The Secret Ingredient is silicon
So Christmas has begun early – as it often does in my house, for some reason. Starr got me the Wii I have been waffling about since its introduction: I wanted one, but couldn’t really justify one (which makes it an awesome gift, if you think about it).
As I mentioned on Twitter, she also picked up the Iron Chef America game, which I found surprisingly entertaining, and potentially Repetitive Stress Injury-inducing. I think it’ll go over well when we have friends over, as it’s fairly easy to pick up and a round plays fast. Plus it’s got the voice acting talents of the Chairman, Alton Brown, and Masaharu Morimoto, so you can’t go wrong.
Now that I have this new console, a quick poll for purposes of future wishlisting: what games on the Wii are the most awesome and should really be in our library?
AllerGEE, AllerGAA
(This would have been posted this morning were it not for the LJ downtime)
If I should pass away from exhaustion and allergy-caused asphyxiation, I just want you all to know that I died the way I lived: semi conscious and sniffling. Seriously, this morning I was so wobbly, I thought I might wreck my car on the way into work… and tonight I’ll be putting my back into it again and hauling more boxes.
QQ, I know, but I’m honestly having some trouble coping at the moment. I’ll manage, of course, but oy. I’m in a closed office for the next hour, doing a software upgrade and tapping away on the Newton, and it’s awfully tempting to take a nap. Bad Idea.
On the good side of things, I played some PS2 Fatal Frame on a five-foot plasma flat panel TV last night. That was kinda fun.
My Life for Aiur
If you can understand this guy’s comedy routine, without speaking his language or checking out the title of the video…
then you might be a fan of Blizzard’s computer games.
(I had the Battlecruiser captain stuck in my head the other day. It was a strain not to start conversations in his accent.)
Stand back, I’m doing… stuff.
Most weeks I wait impatiently for my Kingdom of Loathing turns to build up to a useful level. This week, I’ve been sitting at the max of 200 turns for days, but I don’t have time to mess with it. I guess it’s a sign I’m using my time well… KoL isn’t exactly productive… but on the other hand, you can’t be productive all the time. Makes Jack a dull boy, you know.
On that note, I am going to watch a movie this weekend. Either in the theater, or from my list of DVDs to watch or re-watch. I don’t remember sitting through an entire movie since we watched “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” together.
One of the two 400MHz CRT iMacs that have been sitting in my office gathering dust since I left Decipher has found a good home – it’s in the possession of Starr’s youngest sister. She’ll probably want to give it an external FireWire HD and/or a memory upgrade before long, it’s only got a 10GB drive and 256MB of memory. But it’ll do Word and Photoshop and play DVDs, and she seems thrilled with it, so happiness all around. I need to find some old games to pass along that don’t involve serious mayhem.
Speaking of productivity, I am attempting to do something personally productive at least once a day. Either spend at least an hour on a personal project, or sit and write something with some thought in it (thus the recent outbreak of philosophising every week or so in my LJ). It doesn’t come easy: I am a slacker and procrastinator. But time moves with or without me, and I’m not going to be left behind.
Fantasy Battles
After watching Yahtzee take apart the XBox 360 game “Too Human”, I saw a trailer for the new Warhammer Online game starting up, so I stuck around. Now, I won’t be playing “WAR”, as it’s called, if for no other reasons than a) I’m still enjoying WoW just fine, thank you, and b) as is so often the case, I’m using the wrong OS. One WAR developer’s mentioned with a wink that he’s working on something important involving his non-Windows computer, but I take that with a Massively Multiplayer Grain Of Salt (MMGOS).
Okay, but I do read the blogs from the beta testers, and it looks like while WAR won’t be a revolution in online role-playing, they have a few nifty ideas, and kudos to them if they make it all work. As I’ve said before, I’ve long grown out of the idea that my fandoms and other people’s fandoms must engage in steel cage matches until only one can stagger out. But the point of this whole entry is the reaction I had to the trailer, a reaction that surprised me. While I might have been interested in the game under other circumstances, I hated the trailer. I had an intense negative reaction to it. Why?
WAR has two ‘factions’ one can play: Order and Destruction. In the trailer, we see Destruction assault a capital city of Order. Death is everywhere, people dying of (bloodless) sword wounds, spear wounds, arrow wounds, magical fire, magical ice, and crushing mass. The trailer shows us the Dwarves, Humans, High Elves, Dark Elves, Greenskin, and Chaos forces slaughtering each other as the city is knocked apart around them. (I am somehow unsurprised that both Elven ‘hero’ avatars are females who manage to make it through the trailer unscathed, and in the case of the Dark Elf, scantily dressed.)
