Mark, I will respond to our earlier thread, have a couple things going on that I need to tend to before I try to tackle that one. I tip my hat to you for even trying to define what it s to you, the prospect of doing so myself is somewhat daunting.

As for Best Buy, and places like it, I find that the sales droids, and thus their service, are without value. I assume that like myself, you research what your going to buy prior to buying it; more often than not you know much more than the people helping you. I one time purchased Jurassic Park, the DTS edition, only to find that it was not in fact DTS. I took it back, and exchanged it without issue, but prior to leaving the store I opened it (the new one) and found that this one was off as well. The manufacturer had just screwed up. So, when I told this to the droid, they called the ‘AV’ manager and he told me that it is the right version, and that DTS and Dolby 5.1 were the same thing. I got my money back when I explained to him the difference in bit rate between the two (never mind the different logo’s and that this particular DVD came in two versions…). That Best Buy left me alone after that. I actually prefer to be unmolested because I find it awkward to call a sales type on their BS. In my estimation, the Best Buys and whatnot are best used to put eyes to technical info from the net, and if the price and availability is right, buy.

I actually had a fairly decent experience at ‘Video Only’ over the weekend, in that the guy complemented info on details that I was unsure about without trying to sell something else. M’s dad is going to buy an HDTV monitor, and I will make it a point to buy it from him.

Kinda rambling, but, there was an article in the WSJ that I read the other day about the prodigies of Jack Welch. One of them went to Home Depot, and has done poorly; he centralized the distribution model as in the aircraft industry, and pushed for more and more temps. The downside is that they rely on just in time stocking’ and at times are without product in a retail market, and the high turnover of employees means that there is a dearth of knowledge. The lack of expertise in particular has lead to a growing market share for Loews and other hardware type chains. The Best Buys suffer from a similar problem, in that they have a fair amount of turnover and there is no incentive to stay and learn, thereby making one of real use to a customer. As sure as I may be about tech related equipment, the old guys at Home Depot or Loews intimidate me…

Good luck with your dissertation Ben! Good luck with your tournament Chris, even if you don’t want to go! Good luck breaking into J. McBride’s house George!

Man, so many things are happening right now. I’ve been thinking about France lately, and how maybe it’d be nice to move there. I’d have to talk to Robin first of course… And I suppose I should think about it 3 years from now after I finish grad school…

You only spent 2 hours on MoO3 Ben? I’ve spent a good 40 hours on it so far and I am shelving it only temporarily until the patch comes out. The thing is, I think the game could be really good; it just isn’t quite there yet, and unfortunately it’s by design. Fortunately, however, I think those design decisions are mostly superficial and they could fix it with a good patch.

Here’re some other quick reviews for things I’ve tried or gotten recently:

1. Freelancer demo: the demo was pretty short, but it was pretty clear that different space ports you visit are all pretty much the same, and the voices in the demo were not varied enough to make the repitition enjoyable. I was going to buy this game from playing the demo, but I talked to a co-worker who got it and he said that the actual game is nothing more than what you do in the demo. Too repetitive.

2. Viewsonic Tablet PC: my dad got one (recommended by the realtor he works for or something like that) to help him out with his real estate appraisal business. It’s pretty cool for note taking and for being wireless and portable, but it’s somewhat awkward to browse with, using that stylus… Fortunately, it supports all kinds of USB devices (it’s just a snazzier version of Win XP), so once we added a mouse things were fine. Is it worth $2,700? Not to me, but my dad, in his retirement now and doing appraisal to keep himself busy, is making (according to my mom) $90k a year. Jeezus. That’s way more than he ever actually made when he wasn’t retired. If I were to get a Tablet PC, I’d probably go for one that is a laptop with a swivel head so that I’d have a keyboard when needed.

3. cool pants from Xiamen: well, I didn’t actually try these on, but my dad (in an effort to keep one-upping me–first with his computer compared to my new Shuttle…) got these cool cargo type pants from China. They’re every bit as cool as mine except they have even more pockets and can zip to three different lengths. 🙂

4. Samsung 171v 17″ LCD monitor: my Sony 17″ CRT finally died after 7 loyal years. It was time to get a flatscreen. This model is not the best you can get, and it has this slight light to dark gradient from the bottom of the screen, but it was cheap! $500 at most places with a $100 rebate. My local Best Buy had only one in stock and it was an open box so I got an additional $50 off. $350 for this monitor is a steal. Still, if I were making as much as my dad, I would’ve gone with the 191t. That one is sweet. Speaking of Best Buy; I’ve read some reviews on the web which say their customer support is horrible, but I’ve never had a problem returning anything to them. I suspect that the quality of service is more tied to location rather than company policy. The Fry’s Electronics in Wilsonville (just south of Portland) also has very friendly sales reps and I’ve also not had a problem returning something there. Fry’s down in Palo Alto, on the other hand, is a horrifying experience.

more later from yours truly,

JohnnyDanger!

