When I was in High School several of my friends were involved in the Odyssey of the Mind program.  OM was kind of a creativity competition including short-term (you have seven minutes to build a bridge out of spaghetti noodles and marshmallows than can hold a 5-pound weight while allowing a tennis ball to roll under it), and long-term problems, where the kids write a script based on certain criteria (make an allegory to the The Old Man and the Sea, include at least one puppet, there must be a case of mistaken identity leading to disastrous results), create any sets, costumes, and props necessary, then perform it for the judges in a certain time limit.  I stayed clear of the program at first, since I thought extra responsibility would interfere with my dedicated after-school slacking regimen, but found I was hanging out with my friends much of the time anyway, watching them put their show together, so I finally joined them for the last few years.

My school was an experimental school founded in the 70's by hippie parents and hippie teachers (not sure if the students were hippies at that point), and we outside-the-box thinkers tended to do well in the creativity department, so we went on to the State competition several times, although something always seemed to go horribly wrong once there.  Our coach was the science teacher, Julie (in hippie schools, everybody is on a first-name basis), who was the kind of uber-awesome teacher that everybody is entitled to have at some point during their school career.  If you could get Julie to start snort-laughing as she watched the latest revision of the script, you knew you were on the right track.

Well, in the (many) years that have passed since then, most of those OM teammates and I have stayed friends, although since we're flung across the metro area, we rarely all have a chance to get together anymore.  Things have certainly changed... the others are all married (two of them to each other), and have started having kids.  I went from a brash teenager that would do almost anything almost anywhere if I got a laugh out of it-kind of like an anarchist meets stand-up comic-to being the most shy and retiring sort you could ever hope to meet--literally; any more timid than me and you'll never spot them.  Like Bigfoot.

Anyway, Julie retired last Friday.  When the idea was put forth to give her an OM-style tribute, I was surprised to find myself not hesitating in the least to sign up.  We managed to put the whole thing together in basically four days, mostly by e-mail, and furtively snuck in and out of the large event room of the steak house where the ceremony was being held for Julie and two other outgoing teachers, carrying in props and setting up in the small event room.  Since we hadn't ever rehearsed the updated script (we were actually modifying it until the morning of), we did a quick run-though, and flubbed it badly.  We had rehearsed in a very different space, so our blocking was all off, and we were missing cues and lines all over the place.  That's when Julie showed up, since we had told a co-conspirator to give us time for a dry-run, then bring her and a few others over to watch.  Other people must have been curious and followed, because pretty soon there were 20-30 people there.

The weather around here lately has been quite warm and humid, and there seemed to be no air movement at all in that room.  I was warm just in the dress shirt and slacks that I had on during the dinner... add to that a bald cap, fake mustache and heavy cloak, then jump around like an idiot for several minutes, and you've got some serious heat issues.  Something else about me... I'm a sweater.  My dad's side are all sweaters.  With huge heads.  If you see a guy walking down the street with a giant head so moist that he looks like one of those clown sprinklers, chances are he's related to me.  So heat, nerves, and genetics all co-operated to make me profoundly uncomfortable at that exact moment.

We went for it anyway, though, and it actually went really, really well.  Admittedly, most everyone had started their evening in the bar, so may have been an easy audience by that point, but the crowd reaction was all favorable, and I suddenly remembered how much fun it can be to make a complete ass out of yourself in public.  I don't like attention, yet there I was in front of a crowd of mostly strangers, performing quick and inane costume changes with $8 worth of fake scalp and hair, enacting death scene after death scene as the evil Darth Lumberg exterminated (right-sized) the OM order.  I absolutely detest cameras (for several years running I made a game of eluding the yearbook staff entirely), yet I was fine with the entire thing being recorded.  That may change when I see the video, though...

This entry has nothing to do with gaming.  It hasn't got much to do with anything, really... it's just a friendly reminder to everyone to make sure you completely humiliate yourself in public every so often.  Laughter is good for the soul, but being laughed at (and pointed at... you gotta have the pointing) is good for the humility.

I'm not as much of a stickler for sound in games as some.  I recognize the importance of sound in setting the atmosphere, but I just don't have the ear to get too involved in game audio.  I've even been known to mute a game and listen to something else while trying to level up, or beat a certain challenge, or whatever.

