Tea Leaves

Despite the common misconception that both Petes on Tea Leaves are the same person with multiple personality disorder, we actually lead separate, fulfilling lives. This is especially apparent when it comes to games. Here is the typical Pete To Pete Pattern when it comes to “What we’re playing lately.”

Polarity: peterb-to-psu

peterb: Hey, you need to try this game, Morrowind. It’s the best thing ever.
psu: I don’t play Windows games.
peterb: Here’s the Xbox version.

[…time passes…]

psu: I got off the ship and I couldn’t tell what I was supposed to do so I sold the game on eBay.

Polarity: psu-to-peterb

psu: Here, try this PS2 RPG.
peterb: What’s it about?
psu: High school girls who sell gay porn for dresses that give them magic powers.
peterb: …
psu: They use the magic powers to buy guns and shoot themselves in the face to summon demons.
peterb: …
psu: Then the demons have sex with Peyton Manning and give the girls XP.

[…time passes…]

peterb: I got the Student Council President’s pornomancy spells up to level 11, but then I played Pokémon for a week and when I came back to this game I couldn’t remember what the plot was so I stopped playing. Here’s the game back.

The interesting thing here is that with a few notable exceptions, we hardly ever play the same games at the same time. Usually we cross-pollinate our interests, instead.

Last week, however, we both picked up Bioshock at the same time, like every other Xbox 360 owner in the known universe. It has been interesting comparing notes with him as we’ve both progressed through the game.

The really interesting thing about this is that I’ve been watching his (and my) “achievements” as we progress through the game. Achievements, for those of you who don’t know about them, are stupid little Xbox Live Merit Badges that you get for being a good little hamster and slogging your way through the a given game.

Both psu and I have been (and still are) fairly dismissive of the achievement system. It’s not actually connected to anything in real life, or in fact even in the game: the sole thing that achievements enable are bragging rights. I remember in the original Project Gotham Racing they had an in-game achievement system that unlocked certain features (for example, if you drove a car for 50 miles or some such, you might get a new helmet). That, to me, was at least an actual reward. Merit badges aren’t very rewarding to me. I spent years recovering from the trauma that the Cub Scouts inflicted on me, so I certainly am not going to begin squandering psychic effort on acquiring merit badges at this point in my life.

All that being said, I will admit, to my shame, periodically comparing our achievements in Bioshock. On at least two nights last week, I ended up staying up an extra hour playing the game because of the feeling I was “falling behind.” At least at the time of this writing, I have caught up:

I don’t think my fascination with the achievements is a generalizable one. The specific question that was mesmerizing me was “How the hell is he getting through these levels so quickly?” This ties in, I believe, to style of play. I’m a creepsaver. I’ve been abused by bad computer games for so long that I end up saving the game just about anytime I do anything significant. Defeat a boss. Find a powerful weapon. Pick up some dryer lint. Walk five feet. It’s a sickness. Plus, I definitely have a problem where I feel like I “have to do it right.” This leads me to compulsively reload the game when I die, even though Bioshock provides a perfectly reasonable and non-punishing respawn system that is more or less penalty-free.

Psu, I suspect, is simply less type A about this than I am. My guess is that he is playing the game to progress to the next cutscene, and isn’t as neurotic about approaching “perfection.”

Last night, I believe I reached a key point: I reached the point where I was still interested in the plot of the game, but not actually interested in the mechanics. There are some mild spoilers ahead, so those of you who are hypersensitive to that might want to leave off here.

Bioshock’s spiritual predecessor was System Shock 2, which I have talked about here before. System Shock made heavy use — arguably, heavy overuse — of a specific storytelling technique that I have come to think of as the La Paloma Gambit, after its use in Dashiell Hammet’s novel The Maltese Falcon. The goal of the gambit is to give the protagonist their next narrative goal, and introduce some pathos, while avoiding having to depict a new character in detail.

In System Shock this played out by your having radio conversations (or other distant visual or audio contact) with a friendly character, who asks you to meet them in such-and-such a place. When you get there, you are just in time to watch them be horrifically murdered, with you behind a locked door, unable to help. The very first time someone in Bioshock said to me “I’m just down the hallway, come in.” I turned to the other people in the room and said “Watch this. I will get to a locked door with a window and will watch them be killed.”

