The time I made a hit video game

In 1996, I was finishing high school. As was typical of high school seniors at the time, my schedule had a lot of room for elective courses. One of the electives I took was Computer Math, a semester of learning basic programming principles. For the most part it wasn't thrilling (I had already taught myself the fundamentals of BASIC on the family Texas Instruments 99/4A as a younger boy, and this class didn't get into anything more advanced than subroutines and "if-then" statements), but the class's final project was the most engaging final project I would ever complete in my student life: a HyperCard dungeon.

HyperCard was a Mac-based programming tool that could best be described as an intranet of "cards," which could be hyperlinked and made interactive using buttons. A collection of cards that worked together for a purpose were called a "stack." Using a uniquely accessible and English-like scripting protocol called HyperTalk, users could create databases, presentation visuals and point-and-click adventures.

"Dungeons," my teacher called those.

This assignment had a checklist of things that needed to be present in a student's dungeon in order to earn points toward a grade for the project. Game elements like locked doors with keys, pitfalls, sound effects, animation and Easter eggs were all assigned point values and made part of the grading criteria. If memory serves, 50 of these points constituted a passing grade.

I went all out, creating the very best dungeon I could with the resources at my disposal. As a result, my dungeon scored 150 points, the maximum score my teacher was willing to award. It also became popular among students in other classes who found my dungeon on the Macs in the computer lab and started playing it when they were supposed to be typing essays about Lord of the Flies.

Today I used an OS9 emulator to open my old HyperCard dungeon (titled, The House of Death, Darkness, Decay and Doom) for the first time in close to twenty years. Unfortunately, the animations and sounds don't work well on a modern computer, and the text fields are all kinds of broken. It's also full of stuff that, even twenty years ago, was only funny to me and the stoner kid who sat next to me in Computer Math class. Stuff like a .WAV file of David Letterman saying "bubble wrap":



In the basement, there's a laundry room with a port in the wall that looks like a laundry chute...



...but when you inspect the laundry chute, it turns out to be a window to Team Behm Auto Mall (an eastern-Wisconsin used car dealership). After hearing my voice doing an unflattering impersonation of Mark Behm's nasal TV ad salutation ("Hi folks, Mark Behm, Team Behm!"), poor Mark and his dog are crushed by a dump truck that falls from the sky.



Whether or not you witness the death of Mark Behm has no bearing on your ability to reach the end of the dungeon. It's just something to do.

As you'd expect, it's rather cruel for a point-and-click adventure. Lots of doors and clickable objects lead to instant death, regardless of the logic involved:

The game's "climax" comes when the player uses a computer terminal to "decrease the power" of the dungeon's evil proprietor.

Better than Metal Gear, anyway.

For all its limitations, HyperCard was one of my favorite things about the Mac OS Classic environment. I continued using it, mostly to make random text generators for my own amusement, all the way up until the advent of OS X. This one created fictional pro-wrestling match summaries:



And this one was called Insult Me:



But don't just take my word for it. Check out this video of the Fashionable Eyewear Brothers showing off HyperCard's raw computing power. Personally I think the whole thing would feel a little more authentic with a musical underpinning of Tiffany's "I Think We're Alone Now."

Digital Harinezumi 2++ review

In university, I practiced creative photography using my mom's Pentax SLR, a camera older than me. I became quite fond of the camera's honesty, not to mention the tricky, low-light bulb photography I could do with a tripod. But unlike many purists in the photography world, I found myself easily seduced away from the personality and warmth of film photography by the instant gratification and convenience of digital photography in the years that followed.

In an attempt to bridge the gap between the digital photography's convenience and analog photography's personality, Japanese cult camera maker SuperHeadz released the Digital Harinezumi (Japanese for "hedgehog"), a digital camera that emulates the lo-fi feel of old film shots with carefully tweaked saturation and contrast settings, in spring of 2009. The camera also boasted a video mode that did its best to imitate 8mm film. An upgraded sequel, the Digital Harinezumi 2, followed in November.

Currently the latest version of this product, the Digital Harinezumi 2++ offers greater convenience and image quality than its predecessor, while maintaining the same toy camera quirkiness that collectors and enthusiasts seek. Wife and I spent a day in Ueno with this little device and put it to the test.