I will say, though, that there are some bits of video game audio that have forged such deep associations for me that they instantly evoke a certain reaction.  For instance, the synthasized wave of Konami's 16-bit logo screen seems to instantly trigger my adrenaline gland.  When you fire up Super Castlevania IV or Contra: Alien Wars, you know you're in for an awesome ride, and repetition has caused me to have a Pavlovian reaction to that sound.

The click of a microswitch joystick for me is like putting on a sweatshirt straight out of the dryer: pure happiness.  Honestly, if you ever need to occupy me for a while, give me an SNK stick, and I'll just move it in circles, listening to the clicks and giggling like a happy infant.

The sounds of a well-fought battle in Samurai Shodown II are a beautiful thing to hear.  With the clock off and two skilled players, matches go on for minutes, lunge ringing off block, riposte off parry.  The staccatto beat of sword on sword, shifting, irregular, until the wet, lurid sound of one attack getting through the guard, scoring against flesh, leaving you just a heartbeat to press your advantage.

There are, of course, unhappy sounds, as well.  The impotent click of an empty pistol in Halo 2 is just about the most unhappy sound in the world.  Nothing's worse than sighting an opponent, stripping his shields while you ignore the hot lead and energy ripping into you, lining up the headshot, and hearing that empty clicking sound from your finisher. 

Then there's the siren in Silent Hill.  It's thrilling, because you know all hell is about to break loose, but while you know you should be excited about an action-packed part of the game, you can't help feeling, in some quiet corner of your mind, that you might be happier if you don't find out what's coming...

Anybody else out there have instant reactions to game sounds?

It's that time... time for some next-gen (current-gen now? This will be easier once all three are out...) thoughts. I'm no newshound... In fact, with facts flying fast and furious as we digest E3, I'm sure I've missed quite a bit. Does lack of information discourage me from ruminating on the latest efforts of the big three? Well, this would be a very short entry if it did, but luckily, it gives me no pause at all.

Microsoft - "We're really trying..."

So many mistakes were made in planning and releasing the 360. A friend of mine calls it the worst launch ever, and I'd have to agree with him. MS's own incompetence ruined the lead time they wanted to get on the market--you can't say you have a year's head start if nobody can actually find your product to buy it for half that year. For some ungodly reason they listened to the marketing department and castrated their own system with a rusty nail-clippers just so they could say that their console starts at only $299. Faulty hardware, buggy software that erased saves, a massive joke of a backwards compatibility feature... MS made a lot of mistakes.

But, you know, they did some things right, too. In playing with the 360, there were a number of things that impressed me about it. Not the games, yet--I'm just not moved by anything currently available, but some of the Live features impressed me. The wireless controller is actually decent (the wired controller, judging by the ones at store kiosks, is a disaster of misdesign), and finally, an option to power the system on from the controller. I know I'll be picking up a 360 once I'm confident that all of those egregious bugs in the hardware and firmware are corrected. And once Dead Rising comes out--that looks fantastic.

The 360 is a solid system that could have been a great one if my humble proposal to launch all the world's marketers into orbit around Neptune had gotten the attention it deserved. ... admit it: you thought I was going to do a Uranus joke there. Too easy.

 Nintendo - "We're a toy company now."

Back in the dark ages of the Great Video Game Crash, analysts thought that developing a new video game console bordered on suicidal. But Nintendo cleverly plugged a gun and a robot into the NES and billed it as an interactive toy. This Trojan horse, video-game-machine-in-toy's-clothing (because at its heart, the NES was a video game console through and through) tactic worked brilliantly, and Nintendo almost single-handedly revived the industry. Now, when video games are more popular than ever, Nintendo has decided to try the same tactic. Hey, it worked for them before, didn't it? True, that was almost the completely opposite situation, but you have to remember that Iwata couldn't lead the way to his own kitchen, much less direct a large, venerable corporation.

So when he finds that he's dug himself into a hole of mediocrity, he breaks out the shovel and decides to dig his way out! The reasoning (if you call it that) seems go like this: Sony and Microsoft have split the majority of the market between them, and (due to similar brilliant leadership over the last couple of generations) there's no chance Nintendo can recover enough to lead the market in just one generation, so the best solution must be... change the competition! If Nintendo can't take MS and Sony, maybe it can take Jakks. Nintendo doesn't want to compete in the video game market any more, it wants to compete in the interactive toy market. It's inexpensive and it's gimmicky, just like the spongebob-shaped "video game system" that Jakks makes.

