Captiosus's Blog - 2old2play

Not a Political post

...or is it?

My Wife & Gaming, Part 2

It's the end of a very short lived era.

Back in October of last year, my wife wanted a Nintendo DS for Christmas. Overjoyed that she looked to at least expand into more modern gaming, even if it was in the handheld realm, I readily agreed and ordered her the desired Coral Pink DS and the games she initially wanted with it: Brain Age 2, Flash Focus, Mind Quiz, Nintendogs and Tetris DS.

At first, it was a big smash. She played it all the time. She took it to work to play during her lunch hour. She volunteered to go with me to the game stores in the area so she could peruse the used DS and GBA titles. In that month, she picked up Polarium, but little else. Later, I picked up Geometry Wars: Galaxies for myself for when the DS was home and I could play it.

By late December, the appeal apparently wore off. She stopped playing everything and stopped wanting to look at new and used DS titles. In early January, the DS magically disappeared. Since I only rarely played GeomWars:Galaxies on it, I never really paid much thought to the DS' disappearance.

Last week, while having one of my frequent cleaning and reorganizing fits, I found the DS packed away in a box and shoved under the bed. When my wife got home, I showed her the DS and proudly announced I finally found the thing. Her response? "Oh, that? You can have it. I don't want it anymore."

Sigh!

So now I'm the owner of a Coral Pink DS. It matches my pink X360 controller nicely. (Aside: Unlike all of my friends - and apparently my stepson - I'm not afraid of the color pink. I don't know why they get the feeling that owning something pink makes them look gay. I've had people give me grief because I have a pink x360 controller, to which I merely pull a line from Red vs. Blue: "It's not pink, it's lightish red.")

While I'm on the subject of the DS, anyone else been following the litigation between Nintendo and the makers of the R4 Slot-1 device? I find the whole situation funny because there's a lot of people out there, myself included, who didn't know things like the R4, M3 or CycloDS Evo existed, yet because of Nintendo making it into gaming news a lot of people are discovering them. While I wouldn't get one now, if this had been several years ago, I likely would have. It reminds me of when Sony was cracking down on the Action Replay Pro for the orginal PSX , a device that plugged into the back of the PSX and bypassed the bios, allowing pirated games and imports to be played. Until that news, neither I nor my friends knew there was a device that could bypass bios that didn't involve a mod chip. Within a week of it making mainstream gaming news, all of us ordered them.

It makes me wonder how many more people are ordering these Slot-1 devices to play pirated games who, until recently, didn't even know they could have done so. (Aside 2: I have to admit that the CycloDS Evo is tempting, but I made the resolve many moons ago to be fully legit in both gaming and computing simply because I wouldn't want people stealing my work and distributing it for free.)

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Achievement frustration.

I admit, I love the concept of Achievements (Trophies, Badges, whatever your games may call them) because, if done right, they reward skill and time invested in a game.

However, what I absolutely loathe are achievements that are tied to randomness, meaning skill doesn't play a factor at all, rather you have to be lucky to earn them.

An example would be Geometry Wars Evolved 2, where there are three achievements tied to completely random events: Wax Off, Rebound and Treaty.

For the Wax Off achievement, which requires you to run along the edge of the playable plane twice in Pacifism mode, you have to be lucky with the enemy spawns. Will enemies spawn in this corner or that corner? Will a gate spawn along the edge of the plane? Will a cluster of gates spawn and make it near impossible to move through a certain section of the plane (the orange tips will kill you like any other enemy and they wobble back and forth).

For the Rebound achievement, you have to kill 75 enemies by rebounding shots off of gates in Deadline mode (3 minutes timed). Will a gate even spawn? I've had whole games where I didn't see a single gate and then others where I'd see four or five gates.

For the Treaty achievement, you have to activate 30 safe zones in King mode without firing a single shot or destroying an enemy with your shields at the start. Like Wax Off, this relies completely on where things spawn and becomes troublesome after you've activated 25 and the diamond enemies speed up. Will the next safe zone spawn nearby, or will it spawn across the map (which you'll never reach because the diamonds speed up to the point of being able to catch up to you even if you're doing a straight line)?

Achievements that are tied to completely random occurances aren't really Achievements.
You don't "achieve" luck, it's just something that happens.

If you've managed to get these Achievements, congrats! I wish I had your luck.

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What do you get...

What do you get when you try to incorporate:
A. Elements of a free roaming sandbox game;
B. An arcade racer;
C. No real plot?

You get a steaming pile of poo called Burnout Paradise.

