I’ve got the rest of this week, and all of next week off. Today was my first day of “freedom,” and boy was it nice. Had some stuff to take care of, but for the most part, I think I had a pretty relaxing and productive day. Took Mobius to the beach, went to the ‘rents place to water the plants, cleared out my mail inbox (literally more than a year worth of accumulated crap that I wasn’t interested in opening), started tilling the front yard, and pulling all the rocks out (got about 1/4 the way done), played some games (Tiger 06 and Marvel Nemesis – Tiger’s fun but sort of nondescript, and Marvel Nemesis is *terrible*), and watched some Lost Season 1 on DVD. Tomorrow’s likely more or less the same, but with cooking. Gonna try to make Alton Brown’s shallow-fried chicken, and potentially invite some friends over for dinner. I have this weird notion that I want to make fried chicken, with cornmeal waffles. I don’t know whether I will or not, but it seems like an interesting idea.

Man – it’s been a while since I’ve really labored with my hands, and though the electric tiller’s a hell of a lot easier to use than the manual tiller, which blistered my palms last week, my hands are sort of perpetually on the verge of cramping this evening, just ’cause they’re worn out from the work today. It’s satisfying – I basically sorted the rocks that I’d pulled out of the front – the *rocks* were separated from the broken bits of concrete. I took the rocks, then lined the one section of front lawn that’s more or less actually “done,” and removed the concrete bits that we *had* used to line them. Looks a lot better, IMO, but took a pretty damn long while. Whoo.

Tomorrow I have to run by the bank to make a deposit (a few more people have sent checks for Hurricane relief donations, and I’ve gotta get them submitted), run by the ‘rents again, get ingredients for the evening, and see what EB will give me for a tradein for Marvel Nemesis. Probably won’t trade it in there, as it’s better to trade at a place like cheapassgamer.com, but you never know. Been looking forward to a game called Indigo Prophecy for a while now, but it keeps getting shipped later and later. Bleah.

Well, yeah. That’s pretty much that. About as unexciting a vacation day as you can get, but sure beats working. 😀

So, for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. You know this to be true, because you experience it in every movement that you make. You move, some force responds. This has been ingrained in your understanding of the world around you well before you were aware of the concept.

The issue I have with the Revolution’s controller is that it abstracts this concept in a way that is actually quite difficult to understand. Because Nintendo’s attempting to target “non-gamers,” I think this will present them a substantially larger problem than they think.

If you’re swinging a virtual bat, in a baseball game using this positional sensor, you might believe you could have a reasonable baseball-playing virtual experience. However, there is no ball. You will never feel the impact of the swing. The bat has no weight, no inertia. You can’t see it, the way you can see a normal bat.

Now, seeing your player on screen respond to that input may still be entertaining – but it’s abstract. It requires you to learn the correlation between your actions – swinging this controller – and your on screen avatar’s response. It’s not 1:1, it’s 1:! – sort of the same, but also sort of different, and if you didn’t know that ! was on the 1 key, it’s quite hard to understand. I expect that to the casual players that Nintendo’s trying to appeal to, that level of abstraction is actually not terribly different than hitting an A button to swing the bat. In fact, it may be more difficult, because it may attempt to “be more realistic” to appeal to people who know what swinging a bat is *actually* like. How can you judge the position of the bat in space, when it doesn’t actually exist?

Again, *I* can say that I can make the correlation between my onscreen avatar’s bat position and where my hands are positioned, but I don’t think that “casual” gamers will, to be perfectly honest. And I think that that’s a *critical* failing on Nintendo’s part. On the DS, I can poke my Nintendog, and understand that poking it interacts with it, because the feedback is immedately at the end of the stylus I’m using to poke with. On the Revolution, I’m interacting with nothing, essentially – I’m poking … nothing. And my feedback’s on a screen some feet away. Though you can *learn* to understand how one responds to the other, I don’t believe it’s as accessible as Nintendo, and most gamers, may think.

For more than a year, now, Nintendo’s discussed the “Revolution.” Not much had been seen, or shown, but even after E3, the hype was all about a revolutionary new controller that would change the way that we interact with games.

http://media.cube.ign.com/articles/651/651275/img_3073869.html

There it is.

