Yeah, there’s this slim thing (pictured), and that’s great, but the important part: only now is the PS3 hitting the launch day price point of the PS2. Consoles traditionally launch at $300, but this time Sony and Microsoft went much higher ($399 for the Xbox 360 and $599 for the PS3), whereas Nintento went all the way down to $250. And just look what happened. Nintendo has sold more consoles than the other two put together.
The word is that Microsoft will now eliminate the Pro model and drop the price on the Elite to $299 to compete with the PS3. That puts it at the same list price, sure, but Microsoft still charges you an extra $50/year to play online, and the 360 can’t play Blu-Ray discs. For the first time, Sony offers the most value for the money. Take a look at the below chart, taken from PC World
I think those stats are a little hard on the 360 (not sure how many people care about the number of USB ports, or Sixaxis), but they speak some sort of truth, and that truth is not kind to the console with the 50% failure rate.
Do I sound eager? I do indeed plan to buy one. I’ve been holding off for this price cut. I’ve owned every console Sony has put out except the PS3, and I bought a PS2 at launch. If there are more people like me – and in this regard at least there may well be – I think these things will sell extremely well.
A word on downloads vs. Blu-Ray. I am perhaps snobbier about my HD signals than most. It comes with making TV for a living; you get very fussy about your picture quality. I think Rogers compresses the hell out of their HD feeds, and they suck. iTunes HD doesn’t look great either. If I can see compression artifacts, can we really call it “High Definition”, regardless of how many pixels there are? So suffice it to say that while many people are excited about HD downloads and think optical disc formats are already dead, I’m singularly excited about having Blu-Ray and its relatively guaranteed quality. Besides, with Canada’s so-called high speed internet being what it is (and what it is is oligarchitastic!), it took me longer than an hour to download an hour of crappyish iTunes HD Dollhouse. This new PS3 can’t come soon enough.
I’ve been playing a lot of Civilization Revolution lately, partly because there are few new games of interest right now, partly because Civilization has long been a favourite game franchise, and partly because of the new iPhone port. I now have this game on three platforms (360, DS, iPhone), which is sort of silly. So I just stepped up my difficulty level from King (medium) to Emperor (second hardest) and the difference is staggering. I’m not getting destroyed per se, but certainly not getting close to winning. This is a good thing, as it indicates there’s a lot more strategy to this game than you might guess from its general air of casualization as compared to past Civ games, which were insanely complicated. I’m also happy about Civ Rev’s shortened play time (three or four hours per game) – it’s a godsend for those whose minds Civ tends to conquer like pikemen under Roman tank armies.
So I’ve been researching strategies, and recently tested some out. Thought I’d share, y’know.
The Emperor AI civs will attack you constantly, so research bronze working first and then build archers. Aim to have an archer army in each city – it’ll hold you until the invention of gunpowder, or thereabouts. You’re not going to do a lot of attacking in this mode, not until the late game, so avoid wasting resources on too many military units that will just obsolete themselves, and concentrate on good defense. Meanwhile, concentrate your building on improving your cities.
My general civ strategy is to expand early in the game by spamming out settlers. This is much harder to do in Emperor, partly because you’ll need defensive units accompanying every settler and partly because you become acutely aware of the damage settlers do to their originating city. You lose two population every time you build a settler (unless you have a Republic), so in many cases you may do better to let your older cities grow and be choosier about new cities. I lost a game to a Chinese civ that only had four or five cities. But boy were they doozies.
The single most important point is that cities cannot produce both gold and science – that toggle in the interface between them is in fact toggling the city’s output (not simply the display of them as I had thought). So following from that, build cities to specialize in one or the other. In a gold-producing city, build a marketplace and then a bank; don’t waste time on libraries and universities. And vice versa, obviously. You will probably have mostly science-based cities, and one or two for gold. You’re going to want one or two production-geared cities that can spam out military units, too. But you probably already know that.
Don’t be afraid to micromanage as much as is possible in this game. For example, in a city that is working on a Wonder, switch the workers to concentrate on production. Or, if late in the game one of the AIs is close to winning and you’re closer to an economic victory than a technological, switch your cities from producing science to gold.
Early game exploration is as important as in easier game modes, with some good money available from villages, natural features, and barbarians. Getting navigation early on will help you find atlantis and the other ancient artifacts that will spew forth a bounty of bonuses.
