Hidden Peanuts

It’s been a while since I reviewed anything, and I find myself missing it. I’m half working on an idea involving reviews, which is one reason I’ve been holding them back. But anyway, here’s my new favorite cookbook:

A Man, A Can, A Plan: 50 Great Guy Meals Even You Can Make is pretty much exactly what it sounds like. Each meal is simple, with central ingredients that come from cans. A few non canned items are sometimes required, but nothing complicated - usually just a sliced tomato or a bag of shredded cheese. The book is divided into sections by the associated manly main ingredient: ham, chicken, fish, chili, beans, spaghettiOs, veggies, fruit, and beer.

Yes, there is an entire section dedicated to spaghettiOs. I’ve fallen in love with SpaghettiO Western - two cans of Os, one can of black beans. Mix in a skillet and heat until hot. (Of course, since this is a manly book, I don’t “mix” items. I am directed to “dump” the cans together) Sprinkle with cheese, and eat. If I’m feeling adventurous, I add in some corn. It’s ridiculously cheap and simple to make, tastes miles better than the Os alone, and leaves me with tons of leftovers. That’s the easy end of the spectrum. Others, like the Ham-and-’shroom Scramble that I made, feel more like actual cooking.

There’s no earth-shattering culinary tips in this book, but it gave me a ton of great ideas for easy bachelor meals that I wouldn’t have hit on otherwise. If I have one complaint, it’s that a number of the 50 recipes are more side dishes or desserts than a full meal. But there’s still a pretty good assortment. Each one is better than another frozen pizza any day.

After almost four years with my last computer (A Dell Inspiron 5100 which held up remarkably well) I finally upgraded! I decided not to mess with success, and bought another Dell laptop - an E1505 this time.

Vista has taken some getting used to. The constant pestering about mundane security issues is really grating on me, for example. But overall I’m quite happy with my purchase. And while it’s probably a minor thing to focus on, I love that having Media Center built into Windows (combined with a USB tv tuner) lets me use the laptop as an HD DVR and stream the recorded shows to my TV via the Xbox 360. I’d been considering buying a Tivo or something similar lately, but really balked at paying yet another monthly subscription fee. Problem solved!

But my absolute favorite thing about this laptop compared to the old one? My computer’s fan no longer sounds like an airplane is buzzing my apartment every time I bring up a youtube video.

The new Yahoo Pipes service is something I really want to like, but am pretty frustrated with right now.

The concept of the pipes service isn’t easily explainable. The best I can do is to say it provides an intuitive drag and drop interface for mashing up content from different sites. Ebay searches, flickr photos, rss feeds, etc. In theory, anyway.

I’ve spent the last couple days trying to put together a pipe that would merge all of my online presences into one RSS feed: posts from this site, my flickr photos, updates on what games I’ve played on my 360, etc, all sorted by date with the most recent item at the top. Not the most useful feed in the world to be sure, but it would be handy to be able to give it out to friends and family.

I can get to the step where I mash all the feeds together just fine. But the sorting algorithm does absolutely nothing. The resulting feed shows all my blog posts, then all the blog comments, then all the flickr photos, then all the 360 updates. The date isn’t taken into account for any of them, there’s no actual sorting and merging of the feeds done at all. All four of these feeds have the pubdate attribute in their raw code, so there should be no reason I can’t sort by it.

I think you can see my pipe here, if anybody wants to take a crack at telling me what I’m doing wrong: http://pipes.yahoo.com/people/ZulVVVA1oXWEOpI5loGw

I think there’s a lot of potential in the Pipes concept - lowering the technical barrier to entry on mashups would be a great thing. I just wish I could figure out how it works. Maybe the promised eventual tutorials will help.

I’m also really interested to see any useful library-related projects that have come from Pipes.

(In the interest of full disclosure: I was given a copy of this game to review by M80, a marketing company who works for Capcom. They emphasized that they wanted me to be honest in my evaluation, and I will be.)

I’ve had my eye on Lost Planet for a while. The downloadable demo was the first thing I played after plugging in my Xbox 360 last fall, and I was hooked right away. This third person shooter puts you in the shoes of Wayne, an amnesiac soldier on a barren, icy planet full of giant hostile bugs known as Akrid. Fighting through the snow covered plains (either on foot or in any number of giant walking robot ‘vital suits’), Wayne seeks both revenge against and an explanation from those responsible for his father’s death. Being an ice planet, players must constantly seek out new sources of heat to avoid freezing to death. Enemies consist of both Akrid and the human “snow pirates”.

