The Man in Blak

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away...

Still better than "free beer and drive home talking on your cell phone without a seatbelt" night at Busch Stadium. Not one of your better moments.

N-E-S and S-N-E-S. And "Nintendo" is always reserved for the most recent Nintendo console (including the Wii).

This is going to be a long season.

Just my opinion, but Soul Calibur is probably the last fighting game that's ever served as a "killer app" for any system.

Hey, I have a page! It's the thought that counts! Exclamation points!

Whenever we resurrect this thread concept 6-8 months down the road, let's make sure to remember to allow people to vote for multiple nominees. Constraining the suck into one vote doesn't do justice to the sheer variety of crappiness here.

Clearly, I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of every post you've ever made here. The three to five minutes that I spent typing my response would have been better spent studying your gaming habits so that I might possibly gleam some additional value from such insightful commentary as "Man, that should totally go in my sig." But seriously, I think you're being overly dismissive of the game. I'd be interested in an explanation as to why you consider the gameplay to be simplistic, when there are actual levels of skill captured by the game, in addition to the general motion sensitivity. You can actually learn to put more spin on the bowling ball, put more velocity on your fastball over time...in other words, improve your ability (both physical and mental) at the game over time. Contrast this with Wii Play (which really fits the bill of "vapid tech demo", in my opinion), where the level of detail used for the gameplay is considerably smaller; you basically move, tilt, and that's about it, without much too complex of movement analysis beyond that. There are five game types out there (and, admittedly, one or two of them are mostly useless), but there are different variations off of those game types in the training sessions that work remarkably well. Furthermore, in terms of replay value, many of the different incarnations of the games are well suited for multiplayer, which has made the game into a very popular party game. Even beyond that, the Wii Fitness tests allow another level of completion in the game, requiring the user to measure their progress throughout the game as a whole. Obviously, the graphics aren't a technical tour de force by any means, but they certainly convey a cartoony "arcade sports" that suits the game well. There's little or no music to speak of, but the sound effects (save for the lousy wiimote speaker sounds) do a fair job of immersing the player. Overall, I think Wii Sports is a fair bit more than crappy prototype-reborn-as-shovelware (seriously, Wii Play, can't emphasize it enough) and, ultimately, it works as a great mission statement for what Nintendo wants to do with this console generation. It sells the Wii, figuratively and literally. I probably don't know any more than the people that actually break down and critique games, though, so take it for what you will. Maybe I'm mixing up the two; it's been a while since I played either of them. In either case, even mediocrity would be a step above what I get out of MotorStorm and Excite Truck, in my opinion.

Have you even played the game that you continually bitch about? I can definitely understand slamming something like Wii Play for being a glorified technical demo, but Wii Sports is arguably the best launch title of this console cycle, offering very underrated gameplay that almost anybody can pick up and enjoy at a ridiculous price ($0, considering that the price to purchase the console it's packed in with is a sunk cost). It may seem like crazy talk to the hardcore gamer populace, but you cannot underestimate the game's crossover impact - there are people at work talking about this game, people that haven't picked up a game since the SNES days, months after the console has launched. A couple of instances of lackluster execution (golf, boxing) keep it from being an absolute classic, but the rest of the package offers a fun arcade-style sports game that's happens to double as a damn good party game. And, to be completely frank, I would take Bonk's Adventure over MotorStorm and Excite Truck. Outdated graphics and all, Bonk is still an above-average platformer that still plays fairly well to this day, while the other two struggle to deliver even mediocre gameplay, especially when compared to other racing games that have preceded them.

ESPN completely going off the deep end while the Bucs are on the clock. Gruden was checking out and admiring a shirtless picture of Brady Quinn? Bill Walsh hates athletes with muscle definition?

Aramis almost stretched a ten-pitch AB out of Reyes earlier in the game, so I'd say that he's reading him pretty well tonight. Outside of getting blown up in the third, though, Reyes has actually looked pretty good. Marquis, once again, is infuriating - if he had ditched the BP curveball and thrown nothing but sinkers and changeups (like Dave Duncan and the Cardinals had told him to do, repeatedly), as he's doing tonight, he probably would have won 20 for the Cardinals a year or two ago.

"I think you have to appreciate the Astros' attempt to introduce diversity into their roster, but they still come up short unless they have somebody that can communicate with them. And there are candidates out there, candidate that have had success elsewhere. Somebody like Dusty Baker could come in here and relate to these players and bring about a culture of winning."

USB 2.0 can still allow for a little bit of latency, though, just because it's another medium altogether. By streaming audio like that, even the smallest kink of latency can result in artifacting (pops, clicks, or gaps, depending on the codec for playback); I've had it happen every so once in a while when I set up my home recording rig to go through a Sound Blaster Extigy into my laptop. That recorded audio data is coming through the pipeline without any kind of seek time (however miniscule it could be) on top of it and it even has a burp or two, occasionally. All that being said, your question about Czech's laptop is still a valid one, though, because my laptop is hardly bleeding edge and there's always the possibility that the issues I've experienced are rooted in the laptop itself.

