To understand where I am coming from, you have to understand the basketball that I grew up with. My basketball education came at the hands of the Larry Bird Celtics, the Magic Johnson Lakers, the Dr. J and Moses Malone Sixers, the bad boy Pistons and the very beginning of the Michael Jordan Bulls. This, I claim, is the best basketball that ever was. We will never see teams like this again. Get off my lawn, and so on. You cannot have watched these teams battle each other in the NBA playoffs and think that the NCAA tourney comes close to the same level sheer basketball goodness (offense, defense, court sense, passing, and “basketball IQ”), not to mention the incredible physical intensity of the NBA game. Need I remind old time Celtics fans of the fact that in 1987 Kevin (”I traded a championship back to the Celtics 25 years later”) McHale played two series on a broken foot to try and get a repeat championship to Boston? You don’t see that in college.

So I’m delighted to tell you about this new film from ESPN about this period in NBA history. The film is the Dan Klores production Winning Time and it is part of the ESPN documentary film series 30 for 30 where they have made thirty documentary films to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of the network. If you want to feel old, finding out that ESPN is thirty years old will do that to you. I heard about the series via the Bill Simmons podcast. He’s also one of the producers.

Anyway, I told you a small lie about this film. It’s not really about the classic NBA period at all, it’s more about the early 90s, a dark time for the league if there ever was one. And, it’s not really about those classic teams either. It’s about the Knicks and the Pacers, both teams that were perennial also-rans. In particular, it is about how Reggie Miller tortured the Knicks repeatedly in the playoffs over the years.

So why am I so happy about this film? Because it is an almost perfectly constructed ode to some fantastic characters and performances that might otherwise have been forgotten because they involved two “second tier” teams. If you need more convincing, here’s a detailed list:

1. The interviews great. For whatever reason, it seemed like every person that Klores interviewed comes off as engaged, personable and interesting. There isn’t a stiff in the bunch. Even Patrick Ewing, who had a reputation for being morose and monosyllabic during his playing career is funny and charismatic.

2. You don’t need to be a basketball fan to enjoy the film. This is because the film is not about the game, it’s about the people. The basketball sequences are important for establishing the characters and the drama, but you don’t need to know how the game works to appreciate how everything fits together.

3. The pacing and editing are perfect. No segment ever feels too long or too short. There is just enough back story to set up the meat of the narrative, but Klores never dwells on insignificant details. Finally, there are several sequences where Klores creates tension and/or humor just by how he edits the interviews together. These will make anyone who has ever edited video together grin with delight.

4. Best use of opera in a sports documentary ever.

5. Finally, for me, the two best basketball highlights in the film were the “eight points in 15 seconds” game (or maybe the “Spike Lee” game), and all of the vintage NBA footage. You will be amazed at how much more physical the game was back then. None of the modern flagrant foul rules had yet been created. People fell down a lot in very painful ways. While it’s arguable that the game back then was too ugly it’s pretty clear that the rules have swung too far the other way since then.

Up until now, the 30 for 30 series has been a bit of a mixed bag. The subjects are all interesting but perhaps a bit too specific to appeal to a general audience. Winning Time changes this. It is by far the best film in the series so far. More importantly, it is the most accessible to the non-fan. If the rest of the films in the series are even half as good, you owe it to yourself to get all of them into your Tivo and then buy your favorites on iTunes or DVD. ESPN is repeating Winning Time a couple of more times over the next few days, so see if you can find it.

Now I’m gonna go watch Reggie crush the hearts of all those Knicks fans all over again.

A friend of mine politely informed me that I was wrong, and that the traditional Caesar in fact had no anchovies. I laughed in his face, and then snuck away to look it up, and discovered that he was right and I was wrong. Damn it to hell.

This still left me with a problem, which is that I still think that anchovies belong in that salad, and too many places don’t put them in. My solution is to make it at home, myself.

