Knights of the Old Republic

Have played a little of Knights of the Old Republic, which garnered all the game-of-the-year accoladates a couple of years ago. It's OK, but contains many patterns familiar to anyone who's played NWN (which was produced by the same folks). I mean, I haven't bothered following through on certain conversations because "Hey, I remember this NPC from NWN; if you agree with her proposal she takes your money and skips town. Fool me once, etc." It makes for an interesting meta-game, but.

Also like NWN, they took the trouble to implement an alignment system; you start out neutral and earn dark-side or light-side points depending upon how you handle encounters and the routes you take to solve quests. (Do you give the serum to the clinic doctor, or sell it to the crime boss?) That's good, but (again like NWN) breaking into peoples' homes, killing them and taking their loot doesn't count in either direction.

To be fair, the homes I'm breaking into are full of bad "gang members", yucky-looking aliens who attack you on sight. This doesn't change the fact that I'm systematically going door-to-door in an apartment building, clearing out every room, and the game is rewarding me with experience points and treasure, and not punishing me at all. The result is that I feel I'm not playing the game right unless I act like an utter psychopath. It doesn't seem very Jedi to me, but maybe it's so irrational that it doesn't even fall on the dark/light axis.

I hate to say it, but I can only think of a half-kidding-RPG I once read. First, in the game system of their choice, the players happen across a dungeon infested with families of kobolds and goblins and what have you. After they clean it out, the GM takes their character sheets and, in a clinical tone, pronounces a diagnosis over each: the PC is actually a modern sociopath with delusions that he or she is this heroic fantasy character. It's quickly revelaed that the players had actually rampaged through a slummy housing project and mass-murdered its inhabitants, and were now in lockdown for the criminally insane. Ha ha ha, the end!

Oh well. All that said, the swordfighting looks really badass.

Got a Nintendo DS

Bought a DS, to nobody's surprise. It comes with a demo version of an upcoming Metroid game, and I bought Wario Ware Touched! and Mario 64 DS alongside it. Spent about $200 on all that, which is still $40 or so less than I would have dropped on a PSP with no games at all. Poor PSP.

* The sucker's huge and heavy, compared to the Game Boy SP I got two years ago. When folded it may be about the same dimensions as an original Game Boy Advance, but I don't have one here to compare it to. Unfolded, it's twice as tall.

* At first, I feared that you needed three arms to play some of the games. I'm coping with Wario (which uses only the touchscreen) and Mario (which uses the screen mostly for map viewing and camera control), but to play Metroid with the stylus you need to hold the system by its edge, so your thumb and forefinger can hit the hardware buttons, while your other hand uses the touchscreen. A few minutes of this and my nascent RSI flared up, leaving my wrist aching for hours after. Ouch.

I then discovered It comes with a "wrist strap" that is actually a thumb-strap. There is a plastic nub where your thumb goes, making it safe to rub around on the touchscreen. Both Mario and Metroid then allow you to emulate an analog stick on the touchpad by sliding your thumb around, but it's not the same; I kept finding my thumb up against the side of the screen in Mario, forcing me to recenter it and start sliding again in order to get the character to move. Lame.

* Wario is great, though not as good as the original. I feel mixed about its having a whole category of games that involving blowing into the microphone; there's no way I'm playing those on the subway. Much lamer is the fact that the unlockables are just flat and disappointing. The first Wario Ware had a whole bunch of cool, minimalist games that I still enjoy playing when I need a twitch; this one just gives you dumb little touch-screen toys like a one-dimensional scribble pad, a piano, and a metronome. A metronome?! Woooow. I get the impression that whoever put that collection together thought that the mere act of using the touch screen at all was already so fun that they didn't have to add much else. Bah.

* I really want to play Volity on this thing. Oh my gord yes. It's an ideal hardware platform for it. I am so not kidding.

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I think that I lost faith in email some time ago, and haven't really noticed it until lately. The point of awareness may have come with the receipt of two whitelist challenges within days of each other, both from technically minded individuals. In both cases, it happened that I hadn't emailed that person before, so their whitelist software challenged me to do a little dance to prove that I wasn't a spammer.

Conventional wisdom says that whitelists are too much trouble to deal with, and will block legitimate mail when the sender becomes too annoyed or impatient to jump through your hoops. This is not me; I gladly hoop-jumped in both occasions, because I really did want to talk to these people. But I know that not everyone feels this way, and I'd hate to turn away a contact just for misinterpreting my spam-blocker as an insult.

But meanwhile, I am getting more than 100 spams a day, and more than rarely the spam-filters I have installed over every account produce false positives. So I every time I don't hear from an expected writer I gotta put on the hip-waders and start slogging through the thousands of all-caps and misspelled and Korean subject lines in my spam-bucket, looking for a possible misfile.

Worse, when I send mail, I try to keep in mind that the receiver might be using filtering too, so I feel I must try to second-guess it. I can't just send files to people without including a paragraph or two of text; I have to be careful with the subject lines I choose. And even then I don't feel certain that it will actually get to their mailbox, no more than I'm certain that I'm seeing all my legitimate incoming mail.

What are my alternatives? I don't think I have any; nothing really works like email does when it comes to sending, well, electronic mail. So I will still use email, but I no longer trust it as a stable communication medium, as I once did.

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Derek from Skepticality, one of my favorite podcasts, is in the hospital after suffering a brain aneurysm a couple of days ago; his co-host released a short show to (tearfully) report this, adding that it happened just hours after Steve Jobs mentioned their show in his keynote address. I hope he comes through. I promise I'll post an updated list of favorite podcasts if he does. There, that ought to motivate him, half-smiley.