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Archives For January 2011

Review – Zeit²

January 31, 2011 — Leave a comment

Originally published in The Daily Toreador.

Over the decades of video gaming, certain genres that used to be popular have fallen by the wayside. The shoot-‘em-up genre is one of these, and unfortunately for some, it doesn’t seem to be coming back in full force any time soon.

But occasionally hardcore fans of this old arcade-style of action are treated by downloadable releases such as “Zeit Squared,” which began its life as a German student project and has since been picked up by Ubisoft for release on Xbox Live Arcade and PC. It’s short, but it’s also cheap and is a nice throwback to a fading era of high scores in games. It’s also got its share of twists that help it be unique.

“Zeit Squared” (written with a superscript “2” if you’re hunting for it online) is a side-scrolling game that moves from left to right, a la the classic “Gradius.” Most of the similarities end there, however. While the crux of the game still involves shooting tons of enemies — occasionally with power-ups — and gunning for combos and extra points, “Zeit Squared” throws time manipulation into the mix in order to make things even crazier.

Your most trusted time power is the rewind ability. As you play, you build up a charge that allows you to travel back in time for a maximum of 4.2 seconds — which as far as I can tell is an arbitrary number. As you hold down the button to move backward in time, things revert to the way things were seconds before, similar to the trick popularized in the “Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time” game. The catch is that once you stop time traveling, a shadow version of yourself still repeats all of the actions you performed before you rewound time, essentially resulting in two of you on screen at once for that brief moment.

This is where most of the strategy comes in when you’re trying to earn enough points to put you at the top of the game’s leaderboards. There’s an art to knowing when you want to rewind time in order to maximize your scoring potential, rather than just rewind in order to correct a mistake or prevent an untimely death.

Things are further complicated by the fact that certain enemies cannot be attacked while you’re moving through time normally. They can only be hit after you move backward in time. Conversely, some enemies cannot be hit unless you haven’t moved through time, so it’s easy to find yourself screwed if you miss them the first time they come by, as you can’t just rewind time and try again.

And hitting enemies is pretty crucial due to how health works in the game. Your health meter goes down every time you fire a bullet or any time certain types of enemies (read: most of them) get past you and “escape” to the left side of the screen. So you really want to focus on making sure not too many enemies escape your wrath, or you might be paying for it with your life.

I understand that it might sound complex, and I haven’t even talked about the ability to fast-forward, or the special attacks you can perform by shooting your past-shadow-self. Thankfully, the game itself does a really good job of introducing the concepts to you in a steady and efficient manner, so you won’t be too bogged down with trying to understand the mechanics.

The game has a pretty cool art style to it, but unfortunately the environments don’t change much and you end up facing a lot of the same enemies throughout the entire experience. It’s not the worst thing in the world, but it is a bummer for those who crave variety.

In addition to a pretty standard arcade mode, there are other gameplay types to experiment with, such as a puzzle mode and a wave mode which help add some replay value to this $10 package. However, you can easily experiment with each of these and get all of the game’s achievements within a few hours if you’re familiar with this type of game at all.

So the overall value you get out of the game will really come down to how much you like going for high scores. If you have friends playing the game, it can certainly be a lot of fun to try to top each other’s performances. However, that will probably only last so long, making “Zeit Squared” a pretty fun and original few hours, but maybe not something that you’ll stick with for a long time.

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Stop putting two spaces after periods

January 20, 2011 — 1 Comment

Originally published in The Daily Toreador.

When I joined the editorial board of this newspaper, I expected to deal with an occasional misspelling. An occasional grammatical error. The far-too-often disregard for AP style. What I didn’t expect to be infuriated so much by was double spacing.

Farhad Manjoo over at Slate.com published a pretty good and well-researched piece recently on why putting two spaces after a sentence is always and completely wrong. You should look it up if you’re interested. I’m not going to spend my time here talking about how typographers have supported single spacing for a long time now, nor am I going to try to cite scientific studies that prove that I’m right and you’re oh-so-very wrong. Instead, I want to speak from my heart for a moment and share my personal testimony on how double-spacing ruins lives.

OK, maybe that’s a little dramatic, but it is a problem. I’ve dabbled in several areas of publishing now — from newspapers to fiction to screenplays to the Internet — and in all of them, one space after a period is the rule, not just a preference. It’s not a matter of, “We’d like you to use only one space, but do whatever feels right to you.” It’s a matter of, “Don’t use two spaces or our copy editor will hunt you down and gut you like a fish.”

In the case of newspapers it can be especially crucial. We’re given a limited (and diminishing) amount of space as it is, and while we work pretty hard to make sure the paper is aesthetically pleasing to you and words don’t look cramped or clustered when you read them, we do want to give you more quality content. Every unneeded space takes away room for potentially good writing.