Despite the predictability of the plot arc, it is executed superbly. The voice acting, the screenwriting, and the pacing are all about right. But midway through the game, I’m frankly fatigued by the actual combat. And last night, I walked right up to the brink of a dramatic confrontation whereupon I discovered that, once again, I needed to go clear across the map and fetch a MacGuffin or two, I suddenly had the thought: maybe I can just run there, ignoring all the enemies, and get to the next cutscene a little more quickly.

Perhaps I should look at this as a good thing. Maybe it’s not the game after all.

Maybe I’m just becoming less neurotic.

Cachaça is a Brazilian rum-like sugarcane based spirit. Earlier this year I slammed Cachaça in an offhand manner, based on my experience in trying one brand. Dave Catania, aka “Cachaça Dave”, commented and challenged me to try the brand of Cachaça that he imports, “Fazenda Mae de Ouro”.

I’ve accepted the challenge. Here’s the full review:

I’ll be honest: the only reason I did this in a videoblog format is that a certain friendly company loaned me an HD-format dv camera, and I wanted to try it out. I apologize in advance for the poor lighting, the bad editing, and the general ugliness of my face, body, and spirit.

I also apologize for my tragically consistent mispronounciation of “cachaça”, which my friend Francisco tells me is in fact pronounced “cashassa”, and not “catchassa.” I guess this is my comeuppance for giving people grief about mispronouncing the italian appetizer as “brushetta,” rather than “brusketta.”

After harshing on them last week for how clunky their SLO system is, I will take a moment to say something nice about them: my Special Liquor Order arrived today. That means that it took them less than a week to get 3 fairly exotic bottles of liquor into my local store, and they got the order exactly right, despite my snark.

So while it may be a painfully slow process to place an SLO, I have no complaints at all about the actual delivery process. I’ll just say “Thanks, PLCB!”

Like at least half of the rest of the gaming universe, I picked up Bioshock this week. Most of the industry appears ready to pronouce it to be the orgasmic second coming of gaming nirvana. This may or may not be the case, I don’t know. What I can say for sure is that the game knows how to begin with a bang.

You might recall that earlier this year I ruminated about how not to start a game. To summarize: don’t make me look at boring exposition taking place in a generic environment for a full 20 minutes without giving me anything to do but shoot a rat. Whatever else you might think about Bioshock, you can say it does not waste your time. You are literally thrown into the game and instantly given tasks to perform, scenery to look at and a reason to move forward and find out what comes next. In other words, you are given a reason to care about the game.

What is sad is how few games do this right. You’d think people would have learned by now that if I have no immediate reason to care about the game, I have no reason to play the game.

I can only hope that the rest of the game manages to maintain the standard set by the start. This might finally be a shooter that can stand against Resident Evil 4 in my conciousness.

So far my only complaint is, as usual, that Medium might be too hard again. I never learn.

After being killed by a cactus with a flower on its head, I restarted the game and used a cheap technique to quickly level up to level 15 before progressing with anything.

I’m much happier now.

The news came last week that Max Roach passed away in Manhattan. I was lucky enough to see Max Roach play live a few times while I was a graduate student at Dartmouth College. My most enduring memory of the man would have to be Max and the drum kit alone on the stage while he completely captivated the audience for five or ten or fifteen long minutes. It was a shame to see him stand up and exit.

Roach was never one to stick to one style or one particular way of working. A few years after graduate school I happened to catch him playing the Regatta Bar in Cambridge where he brought with him a trio that consisted of the drum kit, a piano and one of those strange sounding Chinese violins.

One of my great regrets in life is that I didn’t find out about Max Roach until well after I had left Amherst and gone on to school. I was in graduate school when I discovered the quintessential record that he made with Clifford Brown: Clifford Brown and Max Roach At Basin Street, and it was at this time that I first saw him live at Dartmouth College. Later I found out that for most of my life up until that time, Max Roach had been a professor at UMass in Amherst. He had been right under my nose for my whole life and I was ignorant enough to not realize it until I had already left town. Typical.

