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zwolanerd

“I guess I just like liking things”

March 4, 2013 I Am Super Lame

Today’s installment of Let’s Watch Something Together will be late.  How late?  Late late.  I apologize.

For what’s it’s worth, it’s The Walking Dead’s fault. My wife and I started it on Netflix and, well, that’s where the time went.

 

 

UPDATE: Folks, it’s not going to happen today, I’m afraid :/  To keep with the (sorta regular) schedule, I’m going to push this week’s episode to next Monday rather than cram two episodes into the next few days. Thanks for watching the episode this week and take this week off, eh?

March 1, 2013 Get Your Game Face On

Yesterday I started playing Tiger Woods PGA Tour 13, carrying on a tradition of playing golf videogames that has lasted almost twenty years (my first was Links 386, and my brother and I still quote “Looks like I hit the tree, Jim” to each other from that one). For me, a gaming console needs to have two things: a good golf game and a good snowboarding game. You give me those two things and I’m pretty happy.  I’ve enjoyed the Tiger Woods series and I’m still looking for a snowboarding series I love (SSX is mostly okay, but I don’t love it).

When you’re creating your golfer in the game (because why would I play as an existing golfer?), you’re given the opportunity to import your own face, either by taking pictures with the Xbox Live Vision camera or by uploading pictures to EA’s website and downloading them from there into the game. Once that’s done, you map certain points on your face to the in-game model and it generates an avatar that sorta looks like you, if you squint and sit very far away from the screen. It’s actually a neat feature, and I’ve only ever seen it in this series and the Rainbow Six games, though I’d guess there are some other games that have it.

One thing I don’t understand about this particular entry in the series: they’ve added Kinect support, but when you’re making your Game Face, you can’t use the Kinect to make it. That makes no sense to me whatsoever. Number one, the Kinect has a camera and is already plugged in (I mean, really, who uses the Xbox Live Vision anymore?  People barely used it back in the day – I only bought it because, hey, accessory for my Xbox). Two, the Kinect already does room and face mapping – that’s its whole deal!  Seems like maybe they could use that?  “Please face the Kinect sensor. Now turn right. Now turn left. Done.” Admittedly, I don’t know much about programming, but this seems like a no-brainer.

My first run-in with creating a Game Face was in Tiger Woods PGA Tour 07, back in October 2006. To encourage the creation of Game Faces, EA actually gave you an achievement for doing it. Sure, it was only worth five points, but achievements are achievements. So I went through the process a couple of times and it worked okay and I got my five points.  I used the Vision camera, so my avatar always looked a little more gray than he should have, but he/I was at least recognizable enough that it creeped people out when they saw it.

winonaryder

Spock’s mom

Turns out, though, that there was also an achievement for creating a female game face. I didn’t really know any females that wouldn’t have thought it was weird that I asked them to make an avatar in this golf game, so I was stumped… for about two minutes. “Why not Winona Ryder?” my brain asked me.  “Why not, indeed,” I replied.

I had to find both a front-face and a side-face picture, and I remember it being more difficult that I imagined it would be.  There were a lot of front-face and 3/4-face pictures, but it was difficult to find the exact right side-face shot. And, yes, I am aware that I could be saying “profile” instead of “side-face,” but I think we can all agree that “side-face” is more fun to say.  Try it!

Once I found the right pictures, I uploaded them to the EA server and then created the in-game avatar with them. I named the character “Noni,” because that’s what her friends called her and it seemed less creepy to call the avatar that then to just call her “Winona.” Looking back, I can see that I was wrong. Very wrong.  There is no version of this story where the whole thing isn’t weird and I feel like I should apologize to her. Somebody arrange a meeting so I can.

Anyway, the avatar turned out about as okay as mine had and I got my five achievement points.

Fast forward about eight months. Golf games are basically timeless, there’s really no need to upgrade ever, but people (including me, obviously) still do. I hadn’t at this point.  I would still break the game out and play a round here and there, as you do. I had started dating a girl who wasn’t really into videogames — no, let me rephrase: she didn’t like videogames. Like, at all. Weird, right?  Anyway, we were still new enough as a couple that she was working on tolerating this hobby of mine, including trying to play a game with me now and then.  She saw my sorta-looked-like-me avatar in the golf game and asked about how that worked, and I suggested that she make an avatar so she could see for herself.

