Author: Sarah Northway

Late Panorama
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

First night in Istanbul was pretty amazing!

We touched down at 5:30pm local time and got into our apartment at about 8:00pm which is basically 8:00am pacific. We all felt surprisingly awake despite having not slept at all during the 20 hours of travel so it was time to hit the town!

Lucky for us our landlord Elif was quite willing to let us tag along with her as she and her husband hit up Club Babylon for some local music. Which was lucky for us, not only for the music tip-off, but also for helping us find the place. This district of Istanbul (we’re kind of near Taksim) is crazy! It’s clear that the city has just been building up on top of itself for thousands of years with little input from city planners. The streets are all exactly the width of a car, they ramble up and down the undulating terrain in labyrinthine patterns and are chock a block with tea houses and ancient looking apartment buildings. It is a thing to behold.

So we arrived at Babylon with about 1/2 hour to kill before the show started. Babylon, by the way, is spelled with a 1-in-a-0 on/off symbol. Which made me assume it was a geek bar, which made me feel at home. We got to try the local beer for the first time! Our driver was all “you have to try Effes, it’s the best istanbul beer!”. But it also appears to be the only Istanbul beer so it was a pretty easy choice when we sauntered up to the bar. I approve of Effes pilsner. It’s not great, but it doesn’t have the sickly taste of a Molson. It’s tastey enough and even at the club it was like 3$ Candaian so big win. We also had a few Efe Raki which I was looking forward to. Raki is _the_ Turkish liquer. It’s got this Ouzo/Absinthe thing going on so it’s my kind of drink. They serve it in a glass mixed with water along with another glass of water, and I can attest that it is a nice drink indeed. Although much more expensive at like 10$ CAD. We were almost the only ones drinking at the show. I discovered later this is because the booze at shows is considered too expensive and people mostly get their drinking in before and after. Although having witnessed the first night of a three day weekend I would say there was generally less drunkeness than a typical Canadian night out.

The club really was more of a concert than a club. Which is awesome by me since I kind of hate clubs and the music was fucking rad! It was a band called Baba Zula. They played this Turkish folk/rock/regae music that was so fucking cooool because it was all middle-eastern sounding but also rocked the house (think early Tea Party). Their lead man played an electrified Tambur wich is Turkey’s historic solution to the guitar/madolin/shamisen problem. Their bongo dude was crazy. I had no idea you could do that with bongos. All the stoned undergrads in the world combined cannot hold a candle to this guy. Plus belly dancing, sexual inuendo, and political commentary (although most of that was in turkish). They put on quite a show (and the Raki helped get through things when they dipped into the reggae spectrum)!

From there we wandered (not stumbled I’m happy to say) out to find our first meal since the plane. Which was also my first real meal in over 24 hours since I don’t eat on planes. Elif pointed us to the fish district with instructions to obtain Mussels. And obtain mussels we did! 2$ for 3 Mussels stuffed with rice and delicious delicious spices. I also had a lamb intestine sandwich which is, in my opinion, the perfect bar food. The other’s don’t share this opinion.

We managed to get home thanks to Leah, Sarah, a map, and only a couple wrong turns to fall unconcious at about 1:00am local time. What a perfect way to start off Istanbul!

Rock the Fuck Out
Originally uploaded by apes_abroad.

Alright. We are about to be off to Turkey and the Mediteranean!

We are leaving today from Seattle with my cousins Pete and Leah after a month of hanging out in B.C. Thanks to Micheal Bayne and Natalie for putting us up for a night in Seattle and showing us around. Their place is crazy. It used to be a kind of small theatre space so it has scuff marks all over the ground excepting a stage-shaped rectangle and it has theatre lighting on the ceiling! How do you top that? Sarah took the opportunity to get some fantasy shots in. We also played tag, did cartwheels and got in some office-chair curling in their huge space.

B.C. was pretty awesome. We have some good pictures that still have to make it online. Played some awesome 8 player starcraft games with the whole family! Is your family that cool? My Mum agressively expands to swamp out her opponents with hydras. What’s your Mum’s Starcraft strat?

We also went on a picture taking expedition for my cousin Ariel with the express purpose of finding some animals to take pictures of. Doomed cause right? Never happen. Well turns out we found a tiny salamander, various bugs and slugs (one of which ended up on Sarah’s nose), and a freaking Tree Frog! So massive success on that front. Pics to come.

Here is hoping that our flight to Turkey is equally sucesful and that no volcanoes get it into their heads that we won’t be flying today.

Pics for this and future legs can be found on flickr: http://www.flickr.com/photos/apes_abroad/

Spelunky Logo
Originally uploaded by gerbil.llama.

I’ve been playing Spelunky all day and just wanted to get a few thoughts out of my head.

