Like every other critic and salivating fanboy, I feel compelled to chime in on yesterday’s religious experience in which The Steve descended from on high bearing a tablet. However, this is not a review, but merely a (lengthy) answer to a simple question: is the iPad for me? I won’t be talking about the market for digital content distribution, I won’t be whining about what software and hardware widgets weren’t included, I’m not going to rant about Apple’s closed ecosystem, I won’t be begging to lick someone’s boots for a chance just to touch one. Additionally, although hopefully this is obvious, this is heavy on speculation, since I have yet to actually hold the product, let alone use it for any length of time.

I’ll also take this opportunity to brag that I got 29.5 points on the prediction score card, with only one question as yet unanswered: will textbooks be available (I said yes, and I think this is eventually likely, based on the list of publishers involved). I was briefly unsure if my existing Apple Wireless Keyboard would be supported, but the Design page indicates that in will be, in spite of the existence of the iPad Dock. I got the name right, and most of the detailed features based on the rumorsphere. The substantive places I was wrong were the absence of a camera, the price point (cheaper than I expected), and the lack of any information on iPhone OS 4. I had a hope for an open development environment, but I knew that wasn’t going to be true, so that’s more a self-docking principle point. I failed to predict the dock, and I gave myself a half-point for saying no 3G when there are models both with and without.

Below the cut I’ll start off with a brief history of my personal electronics habits from college through today, and then consider where the iPad would fit into my little niche… and, if it does fit, whether it’s worth it. I’ll also look at what still-open questions about the device would affect my potential buying decision (not the least of which is that I need to try it out in an Apple Store to get a sense of the ergonomics). While I’m only speaking for myself, maybe my analysis will be useful to people similar to me.

Usage

For the purposes of this post, I’m discussing a subset of my uses for various electronics in rather broad categories. Over time, the breakdown of which device(s) I use for each task has changed, mostly due to the addition of new devices, but also to some extent due to changes in my tasks breakdown over the past 8 years.

• Programming
• Gaming
• Taking pictures
• Listening to music
• Reading news
• Making phone calls
• Remote access
• Online socializing
• Taking notes

I’m not going to get into how my time breaks down into those categories, but it’s safe to say what dominates given my employment (software engineer) and primary entertainment activity (video games). Taking notes is mostly only relevant for school, online social networking has increased since I got on Twitter, and I rarely take pictures or make phone calls.

In all four of the charts below, click to embiggen for a more detailed view (although they’re pretty broad generalizations, given that my percentages are rough estimates at best).

In the Beforetime

I jokingly refer to the period of my adult life before I owned an iPhone, which significantly changed my usual “loadout” when going anywhere by combining my mobile phone and music player into one device and also carving a few of the above tasks away from my (relatively much heftier) laptop. While it is reflected in the chart below, I’m not going into detail about how my habits changed as I accumulated new devices over the course of college.

Chart breakdown of my personal electronics from 2001 to 2005, during college.

At school, my laptop was my sole computer. I still have that PowerBook G4/400, and the only thing it’s needed over the years has been a new battery and a new power cord. Still going strong (more on how that affects my decision later). I got my first iPod at Christmas 2002, and my first mobile phone (a mid-range Siemens that had Mac Bluetooth support) at Christmas 2003. Before then, I had a Koss CD player for mobile music, and I was wedded to a landline. I still have my old Olympus digital camera, even though it’s only 2.1 megapixels and uses one of the losing memory formats, Smartmedia. I’m not a big picture-taker anyway.

The next big change was getting a home desktop computer once I was employed and out of school. My laptop, Chronos, became relegated to 2nd-class status, mostly taking on the roles of Remote Access and Note Taking, and being my primary computer when traveling for all other tasks. Gaming moved to the desktop almost exclusively, since newer games required newer and newer hardware, more than the Rage 128 card in the PowerBook could provide. (As you have read here previously, most of this gaming is World of Warcraft.)

