malvasia bianca

I’m not the only person in the house who likes Love Hina: Liesl liked them, too, and Miranda is halfway through the series now and is finding them highly entertaining. Glad it’s not just me…

I’ve been tinkering with my GTD system in the two weeks since I first posted about it; I’m quite pleased with the system, and wanted to talk a bit about how it’s going and the changes.

First: I really am getting things done. Simple things that should get taken care of immediately are, in fact, getting taken care of immediately: before, I would have forgotten them or put them off for no particular reason, now I’m doing them and finding that it doesn’t take any more time in my day. And I’m also getting some important, larger things done that I’d been putting off for months: in particular, we’ve finally gotten our dryer vent fixed, but the piano is also getting tuned this week and I’ve gotten all my 2007 dependent care reimbursements in.

The dryer vent is a real success: I’ve known for a while that it was important, I’d even thought about what I’d do about it (in particular, decided that I didn’t feel like fixing it myself), but I hadn’t actually done anything concrete. Following what I remember as good GTD style (I still haven’t reread the book), I wrote down my next action (google for handymen near Mountain View), which I got around to doing a few days later. And then I wrote down my next action (call the handyman I’d decided on), which I got around to doing a few days after that. And once that had happened, we set up an appointment, he came and looked at things, and he came back and fixed it the next day.

All I needed was to find half an hour to do some googling and make some phone calls. Once I’d reduced the problem to that and written down the action items in a place where I am reminded of them multiple times a day (and, in particular, am reminded of them at times when I have a few spare minutes), it got taken care of in a couple of weeks.

The nice thing about that, too, is that it didn’t depend on guilting myself into being more active than I can sustainably be: guilt was involved, but it was a small amount of actionable guilt, and guilt that I could ignore for a few days if I really was too busy to act on it.

In another pleasant surprise, my Todo list isn’t spiraling out of control. In fact, right now there are a grant total of four items on it. And that’s not a sign that I cleared it out before writing this blog post: the same four items were on it yesterday evening, and I made the decision that catching up on my blogging was more important than acting on any of them. (But, assuming it doesn’t take to long to finish this blog post, I’ll work on two of them once I’m done writing this.) Four is shorter than the norm over the last three weeks, but the list has never been too bad, and when it’s been longer, it’s been full of trivial stuff that gets cleared off almost immediately. (“When I get to work, write down X in my calendar and send an e-mail to Liesl about Y.”) (In fact, I just added a fifth item in that trivial vein, to write down something on the calendar when I get downstairs!)

I have made two changes to the cards that I’m carrying around in my pocket. The first is that I’ve moved the Projects list out of there and onto my computer. (Actually, I have one list at home and one at work.) Projects are longer-term, so the lack of backups if I stored them in my pocket bothered me. I frequently want to add notes to a project, and there’s no easy way to do that on a physical medium without dedicating a card to each project, which I didn’t want to do. Also, I’m not actively working on more than a few projects at any given time, so there’s no need to have reminders for all of them in my pocket: I have the next action items for the (few) active projects in my Todo list, but everything else can be stored in a location that I don’t have immediate access to. (If I think of something project-related while I’m out and about, I just add a Todo item with the thought, telling me to transcribe it onto the Project list.)

The second is that I’ve switched from a case of 3×5 cards to a Levenger Circa notebook. (Their “Hipster PDA” model; I also bought some tab dividers.) Which I’m very happy with so far: it’s noticeably less bulky than the case I had been using, to the extent that I barely feel it in my pocket most of the time. And the design is great: the cards are just the right thickness, I love the clean look of the pages with lines of just the right strength and spacing, and the Circa rings let the cards rotate very easily. I’m still a bit worried that it might not be quite sturdy enough, but it’s held up well in my pocket for the last week, so I’m optimistic.

My Projects file grew a lot a couple of weeks ago, as I kept on thinking of things that I’d been meaning to do at some point; I’ve dutifully been adding them to that file together with notes on them. (Typically including a next action, though I haven’t been dogmatic about that for projects that I know that I’m not going to get around to in the next couple of months.) It’s still entirely possible that it will turn into yet another list of tasks that grows in an unbounded fashion, but the rate at which I’m adding new items has slowed down noticeably over the last week, and I’ve also completed a few projects and carried out one or more steps on a few others. So, even if I’m adding to the list faster than I’m removing items from the list, I am at least removing items from the list faster than I’d been doing in the days when the list was purely in my brain.

I’ve refined the Tickler list a bit. I don’t think I need a daily tickler list: my schedule just isn’t that busy, and my Todo list and my work calendar handle that granularity fine. So I have a weekly tickler list for the next couple of months, and monthly tickler slots after that. (And yearly tickler slots after that: Miranda has to renew her passport in 2010, I have to renew mine in 2012, Liesl in 2015.) I noticed one mistake in the way I’d been using the tickler list: initially, I’d entered the next steps on a few projects on my tickler list, even though the dates I entered the reminders for didn’t correspond to any triggers related to those projects, because I knew I didn’t have enough time to work on those projects now but wanted to work on them soon. But that’s a bad idea: it muddies the purpose of the tickler list, forecasts like that are likely to be inaccurate, and scheduling myself to be guilty about something in the future is pointless. The correct thing to do is to look over my Projects list every weekend, and think a bit about what’s most important right then and about how much time I have available right then. (Taking into account the tickler items from that week, which really are important right then and which will affect my available time!)

I still have the Shopping and Blog items lists in my pocket. The Shopping list isn’t getting much action, but I tentatively think that’s okay; it’s not hurting anything, and I think it still serves a purpose. (At some point I’ll either pass an Indian grocery store and buy some ground coriander or we’ll start running low at home and I’ll promote that item to the Todo list!) The Blog list is more problematic: it is growing, and shares some characteristics with the Projects list. But, for now, I think having it in my pocket is the right decision, for two reasons: for one thing, if I don’t get around to blogging about something for a few weeks or months, my thoughts on it will go stale, so blog topics should have a significantly shorter lifespan than projects. Also, I find myself occasionally wanting to take long notes on thoughts about a potential blog topic when I’m just sitting somewhere, and I’d rather not have to transcribe those notes into another list when I get back to a computer. I’m not completely convinced that that list will stay in my pocket forever—in fact, “Where should blog topics list go?” is one of the bullet points under the “GTD” item in my Projects list—but for now I want to experience the current setup a bit longer, to get more of a feel for its strengths and weaknesses.

I will close with my current list of bullet points on the aforementioned GTD item. And then I’ll post this, and remove one of the bullet points from the list!

