Geek on Parade

Liveblogging "The Punisher" (2004)

Sun, 20 Dec 2009 09:46:10 GMT

- This movie is so underconfident that when the Magic Carribean Guy gets his one line, "Vaya con dios", he is forced to add, "Go with God."

- Anyone who remotely knows who The Punisher is knows mobsters murdered his family. It's The Punisher's only motivation. He punishes. So why devote the entire first act to showing that Frank Castle has a loving family and end it with a long car chase where his wife and son try to escape? We all know they can't escape or there's no Punisher---it's the least tense car chase ever. It's like trying to play up whether or not Peter Parker is going to be bitten by a radioactive spider.

- Frank Castle walks around Tampa in summer wearing a full-length black leather jacket. He is not sweating. Impossible. Note to filmmakers: Comic book Frank Castle lives in New York, see, so the jacket makes sense. It's Tampa; he should be wearing a skull-emblazoned muscle shirt.

- When I lived in crappy apartments, casually-dressed Rebecca Romjin did not live next door. Also, imagine the script meeting: Hey, let's find one of the world's most beautiful women and dress her badly! Good plan.

- El Mariachi arrived.

- This is odd. They gave all the Schwartzenegger-style bon-mots to the bad guy.

- All the hitmen in this movie use really stupid ways to kill people, even Castle. Everyone seems to think that just walking up to someone armed is a good way to kill someone. Oh, wait, finally, two hours in, Castle actually sneaks up on someone. Oh, wait, now he's just wading into machine-gun fire again. What is this, Commando?

- Frank Castle's modus operandus is not entirely un-Columbine-esque. We're rooting for this guy?

- Why does Frank blow up all the cars in the parking lot? Do they need Punishing as well? BAD CAR! SHAMEFUL CAR!

- For a guy whose toilet was destroyed earlier, he sure is drinking a lot in that last moody scene.

Done

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 20:27:56 GMT

Finished Dragon Age, finally. Last night, at 1:30am, one of the characters said to mighty Canada the Grey Warden, "You need to get some sleep before the final battle tomorrow." I looked at my watch and had to agree.

Finished it this morning. Oblique spoilers about amusing bug in endgame await.

I managed to horque off Morrigan on the night before the battle so she left us. This is a problem, since that left me only with Wynne as a mage, a bunch of lunkhead warriors, and one thief. That means a three-warrior-one-mage build and no freeze ability (Morrigan's Cone of Cold spell is pretty much *the* useful thing she does). Suuuck.

I decide to take warrior Alstair (plot reasons which I shan't elaborate), Wynne, and my dog I named Kitty. The dog is sort of like a LGGWG puffer---super fast, all hand-to-hand. I haven't used him at all, but I figured what the hell, why not? He's level 19 like everyone else.

Anyhoo, we roll into the series of final battle, music all ominous French horns and trombones, and of course Kitty and Alstair go down like bowling pins in most fights, even with me driving Wynne to try to keep them alive with spells. Suuuck.

Finally, we're at the end boss, and of course I'm fighting both the boss AND 300 minions without any area-of-effect spells. For about ten minutes I kept everyone going, but suddenly everyone gets KO'd but Kitty.

I don't want to do 10 minutes of battle again, so I say, oh, what the hell, let's give it a try.

Now, finally, the bug.

The big boss battle is on a giant flat arena. Kitty is very, very fast. I quickly outrun my minion enemies and sprint over to the ballista, the weapon we're supposed to use to kill the boss when he's hiding on the far ledge.

No one bothers me.

Since my friends all died far away from the ballista, Kitty has run so far and so fast that the enemies have been streamed out. They have literally disappeared to make room for the rest of the terrain. If I ran back towards them, they would reappear, but for now they are in some limbo zone. This has happened before in various situations, but I never thought I could cull an entire army into the rear clipping plane.

However, since the army isn't dead, the boss won't start his regular AOE attacks, so he just stands there.

Unmolested, Kitty is allowed to load and fire the ballista. How he does this is not animated, but it works, and two minutes of repetitive A-button mashing later, the boss goes down, having never even taken a shot at Kitty.

THE DOG SAVES THE DAY! THE DOG SAVES THE DAY!

Wacky.

Thank goodness it's almost over

Wed, 16 Dec 2009 09:59:26 GMT

35 hours into Dragon Age. Frack, let this end. The story is getting pretty good, but I'm ready to be done. Let's just kill the Archdaemon and get it over with.

I'm good enough with my troops and they're getting strong enough that the fights are sorta-kinda-fun, although the difference between winning and losing in those fights is dependent hugely on what crazy-ass decision the AI has made. I realize that I'm supposed to get into modding the AI for my guys, but, in truth, I'd rather they just not be morons. Most importantly, I'd like to be able to program formations.

If only there were some technology that would make programming your AI easy and intuitive. Gosh, that would *@&#(*$ rock.