Keeping your cultural production up is extremely important. Not only is it a possible route to winning, but you need some culture to prevent your neighbours from converting your cities. With a lot, you can be grabbing their cities, but also some fat bonuses in the form of Great People. Use them to reinforce your cities’ specialized roles. Great artists should be sent to cultural and/or border cities, great scientists to science-producing cities. Great builders are especially valuable, as they can be used to complete any production, including wonders. So you can park one, find a good Wonder to build, and then use the builder to complete it immediately.
Just as you are doing with your cities, you are going to want to specialize with your civilization as well. Figure out whether a domination, cultural, technological or economic victory makes most sense. Let your environment dictate this. If you are in arid, trade-producing land, go for economic or tech; if you have many neighbours, go domination or cultural. Each path yields its own bonuses.
This page has some interesting strategies for Deity mode that would hold true for Emperor as well. I do agree that an economic victory is probably the easiest.
Man. I had a post ready about how I deal with feed overload.That all changed on the weekend as on Ram’s recommendation I switched to the new self-hosted feed reader, Fever.
I’ve been rocking NetNewsWire since way back in the day. I paid money for it when it first came out of beta. It’s great, it’s now free, and totally packed with features. Problem is, it hasn’t seen any new development in quite some time. I think the free Google reader took the wind out of the feed reader market. At the height of it all NNW seemed about to sprout a bunch of feed management features. Ranchero was bought by Newsgator and they had a ton of ‘other people are reading x’ capabilities and everything seemed promising and then… nothing.
To step back: the problem with feedreaders is you wind up adding too many damn feeds. You realize a feed reader allows you to check more news than you could by manually hitting all those websites. So you add more feeds. Gradually, those unread counts pile up. We’re conditioned from email to imagine missing an item as THEEND OF THEWORLD, and so those unread items translate into stress.
So, inevitably, the net was awash in articles a couple years back about how to cull your feeds, sort them into priority lists, etc. etc. And at the same time, feed reader development ground to a halt.
It seemed the best way to use a feed reader was to not use it at all.
It could have gone a different way. I mean we’re sitting here using computers; perhaps the computers could step in and lend a hand and do something a little more taxing than displaying lists. The computer could determine what news is being talked about across all your feeds. Like Google News, except without the Kansas City Star and Voice of America and all the sources you don’t give a shit about.
Fever represents a step in this direction. You dump in your existing feeds, which are in typically gimmicky fashion referred to as ‘kindling.’ You are encouraged to add ‘sparks’, which is to say, link-heavy, high noise-to-signal feeds you might otherwise ignore. Fever then scans the feed data to determine which links are being referenced the most. It presents this to you in the ‘hot’ list, which is sorted by most inbound links:
The idea – and it is a noble one – is that you can at a glance get a sense of the biggest news items being talked about, sorted by priority. The other associated ideas are a) this diminishes the need for unread counts (although they can be toggled on globally or individually), and b) this works better the more feeds you throw at it. Get it? you “feed a fever”. This calculus of optimal sources to perfectly tailored hot list is actually really fun to set up. Presented with a list that was too tech video game heavy, I went looking for film and news sites. Fever isn’t a feed reader, it’s a feed management game.
Ready for the downsides? Fever, an idiosyncratic app if ever there was one, has many. It costs $30. It’s a web app that must be installed on your own server. The only portable option is a less-than stellar iPhone web view. And for best results, and for the iPhone version to be at all useful, you have to set up a cron job. I had never had reason to do that before.
I can live with all of those issues. (I’m confident the iPhone view will see improvements – hopefully its own app.) The biggest drawback though, as mentioned here, is that Fever only sorts according to links. Sure, this is the web and links are the currency. I duly note the idealism. However, actual real life feeds often fall short of our ideals. For one, find me a newspaper feed with a goddamn hyperlink in it. For two, many feeds (like the link-rich Greencine Daily) only give excerpts, and Fever sees only that and not the full post. Fever works well on tech news and the like, and falls short with real life news where there may be no definitive hyperlink.
This could be fixed. Can small developer Shaun Inman add headline-parsing algorithms that rival the goliath Google News? It would be awesome, and I hope so, but I have no idea. Frankly, I feel we need legitimate personal data sorting tools that don’t involve huge friend lists and massive privacy violations. News is not the only area of our lives in which we grapple with data overload, and Fever is an excellent new weapon that just needs a few tweaks.
Now does anyone know any good news blogs with lots of links?
