Stupid DS Tricks

Every so often I'm brought up short when I'm on one of my "You know, the Nintendo DS is a very flawed console." rants, and it always happens at the same point. One part of my spiel is that Nintendo has a certain list of stupid features that they include in every DS game, and the absolute dumbest is the fact that they make you blow into the microphone for a variety of things. Invariably somebody claims this only happens in a small fraction of games and/or it only happens on goofy niche games. So at this time I'd just like to note that a minor obscure title called The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass has you blow out candles (in order to open doors) and blow dust off a map (just in case you weren't annoyed already). While I'm thinking about they totally ruined the battle mode in Mario Kart where you have three balloons behind your cart by making you blow into the microphone to inflate the balloons. So the next time somebody tells me they are a big DS fan, and they never have to blow into the microphone I'm going to ask if they played either Zelda or Mario Kart. Admittedly, neither is likely to be a popular mainstream game . . . .

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Vlad Versus the Dragon

Vlad certainly had no intention of becoming Vlad the Dragonslayer that fine May morning. In fact he was only supposed to go as far as Willow-on-Taukney to buy his mum a wheel of fine Taukneyshire cheddar. Vlad's mum had always told him never to talk to wizards but the stories had been so fine, so mesmerizing. Vlad hadn't seen harm in talking to old Genikar for just a moment. None of that helped as he crouched in a damp little cave that Genikar had claimed was a forgotten gateway to the ancient Dwarf Runs of Mount Feneelzin. He lightly and repeatedly struck his head on the grim basalt before him, muttering "Stupid, stupid!" under his breath.

Vlad was from good solid Middlelands stock. The people of the Middlelands were not big on adventures - Vlad's own Da had often said "Ye can keep yere epic quests! Me, I'm just for a hot meal and a full flagon!" As a wee bairn Vlad remembered sitting by the hearth down at the Wet Whistle, listening to Genikar spin his tales of great heroes and kings, staying until his Da cuffed him for staying up so late and sent him home to bed. Every tale would end with the prince rescuing the fair princess or the hero slaying the foul monster terrorizing the countryfolk. And the men of Ambleshire would roar with laughter and refill Genikar's flagon and thank the gods that there was no heroing needed there in the Middlelands. 

Vlad grunted disgustedly. "Oi!" he thought to himself. "If me Da could see me now he'd cuff me so hard I'd miss next Tuesday! And where be Genikar now with all his fine tales of adventure and luscious appreciative wenches? He's gone and knocked his fool self out casting some damn-fool spell and now’s likely down that overgrown lizard’s gullet! Leaving me here in a fine little pickle - an angry dragon outside and me with just a little skinning knife that wouldn't scare a large rabbit!"

Not that Genikar had come right out and said to Vlad "Hey, wanna go slay a dragon?" Oh no. At first Genikar had just needed a "little help" getting a cart to Danestown - the roads were boggy and he was afraid his swaybacked old mare wouldn't be able to pull the cart out of a mudhole. The wily old mage had even offered to buy his mum's wheel of cheddar as payment for Vlad going out of his way. So Vlad's best mate Davin had gone back to Ambleshire carrying Vlad's mum's cheese and Vlad had agreed to stay a day and help Genikar over the Taukney ferry and down the muddy path to Danestown. Of course in Danestown it had been a shiny guinea to stay on and get Genikar's goods to the border. Each simple step lead to his next involvement and before he knew it Vlad was huddling in the back of a forgotten cave hoping a dragon wouldn't hear his breathing.

The dragon was nothing like the soaring magnificent creatures of Genikar’s tales either. It didn’t speak and it didn’t swoop through the sky with the sun glistening on iridescent jewel-like scales. The beast had wings aye, but Vlad was more likely to get airborne than this hulking creature. It scrabbled along, a vast serpentine belly clearing the ground by mere inches on stubby legs. Vlad’s eyes watered as an errant breeze brought the foul carrion stench of the beast to the back of the cave.

