Strategy Lessons

Strategy is the theme of today’s post… Weekend before last, one of my friends invited me to paintballing at AG Paintball Games out in Leesburg, VA. We were a total of 21 people, so we got to play against one another.

It was my first time trying this, but it was a lot of fun. I did learn a few things, though… (1) I’m a very good shot, (2) I’m not very good at avoiding being shot, and (3) Being good at strategy in video games doesn’t translate into being good at strategy on-the-field. I do get now why some people are really into it, though. It’s definitely fun, even if (like me) you’re not very good at it.

Cricket Week – IPL Finale, and T20 World Cup Preview

I didn’t get around to an update before the semi-final or final, as I said… Oh well. Anyway, Hyderabad, the Deccan Chargers, won the 2009 Indian Premier League. Interesting too, considering that in 2008 they were possibly the worst team in the league. This year, they managed to put their act together into a solid enough team to just barely make it into 4th place before the semi-finals, knock out the Delhi Daredevils, and win the final against the Bangalore Royal Challengers.

(Source: DLF/IPL)

In keeping with today’s post’s theme, strategy, and consistent strategy, was the big factor here. As I’ve mentioned, my favorite team is the Rajasthan Royals. They hit a groove in the middle of the tournament as captain Shane Warne learned how to best utilize his squad (particularly Yusuf Pathan), but they started faltering towards the end–they even lost to Kolkata. Meanwhile, Kolkata continued their pattern of having great players but piss-poor strategy: they put Ajantha Mendis (my favorite player) in only 3 games, and Mashrafe Mortaza (my favorite Bangladeshi player) in a total of one game. They had a bit of a luck at the end, but that was it. Delhi managed to be in perfect form for most of the tournament, but choked at the end–still haven’t figured out what went wrong.

Anyway, enough on that. I really suggest you check out CricInfo’s Page 2 for a much better, and more entertaining, summary of the last weeks of the IPL.

(Source: AP)

Many things throughout make you really realize how much of an international sport cricket has always been, and how it continues to be that way. You have the Indian Premier League, with many prominent players from Sri Lanka, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, England, and the West Indies. It’s being held this year in South Africa. And, they brought in cheerleaders from the United States (hey, we got to contribute something at least!). They pushed through the “Help Educate and Teach” initiative to support local schools, and ran a “Miss Bollywood South Africa” contest. Even the closing ceremony was pretty good. Akon performed… and Jacob Zuma gave a speech. *ehem*

All the high points even made up for some of the silliness with corporate placement (“DLF Maximum” for sixes, “Citi moments of success”, and the “Fly Kingfisher fair play award). It got to the point of just being amusing by the end. All-in-all, it makes you wonder how good it would have been if it ended up being held in England instead of South Africa–I don’t think there would’ve been near as much character to it.

But, we’ll find out next week, when the 2nd T20 World Cup of Cricket begins! In 2007, they held the 1st T20 World Cup in South Africa; and in 2009, they’ll hold the 2nd in England. So, we’ll get a taste of how different it’ll be between the two countries.

When the 2009 T20 World Cup begins, I’ll try to make another post as sort of a preview of what’s to come. ‘Til then. KF

New Games, New Movies, New Matches

A few things happened the other day that delayed my planned post… So, I’ll make this one on three topics: a new Lunar game for the PSP, first of my summer movie reviews with Star Trek, and the Indian Premier League.

Lunar: Harmony of Silver Star

 

 

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m one of the foremost experts on the Lunar RPG series. Well, just this week, Famitsuu announced a new Lunar game for the PSP–or, more accurately, a remake of Lunar: The Silver Star / Silver Star Story (the first ‘story’ created for Lunar) on the PSP, titled Lunar: Harmony of Silver Star.

