The Journal Of E. A. Kolb

Top Artists of 2008



Scraped from Last.fm



Top Albums of 2008


Scraped from Last.fm



Top Tracks of 2008


Scraped from Last.fm



Travel During 2008

Scraped from DOPPLR

By now you should probably be aware that Google dropped a new browser on the market a couple weeks ago: Chrome. It's currently a beta product (version 0.2 and change) for Windows only, but it already seeing at least the active market share of Apple's Safari in the wild. Google Chrome is worth talking about not just for what features it does and doesn't bring to the browser market or its standards adherence. It's something worth talking about because it's not just Yet Another Web Browser from a code perspective.

I say this and mean it both as a good thing and as something that makes our jobs as web developers harder. And I say 'harder' in the sense that it will force us to not be lazy. Google Chrome changes how back-end browser processing works. For instance, each tab in the browser is its own system process, which optimizes memory recovery over a prolonged period of web use. More importantly, however, is that it changes how Javascript is processed.

For the last fifteen years (or however long Javascript’s been implemented on the browser level), Javascript has been a lock-step affair. Your document is read by the browser vertically. When a <script> block is encountered, its contents are executed, preventing the browser from taking any other action. That is not the case with Google Chrome. I’ve not got it entirely worked out yet, but it is definitely doing more things in parallel, including loading and processing of Javascript.

I'm not speaking for the rest of you, but one habit I've got with my web development is that I will pepper inline <script> tags throught my code. Usually, this is so relevant bits of Javascript remain in the same vascinity as the markup it drives. It might not be entirely proper, but it gets the job done and doesn't make a follow-up developer hunt for unmarried segments of ColdFusion/PHP and Javascript.

This fast-and-loose style of javascript programming has proven to be problematic in Chrome thus far. For instance, in the project I'm currently working on, I'm using Adobe's Spry as an effects and AJAX library in conjunction with ColdFusion's javascript libraries. The Spry includes create the global Spry object and I've had inline <script> blocks that would instantiate Spry effects or data sets. The issue that I was seeing in Chrome is that the inline blocks were sometimes being executed prior to the completion of the Spry includes, resulting in errors from invoking undefined properties of the global Spry.

Thus far, my solution to it has been to revisit the loose bits of inline javascript that I'm so used to peppering throughout our code. If you find yourself in a situation where Google Chrome is making your Javascript go busto, try this at a very early stage of processing.

Then, you can do this with your inline stuff:

This is going to give you control over all the little bits of JS you want to pepper into your document at will and will make sure it's all executed at onLoad (by which point all referenced Javascript files have been executed) in the order you want them executed. It also has the added bonus of meaning you never ever have to write an onload function that has to substitute some other onload.

Hope this helps.

Here's the key to the cross-browser issue I just tackled: the actual height of the document in an IFrame.


I know, I know. First question you probably had is, "Why are you using an iframe?" It's a cheap and easy way of loading an entire document into what you've currently got going. In this case, it helped untangle an upload new / manage existing items interface easier to implement. I've got an interface where I'm dynamically loading a page into an iframe and then resizing it to fit the height of the loaded document. MSIE keeps the document in a different spot in the DOM so I had to hunt it out.

Parents' Disclaimer: Hey wait, this one's rated E (for Everybody). I still make reference to some M (for Mature) rated games. These games aren't for your kids; they're for older gamers, like me. If you wouldn't buy R-rated movies for your youngster, don't buy M-rated games for them either.

Microsoft is having a hell of a summer with its Xbox Live Arcade lineup. Don't get me wrong, I've long respected XBLA titles. In fact, XBLA software has introduced me to several games I was playing this past weekend at GenCon in Indianapolis (and even several I never got around to playing). Still, it's fair to criticize the XBLA platform for being home to way too much shovelware. But there's a veritible renaissance of quality games coming through the Live Arcade this summer that commands a lot of respect and shines a bright light on the viability of small developers publishing smaller, high-quality games. I'll try to touch on at least a few of these in the upcoming days and weeks (especially since I'll be on vacation next week), but today's focus is Braid.

The discussion about games-as-art is one that has a lot of back and forth to it (and ironically it's film pundits that are the staunchest opponents to the notion of games as an art form, despite that they were on the opposite end of the very same argument a century ago), and I'm not really looking to dive into that. I bring it up because if you ever wanted an example to put on a pedastal of a game as art, Braid is it.

The off-hand meme I've been using to describe Braid is "genius-level platforming." If that scares or thrills you even a little, I've done my job. You take control of a generally unassuming character named Tom. Tom is a generally unremarkable guy with one notable exception: he can rewind time (a la Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time). This time ability is capped at the point you entered the challenge room, so you can never get completely stuck. In fact, you can't lose at all -- you can only get temporarily stuck. The platforming execution is very simple. You have goofy looking goombaesque mobs with their naive patrols and you get the slightly more sinister hopping rabits. Either is dispatched by hopping on its head. Your goal: to find the princess.

While everything begins simple enough, but rapidly evolves into a complex experience. The puzzles grow more and more elaborate, forcing you to grapple with objects moving in different directions in time, independent shadow replays of yourself re-enacting what was just rewound, and localized time-slowing. By the time you're well-vested in the gameplay, you realize there is no simple solution to a puzzle, no way to force your way through. You must outsmart the level, you must actually solve the puzzle.

