John's Random Review

They say, “Variety is the spice of life.”  That’s almost the perfect description for my 3rd trip to the Ben Avery shooting facility during our annual spring break trip to Arizona.

This year, Jimbo, Art, and I shot trap again, but rotated through a set of shotguns to see which one we liked (or which ones liked us) better.

The trip to Ben Avery is always one of my favorite parts of the trip, even if it is only a couple hours of our week.  This year, I even remembered to bring my earplugs and shooting glasses.  One of these years, I’ll have a trap gun of my own, and maybe I’ll bring that along as well.  And maybe by then, Easton will be joining us.  But that’s a long way off . 

The gun I shot the best with was a Browning. In the picture, it is the beautifully engraved one near the center.  It might be something like this one, but I’m not positive.  the engraving looks the same to me, and it did have a stock like that one has.  It is a beautiful gun.

This year, after having been there a couple years previously, Jimbo and I dressed a little more comfortably, wearing shorts and t-shirts, instead of jeans like we did last year. 

And again, it was a beautiful, blue sky sunny day.

While we were setting all our stuff down and getting ready, Art went to get us signed in and ready to go.  And then some dude stole our bay!

So we packed everything back up, and moved over a bay, and unpacked again.

After one round, a random dude joined us, but other than that, it was the same setup and just as much fun as last year, just with more guns!

The only other interesting this this year was that Art was trying out a new gun, a pump action one! 

Of the three of us, Art probably still shot the best, even using the pump gun that isn’t really the optimal setup for trap, compared to some of the other guns!

When the end of the day looks like this, with a ton of boxes full of empty shells, you know you had a good day!

Like always, I’m ready to go back, any time!  I wish there was a huge range like this as close to us as this range is to Art!  Although it is probably good that there isn’t a range like this that close, or I’d spend all of our disposable income on ammo!

About 5 years ago, we redid my office.  Well, now that there’s another little being on the way, my office is transforming back to bedroom form. So i had to update my office again. This time, there ended up being a little… well, consolidation.  An entire room of stuff is now in this:

Over the years, “Nerd Central”, as my office was once known, has slowly gone from 3 computers, 2 monitors, 2 printers, a television, surround sound receiver, a small mixer to manage the sound output to one set of speakers, and a huge random assortment of other electronics down to just a single desktop computer and xbox with a single monitor and computer speakers, and the 2 printers (one inkjet, one photo)

and now that setup has been slimmed down to pretty much the bare essentials.  computer, monitor, printer, and 360.

Since this pic, some books and other assorted stuff fills in the empty shelves, but its working well so far.  When I work from home, I can pull out the shelf above the keyboard, put the laptop there, and plug it into the monitor and network, and use the laptop keyboard and mouse separately from the desktop.  It would be nice to have a usb+dvi kvm switch so I could use just one keyboard and mouse…It also looks like I could get a much bigger monitor to fit inside there, that would increase my productivity immensely!

There’s also a small shelf up against the wall (behind that door) that has some other assorted stuff, including the photo printer.

The nice thing is that when it is all closed up, it looks rather clean.  I’m sure it will get a lot messier inside, but at least I can close it up and keep little people fingers away from all those tempting buttons and blinking lights.  At this point, it doesn’t lock, so I’m thinking about adding a little lock to the top, so that Easy can’t open it up. 

I also had to go back into the crawlspace yet again to run cat5 to that wall so that I have wired network access there. Wireless is fast, but it isn’t gigabit fast like everything else wired in the house.

So where did everything else go?  Over the years, a lot of the “headless” stuff, like the webserver and the home media server have migrated to the garage, where the fiber comes into the house.  The old CRT television was recycled years ago.  A bunch of the books went to my office at work, I’ve kept some, recycled a huge amount, and have 2 stacks to go donate either to the library at work, the library, or whoever will take them.  A lot of the other stuff is still in the process of being thrown out or being recycled. 

About the only thing we don’t have a plan for so far is the huge collection of bobble-heads we have.  There are shelves along two whole walls that are full of mariners, brewers, and assorted other bobble-heads.  There hasn’t even been space for the 2 we’ve gotten this year!

