piece is filled with interesting photography, good writing, humor, and increasing evidence that the insurance laws in Britain must just be fundamentally different than in the USA.

Top Gear has always excelled at this sort of thing. The reason the show is so good is because while its subject matter is "cars", the show really isn't about cars. Cars are boring. Cars have basically been the same product for the last 30 or 40 years. What more can you really say about cars? Top Gear is really about other interesting characters or tasks or ridiculous challenges that happen to be related to cars. Therefore, even if you really have no interest whatsoever in cars (and I, until recently, certainly didn't), the show keeps you coming back for more because you know it will be fantastic anyway. This is why it's one of the 10 best shows on television anywhere in the world.

This is also what I want video game reviews to do. No, I don't expect them to be able to film an actual military landing with live ammo and gunboats and stuff. But I do expect them to realize that while their subject matter is video games, the video games by themselves are really not that interesting. I want to see a video game show, or magazine, or weblog, or something, that is compelling enough that people who are not interested in video games won't be able to turn away. That's something that will keep me coming back for more. Because if you don't do that, you can say practically everything interesting that there is to say about video games in about two years of semi-regular writing. There really isn't that much new under the sun.

Still, it would be awesome to see Adam Sessler jump out of an airplane, wouldn't it?

Dances With Dinosaurs

2009-05-28 · by peterb

My recent experience buying a car has taught me a few lessons that I hope I remember next time. I'm going to write them down so I don't forget.

Let me acknowledge up front that these lessons are colored by my personal hangup about "not getting ripped off", where "ripped off" is defined as "paid too much for a given new car, by some semi-objective standard." If you don't share that hangup, a lot of this won't apply to you.

Also, many people believe that the best way to avoid paying too much money for a new car is to buy a great used car. I am sure that this is true. However, I'm too stupid about cars to pick a good used car, so someone else will have to help you with that, if that's how you want to go.

So warned, please read on.

Don't Panic

If you, like me, are the sort of person that drives your car until it dies, then you may end up shopping for a car because you need a car immediately. This is not a state that leads to good decision making. If you can borrow a car while you shop, do it. If you need to, rent a car for a couple of weeks while you shop. The couple of hundred dollars you put into a rental will probably pay off on the back end (and if you're lucky, you may even be able to rent one of the cars you're thinking about buying).

Your Local Car Dealer

Your local car dealer is an obstacle between you and the car you want to buy. The most useful thing about them is that they have the car you want to test drive. So go test drive a bunch of cars! If you walk into the dealership knowing that you're not going to buy a car, test driving cars can be fun.

In this round of test drives, I always told the dealer I wasn't buying that day, and they always assumed that I was lying. Since I assume that everything that comes out of the dealer's mouth is a lie, too, that ended up working out for the most part. This leads directly to a rule of thumb I have.

Rule #1: When test driving, never sit anywhere in a car dealership except in the car you want to test drive. At one Suzuki dealership I went to, the dealer managed to get me into his office and promptly disappeared to "look up a few numbers." So I left. This is related to...

Rule #2: Don't talk money with your test-drive dealerships. Nothing good can come of it, for reasons that I'll explain later on.

If you don't have your heart set on a particular car, test drive lots of cars. Enjoy the process. But most importantly, when you've winnowed the candidate cars down to a short list...

Rule #3: Test drive the cars you're serious about back-to-back. Your memory will play tricks on you, and lie to you. Driving the cars you are interested in one after the other will crystallize their differences. After my first round of drives, I ranked the Mazda3 and the Volkswagen Jetta TDI as offering about the same driving experience, with only a slight edge to the TDI. When I drove them back-to-back in my second round, the TDI trounced the Mazda3 by a mile.

Rule #4: Note the most common option packages while you're test driving. Walk around the lot a little. Ask the dealer about which options the cars on the lot have. This is going to come into play later when you make an offer on the car by email.

Decisions

Eventually, you'll get down to a short list of cars, and you need to pick one. My only piece of advice here is "Make the decision at home, not at the dealership."

Research

The gold standard for information about car prices is Edmunds.com. You tell their web site what car you're looking for, what options you want, and it boils it down to what they call their "True Market Value", or "what others are paying." If you're a kick-ass hardcore negotiator, or if you're buying a car that isn't hugely popular, the TMV is probably higher than what you could negotiate. But if you're that sort of person, you stopped reading this article ten paragraphs ago because you love buying cars. I, on the other hand, hate buying cars. For me, the Edmunds TMV basically is my "sucker line": if I can get to the TMV, then I at least know I'm paying about the average of what everyone else is paying. Edmunds also has a pretty nice system to inform you of manufacturer to consumer (or dealer) incentives and financing deals. You're going to use Edmunds to figure out what you plan on offering for the car.

If you are buying a hugely popular car (poster child: the MINI Cooper), the TMV will be around MSRP. Congratulations! Your negotiation just got easier because you're likely going to just go into your MINI dealer and pay them MSRP. Stop reading, and go do that, and enjoy your new car.

A word about options: Edmunds lets you configure the options packages in great detail. You want to configure a car with the 'common' option packages that you discovered while you were at the dealer doing test drives. The more specific your needs are, the more difficult the next phase of the process is going to be. So it's in your best interests to be happy with the typically configured car in the class you've chosen.

Financing

This is up to you, but if you can finance the purchase yourself or through some service like E-Loan, you're removing another variable from the negotiation, which is always good. Obviously if the manufacturer has a good incentive, you may want to take them up on it.

The Pitch

So you know what car you want. You know how much it costs. You know exactly what color you want (Note: I don't really care about the color of my car, and maybe you don't either. Car dealers get really, really upset if you tell them "I could care less what color the car is." You can literally watch their synapses start to fry if you say this to them. So be a mensch, and just say "black" if you really don't care.) You're going to send an email to every dealer of the brand you want within a certain radius of where you live. Your email will read like this:

Dear car dealer:

I plan on buying a car within 3 days. I will be purchasing a 2009 Vauxhall Vectra, black with the gold lamé interior, with the bluetooth (VVBT3) and navigation (VVNV3) options, for the price of $18,600, plus tax and transfer. I will be [paying cash / financing through Vauxhall Credit with a down payment of $4,000]. I [will / will not] be trading in a car. I will be buying the car from the first dealer to meet my offer. You may contact me by email, or call me at (555) 555-1212.

I look forward to hearing from you,

A. Buyer

This letter does a few things to get the dealers' attention:

In other words, you're removing variables from the negotiation, and making it easier to get to yes. In some sense, the Internet can be used to reverse the traditional equation: the dealer applies pressure to get you to agree to his demands on a timeframe of his choosing. Instead, you're setting the timeframe, and the price, and pressuring the dealer into agreeing to your terms.

Probably the most significant variable in any car deal is the value of your trade-in. I have absolutely no advice on how to negotiate this, because I never trade in my cars. I'd be interested in hearing from alert readers on this topic, though.

You're giving them your phone number because that's how you're going to let them close the deal. You shouldn't expect a bid by email: I've seen them, but many dealers don't like to give them because they (reasonably) assume you'll turn around and use them to bargain someone else down. If you've done your homework, you should be able to get to a deal within 2 or 3 short phone calls. The main thing you want to nail down on that call is what the tax and transfer fees are going to be, exactly, so that you're not ambushed by the Finance guy during the actual closing.

How many dealers should you contact? Well, how far you're willing to drive to pick up your car is up to you, but obviously, the farther you're willing to go, the more likely someone is going to meet your price. I arbitrarily picked 150 miles as my limit, and I found someone within 40 that met my price.

A variant of this tactic is to not name a price, but to ask the dealer for their best price, and indicate that you'll buy from the dealer with the lowest bid. Some people report success with this method. From my perspective, it just means having to have longer conversations with car dealers, which is something I attach a pretty high monetary cost to.

Does It Work?

Acura TSXWell, it worked for me. The phenomenon that's happened over the past few years is that most dealerships have ended up with a salesman - typically just one - who works mainly on Internet sales. This is the guy you want to be talking to, because he gets compensated primarily on volume rather than on commission. I can tell you that when I decided to buy an Acura TSX, I made the mistake of talking price with one dealer in person. They wasted 45 minutes of my time trying to tell me that they couldn't possibly come within $2,000 of the Edmunds TMV price of the car. The next day, I had 3 dealers from around the state calling me up practically fighting each other to accept my offer.

Why would the dealership I visited be so stupid? I have a few theories. First, they assume that they have an inside line because you are already in their lair. You visited that dealer because they're conveniently located to you, and that convenience is worth a premium. Second, I think that there's a specific personality disorder you need to be a car salesman, and there's a level of narcissism that simply doesn't want to be outnegotiated. When you make a firm offer by email, those complexes and emotions just don't come into play in any real way. It's a purely financial decision. Since you did your homework, you already know that you're making an offer that is close to what other dealers have accepted, so the odds are on your side.

If you're looking for a car, I hope this little essay is of some help. Good luck in your search. Kill a dinosaur for me.

Teaching the Less Important Lesson

2009-05-29 · by psu

Today over at The Online Photographer Mike Johnston wrote a post suggesting that spending a year using nothing but a Leica and shooting nothing but black and white film could teach you a lot. I think he's right about one thing. It would teach you a lot, but about what? I think Johnston's claim was that the exercise would teach you a lot about photography. I think it would teach you a lot about shooting black and white film with a Leica. Which is all well and good, but a different thing than learning about photography.

My initial point of attack on this subject was to be dismissive. I wrote a comment that started:

I am firmly in the camp that the spirit of the exercise matters more than the tool.

I went through a phase with rangefinder cameras starting with the Konica Hexar (better than a Leica in many ways) and the Hexar RF and even the fabulous Mamiya 6. While none of these is the Leica itself, the last two are fairly close in terms of how they handle. One just has a tiny motor drive and the other shoots big pieces of film instead of small ones.

What I learned from that whole experience is that I was better off with my Nikon and a single lens.

And so on. The problem with this kind of argument is that you can't really accuse someone of irrational nostalgia and expect him to either listen to your point or be grateful that you said anything. Irrational nostalgia does that to people.

As I was about to hit the post button, I was called away to perform some kind of household task, and while this was going on I realized that my real objection to this whole exercise was not about using the Leica. What's really wrong here is that the whole task is about learning technique rather than photography.

Take his points one by one. The Leica is quiet, so ... so what? So you can point the thing at someone's face and they don't hear the shutter? They still see you pointing it at their face. The Leica is simple. You set three things and shoot. Meh. You can use my Nikon that way too. You should know how to use your camera anyway. Shooting black and white film will "force" you to think about light and form. This is in fact true, but it's still about technique rather than photography. The darkroom work will teach you about exposure, development and printing. Technique, technique, technique.

Don't think that I don't think these things are important. I took three years of black and white photography classes because I think they are important. Everyone should know how to do these things. But I think that the whole exercise misses the point because it's only concentrating on the easy part of photography. Everything he talks about is easily mastered if you spend enough time practicing and learning the right lessons from your practicing.

Here is what the year with the Leica will not teach you:

  1. What do I like to take pictures of?

  2. What's the right tool for the sorts of pictures I want to take?

  3. How do I take pictures that communicate the emotional attachment I have with the subject to the viewer?

Here is what the year with the Leica will teach you:

  1. Having answered questions 1, 2, and 3 above, how do I use black and white film to capture the picture I want in the Leica and then print it in my chemical darkroom while breathing fumes that will kill me?

and maybe

  1. Just what is it that makes people so nuts for Leicas? Is it that you have to load the film from the bottom of the fucking camera?

So, if answers to the last two questions are what you yearn for, by all means go pick up that M6 on Ebay and come to my house and buy my darkroom. Mike's exercise will serve you well.

But, if what you really want to learn is how to be a photographer, then I think what you should do is learn to use your camera very well and then figure out what kinds of pictures you like to take and how to capture them in the most effective way possible. The Leica will be no better at teaching you that than a cheap Canon point and shoot. More importantly, the Leica won't really take pictures that are any better than any other camera. It's the guy holding the camera that does that, not the machine.

One of the things that I tried to do a lot in my rangefinder phase was to get better at people pictures. I do this every time I have a new toy to play with. After years of trying without much success I finally realized that I am no good at taking people pictures, and no camera or lighting technique or other magic equipment will fix this. I am not good at taking pictures of people because it's not in my nature to connect with them in the way you need to to take good pictures. I'm just not that interested. I am an antisocial bastard. This is why I'll never be a wedding photographer, unlike this guy.

Anyway, what I would do is this:

Pick any camera you want and any single lens. Shoot in black and white for a year. Take all kinds of pictures of all kinds of things. Edit fiercely. Show your best pictures to someone who will tear them apart ruthlessly. Learn what you like to look at and what looks good when you shoot it. The answers here are different for everyone. The goal is to find the ones that work for you.

If it were me, I'd do it with either an old Nikon or maybe the Panasonic LX-3 point and shoot, but with the lens stuck on wide. That thing is great.

Wallace and Gromit

2009-06-08 · by peterb

Telltale has done it again.

By "it", of course, I mean "find a humorous property and turn it into a point-and-click adventure game," and not necessarily "rolling around naked in fat sacks of cash," although frankly I'm pretty sure they're doing that as well.

Their latest victory, as they trundle across the face of PC gaming like Germany crossing Belgium, is Wallace and Gromit's Grand Adventure, a series of 4 games for Windows PCs and the Xbox 360. The first episode, Fright of the Bumblebees, does a good job of successfully transplanting the feel of a Wallace and Gromit movie to your computer screen.

The plot — and the humor — is spot on. At various times in the game you control either Wallace or Gromit, and the sorts of puzzles you're called upon to solve could be lifted straight out of a short. The game can be configured to offer hints more or less frequently, according to your taste, so you're only as stuck on a given puzzle as you want to be.

Not everything is wine and roses. Telltale tweaks the user interface to their games with each release. This time around, it didn't go so well. Perhaps in an effort to maintain the "cinematic" feel of the Wallace and Gromit shorts, many of the screens have fixed camera angles that are uncomfortably tight. Coupled to this is a new control scheme where you move using the W-A-S-D keys, using the mouse mostly to manipulate your inventory. At least in the first game of the series, discovering "hot spots" is a matter of walking near an object and hoping your character decides to look at the right thing. If you ever played Lucasarts' brilliant-yet-frustrating Grim Fandango you know the sort of scheme I'm talking about. This was a source of some frustration to me. It did, I should say, feel more natural on the Xbox Live version of the game.

Most of this frustration is front-loaded, and by the time you reach the second act of the game you'll have thoroughly adapted. My only other complaint, of course, is that there isn't a Mac OS X version of the game. But hope springs eternal.

Apart from this, it looks like once again Telltale has a hit on their hands. I can't wait for this summer's release of Monkey Island. It's as if someone formed a company whose entire purpose in life was just to make me happy.

The Illustrated Pot Sticker

2009-06-09 · by psu

We had folks over for one of our periodic Chinese dumpling parties. The food came out particularly well this time, and I managed to use my nifty Panasonic LX-3 to take pictures of some parts of the process. So here is an updated and hopefully slightly more useful version of the reference recipe.

It's best to have a good system for this. So I've broken the recipe up into stages.

Dough, Stage 1

  1. Start with 2-3 cups of flour and one cup of cold water.

  2. You must use crappy bleached bad for you Pillsbury all purpose flour. The fancy-ass organic whole wheat stuff will make you crappy dough. Trust me.

  3. Put most of the flour in a bowl. Add 3/4ths of the water but not all and stir it around with chopsticks.

  4. If the flour does not soak up all the water, add flour. If it is too dry, add water. Stir some more, check again. Turn the mixture out on to a board and knead it until it holds together. Don't worry about making the ball smooth.

Obviously I can't tell you how to tell when the dough is right. That is what you need my mom for. But, what you are after is a dough that is pretty stiff, but soft enough to still be workable. It should take some work to poke it with your finger, but it should eventually bounce back. And, there should be enough moisture in the dough to hold it together. The rest time in the fridge will relax the dough and even out the wet, making the dough softer when you finally work with it.

Having had more experience with this, I think it might work better to measure the flour by weight to try and get a more consistent behavior. But we have not experimented with this yet.

  1. Put the ball into a ziploc bag and stick it in the fridge for a few hours.

  2. Pull the ball out of the fridge. The dough should be stiff but flexible. Knead it around a bit, adding flour if it is sticky. Put it back in the fridge for a few more hours.

Unfortunately, I didn't get any photos of making the dough. Make two balls to use up the filling recipe below.

Filling, Stage 1

Start with about a pound of ground pork. Now chop up one bunch of scallions, mostly the tops. You do this by first slicing them the long way, then collecting up the pieces and chopping them the short way. You want it to be about this size:

P1010790

Now chop up some ginger the same way. Make about a half a cup of it. You won't use all of it, but it's good to have extra just in case. You want the ginger to be about the same size:

P1010791

Finally, do the same for a head of Napa cabbage. You can use a food processor to finish to job if you want.

P1010793

Salt the cabbage and twist it in cheese cloth to squeeze the juice out of it. You want the cabbage to be as dry as you can make it. Save the juice in a bowl.

Now collect all your ingredients together:

P1010795

Put the pork and a bowl. Add a pinch of salt and some ground pepper. Then add about a tablespoon of soy sauce. Mix this together along with a couple of handfuls of the scallion and as much ginger as you can stand. I used to put in sesame oil at this point too, but decided that there was no point in that. Mix the meat and veggies together with a fork or two chopsticks until you have broken the meat down a bit, like this:

P1010798

I usually use the smell and look of the meat mixture to figure out how to adjust the ingredients. After the initial pass I usually add a bit more soy and some more scallion.

Now set this side and start to get the dough ready for filling.

Dough, Stage 2

Get the dough out of the fridge about an hour before you start to work in earnest. Cut the ball into three pieces and roll each out into a long string about 1/4 inch in diameter. Then pull pieces of dough off this string by hand. Each piece should be maybe 1/2 an inch long. You can use a dough blade or a knife for this, but after you get good at it the pulling method is easier. If the dough is right the pieces should come off with a loud snap. Now squish them into small rounds with the heel of your hand, so they look like this:

P1010807

Each round should be around a half inch to an inch across. Do one "rope" at a time. About the time the first rope is done, finish the last stage of making the filling.

Filling, Stage 2

Now finish the filling by adding the cabbage. You want to add the cabbage last and then assemble immediately. The reason you want to do this is if you add the cabbage too soon and then let the meat sit, it will fall apart later. So, for one pound of pork add about 2 to 3 cups of the chopped cabbage from before depending on how much you like. Mix it into the meat. Then add a few tablespoons of cabbage juice. You want to get the filling to be a moist paste, but not too wet. So add the juice slowly until you get a feel for when the filling is right. It should look like this:

P1010805

Now you are ready for assembly.

Assembly Line

First, you have to roll the skin out. Take one of the little rounds you had before and a small rolling pin. The best kind of rolling pin is made by cutting a broomstick-sized dowel into a pin about 6 inches long.

Get a lot of flour on the dough, the pin, the board, and your hands. Roll the dough from the edge into the middle. Then turn it 30 degrees, then roll it again, then turn, repeating until you've spun it round once or twice. You want to roll it about as thin as those frozen wonton skins. Those are a good reference, so buy some, but don't use them for dumplings, or I'll have to beat you. They suck.

The goal is to have the middle of the skin be a bit thicker than the sides, so it can support the filling. Like this (thanks to The Cookworm for the photo):

DSC_3887001

Perfect roundness and uniformity of size is not important. The guy filling the skin can fix that in post.

Assuming you are right handed, here is how you fold the dumplings: take one of the rolled out skins and hold it in the palm of your left hand face up. Put a small amount of filling in the middle. Now with your right hand, pick up the skin in the "middle" and fold it over the filling and pinch it together on the other side. Then turn the thing over to the left, pinch the left ends together, and work your way back to the middle. Then do the same thing from the right end. When you start at this, you usually end up with something that looks like a ravioli. But, with practice, you'll get stuff that looks more like a pot sticker and can "stand up".

When my mom makes these, she can supply three or four fillers with enough skins to keep busy. You will be slower (until about 40 years from now). So balance the number of rollers and fillers according to the talent you have. At our get togethers I can usually fold fast enough to keep up with 3 or 4 of the "guests" who we have enslaved.

When you get one filled and folded, it should look like this:

P1010811

Or, if my mom has made you a perfectly sized skin:

psu_20080101-00071

Take the filled dumplings and put them on a tray. I like to use sheet pans with floured wax paper. Don't let them sit around too long before cooking. An hour or two at most. Anything you don't cook should be frozen on the trays, then put into freezer bags.

Cooking

To make the boiled dumplings, fill a large pot with water. Bring to a boil. Drop the dumplings in one by one. Cook until they float, then a couple of minutes past or until you are sure the pork is cooked through.

Pot stickers are trickier, but more fun, to make. Get a non-stick frying pan on medium heat. Add some oil and lay out the dumplings like this:

psu_20080101-00074

Mix 1/4 cup water with 2 dashes of vinegar and pour it into the pan. You want enough liquid to steam the tops of the dumplings for a bit, but not so much that they cook in it. If the liquid doesn't dry out, you won't get crunchy bottoms.

Cover and cook about 10 minutes. With practice you'll figure out how long to cook them to get the nice burnt bottom that gives the dish its name.

If you get really good you can turn them out on to the serving platter in one piece:

psu_20080101-00076

People love that sort of flourish.

Pot stickers are great fun, but the truth is that the boiled ones are better. You get the soft chewy "pasta" followed the meaty filling followed by the crunch of the vegetables followed by the yummy cooking juices. There's nothing like it.

Serve these with soy sauce, vinegar, sesame oil and hot sauce. Your guests can mix these however they want for dipping. Or you can eat the things plain.

Male Pattern Dorkness

2009-06-11 · by psu

If I have any hobby that does not involve the gratuitous exchange of money for material goods, it is the observation of the dork in his natural habitat. It's not just that I was educated by dorks at a school that was mostly dorky. Or that I work with dorks in an industry whose products are primarily concerned with parting dorks from their dork cash. The fact is that even without these advantages, I spend all 24 hours of every day in the head of a dork (mine), so there is nothing I know better than what drives the dork psychology.

I have always suspected that there are common bonds that hold all the dorks of the world together. I think this is especially true with respect to how the male dork becomes emotionally invested in the objects of his interest and affection. Until now we never had the ability to gather enough data about this. Information about various male enthusiasms were inconveniently scattered among thousands of small scale publications or local clubs. Clubs which met in the less desirable parts of town at the end of dark alleyways and behind doors that could barely contain the stink. It was a lot of work to even find these places, much less endure actual social contact to observe the interactions of the club members.

Like many things, the Internet has changed all of this. Over the last decade or so, our capacity to observe the dork has increased a thousand-fold as the Internet has brought the desires and concerns of millions of dorks into sharp focus. Thus, on the blogs, in the audio podcasts (no video please) and most of all in the forums, we can observe the dork from the relative safety of our living rooms, free from the fear of physical contact.

Thus, I have collected my data, and thus I can present the grand (yet obvious) conclusion that all male enthusiasts basically have the same set of behaviors and emotional responses to the subject of their desires. These behaviors are nearly universal and independent of the actual area of interest and they cut across all socioeconomic boundaries. I have a few humble examples.

Arbitrary Technical Stratification

In the dork's world there are only two kinds of products, those that are good and those that suck. Products that make the cut are spoken of in hushed and respectful tones. Products that suck are binned into categories and given various derogatory names. In general the distinction between the good and the bad is the thinnest and most arbitrary set of technical distinctions.

Examples: Good games are "hard core" or "deep" and have "meaningful moral choices". Bad games are "kiddie", "shallow", "casual minigames" or worst of all: just a tech demo.

Good cameras are serious instruments that will help you capture excellent images (always images, never pictures). Bad cameras are always "too plasticky" and missing some critical feature that you will only use twice, like mirror lockup. Also, you have to carry a 10lb tripod anywhere or you are just a loser.

Good cars are fast, handle well and are fun to drive. Bad cars are "appliances" or a tinny "penalty box" with no speed, "numb" steering, and lots of useless features, like a radio.

You could do this forever.

Innovative Conservatism

Dorks demand innovation. I doubt that there is a dork complaint more universal than "they just don't make anything new anymore." But when "they" do make something new, the people who hate it most are usually the enthusiasts. What enthusiasts really want is for the new stuff to be just like the old stuff, but different. The most common complaint here takes the form "all they had to do was take X and do Y, but instead they did the whole thing wrong."

Examples: Zelda: Wind Waker was a "kiddie cartoon" instead of just like the N64 Zelda with higher resolution textures and a teenage Link.

The Chris Bangle BMWs were wildly popular with consumers and widely copied by the rest of the industry. Enthusiasts didn't see why BMW couldn't have just tweaked the existing styling, which was nearly perfect already. The Truth About Cars has the largest collection of complaints like this yet collected on the Internet, as far as I can tell.

Crippling Nostalgia

A twist on the previous syndrome, nostalgia is a powerful force that colors how the enthusiast evaluates every new product. It is generally the case that every new product will be evaluated against a platonic ideal that was put in place by whatever the dork was lusting after when he was 14. In video games, this accounts for the inordinate amount of praise that is lavished on the Bioware RPGs for the PC, or the original Final Fantasy games, or Chrono-Trigger.

In cameras, no camera is ever as good as that Leica you wanted, or the manual Nikon your dad had. Although really, any digital point and shoot is probably better for most people.

In stereo equipment, it's turntables and tubes.

In bicycles, it's steel frames and side-pull brakes.

And of course in cars there are the old Volvos, anything with real wheel drive, and my personal favorite the old Honda Civic Hatchbacks.

Nostalgia in an of itself is understandable and natural. But the enthusiast tends to elevate his nostalgic favorites above all of what the modern world has to offer. But the truth is that the older stuff wasn't that good. Not even back then.

Obsession with Control

All I need to illustrate this one is a series of quotes.

"I'll never buy any game that doesn't use a mouse and keyboard."

"I'll never buy a car that doesn't have a manual transmission. I hate slushboxes."

"That camera is useless because it doesn't have a manual mode."

"I can't use any operating system that doesn't let me completely control everything that I install or manage. And it has to be totally flexible too."

So, you know what I mean now, right?

The Oppression of the Masses

This one is short and sweet. The "mass market" are a bunch of know-nothing drones who will buy whatever crap is foisted upon them by the forces of mediocrity. The enthusiast "knows better", and is more discerning and generally more intelligent. He wouldn't be caught dead in some plasticky appliance that takes all his fun and control away and thus doesn't let him capture the complete and mature experience. Or something. In any case, all enthusiasts are beaten down and oppressed by the man whose only goal is commerce. Instead, the industry should go broke by catering to a tiny niche of dorks instead. That's always a winning strategy, in the mind of the enthusiast anyway.

Latent Object Hysteria

Finally we come back to an observation that I made with almost my very first post on this great web site. It is universally true that the next thing will always be the best thing ever.

I still think the video game people do this best. Just today I was listening to the podcast over at Gamers With Jobs when one of the speakers launched into a multi-minute drooling and gasping tirade about how a few upcoming games from Bioware were going to be so good that it would be as if Jesus himself came back to earth to shepherd everyone up to video game nirvana. I found this idea curious, especially because Bioware really hasn't done anything that good since KOTOR. And really, it's not clear to me that the stuff before KOTOR was that good either. No doubt I'm setting myself up for assault and battery here.

Nonetheless, no one loves the unreleased product more than than enthusiast. And, no one is more disappointed with the released product than, you guessed it, the enthusiast. This is the inevitable way of the world. When you think about it, how else could the dorks keep up this level of the energy and interest? The desire has to come from somewhere. It comes from the capacity that all of us have to want to replicate that which can't be repeated: that first, perfect experience with whatever it was that got us hooked for life. We keep looking anyway, even if it makes us act like dorks.

Exercise for the Reader

At this point you should be able to figure out which of the above behaviors I have indulged in. Hint: this is an easy question.

More than Camera Enough

2009-06-18 · by psu

Someone finally did it, and I should have known it would be Olympus. Back in 1972, Olympus shook up the 35mm SLR world by introducing the OM-1. Here was an SLR camera that was not as big as a brick. It was small and cute, and came with small and cute lenses. Of course, Olympus has always tried to make small and cute things. The Pen cameras from the 60s, the OM cameras in the 70s and the Stylus point and shoots in the last glory days of 35mm film.

In the digital world they had yet to recapture this magic, until now. Now Olympus stands alone as the first major camera line to finally realize that there are people out there who want a small camera with a decent sensor. They have given us the EP-1, a digital reincarnation of the Pen half frame cameras of yore. And of course, all the camera people can do is whine.

Ok. I have to give some of them credit for seeing what is great about this machine. The Online Photographer ran two good pieces about it, both of which pointed out all the things to like:

  1. It's small. About Canon G10 sized.

  2. It has the same sensor and imaging pipeline as the Olympus DSLR cameras. You can shoot fast frame to frame and you can shoot four RAW frames per second for ten shots. That's all anyone who does not work for Sports Illustrated will ever need.

  3. It will come with a great set of small lenses, so you don't have to carry a 2lb camera body and a collection of 1.5lb zoom lenses on your next trip.

  4. Real hot shoe. Real flash system.

And confronted with this, how do people react? The smart ones see a wonderful gift handed to them from the camera industry gods. A niche camera to satisfy an enthusiast niche. The real camera dorks can only say:

It does not have an optical viewfinder, therefore it is unusable.

Never mind that in the entire history of the camera universe there have only ever been five non-SLR cameras with decent optical viewfinders (see note below). Or that fitting a viewfinder on the machine would make it too big. Or that the entire point of this new 4/3rds form factor is that the camera has no mirror box so there is no way to actually provide an optical viewfinder.

Finally, medium format and large format cameras have come without eye level viewfinders for centuries and no one ever had trouble composing pictures on those primitive machines.

Mike Johnston has also argued these points better than I can, so I'll quit now.

Olympus did not fit it with a 10-35/1.4 zoom lens, making it useless in low light.

Never mind that the entire modern world has been happily shooting with the 2.8 wide angle zoom lenses for the last 15 years or so. Or that the fact that you can push sensors to ISO 1600 obviates much of the need for large aperture lenses. Or the fact that a large aperture zoom (or prime) would be huge and completely defeat the purpose of the entire machine.

Finally, there are more minor pieces of whining about how the AF is not phase detect (again, no mirror box) or how the LCD is second rate, or how it doesn't come in black.

So, to summarize, what the real camera dork wants is a black camera with the viewfinder of an EOS-1Ds, a zoom lens the size of the Nikon 14-24/2.8, a full frame 35mm sensor, and a body the size of a Leica M6. That shouldn't be hard, what do these camera engineers do all day anyway?

I'm here to say, ignore all of this. When this camera comes out you should go and try it for yourself. It's not often that a company takes a risk listening to the enthusiast market the way Olympus has with this camera. They should be paid back for it. We should all be in the Amazon pre-order queue. Otherwise, we're all just dorkier than thou.

Notes

The five optical viewfinder cameras that are decent are:

  1. Leica M.

  2. Those Canonet things from the 70s.

  3. Konica Hexar AF.

  4. Konica Hexar RF.

  5. The Cosina RF cameras.

If I forgot your favorite viewfinder camera, accept my apologies. You were probably wrong about it anyway. I'm out of here.

Premises Aren't Books

2009-06-19 · by peterb

The other week I made a mistake and read some things on the Internet. In particular, I was sucked in to following a contretemps (read: "flamewar") with the nickname of "Racefail 2.0". The premise of the flamewar is that a writer, Patricia Wrede, wrote a book called The Thirteenth Child which was an exemplar of racist writing. The book takes place in a 19th century-America ("Columbia") where magic is real, where megafauna roam the plains, and where the First Peoples never crossed the land bridge from Asia. The claim of racism, specifically, is that Wrede's writing is an eliminationist fantasy which has erased the First Peoples from the face of the planet.

Something bothered me about this argument, but I wasn't really following it very closely, and I hadn't read the book, so I tossed off some sarcastic one-liners on Twitter about it (something along the lines of "When you've written as many books as Lois McMaster Bujold, you get to complain about this." Bujold had gotten involved in the discussion, and was tarred and feathered by some of the participants along with Wrede). My friends Nat and Laura rightly called me on this as wrong-headed, as appeal to authority doesn't settle the issue. I resolved to not comment on the issue again until I'd read the book.

I've read the book now. And now I know what was bothering me about the discussion: it was led, as near as I can tell, by people who were offended by the premise of The Thirteenth Child, rather than by the book. But premises aren't books.

I have a sense, but no actual proof, that this willingness to confuse a premise with a book is more common among genre fans. Certainly I have trouble imagining a serious literary critic pillorying (or, for that matter, lauding!) a book without at least trying to read it: that would be a career-ending move. But looking at what I take to be the genesis of the flamewar I see a disturbing pattern: those (in this thread, who I noticed) who scream loudest and most stridently that Wrede is "erasing native Americans" also say things like "I haven't read the book, nor will I". One is free to experience a work or not at one's pleasure, of course. I myself won't watch any of Lars von Trier's films, without even bothering to find out what the premise is. But that very decision makes (or should make) my opinions on his films of limited value.

With regards to The Thirteenth Child I have read the book, and throughout it I see Wrede dealing fairly sensitively, and subtly, with a variety of racial and gender issues. No, the Native Americans and First Peoples are not present, but Wrede drops a number of hints as to where their culture is. Her protagonist, a young girl named Eff, is fairly deeply buried inside a culture that is itself patriarchal and racist, and so does not call out injustice in her own voice stridently, but Wrede still manages to get the point across that this is a racist and sexist society. That, to me, tells me that this issue was on her mind, and she was trying to deal with it as much as her plot and character decisions would allow.

Judging a book by its summary is a dangerous business. It's perfectly accurate, from a plot perspective, to describe Martin Amis' Time's Arrow as a reverie, written by a Christian, in which Auschwitz is presented as a facility for resurrecting Jews. Likewise, Johnathan Littell's The Kindly Ones could be described as an apologia for every Nazi indicted at Nuremberg. Both of these descriptions fail to accurately capture what you experience when you actually read the books, instead of the blurbs on the back of the covers.

I am not implying here that all of Wrede's critics are book-burning zealots; there's a lot to criticize in The Thirteenth Child. Many of the characters are flat and somewhat interchangable, the protagonist isn't as well-developed as she should be, and there's too much telling and not enough showing. There are also some reviews by people who actually read the book who view the racial issues as more problematic than I do. My central — and perhaps only — point here is that describing a book as racist without having read it is, in my mind, a problematic act in and of itself.

Wine, Donuts, and Sex

2009-06-30 · by peterb

Why won't I be buying The Sims 3? Because, although I sometimes do act like a dog who returns to his vomit, I have finally come to peace with the fact that I no longer have any interest in playing games that require as much effort as my job. So, sorry, no Sims 3 for me.

This was driven home to me recently when I foolishly started re-playing Animal Crossing after a hiatus of a few months. I enjoyed putting the town back together and "improving" it for a few days. Then, I took a vacation. And when I came back, the prospect of having to do it all over again because I wasn't playing on the game's preferred schedule made me angry.

This feeling of spite has been compounded by the fact that I've been playing (and buying) tons of iPhone games recently, and then also bought a Windows game for $30.

Here's the difference between most good iPhone games and the PC game you last bought:

This vibe, in other words, was summed up on a forum site by a game developer complaining about PC games that took too long to become interesting: "[Games that take an hour before the fun starts] have to compete with wine, donuts and sex which all provide fun from the very beginning."

Damn straight.

Review: Tales of Monkey Island

2009-07-07 · by peterb

He sails the seas of the Caribbean like he was born on a schooner. He romances beautiful women, scandalizing those in the Governor's Mansion. Every time he makes port, it seems that a piratey bar brawl starts. And he is locked in a seemingly endless conflict of swordplay and sorcery against an undead ghost pirate.

What's that? Captain Jack Sparrow, you say? Sorry, mate, never heard of him. I'm talking about the mightiest pirate of them all, Guybrush Threepwood!

Guybrush ThreepwoodThe Monkey Island games, to me, define an era in computer games. The original game, The Secret of Monkey Island, was released by LucasArts in 1990, and it was followed by three sequels of varying quality (Monkey Island 2, in particular, is arguably the best-written graphic adventure game of its era). When the 1990s ended, the geniuses who run computer game publishers decided that no one wanted to play so-called graphical adventures any longer. Several years followed, with adventure game fans drifting in a Sargasso Sea of first person shooters, only occasionally interrupted by a worthy independent effort.

This changed in 2006, when Telltale Games began releasing episodic graphic adventures based on somewhat obscure intellectual properties with cult followings. Sam and Max. Homestar Runner. I've never read Telltale's business plan or operations handbook, but I'm reasonably certain it contains a chapter instructing its designers to fly to Pittsburgh and to follow me around until they find out the sorts of things I like, and then to make games based on those properties.

Fortunately for all of you, sometime in 2005, someone at Telltale must have been reading this weblog! Because, really, isn't it all about the world revolving around me?

Telltale's latest release, for which I hope they will all spend many, many days rolling around naked in huge piles of money, is an episodic series of adventure games called Tales of Monkey Island. The first episode, Launch of the Screaming Narwhal, is available now. I played and finished it last week, and wanted to share my impressions with you.

One of the themes on this weblog recently has been the rise of iPhone games as competitors for our marginal dollars. As far as I'm concerned, in the current Windows market, Telltale might be the only publisher making games that I'll buy sight unseen. Their games compete by offering a more complete experience that is more accessible to more players, over a longer period of time, than your standard Windows game. The first episode of Monkey Island lives up to Telltale's reputation, and anyone who isn't dead should buy it.

LeChuckThe game begins (of course) with wannabe mighty pirate Guybrush Threepwood trying to save his wife, Governor Elaine Marley, from the clutches of the evil ghost pirate LeChuck. The early moments of the game act as a somewhat subtle tutorial, and in short order Guybrush will find himself in a sticky situation from which only you, through the careful use of your wits, can extricate him.

Each new Telltale release has a slightly different user interface. I found the UIs of Sam and Max and Strong Bad to be straightforward and simple, but that may be playing to my strengths as a longtime gamer. Their most recent release, the Wallace and Gromit games, I found somewhat frustrating, as I mentioned in my recent review. Monkey Island lives somewhere between the two extremes. You still use the keyboard to walk your character around (or, alternatively, use a slightly odd "click and drag" scheme), but since the game doesn't try to maintain the "cinematic" feel of Wallace, you're not as hamstrung by the need to maneuver tightly in small spaces. And, thank the gods, you can simply click on items to interact with them.

The puzzles are good. More than that, they're clever. Telltale games tend to be a bit easier than the games of yore, but the puzzle design is spot-on here. Specifically, the biggest and best puzzles in the game can't be solved just through random exploration and clicking. When you solve them, you don't just feel the satisfaction of advancing the plot: you feel smart. And even the smaller puzzles make intuitive sense. The writing is perhaps not quite as unremittingly clever as in Monkey Island 2, but I'm willing to stand up in public and say that the actual puzzles are better than in any of those in the LucasArts games.

The writing is of a piece with the other Telltale games: the jokes are thick, the puns head-slappingly painful, and the game rewards you for trying the ridiculous. There are, as near as I can tell, no dead-ends or events which would force you to reload, so the game is appropriate for beginners (note to the rest of the industry: I hope you're taking notes, so that when you declare Chapter 11 and you are sitting in a puddle of your own urine on Skid Row while the Telltale guys are driving past you in diamond cars with platinum wheels, you understand why it ended up that way.)

My only negative comment about the game is the one I have made about most of the Telltale games: there's no Mac OS X version, and there should be. (For that matter, Telltale, why haven't you ported any of your games to the iPhone yet? It would be like printing money.)

Tales of Monkey Island: Launch of the Screaming Narwhal, by Telltale Games for Windows. $34.95 for 5 episodes. A free demo of the game is available here. Disclosure: Telltale graciously provided Tea Leaves with a review copy of the game. But we're going to buy it anyway.

When All Is Said and Done

2009-07-13 · by psu

I can officially stop reading Internet forums about PC games, because I found a single thread that contains every single line of thought ever covered in any post in any forum anywhere. Well, at least all the stupid ones.

Here you go: http://www.quartertothree.com/game-talk/showthread.php?t=53606.

All in five short pages we have:

  1. PC gaming is byzantine and sucky! I give up!

  2. If you can't build your own PC from bare silicon you are a brainless loozer who doesn't deserve to play games!

  3. Shooters can only be played with a mouse and keyboard/Not true!/Is so!/U R Gay

  4. The Mac "experience" is worth the extra money.

  5. Macs are too expensive, I can build my own Mac from parts for 1/3rd the cost and not have it work right. But that's OK because my buddy down the street can fix it for me just for the love of tinkering. And MacOS isn't any good anyway.

  6. Vista rules/No Vista sucks/No Vista rules!

  7. Make sure you get an upgradeable Mac.

  8. But but, think of the high resolution graphics you'll be giving up!

  9. This speaks for itself.

  10. BTW, this sounds like a simple problem to fix, try swapping some hardware in and out.

So anyway, enjoy.

Paris 66

2009-07-27 · by peterb

Paris 66 is a nice alternative in a town which has had a shortage of crêperies. Located in Pittsburgh's East Liberty district, near Kelly's Bar, they have a nice variety of both savory and sweet crêpes, along with many other choices including sandwiches, soups, and salads. I enjoyed my carrot soup, and my co-diners' sandwiches and salads all looked great. The prices are reasonable, ranging from $4 for simple sweet crêpes, up to around $9 for some of the more elaborate savory creations.

Paris 66I liked the atmosphere much more than the somewhat hectic vibe of Crêpes Parisienne. It does get crowded, so time your visit appropriately.

The crêpes themselves are made with buckwheat flour. I happen to love buckwheat, but if you're not a fan I could see this being an issue.

There's outdoor seating available out back.

One more note: I'm basing this on one visit to the place. I have a couple of friends who have had "service issues" with Paris 66 that seem to have resulted in them souring on the place. That didn't happen to us, but if you have anything to say about it, please sound off in the comment thread.

Pictures of Paris

2009-07-28 · by psu

I was standing behind the Gare St. Lazare last week looking around at the morning light in Paris. We were taking the train to Vernon to go to Giverny, where Monet had his house and famous gardens. There was a lot of construction around the train station, but I didn't see anyone jumping over puddles. Even if I had, I probably would not have grabbed a picture of it.

I have long thought that the famous Cartier-Bresson photograph of the man jumping into a puddle behind the train station has caused more people more confusion over the years than any single image. There is a romantic notion that Cartier-Bresson stood there, perhaps for hours, waiting for exactly the right instant to stick his camera out and hit the button. But without knowing the whole story, I bet he was just walking by and saw something interesting. Maybe a glint of light, or a reflection in the water. Then he stuck his camera out and took a few frames. Then the man jumped at the right time, and history was made. It's true that he captured the "decisive moment", but I think it's equally true that the decisive moment found him just as he was hitting the button anyway. This sort of thing tends to happen when you are at ease and in sync with your subject matter.

I thought about this over my coffee because here, in Paris, on my tenth trip to the city over the last twenty years, I had not been feeling photographically in sync. This was unusual for me in this location, where I have probably taken more pictures than anywhere else. Usually I walk around the city for a day or two and all the familiar patterns of light and street and architecture fall into place and there are pictures everywhere. Maybe we weren't walking around enough. Maybe it was because we were staying in a different part of the city this trip. Maybe it was because we went in the summer instead of the spring. Who can say. I just wasn't feeling it. I looked around and all I saw were things I had seen before. I wasn't shooting anything, and because I wasn't shooting anything, I was not "exercising" the shooting parts of my brain.

I did fool around with some lame ideas at the Musee D'Orsay, trying to create a visual play on words while looking some of the favorite Monets. But, this wasn't great.

But then we went to Giverny and I perked up. Because really, when you are looking at this, how can you not.

psu_20090724-03198

Paradoxically, because the weather was overcast with occasional rain, it was perfect for taking pictures in a garden. The overcast sky brings with it low contrast light that does not destroy the subtle details in the flowers. Also, for some reason wet green is much better than dry green. In any case, I finally found something to latch on to and start thinking more photographically. There were wide shots, small details, and interesting textures. I ran enough frames to drain the pathetic battery in the D200, and even if most of them were just generic "pretty" scenes, the exercise at least got me seeing things again.

Back in Paris, everything looked better.

psu_20090724-03376

That magic light that dances over all of the grand architecture in the city was finally registering in my photographic consciousness. People even started showing up in just the right part of the frame for me while I was looking at something else.

Paris street, dinner time.

Over the last two days of the trip, I took more favorite pictures than in the first six combined. And it's not just because I burned 500 frames at the Tour de France. In the end, as always, I was sorry to leave the city again. But at least on the morning that we left I was treated to a perfect sunrise shining through a perfect blue sky, and was able to grab one last shot.

last morning in Paris

To me this was a sure sign that I'd be back and looking for more.

Paris Shorts

2009-07-29 · by psu

No we don't wear shorts in Paris. Our American in Paris inferiority complex forbids the use of shorts in the city, since even when we bring all our dressiest clothes and wear them, we still look like slobs. So we don't usually go to Paris in the summer because it's too crowded and too hot. But this time was different. We had arranged to meet friends and family, and see the last part of the Tour de France, so what choice did we have but to put up with the heat? We still didn't bring any shorts.

Here are a few short thoughts on the proceedings.

Camera Review

The new camera this time was the Panasonic LX-3 point and shoot. I have already expressed my admiration of this small machine, and it continued to please. I probably only took one third as many frames with this camera as my "real" camera, but the percentage that I picked out as favorites was much higher. In particular, the macro mode is great for taking pictures of food which you can then use to taunt the people back home. Thumbs up.

Cars! Cars! Cars!

Spent a lot of time gawking at cars for no reason. Apparently I have some kind of sickness. Lots of hatchback and wagons for cabs this time. That's great. The Ford Mondeo wagon was the best cab we had. The Fiat 500 is cute. Alpha Romeo makes this two door hatch that is neat looking in red. I can't believe I never noticed how many hatchbacks there were before. I think I saw more Audi A3s and A4 wagons than I've ever seen in my life.

Diet Coke Review

Diet coke in Paris tastes a bit different because they use a different sweetener. It's also always warm because the French do not believe in adequate refrigeration. Remember to grab the coke from the back of the cooler.

Official Retraction

A couple of years ago I wrote a piece defending the surly service at Brasserie Balzar. I'm going to officially retract that article right now, as when we went this time around they were surly and they served us a well-done steak without asking first. It turned out that the fourth in our party didn't like the dish she had, but was perfectly willing to eat a well-done steak. So while they insulted us horribly, it all worked out in the end without needing to argue with them more. Avoid.

You should go to Rotisserie du Beaujolais instead. They can also be surly, but at least they don't serve you crap on purpose. The place also has a nicer view.

Yet More Camera Bag Thoughts

I almost bought a new bag to bring on the trip. Since I was going to the TDF, I was bringing a third lens along, which put a chink in my camera bag routine. So I looked for a bag that could carry three lenses comfortably on a 3 mile hike, be quick to work out of, and maybe take my laptop on the plane as well. I have decided that such a bag does not exist. The possibilities fall into three main categories:

  1. Briefcase bags that can hold a camera kit and a laptop.

  2. A traditional larger shoulder bag.

  3. A camera/laptop backpack.

The problem with the briefcase bags is that the ones that can hold a laptop are too big. And if you actually put a big camera and three lenses in them, you can't carry the result all day anyway. And you are saddled with a camera bag that is too big.

The problem with the traditional shoulder bag is that the ones that are big enough to carry three lenses are too big, and the resulting load is too heavy.

The problem with the backpack is that while it will be comfortable to carry, it will also be as big as your house. In addition, the ones that can hold a laptop assume that you also want to be able to carry a 300mm lens. So they are even bigger than your house. Backpacks are also hard to work out of in tight situations. For example, it would be hard to change lenses while standing on a ledge between two people while you all crane to see the Tour de France go by.

I conclude that the strategy to use is to never need more than two lenses. Just pick two and take pictures that use those two lenses at their maximum advantage.

I would also like to call a moratorium on people saying things like "I like camera bag A because it doesn't look like a camera bag" or "This bag doesn't scream cameras inside." Here's a hint: when you take the camera out of the bag people will have a pretty good idea that it's a camera bag because you took a camera out of it. Get over it.

Anyway, I ended up taking my two lens briefcase shaped bag, and another bag for the laptop. Maybe by the next trip someone will design a smaller camera backpack with a laptop slot in it.

My Crazy Organ Meat Ceiling

We went to Le Violin d'Ingres for lunch. It was fabulous. It is run by the same people that run Cafe Constant, where we had a fabulous lunch on our last trip. Any place that has deep fried foies gras is going to be good. On a perhaps misguided whim, I passed up the roasted lamb, and the beef stew with the lincoln log sized frites, and the pan fried sweetbreads and decided to try one of the last of the classic French peasant dishes that I have not tried yet: Tete De Veau. I'll let you look it up in Google. I didn't hate it, but I didn't love it either. The vanilla souffle with salted caramel sauce made up for it. I'll get the sweetbreads next time.

Airport Review

For this trip we got to take advantage of the new direct flight from Pittsburgh to Paris on Delta. This direct flight lets you avoid visiting everyone's favorite circle of hell on Earth also known as the Philadelphia airport. That's awesome. Go while you can. Who knows how long this will last.

The flight also lands in Terminal 2E of CDG. US Airways always landed in the CDG terminal that was an endless obstacle course of uphill and downhill moving walks, clear tubes at impossible gradients and miles and miles of walking with luggage. In Terminal 2E, you walk off the plane and across a wide and smooth and perfectly flat landscape until suddenly you are at the taxi stand. It's heaven.

Boy I hope this flight sticks around. There is almost no hope that it will though. Really, go while you can.

Live the Nightmare

2009-08-06 · by peterb

Comments

3 comments from the original site, preserved as written.

Brett Douville — 2009-08-06

Just... wow. After ten minutes, I thought, "Richard Dawkins has an amazing store of patience." After twenty, I thought, "Richard Dawkins should be nominated for sainthood."

Chris — 2009-08-06

There are certainly some insane people in this world... this is a fine example of one type of said crazy.

'its in the DNA...'

Benoit — 2009-08-08

I love how she respectfully offers to conduct the interview standing up, in the middle of the office.

I'll Never Get Those Four Hours Back

2009-08-07 · by psu

Having returned from my recent trip to Paris, I ran my pictures through my semi-home grown web gallery generation scripts. No, you don't want this code, trust me. Just use flickr. Anyway, I uploaded the pictures and put the links up for all to see. People were happy. I have generally been happy with my scheme for lo these many years except for the fact that the pictures are always a bit soft after the downscaling, and I don't have a convenient way to sharpen them. Every couple of years I look for a solution and fail, so last night was the time to try again.

The first thing I did was look at the available solutions for turnkey online galleries. I don't really mind running my own stuff, but it does get tedious to:

  1. Export from Lightroom.

  2. Edit 2 text files.

  3. Run make

  4. Run rsync

Every time I want to put up pictures. I have enjoyed the "click and forget" nature of sites like Flickr. I just hate the interfaces that they implement for navigating the albums.

So I looked at Flickr. And it sucks. Smugmug sucks. Zenfolio is almost not bad. PhotoShelter sucks. The Costco photo app is OK for ordering prints, but otherwise sucks. PicasaWeb is probably the best of the lot. It's not openly hateful, but it's not perfect either. At least it's fast. And the pictures looked a bit sharper than my slightly fuzzy homebrew. Still, I wasn't convinced that it would work.

Then, in act of true desparation, I thought, "maybe there is an open source tool that can do a better job of resizing the images for me". Don't let this happen to you.

The obvious free tool to try is ImageMagick. It's widely available and it's "easy" to download and build. I downloaded the binary install to test, and the test seemed to go well, but setting up the binary install is annoying. So I told MacPorts to compile it for me. Two and a half hours later MacPorts had downloaded and compiled half of the fucking open source universe. Remember kids, when you build your own open source package and build system, make sure that I have to build "ncurses" in order to get ImageMagick. Because I love running gcc just as much as I can.

When my Macbook finally cooled off I was able to reprocess some of my albums in earnest. At first, things looked good. Then I realized that the color was wrong. The contrast and brightness on every JPEG that I processed changed ever so slightly. The problem was clear. Even though IM was not just stripping the color space tags like it used to, it clearly was not keeping track of color correctly as it did its resizing and sharpening work. So I deleted everything the poor Mac had just spent so much time compiling.

Before throwing in the towel for the night, I took one last look at PicasaWeb. It turns out that Google may know how to do search really well, but they don't care about the color in your photographs. The Picasa desktop client seems to ignore the relationship between the color space in the picture and your screen. And, when you upload the pictures to the web site, Picasa completely strips the color space information, leaving it up to the whim of the your browser and display system to determine how the pixels are rendered. Boo.

So, summary for Pete Su two years from now: ImageMagick will suck. And all the free web galleries will either have bad navigation interfaces, bad color handling, or some hideous combination of both.

As a final note: I was also hopeful that CoreImageTool would be what I needed, but it does not preserve the color space of the source image when it writes the processed image to disk. Instead it does everything in the "Generic RGB" space. Luckily, it was an easy "fix" to make it use sRGB for everything, which is what I want. Although really it should preserve the color space in the original file. Maybe that's not too hard to do either, but I'm not going to find out.

Dinner in Half an Hour

2009-08-10 · by psu

Ok. It turned out to be more like 45 minutes or a little longer. But that was only because I messed up in the middle. But first, the background.

I was annoyed this weekend to listen to an insufferably smug interview with Michael Pollan, who has written several enjoyable books about food and cooking. The interview was on NPR, and appeared to be a trial balloon for an upcoming book tour, since a longer version of his main thesis also appeared recently in the New York Times.

In his piece Pollan laments the death of cooking in America. This is nothing new. Cooking has been dying in America for the last fifty years. Even as a certain elite becomes more and more fascinated with its own particular ideologies, for the most part cooking in this country has turned into the mindless defrosting of frozen dinners or going to the mall to get takeout from the Cheesecake Factory or maybe the Whole Foods prepared food deli.

Pollan takes us through this same old sorry story, but with a new angle and a new scapegoat: TV, specifically the Food Network, is to blame. In particular, he likes to trot out the following meaningless statistic: on average we cook only half an hour per day. I'm going to leave the Food Network alone for now. All you really have to know about the Food Network is that while it talks about fancy food in its editorial content, all the commercials are always about diet shakes. 'Nuff said.

No, what interests me is what you can cook in half an hour. In college, I used to make spaghetti with sauce out of a jar in half an hour. So tonight I sat down to see if I could do better.

Start with a whole chicken. Salt and pepper it all over and rub it with butter. Stuff the middle with garlic and herbs. Total time: 5 minutes.

Peel and cube 4 medium sized gold potatoes. Total time: 9 minutes. I suck at peeling.

P1020482

Put the chicken in a cast iron pan. Total time: 1 minute.

P1020481

So we're up to 15 minutes. Dinner is mostly made.

When the oven is hot, put the pan in the oven with the back of the chicken up. Set a timer for 15 minutes. Go watch TV. Total time: 1 minute.

After 15 minutes, take the pan out of the oven. Stick the potatoes in.

After another 15 minutes, take the pan out of the oven and turn the chicken over.

P1020489

Now let the chicken roast for about 45 more minutes while you watch Anthony Bourdain on the travel channel. You should check the temperature starting at 30 minutes in to make sure you don't take it out too soon or too late.

This is where my story goes off the rails because I took the chicken out too soon. This is because I suck with a meat thermometer. My internal clock said the chicken was not done yet. But my badly placed thermometer disagreed.

I took it out and started making the pan sauce, but I should have known it was wrong because everything was the wrong color in the pan:

P1020493

Don't let this happen to you. Leave the bird in longer.

Assuming you get the bird out of the oven at the right time, put the chicken on a plate and the potatoes on another pan. While you make the sauce let the chicken rest on the plate and put the potatoes back in the oven to crisp them up.

First, dump the chicken juices back into the pan. The pan should now be full of juices and yummy browned burned stuff. If it's not nice and browny, put the pan back in the oven for a while until it gets nice. Then deglaze the pan with white wine and chicken stock. Add salt and pepper to taste and reduce the pan sauce until it is thick. Strain into another smaller pan and toss in a bit of butter to make it rich and yummy. Total time: 10 maybe 15 minutes. It should look like this when you are done.

P1020508

If you want to get even fancier, make some demi-glace or a heavily reduced chicken stock ahead of time and use that as the base for the sauce. That'll be full of awesome. Sure it takes longer, but one batch of demi-glace is good for ten dinners, so the time cost is amortized.

Anyway, if you were keeping score: you now have a roast chicken and potatoes and you only did about half an hour of total work:
P1020506 P1020501

It's not quite as fancy as something like this, but with practice it will be almost as yummy.

I myself had to make the sauce twice, and put the chicken back in the oven where it never really got done because it had already cooled off a bit while I was making the sauce the first time.

So because I completely botched it, I had to do an hour of work to get the same chicken that you will have in 30 minutes.

So here are the keys to fast dinner:

  1. Make food you've made a lot before. I don't roast chicken much. I always mess it up.

  2. Know how to do the simple things quickly. Things like cubing potatoes, getting the chicken ready for the oven, making pan sauce after the chicken is done, and so on.

  3. Trust the courage of your convictions. If you know the bird is not done, don't let the thermometer bully you into taking it out of the oven.

  4. Have leftovers for the rest of the meal. I had a leftover soup to round things out, along with frozen peas and rice for the kid. This gives you the rest of the food you need without much extra work.

Finally, don't get stressed out about mishaps. Unless you set the food on fire, there is very little you can't recover from. And, if you do set the food on fire, you can always just get pizza. So go ahead, cook with speed and confidence. Always remember that most of the food you eat in fancy restaurants is made from scratch from when you order it. If they can do it so can you.

Checkmated

2009-08-11 · by peterb

Recently, my friend Nat issued a plaintive cry for help regarding his strategy game problem: he thinks he likes them, but whenever he plays them he finds them too hard to actually enjoy.

I have this problem, too. Unlike Nat, though, I don't really blame myself (at least, not in toto). I blame the games.

I can say this because I think I've played more strategy games than Nat, with a bit more success, enough that I've thought about why I don't enjoy some of these games.

Afraid of Commitment

The first, somewhat obvious problem with many of these games is that they take a long time to play. That's not to say that long games are bad, but rather, in strategy games you can often create a terrible position for yourself early in the game and then not know you're doomed for, literally, hours. By the time you find out that you're screwed, if you're like me, you have completely forgotten (or, as Nat points out, never even begun to understand) what you did that was actually wrong. Without understanding your mistakes, improvement is difficult or impossible. This is compounded somewhat by games that have unclear victory conditions or time limits.

The problem here is not one of game length, but rather one of feedback and specificity. Using a game from antiquity for an example, in QQP's classic game The Perfect General, each battle had clearly defined victory conditions, a scoring system, and turn limits. In other words, each turn you could evaluate whether your current strategy brought you closer or further from victory, and you knew how much longer you had to bring things to a resolution.

Strategy games where we don't win can be fun: the battle of Thermopylae, or for that matter Pearl Harbor, are celebrated and simulated and enjoyed by gamers today. What sucks is not losing, but having no idea that you're losing until 4 hours in.

The Curse of the Easy Tutorial

This happened to me just last week while trying out Matrix Games' recent remake of Close Combat, called Close Combat: The Longest Day.

The game begins, as these games so often do, with a step-by-step tutorial on playing the game, and an introduction to the sorts of tactics that are needed to win. The tutorial is closely guided; that is to say, there's no way to make a "wrong move" during the tutorial. The only menu options that are enabled are the ones you are 'supposed' to use next.

After wiping the floor with the filthy Nazis in the tutorial missions, I leapt into the first real mission, at which point my entire platoon was mowed down in a brutal hail of gunfire and flamethrower fuel within a matter of seconds, with no idea of what I did wrong.

A good tutorial, in other words, shouldn't just show you what strategy will let you win. It should show you why that strategy lets you win. And it should show you what it looks like when you're not winning.

You're Giving Me A Complex

I've written about this one before: complexity is not richness. If you're creating a strategy game, and it's a sufficiently big one, it is more important, not less important, that the UI be absolutely, positively, drop-dead simple. Quoting my review of Commandos 2 once more:

For example, A readies an attack, unless you want to use your fists, in which case you press Q. In the example I gave earlier, the Sapper would use the I key to cut the wires, D to detect mines, click on the mines to retrieve them, and then P to place mines. If the Sapper wanted to place a satchel charge, he uses the B key, but to throw a grenade, he’d hit G (but if his friend the Driver wanted to throw a molotov cocktail, he’d hit S).

If I was designing that game, all of those actions would be done by hitting the big red button in the middle of the screen. That button would be called the DO SOMETHING button, and it would figure out from context what it was that you wanted to do. If I absolutely couldn't figure out what it was I needed to do from context, I'd throw out my design and start over.

I'm exaggerating for effect, yes. But only a little. Ask yourself if Civilization or Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri was actually improved by the late-game ritual of looking at each of your 43 workers and telling them exactly what improvement they should be building, or if it just pissed you off.

Right. Me too.

The complexity of your game should consist in the interaction of the game's elements, not in the interaction of the user interface.

Interestingly, some of the iPhone strategy games, such as Uniwar and Reign of Swords get this exactly right, possibly because on that platform, they are forced to. This is yet another reason to play games on your iPhone instead of your Windows PC, as if you needed one beyond "they're with you 24/7."

Just Like Heaven

You may have detected a pattern here, and if so, you're right: the things that make great strategy games great are the same things that make all other great games great: accessible UI, transparent mechanics, and a system which rewards you for playing the game rather than punishing you (where "reward" doesn't mean "you win the game", but "you have fun whether winning or losing.")

A number of computer strategy game players (and, for that matter, developers) grew up playing old-style Avalon-Hill board games. This means that we have, unfortunately, an ingrown willingness to put up with needlessly complex bullshit. You can see this in the willingness of some to dismiss any strategy game that's actually accessible (say, Panzer General) as a "beer and pretzels" game. There are two responses to this. The first is that if you are the sort of person who thinks beer and pretzels are bad, you are beyond redemption. But the second is that the great promise, the great power, dare I say the great miracle, of computers is that they can take care of all of the complexity and hide it from us.

Let me close by telling a story that has nothing to do with computer strategy games, but everything to do with computers and how we can use them, or fail to use them, to manage complexity.

In the 1990s a number of competing UNIX-like operating systems were being actively developed. You've all heard of Linux, of course, but two of the alternatives were FreeBSD and NetBSD. The FreeBSD people went to some lengths to make their install process easy. One day, I needed to install NetBSD on a machine at work, so I grabbed the distribution and began the process.

One of the first things you had to do was partition the disk. In FreeBSD, this was so simple you basically didn't even have to think about it. In NetBSD, there was a command line tool that engaged you in a dialogue that went something like this:

Enter the number of cylinders per disk: (the user would enter "1024" or whatever. I am making the numbers up.)

Enter the number of sectors per cylinder: (the user would answer "512").

Enter the number of sectors per disk (this is the number of sectors per cylinder times the number of cylinders.):

And I just sat there, slack-jawed, in contemplation at the sheer bone-headedness that I was sitting in front of a computer that was asking me to calculate, by hand, the product of two numbers I had just typed in.

Now, had I brought this issue up on the NetBSD mailing lists at the time, there is not a single doubt in my mind that this would have precipitated a whirlwind flamewar where someone who thought they were Very Very Smart™ would explain to me All The Really Very Important Reasons™ that they had to write an install script that was a complete and utter disgrace, an install script that by its very existence degraded humanity and did violence to 10,000 years of civilization.

But the real reason they wrote that script was that, at the time, they just didn't want to do the work to make the product accessible.

I don't think that computer strategy game developers, generally speaking, have that bad attitude. I think they want people to play their games, and to enjoy them. But it's easy to forget what it means for a game to be accessible when you've spent your life playing games that weren't designed with that in mind.

So this is my longwinded response to Nat. Nat, it's not you. Really. It's not. It's the games. Sturgeon's Law applies to strategy games too.

The thing we need to do is not "learn to play strategy games," but learn to be better at buying only the 5% that are actually good.

Bookworm Adventures 2

2009-08-13 · by peterb

He's a bookworm who loves to spell. She's a fictional bird who tells stories to children. Together, they fight crime!

That's the premise of Bookworm Adventures Volume 2, Popcap's recent release which is, not to put too fine a point on it, almost exactly like the original Bookworm Adventures. This is not a criticism. This is a compliment.

Bookworm Adventures 2, like its predecessor, is essentially Boggle: The RPG. Your character travels through a variety of fantasy worlds encountering strange creatures (scripted by Stephen Notley of Bob the Angry Flower fame). And then you and your opponent try to spell each other to death. Spelling a word damages your enemy; the longer the word you spell, the more damage you do. If you spell long enough words, some of your letter tiles glow with special colours, which have various side effects (for example, blue tiles freeze your opponent, making him lose a turn).

One new mechanic is that of rainbow tiles. In the original game, I found I'd tend to hoard my coloured tiles, waiting for a boss monster. BA2 rewards you for using them by giving you special, more powerful tiles when you spell words with 3 or more coloured tiles. It's a nice little change, one that encourages you to take more risks.

Another interesting new mechanic is the addition of companions. In the original game, on each level you can take up to three treasures with you. The treasures changed the rules a little bit, giving you some bonus (for example, an item that gave you a damage bonus whenever you spelled words related to metal). In BA2, you can take 2 treasures per level, and one companion. The companions help you on a regular basis. For example the first companion, Mother Goose, provides you with a healing potion every four turns.

The art and sound direction, as in the first game, are top-notch; but at this point saying a Popcap game has high production values is a bit like saying "fire is hot."

Download the demo and give it a whirl. For anyone who likes word games (and who has a Windows box -- hey, PopCap, get with the Mac action already), this will be a no-brainer decision.

Bookworm Adventures Volume 2, by PopCap games, for Windows. $19.95. The publisher graciously provided a copy of this game for review.

The Madden Cycle

2009-08-14 · by psu

It's August again, which in gaming terms means that the new Madden is out. My relationship with Madden is pretty simple. Every year the new one comes out. Every year I decide which one or sometimes two platforms to buy the game on. I buy the game and I play my Patriots for a few seasons of franchise until I figure out where all the money plays are. I win a couple of Super Bowls and I put the game away until next year.

I've noticed though, that for others the situation is more complicated.

Among the set of web sites that I keep track of via RSS (or, as I like to call it, USENET only with really stupid client), there are three weblogs that concern themselves with sports games. There is Bill Harris over at Dubious Quality, Dan and Glen over at The Blog for the Sports Gamer and Bill Abner at the Nut and the Fiesty Weasel. I don't know where they get these names.

Almost every year these guys, but in particular the two Bills, get very busy when the new Madden rolls out. They pick it up and engage in what can only be called a nearly psychotic deconstruction and reconstruction of the game. This process can go on for weeks, and when it's over each of the sites will have published what has to be the deepest and most thorough evaluation of any game anywhere. No other review that I have ever read examines the game under scrutiny at such a level of detail. No minor piece of minutae is too small to bring under the microscope. It would be as if someone reviewed a Half Life 2 expansion pack by reverse engineering the game engine and then simulating all possible experiences in it.

What interests me about this work is two things. First, they do it every year, or at least almost every year. Second, to a large extent the results are always the same. I don't just mean the final results either. I mean that it is possible to predict the current opinion of the game based soley on the amount of time that the game has been in the reviewer's hands. The cycle progresses through a uniform set of stages:

  1. High Optimism. Soon after the game is released, there is always some reason to think that this time, this year, things will be different. Bugs will be fixed. EA finally gets it this time. They actually care about the hard core simulationist football fan and will be providing the most realistic version of the game yet. This state of mind lasts for one post to the weblog. Maybe two.

  2. Normal Mode. The reviewer spends a couple of days playing the game the way the rest of us do. They play franchise mode game by game controlling their favorite team with the controller. Various bugs in the presentation and user interface are pointed out. Stupid plays are recorded in digital video and uploaded on YouTube.

  3. Initial Simulations. After playing a season or two game by game in, ya know, video game mode, the reviewer sits down and starts to really get his teeth into the fat chewey center of the game: the simulated franchise mode. Seasons are simulated. Stats are collected and compared with the "real world." Doubt starts to form.

  4. Slider mode. Now we get to the meat of it. The reviewer will spend a week or two, sometimes more, tweaking the sliders in the game. The sliders are knobs that affect the outcomes generated by the simulation engine in the game. These knobs will be adjusted incessantly and several dozen more seasons will be simulated to try and get them "just right." At this point doubts about the game are growing. It just might be completely broken yet again.

  5. Anger and Disillusionment. The reviewer will conclude that the whole exercise is hopeless and that the game is fundamentally broken. Nothing they do leads to "realistic" behavior. There are always problems which, once perceived, completely "break" the game.

  6. Denial and Disgust. The game goes back to Gamefly or Gamestop. The reviewer vows not to be suckered next year and proclaims that he will give up football games for a season or two while EA fixes all the bugs.

Obviously I'm being unfair and disingenuous here. I don't mean to imply that I do not appreciate what these people do. I think what they do is fantastic. They really dig into what is broken and they hold the developers up to a higher standard. This is a refreshing change from the regular relationship gamers have with their dealers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H developers. I think if all reviewers took their task more seriously, the way Mr. Abner and Mr. Harris do, we would not have so much blind praise or equally blind dismissal of games in the other genres. How many Earth-shattering 10/10 games were actually just a piece of crap that you'd get tired of in about a week? So, please don't think that I don't value what these people do.

But, however much I admire their work, it doesn't really change how I interact with Madden. I buy the game. I play the game for a while. I wait for the next one. I'm not in this to figure out how to make the simulation engine play "like real football." I just need a decent illusion of realism for a few weeks every year to get from the summer gaming lull to the fall gaming lull. Then I'll turn the PS3 off and spend my weekends watching NFL Football. It's too bad the real game doesn't have sliders though. Because that would be awesome.

You Can't Go Back

2009-08-17 · by psu

A couple of months ago Kodak announced that they would stop manufacturing Kodachrome slide film. Given that this is a product that has been continually available for longer than most current photographers have been alive, you would think that this was a pretty big deal. But no. The end result of the digital vs. film battle was so predetermined that even that bastion of irrational nostalgia: the Leica Users Group mailing list barely made a peep about it. The truth is that Kodachrome died in the 1980s when Fuji introduced Velvia.

So what did I do to mark this historic event? In a fit of irrational nostalgia, I bought five of the last rolls of Kodachrome from B&H and cracked open a couple of my film cameras to get busy.

I shot one roll in my trusty Konica Hexar. I shot the another roll in my old Nikon 8008s SLR. Using the Hexar is a lot like using a larger fixed lens digital point and shoot except:

  1. The viewfinder does not suck.

  2. It doesn't have 59 useless modes.

  3. It's quiet, simple, ergonomic and fast enough frame to frame.

It's too bad there still isn't a digital version of this camera.

But, I'm not here to bitch about digital cameras, I'm here to bitch about film. Here is what shooting film is like after years and years of shooting digital:

First, 36 frames at a time is just not that many. I am not as experimental with film. I certainly don't do hip shooting or shooting without framing, since I'm not that good at it and I can't tolerate the hit/miss ratio.

Second, you are stuck with one film speed. This sucks. This sucks a lot. This is possibly the very worst thing in the entire world. To make it worse, the film speed you are stuck with is 2 to 3 stops slower than what is routinely usable in even the cheapest DSLR. Did you just load that Kodachrome 64 into your camera? No inside shots next to the window for you. In fact, it's hard to find a good shutter speed until you get outside in the full sun. And then the contrast is too high. No wonder everyone used to carry tripods.

Third, my old film cameras are all slow and primitive compared to the D200. I hadn't thought that the ergonomics of a modern digital SLR were all that different from the late generation automatic film cameras, but I was wrong. Many little things are different and a lot nicer on the DSLR. Not to mention the new autofocus actually works.

Finally, the migration away from film has brought about huge inflationary pressures on processing costs. Never mind that there is only one place in the entire world to process Kodachrome. Get ready to spend more than the unit cost of the film to have someone turn that blank black plastic into little pieces of reality in a slide mount. It's true that what you get out of the back end of this is a much more permanent record of your world than bits on a disk. But it's no wonder amateurs don't shoot film anymore: it's just too expensive. It's also not so useful for our modern communications applications, like Facebook. No one cares about pictures you took 3 weeks ago. It's all about now now now.

So, while I'm having fun with my little nostalgia kick, the reality is that no one is going back. Digital is how pictures are made and delivered in this century. While certain kinds of film will hold on in certain circles just like other historically or artistically interesting photographic media have held out over the years, the mass market has moved on and is not coming back. My last few vacations to Paris are the best illustration of this. The density of digital cameras was maybe 50% at most in 2003. In 2009, I could count the film cameras that I saw on one hand.

I'll post images from my little exercise in a few weeks when the film comes back. If there was anything good. After all, I only took 72 pictures.

Dinner in Half, Well Really About an Hour

2009-08-18 · by psu

Today's recipe takes a bit longer because there is more prep, but once you get through that you can play two full games of Madden while you wait for it to simmer. We're making a pork stew with chili peppers and lime. This is based on a recipe that Karen found that is completely wrong, so I rewrote it. The last time I did this it turned out I had lamb instead of pork, and that's not really the biggest change I made to the recipe. Then I forgot what I did. So now I'm writing it down.

Things you will need

  1. 3lb of pork shoulder, give or take.

  2. Juice from 3 to 4 limes.

  3. 2 dried ancho chili peppers.

  4. Onions and carrots.

  5. 1 or 2 canned chipotle peppers, in sauce (optional).

  6. 2T of chili powder. If pre-made chili power offends you, use whatever spice mix you like instead.

  7. 6 or 8 cloves of garlic.

  8. Bay Leaf.

  9. Some dried oregano.

  10. Chicken stock.

  11. Cast iron dutch oven, or your favorite soup pot.

Turn on the oven, set to 300F.

Start with a pork shoulder roast. The one I had was around 2-3lb of meat but I had to cut it off the bone, so I'm not really sure of the exact amount. Just get one at Whole Foods. The one I had was about that size. Anyway, cut the roast into half inch cubes. Try to make them as even as possible so everything cooks at the same rate. Put the meat in a bowl while you do the rest of the prep.

Dice two yellow onions. Then cut up six or seven carrots into a large dice. Next, smash the garlic with a knife and chop it up small. Finally, go to Penzey's in the strip and get some dried ancho chili peppers. Open up two of them, take all the seeds out and then cut it into little pieces with some scissors.

Now heat up the pan over medium heat. We're going to brown the meat in small batches. For each batch, take a bit of meat from the big bowl and put it in a small bowl. Throw some salt and pepper on top and toss it around to distribute the seasoning. Then add a bit of oil to the pan with the meat following. Brown the meat on all sides until it is nice and crusty. Be patient. Give yourself 5 to 10 minutes per batch.

When the meat is done, add a tiny bit of oil to the pan and throw in the onion, carrot and garlic. Season with a bit of salt and pepper. Saute this for about five or ten minutes until the carrots look like they are starting to cook. By then the onions will be nice too. Now add the chili peppers and the dried spices. Stir this around and let it cook for a minute or two more. If you want a bit of extra heat, you can add some of those canned chipotle peppers. Just chop one or two up and throw them in along with some of the sauce.

Now add the pork back into the pot along with the chicken stock (and wine if you want) and the lime juice. Stir some more. Bring to a boil and then put this in the oven for a few hours. If the stew seems to have too much liquid, leave it not quite covered. Otherwise cook it covered.

Check on the pot every half an hour just to give it a stir. You'll know it's done when you can cut the meat with a spoon. This should take two to three hours. So play lots of Madden.

One warning: if you are getting good pork, it will have a lot of fat on it, which will end up in the stew as oil. You might end up with more than you want, so if you are sensitive to this, trim as much as you can off of the meat before hand, and maybe drain the fat from the meat and the pan while you are doing the browning. I generally don't worry too much about this, but I ended up with a bit too much fat in my last attempt so I thought I would mention it.

Total War

2009-08-19 · by peterb

In the comments on my recent rant about overly complex strategy games, regular Tea Leaves reader Andy P sung the praises of the Total War series. It was a very short song, but very spirited.

I'd heard of Total War but never really paid attention to the details. So, I decided to check them out.

There are at this point, not counting expansions, 5 Total War games, with fairly self-descriptive names: Shogun and Medieval are hard to find (read: not on Steam), so I didn't spend too much time thinking about them. Rome is the oldest one you can get, and was followed up by Medieval II and the latest release, this year's Empire: Total War.

I have something of a bee in my bonnet about ancient Rome, so I opted to pick up Rome: Total War. The fact that it was a mere $9.99 on Steam helped seal the deal (for our Macintosh brethren, an OS X version of Rome: Total War will be released on August 30.

I enjoyed Rome so much that two days later I dropped $20 to pick up Medieval 2 as well.

The basic premise of both games is the same: your faction, playing on a map of the world divided into provinces, raises an army and grooms leaders to battle for control against other factions. You conquer a province by taking control of the city or fortress in it. This will almost always involve a siege, but you may also become entangled in field battles along the way. Your leaders and your troops improve their fighting skills through battle.

The strategic game is turn-based, not unlike Civilization. The battles themselves are conducted in real-time, but you can pause as much as you want to consider your tactical situation and issue orders (if this sounds a lot like Legion Arena, that's because it is). In battle, your troops are divided into groups of soldiers who move as a unit - for example, a unit of 45 javelin-throwing Velites, or 55 light infantry. Victory in tactical battle comes from using a combination of combined arms and flanking manuevers. In a typical battle, you'll deploy your troops, start the battle, and immediately pause (at least if you're not playing online), and then issue orders to your units. With some exceptions, these orders mostly consist of telling your troops to march (or run) around the battlefield, maneuvering and engaging (or avoiding) enemy troops.

Battles can be won by annihilating enemy units, of course, but a more common outcome is to cause the enemy's morale to flag, causing their troops to rout. Enemy morale can be reduced in a number of ways, including inflicting casualties, by exhausting them, by attacking from their flanks or rear, or by killing their general. All of these factors apply equally to your troops, as well.

You can resolve battles automatically, skipping tactical combat, if you like, but since the battles are sort of the point of the game I don't recommend it. The tactical battle is the center of the game.

The older game is, perhaps unsurprisingly, the better one. In addition to having a more consistent feel and being more focused, it is simpler, and I mean that as a compliment. It's clear that in Medieval 2, Creative Assembly tried to make everything bigger and more complex. They achieved their goal, and the game suffers for it. To take just one example, in the strategic game in Rome, in addition to troops and their leaders, you have spies to infiltrate cities, and diplomats to negotiate with other countries and their armies. That's it. In Medieval 2 you have spies and diplomats, as before, but you also have merchants, who can make money by wandering around the map, and assassins, who can try to kill leaders, and priests (or imams) who can convert the populace and try to kill heretics, and you also have Princesses, who are just like diplomats, only with breasts.(Footnote 1)

In Rome, recruitment of troops and agents works like this: if you've built the right building in a given town, and you have cash, you can recruit them. In Medieval 2 you can recruit them if you've built the right building, you have cash, you haven't reached your muster limit in that town, you haven't hit the mysterious global limit on that number and kind of agent, and this is all affected by several other variables that, on my second play through, I still don't understand. Medieval 2 adds complexity, but this complexity doesn't make the game appreciably richer. It just makes it busier.

The tactical game feels a little better to me in Rome as well, although it's hard to separate my opinions on this from my subjective enjoyment of the setting. As you would imagine, towns in Medieval Europe tend to be better fortified and a little more closed in than your average Gallic outpost. The net result of this is that sieges take longer (especially at the beginning of the game, when you don't have elaborate siege engines yet) and your options for maneuver warfare are more limited.

None of this is to say that Medieval 2 is bad, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to anyone who prefers that milieu to that of ancient Rome. But I do think it's a fascinating case study of how adding features to a game can in fact detract from the experience. By some reports, the most recent game, Empire has gotten even worse, and is sagging under the weight of newer features, such as detailed naval combat, although recent patches have reportedly improved things somewhat. I haven't played Empire yet. It does look beautiful, though:

If you've played any of the Total War games, please share your comments on the games with us below. I'm especially interested in anyone who can compare Empire to the previous games.

My nigglings about the world map game mechanics aside, I like the Total War games I've played. I like them a lot. I like them because they allow me to play at my own pace. I like them because they don't abstract the combat away completely, and instead keep the realities of cohort-level tactical engagement constantly in the foreground. And I like them because they work hard to balance the desire to match over-the-top levels of military detail to keeping the game fast, simple, and fun.

Footnote 1: No, I'm not kidding.

The Camera You Need

2009-08-21 · by psu

If you hang around the Interweb forums related to photography long enough, you come to notice that the two most common questions are always first "what should I buy?" and second something like "what bag should I put it in?" or "I am going on a trip, what should I bring?" When you think about it, all of these questions stem from the same basic source of insecurity on the part of the photographer. What these questions really say is "I don't know what I want to do with the camera, please help."

I'm here to help.

The Simplest Answer

If you don't want to read the rest of this article, then the answer I have for you is simple. What you want is the newest Canon point and shoot (or Panasonic if you can find it). Now you can get on with your life. Carry the camera in your pocket. Take the occasional picture when it comes up. This answer will work for 90% of you, including me. You just don't know it.

The Second Simplest Answer

If for some reason you think that the point and shoot above will not fit your needs, then you lied to me. You actually have some idea what you want to do with the camera, because you have some idea of what the point and shoot will not do. Usually this falls into two areas:

  1. You want a camera that's faster to operate.

or

  1. You want "better image quality".

Here the answer is also simple. You want the smallest and cheapest DSLR from whatever line you like (Canon, Nikon, Pentax, Olympus, Panasonic, Sony) along with a single lens. Just use that like you would use the point and shoot above. Of course, this introduces the age old question: "Which lens?"

Which Lens?

This is where most people get tripped up. The lure of the interchangeable lens camera is that you can change the lenses. The main problem with interchangeable lens cameras is that you can change the lenses. The way the camera should actually work is that it should come with a single lens glued to the front which you can only remove after you have taken a few thousand pictures and studied them to find out what you personally like to do with the camera. At that point the camera would allow you to change lenses.

But this is not how it works. You can buy all the lenses you want before you have even cracked open the camera, leading to what I will call "Premature Contingency Shopping Syndrome". It works like this: new camera dork has his nice D40 with a kit lens, and decides that he needs "more flexibility" or something. Finding his way to the Internet, he comes across dozens of articles on what lenses he will need for various tasks. Maybe something like Thom Hogan's long treatise on the Nikon lens system. He then spends his days shopping on photo.net and amazon.com, debating with himself whether the 70-200/2.8 with an extender will be "good enough" or whether he should really spring for that 300/4 instead.

Then, of course, he'll need something to use to carry all his purchases. Thom is there to help with a great piece on the best photo backpacks. Pretty soon the packing list for the trip includes two camera bodies, three large aperture zoom lenses, an extra-long telephoto, two flashes, pocket wizards, and a couple of light stands to be "sure" that you can get those good vacation shots.

Don't let this happen to you. What gets lost in the shopping is the key fact that all these lists on the Internet are not about what you, they are about what the writer of the list needs. So think a bit harder about that question before you jump in.

The Camera You Need

It turns out that if you read over the two Thom Hogan articles links above, he has already told you what you need.

But lest you bemoan the fact that you'll never have enough disposable income to afford all that, remember this: there will be a few photographers out there with that D60 and two kit lenses that are shooting up a storm. People keep asking me what the best lenses are. You now have two answers. One is the list of lenses you see above, the other is what you've got, used right. Start by learning to do the latter, then add better options as you can afford to.

You should really listen to this man. Buying some new lens will only do you any good if you have a specific task for which you need said lens. But need is a funny word. You can think that you need a lot of things. It's hard to really know. In particular, reading articles on the Internet can convince you that you need a lot of things that you don't need.

But listen to Thom. You don't need that stuff. I will bet you a case of beer that if you open all your pictures in Lightroom (ok, or Aperture) and look at the metadata embedded within, you will find that 90% of your shots could have been taken with either a wide to normal zoom lens or a single focal length lens somewhere in that range. It's fashionable to discount the so-called "normal" lens as a boring perspective without flare or creativity. But entire photographic careers have been built by people nothing but a normal to wide lens. David Alan Harvey is perhaps the most famous photographer to work this way.

I think you need to remember three things about lenses:

  1. Most pictures happen in the range of a normal lens or a wide to normal zoom.

  2. Wide angle lenses are good for pictures with exaggerated front to back spatial relationships, or shots in tight spaces. Take one of these if you like that sort of thing.

  3. Telephoto lenses are for things that are far away like small animals or the baseball game. Be careful about thinking you will get good sports pictures though. You won't.

With this in mind, the stuff you actually need is simple to catalog:

  1. Make a list of pictures you want to take. Will they be close to you? Far away? At a "normal" sort of distance?

  2. Bring the stuff that will help you make those pictures.

Once you can answer these two questions everything else works itself out. It's even easy to figure out what you need to bring on your next trip and how to pack it.

What to Take With You

Here is what I do. My thing is "cityscape" type pictures. I like the streets and the buildings and the overall landscape of the town. I shy away from portraits, candids and other people pictures just because I'm not much of a people person. I generally also have little interest in things that are far away from me because I can't see them and I'm not that good at aiming the camera. On most trips I take:

  1. Nikon SLR.

  2. The Nikon 18-70 normal zoom.

  3. The Nikon 12-24 wide zoom.

  4. A flash or two which I never use, or only use badly.

  5. Extra batteries and cards and so on.

I pack a small bag (a Domke F-803) that can hold the camera, lenses and flash all at once into a rolling carry on. Anything extra that doesn't fit in the small bag gets checked. I have another bag for my laptop. I have spent a lot of bag angst trying to get the camera and the laptop in one bag, but it just doesn't work. So give up now.

When I get to the place (the place is usually San Francisco or Paris), I unpack everything into a drawer in the hotel room. Then, in the morning I ask myself "do I feel like taking wider shots today?"? Usually the answer is no, and I stick the 18-70 on the camera and throw the camera and the flash into the Domke and get on with my day. I have found experimentally that I can carry a D200 with this zoom lens all day in a bag with my other travel items and not get too upset. The D200 is too big though.

Sometimes, the answer is "yes", and I take the wide zoom along. Then I get more upset because my bag weighs more.

For this latest trip, I knew I'd be trying to take pictures of the Tour de France even though I would not be any good at it. So, I threw an extra telephoto zoom into the bag but didn't carry it that much. This zoom was not the huge and heavy 70-200/2.8VR. No, this was the smaller, lighter, slower 70-300/4.5-5.6. You obviously give up a lot with this lens, but I did OK. It did came in handy at the Giverny gardens, but I was unhappy most of the time it was in the bag because even though it's smaller than the bazooka, it was still too big and heavy.

Summing Up

Over time I have concluded that your goal for taking a camera on a trip is to bring something that is as small as possible while still keeping your inner voices at bay. While I have managed to do this to some extent, I think my kit is still too big. If had two wishes in life, one would be that Nikon copy Canon and make a pair of smaller lenses that cover the 24-105 and 70-200 ranges with image stabilization and a constant F4 aperture. Then I would spend more time carrying only one lens. The second would be that they put the D3 autofocus and imaging engine into the D90 body. Hopefully both of these will happen eventually.

So now you know what you need, if you are me. But since I'm a dork on the Internet, I have implicitly assumed that your needs and mine are exactly identical. What this really means is that you should have stopped reading after the first section and just taken your point and shoot on the last trip. Chances are it will capture most of the pictures you want these days. That's what happened to me on my most recent Paris trip. So the sad truth is, I don't need any of this stuff at all. And therefore, neither do you.

The Battle of Tingi

2009-08-24 · by peterb

I don't often write so-called "After Action Reports". There are people who are big fans of this, who write in the voice of their characters, making long, multi-part sagas outlining the rise and fall of their empires. It's just not my thing.

Today, however, I'm making it my thing, because I had a battle in a session of Rome: Total War last night that was so satisfying that it perfectly encapsulates what I like about the game.

Why We Don't Live In Mauretania

A brief outline of the strategic situation before I get down to brass tacks. I'm playing as the Julii, one of the three initially playable Roman factions in the game, the other two being the Brutii and the Scipii. In the opening stages of the game I aggressively moved into Gallia Comata, reduced the Gauls to a band of disorganized tribes, and chased them halfway into Iberia. Why We Don't Live In Mauretania Nominally allied with the Iberians, while in Iberia I seized Corduba and Carthago Nova from the Carthaginians. Pushing my luck, I sent a strike force across the Straits of Gibraltar to take the settlement of Tingi, in Mauretania, originally a Numidian outpost, but now held by Carthage. Tingi was lightly defended, so I took it with little difficulty. While this was risky, given that I might find myself fighting Gauls in the North and Carthage in the South, I decided it was a strategically safe move for a few reasons: first, the Carthaginian's main front was fighting the Scipii in the East. Second, taking Tingi gave me complete control over the Straits of Gibraltar and thus supremacy by sea. Third, to reach Tingi by land required a long march through the desert. I had no intention of pushing east towards Cirta and Carthage, at least at this point, but holding Tingi seemed plausible. So I gave it a go.

In Rome: Total War in order to develop a settlement you need to keep a family member in it to serve as Governor, and who also serves as your military commander if attacked. I certainly wasn't going to keep my best general, Decius, in this provincial backwater. Fortunately, I had the perfect candidate lined up: Manilius the Lewd.

I, Manilius

In Total War, family members accrue traits as they age. Decius, for example, is known by his troops as "Decius the Morose." He's a latter-day Tiberius, always depressed, a terrible speaker, who can lull troops to sleep before combat with his stuttering, clumsy orations. I actually heard him one time — I am not making this up — telling the troops "We are gathered here today to do battle. Regrettable isn't it? I didn't want to be here myself, but my mother told me that I better make a good show out of it. So here it goes."

Young Manilius was a heavy drinker who, in an unwise moment, I put in charge of the newly-conquered city of Massilia. Presumably besotted by wine and drowning in an endless procession of golden-braided captured Gallic slaves, Manilius began developing a reputation for obscene behavior, for wine-bibbing and indecent behavior with Roman citizens' wives (and, on occasion, with their sons). This problem only intensified when a few years later, for tax reasons, Massilia became our faction's capital. Shipping him off to distant Tingi was the perfect solution. Even a bad Governor was better than no Governor at all, and being so distant from the capital, Tingi was practically doomed to being a financial drain anyway. At least he'd only be embarassing himself in front of some proto-Barbary Coast Barbarians, instead of in front of some Senator who might influence our family's fortune. It was a win-win situation.

Manilius was duly installed in Tingi, with a few cohorts of experienced troops — mostly there in case we needed them in Corduba in a hurry. He had two units of velites, lightly armored, who hurled pilii (a sort of short, sharp, sling-thrown javelin). He also had two units of hastati, younger troops in armor who fought with pilii and sword. He had two additional Legionary cohorts. He also had a unit of equites, light cavalry, and his own personal heavy cavalry guard, who were mostly responsible for carrying him home safely after he threw up all over someone else's toga.

For a while, everything was going swimmingly. The Gauls were conquered. We began a war against the Iberians, who had committed the terrible insult of serving us inferior Lusitanian hard cider instead of the superior Asturian cider. And that was when Hannibal and Hamilcar Barca began their seige of Tingi with two separate armies. My other armies were too far away to help; it was Manilius against the hordes of Carthage.

Madidus Fortuna Adiuvat

The Carthaginians outnumbered us around two to one. Manilius was not exactly Gaius Marius — he's an average, or perhaps slightly worse than average, commander. Things were not looking up. I deployed my troops near the city's front gate and hoped for the best.

As the battle began, I realized things were even worse than I had thought. The enemy had deployed fairly smartly, putting a battering ram at both the front and rear gates of the city. Surrounding each ram were several units of infantry, sling-throwers, and, unfortunately, spearmen, who would make short work of my cavalry. Even worse, in the distance was a troop of elephants.

Taking a deep breath, I marched all of my troops out of the front gate, cavalry leading the charge, straight at the infantry who was carrying the ram. Miraculously, we broke them (and their ram) in fairly short order. Pulling the cavalry back into the city, away from the dreaded spearmen, I sent them galloping across the city towards the rear gate, while my hastati cleaned up the now-routed ram-carryers, and then had them harry the spearmen. The rest of my troops I reformed inside the city gates, and marched towards the town square. The Carthaginian troops, realizing that this gate was lost, pulled back and began the long walk around the city to the rear gate.

Swinging the camera back to my cavalry I saw that holding the rear gate was impossible: the Carthaginian battering ram had shattered it open, and their troops began their invasion. I had saved us from a hammer-and-anvil attack, but at the cost of losing the gate more quickly. I pulled all my troops back to the town square in the middle of the city.

Rome: Total War has a game mechanic that, when I'm on the attack, I sort of hate: troops stationed inside the town square will never rout. This is even more annoying in Medieval 2: Total War where it feels like every siege eventually degenerates into "build a pile of corpses around the town's central flagpole." This siege marks the first time that I've had to rely on that game mechanic while on defense.

My two units of pilum-throwing velites surrounded the town's central flagpole. As each enemy unit approached, they would sally forward and pepper them with spears to try to break up their formation a bit; velites will fall back by default when attacked, so this is reasonably safe if you're fighting on one front. When the unit was in spitting distance, I would engage them with my legionaries (if the enemy was a unit of spearmen) or try to break them with a cavalry charge by the general (if they were anything else). My light cavalry roamed around the town's back alleys, looking for units trying to flank us, of which there were a few. Fortunately for me, none of the flankers were spearmen. Most of the flankers were isolated, and easily broken.

The Carthaginians sent unit after unit straight at us, and we held the line. Their men would rout, run away, and then come back for more punishment. We were doing well.

Finally, tromping down the town's main road, came the Carthaginian elephants. There were 5 of them. I had never fought elephants before. "How hard can they be?" I thought. "There are only 5 of them."

Peppering them with pila, I braced my legionaries for impact. It did not help much: bodies literally flew into the air and the elephants seemed none the worse for wear. Had this happened out in the field, I have no doubt that every one of my units would have broken and run at that moment. Desperate, I threw both units of cavalry at the elephants. This didn't actually hurt them, but scared them sufficiently to force a rout. As they retreated, we managed to kill one of the lumbering beasts.

