Linkstew

So this 404 error page is an absolute riot. I was tempted to just view the source to see what was troubling the poor little fellow, but I decided that I should instead patiently listen to his concerns.

Sure, you might think a manic-depressive web server is funny, but a suicidal web server is no laughing matter.

The other night, Keith and I got into a rather heated conversation about the Gran Turismo series in general, with him on the side of all that was right and good about Gran Turismo 1 and 2, and me admonishing the controls of Gran Turismo 3. And as long as it was fresh on my mind, I figured I should codify it into a proper review.

The first two games in the Gran Turismo series were highly regarded as some of the best racing games of all time, with incredibly realistic driving physics, "good" graphics, more authentic cars then you could shake a stick at, and incredible customization options. But I couldn't ever bring myself to play them, because the graphics just weren't realistic enough for me. Now, I'm not normally much of a graphics whore, but as long as a game is trying to be realistic, the whole package has to be realistic. In the case of Gran Turismo 1 and 2, the graphics just weren't realistic enough for me, and so I never bothered to try the games.

So. Gran Turismo 3. There was a lot of hype surrounding this PS2 game: "System Seller." "Killer App." "Photorealistic." Et cetera. I didn't quite buy the hype, but I watched many videos, and decided the graphics were finally realistic enough for me to give this "realistic driving game" a go. But the repeated delays the game suffered only served to increase my anticipation, and by the time the game actually came out in July I could hardly wait to play it.

And I popped the game into my PS2 (which I hadn't actually touched since April), and attempted to jump into the game. And instead of a racing game in which I could just go, I found out that this was a game where I was going to have to learn the ropes. And I found out that not only did I have to learn the ropes, but that the ropes were very high. Getting good at this game takes extreme patience, and the margin of error to earn the various licenses is ridiculously low. Frankly, I found myself frustrated with how precise the game required me to be, and the time it would have taken to get good enough for the game to be enjoyable simply wasn't worth it.

But wait, you cry, it's a realistic racing game! Yes, it is. It's very realistic, and that's a good thing, but just because it's realistic doesn't mean that the controls have to be a bitch. How are they a bitch, you ask? Well, you probably don't know this, the the X O SQUARE and TRIANGLE buttons on the face of the PS2 controller are supposedly analog. While they *might* be analog, the buttons themselves have a very small range of motion, and most games still (thankfully) treat them as digital buttons. But not Gran Turismo 3. Oh no. Acceleration (X) is (realistically) an analog affair, but attempting to *half* press the gas through several S curves is not only necessary to get certain licenses, but also damn near impossible without an incredibly steady thumb. And trust me, it's necessary. I spent hours on certain license courses, attempting combinations of gas+break, tapping the gas, and more, but half pressing the gas (as the demo car demonstrated) was the only effective way of taking those turns.

The control situation was, as I've already said, frustrating. And it was that control situation that left me considering buying a wheel for my PS2, just so that I could have foot peddles for gas and break. And it was also the control situation that kept me from playing this game for months, and instead only had me playing for weeks.

I think the control of the game reduces its mass appeal, and will keep a lot of people from truly enjoying it. However, there are people out there who will be more than willing to invest the time to get good at this game. And I'm happy for those people, because they're going to get an incredibly realistic racing experience with a ton of replay value. I'm unfortunately not one of those people.

So now that I've spent all that time talking about the control, you're going to get one paragraph talking about the rest of the game. The graphics were up to snuff, and I found them acceptably realistic. My one complaint was the lack of drivers in the cars, which was just... eerie. And when I showed the game to a few of my non-gamer, non-racing-fan friends, they simply commented "What's so special? It looks like any other racing game..." There were more than enough cars for my taste available in the game, and they all looked great. There were ample customization options, most of which I barely understood. And the sound was more than adequate.

As frustrated as I got with the controls, this is still a very good game, and I wouldn't hesitate to recommend it to any racing fan with the above caveats. I don't believe the game is for everyone, though, and I would probably recommend a simpler racing game to most casual video game players who don't want to invest a lot of time to learning what it takes to be good at this game.