“And where is his vast horde of gold and treasure anyway?” Vlad muttered to himself in disgust. He looked around the dank cave where he huddled but saw nothing more than stone outcroppings and a few piles of ash.

“Give Genikar his due. His tales got the firebreathing right at least. Guess that why yon lizard doesn’t mind the damp.” Vlad clamped his hand over his own mouth as the dragon’s head rose up. The triangular snout turned to the rear of the cave. It sniffed the air, nostrils larger than dinner plates flaring wide. Vlad wished he could strike his head on the rock again but he knew he couldn’t afford the slightest risk of a sound.

The dragon stepped further into the cave, still snuffling at the now-still air. Vlad held his breath in an attempt to be completely still. Still suspicious of something the dragon sucked in a huge breath and then pursed its muzzle in a dainty moue. Vlad would have chuckled except the dragon then exhaled a narrow ribbon of flame that reached to the back of the cave, just a scant foot from where Vlad hid. The fire roared greedily as Vlad recoiled from the sudden heat. To his great horror he collided with a stalactite behind him and broke off the tip. The stone shards clattered noisily down the back wall. The dragon lumbered forward, nearly filling the cave mouth with scaly bulk.

“That’s it, I’m in the soup now. If I don’t go now I’ll never have the space to squeeze past. If I get eaten by a dragon, I’ll hope I can haunt Genikar’s shade in the afterlife!” Vlad muttered, past caring if the dragon heard him. Hoping for an element of surprise Vlad placed both hands on the rock in front of him and vaulted over. Or he tried but cold and cramped muscles failed him and instead he sprawled gracelessly on his stomach right in front of the dragon’s questing snout. Vlad got his surprise though, and the dragon reared back its head away from Vlad’s sprawled form.

“Heeeeyyaaaa!” Vlad screamed and pushed off the ground, clumsily scrambling back onto his feet. He stumbled forward and brandished his skinning knife. “Come on you misbegotten overgrown salamander! I’m not afraid of ye!” Vlad’s voice cracked on the “ye”, which rather ruined the dramatic effect.

The dragon blinked in surprise and paused briefly before inhaling again. Vlad watched carefully and when the dragon stopped inhaling he tumbled madly forward. He somersaulted a half-dozen times, veering randomly to the left or right with each tumble. The dragon exhaled flame and came close enough to singe Vlad’s beard but didn’t strike home. Vlad tumbled a last time and popped up next to a bulky forelimb almost as thick as his waist.

“Ye missed!” Vlad grinned nastily and stabbed at the shoulder with his skinning knife. He stared round-eyed as the blade broke harmlessly against the dragon’s ruddy scales with a metallic TING!

“Bugger!” Vlad cursed and then tossed the useless hilt at the dragon’s eye. The dragon caught the missile in its mouth and swallowed it.

“Smug little bastard, ye are!” Vlad muttered as he dove for the cave mouth. The dragon’s sinuous body still blocked most of the entrance, but the beast couldn’t move sideways at any speed and Vlad slipped past into the warm spring sunlight. Vlad smiled and stepped forward where he promptly tripped over Genikar’s body.

“Godsdamn! I thought ye had been eaten!” Vlad said. Genikar lay tossed at the cave mouth, one arm outstretched and his other hand clutching an amulet around his neck. The amulet flashed golden in the light, but more than that it seemed to pulse with an interior glow.

“I don’t recall seeing that before. Mayhap it is tied to your last spell?” Vlad reached out and tugged on the amulet. The clasp opened with a snick as if the amulet was eager to move. There was a bright flare as the necklace came free and then the amulet pulsed faster, synchronizing itself to Vlad’s racing heartbeat.

The dragon roared in rage, having doubled back in the cave and forced its head outside past its tail. Vlad blinked at the beast and quickly fastened the amulet around his own neck. He dropped the medallion inside his tunic, hissing as the metal touched his chest. It burned there with a cold fire and he reached to pull it out again when he noticed something that froze him in place. As soon as the amulet had touched his skin the dragon stopped looking at him, choosing instead to sniff the air as if unsure where Vlad had gone. Vlad paused for a moment, thinking of Genikar’s last spell, remembering th e wizard speaking of going undetected through the dragon’s den. Vlad waved his hand in front of the dragon, at first tentatively but quickly gaining speed and energy.