Chart breakdown of my personal electronics from 2005 to 2007, as a young professional without an iPhone

The iPhone Cometh

The iPhone (I got a second-iteration EDGE one) significantly changed my electronics usage by replacing the iPod and phone in one fell swoop. Because I now had mobile data, it also reduced how often I brought my laptop with me, since I could do some limited forms of online interaction while out and about. Now instead of a laptop requiring a backpack (the titanium powerbooks are light, and beautiful machines, but still a lot heftier than a phone-class device), I could bring a device that just clipped to my belt.

Once Apple added the App Store, I suddenly had my first mobile gaming platform (I think my first purchase was Trism, downloaded over EDGE somewhere in Wisconsin while headed to my friend Gus’ wedding). These are all casual games, and mostly only occupy me while waiting somewhere or riding public transit, although I do occasionally play while sitting at home. The state of my electronics post-App Store is below.

Chart breakdown of my personal electronics from 2008 to present, covering two iPhone generations

This past summer, I upgraded to the iPhone 3GS, which meant I had a better camera (in fact, except for the lack of a flash, on par with my old Olympus), and one capable of video. It was otherwise a 1:1 replacement of my old iPhone, which I then promptly unlocked for use in Mali.

Room for one more?

So, how does the iPad likely fit into my usage patterns? In my case, it basically needs to be able to replace the few tasks still assigned to my PBG4. I don’t need a full-power laptop because I have my desktop at home, but I do need a device that has a bigger screen for graphical remote access (Microsoft RDP through work VPN, VNC tunneled through SSH to home Mac), and sufficient input capabilities for taking notes in class. It can also take over a few of the tasks that my iPhone had carved away from my laptop, such as Online Socializing while traveling. Pretty much everything else (larger screen web browsing, iBooks) would be an ease-of-use bonus or creating a use I don’t currently have.

Given my proposed usage breakdown in the chart below, the big questions are whether I can easily get a secure remote desktop connection to both my work and home computers, and how easy it is to take notes in class, possibly using the iWork app, particularly if mathematical notation is involved.

Chart breakdown of a possible fit for the iPad in my usage

I definitely do not see the need for two 3G-capable mobile devices for myself, so I’m glad there’s a WiFi-only version. The other advantage of not being tied to a mobile contract is that I’ll have far fewer qualms jailbreaking the device to run arbitrary 3rd-party apps, as I’ve done with my old iPhone, which might solve my remaining concerns.

Conclusion

At this point, I’d say I’m fairly likely to get one, although I have a hard time giving up on a perfectly functional (albeit old) laptop. It clearly fits in between my laptop and my iPhone in terms of functionality, with some overlap, and I think it might be just enough to retire the old TiBook. Another big advantage is that I won’t feel guilty about playing games while mobile as much, since I don’t have to worry about the necessity of the battery of the device-I-use-as-phone.

If, however, it is very lacking in editing capabilities (The Steve was certainly emphasizing it for content consumption for the most part), or cannot easily access my work and home desktops (possibly requiring jailbreaking), I probably won’t be interested except as a new shiny toy I can lust after until a second generation with improvements.

The verdict is still out until I feel it in my hands. What do you think?

Avatar is visually stunning. It has precisely all of the elements you would expect from a modern science fiction epic. I give major credit to James Cameron for an original idea, although the plot itself is a pastiche of mostly unoriginal classic memes. My snarky tweet-length review is “a visually stunning remake of Disney’s Pocahontas“. That said, the film is on its way to become one of the top-10 grossing films of the decade, which until now has consisted entirely of remakes/reboots, sequels, and/or book/comic book adaptations (i.e. not a single original idea). (Note that a non-trivial factor in Avatar’s opening weekend success is the higher ticket prices for 3-D and IMAX showings.)

A word of warning for my typography nerd friends (you know who you are): all of the subtitles are in Papyrus. Hey, at least it’s not Comic Sans, right?

