once in a blue moon

I'm not quite sure how often a blue moon presents itself, but if the duration between two showings is more than 3 months, that's how often I think I'm funny. You see, I was helping design a site with a fucking interface genuis, like über design mastermind, but found myself giving the guy tips on how to do his job. I said to the guy, laughing all the way:

Danson on Decks says:
hehheh this is like me giving michael shumacher tips on race driving
Danson on Decks says:
"no no, seriously michael, the APEX of the corner!"

Ann says:

A: When I turn 100, the Queen will send me a telegram.
D: Really?
A: Well, she used to. I don’t know if she still does. Actually, I think she still does.
D: That’s cool!
A: But the question is, what does she do when SHE turns 100?
D: !

In review: million dollar baby

So we took a chance and got out a movie we hadn’t heard anything about. If you know anything about my movie selection methods, you’d know that I never get out any move I haven’t seen before or heard anything good about, because the planet Earth is full of assholes who’d do anything to make a few bucks (like make a movie similar to Open Water).

True to form, I have to say, we were kind of peeved off within the first 5 minutes. The story starts weakly and confuses the hell out of us. No introduction, no explanations, just right into the movie, and it doesn’t look that great. We continue, hesitantly; we’ve nothing better to do and it cost us eight Zealand-dollars. I am happy to say, however, that the movie was designed to start slow like it did. And, as I’m sure it was designed to do, got bloody good really quickly.

The cast is really what made this movie at the end of the day. The lead actor was Mr. Clint Eastwood. Now, I’m not that old, and I’ve actually never seen any of the movies he used to coin phrases like “Go ahead, make that guy’s day” or any of the other western classics, but I’m alive. That means I’ve got an appreciation for great artists (much like I appreciate the Beatles, even though they were before my time), and I recognise what he’s done for Hollywood and movies in general. That doesn’t mean though, that he’s not too old to be acting now. He’s got a really frustrating monotone husky voice that doesn’t change throughout the duration of the movie, and at one point when he’s actually yelling at his “Million Dollar Baby”, it still doesn’t change. He makes a great grumpy guy though.

The star of the movie is an easy one. Hilary Swank makes one of the best female acting performances ever (well for me, anyway). It’s hard to explain what she does right, but I can simplify it by saying she does everything right. She is perfectly cast; the feeling you get when your favourite band plays your favourite song is the feeling you get when Swank plays the Million Dollar Baby. Below I’ll recommend you watch this movie, and it’s only because of Swank.

We can’t forget Morgan Freeman, but hell, it’s Morgan Freeman. You kind of take his acting skill forgranted nowadays, and you don’t even notice him up against Swank.

All up, the cast is very well done, as is the first half of the movie. We got sucked in, and had a wonderful time watching up until half-way. It started slow, built up really well but then hit’s a brick wall. Obviously the writers have never heard that a happy ending is what most people like to see, and a happy ending is exactly what you don’t get. The second half of the movie is depressing and very flat, and you just want some closure that you don’t really get in this movie. I can’t say much more, really, without giving anything away.

I have a kind of a love-hate relationship with this movie, but in a strange way I still think you should go and get it out. Watch the first half and then turn it off, it’ll be better that way. I give it a 6 out of 10, and that’s just because of the ending. I bet if they’d changed it, the movie would’ve done so much better. If you’ve nothing better to do then pick it up and enjoy the best acting you’ve ever seen. That’s all.

This really happened

The other night I was out running (or walking because I can’t get my fat ass past walking speed), and a police vehicle passed me doing roughly mach 4 with his lights on. That’s ok, we’re importing over 100 people into our country every day, and we’re got to keep them in line. However when I caught up with the car down the road where it had stopped, I saw the two officers interviewing some dude. As I got closer I overheard the guy explaining something, and I swear I’m not making this up. As the cops looked on, with strained straight faces, the guy was saying:

“…that little hobbit from Lord of the Rings. You know the one, the short one. Frodo. You know Frodo, right?”

And on that note, I walked away because I didn’t want to hear any more. Doing so would’ve put things into context and ruined this story (not much of a story, really). Actually, now I think about it, it could’ve only got better. I should’ve stayed.

