John Zeitler

The iPad was announced today. I can see how it would be kind of cool, and I’m thinking oh dear you’ve already stopped reading. I’m sorry, did I offend you by not frothing myself up into the righteous nerd rage that is demanded of me simply because it did not meet up to the specifications that everybody and their brother pulled out of their asses the past three weeks? And I’m not saying that just to be colorful, I mean it quite seriously– some of the speculation, including from people who honestly should know better, was clearly made from whole cloth once the event occurred.

I made a point last night and this morning to gently remind people that nothing was “confirmed” until the event actually occurred. Naturally, nobody listened. They started harping on the event for not providing what was “confirmed”– specifically multitasking, any update to the iPhone’s OS, support for Chocolate-Chip-Muffins-Over-TCP/IP 2.3, that sort of thing– instead of remembering one important thing.

People lie. Everybody lies. I guarantee you 95% of the “confirmed” leaks were “confirmed” bullshit thrown around by trolls and misinformation mongers. When you get that kind of a noise-to-signal ratio, there’s only one sensible thing to do: disregard everything. That way you can retain your objectivity and look at the device on its own merits. With that said.

I’m a little surprised at the iPad for not exactly having a clear idea of what it’s supposed to be. Then again, I didn’t care for the iPhone either. The more I thought about it since the end of the event, the more I realized that quite frankly, this version of the device isn’t for me. Just like the original iPhone wasn’t for me, and how waiting for the 3G turned out to be the right thing to do. Just like how waiting for a little while on the 360 and PS3 was the right thing to do; just like how I should have waited for the Rock Band 2 peripherals (I don’t regret that one nearly as much); etc. etc. The iPad is a good device, and a good start– but it’s not for me yet. When the technology matures, and developers start showing off some cool things to do with it, I’ll consider it.

And now that what I hope is a fairly reasonable and level-headed set of remarks is on here, you may proceed to the comments, whereupon shortly you will find a thousand people calling me a retard for not immediately hurling all of my Apple products off a cliff in retaliation for this “atrocious”, “boring”, “useless”, and “lol” event that I just got done saying disappointed me. If you want you can even go ahead and add vitriol to the pile.

As if I didn’t have enough projects, I decided to try my hand at working with XCode and Mac development in general again. The good news is that, by and large, Core Data makes file manipulation and data storage much easier.

The bad news is that it’s still all in Objective-C and, if anything, the people who developed that abomination of a language have only managed to become more cynical and sadistic in the intervening year or so.

It’s for my own good… It’s knowledge and self-training… it’s a new language and resume fodder……..

…it’s time to go shoot some zombies until I feel better.

Just a little bit of an update tonight regarding the state of the Xbox Indie Games I was working on over 2009. Obviously, I lost a lot of momentum after losing the services of my artist over the summer. So, even though I had two mostly-working engines going, I had no games to produce with them. And now that I’m looking to have a lot of free time in the very near future, it turns out that the Windows machine I was using as my main development box had a power source failure (I think) and refuses to boot up. Meaning, quite simply, that all my source code is completely inaccessible. I have an old backup of the XVINE engine, but I primarily want to get something together using the action-oriented engine.

It’s not all bad news. I set up dual-boot on Mahoro a few months back so I could play my Steam games easily, but as it turns out I think I’ll be using her for development from here on out anyway. The source code for the old engines isn’t lost forever (I don’t think it is, anyway); I just need to get a hard drive enclosure to put the old machine’s drives in and retrieve it from there. And even though things are going to be a little rough soon, I’ll be paying for another year of the Creator’s Club here very shortly so that I can continue to develop and deploy to the 360. The action engine, from what I recall, was pretty adaptable, so putting together something simple and interesting is probably going to be fairly easy. The hardest part, as before, will be the art and music/sounds. We’ll see.

Catch you folks later.

Over this past week, Microsoft announced that their Xbox Live service had reached a usage level of over two million simultaneous users. This is apparently unprecedented for the service, though it’s not hard to believe; having used all of the major consoles’ (and handhelds’) online services, I feel Live stands head and shoulders above the rest in terms of content and ease of use. (And I’m not just saying that because I won enough credit for the service that I haven’t bought marketplace points since February and I’m paid-for until 2011… though the points are getting a little thin now.) Still, something unusual had to have happened to drive usage up that much, and the answer is simple.

