finchr.

I'm Finch. I like to mess with computers and make people laugh. This is a tumblog.

[sharkodactyl]

southern california gothic

It is summer. The sun is shining. It is winter. The sun is shining. You aren’t certain, upon reflection, when the last time was that the sun was not shining.

You are starting to fear that In-N-Out is not actually a burger chain, but rather a cult. Whenever you bring it up people’s eyes glaze over. They are so hungry. Oh, god, they are all so hungry.

You’re fairly certain that one Starbucks store is following you. There wasn’t a Starbucks on that corner a minute ago…right?

There is some sort of warp in the space-time continuum near Los Angeles. There is no other explanation for why you have been stuck in traffic this long. No matter what channel you turn the radio to, all you can hear is static. Occasionally: the distant sound of a voice speaking in Spanish, as if trying to convey a message to you from many miles away.

When the rain starts, everyone around you panics. What do they know that you don’t?

[chrimifi]

Everything is always 45 minutes away. Brea is 45 minutes away. Claremont is 45 minutes away. Venice is 45 minutes away. Happiness is always 45 minutes away. Death is 45 minutes away... right?

Rancho Cucamonga. What a fun, odd name! It was formed when three communities-- Alta Loma, Cucamonga and Etiwanda--became one. Many Etiwandans perished in the assimilation. But we’re very confident they’d have volunteered their lives anyway if given the choice.

Everyone has worked for Disney. They smile wryly and refer to it in indirect terms, like “I worked for a mouse.” They will not say “Disney”. You cannot trick them. I have tried. You cannot coerce them. I have tried. I have done things that cannot be undone. And still they do not say “Disney”.

We lived in a place called “Verdugo”. It was just a name to us. We never thought to consider it further. It was right in front of our faces, and yet we had no idea.

I was always told stories of Orange County when I was a child. It was an elysian place where everyone had their own house with their own yard and wide, empty roads that would take you anywhere. But now I am an adult, and I begin to wonder what just deity would create such a thing. I do not think this Orange County exists.

Mark said he would move to the Valley. We had never seen this place. We dared not gaze upon it. But we knew what this meant. We would never see Mark again. His spirit would reach out to us in ethereal communiques every once in a while, excited at the thought we might be reunited, and we would have to steel ourselves against such threats.

[chrimifi]

Something Old, Something New, Something Borrowed, Something Cute: A The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds Review

This article is part of a series called “Reviews You Can’t Use”, in which the author looks at a game which has already been declared a success or failure and moves the goalposts to where he thinks they should be.

The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds is a Zelda game. I feel confident in saying that. Is it a new Zelda game? I’m not quite sure. It’s not an old Zelda game. It’s not a remake; I just played Majora’s Mask 3D, so I feel like I have a good grasp on what a remake is. It’s not a port. But, at the same time, I can’t bring myself to call it a new Zelda game. It’s a game that has prompted me a few times to awkwardly whisper aloud to it, “What even are you?”

The reason for my confusion is that A Link Between Worlds is reminiscent of is based on is a non-stop nostalgia-fest for shares a deep connection with its SNES/GBA predecessor A Link To The Past. It’s not unusual for a game to reference other games in its franchise, but ALBW intersects with ALttP in ways that seem too profound to call it merely a spiritual successor. At the same time, they diverge in very significant ways as well. Take, for example, the world map. The layout of the world map is almost identical between the two games... except in the dark world. In ALBW, the dark world has numerous impassible chasms carved into it. That’s quite a change. But when the light world map is almost identical, can I really call this a new map? It’s as if there’s an uncanny valley between an homage and a remake, and this map falls squarely in the center. The plot is a somewhat similar situation. There are new people in the story of ALBW, and they do things the original characters never did. Zelda’s kidnapper, for instance, is a sorcerer named Yuga instead of Agahnim, and when Yuga kidnaps people, he turns them into paintings. Yet, this new plot results in Link having to visit the same places in the same order as the old plot. At the end of the day, it’s still about an evil sorcerer kidnapping seven people and putting them in the same seven places as ALttP. The use of a light world/dark world mechanic is also shared between the two, but Nintendo has made so many games with “dark worlds” that I can’t even call it homage. This is the fourth in the Zelda series. It’s almost as much of a tradition as the green clothes.

The items of Hyrule and Lorule (as Nintendo has christened the dark world this time around) constitute a somewhat larger departure from ALttP. It is true that most, if not all, of the items from ALttP are present in ALBW, and many of them are found in the same place. However, the true staples of the series--bow, bombs, boomerang, etc.--have to be acquired from Ravio, the strangest character to show up in the Zelda series since Tingle. Ravio is a mystery clad in purple and bunny ears, who appears out of nowhere. I wasn’t even sure what gender pronoun to use at first. Ravio helps Link while he’s unconscious, and that’s an auspicious start, but everything after that just raises questions in my mind. He asks to live in your house, and while you’re gone, he converts it into a storefront. You learn from this that he has a wide array of weapons at his disposal. I have yet to learn where these came from. And, in perhaps what is the most suspicious revelation of all, he tells you that what he intends to do with these weapons is lease them to adventurers (i.e. you). I can deal with heavily-armed rabbit-people of unknown origin setting up commercial operations in my house, but rent-to-own? That’s just sketchy.

Jokes about theoretically ethical business models aside, what this means for gameplay is that item acquisition in this game works differently from any other Zelda game I’ve played. Since 1987, the way it’s worked is that you walk into a dungeon, you find a weapon in that dungeon that’s essential to clearing it, you fight a boss that (oh, the irony!) is particularly weak to that weapon, and you repeat as needed until you've saved the world. You have to get the boomerang before the bow, and the bow before the hookshot. In ALBW, all of the classic Zelda weapons are immediately available once Ravio opens his shop. All you need to get the hookshot is 50 rupees for the rental fee. Bombs? Another 50 rupees. The only catch is that if you die, you lose all of your rented items. Then it’s another 50 rupees to get the hookshot back. Eventually, you gain the ability to buy items outright, which lets link keep them if he dies. For the hookshot, this costs 800 rupees. The items also function differently. In the past, the number of arrows you had left would be different from the number of bombs, and all of that would be separate from the magic meter. In ALBW, there is one meter that contains your ability to use items. Every time you shoot an arrow or pound the hammer or drop a bomb, it drops a bit and then begins to slowly recharge. When the meter runs out, you can’t use them and have to make do with a sword and shield. This hasn’t felt earth-shaking to me in terms of gameplay, but it really is. The dungeon-item paradigm has been as much a part of Zelda as the Triforce, and they didn’t have to change it, but they did. This isn't just a change from ALttP. This is a change from the rest of the series.

The other big change is that Link has the ability in ALBW to walk across walls as a painting. I’d like to describe this in grand, sweeping terms, because it seems like it should be impressive, but you get used to it pretty quickly. It’s still a pretty significant contribution to the game, because it enables some very creative dungeon design. And that’s really the main appeal to this game, in my judgment. It has some very high-quality dungeons in the classic top-down Zelda style. Some of them are a little short, but they can afford to be when there are ten of them.

As is standard for the series, presentation is excellent. The art, music, and writing are all very polished, and gameplay is smooth and seemingly bug-free. Of particular note is that ALBW deviates from the visual style of other recent handheld Zelda games (you know, the ones where they all look like Wind Waker), in favor of reviving the style of ALttP. So get out your Motorola StarTAC and chart a course for the 90s, because we’re giving Link a mullet again. This means that the characters have a sort of early-anime aesthetic to them, which isn’t objectively bad but makes me uncomfortable by virtue of its closeness to Zynga art or Precious Moments figurines. It’s something I’m willing to forgive if it’s done well, and it was done well, so I forgot about it, for the most part. I do wonder, however, what this means for the art in the next handheld Zelda game. Is this the new style, or was it only revived temporarily because of ALBW’s special relationship with ALttP? If it’s not, do we go back to the Wind Waker style for the next one, or do something entirely new? I also think the music deserves special mention. Some of it returns from ALttP, and some of it is new. All of it has adopted an orchestral style that modern consoles have finally given developers the power to embrace in earnest. I’m not going to say that you’ll mistake yourself for being in Carnegie Hall when you’re playing it, but a little fake woodblock goes a long way in advancing the stateliness of an adventure, in my opinion.

Should you play it, even if you’ve played A Link to the Past? I think so. There’s a lot that’s old, but there’s a lot that’s new, too. It’s a more intense nostalgia trip than we’re accustomed to, but it is still, I think, a new game, and a good one at that. I’m, like, 70% sure.

So, let’s head back to the question I proposed earlier. What is A Link Between Worlds? A Link Between Worlds is the retaliation of a bitter Shigeru Miyamoto against an ungrateful fanbase. It is a baseball bat applied with vigor and malice to the uneven Jenga tower that is the Zelda timeline, in hopes of destroying it once and for all. He never wanted a timeline. His series never needed one. But the fans... they wouldn't rest until they had found some way to fit his work into a coherent timeline, like jamming together pieces of disparate puzzles into a frame never made with them in mind. He tried to kill it off with his “three timelines” theory, which he thought was so elaborate and nonsensical that it would stop the speculation, but he was wrong. The fans just kept going, and he never got a respite from their constant yammering about how some minor detail in Oracle of Seasons contradicted everything. He realized the only way to make it stop, to get even a minute of goddamn silence, was to burn it all to the ground. And so, he created A Link Between Worlds, a game too new to be a remake, but too derivative to fit comfortably anywhere, and too good to be ignored (because The Wand of Gamelon and The Faces of Evil aren’t timeline-friendly, but they’re bad enough that no one complains if we just act like they didn’t happen). It’s a bold dare to the timeline theorists of the series. “So what are you going to do with this one? The events are clearly different from A Link to the Past, but are you really willing to say that both games happened? Are you really willing to claim that in your universe, these remarkably similar events happened in geographically identical places? That the world was pulled back from the brink of destruction twice in almost exactly the same fashion? I can’t tell if it’s more ridiculous to insinuate that they’re connected or that they’re just a coincidence! Or maybe, possibly, you could concede that it doesn’t make any sense to try to put these together, and go do something else!”

Yeah, that’s probably how it happened.

Final Score: 1.7 points per week for 60 weeks, but 15 of that is the leasing fee / 100*

*on approved credit

[chrimifi]

Trigger Warning: A Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons Review

This article is part of a series called “Reviews You Can’t Use”, in which the author looks at a game on a hard drive he owns and thinks "Well, no one else is going to play this." So then he finishes it so that he can get some hard drive space back, and then he writes about it because this whole line of reasoning seems less pathetic if it can be written off as a creative exercise.

This week, in case you didn't hear, The Wall Street Journal announced that Netflix is working on a live-action The Legend of Zelda TV series. In hilarious Journal form, the article is headed by a picture from a trailer for an upcoming Zelda game on the Wii U, with the certainly-true-to-some-nonzero-extent description 'A scene from the videogame “The Legend of Zelda” for Nintendo.' I shouldn't laugh too hard. This is a big step forward for a demographic long known for referring to anything used in the playing of video games as "a Nintendo", regardless of its maker or ability to function on its own. If it has its own SKU, it's "a Nintendo". The Journal now appreciates that many companies are involved in the modern games industry, and in a few more years, I suspect that they will catch on to the fact that when the people that make Nintendo and The Legend of Zelda make other things like those, that they add other words behind "Nintendo" and "The Legend of Zelda", so that you can tell them apart from the earlier ones that they made.

But I digress.

The reason I mention this here is because hearing that news did not excite me. I loved House of Cards, so I generally trust Netflix to make good stuff, and I dressed up as the main character from the Legend of Zelda series for our last Halloween, so obviously I have some sort of affection for that franchise. So why am I not excited? Because I'm scared. Because I've been hurt before. Because some magical force-field seems to exist between screenplays and video games that makes making one out of the other inherently fraught. Making a video game based on a TV show or a movie or making a movie or TV show out of a video game just never seems to end well. Perhaps this was partially due to the immaturity of the games industry, both individually and as a whole. Perhaps as we embrace the idea that games can be art, the idea of crass cash-in movie crossover games will fade from memory. But right now, the wounds are still fresh, and I have to consider classics like The Simpsons (the arcade game) alongside the dozens of Shrek games that were made and apparently purchased in large enough numbers to justify this. So I'm worried about the possibility of a Netflix Zelda series, and I was similarly worried the first time I heard about Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons, introduced to me as "a game by some Swedish director".

"Some Swedish director" turned out to be Josef Fares, and the game turned out to be delightfully exceptional to the rule.

