The “TOS Bundle”, as it’s called, would have given my in-game character the ability to walk around the original Enterprise bridge and interior, several classic TOS uniforms to wear, the TOS-style Type II phaser, and a classic shuttlecraft to…do something with, I guess. Maybe crash-land on a planet of big hairy trolls, or fly into the maw of a planet-killer. Even if I never would up getting much further in the game than I did during the beta, it would be cool for a little while.

However, apparently the makers of Star Trek Online are not very interested in taking my money, despite the incredibly big show they make of it. And this, I discovered, was only the first of many reasons why I now feel increasingly compelled to just stay away from this game.

The Star Trek Online store, as it happens, was unable to complete my transaction — despite four attempts over two consecutive days. I’d plug in a credit card and it would report that it was declined. This was despite the fact that immediately thereafter, I’d get an email from the credit card company thanking me for making a $1.00 purchase. (This was Star Trek Online placing an authorization hold on my card, which it did successfully each time I tried to buy the TOS bundle despite continually reporting that my card was declined.)

OK, I said. They offer a PayPal option. I have a little money in my PayPal account, so I’ll just use that. Nope! All the Star Trek Online store would agree to use PayPal for was to facilitate an electronic check, which would take a week to clear. Huh? Isn’t the whole point of PayPal to, you know…pay instantly? With your PayPal balance?

The first time I tried to buy this thing, I noted an announcement on the STO website claiming that the entire account management system was going to be taken offline for maintenance in about six hours. So I thought maybe they’d gotten an early start and decided that I would come back the next day to try my purchase again. Not only did that not help, but I also noticed a brand new announcement claiming that the game, website, forums and everything were all going to be offline for the next half a day. I remember lots and lots of this during the couple of months that I actually played the game around launch two years ago, come to think of it. Makes me wonder if all the pieces of this online enterprise (har har) ever run at 100% for longer than 24 hours.

Then I went to the game’s official forums to see if anyone else had reported problems buying things. One or two people were having the exact same problem, but their posts were from a few weeks ago and no one had answered them. While I was there, however, I became more disturbed by the fact that apparently, just one day before inviting me to try out the free-to-play early access program, the proprietors of Star Trek Online jacked up the prices on everything in the online store to vastly higher amounts than what they had always been. Of course this was done in lieu of the $15/month fee they used to charge everyone just for the ability to play the game — a fee that I understood, but would not in good conscience pay. Which means that the price hike was yet another fee that I could understand, but flatly refuse to capitulate to. Knowing the true cost of the goods that I was now being asked to spend $25 on, I could no longer spend those $25 — even when they had seemed worth it just hours prior.

As one final kick in the balls, the game has one of those infuriating “point systems” for currency where $1 does not equal 1 point (it equals something more like 80 points). Similar to Microsoft’s Xbox Live Marketplace, this forces you to top up your account with some bizarre obfuscated currency before you can purchase products. Somehow on XBLM I don’t mind it so much, but the STO guys set up their currency in batches that are clearly designed just perfectly so that you’ll have to buy a larger bucket of points than you want, especially if you want more than one item. The TOS Bundle I wanted? 1,600 points. Can I buy just that many points? No. I can buy 1,500 or 2,000. Great, so I will buy 2,000 and have enough left over for a spiffy Mirror Universe costume pack, right? No. Costume packs are now 440 points. After my 1,600 point purchase, I will have 400 points left in my bucket. I’d be short 40. And the minimum number of points I can buy is 500. All I need is another 50 cents worth of points, but to get it, I have to spend $6.25.

As Captain Kirk once said, “Well, double dumb-ass on you!”

So what do we have here? We have a game that goes down for maintenance constantly, which has just been sold and handed over to a different company than the one which developed it, with a business model that revolves entirely around an online store that is utterly incapable of completing a transaction. Somehow, the idea of donating even a dollar of my money to a venture of such poor stability makes every Red Alert light in my head go off like the Enterprise being ambushed by a hundred Borg cubes.

