blueZhift Blog

I’ve been wanting to update my Product Image Not Found image on the main site for a long time since the last redesign. So I’ve been doing a lot of sketches with an anime theme in mind and finally became inspired by some sketches I’d done based on my oldest daughter and the craziness of the Excel Saga.

So after a couple of days of on and off work going from a letter page sized sketch to scanning it in and finishing it off with Fireworks MX, I got an itty-bitty little image for the main site. Well, I really didn’t want to waste the full sized image having grown somewhat fond of it. So here she is! The StressGirl!

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When I received my weekly update from gamesindustry.biz today, I was a bit disappointed to read that there are rumors that Gran Turismo 4 for the Playstation 2 may miss a Christmas 2004 release date in the United States. In the games industry, missing the biggest shopping season of the year is usually a sign that something catastrophic has happened in the development process. This tends to be supported by the observation that games that get pushed out the door in order to meet the holidays or a movie release date (cough!Matrix!cough!!), tend to be full of bugs.

Without any other information, I can only speculate that further delays in Gran Turismo 4 are due to performance issues related to online network play. Why? Because network play is the biggest thing to be added to the next iteration of the series and easily the most complex. Players have come to expect a lot of what is arguably the greatest driving game ever. If the framerate drops to 20fps when you hook up with your buddies to race online, that will be big trouble! High resolution graphics, detailed models, and online play may not get along too well on the PS2. If that is the case, Polyphony’s engineers may be madly rebuilding and tweaking the car models even as we speak in order to get acceptable performance. Don’t be too surprised if the maximum number of players able to race online drops from 6 to 4. The upcoming NASCAR 2005 from EA only supports 4 online players on Xbox and PS2 and the car models and environments probably are not nearly as complex as Gran Turismo is reported to be. The Xbox can probably support more online players, but they likely develop from a shared code base which means having to meet the lowest common denominator. That is, the PS2 may not have the horses to support more than 4 online racers.

I might further speculate that development of Gran Turismo 4 for the Playstation Portable (PSP) due out in Japan next Spring, could be interfering as well. It has been reported that GT for PSP will be nearly a straight port of the PS2 version. Assuming the same team is working on both versions, the need to port to the PSP may place constraints on available solutions to other development problems. The bottom line is that it all takes more time, and the feature set may be reduced in order to get the thing out.

This is of course all speculative and could be completely wrong. It doesn’t really matter though because whenever it comes out GT4 will be a huge hit and it will be good. It has to be.

It’s funny how life can often imitate art, and sometimes it’s scary too. Gundam Seed is a popular Japanese anime series currently airing in the United States on Cartoon Network. The series is an alternate universe retelling of Mobile Suit Gundam, except that this time genetically enhanced humans, known as Coordinators, who live in giant space colonies, are at war with unenhanced humans, Naturals, who live on Earth. The war was apparently started by an Earth alliance nuclear attack on a Coordinator space colony. Beyond that, the heart of the conflict is the fear that the Naturals have for the Coordinators who have enhanced mental and physical capabilities. Many Naturals feel that manipulating human genetics for nontherapeutic purposes is immoral, while many Coordinators feel that conscious human enhancement is the next step in human evolution and a way to a better life. They are faster, stronger, and smarter than the Naturals.

That all sounds nice and science-fictiony doesn’t it? Well, this morning’s New York Times has an op-ed article on the subject of genetic enhancement that is all too real. Here’s a bit of it.

"Belgian Blues are unlike any cows you’ve ever seen. They have a genetic
mutation that means they do not have effective myostatin, a substance
that curbs muscle growth. A result is that Belgian Blues are all
bulging muscles without a spot of fat, like bovine caricatures of
Arnold Schwarzenegger."

The article goes on to describe gene therapies being developed to inhibit myostatin to cure or prevent diseases like muscular dystrophy, and how these same therapies might be used to enhance athletic performance. The article lists a few exceptional athletes who have been found to have naturally occuring genetic mutations that in turn lead to their exceptional abilities. Hmmm, to anyone who has seen Gundam Seed (or the Star Trek episode Space Seed) this sounds all too familiar! So it would seem that questions of just what it means to be human are going to become relevant sooner than we think. The past doesn’t hold much hope for a peaceful discussion of this, as not too long ago (in the history of humankind) my people were not even considered to be human which was very convenient for those in the slave trade.

What do I think of all this? Well first, I don’t believe that genetically enhancing humans is immoral. Our creator has allowed us to enhance ourselves in many ways to suit our cultural tastes and personalities and to learn more about what it means to be human. But I do think that genetic manipulations will be very dangerous with an initially high failure rate. I don’t think there is an ethical way to do this kind of research. We are only understanding little pieces of a large and complex puzzle which means that changing one little thing may appear okay at first, but could have consequences that won’t manifest themselves for some time. There is also the danger of unleashing dangerous organisms that natural systems won’t be able to adapt to in time to counterbalance them. Should this stop us? I don’t know, because someone, somewhere will always have the motivation to go where no one has gone before. So I think it would behoove us all to be fully prepared to deal with whatever fruit comes of genetic research and the consequences.

