Elite Beat Agents

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I like silly things. Always have. And the more out and out daft that they are, the better it is for me. Elite Beat Agents for the Nintendo DS is definitely silly. We are talking "FBI style agents with big hair solving problems through history by the use of dance" (including helping someone who looks suspiciously like Leonardo da Vinci get the Mona Lisa). Deeply silly and perhaps a bit strange too.

You control the game with the stylus, using it to tap out beats, follow notes and twirl things around. The action takes place via a sequence of little stories, each of which is illustrated by animated cartoon sequences. There is no reason on earth why any of this should work. But it does.

If you think that video games are designed by percentage players, who use focus groups and cunning market analysis to decide what will sell and what won't, then Elite Beat Agents will come as a bit of a surprise. There is no way that something like this could have come about in that way. Sega must have just locked a bunch of programmers in a room with an X-Files DVD, a pile of manga comics, a copy of Parappa the Rapper and a children's encyclopedia.

 If you like silly games, this is for you.

Antique Bondery

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We got off the boat at 8:30 this morning. That's the only snag with the mini-cruise, it ends at a most peculiar time. Anyhoo, we got some almond croissants on the way home (breakfast of champions) and had a most restful day.

In the afternoon we went out to Beverley and had a look in the antiques centre there. If you ever go to the town you must take a look. It is a bit like a mini-museum where you can buy stuff. Although it is rather upsetting to find things that you had as a kid being sold of as antiques.

They had a James Bond Goldfinger Aston Martin, in its original box. I had one of those. It came with a henchman that you could shoot out of the roof using the cars ejector seat. Needless to say, my henchman vanished quite soon after I got the toy. The one in the museum was not only as shiny as new, but it also had henchman and everything. Mind you, you've got to feel something for a kid who got a toy like that and then doesn't seem to have played with it. I ended up using mine to see how far I could flick a Malteser with the ejector seat roof. Great stuff.

Promiscuity in Amsterdam

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After rising bright and early we set off from Europort to the city. I don't know Amsterdam very well and there were some places I wanted to visit. Fortunately I had a plan.

I was going to use my Nokia 770 (a neat little web-terminal thing that I bought cheap a week or so ago) and its matching sat-nav, which was fully loaded with Netherlands maps and had all my destinations carefully favourited. All I had to do was kick the thing into life when we arrived and never be lost. Well, that was the plan.

On the bus as we approached the city I fired up the 770 and the GPS device. Because of the rather stupid software it seems you have to pair the GPS device and the 770 each time you try to use it. On first attempt the navigation software found a Bluetooth device called "Dave" and then crashed. After a reset, and with the faint inklings of foreboding I tried again. This time I found a veritable plethora of Bluetooth partners who all wanted to talk to me. One was called "Land Rover". I looked out of the bus window and sure enough, there it was in the traffic alongside us. Of course the GPS device was nowhere to be found.

By now we had arrived at our dropping off point. My plan was to add this as a favourite so we could easily find our way back to the bus, but things were not going well. The GPS device finally paired with the 770 and told me I was standing in a canal before losing the signal. Not good.

I tried to find my favourites and set the destination, but of course I couldn't see the screen in daylight and the stylus was a pain to use. By now the patience of number one wife was starting to fray a bit. We started walking in order to try and get a better signal and now the direction indicate pointed back the way we'd come and it started to rain on the screen. So that was game over for Mr. Satnav. As I put the whole thing back in my pocket I heard a muffed "At the next intersection turn left.." We bought a map (price 2.5 euros) and used that very successfully for the rest of the day.

The good news is that the GPS device happily paired with my Smartphone and works a treat with Live Search (but I was not going to pay roaming GPRS prices to find my way around Amsterdam).

I'm going to upgrade the Nokia software first chance I get, with a bit of luck this should improve things.

Of course, I'd taken the cameras.

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Early morning ships

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Actually, these are made of wood

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satnav, pah!

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Beer marketing with horses

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Canal mural

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Multi-storey bike park

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Container stacking

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Industrial Skyline

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Down the decks

There are more pictures on Flickr.

Night Boat

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Tonight finds me on a boat on the way to Amsterdam. P & O do these wonderful little min-cruises, which for only slightly more than the cost of a return ticket to London will put you up for two nights on their luxury ferry and take you to Amsterdam for the day to boot (or should that be clog).

Anyhoo, we set sail tonight and, in spite of poor weather, spirits are high.

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View of the estuary

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Leaving port

We are to be up bright and early tomorrow (5:00 am)...

