Another thing I felt that most tutorials lacked was the explanation that you should really, honestly, truly WATCH what you are doing when attempting to learn how to solve the cube. Personally, I don’t learn well by seeing R U R’ written down and say “oh, ok, no problem”. I need to see that move in action on the cube, and even if I don’t fully comprehend what exactly is happening, I can see what is happening which helps my brain remember what my hands should be doing so that my eyes see the same thing next time. 

I also ran into a few cases where the person explaining the solve either underestimated the person wanting to learn to solve the cube, or greatly overestimated them. “This algorithm should be real easy for you to learn, it’s only 18 moves long.” Oye. Or, the flip side of that coin was “Try this algorithm to do what you need to do next. Depending on the state of your cube you may need to do this 1, 3, 5, or 39 times in order to get the cube to look like what you want”. (I may have slightly exaggerated that, but the point stands). What I would prefer, myself, in a Beginner’s Method is to be given some basic instructions on what I should be looking to accomplish, what I should do in order to reach that goal, and be given not only an explanation of what is happening when I do that but also be presented with one or two alternatives saying “hey, if the first thing isn’t working for you, maybe this will help instead”. To me that seems like a fairly basic teaching method which would help a lot of newer cubers. 

Before I do start into my own ideas on what may help beginning cubers on their way to solving the cube, I do want to give credit to the two primary places online which helped me as I learned how solve the cube myself.

CubeStation - http://www.cubestation.co.uk/ – DanH has a lot of great information on here for beginning cubers and is probably the most well-thought-out tutorial that I found. The Java applets also really help for watching some of the algorithms in action for when you’re unclear on what exactly the notation in the algorithm means you should do. 

Badmephisto on YouTube - http://www.youtube.com/user/badmephisto – A personal hero of mine for making extremely well-made video tutorials for many aspects of solving the cube, including a great 3-part series for beginners as well as more advanced concepts for once you start to get more comfortable with the cube such as intuitive F2L (if you decide to learn the Fridrich method later), advanced cross techniques, commutators, and more. 

So anyway, that all said and done I suppose without an further adieu I present my effort at teaching others how to solve the Rubik’s Cube. 

update 3/3/09: this series of blog entries is actually going to become separate pages within the site to accomodate the addition of some Java applets to help illustrate the points. This post will be updated when the entry point to the series has been created. I do know of at least two of you who have been actively asking where this tutorial is, and all I can say is “soon”.

Let’s talk about the good. To many vets of the DS version of Mario Kart, Mario Kart Wii is almost going to feel like “more of the same”. Fortunately for those of us who liked MKDS, this isn’t a bad thing at all. Nintendo didn’t change the formula too dramatically, with the biggest changes coming in the form of motorcycles you can race in (to complement the karts) and the new steering wheel adapter that really does a great job of motion-controlled steering. Bikes are a bit tough to adjust to at first, but if you play the Grand Prix circuits the 100cc circuit is exclusively bikes in an effort to force the player to at least get a taste of them. Bikes can only charge a single level of sparks in drifts, which means they can’t get the same level of Mini-Turbo (MT) coming off a turn as a kart can after charging to the second level, but bikes gain a distinct advantage in the straightaways with the ability to pop wheelies for a small boost in speed. They also handle much tighter than any kart, which is great for tracks with tight corners but can very often leave you stuck in the grass on the inside corner of a turn (or facing the inside corner of a wall) for the inexperienced racer. Still, they’re a nice change to the series and I wouldn’t be surprised to see them stick around for the next installment of the series as well. Fingers crossed Nintendo just stays away from airplanes a-la Diddy Kong Racing.

For the most part, “the good” simply contains Nintendo continuing to do well what they have done well in the past with the series. A healthy number of tracks – 16 brand new and 16 “retro” revamped tracks, similar to what they did in MKDS – with GP’s across 4 race classes: 50cc, 100cc, 150cc, and 150cc mirror where all the tracks are flipped left-to-right. On top of the GP’s, there are Time Trials where you simply race the clock with three boost mushrooms to last the full three laps. Similarly to MKDS, there are Staff Ghosts that come with the game so you can race against a saved ghost to try and better your time with a goal in mind. A new addition in this game are EXPERT Staff Ghost times, which will unlock on a track after you beat a certain time better than the original staff ghosts; these guys are tough, and I doubt most players of the game will ever beat most of these ghosts without serious dedication put into the game.

