The Dord of Darien

Must-play games of 2011

So I guess I’ve put this off long enough. Here’s the official, authoritative list of games you absolutely must play or else you’ll get sent to internet Hell. If you disagree with any of my choices, well, that’s fine; there’s plenty of room for disagreement… in Hell!

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword (Wii)

Skyward Sword is not just one of the best games of 2011 — it’s one of the best games at all. It’s finally 3D Zelda done right. It has a hell of a learning curve and a really sinister game-annihilating bug, but it’s worth it. The dungeons are fantastic, the world is beautiful, the dialogue is great, and Groose won’t bring you down. The only negative thing about this game — aside from the aforementioned soul-shattering bug — is that there are three "silent realm" areas that are 100% not fun at all, but that you can’t skip. But there’s a lot to love when you’re not doing that!

The Witcher 2: Assassins of Kings (PC)

The original Witcher was a really, really thorough Neverwinter Nights mod. Witcher 2 ain’t like that at all. Instead, it’s more like a melee-centric Mass Effect 2 mod. The game is a direct sequel to the original Witcher, and follows Geralt on his continuing adventures to hack drowners to pieces and then get laid. The graphics are top-notch, the world is interesting, and the cutscenes are interactive enough that they don’t get too horrid. Plus this game contains the word "lesbomancy." What more do you need?

Jamestown (PC)

So it’s a top-down shooter, right? Nothing unusual about that. What if I told you it’s set on Mars? Still nothing? Okay. How about this: seventeenth-century colonial Spanish Mars? Ah, now we’re getting somewhere! Jamestown has a prodigiously awesome story about searching for the remnants of the Roanoke colony on Mars, which is all the funnier because a shmup is the very very last kind of game that needs a story. And its over-the-top story is backed by brilliant SNES-with-a-bigger-palette graphics and perfect shmup gameplay. There are four ships to choose from (eight with the "Gunpowder, Treason and Plot" DLC, which I bought on the strength of the name alone), five difficulty levels, unlockable extras, and local co-op! Damn, this game delivers.

Super Mario 3D Land (3DS)

The name, she is not so good. Never mind that, though, because that pooper of a name is wrapped around a truly excellent game. This is a "new school" 3D Mario game, which is to say that, like Mario Galaxy, it focuses on actual platforming rather than on 3D scavenger hunt adventure 64 mechanics. The game looks and sounds perfect — just like a Mario game should — and makes brilliant use of the 3DS’s 3D screen by giving you tons of really, really long drops that look a surprising amount scarier in 3D than you’d think. If there’s a flaw here to pick out, I’d say it’s that the game is too aggressive about making sure anybody can beat it; die in the same location three times, and on your next attempt there will be a block next to your spawn point containing a leaf that makes you invincible for the rest of the level. Yowza.

Portal 2 (PC, X360, PS3)

I’m "that guy" — you know, the guy who wasn’t totally in love with Portal 2. Now, don’t get me wrong — it’s a great game — but I think it points to a fundamental weakness in the Portal concept, which is: the original Portal, in three hours, managed to exhaust absolutely everything fun there is to do with the portal gun. Now, to their credit, Valve is bright enough to realise this, and Portal 2 relegates the portal gun almost to a support role, where the portal gun is the thing you use to move around the level, but you actually solve the puzzle by using laser-redirect cubes or magic bouncing pudding. Still and all, the environments are great, and the characterisation is great, and the gameplay is sufficiently good to hold it all together.

Warhammer 40000: Dawn of War 2: Retribution (PC)

I was worried about Retribution at first. It’s a significant departure from the Dawn of War 2 series, in that it moves back toward the RTS standard of resource-gathering and squad-recruiting, the absence of which was, in my opinion, a large part of why the original Dawn of War 2 was so great. But it turns out it works just fine — the implementation is sufficiently clever that your army will gradually grow as you play the map, without at any time becoming grind city USA of the future. There are six different campaigns, sort of; they’re basically all the same levels with small variations here and there, but the units and the storyline are entirely different. As an added bonus, Retribution is finally divorced from the wretched Games For Windows Live service! Hooray!

VVVVVV (3DS)

Hey now, wasn’t VVVVVV in last year’s roundup? Why yes it was. Oh, and I did screenshots last year? And got it out on time? Tsk. Can’t be arsed to fix it now. The difference between last year’s VVVVVV and this year’s model is not quantity of V’s, but quantity of D’s (hey-o! Was that joke lame enough? I’ll Leno this shit up if you’re not careful) — it’s the exact same game, but with the backgrounds and dialogues tastefully three-deed by Nicalis. If you liked VVVVVV, you should buy this one too, and then maybe I won’t be the only goof who’s bought it four times. If you didn’t like VVVVVV, well, there’s still room available in internet Hell. So don’t push me.

Star Wars: The Old Republic (PC)

I played World of Warcraft for six years, you know? So I wasn’t going to get this one. Figured, hey, I’ve done the MMO scene. But that’s the brilliance of SWTOR: in its heart of hearts, it’s a single-player game with some optional group content. Remember in WOW, how stuff would start out being normal solo quests, and then there’d be an elite quest, and a dungeon, and if you want to finish the storyline before you know it you need forty people for Molten goddamn Core? SWTOR doesn’t do that. The "storyline" quests are all steadfastly single-player — at no point do you need a group to finish what you’re doing. Group quests exist, but they’re optional "extras." And would you believe you can play any dungeon in the game with just two people? Because, hey: you can. This is truly an MMORPG designed with grown-ups who have jobs in mind.

