Tea Leaves

So, it turns out that there are people who are really, really enthusiastic about Mac OS X, as I discovered at the Tiger launch party in Shadyside last night.

And now, I have photos to prove it.

Tiger Launch, With Actual Tigers (click to enlarge)

Walking Feature List (click to enlarge)

Thanks to Jenny Ladd for the photos!

Now that Mac OS X 10.4 (”Tiger”) has been unleashed, it is only right and proper that I make available The Inscrutable Denominator of Heaven’s Dashboard, ready for your Dashboard-using pleasure. It requires, of course, Mac OS X 10.4. Download, unzip, and double-click to install and run.

On the one hand, it’s still the same garbage code, and the random number generator doesn’t quite work right. On the other hand, I ported it in to Dashboard in just about 10 minutes, and most of that was spent dorking around with the background image. I didn’t edit the code at all — it was a straight cut and paste job.

That, I think, convinces me of Dashboard’s worth. It is so incredibly trivial to get something useful(*) in to Dashboard, that I have no doubt that there are going to more cool widgets than we can possibly imagine at this point.

(*) Yes, I understand that this particular widget is, in fact, not at all useful.

In the South Side of Pittsburgh, on 17th about a block and a half south of Carson Street is a small house with a green awning. Under the awning is a door and a sign that reads: DISH Osteria and Bar. From the outside, the door is just another door in another blue collar Pittsburgh neighborhood. It’s a skinny street with a beat up sidewalk lined with cheap looking row houses as far as the eye can see. But, if you walk through the door, you are transported to another place entirely. The place on the other side of the door is not of Pittsburgh at all. It is DISH, and it is fabulous.

Drinks and Specials

It’s about 7:30 on a Wednesday night. We usually get there earlier, and with reservations, so we’re not even sure we’ll be seated. We end up sitting in the bar area rather than the main dining room. This is actually a feature, since the bar is where all the interesting people are anyway. Directly behind us is a large man and his girlfriend. The man’s hair is an accidental sculpture of protein and gel, and his girlfriend’s seems sympathetically rumpled, like how owners always look like their pets. They are having a good time with drinks and just a little food, a couple of appetizers. They are loud, but not obnoxiously so. In fact, this is true of the whole place. There is a general atmosphere of a lot happening, but not in the normal American way where you can hear all the conversations. Instead, they float underneath the music coming from the bar. The music is an eclectic mix of genres that I don’t usually listen to. But, unlike most music in restaurants and bars, it does not make me feel like I have to hop over the bar and put a blunt weapon into the CD player. It’s actually enjoyable.

One conversation that we can hear are two gentleman in black who appear to be ordering food to eat at the bar, since the dining room is too full. They commiserate with the bartender, the waitstaff, the chef, and anyone else close by.

Ten minutes in, we get drink orders and the specials menu. Hand rolled pasta with a saffron sauce, shrimp, tomato, maybe zucchini; a pork “t-bone” chop, and a halibut filet, pan roasted with a saffron seafood risotto and spinach on top. The food is described with a lot of words, but none of them are stupid.

We order appetizers and main course and then settle in to watch the show. The man couple at the bar have started act one of their eventual drama, delaying their food so they can run some errands. One leaves and begins an apparently endless cell phone conversation out on the street.

Appetizer

In a while, we get our first round of appetizers. A basket of bread and the house special mix of olives. These are presumably the same olives that you get at Penn Mac out of those huge buckets. We take them home and they taste like brine. DISH bathes them in some kind of magic elixir with oil, vinegar and dried herbs and they are transformed into little green and black works of art. We have to physically restrain ourselves from getting sick on the olives. My wife remarks that we never remember to come and just get the olives takeout. I remind her that ten years ago she didn’t like olives at all.

The guy on the cell phone returns, and his partner gets up and runs outside, muttering something about cigarettes. Later we can see both of them out in the alley smoking. Our second round shows up. I have pan-fried shrimp with olive oil, grape tomatoes and a bit of basil oil in the middle of the plate. Karen gets a panzanella salad. Greens, ciabatta, oil, vinegar, tomatoes and cucumber mixed up in a bowl. Simple food, well-prepared.

