Tea Leaves

One of the networks that my “Comcastic” cable system picks up is a repository of HD content called “Mojo”. I don’t know what this network exists to do, but I perked up because it’s only two clicks away from ESPN (NBA playoffs, don’t ya know) and it broadcasts a food show called “After Hours with Daniel” where noted New York chef Daniel Boulud gathers a bunch of food people at various places around the country for “parties” that are then filmed for the television audience. While the setting is a bit contrived, the show plays to every foodie’s fantasy, which is that we have it within ourselves to get closer to the “inside” of these kitchens and really understand what goes on in them.

Don’t be fooled. I think restaurant kitchens are something that even the avid home cook simply cannot visualize or understand. It reminds me of playing volleyball in High School gym, and then watching Olympic level volleyball on television. The court was the same. The ball was the same. The net was the same. But it was an entirely different game.

Bill Buford is one home cook who set out to find out what a restaurant kitchen is like, and he wrote a book about it. After a chance meeting with Mario Batali he ends up spending a year working as a kitchen slave and line cook. His book is full of stories of the various mishaps that befall him as he tries to become a useful member of a professional kitchen. See Bill as he can’t dice carrots well enough to be used in the stock pot, or slices his hand open cutting something or other in the prep kitchen, or sets himself on fire. What was amazing to me about the book was not so much that the guy manages through sheer intestinal fortitude to become a useful line cook (I don’t think I would have made it) but that he clearly had no idea what he was getting into when he started the project.

The food aside, people don’t seem to realize that the mechanics and scale of a real kitchen is difficult to imagine. For example, a dish that I make a lot, like a beef stir fry, I might have done a few hundred times in my lifetime. I like to think I’m pretty good at it. At Babbo, where Bufurd was working, you might cook a particular dish on the menu that many times in one week.

But there is more to it. Every time I make my beef stir fry it always comes out just a tiny bit different. Too much soy one night, a bit too little the next. Sometimes it’s just the right texture, sometimes it’s a little chewy, and so on. In a good restaurant, every one of the 500 grilled whole fish you make have to be exactly the same. One of the toughest scenes in Buford’s book is when he gets taken off the line for one overcooked piece of lamb and one undercooked piece of pork. Two mistakes out of one night of hundreds of covers. Of course, the repetition means you get a lot of practice. I bet if I had to make my beef stir fry 500 times in one week I’d get better at it.

Buford’s tales illustrate one aspect of how the professional kitchen differs from what we do at home. You have to be able to make a phenomenal amount of food at a consistently high level in order to survive. The After Hours show deals with an entirely different aspect of restaurant people. After watching this show for a while I realized that mechanics aside, these people just think about food in a way that is completely different from the rest of us. This shouldn’t be surprising. After all, all they do all day is think about food. But here are a few examples that left me in a state of startled wonderment:

1. In one episode, Daniel makes a pork and ham meatball concoction where each ball is about the size of a baseball and has an entire golf-ball sized black truffle stuffed in the middle. That’s a $200 meatball.

2. There was the paella for 40 cooked all at once in a pan with a custom gas burner that measured six feet across. Where do you even buy a six foot paella pan?

3. The pan of live prawns that were then roasted under a 20 pound mountain of 500 degree salt.

4. In response to the horrendously decadent “DB” burger, which you can get at Daniel’s Restaurant in NYC for a mere $32 or so, the staff at the Commander’s Palace constructed a similarly structured Po Boy sandwich with duck, a foie gras dipping sauce, truffle french fries and a sunny-side up egg, which they sell in New Orleans for a mere $29 (I think). The sandwich sells too.

5. A whole pig roasted in a box in the ground.

6. The 4 foot rondeau (it’s like a big shallow soup pot, but bigger) pan filled with pounds of root vegetables, a gallon or two of stock and wine, a half a dozen whole lamb shanks, blood sausage, pork sausage, and who knows what else being tossed in an oven as casually as a pot of beef stew.

7. The live lobster trying to eat a piece of raw Kobe beef.

You get the idea. These people can not only cook you under the table, they can think of things to do with food at a level that you can’t even dream of, because it would never have even occurred to you to try. These are the people who, hundreds of years ago, would have been the nuts who tried the first piece of rotted milk that turned into blue cheese. Or discovered that when you soak field corn, which isn’t great, in lye, you get something wonderful. Or decided to try and eat the preserved fish a little earlier, before the rice on top rotted.

