ben is on the inter.net

We had a totally rad baby shower for Jhonen this weekend! There were like hundreds of people (estimate!!!)! And lots of food and some totally amazing presents. The standouts (if you ask me) (please, nobody be offended by these selections, as I am fickle, tired, and kind of sick):

• Richard Champalbert bought us the End of All Strollers. Seriously, this thing is like a Cadillac mixed with a Dinosaur mixed with an F15.
• Jack got us approximately 15 copies of Sneak King, which I guess are like diapers or something. They have their own display case, which is nice, since now I can display Sneak King as she was meant to be seen.
• Alex gave us back this Toilet Me Elmo doll that I gave him a few years back as a joke. Rad!
• My personal favorite gift was a plush Ultraman hewn from Godfelt delivered by Juls. I want to hide it from the baby and just tell him he can’t have it!

All in all a very successful party sponsored by our housemates. To everybody in attendance, be you friends or family, you have given us the strength to go through with this whole parenting thing! Either in your support or your examples as parents not only could we not have done this without you, but we would not have done this without you. Thanks!

Back in March, The iPhone Developer Program Sucked. They’ve been adding people into the developer program proper pretty much since the day the iPhone 3G came out. I have some great ideas for some games that DO NOT USE THE FUCKING GIMMICKY TILT SENSOR but I’m not really in a good spot to make them at the moment. One of them — Potions and Stuff: Legends of the Murderwizord — will be playable someday, along with the real version of sup blocks, but today is not that day.

I want Time Travel to be a major part of my life. Maybe not like For Reals time travel, which by all accounts is probably impossible — at least if you want to go backwards — but I think that Capital Tee Time Travel is one of the most interesting mechanics in stories or video games. Unfortunately for traditional One Dimensional media (books, movies, music, anything that has a beginning and an end without direct interaction from the viewer), if the creator doesn’t control the time travel well with nonsense rules (see Harry Potter 3!) the viewer could end up experiencing a broken world where death and fear and loss are not real things. A world without death or fear or loss can be interesting! But usually that fades away pretty quickly, and we, the viewer, will be left with nothing to grab onto. The characters in a world of uncontrolled Time Travel can solve any problem with Superman-like inefficiency; Bill and Ted, for instance, can break themselves out of jail, because when they wish for a key all they have to do is put it there once they’ve escaped. By around the second time we see the trick we’re tired of it.

But games (yes, even board games!), especially video game platformers, are different. Failure failure failure success is the general pattern of video game playback. Games are Two Dimensional media, as the axis of player control can drastically change the output displayed on the screen. Perhaps the programmer decided that it will take 10 minutes to get from Point A to Point B when in execution each player could experience a different scenario. Simplistic platformers (think Super Mario Bros. 1) have nearly infinite solutions to the route from Point A to Point B. While this sort of jumping around (pun completely intentional) is possible in books, movies, or whatever by skipping around, it is generally not considered to be a valid way of experiencing the media in question. I will conveniently ignore that possibility! Time to refocus on video games!

Imagine Super Mario Bros. where you can travel back in time, effectively removing the threat of pits and enemies. How would you make this game challenging? This is the basic premise behind Braid. Since the user can’t kill their character, no matter how hard they try, the game designers had to completely rethink the basic concept of Point A to Point B. And it comes out this week. At a mere $15 you are practically breaking into Jonathan Blow’s house, tracking mud on the carpet, leaving the seat up, and using a giant magnet to steal all of his magnetized valuables. While the story can feel kind of… wimpy at times, just pay attention to the number of mechanics introduced here that WILL appear in countless games of the future.

With Braid, Time Travel can become a major part of your life.

So it’s been a while, yeah?

The news:

• Sold the Vespa!
• Jess is still pregnant, but apparently Jhonen is ready for deployment.
• Been playing WoW again! Playing on Farstriders with Pewpewpew (Gnome Warlock) and Ouchdown (Undead Mage). Hit 30 for the first time! About to hit it for the second time. I’m really thinking I might make a go of it, at least get to 55 so I can play a Death Knight when the expansion drops. I’ve rerouted almost all of my look at the internet time to this task, and it’s strange that playing a game can feel productive.
• Braid comes out next week! Finally!
• Worked on a Wii game for a few weeks. Man, the Wii.
• Pretty much stopped programming for fun for reasons I can’t really discuss! I might work something out soon, though.
• I now have a twitter for day to day chatter. I’ll set up a wordpress plugin for it soon.
• Florida is still too hot to inhabit.

Oh god I want this, originally uploaded by bburbank.

I went by the local vespa dealer today. They had one of these in stock, in the color I wanted. Out the door price was kind of high, but I could probably cover it. It was beautiful and the guy said they don’t think they’ll get any more of that model and definitely not in that color. This thing would do 75MPH on the highway, was fully automatic, and was slightly more comfortable than the really expensive chair that I’m sitting in right now.

My ad slogan: “I just want to kill myself and ride a Vespa LXV150 through heaven.”

Here’s some stuff. Some stuff that my kid will not understand that I understood as a kid. Some stuff that, should I mention it, will probably sound like somebody saying “color television” or “talkies” or “programming with punch cards.” It didn’t occur to me how much of this there was going to be.

• Command Prompts (mostly DOS here, but probably Unix too)
• Standard Definition (NTSC) versus High Definition (also, “widescreen”)
• 2D Fighting Games
• Point and Click Adventure Games
• Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games
• Polaroid (RIP)
• C++ (it’s gotta’ happen some day)
• the Gameboy
• Games without tutorials (PLEASE PROVE ME WRONG, VIDEO GAMES)
• The USSR and the Cold War
• Racism (this is pretty nice, actually)
• Compact Discs
• Drive-in Movies
• the Space Program
• Star Wars?

It just occurred to me that Happy Meals will probably be fine, though. They will be the last thing that God destroys before shutting off the lights on his way out. The last bits of life on the earth (probably crabs and bugs) will make their homes in discarded Happy Meals on the beach, the only proof that once I was a child.

So Rivers Cuomo is doing this thing on youtube where he’s trying to get yonder internet to participate in a giant collaborative songwriting project. That’s kind of neat! He’s up to step 4 (arrangement), where you have to lay down some beats using the provided chord progression to fit the given song name (”80s Radio”). Here’s my entry:

UPDATE: I don’t like that very much… I’m going to write a straight up chiptune on my DS and hopefully have this done by the deadline this evening.

I’ve had this nasty flu that made me shiver awake at night even though there was not an ounce of cold in the room.

I was reading a blog this morning and somebody mentioned the JR Yamanote Line and I felt extremely homesick, which was weird since I’ve never lived there, but I guess Tokyo of all places feels the most like home now. I guess, arguably, it’s one of the few places I’ve truly lived, as in life.

Day/Night cycle requires Day/Night music duh.

 Sup Blocks - Night Leap: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This is for a long night after a long day.

 Sup Blocks - Sundown 2: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

I made what I guess is my first for reals chiptune. It’s called “Beat It Out Of You.” It’s CLOSE to what I want in sup blocks, but not exactly right. That said, I think I’m getting to the point where I can make MilkyTracker do exactly what I want. This is SO much better than working in GarageBand or Logic to make this stuff. Man.

 Beat It Out Of You: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Supblocks needs a very specific sound, and it’s stuck in my head, and I’m going to have to finally learn how to write mods in order to create it. The garageband plugin I’d been using for sine wave music doesn’t really fit the bill anymore; it sort of crashes a lot and honestly I should just be doing this in a mod tracker, so I am. Currently learning MilkyTracker on OSX, and I might try out a few PC ones soon enough. I’d considered just working in CSound to program all my own sounds but it’s so unforgiving and I’ve honestly forgotten the syntax. It’s actually great to be in a tracker, writing music non-linearly. I’ll post samples once I have the thing I want.

