Archive for the 'Nerdtastic' Category
Saturday, June 6th, 2009
iPhone Impressions
I am very sorry to say that I am now in possession of an iPhone.
It was totally not my choice, but a required thing for the project I’m on with work. My first impressions were horrible, to relay the experience. As it turns out, the iPhone is exclusively with AT&T. To find one, you actually have to go to an AT&T Corporate Store… you cannot get them from authorized AT&T stores. The corporate stores are rare, the authorized ones are prevalent.
So to start, they essentially limit the availability by simply providing iPhones at as few places as possible. If you want one, you must go in search of one. You cannot procure one through happenstance, it is a cognitive move.
So I’m in the AT&T corporate store, and this cell phone maven comes up to me and takes my name. She literally signs me in on a waiting list. I sit down on the trendy waiting benches and watch as the high pressure salespeople do their best to try and get retirees to buy as many 30 cent pieces of crap, er, I mean $19.99 exclusive accessories, as they can.
After a 45 minute wait, I’m tendered up to the counter where the salesjackass mocks my vocal inflection. I hate it when people do that. Yes, I annunciate my words. It doesn’t make me Thurston Howl the Fourth, f**kwit. You don’t have to talk to me with pinkys up. “Oh yes, of course, indeed, quite right.” Die in a car fire.
It takes a good 10 minutes to figure out whether or not I will be able to make calls on my current plan to and from work or if I can even receive them. He brings out the iPhone, which is situated in the most assuming box ever built by mankind. I already feel like an elitist buying the damned thing. I realize that the screen, touch-based, is likely to get pretty screwed with the way I treat phones, so we go over to look for a case. My 48 cent case, I mean, my $29.99 custom iPhone exclusive leather holster in hand, I check out after the number is transferred.
So here’s the bad news. The iPhone is actually cool. I adore the apps, the interface is elegant, and I can actually type faster on the touchscreen than I could with my blackberry’s qwerty. I am disgusted at myself for liking the damned thing as much as I do. It’s so trendy and hip and ugh. No one as uncool as me should have something as cool as this. With it, I feel like I should own some bohemian loft apartment and watch indie flicks with my art clique shovin’ buddies. Dark earthtones and soy chai latte’s pervade.
Saturday, May 2nd, 2009
Braid
So, I finally got around to playing Braid on the PC. I had noticed this little gem on the Xbox 360 through the Xbox Live Arcade, but never followed up on it after going through the trial. Well, with a little help from gamefaqs, I stomped this game in about a day and a half. It was an interesting experience.
I’d almost qualify it as melancholy. The last indie game I played was World of Goo, which made me cry and laugh in places, the sign of a really frikken GOOD game. But this Braid didn’t seem to have the emotional depth that Goo had. It started good, it built up slow, and near the end I was expecting some kind of closure, a release or a revelation of sorts. But nothing panned out. I have my own theories and ideas about what the game was about, the story it tried to convey, but the puzzle pieces don’t fit right in my head, to strain the analagous feature from the game into metaphor.
I come away from the game feeling “less than”. Like seeing bits and pieces of a really awesome movie that you’d like to watch later, but can’t remember enough of it to look it up. In terms of art, certainly stunning. And some of the puzzles had me waltzing through the fourth dimension like Donnie Darko on crack. The narrative - not so much.
Tuesday, February 3rd, 2009
Dear GoDaddy
Dear GoDaddy,
I was sorely disappointed to see your advertisement during the Super Bowl this year. I have been a loyal customer for the better part of a decade now, and I am shamed that a company I rely upon for my domain registration needs has stooped to appeal to the lowest common denominator.
Please inform your marketing department weasels that the reason you have been a success in the industry is due entirely to your attractive low prices, fast service and customer-based word of mouth about both. It is not due to giant jiggling plastic titty-monsters in the softcore porn you insist on airing video of.
If you want to grow your already considerable market share, target your actual user demographic. You will find most of your users are likely middle-aged technology enthusiasts rather than kegger-slurping fraternity jocks that your commercials seem built to appeal to. Sure, the old adage is that “Sex sells”, but this generally applies to traditional consumer products like beer and sunglasses. You wouldn’t try to sell term life insurance with a set of giant perky tits pressed against cold glass, and neither should you be hocking domain names with an unmitigated quantity of scattered ass. If you want trendy, use the Aqua Teen Hunger Force as mascots, or hire some of those internet celebs from Weezer’s “Pork & Beans” music video. Either or, get a clue.
Friday, November 21st, 2008
Quick Review
Quick review - after playing this game, I absolutely must recommend it to everyone. World of Goo is so damned elegant, there aren’t any comparisons short of Portal. Best game I’ve played this year so far. Five freaking stars. The music is wonderful, the art style is something out of Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas, the puzzles are ingenius, and the narrative is a smattering of dark humor. This is a gem of a game and not to be missed.
Saturday, November 8th, 2008
Ultima Online: Resurrection
Ultima Online bore me and several of my fellow Community Managers. As the first MMO and the grand-daddy of virtual worlds, it spawned a generation of personae communitatus that affect practically every MMO in existence.
For nearly ten years, I have played Ultima Online in some form. I have known many greats, players who themselves moved on or even joined the gaming industry because of their experiences in UO. Rainbow King, Grishnak, Navrip, Nikademus, Aleph Aeirs, Azalin, Perianwyr, Dragons, Dayel, Kieron, Talanithus.
