Tea Leaves

Once again, Tea Leaves is proud to be one of the few sites on the web that doesn’t have a stupid and irritating April Fools’ joke.

I say “Bah, humbug!” and I’m proud to do so.

For two years in graduate school, I lived in North Carolina. One of the things you learn about when you live in North Carlina is what good pulled pork tastes like. Good pulled pork is pork shoulder, or the whole pig, cooked over a low smokey fire for many many hours. In the part of North Carolina where we lived, the meat is also marinated in a vinegar and pepper sauce. The result is meat that is textured but tender, and is infused with the flavor of the smoke.

I moved from North Carolina to Pittsburgh almost 15 years ago, and have never had passable pulled pork in the city limits until tonight.

There were a few places that came close. But in general, what passes for pulled pork in this part of the country is chopped up tasteless meat dunked in liquid smoke and about a gallon of bad sauce. Good pulled pork has taste even if it is not sauced at all.

Tonight I went to the new Red Hot and Blue franchise at the Waterfront, and although they do not serve the most sublime BBQ pork that you can get, the stuff is decent, and it at least tastes like real meat instead of a mashed up saucy pudding.

Red Hot and Blue is a chain that originated in Washington DC and has several stores in that area and along at East Coast. There was even one in North Carolina that we used to go to. I had feared that the place would not be very good because the last couple of times I had eaten in the Red Hot and Blue in Rockville, the meat had been a bit marginal.

But tonight, the pulled pork was tender, and tasty. My only complaints are that some pieces were dry and overall the meat was not quite as smokey as the best stuff. The corn muffins were also stupid. These problems are easy to overlook, because at least we can now say that there is decent pulled pork in Pittsburgh. All lovers of well cooked meats should rejoice. But, if I catch you going to this place and ordering the chicken, I’ll hurt you.

There are a few funny things about my craving to play Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.

First, I won’t really like it. I had this problem with Morrowind, the previous Elder Scrolls game. I mean, I played it. It was “interesting.” Mostly, I think I was in awe of the sheer audacity of the game — the scope and size of it, the varied environments, and architecture, and clothing styles. The intricate magic system and the wonderful, wonderful books scattered all throughout the land.

But, y’know. Let’s be honest. As a game qua game, playing it was sort of like watching grass grow. I expect Oblivion to be more of the same, only with a higher polygon count. (If I’m wrong on this, feel free to correct me)

Next, I don’t have a machine to play it on. My PC is woefully underspec, and I somehow, mysteriously, lack the motivation to drop $1500 to get something capable of playing it even marginally well. I was also holding out on buying an Xbox 360 until Oblivion came out, but now that the moment is here, I feel “meh.” If I am going to buy another game machine, I want to buy a good one, which means a Nintendo DS, probably.

My best estimate is that I am doomed to not play Oblivion until someone gets 3d acceleration in Windows emulation working on the new Intel iMacs. Then I’ll buy a copy of Oblivion, install it, and then complain bitterly that tilt mislead me with his praise of it.

So, in summary: I really don’t want to play Oblivion, because my left brain tells me it will suck, but at the same time I feel like I have to play Oblivion, because my animal brain is afraid that I might be wrong, and then other people might be having more fun than me, which means I MIGHT BE A BAD PERSON.

Stupid brain.

Over the weekend, the New York Times published this depressing profile of a growing service in the food industry where you pay someone to be your prep cook. Apparently, the way this works is that for a nominal fee, you are given use of an industrial kitchen space and told how to “assemble” your dishes from the vats of ingredients that are given to you. This article is just the latest indication when it comes to food, certain Americans suffer from three pathologies: sloth, ignorance and denial.

We can cover these one by one.

Sloth

The obvious motivation for using a prepared food service is that the client does not want to spend the time to purchase and prepare the food himself. I can understand where this motivation comes from. The modern life is a busy one, with multiple conflicting requirements filling our days. But, I have a problem with the claim that someone’s life is so busy that he can’t cook the occasional meal. The main argument I can make about this is a personal one. Anyone who knows me also knows that I am the laziest person on the planet and yet I manage to crank out a few meals a week for me and my family. Admittedly, my wife does much of the planning and shopping. But I do most of the preparation and cleanup. The main trick here is to replicate what the prepared food service would do for you, but in your own kitchen. Cook large dishes that amortize the work across multiple meals. Cook a lot of lazy food.