Saw Bruno on the weekend. It’s got some hilarious parts, but it seems almost like a collection of skits that would be better enjoyed on YouTube.
It’s almost all embarassement humour in the same mold as Borat. Part of the time Bruno is successfully provoking and lampooning hetero gay panic. But often he is doing this by playing into straight stereotypes of gays. I think my favourite scenes were at the beginning, when the victim of the meatspace trolling was the fashion industry, and not so much later in the movie, when the victims are southern US men. In general Bruno felt a lot staler a character than Borat – we’ve all seen hilarious gay stereotypes in our entertainments before, and we don’t need Bruno to point out that yes, wrestling is pretty gay.
Take a look at this rather good half-hour doc about Detroit from Al-Jazeera’s English station. This one is hosted/narrated by Avi Lewis. It’s a little too newsy and focused on the auto crisis for my tastes, but it’s pretty excellent. Isn’t Grace Lee Boggs a total champ?
I could use your help with something. I have a film in this year’s Star Wars Fan Movie Challenge. (I admit it, I’m a huge nerd.) It’s called “Bad Day For Vader”, and I’d love it if you voted for it. It’s only a minute long so that part ain’t hard, but you may have to register on atom first – not sure. You should be done in a couple minutes regardless.
Those of you with weblogs, newspapers, megaphones and/or skywriting businesses, I’d also appreciate your help spreading the word.
Voting stops at noon on friday, so if you could, make haste!
Ooo, my robot heart just throbbed a little at this: “Showcasing the talents of some of our favourite artists from Toronto (and one from Sweden), over 20 illustrators, painters, sculptors, graphic designers, photographers and a blacksmith have produced a stunning array of work with LONELYROBOTS as the theme.”
My copywriting mind went immediately to how police state/patronizing this sounds, and how it could be rewritten to sound less so. “This audio track violates copyright laws, so it has been disabled” seems slightly better, but there’s no way around it seeming like a dick move by YouTube. Because it is. A better mechanism might be to disable copyright-breaking works* only once they breach a certain viewership, say 100,000 views. This video has only 450 views – why bother messing with that?
*At that point, it seems like everyone is better served if an ad-revenue sharing deal is worked out, and the work kept intact.
I love the feel of this camera in the hands. I love old school film cameras with all their manual doohickeys and I don’t like bad digital compacts with all the navigating poorly-laid-out on-screen menus. This thing has got old school buttons and levers, and where you need to go into menus, they are very well designed. The flip-out LCD is from heaven. Only thing I don’t like is the absence of focus marks on the lens. Still getting used to manual focusing with this bastard – the autofocus is good, so I’m not complaining too much.
It takes a bit to get used to the video. I got into the stills part right away. As I mentioned I have plenty of experience with shooting stills, and so I saw the improvements a camera like this makes possible right away.
On the video capture side I have few skills, other than general knowledge of photography (well, plus a wealth of skills in post, but that’s anoher matter). Also, this camera’s advantages in cinematography are tricky to unlock.
The post workflow is one thing. For me, it actually takes longer to get my tapeless footage off this camera than it did with tape. That’s because you have to convert at least once from AVCHD -> ProRes if you want Final Cut to be able to digest it (here’s one video task that may actually be better on windows systems). You need to convert again if you want to remove the 30i wrapper from your 24p footage. You can shoot slomo since the camera has a 60p mode, but that involves some trickery again.
Capture has its own challenges. I certainly saw the AVCHD ‘mud’ (compression junk as a result of the codec breaking down) that happens with fast pans. This is disappointing to say the least, and hopefully panasonic can address it in a firmware update, perhaps by upping the bit rate.
I personally needed to get a ND filter for daylight shooting; if you’re looking for ‘film look’ bokeh, you want some filters going. Once I had that I got better-looking footage.
Finally, camera shake is an issue in something this small. It’s okay if you’re shooting slomo. But if not, you either want to stay wide or get some means to stabilize this badboy. I had okay luck with the camera on my lap or otherwise propped against something, but i’m also looking into either a shoulder brace or steadicam-y type thing, and there are many options that I’m still shopping around for.
Once you figure out some of these things, you can get some excellent results. Here’s two vids of test footage. (You can’t watch them in HD through these embeds, so perhaps click through to the vimeo pages.) Here’s an early, not great one:
I’m happy with the footage on our back patio (the girls chatting), but little else. That footage looks great because the camera’s stabilized, I’m able to get some bokeh, in part because it’s not too bright. The footage on queen street in direct sunlight is pre-ND filter and so the aperture is closed down, meaning there’s too much DOF. A lot of it was too shaky to use, too.