The Carthaginians tried one more rally, but midway to the square, the elephants went mad, stampeding their own troops. Shocked and dismayed, the Carthaginians routed for the final time. In disbelief, I took stock of the situation. Against all odds, I had held Tingi, losing 50 men in so doing. Carthage had lost nearly 800.

That night, Manilius had a good drink, and I didn't begrudge him it one bit.

To Sell, and to Shop

2009-08-27 · by psu

The natural cycle of things has been working its way through my life. Back in the day I was an enthusiastic shooter of black and white film and printer of black and white prints. I even had someone rebuild a bathroom in our house to use as a small darkroom where I cranked out what I think were credible prints of reasonably interesting pictures. Of course, I can't show them to you unless you come over to my house, so you will never know. You'll have to take my word for it.

Well, that was then, this is now.

Over the last year or so we have been doing some more renovation on our house, and the bathroom is a bathroom again and the darkroom stuff was shuttled down into the basement to collect basement dust instead of bathroom dust. I have not touched a developing reel, or the D76, or even an unshot roll of black and white film for the last eight years or so. We all know why: pictures are delivered digitally now. I can show them to you instantly, if I wanted to.

I figured the darkroom stuff would continue to collect basement dust until I gave it away. But then fortune came my way again. A friend of my wife's, for whatever reason, is setting up a darkroom in his house and needed all those little odds and ends that cost a lot of money and time to acquire:

  1. Trays.

  2. Timers.

  3. A print washer. He's gonna print on fiber paper. What a nut.

  4. My 11x14 easel.

  5. My bitching grain focuser. I'll explain what this is later.

Anyway. He needed it all. I gave it to him. I'll get a small amount of cash back. He'll be happy. Besides the minor cash infusion, I also get to wallow in a bit of nostalgia for a few hours, especially for the bitching grain focuser. What this device does is magnify the projected image of the negative so that you can adjust the focus on your englarger. What you do is move the focus around until the grain in the film is sharp. Then, if everything is aligned correctly, the print will be sharp. If the picture was soft anywhere, it's your fault and not the enlarger. I bought an expensive device to do this. It was expensive because it had beautiful optics so that you could really see the grain without moving your eyeball around too much. I loved that thing.

My nostalgia for that device is almost enough to make me believe that I could get back into printing. But I know better. The chemicals give me a rash. They trigger my asthma. Spending hours in the dark bent over trays is not really that enjoyable. I do miss the "hands on" aspect of it, since my hands are otherwise fairly lacking in talent. I'm not really good at anything done with my hands. Except printing.

But, now is not the time to dwell on the past. As part of the cycle towards the future, the darkroom funds will be put towards the next digital camera. I have finished my yearly survey of the available digital camera systems, so I can save you some time by summarizing my findings here. I always start with Nikons, which I already own.

The Nikon bodies are clearly the most desirable right now. For $900 I can buy the "consumer" D90, which just happens to do everything my D200 does and a bit more, while giving up very little and improving the image quality a great deal. For $700 more, there is the D300/D300s which is even more, well, just more. Nikon has really beefed up its AF and sensor technology over the past few years and their engineering teams have really come through. For $700 more than that is the D700. This camera takes that same kick ass AF system and adds a sensor that is so good that you can shoot pictures where you and I can barely see.

Where Nikon falls down is in the lens line. They have a stunning line of huge pro zoom lenses. But if you want something smaller and still modern, you lose.

Canon wins with their cheaper "prosumer" zoom lenses. The 24-105/4 and 70-200/4 are the best pair of lenses I can imagine owning for what I do with a camera. Add a fast prime or two and you can shoot anything. Too bad the affordable Canon bodies have bad viewfinders and an autofocus system that hasn't been updated in a long long time.

Pentax and Olympus are the main also rans. They both have intersting lenses (the Olympus 12-60 and 50-200 pair might even be better than the Canon). Sadly, they have never kept up with body technology so if you look into your heart you know the AF won't work and the sensors will not be as good as the big C and the big N.

Sony is not in the running because of memory stick. And because Sony is really Minolta.

So there you have it. The answer was pre-ordained. I'll get another Nikon. And while I shoot with it and make soulless digital prints at Costco I will, every once in a while, dream about developing film by hand in a dark room while poisonous chemicals drip over my hands and down my arms. I can already feel my lungs clogging up, and my hands flaming up in a rash. Good times.

Earthbound

2009-08-31 · by peterb

I've always liked Earthbound, a Japanese RPG game for the Super Nintendo system.

Earthbound

I like the Charlie Brown art style. I like the writing, which is surreal and matter-of-fact at the same time. I like the patterned, elaborate backgrounds during combat that give the game a feeling of dynamism even though there's hardly any animation at all. I like the lectures your father gives you in-game when you've been playing for too long. I like that major plot points and interludes are generally introduced when your character decides to have a nice soothing cup of tea. I like the color palette of the game, and that the 8-bit synthesized music can fairly be described as 'lyrical'. I like that you can buy a teddy bear to soak up damage for you. I like that if you get lost in a maze, you can use an "exit mouse" to find your way out; the exit mouse is a mouse with a big arrow on its head. The exit mouse sort of looks like Woodstock.

Earthbound

I like that the Mr. Saturn spacemen in the game talk in a different font. I like that one of the status ailments your main character can get is becoming homesick. I like that it's almost impossible to get lost. I like that as you progress through the game, they make it easier to go back to earlier places to find things that you forgot. I like that save points are just telephones. I like that the game, while it has violence, is not meanspirited. I like that when you fight animals, instead of being killed, they become tame. I like that when you become sufficiently strong, enemies start running away from you, so you don't engage in so much pointless combat. I like that the item which revives fallen allies in combat is called a "Cup of Lifenoodles."

Yep. I like Earthbound.

A Photoshop Puzzle

2009-09-03 · by psu

Back when I used to print in the darkroom I had a little green notebook that I used to keep track of what I had done. If I made a worthy print of a given negative, I'd write down the roll the negative came from, the frame number on the roll, the paper I used, the contrast settings I used on the enlarger, and any particulars of how I dodged and burned the various areas of the picture to get the look "just right." The theory was that if I needed to print the picture again I'd have a point at which to start working.

With digital processing techniques, I generally don't need a log book like this. I can just open the file again in Lightroom or Photoshop and the software will have kept all my settings for me. But, once in a while this is not enough.

A couple of years ago I made what is now a favorite picture in Paris. The one with the boat on the river at sunset:

DSC_20070527-02875-compisite-2

I made this picture by combining two pictures. One was very dark, but kept detail in the sky.

DSC_20070527-02873

One was very light, but kept detail in the boat.

DSC_20070527-02875

I combined the two pictures together as layers in Photoshop. The bright one was on the bottom. The dark one was on top. Then I made a mask that hid the dark parts of the dark picture that I didn't want and let the bright parts show through. The mask looks like this:

mask

I had all this information in the Photoshop file that I kept with this picture in it. So I knew at least in principle how I had done it. But when I tried to apply the same technique on some recent pictures I kept failing over and over again. I realized that I could not remember how I had made the mask.

There were two aspects of this mask that vexed me. First, it is in almost perfect alignment with the elements in the pictures that it is meant to mask off. Second, the mask itself seems to be a composite of the light and dark pictures. It's almost as if I combined the pictures together to make the mask so I could combine the pictures together.

After playing around with this for most of a weekend, I finally think I know what I had done originally. The first, and most important step, is to the use the Photo Merge feature in Photoshop to merge as a first step in combining the shots. It turned out that I was shooting these pictures hand held, and so even the parts of the picture that did not move are not in perfect alignment because I moved the camera between shots. My first 15 attempts at masking were foiled because the normal hand alignment of the bits was not precise enough for the final picture to look clean.

As a side note, if you look at the composite carefully you can see that it in fact is not nearly perfectly aligned but it's a lot better than you can get by hand. I can now see these flaws in the print, and it will bug me a lot because I have a disease.

OK. With the layers aligned, making the mask is easy. First, add an all white mask to the dark layer. There are a few different ways to do this depending on which Photoshop you are running. Recall that this mask is a 8-bit grayscale layer. You can edit this layer by opening the Channels pane in the Layers and Channels inspector and then clicking the eyeballs on and off until all you see is the alpha channel that the mask lives in. You can edit the mask using all of the bitmap tools that Photoshop provides including the drawing tools, copy and paste, and so on. Areas of the mask that are white or light colored reveal the picture underneath them. The parts of the mask that are black or dark block those bits of the picture from being visible. We have started with an all white mask, so right now all you can see is the top layer, which has the dark picture in it.

Having created the empty mask, use the magic wand tool to select all of the sky, following the outline of the trees. This will work well because of the high contrast between the tree and the sky. Copy those bits out of the light picture and paste them in the mask. This will make the sky part of the mask mostly white and very light gray. In this form, the mask will mix the dark clouds in the top layer with some of the light colors from the light layer.

Next, go back to the dark layer. Use Load Selection to load the selection from the layer mask. Then invert the selection and copy the dark bits from the foreground of the dark picture. Paste those in the mask. Now adjust the darkness of the dark part of the mask so that it blocks out what you want it to block out. Voila you are done. The resulting mask reveals the sky part of the dark picture but blocks most of the dark bits.

Note that this will only work well if you have a large expanse of white sky that is easy to select. In a sense, I got lucky because the contrast in the original scene was so high.

Of course, these days you can just buy some off-the-shelf HDR software to do all of this work for you. You push a button, adjust some color settings and get this:

Boat, automatically merged

Note how the automatic merge is also better than mine. It brought some of the warm light from the foreground of the dark shot into the final picture, which I did not do. It also aligned the mask with the trees much better than I did. Here is my work blown up to 100%:

bad-registration

Here is what the computer did:

reg

The software I used is called Photomatix and it seems to be a bit more intuitive to use than the built-in HDR merging in Photoshop. I have not been able to figure out how to do the final color corrections in Photoshop so the picture looks "normal" instead of freaked out. But Photomatix seems to do a good job.

So there you have it. In the end, I found both my original answer and a better solution to the original problem. If any of you Photoshop wizards out there have an even better scheme for doing this, let me know. Next time I try this I want to be more prepared. Or, maybe I'll just learn how to use ND grad filters.

Too Much Camera. Way too Much.

2009-09-11 · by psu

I left this out of my 09/09/09 post, even though it was the other cool thing that happened that day. I thought maybe you all had suffered enough of with my constant rambling about cameras. But, after a lot of deliberation, I decided to pull the trigger on a D700. After only two days, I haven't used it enough for to provide you with a in-depth and comprehensive review, Top Gear style. But I can say this: Wow.

The D700, of course, is Nikon's "smaller" and "more affordable" model of "full frame" digital camera. That is, the sensor in the camera is the same size as a piece of 35mm film used to be. Nikon thinks this is so important they even gave a new name to the full frame cameras, calling them "FX" cameras. The older digital SLRs with the smaller sensors are now called "DX".

It took me a long time to convince myself that I wanted to pony up the extra money for an FX camera. After all, there is nothing sacred about 35m frame size. It's just a historical coincidence. The supposed advantages of the FX cameras are easy to summarize and refute:

  1. Better image quality per pixel. Nikon's pro cameras all have 12mp sensors. This means the pixels in the FX cameras are larger, which in theory means various things about the image will be better on a per-pixel basis. But realisitically, the 12mp DX sensor that is in the D300 and D90 is already almost unimaginably excellent. Just ask peterb.

  2. Your old lenses have the same field of view and depth of field as they used to. This is no big deal, you can either get used to it or get different lenses. The Nikon DX lens line is pretty well filled out, covering very wide to very telephoto. Just suck it up.

  3. Nicer viewfinder, and some handling advantages. It's true that the FX viewfinders are larger and easier to use. On the other hand, if you shoot with autofocus most of the time who cares? Also, in the D300 the AF sensors cover the whole frame which is awesome!

FX, it seemed to me, had a thin set of advantages at a relatively high price. So, why did I end up caving? Three reasons:

  1. The sensor is insanely good.

  2. My old lenses work right again.

  3. The viewfinder is really nice.

I have a modest example what the sensor can do here:

psu_20090909-04866

This picture was taken by room light at ISO 1250. As a point of comparison, I think it looks as good as what my D200 would do at ISO 200, maybe 400 if I was lucky. But that's just the noise characteristics. Pictures out of the D700 just look sharp to me. When you hit focus correctly and you control the camera shake, all of the detail that you imagine will be in the picture is there. This didn't always happen with the D200 no matter how careful I was. The D700 lets you get cleaner, sharper pictures in more situations than I ever imagined possible. That doesn't mean the pictures are better, but it does make the process easier.

Also contributing to this ease of operation is that my 35/2 is finally a 35/2 again. Let me explain. I like the point of view provided by a 35mm lens used on a 35mm film body. The 35mm F2 lens was always was one my favorites on my film cameras. But, on a DX camera, the field of view is cropped. To get the wider field of view, you have to use a 24mm lens. But the 24mm lens has two problems

  1. Everything looks like you used a 24mm lens.

  2. The 24mm lens is a 2.8, not F2.

These don't seem like they should be insurmountable problems, but I never could get comfortable using the 24 to get my 35mm point of view. In addition, the D200 was never great at focusing the lens. So, I would just give up and use my zoom lenses. There is nothing wrong with zoom lenses, but they are bigger, heavier, and slower (F4).

The D700 brings back the joy of the 35/2. The field of view, perspective, and depth of field are finally right. The autofocus is faster and more accurate than with the D200. And as a bonus you can take pictures of things you can barely see, lit only by the slightest light, and they look like you were working in daylight.

psu_20090911-04919

The viewfinder is really great too.

In addition to resurrecting my old prime lenses, I also picked up the Nikon 24-85mm f/3.5-4.5 AF-S G zoom lens. This is the zoom I used to use on my D100 and stupidly sold with the D100 to get a D70 with the 18-70 kit lens. On the D700 it's a bit wider than the 18-70 was on the DX bodies, and as a bonus the lens is a bit smaller and lighter too. I plan to be happy with it. At some point I'll get a 20mm lens to get just that much wider, and then maybe a longer telephoto prime too. I'm not in any hurry.

Overall the D700 feels like a machine that I have no right to be using. The thing is a bit too big, a bit too fast and most of all a bit too good for what I'll do with it. Realistically all I will do with it is family snaps, vacation pictures maybe the odd bit of personal cityscape work around Pittsburgh. Still, I'm lucky enough have this camera available to me at this point and time, so I decided I'd take advantage of it. It may be too much camera, but it will be a hell of a lot of fun to use.

And the viewfinder is really nice too.

Done and Done

2009-09-14 · by psu

I've been playing Madden a lot since it came out. Almost two full seasons worth. I play Madden on the PS3 to avoid the overwhelming jet-engine like drone of my Xbox. The other day I noted that Madden seemed to be running the PS3 hotter than it used to... kicking the fan up to a new level. This worried me a bit, and then I tossed a 80 yard screen pass to Randy Moss and forgot about it. Then one night Madden got stuck.

It was late and I was sleepy, so I turned off the machine and went to bed. Then the next morning it happened again. Right in the middle of the game the little robot players just stopped doing their thing and stood on the field shivering in the cold. I restarted the game again. But it would not restart. I did a few little arcane dances and got Madden back, and thought my troubles were over.

Tonight I was feeling overloaded on football, so I decided to be Batman for a while. Then Batman got stuck. Then the Batman game would not load, preferring instead to just show me a blank black screen.

The conclusion is clear. The Blu-Ray drive in the PS3 is dead. This is an apt way for the console to die, because it was the drive for the useless Blu-Ray player destroyed Sony's stranglehold on the game console market in the first place. Still, I liked my Playstation 3 because it played Blu-Ray movies and because it played video games without sounding like a god damned jet engine the way my Xbox does. I have been hoping for almost a year for my Xbox to die so I can get a new quiet one. Now the PS3 has done me a favor by making that unecessary. Let me explain.

The PS3 is out of warrantee. Thus it will cost a ludicrous amount of money to fix. So, rather than fix it, the rational choice is to get one of the new slim PS3s which will be smaller, quieter and more reliable, right? Hah! Fat chance.

The rational move is to put up slightly more than it will cost to fix the machine and get a new quiet Xbox. Then the next rational move is to throw the PS3 in the fucking dumpster. It's pretty clear that with even Square having jumped ship the Playstation 3 as a gaming platform has evolved from bad, sad, and lonely to merely pointless. There is literally nothing on the platform that is deserving of your attention and dollars that you can't have delivered to you in some other way that will be more enjoyable. They let the PS2 die. The PSP is being crushed by the DS and the iPhone. And the PS3 was essentially stillborn so that Sony could "win" a movie format war that doesn't matter anymore.

Therefore, the plan is:

  1. The PS3 goes out the window. I will feel a small pang of sadness for not getting to play MLB: The Show anymore. But I didn't even play the '09 game anyway.

  2. Buy a quiet Xbox and put it in the Xbox slot. Maybe get Netflix now that I can hear the dialog over the console's drone.

  3. Get a cheap standalone Blu-Ray player for watching The Matrix once in a while. Maybe one that has a normal remote instead of this stupid Bluetooth piece of crap that doesn't work with the Harmony.

  4. Keep my old PS2 games just in case I ever haul out that cute little slim box again. I wonder where the memory cards are.

  5. While I'm at it, no more Sony TVs either.

Done, and done.

Things Change

2009-09-16 · by psu

I have often been accused of an almost irrational affection for my standard hangouts, especially my favorite purveyors of various forms of material sustenance. If you are in Pittsburgh you get pizza at Piccolo Forno. You get Chinese food at Rose Tea. You get Thai food at the Green Mango. You get grilled meat and fish at DISH. You buy fish at the Penn Avenue Fish Market. You get fancy meals at Vivo. And most recently, you get cozy personal bistro food at Legume.

And, for as long as I've been back in Pittsburgh, if you want good coffee you go to La Prima.

People have told me to go to other places, but I have always rebuffed their suggestions. La Prima makes my favorite beans and they get infinite credit for making proper cappuccinos while everyone else spent the last 20 years or so making anemic lattes or those Seattle foam pyramids that sit on top of a tiny little acrid shot of espresso. No thanks.

The coffee aside, there was also the consideration that for years La Prima sat next to perhaps one of the top three bakeries I've ever seen in my entire life. You just can't turn down a breakfast pizza, and if you are going to be in the building anyway, why go anywhere else for coffee? Sure, you might get a shot from the slightly slow guy who doesn't quite know how to pack the coffee. But just like hot dogs taste better with baseball, the coffee always tasted better with Antonio's baked goods.

Of course, things change. The bakery next to La Prima, while still excellent, is not quite the same, and while you thought you might never hear me say it, there actually are other places in the city to get good coffee. I am by no means familiar with all of them. But the one I tried most recently is 21st Street Coffee which is just the other side of Pamelas from La Prima. While they have been there for a few years, I have not given them a proper try because, honestly, there is nothing else on that side of the street to draw me over. I also remain suspicious of this cult around Intelligensia Coffee Beans. I have just never been able to get a good shot out of them. I don't know what I do wrong.

Anyway, my buddies from work wanted to go over to 21st Street after we had a nice lunch at the Penn Avenue Fish market. I have an open mind so I followed them. Lo and behold here, finally, is a second place in Pittsburgh that I can say with confidence knows how to make a decent cappuccino. Fans of Tazza D'Oro would surely tell me that they've gotten good stuff there forever. And they'd be right. But I'm never in Highland Park and the few times I did go there (say) five years ago it had not yet reached it's current level. Surely I also have to try Espresso A Mano in Lawrenceville, especially since it is run by a former La Prima guy. I'm sure you will step up with your favorite place that I have missed. My only excuse will be that I wasn't there because it's not on my way, and the Strip is. I still wish someone would open a decent coffee place in Oakland. There is literally nothing worth paying money for between CMU and Downtown since Cafe Zio closed.

But coffee is only half the story. What has also happened down on Smallman street is that there is finally another reason besides the cafe to venture down the street from La Prima and brave the throngs of clueless barbarians lining up for a breakfast of greasecakes and whipped cream at Pamela's. Now, just down the street from 21st Street is another small bakery called Peace, Love and Little Donuts. They make freshly fried mini-sized donuts in various configurations that are so good you simply cannot help but eat a pound of them. I hesitate to compare them to Stan's in California, but they are certainly the best donuts that I have had since eating at Stan's.

So now, after all these years, there is finally another compelling pair of businesses to pull me out of my traditional habits and go and observe other parts of the world. It's good when things change for the better for once. It's good to have a couple of extra good choices. Let it never be said that I am a closed minded and bitter little man. Well, OK, you can say that. But let it be known that given a good enough reason (i.e. donuts) I will try anything new at least once. And I might even go back.

Bigmouth Strikes Again

2009-09-17 · by peterb

When I was younger, I was something of a jerk.

That's not to say I'm never a jerk today, but I have definitely mellowed with age. A pretty common occurrence for me when I was in my 20s was to hear someone say: "Hey, I know this guy who is just like you — he's a total jerk!" I don't hear that too much anymore. But it was always kind of a downer.

The other downside of being a jerk is that some people project all their passive-aggressive jerkish desires onto you. So someone will be irritated by Meg, and they'll say to you "Boy, Meg's Halloween costume is something else, isn't it, Pete? I bet you could say something really mean about how slutty it looks. Right? Right? Am I right? Wouldn't that be funny?" Then they look at you and hope you'll go make a scene. If these people aren't actively providing you with beer, they become intolerable pretty quickly.

Years of working for a living and generally learning that words have consequences have caused me to moderate my jerkish tendencies. But every so often something will slip past the shields. That happened tonight, at the library.

I was checking out a pile of books, looking forward to a weekend full of deep reading, when I overheard a couple of the younger clerks, a man and a woman, chatting about the G-20 conference that is happening in Pittsburgh next week. There's a lot of uncertainty about the level of protests that are going to happen. Pittsburgh has its own Special Ed group of hardcore protesters who show up at every event, but as eyerollingly cheesy as they are (footnote 1) I think most Pittsburghers have developed a sort of reluctant affection for them. They may be embarassing, unwashed and irritating, but they are nonviolent and, when not chaining themselves to buildings, are generally decent people. In Pittsburgh, being decent counts for a lot.

(A brief detour before I return to my story. A few years ago, I was watching a grueling documentary about people who jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge, most of whom of course did not survive. One particularly touching story was that of a woman who was getting ready to jump, and this guy was watching, and saw that no one else was doing anything, and he hung out with her and talked with her and then, just as she was about to leap, he climbed over the railing, reached out, grabbed her by the scruff of the neck and pulled her out. In the interview, the guy couldn't understand how anyone could possibly do anything else. It was the right thing to do. It was the decent thing to do. When I found out that the guy was from Pittsburgh, all I thought, with absolutely no sarcasm or meanness, was: "Of course he was." That's Pittsburgh.)

But the real question for those of us who live here is how many protesters are visiting from other places, and how many of those protesters are out to start real trouble, where by real trouble I mean the destruction of property or violence. I don't think anyone knows for sure how rough things will be next week.

So I'm listening to them talking about the protest, and one of them says to another "I heard this great tactic for protesting. When you go out to protest, wear Steelers fan gear, so that if the cops sweep up the street, they'll think you're just a fan out on the town, and they won't take you in!"

Something inside me just broke when I heard this. Partially, it's because I expect the protestors to be in my neck of the woods, interfering with my trip to and from work, and partially its because I, being a pessimist, do expect people to get hurt, and to have my worst expectations about humanity in general confirmed. So hearing people treating it like a game kind of pissed me off. (Footnote 2)

So, betraying my hard-earned experience, I unlimbered my tongue and the artillery was fired before I had even finished checking out my books.

"Oh, that won't work. The cops have already prepared for that. Didn't you hear what they're doing?"

"No, what?" the girl clerk said.

"Well, they're traveling around with a big grille with lamb shish-kebabs on them, and whenever they encounter a person wearing a Steelers outfit, they're going to give them a shish-kebab. And if the person doesn't eat it, they'll know that he or she is a vegetarian, and thus is just a protester and can be arrested."

It turns out, purely by coincidence I'm sure, that both of these clerks were vegetarian. They weren't amused.

But I was.

Footnote 1: ProTip™ for protesters: "The People...United...Will Never Be Defeated" is an annoying chant because it has an irritating and uneven meter, and also because it is demonstrably wrong.

Footnote 2: Allow me to observe that, when I was the age of these clerks, I would totally have treated protests like these as a game.

Why I Don't Like the G-20 Protesters

2009-09-18 · by peterb

In response to my recent article on a joke I made about the G-20 protesters, one of the readers — in fact, an old friend — asked me "Do you think protesting the G-20 is entirely without merit?"

That's a complex question. It's so complex that I am going to suspend, for this post, my self-imposed moratorium on cursing in writing on this weblog. If foul language offends you, you might want to stop reading now.

First off, let's be clear that people have the right to and can peacefully protest whatever they want, and whether or not I think their cause has merit or not doesn't really matter.

Regarding the G-20 protests specifically, I have several critiques. Some of those critiques are objective, and one is subjective. The first objective critique is that at each and every G-20 summit protest, the protesters have brought some level of violence and intentional destruction of property. I think that that is unacceptable thuggery, and anyone engaged in it must be publicly shamed.

A common rejoinder to this is "Well, not all the protesters are violent, so don't blame everyone for a few bad apples." That's a bad argument. Let me explain why.

Recently, the right-wing "Tea Baggers" marched on Washington. Some of the marchers carried signs like this:

20090916TeaParty03

Now, I don't feel at all shy about saying that not only was the person carrying that sign a racist pigfucker, but every single person marching within sight of that sign who didn't confront him is, without question, someone who likes hanging out with, aiding, and abetting racist pigfuckers.

I apply the same standard to the G-20 protesters. Every person who marches with people committing violence and thuggery, and who doesn't confront them and try to stop it, is someone who likes hanging out with, aiding, and abetting thugs.

My other objective observation is that the G-20 protests have no center, no organization, no cohesive goal, and no end game. One can't even state with certainty what, in fact, is being protested. There is absolutely no set of actions any government or private entity could take that would result in "the protesters" (giving them a monolithic status they don't in fact have) saying "Our demands have been met: we're going home." Given that, my impression is that this is less a legitimate protest movement and more a party holiday for people who have determined that showing up at protests is the best possible way to get laid.

My subjective comment is that we live in a world where most women are subjected on a regular basis to systemic and widespread oppression through physical violence, where in much of the world you can be harassed, injured, or killed if you are of the wrong religion, where much of the world is subject to governments that are actually totalitarian police states, and where the response to protests on the scale of the G-20 would be, as we've seen in Iran, violence on a much greater order of magnitude (warning: disturbing violent imagery at that link). As I said above, people can protest whatever they want to. But in my personal opinion, if you live in the Western world and economic globalization is the issue you choose to get worked up over, then you're a complete lightweight and not worth taking seriously.

Next Next Gen

2009-09-21 · by psu

By my accounting I bought my original Xbox 360 about three years and a few months ago. At the time I thought it was a pretty dubious purchase, but what can you do if you have an irrational urge to experience a particular video game at a particular time. Well, as my experience with the current consoles shows, you should beat yourself with a bat until you come to your senses.

Back then the Xbox 360 and the PS3 were called the "next generation" of consoles. I think it's now pretty clear that they were little more the beta test period for the actual next generation of hardware.

Almost two years after my purchase, that first Xbox failed with the round red lights of doom. I played a few sessions of Microsoft's torture the customer needing service minigame, and eventually got a replacement Xbox. The upside of this Xbox was that it worked. The downside was that they made it work by wiring the fans in "run full on all the time" mode. Here is how loud the box was: if I turned it on and let it sit idle for 15 minutes the fans would spin up to full. In that state, the fans were so loud that you didn't really notice if the DVD drive spun up too.

To try and escape this din, I would play games on the first generation PS3 that I had also picked up at the time. I got the last version that could still play PS2 games. The hardware seemed well put together. And even though it ran hot, the fan did not have that jet engine nature that made the Xbox so intolerable. In an interesting incidence of temporally symmetric failure, my PS3 failed last week, just about two years after I bought it. The PS3 failure was much more subtle, as most of the machine worked fine. It was only when the poor thing actually needed the Blu-Ray drive to perform its intended function that the whole system would freeze with a useless blank screen and no indication of what might be wrong.

So, three years since the start of the "next generation" what we have learned is that the game console people have completely lost their way. They built hardware platforms that were so inherently flawed that a large fraction of the machines will fail catastrophically after just a couple of years of light duty. Of course, peterb told me this would happen a couple of years ago. He correctly observed (twice!) that the "big" consoles were aggressively designed to capture a "high resolution" gaming experience at the expense of the reliability of the hardware. They have effectively given me the two aspects of the PC gaming experience that have caused me to mostly avoid the PC gaming experience: useless high resolution graphics, and hardware that I have to worry about instead of just turning on. Way to go.

My conclusion is that I should have sat out for a while, which goes against my dork nature, but would have made me happier and less poor in the long run. Having made that mistake already, I guess I should have just chalked it up to experience and given up on the consoles altogether. Unfortunately, I need at least one of them, especially if I want to shoot things this winter.

Therefore, I went out and got my third Xbox. In many ways, this is the box that Microsoft should have shipped in the first place. It does not require an external power suppy the size of a small planet. It does not require an electrician's certification to connect said power supply to the console. Finally, it is gloriously quiet. Even with the DVD drive running and actively copying data it generates no more noise or heat than the Nintendo Wii that sits above it on the shelf. Clearly, three years after launching the console, Microsoft has finally figured out how to build it.

Or have they. One of the biggest new features of the "Elite" model that I bought is the HDMI port in the back. And yet the console comes with no cable. In addition, near the end of the first decade of the 21st century, you still have to pay Microsoft $100 to get wireless networking in their game console. For $100 you can buy a wi-fi adapter that has a whole DVD player connected to it for free (on the other hand, although the PS3 comes with wi-fi but the TCP/IP stack is so bad you'd never want to use it).

However, the biggest failure in the new Xbox is undoubtedly the controllers. Oh they work fine (except for the shitty d-pad). Unfortunately, the new black one that came packed with my "Elite" console had no usable batteries. I pulled the battery pack off and tried with all my might to jam a couple of AA batteries in there, but the holes were too small. If I were smart I would turn around and return the console to Best Buy, concluding that Microsoft still can't be trusted. But I'm getting a little bit too much enjoyment out of being able to actually hear the sound effects in my video games instead of the console's fan.

Still, this battery thing is worrying. For example, I took the failure of the battery pack as a subtle hint from Microsoft that what they really want me to do is buy the rechargeable battery pack. This thing is a complete piece of crap compared to the PS3 controllers. First, for some reason it weighs as much as an entire PS3 controller by itself, but I gather that the battery life is not much better. In addition, the PS3 controller can recharge in a couple of hours off of a USB port. I've had an Xbox controller parked next to my laptop for about the last 7 and a half hours, and it's still not full. And the battery is hot.

So in summary, they finally have a motherboard that does not need a 500W stand fan to keep cool, but Microsoft still can't build a decent battery pack.

Oh well, two steps forward. One step back. Maybe by year six they'll have figured this out. Maybe I'll be smart enough to wait and see next time. Sadly, I have my doubts.

Why I Still Don't Like The G-20 Protestors

2009-09-24 · by psu

Well they certainly have lived up to their advanced billing. As these morons smash up Bloomfield, Shadyside, Lawrenceville and most recently, what appears to be much of Oakland, I think we can safely say that they are the gutless and intellectually bankrupt douchebags that we thought they would be. Good job enemies of Capitalism! Once again you've proven yourself to be utterly incompetent at making an impassioned and compelling case against your foes. I guess you have good aim against those helpless windows though. Jerks.

Halo Halo Halo Halo Halo Halo

2009-09-29 · by psu

It's fall and it's been two years since the last Halo game so it must be time for a new Halo game. And right on schedule, the nice UPS man showed up with my copy.

This game slots in as a little piece on the side of what happens during Halo 2. From a gameplay perspective, the new gimmick is that you no longer play as an invincible super solider. Instead you are a slightly less invincible human solider engaging in street combat in various areas of the city of "New Mombasa". The fact that you are only mostly invincible means that you have to change up your tactics a little bit. But mostly the same Halo combat engine that we know and love (or hate) makes itself evident from the beginning. It pays to use combinations of weapons well. It pays to engage as few enemies as possible, lest you be burned to a crisp by plasma fire. It pays to conserve sticky grenades.

Bungie also contribues to a bit of the old OCD by adding achievements for some standard Halo combat moves. For example, you can get one for pulling off ten bitchslap moves on the same level. This is great fun. Try it with the Covenant Carbine. Very effective. There is also an audio log collection minigame, ala Bioshock. Apparently audio logs will soon be the new clichéd narrative device for first person shooters.

Speaking of narrative, the game tries to switch things up by introducing a plot that jumps back and forth in time and presents the events of the game through multiple points of view. This works fairly well to distract you from the fact that the writing is about as good as a bad episode of Dollhouse. For some reason, they also tried to tie the threads of the narrative together by introducing a gameplay device that I will call "make the user search the entire map for a small object that glows yellow so he can get to the next area." I haven't done so much brute force search since I spent too much time looking for non-rendered treasure chests in Shadow Hearts. Bungie has faithfully reproduced that experience, leaving out only the little thought bubble that is supposed to appear over my head when I am finally standing in the right spot.

This annoyance aside, the rest of the Halo checklist is safely in place:

  1. Set pieces with large groups of enemies that kill you over and over until you fight smart: check.

  2. Annoying areas where you have to fly a Banshee: check.

  3. Blowing shit up in tanks: check.

  4. The "I'm driving the Warthog on an endless highway with loud music, this must be close to the last level" moment: check.

  5. Long linear hallway often disguised as multiple areas that all look the same: check.

I have not yet dipped into the multiplayer, although I hope to play Firefight with a few of my online friends. Overall, I have to say that I'm happy with the single player. I like the feel of combat in the city. I like the narrative involving multiple characters. I like the slight twists that they have added to the fighting. It's been a long time since I had a nice alien shooting gallery and this one is well enough implemented that I've even decided to go through again on Heroic. It helps that Bungie was considerate enough to make the campaign short. This way you can replay it without wanting to poke your own eyes out with a fork.

There will be the usual chorus of naysayers. Some will say that there is not enough content. Some will call this a glorified expansion pack. Some will chastise Bungie because they didn't make the game satisfy their literature dork wet dreams. I have no real opinion on whether these people are right. But I do think that they should be ignored. Buy the game. Shoot the aliens. I liked it. So will you.

At Arm's Length

2009-10-06 · by psu

Some reviews of Panasonic's answer to the Olympus EP-1 are starting to trickle out into the intertubes. I just noticed that the Luminous Landscape people are talking about their experience with the camera. The review is about what you would expect. The camera is quicker to focus and generally more usable but it does not have the sensor-based anti-shake. You can't have everything.

But here is a line from the review that confuses me: "Doing serious photography with a camera at arms length just isn't my thing."

You hear this complaint over and over again from the people in the world who just can't live without an eye-level viewfinder. I understand the shortcomings of the LCD screen, but this complaint still baffles me. The implication is that the only way to use the LCD on the back of the camera to compose pictures is to lock yer arms straight out in front of your face like a mentally crippled robot and then point the camera in the right direction. So here is my question: do serious photographers not have elbows? Can any of you out in the Intertube-land enlighten me? Do you have elbows?

What Comes Around

2009-10-13 · by peterb

I used to play a lot of board games.

This was back when I actually lived near my friends, and hung out with a critical mass of people who enjoyed the hobby as well. I have a small collection of games from back then that I don't play much any more.

The most valuable accessory, if you like board games, is a friend who is obsessed with them, because then you get to try all the games without spending money or, more importantly, storage space. That board games are physical objects, which can be looked at, touched, manipulated, and put away, is both their great attraction and their great drawback. And it's inevitable if you play that you eventually collect more than you want to own. Boardgame fans revel in the frivolous, the unnecessary. You can play Sid Sackson's classic game Can't Stop with 4 dice, a sheet of paper, and some pennies, yet most people would rather have the big piece of plastic with all the little colored tokens instead. It's ingrained in human nature, I'm convinced. I had a friend with the Infinite Collection of Boardgames, but then he moved to California, which meant that I was still interested in the games but suddenly with no access to them. This meant that I foolishly bought a few before realizing that I was rapidly running out of space. I dealt with this by sealing the games up in the basement and forgetting about playing them for a few years. But recently, the urge to play has reared its ugly head again.

I have a few issues that make board games a debilitating hobby for me personally. The first, of course, is that in order to play games I have to interact with and speak to other actual human beings, which is always a bad thing. But more problematic is that board gaming, as a hobby, is deeply subject to the desire for the latent object. The board game you don't own is always better than the game you do own. Even when the one you are obsessing about sucks.

The best recent example of my personal latent object fetishism is that I can't get Advanced Squad Leader out of my mind. ASL, as it is known, is a horrendously complex tangle of rules that no reasonable person will ever bother to learn. I think of it as less of a game than as a medical condition. I got to thinking about ASL because I had been playing Combat Mission on Windows, which is a turn-based computer wargame based loosely (very loosely) on ASL. I knew the full game was too involved for me, but when I discovered there was a Starter Kit with slightly simplified rules, I started having second thoughts. If you want to know what I mean when I say "slightly simplified," feel free to peek at this 135 page PDF tutorial that covers some of the basics of the game.

The thing is, even if you gave me the Special Ed version of ASL, I would never play it. First, I would never find anyone to play it with. Second, the level of detail in the rules is, if not beyond my capabilities, certainly beyond my level of interest. I would stop playing the game before I had finished a single turn. I know this. Yet I still find myself idly thinking of picking up the starter kit, instead of getting a game more well-suited to my internal one-hour-limit game clock, such as Memoir '44.

Apart from my small circle of friends, I've never really explored the wider boardgame geek culture. I don't go to cons, hang out at game stores, or the like. Recently, however, I perused the forums at boardgamegeek.com, and discovered that the same sorts of geek one-upmanship that happens in computer game circles ("This new version of the game has been dumbed down because it's not hard enough!") happens there as well. The best example of this I've seen so far is this article, entitled "Why Memoir 44' is not really a war game despite claims to the contrary", written by the Comic Book Guy from the Simpsons. It really is a masterful exemplar of the fandom rant genre, and is not to be missed.

This shouldn't surprise me, of course. As psu has observed, we live in a Dork Nation, and if you're playing wargames you're already a pretty serious outlier.

Anyway, I've tried to get my boardgame-collecting friend fired so he'll move back to Pittsburgh, thus sparing me from acquiring any more games, but apparently his bosses trust him too much, so that plan has fallen through.

Maybe I can get psu addicted to boardgames, and then if I want to play them I'll just go over to his house. It worked with the Xbox.

Look Sharp!

2009-10-14 · by psu

If camera bodies and bags are the number 1 and 2 dork shopping obsessions related to photography, sharpness is probably a close third. It is probably the most popular purely technical aspect of actual pictures that makes it to the camera dork shopping list. People buy bigger cameras, more expensive lenses, sturdier enlargers (well, maybe not), and spill a lot of sweat and tears over sharpness and "picture quality." Even my resolutely un-camera-dorky partner peterb got into the act when he described the Nikon D300 autofocus system as being one that could lead to "tack sharp" images. Unfortunately, it's a hard concept to pin down. Most people will tell you when they think a picture is sharp, or not. But sharpness is more of a mixture of multiple technical characteristics than a single measurable quantity.

I would be on shaky ground if I tried to present you with a purely technical discussion of what makes pictures look sharp. I don't have the background in optics or the various engineering fields necessary to talk about the subject at that level. But in my experience in taking photographs, I do know that there are a collection of factors that you, the photographer can control, that lead to a general impression of sharpness, or not. I will list these here for your reference.

Focus

Every picture as a point of best focus. When you are good, and sometimes when you are lucky, you manage to put the most important part of your subject at the point of best focus in the picture. This makes the picture look sharper.

Depth of Field

As you move away from the point of best focus things get progressively blurrier. The concept of depth of field refers to how far to the front or back of the focus point you can be and still "appear" sharp. Depth of field is a function of the focal length of the lens, the focus distance, and the aperture that you are using. These are all numbers can you can read off. But, depth of field is also a function of how blurry you are willing to allow the picture to be. This last parameter is called the "circle of confusion", and all the DOF charts or graphs all depend on first fixing how large you allow this circle to be.

Generally you get more depth of field by taking pictures of things that are far away with short focal length lenses at small apertures like F8 or F11. Of course, things that are far away are often tiny and boring and you can't shoot everything with a short lens. Also, stopping down too much can introduce diffraction and other problems. In addition, having too much depth of field can cause its own issues, as anyone who has found herself in a photograph with a telephone pole growing out the side of her head can attest. So, working with depth of field, like everything in photography, is an exercise in compromise.

Image Size

The more you magnify a picture the more blurry it looks. I think this fact alone would discourage people from having absolute discussions of sharpness, but it doesn't. I have a modest example. I took this picture in France, and it looks great at flickr sizes:

psu_20090724-03198

.

When you print it 12x18 and stare at it, you realize that I didn't put the focus where I should have and the right half of the shot is mostly out of focus. So is the picture sharp? Yes and no. There is no single answer.

These days with digital cameras, people tend to hold their pictures to a ludicrous standard in terms of sharpness versus image size. You open the file up in Photoshop and crank it up to 100% and proclaim that your camera can't focus, your lenses are crap and you botched the depth of field yet again. Never mind that you'd have to print the shot at 60 by 40 inches to really notice. Don't be that guy. At this point I will note that I'm the only one I know who is bothered by the focus problems in the above picture from France.

Subject Motion

Aside from focus problems this is probably the number one reason pictures don't look sharp. If what you are taking a picture of moves while the shutter is open, it will be blurry. The solution is to either nail the thing in place or use a faster shutter speed. Probably half of all example images proclaiming that a camera or lens doesn't work are actually unsharp because of subject motion.

Camera Motion

The flip side of subject motion is camera motion. If your camera shakes up and down while the shutter is open then it's just like your subject is jumping up and down in front of you while the shutter is open. What you get in the end is a blurry picture. Probably half of all example images proclaiming that a camera or lens doesn't work are actually unsharp because of camera motion.

Sometimes it's fun to play around with using subject and camera motion on purpose... but it usually doesn't work:

Musee D'Orsay

Subject Texture

Here is an intersting wrinkle. Some subjects just look sharper than others. Rocks look sharp:

Walkway wall, Giverny

Water and fog and mist, not so much:

psu_20090227-00977

Filling your pictures with things that have a lot of fine detail or clear sharp edges tends to make people think they are sharper. One of the reasons for this is the special importance of edges in the psychology of perceived sharpness. Edge sharpness is so important that the most used filter in Photoshop is the so called unsharp mask which, in its simplest form, is nothing more than a computation that increases contrast around the edges to make them look sharper.

Lighting

Another often overlooked aspect of sharper pictures is the lighting. In general directional light that emphasizes textures and edges makes pictures seem sharper. Also, juxtaposing high contrast light against low contrast light is a good way to make your subject "pop" out of the picture. Head over to the Strobist for more lessons about this. The principles are the same for either flash or natural light. Here is a lame example:

psu_20080101-00059

If you want your pictures to look flat and boring and completely lacking in texture, find light that is head on and very uniform:

psu_20080101-00064

Flat light from the front makes it impossible to find the edges in the picture, and sharp looking edges are psychologically important.

Resolution

I put this last because out of all of the factors I have listed it probably has the least to do with perceived sharpness. Resolution is nothing but a measure of the smallest detail that your imaging system can show as an independent entity in a picture. It can effect sharpness in that if you are taking a picture of something with a lot of fine detail, that detail will look sharper if it is better resolved. But there are plenty of pictures that are relatively low resolution that look sharp anyway. The best examples are HD television and projected films, both of which we think of as sharp even though the raw resolution is pretty low. Very small but sharp looking web photos are another example.

I think the rise of digital cameras have made people overly conscious of resolution and they tend to latch on to it in the hope of finding a single number that means "good image quality." I think history will show that hardly anyone needs more than a few megapixels, and of those people, hardly any really needed more than six.

Related to resolution, you will also notice that I didn't mention anything about lenses. I don't have much to say about lenses for two reasons. First, I think the other aspects of image sharpness are more important than the raw performance of the lens. Second, I have never felt that I am "lens limited" with respect to how my pictures look. If there is something wrong with them, there is almost always something else to blame, and it's usually my technique. If I were a real photographer, I would feel more confident about proclaiming grand truths about lenses. But as it is, the reality is that all the lenses you can buy are probably good enough. And if they are not, you'll probably find out before me.

To sum up, in order to take sharper pictures you should:

  1. Find sharper subject matter.

  2. Keep the subject still or your camera still or both.

  3. Use good light.

  4. Learn to focus.

Seems simple enough. Maybe I'll figure it out in another 20,000 pictures.

What Computers Do

2009-10-22 · by psu

Every once in a while someone who I don't know will find out that I work with computers. Often when this happens they get a look on their face like they have just found a great free source of technical support. I try to quickly end any such misconceptions. I just program the things, after all, I don't really know how to use them. At times though I do find myself daydreaming about the true nature of the computer as a device. We know that at the surface the computer is a tool that helps us get things done that we didn't used to be able to do as easily or as efficiently. Things like get directions, or process our photographs, or compose long pieces of text for total strangers around the world to read. That's not the level of inquiry that I'm interested in here.

I'm more interested in the following question: if you had to describe in a single sentence what computers do or how they work, what would you say?

My answer to this would be: a computer is a machine that stores and manipulates abstract symbols, or languages, that represent real things that you or I are interested in. A second way I might put this is: a computer is a universal recursive name translation machine.

To see how I arrive that this pretentious and esoteric turn of phrase, let's review how computers work. Here's a pretty good picture:

In its simplest form a computer is a machine that loads instructions from some memory, excutes these instructions, and then can write results back into the memory. This immediately brings up the question: what is in the memory? How is it stored? What kinds of objects can we store and retrieve? In most modern computers, the answer is that you store bits. We all know that you can store bits in "main memory", or on the disk, or more recently in other media like DVDs or flash cards. Exactly how a bit is physically manifested varies. Therefore, we software people think about this in a more abstract way and say that a bit is a place that you can store either a value representing a "1" or a value representing a "0". Notice how we have already started to build a language. The memory in a computer does not really contain anything that looks like the digit "1". But we think of it that way. So now we have gone from talking about an entity that probably has a fairly complicated physical construction to something clean and simple. Just ones and zeros.

In order to effectively store and retrieve bits from a memory we need a way to address them. That is, we need a way to talk about where they are in the memory. From this need comes the notion of an address space. Generally computers are built to be able to efficiently work with values made up of some number of bits all packaged together into an aggregate value. When you hear people talk about "8 bit" computers vs. "32 bit" computers this is generally what they mean. They mean the hardware has been built to be able to push around packets, or "words", that are 8, 16, 32, or 64 bits wide. There have been other oddball sizes too in the past, like the 36 bit DEC machines, or the CDC machine that used 60 bit words. But these days since there is only one architecture that matters (just kidding!) the main values are 32 or 64. In addition to being able to fetch, say, 32 bit values, a 32 bit computer can also be easily programmed to perform arithmetic on these values. That is, the hardware itself supports instructions for doing simple, (and not so simple) math on integers up to 32 bits wide.

With this background, we can talk about address spaces. An address space is simply what you get when you put together all of the possible bit strings that a computer can generate and use each one to name a particular location in memory. So, if your computer deals with 32 bit numbers, you can usually use each one of those numbers to address a unique location in memory. If you write down all the numbers you can represent with 32 bits you get 2^32-1 which is around 4 billion addresses. By convention most modern memory systems lets you store a single 8 bit value at each address in the machine. This is why your laptop maxes out at around 4GB of system memory. Of course, disks and such are much larger than this. But that's another article.

Now we have enough information to go through one step in a computer's life. Assume we have the CPU and the memory hooked up. Assume also that some being of greater intelligence has loaded the memory with a bunch of instructions. Finally assume that the CPU has two pieces of internal memory. One stores the address of the next instruction to be executed. The other stores the result of the last instruction that you executed, if it generated a result. Here's what the computer does:

  1. Load the address of the next instruction from the first internal memory slot.

  2. Ask the memory system for the instruction at that address.

  3. Execute the instruction, storing the result in the second internal memory.

  4. Store the result back into memory at a location specified by the instruction that we just executed.

In the old lingo, we used to call the first internal memory slot the "PC" or Program Counter. The second internal memory might have been called an accumulator, since it accumulates the results of our arithmetic. These days these things are all just called registers. And typical computers have a few dozen of them instead of just a few.

Now, you might ask, what kinds of instructions am I talking about here? A typical computer has a few dozen instructions that can do things like

  1. Load a value from a location in memory into a register.

  2. Store a value from a register to a location in memory.

  3. Perform simple arithmetic on loaded values.

  4. Jump to a new location in memory and start executing the instructions stored there.

  5. Conditionally jump to a new location in memory based on the value in a register. For example, only jump to location 10 if the value in a register is zero.

It turns out that these five things are, essentially, all that is needed to build all of the computing infrastructure in use today. Real hardware is, of course, much more capable than this. But it's reassuring to know that at the bottom of it all, this is all you need. This is because what computers excel at is providing you with a basic set of building blocks and letting you combine and layer the piece into an ever more complicated edifice. Before you know it you are taking a machine that basically only knows arithmetic and using it to render the next Pixar film. It's a miracle.

How does this miracle happen? It happens because you can represent everything using bits. Most importantly, the instructions that the computer executes and the addresses provided to those instructions are also represented using bits. Therefore, the machine itself can process and generate instructions that it will then turn around and execute. This is the fundamental meta-recursion that makes the entire modern computer industry possible. We can write programs that when executed, generate programs.

As one final example of how computers are constantly immersed in self-referential confusion, I would now like to discuss the notion of virtual memory. The original virtual memory systems were motivated by the fact that you wanted to be able to write programs that operated on more data than could be stored in the main memory of the machine at once. Therefore, people built a two level memory. The first level was small and fast. The second level was large and slow. The virtual memory system would then automatically transfer data from the small memory to the large one and back again as the need arose. We do this by taking the addresses that the CPU generates and doing a bit of computation with them before feeding them to the memory system. This second box remembers whether we actually have the data at that address in the fast memory or not and manages the transfer of the data if required. The interesting thing, to me, about virtual memory is the management of the address space.

Recall the main processing loop of every program above. First we generate an address at which to load the next instruction (and/or data). Then we ask the memory system for what is stored at this address. Suppose we put another box between the CPU and the memory system:

Every time the CPU generates an address, it goes first to this other box which then asks the memory system for the data. What this second box does is keep a table of memory addresses that the CPU has generated. Next to each address in this table is another address. When the CPU hands this second box an address, the second box looks it up in the table, finds the second address, and uses it instead to load data from the main memory. We call this address translation. The address that the CPU generates is a virtual address and the address that this mystery box stores is called the physical address. We call this mystery box the address translation unit, or more generically the memory management unit or MMU.

It might be the case that we have not yet mapped the virtual address to any physical address. In this case we pick a spot in the "real" memory to put the address and create a new entry in the table. It might also be the case that the smaller physical memory is full, in which case we have to pick some other entry in the table to throw away to make room. When the entry is removed from the table we have to save the data to the slow memory for safe keeping, and reload it if we need it again. The MMU, with the help of the operating system, manages these low level details. From the CPU's point of view, it is looking at a simple linear address space, even though we have really cut it up into little pieces.

While virtual memory was originally developed to deal with address spaces that were much larger than a machine could physically provide, I don't think this is its most interesting application anymore. For most users and most programs physical memories are plently large these days. It's easy to buy a computer with 4GB of system memory. The real importance of the MMU lies in the fact that it allows the CPU to use addresses do not really exist in our reality. They are a figment of the computer's imagination. It's as if everything in the machine has a forwarding address.

You might ask, why is this important? It's important because it is what allows you to run your Web Browser and Photoshop at the same time without the two programs interfering with one another. Operating systems use address translation to provide the illusion that every program is running on a mystical computer whose memory starts at address zero and ends at address 4 billion (or whatever). It doesn't matter where the data really is, the MMU and the OS are keeping track.

It turns out that this is a facility of remarkable convenience. Before virtual memory, you had to constantly worry if the memory you wanted to use for your program was already in use and figure out how to move it around so that you could get your work done. With the address translation system around, you just load the program at address "zero" and go. Not only does the operating system keep track of where the data really is, it also makes sure that your program can't accidentally end up loading or storing data that it does not own. It can only see what the MMU and the OS let it see. So, in general, when Firefox crashes, it can only destroy things that were in its address space, and therefore Photoshop will keep happily humming along.

Addressing memory is at the core of how computers operate. You can't do anything in a computer without fetching it from or writing it back to memory at some point. Therefore, given how virtual memory works you can now really think of a computer as a machine that spends much of its time translating the name of one thing (the virtual address) into a completely different name for something else (the physical address). Hence, I return to the more pretencious and abstract statment form the beginning of this article:

A computer is a universal recursive name translation machine.

In fact, there is more truth to this than you might imagine. Even outside the relatively esoteric and abstract land of address translation, almost all software can really be thought of as just a fancy translation engine. But that is a subject for another time.

Note

If you want a more detailed yet more understandable version of how this works, go read The Soul of a New Machine. Really. You'll be glad you did.

Jumped the Shark

2009-10-28 · by psu

I like bookstores. Actually, it's more general than that. I like libraries too. I like sitting next to bookshelves and just peering at them, memorizing everything that's there. I like spending hours just browsing the stacks, running my finger down the spines of the books, pausing every once in a while to pick one out and leaf through its pages. In high school and college, I used to have entire sections of the school or university library memorized. I could find any book that I had found once before just by going to the right set of shelves and walking to the right spot. I can still visualize some of those shelves in my head, although the contents are by now long gone. I like to do the same thing in my favorite bookstores.

I like hanging around books. It's not a good time to be me.

Books, culturally speaking, are on the way out along with every other form of cultural consumption that requires more than a 10 second attention span. With the dozens of hours of reality television shows, sports, internet surfing, and most importantly, MMORPGs to consume every week, it appears that no one has "time" for books anymore. I would be bitter about this, but I'm just as guilty as everyone else. And, even when I have time to consume a book I go off and buy it for my cell phone book reader instead of obtaining the real thing from a nice bookshelf somewhere.

You see the effects of this cultural shift everywhere. Pittsburgh is blessed with one of the most fantastic public libraries in the entire country. What do you find when you enter this august institution? You find 12 year olds playing Runescape. The place looks and feels like the main terminal room for the Computer Science department at Carnegie Mellon when I was an undergraduate. It's open, a bit sterile, and filled with the sound of keyboards. At the smaller branches, the actual space for books is so sparse that it's not even worth spending some time scanning the shelves. There is little to look at.

I don't let this bother me. I just go to the main branch in Oakland when I need a bookshelf fix. The main branch does not have as many computer terminals, and has less empty space as well.

But then, the other night, I spied a book in a window that I wanted to pick up. It was the 2009 Best American Sports Writing. I like books of essays. I didn't get to get in the store that night, and thought "well, I'll just drop by the Borders on my way home tomorrow." This Borders was built near the house we bought in a northern Pittsburgh suburb about a year after we moved up there. Back before amazon.com, we spent a ludicrous percentage of our disposable income there. Like the libraries of my youth, I liked hanging out there, remembering where all the books were.

So I dropped in, ready to go find my essay book. They keep the essay collections over on the end of the fiction shelves. I knew just where the book should be. But something seemed off the minute I actually walked in the store. My senses were attacked by a local group of young people playing "music" in the "cafe". I thought to myself, why should I have to be distracted by this folk-rock bullshit while I look for my book? Undaunted, I sauntered over to the shelf, feeling a bit of extra stress as I wanted to escape the din. I could not find the book. I could not find any of the essay collections that used to be there. I thought maybe it should be in Sports, which had recently moved. So I went down there but still could not find it because I was unfamiliar with the layout.

Now I was getting annoyed. I had to ask the store clerk where the book was, and she had to look it up on the in-store computer. At that point I realized that my entire world had fallen apart. I mean, if you go into a bookstore and you have to find the book on the Internet terminal anyway, then what precisely is the point for the store existing? Why have they taken what used to be this relaxing space for hanging out and memorizing useless information into an awful and annoying assault on the senses? I have to assume that Borders is reasoning that they have to do all they can to keep the attention of the patrons of their store. Since no one has "time" for books alone, the bookstore must also be a cafe, a restaurant, a live music performance venue and a tacky gift shop. An entire shopping mall under one roof, although one with fewer books than the store used to have. All these things are like the computers playing Runescape, only for adults (1).

They saved the final insult for last. After suffering all this indignity, it turns out I could have bought the damn book at amazon.com for between 30% to 50% less money. So I bought one book at the store, and saved my other purchase for amazon. I'd have felt guilty about this in the past, since I have an interest in supporting my local bookstore. But now I feel no remorse, because the bookstore as I know it has been removed from the face of the earth. Maybe if I am lucky it will return to me some day, inviting me to again commune in that dense field of bookshelves, running my fingers along the spines and remembering where all the books sit. I'm not optimistic though. It seems like the time for such a place is in the past.

Notes

  1. I realize that World of Warcraft is really Runescape for adults.

Rock Band Beatles Picoreview

2009-11-02 · by psu

Same pitch perfect Harmonix gameplay. But this is by far the best music collected into a Rock Band or Guitar Hero game. They will never make another fake guitar game with a higher hit ratio, because honestly, there is no better pop music than The Beatles. That is all.

In Which We Acknowledge Our Shortcomings

2009-11-02 · by peterb

A couple of years ago, we two Petes collaborated on a brief parody of a certain video game reviewer's writing style. We actually worked on it for quite some time. Many of this writer's more obvious annoying habits - the fact that he always makes sure you know that he lives in Japan and is really popular with girls and his habit of analogizing every game to an obscure early 1980's game that you've never played - were easy to imitate. But what was much harder was imitating this writer's ability to pump out page after page of sheer unmitigated volume. The man has a relationship with words like a sorority girl who has just lost her first drinking contest has a relationship with beer: emerging in an unending torrent, horrifying everyone who witnesses the aftermath.

Our meagre parody topped out at a paltry 1200 words, which wouldn't get you past the introductory remarks in one of this gentleman's pieces. And now I have the perfect example to share with you, because he has just written Can Videogames Be Our Friends, which at a mere 12,000 words is probably one of his shorter pieces. Find yourself a nice, comfortable chair, and have something nearby that you can punch, and enjoy.

For those of you who are more interested in the statistical side of things, I present the following, Harper's Review style precis:

Really. It is beyond belief.

As my friend Nat said, I can't decide if he's really this thick, or if he's just cleverly figured out how to monetize infuriating people.

Excuse Our Dust - 2009 Edition

2009-11-04 · by peterb

We're upgrading the blog software here at Tea Leaves to clear out some lingering problems from old versions of Wordpress.  All permalinks and comments should be working properly, but until we get ourselves back up to speed, you'll notice that the layout is a bit different and some links (notably Amazon.com links) may be broken.  We should be back to normal by this weekend.

Half Baked Shorts

2009-11-11 · by psu

I read a 700 page book about the NBA last week, and paradoxically it left me without the cranial capacity to write anything full length. So instead I have these thoughts that are not completely cooked yet.

The Book of Basketball

I first became aware of Bill Simmons in 2007 during the months leading up to the Helmet Catch ruining the best season of NFL football ever executed by the team of my youth. After reading some of his scattered and hyperactive online prose, I went and found his first book which covers the other tortured team of my youth: the Red Sox. I remember thinking at the time that while he certainly knew how to generate a lot of words, the writing was sort of juvenile in both content and structure.

Simmons' new book, The Book of Basketbell proves that he's gotten a lot better. This is partly because he starts the book with the one shining light in the sports experience of my youth: The Larry Bird era Celtics. But it's also the case that while he still has a juvenile frat-boy streak in him, his writing has spent a lot of time maturing and becoming more thoughtful. The core of the book is a 100,000 word reconstruction of the NBA Hall of Fame as a multi-level pyramid. He populates his basketball temple with 96 of best players ever and explains in almost horrific detail exactly where each guy goes and why he goes there. If you have any interest in the NBA at all you have to pick up this book. He even manages to shed a bit of his Boston homerism. Really.

I read it all and then immediately bought the Larry Bird Legend DVD to show to my kid. They gotta learn sometime.

Small Cameras

I have often opined that no one makes a small camera with the image quality and performance of (say) a Nikon D70. Well, someone finally heard me because now we have a veritable flood of such machines. It started with the Olympius E-P1. But now Panasonic (GF-1), Leica (X-1), and even Ricoh (GXR) are jumping in. And there are rumors of a new machine coming from Nikon. You'd think I'd be happy about this, but I'm not.

What bothers me about all of these machines, except the Leica, is that they are obsessed with useless interchangeability. They work very hard to allow you to use different lenses, but for some reason the lenses that are offered are all useless zoom lenses or prime lenses of the wrong focal length. The correct lens for one of these cameras is something that will act just like the 35/2 on my Konica Hexar. And I dont' really care if it's glued on permanently. The Leica comes the closest to this, but costs as much as an expensive laptop. Oh well.

Borderlands

I had been playing Borderlands for about a week when Pete asked me if he should buy it. I said, "Well, the RPG stuff is rudimentary, the shooting isn't as good as Halo, the game has some control issues, I don't like co-op, and here really is no plot to speak of." In other words, Borderlands does not shine in any way that you can catalog. But, a week or two later I'm still playing. Here's why.

Borderlands has taken the core of every RPG and wrapped it up in a nice package where you shoot things and make them blow up. It's Diablo with guns. You talk to someone. They give you a "quest". You go to the location of the quest. You destroy some shit. You get loot and points. There are no grand pretensions of interactive story telling. No epic arcing plots out of juvenile fiction. No insistent and constant world-building via boring exposition. You kill stuff. You get loot. And that makes for a good game because the developers targeted something very specific, and they implemented that specific thing very well.

I will keep playing until I find a sniper rifle with lightning. Then my life will be complete.

Dork Value Judgement

From the Internet Forum people, a new sort of cognitive dissonance! Since it's November, a lot of big "AAA" video game titles have been dropping all at the same time. I can count at least five or six off the top of my head. But, I have been ignoring them because I have not yet found that sniper rifle with lightning. Anyway, two of the big titles this year come from long standing franchises all of which have had multiple releases over the last decade. There is a new Call of Duty game and a new fantasy RPG from Bioware called Dragon Age. You might object that Dragon Age is not a new game in a series, but I would counter that all Bioware games are cut from the same cloth no matter what their setting, so it counts.

Here is the interesting thing. In the Internet game forums, these two games have gotten very different reactions. I will summarize:

Call Of Duty: Meh. Just another military shooter in a long line of military shooters. This game is not for "real gamers" but for frat-boy poseurs who like console games.

Dragon Age: OMG it's a grand and epic re-imagining of the classic hard core Baldur's Gate style fantasy RPG with a super mature plot and deep and tactical combat!

So, Call of Duty refines a well established genre but probably does not break any new ground, and is therefore shit. Dragon Age refines a well established genre but probably does not really break any new ground, and is therefore the best new game of the year.

Note: I will not begrudge anyone their enjoyment of Dragon Age. My only complaint is someone getting high and mighty over a game they like only because it panders to their particular adolescent power fantasies and being too lacking in self awareness to realize this.

Final Note

Go to Tamari in Lawrenceville. It's good. While there, get coffee at Espresso a Mano. It's also good. That is all.

Elise, a precocious aesthete of not inconsiderable passion, plummeted from a cliff on St. Swithin's Day

2009-11-12 · by peterb

My friend Zarf (of interactive fiction, and Boodler fame1), recently released Mutagen, a small Javascript library for generating pseudorandom strings of text, according to a grammar. Because my entire purpose in life is to walk up to the huge forests Zarf plants and opine "Saaaaaay. That's a really nice tree!" I of course immediately took his sample app and dropped it nearly unchanged as the 'subtitle header' of Tea Leaves. You'll get a new one each time you visit.

My divine role of King of Missing the Point shall forever go unchallenged!

Footnote 1: At least, he's famous among the circle of people whose opinions I care about.

The Meta-Games People Play

2009-11-16 · by psu

Stricken by a mean stomach flu, I spent Sunday sprawled on the couch watching football. What I was hoping would be an enjoyable diversion while I was sick on the couch turned into a horrible psychological buzz-kill. First, the Cincinnati Bengals beat up the locally beloved Steelers, sweeping the season series for the first time in more than ten years. Then the Cowboys and the Packers played a mostly uninspired game, with the Cowboys being much more uninspired than the Packers. Finally, my beloved Pats were going up against the Colts in the late game. But more on that later. First, I have to talk about why I spend time watching some games that I have no reason to care about.

My predicament stems from a whimsical decision I made at the beginning of the season. Feeling that it "might be fun" to have a little extra football-based diversion on top of the normal three to six hours of television on Sundays, I convinced myself to join two different games about Football. That is, games you participate in not by playing football, but rather by thinking about the people who are actually playing football.

The first one was the ESPN Pigskin Pick 'em game, and is fairly straightforward. Every week they tell you the gambling lines on all the games. You pick who will cover the spread or not. You see if you can pick better than Bill Simmons. It turns out that I'm really bad at this. I might as well just check the boxes at random. But, the true humiliation is that just making a pick, and not even betting any money on it, is enough to keep you interested in the Oakland vs. KC score for most of the afternoon, even though no rational human being should care about that game. Oh well.

The second sort of meta-game that I got roped into is Fantasy Football. If you don't know how this works, go study the wikipedia page. The basic idea is that you "manage" a team. You pick players on the team to "start" or "be on the bench." Then when those players play in their real game, you get points based on their performance. The scoring systems vary, but you typically get points for yards, touchdowns, and so on. You get negative points for fumbles, interceptions, and so forth. Every week your fake team goes up against your friend's fake team and whoever gets the most fake points wins. Here are the two intolerable facts that I have learned about Fantasy Football.

  1. Week to week it does not matter who you play. You could pick teams completely at random, and your average score would not vary significantly from someone who took this very seriously. I'm convinced of this. I think some outfit like Football Outsiders should do a detailed statistical study of the performance of all the fantasy "analysts" to definitively show that they are no better than coin flips. There probably isn't even a Fantasy Football equivalent of Warren Buffet who against all odds is able to beat the probabilities and win consistently. Let me be clear: there is no reason to take these games seriously. Your input has no impact on the final results.

  2. Even given (1), I lose every week anyway.

Clearly, my participation in these auxiliary football activities has done nothing to increase my enjoyment of the actual contests. Instead, all I do is watch games I don't care about and then become upset when the wrong team covers, or Kurt Warner goes unconscious and outscores my entire fantasy football team single-handedly. And yet, the brilliant mind control marketing of the NFL will keep my playing these games. I don't know what's good for me anymore.

With this background you should be able to understand the depth of my shock and dismay when I say that when the Colts stole a 35-34 win from the Patriots in the last two minutes of the game, I didn't even think about my fantasy team for a good hour (ironically, my opponent had Peyton Manning, who in winning the game yet again destroyed any hope that I'd win a game). Let's be clear, this was a failure of Red Soxian proportions. It's not every day you can blow a 31-14 lead in one quarter.

Today the Patriots Media are up in arms about "the call" on 4th and 2, but the truth is that the game was lost long before that call. Before that call, Peyton had been able to get the ball and march down the field so fast and so effectively it was like he was playing Madden 10 and he knew the money plays. So, bitch about the call all you want, but the most mortifying thing about this loss is how well it illustrates the complete psychological collapse of the Patriots fan over the last couple of years. Beaten down by the 2006 AFC Championship game (lost a 21-3 leads to lose... to the Colts) and the Helmet Catch, here is what we are thinking when up 34-21 with four minutes left against Peyton Manning: 13 points is not enough.

The entire last four minutes of this game all I could do was think back to when Peyton had shredded the Dolphins in exactly this way earlier in the year, and I knew that we were the new Dolphins. This state of mind is bothersome. The Pats have been the one sure thing in Boston Sports for the better part of this decade. But we might have to face the fact that the run is coming to an end... or at least that it is a bit past its peak.

So, that's what I brooded over last night after Reggie Wayne caught that last pass. I finally didn't even care that I had somehow lost my fantasy game by 30 points again. Instead, for once, I wondered how my real team had failed so badly. Then I went to bed too late, my stomach still rumbling with discomfort. Maybe football is bad for me. Meta-football certainly is. Gonna give it up next year.

I Defer

2009-11-18 · by psu

I was going to write a snarky unfair assassination of Dragon Age where I would have cataloged the ways in which Madden 10 is better than Dragon Age. But, I had done that sort of thing before, and I wasn't really feeling the creative flow. Then to my great amusement and delight, I found that I will not have to provide the snark here because I can let Zero Punctuation do it for me. No, he doesn't compared it to Madden, but that's OK. I can't stop giggling.

Where There's Smoke...

2009-12-09 · by peterb

Here's the thing, game developers: I don't want to buy your game if it isn't on Steam.

I'm exaggerating, of course. When I say "on Steam," what I really mean is "I don't want to buy your game if I can't buy it and immediately download it to my hard drive, on any number of arbitrary desktops and laptops that I own, via a service that keeps track of whether or not I bought the game forever."

I came to this realization only slowly. Like the rest of the PC gaming world, I was distrustrful of Steam at first. It was subject to network issues. There were the inevitable worries about DRM-style lockouts. But after the complete disaster that was my purchase, last year, of Spore, I'm basically at peace with the idea that I will never buy a PC game that ships on a disc again.(footnote 1)

The irony is that in practice Steam has proven, over the past 6 years, to be way more reliable than any of my CDs. Now, while I'm sure many gamers are more OCD than me, here is the situation:

This came to my attention tonight when for some obscure reason I wanted to re-play parts of The Temple of Elemental Evil and, of course, I can only find one goddamned disc of the 2 goddamned disc set. So, no game for me.

Meanwhile, I still remember, like a religious experience, when I installed Steam on a new computer sometime in 2005. I had long since lost my Half-Life disc, and in fact was installing Steam to pick up a completely different game. I logged into my account, and saw, to my utter shock, all of the Half-Life games I had previously bought. Waiting for me. Steam has reminded me of games that I forgot I owned.

Even better than Steam, of course, are DRM-unencumbered direct digital downloads. As long as the game is self-contained, backing it up myself is no big deal. But some game developers don't like this, so: use Steam (or Impulse, or Good Old Games, or gamersgate, or whatever).

For me, this urge to avoid discs is so strong that I have actually re-bought games that I already own via Steam, just so that I can throw away the goddamned discs. I plan on doing that with Jagged Alliance 2, next, which you can buy direct from the publisher, Strategy First.

Welcome to the 21st century.

Footnote 1: Unless I'm being paid to write a review. I'm not proud.

Five Things I Don't Like About Assassin's Creed

2009-12-14 · by psu

Having given up on Dragon Age I jumped into arguably the second epic production of the Fall Season: Assasin's Creed 2. You might remember that Assassin's Creed was a fantastic running, jumping, climbing, stabbing engine wrapped up in a overall game that sucked your very will to live. In a lot of ways, AC2 is better. But in a lot of ways, it's just more of the same.

1. The Tutorial that Never Ends

In AC1, there was an opening mission where you unleash an unholy ass-kicking in the form of a flurry of acrobatics and whirling weapons. Then they take it all away from you with some trumped up narrative device and you spend the rest of the game getting it all back. Except you never really get it back because halfway through the game you can't stand the beggars anymore and you keep killing them.

In AC2, they skipped the kick-ass opening, and just go right to the part where you have to play for hours and hours and hours and hours to "learn" the "skills" that you already know from the first game. Much of this time is spent fetching or delivering small goods to various people in the city. You do this by climbing over buildings, leaping between rooftops and performing other crazy acts of derring-do. Then the game gives you a tutorial on how to climb buildings, or leap between the rooftops, and so on.

Here is an example of the exciting tasks you will perform:

  1. Talk to your sister and run clear across town and beat up some clown while the game gives you tips on how to use its combat system. This combat system, as I have already said, is pretty much the same as in the first game, so you already know how to use it.

  2. Run back across town to tell your sister you are done.

  3. Talk to your brother and find out that you must climb the tallest tower in the city and get some fool feather for him.

  4. Climb the tower, which requires you iteratively spiral up each side of it, following the hand holds that some ancient architect has so conveniently placed on the brick face so that you can make your way up. The question in your head at this point is always: why is the path so crooked? Why not just let me go to the top in the straight line?

  5. Run back to your brother and give him the feather.

What is your reward for all this toil? You get to deliver three letters for your dad. And then you get to help your mom pick up some stuff from a studio.

This sort of torture will wear down all but the strongest souls. They'd be giving up in droves and putting the game on Ebay. But I fought through it. I wanted to get my blades back.

2. The Story Gets in the Way of the Game

Most of the pacing problems in the first part of AC2 stem from Ubisoft's indulgence of their overwrought narrative. The game tries mightily to make the opening tutorial seem like an organic outgrowth of the environment and the story. Unfortunately, the whole thing is self-concious at best and comical at worst. Who can forget the 25 minutes devoted to the glorious full daylight "stealth" system. This is the one where you can completely blend into the fabric of the city by hiring a group of hookers to follow you around. Because, as we all know, hooded figures in robes and armor fit right in with hookers. Why hookers? Why, to introduce you to the Street Smart Madam with a Heart of Gold character of course. But why is she there? Do we ever see her again after the tutorial?

Over and over when the game could just get on with the business of being a game, it instead shuttles you to useless little pieces of narrative exposition. AC1 suffered more badly from this issue, what with the ten minute speeches that spewed forth from your every victim. But AC2 is still weighed down by the ambition of the developer to present the player with long form narrative. The result is that the game wastes three hours of your life introducing you to your family before giving you the tools you need to jump off a tall building and put a poisoned knife through someone's eyeball. I claim that people are buying the game to do the knife in the eyeball thing. We could care less about Ezio's family.

3. The Game Gets in the Way of the Story

As if the plot in AC2 didn't have enough problems, it also has to spend half of its time fighting with the "open world to explore" requirement on the side of the game box. Every big plot point and can be indefinitely postponed by just running around on the tops of the buildings some more. Quick! You must save your compatriot from certain death! But first, you can go and climb up 20 different eagle-eye viewpoints while your friend suffers. The character in the game will stop at nothing to exact revenge on his enemies. Well, unless there are feathers to be collected, or strange computerized codes to be found on the sides of building, or contract killing, or races, or beat up missions, or climbing around inside ancient tombs. There is no distraction small or trivial enough not to have gotten the attention of the content people at Ubisoft. Why try to make something coherent and well-paced when you can just throw raw "variety" at the player instead?

This fall season of games has presented the conflict between narrative and gameplay in stark relief. Both AC2 and Dragon Age take competent gameplay and weigh it down with clichéd plot and endless exposition. I think they also teach a core lesson about narrative in video games: the implicit, or indirect narrative is always more interesting. That is to say, it's always problematic to tie the story of the game directly to the actions of the player. Inevitably you end up with weird contradictions and stupidity. It's much better to allow the game to play itself out and layer in the narrative from the environment, the world building, or various delivery devices for backstory like the ever-present Bioshock audio tapes.

Compare the dozen or so Assassination missions in AC2 to the similar number in Shadow of the Colossus. I claim the payoff in the latter game was a much stronger emotional moment precisely because the game said nothing about it while you played it. The game set up the world, and the situation, and then told you the final truth about it after you were done.

Oh well, at least AC2 doesn't have the infinite forest of dialog trees.

4. Get Your NOTORIOUS On

As part of the stealth system, the game has a little meter to tell you how NOTORIOUS you are. If you are a red angel of death, you are NOTORIOUS and guards will attack you on sight. If your symbol is pure and white, you are INCOGNITO, and guards leave you alone. It turns out that if you find yourself in an enemy city and have become NOTORIOUS, there is a simple way to get rid of that red stigma:

  1. Find a high official of the city minding his own business going about his day.

  2. Walk up behind him in the street. In broad daylight if you wish.

  3. Stab him through the heart with your hidden blade.

  4. Kill the guards that see you do this.

Presto, you are now 75% less NOTORIOUS.

I guess this made sense in the feature meetings.

5. The Beggar Problem

AC1 had the beggars. They followed you around and asked for money. They came in packs. The only solution was to stab them dead.

AC2 has bards. They follow you around and sing and ask for money. They come in packs. The only solution is to stab them dead. But you have to be careful not to kill too many in a row or the game will punish you for it. I think the game must have a pretty high horse. After all, it looks the other way as you off hundreds of poor guards and archers who, after all, are only doing their jobs. But offing a few too many of these instruments of pure evil, in self defense gets you a smack down.

OK. That's everything I don't like about this game. Except the map problems. The rest is great. Italy never looked so good in a game. Oh, and the people talk funny. Some kind of bizarre accent. I'm done.

Objectively Speaking

2009-12-21 · by psu

The Zero Punctuation videos are without a doubt some of the best writing about video games on the Internet. The pieces are snarky, hilarious, and well produced. Most importantly, they are not tied down to the tired old "game review" format where the game is poured into a metaphorical centrifuge and spun around to produce 5 numbers between 6.5 and 9.6 which the reader can then use as a quick reference guide while at the Gamestop. Here, finally, are video game reviews that are actually interesting to experience. So of course the video game people hate them. Why? Because he's not "objective."

This irrational need for an "objective" evaluation of something as inherently subjective as a video game experience is not unique to the field. Every human endeavour filled with dorks seems to have this problem. Why, even in our humble blog, we have been taken to task for various such sins. The big one that comes to mind were the people who complains that peterb wrote up his experiences using a D300 camera without also acquiring every other camera to make sure that his impressions were "objective."

Tonight the subject of my mocking will be the Quarter to Three video game forums. I find they are often the subject of my mocking. They make it easy. The subject of their ire this time is Yahtzee's very entertaining snark on the PS3 game Demon's Souls which is incredibly mockable just on the basis of its name alone.

In several pages of forum nonsense Yahtzee is taken to task for that sin that is worse than all other video game reviewing sins in the entire world. This is worse than not providing a numerical rating. It's worse than not enjoying a game the same way a horny 15 year old would. It's even worse than admitting that you hate boss fights. What is his sin? He "obviously" reviewed the game before finishing it.

Apparently nothing in the video game world renders your credibility null and void faster than publishing something you call a "review" of a video game without having actually suffered the 20 or 40 or 100 hours necessary to have consumed all the content the game has to offer. After all, you never know, it might get better. And so the same tired arguments get trotted out in the forum. His impression of the game is not accurate. He'll make people not try the game because he has misrepresented how it works. Basically, because his experience with the game was so bad that he just gave up, he does not have the right to call what he writes about it a "review" because doing so would be an breach of ethics on the scale of using government money for hookers and blow.

Here is what I say: bullshit. This is the false quest for objectivity at its worst. What drives it is primarily the fanboy's need for everything he reads about his favorite game to agree with what he already thinks about his favorite game. If someone disagrees, the easiest way to shoot the opinion down is to declare that it is not properly objective because the writer did not play enough of the game. As if playing more of the game will inevitably improve one's opinion of its core systems or overall experience. All of this reminds me of the recurring character of "Mr. Needham" on Top Gear who is forever complaining about the lack of "proper" car reviews on the show. In response, the Top Gear boys have produced on of the best pieces of television about a car to ever air anywhere.

I'm sure the various upset forum people at Quarter to Three would take Top Gear to task for their work, as it is not sufficiently "objective." But that completely misses the point. In place of some misguided objectivity, there is fantastic writing and creative production.

This, on a smaller scale, is what Yahtzee does for video games. Consistently creative and off the wall banter that happens to be about some video game of another. The least of our concerns should be whether he has played a sufficient number of hours to be "accurate" in his portrayals. We should be thankful that there is at least one guy out there writing about video games for reasonably large audience who is more than a glorified shopping catalog.

Back to the Future

2009-12-22 · by peterb

I haven't had a lot to write about lately, for several reasons: first, and most importantly, I tend to prioritize work over my hobbies, but then in addition I've developed several new hobbies that don't lend themselves as much to this weblog ("And then, when I painted the 1/72 scale Carthaginian infantry, I used turquoise as the dominant accent color!")

One thing that I find is interesting is that I've played no console games in nearly two months. I'm back to playing PC games all the time, something I swore once that I'd never do again. I've decided that this has more to do with how my house is arranged at the moment, and with the season -- the room with the PC is warmer -- but I'm curious to know if other people go through cycles like this as well. Put simply, over the past few years I've noticed that I play console games in the summer, and PC games in the winter. I have no idea why this is. It's not a rational choice, it's just the pattern I've gotten in to.

The particular games I've been playing are ones that I don't actually have time to play: a political article by Barrett Brown casually mentioned Morrowind, which made me want to play it again. So that gave me a few days of both Morrowind and Oblivion on Steam, followed by Gothic 2 (mostly, and a teeny bit of Gothic 1, which seemed more interesting, actually) via Good Old Games. It's still striking to me how much more fully realized and natural the world of Morrowind seems to me than its prettier, much more successful successor. Although, to be fair, the impressive number of user-generated add-ons and enhancements helps a lot in this regard.

The game's also a lot easier when you've played it for so many years that you no longer feel guilty about cheating past the parts that are too hard.

Fresh Sardines

2009-12-23 · by peterb

Please enjoy my latest video, "Cooking Like a Peasant #6: Fresh Sardines".

Ammo for the Coming Zombiepocalypse

2009-12-28 · by peterb

Alert reader Brendan, noting that I was talking about buying ammo on Twitter, asks, "What's the best generally available shot load (i.e. on shelves at Walmart) for the coming zombiepocalypse?"

The most popular size shotgun shell is surely still the 12 gauge. 12 gauge, 2 3/4 inch shells should fit most shotguns that you are likely to find lying around in deserted office buildings after the zombie plague begins. The most common shotshell type probably has fairly small shot, #7 or #7 1/2 (larger numbers mean smaller balls, smaller numbers mean larger balls). These aren't really ideal for taking out human zombies, but should be adequate to dispose of the huge numbers of zombie dogs that are likely to be roving the streets, searching for brains (Key unanswered questions: do zombie dogs want to eat human brains, or canine brains?) They are, however, cheap and plentiful. You'll want the largest shot you can find, or better yet slugshells. For survivors with a lighter build, such as your ex-wife, younger teenagers, or that annoying girl who cries all the time and is constantly saying "We're all going to die!" you probably want to stick with a 20 gauge - the gun itself is likely to be lighter. 16 gauge ammo is hard to find except at speciality shops, and anything smaller than 20 gauge is probably not worth using.

The truth is, though, for use against formerly-human zombies, I think the shotgun is probably not the weapon of choice, despite its historical popularity in fending off zombie attacks. The fact of the matter is that in order to disable or kill the zombie, you'll need to be at almost point-blank range. Since, as everyone knows, zombies travel in groups, if you're at point blank range with the zombies you are likely to be overwhelmed, typically just as your fellow survivors are shouting at you to get the engine of the car started or to reach the safe room with the barred door. Although I personally have no experience with this sort of anti-zombie combat, I would think that a rifle with high penetration would be much more likely to let you kill the zombie by destroying its brains via a headshot, and furthermore might let you do it at a safe range. I don't know enough about rifles to make an informed recommendation on this point.

I hope this helps, and may you and your family make it to safety.

What I Did On My Winter Vacation

2010-01-06 · by peterb

Let's review what I ended up buying in December.

On Steam: Not counting Dragon Age, which I purchased before the sale started, I ended up with: Borderlands, Bioshock, Jade Empire, Mass Effect, Counter-Strike, Titan Quest, and The Witcher.

On Good Old Games: Myst, Riven, and Jagged Alliance 1 and 2.

A few more sales like this, and I'm gonna be broke.

To be fair, I probably only ended up spending about $70, at least half of which was just for Borderlands. But as I read accounts from people who one-clicked their way through $300 worth of games because "the deals were so good", there is a sad recognition.

The More Things Change...

2010-01-07 · by peterb

Tonight I installed the Europa Universalis III demo and played it, and tried really, really hard to care about the game.

Same results as with EU II. Beautiful map, and gameplay more stultifying than Sominex. I just don't get it.

Field of Glory

2010-01-12 · by peterb

This winter, as I believe I've alluded to in other articles, I've begun to ease back into boardgaming as a hobby. This is difficult, as you might imagine, since the other Pete is my only friend, and he doesn't play boardgames. But I can at least think about playing them, and I actually managed to press-gang some of my relatives into playing Combat Commander and Conflict of Heroes at Christmas.

Yes, the bug bit me, and it bit hard. Witness:

Roman cavalry.

Yes, even though this is the exact sort of hobby I swore up and down I'd never get into, I did it. I bought the excellent block game, Commands & Colors: Ancients and, not satisfied with the blocks, bought and painted little Roman and Carthaginian soldiers. I die of shame, but I die with lots of toys.

Because, truth to tell, I'm a Roman history geek. This is odd, given that I don't have a drop of Latin blood in me, but maybe it stems from watching I, Claudius in grade school.

Therefore, you can imagine that when I heard that Slitherine had released a Windows version of their popular tabletop miniatures game, Field of Glory, the effect was akin to telling a feline that a catnip truck had overturned its cargo just outside his house.

Field of Glory is a miniatures game for ancient and medieval combat. There are, at present, only two anceints miniatures game systems.(footnote 1) One is called De Bellis Antiquitatis, and is too complicated for anyone to actually play.(footnote 2) Field of Glory is the miniatures tabletop game that everyone plays after they try to learn DBA and then think better of it.(footnote 3)

Now, when I say DBA is "too complicated" I'm actually expressing a personal value judgment about most miniatures games. What makes Field of Glory a "miniatures" system and, say, Memoir '44 not a miniatures game is, basically, that the latter has hexes. The central conceit in a miniatures game (derived from as traditional a source as H.G. Wells' Little Wars) is that your little toy soldiers are doing the fighting. The implication of this is that things like facing and line-of-sight are too important to be left to mere abstractions. So if you want to know if your archers can see the enemy to take a shot, you get a piece of string and try to 'point' a straight line between the archer and his target. Likewise, if the archer's range is 12.5 inches, you'd better have a ruler handy. This whole issue of rulers and straightedges and fiddly movement is what has kept me from ever seriously considering playing a miniatures game in person.

The appearance of a computer version of Field of Glory then, presented a great opportunity for me to enjoy the flavor of the tabletop game without having to put up with all the intolerable fiddlyness of it.(footnote 4)

The game is wonderful.

It should be said that this is not a perfectly faithful translation of the game: compromises were made for playability, which is always a good thing in my book. Amusingly, there's no measuring, for example - the computer version of the game is played on a hex grid; my guess would be that this makes managing the AI much simpler. The graphics are simple, and fairly low tech, but are clear enough to clearly illustrate what's going on in any given battle, although things can get a bit cluttered at times:

Field of Glory

There are 25 battles that ship with the game, 22 of them historical. The game comes with a scenario editor, and players are already designing their own historical scenarios. Before each battle, you're given the choice to assign sides to humans or computer players, and to given an advantage to one side or the other (necessary for those of you playing against the AI, which is, regrettably, weak). Once on the field of battle, each player moves (or declines to move) all of their pieces in turn.

The combat rules are only slightly more baroque than those of Commands & Colors. There are essentially three types of combat: ranged attacks, "impact" (riding your cavalry into an enemy) and "melee" (slogging it out with swords and shields). Light troops, such as velites, will evade melee with stronger units if they can. As units take damage, they may lose levels of cohesion, which will make them fight worse. A strong unit, taking enough damage, may become disrupted (see the units in the picture above with the "D" badge on them), and will fight at a penalty. A disrupted unit may become fragmented, fighting even worse. And a fragmented unit may rout, trying to flee the field of battle headlong. Each turn units that have lost cohesion have a chance to rally back up a level, a process helped by the presence (and proximity) of a strong commander.

There are a few things that bugged me about the game as a software product. Parts of the user interface, while functional, lack polish. More importantly, there's no obvious tutorial, and the manual is a disorganized mess of web pages. A little programmed instruction would have gone a long way for me. This is not a hard game to comprehend, so after I played through a short battle or two I understood what was going on, but a tutorial (especially on how facing affects your ability to charge, and how training affects when and whether you can manuever during a turn) would have been really nice. (Strangely, the game started giving me tutorial explanations only on the third or fourth time I played it, 7 battles in. Perhaps I picked up an update?) But these are, ultimately, nitpicks about what is, at heart, a lovely little wargame.

The game supports play-by-email, and Troy Goodfellow, who has written about the game here is already needling me on Twitter to play with him, presumably because a night without delivering me a humiliating defeat is like a day without sunshine. I will have to take him up on it. The PBEM part of the game - which I have looked at, but not actually used yet - is extremely polished, compared to the single player game. You register an account, and then you can issue and accept challenges from other players. I look forward to trying it.

We don't give numerical scores here. But if you love strategy games, and you love games themed on ancient warfare, you must buy this game.

Field of Glory by Slitherine, published by Matrix Games in the US, available here. Digital download is $29.99. Windows only.

Footnote 1: ...that I will bother to tell you about. Footnote 2: I'm lying, but the chances that anyone who reads this will have actually played a full game of De Bellis Antiquitatis make it unlikely that anyone will call me on it. Footnote 3: Or, if they don't think better of it, their wife leaves them and they move back into their mom's basement. Footnote 4: Intolerable to me - I suspect most of the tabletop players in fact play it because of the fiddlyness. And that's fine: let a million flowers bloom.

Disclosure statement: Matrix Games graciously provided Tea Leaves with a review copy of this game.

Things That Won't Make Your Pictures Better

2010-01-13 · by psu

My year in photography ended like it usually does, at my parents' house where I took pictures of the Christmas festivities and all of the excessive preparation of food. This year I sent the gallery to my parents, and then got a curious email from my dad essentially asking me why my camera takes better pictures. I did not have an answer. As is usual for me though, I do a lot of insight from the negative. So, for the new decade I present up to ten things that will not make your pictures any better.

ISO 12,800

High ISO cameras are all the rage now. In fact, they've been all the rage ever since the dawn of the digital SLR era. Somehow we've all forgotten that we used to get by with Tri-X (ISO 400) as "fast" film, and pushed Tri-X (ISO 800, maybe more if you tempted fate) as "last ditch desperation" film. These days if a camera sucks at ISO 400 all we can say is that it either has a "tiny crappy sensor" or it was built by incompetent monkeys from Germany.

But here's the thing. It doesn't really make your pictures better. I think it encourages people to take lots of bad pictures in dim bad lighting. In particular, it enables that smug "oh I would never shoot with flash" attitude which really means "I don't really care if the light I use is any good".

All of this griping might seem hypocritical from a guy who bought a D700 at least partly because of its high ISO performance. But, what can I say. There are times I find it useful. There are times it lets me make a picture I would not otherwise be able to make. But it doesn't really make the pictures better.

Weather Sealing

Every time I hear someone gripe about not being able to buy a camera body because it is insufficient build quality, and in particular if it is not "sealed against the elements" all I do is snicker and think of this photo.net thread about skydiving with a D-Rebel.

The payoff message is about eight or ten replies in. Trust me, if you aren't working harder than that guy, you don't need weather sealing.

That 50/0.9 Lens

See ISO 12,800. I thought about it, but I don't think I have anything to add.

Lighting Equipment

Of course, the flip side of being obsessed with not using flash is being obsessed with using flash. I swear there are more strobe lit pictures of boring skateboard people, cats, iPods, or half-dressed women with tatoos at that stupid Strobist flickr group than I care to stare at for one second longer. And they all seem to be afflicted with the same one light in front (or behind) and one to the left (or the right) lighting scheme. I guess I should not complain, as I've been as guilty of this sort of fooling around as the next guy. After all, those Christmas pictures my dad liked were really well lit, thanks to the kick ass cross-lit living room for Christmas scheme that I stole from, well, the Strobist.

Carrying a tripod

Tripods are a great way to carry around 10 pounds of extra weight so that you can take bad pictures that are really really sharp. Alternatively, they are a great way to carry around 10 pounds of equipment that you never ever use.

Here is the thing. I don't begrudge anyone their tripod. For certain kinds of work in certain environments, tripods are indispensable. If your goal is to make huge prints and your favorite subjects mostly sit still, then by all means bring the pod along. Or, if you are shooting something that is very far away and requires a huge lens to reach it, you have my blessing. However, spare me all the pious rhetoric about how the only way to get technically acceptable images is to always have your camera on the tripod and the mirror locked up as you breathlessly hold the plunger of the cable release at the ready. For a lot of pictures and in particular a lot of subjects, this would be death.

A camera bag that does not look like a camera bag

Here's a hint: when you take the camera out of the bag, people will know it's a camera bag. Get over it.

A Spot Meter

I think Ansel Adams made spot meters popular. His classic treatise on the control of exposure and development in black and white photography unleashed a legion of disciples into the world, each one methodically pointing her spot meter at things to make sure she knows where Zone VIII will fall. I went through a spot meter phase when I shot a lot of slide film. You had to be careful with slide film because if you hit it with a stop or two too much light it tended to just go white on you.

It's not clear to me that all of this is needed any more. If you have sufficient experience with your camera and are good at reading light, you can mostly trust your camera's "multi-segment" meter to get pretty close to the exposure that you want. Sure, you might have to compensate for extreme tones once in a while, but that's easily done. Finally, you can easily find out if you missed badly by quickly scanning the histogram of the picture on the back of your camera. Oh wait, that would be chimping...

Not Chimping

People like to dump on chimping. I think this is dumb. I think if we are going to carry these complicated digital cameras around we should exploit every advantage that they afford us. And, to my mind chimping is one of the biggest. You can chimp to get a good meter reading while nothing is happening, and then shoot away when the going gets good. You can chimp to set up your flash on manual and then take an hour of flash pictures without worrying about the TTL metering going nuts. You can chimp to make sure you didn't blow out that highlight. You can chimp to make sure your mom's eyes are in focus.

I don't completely understand the hate, but it probably stems from the sort of "I get everything in one shot" dick waving that is popular among most male photographers. Only the weak, the thinking goes, would need to use something as dumbed down as the chimping screen to check their work. Real men get it right the first time and every time. Well, I guess if you really are perfect then more power to you. I'll use my dumbed down chimping screen, thanks.