Online has been slightly re-tooled, mostly for the better. Pick-up-and-play has seen a vast improvement in MKWii over MKDS, with online matches supporting up to 12 players at the same time (and one console can bring 2 players online to play split-screen, also). When you attempt to find a game, you will more often than not be dropped into spectator mode of a session already happening online, where you will have to wait for the current race to be over before going back to the Track Voting screen. Personally I prefer this method over the servers attempting to find players who happen to be looking for a match at the same time all into the same game, especially when you do have the 12-racer limit. You may have a race with 5 people, and the next race will have a full 12 players on the track, which is really nice and also doesn’t limit you to a 4-race, Grand- Prix-style format either, since you can stay in one session and keep racing for as long as you want.

Controllers have been a hot topic of discussion leading up to the game’s release, and I have to say that coming from MKDS I don’t see any alternative to the Classic Controller. The wheel is a great tool for introducing more gamers to the franchise, is implemented very well, and I give Nintendo a lot of credit for not trying to make a true peripheral and instead make the “shell” that they did where the Wiimote fits right into the wheel to act as a controller. Still, ask any powergamer of Mario Kart to race while relying on motion-sensitivity for tricking off of jumps, drag an item and constantly hop in and out of turns with the B-button without feeling like you’re going to sprain a finger, or be able to counter-steer and correct in a turn without being able to rely on button-press response and a more comfortable controller to hold than the side of the wheel: the wheel simply is not going to win over the hardcore racers out there. The wiimote/nunchuck combo works well I suppose, but the top two controllers of choice are definitely the GCN controller or the Classic Controller in my eyes. Personal preference, I feel the cube’s shoulder buttons require too much “depth” to press, and I’m not a big fan of the digital click of them either. The d-pad is and always has been ridiculously small, and these two points going against the cube controller combined with the pure smooth comfort of the CC lets me know where I have a winner.

Now to some of the downsides. First of all, setting up your Friends List has never been more annoying than in MKWii. It has supposedly been made much easier to connect with friends, and the game even has a function that allows you to send a MKWii Friend Invite to someone on your Wii Friends List, which will allow them to simply reply to your message they receive on their bulletin board if they have the game so that you will both automatically be added to each others’ lists. The problem I have found is that the only reliable way for this to work is for BOTH people to send invites to each other, and BOTH people to reply to each others’ invites. Manually entering Friend Codes can take upwards of 24 hours for the “?”-block entry you put in to validate and show your friend’s Mii in your list, and the auto-reply feature one time outright failed for me when my friend and I were trying to get online to play against each other – we ended up deleting each others’ entries after 4 days of the game simply never finding each other and trying again with the “send each other an invite” method.

Speaking of inviting Wii Friends, this sounds like a great feature but like many of the ancillary functions in MKWii, is almost impossible to find. My second very large gripe with the game is just downright user un-friendliness. In order to send a Wii Friend an invite for MKWii, you have to first go to the MKWii Channel. There are 4 permanent menu options here: for Friends, Ghosts, Rankings, Tournaments, and then there is a 5th option that rotates a message every few seconds. Wouldn’t you know, the 5th slot is still a menu option and will sometimes show the “Invite Wii Friends” option. Someone please remind me why this isn’t handily located in the Friends menu again? Even once you do find that option, you can only invite a single Wii Friend at a time before having to go back to the Channel Menu and waiting for that magical scrolling option to come back so you can invite another person.

The Ghosts menu in the channel is the same way. You can either race ghosts from online, where your system will download a random ghost from another player out on the www and you will race to see if you can beat other people, or you can view downloaded ghosts. Fairly straightforward, but this menu completely lacks an interface to a very cool feature that the game contains, which is that you can also send your own ghosts to people in your MKWii Friends List as a “Challenge”. The Ghosts section seems to be a perfect fit for doing something with this feature, but instead you can only do this under the Rankings menu.

