Static Zombie

Surviving

Right about now is when you'd usually come to Static Zombie and find a witty, insightful post about the new season of Survivor.  Something about the new twist this season and Mark Burnett's ongoing deal with the Devil.

Sorry to disappoint.

The new season's begun, but I haven't had a chance to watch it yet.  Worse, I'm not really sure when I'll get there.  That's because I'm engaged in an entirely different season of Survivor.  No immunities, but plenty of challenges.  Meals are made up of whatever can be scrounged up.  Sleep is difficult, interrupted by the hungry wailing of local fauna.  It's Survivor: Parenthood.  And here's the most adorable immunity idol you'll ever see:

This season will run much longer than 39 days, but it's already the best season ever. 

PAX Boredomica

Despite living mere minutes away, I'd never been moved to attend PAX in the past.  The bullet points rattled off by enthusiastic friends ricocheted harmlessly off my armored exterior.  When a pass was offered to me this year, I took the opportunity to find out what all the fuss was about.

I'm still not sure.

The exhibit hall was like a mini E3, and yet held very little sway over me.  The items of greatest immediate interest-- Duke Nukem Forever, Portal 2, Dead Space 2-- commanded absurd lines, distinguishing them from other booths mainly in the level of absurdity.  I saw nothing at the show that made me feel I had to try it, now.  The Epic Mickey booth convinced me that I'll be dusting off the Wii when that game hits the shelves, but I didn't need to play it at the show-- watching on the monitors was enough.  For most products being shown, there will be ample opportunity (reviews, videos, demos) to make purchase decisions at my leisure when they're closer to release.  Waiting in a line for a brief taste of them today held no appeal.

Attending a panel required two hours of committment-- one for the panel itself, and one for the line to get into the panel.  I missed one panel because the room filled.  I waited in line for the next panel, and was disappointed by both the content of the panel and the presentation.  When everyone is in the room to see and hear four people talk, organizers should make sure people can actually see and hear them.  Would it really be so hard to raise the panelists' table on a dais so they're visible to more than the front row of spectators?  Seems like Conference 101, and this is, what, the 5th PAX?  I left the panel early.

The free-play console room was impressive-- a vast hall of PS3s, 360s, Wiis, and other older systems, plus an extensive library of titles available for the asking.  But I couldn't think of anything I wanted to play that I wouldn't prefer to play on my own 360 at home, or that wouldn't take more time than I wanted to devote in that venue (Shadow of the Colossus).

As for tabletop gaming, I have enough opportunities to do that with friends that I didn't need to play with strangers.  The one event I considered, the Puerto Rico tournament, only had 7 people signed up-- hardly enough for a tournament.  I suspect noon on Friday was too early in the show to schedule a board gaming event-- people were still busy browsing the expo hall.

I didn't attend any of the concerts, which hold no attraction for me.  Sitting/standing in a crowd of people is not how I like to listen to music anymore.  Music for me is a supplement to other activities, not something I want to focus my attention or schedule around.  I also missed the keynote and other big-ticket "events" like the Omegathon (an elimination tournament of different games, culminating this year with an arcade claw machine).  Too much waiting.

As I wandered the convention center I saw lots of people enjoying themselves, but in ways that held little appeal to me.  I love Plants vs. Zombies, but had no desire to (wait in line to) get an orange traffic cone hat and get made up as a zombie.  I like nestling into a comfy chair, but as I waded across the sea of humanity beached on beanbag chairs, each person focused on their handheld device of choice, there was no sense of community, only isolation.

I went to plenty of these kinds of events when I was younger, like WorldCon and local Star Trek and comic book conventions.  I get it.  The desire to share your passion with others who understand, to immerse yourself in it for a weekend, to feel part of a community where what you do is normal and not something to hide away when the popular kids come around.  The chance to revel in geekiness among geeks, to be over the top without fear or shame, to meet the people who make the things that bring you joy.  I've been there, done that.  And it's just not important to me anymore.