So that’s that! Those are all the games that an internet committee appointed by me and consisting entirely of me commands you to play. I may be able to fit the whole internet in my mouth at once, but that doesn’t mean there are no gems I’ve overlooked — feel free to clog my commentpaths with suggestions of your own!

January 18th, 2012 Posted by Darien | Games | no comments

If this is Wednesday I must be famous

I assume you’ve all heard about this SOPA brouhaha. The entire internet is shut down because of it! But you know me — I’m a notorious capitalist after all, so what’s the use of a protest if I can’t make a quick buck off of it? So here’s my plan: today, while the whole rest of the internet is shut down, I have updated my blog! The way I figure it, since there are no other web sites anymore, I’ll get 100% of all the traffic and become rich due to the multiplier. No, that’s how it works. I checked.

This may not seem like much of a blog post. In fact, the more astute among you may regard this as a useless "filler" post. There’s a story there. See, this was meant to be an erudite discussion of Curt Schilling’s new game "Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning," but it won’t run on my computer due to not supporting 1024×768. What the fucking fuck, Curt? I guess millionaire baseball players can afford to get a new monitor every ten years, but this one still works just fine thank you! Besides, if 1024×768 was good enough for the Lord God to create the World of Warcraft in, it’s good enough for anybody.

So I can’t review the game, but you know what I can review? The title. It’s pretty goddamn generic. "Kingdoms," generic fantasy name that at least doesn’t contain an apostrophe or a Y, colon, scary word that implies murder. That title could have been shat out of the Official Fantasy Game Title Shitter-Outter without using enough processing time to put a dent in Bioware’s shipping schedule. Here’s a better title for you: Curtis of Schillingforth: Sock Warrior. At least then not playing your game because of unstoppably weird system requirements would be 15% more fun!

Edit: Curt Schilling responded to this post, and he didn’t even swear at me even though I’m a complete asshole. I guess I really am famous!

January 18th, 2012 Posted by Darien | Bullshit, Games | no comments

Wasting my time

I really wanna see an end to unskippable physics-engine-logos taking front seat in game title sequences.

Jasper Byrne said that on Twitter earlier today, and it got me to thinking: I, personally really wanna see an end to unskippable anything. Not just in game title sequences, either; I mean anywhere in the game. As far as I’m concerned, anything I’m doing while I’m playing your game that doesn’t involve actually playing the game is you wasting my time. So here are things:

• Intro titles: I get the idea behind the titles; branding is not a foreign concept to me. But it’s getting ridiculous. Games these days often have like seven or eight mini-movie plugs you have to sit through before the title screen and attract mode even begin. That, to coin a phrase, is shit. I’ve actually had to look up — on the internet, so thank god for that — where games store their intro movies so I can go delete them and actually get into my damn games. There is absolutely no excuse for this garbage to be unskippable! At least take a cue from Relic and only make it unskippable the first time. That still sucks, but at least it only sucks once.

And everything I just said goes triple for you, Square Enix. No, I have not forgotten that Lufia: Curse of the Sinistrals doesn’t even let me skip the attract mode. I seriously had to sit through like six minutes of crap before I even got to the main menu.

• Loading: I know. I know that load times are, to an extent, inevitable. I know there are solid technical reasons why a 20 GB game will have to load data. But.

There is absolutely no excuse why, if I die during a level, I have to sit through the entire loading process before I can respawn and try again. I’m talking to you, Mass Effect 2. Also, why is it that, here in 2012, we have MMORPGs clever enough to prefetch data to create large, broadly seamless environments, but single-player games can’t learn this same trick? I can load up World of Warcraft and run all the way from Winterspring to Ahn’Qiraj without seeing a single loading screen.

• Options menus: I’m not advocating getting rid of options; lord knows I can’t stand one-size-fits-all interfaces. But your options menus need to be designed with usability in mind. Ideally, I should be able to open the options and figure out what all the options do and configure everything all at once. That means you need goddamn tooltips, and it means you need sensible organisation. In particular, if your key bindings give me more than about a dozen actions to bind, they need to be paginated and categorised intelligently, not just dumped in a list at random, like they are in Star Wars: The Old Republic. Here’s a picture of the movement bindings. Categories are nice, but holy shit, Bioware, sort those maybe.

Also, hey Magicka, it is incredibly offensive that I can’t change my key bindings without quitting the game. Especially since you don’t let me save anywhere; if I discover I want my keys bound differently, I have a choice between finishing the level with suboptimal bindings or dumping my progress and starting over. And that’s terrible.

• Cutscenes: You knew it was coming. Now, contrary to popular belief, I don’t actually want cutscenes abolished. I get that there do exist out there people who play games because they really enjoy long, stupid movies with terrible dialogue and bad acting, and, more to the point, I acknowledge that cutscenes, properly used, can definitely enhance the game-playing experience. What I’m saying is that cutscenes are way, way, crazy, murderously overused. And there is no excuse in the atmosphere for them not to be skippable.