A Bigger Camera

For most people, bigger cameras are mostly just heavier. Aside from providing you with a good workout, all that extra weight doesn't amount to much of an advantage in my opinion. Of course, some big cameras have unique advantages that are not in smaller cameras. But, if you are reading this weblog, chances are you did not need those things. So, carry smaller cameras. Your back will thank you.

Of course, if you are one of those genetic freaks whose hands are just SO HUGE that you can't even pick up a Canon S90 point and shoot because your fingers are the size of footballs, then by all means get that 1D mark IV. Who am I to stand in your way.

A Smaller Camera

Smaller cameras are smaller. This means you carry them more, which is a great advantage. However, I am tired of people claiming that smaller cameras are "less intrusive" or make the fact that you are taking pictures "less obvious." I occasionally test this theory by trying to take hip shot candids of people with my small point and shoot. Here is what I learned:

  1. The pictures are always out of focus.

  2. The people point and yell at me anyway.

  3. I never get anything better than the time I pointed a Nikon 8008s film SLR with a 24mm lens right into the face of that lady at the bus stop and snapped 5 frames.

The truth is that the big camera brings out more anxiety in you than in your subject. If you project a relaxed state of mind and have a rapport with your subject, no one will care if you are pointing that 24-70/2.8 zoom in their face. The way to disappear with a camera is to get people used to the fact that you will always be pointing a camera at them. Then they forget you are there.

There. I made it to ten. One parting thought: reading long winded blog posts about photography also won't make your pictures better. Happy new decade. Go shoot some stuff.

iPhone Corner: Bee Spelled

2010-01-14 · by peterb

I'm sort of coming to the conclusion that the iPhone is where some of the most interesting games are being developed.

"Interesting" has a few meanings in this context. First off, the various hardware features of the platform (multitouch, the directional sensor, and so on) have led to certain game interactions that you just don't see on other platforms. Second, the ubiquitous networking makes multiplayer games, especially turn-based strategy games like Uniwar a pleasure to play, instead of a chore. Thirdly, the massive competition in iPhone games has led to a price war, leading to a market where consumers can buy scores of games, many of them excellent, for a few dollars. Or sometimes less.

Bee Spelled is in the third category. It's at heart an iPhone translation of many of the mechanics from Popcap's awesome game Bookworm Adventures. If Popcap had published BWA on the iPhone, I'd have bought it. But they didn't. So I bought this instead.

(Popcap did publish a version of their original Bookworm, but the mechanics are completely diffferent. In Bookworm, you can only spell words from letters that adjoin. In Bookworm Adventures, and in Bee Spelled, you can use any letters that are visible in the current matrix. I actually can't stand the traditional Bookworm mechanic, because I feel like I get stuck in a rut too easily in that game.)

Bee SpelledA game of Bee Spelled lasts 10 rounds against progressively stronger enemies (our hero bee is beset by cats and robots, for some reason). Spell a word, and you hit your enemy; if they can, they hit back. Longer words do more damage. Spelling longer words also gives you access to bonus tiles, which can burn or freeze the enemy, or heal your bee.

The game has a lot to recommend it. First, each round is comparatively short, so you can dispose of a game in about 10 minutes or less. Second, the dictionary they're using for the words is fantastic. One of my perennial complaints about Bookworm Adventures is that it seems to know way fewer words than I do. The difficult level (chosen when you start a game) seems to affect the mix of letters that you get, although that could just be a coincidence: I felt like I got a lot more J's and X's when I played on Hard.

The game is not a complete replacement for BWA. There's no overarching story, and no bonus items beyond the colored tiles you can earn.

My biggest criticism of the game is that parts of the interface look a little drab. The animated figures of your bee and its antagonists serve perfectly well, but the tile grid wants a bit more life -- there's a gradient and an edge highlight on the tiles, but it doesn't really make them pop. The tiles feel, if you'll pardon the pun, a bit flat. But for a game like this, if the biggest criticism I can come up with is "the tiles aren't pretty enough", that's hardly a criticism at all.

Bee Spelled by The Dumpling Dimension. $0.99. What are you waiting for? That costs less than coffee at Starbucks.

Disclosure statement: Since I say nice things about the iPhone and iPhone games here, I will note that I hold long positions in AAPL. Screen shot provided by the developer.

Seasonal Affective MMO Playing, Part 1

2010-01-25 · by peterb

It was around this time last winter that I made my brief foray into World of Warcraft, buying a two-month card and playing it deeply, 5 years after everyone else had gotten around to it. At the end of that two month period, I had too much work to do, so I never bothered to renew.

This January, I had the same urge to play something "big" again. I can pinpoint the thought process that led me there: I was enjoying Torchlight, which made me try Titan Quest and then Borderlands, and that last game was sufficiently MMO-like to reawaken the hunger. Some people will tell you that they like MMOs for the large, persistent world, or for working together with their friends to vanquish a common foe. But I know what MMO's are really all about: the ability to pick up a limitless number of objects whose titles are rendered in green, yellow, blue, or purple text. I can never get enough of that.

And when there's no sunshine, collecting objects with colored text is a pretty good way of waiting for winter to end.

There are two games that I've tried out this time around: Star Trek Online (which is in beta) and Lord of the Rings Online. For this article, I'm going to talk about the new Star Trek game.

Star Trek Online is by Cryptic, the outfit that developed City of Heroes (which I, personally, found way more addictive than World of Warcraft - possibly because it taps into the deeply-rooted comic book geek inside me.)

The conceit of the game is that all the action takes place in two separate spheres. There is starship combat, where you take on Klingons, Romulans, and others from the Star Trek mythology, and there are ground missions, where you take an "away team" onto a planet's surface and shoot things up.

Amusingly, just before getting my beta key I had reinstalled Starfleet Command II, a single-player Windows game that simulated ship-to-ship combat in the Star Trek universe. Tightly modeled as sort of a real-time Star Fleet Battles, SC II was, at the time, considered one of the best space combat games of its type (which is to say, space combat games that loosely pattern themselves after naval combat tactics).

Star Trek OnlineThe space combat in Star Trek Online is way better than that in Starfleet Command. That's no small accomplishment, and all the rest of my comments should be read with that in mind. If what you want is to see starships shooting phasers at each other, Star Trek Online is probably the best game to be playing at the moment. The combat is fast, furious, strategic -- as in most games of this type, there's a constant tension between keeping your weapons pointed at the enemy, and changing shield facing to absorb more damage -- and beautiful to look at.

The ground combat, while not quite as polished, is workable. It feels very much like Bioware's Mass Effect. It uses the time honored MMORPG user interface, which boils down to "press a number key to do an attack, then wait a while before you can use that attack again."

One thing that I think is sort of brilliant is that, with a few exceptions, the space combat and the ground combat use practically the same UI. This makes switching between the two feel particularly fluid. (Internally, you can tell that they're in fact using the exact same engine. A few times, I transported down to a planet and saw my ship's model flying around on the planet before my captain "popped in"; likewise, a few times I got to see my captain strolling casually around deep space before the graphical engine got around to loading the right mesh.)

All is not sunny in the Federation, however. There are a few places where I think Cryptic has missed the mark, and missed the mark widely.

First, let's talk about advancing your character. In every game of this type, as you gain experience, your character gets additional powers or gets stronger. The same is true here. At the high level, it sounds simple: gain experience points, get a ship with more guns! The devil is in the details, however. Let's see if I can concisely explain the scheme.

As you complete missions, you gain skill points (which are distinct from "bridge officer skill points," and also distinct from "Federation merits points"). Before you can gain a rank, you have to spend those points on skills, each of which gives you a 0.004% increase in efficiency. After spending so many points, you will gain a subrank, which gives you 0.05% increase in strength. Subranks themselves aggregate into hyperranks, hyperranks into zomflargs, and 38.4 zomflargs make a strudel. Strudels can be hyperborean, transborean, or antidiluvian (in which case they are negatory, except when transmogrified into the dimensional blahdificator, which will blah-de-blah-de-blah.) After blah blah blahing your blah until it's completely blahed like a cheerleader at the Super Bowl after-party, you bore yourself to death and die, and re-subscribe to World of Warcraft instead.

In other words, the game is constantly, and I mean constantly, asking me to "allocate points" which, when I allocate them, accomplish approximately nothing. Just to be even more bloody minded, you earn the points one at a time, but you spend them in groups of (at least) 100. This is completely ridiculous. Don't ask me to make a decision until the decision actually matters.

The other aspect of the game that I suspect misses the mark is the social aspect. Now I say "suspect" because I am not the best person to judge these things, because I fundamentally dislike people. Perhaps because so much of the game is spent in outer space, where other players just look like spaceships that are all extremely similar, there just seems to be no particular incentive to interact. Mind you, this meant that I was as happy as a clam, because I didn't have to talk to anyone, but if you aren't like me, this might bug you.

The game goes out of its way to not just "encourage" grouping, but to just make it happen. This is probably the best part of the social aspect of the game. You go off to do a mission, and if it's a group mission, there's no time wasted looking for a group: you just warp into the area and other players are already there or arrive shortly. It's so uncanny, in fact, that at times I literally couldn't tell if I was playing with human or computer players. This was profoundly unsettling.

There is no "world player vs. player" in Star Trek Online: if you don't want to be randomly killed by other players, you can (at present) completely avoid this. If, on the other hand, you're the sort of sociopa loser player who likes nothing more than teabagging the corpses of your enemies and calling them gay lamers who probably use a Mac, you can play as a Klingon, which, I'm told, is a mostly PvP experience. I didn't try this because I'd rather dig latrines for the army than voluntarily do PvP in a MMORPG. It's a pretty good bet that at some point they will roll out optional missions that allow PvP between the Feds and Klingons. For all I know, I might have played one, but given that I couldn't tell if my allies were other players, I sure as hell couldn't tell whether the enemies were.

As a gamer with a job, the biggest problem for me was the unpredictability of mission length. Sometimes you pop into a solar system and there's a brief, furious combat that lasts 5 minutes. Other times, there's a protracted series of encounters in the system that last 20 minutes to half an hour. Still other times you'll get that plus a ground mission that can take 40 minutes to an hour. The problem here isn't that there are missions of differing lengths, the problem is that, unless I'm missing something obvious, I can't tell which ones are which in advance. This, more than anything, is why the thought of clicking on the Star Trek Online icon fills me with a sense of unnameable dread. And inducing that feeling isn't really a big selling point for a videogame.

So in conclusion, Star Trek Online leaves me feeling conflicted. This feeling, I might add, has been shared by literally every person I know who has played the game. There are moments in the game, in ship to ship combat, particularly, that are absolutely gripping and beautiful. If I could purchase a space combat simulator that constructed random battles using that engine, I'd buy it today, just to get those moments. But in the product we actually have, those moments are embedded in this monthly-fee MMORPG that is littered with systems that are at best ill-conceived and at worst actively irritating.

That I'm even still considering paying for a month or two is an indication of how good the space combat parts of the game are. But it's not a slam dunk, and it should be. And in the back of my mind, I think to myself "If they can't deliver something that's compelling from top to bottom with this licensed property, what hope is there for the game in the long term?" That's the source of my conflict. Time, I suppose, will tell.

Other People's Talents

2010-01-27 · by psu

I hate people who are more talented than me. Well, hate probably isn't the right word. The way I should put this is that in my life I am constantly confronted by people who are more talented than me and this brings out the darker side of my personality. For example, if you watched Apple's launch event for the iPad, you will notice that about 42 minutes in, they bring up a guy named Steve Sprang to demo an application called Brushes. Brushes lets you paint pictures on your iPhone, and has been used to create, among other things, covers for the New Yorker. I used to work with Steve, and he's always been smarter than me.

When Steve released Brushes, I told him flat out that a fatal flaw in his plan was that the application would be no good to anyone who can't draw. He chuckled and kept working. But for me, this fatal flaw persists. I can't use the thing because I can't draw. No matter what sophisticated software I might be using, all I ever end up with is a mess.

Clearly Steve can draw. I mean, he developed the drawing program. He must be pretty good at using it. Steve can also ride bike faster than me. And he's in better shape. And he's probably a better photographer too. All this, and he's always been better at writing code than me too.

A lot of people I work with are like this. In our humble Pittsburgh office, we have people who write code and play music, sing and act in plays, make films, fix cars, and write interesting things on the Internet. What gives them the right to be better than me at so many things? How does this happen?

So here is my thinking. I've worked hard all my life to be a reasonably talented dork. On a professional basis I can say that I'm probably one guy on the planet who is above average at creating, and, more importantly, fixing the code that computers run to do things for us. I have done this mostly on the strength of one, maybe two aspects of my personal makeup that you might call "talents":

  1. I have good memory for code I write, and I have a knack for "visualizing" how code is organized. This makes it easier to debug things, because I generally don't have to ask my past self what the hell I was thinking.

  2. I am good at not being clever. In large scale software engineering, clever code is the enemy of shipping. But that's another article.

I've always found it astounding that these two humble abilities can provide a paycheck over the long term, but there you go.

Aside from this, everything I'm good at is mostly a matter of practice and experience. When you see as many bugs as I have, you get good at recognizing patterns and guessing what is going on.

I tend to think that everything I'm good at is mostly a matter of practice. People say I take good photographs. I retort that if you shoot as many frames as I do during (say) a birthday party, four or five of them better be good. Some people think that I am a reasonable cook. Again, this is a ruse. When you come to my house, I inevitably cook something that I've made dozens of times before. So again, I've had a lot of practice. I don't think there is anything else I'm really that good at. Maybe shopping for bags on the Internet.

So this is what makes me feel bad. I see all these great people in the world who just have a seemingly magic ability to perform tasks that I have no hope of ever managing. And that's not even what they do professionally. What they do professionally is exactly what I'm also good at professionally. How is that fair?

In the end, I make myself feel better by reasoning that maybe I'm giving them too much credit. Maybe, as I've indicated above, it's not really possible to find the fuzzy line between talent and accumulated experience. This cheers me up for a while, but in my heart I know it's not true. But ultimately I'm OK with that. I long ago realized that life is too short to worry about being the absolute best at everything you do. I'm happy to muddle through life in my slightly-above-averageness. It gives me time to get out once in a while and shoot some pictures. Or put together that nice beef stir fry for dinner. All in all, a good tradeoff.

So You Want to Sell Me a Bag

2010-02-04 · by psu

Long time readers of the site will be familiar with my problem with bags. At times I have an almost pathological need to shop for them. So it was a mixed blessing when I was told by the powers that be that I would be "allowed" to look for a new computer bag. I had become, for no reason, unhappy with my backpack. A year and a half ago, the pack was perfect, but no longer. Bag shopping is a bit different now than even a few years ago because almost every vendor is now on the Intertubes. It's possible, in a few short evenings, to study a huge cross section of the available hardware. Here is what you learn.

The first thing you learn is that a non-trivial percentage of bag manufacturers do not understand the following fact:

Fact: I cannot buy your god damned bag if I don't know what it looks like on the inside.

I've finally gotten to the point where if I go to the bag maker's web site and all they have is pictures of the outside of the bag, I take them off my list forever. I don't care if the bags are hand stitched in your own Paris apartment out of the best Italian full-grain leather harvested from cows that have done nothing but live in the laps of luxury for their entire existence. I don't care if they carry on a hundred year old tradition of excellence. If you don't show me how the bag is laid out inside, I have no reason to even talk to you. It's not hard, all you need is four or five pictures. Just do what Timbuk2 does.

Speaking of Timbuk2. My favorite bag before the backpack which I have now rejected was my beloved TImbuk2 Commute. I was excited to find that they have updated this bag. So I bought one to try it out. The original Commute was great for the following reasons:

  1. The bag was roomy but not bulky. You could get your laptop in there, and the bag still had room for a camera, a lens or flash, a diaper kit in the back, a book, some DVDs, and a pound of La Prima coffee that you just bought.

  2. Keeps its shape. Unlike most messenger bags, which tend to fall over into an amorphous lump when empty, this bag has enough structure so you can always stand it up and get things in and out.

  3. Padding in the right places. The back pad and the padding on the bottom were perfect.

My only complaint about the bag was the strap, which was uncomfortable and lacked the fantastic cam-buckle that Timuk2 uses on their real messenger bags. Also, the original model is too small for the new slightly larger Macbook Pros. Or at least that's what they say.

The Commute 2.0 updates this bag so it can fit the new laptop but otherwise does nothing good. They have split the laptop part of the bag away from the rest and connected it with a split zipper. This lets you splay the bag out and lay it flat on the x-ray machine when you fly. However, to me this is a bad tradeoff because it makes getting the laptop into the bag about twice as hard. Therefore, if you spend all your time in airports with the laptop in the bag, this is great. But if you actually have to use the machine, it's not so great.

To make up for this insult, the bag's design takes the laptop out of the waterproof part of the bag, and it messes up the balance of the bag and makes it more uncomfortable to carry. As a result, you are reminded every time you put the bag on that they didn't fix the one thing that was wrong with the Commute: the shoulder strap. Same old crappy strap.

This disappointment in hand, I went looking for a bag that could regain the exalted position of the original Commute. Of course, I failed. The original Commute probably isn't even as good as the original Commute. But, it was some pretty fun extreme Internet shopping.

The most interesting outfit I found in my current quest is Saddleback Leather. Whatever else you want to say about them, they make bags that fit a vision of what a leather bag should be and they do not stray. Ultimately I could not find a bag that they make that I could actually imagine carrying all day unless it were empty. But I might try one anyway. The bags just have such a unique look to them you have to try one out. But I don' think the look is "me". I'm not the rugged trail leather kind of guy. I'm more of a soft sided man-purse and loafers kind of guy.

Which brings me to my other major observation about bag shopping. Ultimately, it's not really about the bags, it's more about you. Like everything that is similar to clothing, the bags you wear reflect the aspect of the personality that you want to project. For me, the bag should usually say something like "too practical, not very fashionable." At first I thought I would pander to the overly practical part, and I spent a lot of time looking at old fashioned canvas and leather bags like the Billinghams and the Filson. These ended up feeling a bit too "earthy", and fans of these bags tend have a bit of a retro fetish which I find distasteful and creepy.

Then I thought I would try to indulge my bad sense of fashion. This lead me to spend a lot of time looking at leather briefcases, which I assume are fashionable. But, briefcases are hard to understand. For example, I can't for the life of me understand the bag designer's obsession with the following sorts of accessories:

What I want in a bag is one or two compartments, two or three small inside pockets, and two or three small outside pockets. Any pocket that I can't fit my entire hand into is useless. Note, this was a problem in the aforementioned Commute 2.0. The front interior of the bag was full of a panel of a dozen or so tiny little pockets, none of which you can actually put anything into. I suppose they are supposed to for holding individual small items that then will not rattle around. But really they are just useless space.

Anyway, the bag that fits my personality is a bit more general purpose, with pockets that can fill more than one role in life. This leads you to the world of messenger bags, which I like a lot. All of my recent favorite bags (except for that one backpack) have been a messenger or satchel style bag. There is the Domke Camera Satchel and the Courierware messenger bags. These seem to have the most space for their size, and they are the most suited for carrying either a laptop or cameras. But, the Domke is too small for the computer and the courier bag never worked out as a camera bag because the sides of the bag just fall over on themselves when the bag is empty. It's great for the computer though.

I conclude that what I want is for a custom bag maker to step to the plate and make me a love child of these two bags. Namely:

  1. The same basic shape as the Domke (but without the awful rubberized sticky strap). More importantly, some stiffening material in the sides and the bottom to keep the bag from doing the old messenger bag flopover. But not so much that the bag carries badly. Domkes seem to have this perfected.

  2. Wide enough to hold a 15 inch Macbook.

  3. Enough depth (3 to 4 inches) to hold my camera sideways, plus a couple of lenses. But note, I don't want to carry the cameras and the laptop at the same time. That would be stupid. I want the bag to have two modes. I'd even buy two of the bag just to keep each one permanently in each mode.

  4. The great font pockets of the Domke for either a flash and camera extras, or other computer extras.

  5. Neoprene shoulder strap.

  6. The cool retro Billingham look.

  7. A carry handle on top. Messenger bags are all missing this by default for some reason. People are stupid.

  8. Custom removable padded inserts for either laptop mode or camera mode.

  9. Have a slot on the back to hook up to a rolling carry-on cart.

  10. Maybe a leather body. But canvas with leather straps is probably more practical.

So, there you have it. Can you make one for me? Maybe this guy already has. Oh but wait, his wait time is two and a half years. Truly the universe has a sense of humor.

Why Football is Better Than Your Favorite Sport

2010-02-08 · by psu

Of course by "football" I mean American football and by "sport" I mostly mean "American Sport". I certainly do not mean "rest of the world" football, which Americans call soccer. If your favorite sport is soccer than we can just agree now that you will hate me and I will feel sorry for you. With the Super Bowl once again upon us I have been ruminating about why football in general, and the NFL in particular, is clearly the best sport in the country. I thought I stole this idea from Chuck Klosterman, who wrote an excellent essay about football in his recent book Eating the Dinosaur. It turns out that his essay did not say what I thought it did, but it did tickle me to ruminate about this subject for a while. So why, exactly, is football better?

There are many reasons, and only some of them have to do with the game itself.

Game Day is Once a Week

This, I think, is the most important reason the NFL dominates. The almost slavishly constrained structure of the NFL season is perfect for the modern life style. Who really has time to watch 82 or 160 or however many games are in the hockey season games per year? Nobody, that's who. Well, the nuttiest of the fans will make the time, but the football season allows you to maintain a genuine interest while not requiring that you allocate a fifth of your waking hours to following your favorite team. Instead, you have to remember one simple rule: be at home at 1pm or 4pm on Sunday (with the occasional exceptions for Monday and Thursday) and you are all set.

In addition, the really nutty fans can buy a special TV package that lets them watch every game every week. In what other league would you even watch every game that happens on a given day? In the NFL it's not really that hard, if you have most of your weekend free and a few Tivos.

Made for Tivo

Speaking of Tivo, football is made for Tivo. Have you ever noticed how the play clock is 40 seconds? Have you ever noticed that your Tivo can skip ahead by exactly 30 seconds? This means that if you have the next hour of the game buffered in your Tivo you can skip from play to play to play with a great deal of precision and not have to listen to the idiot announcers fill time. You can't do this with any other sport.

The Analysis Cycle

An underrated aspect of the "one game per week" nature of the football season is the fact that it has allowed the NFL to construct the perfect structure for its news cycle. The only news in the NFL that the NFL doesn't tightly control is what happens on Sundays when they play the games. Everything else is an endless stream of canned analysis, preview and opinion pieces about either the games that have just happened or the games that are about to happen. For even the casual fan, this stream of content is hard to resist and very addictive. The only evidence you need to convince yourself of this is to watch the NFL Network for an hour. If you have any interest in football at all, you'll be completely mesmerized. The entire time you can't turn away the rational part of your brain (which is weaker than the rest) will be telling you that what you are consuming is mindless drivel almost completely devoid of fact or meaning. Unfortunately, the rest of your brain will refuse to turn it off. It's the most brilliant consumer television move since The Real World.

Game Management

Given the regimented structure of the football season, it's not surprising that the game itself is also highly ordered. The contest lurches forward in intervals of forty seconds. The offense and defense line up, a lot of complicated maneuvering happens, then there is an explosion of chaos and violence. After that, the whole thing resets and repeats itself.

This "turn-based" structure, if you will, leads to a the popularity of a particular point of view about how the good teams win. When good teams win, a huge amount of credit tends to be given to the Head Coach. The coach will be put up as a brilliant tactician, a keen evaluator of talent, and a savvy manager of the players. People will say he (or his quarterback) knows how to "manage the game", as if the important part of the game was all in the setup. This leads to a view of the players as something akin to automatons, required by their programmed nature to "do their job" and execute the grand "schemes" and "adjustments" of the huge intellects in charge of the team.

As Patriots fan, this view of the of the football team is especially poignant since over the last ten years the franchise has been put up as the model for this sort of team. A lot of "interchangeable parts" with a few superstars all controlled directly from the giant brain that is Belichick. All of this would be great except that it really hasn't worked that way since 2005. The course of the team since then is a stark illustration that you can't control the game and the dividing line between shutting up the Dolphins forever and becoming second banana to Peyton Manning can be as stupid as some guy catching the ball against his helmet.

However, the NFL doesn't care about this. The NFL likes to perpetuate the myth of the coach because doing so will make you, the fan, think that if only the coaching staff could hear what you are shouting from your couch, the game would be going a lot better. This is a great fantasy, and is yet another way the NFL hooks its fans. But don't be fooled. The game is played by players, not little robots. And how those guys feel and what they make themselves do on any given day is ultimately more important than all the scheming and adjusting the giant brains can do. Remember: helmet catch.

Meta-Football

I was going to write a bit here about how Fantasy Football is clearly the only fantasy sport worth subjecting yourself to. But then I remembered that I hate fantasy football, so I think I'll give it up. That said, the weekly structure of the league is what makes this true. Gives you time to indulge in your coaching fantasies (see above) and adjust your team a lot.

I bet gambling on football is more fun for the same reason. But I wouldn't know anything about that.

Football also makes for the best video games. The reason is simple and familiar: you can actually play an entire season in a reasonable amount of time. You can even play two seasons before your 40 hours with the game are up. But there is no one on earth who has time to actually play 162 video baseball games in a season mode. The brilliance of the 17 game season comes through again.

The Game of the Year

And so we come full circle back to the Super Bowl, clearly the biggest single day in American sports. The Super Bowl is more interesting than the other championship contests because all of the other professional sports leagues use a series to decide rounds in the playoffs. The NFL uses single elimination, which is obviously superior.

For example, last year the Celtics were in the NBA playoffs. And if you wanted to follow them you had to realize that the entire first round of the NBA playoffs took more than a month to play out. There were a total of 16 teams in two conferences playing eight series all of which could go seven games. This is potentially a total of 56 basketball games just to get into the second round.

This happens in the NFL in two days. Then there is a whole week to crank up the analysis and hype machine. This is even more effective in the playoffs because the fans are even more invested. If you work hard at it, you can even convince yourself that (say) a weak Patriots team with no defense to speak of is actually a favorite to beat whoever it was that completely destroyed them once the game was played. Oh, sorry.

Again, the NFL takes advantage of the fact that they play relatively few actual games to crank up the hype machine between rounds. This culiminates in a two week feeding frenzy around the two teams that play in the Super Bowl every year. By the time the game is actually played, it is completely impossible for anyone to not have found out what is going on. There is even an out of band hype machine around the advertising for this single football game. All bases: covered.

On the other hand, the NFL has made an uncharacteristic mistake in navigating its juggernaut through the consciousness of the sports consumer. This year, they decided to put the Pro Bowl in the off week between the conference championships and the Super Bowl. This is a remarkably stupid move. Not only does no one give a shit about the Pro Bowl, the game also interrupts the hype pipeline for the more important game. Instead of gripping 24x7 analysis of which quarterback's grandmother might have the psychological edge on gameday, the talking heads have to spend time talking about the Pro Bowl.

I'm not sure who thought of this move, but it strikes me as strange and unwise. Maybe its a harbinger of more failures to come. Like how the Patriots stopped being able to play pass defense in crunch time, thus ensuring that their next Super Bowl is probably a long ways off. I saw something about this on the NFL Network. I thought that analysis was very insightful.

Note: This article was cross posted at Draft Day Suit with permission from the nice people there.

Let it Snow

2010-02-09 · by psu

I feel I have to come clean about this. The recent incredible snowfall in Pittsburgh is my fault. I present the following facts in evidence. Fact: The last storm like this to hit Pittsburgh happened in 1994. Fact: That year I had rented a condo that had inside parking. I was very happy to have inside parking during that storm. Fact: Since then I've lived in house that lacked inside parking. Fact: During that time Pittsburgh has been mostly free of huge snowfall. Fact: This year we've done renovations on the house which include a new garage. So, just before this huge storm, I had inside parking again.

So, in light of all of this, let me just apologize. Hopefully this won't happen again next year too. It would be a pain to take the garage down.

Mac Gaming: Tales of Monkey Island Released!

2010-02-11 · by peterb

Those of you who are regular readers know that I despise (and, in fact, frequently make fun of) gaming web sites that update a thousand times a day by, more or less, just republishing game company press releases. But today something happened that I think warrants doing essentially that.

Telltale Games, a company that I have such an irrational love for that I hope someday it wants to be my boyfriend, has finally succumbs to my nagging and released their fabulous game Tales of Monkey Island for Mac OS X.

This in itself would be news, but in a move that can only be compared to the gaming industry's version of "Don't Be Evil", they've gone a step further. You buy a Telltale game, you can play it on Windows or Mac. For that matter, if you've already bought a Telltale game on Windows, you can now download the Mac version as well. Tell me the last time you heard of a game company doing that.

I've reviewed Tales of Monkey Island on this site, as well as Telltale's other games, such as Sam and Max (a series so wonderful that it deserves more than one review), their paean to adventure games Strong Bad's Cool Game For Attractive People, and their Wallace and Gromit games. Their games are good. In a world where you can spend $60 on a game and feel bitter about it, Telltale's games offer something that shouldn't be unusual, yet is: quality entertainment value for your money.

On the company's launch page, you can also vote for which game they will port to the Mac next. Everyone will have their own opinions about this. From my perspective, the best ones in their stable (and, possibly, the best adventure games of their type, ever) are the Strong Bad series. But even if you disagree with me, drop by and make your voice heard.

Kudos, Telltale. Thanks for giving those of us on the Mac side of the great divide something to smile about.

Disclosure: Telltale has provided me with review copies of pretty much all of their games. But I'll be buying the Mac version of Tales of Monkey Island with my own cold, hard cash. $34.95 gets you the entire series. It would be a bargain at twice that price.

Side Dish in 20 Minutes

2010-02-12 · by psu

Today, a good all purpose side dish that's stupidly easy. This is my lame version of roasted brussels sprouts, in which I have tried and failed to duplicate what they do at Legume. Mine are good, but not quite that good. I'll even do a vegetarian version in addition to the one with bacon.

First, buy some fresh brussels sprouts. We've been getting the ones still attached to a large branch that they have at Whole Foods. You can also get the pre-bagged kind. I won't hold it against you.

Trim the sprouts and cut them in half. If you are going all veggie, put them in bowl and drizzle them down with olive oil. Then add salt and pepper. Lay the result out on a half sheet pan and broil at 400 degrees for around 15-20 minutes. While they cook, open the oven up once in a while and shake the pan.

OK. Here is the bacon variant:

  1. 400 degree oven.

  2. Cast iron pan.

  3. A few pieces of bacon.

  4. Put the bacon in the pan. Get it about 1/3rd cooked. Take the bacon out of the pan and put it in the oven for a while. Put the sprouts into the pan and coat with some of the bacon fat. Add salt and pepper. When the bacon is 1/2 to 2/3rds of the cooked, take it out of the oven and put it on top of the sprouts.

  5. Put the whole mess back in the oven for 10-15min.

That's it. Put it on a plate. Eat with rice. I like the bacon super crispy, so I cook it a lot in addition to blasting it with the sprouts. If you like it softer, adjust as needed.

Dinner in Half an Hour: Mushroom Soup

2010-02-17 · by psu

Today a soup that I discovered accidentally. It's influenced by a lot of Chinese and Japanese style soups that I have consumed over the years, but I can't claim that it actually has any real authentic connection to those cuisines. I threw this together one night in a miracle after a late day at work. So here we go.

First, make chicken broth. Or buy it. I don't care. It will be better if you make it, and it's easy:

First, buy a two or three pound package of chicken wings. Then cut up 2 onions, 2 or 3 carrots, and 2 or 3 stalks of celery. Put all this in a pot, cover with water, add salt, pepper, and bay leaves. Turn the heat on until you get a simmer. Now play Halo for 3 or 4 hours. If you are industrious, you can saute the vegetables before adding the wings and the water. You can also hack the wings in half. But these are both extra work and not really needed.

If you want the broth to be more Chinese style, leave out the carrots and some of the celery. Add green onions and ginger. So there you go. When the broth is done, let it sit in the fridge for a day or two and skim the fat off if you can.

Now go to your favorite Chinese food store and find some dried mushrooms. I don't know what kind I bought but the package looks like this:

P1000190

They look like this out of the package:

P1000192

I also bought a couple handfuls of Shitake mushrooms.

Take two handfuls of the dried mushrooms and put them in a bowl of water. Soak for a few hours to a whole day. It doesn't seem to matter. When the dried mushrooms are all soaked, save some of the mushroom water. Cut all the dried and fresh mushrooms into little pieces and put them in a bowl. Make sure you cut off and throw away the stems. You can't actually eat them, which I found out the first time I made this.

The mushrooms should look like this:

P1000183

If you are into that sort of thing cut up a cake or two of tofu too. It's best to use fresh stuff (you can get fresh at Lotus in Pittsburgh on weekends, for example). Most of the packaged stuff is crap. Get the softest you can.

The last thing you'll need is a diced onion and about five or six large slices of ginger.

After you have gathered all your stuff, heat up a big soup pot and put a couple of teaspoons of olive oil into it. Using enough oil is important because it will carry some of the flavor. Add the onion and stir it around a few times. Add salt and pepper. Then add the ginger and toss the whole thing around some more. Reduce the heat and cook the onions and ginger until the onions are soft. Do not get impatient, do this for at least ten minutes.

When that's all set, add the mushrooms. You might need some more oil at this point. Salt and pepper the whole mess and sauté the mushrooms for another five or ten minutes. When you are happy with how things are, add a cup or so of the mushroom water and let it come to a boil. Then add a total of three to four quarts of chicken stock. You want to use enough liquid to balance the solids. Also, if your stock is particularly rich, cutting it half and half with water is a good idea. So, I use maybe two quarts of stock and two quarts of water. But you can figure out what you like.

Add some salt and pepper to rebalance the seasoning. Then add a few tablespoons of white wine and a tablespoon or two of soy sauce. Stir, bring to a boil and then simmer twenty minutes to half an hour.

When you are ready to serve it, add your favorite Chinese leafy green into the soup pot. Let those cook until they just get soft. Then serve the soup wth the greens on top:

P1000200

I also like to have soup with rice in it, like they do with gumbo. But most people think that's weird.

When you get this correctly balanced, people will think you are a genius, which isn't really fair since it takes so little work. But that's the best kind of dish for me.

Oh. Fish the big pieces of ginger out of the soup before you serve it. You don't want some poor unsuspecting child chewing it by accident.

Seasonal Affective MMO Playing, Part Deux

2010-03-02 · by peterb

As I mentioned in my last post, I have also tried out the now aged and decrepit MMO Lord of The Rings Online (simply "LOTRO", for short).

LOTRO is probably the most popular MMO today after World of Warcraft, which is to say that it probably has only three orders of magnitude fewer players, rather than five. One would think that this would make Turbine, like Avis, try harder, but that doesn't really seem to be happening.

LOTRO is a game of strong contrasts. Unlike Blizzard, whose World of Warcraft is of such preternaturally high quality throughout that you have to suspect it was designed and implemented by hyperintelligent aliens from another dimension, LOTRO is a fundamentally human, which is to say flawed, endeavor. The high points are very high, and the low points are very low. Let's cover the high points first.

LOTRO partisans will crow about their favorite game's "graphics", but this is standard misguided PC gamer wankery. What is distinctive about LOTRO is not its "graphics", but its visual design. Whereas WoW goes wholly (and brilliantly) for a cartoonish, oversaturated look, LOTRO tries to achieve a lyrical, somewhat photorealistic appearance. To my shock, it mostly succeeds. For me the highest points of the game are exploring Middle-Earth. It is worth trying the game out if for no other reason than to experience a sort of Virtual Shire Simulator. The game has the license from the books, not Peter Jackson's movies, but the resemblance between the movies and the game-world is strong.

Also strong, again to my surprise, is the writing in the game. I came into the game viewing the Lord of the Rings license as a potential liability: how do you write several thousand random heroes into a game and still make it seem plausible? Turbine pulls this off by keeping you tangientially appraised about the progress of the War of the Ring, and by occasionally - only every so often - giving you quests that either foreshadow or deal with the aftermath of some of the events in the books. The "non-plot" quests easily number in the thousands, and are sufficiently well-written that I actually found I wanted to complete quest chains even after I had "out-levelled" them.

The game's leveling system tries hard to make you not care directly about XP by also providing rewards in the form of "traits", which are vaguely analogous to WoW's Talent trees. By completing certain quests (say, "Kill 150 goblins in and around Bree" or "Explore and discover all the farms in the Shire."), you get a trait that you can choose to equip which provides some sort of bonus. There are way more traits than you have slots to equip, so you can spend quite a lot of time chasing the various completion bonuses down.

There is no "world player-vs-player" in the game; just arenas for something called "monster play" that I haven't tried yet. Every single person I have met in the game has been uniformly nice. It's like all the players are Canadian or something.

The game itself is fairly easy. The mechanics for attacking monsters are very WoW-like, and vary widely among the classes; playing a Hunter feels very different from playing a Warden or a Minstrel. Likewise, there's a crafting system which is the most fun out of the three MMO's that I've tried. To craft you choose a career which is a grouping of three different crafting skills. Generally speaking, skills either provide resources or consume them, and they've cleverly tried to balance things such that you're likely to have to depend on another player to get everything you need for all of your skills.

The game has drawbacks, though, and it wears them on its sleeve. The UI is a disaster, a complex of buttons and mouse targets that shift and morph and never act the same way twice. The inventory is particularly galling, taking the worst parts of the WoW system and intensifying them. Here's my favorite example. I promise it is just one of many: when you go to a vendor to sell items, your inventory is arrayed in a random useless order, with no labels. When you actually decide to sell stuff, it appears in a separate window, in a different random useless order. This window shows your to-be-sold items in two columns. To sell an item, you double click on it. Since that item disappears, and since your inventory is being displayed in two columns, every single item in the inventory below the item you clicked moves horizontally.

It is to weep.

Other problems with the game that keep me from unreservedly recommending it include the lack of a Mac client, the terrible auction house interface, and the game's version of "fast travel" which involves a completely incomprehensible network of travel nodes which may or may not allow you to go from one place to another. You know how sometimes in real life you want to get a flight somewhere and you find out that the only way to do it is to make two stops at different airports in opposite directions? Welcome to the LOTRO fast travel system. At least they don't lose your luggage. Although, since your luggage is in the aforementioned LOTRO inventory system, you probably won't be able to find it anyway.

So all in all, I find LOTRO to be a mixed bag. The UI issues are enough to turn me off of it for the long term (and that's on top of my standard "I don't actually have time to level a character all the way, because I have a job" MMO angst). But I'd be lying if I said that being able to enjoy the view from the peak of Weathertop didn't trip all of my Serious Geek circuits in a very deep and powerful way.

Four Mini-Reviews

2010-03-05 · by psu

While peterb wallows in his extended winter-induced MMO haze, I've been stuck on the console. I have the following four thoughts on my recent experiences.

PS3 Slim

I caved and bought a slim PS3 a few months earlier than I wanted to. But it's OK because I had a gift card for it. This new incarnation of the Playstation yet again shows why Sony completely destroys Microsoft as a pure hardware company. Everything that made the original PS3 a better hardware platform that the original Xbox 360 is amplified by a factor of two in this new machine. It's smaller and sleeker. It doesn't require an external power brick. It hooks up to your wireless transparently. The thing makes basically no noise at all. You can't really even hear the fan. The only noise the machine makes is an occasional rumble from the Blu-Ray drive.

The machine is a total joy until you actually have to interact with its software. When I stuck in Uncharted I had to wait 25 minutes for it to download and apply four patches one after another. I guess it's just not feasible to combine them into one big ball. Speaking of Uncharted...

Uncharted 2

I didn't play the first Uncharted. I haven't really even played the second one yet. But it was the first new game I stuck into the new PS3 and I had a quick thought about it. I put the game in the machine for about an hour and played through the introductory chapter and the tutorial. Having had this experience, I would like to propose that the guys at Naughty Dog go over to Ubisoft and teach those morons what pacing means in a narrative-driven video game. The tutorial in Uncharted 2 was brilliant. In a short half an hour or so it teaches you all the major game mechanics that you will need and sets up the plot in a series of remarkably well produced cut scenes. Compare that with the nearly three hours of torture that you are subjected to in Assassin's Creed 2 before you are even allowed to stab someone. Well done.

Bioshock 2

I don't have much to say about this one. Same cool setting and atmosphere. Same "environmental" combat mechanics. Same creepy little sisters. Dumber story. More combat. More combat means the game was less interesting and more tedious overall. The narrative and plot has the Dragon Age disease in that it tries to make up for the fact that it is completely redundant and mostly uncreative by just giving you more dialog. The more intense things get, the more your radio chatters on about THE FAMILY or WHATEVER. But none of it is particularly interesting. One good thing: the fetch quests don't make you constantly backtrack.

Demon's Souls

Demon's Souls was the second game to go into the PS3. Here is a game that takes you through a straightforward tutorial and then immediately presents you with a Boss who more than likely insta-kills you with one hit. This is most definitely not the sort of thing I usually go for.

The best way to describe this game is as a Japanese take on Diablo with a bit of Nethack mixed in. You run through dungeons. You kill monsters. You collect "souls" that you can then use to buy more power. Then you run through the dungeons some more. If you die, no problem! You just run through the dungeon to where you fell over and pick up the souls you lost. Then you start all over again.

In most other games, this repetition would crush your very will to live, but for some reason in this setting with this game, it seems to work. You just have to put yourself into a state of mind where clearing the same enemies from the same spots on the same maps all over again is progress in its own right.

Demon's Souls enables this by avoiding the narrative weight that many games seem to insist on carrying. There is almost no plot to advance, so not being able to advance it is not as bothersome as it would be if the plot were there. And, thank the gods above there is little or no NPC dialog in the game. This game is the anti-Dragon Age. No endless trees of pseudo-philosophical babble attempting to hide clumsy exposition. No badly written "emotion". No artificial "moral choices." The game is delightfully free of the encumbrances of the bad video game story. Instead, the point of the game is simple: you run through dungeons, you kill things, you do it again.

I'm sure I'll get tired of it after the first few maps. But at least by the time I quit I will not have had to read enough bad dialog to fill eight novels.

An Emulation Rumination

2010-03-08 · by psu

In my lifetime I have spent my time using three software platforms that actually mattered in the outside world. The first was Berkeley Unix on a Vax in college (yeah yeah, you might not think this matters, but without BSD there is no Linux and more importantly, no Mach and no modern MacOS). The second was Windows. The third was, and continues to be MacOS X. I've also used Linux but in user land it's similar enough to other Unix to not really matter to me as its own platform.

Occasionally one finds oneself needing to migrate between major platforms. I've had a lot of friends who had to go from using Unix in graduate school to Windows in the real world, for example. My advice to them was always simple: make a clean break. Don't use emulation environments like Cygnus. The reason is simple: there is nothing worse than an emulator that almost works.

In the case of Cygwin and other systems of its ilk the problem is simple. You can try and fool me into thinking that I'm using a Unix shell and all the standard shell utilities, but when push comes to shove it's inevitable that Windows semantics will leak through. Things like file system syntax, the process model, or something as mundane as how memory protection works will eventually shatter the illusion and the tools will not work right. As the user, you have to constantly look over your shoulder for this. Life is too short. Better to just learn the native way to do things instead.

Ever since the Intel Macs shipped, we've been in the same kind of situation with respect to running Windows software on our beloved Apple hardware. There are basically three choices, all of which have problems.

  1. Bootcamp. Runs everything, but you can't run the Windows stuff side by side with the Mac stuff.

  2. VMWare or Parallels. Now you can run side by side, but not everything works.

  3. Crossover. Like VMWare, but worse.

Now, the only reason I want to run Windows software is to play Valve games. The reasons are simple. I don't need to run Office and the like. Blizzard games already run on the Mac natively. And as we all know, the only PC games worth playing are from Blizzard or Valve.

In particular, the only reason I installed Crossover in the first place was to run Steam and the supported Valve games. But, here's the thing. It never really worked. It almost worked. Really though the experience was just like trying to run a Unix shell with Cygwin. Every time you turned around you noticed that you were not really in Steam, you were in something that looked like Steam on the outside but only worked about 75% of the time. Crossover also teased you with the possibility of installing non-Steam games to run on your Mac, but that experience was even worse. Most of the time you'd start the install process and it would chug along until you actually had to put in a content DVD, at which point it would fail. Again, you get the promise of a seamless experience but the reality of something that is only 3/4ths of the way there.

As negative as this sounds, I don't mean to say that I don't appreciate the effort. I really do. But the reality is that over the year and a half or so that I have tinkered with Crossover, all I've really accomplished in it is to replay about a third of Half-Life 2. The whole experience just never quite clicks. In fact, it's nicer to use Steam inside VMWare than with Crossover.

Of course, now things have changed. Now Valve has announced that Steam and their major titles will be available on the Mac in a native port that will start shipping your computers next month some time. This is certainly grand news. What it means to me is three things.

  1. All the PC games I want to play will be on the Mac.

  2. No need to humiliate myself by buying a cheap Windows laptop for Valve games.

  3. I can delete Crossover.

Now all I need to do is make sure my Half-Life 2 save file is in the "cloud." I wonder how I do that.

Dinner in Half an Hour: Lamb Stew

2010-03-10 · by psu

This one is easy. Basically we're going to do this recipe for pork stew except with lamb shoulder instead of pork, a bit of extra potatoes and parsnips, and just a plain set of herbs instead of chili peppers. That's all you really need to know, but here's the rest anyway.

Here is what you need. For stage 1:

  1. 2-3lb of lamb shoulder roast. The one I bought was tied up, which is convenient. Season the roast with a good bunch of salt and pepper.

  2. 1 large onion or two small ones, chopped.

  3. 1 or 2 ribs of celery, chopped.

  4. 2 or 3 carrots, chopped.

  5. Dried rosemary, thyme, and some ground cumin seed, bay leaf.

  6. Chicken stock.

  7. A lot of red wine. Like a whole bottle.

For stage 2:

  1. Another onion or two, chopped.

  2. 3 or 4 white potatoes, cut up.

  3. 3 or 4 more carrots peeled and cut up.

  4. 5 or 6 parsnips, peeled and cut up.

First, put the red wine into a small soup pot and bring it to a simmer to reduce it. Reduce it by about half while you do the rest of the prep.

Heat up your favorite soup pot on medium high and put in some olive oil. Toss in the lamb roast. Brown on all sides. This should take a good 10-20 minutes, plenty of time for you to chop all the aromatics.

Remove the roast. Put the aromatics into the pot with some salt and pepper. Cook this over lower heat for around 10 more minutes until the veggies are soft. Add the dry herb mix, then put the roast back in the pan along with enough stock and red wine to cover its lower half. Throw this in a 250 to 300 degree oven for 1 hour. Turn the roast over, put it back for another hour or until it's all soft and nice.

When the roast is done, take it out of the pot and cut it up into small pieces. Then strain the braising liquid.

For stage 2, cut the root vegetables up into stew sized pieces along with another batch of onions. Toss this back into the soup pot along with another couple of teaspoons of ground cumin. Let this cook a bit, then add the cut up lamb and the braising liquid. Top this off with a bit more red wine and stock if it seems necessary, but not too much. I used a bit too much.

Put this back in the oven until the vegetables are soft. Then it's ready.

Pro tip: The best thing is to make this one day ahead and heat it up. This is because all stews are better the next day.

Thanks to "Brucey" in the comments of the previous pork stew post for reminding me to cook the roast whole and then cut it up. That's a lot nicer.

Nerdicious Furiosi

2010-03-12 · by psu

Pity the poor PC gamer. There he sits at his computer desk waiting for those AAA titles to come to his "platform of choice" a few months after they ship on the crippled consoles. Then, when the object of his desire is finally made available, the publisher encumbers it with what is an undeniably stupid system for "protecting" the digital content therein. I speak, of course, of the recent firestorm that Ubisoft has caused with their new DRM scheme on Assassin's Creed 2 and other titles.

I have mixed feelings about this whole fiasco. On the one hand, I don't really understand what Ubi hoped to achieve here. Requiring a game to be played online while giving the player no real reason to want to play the game online is kind of stupid. On the other hand, I can't help but think that you don't have to work too hard to find reasons not to play Assassin's Creed.

What confuses me most about this "conversation", if you will, is that tone of the rhetoric coming out of the PC-gaming dork community. I could understand anger that the feature sucks. I can understand being angry with Ubisoft for imposing restrictions on play without any sort of compensating added value. It seems to me that in the current marketplace the minimum bar for requiring the user to be online to play a game is in turn providing that user with services that are on par with Steam or Xbox Live.

What I don't understand is expressing one's anger over this slight in almost political terms, as if the ability to play a video game on your PC is written into the Constitution. I don't really understand the notion that there is something going on here that has earth shattering implications on the future of personal freedoms in personal computing. I don't really even understand why anyone would spend more than a dozen words complaining about this before just not buying the game or buying the game used on a console. Even the normally sedate and rational Gamers with Jobs have seen fit to throw what seems to me to be a melodramatic fit over this.

Is this really this important?

What seems clear to me is that Ubisoft does not really give a shit whether they sell games on the PC or not. I would bet that it's an overall lose on their bottom line to spend all the time and pain needed to get something running on that 15-headed chimera that is the Windows Platform. It's not surprising that they don't like PCs. There are probably easier ways to get out of the game than this weird protracted war, but then I've never understood management anyway.

Of course, civil rights-like rhetoric around the control of the personal computer is nothing new. The Open Source jihadists have been doing it for years. In fact, the rhetoric around what Ubisoft has done reminds me most of the similar levels of teeth gnashing that surrounds all discussions of "closed" vs "open" software platforms. Here is how these discussions go:

  1. Dork: Man, it's bullshit that the Fruit Fucker company doesn't let me run any code I want on this machine they sell.

  2. Regular Human: But it's not meant to run any code... all it does is fuck fruit. You don't complain about this on your car or your Xbox 360

  3. Dork: Yeah, but the FF3500 is obviously a general purpose computer, not just a game console, therefore I should be able to run anything I want on it.

There are two fuzzy points of reason here. The first is the notion that there is a fuzzy yet absolutely recognizable line between a general purpose computer and a special purpose computer. I find this notion strange. When I was in school any CPU that had memory and branching was defined as essentially general purpose. So I think when people use the term "general purpose" here what they really mean is something like "a machine I'd like to program, and it pisses me off if this desire is blocked in any way."

The second fuzzy point is the notion that given a "general purpose" machine, it is always and undeniably wrong to block any code from running on this machine, even if doing so would arguably improve the user experience. I'm not sure what legal or moral doctrine is used to derive this line of thinking, but I'm pretty sure it's something like: "well, this is how computers and operating systems have worked since I was 13".

The result is that if I put a bunch of hardware into a box and I call it anything that might be interpreted as a "personal computer", I'm a pigfucker if there are restrictions what software that the machine can run. But, if I call it a "game console" or a "automobile" or a "DVD Player" then it's OK if you have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to just get a dev kit for the machine and anything you develop must then be additionally tested by my internal Q/A certification team.

The truth is that these sorts of value judgements are quickly becoming useless and irrelevant. In my opinion, like it or not the world is moving away from the traditional model of a "general purpose and completely open" computing platform and more and more towards machines that do specific things and take advantage of their specificity to better tune the user experience.

What does this mean for the poor fan of Assassin's Creed 2? I can't really say. I'd just buy the game on the Xbox 360. And then sell it, because it sucks anyway.

Caesarion Salad

2010-03-15 · by peterb

A while ago I was holding forth, as I often do, cursing some local restaurant that made a crappy "caesar salad" that had no anchovies. Caesar salads, I opined, are meant to have anchovies, and any place that didn't have them in their salad sucked.

A friend of mine politely informed me that I was wrong, and that the traditional Caesar in fact had no anchovies. I laughed in his face, and then snuck away to look it up, and discovered that he was right and I was wrong. Damn it to hell.

This still left me with a problem, which is that I still think that anchovies belong in that salad, and too many places don't put them in. My solution is to make it at home, myself.

Since I can't technically call it a Caesar salad, it deserves a new name. Hence, the Caesarion Salad, Caesarion being the bastard child of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra.(footnote 1)

Ingredients:

You may be noticing the conspicuous absence of vinegar, and of the raw egg. This is because if you want to serve a guest something with a raw egg nowadays, if they're female, you have to ask if they're pregnant, which can really be a bit of a buzz-kill on a first date. And, since this is a bastard recipe, the whole point is that you can make it in about 3 minutes. Omitting the egg makes everything easier, and really, isn't being sloppy and carefree how Caesar ended up with a bastard in the first place?(footnote 2)

Take 5 or 6 anchovies and mash them up with a fork in a small ramekin. Add the lemon juice and olive oil and whisk with your fork until the anchovies have incorporated and the whole thing is a mess of salty, lemony awesome. Add about 1/2 tsp of ground black pepper (you can save that until serving time, but I'm lazy so I incorporate it into the dressing and if my guests don't like it that means there's more for me).

In a large bowl, put a ton of salad greens. Dress the salad greens with the concoction you just made and toss. Get out your block of parmigiano and slice off thin but wide slices liberally. You can use more or less depending on how much you like your guests. Add the rest of your anchovies to the salad whole, and be prepared to fight over who gets them.

Lastly, add "other stuff" to taste. This can include croutons, if you like, but I often dispense with those when I don't have them (which is often) and instead toss in a handful of almonds, pecans, and/or dried cherries. You don't really want to use too much of these other things - the heavy lifting is already being done by the awesome dressing and those anchovies, so really you're just introducing a grace note or textural counterpoint.

Serve immediately and enjoy.

Footnote 1: And for you, yes, you, the one about to object that the salad isn't in fact named after that Caesar? Go away.

Footnote 2: I thought I told you to go away, Picky Guy.(footnote 3)

Footnote 3: The Picky Guy in my head is now observing that, in fact, Caesar probably gave Cleopatra a child intentionally in order to secure access to Egypt's limitless wealth for his conquests, and so he probably wasn't being all that sloppy and carefree.(footnote 4)

Footnote 4: Also, Cleopatra wasn't an exotic Egyptian native like they always portray her, but was redheaded and the result of generations of Macedonian inbreeAAUUUUUUGGHGGH [SMACK].

Miller Time

2010-03-17 · by psu

The middle of March means that March Madness is upon us. Therefore I'm going to talk to you about a film that is about the NBA. This might seem strange to you. But it makes sense to me. With the exception of a few years following Duke after I was at the school when they repeated in 1992, I've never been much for NCAA Basketball. As a singular event full of spectacle and drama, there isn't much that can beat the NCAA tournament. But that doesn't mean the basketball is that good. People will call me nuts, but what bothers me about the college game is that, well, the players are not that good yet.

To understand where I am coming from, you have to understand the basketball that I grew up with. My basketball education came at the hands of the Larry Bird Celtics, the Magic Johnson Lakers, the Dr. J and Moses Malone Sixers, the bad boy Pistons and the very beginning of the Michael Jordan Bulls. This, I claim, is the best basketball that ever was. We will never see teams like this again. Get off my lawn, and so on. You cannot have watched these teams battle each other in the NBA playoffs and think that the NCAA tourney comes close to the same level sheer basketball goodness (offense, defense, court sense, passing, and "basketball IQ"), not to mention the incredible physical intensity of the NBA game. Need I remind old time Celtics fans of the fact that in 1987 Kevin ("I traded a championship back to the Celtics 25 years later") McHale played two series on a broken foot to try and get a repeat championship to Boston? You don't see that in college.

So I'm delighted to tell you about this new film from ESPN about this period in NBA history. The film is the Dan Klores production Winning Time and it is part of the ESPN documentary film series 30 for 30 where they have made thirty documentary films to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the network. If you want to feel old, finding out that ESPN is thirty years old will do that to you. I heard about the series via the Bill Simmons podcast. He's also one of the producers.

Anyway, I told you a small lie about this film. It's not really about the classic NBA period at all, it's more about the early 90s, a dark time for the league if there ever was one. And, it's not really about those classic teams either. It's about the Knicks and the Pacers, both teams that were perennial also-rans. In particular, it is about how Reggie Miller tortured the Knicks repeatedly in the playoffs over the years.

So why am I so happy about this film? Because it is an almost perfectly constructed ode to some fantastic characters and performances that might otherwise have been forgotten because they involved two "second tier" teams. If you need more convincing, here's a detailed list:

  1. The interviews great. For whatever reason, it seemed like every person that Klores interviewed comes off as engaged, personable and interesting. There isn't a stiff in the bunch. Even Patrick Ewing, who had a reputation for being morose and monosyllabic during his playing career is funny and charismatic.

  2. You don't need to be a basketball fan to enjoy the film. This is because the film is not about the game, it's about the people. The basketball sequences are important for establishing the characters and the drama, but you don't need to know how the game works to appreciate how everything fits together.

  3. The pacing and editing are perfect. No segment ever feels too long or too short. There is just enough back story to set up the meat of the narrative, but Klores never dwells on insignificant details. Finally, there are several sequences where Klores creates tension and/or humor just by how he edits the interviews together. These will make anyone who has ever edited video together grin with delight.

  4. Best use of opera in a sports documentary ever.

  5. Finally, for me, the two best basketball highlights in the film were the "eight points in 15 seconds" game (or maybe the "Spike Lee" game), and all of the vintage NBA footage. You will be amazed at how much more physical the game was back then. None of the modern flagrant foul rules had yet been created. People fell down a lot in very painful ways. While it's arguable that the game back then was too ugly it's pretty clear that the rules have swung too far the other way since then.

Up until now, the 30 for 30 series has been a bit of a mixed bag. The subjects are all interesting but perhaps a bit too specific to appeal to a general audience. Winning Time changes this. It is by far the best film in the series so far. More importantly, it is the most accessible to the non-fan. If the rest of the films in the series are even half as good, you owe it to yourself to get all of them into your Tivo and then buy your favorites on iTunes or DVD. ESPN is repeating Winning Time a couple of more times over the next few days, so see if you can find it.

Now I'm gonna go watch Reggie crush the hearts of all those Knicks fans all over again.

Slightly Delayed

2010-03-22 · by psu

I was gonna write something about Final Fantasy XIII. Probably something about how I enjoyed the first ten hours more than any single area of Dragon Age, even though that's unfair and really comparing apples to pomegranates. Actually though, I've got another chapter of Final Fantasy XIII to go play instead. So I guess I'll piss off the Dragon Age people later. It's not like that will be hard anyway. I'm outta here.

Field of Glory: Rise of Rome

2010-03-25 · by peterb

As you can tell from my recent review of Field of Glory, there's not much about Roman-themed wargames that I don't enjoy. Now, with Slitherine's first expansion pack for the game, Rise of Rome, there's even more to love.

Lest you think this will be nothing more than a paean, let me say that it took me a while to really get into the spirit of Rise of Rome. Slitherine's games are great, but they really need to look in to the issues they have with branding and UI design. I downloaded the expansion pack, installed it, ran the game and...couldn't tell that anything was different. Not even a splash screen or a version number. I actually quit the program and double-checked to make sure that I had installed it correctly. There is nothing in-your-face about Rise of Rome. It's not even in-your-house. It's a very quiet expansion.

What it does -- quietly -- is add stuff to Field of Glory. This consists largely of army lists, some extra scenarios and terrain types, and a random battle generator to magically create scenarios with the armies you create.

Like I said: it's very quiet. But it's also very deep.

To really appreciate the expansion, you have to open the "Digital Army Generator". At which point just how deep becomes apparent. This expansion -- there are 3 more in development now -- brings over 100 new unit types into the game, representing a huge swath of ancient history. This includes several army sets for different periods in Republican Rome's history. It is extremely likely that if you want to simulate any battle that took place anywhere around the Mediterranean you will be able to. Want to recreate the battles against the Pontic King Mithridates? Check. Fancy a battle against Armenia? No problem. Want to simulate Cassius' ill-fated expedition against the Parthians? Rise of Rome has you covered. It is enough to make an ancient history buff cackle with glee.

Armies are built with point counts, so you can theoretically balance your armies for different battles. For fun, I took an elite army of Roman legionaries against a less-well trained (but much larger) Gallic horde, using the random battle generator, and the battle was bloody satisfying and unfolded as I expected. The AI doesn't seem to have changed much since the first outing, so you'll want to use Field of Glory's superb play-by-internet system to obtain some real challenge.

Like the additional army sets, there are some game mechanic changes that are quiet, but deep. You can optionally now enable line-of-sight rules, which should make tabletop gamers quite happy. Armies can also have baggage camps, which can be raided for extra points. Temporary fortifications, palisades, are also a new addition to the game, and add another layer of tactical depth.

Should you buy it? Well, first you'll have to buy Field of Glory. In my mind, Rise of Rome isn't so much an expansion as a completion to the game. Once i played through the original FoG scenarios, I sort of felt like I was running over the same ground when replaying them. With the addition of the army creator and the random battle generator, I think some serious replayability has been added to the franchise. It was already a superb wargame; now it's a superb replayable wargame that gives you a huge amount of "What if?" flexibility.

So yes. I like it, and I think anyone who loves wargames is missing out if they don't get this.

I do, however, want to urge Slitherine to do themselves a favor. Please, please, please, hire someone who doesn't just think about how the product plays, but also how it looks and acts. The first time a user clicks your product's icon they shouldn't be left wondering "What's different?" It should be magical. Take your users by the hand and show them what you added. You made something great. You should be proud. So don't just write a webpage about it. Show it off a little when the user runs the game. Seriously. Your players will love it.

Field of Glory: Rise of Rome, available from Slitherine or from Matrix Games. Requires Field of Glory to already be installed.

Disclosure: Slitherine graciously provided an evaluation copy of this game.

Backups

2010-03-30 · by psu

You need to do backups. Back when computers were primitive and useless, backups were not as much of a problem because no one was storing anything in the machines. But these days, computers have grown up and it's possible that your entire life is stored in your laptop. So you should back it up. I came up with the following backup scheme primarily to archive my digital pictures. But I think it's useful for most general use too. The scheme sounds complicated, but it's actually fairly simple.

Rule number one about backups is simple: don't think. Back it all up. The less you have to think the better.

Rule number two about backups is that the best place to put them is on an external hard disk. In the old days, optical disks were big enough for people to consider using them, but DVDs only hold at most 8GB each which means it would take three or four to do a full backup of a circa 2001 Apple Powerbook with a 20GB drive. Disk storage has grown by an order of magnitude since then, so you are talking about burning a few hundred DVDs for a backup. I was too lazy to even do four back in the day. So avoid optical disks because they make it too hard to apply rule number one (backup everything).

The best thing about external disks is that they get bigger every couple of years. So every couple of years you buy a new set and copy all the old data to the new disks. This is rule number three about backups: no matter how you store the backups, the bits will rot. The only way to make sure they do not rot is to copy them over and over again. Copying everything to a new set of disks every year or two is therefore a good idea. Don't worry about the cost, you can buy a terabyte external drive for $100 now. Compared to losing your entire digital life, that's free.

The next best thing about external hard drives is that they are so cheap you can buy lots of them and use them for different backup purposes. At a minimum you should have two external drives that are about the same size as the main drive in the machine you are concerned about. My main machine is a laptop, so here is what I do:

  1. Whenever I get a new laptop, I buy two bus powered portable drives that are about the same size as the main drive in the laptop.

  2. When I get the laptop set up, I take one of these drives and make a complete bootable copy of the drive in the laptop. On Macs, there are various pieces of software that allow you to do this easily. You can use Disk Utility to do it. I use something called SuperDuper! because it has some other handy features. I then label this drive as the "mirror" drive. I carry this drive on trips in case the disk in the laptop goes bad and I need an emergency boot drive.

The mirror drive is also handy for when you need to undo some disaster that you have perpetrated on your main machine. You can mirror your machine before every major OS update, for example, in case you need to back it out. If it all goes bad, you can boot from your mirror and copy it all back to the main drive on the laptop. Macs make this easy. I would assume and hope that there is some way to do this in Windows too, but I don't really know.

  1. I use the second external drive for Time Machine. Time machine is handy for automatically keeping track of all the new files I've created without me needing to do anything. And it keeps multiple versions of all those files. So in a disaster, I can boot with the mirror drive and restore all my data from the Time Machine drive if the mirror drive is out of date.

My backup scheme follows this main pattern. I generally do a backup whenever I have a add batch of pictures to my laptop. I do this a lot, and digital photographs make up the bulk of the data that I want to back up, so this makes sense for me. Here is how the flow works.

  1. Load pictures into laptop. Do all the picture workflow stuff on them.

  2. Hook up the mirror drive. Sync the new data to the pictures folder there. SuperDuper! has an incremental update feature which makes this easy.

  3. Hook up the Time Machine drive, let Time Machine do its thing.

At this point, the first level backups are done. But, there is more to consider.

In addition to the two small drives, I also have two large desktop drives that have my complete photo archive on them. The laptop and portable drives really only have enough room for a year or two of pictures, and I'm up to eight years of pictures now. These two large drives are specifically dedicated to the photo archive. So whenever I add pictures, I use a script to copy the new pictures to these drives. In addition, I keep one of these drives at work, just in case my house burns down. This forms the second level of my backup archives.

As a side note, the one time I had a serious disk crash (knock wood) on my laptop, it was the work backup drive that saved me from losing about a month of photos. I generally bring my laptop to work about once a week to sync it.

The fourth rule about backups is that if you can make two backups of something, it's just as easy to make four. I have a desktop machine at home that is used mostly for iTunes. But I also use it as a third level of backups. Whenever I add pictures to the mirror drive, I also sync them to my home directory on the iMac. Then I let Time Machine on the iMac copy them to yet another external drive.

So now each new photo is stored seven times:

  1. On the laptop.

  2. On pocket drives #1 and #2.

  3. On desktop drives #1 and #2.

  4. On the iMac.

  5. On the Time Machine disk for the iMac.

When I run out of space on the laptop and the smaller external disks, I delete older photos. So for the long term, I have the entire photo archive stored four times. As before, every couple of years I upgrade all these disks.

Most recently, I also decided to sign up for one of these online backup services. I picked Backblaze. I told it to backup my iMac to some data center somewhere. So if Pittsburgh burns down and takes all of my local drives with it, I can still call them up and get my photos back. It only took a month for the iMac to copy everything over the network.

To summarize. There are four things you need to know about backups:

  1. Backup everything. Even what you don't need. Backup the important stuff more.

  2. Use disk drives. Other media are too inconvenient, which means you won't make backups.

  3. You must make new copies of the data every year or two. Conveniently, you need new disk drives once in a while anyway.

  4. If you are going to back everything up once, you might as well do it twice. And if you are going to do it twice, you might as well do it four times.

When Jerez Met Shaoxing

2010-03-30 · by peterb

Crossposted at Wine Bastards

This week's discovery: sometimes, if you can't get an exotic ingredient, it's because it isn't any good.

Having been on something of an asian cooking kick recently, I noticed that I kept seeing recipes that called for Shaoxing rice wine, which is more or less impossible to find here in Pennsylvania. The longer I went without any, the better is sounded. Finally, the grass growing intensely green, and sucked in by the marketing promises of "drinking quality" rice wine, I asked my friend Steve to pick some up in Portland and ship it to me.

Here's the thing about the phrase "drinking quality." There are people in this world who drink Sterno, too.

Chinese rice wine is cheap sherry. Note: I'm not saying that it shares some characteristics with cheap sherry. I'm saying that as far as I could tell, there might be a warehouse somewhere where some bastard is uncapping bottles of Taylor's New York Sherry, pouring it into a smaller fancy bottle, and charging a 600% markup on it to suckers honoured customers like myself. There is absolutely no reason to use Shaoxing rice wine for cooking (or drinking) if you have access to cheap sherry, which you do.

Undoubtedly, there is some person, somewhere, who will insist that for authentic Chinese flavors, only the authentic Shaoxing rice wine will do. That person is a damn dirty liar, and you can tell them I said that.

Slow Food vs. Naked Lunch

2010-04-12 · by peterb

I sort of dislike the way the Slow Food movement has developed in America.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not against eating healthy, real food. I'm not against preferring local food sources over the industrial. I'm not against trying to appreciate sensuality instead of worshipping convenience and speed. To the contrary, these are principles I honor and, when I can, live by.

But I've gone to a few of these Slow Food events now, and although the food is almost always delicious, the politics leave a slightly bitter aftertaste in my mouth. The other Pete has written about this also, but I think my issue is subtly different from his.

I look around me at these events, and I notice a few things. The attendees are largely white. Largely older. And largely very, very wealthy. And I find it hard to reconcile the high flown and, at least in translation, condescending tone of the Slow Food Manifesto with the reality that this sort of lifestyle is only open to the wealthy. There are occasional programs, such as the various farm CSAs that are actually helpful, but my overall impression — which I acknowledge may be half-assed or simply wrong — is that the organization as it exists in this country is basically a social club for foodies with more money than friends. The other half of the equation is that it's a great tool to market your restaurant or company to said foodies.

There's nothing wrong with a social club for foodies per se, but it feels to me like this particular meal is larded with a generous helping of self-congratulation. And it seems to me that eating well when you're wealthy isn't a particularly difficult task.

Putting this into context, it's clear to me that Jamie Oliver has done more in a month to spark a national conversation about how we, as a nation, eat than Slow Food has done in 20 years.

Watching Food Revolution, the most interesting aspect to me was that, in making a fairly healthy yet simple meal for some elementary school kids, Oliver still came in at over twice the school's budget for that meal. I'd like you to think about that for a minute. Sure, maybe Oliver totally messed up and shouldn’t have included the foie gras as a side dish. But the truth is that the school district, even with all the State resources behind it, cannot afford a slow-foodish lunch for its students.

Now imagine how working single parents with little or no savings have to feed their kids. Their shopping and ability to prep meals is limited because they can't fill a pantry in advance. They likely can't prepare meals that take too much time. And for every meal they prepare they have to answer two burning questions: How much is this meal going to cost, and is it going to cost more than a $1 cheeseburger at McDonald's? If you are in America and are in poverty, you have, at most, $7.87 to spend on food per day. And don't forget that any time you spend preparing your food is time spent not earning money to hoist yourself out of poverty. If you think that's easy, try doing it yourself. Let me know how long you last.

People are not eating crap just because they want to eat crap. Many, many people are eating crap because it's the only thing they can afford. That cascades directly from our nation's agricultural policies. It is not enough to lecture others about how to eat unless you also have an answer as to how they can afford it.

Maybe I'm expecting too much from Slow Food. Maybe its members are happy just being a part of a kaffee klatsch for the overprivileged. But I don't think that I, personally, have time for something like that. Slow Food is all well and good, but at this point what we really need is Fast Change to our food politics.

Making the Food Taste Like The Food

2010-04-14 · by psu

When I was a younger cook there was a period of time when I was trying to figure out how to make chili taste like chili. I gathered the spices and herbs that the recipes told me to gather and combined them as described. But the result always tasted like meat and cooked tomatoes. It did not have that flavor of infused seasoning that you want in chili. Later on I found a recipe that told me to combine everything in a slightly different way, and my chili tasted like chili again.

At the time I was happy to just have a decent chili, and I did not think about the implications of the recipe I had found. But now I realize that within that bowl of meat, beans and chili peppers is a deep lesson about how to make food taste right.

The chili recipe that worked had you saute the onion, meat, salt, pepper, chili peppers and dried spices all at once at the beginning of the recipe rather than assembling the whole stew and then seasoning it later. This turns out to be the core of an important secret. You can generalize this secret into three simple rules:

  1. You need to use enough salt and pepper to bring out the taste of the food.

  2. You need enough oil to distribute flavor through the dish.

  3. You need to pre-cook the aromatics. There is a reason so many recipes tell you to "saute the onions until soft." This holds doubly true for dried spices like chili peppers, or the various dried ingredients that make up Indian "curry".

I should have figured this stuff out sooner, but I didn't work it all out until recently. Doing my pan roasted steaks taught me that you have to put more salt and pepper on the steak than you might think for the meat to taste like meat. My recent adventures in braising taught me the importance of that trio of aromatics that are so important to the French: onion, celery, and carrots. Working out how to make a better tomato sauce involved realizing that yes you really do want to poach the onion and shredded carrots in 1/4 cup of olive oil because it's the oil that will carry all that sweetness into the tomatoes that you add later.

However, I think no cuisine illustrates these principles of seasoning more than Indian food. I've never been good at Indian food. I like to make excuses for this, saying that I never had an Indian mom to show me how it works. But, this is just a smokescreen. The truth is that I'm not smart or inherently talented enough to make Indian food. In particular, I always end up with a bland mess instead of a wondrous concoction full of layers of different flavors and spice.

I'm not going to say that I have cracked the code on this, but I have at least managed to make a good dal based on red lentils. It's simple if you follow the rules above.

  1. Dice one large onion or two small ones. Also chop up a couple big tablespoons of ginger. Finally, chop up some garlic if you want.

  2. In a spice mill, grind cumin seed, coriander seed, and mustard seed. I'm not sure how much I used. I got about two or three teaspoons of spice mix out the other side.

  3. Heat up a soup pot and add a couple of tablespoons of olive oil. Make sure you use enough! Saute the onion and ginger in the oil until the onion gets soft, about five minutes. After that's done, add the spice mix and mix it around so that the onion and the oil absorbs it all.

  4. Add the lentils and stir the mixture around. Then add enough water to cover by an inch or so. Simmer this until you get a fairly thick mixture of cooked lentils and onion. It should not get dry, so add water if that happens. Total simmer time should be around ten or twenty minutes.

Easy as pie. And I finally got a dish that has the flavors of the spices infused throughout, rather than getting lost in the mix.

There is no doubt that seasoned (ha ha) Indian cooks will mock me for having taken so long to figure out something so basic. And there is no doubt that I deserve such mocking. But at least I figured out this much now rather than later. Maybe I can find someone's Indian mom to come teach me the rest.

Lose The Disk

2010-04-21 · by psu

Long time readers of this site will remember (or not) that I've been slowly working my way through my CD collection and adding it all to iTunes. Over about the last three years, I've gone from having 140 albums filed to the current figure of around 375. The total number of disks is somewhat higher, because a lot of my collection is large boxed sets that I hardly listen to. Because I'm stupid. Anyway, at the current rate, I should be finished with this project in about 2017. A week or two ago I came to an interesting epiphany about the whole endeavour: what I should do is rip the disks and then throw them away. I'm just going to lose them anyway.

The event that brought about this conclusion was one that has happened two dozen times while I have been filing my CDs. Here is how it goes:

  1. I see album A already ripped in iTunes, but at a hideously low bitrate.

  2. I look for album A on my shelf.

  3. Album A is gone, because there is nothing in my life easier to lose than a physical disk with digital data on it.

  4. Go and buy another copy of the CD and rip that.

This finally came to a head when I temporarily lost two boxed sets which contained about 10 disks each. The boxes finally did turn up (they had been misplaced during some renovation on the house), but the fact that two large repositories of digital music could just disappear like that got me to thinking about my position on the purchase of downloads in general.

In the past I have had two main objections to music (or other) downloads:

  1. I tend to believe that I will lose the data and have no recourse.

  2. I have a fear of the "lower bit-rate" format. The files you download are more compressed than the music you buy on disk, so I'd like to have a copy of the "full bit-rate" recording around "just in case."

I now realize that my first objection is complete bunk and my second objection is probably meaningless.

While ripping my music collection, I think that I have discovered one sobering fact: I have lost an order of magnitude more data on physical media than I have ever lost on a sealed disk drive in my various laptop and desktop computers. This is because I am very careful about preserving data on hard drives. That said, preserving data on hard drives is easy: you just make lots of copies.

In contrast, it seems to me that keeping track of physical disks is a lot more complicated. You need shelves. You need to make sure you put the disk back in the same place you found it every time you use it. This works OK for disks you never listen to (like my boxed sets) or large disks that you would step on if you were not careful (like my LPs). But, CDs and DVDs just get lost. It is apparent to me that I don't have the space in either my physical or mental life to actually keep track of them. Therefore, they get lost. And when they get lost, I replace them and then lose the replacement. I bet I have six copies of Kind of Blue lying around the house in various places. This is stupid.

As for bit rate, I made a discovery there too. I ripped a couple of my out of print CDs in Apple Lossless in a fit of misplaced paranoia. What I discovered was that Apple Lossless averages at about 500Kbps. Songs from the iTunes store (and the stuff I rip myself) comes in at 256Kbps (in AAC format). It is my solemn belief that doubling the number of bits will not make a material difference for me and my sound reproduction equipment. I have made an executive decision to throw half the bits on the floor because I don't care anymore.

These two conclusions have a large impact on how I view my little CD ripping project. In the past, I had viewed it as a way to convert "my collection" into a more convenient form for listening, while preserving the "base data" somewhere else so I would not lose it. Now, I think, I have tipped over and realize that the iTunes database is the entire point and the truth is that I don't want the disks at all (except for the liner notes, dammit!).

This means that increasingly often, my workflow in the project has become:

  1. Find a disk or disks I need to rip.

  2. Realize that I will spend 15 minutes per disk getting the data into iTunes, editing meta-data, and filing things.

  3. Notice that the album is at the iTunes or Amazon store.

  4. Just buy it and download it.

Incredibly, this flow is even possible for a large percentage of the more obscure classical titles that I own.

My final conclusion is this: forget about the disk. It just doesn't matter. In fact, I'll go further and say that all of this holds, only doubly so, for disk based movie formats. The only thing allowing Blu-Ray and DVD to tread water against the inevitable is that the movie companies have done a better job at locking the rights down and making it hard to find movies for download. But these days, given the choice between buying/renting a movie on disk or just downloading the thing I will just download the thing 99.99% of the time.

I'll only buy Blu-Rays if they come with the digital file as well. That way I have something to watch when I lose the disk.

P.S.: None of this applies to LPs, because LPs rule! I just like staring at them in all of their oversized plastic glory. So there.

Signs Point to Quit

2010-04-23 · by psu

It must be the slow season for video games, because even though I have games to play, I have found excuses not to play them. But, I promised a month ago (!) that I would write something down about Final Fantasy 13. Now that a month has passed it is virtually certain that no one on the planet really gives a crap about what I think of Final Fantasy 13. Therefore, it's the perfect time to meditate on the game.

Here is what you need to know about FF13. For about a month I played a bit every night and enjoyed it. Just before a long business trip I got to a Major Plot Point. While on the trip, I started watching The Wire. When I got back, I just kept watching The Wire and felt no real need to pick the game up again. Unlike a some other games which I have given up on recently I have no overwhelmingly negative feelings towards the game. I believe that it succeeds at everything it sets out to do. In particular, it fulfills the three main requirements of an RPG:

  1. The combat is engaging without being either overly difficult or overly complicated. More on this later.

  2. The character progression is marked by the right combination of increased ability and pretty cut scenes.

  3. The plot does not get in the way.

The first two points are the main positives. The combat and character progression systems display a rare willingness on Square's part to actually streamline tedious crap out of the game. The character ability trees are not a minefield where one bad decision early on in the game can ruin your entire experience. Instead, it's usually clear where you want to go to make your characters appropriately powerful. This is good.

The combat system is similarly accommodating. Rather than requiring you to constantly babysit all of the other brainless drones in the party, the combat system has you do two things

  1. Control the main character at the time (this changes up depending on where you are in the plot)

  2. Control the overall set of roles that you want the AI to play.

The second aspect of the combat system is called the "paradigm system." It basically allows you to dynamically change the concentration of abilities that the AI will use on your behalf. So you can have one setup for aggressive attacks, one for healing up, one for casting buffs, and so on. Once the combat gets going, the main task for you is to pick the party type you want and then just tell the combat AI to do its thing. In other words, what the game has done is tell you to constantly monitor the high level strategy of the party in combat rather than spending your whole life picking the same 5 things by navigating the same 5 levels of menu over and over and over again. The automatic AI is not perfect, but it is a whole lot better than the armored retards in Dragon Age. Overall, this is a win.

As in all Final Fantasy games, in between the big battles, there are cut scenes. The cut scenes are spectacularly pretty. I don't care if the base graphical abilities of the consoles are dumbed down compared to PCs or not ... no development house in the West has been able to match the visual richness and overall quality of either the pre-rendered or engine-rendered movies in this game. It's a remarkable achievement. The best part is that when you drop out of a cut scene back into the game, the drop in visual quality is nowhere near as jarring as in the older games on the PS2. The looks-like-ass filter is finally gone.

The movies would be even more enjoyable if the plot were actually interesting. Unfortunately, here is where the game breaks down. The plot is full of painfully slow exposition. But, to make up for it, they leave out a lot of exposition that is required to understand the exposition that is actually there. If you are patient and just ignore the words you do not understand it eventually all comes together. But I can't help but wonder how this might have turned out if video game writers actually knew how to write. Or, perhaps it's some disaster of localization. Either way, there is not a lot going on narratively in this game, and what is there doesn't make much sense for a long time.

In fact, everything in this game seems to take a long time to get going. The Internet People have complained loudly that the game doesn't let you out of tutorial jail for a good 20 to 30 hours. I think this is overblown. It is true that for reasons having to do with the narrative the game does not give you full control over your party and its combat for around the first 20 hours of the game. But I think it's disingenuous to call this entire sequence the tutorial. It doesn't take that long for you to get into the main mechanics of the game (walk down hallway, slaughter enemies, level up), so in my view the tutorial ends pretty much as soon as most of the combat system has opened up. Contrast this with Assassin's Creed, which really didn't let you stab anyone (which is the entire point of the game) for a good four or five hours. Now that's a painfully long tutorial.

Another complaint from the nets has been that the game is "overly linear." I think this is like complaining that shooters have you "shoot too many enemies with guns". It's a Final Fantasy game, of course it's overly linear. That's what you signed up for. Related to the linearity angst is the widespread complaint that Square got rid of the towns and replaced them with a relatively impersonal shopping interface at the save-points. I agree with this to the extent that the shopping interface is completely opaque and useless (as is the upgrade system for weapons). But it is not clear to me why people seem to have such a deep-seated nostalgia for the towns. Why would you like walking around in a ghost town full of dead people who offer the same three lines of dialog every time you "talk" to them. These idiotic edifices are gone in FF13 and all I have to say is good riddance.

My complaint about the game is that it leads you down the same old hallway but there is no tasty cheese at the end. The tasty cheese is supposed to be a pretty cut scene that I actually care about. Unfortunately, FF13 has spent all too many hours not generating anything that I actually care about. On the other hand, nothing in the plot has caused me to want to plunge a hot poker through all of my main sensory organs. And that's more than I can say for a lot of video games. I find it indifferent and easy to ignore while I continue to run down the hall.

But, this indifference only gets you so far, and around the time I started watching The Wire I must have hit my limit. So while I have no real complaints about the game systems, the characters, the combat, or the overall production, it's not clear to me that I will spend any more energy to get to the end of the hallway without some indication I will eventually get my payoff.

Maybe I'll get back to it after I get through the rest of The Wire. Or maybe I'll be able to put it off until it's Madden Time again. Either way, at least I didn't waste any more time with Dragon Age. Yes, I went there. That game left a mark.

Why I'm Done With Barnes & Noble

2010-04-28 · by peterb

Today I window-shopped a little for a new copy of J.R.R. Tolkien's *The Hobbit*. I don't yet know which edition I'm going to buy, but I know I'm not going to buy it at Barnes & Noble. Let me explain why.

First, I should observe that the net flow of books is still primarily out of my house. My goal in life right now is to simplify, simplify, simplify, and I simply don't need all of these big heavy paper things sitting in my space proclaiming my hipness. This is what libraries are for. Beyond a few works of rarity or artistic significance (I'll never get rid of my Codex Seraphinianus), I'm happy to not have the physical objects in my house.

This doesn't mean I don't read, mind you - I have jumped into e-books in a big way, and I find them preferable in almost every way to their paper compatriots. But specifically for reading aloud to others, there's something communal about a book, and The Hobbit is a book that rewards reading aloud.

So I want to buy a physical copy of The Hobbit. While window-shopping at Amazon, I went looking for a particular edition at Barnes & Noble, and visiting their web site reminded me why I hate them. It has to do with the divide between their online store and their brick and mortar store.

In my mind, the existence of the brick and mortar stores is, quite possibly, the only reason I would use Barnes & Noble over Amazon: if I want it today, then maybe I would want to swing by a store and buy it. Let's use this edition of The Hobbit as an example. I didn't actually buy this book today, but this is how it worked for a different book the last time I bought one (*Haroun and the Sea of Stories*, if you must know). Here's how the shopping experience works if you want to buy a book at B&N and pick it up at their store.

First, you go to the page for the book you want. It has an "online price" (in this example, $25). You give your zip code in the "Pick Me Up" dialog box, and it checks local inventory, and tells you what nearby stores have the book. So far, so good. If you want to get it at one of the stores, you press the bright happy "Pick Me Up" button, and go to the corresponding store in about an hour.

You arrive at the store and say "Hi, I'd like to pick up and pay for my copy of The Hobbit." They say "Yes, sir, we have it right here. That will be $34.99 plus tax."

Now, to give Barnes & Nobles their due, they do have some language, in 8 point text at the bottom of the page, quietly mentioning "Store and online prices may vary." But on the other hand, if the e-commerce site for your book-retailing company with 5 billion dollars a year in revenue cannot manage to tell me what I'm going to pay at the time I actually click to reserve the book, they can go jump in a very deep, very cold, and very filthy lake.

Let me be perfectly clear: I do not begrudge them their price difference. I do not begrudge them charging more in brick and mortar stores. All I want is for them to tell me how much they expect me to pay before I click the button that, emotionally, commits me to getting in my car and driving to their storefront. That little bit of deception by sleight-of-hand, that little bit of screw-the-customer attitude, is all I need to convince me that if I'm going to give money to someone for a physical book, that someone is never going to be Barnes & Noble.

I hope they enjoyed the extra $7 they got out of me for Haroun and the Sea of Stories, because it's the last $7 they'll ever see from me.

Vancouver BC: Cooler Than Seattle

2010-05-03 · by psu

I promised my friend and co-worker from Vancouver that I'd lead with that statement so I did it even though I love Seattle dearly. Don't be mad. The truth is that Vancouver is cooler than most of your favorite cities. There are several reasons why, and some of them don't even have to do with food.

Vancouver is a pretty town. This is because it has that whole city plus water plus mountains combination going on:

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You can even take mass transit and get a good view:

psu_20100429-01929

The mass transit system is also better than most cities I've been to. It goes to a lot of useful places, and the ticket checking system is surprisingly laid-back. There are no oppressive gates and turnstiles that you must navigate. Instead, every once in a while there is a nice person checking tickets. It's a semi-honor system, which surprised me because the transit systems I've used in the USA were all much more paranoid about freeloaders and deadbeats perpetrating fraud. This lack of gates contributes to the excellent wheelchair access in the train system. In fact, access all over the city is great:

  1. The buses are great.

  2. There are a ton of ramp-van taxis.

  3. Most of the buildings in the city have flat ground level access. We even went to a dim sum joint out in Richmond, the suburban Chinatown, and had no problems. It was a second floor place with an elevator and a ramp in the parking lot. Excellent!

As a matter of record, access in Seattle (and most other American cities) is by comparison a disaster.

All of this access made it easy to wander all over the place and eat cool food. Vancouver has to be right in the running for the best food town in North America.

There is coffee:

psu_20100427-01633

This sort of cappuccino can be hard to find in Seattle.

There is Chinese breakfast:

psu_20100427-01647

There is Ramen:

psu_20100429-02195

There is fancy Northern Chinese food:
psu_20100427-01763 psu_20100427-01773

There is fancy sushi:

psu_20100428-01838

And of course, there is the inexplicably brilliant Japadog:

psu_20100427-01740

There is also a ton of dim sum, but I neglected to get a good photo of the best stuff we had. Here is a picture of the second-best stuff we had: the shrimp and pea shoot dumplings at Sun Sui Wah. It was only disappointing in that it was only as good as anything I've ever had on this continent.

psu_20100426-01565

Later in the week we went to the Jade Seafood Restaurant in Richmond. This place was so good that even the completely clichéd Crystal Shrimp Dumplings were really really good like nothing I'd had before. About two blocks away was another dim sum place called Empire that was the size of two city blocks. The only other place I've seen Chinese food on this scale was in Hong Kong.

Ok. Enough of the dedicated restaurant food. Let's talk about shopping malls. The first day there we took the train to the Aberdeen Shopping Mall. This is just like a typical high-end mall in a more affluent suburb of any major city. Well, except for the fact that you can get hand made Shanghai Soup Dumplings in the food court:
psu_20100425-01469 psu_20100425-01484

The food court also had Pho, Taiwanese food, Chinese Beef Noodles, Vietnamese subs, and Beard Papa. It also had wireless Internet. Half the dorks in North America could just set up a tent and live there.

The mall also has a fountain and light show on the weekends. Great for the kids!

psu_20100425-01501

So that's pretty much all we did in Vancouver. Eat and shop. Oh wait, no it isn't. We also took advantage of two fantastic pieces of green space right in the city. There are the Van Dusen gardens:

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and there is Stanley Park, where you get a great view of the harbor and the city at the same time.

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Oh, and if the outdoors bores you, you can always go to the public library. I think the Vancouver library is probably cooler than the one you have too:

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OK. That's all I got. We will have to go back to find some of the other cooler things there. There is a whole area of the city that is nothing but outdoor stores. There are some sea kayaking tours. There are a lot of bike shops. There are more gardens. And we have to slowly work our way through the Chinese restaurant food awards page and go to every place that is listed there.

It Ain't What You Do, It's The Way That You Do It

2010-05-05 · by peterb

I've been listening to a lot of books on CD recently.

This is not my preferred way of reading books. But it is a good way to burn up a commute, while also being entertained and sometimes educated. And since my favorite place in the world, the Carnegie Library, has a great collection of books on CD, I don't even have to bankrupt myself doing it.

In listening to so many books on CD, I've discovered a very interesting phenomenon. Let me set the stage before revealing it to you.

Since I prefer actual reading to listening to books, I tend to not get the books I am very excited about on CD; I've tried, and usually I just get frustrated and end up abandoning the CD in favor of the written word. Instead, I use books on CD to fill in the gaps. I seek out -- usually -- nonfiction books on topics that I am vaguely interested in, but reluctant to commit to actually reading about. So: lots of history (classical and military), a bit of economics, the occasional biography. Once in a blue moon I'll add some pulpy fiction to the mix. That sort of thing.

What I have discovered, through trial and error, is this: it is more important that the person reading the book is a good reader than that the book be an interesting book. Put another way: I would rather listen to a superb reader read a bad book than listen to a bad reader read a superb book.

It makes sense: an audiobook is an intermediated experience, and the mediator is, after all, a performer. A shoddy stage performance can ruin Shakespeare, and just as certainly a shoddy voice performance can ruin an audiobook. And a great performance can uplift it.

This conclusion is remarkably liberating. It makes the decision process for finding a book to listen to remarkably simple: find a book read by a performer whose other readings you have enjoyed. Currently my favorite reader, bar none, is John Rafter Lee, perhaps better known as the voice of Trevor Goodchilde in Aeon Flux:

So far I've listened to his reading of George R. R Martin's *A Feast for Crows * (a book I sort of hated actually reading, but enjoyed listening to) and the pseudohistorical polemic *Worlds at War: The 2,500-Year Struggle Between East and West*.

When I can't find something by John Lee, I have a simpler algorithm now. I go to the library, and I pick out four completely random nonfiction audiobooks. Then I listen to the first chapter of each in the car. Any in which the reader mispronounces a word go back to the library the next day (you'd think this would be unusual, but it happens in about 50% of the books I've grabbed, particularly with respect to place names. My conclusion is that while these audiobooks may be edited in a technical sense, there is little or no knowledgeable editorial oversight.) Books in which the reader is technically precise yet subtly grating (hello, Richard Dawkins and Lalla Ward) can take a little longer to go in the returns bin. Typically, with this method, I'll end up with one audiobook out of four that is enjoyable and properly read. And that lets me add a new performer to my list of Readers That I Personally Like.

Steam Power

2010-05-12 · by psu

In case you hadn't heard, today was a magical day for all of the Mac users of the world who also like to play video games. This is because Valve released an implementation of the Steam platform that runs under MacOS X. Now, I know that I have been hard on Steam in the past. But things change, and my bitter feelings for Steam were a product of its initial implementation. From those humble beginnings Steam has evolved into perhaps the best online video game platform for non-mobile devices that there is.

In fact, over time it's become clear that if you are going to buy video games for a personal computer, you should generally avoid those companies that are not called Valve or Blizzard. Valve and Blizzard tend to meet the minimum requirements of game releases that are worth buying instead of stupid. I will repeat the list here:

  1. Works out of the box 100% of the time on the hardware I own.

  2. No stupid optical disks for either installing the game or proving that I own the game. Just authenticate me on a web site, or equivalent, once in a while.

  3. Works out of the box 100% of the time on the hardware I own.

  4. The game is actually polished, relatively bug free, and well designed.

  5. I am allowed to install the game on a reasonable number of machines that I own without undue difficulty. Steam provides the added bonus that any game I previously purchased for the Windows version of Steam will automatically be available on my Mac as well. Therefore, I'll be able to play Half-Life 2, a game I bought for Windows in 2004, on my Mac in a few weeks when they release it. That's magical.

So the number one good thing about Steam on the Mac is that now all those great Valve games can be played natively without any painful emulation hoops.

The number two good thing about Steam on the Mac is that various publishers that share Valve's general development philosophy will also be porting to the Mac. Thus, things like the excellent Torchlight from Runic games are already available.

Finally, perhaps the most dangerous thing about Steam on the Mac is its support for the Steam Cloud system, which puts your saved games into a server so they are transportable from machine to machine. With this system you can start your Torchlight game at home, then continue to play it in your office while you "compile", and finally take it on your laptop to that long series of architecture meetings that you'll be in tomorrow since you will need to take "notes."

In other words, Steam Cloud could destroy civilization as we know it as millions of people everywhere play Civilization IV on their Macs instead of contributing to the engine of industry. Society as we know it will go up in a puff of Torchlight, or Counterstrike, or Half-Life 2 Deathmatch.

Maybe someone in Homeland security should shut this down now, before it's too late.

The Wire

2010-05-17 · by psu

People have been telling me to watch The Wire for years. I have resisted because in general I am suspicious of what television enthusiasts tell me. I finally relented because I never heard or read a single negative review of the show. I still had lingering doubts that I would be able to deal with the somewhat grim subject matter, but it only took a few minutes for these doubts to evaporate.

Note: There are a few minor spoilers about the subject matter and structure of the last season of the show near the end of this article. If you have not watched the show and do not want to be influenced before you do, beware.

