40 Meter 5

I have been a fan of computer and video games since the days of the Atari 2600 and the Amiga. For a while recently, I was totally on top of the videogame world with my PlayStation 2, XBox, and GameCube all set up and ready to go. I could rent a new game without bothering to check which system it was for!

With time I have become less au courant videogames-wise. I didn’t upgrade any of my systems, because their next-gen replacements were much more expensive but didn’t seem that much better, or even that much different. (Can anyone distinguish between 95% perfect and 96% perfect at twice the price?)

I like playing Final-Fantasy type RPG games on the PS2, so it’s still hooked up. I occasionally pop in SSX Tricky, and I play a round of PS2 golf with my music buddy after our recording sessions. But for the most part, what little gaming I do these days is on the PC. Here, I enjoy point-and-click “adventure” type games based on some exotic story or mystery. Among my favorites have been The Longest Journey and Syberia, both of which I recommend extremely highly.

After all this time, I still enjoy pcking up a new game for the PC. With luck, it will have some special feature - great story, detailed graphics, many locations, humor, whatever - that will set it aside from all the other seemingly similar offerings. I expect to discover great new games from time to time. What I don’t expect to discover is a great new kind of game. Yet Mystery Case Files: Ravenhearst was just that for me: an inexpensive, fun game of a genre I had never even realized existed!

Where’s Waldo?

Ravenhearst is what they call a “hidden object” game. That’s right, just like those hidden-object puzzles of your youth, you are supposed to locate the olive, the mandolin, the basketball, and the bird within an incredibly detailed photo-like portrayal of a scene filled with many, many objects. I know, it sounds kind of dull, but somehow it becomes real addictive real fast.

There’s a little more to the game than “find these seven things in the alotted time,” but not much. Every level has an ingenious mechanical contrivance for you to assemble and get working to open the final door, and there is a jigsaw puzzle to do after each level is complete. There’s a story, too: some claptrap about a missing diary. But the bulk of the game is finding those objects in those scenes, and it’s a riot. And, when I’m done with the game, there is a sequel, plus other games in this genre!

Here’s a screenshot of a typical game scene, so you can see what I’m talking about. (Click on the image to see a larger version.)

During the summer of 1969, I had a temporary job with the Cleveland Post Office, part of a Civil Service deal going on at that time with the aim of gainfully employing vacationing college students. I was assigned to the Special Delivery unit downtown, meaning I got to drive cool red-white-and-blue station wagons to various areas of the city and its suburbs, ringing people’s doorbells and bringing them the good news (or the bad).

One of the other students doing Special Delivery that summer was a cool, vaguely pre-Fonzie-ish guy named Bob Koly. (In Googling him today, I could only find this Bob Koly, of my Bob’s age and from the Cleveland area, who died the next year in Vietnam. I hope it wasn’t him, but I’m afraid it probably was.)

Anyway, the job involved a lot of reading, since there wasn’t all that much mail coming through and we weren’t allowed to come back early from a run and be seen loitering at the station. Bob insisted that I had to read this huge paperback he gave me, a book by John Barth called The Sot-Weed Factor. It was 800 pages long! But as I said, there was a lot of free time, and in a few weeks I had finished it off. What a ride! Parts of it are still vivid for me today.

Here’s what Barth’s Wikipedia entry says about the book:

Another great Barth book I first read that same summer is Lost In the Funhouse, a collection of stories of a decidedly post-modern bent. (For example, one is a stories-within-stories micro-epic featuring seven layers of quotation marks.) Every now and then I come across a person that I think will appreciate this book, so I give them my copy and buy a new one. I’ve probably bought eight copies of this book over the years. In fact, there’s a brand-new one on my bookshelf right now!

Here is another of my public-library DVD discoveries: Midsomer Murders, a terrific series of full-length (100 minutes) mystery movies from England featuring the no-nonsense Detective Chief Inspector Tom Barnaby and his sidekick Sgt. Gavin Troy. (Other sidekicks appear later in the series, but I haven’t gotten to them yet.)

Like in many British mystery series, the stories here are solid and meaty, with lots of character development and a strong and very English sense of place. I watched an episode last night, for example, set at an old-school boarding school with an elite “Pudding Club” that had gone quite bad. I was amazed at the way the movie drew me into the milieu of the school and the people who had devoted their lives to it.

