XyzzyB - videogames

Fallout 3

2008-11-11T02:51:00Z

Fallout 3 is simply an astonishing work. Randomly wandering around the ruined landscape surrounding Washington DC in the year 2277 is one of the most amazing gaming experiences I’ve ever had. I watched the sun rise from a small village set on a half ruined overpass and could actually see the birds circling the nearby town of Megaton, off in the distance I could barly make out the ruined tower of the Washington Monument with the Capital Building beyond. Beautiful.

So, what's up?

2008-10-05T03:20:00Z

We now return our regular infrequent updates, already in progress.

The iPod Touch continues to be a really nice gizmo. Now only do I still use it as my primary home email interface, but it’s also my front end to Wikipedia, the New York Times, and Pandora Radio thanks to some excellent applications. Every night Sarah and I pass a game of Scrabble back and forth. The Scrabble app is surprisingly complete, considering Hasbro phoned in their facebook version. It includes a nifty game play mode wherein each player places a word from the same set of letters, each player gets the score from their word, and whoever’s word has the higher score is kept on the board. It nicely eliminates luck from the game, so it’s all down to whoever can tease out the best word.

My XBox 360 briefly suffered from the red ring of death, but Microsoft’s surprisingly expedient (and free, even though my box was out of warranty) repair service had it back to me in about a week. While there was a gap in my high definition gaming I decided to actually buy a game for the so far only used for moving watching Playstation 3. I wanted a game exclusive to the PS3 (why would I play a game without achievements when I have the choice?) and a game on the cheap: Motorstorm fit the bill. Turns out, it’s not all that bad. I mean, if I had bought that as a first game for my PS3 for $60 I’d be mighty let-down, but as a bargain-game is pretty ok. Just imagine Excitbike thrown into a multi-route, gorgeously 3d (and it a very gorgeous game), and multi-vehicle game work and you’ll have a pretty good grasp of the game. It’s even got the same boosting/overheating mechanic. Unfortunately the developers were so focused on making the pretty, the forgot some of the fun. Yes there are some races were you can just pick any vehicle from big rig to motorcycle, but to artifically extend the length of the game the developers take away that choice whenever possible and force you to race in a a specific type of vehicle. As you win races you unlock new cars and courses, but most often you’ll unlock…the same course but with a different vehicle type that you are forced to use. Lame.

Sarah and I are enjoying the new series, Fringe. The science is completely bogus, but the show clicks together in a fun way.

Work continues to be awesome. I’ve finished up an internal IP address tracking tool and had a great time learning mod_python and jQuery while I was at it. jQuery is, simply put, an amazing accomplishment. JavaScript and AJAX made sane. jQuery plugins allow us coders to add in some terrific shiny things (e.g. jQuery Tablesorter) for the cost of properly marking up our HTML (which would have been done anyway), a one line include, and a one line jQuery script ($(”#myTable”).tablesorter();). Hello awesome!

Edward continues to get cuter and cuter. He loves to play peek-a-boo and is starting to get ticklish, which is exceedingly adorable. Moving continues to be his activity of choice and his favorite place to be is hanging out on one of our shoulders peering around at the world.

OMG Vacation

2008-09-01T02:38:00Z

Vacation! I’m taking the entire week off of work. Four vacation days buys me nine continuous days off. Sweet! No special plans, just relaxing at home with Sarah and Edward. Ahh.

Sarah and I have been watching Hill Street Blues on Hulu and we’ve been very impressed. From the very first episode the characters and story are gripping and nuanced. Of course we have both been imprinted by the theme music, which is now an almost irresistible psychological command to relax and get ready for bed.

Speaking of Hulu: Jaadu has proven to be fantastic for controlling our home theater mac. This great app allows an iPod Touch (or iPhone) to connect to VNC servers (such as Leopard’s screen sharing) and does it extremely well. It comes with some shortcut setups that are supposed to be geared toward driving powerpoint presentations, but also happen to be perfect for controlling mplayer or hulu. Now we don’t even have to keep a laptop on hand, just a couple clicks on the iPod controls anything we need on the tv computer. Establishing the connection only takes a couple seconds, and everything works intuitively. Tapping the screen is a click, double tap is a double click, double tap and drag is a click and drag, and dragging with two fingers pulls the scroll bar for the current window. Jaadu even perfectly scales our odd resolution (when tilted to horizontal mode) to fit, although it scrolls so seamlessly I usually just use it in vertical mode.