The events aren't the draw for me now.  If I go to something like BoardGameGeek.Con, it's not to be at the event-- it's to reconnect with friends.  Maybe some people are having that experience at PAX.  Maybe there are people who only knew each other as gamertags, and meet up at PAX for the first time and forge deeper friendships.  Maybe there are college buddies who fly in to Seattle for a PAX fragfest in the LAN lounge, reliving old times and keeping bonds alive.  Maybe there are people who met at the very first PAX, and come together year after year to see each other again and bring even more people into their widening circle.

I really hope so.

How Low Can You Go?

It's time once again for the XBox Live Summer of Arcade, an annual promotion of new titles on XBLA.  This week's title is Limbo, an indie game that proves it's the gameplay, stupid.  That's not to say Limbo lacks style-- it goes out on a limb(o) on that front, presenting itself entirely in black and white silhouette.  It's distinctive, albeit depressing.  They also chose to use a blur filter which keeps me wanting to scream "Focus!" at the non-existant projectionist.

Gameplay is very, very simple.  Move to the right (and occasionally back to the left, but generally, your goal is to advance to the right).  Sometimes jump.  Sometimes use things you come across (crates, power switches, etc). Don't die.

Except die you will.  Many, many times.  There's no story in Limbo-- you don't know who you are, where you are, or why you're on a relentless march rightward.  But you quickly learn your surroundings are deadly and, mercifully, the cost of death is very low.  The game autosaves at all the right times, resulting in very little pointless replaying of the same jumps and climbs.  A click of a button puts you back at the start of the current puzzle.

That's more or less how the game is structured, as a series of puzzles.  And the game's appeal lies in the utter simplicity, logic, and elegance of the puzzle design.  Nothing is out of place.  Nothing is extraneous.  "Why is this elevator hoisted from above by chains, instead of being a single, solid piece?" you might ask.  And well you should, because it's not by accident.  The puzzles aren't convoluted.  Their solutions aren't arcane.  Everything is fair, laid out right in front of you.  Delightfully, in most cases it's easy to execute the solution once you spot it-- you don't spend a lot of time retrying the same jump over and over to get the timing just right.  This is a game that rewards thought, not reflexes.

There are some great bits of puzzle design here, but one particularly fine display of finesse involves some sequences where your character is forced to move in one direction only, either left or right, until something reverses or removes that restriction.  At these times you often pass by ledges or routes that, because of your movement restriction, are inaccessible to you.  But that's OK, because you know the game was designed that way.  You know those routes are not important to you right now, because you simply can't use them.  There's no anxiety about passing by, about wondering if you should be trying to reach them.  A short while later, the simple removal of your movement restriction is a brilliantly organic design trick, instantly suggesting that since you can now go in the other direction, maybe you should check out those things you passed.  In lesser hands, restricting an avatar's movement can frustrate a player.  Here, it's actually liberating.

As clever as Limbo is, the oppressiveness of its art and sound make it a game I can only play in short bursts.  Many will compare Limbo with Braid.  The latter had bigger, bolder ideas in both story and puzzle design.  People talked about Braid in a way I think few will talk about Limbo.  I thought Braid's puzzle design had purity and elegance, but Limbo takes it a step further.  I'm not sure, in the end, if it's a game people will love.  As a game and puzzle designer, it's a game I certainly admire, and I'm enjoying the journey.

Evolution of Controllers

From ExtraLife, Kinect in context:

Behold the Power of Cheese

When it comes to macaroni and cheese, there are two kinds of people in the world: those who reach for the blue box, and those who reach for the orange box.  I've always been an orange boxer.  I can't recall ever seeing the blue Kraft Mac & Cheese box in our house when I was growing up, but there were always two Stouffer's products in our freezer: french bread pizza and mac & cheese.  Kraft's version seems like a product that tends to grab people in their childhood.  The shockingly bright powder that becomes a gooey cheese sauce on the stovetop feels too artificial to my adult taste.  But the contents of that orange Stouffer's box-- fluffy, creamy, with a fabulously browned cheesy crust-- is my Platonic ideal for this dish.

