Brain-in-a-Jar!

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Man, look at that thing. It’s a brain in a jar. I’ve always felt that as a villain, a brain in a jar is a little lacking in the intimidation department:

DM: You enter the darkened room cautiously, on a pedestal in the center, emitting a pale green pulsating phosphorous light is… a BRAIN IN A JAR!
Thief: I knock it over.

As you may have heard, stem cell research is growing all sorts of human body parts on the backs of rodents. I was going to track down some links and stuff to interesting news articles for you to read, but then got sidetracked and found myself looking at pictures of treeman (and now that I’ve seen it I must share). Seriously though, stem cells. Brain-in-a-jar. These things are linked… at least, they are to me.

We can grow any organ using stem cells, so I was thinking, could we grow a brain? The obvious answer is yes, we could grow a brain. The problem is that we could not teach that brain anything, or that it would be very very hard to so. If we could manage a way to simulate and manipulate memories and dreams, we could teach a brain in a jar. We could hook it up to a network of cameras and have it operating a whole building or something. The building would be alive!

We discussed the problems with this at length, and someone who knows a whole lot more about the human brain than I do feels as thought the brain would be suicidal and it would end in disaster, which it probably would. The part that I thought was super cool is that the idea of a brain controlling a building should be pure science fiction, but that we’re getting close to a point where it almost seems feasible.

That shit is whack.

PAX Wrapup

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So PAX has come and gone. And now I’m back to Monday to Friday, in Montreal, unsure of what to blog about in the future. But there’s still this entry. Which is going to be a rapid fire rundown of my personal and first PAX experience… starting NOW!

Zoom!

Thursday: With the MP3 players loaded up with Anamanaguchi, Metroid Metal, Frontalot, Freezepop and a some old timey radio plays, we hit the road around 1:00 pm.

PROTIP FOR ROADTRIP: Old time radio shows are free to download from sites like this one and are some of the best entertainment for a long roadtrip. We listened to the first few chapters of Doc Savage and the Thousand Headed Man, and we learnt several important things. For instance:

1) Doc Savage makes a weird whistling nose when he’s discovered something.
2) Johnny Littlejohn’s (one of Doc’s assistants) catchphrase is “I’ll be super amalgamated!”

As you can imagine… we were super amalgamated for lots of things. The roadtrip also brought some cheap booze into the car, and later that night I would teach my companions that Hendricks is the best gin in the world. Moving along…

Friday: Neither JonJon nor I wanted to risk not having a spot in the Omegathon, so we rolled into Hynes around 10:30 am… and set up in line… we were seated precisely in an area where both Get In Line Game screens were blocked… awesome… I ducked out of line to pick up some T-Mobile sim cards for our Canadian phones and to do a quick supply run because we needed more coffee, then of course back in line (didn’t wanna be gone too long, had to maintain Wheaton’s Law in the lineup.)

JonJon exhibited his remarkable Metroid prowess by speedrunning through the entire NES Metroid in a single sitting with no deaths… I even took a blurry camera phone picture of Samus in her bathing suit… but it didn’t look so good, so whatever. We made it to the keynote and the good Wil Wheaton once again knocked it out of the park. We were not named as Omeganauts, but you can’t be too bummed about that now can you? Moving right along in the first Penny Arcade Panel, it was fun, but I have to say… PA fans need to step up the quality of their questions… ask them something interesting! Seriously! It’s not hard! We get it! They’re awesome! Stop it. Seriously. Oh yeah, there was this terrifying display as well.