Now, I’m not talking about Bioware-style conversations. Those are actual gameplay elements. You see how you can interact with those? Actually make choices that influence the game? No, what I’m talking about is the endless bits of watching polygons talk to each other and having no ability to influence the game at all. A horrible offender in this way — and I’m not even going to discuss anything by Square Enix — Is Half-Life 2: Episode Two. Episode Two was especially egregious because the previous Half-Life games had all been excellent about allowing their narrative to be player-driven instead of relying on constant canned exposition. But here’s what happens in Episode Two (spoilers, obviously):

• Gordon is pinned under a house and can’t do anything but watch when the hunter attacks Alyx.
• Gordon can’t help with the healing ritual, so he just watches the Vortigaunts.
• The ritual cutscene is interrupted by a different cutscene, involving the G-Man. Inception-y. At least this one’s interesting.
• Gordon finally locates an Advisor… and gets paralysed and can’t do anything but watch until it leaves.
• Upon arriving at White Forest, Gordon stands around and watches Alyx and Eli discuss the plot.
• Another advisor. Gordon spends the whole encounter paralysed again — if they liked it once, they’ll love it twice!

What the hell, Valve? Why not let me participate in this somehow? If I’m locked out of playing the game and can’t do anything but watch, there’s no way to build suspense or tension. I know I can’t do anything, so why care?

For further illustration, let’s compare the beginning of Half-Life 2 with the beginning of Bioshock. They’re both paced the same; you start out riding transport, and then you wander around an unfamiliar environment for a while before suddenly finding yourself in danger. even the danger’s the same; in both games you’re under attack by enemies you don’t understand, and you have no means of defending yourself. But here’s where it gets different. In Half-Life 2, you’re climbing up through an apartment building, being ushered through apartments by residents who don’t want civil protection to catch you. The whole environment is very dynamic; as you run down hallways, CPs come in at the far end and close in on you, but then a door opens up and you get herded through to another place. Eventually, you wind up jumping from rooftop to rooftop as they shoot at you from the street. Then you finally get trapped, and the CPs begin to beat the shit out of you, but Alyx shows up for the rescue just in the nick of time. It’s really, really effective.

In contrast, Bioshock is very insecure. It doesn’t give you a large, open environment to run through — instead, you’re trapped in a bathysphere while a splicer attacks you. There’s nothing dynamic around you, either; it’s just an unchanging bathysphere. And to pile on even more idiocy, Bioshock doesn’t even let you struggle and get claustrophobic; you can’t move or act at all during this sequence. You just sit in the bathysphere and look straight forward out the window as the splicer attacks you, and then eventually Atlas kills it with a turret. Only after the danger is completely gone are you permitted to interact with the game at all. This is especially insulting since, as soon as you get out of the bathysphere, the game begins making Half-Life 2 references — if you fools were aware of Half-Life 2, why didn’t you learn anything from it?

January 8th, 2012 Posted by Darien | Games | no comments

Real quick

Remember when I was making fun of this dum-dum for coming up with a kooky voodoo way of determining which players gave the most value for money? Well, here are actual smart people doing it an actual smart way. Just a heads up.

December 23rd, 2011 Posted by Darien | Baseball | no comments

Preview release #1

I asked on the Tweeter yesterday if anybody would be interested in a playable preview version of the game I’ve been working on. I got a rousing response! By which I mean one, single response. But it was very rousing!

Eh, good enough. So today I give to you a playable preview version of my game. You can play it here.

There isn’t a whole lot to do yet — and the graphics are, of course, all placeholders — but everything that’s implemented works, and you can get a rough idea of what the game is and what it’s about. The "level" I’ve included is, of course, not especially challenging, but feel free to play around with it and get a sense for the game. Any feedback is appreciated, especially if "feedback" is a euphemism for "money."

December 20th, 2011 Posted by Darien | My games | 2 comments

The Agony and the Idiocy

If there’s one thing you should have learned from reading this blog, it’s that a morally outraged sportswriter is the stupidest creature alive. I think this guy might have a shot at the title even when he’s sober. He’s written a column about steroids that he begins with the lines

The Agony Of Filling Out A Hall Of Fame Ballot

While leaving an empty box next to Jeff Bagwell’s name …

Yeah, it’s going to be one of those articles. Hold on to your hat. Oh, and you better read this quick; I’m going to quote whole huge swaths of it in utter defiance of SOPA, so the government may lock me and my website up in an overseas torture chamber per the provision in the other law they passed today but which fair-weather leftie "civil libertarians" don’t seem to care much about.

Lots of folks have a bucket list, or at least that’s the term they assign to it after the 2007 movie with Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman. And while it is probably best to keep most of the Before-I-Croak inventory private, I will share one checked off mine:

Cast a vote for the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Really, BBWAA, why do you give people like this Hall of Fame votes? If they write shit like that, you just know they’re going cast stupid ballots.

The first hint reality wouldn’t be nearly as romantic as the dream arrived in the form of Michael Felger, Boston television and radio provocateur, in the Patriots locker room in 2008.

I can parse that, but it took me like four tries. And it totally wasn’t worth it. Also, I’m guessing you mean "raconteur," since that word you used… isn’t complimentary.

He pointed out I was the only new voter from the Boston chapter of the BBWAA that year and the Jim Rice ballot could come down to one vote either way. He offered two words of advice, "Be ready."

Better advice would have been "be quiet."

The two words scared me so much sabermetric decimal points started running down my leg.

