Video Games Live!

Last week, I had the luxury of being invited to go on a road trip to Cincinnati to see Video Games Live (Wikipedia Link). They play orchestrated versions of popular video game music. It took around 3 hours to get there, and we also had the luxury of stopping at a Skyline on the way there (they have good chili if you like chili). The trip was a little long for me, as I was a little scrunched in the back of a Mini-Cooper, and there wasn’t anything exciting for me to watch on the way to and from the pavilion which was hosting the show.

The show was fantastic, and I recommend going if you like either video games or orchestras playing music (or both). Most of the set was from the big names in the industry (like Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Halo, etc.), and was quite entertaining. The show lasted for around 3 hours, and I had the chance to go backstage and see the performers and the host up close and personal. They even gave a double encore, which was even more worth the trip there. It was just that awesome. The pictures posted tell even more of the story.

A Surprise Party

Last week, our HCI cohort decided to throw a surprise birthday party for one of our professors. We arranged for a surprise dance number, cake, presents, and the fun that would ensue for the night. Here are some pictures to bring this event to life again. Everyone had cake and was merry. Have fun with these pics.

The Redbox Kiosk

When I went home this July, I was fortunate enough to stumble across something I could comment on for design purposes – the Redbox Kiosk. If you haven’t heard of this company, its basic premise is akin to Netflix – you can rent movies from this company for low prices. I won’t give the buisness spiel, but if you are curious, you can go on ahead and check them out at redbox.com.

The kiosk is very simple, and equipped with a touch screen interface for you to find the movies you want to rent. You swipe your credit card, and in a second, the movies you want are immediately given to you from this little slot on the side of the kiosk. Getting movies very quickly from this machine is awesome, and I give the people who designed this part of the interaction a thumbs-up.

Returning movies, on the other hand, I personally had trouble with. There’s a label on the side of the machine that says to return the video, you insert the video in the slot and the machine should take it. So I did that, and the machine wouldn’t do anything. And then I thought – “maybe I need to push it in for it to accept the video” – and then I tried that for a couple of minutes, and it didn’t work. Boy, was I not happy at all with this machine. Turns out, there’s a label on the other side of the machine that tells you to return the video by selecting return on the touch screen. And then I felt extremely embarrassed, as I was in front of a giant grocery store pushing and shoving at this machine, with people staring as I was in epic fail mode.

Hopefully other people don’t have this trouble, but I thought I would let you know of this trouble I had, and that this interaction should be simpler than having to tell the machine to be set into receive mode – I should be able to just return my movie into the slot, just like I have done before when I actually went to a real video store. Those were some good times…

Have fun in the real world!

DDR X

Dance Dance Revolution is one of my favorite games to play. Not only does it have mostly good music to listen to, but it is very good at giving a nice cardio workout. I have lost roughly 60 lbs. playing this series, but now I’ll be talking about the newest home mix that I got to play – the X mix, for 2008 being the 10th year DDR was around.

When I first picked up this game, I was pretty excited to see what this game offered me. After I got a chance to play it, I am sorely disappointed at it, mostly for its execution and song selection.

The Good

So there were actually a couple of good things about this mix. If you actually care about knowing a little bit about the dancing characters that appear behind you as you’re dancing, then the story mode will be your favorite, as you’ll get to experience a story featuring each character, which will end up unlocking all the songs on the disc. If you don’t care about the story mode, you’ll basically end up playing this for at least 6 hours hating every minute of it to get all the songs, without using cheats.

Here are the songs I liked a lot on this mix, not in any order of preference:

The Bad and Ugly

There is a lot left to be desired from this mix. The story mode was quite long (though I enjoyed it), and you had to play through every character in order to unlock all the songs. This made you play through a lot of songs on low difficulties just to get the right to play them in the regular mode. Also, extra stage on this mix is not set to oni life mode of battery level 2. This means that one can only break their combo 2 times on the extra stage (which is already poorly synced to begin with), and not the traditional no recovery mod on. Also, many of the songs are synced poorly – they either have arbitrary stops in them, and fluxuate in the scroll rate, even though the song doesn’t change tempo. That highly irritates me – I’ll have to spend more work resyncing it to be playable on Stepmania. Also, most of the songs aren’t that awesome, and are just kind of “there”. The worst offenders are listed below, some of them hyperlinked so you can see how bad they are.

Also, this mix is heavily weighted to low 6 and 7 foot difficulty, with only a few songs at supremely high difficulties. This provides few opportunities for someone to build up their stamina and speed to play the harder boss songs. In addition, the higher songs are stepped for the elite – making this mix one of the hardest top end mixes out there, with long streams of 800 BPM steps, sometimes with crossovers. In addition, the game still feels like it triplets aren’t quantized correctly, even though the game has 10 times to try and fix this syncing error. Hopefully this will get fixed soon, and also the mixes will be better balanced for both the beginners, and top end players, as I feel with the current path of songs and syncing, this game will probably lose it charm and appeal to those who aren’t already players.

Now here are the “bad songs”:

Have fun with this, and please feel free to comment.