GTD:

• Read book!
• Blog about moving projects list, once I’ve got a bit more experience under my belt.
• Make projects/tickler available via a vcs to multiple machines?
• Where should blog topics list go?

I’ve talked enough about Zack and Wiki that I’m not quite sure what to say here. It’s a puzzle-solving point and click adventure game, with excellent use of Wii motion-sensing controls and a great sense of humor. And a great set of puzzles: Liesl and I thoroughly enjoyed working through them; I was continually amazed at the clever new puzzles that they came up with, given the small number of objects that are in play on each individual level. And the game gets plenty difficult, but, between the two of us, we managed to solve all but two of the levels without any hints at all, and the in-game hints sufficed for those two levels.

There are some annoying aspects: in particular, it punishes you too actively for your mistakes. Requiring you to restart a level by default if you die is fine, as long as there’s some sort of out; they do, in fact, give you an out in the form of tickets you can purchase that revive you if you die, but if you use one of them and die further on in the level, it returns you to the start of the level (unless you spend another ticket!) instead of reviving you at the state where you used your last ticket. That was a bad choice, but not a bad enough one to put me off the game too much.

It’s also totally charming. I love the art style, the Rose Rock Pirates are an amusing bunch of enemies, Wiki (with his cute little pseudo-baby-Japanese(?) utterances) is very cute.

And it’s budget-priced, despite which (and despite active lobbying from various sources), very few people bought it; I don’t know if it didn’t get enough publicity or if hard-core gamers were put off by the name and cover art or if, ultimately, it’s just a niche product. (Why aren’t the Phoenix Wright fans all buying it?) But it’s a niche that I’m very happy to have spent time in.

As my coworkers can attest, I am a big fan of Trader Joe’s cocoa-covered almonds. So, on a recent trip to the store, I decided to branch out into their other chocolate/almond combinations, and bought a package of chocolate-almond clusters and a package of almonds covered with chocolate, sugar, and salt.

The former were quite yummy, in a relatively uncomplicated way. The latter, though, were different in a somewhat interesting way, but not really what I wanted to snack on for dessert.

After a few weeks, though, it turns out that I was taking the wrong approach to the latter. You see, we keep the Trader Joe’s plastic containers of chocolate (as opposed to the bars of chocolate) in the shelf on the cabinet where the garlic lives. So whenever we cook a meal involving garlic (in other words, whenever we cook a meal), we temporarily put the chocolate on the counter. (Digression: have I mentioned here my notion that any food goes well with either chocolate or garlic? And a quiz for my readers, what foods go well with both?) At which point we, of course, snack on the chocolate.

Which works well with a wide range of chocolates (including the cocoa-covered almonds that started this all off; a great time for Milk Pail dutch mints, too!), but in particular the chocolate-sugar-salt covered almonds turn out to be just the thing to snack on while, say, preparing some sort of garlic-laden pasta dish. The salt is just the thing to tie the chocolate to the other aromas that are wafting through the kitchen, to balance against the other bits of ingredients that you’re nibbling on while cooking.

I’m still waiting to find the right time for their chocolate-covered crystallized ginger, though. I think it might actually work fine as a dessert for some people, I just don’t like crystallized ginger enough…

(Hmm, have I posted the recipe for ginger chicken from the Elephant Walk? I should do so. But does anybody read those recipe posts? Not that that normally stops me…)

Portal is a first-person puzzle game. The controls are like a first-person shooter, but your gun shoots portals onto flat surfaces (walls, floor, ceiling): you can have one blue portal and one orange portal, and the two teleport you from one to another.

The game starts out with simple puzzles: you need to get to a door on a ledge, so you shoot one portal to the wall next to the ledge and the other portal on the wall (or floor) near you, walk through it, and you’re on the ledge. Later puzzles include more of a physics component: e.g. if you have the blue portal on the floor and the orange portal on the ceiling directly above it, then you can fall through them over and over, building up a fair amount of momentum, and then at some point you can shoot the orange portal onto a side wall, sending you horizontally away from that wall at high speed. (Perhaps over a barrier or something.)

Also, unlike an FPS, there aren’t enemies to shoot. Most levels have no enemies at all; some have guns that you need to either evade or disable. (Either by shooting a portal on the ground beneath them or dropping something through a portal above them.)

It’s a bit hard for me to know what else to say about it: it’s been discussed so much on the interwebs, typically in such gushing terms, that I don’t know whether or where to enter that conversation. So I won’t say much, I guess. It’s a very nice illustration of how to mix genres (which was a bit of a theme last year), how to divorce a control style from the gameplay that it’s traditionally associated with. It’s a fun little puzzle game; I enjoyed the three or so hour I spent going through the levels, but I was glad it was done when it was. (There are some harder versions of a few of the original levels that open up once you’ve finished the game; I did one of them, tried another, and decided that I wasn’t looking for that sort of challenge.) So, on that level, I’m glad I played the game, I’m certainly glad it exists, but I don’t see it as the first of dozens of games with that particular mechanic.

What is completely surprising and wonderful about the game (certainly not something that one would traditionally expect from either the FPS or puzzle genres) is its style and sense of humor. You almost never directly interact with anybody else in the game (though the turrets are careful to assure you that they don’t hate you when you disable them), there’s just this voice that comes through the grill occasionally. (Well, that plus little drawings on the wall, e.g. guides to the level and pictures of cake.) But those snippets of voice give the game as much personality as any other game I’ve played over the last couple of years.

Which is reinforced by the last level, which is almost as long as the 18 levels preceding it put together and is a very well-done capstone. I’ve already posted the end-credits song, but I’ll do so again because I love it so much:

I’m still not ready to join the legion of Portal cultists, and I don’t quite understand the Companion Cube gushing. But the game does manage to cram an amazing amount of style and new directions in its three hours.

According to a helpful informant on rec.games.go, Viz has stopped publishing the Hikaru no Go DVDs in English:

Viz has cancelled the release of the remaining DVDs as single disks due to poor sales. Basically, they’ve discovered how expensive it is to translate and market, and are instead focusing their energies on the shounen market (Naruto, Bleach, Death Note), where they get a greater return for their effort.

There is speculation that Viz will, later this year, release a slim-case box set with ALL the episodes of HnG in it. No official confirmation yet form Viz Media, though. Pisses me off, though, that to get it, I’ll have to re-buy episodes I already bought, just to complete the series.

I am annoyed.

I hooked up a spare USB drive to my Mac a couple of weeks ago and turned on Time Machine. Seems to be very easy to use; certainly the process of making backups is painless, and while I haven’t tried a restore yet, the GUI looks easy to manage. My only complaint so far is that it doesn’t seem focused on people like me who are only plugging in a backup drive at sporadic intervals: it wants to back up every hour, at 48 minutes after the hour, and insists on that schedule even if I just plugged in the backup drive for the first time in a few days. (So if I attach the backup drive at, say, 9:02, then I have to wait 46 minutes for my next backup, even if I haven’t backed up the computer for days.)

