Does. Not. Want.

Movies addendum

• The trailer for The Love Guru is no funnier the second time you see it. If anything, it's even more irritating. No laughs whatsoever, but plenty of off-putting moments to go around. Take your pick: Adult Mike Myers head on child's body? Hitting a little person with a hockey puck, then holding him up and giving an Oscar acceptance speech before dropping him hard? The idea of a leering mustachioed freak being some sort of sex idol/teacher? It's probably only a few minutes but seems endless.

Things I learned at the movies today

• Iron Man is very good, mostly due to a never-better Robert Downey Jr.
• Twenty-five minutes of commercials and previews, shmenty-five minutes of commercials and previews.  Let's be honest here: Most of your customers would just be smoking crack in the bathroom with that time otherwise.
• Infants LOVE loud movies! By no means should you remove your child during the intense parts and, in doing so, deny others of the melodic strains of your baby's screams of terror.
• The numerous warnings to turn off your cell phone are for other people, not you Mr. Very Important Businessteen! Walking slowly to the aisle while answering your is really good enough.
• If you're bringing a very small child to a PG-13 movie, be sure to sit right in the middle of the near-empty theater near the few other patrons, so that everyone can enjoy your many, many conversations
• Shushing your kid is basically child abuse! Don't do it.
• Be sure to answer every question that your child babbles, large or small. If you  don't teach her about Iron Man, who will? Who. Will.
• Limit your loud replies to your child's incessant questions to the quiet parts of the movie - you don't know if someone else needs to know that HE'S MAKING THE IRON MAN SUIT HONEY. There may be blind patrons who desperately need your service to determine what's happening.
• If the urgency of your communications demand that they occur during one of the louder parts of the movie, be sure to raise your voice so that your child can be informed that, indeed, IRON MAN IS  FIGHTING THE BAD GUYS HONEY
• If you've enraged the other patrons for the last two hours, clear out slightly before the movie's end, abandoning all your trash if necessary. Later suckas!
• Also, never go to the movies.

We'll be following that last piece of advice from here on out.

Chibi Robo: Park Patrol review (Nintendo DS)

Summary: It's good fun for fans of the original Gamecube entry, even if it doesn't approach the heights of silly awesomeness that its predecessor scaled.

The game centers around a run-down urban park. Your job is to bring it up to snuff, mostly by planting flowers. To accomplish this, you're armed with a squirter that'll make buds grow, a boom box that turns the plain flowers into more colorful versions that spew buds everywhere, and many other tools. You'll also (eventually) get access to several vehicles, like bicycles, carts and canoes.

Much like the first title, you'll find many discarded toys lying around that can help you in your quest. After refilling their batteries and befriending them, they'll take on larger tasks in the park (tilling sandy soil so that flowers can be grown, building structures, etc.)

Your enemies are the Smoglings, led by an ex-good guy and his boss, an outright evil cloud of smog named Miasmo. Their irritating henchmen will pop up occasionally, requiring you to hunt them down before they can kill healthy flowers. They'll also periodically zap you, forcing you to look for your precious tools again.

Each day, you'll start out with a full battery charge and an alert system to tell you if you need to watch out for Smoglings. You'll spend most of your time going from patch to patch in the park, watering buds and getting flowers to dance in order to spread more buds everywhere. Every action will cause your energy meter to slowly run down, eventually forcing you to return to your charging station.

Doing this makes your Happy Point count grow, which you can use for both recharging your battery and paying for your friends to do landscaping work in the park. Over time, you'll earn rewards like additional tools and landscaping options, as well as larger batteries and more vehicles.

Overall, the game is really enjoyable. The graphics are excellent, capturing the spirit of the series nicely. They've done a good job of simplifying the console controls, incorporating some of the best stylus action that I've seen on the DS. Though some might find it tedious, every flower you grow improves both your park and Chibi Robo. Having options in a game that don't involve violence (unless you count blowing water at silly-looking minions 'violence') is a nice change of pace. Improving the lives of your toy friends also makes the player just feel good.

There are some minor criticisms that can be leveled. The story isn't as involving as the first game's story was, as it centers on the park rather than Chibi Robo and his adoptive family. It's even a bit preachy at times, depending on your tolerance for environmental hyperbole. You're told that you got more visitors each day, but you don't actually see them admiring your hard work. The area of the game, while perhaps technically larger than that of Chibi Robo, feels much smaller due to the fact that there's only a few locations, none of which are particularly interesting, all of which you can access from the start.

