Blessed by the Potato

I’ve been taking advantage of a little bit of time off to catch up on some gaming here. I have had surprisingly little time to game over the last year or two, so I’ve got a fair number of games on the pile already, in addition to all the games I don’t own that I haven’t played.

For the Wii, I got Metroid Prime 3: Corruption and Zelda: Twilight Princess shortly after getting the console itself. Although I’ve picked up (and finished) new games since then, like Force Unleashed and Mario Galaxy, I never finished those two, which I had such high hopes for. So I put them back in to see if I could finish them off.

Unfortunately, I’m just stuck at a point in both games where I’m frustrated and sick of them, and I have to say it’s due to poor game design in both. Zelda is the lesser of the two evils in terms of brick wall of difficulty: I was just getting frustrated at one point (actually, many points) where you’re running around and these bat-like things would come down from the sky to attack you. But, you couldn’t look up to take them out until the scary music was playing and they were almost on you. It was annoying, and I just wasn’t finding the plot or the rest of the gameplay for this Wii entry to Zelda to be engaging enough to put up with it, so I shelved the game. Metroid I found (to my surprise, since I was expecting to love Zelda) was a pretty fun game, one of my favourite “serious” games for the Wii (Sports and Play and Fit are fun toys that are characteristic of the Wii, but not “serious” games) and I got used to having to point the Wiimote at the screen to play. However, I got to one point where what was a “casual” FPS suddenly turned into an impossible, frustrating challenge. It was the second AA gun on Bryyo — you can Google it to see that I’m not the only one who thought that spot was ridiculous. You have to flip these 4 levers in the game, and enemies will spawn to attack you and flip the levers back. However, they respawn in pairs virtually instantly after you defeat the last pair. And, they’ll prioritize flipping the levers you just flipped back over staying in your vicinity. It was just too annoying to try to shoot these guys down from across the area to keep them from undoing the work I’d done to continue with the game. I just spent another hour or so trying to pass this stage and I just can’t do it. Really poor level design, IMHO. Even a 5-10 second delay in the respawn would give you enough time to flip a lever while they were dead if you were quick, then it would still be challenging (but doable) to kill the next pair before they undid your work.

Speaking of respawn, it’s one element of Borderlands that I am not digging. It’s a single player (or small group) game. There really isn’t a call for respawn, and certainly not the amount of respawn that we’re seeing. I’m loving the fact that it’s a co-op “post apocalyptic” RPG/shooter. I’m thrilled that Wayfare likes it too so we have a game to play together, but the ~10 minute respawn is really ruining it for me. Much of the time the game feels like playing a MMO without all the other people as there’s been a fair bit of just grinding going on to clear an area to finish a quest, and then clearing it again to get back out.

Ghostbusters is cute and light-hearted, and features the voicework of the original cast. However, I’ve been getting annoyed at its game design as well, since there are a lot of points where the ghosts you’re hunting/zapping disappear. I know, that’s what ghosts do, but what’s the point of wrangling them with the proton pack if they’re just scripted to run into the wall and disappear into another part of the building on you? The game just feels too much like they couldn’t decide whether to make a Ghostbusters 3 movie or a game where the player actually has control. When the ghosts are behaving themselves, it’s not particularly challenging.

I finally managed to finish Batman: Arkham Asylum, which was a good bit of fun. Just as I was getting fed up with the trippy Scarecrow sequences, Batman finally did him in, which worked well. I’ve also been trying to work my way through some of the challenges, which is a good way to extend some of the better points of the gameplay (the sneaky assaults on armed thugs, and the giant slow-motion melees). I think that speaks volumes as to the quality of the experience.

Netbug’s Xbox Live account expired this month. Mine will expire in February. I have no plans to renew it — I’ve had trouble enough finding time on my own to game, let alone coordinating a multiplayer session over Live. The last time I actually played online was in October when Borderlands first came out; before that, April-ish. I also can’t understand how microsoft can get away with charging what it does for access to the multiplayer gaming service when pretty much all competitors (most PC games, as well as PS3 and Wii) are free.