If you have a Mac, I highly recommend it: spend 100 bucks (or whatever) on a USB drive, set up your environment so that drive is near a location where you frequently use your laptop, and get in the habit of connecting the two periodically. (If you have a desktop, then just leave it plugged in all the time.)

The server hosting this blog had some troubles recently, caused (probably) by spikes in e-mail and web traffic happening at the same time. It’s under control now, but that got me wondering: it’s unfortunate that we have a single, not particularly scalable box that we’re depending on to carry that load. Wouldn’t it be nice if we could move to a setup where resources could expand (or contract) as necessary? In particular, cloud computing is all the rage these days (my own employer has a grid, or Amazon with its S3 storage and EC2 compute; as will doubtless become clear, I know essentially nothing about any of those!); what are the barriers between us and that world?

What are the basic requirements? At a minimum, we can’t be tied to a single machine (or assume that we are running on a single machine at any given point in time, since we want to be able to scale up), so we need to diverge the notions of compute and storage. My guess is that we’ll want multiple incarnations of at least one of those concepts; let’s run through some examples and see.

One test case: can we come up with a server that feels pretty much like the one we’re running now, with the exceptions that there could potentially be multiple live instances (with some shared storage) and that we shouldn’t count on long uptimes? (Hmm, how long should the uptimes be? It’d be nice if instances disappeared entirely when nobody was logged in: maybe provide a mechanism where an ssh connection triggers an instance of the server appearing.)

I guess the compute here would look like an OS instance running on a ram disk. For persistent storage, you’d want to provide some sort of NFS-like view of a subset of the cloud’s storage pool. I guess it would be okay if that persistent storage was somewhat slow; you could have a fast ram disk for situations where you needed to have temporary local data. (Hmm, what about situations like compiles? That could get a bit sticky.)

Those abstractions would provide the basic generic server infrastructure plus home directories and shared storage areas. One question is: what parts of the generic server infrastructure change on a somewhat frequent basis? At least frequent enough that you don’t want to spin a whole new ram disk image just for those changes: e.g. when I change my password, I’d rather not have to create a new image.

Or rather, I don’t want to have to create a new image if that’s a heavyweight operation, so let’s try to make it lightweight instead. To do that, I think you’d want to separate off configuration information from other sorts of information. So you’d want to have a mechanism where you can create a base image, e.g. by picking a set of packages from your favorite Linux distro. And then basically apply a diff to that by adding/editing configuration files. If there are easy ways to manage that diff and add/remove packages, it should be easy to tailor the image that you’re using.

One question: is this case of mimicking shell access to a single Unix box actually useful? It doesn’t solve big compute problems; and if you have a small compute problem, it’s cheap enough to get compute power that you can run at home. So maybe there’s no real need for traditional shell access in a cloud-based world. I’m not convinced, though: e.g. if you want to run custom software in the cloud, you need to be able to compile it (assuming it’s in a compiled language…), and I don’t want to require my home Linux distro (or, for that matter, my home machine’s architecture) to match whatever’s running on the cloud.

Enough about traditional shell access (which is, after all, the most boring use case); what about other services? Recently, we’ve had mail problems; what does a mail server look like in the cloud?

It mostly has a separate pool of storage: I guess it might be accessible from the shell view (you might want to mount your mail spool in your home directory?), but there’s not a lot of overlap there. There also might be some amount of per-user customization (.procmailrc files or their moral equivalent) that you’d want to view from your home directory; not a lot, though. You’d want the potential to farm out incoming SMTP connections to one or several computer servers, growing on demand. And you’d want to divorce receiving mail from reading mail: the SMTP server and the IMAP server have to access the same pool of storage, but there’s no reason why you’d want them to run in the same compute environment. And then there’s sending mail and managing mailing lists.

Hmm, mail is pretty boring. Honestly, I’m not sure why we run our own mail server any more: it seems like all the customization issues are solved well enough, so what I really want is somebody to accept mail, filter it for spam, and store it until I retrieve it, and lots of people can do that fine for me. The only hard part is spam filtering, and that’s a hard enough problem that doing it as a hobbyist effort is doomed to failure.

So let’s move on to the web server, which is the most interesting problem. Different people want to install different packages on their web server: different programming languages, different publishing platforms, different platforms for viewing data that may not have originated from that web server, and people are writing new code in all these areas all the time. So it’s nothing like the mail server situation from that point of view.

How does the configuration look? And to what extent can/should compute instances be shared? Right now, we have one web server with all sorts of stuff installed on it, and a large amount of configuration inside the Apache configuration dir. Some of that configuration information is global, some of it is on a per-vhost basis; there’s also configuration information in individual users’ directories (in the form of .htaccess files). I tend to think that, in a cloud view, that’s the wrong way to slice-and-dice: on a package level, the fact that I want, say, access to Ruby doesn’t mean that everybody does. So probably each vhost gets its own compute configuration? (Of which there could be one or many or even zero instances running at any given time, depending on the traffic load.)

Besides the configuration information, you obviously need storage, for the files that you’re serving up. Right now, that storage is sitting inside my home directory, and in general it would make sense for the storage that’s used by the web server to also be mounted from the shell account view of the cloud. Though, these days, thinking about editing files in your home directory is perhaps a bit passe. In fact, what I typically do is edit files on my home computer and then push them to the server via rsync. (Well, what I typically do is write blog posts, which are stored in a completely different location, about which more later.)

Maybe we should take that idea and run with it: there’s a repository that the web server dishes up to the outside world, but I want to be able to edit it from a remote computer. Using rsync is okay for that, but we have better tools now for managing remotely modifiable repositories: what we really want is a version control system, so I can see a diff before committing, so I can commit from multiple locations, so I can roll back my mistakes. That seems like a useful abstraction that a cloud-based environment should provide: its storage layer should have version control primitives that can be implemented efficiently and are strong enough to, say, let you write a subversion filesystem that works off of it. (I’m under the impression that Google has a subversion filesystem that works with their own internal storage cloud.) That would also be useful for the configuration part of my earlier view that the compute environment consists of a set of packages plus a diff giving configuration information.

