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Sam's Story: Week 57 February 28, 2005
Okay, now what kind of person doesn't wave back to a baby? A cute little kids waves at you in public and you just ignore her? I mean COME ON!
Yes, Sam's newest thing is waving. She waves at me and Ger pretty much whenever we step more than 5 feet away, and she sporadically waves at people in public. I took her grocery shopping with me last night and she waved to some guy that was frowning at mangos as he poked and sniffed them. The guy looked right at Sam, who was waving and smiling at him, and then turned away to inspect some bananas. What, did a baby kill this guy's parents or something?
Anyway. Nothing huge to report on this week, other than after deciding that the swear jar wasn't a very aggressive savings strategy Geralyn decided to open a school savings account for Sam. We'll contribute a little bit each paycheck to make sure that Sam can attend the finest pre-schools. College? Pft. Yeah, right. She can pay for it the same way I did: have a mom that worked at the University library and got full tuition reimbursement.
The only other thing is that we've been experimenting with taking Sam to one nap a day. Everyone is telling us that kids her age start engaging in such marvels, and that it's awesome because they'll sleep for like 3 hours at a time, giving you a huge chunk of your day to do anything you want ...as long as you don't leave the house. Or make any noise. Sam has resisted, though. She seems to do fine missing the morning nap, especially if she's distracted, but she hasn't quite caught on to the idea of extending her other nap to compensate. So she wakes up from her afternoon nap after the typical hour, and then by early evening she's pissed at me, Ger, that talking frog that Nana gave her, and the world in general. Since filling her sippy cup with coffee is apparently out of the question, we'll just have to play it by ear.
Now, pictures:
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You may notice that we bought Sam a new book: The Velveteen Rabbit. I know this is a classic, but I'd never read it before. I was actually kind of surprised to find out that it's about a stuffed rabbit that, like a little boy's other toys, is somehow sentient. But when the boy gets some kind of disease all of his toys are thrown into the fire as they scream in horror and curse the cold, uncaring universe. Well, that last part happens off camera, but that's essentially right. Only somehow the Velveteen Rabbit is saved by magic and turned into a real rabbit so that he can eventually die of old age or a hunter's bullet.
So yeah. Great children's story. My kid's warped now.
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Sam greatly enjoys a good cardboard box.
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Flash!
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Sam, enjoying her fruit basket.
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At work I've started referring to my daily To Do list as "my Quest Log." I think I may be playing too much World of Warcraft.
Yes, I've taken a flying leap onto the World of Warcraft bandwagon and landed squarely in the dogpile. For the philistines among you, World of Warcraft (WoW), like its less talented and slightly buck-toothed brother EverQuest, is a "massively multiplayer role-playing game" (MMORPG) where you play with and against hundreds of other human players at the same time in the same game world. Despite attempts to break the mold, the emphasis is still on building a better and better character with better and better equipment and better and better abilities. It emphasises the "just a little more" hook and is kind of like crack cocaine injected directly into your eyeballs.
I held out on WoW for a really long time because I was literally afraid for my life. Not that I'd die, but that my life would be radically changed nonetheless. In college and grad school I was REALLY addicted to MUDs --that's "Multi-User Dungeions," the text-only predecessor to today's modern MMORPG. I managed to keep my grades up, but everything else was secondary. I'd get up at 4:30 or 5:00 IN THE MORNING so I could play for a couple of hours before work or school. I'd play between classes. I'd play late into the evening. I'd play while my girlfriend watched TV in the other room. On some Saturdays when I didn't have to study the sun would slide all the way across the sky without my even noticing.
I had "Leafy Greens," one of the most powerful characters on the whole MUD where I played, but it cost me a LOT of time. I was only set free when the University computer that hosted the MUD was abruptly shut down and never brought back. I pushed back from the keyboard, took a deep breath, and said "Okay, that's over. Never again."
But I did do it again last week when I bought WoW, installed it, and brought Leafy Greens back to life. I have to admit, it's been a really fun week and I love the game. It's well done in almost every respect, but I'll leave the high praise to the reviews. The game is so huge, though, that the intimate social aspect that I enjoyed so much in MUDS is largely lost. It seems that you can't really get to know the people you play with unless you join a guild or know them outside of the game.
And while I'm really into the game, I'm not really into it any more than I'm usually into a good game of any other kind. I want --badly-- to play it when I have free time, but I'm not obsessed with rearranging or paring down my schedule to create time to play it, and I still manage to shower every day and clean the cat box.