Helicopter Girl

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One other thing I had my my uber posh hotel in Korea was a soundtrack. Sitting in the Bose CD player in my room was a disk called "Warmth of Cool_Interlude", a pretentious (and somewhat meaningless) name. Out of interest I pressed the play button.

There were some good tracks on there, including the wonderful Imogen Heap. There was also one from someone called Helicopter Girl. The song, called "Umbrellas in the Rain", seemed very appropriate, since that is what we had been all about that morning in Seoul.

Once back in the UK, I tracked down the album that it came from. The album is called "Voodoo Chic" and is completely wonderful. Very tuneful and atmospheric. If you can get hold of a copy, I think you'll like it.

Seoul Moments - Calculator Haggling

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When you have no common language, but you want to agree on a number, a calculator is a very useful device. Having decided on a suitable present for number one wife it was all down to the price. The lady in the shop smiled, bowed, entered a number on a big calculator and handed it to me.

I looked down, clearly I now had to do something to move the situation forward. A smaller number seemed like a plan. I examined the calculator carefully. It had clearly been involved in a lot of haggling. Several of the keys had worn so that they no longer had any markings on. Feeling that I had to do something, I stabbed at some keys, typed in some digits and handed it back. The woman's eyes widened in surprise, apparently I had just offered her the entire gross national product of Korea for a necklace and a bracelet. The calculator was handed back to me.

By now I reckoned I was gaining control of the situation, having worked out how to clear the display by the simple process of pressing all the unmarked buttons until I got a zero. I entered a number only slightly larger than the original one, handed over a wad of notes and made it out onto the street with my purchase.

Now that's what I call Silly

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I've just spent 24 quid. That is probably what some people spend on drinks on a Friday night. I could have got half of Bioshock for the 360 (which number one son says is worth a punt). I could have bought "Elite Beat Agents" for the Nintendo DS (but I don't have to because number one son got me it for my birthday). Instead I've bought:

www.verysillygames.com

- for two years. I know I could have got it cheaper, but I like to have all my domains in one place and I've used my favourite company for years and they have a very easy to use interface.

It occurred to me that I'm going to need a place to put all the silly XNA games that will form part of the book. So I bought the domain. At the moment it points into this site, but that can change. Anyone fancy setting me a site up for 25% of the equity, a profit sharing scheme and fringe benefits (in other words no money at all)?

Oh and Chapter 3 is coming along nicely. I should have it on the site some time next week. Prepare yourselves for the gaming sensation that is "Color Nerve" (note American spelling in vain attempt to increase market penetration).

Windows Vista Performance Patches

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There are a couple of patches that you might want to apply to your Vista machine. I've put them on two of mine, and whilst I've not noticed a huge improvement, they haven't made things worse....

KB938194:Improves the compatibility and reliability of Windows Vista
      <http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=938194>
KB938979: Improves the performance and reliability of Windows Vista
      <http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=938979>

Radio A Levels

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Went up town first thing today to do a paper review for Radio Humberside. We had a chat about the UK A-Level results, which are out today. Apparently everyone has done better than ever, and this is a national scandal. Although if everyone was doing worse, that would be a national scandal too. And if everything stayed exactly the same, that would be regarded as deeply suspicious because someone would obviously be fiddling the results....

I've seen modern A-Levels at first hand. I've know the amount of work that kids have to put in to get through them. All I would say is kudos to anyone who has got good grades, I hope they take you where you want to go.

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Early morning Hull. Don't you wish you lived in a place that looked like this?

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The BBC building

Simpson's Movie

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We went to see the Simpson's Movie tonight. It was good, but not great. Around 2 episodes worth of good stuff spread over three episodes worth of time. Worth seeing though, just for some of the one liners. And I'm sure that if I watch it again I'll find a whole new bunch of things to laugh at.

Stephen put me on to this, which seems very appropriate. After some fiddling I came up with a Simpson's version of me which I'm reasonably happy with...

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...perhaps because it doesn't look much like me at all.

Raw Power

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My biggish camera can take pictures in RAW format. This means that rather than compressing and processing the image data when it takes a picture, the camera simply dumps the output of the photo sensor into a file. It results in rather large files (around 14Mb in my case) for each picture but it does represent the epitome of quality, as you get all the data from the picture. It also means that you can do things like white balance compensation (making sure that things don't look yellow, or blue or whatever) after taking the picture, rather than at the time.

I was taking pictures of Seoul at night, and unsure about the white balance, so I took a few RAW pictures as well. The bad news was that when I got home, I now had to convert them into proper images. Fuji, who made my camera, supply a truly horrid set of programs to do this. They don't work very well on Vista, and I've lost the disks, so I thought I was stuffed. Until I found this.