Moving on to current videogames. If you have an XBox 360 download the demo for Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. Unless you think that pulling down Tie Fighters and throwing them at squads of storm troopers sounds boring. While you’re on XBox Live, you should download the demos (or full games!) of Braid, Bionic Commando: Rearmed, and Castle Crashers. The wonderfully, magical, and myterious game Braid is a moving and beautiful mindbender about time. It’s kind of like Einstein’s Dreams in videogame form. If you don’t know about Bionic Commando don’t bother, it’s a perfect remake of an old school Nintendo game of the highest order. If you don’t already have the ingrained reflexes from the ages of high hand-eye coordination games then you’ll just be frustrated. Castle Crashers is the next game from the geniuses behind Alien Hominid. If you get it, hit me up for some four player fun on XBox Live.

A bunch of cool stuff

2008-07-19T02:19:00Z

There are a ton of cool things happening now. Let me show you them.

Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog is pretty much the best thing ever. It’s a musical starring Neil Patrick Harris as the eponymous Dr. Horrible, Nathan Fillion as a swaggering superhero, and other people that I don’t really know or care about. Watch it now, part three of three comes out tomorrow and it’s all gone by Sunday. After that if you want to watch you’ll have to pay.

Avatar: The Last Airbender has finally had new episodes all this week, leading up the to inevitably incredible two hour movie “Sozin’s Comet” tomorrow (Avatar and Dr. Horrible on the same day, sweet). If you don’t watch it, you are missing out one of the best shows on tv.

Sarah and I have made semi-complicated plans to see The Dark Knight) tomorrow (oh yes, Avatar, Dr. Horrible, AND Batman on the same day). We still can’t bring ourselves to both leave the baby at the same time, so Sarah and her sister will see it in the early afternoon, followed by a dinner by Lance, then Lance and I will see it in the evening.

E3 is going on. The coolest announcement so far may be for the 1-to-1 movement add-on for the Wii that will come with Wii Sports 2. Wii Sports 2 has frisbee throwing and sword fighting. Sword fighting and frisbee.

Terminator 4 looks fantastic. I was very “meh” until I saw that we have Christian Bale as John Connor. Bam!

The wonderful Hulu:http://hulu.com has The Secret of Nimh available for your viewing pleasure. My favorite Bluth movie and it holds up quite well.

I’m on del.icio.us roughly eight years behind everyone else, but now I have a cool little linkroll widget over there on the side. I’m pretty sure you can subscribe to del.icio.us links as an RSS feed if you’re all that interested.

Identi.ca just annouced that they’ve implemented the Twitter API, which is great because that means that every cool app people have written for doing Twitter updates will seamlessly work with identi.ca with just an address change. So Twitterific, can I have an Identi.cariffic for my iPod Touch?

Speaking of the iPod Touch. Its firmware 2.0 is great for two reasons: multiple message movemenet and deletion in email, applications. As for iPod Touch/iPhone applications I have three standouts: Remote, Pandora, and Scrabble. Scrabble is scrabble, so that’s a given. Pandora gives me access to my Pandora radio stations via my iPod Touch anywhere there’s open wifi (and that would be a huge win for an iPhone user, Pandora everywhere! Who needs XM?). Remote lets me control the iTunes on our mac over wifi with my touch. Let me say that again. I can sit on my couch, and with just a flip of my iPod Touch start browsing through our entire music collection (including videos and podcasts) and play them on our nice surround sound system. Of course I could do this before, but it involved: turning on the tv, switching to the computer video input, turning on the surround sound, getting the (sadly, wired) keyboard and mouse, and then going to iTunes and playing the music. Now I just have to turn on the surround sound, and start up Remote on the touch. Oh yeah. It’s really nice to be able to jump around our whole music collection while feeding Edward. It even streams the album artwork to the iPod just to be cool.