The Rankings menu in the channel allows you to view each track in the game with a pseudo-chart of Mii’s that indicate where you are on the bell curve of your Friends, the Regional standings, or the Worldwide standings. You can awkwardly scroll through the Mii’s using the control pad (I don’t believe this screen was made for usability unless you are using the Wiimote and could easily just point-and-click) to look at what people have gotten for times, and even download the ghost for the best racer in the view you’re looking at so you can watch the replay and/or race against them. Also, dun-dun-dunnnn, you can click on your own time for a track from this menu and you will be presented with the option to issue a challenge to someone on your MKWii Friends’ List by sending them your ghost. Very intuitive. Perhaps the worst part about the Rankings is that Nintendo failed to put these lists anywhere but in this channel, meaning that if you are ever practicing Time Trials you have no way of easily checking the leaderboards to see where your latest PR stacks up against the other times that are out there. You will have an option to Check Rankings, but after viewing the rankings your only course of action is to back out to the main menu, where you then have to drill through the main game menus again to get back to the Time Trials.

I’m psyched that we have another iteration of the Mario Kart franchise out, and I’m sure it will entertain me for quite some time to come since I’m still working towards some better GP ranks and shrinking a lot of my Time Trial times. Still, in some ways it feels like Nintendo rushed to get the game out the door without a lot of their usual final polish, and it shows with the haphazard way that the online system tries to work and with all of the accessory features that the game provides being poorly presented to the gamer.

While he was over, we definitely got some game time in of it and it definitely aims to please. In some ways it felt like it was “more of the same” for the franchise, but I don’t think any fans of the franchise would think of that as a bad thing. Some of the new levels are definitely interesting, with the Mario Kart level bringing karts from different directions (and actually letting you place a well-timed hit to send a kart off the track and at an opponent) and the WarioWare level forcing you to take part in minigames as you fight. Some of the new items are very neat as well, such as the 3-part rocket of death you can only use if you happen to pick up all three pieces during a fight, or the “break me” ball that will allow you to execute a Final Smash move with a simple press of the B button (which, by the way, some of the Final Smash moves are simply devastating: Ike’s Final Smash will likely send you if you have any damage taken before he gets to you).

I liked it, I really did; but I’m still on the fence about whether or not I will be going out to pick up my own copy. It’s a great party game but I only get to hang out in person with people who would be willing to play it once in a blue moon, and the draw of online play is tempting but I know I won’t be able to consistently put together online games with those people either – which means dealing with the powergamers out there who can beat me blindfolded and/or the 12-year olds who would rather turn their Wii off and disconnect from the match rather than face a true loss. We’ll see. I still have Metroid Prime 3 to play through and beat anyway since the DS has been keeping me really busy lately, maybe I’ll get back into that for now and bide my time until Kart comes out.

Congratulations my friend, you’ve just succumbed to another episode of DSLS; the symptom of spending such an extraordinary amount of time pressing your elbows into your thighs that you have successfully reduced your circulation to practically nothing. As the blood begins to flow through your legs again, your legs slowly feel numb and as if they are not your own. How do you cope? Do you ride it out, knowing that you will only be able to walk again once enduring the excruciating pain of your nerve receptors coming back online? Do you hit yourself in the thigh, sending shockwaves of feeling rippling down your leg as you force the blood to move swifter through your veins? God only knows that if you stood up right now you would do only one of two things – immediately fall over as you realize that you have no control of your legs, nor can they hold you upright by themselves at this moment in time; or be forced to support yourself on the sink, trying not to put too much weight on either leg and wishing dearly that feeling would just come back so that you could continue your life as normal.

Damn you, Professor Layton. Damn you Advance Wars, Picross, Mario & Luigi, Tetris, Puzzle Quest, damn all of you games past present and future that inflict this wretched condition upon me.

credit to ShortAttentionGamer (RIP) for the image

Well I do in fact have a DS Lite now, and in two days (02/26/2008) realhotstuff.com is currently expecting to have these back in stock after being out for quite some time. I know that I’ll be doing my level best to pick one of these bad boys up.

