I wanted to add two more points to last month’s Netflix vs. Blockbuster post.  First, Blockbuster allows you to continue to access your account and modify your queue even after you have cancelled your membership.  This is nice for me, because it means I can add movies as they come out in theaters, rather than sitting down next May and trying to remember every movie from the last year that I wanted to see.  With Netflix, you get nothing but a message telling you how to come back.

Second, Blockbuster announced in February that they would integrate games into their service, on a trial basis, and hopefully roll out the service by the second half of the year.  Apparently the trials didn’t go so well, because we’re almost halfway through the second half of this year and they haven’t mentioned games at all.  It would have been a very convient Netflix+GameFly type of service (speaking of which, if those two companies merged, wouldn’t that be cool?).  But I’ve since found Goozex (which I might blog about some day) to provide me with a fresh and cheap supply of video games.  And it’s not like Netflix offers video games either, so neither service has an advantage here.

You may recall that nearly three years ago I won a SumoLounge Omni bean bag chair.  At the time, I said “I’ll be sure to let you, o faithful reader of my blog, know what I think of it.”  Well I never did, mainly because I forgot about it.  But a few months ago someone asked me what I thought of the chair, and I wrote a quick review in an e-mail.  And I decided, since I had already written it, I would repost it here and fulfill that three-year-old promise.  I know you’ve all been awaiting this anxiously.

The most surprising thing to me was that it was very light.  Bean bag chairs that I’ve used before were always really heavy, but this thing uses something about as dense as styrofoam.  It’s also pretty much indestructible—I’ve let my dog play on it and her claws never came close to penetrating the material, which feels sort of like the material heavy-duty waterproof backpacks or wintersports/skiing jackets are made from.

On the downside, it’s not very good as a seat for an extended period.  The SumoSacs look a lot bigger, so maybe that wouldn’t be a problem there.  But the Omni doesn’t hold its shape quite well enough when one person is sitting on it.  After a few minutes, you’re basically sitting on the floor.  I’ve never really tried the upright/straddling positions the blonde girl on the website is doing though.  I’ve tried putting it up against a wall so that it is shaped kind of like a couch, but I didn’t find that very comfortable.  I’ve also tried folding it in half and sitting on it, but it felt like it wanted to unfold again.  The thing I’ve found it best for, actually, is if I want to lay on the floor and watch TV.  You can make one side of it into a pretty good pillow so your neck isn’t strained, and the rest stays comfy for a quite while (since your weight isn’t all focused on one spot when you’re laying down).

So, to make a conclusion: in my opinion, I don’t think the Omni is worth the price as a seat for an adult, but I can’t speak to any of the other bigger things they sell.

For the last four summers, Stephanie and I have subscribed to Netflix.  It’s something I mentioned on this blog way back in 2005.  We find that we can get our money’s worth in just three or four months, and watch everything worth watching from the last year.  But this summer when I went to sign up for Netflix I found that they are charging extra for Blu-Ray, which they didn’t do last summer.  So I decided to use Blockbuster, since they do not charge extra for Blu-Ray.  Here are a few things that are different, for anyone wondering how the services compare:

• Blockbuster doesn’t charge extra for Blu-Ray (see above).

• Blockbuster lets you return a movie to a physical store, which means that you get your next movie a day faster than you do with Netflix.
  

  • Now, you might think you’d be able to exchange a movie in-store with another movie.  You can, but you have to pay extra for that.  I didn’t bother (although I got five free in-store exchanges my first month, of which I used two).

  • For some stupid reason, if you do exchange in-store, you can only exchange a mailed movie for a store movie.  In other words, say you got Air Bud1 in the mail.  You watch it, and exchange it in the store for Air Bud: Golden Receiver.  Now, since you didn’t get Golden Receiver in the mail, you can’t exchange it in store for Air Bud: World Pup2.

  • Of course, for this to be helpful, there needs to be a Blockbuster nearby.  The store a quarter-mile from my house went out of business a month after I signed up, and the next closest one is five miles away and not on the way to anywhere. :(

• Blockbuster’s selection seemed to be a little spottier on random things.  (For example, Steph wanted to rent My Little Pony: The Movie and it was listed as “Very Long Wait” all summer.)  Other than that, we were able to get everything we wanted.

