Preface: I started writing this post over a month and a half ago. For lots of reasons (real life, lack of direction) it’s drug on this long. However, I like it just enough to publish it, instead of trashing it (which is not unprecedented for me). So instead of putting it on a shelf forever, here it is. For some reason when I’m in this mode of writing a long, titanic post I never feel like posting other little things until the long post is done. Now it is. Hopefully we can all move on with our lives.

I’ve always been a little bit disdainful of the approach of overhyping something way in advance. Something about the concept of announcing something years in advance has always bugged me. There are games being announced right now that won’t see the light of day until Bush is out of office. I understand the need to hype your product, but in this day of delays and cynical expectations, I can’t seem to give a damn about your game coming out in 2009.

This was why I was really hoping Valve could have delivered Half-Life 2 a year ago when they said they would – just to prove you could develop something in secret for years and make the call on your ship date so well. Oh well. Spolsky details the “Apple Approach”, which is to wait until you have something to ship, versus the “Microsoft Approach”, which is to announce something as soon as the idea comes into your head.

Something that did do the approach which is the opposite of the industry is the recent game JFK Reloaded – though for reasons completely different than the approach I advocate. JFK Reloaded is the product of Traffic, a new developer out of Scotland. It was announced as being available for online purchase one day before its release: November 22, 2004 – the 41st anniversary of JFK’s assassination.

In the game, you assume the role of Lee Harvey Oswald (or, if you prefer, whomever was in the sixth floor of the Texas Schoolbook Depository) and you get to try and assassinate Kennedy. That’s the entire game. Suffice it to say that this premise alone, coupled with the fact that it was released when it was and how it was (i.e., there was no publisher to stop or anything) got it national attention in America. It was on CNN and every other major news site and channel. The tactic worked, brilliantly.

When you’re a person like me and generally an advocate of all things gaming, it’s not an easy gig. There are games out there that are tough to defend, and there are games out there not worth defending. Usually due to violence. The Grand Theft Auto series of games is tough to defend, but since the games themselves are so good it’s worth it. Postal 2 is tough to defend but the game itself is crap, so it’s not worth it. The Godfather series of movies glorifies criminals but no one says we should get rid of them so that they don’t inspire children.

With me, the context of the violence is important. I have no problem seeing a violent movie like RoboCop or Starship Troopers but I can’t stand watching ER a lot of the time. Tons of sci-fi soldiers getting killed by giant bugs? Fine. A little old lady’s heart exploding in a hospital? I’ll pass. I can handle all kinds of fake violence. Some would call that hypocritical.

The other thing about this game is the mere situation involved. As games move forward one of the things to reckon with is what is and is not appropriate for a game.

For example, one of the things that’s been bugging gamers is that we’ve been given a glut of World War II games. Return to Castle Wolfenstein, Medal of Honor (3 games on the PC alone), Call of Duty, Battlefield 1942 – to say nothing of the niche MMORPG approach WWII Online. The biggest reason is that WWII games still sell well. That will probably come to an end soon thanks to oversaturation, but for now it’s true. The other reason is that WWII is a “safe” war to make a game about. There was a simple and clear enemy – the Nazis. There were simple and clear reasons for being in the war – the Holocaust and Pearl Harbor. And it’s sufficiently far in the past that most who were in it are no longer around to be offended (and the ones that are don’t care). There’s other reasons, too – WWII had planes and ground combat, and guns that didn’t take forever to reload.

Now compare that to other wars. Vietnam is still controversial (witness the attacks on Kerry during the recent election) due to the circumstances in which the war happened. The Civil War’s cause is controversial as well, plus its lack of technology is a tougher sell. Worse so for the American Revolutionary War (muskets, anyone?). And as for the recent Iraqi wars – there’s something odd about playing a game of a war in progress.

And yet of course games on all those wars do get made – just not as many as WWII.

At a recent family get-together, the topic of JFK Reloaded came up from an uncle-in-law. I had to confess that not only had I played the game, but I thought it was pretty neat. At this point a cousin-in-law proposed, “well then – why don’t we just make a game where you man the gas chambers at the concentration camps?” I very quickly assessed the situation (family, holiday, lots of non-gamers), decided a debate was inappropriate, and changed the subject. But she has a good point. We make games to emulate certian aspects of WWII (D-Day, the battles at sea, etc.) but not other aspects (the Holocaust, etc.). I personally thought it wasn’t in the best of taste to make the game Medal of Honor: Pacific Assault, a game wherein you are an American soldier at Pearl Harbor. The shocking part is that it sold well in Japan.