One thing I really like about this series is that I can always understand the stories. I know this sounds kind of dumb, but (a) I tend to get confused when there are many poorly-related parallel plot lines involving similar-looking people, and (b) British mysteries tend to do a lot less telegraphing and repeating than do American ones. (Apparently they expect you to actually pay attention and think while the show is on.) There have been several episodes of A Touch Of Frost (yet another British mystery series) that I enjoyed well enough but reached the end without really getting “whodunit” or how they got caught! Not with Midsomer Murders.

Check out this “definitive guide” website for more information.

I first read about the band called The Soundtrack Of Our Lives in an Amazon review of some other band’s CD. I ended up buying the Communion CD from TSOOL instead of whatever CD I was reading about, and I’m glad I did!

One great thing about this CD is that it’s really two CDs, yet it costs only $13.99 on Amazon. I actually bought a new copy instead of following my usual practice of finding the cheapest used copy that sounds from the description like it might actually play OK.

The CD packaging features numerous illustrations of the type you see on the cover, with impossibly bland race- and gender-balanced people in impossibly bland corporate-looking settings and poses. I haven’t really delved into the songs and their lyrics enough as yet to determine whether this is part of an overarching concept concerning consumerism or whether it just seemed like a cool cover-art idea.

As for the music, well, it’s kind of hard to describe. Although the band members are from Sweden, the songs and arrangements put me in mind of something I would have bought in 1968 or so to listen to in my college dorm room. Creativity fairly bursts forth on every song - no filler here. The album has the Beatles-like property that as you play it for the first time you have no idea what the next song will bring. Some rock out hard, others lay back prettily. One standout number is “Second Life Replay” (yes, that Second Life), which starts out acoustic and pretty, picks up tempo to become hard-rocky, then drops back again at the end. Whew!

You can hear sample excerpts of the CD’s songs on the Amazon page for Communion. I liked the album so much that I also bought their earlier album Origin, Vol. 1. Truth be told, I haven’t had a chance to give it a spin as yet. Once I get to know it, I’ll update this post with my reaction.

What would we do without YouTube? I must say, this is the strangest video involving sheep that I’ve ever seen.

Here’s a strange one! This guy has taken a whole bunch of YouTube videos - guitar lessons, people singing in their bedrooms, actual music videos, etc. - and sliced-n-diced them into a single performance. You probably haven’t seen anything quite like this before.

The (non-embeddable) video is at http://thru-you.com/.

When I was at Ohio State a few semesters ago (OK, in the late 60s), my roommate Marty and I accumulated and listened to a lot of albums. I mean hundreds of albums. How could we not? The late 60s was an incredible time for music - the heavy hand of the corporations had not yet fallen and it was just us kids thinking up cool songs! The level of creativity back then has never really been matched since, in my opinion.

I still have most of the vinyl LPs I had in those days, but the fact is, I don’t usually haul out a black beauty and put it on the gramophone. I guess I’m out of the habit! But like many others, over the years I have bought the CD versions of some (some) of the classic albums I enjoyed listening to in the dorm. Of these, I still listen to a few (a few) on a regular basis.

An unexpected survivor of that hallowed time is After Bathing At Baxter’s by Jefferson Airplane. Although I love Surrealistic Pillow, JA’s sophomore-album tour de force, it is Baxter’s that I have come back to over and over again. (In contrast, Crown Of Creation, from the same era, leaves me totally cold.) Maybe it’s because it has long songs (I love long songs). Maybe it’s because there are no actual hits on it. Maybe it’s the wacky sike-ay-delic freeform piece, “A Small Package of Value Will Come to You, Shortly.” I don’t know. But this is an album I think of as current rather than as a relic of a forgotten age.

The CD of this album is available at low cost these days. Modern hipsters would be wise to indulge themselves in this blast from the past. It’s that good. Check it out!

I recently needed to transfer a very large (84 MB) WAV file to my music buddy Jack, and I knew that was waaay too large to attach to an e-mail message. What to do?  I ended up transferring the file by way of MediaFire, an online file hosting service that’s free, convenient, and fast - a great combination! It even has an attractive web page. You can upload files as large as 100 MB, and they will stay there as long as you access your account at least once every 60 days.

There are other large-file sharing services, but this is the one I like the best of the ones I’ve tried.

Have you ever clicked on the red exclamation point on Yahoo’s home page?

You have got to check out this new tool I discovered for searching the Flickr Photo Database!  It’s based on tags, short descriptive words or phrases associated with the photos in the database.  The tool is so easy to use that I won’t describe it here; just follow the link, then follow your nose.

http://taggalaxy.com