And, for those nights when you have to do something from scratch, fall back on quick and easy dishes, like Chinese meat stir fry (make the rice ahead with your Zojirushi). There are dozens of great dishes you can make in twenty minutes with some practice.

Finally, the NYT piece quotes some ludicrous statistic indicating that men still don’t cook. I say, kick their ass. Make sure the load is shared. In this day and age, a man who can’t cook is a pathetic creature indeed.

Ignorance

If laziness gets people in the door, then ignorance is what makes them pay the rent. Consider this quote from the piece:

So Ms. Robbins now goes to Dream Dinners in West Seattle, where she spends just under two hours assembling dishes like cheesy chicken casserole and Salisbury steak from ingredients that have been peeled and chopped for her. She does not have to pick up a knife, turn on a stove or wash a dish.

Chicken casserole? The chicken casserole that I used to cook when I was an undergraduate went something like this

1. Put rice in a baking dish.
2. Add cream of chicken soup.
3. Mix in cream of mushroom and cream of celery soup.
4. Put chicken pieces on top. Mix around.
5. Bake.

I find it hard to believe that someone would need a service to make this dish for them. But I’ve been surprised before.

The Salisbury Steak is equally mind boggling. You will recall that Salisbury Steak is a mainstay of not only elementary school lunches, but also Swanson frozen dinners and such, where the nondescript meat is always accompanied by a white gluey “potato” product and some desiccated apple “cobbler.”

The question I have is: how can anyone in their right mind pay prices comparable to what you would pay at the prepared food deli at Whole Foods for something that is basically what you can pull out of the freezer at the 7-11? Ignorance.

Denial

In the end, the value proposition for one of these prep-cook services is something like this: you pay them premium prices for food that you could probably buy at the deli for not much more. In return, you go to their house and help them finish the dishes for you. While paying hard-earned cash for food like this is confusing, I can understand the motivation. People are busy, they’d like to avoid cooking. That’s fine. What I truly can’t understand is the level of self-delusion that one needs to buy this fancy takeout, and then go actually to the place to assemble the food in some pathetic attempt to preserve the feeling of having actually cooked something. The truth is, no cooking happened. What happened was that someone took food, and put it in a box so they could then take it home and heat it up. This is denial of the highest order.

Let me be absolutely clear. I understand why people don’t want to cook. I can even forgive people cooking crappy food or buying crappy food at the takeout counter to take home and feed their family. I would not prioritize my life this way, but people have disagreed with me before. What I cannot forgive is people lying to themselves about what their true motivations are.

If you want to avoid cooking, then avoid cooking and be happy with yourself for having done so. You should be at peace with your life decisions, and you should structure your life around your priorities not mine. What you should not do is deny that food and cooking are worth your time, while at the same time trying to convince me that you want to preserve the family meal as an institution. You are buying fancy takeout food. If you claim anything else, you are just lying to me and yourself. Stop that.

My new column, Retrograde, appears in the latest issue of Played To Death. Feel free to check it out (PDF, 42 Mb).

This issue’s topic: everyone’s favorite Playable Classic, Ultima IV.

I picked up the new Metal Gear Solid 3 special edition because the promise of playing the game with a real third person camera intrigued me. You have to give Kojima credit. If nothing else, he has a sense of style, and he does not take himself too seriosuly. Things happen in the latest Metal Gear game that you just can’t imagine happening in, say, Splinter Cell because the latter game puts up a pretense of being a serious take on the action/stealth genre.

In Metal Gear, you can kill snakes and frogs and alligators and eat them later to heal yourself. You can do field surgery on bullet wounds in the middle of a firefight without taking cover. You can hide in cardboard boxes. The main bad-ass hero looks sort of like a green monkey when he runs through the jungle with his gun and knife. All of these things, give the game its own unique feel and style. And that’s sort of fun. It makes the Splinter Cell games seem stiff and pretentious.

