Gamefly Suggestion

Good ideas always turn out to be elegant in their simplicity.  I just handed Gamefly an elegant suggestion via their web-site that I would love to see implemented.  It would be so easy for them to implement it.  Yet I have no faith that it will ever be read let alone acted upon.  

Here's the suggestion: Gamefly has a queue of games just like Netflix, with a number field next to each title.  My suggestion is that they put in a wild card, either 99 or 00 or something, which would keep a game in the queue but keep it from being considered an actual request.

My fake example was that if I had 2 football games I wouldn't want one coming right after the other, so instead of deleting it from my list and adding it again I could just put a 99 next to it and still be aware of it but not risk it being shipped next.

To me this seems like something a programmer could whip up in an afternoon, and if nobody used it ever then Gamefly would not be harmed by it.  But if people actually used it, unwanted games would never be shipped and Gamefly would not be paying for shipping on games that might be turned around and sent back in right away.  Win-win!  But the idea will probably only go as far as this blog, which is why I felt I had to post it somewhere.

SoulCalibur IV - The Experiment

Having a rental service like Gamefly allows one to experiment with games, much like Netflix allows you to experiment with movies.  SoulCalibur IV was purely an experiment on my part.  I haven't played a fighting game since the 2D fighters like Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter reigned supreme and I was curious what a current generation 3D fighting game would feel like.

I knew I'd never get so far in to the style that I'd be challenging people online and mastering my moves and timing.  Things have gotten a lot more complex than the days when most moves were accomplished by quarter-circle movements on the joystick and the press of a button.  One look at the move list for a character showed pages and pages of combinations of buttons and directions, all of which accomplish a similar but subtly different action.  The beauty of dabbling rather than studying these games is that mashing your buttons can get your character to do crazy and unexpected moves and the surprise may possibly be more enjoyable than doing something on purpose.  In any case, once you've seen a fair variety of back flip/slash/spin/throw moves my entertainment of the theater waned and I moved on to my focus on achievements.

SoulCalibur IV has done an evil job of stinging the achievements along a timeline so that I'm always an hour or so away from the next few achievements.  Without any context I thought that making 10,000 attacks, walking 10,000 meters, blocking 1,000 times, etc. would take a long time but they're all fluid within battles and my progress towards all of these achievements seems to be pretty constant based on my playing style.  So I'm 80% done with one, 70% with another, 55% with another, and so on, so that I'm always getting rewarded for playing just a little bit more.  As I said, this is cruel because if all achievements had been a good distance off then it would already be in the mail headed back to Gamefly to be replaced.  It's a struggle to weigh the benefits of spending more time vs. progress in another game.  Well played.

The Media

There are a million different reasons to rant about the media.  Today it will be about the way that they twist headlines.  Looking at MSNBC's front page there is a bar on the left with headlines under "Economy in turmoil." Below that are the following headlines:

Harder times mean softer paychecks
White House to banks: Stop hoarding money
Home prices fall by sharpest annual rate ever
Consumer confidence at lowest ever
Wall Street rallies despite bleak news

It's the last headline that bothers me, because on a daily basis the Dow is up or down 2% as many things in the world are being factored in.  To suggest that Wall Street is rallying because there happens to be a modest upswing today that coincides with this other negative news is silly.  Wall Street is down 20+% from where it was.  Slight ups and downs do not change the fact that we're no where near a rally, we're just wobbling on an uncertain base and will continue to wobble until all the current factors in our new reality settle.  The news is no less bleak because Wall Street is up 2%, and Wall Street isn't excited about the bad news, and it doesn't suggest that Wall Street expected the news to be worse.  It's more reasonable to report these as unrelated event but that's not like the media, so why have high expectations.

Gamerscore Guilt

I have to make a confession about my gamerscore that I feel guilty about.  No, it's not the fact that I rent games, rack up as much score as I can efficiently and then send them back.  What I feel guilty for is that I have formed a band with Loddie in Rock Band 2, and we had been earning gamerscore points together as our band progressed.  So yesterday when I was trying to make the microphone work properly I picked an old song that we had done before to test it out and a screen asked me if I wanted to make a music video to get more fans.  I of course said yes, not suspecting the consequences.  At the end of the song an achievement popped up for making a video.  Now I feel guilty, and my only hope is that these video opportunities come up multiple times because otherwise I'll feel really guilty if this was our band's one shot at making a video.  At least I've gotten that off my chest.

Anonymity

"A person familiar with the case provided the number of players involved Monday, saying estimates of a higher figure were untrue. The person spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity because the players are appealing the findings."


