Wits Intact

Worst. Game design. Ever.

2008-05-27T15:00:00.001-07:00

Imagine, if you will, playing for seventy-odd hours through a fairly kick-ass game. Now imagine that that game ends with a forty-second cut scene, followed (with no transition) by a button that you have to press within roughly half of normal human reaction time or you die. And then have to sit through the forty-second cut scene again to get another chance.

Well, you don't have to imagine it! In fact, God of War II gave us this lovely experience a couple of years ago. It just happens that I am only now getting around to playing it.

Everybody say it with me now: A NEARLY IMPOSSIBLE ONE-BUTTON PHYSICAL CHALLENGE WITH THE DIREST OF CONSEQUENCES DOES NOT MAKE YOUR GAME "HARD." IT DOESN'T MAKE PLAYERS FEEL "HEROIC." IT MAKES THEM FEEL (and of course, I'm projecting MY feelings on the gaming audience at large, here) LIKE DRIVING DOWN TO THE SANTA MONICA OFFICES OF SCEA WITH SOME LARGE IMPLEMENT OF DESTRUCTION. Like a bulldozer, or maybe a very angry bobcat. I mean, seriously, what the hell? I have literally played this scene dozens of times now. Even sitting on the edge of my seat waiting for it, I have successfully hit the first button once. I even sucked it up and let them switch me to easy mode, something I've resisted for the entire game. Alas, easy mode only affects "combat" -- aka, it does nothing for the button-mashing games.

It wouldn't be so bad if you just jumped into the button-mashing directly, but having to sit through the same forty seconds of complete bullshit just to die instantly? You people are bloody sadists and I hope you enjoy the special circle of hell you will be roasting in shortly. (Escaping is easy! Within the next 100ms, just press... triangle! No, square! Hahaha! Maybe next-- triangle! Still too slow!)

I realize it's hard to design an endgame experience that doesn't feel like a cakewalk (I'm looking at you, BioShock) yet isn't so challenging you want to throw your controller through your TV screen. So hey. Let's pretend you're professionals and that you get paid to do your job, and not punish your goddamn customers by gating your endgame with a stupid, impossible bit of torture.

Want to be a part of Heatwave?

2008-01-16T11:12:00.000-08:00

No, we're not hiring people -- not just yet. But we've started the process of assembling our "player advisory council," a group of volunteers who will have access to and offer feedback on our games while they are still in development. If this seems like something you'd be interested in, here's the article, with a link to the application form.

EA Store: You Just Don't Get It

2007-12-04T22:33:00.000-08:00

I know, shocking.

Here's the sitch: some friends have picked up Crysis and are enjoying it. I thought I might join them. Then I remembered that EA has that Steam-like downloadable store thing that should, in theory, let me buy the game digitally. Sweet! No more having to remember where I put the damn DVD. I decide to check it out.

You might notice that when I chose a digital download for my delivery option, they added a little something to my cart automatically. It's that $6 line item there, with the unfortunate acronym EDS (hint: a little Cialis will clear that problem right up, EA Store).

What might that be, you may wonder, as did I. Let's click on the little "what is this?" link, shall we?

Whoo, check that out! For only an extra $6 (and let's not even start on how EA is making out by selling me this thing digitally, because they keep 100% of the retail price and don't even have to print a BOX), EA will "keep my game on file" for 2 years. Uh, no thanks. If you do this, you are an idiot. They're going to keep a copy of the game online whether you get this or not, so they can sell it as a download in the future. You are literally handing EA free money. It's like the extended warranties you get at Circuit City (again, only if you're an idiot). Here's a clue guys: if you buy a game on Steam, you can reinstall it at any time in the future by simply re-downloading the Steam client and logging in. Not for 2 years, and not at some price premium -- forever. Likewise, if I want to play Galactic Civilizations 2, I just install the Stardock client and download it. Forever. Those guys clearly get it.

Some marketing bleeb came up with this genius idea to soak the credulous for a few extra bucks. Don't reward them for this behavior by taking them up on it.

While this may seem like my usual ranting about greedy corporate etc. etc., it's really not that. I was honestly interested in the digital download alternative, but this clause makes that untenable. Genuinely disappointing.

