Last year I turned 41. My birthday present to myself: a brand new Xbox 360.

The games that had gotten me excited about Microsoft’s console were, in no particular order, Alan Wake, Mass Effect (the first one, which was a 360 exclusive), and any future iterations of the . . . → Read More: An old guy plays Halo: Part 1…]]> Part 1 –  Halo: Reach

Last year I turned 41. My birthday present to myself: a brand new Xbox 360.

The games that had gotten me excited about Microsoft’s console were, in no particular order, Alan Wake, Mass Effect (the first one, which was a 360 exclusive), and any future iterations of the Fallout series, which suffered from almost unforgivable bugs on the PlayStation 3.

I was also quite aware of the Halo franchise.  I can’t imagine that someone could know that there was an invention called an Xbox, and not know there was something called “Halo” that was symbiotically connected to it.  Just in case you’ve been living in a cave for the last 11 years or so, Halo is a series of first-person-shooters (FPS), the first installment of which was one of the launch titles for the original Xbox back in 2001. The universe in which Halo unfolds is 500 years or so in Earth’s future.  The United Nations Space Command, or UNSC is at war with the Covenant, an alliance of hostile aliens, grouped together by a shared religion.   Starting with Halo: Combat Evolved, the player steps into the armor of Master Chief, a member of the Spartans, a group of physically and mentally enhanced super-soldiers. Through Master Chief’s high-tech visor, the player discovers a gigantic ring-world floating in space.  The purpose and history of this ring are the underpinnings of the story, so I won’t spoil them here.

It would be hard to overstate the credit and praise that has been heaped upon Bungie Studios for their creation.  Check out The Halo Nation Wiki, and you’ll see what I mean.  Some have compared Halo’s cultural impact to no less than that of Star Wars (I’m not quite sure I believe this one).   Others have claimed that without Halo, and its unprecedented commercial and critical success, Microsoft might not be in the video game business today (this one I completely believe).

So there I was, in the store, buying an Xbox 360.

There it was, the most current Halo game, Halo: Reach. The “Limited Edition” version happened to be on sale for a full ten bucks less than the standard, green DVD box version, so what could I do?  By the way, I am a serious sucker for things with names like “Collector’s Edition”, “Limited Edition”, “Double Secret Edition”, you get the idea. I admit that I do in fact own a Bobblehead, a Jack-in-the-box, a deck of cards, some strange poker chips, a number of “The Art of…” books, and several “Making of…” DVDs, all based on video games.  But I digress…

On the way home from my console quest, I stopped in at a game store that I frequent, and asked one of the clerks about where the best place was to start into the Halo experience.  This is when I found out that Reach was a prequel, and actually the beginning of the story, not unlike Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace.  He also pointed out that the original Halo: Combat Evolved was being reissued with the Reach graphics engine, and would be a great place to continue the story.  So I went ahead and pre-ordered that as well.

At first, I actually found Reach to be a little disappointing.  It seemed to me to be a First Person Shooter (FPS) that was more along the Rambo, charge-in-with-all-guns-blazing approach, where I am a little more into the hang back, be patient, pick-off-the-bad-guys-before-they-know-you’re-there type of game.  I’m also not terribly into public multiplayer games that involve a bunch of strangers shooting each other over and over.   I put Reach away and played Alan Wake.  I started wondering if pre-ordering Anniversary was a good idea.

It was actually a couple months later, after I trekked out to GameStop at midnight to pick up my copy of Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary that I decided to really give Reach its due attention.  I wanted to give CEA a fair shot, and figured that in order to do that properly, I needed to at least run through Reach‘s campaign once, if only for the story continuity.  So I selected “Normal” difficulty, and off I went.

This time, something clicked.  After the first couple of missions, things really got rolling.  When the fourth mission, Nightfall,  opened with one of the supporting characters advising me to stay quiet and use my sniper rifle carefully, I knew the momentum had shifted.  The sneaking around was so much fun that when it eventually (and inevitably) turned into an open firefight, I was way too hooked to stop.  A couple of missions later, when the battle went into space, I knew I was enthusiastically “all-in”, and thoroughly enjoying the ride.  By the end of the final mission, which I was sure was over at least twice before it actually was, I knew that I truly “Got it”.

