When I first heard about Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light, the new Xbox Live Arcade title from Crystal Dynamics, I didn’t think it was going to be that good. Although my enjoyment of the Tomb Raider franchise is well documented — with one exception — this isn’t technically a Tomb Raider game. See, the words don’t even appear in the title and stuff.

More importantly, though, this game departs from the usual retail disc experience of Tomb Raider as well as the core gameplay foundation that its fans have become used to. Rather than a single-player adventure game that has you jumping, climbing and cavorting your way through exotic locations in search of some ancient artifact, Lara Croft: GoL is an isometic action game that focuses much more on combat. Because combat has traditionally been one of the weakest features of the Tomb Raider series, I was not hopeful.

I was also, as it turns out, wrong.

This is a really good game — in fact, I see it as the 2010 Summer of Arcade equivalent of last year’s Shadow Complex, which I also loved and discussed here. It is, in fact, the first time I’ve ever actually enjoyed the hell out of combat in a game starring Lara Croft. You’ll notice I didn’t say “in a Tomb Raider game”, because as I’ve noted, this technically isn’t one. (Hee…you see what Crystal Dynamics did there?)

Furthermore, GoL departs from the single-player roots that traditionally underpin the adventures of Ms. Croft. This is a game with an entire cooperative element fully baked in, where you and a friend each take a leading role — one playing Lara, and the other playing Totec, the Guardian of Light himself. Totec is an Aztec god who was awakened by some greedy bad guys when they attempted to steal the ancient Mirror of Smoke, in which the evil god Xolotl was imprisoned. Xolotl escaped and began to summon his horde of evil from the Negaverse abyss, and it’s Lara and Totec’s job to rein him in again.

Graphically, Lara Croft: GoL runs on the same engine that powers the most recent Tomb Raider games, but it’s been reworked to provide players with an isometric perspective that shows you looking down on the playing field from slightly above. It’s a lot like Dungeon Siege and other isometric dungeon crawlers of old, actually, except the gameplay is a little simpler: there are no magic spells or skill trees to build up. GoL trades these for some platforming elements that old-school Tomb Raider fans should feel right at home with: climbing, grappling, swinging and more, although pared down a bit and presented in a more rudimentary fashion.

The gunplay is simply a joy to experience. Although the firearm sound effects are a bit on the weak side, my complaints end there: levels are filled with a wide variety of baddies that you can dispatch with an equally wide variety of weapons, ranging from pistols and shotguns to flamethrowers and throwing spears. The spears, in fact, are not just weapons but also useful tools that help you climb and reach areas that would otherwise be inaccessible to you. The action reminded me a lot of classic Doom: tons o’ enemies, tons o’ guns, tons o’ destruction.

Speaking of destruction, Lara has a new weapon at her disposal here: remote bombs. They’re basically what you’d expect: tiny explosives that you can set anywhere by pressing the Y button, then detonate at any time by pressing Y again. Lots of objects in the world are destructible, and the sounds stuff makes when it blows sky high more than makes up for the wimpy gunshots. I often want to cackle like a mad scientist as shards of broken wood, metal and glass rain down from the sky in the aftermath of a bomb detonation! The only trouble is that you can set and detonate just one bomb at a time, but this is part of the strategy.

What I found most fun of all was the vast array of challenges that the game offers. Each of the 14 levels has a list of “extra credit” goals you can attempt to accomplish, ranging from collecting 10 red skull artifacts to jumping over a spinning deathtrap a certain number of times in a row without being hit. Completing each goal rewards you with something like a new weapon, longer health and ammo bars, or a special powerup artifact, which is something else the game is chock full of. These powerups are modifiers that you can equip two of at a time to alter and enhance your abilities. Most of them have a tradeoff effect; for example, one artifact might boost your weapon power while simultaneously weakening your defense stat. There are also challenges for maximum score and fastest time, giving you plenty of incentive to replay each level. (I think I replayed the first one about ten times this weekend, and I still have one challenge left unfinished!)

You’ll notice that I haven’t really touched on the cooperative gameplay aspect at all. Although this has been a huge marketing point for Lara Croft: GoL, the game had to be released with online co-op play disabled because it’s not finished yet. A free update will be made available on September 28th to add this feature back into the game, but in the meantime you can still play offline co-op with your friends who are in the same physical room as you. Additionally, as a “make good” gesture, Crystal Dynamics is offering the first downloadable content pack (of a planned five total) free of charge to anyone who buys Lara Croft: GoL during the interim. These DLC packs, incidentally, are rumored to contain new levels, new puzzles, and even new playable characters from the Square Enix IP library.

With the exception of a few minor complaints — poor weapon sounds and really cheesy voice acting from everyone except Keeley Hawes, who voices Lara to her usual professional level — I’m quite taken with this game. It’s a wonderful addition to not only the Tomb Raider franchise (though not in name) but also the Xbox Live Arcade library. To date I have purchased only three or four full games from XBL Arcade, preferring to save my hard-earned Microsoft Points for the best of the best, and Lara Croft and the Guardian of Light absolutely qualifies in my book.

If you’re not convinced, no problem: there’s a free trial available for download (at a hefty 2 GB) that lets you play the first level as much as you want, including all of the challenges and such, before you decide. Instead of relying on a review, give the game a try for yourself. It certainly convinced me.

Oddball Verdict: Emphatically yes, Brock.

Not to be confused with The Stig, The Snitch is believed responsible for the variety of violation letters that the HOA sends out to the community residents. He was riding a basket-equipped bicycle, carrying a thick stack of papers scribbled with myriad arcane notes in one hand and a can of beer in the other. He would stop at random points on the street, pull up in a driveway and appear to be adding further notes to his paperwork.

It’s possible that the HOA hires this guy — or he volunteers his time with them — to catch people with driveways that are too dirty, walls that are starting to show mold, etc. Although this thought may be worthy of an eye-roll, even worse is the idea that The Snitch does all of this at the behest of no one because he enjoys sounding the alarm over every perceived fault.