The sweet thing about martial arts movies

Last night I sat down and turned on the box. The lady is out of town, you see, which leaves me with a) nothing to do and b) the remote to myself. Flicking around the dismal 3 stations I get in my apartment, I came across “Kiss of the Dragon,” which is a movie written by Jet Li, and staring, Let Li. Actually, while I think about it, another sweet thing about martial arts movies is that the stars usually write the movie and then star in them, making for boring storylines but awesome stunts and martial arts moves.

Anyway, so I was watching the movie, and halfway through, Jet Li stumbles into a room full of black-belt karate students training, and proceeds in kicking all of those guy’s asses. Now, if I recall correctly, in almost every martial arts movie, if the star doesn’t walk into a room full of training martial arts experts, he walks into a similarly populated confined space with bad guys, and I love it. Let’s face it, we don’t watch these movies for the nail-biting conclusion to the story or the fast cars, we watch it because these guys defy gravity like they have a rocket pack strapped on their back, and fight impossible odds to kill some dude who pissed them off. Martial arts movies rock, and I won’t hear anything different.

the truth

Before I start: Mike, I’m just roughing you up. You know you’re the man!

So I wrote a quite sizable comparison of the Ico game to Prince of Persia, and it obviously rubbed some people up the wrong way. Cam got the thought that I was hackin’ on his favourite game and defended it by telling me all the things I missed out on, where in reality I covered every base but the one where the FMV (Full Motion Video) smoothly morphed into the playable characters. Now I don’t know about you but that doesn’t make a game good, or any more playable, but there you go. I made it quite clear Ico was a good game, that you should hire it and play it, but it had a few teething problems. That sounds like a pretty good review to me, but what do I know? The real reason for this post is for Mike who posted me a message that said something along the lines of:

Not quite sure why you would choose to compare POP-a hack and slash game…to ICO-pure fantasy??? Apart from camera design and movement…they are like chalk and cheese to me…

This is sweet

Bling!

In review: ico (playstation 2™)

Let me begin by giving a heads up to those who

a) read this blog every now and then, and
b) love this game.

This isn’t going to be particularly nice. I have a habit of focusing on the bad things, as opposed to the good things, and thus I can be successfully described as “a person that starts with 100% and takes away a percent every time something goes wrong, instead of a person that starts with 0% and gives a percent every time something goes right.” So let’s start with 100% and work backwards.

Previously, I wrote a review on Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, and gave it a pretty good review. It’s a good game, just like the original. The whole problem-solving aspect and sweet visuals makes for a fun game. Ico is very similar in style to Prince of Persia, and if it wasn’t for the fact that POP was released within a year of Ico (about 15 minutes in game-development time), and the original of POP was so groundbreaking in design and playability, I could’ve sworn that it was a rip-off of Ico¹.

Ico is a kid who gets sent away for being born with horns on his head (a bad omen in his home village) and gets locked away in a castle. After escaping from his pod, he discovers a girl locked in a cage, and after rescuing her, starts the long process of escaping from the castle they’re locked inside. Along the way, there are spirits that make an effort to take Yorda back to her cage, and a mum that seems pretty pissed that she’s running around. In the first 10% of the game, you find a big gate that leads out of the castle to freedom, but it’s locked, and that’s pretty much the idea: to open the gate. If it sounds like it’s not much of a game concept, then you’d be right. The game itself feels pretty small, but they’ve stretched it out quite well.

The gate is made of two doors, each that need to be opened by solving a puzzle. However, the puzzles that need to be solved for the two doors are similar in design, so once you’ve solved one, the other is easy. The hard parts are getting to and from the puzzle rooms without letting Yorda out of your sight (doing so will have her taken back to her cage, and you having to go back to your last save-point). I mean, there’s not much more to the game than that.

Albeit being a good game, and very playable, there were some serious problems and shortcomings of Ico that let it down.

1) The number one thing that let the game down was the camera design and movement. Unlike the camera structure in POP and other similar games, when you move the camera, it circles around the character at an equal radius. The camera in Ico, however, stays in the same place and lets you move just over 90 degrees to the left and right. Doing this means there is a blind-spot that you can’t see “behind” the camera, and only by moving Ico to a different position (if he can go there), can you see all around. I’m assured by other players that the scenery is much greater than that of POP (which I liked personally because I got vertigo in the ending 20% of the game), but to be honest, I couldn’t see much and I couldn’t be bothered moving Ico around to see what was there. I did move him once or twice to see some shots of the ocean and cliff-faces which, I must admit, were breathtaking and almost perfectly realistic (surely photographs). An altered camera setup would have made the game 1000% better.

