Ressurected in New Cap City

Wow, it's been almost 2 months since my last post. Not that all three of you haven't been able to find something else to read ;)

In any case, this was worthy of bringing the mostly dead blog back for three reasons. First, it's in honor of Caprica being cancelled, a not entirely unsurprising event. Second, it's a sketch clip from Attack of the Show on G4, a channel I now longer get thanks to Directv and their asshole execs (which has a whole other rant at some other time). Thirdly and most importantly, It's got Alessandra Torresani in all sorts of Cosplay goodness and needs to be spread as far and as wide as possible.

Video Game - E3 2011 - Comedy

"Starbirds are breaking into our Destroyer, so we should get to unleashing the 5th Element." Best. Pickup. Line. Evar.

Also, that Slave Outfit has got to be in the top 5 greatest inventions.

Mixed signals

While I was looking into gifts from PBS, I came across this site. It's a blog about the prevention of teen suicide, a very worthy cause. The curious thing though, is the picture they decided to have on the site:

Maybe it's just me but it looks like a suicide pact to jump off a cliff. Nothing like discouraging kids from suicide by making it look fun. Is it supposed to be ironic? Who exactly chose this picture to represent the prevention of teen suicide?

Co-op Cake

As if I wasn't excited enough about Portal 2, the newest clip made me wet myself a little bit:

PC Games - E3 2011 - Portal 2

I've always had a love/hate relationship with online games. I love when they can be Co-op, hate the other stuff. With this clip, March can't come fast enough.

To Tom-Tom listen you must

This just may be worth getting a Tom-Tom unit:



Or for a set of directions to the dark side of GPS, the Vader Tom-Tom voice.

Busting a fakie ollie through a Portal

I'm not one that normally enjoys snowboarding videos, and I hate the X games. However, this was worth sharing, if only for the retro gaming references (and one not-so-retro reference).



Always a plus when a skater punk gets disintegrated...

Indie attitude

I love indie games. I try to play as many as possible. From brain-benders like Braid, to light flash games like Home Sheep Home, The Atomic Puzzle, Boomshine or Obechi (If you can't tell, Kongregate is one of my favorite time waster sites)

Anyway a relatively new one is on my radar (and thanks to the weekend Steam sale, in my possession), Gratuitus Space Battles. It's a game that boils the RTS game down to the battles, supposedly eliminating the resource gathering/unit building that can be the down side of most RTS games.

Anyway Cliff Harris was recently at the Develop Conference in England, participating in a panel of indie developers discussing "microdevelopers". Cliff was talking about the advantage of being a one man studio with the ability to support users on a one on one basis. As he discusses here, Marc Rein from Epic games loudly snorted derisively at this concept. Showing how larger companies really feel about their individual gamers. Not that Epic is really that epic in my mind, The Gears of War series is a piece of crap shooter that they keep re-releasing over and over.

Cliff sums it all up in his blog with a direct, "[Big] studio bosses trying to lecture me on how to communicate better with gamers? Fuck off.". Awesome, if I hadn't already bought his game I would anyway.

I laugh at your Roomba

Robot scientists are simultaneously advancing our lives and bringing us closer to our robot overlords (if the zombies don't kill us all first)

From the awesome folks at AotS, comes this Robot News report. This report starts with the creepiest damned thing I've ever seen in my life and ends with the most awesome:

Game Reviews - E3 2011 - Robot News

Seriously, it's a good thing the first one doesn't have legs or arms, I know it can't come after me too fast to eat my face. As far as the last robot? Really?!? Miller?!?! What a waste of beer-delivering technology...

Z-plan must have

From the people at Bestmadeco.com comes the next thing that every zombie apocalypse survivor must have, the Axe Sling.

Before now it was impossible to arm yourself with a double barreled shotgun and subcompact machine pistol at the same time while staying prepared for that inevitable gun jam or running out of ammo. For a mere $165, that's now a reality.

I think Max Brooks would be proud to know that companies are taking his advice...

Comicon Oddness

AoTS did a piece at Comicon about the weird collectibles. While the last one is simply cool (and Allison obviously has never camped), the first is definitely the oddest:

Video Games - E3 2011 - AOTS Exclusive

"Because tomorrow may never come." Awesome...

World Agricola

Those who play Agricola will get this, sorry to those that don't other than it's yet another world Cup joke, but I'm not a proud person....


Not really sure why it takes a brick to build. Maybe so you have something to throw at the person playing it...

I'm sorry Dave, you suck.

Starcraft 2 is about to be hopefully released! While there has been a lot of controversy about Blizzard's policies, it's still an exciting deal and Blizzard knows it. Now even software developers are jumping on the real money makers - Moichendizing!

The official Starcraft 2 hardware is available through Razer. Now you can own a mouse, keyboard and headset that have a backlit Starcraft 2 logo. Seriously, only noobs use a regular mouse (or those that don't have $320 to spend on them).

I have to admit, they're very cool. Come on, the keyboard flashes red when your base is being attacked! How cool is that? It does more too, the LEDs glow different colors depending on how well you're doing at the game. They flash green, yellow or red based on how many actions a minute you are using.

Great, now in addition to having my sexuality questioned by a 12 year old, my mouse will also let me know how bad I suck.

Interesting priorities

I always get a kick out of the wall ads in bars in the bathrooms. This one especially tickled my fancy ( and not in that way Snarky). It's for a local Harley-Davidson dealership that's displaying their 1000 mile service program and all the parts that are serviced. Note what #1 is:


That's right, their very impressive 28 point service program starts with the latch of the saddle bags.