You are requested to lock your doors, shutter your windows and shield your women and children from the watchful eye of…The Snitch.

(On a side note, the “Who’s Online” feature of this blog is broken after yet another plugin upgrade, so I’ve written that functionality out of the site because I no longer have the patience for the continuous fuckery it requires. A eulogy for this fallen functionality will commence at half past never. Thank you.)

Almost all of the stories I wrote between 1986 and 1992 were crafted on an IBM PC XT using PFS: First Choice, an old DOS-based word processor with about as corny as name as was possible. (But didn’t it seem like all productivity software had gimmicky names back in the mid-’80s?) As Microsoft has dropped native 16-bit code execution on modern 64-bit versions of Windows, like the one I’m running, First Choice no longer even runs. However, it runs just fine under DOSBox, the best x86 emulator around. Armed with this, I’ve been converting some of my old stories to Word format so that I can read them in this day and age.

There are utility programs that can handle this, although most of them cost money. I’ve found a far simpler solution: First Choice has the ability to save a file in plaintext ASCII format, if you change the filename extension in the save dialog from DOC to ASC. The software itself gives you no idea that this is possible, so if you lost the manual, good luck figuring that out.

To make the documents pleasantly readable, some additional work is necessary. First Choice’s ASCII format, unfortunately, adds hard carriage returns every 80 columns, so with a decent text editor that can do a find and replace on the carriage return character — my favorite is UltraEdit — you can have that problem licked in short order. Then, just copy and paste into Microsoft Word (or your modern word processor of choice) and you’re all set. The only other issue involves styles (boldface, italics, etc.) that you may have applied to your document in First Choice, because the ASCII format drops them. To reapply, you’ll have to review your document within First Choice line-by-line until you see styled text, then apply the same styles in your modern word processor. This is made more irritating by virtue of the fact that First Choice, being a pure text mode application, wasn’t able to show these styles on the text itself, so you have to highlight a block, open the Style menu and see for yourself which style(s) are applied. Bit of a pain, so hopefully you didn’t use styles too much!

Anyway, I recently converted another batch of those old First Choice stories, written when I was eight or nine years old, which I haven’t read in years. Back then, I often pilfered characters from my favorite childrens’ books that my mom read to me when I was very young, particularly the tales of Peter Rabbit and his friends, by Beatrix Potter, and the Winnie-the-Pooh books by A. A. Milne. (I guess I’ve always enjoyed seeing familiar characters in new situations, which is probably why I enjoy the Star Trek novels so much today.) The old stories I ran through my conversion process this week featured none other than Peter Rabbit, Benjamin Bunny and Pooh Bear themselves, although in roles so completely detached from those that made them famous, I doubt that either Ms. Potter nor Mr. Milne would have recognized them. Why I didn’t just invent my own characters is beyond me, since I discarded almost everything about these characters besides their names.

In this particular series of 10 stories, Peter and Benjamin are brothers in their late twenties or early thirties, each of whom is the owner of his own engineering firm in the automotive industry — something like Dana or Delphi, but on a much smaller scale. Our main character, Benjamin, was the “good guy” who practiced business ethically, was friendly and diligent, who enjoyed fast cars and the free spirit that comes with roaming the highways. His brother Peter, meanwhile, was the stereotypical “bad guy” who tried to screw over his employees, spy on his competitors, and who had been harboring a grudge against Benjamin ever since a tragic childhood incident. Pooh Bear is along for the ride as Benjamin’s straight-man friend (and recurring target of hostage-taking attempts by the evil Peter). The stories detail the exploits of Peter and Benjamin as they struggle to one-up the other on two separate battlefields: that of business, and that of the highway.

Yes, the highway. Even as a child I was into cars, and car chases, and all the action movie clichés that go with them. As such, each of these stories ties vehicular aggression into its plot somehow: car chases; frenzied shootouts on public roadways; drop-of-the-hat road trips used as escape mechanisms; and always lots of crashing, smashing and bashing the daylights out of one car or another. It’s mindless! It’s apropos of nothing! And yet, it’s seriously fun.

In reviewing these stories again, I often find myself having a good laugh. This is mostly due to the sheer naïveté baked into every plot and situation. I wouldn’t expect much else from the mind of a child, but what makes it even more amusing is the incredibly serious and dramatic way in which every story is written, like each one is an episode of a crime drama on prime time television. (The fact that I was heavily inspired by Miami Vice, which was a serious hit at the time, only contributes to this.) In short, the stories take themselves very seriously, but are so full of pure and total illogic that doing so becomes tantamount to impossible. I find myself experiencing what my parents probably felt when they read the stories I excitedly brought to them back then, printed out on tractor feed paper from a dot-matrix Epson LQ-800. It’s cute, and funny, but patently absurd.

Take, for example, the constant rivalry between good-guy Benjamin and bad-guy Peter. In the beginning of the series, Peter isn’t a convicted felon with a criminal record; he’s just a bad seed who grew up angry and has it in for his brother. Yet Benjamin pursues him with apparent intent to commit homicide, armed with a .357 Magnum that he repeatedly shows no compunction about firing at Peter in public places, including a supermarket [!]. Peter does eventually step up his game and joins the big leagues of armed assault, arson and even kidnapping, but throughout, we’re supposed to see Benjamin’s actions as 100% justified and Peter’s as 100% unjustified. A court of law wouldn’t really care that Peter has been a really mean brother when it tries Benjamin for vehicular homicide, wanton property destruction and attempted murder (or at least discharging a firearm in an unlawful manner).

Additionally, the main “A” plot is often so laughable that you find yourself just reading for the sake of enjoying the action scenes, because like the latest Michael Bay flick, they’re really the raison d’être. In the first couple of stories, there basically is no “A” plot, and the characters simply get into violent clashes spurred on by nothing identifiable whatsoever. The last two or three volumes in the series do show glimpses of semi-competent plotting, as the extra years I’d aged by then had brought with them a bit more experience, but they’re still as formulaic as all get out.

