PNC Park, Pittsburgh, PA

We didn’t buy tickets ahead of time. The Pirates average south of 19k fans a game, they were in the midst of a 12-game skid, and their opponent for the evening was the equally hapless Cleveland Indians. That combination doesn’t scream “sellout” to me, so even though it was a Saturday night game we figured we were safe buying day of. Wrong-o. We showed up three hours before game time and were told the only available seats were standing-room or obstructed-view.

Well, I was thinking bullshit. The ticket lady was nuts, there was no way the game had sold out. Then there was a nasty thunderstorm leading to an hour-long rain delay, so I was thinking double-bullshit, this place is going to be a ghost town. But no. I am wrong about everything, everywhere, all the time. By twenty minutes before the first pitch the place was filling up. By the second inning the stands were jammed.

The culprit seems to be a promotion celebrating the 1960 Pirates, who won the World Series over the Yankees following one of the more famous home runs out there. The team was on hand for the pregame and everyone got a (pretty awful) commemorative mug at the gate celebrating their Series win. But the Pirates played well and the fans were into it and it ended up being a much livelier experience than I’d been expecting. Nice!

Final score: Pirates 6, Indians 4.

Impressions of the year-to-date after the jump.

The Legend of Zelda: Spirit Tracks

I got about three-quarters of the way through and that’s as far as I expect to go. The train makes me furious.

P.B. Winterbottom

I played this to death. I would have played more but I ran out of game. Fantastic.

A Boy and His Blob

Charming style but the game world feels lonely and disjointed. The first world was too easy. I wonder if Way Forward meant it as a kind of extended tutorial. The puzzles seem to pick up in world two but by then I’d lost interest.

BioShock

I finally got around to this a couple of weeks ago. It clicked for me in the third level and I rolled from there. I liked the twist. Some cursory reading suggests that some corners of the internet think it’s mocking gamers. I don’t see it but then I’m not such a staunch defender of video game narrative.

Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade

The fighting in this game has a well-deserved reputation for cruelty.

Torchlight

It’s a dungeon hack. I knew this and bought it anyway. Virtual loot makes my brain light up but by three o’ clock in the morning much of the shine is gone. I’ve shelved it for my own good.

Red Dead Redemption

I just started this. I am very bad at it. I have played a million games that use the right thumbstick for aiming and I don’t think I’ll ever get the hang of it. My piss-poor aiming is already taking a toll on the innocents of New Austin. I’m blowing missions left and right. But man, I could ride through Rockstar’s version of the west all day.

You kill almost everyone you meet in Bioshock. So when crazy artiste Sander Cohen finally reveals himself at the end of Fort Frolic, you expect a fight. But you don’t get one. Cohen makes a grand entrance, gives you a present, then just hangs out in the lobby of Fort Frolic next to a looked chest. He implies that he has the key to the chest, the pulsing, glowing chest, but you’re not cool enough to get it.

You have two options:

(1) Pick a fight

(2) Leave him hanging out in the lobby

Every. Single. Thing. That happens in Bioshock up to this point says go with the first option. Cohen is a crazy murderer, he’s standing next to a glowing chest, and you’ve killed everyone else you’ve met so far. Defeat him and you’re rewarded with the key to the locked chest. The stuff in the chest is no great shakes but the way the scene plays out is familiar to anyone who’s ever picked up a controller: Challenge, action, reward.

Towards the end of the game you come across Cohen’s house in another part of Rapture. Because you’re a rational person who took the game’s logic at face value and didn’t read the strategy guide, his house is empty. There’s a locked door. You might think there’s a way to unlock it, but there isn’t. The room is inaccessible. Had you left Cohen alone, however, you’d be able to open the door and access the room beyond. Naturally the room beyond has nice loot in it, including one of the twelve weapon upgrade stations in the game.

There is a place for decisions like this in some video games. Bioware, for example, builds entire franchises around forking storylines. Bioshock is not one of those games. It is linear, it is straightforward, and it is explicitly about the absence of player agency in video games. It is about going from A to B without considering why. You have one decision to make and you know exactly when you’re making it.

The Sander Cohen subplot is a lapse in the game logic. Bioshock is easy enough that missing the room isn’t back-breaking, but why structure the encounter this way in the first place? Fighting Cohen at the first opportunity to do so is the logical choice; it fits the pattern developed in earlier levels and produces an immediate, tangible reward. Leaving him alone is bizarre. Without knowing that you’ll run across him later, is there a good reason to let him be? A short-lived commitment to nonviolence? A soft spot for creepy guys in bunny ears?

Arbitrary things like this makes me want to abandon the medium entirely.

Today I see that Google Street View has expanded into Takoma Park. Terrifying.

I have mixed feelings about the hypertexts. On the one hand, The Waste Land is allusion-dense and impossible to understand without having read everything that has ever been written. On the other hand, the existing hypertexts fall victim to an inviolable law of the internet, which is that the internet makes everything ugly. Links, frames, sidebars, ads for teeth and weight-loss pills. I could go on. In The Waste Land, the hypertexts take a wonderful poem and replace it with a hyperlinked monstrosity, information-dense but aesthetically damaged.

Maybe this only bothers me but bother me it does. It’s a poem, poems are pretty, The Waste Land should be pretty as heck. So last April I started working on a stripped-down hypertext. Then I got a job and had less time to work on insane, time-consuming projects, so I just got around to posting the sort-of-finished product. It includes footnotes, a map, and a list of references with links to full texts, where available. In theory it looks nice on mobile devices; in practice I’ve only tested it on an iPod touch.