I, like many other commenters, am very interested in the technical aspects of how the film was made, and I do expect that, like the motion control techniques invented for the original Star Wars, we’ll see a significant shift in how movies with fantastical elements are filmed. It also seems likely that some of the performance capture technology will be applied to video games, especially those with more immersive plots like single-player RPGs.

Another thing I’d add: the 3-D version isn’t strictly necessary to enjoy the visual experience of the film. While RealD, as a single projector polarized 3-D technology, is certainly better than the old red-blue systems, or the ones that required bulky electronic goggles to alternate flickering in each eye, I don’t think it adds a huge amount.

So, overall, I liked the movie, but I wasn’t blown out of the water, due largely to the tropeful plot. That said, it certainly got me thinking about a wide variety of topics, including racial issues, exobiology, and linguistics. I plan to see it again, probably in IMAX. Detailed thoughts below the cut (with some vaguely spoilerful comparisons to District 9).

Visuals

Simply put: amazing.

Basically, the entire movie is a special effect. The main advantage of this is that there are very few noticeable seams between the live action acting and the computer graphics, since much of the time only one or the other is visible onscreen. Compare to even the advanced effects in the new Star Trek, or the just-released Sherlock Holmes, and you can see the difference between quality special effects that are noticeable and totally immersive effects.

I went to see the movie with @Andrle and the both of us were totally immersed in the movie, which is impressive considering its length. A number of my friends have posted that they were similarly impressed.

One thing that I thought was interesting about the performance capture was that I could recognize Sam Worthington, Sigourney Weaver, and Wes Studi in their Na’vi bodies, but I couldn’t really see Zoë Saldaña in Neytiri. This might be a function of having seen her in only one film, namely, the new Star Trek.

Technology

As I addressed above, I don’t think 3-D is necessary for an enjoyable Avatar experience. Part of the reason is that even the polarization method causes at times jarring depth perception problems, and I think it also encourages the direction and cinematography to overemphasize depth-of-field in making shots. On this point @kylejames and I disagree. I’ll grant that I know approximately jack about cinematography, but my sense is that you end up with non-standard shots, which can sometimes be used for interesting artistic commentary, but in this case I just found a little odd.

I fully expect the performance capture technology to catch on for other epic-style science fiction and fantasy films. Cameron is probably going to make a mint on the patent licensing (I’m assuming he has such things?), because this kind of digital puppetry is more flexible and easier to use than heavy prosthetics, and allows the actor more freedom. We might see this in the video game space as well, where motion capture is used heavily for character moves, but not much for character faces (as far as I know).

As for the in-universe technology, the 3-D holographic displays were particularly impressive, especially given how close we’re getting with current research. I think there tends to be a lot of back-and-forth between science fiction and actual research in this regard. Most of the rest was your standard space-marine fare; helicopter-like gunships, mecha suits, and ridiculously hefty-looking combat rifles with multiple ammunition types, etc. Overall this had a very Vietnam feel (the airships hitting the Home Tree was particularly reminiscent of a similar sequence from Apocalypse Now).

I had one criticism, which is that even given the mentioned value of “unobtanium” (ugh, really? To borrow a phrase from a friend, did someone forget to run find/replace on the script before printing?), I have a hard time believing it’s worth it to ship that much mass (in the form of military hardware) to an alien world. Mass is still really expensive to move (as far as I could tell, they were using sublight propulsion and sleeper ships). I suppose I can give them some credit and believe that more of it than I think was built locally, but that was never explicitly portrayed and seems unlikely given the absence of factory-scale manufacture that could produce the mining equipment and such.

Exobiology

They had a really amazing science advisor, or team of them, because I found the flora and fauna of Pandora to be remarkably consistent, with a few exceptions. I found myself throughout the movie wondering how a standardized biological neural interface would evolve, and be preserved across species.

One of my complaints is that they were fairly consistent about showing most of the megafauna as having four forelimbs and two hind limbs in pairs… with the notable exception of the Na’vi themselves. What happened to theirs? I assume the real reason was a desire to have the characters be more human, and be more easily puppeted by a two-armed human actor, but it was still a glaring hole in an otherwise believable alien biosphere.