So where is the line? Is it wrong to make a computerized simulation of the JFK Assassination? People have been doing that for years – mostly in the non-interactive quest to try and guess trajectories of bullets. So is it that much worse to make one that’s interactive? Or that runs on consumer-grade hardware in real-time?

The game itself is actually pretty interesting. For starters, it’s more realistic than you might expect. If you shoot and miss too many times, the motorcade speeds away. Shoot the driver and the car swerves. You can view the replay from multiple angles, including the Zapruder angle. Since the entire “level” is so small, it’s actually a very detailed recreation of Dealy Plaza in 1963.

Supposedly part of the goal of the game is to establish that it is in fact very plausible that Lee Harvey Oswald did in fact pull off the assassination alone. However, I got out of it three things. First, getting off multiple shots behind a tree is insanely difficult. Second, it would have made a whole lot more sense to shoot him on Houston Street instead of Elm (leading to the theory that someone else shot him from somewhere else), and last – it’s impossible to actually kill a president with a mouse. If anything, this game makes it harder to believe that LHO did it. Or more amazing that he did.

It’s less a game and more a toy. Specifically, it’s a toy for JFK consipracy buffs, which includes me – sorta. Back when the move JFK came out, I was taken in by the hype like everyone else. Today my viewpoint is mixed – I buy the idea that Oswald did it about as much as I buy the idea that he didn’t. If Oswald didn’t do it – what are the odds it could be kept a secret for 40 years? Then again the show Mythbusters has shown us that those things we take for granted as true actually are pretty unlikely (for example, the guy who flew using weather baloons – Mythbusters could barely pull it off but it did really happen).

My Wife and I went to the Conspiracy Museum in downtown Dallas. It was definitely intertesting, though it does sort of underscore why even if JFK conspiracy buffs have a point, it’s lost on the general public due to their demeanor. We got there and it was closed for lunch. We sat there for a minute and pondered what to do next but the man running the show showed up at that time to let us in. We paid our admission and started to walk around. We were the only ones in there, and apparently we were doing it all wrong. He told us which order to view the items in (always a good trait in a museum – difficult to navigate) and seemed a little offended at our “tourist” mentality. He then had us sit in the back in plastic white chairs watching some clips of the assasination, a clip from JFK, and then a very long documentary “banned in the US” (banned how, exactly?) whose main revelation was that the man on the grassy knoll doing the assassination was in fact David Ferrie. How no one else in forty years has come forth saying they saw this guy running away is anyone’s guess but I do have to give them some credit – in all the conspiracy talk you never do actually hear anyone name names on who did kill JFK – it’s secondary to the notion that Oswald didn’t do it (or do it alone) or which organization set him up.

Anyway what we figure out quickly is that this isn’t some guy manning the ticket counter – this is the guy who owns the place. Like I said the entire museum was neat but since it’s the “Conspiracy Museum” and not the “Assassination Museum”, it’s not there to be objective. They have a particular viewpoint on what happened and why. They believe that JFK, RFK, MLK and others were killed to feed the “Paramilitary War Complex”. The entire museum is not entirely unlike a child’s science fair project – lots of painstaking inexpensive detail, typewriter-made signs glued to cardboard, a painting of the limbs of a tree representing all the aspects of their theory, etc.

The guy running the place reminds me of my friend’s view on Apple Computer. Apple might make the best products in the world but everyone knows someone who’s pretentious about their viewpoints on them to the point of being off-putting, turning some off to the concept of Apple entirely. The guy running the place might be dead-on accurate as to why JFK was killed, but since he and his museum are representative of the conspiracy nuts of the world – magnifying the shreds of evidence that support their idea, ignoring the mountain of evidence that debunks it. Compare this to the Sixth Floor Museum, possibly the best, most unbiased and even-handed approach to the assassination I’ve ever seen. I reccomend it to anyone.

