Play My Cards Right

Last year I was running 24 mile long runs in preparation for the Pittsburgh Marathon.  This year I’m doing my best to keep a sick baby from crying and I’m lucky if I can get a few runs in a week.  I wouldn’t change a thing, but its amazing how much my life has changed in such a short time.

So EA Sports Active 2.0 is coming out on the PSWii and a few sites have been treating this as some kind of surprise or affront to the 360.  The truth is probably more technical than conspiratorial:

Bluetooth

It may not be the only reason but seeing as both the Wii and the PS3 support Bluetooth out of the box it is pretty likely that it was more cost effective to build a single one-size-fits-all peripheral for the game rather than build an entirely new one just for the 360 and pay Microsoft licensing fees on top of it.  They may even be able to squeeze iPhone and iPod touch out of this one device as well.  For a company trying to cut costs in today’s economic reality, sticking with standards may be the right way to go.  If anyone has financial information on just how much it cost MTV and Activition to build peripherals for their plastic toy games, I’d love to see it.

Of course, EA may just have seen some synergy in the introduction of the Playstation Move and the UI it shares with Wii.  Or they’re waiting for the moneyhat.

I’ve mentioned this before, but wanted to mention that the booklet is being released this month, and my contribution is indeed inside it.  Charissa is doing amazing work with this, work I’d love to do more of if I was’t so hung up and lazy.  I’m debating whether to read my contribution at the party, I’d definitely like to attend but we’ll see what happens.  The poster is of course the work of the incomparable Mike Budai.

We had a chance to catch a few movies this weekend- Inglorious Basterds and Shutter Island. I can’t say I loved either but they were both visually striking movies. Quentin does his thing, tension and release, long dialogs and gratuitous violence. Martin does his too, excellent sound design and striking imagery. Both fell kind of flat to me, but one thing that really struck me was how ridiculous the violence in Tarantino’s movie is. For all intents and purposes its comic relief. The violence in Shutter Island is doled out purely in service to the story.

There is something about Leonardo Dicaprio that doesn’t ring true to me, but Scorsese is firing on all pistons as usual, save for a thing here or there. The opening sequence could have been just as suspenseful with no music at all as opposed to the insanely bombastic score that accompanies it. I’m glad he didn’t lay too heavily on the pop to score the rest of the film but the sound and music cues were really well done.

As far as the story…eh…you basically knew what was happening from the beginning and I guess people were into the “twist” but the quality of the movie really came from the suspense, the fantastic imagery, and the sound.

Quick rundown of my playthrough:

• Played it on Normal and it was in no way a challenge.  Now I didn’t play it for the challenge.  I played it for the story and the choices I’d make and because I’m really into the universe, though I can’t say whether I’m into it because of anything beyond how richly developed it is.
• Doing a New Game+ on insanity and it is frustratingly difficult
• My Shepard had a relationship with a character from the first game, and she did not pursue anyone in this one.  This may pay off in part 3 but it also closes off a lot of possibilities as well.
• She opted to save a kid about to enroll in a mercenary squad.
• Managed to keep her crew member from being exiled as well as stall a potential war.
• Opted to kill off a band of rebels rather than brainwash their entire race.
• Finally, at the end of the game, my Shep chose to cut off relations with the group sponsoring her mission rather than allowing them to pursue their own agenda.

There are a lot of loose threads that I can not wait to see tied up.

Although I was thoroughly engrossed in the story of Mass Effect 2, my story of Mass Effect 2, I couldn’t help but feel a little weird when Dawn was watching me play through my choices.  Yes, this included romance dialog but even regular old paragon vs renegade type conversation.  The world of Mass Effect isn’t any more geeky and sci-fi than Farscape, in a lot of ways it is actually more convincingly conceived, but at the same time, the movie-like presentation mixed with dinosaurs in armor and musical-singing Salarians just seemed a little too…nerdy?

As much as this is Bioware’s “blockbuster” game, there is something about the way it is presented that still lands it firmly in the domain of geekiness.  Certainly Farscape is a geeky show but I get the feeling that non-gamers would really be willing to sit through someone’s playthrough of the game.  Certainly the mechanics are part of it- watching someone shoot and shoot and shoot their way through a story isn’t fun if you aren’t doing the shooting.  But is there something about the choose-your-own-adventureness of the story that diminishes it in some way?  I’m really not sure.

The game does tell a good story, but I don’t think it really says anything new.  I suppose it doesn’t necessarily need to but when a game is this hyped and this loved one would hope that it might deliver something more than a good heist.

From Daring Fireball, a bunch of magazines are about to launch a campaign intended to sway people away from the net and back to reading paper magazines, about as foolhardy a thing they can do at this point.  Getting back to my thoughts about reading on Sunday, I have to think that one of their slogans has a point:

“The Internet is fleeting. Magazines are immersive.”

The internet can be fleeting.  As we’ve all been trained to hop from link to link and pull information from a world of sources, depth can be hard to come by.  Its kind of funny to think that the magazine, a format considered fleeting itself in the old days, would be considered immersive.  But reading a magazine from beginning to end is something you just can’t replicate online.  What the print publishers fail to realize is…

A generation of people have grown up without that experience, they don’t understand it, and they don’t need it.