Anyway, if you have not found Max Roach yet, I suggest you start with the record above and then go and get everything else he ever did. It will be the most interesting time you ever have listening to a drum kit, I guarantee it.

While on my recent trip to California, I visited a couple of liquor stores — the venerable BevMo, of course, and also the little diamond The Coach House, in Cupertino, where one can find Tequila Los Abuelos. While at the latter facility, I stumbled across a bottle of Amaro Nonino, perhaps my favorite Italian amaro. I considered bringing it with me, but I knew that Nonino was available via Special Liquor Order — aka SLO — in Pennsylvania. “I’ll just order it when I get home,” I said. “It’s been years since I’ve special ordered anything. Surely they’ve improved the process by now. How painful can it be?”

It turns out the answer is “Embarassingly painful”

I had a few items that I wanted to special order. In an effort to give the LCB (and myself) every possible advantage, I did some homework before visiting the store. First, I picked a store where I knew the staff was helpful and polite. Second, I visited the PLCB’s website beforehand and wrote down the SKU numbers for the products I wanted, so we wouldn’t have to spend time looking them up at the store. Lastly, I visited the store about 20 minutes before they closed, to give the staff that extra incentive to get it done quickly.

The initial encounter went well. I told the manager that I was shopping for a few items (including a bottle of Grand Marnier’s new “Navan” product, about which I’ll have more to say later in the week), and that I also wanted to special order some things. “I have the item numbers right here,” I said. “Great,” said the manager. “Just give those to me and go do your shopping, and I’ll meet you back here when you check out.” I was the only customer in the store. This certainly seemed promising.

I spent about 15 minutes making my choices, and came back to the desk. “Umm, go ahead and pay for those things,” said the manager, “while we get this paperwork finished.”

As I paid for my booze, I kept an eye and ear on the process for completing an SLO in the store. It goes something like this. On one computer, the clerk or manager types in the SKU number of the product you want. That computer then displays the product name, bottle size, and so on. Then, there is a second, separate computer for actually entering the special order. You type the SKU number into that machine, and then read the name off the first machine, which is loads of fun if you’re ordering something with a long, complicated name. You type the name into the second machine. You also copy the bottle size and some other data from the first machine as well. Presumably, connecting these two machines together, or allowing the second machine to do the lookup itself is beyond our primitive Earthling technology.

After a while, they were ready to take my deposit for the specially ordered booze, but had forgotten to tell the system what the deposit amount would be. That can’t be changed at the register, so they had to go back to the special SLO machine, cancel the first order, create a new one (typing all of the information in again), and put in the deposit amount.

Elapsed time from the time I gave them the three SKU numbers to the time they were ready to check me out: 40 minutes. This is beyond bad. This is pathological.

I want to emphasize here that I’m not slamming the employees who were processing my “Special” Liquor Order. The people checking me out were the competent ones. Imagine if I had gone to a store with a more typically unhelpful PLCB employee (say, the Squirrel Hill store with the nasty old crone who cards everyone, even if they’re 60 years old?) Imagine how long it would have taken if I hadn’t collected the SKU numbers in advance, and needed the have them look it up? (I tried that once at the “Premium Collection” store near Whole Foods, and was stunned into silence as the nice but bewildered clerk began pawing through a drawer containing big books of dot-matrix printed paper in order to figure out if it was even possible to SLO the product I wanted.)

The PLCB has an online store which, in theory, allows you to use a series of tubes called “the internet” to place an order yourself and have it show up at your local store. Exactly none of the items I wanted to order are actually available via that store.

Now I get to wait for a few weeks, at the end of which I will get a call, go to the store, and probably find out that they’ve shipped me the wrong products.

So, in summary, Pennsylvania has managed to create a liquor sales system where it is actually less emotionally painful for me to fly to California to buy booze than to special order it in my home state.

Way to go, guys. Way to go.

Additional Resources

We’ve written many other articles about how Pennsylvania’s Liquor Control Board is simply horrid:

• Whine and Spirits
• It’d Probably Work Better If It Were Run By Drunkards
• Fixing the Pennsylvania Liquor Control Board

In my time on this Earth I have often been accused of taking things too seriously. As I’ve grown older and seen more of the world, I have tried to keep a tighter hold on my tendency to do this because if there is anything I have learned it’s that no matter how seriously you take something, there is always some guy living in a basement somewhere who is working much harder that you are.

