John Zeitler

So it’s time for me to start making preparations for a few big events… one later this week, and one closer to the end of next month.

This is going to be one busy summer, boys and girls.

So…. WordPress 3.0. Spiffy so far, though my exposure to it at this point is limited to, uh… typing this post.

Sue me, I read through an entire webcomic this evening to de-stress.

I started off this post with a rather poor attempt to review BT’s latest album, These Hopeful Machines, but as you can no doubt see, I’ve scrapped it. The reasons are many, but mostly they boil down to “I’m not a music reviewer, so anything I say is going to be hopelessly shallow and pedantic”, and “even if I was a music reviewer I literally cannot find the words to describe how this album makes me feel beyond ‘profoundly reflective’, but that’s mostly for personal reasons completely unrelated to the album itself”. I suppose the best I can do, really, is to say that it’s really good, and that anyone who likes electronic music is going to absolutely love it.

If that in fact turns out to be old news, then blame Amazon. I know I do.

Anyway. The word “hope” is a bit appropriate this week, as it turns out, as the Apple WWDC came on Monday and the big video game hoopla, E3, is next week. In both cases the internet has done what it does best: ruined the surprises. We knew about the iPhone 4 months ago, and “leaks” are coming faster and faster as the console “pre-conferences” come closer. I’ll cover these two events one at a time.

First, the iPhone. I found Penny Arcade’s assessment of the technical difficulties a bit… well, anticlimactic. I mean, come on. We all know what really happened. Grey Davis was accompanied on the altar by the employees responsible for the foulups, and together they were all sacrificed by The Jobs to The Beast That Has Naught But Two-Dollar Bills, He Who Thirsts For Quicksilver And The Blood of Interns, Great Bearded Geek With A Thousand-Dollar Computer, W’oz-Loggoth. For Gabe and Tycho to whitewash this just shows you how far lost they are in The Dark Faith of Cupertino. That said, the iPhone 4 was, literally, nothing surprising. I don’t mean that in light of the advances that were known based on the Gizmodo leak, and I don’t mean that it wasn’t technologically impressive. It was, in all respects, exactly what I was betting the 4.0 version of the iPhone would be when I signed on for the 3G two years ago.

See, the only people really getting bent out of shape are the fanbrats who are, either willfully or through sheer stupidity, failing to realize that the iPhone is not a computer and is not beholden to the same product lifecycles as one. It is a smartphone, and as such the decision to purchase or to skip it must be made from that paradigm. Phones are updated on an almost weekly basis. I’ve lost track of how many “phone X running Android-/Palm-flavored OS version Y is now available on carrier Z” posts I’ve seen in the last year. Hell, I couldn’t tell you how many I’ve seen this week. The point being that it doesn’t matter which phone you buy, or which platform you commit to. You need only blink before something “better” comes along. If you’re going into the iPhone, or an Android handset thinking that you’ll be hip and completely up-to-date, think again. Also please hit yourself on the head with a hammer, repeatedly, until the stupid leaks out of your ears. It’ll be a gray color, you’ll know it when you see it.

I can’t speak for everyone, and I certainly can’t speak for someone who’s taking this opportunity to jump from iPhone to an Android set. Who I can speak for is myself, and I’m going by the same rules I’ve had for cell phones since the very beginning– altering them, in point of fact. I started with a fairly basic clamshell phone back in early 2004, and limited myself to one upgrade per year until I made the jump to the iPhone two years ago. I did so knowing that I could not keep up that pace, and that it was entirely likely that I would not need to– remember, the first-gen iPhones shared in a lot of the features that the 3G version did back in ’08. It was not an altogether wild leap to assume that it would be merely one year between each version of the phone, and it turned out that I was right. The 4.0 handset has features that I want, and makes upgrading an attractive option– and since I was planning to do so anyway, there’s no problem. (If the 4.0 had, in fact, not been announced this year– I would have waited until the end of summer– I’d have gone to the 3GS for the extra storage space anyway.)

As for people dealing with the advertising and marketing campaign surrounding, well, all of Apple’s products, I refer you to the dissertation available on this weblog dated the twenty-eighth of February, Anno Domini Twenty-Ten, and shall leave it at that.

This ran a bit longer than I expected, and got a little ranty and preachy near the end. I’ll skip the E3 discussion until tomorrow, but I have a lot to say about that, too.

Dumb: Sony is removing the “Install another OS” functionality of older PS3s as of a firmware patch this Thursday. The intended goal of this is to reduce piracy, but in point of fact it will only serve to have the machine’s primary OS (the XMB) hacked that much faster… because the majority of the hacking community has said that the presence of the more easily-exploitable other OS feature has discouraged hacking attempts on the native OS. I give it about another six months, folks.

Dumber: Some waste of genetic material in Florida decided it would be a good idea to show off that he could hack Xbox Live by defacing Major Nelson’s account. While he was at PAX East. Bear in mind: MN works for MS, and has, on a weekly basis, the head of XBL’s Policy Enforcement division on his show. The individual involved thought it would be a good way to drum up business for those seeking revenge. Instead he found his address and contact information disseminated by people far smarter than him (read: roughly 85% of the human population) and is probably going to have a nice little wake-up call this morning.

Later, folks.

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.