Holiday Sparkle
Holiday dinners in my family always include a sparkling beverage. There’s something particularly festive about a bubbly drink, especially when served in slender, elegant crystal glasses. The nose-tingling effervescence is always good for a giggle, while the gentle fizz wakens the taste buds in preparation for the culinary delights to come.
Our holiday pours are usually limited to one or more flavors of sparkling non-alcoholic juice, but this year in honor of some momentous and happy events in the family, I decided to add the king of bubbly beverages to the mix.
Champagne, the most elegant of wines, was created in northern France during the 18th century by a Benedictine monk, the original Dom Perignon. As I perused the selection at our local market, I realized more education was required before choosing a variety to fill our glass. Vintage, Non-Vintage, Brut, Semi-Brut, Sec, Extra Sec – these appellations were foreign to me in more ways than one. In trying to determine which champagne to buy, I was intrigued by the stories about this beverage and my research into the development of this historic drink added an extra measure of satisfaction to my final choice, a non-vintage Veuve Cliquot Brut Yellow Label.
Upon tasting that first sip, I could concur with Dom Perignon’s remark when he first imbibed – “I am tasting the stars.”
Check out a fascinating champagne infographic after the jump!
Oddball Review: Sony Reader Wi-Fi (PRS-T1)
For at least a couple of years now I’ve wanted an E Ink e-reader, despite having little to no trouble reading e-books on my iPhone. Personally I’m all for the e-book revolution, but when you want to focus on reading, you’re best served by trying to recreate the aesthetic of an actual book. No eye (and battery) straining backlight, no email and social networking to distract you. Just a close facsimile of a printed page, a mountain of books on tap and a dictionary ready to assist you with arcane vocabulary. That’s my idea of a proper e-reading experience.
Even so, for those last two years I’ve been content to settle for my iPhone and the iBooks app. But now that Amazon’s Kindle line of e-readers have had ample time to not only push down prices but also spawn competition in the E Ink device market over that time period, I finally decided that now was the right time to jump in. But I’m not a fan of the Kindle, since it doesn’t support the open standard EPUB format that I already have a huge number of books in. I’ve always rather liked the Sony Reader for this instead, and additionally because it ships with a stylus and offers a handwriting / sketchbook function. Sony Readers were always too expensive, though, until now.
The pressure of the Kindle, Nook, Kobo et. al. finally got to Sony and forced them to reduce their oftentimes ridiculous prices on e-reader hardware, as well as consolidate their somewhat confusing model array into a single E Ink device: the $99 Sony Reader Wi-Fi (PRS-T1). So this week, I picked one up.
Right up until the point at which I added my first books to the Sony Reader, I wondered if I was really going to find myself using it to read all that often. After all, my iPhone is always in my pocket and it’s got all my books on it, too. Despite the more visually pleasing screen of the Sony Reader, it seemed like the convenience of the iPhone might win out. Since then, though, the only time I’ve actually read a book on my iPhone is in bed when there hasn’t been enough ambient light for the Sony’s E Ink screen — and that’s only until I get the Sony Reader case with built-in light that I ordered from Amazon.
Retro Game Review: The Legacy: Realm of Terror
Part 1 of the Oddball Review Survival Horror Series
The Legacy: North American box art
One Sunday evening in September of 1993, I was browsing the shelves of the local mall’s Babbage’s store in hopes of finding a new computer game to play on the Dell 486 that I had only recently set up in my bedroom. Back then, before Internet-enabled mobile phones on which you could instantly find a review of practically anything before buying it, I chose which games to buy based almost entirely on their retail packaging. And I remember being particularly taken with the box art for the game I chose that night: it looked like a delicious amalgam of ghostly lore and modern armament. I bought the game, went home and installed it, and promptly creeped myself out to the point where I had to leave the lights on for a while longer than usual.
That game was The Legacy: Realm of Terror, a role-playing adventure developed by Magnetic Scrolls and published by MicroProse, and I fondly think of it as the game that primed me for my eventual love of the survival horror genre. I know that technically it wasn’t a survival horror game itself, since the genre did not even exist then, but it’s got all the trappings: boatloads of atmosphere, tons of creepy and disgusting monsters that you’re better off running from than killing, and a gothic story inspired by the work of H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allan Poe. If you enjoy games like Penumbra or Amnesia: The Dark Descent today, chances are you would have enjoyed The Legacy back then.
The Legacy places you in the role of a character who has just inherited the vast and ancient Winthrop estate in New England from a deceased relative whom you didn’t know you had. On the night you arrive for your first look at the property, you find yourself suddenly trapped in the house, held there by demonic forces that have barred the exits. Very quickly you discover that something terribly strange is going on at the Winthrop estate, something involving a family curse, horrifying improprieties that go all the way back to the 1600s, and astral devils attempting to break through into our world. You are the only one who can stop them — but their appointed hour draws near, and your time is short.