While Reach represents the beginning of the Halo story, it is also clearly the fourth chapter of a widely arcing storyline that goes way beyond the basic “blow stuff up” appeal of many FPS games.  There is a certain bitter-sweetness to the way the story unfolds.  Perseverance in the face of hopelessness, commitment to comrades and duty, great personal loss and the fine, occasionally indistinguishable line between victory and defeat are just some of the themes that are explored.   All of this occurs, of course, against the backdrop of knowing that in some important way, this is in fact the finale of something that has been wonderful.  Kind of like watching the two-hour special final episode of a TV show you’ve been watching for years.   Completing the campaign was both challenging and rewarding.  The gameplay was quite varied, and the game mechanics were smooth and consistent.   I also found the setup for Halo: Combat Evolved, Anniversary to be just about perfect.

Halo: Reach was the fifth and final game of the Halo franchise to be produced by Bungie Studios.  Starting with CEA, the baton would be passed to 343 Industries  (being new to the Halo universe, it wasn’t until halfway through CEA that I realized where the “343″ name came from).   Just before the credits roll, there is a slide from the people of Bungie Studios to the fans, thanking them for the great ride and support.  By the time you get to that slide, if there wasn’t already a little bit of a tear welling up…  Well, you get the picture.

So, did Reach have me at “Hello”?

No. But it had me by Nightfall…

Part 2 – Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary

So I’d finished Reach, and was ready to move onto the next episode, which was actually the first episode, but had been re-released, so it was really the sixth episode… Yeah, whatever.  I still don’t get why prequels are such a hard concept to so many people.  The newest episode of Halo picked up right after Reach, so that’s where I went.

CEA represents a very interesting point of transition between one studio and the next.  On the one hand, it was the exact same story, the same level design (including some maddeningly frustrating game mechanics – especially checkpoint design!),  but with new, state of the art graphics, newly remastered audio and a few extras that do not affect gameplay, such as achievements and terminals (interesting cutscenes that help explain the back story of the game).

I found CEA to be an absolutely fantastic way to experience the original 2001 game for the first time. This was my first introduction to Master Chief, the iconic hero of the Halo franchise.  From the moment he emerged from his cryo-tube and jumped into action, I saw what all the hype was about.  If Reach felt like the final chapter of a long and glorious story, CEA felt like watching the pilot episode of a great TV show, where you can’t believe how young everyone looks.  The overall structure of the game was wonderfully variable, moving between short, frenetic missions like the opening Pillar of Autumn, and moving through wide-open spaces, then back into claustrophobic and creepy (The Library),  then back to fast-paced and high energy (The Maw).  It certainly wasn’t perfect.  There were some seemingly interminably long and repetitive missions, and as I have already mentioned, the checkpoint structure at times got absolutely infuriating.  I have to say though, this was the state of the art for game design in 2001, and I am glad that 343 Industries chose to keep the original structure intact, warts and all.

CEA includes what I think is an extremely cool feature: with a single button press, a player can switch between the gorgeous, new, state of the art graphics, and the original 2001 renderings, so it is possible to recreate the original experience almost completely, but without the extra hassles that always seem to come with playing an original Xbox game on the 360.

Halo: CEA was also the start of a slippery slope for me.  I am a sucker for achievements.  I love to see the pop-up, and hear the beep when one of those little guys unlocks.  It’s a feeling of accomplishment that comes with a nice dose of instant gratification.  The achievement list for CEA was actually rather modest, and seemed to be reasonably doable while still remaining challenging.  Most importantly, none of them required doing anything completely insane and unlikely in some specific kind of multiplayer matchup (I hate those!).  They did, however, require me to raise my game quite a bit, or at least raise the difficulty.  Nearly all of them require that something be done on Heroic or Legendary difficulty (the two hardest settings).  Seeing as one of the achievements involved completing each mission on Legendary, the choice seemed clear: Do everything on the highest difficulty!

So how does one go about doing all this stuff on the hardest difficulty setting?  Why, go to YouTube, of course! As I was researching how others had managed to unlock all those wonderful achievements, I learned that there is, unsurprisingly, a large community of Halo players who have taken the game to places I’m sure Bungie could never have imagined.  I learned terms like “Mythic” and “LASO”, which refer to playing the game at the highest difficulty, and as if that wasn’t tough enough, turning on all skulls, which are objects that can be collected during the game, then activated to increase the difficulty even further.   I also learned about “Speed Running”, in which players try to complete the game’s missions in a race against the clock.

