fine whine

So I was a-playin' some Nightfire tonight, and in-between shooting my teammate and switching control schemes I realized why I like that game, that game that troubles me so with control issues and whatnot. I like using the Sentinel, the guided rocket launcher. Flying those missiles of doom is just so much fun. Without them I think I would despise the game.

Which is where y'all come in. What is a video game, for any platform, out there that plays like the rocket launcher from Nightfire?

I can't help some things. Here I was, playing miniature golf with my in-laws and wife, and what did my eyes espy but a stray golf ball bobbing merrily in the dye-saturated water. Naturally, I couldn't help but retrieve it and continue my merry way along the greens. I gave the "front nine" a decent go, beating the others but as we continued playing I took more and more side trips, picking up wayward and stuck balls out of the water hazards and elaborate (but not well-maintained) pipeworks and traps. By the end of the back nine I'd fallen a stroke behind my father-in-law (a real golf player, if that helps) but had picked up an extra seven balls. This meant that we were able to play a second course (our first, paid-for balls having returned to that mystical subterranean place they always go at the end of the eighteenth hole. So we enjoyed another game for the price of one on a beautiful day, and I lost the second eighteen by several more than one stroke.

Anyway a good time was had by all, and I got to remark at one point (while I was still ahead) that the reason Jessica's dad was trailing me in scoring was that he "didn't have enough balls". And I laughed. And we laughed. And it was good.

Soul Calibur II on the PS2 is a pretty cool game. It is different from the first one (alas, only to be found on the Dreamcast), which was itself different from Soul edge from the original Playstation. Each time Namco takes out some features and adds others, as though they're trying hard to tweak the games more than to expand them. SE (henceforth I will use acronyms to sound cool) had a game mechanic whereby the weapons used were damaged and occasionally destroyed before the end of a match. To have weapons alone set SE apart from the other fighting games of its day (so I've been told) but the idea that the weapons could get used up was even more original. So what did Namco do when translating the game up to the arcades and the Dreamcast? They got rid of the whole weapons-breaking thing, though they really upped the ante on the whole graphics and visual presentation side of things. SE had looked very good on the PS1 and SC looked every bit (well, 96 bits) better with the newer hardware to push to the limits. Also new was the ability to get rid of post-fight replays, which was the first thing I noticed missing from SCII. That omission boggles the mind—why get rid of a preference? Did none of their playtesters toggle that one option? Also, they got rid of the line at the end of fights that says "...and the soul still burns." which I apparently became fond of once and now miss. Otherwise I'm happy with it, I think.

Blah blah Christmas and whatnot. I didn't post anything the last two days and I'll let you come up with your own reasons. Speculate away.

Anyway, for almost the last week I've been trying to write about John Varley's Red thunder. It's a great book and it pays homage to a great many things, not just the Heinleinian juvenile books but also south Florida crime fiction. More than that, though, the book (I think) played with the reader. In the beginning there was a passage where the narrator says, "I used the tip of the screen's stylus to touch 7, then 5, then ENTER on the tiny flatscreen keypad..." and then later at least five more (though shorter) descriptions. At first they annoyed me, but then I reasoned that they too must be part of some homage or other. And as the days have passed I've thought more about it and I'd like to think that that little section there is to deliberately annoy readers and weed out the less deserving fans. Or something like that. A day ago, I had it all reasoned out, but the days have passed. Oh well, these things happen.

What else has happened in the intervening time? I got a couple presents including a cheesy but probably fun digital camera and a damn cool watch, the very one after which I've been lusting since first seeing it on TokyoFlash. Today I went and spent a couple giftcards, also a present, on a very reasonably priced Soul Calibur II, which would be more fun if my thumbs weren't sore from a day or two of Gran Turismo 3, which I've been playing for who knows how long and still am only fifteen percent finished. I also watched Full metal jacket, but I'll go into detail on that another time, I think.

By the way, I didn't post anything because my blogging software was acting up. I don't know if it's because I upgraded (and then down-graded back) or just some odd two day quirk, but it wasn't working. I hope you all enjoyed your days, however you spent them. Happy holidays to all, and to all a good night.

So I posted nothing yesterday; I hope that nobody has died from forsaking food and drink to continually refresh my page over and over again in fervent anticipation of further blathering nonsense. I have been busy, but that is no excuse, really. This is my blog, though, and I make the rules—I can post whenever I want. So there.

Anyway I have been doing a whole bunch of stereotypically nerdy things, at least the way I see nerds. Yesterday night I was up late, much later than my bedtime, banging out a new layout for this blog including the now cliched left top corner piece of stock photography. I mean that not as a criticism but as an observation, as I am doing mine to be cool and not kitschy or post-hip. Alas, in doing so I am hitting the wall of every burgeoning web designer, that of browser incompatibility. I developed the somewhat difficult (though simple looking) layout using Safari on the Mac, and as soon as I was happy enough with it I tried loading the same in Internet Explorer, which was a spectacular failure. Nothing lined up and the image, that for which this whole exercise had begun, was nowhere to be found. I was crushed. Expecting no better I loaded it up in Opera, which, true to form for being a sleek and efficient browser, crashed and burned before even trying to show the page. Par for the course. It loaded okay but not as perfectly in the browsers on my PC, but I'm not happy having it look bad on a bunch of systems. That said I could likely poll all three of my readers and find out what they're using and hack my CSS accordingly. So that was that.

Yesterday I also finished Michel Houellebecq's Platform (well, the excellent English translation thereof) but that it not in line with the rest of this entry so I will have to talk about that brilliant, yet disturbing book some other time. Go read it, though, it's very literary. Today I began a book based on an offhand recommendation from a website (well, boingboing) so that's pretty geeky, right? It's Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake and it's really pretty interesting so far, my bias against women science fiction authors notwithstanding.