The same can be said of the cut scenes. And oh boy do you get to watch cut scenes. Here’s what happens at the end of one section of the game:

1. Short cut scene introducing a main character in the game.

2. You walk out the door.

3. Longer cut scene introducing major villan in game.

4. You walk down a hill.

5. Even longer cut scene establishing main plot conflict in the game.

6. A 5 minute radio tutorial on field surgery.

7. Another short cut scene.

8. The opening credits roll, James Bond style, and thus you find out that the level you just played was the tutorial.

9. Then, you start the first actual chapter of the game with another long cut scene.

In all, the gameplay content of this 45 minute segment of the game consisted of running across an empty field and using the surgery menu.

But, this isn’t really the problem with Metal Gear Solid. The real problem with the game is that these cut scenes are more fun than the actual gameplay. I had forgotten that camera problems aside, the gameplay in Metal Gear Solid is just broken.

Here’s how the introductory level played out for me.

1. Come into an area.

2. Look for enemies. Spot one over there.

3. Crawl around in the grass to get closer. Stand up, oops, didn’t stand up enough so I start crawling again. Stand up again. Move a bit. As I pass by a tree, I turn 180 degrees around and stick my back to it. Get unstuck, turn around, make too much noise, alert the guard who starts shooting me with a rifle. Run up to the guard, stick to the tree again, taking dozens of rounds to my body. Unstick from the tree, grab the guard and cut his throat. Hide in the grass until the alert music stops. None of the other guards seems to take any notice of the bloody corpse of their comrade lying there in the mud.

Lather, rinse, repeat. The stealth gameplay is not only completely hopeless, it’s also completely pointless. You don’t really need to hide, because you can be shot hundreds of times without falling over, and your health regenerates automatically. This gives you plenty of time to knife everyone in an area and then heal up after your killing spree. I can’t decide if this is by design. It would be in line with the style of the game to sort of wink and knod at “stealth”, and then make it possible for you to get to the next cut scene any way you see fit.

Of course, combat is no better. The only effective third person attack you have is the grab-and-knife thing. Using ranged weapons is just as tedious as in the previous games. You must use the first person view to aim your gun, but every time you do this your view completely resets in some random direction.

Targeting grenades is equally futile as there is no easy way to control the distance the object is thrown. Burning yourself up with your own grenade is depressing.

It’s true that the new re-make of the game at least fixes the third person camera to not be actively hateful. It’s too bad they didn’t modernize any of the other parts of the gameplay engine. Just imagine if the main character in the game could really aim his weapon quickly and fluidly like he does in the cut scenes.

In the end, I used this “run and knife” strategy to make my way all the way to the first big Boss in the game. Strangely, it was very similar to the first Boss fight on the boat in Metal Gear Solid 2. There was the Boss, over there, running back and forth in a simple pattern shooting me. There I was, on the other side of the screen in an endless search for a way to both stay behind cover and actually aim my weapon so I could hit the Boss.

Eventually, after following the pattern a few dozen times I’d have shot him enough to kill him. But there didn’t seem to be much point. I would have been really bored by then. And all it would lead to is another cut scene. I turned the PS2 off and went and found my copy of Madden.

It was, quite arguably, the best game of its era: X-Com: UFO Defense. It had everything. A gripping plot. An approachable, iconic art style. Furious, deadly combat. An easily-learned user interface.

It spawned a number of official sequels, and a few imitators, but none of them had the impact of the original. And you can understand why: if you want to play X-Com, you can play X-Com. It’s a game that comes so close to perfection that it’s hard to argue that you even need a sequel.

I could probably write a long article on why X-Com is such a wonderful game. I’m not going to write that today. Today, I’m writing a review of X-Com’s spiritual sequel, UFO: Aftershock. UFO: Aftershock both is and is not a sequel to X-Com. The developers clearly want to tread the line of enjoying the aura of the earlier product, while not actually getting sued for it. Judged as a substitute for X-Com, UFO: Aftershock (inevitably) comes up short. But judged on its own terms, it brings some intriguing things to the table. Let’s take a look at what they are.

