Dynamics conservation in the Ras superfamily

The proposition that general fold architecture is preserved within a family of evolutionarily-related proteins is not controversial. The amino acid sequence of a protein determines its structure, and countless studies have substantiated the idea that proteins with similar sequences will adopt similar folded conformations. Because structure and dynamics are intrinsically linked, one could reasonably assume that many features of a protein's dynamics get conserved along with the fold. A growing number of experiments show that this is indeed the case, including a recent paper in Structure (1).

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Even more lab courtesy haiku

Alert your labmates
if your prep will require all
the lab's baffled flasks.

Refill or reorder
reagents before you empty
the goddamn bottle.

Touching toxins, gloves
go on. Touching telephones,
take those nasty things off.


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Capsule: Star Fox Adventures

Final Status: Complete.

Put this on your box: It's Star Fox without anything that you liked about Star Fox!

Most intriguing idea: Translating a sci-fi dogfighting character to a magical adventure setting. (It says intriguing there, folks, not good.)

Best design decision: The surprisingly smooth inventory/command system.

Worst design decision: The first-person targeting reticle's aggressive recentering behavior.

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Camp

The ultimate Camp statement: it's good because it's awful. ...Of course, one can't always say that.

—Susan Sontag, "Notes on 'Camp'"

This game is so bad, it's not just become good. It's pretty close to perfect.

—Jim Sterling, review of Deadly Premonition

Jim Sterling gave Deadly Premonition a score of 10 points out of a possible 10, easily the highest score the game received among major gaming review sites. In his review, he makes it plain that this game does not deserve that score in any "objective" sense. The graphics are dated, the gameplay is limited, and its systems pay too much attention to irrelevant details. This is to say nothing of its absurd plot and characters. In comparison to almost any other game, Deadly Premonition is awful, but within the bounds of a certain kind of sensibility, that does not preclude it from also being good. Sontag identifies that sensibility as Camp, and it's an idea worth thinking about in connection to games.

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One-button war

In comparison to systems like Pong or Pac-Man, modern games tend to be extremely complicated. An XBox 360 controller has 16 unique inputs, and many of the games for the system shift the meaning of those inputs contextually to multiply the possible ways a player can communicate intention to the game. But the complexity of controllers is a response to increasingly byzantine game systems, of which there are few better examples than the typical real-time strategy game, with its array of resources, buildings, and units. So it's refreshing to play a game that provides some RTS flavor without the need for a poster-sized command summary. Pax Britannica, from my friend Matthew Gallant and the other guys at No Fun Games, offers four-player deathmatch RTS using just one button.

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Prion diseases: protein is enough

Spongiform encephalopathies are transmissible diseases that can have a major economic impact on agricultural exports, and pose a significant challenge for surveillance of the food supply. Scientists generally believe that these diseases are transmitted via a self-propagating, aberrant conformation of the prion protein (PrP). This prion hypothesis suggests that PrP alone should be sufficient to cause symptoms or death. If this hypothesis is true, then it should be possible to reproduce the disease using recombinant proteins expressed in yeast or bacteria. In tomorrow's Science, researchers from Columbus and Shanghai report that they have managed to do this, establishing that PrP alone can account for prion disease transmission.

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The sea of broken dreams

During the initial hype cycle for BioShock 2, the game had the subtitle "Sea of Dreams". The player can find a recording in Siren Alley that ties this name into Dr. Sofia Lamb's view of Rapture itself. The world's brightest and most creative minds were drawn to Ryan's underwater would-be utopia, each trying to remodel its world to fit their own desires. BioShock drew much of its power from depicting the ways those dreams could grow out of control and become malignant obsessions. The sequel, in contrast, builds its world from the dreams that died. In many ways, the subject of BioShock 2 is failure.

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Why I used to love Santa Destroy

In Suda 51's No More Heroes, I loved the city of Santa Destroy. That's a controversial position, because Santa Destroy bored almost everyone else to tears — the excision of the city from the sequel, Desperate Struggle, was met with almost unanimous praise. Judged strictly by its impact on the gameplay, the town had few redeeming features, and there's not much point in disputing that. But Santa Destroy had value to No More Heroes in other ways. In excising it, the sequel lost something.

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What price eternity?

In 1951, Henrietta Lacks died of an incredibly fast-growing and invasive uterine cancer. She is still alive today, making vital contributions to our understanding of cancer and cellular biology. How a dead, uneducated black woman continues to live and provide valuable scientific insights, and why her children and grandchildren have not benefited from her legacy, is the subject of Rebecca Skloot's new book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (which you can buy from Amazon here).

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Regrettable steps

So, the spam has finally gotten to be a bit too irritating. I am leaving anonymous commenting available, but the CAPTCHA is on for at least the time being to see if that suppresses the spam. I have also posted a formal Comment Policy, as well as a Page of Shame describing my most irritating comment spam. Sorry for anyone who is inconvenienced by the CAPTCHA: consider this post to be the place for leaving complaints about that or the comment policy.
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Choosing what to complain about

My review of The Saboteur has gone live at GameCritics.com (spoiler alert: I really liked it!) after a modestly torturous rewrite. It's a vastly larger game than any I've reviewed before at that site, which led to an enormous imbalance between my notes and the size of the review. I spent almost 48 hours in the world of The Saboteur, which means I have many pages of notes that had to be boiled down significantly before I could get anywhere near a readable size. Games like this are so large that reviews could easily become a ponderous, ten-page affair, and there are a number of sites that don't put any reins on that kind of approach. Those bloated, feature-counting reviews are, in my opinion, part of the reason that game criticism has been slow to grow beyond software criticism. Yet, games are software, and they often have bugs or shortcomings that become increasingly obvious as more time is spent with them. A game like The Saboteur has tons of little things wrong with it, and some of the other games I've reviewed had a few little things wrong with them. When I write the review, I discard most of those criticisms, but I can imagine somebody reading those reviews and wondering why I didn't talk about problem X.

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Capsule: The Sky Crawlers - Innocent Aces

Final Status: Completed all main story missions on various difficulties

Put This on Your Box: It's Top Gun meets World War II!

Most Intriguing Idea: Making an arcade flight sim that controls somewhat like an actual airplane.

Best Design Decision: The tactical maneuver commands — done right, there's nothing wrong with "Press A for Awesome".

Worst Design Decision: Brevity.

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