I suppose they did sucker me into paying $60 for a one-year membership, but now I clearly see that the value proposition isn’t there…

Anyway, I hope everyone has a happy new year, and that StarCraft 2 makes the year an awesome one!

As a semi-serious curler I take pride in having good equipment, and one of the items that has gone through a lot of changes over the years is the broom. From corn husks and horsehair to various synthetic pads; push-brooms to swivel-heads, and getting lighter all the time — especially now with these carbon fibre shafts. I’ve used a lot of different push-brooms over the years, and I have to say that I like the new swivel-head ones a lot better, but I really only have experience with the Olson ones. I notice that a lot of players with swivel-head brooms tend to grab a club broom for throwing since the downside of the swivel action is a lack of stability when leaning on your broom. The Olson brooms fix this with a tension adjuster, so you can lock your head in a good position for sliding, and loosen it up for sweeping (or, like I do, just find a happy medium where it will move stiffly, giving enough stability for the throw while offering flexibility for the sweep). Plus with the fact that it’s really super light you can sweep so much faster, which really does seem to make a difference both to the rock and to the quality of the cardiovascular workout you get.

In short, I love my Reactor 2, as you can surely tell by the fact that I just got my 3rd one in as many years.



Yes, they definitely have a reliability problem. They’re one of the most popular high-end modern brooms at our club (due in large part to the choice selection at our pro shop). I play twice a week, so I see roughly 100 curlers on a regular basis, and I’d guess that maybe 30 of them have a Reactor 2. I have personally witnessed 5 of these brooms fail (including the 2 of my own I’ve been through). That is a terrible reliability record. For the most part, the point of failure has been the plastic connector between the brush head and the shaft, in fact, all but the broom I just turned in today failed that way. I had hopes when I got my new one this year that the problem was fixed because they changed that bit of plastic. It used to be a matt black piece, and this year the brooms are sporting a grey plastic bit that has a bit of marbling to the colour, so I was hopeful that they found a new (hopefully stronger) plastic compound to use. Unfortunately, the shaft (the carbon fibre shaft) cracked on me in less than 2 months — given the timeframe (and how little the broom has been through in that time) I suspect it may just be a manufacturing defect. They did replace it for me free-of-charge, so we’ll see how the new one holds up.

It almost makes me wonder if curling is going down the hockey road. I remember as a kid playing hockey I had one stick. I only got a second when I got too tall for the first one. These days, my brother buys his in packs of 3 because they seem to break all the time (though the bigger kids sometimes fight with theirs and do all sorts of other uncouth things that wouldn’t be tolerated on a curling sheet). I don’t mind too much — even at $125 for the broom, if it’ll last 3 or 4 years the broom’s a pretty minor expense compared to the ice fees, and it is a considerable improvement over the old fibreglass brooms (which started to crack on me after about 10 years of use). Longevity could also be the cost of shaving a few hundred grams off.

We saw the Vampire’s Assistant last night. I thought overall the movie was ok — there were a few cute scenes, the supporting cast was quite good, but the main character was a little flat. He just looked spaced out most of the time, even before being sucked into the crazy overwhelming underworld of Cirque du Freak.

Spoilers follow!

The biggest let-down for me was the ending. It didn’t actually close with “to be continued”, but it was close to it — the movie just ended without resolving the conflict they were building towards through the whole thing.

Next to that was the fact that there was very little exposition as to what being a “half-vampire” entailed. The main character signed up to that fate with very little in the way of questions. From what we can see in the movie, a half vampire gets all the powers of a vampire, but can also walk about in the daylight. Why anyone would then opt to become a full vampire is a question left unanswered. I really found that surprising — from the foreshadowing in the movie, I figured that there would be limitations to being a half-vampire, but the main character’s spider affinity would grant him some additional powers that would make the confrontation at the end (which never came) more balanced.

ZOMG, totally hella awesome! Hilarious, heartwarming, and full of undead brain-smashing fun. At one point they even had to stop and move a burned-out car off the road so they could drive through, showing that not everyone follows the rules of apocalyptic courtesy in times of crisis. To be fair, it was an obvious accident, so maybe if they hadn’t crashed, the drivers would have pulled over.

