the-inbetween.com

B-Alarm Elaboration

The entry two posts down was titled "Achtung! Achtung! B-Alarm!" There was no context as to why it was called that. I shall explain.

The B-Alarm song has become the unofficial "5pm on a Friday" theme song. A theme that is doubly important at 5pm on a Friday before a long weekend. It is short, has a good call to action, is adventurous, exploratory, and the perfect escape theme for the transition from weekday confinement to the open vastness of the weekend universe. Here it is [1.48MB mp3]

It is off of Soundtracks of Eastern Germany's Adventures in Space, which is funky rad.

NNNOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

You're so beautiful.
It's only because I'm so in love.
No, it's because I'm so in love with you.
So love has blinded you?

Regarding the acting and writing of Star Wars: Episode III:

Also see ytmnd for Noooooooo and This is CNNOOOOOO and all the other Noooos that caused this harsh reaction to Hayden Christensen's acting.

I'm still laughing at the cheese factor.

Achtung! Achtung! B-Alarm!

I started writing about the Nintendo Revolution, but the long weekend hit and I've lost interest in that subject. The basic gist was that Nintendo can not compete with Sony and Microsoft with hardware, so its plan to leverage what it does best, software IPs, in the next generation is the only logical and sane decision make. To open it up to indie developers, as the vague press releases hinted at, would be genius too and would definitely secure the Revolution a market (the size of which is indeterminate.) However, what Nintendo actually plans to do with those claims is nebulous and any excitement for indie console game development would be premature at this point. (elsewhere)

Then came the long weekend.

On Saturday, I went with my sister to the Distillery District to gallery-hop a few Contact Photo exhibits. Turns out there was a Jazz festival at the same time. Which is fine, except for the mass of people and the mass of old people and the over-priced food and drinks and the stupid lines to the over-priced food and drink. The main draw there was the Tomasz Gudzowaty exhibit, which had some outstanding photos. Really nice ones. Why it wasn't a featured exhibit, I don't know. The fact that they couldn't spell his name right probably had something to do with it.

Sunday was spent at the parent's house watching a Hitchcock movie marathon on MPix. After about four complete viewings and three partials, I think I'm all Hitchcock'ed out for a few months.

Monday, the day of the holiday, is currently being spent doing shit all. Watching the fireworks from the balcony with a beer in hand. Some cleaning. Some Forza Motorsports. Some Half-Life 2. Some Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law. A lot of nothing much. I need more of this.

Meanwhile, the local new rock station has been running the "high school reunion" theme all weekend, which is basically an excuse for them to play music from their archives. Often, they come in chunks of music from a particular year, like 1994 or 1988 or whatever. I tell you, when they played a chunk of music from my graduating year, 1999, I changed the station. What a lousy year. Yeesh. My freshman year was so much more interesting.

Ridge Racer PSP is good.

What the fuck indeed.

Canadian Politics

Stop the presses! Canadian politics are interesting! What a shocker.

Feuds, defections, jousting, positioning, bargaining, and politicizing. Today, Canadians woke up with a government in place and might leave work without one. The fate of it lies on the decisions of a couple of independent non-partisan MPs as the other four major parties are virtually split down the middle. Crazy. A far cry from the two parties of our Southern cousins.

If the government falls then we'll have a month of campaigning, a new election, and a new government before the end of June. Once again, a far cry from the almost year long campaigning that goes on south of the border.

Outside of a referendum here and there, Canadian politics don't get much attention outside of Canada. Today won't be much of an exception. But if Canadian politics did receive attention in the US, how alien would they seem? I tried explaining the current situation to an American yesterday and half-way through I realized how antonymous our system is compared to theirs and how "boggling" it must seem to one not immersed in it.

Eh, I like it.

EDIT: we still have a government.

PS3

So as soon as I write the previous entry, the Playstation 3 details are officially... detailed and the XBox 360 has been officially said to be backwards-compatible. Less fucked, perhaps.

I kinda like the design of the PS3, even if it is just an official mock-up right now. It's a hell of a lot cleaner than the odd looking concave XBox 360, with its gigantic button and awkward looking ports. Tech wise -- eh. I'm sure it's all fine and good. I'm sure they both are.

The videos and screenshots are certainly impressive enough, even if a good chunk of them are obviously pre-rendered scenes or "artist's renditions" or not in-game action. I have a hard time getting excited about screens and video unless some actual GUI or interface is visible, because that means it's actually being played and that it's actually close to launch.

That said, the news that Warhawk (an often overlooked PS one launch-era title) of all things is getting a PS3 sequel has me feeling a little bit interested. Just a little.

Microsoft to fans

If I was a new XBox owner, I'd be pissed.

Edge Online has written a good little piece of analysis about Microsoft's Halo 3 vs. Playstation 3 dick waving.

