September 2009

Dissidia: Final Fantasy
Submitted Sunday, September 27, 2009 - 1:07:11 AM by Klaitu

Apparently "Dissidia" means "crap" in another language.

I am an unabashed Final Fantasy fan.. though I feel the series has taken a downturn in recent years. I was very, very disappointed with this game.

Dissidia is an attempt to make a Final Fantasy fighting game, something akin to Super Smash Bros is for Nintendo's characters. It doesn't succeed very well.

For a Final Fantasy game you might expect some story.. and I don't know if it's the translation, but there are loads and loads of complete nonsense cutscenes. Here's an example:

Cloud: I just want to know why we are fighting.
(the reason why he is fighting was explained earlier)
Tidus: Why we're fighting? Gee I guess I never really thought about it before.
Bartz: I'm fighting because I like flowers.

The entire freaking game is nonsense like this. It makes even less sense than Soul Calibur if you can believe it.

So, with no story, you'd think the game would deliver on the gameplay front, right? Well.. sort of.

This isn't a fighting game in the sense that Soul Calibur is a fighting game.. it's more like Virtual On or something like that. Instead of the right-left configuration, there's a foreground background configuration. Your opponent is always very far away from you, killing you, or offscreen. I've been through battles where I was not entirely sure who I was fighting.. and in a game that was made purely because of the "cool nostalgia factor" you'd think seeing the enemy would be a big deal.

Another problem the game has is the arenas. There might be a map with a castle tower on it, and you're on the top of the tower, and your opponent is on the bottom, and he will just sit down there until you decide to come down. Of course, when you come down he completely destroys you.. which brings me to my next point:

Dissidia is hosed down with a generous portion of Japanese fighter juice. You know, that's the juice that makes sure the person who hits first always wins because you will be juggled in the air until you die, with no way to block or counter or anything of the sort.

The other aspects of the game are your standard square job. nice PS2-like graphics and a remixed soundtrack of all those old battle songs give the game a nice feel... until Sephiroth kills you with a combo that takes nearly 45 seconds to complete.. and of course, he hit you with that combo 0.4 seconds after the match started... and on top of that, while he can hit you 1 time and you die, you have to hit him nearly 30 times.

And I freaking played the game on casual mode!

Nostalgia factor does not excuse the poor gameplay. This would have been better served as a $5 download on the Playstation Store on the PS3 instead, where you could maybe make out your opponent.

Overall Score: 4 of 10
Quality Rating: 5 of 5
Pass on it.

and yes, that score is lower than Dirge or Cerberus. At least I could see what I was doing in that game.


Science Saturday: Mysterious Star
Submitted Saturday, September 26, 2009 - 7:56:26 PM by Klaitu

Nobody knows how long people have been looking at the sky and studying it, but it's been a long time. Speaking of time, the stars are where our concept of time comes from, when humans first calculated the length of the day and the month, and eventually the year.


On May 1, 1006 something out of the ordinary happened. A new star appeared in the sky, a star so bright that it's the brightest star in all of human history. People of the period from Japan to Switzerland wrote about it, but everyone saw it. It would have been impossible to miss, even to cultures in North and South America.

In fact, the depiction of the star on the rock in this photo was recovered in Arizona.

It was so big in the sky that it appeared to be 3 times the size of Venus, and it was so bright that it created shadows, even in the darkest of nights. Ancient Egyptian astronomers estimated that it was nearly 1/4 the brightness of the full moon.

The new star stayed visible in the night sky for about 3 months, and then it dimmed out. Shortly thereafter it returned, though not as bright, and shone in the sky for another 18 months.

The tale of the mysterious star lasted throughout the ages, existing as legend, or folklore. The people of the time had interpreted the star as an omen or portent. In some places, the records survived.

Some 959 years later in 1965, two astronomers were working on a project with radio telescopes and they stumbled across some strange, gaseous clouds near where they were searching for their project.

Astronomers noticed that the gaseous cloud was enormous, and it was expanding. Since they knew how fast it was expanding, they were able to figure out exactly where it came from.. and when that expansion started.

As it turns out, the Mysterious Star in the year 1006 was a Supernova, and not just any supernova, but they witnessed the brightest thing to ever appear in the sky besides the sun and moon.. in all of history.



What you're looking at above is that Mysterious Star as it appears today, over 1000 years after the explosion that caused it to be so bright. This image was taken by the Chandra X-ray observatory, a satellite telescope not unlike the Hubble Space Telescope.

Today, we call it SN 1006. It's 7500 light years away, and as a consequence this means that it actually exploded in 6495 BC and it took 7500 years for the light from the explosion to reach earth.

so there you are, a 1000 year old mystery solved.. by SCIENCE!


Science Saturday
Submitted Saturday, September 26, 2009 - 6:57:35 PM by Klaitu

You know, I'm going to try a new feature here at Special K: Science Saturday. Each Saturday, I'll totally go Bill Nye and show you readers some fascinating but obscure aspect of science.

Stay tuned for it!


G20 Protests
Submitted Friday, September 25, 2009 - 4:00:06 PM by Klaitu

I've said many times before that I don't really watch the news, and I especially don't watch political news. I do, however, keep up with technology news.

So, I came across a report about an LRAD being used against G20 protesters. The LRAD is a long range directed sound energy weapon which causes severe pain to people within 900 feet of it.

I got intrigued, and not just by the prospect of the effective use of high tech nonlethal crowd control weaponry.

What do you know about the G20? All I knew was that it's some kinda financial UN from the top 20 economies of the world. Turns out they're concerned about this whole global economy downturn thing and working on ways on improving the situation, and trying to make sure it doesn't happen again.

So, what exactly are people protesting so fervently that they've been zapped by sound beams? I was curious.. who protests against attempting to achieve worldwide economic stability?