Congratulations — you have written the very worst hacky stat-nerd joke of all time. Not only is it weirdly scatological, but it doesn’t even make sense; what makes a decimal point "sabermetric?" The decimal point in WPA is somehow materially different from the ones in like batting average and ERA?

Now if you’ll excuse me, I have to go to the restroom and take a giant Jeff Jacobs column.

Rice got in by seven, with 412 votes among 539 ballots. Phew, dodged one bullet … only to be dragged into bottomless mire of performance-enhancing drugs. And, man, I have come to hate it.

It’s only bottomless for stupid people. Here’s a simple test: do the following people belong in the Hall of Fame?

• Ty Cobb
• Gaylord Perry
• Joe Morgan
• Willie Mays
• Rickey Henderson

If you said yes to any of them, then you have the answer: you do not care about allegations of cheating. All of those men were accused (some proven) of breaking the rules of baseball to get an advantage. To say nothing of the fact that the official rules of baseball contain the line "the pitcher shall not Intentionally Pitch at the Batter," which seriously disqualifies every pitcher ever, especially Bob Gibson.

On the other hand, if you said no, they’re all possible rule-breakers and they should all be out, then you’re completely mad. Easy!

Few things open you up more quickly to Internet ridicule than releasing your Hall of Fame ballot.

Among those things: supplementing it with lots of pointless, defensive hand-wringing.

You’ve got your, "Hey, moron, it’s not the Hall of Very Good. If you need to ask if a guy is a Hall of Famer, he’s not."

That’s Colin Cowherd you’re quoting there. He’s an idiot. Who cares what he thinks?

You’ve got your, "The guy hasn’t had one at-bat in five years, you’re a hypocrite for changing your mind." Guilty on that count, I’m voting for Barry Larkin this year after not voting for him the previous two.

Those people are the worst of all people. Like Colin Cowherd. And good on you for being at least slightly vulnerable to reason!

There’s the, "You’re an imbecile for voting for a compiler [Bert Blyleven]."

Okay, are any of these people not Colin Cowherd? Because I really think you’re just quoting something he said on his show yesterday. Look out! The SOPA will get you!

There’s the, “You’re an imbecile for voting for a guy who only came up big in big games [Jack Morris].” Guilty on both counts.

Oh, that one’s not Cowherd. Jack Morris is his favourite. Which is really, really funny, since Jack Morris kind of stank.

Yet it wasn’t until Joe Posnanski of Sports Illustrated wrote something last December that I began to wonder if voting for the Hall of Fame is worth the hassle. There are places on the Internet where you are called a man playing God if you don’t vote immediately for Jeff Bagwell. You are called Joe McCarthy. Posnanski didn’t use either term, but he came close.

Yeah, because Bagwell was great. All-time great. I wouldn’t call you a man playing God, though; I’d stick with "moron."

Bagwell never tested positive for steroids. He was not named in the Mitchell Report. Yet because Bagwell has become, in some voters’ minds, a player who used PEDs, Posnanski wrote, "I can’t even begin to describe my disgust … it makes me absolutely sick to my stomach.

"I hate the character clause in the Hall of Fame voting. I think it encourages people to believe their own nonsense, to stand up on high and be judge and jury …I’d rather a hundred steroid users were mistakenly voted into the Hall of Fame over keeping one non-user out."

Posnanski is often correct. This is one of those times.

Joe Posnanski is the best sports writer in 2011 America, but it doesn’t mean he’s 100 percent correct on this issue.

As in it’s not a causal relationship, sure. But… he is 100 percent correct on this issue. I get the feeling you’re about to say something really stupid.

Based on numbers alone, Bagwell deserves to be in the Hall of Fame. That part is easy. He hit .297 with 449 homers, eight 100-RBI seasons and had a .948 OPS as well as a Gold Glove and an MVP Award.

His grown-up numbers were good, too, by the way.

Yet because of the sins of his baseball generation, fair or not, Bagwell finds himself in an uncomfortable position.

Yeah. Which is: left out of the Hall because of idiots like you.

Yet we also have heard tens of players like Bagwell deny steroid use over the years only for it to turn out otherwise.

So add this to the list of reasons to bar people from the Hall of Fame: he says he didn’t cheat at baseball. This is a Life of Brian thing, isn’t it.

We have seen tens of players like Bagwell blow up from a skinny 20 to a cartoon 35.

I… what? That is fifteen years, you ignoramus. You don’t need to be on the juice to put on a bunch of muscle over fifteen years!

We have seen tens of players like Bagwell break down physically in their late 30s.

Players like Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Rafael Palmeiro, right? That’s what they were notorious for doing? Breaking down in their late 30s?

Come on, stupid. The notorious juicers had unnatural longevity. And now you’re using a late-30s breakdown — which we’ve seen not tens but thousands of players go through — as evidence that he was juicing?

Oh shit, you guys! Nap Lajoie was on the juice!

I will never vote for Rafael Palmeiro or Mark McGwire, not in 15 lifetimes, but I also don’t want to be part of any witch hunt.

I will never eat meat, not in 15 lifetimes, but I also don’t want to be a vegetarian.

I only want to play the percentages. I want Bagwell’s insistence he was clean to be true. I don’t want his induction to backfire in an ugly way.

So, wait. Your Hall of Fame standard is that you will never vote for anybody unless he can absolutely prove that he never cheated at baseball? No permissible ambiguity? And the reason for this is: you’re afraid of being wrong.