Also, to the extent that we’re serving up flat files, we’d like to have as much of that be handled directly by the cloud’s storage abstraction, instead of having it done by the compute layer that’s running the web server. Ultimately, more and more of the web server will, I think, have it just be acting as a proxy. If it figures out that it wants to serve up a file that’s sitting in the storage cloud at some address, it shouldn’t look up the contents of that file through the NFS view of the storage cloud that I hallucinated above, it should simply forward that web request to a web front end of the storage cloud, and let the bits flow. Ideally, the bits wouldn’t even be flowing through the web server at all, once the web server has identified the correct bits; c.f. Van Jacobson’s Google talk.

Of course, these days a lot of the content on a web server (e.g. this immortal prose) isn’t sitting in some directory hierarchy mirrored by the web server: it’s sitting in a database. So any web server platform needs to provide that; that’s an important enough concept (and one that’s different enough from a traditional filesystem) to deserve its own separate abstraction. Not sure what to say here, other than that it would be nice for query results to be RESTful enough that, whenever possible, we can forward them directly from the database cloud to the user, with the web server cloud doing as little work as possible. (Which requires restructuring your web pages; see Tim Bray’s “The Real AJAX Upside”.)

Hmm, so a web server needs:

• A set of packages that you can select to provide the basic functionality.
• Configuration that’s easy to modify. (Ideally with a VCS view.)
• Storage that’s easy to modify. (Ideally with a VCS view, ideally massaged as little as possible by the web server.)
• A database abstraction. (Ideally with a RESTful view, massaged as little as possible by the web server.)

What am I leaving out? Logging, I guess: you want to be able to figure out who is accessing your data. Which might need a different twist on the storage abstraction: you want fast appends, possibly with indexing to make data analysis easier. Hmm, there’s probably something there that could be shared with the mail server concepts.

Enough about the web server: any other big concepts? We host subversion repositories at red-bean; probably if we can get the above working right, we can get that working right, too. And then there’s big compute projects; I’m sure the cloud has something useful for HPC-style applications, I’m sure the above abstractions aren’t good enough for it, I’m sure my employer has lots of productive ideas in that vein, I just don’t have enough first-hand experience to say anything in particular.

I wonder what any of this has to do with existing cloud abstractions? I’ve read a bit about S3 (it was mentioned as an example in the REST book), but I don’t know squat about EC2, and I don’t even remember the name of Amazon’s database abstraction. I don’t see anything in the picture that I sketched above that should be too difficult to bring to fruition: you can start by providing a traditional view of cloud resources, and then do a few targeted replacements to make it significantly more efficient. (E.g. teaching Apache how to interact directly with the storage server, instead of routing requests through a file system layer.) And then you’ll want to start rethinking your designs, increasing the range of components that can be addressed directly as resources (and hence provided in an optimized way by the cloud core abstractions), stitching them together on the client whenever possible.

Should be fun. I suspect that the next red-bean upgrade will be to another physical machine, but for the one after that, who knows?

A year or two ago, my brother gave me a copy of the Getting Things Done book. I won’t go into the details here (partly because it’s been more than a year since I read the book, so I don’t remember the details!), but it’s basically a system for organizing tasks in such a way that important stuff gets done with as little administrative overhead as possible, while simultaneously freeing your brain from worries that you’ll forget anything.

Which is something that I can use: sometimes I forget tasks, I procrastinate on large/important tasks longer than is desirable (the GTD system has some special techniques to address that one), and my e-mail inboxes are pretty cluttered.

Of course, since this is a potentially large/important task, I immediately set hard to work on procrastinating, not doing anything about it while periodically worrying that I should be something. Which is just the wrong thing to do, from a GTD point of view: instead, I should identify the next concrete step towards implementing the system, write it down somewhere where I won’t forget it, and then take care of it when I have a free moment while I’m in an appropriate place.

I decided that the next important step was finding a place to write down various lists. The main criterion is that it has to always be accessible (part of the system is that you can write down an idea whenever you think of it, and look at your todo list whenever you have a moment). The cool kids all like Moleskine notebooks, and for all I know I might eventually move to one of those, but I didn’t think it was a good idea to start with: I don’t even know what my categories are, and I certainly don’t know at what proportion I’ll move through pages in those categories, so I’d rather start off with something random-access.

My boss carries around a case for holding 3×5 cards; a couple of weeks ago, I took a look at it. It was a bit bulky, but it fit well enough in my pocket. And 3×5 cards are perfectly suited to my random-access desires: give me some white cards to write on and a few colored cards for category dividers, and I’ll be all set. I haven’t yet found a link to that specific case online, but a local Office Depot had one, so I went out and bought one about two weeks ago.

So far, results have been good. I’ve been getting prosaic little things done quickly and reliably: if at home I think of some information at work that I need to e-mail Liesl (e.g. exactly what information I need her to get from the daycare so I can file my last 2007 dependent care receipts), I now get that taken care of the next day. I’ve taken care of some slightly larger projects, and taken a first step (and written down my next step, I just need a bit of free time at work to make a phone call at lunch and a morning when I can work from home, neither of which have been in great supply recently) towards a bigger project. I’m still in the first blush of excitement, and I’m not at all convinced yet that it will continue to have an effect of guilting me into getting stuff taken care of, but it does seem to have real organizational benefits in situations where guilt isn’t necessary. (Which is most of them!)

So far I’m using categories of “task list”, “blog ideas”, “projects”, and “shopping”. (The latter isn’t for stuff I need soon – that goes in the task list – and it’s also not for abstract wish lists, it’s for notes like “if I happen to pass an Indian grocery store, I should buy a bag of ground coriander”.) I expect that I’ll think of one or two more categories eventually, though. The card case I bought works well enough, but it really is a bit thick; I just went and ordered a Circa PDA Notebook from Levenger, and we’ll see how that turns out. It should be thinner and more stylish; I’m worried about how durable it will be, and it may or may not feel less random-access than my current index card solution in ways that matter.

I’m still very much in the playing around stage, of course. I need to reread the book, for one, to see what I’m missing. And, of the things I can think of from the book, I’ve got my task list taken care of, and I’ve stored a simple tickler file on my computer, but I need to rethink my e-mail sorting strategy. That will happen soon enough, though (yay short book queues), and it’s not urgent: if I don’t get around to rereading the book until a month from now, the plus side will be that I’ll have had a month of experience with my new system, which will give me something more concrete to test against when reading it.

Mass Effect is the latest RPG from BioWare, makers of the excellent Jade Empire. Like that one, it’s an action RPG: combat takes place in the middle of the environment you’re running around in, and different characters don’t take turns attacking each other. (Though the details are quite different: in particular, the combat is based around shooting people rather than whacking people.)