Being a “car kid,” I always described the vehicular aspects of my stories with almost preternatural levels of detail. This has been perhaps the greatest source of amusement for me this week, as I transport myself mentally back to 1990 and try to envision the ancient cars (and other technology, for that matter) that’s being described. Benjamin’s pride and joy is his white Ferrari Testarossa, totally Don Johnson style and lifted straight out of Miami Vice. (He also has a red 1970 Dodge Charger in his garage that he uses as his weekend toy.) The eeeeee-ville Peter Rabbit, meanwhile, is even more aggressive on the road, if that were possible, but apparently wasn’t blessed with the same good taste as Benjamin. He begins the series driving a clapped-out Chevy Chevette, but by the third story he upgrades himself to the absolute picture of automotive badassery…a car so scary that just to see it coming down the road is sufficient to set you quaking in your boots. Check it, and BE AFRAID:

FEEL the POWER of the J-BODY!

Yeah. A freaking Pontiac Sunbird. Oooooo, that’s evil. In the stories, Peter is actually rocking a 1990 Sunbird GT powered by GM’s 2.0-liter turbo LT3. The one pictured above is a 1991 GT, which had the same 3.1L V6 that my Grand Prix had, but that red/black color scheme is the exact look I envisioned way back when I was writing these stories. So yeah, this car versus a Ferrari Testarossa. I laugh every time I read yet another scene where Peter somehow manages to “gain on” or “overtake” Benjamin in his twelve-cylinder Italian supercar, and trust me, it’s way too often.

I must have had a fascination with Sunbirds, because Benjamin’s scatterbrained friend Pooh Bear had one, too. He is written as a kindly but somewhat clueless dude who is apparently unemployed but also apparently wealthy, somehow, and who is also the automotive antithesis of the gearhead Benjamin. A constant fixture of the stories is Pooh’s gold 1986 Pontiac Sunbird that’s perpetually dirty and increasingly beaten up, because he Just Doesn’t Care™ about his car. In my mind’s eye, it looked pretty much exactly like this:

Looks like it's made out of rubber.

It isn’t just the cars that are funny, either — it’s the yester-tech that speaks to the era in which the prose was written. Everyone has to rush home to make a phone call because there were no cell phones — except Benjamin, who is fortunate enough to have one of those big honkin’ “car phones” hardwired into his Ferrari. TV consists of rabbit ears feeding you the major networks. One character orders a McDLT at McDonald’s and the cost for an average meal is around $5. When Peter tries to extort money from Benjamin’s company, a mere five thousand dollars is his lofty goal — practically nothing in the corporate world of today.

Despite all of my snarking, I’m having a good time revisiting these old gems from the past. Examining the product of your creativity from times past helps put the spotlight on how your skills have evolved since then (and hopefully they have). While I’ve gotten a lot better at writing fiction — though certainly not to a professional level — some things still ring true today: I still like to borrow someone else’s characters for my own situations, and I still like to write car chase scenes. (I figure I’ll never have the money or a reason to film one, so I might as well put them down in words.) One of the installments in this particular fictional series was never finished, and I’ve been half-seriously entertaining the idea of completing it. Part of me wants to do so in a self-aware manner, with the characters reacting to the illogic of their situations; “breaking the fourth wall” if you will. I enjoy that kind of stuff, perhaps a bit too much if I’m honest.

Believe it or not, I think engaging in this kind of introspection and nostalgic whimsy actually has a beneficial effect on on my creative processes in other walks of life. I spent an extra 30-45 minutes at work on Friday evening perfecting the product packaging artwork I’m developing, because I was really “in the zone” on it. I’ve also got some grand designs (metaphorically speaking) brewing on a redesign of our company website. I’m convinced that the frame of mind my pasttimes put me in are a significant contributing factor.

This stuff also helps keep me optimistic through life’s other vagaries, including the seemingly unending house selling bonanza. We had another prospective buyer arrive this morning, necessitating our early rising on a Saturday morning, something neither of us was all too happy about. But the buyer actually did show up, and took one of the flyers, which is all we can ask — and I hope they enjoyed the scent of those freshly-baked chocolate chip cookies, too. I know I’m going to enjoy eating them, nya ha ha!

Anyway, with my nostalgia cravings thoroughly satiated for another day, I’m about to head off and whip up some hamburgers for dinner. There’s a storm darkening the skies overhead, so another evening of playing Alan Wake on the Xbox sounds like a good plan. And if I know me, I’ll be knee-deep in a word processor by bedtime. After all, I’ve got to crank out something new to read back to myself in twenty more years!

If this were Facebook, I’d have stopped right there and felt right at home with the millions of other vacuous posts that contain so little detail as to be utterly worthless to anyone but their author. However, this is a blog — indeed, a novel concept — where paragraphs are written, at least so long as the proprietor doesn’t forget to come around and actually write them, in which case the blog collects dust for days if not weeks. But never mind all that. I’m a bit tired right now, and my thinking has become…randomized, to paraphrase V23. Wow. You see? Random.

Up until this past weekend, we went three or four weeks without any showings of our house. I got in touch with our realtor to see if I could get an update, and the update was that there were three new properties whose prices were undercutting us. One was a short sale and the other two were foreclosures, so it wasn’t exactly direct competition, but they were the same model home as ours and when someone is bargain hunting, they tend to start at the bottom. Shortly after we had this conversation, coincidentally, we had two showings booked within hours of each other: one for Saturday and the other for Sunday. Finally, some new activity had arrived.

Apple and I had a fairly busy weekend, doing a lot of shopping and housecleaning and stuff. One of Apple’s Facebook friends reminded us that we should try baking cookies to fill the house with a pleasant aroma before our showings, so we heeded the advice and picked up some ready-to-bake chocolate chip cookies from Immaculate Baking Co. We baked half of them, and they were — in a word — scrumptious. Oh yeah, and the scent was pretty darn alluring too.

Then, we had another showing today…that was scheduled 90 minutes in advance. I got the call around noon, just as Apple was starting to prepare lunch, and the buyer’s agent was hoping to show the property at 1:30. So we had to stage the house, pack up all the food and jet over to my parents’ place pretty quickly, but it all worked out. I did some work on my new Sony Vaio F-series laptop and really is a fantastic machine for work, which is good because that’s why I bought the thing.