I was initially annoyed that the Na’vi didn’t look more arboreal, particularly wondering why they would have evolved bipedalism, given that they still lived in a large tree, but this feeling was assuaged when they later revealed that there were savanna-dwelling Na’vi. If one assumes a parallel evolution on Earth, this makes more sense, and then the humanoids would have later returned to the jungle.

I thought the flying creatures were very cool; I’d say someone did some extensive research into the recent transitional fossil finds of flying dinosaurs and the first birds. However, instead of four wings consisting of all four limbs, these had the wings on the four forelimbs with the rear legs as landing gear.

The planetwide neural network on a world orbiting Alpha Centauri is nothing new – and it was probably done before I was exposed to the concept in Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri, my favorite turn-based strategy game of all time.

Linguistics

In theory, this is probably the aspect of the film I’m most qualified to speak on, but I’ll let my actual linguist friends @kobutsu and Comma get into this topic a little more. If you want some crazy detail on the Na’vi language, check out this LDC post.

I love constructed languages, and my interest in tlhIngan’ Hol (Klingon) and Quenya (Elvish) as a kid are a non-trivial component of why I took any linguistics coursework at all. I also very much enjoyed recently reading In the Land of Invented Languages by Arika Okrent.

Overall, the Na’vi language sounded believable… which I think is its biggest problem. It was designed to sound like what Westerners (particularly American English speakers) think tribal languages sound like. This falls more under the category of cross-cultural perception below.

My biggest linguistic complaint was how much colloquial American English was used. I understand that they need the characters to speak in a language moviegoers can understand, even though the film is set almost 200 years in the future, but there was to me an excessive use of colloquialisms. If there’s anything that the sudden rise of the Internet and mobile communications has taught us, it’s that the pace of language change (sorry prescriptivists) can be viewed right in front of us. On the other hand, it’s often obnoxious when science fiction decides to go overboard on word invention. (Note: I am a total Neal Stephenson fanboy and really enjoyed Anathem.) Given that, I would have expected a little bit more technology-oriented slang than we saw, but on the other hand, most of the background characters were ex-military employees of RDA, so maybe all the military slang fits better than I think.

Plot

Umm… well, the film has one, so there’s that…

I’ll chime in with just about every other internet blag and say that this movie is Pocahontas combined with Fern Gully, right down to living in a tree, communing with nature, and stopping big scary futuristic bulldozers.

As I said in the introduction, I give Cameron credit for penning an original story. Unfortunately that story consists entirely of standard tropes, monomythic plot devices, and unoriginal plot “twists”, all mashed together.

It’s not so much boring-unoriginal as comfort-food-unoriginal. I think it says something that we’re culturally attracted to the same plot elements over and over again. I guess the question then is (and I’m sure people much smarter than me have debated this already) is whether those things seem true because they speak to something innate in the human experience, or that we’re all just acculturated to accept them as such. In this film, this manifested as nothing being terribly surprising, but at the same time, it didn’t really bother me much.

I did have a problem with some of the character development; in particular, it was unclear to me why Michelle Rodriguez’s standard tough-as-nails female-in-a-male-world character had a change of heart. They portrayed that she did, but I didn’t know enough of her background to know why she had a problem with the military plan. I also got the sense that the one lead soldier was supposed to be more of a villainous character… I wonder if some of his development got cut?

Cross-Cultural Issues

For once, as a WASPYSM (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant YUPpie Straight Male), I’m eminently qualified to speak on a cultural topic… because it generally seems that this movie is about white guilt. :oD It’s all about the early exploration and colonization of the Americas Pandora while searching for gold unobtanium and dehumanizing/reeducating/relocating/oppressing any amerindians Na’vi who got in the way of “progress”.

