John's Random Review

I’ve been going to a pistol league at Shooting Sports Northwest for a few weeks now.  I’ve never competed in any gun related things before, so this is a first for me.

There are 3 events every week, and you shoot each event twice.

The first part is called “zombies”, and is worth the most points.  10 rounds, 9 targets.  the back row of 3 poppers pops up, and is up for a few seconds.  Then the middle row of 3, then the front row of 3.  The zombies are scored on distance;  the back row is worth 20, 18, 15, middle 12, 10, 10, putting the front row at only 7, 7, 7.  Most people will use as many rounds as they can to get the back row. 

The second part is called “blackjack”.  only 3 rounds, all 9 poppers pop up and stay up 8 seconds.  The object is to get 21 points (without going over!).  All of the targets are again assigned point values:  Ace, 10, 9 in the back row, 8, 8, 7 in the middle, and 6, 5, 4 in the front row.  Most people aim for the middle’ish area, doing 8+5+8.  Depending on a miss, you might try something else, like 8, miss, 10.  With all of the poppers up, seeing and hitting the back row can be a challenge though!  8 seconds seems like an eternity, so almost everyone is going too fast.

“Stop and Go” on the dueling tree is the last part, and this part is timed!  10 rounds, 7 targets. When the green popper in the background falls (it pops back up instantly) time starts: shoot the 3 green targets on the tree, then the green popper in the background, then the three red targets on the tree.  Time ends when you hit the last red target, or when you’re out of ammo. Scoring is 5 points per target hit, minus one point per second on the clock when you’ve hit the last target or are out of ammo.  This one is everyone’s favorite, it seems.  The fastest people (I’m not one!) are doing it in around 5 seconds.  I think I’ve been in the 7’s mostly, although one week I did have a 5.66.  The fastest people are doing bottom to top, so that you follow the recoil up to the next target.  Although I think people are still working down the red side after shooting the popper though…

The theoretical maximum number of points each week is ~320.  After 6 weeks, I’m averaging ~185 with a high of 241 (I was #1 last week, but only because most of the high scorers were gone ). The highest person in the league is averaging 256 with a high of 291, so I have some work to do!

Here’s a phone video of me doing one run of stop+go:

Hey, that rhymed!  The story in Bioshock 2 wasn’t as quite as good as the original, but was still very good.  Helping the little sisters harvest was pretty cool.  The big sisters were a clever idea.  the most interesting part was the part where you see what the world looks like through a little sister’s eyes.  That was pretty cool.   Like the first game, the art direction and theme were magnificently done.

The creepiest part wasn’t actually in game, though.  We went to a birthday party during the time when I was playing through the game, and at the party there was a bouncy house.  So easton and I are bouncing in the bouncy house, and one of the little girls comes in.  And she wanted her dad to come into the bouncy house.   The little girl’s voice and what she was saying were right out of the game.  “Over here daddy!”  Every time she talked I just got chills!

Now I see that there’s a “Bioshock: Infinite” coming out.  Instead of being underwater, this one takes place in the clouds!  That should be fun!

It’s not as exciting as the old Sports Illustrated Cover jinx, nor as cool as the Madden Cover curse, but I think this year the mariners have created a “mariners commercial” jinx.

The Mariners 2010 Commercials:

Last, and most recent result:

Of all of these commercials, the only ones you can really still air are the bullpen and hyphen…and maybe the junior one.  I bet the Mariners’ marketing department didn’t plan on that!

Dragon Age: Origins is probably the best RPG I’ve played since Lunar on Sega CD.  Or maybe the Might and Magic series on PC.  Or maaaaaaaaaaybe the original Final Fantasy on the NES.

None of those had the kind of character development that Origins had though.  It was simply amazing to me how many conversations a pair of characters would have in the background.  I’d be walking around town or the woods or whatever, and two of the characters in the party would start bickering.  so I’d have to stop and turn around so I could watch the full conversation.  Some of the characters did not get along at all!

And during conversations with other characters in the story, the decisions you made in conversation, and even the way you said things affected how the other characters looked at you.  In some games, like Knights of the Old Republic (also a bioware game), your decisions shaped the whole party, if you were evil, they were all evil, or if you were good they were all good.   In origins, everyone had their feelings and their goals and history, so if you were too good, they’d get pissed off and not be as effective as they could be.  If you were bad enough to them, they’d up and split on you.  You could even become romantically involved with characters, and others would become jealous, or extremely disapproving.

Each of the possible party characters also had their own personal quest line, where you had to help them do something, or fix their past, or their future.  The sad thing is that I didn’t realize that, so I only stumbled into a couple of them by mistake.  I did a couple more in a second play-through, but I really wish there had been something in the game itself to indicate that the person had a quest, like other quest givers do.

