Below are the 20 most recent journal entries recorded in greenexecutive's LiveJournal:

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Monday, May 23rd, 2011
9:49 am	Postcards from Fereldan Dragon Age II is conducting a very expensive experiment. They're trying to figure out if RPG players notice or care if you reuse the same locations. In all of Kirkwall, there appears to be one kind warehouse, one cave, one house, etc., no matter where you go. Sometimes you enter through one door and the bad guys are in the north end; sometimes they're in the south end. In one really wacky case, you enter in the middle and there are bad guys in both the north and the south! Woo. The answer for me is YES, I NOTICE. It's tremendously disappointing. ( Read more... ) In their defense, the combat is a hell of a lot better. Faster, crisper, and I'm playing a mage now, so I'm like Calvin---this is my autobiography where my hands shoot lightning. Story is bland, and my hero is honestly kind of a tool, but knocking off quests is more fun than washing dishes, so I'm still playing. (And the dishes aren't washed.) (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Friday, April 8th, 2011
10:12 pm	A long rope Kate was getting all cocky, and repeatedly made mistakes. First she wasn't able to land properly, then she banged her shins on the tree roots, then she couldn't land on the far side of the water without getting pulled back, out of control. We were at Stuhstaft Park in Redwood City at the site of Kate's current obsession: the rope swing. It's not much of a swing---just a rope that hangs conveniently over a 5-6' wide stretch of water, perfectly suited for launching out over the water. It's probably dangerous and there's no good way to test the rope for safety, but....there it is, and it's amazing. I have a shiny new Nintendo 3DS at home. I haven't turned it on more than twice, but somehow I've managed to spend an hour and half every Friday tromping through this stream, jumping from rock to rock and swinging on ropes. It's like Mario Brothers, but we're doing it live. We deemed it "Pokey Stick", a long branch I had acquired originally to poke at the bottom of the stream, but then used as a tripod leg to more easily leap from rock to rock. It was great, but at this point both of us had missed enough that our shoes were dripping wet. We followed the stream around two big bends to find the end of the park, where it exited under a tumbledown barb wire fence into a deep channel heading straight to the bay. Uncontrolled erosion has exposed tree branches, cement post settings, and water pipes. The infrastructure in California is in such terrible repair that this all sits in benign neglect, resembling more and more a third-world country. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Thursday, April 7th, 2011
4:21 pm	http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/04/07/and-the-cobras-name-isssssss-mia/?hp "Alright, listen up, people. Our fugitive has been on the slither for ninety minutes. Average belly speed over uneven ground barring injuries is 4 miles-per-hour. That gives us a radius of six miles. What I want from each and every one of you is a hard-target search of every gas station, residence, warehouse, farmhouse, henhouse, outhouse and doghouse in that area. Checkpoints go up at fifteen miles. Your fugitive's name is Mia the Cobra. Go get her." (Comment on this)
Sunday, February 6th, 2011
4:43 pm	Well, this didn't work.
