Tea Leaves

Having learned my lesson from the last time I bought a football game for the 360, I took advantage of the boundless generosity of the second Pete to get Madden 2007 for the 360 using his Gamefly account.

I was cautiously optimistic about the game this year because the press says that the game is much closer to (say) the PSP version of the game than last year. The reality is that as usual, when they say “close” they mean something completely different. Sort of like when they say Metal Gear Solid has “good” game-play.

In its defense, the 360 Madden does play better than last year in one way: it doesn’t feel like the running back is stuck in quicksand anymore. That’s good.

Of course, there are a small number of things missing from the game when compared to this year’s offering on the PSP. Yes, I bought the PSP version. Yes I know it’s a sickness. Go away.

Let’s see:

1. No accelerated clock. To make up for this, they make the playtime even longer with stupid offsides and motion penalties. Also, for God’s sake whatever you do, never play against the Colts. Because then you spend almost all of the 45min of game time watching the Zombie Peyton Manning jerk and dance and sing and audible.

2. The A.I. on defense goes missing occasionally. Your little minions will run right past the play, seemingly clueless as to the fact that the guy they just ignored has the ball.

3. Defensive backs in particular enjoy ignoring their coverage assignments and just watching the ball go by.

4. The instant replay camera control is jerky and annoying. The frame-rate in the replay itself can be inconsistent as well.

5. The game camera occasionally jumps around at random.

6. Jump the snap was stupid in NCAA 2007, and it’s just as stupid here.

7. The pre-snap adjustments are completely crippled compared to the PSP. You know, the machine with 1/10000th the CPU of the Xbox 360. To make up for it, the UI makes it harder and more tedious to configure fewer settings. Way to go.

8. Replays show that collision detection and clipping problems are common. Passes “hit” your receiver’s hands 5 feet away from their body and bounce off. Willie Parker runs through the head and shoulder’s of his center on the way to melting into the defensive lineman’s mid-section. Yes, this sort of thing happens on the PS2 as well, but it’s not quite as noticeable. I guess the machine is too busy pushing out textures and has no time left to actually do decent geometry.

9. The vertical play calling menus suck just as much here as they did in Madden 06 and NCAA 2007. They are also strangely non-deterministic. You’ll hit one screen and go to the next, and hop back, and the available choices are not the same. This makes fast navigation difficult.

10. The Steelers picked off my Tom Brady avatar 4 times in 16 passes. That’s stupid.

OK. There is one cool thing. The rendering model of Downtown Pittsburgh is cool.

Looking over this list, I find it hard to believe that the game is this bad. Maybe I’m being unfair. After all, I only played a few games over one night. But here is the thing. The game is almost fun. You play, and you are almost convinced that you will have a worthwhile experience. Then, inevitably, something stupid happens and you think “WTF?” and you are back to reality. I think playing the game for a few more hours will not change this.

My recommendation is to play this game on the PSP. The new version is really nice. They have added instant replays back this year. So it’s nearly like having the PS2 version in your pocket, except that it’s better because stuff like the retarded Superstar mode is not wasting your storage.

I’ve had my current road bike since I moved back to Pittsburgh in the early 90s. So, I imagine that it is almost 15 years old. In this time, I have spent a lot of time shopping for my “next bike”, the perfect machine that combines versatility with technical and aesthetic excellence. The problem is, whenever I ride my bike I realize it’s perfect (except in the rain).

This didn’t stop me from building a list of attribtues in the perfect road bike. This piece overlaps a bit with my previous rant about road bikes, but not too much.

1. Steel

Here is the thing. Aluminum is cheap and light, but it’s a crappy way to make a frame. Stuff just breaks off if you are not careful. Carbon fiber is just a fancy way to say “plastic”. Would you ride a plastic bike after you crashed it? Titanium comes the closest to being a real contender. It doesn’t rust! The only thing going against it is cost. But custom bike frames are primarily yuppy toys anyway. Still, you can’t get a nice lugged Titanium frame. So steel wins.

2. Lugs

Lugs look nice. They can be a bit overblown, as in the Rivendell bikes. And, people can be a bit too ardent about defending them with foofy statements about Bike as Art. That’s stupid. Lugs just look nicer than those stupid huge bubble welds in the average aluminum mountain bike.

3. Fat Tires

Bikes as transportation people make a big deal about wanting a frame with clearences so that they can fit fenders for rain riding. I used to think this way. But, over the last few years I’ve come to the realization that I will never ride in the rain unless I happen to get caught in a freak all day thunderstorm on a century ride (this happened once). I mean, my favorite saddle is a Brooks, made out of leather, which hates rain. ‘Nuff said.

