Netflix Instant is awesome but the biggest issue is still that so much content is missing, and even worse, somethings get removed from Instant! ( I'm looking at you Star Trek remastered first season, grrr ) Instant was a godsend to combat the Renter's Remorse we all felt when we didn't want to watch the movie we had a home, but it's so far from being perfect with the large swath of missing content.
I'm not completely certain why everything isn't on Instant but it would seem that one of the main reasons is to spurn on DVD and Blu-ray sales. If you can watch something on Instant than why would you ever want to buy it? Fair e-nough.
The great thing about Instant is that it's instant (duh), well more specifically that you can decide what you want to watch, then watch it right away with no snail mail delay. Instant gratification, renter's remorse is dead!
So you want it right now, and the copyright owners want you to painfully wait long enough that you eventually get fed up and buy your own shiny disc to love.
I think there's a beneficial compromise - here's my idea.
Create a new category of Instant content, call it Instant-less, and put in there everything not currently in Instant, then just stream it like Instant. Now everything is streamable to customers, and it's available right after they decide they want to see it. Yay for NetFlix users!
Ok, to make the copyright owners happy what we do is add a delay before you can do this again, a delay that mimics the physical constraints of returning a disc and waiting for another, the part I can only assume the copyright holders like. I don't know what this would be, but for me I can turn a disc around in 3 business days in the mail, so let's err on the side of caution and say 5 days, heck make it a week I'd be quite fine with that and so would my two week old copy of Sherlock Holmes. Yay for Copyright holders!
So, you decide you want to watch something that just came out on dvd, find it on Instant-less and enjoy it. Then 5 days later, come next weekend, you repeat it all again. All the while the current Instant content is still there to fill any other watching you want to do.
The Good
So here we have a way for users to have an even better NetFlix service where they no longer have to worry about renting something they don't end up wanting a few days later, and rights holders can still maintain the delayed gratification which they believe helps cause us to want to buy actual discs.
But there's more. This is even better for rights holders because it gives watchers the ability to impulse watch their content which they couldn't do before because the activation cost of putting something in your queue is a lot higher than simply clicking Play. If something goes in your queue it can unknowingly and accidentally end up in your mail box, so it has to be good to end up in your queue in the first place.
The Hard Part
Alright, now while that all seems fair there's the whole streaming part. Netflix doesn't have the rights to stream the content so they'd have to convince the rights holders that this would work and they can manage the delay lock out correctly so as to maintain the bottle neck in users getting content. It could be tricky, but maybe some studios would go for it, at least for a test.
The Details
There are now three ways to get content.
Disc
Instant
Instant-less
The first two don't change you still get all the current Instant content you want, but we add Instant-less as an alternative to the Disc option. So if a user is on a 3 disc plan, they could make that 2 Discs and 1 Instant-less watch
For each Instant-less watch a user gets:
1. They can't watch another Instant-less movie until 5 days have passed.
2. They can choose to rewatch the previous movie at any time in the 5 days but the 5 day period restarts again when they're done.
So if you have 2 Instant-less views you could watch a new movie on Saturday, then on Sunday through Wednesday you could watch episodes of a TV series from a single disc of that series. Then on Friday ( after your movie view's delay is up ) you could watch something new again at your whim. And if you also had a disc in your plan your kids could be watching Dora in the van the entire month long.
Sunday, July 11, 2010
Sunday, June 6, 2010
House buying! WTF?!
So I recently bought a house and being mostly settled in I wanted to recap the crazy process that is house buying as I discovered. While I hope this exposes some of the less discussed aspect of home buying for those considering it, it is also a bit of a rant, though hopefully a well constructed one for everyone else. ( oh and it's a tad not edited too )
I'll also add foremost that a lot of these issues are trying to be fixed by new companies like RedFin. Being my first home purchase and that I was completely ignorant, I just went the typical route; however, I'd seriously consider RedFin et al. when I buy again.
The Looking
MLS listings are annoying!
So when your realtor sends you listing to look at you get a fairly junky experience, in my experience at least. MLS is a listing system everyone uses and the format is ok, though the features are 1999. You're effectively given a single screen search-result list of places. So for some broad searches you have to scroll through a very long page. You also can't link to a single listing, and getting additional images beyond the first opens a whole new page.
You never meet or talk directly to the sellers
This kind of really annoyed me. Everything you do with the seller is telephoned through your realtor, who telephones it through the sellers realtor who then conveys it to the seller. This makes asking any question an lengthy process with responses nested three deep if not more.
Also, you have no idea what kind of people owned the house before hand. When you buy a used car you get to see who the people are selling it and through that get some idea of how the treated the car. But nope, not with a $100,000s purchase.
The Buying
You have no real idea what your closing costs are until you have to pay them
Closing costs are basically all the things you have to pay for on top of the house and it turns out no one really knows what that value is until pretty much when you have to pay for it, and even then it might be a little wrong.
The problem isn't that the exact value is unknown, it's that any estimate you get will be wildly off. My actual closing costs were just under 2% however my first estimate was something like 5%, and my 'mostly correct' estimate was still several hundred dollars off.