This week, Activision and Infinity Ward’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 was released for both the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3. (The Wii, instead, received a port of the previous Modern Warfare game, subtitled “Reflex Edition”.) Most news outlets– and here I’m talking about mainstream news outlets, not specifically the gaming press– have called it the must-have game of the year. While I congratulate Infinity Ward on releasing a product that has received almost universal acclaim from reviewers and the media, I have to quietly and calmly repeat my statement that I will not buy the game.

( It’s not for the reasons you think… » )

I made mention on the Twitter feed that “today is a weird day for gaming”. With Tokyo Game Show behind us, it’s hardly a surprise, but at the same time TGS this year was really, really low-key. No bombshells, no big reveals, nothing too shocking at all. That, in and of itself, is pretty damn unusual. About the only exciting news out of TGS was that Yakuza 3 was going to be released in North America, which excites people who are explicitly not me. Kotaku raised the point that the reason TGS was such a non-starter is because we saw all the big news a month ago at GamesCom in Germany… but honestly, we didn’t hear a whole hell of a lot back then, either. Maybe it’s the recession, maybe it’s gross mismanagement, maybe it’s the fact that the entire ‘09 holiday season has been delayed to Q1 2010. We just don’t know.

Wow. 2010. I may have to pull out Crazy Taxi and hear Bad Religion talk about that mythical, far-off year of doom and gloom. Maybe not ten billion people, but enough troubles to go around for them. Anyway.

It’s not all bad, though. Capcom decided not to reveal Super Street Fighter IV at TGS this year, instead breaking the news last night. Eight fighters will be added to the already-impressive roster, including the often-overlooked T. Hawk and the new challenger Juri. Juri is already a part of the story, having been a supporting character in at least Hawk’s backstory (I think), but the other six fighters have yet to be named. Now, there’s a few things that make me a little bit giddy about this. While it certainly would have been nice for Capcom to let go of their “minor update, press a new disc” model and make Super a DLC pack, that just wasn’t gonna happen. The good news is, though, Capcom said they were not going to charge the full $60 for the standalone disc, though, which is good (I can hardly complain, though, having waited for the stars to align before snagging SF4 at nearly 1/3rd price from Gamefly anyway). More to the point, though, they announced that the existing fighters were going to be rebalanced. While I would love to read that as “Seth will no longer be an auto-blocking, cheap, defense- and damage-boosted pain in the ass at every difficulty level”, I have a hard time believing that they would make the final boss easier. This is Capcom, after all, who claimed that (Mega Man series creator) Kenji Inafune had a “jar of broken gamer spirits” on his desk. It is entirely believable that this is the unvarnished, godspoken truth. At least getting to Seth should be a less hellish prospect. As soon as there’s a date for this, I’ll probably be tossing a couple bucks on a pre-order.

Speaking of expansions, Dawn of War II is getting one that adds the Chaos Marines into the mix. I suppose if I had time, I’d spend a little while getting through the base DoW2 campaign… but then again, I never really had much in the way of fondness for the Space Marines. Give me the Imperial Guard or the Orks any day– hell, I’ll even settle for a Tau or Eldar campaign. I suppose I’m just gonna have to slog through FOR THE EMPEROR!.

I had the Blue Glow of Love this morning! However, it was not the Glow of Love, but the Glow of Mediocre And Meaningless Firmware Update. Now, I don’t have the Homebrew Channel currently installed on my Wii, mostly because I haven’t wanted much in the way of Wiibrew software. There just hasn’t been much of anything compelling. (Piracy, of course, is the complete opposite of compelling, in my eyes.) I don’t begrudge Nintendo the right to prevent piracy on their console, and I understand, on some level, the desire to protect users from potentially harmful applications that could trash a novice user’s Wii or siphon away personal data. Of course, no such malware apps yet exist and the Wii doesn’t store anything like credit card information, so that point is a little moot. I have to admit, my loyalties are torn here– like I said, I realize why Big N is doing this, but I also think that keeping the system open to legit homebrew while preventing piracy is a great idea. (It warmed my heart to see on WiiBrew.org that piracy bootloaders were broken, with the workaround being “Don’t pirate“.) There’s workarounds for legitimate hacks, and heaven smiles upon those who work tirelessly for the opening of the Wii, but I’m probably going to have to update soon, because the Shop Channel was updated as well.