Unlike the last couple of showings we had (or didn’t have) a month or so ago, all three of the buyers actually showed up this time, if their agents’ business cards being left on our countertop is any indication. So we’ve had plenty of the home-showing process lately…but can we get some resolution soon? Like an offer, maybe? Just saying. Oh, well…the housing market in Texas continues to depreciate a bit, and interest rates are still declining, so while this isn’t exactly heartwarming news, the delay can only be helpful to us.

Florida has been doing its usual “pop-up thunderstorms” shtick a lot lately. For two days in a row now, I’ve gotten wet whilst walking up to the post office to get the mail. Yesterday Apple and I both went for our usual lunchtime walk, and the sky looked rotten dark so we took the big golf umbrella that I won in an office Christmas party trivia contest some years ago. (No joke.) We needed it, too, because a storm blew up on our way home and nearly blew us away. It took both of my hands to keep the umbrella from firing off across the lawn. The driving rain was so bad that we were both soaked by the time we got home, requiring our clothes to be hung up to dry overnight.

And then again today, I walked from my parents’ house to the post office at lunch time and was promptly rained upon again. I was out there by myself and had brought an umbrella, so it wasn’t as bad as yesterday, but I was still pretty damp by the time I got back. The summer storms here often blast you hard enough that an umbrella only keeps your upper half dry. I’ll never forget how many times my great uncle used to tell the story of how he once visited Florida after being recalled from the second World War, and how torrential the summer storms were even then. In the time it took him to run across the street, he was completely drenched. “My wallet was soaked all the way through in those few short seconds!” he would always say. Having lived here for over a decade now, I am only too well acquainted with that particular anecdote.

In other news, this morning we got up early to take the Mazda 6 down the street to the Goodyear shop for some scheduled maintenance: transmission fluid flush and refill, oil change and some brake work. I wanted to have the brakes looked at because the wheel shimmies a little when you stop. However, we didn’t exactly bargain on being told that the rotors were so warped that they had also ruined the brake pads, and that everything needed to be replaced — including the brake fluid, which was old and contaminated — to the tune of almost $900, inclusive of the other work I mentioned. It was a bitter pill to swallow, but we swallowed it because, honestly, the car needed it, and I’m not going to let my wife drive a car with unsafe brakes. I didn’t doubt the shop’s diagnosis, either; I could tell something was going on with the brakes because every time you’d apply them when they were cold, this horrific CLUNK would go up from the front end. That’s gone now. Overall the driving (and stopping) experience is significantly enhanced, which is nice because when you drop that much money on auto work it’s nice to feel some kind of improvement!

Tomorrow morning I’ll be getting up a little early once more, to go help my grandparents set up their new HP all-in-one printer, scanner, fax machine, coffeemaker and pressurized water reactor. (Not really, but it does seem like those all-in-ones are made for just about everything.) I hope there are no surprises along the way. Tomorrow is also when my boss gets back in after more than a week of vacation, and he’ll likely want to get caught up with me on a variety of stuff — not to mention all of the marketing and design stuff that I’ve got to get him caught up on.

Yesterday evening we watched the Comedy Central roast of David Hasselhoff. Ohhhh, God. Seriously, this was the first “roast” I’ve ever watched, and it seemed mostly like an occasion for the guest panelists to roast each other, rather than the headline actor himself. The set design was pretty cool, though, featuring a real-life KITT replica from one of the Knight Rider Online forum members, a huge KITT vox-box and flashbar behind The Hoff himself, and lots of other goofy Knight Rider and Baywatch-themed dressing. The actual comedy was incredibly raunchy — a long time has elapsed since the days of “The Kids in the Hall” and the relatively tame stand-up acts that Comedy Central used to air in its infancy, which was the last time I really tuned in with any consistency. William Daniels lent his iconic voice to a (pre-recorded) bit of banter between KITT and The Hoff, which was entirely too short but fun anyway. (And man, Daniels’ voice has really gone down an octave in his old age!)

Besides watching some washed-up D-list celebs roast The Hoff, I spent the last couple of evenings writing and working on other document-related tasks on my new laptop, and honestly, I’m kind of sick of writing. Tonight, in comparison, I’m going to just sit back and play some video games for a while. There are a lot of new games coming soon, including Mafia II which lands on the 24th of August, but I’m thinking of just holding off on all new game purchases for a while and focusing on my back catalog. I’ve got a lot of stuff to get through that I either never finished the first time or want to play again, including:

• Alan Wake – Still about 1/3rd of the way through
• Grand Theft Auto IV – Never finished it; trying to now
• Grand Theft Auto IV: Episodes From Liberty City – Bought it last week for 50% off
• Bioshock – Never finished it
• Bioshock 2 – Saving it for after I finish the first one
• Dead Space – Finished it, but want to play it again because it rocks (and there’s a sequel coming)

My other problem with games right now is that I’ve basically exhausted my supply of trade-ins. Normally, I partially fund my game purchases by trading in stuff at Gamestop, especially when they have those “extra trade-in credit” deals. But right now, looking at my game library, I don’t see anything that I want to part with. Even though I beat Red Dead Redemption in a very unusual-for-me straight runthrough, the game was so frakking amazing that I feel as though I can’t bear to part with it. The only games I wouldn’t mind trading in are so old that they’re worth next to nothing, so what’s the point? I’d get more enjoyment out of just keeping them here for future nostalgia-fueled replays.

Speaking of games, Apple recently informed me that Blockbuster has added video games to their discs-by-mail rental service (you know, the one that competes — barely — with Netflix). Since we’re already Netflix members and still have a few more months on our gift subscription, there’s no way I’d make a switch right now, but it was certainly a compelling idea, and one that I’ve long wished Netflix would take up because I’m too cheap to pay for a Netflix subscription and a Gamefly subscription. Blockbuster doesn’t even charge extra for games; you can just rent a game instead of a movie for any (or all) of your disc slots whenever you want. It’s freaking brilliant.