The rant today will be on anonymity.  While the above quote isn't as heinous as some examples, it does highlight the issue I have with the media and anonymous sources, because in the case above, the source could have given the names of the players, which the media would have quoted, regardless of the fact that appeals and due process are ongoing.  There is no personal protection from an inside source blabbing anonymously and the media will jump on that source any chance they get.  Since it is completely unethical for an inside source to utilize that information and disclose it to the media, why is it ethical for the media to print that information? (answer: it's not)

Which would you buy?

In April of 2008 Hasbro made 1,000 copies of Risk: Black Ops and sent them to various game outlets.  It was a reinvented Risk with easier rules that allowed games to take less than 2 hours, much shorter than the previous versions.  In addition to the revised rules, it looked like this:

It came in a slick black box and had a style that showed it was very different from the prior Risk.  Many were excited, until Hasbro mentioned that the new Risk wouldn't look like this.  It would look a lot like the old Risk.  And then the proceeded to follow through with Risk: Reinvented, which looks like this:

Bright, colorful, arrows?  Definitely not slick.  I honestly had the expectation that within the 8 months before Christmas they would see the error in their ways and release the Black Ops edition.  Today I sent an angry e-mail to them since they still have not seen the error in their ways.  I know that angry e-mails to customer service of big companies don't actually go anywhere, but it's therapeutic to fire one off sometimes.  I've sent many angry e-mails and this won't be the last, that's for sure!

Stimulus Package

This time I'm really going to spend it!  No, not really.

From MSNBC: "Democrats in Congress are also pushing efforts to assemble a second economic stimulus program that could total $150 billion or more. On Monday, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke said a “significant” stimulus package is appropriate. The White House has yet to endorse the idea, but has said President Bush was at least willing to consider a second stimulus measure."


Of course it goes without saying that I think this is stupid, and that the government is wasting its money.  In case you're not aware with the specifics, the last round of $600 checks cost around $150 billion total to send out, and congress is thinking about another one.  Of course this is an even bigger waste than the $700 billion bailout package, but really, people need to spend, right?


Where I'm really torn is that when everyone was living above their means at least my stock portfolio and 401k were doing well.  I was even profiting on high gas prices.  Now, in order for other people to start living within their means my portfolio has to take a hit, and I don't like that one bit.

Lamenting over what used to be is a lost cause so now I'll just continue stockpiling cash like the rest of America, cross my fingers that the US doesn't do something to make all that cash worthless, and wait until brighter days.  At least if we have a 2 year recession then I'll feel like I've got some safety net for the next 20-30 years.  If it turns around in a few months then I won't feel very comfortable putting cash back in to the market right away and will miss the opportunity.

Bad Company: Final Thoughts - 8

I wrapped up the single player campaign of Battlefield: Bad Company after giving it a long rest and focusing on the multiplayer battles.  The multiplayer is fast paced, has (limited) character progression, stat tracking, etc.  The fast pace is what really made it enjoyable, because there was always some new opponent with some different tactic coming to try and kill you before you killed them.  The single player campaign lacked this for the most part.

In my review of the game I would have to say that if the other chapters were anything like the pace of the final chapter then it would have earned a higher score.  The 8 was the averaging of a 7 single player campaign with a 9 for multiplayer fun, but the final chapter was also a solid 9.  It changed things up, going from tank battles to artillery to blowing up bridges to riding in a vehicle shooting at enemies... a lot of variety.  It proves that they held back on the creativity trying to stretch out the game earlier and only when they were ready to wrap it up did they put some effort in to the level design for the ending.  Coming after Call of Duty 4 one would say they should have known better than to make long repetitive levels over tight entertaining levels, but some game designers still have not learned their lesson, or simply come from a different school.

As for the multiplayer and the 9 that I would give it, were it stand-alone, the only flaw I see in it is the limited weapon selection available.  The main game had such variety that I was surprised at how few weapons were available and even fewer options to customize your character within whatever class you chose to fight in.  I also question a spawn-on-teammate option that sometimes left me dead shortly after the teammate I spawned on was killed or let me kill 2-3 people that just appeared in front of me as I was tracking down an opponent.  But regardless, the battles were always tough and entertaining.  It was always rewarding to sneak up and take someone out.

It's unfortunately not a must-play, because better experiences can be had in other games, but it's not a waste of time if you enjoy FPS war games and especially if you like Battlefield multiplayer games.