Many television series take a while to grow into themselves and establish their style and voice. Not The Wire. This show comes out of the gate with a confidence that can only be explained by the fact that its creators already knew exactly what they wanted to do and exactly how to achieve it. From the first ten minutes, the characters all feel fully conceived and developed, their voices pitch perfect and their personalities fully drawn. Even before the show has them do anything, they feel like real and natural people standing there in your living room (or at least inside your iPad).

It is a pleasure just to sit and listen to them talk. And this happens immediately, from the very first scene. The first five minutes. I can't remember a show doing this to me before.

The second five minutes were filled with the music over the opening credits. I also enjoyed this immensely. Each season used a different performance of the same song, but to my mind the one used in the first season was by far the best. To summarize: the show hooked me in ten minutes.

Over the next few weeks the show kept me hooked as I methodically plowed through the entire series (thanks iTunes). As you probably know, each season concerns itself with another dysfunctional instutition in the city of Baltimore. There is the drug trade and police, the port and dock workers, the city government, the schools and finally the media.

After a few episodes, one thing you realize about the show is that it was clearly made to be consumed on DVD. There is little or no filler material. Every minute of every episode moves something in the series forward. As in the first ten minutes, the key is the characters. This may sound obvious and almost trite, but let me explain. The television industry pays a lot of lip service to the idea of a "character driven" series. However, the truth is that almost all drama on TV is populated by characters that are either clichéd copies of predictable prototypes (Star Trek, the later seasons of The Sopranos) or dark, unlikeable, mysterious assholes (Mad Men). Shows will try and convince you that they are being dramatic, when really their supposedly intelligent leading men and women are actually acting stupidly. Or they will try and convince you that they are plumbing the depths of the human condition when in fact their characters are just wallowing in their own filth and self-pity.

To my mind, The Wire is different. It is different because all the show does is tell the story of the characters. It does not construct contrived situations and it does not have people acting in a completely strange and irrational manner in order to drum up "drama". Instead, the show presents the characters and their world, and shows you what happens to them day to day. What makes it work is that the show so consistently establishes its sense of place and your sense of its characters in a way that feels completely organic and believable, even if the reality is that you are being manipulated by a television show. The show makes you care about the characters because for once they are worth caring about. For lack of a better way to put it, they seem self aware in a way that most of the people in television and films do not.

Many have suggested that The Wire is a "visual novel", but I think that it is more like a long form symphony. The characters and themes in the show are like the core melodic and harmonic figures in symphonic music. The show progresses in way not unlike the classic sonata form. Each time we are introduced to a new part of Baltimore, new characters are introduced, the regular characters are further developed along their individual arcs and the same core themes of the show are reintroduced. The show even culminates in a grand climax that is full of self-reference and a bit of gratuitous meta-circularity.

In any case, by the end of the series, we have been treated multiple times to the larger social themes that David Simon, the show's creator, is concerned about. There is the inherent dysfunction of large institutions, how money destroys any and all ethical behavior, the oppression of the individual by large bureaucracy and the general evil of unfettered capitalism. While these core themes are essentially grim and depressing somehow I never found the tone of the show to be oppressively bleak. Instead, Simon and his writers always manage to balance the desolation of the city with occasional humor and a few stories of individual survival.

So, what is there to complain about? Since it's me writing there must be something, and that something is the fifth season. I would say that about half of the fifth season is as good as anything else in the series. In particular, the way the show pulls several secondary story arcs to their final conclusion is really enjoyable. Unfortunately, there are two uncharacteristic failures in the fifth season:

  1. The main narrative requires two of the regular characters to make decisions that while plausible, seemed to me to be extremely unlikely, even for them. This made at least a third of the season feel uncomfortably artificial.

  2. The portrayal of the fictional Baltimore Sun is ironically shallow, given that David Simon worked as a journalist at the Baltimore Sun before he got into TV. Unlike in the rest of the series the characters at the Sun are drawn mostly in absolutes. The "good guys" who are all smart, ethical and stand for truth and motherhood and pie. The "bad guys", on the other hand, are stupid, self-serving, and generally built of unmitigated evil. What you realize by the middle of the season is that while Simon can make you believe that a drug dealer is intelligent and likable, he cannot do the same for the head of a large media corporation.

I didn't really notice this at first, because the usual excellent execution and production values distracted me from the truth. But the more I think about it the less I like the setup for the big climax at the end of the season. On the other hand, the final episode was still great, and that fantastic music from the first credit sequence reappears, which was enough for me to forgive the season of its various failings.

Overall, I have to echo everyone else in the world in saying that this series is as good as anything I have ever watched. For me, it is unprecedented that a show could go more than four seasons without any noticeable drop in quality. There isn't much more to say than that. Go get the DVDs or the seasons on iTunes.

Stream The World

2010-05-25 · by peterb

10 years after canceling my account for the first time, I have resubscribed to Netflix.

I canceled my account, all those years ago, not because of any flaw in Netflix's service, or because it wasn't worth the money, but because Netflix was making me crazy. I had to watch the movies. I had to watch all the movies, and I had to watch them immediately. Friends would come over: "Hey, want to go out and see Bob?" "Can't. MUST WATCH MOVIES so that I can RETURN THEM." The fact that I wasn't actually enjoying all this panicked watching was sort of beside the point. Somehow it tripped a wire in my brain. I eventually realized this wasn't healthy for me, and I dropped the subscription.

The arrival of the Netflix app on the iPad brought me back. I'm sufficiently steeped in movies at this point that I've come around to the psu way of thinking about Netflix: you're not paying for the subscription to watch the movies, you're paying for the subscription so the movie can sit on your end-table, unwatched, for 6 months while you don't worry about it. And the ability to stream movies to the iPad, to the computer, or to the Xbox is pure love. I actually watched half of a movie on the iPad, then later started watching it on the Xbox, and Netflix remembered where I was and picked up where I left off. That gave me a little thrill.

Conceptually, streaming these things should be the ideal way to go. When it works, it is a little like living in The Future. The quality is good (or at least "good enough"), there's no physical media management to worry about, and I don't have to think about getting to the Post Office. In reality, the selection of movies available for streaming is a bit thin. It's definitely enough to find something to watch if you're bored, but the percentage of movies that can be streamed is still comparatively miniscule. Interestingly, this is true not just of Netflix, but also of various other online movie rental services, such as iTunes or Amazon MP3. This, for me, has been the frustrating part of the movies-on-computers experience: there are some movies that I want to watch, without having to touch a DVD, that I am ready and willing to pay for, but Hollywood can't figure out how to take my money.

This doesn't just apply to movies, but also to other forms of media. I can't tell you the number of books I have wanted to buy electronic copies of that aren't available. And I don't mean "not available on the iBookstore," or "not available on the Kindle store," but not available anywhere. The only way someone will sell me some of these books is if I let someone take an axe, chop down a tree, soak it in chlorine bleach, and stain it with the processed juice of long-dead animals and plants. It's like the publishing industry is composed entirely of ignorant, filthy savages. My solution to this is "I don't buy the book." They don't get my money, and my local library gets more use. Everyone wins except the barbarian who can't figure out how to take my cash.

We are so close to my ideal media world that it almost hurts. We need to get to a place where we can (legally) watch any movie (or read any book, or hear any song) ever made, wirelessly, with no physical media, on whatever screen we happen to be sitting in front of.

Auto is a Four Letter Word

2010-06-01 · by psu

A recent article in The Online Photographer got me thinking about the role of automation in those machines that take pictures for us. It got me thinking about this even though the piece was supposed to be about what lenses you should own and carry because sometimes Mike rambles. Anyway, here is what I thought: certain people hate automatic cameras because they can be harder to control. But we should ignore those people.

Until around thirty years ago, cameras were primarily mechanical devices. A few had electronic light meters in them, but the user was still expected to set everything by hand. First, you would do it peer into the viewfinder of the camera and turn one knob until your intended subject appeared to be sharp. Then you would stare at the light meter and set the aperture and shutter speed accordingly. Then you would take the picture, confident that it would be perfect because you had spent so much time in thoughtful deliberation over all of these critical settings.

This usage pattern means different things to different people. For the non-enthusiast who just wants a picture, it is complicated tedium. For the professional photographer or photographic artist for whom the image is most important, it is a small bit of technique that is easily mastered and then forgotten about. Finally, for the enthusiastic amateur, it is a secret to be mastered and then cherished, since the actual photograph that he is taking probably isn't all that interesting.

Not surprisingly, the advent of the automatic camera had a distinct effect on each of these classes of users. For the non-enthusiast, the more that can be automated the better. Automatic exposure, and later, autofocus is a great boon to these people who can now take pictures of higher and higher technical quality while never needing to think about it. Perfect.

Professional photographers also tend to be happy about these features. After all, on the high end cameras the most sophisticated automatic systems are mostly built for them. However, automatic cameras introduce layers of complexity that must first be mastered before a good photographer can take full advantage of them. The late Galen Rowell wrote about this 20 years ago when he compared using an automatic camera to flying a plane on instruments. Rather than interacting with the scene and the settings on the camera directly, you have to observe the scene and then also observe what the automatic system has done for you before you have confidence that the settings are right. Furthermore, when the automatic systems break down, you have to reverse engineer their logic to work out how to make it right. Thus, there is constant fiddling with exposure compensation or autofocus tracking or which focus sensor to use in the viewfinder just to trick the computer into making the settings that you would have dialed in by hand on a simple camera.

So here is the rub: with a manual camera you feel more secure about focus and exposure because you are setting them directly on the machine. With an automatic camera, the interaction is more indirect. You program the camera so that it will automatically do the right thing. This is inevitably difficult at first, but like everything with computers, once the basic abstractions are mastered they can provide a remarkable amount of leverage. Modern autofocus systems are so good that users expect to be able to set them up to accurately track fast and complicated action while still getting every shot sharp. You might have to dig through a dozen different menu settings to get things tuned the way you like, but a modern camera can do it.

In the modern automated world then, it is the poor amateur enthusiast who is left out in the cold. The more indirect way of working with the camera is the least satisfying for this user, because that tactile and emotional connection with the machine was at least half the reason he was using the camera in the first place. These people will complain that they don't like "giving up control" to the robot brain of the automatic system, or that modern cameras have been "dumbed down" to cater to the uneducated masses. Analogies to automatic transmissions in cars will be made. This is because inevitably the camera enthusiast is inevitably also a car enthusiast, and driving is another hobby where the size of your private parts is reflected by your ability to quickly perform a mostly meaningless feat of marginal manual dexterity (i.e. shift gears).

Luckily, we can ignore the whining and moaning from this particular audience. The truth is that while they are unquestionably more complicated, modern automatic cameras can be mastered and controlled just as effectively as their older manual counterparts. And, while it is true that the someone really needs to take Canon and Nikon out in the back and beat them with a user interface design stick, I'd still much rather be using a modern camera for fast work under marginal conditions. When push comes to shove, the modern camera can hold focus wide open with a 50/1.4 lens at ISO 3200 better than I can. And then it can dial the ISO back to 200 when I go back outside in the sunlight without me babysitting it. That's just great.

Sometimes the tactile wonder of a mechanical camera still calls out to me once in a while, but it's mostly false nostalgia. I think the reality is that modern cameras really are better and any reasonably competent photographer should be able to learn how to master one. Of course, if you can't you can always buy a point and shoot, like a Leica M9.

Il Credo dell'Assassino

2010-06-03 · by peterb

Although the other Pete already reviewed the game 6 months ago, I'm just now getting around to playing Assassin's Creed 2. As usual, he's already said everything I would plan on saying, and been more eloquent about it. But, I get paid by the word here, so I'm going to opine a little here on some of the things that AC2 gets right, compared to the first game.

The Personal Is Political

My first observation is that the plot of AC2 is worlds ahead of that in the first game. Overwrought? Perhaps. But the plot in the first game was so distant and emotionally uninteresting that I really wouldn't have cared if every character in the game died in a fire. For all of its flaws,the story in AC2 is one with a little bit of personal pathos.

In Assassin's Creed 1, I felt like I was playing with a vaguely interesting physics engine that was occasionally interrupted by a bad plot. AC2 has managed to keep me interested in the plot. Although it does have the moments of distraction that psu talked about -- "Must save my friend, who is being tortured! Oh, wait, I want to climb this tower to get a nice view, first" -- on the whole it feels much more well integrated.

Interestingly, like the first game, Assassin's Creed 2 also opens with a note asking Wahhabi extremists to please not murder the developers or their families, since they are very nice people.

Duomo Arigato

Here is what the first Assassin's Creed was like, from a visual perspective. First, you're in a desert town with nondescript architecture. Then, you get a mission to go somewhere else. So you get on your horse and ride through a brown landscape, punctuated occasionally by bits of tan dirt, and the occasional tan guard tower, until you reach your destination, which is another desert town with nondescript architecture.

You can almost imagine the planning meeting for AC2 where someone said "What's the most interesting building made during the Renaissance? The Duomo in Florence? OK, that's where the game will be set." If you have ever been to Firenze, playing Assassin's Creed 2 is going to make you want to go back. No one in the entire world felt that way about Damascus in the first game.

Epiphany: The Futuristic Office Building Is Not Interesting

In the first game, your character kept flipping back and forth between Altair's crusader-killing-spree in the Middle East and the futuristic office building where you were being held prisoner. I am not that far into the game, so this may change, but at least so far apart from the game's opening sequence, I haven't been back to The Boring Office Building. I'm hoping that continues, and if it does, it will have been an improvement on the first game. Hint to Ubisoft: next time, skip the cover story completely and just drop us in whatever past era the game occurs in. That's why we are playing. (Footnote 1)

Minstrels are Better than Beggars

Because at least the minstrels make me laugh.

Il Nome Della Rosa

It's not clear to me yet how long I will maintain my interest in the game; as I said, I'm only partway in. It's likely, I suppose, that the bloom will come off the rose at some point. But whereas by my second session of the original Assassin's Creed I was already starting to think of it as a sort of a disappointing job that I was obligated to undertake, tonight I had to force myself to stop playing AC2. And that's a pretty good place for a game to be.

Footnote 1: May I humbly suggest "Assassin's Creed 3: Ninja's Creed" in Edo-era Tokyo?

We are Dusty Again

2010-06-04 · by psu

Please bear with us. We hit the "upgrade" button on Wordpress. As you know, the upgrade button on Wordpress actually means "break the entire god-damned weblog until we can hand edit all the completely hateful PHP and CSS so that the site almost looks like it did before, but not quite". If you have been paying attention you've noticed that the site has been looking incrementally more ragged over time. This happens every time we hit the upgrade button. This is because fundamentlaly Wordpress sucks.

Eggnog 2.0

2010-06-08 · by peterb

The farm CSA box arrived today, and amongst its bounty was a package of fresh farm eggs. I considered what I might do with really fresh eggs, and decided the best of all possible things I could do was: put booze in them. So I made eggnog.

To my shock, although I've written about eggnog before, I've never written one of my eggnog recipes down. So that, as bbum says, "Google can index my head," here's my eggnog recipe. It's simple, easy, and delicious. It's loosely based on Alton Brown's recipe, but mine is better.

Ingredients:

Equipment:

In the stand mixer, whisk the yolks briskly until they start to turn pale. Slowly add the sugar. When the sugar is fully incorporated, steadily add the milk, cream, and liquor. Grate in fresh nutmeg, about 1/4 of a nutmeg. Remove the bowl from the mixer, wash your whisk, and put a clean bowl in its place (or wash the other one, but I'm lazy.) Whisk the egg whites to soft peaks, and add about a teaspoon or so of sugar. Continue whisking to stiff peaks. Whisk the whites into the liquid mixture, refrigerate, and serve.

Simplicity itself.

Dear Western Digital

2010-06-09 · by psu

What I want to buy from you is a hard drive. I want to buy hard drive from you because you are good at building drives. I do not want to buy software from you because you suck at building software. Here are some things not to do.

  1. Do not waste 500MB on a hidden partition with shitty software on it that I will never run.

  2. Do not make this 500MB hidden partition undeleteable.

  3. Do not write firmware that tries to use the 500MB hidden partition to create a phantom "CD Drive" that is supposed to mount whenever I plug the drive into my computer. Especially do not do this if the fucking fake CD drive device never mounts.

  4. Do not make me download special software to disable your brain dead fake CD drive device firmware bullshit that doesn't actually work.

  5. Do not make me download more software to do nothing more than reset some display text on the front of your drive because you think I want to stare at "VIDEOS 09" whenever I look at the drive.

  6. Do not make said second software download also install some more brain dead backup software that runs as root on my machine. There is no fucking way I will run your backup software. You can't even make a fake CD drive that works. I already have backup software. The only reason I bought your drive was to write data to it from my backup software

At least you made it possible for me to uninstall your dipshit backup software.

Anyway, never buy a Western Digital external hard drive again. Go to Other World Computing instead. Their drives just have bits on them. And some software you can just delete and doesn't otherwise get in your way.

Stream The World Cup

2010-06-12 · by peterb

Recently I wrote about streaming movies on demand. I'm interested in this not because I care overmuch whether content is "streamed" or "downloaded." Rather, what I desire is "deliver the content I want, when I want it, where I want it, with a minimum of effort." Today I had another encounter with The Future™ that I think is worth mentioning.

It happened when I was driving into the city during the early World Cup game today. I sort of wanted to be able to listen to the game. My first instinct was to use the XM radio installed in my car. I haven't kept my XM subscription up, because I generally prefer the music on my iPod or iPhone. But, I thought to myself, perhaps i can activate XM for this month, just for the World Cup, and then cancel when it's over. When I arrived at my destination, I looked into this option.

In order to do this, I went to XM's web site, which was a mistake. What I learned from their web site is that they can't actually tell me how much their service costs, and if I want to buy it I have to type in my credit card and a bunch of numbers identifying my radio, and so on.

As I was looking all this stuff up on my iPhone, a question suddenly popped into my head: "Gee, I wonder if ESPN has an app that does this?" Sure enough, within 30 seconds I had downloaded ESPN's free 2010 World Cup app. 10 seconds after that, I had made an in-app purchase - for about $8 - that gave me access to streaming audio for all 64 World Cup games. No typing in my credit card numbers, no creating an account, no recurring subscription, no email confirmations. One tap to download the app, entering my iTunes password, one tapping "yes" to agree to the in-app purchase, and one tapping "Yes" to confirm the charge. Within 1 minute I was listening to Argentina tussle with Nigeria.

That is how I want my digital transactions to work. If you are selling a similar service, and it's more work for your customer than that, you are doing it wrong.

I Do Fusion 2: The Soup

2010-06-21 · by psu

I've always thought that the Chinese and Jewish cultures have some sort of subconscious bond. I'm not sure why I thought this, since truthfully I didn't grow up around a lot of Jewish people. But there you go. Anyway, this soup is, I think, the natural expression of this bond and it's something that I've been meaning to do for a long time ever since Pete gave me the idea. So, I give you: Hot and Sour Matzoh Ball Soup.

Collect the following ingredients together:

  1. Shitake mushrooms: a handful. Also a handful of dried shitake or black mushrooms.

  2. Dried "wood ear" mushrooms: a handful. Soak these in water for a few hours before you start making the soup.

  3. Chicken stock. 2 to 4 cups. Or more even.

  4. 1 or 2 scallions. Chopped. Mostly the green part.

  5. 1 large onion or two small ones.

  6. A box of matzoh meal (Manischewitz is best, thanks Mr. Coblenz).

  7. Bacon (optional).

  8. Chinese black vinegar. Rice wine vinegar. Soy sauce.

  9. 2 blocks of good fresh soft style tofu. In Pittsburgh this means going to Lotus on a Saturday and getting the stuff they make fresh in the store. None of the shitty boxed tofu in Whole Foods or whatever your favorite vegan health food store has is actually any good. Don't fool yourself.

  10. White pepper for the heat.

OK. First, follow the directions on the matzoh meal box for making matzoh balls. They all have a recipe on them. Put the mixture in the fridge and let it sit for half an hour. Put a large pot of water on the stove and set it to boiling, then turn it to a simmer.

While you wait for all that, chop the onion into a fine dice. Then slice the mushrooms. If you are using the bacon, chop it up and fry it in a cast iron pan until it is brown and crispy. Then save the fat.

Now take the matzoh ball stuff out of the fridge. With two soup spoons, form small balls and drop them in the hot water. Cook the matzoh balls in the water for 45 minutes to an hour, or until they are nice and soft.

Now make the hot and sour soup. Saute the onions in olive oil (or the bacon fat, if you have it). Season the salt and pepper. Let them cook for five to ten minutes until they get nice and soft. Add the mushrooms and mix it around. Now add the chicken stock and some water until it feels like you have enough liquid. You want enough soup around the mushrooms so that things feel "right", and you need a bit extra to accommodate the matzoh balls later. Add the tofu and mix it in. Finally, if you want, stir in a beaten egg to get that eggy tendril effect.

Now season the soup. Start with a about a teaspoon or two of soy and the same amount of vinegar. Then add soy until the soup is the right color and the right level of salty. If you go overboard, dilute with a bit of water. Then add vinegar until it is sour enough. Finally, add white pepper until you get some nice heat. Thicken the soup with a bit corn starch mixed with water.

When it's all done serve like this: put 2 matzoh balls in a big soup bowl. Then lade the soup over them. Then put some of the scallion on top. Finally, add bacon if you want. It should look like this:

psu_20100530-02425

Note the color of the soup. Note the bacon. Enjoy.

Cilantro Syrup (and Associated Margarita)

2010-06-29 · by peterb

I made syrup out of my cilantro because I hate Patron Citronge.

This takes a little explaining, I guess. I don't really hate Patron Citronge. It seems fine for what it is. But the first, second, and third requirements I have for my orange liqueurs is that they make a good margarita. And, to my taste, Patron Citronge doesn't do it. I wandered away from my faithful Cointreau just out of an urge to experiment, and, as sometimes happens, it didn't pan out.

My complaints about the Citronge center around the orange taste (too faint) and the alcohol base taste (too strong). When I add Cointreau to a margarita, it enhances it by adding a new flavor. The Citronge just seemed to distract and attenuate the tequila instead.

Thinking of my visits to Tommy's in San Francisco, I recalled that he doesn't use any orange liqueur at all, but rather uses an agave syrup of his own formulation - the better to preserve the essence of the tequila. Could I do something similar?

Well, I did have all of this cilantro in my front yard. And I knew from experience that muddling a stalk or two of that in my margarita could give it an interesting element (albeit one that would probably make Tommy's Julio Bermejo wince). I decided to try to leverage this by making cilantro-flavored syrup.

It works. It works really well.

Making the Syrup

On your stove, combine 1.5 cups of white granulated sugar with 1 cup of water. Bring to a boil, stirring. Remove from the heat. When the boil settles away, add a large handful of nicely bruised cilantro. Stir a bit, and let sit as it cools. Strain into a jar or squeeze bottle when cool enough.

Normally, you'd infuse all the way through the boil - in fact, I'm doing that as we speak, with a bunch of bay leaves - but cilantro is so delicate that I decided to avoid it. Even going in after the boil, the taste is not strictly the aromatic breathless taste one associates with cilantro, but also has a stronger vegetal note (and an interesting light green color). It's quite pleasant.

The Margarita

The ratio here is 2 parts Tequila to 1 part lime juice and just a bit of Citronge, then add syrup to sweeten as necessary (just under 1 part did it for me). I probably didn't use more than a teaspoon or two of Citronge, just enough to give the drink a light orange cast. (The important thing here is to not let the Citronge screw up your good tequila. If, like me, you enjoy the orange notes in a margarita, It might be interesting to substitute orange bitters instead. I haven't tried that yet, but will comment here when I do.)

For bonus points, muddle some fresh cilantro in the syrup, then add your liquors and ice, and shake. Enjoy a nonstandard, but very delicious, margarita.

As always, make sure you use 100% de agave tequila.

Bike Shopping

2010-06-30 · by psu

I bought a bike last month. It's the first one I've bought in a long time. I bought my current blue road bike about 17 years ago when I moved back to Pittsburgh. What happened that day was that I accidentally bought the perfect bike. Having ridden it for so long, I have come to realize that without even trying, I managed to get a bike that fits perfectly, handles just the way I want, and in general is just "right." Every once in a while I would try to convince myself to drop money on a new bike, but it would never work out because I'd just take the blue one out and it would be perfect again. What's a hobbyist shopper to do?

This year I finally decided that the old bike was starting to get a bit creaky. It started making noises that I didn't like. And, I got tired of the skinny tires. Aside from my normal shopping tendencies, the skinny tires were only reason that I did spend any time looking at other bikes. I wanted to find one just like nice blue one, except with a frame that would take wider tires. I never managed to get tires wider than about 25mm onto the blue bike. When I tried, they would rub on the frame. I kid you not.

Over the years, I built a fixed view of the bicycle market in my mind. It's not important exactly how this market looked. The important thing was that I was always convinced that the bike I wanted was not in it. You could get road bike frames that took wide tires, but that always meant using cantilever brakes. And I hate cantilever brakes. It's just a thing. Dual pivot side pull brakes are the best bicycle brakes ever made. And they are what should be on a road bike.

For the longest time, not many companies made such a bike. This meant that finding the bike that I wanted always involved expensive boutique brands that catered to my particular specialized whims. This was good because it made me feel special and superior, which is important in all of the major dork hobbies. The truth is that while this was probably true up until a few years ago, I learned a funny thing while shopping for my new bike this year. I learned that I was wrong.

The bike that I ended up getting is from a brand called Surly, which I have talked about here before. I was ready to go to my local bike shop and ask them to buy me a Surly frame and allow my to put some custom parts on it. This particular frame is relatively inexpensive, takes the fatter tires that I want, and looks like I think a bike should look. Anyway, when I went to a couple of local stores, I learned three interesting things in this exercise.

  1. Surly had been bought by a large distribution company called QBP, or Quality Bike Parts. When I first ran across Surly, they made what seemed to me to be fairly niche bicycle products. Odd shaped bikes for people who wanted odd shaped bikes. Now it turns out that they have been bought by the largest distributor of bicycles in the country.

  2. QBP, in fact, is so large that every single shop in my area is basically just a dealer for QBP. On the surface they look like they still deal in "Trek" or "Specialized" or "Surly", but in fact it all comes from QBP. Every single store I went to had a computer terminal that was permanently logged in to the QBP web site.

  3. It is apparently economically impossible to get a local store to build you a custom bike. It must be that the margins on selling the frame and parts at retail are so low that you don't make back the cost of actually putting together the parts list and building the bike. Every store that I talked to would rather sell me a bike they had on the floor than build me something.

My status as a consumer of unusually configured bicycle equipment also took a final deadly blow. While in QBP store #2, I described the bike I wanted, sure that they would not have anything close. Instead, the manager walked over to the wall of carbon fiber bikes that they sell to the racer wannabes and pulled out exactly what I asked for. It's a road bike made by Jamis that is simply a full-out road bike designed to be able to take slightly wider tires than average. It's even made out of carbon fiber. I had been instantly mainstreamed. I was flabbergasted. I even almost bought it. I think it actually might have fit a bit better than the Surly. But carbon is not for me.

In the end, I ordered a complete Surly Pacer from the store I've gone to for years. They got it in, built it up for me and I rode it away. My first long ride on the bike indicates that the bike is a bit small. My blue bike must have been slightly larger than its paper measurements. All these years I've been on a 56 in stead of a 54. The drivetrain is also not as smooth, reflecting that fact that the bottom of the line Shimano parts in 2010 are worse than the bottom of the line Shimano parts from 1998. These are all minor issues. I can have some store switch them out for 105. However, I am happy with the ride of the wider tires. They smooth out the marginal Pittsburgh pavement to a degree that makes my slightly more comfortable, and this is nice. This bike will serve perfectly well. After I get used to the size I'm sure it will slot into my brain as the "perfect" bike.

Still, I think the blue bike is still more perfect.

Postscript

My other badge membership in the official club of retro was my Brooks leather saddle. These seats are purported to have various mythical qualities. I just like their shape, but I hate how one ride in the rain ruins them. Anyway, apparently these have also moved out of the basement and into the minds of the masses of bicycle consumers. I saw two at my local store the other day. I guess I'll have to get another one.

Field of Glory - Now on Mac OS X

2010-07-02 · by peterb

File under "Good news": Slitherine's awesome light wargame of ancients combat, Field of Glory, is now available on Mac OS X!

I reviewed the game and its first expansion, Rise of Rome earlier this year. This is a nearly perfect port, so all of the kudos and criticisms you'll find in those earlier reviews still apply. But there are a few updates since my earlier reviews that are worth mentioning.

First, the game itself seems to have subsumed the expansions. This is a bit of an improvement. So, instead of having to download the expansions, the content for them is already in the app, and you just purchase a serial number for the expansion you want and add it to unlock it. I know this sort of scheme drives some people crazy, but I actually found it refreshingly honest (and it neatly sidesteps all the complexity of installing multi-stage expansions, which often suffer when being ported from Windows).

Second, one of the things I thought was a bit disappointing about the game when it was originally released was that it shipped with only 25 scenarios. No longer; Slitherine has leveraged its user community and included a very large number of player-designed scenarios. Most of the scenarios Slitherine has tapped are quite good; I think some of them are better than the included scenarios. Max Attenborough's "Caesar's Landing," portraying the initial stage of Julius Caesar's conquest of Britain in 55 BC, was wonderfully unbalanced, and gave more of a sense of "You Are There" than many of the more 'balanced' "OK, your two armies have lined up on a featureless plain" scenarios one can find.

Nitpicks: the Historical Game battle selection screen is too primitive. There's no way to sort (or filter) the battles in the list. User-created scenarios have no 'complexity' rating. I still find it completely impossible to tell exactly which way most of my troops are facing, which is rather a critical issue for a game which restricts where you can charge based on facing. The music is still infuriating and repetitive (but, you can turn it off). There's no way to save a replay of a game or even statistics.

And yet, despite these flaws, the game is still a diamond in the rough. Even the longest games against the AI are fast-paced while still allowing for thought and strategy. Most battles never play out the same way twice. And the ability to play a turn at a time across the internet is usable and enjoyable. Yet I am out of practice in playing turn-based games on my computer; being able to play games like Uniwar on my "with me all the time" device, the iPhone, has sort of made the PC seem like a lumbering beast in comparison. If Slitherine could figure out a way to release this game for the iPad, they'd make a mint.

Field of Glory, by Slitherine, for Windows and Mac OS X. £24.99, or $US 39.99.

Disclosure statement: Slitherine graciously provided Tea Leaves with a review copy of this game.

New drink: Spirited Away

2010-07-07 · by peterb

Here's an original recipe for a great drink. I call it the "Spirited Away."

My goal was to make something akin to a White Russian, but based on a green tea flavor instead of coffee. It's better than I could have hoped for.

First, mix a teaspoon of matcha tea powder with a couple of tablespoons of warm water. Be sure to use the most expensive matcha you can find, so as to really scandalize people who respect and honor tea. To that, add about a teaspoon (or more, if you've a sweet tooth) of simple syrup. Add 2 ounces of a rice or barley-based shochu liquor (for my test run I used Gyokuro green tea shochu, but any neutral-ish shochu will do.) If you don't have shochu, vodka will serve. Add about 3/4 ounce of cream - I used half and half. Combine with ice, shake vigorously, and strain to a cocktail glass. It should be a phosphorescent green, and absolutely delicious.

One side effect of using shochu instead of vodka - and part of the explanation for the name - is that it will have less alcohol than a White Russian. This is important, because you will be drinking more of them.

The Haunting of Alan Wake

2010-07-12 · by peterb

I just finished paying the horror-action game Alan Wake.

Before I complain about the game, let that sink in for a minute: I finished the game. I hardly ever finish games. Games that irritate me usually go on the shelf and never come off. But I finished Alan Wake. So despite what follows, keep in mind that the game was good enough for me to play to completion. Which doesn't happen that often, lately.

Alan Wake is a plot-driven, self-aware, mannered game that aspires to being a meditation on the nature of creativity and authorship. The game's main technique for doing this is to put you in the role of a self-absorbed douchebag which, given the topic, is somehow appropriate.

The plot, in brief, is as follows. Stephen King, played by Alan Wake, is suffering from a creative drought. He goes on vacation with his wife, Alice, to the northwest logging town of Twin PeaksBright Falls, where he meets a number of quirky, unusual characters, including the loglamp lady, Agent CooperValentine, and has many cups of damn fine coffee. Shortly after arriving in town, his wife is kidnapped and Alan wakes up, a week later, in a car wreck. As he stumbles towards the nearest building he can see, he is attacked by men who have somehow been absorbed by evil shadows.

When enemies appear in Alan Wake you fight them, usually, by shining a flashlight at them. After you have painted them with enough light, the shadow-creatures become mere men, and then you can shoot them to death with your gun. There are some interesting ethical questions here that could have been explored, but the game doesn't touch them with a 20-foot pole. In addition to the action and fighting, there are various 'collecting' mechanics in the game. The most interesting of these is that you sometimes find "manuscript pages" which appear to be something that your character wrote in his week-long blackout. These elaborate on the plot and sometimes foreshadow future events.

The game presents itself in 6 'episodes', which should provide a clever way of letting the player know how far along they are. But it doesn't. This brings me to my first major criticism of the game: the pacing is uneven. The episodes vary widely in playlength. I polished off the first in about an hour, taking my time and exploring every nook and cranny and wandering down every side trail to find manuscript pages. The second took me about 90 minutes, played similarly. The third episode - where I seriously considered quitting the game - took me well over three hours, and that was spent running headlong ignoring all unnecessary paths. Episodes four and five were probably also about 90 minutes, and episode six took me about an hour.

Reducing this to "minutes to completion" isn't the whole story, though. The problem isn't that Episode 3 was long. it was that it was long and it was boring. Had there been some compelling narrative pulling it along, or even had the set pieces been interesting, I might have forgiven this. As it was, it simply felt like I was being punished for playing the game.

This failure of pacing is mirrored on a micro-level. Survival horror games as a genre are fond of throwing endless numbers of enemies at you. When playing, say, Silent Hill you quickly learn that the order of the day is "Don't fight the zombies unless you have no other choice," since first, you will run out of ammo and second, like Frito-Lay, they'll just make more. In Alan Wake, there are three types of fighting you have to do several times per stage:

The problem, as you may have guessed, is that I generally found it impossible to distinguish between the "must run" and "must fight" combats until it was way too late. By episode 5 I started picking up on some audio and visual cues that, even now, seem way too subtle to me. This one aspect of the game - leading, as it did, to many reloads and having to replay segments repeatedly - frustrated me more than any other. Having to cope with these frustrations even changed the way I played the game for the worse: by chapter 4, I stopped wandering down any sidepaths at all, lest I find myself in a "must run" situation that would result in death and a reload. Did I miss manuscript pages because of this, and therefore plot? Almost certainly.

This problem bothers me because when not worrying about whether I had to run or not I was enjoying the game. The mood of mixed terror and anger was exciting and the art direction was great. The music — particularly the selections played on the radio — was fantastic.

I even liked the plot. I did not find it arresting, or emotionally gripping, but it was interesting, in a dissociated, Twin Peaks sort of way. I do think that Remedy really sold themselves down the river by establishing Wake as a jerk so early on in the plot. Part of the true horror of Silent Hill 2, for me, was discovering exactly how damaged and unreliable its narrator was. It got to the point where by the end of Silent Hill 2 I was happy to be fighting zombies, because fighting zombies was less scary than contemplating what the character I was playing might have done. Alan Wake tells an interesting story. But that story is about a dark place somewhere else, whereas a truly great horror game is about a dark place inside. Alan Wake, the character, is never an "I". He is always a "he".

So where does this leave us? We have a game with some great game mechanics. Decent (though not transcendent) writing. One of the best soundtracks for any game in recent memory. But for me, at least it does not connect emotionally, and in places the pacing fails completely.

I'm happy to have bought and played Alan Wake, which is more than I could say about other, more hyped yet much worse games. But I'm not haunted by it. And I want to be haunted by it. Instead, I am haunted by the game that it could have been.

Mid-Life Crisis

2010-07-28 · by psu

I had an epiphany this weekend that my mid-life crisis is going to be pretty boring. I realized this while I was browsing classified ads for telescopes over at Astromart. What's that? Why would I be thinking about a mid-life crisis while looking at telescopes? Why was I looking at telescopes at all? Well, that's a long story.

Before I became a computer dork in high school, one of my first dorky loves was astronomy. My parents had bought me a now classic Edmund "Astroscan" 4 inch Newtonian telescope. This was a simple enough machine to use. The scope was a short tube with a small red bowling ball attached to the bottom where the mirror sat. You pointed the thing at the sky by rolling it around on its red ball-shaped base. Then light from the stars went into the tube, reflected off a mirror at the bottom and then a smaller mirror at the top. You can then look through an eyepiece at the top of the telescope.

I loved the little red ball, and I devoured all of the literature available to me at the time, mostly in the form of the classic Astronomy and Sky and Telescope magazines. I remember the awesome back cover ads with the orange Celestrons. I remember the first writeup of the now iconic Dobsonian telescope in S&T. I even wrote a letter to John Dobson himself, who was gracious enough to reply to an enthusiastic 14 year old. I then had an extended period of time in junior high when I considered building my own larger telescope. I went so far as to scam a subscription to a magazine about the subject: Telescope Making, published by the same people that put out Astronomy. This project never materialized. Instead I started to get interested in computing machines, initially motivated by the notion of building a piece of software to generate astronomical charts, and maybe even control a telescope. I soon realized that my real talents did not lie in building physical machines, but rather abstract machines made out of patterns of electricity.

I came back to all this a few weeks ago when I found out that some publishing company had made the entire run of Telescope Making magazine available for download on the Internet. You can find it in google. One thing led to another and I was soon buried by a wave of nostalgia. I had kept a cursory eye on astronomical matters over the years by buying the odd issue of S&T but I had never dug deeply into it. But these days the Internet lets you dig into anything as deeply as you want with just a few clicks of the mouse and visits to Google.

The best of the sites I found is clearly Cloudy Nights which contains all manner of discussions of interest to the astro-dork. From there, you can then visit Uncle Rod who seems to have used every telescope made between now and around fifty years ago. And of course there is Astromart.

A lot has happened in amateur astronomy since I stopped paying attention. Meade and Celestron are still the big players, but both almost went out of business. Meade is now fighting its way back. Celestron is owned by the Chinese. The Chinese appear to own most of the rest of the optical industry as well. This has had the effect of making many things, like exotic refractor telescopes, into reasonable affordable commodity items.

In addition, computers are everywhere. They control the telescopes. They hold larger star charts than ever could have been printed on paper. They capture photographs of celestial objects more easily than the guys who used to soak Tech Pan film in hydrogen gas could have imagined. In particular, the use of digital video equipment, from fancy custom cameras to simple webcams, in capturing astronomical images is something that I never could have imagined possible. All in all while the 14 year old me would have expected a lot of this to have happened, he would still have had reason to be amazed.

Studying all of this material over the last few weeks brought me to a few interesting conclusions.

First, the astronomy hobby forums are all filled with older guys like me who are still stuck on telescopes just like I was when I was 14. This is apparently true of every hobby driven Internet forum in the entire universe. Just replace the telescopes with some other object of affection.

Second, the obvious path for my mid-life crisis would be to build a permanent and completely automated observatory in my back yard. Fundamentally a mid-life crisis is about rediscovering the unfulfilled dreams of your 14 year old self. While most normal 14 year olds dream of cars and well endowed women, I'm pretty sure that the 14 year old me could not have imagined anything cooler than a completely automated, computer controlled observatory in my back yard. That's just how I would have rolled. I mean, just imagine it. Running the telescope and capturing awesome digital images all from the comfort of my bedroom inside the house.

Third, while computers have had a bigger impact on amateur telescopes than I could have imagined back in 1977, the 2010 me can't fathom how slowly the amateur astronomy industry moves. The basic user interface for controlling a computerized telescope was first made practical and usable by Meade in the mid 90s. And it basically has not changed since. You put a small computer inside a plastic hand set with a few dozen keys on it and 2 lines of LED text. And that's what you use to point the telescope.

Most computerized telescopes still use RS-232 ports for external connectivity. So if you want to control the scope with your laptop you need to find someone to build you an exotic one-off cable. Worse, it never occured to anyone until just last year that wireless control might be a cool idea. The SkyFi is particularly sweet because they also make an iPhone application to talk to their device, so you can control your scope with your cell phone. Still, how does it take more than 20 years to go from a clunky wired handset to a wireless remote? Note, if you study the SkyFi page that I just linked to above, you will note with great irony that it only works with telescopes that have an RS-232 port.

The result of all of this is that my remote controlled automatic backyard observatory would still take a lot of legwork to put together. Although most of the required pieces are in place.

So, for now, my real mid-life crisis will be delayed while the world waits for a few more critical pieces of infrastructure. Surely a video-based camera system with a wifi chip in it can't be far away. Meanwhile, I can enjoy myself like I always do. Looking at the Internet and thinking about how much fun it would be to have some of this equipment, while avoiding the actual task of going outside in the cold and cursing the Pittsburgh weather. I would do this secure in the knowledge that if I ever did actually buy a telescope, Pete would just mock me for having done so when Pittsburgh is known to be cloudy on 90% of the nights ... unless I buy his.

All Too Soon, Back in the Breach

2010-07-29 · by psu

My HDTV is dead. Actually, it's more half-dead. Most of the time when you turn it on, it flashes its picture for about a second, and then gives up. Instead of 50 inches of HD splendor, you get a feeble blinking red light. Once in a while it turns on for good, and it works fine for as long as you need it to. Since the TV is out of warrantee it will cost about 25% as much as a new TV just for the guy to show up and start to see what's wrong with it. To actually fix it would probably cost 40-50% as much as a new TV and more importantly, would take about 4 times as long as just buying a new TV. The problem, of course, is that you have to shop for a new TV. You only have to do this for about 15 minutes to again realize why television has completely failed as a consumer electronics product.

As an illustrative example, let's mosey on over to the Panasonic web site. If you look at their page of available flat screen TV sets you will notice what I am talking about. On this page there are no less than fifteen separate lines of televisions. The model numbers mostly differ only in one or two alphanumeric characters. The only way you can figure out how the televisions differ from one another is to click through at least 4 pages of information in each of the different areas and carefully read dozens of different lines of meaningless specifications. Also, what does Viera mean? Also, why do I want a god damned Internet connection in my television? Didn't Microsoft try that to great failure in the 90s?

Just about every major manufacturer of television equipment has a web site just like the one at Panasonic. Sony has 5 lines of LCD TVs: LX, HX, BX, NX, and EX. As with the Panasonic, the reasons for the differentiation are hard to fathom from the information on the web site.

For some reason, the TV people think that we want to buy a TV the way we might buy a Dell computer. Here is the page you get when you are after a Dell laptop: it looks very similar.

What's even worse is that if you go a major retailer of television equipment, the organization is no better. You end up with pages and pages of lists of TVs, all of which look essentially identical. Sometimes, they even are identical but have different model numbers. Sometimes, they are almost identical, but actually you are looking at last year's model on closeout, but you can't tell what changed from last year to this year. In this environment it is basically impossible to compare the different sets in any rational way. It's almost as if the goal of both the manufacturer and the retailer is to completely obfuscate what is actually available, so the consumer will just throw up his hands and buy whatever is most expensive.

I think that perhaps these people should consider that people might want more straightforward choices. That they might do more business if there were fewer product categories with clear differentiation. That consumers might be more willing to part with their hard-earned cash if it was clear what it was that cash was buying.

I have a modest example. Say you want a new iMac. You go to this web page. Then you pick which machine you want based on screen size, memory and disk. Very simple. Very straightforward. Even better, the page that describes the computers presents the relevant information in a straightfoward and easy to digest fashion. The web address is even easy to remember, you only have to know that you are after an Apple iMac.

Everything in life should be that easy to buy. I'm going to go see if my Sony will turn on again now that I've given it some time to think.

But, I do have to say one last thing to the TV people: nobody gives a shit about 3-d TV. Just give up now please.

How to Buy a TV 2

2010-08-12 · by psu

The replacement TV came today. I now feel that I must quickly update a few articles that appeared a few years ago on our humble web site. In this one I surveyed various TV technologies. In this one I gave pithy advice how to to pick a TV. Things are different now. Now all you need to do is (1) pick a size and (2) buy (generally) the cheapest LCD TV that is of that size from a brand you like. Don't worry about all those other TV technologies. They are either already dead or will be dead in 3 years. Also, people will try and convince you that the more expensive stuff offers more value. Unless you know this in your heart to be true, don't believe it. It's all lies. Make your life simple. Follow the simple list of instructions above. In particular, for god's sake, don't buy a 3-d TV. Hopefully if we ignore them they will just go away.

Arsenal Cider House

2010-08-13 · by peterb

I finally visited the Arsenal Cider House, and I'm thrilled that such a quirky new local winemaker is in Pittsburgh. Two thumbs up. I recommend their dryer wines and ciders, but everything is very drinky.

I had my phone, so I threw together a quick interview:

Saluté!

The Big Lie, Solved

2010-08-16 · by psu

Amateur astronomy has always suffered with one central delusion. It's always been the case that in order to maintain a healthy enthusiasm for the hobby, you have to be able to lie to yourself under rather difficult circumstances. Let me set the scene.

It's a cold fall night and you are lucky enough to live, or at least visit, somewhere that is relatively free of the worldwide dome of light pollution. Andromeda is high in the sky, so you decide to look for the famous Andromeda galaxy (M31) in your telescope. You track it around the sky, pointing the scope here and there until you are pretty sure you have it locked in. In your mind's eye, you see this:

Andromeda, M31, a Star among the stars rushing toward us

Excited, you slowly peer into the eyepiece, and what do you see? You see a white splotch against a dark gray background. With lots of stars around it. Where are the clouds of dust? Where are the white puffy spirals? Where is the color? They certainly are not in your field of view. Those fantastic vistas are the result of hours of work and painstaking long exposure photography. They can be constructed because image capture devices (most recently, CCDs) can accumulate visual information over time, and are not handicapped by the human eye's need to be real time.

You, the visual observer are denied this fantastic splendor. Instead, it must remain locked up in your imagination. Any satisfaction that you gain from this experience does come not from the actual visual spectacle. Rather, it comes from the idea that what you are looking at is a magnificent object represented by photons that have travelled hundreds or thousands of years to reach your eyeball. This, is the big lie behind amateur astronomy.

Don't get me wrong, I don't mean to disparage the activities of the backyard astronomer. I have spent more than my share of time participating in this particular act of self delusion. I have spent hours hunting down the tiniest of fuzzballs (much smaller and dimmer than M31) in the dead of winter and at the time I loved it. If I had the time and the sky to do it tonight, I'd probably love it just as much.

But, what I have discovered recently is a class of devices that allows us to do away with this big lie. Finally, armed with a reasonable telescope and a not unreasonable amount of time, you can actually see all those faint fuzzies for what they really are.

These devices find their inspiration from the most unlikely of places: the webcam. Instead of being engineered to take video clips of teenagers sitting at their desk playing WoW, the various astronomical video cameras are instead built to take relatively short time exposures of objects in the sky and display them to you in near realtime. The most impressive of these cameras is built by an interesting Canadian character named Rock Mallin who lives in Ottawa. Here is the sort of thing you can do with a Mallincam and about a 20 second exposure under dark skies:

While this is a low res screen grab of the Trifid nebula (M20), the actual picture is about as good as you might have gotten by exposing film for hours 20 years ago. Here's another example, this time the famous spiral galaxy M51:

This object is famous for the dust lanes and star clouds and huge spiral arms which for the most part are only visible in huge telescopes or in long exposure images. But now, with this super sensitive CCD video camera, you can get images like this in 20 seconds.

Another wrinkle in this piece of equipment is that it is equally impressive under light pollution. If you don't believe me, go to and check out the video archives of various observing sessions that Mallin has recorded from his home under the light dome of Ottawa. They are linked off of the Mallincam web site.

It's pretty clear to me that the combination of modern computerized mounts and these cameras will completely change the face of amateur observation, especially from the cities and the suburbs. What this combination hardware has the potential to let you do is "see" these objects without needing to be able to see them. The telescope (or your laptop) knows where the object is in the sky, and the camera can help to compensate for the fact that the sky glow makes the object too dim for you to actually see on your own. Of course things will always be more impressive under dark skies and with large telescopes. And, one can't discount the the nostalgic romanticism of actually seeing the object with your own eyes. But the reality of the world is that un-aided visual observation is simply not practical for a huge percentage of the astro-dork population in the modern world, and I can't imagine a better tool than one of these nifty cameras for maximizing one's enjoyment of time spent in the dark under the stars.

Notes on the Pictures

For the non-astronomical dorks out there, the M-numbers that I keep spouting refer to the Messier catalog of objects that were collected by the French astronomer Charles Messier in the 18th century. There are around 100 of these objects, made up of nebulae, stat clusters and galaxies.

I stole the M31 photo off of some guy's flickr page.

The screen grabs I took were from a video broadcast on the Night Skies Network web site. Mr. Mallin himself had set up his telescope, the camera, video capture software and a small laptop and was transmitting everything the telescope captured to a flash video stream. Truly that's living in the future.

I have only recently discovered this remarkable equipment, but I am late to this party. You should go to Uncle Rod's web site where has covered this material better than I ever will. He also has the advantage of having actually used the equipment, rather than, for now, only daydreamed about it.

Anyway, time to find a telescope. Maybe in a year or so when I after I build up the strength to withstand the mocking.

Monday Food Shorts

2010-08-23 · by psu

For a Monday evening, a few short thoughts on food, because I have not bothered you with this in a while.

Dinner in 20 minutes redux: Ceviche

Buy some of that sushi tuna from the Penn Avenue Fish store. Yes I know it's not sustainable or whatever. Do it once a year. You need four ounces.

Dice the tuna into small cubes. Put in a bowl. Add olive oil, salt, pepper, juice from 1/2 a lemon and a dash of soy sauce. Further add about a teaspoon or two of chooped cilantro. Stick the bowl in the fridge for 20 minutes. Serve it however you like.

I Do Fusion, Part 3: Kielbasa Fried Rice

This is traditional in the well known Polish communities in Northern China. OK, just kidding. Do fried rice like I wrote it down here a while back, but leave out the ground pork. Instead, substitute 1/2 pound of kielbasa, cut up into small pieces. If you really want to go ghetto, use hot dogs. For a more "authentic" Chinese experience, use the sweet smoked sausage from the Chinese store.

Coffee Heaven

Recently the guys at 21st Street coffee have been doing hand drip coffees. I generally get espresso drinks there, but I decided to try something different the other morning. This is the best non-espresso coffee drink I have had in a commercial coffee house ever. Absolutely sublime. Go get one. Drink it black, because milk would just make it worse.

Avenue B Picoreview

Went to Avenue B in Shadyside. Nothing they do is bad. But nothing they do is actually better than somewhere else where it's easier to park. This is a petty reason not to go back. But there it is.

The Case of The Disappearing BBQ

There was a guy in the strip the last few week selling brisket and pulled pork sandwiches out of a cart. He was on 21st street and Penn, around the corner from Reyna's. He has disappeared. If anyone knows where he went, could you tell me please? That was the only good pulled pork I've ever had in Pittsburgh.

Sherlock for iPhone

2010-08-24 · by peterb

I have written many articles about my love, passion, enjoyment, fascination, and overall obsession with the games of Everett Kaser. Everett, who has the worst web site in the world, writes puzzle games. Many of these games are based on boolean algebra, which is enough to make them warm the cockles of any software developer's heart.

A while ago I sent Mr. Kaser mail expressing my wish to see Sherlock, or his other fine puzzle games, on the iPhone or iPad. Superlatives may have been used. It is possible, although not certain, that I used the phrase "leaving money on the table". Rumor has it that I implied that if he did not develop for this platform, he was as mad as a hatter that had mated with a March Hare.

This week I was pleased to discover that Sherlock, the Game of Logic has been released for the iPhone. The price: free, which gets you the first 10 puzzles in each size. The other 50,000 puzzles per size can be purchased in-app for a mere $2.99. Since I wrote one e-mail to Everett suggesting that he port his game to the platform, I am happy to take full credit for all the hard work behind it. You're welcome. It's not easy being the "idea man," but one does what one can.

The game is an iPhone game, but runs fairly well on the iPad. The UI is primitive — we are, after all, talking about a game that is essentially a direct port of an ancient DOS game — but has a few nice touches. The nicest is that he has implemented a clever "zoom" when working with a given group of possibilities. The single biggest downside of the game is that there is no on-screen text explaining what each of the clues mean. Not a problem to someone like me, who has been playing the game for (oh, God) 20 years, but its probably a bit offputting to new players, who will have to keep diving into the text-heavy help screen. Dismissing versus promoting a possibility presents an interesting UI conundrum. The mechanism Kaser has chosen is that tapping a possibility dismisses it, and tapping and holding it promotes it (or rather, declares that you think it is the correct answer for a given position in the matrix). That's not terribly discoverable, but the only other way you could do it, I'd think, would be to somehow drag possibilities to "select" and "reject" zones. It works, but I do inevitably get confused at least once per game and do the opposite of what I meant to.

Sherlock is not for everyone. I suspect that the fairly primitive graphics and some of the slapdash UI may turn some people off. But if you can see past that, what you have in your hand is one of the best simple puzzle games of the PC era. On your phone. For free.

I don't give stars or numeric ratings on Tea Leaves. But if you have an iPhone or iPad, you should go download Sherlock right now. You owe it to your little gray cells.

Puzzle Bots

2010-09-04 · by peterb

Small is beautiful.

This is especially true in videogames, where small games carry virtue that larger games don't. Small games run on just about all hardware, and don't require the latest overpriced monster videocard with unreliable drivers. Small games can be finished by people who work for a living. Small games have to have fun core mechanics, and thus offer more fun-per-minute. Small games have less filler and busywork. Small games are often less expensive. I got the small game religion a few years ago, and I haven't looked back.

Today's entry in the wonderful world of small games is Puzzle Bots, by Nanobots designer Erin Robinson, and published by Wasjet Eye Games. Puzzle Bots is a clever little Saturday-morning cartoon of a game that reenvisions some ideas from Lemmings or, if you want to get all esoteric about it, from Infocom's text adventure Suspended.

The Puzzle Bots world looks hand-animated; someone happened upon me playing the game during a cut-scene and asked me, quite seriously, "Hey, is this a Simpsons game?" Each level in Puzzle Bots is an environmental puzzle where you must use tiny robots to manipulate the environment to accomplish some task. Each robot can do only one or two specific things. For example, the robot named Hero can pick items up and use them with each other. Ultrabot can only push things, Kelvin can only set things on fire, and so on. Most of the game, therefore, centers around using one robot to transform the environment in such a way that another robot can do something to it.

The levels themselves are tightly designed — during my play-through I never managed to get into an unwinnable state — amusing, and best of all short. I'd estimate that each level took me about 10 to 15 minutes, tops, to finish. You can save at any time.

An aside here: here's an example of how the iPhone and iPad have transformed how I look at games. When I find that a game makes me explicitly save and load state I'm sort of surprised now. It's as if I had walked into the dairy section of the supermarket and was confronted by a butter churn and a cow. Puzzle Bots seems to me like the sort of game that would work perfectly on the touch platform; let's hope that Robinson and the game's publisher decide they like the idea as much as I do.

The puzzles themselves, for most of the game are appropriate, perhaps erring just a tad on the side of too easy. For most of the game Puzzle Bots manages to convince you that you are very, very clever. Which is sort of the main victory point a puzzle game is trying to assault. There is one puzzle at the very end of the game that was not "hard" per se but was, by my lights, uncommunicated. I solved it through brute force, but missed a set of clues along the way that presumably explained what I was doing. Every other puzzle in the game seemed both environmentally appropriate and correctly gated and, where appropriate, hinted at.

The cut-scenes in the game are written to entertain and, apart from maybe a few moments of trying too hard, mostly succeed. The competent and pleasant voice-over work helps out here quite a bit. No, the game's plot is not quite Dostoevsky, but it provides motivation while also giving you the occasional smile, if never quite an actually belly laugh.

Puzzle Bots, by Erin Robinson and Wadjet Eye Games, for Microsoft Windows. There is a free demo available for download, or you can buy the game for a paltry $10 American dollars. Through September 6, you can buy the game for just $4.99 by using the discount code "PUZZLEPAX" at checkout. If you play Windows games, you've really got no excuse for not trying Puzzle Bots

Disclosure: Wadget Eye Games graciously provided Tea Leaves with a review copy of Puzzle Bots. But, really, had they not done so I'm pretty sure we could have found the $5 somewhere.

My Hero

2010-09-07 · by psu

The "my hero for writing something smart online" award for today goes to the noted photographer and printer Ctein, for this gem at the Online Photographer:

Most photographers are lousy printers. Most always were. The difference is that in the old days you had to master a substantial skill set in craft before you could demonstrate how lousy you really were. Now anyone can simply buy a technologically superior printer for $500-$1000 and immediately demonstrate their lack of competence.

Read this post (which, IMHO, is a bit of rationalization in an attempt to justify a personal preference, but that's OK). Here is a bigger link for you to click on, even though I know this sort of thing is bad "style".. Scan the comments for what Ctein said. As usual, if the post takes itself too seriously, the comments are an order of magnitude worse. Especially mine.

Football! Football! Football!

2010-09-09 · by psu

Just a friendly reminder that the best of the four major sports in America starts up tonight. While it's completely wrong for the NFL to start on a Thursday (boo!), it's a great thing that we can finally start ignoring all the other sports until February. Bill Simmons has even started doing his "guess the lines" game with his "Cousin" Sal. Life is good.

Dirty Dozen

2010-09-12 · by psu

A new store in the Dozen chain of cupcake bakeries opened near our office a couple of weeks ago. From my experience with their previous stores I could not think of a single reason to consider trying the new place. But, a few guys in the office have taken a bullet for the team. One of the intrepid explorers, who I will call "Mike" commented that the move to Craig Street seemed to have had a negative effect on the quality of the baked goods. Where before they were just bad, now they were nearly inedible. This was backed up by Pete's experience, where he got a cinnamon roll that was so bad that he threw it away. I figured that as a public service to our large population of readers, I should warn people away from this place. So I'm going to try and think of a Dozen reasons to avoid Dozen.

Who am I kidding. I'll never think of twelve. Here is the bottom line though. If I did try and write down twelve reasons, the first six would be as follows

  1. They do not know what good cake tastes like.
  2. They do not know what good cake tastes like.
  3. They do not know what good cake tastes like.
  4. They do not know what good cake tastes like.
  5. They do not know what good cake tastes like.
  6. They do not know what good cake tastes like.

I believe that the first cake I got from Dozen was a chocolate cupcake of some sort. I might have gotten it from the now defunct CoCo store, but it doesn't matter because they were about the same. They were 6 inches of frosting on top of bad cake. The cake was bad in the following ways: dry, crumbly, tasteless, and lacking in chocolate. I would like to submit that it should be impossible for a bakery with any self-respect to sell me a bad piece of chocolate cake. If they can't do that right, they should just shut themselves down.

Anyway, here are other unremarkable pieces of cake I've had in my life that are better than the shit at Dozen. Note, long time readers might think I am being hyperbolic or sarcastic here. I assure you I am not.

  1. The cake in a Hostess Devil Dog.

  2. Chocolate Zingers.

  3. Pepperidge Farm's frozen chocolate cake with chocolate icing.

  4. The Red Velvet cake at Costco. A special note about this. One other confection I obtained at Dozen recently was a Red Velvet Gob. That was also worse than the cake at Costco.

  5. Sara Lee Frozen pound cake.

  6. The cake I used to bake out of a boxed mix from Duncan Hines when I was 15 years old. You know... mix powder with milk, eggs and oil. Bake.

  7. The cakes at Whole Foods. Which suck but they do not suck as much as Dozen.

  8. Giant Eagle birthday cake.

  9. The crazy Chinese sponge cake that you can buy at Lotus or the other Chinese stores in the Strip.

  10. The gluten free brownies at Gluteny in Squirrel Hill. They were not transcendent, but ya know: gluten free.

  11. Entemann's packaged coffee cakes, especially the raspberry and cheese.

  12. The "Gobs" at Giant Eagle. Other people call these cakes Whoopie Pies.

So there you go. I managed to make a list with twelve reasons on it after all. Never let it be said that I did not achieve something noble in my life.

By the way, if you want some foofy cupcakes made by people who actually know how to bake, follow the advice of the Pittsburgh Post Gazette and go to Vanilla Pastry Studio in Shadyside. They make a variety of tasty treats, including cupcakes with too much frosting. But, the frosting is usually pretty good, and the cake underneath does not suck.

Play Like a Pirate 2010

2010-09-17 · by peterb

To celebrate "Talk Like a Pirate Day", Telltale games this week has unveiled their Play Like a Pirate sale. Put simply: all 5 episodes of *Tales of Monkey Island (*previously reviewed by Tea Leaves, here) for a mere $4.95.

This is crazy cheap. Whether you've got a PC or a Mac, this might be the best $5 you'll ever spend. Sale ends when the weekend does, so get to it.

Dare We Hope?

2010-09-19 · by psu

Has Fujifilm, of all people, finally made me my Digital Hexar? This new FinePix X100 certainly looks the part. Fast fixed lens: check. Fast sensor: check. Claims of fast autofocus: check. Finally, check out the freaky hybrid optical/electronic viewfinder system! Pretty nice.

Overnight update:

The photo blogosphere was all aglow with the news of this new machine. In particular, over at TOP you could almost feel the drool over the Internet wires. There were four classes of comments:

  1. "WOW, WANT!" Sure, I can agree with this.

  2. "Fuji will sell a ton of these because we all know what everyone wants is exactly a niche enthusiast camera!" Well, no. Enthusiast photographers, like all enthusiasts, want something every different from all other users. They tend to just not know it. That's why no one has done a camera like this before. It won't sell in large numbers. Just ask Konica about the Hexar. Also, there is little chance that this camera sells for much less than $1000. You don't sell large numbers of $1000 cameras with fixed lenses and a relatively limited feature set.

  3. "Where is the interchangeable bayonet mount?" These people are the same ones who cannot use small cameras because of their huge ape-like fists.

  4. "Boy this would have been great as a film camera!" Um. Yeah. Sure.

Also, I would like to register my annoyance with the constant use of the term "analog" to describe dial-style controls with click stops and numbers on them. These dials are sending digital signals to a little computer inside the body of the camera just like all other controls on a digital camera wouild. Just get over it. Sheesh.

Anyway, to summarize: WOW. SHINY. WANT.

Vampire Saga: Pandora's Box HD

2010-09-21 · by peterb

A few years ago there was a sudden proliferation of "find the hidden object" games. They were everywhere. You couldn't turn around without encountering one. Essentially computerized versions of "Where's Waldo?", these games would wrap a thin veneer of story around their central mechanic. A trip to Africa! A locked-room mystery! No genre was safe.

Generally speaking, this veneer was tissue thin, and this made most of them unbearable. Occasionally, though, someone can take a tired game and breathe some life into it. Alawar Entertainment has done this with Vampire Saga: Pandora's Box HD. Vampire Saga is, yes, a find-the-hidden-object game, but it is also a point-and-click (well, OK, point-and-tap) adventure game, and one that tries to tell a story with some degree of seriousness.

In each stage of the game, you have access to a small number of locations. Advancing through the game means figuring out how to solve small puzzles. For example (and I'm making this up, but it is within the spirit of the game), perhaps you need to get past a sewer grate. The sewer grate has a lock on it, so you need to search for a crowbar with which to break the lock. In another location, there will be a find-the-object diorama, and one of the objects you are looking for will be the crowbar. When you've solved that diorama, you can return to the sewer grate, use the crowbar on the lock, and now have access to the area behind the grate.

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Click to enlarge](http://www.alawar.com/images/games/vampire-saga-pandora-s-box/vampire-saga-pandora-s-box-screenshot2.jpg)

This serves a double purpose, both of them good and honorable: first, there are actually things to do besides the find-the-object puzzles, and second, the puzzles themselves are slightly less arbitrary. Instead of looking for eight random things, you're looking for seven random things, and one thing that is actually explained by the plot of the game. This by itself puts the game ahead of most of the games in its class.

The actual find-the-objectificationism works well. There's a time-release on-demand hint system that you can use if you get frustrated. Or, if you're me, you can just drum your fingers lightly over the surface of the iPad - there's no penalty for guessing wrong here. The art is moody and appropriate, and the objects are, usually, hidden cleverly yet fairly.

Kudos should also be given to Alwar for trying to tell a story in this format. It did not resonate with me particularly, and there's something about the production values that feel, well, Eastern European. But this isn't really a criticism, as much as an observation. It did not resonate with me, but again, the mere presence of the story puts them ahead of the rest of the pack.

Vampire Saga: Pandora's Box HD is available for iPad on the app store. $6.99; there is also an iPhone version available for $2.99.

Diclosure statement: Alawar Entertainment graciously provided Tea Leaves with a review copy of this game.

Battlefield Academy

2010-10-13 · by peterb

Inspired "by a concept devised by the BBC", Slitherine and Matrix games' Battlefield Academy should appeal to those of you who have been desperate for a Panzer General fix. In a world where "strategy" has become a videogame codeword for "He who clicks fastest, wins", Slitherine is still developing turn-based games that are thoughtful, clever, and fun.

The presentation of Battlefield Academy is unusual for a wargame. Set in World War II, missions are introduced by a comic-book like splash screen - think of something from a late '50's era Sgt. Rock comic. The scenario is introduced (typically with a hint or two as to the optimal Allied strategy) and you are dropped in to the thick of battle. In all cases, you'll control Allied forces - British, Polish, and American - and be fighting the Germans or Italians. The order of battle is largely set in advance, although you do get a limited number of points that you can spend on additional units to provide some degree of flexibility.

The scenarios themselves are not directly connected except insofar as they mirror the Allies progress through the war. Each scenario effectively introduces complex concepts (combined arms, ambushes, concealment, suppressing fire, artillery and airstrikes, and so on) in simple yet effective ways. Moves are "turn based with interrupts" - you can move all of your pieces, but if you move while within sight of an enemy, and they have movement points left, they might take a shot at you. Or vice-versa.

I've talked at length here on Tea Leaves of how fantastic I think Nintendo's Advance Wars games. They're tactically rich, yet don't get lost in a maze of needless user interface complexity. Many PC games have tried, and failed, to pick up the flag that the Panzer General games placed on the hill of turn-based modern combat fun. Battlefield Academy is the only one I've played - on the PC - that actually succeeds. It is like an Advance Wars game that tries to teach you how to apply real-world military tactics. I unreservedly recommend it to anyone who is as enamored of turn-based combat games as I am.

Battlefield Academy by Slitherine and Matrix Games. $37.99. Windows only, but for those of you playing on the Mac, it runs acceptably in VMWare at low-ish resolutions.

Disclosure statement: Matrix and Slitherine graciously provided Tea Leaves with a review copy of this game.

A Telescope in the City

2010-10-13 · by psu

I never expected to get back into telescopes. While they were my first hobbyist love and contributed indirectly to my final choice of career, the time of my real interest had long passed by. It also does not help that I live in the suburbs under a semi-permanent light dome coming from Pittsburgh. So no one was more surprised than me to be sitting in my back yard last night under a beautifully clear sky, peering once again into the darkness at the faint fuzzballs.

Let's get one thing out of the way first, so the point does not get lost. An 8 inch Schmidt-Cassegrain telescope really is the perfect instrument for someone like me: an overly affluent dabbler. Aside from the comparatively modest cost, it has three characteristics that make it great:

  1. Relatively large aperture. This thing has four times the light gathering area of the Astroscan of my youth.

  2. Relatively portable size. The optical tube of the telescope is about the size of a small child, and about as easy to carry. More importantly, it's small enough to be easy to store. I was really worried about this and for once the thing ended up being smaller than it looks in pictures.

  3. An automatic, computerized mount. We should talk more about this now.

The fact that the telescope has a computer that can accurately point at specific locations in the sky is simply invaluable. This is especially true in the suburban environment, where the sky glow would make it impractical to use even a large finder scope to "star hop" to you what you want to look at.

My main worry about this was how onerous the alignment process might be. Before the telescope can point at things, you have to tell it where it is. The quickest way to do this is as follows:

  1. Turn the telescope on.

  2. Point it at a first known star. You have to do this by hand. Put the star in the eyepiece and hit a button on the controller.

  3. Now the scope goes into a slower pointing mode so you can center the star in a higher power eyepiece. You do this very carefully. With Celestron telescopes, you also try to only move the star using the right and down buttons on the controller. This apparently helps to align the gears in the motor drive more effectively. When you are done, you hit the align button again.

  4. Now the telescope suggests a second star to point to. It goes there by itself, but it will probably miss. You then repeat step 3 for the second star.

  5. Now you are done.

If you have done your work well, my telescope (a Celestron 8SE) will now point accurately enough to put the object into the field of view of my 120x eyepiece. Right now that field is only around a third of a degree in diameter. Not bad. Even better, after you hit a target, the scope will automatically track it. You can leave the thing in the yard while you warm up in the house and then walk back out and have it still be in your 120x eyepiece. This is much more cool than I thought it would be.

Happily for me, it did not take much practice to figure out how to obtain this level of performance. Sadly for me, I got a lot of practice at this because the power cable on the telescope kept falling out because Celestron never fixes their stupid power connectors. Every time the cable falls out, you have to do the two star dance again. It only takes four or five tries to get good at it. Then I learned to put batteries into the telescope as a backup against the stupid power cable.

My other complaint is that the actual interface on the controller is ludicrously primitive. For example, if I want to see the Andromeda Galaxy, I have to type "M 0 3 1". The stupid thing is not smart enough to actually parse integers for me. The menu system is also strange and hard to work with, especially since you only get to see 2 lines of text at a time. These interface problems are emblematic of an industry that is selling its main product (telescopes) on so little margin that actually investing in improving the interfaces is both too expensive and too risky. I mean, for god's sake they still use RS-232 ports.

But, I will forgive them these foibles, because the way I find things now is to point the telescope at the object and then compare what I see in the eyepiece to a known chart. I can look the object up on my iPhone and have the phone display a chart of what should be in the eyepiece. As an aside, this is much nicer than fumbling with printed star charts. The StarMap Pro software is even smart enough to generally orient the eyepiece field correctly. And the iPhone screen, when it's mostly black, does not completely destroy your dark adaptation.

Anyway, with the telescope pointed and the iPhone holding the chart, I can then look into the eyepiece, and see if the stars look right. Then I squint and stare until the back of my brain starts to leak out of my ears, and I decide if I think I saw anything.

For relatively bright objects (M31, the big globular clusters, etc) it's usually pretty easy to pick out the faint fuzzy. Sometimes the view is even pretty impressive. More often than not though it's hard to know if you actually saw what you thought you saw. Which is why this particular night made me so happy. I jumped over to the galaxy M82, which I had tried to see a few nights ago, and I only noticed a faint hint of its existence. But last night it was obviously there. A dim gray cigar shaped cloud right where the StarMap chart said it would be. Its brighter partner, M81 was also an obvious cloudy object when I pointed the scope there.

Finally, the last major success of the night was tracking down the Comet Hartley 103P. I had missed it when it passed by Perseus before. But tonight it was easy to see, as it had become a bit brighter in the intervening time.

Tonight my squint and stare fest was reserved for M110, a small galaxy that is near the much larger and brighter M31. I spent about 20 minutes going from the iPhone chart to the scope and back again and I think I got the faintest hint of its existence but I'm not sure. I'm a bit more sure of this than I was of M82 the other night though, so that's a reason to be optimistic.

Overall this telescope has worked better than I ever imagined it would. More importantly, using it from a light polluted suburban back yard is more practical than I ever imagined it would be. I have a reputation for not being able to be pleasantly surprised by anything anymore, but here my friends is a counterexample for you. So there.

Extra Notes

I never would have gotten this far without the excellent writings of "Uncle Rod" Mollise. His weblog is good. His books are good. They made me believe the hardware would work for me.

One of the best things about amateur astronomers is that they are still relatively cheap people. You also have to love a hobby where a $300 lens (eyepiece) is considered to be staggeringly expensive. I'll be ordering a couple of fancy eyepieces I think. Gotta see what the fuss is about. While I'm at it, I think one of those astronomical video cameras needs a home too.

Hannibal: Rome and Carthage

2010-10-20 · by peterb

Oh, look, a beautiful and challenging strategy game.

Hannibal: Rome and Carthage is a gorgeous computer board game. Based, seemingly, on the board game Hannibal: Rome and Carthage in the Second Punic War, 219-202 B.C., Hannibal is a unique little gem of a wargame.

For those who, like me, are merely amateur students of Roman history, the real Hannibal is something of a mystery. Clearly a general of legendary talents — his brilliant army-destroying trap at the Battle of Cannae alone would be enough to catapult him into the company of Alexander of Makedon, even before you think about what kind of balls it takes to march elephants over the Alps — the question in my mind has always been "Why didn't he march on Rome? Why did he dork around in the south of Italy for all those years? What was the point?" Hannibal: Rome and Carthage, through the magic of game mechanics, tries to answer that question.

In the game, Hannibal is the most brilliant general in the world when in the field. The moment he is pinned down maintaining a siege, many of his advantages (represented in-game via action cards that provide him with incredible bonuses in battles) evaporate. Furthermore, Hannibal is fighting a war far from home, past the limit of the ancient world's supply lines. Reinforcements from Carthage are hard-pressed to reach him, and are inadequate to replace his losses besides. In order to mount a serious challenge to Rome he has to capture cities in mainland Italy (as well as in the other theaters of the game). Capturing these Latin ally cities both reduces Rome's (prodigious) ability to levy new troops, and makes some troops available to Carthage. The question is whether the player, as Carthage and Hannibal — you never get to play as Rome — can maintain his advantage long enough before losing so many troops to attrition that the Roman player overwhelms him with sheer numbers.

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Click to enlarge](/img/ext/3870a526-20100705202535.JPG)

The game is stunningly beautiful. It looks hand-drawn, or hand-painted. I simply can't recall the last time I've seen a tile-based war game that looked this good.

Battles in the game occur on land and at sea, in five different areas, or theaters: Italy, Spain, Northern Africa, Sicily, and Sardinia. Travel between theaters ranges from easy to treacherous depending on who holds what cities, the state of naval superiority, whether there are any intervening mountain ranges, and how far you are trying to march. On each turn, you activate generals, who collect troops and (hopefully) perform operations against the enemy, including sieges, field battles, and sea battles. At higher game levels, there is also work to be done convincing the Carthaginian Senate to reinforce the theaters that you want to be reinforced.

The turn structure is odd, and somehow satisfying. Each turn, you have a certain number of "activations". You can use those to activate a general (or admiral, for sea operations). Each general may do as many things as he wants, although certain operations (such as laying siege to a city) may end his turn. Once a general ends his activation, he cannot be activated again for the rest of the turn.

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Click to enlarge](/img/ext/1669370a-20100705202534.JPG)

Among the biggest drawbacks of the game is that the combat system is very, very opaque. Each army has an attack factor and a strength factor indicating how much damage it can do, and how much damage it can take. However, there's no way to see any calculation showing why you won or lost, just that you did. So you know that the general has a bonus that is added into combat; you know that (for example) the defender in a city has a bonus that is added in as well. But you don't see how any of these are applied. I generally hate having to sit there and calculate in war games, and that's not what I'm begging for, but the fact is that since the attack and strength factors are on the tiles already, you've exposed part of what I need to know, but not all of it. The overall effect is that combat sometimes feels like playing that game where you shoot lasers into a covered table, trying to figure out where the mirrors are located. I'm not ashamed to say that I reloaded my first game several times when the world came crashing down around my ears, and I think the opaqueness of the combat resolution makes such behavior practically inevitable.

This is a difficult game: even on the easiest level, I think even experienced war-gamers are going to find this one to be quite a challenge. But this is as it should be. Hannibal, despite his genius, and despite the many Roman armies he destroyed, eventually lost.

Do you think you can do better than that? This is your chance to prove it.

Hannibal: Rome and Carthage in the Second Punic War by Forced March Games is available from Matrix Games, for Windows only, for $39.99. A free demo is available.

Disclosure statement: Matrix games graciously provided Tea Leaves with a review copy of this game.

An Open Letter to the People Who Buy Games

2010-10-28 · by psu

OK. Rant time.

I have been down on video games lately. Part of the reason for this is that I've been busy reacquainting myself with hobbies from my past and my brain is only big enough to hold one obsession at once. Another part of the reason for this is that at least to my mind, there simply has not been anything that interesting released in the last, say, 18 months. There have been the standard titles that are good enough to pick up and fool around with. But nothing good enough to actually flip the bit that makes me want to play every night. Perhaps the most important reason for my recent lull has been more sinister: I'm tired of gamers, because gamers are a bunch of juvenile self-centered whiners with an overly developed sense of entitlement. For example: take Bill Harris and Russ Pitts. I've gotten to the point where I can't stand to listen to the "community" talk about games, and this has made me lose interest in the video games themselves.

After many long years of observation, I have concluded that for the most part, the "core gamer" mentality is largely driven by two main psychological engines:

  1. The self-centered juvenile male sense of entitlement.

  2. A crushing feeling of material poverty.

There are two things that gamers hate over every other evil in the entire universe:

  1. That the developer of the video game did not sit down and specifically implement every single pet requirement that the gamer wrote down on his Dorito-encrusted wish list while sitting in his parents' basement re-watching the entire DVD set of Battlestar Galactica.

  2. That the game costs more than $30. Or $20. Or $5. Or any money at all. God forbid anyone actually make back any return on their investment. The amount of forum whining against high game prices, in game advertising, DRM, and any other way to make the business model for video games have even a little bit more margin for the people on the production side is almost endless.

Now, I have snarked about these sorts of things before. The Tea Leaves archives are full of me and Pete taking advantage of the peculiar persecution complex that the hard core gamer has: we've talked about how games are too easy or games are dumbed down or how the support for online game sucks or whatever. This is nothing new. In the past I have generally written this sort of thing up to a combination of ignorance and stupidity on the part of the people who like video games a bit too much.

But the Russ Pitts piece above, and the general love given to it by Bill Harris say something different to me. What they say to me is that even people who up until this point I thought of as relatively adult and reflective thinkers in this strange world of video games are in fact infected with the same core gamer brain damage as all of the other pubtards on Xbox Live.

What does this article say? I will summarize.

First it says "the industry is doing something that is bad for me." That is, they make these "expensive" games that apparently do not work. Second it says that after putting out huge amounts of hard earned cash to purchase the game, the poor poor impoverished game critic cannot return an opened video game to his retailer if it does not work. While I agree that in principle this is a situation that one should not have to tolerate, surely you can't say that this is the most important threat to the health of the video game industry that has ever occured in the entire history of life the universe and everything. Here's a hint: be more careful about what you buy, and learn to use Ebay or Amazon reselling to limit your losses. This is not that hard. It is certainly not the crushing hand of the capitalist oppressor. Get over it.

Anyway, back to the game not working. For a group of people that spends most of their entire lives dealing with hardware and software systems, gamers, and especially gamers with a lot of experience seem to be woefully clueless about how these systems are put together. Let me make this as simple as possible. Suppose software were like an RPG, and you were allocating stat points. Then you can allocate a fixed number of points into the following buckets:

  1. Number of requirements delivered at the given ship date.

  2. Cost.

  3. Correctness.

As we have seen, the poor game developer, by the nature of the audience that video games target, does not have a lot of leeway with respect to the first and second buckets. If we know anything about gamers it is that they will absolutely not tolerate any compromise on either features, the content in the game, or the cost of the game. This by itself is staggering if you consider the evolution of the medium. What is required of you to make a "real" AAA game in 2010 is that you fit three orders of magnitude more content onto that disk that used to be in (say) that Asteroids or Super Mario 2 Nintendo cartridge back in the day, and that the game cost nearly the same amount of money (or less) than before. Adjusted for inflation, the situation is even more ludicrous.

In addition, if your company does not happen to have an infinite well of money (like Blizzard, Valve, or maybe Popcap) you have a limited amount of time and human resources with which to generate this huge torrent of content.

Therefore, where do you compromise? Of course you compromise on #3. It is a no brainer. There is nothing else you can do. It is the way things have to be, like a universal law of software physics.

If gamers want it better, then they have to pony up. Either:

  1. They have to be able to wait for all games to take as long as a Blizzard or Valve game to reach release.

  2. They have to pay more money

or

  1. Both.

Rant over. That's all I had to say.

Note: if you are a gamer and you are currently my friend, I didn't mean you.

Second Note: I might have the tiniest bit of sympathy for Mr. Pitts if the web site he ran didn't cut his article up into three micropages of text to make sure that I get to see all the banner ads for his sponsors three times. Maybe he should consider making a usable web site before complaining about unplayable games.

OK. Now I'm really done.

Editorial Note: I got the Amazon returns policy wrong in the first version of this rant. So I edited it out of history.

I Shall Wear Midnight

2010-10-30 · by peterb

I Shall Wear Midnight (Discworld, #38)I Shall Wear Midnight by Terry Pratchett

I Shall Wear Midnight is Terry Pratchett's final book in the Tiffany Aching series. While clever, thoughtful, and well-constructed, it suffers from the same problem Pratchett has had in his other recent books: he has fallen too much in love with his characters to truly hurt them. Compared to the latent menace that suffused, for example, The Wee Free Men, we never feel here that Tiffany is at any risk that she can't overcome through prodigious application of witch-bourne moxie. This is a drawback. A number of the other Diskworld characters appear, briefly in the book; even antihero-turned-completely-boring Sam Vimes (am I the only person who is tired of him yet?) makes an appearance.

I don't mean to sound ungrateful. I realize this is a book for young adults, and so it isn't appropriate to expect the literary equivalent of Werner Herzog. But compared to 2008's superb Nation, also a book for young adults, which was infused with a sense of legitimate dread and danger from the first page, this novel feels more like a cop-out. Where Nation was a gallop on a wild horse, I Shall Wear Midnight was more like a well-constructed carousel: attractive, even pleasant, but not thrilling.

I enjoyed I Shall Wear Midnight. I would even recommend it. But it is, to its detriment, redolent with what might have been, and isn't.

View all my reviews

Why I Love to Watch Sports

2010-11-13 · by psu

A while back, my friend Kim asked if I could write a "Why I love X" article for a sports-related weblog for which she writes the occasional piece. At first this did not seem like a difficult task. After all, I have more than my share of sports-related obsessions. The Tour de France, the 1980s Celtics, the Tom Brady Patriots or the tortured teams of the Boston Red Sox. The list goes on and on. However, I found that each of these subjects seemed to me missing something of the big picture. The larger reasons why we are drawn to these grown men taking childish activities so ludicrously seriously. But I found my inspiration in two pieces of television that happened this week. The most recent 30-for-30 film about Marcus Dupree, and last night's NBA game between the Celtics and the Heat.

Warning: Don't read the rest of this piece if you wanted to watch the Marcus Dupree film and not be spoiled about the content.

OK. First the fun part. No story of the NBA off season was bigger this past summer than the story of Lebron James leaving his boyhood state of Ohio and "taking his talents to South Beach." This whole debacle even took over the 24/7 Brett Favre coverage for a while. But, even as the media feasted on the spectacle, there was in the background a general feeling that there in Miami was being assembled a team that would come out of the gate and dominate the league. After all, just a few years ago in Boston, three high profile free agents came together and those guys came out and immediately dominated the league. This feeling was so universal among anybody who cares anything about sports in general or the NBA in particular that it seemed like the entire script for the 2010-2011 season had been written: Miami comes out and steamrolls its way through the league and forward to an eventual NBA championship.

Not. So. Fast. This, my friends, is the first thing I love about sports. There is no script. At the end of the day, you have to play the games to find out what will actually happen. This is why sports is inherently better than everything else on TV. With everything else on TV, you pretty much know how it's going to go. Even so-called reality shows pretty much fall into a fixed set of pre-formed plot lines. With sports, you just never know. As an example, I will delve into one of the more painful episodes in my time on this earth, the Super Bowl that was played in February of 2008 between the Patriots and the Giants.

The buildup to this game was epic in its depiction of a one-sided contest. I believe that Pats were favored by something like two touchdowns, even though they had not exactly blown out the Giants in the last game of the regular season. We all know how the game went:

Anyway, how are the Heat doing this season? Well, here's a hint:

So remember: you have to play the game. I think of this as the small-scale reason why I like sports.

The film about Marcus Dupree provides a more "big picture" reason. In my opinion, the film itself is not all that notable. We follow the by now standard arc of "boy is given unbelievable physical gifts" to "boy runs into buzz-saw of big time sports" to "young man is out of sports due to somewhat freaky and tragic injury and is never heard form again until I, the Filmmaker™ see fit to put together this grand tribute." The film feels a little too proud of itself.

But, here is the inspirational part. The film starts with footage of Dupree playing high school football. And to you, the viewer, this footage is indeed breathtaking. Here is a kid who essentially scored every time he touched the ball. He runs around people, over people, through people and just plain past people. He is inhumanly big and fast. You stare in amazement, knowing that you are a witness to feats that you yourself never have any hope of duplicating. This feeling of amazement is why we are fascinated by athletes. We need to watch them leap over huge men and dunk the ball, or ride a bicycle over a mountain at 15 miles per hour, or run through and entire opposing defense while carrying a football into the end zone. I'm not sure exactly why we need to do this (some people don't I guess), but I think that that feeling of complete astonishment is valuable.

It's also hard to explain. But in my mind the best moment of this film is when it comes close to showing you what that feeling is like, on film! Near the end of the film, after we have followed Marcus through college and into the pros and then finally into his life after football, there is a fascinating sequence where the producers of the film show him the footage of himself in high school. And then something amazing happens.

You see this look wash over Marcus Dupree's face while he is watching the old film. And it's exactly the look you had at the start of the film when you saw it for the first time. Here we have a visual explanation for why people are in love with sports and the athletes that play them. Dupree stares into the film editing machine and he says to himself "that's amazing."

That's what we all do every Sunday, or with every walk off home run, or when Rajon Rondo posterizes that stiff Chris Bosh and proves beyond any shadow of a doubt that all the hype in Miami was just empty promises.

That's why I love sports.

Lords of the Sea.

2010-11-13 · by peterb

Lords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy and the Birth of DemocracyLords of the Sea: The Epic Story of the Athenian Navy and the Birth of Democracy by John R. Hale
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

John Hale's "Lords of the Sea" is an in-depth history of the Athenian thalassocracy from before the Peloponnesian Wars, up until Cleitus, one of the Macedonian successors to Alexander the Great, forced Athens to accept the yoke. It is a fascinating read.

Hale brings a very specific perspective to this topic: as a crew rower, he is perhaps more interested in the naval side of Athens than of any other aspect. Hale makes a compelling case that Athenian democracy itself had both its roots and its flowering in naval power. Athens, like the other Greek poleis of their day, only allowed citizens to serve in the military. The trireme, Athens' war vessel with 3 rows of oars on each side, needed 170 men to power it. With hundreds of triremes - each one able to ram and cripple enemy ships - Athens needed thousands of citizens actively involved in the war effort, citizens who needed to provide neither arms, nor armor, nor anything beyond a strong back and the will to fight. This need, Hale argues, made democracy rather more likely to flourish in Athens than in land-based poleis, whose military might resided in the hoplite phalanx. Hoplites, needing to supply their own arms and armor, were by definition men of property; not so the humble sailor.

Hale backs up his argument with evidence that the Athenians themselves saw life through the lens of naval warfare. Citing works by Euripidese... My favorite little etymological guilty pleasure would have to be Hale's offhand observations on sexual terminology:

"A woman's vagina could be described as a kolpos or gulf, like the Carinthian and Saronic gulfs, where a happy seafarer could lose himself. As for the penis, a modest man could claim to have a kontos or boat pole, an average man a kope or oar between his legs, and a braggart a pedalion or steering oar. Inevitably too, the erection poking against an Athenian's tunic was referred to as his "ram." Sexual intercourse was likened to ramming encounters between triremes, but the men did not always take the active role. The popular Athenian sexual position in which the woman sat astride her partner gave her a chance to play the nautria or female rower, and row the man as if he were a boat. A man who mounted another man might claim to be boarding him, u sing the nautical term for a marine boarding a trireme. Sexual bouts with multiple partners were sometimes dubbed naumachiai or naval battles."

Hopefully Hale will forgive me choosing perhaps the only sexually explicit passage in his 500 page book as an excerpt. But I am now waiting eagerly for life to give me a chance to deploy the word naumachiai in this context. May I live long enough.

The modern image of golden age Athens is wrapped up in images of philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, in deep conversation about life and government. But Hale points out that these men were, largely, reactionaries. A chapter-long discourse on Plato's fable of Atlantis shows how it was a crypto-mythological critique of Athens' addiction to sea power, which is a perspective I was, before this book, simply unaware of. The thought of people ignoring that critique in favor of searching for the "real" Atlantis would, one suspects, make Plato weep.

I was led to Lords of the Sea by my explorations of Thucydides. I was searching for something that put the Peloponnesian War in a larger context. The fear when you pick up a book such as this is that it will prove to be nothing more than a palimpsest, a summary of things that other, better writers have created. What Hale has actually accomplished is a synthesis, drawing from ancient sources but also contributing his own insights. I was considerably enriched by Lords of the Sea, and I recommend it unreservedly to anyone interested in the history of Hellenic warfare.

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Kickstarting Andrew Plotkin

2010-11-17 · by peterb

Every so often someone undertakes a project so crazy and beautiful that anything you can say will just be superfluous. That's how I feel about Andrew Plotkin's quest to fund the development of his new text adventure for the iPhone.

Andrew, known in other circles as "Zarf", is more than just a brilliant writer and software developer; he's also my friend. I urge you to visit his kickstarter page here and watch the intro video. And, although he's already reached his funding target, if what he's doing seems like something you want to support, send a few dollars, and perhaps some positive psychic energy (ideally, focused by crystals) his way.

Crossing the Chasm

2010-11-23 · by peterb

Thomas at Mile Zero recently wrote a piece called The Console Model is a Regressive Tax on Creativity. I think Thomas is wrong. Here's my reply.

Thomas,

Your attempt at a conceptual leap from "There exist platforms that limit the amount of hacking that can be done" to "Those limitations are a barrier to entry for minorities" rivals Evel Knievel's storied jump over the Snake River Canyon, and ultimately it is no more successful.

First off, encoded in your article are the following assumptions:

...that coding or "hacking" is the most meaningful way to interact with technology.

...that "running homebrew code" is a valuable form of experimentation for a statistically significant number of people.

...that making a platform more amenable to end-user coding is cost-free (and here I'm using "cost" not in the monetary sense, but in the sense of "cost to the end user in terms of the usefulness of the platform").

All three of these assumptions are not simply incorrect, but woefully so. To borrow the words of Wolfgang Pauli, "This isn't right. This isn't even wrong."

Regarding the first assumption: while those of us in the technology sector like to romanticize our early experiences with our various Apple IIs, TRS-80s, and other hackable platforms, the fact is that the skills we learned from doing that work had a narrow effect: they made us marginally more likely to enter into one particular career track in the tech industry. There are thousands of other equally valid, fulfilling, and financially rewarding career tracks in the tech industry that don't involve the specific aspects of software development you are rooting for. Put another way, the assumption that hacking is an intrinsic good in and of itself seems to me morally equivalent to bemoaning the fact that most people who buy modern cars aren't using them to brush up on their auto mechanic skills.

Regarding your second assumption: to the extent that one decides to make the (incorrect) choice that Everyone Should Be A Computer Engineer, it's not clear to me that bemoaning the existence of less-hackable platforms is in any way effective. Risking a second analogy, you are complaining that it's hard to use hammers as screwdrivers, and really, those hammer manufacturers are holding us back by not putting a Phillips-head socket on the handle.

Regarding your third assumption, end-user electronic appliances have expected use cases. Presumably, both the people selling these devices and the people spending money on them think that these use cases are important. Making a platform "hackable" is not simply a matter of "don't put DRM on it". In many cases, what you call "hackable" I call "dangerous", in the sense of a gun manufacturer who sells a handgun without a safety. If leaving a platform "open" or "hackable" means that developers should compromise the experience of 98% of their users for the benefit of the 2% of users who desperately want to use their hammers as screwdrivers, then I have to say that "open" sounds like perhaps one of the worst ideas I've heard of. If, on the other hand, you're positing that we should refuse compromise, and perfectly meet the needs of 100% of everyone, and make an open platform that in no way compromises the user experience, then I look forward to eventually eating and/or cleaning my kitchen with your combination floor wax/dessert topping.

In summary: even if I accept the (flawed) premise that "careers in technology" are driven by, specifically, the ability to write software, you have in no way made the case that degrading people's experiences with technology is the best way to get them to write more software. Optimizing technology for openness is almost never free, and if in making a product more hackable you end up interfering with the job the product was intended to do, you will, in the long run, do more harm than good.

Open platforms will always exist. This is a good thing. Equally important is that there will always be platforms whose primary concern is that of the experience of the user, and not the desires of the tinkerer. To elevate the tinkerer's needs above the needs of those who need the product is, to be blunt, vaguely silly fetishism of technology as an end in itself.

Same as it Ever Was

2010-11-26 · by psu

I have always really liked the Best American Essays series. For those of you who are not familiar with these books, every year they rope some editor into reading thousands of pieces of non-fiction from vairous periodicals that specialize in publishing such material. Then they put 20 or 25 of these pieces into a single book and put it out on the shelves so I can buy one and read it on my next long plane trip. The stuff is fantastic. In addition, it saves me from needing to subscribe to all of the magazines find the good stuff.

So this weekend I picked up the 2010 edition of the series at that venerable DC institution KramerBooks. Kramer's is great because it's also a pretty good restaurant. So you can buy food and books at the same time. Win! I ordered some fried catfish and opened the book up to the forward. My other favorite literary hobby is reading forwards and introductions. I like the peek into the "real" mind of the writer that they sometimes provide. This time, the subject of the forward was somewhat surprising. The series editor, Robert Atwan, was talking about the iPad, e-readers, and the fate of the printed page in this brave new world of electronic and digital content. In a nice twist, instead of lamenting the loss of his particular beloved physical artifacts, he was worried about how the new media would change the reader. His reasoning goes something like this:

  1. The electronic reader can provide a "reading experience" that is so much richer and more complicated than the standard book.

  2. Therefore, the next generation of "books" will be forced to provide such an experience. Rather than just words, words will be forced to mingle with sound, and video, and instant messaging and social network-driven community content consumption.