Fenders aside, the bike should be able to take 28-32mm tires without using stupid cantilever brakes. I don’t like cantilevers. They squeal, they are hard to open, they are weird to adjust. I realize this is my particular problem.

4. No Lawyer Nibs

No lawyer nibs.

5. No Stupid Colors

It is a fact of life that companies that make bikes and bike related equipment employ people who are colorblind. The shoes from Sidi and Carnac are the best proof of this. But, the paint chosen for most production bikes and frames makes the case almost as well. You generally have a choice between industrial gray and black or some hideous two tone striped pastel mixed with blazing green.

Everyone knows that the proper color is a single paint and any color you want as long as it is blue, burnt orange, or red. Solid black is also OK. If you must have white panels around the lugs, I can forgive that.

6. Higher Handle Bars

Drop bars are for keeping your hands comfortable. This means you should not lean way over and put too much weight on them. If you want to crouch, get in the drops.

7. Bikes I like

I like my road bike a lot. Its only real failing is a lack of clearence for fat tires. I tried to run 26mm tires once, and for a year the tires rubbed against the frame whenever I was in the big ring. For the most part, I can forgive the bike this one sin. But, in looking around, I have found a few almost perfect bikes to replace it:

Surly Pacer. This bike is all business and no nonsense. No lugs, but no stupid welding either. I like the black and the fact that it’s cheap.

Bianchi Volpe. This bike is great except for the cantilever brakes. Unfortunately, the same frame with decent road bike frames will only take skinny tires. Pick your poison.

Rivendell. This is the cheaper production of their road frame. I rode one of the custom road frames back when they only cost this much. These bikes are great, but I think the lugs are overdone and I don’t like the paint panels.

Ebisu. I rode one of these a few years ago in Berkeley. I think this the current favorite on the “bikes I shop for but never buy” list. I like the understated styling.

Jamis. Jamis makes some nice cross bikes (Aurora, Nova) whose only bug is cantilever brakes. They used to have a bike that was the perfect orange, but they changed to stupid colors instead. I still haven’t gotten over that.

Late last year I wrote a review of the then-new game Civilization IV for Played.todeath magazine. It was a hard review to write: Civ IV was a brilliantly designed game that was crippled by performance and user interface issues that made it, in my opinon, virtually unplayable.

At the time I opined:

[The developers are] rumored to be working on fixes for some of the issues in their release. If the patch is better engineered than the retail release, I might be willing to revise my opinion.

It is, and I am. I’ve recently been playing Aspyr’s Mac port of Civilization IV, and it is a much more enjoyable experience than the original Windows release. Here’s what you need to know.

Most of the improvements to the codebase have been incorporated in recent Windows patches as well, so you don’t have to go the Mac route. That being said, a number of aspects of the game seem to just work better in the Aspyr version. Most notably, alt-tabbing back to the desktop is quick and painless in the Mac port, whereas when trying the same thing on Windows it always seems just too darn slow. On the downside, both the Mac and Windows versions of the game require that you keep the CD in the drive while playing, because no one ever plays games on a laptop.

The most noticeable improvements in the updated version of the game are in how it performs. No more do you suffer from intolerable slowdowns on large maps. The game moves along at a brisk pace, which allows you to enjoy the strategic improvements to the franchise that much more.

And the improvements here are not small. It’s hard to describe them adequately without getting marred in minutiae: many reviewers like to discuss the intricate system of religions, for example. I prefer to describe the matter in broad strokes. The game allows for a certain degree of strategic flexibility that was abjectly missing in Civ III. Playing Civ III was like building a house out of playing cards. Cards that had been dipped in oil. Also, you were trying to build the house on the deck of a ship, during a storm. What I mean by this is that you could spend 4 hours playing a perfect game of Civ III, and then you’d make one wrong move and your country would be annihilated in under 45 seconds.

Civ IV is more sensible, and has an arc of play more appropriate to the game’s timescale. You can still run things into the ground if you’re not careful, but through commonsense gameplay and forethought you can almost always salvage some dignity, if not an actual victory.

In other words, it’s a better game. A more balanced game. A game that, now that we can actually play it, is more fun to play.

The other issue I had with Civ IV was that I found certain aspects of the UI to be tragic. What particularly enraged me was the in-game help system, the Civilopedia, which I described as “not there when you need it, and when it is there, it’s hard to use.” The patches have solved the latter problem: they have thrown away the useless “icon view” in the Civilopedia and replaced with a simple, easily navigable hierarchy of English text. Let’s hear it for blessed simplicity. I’m still unhappy with the haphazard way the game targets tooltips, but I can live with it.