All this puzzle solving leads to more puzzle solving, only in a more literal sense. Progress through a level is measured in terms of pieces of a puzzle acquired. Each room contains a fixed number of pieces and once a world has been fully traversed you can then complete the world by piecing together the puzzle. New worlds are opened up by completing these puzzles.

Why do all this? Why exercise your brain like this and go to all the trouble for a measly video game princess? Well, I won't spoil all the surprise, but this isn't Mario. While you're arranging these puzzles of portraits of Tom's life, you begin to collect pieces of the puzzle of Tom's psychological portrait. Ultimately, the game's tone is more like that of Silent Hill 2 in that the game is about the characters's inner demons (not so much with the horror bits). It's about errors and pennance, about saving Tom more than it is about saving the princess.

Braid is an independently developed platformer that will cost you $15 to purchase, and you should. This price point has been the subject of its own controversey, but since any argument against the developer charging that amount for this game ultimately boils down to "I'm a cheap tart," I'll happily disregard the entire debate out of hand. I will, also, gesture mildly towards Penny Arcade's take on the subject and remind you that they're right. You're a consumer whore (and how!), so cough up the money and support people who do cool things.

Blizzard has released the cinematic trailer for the impending Wrath of the Lich King expansion to World of Warcraft. Thought one: that's totally freaking sweet (as can be expected of Blizzard cinematics). Thought two: when did the Scourge get elder dragons? That's totally stacked.

Last week, Kristen (galactose), Nate (statichd3), and I went to see Nine Inch Nails at the Knoxville Auditorium and Coliseum. We had bought floor tickets through nin.com the minute they became available several months ago. This was my second time seeing them in concert; the first being in Buffalo, NY during the Fragility tour in 2000 (tour shirt: "Where the fuck were you?").

I first started listening to NIN back in 1997. That was the summer I was working as a councilor at Camp Sabattis in the Adirondacks. That year the staff suffered through the regime of a particularly inept program manager, so there was much angst to be had by all. Between Zay (linzzay) and a couple of other staffers' music collections, I got hooked and the band has remained one of my favorites to this day.

The tickets we were general admission floor tickets. Eight years ago, the ticket I had was not a floor ticket and I recall trying to spend a fair amount of time at the concert trying to weasel my way down to the floor. (No dice, by the way.) When tickets for this show went on sale, floor admission was a necessity.

We got in there pretty early on and got a good position -- about 15 feet from the stage. Of course, with so many people packing into a place on a summer evening, body odor became a bit of an epidemic, but what can you do?

Reznor picked four different bands to open for Nine Inch Nails: Crystal Castles, Does It Offend You Yeah?, A Place To Bury Strangers, and Deer Hunter. Sadly, it was Deer Hunter - my least favorite from the sampler that Reznor distributed earlier in the season - who opened for us. Apparently the front man is a native of Sevierville, not far from here. I don't think his memories of this place are that fond; their performance could be summarized as irritating the crowd for 45 minutes. All of their music sounds like a rambling Tom Yorke solo track, only completely lacking any soul. It seems like they were deliberately lengthening their songs with the same narrow sequence, just to fill their time on stage. By the time they left, most folks around us had reactions ranging from "good riddance," to mild rationalizations that they didn't feel totally gypped.

We had miscalculated a bit on our positioning strategy when we came in. Once Nine Inch Nails came out, the crowd surged forward, utterly ignoring the notion of "personal space". I feel like I should have anticipated this, but nobody's perfect. Predictably, our position (now slightly less than 15 feet) turned into the writing masses once the music began. If you were by yourself, this was probably a lot of fun. However, I spent most of the first five songs doing whatever I could to keep Kristen from getting crushed and/or smotherered. I wasn't exactly comfortable myself either. Things got just way too hectic and, by the middle of "March of the Pigs", we started pushing our way towards the back.

This turned out to be a Very Smart Move^TM. Not only could we see better, we weren't distracted by personal safety issues and pressing concerns of getting knocked over or trampled to death. Plus with my height I was still able to get a fair amount of photos and videos. You can see them here: http://flickr.com/photos/eakolb/sets/72157606858403079/.

The show was amazing. They touched on music from every major release (including Ghosts I - IV). The theme of the concert was Lights In The Sky Over North America and was hallmarked by the dual screens they had going for the light show. The screen in back was backlit while the one in front was a mostly transparent grid that seemed to be projected on. The grid was wired up with various sensors that played with the show. For instance during "Only" -- the highlight of the lights show, in my opinion -- the projected screen of white noise bubbled around Trent. At one point, they had the screen obfuscating the stage while the crew cleared the Ghosts kit (they were performing "The Greater Good"). When that was complete, one of the crew guys came out and used his flashlight beam to wipe away the front projection layer. Finally, at the beginning of "Echoplex" during the encore, one of the band members came out and touched the squares on the projection layer to program the drum machine.

All in all, it was an incredible show. My left leg locked up on my way out and my calves were sore for like four days afterwards, but it was worth it. Also, the only time I would willingly drop $70 on t-shirts and not bitch about it.