So, of course there’s war. It’s called Warhammer! But the video made something abundantly clear: in the world of Warhammer, Destruction wins.
It may not look like it. The last scene of the trailer shows the three Order races facing some huge monster, and we are led to believe that the resolution is up in the air. But look around the heroes. There are bodies everywhere. The city is smashed. Even should the monster be defeated, Destruction can just come back tomorrow, to a city that’s still smashed and carpeted with the dead.
(Oh, I know that in the game, the city will reset overnight, buildings will spring back into existence, and the citizens will respawn. I’m not talking about the game, I’m talking about the fictional world.)
It takes years to build a city, weeks to construct a building, and decades to produce an adult warrior. It only takes hours, minutes, or seconds to end that existence. Destruction is easy. The years of food and housing and training and socializing that went into that warrior are countered with a single arrow. If all one cares to produce is wreckage, the world is quite willing to help.
(This, by the way, is why I had to give up on Battletech fiction after a while. Excellent games, and the individual novels ranged from okay to excellent, but they painted a reality where a star-faring humanity nearly pounded itself back to coal and steam, called a truce, recovered long enough to rebuild some technology, and then immediately resumed smashing everything within the reach of a Jump Drive. And they did this cycle repeatedly.)
Now, the game isn’t exactly its fiction. Once online, Order and Destruction have nigh-infinite resources in the long run, and new weapons, warriors, and metropolises with the click of a mouse button. But the fictional background shown in that trailer is far too bleak and pointless for my tastes, and unless the WAR loremasters have something up their sleeves, this is a world that offers me little appeal.
Brief updates
- 17:59 Played Guitar Hero 80s on Med. (4 chords) instead of Easy (3). Having a hell of a time keeping track of which finger presses which button. #
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Brief updates
- 08:20 Reading rumor that Diablo 3 will not support LAN multiplayer, only Battle.net multiplayer. This makes kitty sad. #
- 19:25 @meiran Tell her that ‘film noir’ is when the lighting guys aren’t doing their job. #
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Surrender the Werewolves
I wasn’t a fan of Kid Rock before, but he’s dead to me now. How can a digital mashup of “Werewolves of London” with “Sweet Home Alabama” be a ‘new song’ even with new lyrics? It’s not even a re-recording of the music, he just loaded them both into GarageBand and went with it. Total junk.
On a brighter note, when I switched radio stations, they were playing “Surrender” by Cheap Trick. To my amusement, I found myself muttering the “Guitar Hero 2” chords under my breath during the song: “Red, (beat, beat), orange, (beat, beat), green…” I do it for Dance Dance Revolution cuts too. Anyone else do this?
And The Heavens Shall Tremble
Today in Paris, at their WorldWide Invitational event, Blizzard Entertainment announced their upcoming game Diablo III.
That is all. (That’s plenty!)
‘Twas caviar
This weekend was good. I got to chill a little bit, which I’d long needed. Had caviar for the first time ever; it tasted mostly of salt, and slightly fishy. I’ve heard it’s served on buttered toast, and I think that would improve it quite a bit.
I also tried the Lord of the Rings online role-playing game. The first thing I noticed is that it’s certainly prettier than WoW (and therefore needs more video processing power than, say, my desktop can handle). I enjoyed the Minstrel class I tried – there’s something entertaining about whipping out a lute in the middle of a melee and dealing damage with a few bars of a song.
But, when all’s said and done, I enjoy the slightly surrealistic graphics of WoW – they seem to fit with a world which has so many fantastic shorthands for everyday actions – and the LotR game takes itself fairly seriously, which also isn’t really what I’m here for. I might play it if there were a Mac version and no other competitors, but my subscription will stay with Blizzard for now.
This week’s Doctor Who episode brings the Series 4 average down to .667. Even discounting the goofy, thoughtless science – which is hard, since one element is a major plot point – there wasn’t much special about it. Donna was great; her emotional arc about the future of humanity and our ethics, and the conditions of the Ood provided a welcome touch of development.
But overall, the episode was fairly formulaic, including at least one completely gratuitous CGI death, and someone trying viciously to kill the Doctor for no reason at all. One touch I did like: minor spoiler
