Who would have thought that Costco is the best travel agent for vacations to Hawaii? Last year, Victoria and I booked our honeymoon to the Grand Hyatt on Kauai and absolutely loved it. The same package was available this year, but we decided to try something different. After a bit of soul searching (Dominican Republic? Puerto Rico?), we settled on a similar deal for the Hyatt Regency on Maui. Similar deal from Costco, including a rental car and other amenities. It was fun! A few memories from the trip:

• Watching Forgetting Sarah Marshall on the iPhone on the flight to Maui. Damn, it’s a great movie! Perfect flow, funny at the right places, racy when appropriate, and appealing to both genders. Judd Apatov Brat Pack FTW!

• Spending days at Little Beach and swimming in the ocean. I don’t need to snorkel, I just need the waves! Victoria got almost hit in the head by a boogie boarder, though

• Getting up at 3:45 in the morning to take drive up to the Haleakala crater. The sunrise at 10,000 feet is supposed to be the best in the world… unless the entire crater is fogged in, that is, like on the day we went. We drove two hours, braved sub 40″ temperatures, waited for over an hour with many other people - and saw (almost) nothing But I’m still glad we took the trip together. It’s an adventure. We caught some neat glimpses of the fog wavering through the crater, and if we ever come back it will be twice as grand!

• Finding a praying mantis in the middle of the night at the unlikeliest of places: the pump of a 76 station. Those things are cool (the mantis, not the gas station)! And a tiny bit freaky.

• Watching Madagascar 2 in the theater in Lahaina with a crowd of screaming, out-of-control kids. The movie is funny, if a bit on the convoluted side. Four or five major story strands that all come together somehow, but fragment the movie.

• Watching NASCAR in the Grotto pool bar. Congratulations Clint Bowyer, and congratulations Jimmie Johnson!

• Renting Pineapple Express over the hotel’s entertainment system. It started out promising, but went absolutely nowhere, as you would expect of a stoner movie. Unfortunately for us, we weren’t stoned and quickly lost interest.

• Being called by hotel security to extinguish the two candles we had burning on the balcony because they posed a security risk (Whaa?)

• Laying in the hammock at the beach and star-gazing on our last night.

• Hearing Victoria shrieking all the way down the (pitch black) water slide, emerging from the water shouting “Holy shit!” Did I mention that the slide exits right next to the toddler pool?

• Driving around all of West Maui on winding one lane roads. Not as scary to us as to somebody who isn’t used to hway 1 or the hills of San Anselmo, but exciting nonetheless. We didn’t do the Hana Highway, opting to be slobs at the pool instead.

• Passing on our beach umbrella to the next guests. Gotta keep the spirit alive!

Now it’s back to the good old work week, which will be very exciting in its own right, though. Here are are few pictures from the trip!

Copy & Paste Support
As I mentioned a while ago, I’m all over the place when writing longer, essay-style posts. Being able to copy & paste would make editing the text much easier. It’s currently impossible to move paragraphs, and the only way to change the structure of the post is to retype a whole section. Hardly ideal. Pasting hyperlinks isn’t possible, either! I had to write down each link first and manually add it to the post later.

Image Naming
Would you like to know the filename for that Fallout image? l-640-360-ef51-c6f9-685d-4cb7-8210-290be6fafa65.jpeg. Yep, I just typed that on the iPhone keyboard. Just like I manually added the “img scr” of that image to yesterday’s post (after copying the name to my notebook first). I have no idea if that’s the iPhone’s internal filename for the image, or just a weird checksum/hash produced by the Wordpress app. Either way, it’s way too unwieldly - my 128bit wireless WEP key is less cryptic!
You’ll also notice that the first image in the post isn’t working, and I have no idea why! I cross-checked the links about five times, and they look identical. One works, one is broken. Obviously, copy & paste would once again be very helpful here.

Image Handling
Image handling in general leaves a lot to be desired. I was able to find the image through Google image search and save it to my camera roll, and I was able to upload and add it to the post. But there’s no way to specify where the image is added to the post (always at the end), and the only way to apply image formatting is to display the fullsize image, then use “width” and “height” tags.
Forget all the fancy media management that you get on the web (which doesn’t work via iPhone Safari, by the way). This is as barebone as it gets, and could use some serious improvement.

