It's been a while since I talked videogames, so I thought I might drop a whirlwind tour of recent games.

1) I got Hotel Dusk from Gamefly last Friday. And I sent it back today. It wasn't terrible, but several places describe the experience more like reading a novel than playing a game. Which sounds interesting, but the thing about wanting to have an experience like reading a novel? When I feel like that I read a freaking novel. And I don't have to push a button every two sentences, even if I'm reading on my Treo. It didn't take much walking back and forth from my hotel room to the front desk to be done. I realized this morning I was dreading seeing somebody in the hall, because it meant having to press the "next" button a hojillion times.

2) My other Gamefly title at the moment is Odin Sphere. I've been playing it on the PS3 so it's also been a testbed for the new upscaling options for PS2 titles. I haven't fully made up my mind on Odin Sphere yet. I think I like it overall but it comes close to violating my "no replaying content" rule. There are a lot of bosses and some of them seem quite cheap. On the other hand, the combat is satisfying and a single boss fight isn't more than a couple of minutes and it intelligently just reloads quickly, so it's not too bad. Before this I was playing FInal Fantasy XII so my PS3 has logged a lot more time in PS2 games than PS3 titles.

3) Speaking of PS3 Calling All Cars for the PS3 is good. The only problem is you need three friends with PS3's. This is not like Rock Band, or even Final Fantasy: Crystal Chronicles, where's it is reasonable to assume your friends already have the proper hardware, or maybe reasonable to pressure them to buy the needed gear. I can't seriously recommend a PS3 to anyone unless they want a Blu-Ray player. Ah well. Nice product, wrong timing. And of course, the thing that will suck is people are going to take the wrong message away. Nobody is going to say "Well, you can't release a multiplayer-focused title early in a console's lifecycle - you have to have your system sellers first." The industry is going to say "small lightweight multplayer titles don't sell". Or maybe if we're lucky they'll say "don't sell on the PS3" and not extrapolate to the Live Arcade. Speaking of Live Arcade it's interesting to note that Calling All Cars is a couple of hundred meg - too big for Live Arcade (even with the higher size limits). I really hope Microsoft lightens up on the must fit on a memory card logic because it's forcing Live Arcade games into a simplistic . . . well arcade sort of mode.

4) Speaking of Live Arcade, I guess I never talked about Catan after getting my 360 mojo back. Catan is pretty sweet as an online adaptation. I haven't played it single-player much after the first few days. I don't really think it plays very fair, the AI seem to gang up on the human player. It's especially frustrating when they offer you a trade, you accept, then they say "not with you". Is it really necessary to have the UI work that way? It seems like you often have to simply reject the offer or leave the trade screen altogether. But if you have three friends with 360's and the willingness to play a slower boardgame pacing then I highly recommend checking it out.

technorati tags:Xbox360, games, Cata, CallingAllCars, OdinSphere, HotelDusk

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I had an ulterior motive for that last post. I needed to write it to clear an email out of my Inbox, resulting in a clean Inbox for Mail, and a clean Inbox for my Desktop. (I do have some stuff in my physical Inbox right now but that's because I process it on Mondays when Kinkless GTD tells me to. It's mostly filing.)

I wanted to recommend the articles over at Kinkless on the "kinkless desktop". They are sort of Mac-centric in terms of the specific software recommendations but the general philosophy of "Stop treating your Desktop as a dumping grounds - and stop letting software do it as well." is applicable to Windows as well. One of the ironies for me is that my desktop was reasonably clean but reading this article lead to me downloading a bunch of software, and I didn't have time to process it all until today. So my new Desktop Inbox was stuffed with software - to streamline and/or prettify my Inbox. (sigh) But it's a great series of articles, and I highly recommend it.

If nothing else the suggestion of having a folder called "Pending" on your Desktop is brilliance. Part of the clutter I did have was little test files coming up or down from the web server as I worked on various import/export mechanisms. But once I had four or more of those on my desktop, then a couple of songs (downloaded legally from TMBG.com, thankyouverymuch. Stay away RIAA), then a program or two to install later and . . . chaos. And as I mounted and unmounted removable discs and networks shares I'd have weird gaps left in the desktop, so three files downloaded consecutively wouldn't even be congruent. (That suggestion to NOT show mounted shares and drives on the Desktop is also a great idea. Leave 'em in the Finder!)

My desktop has officially Gotten Things Done(tm). David Allen would be proud :-)