Here’s a later vid, with footage from Pride last sunday:
As you can see, the slomo works great. It smooths out the camera jitter awesomely. Also, I had the ND filter by then, and it was cloudy, so backgrounds are all pretty n’ soft. I look at some of these shots, and think I shouldn’t be able to get them, the camera being so cheap, and me being nearly unskilled.
The other nice thing is how people deal with the camera. It’s small and has the body of an SLR. I think at the AlternaQueer tent people thought I was a news photographer. And out on the street there were so many cameras I was more or less invisible. Because of the massive proliferation of cameras these days, the incredible 280mm zoom this thing can do, and the appearance of the camera’s body, I found myself able to go pretty much anywhere and take pics of anything with no problems. That was a nice surprise.
Anyway, I hope to shoot a few more tests this week as there are still things to figure out and questions to answer. Dealing with sound is one of them.
Having filled my 160gig internal, and with a new camera on the way, and realizing that 500gig 2.5” drives were now here and quite affordable, I had ordered a replacement hard drive, with the intention of paying a technician to install it. I had read the guide and it involved many steps, specialist screwdrivers, and a great number of differently-shaped screws. However, as Computer Systems Centre never called me back, and routinely put me on hold for 5 minute intervals, I decided to go it alone.
A trip to Canadian Tire later, I had all the nerd screwdrivers I needed, and was ready to start. This Macworld article had invaluable advice: print the instructions and then tape the screws to the pictures that indicate their provenance. Without this, I would have a frankenstinian monster on my lap right now, but with it, the procedure was long and repetitive, but not hellish at all. Although it gets scary when you crack open the top case (it actually goes ‘crack’), and see your computer’s guts just lying there.
So it worked, and my free space is now a cavernous 300+ gigs, plus I feel like I really upgraded my nerd cred a whole lot. Fucking A.
Prototype is hells fun. That’s pretty much all you need to know. It’s got what we might charitably call a ‘traditional’ video game plot, with a genetic experiment gone awry, and a super-powered, amnesiac protagonist, and a viral infection turning Manhattan into a playground of zombies and soldiers. However, the plot provides all the motivation we need for some super-insane power-fantasy abilities, like growing massive claws out of your hands, running up buildings and leaping over them, and shape shifting. It feels a lot like Crackdown, with even crazier powers, but with less sense of humour.
The ‘consume’ mechanic is particularly interesting. In order to assume someone’s appearance, you basically eat them, but you also get a brief, impressionistic montage of their mind, revealing plot details. Sometimes this is part of the main plot, but you can also leap around looking for other plot items to consume. That’s pretty much all I do in there now – narrativized leaping. I find it pretty irresistible.
Just got the Panasonic GH1 in. I had pre-ordered at adorama in the US, and at Vistek here in Toronto, and due to a lucky turn, Vistek came through much earlier than I had feared. I know from scouring the forums that many are being told they won’t get their cameras until July.
I’ve only barely used it, but I’m already thrilled. Perhaps much of the thrill would be common to any camera in this price range / category; many entry level DSLRs, as I understand it, would have equivalent picture quality and features. But it’s all new to me – my recent cameras are an ancient film SLR, a crappy five-year-old point & shoot, and the iPhone. I’ve taken good pictures with all of them, but never with the ease I experienced since this new baby came.
Perhaps the most unsettling thing is how frickin’ smart the camera is. The autofocus is fast, and shows you what it’s focusing on. The metering seemed always on point. And more than once we noticed it doing crazy-ass face detection. Apparently it predicts motion too? How long until it becomes self-aware, if it isn’t already?
I’m just scratching the surface of video recording, which of course is the reason I bought this camera. It’s harder to get sorted than it needs to be. If you’re going for a film look thing the right settings are crucial, which would be 1080p (“full HD”) and a shutter rate of 1/50. That means you’re recording in the rather nasty codec AVCHD, which causes workflow problems because Final Cut can’t edit that natively. Getting real 24p also requires deinterlacing the shots after that. To make matters worse, the AVCHD footage can break up and create compression mud on fast pans and tilts.
That said the 720 60p works well, and also presents the opportunity to shoot slow motion. And all in all, for the crazy small amount of money this thing costs, you have an HD, 24p camera with a sensor only a hair smaller than a RED camera.