HTML Tag Support
Typing HTML code via the iPhone keyboard is a major pain in the ass. Just getting to the bracket characters is annoying. And then the iPhone spellchecker keeps trying to correct the tags because it doesn’t know terms like “href”, “em” and “img”. It would be very helpful if the Wordpress app provided some extra help to insert HTML tags.

The More Tag
Adding the More tag to split a post can be done manually, but it totally breaks the app. It will only retrieve the post up to the break, ignoring everything afterwards. You can log into the database with Safari and fix the article by deleting More, but it’s cumbersome.

Post Preview
Finally, the post preview function is unreliable, making it hard to review the post before final posting. Sometimes, the theme cannot be retrieved, and I just get the barebones version of the text. But at least I can read the post that way! When the app tries to actually use the theme, I end up with a 404 on my page instead of seeing the post. Not life-shattering, but annoying for sure.

Those were my main observations. Wordpress For iPhone is definitely a neat little app, and it’s free to boot! It already works great for small updates. But there’s room for improvement: I estimate that I could have written my Fallout post 3-4x faster on a traditional computer. That’s a bit too slow! I’m not looking for identical times, the iPhone keyboard will never be as fast as a real computer. But improvements could bring down the difference to roughly 2x.

Not all of the problems mentioned here can fixed by the Wordpress team. Copy & paste abilities sound like something that needs to be addressed by Apple, for example. Other problems are my own - I just need to figure out the structure of the post ahead of time! I’m relying too much on the editing capabilities in the first place; generations of writers have gotten by using hand-written notes and typewriters. I need to get more used to that style of working!
But other features belong in the app and would be much appreciated. Better image support and help for HTML tags would help a lot, as would some way to fetch hyperlinks from the Safari address bar.

Our vacation is winding down, and with it the need to use the app. But Germany is coming up, and I’m looking forward to seeing how far it will have come next year for the next vacation

Update: All problems now fixed through regular Wordpress!

When it comes to Bethesda’s big, open world RPGs, I have a predictable pattern: I will hopelessly fall for every other game that they release. When The Elder Scrolls: Arena was released in 1994, I was all over it. Then Daggerfall hit the streets, and I never got past the initial quests. Several years later I was hooked again, dedicating hundreds of hours to Morrowind; only to be left cold by the even grander follow-up, Oblivion. If this alternating outburst of enthusiasm sounds weird, there’s a simple reason for it: Bethesda’s games are so comprehensive that I can’t play more than one every few years. When Oblivion arrived to much fanfare, I found that I just hadn’t recovered enough from Morrowind; I was feeling like I was replaying the same game again. I knew how much I should have been loving Oblivion and actually bought it for all available platforms. But every time I stopped playing early on.

Enter Fallout 3! Hardly a classic Elder Scrolls game, but let’s be honest: I didn’t really buy this game because of the Fallout legacy. I bought it with one expectation, and one expectation alone: to get a post-apocalyptic Elder Scrolls to dig my teeth into. Additional time has passed since my Oblivion apathy, the game boasts a new, fresh setting - and I’m happy to report that I am once again hopelessly addicted to a Bethesda RPG.

There’s a simple reason why these games are so captivating: the entry barrier to the myriad of available quests and activities is low, and the completion of every task contributes to the advancement of the character. It doesn’t matter if I’m making headway into the Capitol Wasteland as part of the main quest to track down our father, or just selling off some scrap metal that I found in a little dungeon off the main path: every action feels meaningful, even when it’s just simple, aimless exploration. And as I complete one task, the next one is very easy to get into. Sure, it’s late and I should go to bed - but quickly checking out that old, abandoned subway over there can’t hurt, can it?
On top of this, Fallout 3 provides the great feeling of leaving a mark on the world. The Galaxy News Radio, whose DJ provides running commentary on the player’s achievements, is specific enough to make me feel good, but speculative enough to grow the myth of “Mr 101″.