The only problem is, it sucks. Because not only does Blockbuster have somewhere around 1/4th of the game lineup that Gamefly offers, their availability dates are ridiculous — mid-October for Crackdown 2?! That game’s been out for at least a couple of weeks already! Why is there a nearly three-month lead time? Unacceptable. So, once again, it appears that Blockbuster is doing little more than hastening their own destruction. Honestly, with bonehead moves like this, the lack of instant movie streaming, and the continued shuttering of their retail outlets, I’ll be surprised if Blockbuster still exists by this time next year.

Anyway…I think I’ll stop talking about games and actually go play some games. Believe it or not, I was originally planning to make this a pretty short update — short enough that I considered using the “Quick Take” category. Ha! You are looking at very possibly the antithesis of a Quick Take here.

Till next time.

On our way to dinner we stopped off at the mall, where Apple picked up something cool for herself. Then it was on to our favorite Carrabba’s in East Naples, where we enjoyed another fantastic meal. Even better was the free large-sized platter of calamari that we received for filling out a survey after our last visit. We took home half of everything, as usual — meaning another full meal to be enjoyed later, for the price of one. At the end of our visit they gave us another survey, good for another free appetizer. You keep giving ‘em to me, and I’ll keep filling ‘em out.

The initial setup and exploration of my new Sony Vaio F-series laptop has continued off-and-on since the machine arrived on Thursday; I’ve actually managed to not completely abandon my job in favor of geeking around with it. In fact, I got quite a bit done these last two days. New computer not withstanding, Thursday and Friday were a lot better than the first half of the week, which was a frustrating hair-pull of an affair. Eventually, on Thursday morning I got so fed up with the perceived disorganization at work that I spent an hour typing up a huge email on the situation, all but begging for clarification on a handful of very specific points. It was with some satisfaction that my immediate supervisor revealed himself to be almost as confused as I was, but I still await real answers to several questions.

Back to the new laptop itself: I’ll have a full review here once I’ve actually worked with it enough to qualify myself. But so far, I think this thing is going to live up to my expectations of being the most ideal portable workstation possible. It’ll be great for working while traveling, its performance actually puts my desktop computer to shame and I’ve even figured out how to dial back all of the horsepower enough to make it serve as a subdued word processor for the evening hours. The latter required that I create a custom power management scheme that keeps the CPU constantly throttled to 5%.

Vaio F backlit keyboard at night

I can’t decide what I’m most impressed with: the keyboard or the solid-state drive. The former is, without a doubt, the best laptop keyboard I have ever laid hands on. I was typing on it this evening with all the speed of my regular desktop keyboard, and the backlight made it easy to see in the dark. The SSD, meanwhile, is the first of its kind that I’ve ever owned and the response times are astounding — and this isn’t even close to being the fastest model SSD on the market! You can boot the machine to ready-state in just a few seconds, it’s completely silent and it generates no heat. One of the weakest performance links of every laptop I’ve ever owned has been the hard drive, and it’s so nice to be rid of that.

This weekend I have quite a few projects in store. I’ve got some more setup to do on the laptop, primarily the installation of the Adobe software I use for work. I’m also going to switch myself into the seldom-used “handyman mode” and attempt to repair a toilet. I had to order the proprietary Mansfield replacement parts from some obscure vendor at the Brooklyn Navy Yard of all places, but the stuff got here yesterday and now I no longer have an excuse to sit by and listen to the toilet groan loudly every time you flush it. Also, I need to install the air filter I just had delivered for the GTO, clearcoat the touchup paint job I did on the wheel rim, then get the car up on ramps and check again on the status of the oil leak. There…might be a story behind that, depending on what I find down there. If I don’t say anything more on the subject, you’ll know that there isn’t.

Oh yeah, and I would like to play some games too.

I’m ridiculously wired tonight. Guess I’ll hit the sack, though. Would hate to waste half of Saturday sleeping it off.

Being Sunday — and the off-season, to boot — the parking lot of a local private school was empty and ripe for the photographing. I also finally had the opportunity to solve the big problem with most of my parking lot photoshoots: the damn white lines crisscrossing all through the frame. This time I parked in the middle of the access road where parents are supposed to let their students off in the morning. Conveniently, there was a flood lamp a short distance away that provided some fairly good diffuse fill light.

I’ve hand-picked a few photos from the shoot that came out especially well. Hit the “Continue Reading” link to see them, or find them all on my Flickr photostream.

Sony Vaio F Series

As with everything these days, I tend to buy the best equipment that I can afford and make use for it for as long as possible, until it either just plain craps out or my needs significantly eclipse its capabilities. Today’s purchase was no exception, as I decided to choose a loaded-to-the-hilt Sony Vaio F Series, a 16.4″ Core i7 beastie that I optioned with enough equipment to stave off obsolescence for a good long while. What’s perhaps most significant about this purchase, for me, is that it’s the first laptop I’ve ever bought from someone other than Dell.

Excluding the first laptop I ever owned — a 486-powered Canon Innova Book — which was a gift, I’ve only purchased Dell Inspiron or Latitude systems for myself. The quality of these machines got progressively worse; the Inspiron 3200 was a solid (literally!) notebook, but the 8600 that came next was creaky, flaky and hot. Worst of all was the Latitude D620 I bought in 2006 for business use, which turned into a complete heap of slag in two years’ time. Its LCD backlight became dim and uneven, the lone monaural speaker blew out, the battery was reporting imminent end-of-life within six months, and the system gradually slowed to a molasses-laden crawl that even a full reformat and reinstall of Windows couldn’t cure. (This makes it all the more ridiculous to read my glowing impressions of the D620 on my first day of owning it…I shall endeavor to remember this and temper my review of the Vaio F accordingly!)