Unfortunately, due to an exclusive licensing deal, new copies can only be purchased at Wal-Mart in the U.S. It's well worth tracking down for fans of the first game, though, or for younger players who can't quite handle the controls of its Gamecube predecessor. Have fun!

Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory: The D&D 4th Edition Podcast

D&D 4th Edition (4E to the l33t) is a completely new game system for all intents and purposes. Wizards of the Coast kept the game's flavor, but changed the mechanics in a big way in order to appeal to the World of Warcraft/Age of Conan/etc. crowd that's draining the base of support for their pen-and-paper game. They encounter significant resistance from the entrenched user base, so they get some of the most well-respected gamers around (the boys from Penny Arcade and PvP's Scott Kurtz) to play the game and record a podcast about it. Smart move, right?

...and that's when they sabotage themselves. Instead of just letting everyone in on the fun, they force everyone to create an 'Insider Account' at a completely separate site, including entering personal information and agreeing to a  lengthy Terms of Service document, in order to see the content. You know, the content that's basically AN ADVERTISEMENT FOR THEIR GAME.

You read that right, they want you to jump through multiple hoops in order for them to show you why you should buy it. On the Internet. Where giving people content (that WotC didn't even create, mind) is basically free.

Fail.

Update: Even some of the static pages with general 4E information are hidden away under the Insider membership requirement. Who thought that was a good idea?

Memo to Gamefly: Stocking all your distribution centers with games would be great

Normally, I'm a big proponent of Gamefly. The ability to try out several games every month, finishing the shorter ones and quickly sending back the ones that don't work out so well, is a huge boon for the cheap gamer.

I'd thought that having the Tampa distribution center relatively close to us, just a few hundred miles away, would work out great. Netflix's even closer center gets us movie turnarounds of just 3 days or so from being sent to receiving a replacement.

In practice, things haven't improved that much from when it was all the way across the country. It still takes 3-4 business days or so just for them to receive sent games, and 2-3 more after that till I receive them.

Still, it was working out reasonably well. For the last couple of games, though, they've decided they couldn't procure them from the Tampa center and insist on using the Pittsburgh one. Argh! I'd much rather they skip down a few items on my queue than make me wait over a week and a half to receive a new game. Hell, they already *did* skip several Low-Medium availability games on my queue to get that one!

At this rate, it'll cost me about $6 per game I rent from them every month, and I'd still only be keeping them a few days. If we had a Blockbuster whose game selection didn't lean heavily on games that were crappy when they came out two years ago, it'd probably be a better deal to rent from them instead.

"Top Secret" is hilarious!*

*If you see it for the first time when you're twelve in 1984. If you're on the wrong side of 30 in 2008, not so much.

It's not a bad movie - there are a few cute gags here and there - but it's not even up to the quality of any given episode of Police Squad. The humor's less pointed and dark than other Abrams/Zucker efforts, and tends more towards absurdist silliness.

Val Kilmer, while a terrific actor, doesn't work well here. The twinkle in his eye defuses the humor, letting us know that he's in on the joke and ignoring one of the most important rules for this type of comedy: Play it straight.

I know this one has legions of fans - I beg them not to watch it again and taint their good memories.

Do not accept deliveries from "The Messengers"

Don't remember this movie? Don't blame yourself. Though it was a major release with the producing might of Sam Raimi and Robert Tappert behind it, the actual film is kind of a mess.

We begin with a flashback to a child and his babysitter being stalked by an attacker through their house. After that, the main film begins. It the concerns the troubles that a family encounters in their quest to set up their sunflower farm in an old, abandoned farmhouse. The youngest child (a mute) sees J-horror ghosts, who then turn their gaze on the troubled teenage daughter. Finally, we learn the terrifying secret of the old farm and wackiness ensues.