It was also interesting how every main quest line had at least 2 possible endings.  In one of them, (the dwarves one), I ended up getting “used” by the dude that I ended up getting installed as king.  By the time I realized what was going on, It was too late.  I had to follow through with the chain of events I had set in motion.  In all my years of playing RPGs, this is one of the few times I’ve felt real remorse for doing something in a game.

I started a second play-through to try some of the other options and quests, but gave up about a third of the way.  The game is just so huge, I didn’t have another 50 hours to play it again when there are so many other good games to play!  There has been a fair amount of DLC released for Dragon Age already, so it may be one that I pick up a used copy of the game later on in the year during a dry spell to continue on in my second quest to see if I can get through the game with the other choices… but we’ll see.

While I’ve only worked there for a year, because I was “acquired” in an “asset” in an acquisition, I have 11 years of “service” for things like vacation and office placement, so that’s handy.  In no particular order:

• I’ve installed Windows a lot in a year. 2 different versions of Windows 7 a total of 9 times, 2 different versions of Server 2008 3 times. (And 3 Win7+1 Server2K8R2 installs at home!) Although i haven’t installed windows in several months, though.
• I’ve installed Visual Studio 2010 even more.  Probably something like 20 different internal builds on 3 machines and several VM’s. Although since the RTM version was available, i haven’t had to install that anymore either. Visual Studio 2010 is so much better than 2008.  After using Eclipse for years, i’ve gotten used to so many of the built in features there that i was really surprised that visual studio doesn’t have similar functionality.  There are some add-ons that add a lot of the refactoring things and other tools, but like visual studio, most of them are not free.
• It’s amazing how many IM conversations i have. At rosetta we would have just gotten up and walked over there instead of using IM. Communicator at MS works way better than it did at Merck.  Even the desktop sharing works really well.  At Merck, the old version of netmeeting we were using was pretty finicky.
• I’ve had 4 different offices (not counting the conference room we worked out of for a week+)
• There’s an email mailing list (or 2) for anything and everything.  The email alias often has a name that makes no sense unless you know what the codename of a product was 5 years ago.  And with all the email, there are still a ton of people with no email etiquette whatsoever.  And there are people that have 30 lines of crap in their signature.
• Across 4 computers and 2 VM’s i’ve had exactly one bluescreen, and it was in the windows2008 server installer. (apparently it didn’t like the USB headset i had plugged in!)
• I use OneNote all the time to take notes.  I’d never used it before.  And the 2010 version of OneNote makes some other things even easier.  I only write on paper now when i go to meetings and don’t take my laptop, or if i’m sketching out paper prototypes.  Sadly, it looks like the mobile version of onenote is pretty crippled compared to the full version.  i only see numbered and bulleted lists, when i use the other tags like checkboxes and colors all the time.
• C# as a language (and the .net framework in general) is pretty awesome.  Especially LINQ and lambdas.  Likewise,  WPF + the xaml language and bindings makes it trivial to do a lot of things without much (or any) code. The visual GUI designer tools in VS2010 and Blend are the first ones i’ve used that don’t generate horrible horrible code.  And the binding functionality makes hooking data up to controls trivial.
•   Expression Blend + SketchFlow are pretty awesome.  I need more time to learn them both, as they’re way more powerful and useful than i’m using them.   But there are some things that take like 2 seconds in Blend that are painful in visual studio.
• There is a HUGE amount of available training.  Classroom, online, books, everything, and most of it that i have used as been very very good.
• like half the people I know have iphones.  windows phone 7 looks cool at all, its just so far behind/away.  Apple has released 4 hardware revisions and major OS versions in the time its taken MS to do 1?  Since my first gen iphone is effectively a dead end now that it is no longer upgradable, I’m waiting for it to be worth my time to buy a new phone…
• The company meeting at Safeco field is crazy.  Last year had lots of great stuff, with Windows 7 and Office 2010 coming.  This year’s should be interesting, with Win Phone 7 and Kinect coming soon.  It would also be cool if they gave some more Windows 8 details.
• I’d say like 33% of the people I know/have met are hardcore pro MS people.  Another 33% are just there for a job that pays the bills.  Another 33% are pro MS but realistic about the areas where we could be doing better.  That last 1% is a crazy rabid anti microsoft bunch that thinks we’re on the wrong track completely about everything we do no matter what it is.  We could be curing cancer and they’d still be upset.

Recently, film critic Roger Ebert said (again!) that “video games can never be art.”  He has obviously never played Uncharted 2: Among Thieves.  It was one of the best games i’ve ever played.  If I’m not going to say it was the best i’ve ever played, because it did have some repetitive things and some other weird issues.  But this game is art.  There’s no way it can’t be.  As much as I respect Roger Ebert, he’s just plain wrong on this one.