Yes, snow pirates. OK, so the story won’t win any awards. In fact, it gets more and more nonsensical as the game progresses - and the situation isn’t helped by some truly awful dialogue. Thankfully, the gameplay isn’t held back by this limitation. I always try to ask myself one question in particular when reviewing a game: Is it fun? Lost Planet absolutely is.

There is a certain simple joy in climbing into a robot battle suit, picking up a rocket launcher, and duking it out with a giant alien bug the size of a small skyscraper. And I’m not exaggerating - some of the enemies you’ll face really are that huge. Click on the thumbnail above for an example (that giant worm is only about halfway out of the ground). Visually, this all occurs in some of the most impressive graphics I’ve ever seen. Whoever did work on Lost Planet’s explosions and smoke effects deserves some kind of award. Most battles in the game involve many instances of both, and they just make blowing something up that much more fun.

Control-wise, Lost Planet has a bit of a learning curve. Each vital suit has it’s own special button scheme, which is only displayed the first time you sit down in one. Find the same model again later, and it’s up to you to both determine which model it is and remember which button does what. And you’ll be switching suits a lot, constantly picking up new ones as your current ride runs out of armor (the possibility exists, of course, that I’m just really bad at the game). A cheat sheet located in the pause menu would really come in handy. Controlling Wayne on foot is thankfully easier to get the hang of, and the ability to zip around a level with his grappling hook is a nice touch.

Unfortunately, there is one major problem with how controlling Wayne is handled. If knocked down by an explosion, the animation as Wayne scrambles back to his feet takes about three seconds. During this time he does not respond to any commands. Three seconds is an eternity in a firefight, as rockets and bugs continue to stream at him. On multiple occasions I found myself simply unable to react: Wayne gets knocked down, spends ages getting back up, gets hit by enemies who have run up to him in the meantime, gets knocked down again, etc. If this happens while you’re backed into a corner, you might as well just restart the level. Wayne won’t be long for this world anyway. Having absolutely no control over this process is extremely frustrating, and I found myself trying to sidestep as many close encounters with enemies as possible as a result.

This is a game I would love to play in surround sound. But as I don’t have such a system, I was limited to stereo. I was still impressed, effects are realistic and even useful. Each gun has such a distinctive sound that it becomes a simple matter to determine exactly what Wayne is under attack by without even spotting the assailants.

The single player mode took me about 8 hours to finish, which feels just about right. I personally prefer games of about this length. They’re meaty enough to be worth playing, but not so involved as to keep me from other things. There’s also a significant amount of replay value in returning to earlier levels, both in optional secondary bosses to fight and hidden items to search out.

The online multiplayer mode is not something I plan on spending a lot of time with. As in any online game with voice chat, there’s a large number of players present with a questionable vocabulary and attitude. If my friends had this game I would gladly play against them. But they don’t, and getting constantly insulted isn’t how I want to unwind after work. I also find the interface and lobby for setting up a game to be confusing, much of which will be clarified in an upcoming patch. I didn’t spend enough time in online play to feel qualified to comment on it any further.

Lost Planet truly shows off the technical capabilities of the Xbox 360. Gorgeous graphics and sound complement solid gameplay. It’s just really too bad that the story wasn’t given more attention.

Forgive me, I can’t resist a bad pun. Translation: Week in Review.

A little over a week ago I stood in line very early on a cold rainy morning outside Circuit City, and managed to buy one of the thirteen Nintendo Wiis they got in stock that day. Now that I’ve had some serious playtime, here’s my impressions:

Put simply, I love this system. The novel motion sensitive controller works just as advertised - playing tennis feels like tennis, bowling like bowling, etc. Being able to point at the screen to select options makes it much easier to enter text and set options than on previous generations of controllers. The game it comes with, Wii Sports, is an excellent introduction to the Wii. It’s a package of five games: Bowling, Tennis, Boxing, Baseball, and Golf. I haven’t managed to figure out the right timing to hit the baseball reliably, but the other four all work just as advertised. Most game types even let you pass one or two controllers around among players, instead of having to buy more. Boxing is by far the most physically intensive of the five, and can be quite a workout depending on how much you allow yourself to get into it. The Wii controller can be used with multiple intensities - a flick of the wrist, for example, will return a serve just as well as a full arm swing. It’s up to you how you want to play.

The interface of the Wii’s main menu is extremely well laid out. Finding options and starting programs is easy - there are freely downloadable ‘channels’ that let you browse the world’s weather or new by rotating a globe, and another that provides a basic version of the Opera web browser. The console also comes with the ‘Mii Channel’, which is where you design your cartoony avatar. This avatar then shows up in a number of games, primarily as your player in Wii Sports.

