Shiny Stuff and Other Distractions

So there was my graduation from college recently (finally,) which is really big for me, and exciting.  Even more exciting, my middle brother John and his wife Maya have a baby girl as of today!  Her name is Eliz (pronounced the “e” is a schwa, the “i” is a long “e,” the “z” is an “s.”)  So yay, new baby!  And she was the New Year’s baby in our little town, too, so she’ll be in tomorrow’s paper.  Pretty cool stuff.  In other news, somehow graduation doesn’t equal free time.  But I got a new laptop, so maybe I’ll post more than 3 or 4 times a year again.  Well, more often in a place where I don’t have to be anonymous.  ….I’ve said too much already.

They really liven the place up, don’t you think?  The decorating is done courtesy of my brilliant wife Lisbeth, who is just hotter than a firecracker when she gets behind the dashboard of a WordPress blog.  It’s so perty I’m thinking about getting a URL of my own to go along with it.  I’ll get back to you on that front.  So I don’t actually remember what this them is called, and I’m not in the mood to go poking around the server to read the directory name, but I just love the orange-y wood grain.  Hearkens back to the 2600 for me.  Mmm, blocky.

We know that ‘nerd’ can be contagious.  The professor has demonstrated it to be so in this very blog when his wife came down with a case of nerd, caught from overexposure to videogames and anime.  It turns out Lisbeth’s case is gettting worse.  A couple of days ago, she and the professor watched Sergeant Keroro together.  What is this?  It is anime that has not even been published in the US yet.  It is translated, subtitled by fans, and put on the internet.  They watched it in Japanese with homemade English subtitles.  And she liked it.  Enough so that they watched a second episode, and will likely soon watch more.  The professor is valiantly resisting the temptation to shout “muahahahaha!”

My first clear memories of video games are all of the Atari 2600.  I remember vaguely a few things before that: Donkey Kong Jr. at Taco John’s, Pac-Man at some arcade/pool hall my dad took me to a few times when I was maybe four or five.  At home on the floor with the 2600 is where I learned the path through the mazes of Adventure, my heart racing as I ran from a dragon, chalice in hand, even if I was just a tiny square with no visible hands and the dragon looked for all the world like a duck, no matter how many times it has been said or by how many people, it will never stop being true, those dragons all looked like ducks.  Then again, the instruction manual didn’t call them dragons, did it?  I think they were all generically referred to as Grendel, so maybe they were just monsters.  Duck-monsters?
It doesn’t matter, though.  The dogs woke me up early this morning, so I’ve been wandering the wild ‘nets and stumbled across this.  IGN, in remembrance of the anniversary of Atari’s founding, has run a story on Atari.  It’s a pretty cool perspective that I haven’t seen implemented before.  Rather than history, or the musings of former developers, it is the fond memories of current game developers who grew up with Atari.  It’s a pretty good read, if you are or ever were into Atari.

Having owned a GameCube as my exclusive means of current-generation gaming until very recently, I’m a little out of touch with games that don’t involve 200Kmh hovercraft or rainbow-trailing golf balls.  More importantly, I’m out of touch with the single most used control scheme in the world.  The Playstation controller has been the dominant console input device for somewhere in the neighborhood of ten years now, more or less, and I’ve spent very little time with it.  The point of this little rant is that I don’t know now, when playing a new game, if the controls are horribly awkward, or if I just suck at it because I’m expecting the left analog stick to be above the d-pad, and the right stick should be tiny, easily nudged in tiny increments by my thumb.  So when the new issue of Official US Playstation Magazine showed up, I pulled out the demo disc, dropped the mag somewhere, and started playing Urban Chaos: Riot Response.  I watched the trailer first, which made me kind of not want to play it.  Click here to see for yourself.  It has a kind of yet more dumbed-down Die Hard: With a Vengeance feel to it.  The game itself isn’t much better, but I was drawn in for a while.  I kept thinking to myself “Wow, this is absolute crap, but it would make a pretty good bargain-bin find.”  The more I played, the less I liked it on a conscious level, but viscerally it had some impact still.  I doubt that I’d like it for more than 20 minutes or so, the gameplay was getting repetitive in the short demo, and the bad guys were kind of hard to shoot, owing either to a poor aiming system, or my aforementioned stupid thumbs, conditioned for use with the WaveBird.  As I say, in the post title, I <3 crap, and I mention this because I may yet rent this game when it hits my local chains, but it didn't even get that much love from the magazines.  I've read a few bad reviews, and in Electronic Gaming Monthly, which I consider to be the gold standard in actual print gaming mags, it was spared the humiliation of bearing the "Shame of the Month" title only by the presence of the X-Men 3 game.  I haven't tried that one, but based on how low its review scores were, it must be pretty faithful to the movie.