Yes, personal aesthetic preferences do play at least a small role in this argument. When I’m editing a column or a letter to the editor and I see that it makes use of double spacing, part of my soul dies simply because I hate the way double spacing looks. But it also makes my job just a little more frustrating at times, seeing as how I’m the one who has to remove all the redundant spaces before the piece goes to print.

“But master,” you say, “with modern technology’s ‘find and replace’ tools, fixing that mistake only takes a couple of clicks.” You’re right; fixing the problem isn’t typically a huge ordeal. However, those few clicks are a few clicks I could have spent on Facebook instead of editing, and really, which clicks are more valuable when it comes to that?

Plus, there’s always the issue of spacing typos. Occasionally a single spacer will accidently put two spaces after a period. That’s fine, it happens. But when a double spacer similarly slips up, you end up with the dreaded three spaces after a sentence, and that just makes kittens cry. I’ve even dealt with a few instances of four spaces after a period, and I think there’s a verse in the Bible somewhere about God considering that an affront to His glorious creation.

Some people try to defend their ugly habits by saying it doesn’t matter with today’s fonts, as two spaces in Times New Roman isn’t as gargantuan as two spaces on a typewriter. But that’s just an addict’s lie. I can tell if you’re high, and I can tell if you used more than one space.

Look, I can typically let the older typists out there slide on this thing. They learned to type back when Moses was mass-producing copies of the Ten Commandments, and old habits die hard. What frustrates me is that schools are still teaching children that putting two spaces after a period is the right thing to do. It hasn’t been right since the time of typewriters.

A quick Google search will bring up Internet posts from people who say they’re still being taught to double space, even today. A quick poll of my friends and columnists confirms this. Teachers are still teaching the practice because that’s how they were taught, and it’s a cycle they don’t plan on ending.

The problem is, that’s like teaching students the earth is flat just because that’s what we’ve taught them for years and we don’t want to invest in better textbooks or risk confusing people. We need to fix this.

If nothing else, the Twitter generation should realize that using two spaces means you have fewer characters with which to tell people how much you love/hate “Twilight.” Consider that.

Putting two spaces after a period is wrong. The sooner we accept that, the sooner we can all recover from this unhealthy addiction. If you’re currently struggling with double spacing, my advice to you is to seek help and to stop now while you’re still young and can make something of yourself. It will only get harder to quit the longer you continue to do it.

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Column – Blaming politicians for tragedies helps nobody

January 11, 2011 — Leave a comment

Originally published in The Daily Toreador.

Some of the last big news we students have received before coming back to school was the extremely unfortunate shooting of 18 people in Tucson, Ariz. The event could accurately be described as the attempted assassination of Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords.

I don’t currently have any form of television programming at my home, so I got the news the same way I get most news these days: from the Internet. Sadly, this meant that I saw some of the worst political commentary on the event that was available.

Of course, as Giffords is a political figure, the shooting can indeed be deemed “political,” though the shooter’s motives aren’t 100 percent clear. The problem is that moments after news of the shooting broke out, Twitter and similar sites were aflame with all major political parties placing the blame on the other side.

On my feed, at least, it started with a lot of comments bringing up Sarah Palin’s infamous “Take Back the 20” map of political “targets,” which depicted crosshairs over locations in the United States in which political opponents to the Palin and Tea Party cause reside. Giffords was among those in the crosshairs. The map was rightly criticized even before this shooting, and the people in charge of the website removed it immediately after the incident occurred.

So when word got out that Giffords, one of Palin’s “targets,” had been gunned down, a lot of people immediately blamed Palin and the Tea Party. They posted comments blasting Palin as a person, saying that they hoped this was the end of her career (if not her life) and that the Tea Party would crumble as a result. Conservatives as a whole were also attacked, with people such as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman saying the rhetoric of right-wing radicals such as Glenn Beck is directly connected to such violence.

All this before police had even publicly identified the shooter, much less his political affiliation or motives.

This was followed by an equally reprehensible display of conservatives firing back. Once the shooting suspect was identified as 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner, cases were immediately being made for him being someone who leaned heavily to the left of the political spectrum.

They tried their hardest to find evidence that Loughner was, in fact, an ultra-liberal. Among other things, they referred to his apparent atheism and his fondness for books such as “Mein Kampf” and “The Communist Manifesto.” At the very least, they had an easy time showing that Loughner wasn’t exactly a Bible-thumping Tea Partier.

So there we were, not even sure whether Giffords was alive or dead, not sure of anything but the alleged shooter’s identity, and all we cared about was making the other side look like the villain. We had turned her terrible tragedy into a battleground for some idiotic sense of political morality. “See? This is what those other folks think. Vote *party affiliation here*.”

