“The lead singer totally sounds like he has a British accent, and I know he’s American.”

“Yeah, he sounds like he’s from Liverpool. You know, like that band, Oasis.”

Thank you and good night!

For the past couple of weeks, Eli and I have been playing Tasty Planet. He likes the animation and finds it fun to gobble up everything. He makes me sing the songs. Since they don’t have words, I end up singing “Tasty, tasty planet, hey, it’s tasty planet, yeah!” Tasty Planet is a 2D version of Katamari Damacy. It’s not an unfair comparison to make: Dingo Games makes it themselves on the Tasty Planet web page. Unfortunately, comparing the two shows some of Tasty Planet’s flaws.

You know, instead of reviewing the game, I’m going to look at what Katamari Damacy does right and what Tasty Planet does wrong because, hey, occasionally I like taking a hammer to creative works and looking at the springs and gears that come sproinging out.

First, here is Katamari Damacy:

The guy you see at the bottom right hand corner of the screen is the little robotic prince, son of the King of All Cosmos. You can also see the prince near the bottom center of the screen. His back is to you because he’s busy rolling his giant katamari, which is not nearly as dirty as it sounds. See, the King smashed up the heavens, and you have to rebuild them by rolling around a sticky ball called a katamari. It’s like you’re this weird dung beetle. Anyway, anything that’s roughly half the size of the ball will adhere to it, making it larger. As it grows, you get to pick up larger and larger things. Then you give the katamari to the King, and he uses it to replace the planets and stars he destroyed. This sounds crazy, and the bizarre proclamations of the King don’t help make sense of it all, but the game’s incredibly fun and has an indescribable charm. It’s satisfying to roll your katamari ever larger, progressing from thumbtacks to pencils to balls to that cat that was chasing you earlier.

Now, Tasty Planet:

In it, you’re a bit of grey goo, a collection of tiny nanomachines that was designed to suck up dust, dirt, and bacteria and use it to make more nanomachines. You can see him in the middle of the picture above. You start out eating bacteria and progress from there, gobbling up rocks and mice and dogs and people and cars and trains and space capsules. It’s rather more disturbing than Katamari Damacy. At least when people are rolled up in a katamari I can still see them wriggling there, trapped but otherwise unharmed. When the grey goo eats people, they shriek as they’re killed and converted into more grey goo.

In both games you’re (mostly) competing against a time limit. In Katamari Damacy you have to reach a certain size before time runs out, with the goal of getting much larger than the minimum size, or you have to reach a certain size as fast as you can. In Tasty Planet you have to reach a certain size before time runs out, with bonus points for finishing faster. In both games you start small and get bigger, and larger objects can hurt you. In Katamari Damacy, large objects that are moving, like people or cars, can push you around, knocking stuff off of you. In Tasty Planet, large objects can push you around or even destroy you, making you have to re-start the level.

While Tasty Planet’s graphics are more primitive and the soundtrack far more limited than Katamari Damacy’s, that’s not the real problem. The problem is with the gameplay and design choices that Dingo Games made regarding Tasty Planet.

Let’s talk about progression. It’s the changes in your avatar’s scale that makes you want to keep playing both games. You get bigger so you can eat bigger things, especially those bigger things that were blocking your path or trying to destroy you earlier. Katamari Damacy takes this further by changing camera scale as you play. In Tasty Planet, everything around you is the same size as when you started. Only you get bigger. In many levels of Katamari Damacy, when you get big enough, the camera pulls back, making everything around you look smaller and allowing you to keep on getting bigger. In Katamari Damacy you can go from a katamari that’s the size of a tack to one the size of a city in a single level, and that’s just plain fun.

Ideally, games should maximize fun. That’s a fuzzy metric, but for these two games the fun clearly comes from gathering stuff up and getting bigger. Katamari Damacy fills its levels with plenty to roll up at many different scales. You don’t waste much time moving around without rolling things up. Sometimes there’s so much stuff to roll up that it’s overwhelming. As you get bigger, tiny items that don’t help you much go away, maximizing the joy of embiggening. The same isn’t true of Tasty Planet. At the beginning of many levels, you wander around aimlessly waiting for items to show up that are small enough to eat. At the end of levels, there aren’t enough large items for you to eat, and the small items don’t do you much good, relatively speaking. Katamari Damacy levels provide a near-steady rate of growth throughout; Tasty Planet levels start slow, speed up in the middle, and slow down again at the end.

Now that I think about it, there are two underlying differences between the games that is the cause of most of my discontent. One, Katamari Damacy has an environment, a real sense of place that Tasty Planet only occasionally has. Two, Katamari Damacy is mostly deterministic, while Tasty Planet is random.

