Trainers Curse the Idea of a Curse
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It has not been a good week for sports curses, and the eight trainers of starters in the Breeders' Cup Juvenile hope the gods will soon strike down another hex.
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Forget about the Curse and all that nonsense. The real ongoing issue with the Boston Red Sox is the fact that they are eternally held hostage by what we shall call &quot;Gilda's Law.&quot; (OK, Roseanne Roseannadanna's.)
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FoTW Inability to follow a story by reason of anger, part 73
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It sure sounded like an insult. A dismissive dig, at least. The sort of thing Gilbert Arenas loves to hear so he can store it away for extra motivation.
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Some like to compete, but group training isn't for everyone.
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Gabe: Well we had ourping pongmatch with Sucker Punch last Friday and I must say things did not go well for us. The Sucker Punch Rockets lived up to their studio's name and left us with a big old purple shiner. Already there is talk here in the office that our glorious victory march through the game industry is now looking more like a trail of tears.
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Congratulations, BoSox fans. Your time has arrived. The Curse has been broken once and for all. No longer will you be taunted by obnoxious Yankees fans waving signs that read only &quot;1918.
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You know things are bleak when the trainer has to call off practice. Yet that is what happened after the Celtics' 111-80 loss to the Rockets last night. Two more players were injured in the game. A third was sore. And trainer Ed Lacerte told coach Doc Rivers not only to call off practice today, but to keep all players ...
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Tycho:  When I started reading articles about Senator Brownback's bill - the one that would require that the ESRB play through games in their entirety - I expected to agree with it in principle, but take issue with its execution.  The shrill phase of the site, where I would don armor and ride under the aegis of the true gamer no matter how mild the incentive, now rests in the reliquary with Xbox Controller Jokes and Jabs At User Friendly.  I had chosen a singularly poor moment to become reasonable.  Upon further examination, the Senator's plan (which I think may be rightly called a machination) is the sort of thing one might forge in the fires of Mount Doom.
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Tycho:  I'm super depressed.  I thought I had invented a new word - mirthquake - and then I was going to say that you should prepare yourselves for the aforementioned, as today's comic strip was rated this or that number on the rictus scale.  I mean seriously, I've been excited all weekend.  A simple Google search put me in my place - the word is practically ubiquitous.  Expect it soon on Urban Dictionary, that mausoleum of once vibrant language.
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Gabe: So the big news today, in the world of web comics at least is that PvP is getting itself animated. Scott posted the news along with a little teaser over on his site. He"s actually writing the entire thing with the help of Kris Straub. I was a big fan of the old Blamimations they did together and I"ve told them both whenever possible that they needed to collaborate more. I make jokes when I"m uncomfortable and it just so happens I have issues with anxiety so I"m essentially uncomfortable all day. That means I spend a lot of my time making jokes. When Scott and Kris were up here visiting I hardly said a word. They"re just too funny and they"re always on. You just can"t compete with them, all you can do is laugh.
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Tycho:  I should have all the science lined up by the end of the week, ready to stuff into the piano black lozenge I've obtained to celebrate my return to personal computing.  Wish me luck; I've never before had the opportunity to fry four processors at once.       I know things.  Specifically, things that may be of interest to you.  For example, I know if playing Eye of Judgment online is an onerous as it might seem.  It is not!  I cannot express my relief.    Well, let's try.  In my last, vast expose, I broke down a card's unique language and expressed some misgivings about online play - ultimately just accepting it, because what they're trying to do is so weird that there's no prior art.  Essentially, you "register" your thirty card deck with the system itself, where it is stored and named for future use.  This process is extremely straightforward:  it is simply a matter of you laying your cards anywhere on the mat, a few at a time.  It will probably take two minutes if you really keep on it.  Then, you jump online, choose what nation you want to play for, and track down a partner.  At this point, the game will "draw" you your five card hand by showing you the card art onscreen.  You get one Mulligan (or redraw), but if you like your hand you move into the game proper.  We laid out our deck by element, face up, and this smoothed the turn to turn process considerably.      In the build we have, and I hope this is changed for release, it shows you these cards in a single file line without their name or text - just the art.  Once you got familiar with these images, slightly modified from their card format, it's pretty quick - but the names should be displayed on this screen.  You can use the controller to pull up the names, but let's be serious - at no point should the player be forced to interact with a mundane controller once the game is underway.     You should know that the game really wants a well-lit environment.  You don't need a flare gun or anything, but we didn't have what we needed before and certain squares would slow down the game flow with partial reads that would only resolve after several attempts and minute card adjustments.  I should state that here in the office, we removed all the overhead lights, installing a single track of illumination that we point at the ceiling, where lights used to be.  We tend to transform any place we live into a cave.  So, our scenario might be somewhat atypical.    Also, I know if playing Rock Band with all the instruments off of a USB hub is onerous.  You will be happy to know that it is not - we played said instruments spread out on an actual stage, and found it more than satifactory.  The reality is that the drum kit already needs its own wire, so it isn't as though the future had actually arrived anyway.  Plus, the mic isn't wireless either. This makes the contrived brouhaha over wired guitars a fairly transparent traffic ploy.    This is a matter quite apart from Microsoft's reticence to play ball with unique, third party hardware.  And when I say "play ball," I'm taking about the shakedown operation they've got going licensing their wireless technology, which either makes products for their system more expensive or (in the salient case of Rock Band) results in them bundling a wired controller for the same price as a wireless one on a competitor's system.  This is the last holiday they can get away with this sort of thing...  right?