We then strolled around the center, had some drinks at some bar near Hynes that was playing video game tunes, played a round of Chez Geek and then foolishly got in line for Friday Night Concert… I say foolishly because it turns out we totally could’ve just walked right in without the hour or so of waiting around… oh well… we learnt that lesson for the Saturday night and Kid E just strolled in about 2 minutes after the Saturday show started… which was a good call. Friday night concert started late, but all the bands killed it… Protomen lived up to my expectations of putting on an over-the-top theatrical live show, Anamanaguchi was just tons of fun and holy crap they’re doing the Scott Pilgrim video game music!? Alllright. Metroid Metal was both of those things in awesome amounts, and even though we were exhausted and didn’t listen to the whole set, Frontalot looked like he was having a lot of fun putting on a great show… off to sleep.

Saturday: JonJon and Kid E woke up early to try and register for a D&D DarkSun adventure, they failed at this or something… meanwhile, I discovered that in Boston it’s ok to drink at breakfast. Guiness? Why yes, thank you I will. After bagel, bacon, eggs and beer with my friend Andrew, it was time to make my way to the convention center to catch about 2/3 of the make a strip panel… ducked out for a few minutes to go find the Mad Catz guy who was giving away sweet little tournament stick keychains. After the panel we played a round of Nanuk which was pretty sweet, I thought about picking it up… but then realized I can make my own deck with two regular sets of playing cards, and then opted to be cheap about the whole thing. After that it was off to Freezepop across the street, who, as I tweeted, killed it. We all went separate ways again, I met up with Andrew and his former WoW guild, bonded with one of the guys inappropriately about Cyanide and Happiness (“Go back to Africa!”) to the chagrin of almost anyone within earshot, had a lambwich for dinner and then opted to fool around at PAX instead of going to see a movie with the guild. We walked into the Classic Arcade freeplay just in time to see some kid beat Dragon’s Lair while Rush’ Tom Sawyer blared in the background… kick ass.

We also played some PowerStone in the Classic Console Freeplay and took on some random challengers… we naturally ripped them up. Andrew and I have both put unheard of amounts of time into PowerStone, so it wasn’t really fair. JonJon explained why us playing against strangers at this game was funny to his non gamer girlfriend: “Trash playing against some guy at PowerStone is like Kasparov playing against your mom at chess.” I’m flattered. We then headed over to the normal Console Freeplay to try some games we didn’t own. I was pulling for Tony Hawk’s ride, since I don’t own it, have no intention of buying it, and know nobody who does, but Andrew had zero interest in it, so I still don’t know the agony of a little plastic skateboard beneath my feet. We settled on Bayonetta, and were actually pleasantly surprised. It’s like a cross between God of War and Devil May Cry, and that’s a good place to be when you’re making a game. Not the most creative place to be, but still a pretty fun place to be. We poked our heads into the Paul and Storm concert and it wasn’t really doing it for us, so we bounced for the day.

Sunday: All the panels that we had interest in had lineups beyond belief… so we swung down to the expo hall floor, played some BlazBlue: Continuum Shift and then decided to head home out of exhaustion, the thought of our own beds was a powerful lure.

All in all, I could have had a better time I think, particularly if the lineups to panels were not broken, but still had an overall good to great time most of the time. Is that vague enough for you?

PAX’d!

Road To PAX East : Starting Now

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Right now we have a couple of articles, weekly columns, bi weekly webcomic. Soon we'll have some videos up there too. So go there... go there now. Add it to your favorites. Share with your friends.

Please... I beg of you. For the love of all that is good, visit my site. Now back to the old and out of date blog you've somehow found:

Or rather, in about 20 minutes... my car is packed, google maps are printed, T-Mobile location found so I can buy a SIM card, PSP is charged, badges and passports are ready... I don't think anything could possibly go wrong at this stage.
I have thought of everything, because I'm awesome.
This will be my last pre-PAX entry, though I do intend to updating on Twitter at http://www.twitter.com/50moretrash ... so yeah, there's that (the twitter feed is also over there on the right, if for some reason you don't do the twitter thing).
Weee-ooo.

Pumped for PAX Spotlight: Steve Jackson Games

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Right now we have a couple of articles, weekly columns, bi weekly webcomic. Soon we'll have some videos up there too. So go there... go there now. Add it to your favorites. Share with your friends.