Wow, I love Powell’s response to the fake issue: “With respect to the uranium, it was the information that we had,” Powell said. “We provided it. If that information is inaccurate, fine.” Fine? Fine what?

• Fine – you caught me, or
• Fine – in 27 hours no one will be talking about stupid aluminum tubes anyway?

s heartened to hear this though. At least the French are being relatively consistent. Did you hear about that bill that would have us dig up all of our WWII soldiers over there and bring them home? Wow.

So here’s my deal: I’m going to be in Maui from March 20th to March 29th. I will be around the week of the 31st, but it’s going to be a pretty interesting week, since I’ll be playing some major catch up. Our team is still talking about going to nationals, which would be the next week. Rumor has it that we’ll get nominated in the top ten for the tournament (we’re #8 now), but I am not convinced that we’ll finish that high. Some key people can’t make it. Personally, I’d rather not go. Anyway, Schrag you can call me on the cell phone whenever. I’ll have it in Hawaii.

Of course, you may notice that my plane leaves about 10 hours after the war deadline passes. If history is allowed to repeat itself, my vacation in paradise may get fucked. Two years ago, a trip home for my 27th birthday (and a major mental health vacation – I was to leave hours after learing the result of my Ph.D. written qualifier) was cancelled because of the Al Queda airplane attacks on the US. This time, I just want Bush to wait until I am safely in Hawaii, so I get stuck there. If the above statement makes me a shallow person, fine?

Damn Mark that MOO3 review is on point. You said exactly what I was thinking, but in a funnier and more concise way than I would have. I’m pretty disappointed with the game, at least for the two hours I tried to play it. I want Supernova…let’s pay George to break into J-McB’s house and steal it. By the way, thanks for the “simple/complex” shout-out.

In good news, I have set a date for my dissertation defense: April 22nd is high noon. In bad news, that means I have to have a draft to my readers by April 4th…that’s 16 more days of big fun! Plus that last week I am at a conference in Boston, for which I haven’t started my presentation. Melhus, did you check your calendar for the week of March 31st yet?

In other words, Bush seems to have finally done what he was going to do all along. I read an article that said all the details of this whole process, including the timeline, were set almost a year ago…shady. Also, what’s the deal with the fake nuclear evidence? It’s a depressing time for the world. The saddest part for me is that now if there is another terrorist attack in America, we really have no one to blame but ourselves. Of course, people will take that as evidence that Bush was right, and totally miss the point (as they have been missing it all along).

Spaceward Ho! was the baddest game that ever made it onto my Mac LCIII. Well, I’m going to exclude Civilization, because only Derek played that (on my computer), and I’m going to exclude that game where you were “God” and people continuously dropped from the top of the screen and you could bomb them, run them down with rolling wheels, light them on fire, etc. That game was pretty bad-ass too.

Anyway, the concept of the game is that you are the leader of your own burgeoning empire in outer space! This is something that I often fantasize about (Note: Heidi Klum is involved too, BTW), but what a crazy idea to let you act on those fantasies in a game! You get to start out on a “home planet” and make money and shit. When you get enough goods, you can start building spaceships that explore the planets around you! WOW! Some of these planets have stuff that you can use to build more spaceships and shit! SWEET!

After a while, you have a bunch of planets, spaceships and shit. But the more planets you have, the more work this game is. Like really, who wants to check out what’s going on at every planet each turn? The turns get longer and longer, and you have to manage everything. Why can’t I put someone else in charge? I’m master of the frigging universe? Anyway, there is an upside: you have these scientist, nerd guys that advance your technology and make your spaceships look totally cool! You can name them whatever you want to, so I loaded ’em up with more and more guns. I made:

• The Baddest I
• The Baddest II
• Totally the Baddest
• Baddy Boy
• Baddy-Baddy Bing-Bong

But you have to be careful, because some of the planets are crappy. There can be a bunch of Mars’ for every Earth. If the planets around you suck, then you don’t get to build the good spaceships and shit. If I get a couple of bum planets right away, I just start the game over.

Now, here is where the game kinda SUCKS. So it turns out that there are other people living in the universe, but you can’t see ’em until you discover their planets. WHAT? And get this, they have been developing their own shit too! Not only that, but they have also been building defenses that totally blew the crap out all of my Baddy-Baddy Bing Bongs! What did I ever do to them? Then, these jerks (who I don’t even know!) went and systematically blew up all of my planets. Really, what was the point of my making them anyway? I was perfectly happy on my own home planet with Heidi Klum!

