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.

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.

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.

View Seattle Board Game Stores in a larger map

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.

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.

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)

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.

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 next demo I played was Bayonetta.

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.

on Love, Semantics and the Law

Washington state voters recently voted to approve Referendum 71.   That is, the legislature decided to grant full and equal rights to Domestic Partners (a legal term), a group petitioned to block it pending a vote, and the rest of the state backed the legislature.

Despite the law passing being important, what the law actually did was even more important in the long run.

Let's step back for one second.

I believe there are two key points in this whole thing.

1. Denying same sex rights IS discrimination.   It may be discrimination you believe in, but it is discrimination.  (I'd even argue it's illegal for the simple reason you are discriminating based on sex which is illegal)

2. The word marriage means a lot to a lot of people.   There is almost certainly more people who really care about the word than those who don't.


What Washington State did differently is it did not touch the word Marriage.   It simply said that those who register as Domestic Partners have all the same legal requirements.  The actual affect of the law was to effectively take every instance of the word "Marriage" and add "and Domestic Partnership".   Given how many attempts to actually legalize gay Marriage have failed or been overturned, Washington has shown that this is a much more tenable approach.  In fact, a gay marriage provision has never passed a public vote before.  Read that again.  Never.   All the existing ones have come from legislatures which have not been challenged.

I have long said the only route for gay "marriage" is to focus on the law and not the word.   The word simple means too much to too many people that it will never work as a step toward the concept.  In fact Referendum 71 only barely passed with 52% acceptance.   With that little of a margin, in a state with a large liberal bias, I think it's clear that "Marriage" is simply a non starter in our nation.   Ideally, governments should only recognize 'civil unions' and churches and society can do what they like with the word Marriage, but I think Washington has done a good job with this step.

on Better Video Game Playability

An open letter to game developers:

This letter stems from a recent issue I had playing two games, Fear 2 and Mirror's Edge, though I have no doubt it applies to many others.   The issue was that my PlayStation 3 went belly up and would no longer boot.  The short of it was that the data was unrecoverable and while Sony replaced the system under warranty, they would not recover the data for me.   I had in effect lost all saved progress in all my games.   Of particular interest to me though, I was half way through Mirror's Edge and almost finished with Fear 2.   The issue with the PS3 was certainly not the game's faults, I hope..., however I believe they very poorly recovered from this increasing issue of hardware failure.

Neither game would in anyway allow me to restart  where I had left off or anywhere else in the middle of the stories despite my best efforts.   I tried finding save games online only to find that the games would simply reject them.  I tried finding cheat codes and came up with nothing.   I was left with two options, abandon the games, or restart them.   I choose to abandon both games.   Before I list the reasons this is bad for you and for me, let me provide an instance of a success in this area.   At the same time I was also playing Half Life 2: Episode 0 and also lost my save game for it too.   However, with very little work I soon found a cheat code that allowed me to start at any chapter.  I was thankfully able to finish my game where I left off and as well have gone on to play Episodes 1 and 2, as well anticipate 3.

So onto why this failure scenario of Fear 2 and Mirror's Edge is bad.   The obvious consequence is that for me to finish these games I must waste my time to recreate the achievements I had already gained.   I don't know about you, but I do not like repeating things.   I decided it was not worth my time to replay many hours of these two games, let alone effectively reread the start of a story and as such simply put them down.   Unfortunately, the best case recovery scenario for me was to simply eat the time and money spent on these games and move on.   While this was the worst case scenario for you, you unfortunately made it the best case scenario for me.    But it gets worse.  The hidden consequence is that not only did I waste my time and money on these games and not actually get to finish the stories, but you have now effectively prevented me from buying and enjoying any of your sequels or add on content.   This is certainly a loss for you, though given the annoyance incurred so far, I'm unsure where it ranks for me.

So that's where we are right now; maybe try and learn from this.




Having no actual discussion with you, I can only assume that since a number of games, such as Half Life2, do provide a way to start in the middle, that someone made a distinct decision to not allow it on these games.  (If that is wrong, well then problem solved I hope.)   While it doesn't make much sense to me, I can only speculate that the reason to specifically disallow this is somehow rooted in the 'hard core gamer' mentality of core gamers, or simply in hubris of developers.

For hard-core gamers, a way to skip through a game is a way to skip some challenges and reap the rewards of boss fights, cinematics or perhaps trophies on the PS3 without actually doing the work for them.   If two people have beaten the same game then they have gone through the same trials and tribulations as each other, there is something here to bond over.

For developers, this ability is a way to skip your well crafted story and interaction elements.   There was the pit with awesome fire that shot up to get past, the balrog that required precise button hits to defeat, and the tricky puzzle that required assembling items from around the island to solve.

Unfortunately all these things are pretty much already skippable in some various form.  As for the challenges, games already allow for different difficulty levels so there's little in common with the challenge of an easy run through and a hard one.   As well there is no end of pay and free walkthroughs everywhere.   There is no more challenge needed than reading if desired.   As for experiencing your content in full, people very frequently record full game plays and put them online, so you can not only get a visual cheat guide you can simple watch the pieces you might want if you desired as such.   I can understand the trophy/leader-board issue, but how about just disabling them completely in these situations?

Additionally, video games are pretty much the only entertainment medium that locks people into a linear progression.  Movies, books, music do not prevent me from jumping right into the middle of them or even just experiencing the ending if I really want.  A play even lets you come in in the middle if you really want, so why maintain such control over how someone who has paid you good money experiences your content?   You're creation is not that amazing.   While it's true that it would really suck to jump past that pretty awesome scene in BioShock and have no idea what's going on in the game, do you actually think people really want to skip random pieces of content if they haven't been forced to, and is it really going to hurt you if they do?




Let's talk about how you might be missing out by requiring people to play in traditional ways though, and why you might instead want to embrace it over simply allowing hidden cheats.

The wii has shown that casual games are a huge market, and further more Prince of Persia has shown that you can successfully create a game in which the player never dies or has to give up important progress they have made.    Embrace this.   Most modern games are simply elaborate Interactive Fictions.  They are linear stories which the player is immersively experiencing.   There is no reason that gamers of all skill levels should not be able to participate in your stories.

A game could implement a movie mode where it simply walks through for you. If the story is that good some people may actually want to just watch it if you make it interesting enough.  ( probably not too bad for those late night parties where you want to replay some gorefests and are perhaps not quite capable of doing it yourself at the time)   For players who still want some interaction, games can also offer walkthrough mode where you are hard or impossible to kill, enemies die really easy, and puzzles call out to you with assistance.   Just because some people are too young or old, or didn't develop excellent straffing technique when they were 14, doesn't mean they don't want the viceral enjoyment of walking in, and then out of a firefight.

Take the simplest case though ( aside from my tradgic hardware issue ).  Your game rocks, and on a bored sunday night years from now, I want to go back and relive that final boss fight.   Guess I should have kept all my save games around after all.

(I'll be mailing a copy of this to the creators of Fear 2 and Mirror's Edge)