People are dead. Others are seriously wounded. And we’re fighting over politics.

It may have been the most despicable thing I saw over the holiday break.

Now, let’s be clear. Even though I lean conservative, I consider the aforementioned target map deplorable and a huge mistake. And if Palin were to run for president in the future, I can all but guarantee that I will be voting for her opponent, no matter who it is. I’m not here to defend her.

However, we need to remember to keep things in perspective. Trying to pin the blame of a horrific shooting onto a disliked political candidate, no matter how bad she is, is horrible. And even if you can cite self-defense as an excuse, trying to turn the tables and make Democrats out to be the killers is just as bad.

Obviously there will be extremists on all sides making their political party (or religion, or race or gender) look bad. They showed up online, too, saying things like, “Giffords deserved to die. She supported the gay agenda.” Yes, that’s absolutely despicable, but it’s not indicative of an entire group of people. A lot of self-proclaimed liberals would have said similar things about any Republican figure that was shot down. It’s a two-way street.

In viewing the YouTube videos that were allegedly posted by the shooter himself, you can tell that this isn’t a man driven by the desire to push the liberal worldview or impress Bristol Palin. His ranting was that of a sick individual with a hatred of religion, government, currency and even abuse of proper grammar.

It takes a seriously disturbed individual to gun down well over a dozen people. A party affiliation does not make you a monster. CNN reported that Laughner listed himself as “independent” on two seperate voter registration forms.

Personally, while Giffords may not have been someone I would have voted for, my prayers go out to her and her family, as well as the other victims of the shooting. I couldn’t care less whether the shooter was a liberal, conservative, Christian, Muslim or atheist. There are far too many more important issues to be thinking about.

Some of the last big news we students have received before coming back to school was the extremely unfortunate shooting of 18 people in Tucson, Ariz. The event could accurately be described as the attempted assassination of Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords.

I don’t currently have any form of television programming at my home, so I got the news the same way I get most news these days: from the Internet. Sadly, this meant that I saw some of the worst political commentary on the event that was available.

Of course, as Giffords is a political figure, the shooting can indeed be deemed “political,” though the shooter’s motives aren’t 100 percent clear. The problem is that moments after news of the shooting broke out, Twitter and similar sites were aflame with all major political parties placing the blame on the other side.

On my feed, at least, it started with a lot of comments bringing up Sarah Palin’s infamous “Take Back the 20” map of political “targets,” which depicted crosshairs over locations in the United States in which political opponents to the Palin and Tea Party cause reside. Giffords was among those in the crosshairs. The map was rightly criticized even before this shooting, and the people in charge of the website removed it immediately after the incident occurred.

So when word got out that Giffords, one of Palin’s “targets,” had been gunned down, a lot of people immediately blamed Palin and the Tea Party. They posted comments blasting Palin as a person, saying that they hoped this was the end of her career (if not her life) and that the Tea Party would crumble as a result. Conservatives as a whole were also attacked, with people such as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman saying the rhetoric of right-wing radicals such as Glenn Beck is directly connected to such violence.

All this before police had even publicly identified the shooter, much less his political affiliation or motives.

This was followed by an equally reprehensible display of conservatives firing back. Once the shooting suspect was identified as 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner, cases were immediately being made for him being someone who leaned heavily to the left of the political spectrum.

They tried their hardest to find evidence that Loughner was, in fact, an ultra-liberal. Among other things, they referred to his apparent atheism and his fondness for books such as “Mein Kampf” and “The Communist Manifesto.” At the very least, they had an easy time showing that Loughner wasn’t exactly a Bible-thumping Tea Partier.

So there we were, not even sure whether Giffords was alive or dead, not sure of anything but the alleged shooter’s identity, and all we cared about was making the other side look like the villain. We had turned her terrible tragedy into a battleground for some idiotic sense of political morality. “See? This is what those other folks think. Vote *party affiliation here*.”

People are dead. Others are seriously wounded. And we’re fighting over politics.

It may have been the most despicable thing I saw over the holiday break.

Now, let’s be clear. Even though I lean conservative, I consider the aforementioned target map deplorable and a huge mistake. And if Palin were to run for president in the future, I can all but guarantee that I will be voting for her opponent, no matter who it is. I’m not here to defend her.

However, we need to remember to keep things in perspective. Trying to pin the blame of a horrific shooting onto a disliked political candidate, no matter how bad she is, is horrible. And even if you can cite self-defense as an excuse, trying to turn the tables and make Democrats out to be the killers is just as bad.

Obviously there will be extremists on all sides making their political party (or religion, or race or gender) look bad. They showed up online, too, saying things like, “Giffords deserved to die. She supported the gay agenda.” Yes, that’s absolutely despicable, but it’s not indicative of an entire group of people. A lot of self-proclaimed liberals would have said similar things about any Republican figure that was shot down. It’s a two-way street.