Since I can’t technically call it a Caesar salad, it deserves a new name. Hence, the Caesarion Salad, Caesarion being the bastard child of Julius Caesar and Cleopatra.(footnote 1)

Ingredients:

• Salad greens. The traditional Romaine works, but so does pretty much everything except spinach.
• The juice of half a lemon, fresh
• 1 1/2 tablespoons of olive oil
• One small tin of anchovies, about 10 total. You want the industrial, packed in oil (ideally olive oil) anchovies, not the fussy salt-packed ones.
• Black pepper
• A block of Parmigiano-Reggiano cheese. Grana Padano is a legitimate substitute here. Romano is not. You need a block; grated cheese won’t work for this.
• “Other stuff to taste” (see below)

You may be noticing the conspicuous absence of vinegar, and of the raw egg. This is because if you want to serve a guest something with a raw egg nowadays, if they’re female, you have to ask if they’re pregnant, which can really be a bit of a buzz-kill on a first date. And, since this is a bastard recipe, the whole point is that you can make it in about 3 minutes. Omitting the egg makes everything easier, and really, isn’t being sloppy and carefree how Caesar ended up with a bastard in the first place?(footnote 2)

Take 5 or 6 anchovies and mash them up with a fork in a small ramekin. Add the lemon juice and olive oil and whisk with your fork until the anchovies have incorporated and the whole thing is a mess of salty, lemony awesome. Add about 1/2 tsp of ground black pepper (you can save that until serving time, but I’m lazy so I incorporate it into the dressing and if my guests don’t like it that means there’s more for me).

In a large bowl, put a ton of salad greens. Dress the salad greens with the concoction you just made and toss. Get out your block of parmigiano and slice off thin but wide slices liberally. You can use more or less depending on how much you like your guests. Add the rest of your anchovies to the salad whole, and be prepared to fight over who gets them.

Lastly, add “other stuff” to taste. This can include croutons, if you like, but I often dispense with those when I don’t have them (which is often) and instead toss in a handful of almonds, pecans, and/or dried cherries. You don’t really want to use too much of these other things – the heavy lifting is already being done by the awesome dressing and those anchovies, so really you’re just introducing a grace note or textural counterpoint.

Serve immediately and enjoy.

Footnote 1: And for you, yes, you, the one about to object that the salad isn’t in fact named after that Caesar? Go away.

Footnote 2: I thought I told you to go away, Picky Guy.(footnote 3)

Footnote 3: The Picky Guy in my head is now observing that, in fact, Caesar probably gave Cleopatra a child intentionally in order to secure access to Egypt’s limitless wealth for his conquests, and so he probably wasn’t being all that sloppy and carefree.(footnote 4)

Footnote 4: Also, Cleopatra wasn’t an exotic Egyptian native like they always portray her, but was redheaded and the result of generations of Macedonian inbreeAAUUUUUUGGHGGH [SMACK].

I have mixed feelings about this whole fiasco. On the one hand, I don’t really understand what Ubi hoped to achieve here. Requiring a game to be played online while giving the player no real reason to want to play the game online is kind of stupid. On the other hand, I can’t help but think that you don’t have to work too hard to find reasons not to play Assassin’s Creed.

What confuses me most about this “conversation”, if you will, is that tone of the rhetoric coming out of the PC-gaming dork community. I could understand anger that the feature sucks. I can understand being angry with Ubisoft for imposing restrictions on play without any sort of compensating added value. It seems to me that in the current marketplace the minimum bar for requiring the user to be online to play a game is in turn providing that user with services that are on par with Steam or Xbox Live.

What I don’t understand is expressing one’s anger over this slight in almost political terms, as if the ability to play a video game on your PC is written into the Constitution. I don’t really understand the notion that there is something going on here that has earth shattering implications on the future of personal freedoms in personal computing. I don’t really even understand why anyone would spend more than a dozen words complaining about this before just not buying the game or buying the game used on a console. Even the normally sedate and rational Gamers with Jobs have seen fit to throw what seems to me to be a melodramatic fit over this.

Is this really this important?

What seems clear to me is that Ubisoft does not really give a shit whether they sell games on the PC or not. I would bet that it’s an overall lose on their bottom line to spend all the time and pain needed to get something running on that 15-headed chimera that is the Windows Platform. It’s not surprising that they don’t like PCs. There are probably easier ways to get out of the game than this weird protracted war, but then I’ve never understood management anyway.

Of course, civil rights-like rhetoric around the control of the personal computer is nothing new. The Open Source jihadists have been doing it for years. In fact, the rhetoric around what Ubisoft has done reminds me most of the similar levels of teeth gnashing that surrounds all discussions of “closed” vs “open” software platforms. Here is how these discussions go:

1. Dork: Man, it’s bullshit that the Fruit Fucker company doesn’t let me run any code I want on this machine they sell.

2. Regular Human: But it’s not meant to run *any* code… all it does is fuck fruit. You don’t complain about this on your car or your Xbox 360

3. Dork: Yeah, but the FF3500 is obviously a general purpose computer, not just a game console, therefore I should be able to run anything I want on it.