As we finish the appetizers, the bar fills with people waiting for tables. An absolutely huge party gets up and starts filing out of the main dining room. Maybe 10 or 15 people, all young, all well dressed, all beautiful. They are from a dimensional reality that Pittsburgh has little contact with, but to which DISH seems to have a secret conduit. Even as they file out, one suspects that others from the same Eurohip clan will soon appear to replace them.

Entree

I get the halibut. Karen gets the strip steak, but with the sides from the filet because she wants the mushroom risotto. Her steak is a perfect medium rare. Not uncooked and raw in the middle like I got at Ruth’s Chris. Not teetering on the edge of well done and gray like I got at the Lidia’s brunch. Maybe I have bad luck with steak.

The fish is a calculated risk, as is all fish in Pittsburgh. But, for once the guy in the kitchen can make me a fish which is better than what I can do at home with the stuff from Whole Foods. I can’t remember the last time this has happened to me in Pittsburgh (or in the rest of the country for that matter). I have pretty much given up on cooked fish in restaurants. But this halibut restores my faith. The risotto and the vegetables are also great, although, as always, the risotto is just a little bit undercooked.

As we enjoy the food, the man-couple returns to the bar. The cell phone guy puts his phone away and starts berating the cigarette guy. He finally slams the phone on the counter, mutters about how he can fucking argue with both of them until the end of time and stalks out of the place. His friend sits stoically at the bar and then just says “bring it on.” The bartender assures the cigarette guy that his cell phone guy “will be back”, she “just knows it.” Cigarette guy despondently asks for the food to go.

Just as I have polished off my risotto, another huge crew of the pretty people file out of the main dining room. As they leave, a new couple shows up at the bar to replace them. Then a tall blonde woman appears and chatters into her phone in fast Italian. She sits down and has a cigarette. So, fair warning to all you people who are paranoid about secondhand smoke. The bar at DISH may not be your place. But, that’s fine because it means more food for me. So, by all means, for the sake of your health, stay away.

It’s at this point in the meal when we always wonder why they let us in. We guess that they have to have a certain quota of normal people to maintain the dimensional stability of the portal. Otherwise the whole thing would collapse and get sucked over to San Francisco.

Dessert

Our dessert arrives as the take out order is finally finished. The cigarette guy picks up his bag of food and hands over a pile of cash to the register. As he plods out of the place, the bartender tries to reassure him, but it doesn’t seem to help. When he’s out the door, she just sighs and mutters “unbelievable” under her breath.

Dessert is a chocolate bread pudding with raspberry sauce and some unfortunate strawberries on top. The berries are the only clear loser for the night and the only indication that we have not been dimensionally transported to some other city where there might be berries this time of year.

The coffee comes, and along with it yet another couple in the endless stream of fashionable people that appear and then disappear at a constant rate.

Both the pudding and the coffee are great. We pay the bill. We get up to leave and on our way out the door, we run into the Italian woman’s friend. As you can probably guess, she too is tall, well dressed, blonde, and beautiful.

We go out the door, and we are back in Pittsburgh, on the South Side, walking up 17th street towards Carson. It’s dark now and the lights are on in all the row houses, and the trash is out on the sidewalk for pickup tomorrow.

GT4 Photo Mode

Now that I have finally obtained a USB jump drive, I have been able to try out “photo mode,” which means I have now tried everything Gran Turismo 4 has to offer.

My review remains the same: “meh.”

Last October I wrote about a Star Trek game for the Apple II that I remembered playing in the early 1980s. It had the somewhat disconcerting habit of spewing out page-long quotes from Marcus Aurelius’s Meditations. It was so incongruous that I wasn’t sure if the game actually existed, or if I was just remembering some sort of odd dream. The other week, to my surprise, someone wrote me saying: “Hey. I remember that game. In fact, I have it on a disk.”

The problem is that this person’s Apple II disk drive is completely broken, so he’s not even sure if the disk is still readable. With luck, he’ll be sending me the disk soon, and I’ll try to recover the data from it and get it into a disk image form and onto the various Apple II archives on the net.