The thing you don’t see is a 3-D response to motion in space, along with rotation. So, you could supposedly move this iPod Shuffle around in space, and the game could read where the thing is, and what orientation it’s in, and use that as some form of input. You can also apparently plug peripherals into it, like an analog stick & two triggers, and do something or another with that sort of thing.

Now, I think it’s sort of a noble concept. But I think it’s a noble concept in the way that I think that say, the 32X was a noble concept.

1.) The thing looks like a complete ergonomic disaster. The DS was bad, but this thing’s even worse. Nintendo expects me to hold that for hours on end? Really? I only have access to two buttons at a time? Or a D-pad and one button? Weren’t they supposed to have a library of NES games? How do they expect me to play them? I suppose they’ll release an old-skool NES controller add-on? (actually, from what I’ve read, this is the one cool thing I’ve heard – if you turn the controller sideways, it’s basically an NES layout. D-pad, and a and b buttons. How the concavity behind the D-pad is when you’re holding it, I have no idea, but the concept is cool, at least.)

2.) Hold your arm out. Leave it there for five minutes. Hell, move it around if you want. Now, imagine you’re say, in the middle of a boss fight, and you’ve been holding your arm out there for five or so minutes, and man, your arm’s getting tired… yeah. Not so great now, is it?

3.) All our conference rooms at work have gyroscopic mice. They are limited to moving a cursor on a 2-D plane, and they’re not terribly accurate. They shake a lot, because your hand shakes a lot (so, maybe they *are* terribly accurate, but terribly accurate isn’t really what I want). If Nintendo wants me to move this thing through 3-D space, including rotation, in some sort of precise manner… well, they’d better have substantially better tech than the gyro mice, or it’s going to be extremely frustrating to play.

4.) Nintendo’s never been able to fully stock a product lineup. That is, first party titles simply aren’t enough to keep a console stocked with titles for a full year. Because this thing is completely unique, there’s simply no reasonable way to port to it. As a result, I would suspect that relatively few companies are going to make the investment in titles exclusive to the Revolution. On top of that, even if it’s the least “powerful” from a hardware perspective, you’re going to be competing with MS and Sony in a relatively niche way, so your installed base will be relatively low, and even with today’s tech, development costs aren’t anywhere near “cheap.” So it doesn’t make economic sense for developers, unless you can be sure you’ll be releasing in a void between first party titles, in which case, people will probably buy your game regardless of quality, simply because they need something to play.

*shrugs*

I hope I’m the naysayer who’s proven wrong a year after this thing’s released. Maybe Nintendo will pull some software innovation out the same place they pulled Nintendogs. But Nintendogs isn’t enough to really justify a system (without Meteos and Advance Wars), and frankly, I understand what you can do with a touch screen. Realistically, I simply don’t really know what I could do with this controller that would be *fun,* and not just novel.

Hm.

So, Steam’s finally back up, and as a result, HL2:GOTY is finally accessible. That’s good. I e-mailed the various sites I’d e-mailed before when it wasn’t working, and mentioned the problem had been rectified. Ended up on Kotaku, as A_B pointed out in the comments below. Though I figured it would be fixed, the fundamental problem is that most companies won’t do crap without a damn good reason to do so, and bad publicity is something that’ll make a company get their butt in gear. Not that that had anything to do with this situation, but the issue was that I wasn’t about to sit there and wait without *any* sort of response from Valve for *days*. That’s just really poor customer service, and it’s STILL a poor response, even though as compensation, they’ve given the people that got stuck with un-working Steam over the weekend a free copy of Counter Strike: Condition Zero and the original CS via Steam.

The good part, which I feel unabashedly great about saying, is that HL2 is stunning. I know I’m about a year late to the party, but so what – it’s *still* excellent, and *still* one of the best looking games in existance. The facial animation is still a little “uncanny valley,” but still better than any other game so far. City 17 *feels* like a real place, and the action that they guide you through is so well orchestrated it never really feels as linear as it really is. It’s great stuff, extraordinarily designed, and the only game *since* Half Life to really tell the story the way that Valve does it, with atmosphere, and without ever taking you out of character. Excellent, excellent stuff.