Please... I beg of you. For the love of all that is good, visit my site. Now back to the old and out of date blog you've somehow found:

I took a break from updates yesterday since I was shifting to an earlier time slot at work, I also couldn’t think of anything to update since I was tired and busy. How did karma repay me? Someone stole my tickets to the hockey game last night.

Good times.

But here we are on a Tuesday morning, 3 sleeps between now and PAX East, and we’re returning to our regularly scheduled programming. Today’s topic, one of the esteemed PAX East vendors: Steve Jackson Games.

To me, Steve Jackson Games are pure college nostalgia. Back in college, there was a plethora of geeky distractions, table top RPGs a few times a week, an arcade that you could get to without going outside (attached to a bar), laser tag down the street, even a bi-weekly Vampire larp, oh yeah… there was some classes involved too, I wouldn’t know too much about that though, I didn’t go very often. Even with all that going on though, there was still an absurd amount of time that needed to be killed off during any given day (there would probably have been less time to kill if we went to classes). That’s where SJG came in.

Founded in 1980, they specialized in mini-games, often just using cards and a few tokens to track points or character locations. These games were highly portable, originally sold in 4x7 ziploc bags, and later in 4x7 pocket boxes. The gameplay of these microgames fell somewhere in between traditional card and board games, and more complex “German style” games (ala Settlers of Catan). Not overly complex, easy to pick up, but with a little more strategy involved than a game of Sorry!

Oh sure, SJG published some traditional tabletop games, using the very competent self-designed GURPS (Generic Universal Role Playing System) mechanics, which was a universal (duh) system designed to be adapted to any setting. Fun side bar: They even released GURPS versions of existing properties; you could play World of Darkness GURPS, Hellboy GURPS, Deadlands GURPS, etc. I will admit that I never played GURPS myself, but I’m told by reliable sources that it’s a good system. GURPS is not why SJG holds a special place in my heart though.

As I’ve already alluded to, the microgames were the draw. My first SJG was Car Wars. An old beat up deck from a time possibly before I was born, every card dog eared, held together by browned scotch tape would hold a world of car combat, and by the unofficial rules, as the newest player of the game, I was fresh meat. I think I was destroyed in about 10 minutes. This was standard fare amongst my friends; the new guy playing Car Wars was ganged up on by the other 3 players, sort of a Car Wars hazing. However, I was hooked, the next day; I wanted to play Car Wars.

Sooner or later, someone would show up with a new SJG. The Awful Green Things from Outer Space was a favorite (and I’ve since found out it was an old favorite, originally published in Dragon magazine in 1979), followed by awesome games like Illuminati and the still popular Munchkin. You know that jerk that you might’ve gamed with in college? The guy who was all about the loot and occasionally even screwing over other party members (I’m referring specifically to tabletop Munchkins here)? Well, even though you’d be a dick if you played like that in a tabletop, in the card game it was the whole point. It was tons of fun, tweaking the rules to equip a great-axe and a chainsaw at the same time against an unstoppable gazebo? Hells yes. Behavior that was frowned upon became ok, just for this one game. There was also the entertaining Ninja Burger, where you played burger delivering ninjas! Did it make sense? No! Was it fun? Yes! And who can forget 4 hour long games of Knightmare Chess?

Steve Jackson was even kind enough to publish a set of rules for the sure-to-get-you-in-trouble-with-school-administration game Killer (or Assassination by any other name). In my extended group of friends a game of Killer could start off with 20-30 people, and sign ups were done anonymously, so you never knew who was even in the game, let alone who might be after you, add into the mix that we were all going to school, gaming, drinking and generally hanging out with each other? A healthy dose of paranoia was injected into our daily lives (“Oliver never comes out drinking with us, what gives? Oh my God he’s gonna kill one of us!”).