I've tried making baked mac and cheese from scratch a couple of times, but the recipes-- from Alton Brown and Cook's Illustrated, each of whom has produced big winners for me in the past-- left me flat.  The results lacked flavor and the unctuous body I was looking for.  I always thought that the big choice with mac and cheese is stovetop vs. oven.  But yesterday I discovered one even more important: bechamel vs. custard.

Bechamel, made by whisking scalded milk into a flour-butter roux, is one of the five French mother sauces and a basic component of dishes like lasagna, moussaka, and many casseroles.  Custard is a cooked mixture of milk/cream and egg, and can become the foundation of anything from pastry cream to quiche.  The recipes I hadn't liked started with a bechamel.  But now that I thought about it... the Stouffer's mac certainly had the qualities of a custard.  Could this be the answer I've been looking for?

Why, yes.  Yes it could.

Yesterday I put together this recipe from Saveur Magazine (just look at that photo!), whose story on macaroni and cheese educated me about the bechamel-versus-custard debate in the first place.  And aside from an absurdly low quantity of pasta in the recipe-- next time, I'll increase the pasta by at least fifty percent, because there's ample sauce to handle it-- it turned out splendidly.  The custard gave the dish exactly the kind of body I'd been looking for, and the hint of onion elevated it even further.  I intend to try the Artisanal recipe soon (since the Bellevue outpost of that restaurant just closed yesterday, I lost my chance to just walk in and order it), but for now this custard-based mac and cheese is my new comfort food favorite.

Introducing: Kinect Adventures

Today Microsoft officially announced the game I've been working on for the past 18 months or so, Kinect Adventures, for the hands-free Kinect controller (formerly known as Project Natal).

The gaming community's response to today's announcements has been a lot of hate.  Hate that all the announced titles are aimed at the casual market rather than the hardcore gamer.  Hate that these games are "rip-offs" of titles already available on the Wii.  Hate that Microsoft is offering something to a different demographic than its traditional male, shooter-loving adolescent.

Completely predictable.

Nintendo experienced the same thing when they launched the Wii, and took that hate all the way to the bank.  As demographics go, gamers are moderate fish in a fairly small pond.  With Kinect, Microsoft is digging a channel out to sea to go after bigger fish.  And smaller fish.  And fish of different colors, shapes, and sizes.  Gamers don't like that.  They want the pond all to themselves.

The magic of Kinect is hinted at by the videos, but doesn't fully manifest until you step in front of it yourself.  Until you do, your mind grasps the idea of the technology.  It understands on an abstract level that the thing works.  You think you know what it would be like to play a Kinect-enabled game.  But like the Matrix, nobody can tell you what it is-- you have to experience it for yourself.  And when you do, the walls of indifference, intellectual detachment, and self-assured rationalization crumble beneath the force of sheer childlike delight.  Kinect reaches behind your back and flips a hidden switch you didn't even know you had.  It's simple.  It's intuitive.  It's marvelous.

And it's nothing to be afraid of.  If a traditional controller is an oven, Kinect is a stove.  They're two different ways of doing similar things, each better at some things and worse at others.  There's room in the kitchen for both.

Kinect Adventures is a great launch title.  It's great for the entire family, supports players joining at any time (what we call easy-in, easy-out gameplay), can be played in short or long bursts, is incredibly easy to play, and lends itself very well to party situations.  The photos it takes of you as you play are always crowd-pleasers, and the ability to show off and share creative rewards with friends will appeal to social players.

Once people get a chance to get in front of Adventures and try Kinect, I think these things are going to sell themselves.

Points for Cheap

To all my XBox 360 peeps in Zombieland, allow me to direct your attention to this deal for 4000 Microsoft Points for $37 (that's 25% off!) courtesy of Dell.  Normally, those points would set you back half a Benjamin (a Benj?).

Totally Lost

Let the analysis commence!  Me, I've got a lot of questions and very few answers.  I was really digging the finale right up to the moment where they started talking about leaving, and Jack's father appeared.  I liked it better when the sideways universe was everyone's second chance.