X-Com is a turn-based tactical squad combat game where you operate a secret intergovernmental authority that investigates and fights a growing space alien menace. Only one of your squad’s soldiers (or the enemy aliens) can move at one time. Some time ago, I suggested that you could categorize strategy games by the intersection of their control quantum and how movement occurred. In that article, I said “I’d love to see more squad level games where combat is resolved simultaneously.”

Well, UFO: Aftershock is at its heart a squad level game where combat is resolved simultaneously. It is the direct sequel of an earlier game, UFO: Aftermath, that was released several years ago to decidedly mixed reviews. The good news is that Aftershock is more interesting than Aftermath.

Combat is implemented as a curious mixture of X-Com and Baldur’s Gate. On the one hand, you need to direct your squad members explicitly. By default, the game will pause when a squad member has no orders. On the other hand, you can also pause the game at any time and issue new orders for a squad member, adding to or superseding previous orders. Unlike X-Com, all movement and combat is resolved at the same time: you give orders to as many of your men as you like, unpause, and they go forth to conquer or perish.

Eric is my medic. He likes show tunes.

Among the more successful aspects of UFO: Aftershock is the individuation of squad members. In this style of game, life for squad members is typically nasty, brutish, and short. I might feel some small affection for Kenji Masumoto in X-Com, but realistically I know that every time I send Kenji out on a mission, there’s a damn good chance that he’s going to get cut down in a hail of gunfire the moment he disembarks his aircraft. This means that I try not to get too attached to characters in these games.

In UFO: Aftershock, your squad members are a bit more resilient. They can take more damage, they can heal each other more effectively, and they are modeled with more personality. In X-Com or Jagged Alliance, it’s perfectly common for one lucky shot to blow away a squad member. In UFO: Aftershock, it’s more typical that either everyone in the squad survives, or everyone dies.

Furthermore, as the game progresses they level up, and you decide their career path and specialization. This starts happening almost immediately, at a much faster pace than in similar games, such as Jagged Alliance. So it’s easier to create a vision in your mind of who the character is, and why you don’t want him or her to get killed.

The strategic game

Tactical battles take place in a strategic context. The game uses the “geosphere” graphic introduced in X-Com, but makes the strategic game more sophisticated. The player is confronted with a Risk-like map of territories. Each territory either houses a base (which can be developed to perform research and/or produce items), or provides one of three types of natural resources. Players conquer territories to gain access to these resources, but the act of conquering them also increases the upkeep required to feed your empire. Your base, a movable floating island called a Laputa, can project power over an area about as large as western Europe. Moving the base around takes substantial time, adding another strategic element to the game.

The strategic game shows promise, and is certainly more involved than that in similar games, but feels somehow tacked on. It’s troublesome, because the strategic and tactical games are so different, the overall effect is that each feels like it is interrupting the other. X-Com had this problem too, but combat (at least in the early part of the game) happened much less frequently. This gave you some time to adapt to the strategic game and get some production underway. UFO: Aftershock, on the contrary, rarely allows a single day to pass before forcing you to send your exhausted marines out on another assault. The end result of this is that the strategic game was complex enough to intrigue me, but the game never allowed me to play it enough to feel confident that I was learning its subtleties.

My team, in trouble

The tactical game is where you will spend most of your time in-game. Viewed purely in terms of game mechanics, it works well. You can apply standard squad assault tactics (two teams leapfrogging, one covering as the other advances, concentrated fire, and so on), and they work just like you’d want them to. There are a good variety of weapons and different skills. Your squad members’ different skills are clearly reflected in combat. Unfortunately, some of the rigging in the tactical game detracts from it. The fact that there are no pre-set turns mean that the game pauses and unpauses wth a frequency that rapidly becomes distracting. The design decision to only have essentially one type of terrain (industrial sites) gives the game an oppressive mood. And anytime you have to go inside a building, or navigate your team under an overpass, you will curse the terrible camera management.