I just returned from GenCon in Indianapolis this past weekend. If you're uninitiated, GenCon is the premiere convention for tabletop gaming (pencil & paper role playing, board games, tradable card games, live-action role playing, miniatures) in the United States. (Take a moment to reflect upon and appreciate how many acronyms I didn't bomb you with in the previous sentence.)

The last time I went was in 2005 and then only for two days. This year, I bought my 4-day badge in advance and bought tickets to events I wanted to be at. I went with Nate (

statichd3) and we met up with other members from our WoW guild: Bloc. Most of these folks are more direct friends and acquaintences (i.e. uofirob and deusinnomen), but the greater circle was about 8 people.

Most of the time there, I was hanging out with Nate and Sean. We had a hell of a time. Here's a rundown of what all we did:

• Played in a late-night preliminary round of a Munchkin tournament. None of us won.
• Participated in Mayfair Games' event. Their flagship game, Settlers of Catan, features five resources: ore, grain, sheep, brick, and lumber. By demoing their products, you would acquire badge ribbons. Get all five and you become a Knight of Catan. This enters you in a drawing for their new $500 wooden Settlers of Catan set (among other prizes) and gets you 50% off one of their products. Mayfair Games makes a lot of great games, so we had a tremenduous amount of fun doing this. I picked up Pillars of the Earth (apparently inspired by a Ken Follett novel).
• Purchased the US edition of Ticket To Ride. Demoed the Nordic Countries edition. Like it, but not nearly well enough to pay full price for it too. (All the Ticket To Ride variants except Switzerland are full kits.)
• Played in a Call of Cthulhu draft tournament. Finally learned the game literally minutes beforehand. (No offence to Nate, but he wasn't the best teacher on that.) Was surprised at how the people in that tournament were generally likeable people. Usually, the TCG crowd is filled with callous jerks (of all ages) with attitude. Played three rounds (Swiss), lost three. Still played pretty well for only having just mastered not completely butchering the rules.
• Played in the World of Warcraft TCG Bounty Tournament. Played one round against another surprisingly cordial fellow. Lost two matches to one. Could have continued, but opted to go to the Mayfair Games drawing instead.
• Turned the terrible demo deck of Magic: The Gathering that came in the swag bags into a servicable deck. Had fun playing M:TG for the first time in a decade. Subsequently built two theme decks (vermin and Fallen Empires' thrulls) from my single long box of black cards.
• Played a bit of the new Maple Story TCG with Sean. Maple Story is a free-to-play online MMO that actually is a competitor to the product I'm working to build now. The TCG comes from a partnership with Wizards of the Coast and, despite its cutsey younger audience draw, is actually very impressive as a game in its own right. Sean bought into those cards, so I won't exactly be playing this any time soon.
• Sat on a demo of Tomb from AEG. At first glance, it looks like a fairly standard dungeon crawling board game. It's not overly complex (unlike World of Warcraft: The Board Game from Fantasy Flight) so learning to play was pretty simple, yet one can see the depth of play can go a long ways. Where this was really interesting was in its variety. The demo was done with 8-10 characters available to put into your party. There were another 80 or so characters in the box that weren't in the demo. The stack of event cards (monsters, traps, treasure) was about 8 inches tall. You're not likely to exhaust the game in a hurry. Nate invested in a copy of that and I think we're both looking forward to the first excuse we can find to play it.

We had a fantastic time. I made some notes on what not to do next time. I think we may have been a little over agressive in what we signed up for. Our couple of TCG drafts were fun, despite both Nate's and my amazement that we weren't deluged by agressive TCG-scene assholes. The Munchkin tournament was mostly superfluous. Had we actually won, that would have been a lot less time we'd have had to just play games. We signed up for a session of Innsmouth Escape from Twilight Creations. We saw that ahead of time and the production value wasn't impressive. Plus we didn't want to interrupt what we were doing at the time for that.

We were smart to bring carry-on sized suitcases on wheels. More room than backpacks and not much more trouble navigating the hallways.

Photos I took with my camera phone can be found here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/eakolb/sets/72157606805434810/

 

1942: Joint Strike is out for XBox Live. It's essentially a remake of Capcom's arcade classic 19XX: The War Against Destiny. If you pine for that kind of throwback to classic arcade sensibilities, it's worth the $10 it costs. (Face it, you spent much more than that in quarters when it was in the arcades anyway). It adds a few little tweaks and improvements for multiplayer play (hence the joint strikes).

In other news, The Darkness is finally in the bargain bin for $20. I mentioned long ago that I'd probably pick it up with that happened. Lo, it now sits on my TV stand. It should yours too.

I’m not a big fan of personalities in the video game industry. They don’t contribute anything and mainly only fuel the hype machine, and not in a good way. It turns the marketing message from, “Look at what we’re making,” to “look at me!” I believe that if you’re doing notable work in an industry, you’ll be noticed. Moreover, I think trying to be a rock star means you never will be one.

