blueZhift Blog

Almost forgot the resolutions! First the usual stuff (which really doesn’t count because everyone says it), lose weight, spend less money, yadda yadda yadda… Now for the real deal!

1. Finish coding at least one game under development. This has been a bug in my butt for a long time now! 2005 will be the year!
2. Cut down on the mindless nocturnal web surfing that eats into the time needed to accomplish item 1.
3. Learn enough Chinese and Japanese to impress my Hong Kong inlaws and fanboys at anime conventions! Seriously, my Cantonese could be much much better if only I would study. And as for Japanese, I want to learn enough to play import games (including RPGs and ren ai), get the gist of most J-Pop songs, and read background text and sound effects in manga.

I think these are all reachable goals and something positive to aspire to. Not only that, I think the effort will be a lot of fun!

As 2004 winds down, I feel compelled to write something. I’m still feeling rather overwhelmed by the news of the Indian Ocean tsunami (津波) that claimed so many lives on Dec 26. Like many, I just wonder why things like this have to happen.

Then I remember so many disasters that humankind has created on its own. So many of us die for such useless, preventable reasons at our own hands that maybe we shouldn’t be so amazed when an act of nature claims us en masse. But I think the real wonder and heartache such a great natural tragedy is that it feels like God no longer loves us and has chosen to smack us down just to show us who’s boss. I remember growing up that the worst thing that could happen was getting on the wrong side of daddy, which is something I try to remember when I get mad at my own kids.

Well, I believe that God still loves us, because if He really didn’t, none of us would escape destruction. So with that faith I’ll lift my glass and welcome the new year. Besides, what else can I do?

Oh, I did give money to Unicef, click here and you can too!

Well I had the displeasure of seeing Sponge Bob Squarepants The Movie with the kids yesterday. Oh the being with the kids part was great, it was the movie itself that, well, sucked! The basic problem was the lack of the really funny stuff that the Sponge Bob fan has come to  expect from the TV show. As one of my young ones put it, "there wasn’t enough funny, it just made me giggle." So if you absolutely must spend money on Sponge Bob then please click here! I’d have saved a lot of money that way. One bright spot was the introduction of Mindy the mermaid princess, I just love かわいい characters! (かわいい is kawaii which roughly translates as really cute. Why use it here? Well it really fits, and because I can! Heh heh heh….)

The oldest kids are out of school today for the holidays, so the annual question of what to do with them during this time arose once more. Fortunately, I decided to take them to see A Series of Unfortunate Events which was, quite fortunately, quite good. And since this was the first show today, it did not cost….a fortune… Okay, enough of that!

My oldest daughter (11) is quite a fan of the series of books on which the movie is based and was not disappointed. She did point out many of the differences between the movie and the books, but by the gleeful look on her face, none of these were show stoppers. Her younger brother and sister, who have not read the books, also enjoyed the show. The acting is good and the movie is well cast. I hope that we’ll see more Emily Browning in future roles. She’s gorgeous! And she has a lot of potential.

I haven’t read other reviews of the movie, but as an adult who has not, forgive me, read the books, I think it’s a good movie. It has a surrealistic, storybook feel to it, that just felt right from the bits I know about the books. And Jim Carrey is perfectly cast as the evil/hammy/campy Count Olaf. The trick for adults watching this is to not take things too seriously, which was easy for me since I take very little seriously! The only warning I would give is to those, who like Indiana Jones, are afraid of snakes. There are some scenes that feature a lot of snakes, but the snakes are not doing anything too scary except for one brief scene that is handled brilliantly (no spoiler here!).

So I give it two thumbs up, which, of course, are all of the thumbs I have!

I’ve been reading Chris Kohler’s excellent book, Power Up: How Japanese Video Games Gave the World an Extra Life and I’ve almost finished Chapter 9 which covers game music and music games. Music in games has always been a big deal for me and back in the day I even ripped songs from some of my Saturn game CDs to play in the car (the Virtual Cop, Wipeout, and Nights music are my favs). One of my favorite music games was the PS1 game Parappa the Rapper. Anyway, what does this have to do with Puffy AmiYumi?

Well, I was watching last night’s show whose first episode featured Yumi singing opera (I really liked the mouth animations in this one which added to the hilarity of the episode, good show!), followed by an episode in which they literally save a farm by playing a concert. This got me to thinking that Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi would be perfect for a console game in the style of Parappa the Rapper and its sequel (there was a Parappa 2 eventually but this came out firs) Um Jammer Lammy! The stories they’ve done so far would lend themselves to a music game of this sort quite well I think. The minigames on the Cartoon Network site are okay, but this show deserves a real game. Parappa the Rapper was a big success in Japan and a little less so in the U.S. while Um Jammer Lammy did not fair so well. Both of these titles got pretty good reviews, so maybe all they really lacked for U.S. success was a really good hook. Hi Hi Puffy AmiYumi has been a pretty big hit for Cartoon Network, so maybe Puffy AmiYumi is the hook that a Parappa/Lammy style game would need in this market. I hope they’ll give it a shot!

