Two weeks that stupid post was up. Milestone madness has hit, and I wish that I could blame that, but…

The fact is that I’ve been overwhelmed with games.

I have, for example, been playing Dawn of War every morning with my office-mate. We got the Winter Assault expansion, and ever since the morning hours have been dominated by the hew and cry of intergalactic war. I’ve become reasonably proficient with my Eldar minions, and can at least hold my own. Whereas before I was meat.

Dawn of War is a funny case; it’s not really that great of a game. It’s what I would describe as a very competent RTS. It sports one or two genuine innovations (upgrading your units in the field, for example, is a lot of fun), but on the whole, it’s a resource race like any other RTS. It’s certainly no Warcraft.

But god damn it is fun. For fans of the Warhammer universe (which you might say I qualify as), it’s a fucking kick in the pants. Watching my Avatar go toe-to-toe with a Bloodthirster of Khorne is more fun than I ever imagined I could have.

Enough about that. Because, see, that’s not all that’s been destroying me of late.

For example.

I’d been waiting for Shadow of the Colossus for quite some time. And, I beat it, three days after I bought it. Oh my god. Go play it.

[ASIDE: I can say with some pride that I figured out the whole game myself. I nearly cracked at one point, but I persevered, and pulled through. No walkthroughs. Yaaay, me!]

Controversy! This brilliant game caused something of a stir at my workplace. Said stir centered around the often violent collision between framerate and gameplay.

I will summarize for you. Whereas it may be appropriate to judge an individual game on its technical merits, and whereas framerate does certainly directly impact gameplay, those that play this unbelieveable title and snivel about the framerate choppiness I hold in the same contemptable category as folks who watched the Lord of the Rings films and sniveled about fictional accuracy.

Get. Over. It.

Would you, perhaps, prefer that you not be subjected to this entertainment masterpiece? Does the fact that the Playstation buckles from time to time under the weight of the developer’s ambition put you in a frame of mind where you are wanting to get your $50 back? Are you ignoring the absolutely stunning imagery passing through your eyestalks and tickling your cerebral cortex, because there’s a stutter or two in play, and this doesn’t meet your quality bar?

Get off your high horse. To quote myself: “You can criticize Shadow of the Colussus on its technical merits when you, yourself, have created a masterwork entertainment experience of that quality. Until then, shut the fuck up.”

Ahem.

And, you would think that that was all. No.

Lost in Blue is a game for the Nintendo DS that a co-worker of mine turned me onto. The premise is simple: you’re a teenage boy stranded on a tropical island with a near-sighted teenage girl who was on the same boat as you were on. Survive.

It’s basically The Sims in survival mode. And, for some goddamn reason, I can’t put it down.

My cave is tricked out, man. I’ve got beds, I’ve got shelves, I’ve got a water drum filled with water (which is awesome because it means that I don’t have to walk the near-sighted girl down to the river every day to drink, she can — get this — take care of herself), I’ve got tables and chairs, man. I’m a survivor.

I also spend a lot of time doing this:

Which is surprisingly fun. (That’s fishing, by the way. I’m a fishing God.)

Nintedo DS?? Awesome. Who’d have thought. Certainly not me. I was a PSP believer all the way. And then, I got a DS for my birthday, and it’s kicking Sony’s ass.

A fine example of that declaration is Trauma Center: Under The Knife (which I’m most of the way through).

This game has proven, for all time, that you can make a video game out of anything. I’m going to make a video game that’s about filing paperwork someday, just to demonstrate the truth of this axiom.

And THEN… there’s We {heart} Katamari. Which I have also been playing.

Did you play the original? You outta. No, really. Really, you should. It’s bizarre.

Quick story about Katamari Damacy: I attended the G-Phoria awards show last year (to accept the award for Best Male Performance in a video game, on behalf of Mr. Pierce Brosnan… yeah, that was fun). Useless night, all things considered, but out in the liquor mixer hall before the show they had Katamari Damacy up on a plasma screen for folks to play. I hadn’t played. So, what the fuck, right? I was half drunk, I’d give it a shot.

I started rolling. Roll roll roll. Now, if you’ve ever played this game, you know that the object very quickly becomes to get big enough to roll up cows and people. Rolling up tacks and pins and shit is fun, but when the thing that you roll up screams in fear, that’s when the real game starts. And, I have a loud, booming laugh that I let fly when I’m having a good time destroying virtual civilizations.

And, so, shortly, me and this other guy were exploding with cheers and hoorays every time I rolled up something that I was previously too small to roll up. I mean, we were having a ball(no pun intended), rolling up cows, and trees and buildings and shit, and whooping it up… and I kept noticing that our hoots and hollers were being joined by more and more voices. Finally, the level ended, and I turned around… we were standing at the center of a half-circle of maybe forty semi-drunk game developers who were having what appeared to be a grand time watching my compatriot and I roll shit up. There was applause.

I put to you: there are not many games that could generate that kind of spontaneous event. Katamari Damacy is one of them.