• I’m not sure if Blockbuster has a movie-streaming option.  I’m pretty sure they don’t.  I never used it on Netflix, and I wouldn’t use it on Blockbuster, so that’s not a detraction for me.

• Blockbuster lets you rate movies in half-star intervals.  Which is nice.  Sometimes you want to give a movie 3.5 stars, not 3 or 4.

• Netflix’s movie suggestion algorithm seemed a little bit less terrible than Blockbuster’s.

• Netflix’s website was faster and more responsive.

• When you cancel your membership with Blockbuster, you get a month to return the movies you have out.  With Netflix you only get seven days.

At this point, I’ll still subscribe to Blockbuster next summer, as long as they don’t add a charge (or charge more than Netflix) for Blu-Ray rentals.

Update: See my follow-up post for more.

Anathem by Neal Stephenson is the best book I have ever read.

A few weeks ago I finished playing Shadow of the Colossus.  Since the game is three and a half years old, I’m not going to talk about it too much.  The game consists solely of 16 boss battles, in which you defeat colossi that are often hundreds of feet tall.  But the interesting thing about the game is that you start to sympathize with the colossi.  The only reason you are killing these things is because some god told you he would bring your dead girlfriend back to life if you would do it.  But no justification beyond that is ever given.  The colossi are not terrorizing villagers or anything like that.  In fact, they keep to themselves in a land devoid of human life, and they’ve certainly never done anything to you.  And, with the exception of the final colossus, none of them even appear to be attacking you for any reason other than self defense.  In one case, you must even shoot a colossus with an arrow in order to make it wake up!  As I was playing the game, I had the thought that this must be similar to bullfighting.  I mean, the bull has never done anything to the matador, yet the matador provokes him and stabs him with swords, ultimately delivering a final blow in a weak spot (between the shoulder blades, I think).  This is quite similar to what happens in Shadow of the Colossus.  And the game has a satisfying ending which I won’t spoil.

If you follow games at all, you’ve probably heard the praises of this game over and over.  So I’m not going to continue repeating things that have probably already been said in much better words by much better writers than myself.

Shortly after Christmas I applied some Best Buy gift cards toward Prince of Persia (the new one that for some reason has no subtitle).  The series has been riding on the goodwill created by 2003’s masterpiece The Sands Of Time.  And I have to take a moment to state again just how much I loved that game.  Since then, they released two sequels that didn’t even come close to living up to SoT.

Apparently someone at Ubisoft Montreal has decreed that their games must end with obnoxious cliffhangers.  There was at least kind of an ending to Prince of Persia.  Part of the ending was interactive, and I simply did not want the Prince to do what I had to make him do to complete the game.  So I will give them credit, as this means they did a good job of making me identify with the Prince to some extent.  Of course, after you do this, you get an ending that might as well say “please insert a credit card to buy the next sequel.”

Last week Ubisoft released “Epilogue”, a downloadable episode that takes place immediately after the ending.  Since it was only ten bucks, I bought it (the first time I’ve purchased any DLC, actually).  Well it didn’t really clear up anything, and actually ended more abruptly than Assassin’s Creed’s abortion of an ending.  I didn’t think that was possible.

I don’t understand this decision.  I’m sure someone at Ubisoft thinks “if we make a cliffhanger ending, then more people will come back for a sequel.”  I’m not sure this is a valid line of reasoning.  What they’ve put at the end of their games are essentially a mechanism to make the player very angry, not to generate sales of the sequel.  I don’t think that decent endings prevent anyone from playing the sequel.  Sands Of Time had one of the best endings of any video game that I’ve ever played, and I have come back for three sequels now (four even, if you consider Assassin’s Creed to be a “spiritual sequel”).  If a game is good enough, people will come back for more because they like the game that much.

All that said, I really enjoyed this game.  But can’t I expect the reward of a decent ending after having put twenty hours into playing your game?

So I mentioned in a post over two years ago that I was going to start reading The Chronicles Of Narnia.  Well I just finished them over Thanksgiving break, and I thought I’d share my thoughts.

First of all, it didn’t take me two years to read them, I just read a lot of other stuff in between.  Especially after I finished The Silver Chair, I think it was over a year before I went back to the series.  I can easily say that it was my least favorite book in the series.