I've been a big Burnout fan since the beginning of the series but this is, by far, one of the worst to come out. The reason I included "no real plot" is because when Need for Speed shifted to a free roamer, at least it added plot elements. In Burnout Paradise, free roaming only exists so you can find events, billboards to crash, special cars to takedown (which usually appear within a mile of you once your notified they're out there 'somewhere') and jumps to do. To be perfectly frank, the "free roaming" of Burnout Paradise is nothing more than a large and elaborate (also pointless, lengthy and annoying) menu system.

What was wrong with the original formula of "Pick a style, earn stars to move up the progression ladder, blow stuff up, win cars"? Instead, they turn it into a piss poor "sandbox wannabe". And, in typical EA fashion, there are ads everywhere. Not just on occasional billboards which would be somewhat realistic, but.. everywhere. I find it amazing that there are so many CompUSA billboard ads in the game when CompUSA, shortly after the release of this game, shut down nearly every retail location for good.

Showtime mode is nowhere near as engaging as old Crash mode. While it's fun to rack up a big Showtime chain the first couple of times, after that it just becomes boring. In Racing events, I don't find myself caring about taking down my opponents anymore because it doesn't really matter as long as you find the fastest route to your destination. Road Rage is about the only event where Takedowns matter anymore; If you try to takedown people in Marked Man, you just end up with a very damaged car.

Which brings me to cars. Now I have to worry about 3 classifications of cars and go to a junkyard to get the best car for an event, repair my car (trashed by default) and then drive back to the event starting area? What the bloody fuck? Again, what was wrong with the old method of getting progressively faster racing/road rage cars and progressively stronger crash mode cars? Nothing.

This entire title wreaks of EA influencing Criteron Games to make Burnout more like Need for Speed, and, in my opinion, it's an abysmal failure. If I want to spend time driving around a fictional city looking for things to wreck and things to collect, I have GTA, Saints Row and Crackdown. Burnout used to be an awesome arcade racer that you could pick up and play for a long time or play for a little and then put down but still have fun either way. Now it's a frustrating pile of crap that tries to be too much - most of which simply doesn't fit in the Burnout "universe".

If there's another Burnout title, I hope for Criteron's sake they go back to the old menu driven, takedown/destruction laden system instead of this half ass "find your own route and then go do superjumps" system.

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Politics

Let me start by saying I don't trust any of the 3 major players seeking the office of President.

Despite that I still like following politics because every 4 years when we go through this Presidential election cycle, we really get to see spin masters working their charm.

A great example is this whole "debate", as it were, on so-called Foreign Policy experience. Explain this to me.. why does this matter? Bear in mind the following little tidbit: Our last two Presidents, including the current sitting one, both became President after being Governors. What Foreign Policy experience do freakin Governors have? Zero. His lack of foreign policy experience did little to assuage people from voting for Bush in 2000 - even if he didn't win the popular vote. And yet in 2000, such experience was still pretty relevent: Terrorism was on the rise and becoming more brazen (Remember the USS Cole?), and the fragile tendril of "peace" between Israel and Palestine was starting to show its weaknesses.

So when I see people attacking Obama for his lack of foreign policy experience, it makes me want to laugh. Sure, McCain has more of said experience than him, but it was McCain's party head (read: The POTUS) who got us in this foreign policy mess to begin with. And what was with that hardline McCain took about other nations like Iran and North Korea that sounded an awful lot like Bush's "Axis of Evil"/"You are either with us or you are with the terrorist" comments. Have the Republicans learned nothing these last 4 years?

Newsflash to the GOP: Most reasonable people like the idea of pursuing every avenue of diplomacy before resorting to bombing someone to the stone age. 'Every avenue of diplomacy' is not the same as "appeasement".

Now, before anyone thinks I'm all anti-Republican, this on-going fight between Clinton and Obama is pissing me off. And what is Clinton's primary argument? She has "experience".

Folks, "experience", when said in a political context, is the same thing as saying:
"I can maintain the status quo. I know how to exploit government loopholes, accept underhanded PAC funds, and play hardball while looking out for number one. I'm a Washington Beltway insider."

I would rather have someone with 2 years of Washington DC "experience" than someone with 30. Public Service, in my opinion, was never designed to be a freakin' career choice. People shouldn't aspire to grow up and want to be a Senator for 30-40 years. People with lots of Washington DC "experience" are career Politicans, no more, no less, and like everyone else with a career, they want nothing more than job security. [This, of course, is why I'm a very staunch advocate of term limits. No more than 6 terms as a Congressman or 2 terms as a Senator - that's a total of 12 years. And if you go to the Senate from the House of Representatives, you can only serve the number of years which equal to a maximum of 12 (for example, a 2 term Congressman who takes a Senate seat would only serve one full term as a Senator plus 2 years).]