Despite the fact that I’ve been rewatching bits and pieces of Star Trek episodes lately and would really enjoy spending some time in a Trek-themed game (combining two of my passions, don’t you know!), I just can’t do it with this game. To keep banging my head against this wall would be to willfully ignore the fact that I hate MMOs, that I especially hate other random idiots whom you must invariably deal with in MMOs, I hate incompetent companies with broken websites and I don’t have even a smidgen of the time needed to really get any kind of meaningful progress in an MMO. I’d say that leaves “cool Star Trek geekdom” as the only factor remaining in STO‘s favor. To satiate that craving, I will settle for back episodes of the show itself.

Shortly after deciding this, I spent about an hour or two playing Skyrim and lapped it up with incredible glee. Although I am not normally a fan of the fantasy genre, this is my kind of game: Beautiful and open environment, lots of character customization, tons of missions and quests, compelling story, and it’s a single-player only affair. No dorkfaced preteens cussing through microphones past their bedtime.

Now that adventure games are making a bit of a comeback, especially on mobile touch-based devices where they are very enjoyable to play and easy to take anywhere, how about a return to the classic point-and-click Star Trek adventure stories like those of Star Trek 25th Anniversary and Judgment Rites from the 1990s? Those are still the unsurpassed pinnacle of Trek games, in my opinion. (And yes, I’m still bitter that Secret of Vulcan Fury got canceled.)

At last, I have reached the point where it is now “couth” for me to get out of here for the day (and the week), so I’m leaving. Catch you on the rebound, clowns!

The Oddball Oddcast returns! Far from the polished and post-produced pseudo radio shows of the past, the new Oddcast is a no-frills audio blog where I simply discuss my thoughts on various topics instead of writing about them. From video games to rants, the Oddcast is Chief Oddball’s easy outlet for spur-of-the-moment rambling when a keyboard isn’t handy.

This episode of the Oddball Oddcast discusses Star Trek Online, soon to relaunch under a free-to-play model, and the nigh-uncontrollable compulsion I feel to play it despite having very little time or appetite for MMOs. Which half of my personality will win out: the dyed-in-the-wool Trekkie, or the busy dad with no patience for online buffoonery?

It occurred to me that having a license plate propped up against the inside of the windshield was a potential serious safety hazard, one that could instantly turn into a tin stiletto should I ever (God forbid) get into an accident. So my friend and I decided to both order proper license plate brackets and solve both our safety and legal issues right then and there.

For his Evo, we ordered the Swift Motorsports hideaway plate holder. It’s a mechanical retracting plate bracket that mounts to the bottom of the car, so you only need to drill into surfaces that aren’t normally visible, keeping any eyesores hidden. Even better, you can stow the plate under the car by flipping it down 90 degrees and pushing it back under the front end. Great for car shows, car washes, or if you really hate the look of the plate, driving out of state.

For my GTO, I wasn’t convinced that there was a good place to mount the hideaway plate. Unlike the Evo, the underside of the GTO’s front end — even with the SAP kit included — has a nice flat lip, but it doesn’t go back very far. It was the aft end of the hideaway bracket that didn’t seem to have a decent mounting spot. But I couldn’t just bite the bullet and go with the factory solution, because the Sport Appearance Package front end is incompatible with the standard GTO front plate bracket — and the special SAP-compatible bracket is long out of manufacture and near impossible to find.

Then I discovered the ultimate solution on the LS1GTO forums. Another member, who had a GTO with the SAP kit almost exactly like mine, had fashioned the perfect solution out of none other than a mid-’90s Ford Explorer front plate bracket, which in his case he had mounted with only double-sided tape! He said that some minor trimming was required but didn’t elaborate, and the one picture he posted of his car with the bracket attached wasn’t close up enough to afford me any detail. But it looked perfect, and the fact that it could theoretically be done without drilling any holes for screws was mighty tempting. So I went searching, found the Explorer bracket on eBay, and crossed my fingers that the install would go smoothly.

Below, I’ll show you how I did it.

