I remember when I was kid the thing I wanted the most in the world was a video game system. Atari, Intellivision, whatever, it didn’t matter. So long as I could plug it into my TV and slowly kill off brain cells via quickly flashing lights I was in.

I was even well on my way one year only right before we were supposed to buy it I somehow managed to lose my glasses. Now the video gaming money turned into Grant-needs-to-see money and a rather stern lecture about economics and responsibility and a bunch of other stuff that had absolutely nothing to do with Pitfall or Frogger.

Not even my well thought out argument of “It’s your stupid genes that got me into this long distance vision mess” made any difference.

Funny how that didn’t work.

Eventually we did get an Atari 128k computer that could run all the cartridge games as well as other computer-y stuff. That then beget a 386 with a VGA card, a NES, a Super NES, a 486, a Pentium-something-or-another, a PlayStation, a Nintendo 64, another Pentium-something-or-another, and finally an Xbox. It was around the time of the last Pentium and the Xbox that I knew the steam was running out for my gaming career though.

The part I liked about console games was making fun of your friends while playing. And even though Xbox Live kinda sorta allowed that to happen remotely it just wasn’t the same. (Like when a buddy is concentrating real hard on some jump/putt/shot and you hit him in the head with a football. You can’t replicate that one the internet.) PC gaming didn’t fair much better in that the unholy marriage between game designers and the video card makers had the look of something that would quickly lead me to the poor house.

So, long story only slightly shorter, I’ve more or less not played video games in the last five years. Sure there will be the occasional digging out of the Xbox for old times sake when the out of town friends come over but that’s about it. Through it all, however, I still like video game reviews. I think its because years ago a friend turned me onto to Old Man Murray and its, how to put this nicely, colorful method of writing. It was witty and sharp (and vulgar) and for some reason it just tickled my funny bone. Heck the site is still alive and kicking even though it hasn’t been updated in over five years.

Special note: If there is even a remote chance that you’ll get offended by, well, any of the usual stuff that people get offended by then just skip Old Man Murray. And dear god skip the upcoming site with the videos.

Imagine my surprise recently then when I got forwarded a link to the work of a guy who calls himself Yahtzee. If you’re skipping the videos from that link for fear of being offended reasons lets just say he reviews video games by making cartoon animations while reading a ten minute script in like four minutes. Oh and with a British accent. It’s brilliant.

And, to top it all off, he claims in his posts that one of his major influences was Old Man Murray. What could be better. Anyhow, here is his video about his videos, which should be pretty safe for everyone. Don’t blame me if you can’t stop watching them all though.

So from my last post I got a comment from Jonathan to basically do his homework for him. To make life easier for you the reader here’s the comment:

So can you give me a full analysis on Word vs. Pages? I’ve considered buying Pages, but I’m not sure if it’s the right thing to do.

Comment by Jonathan — October 19, 2007 @ 7:06 pm

Fear not poor Jonathan, I am here to light the way with my first ever Word vs. Pages totally subjective review. Oh and science has no place here, this will just be a lot of observations and screenshots. It’s best not to ask for things like say, evidence, just accepting on blind faith will make this all go a lot more smoothly.

Starting with my all-time favorite, the Blank Template, Pages looks like this in its default view:

Word? Looks pretty much the same save for the lack of a unified toolbar:

Even though the Word toolbars are annoying as all get out I’m not going to ding them for that. The Word 2008 release is coming in January and from the screenshots I’ve seen this has been fixed. I also feel bad for the Word team at Microsoft. They have this product that has always sold well for them and then Apple goes and changes their processors to Intel AND does so in a manner that anything written in CodeWarrior becomes a huge pain to port. I wonder if Apple poured sugar in their gas tanks too or if they thought that this was enough.

Now Word has this little view tab thingie in the lower left hand corner which changes how the main editing window is displayed:

Choosing the first one gives the default view and the third one shows the full page view. The second one gives this outline view:

I’ve never used the outline view and much to my surprise there was a fourth view, the notebook view. Clicking on it either creates a new document or it transmogrifies your current document into a notebook one.

Considering I had no idea what this was going to do I chose the new document option.

Look at that, it looks like lined paper from a notebook. I guess you’d use this for taking notes or something. Like if you were in class and you weren’t playing with IM/Facebook/MySpace.

Now Pages really only has two modes, normal and page layout. (i.e. The one to create things like newsletters that most people never choose.) You can’t flip back and forth between these two though. The only time you get to choose is when you create the document:

Now I’m a man with a newsletter writer tool in need of a newsletter:

One of the features of Word that I do use a great deal is the change tracking and commenting. You get to it by clicking these icons in the toolbar.

The icons in Pages are so close to the Word ones that you’d think they were separated at birth:

Pages then highlights your edits in this gutter on the left hand side with arrows pointing back into the main text.

I think I generally like how this is done but I’ll admit that I am a little surprised that the changes and comment boxes are square. It seems like Apple generally likes to make things like this a little bubbly.

In contrast this feature in Word is my mortal enemy. No matter how many times I do it I get my inline comment view, which looks a great deal like Pages’ version, into a situation that looks like this:

with all the changes showing up at the bottom of the window:

Then I have to mess around looking for how to change it because I never bother to write it down or take notes or do anything reasonable like that. I’m pretty sure that you have change to full page view to get it to work like I want, only when I did it today:

Figures. I guess that kinda sums everything up though doesn’t it.

Sometimes an email that crosses through my inbox that really catches my attention. A recent example of this phenomenon:

“Joost beta is not available for Mac”

So I opened it up thinking that for some reason the Joost guys had dumped Apple completely. Turns out the “not” was supposed to read “now” which pretty much means the exact opposite. I figured having invested two seconds into this so far that I may as well sign up. A few minutes later I got the beta acceptable email and downloaded the client. It didn’t take long to find this…

Yep, that’s full screen GI Joe right on the old laptop. This got me thinking:

Grant (right now): Wow, I don’t remember them bending reality so much on this show as a kid. I guess the thought of a giant teleporter machine that runs on red crystals, water, and dirt seemed scientifically reasonable back then.

Grant (as a kid): No way I’m ever going to be able to watch EVERY SINGLE AWESOME EPISODE on a computer. And a computer that has NO WIRES attached to it, yeah right.

The software itself worked fine except when it didn’t. (How’s that for profound?) It’s been a long time since I’ve written used software that a kill -9 didn’t stop. That only happened once though, the other times kill -9 worked great.

The one kind of strange thing is how it handles commercials. I’m thinking that the 1980’s animators didn’t really have distributed network video delivery in mind when they wrote the shows, so a commercial would sometimes randomly start right in the middle of the action. On the bright side, the commercials worked as well as TV commercials in that I have little recollection of what products were being pushed. All I remember is that LaDanian Thomlinson ran around in one and there was one of a dude that was painted silver. I’ll have to pay more attention next time, but I’m not currently in the market for a running back or silver paint so it probably just didn’t resonate with me.

Nitpicks aside, I give it a solid: