MoCRAPoly

I went up to Tamworth on the winter holidays. While I was there I ended up going to McDonald's every second day or so to use the free wi-fi, and when I was getting some food I noticed that they had a promotion where you get a meal deal and for $1 you can get a mini board game. I got a mini Monopoly. The thing is, it's not really Monopoly at all.

One of the reasons Monopoly is so popular, I think, is the strategic element, i.e. when to buy properties, when to morgage, etc. Now, I was expecting this small, one dollar McDonald's Monopoly to be a bit simplified, but for some idiotic reason this version has had every element of strategy unceremoniously removed. The rules allow absolutely no choices to be made in the gameplay, reducing the game to pure chance, and reducing the players to bored dice rolling machines. (In fact, there are no dice, just a stupid spinner thing.) The game board (actually not a board but a piece of paper) has been horribly simplified, so the properties don't even have names, let alone title deed cards. There's no Chance cards. No Community Chest. No utilities. No train stations. No jail.

Basically it's dumbed down beyond recognition. It's even more dumbed down than Monopoly Junior. Even when I was a kid I could see that Monopoly Junior was bullshit. Not because it's set in a fun park (although that's dumb too) but because there's no choice involved, and therefore no strategy. And yet, this McDonald's version is even worse than that. It just shouldn't be called Monopoly.

I want my dollar back.

How to ruin a movie

I saw Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow on TV the other night. It was, in a way, a painful experience. Sky Captain is a vaguely steampunkish alternate-history movie with giant killer robots, cool plane dogfights and an impressive and unusual sepia-toned look, using a mix of live-action and CGI a la Sin City. By rights, I should have loved it. And I nearly did.

A few glaringly stupid things go a long way to make an otherwise cool thing bad. When those stupid things could easily have been fixed, or better yet turned into something cool, it stings all the more.

Here's an example: There's a scene where the two main characters, Sky Captain and Polly, are in Sky Captain's plane, flying over some water while being chased by other planes. They dive down towards the water, and moving at several hundred kilometres per hour, slam straight into it. Underwater, the plane continues to dive down and then converts itself into a submarine, with SC and Polly unharmed.

Call me a pessimist, but I'm pretty sure if a plane did that it would be completely destroyed. Even if by some miracle of engineering it was able to withstand such an impact, its occupants would still be instantly killed. Suspension of disbelief can only go so far - I'm willing to accept a plane that can turn into a submarine, but not one that can slam straight down into water at flight speed.

They could have turned this into a really cool sequence, where SC pulls up, and they barely miss slamming the water, with their enemies shooting all around them, and then they skid along the water all Hudson river-style with water spraying everywhere before slowing down enough to dive under. It would have eliminated the need to shit all over the laws of physics, while making the scene awesome. But they didn't.

Another example: [SPOILER ALERT] Later in the movie SC and Polly arrive at a facility where there are all these robots that are just hovering through the air. There are also platforms that are hovering through the air. There is no apparent way they are doing this, and no explanation is given. The least they could do is give some vague hand-wavey explanation about it being "like magnetism". Or better yet, they could go all steampunk and have cool propellers holding them up like little helicopters. It would have looked great and not crossed the line into ridiculousness.

Last example: [SPOILER ALERT again] Towards the end of the movie, our intrepid hero and heroine are standing on a flat platform at the top of a rocket that is being launched into space. Let me repeat that: They are standing on a flat platform at the top of a rocket that is being launched into space. You don't have to work for NASA to know that the G-forces involved in a rocket launch are pretty impressive - there's no way in hell you could stand upright inside a launching spacecraft, let alone on top of one, with the air blowing past at several thousand km/h. And yet they can not only stand comfortably, but talk to each other audibly! There are other technical problems, like the fact that the rocket clearly didn't have the fuel capacity to reach escape velocity.

I could offer some suggestions to fix this scene, but the whole thing is just so insultingly stupid that I won't bother.

Fuck this movie.

WALL-E

I saw WALL-E yesterday. I don't usually go in for Pixar films, mainly out of loyalty to traditional animation, but I've got to say WALL-E is a really good movie. Pixar has always made fairly decent stuff, although all the ones I've seen before (of which the most recent was Finding Nemo) I've always viewed as primarily kids' movies. Sure, adults taking their kids can enjoy them, but I doubt many adults would buy them on DVD for themselves. When was the last time you felt the urge to go rent Toy Story? WALL-E is different - it really is a movie anyone can enjoy, perhaps adults even more than kids. (The kids sitting next to me, during one of the film's climactic scenes, were too busy fart-assing around with lollies to pay any attention.)

