Stuff St. Louisans Like

Oi there, cats and jammerz. I've been asked to contribute to a friends local-interest blog: Stuff St. Louisans Like. My first post (about the City Museum) went live a few days ago, in all its semi-colon-abusing glory.

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Oscar Reactions

So I actually picked the winner. Sort of. I wanted it to win, I just didn't think it would.

Am I talking about The Hurt Locker? Of course not, I was sure Avatar would win. I'm talking about the winner for Best Animated Short Film: Logorama.

Watch it at Cinematical. Like, now.

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Open The Mac Valve For More Steam!

Right now there are only two software companies whose announcements I can really get excited about: Google and Valve.

Google's code is immaculate, their products are ubiquitous. Which is not to say that they haven't made a few missteps, but whether you like them or not, they've made your internet experience better. It's called the Wal-Mart effect: a few stingy shoppers harangue Wal-Mart to keep their prices low, but you get the benefit of their labors just by shopping there. In this case, Google reinvented e-mail with gmail, and it was so successful that Yahoo! and Hotmail copied them--hence, you get more storage on your Hotmail account. Or there's Chrome, Google's web-browser, which beat the pants off of IE and Firefox in speed tests. Microsoft and Mozilla stepped up their game in response, and you get the benefit of a faster browsing experience no matter which browser you use!

Also, they do something with search engines, I forget what exactly.

Now take a look at Valve. Yes, I've been wigging out over Portal 2 news and gushing over Half-Life, and I'd hoped to leave it at that. And then yesterday Valve announced that their distribution client, their gaming engine, and their entire catalog would be coming to Mac this spring.*

With all the platform wars going on, Valve decided the best way to do things was to open the field to more players. You know the Soul Caliber series of tournament fighters? In the last two numbered installments, the game had a difference "bonus" character for each platform. In Soul Caliber IV, for instance, XBOX 360 owners could play as Yoda, while PS3 owners could play as Darth Vader. If you want to play as both... well, you have to buy two versions of the game. It was new, it was innovative, it was downright dickish.

If you read the press-release from Valve (same link as above) regarding Steam-for-Mac, they say over and over that from now on, all their releases will be simultaneous for Mac, Windows, and XBOX 360. Games will run on native code, not emulation. They will be simultaneous builds, not ports. Furthermore, if you own a copy of game for Windows, you automatically get a license for Mac at no additional charge. In short, they've decided to take "gaming" away from Microsoft, and they've made pretty clear that the Mac version will not be some ugly younger sister, but will get the same treatment.

This is pretty groundbreaking, and it's one of the reasons I've come to respect Valve so much. What does this mean for you? Well, probably nothing, unless you count the Wal-Mart effect. Since Valve is catering to Apple and has re-written their distribution client to be compatible, they're going to be encouraging other game developers to write for Mac. Which means other software developers will begin to follow suit. So, if you're a Mac-user, you'll have more software available and if you're a Windows user you'll be better able to interact with Mac users.

And the world slowly becomes a more open place.

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*to clarify: the Steam client distributes games that are not made by Valve, and obviously not all of those will be Mac-compatible, but everything Valve makes will be.

Do Two Half-Life's Make A Whole?

Well, Portal 2 has been officially announced for the holidays--this time Valve told us using a straight-forward news release rather than their recent viral malarky (but don't worry, the press release contained a hidden login for the BBS site that revealed a co-op mode). Details will be unveiled over the coming month, but for right now we know a few things: GLaDOS is back, Chell is probably back, there's a co-op mode, and the game will be a full-size release (Portal is relatively small, taking only a few hours to get through on the first go, and only costing $10-$20 depending on where you buy it).

All this Portal news has made me curious about the Half-Life series, since the two take place in the same universe. For the uninitiated, Half-Life takes place in the Black Mesa research facility, Portal takes place in the Aperture Science Enrichment Center, and according to the mythology of the games the two corporations are rivals. Supposedly Half-Life 2: Episode 2 finishes up on the Borealis, a ship owned by Aperture Science. So there is further speculation that Portal 2 will tie in to the as-yet-unreleased Half-Life 2: Episode 3 somehow.

This would be much more exciting if I had played the Half-Life games, which I haven't. I have them all--I picked up the original on a whim and got the sequels with The Orange Box. But they tend to make me a bit sea-sick--especially the first one. But, again, with all this Portal news, I decided to give it another go--I futzed with the settings to find something that would be less grating on my sense of equilibrium (and was successful: 2-1 mouse movement and a 4:3 screen ratio did the trick). So now I've gotten about a third of the way through the original.

And holy shit...

Valve's fingerprints are pretty easy to recognize. Their games are all first-person shooters with a highly-developed story that is told interactively (read as: no cut-scenes). There's usually a pretty dark sense of humor at play, and the games are designed with an eye towards subverting expectations and making sure that the damned thing is--if nothing else--fun. You come to expect this from them--but I really wasn't expecting so much from their debut release. Hell, Half-Life came out in 1998; the pinnacles of PC shooters at that time were Duke Nukem and Doom. The zenith of PC puzzlers at that time was Riven.