Perhaps most significantly, it's a statement which shows Microsoft talking about its most valuable IP like a commodity which can be wheeled out whenever they need headlines, rather than a creative project which needs to be husbanded to get the best results. All games have deadlines, and most deadlines are set according to hardheaded commercial considerations. But allowing the timetable for your most respected title to be set by your competitor is not a policy likely to inspire confidence in the series' loyal fans.

If I was a big Halo fan, I'd be annoyed.

The XBox's first few years of operation were relatively average. In the last year or so, it started getting the momentum it needed to capture more and more marketshare from the aging PS2. Last fall's Halo 2 was a big part of that push. Halo 2 was a system seller. There's no argument about that.

Then there is the following from a NY Times story on the "HD era."

To hasten sales of Xbox 360, Microsoft will cease the development of games for the current Xbox this year. J Allard, a Microsoft vice president and a principal Xbox executive, says he expects that other companies will continue to create games for the original Xbox through 2007. Microsoft has not said whether current Xbox games will play on the new console.

So, less than a half year after Halo 2 comes out, Microsoft goes all "thanks for nothing" and pulls out an early next-gen system, uses the sequel as some sort of anti-PS3 carrot, stops first party XBox game development, has no plans for (out of the box) backwards compatability, and even stops buying NVidia chips for the original XBox.

This happens to late adopters of every gaming generation, but it just feels so much more smug this time around. Microsoft seems to be ignoring its hard-earned fan-base in favour of the MTV crowd. Microsoft to fans, "fuck you".

Thankfully, I'm not a new XBox owner.

Revoluti-ON

Holy shit, I'm amazed at how vehemently convinced some people are on the authenticity of the fake "Nintendo ON" video.

Yes, it's relatively well done and a lot of time has been spent on it, but it's amateurish with the details. There are a lot of intangible things that you can see in the video that show just how non-Nintendo it is. It lacks the kind of top-down corporate brand touches that would make this feel authentic. The minute details.

Ignoring the technical, logistical, practical, and functional problems of a system like this -- that's a lot of problems -- you can see many faults at the design and brand level. To a company like Nintendo, branding is very important. Very important. To this video... not so much. The little history of Nintendo bit uses sketchy footage and odd callouts (why would Nintendo list 1983 as NES? If this is being marketed for a North American audience, it should be 1985.) The castle bit is way too drawn out and the transition to the Nintendo logo is weak. When is the last time you have seen a pixelized Nintendo logo anyway? The "ON" logo is poor. Hell, I'm no designer but even I can sense that the type treatment is unbalanced. I mean, christ, it uses three different typefaces for the "N" character! Compare that with the DS and GameCube logos. I can almost feel the $100,000 difference!

Then there are the animations at the end, which look about as amateurish as those seen in Badboy ads (local furniture retailer). It's bad enough with the figure interacting with the "Revolution", but when you throw Mario into the mix it's downright attrocious. Nintendo would never release such a weak, weak, weak animation of Mario. It's un-Nintendo.

They've done stupid shit in the past, but Nintendo isn't this retarded -- especially when it comes to their brand.

360

R U e?

Welcome to the marginally improved generation of gaming! It's like the last one, only better. Seriously. We have XBox Live... again. Wireless controllers like Nintendo and other third-parties have had for years. A camera peripheral like Sony has had for years, but now with video chat... again. Now you can listen to custom soundtracks, customize your cars and characters, see who's online, and download/buy content for your games -- just like you could before, but better! Marginally.

Somebody needs to tell the extremified J. Allard that new processors and new chips aren't going to, as he says in this go us video, blow the doors off of the imagination of game creators.. Most of them are vapid already, new CPUs aren't going to cure them.

Take a look at the results of this new found XBox 360 creative power: Higher polygon boobs; brief clips of a technically underwhelming game that was originally going to be an early GameCube title; some games with the number 2, 3, and 4 in their titles; some prerendered scenes of game cinematics that won't look anything like the actual gameplay footage; and more first-person shooters! Whoop-dee-doo. Maybe Microsoft can use the extra power to find a proper ending to Halo 2.

I especially like how it seemed as though the XBox/MTV crew were trying their hardest to not show any Perfect Dark Zero footage. There's a good sign!

Ghost Recon 3 looks nice, but overall I'm not impressed with the early game footage.

NES emulator for the PSP

The news of the Gameboy emulator for the PSP forced me to move on this faster than I would have liked. I've been sitting on it for a while as I've been quite busy lately, but I'll reveal it here and now: an NES emulator for the PSP, running my favourite NES game of all time, Jaws. It's buggy, but as you can see, it obviously works.

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Unfinished Epics

It passed without a mention due to reasons of unmentionable annoyance and irritation, but this domain turned five a few days ago. Five years means the wood anniversary. I only mention this for the euphemism opportunities it creates because, really, WTF is a wood anniversary? And, also, you don't buy domains things. You just renew them.