In the meantime, look me up on the Uther server, Alliance side as "Leafygreens" the Druid. I'll be on most evenings unless my real-life Quest Log needs attention.
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Taken while we were out this weekend, running around in the rain.
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It's been a busy weekend. As I mentioned, Sam has been sick last week with some kind of stomach bug. It started with projectile vomiting, but quickly moved on to explosive bowel movements. At one point she somehow managed to get the stuff up between her shoulder blades and the nape of her neck. I'm still not sure how that happened. Ger caught the brunt of it over the week, but I had a long weekend off work and got plenty myself. The good news is that she's over it all now; I've never been so happy to see a diaper full of solid poop.
Funny thing is that especially towards the end, Sam never really seemed upset or cranky unless she had just yarked all over herself. And since Ger and I were shopping for a new sofa set, we decided to tempt fate and spend most of this weekend out shopping. Having Sam along was like having a cute little time bomb in the back seat with a wet, squishy payload --and when she went off, it was time to GO HOME NOW NOW NOW. Still, by Sunday she was better, though the whole thing had worn her out.
Sam's still a good sport about things like this in general, but I've noticed that she's realized that if she sees something she wants she can cry and we'll usually give it to her. And if we don't give it to her quickly enough, she keeps kicking it up a notch until we do. Case in point: with all of Sam's nifty new toys, her favorite thing to play with appears to be a bowl of fruit. She loves to just sit there and put the fruit in and out of the basket. Last night she spotted the basket during dinner, pointed at it, and started screaming because we didn't immediately fetch it. We finally had to put the whole thing in the cupboard.
I know her bag of communication tricks isn't very deep at this point, but it still feels manipulative and I worry about it developing into a habit that she'll use to get what she wants all the way into her 40s. Yet she's too young to really be given orders, much less be reasoned with. Weren't things supposed to get more and more simple as she gets older? I guess I'll just have to turn to denial and alternative medicine.
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Developmentally, Sam is still trucking along. She can stand up by herself --we've seen her do it several times. She just doesn't seem very interested in repeating the feat too often. Her first tooth is almost completely in and it now has a little neighbor moving in right next door. Unfortunately because these two teeth are all alone and they're coming in kind of crookedly, when Sam smiles she looks kind of like a little hillbilly baby. If you know where I can get a tiny little banjo and corncob pipe, let me know.
Lastly, thanks to everyone who sent Valentine's Day gifts to Sam. She got an outfit from Nana and Grandpa Madigan, cash from her other grandparents, and two outfits and a cool little handmade photo album from her Aunt Shawn. That kid ended up doing better than anyone I know, and she's too young to even date. I guess everybody loves Sam.
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This picture was taken just right before Pietro the Giraffe achieved flight.
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More of Sam on Valentine's Day. The swing seems to have lost some of its charm of late, as she doesn't get bonkers for it any more.
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Sam wishes you a belated happy Valentine's Day. Sam's wardrobe provided by Nana and Grandpa.
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For those of you playing from home, Sam has been sick with some kind of stomach bug. I went in to check on her yesterday morning to find a big puddle of half-digested peas next to her in the crib. Which, you know, kind of explained the retching sound I had just heard over the baby moniter. If Ger managed to feed her anything at all yesterday I think she got a full refund a few minutes later, so basically Sam didn't eat at all yesterday. Then our DVD player broke and we couldn't even turn to our Ultimate Solution to Crankyness in the form of Baby Einstein DVDs.
Her crib was yark-free this morning when she woke up, though, so hopefully she'll be over it.
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Blast from the past. This is Sam at a mere
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I mentioned a while back how I was elected, through what I think was an uncontested race, to the office of "Vice President - Web Publications" for the Personnel Testing Council of Southern California. This is a fancy pants way of saying "Webmaster" as my duties seem to wholly consist of updating the website.
Unfortunately the old website (archived here) appears to have been done in a WYSIWYG editor. The code looked like someone had filled a paintball gun with <font> tags and unloaded the thing on the hapless web. It looked fine to the end user, but it made it hard for me to update. To remedy this I spent a chunk of my weekend recoding the whole thing from scratch. It's a very simple design, but I think it turned out okay. Observe for yourself.
