Sony quoting Henry V? wtf?

Sony just took something really cool and bastardized it. The current PS3 ad (featuring Gran Turismo 5 Prologue, MGS4, and Little Big Planet, and placed above via YouTube) has a voiceover of the famous speech from Shakespeare's Henry V in the background.

I...I don't quite know what to make of it. It's an awesome speech - I loved it when I was in a performance of that play in high school - and I don't quite know whether to appreciate the reference, or feel ashamed that Sony's taken something I know well and bastardized it.

More tomorrow on the Pile of Shame. There's some headway, but not a lot, sadly.

The Finals are here

The Finals are here.


The Celtics have had NBA Finals expectations on their shoulders all year, and are now a game away from the title.

The NBA got its wish - not just the two best teams in the regular season, the No. 1 seeds in the Eastern and Western Conferences meeting in the finals, but the league's two most storied franchises - the Los Angeles Lakers and Boston Celtics - meeting for the first time since 1987. Not since Bird, McHale and Parrish faced Magic, Worthy and the rest of the Showtime Lakers in the Boston Garden and the Forum in L.A. have these two met, and you always knew if they met up this season it would be wash of white-noise and hype leading to the games.

Two things are keeping this series from being great right now: One, the Lakers self-detonating when it counts the most (aside from their Game Three win back home in L.A., which they even almost choked away in the fourth quarter) and two, disgraced former referee Tim Donaghy has raised his ugly head and the NBA is now fighting a PR nightmare.

It's almost only fitting that as the NBA gets its dream finals, accusations are coming in that there might be somebody behind the scenes pulling strings. Donaghy has apparently accused the NBA of influencing the referees, who in turn are supposed to influence the outcomes of playoff series - to try and improve ratings, it would seem. The crux of some of this is around the Kings-Lakers Western Conference Finals in 2002, in which the Lakers won game six to take it to a seventh game, which they won en route to the title.

NBA fans have been cynical about referees in the past, and many have conspiracy theories regarding the NBA front office that should earn them honorary tinfoil hats. Frozen envelopes, make-up calls after non-calls in games, doctored playoff series, refs in on it...all of it sounds too familiar, and where there's smoke there's eventually fire.

I just hope this doesn't completely cripple the league. That would be a shame.

-------


The world's best player, Man United's Cristiano Ronaldo, tries to lead his Portuguese national side to glory

The Finals are here. After a year and a half of qualifying matches, the European Championships - aka Euro 2008 - are upon us. A week gone, three teams have qualified after winning their first two matches, the first few uninspiring matches have given way to some scintillating soccer, and pre-tournament conceptions on the favorites have already been changed.

The Dutch are flying high and Portugal is strong, whereas the Germans have slipped up and Italy - current defending world champions - are in danger of going out at the first hurdle.

I've been watching the matches every morning, and I'm actually enjoying ESPN's coverage - shocking, I know. They're putting a real effort into improving their coverage, going as far as to hire Scottish commentator Andy Gray onto their team, as well as showing three games a day (one is repeated) and doing a studio show every night. They didn't even put this much effort into their World Cup coverage two years ago.

So far, for me, the Dutch have been the story of the tournament. With no in-camp squabbles, it looks like the Oranje are finally united. Their defense isn't outstanding, but with one of the best keepers in the world - Edwin van der Sar - marshaling the back line, they're organized, and they're incredibly dangerous on the break. They've scored 7 goals in two games - against the World Cup winners (3-0 over Italy) and runners up (4-1 over France).

Watching both these finals is an exercise in drama. I wish the NBA Finals didn't have two days between games, and I wish the Germans can get through their group to the knockout rounds of the Euros. I wish I was there, too - maybe I could pretend I'm Dutch for a few days.

Of frustration and fake plastic instruments

Sometimes you just have to accept your failures and move on with life.

