the-inbetween.com

Covers and Snakes and Shootouts

Based on their recent album, Franz Ferdinand could be a killer NES cover band. It's been said that the music of the NES chips is most like that of three or four piece rock bands, which makes some sense when you think about it. With the kinds of hooks that Franz Ferdinand use on the album, many of their songs could be chiptunified. Or they could easily play NES songs in their own style. Either or.

New up and coming meme: Snakes on a mother-fucking Plane!. Now with soundtrack. You can't miss with a concept like this. Snakes! On Planes! With Samuel L. Jackson!

I've hated the concept of the ice hockey shootout ever since I first became acutely aware of its consequences during the 1994 Lillehammer Olympics. It's not bitterness from a loss to an arch rival that makes me say "fuck this shootout bullshit." Rather, it's a long standing dislike of the entire concept of the shootout. Fuck this shootout bullshit. I wrote some random, disjoint thoughts on the start of the season over at SportsFilter.

Otherwise, I've been real busy with new work commitments and an annoying, lingering illness. Hi.

Correction: Power Glove

I hate to bitch about such a minor, useless fact, but it annoys my pedantic side and this recent article (by someone that should know better) pushed me over the edge.

Everytime there's some new hardware from Nintendo, some unconventional control scheme, some lame gimmick, someone somewhere always brings up Nintendo's Power Glove. It's not, people! The Power Glove belongs to Mattel, not Nintendo.

Power Glove Page.

Live Covers

A school band has played a live cover of a DJ Shadow track. That's interesting, but it reminds me of Alarm Will Sound's good Aphex Twin cover album. It seems that live, semi-orchestral covers of all digital -- and often glitchy, which makes them harder to play -- tracks is kind of the cool new thing for bands to do.

The old favourite, live band covers of classic 8-bit chiptunes, has become too mainstream for some, I guess. Edit: I now have tickets for the Toronto Video Games Live concert. Geek out.

Burnout Revenge + Online

The problem with online gaming with random people is that there's a severe lack of trust. Everyone is always looked at with skepticism. In such an environment, actual skill is exceedingly suspect. Unless you know the people you are competing against, a strong performance by a random player is always given the suspicious eye. They have some super high speed internet connection! They're exploiting glitches! They're cheating! The game is unbalanced/poorly designed! They have no life!

I played six or seven races of Burnout Revenge online a tonight -- my first foray online with this game -- against the same bunch of random guys (server persists). I won all the races*. The accusation that I have no life came up at one point. In reality, my total time with Burnout Revenge is a little over 3 hours. Maybe close to 4 hours by now. This is not much longer than some movies that I have seen this week.

Luckily, this group of guys was of a mature age and after rebuffing their comment, the games with them was quite enjoyable. Nonetheless, excuses and accusations were made and it really highlighted this point.

The biggest fault with Burnout Revenge is that, after mastering Burnout 3, Revenge feels really damned easy. It didn't take me long to get into top form, and since then I've been flying through the single player campaign with little difficulty. At this pace, I'll 100% this game in a matter of days (something that I still haven't actually achieved in Burnout 3.)

This is a fault inherent to most sequels, really. If you ramp up the difficulty for those that played the previous games, you risk alienating newcomers; if you try to bring in new players, you risk boring the previous fans. The only way to avoid this is by either completely reworking the game, or by, you know, not going the easy sequel route and create something new instead.

However, as long as those with business degrees dictate what games should be made, both of those options will remain rare for developers.

* After the six or seven races and six or seven wins, I was launched to overall rank 390 on XBox Live. I'm still trying to make heads or tails of Burnout Revenge's online ranking system. It seems that as you play you score points based on your race result and those points are used to level you up. This might or might not unlock cars for online play. This is an annoying -- almost Battlefield 2 like -- cheap design decision. This is the kind of system that specifically rewards, well, people with no life.

I'm not sure how limited the cars are based on your online rank, as I haven't been online with the game enough, but a similar issue was a major sticking point for me in Burnout 3.

In Burnout 3, when playing an online game you could only use the cars that you unlocked in the single player game. This immediately made the multiplayer unfair to a lot of people. Unfair to people who couldn't be bothered (or just couldn't) get gold in all single player events to unlock the fastest car, be it for lack of time or skill. And because they couldn't devote themselves to that, they were doubly punished for this by being handicapped in online races by being forced to use slow moving vehicles. Yet another cheap design decision.

Note to developers: if you are making a multiplayer game, in a multiplayer gametype make all available options present from the start. It is exceedingly annoying to start a game with a friend by going straight to the two player mode, and then finding out that: only half the characters/cars are selectable; there are only two maps/courses/arenas available by default; there are locked game modes; there are weapons made unavailable to you; etc etc. Fucking stop that.

Max Requirements

Microsoft releases Max. A free photo organization app not at all unlike Apple's iPhoto or (Ballmer: "I will kill") Google's Picasa, but late and with more Microsoft. Worry not, though, because this piece of software is not made by robots, as they boldly say right there on the site.