This critical discussion at IO9 covers the topic with more expertise than I could, although I don’t think I agree on all points. At least, in my experience of cultural sensitivity (largely developed during my undergrad time at Swarthmore), the “becoming their leader” thing is not what I find interesting. I would agree that District 9 had a much better (and more real-world relevant) portrayal of alien-human interactions. A great discussion of the racial issues in that film, from back in September, can be found in Swarthmore History Prof. Tim Burke’s blog.

One thing that’s mostly absent from Avatar, and the linked discussion, that was a key component of the relevant history is the religious conversion aspect, that a non-trivial amount of cultural suppression was justified through the claim of saving souls. While aspects of the Na’vi religion were portrayed, they also got heavily scienced, in that their perception of god (well, the earthmother deity Eywa) is in fact a manifestation of a physically measurable planetwide neural network. When their “soul” departs the body, some aspect of the individual is stored in that network (making the destruction wreaked on the sacred groves all the more devastating, because the sacredness is real).

I can see why this topic has parts of the right-wing blagosphere up in arms. The movie does not pull any punches in its statement of white guilt, its statements on the environment and resource management with regards to industry, or its statements on private military corporations and the military-industrial complex. I think Cameron tried a bit hard to update the politics; there were a few blatant Bushisms that I found pulled me out of the movie (I heard “shock and awe” used once, and there were others that I now do not recall).

Conclusion

Overall, the film got me thinking, which for me is a sign of well-executed entertainment. We definitely need to figure out our own racial history as a species before we encounter other intelligences (or more intriguingly, create our own artificial ones).

It was visually impressive and enjoyable, and I will certainly see it again. I would recommend the movie highly, in spite of my complaints above.

What did you think?

I just did this freehand; this was my first try. Not as hard as the instructions make it sound.

I think it’s pretty cool. Impress your nerdy friends!

Specifically, certain characters which much be escaped in the GSM 03.38 character encoding are getting treated as the wrong encoding when posted to Twitter from Verizon Wireless SMS, and showing up as ? in text messages sent by Twitter to Verizon Wireless customers via SMS.

I should add that I didn’t find this bug alone – @elliotreed asked why I used question marks to note something in a tweet when I had actually used square brackets around some text. Some quick investigation with him revealed the more specific nature of the problem, but it wasn’t until I actually found out that there was such a thing as GSM encoding that I came up with a hypothesis to explain the character weirdness.

As far as I can tell, Verizon’s HTTP/SMS gateway is now doing the GSM/UTF-8 mapping internally, but Twitter is assuming it still has to send GSM bytes to Verizon, so the encoding is happening twice, or at least attempting to happen twice. Verizon chokes on the GSM two-byte characters, since they’re not valid UTF-8, while Twitter receives certain ASCII-range one-byte UTF-8 characters but converts them as if they were GSM one-byte characters, resulting in a totally different UTF-8 character!

The GSM-to-UTF-8 encoding bug, shown here for square brackets, curly braces, tilde, backslash, and carat.

The GSM encoding doesn’t allow certain characters as single-byte characters; this appears to be a way to shove a number of European characters into a 7-bit mutant ASCII, with control characters and certain punctuation replaced by characters from the Latin-1 codepage. To some extent this makes sense, given that with the 160-byte length limit on SMS messages you want to avoid multibyte encodings while still supporting commonly used characters (UTF-16 is used for non-roman languages). Unfortunately, this leaves [, ], ~, {, }, \, |, and ^ out in the cold. As a programmer, I use these punctuation characters often as separators in various notations, so it is perhaps not surprising that one of my tweets revealed the problem. These characters can be sent as a two-byte sequence in the GSM encoding, but those start with an escape byte 0×1B, which since it starts with more than one initial bit high will always be invalid as the first byte of a UTF-8 character.

I would have thought that the Age of Unicode would have ended many of these non-standard application-specific encodings (and plus, given the way mobile carriers love to gouge on SMS, if they make your characters take more bytes, they get more money!). It looks like that’s exactly what Verizon is trying to do, in moving to exposing UTF-8 on the edge of their network… they just didn’t tell anyone that they had changed encodings, or if they have, Twitter hasn’t acted on the change yet.

