On the Eve of the Playstation 4

February 20, 2013

It’s become kind of a cliché, because technology is the basis for the delivery method, but there’s never been a better time to be a gamer. I was perusing my game collection on my iPad the other day and in a portable high quality format I have a perfect edition of almost every single solitary arcade video game I have enjoyed since I was 5. On my Xbox and PS3 I have faithful renditions of many of my favorite 90’s PC and console games, and my Wii has me covered with Mario and other titles.

The present console generation has unfolded in a way unlike any previous.

The Wii managed to illuminate an entire user base no one really had figured out how to tap. Its lower resolution was almost a comfort to parents who wouldn’t have to upgrade the entire living room, and the motion control paved the way for technologies like Kinect. Most of all, while Sony and Microsoft were concentrating on connecting distant players, Nintendo reminded us what fun four people in a room could have. To say it sold like hotcakes is a disservice. Hotcakes could only dream of Wii sales numbers. “Hotcakes”, to be clear, is not a euphemism. They are delicious.

The decision to include an ethernet port in the original Xbox over a modem was lambasted by the industry in general. Remember that in 2000 when it was announced Wi-Fi b with its paltry 6 to 12 megabits a second was still a corporate luxury and your average home connection was either dial up or 1-5mb broadband. But from the beginning the idea of connected services being the long term bet that differentiated the Xbox was firmly cemented in that decision to go with a network port over dial up or some type of adapter. When the Xbox 360 launched in 2005 the whole landscape of home Internet had changed. And with it a new service launched in Xbox LIVE that incorporated not just multiplayer, chat, and messaging but quickly evolved into video and music. It introduced achievements and system-wide leaderboards. Most importantly, it made the Xbox 360 a general purpose entertainment device by constantly upgrading and changing the capabilities and experience. Today Xbox LIVE is the gold standard all console services are compared to, and many of the services other devices have were pioneered first on Xbox LIVE. Titles that are cross platform sell by far more copies for Xbox because of LIVE’s user base.

The PS3 launched in 2006 with the promise it was a better console than the 360 in terms of raw power, and the strength of Sony’s amazing first party exclusives. But what really resulted in the PS3’s success was a pretty bold choice on Sony’s part to pack in an expensive Blu Ray drive. A bold bet that paid off, as within 2 years they killed off HD-DVD through the strength of the PS3 sales and the Sony movie catalog. It was the only “future proof” Blu Ray player, as the device was much more powerful than a standalone one. While some Blu Ray players became quite literally obsolete and had to be replaced due to changes in the Blu ray spec, Sony simply updated the PS3 firmware. Sony also did very well with first party exclusives such as the God of War franchise, the Uncharted series (fantastic games, I’m a huge fan) and wonderful titles like Little Big Planet. But Blu Ray was the bet that paid off the most.

I’m leaving out a lot here, Nintendo had some huge success with their own exclusives, Microsoft took motion and voice control to the next level with Kinect, and Sony adapted their own services to make their moves in video streaming and by far the easiest digital game purchasing system.

The point is, back in the earlier generations people talked about “winning” and “losing” a generation. The Winner usually sold an outsized number of consoles more than the Loser. Sometimes the loser flat out killed their console (RIP Dreamcast Never Forget).

This generation all three could be said to have won in some key way, and all are on track to break 100 million units (Wii got there this month I believe) assuming certain price cuts over the next three years as the new generation starts.

And all of this happened in the course of 7 years while at the same time the iPhone and iPad came about, and Android tablets, and oh by the way let’s not leave out PC gaming which is stronger than a lot of people think between standalone titles, Steam, MMO’s, and flash games.

Games are *everywhere*. Characters play them to unwind in our sitcoms now, and our dramas and movies. Bitching about losing in Words with Friends is reaching an epidemic level. Halo has crossed over to have top science fiction authors like Greg Bear writing in its universe. We now demand even single player games have some level of online capability to issue challenges to friends or check leaderboards. Games are living and breathing forms of entertainment with downloadable content and the capability to provide instant fixes or tweaks on server backends. As of December 31, 237 million consoles have been sold across three platforms not even counting iOS or Android or PC/Mac.