I had told myself that I'd never code another site using HTML tables, and that my next web project would be structured and laid out using only the glory of cascading style sheets (a.k.a., "CSS"). I have yet to get around to teaching myself the necessary CSS skizzles, though, so the PTC-SC site makes use of tables. And you know what? I'm not so sure that's such a bad thing. I don't understand the bad rap HTML tables have gotten, really. I make good use of server-side includes and CSS for all the style stuff (no more <font> tags!) so it'd still be a snap to update the colors and layout. I only nested the tables one level deep at most, so page loading isn't a problem with today's modern super computers.
So honestly. Tables. Not that bad.
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Okay, so I'm using an old picture for today's pic of the day because I forgot to do it before leaving for work today. This is from a trip Ger and I took, pre-Samantha, to the San Diego Science Center. I actually can't wait to take Sam back.
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Swear Jar funds this week: $2.50. It would have been less, but the vending machine at work stole my money.
Sam's big thing this week has been using her walker, so now she has something in common with old people. I showed her how to push it and walk behind it one day, and now this is ALL she wants to do whenever it's in sight. She'll trot along behind it, giggling and gufawing like an imbecile (but in a cute way) until she rams into a wall. She'll then pull back a step and ram it a couple more times just to see if it'll give, then look at me and start squawking for me to remove this wall immediately so that she can get on about her business. So I get up, come over, turn her around, and send her off in the opposite direction like a wind-up toy. Giggle giggle, WHAM, bump bump, WAAAHH, repeat.
Sam's other thing this week is that she has started this low, slow, throaty laugh whenever she sees something coming that she likes --bath, nursing, food, drink, et cetera. She'll close her eyes halfway, curl her upper lip, and start going "Huh, huh, huh-huh-huh, huh huh." It sounds just like Beavis and Butt-Head, and it's as frightening as it is funny.
Talking has progressed a bit, so that she doesn't identify every animal as a cat. She still knows what a cat says ("Rower-rower-rower"), but has added what a turkey says ("Gagga-gagga-gagga") to her lexicon. I don't think she doesn't really understand the questions; rather, she just hears me say "cat" or "turkey" and knows what sound to make so that I laugh, smile, and clap. She's playing me like a fiddle, in other words. To test this, I asked her "Sammy, what does anything that's NOT a cat say?" She smiled at me and said "Rower-rower-ro--" at which point I jumped up, pointed at her, and shouted "WRONG! YOU LOSE! I'M STILL SMARTER THAN YOU! YEAH! UH! YEAH! UH-HUH!"
I'm now told that this kind of behavior is not appropriate, but I'm still not sure, as it wasn't specifically mentioned in the "What To Expect When You're Expecting" book I read.
Now, pictures:
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As you can see, over a quarter of those pictures are of her pushing her little walker around and looking pretty happy about it.
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I thought this was kind of a sweet picture. The secret to our eventual success with getting Sam to nap regularly was routine. Twice a day around the same times, read her two books. Then close the blinds and curtains, put her in her crib, and give her musical mobile two twists. She's almost always out like a light.
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With all the rain we've gotten lately, I really should cut it...
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Sam, trying to get into trouble. Her reach has really improved amazingly.
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With all of her toys made of molded plastic, Sam's favorite plaything is whatever's in our fruit basket. She loves to hold and slober all over the apples, oranges, and avacados we keep in there.
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Ger and I were arguing one day about what kind of cheese Sam likes better, Cheddar or Swiss. Yes, we argue about these kinds of things. Before we had a kid we debated politics, philosophy, and the ontological mysteries of the cosmos, but now it's pretty much "How much did Sam poop today?" and "Which cheese do you think she likes better?"
I figured, though, that we need not rely on pure speculation for the answer to this last question. If my Ph.D. in Psychology is good for anything, it's determining cheese preferences in little girls. So I concocted an experiment, ran it, and wrote up the results below. Yes, seriously.
The researcher was interested in cheese preferences among babies who are his daughter. The implications for such research include grocery shopping planning, general happiness of the population in question, and giving the researcher something stupid to write about on his blog.
A review of the baby literature yielded very little useful information. It has been found that babies prefer "Buh-buh" and "crapping themselves" but little substantive research has focused on dairy products in particular. Obviously, this highlights the tremendous value of the present research.
Given the dearth of research on the subject, the researcher was not comfortable specifying a specific hypothesis about cheese preference. Instead, he will simply test the null hypothesis:
The study employed a simple 2x1 within-subject, repeated measure design. The rest of this section describes the sample, stimulus materials, and procedure employed in the present research.
Sample
Uh, pretty much just Samantha. I really don't care about anybody else's kids, so she's the entire population of interest.
