Blessed by the Potato

Another bad week for exercising, but the diet was at least a bit better.

A NYT story on credit scores suggests that the pendulum has swung too far in the states, and now it’s becoming hard for even borrowers with decent credit to get a loan. Some mortgage brokers are lamenting that too much weight is being put on the FICO score:

In fact, FICO scores are not the best predictor. The amount of equity a person has in his home, his debt-to-income ratio, his job stability and his cash reserves are all better predictors than credit scores, according to Dave Zitting, the chief executive of Primary Residential Mortgage, a leading mortgage lender.

Now from what I’ve read I don’t know if I’d say the amount of debt-to-equity is a better predictor, but it’s certainly up there. This just reinforces my earlier point that the line “Canada doesn’t have a subprime mortgage problem” is glossing over the prevalence of CMHC-supported low/no downpayment loans, which while not quite as risky as a pack of NINJA negative-amortization loans, are still much riskier than the “conservative” banking culture played up in the media.

Aside from seeing another source to use to trot out my ongoing argument, the article isn’t all that good. It belabours the point that lending criteria use hard cut-offs sometimes (like here with FICO scores) where the difference between just over and just under the line are too small to be meaningful. Unfortunately, life is full of such arbitrary cut-offs: for instance, if you have $499 in your account but write a cheque for $500, it’s bounced all the same as if you had nothing in the account. These cut-offs can help protect the larger system (e.g., the bank) from bad risks from decisions made throughout the organization. Though the article didn’t mention it, there is one solution to the issue: make the cut-offs continuous rather than binary. Rather than someone with a credit score of 620 getting a loan and someone with 619 getting nothing, scale it in so that someone with a 650 could get a full loan right up to their debt service level of say 32%, while someone with a 620 could only get 20-some percent, and scale it down to zero over a wider range… But that’s nitpicking the point.

Rogers has tightened up their download limits again, just days after Netflix announced it was coming to Canada. Whispers of market manipulation to shut out a competitor to their own video-on-demand service arise.

An older article from the CBC goes over some of the basics of download limits, and some of the anti-competitive issues. As you all well know, I think the companies are BSing us here — first off, their “average user’s usage” figure hasn’t moved in years, despite the prevalence of things like streaming video in the last few years. I think it’s probably way out of date now, likely a factor of 10 too low.

the company says the caps were necessary because between five to seven per cent of its customers were using more than 80 per cent of its bandwidth, thus slowing service down for everyone.

This is an argument trumped out often in favour of caps or limits, but what does it really mean? Years ago, during the first round of ISPs cracking down on heavy users, these sorts of arguments were used to cut “abusers” off… but this sort of relationship is just a feature of how humans distribute resources. It’s the Pareto principle. Plus of course, data transfer is very cheap, on the order of cents per GB, yet the overage charges are $2/GB. Even with a healthy extra put in there to act as a disincentive, this is clearly a massively profitable area for ISPs, way beyond the costs of data transfer or economic disincentive. The real issue they often complain about with their networks is peak usage, i.e. time-of-use (especially Rogers’ architecture). Yet they’ve taken no steps towards time-of-use billing, even though that would make more sense.

On the StarCraft 2 front I ended up using one of my guest passes since it’s just getting ridiculous that they can’t solve the account problem that’s kept me from playing. I finished the single-player campaign, and found it quite short. There were 26 missions (Terran and a few Protoss side missions), which compares well to the number of missions in the first StarCraft. However, I found the missions to be very fast and small-scale. I don’t think there was any one level that took me more than 30 minutes to clear, whereas I remember at least one level per race taking over an hour in the original as you had to carefully pick your way through the enemy forces and win by attrition sometimes. Detaching the single-player a bit more from the multiplayer did add some neat options with unit upgrades and mercenaries, as well as a greater spectrum of units (e.g., the medic, wraith, and goliath were cut from multiplayer). Still haven’t played multiplayer though. I tried calling the support line a few times last week, only to find that I couldn’t even get into the holding pattern since the queue was full. When I did finally get through, though the fellow was nice, the problem didn’t get solved. I sent an email right away on release day, and found it ironic that the message telling people to call again since the hold queue was full suggested emailing support instead. Finally, 6 days later, a rep has gotten back to me, and after some back-and-forth going through the motions of trying steps that everyone in the support forums said didn’t help (and that I already tried on my own), it looks like I should get my account fixed tomorrow (8 days after release). Update: Just got in, woo-hoo! Now I’m too tired to play though and have to go to bed…

Blizzard is a company renowned for its quality. Even with World of WarCraft, which saw unprecedented demand that overloaded servers, they did their best to make the game marginally playable as soon as possible.

