Game

Rock Band 2

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Rock Band 2Because I’m addicted to rhythm video games, I pre-ordered Rock Band 2 which showed up this afternoon for Kelly and I to spend the evening rocking plastic replicas of instruments. Kelly plays bass or sings, I’m on guitar (or drums during the day).

Our band name: Sleeping Baby.

Don’t expect it to show on the leaderboards anytime soon, but we’re having a good time with the new collection of songs from this, the exported tracks from the previous version, and the downloaded songs we continue to revisit.

The only reason I’m not playing right now? Kelly’s dressing another new character.

A Wii Legal Concern

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Wii swing
It was only a matter of time.

  1. Nintendo releases an innovative console with motion-sensing controllers
  2. console sales quickly reach more than 400,000 in Japan, 600,000 in the US, continually selling-out shortly after stores open, successfully establishing success
  3. a few people online claim stories of controller straps breaking, flying remotes, and broken items on impact
  4. web-sites appear devoted to humorously highlighting Wii player mishaps, capitalizing on buzz, hoping to catch visitors and ad revenue
  5. “news” stories report on hyped incidents, increasing popular media coverage
  6. Nintendo reminds Wii owners of the safety precautions they provide with each console, game, and controller to protect themselves from lawsuit-happy idiots
  7. consumers declare the devices unsafe and defective, demand reparations
  8. Nintendo considerately responds to public concern, offers free strap replacement in retail stores and online
  9. class action by idiots ensues
  10. class action stirs Nintendo defenders at kotaku and slashdot

There’s nothing particularly surprising in this series of events. As a happy owner of a Wii and four remotes, I can only identify a few reasons you might have explaining why you can’t be trusted with this toy.

  • You deem the wrist-strap too uncool for your Wii Sports: Bowling stance, and skip it before hurling the ball down the lane. But your hands are covered in Dorito-grease, and you’ve been drinking (like you do), and you release that ball with just the right about of spin, curving it in for a strike. But it’s still not a bowling ball, and you’re still in your dorm-room, now quiet with a remote through your TV.
  • Wii Sports: Golf so realistically replicates your golf course experience, you can’t help continuing your bad habits in front of the video-game. Like slightly twisting left on your swing. Or consistently over-shooting the green. Or chipping into the water-hazard and throwing your club after it. But that wasn’t your club.
  • I got nuthin’ else … Just don’t let go of the damn controller, and don’t make up stupid excuses if you do without wearing that strap.

Nintendo Wii

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I didn’t expect to add the Wii to our distraction options this year, but one nonetheless sits connected to our TV. I can’t recall having more fun with another video game system. Sony and Microsoft may have superior hardware performance, but they’ve not once innovated with their consoles like Nintendo has with introducing a whole new way to interact with the system. Control through physical motion opens up so many doors for new game types; I look forward to seeing what appears over the next year: this system will attract so many unique games.

We’re currently restricted to single-player gaming as no additional controllers were available when we got the system, but it’s still fun taking turns in Wii Sports (Tennis, Baseball, Golf, Bowling, and Boxing), and I’m many hours into The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. I’ve encountered some shoulder and wrist soreness from repetitive motion, but that’s not surprising after spending hours punching, swinging, and throwing the wiimote around; I just need to stretch more before playing my video games. I’ve found it’s possible to play with smaller motions, but it’s less fun.

You’re all welcome to visit for a work-out.

St. Louis Gateway Arch to replace Monopoly’s Boardwalk?

A local forum points out Hasbro’s Monopoly board-game is getting a new Here and Now edition. The gimmick is the addition of cities, national landmarks and attractions, and allowing Internet voting for selection of those icons represented.

St. Louis’ candidates are the Gateway Arch (most recognizable), the Delmar Loop (incorrectly represented on Hasbro’s site with a photo from downtown), and Laclede’s Landing (St. Louis downtown riverfront scene). The Arch dominates the local race with 95% of St. Louis’ 43,976 votes.

Checking the results on the other cities, there’s more of a fight between landmarks spreading out their votes, and they don’t have much more voters than St. Louis. The promotion details explain:

the vote totals will determine where on the board those landmarks will be placed. The top voted city will be honored with the coveted blue property traditionally occupied by Boardwalk.

