Monthly Archives: December 2008

Dec 10 2008
Technology

We'll turn this team around 360 degrees

I really do enjoy the xbox 360.  To be honest, it’s one of the better things to come out of Redmond, Washington. When given the choice, it’s my console of choice when it comes to titles that appear on more than one console.  Mainly for multiplayer, but sometimes because I am an achievement whore seeker.

It does online gameplay correctly.  (I’m pointing at you, Sony.)

Netflix is “in the box.”  It’s how I watched, Lust, Caution.

What they did not do well was the actual physical hardware.  You may recall I had the infamous Red Rings of Death failure on my xbox 360 last year.  This year, it’s a different failure. Continue reading →

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Dec 09 2008
Games, Technology

Ruined Techno for me, forever

The Nintendo DS is not considered a musical instrument.

There are music games, yes, and there was the brilliant in concept but flawed in execution Jam Sessions guitar simulator for the DS.  (Full disclosure:  I spent about two weeks just trying to play Jonathan Coulton’s RE: Your Brains.  It’s just too unwieldy on a directional control pad and a strum bar on the touch screen.)

The KORG DS-10 Synthesizer for the Nintendo DS is exactly what it says it is.  It is not a title for a KORG Synthesizer based game for the DS.  It is, in fact, a synthesizer and sequencer for the DS.

I’m going to let that sink in for a second.

It’s not a musical instrument simulator of any sort, it’s actually a synthesizer and a sequencer.  And on top of that, it uses the DS screen like a poor man’s KAOSSilator.  Which is a lot of fun.  Here’s a video showing what four of them together can do.

They wirelessly synchronize for beat matching and playback.  Of course, you’ll need a mixer to take full advantage of that, but who doesn’t have one laying around?

In short, it’s awesome.

Review based on doodling in the sequencer window and editing note lengths and values, and then adjusting the drum kit sequencer so that it repeats doom-tch-doom-tch-doom-tch while panning speakers from left to right and repeating for several measures before using the kaoss pad function to adjust peak and cutoff values for synth 1, while synth 2’s track is all doomp-doompdoomdoom-doomp and synth 1 and 2 mixed through the flanger FX at the end with the knob turned all the way wet and mixed so that the bass line on synth 2 isn’t overpowering the entire song at 142bpm.

I did not get to try the multiplayer mixing aspect of this program but god help me if I get another copy.

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Dec 08 2008
1 Comment
Uncategorized

We have been duped

I ordered Japanese last night.

Not a big deal, but I ordered some grilled salmon, beef negimaki, some age tofu, gyoza, sukiyaki, and an order of tonkatsu.

I was splitting this with a friend while we watched Lust, Caution, via the Netflix instant queue on the xbox 360.

The food arrived earlier than expected, and I realized that we were missing the tonkatsu sauce. This realization of course, came after the delivery person had come and gone.

Tonkatsu isn’t tonkatsu without sauce.  However, it was already too late and I didn’t want to call the restaurant back for tonkatsu sauce, so we decided to make do with some barbecue sauce I had in the fridge.

It’s just as good.  In fact, I could hardly taste the difference.  I felt like I had been living a lie all these years.  All I needed was hot mustard and it would have been the same.

Oh, also, Lust, Caution has sex in it.  Just thought you should know.

Update:  I just want to talk about Lust, Caution some more.  It’s an espionage spy thriller set in Japanese occupied Shanghai.  It’s nearly three hours, but I didn’t mind, and it’s an Ang Lee film, so I’ll leave you with that.  It was somewhat controversial, and I understand that it took over 100 hours to film that ten minutes.

It is also not the “feel good movie of the year” but then I did tell you it was an Ang Lee film, so I feel you’ve been warned.

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Dec 06 2008
Games

Persistent Growth

Persistence. I’m going to call it a feature. Three really excellent titles feature persistence this year:

  1. The World Ends With You, by Square Enix for the Nintendo DS
  2. City of Heroes, by NCSoft, for the PC (and MAC!)
  3. Fable 2, by Lionhead studios for the xbox 360

The World Ends With You had a great system of character growth. Your skills are attached to wearable pins. The more you use them, the more they level up. What was also interesting was the fact that they would earn experience when you weren’t playing, but only to a certain level cap.

In addition to being a great game, it was always a major draw to come back to it after a couple of days to check on the pins and swap them out so that other attacks could become more powerful. Even when I wasn’t playing, my characters were getting stronger. It felt like the game was going on, even when it was switched off.

In MMOs the world goes on without you regardless of whether or not you’re in it. But nothing directly happens to your character. There’s no growth–at least in most cases. (World of WarCraft toys with this idea, but it’s merely a case of accruing a period of time where you earn double “rested” XP. This is done, presumably so you can log back in and level up twice as quickly to make up for the time you’ve spent falling behind your friends who raid full time, in addition to their 40 hour a week day job.) Continue reading →

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Dec 05 2008
Technology

PS3 Home (or, what it feels like for a girl)

So I recently got into the PS3 beta of second life Home, Sony’s advertising space virtual world that connects all PS3 owners.

It’s all right. It’s nothing that I’d spend money or time on.

But, I did check it out, so the first thing I did was create my avatar. Through various tweaking and fiddling, I managed to create something that looked like an uncanny valley version of me.

If you squinted.

And were drunk.

But, being the overachiever I was, I had skipped out on the mandatory tutorial, so I was prompted (rather, not allowed to log in until I completed it) to take the tutorial before I could enter the Home beta. During the tutorial process there was a bit of confusion and I ultimately, I entered into the PS3 virtual space with an entirely different avatar, this one, a female.

I’ll be honest, I play games with female protagonists. I will usually defer to a female model in games that feature character creation. So, I thought nothing of entering PlayStation Home with a female avatar.

I’ll summarize. For the first time in my life, I was embarrassed to be a man. Continue reading →

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