There are two fuzzy points of reason here. The first is the notion that there is a fuzzy yet absolutely recognizable line between a general purpose computer and a special purpose computer. I find this notion strange. When I was in school any CPU that had memory and branching was defined as essentially general purpose. So I think when people use the term “general purpose” here what they really mean is something like “a machine I’d like to program, and it pisses me off if this desire is blocked in any way.”

The second fuzzy point is the notion that given a “general purpose” machine, it is always and undeniably wrong to block any code from running on this machine, even if doing so would arguably improve the user experience. I’m not sure what legal or moral doctrine is used to derive this line of thinking, but I’m pretty sure it’s something like: “well, this is how computers and operating systems have worked since I was 13″.

The result is that if I put a bunch of hardware into a box and I call it anything that might be interpreted as a “personal computer”, I’m a pigfucker if there are restrictions what software that the machine can run. But, if I call it a “game console” or a “automobile” or a “DVD Player” then it’s OK if you have to pay tens of thousands of dollars to just get a dev kit for the machine *and* anything you develop must then be additionally tested by my internal Q/A certification team.

The truth is that these sorts of value judgements are quickly becoming useless and irrelevant. In my opinion, like it or not the world is moving away from the traditional model of a “general purpose and completely open” computing platform and more and more towards machines that do specific things and take advantage of their specificity to better tune the user experience.

What does this mean for the poor fan of Assassin’s Creed 2? I can’t really say. I’d just buy the game on the Xbox 360. And then sell it, because it sucks anyway.

Here is what you need. For stage 1:

1. 2-3lb of lamb shoulder roast. The one I bought was tied up, which is convenient. Season the roast with a good bunch of salt and pepper.

2. 1 large onion or two small ones, chopped.

3. 1 or 2 ribs of celery, chopped.

4. 2 or 3 carrots, chopped.

5. Dried rosemary, thyme, and some ground cumin seed, bay leaf.

6. Chicken stock.

7. A lot of red wine. Like a whole bottle.

For stage 2:

8. Another onion or two, chopped.

9. 3 or 4 white potatoes, cut up.

10. 3 or 4 more carrots peeled and cut up.

11. 5 or 6 parsnips, peeled and cut up.

First, put the red wine into a small soup pot and bring it to a simmer to reduce it. Reduce it by about half while you do the rest of the prep.

Heat up your favorite soup pot on medium high and put in some olive oil. Toss in the lamb roast. Brown on all sides. This should take a good 10-20 minutes, plenty of time for you to chop all the aromatics.

Remove the roast. Put the aromatics into the pot with some salt and pepper. Cook this over lower heat for around 10 more minutes until the veggies are soft. Add the dry herb mix, then put the roast back in the pan along with enough stock and red wine to cover its lower half. Throw this in a 250 to 300 degree oven for 1 hour. Turn the roast over, put it back for another hour or until it’s all soft and nice.

When the roast is done, take it out of the pot and cut it up into small pieces. Then strain the braising liquid.

For stage 2, cut the root vegetables up into stew sized pieces along with another batch of onions. Toss this back into the soup pot along with another couple of teaspoons of ground cumin. Let this cook a bit, then add the cut up lamb and the braising liquid. Top this off with a bit more red wine and stock if it seems necessary, but not too much. I used a bit too much.

Put this back in the oven until the vegetables are soft. Then it’s ready.

Pro tip: The best thing is to make this one day ahead and heat it up. This is because all stews are better the next day.

Thanks to “Brucey” in the comments of the previous pork stew post for reminding me to cook the roast whole and then cut it up. That’s a lot nicer.

Occasionally one finds oneself needing to migrate between major platforms. I’ve had a lot of friends who had to go from using Unix in graduate school to Windows in the real world, for example. My advice to them was always simple: make a clean break. Don’t use emulation environments like Cygnus. The reason is simple: there is nothing worse than an emulator that almost works.

In the case of Cygwin and other systems of its ilk the problem is simple. You can try and fool me into thinking that I’m using a Unix shell and all the standard shell utilities, but when push comes to shove it’s inevitable that Windows semantics will leak through. Things like file system syntax, the process model, or something as mundane as how memory protection works will eventually shatter the illusion and the tools will not work right. As the user, you have to constantly look over your shoulder for this. Life is too short. Better to just learn the native way to do things instead.