It took me a little while to decide what I think about the game. Don’t get me wrong, it was obvious from the start that it’s a quite good game: it’s gorgeous, has the best conversation system I’ve seen, and is well plotted, which adds up to the most theatrical experience (in a good way) that I can think of in a video game. The intro world was pretty good, but there was a fair amount of combat, and I wasn’t sure how much I liked the shooter RPG idea. The main city after that had some interesting environments and fun tasks, but it wasn’t quite as large as I expected. Then I explored a couple of small side-planets (of which there are a dozen or two); pretty neat to have that wealth of side-tasks to complete, but they didn’t add much to the plot and reused environments in a big way. And I started Feros, one of the three main quests which are open to you at the start; about halfway through that quest, I was enjoying myself, but I kind of wished that there was more of a city there to wander around in.

And then things sort of clicked. To explain the “more of a city” comment: in a traditional RPG, your environment is divided into cities, overworld, and dungeons. Cities are great for talking to people and getting quests and doing commerce and such; dungeons are great for focused exploration and combat and key plot moments; overworld are great for, well, nothing, they’re usually just filler. I personally enjoy cities the most, but you need to balance them; in particular, it’s traditional to pair each dungeon with a city.

Feros wasn’t doing that for me. There was this small, weird town there, but it was really basically just one room, surrounded by… surrounded by what? I’m still not sure how to analyze it: there was combat in those areas, but it didn’t feel like a traditional overworld or dungeon. There were plot elements (stemming from quests I’d been given in the town), and I went back to the town afterwards, so it didn’t feel like overworld. There wasn’t one linear goal, so it didn’t feel like a dungeon. Maybe that whole chunk was one big town, just a particularly dangerous one? Once I’d finished that area, there was a bit of overworld, but it was mercifully short, then another tiny town next to something that did feel like a dungeon (because I had one specific goal), but in a somewhat townish setting. Then I went back to the first town, a new area opened up, and I had a small dungeon with a nice plot bit at the end.

Basically, my analytic categories had largely broken down, but it didn’t matter: I was having a lot of fun. Much more combat than I normally like, but I’d started understanding the combat by then (about which more later), and was rather liking it. Conversations, side quests, main quests, plot elements, cityscapes, less urban areas were all woven together, giving me a constant flow of challenges and rewards and story advancement.

About that combat: there are three basic classes, one fighter type and two magic-user types (technician and biotic). (Plus three hybrid classes.) I wasn’t sure what to start with: I’m usually drawn to the more magic-user types but end up taking a straightforward approach, which suggested I should be a fighter or a hybrid. But I really don’t like shooting or feeling like a brute, which argues against the former, and the hybrids couldn’t use enough weapons to really feel worthwhile. Ultimately, I went for technician, because I didn’t want to focus too much on shooting and because that would allow me to open up locked items without depending on having the right fellow party members equipped.

Which turned out to be a great choice for me. Your characters (especially technicians and biotics) have special abilities (offensive and defensive) that you can select from a menu that you can bring up by pressing the right bumper. (Which also pauses the game and lets you change your aim at the same time.) And technicians have some nice attacks that work well against robots and well enough against normal humans/aliens with their shields and weapons; they don’t work well against zombie types, but there weren’t too many of those. (I really wish I’d started using A.I. Hacking against the Geth enemies much earlier than I did: some of my initial attempts failed for whatever reason, so I put it on the shelf, but once I got it leveled up a bit more and started using the technique, I quite enjoyed entering a room, hacking the first Geth I saw, and letting it soften up the room for me.) I still had to do some amount of shooting, but my special attacks were good enough to seriously weaken the enemies, so I didn’t have to be all that good at shooting. (And I got good enough at it by the time I was done with Feros.)

And they got one thing right that is so much more important than the details of combat mechanics that I don’t know why I’m talking about the latter: the battles happen in the regular environment and aren’t turn-based. Right now, I’m playing Eternal Sonata, which is a more traditional RPG (and actually one with a pretty good combat system as traditional RPGs go). And every time I enter a non-boss battle, I just get annoyed: I know I’m going to have to spend a minute or two on a separate screen, waiting for various turns to happen, just going through a battle using the same strategies that I’ve used dozens or hundreds of times before. I know I’m going to win, I know I’m going to end up with good health, I know I’m not going to have any interesting experiences honing my skills, it’s almost a pure waste of time.

Most battles in Mass Effect are also almost as lacking in real thought or drama. But they’re over a lot faster: no waiting for turns, no fancy animations of attacks. I’m spending all of my time focusing on what my main character should be doing right then, I don’t have to wait for anything, and in the mean time other parts of the battle are littering the ground around me. Also, the separate battle arenas of traditional RPGs have a real psychological effect: they force you to treat battles as a phenomenon to be considered in isolation, which raises the question of “are they good or bad in isolation?”, to which the only answer is “bad”. Whereas Mass Effect avoids that question: battles are one way of changing the texture of a larger sweep of action, and their effects on that texture are a generally positive one, as long as they’re not overdone. (Which they’re not here.)

From the end of Feros on, I was just having fun. I stopped doing as many of the side-planet quests, because they didn’t add much; that was fine, I’m happy to have optional tasks available for people who like them. The main quests continued to be very good, in different ways: the dig site was a much more focused dungeon run, Noveria had a reasonably satisfying city at the start of it and another small one in the middle, and the final dungeon run at the end of the game was satisfying without being drawn out in the way that the later parts of Jade Empire were. They continued to avoid stupid traditional RPG gameplay decisions. (Hint to other developers: if you’re going to make me chose a subset of the party to play with, have us all level up as a group, don’t punish me by having people level up individually based on how much combat they’ve seen.) The environments are extremely well done, and the theatrical nature of the conversation, plot, cut scenes, etc. was top-notch all the way through. Great alien races, too.

The only down side is that now I’m afraid to play other RPGs. I like the plot-driven nature of the genre, but a lot of the basic gameplay mechanics that the genre traditionally uses that are just plain broken. On the whole, that’s a tradeoff that I’m willing to make some of the time, but why oh why do I have to?

About two and a half months ago, I had 89 saved items in my feed reader. I noted that I wasn’t shrinking that number as quickly as I expected, and predicted that, two months later, I’d have shrunk the list by a further 20 items. It’s a more than two later; how am I doing?

Going over to my starred list and scrolling to the end, it turns out that, in fact, my list has shrunk by a total of -9 items, bringing me to 98 saved items. Which makes my prediction off by 29; oops. What happened?