Saturday, February 5th, 2011
1:05 am	All Good Things I've had that phrase stuck in my head for several days now. All good things come to an end, I suppose, but for me the phrase is more from the last episode of Star Trek: Next Generation. It wasn't a great episode as these things go, but it hit the right note of nostalgia---this was a long, long journey we had been on together, and this was seeing them off. I had been watching ST:TNG since I had to stay up Sunday nights at 1am to watch it on UHF out of Des Moines, and I had grown from a kid who liked space ships into a seasoned fan. Now, all good things, again. I'm taking LGGWG down. Most of you who read this know why, but I thought I'd touch on some things I had learned in the process. 1. LGGWG remains a great multiplayer game. It was exactly the sort of game I wanted to play, and for a handful of people it took off. We passed 52,000 turns submitted, and that means with conservative estimate at 3 minutes a turn we get 2600 hours played multiplayer, plus countless others in tutorials. (Well, I can count them, but I haven't yet.) Obviously, LT, the MotionPlus, and NBA2K* geometrically exceed that in terms of hours played, but 2600 hours is still a heavy number---hard to say, no, no one liked that game. 2. LGGWG was too damn hard to play. The end-game multiplayer was rich and nuanced, sure, but oh, what a learning curve. The give-orders, see-orders executed later thing works for veteran wargamers with analytical minds, but it's just a bit too much like programming for it to be easy to grasp. When I was designing the controls, I was sacrificing clarity for control and complexity, but I'm pretty sure there's a better local minimum out there. Next wargame will have a completely modal interface so you can figure it out just by clicking around randomly, EVEN AT THE COST OF GAMEPLAY. 3. Single player, for Odin's sake. It was clear a lot of people liked the game and the format, but were overwhelmed by joining the multiplayer free-for-all. Unfortunately, LGGWG is a little slow-paced played at speed against RoboBot, and the tutorials were too predictable---not enough exploration, not enough variety. Once you got past those first three tutorials, I think the remaining ones were meaty and interesting, but if I were to start over, I would start with the single player content immediately with an engineering eye towards supporting multiplayer, rather than trying to graft a single-player campaign onto an essentially multiplayer experience. Plus, then I could sell the single player experience to single-players and widen my audience significantly. 4. People on the Internet are terrified of failure. Nearly every game of NewTown with anonymous newbies started with a bunch of apologies---oh, I just started, woo you're gonna beat me, blah blah. I knew that they were setting expectations so they could leave the game with their pride, but it was a clue that I needed some more gentle way of introducing newbies to the game. OK, enough for tonight. I'll post more post-game analysis later. (Comment on this)
Sunday, January 23rd, 2011
7:40 pm	Committed '91 That was a horrible, horrible movie. Jesu. The only interesting part was that I spent an hour and half wondering where I had seen Jennifer O'Neill before. Finally learned she was the Covergirl Makeup model for 30 years, so of course her face was burned into my consciousness from posters and billboards. (Comment on this)
Friday, January 14th, 2011
9:22 pm	S. Getting S. to smile is tricky. S., Kate's friend, age 7, has a stone poker face. Kate's all noise and personality, while S. will go blank in an unfamiliar situation and wait to see what happens. She stayed over for dinner tonight and we hit Food Anxiety. Like, I want to stay for dinner, but the food will be *weird*. Worse, S.'s mother is a pediatrician, so when I poured out some potato chips she was like, no I don't want to get in trouble with my mother. I told her I wouldn't tell her mom. She said, NO. The Food Anxiety was big. She wanted a turkey sandwich, NO lettuce, NO ketchup, NO cheese. I produced a mostly-ripe avocado and she relented, but THAT WAS ALL. She and Kate wandered off to play some more, and when I said, "Hey, I need some people who want to eat turkey sandwiches" they returned. "This one is for Kate," I said, placing a huge sandwich festooned with trimmings. "And this is for S.," I said, putting a flat, boring sandwich in front of her. S. gave it the eye, total poker face. Seeing her look, I said, "It's only got turkey, avocado, and chilled monkey brains." She went a little pale, but never broke expression. I leaned close and whispered, "It really doesn't have chilled monkey brains." Pause, and then we got it. First a guarded smile, and then a huge one of relief. I have my ways. (Comment on this)
Sunday, December 26th, 2010
