Pigs!...In!...SPAAAAAAAAACE!!

Hello and welcome to another edition of no-hate blogging. Really.

This is a quick update, just to let you know I'm working on two reviews; both of them space games, both of them written by folks on the 'other side' in the infamous Eastern Bloc. Or former Bloc. I dunno, all the socio-cultural-political changes make my head spin.

First up will be Star Wolves, fighter-squadron based space combat against space bad guys. In space.Secondly will be Nexus: The Jupiter Incident which is capital ship based space combat against even more space bad guys. In space.

Yeah, I had enough of 'Ooo like, be an elf with a big bow and kill Orcs!' games. For now anyway.

Miss Piggy, warm up the Blog-Drive, we're going hunting for truffles! In Space!

PSP = Ow

Lately, my conspicuous consumption gland has been kicking in. I think it's been stimulated by the overwhelming barrage of iPod, Gameboy and cell phone (It's got a camera! It's got text messaging! It has bits that will make you look so cool!) I've been craving, nay, jonesing for a portable electronic device so I can be 'hip'. Which is the best I can do, despite that 'hip' is a term used by those who have had one or more replaced via surgery.

First obvious choice is a cell phone. Now to most this would make sense, as it has a practical use: you can talk to other people equipped with similar devices wherever you go. The downside (for me) is that other people similarly equipped can contact me at any time. Although I've deleted my previous rants on the work situation, the summary is that, if my cell phone number was ever released to certain parties at my place of employment, the damn thing would be vibrating into the next universe, DC’s The Flash-style. That, in itself, would be cool but then I would have to actually pick up the damn thing, as they would keep on calling, sending me to the next universe. And so on. Eventually I would end up in a world devastated by a cataclysmic struggle by those who worshipped the Three Stooges and those who revered the Marx Brothers. Scary.
My second choice was going to be an MP3 player (or isotope thereof). However, I'm not one of those who feel the urge to have music piped directly into their lobes 24/7. There was a significant portion of time in my life when this was certainly the case (call them the Rock 'n' Roll years). The means of delivery was a very large set of speakers (a wall of them you could say), several socially dysfunctional, hygienically questionable young 'musicians' and four or five hundred drunk and disorderly teenagers who paid $5 a head at the door, of which I took a 25% cut. Besides, a very sure way to summon someone who wants to ask me a question is to put an earphone on a lobe, so that's out.

So I reached down, way down deep into the very essence of my being and questioned what shiny thing should I get to parade around with. The words "you play games you idiot" resounded from the abyss.

Of Course! Portable Gaming!

I had seen ads for the PSP etc and debated weather I should get such an insidious time-leecher. The price was a tad out of my comfort zone and the line up of games is currently mediocre at best (at least to my tastes). However it does actually play games, you can listen to music on them and, if you really went hardcore, watch movies on them.

So I hummed and hawed over this. For weeks, the debate consumed my very soul. I surfed around for information, opinion and outright lies at work when I should have been punching code. Which is the same thing really.

A solution came when I mentioned the internal fracas to a work mate, who said he had acquired the gizmo in question and loved it. Do I want to try it out?

The next day, after I came home from work, I fired up this little black lozenge, with its ever-so-cutely shrunken controls. I only had one game, Wipeout:Pure. Now the game itself was a joy; great graphics, a challenge to race and enough variation in gameplay to keep me entertained for hours on end. And this was only one game!

The problem is, after about thirty minutes of play, both my hands cramped up so bad I couldn't even operate a mouse to check email.

Now I do not have gorilla-like mitts by any stretch. Due to a genetic mutation, my feet and hands are disproportionately small for my height. The machine's sleek design may be a detriment in this case. I found my hands constantly slipping on the shiny black plastic casing while trying to keep the weighty block steady. The controls are too close to the sides to use my palms on each edge to brace the thing. So the resultant effect was turning my hands into grotesque, twisted claws. Lord knows what long-term effects it would have on my body parts.
Other than the sinister unergonomics of the Playstation Portable (which could be resolved by creating and deploying a framework matching a normal PS controller, making it into the Playstation Luggable) I found the machine to be quite enjoyable. The unit price I'm sure will go into a comfort zone where it would be (with the sizeable memory card and accessories) slightly less than my monthly rent. I'm also hoping that someone at Sony, when faced with a class action suit brought about by thousands of wretched, crab-like creatures waving their grotesque mockeries of pincers in the air, may consider a more comfortable design rather than something that looks good in ads for the next deployment.

So it looks like I may be delving into the MP3 player world. Or maybe I’ll just purchase a set of white headphones and plug them into a block of mozzarella taped to my belt. It’s cheap and, unlike an iPod, a nutritious snack any time of day.

Okay I'm back(ish)

Alright deleted the so-full-of-hate posts and will get back to posting at least once a week.
So up and coming is my play test of a PSP, a review of Star Wolves and Fate.
More to come.

Phone Cam Redux

Yup the guy from the floor below came steaming up to my place, red as a beet, and slunk away.

I'm telling this story until I'm in the old folks home. Then Ahlzheimer's will kick in and I'll forget.