All this happened in this current generation. What’s going to happen in the next?

There’s only one clear winner of the “Seventh” generation of console gaming. Us.

Kinect what are you doing? Kinect STAHP.

by Stepto

1 Comment

February 9, 2013

Funny story, and this isn’t Kinect’s fault in any way as much as it is trying to integrate its capabilities into your game so consider it a cautionary tale.

My friend Mark and I are doing a run through of Dead Space 3 in Co-op mode. Mark and I have been playing multiplayer co-op games on PC and console for a decade or more. We’ve got our routine down pat. It’s not uncommon for us to revert to verbal shorthand in fact when gaming, something like this:

Me: Health here.

Mark: Ammo here.

Me: Low on health.

Mark: Low on ammo.

etc. etc.

So we’re playing Dead Space 3 over Xbox LIVE and having a terrible time. Every few seconds the narrative is ruined by popup toasts that say “Your partner needs health” or “You have accepted your partner’s ammo!” This would happen during firefights or plot scenes, etc. We were really getting frustrated with it.

We finally figured out that since Dead Space 3 is Kinect enabled for voice commands, and we both have a Kinect, our own shorthand for communicating over our microphones to each other what we needed or what was going on matched the game’s Kinect commands and was auto-executing them.

We had a much more immersive time when we turned the Kinect commands off.

(note that in Single player I love Kinect commands in games like Halo etc. This was just unusually funny because we could not figure out why the game was interrupting us all the time with things we didn’t think we were initiating.)

In Which I Concoct a New Way To Pay My Rent.

by Stepto

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January 8, 2013

So for those who don’t know from Twitter or Facebook, towards the end of November I was laid off from my position of Director of Product Management at GAEMS. We’d just shipped the Halo UNSC Vanguard and the follow up to the G155, the Sentry. The company pivoted to pure sales since they had two new products and my position was defunded. I certainly wish them the best, that’s the way it goes when you take a chance working with a startup. I’m proud of the products I helped make and learned an *incredible* amount about designing, sourcing, manufacturing, and shipping a consumer electronics device from China. (If you just want a tiny taste of what I now know how to do, read this. If you’d like to see my resume, click here.)

So now I have that video game industry notch in my belt: “Shipped a product, got let go.” Achievement unlocked!

A number of interesting opportunities lay on the horizon, but I decided to take the time to do something creative last month. Over the past few years I’ve been performing standup style geek comedy at a number of different events and venues, so I thought I would write and record a comedy album! Here it is, you can buy it RIGHT NOW.

This was an enormous amount of fun to do and I am really proud of it. If you’ve seen me perform a small amount of this will be familiar to you but much of it is new and expanded material. I keep it fairly clean for the most part, so I wouldn’t call the comedy “Explicit” in any sense, but some of it is definitely mature. It will soon be available on iTunes and Amazon Mp3, but if you buy the bandcamp edition you get a bonus track, and I get a greater percentage of the sales.

PLEASE NOTE: If you are one of my Kickstarter backers check your email, this album is free for you.

So please support getting excited and creating things on the Internet! (so that I can make Wells Fargo happy this month)

Recipe File: BBQ Beef Back Rib Meat

by Stepto

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December 27, 2012

I keep telling people there’s two types of BBQ, what the restaurant sells to customers and what the kitchen eats. And what the kitchen eats is always light years better. That’s because the kitchen can afford to make things for themselves that simply don’t scale in labor or food cost to have on the front menu.

Case in point, if your BBQ restaurant serves Beef Back ribs, no one in the kitchen is going to eat chopped brisket. One of the greatest secrets about BBQ beef is how much more tender and flavorful rib meat is over brisket. So why doesn’t everyone eat ribs then? Well first off as far as an eating exercise beef ribs are messy and don’t yield a lot of meat per rib. Second of all, going the route of shaving or peeling the meat off every bone is simply too labor intensive (it can take 30 minutes just to yield a properly trimmed and chopped pound of rib meat, and the person doing it has to know just how much fat to trim over keeping enough to make the meat flavorful and moist.)

