1. You know how in magazines they have those “special advertising section“s? Well, they do that in radio, too. They try really hard to make commercials sound like they’re actually content. Often, the hosts of the shows will “tell” you that they really love a product, but they’ve never used the thing at all. Well, in a magazine, they put “advertisement” at the top, but in radio, they don’t. You’re just expected to know. Or not, more likely.

2. They try really hard to make people sound like they’re being conversational. But when you listen to a commercial over and over and over again, the ticks and affectations start to stand out. And then you start to wonder if they’re doing it on purpose. And then you know for certain that they are because they don’t do anything unless there are a million different numbers backing their decisions.

3. I used to really be bothered by the pledge drives on public radio. Now, though, I will willfully and gladly take that if this is the alternative. The people that advertise on radio these days are the worst of the bottom-feeding, pyramid-scheming lot and it’s incredibly insulting to anyone with at least two brain cells.

But I’m not here to talk about the boring ways in which I spend my free time. There is a tendency, in wikipedia articles, to be less and less accurate when the topic of the article is less and less general. For example, during my reading adventure tonight, I was reading about breaking in regards to martial arts demonstrations. At a point, the article starts to make questionable statements:

People often talk about a “domino effect” that only exists in the mind, which was proven scientifically.

In most other wikipedia articles, it would probably look like this:

People [who?] often talk about a “domino effect” that only exists in the mind, which was proven scientifically. [citation needed]

This amuses me. I know I’m pretty much done reading wikipedia for the night when I start to encounter these.

I have a theory for why this phenomenon exists. I read a lot of articles tonight about Japanese warcrimes during the 20th century. Those had plenty of sources and were very clearly written. I think many people are interested in these topics. They are historically significant.

But breaking boards and bricks for martial arts demonstrations is, to say the very least, less significant. I imagine that far fewer people read the board breaking article than read the warcrimes article. And the people that are reading the board breaking articles have no problem with claims of dubious quality. I’ve seen this whenever I come across an article that seems to have little possibility for general interest. Articles about anime, musical genres that I’ve never heard of, and fanboy-inspiring topics in general.

It’s really easy to imagine the guy from The Foot Fist Way reading and possibly contributing to the article on board breaking. In fact, I can’t imagine anyone else reading it, really.

I want to come up with a word for this drop in quality. It is the point at which wikipedia stops being useful and simply elicits a chorus of “yep, that’s pretty much how it is.” And it will never get any better for these kinds of articles because nobody who knows anything about writing or truth will ever read them.

I love the characters and the setting. I even think some of the puzzles are pretty good. Certainly it’s a very good game. I love adventure games, and I would even say that it’s a relatively good adventure game. But Grim Fandango is not the best adventure game ever. Lots of people seem to think so. It even tops a lot of best-of lists.

Apparently, Lucasarts was in a transitional period when this game was made. It ended up being their second-to-last adventure game, which is a shame, because they made some really fun adventure games over the years. Most of this is due to the writing and game design of Tim Schafer and Ron Gilbert. Ron Gilbert left the company before Grim Fandango was made, and this game served as Tim Schafer’s last hurrah. It seems that Lucasarts used Grim Fandango’s performance as a way to test the market waters. If it didn’t make a boatload of money, then they would stop focusing on adventure games. And, well, it didn’t make a boatload of money, so they stopped focusing on adventure games. I assume that some of the differences between Grim Fandango and other Lucasarts adventures, then, were because they knew that the genre was close to death, and they were trying like hell to attract new players. So they debuted some new experimental features.

The trademark Lucasarts writing remained excellent. The puzzles remained excellent. But the graphics were converted to 3d. I know this was 1998, just into the Playstation era, but holy hell, these graphics are terrible. They did the best with what they had, I guess, but the characters are blocky, and the pre-rendered backgrounds are, well, I guess they’re fine for pre-rendered backgrounds, but even the art from Myst looked better, and that was 5 years before. I admit that the idea of using traditional Mexican art is quite inspired. I can only imagine what the initial concept art looked like.

