Tom Petty's Last Dance

This is a recording of the final song in Tom Petty's final show . . .

An Exemplar Example of a Best Man's Wedding Toast

William, as the best man at my upcoming wedding, I thought you might be looking for an example of the kind of wedding toast I am looking for. This clip illustrates a wedding toast where everything is done perfectly, even a temperature of one's own choosing:

https://youtu.be/9tO2zVCvN10?t=22m9s

Why I Love Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball

As all of you know from those occasions where I have forced you to play it with me, Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball for SNES is a terrible game. One button is used to both shoot and pass causing you to frequently throw the ball out of bounds when you don’t mean to. The graphics look plain, pale and more of the quality of something from the NES than the SNES. Gameplay is slow and awkward, since even once you have mastered the controls (as much as they could be) often times the best thing to do is simply throw the ball down the court and hope one of your teammates might catch it before it rolls out of bounds. Scoring a basket feels more like luck than an accomplishment. Most egregious of all though, the game is just boring from the sluggish controls to the repetitive game play, once you have played long enough to get over the initial awkwardness of the whole experience, you’ve done everything there is to do.

Although as a child this game was really my only exposure to this idea, for some reason there were numerous sports game made in the 80s and 90s, most notably Super Baseball 2020, where futuristic robots (some of the art makes them look like cyborgs or something, but in game they look like robots) played instead of humans. With little explanation as to why he is the only human hanging out with a bunch of futuristic robots, this game used basketball bad boy Bill Laimbeer to legitimize the combat elements of the game because apparently this was his dream of how basketball should be played or something. Bill Laimbeer was a star player for the Detroit Pistons known essentially for being a dick. He frequently fouled other players and fought with referees. So Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball brings violence, (if you can call robots pushing each other over violence) robots, and celebrity together in a way that I don’t know has ever been done before or since.

My first exposure to this game was playing it at my friend Wes’s house. He got a SNES before we did and along with it a few games Super Mario World, some weird game with the superscope and Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball. Since we only had these handful of games to play and eventually we got bored of Super Mario World, we ended up playing a lot of Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Baskebtall. I was so excited to be playing the SNES during those times and part of my love of this game is relieving that excitement.

However, it goes beyond that too. Much overlooked in its terrible gameplay, Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball had interesting strategic elements in its campaign mode where you started with a team of lousy robots and as you won more games and won more money, you got to upgrade to better robots. This part of the game was fairly simple, but I remember loving this simple combination of strategy (you had to decide what kind of robots to buy-faster ones, good shooters, etc.) with the addictive ability to gain incremental progress towards making your team better. Although it has a ridiculous amount more depth, Out of the Park Baseball, one of my favorite game series of all time, has similar core elements where you are trying to strategically improve your team.

I guess it’s mostly nostalgia, since I generally have little tolerance for such terrible games, but something about this game speaks to me. It’s bad, but with a strangeness all its own. I like the fact that you are playing something so unpolished where you have to figure out how to win despite the glitches and awkwardness. Much like many people like to watch old, campy science fiction movies with silly looking special effects, I like that Bill Laimbeer’s Combat Basketball contains such a bizarre combination of elements and has that same kind of rushed, shoe-strong budget feel of these campy old movies. I see so much potential in all of this quirkiness as if, in some kind of alternate universe where this game was well polished with better graphics, it would have been a cult classic talked about for years to come. Instead it is something more on par with Yor Hunter from the Future. If only you could also play combat basketball with cavemen . . .

Heroes Two Retrospective

Let me start by saying that this game is by far my favorite in the series. Due to the fact that I've played this game hardcore since middle school, I find very difficult to approach this review from an objective standpoint. Every time I've sat down to play it for the sake of reviewing, I quickly forget what I'm doing and get sucked right into the game. A big reason for this absorption is the fact that the art style and sound direction is so appealing to me. There's a few reasons why they are so damn polished and pristine. The art was developed by the same company that created the pixel art for Warcraft II. Note the similarities:

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Also, Heroes II sound was designed by the venerable composer, Paul Romero. His sound direction gave the game a lot more personality than the typical midi sound of the time. The big reason why there sufficient time to polish the hell out of the feel of the game was due to the fact that Heroes II was developed using Heroes I as a base. It was just the same engine, it was in large part the same game. Heroes II was released in 1996, a year after Heroes I was released. Given the quality of the game, the development time was relatively short.

Mechanically speaking, you could view Heroes II, in large part, a strict upgrade of Heroes I. And while technologically, that statement is incredibly true, in terms of mechanics I would argue that game only grew more complex. While complexity is not at all a bad thing, it significantly changed the game-play experience from the first one. Heroes II gave the players far more choices to make. There were two main new features: Secondary skills for heroes and upgrades for creatures.