Ever since the Intel Macs shipped, we’ve been in the same kind of situation with respect to running Windows software on our beloved Apple hardware. There are basically three choices, all of which have problems.

1. Bootcamp. Runs everything, but you can’t run the Windows stuff side by side with the Mac stuff.

2. VMWare or Parallels. Now you can run side by side, but not everything works.

3. Crossover. Like VMWare, but worse.

Now, the only reason I want to run Windows software is to play Valve games. The reasons are simple. I don’t need to run Office and the like. Blizzard games already run on the Mac natively. And as we all know, the only PC games worth playing are from Blizzard or Valve.

In particular, the only reason I installed Crossover in the first place was to run Steam and the supported Valve games. But, here’s the thing. It never really worked. It almost worked. Really though the experience was just like trying to run a Unix shell with Cygwin. Every time you turned around you noticed that you were not really in Steam, you were in something that looked like Steam on the outside but only worked about 75% of the time. Crossover also teased you with the possibility of installing non-Steam games to run on your Mac, but that experience was even worse. Most of the time you’d start the install process and it would chug along until you actually had to put in a content DVD, at which point it would fail. Again, you get the promise of a seamless experience but the reality of something that is only 3/4ths of the way there.

As negative as this sounds, I don’t mean to say that I don’t appreciate the effort. I really do. But the reality is that over the year and a half or so that I have tinkered with Crossover, all I’ve really accomplished in it is to replay about a third of Half-Life 2. The whole experience just never quite clicks. In fact, it’s nicer to use Steam inside VMWare than with Crossover.

Of course, now things have changed. Now Valve has announced that Steam and their major titles will be available on the Mac in a native port that will start shipping your computers next month some time. This is certainly grand news. What it means to me is three things.

1. All the PC games I want to play will be on the Mac.

2. No need to humiliate myself by buying a cheap Windows laptop for Valve games.

3. I can delete Crossover.

Now all I need to do is make sure my Half-Life 2 save file is in the “cloud.” I wonder how I do that.

PS3 Slim

I caved and bought a slim PS3 a few months earlier than I wanted to. But it’s OK because I had a gift card for it. This new incarnation of the Playstation yet again shows why Sony completely destroys Microsoft as a pure hardware company. Everything that made the original PS3 a better hardware platform that the original Xbox 360 is amplified by a factor of two in this new machine. It’s smaller and sleeker. It doesn’t require an external power brick. It hooks up to your wireless transparently. The thing makes basically no noise at all. You can’t really even hear the fan. The only noise the machine makes is an occasional rumble from the Blu-Ray drive.

The machine is a total joy until you actually have to interact with its software. When I stuck in Uncharted I had to wait 25 minutes for it to download and apply four patches one after another. I guess it’s just not feasible to combine them into one big ball. Speaking of Uncharted…

Uncharted 2

I didn’t play the first Uncharted. I haven’t really even played the second one yet. But it was the first new game I stuck into the new PS3 and I had a quick thought about it. I put the game in the machine for about an hour and played through the introductory chapter and the tutorial. Having had this experience, I would like to propose that the guys at Naughty Dog go over to Ubisoft and teach those morons what pacing means in a narrative-driven video game. The tutorial in Uncharted 2 was brilliant. In a short half an hour or so it teaches you all the major game mechanics that you will need and sets up the plot in a series of remarkably well produced cut scenes. Compare that with the nearly three hours of torture that you are subjected to in Assassin’s Creed 2 before you are even allowed to stab someone. Well done.

Bioshock 2

I don’t have much to say about this one. Same cool setting and atmosphere. Same “environmental” combat mechanics. Same creepy little sisters. Dumber story. More combat. More combat means the game was less interesting and more tedious overall. The narrative and plot has the Dragon Age disease in that it tries to make up for the fact that it is completely redundant and mostly uncreative by just giving you more dialog. The more intense things get, the more your radio chatters on about THE FAMILY or WHATEVER. But none of it is particularly interesting. One good thing: the fetch quests don’t make you constantly backtrack.

Demon’s Souls

Demon’s Souls was the second game to go into the PS3. Here is a game that takes you through a straightforward tutorial and then immediately presents you with a Boss who more than likely insta-kills you with one hit. This is most definitely not the sort of thing I usually go for.

The best way to describe this game is as a Japanese take on Diablo with a bit of Nethack mixed in. You run through dungeons. You kill monsters. You collect “souls” that you can then use to buy more power. Then you run through the dungeons some more. If you die, no problem! You just run through the dungeon to where you fell over and pick up the souls you lost. Then you start all over again.