American McGee is one such personality, and from a particularly bad stock. McGee was a level designer for id Software back in its heyday. There’s another personality that came from this same background: John “About To Make You His Bitch” Romero. (If you don’t get the punch line, the game that ill-advised ad was promoting flopped horribly.) To his credit, McGee has delivered on a project before: American McGee’s Alice, a twisted take on Alice in Wonderland. It wasn’t a groundbreaking game, but it was solid. It was fun.

After Alice, McGee had a couple of low profile projects. That’s not to say his name wasn’t attached to it like it being a high-profile project was a foregone conclusion, but I digress. He’s been under most folks’ radar for a goodly while. His latest project, American McGee’s Grimm, merits a little discussion.

The premise is simple: fairy tales are too goody-goody, and Grimm is a character who makes it his mission to set things “right.” And by “right,” I mean foul and nasty. It’s Katamari Damacy-like in its execution. Grimm is a genuinely unpleasant individual who corrupts the scene with his stench. As he runs through the fairy tale, things turn gross and vile around him. Objects change from cute and cuddly to mean and disgusting, strengthening his sphere of corruption. The denizens of the fairy tale world will try to clean up the filth in your wake until your power grows strong enough to turn even them.

The first episode is free, a kind of teaser. Additional episodes will be coming out every Thursday through September 18th. If I understand correctly, each episode that comes out from here will be free for the first day and then only a part of the GameTap lineup afterwards. Truthfully, one day is really all you need. I played the first episode to exhaustion on the day it came out.

The question to ask about the game is who is it really made for. The game play it terribly simplistic. In fact, you can’t lose. If you misstep into lava or water (Grimm reacts the same to either), you’re put back on dry land a couple seconds later. You can’t actually lose the game, so really it’s nothing more than an interactive narrative. But it takes the theme of turning good fairy tales bad to heart. It’s not something you’d want to put your kids in front of, per se. So if it’s not really a kid’s game, it’s not very good at being a game for non-kid players.

Bottom line, however, is that it’s free. Worth checking out at least to kill a little time. And school teachers.

Parent Disclaimer: I will often discuss video games in this journal that are rated M by the ESRB. These games earn that rating for good reason; they're intended for people like me, not your young one. Please take ratings seriously and make smart decisions when it comes to purchasing content designated as mature for your kids.

I watched the new Resident Evil 5 trailer from E3 last night. It's a really poorly assembled trailer. If I weren't already following this title, this would have done nothing to grab my interest. Maybe even drive it away. At least it's toned down on the white-protagonist-gunning-down-black-savages motif that caused so much brouhaha on their first go around.

Compare this to the recent Dead Space trailer, which was cut by James Wan, the writer/director of Saw. (He also wrote Saw III and was involved with the others as a producer.) It's not the most amazing trailer ever, but it's a damn sight more engaging than one that decides sound editing is for the birds.

As for the "totally awesome": This and this don't really belong in this post, but they are totally awesome.

Parent Disclaimer: I will often discuss video games in this journal that are rated M by the ESRB. These games earn that rating for good reason; they're intended for people like me, not your young one. Please take ratings seriously and make smart decisions when it comes to purchasing content designated as mature for your kids.

The answer to my dilemma earlier in the week turned out to be Civilization Revolutions. In retrospect, it was really no contest. Grand Theft Auto IV is still pretty enticing looking, but there’s a lot of stuff in it the game just doesn’t seem appealing.

This isn’t anything new to the franchise. While I think they were wise to pull out the gymnasium gimmick from San Andreas, but instead they’ve added a lot of other clutter. Missions where you pick up a contact, drive them to night clubs just to entertain them, that sort of thing. These kinds of missions always feel more like work than play. Given my completionist tendencies, I’m hesitant to subject myself to that. I hate feeling like I’m skipping content that I’ve paid $60 for. So maybe I won’t really ever get around to purchasing it at all. Maybe I’ll rent it…

As for Civilization Revolutions, it’s a great game. It’s definitely not a direct port of the PC-based Civilization 4, but it does an excellent job of re-implementing the concept to fit the platform. It’s a genuinely enjoyable strategy game that successfully reproduces the “Just a few more minutes,” response. Does it lack the complete depth and breadth of the PC game? Absolutely. But it loads of fun, keeps you playing, and keeps you coming back. Money well spent.

In other news, E3 is happening this year. While a lot of major players decided to take their ball and go home, there’s still a lot going on. Microsoft had a busy day today. Partnerships with Netflix, all kinds of new features… They’ve formally announced their upcoming Dashboard revamp this fall. They’ve decided the interface is past over-cluttered and are dropping in a total redesign. They’ve claimed they’re inspired by the fictional CHI from Minority Report. We’ll see how that turns out. They’re also implementing avatars. Think Miis. Think Home. Think last kid on the block to realize that virtual worlds are hot right now.

There were other announcements and trailers I’m still catching up on. There’s still one other big one from just today: I’m well past caring but Square-Enix announced that they’re releasing the primary portion of Final Fantasy XIII simultaneously on both major consoles. From the publisher who historically views their meager 360 publishing as throwing the Americans a bone. A scrappy, sad little bone. And that game in particular has been stated as a PS3 exclusive again and again. This complete reversal on that policy is rather surprising.

