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Deepgate Codex

posted December 15th, 2012 in Books,Writing

A few years ago, Jeph Jacques of Questionable Content had recommended the Deepgate Codex. I finally got around to reading them this year and just finished the last book last night.

Overall, they were decent, although it took a while for them to pick up — Scar Night in particular is, in my opinion, very slow for the first half of the book, and Iron Angel was also slow for about the first hundred pages. The end of God of Clocks, on the other hand, is maybe even paced a bit too fast — I remember wondering, as I was finishing it last night, how they were going to resolve everything in the remaining 5 or 6 pages. (Campbell does a decent enough job of it, in an ending that was a bit of a surprise.)

The only other thing that bothered me was in Scar Night, which seems to introduce a character for no good reason. It looks like he will get his own plot, and it’s even set up that his plot will continue through out the remainder of the trilogy, but as I closed the third book I wondered what his purpose was in the first place. He serves to set up some world building, perhaps, but in a way that is only “obvious” upon reflection. Otherwise, he doesn’t even seem to serve much purpose in the plot of the one novel he’s featured in.

At any rate, they were overall a decent set of novels set in an interesting universe, and gave me two ideas for my own world-building. You know, in case I ever actually get around to writing.

Linearity in Games

posted December 12th, 2012 in Gaming

I’ve always had this unusual (I guess) habit of playing video games in a last in first out fashion — if I get a new game, I tend to drop whatever I was playing before, regardless of where I was in the game, and focus on whatever’s newer. Coincidentally, right after finally finding a used copy of Bulletstorm at a price I was willing to pay (woot Half Price Books), I picked up a hot-off-the-press Forza Horizon. So, of course, I played all the way through that, finishing almost all of the achievements (a rarity for me for non-Xbox Arcade games) before my Xbox Gold membership ran out. Now I’m making my way through Bulletstorm, and it’s really striking how different the two are.

Okay, sure, one’s a racing game and one’s a first person shooter, but let’s set that aside, as well as the difference between Horizon and previous Forza Motorsport titles. Sure, Horizon has a series of official races that you should grind through to finish the game, along with multiple logical sets of side races and challenges. But it’s also an open world with the ability to do most of the things in whatever order you want, along with a number of nigh-infinitely replayable personal best challenges (to say nothing of the Xbox Live integration, to beat your friends’ personal bests).

The big contrast in Bulletstorm is how incredibly linear it is so far. Again, any game with a plot is likely to have some gentle nudging at least to keep you moving in the right direction, but this is insane compared to my memories of games like Doom, Quake, and Duke Nukem 3D. The closest thing to a puzzle or a maze has been trying to quickly find my way through some kind of clouds after breaking giant eggs, but for the most part the game has been following straight hallways and ledges from one firefight to the next, occasionally looking for the “push X to use” or “push B to kick” instructions to open the doorway. People mock endless key hunts to open the next door, but come on… maybe the game opens up later.

The funniest thing to me though is thinking back to the “games” I made in middle school and high school in QBasic, when I had no idea what I was doing or how to do anything efficiently (as though there is actually an efficient way to run QBasic on a 100Mhz Pentium). The biggest one I did was an attempt at a JRPG sort of thing, except that because I had no way to do an overworld or city map it was really move from fight to fight, collect your treasure, maybe buy something in a town, move to the next series of fights. And of course at the time I figured it was terrible, not even worth showing to people…

…but really, the biggest difference between it and something like Bulletstorm and a lot of other more linear games is a few million dollars of art direction and assets, not the game design itself.

Sweetwater and Musical Wishlisting

posted December 2nd, 2012 in Guitar,Music

I had checked all of the Black Friday-Cyber Monday sales at Sweetwater, Guitar Center, and Musician’s Friend in hopes of finding a Line6 James Tyler Variax (any model, really) on sale for sub-$1k. (There were a couple possibilities, except that no coupon at Guitar Center or Musician’s Friend seems to apply to the JTVs…or, any piece of gear I want, for that matter.) All I ended up with was ordering a copy of Superior Drummer 2.0 from Sweetwaer. This was the first time I’d actually ordered something from them; I’ve been on their mailing/calling list for a while, courtesy entering several of their gear giveaways. (Fingers crossed for their Christmas giveaway to win a full Toontrack pack or the Protools rig!)