But it's all there in Half-Life--the jokes, the surprises (floors surprisingly dropping out from under you as you enter a room), the creepy bad-guys, the background action, all those things that really immerse in you a universe are there. And even if you aren't following the story, it's pretty easy to play the game--kill anything that attacks you, do what it takes to advance. Characters are easily identifiable, even at a distance. And for a "shooter", there's a surprisingly large emphasis on puzzling. Not hard to see why it was considered such a break-through when it came out. And while visually, it's a bit dated, I'm having tremendous fun playing it.

You know, now that it doesn't make me want to throw up.

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Boy, Does My Ashburn!

So, Republican State Senator Roy Ashburn, who has a pretty healthy track record of voting against gay rights, was pulled over for drunk driving the other day. Leaving a gay bar. With another dude.

If you've seen Kirby Dick's Outrage, you'll know that this sort of thing happens all the time in politics. Washington (and California as well, it seems) is a haven of closeted self-loathing homosexuals who grow up to be self-oppressing homosexuals. Schadenfreude aside, can we start treating these people as people already?

Of course, it wasn't until 1973 that homosexuality was declassified as a form of insanity. So, there's progress there, I guess.

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Gaming Soon 2: Eclectic Boogaloo

Valve have been busy.

In addition to the new Left 4 Dead 2 content coming this month, the Left 4 Dead content due out next month and a recent post to the Team Fortress 2 blog about the (final) forthcoming class update for the engineer, it looks like there've been some rumblings on the Portal 2 front as well.

On Monday, Valve released a somewhat cryptic update for Portal about having changed transmission frequencies. Since that update dropped, Portal is now sporting a new achievement that can be unlocked using radios that are now present throughout the game.

It gets weirder.

Each of the radios gives you some kind of audible signal when you move them to the right place in the level--four of them are Morse code that give the impression that GLaDOS is rebooting. The other 22 can be run through an SSTV program to generate numbered image files, all bearing the Aperture Science logo.

No, wait, it gets weirder.

The alphanumeric designations on the images, when run together into a single String, is an md5 hash for a phone number to a BBS dataline in Kirkland, Washington. The username and password for the BBS can be found in the Morse code messages, and from it you can retrieve (via telnet) some ASCII data streams that appear to be images of test chambers and memos from Cave Johnson, the fictional founder of Aperture Laboratories.

All of this brings me to my second point: the people at Valve are fucking insane.

Not nearly as insane, it seems, as the fans who've spent the last 48 hours decoding all of this and sharing their findings. Valve's managing director Gabe Newell is going to receive an award on the 11th of this month, and there's some speculation (reinforced by the fact that GLaDOS is in version 3.11) that he will use this opportunity to announce... something... be it Portal 2, Half-Life 2: Episode 3, The Orange Box 2, or something else in that vein.

And it seems to still be happening: yesterday another mysterious update dropped, this one labeled "Added valuable asset retrieval", and with it came a slightly changed ending to the game (don't worry, the song is intact). [SPOILER] Originally after defeating GLaDOS, you black out in the parking lot, but it's assumed that Chell escaped. Now, instead, a male robotic voice thanks you for assuming the party escort submission position and you are dragged backwards a short distance before the scene fades out.

So one thing's for sure, we've got a full-fledged alternate-reality-game going on here. This should be an interesting month. Between announcements, releases, and notes-and-ASCII-streams-generated-by-telnetting-into-a-BBS-(seriously-who-uses-that-anymore?)-whose-number-was-md5-encoded-in-image-files-which-were-encoded-as-audio-files-that-can-be-heard-so-as-to-unlock-a-brand-new-achievement-mysteriously-uploaded-on-Monday... we've got... well... um...

What was I saying?

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Released In Canada As "Kid, Eh?"

Topics are running a little thin right now, since I don't really feel qualified to talk about earthquakes. So today, Kurt talks again about the music that shaped his life.

Radiohead

Kid A

Full disclosure, this is not my favorite Radiohead album. I picked up Kid A on a lark during my... erm... sophomore year of college(?). I had actually gone to Wal-Mart with the intention of buying OK Computer, but they didn't have it and--not wanting to leave empty handed--I purchase this instead. I took it back to my room, I listened to it, I absorbed it, I didn't get it.

But I kinda wanted to hear it again.

Kid A is one of those records that dares you to hate it and then welcomes you back for seeing past its rough edges. It doesn't flirt, it doesn't tease; it simply is what it is and does what it does and if you can get on that wave, then it is nothing less than a warm blanket on a cold day.

I found this at a time when I was getting sick of rock-and-roll. I'd been firmly reared on alternative and grunge and classic rock. I worshipped at the altar of Van Halen and could recite the Tao of Nirvana from memory. But music had abandoned my heroes, slumming it with Brittney and SELECT * FROM BoyBands (code humor... sorry). And frankly even rock had grown dull. I needed something more fulfilling than the latest Green Day single.

Kid A delivered. It confused and enticed me with its blend of blips, beats, and brass. The closest thing to a pop song on the record is Idioteque, buried eight tracks deep--a song confident enough to go ten measures without anything but distorted drums. I listened to it over and over, and every time it seemed to make just a little bit more sense, to drive the knife a few millimeters deeper.

Kid A got under my skin and introduced me to a band that would become one of my most beloved. It's not my favorite Radiohead record, but it's the one that popped my cherry--and you never quite forget your first love.

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