Tea Leaves

I will allow myself a brief comment on the little local blogging drama. I will keep it short and sweet, and anyone who doesn’t already know what I am talking about can safely ignore this.

My comment is “Don’t let the door hit you on the way out.”

I am not given to declarations of consumer affiliation (subliminal: buy !) But last year I waxed rhapsodic about Seagate’s FreeAgent Pro external drives, and tonight, well, I’m going to do it again. I needed more storage, and I couldn’t quite convince myself to shell out the cash for a Drobo storage robot (mostly because I was afraid it would be loud) so instead I just bought another FreeAgent. Specifically, I picked up the 1 Terabyte model

Every good thing I said about the 750 Gb model holds true for the 1 Tb. It is perfectly quiet. I can’t hear it unless I put my ear up to it. In some ways, it’s even better. They toned down the manically happy packaging to a purely functional level. The firewire interface, which used to come in a sort of offboard daughtercard that needed to be swapped out with a screwdriver, is now built in: the unit comes out of the box able to do USB or Firewire 400 with either full-size or mini-connectors. It also comes with both Firewire and USB cables, so no panicked trips to Fry’s or Best Buy for the cable you forgot are necessary.

They’re little, they’re quiet, they work great, and I sort of dig the orange light (which you can turn off with a Seagate-provided utility if it bugs you). I’ve heard through the grape vine that this model is soon to be discontinued, so buy five copies of these, per the consumer rule, before they mess it up.

(OK, actually, buying 5 of any disk drive, given the rate at which storage technology advances, is probably not a winning strategy. But I’ve noticed that even with all my 21st century space-age-au-go-go applications, like HD video editing, 1 terabyte feels a lot “bigger” to me, in terms of my storage needs, than 1 gigabyte felt when the first gigabyte drives were released.)

I’ve had some bad luck with hardware this year. For the first time ever I had a disk fail in one of my computers. And then after getting my laptop rebuilt my iMac’s power supply went south and I had to get that machine rebuilt as well. When the laptop came back, I had to install all my old tools one by one, something I haven’t had to do for three or four years thanks to the wonderful Apple magic brain transfer function which makes imaging old machines into new machines easy and painless. For some reason, in doing all this work I didn’t reinstall Photoshop… until this weekend when I wanted to do some panoramas. Therein lies my story.

The install on my laptop went fine. I went to Adobe’s web site, downloaded the binary again and ran the installer. After all of that the app came up, asked me for my various keys and then made me hit a big blue Activate button and everyone was happy. However, I found working with the panoramas to be a bit painful, so I thought I’d fire the whole thing up on my iMac to take advantage of the 4GB of RAM and big screen. This time, I got to the big blue Activate button, and instead of warm happiness I got a message about how I had too many activations of the software.

No problem, I thought. I’ll just go to the web site and deactivate my previous installs the same way you can do at the iTunes Music store. Unfortunately, there is no such facility. Apparently Adobe expects you do know when your hardware is going to fail so you can preemptively make room for more installs on your Photoshop license.

I had only one recourse, I had to call Adobe on the phone, explain what happened, and get another key that allowed me to use Photoshop on the iMac. This all took only 10 minutes and went very smoothly, which just goes to show that Adobe at least does not hire the same incompetent drooling monkeys that Microsoft or EA do. Still, I don’t think this is good enough.

And this brings me to my philosophy about DRM. At my core, I don’t really care about Fair use, deep legal philosophy, or my inalienable consumer right to do what I want with a product that I have bought with my hard earned cash. Software piracy is a problem and people that work hard to deliver expensive applications and content have a right to try and control that content as they see fit. I think that there is a much more pragmatic ideal to be pursued here. And it is this:

If I have to call you on the phone in order to be able to use your software, then you have failed in a fundamental way to provide a decent out of the box user experience.

That’s all I have to say. Do whatever you want, just don’t make me call you on the phone.

What’s wrong with Spore?

This is the question that’s been occupying me this week. With the help of about an hour on the phone to India I managed to resolve my DRM issues and played the game for days and days. It leaves me a bit cold.

But frankly, I expected Spore to leave me a bit cold, since I’m one of the 2% of the population that doesn’t like The Sims. The interesting thing is the particular way it leaves me cold, which I didn’t expect, and that I’ve noticed is that it’s leaving other people a bit cold, people who should like it. I think this is worth examining in some detail.