Getting back on track, like I said JFK Reloaded is less a game and more a “toy” for conspiracy buffs. Of course there’s a couple of things which somewhat preclude the “simulation” notion. For starters, they charge money for it. It can be argued that if it was free or had no commercial motivation the quality wouldn’t be as good. If it was a level in an existing game it would be limited by the engine of that game (versus being able to do whatever they want). But that the developer is trying to profit off of the JFK assassination hurts their cause. Of course, so is everyone who writes and sells a book about the assassination, so whatever. The other thing is the fact that they released it when they did – on the annniversary of the assassination. Sure, a brilliant marketing move, but not the most tasteful one. Also, there is a violence setting in the game – you can choose whether or not to have realistic blood in the assassination or not. Not sure how much of this is “optional realism” and how much is exploitation.

But the final thing they did which makes them harder to defend has to be fact that they have a $100,000 contest to recreate the assassination as per the Warren Commision. When you buy the game you get “tokens” to enter the contest. You have to hit JFK at the same angle, trajetory, and timing of the actual assassination. Meaning you also have to miss once or twice first. I wonder if they’ll actually give the prize out (as they claim they will) – if they do then the first 10,000 sales of the product go toward the prize. That seems more than questionable taste to me – it seems stupid.

But whatever, I started writing this post over a month ago and it’s drug on long enough. Is a game about a war too far? Is a JFK assassination simulator too far? Is a Holocaust simulator too far? If the game industry goes the way of the movie industry will we see lots of “artsy” projects with controversial depictions of things in ways people can’t handle? Are the same people who complain that DOOM 3 is just another FPS also the ones complaining about how tasteless it is to do something innovative like JFK Reloaded? I don’t know the answers, but in the meantime I’m going to go watch JFK again.

Schnapple’s nitpick of the day: Quentin Tarantino did not direct Hero

Hero was directed by Yimou Zhang (I’ve never heard of him either)

Tarantino has directed four films:
Reservoir Dogs
Pulp Fiction
Jackie Brown
Kill Bill Vol 1 & 2

(common practice is to consider Kill Bill once)

Tarantino saw the movie under its original name, Ying xiong, and pitched it to Miramax, who decided it was worth bringing to the states – but in an altered form. Tarantino pleaded with Miramax to not alter the movie for American audiences and Miramax agreed – on the condition that it carry the prefix “Quentin Tarantino presents…”

So now you know…

OK, I’m about to write a longish post but in the meantime here’s an update.

Halo 2 – still don’t got. But what’s amazed me is that not only are there still tons of copies of the collector’s editon in stores, but that people at work who don’t know me all that well still are amazed that I don’t have the game.

Half-Life 2 – got it. It’s amazing. Of course, a lot of people didn’t get to play it on day one since, despite not being an MMORPG, once people on the east coast started getting home from work, the Steam servers went in the toilet. I presume their infrastructure was smart enough to separate the “pusing 3GB of content per user” cluster from the “authenticate so people can play the game when they install it” cluster, but maybe not. I know that people who installed the CD version were complaining of not being able to play, but my DVD version told me it would just finish the process later and let me play in the meantime. Maybe we’re just special since we paid more.

But the whole Steam thing is fascinating to me. Part of me wants it to work – I think the industry would be better off with digital distribution and mandatory updates. But part of me wants it to fail – I’m amused by all of those who say that Half-Life 2 is a better game than DOOM 3. It’s like saying that, say, Gone with the Wind is better than Star Wars – not exactly a good comparison to begin with. Maybe DOOM 3 requires Windows XP (or Linux or Macintosh), but at least you could play it day one. Hell, some crazy fuckers got it running on a Voodoo 2

You want to know why we don’t have anything other than a white anglo-saxon protestant up for the White House? Why we don’t have black or female candidates for the presidency? Because the first few to try will lose and neither party feels like wasting their turn. You want to know why companies like id Software don’t want to do something like Steam? Because the first big time game to try it is going to get bit and no one other than Valve has the desire to tough it out. Stardock sells Galactic Civilizations online, but that game isn’t going to sell millions of copies. DOOM 3 was guaranteed to sell millions and id and Activision didn’t feel like messing with that. Hell, VUG is still going to sue Valve before it’s all over. A party will have to decide that it’s worth the possibility of losing before they put up a minority candidate, and a company like Valve will have to decide it’s worth the possibility of taking a bath on sales and PR before we saw something like Steam.

Metroid Prime 2 – I really want this game. Actually I really want to finish the original. Sure, it’s just more of the same, but the same was damn good.

Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater – from what I understand, this is just more crazy weird shit, but not in a good way. People blast Quake for having no plot, but maybe that’s a good thing since the last two MGS games have had plots so bad no one wants to play them.

Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas – I want this game just so I can drive around and hear DJ Axl Rose.

Tommorow is the release of Halo 2. Ironically, despite the fact that I consider myself a “hardcore” gamer (whatever that means) I won’t be getting it. There’s a couple of reasons why – the fact that there’s so many good games coming out, the usual “lack of time” issues, the fact that Half-Life 2 on DVD is eating most of my money, etc. But the real reason is this – I’m just not that excited about it.

Halo was a good game, don’t get me wrong – but it didn’t really “do it” for me. I personally thought that, as far as console based FPS’s go, Metroid Prime was a much better game. Another game I need to get to this holiday season is Metroid Prime 2: Echoes, but since I never got all the way through the first game, I need to go hit that up first. Heck, I never made it through Halo either. Of course, if someone out there got me Halo 2 I’d play it to death, but I’m not one of the millions of people sitting outside right now waiting for midnight and the game to drop.

Instead, I’m one of the ones wondering – what was the big deal, really, about Halo? I mean, it was a good game – there’s no denying that. It did a number of things very well. And when my born again Christian sister wants to do Halo deathmatch like she does at her Christian singles parties, I know it’s penetrated the Zeitgeist. Someone had a theory – people have a soft spot in their hearts for DOOM because it was their first FPS. Some have a spot for Quake because it was their first deathmatch experience. Halo attracts a ton of people who don’t game on the PC and never experienced an FPS before. Most PC gamers detest console FPS games because of the controller, but console gamers who love Xbox are more or less unanimous on their choice.

Plus, Halo was a launch title – Xbox wound upbeing the only one of the three consoles with a strong launch title. The PlayStation 2 could only muster up SSX (not even an exclusive) and the GameCube had Luigi’s Mansion (Metroid Prime didn’t come out for another couple of months). Microsoft is doing all it can to make Halo 2‘s launch rival that of early Rolling Stones albums. Apparently though there’s a bit of backlash from the hardcore crowd. That’s to be expected.

I’m not sure what went wrong but apparently the conversion of Halo to the PC has been considered “botched” by many. I never played it (already owned it on Xbox) so I’m not sure if it was just disdain over the course of the game’s development (originally a 3rd person PC game, then a FPS console exclusive, then two years delayed on the PC) or if it was just considered a below-average game by many’s standards. It occurs to me that I thought the Atari Jaguar game Tempest 2000 was an amazing game on that system, and the critics agreed – but the game was damned on the PC. It occurs to me – it could be that, by Jaguar standards Tempest 2000 was indeed an amazing game but by PC standards it was crap. Perhaps it was too with Halo.

And for some reason the “Special Edition” Halo 2 bugs me. Of course, if I was getting the game I’d probably get that one (same reason I opt for the Extended LOTR DVD’s) but to be so self-congratulatory on a game before it’s release disturbs me. At least when some movie gets a special edition DVD treatment, it’s because it had a chance to prove itself at the box office. But games don’t get a second chance really. Of course if they had released the special edition later, then gamers would be mad that they had been suckered into the “regular” edition. What a mess.

The ultimate irony however is that most non-print reviews I’ve seen of Halo 2 say that it’s essentially “more of the same” of Halo. It has online Xbox Live gameplay and the usual spate of enhancements, but it’s apparently just an improved Halo. Not that this is bad – the sheer popularity of Halo implies it was at least a good idea, and plus it’s not like it’s a mission pack or a pseudo-sequel like the last two GTA titles, but in an industry where innovation is supposedly everything (witness the quick backlash DOOM 3 experienced) people en masse seem to want exactly what Bungie is serving with Halo 2.

Well anywho, perhaps I’ll pick up the game. Ah hell, who am I kidding – I know I’ll buy it. Just not tommorow.

Half-Life 2 went “gold”. On the off chance I’ve never explained that, when a computer or video game goes “gold”, it just means it’s finished and headed off to manufacturing – a holdover from when CD-R’s tended to be gold, so the master disc was gold (as opposed to going gold in the record industry, which means you sold 500,000 copies). It hits stores November 16th.

