Indiscriminate Transgressions

I bought a Dell XPS M1330 with a 64GB Samsung SSD in it, as well as some other goodies like Wireless USB and and LED backlight. I wiped most of the drive and installed Vista Ultimate x64.

I feel like I went into the future a few years, mainly because of the SSD. Holy WOW is that shit fast.

Booting is fast. Running Word or Excel results in teh applicaiton almost instantly appearing on the screen. Visual Studio 2005, which normally takes about a day and a half to install was finished in 15 minutes. And on and on. And the silence is eerie.

More soon, but holy wowsers I’m in love.

Back when I had my GBA, I really wanted the Nintendo Picross game, but it was really hard to find here in the states. I guess because of the wholly superficial resemblance to Sudoku, there are suddenly myriad versions of Picross available. I’m going to talk about two of them, Picross DS for the Nintendo DS, and Gemsweeper for Windows PCs.

Picross DS

Picross DS is a straight-up Picross game. Thank you, Nintendo.
The upsides here are:

• Hand-held Picross goodness
• Many single player levels
• Awesome head-to-head Picross via Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection
• Puzzle editor
• Share your own puzzles via Nintendo Wi-Fi Connection
• (Supposed) downloadable Picross levels from the previous Nintendo Picross games that Nintendo has offered
• Low low price of $19.99.

The downsides here are:

• The downloadable games are all “coming soon”
• I am not at all happy with the zoom scheme they came up with for the larger puzzles. It’s really hard to keep track of the big picture while you work, at least for me.

So as you can see, the score is 7 to 2 in favor of the upsides. I’m a happy (addicted) camper. It made me stop playing Planet Puzzle League at least. At roughly the same time this game came out, I stumbled across another Picross game.

Lobstersoft’s Gemsweeper

First up, I’d love to include some kind of title screen or game logo here, but their product page doesn’t have one, just this screenshot and a picture of the game’s narrator.

Gemsweeper plays on your Windows PC, so it has a great big screen and doesn’t need any kind of zoom-in mode for larger puzzles. There is a typical casual-games “Quest mode” which, like in most casual games, progresses in difficulty way too slowly. You can play through 5 “temples” of 10 levels each and even though the puzzles get much larger, they aren’t much more difficult.

Pros:

• Solid interface
• Quick in/out play, much faster than most PC casual games
• It’s Picross
• $19.95 - 4 cents cheaper than Picross DS!

Cons:

• Difficulty just isn’t there
• The jokes the Professor/narrator character tells are really lame
• No head-to-head online play feature

Two of the downsides aren’t really downsides as much as taste, so the score is 4 to 1 here in favor of the upsides.

The biggest problem with these two simultaneous Picross games appearing in my life is that I am not getting a lot of work done. If Xbox Live Arcade released one now, I think I’d be paralyzed.

I’m not sure what exactly happened here.

Let’s see. I loved Forza. It had amazing graphics, felt real as all get-out, was fun to play, and I loved it. When I heard Forza 2 was coming out, I got all excited and thought about getting a force-feedback wheel and the whole nine.

So I bought Forza 2, and it’s all I can do to hire another driver to finish another race. I feel like I’m unlocking things as a part-time job, and I’m not sure where the fun is. Yeah, I know it’s a simulator, and simulation != fun in all cases, but I expected it to be a little bit fun, at least for as many minutes as I spent dollars on the game. (In this case, I did the Best Buy deal via the Xbox Live offer, so it’s $10 less than usual.) But.

I put it in, and was all set to spend like 5 hours driving. The interface looks amazing, the transitions and loading screens are all slick and pretty, but the actual driving feels like not much more than work. Yes, I know it’s a simulation, but I don’t remember Forza feeling like this much work and like zero fun.

Because I have an addictive personality, however, I’ll play it like a sports manager game, and load up new races and match a car against a race and hire a drive in an attempt to at least get some unlocks out of it before I sell it. I wish I had enough money to hire a guy to hire drivers in Forza 2 to earn achievements for me. That way at least I’d be giving someone a real job, as opposing to have to work at this myself for nothing. Maybe I was deluded. Maybe as driving simulators approach reality the driving experience is too real to be a “fun game” anymore (even if there are red lines appearing on the road surface telling me to brake, which never happen in real life (then again, maybe I don’t drive fast enough in real life to see these)).

I haven’t looked at reviews of the game to see if other people feel this way or if I’m just officially old, but Forza 2 makes me feel empty and sick to my stomach like I just binge ate 12 candy bars or something. I give it 2 out of 5 stars cos it sure does look pretty, but I am hoping someone steals it from me so I don’t keep unlocking achievements and feeling emptier and bingey-er.

I was asked by a client if I wanted to attend the DigitalLife conference. So, I went.