There’s Pride on the weekend, and then I’m off the next week, with the intention of shooting me some (film? AVCHD? MTS files?), so I’ll have at least some test footage to show before too long.
Interesting post from Anil Dash comparing blogging to hip hop, in terms of the futility of finding the ‘first’ to practise the form. It includes this video:
which includes a screengrab of my old site Bloggus Caesari. Whaddup, Caesar!
After a few months the thrills wore off, and the iPhone became the less thrilling but still awesome item of massive convenience. I used it to get online when I was in my edit bay, which until recently was an internet no-no zone. Or, you might be happy to do an IMDb search while in a bar, settling an argument. Everywhere-you-go email notification is another mundane lifesaver.
Eventually you notice things wrong. Copy & paste, no wireless sync, no multitasking, slow browsing. Bad battery life. But to bring them up feels like complaining that the alignment in your solid gold car is slightly off.
Ultimately you get used to massive change. Change that stays still isn’t change any more. The iPhone has become part of me, another set of solutions to problems that might come up. I don’t notice now when I whip out tweetie while waiting in line for a coffee, or upload photos I just took, or whatever. But also in no way would I go back to my pre-iPhone life if I could avoid it.
That’s not to say I have to have an iPhone. I’m happy now that the Pre and Android seem to be giving Apple a run for its money, or at least promise to some time in the future. But what these are is post-iPhone devices, things made with an attempt to approach the feature set and polish of Cap’n Touchy here. I don’t think any of us wants to go back to pre-iPhone devices, stone daggers next to the Colt .45s we have now. Like the Treo with Windows Mobile. (shudder.)
From that perspective, iPhone OS 3.0, which I just installed, feels underwhelming at first. It is essentially a bunch of small fixes – search, copy & paste, landscape keyboard, YouTube account support, etc. etc. Browsing is sped up. These are all welcome. (Can’t say I give a shit about MMS.) I’d love to upgrade to the new phone to get the compass and video and voice control, but ultimately I may hold off for now. These additions are cool, but not $200 cool, and aren’t that big next to the huge changes I’ve already experienced this past year.
The jist of it is that the networked computer ultimately meant that us nerds got big brain upgrades, but only when near our computers. With devices like the iPhone, we get to bring our big outboard brains around wherever we go. I’m still thankful for that.
I think the most significant announcement from Apple last week was not OS 3.0, not the new iPhone, but rather the $99 price on the old model, the one sitting in front of me here. That means more people will get this thing in their hands, and perhaps experience the brain-enbiggening power I’ve gotten so used to now.
Front Mission: Evolved is coming to North American consoles. Although Front Mission is a strategy RPG franchise, this is a third-person action game. However, it’s giant robots, and the developers promise a hybrid of Front Mission, Call of Duty 4 and Chromehounds. Could it be the elusive Citizen Kane of giant robot games that we here at AR eternally await? Maybe. Hell yeah maybe.
Vindicated! I was actually having my doubts as to the authenticity of this film (see previous post), after I seemed like the one naive idiot who didn’t think some arch ironist like Gondry or Jonze was ingeniously behind it. However, here’s a review at twitch. “The film is not a put-on. After Last Season is, however, so genuinely and startlingly bad that a movie cult will undoubtedly form around it.”
Other highlights:
“Unbelievably, the film’s trailer, including the editing, is representative of the entire movie.”
“Impromptu props made of cardboard and other discarded material are everywhere.”
“In fact, the performances seem disconnected from the overall narrative as if they were occurring in a black box.”
“Some scenes are perceptibly out-of-focus. There is a pervasive, muffled background noise. Scenes come and go with no continuity or explanation. Conversations often cutaway to shots of furniture and other items for no reason.”
“A large part of the movie consists of the previously mentioned computer graphics, which are brutally crude. Although these graphics fit into the story, [the] film leans heavily on them to pad out the 93 minute running time. Thus, the parade of colored circles, spheres, birds, and fish tends to goes on and on as if the film went on pause and a screen saver kicked in.”
I’m really thrilled by After Last Season. The trailer is something else:
It’s tempting to believe it’s an exquisitely constructed hoax, isn’t it? After reading this MetaFilter thread, though – especially this and this – you’ll be convinced it’s real. Real, and more awesome than a sack of robot pegasi. Just for font nerds alone it’s a comedy explosion. If you like fonts, unrelated clips of mundane dialogue and overlit white rooms, you’re in for a nirvanic thrill ride.