I went on a search to find out.. and I didn't limit my search to this most recent meeting of the G20. I decided to check out the oppositon from all of the G20 meetings... and you know what? It was not as easy as you might think.

I found hundreds of articles and reports of various G20 protest groups being arrested, being tear gas bombed, being dispersed by armored vehicles... in some cases people even died. However, trying to uncover the "why" of the protests was proving to be much more difficult.

In an April meeting in London, the summit was opposed by the "March for Jobs, Justice and Climate" so I decided to start with them.

According to their website:

Even before the banking collapse, the world suffered poverty, inequality and the threat of climate chaos. The world has followed a financial model that has created an economy fuelled by ever-increasing debt, both financial and environmental.

Our future depends on creating an economy based on fair distribution of wealth, decent jobs for all and a low carbon future.


I don't entirely disagree with these people, but it's easy to create a statement full of buzz words. I'll go point by point.

The world will always "suffer poverty" simply by the fact that the world contains an entire spectrum of wealth, and someone will always be on the low end of that spectrum. If you change where the spectrum ends, you still don't change that it has a low end. If you try to share everything equally you get communism, which simply does not work.

Inequality is a load of garbage. If everyone were equal there would be no diversity, so how can you celebrate diversity and demand that everyone conform and be the same? Humans are not robots.

"The threat of climate chaos" is pretty ambiguous. I've talked about the myths surrounding climate change before, but let's set that aside. Take a look at the new social campaigns.. "green technology" "clean fuels" and so forth. Why, just last night Jay Leno put Rush Limbaugh into an electric car on national TV. Enviornmentalism has become hip, cool, and trendy. Things are looking up for tree-hugging hippies. Exactly what more do you want?

"A financial model fuelled by ever-increasing debt" is completely true. Rich gurus have been using debt to juggle all their financial balls.. but Rich people like money, and they assumed they could keep juggling indefinately making more and more money. Now that they've been proven wrong, they will be less likely to try it again. Actually, that's pretty much what the G20 summit is all about, keeping rich people rich (and by extension, everyone else).

"Fair distribution of wealth" Now come on. You have to know better than this. Who decides what's fair? Are you ever going to trust that this person has fairly distributed the wealth.. even if they actually did distribute it fairly? The idea of "distribution of wealth" is so alien to the actual reality of the universe that it can never work.

"Decent Jobs for All" What does this mean? The world will always need people who clean out toilets. Decent? no. Neccessary? Yes. You want a decent job? Go out and earn one like anyone else.

"A low carbon future" Again with the pseudoscience.. but setting that aside.. again, carbon-friendly technology is all the rage. What more do you want, people?

So, I can only conclude from these statements that these people are whiny people who believe they are entitled to be paid for doing nothing. Get in line pal, we all want to get paid for doing nothing, but very few of us are that lucky.

There was another protest group at the London meeting of the G20 who instigated something called the "G20 Meltdown" which featured (from what I can gather) a carnival and the four horsemen of the Apocalypse.. sounds like fun, right?

The goal of the Meltdown was to "overthrow capitalism". It seems like a big deal to think of capitalism as evil, but all capitalism does is create an economic situation where the people with the best products earn the most money. If you can't see why people should collect the results that they have earned, there is no hope for you.

Another group protesting the London event was a group called the "camp for climate change" and their big beef is with carbon emissions, in particular carbon credits.

I don't really agree with them, but if you're an anti-carbon enviornmentalist, and you're using carbon credits to remain "carbon neutral" I have zero respect for you, because you can't do without the technology that you preach against.

I still can't figure out why they are protesting against an economic summit about finance. The G20 people aren't twisting their evil moustaches saying "how many coal plants should we build today? MWAHAHA!" They're stroking their evil goatees saying "How can we work together so that we all get richer? MWAHAHA!"

As with the Tea Party protests.. and other protests throughout the ages, these look to be largely idiotic meetings of ignorant people who are unhappy, and want to express that unhappiness collectively.

Maybe it helps for them, maybe it's theraputic.. but it all makes me wonder, just exactly how useful are protests in enacting the changes that they so desperately seek?

I plan to do more research into this. Stay tuned.


Fringe
Submitted Thursday, September 24, 2009 - 5:25:39 PM by Klaitu

Imagine the X-Files without Mulder. Now Imagine that Scully is extremely boring and will believe anything anyone tells her. Now, add in Denethor from Lord of the Rings.

You've just created Fringe.

I got interested in Fringe because I read that Leonard Nimoy would be in it, and that the producers are the same staff that wrote the new Star Trek movie.

So, I gave Fringe a chance. I watched the first season, and at the end of the first season, I didn't care about any of the characters any more than I did on the first episode.. however I did often find myself being amazed at Denethor's acting talents.

JJ Abrams is a producer on Fringe, and strangely, Fringe begins with a mysterious plane accident.. and just like in LOST, this section of the show is complete BS. It's not even close to reality. The show just got worse from there.

My recommendation: pass.


Eastwick
Submitted Thursday, September 24, 2009 - 2:50:14 PM by Klaitu

I think I just threw up in my mouth a little.

I watched the pilot of Eastwick because it stars Paul Gross, who you may remember as the mountie from Due South. In this show, it turns out that he is.. well, the devil or something.

Anyways, Eastwick is about 3 idiot women living in a town called Eastwick. They're witches, but they don't know they are witches.. and blah.

This show is unfit for human consumption.. a concept that has passed by ABC execs because it's had 3 seperate TV series based on the book of the same name, all of which failed.


Cougar Town
Submitted Thursday, September 24, 2009 - 2:47:47 PM by Klaitu

ABC has apparently turned their Wednesday nights into woman-centric shows, and Cougar Town is one of those.

Ordinarily I wouldn't consider watching a show like this, but it was produced by the guy who made Scrubs, so I gave it a shot.