That sounds like the making of a good book, and indeed sometimes I wish The Legacy had one to go along with it. This was the game that introduced me to the macabre stories of H.P. Lovecraft — not in any direct way; though the aesthetic of both are similar — and I could easily see the game’s plot played out in one of Lovecraft’s chilling short stories.
I recently resurrected my copy of The Legacy for a proper modern-day playthrough, thanks to the wonders of DOSBox, a robust DOS emulator that is an absolute must for anyone wishing to relive their ’80s and early-’90s gaming experiences with minimal effort. In addition to seeking a nostalgia injection, I also wanted to find out if The Legacy would live up to my recollections of it, despite the weight of so many years’ of gaming evolution between then and now.
In short, yes. Emphatically yes.
World Series of (Videogame) Poker
I remember where I first learned how to play poker, and from whom. When I was a kid, my mom taught me the basics of the game so that we could play it to pass the time in the airport while waiting for a flight to a now long-forgotten destination. I seem to recall reacting with some modicum of surprise that my mom, of all people, knew how to play poker! But neither one of us, naturally, could play to a competitive level. This was a purely recreational pursuit.
Since then I’ve rarely picked up a deck of cards, but I’ve played countless hands of poker anyway — in the videogame world. I’m not actually talking about online poker houses where you can play on the Internet — click here for one such example, which also handily offers up some basic competitive poker tips for the true beginner — but rather about console games that on their face appear to have nothing to do with poker, but actually contain some very entertaining poker minigames built in.
Since it’s relatively trivial to build a poker videogame compared to the open-world adventure games, shooters and simulators that abound today, sometimes you will find a really good poker game in the most unusual places. One example is Dead or Alive Xtreme 2 on the Xbox 360, where each in-game evening offered the option to visit the Zack Island Casino for a suite of Vegas-style games, including poker. I often looked forward more to putting the smackdown on Tina or Hitomi at the poker table than kicking their bikini-clad butts off the volleyball court, which was the central focus of the game. I found, however, that playing poker in DOAX2 was often incredibly unforgiving, unpleasant and too difficult to win any actual money in. (I guess you might say that makes it realistic?)
If you’re more interested in playing electronic poker against actual people, you could hit up an online poker house (though you’d be advised to first click here to learn some strategies about bluffing, bonuses and researching professional strategies). Or you could try a risk-free poker fix in the least likely of places: Red Dead Redemption, a video game about violence and deception in the Old West. There’s a poker minigame in Red Dead that is simply tons of fun, and will have you going up against a whole myriad of opponents who are just as good at calling your bluff as they can be at bluffing you out.
What’s really cathartic about Red Dead’s poker minigame is how, if things are going really badly for you and you just can’t take it anymore, you can jump out of your chair, unholster a pistol and fill your opponents with lead in true Old West Bad-Guy style. You’ll then get in a lot of trouble with the law, but you can just reload your last saved game to clear away your impropriety — you were probably going to do that anyway, if you were losing your shirt at the poker table!
I’m perfectly content to stay with Red Dead’s idea of a poker simulation, but anyone wanting to take the challenge of electronic poker to the real world (where you don’t need a poker face, per se, but you will still need a cool head) could click here to get some beginner’s tips at PokerInsider.com and register to play online with others via their online poker provider.
But don’t try to pull a John Marston if things don’t go your way. You’ll just wind up putting a hole in your computer screen.
Changes
To say that a period of life changes is upon me now that we have a newborn at home is, obviously, an understatement. But there are changes afoot here at Oddball Update as well, and I thought I’d better mention at least a couple of them lest someone become…concerned.
Here’s the deal. Since I no longer have A) the time for extensive sidework projects or B) very much spending money, I’ve decided that all the time I spend writing content for this blog might as well earn me something. A lot of people hate writing and would clearly pay to offload that responsibility onto others, whereas by contrast, I heartily enjoy it. Since that equation typically forms the bedrock of any capitalist venture, I decided it was time to grab hold and leverage it.
I’m going to continue posting game reviews, journal entries, project updates and rants, just as I usually do. In addition, though, you may see the occasional post from “guest authors” who have sponsored space on this blog for entries about one topic or another. (You’ll be able to tell them apart from regular blog entries because of their design and the nametag they’ll carry.) Those of you who know me might also be perplexed by the subject matter of certain entries I myself might write from time to time, or the websites I might link to. If you see bizarre stuff like that, it’s because I’ve accepted writing assignments to add commissioned content on behalf of someone.