 Figure 1: The population |
Stimulus Materials
In an effort to keep the research manageable, the researcher decided to limit his investigation to Cheddar and Swiss cheeses. Also, these are the only ones we ever really get coupons for. A block of each cheese was procured from the local grocery store and each was cut into many half-inch cubes for a total of 76 pieces.
 Figure 2: Stimulus Materials |
Each type of cheese was then placed in a special, scientifically prepared, plastic container. Okay, they're not special containers. They were just these little Tupperware containers that we put all of Sam's food in. But we do it scientifically.
 Figure 3: Materials Preparation |
Procedure
Each day the researcher or his assistant (hi, Geralyn!) would run 5-7 experimental trials. Each trial involved sitting the Subject in a high chair and placing two cheese cubes --one Cheddar and one Swiss-- in front of her. It was then noted which type of cheese the Subject ate first and this information was coded on a specially prepared piece of paper. Using, uh, a pen. A scientific pen.
 Figure 4: An experimental trial in progress |
After the Subject made her choice, the remaining cheese cube was removed (often under protest by the Subject) and two more pieces were placed on the tray. The left/right order of the cubes was varied so that if the Subject had a preference for the cheese on the left or right that error variance would be evenly distributed across conditions.
Data collection was spread out over 12 days lest the Subject become really, really constipated.
Table 1 shows the distribution of cheese choices made by the Subject across all 76 experimental trials. The "Observed" row shows the number of each cheese cubes actually chosen while the "Expected" row shows the number of cubes one would expect her to choose if there were no preference.
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To test the Null Hypothesis of no preference, the researcher took the categorical data in Table 1 and conducted a Chi-Square analysis. As you may remember from your remedial math class in junior high, this is the formula for Chi-Square test:
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Where O is the Observed cheese choice for each type (Cheddar or Swiss) and E is the expected choice. Filling in the values from Table 1, we get an observed Chi-Square of 1.895:
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Referencing a table of Chi-Square distributions, it is noted that with 1 degrees of freedom, an observed Chi-Square of 1.895 does not reach the critical value for alpha = .05 (or even .10). Thus, the null hypothesis is not rejected.
Well, just like my dissertation and my master's thesis, I've once again failed to find significant results. Samantha appears to prefer neither Cheddar nor Swiss; she likes them both equally. During the course of the experiment she chose Swiss more often than Cheddar (44 Swiss cubes vs. 32 Cheddar cubes), but the difference was not large enough to rule out random chance as the cause as opposed to a taste preference.
Future research might investigate the question of whether the Subject more often prefers the cheese on the right- or left-hand side to the extent that this overwhelms any other preference.
So there. Can I get tenure now?
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Okay, this is the last of the GameSpy Beatdown pictures. I never drank Corona beer before moving to SoCal. In St. Louis it was always considered a cheap-o, poor quality substitute. You have to believe me, by the way, when I say that the alcohol abuse was kept to a minimum.
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On one of my frequent trips to work last week I heard a story on the radio about how some corporations are looking to blogs for feedback from their customers. The piece went on about how limited information could be when you get it from marketing surveys, and how many executives just LOOOVE to mingle directly (ironic?) with customers through corporate blogs. I guess the idea is that an exec could post a story or question on the company blog, like this one, and readers, like you, could post comments about it. One guy was quoted as saying that this kind of thing was much more useful than running focus groups.
Yeah. Right.
First off, I've been on the receiving end of scathing user feedback. When I ran FilePlanet.com we got hundreds of pieces of barely literate hate mail each day. We shut down the messageboards for the site because they were chock full of vitriol. Much of it was complaints that were either demonstrably untrue or against practices that we knew were necessary for our survival. Granted, you can still learn from that stuff and improve your communications, marketing, and help pages, but it's not nearly as wonderful as these guys think.
The real nail in the corporate-blog-as-information-source is that it's completely unstructured. A focus group or a survey you can direct, limit, and otherwise focus to issues that you know you want to find out more about. You can standardize the information that you bring in so that you can compare it to other measures and quantify it. "People love our toothpaste" isn't nearly as valuable as "74% of people who like our toothpaste say it's because of the taste, 10% because of the packaging, and 9% because of the scent." Granted, mine may not be everyone's experience and open forums like blogs might possibly be good for generating topics that you don't know about and thus can't ask about in the first place, but there are survey and focus group methodologies to accomplish that, too. And again, they can do it in a much cleaner fashion.