But after hours when the customers have left and there’s a couple of racks of ribs left that will otherwise go to waste? Well….Let me tell you how to enjoy this for yourself. With a little time and effort you’ll be eating like the kings of BBQ: The kitchen staff.

I prepared 24 pounds of this recently for a private event among friends, not only did they devour it all the general opinion was it was the best meat many of them had ever had. I can’t claim to have invented this. I can only claim to have benefitted from 5 years Texas BBQ restaurant experience.

Ingredients:

2 racks of grass fed Beef Back Ribs. (You don’t *have* to do grass fed, but it’s healthier and more "beefy" in its flavor. The downside is less soft fat. You can absolutely use normal store bought beef back ribs and have a great experience)

12-16 ounces of your favorite sweet BBQ sauce. (For the purposes of this recipe I usually use Sweet Baby Ray’s Sweet and Spicy sauce. WARNING: Contains HFCS but it’s one of the few times it’s worth it)

4-6 ounces brown or yellow mustard.

1 cup dry rub (I use my own, but Salt Lick BBQ’s is outstanding)

First off let the meat sit at room temperature for 30 minutes, then peel the membrane of tough fat off the backside of the ribs. It should come off in a clean rib-wide strip less than a mm in thickness but you might have to work at it.

Next, rub that meat thoroughly with the rub. Allow it to sit another 30 minutes. The meat will sweat a bit over time, allowing the rub to adhere to the surface a bit better. While the meat is resting with the rub, combine the mustard and BBQ sauce in a bowl and mix thoroughly. We’re adding mustard here to give it a South Texas style flavor. Don’t worry if you don’t like mustard, combined with the sweet sauce the final product after slow cooking on the meat is very subtle, especially after we chop it all up.

Now delicately spoon half the sauce all over the meat, using the back of the spoon to spread it around, DO NOT USE A BRUSH. We’re not looking to brush our rub off, but at the same time we’re going to go so low and slow with this meat that spooning a thin layer of sauce all over the top of the rub at the beginning actually creates a kind of moist crust over time when its cooking.

Ok the meat should be covered in a very thin layer of sauce. Set your oven to 170. That’s right, the oven. You can absolutely use a smoker if you wish, it will make things about 5-10% better flavor wise but adds a lot of work tending it properly. Beef ribs don’t need the smoke preservation that pork ribs do to cook them so low and slow, and unlike baby back pork ribs I find overly smoked beef to be a distraction flavor wise. This is one of the reasons I cannot stand “Smoked Prime Rib” or “Smoked Tenderloin”. To each their own if you enjoy such things, if you do please use a smoker in this recipe and you’ll be pleased.

Now let those ribs cook for 7 to 8 hours, checking once or twice just to make sure the low and slow isn’t drying them out. Note that you can go even longer if you wish. At the four hour mark you can choose to apply more sauce, but what I prefer to do, since some fat is rendering slowly at the point, is spoon the fat/sauce/rub drippings onto the meat and massage it in with the back of the spoon.

At roughly the 7 hour mark the exterior should look like it has a moist saucy crust from the rub and sauce, here it is safe to *lightly* spoon or brush 1/2 of the remaining sauce, but keep a quarter of the prepared total on hand. We’re going to need it later. In other words at this point you should have used 3/4’s of the prepared sauce. You should also notice the ribs have changed significantly and peeled far back from the ends of the bones, almost like braised short ribs.

Let the ribs cook for another hour, bringing our cooking time to somewhere between 8 and 9 hours (it can go longer as long as the meat is moist). Take them out and let them rest for 20 minutes.