Five years of this domain. Five year of other people's misplacement of the dash (thein-between). Five years of confusing other people when verbally giving them my email address "at" "the" "dash" "inbetween" "dot" "com". In hindsight, a domain with a dash wasn't the best of choices -- but, eh. It has grown on me; I can not part with it. So I won't. Not until 2007. Maybe later.

In that span, there have been 405 Moveable Type posts, 1266 comments -- 800 of which have been deleted for being douche-baggery spam -- nearly a thousand Blogger entries, and tens of thousands of written words. Yet not a single one in over a week.

They were there, though. Thoughts and observations and comments about non-animalia long-tails relating to games and the industrial design of game machines and art GAMES. There, but forgotten and unformed. Lost to the ether; the heavenly and the anesthetic ethers. The (local) anasthetic ether mostly.

This Dental Epic, a long forgotten genre, began on the day of the last entry. Not satisfied with the still throbbing pain, I sought out a second opinion. That was Saturday morning, less than two days after my original dental appointment. I went in for a second opinion, I left with one less nerve and a beautfiul canal extending from the mighty banks of the enamel to the warm, cozy environs of the root.

Of course, a root canal on its own would be too easy, so I had to schedule a follow-up appointment with a specialist. So I did. For Tuesday morning. I also kept my previous appointment with my dentist for Wednesday, figuring that a good cleaning might be in order. Thus, Tuesday, I go to the specialist and get quite the painful shock... to my wallet. Two appointments with him, to finish the procedure, would cost $905 dollars. The extra five was to make it seem authentic and not like a mouthly gouging.

OK, fine, I don't have insurance but more money and constant pain is less favourable than less money and no pain. So I agreed to it.

I expected Wednesday to be light. I thought I was going in for a cleaning. I was wrong. For the second time in the week, I thought I was getting some innocent work done when, surprise!, out comes the needle and the drill and, in this case, the pliers. I had a wisdom tooth yanked out. "Yank" being the proper medical term for this extraction, as the tooth did not go without a fight. That made the procedure all the more fun! The dentist couldn't get a proper grip on the tooth and kept having the pliers slip off (and into my lip.) Even better, the tooth didn't want to go in one piece, so as the dentist tried to pull it, chunks of tooth break off. Piece by piece it broke off until what was left was solid enough to grab onto and, given a two to three minute yank, it finally gave in.

But the war is not over, and I have a month of drills and fills to look forward to. Then a crown. And maybe some more work. Fun. There is a plus side, though. It might not be entirely pleasant to have your enamel drilled, but the way things are going... it is less painful than the non-stop ergon that I've been experiencing, and any opportunity to avoid that is a welcome one. Tylenol 2 not needed.

In conclusion, I am losing my mind.

Bonus Content: free Polarium puzzle for you. I think it's easy, but I'm biased:
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Contact

Toronto Photography Festival this month. Several of the exhibits involve using billboards to show photographic work rather than advertising. This is good. Most (if not all) of them are in the Spadina + Richmond area, close to where I work. Wish stuff like that was done more often. There are only so many obnoxious mortgage or bikini ads that I can stand.

On The Irritations of Mouthly Objects

Personal account of my dental situation follows:

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The hyperbolic machine

I'm sick of the hype. I'm sick of the PSP is the greatest thing to happen EVER since THE WHEEL hyperbole. I'm tired of ourcolony.net and all the people eating their useless morsels as though they were meals (OMFG, IT'S A POWER BUTTON!!) I'm annoyed by all the losers posting their chump next generation mock-ups and poorly kerned and thought-out logos. I'm nauseous of the "artist rendition"s and prerenders of what next generation graphics might but won't look like. Here's a hint, increasing poly counts won't make your shitty games any better.

It's as though the game industry is the one developing the Amazing New Hyperbolic Chamber.

Five or six years ago, Sony went on record to say that their upcoming Playstation 2 will be capable of Toy Story-like graphics in real time. We haven't been close to achieving that. Even the next generation will be hard-pressed reach that level of graphical fidelity. The more important realization, however, is that even if real-time rendering reaches that watermark, the game industry will still be a long, long ways off from reaching the standards of Toy Story's creativity, originality, cleverness, writing, acting and maturity (all this from a G-rated film).

Instead, for the oft-acclaimed pinnacle of the system we have a game about a sadistic, womanizing Spartan with a threesome mini-game. Coooolnessss!

I have yet to play the game, but I would bet a small fortune on the fact that God of War never alludes, even in the slightest, to the fact that Spartan society was strongly and openly homosexual and the city state was, for the time, very progressive on women's rights. Such facts would, no doubt, offend the sensibilities of its designer and his legions of devotees (hey, I'm generalizing!). Granted, that's probably way too much to expect from a game like this (which is a sad state of affairs on its own), but it highlights just how much the ESRB's "Mature" rating is an oxymoron.

So fuck the hype on the next generation of hardware, I want the next generation of interactive originality and maturity.

/me goes off to play Psychonauts.