Years ago there was this movie called The Piano. It was the one where Holly Hunter was a mute woman with an abusive husband in a Victorian era who can only communicate by playing a piano which washed upon the shore one day. I guess the best category for it would be “artsy fartsy”. It was up against Schindler’s List in the Oscars and mostly lost. However, while all the critics loved it and most said it should have won best picture, no one I’ve ever talked to who watched it has ever had anything good to say about it. My mother watched it and said it was horrible. So if it was so bad, why did the critics like it? I believe there is a phenomenon in the movie industry where critics are “supposed to like” certain films. Was The Piano any good? From what I’ve heard, no. So why do the critics like it? Because they’re supposed to. Is Woody Allen a great film maker? No. So why do the critics love his films? Because they’re supposed to.

So a Dreamcast game was released Christmas of last year called Shenmue. It had been in development for close to four years. It had a budget in the millions. It had even originally been conceived for another platform, the Sega Saturn. It came out and instantly most critics proclaimed it the best game ever. Daily Radar did (right after saying the same thing about Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2). Next Generation gave it the 5-star treatment. dreamcast.ign.com gave it a 9.7, and the Official Dreamcast Magazine gave it a perfect 10 (though they did give that one out a lot). OK, so I’ll bite – I got the game.

So I fire up this game. It’s got a cool into and it sets a nice initial mood. Then I go exploring my house in the game. One of the really big deals about this game supposedly is how realistic it is. Every room in your house can be explored. Every room in your house has something with drawers. Every drawer can be opened. Every drawer has something different in it. Every character you run into you can talk to. Every character has something different to say. Every character has a different voice. Every location in the game is detailed this way. Suffice it to say this was an ambitious project. There’s a vending machine you can buy drinks from and drink them. There’s people to buy stuff from. There’s a cute kitten to save. And the coolest – there’s an arcade where you can play emulated old Yu Suzuki games (the creator of Shenmue as well).

But this is where it breaks down. Everything I’ve done in the game (so far) has been of the “go here and talk to this guy and ask him this” variety. Problem #1 – the world is huge. Problem #2 – the characters don’t stay put and they are only at certain places in certain times of the day and only when you’ve already talked to someone else. Problem #3 – every sign on every house and street is in Japanese. You can of course go up to them and look at them closely and the English translation pops up, but this is tedious and it’s hard to remember where the hell anything (the streets tend to look the same).

And there’s other problems as well, mainly with the voice acting. It sucks. The original Japanese game was in, well, Japanese. They went back and forth on whether or not to put this one out with subtitles or redubs of the voice. They went with dubs but since all the characters in the game are Japanese it made sense to have Japanese people who speak English as a second language do the voices. However the low sampling rate means that the words tend to slur a little bit, so add to that the natural slur of the Japanese accent and it’s hard to make anything out. Finally, combine all of this with the fact that the actors they picked were just awful and they sound like they were instructed to yell into the microphone as loudly as possible, and you see why many people wish they would have just subtitled the game.

But the big problem is the amount of stuff to do. Sure, it makes the game more realistic, but it makes it boring, or at least as far as I got into it. I can wander around aimlessly anywhere. It’s been a year now since I touched the game and I’ve always meant to get back to it, but why? Well first off is the fact that I actually thing there’s a good game to be had, if I can find it. But ultimately I think that this is one of those games where you’re just “supposed” to like it. I want to play and like this game because I’m “supposed” to. And all the critics address the fact that this is an unconventional game and that’s great and all, but it’s not any good – that doesn’t make up for being unconventional.

And to make things worse, many people were turned off by the pseudo-episodic nature of it. The basic premise is that the main character, Ryo, witnesses his father’s murder at the hands of a gang and goes on a quest to solve the murder and why it happened. But here’s the rub – at the end of the game you still won’t know why. The reason is because Shenmue isn’t finished – it was envisioned as an episodic RPG of sorts with 16 chapters (16 games). That has since been scaled back a bit, the first game covers two chapters and the second game, Shenmue II, covers four, so there’s ten chapters to go. Shemnue III has been greenlighted but will not hit the Dreamcast for obvious reasons.

And even worse – Sega released Shenmue II in Japan and made a big hubbub about the game’s release in the U.S. Namely, in the efforts of cost effectiveness and timeliness they decided to do the subtitle bit for the sequel. However then they turned around and announced they weren’t going to release it in the U.S. after all but instead put it on the XBox in Fall 2002. However in the U.K., where two consoles weren’t just launched, they decided to go ahead and release it, so now everyone who wants to play this game on the system they already have has to import it (the game plays in NTSC as well). Insane.