The show stars Courteney Cox as a recently divorced older woman trying to hook up with the menz. It doesn't seem like it would be that appealing, but it was actually quite funny.

I've just seen the pilot, but it was good enough that I will watch episode 2 to see if the trend continues.


Survey says?
Submitted Thursday, September 24, 2009 - 12:36:57 PM by Klaitu

Recently in Australia, a study was conducted of 3000 women aged 18-50. The study was looking for a link between alcohol and relationships. You might find the results surprising.

Almost half of the group responded that they preferred to be drunk during sex, because it lowered their inhibitions and made them more adventurous.

The average woman in this survey has slept with 8 different men, 5 of them while drunk, 2 of those when they were so drunk that they couldn't remember the guy's name.

40% of the surveyed women were drunk when they lost their virginity.

75% preferred drinking before slipping under the covers with their husband or boyfriend.

14% refuse to sleep with their partner while sober.

6% of the women had never had sex while sober.

Over half of the women described imbibing alcohol as "part of the dating process".

The woman who commissioned the survey, Kathryn Lakeland, concluded from these results that women drink before sex because they lack confidence while sober.

I think it's interesting to see this kind of statistical data.. but I'm not sure that you can draw the conclusion that women lack confidence because they drink. There are hundreds of reasons why people drink, and with a group as large as 3000 people, it's likely the reasons would be quite varied.

In my experience, most women are insecure and they have an assorted means of coping with it. Most of them that I have met know on an intellectual level that this insecurity isn't real, and so they pack their feelings into a big box and sit on it.

Stories like this make me feel old and antiquated. I'm a guy, and if I'm in a relationship with a woman who has insecurities, I will try to face those insecurities with her. Getting a woman to face her insecurity is a bit like trying to put a cat into the bathtub. It's almost as if women have been conditioned against doing so, as if shoving their feelings away and ignoring them is the correct course of action.

Then again, that's probably the message that women have been getting from the masculine side of society.

Consider this: If you have to be drunk in order to enjoy yourself when you are with someone, is that reality, or are you just enjoying the effects of alcohol?


Typical Protesting Experience
Submitted Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - 8:46:30 PM by Klaitu

You may remember awhile back when I visited a Tea Party Protest in order to experience what political protests are like, and what they are all about. I talked a little bit about the ridiculous signs that the protesters were carrying.

Well, someone made a big collage of a lot of these signs, seen here for your amusement. For a big version that is easy to read, click the pic!



I particularly enjoyed "Respect Are Country, Speak English"


Overheard in Eve Online...
Submitted Wednesday, September 23, 2009 - 3:38:06 PM by Klaitu

iron-lester-dean: 120+ red fleet in vfk we need more ppl!!!
iron-virtuozzo: I'll impregnate some women
42-takeshi-nuwen: long term planning ftw


Marvel Ultimate Alliance 2
Submitted Monday, September 21, 2009 - 6:24:25 PM by Klaitu

The Ultimate Alliance franchise, and X-men Legends before it has suffered from some restrictive gameplay in the past.

Ultimate Alliance 2 has been developed by a different company, and so many of the problems that plagued Ultimate Alliance 1 and its predecessors have been fixed.

For instance, you can now swap characters at any time. Health and power potions are gone.

The result is the way that the original games should have been to start with. Collecting health potions is garbage, and thankfully they figured it out.

The character selection is not great, and they picked some odd characters like Iron Fist and Wonder Man to be in the game while passing up more awesomer characters like Rogue and Cyclops.

However, the characters they do have work well together, and each one brings something unique to the table (even if they do have similar gimmicks)

By far, the best in the Marvel 4 man RPG series. The game lasts for about 10 hours, and a second playthough is not out of the question due to a branching storyline.

The storyline is pretty interesting for half the game, and then it gets really lame at the end. The Final Boss is lame.

Overall Score: 7 of 10
Quality Rating: 3 of 5
Rent it


Christian Misunderstanding
Submitted Thursday, September 17, 2009 - 2:41:07 PM by Klaitu

In the interests of sharing a plethora of viewpoints, I decided to make a post regarding a simple and seemingly benign Facebook status update that sparked a religious debate. Hold onto your hats!

if evil rules this world..why are we unprepared to confront it. we are in enemy territory, right?


This sort of perspective is common among protestant Christians. I have heard messages many times from multiple pulpits that equate Christian morality into a more abstract, easier to understand war against good and evil.

It really gets the Christian men pumped up because in this analogy, they are spiritual warriors.. the good guys, and their enemy is clearly evil. In a lot of ways its like they're getting pumped up for a spiritual counterstrike match where "counter-terrorists win" always because God is on their side.

This sort of analogy is horrible flawed, and talking to "church people" about it usually results in them storming out of the room because they can't seem to accept anything other than what they have been taught by another person.

Here's a better analogy: Evil is like gravity. It's a natural force that exists in it's own. Even if you were to take yourself into outer space, your body would still be affected by gravity. In fact, your both generates its own miniscule gravitational force simply because it's composed of matter.

As a consequence of you being composed of matter, you will never be free of gravity no matter how hard you fight it. You will never destroy gravity, and you will never cease to be influenced by it.

Likewise, being a human being, you have a capacity for evil. The potential for evil is something that comes along for the ride in every single human. You can fight evil, but you will never destroy evil.. and you will live your entire life with that potential inside of you, no matter what.

Just because evil exists and you can't defeat it doesn't mean that you shouldn't resist evil. If we didn't resist gravity, we would merely be stuck to the surface of the Earth, never moving, going anywhere or doing anything. It's only when we fight against gravity that we are able to achieve our potential. The same is true for evil.