Case of the Mummy's Gold

2008-07-10T01:26:00Z

The fifth Penny Arcade book is out, The Case of the Mummy’s Gold. If you are at all interested in videogames and funny, then you should already own a copy. The book spans the year 2004, which I consider to be the first year of the ongoing golden age of Penny Arcade. The art, the humor, the crazy storylines (e.g. Twisp and Catsby) really came together and created something wonderful. PA had always been funny, this is when they truly started making me laugh with every comic and I became a true fanboy.

Here are some of the gems (including my favorite PA comic ever):

Interact with any significantly large online environment and you will see the following theory in action.

As one who greatly prefers the chill of winter to the heat of summer, “Your star burns!” is practically a catchphrase of mine.

Some context for this, my favorite PA comic. It is set in the game Ninja Gaiden for the XBox. There is a room early in the first level that has several secret doors. When you enter the room, these doors open and out burst several waves of deadly ninjas. The skillful player can dispatch them with ease, leave the room, re-enter the room, and out come more ninjas! If you’re after the ultimate weapon in the game (and you are very patient) then this trick is a great way to make a ton of cash early in the game. No matter how many times you wipe the floor with your extremely dedicated foes, more keep on coming. This comic depicts what surely must be happening behind the scenes.

Maintaining Sanity

2008-06-15T21:49:00Z

A steady stream of flashing lights and sound really helps with keeping awake and alert during late-night feeding and baby care. And when you’re only sleeping three to four hours at most, everything is late-night.

Sarah and I have come to really appreciate the following inputs:

Cable Television with DVR

From National Geographic to Food Network to HGTV to Discovery to SciFi to Comedy Central: there’s always something cool, fun, or interesting to watch on our DVR. While channel flipping would be ok, the DVR is really what makes cable worth it. Frequent interruptions for the baby mean that without the ability to pause and rewind our shows we’d essentially only watch about twenty five percent of the content IF we happened to catch something really cool during the weird hours we’re feeding the baby. Unless you’re into paid programming, there’s not a lot of tv on at 4:27am.

The News and Weather via the Wii

For quickly keeping up with the news and weather with one hand (the other holding the baby) nothing beats the Wii weather and news channels.

The Internet via the Wii

The Internet is, of course, just stuffed with fun content. The Wii’s internet channel allows truly one handed browsing of all of our favorite sites.

Hulu.com

We finally tried out Hulu after discovering to our chagrin that our DVR had dropped two of the last three Battlestar Galactica episodes. Awesome! It has a wide selection of TV Shows and even quite a few movies, all with very small commercial breaks. The commercial breaks are denoted on the video’s progress bar and have a timer countdown while they are running. I’ve always said that I’d be right onboard with official tv torrents that included commercials and, since there’s no download time, hulu.com is even better than that. Hulu even has full movies and a pretty decent selection of them at that.

While it isn’t supported by the Wii’s browser (Flash higher than version 7 required) it does, of course, work great with Opera 9.5 on the PowerMac connected to the tv. The full screen mode taxes our Internet connection a bit too much, but using the mac’s mouse scroll wheel zoom with cursorceror to hide the mouse cursor we get a nice full screen presentation without stuttering video. Since we have the PowerMac connected into our surround sound system as well, the sound is even (thanks to Dolby magic) pretty decent. In a stroke of genius they even mapped spacebar to pause, so after we get the zoom in situated we don’t need to move everything around to find a pause button.

Endless Ocean

Videogames and baby watching are a tricky combination. If he’s deep asleep I can get in some game time, but I can’t really focus on anything involved. Even Super Mario Galaxy requires a bit more concentration than I’d like. Endless Ocean, on the other hand, is a game that requires absolutely nothing from the player. You get to run around beautiful underwater environments and have absolutely nothing that requires focus. In fact, the entire game encourages relaxation over acoomplishment. You can even drive the boat to a scenic spot then just sit in a deck chair and watch the ocean. While diving you don’t need to worry about air, depth, or anything at all. Drop the controller and your character will just patiently wait while fish and creatures swim around to the soothing music. When you do have time to explore, the game is actually pretty interesting and rewarding. Seeing a whale glide in and swim alongside me was an awesome videogame moment.