Two notes

Sat, 12 Dec 2009 19:08:23 GMT

1. Lappy, my cheap-ass laptop I bought on clearance at Staples when I left my old job, finally stopped booting completely. Either the mobo is toast or just the BIOS chip, but either way I took it to the ice floes. Repairing it would equal the replacement cost, and I never really loved it. It was unremarkable as long as it worked, but neither fun nor aesthetic.

I decided to powerup my old tablet with a new solid-state hard drive and Windows 7. Both are da bomb. My brain keeps adding a clicking noise when I see the hard-drive light flicker, but the machine is almost completely slient, lighter, and amazingly faster. It's like a whole new machine. The good part is how much I love this tablet now; the bad part is that I may never be able to get another machine without an SSD drive and they are super-expensive.

2. More Dragon Age.

I never thought I'd be more conflicted about a game after Mass Effect, but Dragon Age happens to be both compelling and irritating at the same time. I was up until 5am last night finding the hugely-foreshadowed Anvil of the Void. Once I got there, I realized it was an old, old fantasy trope, but there was a rockin' battle right before it.

I love the characters, voice acting, even the plot is neat (as lunkheaded as it is, frequently). Some of the dungeon designs are cool, or at least quite polished.

However, the fighting is so annoying. My current strategy is totally weaselly, but it's the only way to get them to keep formation, which is to set them never to move independently, then have my mages attack distant enemies to draw them onto my fighter formation. It's lame, since I'm exposing problem with their AI. Enemy AI will ALWAYS rush you, and they have fixed-distance activation, so the 1995 technique of inching into rooms to pick off enemies one by one works about 80% of the time---any time you are not cut-scened into the middle of a battle.

Now that I've played tons of video games that focus on special forces, written AI for big melees, and studied real-life tactics, this battle system makes as much sense as an 80s action film. If a team of four elite killers really did go into giant dungeons full of slavering hordes, they would drill, drill, drill, drill. They would be like a football offense, with plays and audibles. It's funny to think of all these heroes huddling together before a dungeon door going, "Delta formation left side with fireball on three. Ready? GOOOO, TEAM!"

Yet, in this game, my moron AI sidekicks just sprint into battle every which way from each other and get repeatedly flanked. It's so annoying.

Thu, 10 Dec 2009 01:05:21 GMT

Two notes on Dragon Age: Origins.

1. I figured out, finally, that when they say "two-weapon fighting is good for rogues", what they really mean is "two-weapon fighting is the best rogues are gonna get". If they had written something more clear, like "Only morons would have a fighter specialize in two-weapon instead of two-handed" that would have helped.

Canada, the mighty red-haired warrior lady, has switched to two-handed fighting which comes with repeated chances for stun and knockdown, unlike two-weapon that does lame minor criticals and debuffs on your opponents. I have a giant electrical axe that I liberated while murdering cultists in the west, and it's made the game mondo more fun now that my warrior can actually DO something.

Although it's way more fun now, the combat system is still a weak point. A particular gripe is that the game punishes you with cut scene intros to fights. In a sidequest, there are these graves you have to disturb, and each time you do there's this totally brutal fight you have to survive, tougher than some of the bosses. However, the cut scenes force your units to stand in a clumped-up diamond, which means they are easy pickings for being surrounded and flanked. On the first grave, I forgave them, but by grave #4 it was like, come on, you dorks, you'd think even my lunkheaded warrior would have figured out that the grave is full of skeleton archers and revenants like the last three times, and JUST MAYBE WE COULD TAKE SOME GODDAMN COVER before we summon them.

2. I think I've figured out the relationship stuff and how it mixes with gender and class.

So, you can go through the game as male, female and either wizard, rogue, or fighter. You can't really drag someone of the same class around with you without missing something. (I tried a two-warrior build for a while and got munched.)

So, given you know that you have three classes, two genders, and two major play styles (nice vs. d-bag). Your romance partner, then, has to complement you in this matrix. It's important to remember you can't double-up on warriors or rogues in your party (only mages double well).

So, let's review our romantic leads:

Zevran: Rogue, male, amoral, bi
Alstair: Warrior, male, basically nice, straight
Leliana: Rogue, female, nice, bi
Morrigan: Mage, female, hateful wench, straight

The missing combos are then:

Mage, male
Warrior, female

If you play as a warrior and you're nice, you won't hook up with Alstair, but otherwise you have your choice.
If you play as a warrior and you're mean, it's a shoo-in for Morrigan.
If you play as a rogue and you're nice, you can have either Alstair or Leliana.
If you play as a rogue and you're mean, you get Morrigan. I can't see any of the others working.
If you play as a mage and you're mean, you can get either Morrigan or Zevran (since mages can double).
If you play as a mage and you're nice, you get Alstair or Leliana.

So, the upshot is that they have excellent coverage---except for female mean rogues, as Morrigan don't swing that way. You would have to win Zevran over by showering him with gifts, I think.

It's funny that I've spent this much time modeling the romance but have zero interest in modeling the spell system. Honestly, the romance part is more compelling than the story at times. (Plus I'm a big softie.)

Fanboys

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 19:45:55 GMT

Saw Fanboys, the story of four nerds (and one nerdette) trying to see Phantom Menace early.