So far, StarCraft 2 has not lived up to the Blizzard name, the rollout being much worse than WoW, without the extraneous factor of hordes of unexpected players. My preorder never arrived, and caving to the irrational logic that I had spent the whole day waiting for it, I rushed out to the store in the evening to pick up a second copy (I’ll return the preorder whenever it arrives, or resell it to a friend that hasn’t purchased yet — nudge nudge, Netbug). So far, this is not Blizzard’s fault, but put me into a rather foul frame of mind before the disc even hit the drive.

The install took forever, literally over two hours. What game, from a single disc, takes two hours to install? It was ridiculous! Then, after all that… I couldn’t play!

I was getting a message that the Battle.net servers were “temporarily unavailable”, though nothing of the sort was true. Unfortunately, my account has fallen prey to a weird, rare bug (though how rare is tough to say, because if you have it you can’t post on the forums!). It seems to be affecting Canadian accounts the most, so beware Canuck gamers!

I of course tried all the recommendations, even going so far as to uninstall and reinstall the game (another 2 hours gone!). What’s extra infuriating about the whole thing is that I was most psyched to play the single player game tonight, and the ever fucking DRM won’t let me until it’s connected to the authorization server, which is up (and which I can connect to in my web browser!), but which the game stubbornly continues to tell me is temporarily down!

Arg!

This is so especially frustrating because not only was I looking forward to the game, but I had set aside special time today to jump in and play. This day was supposed to be special, to mark the turnaround point where my life was supposed to start getting better, damnit. Instead I’ve wasted most of a day, and even the work I did get done — submitted author proofs! I’m getting published, bitches! — can’t put me into anything less than a burning rage as I go off to bed. I want to rip my own head off, and send my unfeeling body, powered by rage and frustration alone in defiance of all known laws of physics and physiology, on a holy mission of vengeance towards Blizzard. There it will tear the buildings down around the heads of tech support until the DRM is gone and we can play once more. While that happens, teams of scientists and practised warlocks will hook my disembodied head directly into the machines, improving my reaction speed so that I can once again marshall the forces of the Koprulu sector with unparalleled efficiency and skill, crushing all opposition beneath my boot… as it was foretold.

I must say, I’m really unimpressed with the complete lockdown on SC2: no LAN means the host for a “LAN” party will have to have a robust enough internet connection and router to get everyone connected to Battle.net servers in order to play together. Even the single player requires an internet connection. Yes, after it’s authorized the first time — which is where I’m stuck at — you can play offline for up to 30 days before authorizing again, but that’s still pretty draconian. Some people have reported that there’s a crack out already to beat the DRM… sad that the pirates can play the game and I can’t.

Nuclear launch detected.

I got suckered in to preordering StarCraft 2 from FutureShop back in May. I was hoping that I could elect to do an in-store pickup, but that wasn’t an option: it had to be shipped. I remember fondly WarCraft 3 arriving first thing in the morning on release day when I preordered it from FutureShop back in the day, so I had high hopes that it would go just as smooth for StarCraft 2.

And, of course… the shipment didn’t arrive. I spent all day staking out the door, reading on the front porch for most of the afternoon to make sure the sneaky mailman wouldn’t tap quietly on my door and then leave one of those notes to visit the shipping depot and slither off. And not even that much: nothing at all.

Damned FutureShop, I should have just ordered through Amazon.

So, here I am, not playing StarCraft when I should be. I feel so very glad I preordered now.

Asset allocation refers to how you split up your assets (i.e., money). To me, it’s an easy concept, but to others less so. Here’s an analogy to StarCraft I was going over with Netbug the other night:

Bonds/fixed income. This is your defensive stuff. The marines in your bunker aren’t going to get a whole lot of kills through the game, but they’re going to keep you protected. Even in an all-out assault, the enemy has to blow through the bunker before they can even touch the marines. It’s not a glamorous job, but it’s always wise to have a few marines on guard duty. As you get nearer the end game, and protecting what you’ve got becomes more important than getting more, it’s wise to shift more of your assets into defensive roles.