I ended up using all the money I was comfortable spending on the house almost on the nose after closing, but the huge variance that has happening easily could have forced me into spending money I didn't want to or for some people don't even have, and at that point you only have a day or two to come up with it.
Closing Costs make NO SENSE
There are two related problems with Closing Costs which make the above variance in value more understandable.
Closing Costs (CC) are mostly just a necessary annoyance with the process. There are roughly 8 million entities involved in you buying a house and they want money for different things from different people. Closing Costs actually serve as a convenience to handle all of that in one place [ a convenience which you also pay money for in your CC too :) ]. This is basically what Escrow does.
The main issue though is Escrow enters the process at pretty much the end, for me it was the week of closing. So up till then it's all wild guessing because no one else owns this process. For me my Lender tried to fill this role, but ended up doing a poor job at it. I assume all lenders more or less step in for this too. Your lender really wants you to buy a house and they don't want you to realize you don't have enough for CC later so they VASTLY over estimate all the costs. They pick the high end for every sub fee I'm guessing. So for me my initial Good Faid Estimate ( GFE ) from my bank was 5% of my house value. that +3% over what I actually paid, which makes it a completely useless estimate. If I'd actually used that value I wouldn't have been able to afford closing, or I would have had to only put 10% down which would have required changing my loan terms late in the game when I realize I could actually do 20%.
So your lender is trying to be nice and help you out, but they end up kinda failing. What facilitates this even more, is that a lot of the costs they're estimating aren't actually paid to them, so their estimating costs for other companies. It all gets worked out when the big legal guys at Escrow set things in stone, but it really should happen sooner.
So basically it's like you half assing your taxes, thinking you owe $5000 then going to a tax preparer on April 13th to realize it was only $2k. You're happy, but it hurt getting there.
Another wonderful thing here is that your HUD may include severl $1k fees which are then just paid to you by the seller but they still show up as money you owe. yay!
The second issue here is then that your HUD ( the official version of your Closing Costs ) is effectively unreadable and what you're paying for makes no sense. My Closing Agent actually told me he's never seen two HUD formats that look the same. I'm 100% sure they're so confusing to warrant paying people having jobs who can read the forms.
The wonderful thing on mine was in each sub section on mine was summed up to the first value in the section, and it wasn't named something like "Total". Instead is was like "blah blah blah fee" with each following item in that section being "blarg blarg blarg fee". AND, wonder that is wonder, some of those were and some weren't in that first item sum! Ahh it's great :)
Loan terms are poorly conveyed
You have a few ways to tweak your loan based on your personal preferences and circumstances. This is great! But it's kinda hard to really see the dimensions offered or eyeball a change etc. Often times I see a static listing of rates for a single situation then a run on sentence describing how you can change that rate by putting more down, or simply paying a higher fee up front. This is something that doing a little studying on what all terms mean will vastly help. LTV, what a 'point' actually means to your lender, etc etc.
Whose who?
This is probably one of those areas where you should just not try and figure it out. It turns out the Real estate market is fairly incestuous and has multiple personalities.
When you buy you'll end up having a Title Company and a Title Insurance Company. In my case they had different names and seemed to serve different purposes, yet as it turned out they were effectively the same company. I actually got mail from one on letterhead from the other for instance. Oh and it turns out all the Real Estate companies in the area owned a partial interest in both also.
The missing Nexus
To round out why the Closing Costs make no sense you should understand that there's no single central information Nexus yet there are at lease 10 different entities involved in your home purchase and it's never clear or certain who is or will communicate with who.
A great example of this is my home appraisal. The appraisal was only just ordered a month before closing and in WA state Lenders can't ask about the appraisal for at least a week. I was told it could take up to a week to schedule the appraisal, then who knows when it'll be scheduled for, then a report has to be created and then the Lender has to review that report. It's 4 weeks out till closing and I can see a worst case scenario of my Loan not being official for 3 more weeks. But oh..., actually the Appraisal already happened and my realtor was just never notified about any of it, and the bank will get the report in a few days. fun...
Ca Ca Condo!
So as it turns out my place is actually a Condo as far as people who charge you money are concerned. From what I can tell this basically means: I don't own every single part of the property, and that an HOA controls the rest. So I'm in what we'd call a TownHome, 3 floors with units on both sides. So I own the walls in and the HOA owns the roof, lawn etc.
The reason this matters is that your Lender is all about risk as they technically own the property until you pay off the loan. So they care about your financial risk in paying back the loan and the property risk in your ability to keep up the property. Ah, but when someone else, the HOA, controls part of that, your loan is riskier.
This meant two very annoying things for me.
1. My loan terms were worse. I had to pay, as a fee, 0.75% ( 3/4 points ). I guess it's effectively a one time insurance fee from the Lender's perspective. I called around too and this is fairly standard. The really annoying this is, I've never seen this kind of restriction on any rate forms. So if you're going to buy, let your lender know if it's a Condo early on, or ask about this if you aren't sure what you're buying. They were nice enough to waive the fee if you put down 40% though....
