the-inbetween.com

The People Before Me

Certain revelations have come to light regarding my apartment's previous tenants. The clues were there all along -- the weird deformation on the door, the filthy, filthy windows when I moved in, the mail from Berkeley -- they just weren't deciphered.

Today, as I met my neighbour for the first time (after living here for five months) the truth came out. My apartment was the target of a raid. Apparently, the previous tenants were growing a lot of weed here. Enough to warrant a raid. If I had known that there was a puzzle to solve here, I'd have been on it. You know, all gamer-like. But I was oblivious to the clues.

There's some sort of game metaphor there, but I'm not keen enough to realize that either. Perhaps a game design principle. If you're going to have a puzzle/riddle, make it obvious enough so that the player knows that there is a puzzle to solve. Otherwise, they might go months without even realizing your genius. That would be a shame.

As an addendum, some dude got stabbed right outside of my building on Saturday. This is a nice area.

Zam BeeZee

Free game alert: Zam BeeZee.

It's another one of the word+puzzle hybrid type of "casual" games, but it's free and a lot more varied and interesting than its less-than-free peers, like the boring BookWorm. Word games are not my strength -- not by far -- but if I can enjoy a game like this for ten minutes without a hint of frustration, then that tells me that the game designers did something right. Finding words in a sea of letters is dull. Finding words in a hexagonal beehive with letter and word multipliers and bombs and wild cards? Somehow, that works.

There is a "buy now" link on the welcome page, but it doesn't go anywhere. I don't know what the for-pay plans for this game are, but enjoy it while it's free.

Lacrosse

The National Lacross League (NLL) all-star game was on NBC today. NBC! Lacrosse on a national American broadcast!! Not much else to show with the NHL in a coma, I figure.

The NLL is a good watch, though. I've never been to a Toronto Rock game, but I've caught a few on tv and they're entertaining enough. All the intensity of hockey but with more goals and, um, less ice. This was even more evident today, during the all-star game. All-star games, in any of the professional sports, are boring affairs. You watch a bunch of over-paid athletes play soft with each other. Whoop-dee-doo.

But this game was different. There weren't any fights or anything too physical, but the intensity of the game was there You could sense that winning actually mattered to the players; unheard of during all-star games. It was exciting, intense, physical to a degree (saw some dude get cross-checked in the back), and extremely competitive -- ending in an overtime goal by one John Tavares.

One of the reasons for this intensity is that all the players compete for the love of the sport. They have to, because they aren't making millions off of it. In fact, most of the players have day-jobs to support themselves, ranging from firemen to teachers. Even the "Wayne Gretzky" of the NLL, the previously mentioned John Tavares, has a day job. After the post-game interview, one of the commentators said he'll celebrate with his team and then go back to his school teaching position on Monday. How can you be down on a professional sport like that?

The thing about John Tavares is that, well, he was a teacher at my high school. I can't remember if he was there when I was attending, but he definitely was teaching when my sister was still going to that school. He even subsituted for some of her classes.

And that's really what seperates the NLL from the NHL. After scoring three goals in the nationally broadcast all-star game, he returns to a high school to teach some teenagers math. Is there any wonder as to why nobody is missing the NHL?

Virtual Photographer

Ignoring the game within Gran Turismo 4 -- something that is easy to do as it overloads you with millions of random functions and features, few of which have anything to do with actual racing -- I have to say that the seemingly throwaway photo mode is, to my surprise, rather impressive. This virual camera features almost as many capabilities as a regular low-end digital. You can change aperture, focal length, and other random technical terms I know little about.

Since the renderer doesn't have to worry about frame rates, the photos this generates can be of far higher resolution than the game itself. And since it wouldn't be sensical to store 200kb+ images on a crappy ole' memory card, Gran Turismo 4 allows you to save the images to a USB Flash Drive. My new iPod Shuffle is a flash drive, so I figured I'd try that. I didn't have any expectations for it to work, but... it did. It saved a folder called GT4/ in the root of the iPod and put the images in there without a hitch. (Supposedly, it also supports direct-to-printer imaging.)

You'd think that with such quality USB drivers that Polyphony could have, at least, supported the fucking Sony hard-drive.

Here's a couple sample images of my new used Mitsubishi Eclipse. Thank god that GT4 allows you to import your previous GT3 license data. I'm so relieved that I'm not forced to sit through that shit again. Thanks to that, I was in a car and off to the races in no time.