I come away from watching this show knowing one thing: I am not these people. I have gotten pretty good at cooking a few traditional recipes that make me happy. I have gotten to the point where the food in the oven will often tell me that it is done so I don’t have to go check it. But I will never be good enough and fast enough to work in a real kitchen. And, I certainly will never have a relationship with food that lets me think of something like cooking a whole salmon inside clay in which you have inserted sticks from a fennel plant. Or poaching a whole calf’s head, and then rolling up the insides into a sort of meatloaf-like object.

That sort of thing is just an entirely different game.

Allow me to take a moment to pimp this eBay auction wherein I am selling an Amiga 500, various accessories, and pieces of software. Help get this stuff out of my basement by getting it into yours.

Most importantly I should note that among the items I’m including in the package is an original cloth map from Ultima V. I suspect that to some people, that cloth map is worth more than the Amiga.

This week I finally managed to finish a Metal Gear game on the first try. I tried and failed to play Metal Gear Solid 2. I also failed on my first try with Metal Gear Solid 3, although the second try was successful. If it had not been for my second playthrough of Subsistence I probably would not have even tried Metal Gear Solid 4. But I did, and for the most part I am happy that I did. Be warned though. All of my comments about the game assume that you are willing, for the most part, to take the MGS genre on its own terms. Except for some marginal gameplay improvements, this game is all MGS all the time. I think that as long as you are prepared for that, you can let go and enjoy the ride.

Metal Gear Solid 4 is a continuation of the events last chronicled in Metal Gear Solid 2. You will recall, or maybe you will not recall, that Metal Gear Solid 3 was an examination of events much earlier in the timeline of the MGS universe. The basic story here is that you are fighting guy who is using the name of “Liquid”, which is the same name as Solid Snake’s twin brother, and who like Sollid Snake is actually clone of some other guy named Big Boss, who was the Snake character in Metal Gear 3. But this guy isn’t really Liquid Snake because Liquid Snake is dead. Instead he is actually Ocelot being controlled by Liquid’s arm, and he is plotting to take over the world by crippling the satellite information systems that run the military industrial complex. The player, as Solid Snake, must thwart this plot. At this point it should be clear that even the surface of the narrative of this game is completely ludicrous. Don’t try to understand it, just let the cut scenes flow over you. They are strongest when they are fight scenes. They are at their cringe-inducing worst when they attempt to create an actual sense of “drama”. But they are part of the rhythm and atmosphere of the game, so it’s best just to accept them without absorbing them too much.

About half of the “play time” of the game is taken up in these cut scenes. Nearly every major character that appeared in any of the previous four games shows up here for a cameo. I think. I can’t keep track. All of the standard Kojima inside jokes and “style” are in full force. There are monkeys, boobs, fart jokes, diarrhea jokes, and Playboy Magazine.

When you actually do pick up the control pad and play the game, you will find that a lot of things are better. In particular, the game has moved into the 21st century by allowing you move and aim your gun at the same time. Both the third person and first person controls for guns actually work well. If you didn’t know any better, you would think you were playing Splinter Cell. This makes it much easier to “sneak” through areas by creeping around and sniping everyone you see. I also managed to actually sneak through some places without killing anyone, which I could never do in the previous games. The high tech camo-suit also makes this easier, as does the old standby: a cardboard box.

The action sequences are split between scripted set pieces and Boss fights. The Boss fights are generally boring, but since you can actually aim the gun, they are at least a lot easier. Environments vary from a hallway disguised as a city in the “Middle East” to hallways in a jungle to hallways in Eastern Europe at night. Just for good measure, the setting from the original Metal Gear Solid is brought back to life. And, you also get to sneak around on a ship again.

The basic flow of the game goes like this:

1. Install next mission.

2. Long cut scene to describe the next mission.

3. Long cut scene to begin the next mission.

4. Some gameplay.

5. Long cut scene. Maybe a Boss.

6. Long cut scene to end the mission.

There are five top-level missions. You have to do a mini-install before each one because Blu-Ray apparently sucks as a data streaming medium.

