In case you were longing for some sort of post from me I took it upon myself to make a quick one.

Since we have so much of a huge following here (read no following and probably if I ask you all for something I will get the opposite) I figured I’d tell you all how I have already voted in my lovely swing state of Nevada.

OBAMA!!

Comments Galore!

P.S. I heard Wedge55 voted early in his opposite of a swing state California as well, and so did…your MOM!

My 11-year-old, 21-inch standard definition television doesn’t have AV input. No composite, no component. A single loose coaxial connection constantly in danger of falling out of my TV serves as its lone input option. In this HD era, audio and video signals reach my television by first passing through a composite switch and traveling from there to a cheap Wal-Mart VCR which has only one of the two standard audio inputs (a white, but no red hole). They finally reach my television via coaxial cable, passing through a SNES RF switch first, of course. I can only assume the picture I finally see would cause any videophile to vomit violently.

Though this setup is less than ideal when it comes to playing video games, the real problems arise when I try to watch a DVD. You see, some DVDs, seemingly chosen at random as I can find no common link between distributors or copyright holders, are protected by a dutiful soldier on the front lines of the war on piracy called Macrovision. “Designed to deter unauthorized recording of copyrighted materials,” Macrovision horribly distorts the DVD’s video signal if it passes through another recording device – like a cheap Wal-Mart VCR – on its way to its final destination. Macrovision alters the brightness of the image, causing it to pulse between light and dark extremes. Of course, this only affects anything on the DVD you’d actually want to watch. Trailers and advertisements are always wholly unaffected.

I realize the primarily goal of anti-piracy measures is to punish people that legimately buy a product, and to that effect Macrovision is a worthwhile tool. Nevermind the fact that I can take any Macrovision-infested DVD and easily rip it to my computer’s harddrive with no ill effects. I realize that I’m one of a select few that are still forced to run connections through other devices due to a lack of proper inputs, and therefore the number of people with honest intent affected by this problem is minimal, but what percent of piracy involves coping DVDs by running their output signals through VCRs? How many people even own a VCR any more, let alone actually have one set up to watch these freshly pirated DVD-to-VHS conversions?

Developing this Macrovision technology cost someone money. Licensing it for implementation on your newly released (and yet already widely available online) DVD collection also costs someone money. It’s a good thing I’m forced to use my PC’s DVD drive to watch half of the movies Netflix sends me because of this. At least Macrovision’s helping curb that prevalent VHS piracy and doing its part to drive up DVD prices.

Konami has gone to great lengths to protect the integrity of its franchises in recent years. Sure, they’ve completely mishandled the Legend of the Mystical Ninja series (Ganbare Goemon, if you’re a “core” gamer) and there’s that large, brown smudge on their otherwise fine smelling track record called Every Nintendo 64 Game The Company Released, but Konami learns from its mistakes. After disasters like Legacy of War and C: The Contra Adventure, Konami used the Playstation 2 as the staging ground for a Contra comeback with Shattered Soldier and Neo Contra. The former is a Treasure-developed boss fight hell; the latter is a wacky Smash TV clone with poor controls. Though the upcoming Contra 4 looks to be all flavors of awesome with a side of “it’s about damn time,” the PS2 games, for all their faults, should not be so quickly forgotten. Today, let’s not forget Neo Contra.

Upon first starting the game, players are immediately deafened by the sort of blaring, electronic video game rock that hasn’t been in vogue since the days of the Ocean action platformer. In fact, in a lot of ways, Neo Contra harkens back to a simpler time when video game heroes were muscle-bound meatheads with full heads of hair and a game’s story was written entirely by a Japanese level designer and localized by a PR flunky. Bill Rizer, star of the original Contra, is awoken from cryogenic sleep and teamed with a gun-totting samurai named Jaguar. Together, they must kill the four members of Neo Contra, an elite force that includes the likes of Animal Contra, a pit bull in WWI-style military uniform complete with a Pickelhaube, and the beautiful but deadly Pheromone Contra.