Could St. Louis claim the hottest spot in Monopoly?

(this post brought to you by “the procrastination of more interesting things”)

Apple Boot Camp for Windows XP and OS X

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Apple announced a public beta for a new utility called Boot Camp, allowing users of Intel-based macs (iMac, Mac Mini, MacBook Pro) to easily install and run Windows XP.

Holy Shit

After the contest to hack the EFI of the Intel Macs to run Windows, I didn’t think this was far off, but I certainly did not expect it to come from Apple.

Casey first alerted me to this, and my initial impulse was to reply, “why the hell would I want to dual boot?” The answers are slim, with the highest on the list being “because you can,” shortly followed by “could I play Half-life 2 or Counter-Strike: Source?” That’d be rather impressive… But certainly not productive. One of the reasons I bought the MacBook was to abandon Windows.

Anything requiring me to turn off my current Mac OS where everything pretty much “just works” and switch to Windows without access to running my OS X programs will be disruptive, and running Windows without official support from either Apple or Microsoft promises a rough experience.

the Apple Remote Control (IR), Apple Wireless (Bluetooth) keyboard or mouse, Apple USB Modem, MacBook Pro’s sudden motion sensor, MacBook Pro’s ambient light sensor, and built-in iSight camera will not function correctly when running Windows.

However, if I could just install some Windows libraries and then run programs compiled for windows without the full OS, and do so natively while remaining in OS X, then I’d be happy. Hopefully some day soon we’ll see that instead.

But I’m a glutton for punishment, and will at least try Bootcamp it to see what happens. Apple offers some details on requirements and issues one might expect.

Windows running on a Mac is like Windows running on a PC. That means it’ll be subject to the same attacks that plague the Windows world. So be sure to keep it updated with the latest Microsoft Windows security fixes.

After I backup my Mac.

Update:
So!

Today I ran Boot Camp, which had me burn a CD with hardware drivers, set the partition size for Windows (5GB default), and mere minutes later, I was rebooting to a Windows install CD.

Note: They’re not kidding when they say you need a Windows XP disk with Service Pack 2. I started with an MSDN disk handy containing that, XP Home, and something else accessible via boot-menu. Sadly, that menu was unusable as the laptop keyboard was not even initialized during the emulated boot process. So don’t bother attempting this unless you’ve got the XP CD proper: the one that you’d get at the store, with your PC, burned ISO to a bootable disk, whatever. And your legal XP license key. That you acquired legally. Microsoft is happy you want to deface your Mac, as long as you pay them for the priviledge.

Anyway, I got a “real” XP disk, and let Windows install. It was… a windows install. Nothing special there. So it puts files on the disk, boots off those files, and I’m looking at the default Windows background wallpaper. Without the hardware drivers, the resolution isn’t perfect and the color depth is off, but it’s certainly Windows. I inserted the disk containing the previous mentioned drivers and the auto-run installer kicked in. Approving the driver updates led to another reboot, and finally that damned Windows startup sound and I’m looking at Windows in 1440×900.

Pretty easy, and very creepy.
(In fact, I’m typing this update in Firefox, in Windows. On a Mac.)

Then, the time spent in “Windows Update.” While that ran I installed Gaim so I would feel so disconnected while operating in Windows. After some long downloads and a reboot, the updates were complete.

First fun thing – Half-Life 2 CDs. Pop disk 1 in, auto-runs… and lets me know I’ve got embarassingly little space available to install it’s content. A quick look at my mess reminds me I failed to give the Windows partition anything more than the default 5GB, which might sound like a lot… (have you looked at how much space your new windows install takes up?), but really 5GB isn’t if you want to dump a few modern games on your drive. No obvious way to resize my partition.

So I start over in Boot Camp with a 15GB Windows partition for round 2.

2 hours later…

Half-Life 2 CDs! (I’m still anxious to try Counter-Strike) At this point we’re still just Windows on a computer, nothing exciting while I swap CDs. Since HL2 runs with Valve’s Steam app, I’ve got to wait a while for it to decode/authorize/download updates. So I let that run.

While that’s downloading, I pull out my Doom3 CDs. Again some disc swapping, and Doom’s done! And Steam is still downloading and applying updates. While it does that, let’s just see how Doom runs…

I can’t make Doom 3 slow.