Of course, this whole thing has my motor running because it's only a small step to go from using blogs to gather information from customers to using them to gather information on employees, where survey and focus group methodologies are already used to great effect. I just hope that companies decide that a completely open-ended format is more appropriate just because it's gee-wiz high tech and snappy.
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Slayah, Sluggo, and China at the GameSpy Beatdown last weekend. At GameSpy we had this tradition of doing Jagermeister shots in the kitchen whenever we launched a new product. Here we did it for fun. For SOME reason --I never have figured out why-- we would traditionally chant "Satan! Satan! Satan! Wooo!" and then do the shot. I think one of our many Human Resources Directors quit on the spot upon seeing this.
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Another shot from the Beatdown LAN party at GameSpy last weekend. I think this was taken around 3 a.m., around the time I thought I'd better call it it a night and start my 1.5 hour drive back home.
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From the publisher:
I'm expecting brilliant, beautiful people doing brilliant, beautiful stuff.This is the story of a man who said that he would stop the motor of the world�and did. Was he a destroyer or the greatest of liberators? Why did he have to fight his battle, not against his enemies, but against those who needed him most, and his hardest battle against the woman he loved? What is the world�s motor�and the motive power of every man? You will know the answer to these questions when you discover the reason behind the baffling events that play havoc with the lives of the characters in this story.
Tremendous in its scope, this novel presents an astounding panorama of human life�from the productive genius who becomes a worthless playboy�to the great steel industrialist who does not know that he is working for his own destruction�to the philosopher who becomes a pirate�to the composer who gives up his career on the night of his triumph�to the woman who runs a transcontinental railroad�to the lowest track worker in her Terminal tunnels.
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Sam, watching something intently while I repeatedly blast her in the face with a camera flash.
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Swear jar funds: $0.
Ger and I have started a new program to help clean up our language around Samantha. It's not like we curse like longshoremen or Dick Cheney on the Senate floor, but we have occasionally use language that we don't want Sam repeating. To end this, we've taken up the time-honored tradition of the swear jar, into which we deposit $.25 each time we let slip a phrase like "damn" or "Tiajuana donkey show." We're just afraid that one day we'll hear Sam shout "cock!" when she's not playing with Ricky the Rooster. Each week I'll give you a running tally so you can more easily judge us.
The conundrum we've discovered with the swear jar, however, is what to do with the money. I mean, it's perfectly good, if ill-gotten, legal tender, so we can't just throw it out. At first we thought that we'd eventually use it to buy a nice dinner, but using our own bad behavior to reward ourselves seems wrong. And it would be too tempting to cuss my way up from the chicken fingers basket to the filet mignon. Then we considered putting it in a savings or toy account for Sam, but again I'd be encouraged to get her into an ivy league college with a foul mouth rather than a community college with a clean one. The compromise we agreed on was to periodically donate the swear jar's contents to our church. So now I'm looking forward to standing up, dumping a whole jar of nickels, quarters, and dimes into the offering plate, and shouting "Give this to the fucking poor!" as I flip one last quarter onto the pile. So everybody wins.
Curbing bad behavior in ourselves is one thing, but doing it in Sam is another. The future parenting duty that worries me the most has got to be disciplining Samantha. Oh, I'll do it, but I think all parents fear that if they dare to scold their youngster for doing something bad (making bathtub gin, for example), then that kid is going to HATE THEM FOR THE REST OF THEIR LIVES and petition the Court for a change of parentage. Whenever I see a parent with troublesome, ill-tempered kid I pray to sweet Jesus that He didn't take that whole thing with the offering plate too seriously and that He won't smite me by giving Sam similar ideas.
We've already started some discipline with Sam, though, and with surprisingly good results. The main two things we've gotten onto her for are standing up in the bathtub (which could result in falling and drowning) and playing with the stereo equipment (which could result in switching to the DVD player right in the middle of The Supernanny). We don't beat her with a sack of doorknobs or anything; we just lower our voices and say "No, Sammy. That's not appropriate." Sometimes if that doesn't work I blast her with a fog horn, but lately that's all it takes. She looks at us with a kind of "Oh geez, oh man, they're serious" expression and backs off. It's worked so well that I plan to use these same techniques, including the fog horn, years from now to prevent her from having casual sex.