Awesome.

Drumming tips

Maybe this is why I suck at the drums on Rock Band (jump to the 1:00 mark):



I'm totally going to trip playing this way next time. Although it will most likely result in me ruining another of the Doctor's drum set, but it's all in the name of rock right?

It's called playtesting

The newest game from Rock Star, the folks who brought us Grand Theft Auto, is Red Dead Redemption. It's a western sand box shooter/adventure game. It's on my radar, but only when it comes out for the PC.

In any case, there have been a few dedicated fans that have uncovered a few glitches. I'm not talking about invisible walls or bad cameras, I'm talking about things like flying bird people, talking dog gunslingers and viscous cougar men.

What kind of play testing did this game actually get? I have no idea how much time Youtube user Wheredabootz spent to find these glitches, but it still seems like a playtester should have found them first.

While they're all slightly creepy, this is my favorite:



WTF?

How many words are in BASTARD?

A while back DrHeimlich introduced me to WordMix, available on the Droid phone. It's an incredibly addictive little word game that is one of the few apps I've actually purchased. Wordmix scrambles a six letter word, then asks you to find all the possible words. My wife loves it just as much, she always wants to borrow my phone to play while we're driving. I find myself playing a round or two almost every day, certainly more than I should be. This is certainly TMI, but it's almost a necessity in the bathroom now.

What's arguably more disturbing, is that it has started to affect my reading. Thanks to this gorram game, I can't make it more than a few pages without dissecting a six letter word I come across looking for other words. I've caught myself staring at a word on the page for a few minutes before realizing I was actually reading to read the book. Fortunately, it hasn't gotten so bad that I feel the need to put the book down, pick up my phone and start playing....YET.

In the end, I feel I must send a large nod of thanks for introducing me to this game, and an even larger nod of hate to go along with it...

Multitask Hell

Here's a "fun" little time waster. Multitask is just that, how long can you go while the game adds various tasks to keep track of.

It starts easy - balance a ball with the left and right arrows, then avoid spikes with the up/down arrows while balancing the ball. Next comes moving a square to a target in using the wasd keys while ball balancing and spike dodging, and so on....

So far I can't get above 61 seconds - about a second into the fourth "task"...

Pickup Cookies

The "fortune" found in my cookie after we ordered Chinese for dinner the other night:

We've apparently completely abandoned the concept of fortunes. Now I get pick-up lines, and not even a good one.

For those who like to wait

Lately we've become pretty addicted to the Bertolli Skillet dinners. They're tasty, quick, and can be fixed in a skillet or in the microwave. Of course microwaving it usually only saves about two to three minutes, then there are the occasional meals from Opposite Land:

I have to wonder why microwaving this meal takes up to twice the time in a microwave...

Massively Underwhelming

A few months ago, Bioware released Mass Effect 2, a highly anticipated sequel to Mass Effect. I managed to finish it a while ago and my final impression was a very palpable, "Meh."

As with all Bioware games, the story is awesome. You can event import your character from the first game to get little NPC nods about your prior achievements.This has some interesting effects, if you happened to keep your Mass Effect save game. "Who the Hell did that?", you may ask and I would be right there with you. Fortunately a few people have created a database of all the possible save games available. Unfortunately, these nods are literally that, nods. A character may make a reference in passing to your first game experiences. That's it, no actual storyline changes, no impacts on the game, nothing. All things considered, it was pretty weak. Also, as with all Bioware games, there's tons of possible sex - though this time in a ABC family theater way. It was really pretty lame this time around.

Gameplay is lack luster. Each mission is a Xerox of the one before it. While there were minor story differences, the missions all had the same basic feel; Go Here-Fight-Go There-Fight Some More-Go Back. Rinse and repeat. While some of them had an interesting moral choice, most had the same vanilla feel about them. The most "interesting" thing about the missions were the ridiculous number of times that I got stuck on invisible walls or crates. The collision detection is horrible. Four or five times I found myself stuck on top of a barrier that I couldn't jump off of, forcing a restart of the mission. It was frakking irritating, especially since this is a basic issue that should have been caught in testing.

In Mass Effect, the player had to land on random planets and drive around in a Tonka/Weeble wobble car to collect resources for upgrades. In Mass Effect 2, the player has to mine minerals from various planets around the galaxy. This is interesting for about 24 seconds. After that it becomes one of the most tedious things I've ever done in a game. At one point I actually fell asleep doing this. I'm. Not.Kidding.

Plus, for some reason, Bioware decided to take a step away from the traditional RPG weapon comparison/selection. In ME2, you have the same basic weapons, and earn upgrades as the game progresses (see previous chapter). During all of the upgrades, however, the game never tells you the actual stat differences. You never know which weapons are more accurate, or do more damage.

In the end Mass Effect 2 was extremely disappointing in almost every way. The storyline was awesome, but I could have gotten that from the wiki page, and should have. Unlike the other Bioware games, I had absolutely NO desire to replay it and see the other endings, again Wiki was just fine with me.

Let me tell you, I can't wait to not spend my money on Mass Effect 3...

Aw, aren't Doc Brown's kids just the cutes....What the HELL?

The Back to the Future movies are some of my all time favorite movies. Thanks to those hyper-observant people on the interwebs, part three has a whole new meaning to me. I can't even begin to count the number of times I've seen the three movies, but have never noticed this:



Is it a request for a pee break or is Little Verne asking Elizabeth Shue for a Journey to the Center of the Earth??