In viewing the YouTube videos that were allegedly posted by the shooter himself, you can tell that this isn’t a man driven by the desire to push the liberal worldview or impress Bristol Palin. His ranting was that of a sick individual with a hatred of religion, government, currency and even abuse of proper grammar.

It takes a seriously disturbed individual to gun down well over a dozen people. A party affiliation does not make you a monster. CNN reported that Laughner listed himself as “independent” on two seperate voter registration forms.

Personally, while Giffords may not have been someone I would have voted for, my prayers go out to her and her family, as well as the other victims of the shooting. I couldn’t care less whether the shooter was a liberal, conservative, Christian, Muslim or atheist. There are far too many more important issues to be thinking about.

Some of the last big news we students have received before coming back to school was the extremely unfortunate shooting of 18 people in Tucson, Ariz. The event could accurately be described as the attempted assassination of Democratic Representative Gabrielle Giffords.

I don’t currently have any form of television programming at my home, so I got the news the same way I get most news these days: from the Internet. Sadly, this meant that I saw some of the worst political commentary on the event that was available.

Of course, as Giffords is a political figure, the shooting can indeed be deemed “political,” though the shooter’s motives aren’t 100 percent clear. The problem is that moments after news of the shooting broke out, Twitter and similar sites were aflame with all major political parties placing the blame on the other side.

On my feed, at least, it started with a lot of comments bringing up Sarah Palin’s infamous “Take Back the 20” map of political “targets,” which depicted crosshairs over locations in the United States in which political opponents to the Palin and Tea Party cause reside. Giffords was among those in the crosshairs. The map was rightly criticized even before this shooting, and the people in charge of the website removed it immediately after the incident occurred.

So when word got out that Giffords, one of Palin’s “targets,” had been gunned down, a lot of people immediately blamed Palin and the Tea Party. They posted comments blasting Palin as a person, saying that they hoped this was the end of her career (if not her life) and that the Tea Party would crumble as a result. Conservatives as a whole were also attacked, with people such as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman saying the rhetoric of right-wing radicals such as Glenn Beck is directly connected to such violence.

All this before police had even publicly identified the shooter, much less his political affiliation or motives.

This was followed by an equally reprehensible display of conservatives firing back. Once the shooting suspect was identified as 22-year-old Jared Lee Loughner, cases were immediately being made for him being someone who leaned heavily to the left of the political spectrum.

They tried their hardest to find evidence that Loughner was, in fact, an ultra-liberal. Among other things, they referred to his apparent atheism and his fondness for books such as “Mein Kampf” and “The Communist Manifesto.” At the very least, they had an easy time showing that Loughner wasn’t exactly a Bible-thumping Tea Partier.

So there we were, not even sure whether Giffords was alive or dead, not sure of anything but the alleged shooter’s identity, and all we cared about was making the other side look like the villain. We had turned her terrible tragedy into a battleground for some idiotic sense of political morality. “See? This is what those other folks think. Vote *party affiliation here*.”

People are dead. Others are seriously wounded. And we’re fighting over politics.

It may have been the most despicable thing I saw over the holiday break.

Now, let’s be clear. Even though I lean conservative, I consider the aforementioned target map deplorable and a huge mistake. And if Palin were to run for president in the future, I can all but guarantee that I will be voting for her opponent, no matter who it is. I’m not here to defend her.

However, we need to remember to keep things in perspective. Trying to pin the blame of a horrific shooting onto a disliked political candidate, no matter how bad she is, is horrible. And even if you can cite self-defense as an excuse, trying to turn the tables and make Democrats out to be the killers is just as bad.

Obviously there will be extremists on all sides making their political party (or religion, or race or gender) look bad. They showed up online, too, saying things like, “Giffords deserved to die. She supported the gay agenda.” Yes, that’s absolutely despicable, but it’s not indicative of an entire group of people. A lot of self-proclaimed liberals would have said similar things about any Republican figure that was shot down. It’s a two-way street.

In viewing the YouTube videos that were allegedly posted by the shooter himself, you can tell that this isn’t a man driven by the desire to push the liberal worldview or impress Bristol Palin. His ranting was that of a sick individual with a hatred of religion, government, currency and even abuse of proper grammar.

It takes a seriously disturbed individual to gun down well over a dozen people. A party affiliation does not make you a monster. CNN reported that Laughner listed himself as “independent” on two seperate voter registration forms.

Personally, while Giffords may not have been someone I would have voted for, my prayers go out to her and her family, as well as the other victims of the shooting. I couldn’t care less whether the shooter was a liberal, conservative, Christian, Muslim or atheist. There are far too many more important issues to be thinking about.

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