No Zytrons In Range

Viva Piñata by Rare takes place on appropriately-named Piñata Island, where piñatas are born and raised to be delivered to parties around the world. This delivery happens via a giant piñata cannon on a tower in the middle of the island. You are given a small plot of land, initially covered with trash and unusable soil, and a shovel with which to start your garden. The nicer your garden is, the more piñatas you’ll attract to it, and the first piñatas come right away in the form of Whirlms once you’ve loosened up some dirt and Syrupents once you’ve planted some grass.

There are many ways to improve your garden and attract piñatas. You are given a shovel and a seed packet for free at the beginning of the game. These can be used to loosen dirt and plant grass respectively. The shovel can also be initially used to smash up junk in your garden and gets upgraded during the course of the game so that eventually it can dig ponds and even cut down trees. There are many improvements available at the stores in town, as well. You can buy fencing, walkways, decorations like fountains and statues, and houses for your piñatas and workers.

There’s also a strange little man named Seedos who walks across your plot often, and talking to him will yield seeds you can plant. If you’re unsatisfied with the seeds he gives you for free, you can whack him with your shovel. This will knock seeds out of his backpack (sometimes mysterious seeds you haven’t encountered before), but he’ll get angry and come back for revenge to plant weeds in your garden.

Each piñata will choose to visit your garden based on certain criteria, related to the type of animal it is. For instance, Flutterflys like daisies, and so they won’t visit unless you’ve planted some daisies in your garden. Many piñatas will only stay if they eat one of your existing piñatas. Pretztails, for example, won’t stay unless they’re allowed to eat a mouse. (The food chain in Viva Piñata is referred to as the “donut of life.”) The Piñata Island wiki contains an extensive database of all the piñata requirements and preferences.

Early on, the tutorial teaches you how to “romance” your piñatas, “romance” being a euphemism for… well, you know, two adult piñatas making a baby piñata. Once the romance requirements have been met for each piñata, you can point them towards each other. Romancing takes the form of a simple mini-game, where you have to guide one piñata to the other, avoiding the bombs and collecting bonus coins. The romancing mini-game starts out trivial, but becomes very difficult as you attempt romance more valuable piñatas. If you’re successful, you’re treated to a cute animation of the piñatas dancing, and an egg delivered into their house.

Once you’re sufficiently leveled-up, you begin to get requests from Party Central. These requests usually take the form of sending a couple piñatas of the same kind to the party. Fulfilling the request in the time limit greatly increases the value of the piñata you send to the party, as well as rains happiness candy down on your entire garden.

Viva Piñata allows you to create new gardens with the money and experience you’ve gained from your last garden, making it easy to try a new garden design or attempt to lure different piñata species than the ones in your previous garden. (Which is important, since some piñatas do not co-exist easily.)

All-in-all, Viva Piñata is an excellent game for every member of the family. It also addresses one of the frequent complaints about the Xbox, the lack of kid-friendly games. I’ve played the game for a couple dozen hours, and I’m far away from completing the accomplishments in the game (which are far more numerous than the Xbox Live accomplishments.) If you have an Xbox 360 and get sick of killing terrorists, give Viva Piñata a try.

Sometimes things just come together. For instance, when I’m sitting around on my ass pointlessly surfing the web and I come across a blog post listing a whole bunch of different videos of random people playing the Mario theme song on various instruments. From there, it was a short step to realizing that, when it comes down to it, embedding a YouTube (or Google Video, for that matter) video is easy… it’s just a single line of HTML code. It’s also trivial to write a small PHP script to randomly insert a text file stored on the server into a page. Combining these two ideas, after a short domain name search, I came up with Yourmario.com.

This site features one of over 30 videos of random people playing the Mario theme song on various instruments. (Those mentioned in the blog post above, plus quite a few others I found on my own.) In addition, it also has a link for you to load a new video and a little comment section. The background to the page is also selected at random, although I only have two of those at the moment, a warp zone background and a bowser background. The comments are stored site-wide, just something so people can leave their mark. And, more to the point, I wanted to practice a little of that shiny new AJAX technique everybody talks about to update content dynamically without requiring a page reload. (Thus, you can leave a comment without interrupting the playing video, or even have an entire conversation with some other random visitor.)

