BuggBlog

A little bit of Buggery for you

If you've been around here for a while, you probably already know that I buy more books than I'll probably ever be able to read. They're just so pretty and shiny and they feel so good when you pick them up and they smell really nice. They also, you know, contain some information you can absorb if you open them up. This week's Buggery column at Metro Weekly tries to explain my passion for the printed page and, as a bonus, make up a new word,"arboranity." I have a  feeling it won't be the new word of 2008.

I've also got a new Gears up on the 2008 Mini Cooper S. In short, there's a lot to love about the Mini, and the new enhancements, mostly stylistic, don't do anything to change that. The new Mini Clubman -- a larger version of the car that should address some of the Cooper's problems with storage area and back seat passengers (it doesn't have any and it doesn't hold any) -- is out soon and I'm awaiting my chance at the wheel. Given the interest in the car, though, I don't expect to get a crack at it until mid-summer at the earliest.

Because I've been sort of slacking on the one hand and obsessing about Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton on the other, I totally forgot to highlight a couple other recent pieces. First, I have a quick overview of my video game obsession, Rock Band -- although I'm not playing it around the clock at the moment, as I'm in the midst of working my way through Lost Odyssey and leveling up some characters in World of Warcraft -- more on those later. Second, I had my first Food article for Domestic Partner, with suggestions for putting together an easy but impressive Valentine's Day dinner.

I do like to keep my interests broad.

Twits, tweets and...um...

I'll just leave the vowel progression on that phrase to your imagination.

Twitter seems to be back up, so it's full steam ahead on posting mindless effluvia and ephemera under Bugg Bites. Hmmm. Effluvia and Ephemera sounds like a good band name -- at least, not any worse than Coheed and Cambria. Sounds like a project for Rock Band.

I will resist the Xbox. I will resist the Xbox. I will resist the Xbox.

My secret shame

No, not pornography. I said my secret shame.

And that would be the point where the handful of family members who still read this blog decide to bail out.

Anyway, my secret shame is something far less sexy. Well, depending on how sexy you think porn is, which is definitely in the territory known as "subjective." But whatever your opinion on that may be, I'm pretty sure an addiction to Guitar Hero II is even less sexy. I believe it was about on my fiftieth run through Deep Purple's "Hush" on "Hard" difficulty -- and believe me, that song's far more difficult than you would think -- that I realized, "I have a problem." Between that and my repeated attempts to get at least four out of five stars on "Freebird," I knew I had to have a break.

And if my high-school self heard my adult self whining about not getting a high score on a country-rock classic like "Freebird" -- the redneck "Stairway to Heaven" -- my high school self would have kicked my ass. Or, at least, gotten some bigger, badder friends to kick my ass for him. Although, in my defense, I got five stars on "Shout at the Devil," so sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll all the way baby, wooooooo! It's just like being back at that triple-bill concert of Accept, Aldo Nova and Blue Oyster Cult back in 1983. Rock rock 'til you drop, man!

And that just proves my point. Now you see why I had to bring my rockin' toy guitar and the game disc to a friend of mine for safe keeping for at least a couple months. But when August comes around baby, it's five stars all the way.

That's a lesson learned

Telling God to "bring it on"? Bad idea. A snow day is a blessing for those of us who love the chance to spend a weekday sprawled on the couch leveling up our Phantasy Star Universe characters or tackling some Gears of War on "Insane" difficulty. In my case, a snow day on a Wednesday means leaving behind my oh-so-comfy couch to brave the snowy to meet an unchangeable Wednesday printer deadline. Poor, poor me. Well, at least I don't have a journalism job that requires me to brave the snow to listen to nonsensical presidential press conferences.

I'm jesting, naturally. Well, except for the Bush part. But my commute this morning was actually a little faster than usual, given that there were only about 20 other people on the road. That would be 20 other people who can't drive worth a good goddamn in the snow, but I managed to steer around them. After the hour-plus commute home last night, I was irrevocably convinced of the fallacy of the whole "wisdom of crowds" thing (not the actual book, per se, but at least the popular culture interpretation of it as "everybody's doing it so it must be good!"). Nothing brings out the stupidity in humanity like taking a little spin on a snowy road, which is amazing, given that everyone I know considers themselves to be the world's best snow driver. Myself included.

Anyway, here's hoping for a quick end to the day. Those aliens aren't going to kill themselves, and my couch is getting lonely.

