In case you didn’t know, Microsoft Outlook is a steaming pile of shit. Sorry. I don’t have an anti-MS bias, and actually quite like some of their products, but Outlook makes me want to stab someone. Usually myself, if I’m forced to use it.

Unfortunately, board people at every company I’ve worked at love their Blackberries, love the scheduling, and love being able to have their assistants manage their calendars. And since CXO’s run the show, if your CXO likes Outlook, you use Outlook.

If it didn’t support an IMAP bridge I don’t know what I’d do. Probably get my stabbin’ stick out (see above). I don’t just hate Outlook, I also hate Exchange, but that’s another post.

My friend Stan has hated Outlook for some time, while being forced to use it. You see, if you are a CXO who hates Outlook, but have to interface with other CXO’s who use Outlook, you’ll have to use Outlook. If you’re trying to pitch someone on a partnership with your company, refusing to use the mail client they know and love isn’t the best starting tactic.

So, back at Lijit’s old offices, Stan would regularly come in with another "Outlook sucks" rant. I’d assure him that I knew quite well that it sucked, but the volume of individual things he’d come up with over the course of the year shocked me. I mean, I hate Outlook, so I use it as little as possible. He hates Outlook and had to use it for everything.

We’d always bug him about making a blog post to vent, but he never had time. But today I got an email, and the infamous "Outlook Sucks" megapost finally made it up there. Check it out!

My friend Jay IMs me a lot with weird movie titles he finds browsing Netflix’s new releases feed. They’re always interesting and sometimes the titles make you want to watch out of sheer potential for hilarity.

Of course, actually watching a terrible movie and making it funny is a tough process, but I think Jay’s got the chops.

Check it out, subscribe to the feed, and let FlixFlops pick out the comedy gold from the comedy turd for you.

I’ll just start this post by saying that I love my Nintendo DS. It’s by far the most fun I’ve had with any handheld console, and it beats out a few of the “real” consoles I’ve owned. I know some people still enjoy their original DS model (usually called a DS Fat), but in my option the DS lite blows away the Fat: it’s small, attractive, gets good battery life, and has a vibrant, bright screen.  I like my Wii, but if you pressed me on it I’d admit the game selection is pathetic: a zillion gimmick games, usually collections of minigames, and a few titles that stand out. When the DS first debuted several years ago, there was a lot of speculation that it would be full of gimmick titles searching for a way to bring the stylus in, but that hasn’t really proved to be the case. Lots of titles took good advantage of the new input method for innovative gameplay (for example, Trauma Center and Kirby Canvas Curse), and lots of classic gameplay was ported over or otherwise refreshed on titles for the DS. One such series that survived with its core gameplay intact is the Advance Wars series from Intelligent Systems.

 You can play Advance Wars without ever using the stylus on DS, although I find it a little easier to select and direct units by tapping and dragging than moving a square at a time with the D-pad.

Advance Wars is, essentially, a strategy game, and you might call it an RTS: you capture cities, factories, airports, and ports, and use the resources  you gather from your captured buildings to produce military units. Each unit has a certain move radius and firing radius, and each unit is strong versus some types, and weak versus others. Some units cannot move and attack in the same turn, while others can; some units must be adjacent to an enemy to attack, and some can attack from a distance.

What you get from all this is a system which is pretty simple to understand, but which contains really deep gameplay full of tactical nuances: on later levels, the AI will respond to the units you are building with the right combination of things to counter your strategy, so you can’t simply pick a single tactic and single-mindedly drive towards it. Create a bunch of tanks, and the AI will make a bunch of anti-tank artillery; the rock-paper-scissors nature of unit-on-unit matchups will then ensure the AI’s rocks absolutely spank your scissors. Later battles are often long-term fights of attrition to starve the other side of resources and eventually overwhelm the enemy force with your units. All in all, the gameplay is simple to pick up and extremely satisfying.

Of course, you are just fighting against an AI, which means, ultimately, it can never really be that challenging an opponent. The game addresses this problem through the somewhat cheap solution of stacking later battles against you, eventually giving more and more of a handicap to the AI. This fits in with the plot of the single-player game but can be pretty frustrating. Thankfully, Days of Ruin supports battles over Wi-Fi with other DS owners, after you exchange friend codes. 

This is the second appearance of the Advance Wars franchise on DS, the first being Dual Strike. Dual Strike was a great game that gave me hours of fun, but some of the mechanics were pretty busted - namely the CO dual strike. You could be trouncing the AI, but if you let them build up enough energy to perform a dual strike (essentially, taking 2 turns in a row with the benefits of 2 CO powers), their single combined turn could reverse the tide of battle. It was a little frustrating. Thankfully, Days of Ruin drops the dual strike mechanic. You still get CO powers, but they’re not quite as game-breaking.

 Days of Ruin maintains the excellent music score and sound effects from previous entries in the series. The plotline has been described as darker than earlier games in the series, and it’s true - the subject matter dealing with warring nations in a post-apocalypse Earth - but they’ve managed to work in a bunch of oddball humor, and, to be quite honest, plot is pretty much near the bottom of my list when evaluating an Advance Wars game.

 If you own a DS and liked Dual Strike, you should already have bought Days of Ruin. If you never played Dual Strike, but like RTS games, do yourself a favor and pick up… well, preferably both. If you can only pick up one, I’d say to start with Days of Ruin.  

Well, it’s taken a while to set up, but I’ve got WordPress running now on this new hosting, a Xen Virtual Machine running at slicehost. The backing engine is nginx with FastCGI and PHP. A fun tech experience to set up and one I’ll blog about soon. Also, lots of other things to do: add some images, flesh out the software page, and of course, install the wijit. I hope you enjoy my new blog.