For as much as I've played, become good at, had fun with and all-around enjoyed the "Instrument Protagonist" genre of video games - Guitar Hero 1 and 2 and Rock Band - I've never actually finished one of them on Expert. And, despite having just one song left right now in Rock Band on expert guitar, I'm no closer than I have been before.

Let's see. In Guitar Hero 1, I couldn't get past "Cowboys from Hell" or "Bark at the Moon." Guitar Hero 2, hit the brick wall at "Psychobilly Freakout" and just got stuck. And in Rock Band? The 9-minute-plus Southern rock epic "Green Grass and High Tides Forever."

Dammit.

I threw myself, fitfully, against "Bark at the Moon" for at least two hours before giving up - in one stint, mind you, I've tried it other times as well of course - and I'm doing much the same with GGaHT. The painfully frustrating thing with BatM was that I got to as far as 97% or 98% before failing. Nothing but frustration there.

I'm stuck at 72% or so on GGaHT, which is acknowledged as a sticking point in the song. There's another one at 84% and one in the 90s, I believe. Great. I have that to look forward to.

That's why it's on the Pile of Shame. I'm still working on upping my drumming skill, too - I just bought rubber silencing pads for my drums today, they work great. I'm working on high-level hard songs and starting up expert, but it's the expert guitar play-through that has me frustrated as hell.

At least Rock Band is insanely fun. At least it isn't unfairly frustrating, or the victim of bad game design - that's not the problem. I must stare into the abyss and see if it blinks back.

Sights through sounds

Death Cab For Cutie, The Roots, Atmosphere, Blue Scholars, the Rolling Stones, Nine Inch Nails, Daft Punk, Justice...what do all these bands have in common? New additions to my library recently. My taste in music is nothing if not eclectic, though it usually falls squarely along an indie rock/hip-hop binary, with a skew toward my native Pacific Northwest. I like to think that what all this stuff has in common is being good music; trying to understand any more behind it would be stupid.

Death Cab's new disc is rather good. I certainly like it, at least, making it a worthwhile purchase. My reaction, after listening through it five or six times, is that it starts out really well (so long as you're not overly creeped out by "I will possess your heart," the lead single off the disc that weighs in with a four-minute plus intro on the album), hits a real high note with "Cath..", falls off a bit, but recovers by the end of the disc. For some reason I like "Grapevine Fires." On the way to the Death Cab/Decemberists show in Bend last weekend, Nick thought it was an interesting song about wildfires (it sounds so happy, contrasting with the content), but that just immediately made me think of Bad Religion's "Los Angeles is Burning," a good song about SoCal in flames. It'd be good in Rock Band.

I don't think you could get more diametrically opposed to Death Cab as you could with The Roots. Their new disc is really good, and brings an immediate, brutal sound, but I think I'll get used to it. I'd forgotten how in-your-face Game Theory was until listening to it again with my dad on a road trip a few weeks ago; the first few listens to Rising Down are just like that. Then again, I would love it, because I'm a backpacking fanboy in the biggest way.

I'm swinging back into hip-hop, though. Right now Blue Scholars' new album is halfway through its first play, and I really, really like it; good soulful loops, much, MUCH improved rhyming by Geologic. I loved their disc from a couple years ago (fanboy moment: got my copy at Sasquatch two years ago, and they signed it for me, eep!) and this is spectacular on first listen. I have to love hip-hop like this from the Northwest, it's just a shame Seattle has a much bigger scene than Portland.

Atmosphere and the Rhymesayers artists are also in the queue to listen to more. I've listened to "Simply Leakage" far too much recently; time to find the proper albums. I'm working on that right now, actually.

Trent Reznor deserves some fucking love right now, but I'll save that for another post at another time. Needless to say, I need to listen to The Slip more because it's a free album from Trent that isn't five years after his previous recording. All of those things together are astounding to NIN fans like me, that much is certain.

Gaming thoughts tomorrow, and as a prelude, I think I'm going to work on that post while grinding through an RPG. I'm thinking of playing two right now that are on my Pile or should-play-again pile, but I'm just trying to decide which it should be...