I’m in an odd position – again, I’m not sure if my system will run the game, but I’m going to buy it anyway. Specifically, I’m going to buy the collector’s edition. I’m doing this for a few reasons – for one, this version of the game, like Unreal Tournament 2004, ships on a DVD instead of six CD-ROMs. Additionally, it comes with Half-Life: Source, the original Half-Life game redone in the Source engine. Oh and it comes with a T-shirt and some other crap. Anyone out there have any good ideas on how to convince the Wife to let me spend $79.99 in November? Here’s to hoping Fry’s comes through on a cheaper deal.

Now what I’m not doing – and what I think Jimmy is – is purchasing the game on Steam. Valve came up with this thing called Steam a few years back. I was actually one of the original beta testers. I downloaded it, installed it, told it I wanted to play Half-Life and before I could blink it had downloaded 500MB+ to my hard drive and had me in the game. I had thought by asking to play Half-Life it was going to search for the installed local copy I had. I had no idea it was going to download a second copy of the game to my hard drive.

The idea behind Steam is this sorta nebulous concept wherein games can be purchased, played, updated, etc. from within Steam. Essentially it’s one step further towards this “buy things online – no need for physical media anymore” concept that, along with video phones and the like, is pretty much in everyone’s Epcot Center view of the universe. Now, given that things like the iTunes Music Store have worked and taken off, this is not an unprecedented concept. Take for example how my Wife decided she liked Insaniquarium enough to buy it online.

However, no matter how “ready” a concept like this is, at least in the case of Half-Life 2, I’m just not ready for it yet. There are games (like the aforementioned PopCap affaris and games which can’t be purchased in stores) that it makes sense to me to buy online. However, I’m just not interested in the idea of buying a game, whose multiple gigabytes in size match affairs like DOOM 3, online and waiting for it to download. Valve has been allowing people to pre-load the game, so there’s 99% complete copies of Half-Life 2 on people’s hard drives right now waiting to be unlocked and completed, but when you do a format/reinstall – you get to let all that crap redownload again.

“But you can just take your downloaded HL2 cache and back it up to a DVD!” yeah, well besides the fact that I just haven’t jumped on the DVD burning bandwagon yet, again – I’m not interested. I want a real, official DVD sitting on my shelf that I can install from. Some will agree with me, others will think I’m being silly. Whatever. It’s my problem, I guess.

This is not to say I won’t be using Steam at all. Steam either is or will be (as in – at some point in the future) the lone method of playing HL2 online. Actually, I’m not sure there really is a “HL2 Online” per se. I mean, I guess there has to be in the respect that HL2 will be a base for mods, but there’s not going to be a “Half-Life 2 Deathmatch” from what I understand, but rather the “official” HL2 online component is Counter-Strike Source, a Source-engine remake of Conter-Strike. People who purchase a HL2 package right now get to play CS:S immediately.

I’m also a bit confused as to how the original Half-Life works on Steam at the moment. Half-Life was one of the first game with the notion of “authenticating” online before you were allowed to play the game online – your CD Key was sent to WON.net for authentication and you got to play if your key wasn’t in use or wasn’t blacklisted. I think WON.net has been abandoned (and/or disbanded in Vivendi’s dissolving of units) in favor of Steam, so I’m not sure that, if I did do an install of Half-Life from CD’s, that I could even play it online – I’m thinking it’s all Steam at this point.

Now I’m not completely against Steam. In fact, I’m not really against it or using it at all – just not for buying huge, eagerly anticipated games. Steam provides many advantages, chief among them the fact that it keeps the games completely up to date – requires this to be the case in fact. When Steam went Open Beta, Valve decided to entice people into helping it stress test things by offering Half-Life and its popular mods (i.e., ones that Valve had bankrolled) for free. This is where the problem hit – Steam just wasn’t equipped to handle it yet. The experience pretty much sucked for everyone – to the point where to lighten the load Valve released huge files for download through other venues (FileShack, BitTorrent, etc.) to handle the majority of the files needed. Many gamers decided that Steam would be uninstalled and never seen or heard from again.

Then when Valve announced that in the near future Steam would be required to play any Valve games online, gamers went batshit. This, coupled with the delay of Half-Life 2 (which may or may not have been a result of the source code leak) turned off a large number of gamers.

But Steam got better. Valve staved off people losing it on Half-Life 2 release day by doing staggered preloads. They hired the BitTorrent guy (proving that little fringe concepts can get you work). People started buying into the idea of automatic updates. And a lot of people like the idea of buying games online.