It's four movies shoved together, and it switches tone arbitrarily. There's a funny movie about SW fans at war with Trek fans while on their holy mission filled with Star Wars references in the manner of (the superior) "George Lucas in Love", but it only peeks out every now and then. I laughed at that part, and programmed through the other bits. I can't recommend it, exactly, but if it's on while you're working it's kinda sweet.

The premise of the film, a pilgrimage to The Ranch to see Phantom Menace, is kind of weird for me. I lived near the Ranch for a while, and even ate lunch there and walked around a bit (thanks Ping!). It's neat, but it's also a big office park where people work.

We got requests from kids to visit Visual Concepts/Sega Sports and see the action. We usually turned them down, mostly because we didn't have time for visitors, but also because making games isn't like making movies, where all the props are sitting out and the actors are wandering around in costume. Games, even good ones, generally suck until right before release, and playing the final is better than playing a broken debug build with temp art and poppy animations. It would break their fanboy hearts to see a hive of nerds sitting quietly writing code.

Bat Boy

Mon, 30 Nov 2009 08:42:40 GMT

Batman: Arkham Asylum is real good. Great, most of the time. It's great being Batman. It's a good story filled with enough familiarities to feel Bat-ish, but not a rote reimagining of any particular movie. It leans heavily towards the colors and shapes of the first and second films, but uses Mark Hamill (yes, that Mark Hamill) from The Animated Series as an absolutely fantastic, rip-roaring, amazing Joker. (Props to Rebecca whatsername for Harley Quinn, although it's a smaller, more thankless part.)

Batman himself has always been a weirdo, and the game doesn't mince around about it---the story is about Joker trying to bring Batman down to his level, and, well, it sort of works. I mean, you totally buy into what's happening in the Asylum, but perhaps you're not so much really believing this a character moment for Bruce Wayne. Batman's motivations are those of any video game hero---reach the next save point, punch the baddies, and get all the collectables. It's hard to maintain character focus when you're like, dude, look, another Riddler trophy! Ka-ching! More XP so I can buy powerups!

The controls rock. You take over Batman effortlessly, and I probably went 4 hours before I managed to get Batman to do something dorky that broke my belief that I was really Batman. (You can sometimes stand on pipes that Batman probably shouldn't, and he takes some big knocks if you zipline through complicated terrain.) There are a lot of animations to deal with starts and stops and ricochets, and Batman even sometimes gracefully bends a wing to fit through tight spaces in the air.

It's not entirely unlike Shadow Complex, although obviously full-3D and less slavishly devoted to aping Metroid all the way down to the metal. There's the usual hustle for equipment upgrades that are doled out about once very two hours, each one allowing new travel and connectivity across the familiar gamescape. You also spend a lot of your time looking for Riddler trophies, most of which necessitate using your tools in some faintly puzzle-like way.

The combat system is the newest piece of tech, and it's tight and fun without requiring much memorization; more about timing and catching all the onscreen cues and not at all about combos. There's a hair too much leaping around---once you get in melees with a dozen men you find that you mash the jump button and roll around like Mary Lou Retton.

There is one boss fight near the end where the camera fails the game, and it's the usual problem---let's strip the character of his regular tools and confine him in a high-walled, inescapable area (despite the fact that Batman's toolbelt is packed to the gills with zip lines, grappling hooks, and explosives). The camera doesn't quite fit inside this walled box, and so it sort of whips around and lets you get blindsided by the big monsters, but, you know, I think that was one of only two times in 15 hours where I kvetched about the camera. (The other is a bit in Killer Croc's lair, which is the nadir of the game in both art and design as well. So, camera was a distant third to my kvetching, as Sara will attest.)

It's way the frack better than Dragon Age: Origins. Origins is drunk on sprawl and story and particle effects but has no control over any of it. Like Mass Effect, Origins feels like big chunks of it were built by teams that never spoke to one another, or were partitioned off for so long they lost track of why they needed any of it.

Batman is the opposite---very tightly focus-tested and economical. It's so technically tight that only once in a blue moon do you see two solid bodies pass through each other. It's also very forgiving---each death comes with a hint on how to avoid dying next time, often too soon during my learning process. At one point I reached an obscure Riddler trophy and a popup appeared telling me how to get down from my perch without killing myself. Right there is the effect of thorough QA.

No, it's great. I really appreciated the fact that I died only rarely, and usually only because I was hurrying through the stealth sequences (I'm not much for stealth, although I didn't mind this much). Batman shouldn't die---he's the frickin' Batman.

And his parents are DEAD.

Awesome

Sat, 28 Nov 2009 06:30:56 GMT

I showed this to Kate. I asked her if she'd be an astronaut. She lifted up her ponytail and said, "Look! I'm an astronaut!"

It's like health care, but with smaller wheels

Mon, 23 Nov 2009 07:08:05 GMT

My old train set was packed in its original boxes, more or less. The ones that didn't come out of the original big-box set had price tags on them.

The smallest coal tender I have was $1.50 at Target in 1981. In inflation-adjusted dollars, that's about $5.70, which is a little less than a 4x inflation. It's not an expensive piece---the parts are simple plastic, the paint job screen-printed, but it's perfectly fine to haul around.