Brothers is not a game made to be played even remotely competitively. It has no multiplayer and no leaderboards. It is, more or less, a very pretty story with puzzles. Nonetheless, that's all it needs to create a sublime experience. The story is probably based on some kind of Scandinavian mythology, because it sort of lines up with what I think I heard one time about there being a tree of life called Yggdrasil that people used to believe in in a cold European place. Anyway, the premise is not too complicated. The father of two boys falls ill, and his sons set out to fetch water from the tree of life to cure him. This premise can't be too complicated, because no one in the game talks. Or, well, they do talk, but they don't talk English. I'm pretty sure it's gibberish, but I don't actually know what Swedish sounds like so I can't be 100% sure. I definitely didn't recognize any Ikea product names so I'm, like, 85% sure it wasn't Swedish. Anyway, running with the assumption that the dialogue is not actually in a language spoken by real people, it nevertheless has the consistency and features of a real language. Around the third time that I heard the younger brother yelling to his older brother, it hit me: he was making the same sound. They have names. He was calling his brother's name. Between the linguistic consistency and the nonverbal communication that accompanies it, the characters say a surprising amount with their nonsense words. Add in some creative staging and camera work, and it's always abundantly clear what's happening.

The aesthetic and the plot are classic fairy tale fare, with a few notable exceptions. (I don't think Hans Christian Andersen ever wrote about orca.) But be warned, when I say "fairy tale", I don't mean the sanitized Disney translations we see today. I mean the surprisingly dark original cuts. Something on par with the sea witch in "The Little Mermaid" telling the titular mermaid she can return to the sea if she stabs her lover. Yep, that was in the original. And to think people got upset because they thought there was a penis on the cover of the Disney version. The point is, you can die, and you can die pretty gruesomely.

The control scheme of Brothers is an interesting experiment. Brothers has to be played with a controller with two analog sticks and two triggers. Each analog stick moves one brother, and each trigger causes one of the brothers to interact with whatever is in front of him. You're controlling both brothers simultaneously. It can be a little awkward at times, since most of us spend most of our time moving one character at a time in games.  In the words of Penny Arcade, "Brothers is a co-op game, for one person. And I am a really shitty partner." It makes running from place to place a little awkward, but it's really not bad overall. You will run the brothers into walls a lot. It happens. Dust yourself off and move on. The interaction button does the usual flipping switches and carrying things, but can also be used to interact with people and animals, which reveals the character of each brother through their interactions. For instance, the younger brother gets along famously with animals, but if the older brother tries to pick up a cat, it will hiss with hostility and flail its limbs at him while he laughs nervously and holds it at arm's length. You don't have to talk to everyone, but you should. It's part of the world you're playing in, and discovering that world is a significant part of the enjoyment to be had from Brothers.

I wish I could go into the plot more, but I can't. I don't want to spoil anything. Suffice it to say that it's good and what the brothers learn on their journey is affecting. The puzzles are good, but they're not all that hard, and if you're only playing Brothers for the puzzles, you'll have to deal with a lot of downtime and will probably walk away underwhelmed. Brothers also isn't very long. I finished it over the course of an afternoon. It's priced in accordance with this, so I don't count that as a negative. My only real gripe with the game is that sometimes the Gameplay and Story Segregation gets a bit too obvious. For instance, there are places in the game where if you fall, you die, and you have to start over. Some of these are adjacent to places where it is part of the storyline for your character to fall. I happened to fall and die very close to one of these places a few times, and when I finally did manage to make it to the staged falling area, I was a bit irritated to discover that my reward for not falling was to see my character fall on his own.

Play Brothers sometime. Don't play it because it's challenging (it's not) or because it's addicting (it's not) or because it's overwhelmingly fun (it's not). Play it to experience something beautiful. Something beautiful that you not only can see and hear, but walk around in and explore. You'll still have fun along the way. It's only a matter of time before it goes on sale on Steam again. Then's your chance.

Fijnål Scöre: Børk Børk Børk Børk / Børk Børk Børk Børk Børk

[chrimifi]

Tatl Recall: A The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask 3D Review

This article is part of a series called "Reviews You Can't Use", in which the author reviews a video game, but does so in such a way that the review will provide little to no information to the reader that would actually influence their decision of whether or not to purchase the game in question. Usually, this is accomplished by writing about a game so old that its worth is already well-documented or by lapsing into emotional, overly-personal detail about the game in question. The author is pleased to announce that this review will additionally suffer from the crippling handicap of being about a remake of a very popular game by a team that already has a great reputation for remaking N64-era Zelda games. It's the application of a proven formula to proven source material. I've already written too much.

Last fall, I was on Twitter because I had run across a fantastic article on professional soccer (the sort of thing I would write if I had to write about a soccer game), and I wanted to see what else the author had written. While I was there, something stood out in the trends listed in the left gutter: "Majora's Mask". "Majora's Mask" is the name of a title from the Zelda series that came out in 2000 for the Nintendo 64. It's a cult classic, and remains many fans' favorite Zelda title to this day. But, for all of the fandom it enjoys, there was no reason for it to be trending on Twitter fourteen years later. And so, I didn't really need to click those words to find out why they were trending. There was only one event with the power to make that happen, and it was one I had seen coming for years: Majora's Mask was being remade.

If that still seems like a reach, consider this: Nintendo had already remade a Nintendo 64 Zelda game for the 3DS: Ocarina of Time. That wasn't exactly a huge risk, since Ocarina of Time is also hugely popular. It's probably the most popular in the series, at least among my generation. OOT is the To Kill a Mockingbird to MM's Catcher in the Rye. The former is indisputably excellent, will be #1 on a great many people's lists of favorites, and will still be in the top ten of just about everyone else's. It was revolutionary at the time, but has been around for so long that we can't help but look at it as old-fashioned and inoffensive today because all of its revolutionary qualities have been adopted by so many more recent works. The latter was supposed to be different, and it was different, and it still manages to tell a story that unnerves people today. It has less fans, but those fans run deeper. It has more die-hards. And, granted, some of them are kind of obnoxious to talk to because of this, and if you sit one of them down and give them a beer and ask them to talk about why it's so great you'll probably regret it. The latter is more of a love-it-or-hate it affair. Anyway, Nintendo had already remade OOT for the 3DS, and MM happens to use the same engine and resources as OOT. In other words, a lot of the work to remake MM had already been done. Considering how many fans would consider a 3D remake of MM an insta-buy, I thought it a foregone conclusion that Nintendo would eventually make MM3D. And what do you know? They did.

Feeling so certain about that did not diminish my excitement in learning that Nintendo had announced the remake, and my reaction was along the lines of "I can't have these feelings in an office setting." Additionally, the fact that I learned about this on Twitter was information I was not equipped to process. The world briefly felt like a surreal place. So I guess there's a disclaimer hidden in all of this: Majora's Mask was and is my favorite Zelda title. It was my favorite in spite of the fact that I had not actually finished the game prior to last night. It struck that much of a chord with me. Anyway, let's talk about the game itself.

Majora's Mask for the Uninitiated

MM, like the last Zelda game I reviewed, is a rare direct sequel in the Zelda series. It takes place immediately after the events of OOT. However, where OOT took place in Hyrule, MM takes place in the alternate universe of Termina. Termina has a different geography from Hyrule, but contains many of the same enemies, and many of the people there look identical to people in Hyrule. They have different names and backstories, but look the same, pixel-for-pixel. This is no doubt for the real-world reason of Nintendo being able to reuse art from OOT. This calls into question to what extent the events of MM actually happen. Link is knocked off his horse in the opening scene, so it's possible this is all just a dream he has while unconscious. It could be a magical fantasy realm that he has to fight to escape, like in Final Fantasy Tactics Advance. Or perhaps it really is a proper alternate universe where everyone coincidentally looks like people in Hyrule. In the end, just pick the level of metaphor, head trauma, and magic that works best for you. The Zelda timeline doesn't make sense anyway.

Link's journey starts with the objective of escaping Termina, but it doesn't take long to intuit what you'll really be after in the game. Look up in the sky, and you'll see an unusually large moon dangling in the air with a very unfriendly face on it. Spoiler alert: it has something to do with the villain. This moon gets closer and closer as time goes on, and by the end of three in-game days, you discover that the moon is being pulled down to earth(?) by Skull Kid, the very same troublemaker that stole Link's horse and trapped him in Termina. Skull Kid has been possessed by Majora's Mask, an ancient mask he stole from the Happy Mask Salesman that also happens to be the earthly(?) prison of an unspeakably evil and powerful entity. You also discover that after three days, the moon will, in fact, crash down into the ground and annihilate Termina. This presents obvious obstacles to your escape. Clearly, it must be prevented. But how? You only have three days, and Skull Kid turned you into a different species! That's an awfully brief time to stop an ancient evil from crashing the moon into the ground. I've had blog posts that took more than three days to write. The answer to this puzzle is the Ocarina of Time, which you eventually steal back from Skull Kid. With it, you gain the power to turn back into a human (well, Hylian) and to go back in time, to when you first entered Termina. What this means in terms of gameplay is that you play the game three days at a time, and at the end of those three days, you warp back to the dawn of the first day. It's Groundhog Day with swords!

I am usually not a fan of artificially-imposed time limits, but this one really works for me. I only found myself running out of time a couple of times in my playthrough, and it's very unlikely that you'll find yourself having to repeat large portions of the game because you had to warp back. What we get in exchange for this small peril is characters with branching storylines that really let you see what impact your actions have on them. When tragedy occurs, you can make a note of when it happens and prevent it on your next cycle. Helping people is a big part of the game, and you're richly rewarded for doing so. However, this is a component of the bittersweetness that lies at the heart of MM. You can't help everyone. Sometimes people have overlapping problems, and you can't be two places at once. Sometimes one person's solution is another person's problem. If you're off saving the world, then bad things are going to happen to people when you're not there. And finally, there are some people that are just doomed. No matter what you do, no matter how many times you go back, you can't stop it. It's too late for them. This is a big deal for a video game and especially a Zelda game, where you can usually solve everyone's problem by the end of the game and everyone gets to live happily ever after.

The other big change in gameplay from OOT is the promotion of masks to first-class gameplay mechanic in MM. OOT offers the opportunity to rent a small number of masks that bestow minor powers. MM has more than 20 masks, and while some of them are pretty minor in power, most of them do more than any mask in OOT did. The most famous ones are, of course, the Deku Mask, Goron Mask, and Zora Mask, which allow Link to transform into the three other major races of Termina. It seems sort of old hat now that we've gotten used to it and had the ability to play as a wolf in Twilight Princess, but it was seriously exciting at the time and is still a lot of fun today.

What's New in the 3DS Version

Well, first of all, it's in 3D now.

But seriously, the textures have been redone in higher resolution and the game looks great. Like in OOT3D, dungeons have gotten special attention and exude more character as a result of the varied textures on their walls. I wouldn't go as far as saying that the game is as sharp as it would be if remade for an HD home console, but it's a big improvement over the original. Gyorg stands out in my mind as the best example of a retexturing gone right. The original almost looks like it's experiencing a texture error when compared to the new version.

The 3DS touchscreen is also used to full effect. Masks and items can be assigned to the X and Y buttons by dragging them to the correct button, and the screen has room for two more masks/items on a couple of soft keys. That's a total of four items one can use without opening the menu, which is one more than the N64 version. The map sits in the center, a bit larger than the mini-map one gets in the original. In sum, it's a useful evolution of the control scheme.

In addition to these more obvious changes, there are a variety of small gameplay tweaks that have been introduced. Rewards are swapped around, rooms are changed, etc. The most material of them is that the 3DS version has an additional empty bottle for you to collect. I think they're a net positive, but I didn't really notice them, and I doubt that you will, either.

The Bad, or At Least Mediocre

"So, is there anything you don't like, or are you just going to stay in fanboy mode for this entire review?", you might say. Ouch, dear reader. A fair accusation, but a harsh one. Nonetheless, there is something that springs to mind for that: the music. The music in MM3D is unchanged from MM, and that's fine (I mean, I wouldn't argue with a remastered soundtrack, but that process could always backfire), but the MM soundtrack has always been a little weak. Much of it is borrowed from OOT, which had a very memorable soundtrack, but it's only memorable the first time around. There are some memorable songs in MM, too, including the Clock Town song (which is creatively arranged to sound more and more sinister as the moon gets closer), "Oath to Order", and the Astral Observatory song, but the dungeon music is completely forgettable, and the various locales in which the dungeons reside all have the same music. Well, actually, it's the same song, but played with different instruments. Unfortunately, it's a song that gets tiring by the end of the game. MM doesn't have bad music, but Zelda is a franchise with iconic music, and MM definitely fell short of that. And game music is a big deal to me, so... there, I said it.