The voice acting was probably the best in any game I’ve ever played. The story was pretty good, part tomb raider, part Indiana Jones (minus the aliens).  The story telling was awesome.  The transitions between “chapters” and sections was great.  It really did feel like a movie that i was in control of.  There’s a PS3 commercial that makes fun of it looking like a movie, and when i started playing Laura even asked what i was watching, because she didn’t think it was a game.

Some kinda spoilers, so…the font’s going white on white background here, so highlight it to read it.  not sure what RSS feeds and/or facebook will do with this, but I’d presume you’ll see it…

potential spoilers:

What the hell is up with going through all these puzzles that nobody else has ever figured out only to find that a bunch of nazi’s got here before and left all their ammo with their dead bodies?  and its all still good?  yeah.

Or i have to figure out some complicated puzzle, and it just opens a frigging window so i can see somewhere else, and that area’s out in the open and bad dudes are already  over there looking for a secret entrance?

And why is everything all rickety, but the badguys can just walk over there?   As soon as a good guy wants to go there, stuff starts falling apart!?

And what is with train scenes?  don’t bad guys know you just unhook the cars you don’t need? Why do the bad guys always take trains?

My biggest complaint is about load times before the game even starts. Why do games these days take a full minute to get to the actual game?  when you start uncharted 2, you see an empty black screen for 5+ seconds, then like 15 seconds of a spinning dagger.  Then it shows you the logo for the developer.  Press start a few times, and you wait for it to load with that spinning dagger again!  Thankfully, once you actually start playing, you never see that stupid dagger in that context again.  Load times pretty much disappear, or are invisible to you because they’re happing during cut-scenes that you actually are interested in seeing.

I was tempted to bring down my NES and a little TV, put in Mike Tyson’s Punch-out and see if i turned them both on at the exact same time, could i enter the code to jump to Tyson (it has been burned into my muscle memory since i was in like 6th grade) and beat him before i could actually play in game in Uncharted 2  Some games, like the call of duty series, have always been awesome about that.  there’s little or no waiting, you can skip through all of the title screens, etc. you press A a few times and you’re loading or matchmaking in multiplayer.  Valve (Half life, Left 4 Dead, etc) is always one of the worst offenders on this. why the hell do you waste a minute of my life loading some animated 3d scene to show in the background of the title screen that i’m only going to see for 2 seconds before i press start?!?

Now that courier is dead (i’d link to that gizmodo article, but being a microsoft employee, i’m supposed to link to that instead), i’m looking at a new laptop or something.

I’d buy an ipad if it had “case” that made it like a my old clio. my horrible ‘shop:

It lets you hide/protect the screen, and yet lets you use the keyboard when you want, or use it as a stand to watch stuff without holding it, but you can pop it out when you want the lighter screen to do stuff with.

The closest thing so far, is this ClamCase ipad dock thing:

It’s kind of sad that one of the most exciting ipad accessories to me turns an ipad into a laptop But all of these things are expensive, and i could just get a new laptop instead for like half the price.

OR, i could get a new touchscreen laptop, an extra touchscreen, some screwdrivers and a piano hinge and some glue and make my own courier? If only i had the time and effort required to do that…

While in Arizona for spring training, my step-dad Art took my brother and me to the Ben Avery Shooting Facility outside of Phoenix.

Here’s the panorama view from where we were sitting. I should have gotten a couple more shots to the left, though!

Here’s the view from space:

The main 200 yard range is just eastnortheast a bit of where the orange dot is on the map. If you zoom in you can see what 200 yards looks like from space. Then zoom back out and see HOW HUGE that place is! It was awesome! Weather was nice, not too warm, not too cold. A little windy, but not so much that it really affected us at the distance we were shooting.

We went on St. Patrick’s day, and expected it to not be very busy. Boy were we wrong! (and boy am i slow finally getting this post up!) We had to wait for a while before we got a lane (originally we were hoping to get a lane each), but that gave Jimbo and I some time to soak it all in and see what was going on. The range masters were all business. There were rules, and rules were followed. Even 6 weeks later, i can still remember the rules they kept repeating during every cease fire, which occurred every 15 minutes. It was basically 15 minutes shooting, then 15 minutes with the range cold to check + move targets (but stay away from the benches. hey, you! move away from the bench. HEY! YOU, YEAH YOU! away from the bench during cease fire!)

We shot a whole bunch of revolvers in .22, .22 mag, .38 special, and .357 magnum, then bolt and lever rifles in .22 mag, 30-30, and a .308 autoloader. I’ve never been much of a revolver guy, but i really liked the .357 mag revolver. The smaller revolvers just seemed like they had too small of a grip for my hands. my hands aren’t huge or anything, but i just couldn’t get a comfortable grip on the smaller guns.