At the 20 minute mark, with some sharp meat scissors and a good fork and knife set, separate the ribs. Then take the individual ribs and shave the meat off the bone with a knife, you can use your hands to get the stuff at the end of the bone. You want to lose some fat here, but not too much. You also want to avoid mixing in the tougher membrane on the “fat” side of the rib wherever possible. As a general rule I like to reduce the fat by about 50% or so from what it would be if I just ate the meat off the ribs, so some trimming is going to be required. After 30 minutes or so you should have a nice pile of picked meat. Chop to your desired fineness either for sandwiches or eating on its own, then mix in the remainder of the sauce to taste or for moistness. You’ll want to then put the meat into a warming oven if you plan to eat it soon, or seal it and prep to reheat in the oven at 170 again for when you are ready to serve it so that the moistness is perfect.

If everything has gone well your first bite will be a revelation. Properly done, rib meat can be wonderfully tender. Slow cooked over 9 hours with a nice rub and sauce then chopped and mixed up yields the most succulent melt-in-your-mouth beef with a much more choice flavor than brisket, such that while you would never give up good sliced brisket, it might be knocked down a notch in your favorite beef BBQ sandwich list.

Oh and did I mention the whole experience can be achieved for about 1/2 the price of a large brisket? The painful part is the skill required to shave the meat off the bone in such a way that you don’t end up with an overly fatty mess, and the labor in prepping the rack and trimming it. It’s messy and takes a lot of time vs simply slicing brisket with a meat processor.

Best part? Not only do you have amazing meat, you have roasted rib bones all cleaned off and ready to make beef stock out of!

Enjoy!

Flying.

by Stepto

9 Comments

December 18, 2012

I hate riding in planes. Please note I didn’t say that I hate flying. When you’re trying to make people laugh, choosing “hating flying” as a topic is pretty thin soup. I actually like flying in the “being way up in the air” part. In March of 1997 my wife and I flew to Europe for our honeymoon just as the Hale Bopp comet was arriving to pick up those cultists and we saw it from 35,000 feet with crystal clear skies. It was glorious, and looked like every special effect movie featuring a comet about to hit the earth.

So I like flying, but I hate riding in planes. That’s still thin soup mind you, but hopefully it’s a more specific thin soup. Cream of water perhaps.

Airports are bad enough. And the happy no shoe dancing TSA grope fest doesn’t help, because inevitably you have to deal with people who don’t fly often enough to know how the dance goes. I went through LAX once, and for those who don’t know, LAX is not praised for its light hearted view of airline security protocols. The TSA agents are all standing there like the Gorn from Star Trek. You don’t joke around with Gorn, you just don’t. The couple in front of me during this particular trip was an older couple from Canada and had just connected in LAX returning home from a trip to Texas. Further, they have not flown in the United States since 9/11.

You might wonder how I know this. Well, when they got to the security scanner and the Gorn dude is droning on and on about three ounces of liquids in a baggie on the plane hrnn hrnn hrnn the couple calls him over. Apparently during their layover this couple had gone shopping in LA. She states to the Gorn that they bought some salsa and things at a local market, what should she do. He asks her to open her carry-on bag, which is one of those probably-a-little-too-big-to-qualify-as-carry-on-but-screw-it-ok roller bags. She unzips it to reveal it is JAM PACKED with unlabeled clear jars, filled with substances alternating from a clear bright green translucent gel to a bright solid red fluid.

It looks, to anyone who has ever seen a movie featuring one, like a convoluted bomb.

You know, the ones that feature two types of thick liquids that are separated then the timer goes off and they start to mix and that means Nicholas Cage has like 15 seconds to defuse it. And invariably the liquids in those movie bombs are green and red in color.

Jalapeno jelly in this case is the green gel and home-made salsa is the red one. So while the only type of explosion the contents of this suitcase are going to cause is going to be in the bathroom at some point, the Gorn still have to check everything. As soon as she unzipped the bag and opened it there were two levels of groans. One from everyone in the line who knew this meant we had to wait while it got sorted, and the groan from the TSA Gorn who knew that although obviously a bomber would never voluntarily offer up this bag therefore the contents were harmless, he was still going to have to do all the work to make sure the security theater rules were observed.