After completing a few achievements in CEA, I got the idea to go back and complete Reach on Legendary.  I quickly discovered that the Halo player community is large, diverse, and very, very helpful.  On YouTube, I was able to find a series of videos geared toward achieving the exact goal I had set for myself.  The guide was put together by a highly skilled Halo player who goes by The Tyrant on halo.bungie.org (HBO), or MythicTyrant on YouTube.

In addition to being ridiculously good at playing Halo, The Tyrant is also a very generous contributor to the Halo player community as a whole, and in particular to the hardcore, campaign-oriented, challenged-obsessed Mythic player community.

With Tyrant’s guide at my side, I  set to task.

Running through on Legendary really shows just how progressively the Reach campaign is constructed.  On the first day of my quest, I got through the first four missions.  I averaged about a mission per day for a while, then the final mission took me about three days of trying.   Now, I wasn’t going for Mythic or anything, this was just straight legendary, so I died a lot,  but it was still plenty challenging, and seeing the achievements finally pop was truly gratifying!

"A Monument to All Your Sins" and "Gods Must be Strong" Achievements

So, with that done, it was time to either go back and finish off CEA on Legendary, or work my forward in the story, and on to Halo 2.  I found that some of the missions in CEA were just plain tedious on legendary.  I’ll eventually get to them, I’m sure, but for now, I was intrigued to learn what happens next to Master Chief!  See part 2 of this series to see how it went!

I was getting a little frustrated with the gigantic stack of electronics in my media room. I had one box for streaming content from my computer, another box for playing BluRays, another one for cable, and since the TV and BluRay player were built about 15 minutes before . . . → Read More: PS3 or XBox 360? Old gamer gets a console… Or two…]]> It started about a year ago.

I was getting a little frustrated with the gigantic stack of electronics in my media room. I had one box for streaming content from my computer, another box for playing BluRays, another one for cable, and since the TV and BluRay player were built about 15 minutes before everything started streaming Netflix, I was out of luck in that department completely. It also didn’t help that I had run out of HDMI inputs, so I was using (gasp) ANALOG cables for some of these highly digital, HD devices. Yuck!

So after doing a little reading and Googling, I decided to go ahead and pick up a PS3, purely as a media distribution device. I figured that with that one box, I could consolidate about 3 remote controls into one, pick up some added functionality, and it might even look a little better. I wasn’t even thinking I’d get into games.

Sony Playstation 3 Slim

I mean, sure, I’ve had some serious interactions with various PC games over the years. WAAAAAYYY back in the day, I was seriously into my Atari Video Computer System (which is what the 2600 was called at first). The first time I rolled the score over in Space Invaders was a very big day for me. In middle school, birthdays, Christmas, and saving up my allowance was always about Infocom text adventures. In college, I got seriously into Wing Commander, and spent a a few all-nighters with various incarnations of Command and Conquer. The next dalliance was with the original DOOM, the iconic first person shooter, which absolutely blew my mind. There was a week or so with Diablo, which was when I realized that computer games, coupled with my obsessive nature could lead to some pretty seriously antisocial behavior (In this case, I should point out, “Antisocial Behavior” means ignoring people around me, not building bombs in the basement).

So I swore off PC games. I also swore off Windows, which really helped as well.

I also had some not-so-great memories of an old roommate’s first-generation Sega console. He loved the thing, and spent hours at a time parked on the living room floor, a steadily growing riverbank of Taco Bell wrappers surrounding him as he stared at various incarnations of Mario, or fired off a three pointer over a highly pixelated version of Hakeem Olajuwon (yes, that long ago). I remember that the controller only had buttons on it, and I really had a hard time figuring out what button did what, and I was even more hampered by the fact that there were more buttons than I had thumbs, so I did a lot of missing, and drew a lot of “What are you doing?” comments. I assumed at the time that I had just plain outgrown my ability to play video games…

So I had, I figured, two very good reasons to believe that I could buy a Playstation 3, and successfully use it solely as a media device…

I’ll stop for a second while you get all the chuckling out of your system.