At the moment it’s just an experiment, but I thought I’d issue fair warning.
In unrelated news, yes, I know the front page “featured post” image carousel doesn’t look quite right. I upgraded the plugin that powers it, forgetting for the moment that I had customized its appearance to suit my needs, and the upgrade blew those changes away. I’m going to re-integrate them in an upgrade-safe manner, but it might take a couple of days. Just so you know.
Gaming of a Different Sort
All has been fairly quiet on the Oddball front lately, all thanks to a certain event that occurred on November 14th, 2011: the birth of my son, whom I think I shall refer to as “Oddball Jr.” or “Mr. C” until such time as I think of a better alias for him. Since Mr. C’s heralded and long-awaited arrival — one week ahead of schedule! — the missus and I have been thrown headfirst into a whirlwind of new joys, new challenges and lots of new educational experiences. My outlook on life has already been altered profoundly in ways that I couldn’t have imagined before.
And yet, at my core I’m still the same odd dude. Since this isn’t really a family blog — most of the family news gets shared on social networks now, either by Mrs. Oddball or myself — I imagine that I’ll mostly keep posting the same kinds of things here: musings on life, technology and auto news, and plenty of gaming reviews. Because if there’s one thing that hasn’t changed, it’s my taste for gaming of all kinds, and I’m still finding ways to inject a little “game time” into my day. The difference is that now I sometimes have a passenger along for the ride during my game sessions.
Like most newborns, Mr. C likes to be held and is typically calmer when being cradled. Already I’ve spent a few collective hours gaming and typing one-handed since we welcomed him into our home! During his first weekend in the world, Mr. C got to experience the wonders of our game room upstairs, whereupon he slept happily in my arms for two hours while I worked on my game of Deus Ex: Human Revolution. (Don’t worry; I was wearing headphones and he most certainly was not looking at the TV, not that he could have seen Adam Jensen’s violent antics with his week-old eyes.)
Unfortunately, since that day, Mr. C decided that going upstairs to the game room was kind of scary and began balking at this activity. I’ve thus found it easier to sit with him at my computer in the study downstairs. Sometimes he’ll sleep in my arms while I’m there, and other times he’ll allow me to put him on his special “sleep positioner” pillow atop my desk so I can easily keep an eye on him while he hangs out with me. I’ve since discovered that playing first-person PC games is fairly tricky when you have only one hand available, although — just like writing stories one-handed when my arm was in a sling back in high school — I’ve managed to find a way.
It would be a lot less complicated, no doubt, to resort to more rudimentary games, like Uno or poker. (Everything I know about poker I learned from playing against varmints in Red Dead Redemption, but that’s another entry entirely.) Of course that would require other people, which is often a tall order at 1:00 in the morning when Mr. C decides he wants to be as alert as a cram school student on speed.
During some of my late-night (and early-morning, which is a new one) PC game sessions, I discovered some new games to play. I largely gave up PC gaming in 2005 with the launch of the Xbox 360 — and believe me, I haven’t missed the driver issues, the crashing, the overheating, the patches and the other rigmarole — but there is a certain charm to PC gaming that really comes out when you find a PC-only gem like Amnesia: The Dark Descent and its predecessor, the three-part Penumbra series. These first-person survival horror games are more about creating mega-gobs of suspense and tension in creepy environments than they are about shooting and bludgeoning things to death; in fact, the central gameplay mechanic of Amnesia requires that you run and hide from your assailants, accepting the fact that you cannot hope to fight them. The “unstoppable monster” trope coined by Michael Myers is fairly unfamiliar in the videogame realm, and it adds a whole measure of terror to the experience.
I’ve already begun planning an Oddball Review Survival Horror Series that will examine some of my favorite games of this genre, including at least one that predates it (and is, in most circles, usually referred to as an RPG). The creepy goodness I’ve been lapping up as I begin exploring the first episode of Penumbra simply cannot go without mention.
Tonight I’ll find out what kind of mood Mr. C is in, and perhaps we’ll do a little gaming together — though it has to be said, he has been very cranky of late and has decided that he can be satisfied only by the opportunity to suck on something! I’m already looking forward to the Christmas holidays, because for the first time in six years I’ll actually have a holiday (from the office, that is), consisting of nearly two weeks of pure stay-at-home playtime. I can’t wait.
Look for the first entry in the Oddball Review Survival Horror Series (which, by the time it launches, will hopefully have a more succinct name) sometime in the near future. In the meantime I’ll be creeping around Greenland, trying to hide from the zombie dogs in Penumbra. As weird as it sounds, that’s my idea of a good time.