Welcome, Wired Visitors

2007-12-02T12:41:00.000-08:00

Back in September, a fellow here in town who works freelance for Wired interviewed me for an article. Unfortunately, that article got morphed into something else & I lost track of it.

Apparently, the morphed version of the article finally got posted a couple of days ago. The interview I did got cut down to a one-line quote -- but more importantly, it linked back to this blog. So for those of you out-of-towners visiting courtesy of Wired: welcome! For your amusement, here's a link to my post about the AGC talk I did (including a copy of the slides), which is what started this whole ball rolling.

Gears of Screw You, Epic

2007-11-11T08:58:00.000-08:00

Ever since I finished Half Life 2: Ep 2 I've been looking for another good shooter to play. And then I heard that Gears of War was going to be available for the PC. I've been wanting to play GoW for a long time, and simultaneously not wanting to buy an Xbox 360, so naturally I ran out and bought it. Alas, Gears of War is not what I was hoping for.

It's allegedly a tactical game, though you have no control over your squadmates -- er, squadmates? Let's not be afraid to call a spade a spade -- "bait," is what they are, as their job is apparently to run in, immediately be cut down by a hail of gunfire and for the rest of the level, lay there panting and moaning for you to come "revive" them -- I put that in quotes because, really, if you do run to [deadliest point in level] and revive them (which you apparently can't do from cover, for some reason, so you have to expose yourself to massive damage for a few seconds), all they subsquently do is repeat the running-into-hail-of-gunfire algorithm ad nauseum.

Your weapons, which have enough recoil to prevent you firing more than three accurate shots in a row, do not have enough impact to stop enemies from routinely charging directly at you, leaping over your cover, and chainsawing you in the face. Meanwhile your own melee attacks take about twenty . . . no, that's hyperbole . . . they take a few seconds to execute, which is not fast enough to respond to the guy chainsawing you in the etc. etc. Not only that, but the number of times you have to hit an individual enemy to bring them down is INSANE. In one place I had a guy above me and across the way popping up from behind a wall. The only place I could hit him was in the head . . . and yet it took me a couple hundred rounds of ammo to drop him. Even allowing for a 25% hit ratio, that's still 50 shots to the head. To take out one opponent. Ye gods. Apparently the human race HAS fallen on hard times, if this is the best tech we can muster.

The cover mechanism, while cool at first, proved very dicey in the heat of actual combat. Oftentimes, when I didn't have a clear shot at an opponent, I would detach from cover and stand near the other face of the obstruction I was hiding behind, hoping to get a better angle. Then hit the "cover" key . . . only to NOT attach to cover, but to dive straight into an onslaught of gunfire and die instantly.

This would be an endurable frustration were it not compounded by an UNENDURABLE one, namely, in porting the game MS have not bothered to add a "save anywhere" feature. No, really. On a PC game. I know, right? You would think they would have learned their lesson from everyone bitching about Far Cry. So in this one place (I'll call it "the last bit of Gears of Torture I will subject myself to in this lifetime") you've got three Locust that you're trying to kill with your little nerf gun -- a guy with a cannon, a spotter for the cannon guy (the aforementioned dude in a loft across the way), and a roamer. About fifteen times I played through this section, often killing the observer, sometimes killing the roamer. Finally, I managed to get behind the guy with the cannon so he couldn't instakill me, at which point it became apparent where they spent the AI dev budget they saved by making your teammates a bunch of slack-jawed monkeys. The guy abandoned his post to jump over my cover and chainsaw me in the face. It sure would have been nice to quicksave before that happened, so I didn't have to kill the same two guys another fifteen times in a row, since doing so is not fun. I know, it's crazy talk and I'm sure the designers at Epic have felt the etheric ripples of my heresy and are even now experiencing a twinge of irritable bowel syndrome.

This feature -- er, lack of a feature -- reduces the game to a sort of series of mini-vignettes in which you have to learn the correct sequence of actions the designers wanted you to do and execute them perfectly before being allowed to go on, such as the area where you have to close five emergence holes and they give you six grenades. No, really.