Even though I generally dislike 3d graphics, that’s not the game’s biggest downfall. That dubious honor is reserved for the horrendous fucking controls. There were so many times playing the game that I would attempt to walk somewhere, but couldn’t, because the Resident-Evil-style-rotating-point-of-view movement is so incredibly broken it makes Resident Evil seem like Super Mario Galaxy. Once, I accidentally went up and down the elevator by the Blue Casket in Rubacava four times just trying to walk past the god damned thing.

So, with the graphics kind of sucking and the control really sucking, I couldn’t help but think that this game should have been made in the style of Lucasart’s other graphic adventure games, like Full Throttle or Day of the Tentacle. The art in those games is far superior because it’s based on actual drawings instead of polygons. It has character and warmth.

Just try to imagine a Grim Fandango that looked like this:

Calavera Drawing

instead of this.

Manny Calavera (aka ol’ blockhead) from Grim Fandango

I think maybe I will always prefer pens to polygons. I believe that the transition to 3d did more harm than good. I guess it’s just hard for me to shake the idea of Grim Fandango looking as good, as, say, Sam & Max Hit the Road.

And the control was so much easier in those games. You just clicked on things instead of moving your character around with the arrow keys.

In most types of games, I prefer a direct approach to game control. For example, in role playing games, I prefer games like The Legend of Zelda where you push a button to swing your sword, to command-driven RPGs, where you push a button to confirm that you want to swing your sword. It’s more visceral and it feels like you’re actually doing something instead of just triggering cutscenes.

Maybe if they had spent more time working on the controls, I wouldn’t be complaining so much. I played Escape from Monkey Island, which was a later game built on the same engine, and I didn’t have nearly as many problems.

In this article, Tim Schafer talks about their intent with the controls. They wanted to minimize menu screens so it looked less like a computer game, making it more immersive. And they changed the control scheme from mouse based to keyboard based for the same reasons, I guess. If you see a big crosshair cursor in the middle of your screen, that makes it harder to suspend your disbelief. Their intentions were good, but they fell short. Moving around is frustrating, manipulating your inventory is annoying, and, for me, this made it nearly impossible immerse myself in the story.

I do want to reiterate, though, after all this criticism, that I really liked the game. If it had been made maybe 3 or 4 years previously, or maybe 10 years after, I think it would have been one of the best games ever made. But, I guess it’s better that it was released than being shelved, like Full Throttle 2.

My band-aid got a cut. So I had to get a band-aid band-aid.

Do-It-Yourself White Jazz Musician Uniform

This behavior isn’t limited to the internet. I do it when reading books, too. Whenever I eat at a restaurant by myself, I bring a book. Often, I’ll stay much longer than the time it takes to finish the meal, just because I want to finish the chapter. Sometimes chapters are long. If it’s more than 10 pages or so, I’ll usually just call it a loss and leave.

In any case, I often try to assess the length of whatever it is I’m reading. I think it’s useful, and you probably do it, too.

And now I finally come to my point — anybody who makes a web page with comments, please make the comments a separate page. Or make them hidden until you click on “reveal.” Or just turn them off. I don’t care how you do it — but they need to not add length to the page.

Like I said, when the article is long, I’ll look at the scrollbar. If it looks like I’m halfway through it, I’m usually wrong, because there are comments at the bottom and sometimes they’re as long or longer than the original article. This is bad.

In my mind, the page does not exist for the sake of leaving comments — it exists so you can read the words of the original author. Now, let it be said that I think comments are are a good idea. I understand their relevance, but they are certainly not as important as the original article. Newspapers don’t print ever single letter they get. The have a special page for letters and they only print a few.

Unless the purpose of the site is discussion, comments should be de-emphasized. And, also, they tend to be poorly written. So I make it a point not to read them. Sometimes I do, when it’s technical information or it’s a site where the comments have a decent reputation, like Slashdot or Metafilter. But usually they’re bad and not worth reading.

If what I’ve said before hasn’t convinced you, think of all the lost productivity. If comments on internet were magically turned off, we’d have entire communities looking up, blinking their eyes and stretching, and going outside to paint the shed.

Certainly you’re as sick of all those unpainted sheds as I am.

Wine: That’s what you drink if you’re rich, right?

Uncle Fun: Crap you won’t buy since 1990.