Although I have since heard that 2006 was perhaps a perigee for Dell and that the quality of their current line of notebooks is much better, I honestly just can’t stomach taking the chance. For the last few months I’ve been quietly looking at various notebook manufacturers, from Sony and HP to Lenovo and Asus, searching for the perfect configuration for my needs. I kind of expect my laptop to do it all: It needs to have a high-resolution screen for my design activities, sufficient RAM for heavy Photoshopping, dedicated graphics for gaming and video playback, a great keyboard for speed typing when I’m writing, and good thermal management so it doesn’t turn into a furnace beneath my wrists. Try finding all of that in a notebook, and at an affordable price — it’s not easy.

I think I’ve managed to do it, though. Although Sony’s Vaio F series isn’t without its problems — the screen isn’t LED backlit, the audio output from its built-in speakers is nothing special and it sucks a fair amount of juice — it’s got literally everything else I needed both for work and play. Thanks to a “Back to School” promotion that Sony’s running (I never thought that I’d actually enjoy a back-to-school sale!), I was able to spec it out with the following:

• 1920×1080 screen that provides plenty of real estate for Photoshoppery and web development
• Intel Core i7-740QM quad-core CPU with Hyper Threading (for a total of 8 threads)
• 8GB of DDR3 memory
• 256GB solid-state hard drive (SSD) to further reduce heat, noise and slowdown
• Blu-Ray writer
• LED backlit keyboard with a full number keypad
• Extended 9-cell battery (provides about 4.5 hours of runtime, not bad for an i7)

Topped off with Sony’s 12 months interest free financing, it was a deal I couldn’t match anywhere else. Sony’s online chat representative even upgraded me to express shipping (2-day service, I think) free of charge.

So why go with the Vaio over, say, the HP Envy 17 or the Lenovo ThinkPad W series? In truth, those machines were my other two top choices. Although the HP’s EyeFinity three-monitor system made it a strong contender for my needs, I was spooked royally by HP’s worst-in-class reliability rating (according to warranty supplier Squaretrade’s reliability study) and the reports that the machines suffer thermal management issues and poor fit-and-finish. The price was also several hundred dollars more than the Sony, with only a 6-month no-interest financing option available. Lenovo, meanwhile, has some great graphic design machines in the W series — that W7xx is amazing with its built-in Wacom tablet and color calibrator — but the price for the configuration I needed was approaching $4,000, and that’s just ridiculous.

And no, I never seriously considered the MacBook Pro — although it would have made a fine computer, it was way too much money, and my job is incompatible with OS X. Who wants to run Windows on a Mac full time?

Sony, meanwhile, offered the most features I needed for a price I could afford, coupled with good reliability rankings and financing options. Also, I was able to actually lay my hands on a Vaio F at the local Best Buy, which really sealed the deal. Yes, I would have preferred an RGB-LED screen, a beefier sound system and multi-monitor support, but these were all things I was either willing to sacrifice or can add later (in the case of the multi-monitor support, via Matrox’s Graphics eXpansion Modules). There simply wasn’t anything else out there that would do the job for the price I could pay — well, maybe from Dell, but I don’t touch them anymore.

Speaking of Dell, I wrote all of the above on my Dell Inspiron 8600 notebook, the one I mentioned back there when I was lamenting about the company’s declining quality. By the time I reached the previous paragraph, the keyboard was so hot that it was uncomfortable to touch and nearly a full second of lag had developed between each keystroke and the corresponding character’s appearance on the screen. When the machine finally started flashing its “battery charging circuitry malfunction” lamp as if the universe was about to explode, I shut it the hell off, unplugged it and went back to my desktop workstation. Screw you, Dell — I am so over you that it isn’t funny. (And I was such a rabid fanboy of yours in the ’90s — what happened? If you ask me, I think you got too close to the cow’s consumer-oriented rear end!)

Anyway, I’ve got about 10-14 days before my new Vaio F gets here. Assuming everything checks out OK with it, I’m probably going to round up all the old Dell laptops I still have languishing around and either donate or recycle them all before we move to Texas. No sense in lugging dead weight halfway across the country.

Believe it or not, rabid posts screaming about the new computer I just ordered are a bit of an Oddball Update tradition. You can go way back into the archives and find tales of my gadget-fueled hysteria from the 1990s, which are seriously laughable when you see what kind of hardware I was getting all worked up about and compare it to today’s standards. Now, because I like nostalgia-fueled histrionics, here’s a selection from the Oddball Archives written fourteen years ago this month — July 17th, 1996 to be precise — in which I listed the specs of the latest Dell desktop rig that I was lusting after:

• 200MHz Pentium Pro With 256K Integrated Processor Cache and “Venus” Chipset
• 64MB Parity EDO RAM
• UltraScan 17HS Trinitron Color Monitor, 15.9inch Viewable Size
• #9 Imagine Series 2 PCI Video Board With 4MB VRAM
• 4.2GB EIDE Hard Drive
• 1.44MB Floppy Drive
• US Robotics V.34 Sportster 28.8 Data/Fax Modem
• 8X IDE CD-ROM
• 1.6GB/3.2GB Travan Tape Backup
• Microsoft Windows 95

It was basically a server-class machine (I mean, parity EDO RAM?) that I outfitted for gaming and design activities. It was certainly up to the task, but in retrospect I probably should have waited until the launch of the Pentium II the following year.

Perhaps the funniest part of all from that historical entry is this overwrought bit of expository text at the beginning:

Remember the good old days? Summer, 1993? The Dell Dimension 486 DX-2/66 had just hit my desk and I was up at right around this time of night, playing Wolfenstein 3D, and basking in the glow of that hot new power system. Now here we are, almost exactly 3 years later, and that once hot-to-the-touch configuration is dead. NOW, we are tracking the computer industry’s most advanced new system on the market, complete with more super-upgraded components than even Bill Gates could shake a copy of Windows 95 at.

Oddball Update Archives from July 17, 1996 / 12:19 AM

There are so many anachronisms in that paragraph that if you turned them into a drinking game, you’d pass out.

Anyway, I’ll undoubtedly post an update here when I actually receive the new Vaio F and have a chance to assemble my impressions of it. Assuming all goes well, I’m definitely looking forward to using it during upcoming travels. With specifications that significantly eclipse my desktop, it should certainly be a capable mobile workstation.