Anyway, it’s opening “regular-wide” tomorrow, so if you live in Lancaster, CA, North Aurora, IL, Rochester, NY or Austin, TX, please go see this. I hear they have printers in the basement you can use. (via the Space blog)
Everyone’s favourite games conference aka press release orgy is here! The most concise way to catch up on E3 press conference porn is to read three posts from Offworld:
Sony and MS are both trying to catch up to the Wii’s motion-sensing Wiimote, and MS’ Project Natal seems most interesting, as it’s a controller-free system, relying entirely on cameras to sense your body position and even recognize faces. That said, until practical questions can be answered (how much? how many games will support it?), it’s best to consider it as a rhetorical salvo in the PR wars and not an actual, tangible thing. Sony and MS both trumpeted their lists of exclusive games, most vague and ages from shipping. Some of them no doubt will be good, but neither could get through their presentations without showcasing some cross-platform games as well.
Nintendo, meanwhile, renewed its license to print money. No, they tried to make nice with the hardcore by announcing a truckload of Mario games.
A few things caught my eye. On the Microsoft side, more details of Halo 3 ODST are welcome (sounds like The Killing with space marines), and I’m happy that Bungie is doing another game in Halo Reach, but I was kinda hoping they’d give the Halo thing a rest for a while and try something new. Alan Wake looked cool, and I really hope Natal works and doesn’t cost a mint, but judging from MS’ track record, that’s unlikely. How much for that 160 gig hard drive again….?!
Sony’s PSP Go! was of course no surprise. But it looks slick, and it sounds like Sony is doing all the right things (woo developers, improve media experience, ditch UMD) to keep the PSP alive. And boy are there a lot of games coming for it, including a new Metal Gear, Assassin’s Creed, and Little Big Planet. But I’m of two minds about Sony. They’re currently fighting two losing battles and I wonder if they shouldn’t just cut their losses on the PSP and concentrate on overtaking MS for 2nd place in the living room. They’ve got so many first party developers tied up with PSP projects, it’s hard to see the logic. I was also really hoping for a price cut on the PS3. Why, why, why, are they not doing that. It’s insanity. I say that selfishly, because I’m looking to get one of the damned things, but it also seems crazy that Sony is sitting in third place with a console almost twice as costly as the competition, and not slashing their price.
A number of divisive transit issues have been in front of the council here in Toronto. The latest is the Jarvis redesign, in which the fifth lane is sacrificed in order to widen the sidewalks and install bike lanes. It passed after much controversy.
From my point of view, any new bike lanes are good, and I’ll take a walkable street ahead of a highway for Rosedale fatcats any day. However, I have some concerns here. There is already a bike lane the next major street east, on Sherbourne. That’s a big deal when you consider the downtown has only two(!) north-south bike lanes, Sherbourne and Beverly-St. George. (No, I’m not considering the Death By Cab shared lane on Bay a viable route.) The Jarvis lane doesn’t make much sense in the context of the city’s own bikeway network plan. We must then wonder if the Jarvis lane is an easy bone to throw to cyclists, in preparation for disappointments elsewhere. Indeed, word comes that the proposed Bloor-Danforth bike lane has been shunted off to an as-yet unspecified consultant, and “Mr. Heaps said … that if the study showed the lanes would hurt local businesses, he would not support them.”
The downtown portion of the bikeway network; dotted means not yet built. I’ve put in the Jarvis route in yellow.
That same article mentions a possible protected lane on University, which would be nice – but again, not part of the city’s own bikeway network plan. The bike plan is good, and it should be implemented. Lanes outside the network are great, but not if they take away political will to actually implement it, and especially not if they are in areas already reasonably well served by the network. I fear Jarvis may hit both these negatives.
I rarely talk about biking here, for some reason. Well, that’s about to change!
Here’s an interesting interview in the Star with bizarro Clive Owen, a bike safety expert since being run over by a truck while in a bike lane. Notable (I quote):
Research shows the average duration of time spent in a car has gone up by over 200 per cent over the last 20 years. The distance people are driving has also increased.
drivers were largely culpable in 74 per cent of all of accidents and partially culpable in another 16 per cent.
97 per cent of the drivers in cases of fatal accidents involving cyclists were male. It is highly unlikely to get that kind of statistic by random chance.