Equities. This is where your growth comes from. The expeditionary forces you send out to secure more expansion points. In the long run, you’ll expect to take a few lucrative vespene geysers with these forces, but any individual one could get surrounded and wiped out. Best to diversify by trying a few different expansion locations, rather than putting all your eggs into one basket. Early on, you’ll probably want to put most of your forces into these growth areas, since even if they do get wiped out you’ll have time on your side to make it back. Later on though you’re going to want to shift your focus away from growing more, and back to protecting what you’ve managed to grab.

Which brings us to rebalancing: if you have a good run of luck with your risky growth stuff, it may be wise to use some of those newfound resources to beef up your defense. Vice-versa, after a nasty market decline decimates your equity expansion task force, you’ll probably want to take a few goons off defense to bring you back up to your target allocation. Turtling up after a small setback on the expansion front is not the way to go in investing.

Your last category of asset allocation is what you’ve got in the bank. This mineral stockpile can be easily and quickly spent to buy what you need in the moment, and is an important buffer for your finances. But, it’s not earning anything for you sitting there, so you want to figure out what margin of safety you need (3 months of expenses is a good rule of thumb, or in SC terms, enough to get each of your production buildings going with one unit in the queue if you need to switch directions), and get the rest out there on the field working for you.

I haven’t done one of these for a while. There was some bad weather for a few weeks there, and I didn’t get on the bike at all for a fortnight. Not owning up to my downfalls in the exercise routine kind of defeats the point of the public update/shaming, but I also reasoned that I didn’t have any links I wanted to share, either.

The last two weeks have been much better though: I broke the 20 km barrier, and rather easily at that, returning home feeling like I still could have done more, and wasn’t much sore the next day. Now the problem is going to be that to keep pushing myself to be able to bike further (e.g., to train for the Rona/MS bike tour), I need to start committing serious time. I did a (fairly hilly) 18 km on holiday Monday, and that took me about an hour and a half — I just don’t have the time right now to push it any further than that.

Diet: aaaah, you don’t even want to know. So far the multivitamin seems to be keeping away the scurvy.

Random thoughts:

Realtors to Canadians: Chill Out

“There will be no drastic drop in Canadian housing prices, the Canadian Real Estate Association said Thursday, because house prices will stabilize and climbing household income will make owning a home more affordable.”

Wow, I barely included tautology in my list of logical fallacies because I couldn’t think of any examples where it really came up, and circular reasoning is usually fairly easy to spot. But, here it is: there will be no drastic drop in house prices because house prices will not drop drastically.

Then that last tack-on about incomes doesn’t mention a timeframe. Incomes rise at about the rate of inflation, say 2%/year. If houses are 10% overvalued on average (and 30-50% in Toronto and Vancouver), that could be a very long period of flat-lining. If even the CREA is saying that the best case is a flat-lining of house prices for years, then why be in any hurry to buy, especially with uncertainty about where rates will go?

And if everyone’s in no hurry to buy, then won’t sellers have to lower their prices to attract buyers back? I just can’t see a stagnation as a likely scenario. Yes, house prices have stagnated for long periods of time before, but not usually so far from equilibrium, and not following such epic volatility (down ~10% in ‘08, and then bouncing back ~20% in ‘09!).

Plus there’s the issue that Canada is not homogeneous… a nation-wide decline of just a few percent could very well mean that Toronto and Vancouver got smashed while the rest of the country stagnated…

Michael James has a good set of links in his roundup this week, including a couple on your financial advisor, and whether small investors have no choice but to become DIYers.

My Bell bill arrived for the month, and I was greeted with a $30 over-usage charge. Bell’s cap of 25 GB is way more restrictive than Rogers’ 60 GB one (and even that is getting tight as more and more uses for the internet come out but the cap hasn’t changed in years). So even though I had a fairly moderate month (~40 GB in usage, well under what my cap was when I was with Rogers), that qualified me for the full $30 overage fee. What really ticked me off is that even though they have my email address (and phone number) they never notified me that I was getting close to (or exceeding) my cap. I thought I was being good. You can bet I’ll be switching to Teksavvy (with a 200 GB cap!) when my contract’s up…

Stephen Novella has another interesting post up on science and public perceptions. “[P]eople find stories much more compelling than data.”

