loonyblog.

…Defcon is all kinds of awesome. I only had a chance to play a few games last night, but jeez…it’s just so much fun. The mechanics are simple enough to grasp fairly quickly, and when you’ve got six players, it just becomes total carnage. I mean total, crap-there-went-New-York-I’d-better-counter-by-nuking-London carnage. So far I’ve restrained myself and not played a game against A.I. where I rename the other player “WOPR”. But you know that’s coming.

I’m also pretty impressed by the performance I’m getting. Granted the graphics are hardly advanced, but still, I’m running it at 1600×1080 and the CPU load is miniscule. That’s pretty cool. I wonder how low it scales? When the Mac version is released, I might be tempted to see if I can run it on my G3 iBook. But it almost certainly won’t. I mean, the thing can’t run Chessmaster for god’s sake.

But anyway, Defcon == awesome. Get it now and start nuking any country that looks at you funny.

There were a bunch of cool announcements at Microsoft’s X06 (here’s everything if you haven’t seen it yet), but the most surprising announcement was that Ensemble Studios (owned by Microsoft) is working with Bungie (also owned by Microsoft) on Halo Wars, an Xbox 360 exclusive RTS. Ensemble + Bungie == awesome to me…no question about it. I love the idea. As a long-time Myth fan (the Bungie games are two of my ten favorite RTS games of all-time), I’ve always wanted a Halo RTS, and Ensemble seems like the perfect studio to handle it.

I’m less excited about the Xbox 360 exclusive part. It’s not that I have a problem with the idea of a console RTS, it’s just that personally, the game I’d want would be mouse and keyboard centric. But who knows what they have up their sleeves. This is being created from the ground up for 360 (not a port from PC), so it should be interesting to see how it turns out.

I will say this much…while I think that EA LA did an excellent job porting Battle for Middle Earth II to 360, I couldn’t help but think that the game would have been much, much, much better had they implemented a pause-and-command mode. That is, the ability to pause the game and still give commands to your units (although they wouldn’t act them out until you unpause the game). That it was left out entirely struck me as a decision based on their need to prove that an RTS could be done on a console, rather than one based on usability.

I don’t think there’s really any debate that turn-based strategy games are inherently better on console systems than their real-time counterparts. As a pure RTS, I think BFME is an excellent case study, but had they implemented that one concession to their RTS mantra, it would have been a more natural experience. Yes, it wouldn’t have worked in multiplayer, but since it’s not a mandatory feature in single player, that’s not a deal-killer.

But regardless, I’m really interested in this game. Having now read all three of the novels (the ones out already, that is…there are two more on the way), and the Halo Graphic Novel, and as a guy who owns Halo for PC (well, Mac, anyway) and Xbox, and owns the soundtrack to Halo 2…I guess you could say I’m a fan of the series. I really don’t consider myself a superfreaky fan, but Bungie has a stellar track record, and they’ve done an excellent job with everything to sport that Halo logo.

Having said that, I don’t know what I think of the news that Peter Jackson’s new studio is making a game in the Halo universe. Yes, I like his movies, but dude, games are not movies. We’ve been down that road before, and I’m not eager to go through that again. I’d be a lot less worried if this were an experienced studio handling the game, but this is a brand new studio with zero track record in the industry, and that’s a little scary.

Ever since I stopped using loonygames.com and created a new, top secret domain exclusively for e-mail, I’ve had a web-based mailer script that people I don’t know personally can use to contact me. It’s what you’re taken to if you click on the “e-mail me” link on the sidebar there, and it’s been very effective. When I get an e-mail from there, I know a real-live human being had to go there to input that information, and aside from one or two unsolicited people wanting to buy one or more of my domains, no one’s really attempted to use it to send me spam.

Until this past week, that is. Some complete idiot, let’s just call him, I don’t know…Dimwitted Unknown Moronic Baby Attacking Scum Sucker, or just DUMBASS for short, decided to see if he could use my script to send me spam. I received several e-mails containing links to ringtones, prescription drugs and so on. I got about one a day, which admittedly is hardly a deluge, but when you get zero spam, one a day stands out. The best part is that my good friend DUMBASS made the brilliant decision to send all of them with the same subject line.