Now that the aftermath has been all but cleaned up, leaving only a mildly itchy sensation, I find myself able to laugh at the situation.  A few days ago, though, I was attacked by microscopic soldiers, I was the victim of biological warfare conjured up in a small, residential home right here in the heartland of the United States.  Produced, in fact, in my home.  As one who believes in the free flow of information, I will share with you now exactly how to create for yourself the diminutive army to which I fell prey:

Step 1: Mow the lawn.  Mow it in the middle of the afternoon, making sure it is as hot as it will be that day.

Step 2: No matter how sweaty you are do not–repeat, do not shower just yet.  Check your email.  Note how nice it feels to sit and rest, possibly drinking water that hasn’t come from the vinyl hose of your Camelbak.

Step 3: Realize how nice and cool it is in the house.  The airconditioning inside blows against your remaining sweat, making it all the cooler.

Step 4: Notice you are nearly dry.  Take a shower.  Leave your shoes next to your clothes on the floor of your bathroom, the one so humid towels literally mildew on the rack.

Step 5: Leave town.  Stay gone for a day or two.

Step 6: Return, put on the shoes, go to work.

That’s it!  Granted, serendipity plays a nontrivial role in all of this, but if everything has gone correctly, within 3 hours of putting on the shoes, you’ll notice some itching.  Within 4 hours you’ll notice substantial itching.  After 6 hours, you’ll have left work, taken off the shoes, scratched vigorously, at which point the burning begins.  Then, in the middle of the night, probably a little before 2:30am, your feet will burn and itch so badly that it wakes you up, you cannot return to sleep, and must go immediately to the store for some sort of relief.

That’s most of the story.  The scratching made it spread to my hands, too, but that went away faster than what was on my feet did.  I’m not sure my feet are completely clear, actually, but they’re mostly okay.  Aren’t you glad you read this?

More pictures are up.  Should have one more small update of pictures coming, then my supply will be exhausted for the season.

This should have driven me off, but I was a Genesis gamer who somehow missed Gaiares, and sometimes the best things have the worst ads, right?  I mean, I haven’t played it since 1988, but I think Solstice on the NES was cool, wasn’t it?  Not the case here.  How can a developer ensure I hate–and I mean truly hate, like as in want to throw my controller at the television hate–their game in under five minutes of play time?  (No small feat as I’ve been gaming since the 2600 and have yet to actually throw a controller.)  Fill the background with as many parallax scrolling layers as possibe, all of them colored dots, and make a whole bunch of the enemy projectiles be the same size, shape and color as all of the dots on one of those layers.  It’ll be awesome!  Cheap-hit deaths every seven seconds!  Good thing game devlopers don’t rush bug-ridden, ill-concieved pieces of crap out the door nowadays, huh?  Yeah…

Okay, more pictures coming soon, for real.  Seriously.  I promise.

This kind of reminds me of this, except for wireless transmissions, and in the hands of the people, and open source, so it’ll be virtually impossible to kill.  I think I like it.  Yes, sir, I do like it, as a matter of fact.

Back to the pictures tonight or tomorrow.

Added more pics to the Track & Field album.