Spoilers ahead!

Borderlands: I finally finished this thing. I had no idea I was that close to the end… it just simply ended. I must say, it was very unsatisfying. The beginning of the game had so much promise (and with multiplayer it would probably still be fun), but it felt like they rushed through it and did a little too much cut ‘n paste, as the charm and humour from the first little bit seemed gone completely by the end. It was a grind-fest basically. The reward for beating the final boss? The ability to run through the game all over again on a higher difficulty to unlock “achievements”. Whoopee. The last boss didn’t even drop any epic loot! Oh, and there is no treasure vault: the vault is a prison for some kind of Eridian demon thing, that is unlocked every 200 years by the alignment of the moons, which gives our hero the chance to finish the demon off once and for all. To quote the PA guys: “It is at this point that people begin to question the wisdom behind moon-powered demon prisons.”

For those who don’t know, if you preorder StarCraft 2, you can get access to the beta and start playing right away (albeit, a beta version). I’ve been too busy to play much, but I have had at least one game with each race, and here are my first thoughts:

The general game: Blizzard’s last RTS, WarCraft 3, was a real revolution to the genre. Heroes, smaller armies, autocasting, smart casting, creeps/mobs, treasure, potions, shops, and mercenaries made the game a pretty wild divergence from the earlier RTS games. StarCraft 2 on the other hand, is pretty true to the original StarCraft. Autocasting and smart casting did get brought up to reduce the amount of micromanagement required, and unit group sizes are no longer limited to 12 (which, IMHO, further encourages massing units). But there are no heroes, no creeps/mobs, no shops, and the unit cap is still quite high at I think 200 (I haven’t had a chance to actually hit it yet).

The units got mixed around and changed quite a bit — the firebat is gone, for example, leaving the Terrans without any melee units. The zerg queen has gone from being a fast flying scout caster to a den mother that watches the hive. The bigger change under this is that the rock-paper-scissors aspect of the original StarCraft has been watered down to an extent. There are still units that get bonuses in their attacks to units of a certain size, and armour still plays a role, but it doesn’t appear possible to counter specific mass strategies as it was in the original StarCraft (or Brood War). Back then, someone could build a fleet of 48 mutalisks, and you could pop them all with just 4 Science Vessels and some micro, or a handful of Valkyries. Basically with some good scouting, you could counter most “mass unit X” strategies with much fewer resources than massing something of your own would take. In SC2, the damage seems to have levelled off a bit, forcing you to build up your army rather than fleshing out your niches. With just a few weeks left to go before release (eek!) there probably won’t be too many drastic changes to the game, but balance issues will be front and centre in what changes do get made.

I was reading some of the pre-beta articles about the game, and was afraid that it would be chalk-full of transforming units to keep track of. I don’t remember if the articles just seemed to focus on the Viking or if there were other transformers as well, but it sounded complicated from the previews. In practice, the transforming nature of the viking and siege tank are not overwhelming.

Macro is the new micro: One of the changes that really struck me was how your macro game — harvesting resources and building your armies — has really come to the forefront in SC2. Much of the micromanagement in a match is now dedicated to the macro part of the game, and these can be very crucial things to optimize (indeed, find yourself just a minute or two on the slow side in building your queens and your allies will jump down your throat!). The Terrans can call down advanced, time-limited workers called MULEs to harvest resources at a faster rate; the Protoss can turbocharge their buildings to pump out units faster, via a spell that must be recast quite frequently; the zerg Queens can increase the larvae spawn rate at your hives with a spell of their own. Also, there is no residual vespene extraction: once your geyser is depleted, you have to move on, which leads to a tiny bit more micro to support your macro game.

Other changes: The way the game handles having the high ground has changed. In case you didn’t notice in SC1, there was a definite advantage to be fighting from the high ground: units firing up the cliff would have a miss rate applied to them. Now, you can’t fire up a cliff at all without a spotter, but if you can see up, you do full damage. There’s also no need to scout just to see the terrain: maps start fully revealed (but covered by the fog of war). Plus, of course, the pretty, pretty graphics.