Edge on GT4

I was browsing the Gran Turismo 4 review blurbs at Metacritic when I saw, at the very bottom of the list, this quote from Edge Magazine:

Gran Turismo 4 is fundamentally unconcerned with furthering the art of the videogame. This titanic franchise, this critical, load-bearing pillar of PlayStation, is barely even a videogame at all. It's a hobbyist software suite, a racetrack tutorial, an encyclopaedia you can get in and drive off.

That sums up my feelings about the entire series. Don't get me wrong, I loved the original Gran Turismo. Hell, I had golds in every (non-license) event! (I attribute that to youthful enthusiasm and a lack of funds for any new games, so I just stuck with that) Being older and wiser and with years of real-world driving experience, I can't find the appeal of having to do license tests so that I can be rewarded with the ability to drive a beat-up used Civic. If I want to do that, I'd just borrow my parents' Honda.

Unfortunately, I'm a digital media whore so I bought it anyway.

But Edge made a good point and it made me wish, for the 3548th time, that it was available here.

Drive and Park

I've been bit by the racing game bug, and the pending Gran Turismo 4 release had nothing to do with it. Rather, it's been a recent encounter with Colin McRae Rally 2005 that set me off. Off to the local game retailer, cash in hand.

I have Colin McRae 3 and I did play it to death when it was new. The game had its faults (a lot of them), but they were ignorable in the face of the solid driving and budget price. McRae 3 was more of a pure rally experience than its contemporary, the higher-profile Rallisport Challenge. Rallisport was a very good racing game, but its rally touch was too arcade for my liking. It had the variety of race styles, but with that it lost the focus that McRae had, which was 95% solitary point-to-point racing (with the last 5% being the final super special stage, which, while in a closed track, only had one lap and an opponent that you wouldn't encounter anyway.) This, one driver vs. the track/environment, is what the appeal of rally is all about. This is what McRae 3 did the best.

This might paint me as some sort of fanatic rally purist, but I assure you I'm not. Fact is, I don't follow rally racing at all. I don't know the championships, the drivers, the competitions. Nothing. I also believe that it translates very poorly to television. The only rally on television I've seen have been 12 hour rallies compressed into 30 minutes of footage. Booooring. (I did follow F-1, though. Right up until Schumacher turned it into a snorefest.)

Poor tv, but good gaming. It's just you, your co-pilot, and the track. All other distractions are removed. In rally racing games, skill is of a higher importance. Other racing games have intangibles that can be exploited to compensate for that lack of skill. For example, in Gran Turismo, I'd often use the opponent cars as pinball flippers to get me through tight turns at high speeds. I'd use them to bump me forward or as shields to keep me on track or, well, anything that the game permitted me to do. That is mostly due to lousy AI and lousy physics modelling, true, but it's going to take a long while before AI opponents become smart enough to not be so exploitable. By not having those competitors, rally games avoid their faults.

Anyway, I liked Colin McRae 3 and hoped that its sequel would fix some of its glaring problems. It didn't. 04 was the same game with insignifcant modifications and a tacked on, poorly implemented XBox Live scoreboard feature. So, when 2005 came out I brushed it off as more of the same -- an EA-styled annual cash-in (changing the name from "05" to "2005" didn't assuage that thought.) I've come to regret not giving it a chance.

2005 now has: a "proper" career mode; an even more refined user interface, which is quite clean and slick; way better integration with XBox Live, with the ability to play against people on XBox Live (haven't done this myself, and it doesn't appeal to me too much, but it's notable); better audio and co-pilot voice work (seems like it); and way, way better scoreboards.

The scoreboards automatically show up after a single race "challenge" if you're logged in, so you can instantly see where you rank. The "challenge"s also have one extra feature: ghost race. In previous games, you'd race your best-time ghost. Here, they offer you the global scoreboard, from which you can choose to race against almost anybody's best posted time's ghost. This is one of the best uses of Live that I've seen and it makes 2005 worth every (still budget priced) penny.

That's the "driving" part. As for the, ahem, "Park"ing. Well, I have to say that my previously mentioned Grace Park infatuation (aka. "Boomer" on Battlestar Galactica) isn't being put to rest by her Maxim appearance. Not helping one bit. Almost makes me wish that Paris Hilton had her phone number... (kidding.)

The Forgotten Mix

Digging through some old CDs, I found a few ancient CD-Rs loaded with miscellaneous mp3s. The CD-Rs date back at least five years, and many of the mp3s they contain were acquired before that, during the pre-Napster days even. These discs are time capsules from a time before my musical tastes refined. They are also from a time when full albums were hard to come by so the collection has a lot of one-off songs and singles -- mostly ones that were getting some airplay..