In short, Gears of War is a stunning looking game that only a certain type of person would enjoy, and that person would be someone who has never played any game but Halo and thinks Master Chief is the deepest, most well-developed character in the history of games. Unless your tolerance for suffering is greater than mine -- and remember, I have kids -- I would give it a miss. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go back and play through Episode 2 again to get this filthy taste out of my mouth.

The Results Are In

2007-09-19T12:08:00.000-07:00

By all accounts, my Austin GDC talk went very well. I was in one of the upstairs rooms, seating -- at a guess -- between a hundred and two hundred people. It was packed, and since I don't think I know a hundred to two hundred people, there must have been quite a few who were there just to see the talk.

Had a moment of terror when I realized, ten minutes before the presentation was to begin, that the video connections in the conference room were VGA and my MacBook Pro only had a DVI out. I called the conference organizer, who dispatched an A/V tech to my room with a DVI to VGA cable, and managed to start on-time. Although I was annoyed that I didn't have a volunteer in the room with a walkie (they gave me someone, but she was just for the "A" in A/V, and she bolted not long after introducing herself), I was pleased with how quickly and efficiently the problem got solved. Still, after the show I bought a DVI-to-VGA adapter, which now permanently resides in my notebook bag.

I did a small Powerpoint to use while setting up the video that said things like "This is not the talk. I am just setting up the video." That got a chuckle. Must remember to save that for future talks.

My metrics for how well it went were:

Only a couple of people sneaked out during the talk, in spite of the fact that it was right before lunch and people generally like to leave early to get a good spot in line.
About 60% of the audience stayed for the Q&A.
They laughed at most of the jokes.
People kept coming up to me throughout the rest of the show. Some just wanted to say "good talk," but many had questions that they weren't comfortable asking in a room full of people or didn't think of until after the talk was over. Either way, they were clearly engaged, so I'm happy about that.

I finished right on time, which was amazing considering that (given my off-the-cuff style) I hadn't really rehearsed it.

CMP recorded the talk, but they haven't told us yet where or when those recordings will be available. In the meantime, you can download the slides. (Note that these include some minor edits made the day of, including text animations. As such they are marginally more up-to-date than the ones you can download from the AGC website.)

Finally, note to self: transactions are a good way to help prevent dupes. Forgot to add that to the duping slide.

BioShock: Copy Protection Tipping Point?

2007-09-04T16:33:00.000-07:00

I finished BioShock, and have been meaning to do a post comparing it with F.E.A.R. However, the whole copy protection "rootkit" saga has me so captivated, I feel compelled to talk about that first.

Note: I generally like to keep it family-friendly hereabouts (why? I don't know. Perhaps out of fear that my kids will one day come across this and have to make a radical reassessment of their mental picture of their Parental Unit). However, there's a little NSFW language in here, because I just can't get around it. Proceed at your own peril.

I once read a book called Racehoss by a guy named Albert Race Sample, who gave me the book when I was briefly his neighbor over off Metric Boulevard. The man went on to become a celebrated City of Austin civil servant, but the book details his life as a young man, including the time he spent in prison. One of the scenes that has stayed with me from that story was his description of the prison mule, which had been fucked so regularly by the prisoners that she simply raised her tail anytime anyone got near her hindquarters.

I bought BioShock the day it got released, and I played the crap out of it. Pretty much every nonworking nonfamily noneating nonsleeping etc. etc. moment for four days was devoted to completing it. It's a great game, one of the few I've ever bought where my expectations were high and were still met. And the copy protection issue didn't really register for me. So I saw all the furor about it, and I wondered: why hadn't it bothered me?

Ah, but as I pondered this question, I realized: it had. In retrospect, as I was installing it, it had bugged me. But this was a game I had been planning to buy for a year. I was really jonesing to play it. Yes, the copy protection was obnoxious, but I wanted to play that game.

And that's when I realized: I had just raised my tail. Sure, I'll keep the DVD in the drive, in spite of the 4GB of hard drive space I just donated to your opus. Sure, you can install a permanent windows service and some undeletable registry keys. Sure, I'll connect to your authorization service and accept my first activation (of a paltry two).