4.5/5

So, here is the first American Gamecube commercial, and here are the first five print ads. The ads are significantly better than the Game Boy Advance ads, and on the whole, they're rather a new direction for Nintendo.

The print ads are rather clever, doing amazing things with such a limiting device. The commercial follows in the cubed theme of the print ads, but is rather edgy. Not that that's a bad thing. I would have liked it if the commercial had shown about 3 times more game play, but overall, I think it will be getting people's attention and setting up (hopefully) more gameplay heavy commercials in the future.

I've now seen the Gamecube commercial three or four times on actual TV, but the only Xbox commercials I've seen are the 7-up ones. And scouring the web, all I could find were some Canadian Xbox commercials. If you happen to know where I can see a full american xbox commercial (or if you've seen it and want to describe it), please post a comment. I'm curious to see how Microsoft, who as far as I know was planning on playing the "edgy" angle, is going to stack up against Nintendo, who just raised the ante...

Though my mom hasn't spoken to me for two months, I know she's still reading the site, so Happy Birthday.

And on that note, my brother's birthday was back on the 9th, so happy birthday to him, too.

Today I took a trip to Target, and there in the electronics section was a three-headed kiosk, featuring a Gamecube screen, a Playstation 2 screen, and an Xbox screen. But the Xbox screen was the only one that was on, and also the only one that had a controller (Why there wasn't a playable PS2 demo, I do not know). So I wandered on over to check out the Xbox, but there was some shit on the floor in front of it.

Now, when I say shit, I mean shit. The smelly kind. It was kind of smeared there. Um. Yeah. (God I wish I had a car so I could go to the (comparatively) good Target in Pinole instead of that ass Target in El Cerrito)

But! Being the game enthusiast I am, I positioned myself around the shit, took to breathing slowly through my mouth, and set to checking out the 'box.

Now then, my first impression of the controller was "hey, this is actually more comfortable than I expected!" But that impression was based only on the impressions of my palms and index fingers, without any input from my thumbs. So, the grips are a nice size and have a nice texture, and the trigger buttons are well placed and actually have analog qualities (unlike the damn dual shock 2). It feels a little on the heavy side, but that might be excusable.

But then I let my thumbs do some exploring, and the results weren't nearly as good. (Reference this xbox.ign article for pictures of the american controller). So, first of all, the joypad is ridiculous. Because of the angle that your thumb is at because of the huge grips, I had the damndest time telling whether I was hitting up or right. Bad bad badness. But that's okay, because most games are full analog these days, right? Well, bad news there, too, because the sticks are really loose, offering very little resistance to my manipulations. And if that looseness is because this is a demo unit, then I'm very concerned about the durability of these controllers, because it can't have been on the floor for more than a couple of weeks. Finally, there are the buttons... The joint of my thumb kind of settled into the center of the "diamond", so I was hitting Y with the pad of my thumb, X with the left side of my thumb, B with the right, and A with the back of the joint of my thumb. And these buttons are small, and hard, and very round, and hitting A and Y a lot left painful indentations in my thumb by the time I was done. Also, the black and white buttons, whatever they're named, are very hard to use efficiently.

In short, I really don't like the uneven spacing and feel of the controls one little bit, though I do think the japanese controller (also shown in the xbox.ign link above) shows more promise, and if I ever get an Xbox, I'll have to pick up some import controllers.

Okay, so, games. Graphically, I saw nothing better than any of the other consoles, but this is what I expected. The one thing I'll mention about graphics is that the environments in Dead or Alive 3 continue that series' tradition of beautiful environments, though I think they could have been done on any of the three equally well.