Acting my age

I turned 39 on Friday, so naturally I celebrated by playing Gears of War, going out for dinner at Gordon Biersch, stopping by the Ritz-Carlton for and early nightcap, then heading home to play more videogames. And somewhere in between I found the time to pick up a copy of World of Warcraft. If I were a single straight guy, you'd have good reason to be worried. Granted, you have good reason to be worried anyway, but now that I've discovered that there's an actual queue that I must wait in before I can get online in WoW, I'm not sure my time there will be the lifechanging sort.

But my point is, I'm so acting my age these days. For example, I went to Target today to pick up an ironing board cover and other items of domestic docility (ooooh, a fabric shaver!). Sauntering by the electronics section, I just happened to see what looked to be two 60 gig Playstation 3's hanging out inside the locked display, eagerly awaiting a chance to go home with me. The rest of my time in the store was a titanic struggle in my own head not to buy the damn thing right there and then. And the temptation was mighty, kind of liking dropping a newly recovered heroin addict in a shooting gallery and telling him to just say no.

But I said no, and I'm proud, dammit. Anyway, there's only one game I'm interested in playing on PS3 right now, Resistance, and since I'm so enamored of Gears of War at the moment -- it is one of the best games I've ever played -- I'm thinking it's going to have to be pretty damn special to warrant spending about $800 for a new system, peripherals and game discs.

Maybe when I'm 40.

I kill a forest and behave totally selfishly

Although my Christmas shopping is woefully behind, that doesn't preclude some self-centered shopping. A Friday night stop at Barnes & Noble went fairly predictably, in so far as I bought yet more books to pile up around the house. This was particularly daunting pile, however. First off, I found the new 10th anniversary edition of Infinite Jest. I've been trying to get friends, family or anyone else I know to read the David Foster Wallace opus for years now, to no success. I understand that a giant, footnoted novel can be intimidating. But I can't stress enough how much the effort pays off -- it's one of the funniest, saddest and most moving things I've ever read. So, somebody, anybody, in my circle of friends and family needs to read it and love it, so everyone won't just think I'm crazy for having read the cinderblock of a book three times already.

After grabbing that tome, I stumbled across a "new translation" of War and Peace, and given that I'm in the middle of The Brothers Karamazov, it seemed right to pick it up and continue my efforts to complete some of the giant Russian novels I should have read, but haven't. Up to now, my big Russian forays have been Anna Karenina and Gogol's Dead Souls. Nothing to sneeze at there, and I recall enjoying Gogol's novel for reasons other than that it was short. But that's not really enough to make me feel all smart and stuff, so War and Peace goes onto the nightstand.

Add in the new Cormac McCarthy and the Japanese novel Ring -- yeah, what the movie came from -- and it was a big spending night at the old B&N. Just FYI, if you get the copy of Infinite Jest from me for Christmas, know that I did spend a few minutes reading the new introduction by Dave Eggers. I hope it doesn't bother you that some of the pages are pre-read. I only ask, because I know it would me.

So, after contributing to the deforestation of the planet in the pursuit of Russian literature, on Saturday I finally found my mom's Christmas present. Along the way, I stopped at Best Buy "just to look." Ooo, there's the Final Fantasy XII guide -- maybe that'll get me past the dungeon I'm stuck in so I can finish the game and consign my Playstation 2 to the great closet of videogame systems past. See, there's a practical reason for it, so I have to get it. Then I spotted the wireless headset for my XBox 360, which would eliminate the last unsightly wire tangle associated with that console. Again, practicality.

Right below that was the new HD-DVD add-on for the XBox 360 and, well, I do have the big HDTV I invested in last year. And it's such a shame to have to watch standard definition DVDs when the option for eye-searing color and clarity is so readily and relatively cheaply available. I'd be wasting money not to get it. Right?

Right or wrong, I got it. Plus a couple movies. Best Buy frickin' owns me. Arrgh. The worst part? I still have to go out this week and finish my Christmas shopping, plus do a small something for the Le-Bugg  fourth anniversary tomorrow, Dec. 19. Flowers -- they'll just die when we leave for the holiday. Chocolates -- he doesn't like 'em. Something expensive -- he'll say it's a waste of money.

Ah, romance.