The huge open world is key to Fallout 3’s success, but that freedom of choice can easily leave the player paralyzed. To add some structure to the beginning of Fallout 3, Bethesda has the player hunting down his father, James; the only friendly face in the brave new world outside Vault 101. This motivation works because there actually is a bond between the player and the father character. Too many times, openings of games ask us to accept that a person is important to the main character - even though we, as the players, have only just met the guy and couldn’t care less. Fallout 3 does a pretty good job at establishing James. Dad has been there from the beginning: he taught us how to walk and interact with the world, he showed us that we’re SPECIAL, and he gave us our first gun. And Liam Neeson is the perfect actor for this role - he has one of those voices that are familiar and reassuring, without drawing attention to the actor behind it.

Even so, I felt a familiar pinch of “Now what?” when I first emerged from Vault 101: a huge, monotonous wasteland without consistent roads and recognizable landmarks. Sure, that brings me on the same page as the game character, but it’s quite disorienting. Especially when you consider that the PIP Boy’s area map and compass UI aren’t sufficiently explained during the tutorials.

Then again, it’s the “Capital Wasteland”! That doesn’t sound all that different from the Washington DC that I remember! Of course Legend Entertainment was located just outside DC, and as much as I loved my time there, my memories of the actual area are that of a social wasteland: a city that nobody actually lived in, a suburbia dominated by lawyers, politicians, defense contractors (and other career people) that changed every four years with the administration, and a hot/humid climate that doesn’t feel too far off from the game. I recognize quite a few of the landmarks, and details like the square “honey-combed” ceilings in the subway stations are vintage DC. Very cool.

Through my time at Legend, I’m fortunate enough to know a few people who worked on Fallout 3. What can I say, they have done an excellent job! Sure, beneath all the euphoria there’s a few small gripes with the game: the UI is somewhat complicated; the soundtrack, as atmosperic as it is, gets repetative too quickly (but I’ll happily admit that this is the first time I’d ever heard the original version of Anything Goes - I’d only known the Indiana Jones version); and the game crashes my 360 occasionally (there’s reports of a few showstopper bugs, as well, but I haven’t run into any of those yet). But those are very minor quibbles, and they are immediately forgiven and forgotten when playing the game. Graphics are excellent for a roleplaying game of this size (only item on the wish list: better shadowing); the writing is good (love the idea behind The Church of The Atom!); the combat system works well with its mix of action points and straight FPS aiming; and the gameplay…well, we’ve already talked a lot about the gameplay. It keeps you hooked. All in all a great package, I’m pretty sure that I’m going to finish Fallout 3. And who knows: when the next Elder Scrolls arrives, enough time might have passed for me to have fully “recovered” from Fallout, and get into that one. I certainly hope so.

Depeche Mode
Okay, so I’m a huge Depeche Mode fan. But really, can you imagine anybody who wouldn’t want to play Personal Jesus and Enjoy The Silence?

Genesis
Give me Congo, Mama and No Son Of Mine any day! While we’re at it, throw some of Peter Gabriel’s solo stuff in there!

Enjoying… Six days in Maui.
Reading… The Phoenix Endangered (Mercedes Lackey and James Mallory). Simplistic, but decent beach reading.
Watching… Battlestar Galactica Season 3. Yes, I’m behind.
Playing… Fallout 3. Well, at least I would be if I was home. I’m addicted.
Dreading… Having to leave Maui.
Starting… Something new at work. That was the one bad thing about going on vacation this week, work is exciting right now!

President Bush passes his legacy to the next President of the United States, Barrack Obama.

Update: It’s hard to be cynical after hearing both John McCain and Barrack Obama’s speeches tonight. I think McCain conceded gracefully, and is finding back to the old McCain that gained so much respect across party lines before the election campaign demons took over. And Obama was very good at being upbeat yet realistic, and rallying people for what will be a very difficult fight.

“Yes we can!”

I believe that, and if the entire country gets behind that message, we will turn the US around!