The alpha transparency is one of the interesting little-known HTML/CSS features I found while making this site and decided to put to use. I needed a way to display the Load Another link, as well as the comment section, so that it would work over any background and still remain legible. Seeing as every modern web browser supports alpha transparency, it seemed like a good solution to this problem. The CSS used is:

background: black;
filter:alpha(opacity=75);
-moz-opacity:0.75;
opacity: 0.75;

If you use a syntax-highlighting editor, you’ll notice that none of these variations are highlighted. From what I understand, the third is the actual CSS 3.0 compliant way of setting the opacity, while the first is for IE and the second is for Mozilla/Firefox. I don’t know which of these tags is supposed by Safari, but Safari displays the site correctly as well. I haven’t tested the site in Opera or Konquerer or iCab or anything other than IE, Firefox and Safari.

The AJAXy comment feature was easy to implement once I realized that, despite being called “XMLHttpRequest()”, the relevant Javascript function actually has nothing to do with XML whatsoever. (Well, sure you can use it to read in an XML file, but you can as easily use it to read in a JSON file, or even a plain text file.) All I had to do was create a small PHP page that accepts a comment and writes it into a file, then use the Javascript on the page to periodically read in that file to update the comments.

So that’s that. I plan to spend a couple hours every couple weeks to add new videos to the site, and perhaps new backgrounds if I feel like fiddling with Photoshop Elements, but other than that I’ll ignore it and see what happens.

(By the way, what’s the deal with Javascript naming conventions? Why is it XMLHttpRequest and not XMLHTTPRequest? Both XML and HTTP are acronyms, right? I don’t get it.)

Update 6/28/2008:

At some point I accidentally broke this site while doing an update on some of my other domains. Sorry. It’s back up and working now, I’m not sure what happened. I got rid of the adblock and updated some of the video selections, too.

By now, everybody has heard of the terrorism scare in Boston prompted by the discovery of flashing signs resembling Lite-Brite kits in several locations around the city. Unfortunately, when it comes to terrorist scares by popular 80s toys, this incident was only the tip of the iceberg. Read on to learn about some more frightening incidents that were buried in the C section of your newspaper.

Seattle Ferries Shut Down

After a frightened passenger aboard the Tahubamup ferry reported a suspicious package on the upper car deck, ferry security officers moved to investigate. After a short search, the package was found to be a box of the popular game “Hungry Hungry Hippos.” The bomb squad was called in and successfully destroyed the package once the ferry had docked at Edmonds. As a precaution, all ferry service was suspended for the next eight hours as the ships were searched intensively for other action-based board games. An hour later, the game “Crossfire” was found aboard the Tuboma docked in Bremerton.

Marie Drophet, the passenger who initially reported the box, described the picture of the cartoon hippopotamus printed on the box as “Islamic-looking.”

BART Train Victim of Hoax

Fourteen passengers had to exit a BART train car this morning after an anonymous call to 911 reported a bomb and Transit Police noticed a small plastic object underneath a seat of the train. “I was so frightened,” said daily rider Paul Sorhees, “We had to exit into the tunnel and everything. I almost wet myself.” The Bomb Squad detonated the object, later found to be a “Man-At-Arms” action figure from the popular 80s cartoon He-Man. Ralph Tanner, spokesman for the BART told reporters, “The situation was handled in the correct manner. Had the extra two arms on the action figure been filled with explosive as our specialist theorized, even a bomb of that size could have easily derailed a train.”

Wisconsin Daycare Evacuated by Authorities

A disc-shaped plastic object prompted the evacuation of a daycare in Madison yesterday. Early in the morning, Shirley Frock called the local police to the scene after noticing the object in a basement storage area of the small daycare building. After extensive investigation by experts, the strange device was determined to be a Sit-n-Spin toy. Despite the basement being locked tight at all times, Mrs. Frock claimed that she had never seen the toy before.

Bomb Squad members at the scene entertained the frightened evacuated children by giving demonstrations of their remote-controlled bomb defusing robot, named Wheelie.

Statue of Liberty Closed To Public

One of our nation’s more recognizable monuments, the Statue of Liberty, was closed yesterday after the discovery of a mysterious plastic object. Officials evacuated the statue and specialists were called in to examine the object, which was initially believed to be a mass of C4 explosive. Clad in protective clothing, a bomb squad expert put the device into a protective metal case and removed it from the statue where it was then investigated. The all-clear was given soon afterward when a child in the crowd of evacuated tourists pointed out that the mysterious plastic object was a misplaced Statue of Liberty souvenir he had purchased earlier that day. C4, used extensively by demolition operations is a malleable clay-like substance with many times the explosive power of TNT.