So two weeks ago, apple got lots of street-cred for “democratizing” iPhone software development. I am writing today to tell you that they have not done this. So, they gave the SDK away for free. Awesome! Now you can compile applications for the iPhone for free! Unfortunately, you can’t sign the applications and deploy them to an iPhone unless you join the iPhone Developer Program (which costs $99). Without the ability to deploy, you’re limited to using the iPhone emulator on your mac. And this emulator can’t run OpenGL applications or emulate real world use with things like data transfer rates or use the camera or use multitouch or really any of the cool features on the phone itself. It’s a pretty good emulator, but it’s FAR from the same as the real phone.

The thing is, they don’t even tell you explicitly that you have to be a Developer Program member in order to run applications on the phone… You just get a “no connected devices” error in XCode (which should take a few hours to download and install), and then you have to look through documentation to see why you’re getting that error (”is your device plugged in via USB? Have you tried another USB port?”) until you ultimately breakdown and read the full iPhone Developer documentation and see that the iPhone can only run signed applications (again, no indication that you can only sign applications unless you’re a Developer Program member).

So you go to apple’s developer site and try and enter the program, because hey, why not, maybe that will work… I did this two weeks ago. I got a message saying that they’ll update me on the status of my enrollment request soon, and that as soon as I’m in the program I’ll be able to sign applications and deploy them to the phone. Well, they updated me today:

Dear Registered iPhone Developer,

Thank you for expressing interest in the iPhone Developer Program. We have received your enrollment request. As this time, the iPhone Developer Program is available to a limited number of developers and we plan to expand during the beta period. We will contact you again regarding your enrollment status at the appropriate time.

Thank you for applying.

Best regards,

iPhone Developer Program

That’s mildly infuriating! I’ve waited two weeks to be told I will no longer get more information soon, but instead, at the appropriate time.

So be warned dear reader, it seems that Apple still holds all the cards in this game; you won’t be making anything for use on actual phones until they decide you’re allowed to do so!

UPDATE: in the past few days, apple has updated their site to say “The iPhone Developer Program will initially be available to a limited number of developers in the U.S. and will expand to other countries in the coming months.” Before, it only mentioned that it would not be available to other countries. Boo on them. When XNA launched its Xbox 360 capabilities you could run games on the 360 on the first day, and Microsoft never approved nor declined applications (you just paid and then you had the rights).

I finally picked up that last issue of Y the Last Man today and I just mowed it down. I have to say, I’m reasonably depressed right now! It was, in my opinion, an extremely good ending to a series that was pretty good most of the time. I’ll have to pick up the trades at some point so this can live on The Shelf instead of in The Box. There are only a few comics that have made me really FEEL something. It was a really courageous way to end the series and still leave everybody involved with a significant amount of dignity (most notable, our author, Brian K. Vaughn).

However, now I’m kind of bummed. I went to the comic store today and picked up the last issue of Y, the last issue of Cable and Deadpool (which I read for the hahas), and what I think is the final “monthly” issue of Astonishing X-Men. Other than Fables, I’m not really addicted to any monthlies right now, and I think this is strange, since when I got back into comics 5 years ago something like Y or Fables or whatever was starting up every couple months, and right now there’s nothing that really feels like it’s so well written you should read it instead of a book. Bummer.

Jack vs. Fat Momma, originally uploaded by bburbank.

This is a picture of her punching Jack in the face!

Megacon was, as usual, decently entertaining and way too crowded. George Lowe (voice of Space Ghost) wasn’t doing any announcing this year, and that was kind of sad. But I also met Adrian Pasdar (a.k.a. Nathan Patrelli from Heroes a.k.a. The Only Brother Charcater On TV That Appears To Be Gay For His Brother Character) and I got him to sign something “To Ben: Brothers Rule!! Best Wishes.”

Went and saw Persepolis tonight. It’s great to see an animated film not aimed at children or Japanese people! It was a pretty good movie and I encourage all of you to go see it while it’s in theaters. I learned stuff! Like, Iran kind of sucks. Unless you’re a little kid, when you can still be cool. Other than that Iran pretty much sucks and is kind of boring (these opinions are entirely those of the people responsible for this film, who may or may not have actually grown up in Iran).