So, this brings the total number of distinct versions to 4: TSS (Sega CD), SSS (Saturn/Playstation/Japanese & Korean PC), Legend (GBA), and now HSS (PSP). Yes, most people are sick of remakes, but many others are still thrilled that the series is definitely not dead (despite Lunar: Dragon Song, released for the Nintendo DS in 2005, doing so poorly).

So we’ve been abuzz with news of this since it broke. Here are some of the highlights:

• It’ll be produced by GungHo Works, but developed by GameArts
• It’s slated for a Fall 2009 release on the PSP; no word yet on an American release
• New storyline events will be added to the PSP remake

I’ve translated the original Famitsu article and posted that on LunarNET. For more information, check out the article:

LunarNET – Famitsuu on Lunar: Harmony of Silver Star

Star Trek
Overall: thrilling, enjoyable, and worthwhile for anyone–fan or no

Now, I’ve been a Star Trek fan since I was 10 years old. I grew up watching The Next Generation, Deep Space 9 is my favorite, and I’m one of the few who likes Enterprise. I also really like some, but not all, of the movies (notably Wrath of Khan, Voyage Home, Generations, and First Contact). So when I heard J. J. Abrams was directing a new Star Trek movie, involving the original Enterprise crew, I was definitely ambivalent. And by all rights I shouldn’t have enjoyed it, but… it was really, really good, and I left the theater more than satisfied.

Spoiler-Lite Review:

The good:

• Action sequences–in space (the first 10 minutes with the USS Kelvin), on-the-ground, and in between (orbital skydiving!)
• The casting–particularly Kirk, Spock, Bones, and Scotty
• How Spock, Bones, Scotty, Sulu, and Chekhov retained the best parts of their original character
• How Kirk, Spock, and Uhura got a much-needed upgrade to their characters
• Occasional lines and events that called back to the series (“Are you out of your damn Vulcan mind?”, Sulu’s hand-to-hand combat, Chekhov’s trouble with Vs, the redshirt on the orbital skydive)
• Leonard Nimoy

The bad:

• The main villain, Nero, for being a genocidal monster on the order of Khan Singh, has really lousy motivations
• The interaction between Spock and Uhura
• Angle-shots and shaky-cameras. I hate these two techniques, yet why do directors insist on using them? I thought Battlefield: Earth proved how completely awful angle-shots can be.

The confusing:

• “Did that just really happen?”

Now, I saw it with two other people. One had little to no familiarity with Star Trek, and the other was, like me, a longtime Trek fan. All three of us really enjoyed it. So, if you don’t know a thing about Star Trek, you’ll have no problem following it and enjoying the movie all the same (they also keep it very light on the technobabble, and have basically excised all the elements of The Original Series that were rather… irksome). If you’ve been a Trek fan all your life, there’s still plenty to love about this movie. And in either case, the bad doesn’t detract enough from the good to keep you from thoroughly enjoying it.

Spoiler-Heavy Review:
(Just a warning: don’t read this if you plan on seeing the movie and haven’t yet.)

The more I think about it, the more I actually appreciate what J. J. Abrams did here. My guess is his thought process was something like this:

• If I make it overly ‘true to the original’, then there’s no way to attract new fans
• If I branch out and do something totally new, then I piss of 40 years’ worth of fans
• Since I’m not Gene Roddenberry, there’s no way I can make it feel just like the original Star Trek
• So, I need a way to let me branch out, without being obligated to stay within the established 40-year history of the shows.

While the alternate universe / time travel deal is a bit of a trope, it ended up working brilliantly here in that it let the story take a completely different and unknown turn, without sacrificing the presence of the characters or similarity of events, and without disregarding the last 40 years. Bold move. And it paid off.

I do admit that I was upset when I first found out that time travel was a part of the plot this time. I’m really tired of time travel in Star Trek, since it forms way too common a plot device (…despite how I like both Enterprise and the First Contact movie). Reason being, time travel plots nearly always end with a “big reset button”, where something disastrous happens, but by the end of the show/movie they’ve gone back in time and fixed it all. It’s the sci-fi equivalent of a dream sequence.