In most other games, this repetition would crush your very will to live, but for some reason in this setting with this game, it seems to work. You just have to put yourself into a state of mind where clearing the same enemies from the same spots on the same maps all over again is progress in its own right.

Demon’s Souls enables this by avoiding the narrative weight that many games seem to insist on carrying. There is almost no plot to advance, so not being able to advance it is not as bothersome as it would be if the plot were there. And, thank the gods above there is little or no NPC dialog in the game. This game is the anti-Dragon Age. No endless trees of pseudo-philosophical babble attempting to hide clumsy exposition. No badly written “emotion”. No artificial “moral choices.” The game is delightfully free of the encumbrances of the bad video game story. Instead, the point of the game is simple: you run through dungeons, you kill things, you do it again.

I’m sure I’ll get tired of it after the first few maps. But at least by the time I quit I will not have had to read enough bad dialog to fill eight novels.

LOTRO is probably the most popular MMO today after World of Warcraft, which is to say that it probably has only three orders of magnitude fewer players, rather than five. One would think that this would make Turbine, like Avis, try harder, but that doesn’t really seem to be happening.

LOTRO is a game of strong contrasts. Unlike Blizzard, whose World of Warcraft is of such preternaturally high quality throughout that you have to suspect it was designed and implemented by hyperintelligent aliens from another dimension, LOTRO is a fundamentally human, which is to say flawed, endeavor. The high points are very high, and the low points are very low. Let’s cover the high points first.

LOTRO partisans will crow about their favorite game’s “graphics”, but this is standard misguided PC gamer wankery. What is distinctive about LOTRO is not its “graphics”, but its visual design. Whereas WoW goes wholly (and brilliantly) for a cartoonish, oversaturated look, LOTRO tries to achieve a lyrical, somewhat photorealistic appearance. To my shock, it mostly succeeds. For me the highest points of the game are exploring Middle-Earth. It is worth trying the game out if for no other reason than to experience a sort of Virtual Shire Simulator. The game has the license from the books, not Peter Jackson’s movies, but the resemblance between the movies and the game-world is strong.

Also strong, again to my surprise, is the writing in the game. I came into the game viewing the Lord of the Rings license as a potential liability: how do you write several thousand random heroes into a game and still make it seem plausible? Turbine pulls this off by keeping you tangientially appraised about the progress of the War of the Ring, and by occasionally – only every so often – giving you quests that either foreshadow or deal with the aftermath of some of the events in the books. The “non-plot” quests easily number in the thousands, and are sufficiently well-written that I actually found I wanted to complete quest chains even after I had “out-levelled” them.

The game’s leveling system tries hard to make you not care directly about XP by also providing rewards in the form of “traits”, which are vaguely analogous to WoW’s Talent trees. By completing certain quests (say, “Kill 150 goblins in and around Bree” or “Explore and discover all the farms in the Shire.”), you get a trait that you can choose to equip which provides some sort of bonus. There are way more traits than you have slots to equip, so you can spend quite a lot of time chasing the various completion bonuses down.

There is no “world player-vs-player” in the game; just arenas for something called “monster play” that I haven’t tried yet. Every single person I have met in the game has been uniformly nice. It’s like all the players are Canadian or something.

The game itself is fairly easy. The mechanics for attacking monsters are very WoW-like, and vary widely among the classes; playing a Hunter feels very different from playing a Warden or a Minstrel. Likewise, there’s a crafting system which is the most fun out of the three MMO’s that I’ve tried. To craft you choose a career which is a grouping of three different crafting skills. Generally speaking, skills either provide resources or consume them, and they’ve cleverly tried to balance things such that you’re likely to have to depend on another player to get everything you need for all of your skills.

The game has drawbacks, though, and it wears them on its sleeve. The UI is a disaster, a complex of buttons and mouse targets that shift and morph and never act the same way twice. The inventory is particularly galling, taking the worst parts of the WoW system and intensifying them. Here’s my favorite example. I promise it is just one of many: when you go to a vendor to sell items, your inventory is arrayed in a random useless order, with no labels. When you actually decide to sell stuff, it appears in a separate window, in a different random useless order. This window shows your to-be-sold items in two columns. To sell an item, you double click on it. Since that item disappears, and since your inventory is being displayed in two columns, every single item in the inventory below the item you clicked moves horizontally.

It is to weep.

