John's Random Review

Red Dead Redemption was one of the best games I played in 2010.  Well, I’m finished playing it in 2011, so it might be the best game I played in 2011 too .  If you haven’t played it, its Grand Theft Horse, basically.  Same developers, same engine.  But the story in RDR was a lot more interesting to me than GTA was.  I think when you set a game in modern day, you really have to get every little detail right, because people’s brains are so used to seeing that stuff, that you will notice if the cars are too shiny, or the windows don’t reflect right, and all kinds of other things just won’t look quite right.  But when you set a game in the wild wild west, not a lot of people are used to riding horses, or herding cattle so you aren’t going to notice little things that are incorrect. 

Even so, I can say that I hated herding cattle.  Seriously.  One time is enough to show me the hardships of the old west, but one time is more than enough herding cattle for me . 

The interesting (no spoilers!) thing about the story is that while it might have been a little predictable, I think part of that predictability came from really understanding the main character and his predicament, and the helplessness of the whole situation.  There were certainly things that I personally wouldn’t have done in that situation, but I know that John Marston would have.  I saw most of what I’d call “Act III” coming, and yet when things started unfolding I was not disappointed at all.  It was somehow…fitting.

The dead-eye system worked really well for shooting, especially from the back of a moving horse.  The duel thing was ok, but I didn’t realize until real late in the game that there was a rhythm factor to the shooting that I didn’t notice (or missed in the first tutorial), so a couple of the story related duels I failed and had to do over and over and I never noticed that there was a specific indicator to watch for while aiming.

My only other real complaint (aside from the frigging cattle rustling!) was some of the voice acting.  It seems like a ton of the dialog was just yelling.  Yelling for no reason.  Yes, people are riding horses so you might need to increase the volume of the dialog, but that doesn’t mean the actors should just be yelling all the time.  That just decreases its impact when people really should be yelling.

The hunting/gathering/treasure quests were ok, but what made me stop completely stop dong them was the last gathering one.  Get 15 of x, fine, I’ve been doing that the whole game.  But “get 15 of plant x, and 2 more of every other plant?”  Screw that.  Get your own plants you jerks!

AC2 was probably one of the best games I’ve played this year.  Most of the time sequels aren’t as good as the original, but this one was as good, if not better than the original.  Yes, it was a little formulaic,  and there was a fair amount of repetition, but I really liked the story.  It had one laaaaaaame moment, but I’ll let it go and see if AC3 cleans it up.  I thought the addition of the interaction with Leonardo Da Vinci was pretty clever.   There’s also a part now where you kindof run a city in a very minimal way, so that was an interesting way to make money.  Towards the end I had so  money I didn’t know what to do with it all, so I wish there would have been something else to do with it

Assassin’s Creed:Brotherhood just came out, too, so I’ll have to add that to the top of my gamefly list.  I know the new one has some multiplayer, so I’m not sure how much the story continues, as it doesn’t have “3” in its title anywhere…but I’m definitely going to find out!

Now that Kinect for XBox360 has officially released, i’m allowed to say that we participated in the beta program for Kinect, and that we’ve been playing it now for a few months. (i even got a avatar t-shirt and a 0 point achievement, yay!)

There’s a very simple reason that i’m buying it: Easton can play it. He’s only 2, and doesn’t have the dexterity to do anything with a wii-mote or an xbox360 controller, but he can run in place, and he loves to play Kinect. Supposedly, the recommended minimum height for players is 3 feet, but for the most part he can play some stuff.

In our part of the beta, we only got to keep the kinect sensor for a week, then had to return it, and check it out again later, library style. The first week we had it, we played a little bit of everything: Adventures and sports, mostly. We played it for the week, and i returned it. A couple days later, Easy is just standing in the living room, pointing to the TV and saying “Boat? Boat?” We had no idea what he was talking about. We asked him all kinds of questions, and you could tell that he was frustrated because he couldn’t explain what he wanted and we obviously didn’t understand. The next day, he did it again. Only this time, after we didn’t understand what “Boat?” meant, he pointed at the TV, said “Run? Run?”, and then ran in place. Eureka! “Boat” was the rafting game in Kinect Adventures, and “Run” was the 100 meter dash in Kinect sports. A couple weeks later after we’d had kinect for another week, he was doing it again, so i got it on “tape”:

Towards the end of the beta, there were enough Kinects available that the “library” would let you have them longer than a week, so we had it for a while. Easton figured out that in Joyride, he could put his arms out to start driving in a stunt mode game, and then just lean back against the couch and do absolutely nothing and he would just rack up the points. He’d end up with like 300k points, to me getting 60k working my butt off. He figured out that you generally control Kinect by waving to start, so he’d stand next to you and wave to try to steal control. He figured out that you have to put your arms up to signal that you’re “ready” to run in the running game. He hasn’t figured out that you have to keep running, though. he’ll run in place for about half the race, then he sees that you’re done running, so he stops running too. So even though you’ve long since finished the race, you have to keep running so he keeps running.