The Netherlands has the lowest cycling fatality rate in the world per kilometre cycled or per cyclist, and their rate of helmet use is less than 1 per cent.
Couple things. One was a discussion about GPS automated direction-giving, in-car and, in my case, on-phone. We talked about how everyone pretty much agree that GPS will get you there, it will just send you there in weird ways. It’s worth double-checking the directions, in other words. However, we concluded that in 10 years, it might be a different story. The ability to navigate will have become an obsolete skill.
The other thing was hearing on This Week in Photography that photographers are feeling pressure from computer generated images. That is to say, product shots that used to be done by whole teams of humans are now being made in CGI. Presumably the next step will be for human model shoots to be replaced as well – think of the poor unemployed models!
It’s tempting to argue that some areas will never be taken over by the machines. For example, we’ll always need photography for the news, right? Well, I saw a CGI re-enactment on US news recently, in a story about the arrest of the suspects in the recent domestic terror incident. It was horribly done (and lampooned on the Daily Show), but nonetheless it was there – the prospect of news without the footage.
Everything seems normal, but in the background that exponential evolution keeps on tickin’.
The PSP is a confused platform. It launched to great acclaim and sales, but was soon outclassed by Nintendo’s DS, whose staggering popularity is hard to compete with. So despite the PSP’s respectable install base, releases slowed to a trickle.
There are two major reasons for this, I think. First, the PSP offers PS2-level graphics, so full 3D. It’s much more of a regular console experience than the DS, which means it’s more expensive to develop for, yet with a smaller install base. Developers can make money making PSP games, but not as much as they can on the DS.
Secondlly, the PSP was originally marketed as a multimedia machine (remember UMD discs?). It can play movies and music. It also has a browser. The hardware itself is admirable and full of potential. However, Sony’s software skills pale next to someone like Apple, and as a media player the PSP lags far, far behind the iPod. Many people may have originally bought their PSP for multimedia reasons, not games – so game sales never reflected the install base. And those people may have stopped using their PSPs altogether in favour of iPods.
I bought mine on a game trade-in promotion at EB Games, knowing there were a few games on the platform that I wanted to try (Final Fantasy Tactics, Jeanne D’Arc, the Syphon Filter games, Patapon, Echochrome). Try them I did, but it was a real struggle finding games in retail. Some were easy, but FF Tactics was hard as hell – I finally found it used for $45, which is way too much for a used portable game. You could download games from the Playstation Network, but originally this was PC only.
When Sony added PSN support to the PSP itself, everything changed. Suddenly there were a ton of back catalogue games available for reasonable prices ($25 is the highest price I’ve seen on the store). I quickly filled up my proprietary memory card format with awesome-ish games, such as
Ratchet and Clank: Size Matters – my first experience of this franchise. It’s a fun platformer with RPG and shooter elements. Not my usual sorta game, but it’s enjoyable, well-paced and slick.
Untold Legends: Brotherhood of the Blade – I thought I’d have to hack my PSP to get a Diablo or Diablo-like game on this thing, but lo and behold, there are two Untold Legends games that hew vary close to Diablo conventions. This one was a PSP launch game. It does the trick.
Jeanne D’Arc – it’s a more simplified strategy RPG experience than FF Tactics, but that’s a good thing. Even at their simplest, SRPGs take like 45 minutes to play a level, so they push the limits of what you want to do on a portable device. This one is beautiful and insane, with a story that involves both Joan of Arc and legions of monsters.
Syphon Filter: Dark Mirror – I’ll admit that this hasn’t quite captured the thrill I felt playing the original Syphon Filter back in the day. Nonetheless, it’s very well-made, especially the control scheme.
Patapon 2 – Just released. Haven’t gotten that far with it yet, but have played enough to know it’s a worthy sequel to the excellent original.
If the rumours of the PSP shedding the UMD drive altogether at E3 are true, the catalogue on the PSN should grow even more – which would be great news. I hope for good things for the PSP. It frequently outsells the DS in Japan, on the back of games like Dissidia and Monster Hunter, which goes to show that it’s games that move platforms – and allowing the games releases to shirnk to nothing is a surefire guarantee that your platform will wither and die. By embracing digital distribution, and opening the plentiful back catalogue to keep gamers busy, Sony keeps the PSP alive between the sparse new releases.*
That said, the PSP had a couple of the few new releases on ANY platform in the past couple months that I actually wanted to play: Patapon 2 and Resistance: Retribution.