The players: It’s only the beta, I’m still in the newbie league, there’s no single-player or battle the AI option to learn how to play, and yet people are still assholes when you don’t play “perfectly”. Dudes: relax, people have to learn somehow, and even if these matches were ranked, your ranking on the beta ladder doesn’t really matter (even when compared to how little the release ladder rankings matter).

Rushing seems to be huge from my subset of games played. I’ve even seen players build barracks/gateways inside another players base to rush them, which is pretty damned audacious. Past strategies for defending against the rush don’t seem to be as effective any more — blocking the choke-point doesn’t work on many maps because many bases have a back door with destructible terrain, and I don’t know if the movement speeds are higher or what, but just having “a few” defenders doesn’t seem to be enough to hold them back any more (a rusher used to be at an inherent disadvantage because even if you were a little slower, you had some extra time to build more units while they were charging down from their side of the map, and if they tried to beeline for the workers, they’d often get chewed up by the marines). WC3 seemed to have a lot of resources to try to block rushing (and it was novel strategies like the orc tower rush that often proved to be the most annoying to counter), not the least of which was the strength of your hero, and the defense of the workers (wisps were completely enclosed, humans could turn into militia, undead acolytes were admittedly corpsicles, but you were guaranteed to have at least a few ghouls to get wood, and orc peons could jump into the burrows and shoot back), plus the strength of the early tower defenses.

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.

“LOL. Buy a new TV, newb.” — Microsoft.

I got Borderlands for my birthday, and it is a fun game. I can’t wait for some of my friends to pick it up so we can give this co-op mode a whirl. Indeed, that’s the part I’m looking forward to the most: I remember playing Fallout 3 and wishing the whole time that it had a multiplayer component. I was all keen on Borderlands for that very reason. I even got it for the 360 instead of the PC because I figured there was a higher chance that my friends would go for the 360 version.

There isn’t as much depth as with Fallout — instead of a nearly infinite number of possible player character attribute combinations, caught deep in the uncanny valley, you have your choice of 4 characters, each with 3 talent trees (WoW players will be very familiar with this levelling scheme). Each character is pitched as having a preferred set of weapons, but so far it seems that once you get past the first little bit of the game, everybody can pick up whatever weapon they want and it works equally well in their hands.

The game so far is a lot of fun: set on a barren, nearly abandoned planet, you seek out treasure and infamy amongst the rusting remnants of civilization. It’s got a fun post-apocalyptic vibe to it, though it isn’t as tongue-in-cheek as Fallout. For the most part it plays like a first-person shooter, and there is a lot of shooting to be had.

There are a number of points that bug me though:

- The fonts are way, WAY too small. It’s like Microsoft is sitting there telling me to buy a new TV. I know, the Xbox was designed to take advantage of high-def, but there are still at least a few people out there like me with old TVs trying to game. They could have the fonts scale if the Xbox is set to output standard def… but even then, I think the fonts should be bigger: even with a better TV, I’d still have to squint to see what’s on screen. There are some things that I simply cannot resolve on my TV, and so even if in high def those at least become theoretically legible, it’s ridiculous to give people that much eye strain when they can just have bigger text and have the windows scroll…

- Speaking of scrolling, even with the tiny text, the mission description windows still have to be scrolled through. And what buttons did they choose to use to scroll? Not any one of the three direction pads, nor the “A” and “Y” buttons which are in an up/down configuration… no, they chose the most unnatural, unintuitive pair: left and right trigger. What were they thinking? [maybe this wouldn’t have been so bad if we could read the instructions that say to use the left and right trigger on our TV]

- Similarly, there are a few button choices in the control scheme that make me shake my head, and wish there was the option to reassign buttons. Melee attacks — something I find I have to use far too often, given that many of the beginning enemies have a bite attack, and thus like to get to close range — are activated by clicking the right direction joystick. That is one of the hardest buttons to mash with any kind of accuracy. Meanwhile, changing guns gets two buttons assigned to it — “Y” and also the direction pad (similar to Gears of War in that respect). “Y”, or one of the other four lettered buttons, could easily have been an acceptable melee attack button.