I don’t know what it is, but every time Laura and Easton leave for a week, I end up doing some project that consumes all of my free time, and half of my sleep!  I finally have some time to sleep in and relax, but no;  I do a woodworking or home improvement project instead.  Last May it was redoing the stairs.  This year it was a cabinet for the theater room for dvds, games, books and things.  We couldn’t use a floor standing one, as that corner of the room has an electric fan forced heater that requires clearance space.  So the cabinet had to be a wall mounted one.  Sounds like a project!

Friday night planning session. just me, some notebooks, a tape measure, and a roll of thin mints.  the little notebook is my construction projects one, the big notebook is one I do other stuff in.  The metal template is for drawing phone software user interface elements, but I was mostly just using it as a ruler and straight edge.  I originally designed it without a center divider and having fixed shelves, so I’m glad I slept on it before starting it.  I think this way turned out a lot simpler.

The carcass, and the face frame on top.  The carcass is 3/4” birch ply, the face frame is whatever oak home depot had.  the back cleat is cut at the center at 45 degrees to make it a “french cleat”.  You screw one half of the cleat onto the wall, and then other half of the cleat gets attached to the cabinet.  that makes it super easy to install and remove.

tongues and grooves! grooves and tongues! this always takes forever to set up, but once everything is ready, things go pretty quick.  Getting the dado at the exact right height to make those tongues exactly centered and the right size took forever.

done!  the windows are plexi, with the back sanded to make them semi-opaque.  The inside of the cabinet is stained, the outside painted “sweatshirt gray”, the same color as the walls of the theater room.  We decided on the gray color, as it would hopefully make the shelf blend in and seem smaller than it is, instead of black (to match the other furniture) or white (to match the trim.) Painting is always my least favorite part of these escapades.  I’d much rather be doing the rest of the project than any of the painting.  I used to dislike staining things, but now that is sooooo much simpler to me than painting.  And I think that most of the stains smell better than latex paint, too.

You can’t see it, but the sides and center have shelf pin holes for adjustable shelves.  I had to buy a jig to do that, so the jig and the self centering big that went with that were the one new tool I ended up buying for this project.  I kindof wish I would have gotten the shelf pins that have the fancy sleeves, as the holes aren’t super clean in the plywood.  Next time

here it is, installed.  I still have to make some shelves to go into it, but that’s just a bunch of straight cuts, and maybe some biscuits.  If I’m feeling fancy, I might use the router to route little slots for the shelf pins to fit into so the shelves can’t slide out.

I might also have to find some super rough sandpaper and scuff up the windows a little more, as from the picture above you can still mostly see into them.  With the overhead lights off (they’re on for the picture), you can see a lot more than normal, but it’s still a little too clear. 

I also have to find some hardware for the doors.  I was originally looking for knobs the same size/shape as our entertainment center, but since this cabinet is a different color, it doesn’t need to match exactly.  With the really tall doors, it might need some thinner, taller pulls instead of knobs too.  we’ll see what I can find around… With the area in the corner, I’m thinking about putting some hooks/hangers on the left side, to hang xbox/ps3 controllers or something in that hidden space between the cabinet and the wall.

Alan Wake was one of the most interesting games I’ve played in a long time.  The story was an actual story.  Well, it was really a story about a story, in the form of a game about a story.

A lot of companies have tried to do some kind of “episodic” game, and of any, I think this game could have actually pulled it off if it had been released that way.

The game was set up as several distinct “episodes”, that had a setup of “Previously, on Alan Wake…” and then re-told important parts of the previous chapters.  It was a fantastic way to get you back into the game when you start a new chapter.

As the game went on, the episodes got longer and longer, so it wasn’t as episodic as the first few.  Every time I thought “this is going to be the end of this episode,” it just kept going.  And partway through, I thought I had part of the story figured out based on something a character said, but the story totally went another way.  I really enjoyed finding pages of the manuscript, which explained little things in the story that were happening or were “shadows” (pun intended!) of things to come.

Gameplay wise, it was different than almost anything I’ve ever played.  For most of the game, you have 2 weapons: a flashlight, and a gun of some kind.  And yes, the flashlight is a weapon!  This might also be the first time that a game had a flare gun that was truly truly useful.  It was like the game’s equivalent of a rocket launcher, and it was fun to use!