That seems like an odd thing to mention. The kind of thing robots would say to mislead the general public. But they might be right. After seeing this new product that is not like any other product (but actually a heck of a lot like iPhoto or Picasa) come out after their competitor's products, I can only conclude that they are actually clones. Possibly with cybernetic implants. So, not robots, but close enough on the evil future overlord scale.

I can't comment on the actual merits of the software, as I have no need for such a tool (and if I did, Picasa works fine enough.) If I did need this, though, I think I'd choose something with slightly more realistic requirements. It's not that I don't meet the system requirements -- I do -- but a fucking photo app shouldn't be recommending a 2.4 GHz processor and 512 MB of RAM. To compare:

Microsoft Max (photo organization)

• 1.0 gigahertz (GHz) processor.
• 256 megabytes (MB) of RAM.
• 200 MB of available hard disk space.
• Super VGA (800 x 600) resolution monitor.

Google Picasa (photo organization)

• PC with 300MHz Pentium processor and MMX technology.
• 64 MB RAM (128MB Recommended)
• 50 MB available hard disk space (100MB recommended)
• 800 x 600 pixels, 16 bit color monitor.

Half-Life 2 (full 3D game with physics and AI)

• 1.2 GHz Processor
• 256MB RAM
• DirectX 7 capable graphics card

Microsoft's photo organization app: slightly less system intensive than Half-Life 2. No wonder Vista is going to be a major system hog, they can't even get their photo software to be light. Screw that.

Seven Swords

At the ungodly time of 9:30am (for movie watching, at least), I caught Seven Swords. It was disappointing. Despite his brief foray into Van Damme movies (though, in all fairness, John Woo also fell prey to that), the director, Hark Tsui, is best known for Once Upon a Time in China, which basically introduced Jet Li. That was a real good film. This, not so much.

It was cornball, cliche, and eye-roll inducing. Apart from the very final battle, nothing in this movie was at all memorable. The swords had more character than some of the actors. Had I bothered to fill in my people's choice ballot (which I haven't done for any movie, though I regret not doing it for I Am, which was most excellent), I would have given it a 2/5.

Celebrity Spotting (sort of)

So there are a lot of celebrities in town. I don't really give a shit. The only ones I've seen have been the directors of two features I attended and Cyril Raffaelli who was at the Banlieue 13 showing. Apparently, according to the masturbatory entertainment "reporters" on the local news, the celebs like coming to Toronto because, on the streets, no one here gives a shit (unless you are some teen-wanker celebrity). This is why so many Canadian "stars", when they have a chance, go to the States -- nobody really cares when they're here.

Anyway, my sister saw more "in the wild": Jason Schwartzman on the street and the president of China. What? Well, his motorcade at least.

The president is here for some North American visit to improve relations or some political bullshit like that. While here, he dismissed real questions on the likes of Tibet and human rights, gave lousy excuses, and/or lectured us on our soil.

On Human Rights:

Given the different national conditions of China and Canada and given our different history and cultural traditions, it is quite normal for our two countries to have different views about human rights.

On Tibet:

We hope that the Dalai Lama will come to the right judgment of the situation, reverse his position [on independence] and really do something useful and beneficial for the country and for his ethnic group in his lifetime.

Arrogant authoritarian cunt. Hu does he think he is? Yes, all that for a stupid pun. No blazing political commentary from me. There doesn't need to be -- common sense, alone, should decry what Hu says.

To tie it back to the Film Festival, I should see Dreaming Lhasa on Wednesday, almost as if to coincide with this visit and the recent anniversary. Supplementary links: Rail Line to Tibet Is a Marvel, but China Is Mum. China Marks Tibet Anniversary, Critics Decry 'Propaganda'.

Toronto International Film Festival

I missed the deadline for the advance ticket draw for the Toronto Film Festival, which meant I had two options if I wanted to attend: go to the box office early, early, early in the morning on Wednesday when individual tickets went on sale and deal with the lineups, or wake up early, early on Wednesday morning and sit on the computer and order them online. I chose online.

As is the case when any batch of limited, sought-after tickets is made available online at a specific time, the ordering system fails. It always does this. The load always blows the server. After a bit of hassle and slowness, and just before I was about to make my picks, the TIFF ticket ordering site blew up.

I persisted, got to the ticket list, made my picks and hit submit. Crashed.

It came back again and, having gone through the ticket picking process twice already, I rushed it, hit check out, and -- score! -- I got my tickets. Not long after that, the system went down again and wouldn't be seen working again for hours. Score x2!

Since my list of "films of interest", which I compiled elsewhere, was focused mostly on movies that didn't feature any star power (because they're guaranteed a wider release in the future) and because I had a lot of morning screenings picked, I managed to luck out and get most of my top picks. Tideland was sold-out but that was my one and only "star power" exception (Gilliam film) so it wasn't unexpected.