I’ve changed categories a bit in the interim: whether or not I got around to watching a video had a lot more to do with how long it was than anything else. So I decided to merge my old “read”, “video”, and “long” categories into two categories “short” and “long”, with “short” being items (written or video) that I expect to take 10 minutes or less and “long” being ones that I expect to take longer. With that caveat, and assuming that all the old video items now belong in “long” (mostly or entirely true), the new numbers for each category, with their change from the previous number from that category are:

• blog: 2 items (-2)
• book: 25 (+7)
• commented: 2 (-3)
• flash-game: 8 (0)
• long: 14 (-4)
• music: 7 (-2)
• podcast: 20 (+9)
• recommendation: 11 (+4)
• short: 0 (0)
• think: 9 (-1)

There’s some good news here. The long items have declined noticeably: I’ve taken the time to go through a few of those, and have generally been glad I did. I’m keeping the blog items under control, and “music” and “think” are doing okay. “recommendation” is growing a bit, but the real issues are “book” and “podcast”.

Actually, “podcast” is a weird case: I currently have 20 podcasts saved up that I’d like to listen to, but I tagged every single one this month. Basically, I’d been doing a quite good job of balancing free podcast-listening time with interesting podcasts that I noticed, but then a lot more podcasts caught my eye this month than last year. I’m not sure how that’s going to play out; check back next time.

The real killer is “book”: I simply run across interesting-looking books a lot faster than I make time to read them. It’s even worse than the numbers make it seem, since some people have the rude habit of recommending multiple books in a single blog post.

This isn’t a new phenomenon, of course: I have other long lists of books to read that I’ve saved elsewhere. At least the only book queue that I really worry about, the queue of books I’ve bought but haven’t read, isn’t doing too bad: it’s at three books, which is two books too large, but much much better than it used to be. Still, I should probably accept that I’m not going to read some of those books any time soon and get rid of them. Or should I? I read a little over a hundred books a year these days, so there’s no particular reason to believe I won’t eventually read most of the books on that list, even accepting that I take a lot of my reading suggestions from other sources.

There’s one other category which seems innocuous but isn’t: “flash-game”. A list of 8 items with a growth of 0 looks like a great example of a productive category: individual games take long enough that it’s not surprising that I might have a bit of a backlog, but clearly I’m making it through the backlog at an appropriate pace.

The truth is, though, that the 8 saved flash games are the exact same 8 flash games from last time, and that they’ve all been saved since July, 2007 or earlier. I have played a few shorter flash games in the interim, but the real lesson here is that I never get around to playing flash adventure games!

Overall, the oldest saved item (excluding possible items that I accidentally unstarred and then restarred, losing date information in the process) is Simon Phipps’s recommendation of Filoli, starred on June 18, 2006. Which looks like a pleasant place to spend a few hours some future day, I just don’t want to do it during the winter! We’ll go there this spring some time, though. The second oldest item is a mention that Getting Real is now available for free online. Which was in the “long” category for quite a while (or maybe the “book” category?), but I recently read it. (And am glad I did, and it’s actually not that long.) Now it’s in the “think” category, because I’m idly wondering if Backpack might be a useful tool.

I guess I need to make a prediction. I’ll report back in early April; I’ll predict that I’ll still be at a little under 100 items. I guess, to be concrete, I’ll predict that I’ll remain at 98 saved items.

• Pretty sand pictures:

  (Via Backreaction, which has links to more.)

• Those are some big crystals.
• Van Jacobson on networking. More than an hour long, which is why it took me more than a year to get around to watching it, but there’s a lot of interesting stuff here.
• You’re probably already all aware of Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby, but if not, you should be.
• I’d never heard of High Dynamic Range photography before seeing these gorgeous photographs of various scenes in Japan.

• Fighting giraffes:

  (Via Mad Prime.)

• A different take on Zack & Wiki.

I just started Eternal Sonata. It’s a Japanese RPG on the Xbox 360 that takes place in the dreams of Frederic Chopin as he’s about to die from tuberculosis; how could I pass up a concept like that?

A few hours in, I’m quite happy to be playing it. At the core, it’s a not-too-outlandish JRPG, but there are several nice touches. The visuals are quite distinctive: lots of bright colors everywhere, and the characters are done in a sort of cel-shaded style, with a little less detail and flatter textures than the backgrounds, making for a distinctive but subdued look. The combat and leveling up system are on the action RPG end, with a real time component (including movement) to your turns, not too many options at any given time, and the playing field divided into light and shadow areas that give you different attacks. And there’s a concept of a “party level” which increases very slowly, giving rise to new nuances in the combat system, so while combat is quite straightforward now, I imagine it will get noticeably more complicated by the time I’m ten hours in.

It’s not my shaping up to be my favorite underappreciated 2007 game or my favorite RPG of 2007, but it’s certainly a good way to pass several hours.

I do not understand the way Google handles their accounts. I have (well, had) two Google accounts: a gmail account (david.b.carlton) that I never used and another account (associated to my public e-mail address) that I use all the time for reading blogs. On the recommendation of some friends, I decided to start using Google as a spam filter, forwarding my mail through their servers; to that end, the natural thing to do would be to unify those accounts, tell the gmail account to forward non-spam mail to my public e-mail address, and bask in the drastically reduced volume of spam that I receive. (Along with some procmail rules on my public account to route e-mail through gmail unless gmail has seen it already.)

Well, no. Some issues that turned up:

• You can’t unify an existing gmail account and an existing Google account associated with a non-gmail e-mail address.
• You also can’t do that indirectly by deleting the gmail account and then creating a new gmail account with the same e-mail address as the previous one but with the new gmail account linked to the existing Google account: even if you’ve deleted a gmail account, you (or anybody else) still can’t create a new gmail account with the same name.
• If a gmail account is linked to an external e-mail address, gmail gets extraordinarily possessive of the latter e-mail address: it refuses to forward e-mail to that address, and it also refuses to forward e-mail that was originally sent from that address.

The upshot is that, after an hour and a half of frustration, I ended up where I started: I still have a Google account that I use all the time linked to my public e-mail address, I have a separate gmail account (which is now forwarding mail to my public e-mail address), but that separate gmail account has a name that I like somewhat less than the name of my first gmail account. (Or, for that matter, than the name of a second gmail account that I created but was then unable to use for the purposes that I wanted.)

I’m actually a little sympathetic to their behavior on the first two issues: the first smells to me like legacy implementation headaches, and I can see how their decision on the second issue avoids a certain class of problems. But their behavior on the third issue just seems like a conscious choice of bizarreness: why refuse to forward to the one external address that I’m guaranteeing is mine? Just because I have an account with Google to use their services doesn’t mean that I’m handing all control of my e-mail over to them…

When I went to download the Devil May Cry 4 demo just now, I was amused to see its genre given as “Stylish Action”.

I bought my first single this week, “Still Alive” from Portal:

Or at least my first online single; I dimly recall buying a few 45 rpm singles when I was a teenager, out of bemused curiosity that they existed.

