You don't really need to read this.

PAX East

Joe — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 03:57:35 +0000

I realized shortly before I left for Boston that this would be my first time driving in a major north east city. It ended up not being too bad except for the lack agreed upon lanes in the city and the fact that I hate valet parking.

On Thursday night, I ran into Greg Miller and Daemon Hatfield, which I know from IGN’s Game Scoop podcast, in the elevator of my hotel. Very friendly people, their eyes lit up when I asked them if they were from IGN.

Wil Wheaton’s keynote was a sequel of sorts to his PAX 2007 speech. He talked about the culture and society that forms around gaming which was interesting.

The Penny Arcade panels were appropriately funny, but the highlights were definitely the concerts. The opening act for Friday night was The Protomen. For those that don’t get the reference (I didn’t figure it out till part way through the concert), they perform rock operas based on Mega Man. I had never heard of them before, but they put on one hell of a show. The second act, Anamanguchi, has an NES as one of its “members”. The mix of chiptune and live guitar was a lot of fun. I don’t know how well either band holds up outside of a concert. There’s just something to being able to FEEL the music while you listen to it. There were two more acts after that, but I decided to cut out. While the first day is shorter, I find it harder to get through than the second day of a con.

The Video Game Orchestra led off Saturday’s concert. Given the venue, they only had a chamber orchestra, but they did respectable versions of the Super Mario Medley and the Wind Garden theme from Super Mario Galaxy. They got an encore, but were apparently unprepared to satisfy the crowd chanting for Zelda (I may have had something to do with that). Next up were Paul and Storm, a comedic duo I hadn’t heard of. They were funny, but leave it to the PAX crowd to be funnier. I was in tears. They eventually told us to shut the f*** up, we didn’t listen. Jonathan Coulton closed out the night. He did all of his required songs including Still Alive. It was a great show, but I didn’t get to bed until 2am.

I skipped the third day of PAX.

[Joe]

Love is an MMO

Joe — Thu, 20 Aug 2009 23:05:34 +0000

Passage is a short ‘game’. It’s kinda one of those things that you have to make of it what you will. The creator, Jason Rohrer, was the focus of the most recent full episode of A Life Well Wasted. My understanding is that he’s drawn some criticism for selling out by getting a ‘real’ job.

A Life Well Wasted is a bit on the artsy side, but generally has enough substance to be interesting. It definitely has that documentary feel to it.

I could try to describe Love, but it’s easier to just point you to this gameplay video. It’s crazy that it’s all being done by one guy.

William and Sly is worth it just for the jumping, but the animation is good too.

As I remember, And Yet it Moves wasn’t in the massive indie game sale that Steam had recently, which was a bit disappointing. The good news for Wii owners is that it’s coming to WiiWare

[Joe]

Putting on My Platform Shoes

Joe — Tue, 04 Aug 2009 01:50:43 +0000

From time to time I will still ask people not-so general knowledge questions when I have easy access to a PC. Possibly equally silly, when there is a topic of interest to me I don’t immediately look for a blog on the subject. After posting about a couple independent games a little while back I wised up and searched out TIGSource which has a very useful independent game database.

From TIGSource, I discovered Knytt and it’s sequel Knytt Stories which are both fantastic freeware platformers for PC by Nicklas ‘Nifflas‘ Nygren. Nifflas is currently working with Nicalis (confused yet?) on Night Game for WiiWare and a game known as Q for an as yet unannounced platform, though likely Wii. Q looks to be in the vein of the Knytt games and Night Game has similarities to Nifflas’ other game, Within a Deep Forest.

Nicalis is the company porting Cave Story, another classic freeware PC platformer, to the Wii. Recently, they announced that they will also be porting La Mulana to the Wii.

I’ve also heard that Iji is a good game, I just have to wade through the story elements.

[Joe]

The Link Trail

Joe — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 20:56:28 +0000

On the Saturday before Easter I woke up to find Dad at the computer. He had been looking for a new trail to hike and found the Link Trail. According to the website, the Link Trail was created to connect the Finger Lakes Trail and the Old Erie Canal Trail. My understanding is that all three are part of the North Country Trail which is supposed to stretch all the way out to North Dakota. Parts of the Link Trail are along the road, so we decided to start at the closest non-road section which starts at the cemetery in Canastota. From there we walked to Nelson Road, which is about a 2 and a half mile hike, and back.

Since then we mapped out about 15 miles of the 39.1 mile trail over the course of around 5 hikes. The most recent, and furthest away hike we did was through the Nelson Swamp Unique Area which is the other side of Cazenovia. It’s been an interesting experience as the trail has taken us through people’s front yards, back yards, an “art” park and at one point through a cow pasture surrounded by an electric fence. Much of the trail is an old railroad bed and there are plenty of indications of that lying around. We’ve also seen some interesting plants which you can see below. For more about the trail and the sorts of things you can find along it, check out the blog dedicated to it.

