So, maybe you’ve already seen it on Penny Arcade, but Puzzle Quest is a good time. If you’ve got a PSP or a DS, it’s definitely worth picking up. Basically, it’s RPG + Bejeweled, to good effect.

Had a good weekend. Went riding in Joaquin Miller park with Alan Saturday, then walked Mobius with Ei-Nyung there today. It’s beautiful, relaxing, and we happened on some really fun trails while riding.

It’s funny – I haven’t been mountain biking even marginally regularly in like, eight years. I suck, compared to what I used to be able to do, but it’s fine. There’s one trail that if I get to a point where I can ride down that without putting my foot down, I’ll be happy with that as the max to what I’m willing to try. There’s a definite limit to how much risk I’m willing to take, now, and trails I used to ride in high school are way beyond both my capacity and my interest these days.

Still – it was good to find some rides that were challenging, fun, and appropriate. Man, I sound old.

Wii this week! w00t.

Alright, Nintendo. It’s been what, five months since you launched the Wii, and you can’t f’ing get more than ten units to any given store on any given week, which is enough that they sell out in less than half an hour? Pathetic.

Sure, I understand that it doesn’t really serve you to actually make them available to people who want to buy them. After all, there is a bit of a game drought going on right now. Since you’re not going to have any more games available ’till the holidays, why make them available now, when people will only get bored with the relatively few good games that are out for the thing.

I know you can look at Sony, and see the backlash they’re getting because the PS3’s available just about everywhere. But the backlash isn’t because they have stock available. People LIKE to buy things they want. The backlash is coming from the fact that Sony’s execs have made statements that have made selling out to be a really, really good thing, and they’ve failed to do so. Similarly, you guys said you wanted to have stock to make sure that it gets into people’s hands, and so now, when there are no Wiis to be found, you guys come off as assholes, too.

I mean, you’re not even dealing in components that are hard to make. The Wii’s pretty much all off-the-shelf parts. Get your act together, jackasses.

Ei-Nyung got me a copy of “Decoding Ferran Adria, Hosted by Anthony Bourdain” for my birthday. I’d heard about it, and people had a lot of good things to say. Count me among them. While it’s only about an hour and some long, it’s *absolutely* worth getting if you like food enough to know who Ferran Adria actually is. It’s just great. Really interesting to watch, entertaining, and in some cases, utterly mindboggling. If you’re even remotely thinking about it, buy it.

So, a good weekend. Not a lot happened, or at least not a lot *felt* like happened, even though I suppose a reasonable amount did. Played some God of War 2 Saturday morning, went swimming with Sean, to lunch with S&H, to a Barack Obama speech/rally with H&M, to Great China with same, then hung out ’till late, watched part of Casino Royale on the laptop, sleep. Woke up this morning, did some random stuff I can’t remember, cleaned up a bit, took Mobius on a long walk, detoured on the walk to find the mom of an old high school friend, and find out what that friend’s been up to, even though I haven’t talked to her in about a decade or so. Then, Olive, the next-door neighbor dog came over to play with Mobius, then off to a BBQ @ A&B’s place (delicious), hung out ’till just before now, and now writing up a blog entry.

As to the obvious question, “How’s the new job?” It’s good. Well, it’s work, and frankly, I like “no work” better than “work,” but as work goes, it’s okay. Got its own set of challenges, which I’m taking as an opportunity to try to be productive and helpful, while not crossing into the line of overbearing. So, walking that sort of line can be a bit stressful, and more than anything, I find that at the end of the day I’m more tired than I might have expected. I think that’s natural, though – I wasn’t really working hard for the last year or so, and I’m sort of full-on at this job, trying to get acquainted, oriented, and have an impact where I should.

Trying also get get “back on the horse” re: the diet, but failing sort of miserably. Lots of food-related “events” that I don’t want to pass up. Sociability at work is often tied to lunch, and dinner for the last two days have been things I didn’t want to miss. But I’ve definitely been eating more than I *should* over the last two weeks, and my weight’s popped up a pound and a half. So, it’s just a matter of re-making the conscious effort to change that a priority.

I think finding a good reward for hitting 200 would be the way to go, but since I’m no longer competing for anything (WHERE’S THE WII!??!?!), it’s harder to get motivated. So, finding something that’s a good external motivator for me will be important. I’ve found that as much as I’d love to be internally motivated for this sort of thing, it’s not successful for me. Having some external motivation – ideally competition – makes a huge difference.

I’m thinking that it’ll either be the Canon 10-22mm EF-S lens, or the 17-85mm EF-S (probably the latter, just because it’s likely to be more generally useful to me). After that, when it gets to the point of maintenance, then it’ll be like, longer-term rewards – like, if I stay on average under 200 for the whole of ’08, then that’ll be a reward, but not anything on a month-by-month basis. It’s just that dieting – the *change* where you’re hungry a good portion of the time and have to make an active effort to refuse available food – is hard. It takes willpower, and motivation helps that willpower a LOT.