Why is the media covering up these incidents which clearly reveal a larger conspiracy? Concerned citizens should demand action! Today it is a Man-At-Arms He-Man action figure, but tomorrow it could easily be a Teddy Ruxpin doll… can we take that risk?

A recent Gamasutra article by Scott Nixon espouses the belief that the Nintendo Wii console has a good chance of resurrecting the dead adventure genre. I have a couple of questions about this premise, the first of which is, “why the Wii?” and the second and more general question, “is the adventure genre dying?”

Why will the Wii resurrect the adventure genre? The argument seems to boil down to the controller, specifically that the Wii’s controller can be used as an on-screen pointer like a mouse. This argument because it makes the assumption that adventure games cannot exist without a pointing device, which (with all due respect) is obviously bunk. The first adventure games (the original King’s Quest, for example) were designed to be played using only a keyboard and that control scheme seemed to work fine for them. (Given, most computers when that game were released didn’t have mouses attached to them, but the debate is whether mouses are required, not whether they are handy to have.) More to the point, however, there are already adventure games on Xbox and they are all quite playable without using the Xbox gamepad.

And of course if you take this premise farther, it makes even less sense. Is Nixon saying that racing games played in an arcade are a different genre from racing games played on your home console because the controls are different? Are first person shooters on consoles a different genre from first person shooters on PC? If so, what about FPS games that are direct ports? Obviously Prey on PC with a mouse/keyboard is in the same genre as Prey on Xbox 360 with a joypad. Dragon’s Lair is in the same genre whether played with an arcade joystick, a keyboard or even with your DVD player remote. Similarly, Doom 3 is the same genre of game whether it’s played with a gamepad or a keyboard/mouse. Why would an adventure game be different?

Nixon seems to be ignoring, or is unaware, that the Xbox already has several adventure games released for it, while the Nintendo Gamecube has none. Syberia II and Dreamfall both have Xbox ports. Syberia II is one of the highest-rated adventure games of the last few years, and Dreamfall is a sequel to one of the highest-rated adventure games ever, yet the writer doesn’t make the argument that Microsoft is going to resurrect the adventure genre. Why?

It’s clear that if any company is supporting adventure games, it’s Microsoft for two simple reasons: 1) The way a game is controlled has nothing to do with its genre, and 2) the Xbox has had the lion’s share of recent adventure games. So why the Wii?

Nixon states, “It is no secret that adventure games need to break into the console market to remain (some would say become) viable.” What, they aren’t there already?

I think what Nixon and other “adventure games are dying” writers are actually looking for isn’t “adventure games” but “adventure games like the ones I remember from when I was a kid.” There’s a difference between the two. The vast majority of Lucas Arts and Sierra adventure games were comedies, but most modern adventures are not. (There are exceptions to every rule, of course, but generally that applies to every adventure made after Myst.) Old adventure games made use of hand-drawn backgrounds and character animations, but most modern adventures use 3D for graphics. Old adventure games were cartoon-like and rarely dealt with more mature content, where modern adventures frequently have more adult-oriented content. Adventure games didn’t disappear, they just changed.

I think what they’re really after is nostalgia. What they want more than adventure games is, “adventure games that make me feel the way I felt in seventh grade when I guided a biker through a minefield using wind-up bunnies.”

Of course, this presumes that adventure games are dying. The adventure genre isn’t dying and I don’t think it’s even particularly unhealthy. (About a dozen adventure games are released every year.) The reason we frequently see articles about the death of the adventure genre is that the gaming press doesn’t write about adventure games. Well, they do write about adventure games, not only to declare them dead every few months. Irony.

The Longest Journey, released in 1999, is perhaps one of the finest adventure games ever made. And yet it’s virtually unknown, even amongst fans of the old Lucas Arts and Sierra adventures. Syberia received very good reviews from many gaming publications, but again, where was the buzz about it? (And what buzz there was came from the Xbox community, not the PC community.)

If the gaming press was really serious about “saving” the adventure genre, here is what they can do to help:

• Cover adventure games when they come out. Not just the obligatory review, but the same kind of coverage new FPS games get: screenshots, teaser movies, interviews with the developers, etc.
• Stop comparing new adventure games with old Lucas Arts games. That is clearly an unfair comparison. Lucas Arts has the advantage of nostalgia, and there’s nothing the new adventure games can do to combat that.
• And, naturally, stop writing articles about the death of the adventure genre! Or at least hold them back until there’s less than a dozen released a year, ok?