Not everyone likes Steam of course. Namely, Vivendi Universal Games. Valve signed on to Sierra to publish Half-Life which wound up being the smartest move Sierra ever made. Somehow, Valve was able to keep their intellectual property rights in the contract, meaning that if they did a second Half-Life game, they weren’t neccessarily indebted to release it through Sierra. They did have to go through Sierra as a publisher, unless of course they were able to skirt the publisher bit entirely.

Now the story gets complicated from here and only highly paid lawyers really know what’s going on. Sierra has been dissolved by VUG for underperformance (namely the lack of a second Half-Life caliber title and the Tribes 2 fiasco). VUG is now publishing the boxed copies of Half-Life 2 but they either see nothing or very little from Steam purchases. They have supposedly tried in court to stop Valve from being able to use Steam to sell Half-Life 2, going so far as to say that their original arrangement is void and that Valve doesn’t own the Half-Life IP. The rumor was that VUG was going exercise to sit on the release candidates for Half-Life 2 for six months, pushing the game to 2005.

Valve made concessions to VUG. They won’t let people unlock and play Half-Life 2 on Steam until the game hits stores. They’re charging the same for it online as they are in stores (though this works for them since it makes them more money). Their $79.99 package in stores includes Half-Life: Source and Counter-Strike: Source but their $89.99 package through Stream also includes Day of Defeat: Source – this is I believe both because this makes the package online different than what’s being sold in stores and because I think it’s Activision that controls publishing rights to that mod.

So Valve and Half-Life 2 go from a slam dunk and a pleasant surprise to a hellish release and delay nightmare. But PC Gamer gave the game a 98%, tying it with Sid Mier’s Alpha Centauri for the highest rated game ever and calls it “possibly the greatest game ever made”, so yeah – I’m getting it.

But I’m getting it on DVD dammit. I can’t push for DVD packaging and DVD games this much for this long and then buy the stupid game online.

My Wife keeps complaining that I never blog. Seems everyone else in our little circle keeps the regular update thing happening, and I don’t. Oh well. Every day at work is hectic, every night is busy with unpacking more boxes. I have tons of potential posts in my head and most of them wither on the vine either because I forget them or they’re not quite as good when I finally do hash them out.

Quick life update – I have now entered the bracket of home owners. Well, “owner” in the respect that I’m indebted to a financial institution for the next three decades or so. I’ve obviously unpacked my PC, got my office set up with the glued wood furniture which almost didn’t make the five mile trip, and purchased a pool table which I’m determined to not have go the way of the treadmil or metal detector.

Ironically, we live in Frisco, TX and we used to live about a block south of Main, which is pretty much where the “city” portion of Frisco effectively ended. We were determined to move further south in Frisco. We wound up moving about five miles further north. You literally have to pass a ranch with cows to get to where we live. Our visitors don’t consider us “city folk” anymore.

We bought a home from a builder, but it was done when we found it. It was an “inventory home” meaning essentially that they cut us a discount to get us in the house ASAP. We found the house and had moved in within a month. That same month I expereinced job stress in the form of my boss being fired (which was good – but it’s still stressful) and my original cat Jenny passed away after 21 years. Stressful.

But overall things are good. If there’s anyone out there who wants to rent a house in Frisco, TX, contact me (long shot, but we still owe rent at our rent house)

Sleeping in on a Saturday morning is not really possible yet – roughly 9 AM or so the construction on nearby homes commences. It’s almost disturbing to see how fast these houses go up – say what you will about the people who build houses for a living, they’re a well-oiled machine. Compare this to the movers we hired – two of them were white guys who would not stop bitching about how much stuff there was to move and how heavy it was – and they move stuff for a living. With the exception of my grandfather’s man-killer of a player piano, I don’t know what the big deal was.

Like I said, we got a pool table. We went originally to Billiards & Barstools, the trendy place, but besides the fact that every pool table there was hideously expensive, the help there was snooty and no help to us at all. Then I spotted a girl on the side of the road holding a sign pointing to Universal Billiards who not only sells nice pool tables for a fraction of the price, but were nice and helpful as well. We got one right away.