Early previews and PR surrounding Spore pitched it as a sort of “sim to end all sims.” You didn’t design creatures, you “evolved” them. The implication, or at least the inference many of us made, was that Spore was primarily about designing species and then watching them do their stuff; in other words, more like Sim City than Space Invaders.

The truth is, sadly, more mundane. As Yahtzee noted in his brilliant video review, instead of being a unified simulation, Spore is actually 5 old games remade and stuffed into one package. For my purposes, I’ll call them Pac-Man, Street Fighter, Dune II, Civilization, and Master of Orion.

In the Pac-Man segment of the game, you swim around an oceanic maze avoiding ghosts (”carnivores”) and eating pellets. In the Street Fighter phase you wander around a lanscape and either beat up other races or charm them into allying with you. Dune II is a sort of real-time strategy segment where you destroy (or, again, charm) other tribes by moving your tribe members around, and Civilization involves conquering other cities around the world. Lastly, in Master of Orion (Yahtzee compares this part of the game to Star Control, which is also fair) you try to conquer the universe through means fair and foul, by flying a ship around, talking to other species, and settling and terraforming other planets.

Skeximoose

Throughout all of this, you are constantly designing creatures, buildings, and vehicles, so Spore probably holds great appeal for those who love tweaking the visual appearance of on-screen creations. I am, alas, not one of those people. But I don’t hold that against the game.

What I do hold against the game, however, is how quotidian each of the segments is. The common thread, the unifying missed opportunity is that in each segment of the game you are in complete control.

Your creature isn’t swimming around the ocean looking for plants to eat: you are steering it into the plants.

Your creation isn’t wandering the primal landscape dancing with (or fighting) other creatures, you are telling it “Dance. Now sing. Now pose.”

Your civilization isn’t trying to conquer an enemy city through propaganda, you are ordering them to build the trucks, then telling the trucks to move to this spot, then telling them to broadcast.

The promise of Spore was, in my mind at least, a world of automata, where there’s always the chance that your creations may do stupid or boring things, but where there’s a chance that, every so often, they might do something rich and strange. But in Spore, there is not richness in the gameplay. There is richness in the player-created art — and let’s be honest, that’s really all we can call the creatures and houses and vehicles, visual art — but there is no richness in the gameplay. Anyone who wants that sort of, dare I say it, numinous experience should put down Spore and pick up Dwarf Fortress instead. More surprising and interesting things happen in 10 minutes of Dwarf Fortress than happened to me in a week of Spore.

When I reached the Space stage of Spore, I had to confront my extreme sense of non-achievement. Talking to a friend about it, I said “The Space stage is probably the most interesting part of the game, but by the time I reached it I felt like the game had sapped my will to live.”

The craft of game design is something akin to alchemy. And, unfortunately, it seems to me that the creators of Spore have transmuted their raw materials in the wrong direction.

There is a classic scene in The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy where it is revealed that the best way to destroy the mind of the average intelligent being is to put them in a room that shows exactly how insignificant they are with respect to the rest of the universe. In other words, the last thing people need is a sense of perspective.

I felt this way the other week when we landed in San Francisco and got some Dim Sum.

We were in SF to go to the Slow Food Nation show which happened at the beginning of September. But that’s another article. It so happened that we got lunch at the Hong Kong Flower Lounge. This is a good, but to my mind distinctly second-tier dim sum place that happens to be very close to SFO so it’s convenient if your plane lands near a meal time. We sat down and got five or six batches of dumplings, sticky rice, the thick rice noodles, and so on. As each dish arrived, I thought back to the last big meal we had in Pittsburgh at the Richard Chen restaurant and I could not help thinking that at least in the area of dumplings, this place had Mr. Chen beat.

Then the bill came: $26. I think we might have been under-charged. But even at twice that amount one might say that on a “value for money” scale the HKFL completely destroyed Richard Chen. Of course, the comparison is not completely fair. The level of service and polish at Richard Chen is much higher. They have some fancy dishes made from fancy ingredients that the Flower Lounge lacks. They have a wine list. And so on. But I still felt smacked hard in the face with the cold hard reality of perspective. While the state of Chinese food in Pittsburgh has undoubtedly improved, it is a fact that at some level it will never compete with larger cities especially on the West Coast.