Other problems with the game that keep me from unreservedly recommending it include the lack of a Mac client, the terrible auction house interface, and the game’s version of “fast travel” which involves a completely incomprehensible network of travel nodes which may or may not allow you to go from one place to another. You know how sometimes in real life you want to get a flight somewhere and you find out that the only way to do it is to make two stops at different airports in opposite directions? Welcome to the LOTRO fast travel system. At least they don’t lose your luggage. Although, since your luggage is in the aforementioned LOTRO inventory system, you probably won’t be able to find it anyway.

So all in all, I find LOTRO to be a mixed bag. The UI issues are enough to turn me off of it for the long term (and that’s on top of my standard “I don’t actually have time to level a character all the way, because I have a job” MMO angst). But I’d be lying if I said that being able to enjoy the view from the peak of Weathertop didn’t trip all of my Serious Geek circuits in a very deep and powerful way.

First, make chicken broth. Or buy it. I don’t care. It will be better if you make it, and it’s easy:

First, buy a two or three pound package of chicken wings. Then cut up 2 onions, 2 or 3 carrots, and 2 or 3 stalks of celery. Put all this in a pot, cover with water, add salt, pepper, and bay leaves. Turn the heat on until you get a simmer. Now play Halo for 3 or 4 hours. If you are industrious, you can saute the vegetables before adding the wings and the water. You can also hack the wings in half. But these are both extra work and not really needed.

If you want the broth to be more Chinese style, leave out the carrots and some of the celery. Add green onions and ginger. So there you go. When the broth is done, let it sit in the fridge for a day or two and skim the fat off if you can.

Now go to your favorite Chinese food store and find some dried mushrooms. I don’t know what kind I bought but the package looks like this:

They look like this out of the package:

I also bought a couple handfuls of Shitake mushrooms.

Take two handfuls of the dried mushrooms and put them in a bowl of water. Soak for a few hours to a whole day. It doesn’t seem to matter. When the dried mushrooms are all soaked, save some of the mushroom water. Cut all the dried and fresh mushrooms into little pieces and put them in a bowl. Make sure you cut off and throw away the stems. You can’t actually eat them, which I found out the first time I made this.

The mushrooms should look like this:

If you are into that sort of thing cut up a cake or two of tofu too. It’s best to use fresh stuff (you can get fresh at Lotus in Pittsburgh on weekends, for example). Most of the packaged stuff is crap. Get the softest you can.

The last thing you’ll need is a diced onion and about five or six large slices of ginger.

After you have gathered all your stuff, heat up a big soup pot and put a couple of teaspoons of olive oil into it. Using enough oil is important because it will carry some of the flavor. Add the onion and stir it around a few times. Add salt and pepper. Then add the ginger and toss the whole thing around some more. Reduce the heat and cook the onions and ginger until the onions are soft. Do not get impatient, do this for at least ten minutes.

When that’s all set, add the mushrooms. You might need some more oil at this point. Salt and pepper the whole mess and sauté the mushrooms for another five or ten minutes. When you are happy with how things are, add a cup or so of the mushroom water and let it come to a boil. Then add a total of three to four quarts of chicken stock. You want to use enough liquid to balance the solids. Also, if your stock is particularly rich, cutting it half and half with water is a good idea. So, I use maybe two quarts of stock and two quarts of water. But you can figure out what you like.

Add some salt and pepper to rebalance the seasoning. Then add a few tablespoons of white wine and a tablespoon or two of soy sauce. Stir, bring to a boil and then simmer twenty minutes to half an hour.

When you are ready to serve it, add your favorite Chinese leafy green into the soup pot. Let those cook until they just get soft. Then serve the soup wth the greens on top:

I also like to have soup with rice in it, like they do with gumbo. But most people think that’s weird.

When you get this correctly balanced, people will think you are a genius, which isn’t really fair since it takes so little work. But that’s the best kind of dish for me.

Oh. Fish the big pieces of ginger out of the soup before you serve it. You don’t want some poor unsuspecting child chewing it by accident.

I don’t know why I have this particular biorhythm, but for the past three years, like clockwork, every winter I switch to playing PC games, and then in nicer weather I switch back to playing console games. Perhaps it has to do with the ambient heat in different parts of the house. Perhaps it’s just an expression of seasonal affective disorder — the only time I’m willing to put up with the hassle of games on Windows is when I’m already depressed! — but now that I’ve switched back to gaming on the Xbox, surely the crocuses will arrive momentarily.