At the entrance, there was a booth called Tylenol Ouch, I’m not sure what they were selling there, but they were giving massages and they had these columns with Plexiglas around them filled with Tylenol. The booth was surrounded by a lot of young kids, and it was one of those science fiction becomes reality moments where the dystopic future society with drugs marketed as lifestyle choices and/or candy was suddenly front and center at a technology conference. Also, I guess it’s a-ok now to sell medication to kids using cute characters. Pardon the quality, but here are some pictures taken with my crappy mobile:

Maybe the message is, if you use all of this new technology, you’ll need painkillers. (Ha! I crack myself up!)

I took my 3 year old son to the event. Many of the exhibitors had Hummer H2s (Verizon, Hot97, some random game controller company, et. al.) and Cooper Minis painted up with logos and stuff on them, another booth had 7 or so scooters (of the motorized variety) in various colors, and my son kept telling me that “they have rides here” and tried
to climb inside random vehicles.

The biggest draw seemed to be the Logitech booth. They were giving away these clear round plastic discs with their logo, which had a flashing Logitech green LED in them. There was a line to get these things which was, I kid you not, about 20 minutes long.

Anyway, here’s what’s going to be new and exciting in your digital life:

• HD DVD. They demoed HD DVD on large flat screens. 1080p didn’t look that impressive versus 480p without a comparison, lord knows why they didn’t have a 480p system right next to it. My guess is it doesn’t look that
  much better to most people. Or maybe the problem was display they were hooked to, they were supposed to
  be the bomb or whatever, but they were pretty weak. I don’t know, to me this seems like a pretty incremental increase in quality that the masses will probably never get behind.
• Belkin had a display with the “Belkin Flip for Mac Mini” - it turns out that with this product you can have TWO COMPUTERS SHARING ONE MONITOR. HOLY CRAP! And not even at the same time, it’s just a KVM. But it was targeted at Mac Mini users and it looked like sort of a short Mac Mini so it’ll probably sell. For $80.
• Lots of people hawking iPod accessories. Apparently, your digital life will be filled with semi-disposable electronic fetish items with large add-on aftermarkets.
• GameTap had a DJ that was pretty decent, they were playing some cool music and they had displays hooked up where you could play their catalog of retro games. If you have Mame and MESS it’s sort of moot, but it’ll probably fly. This was probably the best exhibition in my opinion.
• Xavix had some cool stuff. They seem to specialize in what used to be called virtual reality, at least the controllers end of it. They had some golf demos and baseball demos and fishing demos (I cannot bring myself to link to a fishing game demo) with untethered controls–think Nintendo Revolution with custom controllers for
  each game. It was pretty cool.
• Intel had a controller that hooked up to a bicycle. It made it a stationary bike, and had a few pieces that hooked up to the rear wheel and fork, and the demo was riding your bike down a virtual road. Not in the Tour de France or anything, just a random road. I can’t categorize this as exciting, but I guess if you were to take “real life” and replace it with “digital life” this is what you’d be doing.
• The New York Post always seems to have a marginal-looking guy selling subscriptions at the weirdest places, and this was no exception. If you subscribed for a year they’d mail you a $40 gift card to Best Buy or something.
• The Cooper Mini I mentioned earlier was at an exhibitor that does in-auto video, and had a typical 7-inch widescreen display mounted in the center console, and then a 42-inch LCD display in the back, facing toward the back, like out the back window. Not sure that I get this, but okay.

Which brings me to Dance Dance Revolution.

Whenever I see clips of DDR compos, it’s almost always groups of semi-attractive Asian or European tweens/teens/young adults doing cool choreographed moves, or one player doing both sides with his hands and feet, or some other crazy-assed thing like Germans doing DDR on a moving subway. I know that when one sees something from another culture (like say British Comedy TV) one only sees the best of the best and can easily get a distorted view of what it’s actually like (British Comedy TV basically sucks overall, but you wouldn’t know it from Monty Python and The Office). I get that.

However, a typical snapshot-in-time moment was like this red-haired skinny freckled geek with long hair (did I mention it was red?) sporting the geek beard and “dancing” with absolutely no finesse and next to him on the next machine a decently overweight person (couldn’t really tell the gender). It always amazes me when someone seriously overweight can actually move like that.

No I’m not slagging overweight people, as I’d have to be slagging myself, but I can’t move like this person and I am maybe 4 inches taller and 75 pounds lighter than they were. It was impressive. But it wasn’t attractive squads of nubile
youth, either. Hopefully this improved as the day went on.

A huge line had formed at the entrance when they opened, and when I left a few hours later, the line was even more huge, winding up and down the inside of the Javits Center. I considered selling the 4 wristbands that I’d accumulated going in and out of the floor with my son to help pay for parking ($35), but you know, ethics.

So I sold two of them to people that already paid for tickets for $20, the marketing end of that transaction being “skip this huge line that you have to stand in even though you purchased your tickets online” which was snatched up right away.