I have found this to be especially true in gaming. I think this is why I find the behavior of the so-called “hard core” gamer so strange and fascinating at the same time. Core gamers are a group of people are like me on the surface: we both like video games. What is striking is that they are alien to me in almost every other possible way.

The most obvious difference between me and a hard core guy is that I suck. I’m just really bad. I’m the guy who you really don’t want to be the fourth on your Gears of War team unless you need a quick decoy to run out into the middle of the map to draw out the other team in a frenzy of chainsaw action. I’m slow. I have a bad sense of direction. The controls do not come naturally to me.

One reason I suck is that I don’t like to play hard games. I am not in this to beat the game. I am in this to see how the game turns out. I don’t mind hard games. I’m happy to let other people play them. Hard core players, on the other hand, seem genuinely offended by the idea of an easy game. They complain about how newer games are too easy, or how Blizzard nerfs the game in some way every time they update it. Or how Oblivion is just a retarded first person shooter because of the little compass thing that tells you where to go next.

I don’t understand complaints like this. It seems like we are put on this Earth to play the games the developers develop, and if we don’t like what they do, we are free to ignore them. It’s not like there is any shortage of titles to go searching through while looking for something that matches your particular taste. If the game is pissing you off, stop playing it. But the core gamer set seems to work much harder at actively disliking games or gaming trends that they find distasteful.

A lot of recent forum angst has been targetted at Nintendo, who now stands accused of “abandoning” the hard core. Apparently the fear is that Nintendo has made such a killing by selling people games that they actually enjoy that soon the entire industry is going to try and copy them and start making crappy knockoffs of Wii Sports instead of the crappy knockoffs of products from Valve or Rockstar or Bungie that they make now. Thus, the hard core gamer will be deprived of “real games”, and instead be forced to play shallow game-like skeletons that lack “depth” and “maturity”. Forums and blogs all over the Internets were buzzing with these thoughts in the wake of the Wii Fit announcement. Even the usually intelligent Gamers With Jobs got into the act here in their post-E3 podcast.

Nintendo has correctly been ignoring these people. I say correctly because these are the same people who wrote Nintendo off a decade ago for making nothing but candy-colored kids games, when in fact Nintendo was creating some of the most enduring and brilliant gaming experiences of the time. Nintendo owes these people nothing, and it’s incredible to me that they can have such an inflated sense of entitlement as to complain that Nintendo’s future directions do not include their interests. I say that Nintendo should follow the course that their well-developed instincts have set for them. It’s more important for them to continue to create their own unique brand of experience than to try and cater to people who don’t understand what they are doing.

Of course, if Nintendo is abandoning the hard core, this means they are embracing the so-called “mainstream”. To me, this is a fabulous idea. It will make them money. It will force them to make games that can be stripped of the historical chains of awkward user interfaces or cripplingly stupid gameplay conventions. I say bring it on.

Many core gamers see this differently. The mainstream is looked upon with a high level of suspicion. The terms used to describe mainstream games, when not actively hostile, are often tinged with a certain level of condescension. Thus, the overused moniker of “casual games” has been thrown around as the next big thing, the implication being that there is a second class of player in the world who is not to be taken seriously except as a source of commerce because he will only play a game “casually.” Casual games are seen as simplified shallow minigames that you only need to use half a brain to play. While certainly useful as a way to unwind after that 15 hour raiding session with 60 of your favorite World of Warcraft buddies, they aren’t “real” games. They are only casual.

I don’t like this term because I think it sets up a false hierarchy of gamers and gaming experiences. At the top of this hierarchy, of course, are the hard core gamers and their favorite games. According to them, they deserve to be up on top because they are the most dedicated and the most knowledgeable people in the industry and their favorite games are deep, complex explorations of mature themes like how many times you can shoot someone in the testicles. The mainstream experience they claim, will be watered down, diluted, or dumbed down in order to appeal to the unwashed masses. In other words, moving to the mainstream is a threat to the high brow, challenging core gamer experience.