The cheapest equivalent I could find is $19.99 list, although you can get significant discounts online. Non-digital trains have increased at least twice as fast as inflation, possibly almost 4x as fast, and digital sets are sky-high. I suspect Lionel and Marklin have figured out that the profit on a few thousand obsessives is worth more than broad, cheap market penetration.

Several classic hobbies have done this---baseball cards and comic books. Decade after decade chasing the collector and the specialist and ignoring the mass market, and then suddenly the market crashes.

Lo and behold Marklin went bankrupt in March of this year.

Whoops.

OK, that's the last of the train posts for a while. I have to get back to my first love, collecting Beanie Babies.

Train?

Sat, 21 Nov 2009 05:31:56 GMT

A trip to the train store in Redwood City did nothing to ease the train madness. We didn't get anything, but I left with my head spinning. Man, it's gotten so complicated. And expensive.

The little train that almost didn't

Thu, 19 Nov 2009 07:12:38 GMT

It's train time.

(Yes, the engine is backwards.)

"Your old stuff is cool," said Kate, playing with the little green car that, when wound, shot across the driveway. We were excavating the boxes my parents sent me, looking for the missing track to my electric train that dates back to 1980 or so. She had already cuddled Robert and Teddy, my ratty old stuffed animals, and wanted to take them to bed with her (no), and set my plastic day-of-the-week desk calendar to her birthday. I fished out my Irish 2nd grade math book too, to see if Kate could do some of the problems.

We never found enough track to form a circle, but Kate loved pulling the train around on a short shoofly track and loading the car-carrier with big American cars.

At lunch today, I hit the hobby store and picked up some new turns, railers, and a track with terminals to connect it to my transformer. After Kate went to bed (we played TransAmerica, of course), I replaced rusty track, oiled wheels, and rewired the terminals until my Burlington Northern engine was zooming around the dining room table.

I have Burlington Northernn stock that my father bought be. They model the train that ran through Ames, and it was important to him that I had the "right" train. Dad has his own O-gauge trains from when he was a kid, all Santa Fe trains (including the famous yellow-and-red liveried engines). I'm sure setting up his trains and seeing my eyes light up was just like seeing Kate's. And so now the circle of train track continues.

I don't know why trains are so satisfying. Is it because you are in control of something that's normally huge and unstoppable? Is it that trains and tracks are composable, so you can create something that feels like your own, unlike toy cars? Is it that, like robots and pets and children, something that moves by itself is immediately interesting?

I love trains. Going full-on train guy is scary---you end up with a garage that looks like It's A Small World, or a basement that's lined floor to ceiling with miniature rolling stock. I've seen both, and it's...it's not good. It's not quite as bad as collecting Lladro figurines, but close.

But, oh, it's fun. Maybe I need to hit the store again tomorrow and pick up some proper Union Pacific cars and a new engine.

What do you guys think? More train? Or does that road lead to crazy?

Brief note

Sun, 15 Nov 2009 13:54:13 GMT

Sara and I had been planning to make the smartphone move at some point; we'd hit enough moments where we were like, wow, I wish there were WiFi here that it seemed like it was time.

I visited the Verizon store twice, once with Kate to scout out whether the Droid was awesome or not (she loved it), and once to purchase. The first time, on Veterans Day in a nearly-empty store, required a half-hour wait to see a salesperson. The second time, on a moderately-busy Saturday afternoon, had us with a 45 min wait until we gave up.

We went down the street three blocks, walked into the Apple Store. We had an activated iPhone in less than ten minutes.

On the way back from the store, I said, "Hey, Sara, is Adam's phone number in my old phone? I need to call him and see if he ever wrote me back... Oh, hell, I can just check my email, can't I?"

Postcards from Ferelden

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 04:46:24 GMT

I'm playing Dragon Age: Origins. It's so convenient that my birthday and a glut of video game releases hit next to each other.

My first impression is...hey, douchebags, let me skip over your logo movies at the beginning. You have three. That is two too many, and unskippable. They are followed by a login, followed by you hitting your webservers to find out if I want overpriced downloadable content...yeah, it's like you don't want me to play your game.

Also: I guess after making Mass Effect you were like, wow, that game kinda looked nice, so we better ugly this one up. I mean, it's still a pretty game, but on the 360 the washed-out palette and cartoony foliage just look like Doom II. Some of the facial expressions are nice, but the overall effect is extremely artificial. Now and again my character gets stuck in her combat stance out of combat, and her little weird hunch is extremely dorky-looking and makes my back ache.

Speaking of combat, also: ugly. Remember KOTOR, Bioware? Remember how absolutely kickass the paired animations looked when the characters were fighting with lightsabers? I picked a warrior with dual-wield so I could see that stuff again, and instead everyone just stands there and plays animations independent of one another. It looks like a late-nineties Chinese MMORPG. Yick. I never thought I'd miss Mass Effect combat, but there you go.