It's also kind of a short game. Now, it doesn't feel short. It feels about the right length. But, objectively, it is shorter than its predecessor. MM only has five-ish dungeons, and OOT has at least nine, depending on how you count. I'm not saying they should have stretched it out, because that can easily ruin a game, but considering that these games were priced around the same, it needs to be noted.

In Closing

All in all... never mind. I don't need to do a summary. I told you how I felt about Majora's Mask at the beginning of this review. The 3D treatment has only made it better. Just go play it. Maybe you won't like it. That's fine. But maybe you'll like it, and if that happens, I bet you'll really, really like it. You can play as a Zora and it might break your heart. Doesn't that sound like fun?

Final Score: 5499/5000

[chrimifi]

Aboat A Girl: A The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass Review

This article is part of a series called “Reviews You Can’t Use”, in which the author reviews a video game with about as much buzz as a barber during a power outage.

Zelda games sell consoles, and fans of the series have, over time, just come to expect that any Nintendo console that doesn't tank immediately will have its own Zelda title. Based on this model, The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass is a title that we all knew would happen. The Game Boy got Link's Awakening, the Game Boy Color got Oracle of Seasons and Oracle of Ages, and the Game Boy Advance got The Minish Cap. We all knew something had to be coming for the Nintendo DS. And there was.

Phantom Hourglass is a sequel, making it a rarity for the series. The story picks up right where The Wind Waker leaves off. Link is adventuring with Tetra and her band of pirates when they come across the mysterious Ghost Ship (which, for all its mystery, is very appropriately named). Tetra boards the Ghost Ship and starts to explore, but after a few moments, she screams for help and Link rushes in to save her. Well, actually, he falls into the water. Oops. Link washes ashore on the nearby Mercay Island, where he meets a fairy named Ciela and a sailor named Linebeck, his traveling companions for the game. At some point, Tetra is turned to stone, so the three of them set sail to get the powerful MacGuffins needed to beat a not particularly memorable evil thing and save the world. Just, you know, finish the dungeons. It's not worth asking why.

Phantom Hourglass is the first Zelda game for a portable console with 3D graphics (the old definition of 3D graphics, not the new definition) and looks like a more pixelated Wind Waker. Link's big, dark eyebrows are still there and still remain well-utilized, meaning characters convey a surprising amount of emotion, given their low-fidelity renderings. Phantom Hourglass also introduced a new control scheme, which uses the DS touchscreen for movement. When you touch a point on the screen, Link moves toward it. Make a slashing motion across the screen, and Link will swing his sword. Draw a little circle while he's running, and he'll somersault. When Link uses his bow, bombs, or grappling hook, you just have to touch the place you want him to shoot or throw to. The system is about 90% effective, but falls short in one crucial way for me: you can't move and slash at the same time. Countless times, I've run up to enemies with the intention of using my sword on them, only to stop directly in front of them and get walloped in the face because I couldn't draw a line fast enough or the line that I did draw was not accepted as a line, and hence Link moved a few steps to his right instead of swinging his sword. I very nearly lost to the final boss because of this. I defeated it with only half of a heart left, and while I had figured out what I needed to do, the situation was still essentially "Jesus take the wheel" because I only had about 70% reliability in pulling off the combination of footwork and sword-swinging that I needed. It's neat that Nintendo showed how you can play an action game like this with a touchscreen, but this kind of nonsense is a critical immersion failure. Sometimes, to save the world, you have to be able to move your arms and your legs at the same time. In the end, it makes Phantom Hourglass feel like an attempt by Nintendo to use all of the features in the console, needed or not, in order to make the inclusion of those features look like a genius move instead of a boondoggle. It is hardly the first Nintendo game to fall victim to this. The feeling is further reinforced by the inclusion of sound-activated events (requiring you to make noises into the DS's microphone) and one puzzle (the solution to which I am about to spoil, so if you don't want to read that, skip to the next paragraph) that actually hinges on, well, a hinge. I'm not actually sure it's supposed to be a puzzle. The game tells you to touch something on the bottom screen to something on the top screen, and you're supposed to close the DS, which physically brings the two together. It's a cute idea, but no one I've talked to about it understood it the first time around. We all ended up spending five minutes trying to drag the bottom half up with the stylus, closing the DS in resignation, and then realizing when we opened up the console later that closing the DS was the solution. I remember that I was amused at the time, and it's actually a pretty good puzzle, but the thing is, I don't think it's meant to be a puzzle. It just wasn't presented that way. I think we were supposed to just know to do that, but none of us did. What happens if you play it on a 2DS?

Sailing is, mercifully, much different from The Wind Waker. Linebeck's boat is a motorized vessel, so you don't have to worry about the wind and you move at a consistent clip regardless of your direction. Instead of steering the boat directly, the game has you draw a course on the map, and your boat then follows the path automatically. This frees up your hands to fire bombs at whatever cretins pop out of the sea and attack you. The game has a warp mechanic, as any video game with an overworld should. Like in The Wind Waker, you can use a salvage arm to pull treasure chests from the deep, but unlike in The Wind Waker, this is not an automatic process. Salvaging requires playing a brief mini-game where you try to guide the salvage claw to the seafloor, avoiding exploding fish. It is acceptably fun. You can also fish. You meet a few mildly interesting NPCs on the high seas, as well as one character I could do without: Jolene. Jolene is Linebeck's jilted ex, and no matter where you are on the ocean, she will eventually chase you down and challenge you to a fight. Eventually, she reconciles with Linebeck and disappears, but this happens right before the end of the game, so if you want to explore and hunt for treasure, you'll either have to wait for most of the game or deal with Jolene's interrupting.

Even more than the touchscreen controls (because I don't like them), the greatest innovation that Phantom Hourglass brings to the series is the Temple of the Ocean King. The Temple of the Ocean King is a dungeon that you go to between dungeons, handily distributing information on where the next plot coupon is being kept. It plays differently from the other dungeons because it's fallen under a terrible curse that causes it to drain the life out of anyone that enters, like some sort of magical combination Comcast office-DMV. Link, luckily, is protected by a magical artifact called (drum roll, please) the Phantom Hourglass. The downside to this is that hourglasses tend to keep track of time, and this one is no exception. The hourglass ticks away as long as Link is in the temple, and if it runs out, then the curse goes back to sucking life away like Count Rugen with a cocaine problem. Additionally, the temple is patrolled by invincible phantoms that will chase Link down if they spot him and hack precious seconds off of the timer with a swing of their huge swords. Fortunately, the temple has a variety of safe zones in which the timer doesn't run and the phantoms can't see Link. What this all means is that The Temple of the Ocean King focuses more on puzzles and stealth than combat, and I think the time limit adds a bit of pressure that keeps it from dragging. All in all, I think it was inventive and a refreshing change of pace that keeps the game from being just a series of dungeons.

What perplexes me more than anything else in the game is Linebeck. He's Link's companion in the game, second only to Ciela (who is more of a UI element than a character), but he doesn't really bring anything to the table. I can't think of a place in the game where Linebeck is involved that could be adequately explained without him without any real loss in character. He provides you with a boat and complains about things. Oh, and he has a psycho girlfriend that chases you... that he refuses to confront. He literally hides in a box whenever she shows up. (I'll confess that I found that funny the first time.) I never connected with him. I certainly didn't like him. He's a jerk, and while not all jerks are bad characters, he has to be something else to be a good character. And he's just not! He's not interesting, he's not funny, he's not informative, and while he kind of has a "jerk with a heart of gold" moment, it's too little, too late. He's just... there. Putting him on the cover of the game was a bit much, in my opinion.

So, should you play this game? My answer is a firm "I mean, I guess, if you want to". Phantom Hourglass isn't a bad game, but it's not memorable. Playing it is like adding a pleasant mild salsa to a tortilla chip. It is noticeable and enjoyable, and it's better than nothing, but it will not excite you. Maybe its biggest problem is that it is doomed to comparison with The Wind Waker, a longer, deeper, prettier game. Did you enjoy The Wind Waker? Well, it's like that, but worse. It's worse for very good, hardware-related reasons, but it's still worse, and it hit right after Twilight Princess started to take the franchise in the new direction. In 2005, a small Flash parody of the Zelda series called The Legend of Zelda: The Lampshade of No Real Significance came out, and I remember playing it. The game itself is mostly in-jokes about the Flash animation community of the day, but the title spoke volumes. Zelda had acquired a formula. Step one, get the thing in the title. Step two, defeat the evil with the thing from the title. (Step three is, of course, profit.) Phantom Hourglass went back to that formula, and while it's nowhere near being Wand of Gamelon, it will never be anyone's favorite in the Zelda franchise. Don't feel obligated to go back to it.

Oh, and it has a multiplayer mode, but they shut the servers down, so it's strictly local. I don't know what it's like because none of my friends own this game. I don't blame them.

Final Score: The Great C

[chrimifi]

What It's Like to Switch to iOS in 2015

Recently, I did something that a lot of bloggers that fancy themselves technologists have done. I decided to switch from using an Android phone to an iPhone. This is a topic we just can't seem to stop talking about, we technology types. We'll tell you why we switched, why we're not switching, and why we switched back. War breaks out online between iOS and Android fanatics, leaving iOS users crudely painted as luddites who need their technology with training wheels and Android users as bitter, impoverished souls who would surely submit to the superiority of the iPhone if they could afford it. When forums started seeing little cartoons of the Android logo eating the Apple logo or subjecting it to certain bodily functions, well, it just confirmed what we all expected deep down: the smartphone wars would be fought at a level of discourse about even with stickers placed in the back window of pickup trucks accessorized with Truck Nutz™.

I have always maintained that iOS is a fine smartphone platform and is suitable for the vast majority of people. I have, at times, suggested that it would be unnecessarily expensive for at least 50% of smartphone users. When I first became an Android user, I had to admit the platform was still a little half-baked. But an iPhone would have been about four times as expensive. Per month! I was happy, but I wasn't about to recommend it to just anyone. Things are different now. Android has matured. So has iOS. And, of course, each of them has plagiarized the bejeezus out of the other, so the modern buyer will enjoy much more parity between the two. So why switch? I'll tell you why.

Earlier this year, I encountered a particularly first-world problem. The iPod I was wearing as a watch broke. I had to decide if I would try to replace it, repair it, or move to using my phone as my primary source of music and podcasts. I decided to try the third one. Less devices to worry about. This was a change of heart for me, since in the past, I enjoyed the thought of having a device for music that did one thing, and did it well. I was especially concerned about draining my phone's battery by playing music. This problem had become rectified in part by the fact that you can buy phones almost the size of salad plates these days, and these gargantuan phones come with large batteries. My hands are large enough to accept these as a solution.

Unfortunately, my musical needs are... specialized. I have a lot of music. More than I can keep track of. I am trying to work my way through it and throw out albums I don't like anymore (in particular, I've come to find using an electric keyboard to imitate another instrument increasingly grating with age), but I still rely on my "Neglected Songs" playlist to make sure I'm actually listening to everything and figuring out what to keep and throw out. Neglected Songs is an auto-playlist that selects the songs I've listened to least recently. Naturally, this can't work unless my music player can keep track of what I've listened to and syncs it back to the library. The iPhone is a foolproof solution to this. On Android, I had options, but all of them came with drawbacks. I'll talk about it more later on.

Another reason was my car. While Android Auto is starting to take off and promises an unparalleled user experience in new vehicles, I don't have one of those new vehicles. I like my car and intend to keep it for some time. It just works better with iPods and iPhones. If I want to improve my car-and-phone audio experience, the car's not changing, so I'd better get to changing the phone.

Apple won't be dropping the price of the iPhone 6 until the next one comes out, so I won't save money by waiting. When a promotion popped up to get a free $150 gift card with the purchase of an iPhone, I jumped at it. I got a 64GB iPhone 6 Plus.

So far, I'm very happy. I believe that the iPhone is indeed superior for my use case. But let me be clear about this: the iPhone is not objectively superior to everything else, as some of my friends would claim. If you want a smartphone for Angry Birds, Snapchat, Facebook, e-mail, and Spotify, there's a good chance you'll be just as happy with a Nexus 5, which costs about half as much as an iPhone. In brief, yes, the iPhone is probably the best phone for me, but that's for very specific reasons, so that probably doesn't mean much for your decision.