Funny thing, though, I’ve been waiting for Cave Story Wii for a very long time now. Nicalis, the port developers working with the original game’s developer Pixel, have been promoting the game as “coming soon!” since about this time last year. That’s what the game’s growing hatedom would have you believe; in fact, it was a Nintendo press release that outed the game in October of 2008. Nicalis started the “coming soon” claims around this past spring, but delays and QA submissions to Nintendo have pushed the game into October of ‘09 (at the earliest). Here’s the funny thing: people who have said that they were waiting excitedly for the game back in May, are now saying they won’t get it solely because of the delays. The Nicalis forums are a cesspool of hatred and vitriol, where once they seemed like such a nice place. I hate to stereotype people based on their posts in a forum, but it seems to me that none of the people moaning the loudest can be older than about 15. That means they were around 6 or so in 2000/2001, when Working Designs was at their height and Lunar 2 received repeated and increasingly ludicrous delays. Victor Ireland, love him or hate him, said it best: “Delays are temporary. Mediocrity is forever.” While there’s something to be said for punctuality, the simple fact is that Cave Story is a good game, and bringing it to a greater audience, no matter how long it takes, is worth the wait.

I needed to get that off my chest, really. It’s been bugging me. So, with a loud and triumphant “HUZZAH!!“, let’s move on to the next topic.

No, really, you need to say it before I continue. It’ll make you feel better. I promise.

Studio Ghibli is known for a lot of things, a great many of them cute. Level-5 is also known for a lot of things, primary among them Professor Layton and Jeanne d’Arc. So when you combine the two, you get Ni no Kuni (“The Another World”), an RPG that just. Looks. Awesome. The screenshots are impressive, the frames of the animated scenes are also well-done, and to be honest this may be the first game I make an effort to play through in Japanese before the English release. No English release has been announced, though, which makes me all the more driven to get my hands on it once it comes out. I would say that Nintendo has to realize that the game would make up its localization costs, but then again North America didn’t get Soma Bringer, so yeah.

It puzzles me, though, that with the increasing interplay between the North America and Japan regions, more games aren’t being produced for both zones. Going back to Kenji Inafune, he declared, “Man, Japan is over. We’re done. Our game industry is finished.” He then mentioned, in (what could, in some perverse mirror universe, be described as) his defense, that his latest game, Dead Rising 2, was being developed by a Canadian house (Blue Castle Games, out of Vancouver). I’m not going to say that the East or the West does games better; that’s a silly and stupid assertion to make, and besides, I’ve had a hell of a lot of fun with the Rock Band titles, games that have absolutely no trace of Japan in the– wait, no, there’s that X Japan DLC track (which is awesome). Both regions make some damn good games, and it stands to reason that gamers of both regions should have a shot at playing them. The PS3 merging the two into the same region is a good first step (assuming that there was anything I really wanted to play on the PS3 that hasn’t already been announced for NA). I would hope that the other two players in the industry follow suit and announce that their next consoles (probably in late 2011 or 2012) do away with region encoding.