As Jonah mentioned in a comment on that post, the books were not written in the order in which the story takes place.  The Horse And His Boy and The Magician’s Nephew were written after The Silver Chair, but before The Last Battle, although the stories take place much earlier in the Narnia timeline.  I think The Magician’s Nephew needs to be read next-to-last to be properly appreciated.  There’s just too much in the story that you wouldn’t understand or appreciate if it was the first Narnia book you read.  Of people I’ve talked to who have read the series, they either didn’t like The Magician’s Nephew at all, or they liked it but only when they read the series for a second time.  I thought it was great, which is probably because I read it next-to-last.  Reading The Horse And His Boy where it is presented chronologically, however, is probably not going to detract from the story.

I will avoid spoilers even for this fifty-year-old book series (although, really, isn’t there a statute of limitations on spoilers?), but I have to say I was disappointed with the treatment of one character in particular.  Seriously, I think this character must have been named for a person who C.S. Lewis really liked when he started writing the books, but while he was writing the last book this person must have run over his dog, repeatedly.  The ultimate treatment of this character was just unnecessary.  In a way it reminded me of the gratuitous demise of Chef on South Park.  If you’ve read the books I’m sure you know who I’m referring to.

(Actually, I’m avoiding spoilers because Stephanie is reading the books now, so don’t leave any spoilers in the comments please!)

Over the weekend I finished playing through Assassin’s Creed, and I felt compelled to say a little something about it here.  The game was very polarizing to reviewers when it came out last year—most either really liked it or really hated it.  Those who hated it said it was incredibly repetitive.  Gabe said on Penny Arcade that if you were playing it like you were trying to complete it as fast as possible (like a reviewer on a deadline), you would hate it.  All that said, I really liked the game.  It took me over two months to complete it, but that is because I didn’t play it continuously.

Two things I want to discuss.  First, I’m surprised the game wasn’t more controversial.  It is set in Crusades-era middle east, and one of the subtasks is to assassinate various Templars who are stationed around the game world.  Which is to say (if you want to exaggerate and misrepresent), you must kill the Christians to gain experience.  Add to that the fact that many of the assassination targets are Muslims (who aren’t known for being open-minded to such things), and it seems like something that would have gotten more attention from the Jack Thompsons of the world.  I guess Ubisoft was afraid of that too, because there is a disclaimer everytime the game is started, saying something to the effect of “this game was developed by a diverse group representing different religious faiths.”  But I guess either it worked or people just didn’t notice the game, because I never heard of any controversy.

Point the second:  the ending to the game was dumb.  Spoiler etiquette prevents me from discussing it, but it was bad.  In fact, to call it an ending would be to imply that there was some type of conclusion.  It would be more accurately called “the thing that happened before the credits abruptly started playing.”  I think they want me to be intrigued and eagerly anticipate a sequel.  I’d like to play a sequel, but not because of the way the game ended stopped.

Nearly two months ago, I joined Facebook.  I had low expectations, despite the fact that a few people whose opinions I value told me the same things I’m about to tell you.  I have to say, as a whole, Facebook doesn’t really suck.  I guess I was expecting something more like MySpace, which just kind of looks like the Internet ate too many gifs and had to throw them up as partially-digested ads.  Or something like that.  I probably stretched that analogy too far there.  Whatever.  The point is Facebook doesn’t suck, and it’s actually kind of fun, even for an antisocial computer geek like myself.

I was at home with the flu for a few days last week (not an experience I would recommend to anyone), and I did something I’ve never done before.  I watched a few episodes of Walker: Texas Ranger.  I had always assumed, based on the title I suppose, that the show was about your typical tougher-than-nails-cowboy-who-lives-by-his-own-rules-but-has-a-heart-of-gold type.  Turns out, it’s mainly about jumping out of helicopters onto people, and then proceeding to kick them.  A lot.  Like, I think there have been kick-boxing matches with less kicking.  Now I get all those Chuck Norris facts which set the internets abuzz a few years ago.

I also caught a few episodes of Ninja Warrior.  It’s kinda like Gladiators, only without the gladiators themselves (an improvement), and with the difficulty turned up about ten difficulty units.  And that’s on a scale of five.  You should totally check it out.

Now if only we could get Chuck Norris to compete on Ninja Warrior...