Someone's gotta know how to tell a story

I've been working my way through the big gay game, Enchanted Arms, which has turned out to be not quite as gay as I had been led to believe -- world's nelliest videogame character Makoto (well, after Tingle) "disappears" fairly quickly, and is quickly replaced by the standard array of Japanese RPG stock characters. At 32 percent complete, the game's rapidly becoming a chore that I feel I have to finish rather than a story I feel I want to hear.

One of the reasons I love videogames is the story aspect -- well, at least the good ones. Even dinosaurs such as Super Mario World told simple stories -- odd versions of old fairy tales, but stories nonetheless. But I really got my gaming on with the Playstation One, with Resident Evil and Final Fantasy VII. Those were some games that told stories in a new medium in some new and interesting ways, and some have improved over time. I'm not in the majority, but I thought Final Fantasy X was pretty much the culmination of that particular story-telling method -- I'm looking forward to seeing if the next iteration takes things in a different and unexpected direction.

One can hope.

The problem I'm having with Enchanted Arms, and other games, is that all the vaunted new media aspects of the game as story telling device or artistic experience is being lost under a deluge of hackneyed and trite conventions. I had to give up on Xenosaga 2 -- who the hell wants to spend hours staring at a videogame that tells its story almost exclusively through non-interactive, glacially-paced cut scenes? It's the first time a game's nearly bored me to tears. Then along comes Enchanted Arms, with its promise of next generation, high-definition Xbox 360 goodness. And what do I get? Two nearly static characters standing on opposite sides of the screen exchanging stilted dialogue. If I wanted to play at two-generation old RPG like, say, Persona, well, I'd frickin' go play Persona. But instead I paid hundreds of dollars for a high-powered console and $59 for a story presentation that's less dynamic than a Punch and Judy show?

Plus, did the world need another story about a cutely androgynous guy who has no memory of being a humanoid weapon with the hidden power to destroy the world?

It's not all bad on the videogame story front -- I thought Oblivion was addictively interesting, although the story took a backseat to the telling. Halo has maintained a strong enough story to make me finish both games, a rare thing for me and a first-person shooter (I'm old and my fine motor skills aren't fine enough to compete with the pre-teens who cheat-code their way across Xbox Live). But as my time for games becomes more limited -- things like work, reading and relationship have to take some priority -- I'm losing my patience for this second grade level story telling approach. Some developers need to start paying as much attention to their writing as they do to their polygon count.

Yes, this is an old lament. But if game companies can recycle tired old hash, why can't I?

The Gay Game

Given the preponderance of young straight guys in the world of videogames, it's not all that surprising that the sexuality of games tends to revolve around big-breasted women with proportions that would make Barbie's back ache with sympathy pain. Generally, gay characters are nonexistent, or existent as small, jokey asides (i.e. a quest that required dressing in drag in Final Fantasy VII) or titillating girl-on-girl action, in a game that I can't even remember at the moment because it didn't interest me for what must be fairly obvious reasons.

So I've been quasi-eagerly awaiting Enchanted Arms, a Japanese-style role-playing game with a screamingly flamboyantly gay main character, Makoto. Turns out that the game manual actually calls him a "flamboyant transvestite" because he's a woman trapped in a man's body, which indicates to me that one of the writers at developer Ubisoft is a little behind on the current language of sexual orientation.

After a few minutes of play, I can say that I've never before seen such a flamingly flaming homosexual in a videogame: "Love lunch"? Oy. I'll have to get a little further into the game to see if this is a step forward or a leap backward. What I'm most curious about, though, is how the non-gay players who still make up such a bulk of the gaming world are reacting to Makoto. I'm not sure I'm going to go close to Xbox Live with this one -- I've had enough 12-year-olds calling me a fag, thank you very much.

You cannot be serious

On top of everything else that's been going on for the past few days, my hopes for mindless relaxation with a bit of Dead Rising were dashed over the weekend by the unexpected death of my Xbox 360. Multiple attempts to boot up a game led to multiple frustrations. So I tried to watch a DVD -- nada. Maybe it's a problem with discs? Nope, my game demos froze almost immediately after starting. Then, the whole frickin' thing gave up the ghost and gave me the flashing red circle of death.

Way to go, Microsoft!