So Jack and I want to start making stuff again. We’re lazily working our way through some new reviewhole:

And right now we’re working on a series of comics that should help teach elementary Japanese. I guess the intention would be to post the comics in Japanese and then eventually post them in English. For those of you that don’t know, these are a small side-story of the robot tea party comics Jack made a while back.

Just watched this totally great anime movie called “The Girl Who Leapt Through Time” and now I’m in a really good mood. Here are pictures of what I feel like:

It’s a Coming of Age Time Travel Love Story, and really, that combination seems to be the perfect alchemic mixture to tweak my mood up by at least 3 notches, maybe 4. One of the central themes is the importance of the preservation of art! Another one is the unspoken guilt of a time-traveler! It’s the sequel to a book called (roughly) “The Little Girl Who Conquered Time” and it’s kind of a big deal in Japan since it’s apparently quite popular and touching and it sort of came out of nowhere. Also, the author of the original book said this is “a true second-generation” of his book from the 1960s. The skies in this movie are the bluest I’ve seen in a thousand days.

Anyway, this got me thinking. We don’t have any games with time-travel where you can choose how far to go back. I mean, we sort of do, in the sense that we can load an older save, but the character we play has no idea that we’re rewinding time. I really want a game that has important decision points throughout that you can only see based on your choices in the first hour of play. Maybe an adventure game?

Just woke up from a SWEET nightmare and have decided to revisit this ghost town of mine!

So, the big reason I didn’t post that list up yet was because I kept playing games that I felt were better than other games on the list… and this kept happening enough to make the list of 2007 games feel almost worthless. It didn’t help that I was writing huge reviews of each game! So, as a tribute to MIDNIGHT BLOGGING, I’m going to just put the original list out there. I’ll post the reviews eventually, they’re all saved here and just need some heavy editing. That said, my favorite games of 2007:

• 10. Ratchet and Clank: Future: Tools of Destruction (PS3)
• 09. Earth Defense Force 2017 (Xbox 360)
• 08. Pokemon: Diamond & Pearl (Nintendo DS)
• 07. Super Mario Galaxy (Wii)
• 06. Half-life 2: Epitsode Two (PC, Xbox 360, PS3)
• 05. Guitar Hero 3 (Xbox 360)
• 04. Call of Duty 4 (Xbox 360)
• 03. Knytt Stories (PC)
• 02. Portal (PC, Xbox 360, PS3)
• 01. Uncharted (PS3)

Well there you have it. Looking back at the list, I still think it’s valid. One game that’s NOT on there but might be is Super Robot Wars W (Nintendo DS) which is the latest in a series of games that I’ve fallen in love with over the past few weeks. I’ll post about them seperately, but I will say that nothing satisfies my urge for strategy and giant robots like the Super Robot Wars games. The only problem is that they’re in Japanese (well, the worst two games in the series are in English, I guess) because of copyrights, and by the way, I wish we’d get a president that wanted to make Super Robot Wars copyright situation the first priority when getting into office.

Also, I’ve been on a budget the past month ($75 allocated for games) (this is extremely low compared to what I was spending on games in 2007), and it’s helped me be very picky with my gaming lately. Every last dollar counts! This is what I’ve grabbed so far:

• King of Fighters XI (PS2)
• Fire Pro Wrestling Returns (PS2)
• Viewtiful Joe (PS2)
• No More Heroes (Wii)
• Super Robot Wars W (Nintendo DS)

I stretched that $75 further by trading some stuff in to get No More Heroes for the $25 price that maybe it deserves, while at the same time not waiting for it to drop to that pricepoint after the inevitable Killer 7 Sales Drop (and thus, sending as much money as possible through the sale to Grasshopper Manufacture, the Coolest Guys In The World). In these budget times I’ve gone back and played a ton of free games that I missed as well, but for some reason I can’t think of them tonight. I also got Burnout Paradise on the company dime but really, the demo broke my heart and I haven’t wanted to play it at all. I’ve already allocated my February budget to Devil May Cry 4 (DOWNLOAD THE DEMO IT’S GOOD).

Oh yeah, and I’m on a budget because there’s a baby on the way! So. Yeah. A Real Baby. Oh My God A Baby.