Our first destination was the National Museum and Nature and Science and its temporary land mammal exhibition. The camera has two simulated ISO settings, 100 and 800 (the latter of which is sensitive enough for shooting in a dark indoor environment such as a museum without a flash). As a result, I was able to take a lot of goofy headshots of taxidermied animals...like this bear, who looks like he just heard a dirty joke.

I also grabbed the rare opportunity to use the Harinezumi to take a picture of a harinezumi:

Outdoor photography, especially in bright sunlight, is where the camera really shows off its characteristics. Its image processor washes certain tones out while boosting others. Which colors receive which treatment depends on the individual Harinezumi you buy; in keeping with the haphazard toy camera aesthetic, SuperHeadz thought it would be more appropriate if each unit had a slightly unique eye.

After leaving the museum, we headed for Ameya Yokocho, Ueno's famous street market district. It's a colorful place, ideal for testing out the camera's tendencies. It's also a good place for buying seafood.

The Harinezumi 2++, unlike the original Harinezumi, allows the user to use the camera's LCD screen as a viewfinder in all modes, but toward the end of the afternoon, I began to notice that some of my best photos resulted from ignoring the LCD screen completely and going for "lucky" shots.

The camera also shoots in a flattering monochrome mode, which I didn't use much on this outing, but plan to exploit in great depth in the near future.

As I said before, Ameyoko is a good place to buy seafood. We got a steal of a deal on some scallops and frozen salmon. Wife used those to cook up one of the best dinners we'd had in a long time:

So now that you've seen the pictures the Digital Harinezumi 2++ can produce, here's a breakdown of how I feel about it as a product.

What's Good

• It's small and light. Although its predominantly plastic construction also makes it feel cheap, it fits in a pocket and hardly weighs anything.

• It does what it's supposed to do. Manufactured nostalgia is what the Harinezumi is all about, and in that department, it delivers. Color exaggeration, contrast boosting and corner vignetting come together to produce some very convincing results.

• It offers a level of control. Although it's meant to recreate the chaos and unpredictability of low-tech film photography, the Digital Harinezumi 2++ sports two ISO settings, color and monochrome modes, a ten-second auto-timer and macro mode. And if you feel like you still have too much control over your shots, you can turn the preview mode off and use the folding plastic viewfinder (or no viewfinder at all).

• It's not too electricity-hungry. It runs on a single CR2 battery, admittedly not my favorite power source, since they are pricey (and rechargeable CR2s don't exist in Japan), but one CR2 will let you shoot constantly in video mode for almost two hours. To help you conserve power, the camera turns itself off after remaining idle for sixty seconds.

• The mic is surprisingly capable. I don't really recommend that anyone buy this camera mainly for the movie function, as the video you get is small (640x480) and poorly compressed. And it's likely that the vast majority of Harinezumi videos that appear on YouTube will be set to ambient music tracks (Four Tet comes to mind for some reason); it's just that kind of camera. All the same, when I did take video with sound, I was surprised at the fidelity of the tiny built-in microphone.

What's Bad

• It's overpriced. The camera can be purchased on its own for around ¥15,000, or in a "Box" that comes with a carrying pouch, a strap, a CR2 battery and a 2GB microSD card with USB reader for about ¥20,000. You could make the case that $150 is or isn't a reasonable asking price for such a simple camera, but let me be very clear about something: The Box version isn't worth the extra fifty bucks. The strap and pouch are nothing special. And if you own a Mac, I definitely cannot recommend the Box, as the included microSD card does not work with Mac OS.

• Menu navigation is cumbersome. Granted, this camera only has a few adjustable settings, and two of them (still/video and normal/macro) can be toggled with a single button stroke. But every time you want to change the image resolution, ISO speed, timer, review on/off, preview on/off, color/monochrome setting or sound on/off for video mode, you'll have to cycle through all seven of those options, each of which gets its own screen in the menu. I found myself muttering "come on, come on" more than once while fumbling with the menu mode.

• Video recording is 640x480 at 29 fps and that's that. Come on, SuperHeadz, really? 640x480? In this day and age? Do I have to remind you that analog film, the medium you're trying to emulate, had better resolution than the majority of 20th century televisions? I know you're going for retrograde, but spring for a bigger video resolution with your next upgrade.