Since Twitter disabled their help ticket creation (probably because too many stupid people were posting the same questions without reading the FAQs), I reported the bug using the Twitter API ticketing system on Google Code.

Short story: if you use any of the punctuation characters above in your tweets, expect texting Twitter users with Verizon to see ?, and expect to receive tweets from them with weird European characters, until this is fixed by one or both parties.

My 2005 Trek 7500 FX, fresh off the moving truck, clean, and unused.

It was a solid bike, and it served me well, in spite of occasional abuses such as forgetting to oil the chain often enough or wiping out on wet leaves and bending a pedal out of whack. I certainly put money into this on top of the base purchase price (adding cargo racks, new handlebars, replacing shifter cables, new brakes, etc.), but it is still well below the cost of dealing with a car… and I get some form of exercise, as well.

As for the theft itself, I have learned the hard way regarding cable locks. I had switched to one a while ago for the weight and convenience of being able to lock to more things, but they are of course eminently more cuttable. This particular one, a Kryptonite KryptoFlex 1218 6′, was sliced mostly silently right below the window of my girlfriend’s apartment, locked to a lamppost. I took a taxi home, and first thing in the morning filed a police report and an insurance claim.

Thankfully, my renter’s insurance from Liberty Mutual (obtained through work) covers loss, theft, or destruction of personal property even if it’s outside of my apartment; there’s just a $250 deductible (and potentially depreciation calculated) that comes out of the value of the item(s), which means it’s really only useful for replacing something on the order of a laptop or bicycle.

In the end, I’m getting a check for almost $500, which should mostly cover a new bike purchased during the Eastern Mountain Sports winter sale. My natural disposition then is to see the silver lining, and take this frustrating theft as an excuse to get a new bicycle for cheap (even after you amortize what I pay biweekly for the insurance).

Incidentally, while googling for the insurance quote, I discovered that when he still lived in Chicago, Obama rode a 7500 FX :oD.

Hopefully, the new bike (I’m currently leaning towards a Trek Valencia) will serve me as well as the last one.

On a whim tonight, I whipped up my first Google Chrome extension in about 2 hours. A non-trivial amount of time was spent writing it up and making the icons. It’s obviously very simple, but it replicates one of my favorite features of Safari 3: SnapBack (the feature got eviscerated in Safari 4).

Basically all this extension does is add a button to the Chrome toolbar that you can click to jump back to the first page in a tab’s history. I realize the button and icons are ugly; I am not a design-type person.

The BackSnapper button once installed in Chrome 4

You can read a bit more about my BackSnapper extension, download it if you’re using the developer edition of Google Chrome (currently version 4), or view the code on github.

As Chrome rolls out the Extensions Gallery, I’ll deploy the extension out there. It could probably use some better options, and some smarter heuristics for determining where the beginning is, but for my purposes it gives me the magic button I want.

Installation

You can install the BackSnapper extension from the .zip file more or less by following Step 4 in these instructions. Note that at present this only works for the dev channel (version 4) of Google Chrome.

1. Download and unpack the .zip file
2. Select Extensions from the Tools menu.
3. Click “Developer Mode” on the right in the Extensions display.
4. Click “Load unpacked extension…” and select the unpacked BackSnapper folder

Development Tips

There were a few things I learned getting this working that weren’t immediately obvious from the documentation:

• The debug console is per tab
• You may need to select your injected content Javascript in the debug console to view logged messages
• For simple calls into content scripts, chrome.tabs.sendRequest() is sufficient, you don’t need to use the more complicated connect() message passing calls.

There were also a few things I couldn’t figure out:

• Why won’t the current developers-only Extensions Gallery accept my unsigned zip file?
• Why can’t I determine the current URL in the history after having called history.go()? location.href remains unchanged, and history.current is undefined.