You can see where this is going already. I had, by this point, forgotten Noni was in there. I never golfed with her, I just had wanted the five points. But when we went into the character creation to start making the new one, there she was. And then I had to explain who Noni was. And why she was named Noni. And how I had created her.  It was … well, “awkward” isn’t really a strong enough word.  When we broke up a few months later, Noni wasn’t specifically mentioned, but she also wasn’t included on the List of Positive Things About This Relationship.

I am amused now when I look back on it. Really, it’s a little weird, I guess, but not overly so. I mean, I didn’t print out her picture and tape it to a mannequin head to have dinner with or anything. I just wanted to play some golf and I just wanted those five points.

There wasn’t an achievement for creating a Game Face in Tiger Woods 12, and that’s probably for the best.

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February 28, 2013 The Q*bert Game Watch

When I was in high school I had a watch I could play Q*bert on (this site has some pictures of it). I loved that thing. Every cube had room for four bits of LCD: Q*bert, Coily, a ball, and a “hopped-on” cube. The Q*bert LCD was hollow so if he hopped onto a cube with a ball on it, the ball would show in the middle of his stomach – an ingenious bit of planning to take advantage of the limitations of LCD “animation.” I remember it cost $25, which was a lot for me. I don’t remember how I earned the money to buy it.

The highest score you could get on the game was 1999. It used the clock area as the score area, and it must have saved them some money to not add the extra five LCD lines on the leading one to allow for higher scores. I got so good at playing on this watch that I could get to 1999 without dying once, so to find a new challenge, I started playing it upside-down (with the control buttons at the top, not with the screen turned away, just to clarify!). I got to the point where I could get to 1999 points that way, too, and started playing it sideways, which was a lot more difficult.

Here’s a video of a fellow demonstrating the gameplay:

This is what passed for high tech in 1983, folks!

You hear that beep that happens with every keypress?  There was no way to mute that, and watches like this were made to played during class. In my first-ever modding attempt, I opened the back of the watch and broke off the metal contact that supplied the sound. Good: now the game wouldn’t beep. Bad: now the alarm function on the watch was useless. If I had been a smarter kid, I’d have used electrical tape to stop the contact rather than damaging the watch, but I didn’t know much other than “beeps keep me from playing this in school, I must stop the beeps.”

Honestly, as a timekeeping device this watch was pretty much worthless. Pressing on all four control keys at the same time caused the watch to reset, losing both the current time and the high score. That second part didn’t matter because it was rare that the high score wasn’t 1999, but resetting the clock all the time was a pain. And I do mean all the time, because when friends learned that simply pressing all four keys would reset the watch they did that all the time. Jerks.

I somehow lost the watch around the time I lost my first “serious” high school girlfriend. That relationship ended badly, and I still remember the pain of it, but it’s intertwined with the pain of misplacing that watch, so the overall effect was even worse.   I’m not a guy who generally loses things, so it’s still strange to me that I misplaced something I liked so much.  I came to understand that losing the girl was a good thing in the long run, but you’ll never convince me that losing that watch was.

There are a few of the watches available on eBay, running from $35 to $284. I can’t bring myself to bid on them, though. Part of it is my general mistrust of eBay, but part of it, I think, is that I know I wouldn’t be any good at the game any more.  Q*bert was always a difficult game, but the watch version was something I was good at – any other version I’ve ever played I have been bad at. Not being good at the watch version any more would be another reminder of times and abilities gone by, and I have enough of those reminders, thank you very much.

I haven’t worn a watch in a long time. I graduated from a Q*bert watch to a calculator watch that would store phone numbers (40 of them!), and then moved on normal/regular watches (always digital, though, because reading a “face clock” takes me too long and I still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea) and then to a cell phone in my pocket. I can get hundreds of games on that cell phone, but there’s still no version of Q*bert available.  Sometimes technology marches on and sometimes it just says “nertz to you.”

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February 27, 2013 It’s-a Me, Mario!