2. The Lender wants to know a lot about the HOA and community. This is quite reasonable, but from what I can tell HOA administers are on level with Payroll companies, not as sophisticated as they really should be. In the end I had to pay some company $120 for a sheet of questions with yes/no answers, and then $30 for them to copy those answers onto a form from my Lender. Oh and only 1 of 4 faxes they ever sent out made it.
Reserve Report
I won't say too much about this as it's more about the place you're buying, but if you're going for a condo, look into the Reserve Report and how 'healthy' the reserve is. An unhealthy reserve seems like the best signal that the HOA dues will increase. I say a tad more about it at the end of this too.
In Conclusion
It occurs to me that I may have been just a tad more hands on than the average home buyer. I at least skimmed every word of every document, and ended up understanding every cost on my HUD. I can't say actually reading any of the documents mattered. You have no real choice if you find something you don't like; Your options are buy or don't buy. I guess I at least wanted to have some idea of what things might affect my loan etc, or if something does happen, some quick idea of if it's something covered in those documents.
Understanding my HUD was likely also pointless in that I didn't find any errors, but it did help me realize that a decent bit of what I paid during Closing were things I'd just have to pay soon anyway if they weren't in closing, so they felt less like arbitrary fees and more just pre paying stuff. Some examples are: First two months of HOA dues and property taxes and the interest-only part of my loan for the rest of the month which I closed in.
The one thing I'm really glad I did read through though were the HOA docs. These are likely the things that will have the closest effect on you. They let you know if your potential neighbors had complaints against them, what repairs had already been done, what construction things had to be fixed after the fact for some reason, how much your future-repairs Reserve is funded and so forth. If you pay HOA fees you should get a good idea of where it goes, and the current health of the Reserve will give you some idea of if it'll likely go up.
I'll also add foremost that a lot of these issues are trying to be fixed by new companies like RedFin. Being my first home purchase and that I was completely ignorant, I just went the typical route; however, I'd seriously consider RedFin et al. when I buy again.
The Looking
MLS listings are annoying!
You never meet or talk directly to the sellers
This kind of really annoyed me. Everything you do with the seller is telephoned through your realtor, who telephones it through the sellers realtor who then conveys it to the seller. This makes asking any question an lengthy process with responses nested three deep if not more.
Also, you have no idea what kind of people owned the house before hand. When you buy a used car you get to see who the people are selling it and through that get some idea of how the treated the car. But nope, not with a $100,000s purchase.
The Buying
You have no real idea what your closing costs are until you have to pay them
Closing costs are basically all the things you have to pay for on top of the house and it turns out no one really knows what that value is until pretty much when you have to pay for it, and even then it might be a little wrong.
The problem isn't that the exact value is unknown, it's that any estimate you get will be wildly off. My actual closing costs were just under 2% however my first estimate was something like 5%, and my 'mostly correct' estimate was still several hundred dollars off.
I ended up using all the money I was comfortable spending on the house almost on the nose after closing, but the huge variance that has happening easily could have forced me into spending money I didn't want to or for some people don't even have, and at that point you only have a day or two to come up with it.
Closing Costs make NO SENSE
There are two related problems with Closing Costs which make the above variance in value more understandable.
Closing Costs (CC) are mostly just a necessary annoyance with the process. There are roughly 8 million entities involved in you buying a house and they want money for different things from different people. Closing Costs actually serve as a convenience to handle all of that in one place [ a convenience which you also pay money for in your CC too :) ]. This is basically what Escrow does.
The main issue though is Escrow enters the process at pretty much the end, for me it was the week of closing. So up till then it's all wild guessing because no one else owns this process. For me my Lender tried to fill this role, but ended up doing a poor job at it. I assume all lenders more or less step in for this too. Your lender really wants you to buy a house and they don't want you to realize you don't have enough for CC later so they VASTLY over estimate all the costs. They pick the high end for every sub fee I'm guessing. So for me my initial Good Faid Estimate ( GFE ) from my bank was 5% of my house value. that +3% over what I actually paid, which makes it a completely useless estimate. If I'd actually used that value I wouldn't have been able to afford closing, or I would have had to only put 10% down which would have required changing my loan terms late in the game when I realize I could actually do 20%.
So your lender is trying to be nice and help you out, but they end up kinda failing. What facilitates this even more, is that a lot of the costs they're estimating aren't actually paid to them, so their estimating costs for other companies. It all gets worked out when the big legal guys at Escrow set things in stone, but it really should happen sooner.
So basically it's like you half assing your taxes, thinking you owe $5000 then going to a tax preparer on April 13th to realize it was only $2k. You're happy, but it hurt getting there.
Another wonderful thing here is that your HUD may include severl $1k fees which are then just paid to you by the seller but they still show up as money you owe. yay!
The second issue here is then that your HUD ( the official version of your Closing Costs ) is effectively unreadable and what you're paying for makes no sense. My Closing Agent actually told me he's never seen two HUD formats that look the same. I'm 100% sure they're so confusing to warrant paying people having jobs who can read the forms.