In the next week, starting at midnight tonight, I will see nine eight film fest movies. They are:

• Banlieue 13
• Into Great Silence
• I Am
• Seven Swords
• Dreaming Lhasa
• The Shore
• Duelist
• Dreaming of Space
• SPL

The only dumb thing about this is that, in my rush during that one working online window, I accidentally picked Dreaming Lhasa and The Shore for practically the exact same screening time. Fuck. 10am and 11am on Wednesday. If anyone wants to see one of these, contact me. I will be trying to get rid of one of those tickets in the next few days.

This is my first time attending, so I'm excited. It's costly, but it should be fun and rewarding. There are still some tickets available to a lot of movies, so if I enjoy myself enough I might try to pick up a couple tickets more. Anyway, off to Banlieue 13.

TV-less

As of today, I have gone a week without a TV. I was supposed to get it back on Tuesday... delayed. Yesterday... oops, their delivery van broke down. NO WAIT. It's working again. "How about later today?" Ok. Half an hour after it was supposed to be here, they call -- "how about another hour?" No. I have to be somewhere. Hopefully, today I will finally get it back.

Frantic delivery juggling aside, it hasn't been missed. It's not like I watch a lot of TV to begin with (and the odd, rare show I can still catch on my PC thanks to the TV Tuner.) It does suck for gaming and my DVDs though. Especially since the TV broke down literally a day after I bought four DVDs, but even those can be replaced.

Film replacements: For the first time since late last year, when I went to see the shitty Ghost in the Shell 2, I went to see a movie in a theatre. Two of them, actually, within five days of each other. The odd thing is that they were both bird-related documentaries: The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill and March of the Penguins. I guess I like birds.

They were both good, but Penguins was the better of the two -- but also the one with the higher budget, and the Hollywood pedigree, and more backing, etc. Parrots could have been better edited and paced. But apart from the birds and their own love stories, the two are different beasts altogether. The Penguins and their setting were much more visually remarkable than any San Franciso hippy and some parrots could ever be. That's not a fault of the Parrot movie, but it just doesn't make for as great of a theatre experience. Clearly, Penguins was an Oscar type of documentary, made for the Oscar type crowd. That doesn't make a movie better or worse, but it makes it harder to compare to something more independent.

Game replacements: with the current state of portable gaming, it is easy to play quality video games without having a television set. Lately, it's been a lot of Advance Wars DS. There are quite a few additions like units, new game types, new COs and CO powers, and, obviously, touch screen input, but the game is essentially the same. Since I only played through part of Advance Wars and I never touched the sequel, the formula is still fresh to me.

One of the additions is that there's now four tiers of "tanks" now, compared to the original Advance Wars' two (regular tank and heavy tank.) This seems kind of stupid and unnecessary to me. Adding complexity for the hell of it, mostly to appease their current fans with promises of "more units". For direct combat ground units, there used to be two infantry, one recon, and two tanks. Now it's the same, but with four tanks. It feels unbalanced.

These are minor grievances, though. The game is still damned good, it is still very portable, and it is still a turn-based strategy with no randomness, which is very cool.4/5

I also played some Facade, finally. It's... different. Maybe I'll post some thoughts later, but I might not need to -- I'm predictable enough that some people already know what my thoughts would be!

Either way, this video walkthrough is still amusing.

Airshow

The final weekend of the Canadian National Exhibition is the final weekend of summer (sort of.) It is also the weekend of the Canadian International Air Show. As with all things happening over the lake near Ontario Place, I have a pretty good view of the event. So I just sat around on the balcony a lot this weekend, got my arms sorely tanned, and took a crap load of photos. Well over two-hundred. A few of them actually didn't turn out quite so crappy! I've posted those to my Flickr account.

It was good to see the Snowbirds, because without their appearance (which was up in the air due to recent problems), the show would have been quite boring.

Gas Prices

I don't have a car. I don't have consistent access to a car. I take the streetcar to work. As such, I don't pay much attention to gas prices. However, recent chatter about gas prices has been unavoidable and I was amazed to learn that it was, locally, $1.349 per litre! I have seen the $1.00 mark broken once before, and that was in the middle of nowhere in New Brunswick during my roadtrip (by comparison, gas was about fifteen cents cheaper in Toronto at the time). Now, not only is the $1.00 mark broken, it is also shredded, burnt, and launched into space.

Of course, being on a very US-centric web, I constantly see people discussing (complaining about) US gas prices. The highest gas prices in the US? $3.13 per gallon. Curious, I typed the conversion into Google. To my surprise, the Google calculator converted currencies too.

1.349 CAD per litre in dollars per gallon = 4.299 U.S. dollars per US gallon. So the most expensive American gas is still more than a full US dollar cheaper than it is here. Nice.

Since I don't have a car it's not a big deal to me (until shipping costs work their way down through retail to me), so mostly I'm just impressed by Google Calculator's ability to easily convert that.