LINK:

Official website (English)

Jesse Jace VS The World

Yesterday I bought an Xbox Live Vision Camera. This small USB device provides functionality for a number of Xbox 360 games, but can also easily be used with MacOS or Windows. Unfortunately, a lot of the games that offer camera support kind of suck. For example, nobody has anything good to say about the You're In the Movies series, and my own experiences with Burnout: Paradise -- in which a fresh still of the player who's just bested you appears in a corner of the screen -- have been spotty at best (who wants to be taunted by a fat dude in his BVDs?). EA Sports, however, has done an exceptional job of putting the peripheral to good use.

One of the latest offerings from the aforementioned sports game giant, Fight Night: Round 4, via a feature called GameFace, allows the player to use the camera to put a photo-realistic (if perhaps excessively forgiving) version himself into the game as a prizefighter. User-created boxers can also be easily shared via Xbox Live, used in off- and on-line modes, and captured in the game's replay editor.

To illustrate just how much fun this can be, I made this video. Unfortunately iMovie, the only video editing software I have, is not good at compression, so the picture quality is lacking.

When There's No Room Left in Hell, My iPod Will Walk the Earth

iPods are like women: Can't live with 'em, can't prevent them from ultimately eating your entire music collection. My old, heavy-as-a-brick iPod, which had already died and resurrected itself once a year and a half ago, bought the farm for what I fear may be the final time this evening. And this time, it appears to have taken all 2,500 of my MP3s with it.

Funny, I was just thinking earlier this week about how I really should finish backing up my music collection. I started that process a long time ago, but only got through about letter G of the alphabet before becoming quite fed up with the hassle of it all. Tonight, while I was listening to "Junior Kickstart" by the Go! Team, my iPod started doing that "zzzzz, click" thing it likes to do when it wants to be contrary. As per the usual, I attempted to break the "zzzzz, click" cycle with a force-restart. In what was probably the biggest act of consumer electronics defiance I've ever witnessed, my iPod looked at me and said:

"Force-restart, huh? Guess what, buddy. I got your force-restart right here. Select language."

Just like that, my iPod had re-formatted itself, returned to factory setting and digested all my MP3 files.

The new iPod Touch is currently selling for less than what I paid for my first iPod. Do I really want to set myself up for more audio player drama?

That wasn't a rhetorical question. Please tell me whether I want to set myself up for more audio player drama.

Anti-Productivity Suite

Finally, a web browser-based toy that takes the shape of its container:

Liquid Webtoy

And if you like Liquid Webtoy, try:

Powder Game

Soon I'll Be Banging On Trash Cans

Last night's show was as good as I could have hoped. Today, however, I downloaded some system updates for OS X and discovered afterward that I can no longer launch Logic Express (my music software of choice). I can only assume there is some conflicting bit of something-something amid the updates I downloaded, and Logic doesn't like it one bit. I don't know how long it will be before a solution is found, either; Apple is not so friendly about supporting my version of Logic, which pre-dates Apple's acquisition of the Logic brand.

If anybody out there is running OS X 10.4.9 and Logic Express 6.4, let me know if you have had the same trouble. In the meantime, Apple's free pack-in sequencer known as GarageBand has become my new friend. My new, simple, light on features, not as cool as Logic but better than nothing friend.

Can Tactics Save the PSP?

In October of 2006, Girlfriend and I were having lunch with one of her co-workers. We were talking about video games, and at some point in the conversation I said, "Square Enix needs to make a PSP version of Final Fantasy Tactics."

I'm not suggesting that my comment had anything to do with it (although I can't rule out the possibility that I am clairvoyant), but this month Square Enix announced their intention to do just that, in the form of a PSP title called Final Fantasy Tactics: Shishi Sensou, (Final Fantasy Tactics: The Lion War) which is scheduled for US release in autumn 2007.

FFT and its Gameboy Advance counterpart (Final Fantasy Tactics Advance) have the distinction of being the only games in the FF franchise since Final Fantasy VII to hold my interest. And hold my interest is exactly what the original FFT did....for an inexcuseable 80 hours (a personal record: the longest I ever took to finish an RPG). Try as they may, other FF titles failed to get their hooks in me for such a duration. After all, what is Final Fantasy but a lot of repetative monster encounters that always go like this?

FIGHT.
FIGHT.
MAGIC: CURE.
FIGHT.
FIGHT.
FIGHT.
[FANFARE!]