Anyway, along with shipping my order out, they sent me their Winter 2013 “Gear Encyclopedia” — they had occasionally sent them before, although since I hadn’t ordered anything or entered any contests recently they had been sending them to an old address. So now I have a 500+ page catalog of music toys showing up right before Christmas. It reminds me of when I was a kid and one of the exciting things at Christmas was when we would get the giant Sears Christmas catalog and go through circling or marking the toys and games that we wanted, like a proxy list for Santa.

Maybe I should go through and mark everything exciting in this catalog and then hand it to my wife…

On Spam

posted November 6th, 2012 in Site News

It’s a shame the amount of spam comments I get isn’t actually proportional (in a positive way) the number of actual comments I get…or the number of readers… After I dropped a link to my blog on another musician’s blog, I’ve started getting three or four new spam messages a day.

Mount Rainier Spray Park

posted October 4th, 2012 in Trip reports

I decided to get two hikes in this weekend, so for Sunday I headed back out to Mount Rainier to visit Spray Park. I should have visited it much earlier, and in fact I had wanted to but I had misunderstood where it was and thought it was in some remote area on the east side of the park. It turns out it’s in a remote area on the west side of the park, but Google Maps (very incorrectly) assured me it would only take me about an hour and a half to get there.

“Very incorrectly,” you say? The approximation is probably okay for about the first 70 minutes of the drive from Redmond, until you pass the little middle of nowhere town called Carbonado. After that, you follow a road down the Carbon River gorge that isn’t too bad, except for a one-lane bridge that could use resurfacing and that probably has such simple direction control because it’s probably relatively rarely used. (As in, there’s a sign that it’s a one way bridge, but it’s basically up to you to creep far enough past the line to see whether anybody is coming toward you, then start across and hope anybody coming the other way does the same to look for you.) But even that’s not so bad; it’s that even though the speed limit is never “officially” lowered from 50mph, shortly after the bridge you get to a fork to continue the remaining 17 miles to the end of the road at Mowich Lake and the Spray Park trail. Unfortunately, only the first two of those miles are paved; the reamaining 15 were paved at one point, I think, but have most recently only had gravel dropped on them. Even that wouldn’t be so bad, but somebody has brought some equipment through that led to most of the 15 miles of road being bumpy much like rumble strips along the side of the highway. So despite the speed limit theoretically being 50, I spent most of the time going about 20 or 25.

Amusingly, 4 miles from the end of the road (and one mile inside the park boundary, once you have passed the self-serve pay station), they put a “rough road” sign. Perhaps more amusingly, on the way out, there’s a rough road sign as soon as you exit the park (that also “officially” lowers the speed limit to 25). As if at that point you can do anything about if your car is in no shape to make the remaining 10 mile trip down the bumpy gravel road.

Anyway, one thing that’s different about this trail compared to many that I have been on recently is it has a fair amount of up and down. Most of the trails I have hiked recently have been almost entirely up to the destination, or have at least been up to a ridge and then back down, as opposed to consistently alternating between up and down. It also reminded me of hikes in Shenandoah in that you actually start off going down, although not to completely cross a valley so much as just to hook up with a separate trail. It’s basically all through the woods, with the occasional opening and occasional log bridge across a stream.

Occasionally, you would catch glimpses of Rainier through the trees.

The best view of the mountain from the trail though was from a deck about 100 ft off the trail marked Eagle Point (or something like that):

After about 2 miles, you switch into all-uphill mode, gaining a bit of elevation over the last mile before you reach the entrance to Spray Park proper:

At that point, you basically get to stroll through meadows and around empty snowmelt creek beds, staring up at Rainier the whole time. Had I been here about a month to six weeks ago, I would’ve gotten wildflowers the same as I did at Naches Peak, but I was mostly a bit late.

That area of the mountain is divided into a variety of parks (Spray Park, Seattle Park, and some others whose names I don’t know), and another hiker told me that if I continued along the trail I would eventually find myself in another park and then at another parking lot, so I should walk as far as I felt like and then turn around and go back. After exploring another half mile or mile in, I headed back out and spent a bit of time checking out Mowich Lake (which I apparently failed to take any pictures of with my phone). Really, Spray Park is the kind of place you could hang out all day, and I may do it sometime again when I have somebody else to hike out after dark with (and maybe if I take a car out that feels better suited to what amounted to offroading to get there).

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