- The four lettered buttons are arranged in a cross: up, down, left, right (Y, A, X, B). Quick: what’s the button for duck? “A” you say, the one in the bottom of the cross? No, sorry, that’s jump (rather than “Y”, at the top). Duck is “B”. I’m fine with reload/grab as “X”, but I really think “A” should be duck, “B” should be melee, and “Y” should be jump. This isn’t that much of an issue, but I really think that the weapon change should only live on the direction pad, and melee should get a real button or the option to auto-melee with the triggers (or hey, RB could be melee, and “Y” or another letter could be grenade throw).

- Perhaps because the game was built to do co-op all the way through, it does not pause when you check your map, talk with an NPC, or use a vendor. I found that to be a nasty surprise when I was at a vendor and the screen started shaking. Turns out some nasty biter had run into town and was merrily chomping on my ass while I browsed for goods. It would be nice if the game informed me of this beyond the subtle screen shake and the depleting health bar.

Anyway, it is a fun game, once you get past the lengths the designers seemed to go to make the controls unintuitive. Even Wayfare likes it, and she can’t stand first-person shooters.

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I don’t know where I saw it mentioned, but at one point in my random reading a few weeks ago someone mentioned XCom and how awesome it was, and I just had to get around to re-playing it after that.

This involved installing a DOS emulator, which is just going to open a whole world of trouble as other classic games demand to be played as I continue to age backwards (mentally).

Anyhow, XCom is a classic turn-based strategy game where you hunt down alien invaders in various environments, including multi-level buildings, steal their technology, and sell their corpses to rednecks (it’s not actually made clear in the game who you sell the corpses to, but someone pays top dollar for that dead alien). You have to manage a tight budget to keep your interceptors flying and your crew stocked.

I never actually played XCom though, instead back in the mid-90’s I got the sequel: XCom 2: Terror from the Deep. TFTD is pretty much the same game as XCom: laser weapons were renamed Gauss, plasma became sonics, but aside from tweaking a few stats here and there it was pretty much the same (same damage, accuracy, cost, time to build, etc., for most things in the game). TFTD added some cool, creepy underwater environments and slightly larger maps, as well as some two-stage missions. The biggest change from XCom to TFTD though is that the game became impossible. I’ve heard TFTD described thusly:

“What a great design! The punishing difficulty stopped you from noticing the crippling bugs!”

The first few times I played it, even on beginner difficulty, I was just wiped out in my first mission. The aliens can see farther, shoot more accurately, and snap fire more often than your band of rookies, who couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn, and if they did, it still takes two shots to down an alien with your opening weapons. I quickly gave up on TFTD the first time around, but my defeat always kind of haunted me, so I tried it again this past weekend. It’s still hard, but starting right off with the only strategy I figured out from back then helped a bit: use high explosives early on so you just have to be close. I picked up some other tips from the Internet, such as just sacking rookies who showed up with sub-par base stats: it’s cheap to replace them. Most importantly, that most of your money does not come from the governments ostensibly supporting you, but rather from manufacturing and selling your advanced technological goods. That helped me get through the first dozen missions or so… and then the lobstermen showed up. I don’t know who designed them, but they make the game just ridiculously hard. They can still one-shot your troopers, but take 3-5 shots to bring down themselves. There are some techniques to try to manage, but I was just so frustrated I gave up again: a game with 5 levels of difficulty just shouldn’t be that hard on the easiest setting.

So I found the original XCom and tried that out. While virtually the same game, it’s much more reasonable in terms of balance. Right off the bat you’re a nearly even match for the aliens, rather than starting at a substantial disadvantage. The harder encounters ramp up a little more slowly, and there are no ridiculous lobstermen. It’s still a challenge, even on beginner, but so far it’s not impossible. The alien mind control is annoying me, but I’ve got my scientists on that one and hopefully I’ll only have to suffer through losing half my squad to mind-controlled friendly fire for another mission or two.

Aside from indulging my nostalgia and marvelling at how well a game that only has 16 colours holds up to the test of time, it made me realize that there really haven’t been any kind of decent turn-based tactical games in a long time. There are a few turn-based strategy games, usually of the 4X persuasion (Civ IV, GalCiv), but all of the tactical games I can think of have gone RTS (and from there to FPS, though I hear Halo is going the other way). Turn-based tactical games seem to be relegated to browser-based flash these days.

Anyhow, if you find yourself feeling the need to stay up until dawn playing a game from the 90’s and destroying your eyes with 256-colour sprite graphics, then give XCom a whirl (now on Steam, believe it or not!).

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