The compilations are laden such with Whiskey Tango Foxtrot moments as "why the hell did I download this?" and "I remember this crap!" and "holy shit! I forgot about this track/band, it holds up remarkably well." In honour of these revelations, I have made a mix. The Forgotten Mix is a compliation of various late 90s minor new rock radio hits by bands that, well, didn't amount to anything but these minor hits. Some are good, some are pretty damn good, and others are... not so good. If anything, maybe this compilation will jar a few memories loose.

Download it here through You Send It [72MB]. Get it while you can, cause the YSI link isn't going to last.

Track listing:

1. K's Choice - Not An Addict (Man, I remember when this premiered domestically. Still good.)
2. Remy Zero - Prophecy (These guys were supposed to be "the next big thing". Who knows what happened to them. Good track.)
3. Tin Star - Head
4. Brother Kane - And Fools Shine On Junk. I remember these guys having another single, but that sounded almost exactly the same. A Nickleback precursor or something.)
5. Tracy Bonham - Mother Mother (Part of that somewhat annoying post-Alanis deluge of bitchy rock chicks.)
6. Squirrel Nut Zippers - Hell (Yes, this got airplay on the Edge.)
7. Space - Female Of The Species (I think this made it to the midway mark of the Thursday 30. Odd that I remember that. The song, itself, reminds me of driving the parents car on Hurontario St. during the summer. I was 17.)
8. Mono - Life In Mono (I still love this tune. I've yet to see the movie it was in or read the book it was based on, "Great Expectations".)
9. Ramasutra - Marder
10. Lo Fidelity Allstars f Pidgeonhead - Battleflag ("On yo motherfucking knees.")
11. VAST - Free (Another one of those "next big thing" duds. From what I remember, VAST was just one dude. No idea what happened to him.)
12. Victor - Promise (Was a minor hit, apparently by a solo project of a Rush guitarist -- not a bad song.)
13. Bare Jr. - You Blew Me Off
14. Sprung Monkey - Get Em Outta Here
15. Euphoria - Delirium (Not to be confused with Delirium's "Euphoria")
16. Supreme Beings of Leisure - Strange Love Addiction

The late Babylon 5 game (with media!)

One lower-profile game that I have a modicum of interest in is Nexus: The Jupiter Incident. Conquering nations and the world is fine and all, but I have my sights set on the galaxy.

I've had a long standing thirst for epic space-opera battles translated to the video game medium. I know there's been a few games like this (hence why I installed Homeworld), but they're very rare and if any did come out, they came when I either had no PC or no capable PC. There's been a bunch of space sims that did this, but they've always been "one man in a fighter" affairs. I want entire fleets at my disposal. Nexus seems to do this.

Visually, Nexus seems to draw a lot of artistic inspiration from a lot of sci-fi sources. One inspiration that stands out for me is the design of this ship, which bears a very striking similarity to Babylon 5's Earth Alliance destroyers. Very similar. This makes me anticipate the game even more, for the thirst is actually a specific one -- a desire to see a retail* game capture Babylon 5's vast universe and large-scale battles.

* (I am aware of I've Found Her and I do intend to try it, but I desire the full production values a retail product would bring.)

I still think about the "what ifs" of the now long-cancelled Sierra Babylon 5 game. Oh how I wanted that game to come out. I remember watching the trailers in anticipation, listening to the Christopher Franke preview track, and then hoping that I would have a computer that could handle it. Then came the sad, sad news.

But now, you can reminisce along with me. Not too long ago I dug up an old CD-R with, to my surprise, three trailer/promo videos and one preview audio track. I'm not going to put them all up as I fear for my server, but I will put up the mp3 and one two video trailer.

B5GamePreviewTrack.mp3 - preview of Christopher Franke's score, and it's pretty damned good. [3.19MB]

b5_shadow_threat_big.zip - preview trailer that mixes in-game footage with TV show ootage and -- it seems like -- original CGI. [18.9MB]

BONUS : b5_vidcap_1_big.mpg -- supposed ingame footage.

The Demise

I'm doomed. Yesterday's Valentine's Day is going to cause my downfall.

Like any proper loner, I celebrated the day by relaxing in front of the PC, eating two pizza pops, some nuts, and drinking a couple of beers; strong beers. Thanks to a crazy week, I hadn't had much time to relax and/or play games (sometimes the two things aren't mutually inclusive) lately, so a slower paced, easy to get into game was in order.