Was everyone dead before they ever got on the plane?  Were the earliest theories true, and the island purgatory?  Or was the island real, and the flash sideways purgatory?  Why were some people-- Michael, Walt, Charlotte, Daniel, Miles, Frank, among others-- missing from the church?

If the island is purgatory and everyone on it was dead from the moment the show began, what's the deal with Jacob and the Man in Black?  Why did the lives of the Losties intersect before they got to the island / died?

If the sideways was purgatory, then what was all that business with the nuclear bomb?  It didn't create a parallel universe. Aside from jolting everyone back to the present it didn't really do anything, despite what Juliet said as she died.  That's a whole lot of running around to accomplish nothing. 

Why were the Others so interested in Walt?  Why did they terrorize the Losties in the first place?  Why did the psychic have such dire predictions about Aaron, who never appeared to be significant?

I hope someone's able to put together a Unified Field Theory for Lost, because right now it's feeling a lot like the writers crammed into a room for a weekend, got really excited about an idea, and piled more ideas on top of it without regard for all the contradictions they were creating.

Open Letter to J.J. Abrams

Dear Mr. Abrams,

I love your work.  Really, I do.  Fringe has been far more entertaining and sensible than The X-Files.  I love that at its core, Fringe is really about the lengths to which a father will go out of love for his son.

But please, it's time to retire the doppelganger from your playbook.  You've gone to that well just a few times too often.  It was bad enough when you did it with Charlie, but the switcheroo in the season finale of Fringe was a doppel too far.  Worse, it was blatantly telegraphed.  The moment Olivia dyed her hair, there was no way the episode could end other than the wrong Olivia going home with Walter and Peter.

Worst of all, to make it work, you had to make the other characters into idiots.  Are we honestly expected to believe, after their experience with Charlie's double, that our heroes never put even the simplest safeguards, such as a passphrase, into place?  And when Olivia shows up with a different hair color, none of them think that maybe they should make sure she's the right Olivia?

Tell you what, I'll make you a deal.  I'll cut you a free pass on this one if you give us Charlie back.  He's feeling obsolete?  Great.  Bring him to our universe and have him join our side.  Not as good as having Olivia's original trusted confidante back, but still a welcome addition to the ensemble.

But no more mistaken identity, trading places plotlines, okay?

He Really Doesn't Get It

He wants to be seen as the best player ever to play the game, yet he doesn't care about the social aspect.  He doesn't think it's important.  Jeff had it right-- Russell's not playing Survivor, he's playing some other game.  Unfortunately, he's playing it while he's a contestant on Survivor.

With her final vote, Candice confirmed that she had no business being on this season.  Taking her speech at face value, she based her decision not on gameplay but on personality and values.  She has every right to vote however she wants, just as I have every right to not respect her for it.  It's Heroes vs. Villains.  Respect the game you're playing.  Though, as NPR columnist Linda Holmes wrote, people just don't hand over a million dollars to someone they dislike.

Even so, I'm very surprised at the way the final vote went.  Parvati played, by far, the strongest game of the three finalists.  She made brilliant moves, she kicked butt in challenges, and she never lost her cool.  Yet she only got three votes.  Parvati was robbed.  Sandra played a fine game, but Parvati played a great one.  Unfortunately, her game was indelibly linked to Russell's, and she suffered toxic repulsion by association.

The audience got their vote wrong, too.  JT's play was far from the stupidest Survivor move of all time.  It turned out to be one of the worst, but as Jeff pointed out had things really been as they seemed on the Villains tribe and Russell was the last man standing against an all-women alliance, it would have been abso-freaking brilliant.  No, by far the dumbest move was Colby's season two decision to take Tina to the end instead of Keith.  The other players got eliminated as a result of their moves, but they might have gotten knocked out anyway.  Colby's move directly cost him nine hundred thousand dollars.

And hey, how about that final immunity challenge?  For the first time in a long while, the game finished with a challenge that presented an absolutely level playing field.  It was anyone's game, and those final few seconds as three players blindly groped for the necklace mere inches apart from each other was quite possibly the most dramatic conclusion to any challenge in the history of the game.  A great conclusion to a spectacular season.