Katamari Damacy’s environment involves exploration because some areas aren’t available until you’re big enough to get past a barrier. That adds to the fun, since there’s new stuff to discover and roll up. The environment and the changes in scale also mean you can go back to areas you had cleared of small items and grab the remaining large items. It’s great to see how different a room looks first from a mouse’s vantage point and later from a tall person’s, and to go from pickup up pencils under a table to picking up the table itself.

Tasty Planet doesn’t really have an environment. On a few levels there are dice and dominoes, or houses and trees, but mostly you get bigger by eating things that randomly wander into the area. On one level you might eat mice and rats as they run past. On another you eat small meteors, then larger ones, then astronauts, then satellites as they drift from right to left. You’re waiting for food to come to you, so you don’t have the fun of exploring and you lose player agency.

Tasty Planet’s randomness makes it hard to improve your performance. In Katamari Damacy, you can replay levels and, by getting a feel for the environment and for where stuff is, make a larger katamari in the time allotted or reach your target size faster. In Tasty Planet, a lot of your performance is determined by what items the random number generator sends your way.

Since I’ve spent all of this time griping about what Tasty Planet did wrong, let me end by saying that it’s an okay game. The graphics are fun, the sound effects are neat, and some of the levels are quite creative. It’s not going to knock your socks off, but it’s not a bad way to waste some time. Of course, the $20 you spend on Tasty Planet could be spent on Katamari Damacy instead.

I’m just sayin’.

[tags]tasty planet, katamari damacy, shareware games, reviews, videogames, weird-ass japanese games, grey goo will eat everything[/tags]

Yesterday someone I used to know passed away. 20 years ago he was almost my stepfather.

I try not to talk about my family’s lives here. Sometimes I may mention in passing how some of their choices have affected me but I try to not cross the line of discussing their business here. Who likes to wake up and read on someone else’s blog your business? No one. So I do my best to keep it to myself.

But this person had a big impact on me as a young teen. He was the person that first loaned me Pink Floyd’s The Wall. He was the first person I knew who read sci-fi seriously. He thought space travel was a must. He liked to put his car in neutral when he was going down steep hills. I know this because he helped to teach me to drive. He lived on chocolate chip cookies and milk. He liked to cruise the lake on his party barge and take us with him. He jingled the change in his pockets when he was standing around talking.

He never seemed to mind that my mom came with the Misty Attachment. Even at 15, I thought my mom’s boyfriend was pretty cool.

He and my mom broke up before I got to high school. I was more angry at his leaving than at my own father’s departure because it was abrupt and unexplained. It took me until well into college to let that anger go and stop hating him.

Five years ago my mom met him accidentally at a funeral. They corresponded and after a period of time, got back together. They were together for almost a year and I thought that maybe he had changed his ways, that maybe he was different, better. When my mom told me they were breaking up for good I was shocked all over again and saddened for her. After they parted, she told me some of the things he had done and said to her and my old anger toward him returned.

Today I don’t know how I feel. I am sad for my mom, of course. She is taking it hard and the memorial this weekend will be very hard for her. I am struggling with a load of anger towards him still. Anger at him for his failings and my unwillingness to forgive him for them. I hate that we could have had a family together and he chose not to be a part of that. And yet ever with all of this anger, I am sad that he is gone.

At the beginning, Internet memes passed me by without leaving a mark. I’d see all of the Zero Wing mashups at YTMND or the latest bunny-with-a-pancake-on-its-head macro, be amused, and go on about my life. People would post lists of movies they’d seen or states they visited on their LiveJournal and I wouldn’t participate.

Lolcats changed all of that. I stumbled upon I Can Has Cheezburger shortly before Liza was born, and I was lost. I read them obsessively. I started critiquing them. I read Anil Dash’s take on kitty pidgin. I created LOLTrek.

That was months ago, and yet I still look for lolcats that I think are funny. I save them in a folder on my computer. I created lolcat versions of an author whose books I like. I’m turning into that guy from the one XKCD comic.

Misty’s take on all of this is that I do it because it keeps getting laughs. “And you have to keep track of lolcats to do good ones.” That’s the most comforting lie I’ve heard all week. I keep track of them because I can’t help myself. I can has ten-step program?

The SF writer John Barnes has written several novels set in a future where people can have programs forced into their brains in much the same way as computers can catch computer viruses. These memes then make their infected humans behave in ways to further spread the meme. If that future ever comes to pass, I am so screwed.