12:00 am	Postcards from upside down Just finished VVVVVV. It's an interesting game. It's brute-hard, in the sense that the game depends on your flawless execution of precision jumps, often timed. At the same time, it's not very hard in that I bounced through the thing in 2.5 hours, and the longest I spent hung up on a room was around 5 minutes (a room universally ranked as a noticeable difficulty spike, I might add). Most of the hardest jumps in the game you can clear in about a minute or two because Cavanaugh, the Irish designer of the game, gives you basically instant respawns near everything tricky. So, I died 1122 times, and made about 4200 inversions (jumps, more or less). I died 1 in 4 times I jumped, and over 7 times a minute. That's ridiculous, except that (from forum posts I found) I did about average. Cavanaugh reduced the cost for death to be so low as to not really matter, and although you thought, "I hate you, Terry" for a few traversals, it never really made me lose focus on the game. My least-favorite feature was probably the floaty slowdown. Your character has just a touch of slowdown when you let go of the keys, and although you adjust to it, you get a lot of crap deaths sliding into a pit of spikes because you didn't quite let go at the right moment. However, as noted above, who cares? It's not the game for everyone. It's hard, doubled by the number-pad control. Although I loved the 8-bit sensibility and the artistic use of color and shape, a lot of people don't get nostalgia seeing something that simple. It's worth playing the demo, though, to see what he hath wrought. (Comment on this)
Sunday, November 14th, 2010
11:04 pm	Postcards from the Mojave desert Willow, red-haired hottie with a sniper rifle, just reached level 20. In Fallout 3, level 20 was the max, and the game deflated like yesterdays balloon as soon as you reached it. Didn't matter how compelling the adventure content, when you ran out of perks and levels to get, it was like eating cookies made without sugar. It's hard to explain, but the illusion of progress in an adventure game is almost everything you need. In New Vegas, the game runs to level 30, so I'm still climbing. I was having the height of fun this last few hours of gameplay---excellent characters, funny dialog, and a few actual puzzles in combat form. Like, there's a woman with a sniper rifle up high, surrounded by vicious dogs. What do you do? Just sniping her might work, except that if she sees you she shoots back. Of course, it's still mess. It's ugly, both from a tech perspective and from an actual muddy-brown-rust-colored-textures-everywhere perspective. The game breaks its illusion of life constantly with dodgy animations, pops, flips, teleports, interpenetrations, etc. It's got bugs-a-plenty, with my AI companions locking up or getting lost all the time, out-of-order quest dialogs, and crazy NPCs who just start shooting at me or my friends for no discernable reason. It's hard crashed my XBox a few times, it's locked my direction, it's clearly leaking memory from moment to moment. A lot of the missions are make-workish fetch quests. And yet, it's totally absorbing, and I'm sad to stop every night. It gives me this amazing sense of accomplishment, it's constantly rewarding me with new locations that, although constructed of the same 14 textures, somehow feel fresh. There's funny dialog, unexpected bits of detail, and genuine surprises in the plot. I'm addicted to following the hollow arrows on my compass to new locations. I can see that playing as a Legion sympathizer would be an almost completely different experience, as the place is crawling with NCR troopers and anti-Legion quests. I'm faintly attempted to do it again, except I haven't slept properly in 2 weeks, so I don't need that. I'm not playing tonight just so I can go to bed at a reasonable time, but it'll be hard to stay away. (Comment on this)
Monday, September 13th, 2010
10:53 pm	Watching "Sarah Connor Chronicles" 1. Kate pointed out that SarahMac had a kid named Connor, so she should like this show. 2. They travel through time, then naked Summer Glau beats some football bros up to take their clothes. They missed a one-shot that one of the guys isn't wearing a San Dimas Football shirt, a la Bill & Ted. (Comment on this)
Monday, August 2nd, 2010
12:51 am	Fishing "Will there be nothing left of him?" asked Kate. We stood out behind the garage, trench-digger in hand. The ground was too hard to dig in, much, so I had poured much of the fish's "hospital" water onto the ground to make a hole, and the clay mud was quickly drying in the summer. The hole was one of a wide variety of shallow graves for all the birds, rodents, and now fish that I had buried behind the garage. A lot of wild animals die and leave corpses around that need disposing, and this was the animal cemetery. "He's so small. If you dig around here, you might find bits of bone from the squirrels and rats, but there's hardly anything *to* this fish, so he'll be gone when the rains come and the bacteria do their work." I rested on the shovel handle. She considered this. "Everything ends up this way," I added, knowing it to be true in my heart. She paused for thought. "I'll come back tomorrow," she said, and turned away. We