The first thing that stuck me was the bang-up job they did depicting an Earth that has totally had its shit ruined. The hilariously large piles of garbage and nasty green smog look really cool, and the way everything looks all rusty and banged up is really impressively detailed. I'm big into robots so I thought WALL-E himself was pretty cool, I like how his body serves as a trash compactor/storage compartment as well as being able to hold his head and wheels when he retracts into a cube. EVE is nicely designed, contrasting WALL-E's traditional mechanic design with a cool sleek look, presumably made from some kind of smart polymer. The robot "voices" are really good, which is to be expected considering they were created by Ben Burtt, the guy behind R2-D2's expressive beeps. EVE's electronic but feminine voice reminds me a little of GLaDOS from Portal, perhaps not the best association character-wise, but anything that reminds me of my favourite physics-based first-person puzzle-comedy game is OK by me.

Another cool thing is how they tried to mimic the look of actual cameras. Apparently they wrote software to mimic the cameras used in sci-fi movies like 2001: A Space Odyssey. (There are a few other cool 2001 references too.) The shots during the part where WALL-E hitches a ride on the spaceship that picks up EVE were especially cool. Once they get into space the film shifts gears a bit, and there's plenty of cool shiny tech and robots, and an all-too-believable glimpse at the future of humanity.

So Pixar has seemingly matured, and replaced their usual torrent of pop-culture references with some fairly obvious but effective messages about the dangers of corporate monopoly, environmental neglect and human complacency. Even if you don't feel like being preached to, there's enough laughs, plot and cool robots to satisfy anyone. I give it 9 out of 10 discarded hubcaps.

Evil robot game alert!

I came across a game the other day called...

Choke on my Groundhog, YOU BASTARD ROBOTS

Aside from that being a pretty cool name for a game, it's really fun too. It seems pretty standard at first, but then you die and it suddenly becomes awesome. You will see what I mean.

Tip: two dudes shooting at the same thing can create explosions.

Triplane Turmoil II

The original Triplane Turmoil game has brought many hours of fun into my life. I used to play it obsessively, trying again and again to finish the fiendishly difficult but fun missions. Sometimes after school some friends would come around and we'd play multiplayer, with four of us crowded around the keyboard. It was good times. Especially when we contributed our own sound effects, sitting around the keyboard yelling "ratatatatat!!" and "eeeerrrrrrwwww BOOOOM!!!"

So imagine my happiness when I discovered a week ago that there was a sequel, Triplane Turmoil II, and my surprise that it has been out since 2006. I bought it, and after four days my PayPal payment cleared and I downloaded the game. Unfortunately as soon as I had downloaded it I had to go to work, but then I quit my job so I could go home and play Triplane. (Just kidding - I quit my job because my bosses were total arseholes.)

I've played some of the missions, and they're pretty cool. They're really hard, but that just means it'll be longer before I finish the game, which means more fun for me. The graphics are nice - they're in 3D even though the gameplay takes place in 2D. The controls are improved too - the turning controls flip around when the plane does, which is much more intuitive. The infantry (or "tyke men" as they somehow became known to me and my friends) play more of a role now than in the first game, and are much harder to kill. They tend to stray out of the z-axis of the plane, so you can't usually hit them with machine guns, you need to bomb them. I like the humour in the game, with mission names like "Operation S.T.F.U" (Silence The Felony Usurper) and "Das Boot" (in which you have to destroy a boot factory).

There are now six countries in the game - the first game had Germany, England, Japan and Finland, and the new one adds Russia and America. There is going to be a TCP/IP multiplayer mode sometime soon, it will be implemented with a patch hopefully this year. There's also an online ladder where players are ranked. I'm the first (and currently the only) Australian player on there.

The only criticism I have is that it takes forever for the ground crew to get your plane back into the hangar when you land, which is boring and leaves you vulnerable. Also there are a few cosmetic imperfections like the walk animations for the tyke men looking a bit weird, and the plane engine noise sometimes disappearing which is a bit spooky. Otherwise, the game is totally awesome.

It's cheap, too: US$24.95. At current exchange rates that's about A$27. And it's only another US$5 for a boxed version (as well as download), including shipping. Nice.