A brilliant way to have your plans jump straight off the tracks

I started out the Pile of Shame project with such good intentions. I wanted to play through games I already had, make good with my back-log, enjoy some good karma, discover some gems I haven't spent nearly enough time on...

Then something happened: I bought Grand Theft Auto IV.

Game, as we say, over.



I haven't finished Grand Theft Auto IV yet, but I've put more than 50 hours into this absolutely amazing game. As much as I hate to let a game off the hook so easily, I think it would be asinine to break apart GTA IV or complain about it's faults; sure, it has horrible pop-in in places, but few games allow you to drive for so far in such different areas without loading. The shooting is tricky, but with some learning and some p-a-t-i-e-n-c-e you can avoid death. Some of the minigames, including the dating and friendships, are kind of shallow, but what game has even ever tried this before?

Let's not forget the story, the scripting, the writing and acting. The story included in this game could easily be made into a couple season's worth of 30-minute TV dramas; the story arcs are incredibly well thought-out. The writing is amazing, the characters are all believable - okay, one flamboyantly gay character might be a bit over-the-top, but everyone else is very real. The player's anti-hero Niko Bellic is no saint, but he's trying; Niko's cousin Roman is a good man with bad gambling issues; other characters later in the game have such human writing that even picking them up to hang out is as enjoyable as the minigame of billiards or the quick comedy show.


Fuck. Yes.

I don't think you can blame me for losing track of the Pile of Shame given GTA IV. It's been quite the bombshell over the whole industry, taking over free time from everyone in sight (at least, everyone bar the Wii Fit demographic...).

That said, the Pile grows – just like a Katamari, it keeps rolling on and gaining steam. The two newest additions are courtesy of Nick: Burnout Paradise for the 360 and Psychonauts for the original Xbox (backwards compatible on the 360, luckily, unlike Beyond Good and Evil...) Burnout is just going to be played for fun, but I need to get through Psychonauts in order to keep hold of my Hardcore Gamer card, in all honesty.

On a small sports note: the Blazers are up to something tonight, apparently. I'm guessing it's the official announcement that Rudy Fernandez will join the team, but it could also be a trade or something just completely left-field and inconsequential. Also, I can't help but feel a touch smug about the Oregon State Beavers baseball team not making the NCAA Tournament this year. They're the first winner to not get invited back since 1991 - so there's a precedent! - plus they dropped the games they shouldn't have. Oregon's gotten screwed in years past (snubbed by the BCS and for the National Championship game in a couple of different one-loss seasons, the women's soccer team not getting an NCAA Tournament invite in 2006 after finishing second in the conference) so the Beavers getting screwed just seems so sweet.

The schadenfreude runs deep and smooth, yes it does.

the hard drive blues

iTunes can be a weird program.

Those little exclamation marks means it can't find the file. This is because of one of two things: 1. it tried to play the file earlier this morning/last night while I was asleep and my old external hard drive, though it was plugged in AND turned on, somehow ejected itself; or 2. it was sweeping to see if it could read files while I was listening to the new Death Cab album (which is a purchase that went straight to my MacBook's *internal* hard drive and music folder) without my hard drive plugged in.

Hrm. All I really know what this means is, besides figuring out how to mass-re-import music into iTunes without clicking every single file in my library (10,000+, fyi), I'm going to be watching the Fry's ads a little closer this week. Time to invest in a new hard drive, I think.

Later that night.... What did I learn today?

-iTunes is a finicky program that loads its library on start-up, so that means if you've got the majority of your library disconnected...it won't find them. D'oh.

-MacBook superdrives that burn DVDs don't like DVD+Rs very much. At least that spindle was only $8 wasted.

Pile of Shame: Metal Gear Solid 3

First, to get it out of the way: "Snake? SNAKE! SNAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAKE!!!!" It's obligatory and would be impolite to not say, honestly.