Games from previous generations of video game systems are also available to purchase and download (NES, SNES, N64, Sega Genesis, and Turbografix 16 games are all represented). I take a bit of an issue with Nintendo’s pricing on these games - A Super Nintendo game costs $8, and an N64 title is a whopping $10. I won’t buy very many games at these prices. But if they were cut in half, I could convince myself to make the smaller purchase more repeatedly. Logical? Maybe not, but that’s how I feel. As it is, I broke down and bought the original Sonic the Hedgehog. Even after all these years, I still feel surreal playing a Sega game on a Nintendo system. My 10 year old self would never have predicted this day.

Here’s a couple blurbs on the other games I’ve tried:

Rayman: Raving Rabbids

This collection of minigames is the best thing on the Wii so far. There’s something like 75 games available, usually lasting a minute or two to play. Each uses the controller in a novel way - a whack-a-mole style game, swinging a cow over your head before throwing it, and keeping rhythm using the controller like drumsticks are three that come to mind immediately. The single player game is relatively short-lived, but has a very entertaining bizarre sense of humor, and is necessary to unlock the games for multiplayer use anyway. And multiplayer games is where Rayman really shines. Anybody can pick up the controller and play almost instantly. The games are short enough to get everyone in a large group involved, yet still long enough to have some substance.

WarioWare: Smooth Moves

Another collection of minigames, but this time I wasn’t quite so impressed. WarioWare comes up with some more novel ways to use the controller (like holding it to your nose and manipulating an elephant’s trunk), but never really reaches the full potential that Rayman did. Each Wario game can be as short as less than one second, and usually only requires one quick movement of the controller. This makes some of the games frustratingly rely on what feels like blind luck to complete them successfully. It’s fun in the short term, but I managed to complete the single player mode in less than two hours of play over a weekend. Again, like Rayman there’s some extension of the game’s life in multiplayer modes, and WarioWare is definitely worth playing. But something didn’t click for me, and I’m glad I only rented it.

In the end, the success of minigame compilations like WarioWare and Rayman are also the Wii’s biggest weakness. Game developers are still figuring out how to work motion sensing elements into longer, story driven games. With the exception of Zelda (which I have not yet played), none of the attempts so far have been reviewed very well. But the innovation is there, and that’s the key factor. The potential is here, now games just have to follow through. Given time, I have faith that will happen.

The highest praise I have for the Wii is that it has me excited about finding a chance to play the newest version of Madden. Players hike and throw the football with semi-realistic motions, which has me intrigued. And I can’t remember the last time I looked forward to a sports game. I think the last one I bought was for the Playstation 1. Nintendo’s plan to reach out to new groups of gamers just might work.

P.S. If anyone has a chance, give the Huntsville Circuit City some business. The manager on duty brought us a big bag of Sausage McMuffins while waiting outside in the rain at 7AM, just because she thought we looked hungry.

(In no particular order)

Books:

• Cell, by Stephen King
• The Dresden Files series, by Jim Butcher (the TV show starts next month!)
• The Time Traveler’s Wife, by Audrey Niffenegger (not newly published, but new to me)

Albums:

• The Killers - Sam’s Town
• Colorblind - Robert Randolph and the Family Band
• Straight Outta Lynwood, Weird Al Yankovic

Movies:

• Cars
• Casino Royale
  (I really didn’t see many movies this year, but both of these were superb)

Games:

• Dead Rising (Xbox 360)
• Rainbow Six: Vegas (Xbox 360)
• Tetris (Nintendo DS)
• Big Brain Academy (Nintendo DS)
• Guitar Hero 2 (PS2)

A little over a year ago, I ranted and raved against the Xbox 360. Well, I’ll admit I was wrong.

Yes, I finally broke down and bought one recently. Gamestop was offering trade-in bonus credit on the original Xboxen (my new favorite fake plural form of a word) that was simply too good to pass up. I happened to have an extra box sitting around from my experiments with creating Xbox Media Centers, so off it went!

One of my early complaints about the Xbox 360 when it was released last year was the lack of compelling games. Content is still king in the gaming arena. Now that there’s been time for developers to really take advantage of the 360’s offerings, there were simply too many good games to pass up. Dead Rising tipped the scale for me - who wouldn’t want to play an open world “sandbox” style game set in a mall full of zombies? Gears of War has the best cooperative online play I’ve ever seen, and Chromehounds is fun as well.

