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:

Random Review: Pistol League @ SSNW was originally posted at John's Random Review.

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!

Random Review: Bioshock 2 was originally posted at John's Random Review.

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!

Mariners 2010 Commercial Jinx? was originally posted at John's Random Review.

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.

Random Review: Dragon Age: Origins was originally posted at John's Random Review.

• 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.

Random things about working at Microsoft for a year was originally posted at John's Random Review.

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?!?

Random Review: Uncharted 2: Among Thieves was originally posted at John's Random Review.

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…

I would buy an iPad if… was originally posted at John's Random Review.

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!

Random Review: Ben Avery Shooting Facility was originally posted at John's Random Review.

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.

Random Review : G.I. Joe: Rise of Cobra was originally posted at John's Random Review.

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!

Random Review: Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2 was originally posted at John's Random Review.

Barking Frog, Woodinville

Barking Frog is located near the wineries and Red Hook brewery in Woodinville. The Herbfarm and Barking Frog are both located in theWillows Lodge hotel area. We went for Laura’s birthday. Everything we had was great, and service was too. Laura had the prawns as her first course, and she devoured them. She thought they were awesome, and could have eaten several more plate fulls as a meal. I had the steak tartare, which was also awesome. We both had the pork short ribs for dinner, and both loved it. For dessert, laura had the Pear and Ice cream, and I had the molten chocolate cake. perfecto! The pace of the meal was a little slow, but we kindof expected that. In places like this they aren’t in a rush to get you out and seat the next group While normally a little expensive, we’ll probably go back for a special occasion. We’re also thinking about staying at Willows lodge hotel as a little stay-cation!

Eva, Seattle

Eva Restaurant and Winebar is located in Seattle (probably technically in the Wallingford neighborhood?). We went for no special reason, other than that we wanted to hit another dine around Seattle restaurant and we had a willing babysitter, which is good enough reason, I guess! This time i had the prawns for my first course, and laura had the baby beets salad. I’m not much of a seafood person, but i thought the prawns were great. They were a little spicy, which probably helped for me. The beet salad was interesting, because it had baby beets that were orange, and blood oranges that were…well, beet red! For the main course, Laura went with the vegetarian option, asparagus and goat cheese crepes with hazelnut pesto, and I had the pork tenderloin. Laura, in summing up the crepes:

Do you think it’s okay if I lick the plate?

The tenderloin was good, you could really smell and taste the thyme. Laura set up a little herb garden a few years ago, so we always have fresh thyme, and there’s no mistaking it! For a fancier restaurant, the portions were pretty big at Eva. For dessert, Laura actually broke up her 3 for 30 dinner so she could get a dessert that wasn’t on the 3 for 30 menu. She’d kinda planned it that way by going with the vegetarian option, as the vegetarian 3 for 30 is actually $25 instead. In fact, she’d even picked Eva because of the dessert, or more correctly, 3 desserts in one, the “Eva Trio”; Meyer Lemon Ice Cream, Maple Pot de Crème with Walnut Praline, and a Saffron Panna Cotta with Watermelon–Rose Jelly. I went with the apricot sour cream coffee cake. All were delicious. the coffee cake was HUGE!

We can’t help but recommend the dine around seattle deals, when they restart them. Or, if you hurry, there’s still a couple days left! It lets you get out on non busy day and get a great deal in some great places. We’d go broke if they did it all the time, though! There are at least a few restaurants on the list that we’re going to hit regardless of the deal, but if we can go to them twice, once on the cheap, even better!

Random Review: Dine Around Seattle was originally posted at John's Random Review.

Go to the original review.

In 2009, i put more than 2300 rounds through it, with only 27 failures. And of those 28, 15 were on one day early in February, where i tried to use CCI Mini-mags. Lets just say that it doesn’t like those! I also think i went through a bad batch of ammo in January, where i had ~100 light strikes or duds. It happened with 2 separate lowers, so I don’t think it was hammer or spring related.

Since i got it, i’ve added an Eotech (off an ebay pawn shop ), and a knockoff magnifier. I didn’t spend a lot on the magnifier because i wasn’t sure how well the setup would work, or if i’d like the combination or not. For a cheapo magnifier, it actually works pretty well. I got a used noveske kx3 flash hider, but mostly for looks. The barrel isn’t short enough to really need it, although i am tempted to have the barrel cut down and have the kx3 permanently mounted. Tempted, but not sure.

From March of 2009 to date, i’ve only had 2 failures, both failures to feed, and one bad round in 1600+ rounds.

Statistics

I started keeping really detailed logs a few years ago. I may be off by a few rounds, but not by much!

In the previous review, i talked about how much cheaper .22lr ammo was than .223 or 5.56. Since then, the price of 22 has gone up a bunch, and the cost of .223/5.56 has come back down to a more reasonable (read: non-panic) price. Because of this, i also have an AR chambered for 5.56, so i shoot that too, and shoot my spikes’s 22 a little less often.

Spike’s Tactical AR-22: one year later. was originally posted at John's Random Review.

A Springfield Armory M1 .30 Caliber Rifle, commonly called an M1 Garand.