got some new cardinal fish last week to add to add to our guppies. At first it was like a middle school dance---the tiny blue cardinals schooling around on one side, and the bigger guppies hanging together on the other, studiously pretending not to notice the other. It's gone downhill since then. For some reason, the guppies have decided to nip on each other out of nervousness. In what appears to be collateral damage or mistaken identity, a guppy bit off the delicate tail of a cardinal. We found him stuck to the filter intake, unable to swim strongly enough to get free. After we freed our injured friend and put him in a separate bowl to recover, he appeared to get stronger. Over the course of the next day he weakened, twitching, always face down, unable to right himself without a tail. Kate made a get-well card for the fish which read "Dear, [sic] Fishy, I Hope You Feel Better Soon, -Kate" in gold paint. She put it beneath the clear bowl so our poor inverted fish could read it. There are some things the unconditional love of a 7-year-old can't solve. I wasn't sure whether we should have just pulled the fish out of the bowl and let him die quickly, but I kept holding out hope he'd figure out how to swim straight, and at first he was eating. When we got back from the pool today, he was glassy-eyed and unmoving, and it was time to say goodbye. Kate looked sad for just a minute when I broke the news, but then seemed to take it in stride, and decided backyard burial was appropriate. She came out and spoke with me as we buried the fish, and was soberly curious rather than sad. We had warned her repeatedly that the fish we're keeping are fragile and short-lived, and she seems to have internalized that. Plus, she's Kate. She seems invincible, sometimes. I hope she is. We've added some more fake plants and an improvised "castle" to the tank to break up the sightlines so the guppies and the cardinals have more places to be out of sight of one another, and the cardinals have learned to stay the hell out of the way. If anyone is a hardcore aquarian and can come up with a better plan, do tell. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Sunday, July 11th, 2010
11:50 pm	Bustin' makes me feel good I had heard, years ago, that the last act of Star Wars: A New Hope is heavily influenced by The Dam Busters", which re-enacts Operation Chastise with much lionization. Then again, it was a pretty lionizing moment. Donald Gibson, the wing commander, was an amazing badass who had earned flying medals before he started this long-odds operation. The famous last act of "Dam Busters" is indeed quoted in Star Wars, although the dialog overlaps are fewer than I was expecting. (No one in a Lancaster, for example, locked his X-foil in attack position.) Gibson's dog has a surprising name, although one doubts Gibson was really a practicing Klan member. It's a little jarring for Americans as everyone in the movie repeats this name endlessly, and eventually the dog becomes the center of an emotional beat. However, what surprised me is how much I identified with the Barnes Wallis, the inventor who came up with the Upkeep bouncing bombs. Much of his time on screen is pitching his idea to an indifferent bureaucracy. I've pitched a lot of soon-to-be-rejected ideas to uncaring organizations. It's not a good feeling. Once in a while, though, you end up showing the right demo to the right person and things go faster than you expect. There's some kind of metaphor, here, about delivering just the right payload at just the right time to create a...a flood of change. I can't think of it, though. (Comment on this)
Thursday, July 1st, 2010
12:41 am	Press X to Get Tired Of This Crap Several points: A central plot device in "Heavy Rain" is a torture-porn serial-killer motif, where our sad-sack divorcee suffers bad shit under command of the killer. I'm vastly annoyed that I can't immediately go to the police. Given the players are the one making poor Sad-Sack suffer at the whims of the game designer, who is the torturer and the victim, here? No one in this whole story goes to a doctor when they are injured. I've spent hours doing the worlds' least-effective medical activity with the hot chick, and even the detective has bandaged people up, but, dude, has anyone heard of an emergency room? Their approach to medicine is rivaled only by their grasp of physics (if you're seeing visible blue arcs jumping several feet through dry air, DO NOT GO NEAR) and baby care (no sense, like, cleaning the baby while changing the diaper). There's this veneer of America on the surface, but this is a European game. For example: They told me to go to room 201, so I went to the second floor. Psych, they meant the third floor, since Europeans count from 0 with floors. Lots of bits like that all through the game. There are some weird moments of narrative voice. You start the scene controlling the hot chick, and then she leaves on some errand and you are in control of Sad-Sack. You think, hey, wait, who am I? I finally got to something that