Sure, once in a while you might throw in a "LIMIT BREAK" or a "SUMMON," or perhaps even the occasional "RUN AWAY," but that and a lot of sing-song Uematsu Nobuo music is basically all there is to Final Fantasy. And no matter how intriguing the story...no matter how cute the chocobos...no matter how big the rack on Tifa Lockheart...tapping A (or circle, as it were) grows boring eventually. FF Tactics, however, capitalized on brand recognition -- arguably Square's greatest strength -- and provided an unprecedented level of depth to the genre created by titles like Konami's Vandal Hearts. (I'm not kidding about depth, either; The first time I played FF Tactics, I was so turned off by the game's complexity and steep learning curve that I set it aside for almost a year....until I picked it up again and it became one of my favorite games of all time.)

Final Fantasy Tactics is exactly what the PSP needs right now, especially in the midst of rumors that Sony is planning to abandon its handheld console soon.

FOND MEMORY OF FF TACTICS: The game allows players to recruit new soldiers and give them surprisingly long names, so I had a bunch of people in my party named after celebrities. There was Dustin Hoffman the summoner, Jack Nicholson the geomancer, Jenna Jameson the dancer and Leo DiCaprio the chocobo.

Technorati: Final Fantasy Tactics / Tifa Lockheart / chocobo

Nobody Cares About the PS3

The PlayStation 3 will be released tomorrow in Japan and, incredibly, nobody seems to give a flying Egyptian rat shit.

Even in Japan, the "Land of Video Games," there is a distinct lack of hype, advertising and general awareness of the new console's existence. There are only five launch titles and I can only name four of them. The two I've seen in playable form (Ridge Racer and Gundam) are not exemplary of the kind of excitement I would normally associate with the launch of a major game console. They are exemplary of two games I don't need so badly that I would dump more than $500 on Sony's new machine.

Maybe everyone in Japan has already resigned to the notion that Sony is deliberately limiting supply and there will never be enough PS3s to go around. That, or Japan is holding its breath until Nintendo launches its goofy, quirky Wii console next month. My lungs must not be what they used to be, because I started to turn blue last month and bought an Xbox 360 to prevent my own asphixiation.

ADDENDUM, November 12, 2006:

Apparently some people care about the PS3. It completely sold out of most dealers on the first day it was available. Furthermore, Sony finally started running some commercials showing in-game footage after the launch. I don't know why they didn't go the usual route of pre-launch hype that has become the status quo in the game industry.

Upon being interveiwed, many of yesterday's buyers said they planned to sell their new PS3 online for double the price they paid for it.

Technorati: PlayStation 3, nobody cares

Resurrect Pod?

"Lord! It's a miracle!" - Warden Samuel Norton, The Shawshank Redemption

My iPod, like so many moody iPods before it, has abruptly shown signs of life again. I got up to check my email because I couldn't sleep, and just on a whim I decided to give the old "lock, unlock, reset" sequence one more try. What do you know? Now it suddenly wants to be charged up for old times' sake.

Its battery is probably knocking on death's door, but at least now I have one more chance to back up my music collection before it finally buys the farm, or the iPod spontaneously combusts like that guy's heart in Temple of Doom, which ever comes first.

Imaginary conversation:

A: See? Your iPod wasn't dead after all.

B: You're right.

A: I bet you'll never rush to make a diagnosis like that again.

B: You mean my diagnosis that the iPod was fried for good?

A: Yeah. Or, to put it another way, like the diagnosis that led to the euthanization of Terri Schiavo.

B: Let's not compare apples to oranges. My entire music collection wasn't trapped inside Terri Schiavo.

Technorati: iPod, resurrection, Terri Schiavo

Die Pod

Following the example set a few months ago by my feeble, old PlayStation 2, my iPod decided today that its own day-to-day existence was unjustifiably troublesome and redirected all its energy into a new hobby: Not working.

I mean, really not working. It won't turn on, doesn't charge up when plugged in, can't be reset, won't recognize or be recognized by my computer...it doesn't even show the "sad iPod" icon. It has apparently become a $400 doorstop.

The loss of the iPod itself isn't what bothers me. I do feel I got my $400 worth of use out of the thing; in its heyday it accompanied me on many a boring Ginza Line subway commute. It was, as iPods go, a dependable little bundle of musical happiness. The disappointment lies in the 2200 songs trapped on its hard drive, henceforth inaccessible.