This joke was a year in the making - Mass Effect 3 was released on March 6, 2012

This joke was a year in the making: Mass Effect 3 was released on March 6, 2012

I know the target audience for this joke is kind of small, but I guarantee that if you show it to a Mass Effect-loving friend of yours, they will at the very least give it a nose laugh.  And on the Internet, nose laughter is basically what “ROFL” means, anyway.

I have long promised you an article on the Mass Effect series, and it will eventually come.  It’s one of those “big” articles, though, a “thing I love,” and those sometimes take longer because I want them to be just right.

The above image was drawn by Brandon J. Carr, who is awesome.

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February 26, 2013 Tuesday 49: Music Harmonix Introduced Me To

Harmonix are the people behind Guitar Hero, Guitar Hero 2, and the Rock Band series (and the Dance Central series, but for the purposes of today’s list I will be ignoring that). In every one of these games, I have been introduced to music I was either unfamiliar with or hadn’t enjoyed until I got the chance to play it. I know that part of this is due to my changing tastes over time, but a lot of it is being given the opportunity to interact with the music more personally – the biggest strength, I feel, of these kinds of music games.

I’m breaking the lists down by game, as that helps me process it a little better. These are all songs that I have added to my playlist to listen to outside of the game as a direct result of playing them in the game. Many of these songs have driven purchases of the albums they are on as well. I don’t know if there’s much point in ordering each set, but I have bolded my favorite from each game to soften the pain from the loss of a numbered order.

Guitar Hero – Many of these were “As made famous by…” versions, but drove me to get the real version

  • “Crossroads” – Cream
  • “Godzilla” – Blue Öyster Cult
  • “I Wanna Be Sedated” – Ramones
  • “Iron Man” – Black Sabbath
  • “Killer Queen” – Queen
  • “Sharp Dressed Man” – ZZ Top
  • “Take Me Out” – Franz Ferdinand
  • “You’ve Got Another Thing Comin'” – Judas Priest
  • “Ziggy Stardust” – David Bowie
  • “Even Rats” – The Slip

Guitar Hero 2

  • “Crazy on You” – Heart
  • “Heart-Shaped Box” – Nirvana
  • “Strutter” – Kiss
  • “Surrender” – Cheap Trick

Rock Band

  • “Black Hole Sun” – Soundgarden
  • “Creep” – Radiohead – Getting the non-radio-edited version of this was a rude shock to my system, let me tell you.
  • “Dani California” – Red Hot Chili Peppers
  • “Detroit Rock City” – Kiss
  • “(Don’t Fear) The Reaper” – Blue Öyster Cult
  • “Foreplay/Long Time” – Boston
  • “In Bloom” – Nirvana
  • “Learn to Fly” – Foo Fighters
  • “Maps” – Yeah Yeah Yeahs
  • “Orange Crush” – R.E.M.
  • “Run to the Hills” – Iron Maiden
  • “Say It Ain’t So” – Weezer
  • “Should I Stay or Should I Go” – The Clash
  • “When You Were Young” – The Killers
  • “Won’t Get Fooled Again” – The Who

Rock Band 2

  • “Everlong” – Foo Fighters
  • “Feel the Pain” – Dinosaur Jr.
  • “Float On” – Modest Mouse
  • “Lazy Eye” – Silversun Pickups
  • “Let There Be Rock” – AC/DC
  • “Our Truth” – Lacuna Coil
  • “Pinball Wizard” – The Who
  • “Psycho Killer” – Talking Heads
  • “Round and Round” – Ratt
  • “Shooting Star” – Bad Company
  • “The Middle” – Jimmy Eat World
  • “Today” – The Smashing Pumpkins

Rock Band 3

  • “Bohemian Rhapsody” – Queen
  • “Crazy Train” – Ozzy Osbourne
  • “Foolin'” – Def Leppard
  • “I Need to Know” – Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers
  • “Portions for Foxes” – Rilo Kiley
  • “Stop Me If You Think You’ve Heard This One Before” – The Smiths
  • “Werewolves of London” – Warren Zevon
  • “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots Pt. 1” – The Flaming Lips

 

If you had told me twenty years ago that I ever would have liked songs by Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, AC/DC, and The Clash, I would’ve thought you were crazy.

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