Honestly, I think the Wii might be a fun toy... for an hour or so. Maybe someday Nintendo will make video games again. Until then, get ready for a couple of obligatory entries from the same tired old franchises Nintendo uses for life-support and a whole lot of "cooking game" and "squashing game."

Sony - "We win."

Honestly, I don't know why everybody gets so down on the PS3's price tag... for $100 more than a 360 you get a more powerful machine, not crippled by a version without a hard drive. Oh, and it can do everything that Nintendo's incredibly stupidly named machine can do (and will probably have more than 5 games released a year), but treats the gimmick as what it is... a gimmick. Not bad for $500. Oh, but wait--you also get a Blu-Ray player (which is more than $500 right there), free online play, and (working) backwards compatibility with PS1 and PS2 games. Add the cost of a PS1, PS2, 360, Wii, and Blu-Ray player together and see if it's anywhere close to $500, then complain to me about the price.

I know that a lot of 360 fans are going to take issue with my opinion, and the Nintendo fanboys will probably burn me in effigy. Yes, I ripped on Nintendo, but only because they provoked it. I have no personal allegiance or onus toward any console manufacturer--I would be as happy to rave about Nintendo as to rail about them, if only they'd give me some cause. In 3-5 years (because I guarantee you that all the talk about an extended lifespan for this gen will be completely forgotten by manufacturers in a few years), if Sony comes up with a complete dungheap of a system and Nintendo releases an awesome, kick-ass, forget-everything-we-did-since-the-SNES system, I will hesitate for not one picosecond before singing the big N's praises and textually tearing Sony a new orifice. Until then, try to get a decent likeness on those effigies, okay?

Ever since I saw the Japanese import of Devil May Cry years ago at a friend's place, I wanted to play it.  I patiently waited for the American version to drop in price, picked it up, and completely failed to get into it.  I never understood why I couldn't click with it.  Every time I tried to play it something just didn't feel right, and I'd inevitably put it down.  I knew it was a quality game, and intended to play through it at some point, and even picked up DMC2 at a Toys R Us clearance sale for $10, despite the hate hurled at it by the community at large.

When DMC 3 SE came out, I picked that up, too, and determined to finally sit down and play through DMC, then the sequels.  It was then that I finally realized why I didn't like playing DMC: the jump was wrong.  When I played the import of DMC at Baroque's, the jump button was properly set to X.  In the US version, it's Triangle.  This is, quite plainly, a stupid place to put the jump button. 

I've already decried the lack of button-edit functions in many current games, and DMC is a prime example.  I could switch between configurations A and B, which basically just swapped the shoot and slash functions, but I wasn't allowed to put jump where it should be.  Basically, the localization process consisted of taking an excellent game and hopelessly breaking it.  I mean, the jump button has only been in the equivalent place on controllers since, oh... always.  While interacting a lot with the Square button (generally the primary attack button), the X button (jump) can be pressed by rolling your thumb onto it, so you can jump at will during an intense fight.  That's just how it's done in video games, and it's done that way because it works.  If some developer wants to do something stupid with the controls, that's fine, as long as they let us unbreak it.  ICO and Shadow of the Colossus put jump on Triangle, too, but at least they let me put it back where it belongs.

So I played through Baroque's Japanese copy, with the jump button where it belongs.  Then I started playing my copy of DMC2, which thankfully has its jump in the right place.  I do wish you could put slash on Square and shoot on Triangle, but I can work with it.  So far I've gone through Hard mode with Dante and am working my through Hard with Lucia, and I really don't understand all the derision DMC2 has received.

Admittedly, the original had much more atmosphere, better settings, and more attitude from the Dante.  DMC2 plays great, though, and looks damn good.  I preferred the awesome gothic sets of DMC to DMC2's cityscapes and skyscrapers, but those city streets still look great.  There is an indefinable quality about the game that led me to ask if it had been developed by Capcom of Europe... somehow, something about the game gives me that impression.  Europeans will probably think I'm insulting them, given DMC2's bad reputation, but that's not the case at all since I really like DMC2.

