Psychonauts

OK, Psychonauts is a bit of an older title (released in 2005), but don't let that keep you from trying it out... it's one of those rare cases where it really holds up well over the years. I expect that's because of the art style of the game... since it doesn't take itself too seriously, they use an offbeat, not-quite-cartoony visual style that I wouldn't expect to change much if the game were remade for today's consoles.

As far as what the game is, it's a 3d platformer, following the exploits of the young protagonist Raz, a budding young psychic, starting with his break-in into a government-run summer camp for psychic children, and running from that odd starting point to progressively stranger encounters. All the while, Raz improves his powers and adds new ones along the way, which he can use however he wants thereafter to get past the challenges he faces.

Of course, a good platformer needs a variety of levels, if it doesn't want to bore the player through repetition. In the case of Psychonauts, this is accomplished by having Raz enter the minds of various people to meet his goals (well, mostly people at least... I guess it depends on how you view giant mutated lungfish, for example). Their personalities, histories, and, in some cases, mental health problems, shape the worlds you explore... and, if you care to look around hard enough, you might find out things that, while not strictly necessary to the overall story, make the individual characters more than the bare-bones stereotypes they play to move the story forward.

Overall, it's a unique little game, and I mean that in a good way. It's a solid platformer, a fun world that doesn't take itself too seriously, and mostly avoids the trap of send 'em back to the start if they don't do well (although, some of the final levels of the "meat circus" had me cursing the designers for not spacing their respawns to my liking). It's a $15 (1200 point) download on the Xbox360, probably less for one of the legal PC-version downloads, or you might even find the original disc floating around a used game store for Xbox or PS2. If you have the hardware to support, I think you'll find it worth your while... play time for me was about 15 hours front to back.

FCC ISP regulation battle part 2: Verizon joins in

Well, I'm mildly surprised it took a whole month... after the FCC put forth new restrictions on Internet providers, Verizon has gone to the courts seeking to have the FCC slapped down again (link). I'm sure Comcast would have been happy to jump in again, but they had that whole merger with NBC in front of the FCC already.

Oh well, no great skin off my back... I don't use Verizon, and had no plans of jumping to them with the disgruntled AT&T iPhone lemmings. I'll just sit back and watch the fun for now.

Time for a new toy: Kobo e-reader

When I was younger, I used to, almost literally, devour books. I was an avid enough reader, especially of fantasy and science fiction, that I routinely read while walking from place to place, during church services, and so forth. That changed a fair deal when I was able to afford my first computer, and my more obsessive qualities transferred to that medium, but I still read with great regularity. In recent years, though, I have definitely lost the drive to read... there are too many games, cartoons, movies, etc. to take up large chunks of time. The most "reading" I've done of late has been manga, usually in snippets here and there, occasionally getting sucked into a volume long enough to finish it at one reading... and even then, that takes about an hour, tops.

Over the weekend, Borders held a sale on their Kobo e-reader, bringing the price down to about $100 from its regular $140, which was enough to trigger some thought on my part... what kept me from reading at home? Paperbacks of the sort I tend to like have a fair degree of heft to them, and, while bookmarkable, require some manipulation to get back to where you left off... and, if you have a short reading window, remembering exactly where you left off in a couple of pages of text can take a bit as well. An e-reader takes care of most of those issues for you, plus you don't accumulate physical books all over the house... and the Kobo is a bare-bones device (which warms my engineer heart), supports standard publishing formats (so you're not locked into one store's goods), and comes pre-loaded with 100 books.

So, yeah, I bit... and so far, I'm not sad I did. Those pre-loaded books are "classics", of course, which works for me. I tried out the intended store mechanism to download another free book, which was straightforward enough... but, especially at first, I'm likely to take full advantage of some of the legal, free sources for books online. For example, Project Gutenberg, for some older titles like The Devil's Dictionary... or the Baen Free Library, when I'm looking for a new sci-fi series to get lured into. It may take me a bit longer to get through some of these titles than when I was younger, but even 5 or 10 minutes at a shot should get me some good entertainment value for the money.

Sony, digging their hole deeper

I haven't posted much about my ongoing displeasure with Sony's PS3 shenanigans, and nothing since August of last year... mostly because developments I've seen have had that icky "pirate aftertaste" about them, and I held out some sliver of hope, however small, that Sony might see (or be forced to see, thanks to the class-action lawsuit against them) the error of their ways. That hope is pretty well gone, since they seem to have lost even the basic concept of how the Internet works, now that they're trying to sue a group of hackers, including foreign nationals, in a California court... not for monetary damages, but just to get them to stop posting how to jailbreak your PS3 (link).

For those of you less-obsessed than I, here's a brief rundown of how we've gotten to where we are today: Sony's first-generation "fat" PS3 consoles came with an "Other OS" option, useful for hobbyists (such as myself) who wanted to play with things like Linux on their consoles... in part, at least, this option was likely included to help dodge tariffs on importing dedicated videogame consoles. Years down the road, Sony releases redesigned "slim" PS3 consoles that lack this feature. All fine and well, until April of last year, when Sony retroactively removes Other OS from the fat consoles, in response to a hacker working out how to access some hardware Sony didn't intend Other OS to have access to, alleging security concerns.

In removing Other OS, Sony managed to annoy some of the most technically-savvy customers they had, including people who don't like being told there are arbitrary limits on what they can do with hardware they purchased. First, somebody came up with a USB dongle that used, if I recall properly, a Sony-provided "service mode" to let you install programs on your PS3, bypassing their security checks that way... Sony made relatively quick work of that problem by getting the dongles seized by customs through court order. More recently, hackers have discovered a "master key" Sony uses to verify software as valid for install, posting video proof and key details on the Internet... details that Sony apparently can't fix without breaking their own systems.

So, for those of you so inclined, with PS3 systems of any age... the details are now out there to install whatever you want or can find on your PS3, and I don't expect that to change, no matter what legal tactics Sony employs, because the details are "in the wild" on the Internet. Myself, I'm a bit paranoid when it comes to large corporations in US courts... since Sony started the legal ball rolling today, I'm willing to wait for a bit and verify that this does, in fact, fall under the jailbreaking exception of the DMCA. If it does, by that time, I'm sure the tools will be available to back up my current firmware and programs (just to be on the safe side), then wipe my PS3 clean and see what fun I can find in the way of operating systems, media center software, and the like. This should be fun to watch, from here on out.

Miner Dig Deep

If you own an Xbox360, and have a spare 80 points lying around your account, you could do much worse than to spend it on Miner Dig Deep. Yes, for $1, you can get a dirt-simple mining game, with graphics, sound, and gameplay much better than you might expect for that measly sum. Just be warned... it's an addictive little toy. For all you can do a trip down into the mine in 5-10 minutes, I've got one game I've been playing for about 5 hours or so, with no end in sight... it's got that nebulous "one more round" quality that only the best games bring up. I'd write more, but... I've got some digging to get back to... ;)