Great. Great people you’re letting in, BBWAA.

My view certainly is not foolproof, but it’s one I’m comfortable with given the uncomfortable parameters. Forget 100 juicers. I don’t knowingly want to vote for one.

Your view is bullshit. If I had a Firing Squad vote, I’d vote for you.

I have wanted to wait a few years to see if anything surfaced. To watch ESPN, Yahoo!, New York Daily News, the Texas media — someone with the resources and vigor — put Bagwell in its headlights and see if he emerges clean.

BBWAA: Mr. Jacobs, we’re thinking about giving you a Hall of Fame vote. But we’re concerned; will you ever make a decision for yourself?
Jacobs: I’ll have to check with my lawyer and get back to you.
BBWAA: You’re hired.

I have no intentions of making him wait forever. I will wait another year or two. If the worst thing I do is to make him enter the Hall of Fame with his teammate Craig Biggio, well, that’s damning Bagwell with a great blessing.

Yeah, the "great blessing" of spending another two years wondering why being one of the best first basemen of all time isn’t sufficient for getting into the Hall. Blessing of Caprice! Paladins get that at 40, I think, but only if they spec Dipshit.

I believe in using the 15-year voting period. The years give perspective. They help us look at circumstances differently. There’s strength in the process, not weakness.

You’re not gaining perspective, dummy. You’re waiting for a bunch of other people to change their minds so you don’t look like a dangerous maniac who disagrees with popular wisdom.

As much as it infuriates me, I have to agree with BBWAA secretary-treasurer Jack O’Connell’s assessment that the National League MVP vote on Ryan Braun stands even if his positive test holds up. Ken Caminiti and A-Rod kept their MVP trophies after it became known they did steroids in 1996 and 2003. And, yes, the 2011 voters voted on the information they had at the time with Braun. But that’s not why Braun should keep his MVP.

No, the reason Braun should keep his MVP is because the rules don’t contain any provision for revoking it. Like how president Obama gets to keep the Nobel Peace Prize even though he’s started three wars.

It is because the test he flunked was taken during the postseason. The MVP is a regular season award and unless it was scientifically proved he was using during the 162 games — even though the award announcement wasn’t made until November — I’d argue Braun should keep the 2011 award on a technicality.

What the fuck is wrong with you? With your brain, I mean. I thought the idea was to wait until there was absolute positive scientific proof that people didn’t take steroids. You said so yourself! I mean, for fuck’s sake.

There’s no evidence that Jeff Bagwell took steroids in the post-career either. The Hall of Fame is a regular-career honour. So oh my god you are making my brain evaporate did you even read what you fucking wrote?

Now make new precedent. Immediately. In this case, the BBWAA should make a rule that if a player tests positive for PEDs at any time during the calendar year he wins an award, he loses that award. Set the rules in advance and live with them.

What the fucking fuck is the point of that? Don’t hamstring everybody else because of your peccadilloes, asshole. What if I think 2004 Barry Bonds was so obscenely good that he deserves the MVP, steroids or no? Because I do. I’m now not allowed to vote for him, because it would offend your crazy head?

PEDs have made for a complicated, agonizing world for BBWAA voters.

Especially the stupid, spineless ones.

And until someone steps forward with a firm set of Hall of Fame guidelines, it’s not going to get any less agonizing. Brace yourself. Next year’s incoming Hall of Fame class with Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens and Sammy Sosa will bring arguments and name-calling like we’ve never seen.

Can’t wait. Any luck you’ll be dead by then and we’ll have smart people casting ballots instead.

In the meantime, peek over my shoulder at my 2012 ballot: Barry Larkin and Jack Morris. That’s it. I only hope this doesn’t make Joe Posnanski barf or for someone to call me Joe McCarthy.

Jack Morris was not very good, and there’s no excuse for voting for Barry Larkin and not Alan Trammell. Oh, and you left off Jeff Bagwell. Other than that, you did a great job oh my god I just realised that nobody can fucking prove that Barry Larkin and Jack Morris were not juicing. Larkin retired in 2004. Morris in 1994. These are not ancient players! Either one of them could have been on the juice, stupid. You have just randomly declared them not juicers with no better evidence than we have for Bagwell. You sir are unbelievably stupid.

Hey, Grant Brisbee’s written a better version of your article. Maybe you should just retract this mess.

December 15th, 2011 Posted by Darien | Baseball | no comments

In before Jose Canseco

So I guess you’ve heard — reigning National League MVP Ryan Braun? He juicin’. So I’m sure you’ve all been wondering what I have to say on the subject, as the world’s leading authority on telling people to shut the dick up about drug use.

Well, the first thing I have to say is: shut the dick up about drug use. The irrational terror about PEDs isn’t getting any more less irrational just because now it’s aimed at skinny Jewish kids instead of surly black man-mountains with heads the size of watermelons. You’ve all heard it (from me) before, but, seriously: get over it. Yes, steroid use is bad for baseball. No, it is not materially worse than corking your bat or throwing the spitter, neither of which gets you a mandatory 50-day suspension for a first offense, neither of which will get you barred from the Hall of Fame just on suspicion, and neither of which causes dummies to call for your retroactive erasure from all records. The only reason people think it is is because assholes like the World Anti-Doping Agency make shitloads of money telling us over and over again that steroids are the End Times injected directly into your asscheeks.

