Well, here’s the secret recipe that Welch’s doesn’t want you to know!

INGREDIENTS

8 oz apple, grape, or other fruit juice
8 oz water

1. Pour all ingredients into a 16 oz glass.
2. Stir well with a spoon.
3. Enjoy!

Eat your heart out, Frugal in the Fruitlands.

(After the break, I get serious, and provide a crappy camera-phone photo.)

OK, I was at Hannaford yesterday, and I just had to take a photo of this:

That’s AquaJuice on the left.  It’s exactly what you fear it is: half juice, half water.

Seriously, are people actually dumb enough to buy this?

1. It’s available for pay-what-you-want-including-nothing download from their web site, but if you want a higher-bitrate version or a physical (CD or vinyl) copy, you have to pay a designated amount of money.  Sort of like an NPR pledge “gift.”
2. The music on it is Free as in Freedom, or at least, Creative Commons-licensed, although the liner notes aren’t super clear on exactly what the licensing terms are, unfortunately.

So, how’s the music?  To make a long story short, it’s good!  Some highlights (for me, on a first listen):

1. Pascagoula Pawn & Gun – a country/western song from Jim’s Big Ego!  “Had to pawn my gun to buy the bullets, had to sell the bullets to get the gun – one day I’ll get them both together, then everybody had better run!”  Hilarious.
2. Award Show – they’ve been doing this one at concerts for awhile, and it’s still funny.
3. International – Jim’s modern take on the Communist anthem, which, dare I say it, makes socialism catchy.
4. Depravity – as Jim says, depravity is all around us!  A wonderfully sarcastic slap at the right.
5. Utopia – a really beautiful song, the kind for which you take out the lighters at the concert.  Reminds me a lot of the earlier JBE and solo Jim albums.

To sum up – you may as well try it, it’s free!  And this band is clearly betting that, like a junkie, you’ll keep coming back for more.

UPDATE: Jim posted this on the band’s web site!  Also, he clarified the licensing terms for me, and I thought I should share his answer – the liner notes say “(cc) SANc”, which means the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike Non-Commercial license.  I had stupidly assumed that “SANc” was the name of his publisher.

The premise of the show is that it’s a collaboration between radio psychic Andras Jones and local folk-pop band Jim’s Big Ego.  The format is similar to Jones’ actual radio show – he puts his iPod in shuffle mode (figuratively speaking, I imagine) and has people call in with questions about their future.  Then he plays whatever song comes up next on his iPod and interprets it for them as the answer to their question.  This show is just like that, except instead of an iPod, there’s the band, and instead of shuffle mode, they have a big Wheel-of-Fortune style thing with the names of Jim’s Big Ego songs written on it.  Audience members submit questions on slips of paper, and the interpretation is done collaboratively by the audience member, Jones, and Jim Infantino (the Jim in Jim’s Big Ego).

I wasn’t really sure what to expect from this show.  Jim’s Big Ego is one of my favorite bands, but I was really skeptical about the premise.  I was especially afraid it would turn into a humorless John Edward-type affair where everyone was expected to take the fortunetelling aspect really seriously, and luckily it wasn’t like that at all.  Instead, it was fun, relaxed, and funny, with a whole lot of audience participation.

This is definitely the kind of show you can go back to multiple times, since the content’s almost guaranteed to be entirely different.  The show’s in town until mid-June, so I might be looking into getting a large-ish group together to go to it sometime towards the end of its stay here.  Anyway, highly recommended.