This stuff happens to me all the time. If there’s a line where someone didn’t know about the shoe rule and wants to argue about it, I’m in it. If there’s a checkpoint with someone who insists an iPad is not a laptop and therefore they don’t have to remove it from their bag, that’s me. If there’s a couple who bought 25 jars of homemade unlabeled liquids arranged in a bag to look exactly like a bomb in a John McTiernan film, welcome to Stepto town!

So airports themselves are unpleasant, we know this.

Now, airplanes. You’re in a relatively tiny metal tube with a lot of your fellow humans. The door is shut, and they are about to take off. All the lights go off except the overhead light, your own personal spotlight shining on your head. This always makes me feel like I’m in a CIA rendition room and they’re going to ask me where the bomb is and I DON’T KNOW WHERE IT IS ASK THE LADY WITH ALL THE SALSA.

Taxiing is the worst part, because you get to spend all that time contemplating which turn onto the runway is going to be the one that starts the take-off. At some airports it’s short, and some it’s 20 minutes of turn, speed up, slow down, turn, speed up, slow down. On a recent flight I ended up spending the 20 minutes trying to decipher the secret message in this pattern on the bulkhead.

Seriously. What does that mean? It’s like it’s complex enough to potentially mean something but vague enough it’s just some stupid shapes they felt needed to go on the bulkhead to either torture people like me or make it look innocuous to anyone else.

So now you’re in the air. (Confession time, I feign sleep during take-off hoping to come off like Hicks in Aliens)

Now, this is going to shock you, but when it comes to communal situations I tend towards being a socially awkward penguin, especially when I know I’m going to be cramped and uncomfortable and there’s a chance, however infinitesimally small, that these might be my last moments on earth. The very nature of an airplane means you’re going to be exposed to different types of fliers. For your benefit I have categorized them.

The most common one you will find is what I call the Mouth of Sauron. When I fly I have two modes: eyes closed, waiting to be told I can use my electronic devices, or using my electronic devices. When flying I either play games or read on my laptop or iPad. The Mouth of Sauron sees this. Sees that I am either trying to sleep or concentrating on a time passing activity, and yet WILL NOT STOP ATTEMPTING TO ENGAGE ME IN CONVERSATION.

The most frustrating thing about the Mouth of Sauron is that they assume that any rebuff of their advances means they are simply not trying the right topics. So my single syllable answers or grunts in response to their ever shifting topics (where are you from, what do you do for a living, do you have kids, is this your first time to Boise, etc) just bounce off of them. There’s no way to deal with a Mouth of Sauron with any finality without being rude. The one time I tried to be polite and say “I’m sorry, but I’m really into this book and want to read right now” I had a Mouth of Sauron reply, no joke, “Oh not a talker huh? Well I’ll do the talking for both of us” You know what does work? Murmuring “murder is illegal, murder is illegal, murder is especially illegal on an airplane” under your breath.

Another denizen you will encounter on airplanes is one I like to call The Walking Plague. This is a person who is not only sick but obviously feverish. This is an incredibly irresponsible condition to fly in and I’m not sure why airlines allow it, but more than once I’ve seen them in the boarding area, flushed and bundled up, sniffling into a Kleenex. And more than once I’ve sat next to a member of The Walking Plague and then a week later cursed them as my body turned into a rich natural resource of phlegm.

It doesn’t take too many flights a year to run into Judge Dredd. Judge Dredd is the person who believes the airline’s rules are stupid and arbitrary, and has to make a show of either breaking them to the point of being told to stop it, or argue them as if on this one flight, this one shining moment, they will relent and allow him to use his cell phone to make a call while landing.

“Sir please turn off your device”

“Sure sure in a minute.”