I guess that's the power of Metal Gear Solid. It's truly a gaming enthusiast's series made with the cinematic enthusiasm of a Tarrantino, somebody who really wants to make art for art's sake. Ok, that last sentence might have been about as pretentious as the average MGS game, but where else does that happen regularly in gaming? Nintendo has its child-like innocence, and a other gaming series have their own trademarks, but nobody else does art like Hideo Kojima.

That said, I would call Metal Gear Solid 3 the best in the series. The first PlayStation MGS is groundbreaking, both in storytelling and in terms of its gameplay; the sneaking, the gadgets, the cardboard boxes were all unthought of before the game dropped. As well, the game's storytelling - the twists, the tricks (see the Psycho Mantis boss battle), the psychological drama - is unheard of compared to other games. Metal Gear Solid 2 was bizarre, with even more (and weirder) twists and turns in the story; MGS3 was a much-needed simplification.

Plus, MGS3 brought in some meaningful gameplay changes. Sure, the food and healing mechanics were kinda gimmicky, but certainly more interactive than just picking up a white box with a red cross on it and magically gaining health back. More importantly, though, the Subsistence version of the game implemented a much-needed overhead 3D camera, a necessity brought up by games like the Tom Clancy's Splinter Cell series. Also, the boss fights - specifically the dramatic sniper hide-and-go-seek with The End and the emotional finish against The Boss - were amazing. The story even made sense!

I was stuck at The Boss - my save was from last summer. It took five freaking tries to finally get her down and escape into the land of cut scenes to end the game. Well worth the time to finish off this amazing action game.

Especially as Grand Theft Auto IV is dropping tomorrow and could take my life away shortly...

the Pile of Shame: an introduction

So I play video games - a lot. Unfortunately, a lot of the time I pour time into one game, all the while buying more and shuffling them to the back (for me, the 800-pound gorilla that always seems to take over is Winning Eleven, but that's another post for another time).

This is a problem.

Anybody who has listened to the 1up Yours podcast should be familiar with a specific term: the Pile of Shame. If 1up's Garnett Lee and company didn't coin the term, they certainly have brought it to the fore.

What's the Pile of Shame? All those good games you've bought but haven't finished.

I plan to rid myself of some serious shame here soon, and that's where this site comes into play.

I plan on writing about my experience of sifting and plowing through my Pile of Shame. I want to discuss why and how they're worth finishing, and talk about the process of playing through them. In some cases, it's going to be pertinent to discuss how they've aged - I do have a couple games on the Pile that are a bit older, so seeing them through a different lens is going to be interesting.

On to the pile itself.



From top to bottom, left to right: Rock Band, Forza Motorsport 2, Metal Gear Solid 3, Shadow of the Colossus, Beyond Good and Evil, Sonic Mega Collection, Ninja Gaiden Black, Panzer Dragoon Orta, Final Fantasy VII, The Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past, Pokemon Diamond. These are all games I currently have that I haven't completed from one degree to another, whether that's stuck on a final boss or stuck just a few hours in. Fuller posts on each game will come later, but here's a quick breakdown on each game and where I am in them:

Rock Band: I want to finish Hard Drums and Expert Guitar soon; both are almost done, with only the infamous "Green Grass and High Tides" standing in the way on guitar. Should be done soon.

Forza 2: I've got PLENTY of single-player gaming left for this one as I'm only at Level 33 in my career. Long term project.

MGS3: I'm stuck on The Boss. I plan on tackling this tonight and writing either later tonight or tomorrow.

Shadow of the Colossus: Four colossi in to this brilliant game, I need to dedicate an afternoon and slug through it. Long or short depending on how long I want to play it for at a go.

Beyond Good and Evil: This critical darling is at least 1/3 done, but I need to dedicate ~8-10 hours to finish. Need to pull the ol' Xbox out for it too, dammit. Medium term.