qualified as gameplay, in some traditional sense. It felt fake and stagey, and I wasn't interested in mastering it. The strengths of this game are, of course, graphical. The controls + this hyperrealistic style leads to work well with tiny actions that express a little bit of character, or drag you back into control of the scene a little. If they give you too much cutscene, you tend to sit back and trying to figure out how they rigged the faces, or why the extras have such weird walking paths. Tonight was the first night where I was kind of meh about continuing. It's pretty, but the pretty is wearing off and the conceits of this 2-hours-of-plot-told-in-10-hours story are beginning to show. Sad-Sack is all wah-wah dork, and I'd rather be almost anyone else in the story. Even the Origami Killer himself. (Comment on this)
Saturday, June 26th, 2010
12:16 am	Press X to Jason I'm pretty sure I know who the Origami Killer is in "Heavy Rain". It's the creepy dark-haired woman wearing a POLICE poncho who can shift through time and space. I got to the police station with my Casey Affleck-esque FBI profiler (how much does this game resemble "Mystic River"?). The station doesn't give you much to do. I didn't really feel like chasing down the collection of tiny interactions like getting coffee or quaffing a cup of water, so I started following the "stage music" characters. In particular, there was this Gallic policewoman who kept doing spline-y, LERP-y spirals around the office. I stalked her from map to coffee stand to office to coffee stand to map to whereever, with her eyes never quite focusing on anything and her head bobbing back and forth like she's hunting for clues. Of course, she was searching for clues, since she was playing the same animation that she was at the crime scene. Finally, I break down and follow the story, and then, eventually, we're back in the police station. As we question the guy who is acting guilty and weird...IN COMES CREEPY POLICE WOMAN! She's wearing her low-level-of-detail pixel-y textures, but she walks directly through the desk as if she's a ghost, and continues on through one of the detectives. She's got to be the baddy. I know it. I'm watching you, poncho-clad killer. (Comment on this)
Monday, June 7th, 2010
2:17 am	Discussion tonight: 1: "I finally figured out where all the hot women in Sacramento hang out!" 2: "The middle school?" (Comment on this)
Tuesday, June 1st, 2010
2:03 am	Charted Today we made 40lbs of strawberries into acres of jam. I'd like to say that I did most of it, but in truth I cleaned up around the edges---chopped the odd strawberry, mopped up sticky red goo from the stove, tighten a jar lid here and there. Sara and L. did most of the work. The jam is sweet and sticky and good. Kate and her friends played outside, stole a bag of plastic gold from "the king" (me, but I hired them as treasurers later), and built a fort of pillows where they counted the loot. Kate told me, apropos nothing, that "touching two necklaces means you look like a grownup", then danced off without explanation. As lunch drew near, the girls' mood plummeted, but they returned all to smiles after a sandwich and a glass of milk each. There's a lesson here for grownups, too, but I refuse to learn it. I also finally knocked off the end of "Uncharted: Drake's Fortune". It's been reviewed a lot, so I won't waste your time saying, "Oh, good shooting elements, but they get repetitive; such lovely shaders and outdoor rendering; cutscenes carry the game whenever it slows down." And, of course, it's hard not to be creeped out by the weird levity Nathan has after slaughtering 300+ mercenaries. Dude is Old Testament collector of the firstborns out there. I'll say something else, instead: I found myself comparing this experience to the one you have playing a good side-scrolling platformer, say a free one that has a good design ("Don't Look Back", say, or "Cave Story")(Google both of these if you haven't played them). From an abstract perspective, they are nearly identical games, and, I would argue, contain about as much gameplay. Drake's Fortune takes a little longer, since there are noisy cutscenes and more sequences where you're just admiring the scenery, but an excellent downloadable sidescroller has tighter controls and no camera problems. Either way, Drake's Fortune's gameplay tightly follows the platformer pattern: Teach the interface, tighten the noose of difficulty, forecast the puzzle solutions, and pepper each area with enemies that slow the player down a little . Drake's Fortune takes a hyperrealistic art style, but it is as artificial an experience as Cave Story. Drake's Fortune, frankly, is a hell of a lot easier than Cave Story. Mass market audience and all that. Also, I missed Euphoria. Just three years after release, Drake's poppy transitions and non-physics-based jumping feel old school, like an updated Dreamcast game. GTA IV's crazy human accident physics, and even the way Nico Bellic skitters down stairs, are such an improvement over how Drake moves. How quickly we are spoiled. Still, this is one of those games I found myself looking forward to every night, and I hummed the theme music while I canned strawberries. You can't ask for too much more. As a final note, I was completely smitten by camera- and gun-toting Elena in her slowly-dirtying yoga top and cargo pants. If you're going to take a hottie reporter with you on your pulp serial adventure, she's a wonderful one. (2 Comments |Comment on this)