If that’s the only good thing that ever comes out of Tea Leaves, I’ll feel like it’s enough.

In comments on that same post, Mark Josef asked about a game that eventually turned out to be Green Globs and Graphing Equations. I couldn’t find a disk image of that game, but since that time, someone has written a simple Javascript version of the game. It’s a little dodgy and doesn’t run well in some browsers, but it at least gives a sense of what the original game was like.

So I am emboldened by this trend, and want to make more disappeared games return. So it’s Stump the Game Geek time once again: pick a game that you used to play, that you can barely remember, whose name you’ve forgotten, and describe it in the comments below. I (or our Alert Readers) will try to identify it and tell you where to find it.

In the almost 15 years that I’ve been back in Pittsburgh, the food scene here has for the most part expanded and improved in ways that I would not have imagined possible. I personally would not have believed that our humble city could now be the home of a Chinese place as good as Rose Tea Cafe, an honest-to-god Taqueria (Taco Loco in the South Side), or a Moule Frites place (Point Brugge Cafe in Point Breeze) in addition to several regional Italian establishments (Piccolo Forno, La cucina Flegrea, Lidia’s). It seems to me that at this point in Pittsburgh’s food history, we are finally seeing a growth period in great places specializing in excellent and authentic regional food.

So my question is: Why can’t I get a decent “American” style breakfast?

It doesn’t take much to make a good breakfast. All you really need are four things:

1. Good eggs.

2. Good potatoes or pancakes or some similar anti-Atkins food material.

3. Good meat.

4. Good strong black coffee.

The fact that these four things are rare in a place that serves breakfast is shocking, since none of these items is particularly difficult to prepare well. For some reason, most every place you try in the Pittsburgh falls down on one or more of these axes, the most common being either the potatoes or the pancakes. Most places can make an egg over easy without killing it, even if they can’t do scrambled. However, it appears that there is an art to making pancakes and home fries that is just beyond the average cook. What you want in a pancake is something that is thick and airy without being heavy. What you want in breakfast potatoes is similar to what you want in perfect fries. Crispy on the outside, light and slightly starchy on the inside. Instead, we get a parade of thin and rubbery or thin and greasy or leaden undercooked pancakes to go along with stale, or cold, or boiled and burnt, starchy potatoes.

We have searched up and down the Pittsburgh area looking for the one place that manages it to put it all together, but we have never found a winner on a consistent basis. Here is a list of places in Pittsburgh that have failed me:

- Pamela’s: Greasy execrable pancakes and nothing else really going for it.

- Square Cafe: This place is a recent favorite and it gets close once in a while but ultimately, while it has some nice combinations, none of them involve potatoes and pancakes.

- De Luca’s: Probably as close as you will get in town. The home fries here are not the ideal potato, and the pancakes are only average.

- Pandolfo’s: I had really good pancakes here and a good egg. But the place is 45 minutes south of town, so it isn’t worth it.

- That Diner in Millvale: Yuck.

- The Gatto Diner in Tarentum: Generally bad on all fronts.

- The Grand Concourse Brunch: Still great for the cold fish, nothing else good here.

- Lidia’s Brunch: A recent favorite. Great potatoes. Good eggs. Overcooked my steak.

- The Rusty Nail in Bellevue: Greasy.

- Plates in Bellevue: Unremarkable.

- Coca Cafe in Lawrenceville: Scrambled eggs that were like custard. Also, completely tasteless chorizo.

If you favorite place is on this list, don’t feel bad. Mine is too. If you favorite place is not on this list, give me the address.

Like everyone else, we’re currently absorbed in Jade Empire. A little while ago, my friend Nat was heard to say: “I could say Sagacious Zu over and over all day,” to which I replied, “I need to write a little Javascript app for my blog that generates your Jade Empire Name. ”

So I did. Without any further ado, I present What’s Your Jade Empire Name (update: now, The Inscrutable Denominator of Heavenly Glory), the result of a good, oh, 10 or 15 minutes “work” writing some simple Javascript (don’t look at the source. You’ll go blind.)

Spread the meme!