Sonic Mega Collection: Specifically Sonic the Hedgehog 1-3 and Sonic and Knuckles. I want to tackle these all because I grew up chewing through Sega games and I honestly should have these done. Should be a longer-term one, playing through one at a time.

Ninja Gaiden Black: My controller is already afraid. Might have to be a 'start from the beginning' situation unless I already have a save for it on my 360. Will update status soon.

Panzer Dragoon Orta: As my friend Nick says, "It's a fun 90 minutes." I'll tackle it in an afternoon soon. Short term.

Final Fantasy VII: Put down the pitchforks, I know, I know. I'm stuck very early in this game. Very long-term project.

Zelda: Arguably the best in the series goes handheld. I've had it for a while, and been stuck in the first dungeon for a while. Longer term.

Pokemon Diamond: I have four or five gym badges already, but since I'm going to have my DS with me for a while (even if I go overseas) this is longer term and farther down the priority list.

Honorary list members: Guitar Hero and GHII (which my friend has borrowed and GH1 has all of two songs left to finish on Expert), and Half-Life 2 from the Orange Box (which I don't currently own but will when it drops in price...eventually). But since this is all about killing the existing list instead of piling on, these won't count for now.

Time to rid myself of some shame. Expect to hear about Snake in the '60s very soon. On to some serious gaming.

I turn my camera on

*snap*


Managed to get a picture of my dog in what is known as "god light" coming in from a window. Photo by Doug Bonham

One of the greatest joys I've found the last few months is photography. What a brilliant idea it was to take Photojournalism in my last term of college; though it precipitated the purchase of a digital SLR camera (in my case, a Canon Rebel XT along with a 50 mm f/1.8 lens) and the class was a lot of hard work, it was terribly, terribly fun. I really love framing shots, capturing action, and doing things artfully.


Photo by Doug Bonham

I can't wield a brush to save my life, or create any sort of traditional art on canvas. I can't draw, I'm not great at using stuff like Photoshop to create images either...though I can edit them pretty well now, especially photos. But a camera is something I can operate, control, manipulate, and understand. I can make that thing dance; I know what I'm doing, at least at a basic level.


Oregon wrestler Zack Frazier. Photo by Doug Bonham

I've already got plans how to continue on with the hobby, and even possibly as a career. I'm firmly on the Canon side of the photo world, and would like to upgrade through it, but for right now I just need to keep shooting photos. Shouldn't be a problem.

Dust it off, shine it up

Well, hello there. It's been quite a while - two full months. Sorry, I've been busy — between Duck football season, Rock Band and learning kanji I've had no time to write, which is a shame, because it's something I enjoy doing.

Now, though, I've found something that needs to be shared: I hate videos like this.



There was a whole thread at the GTX back in late 2004 and early 2005 that basically made me buy a PlayStation 2 and pre-order Gran Turismo 4. What was that thread? Photo mode screenshots uploaded. And not just any old photo mode shots, these were made by guys who knew what the F-stops and other settings mean on a real camera.

So, basically, they were the hottest looking thing evar.

Now you're giving me this? A speeding Japanese bullet train with a one-way ticket to the uncanny valley, down to the driver pulling on his helmet? (which looked accurate as, invariably, the guy's probably just 5'3", as all good racers are insanely short or are Boris Said.) How is my mind supposed to take seeing something like that?

The problem's not that the game is pretty. Oh no. It's just that I know where this all leads. Overspending on new hardware; a three-month fling with the game that ends up being not nearly as engaging as hoped; a distasteful breakup that brings up the same old complaints from the previous four games. Lack of good AI, questionable steering and handling feel, lack of customization, ABS on everything, broken single-player treadmill...etc., etc. I know all the problems, but when faced with a teaser trailer like that I get weak.

At least I can take solace in the fact that, knowing Polyphony Digital, if it comes out in 2008 it'll be in time for me to buy the Japanese PS3 version *in* Japan. That'd be kinda cool.