Tea Leaves

I started this weblog last January. Originally, it was just meant to be a place for me to keep my notes on my Final Cut Pro projects. My “real writing” was meant to go on the (now defunct) Tea Leaves project of the Danampersanderic art collective. But that project somehow didn’t take off, and I found myself putting more and more content here. Before I knew it there were actually readers.

It was a month later that I published a document meant to summarize my philosophy of writing for this space. It’s still on the sidebar today. The quick summary is: longer, in-depth articles. No “hey, look at this neat link!” items. Keep confessional, overly intimate, or personal details about myself to a minimum, or better yet eliminate them completely. Lastly, and perhaps most significantly, no “blogging about blogging.” If you want to find a weblog where the authors incessantly talk about Movable Type vs. WordPress, or how great or stupid RSS is, or how blogging is going to change the world, you can go practically anywhere else. I find these topics intensely boring. I want to write about stuff. I don’t want to write about writing stuff.

All rules are made to be broken, on occasion. Since it is the end of 2004, this is a good point to suspend the “no blogging about blogging” rule, for one day. I’d like to take a moment to look back at how this space has grown in the past year, and how it will develop in 2005.

Readership has increased dramatically over the past year. What started as a URL handed out to a few friends now gets about 30,000 page visits a month. Lots of people read us via an RSS newsreader, or through bloglines, livejournal, or some other aggregated feed. Eventually, I may need to deploy a new host to handle traffic. At that time, I may transition the site to the (already reserved and working, although not publicized) domain name tleaves.com.

In terms of topics covered, the site has a strong emphasis on games with discussions of food, culture, and computers and software development topics coming not far behind. The other topics — racing, filmmaking, and photography — have become unusual digressions. I’m inclined to leave them as such, rather than formally eliminating them.

Early on, I decided that the unwritten goal for frequency of posting was “one good, reasonably long article per weekday.” No excuses, no “I don’t have time to post today” items; silence is preferable to weaseling. We haven’t been 100% successful in meeting this target, but we’ve been closer than I thought we’d get when I set the goal. This has been good in many ways. First and foremost, it has kept me writing at a furious pace, which means I’m continually honing my writing skills. That was always my secret goal for having this space. I think it also benefits the readers. It would give me a warm and fuzzy feeling to know that there were even two or three people out there who say to themselves, once a day, at work, “Hey, I should check and see if there’s a new article at Tea Leaves.” I have a day job that takes precedence over the weblog. But I look forward to writing an article each night. If there’s someone out there who looks forward to reading it, that’s super cool.

Having the “one article per weekday” goal has had some negative effects too. It means that I’ve published some articles on topics that I was only borderline interested in. Worse, it has pushed me to publish articles that weren’t ready; they really needed more work. This has had both micro effects (the occasional typo or clumsy phrase that my volunteer editor yells at me for the day after I’ve posted) and the occasional big effect (where I take what was meant to be a more in-depth article and instead chop it down to be “one day’s worth” of posting.) That latter problem hasn’t happened as much since psu started contributing.

And bringing psu on board was a superb thing. I look forward to reading his articles eagerly, and in more than just an “oh, phew, I don’t have to meet tonight’s deadline” sense. We agree philosophically on many things, yet our interests are just divergent enough to give the site more breadth without having strict conformity of opinion. In the coming year, I hope to bring at least one more author on board, if I can find someone whose style, areas of interest, and willingness to write frequently mesh well with mine. My interests in this are somewhat selfish: as the principal behind Tea Leaves, I feel obligated to provide an article a day. But since this isn’t paying work, I’m realistic about my ability to maintain that pace with so few writers.

So it’s a tricky balance. I have a sense that having a few more writers would improve the quality of each article (because of reduced pressure to “just post it, already”). Having too many writers could reduce the thematic consistency of the site. I’m not sure where, exactly, the line is. But I’m going to continue looking for it.