The particular game that lured me back, this time, was Mass Effect 2. I enjoyed the original Mass Effect quite a bit on the couch, and figured I would continue my character’s travels on the same platform.

To be honest, I was reluctant to take the risk, given how objectively terrible Dragon Age: Origins was in nearly every possible way. But, like a dog returns to his vomit (or, more precisely, like Charlie Brown taking another run at Lucy’s football) I was drawn to the prospect of a Bioware RPG that told a good story, and told it well.

And, to my surprise, Mass Effect 2 is pretty damn good. That Mass Effect can be so good and Dragon Age can be so numbingly bad is a vivid demonstration of how thin the edge is on which game design must balance. Get just a few subtle things wrong, and your magical world of mystery and wonder can turn into a whirling nightmare slog of soul-crushingly boring encounters. Both games, after all, have essentially the same core gameplay: explore unknown territory, fight enemies, and try to have interesting conversations to advance the plot. So what’s the difference between these two games?

The Closer To The Bone, The Sweeter Is The Meat

Mass Effect 2 makes some bold departures from the standard Bioware template. This makes a huge difference in playability. Historically, every Bioware RPG that I can recall has a moment that I refer to as “The Packrat Singularity”. It goes like this. When walking through any area in a Bioware RPG, you can riffle through highlighted drawers, garbage cans, and crates, picking up items that are typically useless but are sometimes worth a small amount of gold. The best case is you find a weapon or piece of armor that is a level or two better than what you have at the moment. Each game does this for absolutely no good gameplay reason: the game before had it, and hell, that’s a enough reason for a lazy designer. As you slowly get laden down with small alexandrites, finger bones, and random pieces of scrap metal, you eventually run out of inventory space. At that point, you visit a shop, sell all the crap in return for gold (or, honestly, credit slips, since gold would weigh too much), and then start the process over again.

The Packrat Singularity is that moment in the game when you realize the following things:

• You have more gold already than you can ever spend.
• Even if you don’t pick up that slightly better weapon, the next merchant will probably have something just as good anyway.
• Seriously, screw these guys and their lousy inventory system. I would rather die than hit “sell” 96 times at the next town.

After The Packrat Singularity, you continue playing the game and don’t ever pick anything up at all. Gameplay is exactly the same as it was before, only now it’s 80% less annoying.

The original Mass Effect took baby steps in addressing this problem by providing a button that would let you instantly convert items into gold at any time. Mass Effect 2 goes a step further by virtually eliminating the concept of inventory. There are a few exceptions: you carry a battery of weapons and some healing-potion equivalents, but for the most part anything you pick up is either money or an upgrade.

Just like that, the game is 80% less hateful than Dragon Age with its never ending attempts to drown you in “elfroot” and “deep mushrooms” and hundreds of other bits of bric-a-brac that no sensible human being could possibly care about in the slightest.

The Perils of Pen-elf-ope Pitstop

Going back at least to Knights of the Old Republic, Bioware RPGs have given you SUPER! DYNAMIC! CHOICES! where you could be “good” or “bad” in conversations (these choices existed in the Baldur’s Gate games, but it was in KOTOR that they really tried to make them affect the plot in a fundamental way). In every game the “good” path was fairly well developed, and the “bad” path dialogue was lifted straight of a Snidely Whiplash cartoon: they practically had you twirling your handlebar moustache and saying “Mu-hu-hu-hu-hah!” Perhaps you’d like to help this starving family pay their rent, or perhaps you’d like to kill their puppy for no reason. It was that bad. The “evil path” choices in Dragon Age aren’t quite that bad, but they’re pretty close; certainly worse than in Jade Empire.

Mass Effect and its sequels are the only games where Bioware has written “bad guy” choices that are compelling. In fact, I’d say they’re so well written that most people would find it difficult to play through Mass Effect 2 and not take the “renegade” path at least some of the time. The “renegade” choices aren’t just acceptable, they’re sometimes just so damn sensible that you’ve gotta do them. And isn’t that really how tough choices sometimes unfold in real life?

The gap in scripting is compounded by the stylistic choice in Dragon Age to have the standard mute protagonist, while in Mass Effect games your protagonist is voiced. The difference in effect is astounding. I certainly ended up identifying with Commander Shepard more than with my Dragon Age avatar because Shepard, at least, didn’t just stand there and stare at the person he was talking to like an idiot. He talked to them, and did so with voice acting of a uniformly high quality.

