8-30-08

Today I played Agricola, the new #1 game on BGG. It's well deserving of the hype. It has the same depth and freeform nature as Caylus, but with much simpler rules and a shorter playing time. This is a game I hope to play many times.

8-29-08

I took the LSAT today. It's hard.

8-28-08

Cats are left-handed.

8-27-08

My new favorite forum-related joke:

8-26-08

Forgive this spate of vocabulary-related posts, but I continue to be floored by some of the words my students don't know. We've already had erudite, placid, and tome. Today's addition to "Boris's List of Words He Can't Believe Some People Don't Know:" renegade. Hasn't anyone played Bang?

8-25-08

High school-age Jersey girl: So I went on my ex-boyfriend's Facebook, since his birthday was last week. Only like 30 people wrote on his wall to wish him happy birthday.

Friend: Oh my god. What a loser!

-- Overheard in New York

8-24-08

"Good sense is the best distributed thing in the world, for everyone thinks himself to be so well endowed with it that even those who are the most difficult to please in everything else are not at all wont to desire more of it than they have."

-- Descartes

8-23-08

Dave bought Soul Calibur 4 for the 360. Namco's major accomplishments with this one are as follows:

- Yun-Seong has been turned into a gay pirate. This is not a joke.
- Ivy's boobs have gotten even bigger.
- All of the characters' eyes are now blood-rimmed, as though they'd just been snorting coke. With their eyes.
- Cervantes has a beard. He is actually now the hottest character in the game.

The excellent story mode of Soul Calibur 2 is apparently a relic of the past, as the designers seem to have spent most of their time pandering to repressed teenagers by making all of the characters hotter (see "Cervantes" and "beard," above) and giving them bigger boobs if at all possible, and by making it trivial to unlock every single character within .5 seconds of inserting the disc.

True to the spirit of the shitfest that was Soul Calibur 3, a bunch of new features have been added that add nothing whatsoever to gameplay, such as an "equipment destruction" system which is really just an excuse to transform the characters' already revealing clothing into even more revealing clothing as the battle progresses. Men lose their shirts and fight barechested. Women are much better about keeping their shirts on, but all of their clothing becomes tattered and jagged as large strips of it are ripped off. I wonder how many repressed teenagers will subtly throw matches with female characters in an effort to see how much ass they can glimpse. (Answer: quite a lot, and I recommend Sophitia.)

Also in line with Soul Calibur 3, everybody's still a bit slower than they were in Soul Calibur 2. This means you can usually attack into a blocking opponent and still have time to block their counterattack, making combat a tedious block-centric affair where the only way to deal damage is to hope that your opponent does an attack at the same time you do and that your attack randomly supersedes theirs. To be fair, there is now a "soul gauge" that eventually flashes red if you block too much, at which point the next attack from your opponent will pierce your block and send you into a state of "soul crush." But the inclusion of this feature is essentially an admission on the part of the developers that Soul Calibur 3 was a piece of shit, because Soul Calibur 2 was perfectly fine without any such shenanigans. Moreover, the soul gauge recharges so quickly that the threat of soul crush is rarely relevant. Things like this make me wonder why game designers are so reluctant to, you know, keep doing what works.

Also in line with Soul Calibur 3, characters perform fewer moves than they did in Soul Calibur 2. In 2, pretty much any button combination + direction resulted in a different move. In 3 and 4, many of the combinations are either redundant or do nothing whatsoever. For a game that's (let's face it) resolved primarily by button mashing -- or, okay, intelligent button mashing -- the dramatic decrease in combat variety continues to be disappointing.

So in short, if you're wondering, "Have they found a way to make a Soul Calibur game that isn't strictly worse than Soul Calibur 2?", the answer is still no.

8-22-08

Newton wrote more about religion than about science.

8-21-08

A month ago, one of my students didn't know the word "erudite." That's reasonable, it's kind of an erudite word. Another student didn't know "placid." Now that's shocking, but hey, it's just one student.

Today, though -- I don't think I can ever come to terms with what happened today. My entire class didn't know "tome." Tome! As in, a common synonym for "book." Is this not as common as I think it is?

8-20-08

When you eat sushi, you're not supposed to slather the whole thing in soy sauce. Soy sauce should be used sparingly, and not even on all of the pieces.

8-19-08

My new GRE class has exactly one guy in it. Everybody else is a girl. Does this mean there are more women going to grad school than men, or that women need more help than men do?

8-18-08

Morton's Fork.

8-17-08

I played A Game of Thrones today. I liked the game when I played it a year ago, but today I was sufficiently unimpressed. The diplomacy and battle elements are great, but the event cards at the start of each turn have a significant impact on the players' fates and, what's worse, usually favor some players over others. I'm terrible at wargames and probably would have lost even if the event cards hadn't screwed me over every single turn, but it was decidedly unpleasant to feel tossed about by random chance in major ways in a game that takes eight hours.

8-16-08

Simon's Cat.

8-15-08

I watched this "Dr. Horrible" thing that everyone's been raving about, and it's good. I admire Whedon's ability to evoke unique sensations out of something so cliched, yet the problem in the end is that it is, after all, cliched. The humor is excellent, but there is a definite sense that the show aspires to make a serious point, and you can't make a serious point when the plot and the characters are so banal. Two flawed men compete over a boringly perfect woman -- I'm not going to be moved by what happens.

8-14-08

8-13-08

Flibbertigibbet. It's a real word.

8-12-08

8-11-08

Eidos is making Deus Ex 3. What are they thinking?

8-10-08

There's an addon for Firefox that conveniently lets you download embedded movies from Youtube. Or elsewhere.

8-9-08

Bernie Mac died today. He had pneumonia.

8-8-08

Wondermark hits one out of the park.

8-7-08

Hugh Jackman is Australian.

8-6-08

There's been a surge of incredible Live Arcade games recently. Case in point: Braid.

8-5-08

Eschalon: Book 1 is a kick-ass RPG. It's old-school, but the graphics are still pretty good, the story is cliched but intriguing, and the character system is excellent. If you've been bummed that the last good pure RPG came out like ten years ago, be bummed no longer.

8-4-08

Auntie Anne's caramel sauce is frickin' unbelievable.

8-3-08

Every single person at the Radiohead concert was A) white, and B) high.

8-2-08

The Phoenix lander found water on Mars.

8-1-08

Desert tortoises live underground.

7-31-08

Geometry Wars 2 is amazing.

Now, the original Geometry Wars was the best Live Arcade game of all time -- really, the only good game -- so naturally you'd expect the sequel to be a huge flaming pile of ass. But no. It is unbelievable. Imagine everything you ever loved about Geometry Wars. Then imagine it all doubled. Then imagine playing it multiplayer. I mean, jesus. If you own a 360, you either need to buy this game and play it, or buy a shotgun and shoot yourself in the face.