That robot smashed my house!

2008-05-25T01:04:00Z

Do you enjoy Lucasarts Adventure games?

RPG adventures with clever battle systems?

The artistic style of Mike Krahulik and prose of Jerry Holkins?

Silly Infocom style humor, e.g. Planetfall?

If you answered yes to any of those, then should should definitely check out the first Penny Arcade videogame: On the Rain-Slick Precipice of Darkness. It’s available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and XBox 360’s Live Arcade so if you are reading this you really have no excuse not to at least check out the demo. (Obviously I prefer XBox 360 version because of achivements and gaming on the big screen.)

The game is witty, amusing, gorgeous, and (so far) a ton of fun. The combat system like typical Final Fantasy combat with a twist of real-time action. I am in love with the art style of this game. I’ve just written and deleted three sentences trying to capture it (Comic book paneling cut scenes mixed with 3d adventuring in a 2d world with comic styling. Does that make sense?) but can’t really.

Buy the full game, check out the demo, or at the very least browse through Rain Slick’s gallery.

Science

2008-03-30T05:21:00Z

Mario's Jumping Calculus

2008-03-11T22:11:00Z

Calculus in Donkey Kong

Mario’s jump moves are derived from basic physics of motion, and the calculus-based equations are in the source, nicely formatted

On moving and movies

2008-02-17T15:54:00Z

Happy Valentine’s weekend everyone!

Sarah and I have been enjoying a leisurely move back into our “new” house. So leisurely that this is the first time that I’ve booted up my laptop since it was packed away downstairs over two weeks ago. I’ve been online of course, but only in bits and pieces: at work, at home on the XO, on the powermac connected to the tv. There is a big difference between using any computer and using my computer though. My computer at work is awesome, but it’s at work. The XO is also a fine machine, but only for its niche of cool programs and easy interface. The powermac is great, but even connected to our beautiful 40” LCD television it’s still a little squinty for use from seven feet away. My still-kicking 800Mhz G3 iBook is where its at (ergonomics be damned).

We are seriously loving our bamboo floors. It is ever so nice to be able to look in any direction and see elegant reflections and soothing wood tones instead of dingy carpet. The leisurely move is also quite fine and well recommended. Since we had to clear everything out of every room (including artwork) except for the kitchen and bathrooms and everything was moved into the basement and garage we have the opportunity to start the house over with a blank slate. We are only moving it what we need or want, just pieces at a time, and really making sure that we keep the house nice and neat while we are doing so. Every other move we’ve had has been a regular “move out and in as fast as possible”, but this is the way to do it. It also really helps to be ruthless with your culling of stuff. We have sent boxes and boxes to good will or the dump so far and don’t even really remember what exactly we’ve sent. As two packrats it was hard to get started, but after the initial break we’ve really gotten into the “use it or lose it” mindset.

Speaking of using it (oh man, I am awesome at segues): Sarah got me a Playstation 3 for Valentine’s day! With the HD-DVD format quickly dying after Warner Brothers commited exclusively to blu-ray it was time to get with the true HD movie bandwagon. After a couple days of playing with it I am forced to admit that the better format won. Whereas HD-DVD movies felt like an HD hack of the DVD format (slow menus, buggy discs, etc.), blu-ray really feels like a next-gen movie format. Of course, that impression could stem from the fact that we have a sony television and have been brainwashed by its subliminal messages (and supraliminal, it does force our XBox360’s HD-DVD player to 1080i afterall). Either way, Ratatouille and Casino Royale look gorgeous in high definition. It is a little weird to have a videogame system without any videogames, but all the best games for the PS3 are also on, and done better by, the XBox360. The 360 features better graphics, a much better controller, and achievements! It will be nice to be able to pick up the ‘Darth Vader’ version of Soul Calibur IV though. But without the achievements I might not even do that.

The PS3 doesn’t even have a single “must have” game. There are six contenders: Resistance, Motorstorm, Rachet and Clank, Heavenly Sword, Uncharted, and Ninja Gaiden Sigma. Two of those have really short playtime (perhaps good enough for the bargin bin though), one is a remake that I’ve already bought twice, and three are rehashes of game types done better by other games on other systems. The PS3 needs its own ‘Dead Rising’, ‘Mass Effect, ‘Super Mario Galaxies’, or ‘Metroid Prime 3’.