And still. I'm playing it. I want to play it right now instead of cleaning my den up like I should be doing, so I'm writing a blog entry about it. It's good, although perhaps a little overfamiliar in structure. I feel like this whole experience could be streamlined and still tell a fantastic story, just as they way Phoenix Wright completely streamlined the traditional point-and-click adventure in favor of telling a great story.

My current problem is love, though. I have two people to workplace sexually-harass in my party. I have Morrigan, the cold-hearted witch from the Wilds, and...uh...sword guy, who I will call Marty. I actually like Marty better---if he were a babe, I'd totally be scamming on him. I'm playing as a dramatic red-haired warrior woman and if I could get over the GxB (as they say in the dating sim community) thing, I would be OK.

Instead, though, I feel like I have to impress Morrigan. She and I share a disdain for organized religion, but aside from that I keep wanting to be nice and she's got teenager disdain for everyone. Morrigan gives me the "Morrigan Disapproves <3 -10" when I help out the poor and destitute. Just after lunch I helped a skeezy merchant overcharge refugees *just to impress her*.

I'm...succumbing to RPG peer pressure.

Bustin' makes me feel good

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 09:04:19 GMT

I just finished the Ghostbusters video game (2009 version, not the horrifying C64 or Atari 400/800 version). It gets the Wolff (bang) stamp of approval, with the caveat that you might try playing it on Casual to avoid getting hung up on anything hard.

The story is a retread of the first movie, more or less, which in turn makes it a retread of the second movie, more or less. It's very clear that almost no one can think of anything to do in the Ghostbusters universe except...well, except for the first two or three years of "The Real Ghostbusters", penned by (among others) Babylon 5 scribe Joseph Michael Straczynski. But I digress.

The set design is fantastic, the character models usually quite tight except for some really badly done lipsyncing, and the lighting is quite excellent (except that Ecto-1, the hearse, has headlights that cast no actual light on any surface in front of it). There were at least two environments that were genuinely scary to explore.

The character-to-character dialog is just spot-on, and in particular Ackroyd and Ernie Hudson have a real talent for selling their exposition just with their voices.

The combat from the movies translates poorly. It amounts to aligning a crosshair on a bad guy, and then sort of smacking him until he wears out. The game is aware that this is boring and tries to mix it up with a few weapons, but the weapon design isn't that great and you end up basically using proton grenades and shotgun attacks until it's time to bag a ghost. Then you turn on the proton stream and flail around until they're over the trap. It's not great, but it's better than washing dishes.

There are basic design flaws in the game. Besides the combat, your ally AI are only competent in large spaces but often get themselves irritatingly killed. There are at least two boss fights that suffer from Basic Bad Boss Fight Design:

0. Tiny, restricted space with hard-to-see walls,
1. zero preparation for the new kind of combat,
2. bad cameras (in this case, monsters that hover off-camera),
3. little or no feedback whether you're doing it right or wrong
4. when the monster hits you you stun for long periods of time so the bad guy(s) can hit you a few more times
5. No way to retreat and power up to try it again. You just have to watch the preceding cut scene again and again.

In a 9 hour game, I spent perhaps 30 minutes hung up in Bad Boss Battle land, so this has nothing on hateful sequences from the Onimusha series, the @(@#$ magma spider from Devil May Cry, or any western game with a quickdraw minigame (they're never good). So, don't let this scare you off, although if you played the game on Casual instead of Experienced, you'd miss almost nothing at all, I think.

The fun of this game is something quite subtle. You just get to hang out with the Ghostbusters. You're in intern, and it's just darn fun walking around with a Proton Pack, having Ray Stantz consult with you (it's usually Ray; he was clearly available for more voicework), listening to parapsychology babble over the radio, hunting slimers, sliding down the pole in the firehouse. I mean, in 1986 being a Ghostbuster was so cool---that movie hit like a ton of bricks---and here I am finally being one.

So, the game deserves every "B" rating it gets. They didn't come up with anything creative to do, but it's a good ride.

Ah, nostalgia. Although, I didn't see this video much at all when the movie came out, now the collection of familiar faces (all so young) in the call-and-response is fun.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g4uxIo4t7xM

It was just before I picked up this game that I finally realized that the official Ghostbuster uniform is simply the beige coverall of an exterminator with the poison tank strapped on the back.

Book-a-minute (spoilers?)

Fri, 30 Oct 2009 16:59:46 GMT

I picked up Cormac McCarthy's "The Road" at the library because, in part, the makers of Fallout 3 said they got a lot of inspiration from it. It's clear they did; I could see their graphics in my head as I slogged through it. For such a short book, it's kind of repetitive. I started skimming.

To save you the trouble, let me give you the whole book in Rinkworks' Book a minute style:

Cormac McCarthy, The Road

Father: I love this boy because he's the last remaining hopeful thing I have, and I will do anything to save him.

Boy: My Dad isn't always nice, and this bugs me.

They walk around for WEEKS avoiding CANNIBALS and eating CANNED GOODS.

Cormac McCarthy: I have hit my page count. Oh look, here's the one non-cannibal left in North America. There, we have hope again. La la la. Goodnight everybody!