In Christian parlance, the power of God can give you enough energy to resist evil.. to put you in orbit as it were. The lnfluence of gravity is much less here, and you can do things that you could never do under normal gravity.. and yet, gravity is still there, exerting force on you. So will evil, it doesn't go away.

I've heard "Spiritual warfare" (that is the war of good vs evil for you non-christians) described in World War 2 terms. Christians are usually described as stalwart soldiers, fighting the good fight..

but if we really want to use the World War 2 analogy, Christians are like the 4H, who know a war is going on, but are incapable of fighting in it because they have a handicap which prevents them. They are good intentioned people who are powerless to influence the battle by their own hand. They must rely entirely upon Someone Else in order to survive.

For those of you Christians who have become offended now because I told you something other than what your pastor said, realize that the Bible supercedes your pastor. Read it, come up with your own analogy, and I'll be glad to discuss it with you.


Overheard in Eve Online...
Submitted Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - 11:23:21 PM by Klaitu

Vilnius Schtage > Heath Ledger you're alive!
Heath Ledger > shhhh
Heath Ledger > I faked my death to get more playing time.


LittleBigPlanet
Submitted Wednesday, September 16, 2009 - 3:58:12 PM by Klaitu

My next gamefly choice was LittleBigPlanet, the heavy impact game of last year. By now, you've probably already seen videos of it.

What you see is what you get, LBP is a very creative, very collaborative platformer. The game is highly polished, so if you like platformers, here's a good one to play.

If you have children, they will no doubt love it.

Myself, I get bored easily with repetitive gameplay and so this game was not a good value to me.

Overall Score: 5 of 10
Quality Rating: 5 of 5
Pass on it


On The Education of Children
Submitted Tuesday, September 15, 2009 - 10:08:36 AM by Klaitu

This is an interesting topic for me because as a younger child in the elementary years, I was not properly educated.

I recently scoped this story out on the interwebs:

A New Hampshire woman who has home-schooled her 10-year-old daughter misrepresents her case by arguing that a judge's decision ordering the girl to attend public school “will trip several hot wires in a field full of constitutional landmines.”

Brenda Voydatch has battled her ex-husband, Martin Kurowski, over the education of their daughter Amanda since she began home-schooling her in first grade. Last month, a Laconia (N.H.) family court judge adopted a marital master's recommendation that it would be in the girl's best interests to go to public school in the 2009-10 academic year.

“[T]he Court is guided ... by the premise that a child requires academic, social, cultural, and physical interaction with a variety of experiences, people, concepts, and surroundings in order to grow into an adult who can make intelligent decisions about how to achieve a productive and satisfying life,” the master, Michael Garner, said in his order.

Kurowski had testified that “exposure to other points of view will decrease Amanda's rigid adherence to her mother's religious beliefs.”

Granted, this comes from a nobody blog, and so it may or may not be accurate, but the basic question of the story remains.

I haven't been to public school in some 17 years. The philosophy at the time was to cram as many people as possible into a class so that the school didn't have to pay for so many teachers.

The basic instruction we got was the teacher putting pages up on the blackboard and then either leaving the classroom entirely, or sitting down at their desk to grade papers. If you had a question, the teacher would point to the instructions in the text book and then go back and sit down.

On average, we were assigned 120 math problems a day, presumably in an attempt to keep us busy.. not that it mattered, I couldn't even figure out the first one, and I couldn't get the teacher to help me.. so I just stopped doing any work in that class and did homework that I had for other classes.

The assignments for each day were graded, and I failed to even turn in a paper except in rare instances. Nobody even bothered to ask me where my paper was. On tests, I would just fill in random dots on the scantron.

You would expect a string of 0 scores would be a negative impact on your grade, but somehow I was passed to the next grade despite my score in the class being below 20% at the end of the year.

Granted, not all of my classes were like this. In some classes the teachers were really helpful, and in other classes (notably Earth Science and Civics) the teacher pushed their own agenda onto you.

All this is to say that I can understand a desire for parents to keep their kids at home and home school them, because the public school system is completely and utterly hosed.

On the other hand, unless you are a trained and qualified teacher in all the subjects that you intend to teach your child, you're also doing them a disservice. Whereas the public school may be lazy and not doing what it should, you as a parent are not educating your kids to their fullest simply because you are not qualified to do so. This is especially true for the specialized high school courses like Chemistry and Calculus. Most parents can't remember the first thing about either of these subjects because they are rarely practiced in real life.

Many parents who homeschool their children tell themselves that they will just read ahead and re-learn all the stuff on their own before their kids. Problem is, your kid will learn faster than you just because his mind is younger.

Private schools offer another option. They're not so large as a public school, and since your parents are paying the school, the school has a motivation to obey your parents wishes. Private schools generally pay teachers better, and so their teachers are usually less apt to phone it in.

The flip side is that private schools are not standardized, and could easily be worse than a public school if you're not careful. You potentially run a gamble on your kids future using them.

That year that I bombed my math class in public school was evidence to my parents that the public schools were completely jacked, and so they put me into a Christian School. It wasn't the most open learning enviornment in the universe, but the people there managed to catch me up on 7 years worth of work in only 5 years.. and let's face it, when I was that age I was unwilling to cooperate.. so they did it pretty much without my giving them any slack.

With a Christian school, (or likely any religious school) there's another factor you've got to figure out. Now you're introducing religion into your education.. does the school believe the same way that you do? Do you want your child taught about the Bible by someone you don't know all that well? These questions send a lot of parents right back to home schooling.

The Christian School I went to was Baptist. There are many subdivisions of Baptists and I don't know which one they were, but I would describe them as "extremists". They were the kind of people who believe that men and women shouldn't swim in the same swimming pool at the same time. They questioned wether Jesus turned the water into wine, because wine is alcohol, and alcohol is "evil".

