Linkstew

So there I was, grinding up a rail, when something orange at the top of the hill caught my eye. "Wait a minute..." I said under my breath, "is that a...!?" But by that point, I'd flown through the fully open doors of a Honda Element, and my question had been answered.

Now, regardless of how much I may like or dislike the Element, I'm pretty positive that SSX 3 didn't need an Element endorsement in SSX 3 either way.

Other than the Element endorsement, SSX 3 pretty much completely rocks. I've been playing it all day, and I just unlocked Peak 2. So far, I've only been playing with Zoe, which leaves me with another 9 characters to power up and unlock clothes and accessories for. And if you played the demo and are worried about the quality of the final product, don't worry, the final product is vastly improved in every respect.

Most importantly, it looks like it has significantly more lastability than the original SSX (which we wore out in about a month), so it looks like I'll be playing this game for a long time.

And even better, while flipping through the instruction manual just now I noticed that the song "Mas" by Kinky is on the soundtrack. That disc was probably one of our most often played discs on the way to the mountain last year... clearly EA is reading my mind.

In a word, "whoa." I've probably said "whoa" enough times in my first 3 hours of using Panther to give gold ole' Keanu a run for his money. If you're for any reason waiting to buy Panther, let me just reassure that it made my PowerBook feel like a whole new computer. There are so many improvements that I couldn't even begin to list them all. Boy, I sure wish I had a Mac to use at work. I'd be so much more productive than with windows.

But just to pick one out of the hat, here's a feature of Expose that I hadn't heard anything about until I discovered it myself: Activate Expose in either "All Windows" or "Application Windows" mode, and then hit "tab," and Expose will cycle through the open applications, displaying each one in "Application Windows" mode. So cool.

I've played a lot more of Tactics Advance since my first impressions, and it being the marathon game that it is, that means I've got plenty of time for second impressions:

• In my first impressions I complained about how annoying it was to not be able to see how a given piece of equipment would alter a character's stats. Well, it turns out if you hold start, it will show you how the equipment impacts the stats. Thank god.
• For some reason, I overlooked the fact that a character can equip two different Action "A" ability sets simultaneously. This is an important game play point, because otherwise a character is locked into the abilities of whatever job he is currently assigned. But nope! A character actually gets A abilities from both his assigned job, and one other selected job set.
• The first time I saw an extra character named "Foobar," I thought it was cute and laughed a bit. But by the third time I'd seen an extra named "Foobar," it began to lose its charm.
• The game time clock says I've been playing for 30 hours and 8 minutes,, and 72 missions. Of course, the 30 hours doesn't take into account either (on one hand) all the times I fell asleep while playing only to wake up and just turn the game boy off in the middle of a battle, or (on the other hand) all the times I set the game boy down in the middle of a battle, only to come back to it awhile later and finish the fight. I don't actually know if it balances out or not.
• Finally, it's been a long time since I muttered something like "This game is a lot of work" about a game I was still actually enjoying. But seriously: a lot of work. And you know you're in trouble when you start seriously considering writing software to help you play the game more efficiently.

The most notable thing I can say about Final Fantasy Tactics Advance so far is that it's put me to sleep about 7 times so far.

The intro to the game goes for at least 30 minutes before you can save the game, and closer to an hour if you're a slower reader. The first time I played the game, I fell asleep before I could save it. The second time, I got to save the game, but when I started the third time, I couldn't remember anything so had to go through the intro a third time before anything stuck. Variants on the same thing happened several times after that, where I'd fall asleep in the middle of a mission or forget what I was supposed to be doing, and just had to restart from the last saved game.

In addition to the slow pace of the game, there are a few other issues with the game. You're rather suddenly dropped into things with a fairly steep learning curve, and this isn't helped by the fact that equipment interfaces leave a lot to be desired. When shopping for equipment, you're only told what jobs can use that equipment, meaning you have to remember what jobs all of your characters have. Worse, when you're shopping, you can't tell if any given piece of equipment will improve your character's stats. And when you're actually equipping items, you also can't tell if the stats are improved -- the only way to tell is to note your original stats, swap items, and then see if they improved.

But, this isn't nearly as damning as it might sound. All those times I fell asleep, I was admittedly pretty tired, and playing right before bed. And the interface problems -- while annoying -- can be worked around without too much effort. Regardless, that doesn't change the fact that this game is not for the casual gamer -- anyone interested in this game is going to need to invest a lot of time reading things and learning the intricacies of the gameplay. If you're a fan of Final Fantasy and strategy games, check this out. Otherwise, I'd steer clear.