[Joe]

17 miles and 4800 feet

Joe — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 02:11:42 +0000

At camp there’s a photo that has been there as long as I can remember. It’s so much a fixture at camp that for the longest time I never really thought of it as a real place or even a place that I could go to. It took on a sort of mythical nature. If you’ve seen Shadowlands, you have an idea of what I’m talking about.The picture is of a shear rock face with a tree in front and then a pool of water in front of that. Below is my poor attempt to photograph it while still in it’s frame.

It wasn’t until recently that I asked Dad where the photo might be of, to which he said Yosemite. I guess I had never really looked at pictures of Yosemite before, but now I’m reasonably sure he’s right. More recently, I ran across Trailspotting and specifically this post. When I saw that picture of the Half Dome, I knew what I wanted to do.

The hike starts at 4000 ft and reaches 8,836 ft, at which point you are nearly a mile above the valley floor. According to Trailspotting you have to hike in the 8 and a half miles and back out in the same day. In my current state of physical unfitness, I think that would be a bit much. My advisor says that there might be a place to camp along the way. I’ll definitely have to do some more research.

I’ve also decided to create a Google map of the places I plan to go.

[Joe]

You’ve already lost

Joe — Thu, 09 Jul 2009 16:43:57 +0000

I started following Newt Gingrich on twitter recently. I don’t agree with him all the time (my impression is that he’s a bit of an elitist), but he does tweet about some important topics (e.g. Iran, the new energy tax, health care reform) without an excessive amount of chaff. A little while back he tweeted about the stuff Obama is doing with health care and linked to his own proposal. I read up until this line: “Every American should be encouraged and incentivized to take personal responsibility for their health.” It seems to me that if the government has to “incentivize” people to take care of themselves, then there is something much more seriously wrong with the country than its health care system. And having the government try to fix it would probably just exacerbate the problem.

[Joe]

Humorously, the Firefox dictionary did not recognize the word “incentivized” and one of the suggested corrections was “collectivized”. Hmm…

Independent Game Festival

Joe — Mon, 06 Jul 2009 03:56:48 +0000

Apparently the IGF has been around for a while, because the 11th annual festival was earlier this year. Even though a number of the independent games I’ve mentioned here, including World of Goo, Crayon Physics and Braid, have won awards at the IGF, I don’t remember hearing about it until I checked out Blueberry Garden which won the Grand Prize this year. I also picked up And Yet it Moves which won a student award in 2007. Both games are worth your money (be sure to check the system requirements).

Since both are platformers, I wanted to play with a controller (though keyboard would work fine for both) so I borrowed a PS3 controller. I was able to get the USB drivers to work by following the tutorial in this video and used Joy to Key to map the controls when necessary.

[Joe]

Taking stock of the situation

Joe — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 04:08:48 +0000

Let’s see if I’ve got this right. The government is effectively taking over private companies. Congress is going to vote on a new energy tax that will likely further screw up our beleaguered economy to no useful end. The president is trying to take over more control of our health care system by creating a new program that even he won’t go near. People are being killed in the streets of Iran for protesting tyranny, and all we have for them are flowery words. North Korea is threatening a nuclear “fire shower” and the best we can do is extend sanctions that haven’t done much to stop them so far. And the kicker? All the media outlets are doing is mourning the loss of one of the most vile scumbags* I can imagine.

*My apologies to scumbags, I don’t have the language to describe that kind of evil.

[Joe]

Another Name For

Joe — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 03:23:14 +0000

The way that smokers are treated in America sickens me. The government puts out ads denouncing their chosen lifestyle. They are persecuted through excessive taxation on the things they need to satisfy their desires. The government even has programs to cure them of their ‘illness’. It is important to remember that smokers are people too, and they should not treated differently just because they have an inclination to do something that others don’t have a desire to do. It’s really not surprising that there is such a strong anti-smoker bias in our society today. The indoctrination process against smokers starts at a young age, children as young as elementary school age are taught that it is ‘naughty’ to smoke. I think to rectify the situation, we should create programs to teach these children that it’s not wrong to have the desire to smoke. They should be taught to be open minded and to learn more about themselves and that it’s OK if they want to smoke too. Maybe when they grow up, they can become leaders within their communities and help to bring about some acceptance in this area by extolling the benefits and inherent value of the culture that surrounds this activity and the camaraderie it engenders. It’s possible that in time smoking will even become more legitimized and given it’s proper place among other state sanctioned forms of recreation like mountain climbing or swimming.

/satire

[Joe]

I didn’t realize we lost the battle of Peterboro

Joe — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 03:31:59 +0000

At the end, the Union general got up and started yelling at the Confederates because they were “killing” the wounded. One of the Confederates got so tired of listening to him that he shot him. The Union general’s response was, “You missed. Got anything more?”. The Confederate shot him a second time and the response was “You missed again.” At that point the Confederate took his pistol by the barrel and used it as a club.

[Joe]