And yet after I write this and go home for the day, I think I’ll fire up Shenmue and give it one more try…

First off, I wrote 90% of the 20th’s post and never published it, so when you’re finished reading this post go ahead and read the one right under it.

With that out of the way, I watched the Harry Potter movie over the weekend. Workable stuff. Having read the book right before I saw it, it’s interesting – it follows the book pretty closely, which means most of the suspense and crap was ruined for me. Yet I’m glad I read the book first, it’s a good feeling walking out of the theater thinking to yourself all the things they left out of the movie that were in the book (not that many, but you know). Lord of the Rings is next.

Thank GOD all the freaking consoles are out. No more hype. No more speculation. No more pages of my favorite Imagine magazines wasted on promoting that XBox magazine. People I know love to ask me which one I’m getting and they always seem shocked to discover I’m buying neither this season. Instead whatever exteraneous funding I recieve this Christmas is going towards PC upgrades. A GeForce 3 200 Titanium (the budget power video card) and WinXP. Probably a game or two as well. I did the “bust your ass to get the console ASAP” thing with the PS2 and in the past year I’ve bought ONE game. Not worth it to buy two more consoles when most of the console games I could want fit snugly on the PS2 anyway.

When I played Return to Castle Wolfenstein at QuakeCon I was disappointed to see that the logo of the Nazi’s wasn’t a swastika, but this sort of phoenix/double eagle thing. It’s no fun blasting Nazis if you can’t see the right logo when you’re plugging away at them. As an example this weekend I was able to convince my parents to buy a Dell system and have it delivered to their house. As an example, when my dad asked what all the system could do I detailed some of it but I told him it probably couldn’t run many games. He asked me “well can we blow away the Nazis?”, referring the old Wolfenstein 3-D game. However this morning I discovered that it’s only the multiplayer game which bars the swastikas, the single-player component keeps them. What’s happened here is that the game contains only the “double eagle phoenix” in Germany (where if it had the swastika it couldn’t be sold, something they learned with the original game), so the multiplayer component in all games has the swastika removed from the muliplayer game so that everyone is playing the same game online. Clever, but I betcha the game still gets banned in Germany – it’s not too flattering to that country.

It’s a sad day when you find out that your video card isn’t good enough to run the Harry Potter game. After polishing off Harry Potter and the Sourcerer’s Stone last week, I became interested in how it was going to translate to video games. I think the original cash-in title Harry Potter Racing (think broomsticks) was cancelled, so now we’re left with four different games called Harry Potter and the Sourcerer’s Stone, one on the Game Boy Advance, one on the Game Boy Color, one on the PlayStation and one on the PC. I don’t own a GBA, so I tried the GBC version – it’s actually a pretty decent little RPG. I don’t think it will put Final Fantasy to shame, but the high-color routines on it are nice eye candy. I’m told that the GBA game is more of an adventure game in the vein of King’s Quest and it doesn’t work as well. I’m not sure what kind of game the PSX one is but this morning I fired up the PC game.

When it starts installing I see it installs maps as “.unr” files – meaning that it’s Unreal engine based. This gets me excited – the Unreal games, while never my favorite, kick ass. Once it’s done installing I fire it up and it prompts me to select my rendering preference. Huh? Software and Direct3D only? Wither OpenGL or Glide? I mean, these are APIs already built into Unreal, why would you strip them out? Better question – why is Software Rendering selected by default, when it says it was detecting my preferences? I pick “Direct3D” and move on. When I finally get into the game (there’s an expository story mode you can’t skip) I notice that none of the walls have textures. I fire it up in Software mode and the walls have textures – but of course it all looks like shit. I forgot how bad Software games looked. I read the little readme file and it lists the supported renderers – Voodoo3 isn’t listed, but Voodoo5 is.

My best guess is that EA woke up one morning and said “We need a PC version of Harry Potter“, so they got on the horn with Epic Games and bought themselves a license for the latest Unreal engine and just code-froze it right there, making the game on top of that version. Why they didn’t go with the Quake 3 engine, since they have several titles (including the PS2 port of Quake 3) using it already, is curious at best. Perhaps they enlisted a team that felt better about the Unreal engine. I just think it’s ironic and bizzarre that a children’s game requires a fairly top of the line system whereas more mainstream fare merely requires what I’ve got.

In any event perhaps my wife will like the game.

Well I awoke yesterday morning to discover that Bleem went the way of the dodo. The money they pulled in off of their latest discs simply wasn’t enough to fuel their expensive battle with Sony in court or chip away at the $1 million debt they had amassed as a result. No one’s sure exactly what happened nor is it sure what will happen now (i.e., does the lawsuit by Sony go away, does the lawsuit Bleem filed against Sony go away) but this is an incredible bummer, IMO.