So you can put a lot into this game, and it will just break your heart. But the graphics are still way better than Lode Runner. Plus, I never even mentioned the sweet sound effects. Yeeeeeee-Hah!

Off the top of my head, I’ve played Spaceward Ho!, Stars!, Empire of the Fading Suns, and just one afternoon of Master of Orion 2. Unfortunately, I only remember Stars! really well. I played Stars! off and on for like 3-4 years. (SH! was too long ago and was on a Mac which I never owned, EFS was buggy from what I remember which made the game last about a week before I gave up, and my foray into MoO2 was during the peak of my Stars! life which of course killed any prospects for it to be deemed a good game.)

When Ben, George, and I played Stars! as a team that one year over the internet (Team BMG rules!), George and I literally spent 5 hours a day on this game doing our turns. That is a huge time sink, but it was justified because of the near-perfect gameplay. The ability to see the rules in action and to think several turns ahead is a direct result of having simple rules presented clearly to the players. No behind the scenes number-crunching; all the formulas were readily accessible for logic freaks like us to really dig our teeth into it. It was like Chess played much more slowly and much more complex. Simple rules leading to complex gameplay, right?

Anyway, this article is supposed to be about Master of Orion 3.

Where’s the Micro in my Macro?

I’ve been playing it for about a week now. I started and restarted 5 times before getting enough of a hang of the details to feel like I had a good start. The first 4 times, I would get to about turn 50 or so and realize that I hadn’t set the Tech to how I would’ve liked, or I hadn’t defined Planetary Development Plans, or that I hadn’t tweaked the Tax Levels, or any number of things which I didn’t do mostly because I had no idea how to tweak them or what they affected. This is probably going to be the biggest gripe from most fans of strategy games. QuickSilver, the developer, has mistakened Macro-Management with lack of information.

They have this thing called Planetary AI controlled by Viceroys on each of your planets. You sort of set some guidelines with Planetary Development Plans (by saying things like if it is a mineral rich world then mine like crazy), but the Viceroys make all the decisions as to exactly what to build. I don’t mind this so much, but no where in the manual or on the web or in the hint book or anywhere can you find out exactly what they’ll do based on what guidelines you give them and their planetary specific situations. Funny, I always thought the goal of good Macro-Management was to automate a lot of the Micro-Management methods, not to take it completely out of your hands and make you stab in the dark with your policies.

In two of the games I played (and then terminated prematurely) my people were either starving or didn’t have enough minerals to make the stuff the Viceroys were telling them to make. This was happening even after I set in the Planetary Dev Plans to build Farms or Mines. I eventually had to just go to each planet manually and override what the Viceroys were building. Um, excuse me, how is this different than Micro-Management?

Lame-Ass Combat

Yep, it sure is. Combat between starships works like most RTS games; left click select, right click attack or move, etc. Unfortunately, once you get into a combat screen, the default zoom level is so close that you have to scramble to zoom out and select your guys. Unfortunately, the maximum zoom-out level is so low that you then have to scroll the map around until you find your enemy before you can right-click on them to attack. By then the computer has already launched a volley of missiles and fighters and you are shit out of luck if you die before you even find the enemy. There is no radar/minimap. The combat is on a 2-Dimensional plane but for some reason they made it isometric to give it that faux 3D look. The ships are *tiny*; you’re basically watching some dots fire at other dots.

Then if you are assaulting a planet with transports or if you are defending a planet and they have ground troops you are taken to the Ground Combat screen. Can we say rock-paper-scissors? I don’t mean the good kind of rock-paper-scissors like in Starcraft where some units are good vs. air but suck vs. ground and you have to be able to adapt to your opponent so that you maximize your efficiency in killing. No… I mean the crappy roshambo where you just click on an attack formation and HOPE the enemy randomly chose the defend formation which is weak vs. your chosen attack formation. There’s something like 20 choices (Massed Assault, Sweep, Flank, Ambush, Ruse, etc.). It’s anybody’s guess what they all actually do or what their formulas are.

User-Interface From Hell

Goddamn, this is why I’m going back to grad school. I KNOW I don’t know everything there is to know about good UI (in my case, good ways of presenting info for learning systems), but why can’t others see they need to do some research and learn from set standards?? The UI designers at QS obviously don’t know that consistency is king. If you have a button do something, DO NOT make it do something else during certain situations!