The wonderful thing on mine was in each sub section on mine was summed up to the first value in the section, and it wasn't named something like "Total". Instead is was like "blah blah blah fee" with each following item in that section being "blarg blarg blarg fee". AND, wonder that is wonder, some of those were and some weren't in that first item sum! Ahh it's great :)
Loan terms are poorly conveyed
You have a few ways to tweak your loan based on your personal preferences and circumstances. This is great! But it's kinda hard to really see the dimensions offered or eyeball a change etc. Often times I see a static listing of rates for a single situation then a run on sentence describing how you can change that rate by putting more down, or simply paying a higher fee up front. This is something that doing a little studying on what all terms mean will vastly help. LTV, what a 'point' actually means to your lender, etc etc.
Whose who?
This is probably one of those areas where you should just not try and figure it out. It turns out the Real estate market is fairly incestuous and has multiple personalities.
When you buy you'll end up having a Title Company and a Title Insurance Company. In my case they had different names and seemed to serve different purposes, yet as it turned out they were effectively the same company. I actually got mail from one on letterhead from the other for instance. Oh and it turns out all the Real Estate companies in the area owned a partial interest in both also.
The missing Nexus
To round out why the Closing Costs make no sense you should understand that there's no single central information Nexus yet there are at lease 10 different entities involved in your home purchase and it's never clear or certain who is or will communicate with who.
A great example of this is my home appraisal. The appraisal was only just ordered a month before closing and in WA state Lenders can't ask about the appraisal for at least a week. I was told it could take up to a week to schedule the appraisal, then who knows when it'll be scheduled for, then a report has to be created and then the Lender has to review that report. It's 4 weeks out till closing and I can see a worst case scenario of my Loan not being official for 3 more weeks. But oh..., actually the Appraisal already happened and my realtor was just never notified about any of it, and the bank will get the report in a few days. fun...
Ca Ca Condo!
So as it turns out my place is actually a Condo as far as people who charge you money are concerned. From what I can tell this basically means: I don't own every single part of the property, and that an HOA controls the rest. So I'm in what we'd call a TownHome, 3 floors with units on both sides. So I own the walls in and the HOA owns the roof, lawn etc.
The reason this matters is that your Lender is all about risk as they technically own the property until you pay off the loan. So they care about your financial risk in paying back the loan and the property risk in your ability to keep up the property. Ah, but when someone else, the HOA, controls part of that, your loan is riskier.
This meant two very annoying things for me.
1. My loan terms were worse. I had to pay, as a fee, 0.75% ( 3/4 points ). I guess it's effectively a one time insurance fee from the Lender's perspective. I called around too and this is fairly standard. The really annoying this is, I've never seen this kind of restriction on any rate forms. So if you're going to buy, let your lender know if it's a Condo early on, or ask about this if you aren't sure what you're buying. They were nice enough to waive the fee if you put down 40% though....
2. The Lender wants to know a lot about the HOA and community. This is quite reasonable, but from what I can tell HOA administers are on level with Payroll companies, not as sophisticated as they really should be. In the end I had to pay some company $120 for a sheet of questions with yes/no answers, and then $30 for them to copy those answers onto a form from my Lender. Oh and only 1 of 4 faxes they ever sent out made it.
Reserve Report
I won't say too much about this as it's more about the place you're buying, but if you're going for a condo, look into the Reserve Report and how 'healthy' the reserve is. An unhealthy reserve seems like the best signal that the HOA dues will increase. I say a tad more about it at the end of this too.
In Conclusion
It occurs to me that I may have been just a tad more hands on than the average home buyer. I at least skimmed every word of every document, and ended up understanding every cost on my HUD. I can't say actually reading any of the documents mattered. You have no real choice if you find something you don't like; Your options are buy or don't buy. I guess I at least wanted to have some idea of what things might affect my loan etc, or if something does happen, some quick idea of if it's something covered in those documents.
Understanding my HUD was likely also pointless in that I didn't find any errors, but it did help me realize that a decent bit of what I paid during Closing were things I'd just have to pay soon anyway if they weren't in closing, so they felt less like arbitrary fees and more just pre paying stuff. Some examples are: First two months of HOA dues and property taxes and the interest-only part of my loan for the rest of the month which I closed in.
The one thing I'm really glad I did read through though were the HOA docs. These are likely the things that will have the closest effect on you. They let you know if your potential neighbors had complaints against them, what repairs had already been done, what construction things had to be fixed after the fact for some reason, how much your future-repairs Reserve is funded and so forth. If you pay HOA fees you should get a good idea of where it goes, and the current health of the Reserve will give you some idea of if it'll likely go up.
Sunday, March 7, 2010
The Reason Behind the Seasons
I've become pretty curious about the seasons lately. Like a lot of scientific things I know enough to have a mostly informed conversation about the seasons, but for whatever reason I really wanted to understand all the levels of what was going on and I learned a few things which I will now put in bullet points ( sans bullets! ).
