Another Sign Twitter Might Be Off

Just this week two people, whom I'm not sure who they might actually be, signed up for my twitter feed.

That might not sound odd unless you go see my twitter feed. And that's the way it's been since day one. And probably the way it will remain. I've given twitter a bit of a hard rap, although I can finally get the appeal a little more as I browse Facebook status updates - essentially the same thing with, as it seems to me, less noise. I guess I live a life on the Internet where that can be a wildly lovely thing.

(Brin, Corv - sorry to have lead you to the dark cobwebs of twitter at somepoint...)

In pretty unrelated news, my old place of employ got their redesign out the door. This was a complicated affair and as I put it to my boss this morning, I'm happy to be simply whelmed.

I Declare The Following Cliche

Spent much of the last 24 hours playing video games with an old college roomie of mine. We realized that since playing Doom around the old fraternity house in the days of old that several concepts have moved into first person shooters which may now be wearing out their welcome:

Female Correspondents
Look, we all loved Cortana - but does that mean every shooter now needs an excuse to have some chick whisper instructions in my ear? We're playing Resistance and when the (already narrator) female character appears in the game, I declared "I bet she has a radio that we'll need.... yup, there it is..."

Crates
Enough said.

Transhumanism
From the undead soldiers of Doom to the Chimeran hybrids of yesteryear, with every Strogg and headcrabbed scientist in between - mutated humans have been done to death. Just stop with it already.

Dead Space Moves Up, Banned

Andrew of the clan EA dropped a note by to say that Dead Space has moved up its release date and will now drop on October 14th. Well, some places at least - apparently the title has been banned in Japan, China and Germany.

As marketing pushes go, Dead Space's has been pretty enjoyable. Watching the animated comic now off the PS3, showed off the trailer to a friend this afternoon and the ARGish No Known Survivors has plenty of appeal. It's marketing which is well designed to not just sell the product, but to expand the story around the game as well.

Game Play: D&D Tiny Adventures (Facebook)

It's almost like someone went back to my complaint about Facebook gaming and like, well, read it. Dungeons & Dragons: Tiny Adventures does not force you to hit up all your friends in order to level up - in fact they don't even embarrass themselves with one of those "click here to spam your entire address book" kind of screens.

Instead, the game offers up a simple interface, chock full of the lovely kind of artwork fans of D&D would expect, which allows you to push an adventurer off into danger and see what happens. You're control is minimal, which harkens back to the door games of old, but there's enough interaction with inventory management along with the well-written adventure events to make it interesting. As the events are time delayed, the game provides for an excellent periodic distraction throughout the day.

The social aspect allows you to help out friend's adventurers in need. Sadly, the real adventurer in need here is the game itself. The biggest problem the game has is that it doesn't always work. The server is about as reliable as an ex-girlfriend for about half the day and recently the team had to fall back to an earlier database.

Stability aside, it would be nice to see some more customization down the road. But largely, it would just be nice to be able to play the game.

For Sunday: The Front Fell Off

And yes, this is satire.

Game Play Quickies: Big Willy, The Force Unleashed Demo, Zak & Wiki and Tenchu

Generally when you're sick, if you aren't watching Robin Hood - you're playing games.

Destroy All Humans: Big Willy Unleashed (Wii)
I haven't been this wildly disappointed in a title in some time. The Girl and I are more or less fans of the series and probably would have been in line to play another one "just because" and while in general this game suffers from concepts which feel cut and pasted from the other titles - that's not the real crime here.

The real crime is that for the Wii this game was released half-cooked. The textures are simply inexcusable - sub PlayStation 2 for certain ... they'll make you wonder where your N64 controller is hiding. The HUD, and this might be some kind of odd HDTV conversion, looks miserable. There are weird additions to gameplay like hitting floating orbs to mind control which seem tacked on to appease someone who thought it would make for "good Wii play".

It's just bad, and in an cheap and ugly way.

The Force Unleashed Demo (PS3)
I think I had been warned about this in a preview - the problem with The Force Unleashed is that you'll run around slaughtering people left and right and the suddenly, jarringly, run into some boss or miniboss which gives you an absurd amount of difficulty. Even on hard I mowed down every bipedal foe in the demo except for the AT walker at the end. Which, damn you Kratos, seems to require beating up to a specific point and then engaging in some "follow the button" minigame to kill. If there was a game mechanic I wish people would think twice about using - this would be one of them.