And now, pictures:
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Not much else going on. Last night a friend of Ger's from her playgroup generously offered to watch Sam for the evening so that we could have a night out. For some reason it seems we choose to go get sushi whenever we come into such a boon, because we did so when Ger's parents first came to see Sam and the last time we had a sitter. Fortunately, we didn't come back to find the house empty and dark. I think we have this preference because eating sushi for us is a very leisurely affair where we sip green tea or saki and order a few pieces of raw fish at a time until we feel satiated. Contrast this with taking Sam to a typical family friendly restaurant where we wolf down deep fried meat while trying to simultaneously keep Sam from swiping our plates to the ground or dumping the salt shaker into her mouth. Eh, either way I guess it's better than staying at home.
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GameSpy Industries, one of my previous employers, used to regularly have LAN parties. This is where people bring their computers and hook them together to play video games. Alas, these "Beatdowns" have become very rare, but we had one this weekend. Here's a pic of my rig. Of course, I had to have Skippy the Llama with me.
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One more pick of Sam in her buggy.
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Samantha in the buggy that Aunt Shawn and Uncle Brent sent her for her birthday. Sam seemed mezmirized by the buggy, until she discovered she could BEEP. THE. HORN. FOR. TWENTY. MINUTES. BEEP! BEEP! BEEP!
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Just for fun, here's my computer desktop. At work, no less. What's on yours?
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The Internet is both wonderful in its brilliance and frightening in its stupidity. Witness the man who sold his forehead as advertising space to the tune of over $37,000. This was immediately followed by an auction for forehead popup blockers, proving that the Internet givith and the Internet taketh away. Then some pregnant woman auctioned off the space on her swollen belly (too bad a condom company didn't win) and some gal in Scottland auctioned off her cleavage.
My initial reactions to this were twofold. First, I was disgusted. Second, I thought I had to get in on the action. To that effect, I auctioned off my 12 month old daughter's forehead as ad space on which the winner could place whatever logo he wanted. The winning bid was $1.8 million and here's a photo of the delivered goods:
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In hindsight I really should have specified a temporary tattoo in the auction description, but what are you gonna do? I'm investing all of the winnings, though, in the form of a bet on the Patriots to win the Superbowl this weekend.
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From BarnesAndNoble.com:
I hope it doesn't get all preachy and stuff.The first book written by C. S. Lewis after his conversion,The Pilgrim�s Regress is, in a sense, the record of Lewis�s own search for meaning and spiritual satisfaction�a search that eventually led him to Christianity.
Here is the story of the pilgrim John and his odyssey to an enchanting island which has created in him an intense longing�a mysterious, sweet desire. John�s pursuit of this desire takes him through adventures with such people as Mr. Enlightenment, Media Halfways, Mr. Mammon, Mother Kirk, Mr. Sensible, and Mr. Humanist and through such cities as Thrill and Eschropolis as well as the Valley of Humiliation.
Though the dragons and giants here are different from those in Bunyan�s Pilgrim�s Progress, Lewis�s allegory performs the same function of enabling the author to say simply and through fantasy what would otherwise have demanded a full-length philosophy of religion.
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Geralyn made me go to Costco on a Sunday afternoon to get these flowers. COSTCO. SUNDAY. AFTERNOON.
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My preview of Star Wars Republic Commando for the PC went up on GameSpy.com today:
I'm usually skeptical about games based on movie franchises, and this goes double for Star Wars. Republic Commando, though, was actually really good, even in this preview build. It should do well.If the Star Wars movies are typically shown from the high-falootin' view of the Jedi Knights, then the hard-working Clone Troopers of Star Wars Republic Commando are your tour guides to the grittier, more brutal facets of the franchise. Republic Commando is a first-person shooter that lets you command a quartet of "deluxe model" Troopers on a variety of missions set in the movie timeline between Episode II and Episode III. Think early Stormtroopers, but they're the good guys at this point in the timeline and they can actually hit something when they shoot at it. The game is set in the Star Wars universe, but it lets you experience it in new ways.
Besides the Star Wars license, the game's main catch is that you're not one man against an entire army. You're ... well, four men against an entire army! Okay, technically you're four clones of one man against an entire army. But any way you tally it up, you take direct control of an elite squad leader and then command his three mates by using context-sensitive orders and global commands. Your squadmates do okay on their own, but if you see, for example, a spot suitable for sniping, you can point your crosshairs at it to bring up the "Engage Snipe Maneuver" command. Then, simply press the "use" key and one of your fellow commandos will rush to that spot and start picking off enemies until you either leave the area or tell him to stop. The system is simple, functional, and works well with other commands like "breach that door" or "man that turret."
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