Maybe that's all you wanted to know from this, in which case I give you my blessing to close this tab and spend the remainder of your day looking at cat pictures instead. But if not, here's the blow-by-blow on the strengths, weaknesses, and differences:

How They Look

iOS has just emerged from a design reinvention. It would seem that the current leadership at Apple have become confident enough in their staying power to begin breaking the inviolable rules of Steve Jobs, and skeuomorphism is dying a rapid death as a result. Most of you will remember the iOS of two years ago, where every button had a glossy veneer that said, "I'm a button! Press me!" The clock app looked so much like a certain real clock that the people that invented the real clock sued them. The voice recorder looked like a tape recorder. Eventually, this style crept into Mac OS X Lion, and people began to wonder if Apple skeuomorphism had gone too far. The Calendar app was remade to look like a leather-bound calendar. The Address Book app was remade to look like a physical book. The most amusing, in my opinion, was Game Center, which looked like a poker table. Like, in a casino. Chips and all. Jobs was apparently in charge of these changes, which was not a surprise to me. Jobs was obsessed with usability and user-friendliness. He would insist that users know how to do everything the first time, without coaching or instructions. Skeuomorphism is a generally reliable way to accomplish this. Everyone who knows how to work a tape recorder should be able to use a voice recorder app if it looks and acts like a tape recorder. I, personally, think he went a bit overboard. The design of Game Center says a lot. I have little doubt that he put a lot of thought into what real-world object best models games. Unfortunately, this was probably about as foreign to him as farming. Steve Jobs didn't have time to furnish his house. He didn't have a life outside of Apple, and he didn't care about games at all. So I theorize that Game Center became the Golden Nugget because his conception of what a game would look like on a phone came from the games Apple had made for past devices, things like chess and solitaire. That's what games looked like to him, even though the rest of the world had caught on to the fact that video games are more likely to feature cute, merchandizable protagonists than cards.

Anyway, that's all conjecture. The point is that Steve Jobs loved loved LOVED skeuomorphism and in his absence, Jony Ive used iOS 7 to change the official Apple position on skeuomorphism to #ByeFelicia. We laughed at "iOS Lisa Frank edition" and the fact that the Newsstand app went from being a richly textured 3D bookshelf to literally just five gray rectangles. Still, it had to happen. Tastes have changed. Windows Phone showed that flat, simple designs could be beautiful. So now Apple is all about gradients, blur, layering, and Helvetica. It looks nice. The only real problem is that now that developers are discouraged from making their app icons glossy rounded squares, many of them are just making their icons a logo on a white rounded square. Google does a lot of this. The problem is no doubt exacerbated by the Android design guidelines, which say, in essence, "Don't make your app icon a rounded square. If it's headphones, make it headphone-shaped. If it's an apple, make it apple-shaped." I suspect some studios are just putting their Android icon on a white square. The end result is that my home screen has just enough white squares for it to look repetitive, but not enough for it to look intentional.

Android has also undergone some changes and is currently in a state of transition. Up through the Android Gingerbread version, Android was defined by green checkboxes on white backgrounds and pop-up menus with gray gradient icons. It was the bare minimum of design, and while it worked, it wasn't about to win any awards. Honeycomb introduced Holo, a new design scheme in which everything was black with white text and cyan highlights. It hasn't aged amazingly well, and it gets compared to Tron from time to time, but it was a big step up. Then, with KitKat, Google started turning backgrounds white again, and with Lollipop, Google has introduced a new design language it calls Material Design. It emphasizes bright colors and the use of shadows and motion to suggest that your phone contents are made out of paper or some other material. It's pretty.

I have no real preference.

Music

Music is the area in which the differences between Google and Apple really shine. iOS, of course, has a preferred way for you to listen to music. It's called iTunes. Apple would love for you to buy all of your music from there and use it for radio. (Or at least Beats Music, which they just bought.) They probably call it the best mobile music experience ever. Magical or perfect or effortless or some other word off of the Apple "approved adjectives" list, which I estimate to be about 50 words long. Despite the fact that Apple marketing copy makes me dry-heave, I do like the iOS Music app more than any of the music players on Android, because it works seamlessly with iTunes, which is where I happen to have all of my music. The only music library I'm aware of that can really compete with it is the dead Zune software and the practically undead Winamp. It's understandable. The world has moved on to cloud-based music. 99% of the population can listen to everything they want on Spotify, Google Play Music, Amazon Prime Music, or some other streaming service. I happen to have a sizable collection of obscure soundtracks and other albums that aren't on any of the services, so I remain anchored in the past to my physical collection in order to be able to listen to them. Android, to its credit, has several fine music players, including Apollo and DoubleTwist. DoubleTwist even syncs with iTunes and will maintain my oh-so-important play count. Unfortunately, it lacks integration with Google Now. You can tell an Android phone "OK Google, play The White Stripes", and it can do that, but it will try to use Google Play for any media you ask it to play. Google Play Music is a fine music player, even for tracks transferred from a computer, but it doesn't synchronize play counts, and that's a dealbreaker for me. On the iPhone, Siri knows all about my library, and I can ask her to play whatever I like. Well, almost. I'm still figuring her out.

Podcasts work as before, which I find satisfying. iOS might have a slight advantage here, because as far as I'm aware, Google Now does not have any podcast voice commands. Siri, on the other hand, is fully aware of podcasts synced from iTunes. Forgiving that omission, both have a wide selection of excellent podcast apps. From what I read online, the iOS Podcasts app is unpopular, for some reason. I don't understand why, myself. It seems to do its job just fine. My only complaint is that it doesn't have a landscape view.

Keyboards

For a long time, my most strenuous objection to getting an iPhone was the keyboard. I was an avid SwiftKey user and later an avid Minuum user, and the iPhone was stuck with this primitive one-letter-at-a-time-no-predictive-text keyboard. If there are any of you reading that I haven't texted before, know this: I type how I talk, pretty much regardless of context. I don't abbreviate. This isn't a value judgment on those that do; it's just something I never got in the habit of. So for me, predictive text is love. Predictive text is life. Drag keyboards are awesome. It makes swiping over "be right back" faster than pecking out "brb". Switching to the iPhone keyboard would have been the textual equivalent of acquiring an aggressive stutter. This was, thankfully, rectified in iOS 8, which introduced both support for third-party keyboards and enhanced the stock iOS keyboard to do predictive text. This means I can again swipe to my heart's content on SwiftKey or tap with reckless speed with the stock keyboard.

Unexpectedly, I find myself sticking with the stock iOS keyboard over SwiftKey or Minuum. Minuum was my favorite on Android because it was so small. Covering half of your screen with a keyboard makes it hard to do anything else. However, iOS Minuum isn't very small at all, and iOS is a bit smarter about hiding the keyboard when it's not in use. iOS SwiftKey is just unstable. All in all, iOS and Android are pretty close in this category now. I'll give a slight lead to Android because the third-party keyboard ecosystem is so mature.

Stability

I've heard a lot about how iOS is supposed to be more stable than Android. This hasn't been my experience. In particular, the Messages app seems to bug out a lot (even with stock keyboard), and in general, I notice about the same number of crashes on my iPhone as I did on my last Android phone. I've already talked about how SwiftKey likes to crash, but it's new, so I'll let that pass for now. Podcasts has an odd bug where every time it syncs, it creates a new copy of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me in its menu. I'm less inclined to forgive that because Podcasts is system software. I guess that, on average, iOS is more stable because of how many cheap, awful Android phones are out there, but given that you get a good Android device (and there are many at the price point of an iPhone), I consider this category another tie.

Google Voice

I use Google Voice. I like it a lot. It transcribes my voicemail, it lets me text from my computer, and it lets me change phone numbers without actually having to change phone numbers. For the uninitiated, Google Voice essentially gives me a phone number that's independent of the number actually programmed into my phone, which I can call/text to/from from as many phones or computers as I like. It would take a lot to convince me to buy a phone that doesn't support it.

A certain unnamed Apple fanboy I have as a friend describes the iPhone's support for Google Voice as "pretty robust", but, with all due respect, he doesn't know what he's talking about. He has not tasted true Google Voice support. On iOS, you can make calls through Google Voice by using the Google Voice app to dial the call. If you use the "Phone" app, you will call the person using your phone's real number, and they will be confused. You can send texts from the Google Voice app, but if you use the Messages app, again, it will use your phone's real number and you will confuse your friends and loved ones. If you tell Siri to call or text someone, she will use your phone's real number, and they might put the real into their contact for you, and then they might text you from it, and you'll get that text on your phone but nowhere else and then you have to correct them and it's awkward.

Android supports deep Google Voice integration. The Google Voice app lets you set whether it should use Google Voice to place all calls, just use it for international calls (useful because Google Voice has cheap international calling rates), or prompt you before every call. If you say "OK Google, call Mom," it works with whatever number you picked. You still have to use the Hangouts app or the Google Voice app to text from Google Voice, but because Android lets you pick which app is the default for sending a text, it still works with "OK Google" and other features. It just works™.

Google Voice still used to be a little painful on Android because the Google Voice app was really old. Earlier this year, they added Google Voice support to Hangouts, which solved this problem, to me, completely. It let me text from Hangouts the same way a Nexus 5 user that doesn't use Google Voice would. I could also call people over Wi-Fi through Hangouts. Best of all, all of my texts would show up in Hangouts across my phone, my work computer, my home computer, and any other computer I could access Gmail from. It was awesome and I miss it. The idea that someone sends me a message and it just goes to my phone and lives and dies there seems silly now.

I have a small cheat code in my arsenal for this feature. Sprint has an arrangement with Google Voice where they can integrate your number with Google Voice at the carrier level. In other words, regardless of what your phone does, Sprint will make sure its calls and texts go out through the Google Voice number. So I got a Sprint phone. It's good enough, but it's still not the full Google Voice experience. For one thing, Hangouts integration doesn't work, so to text from my computer, I have to open the web browser and go to the Google Voice website, instead of being able to use the Hangouts app on my computer or in Gmail. iMessages don't show up anywhere but on my phone because they're not SMS, so I've had to turn that off. Now, it bears mentioning that Apple recently unveiled a feature called Handoff that allows you to use your Mac to call or iMessage from your iPhone, and this comes pretty close to what I had with (and loved about) Hangouts. Unfortunately, this requires a Mac running OS X Yosemite. My work computer doesn't have that version of OS X yet, and my home computer is a Windows machine because Steve Jobs hated fun and Mac gaming don't real, so Handoff doesn't do me a lot of good. Now, it's true that not so long ago, text messages were just text messages and they went to your phone and that was it, and I survived. This is clearly no worse than that. But the fact remains that there's already a system where all of my text messages can be sent and received by literally any device capable of running Google Chrome and which doesn't make people who can't afford Apple products second-class citizens, and I can't use that anymore. It seems a little ridiculous. (And that's not even scratching the surface of whether or not I'm really OK, deep down, with Google having a copy of all of my text messages.)

In The Car

I have a 2013 Hyundai Sonata. This advice is probably only relevant for people that have a late-model Hyundai. The iPhone works much better for two reasons.

First, the iPhone has some sort of mechanism for informing the car over Bluetooth that it needs to tell me when to turn. My Android phone would also play its navigation directions over Bluetooth, but the radio would not interrupt the music for it, so my Android phone basically could not speak directions unless I was also listening to audio streaming from it over Bluetooth. I can hear the iPhone directions regardless of what I'm doing.

Secondly, Siri knows the music on the phone. I'm still figuring her out a bit, but for the most part, she lets me play whatever I want with a voice command. Effective voice commands were not something I had with either the Android phone or the iPod. I can also use the stereo to navigate my music, but since I'm carrying around about 50GB of music, voice commands are a big help.

Maps

Poor Apple. The only company producing an integrated mapping solution worthy of the iPhone was their new arch-rival, Google. So they had to try to make their own. Who doesn't remember the hilarious adventures the early versions of Apple Maps sent hapless iPhone owners on? Who could forget the fascinating Salvador Dali masterpieces that early Apple Maps made out of famous landmarks and bridges? I'll be honest. I enjoyed seeing Apple fail so hard. I was sad for the people that worked on it and the more reasonable users forced to live with it, but seeing the fanatics try to hold a straight face while saying that Apple had revolutionized or reinvented or whatever animal-derived fertilizer their marketing department came up with warmed my heart.

Apple Maps looks better, in my opinion. Part of this is because I like the Avenir-esque font that it uses, which is probably a little unfortunate, because I imagine that this choice was made by Steve Jobs to emulate London Underground maps, making it a prime target for stripping away in new, non-skeuomorphic world of iOS. Apple also put a shocking amount of work into reproducing highway signs in the app, so the icons for state routes match what you see on the sign instead of just a circle with a number in it. I'm sure this is helpful for some, but I just like it because it looks neat. These icons happen to be glossy. I wonder if they will also eventually be changed or purged or if they will instead remain, like the iOS Emoji, a glossy reminder of the days of iOS past.