The second thing I have to say about the subject is: Ryan Braun failed one test. One. Oh, but, wait! "Experts" say that a false positive is really unlikely, so I guess we should all shit ourselves in our attempts to be the first one to believe it. Lord knows the PED sophists can’t possibly be wrong!

Comedying matters further, Ryan Braun insisted on being retested after his positive — and the second test came back clean. But disregard that, we’re told, because it’s not conclusive proof of his innocence. Is that the way it works? We hang people on suspicion so the WADA gets paid? Seriously, I’m no Brewers fan (lord knows), and I’m enjoying the schadenfreude of watching the Cardinals and the Brewers both twist in the wind this offseason, but I’d take the Brewers over the goddamn drug politicians any day of the week. So I’m officially on Braun’s side of this one. But here’s Jeff Passan, who is mostly reasonable on the issue, but seems utterly scandalised by the thought of people not trusting the system:

Braun took the standard defense, releasing a statement through his agent before telling USA Today: “It’s BS.” And as much as I want to believe him – that Braun, who came up through the minor leagues when steroid testing was mandatory, who eschewed the possibility of free agency to sign with Milwaukee through 2020, who, according to ESPN’s story, volunteered to give a second test that came back negative – I know better by now.

Not one positive test has been overturned.

So, if you’re following along at home, here’s the score: Braun has been tested regularly for all sorts of bogeyman substances since his minor league days. He never failed a test before. He has been tested since, and passed that one too. But the one positive is the one we should believe. Why? Because the System works, bitches!

Oh, by the way? We know the System is 100% flawless because no appeals have ever been upheld. Which doesn’t suffer from selection bias or sample size issues at all.

Oh, and never mind who judges the appeals. Not important.

Were a positive test, for example, grounds to allow a team to void a player’s contract, the only testosterone in Braun’s body would’ve been his own.

Uh, Jeff? It is. Remejmber Jason Giambi’s werd, cryptic apology for nothing in particular? Why do you think it was that he didn’t say what he was apologising for? Did he just forget, you think? No, Jeff: it’s because if he admitted to steroid use, the Yankees could have voided his contract. Similarly, if Braun is shown to have used steroids, the Brewers can void his contract. Now, the trick is this: the union will fight it. And if the team has an actual confession by the player, the union will probably lose. But if all the team has is one failed test — especially one bracketed by passed tests — then the union will probably win, because one test can be wrong.

Instead, we’re back to where we always are: Debating about how baseball can conquer this when the truth is it can’t. PEDs are going to be around forever.

Yes. Just like doctored game equipment. Which you didn’t seem to give a shit about when you covered Kenny Rogers cheating in the 2006 World Series. Or did it not matter because the Cardinals didn’t officially complain (aside: ever wonder why that was? Give you two guesses), and that’s The System?

The players’ union’s agreement to allow blood testing for HGH shows it’s malleable and concerned for the game’s well-being enough to entertain stricter penalties.

Yeah, okay. Or it shows that they got offered enough kickbacks to sign on the dotted line.

While voiding contracts seems harsh and rife for abuse from owners, baseball is entering its 10th season of steroid testing without one false positive.

Without admitting to one false positive, Jeff. That ain’t quite the same thing. Or is it also true that the United States has completed ten seasons of war with Afghanistan without torturing one single person?

If Ryan Braun becomes the first – if he clears his name – the mea culpas will fly fast and furious and he’ll emerge with his reputation intact, maybe even strengthened.

To Jeff’s credit, he’s quite likely to be one of the culpa-ing meas. Man is not shy about admitting when he fucks up. But really, maybe a bit less knee-jerk outrage would leave him with fewer occasions on which he needs to, don’t you think?

Now get this:

The NL MVP allegedly used PEDs, and we know this only because he got caught. Matt Kemp and Prince Fielder and Justin Upton and Albert Pujols and everyone else who finished behind him might’ve, too. Unless we know for certain they didn’t – and nobody ever will – the MVP needs to stay in Ryan Braun’s hands.

No matter how much blood is on them.

Fuck the heck, Jeff Passan? Ryan Braun did not murder some guy. You really need to relax.

December 11th, 2011 Posted by Darien | Baseball | no comments

Public service announcement

The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword contains a game-breaking bug that will make it impossible to continue the game. Making matters worse, this bug is 40 – 50 hours in. In this post, I’ll detail for you exactly how to trigger this bug, and, therefore, exactly how to avoid it. There will be a spoiler-free section first (I will give province names; this is very very basic information that shouldn’t be any kind of spoiler. If you’re worried, come back after like ten hours and read this then) that is somewhat vague (though I think it’ll be clear enough), and, after the jump, detailed descriptions of exactly what happens. Don’t read that part if you don’t want spoilers.

Spoiler-free description:

Late in the game, there is a bit where you’ll be sent back to three provinces to gather pieces of a thing. You can do the three provinces in any order, but I strongly recommend doing Lanayru Desert last if you wish to be sure you’ll avoid the bug. It positively will not trigger if you complete the other two areas first. If the bug does trigger, you will be unable to collect any pieces you don’t already have. Nintendo has confirmed there is no workaround; once this happens, you’ll have to start over. So do Lanayru last, and back up your save before even starting this sequence if you’re really paranoid.

More detailed description follows below. Stop reading now if you don’t want to hear any more names.