2) There were a number of bugs in the program that let it down. The bugs weren’t repetitive; as to say the bugs weren’t related to the vital play/control engine that you use constantly, but with a puzzle or two which obviously weren’t tested thoroughly. A couple of such bugs were located at the waterfall scene, where Ico has to jump onto two different obstacles, and unless your actions were executed perfectly, there was no indication that the action you were taking was the right one. The first bug was when Ico was standing on a rotating water wheel and jumping from that onto a ledge. Now, I tried this about 15-20 times, and each time Ico grabbed the ledge (just as he should have), but a split-second later, let go. Now, Ico is capable of jumping from pipes and ledges onto other pipes and ledges holding a sword twice the size of him, but he can’t hold onto a ledge? So obviously this wasn’t tested properly, and didn’t give me any feedback that I was doing something wrong. I took a break for a day or two, came back and tried again, and this time it worked. Hmmm.

The second bug had something to do with a piston that bolted up and down, that you had to stand on and jump up to a ledge above. Unless the jump was made perfectly and EXACTLY the “right” time, Ico just jumped normally indicating that he was not getting any extra jumping power from the piston. This part was one of the two problems I needed help with throughout the game. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve played enough games and know enough physics to know when was the right time to jump on the piston, and the developers got it wrong. A little feedback to let me know that I was on the right track would’ve helped. This brings me to the next problem which was the lack of instructions and introduction throughout the game.

3) When I first started Ico, you get Yorda out of her cage and have to start the game. I wasn’t aware that you could drag her around by her hand. It wasn’t until after running around and realising that as soon as you went outside of Yorda’s range, the spirits came and got her that I pressed a couple of buttons and found that the R1 button called out to her. Even though she came to me I didn’t realise that if you held it down you could grab her hand and drag her around. Now, call me stupid, but I’ve got a degree in IT and I still couldn’t figure that out. It’s not as though all games work this way. Additionally, you had to know to drag Yorda to the door next to you to open it, which also isn’t made clear at all. In fact, there were no instructions at all given to the user throughout the game, and this was a big piss-off because I put the game down for a month after 30 minutes of dicking around trying to figure out what the developers were thinking. It’s not as though telling you these things would’ve ruined the game, because as soon as you found out (which you HAD to in order to start the game), you already knew. It’s just a case of developers designing and testing for themselves, instead of getting outside assistance in this area by people who don’t know what the game is or how it works, which is a necessity when testing software.

4) There were no puzzles. I was told by my brother that there are lots of puzzles in this game, more-so than POP. But I think our definitions of puzzles are slightly different. In POP, a puzzle was one of those things that had movable parts and required logical thinking and rationale to get through. Ico didn’t have any puzzles of that nature, just rooms or outside areas that had some walls and a chain you can climb up. More often than not, figuring out what you had to do (without hints and instructions) involved brute-forcing the problem until you had a solution; hardly an elegant way of finishing a game. Looking back, it appears the developers put in an unlikely or different way of doing something, and left it up to the player to work out what they were thinking. This is quite unlike POP where they told you where you needed to go, and what pathway you should take, and then leaving it up to you to figure a way to get there. That way you knew all the different methods of moving around, but just had to work out the best combination that worked.

5+) Other problems included the fact there was no music throughout the game (if you can call that a problem; it was actually quite nice), and no save-point from about 80% of the game to the end meaning if you got bored and turned off the console, you had 30 minutes of catch-up to get back to where you left off.

However, on the other hand Ico had some good stuff going for it. The overall game and playability was very good and entertaining. It’s a short game (average of 7 hours to finish), but it’s better than a 25-hour, boring game. It was about the right length. The ending was particually depressing, as Yorda is left in the castle as it sinks to the bottom of the ocean (and as I watched the credits I made mental notes about what I was going to write in this blog), until the credits finished and I found that the game continued for a little longer. There was no real point to the ending game-play except that… bah, play the game and find out.

The scenery was very nice (pity the camera didn’t let us see more) and amazingly the whole game was built by an impressively small build-team of about 15-20 people. All up, the game seems to be a very ambitious first or second game for the development team; they obviously worked extremely well together and made a great product, but not without its teething problems. I hear they’re working on their next project now, and I can tell you I’m interested to see what they come up with. I give it about 6 out of 10, and as I said, all those points taken off are because of the bugs and problems I encountered. It’s not a bad game, in fact it’s quite nice and what’s better is for a 7-hour playtime, you can rent it for a night and have it done. I suggest you do that.