So I headed out to Best Buy. Of course the Move Bundle was the really good deal, (won’t the kid think that playing Frisbee Golf with the move will be cool!), and if there’s anything I’ve learned about buying technology, it’s that you ALWAYS get the biggest hard disk available… So I came home with a big box, and went about setting it up.

I will be skipping the epic saga of the total failure of the PS3 to act as a streaming hub, as that is another story altogether. Suffice to say that the slogan “It just does everything” either depends on a very specific set of tasks that constitute “everything”, or it’s missing some words… I’ll leave it there.

For reasons I still don’t quite understand, I decided to head out to the nearest mall, where I had heard there was some sort of video game store. Turns out my old college hangout, Electronics Boutique had returned in a new incarnation, Gamestop. My memories of shirt-and-tie clad sales associates were replaced by visions of teenagers who looked like they may have stopped by the skate park on the way to work. Back at the old EB, there was at least a small token section for “productivity” software. You know, word processors, spreadsheets, that kind of thing. Here was a whole store, packed with games, games, and more games. There was a tiny section for PC games, but nothing at all that even pretended it wasn’t just for fun. I had to appreciate the new honesty, that the store was there to sell games to kids, rather than masquerade as anything remotely serious. Of course, even back in the 1990′s, it’s not like the CEO would pop in to EB to get the new version of dBase or whatever, but it did seem they were trying to keep up appearances.

After a few minutes, I was approached by a young, slightly overweight woman wearing glasses and a fairly normal case of acne for someone just out of high school. If you had asked me to describe what came to mind at the phrase “Gamer Chick”, she was it. Okay, I probably would have put her in the hoodie that I am now quite certain was hanging on a hook in the back room of the store, but I could see that she really liked her job. A few minutes later, I found myself walking out of the store with used copies of Uncharted and Uncharted 2, as well as a year membership to Gamestop’s reward program, and the magazine that comes with it. Okay, now I was hooked.

For the next several months, I sat slack-jawed in amazement at the worlds and imagination expressed through the medium of console gaming. The Uncharted series that I started with brought back the excitement I felt as a kid, watching the Indiana Jones movies, only this time I got to participate. Red Dead Redemption showed a depth of storytelling and character development that is rivaled only in the most introspective of films in the same genre, on the order of Clint Eastwood’s classic Unforgiven (some of the political shading in RDR actually had me wondering if I was in full agreement. A philosophical difference of abstract ideas is not something I would have expected from a gaming experience!).

By summer, with my next birthday rapidly approaching, I found myself in an interesting quandary: The PS3 was great, although some of my favorite games had some serious bugs on Sony’s console. There were also some very intriguing games that were exclusive to Microsoft’s Xbox 360. By far the majority of my gaming friends were 360 users. I was also growing disappointed and annoyed with the way Sony was dealing with its community of users.

The Microsoft Xbox 360 slim

I was thinking seriously about adding a 360 to my media shelf.

What actually got me over the edge was the simple math problem that the cost of buying a 360 AND a Ps3 was actually less than the cost of building a single PC, which I have done every couple of years for a very long time. Add to this some nice bundles and interest-free financing, and it turned out to be a pretty easy choice. So I brought home a 360 with a Kinnect sensor, and a handful of games that were on sale, including Halo: Reach, and the original Mass Effect (which was a 360 exclusive).

That was almost six months ago.

So how are the two consoles stacking up? That will be the subject of the next part of this series, in which I will discuss such topics as build quality, graphics, speed, game issues, and any special concerns that may apply to gamers with family responsibilities.

My daughter, a couple of weeks before her 6th birthday, expressed a desire to see the Star Wars movies.

I saw it coming, as soon as I figured out that she had a kindergarten classmate who was always talking about Darth . . . → Read More: Star Wars again – through the eyes of my six year-old…]]> It finally happened, as I knew it would, and I am very happy.

My daughter, a couple of weeks before her 6th birthday, expressed a desire to see the Star Wars movies.

I saw it coming, as soon as I figured out that she had a kindergarten classmate who was always talking about Darth Vader, Princess Leia and the gang. On the drive back from a summer Zoo camp, I kept them both giggling by doing my best Obi-Wan, “These aren’t the droids your looking for”, while waving my hand mysteriously. I had no idea this was going to be such a big hit among the Munchkin set, but as any parent of a kid this age knows, you ride what works until it stops working, especially if it leads your kids in a good direction.