So.

…

Yeah, a lot of games. This is all in the past two weeks. The next few months look like they will be providing no relief. Send help.

Back in 1983, this wonderfully bizarre movie called Brainstorm came out. You may remember it: Christopher Walken played the head of this group of scientists making a device that could record and play back people’s experiences. It was a wonderfully human story about a remarkable technology, and it fucked me up pretty much for good.

I was 12 at the time, understand. 12, and very, very imaginative. The scene where the guy takes a snip of ribbon that has the orgasm recorded on it, loops it, and then hooks himself up for an endless looped death-by-orgasm was running through my head for, oh, I don’t know, ten years or something. I loved it; humans found this wonderful technology, and immediately went about destroying themselves and others with it. Ahhhhhh, people.

But there was this one other scene that actually had a longer lifespan in my head. There’s this moment in the film where Our Hero is returning to his house (which is fucking awesome, by the way), riding what I now understand to be a recumbant bicycle. It’s a very short scene; it had a windshield mounted to the front of it, and they had put a light of some kind on the bike so that the audience could see his face, and he was just truckin’ along, all horizontal-like.

You know what I mean? A recumbant? It’s one of those bicycles that you lay down on while you ride?

The image of this bike – this bike that you sit on while you ride it, instead of being all hunched over the handlebars with your butt in the air – planted itself into my cranium, and grew roots. Years later, when I would see someone ride on by in one of those things, the yearning would rise, and I’d get all lustful.

But… see…

I never liked the idea of two wheels. Doesn’t it seem like you’d tip right the fuck over when you came to a stop? It sure does to me, and the indignity of falling over while trying to push the button at the crosswalk didn’t really seem worth the effort of getting one of these things. And, most of ‘em are really fucking ugly. You’d look okay in them if you were a 60-year-old professor from Berkley or something, but an overweight 6′ tall long-haired nerd in black? No. No, my friends. That would just be a spectacle.

Recently, though, I spotted this thing, coming home. Some dork was riding what looked like a reverse trike; two wheels in front, one in back, and…

Laides and gentlemen, I’d like you to meet… the EZ Tadpole.

I bought one. It took me four months to convince my wife I wasn’t just infatuated with the idea of the thing before she agreed to the expense.

And thus, this wondrous device arrived at my local bike shop last Wednesday. I hustled my ass down there, picked it up, and commuted to work on it on Friday. I ran errands on it for my wife (and myself) all weekend. I chased my son around a parking lot with it (he on his bike, me on mine) on Sunday. I commuted again today.

It’s bliss. Gotta tell ya, I have always loved biking. It’s the bikes I hate. With a passion. I despise the little seats. I despise the “way-up-in-the-air” perch they give you. I despise the trepidation and terror one experiences when your bike wheels drop into a rut of some kind. I hate flipping over the handlebars and ending up wrapped around the bike, which is wrapped around you. I hate them. Hate hate hate.

I love this tadpole thing. “Tadpole”, for your edification, is what is used to describe a trike with the two-in-front-one-in-back configuration. I care not one whit for these details, nor for the whole bike geekiness that threatens to engulf my existence, like dark clouds on the horizon.

No, I only care that I can zip about like a total goofball, out in the California air, getting 30 minutes of hardcore exercise each way, smelling the trees, the bay, and the auto exhaust, and and grinning maniacally against the cold, cold morning air. I bought Jon Stewart’s “America: The Audiobook”, and listened to it on the way in this morning. I must have cut quite an image: crazed longhair all in black save the neon yellow jersy, tooling along on a red and black tadpole with an orange “look out for me!” flag fluttering high above, laughing out loud at random spots as Jon Stewart said funny shit into my ear…

Yeesh. What a morning.

Wowzers. The Escapist has a whole bunch of articles on EA, just came out.

There’s one on how EA became the behemoth it is today.

There’s a really horrible piece that couldn’t do better than scan that seems to be about the authors opinions on EA’s market conditions.

There’s that bitchin’ ad for Second Life that they run every issue.

There’s one on how EA devoured Origin’s soul. And this, I think, is by far the most interesting of the lot. Read it, and let’s sit down, grab a cup of joe, and talk.

See, it points to something I’ve been mulling over for some time now. Let’s see if I can express my thoughts… algabraically.

• Personal contribution = (personal sacrifice) x (talent)
• Quality = (personal contribution) x (# of developers) x (months)
• Cost = (salaries) x (# of developers) x (months)
• Profit = (quality) x ( (marketing) + (licensing) ) – (cost)
• Personal Profit = (profit) / (# of developers)

Solve!