So how is it, as a collection?  Well, it’s not as great as one might hope:

• Unlike Sierra’s old collections, this one doesn’t include the original 16-color version of Space Quest I, just the VGA remake.  I do like the VGA remake better, but it would be nice to include the original too for nostalgia value.  Oh well, it’s easily downloaded from many sites of questionable legality.
• DOSBox works reasonably well for running the games, but for some of the later ones (6 especially) it lags in its default setup.  Repeatedly pressing Ctrl-F12 (to increase the cycle speed of the emulator) fixes the problem.  Given that they had to do custom configurations for each game anyway, you’d think they would have included sane settings in those configurations.
• Perhaps sloppiest of all, though – the CD nicely includes a PDF manual.  Unfortunately, it’s a PDF manual for one of Sierra’s old Space Quest collections, which didn’t include Space Quest 6.  Bah.  I’m pretty sure SQ6 includes a manual-based copy protection part, so I’ll likely have to visit an abandonware site to download a scan of the manual.

All that aside, though, it’s by far the easiest way to play the Space Quest games on a Windows XP machine available today.  If you haven’t played those games, I definitely recommend them – they’re essentially the sci-fi equivalent of Monkey Island.  Lots of fun.

I also finally got around to downloading and playing through Sam and Max Episode 2 – Situation: Comedy.  While this one is, as most of the reviewers said, smaller and easier than Episode 1, I actually liked the acting and dialogue writing better in this one than the first.  Not to give too much away, but I seriously hope the Skinbodies aren’t just some throwaway gag and they continue to show up in the series.

I’ve been playing Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney on the Nintendo DS. This is, without a doubt, my favorite computer or video game I have seen since 1997. Now, if you’re a gamer, you’re probably thinking, “for the love of God, why?” That’s a fair question. After all, between 1997 and now, we’ve seen Half Life 1 and 2, Halo, The Longest Journey, Dance Dance Revolution, Super Smash Bros., and a whole bunch of other games that were both more popular and arguably better games than either Phoenix Wright or CMI. To explain where I’m going with this, I’ll have to explain some of my personal biases in a little more detail.

Still with me? Good.

I am, first off, an old-school adventure gamer. Most of my favorite games come from LucasArts, Sierra, or similar outfits. There are some exceptions (my favorite game of all time, for example, is an RPG – Betrayal at Krondor), but by and large, adventure games are the only computer or video games that keep my interest for long.

In the early-to-mid 90′s (the late period of the heyday of graphical adventure games), I was pretty into most of the games that were coming out. LucasArts consistently turned out great releases. Sierra/Dynamix/Coktel Vision were a little bit more hit-and-miss, but they produced new games in enough quantity to have a pretty high hit rate.

So what happened? 2 things.

First off, the genre changed. The big turning point, of course, was Myst from Cyan Productions. You remember Myst. It, along with The 7th Guest, made everybody rush out and buy CD-ROM drives, and for good reason – those games offered a truly new experience for computer gamers. Never before had such realistic-looking and detailed graphics been seen in electronic games. Those games, Myst especially, were so popular that they changed the genre pretty much for good.

Problem is, Myst, at least in my humble opinion, isn’t really an adventure game – it’s more of a puzzle game wrapped in a fairly thin story. There’s hardly any real plot, at least in the first Myst game, although there’s plenty of atmosphere. And yeah, there are characters, but you can’t really interact with them in any meaningful way.

The other thing that happened is that around the same time, the market for adventure games started to wane. To grossly oversimplify matters, this is basically because of a certain game that came out in 1993 and spawned even more clones than Myst. Since first-person shooters are vastly cheaper to produce than adventure games and were selling like hotcakes at the time, game studios decided, probably correctly, that they’d be nuts not to make their next few projects FPS games instead of whatever other genre they might have otherwise produced.

Combine these two factors and you get the adventure game industry in 1998 – basically dead, with the exception of some studios making plot-light, low-production Myst clones, and a small number of established adventure game studios making niche products for a shrinking market. Then, in 1999, a little-known Norwegian studio published The Longest Journey. Billed as a truly innovative, unique game, TLJ is a quasi-metaphysical ramble that makes The Matrix Reloaded look easy to understand. This is the game that was supposed to save the adventure game. And, to a certain extent, it did. Some smaller outfits, largely publishing through The Adventure Company, have started making new, original adventure games, although the marketing for a lot of them makes them look suspiciously like The Longest Journey.

