Check this out: Winston's Numbers.

Anyone who doesn't get the joke is no longer officially a Chicken Ranger. p_p

Well looks like the new implementation of Border Town, written using the cool Play! framework, just isn't cutting it.

Its sad because I really enjoyed experimenting with the Play! framework and the code that I've written so far in Scala is like a dream. I worked for nearly two years on a professional web site which used the JVM and came to really appreciate the technologies and was looking forward to utilizing that experience with my personal site.

Ultimately, however, I don't have the time or the computer to treat BT like its a professional job. I'm currently using a laptop that was white-hot in 2005; these days its fast enough for anything I do, except for Scala. This project made me realize that Scala is just too slow. I love it to death, I really do, but when you switch Play! (a Java framework whose claim to fame is the quick turn-around time) from Java to Scala page refreshes go from taking a second or two to in some cases half a minute and more if the JVM crashes due to lack of memory. I started the new version of Border Town in a Vagrant backed VM and had a good time hooking all the disparate components together with Bash scripts, but when I integrated Play! I had to start developing it on my host machine instead and only use the VM for infrequent tests. Even then, refreshing a page using Play! with Scala on my host machine with 2GB of RAM took longer than simple Java files hooked directly into Tomcat in my VM.

Its sad because Play! with Scala is otherwise so frickin' cool. The template language is based on Scala which means you get 100% type-safety in your views, which is amazing. Plus Scala is just a beautiful language which I've never had a chance to really dive into, and I was hopeful Border Town would present such an opportunity.

In the end though the overhead of setting all the garbage up to play with the site meant I never touched it. Silly errors that were one-line fixes got noticed, and then put off for several weeks as maintenance required a free morning during the weekend where I could turn on the Border Town VM, then turn on Play! on my host, and then remember how it all worked. Play! also used its own version of everything including its build system (i.e. no Maven or Ant) which was another layer to remember, and then when I went to deploy it on Tomcat I often found it broke due to typical Java issues such as a Jar getting included twice. If this had been my job or even something I worked on as often as I could in my free time I think I could've figured it all out and the time spent would've justified the productivity gains, but since that isn't the case eventually I just came to dread messing with the thing.

I'm not 100% sure what I'll do for the next version. PHP of course will have to be there. I hate PHP and never have “learned” it the idomatic, right way (assuming such a thing exists) but I'll be damned if the apps written for it like PhpBB and Wordpress aren't impressive. I'll start simple and see where I can go from there.

I played a PS Vita yesterday at a demo kiosk for a while, and the first thought I had was “oh no, these buttons are too small.”

I don't own a smart phone, a tablet, an e-reader, a 3DS, or any other current high priced portable. I've thought a lot about getting an iPhone or at least an iPod touch, but the lack of buttons and a d-pad really bothers me. What I want is an iPhone with buttons and the Vita seemed poised to hit the spot.

But it hit me as soon as I held it what a let-down the controls are. The buttons seem tinier than the ones on the Gameboy Advance, and they're cramped. They actually make the DS buttons seem graciously large and spacious.

The D-pad is also novel for a Sony product in that the center of it isn't submerged under the plastic like usual; its so tiny that this wouldn't have been possible. Amusingly enough that may make it better than a typical PS d-pad.

The analog sticks are the second problem. You have no idea how tiny they actually are until you hold the device in your hand, but the sensation is ridiculous. Normally with an analog stick your thumb should be able to comfortably and assuredly rest on top of it to move it around, but since this one is too small for that it felt as if my thumb was always slipping off a bit and pushing it from the sides. It was far different than the 3DS circle pad, which is concave and captures the base of the thumb. The analog nub feel like some cute, non-functioning miniature made for a craft fair. I lack the experience to say they were uncomfortable or unusable, but the feel was discombobulating.

The nubs are also so close to the buttons that it seems difficult to avoid hitting them while pressing the buttons or the d-pad. Its as if Sony didn't give a damn about people with large hands (perhaps moving the elements apart would have affected the look). I can literally lay the top half of my thumb down across the analog stick and press all four face buttons simultaneously.

The irony of it all is the Vita otherwise felt satisfyingly large and substantial in my hands. The screen is wonderful. It's bigger than an iPhone- I'm not sure if I'd want to browse the web or read on it for long hours compared to a tablet but it probably has the nicest screen of any portable game system ever made. The touch controls on both the front and back are wonderful. The triggers were also nice.

But man its a shame that the traditional controls aren't rock-solid when the rest of the package is this expensive. How it is that two decades after the SNES and Saturn giant companies still have trouble with d-pads and face buttons?

Finally, after using my wife's iPhone for the past six months I can't help but notice how zippy it is to switch and start up apps compared to the PS3. Since the Vita has more system RAM than the PS3 I hoped that Sony would have focused on making the transitions quicker, but so far that doesn't seem to be the case. Every application took what felt like ten or so seconds to load before it even showed loading screens, and even then it was half a minute (at least) of credits and menus before the game started. For some reason the demo kiosk had sound disabled, which was really stupid, because if I'd at least heard music or something when the games were loading it would've made it seem more responsive. To be fair maybe the games I tried all took a bit longer to load than will be the norm (just like Infinity Blade takes longer than normal to load on an iPhone). Going back to the home screen from within an app was at least quicker than accessing the PS3's OS menu from within an app.

The Megaman from Megaman One's US box art will be in the upcoming fighting game Street Fighter vs Tekken.

Every few years it seems like Capcom re-imagines Megaman with a fresh design to make him hip and cool for the next generation (i.e. Megaman to Megaman X, Megaman X to Megaman Zero, etc etc). Honestly, they should go all-out and make a new series starring this new fat guy to appeal to older, out of shape gamers like myself, and let me write the script. Just listen to his voice-acting- this is the kind of cheeze I could watch all day.

Also in the game from the Namco side will be Pac-Man, who in order to keep the dumbness at parity will spend the whole time riding a robot for no reason at all. If I was Namco I would've gone with the following re-imagined version of Dig-Dug from Namco X Capcom:

Oddly enough all these characters will be exclusive to the PS3.