Last night I played with my housemate's shiny new Palm Tungsten T3, and I was damn impressed. Now remember, the last Palm I've really played with was my dusty Palm Vx running Palm OS 3.5, so color and widescreen and bluetooth and Palm OS 5.2 and more was kind of a lot of enhancements thrown at me all at once, so it might not be as impressive to someone who's been actively following PDAs as it was to me.

I had some trouble getting used to the new graffiti input, and the ability to write on the screen took a little bit of getting used to, but once I get the general hang of things I was tapping around just like it was the same old Palm OS I knew and loved. The screen was beautiful and bright and the increased resolution made everything look a lot sharper. But the core features of the device aren't what I'm so much interested in talking about: What made me grin like a schoolboy were the connectivity features.

The T3 has bluetooth built in, and I was able to make the T3 use my my Nokia 3650 as a bluetooth modem and check my mail via IMAPS relatively trivially. Admittedly, my laptop should be able to use my phone as a bluetooth modem -- I just haven't tried it yet. I was able to effortlessly send a picture from my phone to the T3, and from the T3 to my laptop. I was able to make the T3 dial my phone. And I didn't play with it, but I'm sure iSync would do a bang-up job of integrating the T3 into my .mac systems (it'd be extra cool if it synced my safari bookmarks, but I doubt it does that... yet). Regardless, the connectivity was damn cool.

But there's still one thing that the T3 is missing that makes me want to hold out for another revision: Wifi. Sure, bluetooth + my phone can get me a net connection, but more often than not I'm somewhere with Wifi, and I'd like to be able to just get my Palm directly online with Wifi rather than resorting to bridging with a bluetooth modem. Sure, there's this Wifi SD card that's supposed to have Palm OS support later this year, and there's also this upcoming Wifi/memory SD combo card which would kill two birds with one stone, but I really don't want to have to carry around a separate card for Wifi that I'd probably just lose. I'd really like to see the Wifi integrated, and with the T3's introduction of the Palm OS toolbar, it'd be pretty trivial to put a Wifi on/off switch in there right next to the Bluetooth switch.

And then there are things missing from the connectivity puzzle: What I really want is an iPod with bluetooth, so I could use other devices as a remote control for my iPod, and so my other devices could be notified of the song currently playing on my iPod. It'd also be cool to have a Digital Camera with bluetooth, so I could transfer pictures to my other devices wirelessly (though with the ginormous resolutions that dcams can capture these days, that might not be practical), or use another device as a remote for my camera.

So if you're currently looking for a PDA, I'd definitly start by looking at a T3. Besides the lack of Wifi, the only other flaw I noticed was that an hour or so of playing with the bluetooth features drained the battery by about half.

I recently played demos of several upcoming games, and here are my bullet point impressions of them:

• GameCube
• 1080: Avalanche - This amused me for a few minutes, and if I can get this for cheap after whatever unforeseeable point I get bored with SSX 3, I might pick this up.
• Star Wars: Rogue Squadron III: Rebel Strike: Attack of the Colons - I don't think I'm going to get this unless I can get it for cheap. It just felt like more Rogue Squadron, without fixing some of the play control issues that have always bugged me about Rogue Squadron. There are other things I'd rather be playing, like...
• Viewtiful Joe - Now this game was one I was unsure about before playing the demo, but after playing it I was totally sold. This games style is just too cool for words, and the fact that it's going to initially sell for $40 just seals the deal.


• PlayStation 2
• ESPN Hockey - It's been a long time since I've played a hockey video game (or any sports video game, for that matter), and I was surprised by how damn complicated it's gotten. The graphics were pretty, and I had fun playing for one period, but I just couldn't imagine playing for much longer than that.
• Hulk - I was amused by this demo, but in the end it was way too short. Still entertaining enough to play the demo twice.
• Ratchet and Clank 2: Going Commando - This was entertaining enough that I spent probably a half an hour playing with this demo, but it's not a game I'm going to buy. In particular, there was an entertaining racing mini-game, but in the long run it probably would lack depth.
• Roadkill - Um, I did not enjoy this demo at all. The objective was entirely unclear, and the demo was sufficiently buggy that I got my car stuck against a mountain and couldn't move anymore, so I quit playing it.
• True Crime: Streets of LA - This game also bored me silly, and again with the extremely unclear objective.
• SSX 3 - Last but certainly not least... Unfortunately, this demo was really buggy, with me falling through the mountain at times, or getting stuck inside of a rock.... The controls just felt a little off throughout, and the board's interaction with the snow frequently seemed very strange. The demo showed a lot of promise, but considering this game is supposed to be released next month, it was kind of scary... But the latest SSX 3 trailer had much improved board/snow interaction, so I'm keeping my fingers crossed. This game has a lot to live up to -- I just hope it can deliver on all of its promises. The only real question will be what platform to buy this game for.