If I buy another MP3 player, which I certainly will, I can't help but feel that buying another iPod would be a violation of principle. As machines go, iPods seem overrated, overpriced and overly difficult to have repaired. At any rate, I've already decided that my next MP3 player will be Flash memory-based. I have far too many bad memories of holding my stunned iPod up to my ear and hearing its hard drive going, "zzzzz, click...zzzzz, click." I never want to hear my MP3 player of choice emit a "zzzzz" or a "click" ever again.

Stay Gold, Pony Boy

When I modified my PlayStation 2 last year I heard a little voice in my head saying, "Don't do it! It's not worth it! Nyooooo!" But I ignored the voice and went ahead with the mod, installing a new top-loading drive cover for using my swap-discs. It gave my white PS2 console a new black-and-white color scheme and allowed me to play the ghostly copies of games I had earlier decided weren't quite worth owning anymore. A sound investment, I thought, ignoring the rattling noise coming from my console with ever-increasing frequency. But after months of smacking the top of my PlayStation 2 to stop it from going "ratatatatatat," it finally looked at me today and said, "You know what? Screw you, I'm outta here."

I'll get over it, but my PS2 died while I was in the middle of Monster Hunter 2, a game I had been playing for months and hadn't yet gotten tired of. Now the little voice in my head is telling me to just hold my horses until the PlayStation 3 comes out this November. And this time I'm going to obey the little voice.

License to Consume

I have fallen victim to a classic method of predatory marketing: The creation of demand as a result of limited supply.

Two months ago if you had asked me if I was planning to buy a Nintendo DS, I would have said no. And I would have had two reasons: 1) A lack of games that appeal to me and 2) that goofy stylus pen which looks to me like a lame gimmick. But you take that DS, shrink it down to a DS "Lite," and -- oops! -- don't produce enough of them to satisfy initial public demand and suddenly everybody and his grandma just has to have one.

Sure enough, after months of noticing that the DS Lite was constantly out of stock at Bic Camera in Shinjuku, something weird happened in my head when I walked in one day and noticed a line of people buying the DS Lite. Suddenly I felt that, if I didn't get one for myself, I'd somehow be "missing out" until the next shipment came in...and who knows how long that could be? So I found myself wandering up to the cash register like a George A. Romero zombie and saying, in a voice that was not my own, "Yes I'll take the navy blue one yes this will be cash yes and could I also get a copy of Mr. Driller please."

After admonishing myself for getting sucked into Nintendo's manufactured retail hype, I must admit that playing Tetris DS against Girlfriend has been a load of fun. It turns out our Tetris skills are quite a close match for each other.

Comedy Writes Itself

Driver mistaken for internet music downloads expert on BBC News 24

What kind of blogger would I be if I didn't pick up on this? This week taxi driver and BBC job applicant Guy Goma was mistakenly introduced as Guy Kewney, editor of Newswireless.net, whereupon he delivered a geniune comic take to the camera (pictured above; the text is my estimation of what he must have been thinking at that exact moment). Tonight's bilingual news on NHK showed that take no less than four times in slow motion. And it was funny every time.

[click for the video]

Better Luck Next Xbox

Microsoft's Xbox 360, which was released last weekend in Japan, sold a disappointing 62,100 units in the first two days (only 39% of units available on launch day). Many blame the low numbers on the delay of Tecmo's Dead or Alive 4, a game crucial to the acquisition of the coveted "dorks without girlfriends" demographic.

Yeah, maybe it's Dead or Alive 4's fault. Or, maybe Microsoft should have put a little more thought into the ridiculous 40,000 yen pricetag. Consumerism may be rampant in this country, but let's be reasonable. 40,000 yen could buy you a hundred puri-kura sessions.

Week of Doom

This blog will never be an important source for entertainment news because I am so far behind the rest of the world.

My new computer afforded me the ability to finally play a demo of Doom 3 for the first time. I'll say one word about that: MOMMIE! I haven't been so creeped out by a video game since Silent Hill 2.

Combine that with the numerically (if not critically) successful release of the movie Doom which, OF COURSE, is not released in Japan yet. But I'm not worried, because maybe I can download it. After all, with my new computer, there is nothing I cannot download. Just this morning, I was hungry so I downloaded an orange (like in that movie Tron).