Gameplay varies from stealth areas to action set pieces to one bitchin’ bullet-time filled rail shooting sequence on a motorcycle. I have three main complaints about the gameplay:

1. Same stupid Metal Gear A.I.

2. Same stupid Metal Gear savepoints.

3. Not really quite enough of it. The last act seemed especially sparse. I had finally started to get the hang of things, and got stuck playing mostly an extended cut scene. But hey, this is MGS after all.

I can’t say that I’m unhappy with how things turned out. I could see myself going back and trying to do actually do the levels without killing anyone.

One thing I do find strange about this game is the critical reception that it has received. There appear to be two classes of reviews. On the one hand there are those put the Metal Gear series on high in the pantheon of human artistic achievement, on par with the great works of literature and film. On the other hand, there are the reviews that make the game out to be so self-indulgent and so poorly paced as to be unplayable trash.

I think both of these groups are making one critical mistake: they appear to be taking what Kojima is showing them at face value. They think that the content is meant to be taken seriously and literally. One group absorbs this information and proclaims that Kojima is the next Shakespeare. The other does the same thing and proclaims Kojima to be the next Ed Wood.

I think you can’t play the game this way, and I don’t think that Kojima really expects you to take the game and its convoluted plot seriously. As a nutty anime inspired action game with stealth elements, Metal Gear, at least in its fourth installment, is finally a game that can be played and enjoyed. Yes, the cut scenes are long and self-indulgent, but you don’t really have to pay close attention to them. And, for all of his verbal diarrhea, Kojima does manage to construct a few interesting characters and some visually arresting animation. Personally I found it more interesting than GTA 4, but that’s mostly because the camera wasn’t making me physically ill.

I say, turn your brain off, get that twitchy trigger finger going, and romp through the game like its the romp it is meant to be. The less you worry about how an arm can contain someone’s soul, or how genetically engineered nanomachines can end up enslaving humanity the better.

In my review of Guitar Hero, back in January of 2006, I wrote what can only be considered to be a prophetic sentence:

Well, I now own Rock Band for the Xbox 360, and I can pay to download songs on Xbox Live. And so I am broke.

I exaggerate, of course. The only thing I have bankrupted is my petty supply of “Microsoft Points”, the Xbox’s demeaning company scrip that is intended to make you not know how much money you spent on their products. Yesterday, for example, I spent about $19 to buy the entire Pixies’ album Doolittle for Rock Band.

Worth. Every. Penny.

The brilliance of Rock Band is in its guitar (and drum) tabs. Whoever writes these is, quite simply, a genius. Never simply punishing for the sake of being punishing, their tabs seem to be written with one goal in mind: convincing you that you actually know how to play a song, when you really don’t know how to play an instrument at all. Here Comes Your Man plays so perfectly you’d swear it was written for the game.

In summary:

Dear Harmonix,

More bands like the Pixies, less bands like Judas Priest.

If there are two strong memories from my high school years watching the Bird-era Boston Celtics, the first is the series in 1981 when the C’s came back from 3-1 down to beat Andrew Toney and the hated 76ers. The other was the very next year when it was clear that the hated 76ers were going to beat us to go to the Finals against the hated Lakers. The crowd at the Garden broke into a spontaneous chant of “Beat L.A.! Beat L.A.!”, because they all knew that local skirmishes were one thing, but beating the Lakers was everything.

This year the Celtics have treated their fans to an unlikely turnaround of enormous proportions, climbing up from a 24 win season a year ago to 66 wins and a championship. But what makes it especially sweet for me is that they not only beat the Lakers, they obliterated them.

I was skeptical from the beginning. Paul Pierce had never impressed me. He seemed too immature to carry a team. I wondered why they traded a high draft pick for a 32 year old shooting guard with bad ankles. But when the KG trade happened, it was clear that the Celtics would be good, although no one could know how good. Even after 66 wins in the regular season there were still questions. The team had no playoff experience, and they did not impress the early rounds of the playoffs, needing 14 hard games to get rid of Atlanta and Cleveland.

The team started to show some life in the Detroit series, particularly the strong game 6, but they still seemed to play in spurts. A strong quarter or two here, then a few weak ones. And so it went into the Finals. They almost gave away a 24 point lead in game 2. They played two incredible quarters of basketball to erase a 20 point lead and humiliate the Lakers at home in game 4. But in the very same game they spotted the Lakers that lead in the first place by playing a horrible first half. Then they threw away a great opportunity to steal game 5, again spotting the Lakers big leads. They just didn’t seem to be able to put a whole game together to put the Lakers away. And, they had started to look a bit worn down from the long season and various nagging injuries to key players.