1)Skills:

 

In the original heroes, every time a hero leveled up, he just got a stat increase. While the stat boosts rewarded the player for acquiring experience and gave each hero class personality (4 hero classes each one specializing in a primary stat), the level-ups felt insubstantial. Unlike the rest of the game, no decision making was involved. Beyond their stats, Heroes had nothing to make them unique and strategic. For a game called Heroes, the heroes themselves lacked personality and strategic depth. 

Heroes II added the new skill system to incentivize players to level and to make the heroes themselves more than just generals on horses barking orders. Each time upon leveling up, your hero would be given the choice between two skills. Oftentimes, you would left with the choice between further specializing in a known skill or branching out to a new one.  This skill system made the Heroes a much larger focus of the gameplay.  Even to this day people still debate which skills are the most useful (Though, everyone agrees unanimously that Eagle Eye is totally useless.) Heroes III would take the skills even further and make them more powerful in the next game.

2)Creature Upgrades:

                Introducing creature upgrades into the mix lead to a lot interesting strategic choices, which were very economic in nature. Do I want quantity or quality? Are these extra stats worth the money? How much do I benefit from building a creature dwelling twice? I still have an old print out of the Astral Wizard site (courtesy of Phil printing them off in 1998), which debated ad nauseam about the merits of every creature upgrade. When you upgrade a creature dwelling you have to worry about two costs: the cost of the upgraded building and the price increase in the creature. Upgrading would often times make a weak creature into a powerhouse (as is the case with Ogres) or make an overpriced creature even more costly (as is the case with Liches).

                These economic concerns lead the player to weigh the risk vs. reward of fighting to obtain a resource. Getting a certain resource earlier meant gaining access to better creatures.  These economic concerns slowed down the game somewhat and put much greater emphasis on building up your town. In Heroes II gold was very limited (you only got 1000 per castle plus 250 for a statue.), so the player had to be ecumenical.

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Again, Heroes II is just a different spin on the formula established in Heroes I. Games in Heroes I tended to move pretty fast and favored aggressive play over more reserved strategies. The game rewarded you for aggressive play due to both economics and the computer's cheating (They're rather stupid, but they seemed to get far more gold than the player did.) Economically speaking, getting fifth and sixth level creatures weren't always the best play since both dwellings ate up a lot of money that could otherwise go towards buying lower level troops. The computer continuously barreled right into  your territory so you would need to be able to afford troops or else your towns and mines would get snatched from right under your nose.

Heroes II changed this formula pretty significantly with the advent of creature upgrades. The Creature upgrades added a whole new level of strategy to town building.  Now the player had to decide between three different options when town building: save money for troops, build up to the next level of troops, or buy upgrades for your already built troops.  Upgrading a dwelling and its creatures was oftentimes cheaper and more beneficial than jumping up to the next tier. While there are definitely fairly rigid build orders for each town, the player still has to work around a fairly sparse amount of gold.

Between the expense of building into the next tier, the low creature production per week, and scarcity of gold, my armies feel very valuable. Aside from the necromancers, whose low level creatures are slowish walkers you acquire en mass, each creature felt necessary and useful, fitting right into its time and place. Whenever I watch my sprites die, I feel sort of a fatherly twinge of regret for throwing them into harms way. Peasants, however, are completely worthless. Much like their real world counterparts, not single tear rolls down my cheek as I toss them into my furnace. Energy isn't cheap kids.

Billy Response to His Fangirls

Hey this is Billy,

uh yeah I mean its kinda weird that I breed lust only in prepubescent girls, yet anyone who is even halfway through puberty finds me to be a jackass. Am I like Hannah Montana, minus the toy line, music, TV, Nick Jonas love child, and boobs. I mean like one time I got like a bed sheet with my picture on it, but my friend spilled bleach on it.

So yeah, girls come the fuck down. I like being able to walk through the mall without being ambushed by a hoard of squealy midgets. It's like that one 80's song where the lock on my door had to be changed and shit. Like everyday after sundown, it is just like a zombie movie, but with crazed 12 year old preteens. I have to take a shotgun with me everywhere I go and sleep during the day. They rush into my house pillaging and looking for me and my stuff so they can E-bay it. You would think after one night they'd get bored but no. The more of an asshole I am to them the more they seem to crave me.

They even got my favorite rug and peed all over it. It tied the fucking room together. I mean you can destroy my couch and TV, and replace the water in my pool with disel fuel, but not destroy a classic chineese rug, made Albert Xian himself during his 70's period.

In closing, any rescuse team type marines that want to find me, my house is the one that is filled with hoards of preteens screaming at all hours (though they seem more aggressive at night.) At the very least air drop Jo bros merchandise so they're distracted long enough so I can slip out and find somewhere else to hide. I hear there's a survivor's colony in Vermont.

-Wish me luck,
Billy