But of all the SJGs that we played, there is a game that holds an even more special place in my heart, a sub-chamber within the previously mentioned special place already reserved for SJGs: Chez Geek. A game where you played a group of geeky friends living in an apartment building, trying to slack off as much as possible by: hanging out at cafés, playing video games, playing RPGs, sleeping in the middle of the day, watching B movies, getting drunk… THIS GAME WAS MY LIFE!! There was not a single character in the game that didn’t have a real world counterpart (even negative status characters like the Chode Warrior… we knew that guy! He could eat your girlfriend if he hung around too long!). It was a little strange, as we grew up and graduated or otherwise moved on from college, and we all started getting our own places instead of living in overcrowded apartments, the game’s popularity sort of dwindled amongst the crew. Did we grow out of it? Or does it just remind us of better, simpler times? Or maybe it reminds us of how shitty living below the poverty line with roommates you used to be friends with but now can’t stand because their goddamned cat wrecked you new coat and they stole your booze and their friend has been on the couch for 3 days!?

Maybe it’s that one.

No matter what though, Steve Jackson and his (relatively) humble gaming company has provided me with countless hours of entertainment, and even though I played most of them in another time in my life, I will definitely swing by their booth to see what sort of new stuff they’re pumping out these days that is just as entertaining as the stuff that I was into back in college (that Nanuk game looks pretty cool!). Seeing them on the list of merch guys also made me toss my old basic deck of Chez Geek into my bag too.

Pumped for PAX Spotlight: Jason Scott, Get Lamp and Text Adventures

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Right now we have a couple of articles, weekly columns, bi weekly webcomic. Soon we'll have some videos up there too. So go there... go there now. Add it to your favorites. Share with your friends.

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Remember how on Monday I talked about the serious amounts of geek cred that Wil Wheaton has? Sure ya do. Now think about how there are no “gamer achievements” in a game like Donkey Kong. That doesn’t make getting a kill screen any less cool, does it? Well, if Wil Wheaton’s cred is like getting gamer achievements on a modern console, Jason Scott’s gamer cred is like getting a kill screen in Donkey Kong (no, not that Jason Scott). He’s old school.

And he made (another) movie about being old school, Get Lamp. Get Lamp is a documentary about the birth, rise and (presumably) fall of text-based adventure games. If you know me, you know I’m a sucker for documentaries, so when I heard there was a doc about text adventure games, I had to look into a little more. When I found out that it was being made by Jason Scott, it made me even more interested.

So, who’s Jason Scott and why should you care?

Jason Scott is the proto-geek. He was busy laying the foundations for geek culture while many of us probably weren’t even born. You see, Jason was born in 1970, this puts him nicely in the 80s as a teenager. A teenager with a computer. Jason at some point got into (as many of his contemporaries did) BBS culture, and in fact, would go on to make a documentary about this awesome phenomena called BBS Documentary, which, if you’re at all into such things will give you a pretty good idea of what things were like back in the day. Jason has also made it even easier to get into that BBS mindframe by creating and up keeping the internet’s secret time waster: textfiles.com. This page documents and archives every textfile Jason can get his hands on that were circulating BBS’s back in the day (the collection is insanely impressive, cataloguing 58,227 textfiles on even the most obscure topics).

This has already set him up as an authority on 80s internet culture, but he’s gone on to even further this credibility. How? How does being a speaker at DEF CON, Notacon and PhreakNIC grab you? Not enough? Fine. How about working for over a decade as the UNIX administrator for the gaming company Psygnosis?

Let’s just say that when it comes to the techy side of geekiness, Jason Scott knows what he’s talking about.

