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!

I’ve long been opposed to the privatization of Canada’s Crown corporations. To my mind, most of them exist for very good reasons: to ensure service delivery in what might otherwise be an underserved market, to foster competition in a marketplace prone to monopolies/oligopolies, or to provide a service that private corporations can not be trusted to handle. In many cases to operate without profit as the prime motive. Plus privatization hasn’t served us terribly well in the past: look at Ontario’s 407 or Drive Test centres, for example.

However, with the recession putting a dent into the government budgets, there is a lot of talk about privatization again. I’m even more opposed to it now because in addition to the other factors, the timing isn’t particularly good. Interest rates are low, and there is demand for safe government bonds (or an aversion to risky investments). The government should have no problem issuing all the debt they need to cover the deficit in this environment, so a sale isn’t a necessity. More importantly, the private sector is going through some of the same pains of the recession — and with the flight to safety, have to pay a premium to raise money — so they’re not going to be able to put attractive valuations on the Crown corporations for buyouts. We’ll get more buck for our bang by waiting until conditions to improve to sell (at which point interest rates may be higher and the 5-year bonds may be maturing and all set to be paid off).

Call me a Keynesian, heck, call me a socialist, but to my mind the economy runs in cycles. The job of the government is to work against the boom-bust cycle: the government is supposed to run massive deficits during recessions to prop up the economy (and to weather the decreased revenue), and is supposed to pay that debt down during the good times with surpluses. However, everyone always seems shocked and appalled whenever a recession brings about the double-whammy of increased spending and decreased tax revenue, and the government starts racking up debt (though caution with debt is always warranted). When things turn around and a surplus is generated, people are again put off by the fact that the government is “over-taxing” them, and demand tax cuts and pork-barrelling, when the boom times are when taxes should be raised and the debt retired. If the government had to take over some failing industries in the downturn, such as say a railroad or two, the boom times might be a good time to spin that off in an IPO; not trying to sell of what good assets they have in a downturn.

And they <3 me.

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.

I put a movie on in the background and just spent an hour and a half going through the last year’s worth of posts correcting the relative links. I figure anything older than that and it won’t really matter that much anyway. It was a little dull, but nowhere near as taxing as the initial adjustment of trying to figure out how to get the MySQL database working.

Things are pretty smooth now, so I think I’m going to point holypotato.com to the DreamHost version now. The plan is to run both in parallel for a while, then start shutting down the self-hosted version for most of the time to save power (though if I keep copying my posts to the self-hosted version, it’s there as a backup in case anything happens to DreamHost, or I decide to leave them, so it won’t go away completely). I know I’ve only been doing this in the middle of the night, but a shared space on DreamHost’s server is about 10X faster than my ancient yet dedicated server!

There’s still work to be done: I’ve lost my ability to upload pictures via the WordPress interface due to a permissions problem (there’s still FTP, but it’s a little more awkward when in the middle of composing, especially when on the road). The search function has never worked right (the first page of results come up ok, but after that the string passed to the URL is wrong and I don’t know where in the php to fix that). I’m sure there are more things on my to do list, and more moving hiccups that will crop up along the way, but none of them seem to be impinging on the core capabilities of me writing and you reading.