And now that I've seen the forest for the trees, I'm hopping mad. Because inch by inch they are making me not want to play games on my PC ever again. "It's only a small requirement," they say, and "we have to protect our investment." Like they are doing us a favor by releasing the game on the PC in the first place.

Why am I even thinking about this, instead of just enjoying what a great game BioShock was? I am starting to understand why Richard Stallman is such a zealot. Seriously, if I went to the store and bought a hammer, then brought it home, started pounding away, and then got a security alert stating that I had driven in too many nails, that hammer would get planted right up someone's ass. So why is this acceptable behavior for software in general and games specifically?

Look, I'm no bleeding heart. I kinda sorta work in the industry, and I'm an aspiring fiction writer, so I'm very much in favor of people profiting from their intellectual property. I'm not saying "software wants to be free," I'm saying, "look, retards, your inability to see what's directly in front of your face is resulting in no harm to the pirates you're targeting, and lots of harm to the people that want to give you their money." I'm saying "there's a better way -- and more enlightened souls have known it for years."

I'm hoping this incident is a wake-up call to the industry. After all, no one ever said, "Here's some money -- please inconvenience me." Surely, hundreds of pages of outraged posts in the 2KGames forums will get noticed, right? With luck, the situation will inspire someone to pick up the ball and run with it, to the ultimate betterment of the situation for all parties. Maybe even me.

W00h00!

2007-07-27T22:03:00.000-07:00

I got this email today:

Hi Tim - Just a quick note to let you know that although the polls officially close today, we're confident that your submission will make it into the People's Choice track. We have it scheduled for Thursday September 6th from 11-12.

Thanks to everyone that voted for me!

Oh, crap, now I actually have to finish the damn thing . . .

P.S. Also? My D&D character came within millimeters of horrible, horrible death (was infected with zombie disease, knocked down to -9, had to stabilize within 1 round and was 5 rounds from standing up and attempting to mack on my group's brains). Pulled it out of the fire, just barely, so woohoo, team!

Deathly Hallows & Me: It's Like I'm Some Kind of Frickin Genius

2007-07-21T04:58:00.000-07:00

I wanted the final Harry Potter book; wanted it now, stamping my little foot exactly like Veruca Salt. But standing in line for three hours at midnight, surrounded by the berobed, bespectacled and be-wanded? Not so much. My dignity was at stake. I'm umpty-ump years old, and those people are nerds.

(For a movie? Sure, that's an inherently social experience, and standing in line only adds to it. But standing in line to get a book that I'm then going to take home and read by myself is just moronic.)

Normally, this wouldn't be a problem. I would just go the following morning when the bookstores reopened. I know they'll have ordered eleventy-hojillion of the things, so availability wouldn't be a concern. However, this wasn't really an option. The morning of, we were leaving the house at 7 AM to go to SeaWorld for the day, followed by a Cub Scout overnight in the park. I resigned myself to having to go and do the midnight thing after all; no way was I going to wait until Sunday afternoon, allowing some jackass to ruin it for me.

Then I had an idea. It remained my plan up until July 19th: go to Wal-Mart. Surely there wouldn't be long lines there -- nobody's that dumb! (Except me, I guess.) Only there was this niggling thought in the back of my head -- too obvious. Sure enough, after the fact, I found out that (BIG SPOILER ALERT) it would have been a bad idea.

So I concocted a new plan: I learned that my local Randall's store (a Safeway-owned grocery chain) would have copies of the book at launch day, and they would be open at 6. Ah-ha! I would get up early, go to Randall's, buy the book and some dramamine, and read it in the car on the way to SeaWorld. Brilliant! I would get the book a mere couple of hours later than the schmucks who waited in line

The alarm went off at 6 AM. My wife, already awake (prepping for SeaWorld, remember) said "It's 6:00". Redundancy, that's the key to a successful plan. I leapt out of bed; I am not a morning person at all but if a new Harry Potter book came out every day I'd never be late to work.