“Hah! The wizard appears to have left me a mighty spell of concealment. Ho! I am away!” Vlad chuckled and boldly strode away, back down the path. It was only a matter of moments before he went around a bend in the path and was lost to sight.

Another ten minutes passed before Genikar blinked his eyes and stood up again, smiling as he brushed dirt from his robes. He straightened his hat as he made a mystic hand pass at the dragon. The dragon froze in place before fading into translucency and converting into a large body of crimson smoke.

“That should bait the hook nicely.” Genikar said to the evaporating smoke. “Now we wait.”

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The March of DTV HD

I didn't mention it but last week DirecTV turned on some more channels - including SciFi HD. And Wednesday they turned on another batch, including Food Network HD. I think everything I watch except Cartoon Network and maybe BBC America is now available in HD (and Cartoon Network is coming soon). So they didn't get the Eureka season finale in HD, but they did have the Doctor Who finale. There are some growing pains still. SciFi is simply upconverting the 4:3 feed and adding "pillar boxes" (the bars on the left and right of the screen. Which is fair enough, but a lot of their shows are *already* in letterbox, so they are showing a 16:9 image in the center of the screen with bars on all four sides. That needs to stop. (And I'll note to people mocking me for buying the DVDO video scaler that said scaler can quite happily zoom in to fix that problem.) It's not unheard of, HBO HD had that recently on some episodes of . . . I can't remember if it was Entourage or Flight of the Conchords, but I've had to do the zoom HD trick before. I'm hoping SciFi will get it sorted out before Battlestar Galactica returns. Food Network HD is odd - it seems like test loops more than actual programming. All the other HD channels DTV has been adding are "simulcast" - an HD version of the regular programming. They even come in on the same channel number, which seems a bit confusing. The Food Network is listed as channel 231 and the HD version is 231-1. It reminds me of circa 2000-2001 where the few HD channels only had about six hours of programming each and was on an endless loop. Basically great for showing off displays in the store, but not that exciting for the consumer. Food Network HD showed one episode of Good Eats like 5 times in the first day it was online. Hopefully this is temporary. The HR-20 unit has grown on me. It's still not TiVo, but it's not bad. In some ways I'm growing to prefer it. It's more responsive than the DirecTiVo units, and its menus are cleaner and less nested. At first I didn't like the 30-second skip showing frames as it moved through (the "undocumented" TiVo 30 second skip simply jump cuts), but I've come to prefer it - if I've clipped into the show I can see that happening.

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I've had it

I love the "scroll nipple" thingie on the Apple Mighty Mouse. But once it gets dirty, it's a major pain to clean. I complained about it before but I've snapped now. The downward scroll stopped worked again this morning and it turns out that I just cannot work without it. I'm so used to a scroll wheel that it constantly jars me out of my workflow. So I just bought the Logitech MX Revolution, as recommended by Macworld. And then I went and got the rubbing alcohol and a Q-Tip. For one last cleaning until Amazon gets me a replacement on Wednesday. Oh how the Mighty have fallen! (Yeah. You see what I did there?)

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Robot Monkey

The whole ridiculous situation was not my fault. If it hadn’t been for the Zoo Plagues of 2030’s the whole SimuApe project wouldn’t have existed and I wouldn’t have been programming robot gorillas in the first place. I wasn’t even alive in 2038 when Bobo, The Last Primate, died in the Tokyo zoo. It’s been over a century now that man was the only ape to walk the Earth, and it was touch and go whether we were going to make the cut ourselves for a while.

My fiancée Jill had thought the whole project was ridiculous from the first day she’d heard of it. “But Robert, another four years and you’ll have tenure.” she had told me.

“Sure. And that’s a license to stagnate for another forty-fifty years. Do you have any idea how cutting-edge the whole idea is? Long term autonomous non-human robots? Ten years from now artificial behaviorists will be split into people working on one of the SimuZoos and the old fogeys out to pasture.” I said, perhaps overstating the case. “Only when your field is academic they don’t call it ‘pasture’, they call it ‘tenure’.”