More musings on unanswerable questions that aren’t actually significant enough to warrant their own long article:

- Am I the only person who thinks that aspirin, chewed, tastes kinda good? I want aspirin-flavored soda.

- Who are all these people that are still buying $2500 gaming PC rigs, and what is wrong with them?

- What happened to my copy of the Tank Girl soundtrack, along with maybe 5% of all the CDs I’ve ever owned? Is there some sort of collective of shame I can join where I can reacquire mp3s of songs I paid for, but lost?

- Let me get this straight: I can get fresh fish from halfway around the world, or any fruit that is totally out of season, in my local supermarket. But to get heavy cream without stabilizers and garbage in it, I have to drive for half an hour?

- Was the real reason that Germany invaded Belgium that they were pissed off that the Belgians made better beer?

- Why does commercial radio suck so bad (even compared to commercial TV)?

- Why is it that 15 years later, the soundcards/sound generators that come with most computers sound terrible compared to the long-gone Gravis Ultrasound?

- Why is Aimee Mann the only one who knows that Disneyland’s about to close? For the love of God, what does that song mean?

Trivial as these questions are, they are the sorts of things that keep me awake at night.

I never played any of the Resident Evil games before Resident Evil 4. From what I can gather, they were slow-paced with a weird camera system that made combat nearly impossible and a fairly bizarre story centered around an evil virus and zombies. The hype around RE4 was that it was different. Most of the rather enthusiastic press waxes lyrical about the new graphics engine and camera, the new combat system, and the interactive cutscenes. Every review also seems to make a point to claim that the game has no zombies. After playing through most of the game, I can agree with some of this, but anyone who thinks there are no zombies in this game must be partially undead in the brain.

Zombies, Lots of Zombies

Let’s get one thing straight. This game is full of zombies. They may look like “villagers”, or wear funny hats, or babble in Spanish. Most of all, they may not actually be dead yet, but they are still zombies. Strictly speaking, the story revolves around some sort of evil that has turned a huge number of otherwise normal people into mindless automatons of death. But don’t let this fool you. They are still zombies. They shuffle slowly, they surround you, they grab you and wack you with weapons and most of all, when you shoot them in the head they explode in a rain of guts and blood and gore while they shuffle off to their ultimate fate. Then they fall over and turn into money.

You Shoot, Slowly

Here is how the game plays. You walk slowly into an area. You can only walk slowly, unless you hit the B key to move faster. You have to wonder about a game that dedicates an entire button for nothing but “move faster”. Haven’t they ever heard of an analog stick? You know, an input device that provides a smoothly varying set of outputs over a large range, which you could interpret as, I don’t know, how fast I want to move. On the up side, the third person camera is fairly well done. It only gets in the way when you try to see around corners. The rest of the time it sits behind your shoulder, letting you peer into the creepy environments while still allowing scary creatures to surprise you from behind.

Anyway, you show up in an area, and some number of zombie bad guys appear. They shuffle slowly towards you. You stand in one place and slowly aim your gun. I gather that the aiming system is a lot better than the previous games. But it is still awkward, and I wish you could at least strafe. If the zombies were moving faster, or actually had any intelligence whatsoever, you’d be dead while you aim. Luckily, the game spares you by having most of the enemies move very methodically in your direction, allowing you to peg them repeatedly with the shotgun until they die. This process is a lot of fun, especially when you make heads explode in interesting patterns.

The game avoids becoming overly repetitive by changing up the nature of the combat once in a while. There are a few different kinds of scary beasts that chase you faster than the standard zombies. There are a few snipe and dodge missions, a couple of shoot things while rolling on rails sequences, and some stupid escort missions where you have to lead a girl around while she screams a lot. The hardest sequences in the game involve killing a lot of zombies while keeping the girl alive at the same time.

The game also does a great job of balancing fun and challenge. You find ammo and health packs when you need them, and there is this creepy merchant creature who follows you around the game and sells you new weapons and weapon upgrades. While the zombie hordes are always menacing, they are hardly ever completely overwhelming. This means that you get to spend most of your time blowing up zombie heads rather than worrying about resources, or replaying levels because you are dead. This means you spend most of your time having fun.