These folks have written an image decoder for Finepix cameras that does everything I want. It is free and it works. If you want to play with RAW images and get the maximum quality from your camera, you should download the program and have a play.

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Raw Seoul

Back from Planet Imagine Cup

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In a previous post I mentioned "Planet Imagine Cup". I think that is the best way to regard it. When you go to the finals you enter a strange, parallel universe where everything is posh, the people are all interested in computers and what you are doing with them, living is free and someone makes your bed for you each day.

This means that returning home requires some small amount of adjustment. Fancy having to close your curtains by hand.

Everyone I've spoken to on the planet wants to go back again next year. For us in the UK this is especially interesting, as the world finals are in Paris in 2008. So no nasty jetlag or 25 hour journeys. And if the French know anything, it is how to have a good time....

The theme for the competition next year is "imagine a world where technology enables a sustainable environment." There are no less than 9 competition strands, including for the first time a game development one. Find out more here.

Profitable Lies

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Today was the say that we had to leave "Planet Imagine Cup" and return to real life. Many thanks to Microsoft for setting up and running this amazing competition.

We got to the airport at just the right time. Found the just the right queue for just the right flight. And were told that the plane was just full. Apparently Air France use this novel technique where they sell more tickets than there are seats on the plane, on the rather strange theory that there are people out there who would spend one and a half thousand pounds on a journey and then not turn up to take it.

The charming lady at the desk told us that this would mean that either:

  1. We would have to travel on a different plane and arrive later (bad)
  2. We would travel on the same plane, but in business class (very good)

At the time of telling, the story sounded like a good deal. All we had to do was not make a fuss and return in forty minutes to find out which of the two options were ours. So we went off in search of breakfast and returned all hopeful to find out if it was smoked salmon and posh seats all the way back.

It was not. It was a different flight and later arrivals. By now of course it was impossible to change things, but we were offered some cash compensation and a chance to use the business lounge while we waited for our later plane.

I had the feeling that we had just been "handled" and that the mythical business class upgrade was exactly that. Never mind though, there was still the comfy chairs and free WIFI at the airport to look forward to, to say nothing of the wodge of euros that would soon be ours. Except they wouldn't let us into the lounge...

After a bit of a fight, we got in, connected to the WIFI, had a free drink and a bun and waited for our flight. We were considerably cheered when one of the VIP judges turned out to be on our flight too. If it's OK for him, it's fine for us.

We ended up using Air Korea, who provided excellent customer service and the best range of on-flight entertainment I've ever seen on a plane (even though I watched "Wild Hoggs", which I now know is a move best avoided). And I had leg room.

We got in precisely ten minutes later than our original flight and two of us managed to get our compensation euros as well (although because of another piece of daftness from "La Premiere Airline Francais" one of our party missed out on the cash).

Then it was a mad dash across town to miss the next train back. I finally got into the house at 11:15 after 25 hours traveling. I think I'll sleep tonight..

Seoul Shopping

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I feel rather bad about this. Rather than attend the World Fair part of the Imagine Cup awards I instead snuck out and took a trip round Seoul. I'd checked that I wouldn't be needed for anything, and it is rather unlikely that I will get to this wonderful city again in a long while, so it was into a taxi and off to the shopping district.

Taxis in Seoul are ace. They are very inexpensive and very efficient. Some of their drivers can speak English too, which is nice. And they have air conditioning, which is all important.

So, all we had was two bits of paper. One had the name of the shopping district written on it, and the other had the name of the hotel written on it. Both of them contained the only Korean language that we had on us. But at no point did this seem a problem. The sun was out, the people were friendly, and away we went. Of course I had both cameras, and of course I took loads of pictures. Most of them will be up on Flickr later, for now here are a few choice snaps.

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We found this little market square area. This is the layout of the stalls.

Then we found ourselves in a video game arcade. This was tucked away in a side street. Even so there were plenty of machines.

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Single player

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This guy was seriously good

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Draw your picture, take a call. That's multi-skilled...

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The old and the new

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Side street

After spending a few hours happily wandering around and steadily accumulating bits and bobs we found another taxi, gave the driver the other piece of paper and headed back to the hotel. I've got some pictures of the trip, which will appear later.

By the time we got back it was pretty dark, but the air was clear and so it was time to take some night views.

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The view from the 11th floor

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...and another.

Seoul is wonderful. If you get the chance to go, just go. And take me along too...