If I Let Them Kill Me, Will This End Faster?

Pacing is hard: just ask any film director (except Terry Gilliam, who doesn’t seem to know anything about it). Bad pacing can take a great idea, great writing, great acting, and great art and grind them into a meaningless paste that nobody cares about. Mass Effect 2 has great pacing. Dragon Age: Origins does not have pacing at all, ejecting it in favor of its gibbering idiot cousin, padding.

It’s hard to quantify this, of course, but the missions in Mass Effect 2 are, with so few exceptions that they’re notable, perfectly timed. Just when you’re starting to get bored with shooting robots, you’ll reach a break point, or discover that you’ve in fact reached the end of the mission. Once you accept that the game is not going to constantly ambush you with meaningless battles for hours on end, you learn to start enjoying the combat: “Oh, good, a group of Geth. What tactics can I use to defeat them?” Contrariwise, in Dragon Age each combat is just a single bead in an seemingly unending friendship bracelet of pointless battles against the exact same goddamned group of 2 skeleton archers, 4 skeleton warriors, and a skeleton mage. What makes them so existentially horrific is not the battles themselves, but the knowledge that you’re going to have to endure another 45 of them before you get to the next plot point. And that you’ll have to manage your stupid inventory while you do it.

I should also mention that in Mass Effect 2 my squadmates seem almost as good at killing the enemies as I am, and are reasonably intelligent about finding cover, whereas in Dragon Age my teammates are retards who charge headlong into their own gory deaths. It’s hard to enjoy a game when you despise the people on your own team for their limitless stupidity.

Little Things Mean A Lot

It is not as if Mass Effect 2 is a perfect game. It wears its flaws on its sleeve (the planet prospecting, for example, is an homage to Star Control 2, yet manages to not be as fun as the prospecting in that early 90’s game.)

But it’s better that Dragon Age in so many countless little ways, and those little moments of better are the difference between a game that is fun to play and a game that is a joyless slog. An interesting thought experiment that I’ve been kicking around in my head for the past few days is “What would Mass Effect 2 be like if it had been designed by the Dragon Age team?”

• Instead of minigames to unlock safes, if you found a safe while on the mission to blow up the space station, you just wouldn’t be able to open it. Instead, you’d have to blow up the space station, go back to your ship, go back to the wreckage of the exploded space station with your thief, and try to open the safe. When you did this, the game would tell you that your thief’s lockpicking skill wasn’t high enough.
• If you came back to the exploded space station later, when your thief had levelled up, the safe would turn out to contain 5 mushrooms and some crystals.
• Every enemy you met would run straight at you, climbing over whatever obstacles they needed to get to you.
• Each gun would have 8 types of bullets. After firing a shot from your gun, you would then have to fire a different type of bullet until the first type’s cooldown expired. When all of your bullets were on cooldown, you’d use a BB gun.
• Snidely Whiplash moustaches for everyone!

On the flip side of things, the sex scenes in the game would still be about the same level of cringe-inducing. So the games do share at least some similarities.

Boiling this overly-long article down to a single, hopefully cogent point: the design choices in Mass Effect 2 seem to me to indicate a team that took a serious look at the drawbacks of the traditional Bioware RPG and attempted to slice them away. The design choices of Dragon Age, on the other hand, took the same problems and wallowed in them.

And therein lies the difference.

First, buy some fresh brussels sprouts. We’ve been getting the ones still attached to a large branch that they have at Whole Foods. You can also get the pre-bagged kind. I won’t hold it against you.

Trim the sprouts and cut them in half. If you are going all veggie, put them in bowl and drizzle them down with olive oil. Then add salt and pepper. Lay the result out on a half sheet pan and broil at 400 degrees for around 15-20 minutes. While they cook, open the oven up once in a while and shake the pan.

OK. Here is the bacon variant:

0. 400 degree oven.

1. Cast iron pan.

2. A few pieces of bacon.

3. Put the bacon in the pan. Get it about 1/3rd cooked. Take the bacon out of the pan and put it in the oven for a while. Put the sprouts into the pan and coat with some of the bacon fat. Add salt and pepper. When the bacon is 1/2 to 2/3rds of the cooked, take it out of the oven and put it on top of the sprouts.

4. Put the whole mess back in the oven for 10-15min.

That’s it. Put it on a plate. Eat with rice. I like the bacon super crispy, so I cook it a lot in addition to blasting it with the sprouts. If you like it softer, adjust as needed.