The story completely set up DLC and a sequel, so this is another sequel I’ll be excited for!

The game begins in disappointment: you’re forced to install a console game.  So before I can even do anything, I’m forced to wait 8 minutes.  Great initial experience there.

During the install I’m forced to watch a dude on screen chain smoke the whole time.  Some of the “hints” it gave during this install (emphasis/commentary added):

• konami is not responsible for any damage resulting from misuse (misuse of what?)
• this game is intended for use exclusively with the PLAYSTATION3 system. (no crap, really? is that why its only available on the PS3? where else would I play it?)
• cigarette smoke has detrimental effects to you and those around you, particularly infants and children.
• put litter in its place.  dispose of ashes in ashtrays.
• ensure that you play in a brightly lit room and sit as far away from the screen as possible (except sony makes this impossible, as I need to charge my ps3 controller, and the cord they give you for that is like 3’ long, and apparently the controller only charges if the PS3 is on!)
• avoid playing when you are tired
• be sure to take a 15-minute break every half hour
• if you begin to feel ill, stop playing immediately

THANKS MOM, for the life coaching while waiting for your game to install.

I’m really hoping that smoking is an integral part of the game now.

[72 hours later, waiting for install #2 to complete…so I’ll post more. Yes, this makes 11 minutes of install time now.]

The second install also features the life coaching that the first install did. Nice.

I wouldn’t call smoking an integral part of the game, I’d almost call it a character. Mr. Cigarette appears all over the place, as a usable item, as a major plot point in most cut-scenes. There’s even a cigarette smoking monkey. That’s just awesome.

Another very strange thing is that whenever you start the game, before anything else you get an empty black screen with the standard console “this game uses autosave, so don’t unplug your console while its saving” message.  You have to press X before you even get to  the title screen.  This occurs every time you start the game.  Lame.

The game is also more like a soap opera with an interactive video game between scenes.  Every time you move into a new area, you get a phone call from someone.  A general, your psychologist, your friend’s former fiancé.  There’s a drama about how the colonel is the father of one of the female protagonists, but she grew up thinking he was her uncle, and now he’s married to your shrink, who calls you when you’re stressed out on the battlefield…

[And another hour or so in, I gave up on it.  There are just too many other good games to play, and MGS4:GotP just isn’t my style right now.]

On March 29, 1911 the army adopted the John Moses Browning designed M1911 pistol.  And today, 100 years later, the 1911 is still used by some of the special forces groups of the military and is still one of the most popular handguns in the world. 

The first gun I bought was a 1911 pistol.  It is still my favorite handgun to shoot, although shooting a lot of .45 gets expensive!  So I bought a Marvel Precision .22 LR conversion that allows me to shoot .22 LR,  and then I bought another (used) 1911 so that I didn’t have to keep swapping the conversion on and off.  The collection has grown, but I still shoot both of those pretty often.  I’ve even used the 45 in pistol league a few weeks, and it’s a lot of fun! 

The 1911 is used in some of my all-time favorite movies, used by Robert De Niro in Ronin (I also love the car chases!), by Benicio Del Toro and Ryan Phillippe in The Way of the Gun (I also love the realism of the tactics they use!), and by Tom Hanks in Saving Private Ryan, shooting at a tank! (the last 5 minutes of Saving Private Ryan and Monsters, Inc get me teary eyed every time!)

A couple weeks ago, the M1911 officially became the state gun of Utah, more because J.M. Browning was a Utah native, and to celebrate the centennial than ay other reason.

So thank you very much, Mr. Browning, for your innovative work!  So innovative, that after selling the 1911 design to Colt, he had to design an entirely new pistol, the Browning Hi-power, to get around his own patents!  The hi-power’s centennial isn’t until 1935, so I have some time to get some of those before that rolls around!

Last year, Art took us to Ben Avery Shooting Facility to shoot some of his guns, and we had a grand old time.

In what has become an annual tradition, we went again this year during spring training. But this year, instead of rifles and revolvers, this year was all about: Shotguns! 

Jim and Art used over/under Browning shotguns, and I used a browning single shot.  We then each shot ~60 birds of trap shooting.  Ben Avery is a huge place, with something like 18 trap fields, so the 3 of us had a trap field to ourselves. This was good since neither Jim or I had shot trap before, and we didn’t want to slow anyone else down.