Triplane Turmoil II

Podcasts

It took me a while to get onto the idea of podcasts. Although I straight away saw the appeal - niche content with no ads that you can listen to whenever you like - I never really felt the desire to seek out good podcasts, probably because there's just so many of them. Eventually I found some really good ones and these are them:

• The Skeptics' Guide to the Universe. This is my favourite. Each week a panel of skeptics (or sceptics if you prefer) from the New England Skeptical Society (the phoney New England in America, not the real one in Australia) gather to discuss recent developments in science and pseudo-science. Aside from interesting and intelligent discussion there's also a great dynamic between the panellists who all have a great sense of humour and fun. There's also a new five minute version called The Skeptics Guide 5x5, in case an hour of hard-nosed scepticism is too much for you.
• Radio Lab. Two guys take a topic relating to science, philosophy or psychology and delve deep into the subject, in a really interesting, engaging and accessible way. On the way up to Woodford recently I loaded about eight episodes (one hour each) onto my MP3 player and listened to them in the car. It was awesome.
• The Rogues Gallery. I found this one just the other day, and listened to an episode today. At four hours (over 200 MB) per weekly episode it's not for the faint hearted, but it's chock full of really great music. As you may know, I can't stand most radio, but one drawback of not listening to it is that it's harder to find out about new music. With podcasts like the Rogues Gallery, that problem is solved.
• Irregular Podcast!. The prolific David Morgan-Mar of Irregular Webcomic! and his co-workers put their witty and geeky heads together now and again to record a ten-minute podcast about... hmm... all sorts of things really. But it's always clever and pretty funny too. Except the bits where they sing.

So there you have it. Throw out your radios, get those RSS feeds aggregating and listen to some of these. Just don't try to do it on dial-up.

The turd that wouldn't flush is finally gone

He's gone! Having lived just over half my life with John Howard as the prime minister it sure is hard to get my head around the idea that his reign of terror is over. I just hope he loses his seat as well. Last time I checked Maxine McKew was ahead by about 0.8% so the postal votes could still swing it, but I don't think they will. So now Rudd's the PM, which is fine by me. He may be a bit boring and not exactly going to revolutionise the country, but any politician who got kicked out of a strip club is a good bloke as far as I'm concerned.

Things have been pretty good in the last few days. I finished my exams on Thursday, which went pretty well for the most part. I'll probably get mostly passes but I reckon I'll get the old high distinction for Computing 1. For all the assignments I got full marks, including two bonus marks for the one that had two bonus marks available. The exams gave me no troubles, except that I forgot I'd brought my bag to the exam and went home without it. There wasn't anything valuable inside so I wasn't too worried but I didn't want to have to buy a new bag. But I got it back in the end, from the exam lost property place.

It's awesome to finally have time to do stuff. My to-do list is long and mostly computer-related, and now I am happily ploughing my way through it. First on the agenda was to sink my teeth into the new Matthew Reilly book. Going well so far. Next was to buy and read the new Scott Pilgrim book. Done.

I'll pause my recount of to-do list adventures to tell you about the magic that is the Scott Pilgrim series. This is basically the series that got me into print comics. I remember Ryan North linking to a scan of a short Scott Pilgrim tale that was done for Free Comic Book Day last year. I loved how the author (Bryan Lee O'Malley) mixed real life and video game logic, so I got the first three books on Amazon and zoomed through them in about a day. I re-read them recently, knowing that the fourth was due, and it was just as good as the first time. My expectations for the new volume were high, and it effortlessly lived up to them. Among the many reasons why this series is great is the art style. Some have called it amateurish, but I find it really effective for setting the right mood and I don't care what anyone says, it looks good. I find I can connect with a comic more if the art isn't too overtly skilful anyway. The characters are great, especially Scott. I see a lot of myself in Scott Pilgrim. I just hope they do the movie right. The signs aren't good to be honest: they're packing all six volumes (two of which have yet to be written) into a single movie, and also it's live action. They're going to need a miracle to find the right actors.

Anyway, back to out scheduled programming. Next on my list was to sort out how to connect my computer and Dad's computer to the interwebs at the same time. I've been meaning to sort this out for a while, not really knowing what to do. Finally discovering that all I needed was a $40 Ethernet switch. So that was very easy, which is rare when it comes to Problems.