One of the strangest things I liked about the movie was the way the special effects for inserting the text into the action (even having rampaging zombies kicking letters out of the way).

The dialogue was witty, and they kept the tone very light (the zombies aren’t particularly scary if you get scared easily). All in all well worth going out to see.

In fact, go see it now.

“Oh, this is the best; it’s where you find out who to call!”

Eschatology is big this year: in addition to the main feature, the trailers featured The Road, 2012, Legion (and New Moon, just to break the pattern).

For years my dad has dealt with using the internet via dial-up while at the cottage, or when the Rogers internet goes down at home. Perhaps due to increasing usage in cottage country, perhaps due to old copper, the quality of dial-up has really taken a nosedive in the last few years at the cottage. What was once slow but tolerable has become unacceptably slow — not only has grabbing a handful of emails via POP (i.e.: old-school stuff) gotten so slow it’s painful, but he’s actually had trades timeout on him when trying to use the online brokerage. That’s costing him money.

I’ve been trying to get him to try something different for a while, but he hasn’t been too interested in increasing his monthly bills, plus since the cell phone service is so spotty up there he figured that the wireless options, such as the Rogers Rocket Stick, just wouldn’t be worthwhile. Finally I just decided to pick one up while I was up there and test it out, because every time I was talking to him, he was complaining about the dial-up. It had a 15-day return policy, which was enough for us to see how well it would work in our location.

Fortunately, it’s been pretty good, and simple to use, too: plug it into a USB slot, hit connect, and you’re off. We typically see speeds of about 300 kbps — about 10 times slower than the cable service at home, but a significant improvement over dial-up. He’s been pretty pleased with how the service functions. At first we thought it’d even save money: the basic plan is about $30/mo (plus fees A[bsurd], B[ogus], and C[razy]), which is less than the cost of dial-up (~$20) and a second phone line (~$20).

Unfortunately the one downside to the Rogers mobile internet is the crazy low usage available. My dad is about as light a user as you can get: he wakes up, checks his email, reads the news, reads the brokerage research reports for the day, gets some stock quotes, makes a trade, and takes a nap. No streaming video, no gaming, no facebook photo albums, and he’s only online for a few hours a day, and only on weekdays at that. Yet that still adds up to over 1 GB/mo, which puts him somewhere into the 2nd or 3rd usage tier. For comparison, when Rogers set the download cap for the cable internet to 60 GB/mo, they said the typical user used 5 GB/mo, and that was what, 4 years ago? There’s been a lot more streaming video use in that time! So the actual cost turned out to be a fair bit higher than the advertised cost, but I suppose that shouldn’t be anything new from Rogers.

As iPhones, Blackberries, and other smartphones become more popular I’m sure (or at least, hope) that Rogers will revamp those plans to make data available wirelessly at more reasonable rates. $35/GB is kinda silly, and doesn’t allow for a lot of usage on these things.

The most ludicrous thing though was that the rocket stick is, according to Rogers, “technically a cell phone”. From a hardware point of view, I can kinda see that — it has a SIM card, it’s a transmitter working on the cell network. Whatever. What was not cool was we got charged for “receiving text messages”. WTF? 15 cents each for what was probably spam sent to what was not actually a cell phone. Why isn’t this blocked on what is obviously not a text-message enabled device? Why is there even a charge for receiving text messages, even if it was a phone? I managed to get that bogus fee refunded by calling in to complain, but if the spam keeps coming, I’m not looking forward to having to do that every month to get my 75 cents back.

Anyway, the rocket stick has surprisingly good reception, or perhaps to put it more exactly, the Rogers network in cottage country is different than the Bell one, so just because we have zero bars with our Bell phones, doesn’t mean that the Rogers stick won’t work — if you’re in a rural area it’s probably worth checking out what their coverage map actually looks like. The service is not like cable or DSL, but it’s a damned sight more usable than dial-up, and can be used in areas not serviced by copper, which is the point. However, it’s not cheap, and keep in mind the exceptionally low usage included in the plans when pricing it out.

Permalink.