This is my bi-annual “I’m not dead” post. Since I have this blog and I know it’s in a bunch of you schmucks’ RSS readers, I’m going to abuse my power over you and pimp out a pretty slick cooking blog an acquaintance of mine is running. She has been updating it like crazy with all sorts of delicious things, so if you like delicious things, you should probably take a look!

It’s a simple Blogspot blog called Roll It, Shake It, Bake It, Make it. Yeah, it’s a mouthful… but it’s a mouthful of delicious food holy shit. Some examples, if you need more convincing:

• Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Muffins
• Vanilla-Bean Leaf Cookies
• Chocolate Chunk Brownies (Pictured above)
• Autumn Leaves Fall Casserole

As you can see, she’s keeping up with the season, which is a good sign of a great blogger, IMO. Timely content is awesome. I don’t know what else I can say to convince you, so just head over there, take a look around, and add her to your RSS reader. Enjoy!

Yes, that is one of the most adorable things in the world. Laura Shigihara, the Plants vs Zombies composer, bought herself a webcam and decided to sing the PvZ ballad for us. Guest starring: George Fan, creator/designer of PvZ.

Anybody who knows me is very aware that I’m a huge supporter of digital distribution. I’m not here to rant about it today, just to share a few links that are great pieces of related news.

• Amazon’s Kindle drops to $189, heating up the e-reader price war. Prices on e-readers could potentially drop to below $100, which is fantastic for consumers. Hundreds upon hundreds of dollars for high-end e-readers and devices like the iPad is all fine and good for tech geeks, but it’s going to prevent them from becoming common household items anytime soon. How do you sell someone that isn’t tech savvy on a book (that isn’t really a book) that will cost them nearly $300? You don’t.
• Despite repeatedly voicing a reluctance to get into the digital marketplace, DC Comics has put out an iPhone/iPad app. Even if you aren’t a big comic fan, the “big dogs” of the comics industry taking the digital marketplace seriously is good news. Indie groups and grassroots efforts have already been capitalizing on the digital market and doing a great job of it, but larger groups like DC moving in will draw a lot of attention to the possibilities available. Here’s hoping they expand their efforts to other digital platforms as well, and not just Apple products.

Good news all around, I think.

• Miss Katie’s Diner
• Mitchell Park Conservatory a.k.a. The Domes
• Milwaukee Art Museum, a.k.a. The Calatrava
• Alterra at the Lake

I have no idea where we’re going tomorrow, but it’s somewhere. I’ll try to remember my camera this time.

[View with PicLens]

I wish I’d known this sooner. Oh, and the video is hilarious too.

The first of many.

I’ll call these “rapid reviews” because I didn’t actually finish either game, so I can’t fairly call them full reviews. I did not play them from beginning to end, I played them from beginning to whenever I got bored as hell.

As mentioned previously, I have an XBox 360 now. However, I can’t afford to keep myself stocked up on new games, so Gamefly is my source of gaming sustenance. It is very unfortunate that I didn’t enjoy my first two games, because Gamefly’s turnaround time is garbage when compared to Netflix. It takes Gamefly roughly a week to get me a new game, whereas Netflix takes about half of that. I suppose that’s what happens when the closest distribution center to Milwaukee, Wisconsin is in Pennsylvania, I guess. It’s still cheaper than renting games from a brick store in the end. …Anyway, that’s a completely irrelevant tangent. On to the reviews.

Resident Evil 5
The Resident Evil games were among my favorites as a kid, and it’s somewhat strange as its the series that has helped me bond with a lot of people in my life that I normally wouldn’t have. My step-dad and I took turns working our way through the first Resident Evil. Resident Evil 2 and Silent Hill were that way for me and my grade school best friend. It’s a series that, at one time, was very special to me. When I put Resident Evil 5 in my console, I was bracing myself for a return to the games that I had invested so much in once upon a time.

Good lord did I get tired of this game quickly. The controls have changed very little from, what, 13 years ago? 14 years ago? This is not a good thing. It fit the games back in the late 90s and early 2000s, but the idea that they’ve stayed that way on current-gen consoles is baffling. They are slow and cumbersome, and while I understand the argument that certain things need to be that way to make a survival horror game even the slightest bit frightening, I don’t need to enjoy it. I’m playing a super ripped soldier, I think the character I control should feel quite a bit more athletic.