OK, so against that backdrop, you can probably imagine what a surprise Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney really is. It’s a cartoonish, humorous, old-style adventure game taking place largely in courtrooms, with the emphasis on conversation with other characters and unraveling fairly complicated murder-mystery plotlines. The game is well-translated from the original Japanese, and the jokes – which are enough to make even Guybrush Threepwood cringe – even managed to survive the translation process. On top of that, it’s a well-designed adventure game: for the most part, the game doesn’t make you hunt pixels, and the answers to the puzzles are logical and fair.

I haven’t quite finished the game yet, but I’m pretty close now, and I will definitely be buying the sequel when it ships early next year. I never thought I’d be saying this, but I’m so glad the 90s are back.

eric	Anybody else see Clerks II yet?
maw	eric: no 
maw	eric: hasn't made it here yet
maw	is it any good?
eric	I liked it.
maw	not as good as the first but still not half bad, i'm guessing
eric	It helps a lot to have seen the original.
eric	The original had the element of surprise going for it.

Yeah, pretty much.

Not bad, but I don’t think I’d have it again.

ZonePerfect Toffee Peanut flavor

My first thought upon opening the wraper was that the color of it is absolutely sickening. It’s this strange off-white vaguely reminiscent of the casing on an Apple ][e. This turned out to be white chocolate.

This bar actually tasted not unlike a Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup. I could certainly see myself eating another one of these, and I didn’t feel at all hungry afterwards. The only downside was that I was left very, very thirsty because this is one of the sweetest foods I’ve ever consumed.

PowerBar Harvest Whole Grain Toffee Chocolate Chip flavor

I guess we’re getting the toffee flavors right up front, eh? I had this one for breakfast today on the subway. This one looks like a granola bar sitting on top of a chocolate bar, with chocolate chips on front.

The grain/nut flavors were much more prevalent in this than in the ZonePerfect bar, and overall it wasn’t as sweet. After eating it, however, I was left feeling vaguely unsatisfied, probably because it doesn’t have as much protein as the other bar does.

There are currently 55 identical (or nearly so) Vekoma Boomerangs in operation today worldwide.

I highly recommend NOT going on this ride. It is violent, shaky, and overall a very unpleasant experience. Stepping off it, one feels a sensation not unlike a hangover. A friend who was on the ride with me at the time said that he felt “violated” after riding this roller coaster.

Consider yourself warned.

First, some positive points about the game:

• This is a very, very pretty game, even compared to earlier Myst titles (very nice-looking games in their own right). They’ve added a whole bunch of new, GPU-intensive effects like depth of field, lens flares, variable lighting, composited-on 3D animals, water effects, fire, etc., and it really adds to the feel of the game.
• Through the liberal use of journals and flashbacks, this game feels a lot more “charactery” than previous Myst games. As a result, the ending is a lot more satisfying than the one in (say) Riven, because you really got to know the principal characters through the course of the game.
• The writers and actors did a pretty good job of making the player wonder who to trust, right up until the last. Yeah, I picked the right one without the walkthrough’s help, but I did wonder.
• For once, Peter Gabriel actually makes a positive contribution to the soundtrack.

And some negatives:

• This game is HARD. Even by Myst standards, and that is really saying something. I would NEVER have made it through this game without my trusty walkthrough.
• Although most of the game is pretty interesting, I felt like Spire (Sirrus’s prison age) dragged quite a bit, mostly because it all pretty much looks the same, which is both monochromatic and dull.
• In order to get the game to run on my Intel iMac, I had to search for a workaround on the web. UbiSoft claims the game won’t run at all on Intel Macs, but hey.

Overall, I actually think it was my favorite Myst game of the ones I’ve played (Myst, Riven, most of Exile, a little Uru, and Revelation). Kudos to Team Revelation, this really looked like a labor of love on their part.

Now on to Myst V: End of Ages…