So, there were a ton of other non-interactive demos, none of which showed me anything interesting, though the Halo movie briefly made me impatient for Halo's eventual PC/Mac release. And then there was the one Interactive demo: Oddworld: Munch's Odyssey. Now, given that this was the only interactive demo, I had to try it, even though the game doesn't at all interest me. And to be honest, the engine was mundane, the graphics were boring, and the action extremely boring. I play RPGs and I thought this was boring. Oh, and there was really horrible clipping and a massive lag and slowdown when you accidentally had Munch or whatever his name is step on a bomb. The whole thing was just running around and picking up green balls. Boy, I hope they get those issues resolved before launch... Boy I hope there's more to this game. Yawn.

In other words, I was more than happy to get away from that shit.

First up, for those of you running OS X 10.1, a couple of security updates were posted to Software Update. So update your system and feel warm and fuzzy and safe when you're done. These updates are not system enhancements, so there are no new features, bug fixes, or enhancements.

For you blogger users, there's Blogscript, which sends the contents of your clipboard flying at your blog with the simple selection of a menu item from Apple's Script menuand the confirmation of a button click. I tried it out, and I liked it and I'd use it regularly... if I used Blogger.

In the pure conjecture department, here are some suggestions for the future of the Dock. There are some neat ideas there -- especially the part about "Customizable Dock" with user defined section ordering. Check it out and if you like what you see please send your feedback to apple.

Say... Where's the feedback link on Microsoft's Windows site, anyway?

For the geeks in the audience, here are a pair of bad ideas for your Services menu. PerlService allows you to send text from any program to be executed by perl and have the results replace the original code, while Terminal Services gives you an easy way to execute arbitrary shell commands and get the results back. Both of these are very dangerous, but totally rock if you know what you're doing.

In the classic Mac OS, and on my linux box, I'm a window shading fiend, and so OS X really leaves me out in the cold. WindowShade X (a $7 shareware program) promises to solve all that, by bringing Window Shading to OS X. The problem is, this version only shades windows for carbon applications, which leaves me out in the cold, because the only carbon application I run regularly is the Finder. But, they promise that a future version will bring equality to the window shading universe, and shade cocoa apps as equals. And when that time comes, they will have my $7 as fast as I can give it to them. And I can't wait.

Finally, for you PowerBook/iBook owners, DoubleCommand is the best thing, ever. Boy, my right thumb suddenly because useful something other than hitting the space bar. Now I just need a control key on the right side of my PowerBook, so that my right-handed self can control-click by hitting the right control key with my pinky and clicking with my thumb. Ah well, back to dreaming.

I hope you OS X users found this list useful; It's just something I've been gathering since 10.1 came out, and I figured I'd share it now.

"I don't know what I had, but I felt so bad that I couldn't even watch TV," I told a co-worker.

"Wow, that's pretty bad! You don't have a remote?"

"Oh... no no no..."

And I went on to clarify that I don't have a TV in my room, and that I would have had to get up, and go to the other room, and sit up for a long time, and the very thought of it made my head pound.

Though now that I think about it again, thinking about rolling over, or even thinking about not thinking made my head pound, so perhaps the fault was with the thinking rather than what I was thinking about... And in that case, TV would have been the perfect way to stop me from thinking too much.

But I digress. The point remains that I don't have a TV in my room. While I was walking home, I was thinking about how I used to have a TV in my room. And combined with the constant background hum of my building excitement about the Gamecube launch, I got to think about how I used to play games on the TV in my room.

And then, all at once, several things occurred to me:

1. Since August, I've only been playing my Game Boy Advance.
2. I've only been playing my Game Boy Advance because I've been playing it late at night/early in the morning, right before I go to sleep, so I can't use the TV in the living room.
3. I need a TV in my room.

And this explains why I haven't touched those playstation (note: not PS2, because no PS2 game since GT3 has even so much as sparked my interest) games I've been meaning to play. But, without a car, I can't put this plan into motion, so this is all just idle musing about why I've just been playing GBA games (which I've enjoyed immensely, mind you).