¹Let’s not forget that it doesn’t matter if an idea (or ideas) are taken from elsewhere (as most are now-days), but the key is executing the idea in a better way than the original. Take Google, for instance, which took the idea from Altavista and various other search engines, and just went pro with the concept

Pure genius

As I mentioned in my post a couple of days ago, the government is only interested in short-term solutions that won’t have any effect on what the kids of tomorrow will have to put up with. This, I have been assured, is because if the government (or any government for that matter) focused on long-term issues, it may appear problems aren’t getting solved, resulting in lost voters and eventually their term in power. Now, this may be a strange thing to insist happens in behind closed doors in the Beehive, (our parliamentary building based in Wellington) but we all know it does. The goal of a political party is not to help the country, it’s to look like they’re helping the country, but in reality to do whatever necessary to make sure the old folk and the Maori are happy so when their term is up for renewal, they get the votes to keep in power and keep the income needed to replace their BMW. Sad, but true. It’s not their fault really; it’s just human nature.

But if you’re not happy with the way things are going: tax rates that get raised at the wrong end of the income spectrum, the increase of immigrants each year from 50,000 to 55,000 (that’s well over 1000 Asians and Indians per week, and only 60% of them enter under the skilled category which means we’ll have 20,000 new taxi drivers and bakery and dairy owners by this time next year), and the continuation of treaty handouts (which doesn’t help anyone), then listen carefully, and get your “action” hat on because it’s time for you to get off your ass and push for a country you want, not one that provides Helen Clark with her new house in Mt. Eden.

The key to solving all of these problems is to insist on long term plans being designed. Plans designed, made clear to the public and implemented. The thing is, the only thing political parties do when it’s election time is make promises for what they’re going to do during their term in parliament. There may be valid reasons for this, like not having control over the government when they lose their term next election (that didn’t stop previous governments borrowing billions of dollars that we’re still paying back 20 years later), but the most probable reason is that they want to be seen doing things NOW so people don’t think they’re wasting time. This (self-assigned) pressure on a political party results in, as discussed in my last post, short-term fixes for long-term problems.

What I want to see (and you should too), is goals set for 5, 10 and 50 years in the future. How many people do we want in our country? Surely at some point our small green healthy fresh country will reach its sensible limit of inhabitants, and I want to know what that number of people is. I would expect in 50 years that we would have reached our target population and at that point immigration (the stupid idiotic people-pouring we have now) would have to stop. Kiwis, of course, would still be allowed to have children to balance out the deaths in our country, and maybe a small trickle of people from overseas to match those leaving, but when we reach our target goal, we can’t be bringing in 120 people a day into our country. It simply wouldn’t be able to handle it (hold it, we can’t handle that number now). Does anyone know what that target number is? Sorry, what? You don’t? Of course not.

If we set a number, say 20 million people (which would see every city and town in New Zealand quadruple in size; imagine that) in 50 years, we would need four times the number of prisons. And Police officers. And hospitals and doctors. And electricity. And crude oil. Where are all the plans for building or acquiring all of those assets? When you build a house you don’t lay the concrete and wait for the builders ask where the walls go before you decide. You plan ahead, make sure you have all the resources you need, and if you don’t have the resources and money, you don’t continue with it. Our country needs goals set and plans made.

How sweet would it be to get on the internet and see on a graph that the 159 billion dollars we need to save to set up our country for the next 10 years as gone up 3% since you last looked? How cool would it be to see on www.yourcountrystats.govt.nz (not a real link, but it SHOULD be) that our country is at 78% of its goal population and immigration is slowing down? For me, that would at least give me feedback that my tax is going somewhere. At the moment all I get is a news show telling me all my money has been given to some lazy Iwi who spent it on drugs and women, and cleaning up a bunch of bodies some Asian hit when he was driving too fast with a fake license.

If I start a political party, I expect you to vote for me.

The epidemic

An epidemic that seems to have crept up on western society in the last 10-15 years is that of obesity, and I say this partly because it looks like I’m well on my way to becoming a chubster myself and partly because there is a huge campaign in NZ to get people out exercising half-an-hour a day. My intention for this post is to outline the ever-increasing likelihood of government organisations and sectors to only focus on the short-term fix instead of working to solve long term problems; the part that maybe fast-food chains and businesses should take in looking after New Zealanders; and maybe if some legislation should be put in place to make the decisions for the common person about eating the food that is making us fat.