The serial number is in the 278xxxx range, which, according to Fulton Armory (via Scott Duff), makes its manufacture date in March of 1944.  By the proof marks on the stock (pics to follow!) it looks like the stock is much newer, either HRA or IH from the mid to late 50’s.  Either way, i think it is the oldest thing i own!

It is in great condition, and it is beautiful!  Laura even said, “That’s way prettier than the AK”

Random Review: A piece of history was originally posted at John's Random Review.

I really liked the original Overlord, and in fact while i was playing it, Laura was pregnant with Easton. In one of laura’s first ultrasounds, easton looked just like the overlord, so that was funny timing.

But the new spider mount feature for the green minions is one of the reasons i stopped playing….

I generally don’t “give up” on games after several hours of gameplay. I might give up in less than an hour if i know right away that this game just isn’t my style, like Supreme Commander (never been an RTS guy) or Mirrors Edge (first-person jumping-puzzle game). If i make it through the first hour, i will probably finish the game, or at least the main storyline.

The “point” of overlord is that you’re literally, an evil overlord. You have minions. In the game, you have direct control over the overlord, and partial control over the minions. You point where you want them to go, and they go do what they do. Brown ones are bruisers, green ones are assassins (poison and hiding and backstabbing), red ones throw fire, and blue ones can walk on water and resurrect the others.

I got to a point in Overlord 2 where you’re supposed to “drive” your green minions (on spider mounts) on the wall of a cylindrical room. As they go up and around, they step on pressure points that raise the water level in the room, in order for the platform you are on to float to the top. The problems with this “puzzle”:

1. The puzzle is timed. If you don’t get around fast enough to each trigger, the water stops, and you go back to the last full level.
2. The green minions can die. There was something going on, which wasn’t obvious to me, that was causing the green minions to die from falling or something after the platform went down
3. You have a limited number of minions. Combined with the first two, not only are you time constrained, but resource constrained.
4. Limited/no real camera control. When driving the minions, the camera is always fixed near your original position, and follows where you are “driving” the minions. So you have a very limited range of looking ahead or behind to figure out where to go next. Sometimes you’d get to a point after you dropped back to the bottom that the minions were still on the wall, but now you couldn’t see them to drive them back…There are some points where you’re in direct control of a minion and that was fun, and probably would have made this part much easier.
5. The minions are “walking” on the wall, so the perspective and control is screwy compared to the rest of the time when you’re walking on the ground.
6. horrible control of the minions. You aren’t driving them so much as you’re “suggesting” where they should go. The further up the wall you got the more of a maze it became. As such, most of the time the minions were getting stuck on a barrier or a wall or something and then sticking or stopping there. If you had a group of minions, they also bump into each-other, so that didn’t help either.

I got through the first couple parts of the puzzle pretty quickly, but the third part was insanely frustrating. Sorry CodeMasters, your game shouldn’t devolve into a fight against the controls and the camera. I was to the point i was moving one minion at a time, stopping them (if i could) on top of the switch i needed to trigger, placing a marker there so they’d stay there, then starting with another minion. But even that didn’t work because for some reason they kept falling and dying. After about half an hour of being stuck on this puzzle, i just said “f-this!” (I’d been swearing pretty regularly up to this point, good thing Easton was already sleeping), turned it off, and sent it back to gamefly. There are too many other good games out right now to waste time swearing at a game because the controls suck.

Random Review: Overlord 2 was originally posted at John's Random Review.

Coded references to New Testament Bible passages about Jesus Christ are inscribed on high-powered rifle sights provided to the United States military by a Michigan company, an ABC News investigation has found.

— From ABCNews.com

I love how all of a sudden a marking like JN8:12 is a “Secret Jesus Code”, instead of a passage in the bible.

This whole article is fully of quotes so hilarious, it should really have been published by the Onion:

“It allows the Mujahedeen, the Taliban, al Qaeda and the insurrectionists and jihadists to claim they’re being shot by Jesus rifles,” he said.

OMG, since the scope on the rifle has a bible passage book/section number on it, its magical? Do they have the pope sprinkling them with holy water too? Or just the ammunition? I wonder if this will finally put to rest the 5.56mm vs 7.62mm myths to bed. “7.62 has more stopping power!” “Oh, but my scope has 5.56 bullet drop compensation marks and HAS SECRET JESUS CODES!!!!!” “5.56×45 wins!”

“This is probably the best example of violation of the separation of church and state in this country,” said Weinstein. “It’s literally pushing fundamentalist Christianity at the point of a gun against the people that we’re fighting. We’re emboldening an enemy.”

Really? Really? A private company stamping 2COR4:6 on some scopes is the WORST thing that’s ever happened in the separation of church and state? I’d think putting “In God We Trust” on every piece of currency we’ve ever used, or adding “under god” to the Pledge of Allegiance would rank a little higher.