Even though I view Tea Leaves as a place for writing (as compared to a place for “discussion”), I do read all of the comments and appreciate them, even when I don’t necessarily agree. The most surprising thread of the year for me was in the article about Idlewild, where Snow White and Little Bo Peep yelled at me for (in their eyes) being an insensitive, child-hating clod. On the constructive side of the fence, the comments on the article What Programming Language brought up some interesting points and opinions. I really wished I had thought of some of the items readers came up with in the discussion on Software Development Considered Harmful. So thanks to all of you who participate regularly, or occasionally, and I hope you keep reading — and writing — in 2005.

I’d also like to specifically thank psu for joining me in this little exercise; my volunteer editor for being completely willing to point out every awkward sentence, verb tense disagreement, and boring part of every article I write; and the folks on CMU CS Zephyr for their useful feedback, helpful suggestions, and not stabbing me in the neck every time I post another URL.

See you next year.

I have a reputation, perhaps deserved, of being generally grumpy and hateful. In the spirit of the Holiday Season, I thought I would try and dispel this notion by listing many things that I like, in no particular order.

Solis Maestro

I had a cheap Pavoni burr grinder that I had used for the last 5 or 6 years for my home coffee needs. I don’t need much from a coffee grinder. I make coffee with a french press or a moka pot. So all a grinder has to do is go from super coarse to medium fine easily. The Pavoni always worked fine, except for the layer of fine coffee dust that it spewed everywhere. Finally, after years of abuse, coffee stopped falling into the burrs, so I decided to get something new.

It may seem strange to spend more than $100 on a coffee mill, and it did seem strange to me at the time. But the Solis is really a thing of beauty. You can set it from french press coarse to Turkish Coffee fine in one easy twist. Whatever the setting, it generates coffee grounds of a uniform fineness without spraying dust and without a huge amount of static, even in Pittsburgh winters. It’s also easy to clean, so it won’t sit uncleaned like the Pavoni did for 6 years.

Rose Tea Cafe

Rose Tea has gone from a purveyor of an odd Asian drink craze to simply the best Chinese food in Pittsburgh period. The home style Taiwanese food that they serve here is actually good enough for me to want to go even if I’ve recently eaten my mom’s food. In fact, it is much like my mom’s food, which is why it simply rules.

Chopstick Inn has a larger menu, but IMHO it is not as well executed. Here are some dishes that Rose Tea does that are so good they will make you weep with joy:

- Shredded pork with pressed bean curd.
- Any of the whole fish
- Taiwanese Chunk Chicken.
- Pork Stomach and Duck Blood.
- Beef Stew (the stewed beef is actually cooked long enough).
- Taiwanese style rice cakes (just like mom’s).
- Chinese greens that are always cooked right. Not just every other time you go.
- The pickled cabbage appettizer
- The Taiwanese sausage appetizer
- The soy sauce eggs (just like mom’s).

All this and good prices too. I used to rate Chinese places in Pittsburgh by how many different sauce colors they had on their menu. It is therefore something of a watershed to have a place in town that has two brown sauces that are completely different in flavor. There is finally real Chinese food in Pittsburgh. Go get it.

P.S. If I catch you in P.F. Chang’s, I’ll kill you with my bare hands.

My G4 Powerbook

I do almost all my computing on my laptop.

- Photography
- Writing
- Coding

That’s pretty much it. If the software I worked on weren’t quite so large, I would not even use the G5 tower at work. But I’ve gotten used to the fast build times. The fact that I use this machine basically 24/7 and it has not failed in two years makes me like it. It’s also silent, except when it gets hot. I love that.

Airport Express

It’s a power brick that gives you wireless network anywhere there is an ethernet tap. What more could you want?

The modern game console

As I discussed in more detail elsewhere it’s just not possible to go wrong with console game machines these days. The current set of consoles are better than their PC counterparts in almost every way and an order of magnitude cheaper. You can buy all of the major brands (GameCube, Xbox, PS2) and a few games for each for the price of that graphics card and monitor you need to play DOOM 3. So I did.

Counterstrike and Xbox Live

Halo 2 and Half-Life 2 may be prettier and feature excellent single player gameplay, but nothing is more fun to me than a few rounds of Counterstrike with my Xbox Live buddies against bots. Xbox Live makes creating and joining the game session quick and painless, and the intense pace, team based gameplay (always with headsets) is simply too good to really pass up.