The Origin Way:

• let (personal contribution) = 10,000 dollar ergs of worthiness
• let (# of developers) = 5
• let (months) = random (12-48)
• let (salaries) < (industry average)
• let (marketing) = 3
• let (licensing) = 0

1. Quality = 10,000 x 5 x ~24 = 1,200,000 (which is a lot of quality, as we all know)
2. Cost = ~$2000 (~$24K) x 5 x 24 = $240,000 (dirt cheap!)
3. Sales = 1,200,000 x (3 + 0) = $3,600,000 (people liked it!)
4. Profit = $3,600,000 – $240,000 = $3,360,000 (much dough, low overhead)
5. Personal Profit = $3,360,000 / 5 = $672,000 each (which is a lot of green for those 5 people)

The EA Way:

• let (personal contribution) = 1000 dollar ergs of worthiness
• let (# of developers) = random (50-200)
• let (months) = 12
• let (salaries) > (industry average)
• let (marketing) = 10
• let (licensing) = 10

1. Quality (~1000 x ~125 x 12) = 1,500,000 (which is, of course, only slightly higher than what was achieved above)
2. Cost ($6000 (~$72K) x ~125 x 12) = $9,000,000 (ow! high! ow!)
3. Sales (1,500,000 x (10 + 10) ) = $30,000,000
4. Profit = $30,000,000 – $9,000,000 = $21,000,000 (much dough, high overhead)
5. Personal Profit = $21,000,000 / 125 = HA! Who are you trying to kid.

I’ll understand if none of that makes any sense at all. I will. And, I promise not to take it personally when you fail the test on Monday.

…

I could tell you which model I aspire to, but I prefer to seem secretive and reserved. But I bet you can guess.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,13509-1811332,00.html

I mean, it ain’t the Pope or anything, but still… those are remarkably sane views presented there.

/confused

p.s. When I say “sane”, I mean it in, you know, the context of believing in like a creator who made everything and wants to judge all the souls he made based on their local behavior and stuff. Just, so we’re clear.

So… much data… can’t hold on…

/deep breath

My children take their breakfast one room over from my web wave-catchin’ terminal. I prefer to “hang-10″ in the den, if you catch my meaning. And so it was that, this morning, my children got to hear, muffled through the thin wall that seperates my domain from their breakfast table, the deep, stacatto pounding of my evil overlord laugh. It leapt, unbidden, from the depths of my chest and filled the house upon my reading of these words.

I “mu hu wa ha ha HA HA HA HA HA HAAAAA” ‘d my way through the rest of the morning. My children scurried hither and yon, hoping to avoid being tossed into the Pit O’ Flame for kicks by this nefarious creature that their father had become.

Made my goddamn morning, it did.

I love being right. Have you heard? Have you heard? Sun & Google have aligned.

What’s more hilarious than the news itself is the effluviant skree (to borrow a word from the title of this blog) that it generated. Hyperbole? Absolutely.

As far as I can tell, very little has actually happened. Here’s Fortune’s take on it, which seems nice and balanced; in short, everyone’s pretty excited, but very little concrete has come out of this alignment.

Some folks are, in fact, taking issue with the whole thing. Which, as experienced media watchers know, is a fine indication that something might actually come of all this bru-ha-ha.

Regardless. Clearly we don’t know much right now. Except, of course, for this:

“The American internet search group said that the deal would bolster distribution of Sun’s OpenOffice software, which offers similar programs to those available on Microsoft Office, such as word-processing software.”

(taken from the Times Online)

Readers of this site have heard me pray to various gods and powers for the day when Google would give me a version of MSWord that I could use with a browser, from anywhere. It appears that the Google gods are kind and just (at least, for now), and want to do just that. And, clever monkeys, they seem to want to do that with a product that already exists.

I {heart} Google.

…

BUT!! For cryin’ out loud. If you can believe it, that’s actually only the first piece of remarkable news to hit the stands this morning.

I love being right. Have you heard? Have you heard? The EA lawsuit got bought out–I mean, settled.

This one I haven’t spent much time on. I used to work for those yahoos, see, and it didn’t seem like a good use of my time to blog about how much it sucks to work there, when other folk have done such an admirable job of that already.

That said, anyone with a passing familiarity with the way EA does business will not be startled at my opinion on how this particular lawsuit would (and will) pan out. It goes something like this:

1. EA will buy out the plaintiffs to prevent a judgement from being entered. This is prudent, and the right thing for EA to do for its own preservation.
2. Alas, this will leave the actual law unclear, and will leave the door open to future abuses.
3. EA will engage in future abuses, in part as a knee-jerk retribution against being ashamed in public. Still unable to make significant changes on their teams, managers will find themselves speaking the words “Well, you guys wanted to be hourly, so… I don’t know what to tell you.”
4. Working conditions will worsen, EA’s profits will increase, and the hourly workers will experience increasing resentment over their small slice of the pie (even though that was the deal they signed up for).
5. The hourly workers will eventually call IATSE (the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees, Moving Picture Technicians, Artists and Allied Crafts), and the drive to unionize will begin.
6. (This may or may not actually improve things. It entirely depends on who’s in charge and what issues galvanize the membership.)

But, as a friend of mine just said, “Yeah, here’s my prediction: the sun’s going to fucking rise tomorrow morning.”