Drove down the street (more or less) to the Randall's (drive drive drive), pulled into the parking lot and what did I see? About 5 cars. Yes! Brilliant! I jumped out of my car and ran to the door, and as I entered the store I saw that it was practically vacant. Brilliant! I crossed to the books area, up front near the register, and what did I see?

Not one copy of the book.

I am thrown by this, but not all the way off the horse. OK, it was early, I could see they were stocking stuff, maybe they just hadn't cracked open their inventory yet. I decided to give them a few minutes to get to it before I started kicking someone's ass . . . maybe my own. I went to grab the Dramamine. Inevitably it takes me ten minutes to find whatever I'm looking for in that place anyway.

Next stumbling block: no Dramamine. No motion sickness meds of any kind whatsoever. And I need it, too. When I was a kid, I could read Dune (the old paperback edition with about a 30 degree bend to the spine and little tiny cramped type) with my head bouncing off the metal frame of the school bus window. Nowadays? Read one article in the paper and bleaugh!

I was frustrated, as you might imagine. But undaunted! I had just made up my mind to go talk to someone about where the hell my book was when I spotted generic Safeway motion sickness stuff. Score! Then I had another genius insight: the door I came in was the side door, not the main one. If they were going to have a display of the book, they might have put it at the other end of the store.

Indeed, as I ran down there, I saw they had about 20 copies of the book in the middle of -- get this -- a giant castle made of Coke. As if I was going to look at the book and go "That's right, reading is thirsty work. I better grab a case of Coke Zero." I picked up my copy of the book, skipped the Coke, checked out and headed home.

Total round trip time: 30 minutes. I would call the plan a success. I read roughly the first 150 pages on the trip to Seaworld, grabbed a few pages here and there during downtime in the overnight program, and finished it reading by booklight at 1:30 the following morning, tucked away in my sleeping bag in the shark tank at SeaWorld.

Ken Levine is one funny guy

2007-07-19T22:11:00.000-07:00

Ken wrote many episodes of MASH and is a cocreator of the series Cheers, among other things. His blog is consistently entertaining and usually pretty funny. His channeling of Sam Kinison knocked it out of the park for me, though, mandating a link.

Hey, linking to another blog with a short comment! I am is an REAL blogger!

PS, have you voted for my talk yet? What about your friends? Did you make them vote? Here's that link again, in case you lost it. (Thanks to all of you who have, by the way! I'm keeping pace with Mark Jacobs, so maybe I've got a shot!)

My Austin GDC Talk

2007-07-17T08:46:00.000-07:00

Killing two birds with one stone here -- I am both responding to Speedman's complaint that I haven't updated in a while, and pimping my AGC talk.

I haven't been updating because I had expected by this time to have something to talk about with Heatwave. Surprise surprise, there's nothing to talk about yet. We're still at the funds-seeeking stage; although we keep getting good referrals and having good meetings, nothing tangible has happened yet. Once we're funded and able to start working on our own title, though, Anthony and I have discussed switching over to a collective Heatwave blog, where he and I (and maybe some of the other members of the team) regularly update on the process of development. We thought this would be interesting, particularly for folks who want to make games but are not in the industry. What do you think? Comment form is below, God (& Blogger.com) willing.

About my talk: I submitted a proposal to give a talk at AGC this year. The talk is called Dupes, Speed Hacks and Black Holes: How Players Cheat in MMOs. It's a hands-on look at actual problems I encountered on Ultima Online, what caused them, and how we fixed them. The talk is not in the bag -- they are doing something new this year, called "People's Choice". Instead of deciding what talks to feature at the show, they have set up an online poll to let participants vote. I applaud the idea, though I don't think they've done a very good job communicating it (if I had read their newsletter, I would have known about it, but the TOC didn't make it clear what this was and so I hit delete). So: if you're going to GDC, and you'd like the opportunity to heckle me, go sign up and vote before July 27. Even if you're not going to vote for my talk, you should still do it -- help pick the lectures that you want to see at this year's conference.