  3. Therefore, what will be lost in the future will be the solitary, linear and meticulous reader. Instead, we will be growing a generation of distracted, hyperactive non-linear, network-connected readers who can't really absorb anything.

Maybe. But I don't think so. I think Mr. Atwan is misreading the real shift in expectations that comes with digital content. His assumption is that digital content means:

  1. Bite-sized pieces.

  2. Gratuitous interactivity.

  3. An inappropriately enhanced and "richer" media experience.

But I don't think this is true. Even on the Internet, that cesspool of Youtube and LOLcats, you can find a huge market for copious amounts of well written text only content. Consider my perennial favorite Boston Homer sports writer Bill Simmons. This guy made his entire career solely on the Internet. He also writes in a style that is anything but bite-sized. His columns sometimes have as much textual content as an entire issue of Sports Illustrated. He is not constrained by space because on the web the marginal cost of a thousand words of text is practically nil.

Not only are his columns epically long, his readers keep him accountable for every word. In several interviews he has mentioned how careful he has to be not to get facts and statistics wrong, lest he incur the wrath of millions of posters to fan forums.

Finally, although Simmons does work in other media (he records a podcast a couple of times a week) the work is never mixed into his text columns. His writing is just writing. And it's linear. And it's long. He wrote an 800 page book about the NBA for god's sake.

So, to summarize, we see here that one of the world's least literary populations: sports fans, are still willing to read a lot of text about their favorite subjects. So I am skeptical of claims that e-books and their various cousins on the Internet are part of an inevitable evolution of books and readers away from text.

I think the real expectations of digital content consumers are much simpler and less work to take advantage of. And here it is:

The point of digital content is to deliver anything that I might want to read, watch, listen to, or interact with instantly and on demand no matter where I am and what I am doing at the time.

Digital books don't need to be that different than "real" books. What I care about is that if I want to read one, I don't have to go to a god damned bookstore to get it. I can ask for it and have it wherever I am standing. Right now.

The music industry didn't understand this and the entire time their business model was being destroyed, they continued to believe that there was value to be had in little silver or black disks packaged in cardboard. The truth was that the kids just wanted their music right now (and unfortunately, for free). The music industry realized this too late, and they are now paying the price for that.

I think the book industry is now going through the same kind of shift. Hopefully the book people understand the real change that is going on around them. It would be a shame not to have anything to read on my iPad in a few years.

Commands & Colors: Napoleonics

2010-12-11 · by peterb

We've just finished our first playthrough of a complete round of Commands & Colors: Napoleonics, playing through the Roliça (first position) scenario. I think it's a good time to discuss my early impressions of the game.

Needless to say, some of these are preliminary in nature, and it may turn out in the fullness of time I'll change my mind. But first impressions matter, and they matter a lot, so I want to jot these notes down while my thoughts are still fresh.

Components

The components, with one major exception, are of superb quality. The board is a solidly-built mounted board with large hexes and three sections - left, center, and right - with a pleasant neutral green background.

Of course, being a Commands & Colors game, it also comes with approximately 68,200 wooden blocks in varying sizes - royal blue for the French, scarlet red for the British, and brown for the Portuguese (sorry, Portugal.) Likewise, there are 136,400 stickers, which are applied to each side of the wooden blocks. I loves me some stickers! The images on the stickers seemed a little more distinctive to me than most of the artwork in Commands & Colors: Ancients.

One major change in the system is that unit hits are not determined by whether a unit is light, medium, or heavy, but whether they are infantry, cavalry, or artillery. Within each type of unit, there are subtle differences: for example, infantry might be light infantry, or line infantry, or grenadiers, or guards, and so on. This is indicated by a narrow band in the appropriate color (blue for infantry, yellow for cavalry, red for artillery) with the name of the subtype written in black letters.

You'd think labeling the units with names would be helpful, but I think it is problematic. While putting stickers on the blocks, the text was perfectly readable. In play however, both of us found ourselves constantly squinting at blocks, trying to distinguish whether a given unit was a Light or Line infantry. If you've played Commands and Colors: Ancients, you may be familiar with how troublesome it can be to distinguish auxilia from light infantry, at least until you memorize the picture. This, I think, is just as bad, and possibly a little worse. Perhaps they just needed to have picked a different typeface, or perhaps I need the "megablocks" version of the game with blocks that are the size of Saltine crackers.

The cards are nicely done, have clear text, and seem of slightly higher quality than those from C&C: A, though this may be my imagination.

Victory banners are no longer wooden blocks, but are instead cardboard chits which have the British flag on one side and the French flag on the other. This seems like a reasonable change.

The game comes with multiple player aid cards that are notably worse than the equivalent cards from Commands & Colors: Ancients. The Ancients cards tell you practically everything you need to know to play the game. The Napoleonics player aids are missing unit range, which seems like an awfully large omission (most infantry, for example, can fire from a range of 2 hexes, but light infantry can fire from 3) The beauty of the Ancients player aid was precisely that I could give them to someone who hadn't read the rulebook, and they were 80% of the way there.

The biggest disappointment, for me, is that GMT is still including ridiculously cheap-looking dice in the game, which the player then stickers. In a game where nearly every other component is, from a physical standpoint, first-rate, the dice are an embarassment. It's a bit like going into a fine French restaurant and being served a glass of champagne, some escargot, and cold spam in a can. They stick out like a sore thumb in an otherwise beautiful package. There are plenty of ways to substitute better dice for the plastic pieces of junk included in the box, but it's a real shame that anyone should even have to think about this at all.

Each die has 2 infantry symbols, 1 cavalry symbol, 1 artillery symbol, a retreat flag, and a close combat hit ("crossed swords"). So infantry combat will be substantially bloodier than in Ancients.

Playthrough

I played the French, my opponent played the perfidious British. Historically, the French at Roliça were forced to retreat by the future Duke of Wellington. Two turns into this game, it looked like we were heading to the same result. I had managed to eliminate half of the British artillery when they moved them too close to my defensive lines, but beyond that, it was looking fairly grim. Portguese light rifle infantry, hiding in the woods off my left flank, repeatedly peppered my light infantry with shot, crippling them by the second turn.At this point, I decided that it was worth taking some risks to try to get out of the situation.

Using a Cavalry Charge card, I dispatched my two units of light cavalry on my left and right flanks to engage leading units of the Portuguese and British infantry. I fully expected to lose them in a counterattack, but my hope was that if I could hold the right flank in the river crossing, I might be able to make something interesting happen.

My opponents decided this would be a good time to test the system's new "Infantry square" rules. Forming a square has a few interesting consequences that aren't immediately obvious from the rules. The square means your infantry will take less potential damage (only 1 die) from cavalry; but it also means that it will only deal 1 die of damage in return. Furthermore, the infantry unit then cannot move until it comes out of square; you lose a random card from your hand for as long as the unit is in the square, and, most importantly, the unit cannot leave the square as long as a cavalry unit is adjacent.

It wasn't clear from the rules whether the cavalry still received its extra die from the Cavalry Charge card while fighting an infantry in square. We decided to rule in favor of the infantry, and only rolled one die. Both infantry survived the attack, and with lucky rolls did minor damage to both cavalry. Thing were looking rather grim. On the next turn, the British eliminated my light infantry.

At this point, I decided to risk it all on a Bayonet Charge. This card is ridiculously powerful, particularly for the French, allowing 4 infantry units to move 2 hexes and still engage in melee. Thus, 4 units of my line infantry left their secure redoubt on the hills and charged down into the British/Portuguese lines. French units naturally get an extra die in melee combat, effectively neutralizing the cover that the allied units were trying to use. On the next turn, luckily, I drew a second Bayonet Charge. That was enough to finish the battle off: within two turns, I had decimated their infantry and won my fifth flag.

Complex, or Just Complicated?

Most of the discussion online about C&C:N has focused on the rule change wherein a unit deals less damage as it loses blocks. In my opinion, this is probably the least important new rule. There are a lot of additions to the system here. It's going to take a few more playthroughs to answer the question "Is this deep and complex, or simply more complicated?" For sure, there are more options at your disposal in Commands & Colors: Napoleonics. Those of you who felt that the line tactics in its Ancients brother were not sophisticated enough will probably enjoy it. In addition to the above-mentioned rule about infantry squares, there are also combined-arms attacks, where artillery can assist a unit that is involved in a melee assault. There are victory point locations (familiar to Memoir '44 players) where you can earn a banner for reaching certain locations on the board. There are cavalry breakthroughs and bonus attacks. And there is a lot of terrain in use throughout the game.

So there's a lot to mull over here. On the whole, I like the game. I think the interactions of all the new rules are likely to add a lot of depth to the system. On the down side, the level of commitment required is higher; the matrix of exceptions and behaviors seems higher than that in the Ancients game, and that might make this less accessible and -- time will tell -- slower playing. But my first impressions are very positive, and I'm looking forward to the chance to play this again soon.

Snapped

2010-12-14 · by psu

Dear Internet Forums: While I love you for the wonderful capacity you have for the intelligent and thoughtful exchange of useful information with others from around the world, I am wondering if you could do me one little favor.

I'm wondering if y'all could simply keep track of which god-damned messages in a thread I have actually read rather than just the threads I've looked at since the last time you stamped a cookie on me? I mean, is this really that god-damned hard? After all, USENET did all the way back in 1984.

Thanks!

Four Fish

2010-12-15 · by peterb

Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild FoodFour Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food by Paul Greenberg
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Paul Greenberg charts the exploitation and decline of four fish - wild salmon, European sea bass, cod, and bluefin tuna - in this thoroughly depressing work. Much of the book is spent channelling representatives from various commercial fishing operations, or alternatively from environmental groups. Some attention is paid to the question "so, if we shouldn't eat these fish, what should we eat?". (Spoiler: Greenberg says barramundi, tilapia, and "kona kampachi", a trade name for almaco jack)

The book comes alive only when Greenberg stops quoting and instead talks about his own ambiguous relationship to these fish as an amateur fisherman. Beyond those parts, I'd have much preferred to have read a distillation of his thesis as an article in the New Yorker. But, and I say this without intending to be cruel, that would require a writer who has more eloquence than Greenberg.

My recommendation: unless you are obsessed with the topic, skip this one.

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The Ultimate Goto

2010-12-17 · by psu

When I was in college I was something of a programming languages hobbyist. I think all young dorks go through this phase. Programming languages are fascinating repositories of different ideas for creating abstractions for constructs that programmers find themselves building over and over again. Back in the day, one of my favorite papers was the Guy Steele title whose short form is just LAMBDA: The Ultimate GOTO. The title is fantastic because it brings together several disparate trains of thought on how programming languages work and combines them into a single statement. Lambda? Goto? What do these have to do with one another? Therein lies a story.

Computers, you will recall, work by fetching a stream of instructions from some kind of memory and executing these instructions one at a time until they come to the end of the stream or the universe ends, whichever comes first. Computers would not be very interesting if all they could do was follow a single "straight line" of instructions though. If this were the case, all they would be able to do is perform the same computation over and over again. What makes computers interesting is that they can examine their input and make decisions about what to do based on what is presented to them. In programming lingo this is called "flow control."

You need two kinds of instructions to implement flow control. First, you need some way to evaluate boolean expressions. For example, you want to be able to ask "Hey computer, is this number I gave you bigger than 10?". Or maybe "hey computer, did I just touch the iPad screen on top of that button?". Next, you need a way to jump from wherever you are in the instruction stream to some other location in the instruction stream based on the result of a conditional expression. This jump is what we call a "goto" instruction. You say, "Hey computer, if that value is bigger than 10 GOTO memory location 55 and begin executing whatever instruction is sitting there instead of the one that is right after me."

It turns out that if you combine memory (that is, a way to save state), conditions and GOTO, you can compute everything that is computable... in the sense that you can emulate any computing machine that man has dreamed up in the past, and will dream up in the future. Alan Turing figured this out back in the day, but that's a different article.

It also turns out that only having memory, conditions, and GOTO is a tedious way to go through life. Programs built on such a simple infrastructure are hard to organize and difficult to understand. What you'd like to be able to do is organize your program into smaller bits called functions and have these functions be executable from other bits of code. That is, you'd like to be able to have the computer save your spot in whatever code was currently executing and jump somewhere else to do something, and then automatically jump back to where you were in the first place. Why would you want this? It turns out that most programs need perform many common tasks, like reading and writing files, or making connections to the Internet. Rather than making every program implement these tasks separately, if we have this "jump then return" mechanism, we can write the code once, and then whenever we need to use it, we can just jump over into that code and then return when it is finished.

Happily, most computers implement just such a instruction. In the venerable 6502 chip, that instruction was called "JSR" which means "jump to subroutine" which is a weird way of saying "jump over there, but save your place so you can return." The 6502 had another instruction called "RTS" which basically just jumped to the last place you saved.

Most programming languages have similar high level mechanisms for building functions or procedures that use these hardware instructions. Typically a function is defined to take a few arguments that the caller provides. These can be used to change the behavior of the function as it executes. So, the function you call to handle the fact that the user just touched a button might take the name of the button that was pushed, so you know what command to run. Once you have hardware instructions like JSR and RTS, it's pretty easy to build up a high level notion of functions. You just need to define conventions for how to manage arguments and results, which is tedious, but not complicated.

Early in the history of computing it was thought that function calls (or procedure calls, as Guy Steele calls them) were relatively expensive. It turns out that they were just implemented badly. This fact is the main subject of the paper referenced above. Steele notes that when you think about procedure calls correctly, all you are really doing is saving some state and then using GOTO to jump to a new place in your program. In 1977, this was a pretty radical idea.

Reading the paper, you might now think, "well, that explains the whole 'Debunking the Expensive Procedure Call Myth' thing, but what about 'The Ultimate GOTO'". Well, that's a longer story.

Functions are so useful that a bunch of clever language designers, including Guy Steele, got to thinking about whether you could define an entire programming language that was completely centered around the idea of function evaluation rather than the more typical "set this value in this memory location and go run that code" programming structure that we are all more used to. To this end, they began to play around with a simple abstract notation called the "lambda calculus" that expresses function evaluation in a way that seems completely different from the operational jump and return dance that I described above.

In the lambda calculus, you write a function in terms of the values that it takes as arguments and the values that it returns as results. The "lambda" in the lambda calculus is an operator that binds names to values. So, you might write a simple function like this:

lambda (x) . (x + 1)

This takes a single argument "x" and returns the value that you get by evaluating the expression "x+1". In other words, it adds 1 to the argument. You might write something like

(lambda (x) . (x + 1)) 10

which will evaluate the function we wrote with the argument "10". First, the value "10" is bound to the argument "x". Then we evaluate the expression in the function itself, and we get 11.

Surprisingly, it turns out that if all you have is some rules for binding and evaluation and a few primitive functions, you can take any program at all and translate it into the lambda calculus. But that's a subject for a course in theoretical computer science. Not so surprisingly, actually writing programs in lambda calculus gets tedious quickly. As with the primitive machine language, you need some higher level languages that let you organize programs into smaller bits that are more easily understood. One such language is called Scheme and happens to be the one that Guy Steele was interested in at the time he wrote his paper.

Scheme programs look a lot like lambda calculus. The function above might be written like this

(define add-one (lambda (x) (+ x 1)))

Then when you evaluate the expression

(add-one 10)

you'd get back the value 11. Easy. Scheme defines various rules for binding values to arguments, and you can think of the evaluation engine as just a fancy and more featureful version of the simple lambda calculus.

One of the more novel ideas implemented in Scheme was the notion that functions themselves would be manipulated as primitive values in the language. This is a natural outgrowth of the language's basis in the lambda calculus. Consider the code above. What we are really doing there is taking the name add-one and binding it to a value which is the function defined by the lambda expression. There are some tricky mechanical issues involved in implementing a mechanism like this. The main issue is that you need a way to capture bindings for all names that appear in the body of the function, even those that are not defined as arguments to the function. I'm not going to get into the details of where such bindings come from, or exactly how you implement this capture scheme. Let's just assume that we have a magic box that does the right thing, and let's call that box a "closure".

In other words, an expression like (lambda (x) (...)) constructs a special object which first captures bindings for all the names in the body of the function and then transfers control of the program to the function itself. But wait. That sounds a lot like the simple procedure call mechanism that we defined on our simple memory and GOTO machine. In the context of this paper, the phrase "The Ultimate GOTO" is used to illustrate that while procedure calls and GOTOs seem very different, in fact they are not.

But there is more to it that this.

Recall how our simple abstract machine implements function calls:

  1. Save values for arguments.

  2. Save location to return to.

  3. GOTO the code for the function

  4. At the end of the function, save the return value of the function and then GOTO the location you saved in step 2.

Suppose we think about this process slightly differently:

  1. Save values for arguments

  2. Save a function value that represents a function to call with the result

  3. GOTO the code for the function

  4. At the end of the function, call the function value you saved in (2) with the result of your computation as an argument.

The new forms of steps (2) and (4) seem on the surface to be different than before. But really they are not. As we have already seen, function calls and GOTOs are really the same thing. It turns out that this is a pretty old idea, and the theorists call the function that we create in step (2) a continuation.

In later papers on Scheme, Steele and others observed that you could create very efficient implementations of Scheme by structuring the runtime to transform procedures and procedure calls into what they called "continuation passing style". All this means is that all of the functions are transformed into something like the second form above. In other words, all of the code in a Scheme program is twisted around so that all the function calls have an extra argument that is a function value that represents "where to go next."

But, Scheme programs are nothing but function calls, so this means that the "where to go next" function is always available to the runtime. It's sitting right there, since we created it to implement the function call in the first place. Therefore, Scheme also defined a special construct called "call with current continuation" (or call/cc) that allowed the programmer to explicitly capture the "where to go next" function and pass it wherever you wanted. When called, this captured function would restore the state of the program to be exactly the same as it was when the function was captured. This is a fantastically powerful and psychotic mechanism. Having access to the current continuation lets you capture and manipulate the control state of your programs any way you want. Iteration, recursion, exception handling, multiple threads of control and any other control construct that you can imagine can be implemented using this mechanism. In other words, lambda really is the ultimate GOTO.

Extra Notes

Scheme is not the only language that has call/cc. ML is another famous one.

Closures have made their way into more mainstream languages: Java, C#, and Objective C among others all have constructs that are similar to closures. As far as I know, there isn't really anything like continuations outside of the functional languages, although setjmp/longmp in C is similar, but not as "clean". This is probably for the best, since esoteric mechanisms for creating odd flows of control tend to be used only for evil.

I had always assumed that the idea of the continuation had originated with the work on Lisp and Scheme, but I was wrong. It's actually a much older idea, as discussed in this paper by John Reynolds, the notable programming languages researcher at CMU. The use of continuations in implementing Scheme is discussed in this paper by Sussman and Steele.

Who said weblogs aren't educational?

The Defense of Duffer's Drift

2010-12-19 · by peterb

The Defence of Duffer's DriftThe Defence of Duffer's Drift by E. D. Swinton
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The Defense of Duffer's Drift is a fascinating little book that anyone can read in a short afternoon. Written by Capt. Ernest Dunlop Swinton around the dawn of the 20th century, it is a meditation on small unit tactics, based on experience gained in the Boer War.

The most fascinating thing about the book is its insouciant tone. The protagonist, Lieutenant Backsight Forethought, has a dream in which he is given command of 50 men and told to defend the ford to a river. Arriving with his men, he sets up a perimeter, is generally irresponsible, and the unit is subsequently attacked by the enemy with disastrous results.

The next night, Lieutenant BF has the same dream — only this time, he remembers what he did wrong the last time, and so corrects those mistakes. Again, his unit is attacked and is lost, although slightly less ignominiously than before. This Groundhog Day scenario plays itself out six times. Each time it is replayed, BF learns something new, and helpfully summarizes it for the reader, ("Do not, if avoidable, be in tents when bullets are ripping through them; at such times a hole in the ground is worth many tents.")

Dunlop obviously intended the book for a military audience; it reads as though he wrote it for his friends. The prose is conversational, easygoing, and unpretentious. Whether the tactical lessons in the book are still valuable and operative I am not qualified to judge. But as a method of getting into the mindset of a turn-of-the-century British infantry officer, it's quite effective.

The book is available for free as an eBook from Project Gutenberg here.

View all my reviews

Close Combat - The Matrix Versions

2010-12-23 · by peterb

And, as the cloak of winter settles comfortably around our shoulders, my thoughts turn to the failed Nazi invasion of Russia, kicked off with Operation Barbarossa.

My thoughts turn this way because I have, of late, been playing (and re-playing) some of the Matrix Games re-implementations of the classic tactical squad-level World War II games in the Close Combat series. Specifically, I've been playing Close Combat: Cross of Iron and Close Combat: The Longest Day.

Cross of Iron is a remake of Close Combat III: The Russian Front. The Longest Day is a remake of Close Combat V: Invasion Normandy. Both of them now run well on modern Windows PCs (but regrettably, not on Mac OS X. Yet?)

Close Combat and I have a troubled history. The sad truth is that when it comes to computer games, I often lack patience. This ends up expressing itself in negative ways when I play games that require sneaking, or games that require "leapfrogging" tactics. The way you are supposed to play Close Combat is to carefully move your squads in position one at a time, maintaining overlapping fields of fire, so that one (or more) squads are laying down suppressing fire while another squad is moving from cover to cover. Then, when your moving squad reaches cover, it starts a suppressing fire so your other squads can move.

Back when I played this game in the '90s, I was usually able to maintain that for about 3.5 minutes, at which point I'd say "Eh, what's the worst that could happen?" and I'd move all my squads forward at once, at which point they would all be brutally mowed down in a hail of machine gun fire and exploding artillery shells.

I have mellowed a bit since then, and perhaps my time playing the (turn-based) Combat Mission games have given me a greater appreciation of the importance of leapfrogging. So that doesn't happen as much anymore. But the temptation is still there.

I think part of this tension comes from the inability to pause the game while issuing orders. The ostensible reason for this, according to one of the original developers, is that it "ruined the game":

We actually did useability tests on live subjects, with a pause feature in the game. We saw the players issue a lot of orders, let the game run for maybe 10 seconds, pause, issue more orders, etc. This destroyed the whole feel of the game.

To which I reply, "Poppycock." As I've said with regard to another game design issue, that of savepoints, the player is better able to manage their own happiness than you, the game designer. There are a thousand ways to allow pausing for orders while still keeping the pace up (the Combat Mission method, of "issue orders, then run for an entire minute" is a fine example). The real reason Close Combat doesn't allow pausing is that the developers couldn't make up their mind whether they were making a single-player or a multi-player game, and in this particular instance they let the multi-player use case drive the design. Since I never play multi-player real-time games that aren't called Counterstrike or Left 4 Dead, I am happy to dismiss this as a completely wrong decision.

Of the two games, Cross of Iron is the better one, in my opinion. The Longest Day tries to provide a strategic campaign mode that allows you to decide which mission to take on next, but somehow that just ends up making me, personally, lose focus. Cross of Iron, on the other hand, is more linear. Which, it turns out, is not a disadvantage, because it's a wonderful way to tell the story of the Eastern Front. Plus, I like hearing my troops speak in Russian.

Close CombatThe graphics and sound are more or less exactly the same as they were in the original release. The player still has a somewhat dissociated, top-down view of the battlefield. The suffering of your troops is vivid, yet distant: the man crawling in agony towards cover might as well be a wounded ant. It is, truth to tell, somewhat unnerving.

The gameplay is straightforward. You can right-click on any squad to bring up a menu of possible actions. Typical actions might include sneak, move, move fast, deploy smoke, and fire, among others. Most battles are won not through direct attrition, but by breaking the enemys' morale and forcing them to flee the battlefield.

Before each battle, you are given an opportunity to rest, refit, or recruit new squads of different types, both infantry and armor. The game also models command and control through the presence of leaders. Men fighting within the command radius of an officer fight harder, react faster, and are generally more resilient. Losing an officer, often, can quickly turn into losing a battle.

If there is anything surprising about this entire genre, it's that in 15 years no one has created a game that models squad-based combat better than Close Combat. Combat Mission comes closest, but it is lacking polish in critical places. From my perspective, Close Combat is still the leader of the pack.

Close Combat: Cross of Iron and Close Combat: The Longest Day, published by Matrix Games. Windows, $26.99 each.

Disclosure statement: Matrix Games graciously provided Tea Leaves with review copies of these games.

A Battle Lost Through Attrition

2010-12-31 · by peterb

Hardcore operational-level computer war games have a serious problem: most of them are unplayable.

Not all war games, obviously. And "unplayable" means different things to different people. A game that crashes whenever you start it up, for example, is literally unplayable. I mean something softer, here: I mean that many games which should be brilliant, which should capture the hearts and minds of every war gamer on the planet are instead consigned to a dusty corner of the market by unacceptably primitive user interfaces, obtuse mechanics, and poor communication of results.

"War game", in the context of this article, means a combat simulation, turn-based or real-time, that models a hypothetical or historical conflict but that strives to achieve "realism" in addition to entertainment.

An "operational level" computer war game is a game that models conflict typically at a level between battalion, division, or corps in size, and where lines of supply are typically an issue. A game where individual soldiers or squads are maneuvering and setting up lanes of fire, such as Close Combat, is tactical in scale. In an operational game, you're moving entire divisions around the front.

What sparked my desire to discuss this is a trio of games that I've been evaluating lately. All three games are published by Matrix: Gary Grigsby's War in the East, Norm Kroger's The Operational Art of War III, and Advanced Tactics World War II. This article is not meant to be an in-depth review, but rather an exploration of some of the ideas that occurred to me while I played these games.

Advanced Tactics brought some of these thoughts to the surface. The game is brilliant, but here is the thing: the UI is so tragic that I needed a week off from work to discover that the game is brilliant.

This is a problem. Perhaps it is just a problem with me, but I doubt it. I have had more exposure to war games than your average computer game player. I think it's a problem with the game. A New Yorker interview with Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo's lead game designer, puts the issue squarely in the spotlight:

Earlier, Miyamoto, a bluegrass fanatic, had suggested that learning to play a game is like learning to play a musical instrument. “Take the guitar,” he said. “Some people, when they stumble over how to accurately place their fingers in an F chord, they actually give it up. But once you learn how to play an F chord you become more deeply absorbed in playing the guitar.” The F chord, as he sees it, is a kind of bridge between indifference and pleasure. “If the bridge is too easy to pass by, it’s called ‘entertainment.’ If it’s rather difficult, it can be called ‘hobby'.

If we continue the analogy, the war games I'm talking about are asking you to play an F chord but, for the best sound quality, would like you to put a new set of strings on the guitar every time you play it.

The knee-jerk Internet forum response is to claim that the UIs are this complex because the underlying subject matter is complex. This is false. The subject matter is complex, of course, but the failures of the operational-level games are not due to this particularly complexity. They're not even really game design failures. They are failures of software development. Let's get specific.

A Brief History Of Not Dating Girls

The operational games I'm describing derive their look and feel from the classic "hex and counter" war games of the 1970s, published by companies such as Avalon-Hill and SPI. Those games varied widely in complexity, but once you got past the fiddly aspect of having to manipulate lots of tiny counters, 95% of them boiled down to three simple rules:

These games were not without flaws — in particular, the "I move all my pieces, then you move all your pieces" turn order, while simple, meant that the non-moving player would have time to go out for lunch (and possibly dinner) while waiting for his turn to play. But most of these games, with some notable exceptions, tried hard to abstract out the details of combat for the purposes of playability.

At first blush, a computer implementation of this sort of game should only get better. After all, now the computer can tell me exactly where I can and can't move, and I no longer have to look up the results on a combat results table. In fact, you can play literal translations of these games at HexWar, and they are better.

Alternatively, instead of using the computer to just automate board game mechanics, developers can increase the complexity of those mechanics. In theory, this is a reasonable choice. When done properly, it makes the game deeper without making it more confusing. But often, the results are simply depressing.

Those Who Can't, Don't Teach

Every war game should have an in-game tutorial. Advanced Tactics, War in the East, and The Operational Art of War don't.

This, for me, is such a basic element of good game design that I'm constantly surprised when I see it violated. A game without a tutorial is like a movie without popcorn; like sex without foreplay; like a hamburger without French fries. A game without a tutorial is incomplete.

Sure, let me skip the tutorial if I'm sure I don't need it. But in a sufficiently complex game the tutorial can do so much heavy lifting that to skip it is madness. It can introduce you to the user interface. It can acquaint you with the basic controls of the game. It can allow you, as a software developer, to hide more advanced controls and still be confident that the user will be told where to find them.

All three of the games I'm looking at in this article do "Tutorial by manual". This means that they provide a "tutorial scenario" which you use by reading the manual and following along. This is inadequate on multiple levels. First, it means that you are told what to do instead of being shown what to do, which is less effective. Second, it opens the possibility that the player may go off-script. Going off-script is a vital part of learning how to play a game well, but is a big mistake during the early parts of a tutorial. Many games split the difference by tightly scripting the beginning few turns of a tutorial, and then at some point telling the player "OK, from here on out you are on your own." Lastly, I have never seen a manual-based tutorial that adequately helped focus the player's attention on what was important, as opposed to what is simply present.

Advanced Tactics also ships with several "training scenarios" which set up simplified battles. For example, the first battle is on a featureless plain, with identical numbers of troops, but with one side using armor and the other using infantry. The next scenario is the same, only this time in forested terrain and giving the infantry player bazookas. The third scenario introduces artillery, and so on. This set of teaching scenarios did more to teach me about the game than the manual-driven tutorial. In my fantasy world, these scenarios would have been presented as an in-game tutorial that also introduced me to the various UI elements I needed to use to (for example) perform artillery attacks. The tutorials would have explained the effect that being out of supply has on a unit's readiness. The tutorial would have explained how to generate political points and how to use them to create new headquarters, and how to transfer staff between them. As it is, I groped through the dark, eventually figuring all these things out.

Despite what the abused customers of ultra-grognard developers might tell you, figuring these things out by yourself does not make you a better person.

Information Wants To Stay The Hell Out Of My Way

Imagine this scenario. You are the Supreme Allied Commander for Allied forces in Europe during World War II. You walk into your office and your aide-de-camp says "Good morning, General Eisenhower. Your general staff awaits you in the conference rooom to discuss Operation Overlord."

"Excellent. I'll be right there."

"One moment, sir. Before that, you should be aware that Fox company of the 506th has run out of condoms in their survival kits."

"Uh, well, get them replacement kits."

"Very good sir. Also, a truck was destroyed in the Ardennes. Should I requisition a replacement?"

"Yes."

"I'll get right on it. A number of toothbrushes have gone missing in a training camp in North Carolina. How many staff sergeants would you like to assign to investigate the crime?"

At this point, in real life, Eisenhower would court-martial his aide-de-camp for being a Nazi spy.

There is important information, and there is unimportant information. Unimportant information should be completely invisible unless specifically asked for. If it becomes important, show it to me then. Some designers of operational games seem to be completely unable to decide how to prioritize the information they show you: large tables full of numbers, all in the same font size, are the order of the day.

This extends to user interface, too. Consider this, the "command bar" in Advanced Tactics:

Considering just the items in the middle of the bar, we've got Move, Transfer resources, Strategic Transfer, separate buttons for various air and sea options, buttons to change the headquarters of the selected unit, buttons to display the supply overlay, and a number of others. All of these buttons are the same size. Buttons can sometimes be disabled, but are still present even when irrelevant (why even show me the naval subformation button in a scenario without ships or water?)

Clicking on an enemy unit gives a similar-but-different view of various options that might or might not be relevant to the current situation. Since the icons are fairly small targets, the only way to find out what they do (before you have memorized them) is to hover the mouse briefly over each of them. And then go read the manual.

Here's another example: this is the control panel that you use to control units in Norm Kroger's Operational Art of War III: kroger

So in the world of TOAW, "Next unit" is as important as "resolve battle" which is as important as "show/hide hex grid" which is as important as the twenty-five other miscellaneous options, some of which you will never use. It is to weep.

Again, let's be clear: this interface is not hard to use because the problem space is hard. This interface is hard to use because it is poorly designed.

My contention is that it is poorly designed because of a feedback loop wherein the designers never test the games with new players, so new players never play the games, because they are unplayable, so the games are only tested by people whose entire attitude is "As long as it is easier than pushing 600 cardboard chits around a paper map, it's a massive improvement!, so the designers never realize the games are unplayable.

I am complaining about this not because I don't like these games, but because I do. I love them. And sometimes, when someone you love has a serious problem that is ruining them, you have to stage an intervention.

Finding Out What the Hell Just Happened is For the Weak

In the same way that input methods for these games are not constructed with usability in mind, resolution of critical events like combat is often more confusing than enlightening. This is actually an area where Advanced Tactics performs better than most: it provides you with a graphical display of combat that, round by round, moves soldiers and equipment from a "Attacking" or "Defending" box to a "Casualty" or "Retreating" box. At least, that's what you get if you attack. If you are attacked on your turn, you just have to notice that your men are missing (unless you use the ‘history replay’ option, which still doesn't give you a clear explanation.)

The worst of the three games, as far as this aspect is concerned, is Norm Kroger's Operational Art of War III where every single enemy's turn can be fairly described as "And then, over the course of about 30 seconds, 10 attacks are resolved and you are shown an incomprehensible screen of text." I'm sure there is some way to get a higher level summary of what happened on a given turn, but I'll be hornswoggled if I can figure it out. Here's a picture of a combat results screen from TOAW III:

Combat Results - TOAW III

Consider what's going on in this dialog box. Off the top of my head:

I could go on, but I've made my point.

The most recent of the three games, Gary Grigsby’s War in the East, is in some ways the most approachable, although the subject matter, Germany’s invasion of Russia along the Eastern Front, is inherently daunting. In places the UI is almost acceptable, with buttons that look like buttons, and movement and simple attacks controlled largely by pointing and right-clicking. In other places, such as the Order of Battle screen which controls strategic force creation and reassignment, it’s typically obtuse. Even the tutorial on the issue (manual based, of course, not in-game) left me more confused than when I started. But the game tries hard to let you ignore those screens completely if you just want to follow the historical path.

It Doesn't Have To Be This Way

So what's my point? Simply this: strategic depth does not require user interface complexity. Back in the bad old days of the 1980s, many sophisticated computer users believed that GUIs were "dumbed down" interfaces, and that command-line interfaces were a prerequisite for effective use of a computer. These people were wrong, and those who believe that an inscrutable UI is necessary for a sophisticated war game are wrong. Some developers are learning this lesson, and others are still in the dark.

The main effect of an inscrutable UI is to confine interest in the software to a small, shrinking minority of users. That minority is ridiculously loyal and desperate for content, but it’s a self-limiting market and, in my opinion, an evolutionary dead end.

Only developers who figure out how to make strategically deep games that are easy to use will avoid that end. Those developers, not the ones preaching to the choir, will define the very meaning of the words “war game” in the coming century.

Wouldn't you rather be one of those developers, instead?

Advanced Tactics: World War II, ($26.99), Norm Kroger's Operational Art of War III ($26.99), and Gary Grigsby's War in the East ($79.99) are all published by Matrix Games and are available for purchase and download on their web site.

Disclosure statement: Matrix Games graciously provided Tea Leaves with review copies of these games.

Ancient Wars Game Giveaway

2011-01-06 · by peterb

For those of you who prefer velites and hastati to cannons and riflemen, Paul Bruffel, developer of HPS's Ancient Wars series of sims, is giving away copies of Punic Wars or Gallic Wars to entrants who can answer a question about ancient warfare correctly. Knowledge of their games is helpful, but not required.

The Worst Cook on the Entire Internet

2011-01-06 · by psu

The other day Mark Bittman published a short piece where he mused about three recipes that he could give you to "turn you into a cook." I thought the piece was pretty good, and agree with its basic premise. He presents three dishes that appropriately varied could be used by anyone of reasonable ability to cook enough different kinds of food to live on. In fact, it was similar in nature to my on and off series of "dinner in half an hour" articles, although I would not be so bold as to think that I thought up this idea.

Sadly, not everyone on the Internet is that smart.

Just to prove it, the worst cook on the entire Internet "reviewed" one of the recipes, a simple chicken stir fry. The result sort of speaks for itself, but I will interject two points.

  1. I thought that I no longer had the capacity to underestimate the general incompetence of others, but I see I was wrong. Two hours to cut up meat and vegetables?

  2. Note how she also doesn't understand "amortization."

Here are my hints to aspiring cooks who are just as incompetent as the above writer:

  1. Jesus, practice a little. If you can't chop an onion in (say) a minute and a half, just give up. Go out to eat, what do I care?

  2. Learn some basic life skills, like time and cost management.

  3. Stop writing on the Internet. If you don't know what a god damned button mushroom is, you should really go back to school and grow up a little before trying to be gainfully employed in the real world.

Ok I'm done.

10 Things to Eat In Pittsburgh Before You are Dead

2011-01-14 · by psu

The idea for this list came to me while I was at the "offal night" at Legume. I also figured it would make a good piece for the annual exercise in end of year top ten lists. Well, so much for that. My personal critieria for the items on this list was a combination of "unique to Pittsburgh", "personal favorite", and simply "really good food" in about equal parts. I did also try to avoid things everyone already knows about, hence the lack of an entry for Primanti's. Sorry. Anyway, here is the list.

10. Chili and Cheese Beef Dog at the O. With onions.

Not much more to say about this. I think this is the best hot dog of its type anywhere.

9. General Tso's Chicken at Zaw's

Zaw's is the only restaurant where I will order this dish. Their sauce is perfect. The pieces of chicken are fresh and breaded/fried to order instead of being little frozen chunks of rubber.

8. Taiwanese Chunk Chicken, Rose Tea Cafe

I have been ridiculed for saying that this is the best "Thai Food" in Pittsburgh. I don't care. I see no reason to go to any number of mediocre Thai places in the city rather than just getting this.

7. Veal Cheeks plus Chocolate Cake for Dessert, Legume

I have mentioned this already. The best slow cooked meat I've ever had in Pittsburgh. Also, the only flourless chocolate cake I will eat. Simply excellent.

6. Bacon and Egg Pizza, Dinette

Dinette changes its pizzas around a lot, but anytime there is one with lardons and eggs, you have to get it. In my view, best evidence yet that there is a god is the fact that the egg and the pizza crust both take the same amount of time to become perfectly cooked.

5. Cortado or Hand Pour Coffee, 21st street coffee

The Cortado is the most perfectly balanced espresso drink that I've yet had. In addition, the hand drip coffee that 21st street has been doing is consistently better than any other brewed coffee anywhere. In fact it will make you question why you buy drip coffee anywhere else.

4. Lasagna, Piccolo Forno

Hand made noodles, awesome bechamel sauce, and the portion is enough to feed a small football team. Pete still thinks this is wrong but I don't care.

3. Grilled Sardines, Dish

I'll say it again: grilled sardines at Dish. The braised onions on the side make this dish. Their mango cake is also to die for.

2. Grilled Cheese Sandiwch, Kelly's Bar

The canonically perfect grilled cheese. Absolutely balanced. Perfectly prepared.

1. Soup and Sushi, Penn Avenue Fish Market

This is especially yummy as a late breakfast. I suggest the Ronnie Roll as your sushi. Also particularly excellent when they have good oysters.

Honorable mentions

Bacon and eggs appetizer at spoon, the cheeseburgers at Tessaro's, the French pastry at Chatellier's in Millvale, the "Filthy-a-delphia" burger at BRGR (along with a Dude Abides shake), the Mexican hot chocolate at Mon Aimee, Uncle Sam's ultra cheesesteak, and the ma po tofu at the New How Lee.

Post Mortem

2011-01-16 · by psu

The Patriots were unceremoniously removed from the playoff "tournament" tonight. In retrospect, it's clear that the bye week did them no favors. They were slow, lethargic, out of sync, emotionally flat and pretty much all around soft. The situation was made worse by the fact that they also outsmarted themselves a few times, and each time it lead to being in a deeper hole. Oh well, that's how football goes. Anyway, my purpose here is not to tediously break down everything the Pats did wrong. I'm here to talk about the important part of NFL football: the commercials.

Having consumed hundreds of hours of football this year, I have observed many patterns in the commercials. The most annoying one is how the major television networks insist on filling the ad time for their football games with promos for shows that have a high body count. These shows tend to be shown in the later parts of prime time, when kids are in bed. But, football games are shown in the afternoon, which is supposed to be the "general audiences" part of the day. And yet here we are bombarded by ads for crime lab shows that show a great obsession with people who are dead or in the process of becoming dead. I say the league should fine these shows at least as much as they have fined, say, the defense of the Pittsburgh Steelers. I mean come on.

The more humorous side of the commercial landscape is that there are really only six commercials that are ever shown during a football game. These fall into three main groups:

Group 1: Ads that play on the psychosexual insecurities of middle aged men. Here we have those Miller Lite ads where men are metaphorically undressed for being vaguely feminine, or maybe even homosexual. Or we have the soft focus slow motion ads where men use the power of diamonds to completely melt the hearts of women who would otherwise think they were douchebags. Finally, there are the Viagra and Cialis ads, where older men (all of whom look like Brett Favre!) are shown the magical powers of modern pharmaceuticals to transform their front yards into a tropical landscape where for some reason there are white porcelain tubs on every beach.

Group 2: Ads that play to the psyche of men who are too masculine to be insecure. These are either car ads (usually muscle cars), truck ads (usually American trucks), and all the other beer ads where beer can instantly make everyone young, in shape, and good looking.

Group 3: Ads for rich people, dorks, or rich dorks. These are for investments, insurance, luxury cars (usually German), and Apple products (usually the iPad).

So, if you were keeping score, besides local ads and the above mentioned TV promos, here are all the ads you ever see during a football game:

  1. Miller Lite.
  2. Viagra.
  3. Jewelry for your girlfriend.
  4. Cars and trucks.
  5. iPad.
  6. Insurance or other financial services.

That's it. Well, OK, there were also four ads for movies and two or three video games. But those do not count because they were not played more than 150 times. Hmmm, I also forgot McDonalds. But that's not really worth talking about.

Maybe the Super Bowl will be better this year. But I doubt it.

With the Old Breed

2011-01-22 · by peterb

With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and OkinawaWith the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa by E.B. Sledge
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

"With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa" is E.B. Sledge's autobiography of his role in two unspeakably bloody battles in the Pacific theater of World War II. At Peleliu alone the Marines suffered losses in excess of 10%; the Japanese on the island 11,000 strong, were annihilated to nearly a man.

Many, if not most, of the most storied books about war come from one of two perspectives: from that of the officers who lead it, or from historians writing after the fact. With the Old Breed is written from the point of view of an enlisted infantryman. This fact suffuses the entire book with a particular bitterness that, once read, is instantly recognizable. The poems of Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon, and the memoirs of Robert Graves, written thirty years earlier, have the same anger. There is patriotism here, and a sense that Sledge is fighting in a good cause, but it is coupled with an anger against his own officers, and indeed against the whole bloody fact of war, that defies any simplistic catcall of "my country right or wrong."

Sledge's description of the enlisted man's relationship with the officer class runs through the narrative like a thread. It's not that there are no good officers - Sledge tells the story of many officers, some excellent, some terrible - but he recognizes that the fundamental job of an officer is, when necessary, to get his men killed.

"Yeah, some goddamn glory-happy officer wants another medal, I guess, and the guys get shot up for it. The officer gets the medal and goes back to the States, and he's a big hero. Hero, my ass; gettin' troops slaughtered aint' being no hero," said a veteran bitterly."

Sledge recognizes that this isn't as simple as an infantryman might make it -- "Actually, in combat our officers caught just as much hell as the enlisted men. They also were burdened with responsibility." But the tension between officers and enlisted men always lies behind every event retold in the book. This becomes particularly evident in Okinawa, at which point many of the enlisted men are veterans, and many of the officers are green. At the height of the Okinawa campaign, Sledge writes of a fabulously tense moment when a veteran corporal on Sledge's mortar team disobeys a direct order to hold fire (telling his lieutenant to go to hell in the process).

The writing in With the Old Breed is not, as they say, Great Writing; that is one way in which it differs from the elegance and eloquence of Owen, Sassoon, and Graves. it is simple writing, with little to recommend it stylistically. But that's not really the point of the book. Its status as a detailed firsthand account of the brutality and viciousness of the war in the pacific is enough to guarantee it a place on the bookshelves of great books about World War II.

Brutality is a theme Sledge treats with repeatedly, and explicitly. The brutalism is not just that which is inflicted on them by the enemy (and Sledge does not play down the visceral and racial aspects of this), but is a process that leads both ally and enemy alike down into a race to the bottom. "My emotions solidified into rage and a hatred for the Japanese beyond anything I ever had experienced. From that moment on I never felt the least pity or compassion for them no matter what the circumstances.") It is this moral decay that informs Sledge's bitterness about what the war did to him and his fellow soldiers.

The war had so brutalized us that it was beyond belief.

I noticed gold teeth glistening brightly between the lips of several of the dead Japanese lying around us. Harvesting gold teeth was one facet of stripping enemy dead that I hadn't practiced so far. But stopping beside a corpse with a particularly tempting number of shining crowns, I took out my kabar [knife] and bent over to make the extractions.

A hand grasped me by the shoulder, and I straightened up to see who it was. "What are you gonna do, Sledgehammer?" asked Doc Caswell. His expression was a mix of sadness and reproach as he looked intently at me."

"Just thought I'd collect some gold teeth," I replied.

"Don't do it."

"Why not, Doc?"

"You don't want to do that sort of thing. What would your folks think if they knew?"

"Well, my dad's a doctor, and I bet he'd think it was kinda interesting." I replied, bending down to resume my task.

"No! The germs, Sledgehammer! You might get germs from them."

I stopped and looked inquiringly at Doc and said, "Germs? Gosh, I never thought of that."
...
Reflecting on the episode after the war, I realized that Doc Caswell didn't really have germs in mind. He was a good friend and a fine, genuine person whose sensitivity hadn't been crushed out by the war. He was merely trying to help me retain some of mine and not become completely callous and harsh."

The book is a bracing tonic to a civilian political culture whose contemporary knowledge of patriotism and warfare is limited to saccharine flag-waving of the most infantile sort. Sledge volunteered for the Marines when he could have sought a college deferment. He believed in what he was doing, and went to the fight willingly. But he never ignores what the war cost him, and his comrades, in human terms. Beyond the loss of life and limb, the war took away people's souls, and Sledge writes on that loss on almost every page.

With the Old Breed is not the book to read if you want an overview of the strategic and tactical aspects of the battles of Peleliu and Okinawa. But it is unparalleled as a personal testimony of the filth, misery, and utter wretchedness of war. It is hard to read. And that might be the most important reason to read it.

View all my reviews

Game Over

2011-01-24 · by psu

Uncharted 2 came out for the Playstation 3 a couple of years ago. It is a solid entry in the "large scale, high production quality action and adventure" genre that is popular with the bigger developers these days. The game does many things excellently. In fact, in many ways the game is better at what it does than any title in recent memory. Thus it is all the more confusing why the developers feel the need to prove that they hate you and want you to quit playing their game and just watch the cut scenes on You Tube.

I had originally ignored Uncharted 2 because when I played the demo of the first Uncharted game I found the setting to be a pedestrian and the controls to be sloppy at best and difficult not to hate at worst. When I finally got around to trying the second game, I was happy to find out that the controls were much better. In fact, everything was much better. Here are some things that Uncharted 2 does that are simply excellent:

  1. Top notch dialog and voice acting. Voice acting is never that convincing in video games, but they come close here.

  2. Superbly rendered environments.

  3. Integration of gameplay into "action" cut scenes. They don't do it too much, but the scheme used in the opening sequence, for example, where you climb a train falling off a cliff is pretty cool. Makes you want to play more.

  4. Music and sound design.

There is almost nothing in the production values of this video game to complain about. Nothing will put you off. Nothing will make you throw up your hands in disbelief at the arrogance and stupidity of the development studio. Naughty Dog has done a great job.

Unfortunately, my main complaints about the game are all around gameplay and the overall design. Here, sadly, the developers constantly give you reasons to quit. It's like they wanted to sprinkle a series of "game over" signs throughout the game's world and make you prove that you could get past each one of them one by one. There are the levels where you have to see the correct 4 pixel wide feature in order to climb a wall and escape. There are the timed platforming sequences that require controls that are tuned to the level of Mario Galaxy, which, sad to say, is far beyond what the control scheme in Uncharted 2 can provide. And of course there are level bosses, mid-bosses and final bosses. Each one of these design elements is the developer saying "I don't want you to see the rest of my video game unless you can perform this tedious and basically useless task." That is, "do this or it's game over."

It is perplexing to me why games that are otherwise excellent insist on doing this. Even the best games, it seems to me, make it their business to make us work for the right to enjoy the fruits of the game developer's sweat and blood. I have examples from Uncharted 2, but playing through this game reminded me of my experience with another excellent game with an infuriating game over sign in it. Recall that about six years ago Pete and I both played through parts of Prince of Persia: The Sands of TIme and both stopped at precisely the same spot. Here is my description of the sequence:

  1. Run up a wall and hit a switch to make a pillar appear.
  2. Run up the pillar and swing on to a pole.
  3. Jump over to that platform over there
  4. Wall run over to that other platform.
  5. Jump down and crawl around to that ledge.
  6. Run into the scary spacey area and drink the magic water.
  7. Swing through 3 poles to get over to that other ledge.
  8. Evade the knives of doom.
  9. Wall run under the saws, hit switch on the floor then wall run back under the saws to get through a door before it shuts.
  10. Pull out a lever which opens a door one level above me.
  11. Evade the knives of doom.
  12. Run up the wall to hit a switch which brings up a pillar so I can jump up to it and climb this shaft.
  13. At the top of the shaft, wall run through the hall over another set of saws and slide under the door which is closing.

After all this, the Prince is then treated to a long fight with several zombies. This fight is much harder than the zombie fights that have come before it, and you will die several times before you figure out how to finish it.

Here again we have a game that presents you with a fantastic world, great platforming mechanics, and what I am told is wonderful writing. But in the middle of it all the developers feel the need to put this huge "game over" sign right in your path and make you jump over it before you can see any of the rest.

In Uncharted 2 this happens at least three or four times. The most egregious example comes about half way through the game where the game throws you into a long and drawn out set piece in which you navigate from the back of a train to the front, fighting goons as you go. This piece requires that you die many times to figure out the timing, die several more times to figure out the right way to engage in the combat and then die several more times while you figure out just the right sequence of button pushes you need to use to kill the boss at the end of the train. As in Prince of Persia, the checkpoints are also suddenly further apart. And like Prince of Persia the combat suddenly gets harder when you reach the boss guy.

After my fifth try at the boss, I went and looked up my old article on Prince of Persia because I recognized the feeling of rage and frustration that was glowing in the back of my brain. I let the game idle for fifteen minutes while looking up how to fight the guy in the GameFAQ (always a true sign of developer failure). I knew that if I turned the game off at this point I might as well throw it in the trash. Then I got lucky and knocked the guy out on my next try. I did nothing different. It just worked this time where before it had not.

There were several more sequences like this in the later parts of the game. Most involved needing to climb on things quickly. The problem being that the platforming controls feel more like Drunk Mario than Mario Galaxy. Nathan Drake does not jump when you tell him to, does not always run or climb in an intuitive direction, often climbs things you wanted him to jump on or jumps off of things you wanted him to climb. Finally, he does nothing of this sort very quickly or smoothly. This can make for slow going when precision is required.

As is usual with this sort of production, the game ends with a tedious and pointless Boss Fight. This one is at least easy. Or it would be if you could keep Nathan from continually leaping around in the wrong direction. No matter. The pattern is easy to figure out, and things are over soon enough.

Then, as if they wanted to emphasize their hatred of your entire being, Naughty Dog ends the game with yet another shitty platforming sequence that puts the weaknesses of their control scheme into stark relief. Yet again they decide to tell you that you are not allowed to finish their game, even after you have finished it. It's a final insult in a a game that has dragged on far too long. I wonder how many people put the controller down after falling off that last platform for the fifteenth time and just threw the Blu-Ray in a fire.

In the end and against my better judgement I got past the last game over. But rather than looking back on the experience with a sense of pleasure or excitement, I just think that Naughty Dog took all of the credit that I might have given them and pissed it all away one bad decision at a time. I think game developers need to reassess their approach to pacing and difficulty in games whose major purpose is delivering narrative. Big narrative games are almost universally too long, too tedious, and get too difficult in their later stages. I even played Uncharted 2 on easy, to no avail.

Unsurprisingly, I think the template for how things should be done is found in Portal. Here is the only game in recent memory with perfect pacing, a smooth difficulty progression, no filler, no tedious sloppy bullshit thrown in for the sake of "variety" and most of all only a single Boss Fight which was not too stupid. Portal stands out because all you remember of the game is the good stuff. The game does not hit you over the head with the bad stuff over and over again until you hate it. Unlike most other games, it was allowed to remain a tightly paced five or six hours instead of being turned into a ten hour slogfest.

Uncharted 2 does not escape this fate. Instead of remembering it fondly for its awesome environments, excellent writing, and superb production values I think the average player will be remembering which game over sign he stopped at. It's too bad that all that excellence will ultimately be overshadowed by what Naughty Dog did wrong.

All the Details

2011-02-02 · by psu

A few of weeks ago in a fit of rage I lit into some Internet moron for what I thought were the following offenses:

  1. Not being able to follow simple directions from Mark Bittman about how to make a simple stir fry.

  2. Drastically overestimating the cost of the endeavor, being unfamiliar with the notion of "amortization".

In retrospect perhaps I was a bit unfair to the poor woman. It became clear to me that Bittman had left out a lot of important details that experienced cooks tend to take for granted. Since I am a software engineer, dealing with apparently insignificant details is my professional business, so I thought maybe I could help clear things up. So here is a simple stir fry recipe with every single possible detail included, so you can get it right the first time and then repeat it later to amortize your efforts.

You will need the following non-food items:

  1. A kitchen stove with one working burner.

  2. A good chef's knife. You can get a decent one fairly cheaply at a restaurant supply store.

  3. While you are there, get a 12 inch non-stick skillet as well, with a lid. Wearever makes a good one that will last you a long time.

  4. One mixing bowl, medium sized.

  5. A good cutting board. I like wood, but those new ones made out of recycled skateboards are OK too.

  6. If you want rice, get a rice cooker.

  7. A large serving platter.

You will need the following food items:

  1. 3/4lb flank steak. This comes in a nice slab that is easy to slice.

  2. 2 tablespoons of soy sauce.

  3. 2 tablespoons of sherry, or white wine, or red wine. If you have no wine, I'm not sure what to do for you. I wonder if other booze would work. Maybe beer. Or whiskey.

  4. 1 or 2 teaspoons of corn starch. You might have to buy a whole box.

  5. Some napa cabbage. The best thing is to get about four of the mini-cabbages at the Chinese stores. These are the best because they are the easiest to cut up. One of the worst things, in retrospect, about the Bittman recipe was that he told you to use broccoli, which is the single worst sort of vegetable to prep for stir fry. If you can't find those, get a normal sized napa cabbage. one will probably be big enough. If you feel like being adventurous you can also use any of the following: baby bok choy, baby chinese broccoli, broccolini, bean sprouts, or almost anything else that can be cut up small and cook relatively quickly.

  6. 2 cups of rice for the rice cooker.

  7. Some water.

  8. Salt and pepper, a large pinch of each.

  9. Optional: garlic and ginger diced really small.

  10. Some cooking oil. It doesn't really matter what kind.

First, start the rice. Follow the directions in the manual for how much water to add. Turn on the cooker.

Next, prep the steak. Usually you want to take your knife and first cut the thing in half lengthwise with the grain of the meat. The grain of the meat is easy to see. It's made up of long vertical strips. Now take each half and carefully slice it across the grain into pieces as thin as you can make them. Put the meat in the bowl. For more tips, check out this youtube video on how to cut the beef.

Now add the soy sauce and the wine to the bowl. Mix. If you have the ginger, mix that in too.

Let that bowl sit in the kitchen while the rice cooks. If the rice has already cooked before you are done cutting, don't worry, it will keep. Move on to the cabbage.

The cabbage is really easy. If it's a small one, lay it down on the cutting board on its side and pretend that it's a gigantic sausage. Now chop the sausage into rounds about an inch thick. Then cut each one in half. Presto, small pieces of cabbage perfect for stir frying.

If it's a larger one, then peel the leaves one by one and cut each one up into little pieces. Then, when the cabbage has shrunk enough you can do the sausage thing. When you are done you should have a big pile of cabbage pieces.

OK. Now wait for the rice to cook. Go play Halo.

When the rice cooker is done, put your skillet on the stove and turn the heat on medium high to high to get it hot. While the pan heats up, add a teaspoon or two of corn starch to the meat and mix it up. When the pan is hot, add the oil and then the meat. If you are using the garlic, add it to the meat now. Turn the heat to medium high and stir the meat around. You want a constant level of smooth motion to get the pieces of meat to cook on all sides. But you can stop once in a while for a short rest. You'll be able to tell the meat is done when it loses its red color. Around the time this happens it will also start to eject some liquid into the pan resulting in a nice sauce. At this point pick up the pan and toss the meat back into the mixing bowl.

Now put the pan back on the stove and let it get hot again. Add a bit more oil and then throw in the cabbage. Don't overfill the pan. You need to leave room to move the veggies around. If you don't use all of it, don't worry, save the rest for later. Throw the pinch of salt and pepper over the cabbage and then pour in a tablespoon or two of water. You should get a nice bubbly steaming action going, and at that point cover the pan. Count to 30 seconds. Take the lid off and stir the veggies around again. Now put the lid back on again. Count to another 30 seconds and repeat. Keep doing this until the cabbage has wilted and the white parts are soft. Make sure the liquid does not burn off.

When the cabbage is done, add the meat back on top of it. Mix this around in the pan. Then turn the heat off. Put the food on the platter. Serve with rice.

Hopefully this clears up some of the details involved in making a basic stir fry dish that might have been missing from existing recipes on the Interweb. If this helps you out, let me know.

The Camera I Want: Available

2011-02-08 · by psu

For a long time on this weblog I have opined for the camera companies to make a digital version of my beloved Konica Hexar. Well, now it's time to put my money where my mouth is, because Fuji has done it. The new Fuji X100 is available for pre-oder today. It is an APS-C format digital Hexar with a nice small size, a nice fixed F2 lens and the promise of two things that have as yet eluded the smaller-than-huge-DSLR cameras:

  1. A good optical viewfinder, with focus confirmation.

  2. Reasonable performance.

Only time will tell if the shipped camera actually fulfills these promises. If it does, I guess some of my disposable income will be disposed.

The Digital Desert Island

2011-02-28 · by psu

The other day I accidentally reset the music that I sync into my iPhone. As I result, I had to wait for a long while for iTunes to copy all the music back into the phone where I had inadvertently deleted it. As it copied track after track it occured to me that the iPod/mp3/iTunes/digital music era has made something that used to be a mainstay of lazy music writing completely irrelevant: the desert island record list.

You know the drill. Suppose while traveling you are stranded on a desert island with no way back to civilization. But, this island somehow has an independent source of infinite electricity, and you happened to pack your LP record player and some albums for your trip. Of course, since you were on a trip you can only carry ten records. Which records do you take?

Or maybe this variation: you are about to be abducted by aliens, but they will let you take as much of your music collection as you can carry. Which ten records do you take along?

Back in the 1990s, these sorts of questions made sense. This is because several hundreds of hours of music would require an entire wall of storage to hold the disks. But in the new digital era, those same hundreds of hours of music now fit in your pocket. Furthermore, in less space that it used to require to hold those ten LP records you can carry a portable hard drive that can not only hold the content of all of your music, but probably all of your books, movies, magazine archives, and every web page you ever read since the web was invented. The infinite scalability of digital storage has rendered the entire question of what to take with you completely irrelevant. You just take everything. So don't worry about that desert island, or those pesky aliens. You will not be bored.

This is the fundamental theorem of digital content: scarcity does not create value. Scarcity just pisses off your customer. Your customer is now expecting to be able to buy and consume your product anywhere and any time she pleases. Furthermore, if you stand in the way of this expectation, she will just leave and find something else because she is carrying the entire library of everything ever published in her pocket.

In other words, there are no digital desert islands.

It's been my observation lately that in the modern content marketplace there are two kinds of vendors: those who understand this thought experiment and those who do not. The music industry tried to ignore this truth, and they were crushed. The movie industry is trying its hardest to ignore this truth, and it seems to me that they are probably on the way down as well. Book publishers are also being shown the truth, and reluctantly starting to play along. The only modern player that I can think of that ignores this rule and gets away with it is the NFL. But off-shore streams or armies of people with Slingboxes might yet defeat that dragon as well.

The industry that actually got me thinking about this was comic books. I read the occasional superhero comic book when I was in junior high school, but my interest in them had largely waned as I became an adult. This changed when I got my iPad. The comic book reader on the iPad is great. It is one of the most perfect marriages of hardware and software to a particular style of content that the world has yet seen. It could not be any better, unless you have some emotional attachment to actually turning the pages, or actually looking at ink on paper.

However, there is one catch: the comic book industry does not actually want you, the iPad user, as a customer. They want to continue to sell comics the old way. My main evidence for this conclusion comes from having interacted with the iPad reader, marvel.com and comixology off and on for the last eight months or so. If you try and use these outlets, the first thing you notice is that the availability of various titles is spotty, and that at best they come out several months to a year after the same titles come out in print. What's clear from the beginning is that the comics industry has not shaken its general prejudice against delivering their content in digital form. They see it as a second class revenue stream which is not really worth their full attention. In other words, if you want to read comics primarily on your iPad, you are not dedicated enough to be a customer that they will pay attention to.

The comics people don't even seem to be comfortable with the middle ground of me finding and ordering print versions of the comics in their electronic storefronts. If you hit "buy in print" in the iPad apps you get an interface that just shows you the phone number and address of near by comic book stores at which you can buy the book. They don't even have the decency to send you to amazon.com.

The Marvel and Comixology web sites are not much better. Assuming you can figure out how to navigate to the book you want to buy neither site seems to do any direct sales. Or, if they do I could not find the interface for it, so it amounts to the same thing. In addition, the registration and account management workflows on these sites is like something out of e-commerce circa 1997. The Marvel site is so bad that I couldn't even change my contact information in their database without sending e-mail to a customer support professional to have them do it.

Over and over again the message is clear. They want you to go to the comic book store and pick up the carefully packaged little book still in its plastic baggie. They want to require you to build some trumped up relationship with a store-owner with questionable personal hygiene habits in order to have the right to consume their content. In other words, they still think limiting the distribution of their content increases its value, when really all it does is make new customers like me give up again. Time will tell if they are right. But I think that they should try harder to understand the digital desert island theorem. So far everyone else who has ignored it has lost.

Tinkering with the Stars

2011-03-16 · by psu

Anybody who knows me knows that I am not a tinkerer. This may sound strange coming from a professional software engineer, but I've just never been very good at it. I never took things apart as a kid. I never built my own hardware back when you could still build your own hardware. I was never any good at assembly language. In fact, specifically because I write consumer software for a living, I have fairly high expectations about the required level of polish in the final user experience of such products. If I can't install your tool and make it work in three clicks, you are dead to me.

So lately I have surprised myself by taking on some telescope related projects that can only be described as tinkering. Telescopes are dangerously close to being the sort of finicky mechanical device that would have defeated me in the past. But, over the last 25 years or so they have slowly become more electronic and so, to me, more friendly. Still, you can't really say that the overall experience is polished. This is an industry still attached to the RS-232 cable. A lot of the most useful software packages are created by teams of one working in basements with Visual Basic or the Mac equivalent. If you are going to play in this world, you have to be careful.

Late this summer, I hit upon the end goal of setting up a system that I could use mostly from my house and mostly for the observation of deep sky objects. In particular, I wanted to take advantage of a new class of astronomical video cameras that make it possible to "see" more like a CCD camera does without a lot of the hassle of actual CCD imaging. One way do to this would be to hop on to the Internet and immediately pick up:

  1. A Mallincam.

  2. A large aperture telescope with a fancy computerized tracking mount.

  3. A large windows PC to control the telescope and camera.

  4. Five or six software packages of various kinds to handle telescope pointing, camera control, focus control, image processing, wireless connectivity with the telescope and video broadcasting of the video images.

  5. An observatory building.

  6. A small windows PC to remote control the large Windows PC in the observatory.

This would have been a phenomenal outlay of cash. More importantly, after two months of being buried under the weight of all the equipment I would have either thrown it in the basement or sold it off on the Internet for a loss and gone back to taking bad digital pictures or riding my bike slowly. If you spend any time at all looking at telescope related classified ads, you notice that by far the majority are of the form "I bought all this stuff and I never used it" or "I bought more stuff than I'll ever use, and I'm selling it all to get something even bigger which I will sell in a month." In fact, I bought the scope used from a guy who was "upgrading", and I caught the same guy selling his new scope a few months later. So, I knew this was a bad plan.

The fundamental rules when dealing with unfamiliar technology are:

  1. Know what your end goal is.

  2. To minimize risk, add only one technical requirement to the system at a time.

The obvious first step in this was to figure out the telescope. Besides the camera it is the most expensive and most complicated piece of equipment in the whole stack. I went out into the Internet with the following telescope requirements:

  1. Not too big.

  2. Not too small.

  3. Not too expensive.

  4. Easy to set up.

  5. Good automatic pointing.

These requirements are a good baseline for my definition of a minimally useable telescope. It also turns out that they are critical for effective use of the video camera, but I'll get to that later. Finally, in a turn of good fortune, it also turns out that the modern consumer telescope has been engineered with these specific requirements in mind. It doesn't matter what kind of tube you buy, you can probably stick it in a system that is streamlined to set up and can do computerized pointing. Even the Dobsonians do this now.

After some deliberation, I picked an orange tube 8 inch Celestron. This was, no doubt, a choice driven partly by misty-eyed nostalgia. Back when I was growing up Celestrons were the commercial telescope. They seemed completely out of reach to me. An expensive toy for rich folks (although the really rich folks bought Questars). Anyway the telescope ended up working very well. I can set it up in ten miinutes. It points relatively accurately. It's easy to use, if a bit primitive.

Telescope in hand, the next step was software. Generally my rule is: when in doubt, avoid software. Since I write the stuff for a living, I feel qualified to say that unless you already know it will do exactly what you want and exactly how you want to do it, software will usually just get in your way. So if you have a choice between direct control and software control, direct control is better. This has mostly proven to be true with telescope software. There are two main issues with telescope software:

  1. It mostly runs on Windows. I hedge by using VMWare. But still, this is less than optimal.

  2. A lot of it is written by amateurs. The market is full of byzantine installation and packaging schemes (like the skychart program that makes you install all the extra star catalogs by hand unzipping them in the right part of the file system, really?) and user interfaces that are straight out of the Visual Basic form builder (I'm looking at you EQMOD).

But, I don't mean to disparage their achievements. The good stuff is executed at a high standard, and even the clunky stuff can have a lot of utility (like EQMOD). After a few false starts, I settled on SkyTools for charting and observation logging under Windows, Equinox as a basic planetarium program on the Mac side, Stellarium as a secondary plantarium program (it's open source, and so more flakey than the others), and finally, SkySafari on the iPhone and iPad, although this gets less use than the others.

Surprisingly, after experimenting with the wireless mount control in SkySafari, I found that I didn't like it. I'd rather hit the big buttons on the hand controller. I've also had mixed luck controlling the mount directly from my laptop. So while I will bring the computer outside with me to reference charts and whatnot, I don't actually point the telescope with it. The mount is not quite accurate enough for that, and making small adjustments is much easier with the controller than with the laptop, especially when I'm staring down into the eyepiece anyway.

One of these days I'll get around to setting up Nexremote for this. And maybe I'll try to use those bluetooth serial adapters too. But for now the "one requirement at a time" rule kicks in, and so it's time to stop.

After a couple of months with the telescope I had settled into the following routine. If the weather looked good (which is fairly rare in Pittsburgh) I would make a list of objects to look at in Skytools. Then I would set up the telescope, align it, and bring the laptop out with the screen dimmed and work through the list one by one. If I felt like playing around, I'd also hook the scope up to the laptop and point with Skytools or NexRemote but I have really only experimented with that a couple of times, and both times the telescope ended up acting funny by the end of the night. Having worked through about 50 Messier objects and a couple of dozen others out of the NGC catalog, I felt comfortable moving to the next step. So I ordered the video camera.

But that's the subject for the next article.

While you wait for it, you can indulge yourself at Cloudy Nights, Astromart, and of course, Uncle Rod's blog. Read Rod's book about SCT telescopes too. It will make you want one.

Star Tinkering Part 2: A Mallincam Tutorial

2011-04-04 · by psu

In our previous installment I chronicled, in horrific detail, the steps I took to gently re-enter the world of astronomical observation. At the end of the episode, our dorky hero had become proficient with the modern telescope and its associated tools. Having gained this comfort with the tools, I took the next step and ordered my camera.

Having received the camera and used it for a while, I thought I'd try to fill a small hole in the Mallincam literature: the lack of a comprehensive tutorial. So here I've tried to tie together a lot of the disparate reference material and user manuals come with the camera and which are also on on the Internet in various forms. To do this I've drawn on the knowledge and experience of many people, especially all the guys (Rock, Don, Chris, Jim and all the others) at the Night Skies Network. I got the idea to write this after Don did an impromptu video presentation of this material one night on the web site.

So first we should review exactly what a Mallincam is. We should do this because the web sites that sell it, while enthusiastic, are not altogether clear about exactly what the device does, and how it is different from other imaging systems.

The Big Picture

Back in the old days, if you wanted to see more than was possible with just your eyeball and a telescope, you could attach a camera to the scope and take tediously long exposures on photographic plates or small pieces of film. Film, sadly, has limited sensitivity, which meant that if you wanted to pursue this line of work, you were often doomed to sit in the cold for hours gently babysitting your telescope as it erratically tracked the heavens.

When semiconductors and computers came along, astrophotographers were freed to capture light onto much more sensitive CCDs and also to use a computer to gently babysit the motion of the telescope. Still, since they are an odd bunch, the imagers were still happy enough to sit by their machines for the same long hours collecting data, and creating ever more fantastic pictures on their computers after the fact.

What was missing was a way to see more without all those hours of work. This is where the Mallincam and cameras like it come in. The Mallincam is an extremely sensitive CCD video camera that can also take relatively long exposures of deep sky objects. Its hybrid of CCD imaging hardware combined with real time video output lets you take time exposures without all the bother of digital image processing. The camera does that work for you so you can look at the object in the telescope.

Here is how it works: you attach it to your telescope on one end and a TV on the other. You tell the camera to expose for some number of seconds (mine can go from three seconds to about two minutes). Then, after each exposure period, a picture of what the telescope is pointing at appears on the screen. This picture stays on the screen until the next exposure, or integration is complete, at which time the screen refreshes and you get another image. And so it goes.

You don't need a computer. You don't need any image processing software. With 15 to 20 second exposures you can see more than you ever would in an eyepiece, and yet the whole experience is fairly close to real time. It's important to emphasize that this represents a rather novel new way of working in astronomical observation. It's similar to visual observation in you generally work in almost real time. But, it's also similar to digital imaging since the camera can capture so much more than you can see, especially under suburban skies. I think it is this hybrid nature that makes the Mallincam (and the similar Stellacam, described here) such an exiciting new class of astronomical devices.

Anyway, let's walk through how it works. What I'm going to describe below is the basic usage of the Mallincam VSS+ camera. Rock Mallin actually makes four different models of video cameras. There is the Junior, the Hyper Plus, the VSS+ and the new Xtreme. You can check out his web site to work out the differences between all the models.

This tutorial also concentrates on the direct on-camera control interface. I prefer to control the camera directly rather than use the Windows software to do it. Using this information it should not be hard for one to figure out what the same settings mean in the control software. Also, the VSS+ is similar but not identical to the newer Mallincam Xtreme. I'll point out some differences at the end.

Focal Length and Image Size

Before we get into how the camera works we have to deal with the issue of image size. The sensor in the Mallincam is pretty small. It's a so called "1/2" size CCD. No one really knows what this means, except to say that the chip is small. 8 inch Celestron telescopes have a pretty long focal length, and if you just stick the tiny CCD at the end of the tube, it is not going to see much of the sky at all.

Luckily there is an optical trick we can play. If we stick an extra lens, or lenses in front of the camera that focuses the cone of light coming from the telescope more quickly, then we can reduce the effective focal length of the telescope. This has two effects. First, it makes the tiny chip cover more sky. Second, it allows us to take shorter exposures, since the rule we learned from camera exposure still applies here. A shorter focal length means a smaller "f-ratio", which means faster pictures. There are various devices that can be used to perform this magic. Rock Mallin makes two reducers specifically designed for his cameras: the MFR-3 for Newtonians and the MFR-5 for SCTs. I picked up an MFR-5 and use it in a configuration that reduces the focal ratio of my telescope from around F10 to around F4. This turns out to be a pretty good general purpose image scale. Most objects are neither too large to fit nor too small to be seen at all.

We could actually spend an entire article discussing nothing but the mechanics of focal reducers. But I'm going to leave the rest of the details alone for now.

Camera Basics

Now we are set to figure out exactly how to use the camera you just bought. The camera comes with a short manual with tiny screen shots describing various menu systems containing many strange words in all-caps.

startup-state

Alternatively, you can use a custom piece of .NET software to set most of these same parameters (still named in all-caps).

startup-stateLuckily, the relative obscurity of these three letter acronyms covers up what is a fundamentally simple mechanism. There are four basic parts to the Mallincam engine.

  1. The exposure engine. The good news is that the camera can take exposures from 1/12000th of a second to several minutes. The bad news is that there are three menus that you have to navigate to make it happen. I will discuss these menus below. The relevant acronyms are ALC/ELC, SENSE and SYNC.

  2. Amplifier Gain. This is called AGC.

  3. Other image processing parameters like white balance, gamma, and something akin sharpening (APC).

  4. Cooling. Cooling is controlled using the MOTION DETECT menu. Even though it has nothing to do with motion detection.

Exposure

Probably the most confusing and somewhat byzantine aspect of the camera is how the exposure systems are interlocked. There are, sort of, three exposure systems in the camera, and three menus to control them.

Recall how the main menu of the camera looks:

The SYNC setting determines whether you are in (essentially) in short exposure mode or long exposure mode. The short exposure mode is for integrations up to 2.1 seconds. To set this you set your SYNC to VBS:

Now you can set the exposure time two ways. The ALC/ELC menu is for setting the shortest exposure times. If you are going to use the camera for very bright objects like the moon or planets this is what you use. To use ALC, you use the little buttons on the camera (or the auxilliary control box, I'm not a masochist) until the arrow points to the "ALC/ELC" menu:

Then you hit the center button to get into the settings screen. Here I have the shutter off:

And here I have the shutter speed at 1/1000th of a second:

In addition, you set the SENSE menu to OFF. We'll talk about the SENSE menu later:

Shutter speeds range from 1/100th to 1/12000th of a second. In earlier cameras, the level bar also affected the exposure of the final image, but I don't think that setting has any effect in the VSS+. I don't use the ELC mode at all, so I'm not going to tell you how it works here.

If you set the ALC shutter to OFF you enable the use of the SENSE menu to set longer exposures of up to 2.1 seconds. In this mode, the final video frame is generated by integrating multiple frames together. The exposure time is expressed as an even multiplier whose value is between is between 2x and 128x. Here we have it set to 32x:

and 128x:

At 128x, or 2.1 seconds, you have enough exposure to see most of the stars you would see in an eyepiece and some of the brighter deep sky objects.

Finally, the SYNC setting controls whether you use the extended exposure engine, which is also called "Hyper" mode.

You turn on hyper mode by doing three things:

Turn off the ALC exposure mode:

Set SENSE UP to 128x:

And then set the SYNC to INT:

At this point, the exposure that the camera uses is controlled by the little knob on the side. Every time a new frame is ready, a yellow light on the back of the camera will blink. You can use this light to figure out what your exposure is. When you turn the knob all the way counter-clockwise and you get a 3 second exposure. Turn it all the way clockwise and you get 56 seconds.

Finally finally, if you set SYNC to LINE, the exposure set by the knob is doubled:

Isn't that simple? Having covered how the engine works, the instructions that come with the camera now make more sense. For example, there is the sheet that tells you to set the menus this way when you turn the camera on at the start of the night to set up:

SENSE = 128x ALC = OFF SYNC = VBS

What this means is "take quick 2.1 second exposures", which is exactly what you want for initially setting up and aligning your telescope.

Meanwhile, for lunar and planetary work, the cookbook settings are

SENSE OFF ALC = 1/100th to 1/12000th (probably around 1/1000th). SYNC = VBS

This sets the camera up to fast exposures on bright objects.

Finally, for bread and butter deep sky work, you set the camera up like this:

SENSE = 128x ALC = OFF SYNC = INT

Then the knob controls the longer exposure times for dim objects.

In practice, I hardly ever take the camera out of "deep sky" mode. I just turn the knob all the way back and flip the SYNC back to VBS when I shut down for the night so I have fast exposures for setting up the telescope the next time out. So, before I shut the camera off I make sure the main menu screen looks like this:

And then I shut everything down and pack up for the night.

Gain (AGC)

With exposure out of the way, the next thing to talk about is gain, or AGC. Setting the AGC tells the camera how much amplifier gain you would like it too apply to the signal coming out of the CCD. It's similar to cranking up the ISO setting on your digital camera. To get the AGC you navigate the main menu to the AGC setting and use the buttons to set it to manual:

Then you can use the secondary menu to set the gain level:

There are two rules for setting AGC:

  1. Set it as low as you can. Lower AGC will give you cleaner pictures at the expense of a longer exposure time. Higher AGC will let you use shorter exposures at the expense of more noise. Where you set this depends on how well your telescope can track and how long you want to wait for new pictures. I generally just put it close to the middle except for short exposure work, where you just turn it off.

  2. You cannot reset the AGC while Hyper mode is on and the camera is going an extended exposure. You must flip SYNC back to VBS, set your new gain level and then re-enable the Hyper mode. If you don't do this, the camera can get into any number of odd states, at which time you reboot it.

Other Image Parameters

When using the Mallincam, you use exposure and gain to set a baseline for your image. But, the camera also gives you a few other settings to fine tune color balance, sharpness and gamma.

Color balance is controlled with the "W/B" menu. This menu has two automatic states and one manual. The automatic states are called ATW:

and AWC:

I'm not sure what the origin of these terms is. The manual state allows you to open up this menu where you can set your own red/blue sliders:

This menu also lets you set what I guess is tungsten (3200K) or daylight (5600K) preset white balances.

The Mallincam also has a setting called APC that lets you manipulate sharpness and the rendering of fine detail. You get to the APC menu through the options screen. First navigate to the OPTION menu and hit the center button to see this:

Then go to the last entry, and hit the right button so it says NEXT:

Then hit the center button to enter the magic second options menu:

Finally you can set the APC parameters in the APC menu off of this second options menu:

Pushing these sliders to the right increases the effect of the APC. To me, the effect is much like unsharp masking. Don't use too much of this because it can make the image look strange and noisy.

The option menu contains several other functions that I am not going to cover here. I will note though that you might have reason to mess with the GAMMA setting. Generally for deep sky stuff you set this to 1.0 to get the darkest backgrounds. But, there is a second setting if you need a lighter picture for some reason.

Cooling

The final camera parameter that you might want to manipulate is the one that controls the cooling system. The Mallincam uses an adaptive cooler that has two parameters: how aggressively to cool the CCD and how often to check and see whether the sensor needs to be cooled. Curiously, you set these parameters from the MOTION DETECT menu even though it's not clear what this has to do with motion detection. This menu looks like this:

The slider controls the level of cooling. The right side of the slider represents minimal cooling. As you push the slider left the cooling gets more aggressive. The timer controls how much the cooler runs. The timer has three setings: 10 seconds, 30 seconds and 60 seconds. Rock recommends that when you first turn the camera on, you set the time to 60 seconds and the level all the way right. This is a gentle level of cooling. As you use the camera more, you can set the timer to 30 or 10 seconds and the level further to the left.

If you turn MOTION DETECT off altogether from the main menu then the cooler runs all the time. I gather that you should be careful about doing this, but I don't understand the hardware well enough to know why.

Using the Mallincam Software

I have not personally used this control program, but others have. It has some convenient presets that set the camera up for planetary or deep sky. The meat of the program is the main settings screen though, which looks like this:

All of the various sections of this form should look familiar to you now. They set most of the same things as the camera menus did above. But, if you have a computer you can do it without needing to navigate the menus on the camera. The one thing you can't use this interface to use is to set exposure. For this you still have to use the knob on the VSS+ because it's the only thing that is hooked up to the exposure system

There is also a new control program for the Mallincam Xtreme. In addition to the regular settings it can also be used to set exposure directly.

You can find more information about this software in this article by Jack Huerkamp. In addition, you should also read this excellent review by Jim Welisek and also this other excellent review of the Xtreme which is also by Jim.

Putting it all Together

Now we're ready to take the camera outside. I have the following routine:

  1. Set up and align the telescope as before with an actual eyepiece. I just find it easier to do it this way. My telescope does not track before it is aligned, and keeping everything centered in the camera while staring that the TV or computer screen was too nerve racking.

  2. Replace the eyepiece with the camera. Hook up the power to the camera and hook up the video cable to the camera and whatever TV or computer is going to capture the image. If you are using a computer to capture the images, you'll need extra hardware to convert the analog video to digital frames. I'll cover that in the next article.

  3. Focus. I have not talked about focus, but it's pretty easy. First, buy a Bahtinov mask and read a web page on how to use it. Put the mask on your telescope. Put the camera into the 2.1 second exposure mode and turn the focus dial until the diffraction pattern on the screen looks right.

If you don't have the mask, focus on a bright star or better yet, a bright cluster of stars. As you come towards best focus you'll notice dimmer stars will being to appear in the field. A good indication that you are close to focus is when no more dim stars appear, but none disappear either.

  1. Point the telescope at something interesting. Right now The Orion Nebula is still conveniently visible. The screen will show you if the telescope pointed well. Use the hand controller to center it, then put the camera into Hyper mode. Remember the SYNC setting:

Wait 5 seconds. You will then see more on the screen. Turn the exposure knob clockwise a bit. With a 10 second exposure in my 8 inch SCT, I got this:

I have to say that this made learning the odd interface worth it.

Next time: All the other little details, and how to spend the rest of your yearly income to defeat periodic error.

Appendix and References

Most of the material presented here was inspired by a short tutorial session that happened on one of the NSN broadcasts one night. After watching that I figured it would be fun and useful to record the most important classes of menus settings that you can make on the camera.

As I said above, my camera is the Mallincam VSS+. It is slightly different than the earlier MCHP (Hyper Plus) model and the newer Xtreme model, but the main differences are in how you set exposure in Hyper mode. For the MCHP, all the camera menus are the same except for the cooler, and you set exposure (and cooling) using switches on the body of the camera. For the Xtreme, all the camera menus are the same except the VBS SYNC mode is never used and you set exposure using either the Windows software that is specific to the Xtreme or using a wireless remote control.

Much of what I covered on this page is also covered in one place or another in the various documents that you can download from Jack Huerkamp's web site. Jack is US distributor of the Mallincam, so if you are buying a camera in the states you'll be dealing with him.

I also recomment looking at the reviews of the VSS+ and the Xtreme on Cloudy Nights.

Finally, the Mallincam Yahoo group has a lot of useful reference information as well.

Tinkering With the Stars 3: The Mount

2011-04-22 · by psu

It clouded over in my yard, so I'm writing this instead of fiddling with my telescope. Aren't you lucky.

Previously in our series we bought a telescope. Then we bought a magic video camera that can seemingly do the impossible. Clearly our dork hero should have been satisfied with this. But all was not quite perfect.

First, some background. As I mentioned before, the Mallincam is a device that is something of a hybrid. On the one hand it is a long exposure camera not completely unlike the CCD cameras that astrophotographers use to collect data over long hours. On the other hand, the Mallincam is a device that is meant to be used for visual observation. That is, it shows you your pictures as immediately as possible, rather than making you wait for a computer and Photoshop to chew on the RAW pixel data for a few hours. Still, the some of the magic of the camera is in the fact that the camera can take long exposures. And here is where our story starts.

You will recall that telescopes made up of an optical tube sitting on a mount. Here is a picture of the sort of telescope I bought, along with its mount:

The mount keeps the telescope off the ground, facilitates aiming the telescope at what you want to look at, and also keeps the telescope reasonably still so that the image is stable and easy to look at. When you look through a telescope with your eyeball, this is about all you need. You point the telescope, look for a while, repoint the telescope as the object moves out of the frame, and then look some more. The object moves because the Earth rotates.

Many modern mounts have mechanisms to compensate for this. What you do is stick motors into the mount that slowly move the telescope in a direction which is exactly opposite to that of the Earth's rotation. Then whatever you put in the eyepiece will just sit there and let you stare at it as the motion of the telescope exactly compensates for the motion of the Earth.

Now, the mount I bought can perform this trick. It has two motors, one for the "altitude axis" (moves the scope up and down) and one for the "azimuth axis" (moves the scope left and right). By driving these motors just the right way, it can track an object pretty well for hours at a time. While this worked fairly well, there were a couple of small problems. The tripod was a bit shaky, especially when focussing the telescope at high power. Pointing at objects near zenith was always stressful because you are never sure if the telescope will clear the base. Finally, using the hand controller to move the mount in small motions could be frustrating sometimes. Because of the way the gears work, objects might not move even if you held the button down for a long time, and then they might leap off in random directions. You learned to cope with this.

When I hooked the camera up to the telescope, all of these small problems were amplified. In particular, the little mount with its motors and gears tracking the sky in two directions at once just was not precise enough. If you pushed the exposure past 15 or 20 seconds, instead of nice round stars you'd get little mini star trails, like this:

This just gets worse as you get into longer exposures. And it gets even worse near zenith. Finally, I had occasional problems with the mount just going nuts and driving off into never-never land. It would happen occasionally, but with no real pattern. Which was annoying.

So what is to be done? I never thought it would come to this, but what is to be done is to buy an equatorial mount. An equatorial mount has its axes tilted so that one can be perfectly aligned with the rotational axis of the Earth. In the northern hemisphere what this means is that you can take one of the axes and point it right at the north pole. Then you can compensate for the motion of the Earth by moving the telescope around a single axis. In theory this solve the jaggy tracking problem and as a bonus you also solve the field rotation problem. Here is a schematic diagram of the idea, along with pictures of a few styles of mount:

The axis of the mount that points at the pole is called the "polar" or "right ascension" axis. The axis that points north and south is called the "declination" axis. This is a reference to the celestial coordinate system which I won't get into here.

I have never liked the idea of equatorial mounts. When I think of EQ mounts, I think of huge Newtonian reflector tubes pointing off in all strange directions and the men in white coats from the Meade ads in the 1970s. Like this:

Equatorial mounts are also more complicated. There is the whole business of polar alignment. The descriptions of this technique on the Internet range from fairly casual to mind bendingly complicated. As we all know, the only thing I fear more than men in white coats is extra complexity.

After some thought and consideration, I decided that polar alignment didn't seem that much more complicated than the star alignment procedure that I was already performing with the little alt-az mount. So I examined the market for mounts in detail. The most popular sort of equatorial mount by far is the so called "German Equatorial Mount" or GEM for short. A GEM puts the telescope on top of the two axes of rotation, with a counterweight on the other side. Like the huge Newtonian in the picture above.

So, which GEM to buy, that's the real question. The answer, like all answers, depends on what you want to do with the thing. Mounts are easy to characterize based on three mechanical parameters:

  1. How much does the mount weigh?

  2. How much weight can the mount hold in a stable fashion?

  3. How long and how smoothly does the mount track?

In the computer era though, there is a fourth consideration that throws things off:

  1. How good is the software that comes with the mount?

In general you will find that in terms of mechanics you get what you pay for. There is a direct and linear relationship between how much money you spend and how well the mount will hold weight and smoothly track the sky with the least amount of fuss. When you spend more money you get more reliable machinery that is built to a higher standard of precision. Those gears in the motor drive will be asymptotically closer theoretical perfection. More importantly, by building in small numbers the premium manufacturers can maintain a tight hold on testing and quality control.

My main requirements in a mount are not all that stringent. The most important thing is that I be able to carry out into the yard relatively easily. I don't yet have my remote control telescope bunker so I need something portable. Beyond that, I have a pretty light telescope and I only need to track for short periods of time. I can also tolerate the occasional sloppy frame. I'll just wait for the video camera to capture the next one a minute or so later. No big loss. As far as I could see, the mount landscape breaks down like this:

  1. Cheap, light, and mechanically barely acceptable, but great software: Celestron CG5. This mount is made in China. If you look it up in Goggle you will find reams of material about how to rebuild it to be better. But, the Celestron hand controller is excellent. More on this later.

  2. Medium expensive, heavier, better mechanics, worse software: Orion Sirius, or its bigger brother the Orion Atlas. You can get the mechanics of the Atlas with the Celestron software by buying a Celestron CGEM. These mounts are actually made by the same Chinese company that now owns Celestron. Strangely, they have not unified their software platform. Also, these mounts weigh 30-40 pounds and are probably too heavy. iOptron also has a nice mount in this class. But it is fairly new, and you should never buy anything too new, especially where embedded software is involved.

  3. Premium expensive artisanal American made: Losmandy. These mounts are well liked for their build quality and overall polish. But, the software is written by one guy in his garage in his spare time. Currently the entire line is crippled by the fact that the hardware that runs the current firmware platform is obsolete. So, the one guy has been frantically rebuilding the software platform in a grand version 2. But it won't be ready for months, maybe a year. So the result is that you can now spend $2500 to $4000 on a great mount, and then wait a year for the software you need to use it to come out of beta.

  4. Mechanically perfect, will just work out of the box, costs as much as a small car: AstroPhysics Mach 1. These cost ten times as much as the Celestron. As a result, everything mechanical is just better. It's beautifully machined. It has easy to use knobs that are never sloppy. It's ergonomic. It holds as much as a CGEM (say) while weighing a lot less. The tracking is up to an order of magnitude better. But the software is somewhat worse. In particular, the pointing and alignment code seems distinctly primitive compared to what Celestron does with their ten cent 16-bit embedded hand controller. This is sort of astounding when you think about it.

You can get other exotic mounts in the AstroPhysics price range from places like Paramount, Takahashi, and others. Those are mostly large mounts for permanent obervatories. Takahashi does make a smaller mount that only costs as much as a used car, but it requires a laptop for automatic pointing. I also forgot to mention the various Vixen mounts. But they use a freaky mini-laptop for a hand controller that seems to get mixed reviews.

What's clearly going on here is that mounts have changed from being something that was predominantly mechanical to something that is a mix of gears, motors and software. But, the people who make mounts have a background primarily in mechanical engineering, not software. It boggles my mind that we can't get an Astrophysics mount that runs the Celestron software. Because that would rule.

So since I didn't want to blow the entire college fund on a mount, I got the lightest one with the best software. I only need the mount to hold my relatively light telescope and track for relatively short periods of time (1 minute, maybe two on the outside). And, my tracking requirements are not that stringent. The Mallincam is not a high resolution device, so if I get a few fat stars on the TV screen I won't mind much.

I came close to getting the Sirius because I had seen it track very well with a load much larger than mine. But I ultimately didn't because I wanted to stick with the Celestron software. It's more important to me that the software in the hand controller be able to build a good pointing model with a minimum of fuss, and the Celestron stuff has proven that it can do so. Even better, the Celestron software can even help you polar align the mount by looking through the telescope rather than some crappy polar scope sitting in the RA axis. Every mount should be able to align itself this way. I don't want to spend my nights trying to find polaris while on my hands and knees on the driveway.

After all that overthinking, I got the CG-5 from B&H on a sunny Friday:

Under a full moon on a clear Friday night, I set it up and got everything aligned in about 15 minutes. That process goes like this:

  1. Put the mount outside and hook it up to the battery. Point the RA axis roughly towards the north and set the latitude to roughly the altitude of Polaris. Don't sweat this. Then turn the telescope so it is also pointed north, parallel to the RA axis.

  2. Put in time and location info.

  3. Start the star align. The telescope will suggest stars and actually move to the first one by itself! This is an improvement over the SE mount, where you had to point at the first star by yourself.

  4. Center the first star in your eyepiece. Hit Enter then Align.

  5. Repeat three or four times. Now the telescope can point at almost anything accurately.

  6. Now hit "Polar Align" on the hand control. The telescope will point back at the last star you aligned on. It will think for a bit and then point to the spot in the sky that the star would be if the mount were correctly polar aligned. At this point you use the knobs on the mount head to move it in altitude and azimuth until you have recentered the star in your eyepiece. This is the most painful part of the process because the knobs on the CG-5 are not great. The altitude knobs in particular are awful. The only way to adjust the altitude down is to back out the front knob and let the mount fall down. Really, I'm not kidding. The knobs on the AstroPhysics would be ten times better.

  7. When you are done with the knob dance, hit Align. You are now decently polar aligned, and you didn't even have to crawl under the telescope to try and look through a crappy polar axis finder. At this point you may need to redo some of the pointing alignment (steps 3-5). But I didn't have to my first time out.

It took a little while to figure out the mechanical controls to get the mount polar aligned. But it wasn't too bad. The Celestron polar alignment scheme is really nice IMHO. I think it should be required by law in all computer controlled EQ mounts. It's also nice to have the scope track while you center alignment stars. This will make it possible, I think, to do alignments with the video camera already in the telescope. Finally, damned if the thing didn't track smoothly enough for about a minute when I was all done.

I guess I don't need to fear the complexity of the GEM, or those guys in the white coats any more. Maybe in a few years I'll blow the college fund to get perfect tracking for five minutes at a time.

Portal 2

2011-04-29 · by psu

Portal 2 had a lot to live up to. Four years ago Portal started as a free short add-in to The Orange Box and turned out to be by far the best game in the entire collection. Now Portal 2 has struck out on its own, in its own box and at nearly full price. DId going solo ruin the magic? Or was Valve able to score again? Well, it turns out that to me it's a bit of both.

While I was happy to see Portal 2 show up, I did not really indulge in any of the pre-game hype or marketing. I heard it was pretty interesting though, and the GWJ wasted nearly half a podcast angsting over whether Valve had become a big bully company, not above using its position of strength to cynically feed the pavlovian impulses of the hard core gamer. From what I can tell the answer is of course they are, but so what.