I’m also not big on joining online games with people I don’t know whatsoever, so I wasn’t interested in playing the game co-op. I wanted to play it solo. It turns out that’s a terrible idea. Most of the horror in this game came from the fact that Sheva, my attractive female sidekick, could not manage her inventory if our lives depended on it. Oh, right. They did. If I gave her bullets, she would try her best to place them in everything except for the bad guys in front of us. If I took her bullets away, she ran around punching everything that looked the slightest bit rickety to see if there were any sweet, sweet bullets hidden inside. If I said screw it and loaded her inventory with herbs so she could stand back and hold my healing items for me, she found every possible opportunity to waste them. If I stubbed my toe, she would throw herbs at me. If I took even a scratch from a zombie, she would run over and rub herbs all over my glistening biceps. Quite honestly, I’m not even sure where some of the herbs went. She was making herself salads with them for all I know.

And every time I got a game over in the game, it’s because Sheva got her ass kicked and then I got mine kicked trying to save her. Personally, I considering the game unplayable solo, but I’m sure people have had better luck with it. As I said, I didn’t finish this game. Far too frustrating for me.

Prince of Persia
Prince of Persia is the second game I got through Gamefly, and I had quite a bit of fun with it. Sadly, that fun only lasted a few hours, because I came to realize the entire game was more or less the same as the opening sequences. The narrative wasn’t strong enough to keep me going, so I stopped playing once I was all parkour’d out.

This game’s artistic style is beautiful. I cannot stress that enough, this game is pure eye candy. The Prince himself has been mocked elsewhere for his colorful plumage, but I really enjoyed his character design. More than that though, I loved Elika. Both her appearance and the way she moved. Her model and animations just made her feel light, the sort of girl that you’d swear can’t weigh more than a feather. It was really quite perfect.

The acrobatics were fast paced and fun, and the interactions between Elika and the Prince during it were well coordinated and really made them feel like a strong pair. If Elika was in your way, she didn’t just block your path or get shunted in the other direction like some games that try the tag team thing (I’m looking at you, Resident Evil 5), the two of you maneuver around each other in a smooth motion. It was fantastic. The crazy high-flying stunts the two of you pulled off were fun to watch, especially through the many-tiered environments they give you to explore. You also didn’t need to worry about Elika’s well-being. Ever. Not while jumping off of tall cliffs are running across walls or lazily swinging your sword at demons. She existed only to help, never hinder.

The problem is the entirety of the game is exactly the same. Jump, climb, slide. Climb, slide, jump. Jump, slide, jump, climb, slide, jump. There’s some combat to break it up, but the combat system is terrible. Elika and the Prince have been leaping and climbing and flipping all over creation, but the second you’re faced with a battle, the two of you have damn near forgotten how to move. I don’t expect a Bayonetta out of the combat system, but I expected more out of a game that gives us such lovely acrobatics.

The environments also struck me as being a little too large for the purpose they served. They’re fun to move through to get to the boss, it’s fun figuring out how all of the platforms line up to gather the post-boss collectables, but you often have to go back and forth through the same areas repeatedly. Just look at this map.

The Temple is your starting point. It’s also where you need to return every time you have enough Light Seeds to “power up” Elika and allow you to explore new areas. The game is non-linear, so each power up opens different areas in each quadrant of the map. Each dot is essentially a small level, the difficulty going up slightly the farther away from the Temple that you are. When you’re trying to travel from one end of the map to the other, it gets really damn tedious. Returning to the Temple from the farthest reaches of the map just has you running through areas you’ve traveled through multiple times already, devoid of meaningful enemies or challenges. I love the environments, but I don’t want to go back and forth through them a dozen times over the course of the game. Adding quick-travel options would have made this much more tolerable.

The power ups themselves are somewhat of a bother, too. The power ups give you things like the ability to fly or scale buildings or whatever else after touching the proper points in a level. It’s mandatory to progress to the more “difficult” parts of the map. The problem is these things are not very fun, they’re glorified quicktime events where you push Triangle a lot and then sometimes you need to tap your joystick so you don’t slam face first into a low-hanging branch. The more powers you acquire, the less parkour you’re doing.

The acrobatics were the entirety of the game’s fun to me. Between these power ups and the constant back-and-forth travel, the game didn’t have a lot going for it. It’s very sad, because I adored the aesthetics. Elika is one of my favorite female companions in a game like this. I just couldn’t justify putting more time into the game. I didn’t feel like it had anything left to offer after 4 hours or so. I wanted more Elika, I wanted more of the Prince, but at that point in the game it felt like I would have more luck turning to the murky depths of FanFiction.net or DeviantArt.