I consider myself a custodian of sorts, last of the storied ancients who made their home amongst the shards of Sosaria. In distant, but paternal measure, I login as GreyPawn and futz about with the new features or items periodically added, always a good quarter-shy of being a relic. I bandy words with my guildmates in the Moonglow Town Council, taking a mild passing interest in the affairs of guild management I long ago retired from. Anyone who knew GreyPawn the character would laugh at the concept of a retired Mayor keeping his words and advice unless called upon for them.
I’ll be here until they turn out the lights. I’ll probably be here until after that, too. The UO community holds too much sentimentality for me to ever leave it - I’ve given it too much and it has given too much to me. That’s one of the reasons I’ve been so heartened about the latest revelations coming from EA/Mythic.
Firstly, they’ve added a new Designer, Sakkarah. I knew her as a shrewd merchant on my home shard, and I patronized her venue frequently for plants. As a player, I always categorized her as one of those “bulk order book types”, the meticulous crafting kind that know the systems intricately. That they have made a person who knows Sosaria so intimately is magnificent, and a heaping wealth of grand new items and features has already been introduced with her signature.
If she can continue to burn the candle at both ends without jading or catching tunnel-visionitis as a whole host of UO designers who have walked before in her footsteps have, Ultima will reap tremendous benefits.
The second of the two miraculous points leading to a potential resurrection (or resurgence at least) of a vibrant community is the reinstitution of the Event Moderator program. I cannot overstate the massive importance of live events to the growth and sustainability of a virtual world. The Event Moderator program, if set up correctly and given appropriate lattitude, can breathe life into an otherwise stagnant game.
By careful and surgical application of unknown, random, invisible forces in a game world, the stasis of anticipated results on the part of the player is suspended. Immersion jumps up from the grave of the grind and thrives like a wild thing in the presence of the classically defined Interest.
By appointing Event Moderators, what the game is essentially doing is assigning the power of Storyteller, the TRUE and RIGHTFUL title of Gamemaster, as Lord of the Lore and possessor of the universal powers of creation, destruction and plotline, not simple customer service rep. Each EM begins to weave his own tales, thrust wholly onto players yearning for a break in the monotony.
I’m looking forward to what the near future has to bring for ol’ UO. Should be intriguing!
Tuesday, October 21st, 2008
A Longer Time Ago
I sense a great disturbance in the Force.
Thursday, February 28th, 2008
Sins of the Sins of A Solar Empire
This game had the potential to finally usurp Master of Orion 2 as the grand-daddy ultimate space strategy 4x simulator of all time and it totally blew it. The gameplay is wonderful, the graphics are pristine, the flow of the game is good, solid and challenging. But the epic feel that comes with taking your civilization from barely out of newly discovering faster-than-light technology at Warp 1 and the monstro-behemoth moon-sized Eater o’ Stars style space stations is nowhere to be found. In Sins of a Solar Empire, you basically take your space-faring folk from “decent space peeps” to “pretty good space peeps” from start to end with no major technological eclipsing of other races to be found. This, in sharp contract to MOO2, where you start off as partially sentient goo and end up with the galactic power to shape energy at will into small planetoids and hurl them through the universe at your diplomatic opponents. The scope just isn’t there.
Actually, I’m going to go out on a limb and classify Sins as an RTS rather than a 4X. All the RTS elements are there, in full force, even the rush. And I take back what I said about Master of Orion 2 being the grand-daddy of 4xers. The rarely mentioned game by Empire called “Stars!” was the true grandpa to the genre, and no one has quite grasped that level of brilliance since.
In Stars!, you could fully customize your race, anything from robotic silicoids to energy-beings that could only live on starbases instead of planets. To colonize a world in the seemingly endless galaxy, you had to ensure that the gravity, temperature and radation were within the thresholds for your population to survive. You could fling mineral packets to and fro with planetary mass drivers, set up stargates to travel between distant worlds within a single turn, bomb and invade other cultures and subjugate them to your galactic will. Minefields, ramscoops, lasers, precision targeting computers, terraforming as an act of war, strip-mining and biological and genetic warfare. What a freaking glorious game that was.
Saturday, October 20th, 2007
We Do What We Must
Because we can. Sweet boneless jeebus, Portal is the funnest game I’ve played since forever! GLaDOS is surely one of the greatest antagonists ever dreamed up. And the ending is something I’d chalk up there with MegaMan 2 on my top 10 list of game endings. Masterfully done. Portal is a triumph of gaming.
Incidentally, Dumbledore is gay. That “woosh” sound you just heard? That’s the millions upon millions of young adult readers who just experienced a paradigm shift in favor of higher tolerance. Mega kudos to J.K. Rowling.
Tuesday, September 11th, 2007
Kingdom Building
I’ve noticed that there is kind’ve a sad lack in good strategy games out right now. It has actually been driving me up the walls a bit as I’ve caught the itch to do some kingdom building lately. My gaming habits tend to come in cycles, probably a lot like everyone elses. I do MMO, then Strategy, then RPG, rinse, repeat.
Now at this point, I’m sure you’ll say, but Grey! There’s such and such out right now, why haven’t you tried it? Well, chances are, I have. Let me take you down a list of my recently played.