1. The earth is closest to the sun in January and furthest in June.
So the orbit is elliptical but only barely so, the furthest point is only ~3% more than the closest. Though that is still 3.1 million miles which is 400 Earths. You'd think that would matter for something, but nope. The closest point is much colder than the furthest for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere
2. The tilt is the main reason for seasonal differences.
The tilt of the earth is 23.5 degrees which at it's extreme accounts for a distance difference between Summer and Winter of at most 3200 mi at the poles (Assuming I did my trig correctly. )
So a straight distance of 3 million miles further from the sun doesn't matter but a tilt difference of 3200 miles apparently does. gees.
It turns out the reason for this is that the energy the sun transfers to us doesn't degrade much with that 3 million mile distance when it hits the earth directly ( i.e. around the equator ), but the tilt causes the energy towards the poles to get to be spread out and have less effect. Wikipedia gives us a good example of this.
So with a 30 degree tilt the energy is roughly 50% less compact meaning it's cooler per unit of area.
Now this made mathematical sense but it didn't make physical sense. How do you make energy less compact exactly? After thinking for a while I realized energy is conveyed as particles and by having one particle travel further ( due to the earth being at an angle ) than it's neighbor means the energy it imparts to the earth will be more spread out and less dense.
This made a bit of sense for say the US which is in the middle of the Northern Hemisphere, but what about the poles? Shouldn't they get a ton of heat in the summer and as much non heat in the winter? Such that you'd expect all the ice to completely melt in the summer?
3. The North Pole ( Arctic ) has weird days and warm waters.
Aside from the fact that the North Pole has 24 days in the summer and 24 nights in the winter, the key piece of info is that the sun is never directly above the pole, so it's always hitting the pole at an angle so the energy is always spread out. In addition the energy is in the form of radiation and snow and ice reflect around 70% of that away in the spring; though it does go down to 20% in the summer, however there's often cloud cover in the summer and that energy is still spread out and less 'effective.' So basically it's 24 hours days are just mediocre. The Arctic even has fairly warm oceans that never get much cooler than -2C and the sun still doesn't have a huge effect. (Wikipedia once again.)
4. The South Pole is very very cold.
Antarctica has much of the same properties though it is notoriously much much colder. So while the Arctic has large fluctuations in it's ice pack, the Antarctic doesn't. The South Pole gets a lot less love than the North Pole, so the best I can figure is that it is so much cooler due to a constant cold current (wikipedia) that circles the continent and keeps warm water away. This lets the ice persist which feeds back and causes the air to be cooler. I suppose if the North Pole wasn't surrounded by a lot of land it to might have a similar feature.
This pretty much satisfies my curiosity. There's a lot more going on at each level of this but digging through the layers goes a long way.
1. The earth is closest to the sun in January and furthest in June.
Periapsis is the closest point, Apoasis is the furthest.
So the orbit is elliptical but only barely so, the furthest point is only ~3% more than the closest. Though that is still 3.1 million miles which is 400 Earths. You'd think that would matter for something, but nope. The closest point is much colder than the furthest for those of us in the Northern Hemisphere
2. The tilt is the main reason for seasonal differences.
The tilt of the earth is 23.5 degrees which at it's extreme accounts for a distance difference between Summer and Winter of at most 3200 mi at the poles (Assuming I did my trig correctly. )
So a straight distance of 3 million miles further from the sun doesn't matter but a tilt difference of 3200 miles apparently does. gees.
It turns out the reason for this is that the energy the sun transfers to us doesn't degrade much with that 3 million mile distance when it hits the earth directly ( i.e. around the equator ), but the tilt causes the energy towards the poles to get to be spread out and have less effect. Wikipedia gives us a good example of this.
So with a 30 degree tilt the energy is roughly 50% less compact meaning it's cooler per unit of area.
Now this made mathematical sense but it didn't make physical sense. How do you make energy less compact exactly? After thinking for a while I realized energy is conveyed as particles and by having one particle travel further ( due to the earth being at an angle ) than it's neighbor means the energy it imparts to the earth will be more spread out and less dense.
This made a bit of sense for say the US which is in the middle of the Northern Hemisphere, but what about the poles? Shouldn't they get a ton of heat in the summer and as much non heat in the winter? Such that you'd expect all the ice to completely melt in the summer?
3. The North Pole ( Arctic ) has weird days and warm waters.
Aside from the fact that the North Pole has 24 days in the summer and 24 nights in the winter, the key piece of info is that the sun is never directly above the pole, so it's always hitting the pole at an angle so the energy is always spread out. In addition the energy is in the form of radiation and snow and ice reflect around 70% of that away in the spring; though it does go down to 20% in the summer, however there's often cloud cover in the summer and that energy is still spread out and less 'effective.' So basically it's 24 hours days are just mediocre. The Arctic even has fairly warm oceans that never get much cooler than -2C and the sun still doesn't have a huge effect. (Wikipedia once again.)
