Bear with me for a few paragraphs, while I approach a review of the Disney release of Howl’s Moving Castle from a very oblique direction.
I’m one of the people who prefers to watch movies that are dubbed instead of subtitled, all things being equal. This is, apparently, a controversial position. I don’t really understand how there can be any debate over this. If you have a movie with a superb dub, and a movie with great subtitles, the dub is the better movie. Period.
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I have for the most part avoided watching pro basketball over the last few years. The main reason for this is the recent period of extended futility in which the Boston Celtics have found themselves trapped. But, I think there are deeper reasons for my distaste. It seems to me that the game has lost any sense of flow and grace. Instead, you watch a game and you see ten virtuoso athletes surrounded by their prodigious egos dribbling into an endless series of isolation plays and 2-on-2 pick and roll.
Then, against my better judgement, I watched game 7 of the current Finals last week. As the game stretched into the hours when I usually go to bed, I realized that here, finally, was the team game that I had been missing.
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People have been making “space opera” trading games for 25 years. Among these is Ambrosia Software’s Escape Velocity, first developed in 1992. It is the best game of its kind. The most recent version, Escape Velocity Nova, is available for both Windows and Macintosh, and provides varying levels of challenge for the novice and for the experienced player. It is a classic, and everyone with a soul will enjoy it.
The first ripe wild black raspberries (rubus occidentalis) of the season have been spotted.
And eaten.
If you like the game-related articles you read on Tea Leaves, you should definitely visit the third installment of The Carnival of Gamers, a collection of some interesting gaming-related articles. Tea Leaves is honored to have been able to participate.
Video games, like all forms of entertaiment, have their own set of idiosyncratic formal conventions. All the Zelda games have a series of dungeons, broken up by exploration, where you collect items to defeat the final enemy. Horror games have a slow pace, shuffling zombies and stupid camera angles. Platform games have hateful jumping puzzles and take place in a strange world where whacking a box turns it into money. Conventions like this can be useful because they provide a formal framework in which the game designers can work. The form gives the player context and helps to set expectations, the same way the formal structure of a film or a piece of music informs the viewer or listener about what should be coming next.
However, while some gaming conventions are useful enough to have evolved into a sort of form, most head over the line into the territory of annoying cliché. There are too many such game design sins to list here: useless backtracking for keys, juvenile puzzles involving 8 tiles in 9 spaces or the Towers of Hanoi, and of course, stupid savepoints. However, the single most damaging game design crutch is the Boss Battle. We are here to say that Boss Battles are stupid and should be annihilated.
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So it’s come down to this. Eleven years after Ayrton Senna’s tragic death cast a pall over Formula 1 and made everyone rethink safety, Bernie Ecclestone and Max Mosley have put up a tent and made everyone rethink clown cars.
I’ve actually done enough riding this year to progress past the “start gasping for air every time you come off the downhill” stage of fitness. More books than I can list here have been written about training for cycling. Certainly, the success of the more systematic methods used by Lance Armstrong and such to win the Tour De France over and over again have gotten a lot of attenion if for no other reason than they use cool toys. But, for normal people who are not racing bikes, there is a pretty simple measure of fitness that is easily applicable without any sophisticated data collection tools.
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It is well understood that there is nothing new under the sun in video games. I recently borrowed Wrath Unleashed from the local library, not knowing what it was.
What it was is a remake of Archon.
Archon, for those of you who have never heard of it, is on every old computer game player’s list of The Greatest Games Ever Made. The basic idea is: it’s chess. But when your pieces occupy the same square as your opponent’s piece, you move to an “arena” and the two players fight it out in arcade-like combat. Each piece has different powers, so while one can in theory win any battle in combat, the strategic element is very significant: you really, really, really don’t want to try to fight a Basilisk with a Knight.
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The office had a trip to see the new Batman movie. The movie itself, while flawed in some ways, was for the most part enjoyable. However, the whole movie-going experience itself has become tedious in many ways.
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