Like I said, I don't trust any of them. And if I even bother to vote (thank you, George Carlin, for your enlightenment on why voting is useless), I'd vote for Obama over McCain and even Hillary over McCain. 8 years of a Republican president is enough. I don't think anything would change with a Democrat, but lets give them a chance. They can't screw us worse than, oh, I dunno, a needless war that has been a multibillion dollar drain on our economy. Even with higher taxes and bigger spending on federalized programs, we'd probably still see a multibillion dollar drain on our economy - but maybe we'd have something more to show for it than dead soldiers and more people who want to kill us.

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Seeking Tattoo Advice

I know there are plenty of other folks around these parts who have tattoos, so I'll drop some lines here and see what responses I get.

I have a couple of tattoos already. Nothing major, both are just fancy text tattoos. But it's time to up the ante. I want to get a portrait tattoo done on my upper right arm.

This link is the subject matter of the tattoo.

Now, before anyone asks, "Why the hell do you want to get that?!", please understand that I have a personal rule that I won't get a tattoo done unless it has significant meaning in my life. That picture is, for all intents and purposes, a picture of one of my kids. I'll never actually have kids so my pets are my kids. He was one of 7 that I helped raise from his birth and he was very much my boy. He, and his siblings, helped me a lot through many dark days and trying times. He's been gone for 3 and a half years now and there hasn't been a day where I haven't thought about him and miss his affection and attempts to cheer me up. This tattoo is no longer something I merely want, but something I feel I have to have done as a tribute, not only to him but to all the others who have brightened (and those who will brighten) up my life.

Alas, I've rambled long enough, back to the matter at hand.

As you can see, he's a white rat. I'm a medium tone (not fair, but not dark) light skinned person. I don't think a lot of white will work well. I seem to recall that it may tint to an off yellow and look very poorly. The only change to the original picture is I'm going to get the tail to go down the length of my arm instead of being straight out as in the picture.

So I'm wondering what to do.
Would this work well as a black and gray portrait?
Perhaps black and gray but get the eyes the proper color?

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Haven't been here a while

Haven't been around here for a while.. for that, I blame Warcraft. And the two months I spent fighting off MRSA Cellulitis in my foot which nearly put me in the hospital but, instead, got me on a cocktail of antibiotics which made me lose about 10 pounds and sleep most of the day.

I just needed to find a place to ramble for a couple minutes because I had to have my last remaining, albeit elderly, pet rat put to sleep today. He had heart and lung troubles as well as advancing arthritis in his legs. He was 3 years old.

I always hate having an animal put to sleep because part of me knows I did the right thing but another part of me feels like I betrayed him or didn't do enough for him. Admittedly there was little that could be done. He could have been put on an antibiotic cocktail, too, but that wouldn't have addressed his heart problems or arthritis.

Anyhow, I buried him earlier today beside the grave of one of my other pet rats. I miss him terribly already. He wasn't the most social of rats we've ever owned but he did brighten up life around here with his presence.

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Rock Band/Party Game thoughts.

Rock Band makes me both happy and sad.

It makes me happy because it's a great game, it whips Guitar Hero under the table, and it's very fun to play over and over again.

Yet, at the same time, it makes me sad because until they patch in the online Band World Tour (which they've promised according to both OXM and IGN), I'm extremely limited to what I can do. This is a byproduct of being an older gamer and having to coordinate with friends regarding when they can visit (or when I can visit them) around work schedules and busy lives. Add to this the fact that two of my friends can't play at the moment because they have borked hardware and it makes me really sad.

Don't get me wrong, I don't mind sitting here playing solo guitar or solo vocals (or quickplay bass) at all, but I've only had a small amount of play as an actual band and that doesn't look to change until they give us the online BWT patch because it's a lot easier to coordinate online band play than trying to get multiple working adults (with kids) in the same physical location for a couple of hours.

It's this same "sadness" which keeps me from picking up SceneIT. I'd love to play SceneIT, but I would spend more time trying to coordinate getting people together than I would actually playing the game.

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Hooray! 3 RROD.

As the title suggests, my 360 bricked on me today. Not only did it brick, but it did so in spectacular fashion.