I don't know that they attempted to "indoctrinate" me with their beliefs.. if they did it was a soft sell. What they did teach me was a lot about not just reading the Bible, but devouring it and then applying it to your life. They taught me to see complex issues from multiple perspectives. A skill that I have come to learn is quite rare, even among the most educated of Americans.

I've talked to a lot of people over the years about how they were educated. Branwen went to public school in Michigan, where her teachers apparently cared and actually educated their children. She's one of the smartest people I know, so I can only assume they did a good job. Each person's experience is probably more varied than the last.

So, what does this mean for the New Hampshire mother and the court ruling? Forcing someone into public school probably violates some kind of law somewhere, but aside from the legal implications, the move will probably net the kid a better education than home schooling (assuming the mom is not a trained educator). In the end, however, all this does is change who the kid blames for her dissatisfaction with life.

Should a parent be able to choose where their kid is educated? Obviously.. but remember that the father and the mother disagree, and it was the father's choice for public school. The court was merely the tiebreaker.. and considering that the court can only look at evidence, and the public school has a lot of evidence that it is good at educating,a nd the mom has no evidence that she is good at educating, the school will win every time.

And so ends this long and winded rant about education. I didn't even get on the topic of the lameness of testing, I'll save that for another time.


Star Wars Galaxies Failure Cascade Begins
Submitted Tuesday, September 15, 2009 - 8:24:09 AM by Klaitu

I just got this note in the mail:

Due to the overwhelming success of the recent Free Character Transfer Service, we want to inform you that on October 15, 2009, at 5:00 PM PT, Sony Online Entertainment (SOE) will close the following 12 Star Wars Galaxies servers:


MMO games only start server consolidation when they are trying to cut costs. SWG hasn't released an expansion since 2004, and its members are draining slowly. This is sad news considering it's direct predecessor, Ultima Online, nas not undergone server consolidation despite being nearly 4 or 5 years older.

I guess that's what you get when you stab your subscribers in the back.


Ace Combat 6
Submitted Saturday, September 12, 2009 - 7:47:16 AM by Klaitu

I picked up the Ace Combat series back with Ace Combat 5, which was an alright enough game for the playstation. This new Ace Combat is for the xbox 360, and it might as well be called "Ace Combat 5 HD" because it's pretty much identical.

Same planes. Same gameplay. The missions are a lot the same, but there is some variety here. The story makes more sense this time around, but is still pretty lame.

If you like flight simulator games, you would be hard pressed to get better than Ace Combat 6.. at least on consoles. The game doesn't do anything amazing, but what it does, it does well.

Overall Score: 7 of 10
Quality Rating: 5 of 5
Rent it


OMG Politics
Submitted Tuesday, September 8, 2009 - 3:50:24 PM by Klaitu

Today's OMG Politics blog post is about Health Care insurance reform. It's true that I am not a fan of politics and think they suck, but there's so much heat about it here where I live, that I decided to go and actually get some facts about Obama's Health Care reform plan.

One of the reasons that there is so much confusion over the issue is that there are multiple open bills in congress having to do with Health Care reform, and they attempt to reform health care in somewhat contradictory ways. On top of that, all of them are put forth by Democrats, so there's not really any party line divider like a Republican version and a Democrat version.

Here's the general premise that everyone is working under: there are people in the United States who do not have health care coverage, but should have health care coverage.

Who are these people, and what kind of coverage do they need? Does everyone have the same coverage? If people have different coverage, how is that determined? Who pays for it? These are just some of the questions that these bills try to address.

The first bill I'll take a crack it is "America's Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009" or HR 3200, which you can read the entire text of here: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:H.R.3200:

This bill is a classic example of politicians sucking. The bill is over 1000 pages long, and while some of it does deal with health care, a lot of it is just ridiculous. Among some of the ridiculousness in this bill:

- It gives the government complete and direct access to your bank account.

- People who are in the US, but are not US citizens have the same access to medical care as a citizen does, despite not having paid any of the taxes to make the system work. The bill does not differentiate between illegal aliens and legal ones.

- It requires that all medical doctors be paid identical wages, regardless of their specialty.

- The medical care that you receive will be decided by a government committee, you have no influence over this process.

- The government can pull medically compromised persons off of life support if the government committee says so.


I have no argument with the basic premise of helping more people get access to medical care, but at what point do we declare "too much"? Is it really neccessary to have the government come in and make medical decisions for everyone regardless of if they need help or not? Do we really need to make this health care system mandatory and not allow people to use private insurance?

This bill doesn't have a chance of passing anything if people actually read it.. and heck, I wouldn't blame them for not reading it seeing as how it's crazy long.

Another bill is called the "United States National Health Care Act or the Expanded and Improved Medicare for All Act" or HR 676 which you can read here: http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c111:H.R.676:

Unlike the other bill, this one actually pretty much does what it says.. it expands Medicare to pretty much everyone, but in the process it supplants private insurance forcing everyone to switch to government medical service.

I think the main problem with government health care services is that they don't want to JUST provide health care for people who need it. Politicians want to make money from this program, and some of them want the chance to achieve power by being the head of a government agency.

Personally, I think that we shouldn't even bother with the 70% of Americans who have their own private insurance. Why should the government pay for people who are doing just fine already?

I think the government should encourage foundations and charities that provide free or cheap health care to people who can't afford it.

I also think that when you make compassion into a law, it's not compassion anymore.

One fact that gets overlooked: the quality of American health care is unmatched anywhere else in the world. I think whatever plan we come up with should provide for people who otherwise can't get health care, but should also not compromise on the quality of the service provided.

How will things turn out? I guess we'll see.


New Ratings System!
Submitted Tuesday, September 8, 2009 - 8:35:51 AM by Klaitu

So, I've decided to implement a new ratings system here on Special K.