We read magazines because they were there for us to read.  Now there are other things to take up our time.  Everyone seems to forget that reading the way we do is not some natural human trait, but an adaptation to the way the written word is printed and disseminated.  As that has changed, so have our reading habits, and that change isn’t about to stop simply because some dinosaurs are fighting it.

I’m still thinking about my playthrough of Mass Effect 2 and at some point I’d like to do an epic wrap-up about it.  The game was phenomenal.  In the meantime, something for today:

We subscribe to the Sunday paper.  We have since we moved in together and Dawn already had a subscription.  There is nothing like a quiet sunday morning of going through the paper with a cup of coffee and a nice breakfast; it can be the restive moment you need to get ready for the week.  That said, we rarely read the paper, or at least rarely read it on Sunday.  We have the little one to thank for that.

So in our considering of what all we can get rid of to save money, time and our carbon footprint, the paper has come up a number of times.  At one point we got the local paper every day but could not live with the amount of newsprint we were accumulating and recycling every week.  We have stopped a number of magazine subscriptions and are purging our collections of magazines we felt worth keeping.  If we need them, most of their content is online and most likely we’ll never need them.  But getting rid of the paper is different.  Because we’re NYT subscribers we not only have access to their full archive but also their Adobe AIR based NYT Reader app that is actually quite pretty.  Of course there’s also the ad-supported iPhone app as well, should we need it in a tiny mobile format.  But both of these are missing something, or perhaps they’re adding too much?

I think the problem of trying to read the paper online is that its just too hyper. Sitting at the table with a cup of coffee, I can slowly make my way through each article, reading what I want and skimming the rest.  Dawn and I can discuss what we’re reading or point out something to look for.   We can do all this with our laptops, but we’ll also be doing a million other things, and we’ll most definitely not go further than the headlines on many articles we will choose to read if we’re looking at the paper version.  I’m not saying I read the paper end-to-end, but in its paper format, and in my Sunday state of mind, I can tolerate the slow progress through the medium.  On my laptop, I guarantee you that within a few moments of almost any article, some flashing light or link to click or url to type or status update to send will pull me away from the paper and likely never bring me back.

The printer paper model is obsolete and wasteful, and I’ll be glad to see it go, but I also can’t say what’s replacing it is better.

How does this

Dragon Quest 4 :: NES :: 1990

Dragon Quest 4 :: DS :: 2007

Yet in light of today’s games, the DS version looks antiquated as well.  Granted the 1990 graphics were terrible even for the time.

Over the last week I’ve been slowly assembling the ingredients to create these Blueberry-and-Cream cookies from Momofuku Milkbar.  We ended up using some incredibly sweet dried blueberries I picked up at Costco.  I should have gone for unsweetened because they were practically Mike & Ikes they were so sweet and chewy.  We also had to pick up some powdered milk for the “Milk Crumbs,” and I ended up buying a huge box of the stuff which I will likely never use again.  We also ran out of parchment paper and I substituted corn syrup for glucose.  Overall they came out pretty well, but they’re also a bit burnt due to the lack of parchment paper.

Probably not worth the money I spent on them but it was a fun little experiment.

Milk Crumbs

Baking

Two Sticks of Butter, 1.5 cups of sugar

The Final Product

Since I picked this up on the iPhone I’ve returned to my desktop version as well.  It feels strangely limited compared to other Tower Defense games (if you can even call it that) but its just so much fun it doesn’t matter.

As much as I’m enjoying Dragon Quest V, I’ve finally reached a point where I don’t feel like continuing.  This used to happen with most of the RPGs I’ve played but I’ve been pretty good at finishing games lately.  A few factors I believe may be why:

No longer bussing to work- initially due to my bus route being closed from the snow, now because I’m back on my bus.

The game froze while in sleep mode and I lost about an hour of progress.

Even though I’ve only clocked a bit over 20 hours, my character is now married with kids.  This is pretty interesting, but for some reason I find it kind of annoying.

I’d love to be playing while Dawn watches the olympics but by the time we get most of our work done for the night I am too tired to do anything.

I’ll finish it, but I have low hopes for the handful of PSP games I picked up a few months ago.

I haven’t really had much to say lately as we’ve been super busy rearranging the house, but I just want to give a shout out to the purge.  Today we managed to get rid of 15 years worth of accumulated detritus, all of which had some sentimental value, or at least some notion of usefulness.  Now if I could just let go of a few hundred more cds, records, dvds and vhs.

Tonight we are officially in a room that is not connected to Max’s.  We moved our bedrooms downstairs when we got a new bed this weekend and out upstairs rooms were only separated by an open wall.  Hopefully now we won’t jump at every stir but I’m sure I’ll wake up terrified when I haven’t heard him for a while.

Last weekend we had the good fortune to buy a new bed.  We ended up buying from The OG Mattress Factory because their beds seem to be of decent enough quality, they rate very high in Consumer Reports, and best of all their employees don’t work on commission.

I will never understand how salespeople can live with themselves when you’re trying to buy something that is extremely expensive and they’re doing everything they can to squeeze as much out of you as possible.  I’ve left car purchases because of it, and I have an extremely hard time conceiving of buying a house without being extremely careful about it.  I know its not everyone, but I’ve seen it enough that I just want to stay away completely.

I suppose making it seem like no big deal is all part of the plan, but jesus guy, I’m about to spend tens of thousands of dollars of my hard earned cash.  Can you at least pretend that this is a significant thing in my life?