On a related note, people often ask me why there is no good dim sum in Pittsburgh. There is some stuff that is OK. But not really good. Later in the trip we went to our favorite Dim Sum place in SF: Yank Sing, and was presented with an easy answer for why. We went to Yank Sing on a Sunday. On a Sunday, Yank Sing not only serves people in their normal 50 to 60 table restaurant space in the RinCon center, they also fill the food court outside their restaurant with another batch of tables. I took a picture:

So my answer is simple. We don’t have enough people for a place like Yank Sing to exist. By the way, if you are ever in SF, go to Yank Sing and ask specifically for the Pea Shoot Dumplings. If they are not the best dumplings you have ever had in your life in North America, I’ll pay for your meal.

Parting note: I am still happy with my experience at Richard Chen. I think it’s safe to say that they could be doing better on their dumplings though. They remain my only major disappointment.

As sometimes happens, I began writing a long and detailed article about how I have given up on having my stereo receiver be part of the “AV” system my TV is hooked up to. Quickly I discovered that psu wrote the same article a year and a half ago, in more detail and with better reasoning.

So I’ll just say that tonight is the night I gave up. I unhooked the receiver and speakers, decommissioned the classic Xbox and the DVD player (anything I want to watch anymore I stream from iTunes, and I can use the 360 as a DVD player in a pinch), and moved them out of the room.

The results are interesting. First, my cabinet now has space for games. The room has more space. The wiring in the cabinet is 250% less tangled.

There are other side-effects, though, too. The receiver was always on when I played games. This meant it was always warm. This means the cat slept on it. So in addition to being a fire hazard, it was probably contributing to a substantial portion of my electric bill, not to mention global warming.

I tried Rock Band through the TV speakers. No, it didn’t sound as completely awesome — but it was good enough that I’m willing to pay the small cost in sound quality to regain the use of my living room.

Now if I can just replace the stupid Rock Band controllers with wireless ones, I’ll really be cooking with gas.

I don’t usually republish press releases, but this is so fresh that I’m taking liberties:

Canon U.S.A., Inc., a leader in digital imaging, today introduced the EOS 5D Mark II Digital SLR camera, the long-awaited successor to Canon’s highly popular EOS 5D, introduced in 2005. Building upon the qualities that made the EOS 5D camera so successful, Canon has coupled the creative power of a full-frame CMOS sensor in a relatively compact and affordable camera body, together with groundbreaking HD video capture that opens the door to a much wider range of imaging possibilities for photographers. Along with the ability to capture full HD video clips at 1920 x 1080 resolution, Canon’s EOS 5D Mark II Digital SLR camera features a 21.1-megapixel full frame 24 x 36mm CMOS sensor, DIGIC 4 imaging processor and significantly lower noise, with an expanded sensitivity range from ISO 50 to ISO 25,600.

There’s more, of course, but let me summarize the highlights as I see them:

• 21.1 megapixels, just under 4 frames per second.
• A viewfinder with 98% coverage. That’s excellent.
• Full HD video capture: clips up to 4 Gb, recording time up to just under 30 minutes per clip. Using a standard Canon EF lens. As with the Nikon D90 announcement, this is huge. Given that it’s this level of video capture in a higher end body, it’s arguably even more huge: you don’t have to choose between video capture in your SLR and a 35mm frame: you can get both!
• Live view shooting, with a silent mode available

Price? Body-only retail price is announced at $2699, available by the end of November. They also announced a 24mm f/1.4L lens at the same time.

One other feature that Canon called out that I thought was interesting was the availability of “small RAW” modes. Anyone who has shot with a higher-megapixel body knows how they can bring even newer computers to their knees when processing the RAWs. You can always shoot small JPEG, of course, but then you lose some flexibility. So the 5D Mark II has, in addition to its standard 21.1 megapixel RAW format a 10 megapixel and a 5.2 megapixel mode: smaller file sizes, but retaining all the advantages of RAW; perfect for when you don’t need a full size file but still want to retain maximal flexibility in dealing with white balance and exposure. I think this is a great idea.

Here’s a picture of the new camera (Photo courtesy Canon USA):

I’d say this exceeds the expectations people have had for the 5D Mark II, and is an exciting answer to Nikon’s D700. Nikon has been on fire lately, and some commentators have wondered if Canon had anything interesting to offer in reply. I think that this combination of features, and especially including HD video recording, qualifies as extremely interesting.