Pardon the silence, but last night, when I had intended to be doing my 188 homework, I suddenly got mysteriously sick, and huddled under my covers alternately shivering and sweating. And I stayed there, with a wicked headache and drinking water and too cold and too hot and feverish, for the better part of 18 hours.

And so not only did I not work on my 188 homework, but I missed my first folklore lecture all semester. Let alone was I feeling up to updating the sites.

I feel like I just lost a day. I effectively did. Though I've been up since 2 today, I've just been sitting in bed in a daze.

But tonight, despite a still lingering headache and fever, I've got to do the 188 homework.

The upshot of all this is that I just found out that the 188 midterm got pushed back from this Friday to next Wednesday. Woohoo!

So uh, more later, when I'm not busy and delirious.

Last summer, a project I took on myself was to overhaul the interface of one of our more confusing systems. The interface was a pet peeve of mine, and I was scratching an itch, as it were. And so I spent a little time, and I made it a lot more useful and consistent, and I was very happy with myself.

And so I called my boss over to show him what I'd done. So I opened the old page to start with, to which my boss replied "Good job! Keep up the good work!"

"But... This is the old page. Let me er, show you what I changed." I said meekly.

I suppose it should be noted that thanks to his having been an RCC the year before me, my boss had never actually used the system in question, and hence did not know what it looked like.

But after that, "Good Job! Keep up the good work!" was a running joke, which he'd use as a useless reply. And now that I have my boss's job (since my boss graduated in May), "Good job! Keep up the good work!" has become a part of my vocabulary.

I use it when I'm complimenting someone on being useless, or having done nothing at all.

By the way, this is the first post in a series of posts in which I'm going to talk about why I say the strange things I say. (Aka, "Benjyisms")

Good job! Keep up the good work!

1. Windows XP Professional is equivalent to Mac OS X 10.1, while Windows XP Home lacks too many features to be considered OS X's peer. [1]
2. A full copy of Windows XP Professional costs $299.
3. An upgrade to Windows XP Professional costs $199 [2].
4. Mac OS X 10.1 costs $129. [3]

Now, who tried to deny being a monoply power again?

Anyway, I'm in the process of consolidating/upgrading my desktop computer, and I'd like to try out Windows XP on this 1.4 ghz athlon I've got sitting here, because heaven knows that lovely linux won't stress it the way bloated bill's system will. But there are three things keeping me from doing so:

1. The very idea of Windows Product Activation not only disgusts me, but leaves me asking some very troublesome questions:
   • In my mind, WPA actually legitimizes try before you buy practices.
   • Then, why doesn't Microsoft offer an XP demo disc with an option to either buy a full version of XP or revert the user's system to its previous state.
   • Assuming XP is all that it's made out to be, it seems that such a demo disc would be much more effective at convincing consumers that they should buy XP than simply advertising.
   • If Microsoft doesn't have the technology to enable an XP demo with rollback capabilities, then they should spend a tiny fraction of their XP advertising budget to develop it. Just make the demo requires X gigs of disk space and it should be trivial to back up the old configuration.
   • That Microsoft has not invested in such a demo disc suggests one of two things to me:
     1. Microsoft does not feel that WPA is secure enough to prevent this demo disc turning into free a operating system. In this case, they shouldn't be using WPA in the first place.
     2. Microsoft knows that XP isn't all that it's made out to be (I'm not saying it is or isn't, I'm just extrapolating), and doesn't want to let consumers find that out without buying it first.
2. If I do try XP and decide I want a copy, I'll be damned if I'm going to have to spend 2.5 times what I spent on my lovely Mac OS X for an equivalent product.
3. Have I mentioned how much I hate the name XP?

[1] A full proof of this statement is omitted. The statement is derived from this feature comparison between XP Home and Professional, and information about OS X in my head.
[2] If you happen to own a new enough copy of windows to qualify for an upgrade.
[3] The $20 upgrade from OS X 10.0 to 10.1 doesn't count here, because I consider the upgrade from Win* to XP to be equivalent to the upgrade from Classic Mac OS to Mac OS X.