• I also watched a video of XIII, and while I believe it's just a first person shooter, the graphics and style in the trailer were damned awesome. I only have a vague notion of what the story is supposed to be about, but I kind of want to play this just for the graphical/style experience alone... I'll wait and see what the reviews say, though.

So the results: I would buy SSX 3 unless the reviews completely denounced it; I was convinced to not buy Rebel Strike, and to hold off on 1080; And I was convinced to pre-order Viewtiful Joe.

So I've had the phone for a little more than a week now, and I still like it. Here's a few more things I've noticed about it:

• I've been using Smart Profiles for the last week to do profile scheduling, and it certainly works as advertised (though the "daemon" has crashed a few times). Before I commit to that app I'm going to try this miniGPS and Extended Profiles suite. It's more expensive, but it looks like the extended profiles half of the suite is functionally equivalent, and the miniGPS half of the suite adds location based events, based on what cell phone towers you're near, which sounds pretty damn cool.
• Either way, I'm a little hesitant to buy an application that will be bound to the ID of my phone. I want my software licensed to me, not my phone.
• There's a really irritating bit of behavior where, if you lock your keypad and then wait long enough for the screen saver to activate, the first press of the "Unlock" soft key doesn't register, so you have to press it again and then press star to unlock the keypad. Actually, the phone is a little slow to respond fairly frequently, and that first press of Unlock which deactivates the screen saver is one of those slow to respond moments, so unlocking the keypad always takes a second or two longer than it should. Very frustrating.
• And while the large screen is nice, I'm really afraid it's going to be a scratch magnet. And for that matter, it smudges like crazy when I hold it to my face. I think that's just going to be a tradeoff.

I got my new credit card yesterday, and though I'm still disgusted by it, I did feel a certain excitement once it was in my hand. But rather than let whim get the best of me, I got something I needed instead: a new cell phone and plan. In particular, I got the Nokia 3650 I've had my eye on for a couple of months.

I've been playing with the phone all evening, and I still feel like I've barely scratched the surface. The short version is it's a damn good phone with a lot of flexibility, but it has just a few little flaws. It's definitely a gadget geek's phone, though. Here's the bullet point version of my first impressions:

• Physical details:
• The round keypad is the first thing anyone'll notice, and it's really not that bad. The biggest problem I have with it isn't the layout, but rather that it's kind of hard to hit the buttons on the right side of the phone when holding the phone with my right hand. This is more of a function of the size of the phone than the layout of the keypad, and I don't think any of the smaller phones would fare any better in this department.
• The keypad itself feels a little flimsy, and I'm a little worried about how the directional pad will hold up to wear and tear. Hopefully it's trivially replaceable like old Nokia keypads.
• The good:
• While it's significantly larger than some of the micro phones you can buy these days, I don't think that's a bad thing. The size of the 3650 is just a little smaller than my old Nokia 5165 in most dimensions, but it's significantly lighter. This is all good.
• The primary reason I bought this phone was because it has bluetooth, and it synchronizes my data with OS X beautifully as advertised. Definitely worth it. It's also really convenient to transfer ringtones and other files to and from the phone with bluetooth. Very nice.
• While I don't really have much use for a phone that takes pictures or videos, it's still an interesting option to have. And while the picture quality is far from fantastic, it's actually much better than the old web cam I had back in the day.
• Voice dial is far from a new feature, but it's new for me, and I think it's neat. We'll see if I actually use it in practice.
• While I knew the phone had "polyphonic ringtones," it never occurred to me that that meant "MIDI." But it does mean MIDI, which opens up so many possibilities... most of them bad. Can you say "Gato's Song?" Heh. I'm pretty sure that if I ever wanted to kill myself, it'd be a simple matter of finding the most annoying midi ringtone possible and playing it for awhile in a public place.
• The nits:
• For some stupid reason, the only option for displaying the contacts is as "Last name First name," with no comma. What I'd really like is the ability to display the contacts "First name Last name," sorted by last name, but I'd be happy with "Last name, First name." The lack of a comma really bothers me for some reason. But Nokia released a software update to add sound recording to the video recorder, so there's still hope. I'm going to try mailing them.
• With my old phone, I got into the habit of pressing "cancelcancelcancelcancelcancel" a lot, just to pop out to the top level of the phone. With the 3650, there's not exactly a dedicated "cancel" button. On most screens, the right "soft button" is either "Exit" or "Back," which is effectively "cancel," so my muscle memory kicks in and I press that button a lot. The problem is, when I get to the top level, that soft button becomes an app launcher, so instead of just getting to the top level, I end up launching an app instead. Kind of irritating. I may just have to write a placeholder app to put in that position to solve this irritation.
• Other phones have an auto keylock function. Why doesn't the 3650? And thanks to the aforementioned inability to get to the main menu without looking at the screen, there's no way for me to lock the phone without looking at the screen. Bummer. I'll definitely have to find a solution to this problem. =\
  Update: It turns out there's an "auto-keylock" feature hidden in the security menu. The problem is, I just want auto-keypad locking to disable accidental button presses, but the security option requires using a lockcode, which might be more inconvenient than it's worth. We'll see.
• Nokia phones have had profiles for awhile, but when are they going to take profiles to the next level and allow the user to set times for certain profiles to be automatically enabled? "Use the work profile M-F from 10 am - 7 pm," etc. That'd be so awesome.
• The ugly:
• While trying to turn on the auto-lockcode feature, I didn't know the PIN number or the Lock Code for the SIM card, and I accidentally locked myself out of the phone. There's a "Personal Unlock Key" (PUK) that's needed to unlock the phone once it gets in this state, but it wasn't included with my phone, so I had to call AT&T and find out the PUK. The customer support guy joked that "there's nothing we can do for you," which at the time wasn't that funny, but in retrospect, it's worth a chuckle. I'm a little disappointed that I wasn't warned about that by the guy at the AT&T wireless store last night, but in the end everything worked out alright.