On my MacBook Pro, with all detail knobs cranked up high, I didn’t have many performance issues. When you zoom out to a great height and the game chokes for a short while trying to swap the ridiculously huge cloud texture to and from the graphics card. This same interaction brings the Windows version of the game to its knees, also. The Mac version was compatible with all of the mods I tried. The game was noticeably slower on the G5 I tried it on, and is effectively unplayable on a Powerbook G4. I’d be interested to hear from readers who have played the game on a MacBook as to how the game performs.

I’m well aware that there are many people who bought the original version of Civ IV and had absolutely no problems with it. I wasn’t one of those people: for me, and for many others, the game was a whirling nightmare of bugs and slowdowns. I am truly happy that a few months of extra engineering has resulted in a game that I can enjoy, now, too.

Disclosure statement: Aspyr graciously provided Tea Leaves with a review copy of the game.

Pittsburgh doesn’t like one of my favorite bands, Me First & The Gimme Gimmes.

(via Pittsblog)

PS: It occurs to me after the fact that this could simply be something that sucks about baseball. Somehow I can’t imagine the band getting a better reception in whatever they’re calling Candlestick Park now.

Dear Astronomers:

You seem to be having some trouble making up your minds deciding which of the celestial bodies orbiting our star is a planet. I read your revised definitions where you explain that Pluto is “not a planet” but is a “dwarf planet” (could you make that any more confusing?).

You are lost. But do not fear. I am hear to lead you to the truth.

What you have is a complex document that was hammered out based on political considerations. What you need is a definition that is simple, crisp, and conforms to basic scientific principles. Thanks to my 35 years as Professor Emeritus and head of the Astronomy department at Universität Göttingen (footnote 1), I can succeed where you have failed. Here is the definition you should use:

Planet — A planet is any celestial body orbiting around the sun that is mentioned in the Schoolhouse Rock song and video Interplanet Janet.

You’re welcome. I hope that clears things up.

The video for Interplanet Janet is available on iTunes.

Footnote 1: I am lying.

Since they’re changing the rules on me, I need a new mnemonic to remember the names of the planets. This one is mine and mine alone.

“My Very Earnest Mother, Camille, Just Served Us Nine Pickles (Cornichons, eXactly).”

(Mercury, Venus, Earth, Mars, Ceres, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, Pluto, Charon, Xena)

The problem with White Russians is that they’re very 1986. The other problem is that to make them, you have to buy a bottle of Kahlua, and now you have a bottle of liqueur that you can only use for White (and Black) Russians.

I was thinking about this today, and realized that I wanted something White-Russian-like (in the sense of “somewhat sweet, somewhat girly, likely to be served in a casino”). But I didn’t want a drink that tastes like coffee. The fact is that I like coffee enough that if I want a drink that tastes like coffee, and yet has alcohol, I will make coffee and then put booze in it.

At that moment I realized that I still had a bottle of Cointreau in the cabinet, and thus this drink was born. I’m sure it’s been independently invented in a thousand places, but mine was created to explicitly mirror the taste of the Good Humor truck orange creamsicles you had as a kid.

The recipe is simple:

• Two parts Cointreau.
• One part gold rum.
• One part heavy cream.

Serve (of course) over lots of ice.

There are people who will blanch at the thought of heavy cream in a drink, and will want to substitute half-and-half or milk. If you are one of these people and are not at imminent risk of heart disease the only thing I can say is: you are worthless and weak.

Now if I can only figure out a way to mimic the taste and texture of those Strawberry Shortcake ice cream bars in a cocktail. Hmm. I wonder how well Strawberry Quik, vodka, and wheat germ would work together…

I found out today that my favorite record store of all time closed last month.

For the Record in Amerhst MA was everything a local record store should be. It had good prices (always cheaper than retail), a wide selection in all areas of music, not just the usual mindless micro-genres of pop music that most places have. You could walk in on any given day and find something unusual and wonderful no matter where your interests might lie. This is because the people who ran the store knew good music. They also knew every inch of their store, and could find any record they had in stock in 30 seconds if you could describe three bars from the first cut.

For the Record was a great place to go and hang out and browse and be surprised. It has fallen victim to other forms of music commerce that may provide you with the bits that you want, but do not have this level of personal contact. After more than 30 years in business, they are gone, and the world is worse off because of it.

It is mid-August, which means one thing. I’m killing time waiting for the next Madden. I’ve been doing this with a mix of old and new and new-old games.