There are things I like about it that aren't probably outdated, though. The navigation interface looks more like the rest of iOS than Google Maps. Animations are very smooth. And, of course, it's the only maps app that Siri knows about.

Still, Google Maps remains incredibly hard to beat in the mapping space. Apple Maps doesn't give very clear directions in the complicated interchanges of East St. Louis or West Pasadena. Google Maps solves this with lane guidance. Google Maps also benefits from Google's significant efforts to become a player in the local media space, so listings tend to have more photos and information, including a brief summary sentence that will tell you, for instance, that Subway is a "casual counter-serve chain for build-your-own sandwiches & salads, with health-conscious options", in case you've somehow never been to a Subway before. Google Maps will also keep your search history across devices.

All in all, Apple Maps is pretty, but Google Maps is more helpful. Apple wants you to use Apple Maps, so you'll have to go out of your way to use Google Maps. It's a small amount of friction, but avoiding small amounts of friction is exactly why a lot of people buy iPhones. I, personally, stopped using Google Maps because of an experience I had where I asked Siri to navigate somewhere when I was already navigating. Unfortunately, I was navigating in Google Maps, but Siri tried to open Apple Maps to find my new destination, and the phone crashed as a result. It is a shame that Apple Maps is about as useless as it is pretty. I wonder if there might be more vibrant competition in this space if Apple had bought Waze after all.

Bits and Pieces

Finally, a few other observations that don't really belong in any specific category:

Touch ID is crazily convenient and I can't wait for Android to steal it.

I miss Android's advanced app-to-app sharing and can't wait for iOS to finish stealing that (they've already started).

Putting back buttons in the top-left corner made sense when iPhones had 3.5" screens, but now some of them have 5.5" screens.

The iOS Wikipedia app is way better than the Android one.

I hope you've found this walk through the modern smartphone landscape edifying. Now, I'm off to not buy any apps and contribute to the continuing miserable state of mobile gaming.

[chrimifi]

Lombax to the Future: A Ratchet & Clank Collection Review

This article is part of a series called "Reviews You Can't Use", in which the author reviews games that are old. Too old. With one foot in the $5 bin at Walmart and the other on a banana peel. It's like that thing that guy did where he made his son play through each generation of video games before I could play modern video games, except that I'm not my own son. Unfortunate, really. I never know what my father wants for Christmas, and this would solve that problem beautifully.

In recent years, dozens of old-but-not-too-old games have been re-released on modern consoles, revamped into "HD" versions that take advantage of the new TVs everyone bought because they accidentally broke their old ones by throwing Wii remotes into them. I personally have no problem with this, since the games that get this treatment were usually very good, and getting a fresh coat of paint rarely makes them worse. Ratchet & Clank Collection is a part of this trend, and is a repackaging and refreshing of the three Ratchet & Clank games from the PS2 era: Ratchet & Clank, Ratchet & Clank: Going Commando, and Ratchet & Clank: Up Your Arsenal. I knew that I would like Ratchet & Clank Collection because I owned and played all of these games when I was younger. I never finished any of them, however, so I thought it would be fun to go back, play them again, and finish them out.

The three games play very similarly. You control what is essentially an anthropomorphic meerkat (a creature called a "lombax" in game) named Ratchet and his robot buddy Clank. Each level is a planet (or some planet-like thing like a space station) that you fight your way through, platformer-style, using the variety of weapons and gadgets that you find and purchase over the course of the game. Some of these are predictable weapons like a blaster, a rocket launcher, or a sniper rifle, but most try to be some combination of creative and futuristic. The Tesla Claw shoots lightning. The Chopper shoots ninja stars that bounce in elegant arcs between nearby enemies. The R.Y.N.O. ("Rip You a New One") just shoots a bunch of homing rockets at once. Most planets have multiple objectives, but advancing the storyline usually comes down to this: blast your way through the level until you either find the gadget/weapon at the end or you trigger the next plot point that tells you about a new planet. Then, go to the new planet, or go back to the place you couldn't get through because you didn't have the weapon or gadget that you just got. Lest this sound like biting criticism, the system actually works pretty well. It gives one latitude to explore, but it's always pretty clear where the next destination is. Sometimes dogfighting/racing/giant-robot-based minigames are thrown in for some extra variety. These mini-games aren't about to win any awards, but they're not horribly broken, either, and they provide a refreshing distraction. Up Your Arsenal features a retro-styled side-scrolling platformer mini-game that is actually quite polished and could be a game of its own (a small, cheap, downloadable game, but a game nonetheless).

The bulk of Ratchet & Clank Collection is spent reveling in the joys of destruction. That's how these games were marketed, after all. Toy with the elaborate weapons, blow away your enemies, and watch as money (in the form of bolts) spills out. Much of the environment (including basically every light fixture) can be destroyed for more bolts. These games exist to let you have that guns-blazing action hero fantasy, and if you don't enjoy that even a little bit, you probably won't like them. Still, one gets tired of that feeling eventually (at least I do), and the trilogy thankfully throws in a healthy number of puzzles. They're not going to challenge you the way a kenken board does, but they at least make the gears turn, so-to-speak. Like the minigames, they're a refreshing change of pace.

These things are only enough to make a good game, however. What makes Ratchet & Clank Collection worthwhile is that it combines this gameplay with a surprisingly entertaining universe. Perhaps thanks to the Hollywood-adjacency of the series's developer (Insomniac Games is based in Burbank), the writing, animation, and voice acting is very good for a platformer, and it feels more than a little like you're playing through a Pixar movie. I looked forward to the cutscenes, which is remarkable considering how some cutscenes of the period were almost physically painful to watch. Graphics are classic, cartoony science fiction, straight out of a space-age World's Fair pavilion. Spaceships have fins and joysticks, and many items hover in midair for no apparent practical reason. Everything looks sharp in HD, although it bears mentioning that the UI of the first game has not aged well. Part of the blame for this lies with the fact that it is mostly based on blocks that look like CRT displays, which look quaint and antiquated instead of futuristic today. However, it still must be said that Insomniac seems to have figured out UI design somewhere in between the first and second games, because the latter two games have much better HUDs. The music is good, if not memorable in the way a Uematsu-composed Final Fantasy soundtrack might be. It takes inspiration from both the science fiction setting of the games and the cinematic feel of them, and the result is a combination of futuristic synthesizer and cinematic orchestra. When I heard a performance of Mason Bates's "Mothership" a few months ago, I was strongly reminded of it. Finally, the writing is simply much better than the typical game of this genre. The games have an irreverent sense of humor that shines through whenever possible. You might suspect as much from a game with "going commando" or "up your arsenal" in its name. Even the serious moments in the plot are frequently punctuated with gags like characters forgetting that a camera is rolling or dealing with personal problems as they announce their plans to destroy you. Every once in a while, there are jokes that weren't exactly meant to be gotten by the 14-year-old me that played these games the first time. ("My daughter tells me you're good with your hands." "Mr. President, I swear I didn't..." "Can you fix our shields?") All in all, it's entertaining for reasons other than the explosions.

So, what's bad, then? Honestly, the worst problem could be economics. In the first two games, there are many levels that end with a character wanting to charge you several thousand bolts for whatever MacGuffin you need to progress in the plot. I try to play somewhat thriftily, so I always had the bolts needed to go on, but what happens when you don't? You just have to walk around shooting things until you have enough? Part of what I liked about the series was that it flowed pretty smoothly from planet to planet, and having to stop and destroy the scenery for 15 minutes to get a plot coupon jeopardizes that pretty intensely. There's also a bit of an inflation problem. You probably won't get all of the coolest weapons in the game, because they're really expensive. The R.Y.N.O. costs significantly more than anything else in the first game, and there's no way to buy it without serious grinding or, in my case, looking up an infinite money glitch on the Internet and wrapping a rubber band around my controller so that the glitch can run while I'm asleep and at work. Even then, it took almost 12 hours of continuously collecting money to get enough. Certainly cool things in games need to be costly to give the player goals, but there's a line, and Insomniac crossed it. This is made somewhat better in the later two by the addition of mini-games as an alternative revenue stream, but even then, you have to really, really want to see the best weapons to have the patience to get them. In the third game, I finished all the mini-games, I did all of the optional missions, and I even collected all of the sewer crystals, and that still wasn't nearly enough to buy all of the weapons and armor.

This is kind of funny when taken with the fact that the Ratchet and Clank universe appears to have runaway inflation problems. In the first game, you collect bolts from things you destroy and sometimes stumble across rare gold bolts that are either cleverly hidden or require you to finish a special challenge. In the next game, all of the bolts are gold, and platinum bolts become the super-rare variety of bolt. (Let's ignore for a moment the uselessness of making a bolt out of gold or platinum.) Then, in the third game, the hidden bolts become titanium. I'm usually not a Paul Volcker devotee, but perhaps his input could be of use in the Bogon Galaxy.

The plot is also somewhat lackluster, though I feel as if this is more forgivable. It has a level of intrigue somewhere around the level of a Saturday morning cartoon. But then, that's sort of what these games are. Well, it's not bad, but don't expect for deep feelings to well up inside of you or for any tearful epiphanies to occur.

I have to say that part of what made this trilogy especially enjoyable was seeing how the series changed over time, how our world had changed, and even how I had changed since the first time I bought the series. The large number of CRT displays in the first game stood out to me, and I realized that at the time it was released, it wasn't such a crazy vision of the future. Today, the CRT is extinct. As I worked my way through the series, I saw that, while flat-panel displays did become more common, one still saw the occasional CRT. At that point, it becomes a stylistic choice, and it makes sense in the world that the Ratchet & Clank series takes place in. It's not the future we think about now. It's the future we envisioned back in the 50's, before we had any idea that flat-panel displays were possible and before environmental preservation became a goal of society. We believed so fervently that science and industrialization would eventually lead us to a techno-utopia where we transcend the planet on which we began. How could nature be desirable? It's what was already here. Surely whatever we humans built was better. Otherwise, why would we build it? The idea clicked with me when I was listening to an episode of Planet Money where they discuss what a World's Fair would look like today. Back in 1964, the future we envisioned included a machine that cut down rainforest with a huge laser and paved over it. That seems just insane now. We've become horrifyingly aware of how much power humankind has over the earth and how wrong things can go when we exercise it irresponsibly. 14-year-old me wanted to live in the future of Ratchet & Clank, where the engineers had taken over and engineered for engineering's sake. There were towers of metal, nanobots, and robots, oh so many robots. Modern me sees the problems with this. The gigantic corporations running the galaxy in each game are simultaneously funnier and sadder as I realize how much of a social commentary they actually are.

The ending of the first game had a similar effect. If you don't want for me to spoil it, skip this paragraph. All throughout the game, you've been trying to stop a plot by Chairman Drek, the ruler of a species called the Blarg, who have polluted their home planet to the point of uninhabitability. Drek's corporation has built a new planet for them to live on. Unfortunately, they've done so by stealing parts of everyone else's planets. So yes, there's your villain, profiting by stealing everyone else's homes. And of course Drek plans to pollute the new planet to smithereens so that he can just sell the Blarg another one after that. He gets the classic Disney villain death where you drop a giant laser on his giant robot, leaving it unclear what happened to him and preserving the game's T rating. Then, Ratchet gets the chance to use the giant laser that was going to destroy his home planet to destroy Drek's new planet instead. He takes this chance. 14-year-old me would probably have been very happy with this ending. Karma and all that. 24-year-old me is not as at peace with the decision. It's certainly an ill-gotten planet, but Drek is dead, and the damage was already done to the various homeworlds pillaged for its benefit. Where will the Blarg go now? They can't go back to their old planet. Are we just going to scatter them across the other planets? You know the native populations aren't going to be happy about that. How on earth (or off of earth, I suppose) will they get jobs? All we need on Earth to cause a refugee crisis is a revolution in a small Eastern European nation. This is a planet. One that was specifically stated to be overpopulated. Ratchet is hailed as a great hero in the aftermath, but what he really did at the end of the first game was turn a crime of war into an economic and diplomatic crisis.