THE END

Geese

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 05:58:34 GMT

I kept watching the trees, and they showed the wind high above the calm streets. Each hour, the wind grew stronger, and at 6 we couldn't wait longer and piled into the car, the sun already behind the mountains.

At the top of the hill we unrolled the lines in the bellowing wind that raced up behind us. Kate held on to the kite itself as I stepped back to grab the two control yokes. For a minute it flopped up, splattered against her body, and the string tangled in the tall, stiff grass.

And then Kate got it right-side up and the kite grabbed the wind and shot directly above me, pulling so hard on my yokes that I stumbled. The wind, stronger as the dusk grew, made my control lines sing a nervous contralto.

If I pulled a little on either yoke, the kite would dive completely perpendicular to the wind and I would lean all the way back and let the wind pull me upright, like a schooner tilting so hard the bows are swamped. There was no question that Kate couldn't handle this; she'd not know to let go and be dragged across the rock-strewn grass into the salt flats below us.

I took a turn launching the kite instead of piloting, and looking back Kate and Sara were just silhouettes against the gleaming sky.

Sara and I were able to do fast twists and dives without fear we'd lose the wind, and at different angles the lines, the kite, and the graphite spars would make different strained noises. We had so much power available to us that my arms grew tired, and my cheeks were cold and sore with the continuous buffeting from the air.

The sky turned a deep Mars red near the mountains and indigo over the Bay, with a bright fluorescent moon that we could make the kite flit about. The park would close at full dark, so I brought the kite down, gently, using the yokes to guide it to rest on the ground. Kate put on my Norwegian jacket to stay warm and scuttled over to hold it still while I wrapped up the lines.

As we were getting everything back into the case, a fleet of Canadian geese came up the rise, coasting with almost zero groundspeed in the gale, only six or seven feet off the ground. They honked and muttered, then slid forward, down past us towards the water.

Call of Nature (oh! I went there!)

Sun, 25 Oct 2009 17:25:41 GMT

Just finished Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. It's excellent, but too many notes. Also, discussion of Scribblenauts.

I blogged, a long time ago, about Call of Duty 2 and how the first few levels make you feel like a war photographer---just running along with the troops while your friends shoot things up. This new game has that same multi-hour "what am I doing" thing going, except that it's over in about 7 hours, so the actual time you feel competent has been reduced dramatically.

For SAS and Marines carrying the world's best automatic and sniper weapons, it takes a dozen shots to down anyone. I'm pretty sure multiple bullets to the chest from an AK-47 is enough to make anyone lie down and let blood flow out, but these hyped up Russian Ultranationalists (Russian ultranationalism is a global threat?) keep coming. It's like shooting an army of identical meth junkies who are in the midst of an all-night bender.

There's a point where you realize how much of a Pirates of the Carribean ride it really is; your only choice is how long you choose to spend reloading. It's about seven joystick presses away from a rail shooter. Arguably, the big action setpieces might better as a rail shooter, but then again, I don't play COD multiplayer.

Still, there are some great visual sequences and one moment, acting as the aerial support gunner for the SAS, where you realize how artificial and distant modern warfare really is.

There's this funny thing about these games. They put you in very dangerous real-life situations, like a Black Hawk Down situation. You are a doofus in a living room, so you don't know how to use the weapons or anything about military tactics, so the game is constantly telling you how to do things, silly things that pros would know how to do. As games get more and more realistic, it's harder to keep up the illusion that is required for male-empowerment-fantasy (I am heroic and dangerous and powerful).

Scribblenauts is, as Zero Punctuation states, a concept in search of a game. If it controlled better it would be a lot more fun; the platforming is dire and the DS screen is ridiculously small for a game that requires that you manipulate tiny, tiny objects. However, perhaps I'm not the target of the game; Kate and my nephew were hit with it the way I get hit by RPGs or children are struck by swine flu.

I'm starting on the Ghostbusters game tonight. Based on ten minutes with the intro, it's nicely done---the voice acting is fantastic (Ramis, Ackroyd, and Murray still have chemistry after all these years), the proton pack sparks good, and you can't help but be excited when you see the 1958 hearse hit the road with sirens blaring.

Lagged

Mon, 19 Oct 2009 03:20:02 GMT

I was lying on the living room floor, eyes half-mast. I heard a splash, and then silence. "Katie!" I shouted. Nothing. "KATE!" I said again. Nothing. I got up to see what had happened, whether she was in the bath ignoring me or, you know, drowning.

She was lying against the back of the bath with one arm draped over the side, legs sprawled, mouth agape, eyes closed. I shook her a few times and she started. "I think I was dreaming, there," she said. I got her towel and told her it's bed time.

Kate normally senses the change in time like an arctic tern can sense magnetic fields, but not this time.

We made it to Germany and mostly adjusted, but the return trip has left us getting up too early, getting impossibly sleepy at odd hours, and long, uncomfortable, gasping naps that strike like a malaria attack.

Last night I was watching Battlestar Galactica to try to stay awake. I only had one eye open at a time, switching eyes now and then. I didn't make it through the episode. I'm trying to hold it together now, but I probably won't make it until 9:30pm.