Crazy-fast Hi-res Inkjet Printing

2007-03-28T09:47:00.000-07:00

A company called Silverbrook Research has come up with a technology for doing full-page width inkjet printing (i.e. they don't use a traversing head, but a matrix of nozzles, presumably with some kind of switching mechanism) that can print 6-12 inches per second. That's one A4-sized sheet per second. They have videos of their prototype printers working. The A4 and label printer videos are particularly impressive.

This could have seriously interesting ramifications for small-scale commercial printing. This solution doesn't look to be nearly as fast or have the quality level of offset printing . . . but it looks competitive. And it doesn't require the setup that offset does. For a small publisher, this is huge -- if you are printing a card game, for example, and you are doing a small run (say 2500 units), prepress can be 20% or more of your total job cost.

The Saddest Thing I've Seen All Year

2007-03-27T11:01:00.000-07:00

Well, that was the title of this post, back when it was going to be about this:

This is Richard Jeni's IMDB page, the week after his suicide. Note their Starmeter for him (which I presume tracks things like mentions in trade publications, internet searches etc.). That's a sad enough testimony to the dark underbelly of humanity. But then, I get this from Warren Ellis' blog, which clearly trumps that:

SAVANNAH, Ga. - A convicted child molester and his father took turns sexually assaulting a 6-year-old boy while the molester’s mother watched, then they choked the boy to death…

To which I can only say, WTF is wrong with you people? And also, how do we avoid making any more of you?

The only reason not to give these people the death penalty is that you only get to kill them once.

At Last, It Can Be Told

2007-03-22T21:19:00.000-07:00

Since some people have already outed me, I guess it's time to come out of the closet: yes all you smarty smart alecks on the UO Stratics board, I am now employed by Heatwave Interactive, the company started by Anthony "Sunsword" Castoro and Donn Clendenon. In fact, I am employee #3. Or, if you consider Donn & Anthony not to be employees, since they are founders & co-owners, I am employee #1. It's some very low number, however you look at it.

Exciting times, indeed. And what am I doing at Heatwave? The same thing I did for almost 8 years at Origin/EA: make great online games. Much as I will always love UO, I have to confess it's very exciting having the opportunity to build a new online game from the ground up. It's just about the only thing I haven't done in the MMO space!

What games are we working on? Well, to be honest, we're not -- the company isn't at that point yet. It's still very early in the process. Day to day, I'm doing contract work right now, for reasons that I probably shouldn't go into. I can let you in on a little inside scoop, though: the sooper seekrit Heatwave business plan:

Collect underpants.
TBD
Profit!

(Note to all of our potential investors who happened to just read that: that was humor. Our actual business plan is, shall we say, a little more grounded in reality than that!)

(Although, come to think of it, if we had a potential investor who didn't recognize that as a joke, we probably shouldn't take their money!)

Now With 110% More Cowbell

2007-03-22T13:31:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Sean McMains, I have discovered that my feed hasn't been updating for something like a year. This is now fixed! You're welcome, six people that read this blog.

Oh, Microsoft! You Slay Me!

2007-03-13T08:53:00.000-07:00

One of my favorite things about the current state of the next-gen console war is watching the response to the success of the Wii coming out of the Microsoft and Sony camps. Here's a great one from MS, courtesy of Gamasutra:

Talking about Microsoft's strategy going forward, Kim specifically praised "...the success of Nintendo with the Wii in a certain customer segment"

Uh, yeah. I believe that segment is widely referred-to as "humans."

For Speedman

2007-03-08T19:25:00.000-08:00

But this was WAAAY too good not to share:

This drawing was done by Binky on my white board in my cubicle at EA Redwood Shores. I supplied the caption, which reads "In my spare time, I got Ultima Online to run on my Motorola RAZR phone - Josh". Which, for those of you who don't know, is totally Speedman in a nutshell.

What The Hell Is Wrong With My Brain?

2007-03-08T08:17:00.001-08:00

Had a bit of insomnia this morning. Woke up at 4:30 and couldn't go back to sleep. I did a little work, still wasn't quite there, so I decided "This is exactly the sort of dilemma for which they invented the iPod."