So, I call Microsoft and go through the hoops of customer service and make the arrangements to send the damn thing in for repairs, when helpful transoceanic customer service specialist "Ray" asks what games I've been playing. Oh, nothing much, just Dead Rising, a little Topspin 2, Prey and Table Tennis. Ray proceeds to tell me that Microsoft is recommending that people not play Dead Rising right now, because there may be problems -- something about the codex, which sounds like something that caused me problems back when I worked on a Windows machine -- with the game that specifically cause a system failure like what I'm experiencing.

Way to go, Capcom!

I'm so, so happy that my easy-going console gaming days are now being subsumed in the Windows world of crashy, buggy "goodness." On the bright side, I can spend a couple weeks catching up on my unplayed PS2 pile -- Xenosaga 2 here I come.

Civic duty

Do you ever have those weeks where, for some unknown reason, you just don't have anything you particularly feel like saying? Where you have an idea of sorts, but somewhere between the brain cells and the keyboard it transmogrifies from insightful to meh? Where you can't even muster a few paragraphs of misty-eyed nostalgia to keep the Web site running?

Yeah, it's been that time of year for me. Actually, it's not so much that I haven't had anything to write -- it's that I've had a huge amount to write, all for the magazine. At some point, I just need to let the old brain recharge a bit, preferably by killing a whole bunch of brain cells wasting time with Dead or Alive 4 or Project Gotham Racing 3. Just as an aside, I still maintain that the boob-tastic Dead or Alive fighting games, ostensibly targeted toward hormonally overactive young male set, are among the gayest things ever created, what with the obsessive focus on unlocking the unreal number of alternate outfits for all the characters. It's like Bruce Lee playing dress up at Barbie's Dream house.

Anyway, the point is that I've gotten way behind in posting about tennis (even missing a chance to do some choice and deserved Sharapova bashing) and cars and gay media and all the other detritus that bounces around my head. For right now, I'm just going to focus on the automotive -- I promise to get moving on the other stuff sooner rather than later.

So, on to the Honda Civic sedan. Here's a car I'd been waiting fairly eagerly to take for a spin. The Civic is one of those models that just about everyone has spent a fair amount of time in, either because you owned one yourself, or a friend (or friends) owned one, that was likely driven into the ground over many, many years. One of my best friends in college had a late-'80s Civic that seemed hip and sharp at the time, although he regularly terrified me by driving it just a little shy of 100 mph on Interstate 81 for weekend trips to D.C. (I was totally unsurprised that the little trooper met its untimely demise in a 16th Street crash rather than becoming an automotive senior citizen). But it was a solid little car.

The Civic has long been a perfect new car for first-time car buyers. It's cheaper than a Volkwagen, it comes with all the "quality" expectations expected from Japanese compacts, it looked just nice enough without getting so stylish it put off the more conservative buyers. And that's one of the reasons I'm fairly taken with the 2006 models: it's the best looking Civic to hit the streets in years.

I'm not saying it's a cutting edge exercise in style, and I don't think it's nearly the boy racer car the so many other critics seemed to think. But the sharp nose and tightly designed taillamps bring a needed up-to-date look. Behind the wheel looking at the oddly stacked intrument panel -- the digital speedometer grows like a small hump from the dash directly above the enormous tachometer and other gauges -- you can't miss the homage to videogame design. Appropriate, given Japan's predominate role in the the gaming world. The Civic's dash and design remind me a bit of early Wipeout and some of the later clones of that futuristic racing game. Although lifting some design cues from a Playstation One game on the eve of Playstation 3 may not qualify as all that cutting edge.

Regardless, it looks nice. The sedan I drove garnered some appreciative oohs and aahs from some (admittedly Honda-loving) friends. Although I haven't driven the 2-door coupe, I think it looks a little sharper, and more definitively targeted at competition such as the Scion tC, a pretty fine and popular little car in its own right. Although when it comes down to it, the Civic seems to share a lot with its sister brand, Acura.

I also didn't get a chance at the hybrid version, but I can vouch that the gas mileage in the sedan is pretty respectable even without the assist from Reddy Kilowatt. I drove all over, all week, without making much of a dent in the tank's supply. Given the impending sense of doom over gas prices, the abstentious use of fuel is a major plus. As for fun, the dashboard may look like you're the head driver in an otaku-racer's paradise, but looks are where things stop. Comfortable, fairly stylish, and sensible are the qualities you get from Civic. If that's what you're looking for, it ain't half bad.

Next up: Mazda's 2006 MX-5, the car formerly known as the Miata.