I'm still trying to understand why DMC2 is so hated.  The main complaints I picked out of Gamespot's review, for example, were that you could go the whole game without trying anything fancy, you didn't need to use the alternate weapons, and the settings were uninspired.  I'll concede the level design.  It's true, too, that you don't have to use the shotgun or the rocket launcher.  Dante can kick ample amounts of ass with his handguns, but you have other options to keep things interesting.  Just like you can go through the game without worrying about your style rating, but then you're missing the point. 

It's like taking a shortcut on a sightseeing hike--you'll get to the end just the same, but you'll miss the whole reason you were out there.  If you're playing DMC for the story elements, you're playing for the wrong reason.  The game is about decimating your enemies in as cool a way as possible, and just has a story thrown in as a framework for the action to rest on.  You get more orbs the higher your style rating is, and can power up your weapons, health, and Devil Trigger with them, but why you really do it is because it's fun.  At least, for me it is.

I'm not sure if I'm going to do Dante and Lucia Must Die or not, but when I'm done with DMC2, I have my shiny copy of DMC3 SE waiting for me.  I understand that it has a full-fledged button-edit mode (at last!), and feels more like the first game, so I'm hoping it will be my favorite of the three.

Okay, it's true that I dive a car with good gas mileage, lean hard to the left in my politics, and believe in recycling anything that can be recycled.  But I'm not a hippie.  I work in a corporate cube farm, I don't take drugs, I don't believe crystals have any special properties other than use in making crappy radios.  I don't own a pair of little round sunglasses, I don't wear headbands, and I don't paint daisies on everything.  Not that that's what hippies are really like.  My parents were hippies, and I had a lot of friends in school that definitely had some hippie tendencies, and they were nothing like that.  That's how society at large sees hippies, though, and as soon as I tell people that I'm a vegetarian they immediately think "hippie."

Whenever vegetarians are depicted in the media, we're either space-cases or nutjobs.  Remember the meat-lover's pizza commercial with the spaced-out, headband-and-little-round sunglass-wearing vegetarians screaming when the pizza was pushed at them?  Somehow, I think that was supposed to be funny, but it wasn't.  If you shove meat in my face, I'm not going to scream.  I might lose my appetite, but it doesn't freak me out.  Meat is everywhere.  It takes phenomenal effort to avoid.

I have to read the ingredients of everything I buy; even things you wouldn't expect to have meat in them often contain lard or are cooked in animal oils.  At restaurants, I have very few menu choices open to me.  I can't even order soup because it's normally made with a chicken base, and the server never has any idea if it is.  I'm not complaining, though, that's just how it is.  Most people like meat, I don't, so it's up to me to avoid it.  I don't try to convince other people that they shouldn't eat meat.

What's weird is that even though I'm in the minority, when people find out I'm a vegetarian, they often become suspicious or outright hostile to me.  They start demanding to know why I'm a vegetarian, which is something I don't like to get into.  A lot of people have tried to trick me into eating meat.  I don't know if any non-vegetarians out there saw that meat-lovers commercial and wondered why someone was shoving that meat-laden pizza in a vegetarians face, but I did. 

Along with the stereotyping of vegetarians as hippies, there's antagonism there.  I don't think that the reason vegetarians are portrayed in media in such an unflattering way is simply because someone thinks it's funny, but as an outpouring of some bizarre anger.  I don't get it... I love pizza, but when I met someone who said he didn't like pizza, I thought it was unusual, but I didn't resent him, I didn't try to hide pizza in his burger.

I was reading the last issue of Hardcore Gamer Monthly and actually read the review of True Crime: New York City.  I know, but I was bored.  In it, they talk about the "funny" mission where you have to stop rabid vegans attacking a vegetarian restaurant for "daring to serve meat."  Now, I know there are a few radical morons out there that choose to be idiots in the name of animal rights-there are people acting like morons for any reason you can imagine-but the majority of vegetarians out there that I know are extremely nonconfrontational.  Pastor Fred Phelps is a dangerously deranged hate-monger, so should we infer that every Christian is the same?  Well, don't judge anyone who doesn't eat meat on those jackasses at PETA, either.

