Winner, Winner, Chicken Dinner!

I've mentioned that I live with my cousin Mark. One pleasant surprise of living with relatives is that I get to meet other relatives . . . who are not relatives.

From Grandma's birthday

For example, in Seattle are my Uncle Paul and Auntie Nancy; Uncle Paul is my blood relative. However, while living in Seattle, I also got to meet Auntie Nancy's side. (Here are "Uncle Wai," "Auntie Janice," and my mom at Grandma's birthday party.)

Back to LA: My Uncle John and Auntie Valerie live here; Uncle John is my blood relative. But recently, Auntie Valerie's niece Tish was visiting, and I was invited to the family dinner.

The dinner was held at "Mrs. Knott's Chicken Dinner Restaurant" near Knott's Berry Farm. The restaurant is a Southern California icon, and it was my first time there.



Relatives! Shown here are Tish's family (husband + 2 kids), Valerie's kids (+ their kids), and me (right side, second from the back).

From Dinner w/Tish et al.

More relatives! Besides John and Val, here are Tish's parents and Tish's husband's parents.

I was grateful that I got to meet everyone, even if we're not related by family. (But genetically, we all share at least 99% of our genetic code!)

And, yes, I was grateful also for the chicken dinner. Yummy!

Video Games: "Valkyria Chronicles" for the PS3

I love video games. I play them not as often as I would like, but more often than I should. My friend Glenn let me borrow "Valkyria Chronicles" (VC) for the Playstation 3, and I spent several dozen hours playing it recently.

VC is a turn-based, tactical strategy game in which you control a squad of soldiers. Since tactics are involved, you spend a lot of time looking at maps. Here, the blue circles with the funny icons are my guys, and the red circles with the funny icons are enemies. The yellow circle is the goal, and the concentric red circles are where enemy mortar shells will land.

Doesn't examining this map make you want to play the game? :-)

What makes VC unique is how you control each soldier. Instead of giving orders or moving soldiers on a grid, you control each soldier in a 3-D world. The game is turn-based, so while you're controlling one soldier, no one else moves . . . sort of. You'll have to play the game to understand. Anyway, the gist is that VC avoids the pressure of real-time strategy games and other 3-D worlds, but it still has immersion and emotion.

From Valkyria Chronicles

So, why did I take pictures of a video game? It was to document a particularly tricky mission in the game. In the picture at left, note the result for the number of turns used: 2. To a VC veteran, that says it all . . . almost.

You see, I love optimizing things. And games are easy to optimize, compared to reality. In this mission, "Escape from Forest Snare," a typical result is finishing the mission in 4 or 5 turns. If you're good or lucky, you can do it in 3 turns. But on the Internet, someone reported finishing the mission in 2 turns! The reported method required some tricks and a lot of patience, but it also sounded like an intriguing challenge.

In the end, I was able to duplicate the reported results (hence the last photo). But, I also discovered an incremental improvement to the reported method (hence the other photos). In VC jargon, I used only two "Double Movement" abilities, rather than three!

For most people in the world, that means absolutely nothing. For most people who've played Valkyria Chronicles, that still probably means nothing. Perhaps ten people in the entire world would appreciate this result.

But, I'm still glad I did it.