Dixie Buick GMC in Fort Myers

Over the past decade that I’ve spent in southwest Florida, I’ve seen my share of ups and downs. One of the definite downs of my residence here has been the service offered by the local area’s Pontiac dealerships. From that fateful day in 2001 when Naples’ big-name Pontiac dealership of note first got its claws into my Trans Am, I’ve been on a roller coaster ride of poor workmanship, damaged parts, rude service writers and flat-out brainless employees of every conceivable position. Imagine my surprise, then, at finding a Pontiac dealer nearby that doesn’t flat-out suck donkey nipple.

That dealership is Dixie Buick Pontiac GMC in south Fort Myers, part of that area’s “big row” of car dealerships lined up as far as the eye can see. Formerly known as Galeana Pontiac, a dedicated PMD shop, the dealership was bought out by Dixie Buick GMC when GM was doing their big consolidation of those three brands under one roof. I took my GTO there for some routine work in 2008 — tire rotation, alignment, and brake fluid replacement — which was performed competently as far as I could tell, though for some reason the techs felt the need to put an inordinate number of miles on the car while it was in their care. Back then, I drove away with a few nagging concerns in the back of my mind, but no evidence to support them other than the trip odometer. The car’s ride had improved, there was nothing damaged and the cost for the work was reasonable.

Fast-forward to last month when I changed the oil in the GTO and discovered, to my heart-stopping horror, a thin film of oil coating the bottom exterior of the oil pan. Although GM cars have been derided endlessly over the years for leaking oil like a sieve, none of the ones I owned have ever leaked so much as one drop. (From the engine, anyway — my Trans Am did leak a few drops from the differential at one time.) I went immediately to the online encyclopedia of all things goat, LS1GTO.com, and discovered that leaking oil pan gaskets were a relatively common issue on the LS2. In my case, it did indeed seem to be coming from the oil pan gasket. I found one bolt on the pan slightly looser than the others, snugged it up, cleaned up the oil and hoped for the best.

Checking back a couple of weeks later, I found the sheen of oil had returned. Welp, that was it. I had six months of my extended 5-year / 50,000 mile GM Major Guard warranty left, and it looked like it was about to get its first use whether I liked it or not. The leak was so insignificant that there wasn’t even any oil on the garage floor after two weeks, but I wasn’t going to chance it.

Perhaps coming as a blessing in disguise — or poetic justice? — the local big-name dealership that had given me so much grief during the years that I owned my Trans Am had since dumped all of its GM franchises (except for Cadillac) and thus were no longer an option to me. The nearest Pontiac service department, in fact, was the aforementioned Dixie in Fort Myers. So I really didn’t have much of a choice in scheduling my repairs there, but as it happened, that choice turned out to be a good one.

I brought the GTO in this Monday and was taken care of by a service consultant named Lynne, who — next to Aaron at the former Scanlon Mazda — was easily the best service consultant I’ve ever worked with. She actually listened to what I had to say and discussed the issues with me, rather than simply acting numb and mute or cutting me off like the rude bastages at the Naples dealers always did. She actually entered all of the suggestions and requests I made onto the work order as I watched. She then shot the breeze with me for a bit about Pontiac and was clearly a fan of the brand, cut from the same cloth as I. How refreshing. (And bizarrely unusual, even amongst the Pontiac dealer service personnel I have met.)

Aside from the oil leak, I also requested a tire rotation, balance and alignment, plus a brake fluid replacement, since it happened to be right on time for all of those services. I also specifically asked if they’d recenter my steering wheel; it has to be ever so slightly turned to the right in order to drive straight. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve asked for that exact procedure over the years on my various cars and almost never is it actually done. Dixie’s service manager had informed me by phone prior to my appointment that they have a dedicated veteran tech in-house who handles the work on Pontiac products, being an old-school Pontiac guy himself from the former Galeana shop next door, so I was hoping that the guy’s skills would be put on full display.

Dixie kept the car for the first day. I didn’t even call them until Tuesday morning, when I rang them up to get a status report, since I knew the oil leak was going to be a big job. When I called, Lynne responded that she had just been looking at my ticket and was about to call me. Apparently the leak had not been the oil pan gasket or rear main seal, as I had feared. Instead it was a leaking oil galley plug on the rear driver’s side of the block. The plug was re-sealed without any significant loss of oil, and that was that. Still a fairly sizable job, but not as bad as it could have been…I hear dropping the oil pan requires removal of the front cradle and steering rack, and from looking at the underside of the car, I couldn’t see any way to argue!

The extended warranty had covered the repair, and everything looked to be in order, so I checked out — even got to use a 10% discount coupon that Dixie had sent me in my email. On the (loonnnnng) way home, the GTO drove smoother and straighter than I could remember, and the steering wheel had indeed been perfectly recentered, with the car tracking straight as an arrow when you took your hands off it. I almost went to sleep, the ride was so smooth. And unlike after other major dealer services that I’ve had on previous automobiles, there were no new noises, knocks, whines, scuffs, cracks, chips, or equipment malfunctions as a result of the work. Everything was exactly as it should have been.

I’ll be getting down on the garage floor again to check the oil pan this weekend to confirm with my own eyes that the leak hasn’t returned, naturally. But from what I can see so far, Dixie appears to have done excellent work with the car and — just as importantly — treated both it and me with respect, which is more than I can say for 75% of the dealers I’ve been to over the years.

If you’re a southwest Florida resident with a Pontiac that needs warranty work, specialty service or even just some routine maintenance performed by people who actually know the product and its history, I doubt you can do better locally than Dixie Buick GMC. And in today’s post-Pontiac era, that’s a great relief indeed.

I’ve already rated Dixie on DealerRater.com, which can be a good resource when you’re looking for intelligence on a car dealership prior to a purchase or service appointment. That site is also where, if you know what you’re looking for, you can find my earlier two scathing reviews of that former big-name Naples dealer for which I harbored such contempt. (I barely recognized that immolative writing as my own…I guess I’ve mellowed out a lot since 2004!)