I realize that I'm probably oversensitive on this topic, but all my life I've been dealing with the odd looks, random dissertations on proper nutrition, and explanations that "God put animals on Earth for us to eat."  Next time someone tells you they're a vegetarian, just treat it like you would if they said they were lactose intolerant or allergic to peanuts.  There's a food that you can eat that they can't, that's all.  Shoving a big can of Planter's at someone who's allergic to them isn't considered funny, and neither is trying to trick him into eating them, and it's not funny with meat, either.

I tried not to complain about all the fallout of GS's latest redesign.  The stupid fixed-width format and scrollbar comments are intentional design choices, and even though I think they're bad choices, I let it go.  I understood that with major overhauls, outages can happen, and I waited patiently for the forums to be back online.  I was annoyed about the complete breakage of the journal response system, but figured that the problems would be addressed in due time. 

When responding to a journal entry, you can preview your post just fine, but when you submit it, all line breaks are removed, jumbling everything into one huge block, and all links are broken.  As a workaround until GS could fix it, I used br tags in my responses to format them into something readable.  Now, though, br tags no longer work.  Basically, there is now no way of making a response readable unless it is very, very short.

If GS wants to keep us from leaving long journal responses, they should institute a character limit, not keep us from making our posts readable.

I used to catch Sports Night on Comedy Central sometimes, and I liked it.  Some people complain that it replaces wit with fast dialog, but if you pay close attention, you see that it actually replaces wit with fast wit.  Because I only saw it haphazardly, though, I missed a lot of the continuing story.  Now, thanks to the joys of DVD collections, I've been watching the whole thing in order.  The first season is absolutely brilliant, but immediately in the second season, I've detected tinkering.

I know that the show struggled to get the ratings that make the network suits happy (just like in the second season's plotline.  Hmm...), and it seems that they tried playing with the formula to make it more marketable.  While I've still been enjoying it, so far I think the first season was better.  I'm curious if this tinkering (I think they call it "retooling") ever actually works, because every time I see it, it breaks something.

Arrested Development was genius from the first episode.  The first few episodes of any show are usually pretty rough until the cast and crew haven't hit their stride yet, but AD was hilarious right out of the gate.  Now in its third season, with cancellation looming despite a loyal following and critical acclaim, the tinkering has begun.  Immediately you can see changes, starting with the opening credits.  The show is witty enough to mock the process, but I can't help wondering whether the show, even if saved from cancellation, will be transformed into something unrecognizable in the process.

News Radio was another great comedy that struggled with ratings, and by the end was so mangled that cancelling it was a mercy killing.  True, the loss of Phil Hartman wasn't the network's fault, and that rocked the show pretty hard, but I believe that it could have found it's feet again if given the opportunity.

The Tomb Raider series has become a joke in the gaming community, but the first game was really, really good.  A lot of idiots complained that there was too little combat, though, so in Tomb Raider 2, the whole lonely exploration aspect was jettisoned to make way for a bunch of shootouts.  The combat engine in the TR games was not great.  It was never supposed to be heavily used.  The game was about exploring huge areas, making precision leaps, solving platform puzzles, and only punctuated occasionally with combat.  They took what was great about the first game and threw it away, and then kept tinkering, making each iteration sink deeper into mediocrity.

Is there a special school that people go to to learn to break things professionally?  I mean, it seems like a whole discipline exists aimed at taking a working product and driving it into the ground.  Took a working show and lost the critical acclaim it had enjoyed?  Job well done!  Took a funny show and turned it into cookie-cutter dreck in only 6 episodes?  Have a 6-figure bonus! 

How do the people that ruin working products ever find work again?  If I pay a guy to put a new roof on my house and he creates a big hole in the ground filled with rubble, I'm not exactly going to give him glowing references.  Maybe if networks listened to the talent that created the show and gave them the wad of cash they spend on consultants and "retooling," the show might actually improve instead of degrade.  That is the intention, I assume--or am I missing the point?

I'm sure if asked nicely, my friend Baroque-Legacy will tell the the epic saga behind the purchase of his new TV, so I won't get into that.  I will say, thought, that it is a really, really nice TV.  Tubes may be big and unweildy, but they have the flatout best picture quality you can get, and Baroque's is the best tube out there.  After seeing games and movies in all their high-def glory, I'm left with the shameful feeling of screen envy.