I first installed Europa Universalis II. Dumb. EU2 is not a game renowned for its easy learning curve. Wanting immediate gratification, I skipped the tutorials and went into the campaign full steam ahead. Also dumb. All of a sudden, I was presented with a complex map of Europe, a complicated interface, and no knowledge as to what I should do and where I should start. All I knew was that I had some troops in Krakow and that Eire declared independence from its brutal English oppressors. Beyond that... no clue. I quit the game, saving the long tutorial for later, and installed Homeworld.

Homeworld was a lot easier to get into. The mechanics are pretty simple and established, it's just the full three-dimensional controls that take some getting used to. I breezed through the tutorial and the first couple of missions, but the gameplay wasn't slow enough to relax to. It's a good game -- I'm nearly hooked -- and I'll perhaps write more about it later, but I needed something even slower.

So I installed the old stand-by, Civilization 3. This is a game I've already played quite extensively so there was no trouble getting into the thick of things. I played as the Greeks because I wanted to have a science and culture focused campaign. I tend to be an aggressive war-monger with Civ 3 (very often resorting to ICBM nuke strikes) and since I started the game to unwind, I chose to take the path towards peace.

Unfortunately, as it is in the real world, you can't always control who your neighbours are. As my second city was founded, I made contact with the Germans to the north. Shortly after, I encountered the Egyptians in the south-east. My nation grew to five cities before I realized my predicament; I was boxed in with no where to expand.

Making the most of my situation, I focused on the construction of cultural buildings and Great Wonders. For a little nation, I exuded a lot of culture. Then the Germans approached me with an unreasonable demand. I declined, they declared war. How German of them.

My nations output ramped up for military production. My armies defended my cities valiantly, but they couldn't hold off the deluge. The Germans had double the number of production centres, and for every one unit that I produced, they invaded with two. The size of my nation made me vulnerable to incursions and prone to resource shortages. As I couldn't defend these resources fully, my defenses focused within my major cities. When the Germans started pillaging my improvements, there was little I could do. The starvations hit. Then the riots. There was little recourse, I met their demands and surrendered.

Once peace broke out, the rebuilding began.... until the Germans, again without provocation, declared war on me a second time. Frustration set in, the mouse was nearly thrown clear of the desk, and the game was promptly terminated.

That was when I discovered that it was nearly three in the morning! Whole hours were lost to the time-sink of Civilization 3, and now my PC has four (just installed Tropico!) deep strategy games. Tempting me. I am so fucked.

Enterprise, music, Snood, Polarium, Block Puzzles

I had a bunch of small thoughts to write, but they got delayed because of tiredness and relaxation and a 19 hour work day. Here they are.

One: the cancellation of Enterprise. It both amuses and saddens me to realize that as soon as Enterprise started getting good, it got cancelled. What I saw of the first and second season -- not much -- was stupid mainstreamed-Trek dreck. Some stupid temporal war, some gratuitous Borg moment (completely contradicting the already screwed up Trek universe's chronology), some naked Vulcan rub-downs, a themse song more fitting "Roswell" or "Smallville" than "Star Trek", and other garbage not using the show's premise to its potential.

I think they brought in some new writers this season, because the episodes that I've seen have been much better. More entertaining. More "classic-Trek". More connections to the proper Trek history (Dr. Noonien Soong!). It's too bad. If they started the show like this, maybe they'd have had a better run of it. Then again, maybe it would have been cancelled sooner...

Star Trek needs to take a long hiatus. Take a break. Let the other space drama take over for a while. Maybe kick Rick Berman out of a spacelock.

Two: I have an annoying musical habit. When I acquire new music that I enjoy, I tend to listen to it approximately fifty times in a row. I then get sick of it, stop listening for a while, discover it again some weeks later, listen to it fifty times in a row again, and repeat. Borderline compulsive.

Three: the so-called "casual gamer" has no sense of gaming history. They don't know what came before and they don't really care. They just care about the games that they have encountered and enjoyed.

The more knowledgable gamers (such as I), do care. These gamers are interested in how things are progressing, where they're going, the lineages, the influences, the innovations. This is why said gamers look at Snood, and its successes, with disdain. They see nothing but a man capitalizing off of a better game with a derivative rip-off that has a hideous design and no character. Conveniently enough, I just found Videogame plagiarism, clones and ripoffs.

The developers that reach that casual gamer market embrace this, much to the chagrin of the knowledgable.

Three and a half: only recently, while looking into block puzzle history, did I realize that Popcap's "original" Zuma is nothing but a blatant clone of Mitchell's Puzz Loop. Hell, the ripoff is so obvious that you can't help but think that Popcap licensed the game from them -- but I've yet to find any evidence of this. Popcap-=1; (the counter is getting low).