Well, I don’t think so. First, I disagree wth the premise that the current core gamer experience is anything to be high and mighty about. But that ground has been covered before. Second, I am old enough to have lived through the mainstreaming of several technical industries from computer hardware to desktop software to The Internet. As each one lurched into the public consciousness, there was a lot of hue and cry about letting the barbarians into the gates of paradise. My observation, in general, is that letting in the barbarians forces you to really fix things that are wrong with what you do. And this is a good thing. The mainstreaming of gaming will be no different. Yes, some old and beloved products may fall by the wayside. Yes, the industry may not always build what you would like them to build. Yes, we’ll get our share of cynical cash grabs and questionable business practices. But, I am optimistic that if we can put away that whiny sense of Internet forum entitlement, in twenty or thirty years we’ll look up and be surrounded by a set of gaming experiences that we can’t even imagine now.

This past week the Petes were both in Cupertino for a visit. The last few times I’ve been out there, I’ve been told to find a donut shop called Stan’s that is close to our normal Cupertino hotel. Because I am lazy and morally suspect, I never managed to do this. On this trip though, we girded our loins and made ourselves get out there one morning. So here is a shout out to Stan’s. If you are in the Bay Area and you don’t get donuts there, you are a fool.

I am normally on record as saying that the canonically correct donut is a New England cake-style cider donut. Some of the best examples of these come from the beloved donut and pie store of my youth: Atkins Farms in Amherst.

Stan’s, however, elevates the raised and glazed donut to a new level of artistry. Pete and I each got one of their “twists” or cruellers right out of the fryer with a fresh coat of glaze. They were hot, crunchy on the outside and chewy on the inside. Overall, these take those little bullshit Kripsy Kreme sugar covered air pockets and kicks them in the ass back into the little sewer hole out of which they crawled to pollute all that is good and proper about real donuts. If nothing else, Stan’s emphasizes the fact that KK donuts are morally wrong in every way.

The cake donuts were good too. Lighter than the East Coast version, but crusty and yummy anyway.

Two donuts were enough food for the whole day. Keep that in mind when you drop by.

Both of the Peters are out of town this week, so updates will likely be slow for a while. Our apologies.

The egg cream, as anyone over a certain age who grew up in New York will be happy to tell you, is a transcendent soda fountain drink that contains neither egg nor cream. A strict interpretation of the egg cream contains seltzer water, Fox’s U-Bet chocolate syrup, and milk. It invokes summers in Coney Island, open fire hydrants, and Steeplechase Park.

The dirty little secret behind the traditional egg cream, however, is that it doesn’t actually taste good: imagine carbonated Yoo-Hoo, and you’re not far off the mark.

But tonight I wanted an egg cream anyway. Fortunately, I didn’t have any Fox’s U-Bet chocolate syrup, so instead I made an egg cream that tastes good.

I’m sure there are people (including my father, who will disown me if he ever reads this article) who will argue with me that a real egg cream, like the one from that soda shop in Canarsie, actually tastes good. I can’t know for sure, of course, because I wasn’t there, but for the most part I don’t believe these people. I think they aren’t remembering the taste of the egg cream, but the taste of their evanescent and distant youth. The taste of the memory of youth grows sweeter over time. But the traditional egg cream, that just tastes nasty.

Drink this one instead.

Ingredients:

• Very cold seltzer water
• A small amount of very good cocoa powder. I used Guittard cacao rouge.
• A little boiling hot water
• Sugar to taste. I actually don’t use any sugar at all, but I accept that I’m in a small minority in this.
• Heavy cream, or half and half, or whole milk.

Put the cocoa powder and sugar (if you want it sweet), in a saucepan. Pour some boiling water on it and stir it until it is liquid. Pour a little — about 2 tablespoons — into a huge glass. Add an equal amount of the milkfat of your choice. I used heavy cream, just to be a jerk about it. But secretly, anything richer than half and half is a little wasteful, since it will be diluted and overwhelmed. Pour in the seltzer water. Get the bottle really high and splash it around a bit to work up a good head of froth.