Most importantly: Spelunky is Nascar racing.

At some point I was trapped in a hotel room and ended up watching the Rednecks Turning Left show. I discovered that cars break down alot in Nascar. There are all sorts of things that can go wrong in Nascar from mechanical difficulties to cars running into eachother. What is interesting is that the percentage chance of something going wrong is proportional to how hard you’re driving your car. So if you take off like a hare you’re car is going to fall apart and you’re going to lose. But if you’re slow like a turtle everyone will pass you and you’ll lose. So Nascar is the game of balancing the two goals of going fast and not breaking down. It’s fundamentaly a calculus problem. Which seems to be amusing to the human brain.

Spelunky is almost exactly the same thing. But in Speluky speed is replaced by collecting gold.

Fascinatingly the goal in spelunky is not to beat a set number of levels. It is to get 100,000 gold to the guy standing at the end of level 4. But you can make multiple trips to fill him up. So if you take him 50,000 the first time you play and 50,000 the 2nd time then you’re done. But you can also play through ten times and take him 10,000 gold each time.

Spelunky is also fucking hard. Making breakdowns inevitable. So the longer you spend in the level the more likely you are to die. But the only way to get more gold is to spend longer in the level.

So you have to do the same kind of calculus Nascar teams do. What is the optimal amount of gold to grab each time through the level? If you try to get all 100,000 in one trip then you may die hundreds of times before you make it. But if you just grab 1,000 you have to play it at least 100 times!

This is a fantastic meta-game that gives each run purpose and meaning as every play you make is seen in the light of this risk/reward calculus.

What would make Spelunky really awesome is if Derek explained to you that this guy who wants 100,000 gold exists instead of making you wander off to the Spelunky Wiki to figure out how the fuck to save your progress.

Ok this isn’t going to be a very useful post. It’s just going to be me going “wha blah ha mah gah weeeee!”

It’s so good. Bryan Perfetto did the work and did it so well. inXile really came through on this. The iPhone version is undoubtably better than the original. I can take partial credit for some of the innovations that make it work so well on the tiny touch-screen. But only because I was in the room for some of the brain-storming. The guys at inXile really know what they’re doing.

So, yes. I am super pleased. I think it’s the best game in the app store.

Mirror’s Edge
Originally uploaded by kosmokomik.

Alright, I both procured and finished Mirror’s Edge yesterday. Despite running out of peas a couple of times trying to keep Sarah’s laptop from overheating.

It is a very interesting game. I have none of the common complaints about the game: too short, too much combat, too much head scratching trying to figure out which way to go rather than running.

The length felt just right. It felt like they wrung pretty much everything they could get out of the mechanics in that amount of time. More levels would have been pretty redundant. And you can always go do the hidden package/time trials thing to add another umpteen hours to your gameplay if you want more of what Mirror’s Edge is pushing.

Combat was solid and not very hard. Making mandatory combat an acceptable way to break up the levels and add a little depth.

Lastly, the “I can’t run everywhere because I don’t know where I’m going and I’m going to fall off a building” complaint. This I did not find. I was amazed how seldomly I got lost while running full-speed. With pain-stakingly crafted level wizzing past at one man-week a second.

This was actually a pretty neat part of the game. It’s one part follow the red things, one part route finding, and one part “guess what the level designer was thinking”. Taken in whole your first guess is usually right. And if you’re not sure there is this briliant little “point me to where I’m supposed to be going” button.

So you have all these little tools and clues to help you figure out which way you should be going, and after a while you’re just wizzing through the levels. But how fun is that wizzing? Probably not quite as fun as it should be.

Remember that this is Mirror’s Edge. Expectations are high. Expectations are through the roof.

I was utterly disapointed by it back when I played it at PAX. I thought it was going to be all “press the up button to go over obstacles, press the down button to go under them”. And so relegate itself to being a fancy game of simon says.

Then I played it a little bit at my little cousin’s place on his M$ Box. Asside from not being able to control it worth shit because console players are too stupid to use mice; I thought it was great. It seemed deep and rewarding. Not as good as I had hoped but still richer than I had thought.

Then I got a copy and played it through. And it _is_ just a big game of simon says. There are just more than the two buttons I thought there were. There are about four. So you run around pressing the right button to get over each given obstacle.

So I’m going back to my original PAX stand on the game: it fails to be great because it contains none of the fluid flow of movement or delicate balance of a human being actually running and jumping.

Which is understandable. Can I imagine how to make that game? No.

So Mirror’s Edge isn’t _great_ for a bunch of reasons. But it _is_ really fun and definitely worth playing through. Even if purisits might rather spend four hours in front of qwop: http://www.foddy.net/Athletics.html