Europe, with fewer broken arms

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 13:15:19 GMT

In Innsbruck, I sat down at the desk to check in to our fancy hotel. The bouncy guy who was checking me in in his natty suit started with "Grüß Gott", and the greeting made me remember my high school German teacher. I was marveling so much that he was just like Frau Furr said that I lost the thread of the conversation. His supervisor, a woman no older than he, switched efficiently to English as I ran aground.

I took 11 years of German lessons (from 3rd grade to freshman year in college), and I've been to Germany now for a total of 8 days. Although I was sort of useful in restaurants, my German listening powers have decayed a lot. I was largely hopeless at listening to announcements on trains and airplanes, and I amused myself by trying to guess at what the little descriptions in the museums said based on the 20% of the words I could translate. The one about the the bronze child's head ended with some baffling witticism whose punchline was "ape skull". What?

Venice was charming. In October following a worldwide economic crash, the streets were uncrowded and the weather sunny and cool. We walked a 10-hour day (with Kate!) doing all the E-ticket Venice stuff we wanted and a few random extras.

The vaporetti attendants were a stone-faced bunch, focusing on making sure that dumb tourists didn't fall into the canals. The only time I saw an emotion besides abstract impatience was when the American mom and dad walked on with a stroller that they were reluctant to fold up. After some fussing, the guy revealed the stroller had no child in it, and in fact they had no child with them at all. The attendant did the tiniest take to the rest of us---No baby? OK, weird person.

I watched three movies on the plane: "My Life In Ruins" (OK airplane fare, but not actually good), "The Proposal" (stale Hepburn/Grant sort of thing that wasn't screwball enough, but tolerable), and "Angels and Demons" (crushingly improbable Dan Brown thingee with much running around---great fun after having just visited numerous ornate Italian chapels but otherwise pretty stupid).

I spotted several German-language Dan Brown knockoffs in the book stores. A cultural hit generates an equal and foreign reaction in every major language.

We're home now.

Safe

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 03:01:21 GMT

Kate and I were discussing safes and things you'd put in them. Money and passports, she suggested. I suggested gold.

This led us to talk about why you'd need a safety deposit box. I told her about the only time I had one, when I was storing my great-grandmother's diamond I was going to use to propose to Sara. I didn't tell her that I kept a note in the box that read:

"Dear Wolff: I love you, man. You're the cat's pyjamas.
Dear Sara: I love you, sweetie!
Dear Dave [my brother]: Hey, what are you doing in my safety deposit box?
Dear Mom or Dad: Oh, dear. Something bad has happened. I hope I'm not dead."

You have to cover all contingencies.

Anyhoo, Kate then wanted to know when I gave Mommy the ring, so I told her how I proposed to Sara, and then Kate wondered who she would marry.

She ran off singing "DYE-IT-SNAP-PULL" and I realized she was reading the label of my drink. I told her she was goofy, and then she serenaded me with a song composed entirely of words she read off of labels in the bathroom.

Heute Europa, Morgen Die Weld

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 08:58:01 GMT

Kate sat quietly as the characters fought with swords, and then kept watching as the plot churned away, characters talking. Just as we got to the airfield scene, Mommy walked in looking for help with dinner. We both got up.

After dinner I asked Kate to sit on my lap and watch the next part, where Cliff Secord blasts across the sky.

Zoom! Whoosh! A man flies through the air with fire on his back, spiraling through the clouds, saving a flyer in danger, saluting passengers in a passing plane, then crash-landing. We stopped as the gangsters arrived to try to steal the rocket pack. Man, there were too many characters in that movie.

When we drive places, sometimes she tells me about how she wants to leap gracefully from car to car, swinging around traffic lights, a tiny red-haired Jackie Chan in her imagination. I know she wants to fly, too.

"So," I said, "What do you think of the rocket pack?"

Kate looked sideways at me. "Do we have any of those around?" she asked.

"No," I said. "They're not real."

"Then how did they do it?" she asked.

"Just pretend. I'm sorry sweetie. Real rocket packs are huge and heavy because they need so much fuel to lift someone off the ground."

Kate looked slightly unhappy, then asked about dessert. She brightened considerably when given mint chocolate chip ice cream.

One of my friends said that the difference after you have a kid is that when you see a man and a child together, you think "There goes a guy with his kid" not "There's a kid with his father."

We watched "Mulan" tonight, too. It was better than I remembered now that it's out of the shadow of "Aladdin". It's also a whole new movie for me now that I have my own daughter. I found it was not about the Huns and their cardboard bad guy leader, but about Mulan and her father.

And this is still a fantastic song.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZSS5dEeMX64

Michael Bay and Orson Scott Card

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 19:36:03 GMT

I would argue that Shadow Complex and Michael Bay's The Rock are twins.

The Rock is a pastiche of other successful action films. It quotes extensively from Bullitt, Die Hard, anything that has Sean Connery as a secret agent in it, Aliens, and even Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. The characters are stock, the situation implausible, the setting an excuse to fly over San Francisco repeatedly. There's rarely a moment in the movie, really, that doesn't remind you some other movie.

