Miscellaneous Videogame Chatter

So . . . 2007. Games and stuff.

I've been playing Sly Cooper 3. I'm not quite sure why I didn't get Sly 3 when it came out, but whatever reason I didn't. I put it on my Amazon wish list and got a copy for Christmas (hey thanks Mom! :-)) I like it. I don't think it's the best in the Sly series - they lost the bottles with the hidden codes, which I really enjoyed hunting for and they added this 3d mode which doesn't work very well (and gives me a headache). But it's an enjoyable platformer. This series has never been groundbreaking, but it's always been a really solid platformer. While my 360 drowns under Tom Clancy FPS games, it's nice to have a change of pace, almost a palette cleanser.

Speaking of the 360, if you haven't tried the Crackdown demo definitely go get that. A lot of people were dubious about Crackdown, including me. It does have that Microsoft Game Studios "We focus extensively on bumpmapping" graphics goo where everything is shiny and overdone and that's combined with some cell shading effects (just like Shadowrun (sigh)) but the gameplay is solid. It's a "sandbox" game but it doesn't really feel like a GTA clone when you play it. I enjoyed Saint's Row, but that game was clearly heavily GTA inspired. I don't mind that per-se, it out-GTA's GTA in several key respects but it's refreshing to see a game that has an open city you can tool around and do your own thing and doesn't rely primarily on carjacking and running over hookers. At first I was messing around with cars, but once you level up your agility a bit it turns into almost super-hero gameplay - you're jumping to rooftops and maybe throwing girders at people and the like. Tony and I played a bit of it co-op yesterday and it seemed maybe a touch crashy but it was solid fun. The first time I played the demo I thought "hmm that was pretty neat, I'll watch this game closely". The co-op sessions made me want to play again and specifically level up other skills (like demolitions - for bigger grenade explosions!) and play with them. This morning I played it again and bumped it up to "Go ahead and pre-order this, it's a must-buy."

And just to make sure I'm not being too positive I'll dump on Lost Planet briefly. Uggh. I played through the first level before sending it back to Gamefly. The intro sequence has a boss that you have to run away from (or die) once, twice, and then the third time for some mystical reason you have to turn and fight it. It's unkillable mind you, but you have to fight it until it almost kills you then watch a story cinematic. If you try that on the second time your screen is COMPLETELY filled with icicles that oddly have no collision (Really. As in I couldn't see my character because there were icicles between the camera and the character.) Then the boss hits you. Two or three tries of that and you die. Hey let's watch the cinematic again. UGH. I played through the first level (which consists of the two parts in the E3 '06 demo), and the boss at the end started doing the same crap. The screen fills with smoke effects, you can't even see the boss who's rolling around like a tire on it's way to orbit and then he starts throwing you across the arena. Bah. I liked it even less than Dead Rising - Capcom is not winning any votes of confidence from me on the 360 platform anytime soon. Multiplayer might be neat, but A ) I'm not buying a game with that bad of a single-player game and B ) how many goddamn FPS deatmatch games does one console need for crying out loud? I've got GRAW, Gears of War, Rainbow Six: Vegas, and Splinter Cell: Double Agent on the platform already. All of those have good single player, deathmatch, and most of them have some sort of innovative cooperative multiplayer play as well. Deathmach with giant robots was innovative in 2002. It doesn't cut it in 2007 for me.

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Twelve is the new Forty-Two. Which was the new Five.

Am I the last person around to realize that in Battlestar Galactica there were twelve human tribes (ignore the thirteenth for a second) and there are twelve humanoid cylon models? (I should also note that I originally posited it was only twelve models, which would have counted the Centurions, the Raiders, the Basestars, and the Resurrection Ships; but it's clear now that the count is supposed to be twelve humanoid models.)

The whole "twelve tribes" thing hasn't really gotten much play - it's not terribly clear what the tribes were/are to the humans.

Why is this significant (and why did it occur to me while watching tonight's episode)? It bridges a gap between the monotheistic faith of the Cylons and the polytheism of the humans. They both seem to impart mystical significance to the number twelve (although it's not clear to me that all the Cylons see the "Final Five" as mythological/sacred).