In summary, the meat of the game is the combat, and while it is awkward and sort of stupid, the combat is good enough to keep you coming back for more. But, this doesn’t mean that the game doesn’t do some stupid things.

A Lack of Puzzling Puzzles

Once in a while you have to solve a puzzle. There are basically two kinds of puzzles in the game: easy and stupid. The easy puzzles are of the form “find the key, unlock the door”, or “turn a couple of knobs, unlock the door”. The only trouble here is finding the right key or realizing which knobs are turnable. The stupid puzzles are annoying combinatorial problems that are not so much hard as just busywork. There is even a “move the 8 tiles around the 9 spaces” puzzle. Luckily, I came to the game late so all of the walkthroughs have the stupid combinations in them already.

Interactive Cut Scenes

One of the more interesting gameplay conceits in RE4 is the combination of cut scenes and action sequences. You’ll come into an area, and a cut scene will start playing and suddenly the game will tell you that you have to mash the A button furiously or be crushed by a rolling boulder. For the most part, this mechanic provides a way to make you play the same cut scene over and over and over again until you mash the buttons in just the right order. As such, it is stupid and evil. There are a few places in the game where this mechanic is used well to provide a general sense of creepiness. But, I think Capcom were a little too proud of themselves, and the scheme is overused, especially in the boss fights.

You are not the Boss of Me

In between the fights, and the puzzles and the cut scenes that kill you are, of course, the bosses. Generally, the bosses follow the familiar pattern: the boss is big, the boss has a pattern of attacks, the boss has a single fatal weakness which you must read the walkthrough to discover and exploit. So, the boss fights go like this: run, run, dodge, run, dodge, shoot, shoot, die, die, get bored, read the walkthrough, run, dodge, shoot, kill the boss.

Some of the boss fights borrow the “mash this button combination or be destroyed” mechanic from the cut scenes. This can be annoying, since it’s hard to do the button mashing if you are already holding down the right trigger and B to use your weapon and the buttons you have to mash involve either the B button or the triggers (which they always do). This is one of the ways that the boss fights ensure that you must repeat them at least 3 times, thus padding out the length of the game.

Even with all these complaints, there is at least one pretty original idea for a boss early in the game. And, there are a couple of boss creatures later in the game who are fun to kill with a single shot.

But ultimately these are still bosses, and bosses are stupid. So mark one more negative point.

Stupid Savepoints

The game has stupid save points. The only positive thing you can say is that they are at least close together.

Stupid Inventory System

The game has an annoying inventory system that allows you to carry a ludicrous amount of stuff, but not everything you find or buy. So you get to waste a lot of time shuffling things around in your box, and you get to waste money buying bigger boxes once in a while. Happily, this is only a minor annoyance, but you have to wonder why they bothered.

Back to the Good Stuff

While I have spent a lot of time whining about the stupid things in the game, I have to say that overall RE4 is excellent in spite of itself. In addition to the zombie killing, it does a lot of other things right. The environments have a great sense of scale, small or large, and at times they manage to generate an atmosphere of general creepiness and dread. This is pretty impressive considering that the game is well balanced enough that you are usually not in great danger of dying quickly (except for certain boss-like meanies). The rendering is stunning; as good as anything on the Xbox. There are even some pretty awesome lighting, fire and water effects. The game is courteous enough to attach a virtual flashlight to the back of your head so you can see while running around in the dark. The light isn’t really there, but a certain glow does follow you around so you can see things. This is a nice touch. Finally, even with all the eye candy, load times are fast.

Overall, I have found RE4 to be a game that is superbly balanced, superbly produced, and a lot of fun. The fun that it provides more than makes up for the things it does wrong. If you have a GameCube, go buy it now. The upcoming PS2 version will probably play just as well, but it will look like ass.

A real conversation I had at the grocery store yesterday:

Me: “Hi. Do you have any heavy cream?”

Employee: “Heavy cream? What’s that?”

And that was when I crumpled to the floor and wept like a jilted cheerleader. I know it was just one employee, but it’s still depressing.