Read the rest of this entry »

December 6th, 2011 Posted by Darien | Games | no comments

Jiggery-pokery

Ever meet one of those people who say shit like "I believe in magic because the world is just too dull without it" or "there are so many things that just can’t be explained by science and reason?" Those people are assholes.

And sometimes they write about baseball.

In sentence-fragment paragraphs.

Because sportswriters love that nonsense.

Hiring the Red Sox manager will be (or should be) more than just solving a metric equation

Holy shit, that’s a title and a half. That’s longer than most of the paragraphs in your column, Ron Chimelis. Also: why is there a parenthetical aside in your title? That’s some confident writing. Allow me to present you with the title for your next article, provided at no cost as a public service from the perfectlydarien.com online entertainment corporation:

"Baseball (or maybe a similar sport like softball) will (probably, unless something weird happens, like maybe the moon falls out of the sky like in that one Zelda game) be back in the spring (or maybe technically it’ll be the very very end of winter, but you get the idea)."

Then you fill the column with great writing like this:

People sometimes ask my opinion of sabermetrics.

I tell them I accept the concept. I also hate it.

See all that whitespace? I get paid by the column-inch, bitches. Anyhow, here’s a short play I wrote about your thinking:

Galileo: Hey medieval Church, what do you think of my theory that the Earth goes around the sun?
Medieval church: I accept the concept. I also hate it.

The use of advanced statistical data, better known as sabermetrics, is very much in Red Sox news these days.

Has been since 2004, yeah. But I can forgive you for overlooking it, because… I think something else happened in Red Sox news in 2004, didn’t it? Something that might lead the ownership to believe this stuff has some merit. Now what was it… ?

The search for a manager always seems to dovetail back to whether a candidate embraces New Age stats that have turned baseball into Trigonometry 101.

"New Age," in case you were wondering what words actually mean, is the exact opposite of rational inquiry. New Age is the belief in magic and voodoo and gut feelings, like you prefer. Methodically collecting and analyzing data to determine what works is a different thing.

Also, how funny is it that this guy is so afraid of math that his idea of obscure and complicated is trig 101? Holy shit, Ron. If you had any idea how much more complicated this stuff is than trig 101, your head would explode.

[Bobby Valentine and Gene Lamont] are the only two candidates who managed in the ancient, pre-metric era before 2002.

Did you know that baseball "metrics" date to 1876?

Oh, no, you don’t. Because you’re not very smart.

Being considered for the job still requires a bow to the metric shrine. Look at Valentine, 61.

Widely regarded as a throwback, he still described himself as practically a pioneer of metrics.

Bobby Valentine also claims to have invented the wrap sandwich. So maybe he’s just a self-aggrandizing blowhard.

Perish the thought of managing by instinct and observation. The dark shadow of Grady Little, keeping Pedro Martinez in for too long because his gut told him so, is never far away.

Also the dark shadow of losing for 85 years, until they smarted up and started using their heads instead of their intestines.

Watching this cavalcade of Red Sox candidates has given me a chance to review my own mixed feelings about New Age stats.

I think there is great value in them – to a point. Preparation is crucial; dismissing information is lazy, close-minded or both.

Okay. So which one do you claim to be?

I can also understand why a general manager would like sheafs of stat data. Players make ungodly amounts of money.

Sure. Here’s another reason: GMs who get hundreds of millions of dollars in player payroll and still can’t field a winning team become ESPN analysts. Isn’t that right, Hendo?

(Aside: "In 2010, for most of the season they were one of the worst teams in the baseball." Thanks, the Wikipedia!)

If I were a GM, I would want some number to validate what my innards were telling me they were worth.

This is why you are not a GM. You do not comprehend. To use data successfully, you don’t scour it for something that confirms your bias; you look for things that challenge your bias. It’s kind of like how, if you want to be a good writer, you don’t just write single-sentence paragraphs.

Assigning a number to everything will not stop, even if a relative old-timer like Valentine or Lamont is hired.

See, you really don’t get it. Bud doesn’t oversee a Bureau of Numbers Assignage that votes on what numbers things should receive. The numbers are already there. They always were. Here, see if you can wrap you stegosaurian walnut brain around this:

I am a baseball man playing in a baseball game. I come up to the plate five times. Did Bill James use his magic numeromancy to create that number? Of course not. Say I strike out three times and get two hits. Those numbers: naturally-occurring or implanted by borg slavers? So we can say that I got a hit two out of five times, right? Which we could express as a fraction like that, or decimally as .400, yes? Either way, we’re not "assigning" anything — that is what happened. All we are doing — all anybody is doing who uses statistics — is talking about what happened on the field during the game of baseball. Why cannot you nincompoops process this?

My problem with the sabermetrics concept is this: It’s useful, but it’s not the Bible.

You clearly have a problem with many things, then.

Yet it is being treated that way, not so much by real baseball people, but by those who analyze real baseball people.

Ron Chimelis: arbiter of who is a real baseball person, and who is a fucking baseball replicant!

Ever talk to these types? They sound like zombies, talking in the vocabulary of initials, not words.

Wait, is that what zombies do? B.R.A.A.A.A.I.N.S.!

They can convince you that Derek Jeter has been overrated, or that J.D. Drew was worth the money. Get my point?

Is your point that they are smart people who know correct things? Because otherwise: no. Derek Jeter has five gold gloves, including 2010.