OK, so you know that I’ve been living under the rock known as having a baby. That’s why I didn’t know until Friday about the Live Earth concerts happening around the world. It is the only reason I can come up with that I managed to miss the biggest concert event since which one: Live Aid, Farm Aid, Live 8? Whichever, it was a really big concert. And I’m as much a fan of concerts as the next fan girl. I actually got goose bumps to see The Police on stage together. And let me tell you if you didn’t see that part of the show, go check it on youtube.com because it rocked! Also, Every Bass Player in the Known Universe rocked, but I only saw that this morning. Yes absolutely, John, Spinal Tap is a rock band.

By the way, how exactly did Al Gore talk all these bands into playing at this concert anyway? “Yeah, I know my wife tried to rate some records a while back, but you kids are too young to remember that. So, can you come play my concert?” Did this memory evoke the same chuckle for anyone else?

But that’s not what I’m going to talk about in this post. I want to talk about what the concert was supposed to be promoting.

Raising people’s awareness of the climate changes that are happening.

I was thinking about that as I sat in my nearly 2,000 square foot, single-family dwelling and my central air-conditioner chugged away in the brutal Alabama sunshine. And then I pondered the carbon footprint of the concerts themselves. That bit of mathematical gymnastics nearly ground my though processes to a halt. The promoters actually address that here but I still wonder what the actual end results were.

Stephen and I take what I call the lazy man’s approach to being green. We recycle, but all that really requires is hauling a second can to the street on garbage day. We do have almost all swirly light bulbs in our house, which we’ve changed as the previous bulbs have burned out. Our new car is decently green, well, it’s small at least, which means less gas, right? We do partake of green power from our local utilities company, but it doesn’t cover our entire bill, just a percentage. I’ve actually learned to turn off the water while I’m brushing my teeth. I know that’s lame but it’s a hard habit to break.

Most of the ways in which we are green are convenient to us and that’s really what it all boils down to: How do we make all these green options viable choices for Americans? I’m not ready to move to the commune and stuff my hand-built house with animal hair for insulation just yet but surely, there’s a happy medium between here and the commune?

I want to start implementing some more green practices around my house. So I think my next thing is to make some morsbags to shop with. Wanna come help? I don’t think I’m ready for a Soy Wallet but hey, some of you might be.

So what are you guys doing to be green? I’m looking for ideas. Especially easy stuff that doesn’t require a lot of time or money. Bonus points for involving the three year old!

When you live with a young baby, you lose track of time. The most obvious external sign is how families with a baby arrive late, often accompanied by a cloud of chaos. But it goes deeper than that. When you have a baby in the house, you find yourself unable to remember exactly what day it is, or week, or even the current month.

This is partially caused by sleep deprivation. Never underestimate how much dumber you become when you don’t get enough sleep. Misty and I have had arguments about brown recluse spiders that degenerated to the point that we were saying “nuh-uh!” and “uh-huh!” interrupted only by blank stares and pauses.

Another part of it’s due to repetition. I get up, go to work, come home, take care of Eli, put Eli to bed, take care of Liza, and put Liza to bed. On the weekends I skip going to work, but otherwise the routine’s very similar. That similarity blurs the days and weeks.

Mostly, though, it’s because you can’t think about the future when you’re with the baby, where by “future” I mean “what I’ll be doing in ten minutes.” If you’re trying to put the baby to sleep, thinking “she’ll be asleep in five minutes and then I can go back to bed” is just asking for disappointment. All you can do is live in the moment with no thought for what’s to come, rocking and patting and rocking and patting until you can move to the next moment of your life.

Since I can’t use the calendar or clock reliably, I’ve been using other measurements. Liza’s noticeably heavier than she was two months ago, and the child who once nestled comfortably from shoulder to mid-chest now stretches the length of my torso. Changes in her are how I tell time is passing, and every night I feel that time rushing on. I felt it with Eli, but I didn’t know it. Now I do, and that makes me treasure the future-less moments even as they vanish into the air.

I am typing on Geoff’s new iPhone. It is as sexy as advertised.

So everyone has posted what they look like as a Simpson character. We here at granades.com like to go that extra mile for your entertainment. So here is our whole family as Simpson’s characters:

Yeah, that is so totally our family.

(Please note that in the masthead photo, Eli has on his puffer fish shirt that Stephen put him in for the character.)

Slightly spoilery, so I’ll throw in a cut.

Continue reading One Other Thought on the Transformers Movie →

Enh, it’s no Robot Jox.

[tags]transformers, robot jox, GIANT ROBOTS FIGHTING[/tags]