4. The South Pole is very very cold.
Antarctica has much of the same properties though it is notoriously much much colder. So while the Arctic has large fluctuations in it's ice pack, the Antarctic doesn't. The South Pole gets a lot less love than the North Pole, so the best I can figure is that it is so much cooler due to a constant cold current (wikipedia) that circles the continent and keeps warm water away. This lets the ice persist which feeds back and causes the air to be cooler. I suppose if the North Pole wasn't surrounded by a lot of land it to might have a similar feature.
This pretty much satisfies my curiosity. There's a lot more going on at each level of this but digging through the layers goes a long way.
Sunday, January 24, 2010
Seattle Area Board Game Stores
One thing I love about Seattle is how usual the unusual is. One of my hobbies is euro/german style board games and after some hunting I found at least 13 stores in the area that sell them, as well that we have our own Pac NW chain Uncle's Games. One annoying thing though was I could find an inclusive list of them, so I made my own!
Making this map paid off nicely for me as I only had about 6 stores until I solicited for others online, and one of them had a copy of Manila which I've been looking for for a while as it's out of print. This is one of those games that I'll want to hold onto for a long time.
Making this map paid off nicely for me as I only had about 6 stores until I solicited for others online, and one of them had a copy of Manila which I've been looking for for a while as it's out of print. This is one of those games that I'll want to hold onto for a long time.
View Seattle Board Game Stores in a larger map
Sunday, January 17, 2010
inFamous Static Cling
In having finally finished inFamous I feel the need to rant about one more aspect of the game; Cole's inFamous case of static cling. First however, I feel like I've only been conveying bad things about inFamous after my last entry which went after its broken morality system. So I just want to say it's a good game, it lasts a lot longer that Prototype and not in an unnecessary manner, as well it has a flushed out story with well done cut scenes. As far as sandbox games go it keeps you focused and makes the side missions accessible and even fun.
However. Apparently being electric has its down sides, and not one which can easily be solved with drier sheets, or perhaps there are no more drier sheets in this post apocalyptic playground! Cole has an annoying tendency to stick to everything and I really do mean everything. Cole doesn't have super jumping powers so he has to scale buildings, telephone poles, train support beams etc to get around. The problem is for him to scale buildings there have to be realistic things for him to grab onto and climb on and there are almost too many: pipes, floor ledges, intermediate ledges, window ceils, window tops, pillars, grates and random little knobs I'm sure were installed just for him.
This is super useful when you're trying to get up a building but almost infuriating when you're trying to get down, which it turns out is kind of necessary from time to time. It's even worse if you are even slightly near something when you're free falling. Your awesome static cling ability kicks in automatically and you get sucked onto anything you can possibly grab onto! A case in point.
The blue thing below is a blast shard, basically if you collect enough you can hold more power which means you can do more power moves before recharging. I think there's about 350 in the game. Now in this case Cole is climbing up and it's easy enough to get, but if you're on the top of the building coming down, you'll grab onto every damn thing along the way. In this case I think you end up having to 'drop down' 3-4 times, and this is one of the easier ones to get to.
However. Apparently being electric has its down sides, and not one which can easily be solved with drier sheets, or perhaps there are no more drier sheets in this post apocalyptic playground! Cole has an annoying tendency to stick to everything and I really do mean everything. Cole doesn't have super jumping powers so he has to scale buildings, telephone poles, train support beams etc to get around. The problem is for him to scale buildings there have to be realistic things for him to grab onto and climb on and there are almost too many: pipes, floor ledges, intermediate ledges, window ceils, window tops, pillars, grates and random little knobs I'm sure were installed just for him.
This is super useful when you're trying to get up a building but almost infuriating when you're trying to get down, which it turns out is kind of necessary from time to time. It's even worse if you are even slightly near something when you're free falling. Your awesome static cling ability kicks in automatically and you get sucked onto anything you can possibly grab onto! A case in point.
The blue thing below is a blast shard, basically if you collect enough you can hold more power which means you can do more power moves before recharging. I think there's about 350 in the game. Now in this case Cole is climbing up and it's easy enough to get, but if you're on the top of the building coming down, you'll grab onto every damn thing along the way. In this case I think you end up having to 'drop down' 3-4 times, and this is one of the easier ones to get to.
This really isn't that bad though, you hit the drop button a couple times and you're there. I also discovered a bit too late that if you hold the drop button you don't grab on to thing, though I found that kind of annoying to use also.
Let's address the next situation though! In this case the shard is hanging over the edge of the pier. No worries, we'll just walk up to the edge and drop off, only in this case this is as close to the edge as you can actually walk! I imagine this has to be a bug, but damn if it isn't annoying. So here you do a jump and just nudge yourself to the edge to find that Cole now won't just hop off and grab the edge, you have to push against the edge and hit the drop down button, only in a lot of cases it actually will not let you in these situations. I can only imagine this is the games false sense of helping you out.