Not content to just lock up and give me 3 RROD, it locked up, made a loud hissing noise, and then spewed forth some very thick, acrid nasty smoke out of the back. I've only seen that happen once before when I was working on a PC that had a bad power supply and a couple of the components went ka-blooey. I submitted a support ticket and the e-mail I got back was less than enthralling. "Due to the holiday season" ... yadda yadda yadda ... "we are experiencing a temporarily backlog of system repairs".. blah blah blah ... "please allow up to 2 weeks for the return packaging to arrive."

TWO WEEKS? For the freaking coffin?

Ah well, I had planned for this possibility. I've been slowly storing up credit at GameCrazy for the last 6 months and I had $207 in unused credit. So I went ahead and got one of the Arcade units. I'll still send back the broken 360, but time is no longer an issue. When I get it back, I'll keep it in storage in case something happens to the Arcade one. The new Arcade unit has a born date of 09/17/07 and has HDMI. I doubt it has the smaller GPU, but it probably does have the better heatpipe cooling mechanism.

As for the Gamefly thing, still no update to report as of yet.
I figure I probably won't hear anything until after Thanksgiving at the earliest.

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A Big WTF

As I've commented elsewhere, I signed up for Gamefly recently.

So far, my experience has been typical and rivals the experience I had during my year and a half of Netflix subscription. That is to say that it's been very smooth and bereft of problems.

Until today. Today I got my next game in the mail. It wasn't the next one on my queue, but can't be too picky, I suppose. But something didn't seem right; the envelope felt terribly light. So I open it up, and to my amazement, there's nothing in the game sleeve. Nothing. The envelope was still sealed when I got it and appeared unmolested by the Postal Service. But inside the envelope was a sleeve and nothing else.

I've fired off an e-mail to Gamefly's support department, but I have no idea what to do. This is a complete first for me. I've had Netflix movies show up cracked or mutilated, but they always had something in the sleeve. I really hope Gamefly doesn't try giving me any grief.

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Product placement in games.

I don't mind that advertising is here to stay. I don't mind product placement in games, so long as it's subtle.

What do I mean by subtle? Well, here's a couple examples:
Racing games: You pass a billboard with a Burger King ad.
Sports games: Product ads on the sides of the stadium or on the scoreboard.

Basically, here's my "litmus test" for game product placement: If it's something that would make sense in real life and doesn't detract from the immersion of the game, it's acceptable.

Guitar Hero 3, however, is a great example of forced product placement that not only breaks immersion but also borders on outrageous, if not embarassing.

Setlist: Wrigley 5 Gum package.
Second venue: A "Pontiac" themed garage.
Desert Rock Festival venue: McDonalds ads on the billboards.
Desert Rock Festival venue (Boss DLC): Led Zeppelin DVD ads on the billboards.
Red Bull cans scattered about on various stages.
Axe-themed Guitars and Basses.
Axe-themed "stripper" dancers.

These things are absolutely horrible because they're completely contrived and serve no purpose other than to shill ads to a captive audience. Worst of all, most of them are impossible to ignore. While you could choose to never use the Axe themed hardware, there's no way to avoid the Pontiac shit, no way to avoid the glaring, lit, McDonalds (or Led Zeppelin) signs and no way to ignore the Wrigley gum pack. Seriously, when's the last time you went to a concert and saw signs promoting some other band's forthcoming release? I've been to a hell of a lot of concerts at the VA Beach Ampitheatre, NorVA, The Boathouse and Hampton Coliseum and never once have I seen the level of forced product placement GH3 puts on the screen.

You'll notice what I don't mention are the "band sponsors" & amps, the guy wearing the Zildjian logo t-shirt, or the Gibson guitars. These are all subtle and make perfect sense. You'd need band sponsors & amps in real life. I've seen plenty of Zildjian t-shirts being worn and since it's a music game which Gibson has licensed, the guitars make sense.

GH3's forced product placement should set the standard for what game developers should not do.

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My wife / Won't get fooled again.

Today I raided my storage and snagged out my entire The Who catalog - another series of CDs I had yet to encode, a fact of which I was reminded after playing GH3. Encoded them all and started listening to them just before my wife gets home. Since no one was watching TV and I essentially had the room to myself, I was blasting "Won't Get Fooled Again".

My wife gets home while I'm blasting the song, tears through the door, notices the TV is off, and says:
"Oh, I thought an episode of CSI: Miami just started."

Sigh! Such is the life of great music, I suppose. Destined to become commercials and theme songs making people unfamiliar with the music only able to identify it as "that music from [insert show]" or "that music from that commercial".