So, given that the GOTY *works* now, I can recommend the content without reservation. Since I’m still a little leery of Steam, though, I’d have to say that fundamentally, I think I’d recommend the xbox version over the PC version, as you don’t have to deal with patches, audio stuttering, and various incompatibilities, as well as the Steam issue. Maybe it’ll have other weird glitches, but who knows – given how well it runs on my old, crappy PC (even though it looks a WHOLE LOT BETTER on my work machine, which is a beast), it’ll probably run great on the xbox.

I feel bad saying that. I really do. But it’s garbage. Literally. I would literally get as much enjoyment, if not more, from the contents of the trash can sitting next to me, than I would from Half Life 2: Game of the Year Edition.

The dead leaves in my trash can didn’t take an hour and a half to install. They don’t take up 4.5 gigs of HD space. They don’t play Half Life 2, but frankly, neither does Half Life 2. After installation, I was told that I couldn’t play the game until Steam registered me. Well, it’s been *more than a day* and it still hasn’t registered me. Not only that, I can’t log on to Steam *at all*. Period.

I looked on the boards, I submitted a technical support request, and here I am, completely worthless game sitting next to me.

Since when do I pay for a product I can’t use? Since when does a game company have the *right* to sell me a completely, utterly, totally worthless pile of garbage? This should be *criminal*. Genuinely. There are undoubtedly hundreds, if not thousands of people with this problem, and the only reason it hasn’t blown completely out of control is that it takes *forever* to get your account activated on Valve’s tech support forums.

Brilliant move, assholes. Seriously. I’m sure I’ll love the game, once it works, but as a company, I completely fucking hate you. Nice work. Half Life was one of my favorite games of all time. It heralded a completely new means of approaching narrative structures in interactive media. It was absolutely brilliant. But I’ll be *damned* if I’ll be suckered like this again.

PC gaming, as a whole – this goes for you, too. You suck. Ridiculous system requirements, absurd failures of compatibility, and crap like this… screw that. Give me console simplicity any day of the week. This is complete nonsense, a total waste of money, and a total waste of time.

I want Valve to pay *me* for the time I’ve wasted trying to figure out this problem. I want them to pay *me* for the Saturday (the first one I’ve had off in more than a month, part of which I wasted on this nonsense) that I’ve spent dealing with this crap. I paid them, now they fucking *owe* me. No way to run a business… jerks.

…so close.

I had almost all of yesterday off. Then, at 11pm, I get an e-mail about a bug that apparently, no one else is willing to touch, because it’s part of the stove code, and since I was pretty much the only person to deal with that, I’m the only person willing to change it. Not that I don’t understand the reason why the other OE’s would be unwilling to mess with it, but basically, it meant that around midnight last night, I knocked down days 35 and 36 in one go.

Fortunately, the bug that I’d been called in about – one of the other guys who was there happened to figure out a 100% reproduceable case for it, and of all things, it turns out to have been crap legacy stuff I hadn’t rewritten from scratch this year – one of the only places I trusted the older code to work properly. So of course I got fucked.

But then another bug came in at 1 fucking 30 in the morning, just as I was about to leave, that was convoluted enough that I had to stay, as again, no one else was likely going to be willing to touch the code. So, I fixed the problem, then helped a coworker look at another problem, and finally left at about 3:45.

Whee.

Here’s the problem. QA ramped up weeks late on our project. At some point, management knew that we’d been short-shrifted on QA, and only now was it finally starting to actually behave like a proper process. At that point, they should have known that we would be late. After two weeks of completely crap QA, the amount of work we had left clearly hadn’t decreased by two weeks, and the critical holes in test (like the *complete* lack of a test plan for the food system) should have made it clear that we were *way* behind, and not at all due to the development team.

Yet, the decision – the conscious decision – was made by someone at that point to compress the necessary 5 or so weeks of bugfixing down to the two or three we had left. Fully knowing that the crunch that would ensue would be *insane*. And surely enough, it has been. I don’t mind the crunch, much, when I feel like I’m in it for some good reason. But this is basically EA sacrificing the developers because their QA system fucked up, and they still don’t want to miss their ship date.

So, all the hullaballoo about how after easpouse, they’d get better, or change their ways, is all bullshit, when it comes down to it. Even when they *know* they’re going to be intentionally screwing over a bunch of people, pushing them to burn out, they’re simply going to do it because the bottom line matters more than their talent.