Next task: to sort out my laptop which has been crying out for a reformat for ages. Something has recently gone seriously wrong with the Windows installation, making it all but unusable, so I decided to install Ubuntu on it. Using Ubuntu on my desktop has been a pure pleasure so far, so endowing my laptop with this king of operating systems seems the obvious route for my mental wellbeing. But before doing that I set up a dual-boot system on my desktop so that I would have Windows available on the off chance I needed it for something. I tried installing Windows on the hard drive I got the other day but that didn't work for some reason, so I set up an NTFS partition on my main hard drive and it all went smoothly from there. I guess I'll just use the other drive for storage. Not that I'll really need it.

Next I'm going to clean my keyboard.

Portal to heaven

About a week ago I heard about the game Portal. Just looking at the Wikipedia article was enough to make my head explode at the sheer awesomeness of it. Immediately I hit Demonoid and got downloadin'. Something's making BitTorrent work really badly for me. Something to do with NAT? Every time I try to figure it out it gets terribly complicated and I then go and do something else. But anyway, after leaving Azureus running overnight a couple of times I finally managed to torrent the last few bits and finished downloading Portal. It's a Windows game, and my computer is now free of the vice-like grip of Microsoft, so I downloaded Wine, which runs Windows programs on Linux. Luckily, Portal runs pretty well on Wine, but there's a few glitches, like not being able to see properly through the portals sometimes.

To the game itself: basically, if you own a computer, you have no excuse not to get this game. It is awesome. By far the most original game I've played in a long time. Watch the trailer here and you'll hopefully understand. I finished it in about 3 hours of solid, addicted playing, and it was just too great for words. But I'll come up with some anyway, in case you want to do yourself the indescribable disservice of not playing the game.

The game starts with the player character waking up in a cell in a research facility of some kind. The character has been chosen to test the "Aperture Science Handheld Portal Device", which creates portals on walls/floors/ceilings which you can see/walk/fall/push objects through. The cool thing about the portals is that you can jump through them retaining your momentum, which makes for some pretty cool manoeuvres. Picture jumping 10 metres to the floor, then going through a portal and suddenly you're flung out sideways from a wall in a different part of the room. Craaaazy. But that's not all! Guiding you through the tests is a sing-song-voiced AI who says some, well, pretty odd things. Make that pretty hilarious things. The humour in the game is really great, and not what you'd expect from a company that makes first person shooters.

The game consists of a series of rooms, in which you must use the portal gun to solve puzzles which allow you to progress to the next room. It starts off easy enough, and never gets particularly frustrating (unlike some puzzle games), but some of the later rooms are pretty tricky. After about 19 rooms the test ends and you are invited by the AI guide to have some cake. It's all over... or is it?

(No.)

When the game does finish, there's a song at the end that is the Best Video Game Music. I give this game a rating of five billion out of ten. No, just kidding. Six billion.

Hooray for Radiohead

So, Radiohead! Woo! The new album is good. I'm not totally bowled over by it, but probably I just need to listen to it a few more times. There seems to be a sort of bell curve with albums; at first I don't really get into them but then after a few listens I do. Then after a while it peaks and then gradually falls back when I've heard it heaps of times. But of course the curve is very different for different albums. For example I used to sort of like Good Charlotte after getting a free single (The Anthem) with my discman. The enthusiasm curve rose quickly, then wavered a bit, then dropped quickly as I realised that Good Charlotte blow ass. At the other end of the spectrum of musical worth, most Pink Floyd albums followed a general pattern of rising slightly less quickly (due to being less accessible) but then going through the roof and eventually settling at "very high". The general Radiohead curve rises fairly slowly for me but usually ends up pretty high. I guess I haven't really listened to them enough to see if/how the curve will drop but it will be pretty gradual, I expect.

I really take my hat off to them for their distribution model (which, in case you live under a rock, is that you choose your own price (e.g. free) and then download the album). It's pretty much a huge "fuck you" to the whole recording industry, which is great. Record companies have had their head in the sand for too long, and with any luck they'll finally see that simply lowering album prices and embracing the internet like Radiohead have will pretty much eliminate the bulk of music piracy. It is a good feeling to legally choose my own price for an album, and I totally would have payed for it if I had a credit card (they probably should have had PayPal as an option). Ultimately I think In Rainbows will be remembered almost as much for its distribution model as for the music.

In other news: The Supanova Pop Culture Expo is on this weekend. I didn't even know it was on until I saw a TV ad for it. Should be fun.