Roughly a month ago I decided to do something crazy and buy myself an XBox 360. This turned out to be a horrible mistake financially, but such is the curse of hindsight. Or the lack of being able to tell the future, one of those. There isn’t much I can do about it though, so no reason whining. So I have a 360 now, and this is the first console I’ve ever purchased for myself. I was rather spoiled on consoles as a kid, they were always my big gifts around the holidays. I’ve had an NES, the old brick Game Boy, a Sega Genesis (as well as a 32x and a Nomad), a SNES, a Sega Saturn, a Playstation, a Playstation 2, and that was the end of my console legacy. I got my first computer during the PS2 era, and that killed any drive I may have had to buy other consoles. I think StarCraft singlehandedly made me a PC gamer.

So why did I slip back into my console gaming ways for a 360? One word: Bayonetta. I was slowly coming to realize there was a void in my heart that the PC couldn’t sufficiently fill. I needed to play an action game and I needed to play one bad. Back when my PS2 was still my favorite toy, I put countless hours into the Devil May Cry series and the God of War games, not to mention Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors of various flavors. I could play shooters and RTSes and RPGs all I wanted on the PC, but I couldn’t play the really badass high-impact action games I used to love so much. There was something missing from my life, and I just happened to realize it just before Bayonetta‘s release date. It had to be mine. So it was!

Bayonetta was awesome as far as combat goes. It was, essentially, the height of Devil May Cry‘s combat distilled and refined. It wasn’t as complex as DMC, but that wasn’t necessarily a bad thing in the context of the game. You were a saucy witch out to beat up angels. That was the entire point of the game. Combat being fast, simple and rewarding was a good thing. Any additional complexity would’ve taken away from the combat pacing, I think. To say it fulfilled my need for a badass action game is an understatement. It was fantastic.

The game isn’t without its flaws, though. Much like Devil May Cry, they tried very hard to build a story around the action, but the formula they used didn’t really work here. The narrative was shallow and made little sense, much of the dialogue took place during weird storyboard sequences, and there was way too much talking going on for a game about kicking angel ass. They failed to make me give one shit about anybody in the game besides Bayonetta’s more attractive (but unfortunately less bootylicious) counterpart, Jeanne. The load times were also horrific, I was honestly grinding gold in World of Warcraft between scenes in Bayonetta. The loading screens had a neat feature where you could try out combo moves in a black void while you wait, but you can only do that for so long before you realize you’re throwing high kicks into nothingness for no gain and no purpose. It was a pain.

Bayonetta was a gratuitous action game and the combat sequences never, ever pretend to be more than that, so it struck me as odd that they tried so hard to string together a tragic story throughout. Can’t a witchy temptress* that summons demons out of her own hair (which is also her clothes) beat up angels just for the hell of it? Seems simple enough to me!

The quicktime events were also something of a bother at times. Most of the time you could see them coming, and pushing Triangle to jump off of an exploding platform at the last second wasn’t a big deal. Other times it was just damn unfair. When you’re in the middle of a very zen moment of asskicking and suddenly it goes WHOASHITPUSHTRIANGLETODODGETHISFLYINGBUILDING while giving you barely a second to hit the button… it’s very enraging. Dying to something like that made me more angry than I want to admit. These moments were few and far between, however.

I highly recommend the game if you do like action games. Don’t expect much depth, it’s not an epic tale of good versus evil or anything like that. It’s over the top action with a strong, sexpot main character. Buy the game, kill some angels, relish in it. It’s all that matters.

A Bayonetta/Devil May Cry crossover is on my list of things that absolutely must exist before I die.

TED 2010 took place this past weekend, February 10th through the 13th. Very few of the talks are online right now, but a number of them have already sparked conversation around the ‘net regardless. While the mosquito death laser was cool and has some awesome potential when it comes to dealing with the spread of malaria, the talk I’ve embedded above held me in its grasp much more firmly.

It’s a talk given by Blaise Aguera y Arcas (creator of Seadragon) on behalf of Microsoft. The topic is augmented reality maps. In particular, he talks about it in the context of what Bing Maps are capable of, but the topic can really be applied to any sort of virtual map. Our level of technology has reached the point where we can not only map the entire world completely with 3D rendering with enough time and effort, but we can use those maps together with still images, streaming video, and all of that sort of thing to give the big picture, so to speak. I’m sure most of us are familiar with the ‘street view’ feature on the big popular virtual maps, Bing and Google. This goes a step farther.