As you know, previously I gave a game an Overall Score based on how much I enjoyed the game. I'm going to keep doing that, but I'm also going to give games a quality rating of 1-5.

For instance, I gave Bioshock a mediocre 5 because I really didn't enjoy the game that much, but the game still possessed much more quality than most games. Whereas I didn't enjoy Bioshock that much, I can still appreciate the art design, sound design, and puzzle solving elements.

Along with the new quality ratings for games, I'll also start showing the Buy/Rent/TV/Pass recommendations for each review, movies and games alike.

So, yay for that.


Valkyria Chronicles
Submitted Sunday, September 6, 2009 - 2:56:43 PM by Klaitu

So, with my newly restarted gamefly subscription, I had to choose something to be number 1 on my list, and I chose Valkyria Chronicles by Sega.



It wasn't exactly what I was expecting, in fact it easily surpassed my expectations. If you look at the cover (as I did) this game could be about anything.

As it so happens, Valkyria Chronicles is what happens when you take World War 2 and hose it down with a generous helping of Japanese cliche. The results are more suprising than you might think.

Sega went and got all clever by throwing down secret code words for everything. It's not Europe, it's Europa. It's not Germany, it's "The Eastern Empire". It's not The Allies, it's "The Atlantic Federation".

But you know, they took it one step beyond. It's not "The Jews" it's "The Darksen". Yeah, Sega went ahead and put the Holocaust into their video game, except.. you know.. all anime and stuff.

So anyway, You play as Welkin Gunther, a naturalist who is conscripted by his small.. Europan country into being a Tank Commander in WW2.. or should I call it "Europan War 2"?

The gameplay is a strange cross between a FPS and Final Fantasy Tactics. Strategy is the name of the game here. You're able to move X amount of times before your turn ends, and the enemy turn begins. That's your standard fare.

The FPS part comes in because you are actually running the units around, aiming and so forth like a really simple FPS. The two mesh better than you might think.

Your squad consists of 20 different people spread across 6 different classes. This being an RPG, you're levelling up with XP, but in this game you just level the classes, and all characters in that class benefit.

As the game progresses, you'll get to know some of the members of your squad.. not through cutscenes, but by how they perform in battle. I'm suprised at the amount of detail put into characters whose function is to essentially be a chess piece. Cheracters can permanently die if you're not careful, and having a guy die that you've had since the beginning of the game can feel like a real loss.

I won't spoil the storyline for you here, but I also won't lie. It's not the most original story to come out of Japan. Guess what? Someone's got a destiny. Someone makes supposedly wise quotes about the futility of war.

Voice acting is pretty good here, it's got the guy who did Spike Spiegel in it. If you're one of "those people" the Japanese voices are also available.

The real draw of the game though, is the awesome art style of the graphics. They've got some kind of weird cell shading and coloring, so that everything looks like watercolor art. I've seen this attempted before, but this game pretty much knocked it out of the park. The game is absolutely stunning to look at.

This game comes close to being a true masterpiece, only the predictable plot holds it back.. though I have to give it some credit for killing off characters you care about permanently.

The game clocks in at around 40 hours.

Overall Score: 9 of 10

Here's a video of the intro screen:


Console Wars in Perspective
Submitted Thursday, September 3, 2009 - 7:17:22 AM by Klaitu

I've written about it before, so you readers probably know that we are currently enjoying the Seventh iteration of the Console Wars.. but these generations are purely an ideal of the latest and the greatest.. after all, you can at any point go and play games from a previous generation.

The lessons we can learn from the history of the console wars might suprise you.

Go ahead and guess, what was the best selling console of all time? I'll let you think about it a moment so you can get an idea of it...

Would you believe that the venerable Playstation 2 is the king of all consoles? So far it's sold over 138 million units since it was released all the way back in 2000.

It's all well and good to say a number like 138 million, but how many units is that?

If you combine the sales figures for the original Game Boy, and the Game Boy color, the Playstation 2 still wins. In fact, if you combine the Playstation 3, 360, and Wii their combined total is still some 25 million units short of matching the sales of Playstation 2.

Anyway, to help get a wider perspective on this whole "console war" thing, let's look at who won each bout.

Generation 1: Magnavox Odyssey vs Coleco Telstar

Have you ever heard of these before? You might not have, and that's okay, because the first generation of console gaming sucked.

The Magnavox Odyssey was primitive by any definition and was basically little more than a way to manipulate dots on a screen.

The Coleco Telstar wasn't much better. On it, you could only play Pong.

Few people bought these consoles, and if there was a winner, nobody knows or cares who it was because they both deserved to die a horrible, horrible death. Their only legacy was to provide a stepping stone to better consoles in future generations.

The Winner: None

Generation 2: Atari 2600 vs Intellivision

This is where things started getting interesting. It's also the generation in which I was born, so yay.

The Atari 2600 today is pretty symbolic of classic video game consoles. That joystick controller, those weird switches..

The Intellivision is equally strange with it's keypad and discus controllers, the Intellivision was actually the world's first 16 bit console (albeit primitive) and also had an add-on speech module to make the machine talk at you.

Atari 2600 Lifetime Units Sold: 30 million
Intellivision Lifetime Units Sold: 3 million

The Winner: Atari 2600

There is absolutely no question that the 2600 blew the Intellivision out of the water. It outsold the Intellivision by a factor of 10.

Of course, all was not roses for the second generation, for their console war ended with a devastating holocaust known as the "1983 video game collapse".

Generation 3: Nintendo Entertainment System vs Sega Master System

Most console generations end when a new "next generation" console is released, but that's not strictly true in this case.

You see, Atari and Intellivision weren't the only competitors in Generation 2, there were a half dozen other upstart companies that wanted to horn in on the market. Each company flooded the market with a wide variety of incredibly crappy video games, not the least of which was Atari.