I listened to a random selection of soothing stuff, but didn't really start to doze until I accidentally came across "Come Out and Play" by The Offspring. Eddie Izzard popped up in my brain and said "Oh just go with it, FFS" so I put on Badmotorfinger, by Soundgarden. Somewhere around "Jesus Christ Pose" I conked out.

Seriously, some kind of deep neurological damage there.

THQ Developing a Warhammer 40K MMO

2007-03-05T09:24:00.000-08:00

Which probably makes you think, "Isn't EA Mythic doing that?"

No, they are working on a project based on the fantasy flavor of Warhammer. The THQ game will be based on the one with the space marines.

Interview (featuring exactly the sort of informationless chest-thumping I abhor) right over here.

Go Stevie Go!

2007-02-07T15:18:00.000-08:00

(Apparently it's Speed Racer week here at the old homestead.)

I have bitched about Apple's DRM in the past. It strikes me as stupid that they go to such lengths to cripple the usability of downloadable music when you can buy the same songs on CD, rip them, and have completely unprotected copies.

Well, evidently, I was complaining about the wrong parties, and Steve Jobs feels the same way.

Time to crack out the old letter-writing campaign!

Go, Wil Wheaton, Go!

2007-02-02T10:22:00.001-08:00

Concerning the giant SNAFU over the Aqua Teen Hunger Force viral marketing campaign BS in Boston. And more specifically, the media's ridiculous handling of it:

You know, if the goal of terrorists and the whole point of terrorism is to scare the shit out of us so badly that we leap ten feet in the air whenever someone says "boo," then the terrorists are clearly kicking our national asses.

I have a tagline

2007-01-31T23:33:00.000-08:00

Or, as some might call it, a "blog description."

It comes from this post over on Elizabeth Bear's LiveJournal. It made me chuckle, and it reminded me of Sean of the Dead, which I've been meaning to rewatch, and I decided it was about as appropriate as I was likely to get. So there it is. Up there, under the title. RIF.

Come to think of it, "RIF" would make a good tagline, too.

Two Quotes

2007-01-31T10:34:00.000-08:00

Two actual quotes from my son Aidan over the last couple of days. (He's 6.)

(Getting out of the car.)
Me: OK, hop out. I've got our coats.
Aidan: And I've got my dignity.

(He didn't really know what the hell he was talking about. It was just random syllables as far as he was concerned. And yet, I about peed myself laughing.)

Next one:

Aidan: Oh, and I already took my vitamin.
(My wife)Lisa: Who gave that to you?
Aidan: I did.
Lisa: How'd you do that? It's a child-proof cap.
Aidan: I know, I read it. It said "Push in and turn," so I did.

No need to buy those safety containers anymore, I guess . . .

Half-Life 2: Episode One Update: For Small Children, Perhaps?

2007-01-18T23:59:00.000-08:00

Just saw this update on Steam for Half-Life 2: Episode One:

Changes/Additions

Added some more health for players to pick up during the elevator battle
Added more cinderblocks and barrels for physics ammunition during the elevator battle
Added some extra shotgun shells at start of the fight during the elevator battle
Slightly reduced the number of zombies attacking the player during the elevator battle

About which I can only say: you people are a bunch of wussies. Just stack all the propane tanks and gas cans in the dead end hallway at the beginning and you'll be fine.

Which got me to thinking: it would be fun to build small, "iron-man" type levels for HL2. No plot, no exploration, just "figure out this one room while every bloody monster in the known world tries to gank you." I may have to get on that in my copious spare time . . .

Which super-villain are you?

2007-01-16T23:30:00.000-08:00

Your results:
You are Dr. Doom

Dr. Doom		68%
The Joker		67%
Apocalypse		65%
Magneto		61%
Lex Luthor		60%
Green Goblin		54%
Dark Phoenix		51%
Juggernaut		50%
Riddler		47%
Mr. Freeze		47%
Venom		41%
Kingpin		40%
Catwoman		39%
Two-Face		38%
Mystique		30%
Poison Ivy		29%

Blessed with smarts and power but burdened by vanity.

Click here to take the "Which Super Villain am I?" quiz...

I'm a bit surprised . . . I kind of expected to be The Joker, and as you can see, it was a close call.