The overall size of the files isn't as important as the sheer number of them that are stored on the drive. Not to get into a uber-technical explanation, but all of the files on a given drive are indexed by something that's called a File Allocation Table. The more files you have on a given system, the more rows in the table you have to seek through to find what you're looking for and the seek time for a given file (i.e. the time to retrieve data from the file) will be impacted appropriately, depending on the type of file allocation structure that you have (FAT32, NTFS, etc.). Even though you "only" have 20 GB filled up, that space is spread out throughout something like 3000-4000 different files (wild guesstimate) and things gets compounded even further if you're playing the files from the external drive itself, which means you're transferring data through another medium (USB) before it even gets to the processor for playback. The audio files themselves should be fine - the initial transfer of the file from the laptop to the external drive is virtually guaranteed - but the playback could definitely be impacted by all of these factors. I can't say to what extent, without being nosey and asking you what external HD you're using, but all of this will definitely impact direct audio playback from the drive. (EDIT: This latency could also impact ripping files from CD directly to your drive as well, if you're backing up your music collection.)

Yikes. With USB, connection speed could definitely be playing a role here, especially if the drive's performance itself is starting to take a downturn from piling up files on it over time. As I said before, have you tried transferring a couple of the files back over to the laptop and played them back from there?

Jewel's 0304 immediately jumps to mind and Bjork's Medulla seems worthy of a mention as well, though for entirely different reasons.

Couple of questions: 1. Are you working with a first-gen FireWire drive? I've heard that some of the older or cheaper external HDs can induce some latency on recording and playback direct to/from the drive. 2. Have you tried copying some of the files with the defects back to your laptop and played them again? Your audio files may actually be fine, but you may be getting audio artifacts as a result of that aforementioned connection latency from playing them back directly from the drive.

So your rebuttal is "well, attendance is only up because baseball got more popular and improved its venues"? You're saying more people are going to games because more people are going to games, essentially. If baseball's popularity is rising, then what's the concern? Ratings are pretty strong, attendance is higher than it's ever been. I really don't see any problem here. I'm playing devil's advocate here, but you can have improved attendance numbers and still lose "market share", if you consider baseball to be a competitor within the overall market of sports. How has attendance and merchandising revenue increased for the other sports, such as the NFL? How about television revenue? There may be an influx of fans throughout all of sports, causing everybody's numbers to jump a bit, but the other sports may be getting a bigger slice of that pie.

I'm definitely eyeing Gradius III (fantastic space shmup), but I may even drop some money on Battle Lode Runner, partly to satisfy my morbid curiosity for how a multiplayer Lode Runner would work, partly because I want to encourage developers to port over games to the Wii that didn't get an original North American release (as BLR never made it to the states, IIRC).

Only the Rams could think that drafting Ted Ginn could help their run defense.

Ted Lilly takes his first crack at a no-hitter against the Cardinals today, and I bet I can predict the lineup: Eckstein, ss Taguchi, lf Pujols, 1b Rolen, 3b (You're a goddamn millionaire - how in the hell can you get food poisoning?) Wilson, rf Molina, c Miles, 2b Schumaker, cf Looper, batting practice

I agree that trying it with no outs doesn't really make a lot of sense (and wouldn't even enter the picture, regardless of the batter - a double play that didn't retire the lead runner could still score the run in that situation), but rolling the dice with two outs gives you no safety net whatsoever - if you fail to score at home, that's the end of the inning and you forfeit both base runners. Attempting the steal with one out seems like the most advantageous time to do it - if you blow the play at home, you would still likely have a runner in scoring position at second base with one more out to work with in the inning. If that's the situation, then it makes a little more sense - it's still unbelievably desperate, but at least the repercussions from a possible failure are manageable.

Sure, there's definitely some game theory at work here. They did have the advantage of a right-handed batter at the plate (Molina), Pujols is a decent, if not especially swift, baserunner, and the pitcher has his back to the play. It's the rest of the context that bothers me - Bengie Molina is no dummy, there are two outs on the board to begin with, and you're getting deeper into extra innings on the road. It just seems like there's just as many red flags as there are green flags with this situation, in my opinion.

You might also consider the possibility that Nintendo is intentionally holding off from expanding their customer base until they can either release another killer app (Super Mario Galaxy or the upcoming Metroid Prime game, perhaps?) or finish fine tuning their internet connectivity. Limiting distribution early not only allows you to induce additional demand for the product, but it allows you to monitor customer experience for a smaller group of early adopters and tweak your product before you really ramp up the distribution. And it's not like Nintendo is wanting for any kind of momentum right now, as the sales figures and general buzz around the Wii have them poised atop the console race, for the time being. The console production business usually yields the lowest profit margins of any revenue stream in the industry, so I don't blame Nintendo for biding their time and making sure that they are primed to yield the most possible value out of a maximized distribution of the Wii.