Jill giggled. “You can make it sound as noble as you want dear, but it still amounts to programming a robot monkey. It’s the opening act of a Godzilla movie, not some noble calling.”

“I disagree.” I shook my head while fighting back my own grin. “OK, sure I have to admit my inner twelve year old boy is clapping his hands and yelling ‘Robot Monkey!’, but it is a noble goal. If we succeed we’ll be able to unfreeze genetic material and create baby apes. Those apes will be raised by the SimuApes and in a generation we can have real wildlife again. What’s not noble about that?”

“Right.” Jill rolled her eyes. “I think your inner twelve year old just has gotten better at rationalizing.” Jill said, but the twinkle in her eye told me she wasn’t upset anymore.

***

CRASH!

I jumped as another barrel rolled off the the lab table at the far side of the room. Just where the hell had he gotten barrels from anyway? OK, maybe I shouldn’t have named the first full size beta unit Kong, and I’m sure the inevitable review board would probably conclude that my monkey database shouldn’t have included the old Peter Jackson film, much less the selections from classic video game history. That had been a late night whim, but it was tagged as fiction. SimuApes were only supposed to use the fiction stores when interacting with humans. I thought it might cause some funny interchanges at most. I guess the current situation might be seen as funny, if you weren’t me. Or Jill. Or any of my team. The media hadn’t decided how to cover this yet. If I shut Kong down safely we’d be the funny local color news story. If somebody died . . . well, I guess if somebody died it would likely be me so I wouldn’t care much.

The behavioral test labs had a huge domed area that was intended to allow for creation of long term habitats. But we weren’t even scheduled for those tests for another two years, so the biome had not yet been seeded. Kong had somehow raided the labs for raw materials and built this ridiculous contraption straight from our cultural unconscious. I scanned over the welded tables and lab carts as yet another barrel dropped down with a loud clang.

Kong had obviously planned his move well. Over the holidays we had shut the lab down for two weeks. For that matter Kong should have been in sleep mode. I hoped the review board remembered to look into who left a lonely SimApe online in an unmonitored lab! When we came back to work after the New Years holiday we were surprised to be locked out of the lab. It was six hours before Kong let us into Biome 1. As for how Jill got here . . . well Kong must have snatched her as she headed in to the university this morning. Which means he had learned to drive, and hadn’t even been around when the hacker boys were trying to convince the lab monitors to unlock an entrance.

Look, I didn’t study all that classic game crap closely. What kind of madmen made video games where monkeys raced go-karts against each other? I had to look up what a go-kart was in order to even know how much sense that failed to make. At any point, it was water under the bridge. Kong had gotten out, and he had snatched Jill, and he had built this crazy re-creation of “Donkey Kong”. Now my fiancée was perched up there on the top level screaming her head off. And I could totally tell she was going to blame all of this on me later.

Kong wouldn’t let me approach any closer until I put on the ridiculous costume. Red overalls, spotless white gloves and a silly little beret with a ‘M’ emblazoned on it. Apparently in the dawn of gaming this “Mario” character was extremely popular, but it all began with “Donkey Kong”. The false mustache in particular I felt was uncalled for. But Kong insisted, and he did have Jill hostage, so I had no choice but to play along.

My team had been frantically playing this old 2d flatscreen game, getting a handle on what Kong was playing at. I was just glad that I had’t seen anything on fire. There was an area inside the dome airlock painted off that said “1P Start”. We gathered that Kong wanted me to stand inside it. I didn’t want anything to do with it, but then Karl pointed out that some of the smaller Apes were building a new structure that looked suspiciously like level two of the damn game. Hopefully I could rescue Jill before it was finished. And as soon as I got close enough I would blast Kong with an override shutdown code, just as soon as I confirmed that Jill was safe.