technorati tags:GTD, Kinkless, Desktop, InboxZero

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Man! To paraphrase Lloyd Bridges "I picked the wrong month to start setting goals." Karin asks about the word count on The Unnamed Fantasy Book in the comments here. For the purpose of this conversation we'll call Karin "Bob" in this post. There's a reason for that which only SF geeks will know. Well, maybe writer geeks of all stripes. Anyhoo.Well, as you know Bob, the goal went poorly. I originally stated the goal was 31,000 words, and in fact I only have 6,000. Ouch! A few things went wrong, some under my control and some not so much. One was that my goal was 1,000 words a day, every day. That's a bad goal. A more reasonable goal is 1,000 words per weekday and assume my weekends are off-times. That would have lopped the goal to 23,000. Writing is work, I'm trying to treat it as a job, and that means I should be able to have days off.The other stupid thing is that I've found that as soon I perceive myself as "behind" then I just ostrich the problem away. As soon as I started saying "I'm behind - tomorrow I need to write 1500 words", the next day I would write nothing. Like clockwork. So I finally said, "OK, let's work together stubborn, stupid ostrich brain." The goal should be 1K words every week day, but it doesn't accumulate. That will mean an average of less than 20K words a month - say about five months for a first draft. Acceptable. I can hang with that. Words started flowing again.What's that Bob? Why did I only get 6K, when I'm saying the average should be 20K? Well, again as you know Bob, the "part-time" job was decidedly not part-time the last two weeks. Sucky to the goal to be sure, but they pay the bills (well metaphorically speaking), and we had a legitimate need for me to ratchet up the workload.So there we are. Some mockery is order, I asked for it, and I'll take it. But overall I think it's a good program. So let's say we should have 20K words in June - that would put us at 26,000 words come July 1st. Check back in a month :-)As for other goals, I talked about my new exercise regime a while back and noted I was losing a half-pound a week. I just did the May numbers and they didn't look good. I averaged only losing 1/10 of a pound in May :-( I'm not entirely sure why. One part is that I hit a wall in the program - I stuck for three weeks on rung 11 of the program, only because of the sit ups. I reached a point where none of the program felt like much of an effort, but those damn sit ups were killing me. I finally went on to rung 12 feeling like I still wasn't ready for two more situps but I wanted the extra push-ups, jogging steps, and so forth. I also skipped more days than I should have. Still I said it wasn't about weight loss, and it it isn't, not really. I'm still down about 7 pounds from the beginning of February, and I'm still losing, so I'll press on.

technorati tags:writing, goals, TheUnnamedFantasyBook, weight, Hacker'sDiet, exercise

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So I grabbed iTunes 7.2 today, which allows you to download the new 256K, non-DRM'ed songs from the store. I'm excited about the concept; I've gone back and forth on my stance on iTunes but I recently settled on "against", as the DRM is too annoying. But now I can buy non-DRM'ed stuff so that's awesome. It does cost $1.30 a track instead of $0.99, but I can live with that.

It's a mixed bag though. It looks to me like Apple rolled it out a bit undercooked (or the servers are overloaded). Once I went through the usual iTunes upgrade rigamarole and then turned on "iTunes Plus" it asked if I wanted to drop six bucks on upgrading my library. Turns out I have a Beastie Boys single, and a double CD of Martin Denny tunes that I bought from iTunes that are in the catalog. Cool, I was trying to figure out what was going to be in the EMI catalog that I wanted so I could be a good consumer monkey and indicate my support. I can do this instead.

Well, that's a problem. I've poked iTunes about it on and off all day. The first pass it took it only downloaded about a third of the tracks and gave me the mysterious "Unknown error 504" message on the others. And when it does this it's SUPER ANNOYING! It pops up a message, plays a "bonk" sound and starts bouncing a dock icon until I go acknowledge it. Welcome to Windows XP-style interfaces, iTunes will be your designated annoyance today. But wait it gets better! Once you click OK that releases another download stream to try another track. It probably won't work and it will go through the bounce/bonk/dialog trick again. Until you scream "ENOUGH" and hit the button to pause all downloads. Oh, that will bork any podcasts you were downloading as well. It's also been thrashing the crap out of my system while it was at it - I've had to shut iTunes down several times because while it wasn't actually downloading songs it was thrashing my net connection so badly nothing else was working.

It looks like NOW it thinks it has all the tracks. I'm not super-confident because the last time I quit iTunes it told me I still had three tracks hung. Now they are marked as downloaded, but I'm not quite sure which tracks they were. Right now if I hit "Check for Purchases" it tells me "Unable to check for purchases. An unknown error occurred (5002)."

But given enough time it seems to have worked. The new tracks are 256k, and they are now .m4a files (instead of protected .m4p files). I had a paragraph about how iTunes had falsely decided it could "upgrade" an album I ripped from CD but I just realized it's right and I'm wrong. I did buy the album from iTunes but then I burned it to CD and ripped it back to get un-DRM'ed tracks. So I figured fine, I'll try another album "upgrade" with them and got the 5002 error. Guess I'll try again later. Interesting that it can find the album I've bought even though those tracks are no longer DRM'ed.

So in general I think I'm going to like the way iTunes Plus works, once the birthing pains are over. Right now? I'm hard pressed to recommend you jump right in. Give it a few days to let the water settle and then see if the new tracks are worth the upgrade to you.

technorati tags:iTunes, Apple, DRM, music

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The 16-Ton Monty Python DVD Megaset * 14 discs packed with every episode from the programme's four year run! * 16 tons of fun, including hilarious extras and exclusive highlights! * 2 MONTY PYTHON LIVE DVDs!

The 16-Ton Monty Python DVD Megaset

Yes, through Wednesday you can buy the entire Monty Python run on DVD from A&E.com for $35! When this set came out it cost like $200 - I remember wanting it but being completely unable to justify $200 on Monty Python. But $35? SO ORDERED! I saw this on BoardGameGeek originally. (It's off topic there really, but I'll forgive the poster. Just this once. :-))

technorati tags:MontyPython, sale, DVD, A&E

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