Not Much to Say

Sorry I haven't been posting about non-Survivor topics, but I've spent most of the last two weeks at the office and really, who wants to hear about that?

Last night's episode had no real surprises.  Colby continues to be a complete zero.  It's incredibly hard to believe, even accounting for the passage of time, that this is the same man we saw in season 2.  He's got no game.  At anything.  And he was an utter douche, transfering all his frustrations at his season of inefficacy onto his brother in the span of one challenge.  I think it's safe to say that with this season, we've seen the last of Colby on Survivor.

The flaw in my analysis from last week was in expecting Sandra and Parvati to let their emotions rule their actions and vote Russell out.  It's now clear there's no chance of that happening.  Everyone believes that Russell can't win, that he's so disliked by everyone (for the second season in a row!) that nobody on the jury will vote for him, making him the perfect person to take with you to the finals.  Nobody wants to vote him out.

Finals on Sunday. Parvati has won (or diplomatically stepped down from) every single endurance challenge this season.  The vast majority of final challenges are endurance-based (in fact, since they're revisiting classic challenges this season, I wouldn't be at all surprised to see the hand-on-the-stump challenge from season 1).  I wouldn't want to go up against Parvati in an endurance challenge, and if she makes it to the finals, she wins. Will the other Villains be smart enough to vote Parvati out at the next tribal council if she doesn't win immunity?  Or will they just hand her another million dollars?

Karma Chameleon

Love the double-elimination Survivor episodes, especially when they're relatively late in an unstable game and it's not just a rote majority vs. minority double whammy.  Spoilers and lots of discussion after the jump.

Possession is Nine Tenths

It's Thursday night, so that means Survivor.  I was happy to see the card tower-building challenge return.  I think it's one of the all-time best Survivor challenges.  There's plenty of drama as the towers crumble.  Each player can create and execute their own strategy without interference.  Nobody, a priori, has a better chance at winning than anyone else.  It requires a variety of skills: manual dexterity, spatial acuity, patience, and structural mathematics.  It's a great change of pace from the usual brute force, endurance, or pick-up-the-pieces-and-assemble-a-puzzle challenges.

Two people did incredibly stupid things tonight.  Spoilers safely voted out behind the jump.

Didn't See That One Coming!

There was a lot of very interesting play going on in tonight's Survivor.  Thoughts after the jump.

"We made Survivor history tonight."

In all fairness, it's a reasonable conclusion to draw.  How else to explain a tribe voting out their strongest members while leaving the weakest?  A women's alliance perfectly explains what the Heroes have been seeing.

That doesn't change the fact that this is, by far, the worst decision ever made by a tribe.  What's really amazing is that, at least as far as we saw, there was little to no discussion of how bad this could turn out for them.  If they played it safe and kept their idol, then after winning the immunity challenge they'd go into the merge even with the Villains.  If they're wrong in their assessment of the other tribe, they're digging their own grave.

Once Colby spilled the beans to Russell on the platform, there was no way in hell Russell was going to finish that race quickly.  He was much better off losing, thereby getting the idol AND voting off a potential flipper on his tribe.

I don't understand why the Villains voted out Courtney instead of Sandra.  Did they not watch Sandra's season?  Her strategy is to sell her vote to whoever isn't voting for her.  And they already believe she likes to plant ideas in people's heads.  Courtney, meanwhile, has been completely ineffective at EVERYTHING in BOTH her seasons.  She's no threat at all, and much easier to control.

Sandra, of course, has to flip.  She's lowest in her tribe's pecking order, so she has to shake things up.  The question is whether or not Rupert and the other Heroes will believe her when she tells them that Russell's running the show.  Because Russell will be swearing up, down, and sideways that he's on their side.  And even if they do believe her, they can't tip their hand that they've changed their minds, or Russell will play the idol.

This episode is going to be PAINFUL for J.T. and the other Heroes come reunion night.