To begin with, I ordered Ford OEM part number F5TZ-17A385-D, front license plate bracket for 1995-1998 Ford Explorers. It was $18 shipped from a seller on eBay, new in the original bag.

Ford Explorer front license plate bracket

When I got it, I noticed that the bracket was equipped with two posts that looked like they’d slot in between the SAP grille slats on the front of my GTO — and they did, almost perfectly. But they were a little too tall, so I used a box cutter (real precise, I know) to shave down the top of each post about a quarter of an inch. (I wasn’t measuring or anything, but that’s approximately what it was.) This left a couple of millimeters of space for my mounting option of choice: industrial-strength Velcro pads.

In the photo below, you can see where I trimmed the bracket down, where I installed the self-adhesive Velcro loops, and where I also added a rubber pad to prevent the plastic bracket from rubbing on the lower lip of the SAP fascia.

Plate bracket backside with notations

It takes two parts for Velcro to work, naturally, so I mounted the other half of the Velcro pads to the top of the first horizontal slat in the SAP grille, where you can’t even see them unless you kneel down (or are at least a few yards away from the car). I chose to mount the Velcro hooks, not the loops, to the car, because they’re the “hard plastic” feeling part of the Velcro and less likely to degrade from weather damage if the bracket is left off for any length of time.

Oh yeah, and please excuse the horrible dirtiness of the car at the moment these photos were taken. It’s been hard to find either the time or energy to wash it, when you’ve got a two month old baby and it’s 46 degrees outside…

Velcro pads installed on the topmost grille opening

Finally, to mount the plate bracket, all I had to do was push it onto the grille. It locked onto the Velcro, sank about an inch deep into the grille and ended up sitting at a near perfect 90 degree angle. The bottom of the bracket normally makes no contact with the SAP grille, but probably does when at speed — so the rubber pad I added will prevent any damage there. Even without the Velcro, the bracket’s posts are a tight enough fit that it wouldn’t be likely to fall off.

Best of all, it required no drilling or permanent alteration of the car.

Plate and bracket installed, side view

Plate and bracket installed, front view

Now I’ve got a plate mount that isn’t likely to cut my throat in an accident, doesn’t hang down too low or look awkward, didn’t require drilling, and which can be removed and reinstalled simply by pulling it off and pushing it back on. Hard to beat that.

I also considered (and may still be considering) adding an “emergency tether” in the form of a pair of black zip-ties, just in case the current mounting fails somehow…but I really like the easy removal that this setup makes possible, so I’ll probably push my luck on that one.

If anyone else out there has a 2004-06 GTO with the GM Sport Appearance Package and needs an aftermarket solution for a front license plate, then based on my experience so far, this is a great way to go.

Kudos to user “time2shine” of the LS1GTO.com forums for the original idea!

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!

Brought To You By Wine.com, Purveyors of Fine Wine and Champagne

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.

Ever since the iPad came out, self-appointed Internet know-it-alls have scoffed at the idea that anyone would ever want an E Ink screen ever again. Well, I’m here to tell you that E Ink isn’t going anywhere soon, not as long as legibility gains of this magnitude can be realized over a backlit screen. Not only is it just like reading a printed page — the screen even has a warm, faintly yellowish tint like paper stock — but the 6-inch size of the Sony Reader makes it possible to actually read without holding the damn thing in your hand. Prop it up in front of you while you eat a meal, for example, and turn the pages with the lightest flick of your finger on the touchscreen’s surface.

Speaking of turning pages, the Sony Reader also has convenient hardware buttons dedicated to performing this action. Unlike some of its competition (the Barnes & Noble Nook SimpleTouch, for example), Sony’s Reader places the buttons right next to each other below at the bottom left corner of the screen. At first I thought this wasn’t as good as the Nook, whose page buttons are to the left and right sides of the screen. But then I realized that in for easy access to those side buttons, you’d have to hold the Nook with both hands. If you hold the Sony in your left hand, your thumb can access both the next and previous page buttons with ease. This is even more convenient than the 3.5″ iPhone, which requires your thumb to stretch to turn pages in at least one direction if you are holding the device with one hand.