Cutscenes bridge levels, highlight boss fights, and feature an over-the-top absurdity reminiscent of Karamri Damacy. Bill and Jaguar exchange deathly serious dialogue with hilariously named characters such as Mystery G. Our heroes travel between levels by blasting themselves out of volcanoes, riding in the warheads of space missiles, or saddling up on armored dinosaurs. One of the levels even has the characters running along helicopter blades, tiptoeing with alarming speed in order to keep up with their rotating perch. Neo Contra takes the sillier elements that have always been present in the Contra series and ratchets them up to the extreme. Players battle four-legged tongues, surf on torpedoes, and blast boulder-riding robots with arching beams of electricity. This overwhelming, seemingly random wackiness permeates the entire experience, keeping players grinning at both its sheer stupidity and inspired brilliance.

Unfortunately, the game doesn’t play as well as it looks. Neo Contra is not a side-scrolling shooter like most entries in the Contra series, its PS2 brother in arms Shattered Soldier included. Instead, Neo Contra is a top-down shooter in the same vein as Robotron 2084 or Smash TV (or, more accurately, the top-down levels in Contra 3). That’s all well and good; I love a top-down shooter as much as the next guy. Hell, I even played through Robotron 64. But rather than feature directional firing and aiming via use of the second analog stick or face buttons themselves, players are given only a single fire button that shoots in the same direction they are facing. This is bad. To make up for this, Konami instead allows players to use the L2 button to lock the direction they’re facing – allowing the D-pad or analog stick to be used for strafing – or to use R2 to lock their character in place, thereby allowing for 360 degree aiming. Neither system works particularly well, and players will find most of their deaths coming from enemies standing directly next to them as they are left with no sufficiently quick method to eliminate these threats. Such a glaring control oversight is particularly damning given that Konami’s own Contra 3, released 12 years earlier, at least lets players use the shoulder buttons to rotate their characters, allowing for greatly simplified aiming. And only two of Contra 3’s six levels were top-down.

Thankfully, Neo Contra is a very easy game. Too easy, in fact. Actually, were it not for the lackluster controls, dying in Neo Contra would be a near impossibility. Still, the game is playable, even if its control options prevent it from stranding on equal footing with other games in its genre. There’s a lot to unlock – weapons, playable characters, new levels – but unless you’re completely won over by the game’s presentation, or at least enough to stomach the poor controls, there’s very little incentive to do so.

Everybody knows two things about SimTower: (1) that it exists and (2) that it is impossible to lose. Nobody knows much of anything about Yoot Tower, its sequel. Developed four years after the original, and once again designed by Yoot Saito, best known for wacky and innovative titles Seaman and Odama, Yoot Tower was published by Sega in the United States with little fanfare. Chances are you’ve probably never played it, but that shouldn’t stop you from doing so. Like, now.

On its surface, Yoot Tower doesn’t seem to differ much from its predecessor. Little pixilated sprite people still line up for elevators, turning progressively deeper shades of red the longer they are forced to wait. You still build offices, hotels, condominiums, restaurants, and shops to keep your tower growing and your star rating increasing. For a game a full hardware generation older, its graphical differences are best described as “subtle.” To the untrained eye, Yoot Tower looks like little more than a SimTower expansion.

However, there’s a lot of depth lurking under the surface here. Unlike SimTower, Yoot Tower is a challenging game. It’s brutally hard. Your tower’s virtual residents are demanding. They need restrooms, security, and quick access to other areas in the building. Stars are much more difficult to earn, requiring you to wine, dine, and impress VIPs, and though each star gives access to more structures and tower elements, your residents will be quick to point out that these are simply structures they now need, the sooner the better.

When starting a new tower, you can choose to do so in Honolulu, Tokyo, or Kegon Falls. Each offers unique gameplay with different options and objectives. In Honolulu, you build a bustling beach resort while you erect a massive, office-filled skyscraper in Tokyo. In Kegon Falls, you’re charged with carving a quaint hotel directly into the face of a mountain. Each setting makes for its own unique challenge, with people’s wants and attitudes, the cost of individual structures, and even the season’s effect on gameplay varying by location.

Yoot Tower isn’t the same sort of easy, set your brain to the off position, sort of fun as SimTower. A far more challenging – and therefore rewarding – experience, Yoot Tower is the superior game. Figuring out the intricate workings and relationships of the various available structures is fun, even when you’re $3.5 million in dept. With a host of new, if initially invisible, features over its predecessor, Yoot Tower is the type of deep, difficult game you’d expect from a simulation, even one without “sim” in the title.