I’ll keep watching and send word if anything interesting crops up.

Parent Disclaimer: I will often discuss video games in this journal that are rated M by the ESRB. These games earn that rating for good reason; they're intended for people like me, not your young one. Please take ratings seriously and make smart decisions when it comes to purchasing content designated as mature for your kids.

I'm in the process of finishing up with Mass Effect (X360) (which I've borrowed from statichd3). When I say finish in this case, I mean completely -- 1050/1050 gamer points, multiple play-throughs, etc. I'm a completionist, I like to get the most out of the money I put into a game (or, in this case, the money Nate put into the game).

Anyhow, I'm pondering what to pick up next. i'll probably take a quick trip through Lost Odyssey's DLC (also borrowing that from Nate), but after that there's a world of opportunity.

• Civilization Revolution - The complete rebuild (don't call it a port) of Sid Meier's PC classic.
• Grand Theft Auto IV - Don't need to explain this one. I haven't picked it up yet.
• Lost Cities - An XBLA card game. Not exactly a long-term investment.
• Ikaruga - A very good Japanese shooter. Originally for the Dreamcast, it made its way to XBLA. I'm not sure I'm that much of a masochist, though.
• Schizoid - The first XNA title, coming out this week. Another shooter, but with a greater emphasis on co-op.
• Army of Two - I had hoped to pick this up when it came out, but it's best experienced as live co-op and lukewarm reviews spooked me.
• Guitar Hero: Aerosmith - A glorified expansion pack for GH3 that decides variety is for the birds.
• Wall-E - Okay, look. I'm a Wall-E fanboy. Whenever I see the robot on the cover, I get this primal urge to try it. I'm not totally out of my mind, though. It's made by THQ; it's not unreasonable to believe I might contract a disease from playing anything they make.

I've listed these in a rough order of interest. Mostly because I need to find something and go with it, and the person most likely to deliver the deciding argument is myself.

Meanwhile, I'm also picking at Diablo II. I just ebayed a copy of the expansion, Lord of Destruction, and wanted to play through that. Mostly because Nate made a comment during "Splashwatch" -- the multiple day splash page progression leading up to the announcement of Diablo III -- that made me realize I'd missed some key lore along the way. I'm a big fan of the Diablo franchise and I'm more than delighted that they're finally doing a third installment. It will more than likely get me to stop playing World of Warcraft again, that's for sure.

I've also got Silent Hill: Origins on the PSP to get through. I've heard the fith cardinal installment has been delayed (it was originally slated for September), but I don't have confirmation of that at present. I'll see if I can't dig that up soon. Nevertheless, I'm not entirely sure if I want to connect the PSP to the TV and play it now or keep holding onto it until I'm travelling again.

I had the opportunity to see an advance screening of Tropic Thunder last night, which comes out in August if I'm not mistaken. This was something that was on our watch list anyhow so when we got passes for a free screening, we were on that like ants on cake. Fat kid ants.

The movie is, in a word, hilarious. It's written in a way that allows each of the actors to shine, and I'm not just talking about the three with top billing. Even the support characters do marvelous jobs. One of the things I like best about this film is that it's a comedy that doesn't rely solely on hyperbole to be funny. This is the hazzard to a lot of previous Ben Stiller efforts. Usually he goes so far over the top that you end up getting a boolean reaction from people: love it or hate it. Tropic Thunder is a lot more balanced. The characters are all silly, yes, but within a buffer zone.

For example, the premise of the movie is that these actors filming a movie find themselves in the deep jungle, where things turn into a real armed conflict and not just a fake one on camera. Where Ben Stiller would go over the top before is that all those characters would be oblivious to the reality of their situation for a long as possible. Some rational folk can't get into that because they're turned off by the "You'd think one person should be able to acknowledge the glaring obviousness of what's going on." Well, that is the case here. So it's still an out-there, silly premise but it's grounded. It's not entirely abhorrent to people who want movies to make a certain amount of sense even within the suspension of disbelief.

I highly recommend going to see this film when it comes out.

Parent Disclaimer: Be aware that I discuss a lot of video games in my journal that ultimately carry the M for Mature rating, and for good reason. I've been gaming for over 20 years. These games are made for me and my peers, not your youngster. If you're a parent, please recognize that ust because it's a game doesn't mean it's for kids.

I haven't updated in a while, many pardons for the obvious fact. The masses have pulled me back into World of Warcraft. I'm generally okay with that; in the time I was gone from the game, Blizzard took steps to address some of the issues and irritations that helped drive me away. I'm not really here to talk about Warcraft, though. This is one of those games where you're either in or you're not, and you don't need me pushing this brand of smack in your neighborhood.

When I came back, however, I didn't want to resume being a career player again. Not so much because I'm concerned about productivity. More because I'm a career gamer and I simply don't want a single game to monopolize all my free time. I realized that was starting to happen so I took a couple steps back and fired up the Xbox.

First of all, I've been playing Penny Arcade Adventures: On The Rain-Slick Precipice Of Darkness. It's available through the Xbox Live Arcade, Steam, Greenhouse, or direct from their website. Pretty much available for anything that isn't a PS3 -- distribution method of your choice. (The PS3 exclusion is because the game is built on the Torque engine, which lacks PS3 support.)