Counterstrike:Source on the PC is prettier, but leaves the gameplay unchanged, and the current server browser system is so bad that it will make a strong man break down into uncontrollable weeping. The other day, tilt and I tried to get into a game together (I have a PC at work I use for this, it’s a long story). Here is how it went:

- We both fire up the game.
- We search for servers.
- We log on to the “friends” list.
- He makes a server I cannot see.
- Niether of us is online for the other.
- Look for a common server to join.
- Can’t do *name* filtering on the list of 350000 servers.
- Dance around for 20min. By pure luck, get into one server by accident, but the game ends.
- Even though we are both live and active in a server, neither one of us is listed as online in the friends list.
- Spend 10min trying to get to another server. Fail.
- Decide to play Xbox that night.

I am never playing any online game that isn’t on Xbox Live or some other similarly centralized service. Life is too short.

My Stove

A couple of years ago, we got a new kitchen. As part of this work, we replaced the old underpowered cooktop with a new shiny overpriced cooktop. This stove is a wonder of the modern world. Unlike others I looked at, all five burners put out roughly the same range of heat. Most other cooktops have “high power” and “low power” burners, which sucks. Most others especially suck because they put the high power burners on the left side of the stove, which is simply wrong (that’s a long story).

My favorite thing about this stove is that on the one hand it can put out enough heat that I never have to worry about my saute going flat because I add a bit of cold stuff to the pan, and on the other hand, you can turn the stove on at the lowest simmer it will do and the burner will light at precisely the level you want. No hiccups. Since I got this stove, for reasons I don’t completely understand, a lot of dishes I make involving long simmers suddenly started to work better. Now, I don’t really believe that the stove did this for me, but it certainly made it easier for this to happen.

For reference, this is a DCS CT-365 five burner gas cooktop. Here is a google link in case the other goes bad.

Google Mail

Finally mail done right. No stupid folders, just fast search. This is the future way of all things.

The Bruckner Symphonies

Of all the great warhorses in the Classical Canon, I think these are the most compelling. Bruckner wrote huge expansive and abstract meditations that are infused with an intense spirituality. Nowhere in music is there a stronger mix of the intellectual and the emotional. If you can sit in a concert hall and not get chills when the orchestra hits one of the massive brass chorales in the later (6th, 7th, or 8th) Symphonies, then you are emotionally dead.

For The Record

My favorite record store on the planet. This store has been in the middle of Amherst, MA for almost my entire life. It started out as an annex in a larger store, but soon became a standalone entity. I love it because the people who run it know what they are doing and have an encyclopedic knowledge of what they carry. They are not the biggest store on the planet, but they stock the most consistently excellent collection of music in all areas that I have had the pleasure of browsing. The guy that runs the Classical section is particularly wonderful and seems to know exactly where every single classical recording in the store is and when it was ordered or when it will be ordered or how many copies they have in stock on a given day.

For The Record is a testimony to the local shop run by people who love music and records more than they love money. The prices are also much better than average.

Here are some things I hate about the Grand Theft Auto games, in no particular order.

• The stupid hip-sway on all the female models makes me embarassed to be seen playing the game. It’s like the graphical assets were created by a 12 year old British public school boy who had never actually seen a female. The most basic grounding in anatomy would tell you that if a hip moves like that, it must have been broken.
• Worst. Aiming. Ever. Even worse than in Metal Gear Stupid.
• Typical braindead broken console save point implementation. Yet more proof that mediocrity is the gold standard in the videogame market.
• In a similar vein, the amount of busywork required when you fail a mission in order to retry it is maddening.
• I think the missions are puerile, sophomoric, and stupid. But that’s OK! Because I can explore this huge virtual world and ignore the missions. Except I can’t, because two-thirds of the game is locked until I do “enough” of the Beavis-and-Butthead type missions.
• Did I mention how idiotic the save point implementation was? I can’t remember, because I just saved my game and the save point system is so hideously awful that it has given me brain damage.
• “We’re going to produce a game where you can pick up a hooker, have sex with her, and then beat her to death with a club to get your money back, but we’ll cave to public pressure and remove mention of Haitians from the game, because we don’t want to be racist against Haitians. However, in the interests of free speech, we will maintain all the racial slurs against Jews, Blacks, Italians, and Cubans.”

