12. One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.

Granted, there’s a lot more to it than just being an average five-year-old child, but it’s amazing what happens when you have someone who just have a perspective from outside of the business.

Oh, and I would love to say that all these flaws “will be corrected before implementation” all the time.  I guess that’s the differentiator between successful businesses / evil overlords and unsuccessful ones.

Hero Core is an intense action shooter borrowing concepts, graphics and sound from the olden days of gaming. What makes it interesting is that it also has elements of exploration and upgrades, often described as the Metroidvania genre. As the creatively named Flip Hero, you land on the asteroid base of your nemesis, Cruiser Tetron, explore its caverns and factories, defeat bosses, and earn upgrades that enable you to explore further and further until you are face-to-face with Tetron himself.

But the way that Hero Core approaches this style of gameplay is absolutely brilliant. For most of games of the Metroidvania genre, there is an explicit secondary goal not just to beat the game, but to collect all the items as well. Hero Core certainly accomplishes this – the “best” ending is only achieved by getting all the hidden items – but yet in Hero Core, this is not the same level of challenge as in other games. By default, the map shows you where the next boss to fight is, and will also show you the location of the hidden items if you find a secret that’s out of the way but likely to be found by anyone who is relatively thorough. Tetron himself, while not a cakewalk, is also easier than some of the later bosses if Flip is fully powered up.

The relative ease of accomplishing the secondary goal, however, is an implicit but strong hint towards the tertiary goal of Metroidvania games – what is the least number of items you can obtain and still win the game? This is where Hero Core shines. In most Metroidvania games, there are usually some opportunities for a skilled player to skip powerups and sections of the game, but for the most part it involves players trying to find unintended holes in the game. Yet Hero Core is built around this concept. The entire map is non-linear; in particular, Tetron’s lair is accessible from several different areas in the asteroid, including areas you reach well before the end of the game. There are a few powerups that open up access to new areas, but most of them simply make it easier to survive. As a result, the only thing keeping you from advancing is whether you have the skill to make it where you’re not supposed to.

So all in all, I think Hero Core is an absolutely admirable game. It brings in many of the things I liked about Iji – the upgrades, the secrets, the replay value, the intense and memorable boss fights – yet still stands as its own game. I have only beaten it twice – once with the best ending, once without – but rest assured I will rise to the real challenge of the game!

Wow, thank you ever so much for that truly edifying list of features! Were it not for your guidance, I might not have realized that Imperial is not a sander and should not be used to polish that kitchen table I’m building. I might not have known that it is not edible, even with zest of lemon and a nice Chardonnay. I might not have known that it does not have 32 gigabytes of solid-state memory or 802.11 wireless connectivity, and thus would make a poor substitute for Trooper.

But thanks to you, I know one important thing about Imperial: “It is a board game.” As such, I know that I instead should present it to other people and invite them to join me in playing. Thanks, Amazon!

Even better is the description of the sequel, Imperial 2030:

Gotta love the product features, but also note the manufacturer’s suggestion, nay their recommendation, that it is playable by anyone aged 0 months and up. To prove this, when I have kids, the very first thing I will do (yes, even before I tweet about it) will be to break out Imperial 2030, which of course my newborn will instinctively know how to play. Oh stop crying! I know you’re upset I took China from you, but there’s no reason to be a baby about it!

Of course, the first thing to do when you have a new piece of technology is to name it. At first, I wasn’t sure what to call it.  Typically, my mobile or auxiliary devices have been named after spacecraft and other astronomical items – my flash drives are Mercury and Titan and my external hard drive is Orion.  On the other hand, my computers have typically been named after rocks or stones – my IBM ThinkPad is Monolith, and my MacBook is Neolith.  So I could’ve gone with Microlith or Nanolith for the new phone, but it just didn’t feel right.

In the end, I went with something unorthodox – Trooper!  Here’s why:

1)I intend to put it through its paces – “trooper” being slang for something that works tirelessly without complaining.  (It better!)

2)It is made of white plastic and represents an organization which insists on imposing its own standards of everything, with no possibility of rebellion:

3)It has a hard green shell which is removable:

4)Finally, this has absolutely nothing to do with the device itself, but it need be mentioned:

So there you have it!

The book cover does not disappoint. That font means it's the FUTURE!