Watch the video, it’s right there, I don’t need to narrate the whole thing to you. So why does it excite me so much? It’s another technology that maybe isn’t incredibly useful in its infancy, but there’s significant potential there to make great things possible. Imagine the ability to truly explore far off places, despite maybe not being able to leave your bedroom.

Maybe you’re bedridden, or simply don’t have the money. When this tech is a little further along, you will essentially be able to visit landmarks and exotic places and not just see pictures, but move yourself through the environments. Imagine the ability to not just see still pictures of Paris, but be able to pick and choose which shops and restaurants you go inside and look around in. These images aren’t artistic depictions or artificial locations, they’re real pictures. On top of that, streaming video capabilities means that you could potentially be doing it live. You could go on vacation with friends and family when you otherwise wouldn’t be able to. See what they see, visit the places that they visit, and all you need is friends and an internet connection. And if you’re interested in seeing what those places look like at other times of the day, no problem, there’s endless pictures online that could be supplied to you seamlessly via these virtual maps. No need to search through flickr for hours. They’re generated for you as you want them.

Eventually, we will be able to see the four corners of the world through others’ eyes. No, you won’t really be there, but it’s pretty close and makes the world a whole lot smaller.

Another TED talk I want to mention but don’t feel like devoting an entire post to right now is George Whitesides‘ talk on affordable health care diagnostic solutions. That is, bringing the price point of diagnosing illnesses as close to $0 as possible. Some of the solutions are fascinating in their simplicity. This talk is actually from 2009 apparently, but was only posted this month. Whitesides gave another talk on simplicity in this year’s conference but that isn’t available online yet.

Related Posts: Neurologist Oliver Sacks on hallucinations and the mind

The Pentagon’s mad science arm may have come up with its most radical project yet. Darpa is looking to re-write the laws of evolution to the military’s advantage, creating “synthetic organisms” that can live forever — or can be killed with the flick of a molecular switch.

As part of its budget for the next year, Darpa is investing $6 million into a project called BioDesign, with the goal of eliminating “the randomness of natural evolutionary advancement.” The plan would assemble the latest bio-tech knowledge to come up with living, breathing creatures that are genetically engineered to “produce the intended biological effect.” Darpa wants the organisms to be fortified with molecules that bolster cell resistance to death, so that the lab-monsters can “ultimately be programmed to live indefinitely.”

Of course, Darpa’s got to prevent the super-species from being swayed to do enemy work — so they’ll encode loyalty right into DNA, by developing genetically programmed locks to create “tamper proof” cells. Plus, the synthetic organism will be traceable, using some kind of DNA manipulation, “similar to a serial number on a handgun.” And if that doesn’t work, don’t worry. In case Darpa’s plan somehow goes horribly awry, they’re also tossing in a last-resort, genetically-coded kill switch:

“Develop strategies to create a synthetic organism “self-destruct” option to be implemented upon nefarious removal of organism.”

The project comes as Darpa also plans to throw $20 million into a new synthetic biology program, and $7.5 million into “increasing by several decades the speed with which we sequence, analyze and functionally edit cellular genomes.”

Head on over to Wired to read the full article, it’s pretty awesome. It’s sound like fascinating work, but also dangerous. The ethical debates that come out of it are likely to be intense, since it invokes the whole “playing god” issue. As an atheist, that’s not really a concern to me.

Whether or not we should create life is not even a question. If we can, we should. The question is what kind of life should it be, what will be its purpose, and are we doing it for the right reason? Considering DARPA is heading up the project, philanthropy is probably not on their priority list here.

I’m not saying nothing good comes out of the military, because that’s just not true. Much of what they do has made the world better, and a lot of it is simply out of necessity. All I’m sayin’ is that it’s pretty unlikely they’re developing ageless organisms purely for science, medicine and the betterment of mankind. It might trickle down that way like all technologies do (including one we’re particularly familiar with) but the initial project? Unlikely.

It’s also worth noting that we’re not looking at a lot of money here, in science terms. This is a bare few millions, which is definitely not enough money to go off breeding a super race or anything. We’re most likely looking at basic tissues or micro organisms.

Regardless, it’s something that is both fascinating and frightening. The fact that we, in the near future, may have the ability to design and create life that is essentially ageless is an intimidating thought.

[Source]