Buying online singles isn’t something I’d been planning to do. For one thing, I’m the sort of person who, if I find one book by an author that I like, goes out and reads another three or four by the same author, and similarly with music. Also, my main constraint right now in music listening isn’t money or having an overabundance of new stuff to listen to, it’s finding new music that I like, so buying whole albums by artists when I’ve heard a single song that I like is generally a good way to approach that constraint.

Though now I’m rethinking that policy: I still support buying the whole album if there’s any serious chance that I’ll like it, but spending 89 cents on a whim is also probably something I should do more often. Though this song really is a special case. It’s from a video game soundtrack, or rather a soundtrack from a collection of video games. I haven’t played the other games in the collection, the other music is by different artists, the other music is all instrumental, so there’s no particular reason to think I’ll enjoy the rest of the music in the collection. I’m not ruling out the possibility of buying the rest of the album when I’ve played more of the games, but it will take a little while for me to get around to doing that.

And I certainly wasn’t going to wait to buy this one; I’ve been singing it over and over the last few days, I can’t think of a video game song that I like more. I suspect it holds up pretty well for people who haven’t played the game, too—it’s so delicious and moist—but who knows.

Look at me still talking when there’s science to do. Or blog reading. Hopefully I’ll get back to blog writing this weekend, though.

Sorry I’ve been so quiet recently; I spent most of my evenings for about three weeks playing Mass Effect. (Which I quite recommend, incidentally.) But I’m done now, so I finally have a bit of time to get back to blogging. (And to catch up with reading the things.)

I’m a third of a way through my Japanese textbook now: I’ve finished ten of the thirty chapters. Which is, I believe, farther than I made it through the book when I was in grad school, and I’m showing no signs of losing track of grammar / vocabulary, so my strategy of not forcing my way through the chapters before I’m comfortable with them is working.

Having said that, it’s been slower going than I thought: it would seem that it’s taken me about six and a half months to make it as far as I have. Which suggests that I have a bit more than a year to go before I’m through the textbook, which is a little disenheartening: I’d have hoped it would only take a year total to go through the book. And, actually, the situation might be worse than that: I breezed through some of the first chapters, while these days it takes me three weeks to go through a chapter, or more if I get sick or go on vacation or am particularly busy. So I probably have more than 60 weeks ahead of me.

Or maybe not. I’ve been getting exposed to bits and pieces of grammar through other sources; I actually don’t believe that the difficulty curve is really going to increase, and in fact I’m on track to finish Chapter 11 in two weeks instead of three weeks. Still, even at two weeks each, I have 40 weeks ahead of me, and in practice I don’t see how I could possibly have less than a year left, unless I find other techniques that significantly speed up my learning.

That’s fine, I guess; I’m in this for the long haul, and if the outcome of all of this is that in five or even ten years from now I’m reasonably comfortable reading a range of Japanese materials and not embarrassed speaking the language, that would be a win: I hope to have that enrich my life for another three decades or so after that. Still, I might as well take this as an opportunity to review my approach. Is there anything I could be doing better?

Well, one question is: better for what? What’s my goal? To learn Japanese, of course, but how do I define having learned Japanese, and what’s the goal that underlies it? (There’s no end of other things I could be learning, after all.)

The answer isn’t as obvious as it once was. When I thought about doing this in grad school, I had some pretty good answers: learn Japanese = be able to read Japanese, and I had some specific ways in which I’d like to use that skill. There are a lot more go books in Japanese than in English; also, I’d been really impressed by the literary fiction that I’d read translated into English, and I was pretty sure that there’s a lot more where that came from. And then I started getting into comics and video games; again, there was a lot of good stuff that hadn’t been translated into English.

A decade later, though, none of those motivations holds water very well. I don’t spend much time playing go these days, I can’t even keep up with the go literature in English any more, and if I wanted to get back into the game, one obvious way to make time would be to give up learning Japanese. Reading literary fiction is a noble goal, but getting to a level where I can enjoy doing that isn’t easy; even reading French literature is enough of a strain that I don’t do it very often, I can’t think of the last time I read literary fiction in German, and realistically it seems unlikely that I’ll end up learning Japanese as well as I know German. Manga and video games are more realistic goals, but the importance of learning Japanese to delve into those areas is much less than it was not very long ago: I’ve been astounded at how much stuff has been translated into English over the last decade.

Still, enough of my entertainment comes from Japanese sources that I think I have a good case for learning the language on those grounds. And I’d like to visit the country pretty soon; we’re not going this year (Paris again), but I very much hope we’ll go there in 2009 or 2010, and if that goes at all well, I hope that will be the first trip out of many.

The truth is, though, I’m not sure either appreciate cultural artifacts or visiting the country is the real reason why I want to learn the language: I think I just like the idea of learning Japanese. Or maybe the idea of knowing Japanese, I’m not sure. I just like knowing something about different languages, and I’m pretty fascinated by the writing system. So maybe the trip itself is the goal, instead of any putative destination.

I don’t want to go too far down that path, though: it’s easy to use that as an excuse to avoid testing myself (in either the written or spoken arena), and that won’t do me any good: I don’t want to be able to just do textbook exercises or recite lists of vocabulary (even if I enjoy the latter rather more than is healthy), I really do want to know the language at a deeper level. In fact, I’ve gotten far enough that I should start testing myself more seriously soon; more thoughts on that in a later blog post.

So am I doing a good job of meeting my goals? Honestly, I’m not sure. I’m sure I’d make faster progress if I were taking lessons with a native speaker. That would cost money, but probably not enough to be a big deal; it would also cost time away from the house, which is a bigger deal. (Though it’s not like my present approach doesn’t have any time cost – I’m probably putting in about five or six hours a week.) I certainly plan to take lessons at some point, the question is when.

So what would trigger that? One trigger would be if I were going to be in a situation where I’d need to speak the language; when it gets to a year or so before I’m planning to travel to Japan, I’ll want to seriously think about taking lessons. Another trigger would be if I’m finding evidence that book learning isn’t doing a good enough job; hopefully I’ll start trying to read some real books soon, and that will give me more information about the extent to which having outside help would be useful. And a third trigger would be if I see myself avoiding to an unhealthy extent figuring out how well I’ve learned the language: if I do that, I’d need to face my fears.

There are also other tools that I could consider using (and paying money for) other than lessons, e.g. the Learning Center at JapanesePod101. For now, I’m not worrying about that; I doubt that would be a better use of my time than going through a textbook would, though it’s something to think about once I’m done with the textbook.