I’m going to start to write a comprehensive article/summation of Bleem but for now check the one I (finally) finished and published:

The Nintendo 64: A Postmortem.

Oh, and I got Civilization III. I may never come up for air again.

Okay, so I’ve joined the cult of Harry Potter. When my wife and I went to Reno, NV for our Honeymoon, we picked up this little white piggy bank with “I [heart] Reno” and little red hearts for eyes. Chalk it up to those little things you buy which make sense on vacation. Every day when I come home I empty my pockets of change and stick all the pennies in this bank. Recently I noticed it was pretty much full, so I figured kill two birds with one stone – cash the little suckers in and get that first Harry Potter book I’ve been wanting to read. Specifically I want to read it before I see the movie/play the game/ingest the commercials/listen to the soundtrack. We all know that the books are inevitably better than the movies they become, so I want to read the book first. It’s been on my “to do” list forever now, but with the movie coming out soon it’s crunch time.

So I get a total of $4.45 from the pennies (they always look like they’ll be more), or $5.45 if you count the Sacajawea dollar coin that wouldn’t fit through the bottom slot and was a bitch to get back out of the slot. I took them to this little machine they have at Albertson’s for this sort of thing. You pour your coins in and they get turned into a reciept, minus 8.9¢ on the dollar. Of course the machine is loud as hell and it’s right in front of all the checkers, so everyone shopping at Albertson’s gets to know how much of a cheap bastard you really are, as does the woman who cashes it in for you. I bought the book the next day at Hasting’s because, as it turns out, Half-Price Books doesn’t have it (cardinal rule of HPB – never go in there with a book in mind, you’ll never find it).

When I get to Hasting’s they have the one out front that’s a larger (width-wise) paperback and has the original cover art. I went to the back where they had the recent trade paperback version to the right. It’s funny that they came out with this one last month – it’s smaller, so it fits on trade paperback racks. It doesn’t have cover art that screams “Children’s Book!” (even the “Scholastic” logo is downplayed) and it of course has that nice movie tie in. It’s even funnier that I decided to get this one – I fit the criterion of its target audience. And of course I’ll probably buy and read the other three books. And of course I’ll proably get them on hardcover and stuff.

I put away the first 80 pages last night. I’m not really in a race, except that I want to go ahead and get to Lord of the Rings. It’s really easy reading. Stephen King books require you pay attention, lest you not be able to discern the real action from the action taking place in the characters heads. Robert Jordan books aren’t so heavy on thoughts as they are on words – every page of the Wheel of Time books I’ve looked at have more words per square inch than most scientific journals. And there are of course 9 WoT books, none shorter than 600 pages hardcover (the paperback ones work out to be longer) and only one of which I’ve had the patience to finish (on my second attempt, no less).

Potter is so far a refreshing break – it does just what you want it to do – no weirdo subplots. It’s like “Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption” (yes, that Shawshank) from Different Seasons – just a compelling story with no baggage. I’ll be finished in no time at this rate. For what it’s worth this is the book my wife put away in one day while myself and my cousins-in-law entertained ourselves at QuakeCon. Had we stayed longer she could have put away Moe’s copy of book 2.

“The primary purpose of the DATA statement is to give names to constants; instead of referring to pi as 3.141592653589793 at every appearance, the variable pi can be given that value with a DATA statement and used instead of the longer form of the constant. This also simplifies modifying the program, should the value of pi change.“

— FORTRAN manual for Xerox computers

Today is the 30th anniversary of Led Zeppelin’s fourth untitled album, commonly referred to as Led Zeppelin IV. This is the album famous for containing “Stairway to Heaven”.

I think I know what I’ll be listening to all day. Is it heresy to say that “When The Levee Breaks” is the best song on the album?

Good thing they can afford it.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a Jolly Rancher Anything that I’ve had an easy time getting the stupid wrapper off. Whatever Jolly Rancher products are made out of – be they the suckers or the little rectangular bricks or, in this case, the little square ones, it’s always one bitch of a time getting the stupid wrapper off – it’s completely stuck to the thing. Most of the time you just have to accept that you’re eating like 1-5% of the wrapper, since that makes for a more appealing move than having that crap all over your fingers (and therefore everything you touch) for the rest of the day. I wonder how many pounds of Jplly Rancher wrappers Americans pass through their system every year, since you know that crap doesn’t digest.

Slighly related – there’s nothing funnier than a cat with tinsel hanging out of their butt since that crap passes right through as well.