5 years ago he decided to turn his documentary making lens on the world of text base adventures, and has seemingly scoured the world to find the people who made, make and enjoyed these games. Judging from the kind of digging that was done for BBS Documentary and the fact that 5 years have gone into this film, the research and quality of contributors for Get Lamp will be top notch. I think anyone who’s ever played an old time text adventure has a secret (or not-so-secret) soft spot for them. There’s something completely captivating about partaking in what is more or less an interactive book. Of course, these adventures were often completely insane word puzzles, and the clues to figure out what to do next often border on impossible. But they all had their charm (the part that got me in the trailer was showing the hand drawn story ‘maps’, it completely blew my mind)

It might even surprise you to find out that people are still making these games at all, but apparently, they are. The Get Lamp website sums it up rather nicely: “Before there was the first person shooter, there was the second person thinker.” Nice.

The version being shown at PAX is going to be a shortened version of the full length film (and by shortened I mean an hour and half, the full length DVD is likely to run at over 2/1/2 hours) and is going to be followed up with a panel consisting of many of the contributors to the film. Basically, if you’re thinking of spending your Friday doing something a little more “low key” at PAX, I think that checking out Get Lamp might be a nice chill way to do so.

Text Adventure PAX Bonus: If you’re suddenly completely enamored with text adventures (or maybe always have been) there’s also a panel on Saturday afternoon regarding their importance “Storytelling in the World of Interactive Fiction” and on Sunday morning there’s a special treat for fans of the genre: Action Castle! Which is basically an interactive live text adventure where you control a human instead of a cursor! Sweet deal.

Pumped for PAX Spotlight: Mega64

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Friday night, the people of Mega64 will have their own ‘Panel for the Soul’. I had heard of these guys before, but never really took the time to check out their videos. Until today!

So I read up on them a little bit, and was a little excited to find out that they’ve been described as “Jackass meets videogames”. I love Jackass! I love videogames! Surely these fellows are making a brand of entertainment just for me! Why don’t they call their troupe Mega-JustFor50%MoreTrash-64?

Unfortunately, they sort of fall flat with their delivery. Oh I mean, I get the comparison definitely, and if someone asked me what most of the videos are like, I’d probably respond with a similar description. I would say: “It’s sort of like Jackass but with videogame references, only sucky.”

Here’s a brief little description of some of their recent videos:

Rock Band: The Beatles: It’s them dressed as the Beatles running around like the video for Help singing the Beatles at people on the street... that's the joke.
Super Mario Bros 2: One guys is dressed as Mario and he's hold a key, a guy with a big mask costume chases him, but stops when Mario drops the key, just like in the game! They run through the streets being slight disruptive... that's the joke.
A Boy and His Blob: A guy with a bag of jellybeans throws the jellybeans at the floor saying "Ladder, Hole Hole Hole, Licorice” and obviously nothing happens, and people look at him funny... that's the joke.
Bayonetta: One of the guy's comments that he can summon demons with his hair and shoot guns from his shoes just like Bayonetta, the other guy is like "yeah right". This is followed the tubby guy in a wig sort of spinning around in public with gun blasts edited in over his feet to show that he's like Bayonetta... and you guessed it, that's the joke.
Halo ODST: Halo had the same release date as Cabela's Big Game Hunter, so they dressed as hicks (posing as the creator's of the Big Game Hunter) went down to game stop and demand that they don't sell Halo, then the manager came out, they sort of giggled and put up a little bit of a fight and ran away... the end.

PunchOut: The only video I found to be really and truly entertaining was where one of the Mega 64 guys dressed up as Doc Louis and had him rattling off some of the lines from the Wii version of the game at people.

“What’s your favorite flower? Mine’s chocolate.”

The only reason this one was continually funny was that Doc Louis’ lines are funny anyway, so they had very little to do with the comedic results. Still good times.

It took me a second or two to sort soak up the problems I have with these videos. The first thing that I noticed was how long they were, all the videos clock in at around 3-4 minutes… but as you can probably tell, there’s only really one joke per video. If they cut these down to about a minute, they might have been able to retain the comedy instead of beating it to death. The second thing was that most of the videos had the same joke: take something that’s a little bit weird in a videogame, then perform that same action in a public place… isn’t that quirky? No. It’s just an annoying guy on the street. The other thing that prevents these videos from ascending into Jackass type territory is the lack of any real danger. The Jackass guys are continually in situations where they could get actually hurt or arrested. Lowbrow? Sure. Engaging? Definitely. The lack of any sort of actual peril makes the Mega64 seem deflated in comparison.

