Of some note…
Blizzard announced today that Warcraft 3 has gone “Gold Master” and should be on store shelves July 3rd. The packages will retail for $55-$60 and contain versions for Windows 98/ME/200/XP and MacOS 9/X on the same discs.
This is only of interest to one or two of the people on my friends list, but will explain why we stop hearing from them next month. 🙂
Editorial
Got a newsletter from starwars.com which mentioned some of the visual (and one audio) Easter Eggs in Episode 2. What interests me is that despite the fact that Lucas has expressed a basic lack of interest in the “Expanded Universe”, one of the secret items is a freighter which has only ever appeared in the EU. (Talon Karrde’s freighter Wild Karrde is visible for an eyeblink in one scene).
I wish Lucas understood that the Star Wars universe isn’t his personal property any more, and it’s his own fault. Any time a storyteller does as good a job as he did with the first trilogy, people will take it to their hearts and run with it. Just ask Lewis Carroll, or Edgar Rice Burroughs, or Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. SW is Lucas’ legal property, sure., and it wouldn’t exist without him, but it resides in more places now than just his head.
Would Star Trek be on its fifth incarnation if the show was still under Gene Roddenberry’s inflexible hand? I don’t believe so.
Ah well… even with his blessing removed, the fans and pros will still continue their own Star Wars… and in this creative age, some of it will be as good or better than Lucas’ “vision”.
And I just heard that “Jedi Knight II” will be ported to the Mac and will run on my machine. Soon, I’ll be wielding a lightsaber just like Mace Windu. Okay, Anakin Skywalker. Would you believe Han Solo in Episode V?
Ready to LAN Par-tay
Blizzard Entertainment announced their OS X 1.0.9d patches for both Diablo II and the Lord of Destruction expansion pack. The carbonized patch allows gamers to play the Classic Mac OS version of Diablo II in X and introduce their Barbarians and Necromancers to the world outside Classic.
More Oscar Fallout
This was part of last night’s “Vote Early, Vote Often!” poll on As The Apple Turns, a weekday Mac news and rumors site. Some of the choices only make sense if you follow Mac stuff carefully: however…
“What did you find most disappointing about the 74th Annual Academy Awards?”
3) Boy, you’d think that Halle Berry could have mustered up at least a little emotion
4) Not nearly enough onscreen violence between the Pixarians and the Shrek team
5) After sixteen nominations, Randy Newman only finally won once he started to look eerily like Roger Ebert
Half-Life: what most computer gamers are lucky to have
I finally finished Deus Ex last night. It’s a computer game set in a cyberpunk near-future world where civilisation is completely dependent on a futuristic Internet, and a mysterious plague is ravaging humanity – though it seems to leave the rich and powerful untouched. You begin the game playing a technologically enhanced special agent for the UN Anti-Terrorist Organization, but by the end, your loyalties have shifted multiple times as you learn more about what’s really going on and who you really are.
At the end of the game, I had three choices (each of which would require some difficult gameplay):
1) Join myself to the master computer controlling and monitoring the Internet (as the bad guy had intended to), and help it rule the world, hopefully with compassion and ethics…
2) Shut down the computer and help the Illuminati (who aided me through the latter half of the game) to return to secretly manipulating humanity from behind the scenes – with myself as one of the new puppeteers…
3) Destroy the computer in a manner that would wipe out the future Internet and give the world the chance to choose its own path out of the mini-Dark Age which would follow.
In the end, I chose option 1. But boy did they leave themselves plot threads for Deus Ex 2, now in pre-production…
And of course, the week I finially get Deus Ex out of the way, Ambrosia Software releases Escape Velocity: Nova. If one owns a Macintosh, the Escape Velocity games are the kind of games where you sit down to play 30 minutes and come out of your hypnosis 6 hours later; this one’s the newest, prettiest, and plays under OS X…
…what’s that, Blizzard? You say you expect the OS X version of Diablo 2 to be ready in about 15 days? Nooooo….
Where’s that lottery money?