I’d bet the bible markings have a more insidious purpose: anti-counterfitting. Everyone marks production numbers, etc on their stuff, and real ACOGs are not cheap. this is a great way to get that but in a meaningful way. Worst case, Trijicon can just replace the text with the number of the book in the bible, like N4:8:12. (The N for New Testament)

I wanted an ACOG before. Now I need an ACOG. The power of Christ compels you! THE POWER OF CHRIST COMPELS YOU!

Now I want an ACOG even more! was originally posted at John's Random Review.

The AI might have been crappy in the first one, but at least the story made sense. Yes, there was a controversial section in this one. But it should have been more controversial that it was horrible horrible writing. Hey, I’m standing here with a fully loaded machine gun, and the world’s most wanted terrorist and his dudes, I could end this whole story RIGHT HERE and be the hero of the world. But instead, i think i’ll let some terrorists waste a bunch of idiot tourists who just stand there. Um, no. And you’re telling me that airport cops in Russia are armed with pistols? God, i hope not.

Multi player is about the same as the original, but much more complicated. Death streaks are cool, and are definitely the place for last stand and martyrdom, but tactical nukes that end a round as a kill streak reward? Meh. Some idiot who can run full speed all the time and stab you instantly with a knife from 10 yards away? No thanks. Some douche running around with 2 double barrel shotguns? Bleh. Heartbeat sensors? Some huge screen real estate to show pictures and titles and stuff that nobody cares about? I think they spent way too much time thinking of all the things they could do and not enough time thinking about what they should do. The main storyline was like a bad season of 24. No, like 3 bad seasons of 24 rolled into one season.

And the sequel didn’t even have the saving grace of the AC130 mission that the original had! Firing missiles from a drone just doesn’t compare to the AC130. And yet you can shoot from it in multiplayer?

Random Review: Modern Warfare 2 was originally posted at John's Random Review.

You’d think that if you were making a game about ghosts you would maybe maybe write your code in such a way that said ghosts don’t get stuck in the environment. Several times i’d get to a spot in the level where nothing was happening. All of the other ghostbusters are standing around, obviously waiting for something to happen. So i had to run around in the whole level, looking for that one stupid ghost that was stuck somewhere. On one of the first levels, he was stuck between a building and a car. Other times, having the ghosts stuck somewhere turned out to be very convenient, as it meant that there was one less ghost to deal with.

The storyline was pretty good, the flow was pretty good, the acting was “meh”. It has all the original actors in it, but it would appear to me that they recorded all the audio sentence by sentence actor by actor. The conversations between characters didn’t seem like they were all in a room together talking, like it should. One cool thing was how when you got “killed”, the other ghostbusters could come tag you and bring you back, so you only “died” if all of the ghostbusters died. In some of the boss monsters or other places where there were tons of ghosts at once, this meant that you spent most of your time running around reviving the other ghostbusters, and spending what little time you had left actually trying to catch ghosts.

The weapons were mostly cool. I loved the standard proton pack thing, it worked exactly like you’d think it would. The “blue” gun mode thing i hardly used (some kind of freeze ray and a semi-shotgun thing?). The “green” gun was a slime gun, similar to what they used in ghostbusters 2, and towards the end of the game you had to use it far too much. I want to be a ghost buster, wrangling ghosts, not a slime pump! The last gun you unlock, the “yellow” gun was like a ghost-busting machine gun. It was useful in some places, but not many. About the only place i really used it was one of the last bosses.

All in all i thought it was a really good game; it had the feel of the first movie, so it was really entertaining for a movie based video game!

Random Review: Ghostbusters (the video game) was originally posted at John's Random Review.

Some examples…

Not a winner:

Winner:

Winners:

Winners:

Winners:

(thanks to jay for photoshopping in the background!)

In the end we’re all losers?:

(thanks to jay for that one)

Halloween this year, not like the others. was originally posted at John's Random Review.

Microsoft Research’s Courier

This new device, called “Courier” showed up on Gizmodo today, and i don’t know why it hasn’t gotten more press. Maybe because its still in a “late prototype” phase and everyone assumes there’s an apple iTablet thing due any time now?

I’ve never been a fan of the ebook reader things because they just don’t look right. my laptop, for how small it is, isn’t the right form factor either. My iphone is just too small to read on. I think this thing is about perfect! I had a Vadem Clio years ago, and it was the closest thing to the right size device for what i’d like to carry around, but it was underpowered and the touchscreen wasn’t anywhere near the size or quality as they are now.

Vadem Clio. now ancient technology!

But this Courier device looks like it would work great with the right ebook reader software, and a coworker already said it would be a great machine to fold over, with a screen facing each way to play battleship on . It would be a great meeting computer, surf the web on one side, take notes on the other. I’d never need another paper notebook ever!

I would buy this thing instantly. was originally posted at John's Random Review.

mirror’s edge, the game
it is a jumping puzzle
and that’s about it.

Well, maybe it had other things, but i never found them. I just couldn’t get into it, because it was just jumping puzzles, so i gave up. I’d just finished Tomb Raider before that, and at least it had puzzle puzzles. And swinging puzzles, and fire puzzles and shooting puzzles, etc. There are just too many other games out to play something that pisses me off.

Random Review: Mirror’s Edge was originally posted at John's Random Review.