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Those the gods wish to destroy, they first make really dumb
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Tycho: Keek directed me to a radical (and potentially even "badical") article on BioShock over at Gamers Wif Jobs. I've been wondering about the recent PR shift the game has gone through, because I don't just keep hearing that it is a "shooter first," but I keep hearing specifically that it is a "kick-ass shooter," even though it's a game where you learn about Objectivism underwater while helping jealous composers get revenge. I've never doubted that the game will be great, by whatever road it reaches that greatness. The recent WWE slant just had me curious about whether I'll be able to perform a suplex in-game. You may not think that is important, but it is totally important.(CW)TB
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Tycho:   The foe revealed, Armadeaddon is now almost complete.  Monday will see the promised epilogue, so at this point you have very nearly survived the ordeal.  We have endeavored these past weeks to reward the true "enthusiast," that man or woman who, brow heavy, has faced such cruel abuse at our hand for the last seven years.  It is apparently our policy to honor such dedication one every decade.    Since it was announced a couple days ago, the revelation that MS would be actively courting the hardcore boardgame player is something I've thought about almost constantly.  It may be that you weren't aware there was such a thing as a hardcore player of boardgames if your last experience with the context was playing Sorry! with your sister when you were eight.  Things have progressed.   There's a million experiences in this space I could use to lure you in, but one company in particular - Days of Wonder has already decided to make electronic variants of their tabletop crack, so they occupy a twilight space between the worlds.  I hope they see an opportunity to take their (already completed!) games over to the 360, or that Microsoft offers them a locked case containing an unspecified amount of untraceable U.S. Currency, because I'd love to see this prescient move by MS turn into a new era.   Days of Wonder makes a game called Shadows Over Camelot that could quickly become a dangerous obsession, obscuring biological realities with a single-minded focus on grails.  Well, grail I guess.  There's just the one.    But it's a completely cooperative boardgame, so every player is working toward the same goals - fighting back invasions, questing, all of it.  Except there might be a traitor in the group, determined by a hidden draw, who tries to derail the effort.  He's not always there, but the potentiality of that nefarious force can create unbelievable social tension.    The gaming table's fixed coordinate in space is its asset and its obstacle - managing space and time is actually the primary challenge of any gaming group, as opposed to banishing necromancers, though that also ranks up there.  Boardgames are so rich in design that, when one of these gets dropped in front of them on Live, I think many gamers will be shocked at their sophistication.    My thumbs hurt.  (CW)TB out.
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It is an all-for-one, one-for-all game if ever one existed. The complexity, the speed, the violence all dictate that, and even those who practice the team concept fervently sometimes find it isn&#39;t good enough.
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Tycho:  Mario Hoops 3-on-3 is impressive in many ways, as I've suggested: certainly as a technical showcase, it's nice to have in your bag.  As a catalogue of Japanese aggression toward gamers, it's clear now that future generations will refer to these advanced cups as a deeply scandalous exhibit.  I have seen a Goddamn ninja weave a dark circle, disappear with a burst of leaves in some strictly Hattori Hanzo type shit, and then phase back into the physical plane to haunt our mortal hoops.