So now what we do is jump and nudge ourselves off the edge a tad near the shard and hope we grab the edge. And we do! but the edge we end up grabbing is somehow of that white pillar. Say what? So yeah, we jump off that, nudge ourselves a little further away and end up just falling in the water. :(
This wouldn't be so bad except for the part where water kills Cole. Thankfully not too many shards are in this kind of annoying predicament, but it is very frustrating to simply have to give up as dying ends up reviving you at a whole different part of the map.
In Conclusion: In a sequel I would highly recommend Sucker Punch ( a local company in Bellevue! ) to revisit this as an area to polish. Additionally, towards the end of the game I often found myself walking through some of the more oddly shaped environment pieces and in the above example I think the engine thought I was at the edge already. I realize these things aren't easy to do, but sometimes not making the user deal with the worse of these situations (shards which involve jumping around right above water) is the better move.
Water Really?
I have quite a problem with water killing Cole too. I think you could argue that the water is draining Cole of his electricity and he needs it to survive except this isn't stated or reinforced anywhere else. When his body is in the water it never stops sparking electricity, and he doesn't die if he grabs his own head or ties his shoe so it's not a completed circuit thing. When you exhaust all of Cole's electricity he doesn't start dying he just can't use his power, and when he's being shot being full of power doesn't help you live any longer. Further more, if anything it's electricity in water which kills other things ( which it does in the game )
But whatever :)
p.s. It is theoretically possible I mostly wrote this just for the title.
p.s. It is theoretically possible I mostly wrote this just for the title.
Sunday, January 3, 2010
It's Bad to be Good by being Bad
Another day of the long weekend and being a tad ill resulted in more game playing. In this case I remembered I still have Infamous and picked it back up. I've also played Prototype and while I think it might be slightly more enjoyable to me, Infamous is still good and likely better to others. It however fails in it's morality system.
Despite the issues Bioshock had with following through on its morality system, it did make a good incremental step in actually applying morality to games and having the consequences matter; however black and white they may be. Infamous though is just bad in its attempt, and perhaps only helpful in what not to do.
The game is basically you quarantined in a large city with superpowers and stuck between a bunch of cultist anarchists and the Police. The basic morality system is you can either fight of the evil force of the game taking your fellow citizens into account or ignoring them wildly as you tear through the city. You can't max out abilities unless you make a distinct choice in either direction and stick to it. This is thankfully furthered by the game locking out one mission of the other direction each time you finish one.
The execution of this is horribly flawed though which is unfortunate because the story is more filled out story than in Prototype. There are missions through the game and some are 'good' some are 'evil'. These are the main way to advance the degree of whatever morality you choose. Supplementally, there are neutral missions which simply let you get more experience to actually buy power ups.
The flawed part is this
Those neutral/story missions are usually in favor of the citizens, but they can make you more evil! I disabled a couple boats and rescued a few citizens and I become less liked!
Another embodiment of this is that you can 'clean' sections of the city from the cultists by doing missions in them. Some of the missions though specifically force you to choose which moral compass direction you're heading; however the end result is still that that section is cleaned. I let a bomb blow up a police station, and somehow that made the anarchists afraid of that section of the city! Normally you have to take out a local gang of them or remove some poison they're putting in the water.
In hopes of learning from Infamous
Black boxing this, it would look like the developers suffered from tacking on their morality system to a game mechanic which is unfortunately biased in one direction already. In the first case it seems that your level in your moral choice is experience point based so doing a neutral mission can bump you up. The broken part is that the neutral missions are almost always in favor of the citizens, so the end moral shift ends up making no sense if you're evil, and unfortunately hurts an otherwise good story.
The map cleaning falls into this problem also. The game wants to reward you for completing missions by making it easier to get around the city and, given the game's citizen bias, making it safer for the people, but they didn't disable this for those distinct instances where you can do a bad thing.
While I like the morality idea, I do really feel like they took it all a step back by it not only make no difference, but actually have backwards outcomes. I played 'evil' because I only plan on playing once and it was suggested it's more fun. I hope playing the good route only works out better.
(Full disclosure: I haven't finished inFamous, though I'd be really surprised if that somehow changed all these backwards consequences)
Despite the issues Bioshock had with following through on its morality system, it did make a good incremental step in actually applying morality to games and having the consequences matter; however black and white they may be. Infamous though is just bad in its attempt, and perhaps only helpful in what not to do.
The game is basically you quarantined in a large city with superpowers and stuck between a bunch of cultist anarchists and the Police. The basic morality system is you can either fight of the evil force of the game taking your fellow citizens into account or ignoring them wildly as you tear through the city. You can't max out abilities unless you make a distinct choice in either direction and stick to it. This is thankfully furthered by the game locking out one mission of the other direction each time you finish one.
The execution of this is horribly flawed though which is unfortunate because the story is more filled out story than in Prototype. There are missions through the game and some are 'good' some are 'evil'. These are the main way to advance the degree of whatever morality you choose. Supplementally, there are neutral missions which simply let you get more experience to actually buy power ups.
The flawed part is this
Those neutral/story missions are usually in favor of the citizens, but they can make you more evil! I disabled a couple boats and rescued a few citizens and I become less liked!