Sure, now everyone knows what a nonogram is. In much the same way Brain Age introduced the (non-Japanese) gaming community to sudoku, Picross DS has recently introduced us filthy American swine to picross, short for picture crossword. Equal parts numerical logic puzzle and pixel art, a picross puzzle, or nonogram, is a truly challenging and entertaining puzzle-based interactive experience. And it involves no falling blocks, to boot.

But back in the golden age of the Internet, before Youtube turned us all into raging idiots and the online world was filled with Web 1.0 optimism, a niche website released a small, freeware Gameboy Color rom, quietly unnoticed between Radical Dreamers translation projects and graffiti-style graphic collections. Representing two years of hard work and a publisher betrayal, Drymouth was a unique blending of brain-twisting nonogram puzzles and balls-out action games. Completely free and completely awesome, Drymouth introduced any Internet-obsessed nerd who bothered to download it to the wonderful world of picross.

The ultimate goal of a nonogram is to transform a simple grid into a (ideally) recognizable image using a set of numerical clues to determine which cells should be filled in or left blank. Each row and column has a corresponding set of numbers to their side, dictating which squares need to be filled in. In the example above, the first column’s clue of 5 3 means the column has two groups of filled cells, one five squares long and the other three squares long, with at least one blank cell separating the two groups. By utilizing the relationships between horizontal and vertical clues, players can reveal the delightful image hidden within the nonogram.

What makes Drymouth so unique, besides acting as an introduction to the nonogram for any non-Japanese Internet user (aside from the widely advertised and barely played Mario Picross), is its unique blending of the brutally difficult nonogram with the trappings of an action game. Players can initially choose from one of three playable characters, each with unique attributes, special abilities, and soundtracks. As players attack larger, more challenging puzzles, they must deal with slime creatures that undo players’ work, collect gems for points and better endings, and wield a variety of special items that offer protection from mistakes or automatically solves rows or columns. Additionally, all puzzles must be solved under a strict time limit, and any incorrect guess knocks a sizeable amount of time off the ever-depleting meter. Run out of time and it’s game over.

A nonogram is a challenge unto itself, requiring a strict attention to detail and an accurate interpretation of the interlocking numerical clues. Because the goal of every puzzle is to reveal a simple pixel image, it also allows players to make educated guesses based on the image they’ve begun to form. Thus, the game requires an interesting combination of both mathematical and creative talents. Drymouth’s clever action elements transform the game from a slow, thoughtful exercise into a frantic race against time with an extra layer of resource (item) management.

This is the sort of game that, had it received a legitimate publishing deal back in 1999, would have been heralded as one of the truly classic handheld puzzle games - in the same league as Tetris, Lumines, and Meteos - and would have almost certainly lead to a few of Japan’s umpteenjillion shovelware picross titles seeing domestic releases. Sadly, the game’s creator had the rights to his own product swindled away from him and was forced to distribute it online freely and discreetly. Still, those who have played it know Drymouth as a uniquely sublime experience while those who have not really have no excuse.

Download it, suckers.

Somewhere I read,

“For a turkey of greater than ten pounds, the roasting time should be equal to 1.65 times the natural log of the weight of the bird in pounds, cooked at 325 F.”

It pleased me greatly.

(vector_black instant stuffing)

On the inside, things happen more clearly — there is food and fuel and writing. These questions and more are explored by the science of English.

English lets us do things.

(vector_black fuel)

Physicists are the bad boys of the scientific world. They are its rock stars and its politicians. Stephen Hawking is their Elvis and their UN Secretary General rolled into one. All things are simply applied physics, or so they claim.

(vector_black applies physics)

The most outrageously famous and wealthy among us, eclectic though they might be, all share one common trait. They are all secretly Astronomers. The science of Astronomy has long been dismissed by most literary circles as “boring,” but only becuase they don’t want you to realize that Astronomy is responsible for banana bread and several varieties of pastry. Eventually we will all have our own deep space telescopes.

(vector_black didn’t go home)

The science of Medicine enhances our capabilities. Scientists of Medicine make better lovers and better chefs. Medicine makes for a better newspaper. Daily we are blessed by its Medical touch.

Medicine and Geology are opposites.

(vector_black is outside)