Played some NFL Street and James Bond:Everything or Nothing online Monday. I had actually played NFL Street a couple of times against the Cheesehead - but there's a huge gap in our relative football video gaming skillz. (Translation - Seth trounced me, badly) NFL Street was fun - but it really brings home that NBA Street was a much better game. I hope EA coughs up an online version of that soon. Bond was terrible. The level designs seemed shitty and annoying, but that was entirely overshadowed by the network locking up and freezing every minute or so. Given that it was only two players in the game, it was the worst network gameplay I've seen in a few years. Boo hiss. I don't recommend bothering with EON online.

Go read this guy's blog. It's worth your time. Not convinced? Try this snippet: communication skills this is the area that most developers are just completely and utterly lacking in. i'm a developer myself, and i can't even stand talking to these fuckers. can you think of any way to have a more awkward conversation that just having to chat with the typical developer? trust me...i don't want to hear about your triumphant saturday afternoon where you finally got your piece of shit linux distro to recognize your 3 year old cd-burner.

Slate has a pretty good article about robotic's "Uncanny Valley" and the connection to games. In brief, there is a belief in robotics that when you try to get "too humanlike" there is a threshold where humans reject things that are REALLY close to human. So there is a point where your robot will be more accepted if it is less humanoid - enough so that we comfortably classify it as "robot" and not as "creepy human". So the Slate article posits that graphics are getting good enough that we are entering the Uncanny Valley. Not the first time that's been said, but an interesting read nonetheless. Wired has a cool article about little jet-powered robots NASA is researching for possible use on the ISS. UPDATE: I forgot this link, but it's a good one. I have no idea what the Japanese says, but these are some awesome bento boxes. Lastly, I happen to have gotten my mitts on a gmail account invite, so you can email me at timothy.sanders@gmail.com So far it looks pretty cool - I like the conversational threading they do. With only like 3 emails in it I can't say much about the search yet. :-)

So two interesting notes about multiplayer. 1) I think I'm going to cancel my City of Heroes account. Nothing wrong with the game - it's just that with E3 and my followon TV madness it's been several weeks since I last played. So I can't play with all of the people I had been playing with, I'd need to build a new batch of friends. I'm finding that I'd rather just play Magic Online, now that that's almost stable. 2) Today is when the new Zelda: Four Swords game comes out. And guess what? I'm not going to buy it. After a fair amount of monkeying around I've determined that I know many people who want to play it, but I don't know three people who can agree on a time. As I was trying to juggle schedules I realized that this was the same deal as Crystal Chronicles. Karin was nice enough to play that with me for a while, but I managed to scrap together enough people to try it exactly once. Not a good enough experience to warrant blowing $50. I'm not used to passing over a good multiplayer game, but I think it's time I started . . . . So anyway, if somebody want to take the title of "Multiplayer King" away, I think I'd plead Nolo contendere.

I've done something insanely clever. Not too long ago I decided I needed a copy of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy radio serial. That's not the clever bit. When the CD's arrived yesterday, I listened to the first one while cooking dinner. That's not the clever bit either. Last night I fed all 8 CD's to my trusty PC and ripped 'em to AAC and stored 'em on my iPod. Yes, that's the clever bit. I now have the entire radio serial and the two bonus discs of interviews, commentary and whatnot on my favorite piece of portable electronics. So if you see me wandering around Menlo Park at lunchtime, headphones on and giggling to myself you'll know that I'm one hoopy frood.