Proper Cell-phone Camera Use

Okay this is a good one.
On Saturday, as I head to my car in the parking lot of my building, I notice a cell phone on the hood.
Now this is an unusual event: it looks like it was left there, and it's obviously a pretty top-of-the line phone. It was almost out of power though, so I couldn't get past a set-up screen to get to a phone list to find out who owned the phone.
It was one of the deluxe models with VGA graphics, full MP3 capability, internal camera and calendar, the whole shebang (I found the manufacturer site).
So I found my landlady and ask here if anyone reported a missing phone. We had a couple of move-ins this past weekend so we went around to the new arrivals to see if it was theirs. Nobody claimed it.
However I did remember some people at work that had a similar phone, so today I asked around and sure enough, Brian had the exact same phone with a charger by his desk.
So we plug 'er in.
Now, the phone list had ALOT of names, mostly female. The natural conclusions were:
1) Single Female Phone with friends names
2) Single Male phone with 'friends' names

however the actual number had been deactivated so we couldn't do reverse lookup. We considered who on the list we should call, but Brian had the idea to look at the pictures and maybe see a face I would recognize from my building (4 story walkup).

So I didn't recognize the faces from the first few pictures but I did recognize a big black pick-up that frequently parks in my space. Thought of vengeance went through my head.

Then I saw the rest of the pictures.

Now, there should be a reward for finding an expensive phone. However the blackmail opportunities for a phone where the owner has photographed themselves and their lover-de-jour are nearly limitless. Seriously, makes Hustler look tame.

I've drained the battery again, posted signs in the laundry room, and so I'm waiting for someone to claim the phone.

More updates as they occur.

Face of Mankind

Okay. Just tried the Face of Mankind Beta. After 30 minutes of wandering around, I uninstalled.
Now if this was a closed beta, I would totally understand if it had no tutorial, no online manual, no help. But an open beta is to get as many people playing as possible. You can't play if you don't know how.
So you get alot of people cramming the server, wondering how the hell you do anything. The only button I found was 'Quit'.
That worked quite well.

The Stages of Human Endeavor

All generalizations are dangerous, even this one.
Now that's out of the way here's a theory drawn from empirical evidence (ie what I see when I actually pay attention). All human endeavors seem to go through three stages. Initiation, Refinement and Exploitation. Those probably aren't the best terms, but they are sufficiently long enough to make them sound pseudo-intellectual. Creation, Ascention, and Collapse would do just as well.
Initiation
So the first step is initiation. Everything has to start somewhere.
That's when someone has the idea and makes those first (faltering) steps at seeing a vision come to life. At the time, others see it as useless, or frivolous, or an abomination. And alot of the time, they're right, the idea fizzles and becomes a footnote in some obscure history at the back of the library racks.
But once it in a while, it catches on. Others can see the importance, the possibility of that first try. It may be a clunky technology, a revolutionary idea, a new way of looking at things or just a really cool thing. Regardless, it is the starting point and it's here that the potential begins.
Refinement
So that idea goes out and spreads. Others get in and bring their own ideas (sometimes gracefully, other times with a fight). This is when things get interesting, become part of society. Here, potential is realized, and the power and the scope of the original idea are brought to the fore. This is always difficult to express because the why's and how's vary so much from instance to instance. At this time, the idea becomes (in alot of cases) a new universal constant (what did we do without it? why didn't we see it before, it's so obvious!). Then comes stage three....
Exploitation
I think the best way to identify the starting point of this stage is to see where, exactly, people who don't get the concept see those who do, and try to exploit it to their own ends, usually to those who also don't "get it".
At this point, the original idea gets lost, and only the benefits are focused on. Very quickly, the concept pales in comparison to it's results. Many times the original endeavor becomes a secondary adjust to effects it has. In some cases, this way of things comes to be the new 'standard', and not always in a negative way. In other cases, the original concept itself becomes corrupted and forgotten, and since it is forgotten, only a pale imitation of benefits remain.

So, some examples
First one is the big one, God. Some folks believe, that way back when, someone had an idea that the concept of gods as humans with power, divinity, and a daily lifestyle that could only be called a cosmic soap-opera was just humans trying to imprint themselves on the universe. And that was it, the universe itself was the only 'god': everything happened with or without human understanding. Trying to pin a motivation on crop-failure, that sudden flood, or even stubbing your toe was just silly: the universe just was and it was pretty damn incredible (and scary and beautiful sometimes all at once). I think that's why god didn't have a name, or was 'I Am'.
So this guy goes tells some friends and family, they like the idea (although I'm sure some sure as hell didn't) and the idea spreads, becoming it's own religion. In an area where every village had it's own pantheon of divinity.
So as the idea spreads, not everyone gets it. The concept clicks for some (twelve tribes anyone) but something gets lost, so once again, the concept of 'universe is god' becomes 'god of the universe'. The idea 'there are no gods' becomes 'there are no god but ours. Die Infidel!'.
And there's the exploitation, the powerful idea becomes something that is diminished as it changes.
Don't get me wrong, there are amazing people who have done (and still do) amazing things in the name of religion, but they are in the minority (at least, they generally haven't had whole civilizations put to the sword, burned women for not accepting their roles as slaves, or driven a truck full of explosives into night-clubs).