It happens again in the third game. Again, skip this paragraph if you want to avoid spoilers. The evil robot Dr. Nefarious builds a huge weapon called the Biobliterator, which he unleashes upon a huge, dense city. Our heroes are shocked to find that it has turned everyone in the city into a robot. They recoil in horror. They declare with more intensity than ever that Nefarious is truly evil and must be stopped. But wait a second. He didn't kill anyone. This isn't genocide. I mean, it's certainly not okay, and he does need to be stopped, but the level of outrage seemed inappropriate. Honestly, when you consider the plan that he had before to amass a giant robot army and kill off all organic life planet-by-planet, the Biobliterator might be an improvement.

This story dissonance made me wonder more than once if I was just romanticizing something that was made for 14-year-old me and was chiefly enjoyed by 14-year-old me. But then I noticed something. I noticed that the map of the area around Dr. Nefarious's giant weapon of mass destruction was labeled "Nefarious B.F.G." I laughed. 14-year-old me wouldn't have known what that was supposed to mean.

Bottom line: The only other platformers out there that are more fun or more polished than this are Mario games. And those don't really have guns or humor to speak of.

Final Score: 8,370,122/10,000,000

[chrimifi]

One of my friends posted this picture to Facebook:

I thought it was a bit inelegant and planned to comment with something sarcastic. But it kind of snowballed and I ended up writing this:

CrossFit: 1 Star

So this new place opened up across town from me called CrossFit. I thought the name was weird and it's not every day a gay bar opens up in a strip mall, but I thought I would give it a chance because the scene here has gotten pretty stale. Besides, all of the people I knew that had been there wouldn't stop talking about CrossFit, and they were always shaming each other for eating carbs, so I figured they had to know their way around a gay bar.I really don't know what they see in the place. The music selection is awful and the lights are way too bright. $12 cover is a ripoff, and they'll try to sell you an entire month, which is just weird. (If you're going out that much, you're either desperate or an alcoholic.) Cover guy had the nerve to say I was wearing the wrong shoes. I've been to some pretty nice clubs in the shoes I was wearing that night and they let me in every time, so I don't know what his problem is. Maybe the owners are brand snobs or something. I insist on Grey Goose in my cocktails, but I don't even know if they have Smirnoff here. I was only able to find the water. Lots of rope and chains and belts, so I thought it might be one of THOSE bars, but I think it's just how they decided to decorate. The patrons have a major attitude problem. I stood there for hours and no one even asked to buy me a drink. And I was the best-dressed one there by a mile!Eventually I got tired of standing, so I tried to find a table, which was impossible. Eventually I found this big crate and figured I was supposed to sit at that, because shabby chic is really in right now. Then finally someone else walks up to me, but instead of asking how my night is going, he jumps on top of the table. Then he jumps off. Then he jumps back on top of it. He does this for about a minute, and then stops, and then I just stare at him, speechless, because honestly, who does that? But just as I’m thinking “at least it’s over now”, he starts jumping on the table again for another minute. Then he stops for another 30 seconds. He does this three more times, and then just leaves. No conversation, no phone number, no nothing. So I tell management about this guy, but not only do they not kick him out, they start getting pissy with ME. So I left. I don't know what kind of place they think they're running, but it's not somewhere I want to be. Only good thing I can think of is they don't have someone checking your ID at the door, so it might be worth checking out if you're underage.Worst gay bar I've ever been to. Not coming back. I'm only giving it one star because I can't give it zero stars.

[chrimifi]

Smashes to Smashes: a Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS/Wii U Review

This article is part of a series called “Reviews You Can’t Use”, in which the author reviews a video game, but for all you know, he could be sleeping with the developer, so I certainly wouldn't trust him.

To truly understand the newest Super Smash Bros. game, one must understand Masahiro Sakurai. Years ago, Sakurai was best known as the creator of Kirby, but in recent times, he has become much more prominently known as the director of the Super Smash Bros. series. During the development of Super Smash Bros. Brawl, he started a blog to tease fans of the series with pictures and videos of things to come, and in doing so, he became the face of the series. He not only shapes it, he takes the heat for it and soaks up the accolades for it. For a long time while he was directing the newest Smash games, he didn't do anything else, including sleep. When we play Super Smash Bros for Wii U or Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS, we are essentially playing a chunk of his life, distilled into a game. Smash is Sakurai. Sakurai is Smash. And as Smash has made it onto its most powerful hardware ever, I have a feeling that we are approaching peak Smash: Smash as Sakurai envisions it. And the irony to this is that this is probably significantly different from what Smash's biggest fans, or at least those that spend the most time and money on it, would like it to be.

There are, broadly speaking, two types of Smash players. The first type is the hardcore player. The second type is everyone else. I am one of the second type. Some like the term "casuals" for the second group. I used to take exception to this, but I don't anymore, because neither "hardcore" nor "casual" gets to the heart of what these groups actually are, which I would argue is this: The casual player enjoys what Smash is trying to be. The casual player enjoys the whole picture, and when something takes away from that picture, the casual player is usually disappointed or amused. (S)he is unlikely to describe that aberration as good game design. The hardcore player, on the other hand, enjoys what Smash is in spite of what it wants to be. (S)he enjoys it for the excellent traditional fighting game it accidentally became in pursuit of being a friendly, non-traditional fighting game.

An artist's rendition of Super Smash Bros. Melee as played competitively

While music and graphics might have lured in the hardcore player as a casual player at first, a hardcore player, by and large, does not care about presentation. A casual player might joke, as in the above picture, that a game between hardcore players can always be described as "Fox only, no items, Final Destination". (For the uninitiated, Final Destination is a stage in the game that, unlike all of the others, is perfectly flat and has no moving parts.) And indeed, most hardcore players dislike the element of chance that items and elaborate stages introduce. "Fox only" is rarely an enforced rule, but frequently happens anyway, based on players' preferences. Besides, if everyone uses the same character, that just makes it easier to tell who is more skilled, in theory. And that's really what hardcore play is all about: peeling away layers and throwing away sources of chance until you're left with a perfectly deterministic engine for determining players' skill at manipulating that engine. You have two fighters on a flat arena with nothing but their moves to use. I like to call it (affectionately) "I Can't Believe It's Not Street Fighter!"

If this still seems unclear, let me offer up an example. A word you'll hear a lot around the competitive Smash community is "wavedashing". There's an entire article on it here, but briefly stated, wavedashing is a technique where one jumps and then immediately dodges into the ground, which causes one's character to slide across the ground. This is used to make one's character move without walking, which is significant, because the moves one's character can use while walking are totally separate from the ones it can use when not walking. Wavedashing allows you to use a powerful Smash Attack while moving. Wavedashing allows you to attack in one direction when you move in the other. It's no wonder that wavedashing is considered one of the core techniques of competitive Smash. If you can't wavedash, you probably can't win.

Of course, if we conceptualize the characters in Smash as actual, physical things fighting each other, wavedashing makes no sense. Propelling yourself forward by jumping and dodging is impossible, and that's fine, as a lot of things in Smash games are impossible, but those impossible things are at least elegant. Wavedashing is not elegant. It is using a door and a piece of string to pull a tooth. It is revving a car to use the engine's waste heat to fry an egg. It's clever, but you can't look at a system that includes it and say that it's well-designed. If you're meant to do that, it should be intuitive, and if you're not meant to do that, then you shouldn't be able to. So in the next version of Smash after wavedashing was discovered (Brawl), Sakurai and his team removed the exploit that made wavedashing possible. He thought he was fixing the game. I think he was fixing the game. But for a hardcore player, Smash is a different game, and Sakurai broke that game. Now, maybe that's not an intentional affront to the competitive Smash community, but it's hard to deny that adding tripping to the game was. Every once in a while, when your character is running, he/she will trip. Randomly. It's literally just adding chance. I find it difficult to imagine a stronger way to signal to the community, "You're not doing this correctly."

The effects were predictable. Brawl's predecessor, Super Smash Bros. Melee, remains the competitive standard, despite its inferior graphics and sound and smaller range of fighters. On the /r/smashcirclejerk subreddit (not quite NSFW, but about as highbrow as it sounds), upvotes (or "upmaylays" as they are called there) are registered by clicking on the Melee logo and downvotes by clicking on the Brawl logo. One post is just a video of someone smacking a copy of Brawl against a table. These are humorous exaggerations of the feelings of the competitive Smash community, of course, but they speak to the truth that Sakurai really did ruffle some feathers. After a method for running modified software on the Wii was discovered, the competitive Smash community got to work building Project M, a mod for Brawl that, along with introducing new cosmetic content, reintroduces wavedashing and attempts to make characters more balanced, in the pursuit of making Brawl the fairest arbiter of skill it can be.

Super Smash Bros. for Wii U and Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS (or "Sm4sh" as I will refer to them collectively from now on; I recommend pronouncing it as "Smash four") shows (yes, the singular conjugation, because they're basically one game) signs that Sakurai is ready to embrace the hardcore players, at least to the extent that he can without alienating the casuals. Every stage now has an "Omega Form", which is just a flat surface. Every stage can become Final Destination, essentially. Hardcore players can finally change stages without really changing stages! I welcome this change. I know people that insist on flat stages, and this means I at least get to experience a greater variety of music when fighting them. Though I must say that the name "Omega Form" tickles me. If you were to show me a flat surface next to a more elaborate stage based on that and ask me "Which one of these looks like 'Omega Form' to you?", I'd probably say that the one with more than one surface looks a lot more finished to me. Anyway, a good move, I think. Another hardcore-friendly feature is the "For Glory" online mode, which, well, enforces "no items, Final Destination". You're not guaranteed a 1-on-1 match, which means it's still below competitive standards, but at least there are no items and no platforms.

So that's a high-level view of the hardcore community and how Sakurai has come to peace with them. But what about the rest of us, that are a bit more concerned about approachability and polish? I'm happy to say that Sakurai's 20-hour days have created what is certainly the best Super Smash Bros. game yet. The graphics are beautifully rendered in 1080p, the sound is perfect, and there are more stages and characters than ever. And that's all we really wanted, right? Well, there's more. Nintendo actually put together a "50-Fact Extravaganza" video before the release of the Wii U version, and while not all of the facts are that exciting ("It's 1080p!" Great! Welcome to 2012! "You can watch all of the character reveal videos in the game!" That's what YouTube is for, but thanks.), there were still around 20 impressive announcements. I had a legitimate "but wait, there's more" moment. The most surprising thing to me was the addition of a new "Smash Tour" mode, which is a sort of Super Smash Bros.-based board game. You move around the board and collect new fighters and power-ups, and after a preset number of turns, everyone takes their accumulated fighters and power-ups and spars in a stock match to determine the victor. Of course, in the lead-up to this fight, there are plenty of smaller fights and tricks you can use to weaken your rivals. I find it to be a fun way to add variety to playing Sm4sh, but your mileage may vary. Your friend that only plays on Omega Form stages and turns off all of the items probably will find it a little gimmicky.

Even if that was the biggest surprise to me, the announcement that the gaming world lost its marbles for was the addition of 8-player battles. I've only had the opportunity to play it with AI opponents, but... it works. It would be absolute insanity on smaller stages, but the game won't let you play 8-player Smash on small stages, so it's not really a big deal.

I wish I had more detailed opinions to give you about it, but it just works. It does not revolutionize my life, but perhaps if you host large parties involving video games it will prove handy. The word "moreso" comes to mind.

While older news, Mii fighters are another new addition to the series. If beating the stuffing out of your friends on TV isn't real enough, well, now you can make something with a face reasonably resembling yours punch faces reasonably resembling theirs! Ever wanted to see Jesus fight Hitler? Well, now you can. Just fire up the Mii Maker and re-create them, because be both know you left your Hitler and Jesus Miis on your Wii, because that hasn't been funny since 2008. A Mii can be assigned one of three archetypes (Brawler, Swordfighter, or Blaster) and can be customized with a variety of equipment that changes its stats and its appearance. It's a well-designed system, and I made a character because the game gives you stuff if you do, but I don't find myself actually using the character that much. There are already more than forty of them. Saying "No, none of those interest me. I prefer to play as myself." just seems narcissistic. I think most of the usage this feature will see will be people creating Miis of celebrities and politicians, putting them under computer control, and betting on who wins. I have to admit that I would enjoy watching a grudge match between Reagan, Clinton, Bush (the younger), and Obama held on Norfair at least a little bit. What I think will see a bit more usage is the feature where you can customize the stock fighters as well. You can create a light, sprightly Bowser or a Jigglypuff whose punch feels like a freight train. Very handy if you like a character for sentimental reasons but find fighting with him/her unwieldy.