Overall, the Sony Reader provides a simple and fairly convenient user interface that mostly stays out of your way. It offers a selection of fonts and contrast options, has robust cropping options that let you minimize the margins around the page (which I would never use, because negative space is essential), and several built-in dictionaries that include not just English but also several European languages. Sadly there are no paragraph justification options, which I believe means that you’re left up to the whims of the e-book publisher who assembled your EPUB file. (I always prefer a ragged right margin, as opposed to the full justification that I often see on e-readers.)

Getting books onto the Sony Reader is a treat for a guy like me, who just wants his applications to give him direct access to the filesystem and then get the hell out of his way (by the way, iTunes: screw you and your whole management model). If you’ve got a bunch of EPUBs you want to read, know what you can do? Connect the Sony Reader to your computer with the included USB cable, activate Data Transfer Mode with a tap of the screen, then drag and drop your EPUB files to the drive that appears under My Computer. Annnnnd…done.

You can go further if you like, by creating a folder/subfolder structure on the eReader to keep things organized. The Reader won’t actually categorize or collect your books by virtue of your doing this, but it keeps the filesystem cleaner and makes it easier to manage your books later.

If the filesystem isn’t your thing, you can use the included Sony Reader Library software (kinda like iTunes, and with an equally bloated feel) to manage your books, buy new ones from the Reader Store and transfer them to your device. If that’s not your thing either, the free and open-source Calibre e-book software can also interface with the Sony Reader, transfer books to it and manage your library.

The PRS-T1 version of Sony’s Reader is a recent release that also includes some new features, which its built in Wi-Fi b/g/n makes possible. You can buy and download books and periodicals directly from Sony’s store, download public domain books from Google Books, and even browse and check out books from your local library using the Overdrive system. I haven’t explored this yet, but intend to soon. Also, there’s an actual web browser, and it actually works pretty well with some very smooth scrolling action considering the E Ink technology behind the screen.

Sony claims that you can get up to a month of battery life from the PRS-T1 model Reader, assuming you read half an hour a day (which admittedly is not very much). Even if the true battery life expectancy is half of that, I’ll be more than satisfied — it beats a phone or a tablet that goes dark on you halfway through a transcontinental flight. The Wi-Fi radio also shuts itself off when not in use, and if you don’t touch the Reader for a while, it goes into sleep mode. What’s cute about sleep mode is that the screen fills with the cover art of the book you were reading, making it look like it’s masquerading as an actual book sitting on your desk!

And there’s also that handwriting mode I mentioned earlier — where you can take handwritten notes, draw maps, sketch or doodle using the included stylus. This, unfortunately, is one area where the PRS-T1 is a downgrade from some of Sony’s earlier e-readers: the stylus is incredibly cheap-feeling and there is no longer a slot on the reader itself where the stylus can be stored. If you want a place to keep the stylus, you’ll have to buy a case for your Reader so you can clip it to the cover.

And while Sony has reduced the quality of materials in order to reduce the Reader’s price — the casing is plastic where it was once aluminum — the upside to this is that the device is now incredibly lightweight. In fact it’s even lighter than my iPhone despite being twice the size. This makes it easy to pick up on a whim, toss in a backpack or a pocket and hold with one hand for hours.

The materials aren’t the only place where some quality corner-cutting was done, as there have been a lot of reports of firmware instability, device freak-outs and general weirdness with the initial batch of PRS-T1s. Even the demo unit I played with at Best Buy locked up after a few minutes and refused to take further input from the touchscreen. Sony has only just released an updated firmware that purports to address at least some of these problems, so the first thing I did was install it. So far, my experience has been bug-free.

Overall, though, it looks like the Sony Reader will be my preferred device for e-book reading for now and the foreseeable future. Tonight I’m going to bust out the 8 GB MicroSD card I just ordered and dump my entire library onto it.