As far as government organisations go, there is no incentive for these groups to work together as a team. My overall view of organisations created to help solve some of New Zealand’s problems is that they will fix their problem at any cost because if they don’t they don’t get paid, but obviously this is not the optimal solution. In a way they’re encouraged to put their personal preferences and financial/political wellbeing before the best solution for the common Kiwi.

There is a common thought process that is adopted when solving problems. This process suggests that to solve a large problem (which optimising and running a country would be), one should break the problem up into smaller, more manageable problems and attack them one by one (or in the case of a number of smaller problems, assign a team to each of those problems). This is, of course, a valid and sensible way of attacking the issues that are forever popping up in our society, however, to put this situation into a software-development environment, if you had 10 teams that had different parts of the program to write, but none of them worked together, you’d have 10 different programs that solved one problem each, but none would work together. This as a metaphor for what I was talking about above, suggests that although there are a bunch of teams working to solve issues like obesity in our country, none of those teams are working together, and if they’re not working together they’re most likely working against each other.

As I said at the start of the entry, there is a very large campaign that is pushing to get people out exercising for 30 minutes a day, and the reason for that is not because they want to see more people interacting with each other, or using the playgrounds in our parks more. It’s because we’re all getting too fat and we need to do something about it (either because it costs the health system, or because our life expectancy is falling). But what the “Push Play” team (no doubt run by our wonderful government) is doing is allowing the problem to show itself (i.e. letting a person get obese) and then after the fact trying to do something about it. Now I don’t know about you, but this sounds like someone trying a quick fix instead of working to solve the source of the problem.

As I walked past the Push Play poster stamped on the bus stop, I started thinking about how we could solve the problem instead of just fixing it (“give a man a fish…” and all). You see I’m not getting paid to fix the problem so I don’t mind maybe finding a better long-term solution that may take longer to implement; I don’t miss out on my BMW at the end of the year. Maybe the only way to stop the intake of fatty foods is to legislate it. These days people don’t listen to anything but the law now (and even that is taken for a ride) so television advertisements and pamphlets of fat people on the gurney isn’t going to put people off. The 80% of stupid people out there need to be told what to do, just like if they were children again.

Of course, of those 80% of “children”, a handful will be what they call “Human Rights Activists”, or the “we’ve got nothing better to do than encourage criminals to do what they want without consequence, and cause the law-abiding, hard-working human headaches” team. They’ll cause a problem, no doubt. So let’s look at the rights and wrongs of legislating fatty foods. Try and stick with me here. I guess as far as I’m concerned, if the problem is preventable but costs the taxpayer money, we should try and limit it, and we do that well. For instance, we’re allowed to drink alcohol. That’s preventable and we put pressure on alcohol in the form of tax, and also do our best to prevent serious injury by prohibiting drink driving. The tax more than covers the idiots that can’t control the intake and those who step on rakes or fall into gutters. Smoking is heavily taxed and we don’t let under-18s at them. But what do we do for fat-eaters? There are three things that I can think of:

1) Tax fast-food joints. The good thing about being a government is that you can raise taxes on things and everyone is just too busy to complain about it
2) Limit the amount of fast-food someone should be allowed to have. This (the more I think about it) is the stupidest idea I’ve ever thought of, and I’ll ask you to disregard it
2) Limit the amount of fat that a fast-food joint is allowed to release in a single-meal

I guess it really comes down to the final result. Why does the government want us to lose weight? Does it really hurt anyone? If it’s because they cost too much in health, then raise the taxes and let them do what they want to do. If it’s because we want a healthier average Kiwi then maybe the time and effort spent on trying to get them to eat better and exercise is wasted; let them do what they want, but limit the things they can do. If you’re serious about getting Kiwis to lose weight, then start at the base of the problem: the food, and let the people that don’t exercise go. Let’s be honest though. It’s not just McDonald’s fault that you’ve packed on those extra pounds. All the years of pushing people to get more into their day, working harder, and missing out on “play” time has surely taken it’s toll on people that used to eat well and exercise but can’t. The problem is always harder to solve than it seems.

Isn’t it funny that the people that eat well are the ones that exercise the most? Bah. I’m going to Burger King.