How much of a geek am I? All I can think about when I play pool is how Virtual Pool makes you a better pool player thanks to the optional trajectory lines in the game. So I dig out my old copy of this 1998 game, and it really can’t handle itself too well – certian windows won’t work and it won’t accept higher resolution modes. This is something I’m noticing – the DirectX notion of “it will run in Windows forever” almost holds up – but not quite. Anywho, a little searching shows that the last title in the series, Virtual Pool 3, was published in 2000. I find the demo for it and it kicks ass, so I start downloading it off of eMule – but then I try and see if the game’s in stores anymore. To my surprise it is, and the Lewisville GameStop has a copy for $10. So I go get one, but by the time I get home my download has finished.

Here’s the funny thing – the version I downloaded has a woman named Jeanette Lee who “hosts” the affair and offers advice through instructional videos. The version I bought doesn’t have this. The game was published in 2000 by Interplay but since Interplay has more or less gone the way of the Dodo, this copy states “Copyright 2004 Global Star Software, a Take Two Interactive Subsidiary”. The game itself also shows itself as “Copyright 2004 Celeris Software”. Celeris Software is the company that made the Virtual Pool series but other than a cell phone game, the company appears to be dead. Were I to guess, I’d say that Global Star got a lot of Interplay’s assets through bankruptcy and they decided to release Virtual Pool 3 as part of a line of bar-themed budget reissues. Not sure about Friday Night 3D Bowling or Friday Night 3D Darts but Virtual Pool 3 is less a pool game and more a physics simulator and in that respect, it kicks serious ass. It makes sense that the rights to use Jeanette Lee have expired and it was easier to just cut the tutorials and crap out of the game than try to re-acquire her rights. Interesting that in some places the spider fonts (Lee’s nickname is the Black Widow) remained in place.

Oh well, at least I’ve got a legit copy and I’ll use that to play online.

I discovered something last night on my own system which is a huge relief to me, so I figure I’ll share it on the off chance that someone Googles for the exact same thing.

Essentially, when I opened up Windows Explorer and clicked on my C drive, it was taking forever (i.e., several seconds) to show me the folders and files from the root directory. The D drive showed me things pretty much instantly. In light of my recent hard drive troubles I was concerned that this was my C drive’s way of telling me it was about to die.

But then last night it hit me what was happening. In the root of my C drive I had a zip file. And not just any zip file – one with thousands of files in in (the Torque source). Every time I was calling up the root of the C drive it was scanning that zip file in order to treat it as a folder, since I hadn’t disabled native zip file support in XP. I moved the file and everything was fine. I’ve disabled zip file support and placed it back, problem solved.

I guess it’s kinda sad that a lot of my peace of mind is tied to how well my PC perceivably functions, but whatever.

Some months back, roughly towards the start of this year, I bought a 200GB IDE Maxtor hard drive. After four or five months, it gave out, which surprised me completely. I figured with its one year warranty it would last at least that long. So I did what anyone would do – send the thing back in and get a new one under the warranty period. Maxtor in particular has a nice policy wherein you can have them send you the new one first and then you send the bad one back – in the proper packaging they sent you the first one in. This of course requires you send them your credit card number in case you try to screw them.

So all was well until the night before QuakeCon, when the replacement one gave way. I had to switch out for the 40GB one in my server so I could play games at QuakeCon. Oddly enough, I found myself hoping that this second drive was out of the warranty period – they do this thing where the replacement drive’s period is the original drive’s period, or 90 days, or plus 90 days, or something. Say what you will about Western Digital, I’ve got drives from theirs that can take normal use. Oddly enough everyone I talk to has no problem with Maxtor drives. I think they even pioneered the 200GB models.

However, the warranty period goes until October so I did what anyone would do – sent it in again. I got it back in last week and as I was opening the box I thought to myself that the least they could do was send me a better drive. Kinda like when you send in something and they don’t make it anymore. I guess that’s what happened since the drive they sent me was 250GB. That’s more additional space than the Windows boot volume I have (another 40GB WD drive). I never really bothered to do this but I think I could fit every game I have on this drive and still have space left over (how sad is it that I didn’t think that about my 200GB drive?).

We’ll see how this goes. Since I only keep crap like games on my second hard drive it’s far from the end of the world when it gives out, but it’s still annoying. If this thing lasts a year I’ll be happy (again, how sad is that?) but I think that, warranty be damned, if this one goes out I’m through with Maxtor as a brand.