It's an excellent game and very worthy of the $20 price tag they've put on it. It's a bit of a hybrid between an action RPG and a classic adventure title. There's an RPG-style field screen with the usual contingent of RPGesque actions: NPC talkin', object investigatin', crate smashin'. Combat occurs in a separate screen, but the enemies are visible on the field screen - no surprise encounters. In combat, each of the three characters (you control yourself, with Tycho and Gabe as party members) has three wheels that charge up in sequence. The first allows an item to be used, the second enables a standard attack, and the third and slowest enables a reaction-based power move.

It's gameplay that should be familiar to anyone who's ever played an active timer RPG or an action game. What makes this so interesting is that it's thorougly Penny Arcade. The first NPC line in the game is, "Holy fucking shit, did you see that robot?!" It keeps the tone moving forward. It has all the verbosity and crass humor you'd expect from Tycho and Gabe, and it revels in it appropriately.

Not for the faint of heart, but PA and adventure fans will definitely find a keeper here.

My Xbox Live Gold membership lapsed, so I had to wait a week before I was able to download the demo for Civilization Revolutions. I've been eying this game with great interest for a while. I wouldn't exactly call myself a hardcore player, but Civilization 4 is what I keep in my DVD drive in my computer to keep it company. Whenever I get bored and want to zone out, that's what I load up and play. Sid Meier's involvement in the Revolutions project made it looke promising: not a mere port, but a complete reimplementation of the game from the bottom up to suit the console experience.

A lofty goal, and they've pulled it off. The demo is worth checking out, and I'll most likely be dropping my dollars on that one.

Anyone have a good recomendation for a savings and money market account? I've got one of both with Regions Bank (the latter is my tax fund) and they're rather pathetically low yield. With the money market, I've got several thousand dollars in that account and it's earning pennies in interest.

I'm thinking I'd like to change where those assets are at, especially the money market. Having savings in Regions is handy because transfering from Savings into Checking in a pinch would be essentially instant. But I only do about four transactions per quarter with the money market, and that doesn't need to be immediate.

I'd like something paperless -- I already process enough paperwork on my bank accounts between my business, my credit cards, and my checking account. 

Any suggestions? 

Parent Disclaimer: Be aware that I discuss a lot of video games in my journal that ultimately carry the M for Mature rating, and for good reason. I've been gaming for over 20 years. These games are made for me and my peers, not your youngster. If you're a parent, please recognize that ust because it's a game doesn't mean it's for kids.

	Grand Theft Auto IV Naturally the center of the ongoing controversy about the subject of violence and video games, one thing that's not open to question is the economic viability of the title. The New York Times is reporting this morning that GTA4 has sold 6 million copies, and 3.6 million of those were sold on day one. That's a cool $500 million, and we're barely a week from the launch date. Compare this to the $102 million that Iron Man made at the box office this weekend, and that's considered outstanding. This is good news for Take Two. Their stock is still riding the up, but they haven't broken the $27 mark. Of course, Electronic Arts insists that the stock bump from the release of an immensely popular AAA title is just a temporary ride, and that they'll come to rue the day they stuck their noses up at the $26-per-share buyout offer. EA's probably right, but for now I'm pretty sure 'Rockstar' is more than just a company name in the Take Two fold; they're all certainly partying like the namesake.
	Rock Band If you're following the DLC, you'd already know that Harmonix/MTV/EA started releasing whole albums back in April. The first was a Judas Priest album with a The Who album this month. As it turns out, Rock Band really is the ultimate cross-promotion tool. There have been a couple of new pseudo-free tracks. I say 'pseudo' because they're actually free-with-a-preorder. If you're a South Park fan, look for a freebie 3-song download code in your season 11 DVDs. Also, if you're thinking about the new Disturbed album, preordering from Best Buy will net you two free Rock Band tracks. But wait, there's more! Harmonix is having a month of cheap DLC. To boost sales and downloads for the X360, they're dropping the price of two tracks each week to 80 points ($1). The first week is Crushcrushcrush by Paramore and Rock 'n Roll Band by Boston. This will go on until June 2, so hop to it, consumer whores! (If you're a PS3 user... well... I'm sorry.)
	Blizzard Speaking of cheap things, they're good. Very good. Blizzard finally gets that, and we love them for it. They make metric asstons of cash just off of WoW subscriptions and decided to stop gouging on the actual software price. Smart move. Now they're pricing their slightly older titles for digital distribution on the cheap. Digital downloads include the Starcraft Anthology for $15, Warcraft III for $20, and Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne also for $20. Expect digital downloads of the Diablo franchise in the forseeable future.

If you've been ignoring the music scene for a while, you might have missed the waves Trent Reznor's been making -- that's easy to do when you're out to sea, after all. Those waves have become a tsunami now as we've reached the shore.

I'm guessing you probably heard about Radiohead's experiment with releasing In Rainbows as a pay-as-you-like digital download. It was a huge publicity stunt that supposedly netted the band more cash than they've ever made off an album (though the band isn't interested in telling us just how much money that is). The problem with Radiohead's radical tactic is that is was entirely ingenuine. The stunt worked well, but a month and a half later, they signed the work to a label and pulled the pay-what-you-want downloads in favor of plastic distribution. On top of that audiophiles weren't entirely pleased because the only option for download was 160kbps MP3s. These provide respectable sound, but it's hardly high-quality.