So after a very brief discussion with Mom (anything like this needs to be a cooperative decision), I invited Maile to watch Star Wars: Episode IV, A New Hope with me. Of course we would watch it together, for a number of reasons. She’s a pretty mature kid, with a good head on her shoulders, so I wasn’t worried so much about the “mature” content, but I also think the whole saga can be a bit confusing on the first viewing. Also, I really wanted to share in an actual first exposure to something that really has become one of the major myths of contemporary western culture.

It took us around a month to get through all six movies, and I have to say, the experience of watching the whole saga this way with my daughter actually did change some of the opinions and ideas that I have had about Star Wars for, in some cases, over 30 years (wow!).

A Brief History of Star Wars:

First off, those of my generation will recall that when Star Wars first came out, way back in 1977, there was one option, and one option only to see it: Get in the car and get driven to the theater (The Westgate, for those in my neck of the woods, famous for having the longest continuous run of the original Star Wars movie, 70 weeks!). There was no on-demand, no Netflix streaming, no DVD. It would be another 6 years or so before my family would be able to drop $600.00 on our first Beta VCR, and even then it would be several more years before Star Wars made it to the small screen. So we would go to the theater, over and over. In my case, I made the trek no less than 14 times. In my crowd, it was an early way of tracking ones’ fan “cred”, and keeping score with the other future geeks.

Then the waiting began.

It was three full years after Star Wars before we could once again bug our parents to pile into the Datsun and make the pilgrimage to the sacred site in Beaverton and see The Empire Strikes Back. Three years is a long time to digest and deconstruct an important cultural happening, and that’s largely what we did. Of course, being little kids, we also made up several hundred hours of additional story line, as well as absorbing the early trickle of novels that started being released (The first time I stayed up so late that I saw the sun come up, I was just finishing George Lucas’ novelization of Star Wars, and thinking about how much more story was packed into the book than made it into the movie). Unfortunately, there was precious little new visual media, and that was largely made up of the Star Wars Holiday Special…

So when Empire came out, we were ready for it, and boy were we surprised at some of the plot twists! It now appeared that the Star Wars saga was getting quite a bit more involved and intricate, so the next three year wait seemed even longer. What was going to happen? The flow of additional novels and stories increased from a trickle to a torrent, so we had plenty to think about when Return of the Jedi was finally released.

Okay, now we had the Whole Story… Right?

Well, yes and no. By the time Jedi was released, home video rentals were becoming more common, and so it would soon be possible to watch the entire saga in one sitting. Or so we thought…

It had been widely circulated among the nerd rumor community that the Star Wars that we had come to know and love represented just a small portion of the entire story as George Lucas had originally conceived it. At the time, I had no reason to doubt that this was the case, especially since the crawls at the beginning of Empire and Jedi each clearly identified the respective films as episodes V and VI (later versions of the original Star Wars added the line “Episode IV, A New Hope” to the crawl).

There were a couple of re-releases of the first two films in the early 80′s, and by the late 90′s, the trilogy was in regular rotation on cable networks like TBS, but for the most part, there was a lot more waiting. Then, suddenly, in 1997, to mark the 20th anniversary of Star Wars: A New Hope, there was something new on the Star Wars horizon: Each of the original three films was re-released as a Special Edition, with a lot of 1970′s era special effects replaced with new, state of the art versions. There were a few character changes, but the majority of the differences were cosmetic. It was nice to see the old films again, like meeting up with an old friend who looks suspiciously well-preserved.

Then some more waiting happened… Babies who were born the day Return of the Jedi premiered could drive themselves to the opening of the next Star Wars film; Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace. This film was different, not just because it was a prequel, but because special effects technology had caught up with George Lucas’ vision. Two more films came out, on the same three-year cycle that the first trilogy followed.

So, for those keeping score, those of us who experienced Star Wars in “real time”, it took from 1997 to 2005 to experience the entire saga. That’s 28 YEARS in which to carefully digest, deconstruct, and otherwise create a detailed worldview of the Star Wars universe.