Something to think about. For now, I guess I should be happy with the real progress that I’ve made; I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me, I don’t want to stay on autopilot, but I know more than I did half a year ago, and that’s worth being proud of.

I’m hiring again. If you live in the S.F. Bay Area, are a good programmer, and want to be the first kid on your block to stream out 320Gbps of video data, please let me know. (You can also submit a resume via the above link.)

The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass is the first Zelda game for the DS, and Nintendo decided to go whole-hog. No D-pad and buttons for them: you move by touching the screen in the direction you want to go, you attack an enemy by either drawing a slashing motion or by touching an enemy.

Which must have taken a lot of guts to decide on; I commend them for it. And it works well enough; unfortunately, enough of the other decisions that they made in the game grated on me that it ended up being the first new Zelda that I didn’t finish.

Hmm, how to structure this post? Let’s try an experiment:

Good: Moving and fighting with the stylus works surprisingly well.

Bad: It’s partly good in a “talking dog” sort of way: my expectations were pretty low, so I’m impressed that it works at all. To be fair, it works fine for core stuff, but it has its rough spots (switching between items, in particular), and I don’t think it actually improved movement/combat at all.

Good: You get to draw on the map. In particular, that’s a nice way to set your course while sailing the ship.

Bad:: It’s only a nice way because the ocean environment is so plain; ship travel is less tedious here than in Wind Waker, but I still far prefer dry land overworlds. Also, drawing on maps to take notes in dungeons mean that you got lots of puzzles of the form “there are four switches over here, and you learn over there in which order to hit them” (And then write the numbers on the map to remember them.) Which gets a little old.

Bad: The microphone-based puzzles were really annoying. (And limited the locations in which you can play the game.) I particularly disliked the bit where how loud you shouted into the mic determined the cost of your salvage arm.

Good: Uh, there were only three or four of them?

Good: I liked the grappling hook item where you could draw on the screen to connect two posts.

Bad: The cartridge only has two save slots.

Good: Only two people can be annoyed by the game at once?

Enough of that; basically, it’s a series of interesting experiments, most of which weren’t too bad, some of which had some real benefits. I hope that they tone it down in their next offering, but I hope that they take some of those techniques and use them on their next DS outing. (Some of the ideas might even work on the Wii.)

But partially successful experiments don’t add up to a reason for me to stop playing the game. The reason why I stopped is that one of the dungeons isn’t like the others. There’s this central dungeon that you start and (I believe?) end the game in, and return to after almost every other dungeon. Each time in the dungeon, you retrace your steps, going a bit farther.

Unfortunately, there are two things I didn’t like about that dungeon: it was stealth-based and it was timed. Stealth-based games may be other people’s cup of tea; they are not mine. I’m not violently against the notion, and certainly I would have been fine with one or two dungeons with a significant stealth element. But I didn’t want to play a stealth-based segment over and over again.

And having it timed was just rubbing salt in my wounds: if I can’t figure out how to retrace my steps and do the next two levels of the dungeon that I’ve unlocked quickly enough, my reward is to replay my last fifteen minutes. None of your traditional wandering around, thinking about puzzles, wondering how on earth you’ll get to that chest over there: you have to be focused on optimizing your path through the dungeon. It also hurts your ability to stop playing the game at a moment’s notice, which can be important on a handheld system, and you probably don’t want to take a couple of weeks, off from playing the game. (Or even a couple of days off, depending on your memory.)

I played through most of it; at the place where I stopped, I had (as far as I can tell) two trips remaining to the annoying dungeon and one traditional dungeon that I hadn’t explored. (Which I couldn’t get to without going back to the annoying dungeon first.) And I decided that it was unlikely that I’d enjoy or learn enough from the remaining traditional dungeon to make it worth going through the annoying dungeon again.

Other people may well like the game more (indeed, clearly have); I probably would have thought it was pretty good if I basically enjoyed stealth games. And I’m glad I gave it a try, so I could see what the controls were like. But it still left a bad taste in my mouth.

Reviews of three games that don’t deserve a full post:

Beautiful Katamari

If you’ve played its predecessors, you know what to expect, and you’ll probably be disappointed. More of the same; the music is still good, but no track was nearly as good as, say, Everlasting Love from the second game. They continued to ratchet up the scale of the later levels, to bad effect: you lose the detail when you get to rolling up islands, which this game goes far beyond. The good news is that there was only one level with a significant non-size-based goal. (Which was by far the most annoying level in the game!)

The main bad news is that there are too few levels, especially since it’s getting priced at close to a full game price (the original launched at 20 bucks); to make things worse, a quick scan through the game’s downloadable content suggests that Namco is trying to get greedy and nickel-and-dime fans to death. A thin enough experience to switch the series from “default buy” to “default don’t buy”, which makes me sad.

Hexic HD

An XBLA game that came for free with the system. It’s a puzzle game, and an awful one: I tried it once, and lasted for 20-30 minutes, not because of my l33t puzzle skills but because there’s no way to lose. Or win. Actually, there is apparently a way to win (but it’s really hard without interesting intermediate goals), and there are ways to lose if you play for long enough, but the basic tension that this style of puzzle game should provide is completely absent: reducing the feedback to how many points you’re getting meant that I never felt that I was doing well or badly, and after five minutes or so I was just waiting for me to die somehow, anyhow.

Reading other reviews of the game, it would seem that the other gameplay modes have a bit more potential for tension. (I did “marathon mode”, because it was first on the list and sounded like a sensible default puzzle game mode.) I have no desire to give them a try.

Gradius III

A shooter. I enjoyed playing Life Force, which is one of its predecessors on the NES, so I thought I’d give this one a try. I remember that game being a fair amount of fun, though its power-up mechanism was a bit off: when you died, you lost all (or all but one) of your powerups, and the game structure was such that, after that happened, you were basically screwed, but it was a pleasant way to spend time if you didn’t mind that.

Either my skills have atrophied, or Gradius III isn’t as good: I had a harder time making it through the earlier levels (though, oddly, the level 1 boss is actually noticeably harder than the level 2 one, so if I made it through level 1 I had a good chance of reaching level 3), to the extent that I wasn’t really enjoying the game. Some of that was due to my not wanting to invest the time in memorizing where every enemy entered the screen, which I recall doing in Life Force. (Also, playing while either Miranda or Zippy was acting antsy made it quite difficult to concentrate enough to avoid swarms of enemies.) Though the good news is that, even when I died, losing powerups didn’t hurt me so much, so I didn’t always have to start over from scratch.

I think it’s probably an okay game in the right context, but right now I have other ways that I’d rather spend my time, so rather than banging my head against it to improve my abilities, I decided to move on. Hmm, that seems to be a theme for me with Virtual Console games…