I’m also going to start doing some non-swimming training. I’m hoping to do a short workout of pushups/pullups/squats and the like either in the morning or the evening. Not weights, or that sort of thing, but just some resistance-using-what’s-available sorts of things. I was never able to do a pullup in middle school. Not one. But at some point in high school, I went from 0 to 13. Now I’m back to 0 again, and despite my f’ed up wrist making pullups somewhat harder than they might otherwise be, I’d like to have some sort of upper-body strength.

The other thing is that there’s a gym right near my new workplace, and if I can find time to get there (and if they have a pool) I might be able to forego the membership at the local Y, and use that one during my lunch hour. We’ll see how it works. Balancing a desire to spend some time with my coworkers and get to know them and my personal health and well-being will get easier after the first few weeks. So, hopefully… no – not hopefully – I’ll have to just make the commitment now.

<200lbs by August 1.

So, one of the things I’ve learned over the course of several years of videogame design experience is this:

When you see a problem, fix it, or attempt to fix it, as soon as you notice it. The longer you wait, the worse it will get, and as much as you hope and wish it will, it will come back, and no one else will have fixed it for you.

It’s a fine line, though. Sometimes, people simply don’t want to address problems, and it’s detrimental to push someone too hard to try to address something you think is a problem, if they’re unwilling to deal with it.

The problem is, if you know what you’re doing, eventually, they’ll come around. They’ll see it’s a problem too, and at that point, you’ll have less time to make things right.

For me, it’s a matter of presenting the best case I can for why I think something should be fixed, and fixed in my particular way, then letting the authority decide. But I am good at my job. And in the past, even if the authority’s disagreed, when I let something slide, it always comes back. With a bullet.

So, it’s a quandary. But, at the same time, I don’t have a 100% success rate on my judgement calls, so sometimes, it’s better to defer to someone else’s judgement. Maybe they’ve got more experience, or a wider view of the issue. Maybe they don’t want to change it, and it’s their right *as* the authority to decide not to do so. I don’t know. It’s a tricky situation, and something I’ve dealt with at every job I’ve had in every field I’ve ever worked in.

But regardless – you see a problem? Deal with it. Do it now. Don’t wait.

So, there was a post on a game site, where people were complaining about a game (Too Human) that’s running late. A 2008 release date doesn’t seem out of the question at this point. Fanboys are up in arms, and the project lead came to the board, whined about how people are jerks, and all hell broke loose.

Now, whose side am I on? On one hand, I feel bad for Silicon Knights. Having a late game, honestly, seriously hurts a developer – much more so than it hurts the consumer. A late game costs a developer a tremendous amount of money. They’ve obviously gone over their originally projected budget, for one. For two, it damages their relationship with their publisher. Any advertisement money that was slated for a launch window is gone – not that it’s likely that at this stage they had any. But it also really, really hurts developer morale. When your game’s late, the end that you thought was coming isn’t, anymore. There was something so wrong with the game, and with the schedule, that things didn’t work out as planned, and as a result, they’ve taken on a huge amount of work to make things *right*.

So, morale sucks at that point. You’re losing money hand over fist. Your publisher’s pissed at you. Fans are pissed at you, because this thing that you’ve shown them has piqued their interest, and now you’re taking it away from them, never mind that you never promised them an actual release date. These things suck for the developer.

For the fan, they were shown something, and built up some expectation based on what they were shown. Maybe it influenced their decision to pick up a particular piece of hardware at a particular time. But for the most part, that’s it. That’s all the negative impact a late game has on the player. They’ll play something else in the meantime. Unless you were stupid enough to preorder something with no release date, you lost only the *potential* for something that might have been. You might as well get angry and pissed off every time you don’t win the lottery.

That said, one of the major problems is that when a company starts pitching their game to the public too far in advance, *they* create certain expectations in their audience. Every time Denis Dyack goes out, and gives a preview of the game, he’s essentially setting up an implicit agreement with the game-playing audience. Here’s this awesome thing, and here’s when you can get it. I’m building up enthusiasm in you – showing you this information now, so that when it’s released, you’ll be pumped up to play it. YOU will in turn generate hype, and help us get momentum behind this game.

The developer can say, well, that’s not REALLY what’s happening – we never really promised anything – but that’s bullshit. This is how the game industry works. If you play the game well, and make things clear, this can work in your favor. Build up the hype and fail to deliver, and you have created your own problems.

That’s not to say it’s Silicon Knights’ fault – maybe it’s their publisher. MS needed to show some first-party exclusive stuff, and SK was probably contractually required to deliver. So, they didn’t actually choose to make their problems – their problems come from a mix of what the publisher needs, and what the developer needs, and somewhere, communication broke down.

Game development isn’t entirely predictable, but it’s also not completely voodoo. A good developer has to continually assess where they are, in terms of their progress against their plan. No developer should “suddenly” be late – anyone who’s doing their job knows they’re running late within a week of starting to run over the schedule. That’s not to say it doesn’t happen. Some places are really that disorganized, or their communication has broken down that severely.