Contra score records as held by Twin Galaxies

I know for a fact that I can beat any score out there, since the game doesn’t change with each passing iteration and I once quit the game with over 50 lives left… after starting with three. The question is, would Twin Galaxies accept a certain amount of proof before they declared me champion with a score of “infinity”? Or at the very least, “max score”?

This may be a day late and a few bucks short, but less than 48 hours before I finally have Metroid Prime 3: Corruption in my hands… I finally beat Metroid Prime 2: Echoes! I do have to say I was a bit disappointed by the end bosses, though. When I made it to the end of Metroid Prime, I had a tough time beating the aptly named “Metroid Prime”. In Echoes, I got spanked by the first iteration of the Emperor Ing. Deep breath, try to figure out his pattern: I still lost a ton of health, but I did beat him. On to stage 2, where despite major undertakings of damage I managed to recoup over half of my health. Stage 3 did a number on me again, but I still survived and got my free pass on to fight Dark Samus after my Energy tanks were magically recharged. She defeated me again on my first try, but the second time against her was, for lack of a better description, a joke. And that’s it? This was the final encounter? Kind of a let-down.

I still can’t wait for Corruption though, for two reasons. One, while I was never big into Metroid growing up it is one of those titles that I have learned to love now that I’m older, and new iterations both on the home consoles and on the handhelds make me giddy. Two, it will be the first Wii game in quite some time that I am going to spend money on, and in fact is one of the reasons (as a 1st/2nd party title) that I bought the system in the first place. I can’t live without my Nintendo franchises!

You really have two options as the developer; ignore the gap, allowing objects to “seamlessly” transfer from one screen to the other, or allow things to temporarily “disappear” between the screens as they make their way from one to the other. Really the issue presented isn’t one that is the developers’ fault. Nintendo made a system that came with a fairly necessary breakup between their two screens due to the hinge mechanism on the system. But one would think, or even hope, that developers could look at their own game being developed and understand how they should treat the gap.

Let’s look at a very basic example. In Elite Beat Agents, there are periodically graphic montages that take up the height of both screens. If you pay attention, the game actually does cut out the portion of the image in between the screens – the illusion is that the player doesn’t notice anything is missing, while if they had tried to just cut the image into two halves things would almost certainly look “strange” near the gap, whether or not the player consciously picked up on why it looked odd.

It admittedly gets trickier when you get into gameplay that has these moving parts. A puzzle game is fairly simple – with very few exceptions, the designer should have objects move directly from one screen to another. But in an action game, one should really examine how the gameplay will be affected based on how you handle the gap. In Dragon Quest: Rocket Slime, boss battles that spanned both screens typically let objects disappear in the gap. And while the potential negative effect of this approach is that the player may get confused or feel like the game is “cheap” in hiding something that suddenly appears, what really happens is the player’s brain accounts for most objects transferring between screens and knows that if something went into the gap at Point A, moving at a certain rate of speed, it should exit the gap and appear at Point B on the other screen. It isn’t even a conscious thought most times, the brain simply treats the gap like a solid bar hiding what is behind it.

Then you have games like Bubble Bobble Revolution. This game allows you to take your dinosaur character between the two screens and allows the bad guys to do the same… but the game noticeably does NOT recognize the gap and rather the designers chose to let objects transfer directly from one screen to the other. The problem here is twofold. For one, the brain does not know how to handle such a transfer since it does not automatically expect something at the bottom of the top screen to seamlessly “jump” to the top of the bottom screen. The “bar” that was blocking content in another game no longer exists. Secondly, the gap between the screens is just enough that things moving between screens while in motion can often appear to even jump horizontally as they make the transition, even if the transition makes perfect sense in a pixel-perfect world. What the developer has now done is create a confusing, uncomfortable game experience for the player when perhaps more consideration should have been paid to how the gap was going to affect the gameplay.

I’m not saying that you should always “lose” content to the gap. Far from it. But please, game designers, THINK when making your game. Which method works best for what you are trying to achieve? And if neither solution seems to be a clear winner… should your game really be switching between the screens in the first place? Perhaps re-thinking the game idea entirely could save your title.