Well, that’s fine, if people want to live like fucking dogs, but it’s not for me. I’m putting together a resume, and will be looking elsewhere. Maybe I won’t have the job security, maybe the stress, and the crunch, will be even worse – if that’s the case, I’ll simply look elsewhere. But really, it’s quite amazing how all the goodwill I can have towards a company can be blown away in just a few short weeks, when you know that you’ve been intentionally screwed. Fun stuff.

I hit my limit today.

We’re supposed to have gone beta 9 days ago. Sure, we’re late, but it’s because our team got completely and totally *fucked* by QA ramping up on our project *weeks* late. We’ve had an INSANE crunch for the last month, and I’m fucking sick of it. It’s supposed to be over, but god fucking dammit, we’re in all labor day weekend. I’m “on call” all weekend, but what that’s meant *EVERY OTHER WEEKEND ALL LAST MONTH* is that I’m in the fucking office.

I wasn’t so pissed about it, but the problem here is that other people have taken days off on the weekend, but because the section of code I wrote had no producer, and I was essentially the only person who dealt with that whole system, and it’s fucking huge, and QA really completely botched testing it, I’m basically here. All the fucking time. Other people have days off, other people have had vacation at critical times, but for a god damned MONTH I haven’t been home for a single day, and I’m really fucking pissed about it right now.

… that seems to be more or less my job description the last few days. Very small amounts of critical action, but otherwise, simply waiting for the time when that action is needed.

I need to figure out something to do, or I’m going to start to get very, very bored.

EA is doing 2:1 matching on all employee donations to relief efforts along the gulf coast. I can’t even begin to comprehend what it must be like, there, even after reading all sorts of horror stories. I’ve donated for most of the major disasters in the last few years, but this… as horrible as 9/11 was, and as shocking as it was because it was consciously inflicted, this disaster is orders of magnitude worse for the country, and its repercussions will be felt for years, if not decades, to come.

I wish I could say that I had confidence that our government were up to the task, but they’re clearly not. FEMA is completely directionless, and the Bush administration has once again completely fallen on its face. I hope Red Cross and other humanitarian groups, as well as volunteers can pick up the slack, and that there’s a full accounting of all the things that went completely wrong.

Not much I can say, other than I hope any money that I donate helps, thanks to EA for generously amplifying our contributions, and my thoughts and hopes are with the victims of this disaster.

So, I was reading some articles today about how funding was cut for the levees in New Orleans due to the massive expense of the war in Iraq, and it got me thinking about 9/11, and how essentially, there is a massive fault in our collective feedback loop.

For *this* President to care about something, it has to affect him personally, either by hurting his allies, or hurting him politically. The problem is that in essence, the President *gains* from massive tragedy – after 9/11, his poll results went through the roof. He’ll undoubtedly be able to leverage this tragedy for political gain as well.

The problem is that essentially, the general public doesn’t care that preventative measures weren’t take, because as a whole, individuals find it hard to believe that these were known potential threats. Since *I* couldn’t have predicted 9/11, it took some time to internalize that our *government* as an organization *did*. Similarly, though the President has said that he didn’t think anyone could have anticipated the levees not holding up, many people did.

The issue, though, is that people seem content to hold the President and his administration to the same standards as some random idiot off the street.

This creates a problematic feedback loop, because essentially, the President is *praised* for massive governmental failures by increased polling numbers, while incurring *no punishment* for massive failures that *led* to the occurrence in question. Not only that, but had he *not* cut the budget for the levees, he’d have incurred *penalties* for overspending (well, even more overspending). In essence, had he taken action to prevent tragedy, he’d have lost in two ways. By taking no action, he wins. This, of course, discounts the tremendous human suffering involved, but I expect that in Bush’s calculations, that doesn’t factor in at all.

I’m not saying that this is a conscious conspiracy – I’m saying that we’re missing a feedback loop to govern this particular behaviour. It’s like training a dog. You praise it when it’s good, you punish it when it’s bad, and it learns to be good through positive feedback.

We’re giving the President positive feedback every time tragedy occurs. There’s simply no incentive for him to do anything to prevent it.