Crimes:

• Trying to make crows scary. An ever-increasing number of the beasts hangs around looking vaguely threatening, until at the end a virtual cloud of them attacks a person (barely damaging him, sadly). If you're going to attempt to scare audiences with something that's not that scary, you'll have to do better than that.
• Shots that make no sense and/or are completely pointless. From repeatedly watching ghosts over the child's shoulder (ooh, a child sees a ghost and giggles, terrifying!), to an inside sequence where a girl walks towards a window and gasps when a crow's wing moves across the frame (how did he do that from outside?), to a people staring way down the hall at a door that closed in their faces in the previous shot, to people turning around in surprise at something they couldn't possibly have known was there... plenty of nonsensical sequences to go around here.
• Blowing its wad way, way early. The ghosts are shown in all their derivative glory as soon as the director could possibly work them in. Less is more when it comes to this kind of thing, as they could have learned from, I dunno, every horror movie ever made?
• More than one plotline goes absolutely nowhere. The guy who keeps showing up and wanting to buy the farm? Never really has anything to do with the plot, though he later pointlessly appears in a flashback. The daughter realizes that the child can see the ghosts and wanders around the house with him, but that sequence trails off into nothingness

There are some positives to balance the bad out a bit. It's beautifully shot, with nice use of color. The actors do as well as they can with the material. Um... the teenage daughter is cute? I'm kind of reaching here to find positives.

Ever wish you could Opt Out of your family?

You know, just check off a form saying "I no longer wish to receive mailings, emails or other communications from you."

It would be even better if there were some categories that I could opt in for. Pictures of nieces/nephews? Wanted. Family news? Yes, please.

"Hilarious" jokes about those darned stupid liberals? No thank you. Page after page of forwards that detail an event debunked by Snopes.com months ago? I'd rather not. Inspirational messages 'bout miracles the Baby Jesus has totally performed? Not interested. Rants about how the ACLU/muslims/homosexuals/atheists/anyone who isn't a WASP is destroying our God-fearin' Christian nation? Yes, great! Wait, sorry, I meant to say "NO PLEASE STOP YOU'RE KILLING MY SOUL AND MAKING ME DESPISE YOU OH GOD THE PAIN".

Defend Your Castle on Wii

My wife and I had a blast last night playing "Defend Your Castle" on our Wii. It's downloaded as part of their original software development lineup (WiiWare) for 500 points ($5, though you have to buy points in 1000 or more units).

It's a Wii-fied version of a flash game with the same name, though the graphics have been improved significantly for the console version. Gameplay consists of one or more people flinging invaders away from the castle at the right side of the screen, using the Wiimode like a mouse. Fling them hard enough and they die; otherwise, they brush themselves off and soldier on towards their objective. In-between rounds, the person with the highest score for the round picks out upgrades and repairs the castle.

The graphics upgrade is simple, but utterly charming. The most common invaders are stick figures topped by button heads, with later versions toting popsicle sticks and accompanied by giant bottlecap-headed giants.The clouds and sun looked as if they're made of construction paper, with the former held up by bits of string. Sound effects are similarly lo-fi, with invaders making a squishing sound on impact and bombs resulting in what's clearly just some guy making a "Bwoosh!" noise.

There's not a lot of depth here - just enough to keep that "one more round..." feeling going. The upgrades consist of a "well"  in which to throw enemies for resources, archery, sorcery, repair, and bomb towers. All of these are acquired fairly quickly, though it'll take quite a while to build them up to their full potential.

All in all, it's a steal at $5.00. If you have someone to play with, I highly recommend it.

Simplified Integer-only Textbox in C#

I looked all over for something to accomplish what should be a very basic task in C#: Allowing only Numeric entry in a text box. Oddly for such an otherwise fantastic development setup, Microsoft provides only the MaskedEdit control, which insists on using a placeholder character (among other limitations). Any other validation has to be manually implemented.

Most of the solutions I found online looked confusing and did way more than I wanted. I found bits and pieces and cobbled together the following function:

public bool IsIntegerEntry(int intKey)
{
//Allow only numeric characters (48-58)
// and control characters (1-31) for copy/backspace/etc.
    return (((intKey >= 48) && (intKey <= 58)) || (intKey < 32))
}

Call it as follows from the KeyPress function of the appropriate TextBox: e.Handled = !IsIntegerEntry(e.KeyChar);

I'm sure there are plenty of gotchas (I'm utterly n00b-tastic when it comes to C#), but it doesn't need to be bulletproof for simple data entry purposes. If they manage to squeeze in a non-integer character in there somewhere, either later validation or database will throw it back regardless.

If you need to validate negative or decimal numbers, be sure to tack an additional "|| (intKey == x)" for the additional ASCII codes at the end of the if statement (45 and 46, respectively). Happy coding!