Of course, then you get into the territorial pissing matches of multi-platform releases. It’s been pretty much a universally lauded fact that Final Fantasy XIII is coming to the Xbox 360 as well as the PS3. However, some folks don’t much care for this spreading of the wealth. Fanboys, I know, right? Well, it would be that easy to dismiss it as such if the disaffected group in question did not include Tetsuya Nomura, aka the guy who’s kind of a big deal with regards to the FF series. Reportedly, he was not told in advance that 13 was going multi-platform, and reportedly he was not happy about it. It’s also probably why FF Versus XIII, the side-story to the main game, is remaining PS3-only (for now– that may change, as details are still scarce on it). Finally, Final Fantasy XIV, the MMO crudely referred to as Final Fantasy XI-2 by nobody but yours truly, is still PS3 and PC-only, but that’s mostly (according to, yes, more rumors) because of Microsoft’s reluctance to allow paid MMOs on Live. Yeah, FFXI is already on Live, but that was a bend-over-backwards effort on MS’s part (as well as Square-Enix’s). I don’t doubt that there’s a chance we’ll see 14 on the 360 at some point, particularly if sales of the 360 version of 13 are significant enough to warrant it. Which I kinda think they might be. We’ll see in six to ten months.

I guess you need another “Huzzah” to muster up some good cheer before the last paragraph, huh? Go ahead, I’ll keep.

There are some things that I just should not do. Playing word games is damn near the top of this list. It’s not because of anything inherently harmful in them; quite the contrary, they are excellent ways to build up one’s vocabulary and quick-thinking skills. The critical issue comes when you realize that I love big words. You might say that I’m predisposed to extemporaneously suffusing my dialogues with prodigious pronunciations of apocryphal etymological artifacts. See? The latest game driving me to mainline Webster’s while eight-balling Roget’s and Oxford is Word Ace, which has the bonus of also inducing habitual gambling. The game plays like a cross between Scrabble and Texas Hold ‘Em: Players are dealt two letters, each with a score value, and bet chips (non-monetary; the game is free to play) as in poker. Five community cards are then dealt, again following the Hold ‘Em mode, and at the end of the hand the player whose word scores the highest takes the pot. It sounds silly. It is, in fact, very good. If you have even the slightest inclination towards language and the like, this game will consume your every waking moment. I had to eventually remove Word Wrap from my phone, because it was starting to really drive me nuts. Word Ace is most likely not coming off for a while. I just wish it would add “look into booking padded room” to my to-do list for me.

Catch you folks later.

Something occurred to me this evening while watching some anime, with my computer happily idling on the desk. While this week was indeed a week of new beginnings, it has nothing on next week’s schedule. Case in point: when I last took a screenshot of my desktop, about three weeks ago, I had but five tasks scheduled for the coming week, and four “ongoing” tasks; the stack of reminders reached only about a third of the way up the screen.

Tonight’s glance at the list reveals thirteen reminders for the week ahead, seven pending reminders, and the whole pile stretches almost to the point where it would overlap the info panel of whatever podcast I might have been listening to, at the very top of the screen.

The obvious lesson to be learned from this is that I do too much stuff. However, what I’m more likely to take away from this is that my idea to step up my usage of iCal and other scheduling tools is working perfectly.

The Think B4 U Speak (and this really deserves the scare quotes) “campaign”, while basically doomed to failure from the very beginning, has its heart more or less in the right place. The primary problem is actually very simple, once you understand one very important thing.

Howard Phillip Lovecraft once described a sound so horrific, so mind-bendingly alien that it could not, by sane men, be considered speech. The sound of wet flesh smacking tonelessly and arrhythmical, moistened by spittle and foam from the gaping maws of things once human but no longer, is the psycholinguistic equivalent of a Dremel applied directly to the forebrain: it is intended to convey a message which is as nonverbal as it is unambiguous. But this foul resonance is no mean fiction.

Lovecraft wasn’t describing the fell chants of R’lyeh. He was describing the chatter in an online match of, well, anything.

When you consider that the homophobic, racist, and other various unpleasant verbiage slung like plasma bolts across the internet are in essence the equivalent of the unintelligible screaming and gibbering of, for lack of a better description, monkeys– when you realize it’s not a deliberate slinging of slime, but a reflexive scream of primal fury from people who should know better but don’t have the presence or force of mind to control themselves– well, I think that pretty much says everything there needs to be said about it.

Except that there’s a convenient setting to allow voice only from friends on Xbox Live, and for the love of all things holy and a few things that aren’t, PLEASE USE IT. That way the apes can scream into the void or with their ilk, and the actual human beings can go about having a fun game or two.