Of course, I must comment on the music. The Smash series has been a gift to video game music fans since the introduction of non-MIDI audio in Melee, and it really came into its own in Brawl. It truly is the perfect opportunity: since Smash borrows content from so many game franchises, it makes sense that it would collect some of the best and most iconic songs from a range of video games. Sometimes these songs appear in their original form, and sometimes they're updated or remixed to sound a bit more modern or battle-appropriate. The result can be beautiful or catchy, but is rarely ugly. Sakurai clearly cares about music a great deal, having even commissioned lyrics for the Fire Emblem theme and the theme to Brawl (in Latin!). Sm4sh continues this tradition in earnest, holding on to most of Brawl's finest tracks and adding worthy new ones. Brawl unearthed unexpected tracks for remixing and inclusion ("Tetris: Type B", anyone?) and Sm4sh continues this tradition with selections like a Spanish guitar rendition of the boss theme from Super Mario World. Other songs, like the Good Egg Galaxy theme from Super Mario Galaxy (awkwardly titled "Egg Planet" in Sm4sh), were already modern, already awesome, and were just waiting to be incorporated. To top it all off, if there's a song you really don't like (looking at you, "Seven Rings in Hand"), you can reduce its play frequency or turn it off altogether in the "My Music" settings. My only imaginable complaint with the handling of music is that so many excellent tracks are set to low frequencies in the default settings and thus won't be heard as much as they deserve.

He included Bramble Blast, people. This guy knows what he's doing. (Of course, the true Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest fans will know that the real name of the song is "Stickerbrush Symphony".)

There's an online mode. It works. But you know me. I'm not big on online modes. You can also gamble the in-game currency on other people's online matches, which is a nice touch, but I wonder how many people will actually use it when there's so much else to do in the game. Among the other features I don't really plan on using is the enhanced stage editor, which now allows you to draw on the Wii U Gamepad to create terrain in arbitrary shapes. I have high hopes this will enable great creativity on the part of other people with more patience and free time.

All in all, Sm4sh is almost a strict superset of Brawl, i.e. almost everything in Brawl is in Sm4sh, and probably better. So rather than enumerating all of the things that have stayed the same, I think it would save time if I just say what's been removed, and then you can just dislike the game if you're a big fan of one of those things. Here they are:

Adventure Mode. The Subspace Emissary does not have a sequel storyline. While I enjoyed Adventure Mode, I'm not sure that I'll actually miss it.

Target Smash. Target Smash has been replaced with a new target mode where you use a fighter to launch a carefully-timed bomb into an array of targets. That means it's a lot less about moving around and a lot more like the Home-Run Contest.

Coin Launcher. The Coin Launcher has been replaced with Trophy Smash, in which you can earn trophies by using a fighter to smash boxes that are dropped from above. It's well-made, but I sort of miss the trophy game being based on a non-fighting activity. I thought it was a refreshing change of pace.

Tripping. Tripping has been removed, except in case of banana peel. I'm sure you're crushed.

Let me return to the ostensible purpose of my writing this: telling you whether you'll like this game. That's actually quite simple. You probably know by now if you like Super Smash Bros. games. If you like them, you will like Sm4sh. Play this incredible fever dream of a fighting game. If you don't, this won't change your mind. It is the same thing, done better. Evolutionary, not revolutionary. It has a lot of content. It feels a bit like Sakurai took literally every idea a staffer gave him for the game and put it in. It is, by every account but storyline, a generally great game. Though, as I said earlier, I couldn't tell you if the franchise can go anywhere from here. It feels like we've hit peak Smash. Look at the menus. Their design is practically identical to Brawl. An incredible amount of content is just Brawl content with a fresh coat of paint. Smash is Sakurai now. Sakurai is Smash. The difficulty slider now integrated into Classic mode is straight out of Sakurai's Kid Icarus: Uprising. With three Kirby characters and three Kid Icarus characters, Sakurai pretty much doesn't have any characters he's produced left to include in the next one. He added Palutena! Nobody wanted that. Nobody wondered if Palutena would win against Link in a fight. I'm not saying it's inappropriate or anything, but I think it's fair to call it unexpected. What we see here is Sakurai's smash, and no amount of fan pressure will change that. How else do we explain how coin battles are still in the game and 2-minute time matches are still the default? The next game, if there is one, will only change if he wants it to. In the spirit of ambitious Internet conjecture, I'm predicting that if we do see another Smash game, it will be literally exactly the same, or totally unrecognizable. I just don't see what there is left to add.

Final Score: My friends only play stock matches. I don't know what a score is.

[chrimifi]

Heart of the Cards

Today, I talked baseball with someone that might be even less aware of professional sports than me, and it occurred to me that, in spite of generally apathetic view of professional sports, the lessons I learned growing up in Cardinals territory might not be immediately apparent to even hardcore baseball fans from other areas. So I thought I would share.

Our discussion of Cardinals Nation was sparked by my mentioning that I’m hoping for a Royals-Cardinals World Series this year. I would just love to see professional baseball be done for all of the country except Missouri. It’s the sort of thing you’d never expect to see happen. Either it goes well and it reflects well on Missouri, or it goes badly and the world gets more Missoura than it bargained for, and I get to watch. I’m happy with either of those. There would be an uptick in the number of media personalities calling the state Missoura and claiming “that’s how they say it there”, and this would be painful to hear, but I still think it would be nice on the whole.

This dream comes with the caveat that everyone will root for the Royals if this happens. Everyone. Everyone?

Yes, really, everyone. Because the Royals are a huge comeback story and everyone hates Cardinals fans. Except for Cardinals fans, of course. We think quite highly of ourselves. But before I get into that, let me delve into the underdog status of the Kansas City Royals. When I was telling said non-sports fan about the Royals being underdogs, he said, “Oh, they’re like the Cubs.” No. They’re not like the Cubs. The Cubs have come close. They’ve come very close, and they’ve choked. As a Cardinals fan, I have been informed many times of the failures of the Cubs, but the Cubs are good enough to be our rivals without our feeling like we’re kicking a baby. The Cubs have been considered, in recent memory, to be a good team. I have not heard such accolades heaped upon the Royals of Kansas City. Granted, I am not a sports buff. But my understanding is that there has not been hope for them since the age of pagers. Exhibit A. The Royals really deserve this. At least once since CompuServe was a thing.

Anyway, the other half of this prediction rides on the fact that Cardinals fans are widely reviled. This might surprise people who don’t follow baseball at all. Everyone knows it’s fashionable to hate the Yankees. They’re a good team with loads of money, and it’s always fashionable to hate New Yorkers. Similarly, one can understand easily why Red Sox fans have an ample collection of haters. Just look at the Red Sox fans that make the news. I’m not saying that every Red Sox fan is obnoxious, destructive, and incapable of talking in a fashion that isn’t both very loud and totally incomprehensible. But I am saying that the ones that go viral are. Non-sports fans can see footage of this and they understand. You can tell them why you hate Red Sox fans and it will seem like a logical chain of cause and effect to them. They will probably start to hate them, too. But if you show a clip of Cardinals fans at their most hateable, it will confuse the layman that you are trying to convince that the Cardinals are worth hating. “They seemed so warm, so nice, so positive,” you will probably hear. They will be unable to understand that this is exactly the problem.

Cardinals fans are hated for their piousness, their hope, and their niceness. The Cardinals culture is to be wholesome American sports fans who love the game and are just so happy to have visitors. It comes off as really, really condescending. Part of this is projection, as most fanbases see themselves as better than all others and will tend to mentally paint other fans with the same dirty tendency and hate them for this trait they assume the others have (never mind how frequently this happens to be correct). Part of it is, well, probably true. I mean, we call ourselves the Best Fans in Baseball™. Some condescension is going to happen. But here’s the thing. Certain high-profile takedowns of Cardinals fans (warning: language) (I have to put that because the pure hearts of Cardinals Nation know not the wrath that would inspire profanity.) like to claim that Cardinals fans are nice and will say nice things about you in order to brag about our decency and inflate our opinions of ourselves. In other words, they think we do it because we’re insecure. I believe this to be incorrect. It’s worse. We sincerely believe all of that stuff you hate us for saying.

We will never tell you that your team sucks. Your team is really good. And we are at peace with this, because we believe with all of our hearts that our team is better. We’re so happy to see you. We’re so happy that you can come to Busch Stadium. We’re not going to yell “this is our house” at you. Nuestra casa es su casa. Isn’t it lovely? We’re so happy you have the chance to see all of the pennants we’ve won and all of the legendary Cardinals enshrined here. We hope you’re having a wonderful time in our wonderful stadium watching the best team in baseball with the Best Fans in Baseball™. Because that is what we call ourselves. Discomfort is momentary. Losses are transient, and just a symptom of living in a world of free will and flawed people. Sometimes you have an off day. Sometimes you get a bad umpire. It’s disappointing, but it will only make the next victory sweeter, because we know that if we believe, if we pray, that the Cardinals will take their righteous throne once again. We know that God is just, and He is a Cards fan. He is also merciful, so we have to take some (undeserved) losses here and there. That’s fine. The arc of the baseball universe is long, but it tends towards Cardinals.

How, then, could we bear ire towards other teams or other fans? Does one mourn an empty canteen when the road leads to a pristine spring? If we know that the Cardinals will prevail, how could any trial, any loss do anything but magnify the glory of that day of jubilation when the Cardinals fulfill their destiny? We rejoice in our adversaries, for without adversaries driving them to improve, the Cardinals might only be a very good baseball team, and the Best Fans in Baseball™ would never see their true potential actualized. Only after heat, pressure, and abrasion will a diamond acquire its elegant shape and stunning luster. How sublime that our Cardinals might face such talented opponents! It propels them even higher into mastery! Each bat and glove raised in opposition is but a mirror to the Cardinals!

We will not trash-talk your city. We know we can’t win that fight. At least half of what makes the St. Louis area pleasant lies outside of the city, and they’re called the St. Louis Cardinals, not the St. Louis-St. Charles-Farmington, MO-IL Combined Statistical Area Cardinals. That “Most Dangerous City in America” article will come up, and it won’t matter if we can prove that the people who did the study based its conclusions off of the opinions of people with a severe fear of parabolas. The name just has too much staying power in the mind. I will grant Mr. Magary, who wrote the seething editorial I linked to, one thing. We definitely do want for people to write nice things about us because we were nice to them. People don’t write nice things about St. Louis anymore unless it’s incidental to something the Cardinals did. So if Cardinals Nation did an about-face one night, and suddenly every journalist impressed with the Cardinals was plunged into a sea of hostility, well… then people wouldn’t write anything nice about St. Louis. It would hurt. Now, I stand by my earlier statements, and this isn’t why we do it, but yeah, we know.

Finally, there is one last thing you must understand about Cardinals Nation. Since I have moved to other cities, I have been introduced to this concept by which people uninterested in professional sports do not have a preferred baseball team. This was new and a bit shocking to me. Growing up in Greater St. Louis, unless you develop strong feelings for a different team by a certain watershed age, you are, by default, a Cardinals fan. Should you not feel like a Cards fan, there is a sort of feedback loop that occurs where people assume that you are a Cards fan and treat you like one, until eventually you internalize this and begin to act accordingly. “What if I just don’t go to any games?” you might ask. Don’t worry. You will. Tickets get distributed a bit like the Book of Mormon, but without the bicycles. You can buy one, and a lot of people do, but odds are one will be offered to you for free at some point in your life. It comes with the catch that you will be invited to have a conversation about your experience, and if you decline to talk or do not seem appropriately excited, you can actually see their face muscles twitch as they try to keep the disappointment from showing. People do not become unaffiliated without having had some event causing them to take umbrage specifically with the Cardinals. These people are treated similarly to Cubs fans.

So come, one and all, to Busch Stadium! We’re so happy to see you! We’re so happy to see such spirit! How cunning you are! How talented you are! How hardworking you are! What a nail-biter! This is truly a great game of baseball! Come closer, friends! We are all children of baseball! You, too, are a part of the glorious plan! Come, let us join together and elevate baseball to its highest potential! It is our common goal! And one day, you will realize, as we have, just what that highest potential is: the Saint Louis Cardinals!

[chrimifi]

The phrase "excessive heat warning" tickles me. It's as if we're criticizing the sun's technique.

"Well, last week was pretty hot, and I got a little dehydrated, but I'm sure there are good reasons. Now this, this is just excessive. I cannot fathom why it would be necessary for you to make it this hot. You're just being mean. This isn't a useful amount of heat anymore. Justify this amount of heat to me, please."

[chrimifi]

in the style of screenshotsofdespair

[chrimifi]

Can the UN please pass a resolution asking the Dutch to take the quaint down to an 11

Some of us are trying to shuffle despairingly through life here, and the airlines are usually so accommodating with that

[screenshotsofdespair]

via

[chrimifi]

Something they never tell you in career counseling is that the people you work with can be divided precisely into these two groups: people who will avoid eye contact with you in the restroom at all costs and people who will start chatting you up in the restroom if they realize they are in the stall next to you.

