Lots of Monkeys

You know, I’ve never swung a real golf club in my life. I hear that going to the range is a lot of fun and can be therapeutic. One day, maybe. But for now, I enjoy golf in video game form.

Sure, I dislike the concept of golf. “Golf,” according to Samuel Clemens, “is a good walk spoiled.”

Yet, I play golf video games. I guess it’s because they don’t have the land usage issues, country clubs, classism and cost of real golf. I’m guessing that if I did play real golf, though, I’d get just as angry as when I play the video game version and miss an “easy putt.”

This anger is intensified when playing Super Swing Golf on the Nintendo Wii. Maybe I’m angrier because I’m physically getting into the game. Taking a golf swing with the Wii remote is a much more visceral experience than pressing a button to time a swing on other consoles. I’m actually cursing when I don’t make a shot, which is different from my experience when playing Mario Golf on the Game Boy Advance.

My guess is that the extra realism just makes the double bogey harder to take.

That said, Super Swing Golf is an okay game. One that I’m glad I rented instead of purchased.

While entertaining, the game is too simplified for its own good. The cute, whimsical atmosphere of the courses are interesting, but I found myself just wanting a round of golf without stylized windmills and crazy water hazards. That and the game suffers from lengthy (for a console) loading times.

There are also strange interface issues, such as you have to use the pointer to get ready for a shot. It’s fine the first few times, but I found myself wanting to just play some golf, and press a button on the remote to address the ball, instead of aim at the television and click on a button.

While it is interesting that there is a story mode to beef up your character, it just isn’t enough to keep my interest.

Guess I’ll just have to wait for a Mario Golf or Tiger Woods option.

So I was watching some World of WarCraft last night. It was some high level play, a forty player raid in Molten Core. I arrived right before the raid reached Majordomo Executus. There were two computers up with the same They had Ventrilo up on one of the speakers and I was amazed at the amount of chatter. It felt like being in the movie representation of a war room, only much geekier.

There is talk about what is going to happen in the encounter, who is supposed to do what at what point in the encounter, which groups do what, who is in which group, who is responsible for healing, and then finally there is the ready check before all of that planning gets thrown out the window and there is just plain madness, people doing whatever they feel like, and the numerous deaths before trying over again.

Best line over the chatter last night was heard when the main tank was in danger of dying, delivered in an absolute Star Wars commander deadpan:

All power to forward shields.

They downed Executus’s guards with a brutal fight, but then wiped at the Ragnaros encounter itself after getting him down to thirty-seven percent. A good attempt, but by the guild and raid leader’s admission, it was sloppy, and placement seemed to be an issue. I didn’t stick around to see if they did down Rag, but I was still impressed with the amount of coordination necessary.

Sure, the graphics when fighting Ragnaros are incredible, but I was more impressed with the amount of work that went into organizing forty players. I was fortunate enough to be at the guild leader’s house (with two machines set up and participating in the raid) and was amazed at his numerous user interface plugins for overseeing damage output by each member of the raid and watching the hit point status of every single member of the raid. There was also the pen and paper for guild members on the “bench” who were waiting to get into the encounter if someone was determined not to be doing their job.

It does take forty people to down Ragnaros, and all members need to be doing their job—I heard many times over the chatter and saw in whispers that it was “nothing personal” but player characters needed to be booted from the raid for various reasons, for instance, low damage output.

It is definitely a lot of work, and it shows how WoW is dependent on social interaction.

I’d love to be a part of that, but I just don’t have the time.

Ah, the PlayStation Portable. To be honest, if I ever got my hands on one, I’d just be hacking the firmware and running emulators.

For games I already own, of course.

Long load times for most games and SONY’s penchant for firmware updates that break the homebrew functionality don’t help.

And of course, there’s EA’s head of development saying this:

EA says it has shifted its handheld priorities since DS began pulling away from PSP. “There’s no doubt that EA has historically bet more on PSP,” said Garner. “I think we were excited by the technology, but the consumers have proven that actually what they want is fun.

Burn. Harsh words, but consumers have already proven you can have fun with the PSP. You just have to downgrade the firmware and code the fun in yourself.

Not good news for SONY, especially after Target and Walmart pulled UMD movies from their shelves.