At one point, Atari produced more cartridges for the game "E.T." than there were Atari consoles to play it on.

Consumers started turning off of video gaming, because the games were crap. The market was decimated, with all the Second Generation consoles being obliterated in this video game apocalypse.

From the ashes of destruction arose new life.. new life from Japan of all places.

The Nintendo Entertainment System is singlehandedly responsible for returning life to the dead video games industry. It came out in 1983, and by 1985 the industry was back on track.

Riding stealithly in Nintendo's wake was the Sega Master System, which had better technology inside (including the same 3d technology that is all the rage in theaters these days). Unfortunately, Nintendo had a ridiculous cadre of third party developers and was pretty much an unstoppable Juggernaut.

Nintendo Entertainment System Lifetime Sales: 61.91 million
Sega Master System Lifetime Sales: 13 million.

The Winner: Nintendo Entertainment System

Again, there really is no contest here, the NES was the clear winner.. but Sega came up with a clever and daring plan. They started the Fourth Generation early.

Generation 4: Sega Genesis vs Super Nintendo

Also referred to as the "16 bit Generation" it was kicked off by Sega when they produced the Genesis in 1988. Nintendo had no counter to this, and so for 2 years the Genesis completely dominated the 4th generation. The Genesis clearly was superior to the aging NES from Generation 3.

Though Nintendo may have not been imediately ready to combat Sega in Generation 4, they did eventually turn out the Super Nintendo Entertainment System, which started taking back territory with an impressive gusto.

In an attempt to counterattack, Sega started whipping out addons for the Genesis such as the Sega CD and 32x.

Super Nintendo Entertainment System Lifetime Sales: 49.1 million.
Sega Genesis Lifetime Sales: 38 million.

The Winner: Super Nintendo Entertainment System

While Sega didn't outperform Nintendo, they did make a serious foothold in terms of market share, and came much, much closer to Nintendo than it had in the previous generation.

It might be interesting to note that this is one of only two generations in which Nintendo's console was the most powerful in the generation.

Generation 5: Sega Saturn vs Sony Playstation vs Nintendo 64

This is the first generation with more than 2 serious contenders to the throne of video games.. and it's all Nintendo's fault.

You see, at one point, Nintendo planned to make a SNES-CD to combat the Sega CD. Like the Sega CD it would be an addon to their console, and Nintendo partnered with Sony in producing the experimental new disc technology to be used.

This had been in development for some time, with engineers trying to figure just exactly how to make a CD console viable. After several years of research, the project was almost ready to be viable.

Then, suddenly, Nintendo decided that they didn't want to partner with Sony anymore because their partnership contract gave a lot of control over the console to Sony. Nintendo turned it's back on Sony and announced it would start working with Phillips to make disc based games.

Sony was suddenly left with an almost working CD-based gaming technology, so they decided to go ahead and make their own console.

Meanwhile, Sega got the drop on everyone and released the Sega Saturn, the new Saturn console was powerful, and featured a CD drive and 32 bits of gaming pleasure. While the console could generate 3d images, it was mainly designed for higher resolution 2d games.

Since Nintendo shot themselves in the foot and had no viable console ideas, Sony got their Playstation to market within a month of Sega. The Playstation was technnically inferior to the Sega Saturn, but was much better at producing 3d Images. Sony also got cracking and picked up a lot of Nintendo's old Third Party developers, who didn't really have a platform to work on since Nintendo didn't have a console yet.

2 years later, Nintendo came back, hoping to slug it's way back to the top of the market like it did with the Genesis of the previous generation. They released the Nintendo 64, but they made it a cartridge system. While the Nintendo 64 was technically superior to both the Playstation and the Saturn, the lack of storage on cartridges severely limited what developers could do with the platform.

Sony Playstation Lifetime Sales: 102.49 million
Sega Saturn Lifetime Sales: 17 million
Nintendo 64 Lifetime Sales: 32.93 million

The Winner: Sony Playstation

The Sony Playstation completely dominated the generation with over 3 times the number of units as Nintendo.. a fact which no doubt burned Nintendo Executives, as all they had to do to clock in that score was to not turn their backs on Sony.

It became apparent to Sega that they had gotten double trounced on this generation, and so they went back to that old tried-and-true strategy that they used in Generation 3.. start the next generation before anyone else ie ready.

Generation 6: Sega Dreamcast vs Sony Playstation 2 vs Microsoft Xbox vs Nintendo Gamecube

Sega were succssful with their plan at first. They got a 2 year head start in Generation 6 before any of their competitors were able to get on the scene with their Sega Dreamcast.

The Dreamcast was respectable as a system, and still has a loyal fanbase even to this day. Unfortunately, the next company to join the generation was Sony with the Playstation 2.

There really wasn't any way that Sega was going to compete with the Playstation 2. Sony had its developers from the Playstation 1, it had the popularity of the playstation 1, and it had backwards compatibility with the playstation 1. The Playstation 2 also featured DVD playback capability, which was a definite contributing factor to it's success.

As a result, Sega closed up shop and discontinued the Dreamcast, pulling it out of the race early.

Meanwhile, Nintendo came out with the Gamecube, and was apparently still shy about the whole CD disc thing, because the gamecube discs were in a strange format that nobody else bothered with.

Then, from nowhere Microsoft entered the fray. Their Xbox was the first important domestic console since the Intellivision.. and being Microsoft, the Xbox was basically a minatureized PC.. but it was still enormous.

Playstation 2 Lifetime Sales: 138 million
Nintendo Gamecube Lifetime Sales: 21.74 million
Xbox Lifetime Sales: 24 million

The WInner: Sony Playstation 2

Again, Sony dominated the generation.. getting more than twice the sales of the other two consoles combined. Newcomer Microsoft managed to come out of nowhere and outperform old veteran Nintendo despite the Xbox having virtually no presence in Japan.