There are no words to describe this, honestly. A gamer who was lucky enough to be featured on the Xbox 360’s “Gamer Spotlight” received very many… unflattering messages from people he didn’t even know. Business as usual in the cesspool that is “random mike nights”. What makes it a proverbial Crowning Moment of Awesome isn’t that the gamer was able to flush the haterade with aplomb, or that he just deleted the messages without a second thought (in fact… well, he tells it better than I could)… no, he broadcasts the worst of them, in a digital version of shaming the mob. To prevent “promoting” the foul-mouthed little reprobates, no gamertags are mentioned in the show he shouldn’t have named the wastes of carbon who vomited out the messages (I think some of the ‘people’ in the voice clips mention their own tags, though). This is the classy way to deal with random messages.

I’m putting the clip behind the cut, though, because it is that damn bad. Most of you know my policy about the F-word. This clip F’s the ever-living F out of the F’in F-word. This isn’t just a cluster F-bomb. This is Carpet F-Bombing. You have been F’in warned.

( Mom, seriously, don’t click this… » )

Catch you folks later.

I promise, these aren’t too abysmal. In fact, this first bit is sheer concentrated awesome.

(Okay, so the Halo “aria” could use some work.)

The second thing, though, is a bit more self-serving. Most of you folks know I’m on a big productivity kick, and part of that means getting as much information available as passively as possible (read: lazily). To this end, I’ve set up another panel on my GeekTool desktop to show me which podcasts in my regular rotation have not yet been listened to. You can see the general effect here. You also get a glimpse at my incredibly boring schedule.

Anyway, that’s really it– tomorrow I’m going to do more coding work, or possibly the D&D campaign review I keep meaning to do. Oh, and as you can see the Twitter feed is back online on the main site page. Catch you all later.

A couple of things worth discussing today, folks, all of them rather brief. The first is that I think my tweaking of my main habits is just about finished. I spent a little bit of time setting up GeekTool to close Firefox for me if the computer’s been idle for longer than ten minutes. I then went ahead and set THAT up to disable the monitoring as needed. The net effect is that if my attention wanders, I don’t have a zillion tabs open to wade through and re-distract me once I get done. Conversely, if I’m using Mahoro to look up code while I do coding on the Windows machine, then I don’t have to worry about wiggling the mouse every so often.

Let’s move on to the new project, then: the second XNA engine. Yesterday I got it set up to sort through sprites and render them in a specific order. Today I went on to create a collision-detection engine that handles layers very elegantly. I did, however, encounter a really interesting bug that I’m going to have to figure out a better solution for, involving two sprites on the same layer having the exact same position. Right now it works on a “last in gets rendered” order, but that’s not gonna work if the sprites have different sizes. On the plus side, though, my idea of setting up each ‘logical’ map layer as a physical tile layer and a ‘pawn’ layer worked splendidly, and I may have figured out a solution to moving sprites between layers as well (but that might need work too). It’s getting there, bit by bit– but given that the system was able to handle 10 layers without a hiccup (that would be along the lines of 1700 sprites at 80 by 80 pixels, filling a 720p screen) it’s doing better than I expected.

Finally, I decided to re-start my XM radio. I have to admit that the service isn’t as bad as I had believed it to be on the day they transitioned to the “XM/Sirius” setup, but there’s still some disappointments. For one thing, I still think that they should have kept the guys doing the election coverage rather than ditching them unceremoniously. For another thing, while it’s close, Area is no replacement for The System. And the audiobook station is almost completely useless now, with most of the shows being rescheduled to oblivion. However, there are some bright spots. One of the more annoying glitches in the system was fixed: now, when the radio powers on, it’s authorized for all of my stations immediately, rather than a two-minute delay (at times) to let me tune into football games. Really, that’s how I justify it: I will be getting new music and such during the week and during the summer, but I wanted to have every football game and every hockey game at my disposal once more.

That’s the plan. I haven’t done any Japanese studying today, but I’ll be doing some later tonight (before bed)… and probably in the morning I’ll do the kana drill again. I’m also going to start up the morning exercise routine as well, but we’ll see how that works out.

Catch you folks later.