Look back even further, when Reznor was pimping his Year Zero saga and alternate reality game. Things seemed to be going smoothly until Reznor's label Interscope took the wind out of his sales. It was a rocky road for them both. Part of Reznor's game included leaving new tracks on thumbdrives to be found at his concert venues. These songs would inevitably get back to the Internet for viral distribution. This was Trent's explicit plan, but the label owns the music and worked to protect its interests. The real barb in the standoff between label and artist came in Australia, where Interscope was intentionally pricing Year Zero several dollars higher than the latest pop flavor of the week. When Reznor pressed the label for why, they slapped him in the face by telling him his fans were willing to pay more for his music, and therefore they should.

From here forward, Reznor's been more than a little fed up with record labels. His early career was hallmarked by him getting the short end of the stick (like most artists), and now that he'd made it the treatment was that his fans got the privilege of paying more for his music. Trent had been working on ways to buck the system right about the time when Radiohead pulled their stunt. He had been working with Saul Williams to produce The Inevitible Rise and Liberation of Niggy Tardust, which was released with higher quality under the same pay-what-you-want system on the heels of In Rainbows (the free option limited to the first 10,000 customers).

The real test was Ghosts I-IV, an instrumental/ambient album recorded by Nine Inch Nails. Reznor decided rather than try a half-solution, harnessing the power of the internet like a jump-start, he would embrace the Internet and its power completely. Ghosts was released sans label. It was put online with several payment options: free (9 tracks of 36), $5 (full album, digital only), $10 (full album, digital immediately and physical in early April), and $70 and $300 limited editions. The digital downloads were of very high quality, offering 320kbps MP3s, lossless M4A, or FLAC files.

The album was an incredible success. The $300 limited editions were sold out within the first day and the record as a whole made $1 million in its first week, with 0% going to a record label. (Bear in mind, this is an instrumental/ambient album.) In early April the CD came out proper and is now in retail outlets, with absolutely none of what you pay for going into the pockets of record label execs.

Once that was said and done, the question for many of us was, "What's next?" Was that a single, big fuck-you to the labels, or will this be the new world order for Nine Inch Nails?

The last week in April, Reznor suddenly released a new track "Discipline" to radio and the internet. The MP3 carried a comment that said "Go to nin.com on 5 May." This was followed by the release of a second track -- "Echoplex" -- with the same comment through Facebook last week. The signs pointed to a new album on the imminent horizon.

I don't think this is what anyone expected. Yesterday, 5 May 2008, Nine Inch Nails released The Slip. For free. Let me reiterate that:

Nine Inch Nails is literally giving The Slip away to fans.

Even if you're not a fan of the band, I'd highly encourage you to download the album. Reznor's stood out from the crowd as the one artist who is willing to completely buck the artist-label system that is dragging the music industry as a whole down.

In other Nine Inch Nails news, there's an upcoming tour. The band has itself bought the best seats at the venues, and those tickets will be pre-sold through tour.nin.com before tickets through the conventional outlets go on sale. These tickets will carry the name of the purchaser on them and will require ID to be shown at the door to use them. Why? They can't be scalped that way. That way the band makes money on the tickets and not some shadow company of people prowling the lines outside.

 

Parent Disclaimer: Be aware that I discuss a lot of video games in my journal that ultimately carry the M for Mature rating. If you're a parent, please recognize that these games are rated M for good reason. I've been a gamer for over 20 years; these games are made for me and my peers, not your 13 year old. Just because it's a game doesn't mean it's for kids.

In a previous post, I included Prototype in a list of games due out this year. I've now removed it from that list as Sierra has delayed the game to 2009 (though I would expect we're talking about first or second quarter). The reasons for the delay were unspecified.

Parent Disclaimer: Be aware that I discuss a lot of video games in my journal that ultimately carry the M for Mature rating. If you're a parent, please recognize that these games are rated M for good reason. I've been a gamer for over 20 years; these games are made for me and my peers, not your 13 year old. Just because it's a game doesn't mean it's for kids.

I'm going to start prefacing my gaming posts with ESRB information like this. Why? Well, as I point out above, I'm a career gamer. Like other long-term gamers, I'm tired of my elders equating games with kids. That was true when a generation of gamers were kids, sure. But now we're making games, we're writing about games, and we're still playing them. We want games with mature themes, dark themes, but these games shouldn't be sold to kids. The answer isn't legislation -- it's information. Parents have to stop thinking game = kids, and they have to start thinking about VG ratings as easily as they do movie ratings. So I'll do my little part and help beat the drum.

With that out of the way, on to the rest of my post.

You probably realize by now that 2007 was a pretty big year for gaming. It was kind of a sleeper throught the first 9 months, but once you got into holiday territory there was an explosion of big AAA releases. So how does 2008 look?

Freakin' amazing.

I've compiled a list of some of the releases that I've been tracking for this year.