First, it’s always fun to see what predictions came true (even partially) and which ones just failed.  To be sure, there are plenty of the latter.  In Mr. Hoyle’s 2010, personal car traffic has largely been eliminated, and the few vehicles on the road are electric-powered buses, provided free of charge.  I need only to drive out to our office in the suburbs, more than an hour-long drive on clogged I-90, to prove how wrong that is.  Likewise with the idea that technology would bring us all a three-day work week, affording more time for life development – I work in technology, and I’ve had six-day work weeks!  But yet there are slivers of truth in it; Hoyle’s concept of “vision phones” to speak face-to-face with your friends, coworkers and classmates who are miles away is relatively commonplace today.  Also, I can certainly get just about anything I want delivered to me without leaving my house, from music to books to groceries, even if it is delivered through a slightly different series of tubes!

I don't think this is what Ted Stevens had in mind...

I also find it very interesting from a historical perspective – how did people see technology in 1972?  Most of Hoyle’s ideas are timesavers, things to enable you to get through your day without a single action, effort or decision that is at all unnecessary.    Yet there are no technologies to enhance your life, to entertain, to intrigue, or to make you think.  To me, this perfectly reflects the path that human-computer interaction has taken.  HCI was formed from engineering and psychology, but recently has added influences from art and design to the mix.  Don’t forget the “H” in HCI – yes, timesavers are certainly extremely helpful, but remember that humans have other needs as well!  I can also see reflections of the current fears and worries that plagued humanity in Hoyle’s inventions.  The first problem he saw was overcrowding, which he solved with enormously tall and cramped buildings (yet still with enough room for ridiculously massive fully centralized utilities for everything, including a 500,000-seat stadium – five times the size of Michigan Stadium!).  Then there were the worries over fossil fuels, pollution and the environment, hence all the electric cars in Hoyle’s future.  (And of course, in our version of 2010, almost forty years after this book, we’ve got the environment completely fixed and we’re totally off those nasty fossil fuels, right?  Right?)

It's Michigan Stadium...IN THE FUTURE!

Overall though, I appreciate this kind of retrofuturism as a sort of brake pedal to the V12 of technological advance.  As great as it is to have a far-flung vision of how awesome the future is going to be fifty, twenty, or even ten years from now, it’s essential to keep in mind that it may very well never happen.  Having the vision is one thing; understanding how the new technology will really affect people’s everyday lives is another, and being able to bring it about is yet another.  For instance, throughout the work, Geoffrey Hoyle posits immeasurably complex machines and computers as a way to enable everyone around the world to live an easier life.  But who is going to design, build, maintain and improve all those machines?  Who is going to drive the delivery trucks to send groceries around the world three hundred sixty-five days a year?  Who is going to collect the raw fruits, vegetables and meats and put them into the machines to begin with?  No matter what your vision is, you have to consider what will really come of it.

I guess the bottom line is – people in 2050 are going to laugh just as hard at our predictions of 2050 as we currently are laughing at 1970s predictions of 2010.

But that’s not what I’m writing to talk about today.  What I’m writing about today is the button configuration and how that affects your sleeping habits.  Here’s a guide stolen from the reference manual (’cause I’m too lazy to take a photo):

Emerson AC100 radio

Notice the snooze button (number 10) and the buttons to actually turn the alarm off (numbers 16 and 17, depending on which alarm is ringing).  Pretty big size differential between them, no?  Just out of curiosity, I actually measured them.  The alarm buttons are circles with about a 1/4-inch diameter, giving them a total surface area of 1/8 * 1/8 * pi, or roughly .05 square inches.  The snooze button measures 4 inches wide by 1/2 inch tall.  If it were a rectangle, it would measure 2 square inches, but it’s smaller than that because of the curvature.  Let’s say it’s 1.5 inches.  So, that means that the snooze button is 1.5 / .05 = 30 times the size of the alarm button!  Furthermore, the snooze button has a distinctive shape and location, whereas the alarm buttons are shaped and positioned in exactly the same fashion as buttons which do things that are completely unrelated, such as adjusting the clock time and time zone.

So, the bottom line is – when the alarm goes off, which of these buttons do you think is getting pushed?  Especially in the dark, groggy first moments of your morning?  It’s like they made this alarm clock for people who don’t want to get up at all, and just want to hit the snooze button every few minutes.