Three point seven: speaking of Mitchell, I want to get their new game Polarium. I can't decide whether to wait for a domestic release or import now. It looks like an interesting little puzzler coming out in what seems to be a very good time for block puzzle games. A lot of that is no doubt due to the renewed focus on portable gaming. It's a genre that is well suited for very quick pick-up-and-play sessions, so with the DS and PSP both in play it's not surprising that they are showing up in droves. Zookeeper. Mr. Driller. Polarium. Meteos. Lumines. Kollon, along with the pre-requisite Puzzle Bobble and Puyo-Pop ports. I haven't seen this many block puzzle games -- especially with original IP -- come out at once since the great post-Tetris deluge.

Three point eight: The DS might not be so great for platformers or racers or first person shooters or, well, a lot of things -- but it is really good for puzzle games. The simplified interfaces benefit greatly from the stylus.

iPod Shuffle

Sticking out of my black PC case like a big, bright, white Apple middle finger "fuck you" is my slick new iPod Shuffle. It is slick. It is small. I like it.

The Shuffle is not only my first mp3 player, but my first portable music player ever. Considering that I listen to a lot of music and that I'm a tech geek, it's surprising that I've managed to go so long without one of my own. I'd borrow my parent's walkman/radio in high school and my sister's discman later on, but that was it.

Unfortunately, as this is my first, I have no basis for comparison. The only portable systems that I have experience with are game machines, but that doesn't help much. I mean, sure, the Shuffle does sound better than the DS, and it is more convenient to carry than the SP, but it can't make cool tunes like a regular old gameboy.

I still consider "iPod White" to be "Dreamcast White".

Quick impressions: the sound quality is pretty damn good, it's extremely light, nice simple UI without any fluff (don't miss a display at all -- except, maybe, when it randomly shuffles to some newly acquired tune that I can't recognize and I'm left scratching my head trying to figure out who it's by), and easy to install/setup. The only downside, for me, is the (expected) iTunes integration. I like good old Winamp just fine, and I don't like being forced to use iTunes to set up my iPod. The thing doubles as a flash drive, so why the hell can't I just copy mp3s onto it directly and have the damn thing play those automatically? I realize that the answer is probably "DRM", but still... iTunes annoys me.

PS. I'm using my own inconspicuous headphones rather than the included white ones. Since the quality is no different, I'm wondering what this says about my character?

MORE...

1994 weekend

In my life, I have seen two Bushes in power, two Gulf Wars, two shuttle disasters, two Germanies, and I have seen the 80s be cool twice. I'm old enough to remember the Cold War (more so, I'm old enough to actually experience Soviet communism first-hand), the Winnipeg Jets, the Fine Young Cannibals, and Herman's Head.

I'm too young for Generation X, too old for Generation Y, and stuck in that middle straggling generation that is hard to pin down chronologically and even harder to define.

I am twenty-five. A quarter century. It goes without saying that every birthday that you have is your oldest, but on this particular birthday I feel older than I ever have before.

It's not helping that the Edge is having a "1994 Weekend". It was a really good year for the whole "new rock" thing (excluding that whole shotgun to the face incident), seeing "Park Life", "Dummy", "Downward Spiral", "Smash", "Definitely Maybe", "Mellow Gold", " Ill Communication" and a whole bunch of others. Add to that the fact that I was starting high school -- when the teenage hormones tend to intensify any music one is exposed to by a factor of ten -- and the whole year (musically, at least) becomes a memorable one. Then, as I listen to these classic tunes on the edge, I realize that this was eleven years ago. sigh.

A Scary Thing

A horrific event occurs every year or two: Uwe Boll releases a new movie. This event is always greeted with extreme vitriol and sheer disgust. Yet, despite that, there seems to be no stopping this man's film diarrhea. Either this man has an admirable passion for what he does irregardless of what other people think of him, or he is completely lost in his own little world impervious to the criticisms. You can guess which one I believe.

Everything I say about Uwe Boll I say not having seen a single one of his movies. Criticism like this should be frowned upon, but it's hard to argue with practically every review in existence. Rotten Tomatoes scores 1%, Metacritic scores 9, IMDB has it at 1.9. This is outstandingly bad. Never have I seen scores this low.

The man comes across as a complete idiot with no common sense, yet he continues. Alone in the Dark should be a career killer, but he continues. Continues to bring more pain (Bloodrayne trailer) based on generic video games. Worst of all, he's taking Ben Kingsley down with him. Yes, that Ben Kingsley. As much as I liked him before, this association is enough to make me reconsider his entire career.

At least with Tara Reid, there was nothing to reconsider.

As UweBoll.com says: Dear Mr. Boll, please stop making movies.