I walked through the door and stood defiantly in the start area with my knees knocking in fear and anticipation. The foreboding mono music played over the loudspeakers. And just as I stepped forward the barrel behind me burst into flames. Crap! I guess I was just lucky Kong couldn’t reproduce the crazy intro sequence. If he had climbed a series of ladders with Jill tucked under one arm I’d be in even more trouble. If that’s even possible. I started forward toward the first ladder when I received another nasty surprise. Kong threw a blue barrel down, but it skidded sideways and stuck to the edge of the top row. I squinted and could just barely make out thin robotic arms clinging to the lip. Kong had reprogrammed some of the maintenance ‘bots and put them inside the barrels! The blue barrel clambered/dropped down behind me and jumped into the barrel of fire. I quickly climbed the ladder as the barrel ‘bot emerged, now cloaked in blue natural-gas flame. This was really going entirely too far!

“Look out!” Michael cried in my earpiece. I had worn Kong’s silly costume, but we had snuck an wireless earpiece inside the hat so I could communicate with my team. I turned to see a second robo-barrel that had careened down to my level. Luckily above me hung a large hammer suspended by a nearly invisible cable. I grabbed the hammer and began smashing it into the tabletop “floor” in front of me. The speakers blared out some different music and the robo-barrel obligingly jumped away as soon as I crashed the hammer down upon it.

“Nice work, Bob. But now you can’t climb a ladder until the hammer wears off.” Michael said.

“Screw that. This isn’t a game, that’s real fire Kong is playing with.” I muttered into my throat mike. But as I reached for the ladder both the ladder and the hammer shocked me! Kong apparently had programmed the environment to enforce his crazy rules. I frowned and almost absently tapped the next barrel with the hammer.

“Time is up . . . now!” Michael said and sure enough the hammer shocked me again. I tossed it away, noticing that another cleaning robo t scurried out from a hutch and picked up the hammer. Damn Kong anyway!

Without the hammer I could safely climb the ladder. Well, safely in the context of “trapped in a reenactment of an ancient video game by an insane robot monkey” anyway. I realize most people wouldn’t characterize that as “safe” but I didn’t have time to think about it as another damn barrel-bot rolled towards me.

“We’ve analyzed the kinetics. Jump on my mark and it should work. Wait . . . and MARK!” Michael said. I jumped as hard as I could. It was immediately obvious that Kong may have replicated the timing of this ancient amusement, but my physique was not up to the task. Luckily the barrel-bot sped up and actually seemed to shrink, gliding just under my heels before I landed heavily. I pumped my fist in the air and grinned maniacally at Jill and Kong, barely visible three levels above me.

“That’s right. 100 points, boyo! Jill, I’m coming to rescue you!” I yelled as I dashed past a broken ladder and watched the shadows from overhead barrels. As one rolled past the good ladder I bolted up another level. Two left!

More confident now I jumped another barrel and then climbed to the penultimate level. There was another hammer to my left and I grabbed it, smashing another couple of barrels before coming to rest just to the left of the only complete ladder at this level. This ladder, than one more to reach the short platform where Jill stood. I swarmed up the ladder quickly and glared at Kong. I honestly didn’t know if Kong had built the scale of this “level” to suit, but I had the remote tucked in my ridiculous, stereotypical overalls and Kong’s built-in data receiver had a range such that all I had to do was reach Jill. At that point where I would finish the level was just inside the range where I could shut Kong down. And frankly, once he was down I was prepared to EMP the crap out of his fucking barrel-accomplice-bots.

It was almost anticlimactic really. I jumped one more barrel with Michael’s timing help and climbed the last ladder. I clutched Jill to my side and triumphantly zapped Kong with my override remote. Now in the game there should be a big heart overhead, which breaks as Kong climbs away and grabs the girl. Kong didn’t get that part simulated right I guess. Jill slapped me so hard my ears rang. As I saw stars overhead I would have sworn I heard Kong grate out one phrase as he fell down. It’s not on the recordings, and Michael insists I imagined it. Nonetheless I know what I heard. As Kong toppled he said a phrase that sent a chill down my spine.

“How high can you get? That was only 25 meters Bob.”

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