Here’s three specific things I hate:

To zoom in on a system you double-click on the star in the galaxy map. To zoom in on a planet you double-click the planet from the system view. To exit the planet view back to the system view you click on the star in the top-left corner. At the beginning of each turn you are presented with a Situation Report (SitRep). If you click on one of the highlighted events of that turn and it happens to take you to the planet screen of wherever that event took place and then you click on the star to see that sytem, you are taken back to the SitRep. This is lame. They already have the spacebar set to toggle the SitRep and there is a SitRep button ALWAYS visible on the top of the screen. To take away any way of getting to the system (and therefore to the galaxy) so you can see where the hell that planet is in relation to your empire… Man, they suck.

When you get to the planet view via the galaxy map and system view, you see the other planets of the system at the top of the screen and you can jump to any planet you own in that system from these icons rather having to click exit to system and then choose a planet. Great. But when you get to a planet view from the Planets Panel, instead of being able to click on the star or other planets in the system, there are three new buttons laid on top, one takes you back to the Planets Panel, the other two cycle through your planets in the order that you’ve set in the Planets Panel. Great feature, but why remove the other standardized buttons? Why not allow us all those options at any time? I don’t get it.

In the Planets Panel, you can quickly see what your planets are each currently building, what their unrest levels are, etc. But when you look at planets in the system view, you only get to see icons of what they are building (no unrest or other info, btw), and the problem with icons is that all your ships of the same hull size have the same icon. So it’s impossible to tell at a glance if you are building a destroyer class colony ship or a destroyer class ass-wiper. To see what you are building you double-click on the planet and then on the build tab, repeat this about five times and you’ve already had it with this game.

Game Mechanics?

So, by my 5th start I thought I had gotten a hang of the quirky “Macro-Management”. I was just polishing off a really weak race who made the mistake of declaring war on me early in the game and just starting to gear up a massive fleet for the rest of the galaxy when I won the Orion Senate vote and the game ended. Yikes! I had a majority over the incumbent New Orions who start out way more powerful than any other race because I was a rather diplomatic race and had lots of friends in the Senate. As it turns out, you only need 50% majority and there doesn’t seem to be any other requirements. It was barely turn 150 or so. I had barely begun to build up my planets. I was only like halfway up the tech ladder (it’s not a tree btw) (er.. at least I think I was.. no way to tell since I don’t know how high it goes–I was up to level 24 or so). So, I’ve read on the MoO3 forums that in an earlier MoO you could only win by vote after a certain number of turns passed and even then you’d need 2/3 of the vote by population from all races even those not in the Senate. Makes it much harder and way more gratifying. Was this game play-tested??

Conclusion

Obviously, this review isn’t covering enough of the basics to be useful to people who are interested in the game. For more general reviews, go to www.gametab.com or www.gamerankings.com. This review, on the other hand, is probably most helpful to people who’ve played the game and are as yet unsure why they haven’t embraced the game. There is a great game in Master of Orion 3 waiting to to be unleashed, but it just isn’t there yet. Maybe with better documentation we can set up the Planetary Dev Plans how we want and be rest assured that the AI is doing what we want it to do. Maybe with a patch these UI annoyances will be fixed and maybe you will be able to zoom out more in combat… hell maybe combat will start zoomed out! Speaking of patches. Did I mention this game is buggy? There is a known bug with the AI that currently makes this game unquestionably easy.

I’ve been reading your guys’ discussion with interest; I’m not ready to post my thoughts just now…but I do want to transcribe part of a song. My apologies for those of you to whom this is spam:

“Clockin knowledge means I’m weaponless
Don’t you step to this, I send Pharoah messages
like Moses takin my people on an exodus,
we on the run; I split the M-I-C open
kids try to follow but get swallowed in the ocean
creature of the truth, families we make a mockery
Ain’t no stoppin’ me, I fulfill all prophecies
Similar to David with the rock I slingshot
<> warrior, plus I’m ill with the poetry
You know it’s me, but you still can’t catch this
Put Silla on the mic, I lose heads like John the Baptist
when I rap this wack emcees feel the rapture,
I’m that fugitive style that your brain couldn’t capture
ever since the beginning of time, that’s to me like
‘That’s the first day, I wrote my first rhyme’
I’m still writing, I see you lookin’ at em
Don’t even think about bitin’
forbidden poetries of life, dig these
Yo ass couldn’t hide from me with fig leaves….”