So, this morning in Tokyo, Steve Jobs announced a 10 gigabyte iPod for $500. I’m not sure that if added every CD I own to my MP3 collection that I’d have 10 gigs, even if I tossed in a gig of files to use it as an emergency boot drive. Heck, put a color screen on that puppy and you could watch ripped DVDs off of it!
Apple: “Yes, we’re expensive. But isn’t this cool?”
Pre-lunchtime thoughts
The Macintosh SE gathering dust in my office is currently worth about $15 bucks on the open market. It was a $3700 system when it came out (thank Ghu I didn’t pay that.)
To prove my geek credentials, I got the Tron 20th Anniversary DVD a couple weeks ago. If that movie had nothing else (and many would say that it did have nothing else), it had great visuals that drew you in when the ‘story’ and ‘acting’ couldn’t. The art director for the film makes an interesting comment on the DVD, claiming “If we’d had the technology then to produce the realistic effects we can now, I’m not sure that the visual style would have been as memorable.”
Sometimes artistic beauty springs from limitations.
I’m also amused that the Light Cycle contest, a sequence took weeks of pre-rendering at the time, can now be rendered on the fly as a playable game by any competent desktop computer.
Ahhh… the technology curve.
I am going to rant now.
A friend of mine has a website she updates once a week. I have been visiting and enjoying this site for two years, chatted with her about it on Yahoo! Messenger, and corresponded with her by e-mail, We’ve exchanged pictures of spouses and (in her case) child, and get along pretty well. But she has other things to do besides learn HTML, so she has a friend build her site with updates she passes along.
And now I can’t get in her site. Why? Because her webmaster has fallen in love with the nonstandard JavaScript tricks available to Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.
I use a Macintosh. I don’t apologize for that, I love it. It’s not perfect, I can point out some of the issues involved long before any Windows user can, but it’s a solid machine that I can get all my work done on. Just about the only thing I haven’t been able to do with my Mac is play “Half-Life”, and even that’s been ported to the PlayStation 2 now.
So I write politely to the webmaster, pointing out that the latest IE I can access is 5.1, and suggesting that he might want to design a more flexible site. Heck, with JavaScript you can ask the browser who it is and reconfigure on the fly.
What do I hear back? “Can’t be bothered. Your machine sucks. Why don’t you buy a PC?”
I gently point out that there are still plenty of users out there who don’t use Windows. Heck, some of the Windows users I know won’t install IE 6 ’cause (I’m told) it’s a buggy, bloated piece of work that rewrites half your system when you install it. Does he want to block every one of those users from his sites?
Response? “Don’t care. Buy a PC so you can look at my site. If Macs were so great, they could handle IE 6 JavaScript.”
At this point, I realized, I was talking to a brick wall. I’m not bothering to respond by telling him that I can, if I want, run a more cutting edge version of MS Office than he can and get great framerate in Quake III at the same time. But I have to miss out on a friend’s website because he’s some l33t idiot who figures, “The hell with standards; it’s from Redmond, so it’s perfection and the wave of the future!”
I’m done now. I wish to point out here that in no part of this rant have I been rude about the general capabilities of PCs as hardware, or of Windows as an operating system.
New iMacs are up
Pictures leaked courtesy of Time Magazine.
Should be easy to recognize these puppies on TV or magazine photos!
Weeks without posting and this is the best I could do
Apple’s announcing new product at next week’s Macworld Expo. My reliable insider sites have been saying things like “1.2 gigaherz G4 PowerMacs” and “cheaper, smaller, lighter iMacs with 15 inch LCD screens”, not to mention possible bugfixes to OS X.
This week, Apple’s put blurbs on their front page such as “Far Beyond The Rumor Sites”. This, of course, has the rumor sites whipped into even more of a frenzy. Here’s the latest: a Apple PDA to compete with all those Palm and Windows CE machines out there.
http://www.spymac.com posted this image, along with a video (which you have to register to see).
If Apple sold a PDA, and it was competitively priced against a Palm, I’d consider it. But it would start with no apps, probably be as expensive as all Apple hardware, and besides, that thing in the picture looks like a mockup to me. One dial to control a PDA?
Guess we’ll see next week…