I’m not making this up! In what might appear to be a effort to one up the Japanese in the all important dating sim market, Hong Kong based Artificial Life, Inc. will soon release a virtual girlfriend game for 3G cell phones. I first heard about this on Slashdot and here’s the link to the BBC News story.

This is all very interesting because it sounds like a  tamagotchi pet for men, an expensive one at that. According to the BBC story, the player will have to keep his girlfriend’s affections by buying her gifts and flowers. On top of the subscription fee, these additional gifts incur additional fees. At some point, one has to wonder if the cyber girlfriend is more expensive than a real one would be! And the cynical might further wonder just who is being played! Despite these questions, I suspect that the game will be a big hit which will only spawn numerous imitators. It might even make it to the U.S. considering that Artificial Life, whose global HQ is in Hong Kong, is also incorporated in the United States.

I’m also rather interested in the technology behind the game. Is there real AI technology in play here? In any case, the heavy processing would be done on remote servers. The real trick in the handset will be handling the graphics, essential for a game like this. The clips on the Artificial Life web site also have a very Final Fantasy-esque look to them. Those are cut scenes I would guess, but they probably do define the game’s overall esthetic and may again indicate the market being pursued. The game play described in the company’s press release is also very reminiscent of Shenmue in that the virtual girlfriend has her own virtual daily routine so she’s doing different things in different places throughout the day.

And since the virtual girlfriend looks the same for every player, if the game proves a success, a new star will be born with product endorsements to follow!:) The ladies need not feel left out, as virtual boyfriend is scheduled for a February 2005 release.

Oh the wonder of summer camp! My two oldest are away at camp until Friday, leaving us the two youngest and me with a little more time for gaming! Today I’m hoping to pick up Astro Boy Omega Factor for GBA. All of the reviews I’ve read on this have been good, and with my oldest son away in the woods, I might get a chance to play it through myself! Oh joy of joys!

Nintendo has a nice Quicktime movie of the action right here. And here’s a review on 1up.com. I haven’t seen the original Astro Boy anime or read the manga yet (saw a couple of eps of the new series), but I became quite enamored with Osamu Tezuka’s artistic style as reflected in Android Kikaider and Cyborg 009. So I’m adding Astro Boy to my growing list of manga and anime interests.

As most tech interested people (i.e. geeks) already knows, Windows XP SP2 made its oft delayed debut last week. I resisted any urge to immediately deploy it at work and waited a couple of days before installing it on my home PC. The installation went without a flaw and I think I may have seen a speed increase. My hope was that installing it on my wife’s computer would result in  a similar speed increase.

Alas, it was not to be. My wife’s PC didn’t have enough disk space for the service pack to install. And since I’d already done the ol’ file shuffle, it furnished the perfect excuse to buy a new hard drive. Afterall, SP2 is essentially a must have upgrade for Windows XP users and my wife’s PC was definitely hobbled by a lack of disk space.

So the shopping began. A coworker pointed me to Circuit City which had a great rebate deal on what turned out to be a 120GB Western Digital HD. I had to go to two CCs before finding one in stock. So it occured to me that SP2 might actually be spurring some hardware sales (along with Doom 3 of course). So I guess one could say that the good folks in Redmond are doing their part to aid the alleged economic recovery!

Final word on this, I installed the 120GB drive in my computer and plan to move the old 40GB to my wife’s. The upgrade was not at all easy until I used the partition copy function of Partition Magic 8 instead of the Data Lifeguard 11 tools. So my advice is to use something like Partition Magic or DiskCopy if you need to move your XP installation to a new disk. If I’d thought of this earlier, it would have saved me a day of work!

Okay, I admit it! I’m a bit of a fan of what are often referred to as "Japanese dating sims". But simulation is really too strong a term. In English, at least, they might be best referred to as computerized trashy romance novels for young men. That said, I’ve been spending a lot of game time working through "Kana – little sister". In short, you take on the role of devoted big brother to frail sick little sister Kana. Perhaps too devoted!

Like most games of this genre, it features sex and adult situations. This one in particular also has a bit of taboo and forbidden love. Yadda, yadda, yadda. So how did this title catch my eye? Well actually it caught my ear first. There was a link to the opening theme song, Shiroi Kisetsu: White Season, on J-List where I usually buy these games. I downloaded the song and was totally blown away by how beautiful it was. So I bought the game and was pleased to find that it also featured two additional full length songs of comparable beauty to the first. Oh, and the game is pretty good too!

I managed to get the first 4 of 6 endings completely on my own. But after spending over a week trying to get endings 1 and 5, I finally decided to cheat. It isn’t too much of a spoiler to say that there is one ending in which Kana can be saved. I had seen everything but that and in playing over and over again, I’d also become rather fond of the characters and really wanted to see the happier ending. After reading a walk-through, I was pleased to find that on a couple of occasions I was really close to the best ending. So my guilt was lessoned, and yes, the ending was worth it! So you could say that in the end I paid my dues, mostly, and got my money’s worth. But more than anything else, the 3 beautiful songs I added to my iPod were well worth the effort!:-)