It all changed in game 6, where they played great for a whole game. It was fitting for this team in this season to play their best game of the year to clinch the championship. For once there was offense to complement that swarming hive-mind defense that made Kobe look so human. The Lakers tried to hang tough for a while, but by the middle of the second quarter the constant pressure from the Celtics combined with the euphoric energy from the crowd seemed to intimidate them to the point where they simply gave up. Pretty soon, they wilted away and the Celtics got anything they wanted. Some favorite highlights from the game:

1. KG getting a jump ball on Pau Gasol with one hand.

2. KG hanging in the air, getting mauled by Odom and the throwing it in anyway off the backboard.

3. Ray Allen hitting three pointers from all over the floor. At times he was so open that he could have done a dance number after catching the ball and before shooting it. I feel I must personally apologize to Ray Allen for all the mean things I said about him earlier in the playoffs. He truly came back from the dead. Owning Sasha Vujacic and making him sob on the Laker bench in Game 4 was icing on the cake.

4. Posey standing Kobe up one on one and then stealing the ball.

5. Rondo stealing the ball from everyone.

6. The Boston fans taunting Kobe Bryant when he went to the bench. The Boston fans performed at a high level throughout the playoffs. You could not say the same for fans in other cities. In Cleveland, the PA announcer had to prompt the crowd to chant “DE-FENSE”. In Detroit the PA announcer was perhaps the most annoying performer that I have experienced since Chris Tucker. And in LA the fans seemed almost as lost as their team. In Boston, the building sounded much like the Garden of old, except for the annoying dancers and the fireworks and light show during the player intros. Whoever made those up should be killed.

While I’m complaining, I have some raspberries to send towards the hard working TV people who do their best every night to keep me from enjoying a good basketball game.

1. Stop with the slow motion HD replays of players talking trash to themselves after a big play. I lip-read more people saying the long form of “mo-fo” than I care to count.

2. ESPN should consider hiring a studio team that actually has something interesting to say. TNT at least has Barkley, who is humorous and seems to realize that the whole studio pre-game and half-time shows are stupid, but he has fun anyway.

3. Putting a microphone on the coaches while they wheeze to their players on the bench or in the locker room is not good television. It’s boring.

4. ABC should fire whoever did their opening Finals show montage. It was a horrible mish-mash of poor Photoshop work applied to a lot of archival file footage which would have been more compelling if they just left it alone.

5. Mike Breen is the devil himself. ‘Nuff said. I like Van Gundy though. He was the only bright spot on the entire team.

6. Finally, 9pm start times and 3 hours of total run time is complete horse shit. Kids on the East Coast used to be able to watch all of the playoffs. Even the night games. It is a telling commentary on the soulless commerce of our modern age that the NBA and the TV networks are willing to basically say “fuck you” to the practically the entire East Coast so those California people, who don’t care anyway, can watch the game closer to dinner time.

To sum up, I was wrong about this team. I figured that according to various conservation laws of Playoff Experience you can’t put a team together in one year that makes a run for all the marbles and wins. But I was wrong. I was also wrong about Pierce, who has clearly matured from the somewhat petulant and out of control guy in 2002 to the clear leader of the team in the Finals here in 2008. It was a great thing to watch. It was great to see that the NBA has been resurrected back in Boston. It’s been a long time.

Blessings and salutations on the head of Nat, who returned from San Francisco with a bottle of Rothman and Winter Crème de Violette for me. May his head always be the unit by which the size of libations are measured.

Click to enlarge

I mentioned several months ago that I thought I had found some crème de violette in Kansas City. I was mistaken. What I actually found was a Marie Brizard concoction called “Parfait Amour”. Some people have maintained that this is an adequate substitute for violette in an Aviation cocktail. They’re wrong. The only thing the Parfait Amour has in common with crème de violette is the color, which is indeed identical. Everything else is different. Where the crème de violette is only somewhat sweet (surprising for a crème), the parfait amour is cloying. Where the violette smells and tastes floral and a bit musty, the parfait is citrusy and tastes like an oversweetened blue curaçao. Where the violette is fairly thin and liquid, the parfait is thick and syrupy.