Now I just need more time to read…

Addendum 12/21/2011

Make sure to read my postscript about the Sony Reader’s free PC e-book management software and why you should never, ever install it (if you prefer to manage your library via drag-and-drop).

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.

Technologically, The Legacy is definitely showing its age, and this is where it appears roughest around its nearly 20-year-old edges. In a world of high resolution gaming and standardized “WASD” keyboard-and-mouse controls for first-person games, this is quite a departure: the 360×240 resolution will make you wonder how we ever crammed so much detail into so few pixels, and the unusual window-based, point-and-click interface feels clumsy and maddeningly slow, especially when you’re in combat with perilously little health and ammunition left.

A lurker patrols the halls of the second floor

Worst of all is the sound engine, which sucked even in 1993 with its terrible-quality samples, miserable hiss and constant dropouts. Frustratingly, DOSBox also cuts off every digitized sound effect early, somehow managing to make the game sound worse now than it did twenty years ago. (The game’s background music is a very notable exception to my ire, and one that I will discuss in more detail later.)

But if you brave these technical challenges, you are rewarded with a game that’s so rich in atmosphere, you’ll quickly come to forget about most of the problems. Legacy hails from the days before video games took on a Michael Bay-style race to assemble the prettiest, loudest, most violent — and yet most vacuous — spectacle possible. This should not surprise you, as Magnetic Scrolls was a well-known text adventure game developer in the 1980s, thought of by some as the “British Infocom“. Back then, games like this were referred to as interactive fiction, for that’s precisely what they were — what else could you do before complex computer graphics were even feasible, let alone beautiful?

The story is definitely the star of the show here, featuring collectible lore spread throughout the game in the form of journal entries, dropped notes, archived documents, even maps and sheets of music. You’ll put together many of these clues to help guide you toward your next task, or your eventual goal, which you invariably need certain items to complete. Gamers who are used to today’s adventures, which might have you flip a switch here or pick up a key there, may be surprised by the nested chains of events they’ll have to follow in order to do something seemingly pedestrian. Simply turning on the power on the ground floor — one of the first tasks you’ll have in the game — requires you to collect electrical tools with which to repair the circuit breaker, either find a key or put skill points into your “Force Door” stat, and face down numerous zombies and monsters along the way. Rather than seem tedious, I found that this added a measure of realism to the game.

Gameplay is about 75% adventuring — collecting clues, finding items, completing tasks — and 25% combat, where you’ll do battle with the likes of zombies, ghosts, rock demons, alien lifeforms from other planes of existence and others far more insidious. Among my favorite enemies are the Servitors (or “fishmen”), the squid-headed creatures clearly inspired by Lovecraft’s Cthulhu mythos, and Ellen Prentiss, the mental patient confined to Winthrop House’s private asylum who has killed her entire family. What’s great about Ellen is that, by the time you meet her, you’ve already read a lot about her from the documents and journals that both she and her brother Robert left throughout the house over the last thirty years. Realizing that you’ve just come face-to-face with the psycho you read about in those pages delivers a real feeling of dread.

Because The Legacy is an RPG at its core, you’ll also spend some time maintaining your player character (if you intend to survive, that is). The game makes this a challenge, being fairly stingy with experience points, and by presenting you with a large swath of skills and spells into which to put them. You’ll also need to make sure your character eats and sleeps from time to time, or s/he may go mad or starve to death. Speaking of spells, there’s a large number of magical cantrips available to heal you, empower you, and even unlock doors, all of which must first be found and learned before they can be cast. (They have great names too, my favorite of which is the Obsidian Shards of Annihilation.) And because this game isn’t for pussies, you’ll only be able to cast your spells when the spellbook is in your hand — not just in your inventory — and watch out, because you may often fail to successfully cast a spell, resulting in outright waste of your precious and hard-to-replenish magical energy. Exhausted yet?