All in all it was a pretty awesome day at the range, even with the wait. Hopefully it will become another yearly tradition when we go down to AZ for spring training!

Just finished the game G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra on Xbox 360.  The idea of the game was good.  The execution was rather….meh.

The game is kindof a 3rd person top down/isometric shooter.  but you have absolutely no control over the camera!  In most of the games like this you have at least some control over the camera.  you might not be able to rotate the full 360 degrees, but at least you can move it so you can see your characters on the frigging screen!  there were several places in the game where you had to make a left or right turn to go around the corner.  and for several seconds, you couldn’t even see your characters until the camera caught up with you!  That’s just insane.  Instead of having the right thumbstick control the camera, it controlled what you were targeting.  I would have much rather had camera control and then use the left/right bumpers for target control.

It had lots of Joe characters, so that was cool, but there wasn’t a lot of differentiation between them.  There were 3 classes: soldier (standard run and gun), commando (fast+weak/melee), and heavy (slower but more powerful weapon).  all of the characters had some kind of special attack, like grenades or stun or something, but some of the special attacks were not very useful.  Snake-eyes is pretty much everyone’s favorite character, and you unlock him rather early, but he wasn’t super effective.

There were also special doors throughout the game that only one of those classes could unlock, so it was generally good to have 2 different classes for the two different players you could control in any mission.  I generally used a heavy and a soldier, as the commandos’ weapons were pretty useless.  If you ran into a door that needed a commando, usually there was a device nearby that would let you swap out a character, so that wasn’t generally a big deal.

The voice acting was pretty meh, the cutscenes were ok, the story was ok, the achievements were reasonable.  The game was pretty linear, with some (but not much) choice of which missions to do in what order.  But what missions in what order didn’t really have any impact on the story or the game or anything.

I know it is a remake that goes along with the new movies, but i would have much rather had a little more cartoony game like the original cartoons were.

I really liked the first Ultimate Alliance, and the sequel fixed almost every problem/annoyance that i had with it. Ultimate Alliance 2 was, in a word: Awesome.

It’s a top-down action game with RPG elements, reasonable multiplayer, and comic book heroes (and villains!) galore. It has a good story with a great moral dilemma, which is (mostly) meaningful to the story. The pace of the game was good, the story was really good.

I played as spidey most of the game (who wouldn’t?) until the second playthrough, where I did a lot of the game as Thor.  I almost always had Wolverine in my party, and the 4th was pretty random, to try out most of the other characters. 

I only had two problems with the game:

1. I never unlocked Hulk, one of my favorite characters. And hulk was the ONLY character i didn’t unlock. I played through the game twice, once on my true choice of anti-registration, and then once on "super hard" as the pro-reg side to get all the story achievements. But i never found all the things you need to unlock hulk, and i didn’t want to go back through every chapter to figure out what i missed.
2. the downloadable content was only available for a very limited time (November 5th through December 31, 2009. Apparently, Activation’s licensing agreement with Marvel expired at the end of 2009, so they had to stop offering it? Lame.

My biggest complaints with the first one were that you could only save at certain locations, and that you could also only revive/swap teammates at certain locations. This game fixed the save issue mostly. You could save at any time, but depending on where you saved, you might load back at an earlier checkpoint (but with all of your stats/etc saved). You could swap in and out other characters whenever you wanted, which was cool, and you could heal/revive anyone as long as you had a healing token, and you could have up to 2, so that was fair.

It seemed like there were much less CGI in this one compared to the first, though. Which was good in a way: While playing through the first one years ago, my xbox was having disc read issues, and this was before you could copy games to the hard drive. Marvel was one of the worst offenders…I’d get through a section, it would load up the CGI, then disc read error and back to the dashboard I’d go. And of course, all of the save points were AFTER the cut scenes, so i had to replay almost every chapter and then pray i could get the thing to load before it would fail. I played the whole game almost twice just to finish it once.

The conversation system was a little more meaningful this time too, instead of just being snarky like i always did with Spiderman, you always had 3 options, aggressive, diplomatic, and defensive, and answering certain ways unlocked things, so that was cool.

I liked the equipment options you had in the first one, but you always ran out of inventory space and couldn’t get the things you wanted, so the “boost” system in the sequel was simpler, but much easier to manage.

I loved in the original when you could get weird conversation pairs, like Dr. Doom talking to himself.  There was a little of that in this version, but i didn’t see any related achievements like the original had.

All in all, a great game.  There haven’t been many games that I’ve played through multiple times, but i think this might have been the best of them!