Articles by Michael Anderson

Cub Scout ‘Video Game’ Loop/Pin: Pandering or Better Preparing Kids?

The joke of the day seems to be that the Cub Scouts are redefining ‘outdoor activities’ to include sitting in front of the TV playing video games. The reality is that the Boy Scouts of America are now offering a belt loop and pin to Cub Scouts (i.e. kids generally 6-11) related to Video Games. Also new this year are belt loops and pins for such activities as Disability Awareness, Family Travel, Good Manners, Nutrition, as well as Hockey and Skateboarding. If you look at any of those you will see a very similar structure to what the Video Games…

Editorials, Game Diary

I Don’t Know If It’s Art, but I Like It!

Image courtesy of WebMuseum I love Jackson Pollock … but there are many who despise his work and would argue that his technique, described as “”all-over” painting, pouring paint rather than using brushes and a palette, and abandoning all conventions of a central motif”, isn’t art at all. I also love Derek Bailey … but again many would argue that his approach to music, which eschews structure of any kind, isn’t art, perhaps not even music. And I love video games – I love role-playing, solving puzzles, shooting stuff, building civilizations, exploring mysteries, shooting peas at zombies, having in-depth discussions…

Editorials

Is the ‘Netbook Era’ Drawing to a Close?

According to a report from CNET, an IDC report this week will show that sales of Intel’s Atom processor – which is dominant force in the netbook space – represent a smaller overall share of the company’s mobile processor space. The implication in the article is that since the Atom powers most netbooks, netbooks themselves are on the demise. The obvious question is … what does it all mean? Here are the basic details: In the first quarter of this year, Atom processors as a percentage of Intel mobile processors fell to 20.3 percent, compared with 24.3 percent in the…

News

Study Shows Link Between Depression and Chocolate Consumption. World Responds ‘No Duh?!’

Image courtesy of Saturday Morning Central If you were to name a ‘comfort food’ – something that you will reach for when you’re feeling down – chances are that chocolate would be in your top 3, if not the first thing out of your mouth. Now a study out of University of California, Davis, and University of California, San Diego published in the Archives of Internal Medicine shows that there is a link between chocolate consumption and actual depression. They note that “of 931 men and women in the San Diego area showed that people who ate an average of…

Game Diary, Reviews

Serious Sam Gold (1st & 2nd Encounter) (2001/2002, FPS): The Netbook Gamer

I was amazed in early 2002 when I came across a jewel-case FPS game at my local EBGames for $19.99 called ‘Serious Sam: The Second Encounter’. The images on the back looked quite nice and the description of a fast-paced action romp sounded like a complete blast – and somewhat of an anachronism. The funny thing is that when I first saw the Serious Sam games, I passed on buying them that day because they were on the ‘junk rack’. There was a four-sided rack of jewel-case games in that store, and they were pretty much universally either low budget…

News

DeluxeComfort.com Girlfriend Body Pillow $9.95 at Sears!

Back in August of 2009 the Consumerist featured a New York Times article about a growing Japanese trend of single men carrying ‘2-D Girlfriends’ around everywhere with them. The rise of 2-D love can be attributed in part to the difficulty many young Japanese have in navigating modern romantic life. According to a government survey, more than a quarter of unmarried men and women between the ages of 30 and 34 are virgins; 50 percent of men and women in Japan said they were not “going out with anybody”. Now Sears.com is getting in on this new trend, featuring the…

News

Avatar DRM Make Blu-Ray Watching Na’vi Cry

Image courtesy of ActFourScreenplays The big DVD news this week – well aside from watching Peter Jackson continue his spiral into mediocrity with The Lovely Bones – is the mega-release of the wonderful but over-hyped Avatar on DVD & Blu-Ray. This should be a good thing – I know my kids are looking forward to seeing the amazing visual spectacle again in our home theater. But – there was a problem! According to a post at the Consumerist, many folks are unable to watch the Blu-Ray version due to DRM that Fox has on the disc. They reference an animated…

Game Diary, Reviews

Don’t Trust That Label!: The Netbook Gamer

Image courtesy of GameSpot There are two paths I take when working on games to review for the Netbook Gamer: on the one hand I love to dig up classic PC games from the late 90’s that will still run on WIndows XP. On the other hand – particularly recently – I have been pushing the boundaries of what a standard netbook is capable of doing. Sometimes – like in the recent Tron review – things go very well. Sometimes – like in the Thief Deadly Shadows review – they work at a level that is barely acceptable. Sometimes I…

News

Popular Science Puts Entire Archive Online … for Free!

Apparently this happened last month, but since there is 137 YEARS of content … I don’t think it will get old for a while! For my first search I looked up an area of interest in my current work: Multivariate. Here is what I found: I really hadn’t expected much, as multivariate statistical analysis isn’t exactly in PopSci’s wheelhouse … but the reference to the Journal of Irreproducible Results was priceless – and a complete time-sink! In fact, there was something linked off the front page that I just have to share: Anyway … Check out the Popular Science…

Game Diary, Reviews

Dragon Age Origins: PC/XBOX360/PS3 Game Review

The other night I was watching VH1’s ‘100 Greatest One Hit Wonders of the 80’s’, and was thinking about Bioware and the whole ’spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate 2? thing surrounding Dragon Age: Origins. Baldur’s Gate 2 is the 2000 classic PC RPG that is not just one of the best RPGs ever but one of the greatest games in video game history. Not only that, it is one of those rare sequels that is better than the original – and the original itself is always on the ‘best video games ever’ lists! Put into that context, it is hard…

Editorials, Game Diary

Where the HECK Did All of Those PSP Games Come From?