Things I like:

• Nice work on the soundtracks, especially the radio DJs, who manage to make me laugh even when they’re offending me.
• In Vice City, I like the motorcycles a lot. The motorcycles might be the only reason I actually try to play the game every so often.

That’s about it, I think.

Thurston Searfoss and Devoted Fan

Excerpts from an interview with Thurston Searfoss, author of The Lost Admiral Returns. We recently published a comprehensive review of the game.

peterb: “How long was the development cycle for the game?”

Thurston: “It’s been about 4 years, part time. I do a number of other different jobs. So a lot longer than I would have liked. I’m a part time developer, marketer — the whole works, for good or bad — so I have to switch to alternative tasks, and then I get very frustrated at how long it takes to do anything”

What development environment and tools did you use to create the game?

“For tools, the usual C++ environment. A lot of them are actually older, so I’m actually using fastpath for file formats, that kind of stuff. I’m having to use DirectX, of course. I evaluated a couple of 3D engines but rejected them in favor of building a 2D sprite system, where I’d have more control.”

Why?

“This is a downloadable product, so I needed to keep the download size reasonable, around 15 megabytes. That’s pretty hard to do when you increase the resolution past 800×600 or when you start going in to 3D. And it just makes it 100 times easier to get reasonable views.”

Who do you perceive as the primary audience for your game? People who played and enjoyed the old QQP Lost Admiral, or new players?

“A big part of it is aimed at the core original audience of all of my original games. At the same time, the core and essence of Lost Admiral is a very simple game; it’s meant to be given a chance to be a breakout. the actual [user] interface has proven to be an obstacle to that. So I’m actually in the middle of rewriting parts of the interface to lean towards the mainstream expectations of the game.”

Why did you build your own UI, rather than using standard Windows (or some well-known toolkit’s) GUI elements?

I had to make the decision early on. [Windows] is a standard, but it doesn’t cater to games that well, because what the heck does “edit” mean? So no, I prefer to have an in-game menu. By the same token, I try to keep all the interface elements simple.”

I found it very easy to make mistakes in-game; for example, I’ll try to select a ship by left-clicking on it, only to realize a moment later that I’ve just given an order to some other ship to move.

“In all my games it was very standard to left click to move and right click to select. The selection box was meant to indicate how far out you could move, and I guesss I never revisted the other side.”

How long does it take to ‘balance’ a new scenario?

“The actual maps go back to the original game, so those aren’t really an issue. The new material I have these days are these missions. The next mission we add to the game will be Bismark, Beachhead, and then Convoy, which is actually in the spirit of the north atlantic convoy. Each one of those is going to be very strongly WWII themed. For the missions I trust my instincts, and my actual users are the testers. Because of the in-game update system, any balance problems that are discovered can be fixed very easily. Players will complain about certain things, so that’s good feedback.

Partially this works because missions are designed to be randomly created, just like the random map is created. So you have the core very balanced game, which has been balanced to work with random maps and then on top of this you blend on each and every mission with its own challenges. Right now there is a small chance you might get, for example, an unfair ‘Secrets’ mission, where the objective it too far away. So the question for me as a designer is how many more safety checks do I put in to detect situations like this?

What’s the most positive, surprising thing about the game now that it’s done?

“The way that the missions really do create a totally new breath of fresh air in the way the game plays. The core game is extremely rich, as you know.”

They’re a great way to make the game about more than just victory points.

“The new missions actually complement the new core of The Lost Admiral very well, once you get into them. They become a different set of victory criteria totally separate from the VP struggle, to the point where it’s a trade-off, balancing which can you get away with. Can you get away with not taking that last city to finish ‘The Trouble Next Door?” Or are you going to blow your VP total if you don’t divert a ship to take a city?

It makes for a richness of strategic decisions. ‘He’s got one sub over there; I don’t have any destroyers in that region. If I move a destroyer over there, I’ll eventually get his sub, but can I afford to do that?’ You don’t just get a free lunch.”