Things I never noticed:

Like any good cultural work, repeat viewings at different times revel different aspects of the work. For just about any work, Star Wars included, I highly recommend watching with a 6 year-old. They have a truly uncanny perspective on things. Here are, in no particular order, some things I discovered while watching all six movies in rapid succession with my daughter:

• Anikin and Luke are both serious whiners. Seriously.  Watch the movies again, and tell me I’m wrong.  Okay, in Phantom Menace Anikin is just a little kid, and actually acts a lot more maturely than he does in the next two films. Once Attack of the Clones starts, he basically just bitches about Obi-Wan to Padme, who somehow finds this behavior to be other than repulsive. He then keeps pushing himself on Padme, who keeps saying no. He doesn’t back off from her and then bitches about Obi-Wan some more. He’s pretty much an adolescent at the time. so I suppose it’s understandable, if not completely forgivable. It does make one wonder why he’s being left alone in the room with a pretty high-ranking senator and former elected queen.
  As for Luke…
  Really, if I have to explain this, then you haven’t seen the movies.
  Anyway…
• Jar Jar isn’t actually all that bad…This one will be controversial, I’m sure. When Phantom Menace came out, I was right there on the wagon, holding my torch and pitchfork, ready to rip that guy’s ears off, and tell my kid that Jar Jar tried to kill her grandma. Now, the way the whole saga unfolds, Jar Jar is really just a momentary annoyance, kind of like a moth flying around the room for a couple hours. You know it’s not something you’re going to have to learn to live with, it’s going away soon. And really, if not Jar Jar, how does the story get driven into the second act?
• By far, the coolest, most badass character in the entire saga is the shortest…Yes, that’s right. After careful consideration, and after viewing the entire saga in rapid succession in the presence of a six year-old, I have determined that the coolest, awesomest, and baddest-assed character is none other than Yoda.
  I mean just look at the light saber battle with Count Dooku in Attack of the Clones and Emperor Palpatine in Revenge of the Sith. Here’s a guy that’s got so much Force that he doesn’t even reach for his light saber, he just holds out his hand and lets The Force toss it to him. That’s just the beginning! He then jumps around the room, spinning and twisting, taking care of business with some of the finest digital wire-fighting ever seen on any size screen.

What the experience has meant to my daughter:

Maile has a summer birthday, and immediately upon finishing A New Hope, she decided she wanted a Star Wars themed birthday party. I have to admit that I hadn’t really done a lot of looking, but I also can’t say I was really surprised to discover that it is just as easy to throw a Star Wars party in 2011 as it was in 1977. A single trip to the party store secured thank you cards with Yoda on them, a special Star Wars version of Pin the Tail on the Donkey, cups, napkins and a Darth Vader pinata (The new kind where you pull a ribbon instead of whacking it with a stick).

As is the tradition in our family, my mother in-law made a special Princess Leia cake for the occasion, and I was proud to see that she included my suggestion of using cinnamon rolls for Leia’s braids.

For the last few days, Maile has been very excited about playing with her new action figures, and it’s really made me happy that what she is really excited about is the both of us sitting on the floor in the living room reenacting A New Hope. It just doesn’t get any better than that…

Maile is most definitely a Girl. She loves things that are pink, and she’s gone from being into princesses to fairies, and is starting into Barbie, so I’m not terribly surprised that her favorite characters are Princess Leia and Queen (then Senator) Amidala. Compared to some of the other royalty that Maile has been into, I have no problem with this. Leia and Amidala are some pretty powerful women who I think make better role models than anything Disney or Mattel have offered. Neither of these women are even close to being damsels in distress, and are confident and comfortable in positions of bold leadership. There are certainly worse examples out there for young girls.

What Star Wars Means

While shopping for the Star Wars party, I noticed that there were a lot of other franchises that were at least as old as Star Wars that were also represented on cups and napkins. Barbie was there, Hello Kitty, the various Disney princesses, that kind of thing. What I also noticed, though, is that all of those other characters and worlds may have been something that present day parents enjoyed in their own childhood, but I didn’t see anything besides Star Wars that parents would generally enjoy watching or reading about if the kids weren’t around (actually, I guess I shouldn’t be too sure about Hello Kitty). Star Wars, on the other hand, is something that my contemporaries and I have probably bought at least two or three times: On VHS way back when, then on DVD, and soon on BluRay. I also defy anyone born after 1970 to try and claim that they don’t stop if they’re channel surfing and stumble across the Millenium Falcon.