Nice. I’ve not used a machine that ran Doom well until my MacBook.

Looks like Counter-Strike: Source is 99% patched now, so I’ll end this post with this:

  • Boot Camp was simple and quick, and had I allowed for more space the first time, I wouldn’t have had to repeat my steps. Majority of time consumed was basic waiting on the Windows install.
  • I’ve never had a machine that ran Windows this well. It’s almost a shame I’ll only use it to play few games. Most of my time I’ll be back in OS X doing everything else.

World-building for Computer Games

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My senior year of college, I lived with Casey and Kelly in the “penthouse” apartment of Lindell Towers across the street from SLU. The penthouse got its name because it sat at the top floor of the building, was adjacent to the roof patio, and was as wide as the apartment building itself. Five windows on the front face of the building looked south above SLU’s campus, two windows west across the patio down Lindell Ave, and the bathroom and two bedroom windows on the east just looked into the adjacent building, which was more or less exciting, depending on what the neighbors were up to.

It was a good place to spend my last year of school. The proximity to campus made the last minute dash from bed to class pretty efficient, but when not at class or work, it was a good place to crash with plenty of room for friends.

But this post isn’t about the apartment physically; more virtually I suppose.

At some point it occurred to me to create our apartment with the mapping software I had to create levels for a computer game (the Action mod to Quake2), possibly while contemplating jumping from 14 floors. Not in a suicidal way, I just wondered what the free fall would be like.

The apartment design wasn’t too complicated, with the exception of the curved vaulted ceiling in the main room that took some time to properly fit. Once I completed the interior, I decided to fill out the other areas we could access physically on that floor and walled in (and floored and ceilinged) the hallway, elevator shaft, and began the stairwell that connected to the patio. Not wanting to create the rooms for each apartment on our floor, I just gave the neighbors locked doors. Since the stairwell had patio access, I had to add the patio, as well as an empty 13th floor apartment below ours since the patio was between floors and could see them both. I couldn’t very well leave empty spaces, which lead me to just fill in the area below our two floors for all 14 stories. This made the apartment building look more like a building, but it lacked a street. It was just floating in space, and I wouldn’t have a place to land if I jumped out the window, so I paved the block between my newly created apartment building and the empty void where SLU’s campus would be (is?).

To keep from roaming around the dark, light sources had to be placed in this new world. I wasn’t content with just placing some magic ambient light in random places as it didn’t seem very natural, so I created a few light-emitting lamps and ceiling fans inside and some light posts outside. The main room in the apartment was furnished with a couch and two chairs to provide some additional reference for scale. I created the counters and appliances in the kitchen, because it was the smallest room and I figured it was the fastest to complete. But then I decided to made the fan blades spin, which took more time than all the furnishing.

I wanted to build out more areas, like the entire street, ultimately creating sections of SLU’s campus also, but I was realizing that the computer hardware and game software didn’t really support large expansive open worlds with far lines of sight. Instead, it was more capable of handling enclosed spaces connected to each other, which is not what I wanted to do. So the grand plan that could have been was quickly halted before I wasted too much (more) time.

in game apartmentWhile the map I created of our apartment wasn’t very large, it was pretty close to accurate, which made roaming around the floor eerie. Especially since the game I made it for is a first person shooter, so I was walking around the place I lived armed with a gun painting the walls with a laser sight. An experience I didn’t anticipate having, ever. Speaking of anticipated experiences, jumping off the 14th floor is a little anti-climactic. You jump, experience a second or two of freefall, and your body unceremoniously crunches on impact with the street. Or the light post, depending on your aim. It occurs to me now I could have made some driving cars as targets, or simply painted a big bulls-eye on the ground if I really wanted to play with my jumping from the roof game, but now I’m just sounding more disturbed.

I bring all of this up now because last night I found the apartment map files and loaded this up again, after presuming it all lost from the last time I switched computers. Walking around the apartment was creepy then, it still is now.

But now is several years later, and the software and hardware support the worlds I want to create, as was evident last night while Sean and I played UT2K4 on wide open maps with lots of detail. I want the mapping software for UT so I can do some more world-building again.