But I feel like the games themselves are almost tangential to my love of the 360. Microsoft’s killer app for the console is the online Xbox Live service. I can download game demos, video clips, etc, almost always for free. Even if I hadn’t bought a single game, I would still have hours of demos to play through. Then there’s games with online cooperative play. Fighting through a warzone with a friend at your side is always a fun experience. It can elevate even mediocre games to much higher status. And the interface holding all this together is an absolute joy. The menus are easy to navigate, and almost everything Just Works. Even potentially problematic features like video chat are seamless.

Starting next week, Microsoft will begin selling TV shows and movie rentals through Xbox Live. Some of the movie rentals will even be in HD! Now instead of buying an expensive HD-DVD player and movie, 360 owners can rent a movie in the same image quality for a reasonable price. Of course, I don’t have an HDTV to take advantage of this (yet). But I’m still excited about the possibilities.

I do still have a few complaints about some of the games for the 360. In many cases, developers have chosen to shrink text on the screen way down to unreadable font sizes. There is never any option to enlarge the text, which causes a lot of squinting and eye fatigue on anything but the largest televisions. There’s no reason I can tell for this shrinking to take place - there’s still plenty of screen real estate available. Another issue is that not all original Xbox games will work on the 360. I was able to keep an Xbox around to handle this issue, but not everyone has that luxury when upgrading.

In the end I never would have bought the Xbox 360 if I didn’t have friends to play the online games with. Sure I could play against random others, but frankly what many online gamers consider socially acceptable actions and language grates on me. Profanity and casual racism run wild. But I have a group of 15-20 friends I play with semi-regularly, and that makes all the difference. Some of the best times I’ve had on the console so far were simply playing a game of online Uno with three friends while video chatting.

It’s all about community. The Xbox 360 lets me connect with friends, and that’s by far the best feature.

(Plus, I didn’t have to camp out for a week and brave shortage-driven riots like the PS3 purchasers did!)

Disney World was an amazing trip from start to finish. I hadn’t been since I was five, so the experience was almost as if I’d never been there before at all. I took far too many pictures and posted them here.

FYI, mid-September is a great time to go if you can handle the Florida humidity. There were no crowds at all, and most rides had less than a five minute wait. We never waited more than twenty minutes. Another helpful hint: The $40/day per person meal plan is a steal. It includes a counter service lunch, sit down dinner, and snack every day. We routinely spent far more than that on dinner alone, although admittedly that’s partially because we ate at expensive places knowing it was all paid for. Just make reservations well in advance and you’ll be set.

Part of what made the experience so great is Disney’s unequaled customer service. Our baggage was magically whisked to and from the airport without ever having to be involved personally, for example. But the best part: everybody knows everything. Cast members (don’t call them ‘employees’) we talked to at the hotel knew all about the parks, and vice versa. They all knew what rides were closed, and were very helpful and polite when I lost my cell phone. (It never did turn up, but hooray for insurance!) I don’t think we were even told “I don’t know that, but here’s who does.”

Of course, Disney has a tad more resources for staff training and equipment than most libraries do. But wouldn’t it be nice to avoid directing yet another user across the library to the circ desk or some other service location, often to wait in yet another line? It isn’t practical for every employee to be cross-trained in so many diverse areas. But what about merging reference, circulation, and any other service point into one location? The concept wouldn’t work very well for large libraries with multiple reference locations around the building, but it has more merit in smaller branches. My local public library has just such a concept.

Maybe this isn’t even a new idea, and most smaller locations work this way already. I don’t have a lot of firsthand experience with them - any insight?

Today I treated myself to a Nintendo DS Lite. I’ve been a huge fan of the DS ever since I picked one up last September, and still highly recommend it. But the new DS Lite is even better!

I have the two units side by side here. The DS Lite is on the left, and the older standard DS on the right. Note how the Lite nearly blinds my camera. That’s the major feature improvement - a much brighter screen. You can even play it in direct sunlight, something the original DS could never handle. I never thought the original’s screen was bad, but the colors really pop out at you on the improved version. I don’t think I could go back. The battery life is also extended, overall size is decreased, and the whole design is much more stylish (it looks quite at home next to my iPod).

Nintendo even went out of their way to make wirelessly transfering your online gaming settings from the old DS to the new one a snap.

I don’t have a lot to say about the system that I didn’t the first time around, but I still really like it

The DS Lite does have one minor disadvantage: Due to its smaller size, Large older Game Boy cartridges like Warioware: Twisted look more than slightly ridiculous hanging out the bottom.