• Grand Theft Auto IV (April 2008)
• Civilization Revolutions (May 2008)
• Alone in the Dark (June 2008)
• Ninja Gaiden II (June 2008)
• Silent Hill: Homecoming [5] (September 2008)
• Fallout 3 (October 2008)
• Prototype (October 2008)
  Delayed to 2009
• Dead Space (October 2008)
• Prince of Persia [4]
• Brütal Legend (December 2008)

This list is by no means exhaustive. First of all, it's just what I'm tracking out of my own interest. I'm not paid for this so I don't follow up on what you're interested in if it doesn't coincide with what I'm following for myself. Secondly, there's probably titles I'm either forgetting or haven't read the 2008 release date yet. Third, apologies to PS3 owners. I didn't shell out for the Blu Ray player witha  game system attached, so anything that's PS3 exclusive won't show up in this list.

As you can see, the list is pretty tall already -- tall enough that I NEED a list to remind myself what all comes out this year. If you're not familiar with what's up there, check it out. You may be surprised.

I'll add a memory to this post and update it as the year progresses. I should have done this earlier, but nobody's perfect. Not even me.

The other game I've recently finished playing (prior to Dreamfall) is Lost Odyssey. It seems I often lose people when I start spouting off Japanese names (imagine that!) so I'll slow it down a notch and explain where this is coming from.

Hironobu Sakaguchi was the original producer of the original Final Fantasy game, some 20 years ago. The game was named that because he hadn't had a tremenduous amount of success as a game developer, and that was to be his last-ditch effort. Unlike his previous failures, however, this game caught on and a massive franchise was born. After the FF movie, Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within, bombed spectacularly, Sakaguchi stepped down from his position within Squaresoft. So, what does the embittered video game industry playboy do after "voluntarily" resigning from his post? Why, he gets venture capital from Microsoft Game Studios and founds a brand new development house: Mistwalker Studios.

WIthout delving into the politico of Japanese video game studios too much, this move ended up causing more than a slight headache for the folks at SquareEnix. A number of key players either left the company or became freelancers so they could continue to work with Sakaguchi. I'm not exactly a Sakaguchi fanboy, but you have to admire that kind of clout.

Last year, Mistwalker successfully released its first game, an RPG by the name of Blue Dragon for the X360. If you recall, I wrote my impressions of the time I spent with the demo previously. It was aimed squarely at a much younger audience so I didn't deign to spend a great deal of my own time with it.

This year, they finally released their second title for the X360, Lost Odyssey. It's an RPG following the story of a band of immortals as they struggle to regain their memories of a thousand years.

The game is utterly un-innovative. I'm not saying that as a slight to it in any way -- there's really nothing new in this game, no clever gimmick of gameplay mutation. Lost Odyssey draws from a great many traditional references, and this works to its advantage because it does everything so well. The way things tend to go with Japanese RPGs is that the developers are compelled by the market to constantly innovate. The result is that you rarely end up with seeing games from that side of the Pacific with real tried-and-tested game play; they can't leave well enough alone.

With that said, I can move onto other topics. If you're already adequately familiar with RPGs, that's everything you need to know about the gameplay.

What makes this game stand out the most is the writing. The core plot isn't hackeneyed or trite. (The main problem I had with Final Fantasy XII is that, while the gameplay was good, the plot was increasingly paper-thin and uninspiring.) Yes, there are moments where the whole "magic of children" theme becomes quite viscous. Yes, there's probably one too many near-death experiences. This is an RPG remember? Work in relative frames here. Painfully overt themes and villians (including their eyebrows) are par for the course.

The stand-out factor isn't the bits of cliché that pepper the game, but the grander themes of the story. The main characters are immortal. Death for them is more of an inconvenience than anything else. It's the "Gee, wouldn't it be great to live forever?" daydream that the story tackles with full force. It paints the lives of these immortals as beings who have to endure aeons of partings: loved ones, strangers, those who deserve to die, and those who do not.

Emphasizing this are the "Thousand Years of Dreams." These are text-based presentations based on short stories that are scattered throughout the world of the game. They're unlocked when the main character, Kaim, encounters something that triggers this memory from his past. The majority of these are extremely well done and appeal quite strongly to the crowd who still occasioanlly read books. They're not generally uplifting, though. They tend to be reflections on the self, on strength and weakness, and on the myriad forms of grief and loss.

Other highlights include the game's visuals. I'll spare you the hyperbole and the superlatives. (Do I really need to say that they're 'stunning'?) They're very high quality, even judging by the high standards established by SquareEnix titles. Actually, this has a small undesirable side effect. Because the graphics are so good, the transitions from the field screen to the battle engine can take upwards of a dozen seconds from time to time. It's usually a small price to pay.

On a personal note, I can really appreciate that someone's finally put forward a lead protagonist who can have emotional issues without being a grade A emo-clown. If this latter phrase didn't evoke an image in your mind outright, don't trouble yourself with it. In fact, be grateful for the fact.

I've gone on quite a bit here, so I'll draw to a close. If you've been looking for a quality RPG -- because they really are quite so rare -- I highly recommend Lost Odyssey. It fits itself into my top 5, but that's a topic for another time.