We interrupt this program for an execution, brought to you by Ellen Prentiss

The gameplay mechanics — specifically the interface to them — are much less impressive than the powerful array of skills, spells and stats laid out for you. The UI, as I previously touched on, is a strange window-based monstrosity, probably designed to capitalize on the popularity of Windows 3.1 which had just been launched the previous year. So yes, you can reposition your inventory view, your movement controls, your message window, even the viewport through which you see the world around you. But in practice you won’t, because at 360×240 there is just far too little screen real estate (or pixel density) to do anything of the kind. It’s a bizarre little quirk.

The interface is point-and-click, and in similar fashion you move throughout the game world you move by clicking on arrow buttons. Movement is based on “squares”, which has you stepping from one square of the map to another, and rotating in 90 degree turns. In addition to forward / back / turn left / turn right buttons, there are also strafe buttons. This is terrible when in combat as you might expect. Hilariously, it wasn’t until my recent reinstall of the game that I discovered that the WASD keys actually work too, which makes the game incredibly easier to play. This must have been a late addition to the game, because it’s not in the manual (but it is in the README file in your game directory, if you bother to read it. Only took me eighteen years to notice.)

Even with WASD available to save you, the combat system deserves mention for being truly cumbersome. Your character has two hands, naturally, and next to each hand are two buttons: “AIM” and “HIT”. When you come up against a foe, you click “AIM” to put yourself in aiming mode, then position the cursor over the enemy on the screen and, presumably, choose where you want to hit it. Then you click “HIT” to strike. What’s clunky is that while you’re doing all this, the enemy is attacking you, because The Legacy is a real-time combat game, not turn-based. Furthermore, I never really noticed that the “AIM” function made any difference whatsoever on the amount of damage dealt to a foe. You might aim for the head thinking that it’s going to put them down quicker, but it never seems to.

Furthermore, many of your enemies are of the vaguely blob-shaped alien variety, so how does it matter where you hit them? Lastly, the game’s AI and hit detection is truly horrendous, with enemies getting behind you or beside you just far enough that you can’t hit them and you can’t position yourself to correct this. To be fair, this may be deliberate — designed to encourage you to flee in terror rather than go all B.J. Blazkowicz on that zombie, demon or firespawn.

As you explore the secret passages, tunnels and locked floors of Winthrop Estate, the suspenseful soundtrack to your exploits is provided by minimalist, yet very effective music delivered via FM synthesis (what we used to call OPL2 or “Adlib” music, before MPU-401 MIDI really took off). The soundtrack, composed by John Broomhall, remains among my favorite PC game soundtracks to this day, and routinely gets airtime on my MP3 players or while I’m working. (I prepared an unofficial soundtrack album by recording each level’s music track in DOSBox and then cleaning up the results.) It’s equal parts spooky, tense, depressing and beautiful — particularly the game’s title theme, which shall never leave my head again.

The Legacy Title Theme

Even the game’s user manual deserves mention, and very clearly hails from a different era (one where manuals were not only necessitated by complexity, but were also points of pride). At just under 70 pages, the book not only goes into exhaustive detail about the game and how to play it, but also boasts a Winthrop family tree, floor plan and elevation drawings of the mansion, but also my favorite part: a lengthy journal purportedly attributable to Edgar Allan Poe, which describes the author’s visit to a friend’s estate during a journey through New England and the horrifying experience he had there. The friend was none other than one of the Winthrop elders and “the house” none other than the one you spend the game exploring. The way this was all dressed up as a manuscript by Poe — and convincingly so — makes the user guide as much of a delight as the game itself. Surely, a product of days now long since past.

Back in those days when I first played The Legacy, the only way I could get through it was by liberal use of a “trainer” (essentially, a cheat program) and the official hint manual, released on CompuServe by MicroProse QA’s Dave Ellis in 1994. Today, I need only my WASD keys, some cunning, and my memories of the past to guide me. It’s an experience well worth reliving, not only for the nostalgia factor, but for the legitimately fun time that The Legacy provides.

It was Magnetic Scrolls’ last game, and a fitting sendoff at that.

Screenshot Gallery

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.

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.

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.