A couple of weeks ago when Apple introduced iPhone OS 4 something struck me, but I had forgotten it until someone on a forum was asking me about the amount of games on the PSP … then it came back to me. Do you remember when Apple announced the new iPod lineup in September of 2009? At the time I wrote about the iPod Touch questioning the quantity to quality ratio, and led with this image: Image Source: Engadget Back then I thought that the PSP number was perhaps a bit low, given that I had reviewed more than 200…

Game Diary, Reviews

Mass Effect 2 (RPG, 2010): PC/XBOX360 Game Review

Way back in late 2007 (early 2008 on PC), Bioware released a game that was unique and interesting in several ways: it was their second game featuring all-new intellectual property (Jade Empire was first), a game designed from the start (or so we were told) as a trilogy, and the gameplay mechanic was a third-person squad-based shooter similar in some ways to Gears of War. The game was a tremendous commercial and critical success, thereby ensuring that the remainder of the trilogy would be produced, but there were some significant criticisms (even in the early 10/10 ‘bestest gaem EVAR’ reviews):…

Game Diary, Reviews

Tron 2.0 (2003, FPS): The Netbook Gamer

As a long-time techno-geek I loved the Tron movie back in the early 80’s and pumped loads of quarters into both the Tron and particularly Discs of Tron arcade game a few years later. I have watched the movie on a couple of occasions over the decades, but never owned or rented a copy until late last year. Sharing it with my kids, I found that they enjoyed it – though some of the ‘inside the computer’ references were terribly antiquated and the kids had no frame of reference to get the jokes. More recently we’ve seen the Tron Legacy…

News

So … Even The Government Accounting Office Can’t Estimate the Impact of Piracy?!?

Image courtesy of BoyGeniusReport If you even peripherally follow any news about media piracy – music, movies, video games, TV shows, ebooks, and so on – you would have likely been confused. The media industry would have you believe that the amount of piracy is so massive and devastating that if they could recoup, the taxes would be enough to pay off the deficit, solve world hunger, wipe out disease, and give every child a cute little hypoallergenic kitten. If you believe the pirates, they are actually increasing sales for media and are misunderstood innovators breaking ground with a new…

Editorials, Game Diary

PSP Charger Conundrum: Sony Reminds Us It is the Leader in User-Unfriendly Design!

As a gamer, gadget-hound and someone who has been a reviewer of games on a variety of platforms for nearly a decade, I frequently get questions about games and gaming systems. These range from ‘what system should I buy my kids’ to ‘how do I get by this boss’. But yesterday I got one that really stopped me in my tracks. Here are the basics: So my next problem is, I went to go play my psp for the first time in a few months and I could not find the charger. I can find the usb wire so I…

You Dropped Your Food on the Floor. Do You Eat It?

News

The ‘5 Second Rule’ Meets Corporate Decision Analysis

If you have spent any time on a project team in a corporation of any size, you have likely used tools such as decision analysis (or DA in Kepner-Tregoe speak), fault-tree, DMAIC, and so on … now you can apply some of those tools to figuring out whether to eat that cupcake that just fell on the floor. Of course, those of you with kids, pets or both know that there are multiple dynamics involved – more than are captured on this diagram, so that perhaps using a PPA (Potential Problem Analysis) or doing a ‘5 Whys’ exercise or filling…

Game Diary, Reviews

Vampire The Masquerade – Bloodlines: GearGames Retrospective

Hello, L.A., you’re up way past your bedtime, aren’t you? That is the line that greets you when you arrive at your apartment ‘haven’ in Santa Monica after a poorly done cutscene and wonderful tutorial, coming from a radio show that is just one of the many delicious undercurrents that make Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines one of the absolute best role-playing games of the past decade. It is hard to think that a mere five years ago releasing a product based on vampires would be considered a commercial liability, and that there hadn’t been a game released based on the…

Game Diary, Reviews

Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader (2003, RPG): The Netbook Gamer

The only thing better than playing a great game is getting a great deal on a great game. Heck, even a great deal on an average game is a pretty great thing! As I’ve said in the past, I came back to the RPG genre on the PC after a long absence in mid-2003, starting with Neverwinter Nights on the Mac and proceeding to Star Wars Knights of the Old Republic on the day it was release, then starting to ‘backfill’ with games like Gothic 2 and Baldur’s Gate 2. By engaging many folks on forums in discussions I got…

Game Diary, Reviews

Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf … MMO Game?

Like many others, I joke with friends who regularly line up for the new edition of Madden NFL or NBA or NHL or whatever annual sports game they choose, that they are really just paying an annual subscription fee for roster updates and tweaks. Apparently EA Games was listening, and has released the dominant golf video game – Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf – as an online web browser-based game based on an annual subscription model. I have been playing Tiger Woods PGA Tour Golf for many years across PC and (more recently) PSP, and was fortunate enough to participate…

Game Diary, Reviews

Dead or Alive Paradise: PSP Game Review

When you hear a title like Dead or Alive, you naturally think about scantily clad women in bikinis prancing around an island giggling and … WHAT?!?! OK, so perhaps you would think of the famed fighting game franchise … but that isn’t what you get here. But let’s get to the real question: is the game any good? No it isn’t, in fact it is downright abysmal … but you can read on for more details.

News

Morning Chicness Bags … Making Vomiting Stylish!

My wife always says that stuff available for pregnant women these days is much more stylish than when she was pregnant. Now I’m not a pregnant woman, nor do I play one on TV, but after the many difficult pregnancies that eventually resulted in our two wonderful boys … I can’t think of anything that would making the vomiting associated with morning sickness stylish. Less Nasty? Perhaps … and in that case, these bags just might do the trick! Check out the amazing selection of bags: So what do you think – is the next big trend just waiting to…

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