Of course, I immediately used my newfound acquisition to mix an Aviation cocktail, using this recipe. This tasted much better than the version I tried to make with the Parfait Amour. The result? Drinkable. Not the holy grail, to my taste, but then I’m also somewhat infamous for having very little interest in gin-based drinks generally. Still, I’m excited to have finally gotten to taste a real version of this legendary (and largely forgotten by the wider world) cordial.

I spent last week in San Francisco and the Bay area, which is why updates have been infrequent. Allow me, however, to share one of the niftier things I saw while there: a busker playing the cymbalom, a Hungarian dulcimer, using tools of his own design:

The performer is named Michael Masley, and his web site is here. When I first saw him, I momentarily thought that he had grown his fingernails out to a ridiculous length. On closer inspection, the extensions on his hand are a tool he has created. The cymbalom is normally played with two hammers, one in each hand. Masley’s “bowhammers” allow him to strike, bow, or pluck the strings with all of his fingers.

Against my better judgement, but driven by Pete’s positive impressions, I used some game trade money to get a used copy of GTA IV last weekend. By the convention of the Ebay Rating System the game is a high 3 or barely a 4. I have already listed the game on Ebay to raise funds to maybe continue my self-hating suffering with the next Metal Gear game. Since it is pointless to write a direct critique of this title, I will complain about the game indirectly. Here are some reasons why MLB08: The Show is better than GTA IV.

Better Camera

The camera in MLB08 is straightforward. It generally sits behind the player you are controlling, allowing you to see the pitch you are throwing or the pitch that is being thrown to you. It moves in a regular and generally predictable fashion with the player if you are running the bases or running around the field to make a play. For the most part you don’t notice that the camera is there. It just does the right thing. This is how a game camera should work.

In GTA IV the situation is different. The camera seems to have a life of its own. It swims and dances and bounces as you move around. If you are indoors it constantly runs into walls, which makes the swimming and dancing motions even worse. In one notable mission, I had to run up 4 or 5 flights of stairs, the camera trying to follow me but constantly running into the stair rail, the door jams, the walls and the floor. The one thing the camera never did was stay still and track my motion in addition to showing me what I wanted to look at.

Instead, the constant motion gave me a headache and nearly made me physically ill. It’s a good thing that the press has told me that GTA is such an innovative and technically brilliant franchise, full of an incredible amount of real life detail, because while I was playing all I noticed was how I couldn’t see anything because my vision was swimming around with the retarded camera.

Better Gunplay

OK. This one isn’t really fair because there are no guns in MLB08. On the other hand, GTA would be a much better game if Rockstar got rid of the horrendous half-baked barely working obviously tacked on gameplay system that they claim allows the player to shoot things. The mystical camera shooting system in Fatal Frame II is downright responsive compared to what you get in GTA IV. The only game I think of that is worse than this is Metal Gear. But in Metal Gear you can forgive the combat system its foibles because you spend most of your time watching cut scenes.

As I said before, MLB08 has no guns, but it does have gameplay systems that make sense and work smoothly. You can pitch, you can hit, you can run, you can throw the ball. So on core gameplay, MLB wins again.

Better Characters

In MLB08, the characters, like the camera, are straightforward and to the point. There are players and coaches and fans. The players play the game. The coaches coach the game, although they don’t have much to say. The fans watch the game, although again, they don’t have much to say either. Sometimes a player and an umpire will get into an argument, although these scenes are not voice acted so you are never really sure what they are arguing about. In all, what you have is a collection of mute cyphers that get out of the way and let you play baseball.

In GTA 4 there is a veritable Hollywood Lot full of characters, mostly either psychopaths or offensive ethnic stereotypes. They provide hours of voice acted cut scenes whose main purpose is to tell you one of two things:

1. Where in the city you should go to shoot someone.

or

2. Where in the city you should next be driving your taxi to pick someone up or drop someone off.

I’ve been playing the game for I would guess seven to eight hours and so far that’s all the characters in the game have done for me. They barely serve any purpose in the narrative of the game at all. But to make up for it, they are mostly loud and annoying.

Better Pacing

Which leads me to my next major complaint about GTA IV. The pacing is horrendously slow. I’ve played four disk JRPGs that deploy their story, such as it is, faster than this game. As I said, I’ve been though nearly eight hours of game and as far as I can tell I’m still in the tutorial.