The Technological

This is the one that I think others might be interested in. Here at home, we have a TiVo HD DVR that we use to record HD programming that we pick up from a Channel Master 4228HD over-the-air TV antenna. While this works a treat, the problem is that I don’t have a second TiVo HD in the game room upstairs and thus can’t watch my favorite shows like Fringe on my new plasma TV up there. However, I do have a perfectly competent PS3 Media Server running on my computer, and the plasma TV has a built-in DLNA client that can stream programs from my server with ease. Surely there’s a solution here somewhere.

TiVo records shows to MPEG-2 files that are encrypted using your TiVo Media Access Key (MAK). It’s a simple matter to decrypt these things, but that’s as far as I could ever get. Simply dropping the decrypted .mpg file into my PS3 Media Server folder doesn’t work; client players can never reliably play back the file. Either I’ll get picture with no audio, or sometimes nothing at all. Sometimes the video would play back on a computer, but I’d often have problems with the audio and video getting out of sync, especially if I fast-forward or rewind. I’ve tried free tool after free tool to convert these stupid things and I’d always get these same problems. I did manage to figure out that something about TiVo’s .mpg files isn’t exactly “industry standard”, in the sense that there is some incorrect, missing or misplaced information in them that causes video tools to choke or work improperly.

Well, recently I discovered a handy-dandly little Java program called kmttg. This program purports to be an all-in-one solution for copying, decoding, re-encoding and transferring TiVo files. Sounds great, I thought. kmttg is one of those great apps that amalgamizes several other tools and utilities to reach an end goal in an automated fashion, and best of all, it downloads and installs almost all of those tools for you without any manual intervention. So I set it up and unleashed it upon the first episode of Fringe’s fourth season, told it to convert to a nice .mp4 file with AAC audio, and hoped that this time I would get lucky.

I almost did. But those same dastardly problems with audio and A/V sync drift were cropping up again. The audio channels weren’t getting mapped properly — one of the surround channels ended up on the front left channel somehow — and the longer the video went on, the more out-of-sync it became. Furthermore, kmttg’s built-in commercial detection and removal features weren’t working either. If I tried to use them, I’d see a whole slew of error messages and wind up with a video that was maybe 5 or 6 minutes long. Unacceptable!

I started poking around Google and discovered a partial answer. There’s a video editing application for Windows called VideoReDo which, besides being a pretty competent scene editor, commercial remover and file converter, also happens to have a simple little tool built-in called “QuickStream Fix”. Running the QuickStream Fix on the decrypted TiVo .mpg file was what I needed to prevent the commercial detection and removal from failing. It also allowed the entire TiVo file to convert to an .mp4 in its entirety, no minutes lost. However, I was still getting issues with improper audio channels and A/V sync drift. Maddening!

To fix this, I decided to try using kmttg’s Handbrake encoding mode instead of ffmpeg encoding. You can do this within the kmttg GUI by simply opening the “Encoding Profile” dropdown and choosing any option that begins with “hb_” instead of “ff_”. Going even further than that, I discovered a pair of purpose-built Handbrake profiles for kmttg on the TiVo Community Forums, posted by a user named Shelleye. The profiles were written specifically with a 720p Roku box in mind, but the settings had been tweaked and tested for both HDTV and DVD sources and also downrezzed the video to 940 pixels in width, a sort of pseudo-HD that sounded like it would probably be a good quality/file size compromise. I decided to download them and give them a try.

So I loaded up the hb_roku_960_Detelecine profile into kmttg and turned it loose on the Fringe episode “Alone in the World”, and a while later (hey, I only have an Intel E6600 CPU here) I had myself a perfect .m4v file with flawless video and audio that streamed beautifully to my plasma TV upstairs. FINALLY! I guess the key here, for me, was using the Handbrake encoder instead of the ffmpeg encoder.