Anyway, in something of a cruel joke, the box from Amazon showed up first thing in the morning at work. So I had to stare at it all day, and then at dinner, and then some more at the Target while we ran some errands after dinner. So it wasn't really until around 10pm that night that I got to start falling through orange and blue holes.

About a week later I had gotten through it all. It took five or six play sessions averaging around and hour to and hour and a half. As expected this is somewhat longer than the first game. This is because the market dictates that AAA full price games need to be too long in order to sell to their core audience who like games that are, in general, too long.

That said, Portal 2 was not too long by much. And the fact that the pacing was just a tiny bit off is really my only complaint about the game. In every other way Valve has managed to capture what was good about the first game and amplify it. So let's review:

  1. Interesting mechanics. Generally good pacing.

  2. Puzzles that require that you compose the interesting mechanics in interesting ways so that you feel a little rush of genius when you get to the other side of the room. This rush is also used in an interesting way in the narrative... but that would be a spoiler.

  3. An interesting narrative that doesn't get in your way while you are playing the game (for the most part).

  4. Good writing, funny jokes, excellent characterization in the voice acting, and an enjoyable song.

So, about the pacing. My feeling is that each major area of the game felt about one "level" too long. This was especially true in the overlong middle act that tried to expand on the narrative arc with an interesting twist while at the same time introducing some new mechanical tricks to layer into the portal-based puzzle solving. I have been accused in the past of being an unfeeling oaf, but I wasn't really that interested in the back story presented here. And, the new mechanics wore thin by the end of the sequence. So, as I said before, if they had taken one test chamber out of each part of the game, I feel like I would have been happier. As it was, I spent a long time in this mid-game staring at industrial platforms trying to figure out how to get off of them. Or staring at vertical walls trying to figure out how to launch myself upward. It got old. I got impatient. I think we are both at fault here.

That's all I have to say. That's really all I can say without getting into spoilers. I think this is as much of a winner as the first one was, which means that there probably won't be a better video game released this year.

Fool's Mate

2011-05-01 · by peterb

I've never been any good at chess.

This has always bothered me, on some level, and I dealt with it in what I consider to be a very mature and appropriate way: I've pretty much avoided playing chess for 35 years.

There are good reasons to avoid chess if you're not good at it: there's no randomness, and both sides start evenly, so when you lose, you have no one to blame but yourself. There's also a nontrivial amount of memorization involved in becoming a really good player, particularly in the opening, and that part of the game just isn't fun, no matter who you are.

But with the rise of iPhone-driven asynchronous multiplayer gaming, I sort of stumbled into playing a little chess, badly, with my dad, and also with a couple of friends. I lost every game, of course. But strangely, this made me want to get better at the game, rather than to avoid it.

Now, when I say "get better at the game", I have what you might call a very modest definition. I certainly don't imagine that I'm going to be winning many games any time soon. Rather, I have a simple desire: I want to get to the level where, when my opponent takes one of my pieces, I saw it as a possibility before he did it.

You might observe that this is a skill that is easily obtainable to anyone who knows the rules of chess and is, let's say, 7 years old. Nonetheless, the thing about my chess suckitude that has always bothered me is not so much that I lose, but that I lose completely by surprise. All I want is to be good enough that I won't be surprised.

I've spent perhaps the past month playing match after match on Chess.com, a "correspondence chess" web site. You can play via the web interface, and they also have an iPhone and iPad app that's convenient. In addition to the matchmaking and games, they also have a pretty nice set of chess puzzles and "post-game computer analysis" so that you can find out, in soul-crushing detail, exactly why 20 of your 40 moves were boneheaded.

Playing so much in such a short period of time has taught me a few interesting principles that I will share with you here. None of them are particularly brilliant, and I will explicitly point out that if you take chess advice from me you are taking reading lessons from the illiterate. But here they are, nonetheless.

Peterb's Top Ten Chess Lessons Learned Via A Seemingly Endless Series of Humiliating Defeats

  1. Take your time before making a move. If you've got a day to make the move, don't feel compelled to make it in 30 seconds.

  2. Look at the square you're thinking of moving a piece to. Consider how it can be attacked.

  3. Look at the square you're vacating. Ask yourself if by vacating it you've opened a gap that can be used immediately.

  4. If you're ahead, don't be afraid to exchange pieces aggressively.

  5. When imagining your opponent's move, never imagine one that is good for you. Always try to find his best move. Then assume that he'll make that one.

  6. Losing to strangers hurts less than losing to people you know. But neither is fun.

  7. Practice moving the knights around until you can 'see' their threat pattern in your sleep.

  8. Leading an attack early in the game with your queen is like wading into a fist fight jaw first.

  9. Properly deployed, pawns are way stronger than you think.

  10. Don't make your move after having had a few drinks. Trust me on this one. Really.

If anyone is interested in playing a match, you can find me as "peterb1201" on chess.com. Feel free to drop me a line.

Thoughts on Burgers

2011-05-02 · by psu

The trend in Pittsburgh food lately has been restaurants with single word names. Here's a no-doubt incomplete list: Legume, Toast!, Spoon, Elements, Habitat, Salt, Notion, BRGR and Burgatory. These last two play to another recent trend: fancy burger joints. I see this as a good opportunity to pontificate about about burgers and burger places.

To my mind there are three things you want in a burger place. I will list them here in order of importance:

  1. Good meat.

  2. Fries and other side dishes.

  3. An appealing atmosphere and attitude.

Now, the next thing I'm going to say will cause many in the audience to huff and puff with a general sense of disdain, because their experience may have been different than mine. But I only know what I know. In my experience, if what you are after is a really good beef hamburger with really good meat and generally well-prepared and well-served, there is only one place to go and that place is Tessaro's.

I know that people have issues with the service there. I know that people have had issues with the kitchen there. If you are one of those people, I can't really help you. All I can say is they serve me well every time I go there and the meat and the burgers are really still the best in the city, even with the new fancy places opening up.

Now, we can all agree that their side dishes suck. The awful excuse for "potatoes" that they serve are just shameful. But the meat is the thing, and the meat is great. Still, sides, and especially fries, can't be discounted.

And this is where the discussion gets more complicated because the side dishes and atmosphere are where the two new places: BRGR in East Side and Burgatory in Aspinwall shine. Both have a hip young bar vibe going. Both have cool boozy milk shakes (I've only had the BRGR version, so I can't comment any further). Only BRGR has good fries. Both also serve respectable beef-based hamburger sandwiches. On the whole, I think that Burgatory has better meat and BRGR is better at everything else. But neither has as good a beefy beef patty as Tessaro's.

My conclusion is this: the meat at T's is still the best. But the overall sandwich experience you get at the new places might be better because of their wide range of interesting toppings and sides. The Filthy-a-delphia burger at BRGR is a particularly brilliant combination.

However, BRGR loses a few points for making sandwiches out of strange patty shaped ingredients and calling them a "burger." I guess in theory there is nothing really wrong with this, but I'm personally not very interested in going to a burger joint to get salmon, or falafel, or turkey for that matter. Turkey is a particular sore spot for me. To me, poultry is entirely unsatisfactory as a basis for a ground meat sandwich. The texture is all wrong and the fat doesn't have great that great rush of juice when you bite into the sandwich.

Even so, the strength of the fries at BRGR more than makes up for a few weak points on the meat axis. Good fries count for a lot.

So my final order of preference is T's, then BRGR, then Burgatory. Feel free to make your own choices. Even if you'd be wrong.

As a closing thought, I do have to give a shout out to Five Guys. Five Guys is not really in the same category as the other places we've discussed. It's cheap food prepared as fast as they can do it. On its own it doesn't really have that much character. Still, it was almost the best food that you could get near the Apple Store in Bethesda Row in Bethesda Maryland. The only place in that pathetic excuse for a gentrified outdoor mall was the great Indian restaurant my friend took me to. So, good job there.

As a second closing thought I also have to give a shout out to Little Big Burger in Portland, Oregon. They do little burgers. They do them really well. And they don't coast on the foofiness of their toppings either. Highly recommended. Beware of the hipsters though. But if you are in Portland you already know that.

A brief political statement

2011-05-03 · by peterb

Late Night With The Mallincam

2011-05-04 · by psu

If there is one thing that I have learned in my now medium-long lifetime it's that in Western Pennsylvania you cannot count on clear skies lasting. So when the clouds parted last Friday night at 11:15pm, I had a short quandry. On the one hand, it was 11:15pm and I should be in bed. On the other hand, it might be the last window of clear sky for another month. April to this point had been nothing but gray skies, cold, and rain. After considering this for about 45 seconds, I started to set up the telescope.

As this was my second time out with the new mount and as the first time had gone pretty well (got set up and aligned in about 20 minutes) this time things went less smoothly. To make this work well, you need script and a list. And I forgot a few parts of the script. Here is how you set up.

First, we need short tangent on what we want the mount to do for us when we are done. By convention we keep track of the position of every cataloged astronomical object that we deal with using something called the equatorial coordinate system. This coordinate system is similar to the one we use on the Earth, with the longitude and latitude, except it that it's projected on the sky. The east/west coordinate, similar to longitude, is called Right Ascension or RA. I don't know why. RA is measured like time, in hours, minutes, seconds and so on. This turns out to be convenient because you are often interested in the time at which objects are visible or not. If you know the time of year and the RA of the object, you can compute whether or not you should be able to see it.

The North/South coordinate, similar to Latitude is called Declination, or DEC. This coordinate is measured in the familiar degrees, minutes, seconds, and so on.

Our equatorial mount, unsurprisingly, has two axes that go by these same names. The right ascension axis is also called the polar axis of the mount.

The eventual goal of the setup is to align two things. First, we want to align the polar axis of the mount with the polar axis of the Earth. This alignment is called polar alignment and allows the mount to track objects in the sky while only driving the telescope along one axis.

Second, we want to give the mount's computer an accurate picture of what is where in the sky so it can point the telescope automatically. I call this star alignment to distinguish it from polar alignment. When we are done, we should be able to tell the mount to point the telescope anywhere we want in the sky, and it can do some quick calculations to figure out exactly how to run the motors to pull that off. Then we sit back and watch the object come into the field of the eyepiece, or camera. So, here we go.

  1. Take the mount outside. Point the right ascension axis of the mount roughly north.

  2. Attach the counterweight on the counterweight thingy.

  3. Go back inside and grab the telescope. Attach the telescope to the mount using the quick release dovetail arrangement.

  4. Balance the scope and the counterweight along the right ascension axis. To do this on my mount, you release the clutch on the RA axis. This lets you turn the mount by hand rather than with the motors. Now turn the mount until the shaft is horizontal and gently let go. If the telescope drops, move the counterweight further away from the telescope and try again. If the counterweight drops, move it closer to the telescope and try again. Iterate until the whole system is balanced.

  5. Now balance the telescope along the declination axis. Tighten the RA clutch. Carefully loosen the DEC clutch turn the telescope until it is horizontal. Slooowly let go and see how the tube moves. With the Celestron telescopes you can then move the scope backward and forward in the quick release saddle until it balances.

  6. Now turn the mount until the little index marks line up. When you are done doing this the scope is in its "zero" position and should be pointing North. If it's dark enough you can look in the finder scope and maybe see Polaris. Resist the urge to center Polaris in the finder. This will do you no good because the axis of the finder is not what you want to point at Polaris. I shoud know, I wasted my time doing this.

  7. Instead what you want to do is look through a hollow in the RA axis and put Polaris into that hole. Then you know the polar axis is looking roughly at Polaris, which is more useful. To do this, loosen the DEC clutch and turn the tube to 90 degrees from where it was. You should now be able to look through the hole and see sky.

Get down on your knees and push the mount around and peer into this hole and see if you can see Polaris. It might take a few tries before you can see anything, depending on how dark it is. If you can't see it, use the following odd scheme to find it. First, you will note two long bolts with handles on them on the front and the back of the mount. These adjust altitude. They do not do it very well. In particular, it's hard to smoothly lower the altitude. So, on the theory that you are pointed too high, loosen the front lever and push the mount so it falls down a few degrees in altitude. Then, using the back lever raise the mount again and hopefully you'll see Polaris enter the field. If not, you might be off to the side a bit. Shove the mount sideways one way or another and try again until you get Polaris in the hole. The field of view through this hole is pretty wide so this isn't too hard.

  1. Also on the front of the mount you will notice two knobs that push the mount side to side. If Polaris is not centered side to side in the hole, use these knobs to move it around. To move the mount you loosen one knob and then tighten the other one. I don't remember how things are oriented so you will just have to try yourself until you figure it out.

Starting with Polaris roughly in this hole turns out to be important. In my short experience, if you are too far off the star alignment which I will describe next never ends up working.

  1. Now turn the scope back to the zero position and plug in the power cord. Answer all the questions about time and date and such that the hand controller will ask you and start the two star alignment. Tell the mount to move the scope to the first star it suggests. If you can't find that star or its blocked, hit the undo key to try other stars until you get one you like. The mount will point the telescope at the star you picked and then you will use the arrow keys on the hand control to center the star in your finder then the eyepiece. The Celestron manual tells you to always make sure the final movements of the stars are driven by the Up and Right arrow keys. This minimizes the resulting backlash in the gears. I have no reason to doubt the manual on this point, so be careful about that.

The mount will then let you repeat this process on a second star. You will notice that by default both of these stars will be chosen from the western part of the sky. After you are done, the hand controller will ask you if you want to add "calibration" stars, all of which will be chosen from the eastern part of the sky. You can add up to four of these stars. Keep adding them until the pointing gets very accurate.

There are two important things to know about this procedure:

First, the east/west breakdown is important for mounts like the CG-5. The CG-5 is what we call a "German Equatorial Mount", or GEM. The geometry of the GEM is such that you have to be aware of the relative position of the telescope and an imaginary line called the meridian. The meridian is the line that runs North/South and splits the sky in half East/West. If you have set up your mount correctly, the middle of the tripod sits right on top of the meridian, and in a GEM this means that the scope is on one side of this line and the counterweight is on the other. The thing you have to remember is that GEMs have a hard time tracking past the meridian because when you go too far either the scope or the counterweight shaft will run into the mount. Bad news.

To get around this problem GEMs flip the scope around whenever they cross the meridian. You want to be able to do this and maintain pointing accuracy, so the Celestron software allows you to do extra calibration to make sure this works right.

The second thing to remember about star alignment is not to try to do it when there are thin clouds around. This makes it easy to guess wrong and align on the wrong stars, or stars you cannot see. Then no matter how many stars you align to, the pointing never gets any better. If you notice this happening, the best thing to do is to reboot the mount and start over. I ended up in this situation at about 11:45pm. By then the sky had really cleared, so I buckled down and tried again. I turned the mount off, made sure that I got Polaris into that damned hole, and started again. Ten minutes later I was ready to move on.

  1. Having fine tuned your star alignment, you can now engage a nifty little piece of software that is unique to the Celestron controllers. It is called "all star" polar alignment. Pick one of the stars that you used for the final calibration as long as it is not too close to either due North or zenith. Hit the Align button on the hand controller and navigate to the Polar Align menu and then choose Align Mount and hit Enter. The mount will think a bit and then move the telescope to point at the star you just picked. Use the hand control to center it just like you did before. When you are done, you tell the hand controller to start the Polar alignment. The telescope will think a bit and then move to another spot in the sky. This is where the alignment star would be if the mount were in fact polar aligned. Now you get to get down on the ground again and use those knobs and levers from before to push the mount around in azimuth and altitude until the star is centered in your eyepiece. When you are done hit the Align button and you are done.

By this time your knees and shoulders should be a bit sore, but your mount will be well aligned for both pointing and tracking. I managed to get to this state by about 12:15am. So then I yawned and went in and got my camera.

While the CG-5 mount is bigger, heavier and more complicated than my old 8SE mount, it does have its advantages. First, I have found that the tripod is much more solid, so the telescope does not shake and shimmy when I'm trying to focus. Second, it's a lot easier to use the camera because I can stick it into the back of the telescope without worrying about it hitting the base of the forks. On the other hand, there are some things you want to be careful about.

If you do not firmly attach your eyepiece to the telescope, you may find that the mount can make it fall out as it turns and twists the telescope at all strange angles. This is bad. You may also find that the various cables that stick our from various ports in the mount and lodge themselves between the motor housings. I've had this happen twice now and I'm not sure why, but it does make the mount upset. Try to avoid this.

Luckily, on this night, with the time nearing 12:30am, I had none of these issues and was able to happily go to my first target, the galaxy NGC 2903. There are two things to note here. First, you can see the cool spiral arms of the galaxy. Second, even with about a minute of exposure, the mount is still tracking pretty well. I have found in general that a minute works well. Two minutes is a bit too long.

Second target of the night was the "Hockey Stick" galaxy, NGC 4656. This is a pretty dim object, I was happy to get a good view of it.

I then cruised through the galaxy clusters in Virgo and Coma Berenices. There was M64, M84, M86, M87, and M91. For two hours, everything I asked for hit right on the camera and the mount tracked with relative smoothness. I was using the camera with a .5x focal reducer, which means that the effective focal length of the telescope was 1000mm instead of 2000mm. This means that the field of view of the camera is roughly 20 by 15 arc minutes, which is pretty darned small. Overall I remain impressed by the ability of a 25 cent embedded processor to accurately point a 15 pound telescope with this level of accuracy.

Somewhere around M87 I noticed the pictures looked funny, with ugly bloated stars. I didn't think about it too hard until I tried to look at M101 and it was all blurry. So, I turned the telescope to the globular cluster M3 and tried my best to refocus.

Having gotten closer, I went back to M101 and got the surprise of the night. Most of the objects I had looked at had been small with bright cores but not much in the way of larger scale detail. M101 was different. The arms spread out over the field of view with dim hints of dust lanes and other grand details.

I finally shut down for the night at 2:45, sleepy but pretty happy. I was also hopeful that with a bit more practice I'd be able to tease even more out of these objects sitting above me in the sky. Who would have thought you could see this much with relatively little work in your backyard.

Market Dinner in Half an Hour: Salmon and Asparagus

2011-05-28 · by psu

The Firehouse Farmer's market opened a couple of weeks ago. This means that we are entering that ten or twelve weeks in Pittsburgh where we get a couple of weeks of every sort of fresh vegetables that you can get practically year 'round in Berkeley. Anyway, nothing goes with great vegetables like salmon. So here we go.

Obtain some nice pieces of salmon filet. I like King because it has the most tasty fat. You can pick whatever you like, but it won't be as good. It just so happens that the Alaskan King is starting to be in season as well. Win!. Cut the filet up into portion sizes and put them in a small pan together. Season with salt and pepper. Please excuse the ghetto cell phone photo here, I thought I did better:

salmon

Let that sit for a while. Meanwhile, snap the tough ends off the asparagus and lay the spears out on a sheet pan. Douse the asparagus with olive oil, salt and pepper. Be generous. The market this day also had green garlic, so I cut that up and put it on top. Let me say: that ruled.

asparagus

Heat your oven to 400F. When the oven is ready, throw the veggies in the oven. You want to cook them 10 to 15 minutes depending on how big they are. When they are half done, start heating the pan for the salmon. Add olive oil to the pan and put the salmon pieces in. Brown them well on all sides. Remove the veggies from the oven and replace with the salmon. Cook the salmon about 5 minutes per side or until they are as done as you like. I have no insight on how to tell when this happens. I know when its right for me, but that won't help you.

When the salmon is done take it out of the oven and throw the veggies back in to reheat them a bit. You can turn the oven off and just let the asparagus sit in there. It will be warm enough.

Let the salmon rest for a few minutes while this happens. Then take everything out and plate it:

done

You're welcome.

A Subject for Yet Another Cloudy Night

2011-05-29 · by psu

Pittsburgh is on its way to about the tenth day in a row where the dusk brings a bank of clouds and haze from the west. So I'm going to talk about field of view, image size, focal length and image size and a cool photo-related astronomy service. Anyway, we'll start with a horribly dry and boring technical discussion having to do with optics.

Focal Length and Focal Ratio

The focal length of a simple telescope the distance the light must travel before it comes to a single point of focus in the optical system. In lens-based systems this is a property of the main objective lens. Light enters the system through the front of the lens and comes to focus somewhere in back of the lens. The distance from the focal point to the center of the lens is the focal length. Similarly with mirror-based systems the light hits the front of the mirror and then comes to focus somewhere in front of it.

The focal ratio of a simple telescope is the ratio of the focal length of the scope to the size of its aperture. So, if your Newtonian telescope has an 8 inch mirror and a 80 inch focal length, then its focal ratio is 80/8 = 10. For some reason we write this "F10" to make sure everyone understands what is going on.

Many telescopes are made up of multiple lenses, multiple mirrors, or some combination of both. My Celestron C8, for example, uses an optically neutral lens, a concave mirror and a convex mirror. The concave mirror is around F2. The convex mirror has a "negative" focal ratio of F5. I'm not sure how this is computed, since convex mirrors don't focus the light at all. In any case, this arrangement stretches the effective focal length of the primary resulting in an F10 telescope.

Why Do We Care?

The short answer is: the focal length of the telescope determines, to a large extent, the apparent size of the objects that you look at with that telescope. The general rule is this: longer focal lengths make things bigger.

If you are using your eyeballs to look through the telescope, you can't just look into the back end of the scope and see an image. You actually need a second lens to put the image on your eyeball. This lens, or set of lenses is called an eyepiece. Eyepieces come in various sizes and shapes, and since they are lenses, they have focal lengths. In general eyepieces with long focal lengths are for looking at large fields of view at low power. On the other hand, eyepieces with short focal lengths are for looking at small fields of view at high power. In other words, the final object size in your field of view is determined by a combination of the characteristics of the telescope and that of the eyepiece.

This turns out to be handy. You can carry a bunch of different eyepieces around with you and pick which one to use based on how big the object is that you want to look at. This is how things worked for hundreds of years, until someone invented cameras.

Cameras are different

Here's an unexpected annoyance when you switch from using eyepieces to using a camera: the camera always sees the same field of view. The field of view of the camera is completely determined by two measurements:

  1. The effective focal length of the telescope.

  2. The size of the sensor in the camera. Ok, so you might be using film, so the film size would matter instead of the sensor size. But chances are you are not, so let's forget about that.

Since the size of the sensor in most cameras is fixed, if you want to change the size of the field of view covered by your pictures, the only thing you can do is manipulate the effective focal length of the telescope. Another way to put this is that the only way to change the scale of the objects in your pictures is to change the focal length of the telescope. If you want to take a picture of something really small, you want a long focal length. If you want to take a picture of something really large, you want a short focal length.

At first this seems sort of inconvenient. Carrying multiple telescopes around is a lot harder than carrying a small bag of eyepieces. Luckily, those clever optical designers have again come to our rescue. It turns out that you can buy any number of special lenses that attach to the end of a telescope and manipulate the effective focal ratio.

Some lenses flatten the light cone and therefore stretch the focal length. We call these barlow lenses. On the other side of the coin, focal reducers make the light cone steeper and make the effective focal length shorter. Thus, as a general rule Barlows make things bigger, and focal reducers make things smaller.

Focal Reduction is Your Friend

For Mallincam use, it turns out that we are generally more interested in shorter focal lengths than longer. There are several reasons for this:

  1. The chip in the Mallincam is small. In addition, the camera's strengths lie in capturing images of deep sky objects, which tend to be more extended in size than (say) double stars or planets. Therefore, generally the case that you are trying to fit relatively large objects on to the relatively small chip, so reducing the image scale is a good thing. Now, this is not always true. If you are hunting tiny planetary nebulas, you'll need to be working at a relatively long focal length.

  2. Short focal lengths usually mean smaller F-ratios. From our lessons in photography we will all remember that smaller F-ratios mean shorter exposures. This is true in astrophotography too, at least for the extended deep sky objects that we tend to use the Mallincam for. Shorter exposures are always a good thing.

  3. In addition to shortening exposure times, short focal lengths mean that you can get away with sloppier tracking in your telescope mount. This is because you are effectively working at a lower level of magnification, so tracking errors will not be as evident.

So Now What?

There is no lack of advice on how to combine various focal reducers with the Mallincam. Just consider this PDF file with dozens of different combinations. The available hardware for this can be summarized in the following list:

  1. Reducers that attach to the back of your telescope using the standard Schmidt-Cassegrain threads. These tend to be designed specifically for SCTs, but who knows, maybe they can work elsewhere. Celestron, Meade, Antares and others all make an .63x reducer that hooks up this way. Meade also makes a .33x reducer that is designed only to be used with small CCD cameras. Conveniently, the Mallincam is just such a camera. I have a Celestron .63x which I also use with my eyepieces.

  2. Reducers that attach as eyepiece filters. The best example of this is the Antares .5x reducer. There are a few others. But I have this one so I'll talk about it.

  3. Special reducers made specifically for the Mallincam that thread on the front. These can be hard to come by. I have an MFR-5, which is a two piece device which I will talk about in a bit. Rock Mallin has also made an MFR-3 which was a single lens. The use of this lens is covered in the PDF I linked to above.

  4. If you use Celestron telescopes, you can look into the Hyperstar system. This device lets you run your SCT at around F2, which is pretty cool. This works particularly well for larger apertures. For smaller scopes, the image scale gets to be too small to be useful.

  5. Finally, various optical companies make custom reducers/field correctors just for their telescopes, usually refractors. You can find these devices made by Vixen, Astro-Physics, Televue, Borg and others. I don't have any of these (maybe soon!).

For my purposes below, I'll cover some experiments that I have done with devices that fall into the first three buckets above, since I actually own them.

Computing Effective Focal Length

This turns out to be harder than you think. You would naively hope that when you buy a focal reducer, somewhere on the box it would say something like "when you attach this to your telescope, it will cut the focal length in half." Unfortunately, it's not that simple. The effective focal length your telescope with the focal reducer added depends on the optical qualities of the reducer and on the spacing between the reducing lens and your eyeball, or the CCD in the camera. The Celestron/Meade/Antares "F6.3" reducer is specified as being a .63x reducer, but this is only actually true if the spacing is just right. If you are closer to the lens than the assumed distance (around 90-100mm, I think), then the final reduction is a bit smaller. If you are further away, then you get more reduction.

This effect is why you see so much traffic on the Mallincam groups about putting "spacers" between the camera and the focal reducer. Note that while you can get some mileage out of changing the spacing, if you get too far outside of the optimal range you will experience various optical maladies, the most obvious of which will be light fall-off in the corners of your picture. The more you push the reduction the worse this gets, since the steeper light cone will inevitably can only cover a smaller image area. This is why reducers like the Meade .33x can only be used with small chip CCDs. Put anything bigger behind it and you get dark corners.

In addition, you may have trouble focusing your telescope and you may find that the image at the edges of the field of view are distorted in strange ways. These issues all reflect the fact that the focal reducer is working against the laws of physics and trying to get you a free lunch.

Now, there are some optical formulas that let you plug in the focal length of the focal reducer and the spacing and compute the effective focal reduction. However, these are of limited use for two reasons:

  1. Focal lengths tend not to be specified, and measuring the spacing is hard.

  2. The formulas go out the window if you use multi-lens systems. This is because you can manipulate the spacing in multiple places and wen you do that who knows how the reduction factors combine. The MFR-5 has this problem since you can put spacers between the two lenses or just after them. You can also end up confused if you combine the Celestron .63x reducer with another lens.

A better way to figure out what your effective focal length is is to just use the camera to take a picture and then compute the field of view of the picture. If you know the field of view covered by the picture and you know the size of the CCD you used to take the shot, then you can solve for the effective focal length. Now, you might ask, how do you compute the field of view covered by a picture? Here the Internet comes to the rescue. All you do is this:

  1. Join Flickr.

  2. Joint the astrometry Flickr group.

  3. Take your screen gran and add it to the group's pool.

  4. Wait.

If your shot is clean enough, the bot that watches the pool will grab it and compare it against a huge database of star and object positions. Usually it will then tell you what part of the sky you took a picture of and the size of the field of view covered by your photo. I have a few examples here in my Flickr page. This one is the best:

m82 Screen shot 2011-05-05 at 10.52.31 PM

Note the comment from the Astrometry bot. It tells you the coordinates of the center of the photo, the size of the field, and even all of the interesting objects in the picture, in case you didn't know. This is fantastic. Anyway, I take the field of view and then use Skytools 3 to match it with the right effective focal length. Skytools has an engine that will show you the field covered by your camera at a given focal length, so you can just plug values into that until you get something that matches. If you don't have Skytools there are any number of other package that do this, including some handy web pages.

Using this scheme, I have tested the following configurations of focal reducing lenses, and computed the efective focal length for each one:

  1. The Antares 1.25" .5x reducer. This one is designed to be used with around 50-60mm of extension. I did not have quite that much, so in my pictures the effective F-ratio (with my C8) is about F5.5 instead of F5.

  2. The MFR-5 with a 5mm spacer between the lenses. This gives you F5.

  3. The MFR-5 with a 10mm spacer behind the entire assembly. This gives you F3.5 or so. This combination also produced obvious vignetting.

  4. Finally, the Celestron .63x combined with the front lens of the MFR5 the standard 1.25" diagonal. This also gave me around F3.5. I used this odd combination because I fit in my diagonal without bottoming out on the mirror. Since I switched to the GEM I stopped using the diagonal so this is not that critical anymore. Still, it's a nice combination.

The next test I plan to run if I ever get a clear night is to combine the .63x reducer with the Antares. I expect to get to around F3.5 or hopefully a bit less. I might also try the Meade .33x focal reducer.

In my telescope, I find that F3.5 is nice because everything is a bit brighter, but the image scale at F5 has been better for the smaller galaxies that you tend to look at in the Spring. Your mileage will vary according to the aperture of your telescope and the quality of your mount.

I will note here that my measurements of the MFR-5 do not match what appears on the various Mallincam web sites, in the Internet forums and in the camera's documentation. I have no insight into why what I found was different, but my numbers are consistent and I'm fairly confident that they are right.

Summary

  1. Focal length determines field of view and therefore image scale in the camera. For the Mallincam, shorter focal lengths tend to give you a better image scale.

  2. Shorter focal lengths also reduce your focal ratio and therefore your exposure times.

  3. Focal reducers can do their job well, but only under certain constraints, like spacing and the size of the final image circle.

  4. With an 8 inch SCT telescope, working at F5 to F3.5 is a good range of focal lengths. Any shorter and stuff gets too small. If you need to go wider, it's probably wiser to get a wider field telescope.

Fine Tuning in the Virgo Cluster, Plus a Surprise

2011-06-06 · by psu

Somewhat uncharacteristically Pittsburgh has had five reasonably clear nights in the last two weeks. In fact, we've had so many nights that I actually skipped one due to fatigue. On the other nights, I have taken the opportunity to try and fine tune setting up my little observational "system" for maximum efficiency. I hesitate to say that I succeeded since the device still regularly confuses me. But with my captured images as evidence, I will say that I've managed to improve what I can see by a substantial margin over the last couple of months. All this, plus a surprise.

There are three parts to the puzzle:

  1. Mount setup, especially polar alignment.

  2. Picking the right effective focal length.

  3. Setting up the computer for image capture.

Mount and Alignment

The first two go hand in hand. So we will cover them in an interleaved fashion. It is axiomatic that the performance of the mount determines the focal length you can use. Since I am cheap, I bought an inexpensive Celestron mount (the CG-5) with relatively crude mechanics. This means that it has rather large tracking errors which would be magnified greatly by a long focal length. In addition, I am lazy so I have not set up an autoguider to correct those tracking errors. This means:

  1. I should use the shortest focal length that I can get away with.

  2. I should set up the mount as well as possible (within the constraints of not having a permanent position) to minimize tracking errors created by misalignment and such.

My telescope has an aperture of 200mm and a native focal length of around 2000mm (F10). After playing with many combinations, I decided that for my telescope while the image scale at F5 (1000mm) was pleasing, especially with smaller objects, the mount just could not track well enough. So, I finally settled on a setup that gives me F3.5 (around 700mm).

The following images of the galaxy M51 illustrate the difference in image scale and tracking quality:

First, at F3:

M51 Screen shot 2011-05-30 at 11.45.17 PM

Second, at F3.5 to F4:

M51 Screen shot 2011-06-05 at 11.32 PM

Finally, at F5 or a bit more:

M51 Screen shot 2011-06-02 at 12.17.39 AM

The shot at F3 has way too much vignetting to really be usable. At F3.5 things are a lot better. The tracking is a tiny bit worse, but still tolerable. You can see a lot of detail in the object. Finally, at F5 the object is a nicer size, but we are right on the edge of what the mount can manage without guiding. The stars are a bit fat and the detail in the object can get blurred.

The second half of the mount performance equation is how well we set the mount up in the first place. Recall that the general scheme goes like this:

  1. Set up the mount on the patio. Point the leg of the tripod under the polar axis roughly north.

  2. Put the scope on the mount and balance.

  3. When it is dark enough, turn the telescope sideways so you can look through the hole in the polar axis. Adjust the mount until you can see Polaris in the hole.

  4. Plug the mount in and do a pointing alignment. The mount will point at 2 stars in one side of the sky and up to 4 on the other side.

  5. Try to end step four on a star near the meridian and fairly high in the sky. Use this star to run the polar alignment software in the mount.

While this seems simple enough in principle, the mechanics of the mount and the temperamental nature of the software make every night a new adventure. Here are my tips for making your setup a less stressful experience. Note that these tips are by no means a complete method for foolproof setup. I still find that every other time I go out something weird happens and I throw my hands up in frustration. I find that it's better to go out expecting the to do the alignment twice, because you will anyway.

So, things to watch out for when setting up a Celestron CG-5:

  1. If you are doing the 2+4 star alignment and the mount does not seem to be getting any better at pointing, you probably aligned on the wrong star a couple of steps back. Unplug the mount and try again. Don't try to fix it, just start over. The UI on the handbox is not really set up to effectively replace alignment information. I have tried to do this a few times when I realized that everything had gone wrong, and it just makes it worse.

  2. The accuracy of the initial pointing will vary widely based on how the mount is feeling or whether you got lucky on your initial rough polar alignment. Don't be surprised if the first couple of stars don't even make it into a wide field finder scope. My finder is 5 degrees across and yesterday I spent the whole night missing. But, this does not really effect the final accuracy of the pointing system. After all my frustrations, I got the best pointing I have ever had last night. Good tracking too.

  3. Don't start aligning the mount too early. Without other stars as references, you are likely to guess badly and then you need to go back to step 1.

  4. If you have a sequence of stars that works, milk it for as long as possible. Whenever you change the stars you use for alignment you are just asking for the mount to change up on you and go nuts. This happened to me when I decided to toss Dubhe into my list one night. Two problems: the mount did not seem to point at Dubhe, and I don't really know where Dubhe is. Needless to say I started over again.

  5. Try and arrange for the +4 part of the 2+4 to be on the side of the meridian where you want to be working for most of the night so you avoid doing a meridian flip. Also, I have had weird problems with the mount pointing off into la-la land if I do a meridian flip just before or right after finishing the polar alignment. So beware. Generally I try to end up in the West, because the sky to the West is not blocked by my house.

  6. Plan ahead with the alignment stars to avoid areas of your sky blocked by trees, or houses. This is why aligning in the Eastern half of the sky doesn't work for me.

  7. When adjusting the latitude of the polar axis with the awful hand screw, always miss too low on purpose so that you hit alignment while tightening the screw. This way it won't loosen later.

  8. Occasionally, usually when everything has gone perfectly and you are polar aligned in 10 minutes, your first GOTO will send the scope pointing into the ground. At this point you should power down and go inside and have a beer. Since you are setting up a video camera, you don't need to worry about wrecking your dark adaption. This is the best thing by far about using this camera, by the way.

Finally, I like to align with a high power eyepiece and switch to the camera after. This calibrates the pointing system with a smaller field of view, which in my experience means you get better pointing.

If all of this seems like a lot of work, it is. Last night I spent about 90 minutes doing trying to make sure that I could repeatably get a good polar alignment in a systematic fashion. I can't really say I succeeded, because I was still confused about a few things. Also, I only got to spend an hour actually looking at anything. But The M51 capture above made it worth it.

The Rest

Now that the scope is set up, here is the rest of the checklist.

  1. Connect the control and video cables to the camera.

  2. Plug the video camera into the USB capture box. I use a cheap Dazzle DVC100. I have also played with a Firewire box and it is better, but the post processing tools, strangely, are better on Windows. So I'm using USB for now.

  3. Fire up Parallels on the Mac. I use this because VMWare would not talk to my video capture widget. After the capture device connects, run AMCap to capture video. This is a .NET example program that does video capture. I use it because the brightness and contrast controls are much better than anything I've found on in MacOS for adjusting the video in real time. There are a few video processing applications for MacOS, but the native brightness/contrast/color controls are all awful. Clearly someone needs to fill this void.

  4. Put the focussing mask on the telescope and go outside with the iPhone and focus the scope using the iPhone to watch the video feed via VNC. This is the future baby.

  5. Take the mask off and go back inside with the hand controller for the mount. Now you can sit inside and point the telescope at what you want to see. Adjust the video with AmCap. Do screen captures to record your conquests.

I use Skytools to make lists of things to see. Skytools is very useful, but I find the UI clunky. I would like someone to take his databases and make a leaner planning program for the iPad. You could make tens of dollars doing this.

Lately, I've been working in the Virgo Cluster of galaxies because it's almost summer and this is my last chance until next year. A month ago I was happy to get this out of focus and not so detailed shot of M87 and some companions. I was just amazed that there was anything there at all:

M87-2011-04-29-2

Last weekend, I managed to do this:

M87 Screen shot 2011-06-02 at 11.15.55 PM

This has the nice feature that it's actually in focus. The tracking is also a lot better. Good enough to capture this small detail in M87: the famous jet. Here is a slightly closer look:

M87 Screen shot 2011-06-02 at 11.18.16 PM

Here are a few other favorites from this area and close by:

M94:

M94 Screen shot 2011-06-02 at 12.10.20 AM

M101:

M101 Screen shot 2011-05-31 at 12.14.00 AM Stack

NGC 4631:

NGC 4631:Whale Screen shot 2011-06-01 at 11.38.44 PM

and M88:

M88 Screen shot 2011-06-02 at 11.47.52 PM

Finally, a Surprise

One thing I've been doing to make myself feel better is to revisit objects I looked at last month and try to do better this month. Along these lines, I've taken a bunch of pictures of that old favorite, the Whirlpool Galaxy M51. Here is my first one from two months ago:

2011-03-27-20-M51

Here is the one I took yesterday:

M51 Screen shot 2011-06-05 at 11.32 PM

I'm fairly happy with the progress.

Having taken so many pictures of the same object, I came across the following cosmic surprise. Here is a shot of the galaxy taken on May 30:

M51 Screen shot 2011-05-30 at 11.45.17 PM

And then again two days later:

M51 Screen shot 2011-06-02 at 12.17.39 AM

If you study the two pictures you will note that there is a "new" star in the second one that is not in the first. To the left of the core there is a straight line of three stars. The middle one is the new one. If you don't feel like finding it, go to the Flickr image and it's already marked there.

It turns out that this is a supernova that had been discovered by some amateurs in France just the day before. A single star 35 million light years away explodes with such violence that a little video camera in my sky-glow-filled suburban back yard can pick it up as a new point of light in a 45 second exposure. I never would have imagined that this would be possible 25 years ago.

I guess I'll have to get a guider.

Avadon: The Black Fortress

2011-06-21 · by peterb

I have a hate/love relationship with Jeff Vogel's RPG games.

I love them because they're a somewhat nostalgic throwback to the days of the early Ultima games (I've talked about my hate/love relationship with those games in detail before). I hate them largely because the games' UIs are just clumsy enough that I feel a bit like I'm trying to dice onions while wearing mittens.

Mind you, Vogel himself has an ambivalent relationship with the genre -- worth a read is his not-so-tongue-in-cheek article Why I Hate Fantasy RPGs, outlining a number of their flaws.

Vogel's latest, Avadon: The Black Fortress was recently released for Mac OS X and Windows and, somewhat more interestingly, for iPad. I picked up the iPad version (it's a steal at $9.99) because I was curious to see how the UI issues played out on that platform.

It turns out, it's pretty good!

*"You are a servant of Avadon. The Black Fortress. Your job is to protect the Pact, five nations that have banded together in a fragile alliance. The purpose of the Pact: To hold back the waves of invaders that seek to destroy you.

Outside the lands of the Pact, there are limitless threats. Barbarians. Fading, jealous empires. Titans and unspeakable horrors. The warriors and spies of Avadon are charged to keep them at bay, weak and divided. You fight in the shadows, rooting out small threats before they have the chance to grow. Your resources are unlimited, and your word is law."*

There are a number of great things about playing Avedon on iPad. Chief among them is the fact there's no "miniaturization" going on for the platform. You are playing the exact same game that you'd get on the PC or Mac, just with a different way of interacting with it. I can't quite explain why - and I'll be the first to acknowledge it doesn't make any sort of rational sense - but interacting with my cute little avatars by poking them with my finger is more fun than clicking on them with a mouse. Go figure.

As always, Vogel has made a fairly interesting world using sparse but effective text. I'm only to the second major area, but at this point I'd summarize the overall plot as "You play a brutal thug hired by an oppressive empire to enforce the Pax Avadonia by murdering as many orphans as possible". Presumably as the game progresses I will be given opportunities to decide whether to embrace the orphan-murdering or to instead lead a band of Ewoks in rebellion. I am doing violence to Vogel's writing with my completely unjustified snark, of course. Vogel has a good sense of when to spell things out, and when to leave things unsaid, and this leads to a well-paced game that draws you in right from the start, and hasn't so far left me wondering "Well? What do I do now?"

The combat system in the game is a turn-based affair redolent of the original Fallout but moving along a lot more fluidly. And with no wondering whether you're supposed to left-click or right-click. There are four character archetypes (whom I will summarize as the Hitty guy, the Ninja Guy, the Wizard Chick, and the Healer Chick), and each plays different enough, tactically, to make each combat enjoyable. Especially when I win.

There are a few UI rough spots that deserve special mention. You identify enemies by tapping and holding your finger on top of them -- which, if you have big fingers like me, completely obscures the label you're trying to read. Second, I keep wanting to use a pinch-gesture to zoom in for a better look at something, or zoom-out for an overview. No such luck. Lastly, you can drag the viewport around while your party is running across the map, after which it jumps back. This feels clumsy, but I'm also not sure I have any brilliant ideas that would work better. When I do this, it's usually because I have tapped on a location I want my guys to go, and I want to get the next location after that lined up. But you end up not being able to do this effectively.

There's also a bit of ambiguity about when a quest has been completed. The first quest in the game gives you a nice big hint in the form of one of your party members saying (I paraphrase) "Well, I guess we did what we were supposed to so we should probably go back and talk to that guy again, huh?" This led me to believe I'd get something akin to that whenever I finished a quest; no such luck. This leads to a little -- just a smidge -- of low-level angst, along the lines of "Am I about to waste 2 minutes walking across the map only to discover that I missed one rat that was hiding in a corner somewhere?' I sort of wish that wasn't the case.

I've only been playing this for a couple of days. But my initial experiences have been positive enough that I find myself hoping that Vogel ports some more of his games to the platform.

Geneforge, anyone?

The Walking Dead

2011-06-23 · by psu

Ever since Nikon put out the first usable consumer DSLR camera (the D1x, btw) what people have pined for is something that would shoot pictures that are nearly as good, but in a much smaller form factor. Over the last few years, several cameras like this have finally become available. Most recently this has culminated in the almost comical Pentax "Q" System which combines what everyone has always wanted: small sensor cameras and interchangeable lenses. What?

Anyway, the universe has yet again dealt the camera companies an ironic blow. Just as they come around to the idea that people want higher quality pocket cameras, we come to find out that actually, no one wants a higher quality pocket camera. In fact, in five years the pocket camera will probably be all but irrelevant.

My partner in blogging, peterb, actually called this in his first comment on this post. The truth is that the smart phone (in my case, an iPhone 4) will destroy the pocket camera. There is almost no question that this will happen. I did not believe him at the time because the camera in the iPhone 3GS was actually kind of sucky. I believe him now because the camera in the iPhone 4 is, for the most part, not sucky. I realized this on my most recent trip to Paris where by far my two favorite pocket camera shots were taken with the iPhone. Here is the first one:

IMG_2491

The second one is a bit more interesting thing than that, but you'll have to take my word for it because as a general policy I don't post family photos to the public Internet. Just a paranoid tick I have.

In any case, here are the four things that make pictures on the iPhone better than all the other cameras:

  1. The camera is good enough in terms of image quality, responsiveness and general feature set.

  2. In camera HDR. Cannot stress this enough. This one feature makes the camera 100% more usable.

  3. Autostitch.

  4. The phone is close to the Internet at all times.

We can go over these one by one. The first speaks for itself. The camera is missing nothing that is absolutely critical for about 75% of the photos I ever want to take. By which I really mean 90%. The second is more subtle. What is nice about the HDR is that it compensates for the one major shortcoming of the tiny phone CCD: limited dynamic range. So, instead of black shadows and blown highlights, in most situations you get decent pictures. The pano above takes great advantage of this. I also love love love using Autostitch in the phone. I'll do panos in my phone in a heartbeat, whereas I hardly ever bother to do panos with my real cameras. This is because doing them in Photoshop sucks and doing them in Autostitch is fun. I can't explain it. In fact, the picture that I didn't show you is a 2x2 square HDR pano. It's the only combined horizontal/vertical panoramic shot I've ever actually tried. I would never do this sort of thing with my Nikon, but the fact that I can see the stitch almost immediately in my phone makes me try.

Finally, the fourth one is important because in general we take pictures to share them, and these days the way you share pictures is on the Internet.

I will posit that no current camera-company camera, be it a lowly point and shoot or a $20,000 professional digital back, combines all four of these features in one package. In addition, I (and others who are smarter than me) would argue that the camera companies will never understand how to put a package like this together. This is because they only understand cameras as they were used between 1960 and 1995. I think they still don't understand how important easy sharing and having a software platform in the camera is to most users. If they did, they wouldn't have spent the last 10 years in a megapixel pissing match. Instead, they would have given us cameras that are more usable and actually take advantage of things digital can do that film couldn't.

Anyway, to end, here's another phone picture I took in Paris which was better than what I got with my big DSLR:

psu_20110508-00839

I think this might also be a panorama. But I can't remember. I can't remember because I did't have to sit at my laptop for 20 minutes watching Photoshop chug trying to put it together. See how that works?

Spring To Summer and The Nexus of All Things Dorky

2011-06-29 · by psu

As spring has turned into summer we are up against our last few chances to look at the really faint fuzzies in the spring sky. I refer of course to the mega-clusters of galaxies in Virgo and Coma Berenices. This week in Pittsburgh has been miraculously clear from summer haze, and my telescope mount has been miraculously clear from strange mechanical hiccups, which means I have spent a last few quality hours with the galaxies this week.

My first stop for the night was M64. I had found that the only image I had of M64 was a bit of a blurry mess because the focus of my telescope had gone off as a I captured it. So I took another shot at it, and it came out better:

M64 2011-06-28 at 11.11PM

This is about a 1 minute exposure. I also used the opportunity afforded by a well behaved mount to take 5 separate frames at 1 minute, and also a "dark" frame with the telescope covered up. I then used a cool program called Nebulosity to combine all these images and use the dark frame to clean up warm pixel noise and generally smooth things out. The result is this:

M64 2011-06-28 Stacked

Noticeably nicer, without a whole lot more work.

After M64, I hopped over to the nearby NGC 5005 to add a new object to my "observed" list. The main reason people buy telescopes is to collect objects into an "observed" list. Anyway, this proved to be a nicer object than some of the smaller "M" galaxies in the area, with a pretty compact spiral:

NGC 5005 2011-06-28 at 11.19PM

From there, I then jumped into the Coma Berenices cluster and got the surprise of the night. I centerd my frame on the galaxy known as (I thought) NGC 4889. But, as you can see from the picture, the object is really small. I wasn't really sure what I was looking at. To make things more confusing, Skytools did not think that there was any object named NGC 4889. It only knew about NGC 4884. Well, it turns out that one of many bugs in the NGC catalog is that these two objects are the same. There is only 4884. This mystery solved I stared at the field of view for a while, and noted a ton of little "stars" that looked suspiciously fuzzy. What could those be?

Since we live in the future there is an oracle in the sky that can tell us what these things are now, and all you have to do is send it a simple picture. I refer, of course, to the Astronmetry blind plate solver. I have mentioned this engine before, but at the time I did not give it enough extended credit. This system is as close to magic as we can get in the modern world. Best of all, it combines all three major dork passions into one glorious nexus of geekdom: it's a computer that processes photographs and tells you what astronomical objects you telescope is pointing at.

Here is the picture I sent it:

NGC4884 Cluster 2011-06-28 at 11.36PM

The astrometry bot extracts everything out of the frame that looks like a star, and then compares the star patterns with a huge index that has been built from one of the more comprehensive catalogs of all stars down to some ridiculously faint magnitude. If it can find a strong enough match in this index, then with no information other than a noisy image, the system can tell you:

  1. The exact celestial coordinates of the center of the picture.

  2. The size of the field of view.

  3. The name of every interesting object in the field.

  4. Which way points north.

And so on. This used to take hours of painstaking work comparing your picture against a paper atlas. Now you send a picture to a web site and wait about 45 seconds, and you get back something like this:

NGC4884 Labeled

The only thing more magical would be if it ran natively on an iPad (ha ha).

What the astrometry bot told me was that I had wandered in to a huge cluster of galactic bodies. The frame contains seventeen island universes each made up of hundreds of millions of stars. Truly a fantastic sight.

I rounded out the night with a reminder of what is to come over the next couple of months. I sent the telescope over to one of my favorite objects, the Trifid Nebula (M20). Images of this object through a six inch scope were what convinced me to take the plunge at the Mallincam in the first place, and the camera did not let me down. Here is a set of five frames, 45 seconds of exposure in each:

M20 Screen Shot 2011-06-28 Stacked-PS

It should not be possible that this looks this good. Especially since the area of the sky this sits in is in the worst of the light pollution in my yard (to the south and west).

I'm looking forward to shifting from galaxy hunting to looking at the great nebulas of the summer. As another teaser, here is the Dumbbell (M27).

M27 2011-06-28 Stacked

I think I'll go to bed early tonight.

Tinkering with The Stars Part 4: The Back End

2011-07-07 · by psu

Back in part 2 I promised a short piece on all the other fussy details related to using the Mallincam. Instead I got into an extended tangent on the subject of telescope mounts, focal length and image scale and various other things. The final missing piece is what you actually do to see the pictures. After some experimentation, I have a scheme I'm comfortable with.

The defining aspect of the Mallincam which makes it different than other astronomical cameras is that its output is an analog video signal. A more traditional CCD or digital camera captures light into the wells of its sensor and then when the exposure is done, the voltages are read out of the sensors wells one at a time and converted into discrete digital values. These are then sent over a wire to a storage card (digital camera) or your computer (CCD). To actually see a picture you have to do some post-processing on the file to convert it into an image format that you can display and then parse with your eyeballs.

The Mallincam is different. There are two outputs on the back of the camera: one for S-video and one for composite video. You hook a regular analog video cable to these ports and then to a monitor and you can look at images directly from the camera. It's as if you hooked up a camcorder from the 1990s to the back of your telescope. This is a great convenience if you want to just look at the pictures and not bother with any computer-based post-processing. Viewing with an old CRT security monitor gives you images that are as good or in some ways better than you can manage in a computer. The CRT has a luminosity to it that images confined to LCD screens lack. Believe it or not you can still find some CRTs for sale... but there are also people who use small and very expensive professional LCD video monitors.

Me, I use a computer. I actually ran a CRT screen side by side for a couple of nights as well, but didn't see too much advantage in it. Anyway, I always have my laptop nearby since it's running my planetarium and observation logging software. So naturally I'd want to use it to capture pictures. This leads to the question of how to capture video frames in the machine. On my Macintosh laptop, I tried two different schemes:

  1. Firewire capture device, some Mac software for image adjustment. I bought a relatively expensive Canopus capture device. S-video goes in one side and Firewire goes into the Mac. Very high quality. Sadly, I was never happy with the capture and processing end. There is a tool called Camtwist with a lot of nice features, and even some filters specific to the Mallincam. Unfortunately it the basic tools it has for adjusting contrast, gamma, color and brightness are hard to use and much too fussy. The astronomy filters are pretty cool, especially if you are limited to shorter exposures. But the lack of a good set of basic controls killed this tool for me. The other worry with this tool is that it's essentially written by two guys who have stopped working on it, so new versions of MacOS are sure to break it.

  2. USB capture device under Windows. Again, the device has an S-video (or composite) input and then hooks up to your computer with a USB cable. For very little money you can pick up a "Dazzle" video capture box on Amazon. The quality is not as good as the Canopus, and you need special drivers that may or may not work on your Windows system. I had to buy and install Parallels to make this work. The drivers did not work in VMWare. In a strange bit of turnabout, once you get the device working there is a basic capture program that is much better than the Mac stuff in the "just works" department. I refer to AmCap.

AmCap doesn't look like much on the outside. It has your basic shitty Windows XP layout and various modal dialog boxes. But, it does a couple of critical things right, which I will now explain. All of the Mac video capture progams assume that your goal is to capture a huge stream into a movie and then import it into Final Cut or iMovie or something. What this ends up meaning is that it's hard to find software that has the video feed in one window and the adjustments in another window and lets you make adjustments to the video while seeing the feed change in real time. This is exactly what AmCap does.

When you fire it up, the main window has the output from the video feed. You can then open an adjustments dialog and drag it off to the side and push the brightness, contrast, saturation and other knobs around to fix up the picture. The sliders have an effective range of adjustments and a good "scale" in that they don't change too fast which was my complaint about the Camtwist adjustments.

I should put a screen shot here to show you what I mean, but I don't have my camera running to do so, so you'll have to wait for later.

In practice the main adjustments you end up making are brightness and contrast. In a relatively light polluted environment like my back yard, you are always fighting the brightness of the skyglow and trying to beat it down without losing detail in the object that you are looking at. So the scheme is to drive the brightness down as much as you can and push the contrast back up to get some detail back. All the while you want to keep and eye on the noise. In the best cases, you can get good object detail and a nice dark background with acceptable noise, like this:

M27 2011-06-30 Single

In the worst cases, I'll have the brightness slider bottomed out and still have a huge glowing ball of noise in the frame, like in this shot:

M104 Screen shot 2011-05-30 at 10.48.21 PM

I was looking at this object low in a very hazy sky, thus all the awful noise. This is about the best you can do with just AmCap. You could, and people do, use additional devices to adjust the signal before it hits the capture device. The Mallincam has spawned a large amount of interest among telescope geeks in archaic analog video processing devices to try and fight the dual problems of background brightness and noise. The most popular of these are based on old time base correctors that you used to use to copy old VHS tapes. These are hard to find since the main use for them was pirating VHS video tapes that no one cares about anymore. But if you snoop around you can still find them. Rock Mallin used to sell a modified one that he called the "DVE", but he ran out. You can even find versions of these devices that allow you more sophisticated adjustments in color, brightness and contrast. I have not as yet experimented with anything like this, mostly because of the cost and also because I don't want to add yet another box to my chain of complexity. But, if I ever run longer exposures that I do now, I'll look into it more carefully.

AmCap also lets you capture single frames out of the video feed into a bitmap image file that you can then look at later. I've gotten into the habit of making a folder for each object that I look at on a given night and capturing 5 or 10 good frames into the folder. "Good" here is defined mostly by the quality of the tracking during the exposure. The mount is not always perfect, alas.

For a while I'd go over my screen shots at the end of the night and pick one that I liked for each object and throw them up on flickr. Here is a favorite object out of the southern summer sky, the Eagle Nebua:

Screen shot 2011-07-06 at 1.00.41 AM

It's a bit noisy and washed out because it is relatively low in the southern sky. This puts it right in the worst sky glow that I have in my yard. On a bad night you can't even see many stars with binoculars in that part of the sky, and it's supposed to be filled with the rich star clouds of the Milky Way.

Anyway, a week or so ago I discovered that if I had five or ten good frames that were fairly well aligned, I could use some code in the Nebulosity application to "stack" the frames together and smooth out the noise and detail. What you do is tell Nebulosity how to align the pictures, and then just tell it to chew on the frames. The result, after a 5 minutes of Curves adjustment in Photoshop, looks like this:

M16 2011-07-05

This is really fantastic in my opinion. It's about ten minutes of work above and beyond staring at the original video and capturing a few good exposures. But the stacking makes a big difference in the final quality of the picture. If you are interested, the tutorial I used to figure out Nebulosity's stacking feature is here. Skip the parts about pre-processing and go right to the explanation of how to align images and do Standard Deviation stacking. It's actually possible to do some dark frame subtraction with the Mallincam as well, but if you start down that road pretty soon you'll find yourself running 8 hours of LRGB data collection when you should sleeping. I'm not sure I want to go there yet.

If you are observing at this point that all of this seems a bit similar to CCD imaging, I don't think you are off base. There are similarities, but there are also differences. I think the Mallincam still does more pre-processing of the image than even one shot color CCD cameras do. The result is that you can can both observe the object in "real time" and then later post-process the images in a limited way to make them prettier. I like doing both.

That said, it's not hard to imagine someone building a more streamlined CCD capture application that did some of the work that the Mallincam's video hardware does. It should not be beyond the realm of possibility to quickly capture data from a short CCD exposure and process it into a color image in real time without all of the baggage of a long winded traditional CCD calibration and image processing workflow. Imagine an iPad app that can talk to one of the new eyepiece-sized CCD guider cameras, capture an image and show it to you instantly while you stand next to the telescope... maybe even over wifi. You could then save the individual files to your computer later to do stacking and other processing. All things being equal I'd buy that app.

To close, here are two more shots from my recent nights out. First, M8, the Lagoon nebula:

M8 2011-06-30 12.15PM Stacked

This is five stacked frames. Next, M17, the Swan. This is also around five stacked frames.

M17 2011-06-30 11.50PM Stacked

The best part of summer is coming. Hopefully the skies will be clear enough to see what's up there.

Let Them Eat Cake

2011-07-13 · by psu

Several people who know me felt the need to point out that Dozen Bake Shop closed their doors last week. I guess since I have written mean things about Dozen they expected me to gloat or something. But while I will talk trash about anyone, I generally don't take pleasure in someone else's loss. Well, except for the Lakers and the Yankees. Those guys can kiss my ass.

Anyway, with Dozen gone, you might be asking yourself, "where should I go for cake?" Four places.

First and foremost, you should go to Jean-Marc Chatellier’s French bakery in Millvale. In addition to the best croissant that I can remember having anywhere in the Eastern United States, the guy can also make a good basic cake.

Second, you should go to Vanilla Pastry Studio in East Liberty. Yes they make cupcakes. But they also make good cake and a few neat novelty items. Try their Whoopie Pies.

Third, you should go to La Gourmandine. I haven't actually had cake here. But, the tarts and the brioche are fabulous. So you should go here anyway.

Fourth, you should get the various pound cakes they make at Mediterra. The lemon "traveling cake" is particularly excellent.

As an aside, there used to be a bakery in Monroeville whose name escapes me that make a fabulous layer cake with some sort of berry jam as a filling. That was some good cake too.

As a second aside, if Legume ever reopens, their version of the usually crappy flourless chocolate cake is actually a stupendous taste sensation.

As a third aside, there is a certain restaurant on the South Side that I like whose name you might be able to guess. In the summer they will sometimes have a mango cream filled layer cake that is absolutely worth dying or killing for. But I'm not going to tell you all the details because I want my piece first.

That's all I have for cake. And no, I don't think that Burnt Almond Torte is all that great. So sue me.

Consumer: Know Thyself

2011-07-24 · by psu

I bought a new bicycle yesterday. "But wait! You just bought a bike last year!", you might be thinking. You probably are not thinking that since you'd have to be an obsessive reader of this web site to remember. But it might happen. Yes, I bought a bike last year. On paper it was the perfect bike for me. Steel frame: check. Nice blend of road bike speed with utilitarian versatility: check. Able to attach bags and fenders and such for longer trips: check. Great brand name for me (Surly): check. Reasonably comfortable yet efficient riding position: check. Well, I hated it.

I was confused that I hated it because it should have been perfect. My favorite bike of all time is the steel road bike I bought just after moving back to PIttsburgh. Here is how I bought that bike:

  1. I walked into Pittsburgh Pro Bikes. For a while they were one of the only serious bike shops in the area, and over time I came to not really like them for various reasons, but at this point I didn't know better.

  2. I said "I want to buy a straight up road bike, but with lower gears. I think I'm a 52? Maybe? Or a 54?"

  3. The man showed me a Specialized Allez Sport. A straight up road bike with a triple crank in front. The triple crank provided a nice small front chain ring and the gears I needed to get over the Pittsburgh hills.

  4. A 52 turned out to be too small. The 54 was just right. I took the bike on to Murray Avenue and rode up and down the hill. The bike felt perfect. I was not conscious of it at the time, but it had the right reach, the right handle bar height, the right length, and the ride handling.

  5. I rolled back down to the shop and hit the brakes. I hit them hard because I was used to the ancient side pulls on my old road bike. The brakes bit down and I almost flipped the bike over forward. Now those are great brakes.

I bought the bike that day. The whole process took maybe an hour.

I spent a few months thinking about the bike I should buy to replace it. I thought that the characteristics of the Specialized that I liked were the nice steel frame, the relatively inexpensive mid-end Shimano drive-train, and the overall size and fit. The Surly appeared to me to match most of these characteristics and also provided the ability to use fatter tires and fenders and such. Perfect, right? Wrong.

At first I thought I just had to adjust to the gearing. The new fashion in gearing is the so-called "compact double crank" wherein you take advantage of the fact that you can fit ten fucking speeds in the back of the bike to get low gears by using a smaller small chainring in front. Instead of the standard 53/39 combination of years past, the new road bikes now come with a 50/34. With a wide range of speeds in the back (11-28, or 11-32) you get a reasonable low gear and a high gear that only a guy with legs larger than his chest can use.

I am used to riding a "road triple", meaning I have a smaller range of gears in the back (13-26) and three chainrings in front (52-42-30). The triple crank in front has always caused consternations in the road bike crowd. You will hear them whine that it is heavy, shifts poorly, is heavy, and also makes your penis smaller. All of these things are true, but none of them matter.

The Surly came with a compact double, though with only nine speeds. I stuck a 12-27 on the thing to get the lower gears I wanted and rode off into my Pittsburgh hills. I found the experience to be miserable. None of my gears were in the right place. I could never work out exactly when to make the too-large jump from the 34 to the 50. I rode slower than I have ever ridden on my standard loops. I put it up to getting older, and figured it would get better this year.

It did not get better. If anything I got even slower. Soon, I dreaded going out on the bike at all. And this made me even slower.

Something else that did not get better on the bike was the shitty shifting and the crappy brakes. I had the shop try to adjust the shifting a few times, but it would always hang up on one of the middle cogs and annoy me as a tried to downshift to slog up the next hill. This made the feeling of slowness even worse. This in turn made me even more reluctant to ride the bike. The Allez never shifted badly. Even after I crashed it once at 30 miles an hour I never had any trouble. One has to conclude that the 1993 just-worse-than-Shimano-105 parts are just that much better than the 2010 just-worse-than-Shimano-105 parts. My advice to new bike buyers: do not buy a bike with parts cheaper than 105.

My second piece of advice to new bike buyers: do not settle for anything but the Shimano dual-pivot side pull brakes. Remember those brakes that almost flipped by bike over? Those were the Shimano brakes. The Surly uses these Tektro brakes which on the surface look like a similar design. The problem is that they are crap. You have to use an inordinate amount of pressure on the levers to make the bike stop. On the steep hill down from my house this means that I'm holding on for dear life and squeezing all the blood out of my hands. I hate it. So heed my advice. Be very careful when reading the parts specifications for that production road bike you are about to buy. You want Shimano brakes.

Another unexpected annoyance was the fat tires. These tires stick to everything. I'd get to the end of a ride with a million tiny little pebbles embedded in the rubber. I figured this would get better over time too, and it did. Sort of. I soon lost interest in the fat tires. And, since I never ride in the rain, I never actually fitted the fenders that would fit into the frame and under the shitty brakes.

The final problems I have with the Surly are my fault. I set up the fit slightly wrong, with the reach slightly long and the bars slightly too high. I did this with my Bike Friday as well. You'd think I'd learn. In any case, the result was a relatively slow heavy bike with fat tires and a clunky drive train.

The more I hated the bike, the more I thought about why I hated the bike. I went over my bike buying experience again and again trying to work out where I had gone wrong. Aside from not actually trying the Surly frame before buying it, I could not see where I had really failed.

Then I had an epiphany.

I had bought the wrong bike because I had misread the sort of bike that I thought I wanted to buy. I had always assumed that what I liked about the Specialized was that it was more practical version of the straight-up racing bike, and that if I got an even more practical bike I'd be even happier. This was incorrect. What I liked about the Specialized Allez was that it was a straight-up racing bike with more practical gearing. I liked the bike because it was light and felt fast. The fact that they had the courtesy to make the fit and gearing more comfortable was just a happy coincidence of marketing. All these years I have thought that what I wanted was a steel all-around bike, since I don't race and don't really ride that fast anyway. The truth is that what I want is a fast bike which I can then take out and ride too slowly. But at least I'll feel fast on it.

My mission was now clear. What I was after was the 2011 version of the Specialized Allez Sport. If you ask the current market "Hey, I want a straight up road bike with lower gears and a slightly more comfortable fit, what should I buy?" the market will answer "You should buy a production carbon-fiber road bike designed with one of the 'comfort' geometries." Most companies that make road bikes do this now: Trek, Specialized, Jamis and even the more hard core racing brands like Cervelo.

Here is Trek's version of this bike: the Madone 4.5. It even comes with a triple crank! I trekked on down to the Trek store and had the single worst bicycle buying experience that I have ever had in my entire life. It started out OK. They seemed very interested in getting me something with the right fit. This involved standing in front of a computer and taking various cryptic measurements. When I finally got out on the bike my seat was an inch too low and the bike was so out of adjustment that the chain dropped three cogs riding up the ramp from the Whole Foods back to the Trek Store. I will never set foot in a Trek store again.

I then went back to Pro Bikes. I wasn't sure I'd actually buy from them, but I figured I should at least try the current Specialized bikes since I had struck gold with Specialized before. I stood in the store for about 45 minutes watching them deal with the crowd of people they had at the end of the day. I don't begrudge them not helping me out. It was a busy end of day crowd. I do begrudge them not even asking if I needed anything.

Luckily, I won't have to deal with my inner grudges, because I found what I needed down the street at BikeTek. I had talked to these guys last year when I decided to buy the Surly and the store owner had been a bit off-putting with his constant cheerleading for carbon frames. Luckily, the current staff of the store is great. They let me ride about five different bikes at various price levels and spent the time to make sure they were in good adjustment. In the end the bike that felt the most like the Specialized of yore was this one:

I decided to get this one because it had Ultegra on it. This was to overcompensate for my horrible experience with the Tiagra on the Surly. Felt also makes a 105 version of this bike which would have been just fine, but at this point in my life I figured why take chances. Also: I like the blue.

So: quick frame with comfortable fit: check. Real Shimano brakes: check. Bike can shift into all gears without choking on itself: check. The BikeTek guys even put the bike on a stand for me to double check the seat height and the reach and such. I had them put on a slightly longer stem. The fit is just right. I'm going to resist the urge to tinker with it and ruin it (the bars could probably be a bit lower...but no no no).

I took the bike out this morning for its first ride longer than three blocks long in Squirrel Hill. I went eight miles through North park and then back up the hill to my house. Here is what was in my head the whole time: man, I think the bike computer must be adjusted wrong, it's reading my speed as too fast. I then rode up my hill on a cog one gear higher than I've been able to use in the last year and a half.

I don't entirely understand why this happened. The new bike is not that much lighter than the old one. Just a few pounds here and there. I'm going to speculate that it's the wheels.

Anyway. The Surly will go on Craig's list. Or maybe it will just sit in my office looking pretty, but not getting ridden that much. Hopefully the next time I buy a bike I'll remember what sort of bike I actually want. And I'll remember about the brakes.

Footnote about the brakes

I screw up this brakes thing over and over again. The last bike I bought before the Surly was a Bike Friday folding bike. It also had longer reach side-pull and then later V-brakes, both of which I hated. This was because I bought the touring version of the bike (more practical!) instead of the road bike version (sound familiar?). I do not learn quickly.

Some Food Shorts

2011-07-31 · by psu

Haven't done a short snippet food roundup post in a while. So here we go.

Salt of the Earth

This place opened recently to a huge amount of hype and buzz, and I avoided it for three reasons:

  1. Hard to get in anyway. I have plenty of places to go that are easy to get in to.

  2. An overbearingly self-concious twitter feed.

  3. I had a friend of a friend who had a poor service experience there. 'Nuff said.

So our foodie friends finally strong-armed us into going. While it's not entirely fair to come to hasty conclusions based on only one visit, this is my web site and I'll do whatever I want. I was not impressed. SALT (I refuse to call it NACL) is not so much a restaurant as a narrative food experience. The entire mission of the place seems to be to tell you an epic and engaging novel-length story about how they served you food and it was fantastic! This gets in the way of the actual food service.

The problem is that the place just isn't that good. Every dish has at least one or maybe two too many ingredients on it. The otherwise excellent beef tartare comes buried under toasted garlic and chopped peanuts. Might have worked if there was less of it ... but it definitely would have worked with no peanuts at all. The diver scallops come with 3 kinds of greens, 2 different soy sauce reductions and little pieces of banana. Banana? Why?

The final insult was the "Pork Baguette." Presumably an homage to the Vietnamese bahn mi sandwich, this dish came out with perfectly cooked pork combined with a fresh and lightly pickled mix of excellent vegetables. And then they stuffed it into a stale and chewy baguette. This is a bad move on any day. But it made me especially grumpy since I had just returned from Cupertino, CA where among other things you can get a better pork bahn mi for $3.50 instead of $15. Yes, Lucy's sandwiches are also only $4 or $5. But her pork is not as good. Her bread isn't stale though.

I can think of four places I'd rather go than SALT on any given night right off the top of my head, and I'll list them here: Dinette, Legume, DISH, and Toast! So there.

A Thing to Do with Fish

Baking that filet of firm white fish in the oven? Don't know what you want to do for sauce? Do this:

  1. Cut 1 or 2 tablespoon side pats of butter.

  2. 4 or 5 or 10 cloves of garlic.

  3. A couple of handfuls of cherry tomatoes, cut in half.

Pile these on top of an near the fish in the half sheet pan. Bake at 400 for 10-15 or however long it takes for the fish to cook. Now you have baked fish and a roasted tomato sauce to put on it.

Short Blurbs on New and Not so New Food Places

Dinette bills itself as a pizza joint, but really you should go there for the salads and appetizers. The chef there makes the best salad dressings in the entire city. Her "green goddess" dressing in particular is something to go our of your way to eat.

Park Brugge is good. At least as good as Point Brugge and with much better wheelchair access, so it's the new default place for that Point Brugge sort of food. They should teach Lidia's how to make steak and eggs and Burgatory how to make fries. I like the thinner fries there better than the fatter ones at the Point.

We went to Elements once. I remember the smoked and cured meats being awesome. And I remember nothing else about the meal whatsoever. I hear the chef there left to open his own cured meats restaurant. That should be good.

Piccolo Forno has some really good risotto. Go get some.

Finally got back to Coca. I liked it a lot this time. I'd go more if it weren't always impossible to get in.

Go get Thai food at Pusadee's Garden in upper Lawrenceville.

Meat and Potatoes is a new place Downtown with a lot of dishes that have too much meat in them. You must go to any place that serves the marrow, liver and sweetbreads triumvirate. So go.

Smoke in Homestead has real BBQ that they serve in "tacos" that are really more like small burritos. No matter. It's good.

New New How Lee

For as long as I've lived in Pittsburgh, HOW LEE (and later NEW HOW LEE) has sat at the corner of Forbes and Shady and been the sort of dive Chinese-American takeout joint that gives Chinese-American takeout joints a bad name. No more.

Sometime last year someone bought the place, rebuilt the inside and filled it with Chinese and other East-Asian people all gorging themselves on Szechuan food that is so spicy that it will melt the front of your face off. And, in something of a watershed, this place serves real Ma Po Tofu, not that bullshit vegetarian peas and carrots travesty that so many places put on the menu to appease the weirdos in the universe who don't like pork. This Ma Po tofu is also infused with a generous amount of the Szechuan peppercorn. If you have not had this sort of peppercorn then you are in for a treat. It does something in your mouth that no other food can do. I don't really know how to describe it. It's like a flowery, peppery shot of Novocain. Other highlights include the Beef with Cumin, either one of the dry fried chicken dishes, the Dan-Dan noodles, and the sauteed green beans (with pork in them, dammit!).

By my count this gives Squirrel Hill its fourth or fifth genuine regional Chinese food restaurant (Rose Tea, How Lee, Ka Mei, China Star, and Sun Penang if you want to push the boundaries a bit).

Random Thought for the End of the Night

Pittsburgh still desperately needs a real ramen place. And a place with truly excellent breakfast. The other things are coming along OK though.

Tens of Dollars

2011-08-17 · by psu

A guy at the office and I have a running joke about the amateur astronomy business. I will opine that the market is just begging for some great product to solve problem X for every telescope user in the world. And then we both snicker that one could make tens of dollars by building and offering such a product for sale. This is a marketplace where selling thousands of units a year makes you a massive player. It's a market that is in a permanent niche.

Now, to some people, this is a feature. There is always that class of hobbyist whose idea of sheer hell is that their interest would somehow blossom into something generates a genuine mass market interest. Even back in the 80s there were already people who thought that computers had been dumbed down too much when people started putting them into boxes for you instead of making you build a wire wrap board. These people must be really pissed off now.

Astronomy serves as a case study in what happens when the mass interest never hits. Let us be realistic. This is a hobby that is primarily enjoyed by a few tens of thousands of users almost all of whom are male and aged between around 41 and 67. As a result, the market has the following odd characteristics:

  1. The market is small. There will never be a product here that has the psychological impact of something like the iPhone. Or the Apple II for that matter.

  2. The market is conservative. These people really hate change. I've mentioned this before, but I can't think of a single consumer device besides a commercial telescope mount that still uses RS-232 for anything. The only other uses I've seen are for esoteric industrial control applications. This is also a market that isn't quite sure that eyepiece designs from the 19th century still don't have some technical advantages. I could go on and on.

Because the market is small, there are very few players in the market that can scale their operations to modern levels. The largest companies by far are the ones based in China. Orion Telescope and Celestron are the two most well known names here. They both source all of their products from the same large optical company in China. But, as you move up the food chain cost and quality, you move into smaller and smaller companies. The most well respected maker of refractor telescopes and telescope mounts is Astro-Physics. They make at most few dozen instances of each of their products a year. If you are lucky you can get a mount almost immediately (like now) but usually you'll wait around a year. If you are unlucky and want a telescope be ready to wait 10 years.

Here is another example: there is a guy who used to work for Astro-Physics who now makes what I hear are bitchin' tripods for the mounts. But the only way you can hear about him is in a forum post, or a classified ad. You can only order one of his tripods via email, and you will have no idea when the thing will actually be delivered.

You see this over and over again. More than half the time you go to any large dealer of astronomical products and look up something you want to buy, the words "pre-order" or "out of stock" or "back ordered" will be right next to the "buy" button. It's almost easier to just look at the astronomy equivalent of ebay and wait for used stuff to show up. It will often happen faster than the new stuff. This is an infuriating state of affairs. People (by people I mean me) are now programmed to expect to just go to Amazon and buy anything with one click. The astronomy world destroys this expectation completely.

The issue of scale also comes up in the software business. Several of the most used pieces of astronomy software are primarily developed by one person. Not a small team led by one person: one person writing all the code (off the top of my head I can think of Skytools, PHD guiding, Nebulosity, the Astro-Physics mount software, and Equinox). While all of these tools are certainly functional, they will not win any design awards, and they are limited in the rate at which they evolve (c.f. the market is conservative). It's just now occurring to folks that wireless control of equipment might be neat. Or that user interfaces might want to evolve past the Visual Basic Forms sort of look and feel.

Of course, there is an upside to all of this smallness. If you are lucky you will find small groups of people making just what you want and doing a really good job with customer service. Every single one of these small companies that I have mentioned (except the tripod guy) runs a mailing list on Yahoo where questions are answered by the people who run the company. Not some customer support staffer in India. The actual guy who runs everything. This is pretty neat. It's too bad that they can't hook up with that Amazon commerce engine though.

It's good that you can find good support because you are going to need it. The combination of the small size and conservative nature of the audience means that there are not a boatload of companies breaking down doors to make telescopes and other astronomical equipment easy to use. I don't think the industry has ever really gotten past assuming everyone buying telescopes has a little DIY streak in them and enjoys constructing custom wiring harnesses by hand, or hacking marine battery packs, or any number of other little construction projects. Let's just say that product packaging is not necessarily a great concern. For example, you can buy a $10,000 Dobsonian telescope and then find out that you have to wire up the cooling fans to a power supply on your own because it's too much trouble for the company to do that in its "factory". In fact, you can go to manufacturer A's web site and read about how one of their best features is that they don't make you wire up the fan by hand, like manufacturer B does. It would be comical if it were not so sad.

Although I have learned to adjust to the strange ways of this industry, I still find myself wishing that it would move from the darkness of an obscure DIY niche into the light of a true mass-market retail industry. I'd like for things to be in stock, and I'd like to not have to worry about knowing whether I am using the right god damned power connectors between my battery and my telescope.

Side note: the power connectors on all this equiment are universally awful. It's pathetic that you can buy an equatorial mount that costs as much as a used car and someone will still tell you that it order to get a clean power connection you might want to "spread the pins" of the power connector just to be sure. I mean come ON people.

I dream of a day when people will realize that spending hours calibrating a CCD camera just isn't fun, and they should figure out how to automate the process. Or the day when I'll be able to 1-click purchase a filter with confidence instead of having to call around to fifteen small-time dealers before I find one. But, I think I'll just have to make the best of the here and now, because I don't see that day coming. If anything, the industry is shrinking and what we have now may be the best it will ever be. After all, there can't be that many people waiting in line to make those tens of dollars.

Dinner in Half an Hour: Flounder and Tomatoes

2011-08-29 · by psu

Here is an expanded version of an idea I have posted before. It's the perfect summer fish dish and there is almost no way in which I can imagine someone messing it up.

Here we go. Start with 4 or 5 or 6 or however many pieces of flounder filet you have. Some will be thicker than others, so make sure at least someone who is eating the fish likes it a bit overdone. Put the fish on a sheet pan and drizzle with olive oil on both sides. Then salt and pepper the fish.

Now get a dozen or so of those medium sized grape tomatoes that are so popular now. The farmer's market is overrun with them this time of year. You can't go wrong. Slice the tomatoes in half and throw them on top of the fish.

Do the same with limes, or some fancy herb (dill, cilantro, I don't know).

You can also put garlic in this, but cut it up and saute it a bit first because the flounder cooks too fast to get a good roast on it.

If you want to get super decadent, put 1/2 tablespoon of butter on each piece of fish.

Heat the oven to 400. Put the pan in the oven and cook for 8-10 minutes. Less if the fish is thin, more if the fish is thick. Put the fish and the roasted tomatoes on a plate. You are DONE.

In the following picture, I also had some corn, grilled zucchini and some other tomatoes lying around so I made a second salad on the side as well.

flounder

Really this is 20 minutes. At the most. Even counting the eating.

My Secret Hideout

2011-09-06 · by peterb

"My secret hideout is a row of intricately ornamented domes hung through a willow copse. A row of beams, engraved with the figures of dancing birds, opens to an uneven core room which is filled with the scent of growing things.

Below that is the place where I write; it is decorated here and there with tiny relief carvings, and yellow light radiates from hidden skylights. My desk is in back.

An observatory is to the right. It's a compact platform, open to the stars, and furnished with a reclining seat and an array of refractors. I've left stacks of hand-written notes and charts here and there. A gear-ridden orrery rests on a stand, in memory of simpler models of the universe.

Behind that is a room filled with tall carved bookshelves. Rows of textbooks on sociology and faded maps lean against terse Norse novels. The scent of ink and paper permeates the place."

My Secret Hideout is the first iPad game by my longtime friend and acquaintance Andrew Plotkin, a.k.a. Zarf. I can't even pretend to be objective about this - in this case, my loyalty to my friend outweighs any objectivity I might have. So I won't try. Buy it. For $2.99, you get a neat little amusement that will generate endless descriptions of a mysterious fantasy hideout.

One of the mysteries, for me, is trying to figure out how the various inputs I can make will influence the story. Why are there six kinda of leaves? What do they do? How does combining them change the hideout? I haven't figured any of this out yet, but I am enjoying the attempt.

It's not a game. There are no "victory conditions" - you don't win or lose this, you just mutate the tree and enjoy reading the results. I am glad that there's a place in the world for things like this.

My Secret Hideout is available for iPad at the iTunes store.

Treehouse

Blue Streak

2011-09-11 · by psu

The bike computer that came with the new blue bike in July is reading 385 miles. For some perspective, in the last few years, I doubt I've ever had a six month season go by where I rode much more than 400 miles. The six months that I had the Surly, according to the computer on that bike, I rode the thing 322 miles. It's possible that I have an extra (say) 50 or 60 on that bike because the computer could have been broken or not installed. But the blue bike has still gone further in 6 weeks than I usually go in six months. Every time I ride I wonder why it's so much better.

The simplest answer is that the bike is better because my buddy Nathan was right. He's been telling me for years that steel bikes suck and carbon fiber is the only way to fly. This is of course infuriating. Nathan is always right. But if I left it at that, we wouldn't have much of a web page here.

In more detail, the claims about carbon fiber and other exotic materials were, among other things:

  1. You can make the frame really light.

  2. You can make the frame stiff, so you get more power.

  3. At the same time, you can make the frame springy, so the ride is smoother.

Let's take these one at a time. Since I don't race bikes, I never thought about frame weight. If a frame is a bit heavier that just means that I have to be in better shape to ride it faster. And besides, the any bicycle is pretty light compared to my tubby 170lb frame. What possible difference could 5 or 6 pounds here or there make?

As for power, I don't generate power. I'm not Lance Armstrong here. I'm just a slow 40 year old.

Finally, if you want a springy ride, run your tires softer.

So what do I like about the new blue bike? It's hard to describe, but I'll put it like this. Say I'm cruising over a flat road and there is a stretch in front of me of about 500 to 1000 feet that's maybe a small rise or a little false flat. I hit the rise, and I start to feel like I need to shift down a gear to give myself a break. On my previous bikes, I would tend to tire out and go for the lower gear. The biggest single difference with the blue bike is that when I hit these things now, I can hold the gear. As an extension of this I've been riding the hills around my house in higher gears than I used to use. All of this makes me feel a lot faster, which makes the bike fun to ride, which makes me ride it more, which makes me go faster. I don't even hate the compact double gears anymore. They seem as natural and perfect now as my beloved road triple ever did. There is nothing like a bicycle that tells you you are fast.

I've been telling myself that a lot of little things about the bike add up to this feeling of extra speed-oriented confidence. "The bike fits better", or "the ergonomics are better in lots of subtle ways." This, of course, denies the truth. The truth is that

  1. The bike is lighter. This is especially true of the wheels, which seem to weigh only half of what my old wheels did.

  2. When I step on the pedals, I get more acceleration (i.e. power). This accounts for that feeling of being able to stick with the gear you have rather than going to an easier one.

  3. The bike is more comfortable to ride than the Surly. It's also surprisingly more comfortable than my beloved steel Specialized in some ways. On a recent ride I ended up going through one of Pittsburgh's famous 4 mile stretches of washboard pavement. A construction crew had taken off all the blacktop on the road, but had not yet replaced it. In the past, this would have been vibrational torture, especially for my hands and wrists. I recall thinking to myself "wow, I barely feel this at all."

In other words, all those carbon fiber advocates were right the whole time. How infuriating. The only defense I have left is that the day I did the washboard ride, I think my tires were running a bit soft... maybe 90psi instead of 100. Take that carbon fiber weenies.

In the end, there is no denying that this is bike the true replacement for my beloved blue steel Specialized. It has everything that I loved about that bike and more. At this point I have only two complaints:

  1. The steering is slightly slower than the old blue bike ... I think this is due to a slightly different frame angle at the front of the bike.

  2. The freewheel is really loud. Small children turn around and cry to their mothers "mommy, why does that man have a machine gun under his bike?"

I can live with both of these small foibles. The miracle of it is that the bike has suddenly made me as fast now as I was when I bought the other blue bike 20 years ago. Maybe I'll go for a thousand miles next year. Haven't done that since the early 90s. Isn't technology wonderful?

Extra Note for the beginning of Football Season

FOOTBALL! FOOTBALL! FOOTBALL! FOOTBALL! FOOTBALL!

Thank you.

Deep Sky Projects

2011-09-19 · by psu

Astronomy is an endeavor that is full of catalogs. And I don't mean the ones that are on the Internet that are designed to separate you from your hard earned cash. For much of its history, astronomers did little else than catalog what was in the sky. Before the telescope, this meant just what you could see with your eyeballs: the brighter stars, the planets, the moon, sun, and their various activities and relationships. With the advent of the telescope, more larger and more elaborate lists of esoteric objects could be created. The most famous of these was the one created by the French astronomer Charles Messier.

Messier was a comet hunter by trade, but he is much more famous for his catalog of interesting "deep sky" objects. The term "deep sky" in this context generally means non-stellar objects that are now known to be outside the confines of our solar system or, indeed, our galaxy. These objects are "deep" because they tend to be small or faint or both. The idea is that you have to look deep into the sky to detect them. This is not universally true, of course. Many of the brighter Messier objects are easily visible to the naked eye under darker skies and if you know where to look. But the term sticks.

So how did a comet hunter get into the deep sky catalog game? Well, in his scans of the heavens, Messier kept running to objects that looked liked comets in his small telescope (small, fuzzy, non-stellar). However, to his annoyance, the objects did not move with respect to the background stars. This meant that they were something besides the comets that he was interested in. In order to help out his fellow comet hunters he decided to make a catalog of these objects. Over time this list expanded to contain about 100 various nebulae, star clusters, and what we now know to be galaxies outside of our own. Later it was expanded and corrected to contain a final tally of 110 objects. You can look up the list in various places.

The Messier catalog is significant not only because it happens to contain some of the nicest objects that there are to look at in the sky, but also because everyone who becomes interested in deep sky observing eventually needs to find every object on the list. This activity serves as a benchmark of sorts; a common ritual that we can all share.

So of course one of the first things that I did when I broke out my new telescope about a year ago was to start working through the Messier objects that I thought would be practical to see from my yard. It's good to have a project to work on. Keeps the obsession focussed. I actually did better under the light pollution than I thought I would. All of the showpiece objects were easy to find (M42, M31, M45, etc). I managed to sniff out some dimmer objects and to find hints of low contrast extended star clouds like M33. Still, there were obvious boundaries, especially for objects that sit in the sky glow to the south and west of my house. I never managed to find M74, and have only ever seen the faintest hint of something as bright as the Lagoon Nebula (M8).

When I got the video camera this all changed. Even relatively short time exposures with the CCD puts all of the Messiers well within reach of an observer of modest skill using a modest telescope. To illustrate this for myself, I set out to take "snapshots" of every Messier object as I encountered them with the camera. My goal is to just collect a recognizable rendition of the object that is representative of what you can do with short exposures (a few minutes total) with the Mallincam. I can't draw, so I think of this as the closest that I will come to sketching what I see like a traditional observer might do. The most esoteric image processing technique that I'll get into here is stacking multiple short exposures to reduce noise and get a bit of detail enhancement. I'm not going to go out and collect 50 hours of "data."

Here's a link to the first 85 images: http://www.flickr.com/photos/79904144@N00/sets/72157627091459246/

There are a few there that I would go back and redo. But for the most part I'm happy with what I have. I'm especially satisfied with the summer stuff. The fact that the camera can reach into the skyglow and get this picture of M8:

M8-2011-09-15-stacked-PS

or this of the Eagle Nebula (M16):

M16-2011-09-15-stacked-PS

or this of the Trifid (M20):

M20-2011-09-15-stacked-PS

never fails to amaze.

The summer Messier objects also brought a few surprises. I had never seen the cluster M11 before, and seeing this in the camera motivated me to get the eyepieces out and take a look too:

M11-2011-08-18

I think the one weakness of the video camera is on star clusters. Stars all take on a square-ish pixelly look in video rather than the pinpoint sparkles that appear in the eyepiece. M11 is well worth seeking out and is easy to see.

The globular cluster M22 also surprised me:

M22-2011-07-26-stacked

I knew all about M13, of course. But the fact that there was this other huge ball of stars in the same sky never occurred to me.

As the summer progressed, it became pretty clear that filling out the last holes in my Messier image catalog would not be difficult. The winter objects that I had missed before would soon come back around and I'd get another shot. So it was time to look further afield for more things to find. Here, another legendary catalog stepped up to provide a longer term project.

In the late 18th and early 19th century the astronomer William Herschel (and his sister Caroline) not only advanced the art of telescope building to various new heights, but also discovered and cataloged an unfathomable number of deep sky objects. Herschel's list eventually reached some 2500 objects and formed the basis for the modern "New General Catalog", or NGC for short. In addition, there are two collections of the more notable Herschel objects called the "Herschel 400" and the "Herschel II" lists which are a good place to start to explore this larger frontier. Over the last year or two the noted Internet Astronomy personality "Uncle Rod" has been working his way through these lists and chronicling his efforts. I figured if he can try for the whole thing, I can try for the brighter stuff from my house. So that's what I'm doing, starting with the H400 list of the brighter stuff. If nothing else it will answer the question "just how much light pollution is too much for this camera?"

Here's what I have so far, as far as I know: http://www.flickr.com/photos/79904144@N00/sets/72157627409712613/. Favorite surprises so far?

NGC6946:

NGC6946-2011-08-28-stacked-PS

The fact that I can see this much of the Veil (NGC6995):

NGC6995-Veil-2011-08-29-stack

And, the occasional great planetary nebula (NGC6781):

NGC6781-2011-08-29-stacked

Anyway, as I said before, it's good to have a project to work on. Keeps the obsession focussed.

I have to end this piece with a shot of M27, The Dumbbell, because it never fails to look good. So here you go.

M27-2011-09-15-stacked-PS

Grab and Go

2011-10-15 · by psu

One key to enjoying the telescope hobby is to know how to set up and tear down your equipment quickly. This is especially true around Pittsburgh where the weather can change only instantly from perfect to disastrous. Over the past couple of months I have developed a reasonably systematic routine in the deployment of the telescope. With it I can set up my full video rig with automatic pointing and tracking in about 20 minutes. While not instantaneous, this is pretty quick, and I would say that it approaches what reasonable people can call "grab and go." The following is my reference checklist and there is no reason in the world for anyone else to read it except to be bored. But I already wrote it down, so I might as well post it. These setup instructions will work for any of the Celestron equatorial mounts. They can work for other mounts too, but a lot of the details will be different.

  1. Put the mount outside. I have a spot on the patio behind my house that I use every night. This patio spot gives me a good view of most of the sky to the west and south and a reasonably good view of the north and east. The house and trees behind the house block the lower parts of the eastern sky. A large tree in the yard blocks the northwest. Otherwise things work pretty well.

  2. Point the mount roughly north. If it's already pretty dark, use the hole in the polar axis of the mount to sight Polaris, which sits right over the roof of the house.

  3. Set up the Telescope. Go and get the telescope and put it on the mount. Also fetch all the accessories you'll be using. I use my scope in two general configurations. For visual work I use a 1 1/4" diagonal and various Televue eyepieces. For video work I use my Mallincam with a light pollution filter and focal reducer on it. In addition I've been using the Celestron F6.3 focal reducer on the back of the scope lately. So I attach that as well. The camera goes straight into the telescope without a diagonal. This is more convenient. I attach it with a Televue 2 inch visual back because I had the camera fall out of the crappy Celestron visual back with the tiny little useless hateful set screws. The set screws failed to hold the camera, and it just fell out of the tube an on to my concrete patio. This sucked. The Televue is a 2 inch tube that holds the camera solidly using a compression ring. Highly recommended.

So my setup goes: telescope, F6.3 reducer, 2 inch visual back, a 2 inch to 1 1/4 inch adapter tube, then the camera.

  1. Balance the telescope. This takes two steps. Set the mount up so that the right ascension axis is horizontal. Now you release the clutches on the declination axis of the mount. This is the one that points north and south and runs parallel to the axis of the telescope. Then while holding the scope, put it in various positions. Let go slooooowly and make sure that the scope mostly stays in place. I try to balance the scope when it is horizontal and when it is mostly vertical. Tracking and pointing near the zenith is a lot better if you get this right.

  2. Now balance on the right ascension axis. This is the one that is orthogonal to the body of the telescope. This is easier. You want to position the weights on the counterweight shaft so that when you release the RA clutch and let go of the telescope (slooooooowly) the scope does not move. This is the simplest mechanical task that there is in astronomy, as far as I can tell.

Some people tell you to purposely set the balance to be a bit heavy on the east side of the mount because it smooths out the behavior of the tracking motors. Depending on what part of the sky you are looking at this means either you want the either the scope side or the counterweight side to be heavier. I have never had any luck trying to do this because it means you need to shift the counterweights whenever the mount flips, and I hate touching the mount in any way after I am done aligning it. Maybe you'll have better luck with this.

  1. Put the scope in its "home" position. For my mount this is the one where the counterweights point straight down and the scope points straight north. Peer into the finder scope and look for Polaris. It should be at least in the field of view. When the scope is in this position I turn the video camera so that later on I know which way north and east will be oriented in the field of view. This turns out to be handy later.

  2. Power. Now go get your power supply. I had been using a big 12V battery, but it started to fail recently, so I bought a couple of 12V power supplies that I can plug into an outlet on the outside of my house. This has proven to be more reliable the last few times out.

  3. Now wire everything up for video. The camera gets a control cable, an s-video cable and 12V power. The control and video cables go back into the house through a sliding door. The video cable goes into the USB capture widget and the into the laptop. The control cable ends at the big Mallincam control box. The largest box ever built for holding five buttons and a knob.

Then I plug the telescope controller into a 25 foot cable and run the other end out to the mount. Finally, a second 12V power cable goes into the mount itself.