It's nothing new to go to Baroque's place and leave wanting to buy something I saw there--Baroque has good taste in games and electronics.  I resisted buying a Neo-Geo after playing his, but only just.  Now that SNK games are being released on PS2 in Japan, though, I've already started buying them.  At some point, of course, this means I'll have to buy a Japanese PS2 to play them on (Baroque leaves his hooked up and only trots his American PS2 out when he wants to play Alien Hominid or one of the other three US games he likes), and that galls me.

I won't get into the evils of region lockout here, though--I'll save that for later.  The point of this entry is that my trusty SD Wega just seems so inadequate now.  I had planned on waiting a few more years to get a new TV.  I won't be buying a 360 or PS3 for a few years, so by the time I have HD sources, I should be ready.  But seeing how good even SD signals look on Baroques XBR has got me reconsidering that time-frame.  My Wega is a really nice standard-definition TV, and with the whole breakup/move-out thing I went through, I don't really have the space right now for a huge TV.  But I still want one.

I'm willing to concede that Baroque probably didn't buy the TV so much in a devious ploy to torture me as he did because it's awesome and he got a great deal on it, but since I go over there to play games pretty regularly, this isn't going to get better.  Maybe I'm going to have to innoculate myself by getting an intermediate display--a 30" widescreen Wega is doable right now, and it's a nice set, but I really should wait until I can just get my dream set (which, after seeing it, is basically Baroque's model).

This really isn't like me.  I'm a patient guy--I never looked at my Christmas presents beforehand as a kid, even though I knew where they were hidden.  I wait for systems and games that I want to play to drop in price before I buy them, even if it takes years.  This weekend may just find me haunting the TV asiles of the local electronics retailers though. 

From now on, though, I'm not making friends with anyone who has good taste in electronics.  It's too expensive.

Well, the GS awards are in.  No big surprise that Resident Evil 4 got GOTY, but I still feel that it's the wrong choice.  I really did enjoy the game--I played through it twice, and just started it again.  One time through I strove for perfection, resetting to the last continue point every time I took damage or missed even once.  I've probably put 50-60 hours into RE4, and I enjoyed it quite a bit.  But a GOTY should not have glaring flaws, and RE4 does.  Flaws can be overlooked if the rest of the game is good enough, and I was able to look past the RE4's to enjoy my time with it, but the flaws exist. 

The AI is lousy--yes, the enemies will go through a window to get at you if the door's blocked, but they'll also stand at the railing and look longingly at you if you stand on the third stair, unable to figure out that two steps to the left and they'd be in brain-eating range.  They'll pile up at the door, let you kick it open on them, knocking them over, then pile up at the door so you can do it again.  And again.  Even the hatchet-throwers will line up to climb a ladder and get knifed off over and over instead of peppering you with missiles. 

Clipping is atrocious.  When those not-zombies line up at the door, you see their weapons poking through.  Not just a little bit,either--a pitchfork will stick several feet through the solid door.

The controls are the same old craptacular RE controls, creating artificial difficulty by making it hard for you to move.  The combat is significantly better than before, but with most weapons Leon shakes more than someone with the hiccups getting tasered.

The story and script, which for some reason are lauded, seemed like they were written in 15 minutes by one guy with a hangover and a deadline.  At least the older RE games had hilariously bad voice acting.  RE4 just has flat delivery of a bad script.  Except Sadler... he was pretty awful.

My pick for GOTY was a well-polished game with no appreciable flaws: Lego Star Wars.  The sound was fantastic, the visual style was consistent and charming, the graphics were subtly impressive (little things like real-time reflections on the floors of some levels that most games still don't do), the control was spot-on, and the feel was perfect.  LSW could have been seriously half-assed, with two popular licenses to lean on and the traditional excuse for crappy games: "it's for kids."  But instead, Traveller's Tales took care to produce a refined, well-rounded game that anyone-adult or child-can enjoy.

The only thing that could have made LSW better is if it included all 6 movies, but getting Episodes I-III with a delicious taste of IV is still an awesome deal.  I can only hope that they release a Lego Star Wars Classic Trilogy so I can enjoy the entire series in Lego-y goodness. 

Which brings me to the 1st annual Goaty award, which is represented by a bronzed pile of goat cherries.  This year's Goaty goes to: Gamespot, for not having Lego Star Wars as an option in the Game of the Year voting. Boo!