It is important to keep in mind that the Star Wars saga really is contemporary mythology. It’s no secret, and no coincidence that George Lucas was an eager student of Joseph Campbell, whose Power of Myth really defined just why some stories have absolutely undeniable staying power. As long as there have been people, stories have been passed down from generation to generation. It is an important method of maintaining a cultural heritage, and for that matter, an actual culture. The Star Wars saga is just that kind of story. One that has great archetypal characters, illustrates the wonder of what might be, and the eternal struggle between good and evil. Throw in some great allegorical content, and you have yourself an honest to goodness myth.

I’ll tell you what, though, it sure is fun to see my little girl get so excited about something we can share!

(oh, and of course, I can’t forget this great YouTube video!)

For those of you who may not be familiar with the on-line commerce systems used by Sony with the Playstaton Network, and Microsoft with XBox live, here is a brief introduction:

Each company provides . . . → Read More: XBox Live, Playstation Network, and the point of points…]]> I can’t exactly explain it, but somehow Microsoft’s approach to buying things on XBox Live feels weird to me.

For those of you who may not be familiar with the on-line commerce systems used by Sony with the Playstaton Network, and Microsoft with XBox live, here is a brief introduction:

Each company provides an internet-based network through which consoles can connect to each other to utilize multiplayer gaming modes, exchange messages, utilize content delivery systems such as Hulu and Netflix streaming. Both networks offer both free and paid versions, and they both allow console users to purchase games, add-ons, and various other content such as movies, and decorations like themes and avatars to customize your user experience.

For purchases, both networks allow the user to store a credit card number to cover payments. The difference is that Microsoft’s XBox Live network doesn’t use regular currency for transactions, but rather uses MS Points. I suppose it makes sense from a global sales perspective, since MS can simply set a single price anywhere in the world, which is good across any currency, then just change the price of the points depending on where they are sold.

Thing is, I don’t really like that. Part of it that the value of a single MS Point doesn’t really compute for me. At the moment, the smallest quantity of points that Microsoft offers on XBox live is 400 points, for which they will charge you $4.99US. Okay, so some Quick arithmetic tells me that a single MS Point costs about 1.25 cents when purchased in a quantity of 400.

Looking at the menu of options that appears when you are looking to add points to your account, a rather unexpected pattern emerges. Like I said, a 400 point block costs $4.99. An 800 point block costs $9.99, and a 1600 point block costs $19.99.

Hmm, time for some more arithmetic…

I’m not going to compute the cost of a single MS point out to several decimal places, I’m going to come at this from another direction:

2 400 point blocks at $4.99 each comes to a total of $9.98 for 800 points

4 400 point blocks at $4.99 each comes to a total of $19.96 for 1600 points.

Again, a single block of 800 points costs $9.99, and a single block of 1600 points costs $19.99.

That’s right. It is a miniscule amount, but the more points you buy at once, the more expensive they actually are!

This holds true all the way up to the biggest block available on the menu: 6000 points for $74.99. The math here:

15 blocks of 400 points at $4.99 each comes to $74.85

That just seems bizarre to me. Maybe it’s because I live near a Costco, and I’m pretty sure I once read the phrase “Economy of scale”, which I’m pretty sure means that things get cheaper the more you buy at once. I dunno, Mrs. Zennmaster owns a lovely new-and-used bookstore, and for her it’s certainly less expensive to run a credit card once for a big sale than it is to run it 15 times for the same total amount. Then again, they’re Microsoft, so maybe credit card processing is fundamentally different on their planet.

Anyway, the other thing that’s weird about “spending” points is that it seems that “points” should kind of have their own economy, separate and distinct from the regular “Dollars-and-cents” economy. Airline miles, retail reward points, loyalty points, these are all things that can be redeemed, but they are also things that can be traded and earned separately. I guess it just seems to me that MS Points should be the same way, although it generally isn’t.

Now, having said that, I wasn’t quite ready to completely play ball. Feeling like you’re beating the system is, of course, a sweet sensation, and buying points in the smallest possible blocks does add a little bit of fun. However, I was still determined to figure out a way to get points without racking up a huge American Express bill.