I suppose making the snooze button easy to find is good because really, it would suck if you just wanted those few more minutes and you were half awake by the time you hit the button.  But making the button which will actually let me get started with my day hard to find?  No wonder people hate mornings.

• Small Worlds won both the judging and the audience award, and with good reason.  Although not much of a “game” in the traditional sense, it is absolutely astounding how much atmosphere Small Worlds packs into just fifteen minutes of heavily pixellated graphics.  The titular worlds are so vibrant and well-realized, and the inclusion of a beautifully-implemented zooming effect truly fills you with a sense of wonder and even horror as you explore.
• Full Moon came in second place.  It’s a good, solid, stylish puzzle effort from Bart Bonte, who just seems to crank out great puzzles woven together in a common theme.  Outside of a few puzzles which were frustrating (dragging is a pain in the butt even if you have a mouse, and nigh impossible if you’re on a laptop), I enjoyed it a lot.  It’s just tricky enough to stretch your brain without breaking it.
• How My Grandfather Won the War has production values that are simply off the charts and a great concept that is fantastically realized.  But I found the gameplay way too frustrating to be fun.  The collision detection is dodgy, the weapon recharges too slowly, and restarting the level every three lives was not fun.  Sorry, I didn’t think this deserved to be third.
• The Fantasy of the Sord [sic] was my sentimental favorite.  It takes everything you hate about old console games (endearingly low-quality graphics and sound, tricky jumps, random enemies, bad grammar, nonsensical story), sautes it in a thick marinade of irony, and serves it up in a big, unmapped world of fun.  You select a character (white knight, rock man, wood sexer, etc.), choose your trusty sord from an overtly ridiculous list of weapons (including a tree branch, a shovel and a boxing glove), and set off to…um, slay some enemies.  And get even more sords.  Or something.
• The Fabulous Explorationsland is a cute Zelda-ish game of finding secrets in ruins.  Its cheesy sense of humor really endeared itself to me, even though it wasn’t very difficult and kind of short too.
• Hell Tour was really interesting.  It’s a wayfinding game with some really neat strategy and RPG elements to it.  However, it’s a bit too random and the ending, while a neat concept, basically undid all the work I did during the game.  That said, this was my third favorite game.
• Following Footsteps is interesting in that it was designed in DHTML, not Flash (which I, of course, have a special interest in), but the gameplay seemed kind of poor from the little time I played it.  I didn’t particularly care for it.

So that’ll do it for the games that I played – now to wait for the next competition!

What catches me about Eufloria is its unique theme.  Instead of rehashing one of the three common RTS themes (medieval / fantasy war, modern / realistic war, or future / space war), Eufloria shows off its own.  You are in command of a race of seedlings, which are insect-like self-replicating machines.  You colonize asteroids by sacrificing seedlings to build Dyson trees that automatically mine the resources in the asteroid and produce more seedlings.  Each asteroid has a unique combination of resources that determines the seedlings’ power, speed and health.  You have to fight off other races, as well as mysterious grey seedlings, for control of the sector.  It sounds closest to the space war genre, but the floral spin on the presentation and abstract visuals make Eufloria stand out.

Unfortunately, Eufloria’s gameplay is lacking.  It shares the “slippery slope” problem endemic to so many RTS’s.  If you’re doing well, it becomes easier and easier to win until victory is just a foregone conclusion.  On the other hand, if you are doing poorly, it is basically impossible to come back.  The strategy in Eufloria typically boils down to getting enough asteroids under your command to build decent-sized army, then just throwing increasingly ridiculous numbers of seedlings at your enemies until you’ve finally conquered them all.  What tends to happen is that you spend the first one quarter to one third of the game building up your empire, waiting painfully slowly to accumulate the ten seedlings to build each new Dyson tree.  Then you manage to conquer one or two other empires, marking the most challenging part of the game.  Once that’s done, you usually have a large enough empire to win the game just by force of numbers.  It can be incredibly satisfying to attack your enemy’s last outpost from three different angles with 200 seedlings each, but it doesn’t feel challenging.  The gameplay is not helped by the fact that other empires ordinarily do not attack you until quite a bit of time has gone by.  Instead, they will happily sit and watch, even if your empire is adjacent and is defended by only three seedlings which could easily be crushed by their 40 seedlings.  If they do get to a point where they attack you, chances are you’ve already done so poorly that you’re going to lose the game anyway.  It’s kind of a shame because there are a few really good gameplay hooks (Do you specialize in power, health, or speed?  Do you build a tree now, or do you hold onto those 10 seedlings to defend?) that never seem to be explored.