“We trade honesty for companionship.”
Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles

“Women think they’re so clever because they can fake an orgasm for the sake of a relationship, but men can fake a whole relationship for the sake of an orgasm.”
Playboy’s Party Jokes

(And no, neither of these quotes pertain to my relationship with Victoria I just thought they were clever observations.)

Looking for alternate universe with 48-hour days. Can be second hand, but must be in good condition.

If there haven’t been many blog updates in the last week, you can lay the blame squarely on the shoulders of Dead Space. In times when I normally write my posts or work on BBelief2008, I have been playing Dead Space instead. When I should have been going to bed around midnight, I kept playing Dead Space instead. It’s one of the best games I’ve experienced this year.

(The following text won’t contain any story spoilers, and no major game spoilers. But if you prefer to not know anything about the game, you might want to stop reading right here.)

Dead Space is a case study in focus and execution. There are a few novel touches (like the 3D inventory and 3D UI screens), but when you get to the bottom of it, there’s a preexisting example for every one of Dead Space’s game elements. Dismembering enemies? Soldier of Fortune 2. In-game economics and stores? System Shock 2 (and, more recently, Bioshock). Node upgrade system: Final Fantasy X/2. Resurrection monsters: Archvile from Doom 2. Zero gravity sections: Prey. And of course Doom 3 paved the way, by the way of Event Horizon.

So Dead Space doesn’t do many new things. But it does everything incredibly well. The individual elements come together perfectly, all gameplay systems are polished from beginning to end, and I applaud the designers (and EA) for seeing through the horror theme much more consequently than Doom 3 did. Dismembering the monsters is satisfying, there’s a reasonable amount of shock situations, and the player is never swimming in super weapons and other resources. The harder Dead Space gets, the more satisfying the experience becomes. I know several people who went for the “Plasma Cutter only” achievement on their first playthrough, and while I’m not quite as hardcore, I have only been using two weapons myself (the plasma cutter and pulse rifle). I might be missing some additional content by not buying additional weapons - but the game doesn’t need them! Even after 10+ hours, and with just a couple of weapons, the shooting doesn’t get stale. That’s a real testament to Dead Space’s core gameplay design.

On top of all that, Dead Space’s environments look gorgeous, with most impressively designed real time lighting. At the core, Dead Space uses a different lighting approach than Doom 3, but the results are similar. (If I wanted to nitpick, I could complain about the low resolution of some shadow maps. But everybody has to deal with limited texture memory.)

My major complaint about Dead Space is that it actually feels too long. That’s not a criticism of the game’s actual playing time, but points out problematic MO design. From the moment we arrive on the USG Ishimura, player character Isaac Clarke (Get it? Isaac Asimov + Arthur C. Clarke) gets his mission objectives from non-player characters. “Do this. Do that. Bend over backwards. Good, now we need to find these key cards and power up this piece of machinery.” At no point in the game do we get the feeling that we are actually driving the action of the game. It’s always reactive, and the entire game becomes an exercise in fetch quests. That isn’t very empowering, but at least it’s standard fare. The much bigger problem is that we don’t believe in any of the quests! Imagine a mission commander who tells the player at the beginning of chapter 2 that “hey, if we just do this and that, we can refire the engines of this ship and get out of here!” Of course we won’t believe that! It’s like reading a 400 page book in which the characters supposedly find the solution to all problems on page 80 - as the reader, we just look at the remaining 320 pages and go “Uhm… no.”
Dead Space is like that, with the added problem of the player not knowing how many pages of the book are left. When the fetch quests just keep on coming towards the end of the game, the game feels aimless and starts dragging out.

But never mind these minor quibbles with the story. I absolutely love this game! Part of that might be my sensibilities - Dead Space feels like a “level designer’s game”. I don’t know how well this perception aligns with the actual development realities, but Dead Space just screams of this design approach: give the design power to a group of experienced, hardcore level designers, let them do what’s best for the game, cut all the marketing crap, and you get an awesome game. The end result will feel as tight, focused and right as Dead Space does. Maybe you won’t end up with a game that captures the mass market. But you do get a 90% game, and you get hardcore players (and the industry) raving.

As for me, I’ll stop raving now. I think I’m getting close to the end of the game