  1. Initialize the Mount. Work your way through the Celestron setup menu. Enter the time and date and then tell it you want to do a "two-star" alignment. This alignment will let the hand controller learn how to point at things in your sky. What you will do is pick two stars on one side of the meridian (either the eastern part of the sky or the west) and then 3 or 4 stars on the other side. I tend to start in the west and then move to the east because I tend to be impatient to go and look at things that are still rising. The eastern sky is also somewhat darker than the south and west, since the PIttsburgh light dome is primarily to the west and south of me.

For most of the summer the first star that I'd pick was Arcturus. The scope will attempt to point at the star, but it will usually miss. If the scope were already perfectly polar aligned and set up in exactly the same place as the last time I was on the patio, it might hit perfectly. But, these things are never true. So, it will miss by a bit. Use the arrow keys on the hand controller to point the scope and get the star in your favorite sort of finder. I use a 9x50 optical finder, because I've never figured out those red dot things. YMMV.

  1. Focus. The start should now be in the field of the camera. If it is not, then that means your finder scope and telescope are not aligned. If that's the case, remove the camera and put an eyepiece into the telescope to fix that. Assuming it is, I then go inside and fire up the video capture software. If I have not disturbed the focus too much, the star will be in the video feed and mostly in focus. Still, it's best to go and get your Bahtinov mask to make sure.

The Bahtinov Mask is an insanely clever device that creates a diffraction pattern on bright stars that will tell you exactly when you have them in focus. Just follow the instructions and you can't miss. After I'm done I remove the make and put on the dew shield. I've gotten away with just using a shield, for now. If I were smarter I'd use those heated strips as well but it's only been an issue twice in a year.

  1. Star Align. Having focussed the telescope we're ready to finish the star align. First grab the camera controller and turn on the cross-hairs. Making the cross-hairs is a bit of a chore that is too complex to describe here. Maybe I'll make a separate page about that. With the cross-hairs set up, use the mount controller to center the star. It will look like this when you are done:

In this picture the horizontal lines point roughly east/west and the vertical lines indicate north/south. The actual directions might be reversed, but the important thing is that I've oriented the camera so that the arrow keys on the controller are predictable. This is a small touch that makes life easier later.

Anyway, when you have centered the star hit "Align" on the hand controller to tell it that you want to go to the next star. The hand controller will suggest another star in the western sky. You can use the menu keys to pick one that you can see that are not too close to the horizon. Center it in the finder then in the video camera, then hit Align.

  1. Calibration Stars. Calibration stars refine the pointing model of the mount to compensate for its mechanical limitations. The hand controller will ask if you want to add "calibration" stars. Hit Enter to say yes and it will suggest a star in the east to use for further alignment. Pick a star that is well placed and hit Enter. The mount will then flip around and try and point there. As before, it will miss by a bit. Center and align the first star, and the hand controller will ask you about another calibration star. Hit enter to say yes and repeat. As you add more stars you'll notice that the pointing will get more and more accurate. Usually the third and fourth stars will be in the field of the view of the camera. If this does not happen, you probably missed with one of the previous stars which means you should just start over.

  2. If you have to start over, don't be frustrated. This happens from time to time especially as the sky changes and you need to pick different stars for alignment because the ones you were using before have moved to the wrong side of the sky or behind a tree. Don't panic. Just unplug the mount and do the whole routine again. Pretty soon you'll end up with a new set of stars that you can use for a month or so and everything will run smoothly again.

  3. Notes on Pointing. At this point, let's review. We've set up the mount and we've told it to point at six points in the sky. Each time we've corrected pointing errors by hand, allowing the computer in the hand controller to build a pretty detailed model for how to point at things. My experience is that this pointing model works very well, especially if you avoid meridian flips. This is why I try to stay in the eastern part of the sky after doing all of this. If I cross back over to the west, the mount has to flip over, and this invites the creation of pointing errors. I've had it work pretty well, and I've also had results that were so bad that I unplugged the mount and started over. In one worst case, I had to wipe reset the firmware in the hand controller after some bug corrupted it. But, these are outliers. In general things work very well at this point and the total time I've spent from putting the mount on the patio to having good pointing is about 10 minutes. But, for video good pointing is only half the battle. In order for the mount to track over even short time exposures, we have to make sure the polar alignment is good. Luckily, this is not hard.

  4. Polar Alignment. The Celestron hand controller has a wonderful piece of software in it that allows you to use the pointing model that you just worked so hard to build to polar align the mount. First, tell the hand controller to point the telescope at a star that is near the meridian and also near the "celestial equator". All this means is that the star should not be too far north or too close to zenith. The hand controller will complain if you pick a bad star, so study your planetarium program to find a good one. I used Altair for most of the summer, and have recently switched to Enif in Pegasus after Altair wandered to the western sky. Remember, I try to stay on the eastern side of the meridian for all of this.

Now go into the Align menu and pick Polar Align and then Align mount. Hit Enter and the scope will point back to the star you just picked again. Repeat the center/align dance on the video screen. You'll get another message from the hand controller about starting the All Star Polar alignment. Hit enter to start. The scope will now point to a different spot in the sky. This is where it thinks the star would be if you were polar aligned. At this point you put the controller down and you use the altitude and azimuth knobs on the mount to re-center the star in the field of view your finder scope and then the camera. When you are done, hit enter. Then find Undo Sync in the Align menu and hit enter on that too.

  1. Polar Alignment Notes. There are a few things to keep in mind with this Polar Alignment scheme. First, you always want to end your alignment by moving the altitude of the mount up. You want to do this because the knob in the back that changes the altitude gets tighter when you push the mount up, which means it will stay in place better when you are done. I loosen the knob at the start end give the mount a shove downward so I know I'll have room to move up later.

Second, it's really handy to have a remote version of the video feed near the mount while you are playing with the knobs. I use VNC on my iPhone so I can see my laptop screen without needing to run back to the laptop. It's also handy to use this trick when focussing.

Finally, the Undo Sync is important. The first part of the Polar Align routine "syncs" the mount to the star you picked. This messes up the pointing model to make pointing near the star accurate. But, as you move away from the star the mount points less and less well. Also, if you move the mount a large distance while finishing the alignment you may find that your pointing gets way off. In that case, unplug the mount and redo the star align. In my experience this hardly ever happens. The one time thought I needed to do it, my pointing didn't really get any better and then it turned out that a cable snag was the reason the mount was pointing half a degree too far south all the time.

  1. Final Notes. I've just described my setup process in about two thousand words. But you should not be discouraged by this. With practice I can do all of this setup in about 20 minutes. While this seems like a lot of up front work, remember that the guy that just goes in the house and grabs his manual alt-az on a tripod will then probably spend 5 minutes star hopping to each dim deep sky object that he wants to look at. Meanwhile, when this process works well, you can spend the next three or four or five hours with objects that are invisible in the eyepiece hitting the tiny chip in that video camera dead center every time.

Using this setup routine I've been able to get the Celestron CG-5 mount to do the two basic things you need an compuerized equatorial mount to do:

  1. Point at things accurately.

  2. Track objects in the sky for time exposures.

I use two telescopes on the mount, an 8 inch Celestron SCT and a new 85mm Televue refractor. I run the 8 inch scope at a focal length of between 1000mm (F5) and about 700mm (F3.5). On the best nights, the mount will point this scope so that every object I ask for is just about dead center on the Mallincam's small chip. This means that we are hitting a field of view that is at most half a degree wide and about 22 arc minutes tall every time. That's similar to the field you would get using a 100x eyepiece, which is pretty good.

The refractor has a native focal length of 600mm and I can also run it with a focal reducer and extension tube to get to about a 400mm focal length. This gives me slightly more than a degree of field of view so I can fit bigger things, like

M31-2011-10-04-stacked-PS

or

M52-Bubble-2011-10-04-stacked-PS

or

M33-2011-10-04-stacked-PS

The main complaint I have about this mount is that it does not track smoothly. I'll sometimes get 4 frames in a row at one or more minutes that are perfectly sharp and then right after that I'll get 4 frames in row where the object jumps 3 or 4 pixels to the east or west. I could try using a guider to clean this up, but I get the feeling that the guider will not be able to deal with these large jumps over relatively short exposures.

In the future I plan to spend a ludicrous amount of money on a mount that will track much more smoothly. But I predict that when I do so I'll miss the relative sophistication of the Celestron software. Being able to use the video camera in the main telescope to do polar alignment can't be beat. Hopefully the other guys will decide to try and catch up.

At this point I am morally obligated to end this post with yet another picture of M27. So here you go.

M27-2011-10-08-stacked-11-PS

Clear skies to you all.

The Stupidest People on The Entire Internet?

2011-11-10 · by psu

Read the comments on this page.

http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/11/10/four-star-vegetarian-dishes-from-eleven-madison-park/

Tell me I'm wrong. For the record, comment 25 was the one that put me over the edge. There is no more foul being in the world than a vegetarian who is also a picky eater.

Dinner in Half an Hour: Spaghetti Carbonara

2011-11-14 · by psu

This one is so easy it's almost cheating. But I had to put something here so that we didn't lead the front page with the stupid Internet people anymore. So here we go. This scheme is based on a recipe I have stolen from Marcella Hazan. Buy her book, it's in there. But I've adjusted the flow a bit to make it easier to follow. For me.

First get out 2 six to eight quart pots. Fill the bigger one with water 2/3rds of the way up and put it on high heat to get to a boil. This is the pot that you will use for spaghetti cooking. Set the other pot aside for now.

If you have it chop up some fresh parsley. I don't always have this.

In a medium sized saute pan, heat up some olive oil while you slice 4 cloves of garlic. Add the garlic to the pan and saute on low heat for five or six minutes. You want to toast but not burn the garlic.

While the garlic is toasting, you have time to cut up the bacon. Gather up six or seven thick slices of bacon. Cut them into thirds and then cut the thirds into thinner strips lengthwise. When the garlic is done, remove just the garlic from the pan and add the bacon to the oil. Cook on medium heat until crispy. Drain off some of the fat, put the bacon back in the pan. Now deglaze with a bit of white wine and reduce for five minutes.

Meanwhile, cook the spaghetti. You should cook around a half a pound to a pound of pasta, give or take.

While the pasta cooks, crack two eggs into a bowl and beat them. Add salt and pepper to taste. This will not take that long, so when you are done grate about a cup or a bit more of Parmesan cheese.

When the pasta is done drain it out and then immediately mix the cheese with the eggs. Dump everything into your second empty pot (the cold one) and mix it up until the "sauce" is all over the noodles. When that it done, toss in the bacon and parsely and mix some more. Now you can gorge yourself. Oh yeah, if you are nervous about raw eggs, be careful where you buy your eggs. Or you could always wuss out and get pasteurized eggs.

I love two things about this dish.

  1. You never actually have to cook the sauce, per se. You just have to mix it together.

  2. It's really a bacon and eggs breakfast on top of pasta, with cheese. How brilliant is that?

Finally, if you are more efficient, you can probably do this with only one pot and the saute pan. But this flow is a bit easier.

Meanwhile, In Skyrim

2011-11-16 · by peterb

DEER ELF AMBASSEDOR:

SORY ABOUT THE DEAD GARDS AT YOUR PARTY BUT I NEEDED A THING FOR A MISHUN. MY KONTACT SAID TO BE SNEAKY BUT I HAD BIG ARMOR SO I WAS LOUD SO I HAD TO KILL EVERYONE SORRY.

LOVE,

KRRRNK THE ORC PS: THANKS FOR THE WINE IT WAS REELY YUMI. PPS: SORRY AGAIN ABOUT THE GARDS.

Skyrim: "Blackreach"

2011-11-22 · by peterb

For the past year or so I have been bitching to my friends about how the free Oblivion mod "Nehrim" was more expansive, more epic, and generally more impressive than any game Bethesda had ever made.

In playing Skyrim, it's been clear that Bethesda has played Nehrim, and shamelessly stole their good ideas, which is something they should be proud of, because it made their game better.

Then, today, I reached the section of Skyrim called "Blackreach". And, this is what happened:

All I Want for Christmas is a Place to Farm Souls

2011-12-30 · by psu

Dark Souls is the mildly sadistic sequel to the completely sadistic Japanese action RPG Demon's Souls. I gave up on the latter game a couple of years ago after encountering the second one hit kill boss in the game. The first one hit kill boss in the game was placed at the end of the tutorial, which gives you an idea of what these games are like.

You know from the start that Dark Souls will be easier on you because after getting killed by the tutorial boss you will immediately notice that there is a door that you can use the escape the fight. You then come back to the same fight later after you have an actual chance of winning.

The rest of Dark Souls follows this general pattern. While it is obviously similar to its predecessor in tone and mechanics, the game has a softer edge to it. The combat is still remarkably unforgiving if you lose focus, but it is manageable as long as you keep enemies in front of you and manage your space so that you never get surrounded. Best to fight the undead freaks one at a time, lest they gang up on you.

I find the combat system to be rewarding and, for lack of a better way to describe it, it is easy for me to parse. There are three things you need to control:

  1. Your position. This is facilitated through the third-person camera lock.

  2. Your health. Even at high levels you can't take too many hits.

  3. Your stamina. In melee combat, this is what allows you to manage how many times you get hit. Blocking requires stamina, and blocking limits melee damage.

Every action RPG combat system boils down to these three areas of control, but I think Dark Souls presents a particularly rewarding system. I found it easier to deal with than Skyrim, for example, where controlling your defensive position was always hard because of the first person perspective. Combat always seemed to boil down to running away backwards and casting spells, which gets tedious.

Of course, you will often lose focus and die. And when you die you still have to trudge all the way back to every fight through hordes of re-spawned enemies. This makes the boss fights more tedious than they should be, but it is balanced to some extent by the fact that the bosses themselves don't seem as punishing. At least in the early game you have room to maneuver and thus a chance to run away and catch your breath if you need to.

The re-spawning also has something of a hidden bonus. If you die a lot because you suck, every time you make your way back to the boss you can collect experience off the bodies of the easier enemies. This helps you in two ways (OK, it's really fake help, but bear with me):

  1. You can eventually level until the final fight is easier.

  2. You get practice at combat, and get better at it, making the final fight easier.

You can also come down with Stockholm syndrome and believe that the game is really helping you by punishing you dearly for losing the boss fight. All of these things happen at once.

Which brings me to my second favorite part of the game. I discovered this thanks to the modern wonder of the video walkthrough. These things are great for when you get stuck. If you watch this video the host shows you how to easily collect around 7,000 souls in 2 minutes of gameplay. You can then return to the save point and make the area respawn and do the whole thing again. This allows you to collect an astounding number of souls fairly quickly.

Souls are the currency of the game, standing in for both experience points and money. You use them to level and upgrade all aspects of your character. This little exploit lets you make your character marginally more powerful more easily. A purist might think that this is a cheap way for players that suck to game the system, as it were, and break the balance. I like to think of it as an explicit design decision that helps to balance out the difficulty of the game. I can run through here a few times and use the resulting "R" to make my life a bit easier. It's an easy way to compensate for the fact that I will always suck at combat. I find it very considerate of the developers to put this into the game for me, especially since they made so much of the rest of their little world so punishing.

Plus, it's fun to watch the moronic NPCs leap off that cliff. It makes me giggle.

In any case, after farming for a while I started to leave one or two of the guys alive to practice fighting more powerful enemies. After five or six runs, most of them are actually beatable one-on-one. But there is still one guy in there that's too hard (because I suck). So then I'd just run away and watch him fall off the cliff again. And giggle.

The result of all of this is that I've had a much better time getting killed over and over again in the undead prison of Dark Souls than I had running around in Skyrim's pinnacle of high fantasy world design getting mauled by bears. At least the enemies that destroy me here were actually powerful, and not just some freaked out wild life.

Well, except maybe for those giant crows.

Better than Real

2012-01-13 · by psu

Today a trailer for a documentary film about a band I have never heard of reminded me of something I've been meaning to write down. Since the thought was too long to fit into twitter. Here we go.

First, this band LCD Sound System apparently came into being, published its body of work, and flamed out prematurely before I had even managed to obtain any hint whatsoever of its existence. I think this says more about me than the band, or the music scene, but I found the situation a bit disturbing.

Second, while I was watching the trailer I decided that it didn't matter that I'd never heard of the band, because this film will inevitably be better than having seen the last show live.

At this point you are saying "that psu, he's nuts like always." But bear with me.

In my mind, rock and roll shows are primarily about two things. First, there is the visual and physical spectacle of the stage show itself. Second, there is the auxiliary ritual pleasure of hearing the band play songs you know over again for you, even though you have heard them dozens of times.

I say films do both of these things better.

Consider another concert film from a long time ago about another band that I had barely heard of until I had already lost the opportunity to see them live at their peak. Stop Making Sense, which documents the Talking Heads tour behind the album Speaking in Tongues has become one of the iconic films of the genre. There are two reasons why.

  1. The film lays down a visual tapestry that you can only capture by being allowed to carry a camera around on stage and through the crowd. The Heads shows were renowned for a lot of lighting and on-stage effects, but the way they are captured on film and then edited together into pleasing sequences simply destroys anything you'd be able to see while stuck to a single seat in the room.

  2. The film sounds better. Let's be clear: rock and roll shows sound like shit. I have admittedly only been to maybe a dozen shows in my life, but the only one of those dozen that did not sound like shit was put on by They Might Be Giants at the Pittsburgh Children's Museum last year. Why did it not sound like crap? They had to save the kids' ears, so they did not turn the sound system up so high that the sound actually distorts off the walls of the room.

A year later I saw TMBG live in Downtown Pittsburgh at a show for large children (adults). This time they played full blast, and it sounded like shit. Even the words of songs I've heard dozens of times were so frazzled and broken apart by the distortion that I could not really hear them at all. This all served to mask undeniably great musicianship (in particular, the band made Jonathan Coulton sound like a semi-amateur geek dilettante). So it's sad. Why do they not want to allow me to hear how well they play?

Anyway, I am sort of sad I never heard of LCD Sound System. They sound kind of interesting. But, I'm glad I'll be able to actually hear what their music sounds like if I see this film. Because I'm pretty sure I'd have missed it seeing them live.

Dark Souls Ate My Brain

2012-02-07 · by psu

Dark Souls ate my brain. I don't understand how it happened. I started December a normal, older, jaded gamer who has not seen anything worth playing in most of a year. I ended it about half way through this game and already planning a second run to see if "tuning" my character build would make things better. But here is the worst part. If you write down what people say about this video game it reads like a set of requirements for building a game that I will hate.

Consider:

  1. Insane difficulty and repitition: check.

  2. Boss fights: check.

  3. Obscure and non-obvious game paths: check.

  4. Emphasis on combat and/or physical dexterity: check.

  5. Unforgiving failure conditions: check.

  6. Ludicrous amounts of useless and tedious expository dia... oh wait. I got mixed up for a second and forgot that I'm not writing about a Bioware or Bethesda game. Never mind. There is hardly any NPC dialog at all and they don't even try to do lip sync, so they can't do that badly either. Kudos.

Like Demon's Souls before it Dark Souls is the whole psu-hating package. Every time you turn around in this game there is more evidence that the developer hates you and wants you to die in a fire. Here are a few basically non-spoilery examples:

  1. Levels with lots of cliffs and narrow ledges that you must navigate in the dark.

  2. Combat on said cliffs.

  3. The one hit kill tutorial boss.

  4. Enemies that re-spawn every time you save and regenerate.

  5. Forced navigation through areas that will poison/curse/cripple you or set you on fire.

  6. Friendly NPCs who are gigantic reptiles. And eat you without warning.

  7. Areas with enemies that you not only cannot kill, you can't even hit them and you have to ask someone, or a walkthrough, why.

I could go on all night, but I'd rather stop and go back downstairs and play some more.

The second to last time I was this confused about a game was when, on the strength of a Penny Arcade cartoon I picked up Shadow Hearts: Covenant on a whim. Here was as hard core J a JRPC as they came and I should have hated it, but it tickled some part of my fancy and I played it all the way to the end.

The last time I was this confused about a video game was when I got into Resident Evil 4. Here was a game where you must shoot zombies with a character who can't walk and hold a gun at the same time. And yet I played the game through a half dozen times on multiple platforms.

After 50 or 60 hours of Dark Souls I finally figured that what I like about the game is what it has in common from these two previous inscrutable favorites.

From Resident Evil 4 you get both the hordes of hostile undead and a combat system that takes a few simple tactics and forces you to apply them with absolute focus over and over again. Although Dark Souls has multiple spell casting systems, the juicy, meaty center of its combat system is the hand to hand fighting. You will inevitably need to engage enemies at close range and you will find that unless you follow a few very important tactical rules exactly and perfectly, you will be dead. Here is my short list of the rules:

  1. Never engage more than one enemy at once unless they are all in front of you.

  2. Preserve and regenerate your stamina bar (green) at all costs. Stamina lets you attack. More importantly stamina allows you to block enemy attacks.

  3. Don't spam attack. Patiently wait for the enemy to try and hit you and only then when they are open and vulnerable should you go after them. This is especially true with slower weapons.

  4. Go in to new areas cautiously and with enough healing resources. Be careful of the white fog.

Of course, since it's impossible to always follow the rules exactly and perfectly, you will be dead a lot. This, combined with the fact that the game re-spawns most enemies when you die or otherwise rest provides a good justification for the game's reputation for unforgiving difficulty.

But, there is more to it than that.

Like most video games, there are a variety of enemies that try to kill you in a variety of ways. The creativity in the enemy design is actually one of the pleasures of the game. There are small ones, big ones, flying ones, running ones, slow ones, fast ones and others that just defy explanation. The design of the enemy A.I. is fascinating in what it does not do. There is no real attempt to simulate a smart enemy. Instead most fight in relatively fixed and predictable patterns. Since you will die a lot and since the enemies will respawn every time you die, you will see any given set of enemies a lot and you will learn how to beat them. Herein is the brilliant conceit of the game:

  1. You get better at killing the enemies in real life because you kill them over and over again.

  2. You get better at killing the enemies in the game because you increase R and level up.

This is one of the few video games where learning the various skills the game wants you to learn actually feels rewarding instead of like busywork that you need to do so you can beat the next cheap boss fight. The fact that it is also loosely coupled with your virtual progression through the character building system is a neat feedback loop.

So yes, the game is unforgiving and sadistic the first few times through an area. But it gets easier each time you go back through not only because you now have a +8 sword of blenderkilling, but also because you know exactly how to beat every enemy in the place.

This would all be for nothing if the combat itself did not hold up under extreme repetition. But for me it does. It becomes familiar and comfortable. And then you zone out and the 20 foot fall knight crushes you under his shield, and you wake up and start concentrating again.

The connection between RE4 and Dark Souls is, at least to me, fairly direct. The connection to Shadow Hearts is more spiritual than anything else. Both games make great use of their settings to communicate a certain mood and overall design sensibility to the player. What Shadow Hearts says to you is "we are batshit insane!". What Dark Souls communicates is a sense of being completely alone in a hostile environment, and also that "our creature designers are batshit insane!".

Perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the Dark Souls world is the sheer variety of locales and how they are all tied together. The game has prisons, sewers, prison sewers, ruined castles, gleaming castle cities, gardens, forests, lava pits, stone caves and a godforsaken poison swamp. But all of these disparate locations are connected. In the game's map they are connected because you can and need to walk from one to the other to progress in the game. This aspect of the level design is actually brilliant because with only a few exceptions all of the connections make spatial sense. You will trek from the opening area up a hill and into a ruined city full of the undead. In this city you will fight your way to a small room with a bonfire in it where you can rest. From there you fight through more of the city and then to the top of a tower and across a long bridge. Under this bridge will be a room with a ladder in it and after you kick ladder out of the wall and climb down, you are back at the fire. Taking the short cut back up to the bridge, you eventually make your way into a church. In the church is an elevator that takes you ... back to the original opening area.

When you remap this all out in your head, you realize that both the original routes and the short cuts really do fit together. It's a tour de force of maze design.

But, the game's world is also connected in a second, more important way. A lot of video games like to give lip service to a "sense of place" or a singular design sense. But to my mind Dark Souls really delivers. And it delivers not in a shallow way, but in that way where no matter where you are standing in the game, your location is obviously of the game. You could be sitting in a fetid and poisonous sewer full of gigantic frogs that breath cursed gas on you, or you could be strolling down a pristine hallway in a marble castle. All of the locales really feel like they are from a single world, or at least from the vision of a single world designer.

Or maybe it's all in my head. You spend so much time running through the world that it becomes burned into your brain. I've never memorized a map to this extent.

Finally, I can't let the game go without repeating: the creature designers are batshit insane! I'll avoid specific examples because you should find out for yourself. You can even do this on youtube if you'd rather not spend the time to play through.

So, to summarize:

  1. Insane difficulty: yes, but for once learning how to be good at the game is actually worth it.

  2. Boss fights: yes, but none that are too obtuse. Also, you can use the multiplayer system (which I have not described) to get other players to help you with bosses. There is no boss that is hard when you are three on one.

  3. Obscure and non-obvious game paths: yes, but that's what youtube walkthroughs are for. Also the multiplayer system gives you hints.

  4. Emphasis on combat and/or physical dexterity: yes, but not too much and also see (1).

  5. Unforgiving failure conditions: yes, but for some reason in this case it all works.

  6. Ludicrous amounts of useless and tedious expository dia... oh wait. I got mixed up for a second and forgot that I'm not writing about a Bioware or Bethesda game. Never mind. There is hardly any NPC dialog at all and they don't even try to do lip sync, so they can't do that badly either. Kudos.

I had to say number (6) over again, because it's important. The lack of useless narrative is a feature. Video game narrative mostly sucks anyway, you won't miss it.

Anyway, I should stop now because the only place to go from here would be to make a gratuitous connection between Dark Souls and Madden. If you know me well you can already predict how that would go. I'll spare you.

Notes

A few links to similar thoughts about Dark Souls:

Tom Bissell

The Brainy Gamer

Gamers with Jobs

Microsoft Flight

2012-03-03 · by peterb

There's a particular cry that goes out on gaming forums whenever any sort of sequel is released. The cry can be reduced to the phrase "They dumbed it down!" Deconstructing this, what it really means is "They changed some difficult or unforgiving aspect of the game such that more people will want to play it." It's the gamer version of "Oh, that band was really awesome until they sold out." In the music context, "sold out" means "has made music that more people want to listen to."

With Flight, Microsoft has made a flight simulator that more people are going to want to play. Microsoft has made a flight simulator that more people are going to be able to play. I think this is a great thing.

From a high level, here's what Microsoft has done with Flight compared to Flight Simulator X.

The graphics engine is completely new. Usually this sort of change is evolutionary, but in Flight's case, it's revolutionary. Specifically, rendering has moved into the 21st century by being moved primarily onto the PC's GPU instead of being CPU-bound. This has a huge number of effects, beginning with "It looks generally better," continuing through "and runs at higher resolutions on the same hardware" and moving on to "with extremely high frame rates compared to FSX.

Second, where FSX gave you the entire world, with comparatively low detail, to fly around in, Flight has taken another tack: they've started with the Big Island of Hawaii for free, and made the entire Hawaiian island chain available for download as a purchase. But the positive side of this tradeoff is that the islands exist in a comparatively fleshed out form. Even flying at extremely low altitudes, the scenery is detailed enough that it looks much better than FSX, to my eyes at least.

LIkewise, where FSX gave you approximately 7,142,528 different models of aircraft to choose from, Flight gives you two (for free), and makes 3 more (at present) available for purchase.

Flight is structured in a very game-like, as compared to sim-like fashion. Yes, you can fly around on your own with no restrictions, or you can run 'missions'. Some missions require particular aircraft (this, by the way, is what some people complaining about the aircraft choice might not have noticed. The Maule, for example, has a price tag not because of the bitmap of the plane, but because it's effectively selling access to the cargo missions.) The missions I've finished so far have run the gamut and have been fun and engaging - I particularly enjoyed a coast guard Search & Rescue mission to find a lost kayaker, for example.

Furthermore, taking a page from Grand Theft Auto, Flight has a large number of 'aerocaches' hidden throughout the islands; finding them awards you with experience points, the occasional achievement, and bragging rights. The aerocaches are a good way to engage in some virtual tourism, since many of them are located at interesting sites around Hawaii.

In what's an interesting decision for a flight simulator, you can get out of your plane and walk around. The world - at least so far - is fairly sterile, so this is more of a curiosity than a major selling point. But it suggests obvious areas for further expansion if Flight takes off.

The user interface is quite streamlined, working best with a flightstick but also being perhaps the first Microsoft sim to be plausible with a mouse and keyboard. This will no doubt infuriate purists. But they can get off my lawn. Flight also bravely steals the best ideas from non-flightsim games. For example, there is a "Fly to next waypoint" shortcut that jumps you straight to the next interesting thing in a flight. This is not something one would want to use all the time, but it's nice to have it available when you need it. (Compare this, from a user-interface perspective, with FSX's pretty-much-unusable time compression feature, and you can see how much more thought went into usability).

Obviously, this usability comes at a price: I seriously doubt that anyone is going to be learning to fly a real airplane by playing Microsoft Flight. But that's clearly not the market they're trying to sell to, and as a kibbitzer I can't say I disagree with their decision.

To those who feel that the existence of Flight is somehow a personal affront, all I can say is •Microsoft is in the business of selling software. •The existence of Flight doesn't take away your functioning Flight Simulator X •Microsoft doesn't "owe" you FS XI, XII, or MCMVII. •No one is forcing you to buy Flight.

"If I'd asked people what they wanted, they would have said a faster horse." -Henry Ford

Flight is a bold experiment to see if, instead of trying to address the expressed desires of the existing flight sim market, Microsoft can expand it. It's an attempt to focus on quality over quantity, on accessibility over detail. Microsoft is essentially making a wager. The wager is that by focusing all their efforts on the features that they think 90% of the potential customers of flight sims want, they can safely ignore the 10% of the market that wants more 'hardcore' features. My personal opinion is that Microsoft is going to win this wager.

But, of course, only time will tell.

Astro-Physics: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying About the Meridian

2012-03-16 · by psu

I'm about a year into using my astronomical video camera to view deep-sky objects from the city and capture small and simple pictures of what I see. All things considered the experience has been tremendous, but there was an obvious weak link: the mount that I bought does not track well.

This is not to say that the mount did not perform up to my expectations. In fact, given the relatively small amount of money that I paid the mount has been excellent. Good telescope mounts are hard to build well, and even harder to build cheaply.

That said, you can do better, and about six months in I decided that I would be doing this enough to consider how to do better. After my first investigations, I wrote this about the relationship between cost and quality in a mount:

In general you will find that in terms of mechanics you get what you pay for. There is a direct and linear relationship between how much money you spend and how well the mount will hold weight and smoothly track the sky with the least amount of fuss. When you spend more money you get more reliable machinery that is built to a higher standard of precision. Those gears in the motor drive will be asymptotically closer theoretical perfection. More importantly, by building in small numbers the premium manufacturers can maintain a tight hold on testing and quality control.

What this means to me is that you should start cheap, decide if you are serious, and if you are serious then go and buy your last mount ever. Mounts are like tripods in photography. If you are really serious about photography it's well known that you will eventually spend $1500 on a carbon fiber tripod and a really good ballhead. The only question is whether you spend $3000 on inferior tripods before finally upgrading to the one you should have bought anyway.

Having started cheap and decided I was serious, the only question now was: which mount is the last one I want to buy. The choices before me were:

  1. A more expensive Chinese mount. Here you have the CGEM from Celestron, and the various Synta mounts like the Orion Atlas. All of these have the same basic mechanics and manufacturing quality as the CG-5 that I had bought, but are built larger and heavier so they are more stable. I could not find a convincing case that the performance of this hardware is consistently good enough that I would not want to throw it away in a year. The Atlas and the CGEM also weigh almost 40 pounds. More on this later. iOptron in Taiwan also makes a mount in this class, but which is lighter.

  2. Losmandy G-11. By all accounts this is an excellent piece of hardware. Unfortunately they've been in a two year death-march updating their control software, which does not fill me with confidence. The G-11 is also relatively large and heavy given the load that it can carry. Finally, there is a lot of Internet literature on do it yourself tweaks to this mount, which brings it down in my mind. But I'm not really being fair.

  3. Takahashi EM-11 or EM-200. Here we are finally getting into the "just works and works forever" category. Beautiful fit and finish. Apparently great mechanics. Best polar alignment scheme in the business (more on this later). But, it requires a laptop for doing automatic pointing. And, the main documentation on the entire mount is a 10 page pamphlet poorly translated from Japanese into English. You can also only get service on this mount from a single company that is far away from me.

  4. Astro-Physics Mach1. You saw this coming. Since this is the one I picked, I will now ramble on about it at length.

My pre-purchase justification for going with the Mach1 was as follows:

  1. Weighs 30% less than the Chinese mounts but carries at least twice the weight.

  2. Weighs about the same as the EM-200 but is more stable.

  3. Extensive and competently produced documentation and support materials available on their web site.

  4. Extensive and competently produced software support on the PC side if I want to go that way.

  5. A few clever control features in the mount itself (more on this later).

  6. Nearly 100% positive evaluation of the mount on the Internets.

  7. Excellent Internet support. The owner of the company can be found doing remote diagnosis of issues on the mailing list. Impressive.

My main pre-purchase worries about the mount were:

  1. Complicated to set up and polar align compared to the Tak, where you just point the polar scope and go.

  2. Expensive.

  3. Maybe a bit too large. The EM-11 is more my size, and would retain my "bring the mount and tripod out in one step" workflow.

  4. Expensive.

Still, I had nothing to lose by putting my name on the waiting list (Astro-Physics makes two production runs of the Mach1 per year, one in the spring and one in the fall. So you put your name on a list and wait until the next run) while I deliberated further. By the time my name came up on the list six months later I had decided that $6000 on a mount is expensive, but not as expensive as spending $4000 now and then $6000 later when the first one didn't work. Two weeks later four large boxes appeared at my house.

Here is what you can say about Astro-Physics, their excellent product photography does not do their products justice. At this point I should include a picture of the mount head, or the polar alignment adjuster knobs, or the keypad, or the wires that go from the control box to the motors or even the knobs that hold everything together. But, I lack the talent and technical ability to create an adequate picture. Every one of these items is built and finished to a degree of polish that I can only describe as good enough to make Apple jealous. I spent five minutes just turning the knobs on the Vixen style saddle. I had never seen machined knobs that were that good. Not even on my Really-Right-Stuff ballheads which until now were my standard for gratuitously expensive pieces of machined aluminum.

I spent the first night with the hardware just putting it together. There were lots of parts and knobs and whatnot. By the time I had it set up it was time to go to bed, even though the sky was clear. This is a hard situation to be in.

Happily over the next two weeks we had enough good weather in Pittsburgh for me to get the mount set up at night. Some impressions from the first setup:

  1. Polar alignment was not bad. The polar scope is easy to use, and the clever "quick star drift" scheme outlined in the documentation works well. You can get set up in about 15 or 20min, which is the same time it used to take me with the CG-5's computer. The adjustment knobs on the mount for altitude and azimuth are incredible. This is still more complicated than the Takahashi mounts with their superbly integrated polar scopes. On those you run a computer program that tells you where in the polar finder to put polaris and you just do it. You are done in five minutes.

  2. The mechanics of the mount, in use, are practically perfect and absolutely predictable. With good polar alignment you can calibrate on a single star and afterwards every single GOTO goes exactly where you want. The CG-5's alignment scheme, while clever, was never consistent. Some nights pointing would be perfect and other nights it would drift around unpredictably. You also have to memorize where six or seven bright stars are in your sky on any given night to make it work. The Mach1 only needs you to find one star.

  3. When moving the mount with the keypad there is no apparent backlash in any direction. This is unlike the CG-5 where at slow speeds you'd have to wait a second or two for the gears to wind up before the mount would move.

  4. The mount remembers the date and time. Hallelujah.

  5. My one and only gripe so far: the clutch knobs can be hard to use because they are so close to the motor boxes. Oh, and the portable pier/tripod is not the easiest thing to fold up or adjust. That's all I can think of.

I also got to set up with my camera. Here's a single shot to give you an idea of how well the mount performed:

NGC2903-2012-03-13-12x-PS

This is NGC2903 and the picture is a stack of 12 frames shot at 2 minutes exposure for each frame. The telescope was being used at 1000mm focal length. Every one of the 12 frames was perfect enough to use. The object barely moved on the screen after each exposure.

Just last month I shot this object with the old mount using my small refractor at around a 300mm focal length:

NGC2903-2012-02-26-stacked-8x-PS

This is a stack of 1 minute frames at less than half the focal length as I used above. And the tracking is visibly worse.

"But you should be using a guider" you might say. And you'd be right. I should be using a guider to smooth out the raw tracking error in any mount. But guiders are notoriously finicky devices, and their ease of use, or lack thereof, is pretty much linearly related to the underlying performance of the mount they are guiding. So the way I see it, I've finally bought a mount that will be worth guiding, because the guiding will just work.

In my mind, this gets to the core value of this product. This is a product that defines the phrase "just works." The behavior and performance of the mount is absolutely predictable. And the value of that is hard to measure.

"Value" is one of those buzz-words that makes the rounds of business meetings and marketing materials. I think in most cases it refers to something that a company would like you do believe you are buying, but in general it's not the case. Most of the time when you spend more money you have just spent more money. It's not often that you spend more money for something and when that something arrives you can stare at it and see the exact linear relationship between the money that you have spent and the value that you have gained. All I can say about the Astro-Physics Mach1 is that you can see every penny of it. It cost ten times more, and really is ten times better than the cheap mount that it replaced. You can't say that about too many other products.

Only read this if you are a mount dork. By that I mean, stop reading now.

The Mach1 is an example of the so-called "German" equatorial mount. In this design the telescope sits on top of the declination axis and is counterweighted on the other side. Here is a poor schematic:

In this design the telescope and the counterweights are always on opposite sides of the pier. When the mount is properly aligned, the RA axis will point straight north, which means the pier will be right on top of an imaginary line that runs North/South right down the middle of the sky which we call the meridian. Another bad picture:

The issue with German mounts is that as you track closer to the meridian you can end up in one of two bad situations:

  1. The weights or scope can hit the pier.

  2. The weights can end up above the scope, which is bad for balance.

So avoid these things, the controller forces you to follow some rules. The main rule is that if the scope is pointing East its body should be on the West side of the mount and vice versa. This keeps things from hitting the pier and keeps the weights below the scope.

Which brings us back to the meridian. What the above rule means is that if we want to go from looking at things in the East to looking at things in the West we need to flip the scope over the mount so it's on the opposite side:

This is a rather drastic and potentially destructive move. Things in your telescope can get out of alignment. You can catch wires on knobs. And, it can throw off your pointing. So, users of German mounts tend to try and avoid flipping at all costs. But, this is annoying since the exact time when you want to look at most objects is when they cross the meridian, because that's when they are highest.

The Mach1 mount does a few things to make this better. First, the geometry of the mount allows it to track far past the meridian if you want it to. So you can pick up an object on the East side and follow it across its highest position in the sky without needing to flip anything around. Second, the build quality of the mount assures that when you do flip over, all you need to do to restore good pointing is to calibrate with the position of one bright star on the new side. I ended up always needing to do this with the Celestron mount anyway, even with all the fancy alignment software.

Finally, the control software in the mount allows you to shift where the mount thinks the meridian is, and thus delay or force flips when you want to. So, if you want to pick up an object that is 30min East of the meridian and track it until it is low in the West without flipping, you can tell the mount that the meridian is actually one hour further East than it really is. It will then dutifully flip the scope over as if the object is already in the West and then track it for hours without flipping. Just make sure nothing hits the tripod when you start this maneuver. If you are really a mount dork, you can read more about this here or in the AP documentation at their web site.

Astro-Physics even has a clever scheme that uses flips to make sure your polar axis is aligned (if you are aligned, a the mount will point to the same star in the same place from both sides of the meridian. So to fine tune the alignment, you flip the mount over on purpose and then adjust).

OK. I'm done.

A Change Gonna Come

2012-03-20 · by peterb

Dear Tea Leaves Readers (all six of you):

Tea Leaves has been fairly static (and infrequently updated) for quite a while now. Truth to tell, we've grown a little bored of Wordpress, so we plan to migrate tleaves.com, by the end of the upcoming weekend, to a new back-end, something we tend to do every few years when we feel like playing with technology for a bit instead of writing about it. This may cause some service interruption, and there will likely be some visual design changes as well. The existing articles will all be preserved at their present URLs. In preparation for this, all comments have been closed. If you're reading this on an RSS or newsfeed reader, check back in on the main page in about a week or so, just in case our RSS feed URLs change.

See you on the other side.

Crusader Kings II - Way of Life

2015-12-13 · by peterb

The archbishop was pretty sure that my fourth daughter, Aelfflaed, was The Devil.

It’s kind of a long story - have a seat. The wine’s poor, I apologize - and here in Leinster, it costs a bloody fortune to have it imported from France, the damned merchants are laughing at me as they sail away, thinking how much I paid for it. D’ye take water in your wine? Muadhnait, bring our guest some warm water.

So, as I was saying, the devil. Well, the gate from hell was probably the first sign. She was just a lass then, but one the cottars come in, upset like they always are and say “Your Majesty, there’s a great big hole in Osraige that leads to Hell!” and of course I say what any sensible man would say. “Boys, that’s just cruel, Osraige can’t help looking like that.” But they insist that no, this is worse and won’t I come see. Now, y’must understand that I didn’t have so many airs in those days, being only a minor king of part of this godforsaken backwater, as opposed to also being the king of those other godforsaken backwaters, so the cottars were used to treating me - me, Siegebehrt - like some sort of royal servant.

“Don’t you worry, boys, I’ll take care of it”, says I. I tour the site, and to me it looks just like Osraige always did, filthy and broken. “Boys, boys, this is just a quarry”, says I. But they insist it leads to Hell. So I call the churchmen to do their job and exorcise it, and go back to my castle, well-satisfied at how good I was at Kinging.

Maybe I should have listened to them.

Aelfflaed was a strange girl.

Her mother was from Kratovo, a place near to the ancient home of Alexander the Great, which suited me just fine. The hangers-on in the court begged me to not go that far afield for a wife, but I had plans. Those plans required an heir, but more importantly they required me to keep the other local lairds a-guessing as to what I had planned, and I couldn’t muck that up by marrying one of their daughters. Besides, murdering a relative is a sin. Or so they tell me.

It were just little things going wrong at first. Horses neighing when we walked by. Great black birds always wheeling around the castle. But soon, it became worse. The water in the well turned foul. People said they heard voices. And then, servants began to die. First the barrow-boy, then two of the girl’s chambermaids. Never a mark on them, never a sign of struggle. Just a look on their face - well, I’m not a superstitious man, but they tell me they looked like they’d been frightened to death.

I saw that look. Not on the barrow-boy, not on the chambermaids, but on the face of my second-eldest daughter, Beorhtgyth. Beorhtgyth, who had taken care of Aelfflaed since she was tiny, found dead in her chamber, with the 7-year old child sleeping peacefully next to her cold, dead, corpse.

So, I did what any monarch who loves his children would do: I sent her far, far away, to live with distant relatives in Spain. After all, I had to think of my other daughter, Beomflaed. I could na' allow any harm to come to her.

For a time, all was quiet, and I was convinced I had solved the problem. Tragic that Aelfflaed had turned out bad, but when she was of age she’d still prove useful to marry off to solidify some alliance or other. Maybe I could wed her to that Welsh bastard and she’d do him in, take care of a problem for me. He’d never see that coming, would he? Heh.

The next year, my tiny boy, Copsige, was born. This being my first son, all the court heaved a sigh of relief - like it or not, in Ireland women cannot rule, so this kept the crown from reverting to my half-wit brother, Murchad.

Then, without warning, Beomflaed was found dead in her room. Sitting at her desk, reading a letter from Aelfflaed.

The Archbishop screamed for hours in the privy council of black magic and deviltry. But I’m a King, and I know of poison. I’ve read a book. I didn’t know how she managed it, but it didn’t matter. Beomflaed and Beorhtgyth’s lives called out for retribution, and I knew that, unless I did something, wee Copsige’s life was forfeit.

I called Aelfflaed back from Spain. Her mother pleaded with me. “She’s just a child!” “Aye,” said I, “a child of the devil!” With the Archbishop backing me, none dared object as I ordered the axeman to chop off the head of a 9-year old girl. All congratulated me on having defeated The Devil, who as the priests tell us can take many forms. But you and me, now, we know the truth, don’t we? Aelfflaed wasn’t the Devil. She was just a bad seed. Evil, aye, evil as can be, but a human sort of evil. And I’m the human sort of evil who stopped her.

I’m an old man, now. The was many years ago, of course. The crown rests on the head of Copsige. Do you know what they call me? Not “The kinslayer”. Not “The monster”. Not “The baby-killer.” No, no. I’m “Sigebehrt the Just”.

That’s are the sort of king we have around here, y’see. Someone willing to kill his own lass and call it justice.

Your wine’s gotten cold. Muadhnait, pour some more for our guest. No water this time. Drink deep.

Aelfflaed

I’ve always had a troubled relationship with Paradox’s grand strategy games. Meticulously crafted, with beautiful visual design and an obsessive level of detail, they’ve often worked for me more as objects to be admired than as games to be actually played. I’ll start a game of, say, Europa Universalis with the full intention to see it through to the end and then at some point a sense of overwhelming hysterisis attacks me - a feeling that, although I’m being asked to make many, many decisions, most of them are meaningless. Whatever I do, wherever I move my armies, whatever policies I adopt, it doesn’t really make a difference. This isn’t strictly true, I realize, but it’s how the game makes me feel. For me, playing EU IV invokes the feeling of trying to whittle down a mountain by pouring water on it. You know it will eventually wear away, but it’s going to take a long time to do it.

For many years now people have suggested that I try Crusader Kings II as an alternative to EU. I finally bent to this suggestion, and I’m glad I did. Crusader Kings II (hereinafter CK II) is, at heart, a more focused game; a faster game; a more intimate game. Rather than being centered on countries, CK II uses the idea of a noble family as its central organizing principle. What you’re concerned with is not the survival or expansion of Ireland or Spain or Muscovy but rather the survival and expansion of your dynasty, whose interests may or may not coincide with those of the counties, duchies, kingdoms, or empires your dynasty rules.

CK II shares many mechanics with EU IV, but the focus is different, and the implementation is generally simpler (and, I think, better). You will fight battles, for example, but rather than (quite painfully) individually recruiting regiments of infantry and cavalry one at a time, you click one button that simply musters your or your vassals' foces, and march into battle (regrettably, the traditional EU mechanism of “And then, after fighting the major battle, you play whack-a-mole for 10 minutes with the remnants of the enemy forces” is still in effect.) But with the bad also comes the good - like all of Paradox’s games, CK II has one of the most beautiful maps in computer games.

Crusader Kings II Map

The majority of CK II is spent either grooming your dynasty directly (arranging marriages, adjusting inheritance laws, trying to acquire territory through violence or alliance) or in managing the relationship between you and your vassals. As your dynasty grows, you must rely more heavily on vassals to do much of your administration for you. (You can try to do it all yourself, but the game imposes grievous penalties on rulers who accrue too many titles - for example, hold more than two Duchies, and all of your vassals will hate you. Well, hate you more.) The central tension of the game is you want your vassals to be strong enough to be useful to you, while still weak enough that you can put them down if they rebel.

All that I’ve told you about above is part of CK II proper. Way of Life is an expansion to the game which basically allows you to add Sims-like focuses to your rulers. Straightforward concepts like “Rulership” or “Business” are available, but the game offers a host of more story-driven options such as “Carousing,” “Seduction,” or “Theology”. All of the concentrations in the game have direct game-mechanic side effects, but the real point of them is that they increase the chance of triggering special events that basically bring “Choose your own adventure” moments to the game (the story I began this review with, for example, was one such event - although one that actually pre-dates the Way of Life expansion.)

Way of Life is an intriguing expansion because it is so responsive it to how people actually play the game. It takes a grand strategy game that has storytelling elements and converts it into a storytelling game that has grand strategy elements. The best analogy I can make here is to Dwarf Fortress (without the crushing UI disappointments that that game carries with it). More than almost any other game, Crusader Kings II: Way of Life manages to approach the platonic ideal of “Losing Is Fun”. Simply put, I think it’s the best of Paradox’s strategy games, and I hope they continue to push their engine in this direction.

Crusader Kings II (normally $39.99) is available from Paradox, along with a panoply of expansions, including Way of Life (normally $7.99). Both the game and the expansion are available for Windows, Mac, or Linux.

Paradox graciously provided Tea Leaves with a review copy of the Crusader Kings II: Way of Life expansion.

Guest post from Tilt

2015-12-15 · by tilt

Long time friend-of-tleaves and master of dungeons Tilt decided to grace us with some of his thoughts on modern computing trends.

Tilt blog

You can find tilt on Twitter. Fine art commissions undertaken for very reasonable prices.

This Is What We Talk About When We Talk About Hexagons

2015-12-23 · by peterb

Let’s talk about Order of Battle: Pacific. Let’s do it by talking about Panzer General. And let’s talk about Panzer General by talking about the history of computer wargames. In order to do that, let’s talk about the board-based wargames from the 1960s and 1970s. We could, of course, go even further back, but this is going to be long enough as it is.

In the 1960s and 1970s, board-based wargames gained some small measure of popularity, spearheaded by two companies, Avalon-Hill and, later, Simulations Publications Inc., or SPI. While both companies made games in different genres and with a variety of game mechanics, their bread-and-butter games were rules-heavy games played on hexagonally-tiled boards, and with combat mechanics that had a number of common features.

The best exemplar of the style is probably SPI’s “introductory” game Napoleon At Waterloo, which is freely available as a print and play game.

What were their games known for? Many (if not most) of their games featured a large number of units, often representing multiple soldiers, who exert zones of control (which means that pieces that come near each other interfere with each other’s movement), and combat results tables that are consulted when battle occurs. Below is the combat results table from my somewhat wrinkled paper copy of Napoleon At Waterloo. To resolve a combat, you add up the combat values of all the pieces on your side and the enemy’s and figure out the ratio of forces - 1 to 1, 2 to 1, 4 to 1 - which tells you what column to use. Then you roll a die, and that tells you what row to use. “Dr” is “Defender Retreats,” “Ar” is “Attacker Retreats,” “De” is “Defender eliminated,” and so on.

combat results table

I’d like to call your attention to the middle column, labeled “1-1”. On a 1, 2, or 3 roll of the die, the defender retreats. On a 4, 5, and 6 roll, the attacker retreats. In other words, attacking with even forces is a coin flip.

People come up with all sorts of explanations for why these games used hexagons; the most commonly trotted out canard is about how it’s easier to tile a plane. But to me, the obvious truth is right there in the combat results table - the need for hexagons in these games are a direct consequence of a desire to allow the players to concentrate their forces and achieve a larger balance of forces in a single combat. If you don’t do that, as a player, then not only can you not win, but you can’t even make progress - in the common case, the game will just grind on aimlessly, flipping one coin after another.

These mechanics were all chosen for practical reasons. Any game is a set of abstractions, and those abstractions are chosen - usually - to strike a balance that makes the game playable, interesting, and fun. Surely, once wargames made the leap to computers, we’d strike a new balance, and not be tied down to all the same old abstractions that made sense when figuring things out with pen and paper?

combat results table

Nope.

Most of the computer wargames of the early PC era share the mechanics, and thus the attributes, of their pen and paper forebears. Combat is static, mobility is limited, stalemates are common, games are long, and the density of (unimportant!) information is too high.

There were wargames that weren’t just nearly straight ports of the same old “combat ratio and a die roll” games from the 1970s, but a supermajority (like SSI’s Tigers In The Snow, pictured above), were, at heart, direct translations. But, perhaps I’m being unreasonably snarky here. We shouldn’t be surprised that many wargames were similar. Some people like what’s familiar, and so some transition period is expected. In the case of of computer wargames, that transition period lasted about 14 years. So this is why we have hexagons today, even though we don’t need them: social signalling. “This is the type of game you’d like. It has hexagons!”

In 1994, in a bid to save the then-failing genre, SSI’s “Special Projects Group” released Panzer General. This game was a revelation. It had a stunning revolutionary UI (for a wargame), “point and click to move and attack”. This may sound obvious to us now, but take it from those of us used to pressing the ‘5’ key to move a unit one hex to the southwest, this was an actual innovation. Beyond the surface, the game also tried to be clever about what information it showed you, and what information it hid - while undoubtedly there is some randomness in play here, at no time does the computer actually display a 6-sided die to you, which is an annoying habit that many games even today engage in (yes, Blood Bowl, I’m looking at you.) For those of you who have read my article on Advance Wars, it’s fair to say that Advance Wars is a slightly simplified version of Panzer General (even down to the combat animations).

Panzer General

In other words, Panzer General took a hard look at the conventions of the genre, discarded many of them, and ended up with a game that was better in many ways. Panzer General scenarios often involved mobility, multiple points of attack, encirclement, entrenchment, combined arms, and a core force of units that gained experience and travelled with you from scenario to scenario. There are places where I feel they were too conservative - to pick the most obvious example, Advance Wars demonstrates definitively that hex maps are completely unnecessary in a wargame - but let’s give them their due. Panzer General was bottled lightning. And many designers have spent a lot of effort trying to remake it.

Slitherine, in particular, has made a cottage industry of attempting, with much success, to rebottle the lightning. Off the top of my head, there’s Panzer Corps (“Panzer General but we changed the name”), Battle Academy (“Panzer General but with even more UI polish”), Warhammer 40k: Armageddon (“Panzer General in the grim future”), and now Order of Battle: Pacific.

I like Order of Battle: Pacific. I like it a lot. It draws clear inspiration from Pacific General while not being a strict clone. There are several aspects of the game that make it more interesting to me than the other games in its class.

Most importantly, the scenario design is very, very clever. Scenarios have primary and secondary goals, and to try to achieve them all will require some deft manuevering on your part. Should you achieve the secondary goals in a campaign game, then this reverberates throughout the playthrough (for example, if as the Japanese, you sink 3 battleships at Pearl Harbor, then American naval forces are weaker for the next few scenarios; destroy Clarke Airfield on the Philippines and American fighter cover weakens substantially. These sorts of changes make the secondary goals much more important, and much more interesting than the Panzer General-style “OK, here are some more resource points to buy units with” rewards.

The game does a good job of mixing up scenarios involving purely naval units, purely land units, and both. Naval combat and air combat are, as one would expect, very intertwined, and a mixture of forces is typically required to succeed. The game is attractive and engaging, works well at various view scales (which is unusual for games of this sort), and from a UI perspective is quite intuitive. As you progress through the campaigns (there’s both a Japanese and an Allied campaign), you’ll also accrue commanders who provide bonuses to units near them.

The Japanese attack Batavia

Another positive point is that the game models both unit supply and effectiveness in interesting and easy to understand ways. Unit supply is similar to what we’ve seen before in Unity of Command, where a unit has to be able to trace a clear path back to a supply depot or it begins to degrade in supply level. As you’d expect, units that are out of supply are much more liable to be degraded or destroyed. In addition, supply doesn’t just come from depots and cities - there are supply ships that can deliver supply to shores near your units, which is essential in a game where many of the scenarios require amphibious landings. Capturing enemy supply depots will make them yours, but only after a delay of several turns.

In addition to health, units also have an “efficiency” value. Units can lose efficiency by fighting, being under artillery or naval fire, or by traversing difficult terrain. A unit with poor efficiency will have a harder time dealing damage. Efficiency is recovered over time through rest. When this mechanic was first mentioned I was sure it was going to be irritating busywork, but I acutally find it quite engaging - it gives you a reason to rotate troops in and out of the front lines beyond “They’re about to be destroyed.”

There is a multiplayer mode that uses Slitherine’s online matchmaking system (this will be familiar to anyone who has played Field of Glory). There’s also a map editor that lets you “paint” your own maps; a number of custom scenarios - and even a few custom campaigns - are available on Slitherine’s web forums.

Are there things I would change? Of course! Like many games in this class, it it hurt by its own compulsive need to display all of the underlying statistics behind every unit on an information panel. They made some moves in the right direction - range of artillery, for example, is shown organically on the map rather than on the info pane - but the game can’t quite bring itself to break away from “Useless salad of meaningless numbers” in too many places.

Number salad

Although the map UI is scalable, text is not, so if you have a large monitor you’ll be cranking down the resolution way below where you want so that you are able to read the text in the game.

The Mac version specifically has a few annoyances, the most egregious of which is that if playing full screen, you can’t app switch out. It’s 2015 - being able to cmd-tab to another window should be standard on all models. And intead of putting my save games and scenario metadata in either my Documents folder or in Application Support, Order of Battle: Pacific created a folder in my home directory (!), which is sort of like walking into someone’s house and putting your mud-caked feet on their kitchen table. I do hope they fix this in a future update.

But, honestly, these are all minor annoyances at most. Order of Battle: Pacific is one of the most enjoyable games of its sort - enough like Panzer General that it scratches the same itch, but bringing enough of its own to the table to be fun and interesting on its own terms.

Order of Battle: Pacific, Mac and Windows (iPad and Android versions announced) is $39.99 on Slitherine’s web site and as of this writing is currently on sale at Steam for just under $35.

Disclosure statement: Matrix Games and Slitherine graciously provided Tea Leaves with a review copy of Order of Battle: Pacific.

Opera Club #1.1 - La Traviata - An Introduction

2016-01-04 · by peterb

Or, “She Dies, And It Takes A Long Time.”

I hereby call the first edition of Opera Club to order.

I’ll be watching, listening to, and writing about Verdi’s La Traviata over the next several weeks, breaking it down a number at a time. First, I’ll post some history and introductory notes, and then we’ll launch into the analysis proper tomorrow. I’ll be illustrating each number with links to YouTube videos, and will suggest others not on YouTube for those who really get bitten by the bug. If you want to watch it on your own, it runs for just over 2 hours, so it’s a fine movie night experience.

Questions are welcome, so feel free to ask them on Twitter as we go and I’ll try to answer as best I can. I claim no professional expertise, so others should feel free to give better, more correct answers if you know ‘em.

I’m going to be illustrating this with different versions of the songs from different videos, but if you want to get a jump, the version I’ll use as a reference is this one…

…with Anna Netrebko, from 2005, the complete opera, with English subtitles. This is basically the same staging as the Met’s Natalie Dessay version from 2008, with a different cast. This is a “modern” staging with a very sparse set and somewhat timeless costuming. This is not traditional; the “typical” setting for La Traviata is late 18th century France with lots of hoops and crinolines and corsets and white tie and tails, but in my experience this makes it feel very stuffy and unapproachable. We’ll no doubt see some of those examples as we go.

What is Opera, and Why Is It So Weird?

This is a big topic and one that I’m not going to be able to handle in a simple blog post, so I’m going to unfairly summarize in a super brief way that is largely inaccurate but sounds good. We can divide a lot of pre-20th century (Western) music into folk/popular music, and “high art” music. For much of the past millennium, most of the high art music was religious music. With the Renaissance, high art music began to find secular expression. A number of Italian philosophers (the camerata fiorentina) developed the idea, on basically no evidence whatsoever, that the ancient Greek dramas unified drama, poetry, and music and thus connected to the emotions of the audience in a deeper way than any of this crappy modern music people listen to nowadays. Despite the substantial handicap of not actually having any Ancient Greek music to actually listen to, this group of academics inspired the first operas. These were aristocratic, somewhat static, and centered around either ancient Greek themes (e.g., the Orpheus myth) or else telling Boring Important Stories of various kings and emperors. This style of opera (and its descendants) is generally known as opera seria.

An Asteroid Hits Opera

Meanwhile, while everyone was busy not listening to opera seria, people in the street were actually watching and enjoying the puppet shows and masked performances of the Italian commedia dell’arte, which was light, fast, funny, and accessible to anyone who likes seeing puppets punch other puppets, which is pretty much everyone in Europe. Around the late 1700s, librettos which were thinly adapted from commedia dell’arte began to be used for operas, mostly in Italian, known as opere buffe, or “funny operas.” Everyone in the world except for a few stodgy kings agreed that these were generally way better than the old style operas. To the extent opera today still has any relevance or popularity, it’s largely due to opera buffa saving its bacon.

Modernizing Opera

There are other styles besides seria and buffa. The two I’ll mention here are the German school of Weber and later Wagner (“Archetypes prance around in nature and weird stuff happens to them because SPIRITS”) and the “verismo” style of Puccini and others (“Instead of terrible things happening to a King, they are happening to a poor person.") Verdi’s La Traviata is significant here because it may be one of the earlier operas that could be called verismo, telling as it does the tragic story of a non-noble courtesan, with nary a crown to be seen.

When opera works, it works because we care about both the drama in the story being told, and the music backing it. In the best operas, the music is an invisible character on the stage, emphasizing, providing context for the drama, or sometimes even contradicting it (Wagner, whatever his other flaws, was a master of this, having a character on stage declaiming a set of words while the orchestra behind him kept a running musical commentary explaining that the character was lying to him- or herself. There’s a beautiful example of this very dynamic in Act I of La Traviata that I’ll point out when we get to it.)

What makes La Traviata work so well isn’t that it’s in one or another category, but its understanding of the breadth and depth of human emotion.

Why, Exactly, Giuseppe Verdi Gave No Fucks

So. Verdi in the early 1800s is a young, middle class man interested in music. He had to struggle to get any success - the only person who believed in him was a rich burgher from his small town: he sponsored Verdi’s education in the Big City, encouraging him to keep at it even after the conservatoire rejected him. He marries the burgher’s daughter, Margherita, whom he adores, in 1831. He begins writing operas, none of them particularly successful,

In 1838, his 1-year old daughter, Virginia, dies of an illness.

A year later, his 1-year old son, Ilicio, dies of an illness.

9 months later, Margherita dies of an illness. At the time of her death, Verdi was trying to write a comedy. This work was one of only two comedies he wrote, Un Giorno de Regno. It was not a success; imagine the agony of trying to complete a comedy under such circumstances - it must have felt like an obscenity. His wife’s relatives, at the time, describe him as wanting only “to hide in some dark place and live out his miserable existence.” Verdi writes in a letter about 40 years later:

My small son fell ill at the beginning of April: the doctors could not discover what was wrong, and the poor child died painfully, in the arms of his desperate mother. But this was no enough: a few days later the young girl also fell ill!…and this illness also proved fatal!…and even this was not enough: in the first days of June my young wife was struck down by violent encephalitis and on 19 June 1840 a third coffin left my house!… I was alone!…alone!…In the space of about two months, the three people most dear to me had vanished for ever: my family had been destroyed.

(Verdi’s dates are wrong, but those who have grieved deeply understand that it is a state in which time has no meaning)

I focus on this episode in Verdi’s life because La Traviata is an opera in which a young woman dies of an illness, and this was an experience that Verdi had seen, with his own eyes, more than once.

Later, While Living In Sin

By the 1840s, after achieving some fame through the success of his crypto-patriotic opera Nabucco, among other works, Verdi cohabited happily with his lover (and, much later, wife) Giuseppina Strepponi, a soprano of some renown. Verdi took some grief for this - his parents, for example, evicted him from their home - but by and large was not harassed about it. Strepponi took more direct abuse from the townsfolk who disapproved of their living together. Once, however, Verdi’s father-in-law dared to raise the subject very obliquely with him, asking, more or less, whether it was really wise to antagonize the townsfolk by his lifestyle choices. In response, Verdi penned the following smackdown which is so modern, so bold, and so righteous in its fury that even as a 21st century person it makes me want to stand up and applaud; that it was written in the mid-1800’s is nothing short of astounding.

I have nothing to hide. In my house there lives a lady, free and independent, who, like myself, prefers a solitary life, and who has a fortune capable of satisfying all her needs. Neither I nor she is obliged to account to anyone for our actions. But who knows what our relations are? What affairs? What ties? What rights I have over her or she over me? Who knows whether she is or is not my wife? And if she is, who knows what the particular reasons are for not making the fact public? Who knows whether it is a good thing or a bad one? Why should it not be a good thing? And even if it is a bad thing, who has the right to ostracize us? I will say this to you, however: in my house she is entitled to as much respect as myself, more even.

It was only a couple of years after this letter was written that Verdi wrote the three operas that he is most well known for - Rigoletto, La Traviata, and Il Trovatore.

La Traviata, (literally: “The Fallen Woman”) is the story of a strong (though ill), independent woman, a courtesan, who is frowned upon by polite society. She is the master of her own house and her own purse, who falls in love, relinquishes that love voluntarily, and eventually dies of an illness, having sacrificed her own happiness selflessly for her lover’s good name. One never wants to assume that the author of a work is just writing their life into their works, but in this case, it’s hard not to think that the way “polite society” treated women was very much on Verdi’s mind.

Tomorrow: A brief summary of the plot of La Traviata.

Opera Club #1.2 - La Traviata in 60 Seconds

2016-01-05 · by peterb

If you’re just joining us, start at the first article in this series.

More Champagne, Please, I’m Dying

And now, on a high wire, without the benefit of a net, I will give you a brief summary of the plot of La Traviata. I am not referring to the libretto, and am just giving you my inaccurate internet summary of the plot in what I hope is a mildly entertaining form.

Before we begin, I will note that La Traviata is directly based off of Alexandre Dumas fils' book (and later play) La dame aux camélias (The Lady of the Camellias), which was in turn a thinly-fictionalized account of the author’s affair-slash-crush on famed country-girl-turned-courtesan Marie Duplessis. In the 20th century, this tale has been retold any number of times, but most notably in Greta Garbo’s famous turn in Camille (1936) and, arguably, the 1990s hooker-with-a-heart-of-gold tale Pretty Woman.

ACT I

[There is a PARTY]

Violetta: Hey, everyone, let’s LIVE FOR PLEASURE and drink a lot.

Everyone: OK!

Friend: Hey, meet Alfredo, he really likes you.

Violetta: So does everyone else!

[People call for a toast. Someone suggests Alfredo.]

Alfredo: I’m shy.

Violetta: Give the toast for me, because I’d like that?

Alfredo: Va-va-voom! “Here’s to LIVING FOR PLEASURE.”

[Everyone DRINKS A LOT.]

[Violetta COUGHS. This indicates that she is secretly DYING.]

Everyone: You ok?

Violetta: No biggie.

Everyone: Cool.

Alfredo: Someone should take care of you. Like, say, hmmmmmmm mmmmmmmeeee?

[Violetta and Alfredo FLIRT HARMLESSLY until Alfredo CONFESSES HIS STALKY YEARLONG CRUSH.]

Violetta: You should forget me. I’m not really into true love. [But she is LYING.] Here, take this flower. We can go out when you return it.

Alfredo: How about tomorrow?

Violetta: OK.

[Alfredo LEAVES.]

Violetta: I must be crazy. I’ve got no time for love. I must be ALWAYS FREE so I can LIVE FOR PLEASURE.

ACT II, SCENE 1

[Violetta is no longer LIVING FOR PLEASURE and instead she and Alfredo are living at her house in the country, ROLLING AROUND ON THE FLOOR A LOT, as Violetta SPENDS DOWN HER CASH RESERVES.]

Alfredo: I’m going out for cigarettes, be right back.

[Alfredo LEAVES]

[Germont ENTERS]

Germont: Hi, I’m Alfredo’s dad, you brazen strumpet.

Violetta: What the hell, man? This is my house. Nobody talks to me that way here. Get lost.

[Germont is IMPRESSED by Violetta’s DIGNITY.]

Germont: OK, let me speak plainly. Everyone is scandalized by Alfredo sexing with you, and because of it his little sister’s engagement is at risk. You should leave him so that his family isn’t hurt.

Violetta: You don’t understand what you’re asking. I’m literally dying.

Germont: Pleeeease?

Violetta: Well, ok. But I don’t know how to break up with him.

Germont: Change your Facebook status to “It’s Complicated?”

Violetta: He’d think I was joking.

Germont: Just text him.

Violetta: Good idea.

Germont: Cry, cry, oh miserable one. I am so moved by your sacrifice. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m not moved enough to withdraw my totally unreasonable request, but I’m seriously super impressed.

[Germont LEAVES]

[Alfredo ENTERS]

Violetta: Love me, Alfredo. Love me as I now love you. Farewell, Love!

[Violetta EXITS while TYPING ALFREDO A TEXT MESSAGE breaking up with him.]

Alfredo: Weird.

ACT II, SCENE 2

[There is a PARTY with politically incorrect DANCERS. Violetta is there and so is Alfredo. Alfredo is DRUNK and BITTER and GAMBLING and WINNING.]

Alfredo: I still love you. Also I hate you. And I love you. And I hate you. And I want my records back.

Violetta: Please stop.

Alfredo: Everyone, this woman spent money on me. And now I want you all to witness that I have repaid her!

[Alfredo THROWS MONEY in Violetta’s face, humiliating her. Everyone at the party is UNCOMFORTABLE.]

Germont: Hi, just passing through and stopped at this party where I happened to see you reacting badly to the disaster I architected and wanted to tell you that I’m ashamed to call you my son.

Alfredo: I’m sad!

Violetta: You’ll never understand.

ACT III

[Violetta is DYING and it TAKES A LONG TIME. Before her death (barely) Alfredo comes back and APOLOGIZES and Germont feels GUILTY.]

Violetta: Wait, actually, I’m feeling better now.

[Violetta DIES. Everyone in the audience is CRYING because the music totally SELLS IT.]

THE END

Next time: We finally start talking about the music.

Opera Club #1.3 - La Traviata, Prelude and Opening

2016-01-06 · by peterb

If you’re just joining us, start at the first article in this series.

The Music

One special note here before we begin. The first act of La Traviata has an absolutely astounding velocity, in both dramatic and musical terms. I’m not prepared to call it unique, but it’s certainly unusual in its incredible density of memorable music. You’re going to be exposed to tons of strong emotion and at (at least) three lyrical, hummable, embed-in-your-head tunes in a mere 30 minutes. By cutting up the analysis the way I’m doing here, I’m intrinsically doing the work a disservice, and it will hurt the first act of La Traviata more than it might hurt other works. So while I don’t think it’s necessary to watch the whole 2 hour opera at once, you might want to watch the first act in one sitting, and then come back for the analysis sometime later. In the Netrebko/Willy Decker staging linked to in part I of this series, the first act ends at 32:15.

NUMBER #1 - PRELUDIO

Let’s talk about the prelude, or overture, to La Traviata. You can watch it in the video I linked to in the first post, or you can use these YouTube links which are prelude-only. For purposes of this post, I’m going to use time markers from the “BBC Proms” version because it will free us from the distraction of watching Anna Netrebko be scared of a big clock. And once again - and this is the last time I’ll say this - I have no musical training and I’m totally ignorant and you should consider anything you read here to be nothing more than the ramblings of an amateur.

BBC Proms, conducted by Xian Zhang:

So that you can hear an alternate, here’s the Berlin Philharmoniker / Herbert Karajan version - more stately, a bit too slowly-paced for my taste, but very emotional:

We start with enigmatic, wandering strings, full of sadness - this is Violetta illness and her inevitable death: the first notes you hear in the opera are basically foreshadowing the end. We are lost in this (beautiful, but disturbing) musical fog for about a minute, and then at around 1:20 (again, BBC Proms video timing) we settle in to this odd cadence: a dance-like “oom-PAH-PAH-pah” rhythm in the bass, and then a descending, lyrical line in the strings:

Prelude 1

That descending line with the dotted rhythm represents Violetta’s love, and Violetta’s loss. You’ll hear it again 2 acts from now, in the linchpin scene of the opera, and you’ll also hear it going through your head all day if you listen to the Prelude and nothing else, because it sticks in your mind like that.

The love theme continues for another bar (it has more than that initial descending line) over the oom-pah-pahs, until suddenly it stumbles (at around 1:58), and everything grinds to an uncomfortable halt. Even the oom-pahs stop. What we get instead is the cellos, playing a triplet and then a quarter note, twice, sounding almost like a lawnmower trying to start. To me (from now on, assume that anything I say is preceded by an invisible “to me”) this is Violetta’s illness - it sounds almost like coughing, and interrupts everything else with its foreshadowing.

Prelude 2

The lawnmower revs a couple of times and then the music gracefully recovers its feet and the love theme resumes (2:17), only now there is this odd, mannered little addition in the violins: triplets (2:21), with a rest between them, rising, and then tripping downwards like a brook (2:25). It’s vapid, polite, nice-girl music. This is Violetta’s public face - it smiles, it’s graceful, and it’s utterly lacking in depth.

Prelude 3

Don’t believe me? At 2:48, the love theme drops away for a few seconds, and it’s almost as if Verdi is taunting us - the music loses all interest. It’s a party we don’t actually want to be at. At 2:55 the love theme comes back, and then we spend the rest of the prelude flitting back and forth between these three states - love theme only, public face only, and both at the same time. The prelude glides to a stop soon thereafter, and the stage is set for the story.

Number 2 - Dell’invito trascorsa

As with the prelude, you can watch the Netrebko version (properly, the “Willy Decker staging”), but I’m going to use a different interpretation for discussion of this number. The reason I keep avoiding the Netrebko version for the analysis is largely practical - it’s really convenient to have a YouTube snippet that has only the song that we’re listening to, and those are the timestamps i’ll be using. But if you’d like to use the Netrebko version, that’s fine! This song starts at 5:36 and goes to 10:12. Or, you can just watch this video for this number alone:

This is largely a connective number, so I’m not going to go terribly deep here - there’s not a lot of deep going on.

With a flourish, the music takes off like a shot - like a bullet from a gun, and it will maintain this pace for almost the entire act. The whole orchestra, in a rising flourish! A pregnant pause! Another happy flourish!

Flourish

The music here is party music! Dance music! People are dancing, gambling, drinking, having a good time! Everything is light and bouncy - this music would not feel at all out of place in the circus. Check out this bass line:

Bass line

That rhythm is going to be everywhere; it’s the rhythm of Paris, the rhythm of the city, the rhythm of goings-on. bom-BOM-bom-BOM-bom-BOM-bom-BOM [repeat for a long time]. That’s the rhythm of people for whom life is very light. If you keep your ear open through the opera, sometimes it will be in the foreground, as it in in this scene, but will appear where you don’t necessarily expect it - someone will open a door, and you’ll hear that in the distance.

This is an opera about a normal (well, ok, rich-normal) woman who has feelings that are at odds with her public persona. The music is going to signal us as those conflicts play out.

Violetta Valery, famous courtesan, arrives, and immediately announces her intention to LIVE FOR PLEASURE! (1:00). We’re introduced to Alfredo (1:30), who seems like a nice Jewish Provençal boy. There’s a little action, still over the light music, which reduces to “Go talk to her, you dummy” / “Nah, I can’t.”

Around 3:00, we learn that Alfredo has a crush on Violetta, but she laughs it off. At 3:50 we can hear the music speed up, grow to a crescendo, and we’re setting up to get into the (extremely famous) drinking song, “Brindisi”. Alfredo is ready to demur, but Violetta says it would please her, so he’s willing to give it a shot. Everyone in the crowd says they’ll listen attentively. Let’s ask the orchestra if this going to be a big deal. “Hey, orchestra - is this going be a big deal?” EVERY INSTRUMENT IN THE ORCHESTRA AGREES THAT THIS IS GOING TO BE A BIG DEAL (4:45).

Big deal

Tomorrow: we hear a toast that is a really big deal (and is probably a song you’ve heard in hundreds of TV commercials and films and not known what it was.)

Opera Club #1.4 - La Traviata, The Drinking Song

2016-01-07 · by peterb

If you’re just joining us, start at the first article in this series. As always, if you have any comments, feel free to share them with me on twitter.

Why You’ve Heard This Opera’s Music Before

Number 3 - “Libiamo ne' lieti calici”, a.k.a. Brindisi (“The Drinking Song”)

Let’s get to the drinking song! In the Netrebko YouTube video this goes from 10:10 to to 13:17, but I suggest you don’t watch it right now, because we’re going to hear this song a few times and I want you to avoid fatigue.

For this one, I’m going to do something a bit different. Rather than analyzing specific phrases of the song, I’m going to talk a little more generally about aspects of opera productions that differ between them, and I’m going to illustrate it with different examples that show different facets of how a performance practice can interpret the work. I think this can make a huge difference in how one thinks about opera - if your first exposure to opera is a meh performance (and let’s be honest, it so often is) it can sour you on the art form completely. What I hope to do here is to illustrate what “good” and “bad” means (to me) in terms of singing, acting, and staging.

The reason I’m doing this with “Brindisi” is, twofold. First, I’m not sure how much there is to say about it. It’s a very straightforward, open song with very little subtext. This is one of those songs where Verdi was chuckling to himself, saying “Yep, people will have this in their heads all day and won’t be able to get it out.” It has a direct melody, it’s lyrical (in the sense of “song-like”), simple, and more or less has the rhythms and tunes of “For he’s a jolly good fellow”. The lyrics can be found here, and reduce to “Alfredo and Violetta flirt while singing of drinking a lot of and living for pleasure.”

(The key musical takeaway from this duet is pretty simple: both Alfredo and Violetta are singing not just the same song, but the exact same tune. By the end of the song, they’re literally finishing each other’s lines. This is Opera-ese for (at a minimum) “These people are in agreement” or, in this case, “These people really like each other.")

Second, you’ve already heard it in multiple commercials and tv shows and movies.

So. Singing, staging, and acting.

If you say the word “opera” to someone unfamiliar with it with no additional context, this is what they think of:

Brunnhilde

(Image credit: from Wikipedia, created in 1876, public domain).

Actually, they think of a slightly modified version of that - the lady is usually blonde, and heavier. I’m not really referring here to the obvious body shaming where people talk about “the fat lady,” although that is part of it (and this is still a problem among audiences and critics today). The two attributes that are notable about The Opera Fat Lady Singing trope is (1) it’s implied that she’s not appropriate for the role, and (2) if you ever see her in a movie, cartoon, or other moving image she is static. She plants herself on stage, stands still, and belts out the song. This is really, really, really boring to watch even if you like the music. Although this doesn’t happen as much as people think it does, it does happen sometimes. The number of people who can actually fill large opera house with their voice is incredibly small, so there has traditionally been a great tolerance for people who didn’t (or couldn’t) act, but who brought the vocal goods. This seems to be diminishing over time, but you will still encounter it from time to time.

But let’s think back to the camerata fiorentina (remember them?) The point of opera was not just to be pretty music, but to merge music and drama into a seamless whole that had more power than either standing alone. As an experience, an opera that is staged with drama and verve is more engaging than one that is staged in a static and lifeless manner. Conversely, if the people on stage can act as well as sing, then it will be even more engaging. And obviously, if they can’t sing, all the acting ability in the world won’t help them.

So with those thoughts in mind, let’s examine three and a half renditions of the Brindisi. Frankly, by the third time you watch this thing the song is going to be wearing on you, so I am going to put the best first.

First, let’s look at a version from Aix-en-Provence that has superb, dynamic staging, very good acting, one of the then-best sopranos in the world, Natalie Dessay portraying Violetta, and a tenor (Charles Castronovo) who in this case I think doesn’t really showcase the song at its best (sorry, Charles. All my personal opinion.) As a bonus, this version also extends a minute or so into the next segment - you can watch it if you like, or stop when the song ends.

Now, let’s look at another version of the opera. With this one, I’m really going to twist your brain around. This is the Willy Decker staging (so the same staging as the Netrebko version on part 1 of this series, but with a completely different cast - Natalie Dessay (again) as Violetta, and Matthew Polenzani as Alfredo, staged at the Met.

So we can contrast these various examples in several ways.

First, we can contrast Dessay’s singing against Netrebko’s. While both have excellent technique, the timbre of their voices is quite different - Netrebko’s voice has a low, almost dusky register, and Dessay’s voice rings like a bell. Neither of these attributes is objectively better than the other1, but you may find that you have a definitive preference. You may even find one of them pleasant and another intolerable (more on that later). The point is, you don’t have to feel bad if you just don’t like someone’s singing. You can like and not like whatever or whomever you want, and indeed finding opera performances sung by people whose voices you like is a key part of learning to like the art form.

Regarding the tenors, I’d say that Polenzani’s singing is better than Castronovo’s in a few specific ways, notably that his enunciation is a bit sharper, and he generally projects a bit better.

Second, we can compare the acting in the two Natalie Dessay clips against each other (and against Netrebko). All things considered, at this point in her career Dessay was a much better actress than Netrebko, but even compared against herself you can see a difference. I’m no expert, but I’d claim that this is a scene where the formalist staging of the Decker production worked against it - where in the Aix-en-Provence version Dessay is loose, flowing, and in the spirit of the song, in the Decker production she’s just a little bit stiff, and I think it’s the staging that makes her so stiff. Likewise, I don’t think anyone would question that Castronovo’s acting is leagues ahead of Polanzani’s in this particular scene. Again, it could be the staging, or it could be the acting, or, it could just be the luck of the draw that these performances were the ones that were recorded, and on a given night one is better than the other.

Here are the questions I’d like you to ask yourself. Did you enjoy one of those clips more than the other? If so, remember that feeling the next time you see an opera clip that you like (or don’t like), and remember that there are all types of productions being staged. Seek out productions that are more like the things you like and less like the things you don’t. And if you’re me, don’t just seek out the best singers, seek out people whose singing you like who can also act. (Not everyone feels this way. There are people who go to operas with the score in their lap and just read it instead of looking at the stage, and will insist that the only thing that matters is the singing. I will assert without proof that you are probably not one of these people, and you should be glad that you are not one of these people.)

Two more examples and we’re done. Let’s talk a little more about singing.

Here are Luciano Pavarotti and Dame Joan Sutherland singing the same song in a stand-up concert (so it’s not a full production, they’re just going to stand on the stage and sing in this case - don’t hold that against them!)

I’m including this link simply because when I was unreasonably slagging off Castronovo above you might have reasonably been thinking “What are you talking about? The guy sounds fine to me.” Pavarotti is a singer who had a voice for the ages, and a known phenomenon in opera is people not liking these newfangled singers just because they’re not as good as [whoever the speaker was obsessed with]. Especially note his enuniciation - I’d be willing to bet that even those of you who don’t speak Italian could still tell where each word began and ended. So when I say that I thought Castronovo wasn’t that good in that scene, that’s the sort of comparison I’m making - “Good compared to some platonic model of what I think I like.” Lord knows that Castronovo’s “not that good” is still singing on a level that would be beyond my reach if I had trained my entire life for it.

One last example and we’re done for tonight. Here’s a style of singing that we haven’t heard before. This is Maria Callas, perhaps the most famous opera diva of all time, singing the same song with Francesco Albanesi. Her style is distinctive, people love it, and to me it’s like hearing fingernails scratching a blackboard. To me her voice sounds like an intoxicated sheep being murdered by a theremin - “She’s the Harvey Keitel of opera singers”, said a friend of mine, thinking of that one scene in Bad Lieutenant, and that comparison resonates for me on multiple levels. (Callas begins singing at 1:15 in the following video)

My point is not “Maria Callas is awful."2 My point is that most people think I’m wrong, and that’s OK with me. What you like and what the world likes can differ. Especially in America, because of the class connotations that opera has, it’s really easy to find yourself listening to things that you don’t like and thinking “Well, since everyone else likes this particular opera or this particular singer, I guess I don’t really like opera.” Don’t fall into that trap.

Trust your ears more than you trust anything anyone, including me, says.

Next time: Un di, Felice and other silly love songs..

Footnotes

1: I’m not a professional singer, so I feel completely unconstrained to offer my personal opinions here. Feel free to disagree.

2: Although, seriously, she is.

Opera Club #1.5 - You'd Think That People Would Have Had Enough Of Silly Love Songs

2016-01-08 · by peterb

If you’re just joining us, start at the first article in this series. As always, if you have any comments, feel free to share them with me on twitter.

Number 4 - Un di, felice, eterea

Starting at 13:17 on the Netrebko/Decker production (which as always you can find near the head of the first article of this series.)

A brief editorial note before I get started on this bit. It’s really easy to let your mental model of Alfredo in this scene look like this:

mlady

I advise against this.

La Traviata has a lot of gender things going on, but as I tried to establish in the “introduction to Verdi”, in its time his works were radical in its portrayal of women as having agency, and for having an appreciation of the practically impossible situation many of them had to live in. There are absolutely valuable things to be had from a “critical” reading of the dynamics between Alfredo and Violetta in these early scenes, but I think that those really only yield fruit if you first approach it head on and take their relationship at face value. Verdi was no stranger to irony, or to sarcasm, or to bitterness, and I think that his Alfredo doesn’t have those qualities because Verdi wants him to be as he comes across: as an innocent (at this point. That will change as we go through the opera). This may make this scene too sentimental for modern tastes, but I think you’ll enjoy the ride more if you are willing to buy in to that naïveté.

The toast has been a success, and everyone goes off to drink, except, suddenly, Violetta is overcome with weakness! (uttering those syllables used only in opera – “Ohimé!”, pronounced “Oy may!”, literally “Woe is me!"). “What’s wrong?” everyone says, “Nothing, nothing,” says she, and everyone wanders away. Everyone except Alfredo, who is worried about her. Violetta frets over herself (unaware that he’s watching), but listen carefully to what’s going on in the background in this simplified score (from around 14:00 - 14:45 in the video)

ohime

See the bass line? It’s the happy oom-pah band playing a march! So while Violetta is contemplating her immanent death, the party is whirling on behind them (most orchestras play this muted as in this video, as if the music is coming from another room.)

So now we have some interplay between Violetta and Alfredo, with him coming closer and closer to confessing his love, and her stringing him along for a lark, until he finally lets it all go (in this role’s big moment) at 15:35. An acting note: Netrebko overplays this scene badly, responding to Alfredo’s concern with deep drama. In the better productions, Violetta is trying to laugh the whole thing off (which is what her music is doing.) Here’s Renee Fleming doing the same thing, much better (in a stodgier production)

Be that as it may - now the cat is out of the bag, and so Alfredo makes his big pitch. This is his most famous aria from the opera - “Un di, felicé, eterea”. The summary of the song is: I saw you, I fell in love instantly, and ever since then this love has given me torment, torment and delight (a beautiful turn of phrase in Italian, “croce, croce e delizia”). In addition to being a famous aria, it’s also an example of Verdi at the top of his game as a dramatist. What you’re going to see here is words and music working together in a way that is more powerful than either standing alone.

The melody of the song is important, and it echoes the love theme we already heard in the prelude (although in a simpler mode, as befits it coming from young and inexperienced Alfredo.)

Recall the “descending dotted rhythm” from the prelude (it’s marked “con. espress” on the score. If you can, try to put it in your mind. Now compare it to what Alfredo is singing here:

felice

It’s different, but the same.

Violetta receives this confession of love and sends back her own song. Now, they’re singing the language of opera, so she tells him that she disagrees with words, but also with music. The words (just going to echo the first lines here)

Ah, se ciò è ver, fuggitemi,

If that’s so then you’d better run from me, buddy,

Solo amistade io v’offro

Friendship is all I can give you.

And the music she puts this to is a light, flighty, and good-humored, literally sounding like birdsong and trilling. She’s not telling him off, she’s letting him down easy.

felice2

“I don’t take anything seriously”, the music says. And she ends with some heartfelt advice: “Forget me” (in Italian, “dimenticarmi”) to the same tune.

Alfredo redoubles his efforts, and sings his love song back at her, redoubling his cries of torment and delight. She, in turn, keeps up her defenses, “dimenticarmi, dimenticarmi” - but something is different. Can you see what’s different (ignore the tragically bad English translation on this score) (17:48).

felice3

Even if you can’t read music and hear it in your head, you can see this. She’s singing the words “forget me, forget me”, but she’s singing his song - she’s singing his rhythm, she’s singing his melody, and that’s telling us that although she’s saying “forget me, forget me”, she’s thinking “torment and delight to the heart.” The flighty tune she had just 30 seconds ago is dropped on the floor and forgotten. In opera terms, the music is telling us that these two characters are moving as one. This is what love looks like to a musician.

Since I’ve already said I don’t love Netrebko’s performance, let’s look at another one! Here’s Natalie Dessay and Charles Castronovo from the Aix-en-Provence festival in 2011.

That’s it. They’re in love. Interrupted by the partygoers, they have some innocent flirting (she gives him a flower, says “Bring it back when it fades”, which turns out to be “tomorrow” because apparently quality control amongst Parisian florists is terrible). Alfredo leaves happy (20:30), and so does the rest of the party (did you notice how the party music underlies so much of this act? It’s an essential part of what gives the act its unspeakable velocity.) After this song, Violetta is left alone with her thoughts (21:57), and her thoughts, as we’ll see next time, will lead to an incredible aria.

Next week: Sempre Libera, or Ragazze vogliono solo divertirsi.

TIS-100p

2016-01-11 · by peterb

Due to our long hiatus, Tea Leaves has never written about any of the Zachtronics games. Since Zachtronics made these games solely for me, under the direction of the network of orbital mind-control lasers I employ, this is a tragedy. Let’s fix that now, and give a small signal boost to their latest release, TIS-100p, an assembly langauge programming game for iPad.

Although they might chafe at my typecasting of them, I’m comfortable waving my hands and saying that Zachtronics makes puzzle games disguised as programming games. They range in difficulty from “Quite hard” to “completely impossible for normal Earthlings”. It’s been fun, as a fan, to watch them try to zero in on the difficulty level that their customers (and those who might be their customers someday) want.

On the “mankind was not meant to play this game” side of the spectrum we have one of their early Flash games, KOHCTPYKTOP: Engineer of the People, a game so unfriendly that the directions are essentially a single sentence that can be paraphrased as “Go to Wikipedia and learn electrical engineering.”

The game that really put them on my radar was SpaceChem, which was a game that purported to be about chemistry and molecular construction but then turned into a master class in concurrency programming and deadlocks. Released for Windows, Mac, Linux, Android and iPad, the game eventually bit-rotted this year, and now neither the Mac nor iPad ports work. This is pretty annoying, and I sincerely hope the same fate isn’t in store for TIS-100p. In their postmortem on Gamasutra designer Zach Barth describes their efforts, and eventually their utter and complete failure, to find the right difficulty level for SpaceChem (spoiler: only 2% of SpaceChem’s players reach the end of the game.)

2015 gave us two games from Zachtronics, the “SpaceChem but in a 3D world” Infinifactory, and the sandbox programming game TIS-100. The former game missed the mark for me, so I’m not going into detail there. But the second game? That sort of thing really is my bag, baby.

TIS-100 is a puzzle game whose conceit is that you are programming a strange multiprocessor system using a custom-made assembly language. Each puzzle can contain up to 16 CPUs; each CPU can communicate with up to 4 other adjacent CPUs using half-duplex busses, and can contain up to 15 lines of 18 characters each. Each CPU also has 1 and a half registers (“One and a half?” “Trust me, it’s complicated”). Every puzzle defines a set of inputs, and a set of outputs. You write programs to generate the correct outputs.

TIS-100

Obviously learning a lesson from SpaceChem, TIS-100 opens up in a slightly less constrained way as you work through the puzzles. There are 23 puzzles (and 2 sandboxes) in the base game, and solving only 19 of them will open up TIS-NET, which provides additional user-created puzzles and a few more of the game’s elliptical story beats. The game also includes a Specification Editor that lets you create your own puzzles, if you’re willing to write a little lua code. Which, if you’ve made it to this point, you clearly are.

Clocking in at a mere $7 on Steam, TIS-100 is catnip if you like this sort of game. Arguably a bit less polished, and more artificially constrained, than the Tomorrow Corporation’s similar-but-different Human Resources Machine, the retrocomputing feel of TIS-100 is, I think, a worthwhile stylistic choice and is justified on its own terms. But of course, I would think that - I’m old.

(A brief aside - what do I mean by “artificially constrained”? The lack of registers and the half-duplex nature of the CPU connections in TIS-100 mean that for many problems you are writing clever assembly language programs to work around those constraints, whereas in Human Resources Machine your cleverness is actually focused more on the actual algorithm, such as “sort this list of numbers”. I’m not prepared to say that either choice is objectively better or worse. They’re just different. But there were times, playing TIS-100, where I muttered under my breath “If I had 2 actual first-class registers, this level would have been finished 15 minutes ago.” For better or worse, the constraints in TIS-100 are an integral part of its puzzle-game nature.)

Now, we have TIS-100p for iPad. At a mere $3.99, this was an instant buy for me. It’s the same game that we see on the desktop, minus a few features, plus an awesome retro keyboard. TIS-NET is not here, and the specification editor is gone as well.

TIS-100p

There are a few annoyances - typing numbers on the awesome retro keyboard requires chording, for example, and since there’s no GameCenter support (yet?) you miss out on the competetive aspect of “Comparing yourself to your friends and seeing which of you used fewer cycles, fewer CPUs, or fewer instructions to solve a given puzzle”. But now I can write assembly language code on my iPad while waiting at the auto repair shop, and really, isn’t that what the past 40 years of technological progress have been building up to?

First Impressions: Dragon's Dogma

2016-01-26 · by peterb

We live in a world where the Internet has become the primary medium for arguing about things, all sorts of things. Certain topics, among nerds, have always been contentious. Star Wars vs. Star Trek. Mac vs. PC. Nintendo vs. Sega. And, among a certain set, “Western-style computer role-playing games” (usually “CRPG”) vs “Japanese-style computer role-playing games” (usually “JRPG”).

Personally, I’ve never had a dog in this hunt: I am omniludorous. Let a thousand flowers bloom; if your game involves simulated fantasy combat in a vividly realized yet oddly constrained world, the chances are good that I will play it. But each side of the debate has its dogmatic loyalists, who are willing to swear that the games they like are good and the other games are crap.

There are stereotypes for each of these types of game, which, as we’ll see, only have a dollop of truth) to them.

The stereotype of Western RPGs is that they are open, unconstrained, liberating playgrounds of undirected sandbox play, where any character can go any place at any time and do any thing. They have deep statistical content and character growth can be in many directions. Plot is largely organic, arising out of the emergent content in the game. At their best, the games allow free-roaming fantasy and exploration. At their worst, they allow the player to trivially and unknowingly put the game in an unwinnable state. Western RPGs largely inherit their DNA from the Wizardry series of games. The example typically trotted out as the sine qua non of Western RPGs is The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, which would happily let your first level character wander into the cave of high-level bandits cleverly placed right near the opening town, where it would be quickly murdered.