Madden 2006

I still pick this up and play it once in a while, especially on the PSP. The game appeals to me because running is too easy and the human-controlled defense is too good. This means I spend most of my time winning. Last night, my simulated Patriots pummeled the Bills 42-0, capping off the fourth quarter with a play-action 65 yard bomb and a two-point conversion. Good times.

The tricky question this year is whether the 360 version of the game is worth considering. If the gameplay is as broken as last year, I’ll probably put up with the PS2 looks-like-ass filter for 12 more months.

Age of Empires: DS

This is a strategy game. It is well done. On the other hand, since it is not Advance Wars it is not as good as Advance Wars. Still, it’s a different setting and a nice change of pace. But it’s really not as good as AW.

New Super Mario Brothers

I picked this up for the annual summer trip to the parents. I never played any of the classic, or even modern, Mario platform games. I’ve only played Mario Golf and Mario Kart. I tried Mario Sunshine once, but it gave me a headache.

If anyone ever needed conclusive proof that 3-d really did nothing to improve the platformer, this game would be a good start. The gameplay is fast and light and fun and super-refined. I presume that anyone who played this game on the NES has a deep sense of constant deja-vu, but for me, this is a great collection of classic gameplay that is as good as anything that has come around since the late 80s. And as a bonus, no camera problems.

My only complaint is, not surprisingly, the retarded save system. I die a lot. This means I have to play the stages dozens of times to get through them. This gets old. Worse, you can only die a limited number of times before starting the whole world over again. This is hard evidence that the game designer hates me.

I don’t think it would be too much to ask to save my game after each level. But NSMB only has saves after every couple of levels. Yes, there are special save “huts”, but you only get to use them once and you have to pay “money” to do it. This must be the result of some brain-dead old skool game design where the designer is supposed to treat the player like manure and the player is supposed to thank the designer for his trouble.

Only two things mitigate my hatred for this system. First, since it is a Nintendo game, there tend to be resources and power-ups when you need them. Second, there are some mini-games that get you as many lives as you need. Still, these are half-measures. They wink and nod at modern game design but only meet me halfway. Unlimited lives and a save at the end of each stage would have been better proof that the developer does not hate me.

Halo

A couple of weeks ago, I listened to a GDC presentation about Halo on my iPod. The talk was fascinating, and covered a lot about what is good in the game, particularly the A.I. and the pre-recorded alien dialog (”Augh! He’s everywhere!”). As part of the presentation, they played an audio track from one of the early levels of the game, and I got curious about how it would be to replay the game from scratch.

I remember the orginal Halo as being slow, plodding and confusing, especially in the early stages. I had a lot of trouble staying oriented and finding my way through the areas. I also died a lot.

This time through, I find the pacing to be much faster. I originally wrote that the pacing in Halo 2 was tighter and faster than Halo, but now I think they are about the same.

The combat in the game also feels faster and more satisfying than I remember it. Maybe it’s just because I’m using the bitchslap a lot. This will sound like an obvious point, but shooting things is fun. This really isn’t the case in other shooters. In almost every other shooter I’ve played since Halo, combat ultimately ends up being a chore. It is boring and repetitive, there is no rythm and flow. In the end, you feel like you need to kill the enemies if for no other reason than to just make them shut the hell up and get their 5 lines of dialog out of your head.

Even in Half-life 2, the shooting took a back seat to physics puzzles, seeing the city, and following the narrative line that never did anything but tease you. Consider that the best level in the whole game didn’t have you using a “real” gun, with, you know, bullets.

In Halo, you shoot things, and the combat has been tuned and refined to such a degree that when you get into a pleasing rythm it’s almost like dancing with the game. Enemies appear at the perfect rate (and slightly differently every time) and you know just what to do to them to make them say something pithy (”Grenade! Oh No! Not again!”) and then fall over in a cloud of blue blood and burnt alien flesh.

The first time I played Halo, I really only felt in tune with the game after I got the shotgun. This time, the feeling started a lot earlier and lasted a lot longer. The game stands head and shoulders above most shooters primarily because so many small details were done right. I’m not sure exactly which of these details were the critical ones. I just know that I’ve played a lot of shooters since Halo and none of them are as fun. You can complain about the checkpoints, the backtracking, the repetitive alien floor plans and the vehicle control, but for me, the whole package comes together better than any game in this genre since the first Half-Life.

Halo 2 is pretty good too.

Some time ago, you may recall that we reviewed Italian amari, liqueurs that are believed to help aid the digestion. Our panel reviewed these beverages solely from the perspective of taste.

Tonight, I had a somewhat overwhelming dinner, and I can report that, in fact, amari do work wonderfully as digestivi. So three cheers for the ragazzi buoni who make Amaro Montenegro.