Fringe streaming to my Samsung D6500 plasma TV upstairs (forgive the wires)

I’m now transferring the other Fringe episodes from my TiVo so that I can convert them as well. At long last, I’ll be able to catch up with this show on any TV (or computer) that I want. One of my personal favorite times to catch up on TV is at work, during my lunch hour. Everyone else in the office goes out to lunch every day, so I typically have the place to myself for an hour since I bring in my own lunch most days. Lately I’ve been watching the Lance Henriksen drama Millennium from Chris Carter, but if I can get my Fringe episodes sorted, I’ll switch over. I watched almost all of the first three Fringe seasons at the office during the summer, so it’ll be like old times.

This has been a long time coming, and now that I’ve got the proof-of-concept done, I’m thinking about converting all of the other crap I’ve got stashed on the TiVo so I have a better chance of actually getting through it. For pity’s sake, I’ve still got 16 episodes of the late, great Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles that I never watched, plus The Walking Dead and who knows what else. Despite all of this, the TiVo’s still got about 150 GB free. In hindsight, installing that 1 TB drive was a seriously good idea.

The Mechanical

Last week I mentioned how I discovered that one of my GTO’s reverse lamp globes had broken off of its mount. The globe was a captive assembly within the passenger side taillamp and was not accessible for proper repair, at least not without major taillamp surgery that I was unprepared and unwilling to undertake. However, there was just enough room to get a finger into the vacant light bulb socket and re-seat the globe. The problem was that the globe’s single mounting clip was broken. So I figured I’d try some Gorilla Glue in hopes of getting it to stay put, clip not withstanding.

Now that I know how to pop a taillight off of the GTO, removing it took all of about five seconds. I brought it into the house and applied Gorilla Super Glue to the rim of the globe, then turned the taillight assembly upside-down and pulled down hard on the globe to try and bond it to the socket. After about two minutes of this, I poured a little more glue directly into the broken clip in hopes of filling up the gap between it and its mounting screw.

Admittedly the Gorilla Super Glue isn’t waterproof and is not intended for outdoor applications, but given that no water should ever get into the taillamp anyway (if it does, you’ve got larger problems) and the regular Gorilla Glue didn’t have a precise enough tip for this kind of detail work, I thought I’d give the Super Glue a try. The thing I liked about the Gorilla Super Glue is that it contains rubber particles that supposedly provide some built-in shock absorption, which is exactly what I’m going to need in this application. Suffice it to say, I’ve got my fingers crossed on this.

So I’ve got the taillamp assembly sitting on my office desk now, where I’ve set up a makeshift prop system so that gravity can assist in keeping the globe rooted in place. The Super Glue stuff is supposed to be fully bonded in a matter of minutes, but I’m going to leave it overnight — although I did check it a little while ago and found that it feels pretty solid. I have a few errands to run tomorrow, so I’ll pop the taillight back in before I leave and take the GTO to see how it holds up. The worst that can happen is that the glue will fail, in which case I suppose I’ll try the regular Gorilla Glue — the waterproof, heavy-duty stuff.

And if that fails, I’ll have to suck it up and buy a new taillight. Sometime. (Like as soon as $260 lands in my lap.)

As you might have guessed, this is the success of the day that isn’t yet fully proven out. Frankly, I half expected not to have enough surface area to bond to, so in my estimation I’ve already come out ahead. I’ll report back after the road test.

Edit: Apparently all those hours I once spent watching Forensic Files were for naught, because I forgot that superglue fumes will solidify and adhere to surfaces. Forensic scientists sometimes use this technique to reveal fingerprints on irregular surfaces. Well, by propping my taillight up on a towel and thereby cutting off most of the airflow in and out of that globe, much of the inner chrome surface of the lens has fogged over from the fumes. It’s not a total disaster — and it would wipe off with a finger, if I could actually get a finger in there — but I wish I’d remembered this a few hours ago.

Ah well — the outer lens itself is still perfectly clear, and the slightly-fogged chrome almost has a kind of pewter appearance!

Edit 2 (11/13/2011): Just got back from a few hours of errand-running and the GTO’s newly-repaired reverse light is holding up perfectly so far. Plus, the fogged chrome is barely noticeable from the outside. Looks like this fix was a win.