The stereotype of Japanese RPGs is that they are tightly controlled “long narrow hallways” in which a male teenage protagonist with spiky hair wakes up on the day of the village festival only to find out that their village has come under attack by airships from a nearby kingdom. He sets off with only his childhood best friend (secretly a princess), a scruffy bandit, and a dog. The protagonist’s team is immediately defeated by a level 862 bad guy. They then march down the long narrow hallways through about 15 different lands, fighting enemies who appear out of nowhere every 15 steps, acquire new companions, level up in a strictly proscribed manner, unlock additional powers, buy slightly better equipment, and eventually defeat the villain from the beginning of the game, but only after looking deep within themselves and finding a reserve of spirit.

These stereotypes have a little bit of validity, although they obscure more than they enlighten. The truth is that Western RPGs have often been more linear than their fans would claim, and much of the vaunted openness is really just a way of explaining away terrible user interface choices. While there are a few notable exceptions, the Western and Japanese CRPG traditions have both borrowed heavily from each other. The basic jumping off point for JRPGs is, in fact, Wizardry (ironically, due to emulation advances, the best version of Wizardry I you can play on a modern machine today is the SNES version.) Western RPGs and JRPGs are not distant cousins. They’re more like close siblings who fight a lot. Which brings me my commodious vicus of recirculation to Dragon’s Dogma.

Dragon’s Dogma is what happens when a Japanese developer plays The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim and says “Hmmmmmm, we can do that. Hell, we can do that better.”

I’m not far enough in to say much more than that. But this is one heck of a strange game. The good sort of strange. It’s the sort of strange you get when someone from elsewhere visits the town you live in, and you see familiar places through new eyes. I think I like it.

X-Com 2: The Dark Souls of Strategy Games

2016-02-08 · by peterb

This weekend I dove into many engrossing and painful hours with X-Com 2, the sequel to the reboot of the venerable turn-based strategy game.

This game does not pussyfoot around. It is hard.

There’s a lot that one could say about the game and how it differs from its predecessor, but I’m going to stick to the big picture. The tactical game is massively improved from the first outing, adding more options and complications for both your soldiers and the enemies. They managed to do this in a way that makes it still feel sensible and authentic. The tactical game feels like it gives you options. The strategic game, on the other hand, is complicated in a way that feels like instead of giving you options, it gives you obligations. This is further compounded by some terrible UI in the strategic game; there’s a lot of clicking to accomplish very little. For me, this is a miss.

I have three separate games running at the same time now, and I’m in various states of slowly-succumbing-to-the-alien-hordes on each of them. Every time I think I’ve seen everything the game has to offer, it throws some new evil at my face and encourages it to chew on it for a little while.

My biggest problem with the strategic game (apart from the UI, which is in places embarassingly bad) is that it’s largely interrupt driven. How many interrupts? More than you can possibly imagine.

OK guys, here’s the plan. We’re going to make contact with the resistance in this region. Ngome, you search the eastern sector. Valdez, you’re on comms - monitor all radio chatter, look for anything that looks like a pattern. Sabelli, you’re second shift C&C, this is our most important operation so don’t get distracted by

COMMANDER, WE’VE DISCOVERED A CACHE OF SUPPLIES IN MEXICO WOULD YOU LIKE TO INVESTIGATE OR IGNORE THEM?

OK, we’ll pick this up later. Now that we’ve arrived in Mexico, it’s critical that we collect these supplies, which are essential to our remaining sharp so that we can continue to take the fight to the invaders. Jefferson, you start searching the old factory, Anderson, set up a picket and start watching for incursions, Guttmansdottir, I need you to

COMMANDER THESE PEACEFUL PEOPLE WHO WERE JUST HANGING OUT WASHING THEIR CLOTHES HAVE BEEN ATTACKED WE HAVE TO HELP THEM

For fuck’s sake.

OK, Sabelli, you lead Bravo team to evac these civvies. Jefferson will run clean and sweep through the compound. Run this by the num

COMMANDER THE LADY WHO WAS WASHING CLOTHES JUST ATE SABELLI’S FACE.

…

What.

I feel like I respect what they were going for, which I believe is the Dwarf Fortress “losing is fun!” vibe. But the strategic game has a few problems. The three things that jump out at me are:

(1) Because of the way the difficulty ramps, I think that the losing-is-fun restarts fail a bit because the very early parts of the game are gonna play out samey-same. The divergences from weird mission types only start coming online a bit later, in my experience. Not sure how i would fix this but I’m thinking something like a “quick start” restart - e.g., “In the game you just lost, the highest rank you had was lieutenant, so we’re starting the game with you having a lieutenant, 2 sergeants, and 3 squaddies, and the difficulty is higher out of the gate. OK GO.”

(2) Building out your base is too much of a slog. Everything takes too long, especially excavation, even with multiple engineers. I respect/accept the idea that I have to choose between multiple useful things and I can’t have everything, but at least in my games the big problem is that I’m going for long stretches without being able to build anything useful at all, and that doesn’t feel like fun to me.

(3) Somewhere in an early design meeting the idea clearly jelled that having constant interrupts all the time while scanning was going to introduce tension and drama into the game. For me personally, I just find it irritating. Surely I can’t be the only person who feels that way.

On the other hand, I have absolutely no complaints about the changes to the tactical game. I feel like they stuck that landing like Nadia Comăneci.

In all seriousness, the strategic game is a bad enough experience for me that I almost wish there was a main menu button that was basically “Generate some random soldiers with random skills and start a random tactical scenario with no strategic game THANKS.”

So after a long weekend with the game, that’s where I am: possibly one of the best games I’m likely to play this year, yet also suffering from a number of frustrating flaws, some of which are purely due to the UI. Wild horses could not drag me away from this game. But I also have the profound sense that there is work still to be done to make it what it should be.

It’s a conundrum.

Desert Island Disks

2016-02-23 · by peterb

Inspired by The Incomparable’s current podcast listing record albums they would take to a desert island, I decided to compile my own list. The rest of the gang on the Tea Leaves slack channel got into the act. What results is this little compilation. I was going to include links and explanation and discussion, but on reflection I think the various lists are sort of more interesting taken on their own. So allow me to present them with minimal comment.

Scrabbling at the Lock

My list, in order from “most essential” downwards:

  1. Tom Waits - Swordfishtrombones
  2. The Ex - Scrabbling At The Lock
  3. Miles Davis - Kind of Blue
  4. Bjork - Post
  5. Downtown Science - Downtown Science
  6. Aimee Mann - Bachelor No. 2
  7. David Bowie - Scary Monsters
  8. Fugazi - Steady Diet Of Nothing
  9. Sugarhill Gang - Sugarhill Gang
  10. King Crimson - In the Court of the Crimson King

(Interestingly, I found that I had made a similar list back in 2010, and 5 of the albums were the same. Sensible consistency, or hidebound conservatism? Who can say?) Feel free to complain about my list on Twitter, if you like.

On a side note, I feel like I deserve a medal for not putting an opera on the list. But maybe I’ll make a separate post for opera recommendations.

Tea Leaves co-founder @psu_13’s contribution, which he says is in no particular order:

  1. Bill Evans - The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings
  2. Bruckner 7th, Eichhorn
  3. Brahms Sextets, Raphael Ensemble
  4. Talking Heads - Stop Making Sense
  5. John Coltrane - Blue Train
  6. Thelonius Monk - The London Collection
  7. Duke Ellington 1940-41. There are various possible collections
  8. Bach: Golberg Variations, Glenn Gould 1981
  9. Beethoven 5, von Karajan 1960, not the later ones.
  10. Bach Musical Offering, Leppard on Musical Heritage Society/Erato

Next up was @importantshock’s essential 10, from top to bottom:

  1. Radiohead - ​Kid A​
  2. Nirvana - ​Nevermind
  3. The Notorious B.I.G. - Ready to Die
  4. Radiohead - OK Computer
  5. Nas - ​Illmatic
  6. Lil Wayne - ​Dedication 2
  7. Kanye West - My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
  8. Aphex Twin - Selected Ambient Works​
  9. Glenn Gould - The Goldberg Variations
  10. Elliott Smith - self-titled

Remain In Light Fourth in the batting order comes left-fielder @inmostlight.

  1. Talking Heads - Remain in Light
  2. LCD Soundsystem - Sound of Silver
  3. Belle & Sebastian - The Boy With the Arab Strap
  4. Thin Lizzy - Jailbreak
  5. Yo La Tengo - I Can Hear The Heart Beating As One
  6. The Mountain Goats - Tallahassee
  7. The Hold Steady - Almost Killed Me
  8. Pulp - His ‘n’ Hers
  9. Faith No More - Angel Dust
  10. Joy Division - Substance 1977-1980

Next comes @snefster with his nostalgia-laden list. He’s trying to pretend that he’s trolling, but I can tell that he’s serious.

  1. Billy Joel - Piano Man
  2. Pink Floyd - Momentary Lapse of Reason
  3. Aqua - Aquarium
  4. The Pogues - Waiting for Herb
  5. Styx - Kilroy Was Here
  6. ELO - Xanadu
  7. Samantha Fox - I Wanna Have Some Fun
  8. Primus - Pork Soda
  9. Black Eyed Peas - Monkey Business
  10. How to build a wooden boat - audiobook

I expected musician and high-powered record-company executive @djehuti to come in esoteric and noise-heavy, but he surprised me with his list:

  1. Fleetwood Mac - Rumours
  2. Fripp/Eno - (no pussyfooting)
  3. Led Zeppelin - II
  4. Yes - Close to the Edge or Fragile
  5. ZZ Top - Tejas (on vinyl!)
  6. Tangerine Dream - Tangram
  7. Miles Davis - Bitches Brew
  8. Pink Floyd - Wish You Were Here
  9. Robert Rich - Below Zero or Bestiary
  10. Dave Brubeck - Time Out

Finally, long-time Tea Leaves contributor @ctokar hits us over the head with this (un-ordered) asiapop list:

  1. Rie fu - I Can Do Better
  2. Mika Nakashima - NO MORE RULES
  3. Perfume - ⊿
  4. Namie Amuro - Uncontrolled
  5. YUI - Orange Garden Pop
  6. Ellie Goulding - Halcyon Days (Deluxe Edition)
  7. LAMA - New!
  8. Mika Nakashima - DEARS
  9. La Oreja de Van Gogh - Cometas Por El Cielo
  10. Namie Amuro - Feel

Lots of good music here. Now I just need them all in a single Apple Music playlist.

How Captain America: Civil War Started

2016-03-10 · by peterb

The Tea Leaves slack channel presents: How the civil war in Captain America: Civil War began.

  1. Sizzling repressed homoerotic tension finally boils over (peterb)
  2. Cap irons and folds his clean underwear. (uurf)
  3. Like ten, with Bucky (snefster)
  4. Cap sick of Tony’s nicknames (arixey)
  5. Wanda accidentally causes the whole thing with a spell and then looks straight at the camera and delivers Erkel catch phrase. (uurf)
  6. Fighting over who gets the Avengers' complimentary ticket to see ‘Hamilton’ (peterb)
  7. Tony and Steve each jealous of Bruce’s attention of the other. (uurf)
  8. Cap says “You know in my day” one time too many. (uurf)
  9. Tragic lack of Reed Richards to serve as level headed voice of reason. (snefster)
  10. Some dispute over merchandising rights. (arixey)
  11. Trying to impress Black Widow. (arixey)
  12. Need to generate artificial conflict to sell more comic books and movies (psu)
  13. Tony doesn’t see what the problem is with Zack Snyder movies, really. (tilt)
  14. The Game Grid demands tribute. (tilt)

Stardew Valley

2016-03-29 · by peterb

Stardew Valley is a Windows game that is a labor of love. Designed and implemented by a single developer (with the disarming moniker “ConcernedApe”), the game bills itself as “an open-ended country-life RPG”. What does that mean?

In practice, it means many of the game mechanics of Harvest Moon, combined with story beats from Earthbound and friendship mechanics from Animal Crossing. The game is presented in 1990s-style pixel art graphics and chiptune-style music - it would look and sound right at home on a Super Nintendo system.

The premise is that you flee your soulless job when you inherit a small, abandoned farmstead in Stardew Valley, near the village of Pelican Town. You will redevelop the farm, become a member of the community, and learn the joys of a quiet rural lifestyle. (The irony that you will do this by playing a videogame is thick, but let’s set that aside and play the ball at it lays. We can also set aside the fact that working as a farmer is miserably hard and, often, financially unrewarding work.)

The game is relaxed and charming. On any given day you can maintain your farm (plant, water, or harvest crops, care for livestock, clear out overgrowth), go fishing, forage for wild berries and nuts, set up crab pots, explore the nearby mines (complete with monsters), donate relics and minerals to the town museum, or read a book in the library. Alternatively, you can spend some time getting to know the residents of Pelican Town, by talking with them or giving them gifts. As you become closer to them, you’ll experience cut scenes that let you learn more about them and their day to day lives.

Stardew Valley

There is very little pressure to engage in any particular activities on any specific timetable. The major clock is that of the seasons. The year in Stardew Valley is divided into spring, summer, fall, and winter, each lasting 28 days. Different crops grow in each season, and each crop takes a different amount of time to grow, but other than that constraint your time is your own. Several times per month there will be a festival of some sort, which you can choose to participate in, or not.

The game, in other words, is largely self-directed. There are certain constants - collect more things, make more money, construct more buildings - but within that framework you have a lot of flexibility to pursue what interests you on any particular day. And that feels pretty darn nice. The game does have quests of several types - in-game assignments given by various characters, and also a more mysterious collection meta-game associated with what I mentally call the “Mr. Saturn Meets Totoro” plot-line. But the pressure to get through these is nonexistent. You can ignore them for months (and I have).

There are about 30-some NPCs who you can get to know. Of these, 10 are single and can be romanced and married (the game lets a million flowers bloom here, and the player can marry any NPC regardless of gender.) Each marryable NPC’s background and story is different - although nearly all are white, which is disappointing - and I quickly found myself wanting to know more about all of them.

The only criticism I have of the game - and it’s a minor one - is that the game saves once per day, when your character goes to bed, and at no other time. This has led to the typical poorly-designed-save-system situation where I, the human want to stop playing, but my choices are limited to “finish the day” or “quit anyway and lose my progress”. A Stardew Valley day is not unbearably long, but this is still a fairly annoying wart on an otherwise extremely forgiving game.

While the game only runs natively on Windows, I was able to run it on a Mac by settin up a Wine container for it quite easily, following these instructions. At $15 on Steam, if you’re looking for something low pressure and play-when-you-want, I recommend it whole-heartedly.

Madness and the Minotaur

2016-04-21 · by peterb

Madness and the Minotaur

Many years ago I wrote a paean to an obscure text adventure called Madness and the Minotaur. It’s a strange game, for several reasons:

Sean Murphy has maintained a fairly comprehensive web page about the game, pointing to walkthroughs, maps, and the like. And more recently, Chris Cantrell of Computer Archeology disassembled the game and annotated the source code. This is more than a typical amount of effort for a mostly-forgotten adventure game.

Now, John Layman of frijid.net, in what can only be described as a sisyphean effort, has ported the game from 6809 assembler to x86 assembler. So today, without emulation, you can play the game on Linux, OS X, or Windows. You can get binaries, or source (in both 6809 and x86 assembler) here. Truly, we live in miraculous times.

All of that said - although the code is now open to all, it’s the unknown story of how this game came to be that mystifies me. There are, as near as I can tell, no author credits on it. The game is copyright Spectral Associates, a Tacoma company owned by Thomas L. Rosenberg. Did Rosenberg write the game himself? Did he subcontract it out to someone else? I can’t find any documentation on this, and my attempts to reach out to Rosenberg have not panned out. I guess this is an obscure topic, so I shouldn’t be too surprised that that history is lost. But I’d still love to know the story of how the product came together. If you have a piece of the mystery, drop me a line on Twitter.

Victory and Glory: Napoleon

2016-05-09 · by peterb

The great countries of Europe were pacified. From my throne in Paris, I sat atop the Empire by the middle of 1807.

Victory and Glory: Napoleon is a Windows game that is the first product of a successful kickstarter, and it’s a little gem of a game. Published by Slitherine/Matrix (and not to be confused with the also-just-released Wars of Napoleon), it’s a great take on the era and one that I found hard to stop thinking about, even after I had stepped away from my computer.

I went into the game knowing nothing of the Kickstarter or even the history of the game. After my very first battle, I said to myself “Hey, wait a minute. This feels like the same game engine as Hannibal: Rome and Carthage” (which Tea Leaves reviewed back in 2010). And indeed, that turns out to be the case. “Uh oh,” I said, remembering how difficult I found that game to be, and I immeditely restarted the game on an easier setting.

I needn’t have worried, though - Victory and Glory: Napoleon is finely-tuned, and less of a punishment than Hannibal. Whereas Hannibal was essentially a tutorial in how you can win every battle and still lose the war because of an untenable strategic position, Victory and Glory gives you the tools you need to win or lose based on your own merit. There are certainly challenges to overcome (that damn British navy!) but tactical success generally yields strategic rewards as well.

On the strategic level, the player is Napoleonic France against the other major powers - Britain, Austria, Prussia, Russia, and Spain. Most of the powers can be at war or neutral at various times during the game, but Britain is a permanent antagonist - they are constantly trying to undermine you, and to convince the other major powers to enter a coalition against you . The only way to remove them from the war is by capturing London, which is painfully difficult. There are also regions that can be added to the empire by playing event cards. In addition, two minor powers, Germany and Italy, may or may not exist depending on the state of the game and what cards you have played. The game ends either after a set number of years, or when all major powers are at peace, or when Napoleon dies.

On the strategic map, you muster and move about stacks of infantry, cavalry, and artillery, led by generals who provide a combat bonus (as you might imagine, Napoleon’s bonus is substantial). When at war with a power, you defeat them by occupying their capital and holding it for one turn. This forces the power to become a friendly neutral for a relatively short period of time, roughly a year. Special event cards are available which can make that status permanent. This is one way that the event cards shape your strategy - if you have a card that lets you permanently neuter Prussia, for example, warring on Prussia will be more attractive than warring on Spain

Strategic map

When enemy stacks occupy the same region on the map, you are taken to a battle mode to resolve the fight. If each side has 8 land units or more, it’s considered a “major battle” which is worth victory points - with fewer units, it’s a “minor battle”. Minor battles have one battle line (plus reserves). In major battles, the line is divided into left, center, and right sections, and routing or eliminating all units in any one section wins the battle. Major battles also can involve terrain and special tactics.

Battle map

As in Hannibal combat is somewhat opaque, but the three-line system introduces a bit more flexibility. The game rewards using tactics appropriate to the era. For example, units receive a defensive bonus for being next to other friendly units, and get a higher bonus for being next to a unit of a different type. Cavalry charges are effective against artillery, but if they encounter an infantry square may be cut to ribbons. Skirmishers can disrupt an enemy before making contact, and the weakest part of an enemy line is generally its flank. So whereas Hannibal felt mostly like a numbers game where the outcome was basically predictable, in Victory and Glory good tactics can turn an expected defeat into a surprising turnaround.

Naval battles are always considered minor, and as the French player you’ll have an uphill fight against the British. On the one hand, this is as it should be - there’s a reason we all know the phrase “Britannia rules the waves”. But the AI does make mistakes the real British didn’t, so in my game I basically just kept my ships in port until the computer player detached a too-small flotilla, pounced on it, and then went back to port. This was a pretty gamey tactic, and is one of the few flaws I found in the game. Repeating this a few times eventually led to Napoleon having tea and crumpets in Buckingham Palace.

Tea and crumpets

Play is advanced also through spending political points to influence the other powers, and by playing Event Cards in both the strategic and battle modes. The cards range from simple activities such as recruiting or upgrading a few troops, to causing a minor province of your choice to join the French Empire, to creating new minor powers such as Italy and Germany. On the battle map, the cards have a similarly wide array of effects, and deciding when to spend these and when to save them is a key part of success in the game. In fact, this is one of the ways that the game lets you adjust difficulty - on lower difficulties, you get more cards, more frequently, and on higher difficulties you get fewer.

The strategic, tactical, and card-based aspects of the game all combine into a convincing whole. If I hadn’t played Hannibal I would have thought that the engine was made specifically for this game. It feels right.

The presentation of the game is lovely, with era-appropriate art on the board and event cards, and classical music (mostly Beethoven - I recognized the Eroica and also the 7th Symphony) setting the mood.

The one (very minor) flaw in the game that I’d call out is how it deals with retreat, and unwinnable battles. On contact with the enemy, the defender is given a chance to retreat, and this attempt to retreat can fail. If your retreat fails, you then go to the battle map, and then fight a minimum of 2 rounds before you can retreat from battle again; this second retreat is always successful, and will trigger attrition from pursuit. Conceptually I like the idea that sometimes you can’t successfully retreat. This can lead to close engagements that you might win or lose. But, most of the times that I tried to retreat I faced overwhelming odds. When a battle is truly hopeless, it is poor design to force the player to slog through several minutes of the battle map to reach the inevitable result. The game does have “overrun” triggers for large enough disparities, but a better design (in my opinion) would be to always allow the defender to aretreat, but make the failure state “suffer casualties” rather than “forced to fight the battle”. It would reach the same result while not making the player spend brain power on a pointless battle.

Victory and Glory: Napoleon is available on Steam for $29.99, or on the web sites for Slitherine and Matrix Games. If you like counter-based wargames, I unreservedly recommend it.

Disclosure statement: Slitherine graciously provided Tea Leaves with a review copy of this game.

Stellaris

2016-06-05 · by peterb

The things we want are not always the same as the things that we need.

What we want, in this case, is Stellaris, a strategic space conquest game that is epic in scope. It is, without question, the galaxy-spanning, world-building, spaceship-fighting, technology tree-climbing, planet-developing, Space Octopus-negotiating, ore-mining, hyperspace-traveling game you have been waiting for. If you are a person who likes this sort of game - and by this point in the review, you already know if you are! - you should get it.

I’ve been avoiding calling Stellaris what it is because the name for this type of game is “4X”, which is, if we’re honest, a punishingly stupid name. I don’t want to go deep into the history of 4X games here, but fortunately I’ve already done so, in detail, back in 2007, with a complete series of articles talking about their history and some examples. So if you’re interested in that, rather than Stellaris proper, go read that now.

Space battle in progress

Stellaris is what happens when the makers of the grand strategy series Europa Universalis and Crusader Kings turn their analytical eyes towards the sky. In retrospect, it’s surprising they hadn’t done this earlier. The size of the arena of play is commensurate to their ambitions.

I will be honest, I was not optimistic about this: my love/hate relationship with the EU games is well-documented on Tea Leaves. To friends, I’ve often described my conundrum as “I like reading about other people’s playthroughs of EU more than I like actually playing it.” Stellaris, as expected, borrows much of the underlying user interface and game concepts from the earlier games - the way the game clock ticks, the real-time-but-pause-frequently cadence is the same, the way musket infantry are mustered super-futuristic spaceships are requisitioned and march slowly from province to province fly through hyperspace lanes are the same.

But you know what? It works! I expected the UI to hang on Stellaris like a too-big jacket, but instead it looks finely-tailored. Either Paradox did a bunch of tuning that operates on an almost subconscious level, or Stellaris is the game this UI has been waiting for. The UI works better in this game than it did in EU IV.

You start your game by choosing one of the pre-existing space-faring races, or by diving into the species creator. (Tangent: some day I will write an article about the troubling aspects of species or race in exploration games and how it sanitizes and encodes European colonial prejudices in the deepest levels of gameplay. But today is not that day, and to be fair the species-centric gameplay was embedded in 4X games long before Paradox came to the genre.)

I, of course, was compelled to create my own – well, honestly, re-create somebody else’s – species.

VUX

I might have gone a little overboard with it.

Shofixti

You begin the game proper, as you might expect, with one star system, an exploration ship (search for resources and drive story events), a construction ship (build stations to mine resources), and a small military fleet (shoot to kill things). An optional set of tutorials gradually introduces the (many, many) game systems to you via a series of missions. The early game is spent exploring your star system and your immediate neighbors and trying to jump-start production and technology development.

The number of systems in the game is staggering. In no particular order, we’ve got: exploring to find resources and “special events”, mining networks to support construction, energy networks to support maintenance of fleets and colonies, agriculture to support population growth and citizen happiness, citizen happiness as a driver for rebellion and/or productivity, three different research trees with associated resources, primitive pre-spacefaring civilizations that can be “uplifted” (there’s that tangent again…), diplomacy with other empires including alliances and vassals, a multi-tiered rock-paper-scissors way of building out your space armadas, combat of said armadas, ground combat including orbital bombardament, three completely different technologies with different attributes for moving from star system to star system, the door that opens on my story, that would surprise me, if it opens, it will be I, it will be the silence, where I am, I don’t know, I’ll never know, in the silence you don’t know, you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on.1

Planetary map

So if you like games with lots of complicated systems interacting in different ways, Stellaris is not just the game you want, it’s probably also the game you need. But I’m not actually a fan of this level of complexity - I think that richness is good and complexity is bad, and so for me, the number of systems in Stellaris is something I deal with, rather than revel in, to get to what I think is the actually good part.

The actually good part of the game is the event system. The actually good part of the game is that it lets us tell ourselves an interesting story.

As in Crusader Kings II, periodically strange events happen (sometimes randomly, more often as a result of one of your science ships investigating a stellar object.) You’ll have to make decision as a result of these events. Sometimes that will resolve the matter, but other times it will turn out that you’ve pulled the string that will begin to lead you to a strange and wonderful place. In moments like that, Stellaris truly shines.

And let me be clear that I’m not criticizing Paradox for making the game systems as complex as they are. If anything, I’m critcizing us, the players, who know what we want, but not what we need. The best 4X games, by which I mean precisely “Spaceward Ho!” and the original “Master of Orion,” and probably no others, were games that felt huge but were small. To take a single example, in those games you had a multiplicity of star systems, which had (at most!) a single planet. Each system presented an interesting set of decisions - do I colonize this planet, do I expect it to make a profit or just strip-mine it, should I abandon it? - but did not interrupt the larger strategic game with layers upon layers of micromanagement.

This is the alchemy of game design, when you can make a game that is simple enough for anyone to pick up, where the rules can be explained in 5 minutes, yet which can hold people’s attention for hours. But the trajectory of 4X games has been in the opposite direction: if big is good, reason gamers, bigger must be even better! And so we have Master of Orion 2, which grafted on Master of Magic' terrible city-building minigame, and Galactic Civilization with its plethora of tech tree decisions, most of which are pointless, to Stellaris. Which accepts all of those strategic layers, the near sight of the mere size of them, the moyles and moyles of them2 as a given.

The big picture

To its credit, Stellaris tries to make the most of this assumption, and tries to make its systems all meaningful. But the result of this is that you scale your empire, and the game does not scale with it. Paradox themselves recognized this, and introduced a system whose job it was was to manage all the other systems, wherein you designate a number of star systems as a “sector” which is then auto-governed. But it doesn’t work as well as you’d like, so at the end of the day you end up micromanaging things that aren’t interesting at scale, and spend time daydreaming about the creation of new game systems to manage the existing game systems (“It would be great if I could set a rally point so that the 40 corvettes I just built on different planets could all show up at the same place without me individually routing them”, “It would be great if I could set a strategic direction for technology research instead of discovering that my scientists have been doing nothing but playing foosball for 6 months because I missed a notification.” “It would be great if I could have my construction ships auto-build stations that improve certain resources instead of me individually looking at the icons under each star system on my 100-system map while holding down the ‘alt’ key.”

I know, I know: I’m a complainer. And if it sounds like I’m saying the game isn’t good, I’m not making myself clear: it’s great. I’ve spent 30+ hours in-universe in the game and always want to know what happens next. And given Paradox’s stellar3 track record with Crusader Kings II, I have no doubt that there will be quality of life additions on a regular basis that address some of these issues. I think what I am saying is: this is a great game, but it is a gamer’s game. The very elements that make it so epic in scope are the same elements that will prevent it from being, in years to come, considered a classic. They are the same elements that explain why even non-gamers have heard of Civilization, but they have not heard of Europa Universalis.

Stellaris ($39.99 on Steam) is the modern 4X game that we want. It’s the game that I want. But I think it is probably not the modern 4X game we need. That game is still out there, yearning to be written. So you should play Stellaris; it’s a great game, and will continue to become a greater one.

But keep watching the stars.

Disclosure statement: Paradox Games graciously provided Tea Leaves with a review copy of Stellaris.

1 Apologies to Samuel Beckett.

2 Apologies to James Joyce.

3 No pun intended.

Brief Thoughts on No Man's Sky

2016-08-20 · by peterb

There’s been some Gamer Drama about No Man’s Sky lately. This game came out last week, and I picked it up and have been playing it a bit, and I think it’s an interesting game. Let’s talk about it for a while.

First, let’s dispense with the drama, which is the typical entitled gamer whinging. There are two main lines of complaint: “The game is not worth $60 and I’m sad that I paid that” and “The publishers lied about what features would be in the game.” Both of these complaints are stupid. There is no world in which everyone did not have an opportunity to know what they were buying, unless they pre-ordered the game, in which case it was their own terrible decision to pre-order a game that led to their sadness. The fact that the game doesn’t precisely match every preview from 2013 is neither surprising nor upsetting. The large strokes to me feel the same, and the differences feel exactly like the sort of decisions that have to be made to ship software.

But, even if the Internet Controversies about the game are not worth discussing, we can still talk about whether the game is good. My answer is: it’s ok, with reservations.

There are striking similarities between No Man’s Sky and Minecraft. But by this I mean it’s similar to Minecraft when Minecraft was first released and there wasn’t that much to do in the game. I think a lot of the rage about the game, in fact, reduces to “Minecraft didn’t cost $60”.

The argument in favor of No Man’s Sky’s is “it is a meditative exploration experience full of moments of childlike wonder and beauty”. On the macro scale, the game does this wonderfully - every planet you visit will be slightly different, from lifeless rocks to verdant paradises. The argument against No Man’s Sky is “Once you’re on a planet, there’s nothing to do while exploring that actually matters.”

There is merit in both of these points of view. When you’re on a given planet, there is very little payoff to “exploring.” By payoff, I don’t mean “collecting in-game resources”, but a more philosophical point: exploring should make you feel like you’ve found something new. If on a given planet you find Resource A on a mountain, then it’s very likely that Resource A will be on every mountain. This means that the rigging of the stage is really obvious in a way it’s not in Minecraft. Minecraft has multiple biomes per planet and more importantly little – not easter eggs, but important-ish things that are rare: villages, hidden temples, dungeon spawners with treasure chests, and so on. These locations actually have very little game-mechanical purpose, but psychologically you think “Oh wow, through my sheer effort I have discovered something that was not obvious.”

I do not believe No Man’s Sky contains anything (yet) that is not, effectively, obvious; perhaps after another 20 hours of the game I’ll feel differently. If I wanted to describe this negativey, I’d say: the exploration on the ground has no (or very low) stakes. Unless you need some particular resource, there’s no particular reason to go over the next hill after the first few hours of the game, because you know what you will see: more of the same. All of that being said, Minecraft did not add biomes, temples, dungeons, etc until several releases in. So maybe this all comes in patches, later - regardless, I think the space exploration itself is enough to carry the game, but you have to set your expectations accordingly.

Another way in which the mechanics of the game differ from other open-world or survival games: Minecraft and Terraria, and Dwarf Fortress, and Rimworld are about claiming space. There are times when you explore and forget a place, but very often what you’re actually doing is building and transforming the landscape. In NMS the very premise of the game means that even if you say to yourself “Hmm I should remember this place so I can come back again,” you never, ever, under any circumstances, will.

This is not to say they should have re-made Minecraft in space, but again: its a question of stakes. In No Man’s Sky the places I’ve been are not important enough to preserve except in vaguest memory, and I can’t make them important – in the sense of “worth returning to” – via in-game mechanics. So, in this admittedly limited sense, the places aren’t special, in a game that is supposed to be all about special places. The consequence of having an open world with no borders is that none of that world is yours.

You don’t need to build to make a place special. Switching comparisons, think about Firelink Shrine in Dark Souls. That place is special. It’s special because it’s a place you come back to, and because it’s a place where most of the rules of the game are suspended in obvious ways, and some not so obvious. In No Man’s Sky I find that I am categorizing the various places because of what they offer me, rather than because of what they are.

While I realize I’ve spent six paragraphs critiquing the game for what it isn’t, I should be clear: I like the game. I think the type of exploration the game has is the result of legitimate design decisions, and those design decisions have trade-offs, and thinking about them is worthwhile. I like No Man’s Sky in the same way I like Euro Truck Simulator 2 - it puts me in a meditative state with low stakes where I can fly around space and see some randomly generated creatures and talk to some aliens and look at strange monoliths (the meta-game of ‘collect new alien words’ is actually the most enjoyable part of No Man’s Sky for me). If that sounds good to you, No Man’s Sky may be your cup of tea. If it’s not, you shouldn’t buy it.

What you shouldn’t do is complain on the Internet that you were lied to because the game isn’t Minecraft in Space. The game is what it is. It’s No Man’s Sky.

Tea Leaves Endorses Hillary Clinton for President

2016-11-07 · by peterb

Not because I believe I am some sort of pundit. Not because I believe that my political judgment is infallible. But simply because I believe, as a matter of principle, that when fascism raises its head in your country it’s important to stand up and be counted:

Tea Leaves endorses Hillary Rodham Clinton for President of the United States.

America is more than a place. It’s an idea. An idea realized, often imperfectly, in a country that draws in people from around the world. People seeking a better life. People seeking a future.

Donald J. Trump represents that part of America that wants to close the door on the future, to close the door on people like my immigrant great-grandparents, to close the door on opportunity. Hillary Clinton is the candidate who is holding that door open.

I’m with her.

Yakuza 0 - A Review

2017-01-30 · by mpc

Cash

It’s late afternoon in Sotenbori 1988 and Goro Majima, nightclub manager, exiled Yakuza, and hyperintelligent thug is drafting Japanese tax policy. Earlier in the substory, he rescued a nameless bureaucrat from angry Osaka businessmen through weaponized breakdancing and his GOD MODE baseball bat. The grateful functionary plied him with booze and asked for his opinion as a small businessman on Japan’s soon to be proposed national sales tax. They talk, and true to his criminal roots, Goro outlines a plan to gradually squeeze the populace with a rate of 8% or higher, terrifying the guy with his plan to make the populace accept it by gradually jacking up the rate over decades.

The substory ends, and I turn from the PS4 to check out [Japan’s sales tax policy] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxation_in_Japan#Consumption_tax) Sure enough, the general progression outlined in the article matches Goro’s plan. I return to the game and continue my process training nightclub hostesses to defeat the Five Stars. I think if I defeat the owner of club Venus, I may unlock all the breakdancing moves.

Meanwhile, KAZUMA KIRYU, angry war god and world’s worst Yakuza is investigating a murder to clear his name among the Tojo Clan. The murder involves 32 square feet of crappy back alley land in Kamurocho, a postage stamp of territory that every one in Japan is ready to steal, kill, torture, maim and mutilate for. KAZUMA KIRYU takes a break from his investigations (implemented ) and defeats the evil Gambling King of Kamurocho. Claiming the last piece of the Gambling King’s land, he makes friends with the nice young lady by bowling to win a turkey. She gives him a chicken; KIRYU doesn’t have the heart to kill the bird, so he sets it to managing his real estate empire.

The substory ends, and I wonder who Emiri, the nice young bowling alley attendant is, in real life. The Yakuza series digitizes Japanese tv and film actors for major roles, and the men are these essays in cragginess – complex facial moonscapes that stand out in a sea of Gackts (I’m looking at you, Final Fantasy XV). Except when a middle aged Japanese actor rips off his shirt to reveal abs that could break concrete, the versimilitude is amazing. Plus, the game has a little minigame collecting cards of the various girls, and they’re obviously photos. So I look up Emiri, and find out that she’s an adult actress, as are about twenty other women in the game. Given that Emiri, who says she grew up on a poultry farm, confused the chicken with a turkey, I feel something has been explained.

Welcome to Yakuza 0. Everything above is true.

What’s a Yakuza 0?

There are three ways to look at Yakuza 0: as someone new to the franchise, as a long term Yakuza fan, and as someone interested in a story that speaks to a very particular period in Japanese history and which Americans only really know from the other side.

For the western player, the Yakuza series are the love children of Shenmue, Japanese RPG’s and Grand Theft Auto. They are crime dramas with insanely complex storylines, manly tears, homelessness, betrayal, immigration and beating people unconscious with bicycles. Instead of a sixteen year old boy wandering the world, the Yakuza games are tied to a place and a person. The place is Kamurocho, the Liberty City to Kabukicho’s New York, the man is KAZUMA KIRYU, so manly that lowercase letters do not do him justice.

Yakuza 0 is a story of a young KAZUMA KIRYU. However, KAZUMA is blunt, honest, forthright, guileless, capable of incredible violence, and basically indestructible. He is a terrible Yakuza, and a bit of a flat character, so flat that the later Yakuza games have deprecated him in favor of others. Yakuza 0 does this as well, it’s the story of KAZUMA and his shadow. A broken man waiting for his best friend to kill him, an exiled ex-Yakuza forced to grovel to drunken bankers and eat their insults with a smile. A controlled, frustrated and broken man named Goro Majima. Yakuza 0 is about both men finding out who they are, and in the process of doing so, beating everyone unconscious with Ming vases.

KAZUMA KIRYU

Like the GTA games, Yakuza is a central fighting mechanic with a collection of minigames strung around it. However, where western open world games are about exploring a map, the Yakuza games are about exploring a story. The world is small; the plot large. In a Yakuza game, you walk everywhere or take a cab; Sotenbori (the fictionalized version of Osaka’s Dotenbori) and Kamurocho are segments of their city’s red-light districts, maybe 5 blocks on a side. The plot, however, is humongous – a maze of interconnected stories and substories, half of them completely optional. Every two chapters, you switch between Majima and KIRYU, advancing their individual stories to the climax. Like a Bollywood film, there’s something for everyone in its ludicrous 50+ hour playtime: Yakuza will go from heartbreaking to ludicrous so fast your emotions will whiplash. And like any good Bollywood film, there is dancing.

The plot advances through its central brawling mechanic. Majima and KIRYU both possess multiple stances, each containing dozens of moves – the stances break into a fast style, a crowd clearing strength style, and a combination of the two. The real beauty of the system, however, is the improvised weapons. Yakuza doesn’t really have much truck with guns, and while you can buy swords, baseball bats and saltshakers, the real appeal is exploiting the contextual events by picking up weapons from around your environment. At some point, you will knock people out using bicycles, scooters, milk crates, and Le Corbusier chairs. You will use context to smash people into walls, in car doors, into flatbeds or on trucks. Boss fights have QTE’s specifically to pull off ludicrously stylish combos, emphasizing the grit and crunch of the combat.

You gain combat moves using an RPG style, except Yakuza 0 takes place during the eighties and adds a twist. When you punch anyone, they drop money, and you gain experience using that money. This is the bubble, however, and beating up people will only gain you millions of yen. To get the billions needed to fully kit out your characters, you need to get a job. Both KIRYU and Majima have side jobs, Kiryu manages real estate, Goro manages a hostess club.

These minigames extend into complicated sidestories all on themselves. To fully kit out your characters, you have to meet hidden masters who teach you secret moves, train hostesses, make friends with a chicken, recruit Michael Jackson, and defeat the evil nightclub managers and real estate tycoons who rule their respective roosts.

So, in the end, why play Yakuza 0? First, because it’s an experience you don’t find in many other games – it’s the crime stories of a different culture, it’s the experience of being someone alien. Second, because it’s visceral combat, a brawler where every fight is calibrated to create an improvisational Kung Fu film. Third, because its an operatic crime drama, it’s about people willing to do anything, up to a helicopter assault, to own 32 square feet of land.

Who Is Goro Majima

Goro Majima

For the returning Yakuza player, Yakuza 0 contains much that’s familiar. The clunky system mechanics are the same – the weird double button saving, the odd purchasing interface. All the minigames are there – mahjong, shogi, and so forth. The combat is still wonderfully visceral, and the boss fights are, by far, the best orchestrated of any of the Yakuza games. The QTE’s in the climactic battles lend a genuine awesomeness to the fight, and that meaty-guys-punching-each-other-on-a-high-rise feel is there in spades.

Of course, what we really play Yakuza for is the story, and for the returning player, there’s two parts to that. First, Yakuza 0 is the story of how Goro Majima came to be. Second, Yakuza 0 is about the bubble, and how the bubble was seen in Japan.

Now, as with any Yakuza game, KIRYU is the central character, present even in his absence, but KIRYU Is basically KIRYU regardless of what happens. He is guileless, honest, forthright, indescribably violent, and really unsuited for this whole Yakuza thing – his first real action in the game is to quit the Dojima family to clear his name. As in the other later Yakuza games, KIRYU’s story is more about the people around him and, in particular, the contrasts we see in later games. Nishiki is almost Kiryu’s deuteragonist, and there’s no way to play the game without thinking about the flaming bag o’dickery he’ll be in Yakuza 1. Kashiwagi, Sera and other Yakuza standbys also appear, and you can watch them take their parts in future games. Sohei Dojima is more than an afterthought in Yakuza 0, although mostly you ask yourself why the hell KIRYU would work for the punch permed twerp. I don’t care how awesome Shintaro Kazama is.

Special shout out to the substory involving young Daigo Dojima, dressed like a Japanese Richie Rich and looking like he wants to murder everyone on earth.

Really, Yakuza 0 is about Goro Majima. Kiryu is presented with a mystery – who owns this empty lot in Kamurocho that everyone will kill for? Goro is presented to the player as a mystery – who is this tuxedoed, passive, intelligent man, and how does he become the snake-suited asskicker we all know and love? The answer, as with most good stories, is pain – Goro Majima’s story is one where every damn he has to give is systematically taken out in front of him, ripped up and set on fire. At the end you see Goro Majima, as he silently walks away from a better life and commits himself to the Mad Dog of Shimano. I dare you to not cry manly tears over the watch.

Cash Cash Money

Cash

Yakuza 0 is a Japanese game for a Japanese audience, and in this case it’s tied to a very specific and now almost mythical Japanese era. Yakuza 0 is in 1988, it’s during the bubble, and the entire game is thematically built around this era. In this way, Yakuza 0 is a bit like Dead Souls, in that it takes the core Yakuza mechanics and ties them into an overarching central theme. However, where Dead Souls was clumsily married to the gunplay of the zombie genre, Yakuza 0 takes the cash mechanic and runs with it. It’s not like, say, Yakuza 4 where Shun kept his 100 billion yen in a safe and you still had to fight for table scraps. The money you get is used for experience and purchases, and the prices are comparable to other yakuza games, so, paradoxically, money just doesn’t matter as much. You want 40 Drinkers of Ryukyu? Go nuts!

The other way this plays out is in the retro elements of the series. KIRYU doesn’t have a cellphone, he has a beeper, and has to interpret beeper codes. Zack Morris cellphones occasionally pop up. What really got me, though, were the references to late 80’s Japanese pop culture that as the middle aged anime nerd when we consumed anything from Japan, I found myself recognizing. Obatarian, Juzo Itami movies (particularly A Taxing Woman), Yanki music, all sorts of little elements like that. Playing Yakuza 0 is very much about experiencing how another culture thinks about its own past, and that was an experience in itself.

Seriously, Guys

So, this isn’t a game for kids, and it’s a Japanese game. It’s also a niche game. The Yakuza publishers know their audience is niche in the US, and so they provide the whole experience, some of which may offend.

ugh

The Yakuza games are known for their hostess clubs, and adult actress thing, but Yakuza 0 takes it to a new level of tastelessness. As I alluded to above, there’s a bit of a collect-em-all game involving collecting “phone cards” for various Japanese adult actresses, and they cameo throughout the game. My guess is that with the exception of Reina (the New Serena’s Mama) and Makoto (the female lead), every other female character is a digitized adult actress. The phone card business involves collecting racy photos, and there’s an “adult shop” where you can watch adult videos (and implicitly wank to). The videos, which appear to mostly involve the actresses frolicking in bathtubs wearing relatively modest swimsuits and, for some reason, playing with balloons, aren’t so much titillating as confusing. Even the achievement for watching a video can’t take the experience seriously.

Similarly, there’s an underground catfighting arena where you bet on women in ludicrous fetish outfits. When I say “ludicrous”, I’m thinking 3D Mortal Kombat era battle scanties. Mercifully, these sections are optional if they’re not your thing. I found them tacky.

These elements are jarring because of the dark elements of the core story. Makoto, the female lead, is trying to regain her own agency after a very dark backstory of trafficking and abuse. Even her rescuer is unwilling to give her much control over her own life (and to the game’s credit, it’s apparent that he is overprotective). So, the game’s mood whiplash is pretty bad there.

can I quit

In conclusion, Yakuza 0 is an excellent game for those who want to experience something unique. It’s very much about a particular time and place in Japan, but it’s accessible to Western audiences. The central brawling element is thrilling and visceral, and the storyline is compelling. The game has flaws – the character building games can get a bit tedious, Kiryu’s story is less interesting than Majima’s, and the “ho ho, gurlz” element will cause some eyerolling in comparison to the pitch-black elements of the main plotline. That said, it’s worth playing, and I enjoyed every minute of it.

Disclosure Statement: Sega of America graciously provided Tea Leaves with a review copy of Yakuza 0.

Mahjong For People Who Don't Want To Think About It Too Much

2017-02-01 · by peterb

A couple of people have asked me about the Mahjong minigame in Yakuza. “What is this? What is happening? Will it ever end? I AM CONFUSED,” they say. Do not worry, for I am here for you. A lot of people have only ever discovered the western “solitaire” variant of Mahjong. Real Mahjong is a 4-player gambling game similar to Gin Rummy. I’m going to explain it to you so that you, too, can be a marginally terrible player like me.

Mahjong in Yakuza

So the thing about Mahjong in Yakuza is that the Yakuza games have the absolute best computer mahjonng implementation (footnote 1) that you will ever play. I have played every one of these games that I can find. With the notable exception of Hong Kong Mahjong for Windows, they are mostly terrible. There are some that are OK. But the Mahjjong version in Yakuza is freaking awesome. The life-changing aspect of Yakuza 0, as compared to previous editions, is that the game gives you SO MUCH MONEY that you can play at will, and in fact if you do the “ranked matches” you just pay 50,000 yen, once, and then can play as much as you want. I spent previous games save-scumming on losses because early in the game money was hard to come by. Now that’s not an issue. Yay!

Anyway. Back to Mahhjong. Torn down to its simplest components:

  1. The object of the game is to win.
  2. You win by winning hands (or rounds) which score points. More points means more money.
  3. THIS IS COMPLICATED AND YOU CAN MOSTLY IGNORE IT =-=-=-=> A game lasts for 16 or more rounds - minimally, you have 4 East rounds, 4 South rounds, 4 West rounds, and 4 North rounds (the “prevailing wind”), and then in each group of 4 rounds each player gets a turn at each wind. The “or more” is because if the hand is drawn OR the player sitting at ‘east’ wins, the winds are the same as in the previous round. <=-=-=-= THAT WAS COMPLICATED AND YOU CAN MOSTLY IGNORE IT. Just note what winds are visible in the center of the board when deciding whether to keep or discard a wind.
  4. You win a round by “going out”. This is called “Maahjong”
  5. You go out by constructing a winning hand that meets the minimum point requirement.
  6. There are a ton of “special case” winning hands and you should ignore them for now.
  7. The general description of a winning hand is “4 sets or runs of 3 tiles, and one pair.” A set is 3 tiles of the same suit and rank. A run is 3 consecutive numbers in the same suit. Some tiles are special and don’t have rank. They are the dragons (red, green, and white) and the winds. In Hong Kong MJ, there are also flowers, but Japanese mmahjong doesn’t use them.
  8. A set of 3 is called “pon” (in Hong Kong mahjong, “pong”). A set of 4 is called “kan” (in Chinese, “kong”). A run is “chi” (in Chinese, “chow”). These are the things you call when you want to steal a player’s discard to form such a set.
  9. Each player draws a tile, and discards a tile. Play proceeds counter-clockwise.
  10. You can call “chi” to form a run from the discard of the player to your immediate left.
  11. You can call “pon” or “kan” to form a set from the discard of any player.
  12. You can call “ron” to win the hand from the discard of any player.
  13. The priority of calls is ron -> pon/kan -> chi. If you call chi, and someone else calls pon, they get the tile.
  14. If you draw the winning tile yourself, you call “tsumo”.
  15. Remember rule 7? It turns you can can’t actually win if you don’t have a certain number of points. There are a loooooot of different ways to score points, but if you build a hand of MIXED runs and sets, you can find yourself with something that “looks” like mahjong but isn’t. I think the requirement in Yakuza Mahjonngg is 1 point.

=> SIMPLEST WAYS TO GUARANTEE YOU HAVE POINTS <=

a. Any set of any dragon is 1 point.

b. Any set of EITHER a prevailing wind or the seat wind is 1 point.

c. All runs (not counting your extra pair) is a point.

d. All sets (not counting your extra pair) is (i think) 2 points

e. A hidden kan is a point.

f. Having called “riichi” is a point.

So far most of what I’ve described applies to most Maahhjaaanng variants, whether it be the Japanese, Hong Kong, or Jewish Grandma types - there are differences in scoring and terminology but they are fundamentally the same game. The real rule that distinguishes Japanese mahjonnng is “riichi”, to the point where it’s usually referred to as “Riichi Mahjong”.

“Riichi” is a bet that you can only make if you have not exposed any sets or runs <=-= THAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT RULE IN THE GAME. The corrolary of this rule is “if you have called chi, pon, or kan, you cannot declare riichi.” You get the menu for declaring riichi by hitting the square button after your draw. If you can’t declare legally, the menu won’t appear.

You can only call riichi if you are one tile away from going out. Once you call riichi, you’re on autopilot and the game will play for you. You win if a tile you’re waiting for comes up.

What if I Want an Accurate Explanation Instead Of Yours?

Go visit the Sloperama Mahjong Page which is incredibly detailed but not as jauntily brief as mine.

Also, watch the grueling anime Akagi. It’s available on Crunchyroll

One More Thing

ADDENDUM: the hardest thing about playing Mmaahhjjoonngg in Yakuza is that the character tiles don’t have Arabic numbers of them. So congratulations, you get to learn the Chinese written number system! LET ME INFECT YOU WITH MY CRAZY PERSONAL MNEMONICS

  1. Horizontal line
  2. 2 horizontal lines
  3. 3 horizontal lines
  4. looks like a grimacing mouth
  5. A kneeling dude
  6. A standing figure with his or her arms and legs splayed
  7. An upside-down 7
  8. A jaunty little hat
  9. The squarish-bendy looking one that looks kinda like a table and isn’t any of the other ones.

Numbers

In Conclusion

Mahjong is tons of fun, and I hope this short yet opinionated and probably terribly inaccurate guide helps you get going.

Enjoy!

Footnote 1: If I’m honest, I suspect that the Yakuza Mahjong game cheats, in favor of the player, a little bit. I’m willing to overlook this.

Madness and the Minotaur - A Mystery Solved

2017-02-06 · by peterb

One of the true pleasures of this weblog is to see gaming mysteries, occasionally, solved. Today, I’m happy to announce one of the oldest mysteries on this site – in this space dating back to 2004 – has been resolved. This is the answer to the question “Who, exactly, wrote the classic TRS-80 game Madness and the Minotaur?”

The game, as I’ve detailed elsewhere, has mystified and fascinated many of us old gamers. There’s no author credit on the game – it’s just credited to the company, “Spectral Associates”, who typically did give author credits. This matters (to me, at least) because Madness was such an innovative text adventure, particularly in its use of incorporating straightforward RPG elements, randomized item placement and even semi-randomized solutions to puzzles, which I’m reasonably sure was an innovation in 1981.

I speculated in an earlier post that perhaps the author was one of Spectral’s founders, Thomas Rosenbaum (whom I incorrectly referred to as “Rosenberg” in that article, mea culpa). Today I’m pleased to announce that that is indeed the case.

This information comes to me from one of Spectral’s early associates, John Gabbard. John writes:

Madness and the Minotaur was written by the founder of Spectral Associates, Tom Rosenbaum. It was one of the very first products for Spectral. I think at the time they also had the game of life, a compiler and a debugger. The compiler and debugger were written by Tom’s brother Roger and were used in-house, but offered as products as well. Roger was very excited about the Color computer, which got Tom interested as well and Madness and the Minotaur was his first project. Tom loved to play adventure games but was disappointed in the computer adventure games that were out there because they had no re-play ability. Once you solved them, playing again was exactly the same. Tom also liked board games like Civilization, and decided that a computer game with the randomness and unpredictability of games like this would be something he would enjoy playing over and over.

I met Tom as Spectral Associates was just forming, right around 1981. I had just re-enlisted in the army and used part of my bonus to purchase a color computer. I ran across Tom while in the local Radio Shack Computer center looking for games. We started talking and Tom saw how excited I was about the Coco and offered to teach me how to write games in assembly language. The first program I wrote for Spectral was Keys of the Wizard. I use the term “wrote” very loosely, because the underlying code was from Madness and the Minotaur and most of the “writing” I did was in the form of map changes, dictionary changes and room descriptions changes. There were a few code changes and additions that changed the way battling creatures worked, and that gave a few of the creatures the ability to “catch your scent” and follow you, but it was mostly Madness code.

The most immediate outcome of reading this email is the thought: Gosh, now I have to find Keys of the Wizard and play that too.

Thanks to John for resolving this long standing mystery.

West of Loathing

2017-08-10 · by peterb

This review may have some very minor spoilers for the game West of Loathing.

It was sometime in the late 1990’s that my friend Zarf introduced me to Kingdom of Loathing, a humorous stick-figure MMORPG that you could play in a web browser. Possessed of both a ridiculous amount of whimsy (classes in the game included Pastamancer, Sauceror, Disco Bandit, and Accordion Thieves, among others) it also had a surprisingly deep number of game systems. I spent a few months exploring the Kingdom, and had a few good laughs along the way, but eventually wandered away once I felt that I had gotten the joke.

West of Loathing is a sequel of sorts that takes the core ideas of Kingdom of Loathing, removes the time-based action limitations, and reframes the mechanics inside a purely single-player game. This seemingly small change in point of view makes the experience stronger, and richer.

Other changes make the game richer as well. Most obviously, rather than seeing static images of crudely-drawn stick figures, now you can see very smoothly animated stick figures doing silly walks around your screen in 4k resolutions. And I’m not being snarky: the combination of simple line art, beautifully animated does something wonderful and strange to your brain while you play.

The the West of Loathing world is similar to the American West from the mid-1800s, with some notable differences. The most obvious is the great tragic event of the timeline, known as When The Cows Came Home. Cows in West of Loathing may be one of your most dangerous enemies, and come in a variety of flavors including stone cows, fire cows, skeleton cows. I haven’t yet encountered a cow made entirely of bees, but frankly if and when I do it will not surprise me.

Upon starting, the game asks you to choose from three classes - Cow Puncher, a fighter-type who uses the Muscle stat to clobber folks, the Bean Slinger, a wizard-type who uses Mysticism to cast spells, or the Snake Oiler, a gunslinger based on Moxie, vaguely analogous to dexterity.

Character class is only part of the story. The first time through the game, you spend some time in a tutorial area where, in addition to gaining some experience and learning the combat system, you also meet a number of companions, NPCs who have unique skills that join your party and bring with them various advantages or penalties. For my first playthrough, cow puncher Sergio Leone brought the local hard-drinking doctor with him. This gave him a big advantage against skeletons, who Doc could dissect quickly, but also closed off the possibility of becoming an ominously powerful Nex-Mex necromancer who can summon undead minions. (I think. Maybe I could do it anyway, but I’m sort of scared of Doc. She’s tough.)

The game proper plays out a bit like the meeting of a LucasArts adventure game and an mid-era Final Fantasy game. You’ll mosey around sleepy western towns, pick up quests, and go looking for key items. In the course of your adventures, you’ll periodially find yourself in combat with enemies which are resolved through a turn-based fighting system where each combatant takes a turn to perform an action. You’ll start the game with only a few combat options (e.g., punching and shooting) but as the game progresses you’ll learn skills that expand your choices considerably. Completing quests and winning combats nets you XP and meat; XP is used to buy skill points, and meat is used to buy items.

In fact, “Expand your choies considerably” could be the unofficial motto of the game. The amount of content, for a game of this type, is staggering. The map of West of Loathing is large and empty at the start of the game, but by the mid-game you will have an embarassment of locations available to you, and an inventory full of an overwhelming number of weapons, clothing, items, food, potions, strange alien devices, and of course, booze.

The true reason to play, however, is not the game mechanics, but the writing. This is tricky to talk about because, obviously, I don’t want to ruin the fun of discovering the game for yourselves. The writing is consistently funny, consistently fast-moving, and has the same quirky sense of humor that suffused the earlier game. There might be someone, somewhere, who won’t be amused by this game, but I hope I never meet that person.

West of Loathing

As for the rest, I will leave you to discover it for yourself. West of Loathing was definitely worth my time, and I believe it is worth yours as well.

West of Loathing is available on Steam for Mac, Windows, and Linux, for $10.99. If they don’t eventually release an iPad version, I will eat my proverbial 10-gallon hat.

Yakuza Kiwami

2017-08-31 · by peterb

Sega has had an epiphany.

They have realized that what people want out of their Yakuza games is “more”. More fights, more Kamurocho, more mini-games, more deadpan naivete from their trademark Mobster With A Heart Of Gold, Kazuma Kiryu. And also more Yakuza games, period.

Explaining the Yakuza games is difficult. To borrow a phrase from the late Douglas Adams, the Yakuza games are almost, but not quite, entirely unlike Grand Theft Auto. Our own mpc goes into some detail on the games in the Tea Leaves review of Yakuza 0, which I encourage you to read; his knowledge of the games, and the world in which they exist, far outstrips my own. Though I’ve spent about 4 games wandering through Manly Gangster Japan, I have still only scratched the surface.

To compare Yakuza to Grand Theft Auto is simultaneously to be perfectly reasonable, and also to totally miss the point. Like GTA, you traverse through a videogame version of a busy city, committing crimes. Like GTA, there is fighting, and killing, and big money heists. There are dating minigames. There is drinking. There are distracting, optional side games (“Cousin! Let’s go bowling.") Aren’t these games just the same beast in different skins?

Match girl No. There is a central different between the games, and that is that Yakuza has a heart, and the GTA games do not.

(There are other differences as well, such as that Yakuza is entirely on-foot, and doesn’t involve driving, and that the combat in Yakuza is a creditable fighting game in the tradition of Sega’s earlier game Virtua Fighter, while the combat in GTA is a pile of garbage, but let’s set those aside for now.)

GTA is, at its heart, a mayhem simulator. Setting aside the plot, GTA really wants you to murder bystanders, to come up with creative ways to crash cars and, eventually, be shot to death by the cops. We know this because of the loving detail put in to those game systems. Yakuza, contrariwise, wants you to make a mess, but only to make a mess inside its sandbox. You generally can’t target random civilians, and even when you’re fighting mobsters the game will go out of its way to establish for you that you are punching people who were really asking for it.

Yakuza Kiwami is an amped up re-telling of the first Yakuza game, with some notable changes. Probably foremost among these - apart from the expected graphical upgrade - is the Majima Everywhere system. Long-time Yakuza antagonist (and, in Yakuza 0, player character) Goro Majima lurks around every corner in Kamurocho, wanting to fight the player again and again. Each time you defeat Majima, you unlock skills in the “Dragon” combat tree, which will, as is right and proper, result in you being ludicrously overpowered by the end of the game.

Kamurocho is the in-game representation of Tokyo’s Kabukicho district. A night-life area full of restaurants, drinking establishments, hostess clubs, strip shows, pawn shops, and gambling parlors, Kamurocho is similar enough to its analogue that you can pretty much use the game as a map to navigate in real life. As you might expect from the setting, the game has gender issues from beginning to end, alternatively treating women as damsels to be rescued or resources to be financially or sexually exploited. There’s really no way to soft-sell this, and being able or willing to put up with it as part of the genre is more or less a price of admission to the game.

Probably the most painful expression of this is the game-within-a-game “MesuKing: Battling Bug Beauties”. Let’s see if I can get this into one sentence. Half-naked female fairies, who are also insects, are controlled by players using rock-paper-scissors to determine which wrestling moves they will use against each other (if you’ve played Yakuza 0, this is the “Japan Catfight Club”, with nearly the same assets and wrestlers, to which has been added a Pokemon card mechanic.) More disturbingly, this is presented in a framing story wherein most of the players of the game are pre-teens. It’s part of the mystery of Yakuza that I am at a complete loss as to whether this is an intentional decision to make the player feel creeped out, or just a tone-deaf decision. You can never actually tell.

I will give a shout out to the game for adding a gay hostess in one of the hostess bars, and more importantly doing it in a matter of fact, straightforward way. Kiryu doesn’t react in any offensive or immature way to this; it’s just presented as yet another facet of that NPC’s character. This is a step in the right direction. Then, taking three steps back, in rapid succession I encountered Goro Majima in a dress (which I will admit was hilarious), followed by a “You encounter a trans person, who is evil” sidequest. So be forewarned: the sexual politics of the game might bother you; make your decision about joining in accordingly.

How one sidequest resolves Speaking of sidequests, this is an area where the game lives up to its “Kiwami” billing. Traditionally, Yakuza games thread many sidequests throughout the game world. in Kiwami, they are so thick on the ground that you can ignore the plot for hours at a time. Before you know it, the map will be covered with the sidequest markers. They range from one-off encounters that are resolved within a conversation to longer threads connected to minigames.

Nearly all the minigames from Yakuza 0 return including among others bowling, batting cages, shogi, karaoke, various dice games, and mahjong. This reviewer was glad to see the “pay a one-time fee, gain access to unlimited mahjong touraments” feature is still here. The Yakuza mahjong minigame is one of the best versions of riichi mahjong I’ve found (at least, for those of us who don’t read Japanese). Being able to play as much as I want without worrying about money is a nice perk.

Kiryu gains skills through the traditional Yakuza mechanic of spending experience points. The “people you fight are piñatas made of money” aspect of the game that was present in Zero has been removed. I miss it; it added to the silliness in a good way. Although Kiwami has its moments of levity, on the whole it is a more serious take on the game’s world.

This seriousness does make some sense. Kiwami is more or less retelling the story of the first Yakuza game, wherein Kazuma Kiryu becomes, through coincidence (or was it fate?) the custodian of the orphaned Haruka, who may or may not be the key to finding 10 billion yen that has gone missing from the crime syndicate’s bank accounts. The game begins with a prologue wherein Kiryu takes the rap for a hit he didn’t commit. When he is released on parole, 10 years later, he comes back to a Kamurocho that is even seedier and more cynical than the one he left.

So where does that leave us? It leaves us in a world that, if you want it, can be all-Yakuza, all the time. Kiwami is one of a storm of Yakuza games that are arriving on PS4 with an almost dizzying cadence. Apart from last year’s Yakuza 0 and Kiwami, Yakuza 6: Song of Life is coming in early 2018, and Yakuza Kiwami 2 is slated for mid-2018. Sega seems to have decided they have a winner of an engine, and are going to bury users under an ocean of content. Is there enough of an appetite (at least in the West) for our favorite gangster-wtih-a-heart-of-gold to support such an ambitious release schedule? Time will tell.

As for me, I’ll be standing directly in front of the firehose. Laughing.

The R Word

2017-09-10 · by peterb

Those of us who play video or computer games need to confront racism and sexism every time they are expressed in our community. I have been playing games since I could barely walk. I’m not going to let racists or sexists define “gamer” as an identity. Why is this your problem, as a gamer? Because the standard you walk past is the standard you accept. It’s more than Pewdiepie’s slur on YouTube. Each racial slur or gendered insult in voice chat, by anyone, degrades all gamers. “I’m not using slurs” isn’t enough.

Players, if someone you’re playing with starts that garbage, drop the connection and block them. Game companies, your online game’s code of conduct needs to treat racist and sexist slurs as a one-time bannable offense.

Gamers are good at learning new skills to beat a challenge. The challenges facing our community right now are racism and sexism. The way to face that challenge is by confronting racism and sexism where and when we see them. Every. Single. Time.

Rock of Ages 2

2017-09-15 · by Jason McIntosh

The core mode of ACE Team’s Rock of Ages 2: Bigger & Boulder plays like a delirious mix of Super Monkey Ball and Rampart, all presented within an animated and unapologetically full-throated Terry Gilliam audiovisual pastiche. Per its own subtitle, the same could be said about the game’s 2011 predecessor; this sequel serves primarily to amp up the absurd audiovisuals for current-generation game systems.

This sequel also gently astonishes me with its existence in the first place. I wouldn’t have imagined the first game – which I enjoyed in concept upon its release, then never heard nor thought about again – to have enjoyed enough success to demand a post-Obama refresh. Clearly, my imagination proved as flat as one of the victims of this game’s smiling and eponymous lithospheres. Never one to complain about the world having more highly weird artwork for sale, I can only welcome it.

In Rock of Ages 2’s single-player campaign and its main two-player competitive mode, each player has the task of smashing down their opponent’s castle by rolling an enormous, grinning boulder through a twisting, obstacle-laden course – Monkey Ball-style – and then down a final ramp towards the target. The boulder has a health meter, reduced by running into obstacles or falling off the track, and enough damage will disintegrate the rock prematurely.

However, the game rewards limiting the caution you practice while bowling down the track. Both players – whether two humans, or a human and their competing AI – play out their turns simultaneously. While not racing against the clock per se, the player who practices too much care in picking their way around anti-boulder hazards ends up giving their opponent more time to set up and launch their own rocky assault on the player’s home castle.

The opponent’s castle takes several hits to breach, and after each such rolling sortie ends – whether through a direct hit or crumbling misadventure – the player switches to a defensive mode, placing appropriately silly items all over their opponent’s track to stymie them. Cow pastures slow boulders down, cannon damage them, spring-traps can fling them off the track entirely, and so on. Placing hazards costs resources, regained through patience or through placing special obstacles near the gold mines that dot every track. This phase does feature a timer, after which the player can leap back into boulder-rolling. Play alternates thus for both sides until one finally squishes the other.

I see that Wikipedia labels the Rock of Ages games as tower defense, and while they do borrow some cues from modern games of that genre – such as the animated “wind” indicating the path that they enemy will take – I don’t think this designation quite fits. The back-and-forth rhythm between building up defenses and then slamming through your opponent’s obstacles brought Atari’s memorably unlikely 1990 arcade experiment to mind before anything else. Arguably, all tower defense games trace their lineage from Rampart, so perhaps Rock of Ages chooses to draw water directly from that primordial well.

More to the point, though, the Rock of Ages games have no patience for the sort of tactical planning inherent to true tower defense games. The defensive controls may resemble those of a more thoughtful game, but in practice one just scatters obstacles across the enemy track in a few frantic gestures during the swift moments between rock-rolls. Granted, this activity does provide some space for strategy: I learned that coating the space in front of one’s castle with momentum-sapping cow pastures works well to limit damage wrought by the enemy boulder, for example, and that spring-traps work best when placed in chicanes, where they might bounce a careless opponent right off the track. Other than these sorts of overarching strategies, the defensive game proves as much an intentionally chaotic melee as the attack phase.

I feel unsure about how this works as a multiplayer game. Its Gilliam-homage animations – which start on the load screens and carry straight through the menus into the actual gameplay – suggest the game as best suited for single-couch competitions. If Rock of Ages 2 doesn’t aim to become anyone’s favorite game, it does vie to earn a place as this ridiculous thing to show your guests. In this respect, though, the core game mode suffers from how the defensive phase makes it just too complicated for a party game, unless the host has the patience to play a single-player round first to demonstrate. To its credit, Rock of Ages 2 does offer less complex play modes that work with no instruction at all, most notably a simple rolling race down a track laden with pre-arranged obstacles, where one can enjoy all the goofy animation with minimal brain-exertion.

Rock of Ages 2 inevitably offers online play as well, but (as of a week after its initial release) seems to have fallen on the dark side of the critical mass required to make quickplay with randos work. During one Eastern-time weeknight, I found no public online matches to join, and when I created one myself I had no takers after fifteen minutes of waiting. I don’t necessarily consider this a detriment, given the game’s clearly better suitedness for local play, but always find this sort of thing a little sad to see nonetheless.

If you try this game for any single reason, let it be the single-player story mode, which one must traverse anyway in order to unlock all the various maps, boulder-variants, and defensive goodies for use in multiplayer. I loved the pre-fight cartoons introducing each of your computer-controlled opponents, all historical or mythological figures hit with a silly-stick: Joan of Arc as a babbling zealot, Robert the Bruce as a giant with eye-lasers, Vincent van Gogh as a paint-vomiting anime monster. They set the mood for the subsequent gameplay quite effectively. If you fancy the opportunity to make an animated cut-out of Henry VIII scream like a baby moments before you pancake him with a house-sized boulder, then you may find Rock of Ages 2 a worthwhile purchase.

Disclosure Statement: ATLUS graciously provided Tea Leaves with a review copy of this game.

Battletech

2018-04-24 · by tilt

Editorial note: This review contains minor spoilers for BattleTech.

Pete and I are both nerds of a certain age, and BattleTech is one of those giant robot franchises that was formative for both of us. (Although apparently Pete had waaaayyyy more of the novelizations than I did.) I’m a fan of what Harebrained Schemes has been doing lately (the Shadowrun CRPGs are some of my favorite recent turn based CRPGs, even if they do have some warts), and I’d seen demos of the new BattleTech game at PAX and online, so I was pretty excited for this one. When Harebrained Schemes provided us with two review copies of the game, we thought it only made sense to turn it into a conversation.

Pete: Let me get this out of the way first: I really like the game. It scratches my turn-based itch and combines it with gigantic space robots that shoot missiles at each other, and does so with a nice degree of polish. With that out of the way I am going to nitpick a thousand things but I only nitpick because I love.

Eric: I like it too! It’s scruffy, but fun. I think the game could stand a little more polish than you do (especially in how the game’s systems get introduced) but I kept coming back to it and enjoying it. Now, since I know our readers really want to know how the game plays, let’s take several digressions. First: the story!

Pete: I thought the first mission was incredibly tense! It’s not often that a tutorial mission leaves you wondering if you’re going to hit a ‘Game Over’ screen then and there. I expected a pointless tutorial but instead it just rolled right into the plot. Not returning you to some sort of mission select screen was a bold choice, and as new enemies kept appearing I was not confident that I would make it through. I was a little hurt deep inside that the Space Princess was much better at BattleTeching than my avatar. She was become death, destroyer of mechs.

I did have one problem, though, which was that I quit the game after the first mission, thinking there would be an autosave - and there wasn’t. I had to replay the entire thing. I had fun, but still found that surprising. Always be manually saving.

Eric: I kind of like that the first non-trivial mission contains more than one encounter. Carrying forward damage from the last fight added pressure and tactical decision making going into the next one. I like what I’ve seen so far of the story missions. They’re really making me care about the stakes. After the first mission, I wanted to take out the bad guy SO BAD. After the second story mission, I was all whaaaaat. Some people might find them over the top, but the plot and the understated cinematics are right up my alley. They hit me right in the nostalgia feels from when I was that 12 year old kid poring over Battletech manuals in the game store while my mom was doing other shopping. I’ve only seen the first few pieces of the story arc in 8 odd hours of play, but I keep being fascinated to see what happens next.

I have a small gripe that the story sometimes sets up things that seem like they’re going to be game systems and then… a later story mission changes that. I mean, the tooltip text does basically strongly encourage you to always be story missioning, but (minor spoilers) I was non-sarcastically totally ready to be spending the whole game dealing with crippling bank debt and playing Mercenary Finances Simulator 3017.

Battletech - sweet victory

Pete: I’m full of bitter shame to admit how many terrible BattleTech novels I read when I was a teenager. I literally could not tell you anything about the universe now except something something Katrina Steiner and something something Clans and Inner Sphere. But the “choose your character’s background” choices definitely brought some of that back. I was a little disappointed that the character choices actually affect your stats - I’m a big believer in choices like that being entirely cosmetic or for role-play reasons, because otherwise I feel paralyzed until I figure out the “best” path.

Eric: I know what you mean! The cutscene evoked an emotional reaction for me about the space opera memories I have kind of archived away, but I have no idea what players were what anymore. (Also yes about the stats. Also it seemed like whatever background I picked, I was always going to be a noble, which was a weird non-choice in the middle of a bunch of choices.)

Pete: Well, obviously Eric, the game knows you and your innate nobility.

Eric: I’m in the space 1%! I wonder if I have amnesia too!?

Pete: It’s a certainty.

Eric: The graphics leave me a little hot and cold, I guess. Something about the detail feels a little dated, but I appreciate touches like the action camera. The game is trying evoke the X-Com remake from a few years back, I feel, but doesn’t really hit the same fit and finish of visual flair. It’s a minor nit, but I could feel some of my goodwill from the first few minutes of introduction flow away.

Pete: I thought the graphics worked but I couldn’t find a reliably good position for the camera - I always felt like it was either too close or too far.

Eric: I will also gripe briefly that the game doesn’t support ultrawide resolutions. There are dozens of us! But I will give props that steam cloud saves working between Mac and Windows worked right out of the gate, which I have learned to not expect.

Pete: I have a Windows box, but cross-platform support makes me 100% more likely to play a game. I’m so happy that I can play this on my Mac, and that it supports Steam Cloud.

Eric: Let’s talk about how there’s a vocal subculture of gamers that are the worst. The game has a decent avatar creator, and includes the nice option of picking your pronouns in at least a limited way (he/she/they). This, of course, has caused a certain type of person to become enraged at how basic courtesy and evolving social norms has ruined their fun specifically. What was interesting to me, though, was that picking a pronoun actually filtered the available default avatars. I got why, but it actually felt like the game didn’t “get” the message it was trying to send. (That being said, regardless of pronoun picked, you could go into customization and pick from options for both kinds of gender presentation.)

Pete: I cannot imagine what sort of terrible judgment it takes to arrive at a place in your life where one is offended by a game offering pronoun choices for a fictional video game character. Good on Harebrained for making this customizable. Everyone who is offended is silly and should be ignored and, where possible, shunned.

Pete: In conversation you and I keep comparing this to X-Com and one comparison that jumps out at me is that if this were X-Com the cutscenes and on-the-ship dialogues would be fully voiced. I’m just going to come out and say that I like this style better.

Eric: I like the board gamey feel of it. Shameful confession: I looked at source books and read novelizations as a kid, but never found a group of people to actually play Battletech with. So I have literally no idea how this game compares to the tabletop game. But this feels like a cool computer vision of a thing that was a board game but really was an invitation into a journey of the imagination of having baller big ass robots brutally slugging it out.

Pete: I don’t think that’s shameful. “I read the sourcebook but never played the game” is what I consider the default state for most wargames or deep, complicated board games.. It’s one reason we have so many computer versions of these games to begin with.

Eric: Out of curiosity, I found a summary PDF of the BattleTech rules. My super high level takeaway is that this game is “in the spirit of” but is in no way a faithful recreation of the table top game. For example, move & fire happen at the same time here, as opposed to in distinct phases. It seems like things like the evasion points might be an innovation here, too. My completely naive impression is that the choices made for the game are completely appropriate and the game would feel more like a slog if it was a faithful representation.

Pete: I agree that it’s not like the tabletop game but I’d say it more strongly: it’s good that it’s not like the tabletop game. As long as we’re making comparisons, it’s completely unfair to compare this game to the mid-1990s MechWarrior games. So, let’s compare this game to the mid-1990s MechWarrior games. MechWarrior 2 was what I’d consider a formative gaming experience for me - i was completely immersed in the game world. Of course, as an action game, it had a totally different portfolio than this one. That game sort of broke down where many battles just turned into two mechs circle-strafing around each other, firing every weapon on cooldown. This game, however, feels more subtly balanced. Heat is a much more strategic issue here.

Eric: One of the very first games of the GPU era I ever bought was MechWarrior 2. I grew up on Transformers and Robotech. I gotta be honest with you, giant robots are kind of a core fantasy for me. And launching up MechWarrior 2 and being in the point of view of a giant robot (and hearing all those whirs and computer noises) was just, like, the most amazing thing. And yes, every damn battle became exactly what you describe.

So, of course, I kept buying them, trying to recapture that feel. And I agree with you that the balance is better here, because the tradeoffs are more meaningful. I noticed my heat was going to go over, and… unchecked one of my weapons so it didn’t go over! I felt super smart and like the best pilot in the Star League.

Pete: Tell me about Voodoo Graphics and 3dfx, Uncle Eric.

Eric: Going down that rabbit hole reminded me that the first BattleTech game I ever played was actually on the Apple ][+. BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk’s Inception. Which was… uh, a graphical RPG made by Infocom, somehow. It was sort of a weird mash up of Ultima and Wizardry UI tropes combined with giant robots. I have no idea how I forgot that this existed, because it sounds amazing.

Pete: Crescent Hawk’s Inception might be a better game than Mechwarrior 2 and I’m willing to fight people over that. I think that game (which I played on PC, not the Apple ][) is in fact why I know the name “Katrina Steiner”. Some years after playing it I tracked down a copy of the sequel, Crescent Hawk’s Revenge, and it was so bad that I can taste the disappointment to this day. Inception was a turn-based game, and Revenge was a real-time game, and it’s clear to me that because this game is turn-based it’s fantastic as well. Q.E.D.

Eric: Whoah, I had no idea there was a sequel. And also that there’s apparently a direct line between these games and the existence of RTS games and therefore World of Warcraft. It’s all coming full circle-strafe.

Pete: I felt like naming the game just BattleTech was maybe going to hurt them from a search optimization standpoint - “How will people find this game among all the other BattleTech games?” But it’s number one on the Google search for “BattleTech video game” so I guess they’re doing fine.

Let’s talk about the actual combat. I’ve already shown my hand and said that it’s all I ever wanted. How do you feel about it?

Eric: I’m down with the mechanics of “pick a robot to go, move, pick facing, shoot!” I like how the game shows me who I can hit after moving, but it took me a while to also figure out that you could also see the hit percentage for each weapon — but only once you were in the “facing” part of movement selection. I also like that there’s some tactical choice around movement—if you move full out, you get “evasion” which makes sense as a way to represent motion in a fundamentally turned based game.

Pete: There are many, many things I don’t understand about the game systems so far - but, I also haven’t cracked the manual. And if the game was popping up tooltips every 3 seconds I’d probably complain about that instead. But a short list would include not understanding what the rules are about when I can change my facing(), how to determine weapon ranges when I have multiple weapons selected(), how multi-attacks work at all(), why one can’t fire on enemies who are knocked down(), and whether it’s even possible to do something like “Fire 1 weapon, move, fire a second weapon.”(*) I just have no idea.

Editorial note: After more time playing the answers seem to be () The more movement you have left, the more you can adjust your facing, () Look for the concentric rings of different opacities when adjusting your facing, () Click each enemy you want to multi-attack, then click individual weapons to toggle the target, () You can, I have no idea why this wasn’t working for me when I wrote it, and (*) Seemingly no.)

Eric: Yeah, the game kind of fell off fast on explaining stuff. I have tried 2-3 times now to do a multi-attack and I’m pretty sure I’m just hitting one enemy badly. And sometimes I get hover tooltips about the implications of moving to a certain kind of terrain, but then later… I don’t?

Pete: The multi-attack UI completely defeated me, until you explained it to me.

Eric: There’s something that doesn’t quite make sense about the common interaction path. The first two steps are fine: select a mech, then select an action. But I would have had no clue that I had to tab through targets if the tutorial hadn’t told me, because there isn’t a similar lineup of target icons to pick from. These are little details, but in a complicated game like this they feel important. I hope they revisit polish on the combat UI in a patch. There’s a ton of stuff I understand now after playing for a few days that seemed mysterious to me up front, and I feel like they kind of threw up their hands after a little bit of tutorial and buried the rest of it in some dialogue trees I’m never going to read.

For what it’s worth I restarted after playing the first few missions because I decided I really didn’t like my avatar, and it was becoming clear I was gonna be staring at that face for a while. The second time through that first mission was like night and day, because this time I actually understood the game’s systems (more).

Pete: Our multiplayer skirmish was a real nail-biter. I totally thought you had me right up until the last couple of turns. Then you jumped on me with a “Death From Above” attack and badly damaged one of your own mechs, and I somehow pulled it out.

I know I am being a hyper-entitled gamer here but holy heck do I want this game to have cooperative play.

Eric: Me too, Pete, me too.

Let’s talk more about the X-Com comparison. My (and your) first reaction was “I want overwatch!” I’ve come to appreciate the lack of it, though. The evasion mechanics seem like they are in direct counter to a game about running to cover. Instead, this is a game about moving, and needing to be pinned down by focusing fire. And that works for me! Because really, these aren’t guys in body armor hoping to not get hit by a bullet. The mechs ARE the cover.

Pete: Yes. If this game had overwatch it would be a very different experience. At a high level the ideal tactic here seems to be “line up a shot on the rear armor”, so that (along with the lack of overwatch) discourages “stand still and slug it out.” One thing I haven’t figured out yet is how to translate the damage numbers for weapons (“25”, “40”, and so on) into “Here’s how close to death your enemy will be if everything hits.” This is something X-Com did extremely well. Maybe I’m just missing the right clue in the UI?

Eric: Yes – there’s aggregate and location specific hit point values for armor & structure in the UI at the top of the screen when you target something. you have to add it all up though, and feels weird – I’d like to see the kind of damage you’re likely to make as a blinking portion of the health bar, just like you see with the heat impact.

Pete: Here’s something I loved that I didn’t notice until a few missions in: the heat profile of your weapons changes depending on the environment you’re fighting in. If you’re in vacuum, heat dissipation is slow, but fight in snow and you can be a lot more aggressive. I don’t remember this being modeled in Mechwarrior 2 beyond “standing in water helps you cool down faster”.

OK, moment of truth. Thumbs up or thumbs down for you? I’m thumbs up, upgraded to a strong thumbs up if you already know you like turn-based games .

Eric: Thumbs up for me too. I think the game may be hard to approach because it doesn’t quite nail the balance between explaining systems and making you figure them out for yourself, but it’s a fun, well paced giant robot game with a combination of ridiculous space opera and procedural content. What’s not to love?

Battletech by Harebrained Schemes releases April 24, 2018 on Steam for $39.99.

Disclosure statement: the publishers generously provided Tea Leaves with two review copies of this game.

The Game Detective: The 'Marcus Aurelius' Version of Star Trek

2018-08-25 · by peterb

In the very first year of this weblog - 2004 - I published an article with the (I thought) Calvino-like title of I Giochi Inesistenti that described the strangest of Star Trek text games: a game which, at seemingly semi-random points, would emit long, wandering quotes from Marcus Aurelius' Meditations. It was such a strange, mismatched thing that I wasn’t entirely sure it existed.

I’ve looked for this game on and off since that time. I posted a bounty on Google Answers (oh, 2004, how innocent you were) with no results. Occasionally I have encountered other people - similarly wondering whether or not they imagined the whole thing. I’m not really sure why I’ve felt compelled to Google for this strange little game every few years. It was just such an odd detail for a game that it stuck in my head. You’d be flying through the galaxy, murdering Klingons with phasers and photon torpedos, when all of a sudden the game would interrupt you with something like:

To the aids which have been mentioned, let
this one still be added:  Make for thyself a
definition or description of the thing which
is presented to thee, so as to see distinctly what
kind of thing it is in its substance, in its
nudity, in its complete entirety; and tell thyself
its proper name, and the names of the things of
which it has been compounded, and into which it
will be resolved.
-- Marcus Aurelius, III.11

It. Was. Strange.

There are many web sites tracking the different versions of these games. Most commentators attribute them to Dave Ahl, who popularized the game in his book BASIC Computer Games, but I’ll call them “Mayfield Trek” games, in honor of the game’s original creator, Mike Mayfield. But none of the most common sources, even the encyclopedic catalogue at Pete Turnbull’s page on the games, have the games with the Aurelius quotes in them. Their existence is mentioned in the “Game History” section of the documentation for the version by Matuszek, Paul Reynolds et al:

Dave Matuszek, Paul Reynolds et. al. at UT Austin played the Hicks version on a CDC6600, but disliked the long load time and extreme slowness of the BASIC program. (David Matuszek notes that the Hicks version he played had a habit of throwing long quotes from Marcus Aurelius at the users, a feature he found intolerable on a TTY at 110 baud. It must, therefore, have been rather longer than the one we have.)

You’d think in this age of ubiquitous search it would be something that could be found, but source code tends to not be indexed the same way as text. So I searched without luck, for years.

Finally, this year I stumbled across the source code to one variant of this game on, of all places, a QuickBASIC-focused forum that seems to be hosted only on Tapatalk. The author of the game posted the source into a thread back in 2002. A little cutting and pasting later, and now I have a disk image with the source code on it. I’ll be uploading it to archive.org soon.

Star-Trek version 13.5

The author of this version indicates that he “modularized” it - separating out the Aurelius quotes, which previously were part of the source code, into a separate .DOC file. In that file, the author describes the provenance of the game as he understood it. (The “@” signs below are part of what allows the BASIC program to look up lines for display on screen):

@3@601@720H i s t o r y
@505@602General idea stolen from Penn. U. by Hicks.
@601Vastly improved and adapted to Taurus by Korp, April 1973.
@601Adapted for the IBM-PC by Woods, April 1983.
@601Modularized by McLamore, February, 1988.
@602If you have any comments or bugs and wish to
pass the information along, please send them to
@520http://www.network54.com/Forum/190883/message/ ... 0/Startrek
@603Press any key to continue . . .

I’m most interested in the comment “Adapted for the IBM-PC by Woods, April 1983”. Would that refer to Don Woods, most well-known for his work on Adventure? I’ve written to him and hope to find out.

In the meantime, if you’d like to try this out for yourself, I’ve made a fair copy here, suitable for use inside the DOSBox emulator. Enjoy the trip down memory lane.

In my original post looking for the game, I indicated that I played it on the Apple ][; I still believe this. Why? First, I recall the Aurelius quotes being hard to read: they were in all upper-case. Also, they interrupted the flow of the game, because they appeared on screen very slowly. Neither of these attributes apply to this PC port. And in addition, there’s at least one other person out there who remembers seeing it.

So on the one hand, the search continues, because I’d still like to see the precise version of the game I played back in the day. On the other hand, at least now I can prove I didn’t imagine it.

So the search is over, and the search continues. If you’re reading this, and you have a line on any other Aurelius-emitting versions of this game, please drop a line to @peterb on Twitter. or @peterb@pgh.social on Mastodon. Thanks.

Masala Chai Custard

2019-02-02 · by peterb

For complicated reasons I have been making a lot of custards lately. A friend asked for the recipe, so I’m typing it up here.

Custards fall broadly into two categories: stirred custards, and baked custards. Baked custards are in some sense easier and more reliable, taking less attention but more equipment and fuss. Because I’m very very lazy, I prefer to make stirred custards, which require more focus while making them but use fewer dishes and equipment in the kitchen. This recipe makes 5 nicely sized custards, or 6 smaller ones, depending on how you divide it.

EQUIPMENT

A medium to large saucepan A large mixing bowl A candy (or other very reliable) thermometer A whisk 5 or 6 ramekins A stove

INGREDIENTS

2 cups milk, half and half, or a mix of the two, minus liquid added for flavorings (see below) 4 eggs Sugar to taste. Less is more. This recipe uses 1/4 cup of white or demerara sugar. Flavoring. For this recipe, make a concentrated masala tea (see below)

If you want to try alternative flavorings for other custards, I’d say lemon is a good place to start - shave the peel from two lemons and add it at the right time (see below) in place of the masala tea.

METHOD

Make your concentrated masala tea - about half a cup - from a strong malty tea like assam (Irish Breakfast bags will do if you don’t have loose tea), and a tea masala mix. If you want to make your own tea masala spices from scratch you can grind black pepper, cardamom, nutmeg, cloves, ginger, and whatever else you like. Because I am lazy my process is to go to the local indian store and buy the first premade dry tea masala spice mix my eyes fall upon. You want to make about a half cup of liquid, using an amount of tea and spice mix appropriate for an entire pot.

Put your milk or milk/half and half mix in the saucepan. Attach the candy thermometer to the side of the saucepan, immersed in the milk. I say “milk or half and half” because you can adjust these to your desired fat content, and also because using a higher fat liquid will give you more margin for error if working with materials that would curdle the milk (like citrus fruits). For a typical custard with no curdling ingredients I’ll use 1 1/2 cups of milk and 1/2 cup of half and half. For this custard, because I’m adding liquid, I used 1 cup of milk, 1/2 cup of half and half, and then the masala liquid for the rest. Add your concentrated masala tea liquid to the milk. Ignore your milk for now but keep one eye on the candy thermometer; you’ll need it below around 120° F for the next step.

Break 4 eggs into your large mixing bowl. Add sugar, and whisk vigorously. You’re not trying to do anything special here, just get it all well combined.

When your milk reaches about 120°F, take a small amount of the warm milk (1/4 cup or less) and drizzle it into the egg/sugar mixture while whisking. This tempers the eggs so they are less likely to curdle. I’ll usually do this 2 or 3 times as the milk heats. Then slowly pour the tempered egg mixture into the still-heating milk while whisking vigorously.

A NOTE ON BAIN-MARIES

They’re annoying and I don’t use them. Common wisdom is they heat the mixture more slowly so you have more margin for error. This is probably true, but the extra setup time and dishwashing isn’t worth it to me.

BACK TO THE METHOD

Continue to heat the milk (on very low), stirring constantly. As the temperature on your thermometer approaches 170 degrees, stir more vigorously, making sure to scrape the bottom of the pan. As your temperature crests 160 and especially 170 you will feel the mixture begin to thicken.

“By the book,” a custard starts thickening at 160°F, should be fully ready to cool at 170°F, and will be curdling into scrambled egg at anything over 175°F. With my candy thermometer, I don’t feel real thickening until around 175°F, and i don’t hit scrambled eggs until 185°F. This could be because of the method I’m using, or it could just mean that my candy thermometer sucks. Experiment on your own and let me know how it works out; you could try pouring out ramekins at different temperatures and see how they turn out.

When I reach whatever temperature I’m aiming for (in my case, just a hair under 180°F), I pour the mixture straight into ramekins and put them in the freezer, refrigerator, or, if it’s cold enough, straight outside. Freezing them will result in a different texture than refrigerating. Experiment and find out which textures you like (I’ll usually do several of each). Enjoy!

Heaven's Vault

2019-04-19 · by peterb

I was midway through my second playthrough when I realized that Heaven’s Vault was an order of magnitude deeper than I thought it was.

If there’s one thing I’d like you to take away from this review, that’s it: there is more to this game than meets the eye. And there is much that meets the eye. There are layers upon layers here, and you will not discover them the first time you play.

On the surface, Heaven’s Vault is a well-polished adventure game using traditional dialogue trees to advance the plot, along with a clever linguistic minigame where you try to translate ancient inscriptions from a language you don’t know, using clues from context and from guesses made on other inscriptions.

I’d rather not give away any of the plot, but the setup is as follows: You, Aliya Elasra, are an archeologist with her own space-sailboat that can coast on nebular clouds. Your mentor at University is worried for a colleague who has gone missing. She provides you with a robot assistant, named Six, and asks you to find him. What you find along the way will change everything.

Travel between worlds is accomplished by a sailing minigame which seems to have no failure state. Both the soundscape and music are diaphanous and relaxing, and some color dialogue occurs along the way; you can also occasionally find wreckage where you may find artifacts with inscriptions to translate. These artifacts may be of use in trade, but their main function is to act as clues to the location of archeologically significant sites for exploration.

At sites, you (and, usually, Six) walk (or roll) around and look for scraps of paper, books, ancient compasses, sextants, drinking vessels, statuettes, swords, tablets, or any number of other ancient items. Most of the items will have inscriptions, which you then try to translate.

I don’t want to give away too much about the translation game, since that’s the true heart of the game, and discovering it for yourself is half the fun. But I can say that this isn’t “real” linguistics; various sequences of symbols you will come to recognize (over time) as having certain connotations. Using some amount of context clues (“The thing I am holding is a musical instrument”) and some amount of common sense about how various symbols connotations might combine, you choose from a small palette of choices as to what this glyph might mean, so the UI is acting as your assistant here. Complicating matters, ancient inscriptions in the game are often a number of words run together without any kind of space or word separator, so deciding where one word ends and another begins is part of the challenge.

I approached Heaven’s Vault like any other adventure game with dialogue trees; a mixture of wanting to find interesting plot threads with having an idea of who my character was and how she would respond. I finished the game in a long weekend and was very satisfied with the story, the writing, and most of the game mechanics (a few of the longer sailing voyages dragged a bit, and felt like padding). Upon finishing, I still hadn’t translated all possible words, and the game offered me a New Game + mode where I kept my linguistic knowledge. Interested in filling out the corners, I restarted the game and figured I would try some of the other dialogue trees, not expected them to have a lot of impact.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

There were a few “side quest” type plot threads that I was convinced would have a different end state while leaving the main plot alone, but overall I was reasonably convinced that I understood the main thrust of the story and the history of the Nebula itself. After zigging instead of zagging through a few dialogue trees - particularly in terms of deciding to visit a few locations out of the most obvious order - I found some of the most central relationships of the game had become nearly unrecognizable. This is a game that rewards replays. It’s almost fractal in nature: the closer you look, the more there is.

My advice to you, Dear Reader, is as follows. First, run, don’t walk, to one of the PS4 or Steam (Windows) stores and buy Heaven’s Vault. You will thank me. (Note to Inkle: this game is a natural for iPad, and it’s frankly madness that you don’t have a port yet. Please seriously consider it.) Second, don’t read any walkthroughs. Don’t read forum discussions about it. Block the name on your social media. Don’t let yourself be spoiled.

Then, start sailing, start translating, and enjoy the journey.

Heaven’s Vault by Inkle Studios. Currently $24.99 retail before discounts, and worth every penny.

Disclosure statement: Inkle Studios graciously provided Tea Leaves with a review copy of the game.

Where I Have Been

2021-05-10 · by peterb

I have, as you can tell, not been doing much blogging lately.

Instead, I’ve been making videos on my channel, Tea Leaves Programming. What kind of videos? All sorts, but as you might expect there’s a clear focus on obsolete programming languages, computer games, and retro computers generally. In addition, there’s the occasional video about double-entry bookkeeping (it’s a long story.)

See you there!