loonyblog.

As if in direct response to my dilemma, the ScummVM PSP team has stepped up and released a version of their unbelievably awesome adventure game VM for version 2.0 of the PSP firmware! Kick ASS. I’ll miss not being able to run Genesis/NES/SNES/TG16/Doom/SMS/GG (and so on) games, but as long as I can run both <game name deleted> and ScummVM, I have no complaints.

Update: It WORKS! (And it fixes a bug in Monkey Island 1, too!)

A certain unnamable (due to corporate connections to myself) PSP title is out, and I’ve got it (thanks to those unnamable connections). There’s just one problem…it requires PSP firmware 2.0 to run. So the question is, do I upgrade to play this game and lose the ability to run all those wonderful emulators? Or do I stick with version 1.50, knowing that I can run emulators, but no MPEG4 movies or newer games?

It’s a tough call. Oh Sony, why must you put me in this position??

I was browsing through the online Warner Bros. store’s selection of Superman merchandise, checking to see if I wanted to get anything else in addition to the Christopher Reeve Foundation Tag, when I stumbled across this six foot tall Superman statue. Now, I’m always interested in seeing high end Superman merchandise, just to see what’s out there (Heather would kill me several times over if I bought any of that stuff), but this is just insane. For $4,500, you get a six foot tall statue of big blue. That sounds great, and in fact I’ve seen several life-sized Superman statues in my day that were pretty impressive (the best one is in the lobby at DC Comics). But this one is just…creepy. Take a look at the facial expression on this guy:

Yikes. Who in their right mind would pay four and a half grand (plus $150 for freight shipping) for something that freaky looking?

From a delightfully odd forum post by Colleen Doran, regarding the oddities of Cerebus creator Dave Sim (previously blogged about here):

…in one of Dave’s exalted moments of spiritual insight, he went on to ruminate that the buttocks of women were a perfect place to administer corporal punishment as the fat deposits thereon were useful padding preventing permanent harm to the female whenever she might have to endure the ire of her hubby. Of course, in traditional Islam, a woman cannot enter heaven if she does not have hubby’s approval, so I guess a good thrashing beats the heck out of eternal hellfire, though having to live under this sort of oppression doesn’t seem like paradise to me, either.

<Snip!>

I stopped reading about the time the text moved on to the sex habits of Ernest Hemingway. Dave considered Hemingway a girly man, and postulated a good deal on posteriors again, as he had some kind of idea that Hemingway had a taste for anal sex and that this was proof he was a closet homosexual. This included massive quotes from the works of Hemingway and others that made me wonder if the Hemingway estate would be mightily disapproving in a copyright kind of way, but by then I’d decided to drop the book, even as a curiosity.

I never even got that far. I’m almost disappointed in myself for that.

Just for the heck of it, I did some HD channel flipping on Friday night (well, as much as I can do with the measly HD channels Time Warner offers), and I discovered something truly disturbing.

Jay Leno in 1080i looks like a muppet. And not in the Jim Henson, cutesy kind of way, more like the “Smile Time” episode of Angel creepy muppet.

From 1UP’s review of Doom: The Movie:

I predict that in the distant future in which the film Doom takes place, scholars will utilize it as a tool to teach the children of that day. No, it won’t be utilized as a humorous example of what the people of our time thought of theirs. It will be used as the shining example of how not to create an action-suspense film. Of how shoving cliché after cliché down ones throat can produce a thick bile in which the only cure is to run out of the theatre in search for the nearest facility to dispose of it. I also predict that they, like myself, will also proceed to near vomit in their mouths upon attempting to digest the 90 minute long orgy of filth that is Doom the movie.

I’ve previously stated on this site my absolute love for Watchmen (recently named as one of Time Magazine’s best books of the 20th century!), and my paperback copy has been beaten up quite a bit…it’s definitely seen better days. So I was very interested when I saw DC was publishing an “absolute” version of the book. It’s a pretty hefty investment for a book I already have, so I figured it was one for the holiday wish list. But then when I searched for it on Amazon (to add it to said wish list), I saw that Amazon is selling it for nearly 40% off. Throw in an Amazon gift certificate I just got, and poof! I paid just about as much as I would have for a new paperback version. Sweeeeet.

So how is it? The first thing I noticed when opening is it is that it smells nice. It smells like a really high-quality book should smell. I don’t know what that means, exactly, but if you have the pleasure of opening a fresh copy, you’ll see (or smell, really) what I mean.