Starflight Reborn

2008-01-15T03:53:00Z

Mass Effect is, in large part, a superb remake of Starflight, one of the greatest space opera videogames.

I’m still impressed at how excellently the pieces of the game fit together. It is astounding that we are able to play a game that can so adeptly become so many games. Tonight I played some Gears of War, some Starflight, and a fun new game I like to call Offworld Offroad Mining Survey Action Racer: all within Mass Effect.

Mass Effect

2008-01-14T19:01:00Z

Sarah bought me Mass Effect over the weekend. I spent most of Sunday afternoon having a great time running around this huge space station and wowing over the graphics and having a great time with the story.

Let’s talk graphics. Lush, is a word that comes to mind. You can really tell that the game designers had a lot of fun adding tons of detail to their game world. Characters facial expressions and eyes are singularly impressive. I’ve played Bioware games before (Knights of the Old Republic, and Jade Empire) and always ran into the edge of believability pretty quickly due to the lack of graphical quality. This was, of course, necessary due to the fact that their environments and game scale were so huge. Thankfully, such dark ages are behind us. This game is space opera at its most grand.

The gameplay is pretty amazing as well, it ties together the elements of a shooter action game with those of an adventure game and role playing game very nicely. I went in expecting them to get the RPG right, the adventure aspects (e.g. conversation branching) ok, and the shooter passably; but all have been quite impressive.

So anyway, there I am having a blast and thinking that it can’t get any better. Then I get to the point where my character is given a ship, a crew, and millions of stars to steer her by. Yes! Via the ships interface my character seems to fall into a gorgeous galatic map with familar features such as the horsehead nebula and I get to pick a point and say: let’s go there!

From the galaxy view I was presented with a dozen or so destinations. Nice enough I thought, but then I drilled down through that beautiful galactic map and found that each of those destinations had more than one solar system (whoa) and then that each of those solar systems had more than one planet! I was expecting just a one system, one planet type of space exploration (Star Wars, Star Trek, etc.) but no, this game has bigger plans. I pick a planet of interest (say we are getting faint distress call reading from an uncharter planet) and get dropped onto the surface in my airtight Mako vehicle that looks like they modded the personnel transport from Aliens for offroading action (and added a kickass gun turret). I literally said, “Wow,” when I first started driving around under the green sky of the windswept, dust filled, desolate landscape of an alien planet looking for the source of the distress signal beacon. Amazing! The planet was about 3/5ths Earth gravity so I careened about the landscape like some superpowered Mars rover, jumping dunes, climbing mountains, and racing down into valleys.

Check out this Mass Effect trailer featuring galactic exploration to see what I’m talking about.

Hacked version of Super Mario Bros.

2007-12-26T15:33:00Z

video of a hacked version of Super Mario Bros. — hilarious if you’ve ever played the original

Finished: Assassin's Creed

2007-12-23T16:56:00Z

Finished: Assassin’s Creed

Review: 4/5

Absolutely superb graphics. The game world is fully realized with three sprawling cities (Acre, Damascus, and Jerusalem) as well as miles and miles of connecting countryside (explored on horseback!) in the year AD 1191. With each cities tumultuous streets packed with citizens going about their business (giving loud speeches against this or that public figure, hawking wares, carrying goods, begging for money, etc.) the game does a great job of creating the illusion that the game world doesn’t revolve around the player/character. You truly feel as though you are an intruding outsider, a sword in the crowd waiting for the chance to strike. The assassinations are tense and exciting but for me the true fun is the exploration of the vast game environments.

Desktop Tower Defense

2007-12-18T14:23:00Z

Desktop Tower Defense – a highly addictive flash game wherein you design a layout of towers to stop creeps from crossing your desktop. The creeps (except flying creeps) can’t move through or destroy your towers so they have no choice but to wind through the maze of towers you construct. The game prevents you from sealing the creeps into an unsolvable maze. Seeing a stubborn creep manage to wind its way through your maze only to be done in by your last killzone? Priceless.