Damn it feels good to be a Jedi gangsta

Seven years ago today — July 15th, 2003 — Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic was released for the original Xbox console. Now, I normally don’t go around spouting off release dates of games; I happened to run across this one a couple days ago only because I am once again playing this game. Since I have been so completely addicted to it in recent days, I thought it might be an appropriate subject for one of those elusive Oddball Update “Retro Gaming” posts. And so here we are.

Star Wars: KOTOR (as it shall henceforth be called, since I don’t want to type out that whole name again) has the honor of being the first game I ever reviewed here at Oddball Update. It was, in fact, the subject of my second post ever on this blog. Reading that old post from 2003 is somewhat disorienting today, as it talks about the old Xbox console and its hamfisted controller, and makes comparisons to other games of the era that I have long since forgotten. But the overall bent of the review still holds true: KOTOR is an amazing game, even today in 2010, and now — as then — it’s an absolute pleasure to play.

Today’s post won’t really be a review of the game (hence the absence of the word “review” from the already-overlong post title). It’s more a chance for me to discuss the technical fine points of going to back to such old software on a modern computer. This is a process which is typically fraught with compatibility nightmares, driver hacks and other stuff-and-nonsense that makes you wonder why you even bothered in the first place. However, thanks to Valve Software’s inestimably helpful Steam digital delivery platform, playing KOTOR on your PC is now as easy as plopping down $9.99, downloading 4GB of data and firing it right up — natively — on your Windows 7 box. Yep — KOTOR is on Steam.

Produced by BioWare, who have more recently been known for that other space opera video game franchise — KOTOR is a role playing game set in George Lucas’ famous Star Wars universe. It tells the epic tale of a Republic soldier whose connection to the Force is more than he (or she) ever expected, and who is thrust into a conflict the likes of which may spell the unraveling of the galaxy. The story is pretty standard RPG fare, really, but the Star Wars setting and typical BioWare spit-and-polish help make it something really special.

I already own both KOTOR and KOTOR 2 for the original Xbox console. In fact, my odyssey began last week when I popped the Xbox version of the first game into my Xbox 360. The built-in backwards compatibility software allows the game to run on newer Xboxes, although it’s not without its faults. For a start, KOTOR was a game that pushed the limits of the first Xbox, and because support for it is merely being emulated on the new console, performance suffers greatly. In most of the game’s environments, the frame rate is so poor that any dialog spoken is all choppy and cut off. Comically, dialog also falls behind during cutscenes to the point where actors are interrupted in the middle of a sentence by an overlapping line. And sometimes, the sound effects just cut out completely, requiring the game to be exited and re-started before they will return.

Goody two-shoes Jedi in the making

Perhaps worst of all — and this isn’t a bug, merely a fact of life — KOTOR really looks like crap on the Xbox 360. It’s not that it looks any worse than it did on the original Xbox, as far as I can tell. It’s just a standard-def game blown up to huge proportions, in a 4:3 pillarboxed presentation no less, on my 57″ screen and that’s just painful to look at. It also suffers from gamma problems that all but preclude true black from ever being rendered. Overall, I got so tired of looking at it that I decided to investigate whether the PC port of KOTOR was still available. And that, of course, led me to Steam. After some hemming and hawing, I finally decided to spend the $9 and give the PC version a try.

In my original review of the game back in 2003, I opined that KOTOR was “yet another game which will definitely be a superior package on a Windows box than on an Xbox.” Although until this week I had never played the PC version, I was pleased to find myself proven correct. KOTOR is gorgeous on the PC, able to run at higher resolutions, sporting better textures, anti-aliasing and absolutely no framerate drops. The controls took a little getting used to, especially after coming directly from the Xbox version not three hours prior, but now I can definitely say that the PC version just craps all over the Xbox version. (My 2003-vintage self would smugly nod his head and smile, because back then I was an extremely pro-PC and anti-console gamer.)

Of the approximate 8 or 10 predesigned appearances you can select for your player character, I was amused to find that one of them very closely resembles Tahmoh Penikett, who played Karl “Helo” Agathon on the reimagined Battlestar Galactica series. Naturally, I selected that design for my character and named the guy Karl Agathon. Dig the comparison mug shots:

It’s about as close to a Star Wars / Battlestar crossover as I ever want to see, frankly.

To my embarrassment, however, despite KOTOR being one of the greatest Star Wars games ever made, I never finished it. Nor did I ever even play the sequel, despite having a copy of it collecting dust on my shelf for the last several years (I picked it up in a buy-one-get-one sale at Gamestop a long time ago). Since I’ve been in a Star Wars mood lately, having added all the movies to my Netflix queue and all, it seemed like a good time to take care of both of those problems. Unfortunately, if you were expecting the PC version of KOTOR 2: The Sith Lords to also be simply a Steam purchase away, you’ll be disappointed: only the first game is available on Steam. Additionally, the PC port of KOTOR 2 was done by a different company and was apparently so bug-riddled as to be almost unplayable. It looks like I’ll be sticking with the Xbox version for that one, assuming I ever get around to it.

Carth: You know, Bastila, you sound just like this Shepard chick that I used to date.

July 15th, 2010, meanwhile, has been an excellent day in many regards. I received another positive annual review from my boss, who even gave me a 5% raise. On the home front, we have another house showing scheduled for tomorrow afternoon, and traction continues to build on our real estate venture since our price-cutting competition went off the market. Hell, even BP managed to get the damn oil spill capped, at least for now. Both Apple and I have been recently casting our eyes toward the future with renewed vigor and hope, and with a little luck and a lot of patience, we’ll get there — and achieve everything we’ve worked for. Despite all of the world’s injustices, hard work does still tend to pay for itself, in at least some ways.

So if you’re bored and looking to celebrate something, dust off your old copy of Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic (or head over to Steam for a new copy on the cheap), sit back and enjoy one of the finest video game gems of the last decade.

Now, if only BioWare would make a KOTOR 3 using the Mass Effect engine. A gamer can dream.