We were pleasantly surprised when we realized that Kinect can track you pretty well while holding a toddler. As long as you’re not playing the wierd bubble game where you have to use both of your arms, you can play most of the Adventures games while holding him, although 20,000 leaks is hard to get some of the leaks. A lot of the games work just fine with him on your shoulders too!

Is the Kinect aimed at more “hardcore” gamers like me? probably not. Is it aimed at more “casual” wii-like gamers? definitely. And if there’s one thing that Nintendo has shown with the wii is that there are a ton of casual gamers out there. We’ve had a 360 for 4 1/2 years. how many times has laura turned it on? Until we got the kinect, she’d turned it on twice to play tetris. Since we’ve had the Kinect beta, she and Easton have played a bunch of times without me. She even invited the neighbor kids over a couple times to play. In fact, she posted about kinect on facebook tonight before i even posted this.

stuff we played and our notes:

1. Kinect Adventures: we played this one a lot. Easy likes the rafting game (boats) and 20,000 leaks (fish), and sometimes likes rallyball (ball). Leaks is fun, and i like the rail game (can never remember what its called!). having to jump to go faster takes a lot of energy.
2. Kinect sports: the beta rotated the games available, so i don’t think we even played them all. soccer was surprisingly fun, for how simple it was. i really like the volleyball. pingpong was ok, never got javelin. easy loves 100 meter dash. bowling was pretty good.
3. Joyride: i really like the “stunt” game. It seems to have some kind of “autopilot” mode for kids or something, as it seems that easton can get really high scores by just standing there with his hands behind his back!
4. Dance Central: i think i was the only person to play it, and i thought it was pretty good. definitely a party game.
5. Fitness Evolved: the demo was pretty short, but i think i might try the full game out.
6. ESPN “The Ocho”: this one is all about content.
7. Voice Control: i didn’t use it a lot, but it did work. i mostly used it to start games before i picked up the controller
8. Video Kinect: i think this one is going to be pretty big. It could be huge if they would/could integrate it with the FaceTime video chat stuff on iphones/pods, and/or Skype. We video chat with laura’s mom sometimes, but doing it on the big TV instead of a laptop you have to keep open and pointed.

Well, probably more accurately, “things which easton says or mispronounces that i find funny”. Right now all the ones i can think of are single words. he’s starting to form sentences so i’m pretty sure there will be funny phrases for a future installment.

• “Zune” is easton’s word for “phone”. I really wish i had my zune still (lost it on an airplane…) so he could be even more confused.
• “Bean” is easton’s word for “beer”. “Daddy’s bean” is what he says whenever he sees a glass bottle of any kind. even though he says other words that end with the “r” sound, he will not say beer, he just says “bean” louder if you try to correct him
• “Coshee” is easton’s word for “coffee”, although i think last weekend he started saying it right. He loves to run the coffee machine weekend mornings, and seems to enjoy the taste of even black coffee. I don’t know if its because he likes to copy me or if he really likes the taste. He does like raw garlic and onions though, so it wouldn’t surprise me if he likes the bitterness of coffee.
• “Shark” is easy’s word for “fork”. sometimes its just “sark”. The weird thing is that he can say the “f” sound, so i don’t know why he won’t say fork.
• “Fi-fi” is what easton calls Felix Hernandez. But most of the Mariners call him that too, so that’s okay.
• “Pay-pay” is what easton calls Peyton Manning. I’m generally pretty anti-Peyton, but he’s my fantasy QB this year, so i root for him, but against the Colts in general.
• When he sees cats, or squirrels or other small animals outside, he will generally say their name, then say “eat”. The conversation goes like: “Meow. Cat! Eat?”, “no, we don’t eat cats.” “eat? no eat.”

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?!?