There is no middle ground.

[navigatethestream]

its the notion of boycotts

you wanna know why the bus boycotts of the civil rights movement were so successful?

because an alternative black run transportation system was created for those who couldn’t walk to work or whatever they had to go

they didn’t just tell...

[chrimifi]

Oh mercy. It's like I've always known this but never knew how to articulate it.

[chrimifi]

Spoiler Alert: a Need for Speed: Most Wanted Review

This article is part of a series called "Reviews You Can't Use", in which the author reviews a video game and lets nothing get in the way of his journalistic integrity unless there's at least a 30% chance it would be funny.

Need for Speed: Most Wanted is a game that will need some context. So grab a jacket, put on some sensible shoes, and come walk down memory lane with me.

I remember my introduction to the Need for Speed series back in 1998 or 1999. One day, I was brought over to the house of a family friend. Her new boyfriend was (and is) really into computers. He showed me this:

It was called Need for Speed III: Hot Pursuit. Nowadays, it looks like a game you would get for free for your iPhone that charges $5 to unlock new cars, but I assure you that this was played on a desktop. It was a different time then. WinAmp, still the media player of choice, had only reached version 2. 3dfx's Voodoo graphics chips were the best on the market. Rosie O'Donnell still had a TV show and was still in the closet. Mark, the boyfriend I mentioned, saw how taken I was with the game and burned a copy for me (which blew my mind because CD burning was still a novel thing).

So much has changed. WinAmp made it to version 5.5 before AOL gave up on it. 3dfx exploded with the tech bubble and was absorbed into Nvidia. Rosie O'Donnell is a known lesbian, and no one cares anymore. Mark the boyfriend ended up marrying said family friend. CD burning is almost obsolete.

One thing that hasn't changed? They're still making Need for Speed games. But today, they look like this.

The Need for Speed series is a long-running guilty pleasure of mine. It's just not something I should like. It's brainless, twitchy fun, and it's not even self-aware about it. The series takes itself so seriously. As much as I dislike the American marketing assumption that life as a man is about beer, sports, and cars, when presented with the opportunity to ram through a police roadblock with an Italian sports car, I say, "OK." When they mention that the police cars are Corvettes, I say, "Yes, please."

I've stuck with this series through a variety of twists and turns as EA tried to reinvent it and keep it popular. High Stakes followed Hot Pursuit, and added the game mechanic of winning your opponent's car if you beat them. (I don't know why I bother with the gender-neutral pronoun. There are at most two women in any NFS game.) There was some other Porsche-themed one after that. I started to have money around the time that Hot Pursuit 2 hit, for the PS2. I bought it and loved it. Underground came after, and it was fun, but strictly rental material. There were no police chases, but it did introduce what would be the most striking feature of NFS games for many games to come: a story mode... with terrible, terrible acting. Most Wanted hit at the end of the Xbox era and reunited the street racing and campy acting (have a little taste) with police pursuits. I was back in. I won't lie. I enjoyed it. It wasn't Proust, but then, I'm not Kierkegaard. It was followed by Carbon, which was the same game, but prettier and set in a city called Palmont, which was Los Angeles, but without the trouble of actually being LA. Shift and ProStreet happened at some point, but they were supposed to be realistic. I wasn't interested. Undercover looked promising, but it turns out that they doubled down on the acting and slacked on the gameplay, and the result was something I didn't care to play for any longer than an hour. This was followed by Need for Speed: World, which looked pretty, but it was entirely online, and I don't buy video games to talk with strangers on the Internet.

It was around this time that the NFS franchise was in trouble. It just wasn't making the money it was supposed to, and critics were accusing EA of just remaking the same NFS game over and over for money. Also, the acting wasn't helping. That's when EA decided to turn the series over to Criterion Games, a UK studio responsible for the Burnout series. For the uninitiated, Burnout is a series of racing games with a focus on wrecking your opponents. One game even features a mode where your goal is to launch your car into a busy street and cause as much damage as possible. The last Burnout game had been well-received. The last NFS had not. So EA decided to have Criterion take a shot at making an NFS game. The result was called Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit. Yes, again. It was, predictably, focused on police chases, and it brought back the ability to play as a cop, something I'd missed. Violence with self-righteousness is the best kind of violence. Gone were the actors. That's not Criterion's style. Their cutscenes are instead about cars, scenery, and a disembodied female voice telling you what you've won. Black Box, the studio that made Underground and Most Wanted, made one more NFS game after that. It was called Need for Speed: The Run. In what I can only assume was a desperate attempt to justify their past attempts at plot and dialogue, they hired Michael Bay to direct the game. This was the last NFS game Black Box made before they were "restructured".

After The Run, Criterion decided to make another spiritual successor. They produced Need for Speed: Most Wanted. A new one. That's the game this review is about.

Need for Speed: Most Wanted, like its predecessor, Need for Speed: Most Wanted, has a single-player campaign that revolves around rising to the top of a list of racers called the "Most Wanted" list. You do this, of course, by racing them and beating them. The main difference between the two Need for Speed: Most Wanteds is that the older one, Need for Speed: Most Wanted, had people in it. In addition to Sgt. Cross and Lt. Eye Candy from the clip linked above, you meet Razor Callahan, best known for theatrically betting five grand--FIVE GRAND--on your race with him. There's Mia Townsend, who very importantly calls things "hot" and makes that face where her mouth is open enough where you can see her teeth but not anything else but she's also not really smiling. Each of the racers on the list has a name, a picture, and about five seconds of animated video in which to taunt you. In contrast, the newer game, Need for Speed: Most Wanted, has no people. The Most Wanted list is a list of cars. There are, of course, no pedestrians. And even when you drive a convertible and the game is obligated to render a driver for it, you get an unremarkable man in a black helmet. The only voices you ever hear are police chatter on the radio and Disembodied Female Voice explaining the game and congratulating you on winning something. When you beat a Most Wanted "racer", you just beat "Porsche 911 Spyder Concept". You don't beat "Sonny", who uses his connections to get new parts before they hit the street or has some other worthless flavor text thrown in. I never thought I'd be defending the shallow stories of Need for Speed: Most Wanted (the elder), but here I am. I miss them. They weren't much, but they were something. Razor Callahan was flatter as a character than a piece of paper that hasn't hit puberty yet, but at least I wanted to beat him. He took my car. He upset Female Character 1 of 2. He's a jerk. Why am I racing Koenigsegg Agera R? Maybe he volunteers at the animal shelter on the weekends. Maybe he's a great guy. Maybe he's actually the second female character! All I know is I'm supposed to beat this car so that I can be the "Most Wanted" in Fairhaven, a title that would seem to carry few rewards and make it very hard to go to public places.

Look, I'm going to save you some time and spoil the ending for you. Disembodied Female Voice congratulates you on becoming Most Wanted and gives a brief but accurate synopsis of who you have beaten and what one can thus deduce about your driving talents. A montage of cars racing and being chased by the police plays on-screen. Roll credits. Then, you go downstairs, pour yourself a glass of water, sip it, and look out the window and ask yourself in a half-sigh, "Why did I do that?"

The setting of Need for Speed: Most Wanted is a richly detailed city called Fairhaven. I found it immediately tantalizing to try to pin down which city Fairhaven was, because the NFS series likes to base its cities on real cities. Need for Speed: Most Wanted (the first one) had Rockport, which echoed New York. Carbon had Palmont, which is clearly Los Angeles (with a bit of Vegas mixed in), and Hot Pursuit (the new one) took place in Seacrest County, which was an amalgam of the California wilderness. Fairhaven is a city of brick buildings and coastline, receding into forests and cliffs. This, combined with the American flag motif on the license plates, had me thinking of Boston, Philadelphia, or DC. I decided it couldn't be DC because there weren't enough monuments. Then, I discovered the best clue someone could ask for. It was a sign, briefly displayed in close-up, that said "NO PARKING EXCEPT MASS STATE POLICE". So there you go. It's Boston. Maybe it's a good thing you never hear anyone talk in this game. (For what it's worth, the police and Disembodied Female Voice talk with a Midwestern/Californian accent.)

Fairhaven is nonetheless quite pretty and offers varied landscapes in which to race. Wide highways, tight city streets, country roads, and pavement-free rally courses are all available. You navigate between them in an open world littered with billboards and security gates to smash, adding a fun collectible element to the game. New cars are unlocked by finding them in the city and driving up to them. They'll just be sitting there, lights on and engine running. It's fine. No one will steal them. There are no people in this city. The only exception to this is the cars on the Most Wanted list. You can't drive those until you beat them in a race and then make them crash. Fans of the series will note that this is a departure from the car purchasing model utilized in Need for Speed: Most Wanted's predecessor, Need for Speed: Most Wanted.

Speaking of cars, there is a dizzying array of them available. Criterion did a good job of modeling them, too, so they look as expensive, powerful, and overall fetching as they do in real life. As you accumulate bumps and bruises, the car will show damage, though you can drive through a repair shop to instantly repair and repaint it. This is obviously grossly unrealistic, but then, there's no whiplash, either, so I'm not about to ask questions. The cars all sound different, which makes me think they put a lot of work into making the sound realistic, but I've never been around any of these vehicles, so I really have no idea. You can customize the cars using a system called "Easydrive", which is a small menu in the upper-left that you can use while driving. Theoretically. This menu uses the control pad, which is located below the joystick on most controllers. This means that you can use the menu while driving, so long as you don't need to turn. In case some of you don't have much experience with driving games, turning is something you occasionally have to do in them. Oh well. It's still a way to change your tires after running over a spike strip. Did they have to call it Easydrive, though? I guess Cumbersomedrive doesn't quite roll off the tongue.

The music selection is good. I actually discovered a couple new favorite albums from this. There is a slighly English bent to the selections, since Criterion is a UK studio. Criterion's Britishness does not show up very often, and Fairhaven is a convincing facsimile of America. However, every once in a while, you can detect a slight tinge of Britishness, as if the game had been sprinkled lightly with the crumbs at the bottom of a bag of prawn cocktail flavoured crisps. Criterion's biggest contribution is the game's crash system, lifted from the Burnout series. You can earn extra nitrous by wrecking other racers and cops, and if you crash, the game simply shows your crash in slow motion and sets you back on the track. Criterion wisely deduced that if you're going to give someone such rich masculine fantasy, then don't waste their time making them undo their mistakes. In Need for Speed: Most Wanted, if you crashed, you had to back up, get back onto the road, and pray that no other racers hit you as you begin to accelerate again. Not so in Need for Speed: Most Wanted. A close second to the crash system is the intros that are played before each race. They are, for the most part, shots of the city and your car with artful camera angles and color shifts, but they show off the beautiful surroundings and set the stage. Most Wanted races are preceded with a pre-rendered video that usually pays tribute to the car design and manufacturing process in some abstract way. Ambush races easily have the best intros, though: surreal chase scenes that probably look like a police ambush would look if you were on LSD. Cop pyramid, anyone? Cop tornado, perhaps? Cop Voltron?

This game's primary problem, in my eyes, is that I don't know its audience. Its biggest selling point, back when it came out, was that you could compete with your friends. There are hundreds of leaderboards where you could compare your time to all of your friends'. One for every track, billboard, and speed camera. You could play live against them, too. But I don't have any friends that like this series. I'm kind of ashamed of liking it myself. I cannot see telling one of my friends, "You should buy this $60 game so that we can race each other. But probably not anyone else, because I don't know anyone else that likes these games." I suppose one could have also played with strangers from the Internet, but I don't buy video games to talk to strangers on the Internet. Now, I'm not saying no one enjoys that, but it's not my cup of tea, and of the people I know that do, none of them like this series. I'm kind of wondering who bought it in the first months after it came out. Need for Speed: Most Wanted must have leaned heavily on its online support, because the story wasn't keeping anyone around. Oh, and you might have noticed my deliberate use of the past tense in this paragraph. That's because EA shut the servers for this game after 2 years, so none of the online stuff works anymore. Come on, EA. I've been to Redwood Shores. I've seen your place. You have some money to throw around. You can keep a server running. No one's playing it anymore, so you'd only have to run one server.

So there you have it. It's pretty. It's fun. Until you realize that there are no people... just an endless stretch of expensive cars seemingly driving themselves incredibly dangerously.

Maybe this game was set in LA after all.

Final Score: Ford Mustang Boss 302/Shelby Mustang GT500