Kurt Halsey

I was just whittling away the hours on StumbleUpon when I came across the website of Kurt Halsey Fredericksen. That dude is so awesome! I really dig his drawing style. It's cartoony and simple but in the best possible way.

Some good TV

Ha! The year's most overrated toy has just had it's price cut by $200. I don't have much sympathy for people who rush in to get the latest trendy piece of tech because they think it will make them cool, only to discover they could have payed 1/3 less by waiting two months. Why would you want an iPhone when you can get something cheaper and far better anyway?

But I digress. I'm here to talk about two good TV shows. Two very good Australian comedy shows in fact. No, really. The first one is The Chaser's War on Everything, which I assume you (whoever you are) already know about. If not, go watch every episode and then come back here for further instructions. What provoked this post was the Chaser team's APEC security stunt.

Sydney's been turned into a fucking fortress for this APEC crap (which of course stands for "A Pointless Expensive Crock"), with more fences and rozzes than you can shake a stick at. Then the Chaser lads come along in a phoney motorcade and get withing metres of Dubya's hotel! If Chas hadn't been dressed as Osama bin Laden, they probably could (and would) have gotten in. This is hilarious, and I'm proud to live in a country where a bunch of guys who have the balls to do stuff like this are celebrated as they are. For a society to function there needs to be people who will take the piss out of bullshit like APEC without fear of the powers-that-be sending them to Guantanamo Bay or some shit. Chaser lads, I salute you.

The other show (which is on, conveniently, straight after the Chaser), is Summer Heights High. This show (the follow up to the legendary We Can Be Heroes) is just hilarious. Chris Lilley is a really good actor and the script is awesome. One of my favourite lines was by Ja'mie King, on "exchange" from a snooty private school: "Public schools are so random!" If you are Australian and don't watch this show, you officially fail at life.

I'm not sure he's evil, and I'm not sure he's a genius

If you are a person who likes to play computer games, I recommend Evil Genius. I just played it for about four and a half hours straight.

This is what the holidays are all about. Playing computer games and then glancing at the clock and seeing that it's quarter past three in the morning and thinking, "well, I SUPPOSE I should go to bed... not that there's any particular reason to."

I love it.

Grindhouse

I finally got around to going to a UNSW Film Society screening tonight. Luckily it was a really good one: Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino's exploitation double feature, Grindhouse.

This movie is awesome. I've never been to a drive-in theatre or anything to see dodgy exploitation films, or double features of any kind, so it was a new experience, and pretty fun to see (simulated) aged celluloid and trailers for schlock horror flicks with names like Machete, Don't and Werewolf Women of the SS.

The first movie, Planet Terror, was basically just a bunch of people running around stabbing and shooting zombies. Well, that's an oversimplification, but not by much. Its director, Robert Rodriguez, was behind the movie adaptation of Sin City, and if you thought that had lots of blood and gore... go see this movie. You'll never look at a hospital the same way again. Actually it reminded me a little bit of that show Garth Marenghi's Darkplace. Only with more zombies having their bodies blown in half by single gunshots. It also has a chick with an assault rifle for a leg, which always works in a movie's favour.

Basically Planet Terror was very funny for about half an hour. Then it started to drag on. Towards the end, I was still laughing but also wishing we could get onto the next movie already. Worth seeing once but that's about it.

I can't fault the other feature, Death Proof, on anything really. Quentin Tarantino has proven once again why he's such a respected film-maker - he took a cool idea, applied it to an old genre and then tipped the genre on its head to make something fresh and new. In short, it's about a stunt driver who gets up to dirty deeds in his "death proof" stunt car. I won't give away too much because it took my by surprise in several ways and I don't want it to be ruined when you see it. (Note my use of the word "when" rather than "if" - you have to see this movie.) I don't think I've ever clapped so enthusiastically after a movie - in fact, I'm pretty damn sure I've never clapped after a movie. FILMSOC are true connoisseurs of cinema.

Unfortunately, there's a lot of people in this world who miss the point of everything, and as a result Grindhouse has been a flop at the US box offices. I guess people don't like seeing two films for the price of one? So in Australia (and much of the rest of the globe from what I gather) it's being released as two separate films, thus ruining the whole point. The copy I saw was a bootleg, which is sadly the only way anyone in Australia is going to see it in its true form. That is, until it gets released on DVD. I expect that Grindhouse is going to become a true cult movie, enjoyed in home or university theatres by small groups of film enthusiasts, just like I was part of tonight.