While in Wilmington, the wife and I brought a couple of our Blockbuster disks. The first was Lohan's I Know Who Killed Me. Ugh. All the ultra-short scenes were bad enough; when it started in on the graphic torture porn, we'd had enough. A brief scan of Wikipedia confirmed that my wife's early prediction of the killer's identity was in fact correct.

Second was The Heartbreak Kid. Now, I have a love/hate relationship with Ben Stiller. I loved Zoolander and Tropic Thunder, really liked Mystery Men and his work in Anchorman and Dodgeball. And then there's his romantic comedies. The ones where he so often plays the same wishy-washy douche who gets dumped upon again and again and can't bring himself to say anything -- until the end of the films when all the repressed rage causes him to explode. I hate that character. Hate hate hate. Ben Stiller in The Heartbreak Kid is not quite that same character, but pretty damn close. So while the movie has its share of laughs, it's yet another movie of various bad things happening to Ben Stiller's character.

Last weekend I was helping my wife at her vendor booth in Wilmington, at their Riverfest Celebration. It's a two day event on the downtown streets near the water. An event organized by dumbfucks.

A two day event typically has the vendors leaving their tents up on the event site while they pack up and take away their products for the night. Vendors at Riverfest were told sales would be between 10am and 6pm, so we all started boxing merchandise a little before 6. Of course, the organizers never gave a thought to how the vendors would actually get their stuff out. It's a street fair, so the roads were closed to traffic. A street fair that continued on well into the night as a street party. And none of the event staff knew anything about how vendors were supposed to load their merchandise into their cars for storage over night. It was never told to vendors or on any of the printed material. It's like they didn't even think it would be an issue. Leaving merchandise unattended over night in the middle of a street fair? Not an option.

Finally we got information from a police officer (not from event staff) that they'd let us drive into the parking lot behind our booth at 7pm. All the while, sitting around and not selling to people walking by who were wondering why all the vendors had packed up their stuff. We were so pissed by the total lack of organization that we simply packed up everything and left for home. We had no interest in going through that a second day.

While out of town, I used some spare time to play one of the few games I have installed on my work laptop: Master of Orion 2. This is a classic game. On the surface it hasn't aged too badly. Still, the more I play the more glaring its faults become.

The research system is horribly flawed; a non-creative race absolutely must tech trade or else has no access to necessary technologies. If there end up being no races to tech trade with -- either because the rest were eliminated or their tech level can't keep up or maybe even there exists a perpetual state of war -- the non-creative race ends up with maybe half of available techs. And in this game, tech is life.

In later stages, micromanagement becomes nearly unbearable. Without the ability to record a default build queue, you end up repeating the same steps over and over and over again. The build queue's limited size also adds to the tedium.

Only five ship design slots? There's six ship hull sizes alone! I usually end up sacrificing destroyers entirely not far into the game.

And then there's the AI. Don't get me wrong, I realize how hard it is to create a good AI (one that doesn't cheat, that is). But the AI players never refit their old ships with new tech. When you have limited command points and every ship matters, this is a big deal. The big scary alien fleets turn out to have quite the glass jaw when you realize most of those battleships have Class I shields that crumple like paper in the face of your death rays and particle beams.

It's a shame that Masters of Orion III was such a dismal flop. I'd really love a modern successor to the game that was so excellent for its time. While I've heard good things about Galactic Civilizations II, it lacks the tactical portion of the genre I love so much.

I recently finished up Mass Effect. This Bioware game was originally developed for the console and later ported to the PC. While this is clearly evident in some places, they did make a strong effort to do a proper port. I've heard they did a lot of revision to the inventory system, which I can't comment too much on since I haven't seen the original.

The gameplay is singularly driven by a forceful main story. There are quite a few optional side missions available, though these suffer from being A) a tad repetitive after a while and B) entirely disconnected from the plot, so you need to make an effort to ignore the constant pressure of your primary goal in order to do them.

Combat is typically fast and frantic. You can pause to give orders to your squadmates, though for some reason there is a quite noticeable pause when hitting the spacebar to bring up the orders menu; long enough for the situation to change in certain instances. Squad members are generally useful, as their combat skills are decent and most will have effective powers that your character does not. I found the game's cover system to usually work really well. This is a model you don't see too often in PC games, except for console ports. Running up and pressing against a solid object (wall or battlefield obstacle) will put your back up against it. Strafing sideways to the edge of the wall will let you peek around it and when you fire or sight, your character will peer from around cover.

The main story is fleshed out effectively. Characters all have their motivations, no matter how misguided they may be. The one question never answered is the big "Why?", but the characters recognize this and at least bother to pose the question. I had a lot of fun with the dialog options. There's a system of player "paths" in place. Act like an angel (save innocents, be nice, pet kittens) and you receive Paragon points, which open up certain options. Performing your job ruthlessly, responding brusquely, ignoring orders, and demanding payment will earn you Renegade points. I played a female Renegade and really enjoyed what a bad ass she was. (Voice acting was also really good.) The drawback to the main story is that it felt so short. If you neglect the side missions, the game will go by pretty quickly it seems.

The inventory system, apparently the source of several complaints on the console version as well, definitely could use some improvement. There's a hard limit of 150 items, and with all the weapons, mods, and ammo types you come across, it's easy to hit this limit. The problem when that happens is that you're forced to scrap the new stuff and not given the option to do so with the older items (scrapping an item turns it into "Omnigel", generally useful only for opening locked containers). There's an overwhelming quantity of mods and ammo and weapons and the problem here is that the upgrade process is just uninteresting. I'm a gun guy; I drooled over the options available in the 1.13 fan patch for Jagged Alliance 2. Even with all the varieties of weapons you come across in Mass Effect, they're all just 3 stats. They don't even look any different, aside from color (you can't even see the items in the inventory screen itself). Worst of all, there's hardly any give and take with the weapons. Some seem just better than everything else you've found. So it hardly ever felt like a matter of prioritizing certain stats over others. Equipment modifications are a little better in that respect. They're more interesting, clearly useful, and force you to choose. There's so many though and spread across so many levels (some mod types change names while keeping the same effect at different levels, a real puzzler).

Overall a really good experience. There's clearly been a lot of serious thought put into the game (vastly fleshed out backstory and history are available for reading, though optional). I wish every game was this well constructed.