What games, other than your own, have you been playing lately?

“Tons of board games. Not many computer games, actually. So many of them are real-time strategy, and there’s only so much you can do with them. It basically devolves into a puzzle agame: which units do you have to build, and then how quickly can you deliver them? It loses that chess-like feel. I’ve tried some of the remakes of some classic games — Hearts of Iron, for example — and they seem to fall pretty flat.”

When you started building Lost Admiral Returns, did you expect more people to want to play against the computer, or against other people?

“When I put my first beta version out, players could only play against each other. I ran into a lot of technical issues with more advanced [network] connections. So I wound up disabling that and going back to the tried and true AI. My surveys repeatedly show that most strategy gamers prefer to play against the AI. No one is saying ‘I’m going to return this game unless it goes multiplayer.’ So there’s a bunch of code in there that is disabled; it’s disabled in the sense that it’s unmaintained, so it probably needs to be reimplemented if we’re going to get it back in to the game.”

You’ve said on your web site that you plan on working on updates of your other classic games, The Grandest Fleet and Conquered Kingdoms next. Will the development cycle for those take 4 years also?

“Based on the engine work, the development time for the next products should be tremendously reduced. It should be 10 times easier going in to Conquered Kingdoms and The Grandest Fleet to deploy them. As long as the engine is not seen as so antiquated that no one wants it, to be quite blunt, it should be good.

The real issue is that I’ve been throwing my home on this project, so I have to balance my books and pay the bills. So how much can I fine-tune the biggest downfalls of the game (user-interface issues) and figure out who is it going to appeal to? Only gamers? Or does it have enough interest for any gamer? So the biggest hinge point for me right now is whether financially whether people will support me enough to go forward.”

What level of sales do you need, realistically, to make continued work on these projects viable?

“To start balancing the books, 200 units/month or so. I’m beginning to wonder if the ‘try before you buy’ model makes it too easy for people to not spend the money. If you buy a game for money the pressure on try-before-you-buy games is to be ‘30 days, full access.’

Who puts that pressure on you?

“The download sites. It used to be, also, word of mouth. So far, for Lost Admiral at least, it isn’t like an arcade game, so most people if they do like it, they do buy it. Its more a question of the user interface, and for some people, the graphics. So that’s another weakness in my marketing model right now — what is the reasonable limit for a number of days?”

Frankly, 30 days is longer than it takes me to get bored of most games, so for me, at least, I’m probably less likely to buy something if the trial period expires after 30 days than, say, 2 weeks. But I don’t know whether or not I’m typical. Although I really appreciate having all the features active — that makes me more inclined to buy a product, because I know exactly what I’m getting.

“If anything, in my haste to get it out the door, I simply took the easy route and left all the features active. At some point I may start boiling that down to ‘here’s a very small but good taste of it, and buy it to get the rest.”

Thurston, thanks for your time.

It was nice talking to you.

Today, I cancelled my satellite TV service. I have no more broadcast or cable TV.

I hate saying that, since I’ve met so many people who get so in-your-face about not watching TV. You know the type. All you have to do is mention that, say, you saw the football game last night, and wasn’t that a great interception, and these people will literally pounce from half a room away, rushing over to inform you, for the eighty-sixth goddamn time, they they wouldn’t know, because they don’t watch TV. They’re too busy reading books and doing macrame and yoga and running their own business selling homemade homeopathic herbal tea.

For me, the decision isn’t really being driven by some sense of cultural superiority, but simple economics.

For a long time now, I’ve been watching basically two things on TV: The Daily Show, and various forms of motor racing on Speed Channel. That’s really about it. It’s not that the other stuff on TV “isn’t good,” or even that I wouldn’t necessarily like it. It’s just that it has to compete with other forms of entertainment that I find more compelling: movies, downloaded foreign TV shows, video games, and books. Add to this the fact that the better segments of The Daily Show show up for download semi-regularly on BoingBoing, and the fact that the winter is a racing wasteland (except for the upcoming Paris-Dakar Rally), and the equation becomes fairly clear:

I’m paying $50 a month for the privilege of not actually watching any TV. That’s $600/year. If you asked me explicitly “How much is it worth to you to watch The Daily Show and all the F1 and MotoGP races?” my answer would be “significantly less than $600/year.” So this is a case where the economy of scale of TV delivery works in the exact opposite way that I want. Let’s say a satellite provider carries 150 channels. They want to deliver those 150 channels to me for $50/month. Really, I just want Speed Channel and Comedy central. I’m willing to pay, say, $10/month for just those 2 channels. Too bad. I’m out of luck, the satellite provider is out of luck, and instead I’ll be looking to download video of races a day later, online.