The pacing problems in this game stem, I think, from two structural problems. First, Rockstar is overly enamored of its “living city” environment and thinks that you should be too. Therefore, you spend a lot of time with nothing to do when, I suppose, you are supposed to drive around the bitchin’ city and find stuff to do. Too bad most of the city is locked up until you finish the story missions, which are the second part of the problem.

The story missions go like this:

1. Drive 10min to get to the quest giver.

2. Watch an annoying cut scene with a lot of ethnic stereotypes screaming at each other to find out where you are supposed to go.

3. Drive 15min to get to the mission location.

4. Fail at the mission because the combat system is about as smooth as a seven year old with ADHD who is also on meth.

5. Goto 3.

The point at which I gave up on this game for good was the tutorial mission for the motorcycle. I crashed that god damned bike about eight times and then listed the game on Ebay.

MLB08 does not have these pacing problems. You play a whole season, or a few seasons, one game at a time. In the RPG-like “Road to the show” mode you make your own character and you only have to play the bits that involve your character. If Rockstar had built the MLB game, I’d have to drive to the airport and then fly the plane to away games before I got to actually play baseball. And then if I lost, I’d have to do the driving and flying all over again.

Better Audio

The play by play announcers in MLB08 are great. They are almost always saying something meaningful, and they are never so repetitive that you need to turn them off.

Everyone says that the radio stations in GTA are the best gaming content short of a live-action first person porn simulation. I don’t get it. Mostly the radio in GTA does to me what the radio in real life does. It makes me want to kill people and turn it off as soon as possible.

The cut scene dialog isn’t much better.

Summary

After suffering for about a week of this, I put the game on Ebay. I give it 4 horrendously painful gaming sessions out of a possible 5 before I decided I didn’t hate myself enough to keep going. Although I think the correct score is more like a high 3, I hated my last session with the game too much for it to count.

This weekend, as I mentioned previously, I picked up a Wii Fit. I’ve been using it for a few days now, and I’m ready to talk about it:

I’m still overweight! This thing is useless!

OK, OK, I’m just kidding. Honestly, it is completely awesome. Here’s the interesting thing: gamers don’t seem to think it’s awesome. Only, apparently, normal people.

Most of the articles that I’ve read about the Wii Fit focus, understandably, on the fitness angle. It’s easy to see why. A game that helps you get in shape! True fitness enthusiasts may not understand what the fuss is all about. Technically, there’s nothing the Wii Fit “does” that you couldn’t do by yourself in a gym with a scale. What it provides, it seems to me, are three things:

(1) Structure, meaning suggestions on what to do next.
(2) Measurement and bookkeeping, in terms of weight/BMI tracking.
(3) Most importantly, it gives you a plausible reason to be working out in your house instead of in a gym, where you will be surrounded by the sorts of people who go to gyms.

For me, the importance of this last point can’t be overstated. I know there are all sorts of advantages to going to a gym with other people: the friendly competition, the socializing, the crushing despair of seeing people twice your age benchpress twice your weight, the filthy locker rooms, the athlete’s foot, and so on. But for me, all of these wonderful things just serve to make me want to run away. I am, fundamentally, an antisocial creature. No matter who you are, reading this weblog, no matter where you are, no matter how we know each other, there is a 99.99% probability that I don’t want to shower in the same room as you. Sorry. It’s the way I am.

So for the past few days, I’ve been waking up in the mornings and spending 30 minutes or so with Wii Fit as my only cold, electronic gym partner. Even when it is cruel to me—as when it plumps my Mii out into a little butterball-shaped porklet—I find it more tolerable, and more motivating, than the finest $5,000/year deluxe gym. And fundamentally, exercising is less about fancy equipment than about motivation.

Wii Fit divides activities into four rough areas: Yoga, which involves breathing and holding a pose for a period of time, Strength Training, which lets you do reps of some calisthenic activity, Aerobics, which are exercises designed to burn calories, and Balance games, which are about adjusting your balance to win an on-screen game, such as a ski slalom.

Interestingly, these four activities represent two distinct feels. Yoga and Strength Training both adopt a serious attitude, giving you a kind and impossibly fit Japanese trainer to demonstrate the activities in question, to urge you on, and to gently chide you when you give up on your push-up routine because you weigh 800 billion pounds and cannot possibly support the massive flesh drooping from your frame on your two, spindly, twig-like software developer’s arms. The latter two categories are “mii-based”, in the sense that they take place in a world populated by Nintendo’s Weeble-like cartoon avatars. One wonders if Nintendo expected people to stick to mostly one section or another, or if they were simply trying to provide variety. Either way, it works.

