It's Dai Time

Katie & Scott & Simon & Cecily.

Category: year26 (Page 69 of 92)

I posted an entry each day during my 26th year of life.

Day 93: what you don’t want to hear at a buffet

May 15, 2009 / / 0 Comments

One time, Katie and I went to Chinese buffet.  After we walked in the door, we waited for a few minutes and no one seated us.

We started to look around at the buffet itself, to get an idea of what food was there.  Suddenly, a few Chinese people appeared from the back, where the kitchen was, and started shouting at us.  They told us, in no uncertain terms, that they were out of food and to leave.

It was a bizarre experience.  A buffet, out of food?  If you can’t count on a buffet having an unlimited supply of food in this world, what can you count on?

Day 92: gametap, or how to ruin a good thing

May 14, 2009 / / 0 Comments

I used to love GameTap.  A few months ago, I would have heartily recommended it to friends and family.  Shelling out a mere $60 a year in order to play a huge assortment of retro games, along with a growing library of modern PC games?  A single entry fee in order to try out games I’m interested in but might never actually buy (e.g. Far Cry, the new Tomb Raiders, Sherlock Holmes: The Awakened)?  Count me in!

Then, the incident happened.

Metaboli acquired GameTap.  That, in and of itself, was not a bad thing.  Metaboli had infrastructure in Europe and with the acquisition came the possibility of an even greater games library with the two services merging.

But a mistake was made – a big mistake.  Prior to approximately a month and a half ago, GameTap had a desktop client.  You downloaded and launched games from within the client, which (for me) always worked flawlessly.  The client also allowed for the setting of such things as subaccounts, where games were stored, and the setting of a variety of playlists (favorites, RTSs I like, etc).

When Metaboli took over GameTap, they forced the desktop client out of existence and instituted a web-based plugin instead.  My guess is that this was to streamline operations; Metaboli’s European market was already using a browser plugin and supporting the old GameTap client must have seemed like a waste of money.

But the first few months of the web-based plugin have been disastrous.  GameTap’s forum have been blazing since the transition and, a little insultingly, the GameTap site now has “BETA” emblazoned on the front of it.  It feels a bit like subscribers got the shaft.  Sure, people who just want to play games for free have a slightly easier initial experience, with no client to download.  But those of us that pay money to access the entire catalog?  We have to deal with a buggy web plugin that deleted our old save games, refuses to download new games half the time, and sometimes (for seemingly no reproducible reason) will refuse to load.  Additionally, the browser plugin has lost several features that the desktop client had, including fullscreen play of old console games, which are now forced into a tiny flash window in your browser.

I still like the games that GameTap offers.  I still like the intention behind the service.  But the transition from desktop client to browser-based plugin has been infuriating.  For a good several weeks of my paid subscription, I was unable to reliably play games.  I am still wary about accessing the website; every day is a coin flip on whether or not I’ll be able to access my old saves or download new games.

I mentioned to Katie yesterday that I might cancel my subscription.  But because I have the yearly package, that doesn’t expire until March of next year.  Maybe, by then, GameTap will have finally sorted through this debacle.

Currently, though, I could not honestly recommend the service to anyone, which is a shame.

Day 91: why blinds suck

May 13, 2009 / / 0 Comments

Not blind people.  That’d be insensitive.

I mean the window coverings.

Blinds suck.  They do.  They are the jack of many trades, king of none.  Let’s break down what blinds are supposed to do.  Blinds are supposed to keep the sun out when you don’t want it and to let the sun in when you do.  They’re supposed to be able to be removed temporarily (putting them up).

Overall, though, blinds do a terrible job at all of this.  Most blinds can’t close completely when you want to keep the sun out – curtains do a far superior job.  Blinds have little holes along the side that always let the sun in, and usually has tiny slivers between the blinds that allow a striped pattern of annoying sunlight in.

Blinds also do a poor job of letting sunlight in.  If you don’t put them up completely, there will always be blinds in the way of the actual sunlight.  If you do put them up, you have to deal with a different wire that, well, doesn’t really work half the time.  Because, in some kind of total user experience failure, the wire both makes the blinds go up and down, as well as make it stop moving, depending on the angle.

And they break all the time.  Blinds get bent, wires get tangled, and the rotation rod sometimes falls off.  Any of these happening causes either the entire window of blinds or a large portion of it to be rendered useless.

How have we put a man on the moon but not come up with a better way to cover our windows?  Get on it, top scientists!

Day 90: games i like vs games i’m supposed to like

May 12, 2009 / / 0 Comments

There’s a certain type of video game that you’re supposed to like.  It’s the game that has a big marketing budget, gets great preview articles, and scores above 90 on Metacritic with dozens of reviews.

It’s the game that wins Game of the Year awards from a variety of websites and magazines.  It’s the rare game that people you know actually preorder.  You know the type: games like GTA IV, Fallout 3, LittleBigPlanet, Bioshock, Super Mario Galaxy.  The games that mainstream press fawn over.

But…do I actually like those games?  I’ve played all of the games on the list above, and I wouldn’t necessarily list any of them as my favorite games.  Is it because they have so much expectation baggaged with them?  Is it because games that fall into this paradigm end up being somewhat formulaic?  In other words, do only certain types of games become media darlings?

Then, there are the games that I actually really like.  I’m pretty that list is different for every person.  Those games rely so much on the circumstances of discovery and the experience you had the first time you played them that it’s hard to imagine one conclusive list.  Factor in people’s individual tastes and the spread of possible favorite games grows larger.

Of course, most games that I like are on certain lists of games that I’m supposed to like.  Portal, Ico, Meteos – they all got decent reviews and a good amount of press.  It’s less confusing to understand that games I thoroughly enjoy are also well-reviewed critical successes.

But why are certain really well-reviewed blockbuster games so disappointing?  How can I dislike a game that has a 98 Metacritic?  This is where game reviewing fails, in my eyes.  What reviewers are collectively telling me with a 98 Metacritic game is this: if you don’t enjoy this game, there’s something wrong with your tastes.

That can’t be true.  Certain games are just not for certain people, but it’s hard to make that judgment when something receives such widespread praise.  People who don’t enjoy urban open world violent games aren’t going to be converted by GTA IV.  Dislike large-scale RPGs with lots of resource management?  The thematic pull of Fallout 3 isn’t going to change your mind.

And it makes it even harder to disagree publicly.  I can state that I didn’t really get into GTA IV (that it felt like every other GTA game I’d ever played, to be perfectly frank) and that I find the amount of world in Fallout 3 overwhelming but the actual gameplay underwhelming.  But the reviews aren’t there to back me up, and that’s a scary place to be.  I must the outlier, right?  The one person in a thousand that would think such garbage.

Maybe.  But I don’t think that’s true.  I think there’s more of us out here for each well-reviewed game than you might think.  Maybe it’s the way that certain games get reviewed that’s actually broken, and not us.

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