Hmmm - I hit Wikipedia to see what they had to say, and from there linked to a Battlestar Wiki and noticed that in the Religion page they list the known Lords of Kobol - there are seven of them. Seven known Lords, seven known Cylons? Or am I being overly conspiracy minded?

One last observation, getting back to the oddball thirteenth tribe. If I'm right and there is a connection that means there aren't twelve Cylon models - there will be thirteen.



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Butterflies!

Over the holiday break Karin, her parents, and I visited Natural Bridges park in Santa Cruz which is a big stop for monarch butterflies as they migrate south to Mexico for the winter. They estimated they had about 300 butterflies there that day, and these are a couple of pictures that don't completely suck. You really need to see them full size to see the butterflies well . . . .

I also took a couple of pictures that don't have butterflies, but were just pretty.

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Überremote - the Third Generation


Way back in mmm 1995 or 1996 I gave up on running my home theater with the coffee table of remotes, and don't even start me on trying to convince Karin it was functional. So I went out and spent some ridiculous amount of money (I can't recall if it was $200 or $300 - I have a suspicion it was the latter.) on a Marantz RC-2000 universal remote. This sucker was a monster and it had macros that you program very painstakingly on the remote itself.

Later when i bought my first Dolby Digital receiver (that was in 1997) it came with a Marantz RC-2000, so I had two for a while. The next receiver (my current receiver) came with a touchscreen universal remote that you could connect to a PC via USB and program from a Windows app. That lasted us until November 2006. But the new house has hardwood floors and every so often the remote gets dropped and . . . well the LCD layer started being wonky. it built up to the bottom half of the screen being blank (luckily the touchscreen still worked but you had to know which button was where.)

So I purchased a Logitech Harmony 880 remote from Amazon. It took some fiddling, but I quite like it. It has a color screen with 8 buttons that change function as needed, as well as hard buttons for transport controls, arrow keys, 10-key keypad, channel and volume. It does have a learning function if you need it, but the key bit is supposed to be that this connects to a PC (or a Mac) and downloads remote codes from the internet.

The big new function for the 880 is that it has internal models of the system state. On the last remote I had a double set of macros - one set that turned on the TV, the receiver and the desired source component, and a second set of macros that assumed the TV and receiver were already on and only turned on the source component and set the input. In contrast the 880 has "Activities" where you push the "Watch HD TiVo" button and it thinks to itself and says "Well I think the TV, the receiver, and the DVD player are on. So turn off the DVD player, switch inputs on the receiver and TV and hit the "List" button on the HD TiVo". This works pretty damn well and it actually quite shortens the macro duration (since it only issues needed commands). The Logitech code database seems quite robust - it knows buttons that my original remotes don't have (such as the direct input codes for my TV set - I used a silly hack to cycle inputs in the past.) Even more importantly, it seems to know all the delay figures for the hardware - which is a painful trial-and-error process. See if you turn on a component it may be a half second or so before it's ready to accept commands. And shifing the TV input may take a noticeable lag before it will accept another command. With the Marantz and the Denon remote you could insert delays but it was a terrible trial-and-error process to figure out what was needed.

There's only one thing I don't like about the 880 and that is the remote programming application is some crazy Flash/web based program and the data is actually stored on Logitech's web site. This means if Logitech ever went out of business or decided to stop supporting the remote I'm just shit-out-of-luck on the programming front. The Denon remote stored it's information in a local file so I can always restore it if I need to. There is one potential upside to this storage which is that I've read stories where the tech support people tweak a remote command on somebody's account and gets them to redownload to fix a problem. That's a neat trick, but I'd feel a lot better if I had some way of locally storing a backup of the programming.

The 880 also has a built-in rechargeable battery and comes with a charging cradle so it's much less battery-consumptive than the Denon remote which ate 4 AA's every couple of months. All in all I give it a thumbs-up.

Well, actually I'm not wild about the silly blue ring of light on the charger, but I can live it I suppose. That's a minor nit.

If you've got more than one or two remotes on your coffee table, I'd highly suggest getting an überremote to replace them. And the Harmony seems to be a nice sweet spot in terms of price/performance and with the necessary user-friendliness to simplify a complex home theater down to "push this button to watch a DVD" level.

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