Another embodiment of this is that you can 'clean' sections of the city from the cultists by doing missions in them. Some of the missions though specifically force you to choose which moral compass direction you're heading; however the end result is still that that section is cleaned. I let a bomb blow up a police station, and somehow that made the anarchists afraid of that section of the city! Normally you have to take out a local gang of them or remove some poison they're putting in the water.
In hopes of learning from Infamous
Black boxing this, it would look like the developers suffered from tacking on their morality system to a game mechanic which is unfortunately biased in one direction already. In the first case it seems that your level in your moral choice is experience point based so doing a neutral mission can bump you up. The broken part is that the neutral missions are almost always in favor of the citizens, so the end moral shift ends up making no sense if you're evil, and unfortunately hurts an otherwise good story.
The map cleaning falls into this problem also. The game wants to reward you for completing missions by making it easier to get around the city and, given the game's citizen bias, making it safer for the people, but they didn't disable this for those distinct instances where you can do a bad thing.
While I like the morality idea, I do really feel like they took it all a step back by it not only make no difference, but actually have backwards outcomes. I played 'evil' because I only plan on playing once and it was suggested it's more fun. I hope playing the good route only works out better.
(Full disclosure: I haven't finished inFamous, though I'd be really surprised if that somehow changed all these backwards consequences)
Friday, January 1, 2010
Demos in Review: Dante's Inferno, Bayonetta, Trine
Unlike last year I have no awesome game to play through the New Year long weekend. Last year I had Bioshock, but this year I just managed to finish Uncharted 2 on Wednesday which left me with only a slew of demos I'd yet to play through on my PS3. ( Uncharted 2 was pretty good. It's no Bioshock, but if you liked Uncharted then this is a good follow along true to the original. )
Two of the demos are kinda crazy awesome and somewhat similar: Dante's Inferno and Bayonetta. Both of which I really only have heard of from when I went to PAX this past year. Both are out soon and amazon's discounting them a few bucks. Dante's Inferno
is out February 9th as well Amazon's giving a $10 coupon for a future purchase and Bayonetta
is out January 5th.
is out February 9th as well Amazon's giving a $10 coupon for a future purchase and Bayonetta is out January 5th.Dante's Inferno makes me think of the Kingdom of Heaven movie in visual style and maturity. It's rated M though I dunno if it's for the gore or the nudity. Having not followed the game the story from the demo appears to be this: Bad ass crusader Dante did some bad stuff, gets stabbed in the back ( literally ) then refuses to die and kills Death/Hades making him some sort of in between demon christian. He return home to find his wife dead and some sort of mystery surrounding that as her soul is taken by a shade. Dante is not the type to give up and I can only assume descendes through the levels of hell to get her back. So there's your R rated movie plot to facilitate this over-the-top button mashing hack and slasher.
I'm fairly impressed in the movie quality of this game. The graphics are well done, it has a fairly adult plot that could actually have some story depth to it, as well it's the first game I've personally ever seen with frontal detailed nudity, in the demo no less.
The game play is pretty awesome too. Every button invokes some kind of attack and you can get pretty far just button mashing and watching the carnage if that's all you want. ( You should learn how to block though, it seems pretty important with the bosses ) However, there are also combos you can 'buy' and then use if you like. The system for this is what's become a standard light/dark set of abilities in a ladder organization. To further push the light/dark choices you can make there's actually one ability that lets you impale an enemy on the scythe you stole from Death and either punish or Absolve them.
I highly recommend this Demo if you don't mind some bloody hacking and slashing; and nudity. I'll likely GameFly this one and play through it.
The best way I can think of describing this is a girlie version of Dante's Inferno, as if it and Final Fantasy X-2 got married. It's a button mashing hack and slash like Dante. A bit dark and kick ass, but with a distint girlie aspect.
Bayonetta looks like a model and shows some valley girl tendencies at times when she isn't channeling a sexy librarian vibe, glasses and all. I think your current target is marked with huge red lips, and some of the special attacks involve your very large high heal shoe coming through a portal and either stomping or kicking your enemies. Oh also, the heel of her high heel shoes are guns which she can shoot a la Chun-Li's whirlwind kick. So it's a bit lighter as well there's no actual nudity. When it would be there, bits are covered; such as when Bayonette channels her, magical?, clothing into an extension of her hair to beat down a boss.
There's some back story about a secret enclave of which she's an outcast or something, and there's a vague WET like cut scene mode which utilizes film strips so it does have some pretty good visuals. The game play is much like Dante too, combos you can use, but don't have to, though you'll likely invoke them on accident anyway.
I might end up playing this though given Dante's availability I'd likely choose it first. The girlie tint to it is perhaps a tad overdone for my liking, but I highly recommend the demo for how somewhat bizarre this game is.
For an added bonus I'll also share Trine. This is a cute side scroller pseudo-puzzler with neat visuals. The basic premise is a thief, wizard and knight all get trapped in the same body after touching a mysterious jewel and being transported to a new world. The story is light hearted and humorous and the game play is pretty light in a good way.
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