Don't get me wrong - I'm either buying or renting this game. This is largely, though, because the Star Wars games end up being such better experiences than the movies (as the apparently wildly disappointing Clone Wars can prove). Basically if you want a good Star Wars movie these days, buy a game or call Genndy Tartakovsky.

Zak And Wiki (Wii)
Love it. Looove it. Wish I had unwrapped it when I got it so many moons ago. There's not much to say about the title since most everyone else has mooned excitedly about it - but it's an adventure title which harkens back to the good things about King's Quest with very little of the bad. Completely brilliant.

Tenchu: Wrath Of Heaven (PS2)
Remember when I bemoaned the lack of PS2 compatibility in the new PS3 models? This is the reason why. Tenchu still looks pretty decent upscaled and aside from some lingering camera issues still delivers the goods when it comes to sneaking around like a ninja, jumping on victims from above and doing very sinister animations on them.

TV Watch: Robin Hood, Season One

Being sick really kinda sucks. Sure, you get to do all of the things you normally would love to have an excuse to do - eat ice cream for dinner, shuffle around in pajamas, laze around on the couch and generally moan when someone asks you to do something responsible (this, unfortunately, turned into a kind of moaning recursive loop since The Girl was at least equally sick at the same time). You get to catch up on all sorts of video games and movies - but at the same time you feel like you're just waiting to feel better.

Basically trying to relax and have fun actually turns into a chore. It's evil.

So let me preface that my view of Robin Hood, BBC's recent television show about the classic, might be a bit colored by the above facts. That's not to say we didn't enjoy the show - and in fact devouring the entire 13 episode first season was a pretty decent chore while we shuffled about moaning like zombies.

Basically the show boils down to a very British version of Xena. The plots aren't terribly complicated, there's a bit of touch and go when it comes to history, and most of the plot points involve fight scenes involve fight scenes. It's not nearly as cheesy as the old Raimi shows, mind you, at least not usually - and by the end of the first season you see the some shadow of depth forming. The show tries admirably to flesh out Robin as a war veteran, hero of the people and lovesick puppy. When it works, it works well and when it doesn't - well, he's generally doing something tricky with a bow so you don't really care.

If anything sells the show, though, it's the Sheriff. The basic theme of the character is "someone evil who really enjoys his job" and it is played out for every ounce. Most of the other characters are moderately two dimensional, but still enjoyable and the while the show doesn't fall into the "he's good with knives" formula of story telling too much - we certainly hope the second season finds more plot motifs than "break into Nottingham Castle and get something out".

Recommended in that beach read kind of way.

Noknownsurvivors.com = fun with floating body parts

EA sent word along about the Dead Space related online puzzle / story (I won't quite call it an ARG, but you can see the similarity) NoKnownSurvivors.com, to "tell two equally tragic four chapter stories" using interactive 3D elements and what appears to be some pretty decent voice acting as well. Props to "the hub" as they call it, which would be those floating body parts which will unlock the stories as they are released.

Sadly these are the kind of things I wish I had more time to toy around with - but generally don't. Worth a poke if you've got some free time, though. If I get a chance to actually get a feel for the stories, I'll post some more.

For Sunday: First Ever Tech Support

Game Play: The Last Guy Demo (PSN)

The only real complaint I can make about The Last Guy is that I'm not sure I can agree with such a loose definition of the term "zombie". I mean, this is just the demo and we're already staring bouncy eyeballs in the, uh ... eye.

That's just not a zombie. It's an eyeball.

But in general the game is pretty much gold. You rush around, collecting people along the way and try to determine safe routes to get them back to the escape zone. Thebouncy happy dance music is completely in tune with the pace and atmosphere. The backdrops, drawn from satellite images, look amazing.

It's hard to tell just how long the simple concept will last - but based on the demo I'd would certainly be giving it a try.

What's Old Is New Again

This picture was cheerfully lifted from this article, talking about integrating rich media elements with consumer electronics for fancy information age mashups (more or less).

What's crazy is that when I saw that picture, I realized I had seen it before. Or rather one very, very much like it. I was at a conference in San Francisco held by a company some people might have heard of called Netscape where they were illustrating their new flagship, Communicator. Communicator was Netscape's salvo into what they thought would be the next generation of browsing: a one stop shop of information integrated deep into your computer where you could pick your email, schedule your life and get information pushed to you whenever it wanted.