Heh, now all need is my obligatory yellow faceplate and I'll be set. =)

(I'm probably going to update this list over the next couple of days as I actually use the phone some)

I think the last first person shooter I really played was Quake III, so I'm not quite sure what I was expecting when I downloaded the demo of UT 2003 today. I guess I was curious to see what 3.5 years had done for FPSs. I played a few deathmatch rounds (with The Flaming Lips playing the background, by the way, which was pretty damn surreal), and after just the second match I was getting pretty comfortable with things and holding my own. Unfortunately, the answer to "what's new in FPSlandia" seems to be "not much."

The graphics, honestly, didn't seem that much better than Quake 3. And Quake 3 has a much better framerate running on my laptop. It's not like my laptop is a slouch, either. My system is plenty better than the recommended minimums in every way, but I still had to turn down a number of settings to keep things from getting really choppy in heavy action.

The weapons were much more interesting than Quake's, but that's always been one of the advantages of Unreal. Unfortunately, I never played enough Unreal to really learn the weapons, so I don't know if they've added any new weapons to the mix or not.

So, this demo is going to provide me with a few hours of amusement, and absolutely no incentive to buy the game. And once I'm bored of UT 2003's shallowness, I suspect I'll be motivated to go back and finish Metroid Prime.

I might have more to say about the iTunes Music Store and how it lives up to my idea of the Ideal Downloadable Music Service in a few days, but for now, here are my first impressions of Apple's new offerings:

• I was half excited by the announced ability to create On-the-Go playlists (god that page is busy) on the iPod, but after installing the iPod software update, apparently it doesn't work on my older iPod. Also, what I actually want is the ability to enqueue -- "Play on shuffle, but let me tell you which song to play next if I so desire." That way I could have my Cake and listen to Cibo Matto too.
• Unfortunately, the other new features that I was excited about in the iPod -- the ability to rate songs on the iPod and auto-updating of smart playlists -- also don't seem to be supported by my old iPod.
• Which means I guess I'm faced with getting a new iPod if I want those features. The 30 gig model would hold all of my music (right now), but I don't know how much I like the new button layout on the front of the iPod, and the docking station is really irritating. It better ship with both a docking station and a firewire to dock converter cable.