Take the Bayonetta video, the guy just sort of gets near people and then does his Bayonetta moves, there’s even some shots where the people that he’s poking fun of are unaware that he’s even there. It would’ve been much funnier of him to try antagonizing them a little bit and then showing of his Bayonetta moves to try and intimidate them. A little more dangerous yeah, but probably more entertaining. It’s just a question of raising the bar.
I also checked out a couple of their videos that don’t involve live-action recreations of games and was equally unimpressed. Basically they just rehash jokes that the entire internet has already made (ie: Dante’s Inferno is a God of War clone, Sonic games are all the same but we’re still always nostalgic for them) a hundred times and then beat the joke to death. And there’s the same problem with time as in the other videos, they drag on too long.

One thing this has taught me is that, if I continue to make any youtube clips, they need to be punchy and fast paced (it almost makes me want to re-edit my unboxing video, but instead I’ll just take these lessons forward) or else the viewer will get bored. For that lesson I thank you, Mega64.

If the guys from Mega64 also learn that lesson, and make their videos a little more edgy and a little better paced, they might be onto something lasting and entertaing, but as it is right now it’s just not for me. One entertaining video out of six isn’t that good of a ratio; I think I’ll be taking a pass on their panel.

Me = Still Pumped For PAX East, and pumped that I’m not going to waste time with Mega64, sorry guys.

Pumped for PAX Spotlight (sort of): Freezepop!

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Right now we have a couple of articles, weekly columns, bi weekly webcomic. Soon we'll have some videos up there too. So go there... go there now. Add it to your favorites. Share with your friends.

Please... I beg of you. For the love of all that is good, visit my site. Now back to the old and out of date blog you've somehow found:

This is a little bit of a cop-out post, I’ll admit it. To make matters worse, it’s only PAX related in the loosest possible sense (and by that I mean, not technically PAX related at all). I’m also sorry that I’ve now done two music related posts in a row.

But I still think it’s important, and when I found out about it, I got super pumped, and since the underlying theme here is getting pumped for PAX, I felt this qualified today’s topic.

Freezepop is playing PAX East! Not really. But they are playing across the street! For 10$! Buy tickets now!

I have to admit I was a little disappointed that Freezepop wasn’t playing at the first edition of PAX East. It seemed like such an obvious fit. They make synth-pop music that appeals to a lot of gamers, their music is featured in a bunch of video games, they’ve played PAX Prime in the past, and to top it off, they’re even from Boston! You’d think that’d be a big enough to get them a gig at PAX East, but I guess not. Don’t know what went on there, maybe they wanted more cash? Maybe it was a snub? Maybe Freezepop were jerks or something backstage? Maybe the PA guys were jerks or something backstage? The band has apparently said that everything was cool and it was just a rotational thing, which I hope is true, my little brain can’t stand it when artists that I like don’t like each other.

If you’re not familiar with the band, they’re worth checking out (check out the “fun” section of the website, there’s a link to most of their videos there). In fact, you may come to realize that you’re already familiar with them.

Their music has been in a number of Harmonix games like Frequency, Amplitude and bigger titles like Guitar Hero I and II and Rock Band. By the way, if you haven’t played Frequency and/or Amplitude (they’re more or less the same game with different songs) you’re missing out on seeing the humble birth of rhythm games like GH and RockBand. To be fair though, Freezepop cheated; one of their members was a sound designer at Harmonix. This probably helped get their music in games. Just saying. Probably.

Anyways, I got my tickets and will be journeying out across the street on Saturday to catch Freezepop play.