Shadow Complex is a pastiche of other successful action games run on a very familiar engine. It quotes extensively from Super Metroid (and Metroid Zero, the remake that had a map), Dark Castle, Metal Gear Solid, Devil May Cry, and any of a number of other platformers. Because it's running in the Unreal Engine, there's not a single lighting or graphical effect I haven't seen before. Most of its imagery comes from movies and comic books, such as Ghost in the Shell (a Tachikoma acts as a boss early on), Die Hard, and (as stated by the designers themselves) G.I. Joe. There's rarely a moment in the game that I don't recognize from some other game.

And yet. The Rock was an immensely enjoyable film. It didn't disguise what it was, but reveled in it. It had great performances, amazing car chases, and a real story that held it all together. It delivers as an action movie all the way through.

Shadow Complex has tight controls, great pacing and a storyline that draws you in but doesn't get in the way. You do stuff that you think is clever and find cool secret powerups, but, of course, you are being subtly guided to do find them, which means you aren't actually clever but rather a victim of clever level design. (I love that.) It delivers as an action game all the way through.

Somewhere after the second boss, the protagonist from Shadow Complex actually quotes John McClane (Bruce Willis) from Die Hard. I wonder if people 15 years younger than I playing this game have any idea that it's a Die Hard reference.

Quote of the Day

Mon, 14 Sep 2009 06:09:38 GMT

While playing Smallworld today:

W, taking skeletons: "I never win with skeletons."

R: "How many games of this have you played?"

W: "One....and I took skeletons...and I won. But that's not the point."

Watching Watchmen

Fri, 11 Sep 2009 18:21:54 GMT

I finally saw Zach Snyder's "Watchmen".

The comic book, although totally amazing and (especially since I read it in the weeks after 9/11) mindblowing, was not perfect, so I appreciated the cutting and reworking some of the later plot stuff. The book was also a crushing critique of Reaganism and an indictment of the Cold War. Snyder didn't really have the guts to go after Bush in his waning years, leaving us a story about broken people who were never heroes.

It looks fantastic, and although Snyder has not met a slowmo shot he doesn't love, I found myself swept away by the colors and the set-ups. This isn't a movie about acting, but I cared about these weird, weird people more than I cared about the end of the world.

I know why Alan Moore won't go see his own movies, but this was a solid imagining of one of his finest works. God help us if someone options some of his other self-indulgent twaddle like Promethea.

Applesauce = napalm

Sun, 16 Aug 2009 00:40:01 GMT

So, it's a hot afternoon and Kate and I have picked some of the endless harvest of Gravensteins. It's late in the season, and the apples are perfectly ripe.

Although it's yummy and an unreproduceable flavor, making our applesauce is disheartening. When you're making plum-apricot jelly, you have 20 minutes of cutting, about 10 minutes of cooking, and then about 10 minutes of pouring and canning and, voila, you have 4-5 jars of fantastic jelly that lasts for weeks. Applesauce takes twice or three times as long to cook and produces maybe half as much. Kate and Sara can scarf down a jar of it in a single day.

Still, you gotta do it because it's pretty good, and the birds don't deserve so much apple.

The first batch we made today was clearly too small. Not enough apples, too much cooking.

The next batch, I almost doubled the amount of apples. It took longer and eventually it was scorching a little on the bottom from overcooking even though there were still bits that weren't quite finished, so I was like, OK, even if it's a hair lumpy I have to take this off.

I pick up the heavy, heavy pot of scorching hot applesauce in one hand and start carrying it over to the table. I'm trying to line up the mill and the pot when my grip slips and SCKLOFF I've dumped about half a cup of applesauce on the floor and perhaps 1/3rd cup is spread down the side of my arm.

It's hotter than hot, since the applesauce is sugary and raises the boiling point of the water to something well above 212F---in fact, there's carmelized fructose stuck to the pot bottom. It's also got a high specific heat so there's tons of burning sugar now smeared all along my arm, the arm holding the applesauce.

So, basically, OH JESUS IT'S BURNING OH GOD OH GOD OH GOD.

Boiling water scalds for a second or two, but this just went on and on as the sugar and apple smoosh vented its heat onto my skin. I'm standing there holding about 6 pounds more of this, this...napalm and I have no place to put it down that I can immediately reach. I'm also using pretty much all my mental willpower not to drop the pot and cover my feet.

There was much cursing.

I frantically tried to lick the applesauce off to stop the pain, but, of course, then my face is covered with super-hot applesauce. That didn't help.

I finally figured out that I could throw the pot on the stove behind me and then stuck my hand under the tap and let cool Hetch-Hetchy water flow over the burns.

At this point, I'm fine. After some ice, there's only a little mark on the side of my hand.

But, wow, I had no idea you could use applesauce as a weapon. I can imagine pouring boiling applesauce onto sieging soldiers through the murder-hole. Guys in chainmail covered in green sticky stuff screaming, "The monsters! They have *applesauce*! RETREAT!"