Fool me Once…shame on…shame on you…Folmuah can’t get fooled again

I updated my PDF resume above, in case anyone cares.

I was discussing C++ with a colleague and came up with the following analogy.

Writing in VB or VB.NET is like building a house on a foundation.

Writing in C# is like pouring the foundation and then building the house on top of it.

Writing in C++ is like having to invent concrete, chopping down the trees to make 2×4’s, discovering blacksmith techniques to make nails, and inventing every single appliance from scratch, before pouring your foundation and building your house on top of it. All the while being told that in theory you could go next door and use the same building materials on your neigbor’s home only to find out that you can’t.

You also can’t go next door with VB.NET or C# but at least you don’t even have the vague premise that you can.

We’re closing on a home at the end of the month – house analogies will probably replace car analogies for a while.

This year’s QuakeCon was a blast. The Gaylord Texan is freaking huge, and I even got the Notorious DLG to go. He denies it, but in years past I was unable to get him or others like him to go since the misconception has always been that if you weren’t a huge fan of id’s offerings, you might as well not go.

One thing I noticed more of this year is the behavior. Perhaps I was just oblivious to it in the past, or perhaps I was just more aware due to the “niceness” of this place. The first night some dude spit off a balcony and/or poured some beer out. He got himself and the others in his room kicked out. Some other people got kicked out as well – and the Gaylord goes the extra step of banning you, reportedly for life. Also I noticed a lot more drinking and drunk people, but again this might just be me being more observant.

I’ve mentioned in the past on the changing demographics of QuakeCon and this year was no different – and several people were calling attention to it. There were definitely a lot more women there this year – and not just the E3 “booth babe” variety. As much as I don’t have a problem with it, I’m already seeing some backlash. It makes perfect sense – when your activity is populated primarily by geeks it’s only natural that a certian percentage of them flock to that activity to escape the social situations that rejected them – i.e., girls. Now that women are getting into this activity these people are hostile to being placed in situations where they are surrounded by the same people whose rejection pushed them into this sort of thing in the first place. Oh well, they’ll get over it – heck, now they have something in common with them.

It’s almost a shame I can’t play DOOM 3 online for shit – my system does an admirable job of playing the single player portion, but it’s just not swift enough for online. Perhaps if I bumped the resolution back down. Just getting in to a DOOM 3 match is a problem though – the in-game browser is completely worthless and although The All-Seeing Eye is tremendously better, the issue is getting the one of four spots on a server in time (since the game takes a while to load) – I wonder if it reserves a spot for you? If not it should.

But the most bang for your buck, multiplayer-wise, continues to be Unreal Tournament 2004. Onslaught is amazing and the game just generally plays great. It’s funny – one of the original slams against the game has wound up being its strength – since Unreal Tournament 2003 mods are compatible with UT2004, the game has a wealth of content it wouldn’t ordinarily have if it started from zero. Ironic that at an id event I was playing a lot of UT2004 but whatever. I played a lot of Quake 3: Arena as well but ironically, I didn’t know what client-side mods were popular, so I was limited to the out of the box servers or server-side mods.

Too bad I didn’t get to go to some of the workshops I wanted to – like editing DOOM 3 maps or the presentation of the Enemy Territory Fortress mod for Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory. Yeah, I was surprised as shit when ET released a map editor and source – now people can make a mod for a standalone game that’s free. I’m kinda surprised that more people haven’t latched onto that idea – but I guess what you really have a lot of is people holding off and making the most of their opporunity.

The best thing this year was the freebies – I have five T-shirts and two hats as a result of free crap giveaways. Jimmy and crew were enthralled with the playable EverQuest II demo. It’s funny – I wasn’t that impressed with it. It looks good, but not any better than say Far Cry. And what’s the use of high-end rendering technology if all it does is make better looking rats to kill? Then again, they’re not as enamored with DOOM 3 as I am – but I think I like DOOM 3 since I’m predisposed to, like they are with EverQuest II. All I know is I’m happy I don’t have to play DOOM 3 on an Xbox – it looks ok and has a steadier framerate than my PC, but it’s simply worse looking with lower poly monsters, etc.

So that was QuakeCon – I hear for the next two years they’ve got it at the Gaylord. Next year I’m definitely getting a room there – the hour drive to and from Frisco is for the birds.