Interestingly enough, the Playstation 2 is still going strong and the little console is still being manufactured and sold in industrialized nations, while also being a big hit in low-income nations now that it's technology is dirt cheap.

For the next generation, Microsoft decided to take a page from Sega's old playbook, while Sony went with Nintendo's old approach.. and Nintendo just started to make stuff up and hoped nobody would notice.

Generation 7: Sony Playstation 3 vs Xbox 360 vs Nintendo Wii

This is the modern generation of gaming, which you can expect to last until 2012 or 2013.

Microsoft initiated this generation when it relased the Xbox 360 nearly a year before Sony or Nintendo were prepared to do so. They used their initial advantage to get a wide install base for 7th generation hardware. In turn, they used this install base and their virtually unlimited Microsoft bank account to make serious inroads into Sony's exclusive developers before Sony even got the Playstation 3 to the market.

Sony for their strategy was, as a company, more focussed on crushing the HD-DVD disc format by attaching blu-ray to the PS3.. a strategy that ultimately worked. The Playstation 3 had a lot of extra muscle under the hood, too. More than perhaps was immediately neccessary to combat the 360. The cost of PS3 production was high, and most consumers felt the price was too high.

Shortly after the Playstation 3 came along, Nintendo unleashed the Wii, a technically inferior console that is supposedly focussed more around "innovative gameplay" than cutting edge technology. The strange, easy to use wiimote controllers led to widespread media coverage of the console, and it benefitted from a widespread word-of-mouth campaign. The Wii drew massive consumer interest from markets which traditionally do not buy video game consoles, as the Wii is also billed as high tech exercise machine.

Xbox 360 present Lifetime sales: 30.2 million
Playstation 3 present Lifetime sales: 24.6 million
Nintendo Wii present Lifetime sales: 52.62 million

The Winner: Too Soon to call

While the Wii has a clear units sold advantage here, its sales have slowed considerably now that the console is actually available without a waiting list. The "new and innovative" gameplay has cemented people into pro-Wii or anti-Wii stances, and little headway exists for the Wii at the moment. Both of the more expensive consoles have begun to outsell the wii on a per month basis.

The Xbox 360 looks like the next best thing, and certainly, Microsoft has thrown every trick in the book at trying to scrape up market share for this generation. It's online features are unbeatable, and gaming technology has not progressed to the point where the 360's inferior graphics technology is an issue.

While in last place, the Playstation 3 can't be counted out yet. It came out a full year after the 360, and until recently cost at least $100 more than the 360.. and yet it is only 6 million units short of the 360. There's certainly time for the Playstation to fight it's way to the top once more. Perhaps the PS3's strongest advantages are its blu-ray player, and its dormant technology which has yet to be fully exploited.

In terms of predictions, I'm sticking with my original prediction that I made in 2006:

The Wii's "innovative controls" make it a bear to develop for, particularly when you're trying to put a game on all 3 systems. It's inferior graphics makes developers overlook the Wii as a desireable platform entirely. Even among gamers who support the Wii, the novelty of the motion controls wears off quickly, and most Wii owners find their console collects more dust than it does gameplay hours.

I originally predicted that the 360 would come in at a tepid number 2, outselling the Wii but not the PS3. I have to admit, I have found Microsoft's commitment to earning gamer cred to be impressive. In terms of effort, I think Microsoft is just phenomenal. They really turned around their abysmal performance with the original Xbox, and they are constantly trying to come up with every advantage they possibly can to stay on top. This is very good news for gamers.

I predicted that the Playstation 3 would take the lead, but it certainly hasn't done it in the way that I predicted. Honestly, I expected there to be more of a landslide than there was.. but there is still time, especially if Sony is ready to go toe-to-toe with Microsoft on pricing. I think that the engineers at Sony have invented an amazing console, but that the management team at Sony doesn't know exactly what it's audience wants. They may be closer to Japanese gamer's desires, but they're falling short in the western world.

If Sony suddenly inherited even half of the custo that the Microsoft team has shown, they'd have this generation won in a cinch, but as it is they've gone with more abstract strategies like using the PS3 to reduce the manufacturing price of Blu-ray diodes so that they can dominate the blu-ray player market.. these things are better for Sony than they are for Gamers.

Whatever happens, I think that this Console war is certainly among the best fought. Each faction still has a viable chance at the title, and the only thing that competition does is make things better for gamers.


Playstation 3 Firmware upgrade 3.00
Submitted Wednesday, September 2, 2009 - 3:24:34 AM by Klaitu

You all remember the last Xbox live update, entitled the "New Xbox 360 Experience"

Well, everyone is comparing this update to that update, but there really is no comparison. The 3.00 upgrade does nothing on the scale that the "New Experience" did for the 360.

Most immediately noticeable changes:

The default theme background now contains sparkles, as if your TV is a lavalamp.

There are now more options for themes and fonts. People were reporting that on some TV's the menu was unreadable. On my TV, there was no difference, except the media bar icons are all purple now, where they used to be white.

When playing back video, you can now step forward and back in 33% increments with the right analog stick. I am not sure how useful this feature is. It's hard to imagine this being an asked for feature.

You can no longer turn off the information bar, so you are forced to see Sony ads in the top right of the screen

There's some BS "improvements" to the Playstation Store which consist of putting ads directly onto the media bar.

There are improvements in viewing other people's online profiles and trophies, which are sorely needed. This update doesn't fix them enough, but it's a start.

I've said it before, I'm a big PS3 fan, but their online support completely blows, and is so far behind that it's impossible to compare with Xbox Live.

The best way I can desribe this is "One baby step forward for Sony.. with a dirty diaper"

Overall Score: 6 of 10

Probably better than no update, but it's hard to say.