Curiously, the SABR group is known for researching and honoring baseball’s long-ago past. Sabermetrics involves the sport’s very new, different present and future.

I’m sorry: for what and honoring? What was that first thing? Researching? Fuck that. That sounds like something people think about. Maybe it involves numbers. That ain’t baseball! Let’s replace this with a Society for American Baseball Bullshitting instead.

Red Sox GM Ben Cherington is a disciple. He was weaned at the feet of Theo Epstein as well as Red Sox advisor Bill James, the guru of the art.

Theo Epstein was GM for seven years. The Red Sox won the World Series twice during this time. I dunno, Ron; maybe there’s something to this after all.

James’ passion has even gone Hollywood. The movie “Moneyball,” based on a book of the same name, chonicles how Oakland’s Billy Beane used new data to uncover unappreciated players he could get on the cheap.

That no longer works, because big-money teams have the secret formula now, too. Everybody is in on it.

Wait, it doesn’t? So the Rays keep winning because they’re out-spending the Red Sox, then?

No longer ahead of the sabermetric curve, Epstein is competing against front offices using the same weapons he does.

So he should go back to making teams randomly, then? This is a win… for what reason?

Sabermetrics has definite use. New Age stats have correctly debunked batting average as the bottom line of hitting value, for one thing.

They’ve also correctly debunked the idea that Derek Jeter isn’t overrated. But you don’t seem to appreciate that for some reason.

But I hope there is more to the Red Sox decision than how a manager handles a stack of printouts. I want to know how he’ll handle the first time the chicken guy comes a-knockin’.

Oof. Wow. That’s terrible. Also trivial, but, hey.

To borrow a phrase, it’s still baseball, not rocket science. Played by humans.

Yeah, it still is, huh. So maybe we can use all this data we’ve collected over the past 135 years and learn something!

Nah, fuck that. Let’s just be lazy dum-dums.

The first time the new Sox manager says he made a move "just because I thought it was right," he will have my undying admiration.

Because he will reveal himself to be a dum-dum also. Gotta stick together!

November 29th, 2011 Posted by Darien | Baseball | no comments

Skyward Ho

When I was in high school, we had to go to health class once a week. You remember health class. You sit in a classroom while the teacher explains to you in great detail all the various ways your anatomy will catch fire and die if you ever have any fun at all. So it was a giant waste of time, but really the only thing that made it moreso than the rest of high school was that I already learned all this stuff watching The White Shadow, the show ostensibly about basketball, but with maniac plot twists. Maybe this week Michael Winslow will guest star, and he’ll play a schizophrenic who plants a suitcase nuke under the bleachers! Who knows?

This is how I am with the first two hours of video games these days. It’s like I’m sitting in class being taught a bunch of stuff I already saw on the special Mario 64 episode of The White Shadow. Maybe in generation 8 console companies can release a two-hour "how to play a video game" disc with the system and I can be spared endless "training" levels where they teach me to press A to pick up a crate. Thanks, game!

What I’m getting at is that Skyward Sword needs more training levels. Doing the flight training, I spent almost all of my time buried in the clouds trying to figure out how the dick to go up, and then, the instant I started to figure it out, training was over and it was time for the big race where I had to chase a bird while dodging three other racers and projectiles. Damn, game, take it easy! I still haven’t figured out how to aim yet!

You see, Skyward Sword uses a completely different positioning system from every other Wii game I’ve ever played. It doesn’t give a shit where the remote’s pointed relative to the screen; what matters is where the remote’s pointed relative to where it was when you calibrated it. And it recalibrates at the beginning of every pointer action. This is very fluid and easy to use, but it’s confusing as hell if you expect it to work like every other game you’ve ever played; for a long time I thought it was just crazy buggy.

The sword controls have been simplified a bit since the E3 demo, and that’s probably a good thing; Link’s sword still broadly tracks the remote position, and you can attack in all different ways by swinging the remote differently, but you don’t have to try to position your shield arm also, and you don’t have to swing hard. It takes a little bit of practice to get the hang of it, but it’s pretty fun once you do. Lefties are a bit humped, though; get used to sword in your right hand or relearn everything you know about how to control a video game.

In terms of visual presentation, Skyward Sword finally gets it right, eschewing both the drab "realism" of Twilight Princess and the goofy cartoonishness of Wind Waker in favour of a middle approach that looks broadly "real," but with bright, bold colours and cartoon-y flourishes. It’s perfect, and I hope they stick with it for future games.

The game itself is super fun. I mean really, genuinely fun. It’s the only 3D Zelda game with decent dungeons, for one thing. You’ll recognise a lot of the mobs, but fighting them is an entirely new experience; the mobs defend aggressively, and you need to fight around their guard. Meanwhile, Link basically can’t defend, since shields are shit in this game; they have durability limits, and will break if you block too many times. The first shield you get can take three hits. That is bullshit.

There’s still no voice acting, which I am 100% in favour of. I’d rather have the music and my imagination than some terrible ham reading the lines to me. Especially since I read faster than you speak, hammo.

So you should buy this game. Absolutely, no question. It’s brilliant. It ain’t perfect, but it’s great, and it’s a meaningfully new experience. I will spoil the shit out of it once I’m done; for the time being, you’ll have to tide yourself over with 25YEARLEGEND.

November 25th, 2011 Posted by Darien | Games | one comment