Monday, April 19th, 2010
1:09 am	Farmville, but in real life The soil in this part of the Peninsula is called "clay soil"; that actually means just "clay". It's hard as a rock by mid-summer, and even now with the spring rains just finished, it still takes a steel shovel and all my weight for every spadeful. Kate wants a garden, and we are providing. Kate didn't really focus on one crop, so we have strawberries, tomatoes, pumpkins, watermelons, carrots, and broccoli, along with some California poppies for color. Sara and I call it our "plant murdering project", since the chances that all of these will grow well are zero, and we're lousy gardeners. The whole project was too slow for a 6-year-old. After we hacked back the hedera vines (the NoCal equivalent of kudzu) to clear off the sprinklers that would provide the water, Kate declared she was on "break" and climbed our fig tree. Hooray. However, she refocused once it was time to put the seeds and plants in, and put together the seedling dishes for our indoor plants. (Note: We are starting seedlings indoors so we can murder them at a slightly later date than the ones that will die outside this week.) We set the outdoor plants along the back fence, an area so sunny it's baked to death other attempts at ground cover. However, they get water there, and the seed packets and web advice recommend full sun for all of these plants, so, have some INCREDIBLY FULL SUN. It's 90 days to harvest our first watermelon. Let's see what happens. (Comment on this)
12:57 am	I spent many hours today beating the hell out of Japanese gangsters. Kate had a birthday party and then that morphed into a playdate, and Sara was at a concert, so it was just me and "Yakuza 3". I have this faint impression one could implement everything but the fight engine in 2D 8-bit style and almost nothing about the design of the game would change. At some fundamental level, this is the same game we've been playing since the first Zelda. There's no emergent gameplay here, or complicated physics, or deep dependency on tech. It's an old-fashioned game that happens to run on new hardware. ( Read more... ) (Comment on this)
Sunday, March 21st, 2010
1:27 am	Who knew? This is the response (as of 2005) of the C&H sugar company to the question of whether they used bone ash to whiten their sugar.... --- Thank you for taking the time to contact C & H Sugar regarding our use of carbonized bone charcoal. There are no animal products in the sugar itself, which is certified kosher. Bone char is made from cattle bones only, never from those of other animals. The function of the bone char is to remove impurities from raw sugar. The bones used are not the byproducts of the meat packing industries, but are from cattle that have died naturally, in places like India, Pakistan and Nigeria. The principal use for such bone material is for gelatin production, and charcoal manufacture is a by-product of this industry. In Scotland, they are burned in an enclosed atmosphere, at 1200º centigrade, to create activated charcoal. This bone charcoal is used to remove color, impurities, and certain naturally occurring minerals that could result in cloudiness when the sugar is dissolved. The bone char is not "in" the sugar, but is used only as a filter, similar to a coffee filter. Its use is a very common practice in sugar refining, and is currently the best available. Vegetable charcoal does not remove ash, so sugar produced using this type of carbon as an alternative is likely to be of somewhat lower quality. C&H Sugar is looking for alternatives. If a consumer finds the use of this bone charcoal objectionable, an alternative would be a specialty sugar. C&H Hawaiian Washed Raw is processed in the Hawaiian Islands, where lime (calcium carbonate) is used a s a clarifying agent, rather than carbonized bone char. It is then transported to our Mainland refinery, where it is dried and packaged. It should be available in markets that carry C&H Sugar. ----- Personally, I'm not aghast about it (I wear leather, use dead trees to hold up my house, etc.) but I had no idea that you used bones to filter sugar. The more you know! Also: C&H sugar is one of the only sugars that guarantees it does not use cornstarch to prevent caking. Hooray! (1 Comment |Comment on this)
Sunday, March 14th, 2010
12:51 pm	Tell me if this works for you http://lggwg.com/wolff/art/fractalCrowd/FractalCrowd.html Thanks! Edit: I had some cross-browser wackiness with the slider, among other things, and also full-screen, so I'm curious if anyone sees any odd artifacts. Looks like no. (3 Comments |Comment on this)