• Also, I really don't like that the data port is now on the bottom of the iPod -- dirt and crud from my pocket is going to fill that thing up.
• Oh well, nothing to worry about right now, considering I can't afford it anyway.
• The new iTunes doesn't fix a lot of the interface issues I had with it. Notably, it still doesn't support emacs-like key bindings for text editing, and the iPod management window still can't be resized and still doesn't show playlist size / current available space, making manually managing my iPod playlists a pain in the ass.
• Of course, they managed to create a few more problems: Now, if I use the search box to restrict what's displayed in a playlist and then switch to another playlist and back to the first playlist, my search has been cleared, so I have to retype it. This sucks if I'm comparing songs in a playlist and a subset of my library and switching back and forth. update: It only clears the search field if music is not playing. That's ... inconsistent and confusing.
• On the bright side, they did fix the annoying behavior where iTunes would forcibly return you to the iPod playlist after it finished updating the iPod, no matter what else you were doing. That drove me nuts and interfered with my workflow so many times it's not even funny.
• As for the iTunes Music Store, my first impression was that there's a lot of interface craziness going on.
• My second impression was that there were a lot of errors. When I first tried to "Sign In," it asked me to enter my Apple ID and other information, but when I tried to complete the last step, it gave me an error. Now it just says "Credit card processing is currently unavailable. Please try again later." I also got a lot of errors just trying to browse around the store. So much for first impressions.
• The selection of music isn't complete, but it's acceptable... None of the things that I've been on the verge of buying are there, though, so even if I could download anything, I wouldn't have.
• It looks like there's a discount for full albums, but not every album is complete (Look at Beck, for example -- there isn't a complete copy of "Mellow Gold," so I'd have to buy the 11 tracks (of the 12 on the album!) from the album that are available for $0.99 each, which is more than the $9.99 album price. Also, not every album is available at that price: Pink Floyd's 9 track Dark Side of the Moon is listed as $14.99.
• And only being able to browse the store in one window is a real drag.
• So, overall, I'm not thrilled with this yet, but some people might like it. Right now I'm thinking I'm going to stick with CDs for awhile longer.

Blah. Anyway, the feedback forms are here (iTunes/Store) and here (iPod). It looks like I'll be filing lots of feedback in the next couple of weeks.

So I've been using Photoshop 7 for a few weeks, and while it's fantastic to finally have Photoshop running natively in OS X, there are some little things that I'm really hating about the way it works.

1. Command-~ doesn't cycle through Photoshop's open windows. This shortcut has become such second nature for me that applications that lack it drive me nuts (Finder and Word being the big offenders besides Photoshop).
2. If you're in another application and click on a Photoshop window in the background, every Photoshop window is brought into the foreground. OS X's psychotic windowing model is already bad enough without apps going out of their way to behave differently. This means that if Apple ever fixes OS X's windowing issues, Photoshop is going to continue to be annoyingly inconsistent.
3. Command-dragging a background Photoshop window when another application has focus brings Photoshop into focus. Worse, when Photoshop is brought into focus because of a command-drag on a background window (the point of which is to move a window without bringing it into focus, and hence, without having it get in the way of the frontmost application), every Photoshop window is brought into the foreground (see point 2), getting in the way of whatever I was just doing. Getting everything back where I wanted it is often an annoying chore of window shuffling.
4. It doesn't use sheets for Save/Don't Save dialogues, and so I'm stuck with the modal days of yore when closing a document needs user input. Worse, if Photoshop isn't the active application and I click on the close widget of a Photoshop window, Photoshop becomes the active application, with all of the issues that that entails (see 2, 3). Damnit!
5. The text-editing supports Control-A for beginning of line, but doesn't support the rest of the emacs-like shortcuts that most other OS X text edit boxes support. While I can understand (and get incredibly frustrated with) the complete lack of these key bindings in Word, I don't understand why Photoshop supports just Control-a, but not Control-{e, k, d, f, b, n, p}. Basically, I don't use the arrow keys, nor do I want to. Emacs-like keybindings are good enough for the System text input widgets, so why not for Photoshop?

Basically, what I feel like what Photoshop is trying to tell me with 2, 3, and 4, is that if I'm using Photoshop, I shouldn't be doing anything else. Photoshop thinks that if I'm doing something else and in any way interact with a background Photoshop window, it must mean I'm ready to return to the Photoshoperating System. It's a lucky thing for Adobe that most people use Photoshop that way anyway.

But honstly, all of these annoyances are outweighed by the minor detail of Photoshop running natively on OS X, because I haven't had to boot Classic since I installed Photoshop 7.

And another thing about Jedi Outcast: I hate turrets. They're a total waste of my time. As soon as one opens fire on me, I'll either back up out of the door I just went through, or if I got hit I'll restart from my last quick save.

Either way, from there the plan is the same: Inch forward very slowly, testing the turret's line of sight, until I find the point where I can shoot at the turret but the turret can't hit me. Then, I just shoot it until it's dead.

It's not like that's exciting, or even fun. It's just tedious. ::sigh::