Oh yeah, I have a blog! Lots has been going on in the intervening months (see my Twitter feed for short attention span details), but I figured a video game post during NaBloPoMo would be a good way to get back on the wagon, even if I’m not actually posting every day during November.

While visiting my Little Brother this weekend, I noticed a rather unusual magazine cover… a (very pixelated) monster from the original Doom. This turned out to be the latest issue of Game Informer, specifically Volume XIX, Number 12, Issue 200. In honor of this decimalist anniversary, they published their Top 200 Video Games of All Time list, which unsurprisingly is linkbait for any video game fan who likes to rant about what should and should not be included in such a list. I ran through my opinions quickly with my Little, mostly fixating on why so many recent games were already on the list, but decided a deeper analysis was in order.

Instead of complaining about the contents of the list, I thought I’d use it to track my personal video game history (much as my father has in the past used the Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Albums of All Time and Rolling Stone 500 Greatest Songs of All Time to guide his music purchases). I’ve also done some histogram breakdowns of what’s on the list. I would say that my guideline for inclusion on any such list would involve adjectives like “innovative” and “influential”, and explicitly avoid conditions like “critically acclaimed”, “popular”, or “best-selling”. This in turn means that inclusion must be viewed through a somewhat temporally distant lens, for sufficient perspective on a particular cultural artifact’s import.

How many of these have you played? Do you strongly agree/disagree with any of the rankings?

The columns are Game Informer rank, game title, platform(s), and year of publication from the original article; I believe using this data for commentary is covered by Fair Use. I added platforms in a few places to account for the particular port of a game that I played. I have also added columns for myself, for Played, Owned, and Completed. The full table and further analysis is below the cut.

Columns

A brief explanation before the table: I count a game as “Played” if I personally controlled the game for at least one significant play session (enough to see one full level, game, etc.); I count a game as “Owned” if I purchased the game or received it as a gift; and I count a game as “Completed” if I finished the primary plot levels for games with solo play, reached a reasonably high or maximum level in games with increasing difficulty level play, or played a simulation game to a goal threshold. Ownership and Completion are both subsets of Played, with some overlap, but not identical subsets.

Top 200 Video Games Table

Overall Breakdown

From browsing the list, I was expecting it to be skewed towards more recent offerings. A few quick histograms to some extent confirm this for the full list, but disprove it when you consider only the Top 20 games on the list. Click to embiggen any of the graphs.

Bar graph histogram of the Top 200 and Top 20 games by publication year

Bar graph histogram of the Top 200 and Top 20 games by console platform (including PC)

Bar graph histogram of the Top 200 and Top 20 games by console generation.

As you can see, the Top 200 list (in red) is skewed towards PC games, since that category is not further broken down by OS or era. It also seems to be skewed towards more recent consoles, particularly the Playstations 2 & 3 and both Xboxen.

However, if you consider only the Top 20 (in blue), a more historical perspective is available. Nintendo is more favored, and the breakdown is more even by by both year and generation. To me that implies that Game Informer recognizes Nintendo as an early innovator (particularly on the NES and SNES), but more lacking in recent offerings for the GameCube and Wii, especially compared to what’s available on the Xbox and Playstation.

My Breakdown

So, in total, of the 200 games, I’ve played 89 (44.5%), owned 25 (12.5%), and completed 26 (13%); however, I’ve only completed 11 of the games I’ve owned. There are three factors here: first, I’ve played games to completion on friends’ consoles/computers; second, I played several classic console games via emulation in high school, where I had downloaded the ROMs; third, I have purchased some newer games on the list that I’ve yet to finish.

Until the Wii, I never owned a console myself (with the exception of the short-lived Virtual Game Station PlayStation emulator for Mac), so all the other games I owned are listed under PC (which I mean to include DOS, Windows, Mac OS 9, and Mac OS X versions of games). PC is nearly impossible to split into “generation”, and since it includes multiple hardware/software combinations, I can’t easily get good stats for it. In spite of all of this, I feel like I’ve experienced most of the key points in video game history from the Nintendo revolution on. In that regard I’m in a historical sweet spot, I suppose. Click to embiggen any of the graphs.