So I did some Googling, and discovered that there were in fact a number of offers out there on the internet that promised huge amounts of MS Points for completing various offers, most of which required buying something. (this reminds me of the time Mrs. Zennmaster bought me a couple of pounds of nice coffee as part of her quest to get a “free” Coach bag, which, had she completed all 6 offers, would have cost her about as much as the bag. Of course, we would also have had some nice coffee and a bunch of other stuff)

I actually did finally find a method for scooping some free MS Points, and it only required a little fine-tuning to get it to where I am not getting a lot of spam, and every couple of weeks or so I can order up another block of MS points.

I don’t really like to do a lot of advertising in this blog, but If you look at the bottom of the right-hand column, you’ll find a link to the Points2shop.com sign-up page, and here’s a link to a video explaining my personal method for generating points that can be traded for MS Points, or, for that matter, anything at all from Amazon.com.

Now, here are a couple of caveats:

If I were to apply my hourly wage to the time it takes me to actually earn enough points to snag a block of MS Points, I would definitely be behind. The problem is, I don’t get to add another hour here and there to my work days, so it doesn’t really matter.

I also adhere strictly to the rule that I will only work on this when I have nothing better to do (Like play games!).

Being that this system does in fact involve some effort, it can’t be fairly said that the points are in fact free, but I would actually rather put in a little work and not have to play Microsoft’s silly little game.

I’ll play a completely different silly little game…

If this is all you needed to know, then here is a link to the .apk, and here is a qr if you want to grab it from the Android Market.

The method the app uses . . . → Read More: Voodoo Toggle Reboot Button]]> This is a very simple app that toggles Voodoo lagfix, then allows the user to reboot the phone.

If this is all you needed to know, then here is a link to the .apk, and here is a qr if you want to grab it from the Android Market.

The method the app uses is simplicity itself: Upon boot, the Voodoo kernel looks in a directory on the phone’s SD card called “voodoo”. It’s looking for a file called “disable_lagfix”. If it sees this file, it reformats the internal SD card back to RFS, and you’re running normally. The app, upon startup, looks for the “disable_lagfix” file, then tells the user if Voodoo is installed, and if it is active. Pressing the toggle button either creates or deletes the “disable_lagfix” file. That’s it. There are also two big buttons, one of which is a standard reboot, and the other reboots into recovery.

Voodoo is On!

Voodoo is off

This app has NO idiot-proofing, so I HIGHLY discourage toggling the lagfix, then booting into the recovery image, unless you have a firm idea of what you are doing, and need to do it this way. Remember, at this time there is no official support for Project Voodoo on the Samsung Fascinate or Epic 4G! In the near future that might all change, but for now, Voodoo on these devices is a potential minefield, you’ve been warned!

If you are not already familiar with what this Voodoo thing is all about, here is Project Voodoo’s Homepage. As explained on that site, Project Voodoo has three major arms of development, all focused on improving performance of Samsung’s Galaxy S series of smartphones. The three arms are: Lag Fix, Color Fix, and Sound Fix. The one we are talking about here is the Lag Fix:

Samsung, for some reason, uses a proprietary file system on the Galaxy S’ internal memory. This system, called RFS, is significantly slower than the current Linux standard filesystem, known as ext4. Now remember, Android is just a focused version of Linux, so it does seem a little strange that they decided to create their own, non-standard system, when there was a perfectly good, open standard system available. In any case, that’s what they did. Project Voodoo’s solution to this is to re-write the filesystem back into the Linux native ext4. This makes things go a lot more smoothly and quickly than on RFS, and is potentially a permanent solution to the lagginess that some Galaxy S users have experienced. So if this is so great, why do we need to toggle this on and off at all? Wouldn’t I just want to leave it running in the much improved state? Well, most of the time, yes, you would. However, the same personality traits that inspired you to do this in the first place are probably also pulling you in some other directions, and you might want to, at some point, make some additional changes, such as flashing new ROMs, updates, or any of the myriad other things we do that make phone hacking so much fun. Trouble is, at the moment, the tools we all know and love for doing all this (Clockworkmod Recovery being the most important example, IMHO) don’t expect to find, and therefore don’t recognize the ext4 filesystem, so no flashing while the Voodoo lagfix is running. So we have this little toggle, like I mentioned a couple paragraphs ago, the Voodoo system looks for this little file in a specific location, and based on the presence or absence of it, it will reformat the internal SD card to ext4 or RFS. So that’s what the Voodoo Lag fix does, and that’s why I wrote this simple little app.