I’m also a bit disappointed by Eufloria’s game modes.  At the start, you only have access to the main campaign / story mode, which isn’t so much a story as a series of gimmicky scenarios arranged in roughly increasing order of difficulty.  If you get far enough in the story, you can unlock eight skirmish levels where you battle multiple enemy races.  I unfortunately cannot be any more specific than “far enough”, as I have yet to unlock a single skirmish level even after completing almost half of the levels in story mode.  Furthermore, there is no multiplayer mode, which is something that RTS’s in general just cry out for.  I do agree, however, that Eufloria’s rules as they are now would not lead to a great multiplayer experience.

On the other hand, I think Eufloria functions very well as an experience, rather than a game of strategic decision-making.  The abstract visuals and ambient soundtrack make for an atmosphere of beauty and calm – quite an accomplishment for a war game without diplomacy or compromise.  As minimalist as the graphics are, they convey a huge amount of information about the location and size of armies the condition of each asteroid.  Even the seedlings themselves are informative – fast seedlings have large wings, strong seedlings have large bodies, and powerful seedlings have long stingers, enabling you to size up an enemy’s army at a glance.  The interface is a perfect example of minimalism, too.  Everything is done with the mouse – a drag and drop sends your seedlings to another asteroid, and you can select subsets of your seedlings with a double-click, a right click, or a drag and click.  The mouse wheel zooms in and out in a smooth motion, and it’s very satisfying to go from seeing the entire campaign all at once to taking in all the action on a single asteroid.  I may have said a lot of negative stuff about Eufloria’s gameplay, but I don’t want to ignore the fact that it really does connect with me on a different level from most other RTS’s.

To sum up, I do have mixed feelings about Eufloria.  I’ve seen a suggestion that the loose gameplay and beautifully realized atmosphere makes it more of a toy than a game – something to run in the background and play with sporadically while you do your bank balance – and I am inclined to agree.  If you are expecting a deeply strategic game where the fate of your campaign constantly hinges on carefully considered decisions, do not get Eufloria.  But if you’re looking for an enjoyable experience with some RTS elements thrown in, Eufloria is certainly worth a try.

Being left-handed is more or less finding out that many different products just doesn’t quite work for you as intended.  In fact, in many cases products have been designed so that you are caused the most inconvenience possible.  I don’t begrudge people who tailor products to cater to right-handers – after all, it’s better to inconvenience just 10% of the population than to inconvenience 90% of the population – but at the same time it’s kind of frustrating.

Most of the time, the difficulty caused by being left-handed is just something silly. I remember the day I noticed that to put change into a vending machine, I basically had to stand all the way off to the right side of the machine in order to get my left hand into the proper location.  On the other hand, my right hand would’ve fit perfectly from just about anywhere.  Then there’s the teasing in art class because I could never use scissors correctly, and the way that I constantly smear hand-written notes when my hand brushes the paper.  But sometimes, the difficulty is much more than that.  The most powerful example is a chainsaw, which usually features a guard to protect the operator’s right hand.  The lack of a corresponding protection for the left side puts left-handers at a much greater risk of injury or death.  Overall, it’s a reminder to me to consider how different people might have different needs, and that sometimes, there is just no one magic solution that will please everyone.

The funny part of this whole thing?  My left-handedness means that I actually find QWERTY more useful than Dvorak in a way.  If my hands get tired, I sometimes switch to typing with just one hand, and naturally, it’s much easier with my left hand.  What I’ve noticed is that most of the important letters are clustered on the left side on QWERTY – to the extent that the New York Times once published a crossword puzzle where all the answers could be formed from letters on the left side of a QWERTY keyboard.  This would be impossible with the right hand.  On the other hand, the important consonants on Dvorak are clustered on the right side.  So maybe Dvorak users aren’t like left-handers after all…