Any Star Trek fan will tell you that, once Vulcan got destroyed (I said spoilers, didn’t I?) they fully expected the crew to go back in time and undo those events before the end of the movie. And, when the Enterprise was about to get sucked into a black hole near the end, I fully expected them to go through the black hole, appear 25 years in the past, and undo everything that just occurred. So, imagine my surprise when the credits rolled, and I’m left thinking “Wait… Did that just really happen?”

Again, bold move. And I like how this has revitalized interest in the series. I definitely wouldn’t mind seeing more along these lines…

Cricket Week – Pt.2

More accurately, the last 2+ weeks of cricket, since it’s been a little while…

 

 

(Source: DLF/IPL)

This post has gone on long enough, so I’ll just summarize some of what’s been going on in the DLF Indian Premier League as of late… The Rajasthan Royals aren’t doing as well as they did last year, but at the very least they narrowly won a victory earlier today against the Mumbai Indians, and are now at #3 on the points table. The Delhi Daredevils, however, have been in outstanding form for this entire tournament: it appears they’ve learned to work together and put their talent to use. Unfortunately, the Kolkata Knight Riders are just like they are last year: lots of talent, but lousy at putting it all together into a workable team.

It should go to show you: it doesn’t matter how good your players are–it matters how well they work together. You can see this with Rajasthan, how captain Shane Warne is constantly directing and encouraging the men on his team–which, I suspect, is how he manages to pull some great talent out of previously-unknown cricketers. Meanwhile, Kolkata has Ajantha Mendis, one of the greatest up-and-coming bowlers, and they’ve put him in something like 3 matches (out of 11) so far.

Anyway, the final is on May 24th. I’ll try to make another update before the Semi-Finals, before the Finals, and after the entire tournament is over. …if I’m lucky, I’ll get 2 of those 3. ‘Til then. KF

Summer’s Finally Arrived–Almost

Well, relatively speaking. DC’s weather pattern is something like: January-March = cold, April = schizophrenic between hot and cold, May = warm but lots of rain, June = right into summer. So, over the past few weeks, I’ve finally been able to enjoy a semblance of warmer weather.

As the summer movie season is here, I’m going to start reviewing any movies I see, starting with Star Trek (later this week–I want to wait ’til my sister has a chance to see it). My cricket updates will continue in my next post (also later this week). Before that, I’ll just recap a few of the things I’ve been doing the past few weeks.

Fleeting Cherry Blossoms

I just barely managed to catch the cherry blossoms around the tidal basin this year before they all faded away. I didn’t go to the actual festival (on account of oddly good weather, it was madly crowded) but I hear it was fun. Anyway, since it was late in the month, there were only a few spots where there was still anything visibly in bloom–we did see a little bit, however, and visited a couple of the monuments around the basin.

XKCD Meetup Again

Also managed to put together another XKCD meetup in the DC area, which went by pretty well. We met over at Teaism in Penn Quarter as usual, and then went over to Dupont Circle (this just happened to be the same day and same time as a Washington Capitols game let out, so we nearly got separated at the metro on the way up–but, some planning avoided that being a problem).

The main reason we went up to Dupont Circle was because of a protest by Project Ch*n*l*gy at the Sc**nt*l*gy Center (vowels removed to avoid coming up on searches, but you can figure out who I’m talking about). It was interesting, but since it was great weather and we were in a good area, we didn’t spent that long there.

Thereafter, we went over to Kramerbooks & Afterwords Cafe for dessert, then spent the rest of the day playing card games in Dupont Circle.

Minor Cricket Aside

Oh, and for my birthday, my sister got me a cricket bat! Now that I have a bat and ball, all I need to find are a large field and 21 other people in the area who know how to play cricket, and I’m set!

Well, that’s that. Next post, I’ll get back to another cricket update, and review the first “summer movie” this year, J.J.Abram’s Star Trek. KF