I’m currently watching the Microsoft press conference as I write this. So don’t mind the occasional “Oooooohhh”s and “Aaaaaah”s and “eh?”s. Wait, I can edit this.
I do like G4’s coverage of E3 events - their commentary is on par of what my friends and I discuss and I gotta say, I do thoroughly enjoy Kevin Pereira’s wit. “Halo made chanting monks cool again”. <3
I'm gonna have to get back to that later... I plan on posting in the next few days a bit more in depth - right now I'm playing catch up.
Sony - you know what I want to hear from your press conference. Two words: PRICE DROP! Blu Ray players are down to $150, you cannot warrant your system being so damn expensive. Refusing to admit your system is not worth as much money as you think it does shows a blatant disregard for your fans - the consumers. And that excuse for a PS3 bundle? Please. PUH-LEASE!
EA Sports Active arrived last week on Thursday. That day I set it up and proceeded to start a 30 Day Challenge. Since I praised Wii Fit at the time I got it, and then changed my mind - I’m going to do an update every few weeks on my review. Bottom line thus far: Thank you EA. Thank you.
I implemented a calendar widget I’m more excited about than I should be. I actually plan on scheduling gaming appointments through this. I’ve been wanting to organize times to play Left 4 Dead, Rock Band 2, Gears of War 2, etc with friends and family. I also wanted to find better ways of posting when webcam is up and running. Twitter was getting a bit old with that. By the way, anyone find a better free webcam agent than Stickam - lemme know.
In social news, I gotta say shame on you California Supreme Court. I’ve been thinking about what to say about this for a while but that’s all I can muster. It’s a crushing blow to human rights that I can’t believe passed. Calling the Prop 8 an amendment and not a revision was a gross mistake that I can’t figure out how it happened. All I can do is leave you with Stewart on this subject, while making fun of such an easy target: Michael Steele.
Huzzah! Oh very happy day! Good job Fox, I want to gripe you’re only extending it 13 more episodes thus far, but I’m hoping for the best, and am happy I get to see that much at least.
On to other stuff. I love Japan.
Here’s hoping if they import this game to the US they don’t change a single thing. Hell I think it’s even better non-translated.
So I haven’t been able to spend much time with Age of Conan or even Free Realms. Free Realms does have a very casual atmosphere, so the mini-games can be a bit draining after a while. But did I mention that it’s free? You just have to ignore the myriads of “Upgrade now!” and “Station Cash” links and buttons strewn throughout your screen, but again, free. My chick is here, and I stay on Server 4 when I play. Group 4 in the hizz-ouse - represent! What?! What?!
I’m sorry, I’ll never do that again.
But this week will be good! EA Sports Active arrives, and while most of my shows are over for the season, We were lent the first season of Battlestar Galactica, which Dan and I have yet to see. Plus I found out I can watch Naruto Shippuuden on Hulu. Huzzah for Hulu! I gotta say too, I’m intrigued by the Punch Out!! Wii remake. Heard some pretty awesome things about it, and my man is a huge Punch Out!! fan. Or at least he tells me every time that game gets brought up. Every. Time.
I hardly had time for Everquest 2, but I find myself recently resubscribing to Age of Conan and giving Free Realms a whirl. Bad Mary! *slaps wrist*
One plus side - Free Realms is… well… free. And while looks super kid friendly (because it is) it’s actually a ton of fun. You can get a $5 subscription fee a month version that enlarges your quest log capacity and unlocks more content in general - but you don’t need to because IT’S FREE. It’s tempting since it’s only five bucks, and when it comes to that quest log space it’s REALLY tempting, but again you don’t need to because IT’S FREE.
I really recommend everyone try Free Realms, there’s a ton of content and it’s pretty damn fun. Lots of mini games and the ability to play on any server is a huge perk. Of course, it’s not bug free - there’s some problems meeting up with group members occasionally, and let’s not talk about how declining someone to be on your friends list puts them on your friends list. But overall, it runs well enough… especially considering (did I mention this) IT’S FREE!
If you do end up paying for the subscription, you get to have pets. The biggest perk? You could be a ninja - with a pirate dog. What’s not to love?
You’re welcome for that annoying squirrel.