Little Big Planet update

I posted an auction for 2 more billboards that I found, but under the guise that I was only selling 1 and keeping the other.  Long story short I got market price on the sale and a local person was the winner of the auction.  I asked them if they'd like to see both and decide which one they liked and they asked if I'd sell both for the $100 winning auction price (actually it was $102.51 but paypal would have charged transaction fees so I said $100 cash was fine) and I said sure, since I don't think future ones will be going for quite this much (one recently ended at $62).  So here's my newest breakdown:

Sale      - $200.00

ebay fees - $6.40
Net       - $193.60

Not bad if I do say so myself.  I still have one left, so I might wait until all the other ones have disappeared off ebay to try to sell it.  

The Great Depression

This is a link from a finance blog I read.  It's a very entertaining look at some bullish headlines regarding the stock market, before, during, and after the impressive drop in the stock market.

Apple vs. Microsoft

The "I'm a Mac, and I'm a PC" advertising campaign has always been a little bothersome to me in its snide presentation but I think the November election is infusing the PR group with that little something extra that typically only comes out during dirty political campaigning.

The most recent ads show PC (it's actually Microsoft they're after but whatever) budgeting for Vista's flaws by piling a huge amount of money for advertising and very little to fix the flaws, and then after talking this strategy over with Mac, pushing all the money in to advertising.  This is exactly what I would expect from a dirty political campaign, which knows that you can say pretty much anything in a public advertisement and get away with it even though it's obviously not factual.  I don't have to know a Microsoft programmer to know that Microsoft is spending millions and millions on Vista updates, and I know after using Vista for a year that I haven't run across any of these supposed flaws, which Apple has never actually identified in their commercials, only spoken vaguely about.

I hope that this is the precipice of a backlash over this type of dirty campaigning.  People only have so much tolerance for mudslinging when it starts to ebb into the realm of unreliability and I think Apple is starting to cross that line.

Ultimately, it's the elitist nature of Apple, charging more for their systems than the equivalent PC (running an MS product or linux) that hurts them and keeps their supposedly perfect operating system out of the hands of the masses.  Sure, people have accepted paying $50 extra for a well designed MP3 player, but they're not paying $300 for a new computer, so ultimately Apple is failing.  Instead of trying to scare people into paying more maybe they should make themselves more accessible and see if they remain unblemished with a 20% market share rather than the 8% market share they've been hovering around for years.  

Starbucks packed at 9:30AM?

I don't know what this world is coming to when I think I'm strolling in late to work and the line at Starbucks is nearly out the door!  Much busier than it usually is around 8 when I normally walk by.  It begs the question I always pondered walking around San Francisco; What do all these people do for a living?

The crowd was younger and many had laptops, but we're not talking college students and downtown Pasadena is not a college town.  My best guess is that before the mall actually opens at 10, maybe all of the employees head over to Starbucks to get a pick-me-up before starting a day in retail.  I guess maybe the economy isn't that bad after all!

Hummingbird

Walking to work this morning I had one of those amazing human/animal experiences that really make you appreciate life.

A hummingbird who was going about its business drinking nectar from flowers stopped, flew over to me and hovered two feet from my face and right at eye level.  I paused for maybe 15 seconds and it just continued to hover there.  Then it dropped a little hummingbird poop and flew back up into the tree.  A very nice way to start a Sunday.

I don't have much sympathy

The linked article is about Fannie Mae trying to foreclose on a house that was behind payments (deputies had delivered over 30 notices of foreclosure) and a woman shot herself when they were trying to evict her.  She lived, and is in the hospital and Fannie Mae has decided to sign over the house to her.  This all just tells me that the world is a big joke and irresponsibility rules and will be rewarded.  I hope that there are 10 million copycats also in foreclosure who all think this will get them their house for free...  That would pretty much be the best possible outcome.

Just think for a second about the actual implications here.  A government body has just decided that they will individually take pity on individual people and hand over government assets on the taxpayers behalf to those pitiful individuals. It is one more example that makes me wonder why I live within my means when seemingly the majority of people do not.

I do not approve.

Toilet Seat Protectors

I know that the part has to hang down otherwise it would never get sucked into the toilet automatically, but damn it's annoying when the toilet seat cover falls in when you first put it down.

Stupid design award goes to the automatic toilet which one time sensed me placing the toilet seat cover and thought I had sat down so when I stood up it sucked the toilet seat cover into the abyss.  Someone should really have tested the logic on that thing if you're only tripping the sensor for a few seconds.  Not that many people can get their business done that fast.