Bar graph histogram of the Top 200 games broken down by my Played, Owned, and Completed lists organized by publication year

Bar graph histogram of the Top 200 games broken down by my Played, Owned, and Completed lists organized by console platform (including PC)

Bar graph histogram of the Top 200 games broken down by my Played, Owned, and Completed lists organized by console generation

As you can see, my own gameplay is heavily skewed towards the PC, although until recently that was almost exclusively games that were available on Mac. This makes sense, given that my mother didn’t allow game consoles in the house, but non-violent and arguably educational games my sister and I could sneak onto the computer.

There’s also a strong “bump” for games in the mid-’90s; this is when I would have been playing lots of console games at friends’ houses (for sleepovers and such), but it also includes the non-trivial number of SNES and Playstation games I played via emulation on my Mac in high school. (Incidentally, that very Mac is now functioning as the webserver displaying this blog entry.)

My ownership numbers have unsurprisingly gone up since 2005, given that I now have disposable income and can indulge my video game habits more easily than when I was living at home or in college. Additionally, I have added a Wii (my first console I can call my own!), a gaming-capable phone (first the original iPhone, and now a 3GS), and with the advent of Intel-based Macs, a drive booting into Windows 7 that I use to play various Windows-only games, such as Half Life 2 and Borderlands.

Conclusion

Overall, I’d say this list is skewed towards recent years, which I think is explainable largely by the target audience of the magazine: roughly, my age group (and a little younger) who probably started playing on SNES (4th-gen) consoles and are currently playing Xbox 360. The breakdowns for the Top 20 however makes me feel a little better, in that games that are more influential (or arguably started a genre) are reflected there.

There are definitely a few “classics” on here that I’d like to pick up and play for historical reasons, and a few I’d go back to for nostalgia, but most of the games I haven’t played aren’t in genres I particularly care about. A number are relatively obscure Japanese releases that only the hardest of hardcore video game fans would have seen in the US.

My biggest complaint about the list is a few items that had been out less than a week at the time of publication of this Game Informer issue! (I’m looking at you Modern Warfare 2…) I don’t care how good your opening sales weekend numbers are, or how good the previews are, you don’t deserve to be on this list yet if you came out in 2009. Give it time!

What do you think? How do you measure up?

Unfortunately, my work looked like it had crapped out yesterday when it prompted me to charge the batteries. I’m outside of the Amazon return period, but still under Logitech’s 5-year pointing devices warranty. As it turned out, I just needed to remove and insert the batteries like 10 times to get it to power on. Really, I think this could all be avoided by having a corded version of this product; I really don’t need the cordless features, but this is the only trackball that came close to having the features I wanted. If it were Bluetooth, I might not complain as much (since a separate transmitter wouldn’t be needed).

The secondary problem, as you can see in the video and picture below the cut, is that my mutant power is apparently acidic sweat. The outer coating of the plastic under where my palm, thumb, and index finger generally rest is bubbling and eventually peeling away.

Long story short, I love the design, but am very frustrated with the execution. I’ve asked Logitech in several places to develop a straight USB version of this device.

My mutant acidic sweat is melting the outer coating of my trackball.

Sam Rockwell is pretty much the only actor you see for the entire 100 minute run time, but Kevin Spacey lends his voice to the robot HAL GERTY, and its at times mysterious motives. There are some amusing moments thrown in, as well (being alone in space unsurprisingly makes you… interesting).

If you can, avoid watching the trailer. I think it’s better going into this film knowing as little as possible about it. Unsurprisingly, I found myself thinking of 2001 a lot, in particular the color palettes involved (lots of whites and greys). However, unlike 2001 or more recently a lot of the effect shots in Battlestar Galactica, sound was allowed for scenes on the lunar surface.

Definitely worth the price of admission (if you can find it, probably at your local arthouse theater, as it is in limited distribution).