In a move that just screams monopoly, Electronic Arts has secured exclusive rights to NFL properties and players for the next 5 years. That basically means that every other football video game that used NFL players and stadiums is out of luck and essentially out of business. This all happens just as we were seeing the competition between Madden and ESPN really heat up, even leading to consumer friendly price drops!

In the end this cannot be good news for the consumer. Without competition, there’s nothing to stop EA from keeping prices high. Indeed, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Madden hit $60/copy on the next generation of consoles. Now $60 for a game is not automatically out of the question if the game rates it. But given recent news about the way EA treats its employees, there is little reason to believe that there are going to be innovations that merit the higher price tag. I remember back in the early Playstation days that EA actually cancelled Madden 96 because the quality of the game wasn’t up to snuff compared to Sony’s NFL Gameday. That was during a time of intense competition before EA had secured a virtual lock on NFL football games. In the absence of real competition, I wonder if they would have cancelled?

Now in all fairness, EA also has an exclusive deal with NASCAR, which as an old Papyrus NASCAR Racing fan, did not sit too well with me. But so far EA has continued to make improvements each year. So perhaps the same will hold true for Madden as well. On the whole, game developers are a passionate lot and will do great things if the suits will just stay out of the way.

Well it seems that the deal to move the Expos to DC to become the Nationals is in jeopardy. Why? Because the DC city council did its job and balked at 100% government financing to refurbish RFK stadium and build a new stadium. The council passed an amendment requiring that half of the estimated $500 million come from private sources.

Now the multibillionaire barons of baseball are all up in arms that DC won’t finance their money makin machine. Oh boo hoo! In these times of limited resources, 100% financing of a venture for private profits is indefensible! So let baseball pack up and look for suckers elsewhere. DC did the right thing, if the deal stinks, just walk away. There’s no shame in that.

They say that dog bites man is nothing special, but man bites dog, now that’s news! I just read that the Bush administration’s nominee to head the Department of Homeland Security, Bernard Kerik, has withdrawn his name from consideration because of questions regarding the immigration status of the nanny he hired. This sort of thing has happened to various nominees in the past, but this is the first time that I know of that a male nominee has met this fate.

This is just ridiculous! This whole nanny issue, while embarassing to those involved, in none of the cases was it truly relevant to the job. But now Bush and the Republicans are having a taste of their own medicine because they have raised the public piety bar so high that now their own nominees are hanging from it. They’ve been hoist by their own petard.

Ironically, they were willing to defend all of the money Kerik made on stock options from Taser International, a pretty strong potential conflict of interest. But a little insignificant nanny thing sinks the ship! Maybe now that a man has been sunk by nannygate they’ll stop this nonsense which is keeping a lot of good people from even considering work in the public sector.

This is the coolest thing of the day! My youngest daughter’s kindergarten class recently created self portraits in Picasso’s cubist style.

This is also up on the Artsonia web site where you can get t-shirts, mugs, etc., with your kid’s artwork on them. Part of the proceeds go to a fund for school art supplies. I’ve definitely got to get this on a t-shirt! One of these days I’ve got to get that girl to make some game art for me!

http://www.artsonia.com/museum/art.asp?id=439450

Well we knew it was coming, but once again the cold of winter is descending on Chicago and once again I totally dressed wrong for it this morning! Though I was nearly as wrong as two young ladies I saw on Michigan during my very late lunch (more on that later). Anyway, they looked like Japanese tourist and one was dressed in a very short tan plaid skirt while the other had rather short capri style pants. Neither had a coat, just light sweaters. Just the sight of that made me quickly forget about my nearly frozen ungloved hands and the short sleeved shirt I was wearing under my leather jacket. As cold as I was, they were definitely colder (and hot too! )

Now why was I out for a late late lunch at 3pm? Well blame it on Windows and stupidity. Never never start computer stuff just before lunch! I’d been trying to find updated drivers for my Dell docking stations without any luck. God, I hate looking for things on Dell’s web site! It is very painfully disorganized and very ugly. Well I didn’t find anything, so I tried installing the NT 4.0 era drivers on the XP box. Baddddd move! Worse move was uninstalling and then rebooting. Yep, dead Windows, couldn’t even run in safe mode. So I had to do a repair install and then SP2 all over again. It took a little over 2 hours which is actually not too bad in Windows world. Fortunately, I’d finished my most important work before that and had another computer I could work on. So on my left I reinstalled Windows and on my right I worked through a web based human subject certification exam I’m required to take each year. So my goof up didn’t really cost me much productivity. I’m pretty lucky that way.