But so as a publisher, MS then has a responsibility to ensure their investment. You could say it’s MS’s fault that they released information too early. Whatever. The point, though, is that basically this is a problem in which all three major parties are at fault, but in the end, the only one who *really* gets screwed is the developer.

Five years after a game’s released, people will remember if it’s great, regardless of when it came out. If it’s not great, no one will remember it, period, regardless of how late it was.

So, staring a new job in two days. It’s a very strange feeling that I’m sure we’ve all felt at one point or another – some more recently than others. I wonder how bad the commute’s going to be. I wonder if I’ll like my coworkers. I wonder if I’ll like the game I’ll be working on. Will they like me? Are they smart? What batch of problems will this company have? What won’t they have? What can I learn from them? What can they learn from me?

Lots of questions. No answers.

Sometimes, I don’t wonder why I work. I know why. I love the process of making games. I love the creativity, the collaborative environment, and the joy that comes from making something new. I love working on passionate teams, with smart, innovative, interesting people. I love dealing with the strange little details no one notices, or trying to figure out how to crack a particular nut, whether it’s a person, or a game mechanic.

Other times, I wonder. I love hanging out in the sun – I don’t get to do that that much when I’m at work. I love doing things – making stuff, changing things, practicing, creating – on my own time, on my own terms. Doesn’t pay very well, but it’s fulfilling, and if I’m not satisfied, I’ve got no one else to blame but me. But I suppose I’ve got bills to pay, so I go.

This time, I hope the things I learn will be fun, not painful. I’m looking forward to it.

So, this morning, I was sort of at a loss for what to do. Midday, I decided to rearrange the bedroom, to be more like the guest room, with the head of the bed at the window. So, I did that, and it took about an hour. The end result is alright, but the problem was that now there’s a giant, blank white wall.

I thought, you know, I should paint that wall some sort of color. Red, maybe? No, too dark. What goes with blue and green (the color of our comforter)?

Well, after a couple minutes of thinking about it, I decided to do just about the most ridiculous thing possible:

It’s a yellow (at the top) to orange (at the bottom) fade. In person, the fade’s a little more obvious. I think it turned out pretty well. The only downside is that the tape I used to mask the edges tore off the old white paint on the walls. Not good. So, I’ll have to find some of the other paint that I used, though I have no idea what color it actually is. This means I’m probably going to have to paint both the wall with the window, and the ceiling. Yeesh.

That’ll teach me to try something wacky.

So, went and saw 300 tonight. It’s a movie that I’ve been looking forward to and dreading simultaneously. The original trailer had me absolutely psyched to see the movie, but some details really rubbed me the wrong way. It seemed to overly music-video-like, and Leonidas shouted way more than I’d expected him to.

So, my hopes were high, but my expectations were low.

All in all, I liked it. I understand why they made a lot of the additions they did, though one of the movie’s problems was that it expected those bits – speeches, mostly, to be as powerful and intense as the original material – and they weren’t. I think one of the issues to me is that 300, as a graphic novel, is almost perfect – it’s probably my favorite comic book story ever, and I’m not sure how one would add to it in a way that I’d hold up to the standard of the original.

That said, a lot of the additions were there to make things clearer, or give depth where needed. In a comic book, a single sentence can be quite powerful, because a reader can linger on it for as long as they care to. There is, for instance, one whole subplot in the movie that is an expansion of something that’s only given a single panel, and one or maybe two sentences of text.

Gerard Butler, who played Leonidas, really impressed me. Obviously, he’s a lot louder than I’d imagined, but in the context of battle, it makes sense, and even where I thought it made sense for him to be quiet, he gave his lines a thoughtfulness and depth that I was really glad to see.

Easily, easily my favorite part was the first battle, in the phalanx. I won’t spoil it, but definitely had the proper intensity.

Good stuff.

Both a game title, and my current state of mind. I’m three races from completing Burnout Revenge with all gold medals, and it’s driving me absolutely batshit crazy. The requirements are insanely difficult, and as good as the control is in Burnout, these last few challenges are tuned in such a way that the difficulty actually outstrips the precision of the game’s control. That is, there’s *no way* that I would regularly be able to complete this challenge at the gold level repeatedly. No f’ing way. Too much is left to chance, and it’s extraordinarily frustrating.

I’ve gotten to the point where instead of cursing at the screen, I’m saying things like:

“My, my! That’s delightful!”

“Wow! That’s the *perfect* place for me to crash!”

“Isn’t it AWESOME that a random glitch in the game would make me fall through the level geometry on my best run ever? ISN’T IT WONDERFUL!??!?!”

I really had a mind to take the disc out of the tray and break it in two. The problem is that so close to the end, I really want to finish it. I want the pain to be *OVER*. I don’t want to walk away from it, I want to DESTROY it.

The other part of me wants to break the disc in two, book a flight to London, and stab the person who tuned these levels to death with the shards of the disc.