At one session they pondered - why stop at computers? why not televisions? And showed a mockup of a baseball game with Internet fed information scrolling on the bottom. TV channels and push channels - all rolled into one.

Of course, another company we might have heard of was a bit annoyed at the idea of Communicator being the core location of their own flagship and spent many a dollars putting it back into a much smaller box.

And that certain company is not completely to blame, mind you. Communicator was full of weak points. Push channels never really took off. We now live very comfortably with their simpler, more portable and more maintainable cousin - RSS. Webtops in general were a pretty buggy affair (and I should know, I hacked one together for State Farm capable of launching Windows apps). Instead we have a modern web app world, where you don't really need either a webtop or a monolithic application capable of running all your apps in one stable.

But over a decade later, it's interesting how the song very much remains the same. It's a big world of information out there - and sooner or later it will get crammed onto my big TV.

Game Play: Warhawk

Well that was disappointing.

After reading a few reviews and being quite interested in the so called "4-player offline" mode. From what I read the game was a delightful little romp dogfighting while making good use of the PS3's motion sensing controller.

Thing is? Not so much. For one thing, "4 player offline" means "LAN". Yes, some reviewers are either reporting or repeating that this phrase but let's get specific - you cannot play Warhawk without being online somehow, be it your local network or the Internet.

Which really sucks because if there was ever a game that needed an offline mode it would be Warhawk. To be precise, Warhawk really needs a tutorial mode so that you can learn the controls before waltzing into a map and getting shot down over and over again while you can't figure out how to even aim.

I won't waste too much time complaining about a game I've already deleted from the hard drive, but let me finish with wondering why the hell they even have walking and driving portions to the game. It makes the entire offering feel like a cheap Halo knockoff - especially when they are the only bits you can figure out quickly.

Big thumbs down.

Movie Watch: Perfume - The Story Of A Murderer

Perfume is an odd corner of cinema. It's wonderfully shot, stars a handful of notable actors (including Dennis Hoffman), has a tight and interesting story and most people probably have never heard of it. The movie follows the life of perfume journeyman John-Baptiste who has "the greatest nose in the world". While that might sound like possibly the most dull concept in the world, read the subtitle again. Baptiste is a man who enters life in a gruesome way, lives abused and outcast and seeks desperately for the ability to cling on to the one thing he understands, aroma, in what quickly turns into brutal ways.

The main problem with Perfume isn't that it will bore you, but that the tone can feel to topple between drama and horror without submitting to either one. At time there are even moments which feel not necessarily light, but the narrative adds a kind of whimsical feel. Still, while not entirely unpredictable, Perfume will grab you with its unique plot and keep you until the end.

And again, the visuals are lush here. One of the curious things about HD is that a good DVD can upscale to the point where you might think it's Blu-Ray if the source material is good enough. Perfume is that kind of film.

Sony - Could I Have My Download?

Last night I did some purchases from the PSN. Mostly demos and that kind of thing, but I also rented The Bank Job as a backup movie for the coming weeks. I wanted to download it overnight since when we watched 30,000 B.C. it didn't work so well trying to watch it "on the fly" as it were.

Unfortunately it didn't work so well "as a download" last night. As in, it wouldn't download. It just sat there, stuck at 0% and wouldn't activate the download in background either.

Not really good behavior for a store selling downloadable content...

Game Play: Civ Revolution Game Level Bug

OK, so - seriously. What the hell?

I just tried to win a domination victory by besting the other civs in the year 2100.

I was closest to an economic victory by a narrow margin.
I was the only civ I know of to put anything into space.
I was the only civ who conquered another civ.
I was the cultural victor by a very wide margin.

Let's be clear: I could have won the game about forty turns ago.

The computer, however, in its wisdom - deemed me second place. As far as I know, despite the hours (and those hours are about four times what they need to be thanks to game crashes) I've put into this game there is no way I can win it even though all of the above is true.

Anyone from Firaxis care to explain this nonsense? This is seriously an impediment to me wanting to play the game any further, knowing that the computer will simply elect a winner based on anything but logic. Granted, this is Emperor mode - but the only victory I'm missing from Emperor is domination and I don't see that happening by capturing each capital with the all Civ pile-on which is the AI. And if another civ can beat out the "most points" rule by having a single edge in any of the categories, not sure if I can get it by hitting 2100 either...