Maybe my $10/month simply can’t be captured — perhaps the cost of sales to someone like me is prohibitively high, and it’s not worth trying. It does seem like a strange failure, though. My impression is that as the internet accustoms us to content that is more and more specifically tailored to our desires, it is becoming a more common failure.

How much TV do you watch? How much are you paying? Is it worth the money to you?

The wonderful gift of the Atari Anthology (more on that tomorrow) inspired my relatives and I to talk about (and play) some other retro games on various emulators. When I fired up Richard Bannister’s Mugrat, I got the following splash screen…

…complete with animated snowflakes and “Winter Wonderland” playing in the background. Since I don’t think the Colecovision actually had a clock and battery, I can only assume this was Richard’s easter egg, specifically for mugrat. In which case: Thanks, Roger! Joyeux Noël to you, too.

And, since this is an entry about an obsolete 8-bit game console, it feels somehow appropriate to note that this is the 256th article on Tea Leaves. Thanks to everyone who both reads the site and writes for it, for keeping it interesting and fun for this entire year.

As I mentioned earlier I bought Half-Life 2 last week. Here is a short meditation on why the game is perhaps the perfect shooter.

First Person Shooters are characterized by fairly simple gameplay:

1. Enter area.
2. Kill everything that moves before you die.
3. Exit area.

Ultimately, no matter how dressed up a shooter is with narrative, cut scenes and interactive non player characters, the key to the game’s success is how well it delivers on this core mechanic. Shooters are at their best when you are runing down a long dark hallway and using your bad-ass skills to cut your enemies to pieces.

I have a soft spot for Half-Life. The original Half-Life was the last game I played before my current descent into addiction. It is also generally credited with expanding the role of narrative in a shooter. The game is played as a series of narrative episodes all told from the game engine without separate cut scenes, and always from the point of view of the player. At its best, the game combines this narrative style with great level design to give you at least the sense that the story, such as it is, is just unfolding in front of you as a result of your actions in the game. The fact that the game sort of falls apart in its last act doesn’t really detract from the fact that everything leading up to that point was brilliant.

After Half-Life, shooters and action games took on more elements of interesting story telling (Halo, Max Payne) and more open ended gameplay (Far Cry, GTA, Deus Ex). It’s now fashionable to tout interactive environments, uncanny AI and complete freedom of gameplay as a set of holy grails that once obtained will usher in a new age in gaming glory.

But I don’t think this is so, and I think Half-Life 2 is a small bit of proof that I am right. Half-Life 2 is brilliant precisely because it is not open ended, but completely linear and scripted. One minute the goons will be chasing you over a rooftop. The next you’ll notice an open window near a ledge and you leap in just in time to save yourself from the rush of the drone army. You feel like a brilliant bad-ass. As the rush subsides, you realize that the game led you there. This happens over and over again. The game has perfected a technique that Half-Life got right once in a while, which is to take you down a long dark hallway that is cleverly disguised as “the real world”.

Half-Life 2 builds this illusion using state of the art rendering and flawless pacing and level design. City 17 is full of beautiful light, texture and a palpable “sense of place.” There was never a dark hallway this pretty. The place looks wide open, but the areas are cleverly designed to frantically direct you in exactly one direction, which is towards the end of the mission. You hardly ever find yourself wandering aimlessly through the game world with no idea where to go. This is in stark contrast to, say, Halo 2, where you could get lost even in the middle of the most frenetic action set piece.