Now with Age of Conan, we’ll see how that goes. I whole-heartedly love the ingenuity with Conan, and it has amazing promise, I just think it doesn’t try as hard as it should. One of the reasons I left it was having a level 50 character (out of 80) with no new content. They really expected a level 50 character to mindlessly grind to the next tier of content at 60. No thanks, I’ll play a game that has something for me to play. Now coming back to it, they’ve remedied that situation and have a new load of content for my 50 Herald of Xotli to demolish - but there still seems to be a lot more work that needs to be done. It just doesn’t feel complete. It’s too early to say tho, I want to toy with it a bit more and there will be a major patch coming up drastically altering some mechanics, so who knows?
I hope you guys enjoyed pictures I posted from Eugene’s Bar 2.0 Party, I thoroughly enjoyed them as well. I have some video from the night, but I think I’ll save those for when the appropriate time to blackmail arrives. I’m gonna post some more pictures in a bit (when I find my copy of Adobe Photoshop lying around.) from an experiment I did with a Facebook application. It’s a farm town, you plant crops have them harvested and then plant again. I did the most natural thing you can do with a a blank template and turned it into a tetris playing field. It’s quite glorious. I just need to fuse the photos together to complete the process. Yes I am that special. Here’s a smaller picture of it actually
Krod Mandoon and the Flaming Sword of Fire - you have potential. It looks like you have a halfway decent story and the humor is humorous. I’m worried you putting out the sexual jokes a bit too much, and it normally wouldn’t be a problem but they really aren’t the funny parts. I worry for you my friend, stick with the eye rolling puns and sad jokes please - you’re doing ok with that part. Adult Swim. Seriously go away. I watched a show of yours called Look Around You for ten minutes last night and I can say without a doubt it is the stupidest thing you have ever aired. I turned the station to CNN and watched Lou Dobbs Tonight and was entertained more. Let me add - Lou Dobbs was covering a case of missing children and I was vastly more entertained than your show. Congratulations on proving me wrong about thinking you couldn’t possibly fail more than you did before.
I’m looking forward to EA Sports Active releasing later this month. Trying to break some bad habits before it comes out and use it as a stepping stone for improving my overall health. That makes me smart. I’ll miss you Sake. You sweet sweet nectar of life. For the time being I’m using Wii Fit’s 30 minute step session to get some activity going while watching The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. That was a tip from Tammi and I can say it was a good one. It doesn’t feel like it does much but the next day I can verify that very much yes it does do something. I’m also midway through writing my lengthy Wii Fit review… after that I’ll finish my Star Ocean: The Last Hope game and review it as well. If you read my previous statements in older posts about Wii Fit you can predict the outcome of that review. Star Ocean: The Last Hope, while it’s a good game, I can tell you right now I still prefer the PS1 version Star Ocean: The Second Story in the end. There’s a bit more too it than that and the overall outcome will not be one that many other will agree with (for good reason) but it’s a review. It’s personal and stuff. Jeez.
I hope everyone is doing well. I hope my sister has a fantastic birthday this Thursday (but she’ll probably be raiding in WoW?) and an early happy Mom’s Day to all the hot mommas out there. I’m just looking forward to a fantastic Benihana dinner with our EQ2 buddy Suzy. We’ll be recapping how awesome we are for pwning The Shadow Odyssey expansion group content boss - Varsoon. Yay, we win at EQ2! Suzy Fraps’ed a video of one of our kill I plan on posting later (this fight is insane) But we schooled him look like the two dollar whore he is. Don’t judge - his whoreness has been established before.
Yeah I’m watching Baseketball. Don’t hate, you know it’s a great movie. I respect any movie that uses Steve Perry as a strategy.
I’m thinking about cracking open Star Ocean today. Even tho I’m almost coming up on the end of the main story, I’ve come to a crossroad in deciding what to do. You see, there’s no way I’m going to get full completion on this playthru, so I do as many sidequests as possible or wait til the second time before doing all the extra work? Grargh! It sucks I even am considering passing it up - I blame achievements for this. I really honestly don’t care about having achievements that much on Xbox Live, but when you mix the aspect of achievements with RPG sidequests, it messes up my modjo.