What I don’t think has come through in most of the reviews of Wii Fit that I’ve read is any sense of how fun the game is. The balance mini-games are all simple, yet both challenging and addictive. The board is uncannily sensitive, and the slightest shift in your position can cause dramatic moves in your onscreen counterpart as he or she skiis, or snowboards, or plays a variant of Super Monkey Ball, or slides around on an iceberg in a penguin suit trying to eat raw fish.

And yet, as I look around gaming forums and web sites, I see…nothing. No discussion of the Fit whatsoever. The straight press is fascinated by the game, but the reaction by the “hardcore gamer” community has been strangely muted. My only theory is that despite the bleating and whinging about wanting “innovative” games, when actually confronted with something innovative, they don’t know how to react. And they go back to buying the latest ultraviolent twitchy shooter with a bad camera. Maybe “hardcore” just means “retarded”?

I don’t mean to oversell the “difference” of Wii Fit as a game. It is much likeBrain Age, but with the promise of training one’s body instead of one’s mind. What I think is innovative about it is that it is one of the most successful attempts to merge “personal improvement” with actual unmitigated fun. “Edu-Tainment” has been the castor oil of the software industry for years (even earning a sarcastic and self-aware song outlining the history of naturalist John Muir in the original Sam and Max, Freelance Police). But Nintendo has created a self-improvement product that, I think, people will actually enjoy using. And that is no small feat.

Will I continue using the Wii Fit every day? Only time will tell. But at this early date, I’m impressed.

There is also a larger question here for the game industry. Significant parts of the industry—Sony and Microsoft, I’m looking at you—seem fully committed to making the same old garbage, but with higher resolution. Words can’t really describe how “special” this is as a business proposition: “Let’s make the same games that didn’t sell all that well last time, but let’s spend even more on art assets (and cutting edge, expensive hardware that fewer people can afford) to do it.” In the meantime, Nintendo makes games with simpler art assets on less expensive hardware, and is literally selling them as fast as they can make them. Customers (remember them?) aren’t buying the Wii because they are listening to the gaming press. They’re buying it because they recognize that Nintendo has created something different, and something innovative. And apparently, “different” and “innovative” sell better than physics engines that lovingly simulate blood spatter through particle effects.

I’ve heard it said that the games made for hardcore gamers are, often, made by hardcore gamers.

If that is the case, here is some free advice for Sony and Microsoft: I think it’s time for you to start firing your hardcore gamers. They’re costing you an awful lot of money.

Back when I was a college student, french fries were easy. You got four or five of your friends together and walked to the O, where you could pick up a few pounds of deep fried potatoes for around $5. What the fries lacked in quality they made up for in quantity and cheese whiz. Life was good.

Now life is more complicated. The O is still down in Oakland, but three pounds of fries are not such a pleasing proposition. Other classic sources of french fried pleasure have also fallen by the wayside. McDonald’s doesn’t use beef fat anymore, so even that last ditch outlet is gone.

I have now come to realize that there is something of a French Fry crisis in Pittsburgh. I hadn’t really thought about it until we had a new guy, let’s call him “Joe”, move from CA to Pittsburgh to start work in our office. “Why can’t I get decent fries”, he would ask from time to time. We took him to all the best local places: D’s have pretty good fries with their dogs, but they are not french. Point Brugge makes fries from scratch, but they only really get it right 75% of the time. Five Guys have gotten a lot better after a slow start, and might be the most consistently decent fries I’ve had in a while. After all this time after college, the O is really more of a mass of onion-ring like material in the shape of a mound of potatoes.

Today we were discussing the problem again at lunch and Joe presetned his new measure of fries quality, and I realized he was totally right. Here is what he wants:

He wants a place that does fries that are better than Ore-Ida frozen french fries that he bakes in the oven at home.

I actually have a similar measure, only with Whole Foods tater tots.

So this is your challenge tonight: find me a place where I can get fries better than either one of these two mass produced products every single time I order them. I’ve eaten all over the city and have never found a joint that could pull this off.

Five Guys in Oakland almost manages this. But it’s a chain, and that’s no fun.

Surely there is a local place that can do better.