Once you get past the smell, you can appreciate the beauty of the book. It’s oversized, which I love. Having the art that big really shows off the quality of Dave Gibbons’ artwork. Plus this is a book where layout is almost as important as the artwork itself, and having it so much larger does wonders for the storytelling. I was actually kind of concerned when I read that this edition was recolored by Wildstorm FX…I was really scared that this would have the candy-colored look of most superhero comics these days (which would completely betray the tone of the story), but those fears were laid to rest once I actually looked at the interior artwork. Yes, it’s been recolored, but the colors are still muted, and thankfully, they kept the tone intact.

The 48 pages of extras are exactly the same as the extras in the old Graffiti Designs hardcover version (which on more than one occaision I almost picked up…I’m glad I waited). There isn’t even a new introduction by Gibbons or Moore. There’s nothing to put the book into any kind of modern context, which is a shame. Moore’s severed all ties with DC, which is a shame, as his participation could have only helped this edition.

Pretty much my only gripe with this book is the fact that the spine on the book and slipcase both read, “ABSOLUTE WATCHMEN” in giant letters. Which seems kind of pointless. The book is still called Watchmen, and the spine would look a whole lot nicer sitting on a shelf without that word tacked on to it. But that’s really a small gripe (as is the fact that the little piece of paper telling you all the cool features is glued to the slipcase in glue that doesn’t just peel right off…be careful removing it or you’ll leave a permanent smudge). It’s an oversized, deluxe version of one of the finest pieces of graphic fiction ever published, and is certainly one of the most lavish comics collections I’ve ever seen (the best one on my shelf is still the limited hardcover version of Cages, but this is a close second). Now hopefully they’ll do a similar republishing of V for Vendetta, as my 16 year old copy is falling apart.

I finished up FarCry (the original PC one, not Instincts) last night, and I must say, I thoroughly enjoyed the experience. It’s a fun game, with great graphics (that ran at a great framerate on my X800XL) and excellent AI. But I’ll say this much about the game…it was hard. I mean, really, really hard, hard. It was hard enough that I simply can’t imagine myself finishing the game without quicksaving (which was added in a patch — it wasn’t there at launch).

Quicksaving is a tricky issue. Developers tend to hate it, or at best, tolerate it, as it completely changes the level of tension. After all, when you can save in the middle of a boss fight, it becomes a whole lot easier, and a lot less nerve-wracking. I’m not ashamed to say that I saved everywhere in FarCry. I mean everywhere. In the middle of firefights, boss battles, jungle crawling, just everywhere. I do this in most first person shooters, from Doom to Half-Life to System Shock 2 and beyond, I’m a shameless quicksave whore.

FarCry though is one of the first games that I don’t think I would have had the patience to finish without the ability to quicksave. There are some huge gaps between checkpoints, particularly towards the end when the difficulty really ramps up. I totally see the reason why it was left out…without the ability to quicksave, every second in FarCry would be filled with dread…this is a game where you’re hugely outnumbered and outgunned and towards the end, it becomes pretty difficult to take out one or two enemies quickly, and you’ll be swarmed by five or more at a time.

I like a good challenge, but I don’t like being frustrated, and even with quicksaving, I was pretty frustrated at times while playing FarCry. So while I sympathize with the developers, I’ll stick to my F5/F9 trickery. When given the choice between playing cheaply or putting the game aside in frustration, I’ll usually go with the former (assuming that option doesn’t involve cheating…that I don’t do). And again, this is why I’ll probably never get around to Ninja Gaiden. Everyone I talk to about the game tells me how freakishly difficult it is. I just don’t have that kind of patience. Now, if I could quicksave, that would be a different story, but Itagaki, in his infinite wisdom, would probably have the game make fun of me if I did that.

One of the frustrating things about the large number of Apple-related news sites on the web is that they have a tendency to jump to conclusions without actually bothering to do even the smallest bit of research. Case in point is this story on The Mac Observer (usually one of the more levelheaded Apple sites out there), reporting that those new iPods no longer support FireWire. This may be true, but I doubt it.

More likely is that they no longer ship with a FireWire connector in the box. Since they haven’t actually done that for some time now, that’s hardly a crisis. Somehow I just can’t see Apple completely dropping FireWire completely from their iPods unless there was a really good reason for it. Plus as someone who owns a G4 tower that doesn’t support USB 2.0 (it came out well before Apple started supporting it) I’d be really annoyed if I bought one of these new iPods to discover that I was stuck with a measly 12 MB/S transfer rate. It’s bad enough putting movies on my PSP through a USB 1.0 connection…transferring 10 gigs (yeah, I have a 40 GB iPod, but only use 10 gigs…I just don’t own that much music!) would take hours at that rate.

I finally decided to upgrade to Movable Type 3.2 this evening, and sure enough, everything broke.

Sigh.

I apologize for all the dead images…I seem to have nuked my entire image directory. Whee! I do back these things up, but if you see something weird (like my current game suddenly reverting back to Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance) that’s why.