The range was all automated, with voice activated release.  So there are little speakers on stands in front of you, and when you say “pull” (or whatever you say loud), it flings out your target.  So once you’re up there, there’s no talking, or it will fling out some more targets that nobody will be ready for!  And since the range is all automated, there’s no free targets if you accidentally screw up!

We did all of our shooting from the 16 yard line, which is the closest spot, and for first timers we did really well.  It took Jimbo a little while to get warmed up, and once he was warm he was on fire!  I started off pretty well and stayed pretty consistent.  The only ones I had trouble judging were the ones that fired straight away, with no left or right movement.  I think I shot over the top of those more than anything.  Of around 60 total birds, I think I missed 7, so I was feeling pretty good!  I wanted to try moving back and see if I could still hit anything, but by then, our cards were up!

(If the embedded video is missing, you can see it here)

I think both Jim and I expected a lot more kick from the shotguns, but the trap loads were pretty light, and the shotguns pretty heavy.  I had a tiny little strawberry bruise on my shoulder, but that was probably from one round that I didn’t have the shotgun pulled into my shoulder all the way.  The next day my shoulder was a little more sore, but that could have been from the shooting or from chasing Easy around the pool all afternoon, or most likely both.

The next day, Jimbo was ready to go again, so we know that he enjoyed it.  I had a great time, and can’t wait to see what art has planned for next year!

(If the embedded video is missing, you can see it here)

By some freak coincidence, I think both times I took video, both jim and art missed.  You can’t blame the camera, as in both cases, neither of them noticed .

If we lived closer to Ben Avery, I’d be there all the time; it’s most definitely good for my wallet that we’re a thousand miles away!

While Torchlight has been available for the PC for a long (long!) time, it just came out last week on Xbox 360 as an arcade game.  And it is a great game!  It’s probably the best value for an Xbox live arcade game so far.  I can’t believe how much stuff they fit into that ~400 meg download!

It wasn’t the best story ever, but I thought the story made more sense than Borderlands!  The side quests were ok, but I think I “broke” some by going through the area and doing something before I got the quest for it.  There were other things where I swear I scoured the whole level, and the thing that was supposed to be there wasn’t there.  And I wasn’t going to spend a lot of time looking when there was so much other stuff to do.

The controls were pretty good for a PC to Xbox port, although I think some things, like inventory management, could have been simplified.  I accidentally sold or equipped things lots of times because the selection outline and the equipped outline were very similar at first glance.  The text in some areas still seemed to be set up for a PC as well, with a really small font that only used up a small area at the bottom of the screen, with the torchlight logo covering the other 70%. 

But I can easily overlook any of those nitpicks for this one.  About 3/4 of the way through, I felt like I was cheating.  Once I started getting really good equipment and skills, I was just destroying things.  In most games, as you get stronger, so do the bad guys, so even though you’re now doing 10x the damage at level 10, the bad guys are 10x stronger, so there’s not a lot of difference from level 1.  While that was somewhat true in Torchlight, I felt like my character really was a hero.  Hacking and slashing and fireballing zombies and dragons and such was awesome fun.  I didn’t die until the very last boss monster, as health potions were pretty easy to come by.

The verdict on this one is 100% clear.  Spend the points and buy Torchlight.  The only thing that would be better would be co-op multiplayer, so here’s hoping for that in Torchlight 2. And here’s to double hoping the Xbox port comes sooner for the sequel, with how well it has done in sales!

This is one of the few sequels that doesn’t have a number or subtitle.  It should be something like “Medal of Honor: Tier 1” or something, as the game was mostly following some Tier 1 special forces operators through the storyline.

Like the Call of Duty series, I played through MoH on the hardest difficulty (until I saw the “Tier 1 mode” or whatever that I didn’t go back through and play).  But unlike recent CoD games on hard, I didn’t see any real “bugs” with the “good guy” AI.  And the special forces guys in this game could shoot.  While you, as the player, still have to do the majority of the work, the computer controlled players could at least draw fire and provide cover so that you could flank the bad guys.  So for this game, I don’t have to write a version of my “letter to my idiot squadmates” posts.  The effectiveness of my squad did make the game feel a little easier than CoD, but it did make me feel like a good player on a great team, instead of the great player on a crappy team.   However, the game not being as hard didn’t make the game any less enjoyable.