But, of course, a gritty, oppressive mood does not by definition make a squad combat game bad. Many designers strive mightily to impart just such a feel to their games. The problem here is that I — and, let’s face it, everyone else — are comparing the game to its spiritual predecessor, which had a cartoonish, anime style, and a sensibility that came out of the British UFO TV series. Viewed as an attempt to recapture this feel, the game falls short. But viewed as a birds-eye alternative to games such as Rainbow Six, it works quite well. It’s all a matter of perspective.

There are a few bugs that are annoying, though not crippling: ammo sometimes disappears, the geosphere screen will pause for no apparent reason, and teleporters and hot spots that were extremely finicky about where you had to be standing for them to activate. None of the bugs I encountered were crippling,

The bottom line? Hardcore fans of tactical squad combat games may very well want to try UFO: Aftershock for its unusual real-time combat resolution. Players looking for the second coming of X-Com are probably better served by a Gameboy Advance and a copy of Rebestar: Tactical Command.

Additional Notes

• Disclosure: The publisher provided me with a review copy of the game.
• UFO: Aftershock uses StarForce copy protection, but it can be avoided fairly easily.
• The UFO: Aftershock homepage contains information about the game, as well as about its upcoming sequel.

“With an iSight, some chlorine bleach, and two pairs of latex surgical gloves, nothing is impossible.”

More context would just ruin it, I think.

I’m 4 or 5 hours into the new Shadow Hearts. Currently, I am breaking Al Capone out of Alcatraz, only Alcatraz is in Chicago and I’m with Al Capone’s bodyguard, who is a gigantic talking white cat. Who knows Drunken Master Kung Fu. Did I mention the talking cat? I can’t really say any more without spoiling the more unique aspects of the plot.

Hi. Glad you could drop by so we could have this little chat. Have a seat. Yes, that one there, right next to the Playstation 2 console. Here, have a cup of coffee. It’s my special blend.

Now, if you could pick it up — no, don’t put that in your mouth — and look at the front. Yes, the front. That’s the part with the buttons. Right. Good. Take a look at the lower left part of the console. Do you see that piece of plastic sticking out?

Why yes, that is a memory card. I’m glad you recognize it. This is so exciting! I can see why you were top of your class. Now, can you see what’s right next to it? Yes! Right again! That’s another memory card! You’re two for two so far.

Now, about this game you’ve developed. It’s quite fun. No, no, I’m not teasing you. Yes. Yes, really! I especially like the lava level. And the way you spaced the save points so far apart, to increase the difficulty. Excuse me? Yes, the coffee is quite good, isn’t it? Oh, yes, that bitter almond taste is quite distinctive — I believe it comes from the roasting. Well, about this game of yours, there’s just one problem. Oh, it’s hard to explain it in words. I happen to have your game right here. Let’s turn it on and I’ll show you.

Now, here, let me just take this memory card out of the first slot, and just leave the one in the second slot. And now just watch…loading…splash screen. Ah, here we are. Main menu. Continue game.

Now, notice that your game freaks out because it can’t find a memory card, even though the card is right there, in slot 2. Your game, in other words, only works if a memory card is in slot 1.

Oh my, you don’t look at all well. Here. Another cup of coffee should perk you right up. Bottoms up!

What? Why would I only have a card in slot 2? Well, there are quite a few reasons. First off, it’s not immediately apparent to a user which slot is which. But if you insist on a more practical reason, many Playstation 1 games, which aren’t compatible with PS2 memory cards, were also written by retarded developers, and require a PS1 memory card to be in slot 1. So if I want to switch between PS1 and PS2 games, I need to constantly be switching cards back and forth. Because you, like a disturbingly large number of developers, are too much of a twit to write a game that recognizes a card in either slot. Today. In 2006. In the twenty-first century.

You still don’t understand what I’m getting at? Well, to tell you the truth, I suspected that would happen. But don’t worry. I have no doubt that by the time you’ve digested my message fully, you’ll never write a game that doesn’t use either save slot again. Oh my, you really are looking quite peaked. I’ve called you a cab. It should be here quite soon.

Here. Have another cup of java for the road. Isn’t this stuff wonderful? It’s just to die for.