A Simple Way To Go Faster Than Light That Does Not Work

I'm going to be online for some Xbox Live shenanigans at 9PM eastern tonight. TF2 and Castle Crashers are likely to be played, and maybe some Carcassonne. Feel free to join me! Note that I'm going to concentrate on how player-herding menu options work at least as much as on actually playing any games... this is a research trip!

I finally played a little bit of TF2 via XBox Live. It's fun! I took ahkond's advice and stuck to the newbie-friendly Heavy and Pyro classes, and then just wandered around frying dudes, taking short breaks when suggested. (Suggestions usually being implemented as headshots.)

You know a game with this structure is successful when getting killed doesn't make you say "dammit" but "ooh, I wanna try that!" (You can see who killed you, where they were, and how they did it.) See also "Street Fighter 2", back in the heady days of Sputnik and Gagarin.

Sorry I can't play with you PC peoples...

Are XBox Live's "gamer zones" actually used when matching up players for games? I just witnessed a Carcassonne match between a local-to-me player in the "Recreation" (happy fun whee) zone versus one in the "Underground" (lol fag pwned) one. I found it surprising, and deeply unpleasant. ("Surprising" in the principle-of-least sense.)

When I was presented with the list of zones while setting up my account, I thought: that's a rather nice idea. I'd be quite disappointed if the XBL world pays it no mind, though.

A good business meeting last night. But with half a month to go, and less than half of our goal met, it's time to bust out my inner jerk. Email poke-n-prod campaign to follow immediately.

I spent most of yesterday bringing our business plan up to date (written in August, it still thought that going wireless was our main goal) and daerr is currently finishing the spreadsheet that details how we're carving up our initial units pool. This will get shuttled off to Ted, our new lawyer, who will do magical and sadly expensive things.

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Also have been using the DS wireless for the first time, and a lot, now that the little flip-top systems are finally starting to appear in the hands of local friends. Got to play both kinds of multiplayer Meteos: "DS Download Play" with a friend who didn't have his own copy of the cartridge, and straight-up Vs. Play with one who did. Download play was quite limited and rather lame, but Vs. was a blast and we played it a lot; I reportedly got this friend to actually like the game, making him feel better about buying it. (Which is good, since I'm the one who recommended it to him.)

And I picked up Mario Kart DS today, letting me try out Nintendo's brand-new Internet service. Have had a bunch of races against unseen folks, and it seems to work great, though it's not like any online game I've played yet.

I know little about how the thing works (yet -- I have a professional interest in reading up on this, actually), and question the apparent fact that it doesn't feature any sort of skill-based matchmaking that I can see. Of course, if it does, I wouldn't know yet, since I'm new to the system and it wouldn't have had a chance to gauge my ability yet. In the last race I played, one person was clearly somewhat better than me -- not so much that I have reason to complain -- while the other two racers just stunk. I have no idea what metric it used, if any, to toss us all together.

I was a little surprised and quite intrigued to see that there's no lobby; to begin racing, your only option is to select which pool of players you'd like your opponents to come from ("Regional" (the default), "Worldwide", "Friends", or "Rivals"), and let the network do the rest. It sticks you in a bin, then (after several seconds) drops in three playmates, and off you go. No obvious way to tell who people are (besides whatever handle they give themselves) or say hello; there is only racing. Again, I've only messed with it a little and haven't read the docs, so I could be missing something.

My friend code is: 326476971938. So apparently if you have a copy of this game yourself, you can punch this in and then you will become my "friend". Maybe I'm not supposed to blog this? I don't know. I assume you can also do this to name someone your "rival". I'm not sure what the semantic difference bewteen "friend" and "rival" is meant to be, in this context. Surely all my friends are my rivals, when I'm playing games with them? Shrug.

A nice touch I really like: the game has a simple paint program with which you can create a unique little icon for yourself. This gets "painted" on your kart, and when you're online everyone who's made an emblem has it permanently displayed next to their name. I made a little Volity icon, of course.

Ohh, I see now. I just read in the docs that your "rivals" are actually people who the system thinks are about as good as you are. But is there something like an ELO score that I see peek at, or is the rating system totally opaque? Meh?

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I have gotten really good at Meteos, by the way. I have unlocked 20 planets (along with the starting set of four) and have eight to go. Woo woo. I have been twiddling with this game for nearly two months, whenever I need to not-think and just twitch-react for a couple of minutes, and I still love it. I have surely gotten a better fun-per-dollar ratio from this cartridge than I have most any other game I've spent money on in recent memory. (Board games, too... a $30 DS cartridge being a sight cheaper than some of the board games I buy.)

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If anyone is curious why I switch between writing numbers as words and as numerals, it's because of my journalism degree. The AP Style Guide compels its followers to write numbers between zero and nine as words and everything else as digits. Or is it one and nine? Well, anyway.

I tend to write out "percent" (rather than use "%") for the same reason.