The scenarios and script of the single player campaign seemed very realistic. In fact, some of it seems to be loosely based on the real life situation that was documented by Marcus Lattrell in his fantastic book Lone Survivor. Some other parts of the game were so engrossing that as things started to unfold, I actually was getting worried.  In one section, you’re fighting your way down an Afghan mountain with a small squad of soldiers, vastly outnumbered by the Taliban.  You’re trying to call in close air support, but things just aren’t working out.  You’re hiding in buildings that are slowly getting destroyed by small arms fire and RPGs, and you continue to fall back.  All the while, your squad-mates are counting down ammo.  Soon, they start firing kill shots only.   Then you start hearing “last mag!” and other not good commentary.  When the radio guy tells command to use the air support to help another group because we’re about to be overrun and it would just be a waste of time… At this point, like my squadmates, I’m also getting very low on ammo, and I’m starting to freak out…back in the real world, on my couch, my heart is racing!

There was also a section where you get to be the gunner in an Apache (my favorite helicopter of all time).  Surprisingly, on the hardest difficulty, I got through it pretty quick, and I was only using the main gun.  When playing through again later on easy to pick up some achievements I missed, I realized that the apache also had rockets, and I never used them on hard!  I died a lot more on that section on easy than I did on hard.  But it sure was fun!  Now someone needs to make a game featuring my favorite airplane of all time, the A-10 Thunderbolt II, aka “The Warthog”, but that’s a discussion for another day!

The multi-player was Ok.  I liked some of the progression aspects, but I think the Call of Duty franchise has a better overall system for that.  As a new player unfamiliar with the maps, I was getting sniped far too much for it to be a lot of fun though.  In the Call of Duty games, after you get killed by another player, you see an instant replay from that player’s point of view, so you can at least see where the person is camping as they kill you over and over…

There was a lot of hub-ub when the game was coming out that in multi-player, one side was good guys, and the other side was the Taliban.  There was a huge negative press that you get to be the Taliban.  After EA changed the name to the more generic “OpFor” (opposing force) that is used by militaries around the world in war games (and used in the Call of Duty series of games set in modern day), the rhetoric didn’t seem to calm down much, and Exchanges on military bases still refused to sell the game.  I wonder if they ever sold “Counterstrike”, or the Call of Duty games.  In counterstrike, one side was always the “Terrorists”, and the other was trying to rescue hostages or defuse a bomb planted by the terrorists.  The Call of Duty games always had one set of players being the Axis and the other side the Allies.  Personally, I don’t see the big deal, particularly since the game is rated Mature.

All in all, I thought it was a really good game, and can’t wait for the sequel (bring on lucky number 13 in the franchise!)

This is the (by my count) 7th game in the Call of Duty series. Of the recent ones (since CoD:Modern Warfare), this one had the best story.

It had a very interesting psycho-drama going on, with the main character being captured and interrogated by someone, causing flashbacks. The missions occurred in the flashbacks, not entirely in order, and interestingly, sometimes without clear beginning or end. I liked that. Several times you’d be what you’d assume 3/4 of the way through something, and then you’d see something that didn’t make sense, and you’d get shocked back to the interrogation. I thought I had figured out what was going on, but I hadn’t. I like it when a game keeps me guessing.

But, like all of the recent call of duty games, i have to complain about the computer controlled characters. There were many many cases where a bad guy would “rush” wherever the good guys were, and would either kill me, or all the good guys in that vicinity, without the other good guys ever firing a single shot. It was if the good guys never saw the bad guy at all. I always play through the CoD games on the hardest possible difficulty, and maybe that’s what exposes me to the worst flaws. I assume as the difficulty goes up, the good guys in your squad become less effective, requiring you to do more, and makes the bad guys more effective. I get that, that’s fine. But its inexcusable to let a bad guy run across 50 yards of open ground uncontested into the middle of a group of what is supposed to be highly trained special forces soldiers. At least in the previous games, most of the time the offending soldiers were just regular soldiers. In this game, they’re supposed to be operators! The elite! If you’re so elite, do something, other than stand there and die!