The other tool that Half-life 2 uses to keep you running is some of the best human character animation I’ve ever seen anywhere. Humans in the game walk, run and fall like real people. But the faces are pure magic. Character’s mouths move like they are really talking, and the faces really project a sense of feeling and emotion. It’s cool how they carefully look at you as you move around them. All of this makes you forget is that most of your interactions with non-player characters who are not trying to kill you are completely scripted.

The result of this design is a game that puts you right on the rails of its story and doesn’t allow you to fall off. You run, you hide, you shoot, the story moves forward. It’s perfection.

My only complaint is that they didn’t hire the guy that implemented Halo’s level loading code, so your time in the game world is broken up by too many stupid load screens.

Other people who agree with me and said it first

Here tilt gushes in much the same way.

Here the Game Brains guys do the same thing.

This week Salon published an especially depressing The Year in Games article, full of various commentators saying obvious and, for the most part, untrue things.

My favorite had to be the “he’s usually smarter than that” Greg Costikyan talking about how there’s “no indie games industry.” I’d be willing to bet that any random game by Ambrosia software has sold more copies, than, say, any Nokia N-Gage game. Would it be accurate, therefore, for me to say “there’s no mobile gaming industry?” Or is the metric for whether an industry exists not whether you book any revenue, but just whether a company is spending money?

The other aspect of the article was how it’s pretty clear that pretty much none of the commentators — except for Costikyan — have ever played any game that wasn’t given to them by some PR flack as a freebie. Halo this, Half-Life that, and their version of being “edgy” was recommending Namco’s Katamari Damacy . And the guy who said the best game of the year was the unplayable — but oh so corporate — Ninja Gaiden made me weep bitter tears of blood.

Stop asking why games aren’t innovative. They are. It’s just that the games you’re choosing to play aren’t innovative.

And if you want to know why that is, just look in the mirror.

For those of you taking off for the holiday, have a great time doing whatever it is you’ll be doing. I plan on continuing to try to update regularly through to the New Year. If you’re travelling, drive safely, and please remember to drink only homemade egg nog, never the store-bought stuff. You have my permission to use pasteurized eggs, if you worry about that sort of thing.

Here’s another game that I vividly remember playing, but could not recall the name of. A little research has helped me figure it out, however. (Yes, I’ve updated this article since last night, when I still didn’t know the name and was bemoaning my fate).

AWACS (Click to enlarge)

It was an Apple ][ game. My memory of it was as follows: The game was played on a map of Europe, with the Soviet Union on the east and West Germany and environs on the west. Soviet fighters and bombers would appear on the map, identified by little call signs (”Tu-26″ “Mi-25″ “Su-11″). The planes would begin flying towards their western targets. In response to this, the player’s job was to select an appropriate airbase and dispatch a fighter plane from that base to intercept a given Soviet plane.

It was similar in some ways to NORAD, a very clever missile command clone, which involved intercepting missiles rather than planes. But in my memory, all you were doing was choosing which planes intercepted the Soviet planes, on a sector-by-sector basis. You didn’t actually steer them, whereas in NORAD there was an actual dexterity requirement. This mystery game was, essentially, a simple air traffic controller game.

I liked it.

Some lucky searches showed me that this game was called AWACS, and it’s a little more complex than what I describe above. The ways in which my memory diverged from the truth are interesting.

AWACS is Missile Command in concept, but a bit more interesting in implementation. Specifically, you should move your AWACS plane close enough to the radar contacts so that you can identify them; some of the radar contacts are friendly, and shooting them down is frowned upon. You don’t actually “steer your plane” around as much as you move a “window” of viewing area over a map of Western Europe. When planes are nearly centered, their blueprint shows up at the bottom of your screen. Rather than launching fighters to intercept, as I remembered, you just hit “enter,” and the closest base launches a missile at the nearest contact. If the plane reaches a base, the base is destroyed (I lost Prague within the opening seconds of a game I played this morning. It’s quite challenging.) The reason I remembered launching fighter planes is that after a while, your own bases start launching planes on their own, and you need to identify them so that you don’t accidentally shoot them down.

You can obtain the disk image for AWACS here, but the fastloader is incompatible with the operating system on the disk image; boot your emulator with a dos 3.3 image and then load the game disk into a second drive and run it there (try BRUN AWACS,D2).