Using my G5 as an external hard drive, originally uploaded by bburbank.

After about 1.5 years of minor graphics card artifacting and the occasional failure, my G5 of 2 years finally killed itself the other day, in the form of permanent heat damage to the graphics card. Yes, this once mighty Xbox 360 dev kit (for about a year before I owned it) would have found its only hope in a new graphics card, which looked like it would have run about $350 (yay, now-ancient AGP-bus).

While my PCs still work fine, I looked around some more and there just isn’t anything that would get me my video-editing-and-music-busting-out abilities like I’d get on the Mac (Final Cut Pro and Garage Band, honestly). I opted instead to replace the G5 with a Mac Mini (came to $700 after my $100 iPhone credit).

For a computer that is roughly 1/20th the size of the G5 tower, I’ve been unreasonably impressed with it so far. I find it pretty incredible that with Connect360 I can stream Xvid off of my smaller-than-a-wii computer to my Xbox 360, which is like, way over there. I’ll just have to do The Right Thing and bump up its hard drive and RAM (although I won’t do this soon if it will void my warranty).

At the moment, I’m using my G5 as a firewire hard drive, which is DEFINITELY the weirdest computer to external hard drive size ratio I’ve ever seen.

My thirsty wanted whiskey; my hungry needed beans,
But it’d been of month of paydays since I’d heard that eagle scream.
So with a stomach full of empty and a pocket full of dreams,
I left my pride and stepped inside a bar.

Been listening to wayyyy too much alt-country lately. Pretty much anything from before 1980, and then all the Uncle Tupelo / Neko Case stuff from the 90s and 00s (ought oughts). That last Johnny Cash record is… wow. And pretty much anything Waylon Janson recorded before 1975 is blissy. I heard some pretty authentic country while I was in Japan with really salty Japanese lyrics, and I really want to get my workin’ hands on some of that.

That said, I was thinking about it, and arcade games are really close to the country music of games. Built from whatever was available at the time, cheap in many ways but endearing none the less. Pure. Alive.

satisfy your quest for adventure, originally uploaded by bburbank.

Jess and I are back, yay?

I’ve uploaded the best of the pictures, but I’m not done tagging / organizing them all. Check ‘em out on my flickr.

Jetlag is fucking AWESOME.

gundam: man or woman?, originally uploaded by skelethulu.

I look forward to my inevitable return to Japan with more excitement than I have welled up in years. Last day summary:

• Ate at a Japanese fast food place called Yoshinoya. For like $5 I got a huge bowl of curry and rice, a bowl of udon WITH A FRIED EGG ON TOP, and a couple tempura’d things. They also had free tea.
• Jess and I went out to Asakusa, a particularly old part of town. Outside of the most important shrine in Tokyo (I think it was even in Azumanga Daioh), there was a huge tourist trappy market. There were lots of Chinese, Korean, and Japanese tourists out there!
• Wandered around for a little while in Asakusa and found a sweet amuzement park. We didn’t ride anything, but I bought a shirt.
• Walked up and down this restaurant supply district; bought a bunch of chopsticks, saw some really great deals on a lot of stuff that we couldn’t fit in our luggage.
• I bought a GIGANTIC Mountain Dew for 120 yen. Seriously, this thing was a MAN’S Mountain Dew.
• Rolled out for Akihabara, for the last time. Saw an American or Australian jerkwad in a girl’s kimono (it looked as if he didn’t know this, since he was a pretty “tough” guy with sharp teeth). Walked into a game store that sold import games from the USA for like 300% the cover price.
• Met up with Tim; he showed us to Super Potato. By the way, Super Potato has a pretty good selection, but there are definitely better stores around Akihabara. I think the reason US gamer guys think it’s so sweet is because it’s the only store in Akihabara that lets you take pictures. Everything was about 2-3 times what it should have cost…
• Walked over to Ueno, our favorite part of town. I’d been saving up change for a couple days for this one particular gashapon machine, and it was a glorious feeling to practically empty it. It was the only machine of this type I’d seen in all of Japan (I think it was exclusive to this one store), and I ended up making the items inside it exceedingly rare!
• I bought a Lavendar Purple PSP at a Yodobashi Camera. Jess had been eyeing them the entire trip. It’s the “rare” color over here, in that it’s the only one that is consistently sold out. The Yodobashi in Ueno only had one left… Coincidentally, the PSP Slim was hacked a couple days ago!
• Met up with Jess’ friend and did some Karaoke. This experience will get its own post later.
• Went out to Tim’s apartment (near Asakusa) and got my PSP Slim hacked. The first game this PSP ever ran was Cave Story. It was a pretty small apartment! That would be something difficult to deal with, I assume! However his rent was only $700 a month, so there are probably larger places around.
• Got some conveyor belt sushi. It was a pretty fun experience! We put our plates into this counting slot machine thing and I made a bet with fate that were we to win a prize I would fight as hard as I could to live here.
• We won a tiny car toy!
• Went into an actual Japanese supermarket. It was weird, since this was an American-style supermarket, the first of its kind I’d seen here. Stocked up on some candy.
• Walked over to Mos Burger, which is a moderately popular burger joint here, and rocked some of that. It was pretty tasty! It was also like the first food I’d had here that seemed bad for me!
• We said our goodbyes.