I’ve even seen a guy turn his device off, then once the flight attendant walked away he turned it back on, then put it in the seat pouch. He didn’t even use it, he just wanted to buck the rules. Way to go Mr. I AM THE LAW! Look, I agree most of the inflight electronic rules are dumb, but on the off chance they aren’t I can put up with 15 minutes without a kindle until we reach 10,000 feet.

The last airplane denizen I will cover here is The Encroacher. The Encroacher, either through bad etiquette or sheer physical size, cannot confine themselves to their seat boundaries. Now, I’m a big guy. As of my talking about this I’m 6 foot, 230, so yes I should definitely lose some weight. But I do fit in an airplane seat without crowding anyone else. If The Encroacher isn’t crossing the seat boundaries due to sheer physical size, then they are an armrest hog or at worst, a leaner. For the life of me I will never understand the person who just nonchalantly curls up against a complete stranger. Either I have physical contact issues, or more likely, this type of person is a creepy weirdo who probably has a murder room in their basement.

Sometimes however, you can see these denizens impact each other.

My ideal flight is me on the aisle seat in an empty row, and in the aisle next to me is Judge Dredd trapped in the middle between an Encroacher on the aisle and The Walking Plague on the window.

So having said all that I propose the following rules. I think they’re fair.

1. If you are in the Aisle seat you will, without comment or complaint, always get up for the middle and window people to walk around or go to the bathroom, even if you are napping on the flight. This is because you have the best seat. Note that this assumes the other two people don’t get up every five minutes.

2. If you are in the window or aisle seat, you cede your middle armrest to the person in the middle seat. They have a shitty seat, and you both get more room than them.

3. If you are in the middle and the aisle seat is occupied, and the window seat is unclaimed upon take off, you move from the middle to the window to give both passengers more room. You also put your below-seat bag under your new window seat so both passengers can stretch their legs into the middle below-seat slot.

4. If you have a screaming newborn, you will look contrite and apologize. You will not glare offensively at all the passengers as if you have the god-given right to bring a creature less than 18 months old on an airplane where it cannot cope with the noise and cabin pressure without screaming. I’m sorry your family refuses to come to visit you, you have no right to visit your screaming spawn on the rest of us without apologizing. Everyone loses here, so try to at least not act like you’re the put upon party in this scenario.

5. Do not cuddle/lean on people you are not related to or do not sleep with. Seriously why do I have to even write this rule down?

6. I know, Judge Dredd, deep down, you think the airline rules are stupid regarding e-readers and ipads and computer use during take-off and landing. Hell, I tend to agree. However the reality is that the rules are in place and we all have to deal. So if you whip out your cell while we are trying to get off the runway under the guise of "these stupid people don’t understand electronics, and I do not have to obey their rules", don’t complain if I BEAT YOU WITHIN AN INCH OF YOUR GOD DAMNED LIFE WITH YOUR OWN CELL PHONE for potentially endangering us all.

7. Do not watch porn on the airplane. Hey I’m a big fan of porn. I have no problem with it in general, but like clipping my toe nails, everything has a time and a place. I don’t care if you have the porn version of an all you can eat Netflix queue. I do not want to look up from my crappy impulse purchase airport bookstore Dean R. Koontz paperback only to see Jenna Chesty Boobs nom nom nom’ing on Peter McPorkSausage’s magical marble sack on your compensating-for-something-else Dell 20 inch laptop screen one seat ahead of me.

8. On the order of your fourth alcoholic beverage, when the flight attendant says nope you can’t have any more, if you still persist on belligerently ordering one more, I will pipe up from next to you and say "He told me earlier he had a gun in his cocaine pack strapped near his heroin bags!" The proper response to make everyone feel better when a flight attendant says they cant serve you any more alcohol is “Oh. Ok. I’ll just take a water then.” Bam everyone is happy. Know when to say when.

9. Seriously #6, I will punch your ass in the neck over and over again until you put that god damned device away while we land. Do not tempt me.

I personally feel these are simple rules. Can’t we all follow them?

I think we can!