I will say this, shame on you Star Ocean for poor planning. I’m now at the point where the game is basically done, so the sidequests I do want to work on I have to travel all over the galaxy for. This isn’t shocking - it’s a staple of RPGs to have this. Now Star Ocean is a three disc game, which isn’t normally a big deal. But get this, In order to go to some worlds, I have to swap discs. So to do the myriad of sidequests I have to spend a good portion of my time actively swapping discs. *Additionally* some of this stuff I have to do for quests involve making things thru item creation. So I’ll go to the first world, farm some monsters to get the materials to make items, then I have to go back to another world, which is on a seperate disc, to make the item (because you can only create items in one specific location). THEN I get to swap discs back to go to the first world to turn the damn quest in. Really?! What genius said “Nobody will think this will get old!”
There’s two worlds on one disc (that also contains the item creator), and three worlds on the other disc, it’s split nice and annoyingly even. Also, you can only hold 20 items. Now, it can take upwards of seven of one type of component to make one item through the creation process. Then the actual quest requires three of the end result item. Yes, that’s right, I’d need 21 of one component when I can only hold 20. Here’s exactly how this plays out. Disc swap to world, get 20 components, disc swap back, make two items, disc swap back, get one more item, disc swap back make the third and final item, and finally disc swap back to turn in. Really? Bad! Fail! Bad!
You know what they could’ve done? Made this easier on people who have the game installed to the harddrive. While you still need the game disc in tray to access a game installed on your harddrive, they could have just incorporated the same activation license on all discs. So, I could install disc two on my drive, have the game play off of disc three, and instead of swapping disc it just accesses the second disc on my drive since one of the game discs is in the tray and not require the exact disc to play it! It’s not that insane of an idea!
*Sigh* but alas… that’s just too logical I guess, I apologize. Even tho your characters are 85% irritating, and some of this crap is inexcusable, I still love ya Star Ocean. You’re still fun to play.
Speaking of fun to play I got a game called God Hand yesterday. It was on Amazon for 11 bucks, and I heard that it’s just stupid fun so I figured what the hell. I’ll play it a bit this week and let you all know if this two year old PS2 game is worth the cheap ass bones it’s selling for, but I got a good feeling.
OK and now to bitch. Family Guy and Adult Swim, it’s time we had a talk. I’ll start with Family Guy. Now we had some fun Guy. Your first season sucked some serious balls, but you picked up and did exceptionally well the following seasons. But now? Why is it so hard to come up with new jokes? The problem with rehashing everything that you already used is that when we see the jokes from the first time they were introduced we roll our eyes. It’s stale! And what the HELL is the deal with Conway Twiddy?? Using clips of his songs twice in the past was actually never funny. Playing an ENTIRE song of his on the show… can you make it more obvious your stalling for time? Same crap with the Christian Bale rant. Filling it in with Peter’s voice would’ve maybe been ok if you didn’t use the entire clip and then it wasn’t. Even. Funny.
Now you had two great opportunities to really do grand slams by having the Fox News segment and the Star Trek TNG segment. The Fox News rip was beyond lackluster and the subplot with Peter’s cartoon show was, again, a deliberate unfunny stall. But you had the whole TNG cast and you put the boring Meg and Brian plot line as the main focus? Really? Well at least when the cast was on it was pretty funny, and your sad re-hashed joke idea actually paid off with Whhhil Whheaton. I guess it’s good that you’re 1 for 20 now in rehashed joke being successful.
Adult Swim you are done. Two years ago you guys were supreme and unflappable. Even shows I didn’t care for were still enjoyable, and didn’t feel my soul draining away from watching them. Robot Chicken, Sealab 2021, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Boondocks, Venture Bros, Harvey Birdman, Morel Orel, Family Guy = solid. Your anime on the weekend ideas were more than welcome. Words could not describe how amazing your show line up was.
Then you took the anime off and proceeded to make fun of the people who complained about it. You didn’t make fun of the idiots, you made fun of ANYONE who disagreed. Then you stopped showing most of your regular line up. You added absolute shit shows that are Tim and Eric Boring Show, Squidbillies, King of the Hill, Assy McGee, Super Jail. None of these shows are entertaining, they fall into two categories of attempted humor. Humor through nonsense, and humor through offensiveness. Well King of the Hill… I never understood what they try to do besides be the longest running cartoon that refuses to have a plot or anything remotely entertaining. Tim and Eric tries to be funny through nonsense (like how Sealab, Harvey, and Aqua did) but the problem is they only have nonsense. Nonsense is not funny by default. They hired Michael Cera on their show to turn into a cat. That’s it. That was absolutely it - that was the joke. All of their shit is like this. And then Super Jail, Assy McGee and Squidbillies just try to be offensive and gross to be funny. Problem is again, they leave out the funny.