-Binary Star, “Masters of the Universe”

I knew that when I posted a small reply the other day that it would open a can of worms, in the sense that it’s never a small discussion. I’ll post a longer and hopefully more detailed reply tomorrow. I’m gonna have to give some thought on your observation about the duality of race and Reed; obviously I never spent much time there, but I did have my own observations… Race issues in places like the Navy play out much differently on the surface… But I dunno, maybe one needs to apply differnt ‘lenses’ when looking at such vastly different structures, and maybe the underlying currents are actually different as aopposed to just more eloquently expressed or avoided…. I’ll get back to that too…

Right now, I have to figure out how to get one remote work with about 5 different pieces of equipment, each of a differnt brand and vintage (installed home theatre stuff for M’s family). This isn’t the best time to attempt to define what it is to be smart, f’ing POS remote…

Rates for business can be severely adjusted by call volume. Your typical rate of say 7 cents a minute is non-negotiable if you’re the typcial legal office or something. When you start getting into excessive call volumes you can get the carriers to adjust rates as they still bill $13,000+ at 1.8 cents minute (690K minutes plus other stuff…). The next tier at which they can consider moving rates is about a million minutes per month. But, these are commitments that companies make; should they only pull 200K min of calls, they get penalized for not meeting the threshold that month. What’s nuts is that there are companies that bill millions of minutes per month, every month… I guess the prevailance of cell phones and their included minutes which you get penalized for going over prompted the question… Didn’t think about that.

As for diversity in your sense; I’d agree that all groups tend stick to themselves. I don’t entirely agree that to find people with ‘simliar experiences’ and build a ‘sense of community’ that you have to look within your own ethnic group. Hmm… Not sure how to put it actually. I don’t have a group that I fall into without conflict, and that has it’s own implications. My race has put me in situations that really have nothing to do with the actual individual that I’ve made myself, but my experiences and the people that I call and seek as friends are entirely a consequence of that indivuality (which is of course influenced by the former, but, you know what I mean I hope). The matter of race figures little when I consider the people that make up my world, save when my race has become an issue to somebody else and I need to be understood. Fortunately, life is such that that is not a constant need…

Trying to express thoughts on the matter of race in so few words is rather challenging… Trying to collect thoughts into a presentable fashion is even harder…

A late thought: I actually have very few experiences in common with any of you guys. I’m more drawn to the possibility of enjoying someone’s intellect than I am anything else. That enjoyment can be had even if your not ever there to build a bank of simliar experiences. At one point or another we all have some generally common threads, and that’s good enough for me.

Uh… what happens when you go over that? Since you say you do 690,000 a month…?

Anyway, I know you’re bright, so don’t bother answering me if you don’t want to.

Speaking of diversity, and I know you mean of experiences, not just race, but… Robin and I were talking about the south bay a few days ago. I am always amazed at how Asian it’s gotten over the last 10 years. We were saying how strange it is to have a whole shopping center with only Asian stores and restaurants. All the signs are in Chinese, and of the thousands of people there, maybe three are white. This led to a discussion of how Robin found it odd that none of my friends from high school are Asian when I was obviously surrounded by them. But the truth was that 10-20 years ago, there actually weren’t that many Asians, at least not in Palo Alto. I think you’ll still find mostly white people there still (too much of an old money, prep boy with sweater around shoulders town), yet only 10-30 miles away towards Sunnyvale and San Jose it’s a completely different story.

Is it that Asians tend to stick together? IMO, hell yes. The family friends (mostly Chinese) I hung out with once a month while growing up were from other cities like Fremont and Los Gatos where apparently there were far more Asians around than in Palo Alto. For them, it was perfectly natural to go to Berkely or UCLA and keep hanging out with their Chinese high school buddies. For me, I just saw Berkeley as this huge segregated school, where if I attended I would no longer have any white friends. It probably wouldn’t have been like that, but I was so against the idea of groups sorted by color that I went to Reed. (When I finally got to Reed and Portland in general, once in a while I would freak out from being the only non-white person around…) Anyway, if I think about it and if I ask my friends, I don’t think it’s a conscious decision they make to gravitate towards other Asians (mostly Chinese–Mandarin speaking Chinese from Taiwan, specifically!). It just sort of happens. That’s the scariest part about it! That by default, a minority group continues its segregation and cliqueishness and indirectly its own stereotyping. Is this true for all ethnicities? I tend to think yes.

But is this actually a problem? I mean we all really just want a sense of belonging and a sense of community, and if it’s to be had by hanging out with people with roughly the same experiences as you then you’re bound to end up with people of your own ethnicity, right? I mean there’s a difference from natural segregation to imposed segregation and prejudice, right?

An interesting side effect, tho, of the mass conglomeration of Asian people in Sunnyvale and San Jose is that you end up having the possibility of visiting another country right here in America. Seriously! Well almost. What is definitely true, however, is that the food is amazing.