Wonder if I should tell her that CSI and CSI:NY also benefit from The Who...

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"Free Bird" and me - a story.

I'm not a huge fan of Lynyrd Skynyrd by a long shot, but anyone who's been around while I play GH2 knows I tend to go nuts when I play Free Bird. But the reason I go nuts isn't because I'm playing it, but rather because it makes me recall a time, years ago, not long after I turned 21, when I was still too young to give a damn about most things...

See, I have to preface this with the fact that in Middle and High School, I was a performing arts geek. I did a combined total of 9 years in chorus and 4 in drama. During that time I was in 12 stage plays, went to all city chorus 4 times, all state chorus 2 times and southeast regional chorus once. In other words, I'm no stranger to getting up in front of people and ultimately making a complete and total ass out of myself.

My friends and I used to have this bar we'd go to down at the Virginia Beach Oceanfront every Saturday night - Abbey Road Pub. Saturday night also happened to coincide with the live local band nights and because it was cramped for space it was practically "band in the round" with the band in the middle of the floor. We had been going there months before I had turned 21 because we had found the place one early June day when we were at the Oceanfront. Over time, I had gotten to know some of the bands because many of their bands were repeat performers. They weren't ever going to be big name talents and they were fine with that. Most of them just played cover tunes and did it in their spare time as a hobby and were glad they had an audience to be playing to.

So, two weeks after I had turned 21, we went down there and I got completely plastered. It was the first time I had been down there since I had turned legal drinking age. One of the bands I knew were playing and in chatting with the singer (a very attractive woman with one hell of a voice who was easily 10 years older than me at the time, might I add) and the bassist before they took the stage, I accidentially let it slip that I had just turned 21. About 20 minutes later, I found myself being pulled up on the stage. Usually, about this time, I get really pissed because I hate it when people make a big deal about birthdays, but I was about 5 shots of Tequila past the "I don't give a damn" stage. The woman said something about it being my birthday over the microphone and then said to me "I hope you know Free Bird".

Then it dawned on me: I didn't just get drug up on the stage to be told happy birthday to.. no.. I was expected to sing. Ah shit! A double penalty for chatting with these people about how I loved to sing in high school and some of my favorite songs they've covered! Oops.

Long story short, it was the best 9 minutes of what ended up being a semi-bash for my 21st birthday and one of the reasons that Abbey Road, to this day, gets my patronage. I oft wonder what happened to the bands that used to play there. So when I hear Free Bird in GH2, or just in general, it reminds me of that day. Some days I wish I could do it all over again.

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Tabloid stuff...

In all honesty, I'm not the tabloid reading kind of person. I honestly don't care about the day to day bullshit of the random celebrity.

However, when I read yesterday's article on MSNBC that Britney Spears will have to pay most of her ex-husband's court and attorney fees - essentially paying for losing her kids - I cracked a little smile. Maybe it's because I've had to deal with custody and support issues on a personal level and have had to support friends who have also dealt with support and custody issues, but the article actually swayed me into a small bit of laughter.

At the end of the article, however, it linked to a related opinion piece from October 1st regarding the loss of her kids and how it may be what she wants. In said opinion piece, the writer comments the following: "Sean and Jayden were her snotty-nosed, diaper-wearing accessories."

The sad thing is, a month later, when Britney's new album dropped, this statement was practically proven fact. Case in point, let's examine some of the lyrics from track 2, "Piece of Me":

I’m Miss bad media karma
Another day, another drama
Guess I can’t see the harm
In working and being a mama
And with a kid on my arm
I’m still an exceptional earner
You want a piece of me

See what she did there? She uses her own kids to promote herself. She views herself as a perfect mother who does nothing wrong and, in fact, deserves to be even more "recognized" because she has kids. Not even Madonna had that kind of audacity and Madonna had some balls, metaphorically speaking, when it came to the media.

Not sure where I'm going with this but it could end up devolving into my rant about the generation which suffers most from an utter lack of responsibility are now having kids and proving, beyond any shadow of a doubt, their inability to be responsible. All I hope is that when or if she ends up in court trying to get the custody situation changed these lyrics come back to bite her in the ass as further proof of her shallow self-centeredness. She can argue that they weren't written by her all she wants, but she sang them, she put the public face on them and they're a great example why she lost custody to someone who is admittedly unemployed with no tangible future.

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Random thought of the day.

Random thought of the day:
Why does Kentucky Fried Chicken use Sweet Home Alabama as their commercial jingle?

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