The cream of the crop? April Fools. For the night of April First, adult swim showed the absolute worst movie I have ever seen in my life called “The Room”. What was the joke? In between commercial breaks they put up a notice saying “What are you Fools watching?” Get it? Fools! April Fools! It’s funny! Wait, no it’s not… not at all. It’s just stupid. Adult Swim you just forgot what funny is.
On to other things. Jon Stewart amuses me. Especially when he talks to Fox.
So I mentioned before the chance of seeing Dollhouse for a second season looks grim, which is sad. The show grew on me pretty damn fast and I consider myself hooked. An interesting article a friend shared shows Joss himself is a bit pessimistic about the renewal as well. The article is a good read for Whedon fans (or fans of any of his shows) and it’s always interesting to see how much writers have control of their own shows. Such as:
When an audience member asked whether he saw it as troublesome that all the actives were unfailingly young and gorgeous, he acknowledged this to an extent, mentioning that early drafts of the show had involved actives of all shapes and sizes to reflect the fact that people’s fantasies don’t always adhere to Hollywood’s conception of attractiveness, and the beautifying of the Dollhouse was one of the realities of dealing with Fox. There had been an entire early subplot about an active named Tango who was an older woman, but sadly all of that had to go when the show’s direction changed.
Man I’m really hatin on Fox aren’t I? Eh, well, easy targets I guess.
Something I’m looking forward to? EA Sports Active. It’s EA’s new fitness game for the Wii. Now I bought into the Wii Fit last year and I don’t necessarily regret it. I think it was a great introduction into interactive fitness, but Wii Fit is not for everyone. First of all, Wii Fit is a game first and foremost. Having that scoreboard with all the activities is great in theory, but useless in practice. For one thing, it’s easy to find ways to “rig” the events to get a better score, not a better workout. Also the scoreboard idea in general causes more feelings of frustration than accomplishment several months in. Wii Fit focused also more on Yoga than cardio, and even when there was a solid cardio workout you could do, they were definitely the lacking parts of the game. The inability to set-up a workout regiment beforehand causes a hefty slow down in between events, which dramatically effects cardio. The dance segment was pretty slow (even at advanced), and fitness boxing was excellent but still had that annoying downtime between patterns. The running segment was horribly inaccurate, and I don’t know how they expected anything else when you have the option to hold the remote, put it in your front pocket, or put it in your back pocket - but had no way of indicating which you were doing in the game. There’s no way those movements between the three positions would accurately translate into the game.
So here’s where EA Sports Active can step up. The workouts they’ve selected are more intensive cardio work, they have preset 20/30 minute workouts, and the added resistance bands and leg strap are an excellent way to give a better workout and more accurate feedback.
Mostly, I’m glad they’re not trying to be a game. I think that’s where Wii Fit fell through by having it’s identity crisis. Hey I’m not faulting Wii Fit for failing, it’s just not for me. One workout does not work for everyone, I actually have a really hard time getting results from most exercise - it’s how my body type is. I did Pilates for a long time and became incredibly flexible and my posture was excellent, I just didn’t drop a single damn pound. Cardio has always given me the results I need and I think the line up they have is lookin right up my alley.
Oh and before I go, spend a quick second with this 1up article. It covers “Misleading Videogame Job Descriptions” and it’s a quick funny read. For instance, ninjas!
Have you ever played a videogame with a ninja in it? How did you know? Because if you saw ninjas, somebody wasn’t doing their job very well. I’ve yet to see a ninja game box cover that displays an empty room, so it’s safe to say that I’ve never actually played a real ninja game in my life.
Good stuff.
I think that’s all I have for now. I’m looking forward to an awesome DnD session this weekend, followed by a Bar 2.0 party as well hosted by Eugene. I have pictures from our last DnD session to post, and I’ll definitely have even more this weekend.
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