I mean no offense by it, but it seems that men write better science fiction as far as I have read. I know that there are good science fiction authors that happen to be women out there, but I haven't stumbled on them yet. I have of course run through many a bad male author, so really the problem is of bad SF in general and not gender at all. So it is with pleasant surprise that I am enjoying this book.

I am not enjoying having had another flat tire, but that too is outside the realm of this narrative and I will only talk about it once it all has been resolved. So stay tuned... but do make sure that you are properly stocked with food and water, please.

My geekiness continues with today's playing of an hour or so's worth of collectible card games and then three solid hours at the local Gameworks, which is something like Chuck-E-Cheese's for adults but they kept skee-ball. Jessica was stuck to the skee-ball and other ticket-producing machines for the whole time, but I was making the best of my company's holiday hospitality by playing all of the otherwise expensive arcade games. Generally I can only play things that involve shooting or driving, and they had numerous options for both. They had every iteration of both the Time crisis and House of the dead series so I got in a lot of shooting. I even was able to monopolize both sides of Time Crisis 2 and House of the dead once or twice so I could live out my double pistol John Woo dreams. To play both sides of TC2, including the ducking with the pedals, is truly an experience to, er, experience. Especially when somebody else is picking up the credits. Beating them brought the same satisfaction and relief I had remembered. I fared a little worse on the driving games, but my heart wasn't in them after losing a four-lap Indianapolis "500" on the last leg of the last lap. Before the party was over I also got to do several minutes of a rollercoaster simulator which was really cool but the picture was blurry, though that didn't detract from the thrill. What did, somewhat, detract was the ride's inclusion of fake "danger" elements, like a swinging blade and other pointy things just outside of where safety ends. Those didn't really add anything for me, but hey, it was free. The last game I played was called something along the lines of "vertical reality" and though it too had focus troubles it was very fun. The game is played on lifting chairs that rise and fall up to some ten or twenty feet (oh, the wonders of pneumatics!) and the premise was something about popping hot air balloons. I had never played it but nevertheless triumphed over the two small girls and one guy who played with me. I beat him by the total of the other two combined, I think, and had a blast once I got the hang of the game. That one I might pay to play, sometime. And the whole time Gauntlet legends: dark legacy sat in the corner, unplayed. Sadly, I too did not play it but really should have, as I have long enjoyed pumping quarters endlessly into the Gauntlet games in all their incarnations.

That's really not that geeky, in toto, just CCGing, going to the arcade and playing with HTML. Round that out with a bunch of Dynasty warriors 3 on the PS2 and Grand theft auto: Vice city on the PC and what do you have? Me and my long winded account of why I haven't blathered on about anything else the last couple days.

Oh, and I've been correcting my spelling a lot more lately. Between this and the book it has been atrocious lately, so bear with me if that bothers you. I will not stoop to spellchecking these entries, though I know at least one MT plugin supports that.

I feel like a colossal boob. This morning I needed to call the help desk for (gasp!) an Outlook problem. A folder that I stored messages needing a response had somehow disappeared. Baffled, I made a cursory glance over all of the other folders and things (for lack of a better word like "features") in Outlook's left pane, and then, wearily, dialed the help desk. I spent more time on hold, listening to "Play" by Jennifer Lopez for almost its entire run length, and then somebody "logged on" to my PC (i.e. they took control, but I guess to call it such is too sinister) and within seconds had found my wayward folder in the deleted items of my archives. I was at once shamed and befuddled. I hadn't moved it there, had I? How does one go about deleting a folder? For not checking in there I felt like a total jackass, but really I can't beat myself up too much because there is no reason for the deleted items folder to exist, let alone for mine to have appeared there.

Something else that I noticed this morning is that the local ATM asks for users to "Please insert or swipe card", though it only has a receptacle to insert one. Would it kill somebody to determine just that and leave the other off of the screen? I understand the desire for generic universality, but still that just smacks of slapdash laziness. Contrast that with this mini PC that knows with way is up (the guy made two different cases, one for Linux and one for Windows) and boots the appropriate OS automatically. Can't we make an ATM that smart, with all of the professionals and designers behind it? Don't the people who build the machines communicate with the people who make the software that runs on them? I doubt it, and this saddens me, me with my engineering degree.

On an unrelated note, it is with great reservation that I am reserving (oops, used same word stem twice in the same sentence) Paul Davidson's Consumer Joe on boingboing's recommendation. I'd run across the title a number of weeks ago but I have been burned in the past by similar books of crank letters. The standard to which I hold all of them is the Lazlo Toth canon, written by former SNL funnyman Don Novello, and few so far have stood up to those letters. Others left such a slight impact on me as to have made me forget their titles and authors, though I remember one had a brown cover and another had an introduction by Jerry Seinfeld. Know this: I usually do not forget books. Maybe I am just reading too many. I admire Scott's resolve to read all of his books before buying or borrowing any new ones, but I can't logistically do that since many of my books are a two hour drive away. And when I had tried such a system with my CDs and DVDs it failed miserably. I still haven't caught myself up on the DVDs, and I haven't bought one in months, but that's what a well-stocked library system does to me.

And holy shit, Blogshares is gone. *Poof* and I am free of that monkey(x) on my back. I had a decent run, became a virtual hundred millionaire, was twelfth best player one month and even managed to break the rules and have both accounts open at once. I only wish I had kept my portfolio somewhere so that I could finally get around to visiting the hundred or so sites in which I was part "owner". Or complete owner, as in jwz's journal, a coup that netted me nine million virtual bucks for a cool hundred thousand. Oh well, I never paid them anything so I cannot complain that they picked up shop and went away.