We’ll have to wait until we can get our hands on one to see how it performs compared to the Nikons, but at least on paper this is a very credible contender.

I signed up for Twitter last week even though I have no idea why. Apparently you use this service to post things that are too useless or trivial to even write into a weblog. Of course, here at Tea Leaves, nothing is too useless to post. So here we go.

Shazam!

The Shazam app on the iPhone is perhaps the best encapsulation of modern dork convergence ever to be conceived by man. I was in the local used record store and they were playing some Rap tune. I don’t really like or know anything about Rap, but this song was catchy. On a lark, I turned on Shazam and just held the phone there in front of me, and presto. In ten seconds it told me that they were playing The Humpty Dance. It worked on the next song to come on too.

Twitter and Food

Why is it that over 50% of the twitter traffic, even among people who know this factoid already, is about what people are eating or just ate. By the way, I had these great pork chops for dinner, topped with peaches that had been poached with mustard seed or something. Yum.

The Inner Loop

Who knew that it was in Diablo 2 where Blizzard perfected the “click-click-click-kill-kill-kill-ooooo shiny loot!” inner loop that would form the basis of millions upon millions of long term $15/month addictions in the future.

The Matt Cassel Era

I wonder. If the team does well, and continues to win, what happens when Brady comes back? Careful what you wish for.

Real Work

If I wasn’t a selfish materialistic hypocrite, I’d move to Harlem and work for this guy.

Extra Bonus Track!

DVD movies at the Exchange all seem to cost around $5. This means that it’s cheaper to buy three movies a month and then just give them back for free than to belong to Netflix. I cancelled my Netflix six months after realizing this.

Children have their heroes: Luke Skywalker. Indiana Jones. My hero was, and is, Sherlock Holmes.

Happy are we to be living in the era when Arthur Conan Doyle’s copyright has expired, freeing up the name and likeness of Holmes for the use of other creators: in stories, in books, and even in video games. One such game is Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened, or, as I like to call it, “Sherlock Holmes vs. Cthulhu”.

The Awakened stars not just any Sherlock Holmes, but my favorite: the game’s Sherlock is clearly inspired and informed by Jeremy Brett, of the BBC Holmes movies. Intense, mercurial, and moody, the writing and voice acting in the game consistently surprised me for being true to the tone of the source material. There are so many ways the writing in a game of this sort can go wrong, but this game is spot on. Time after time, plot twist after plot twist, I’d exclaim “Yes! That’s just the sort of thing Doyle would have written.” I don’t want to give anything away, but I can say that the plot is an enjoyable mash-up of Doyle and H.P. Lovecraft, and is exactly as awesome as it sounds: the world’s greatest rational thinker challenging a world of mystery and madness.

At its heart, The Awakened is an adventure game, which means it involves picking up everything that isn’t nailed down and finding ways to mash items together to solve problems. The weakest aspect of the game is its user interface. I found that even when I knew exactly what I wanted to do, I often had to do it three times in order to make sure I was hitting the right pixels. With a better UI, this game would have been a classic, instead of being merely enjoyable and clever.

Furthermore, the game is linear to the point where it won’t even let you pick up an object before you “need” it. At one point the game rejected my attempt to answer a riddle because I typed “The” before it. This is definitely the sort of game you play with a walkthrough next to you: not so that you can solve the puzzles, but so you can figure out how to tell the game that you have solved the puzzles.

There is quite a bit of gore. Although not intolerable for even a squeamish adult such as myself, think twice before letting children play the game.

Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened has its flaws. But even with the sketchy UI and a somewhat wandering second act, I still kept playing to enjoy the good voice acting and the clever story. I’d recommend it to anyone who enjoys adventure games. It’s nice to see that the genre isn’t dead.

Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened for Windows, by Frogwares, Focus Home Interactive, and CDV. $19.99. The publisher graciously provided a copy of this game for review.

“Any game that has the language it is written in in the name is going to cause deep hurting.”

And yes, authors (or packagers, whoever deserves the blame) of PySolFC, I’m looking at you. The thing where installing the cardset images also slapped a full-on Fink installation onto my mac was particularly poignant. This is like buying a cup of coffee at a 7-11 and the next thing you know the cashier moves into your basement.