For example two I'd like to use the internet, but I think we're still in phase two (with a very quick dip into phase three, time moves fast in this space). So I'd like to use one of my favorite things: computer games!
In the beginning, there was the game and the game was Pong. It went 'bip'.
Yes I am aware there were other games before Pong, but to play them you pretty much had to have access to warehouse sized computers, a PhD, and spare CPU cycles. But Pong was the first one anybody with a quarter had access to play it.
It was a hit. It was new! There was nothing else like it. It went 'bip'.
Then companies formed with the express purpose of creating more games like this. After that, Space Invaders. Then Pac-Man (yes I've skipped a few). Then, you could actually go to Radio Shack and buy a machine that you could pug into your TV and it would go 'bip'. In eight colors. Magazines devoted to playing these games Games. Not sports, not fashion, not cars. People actually paid money to read about games. People bought t-shirts with weird little creatures from games on them. Programmers, instead of building large and complex airline reservation systems or atomic missile guidance software, actually made a career at making these things. And they still went 'bip' (granted in surround sound stereo loud enough to make the neighbors come around and complain). But for a long while it was still the realm of geeks and dips, so it was safely marginalized. Once in a while someone who confused the universe for this vengeful and powerful uber-entity said these games were bad and some people believed them, but that's what they said about TV.
Then not too long ago, somebody asked 'who really play these things' and the results were astounding. It wasn't the geeking male kids in the basement. Well it was, but it wasn't just them. Girls were playing, guys with real jobs, families and mortgages were playing. Hell grandma was playing! Not just bridge with the quilting bee, but she was fragging the basement-ensconced geeks!
There was only one conclusion that could be drawn: 'bip' could make money.

Speaking as one of the geeks who was in the basement playing games, I don't know what to think anymore. When I was a kid, I was buying at least a couple of games and they were good! Sword of Aragon, Arctic Fox, Wing Commander, Leisure Suit Larry (until my Dad busted me); almost everything I bought was good. And there was lots out there I heard about, played at a friends house or just drooled over at the local Radio Shack. Supplemented but hours and rolls of quarters at the arcade, these essentially became my religion.
And the way I see it, there's money changers in the temple.
I'd like to believe I've grown up. According to everything I learned growing up, having the responsible job, the steady relationship, the car loan, male pattern baldness etc was the very definition of 'grown up'. So I have considered the possibility that I have grown out of computer games; that my tastes have matured.
Bull.
We have a company that was very respected in our tight-knit, slightly greasy community that reportedly is using the dream any of us had into an excuse to practice employment policies that would make anyone else string up their boss.
We have games that at one time that could only have gotten better turn into pap. The once challenging puzzles, clever story, or grand system that allowed to become whatever we wanted to be reduced to button-mashing festivals featuring scantily clad ads for breast enhancement surgery.
Because there is money to be made.
Game companies, understandably, want to sell as many units as possible. So of course they try to make their games as attractive and accessible to Joe Playstation and Jane AOL.
Which brings me back to my original point. The idea is getting lost. The idea that, with ones and zeroes, it possible to make worlds, not just market 100000 units at Walmart.
I want games that make me think, not just measure my reaction speed. I want worlds to explore without having to put up with the mouth-breathing hoi-polloi of 'kewl d00ds'. And want to be surprised, challenged and flabbergasted.
I still (rarely) am at times. But more often than not, it's by the 'underground hit', the 'sleeper' and the 'independent' titles. That then get latched onto and repeated mercilessly.
So here's to all those guys and gals who are actually sitting at home, in their spare time, putting together a game without venture capital, a marketing department and a bulk deal with major distributors.
To them I say 'bip'.

By Way of Introduction

Every few years or so I decide to actually attempt something like a journal. Written in coil-notebooks, early eighties dicta-tape, notepad etc. Never lasts long, and I always seem to lose it. This way, it could be cached, unknown and unseen on somebody's harddrive, waiting for the next reinstall of the operating system.
So what the hell, time for at another half hearted attempt to organize my thought.
Alot of talk about computer games, work, the vagaries of long term relationships, general ventings drawn from the everyday, the occassional political rant etc. Of course the key to all this is to remember where the hell I put this thing.
So the origin of the story is a mid-thirties male, single in a long-term relationship, working for the man because not working for him almost led to a life on the streets (more on that later maybe) and sees the forward edge of a mid-life crisis.

Depending on the day it's a sit-com or a drama. Most days, it will read just like a diary:
Woke up
Went (reluctantly) to work
Went home (maybe late)
Saw my girlfriend
Went to sleep.
Just like the rest of humanity (with local variations of course).

So that's the edge of me, anyway. And like I said, this is just a way for me to vent. Any accidental public consumption, illumination, education, frustration or even decapitation is the sole responsibilty of the viewer. Hey, nobody forced you to click that link.

Oh yeah, comments will be allowed only when I'm trying to provoke an emotional response.

See ya (maybe)
DM