The sun is coming up, and I didn’t sleep all night.

I have about 500 more photos to upload; the past few days have been BRUTAL with the amount of stuff Japan has been showing me. Plus, I gotta’ pack to get back home. Real quick bulleted list leading up to our last day:

• Went out to Nikko, a massive temple city on a mountain. INCREDIBLE. It’s where the hear / see / speak no evil monkey caricatures came from. It’s also the site of the 3rd largest Buddha in the world. Oh! And it’s a tomb of a Shogun.
• Thursday, we got up and went our separate ways for the morning; Jess went to the Imperial Palace and I went out to Akihabara.
• Met up with Tim in Ikebukuro where we went to Namjatown, a weird “theme park” inside the only shopping mall (it’s also the only underground shopping mall) in Tokyo. It’s owned by Namco! It has two important features: Gyoza Stadium and Ice Cream City. It also has a stupid haunted forest and probably some other dumb stuff. It’s the closest to Iron Chef I’ll probably ever experience.
• Shopped around Ikebukuro a little; that place is pretty excellent. Saw some sweet guitar stores and even more enormous camera stores. I tried to buy the latest Chanbara game for PS2 but they wouldn’t sell it to me because I didn’t have my passport. Fortunately! I’ve picked up a lot of little bits of the language while I’m here, so I was able to apologize and get out while the getting was good.
• Got some donuts on the way home. They’re nothing like donuts here! They’re like what somebody who had only ever seen donuts in a movie would make. Round bread covered in strawberry frosting.
• Yesterday, Jess and I went out to Tokyo Disney Sea, which is only a 15 minute ride by train from Tokyo Station. It was pretty excellent! Kind of like a Disney version of Islands of Adventure. Saw this show there:
  
• On the way home, and this is REALLY IMPORTANT, I stopped in a news stand and bought a fresh copy of Weekly Famitsu. I’m really, really going to miss this place.

okonomiyaki night boat, originally uploaded by skelethulu.

Started off with some Japanese KFC Breakfast. I was really curious! Jess got some weird mushroom soup with noodles thing and I got a sesame chicken breakfast sandwich on a HOT FRESH WHITE BUNS. After that we headed back to Shibuya and ACTUALLY FOUND STORES FROM DIRECTIONS AND A MAP in the midst of that giant world.

After that, we went out to Koenji, where Grasshopper Manufacture is headquartered among hundreds of used clothing shops. Ate a Totally Amazing Taco with Tim at one of Goichi Suda’s frequented haunts. There was a sign that said “LUCHAS” over the bathroom.

Tim’s girlfriend set us up with this Okonomiyaki boat ride thing at night. It was definitely the weirdest dinner I’ve ever had! Also, I had no idea HOW MUCH WATER is hidden downtown here. I bet you could live here for a year without seeing the Sumida River, unless somebody hooked you up with an Okonomiyaki boat ride.