Now while my script does record all manner of frightening information (pretty much everything I can grab via PHP, which is more than you might think), it doesn’t do any spam-checking. I figured nobody would be stupid enough to try that. But it seems, I underestimated DUMBASS. So this was a welcome excuse to tweak my script.

What I decided to do was edit the script so that the next time DUMBASS attempted to send me an e-mail with that subject or content, instead of sending me spam, he would in fact e-mail his own abuse address. I’m rather proud of that. Plus of course, his IP address and domain were added to a custom blacklist, which will self-propogate itself from now on, just in case he decides to try his luck with a different IP address.

Naturally I had to rub his face in it, so I threw together a quickie page for him to see when he attempted to send it. If you’d like to see the page, just go here (don’t worry, test mode doesn’t send any e-mails or log any addresses). The image I used (both on that page and to the right of this post) is the cover image from the second issue of loonygames, painted by Mike Sanzone. I’ve managed to find quite a few uses for that over the years.

Naturally I set it up so I would get an e-mail notification when he fell for my little trap, and sure enough, I got one this afternoon. So in case you were wondering, 72.232.28.186, by way of ns4.coolmexico.com, you really are a DUMBASS.

I watched the premiere episode of The Legion of Super-Heroes cartoon today. It is, in a word…not bad. On the whole, I’m disappointed, because (as I’ve mentioned before), I really wanted an animated DCU continuity series, and this definitely ain’t it. Instead it’s about as good as The Batman, which I enjoyed for a couple of episodes but quickly lost interest in.

Probably my biggest complaint is that this is very much a Saturday morning cartoon. The Justice League show(s) were created for a prime-time audience, hence the letterboxing and general serious tone of the show. This isn’t as far gone as the Teen Titans show, but you can see where the comic relief is going to come from, and it’s gonna come often.

So what did I like? There were a few things in the good column. I loved the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it shot of Booster Gold + Skeets, and there were several Superman animated series musical cues mixed in. Some of the music was composed by Kristopher Carter, whose past credits include Batman Beyond, Justice League and other DCU shows (but not, oddly enough, Superman), so it may have come from him. Some of the voice cast I recognized, some I didn’t. Jennifer Hale I know well from her video game work (KOTOR, among others), ditto for Yuri Lowenthal (he’s the voice of the Prince in PoP).

So I don’t know where this leaves me and this show. While I’ve been reading it lately (ever since Supergirl joined up) I was never a huge fan of the book. Except for a brief period when I had a thing for Stealth (hey, I was 12, what do you want from me? She was hot). I think this will probably wind up being another one of those shows that I think is okay, but just not for me. We’ll see.

I do think it was a missed opportunity for something great, but now I’ll hold out hope for those direct-to-DVD movies that are brewing as we speak.

If you haven’t seen it yet, Weird Al’s new video is all kinds of hilarious.

Makes a man proud to be a nerd. More than usual, anyway.

Apparently Katsuhiro Otomo (creator of Akira, Memories and so on) was hired by Nissin, makers of bachelor chow, to create a series of animated shorts to promote their Cup o’ Noodles line. Yes, I’m serious. You can see a trailer on the official site, but for a much longer trailer, there’s good ol’ YouTube:

I don’t speak Japanese, but it’s pretty easy to figure out what’s going on. It’s pretty awesome. I hope the rest makes it way online eventually.

I made my first ever podcast appearance last night, as I was a guest on Played, the podcast put together by a couple of shackers. Here’s the story on the Played site, and here’s the iTunes link if you take your podcasts that way.

It was funny…old timey folk may remember that I used to cohost Quakecast and later Shooters, and for all the crap you can say about Pseudo.com (and lord knows you can say a lot about that disaster of an Internet company), they were pretty much way ahead of their time. Back then, a company devoted to drunk people rambling incoherently was insane. Now everyone’s doing it!

Anyway, download Played if you want to hear my dorky voice (I think so, anyway) blathering on about my job, how all games other than my own suck (okay, not really) and other idiocy. And you should subscribe to Played anyway, since it tends to be entertaining on a regular basis anyway (except of course, when I’m on).

The great Yak has blessed us with a clip from Space Giraffe:

Hot damn, I need this game.

Since it seems like everyone is posting their list of their top ten RTS games of all time, I might as well add to the pile. So here you go:

1. WarCraft II
2. Myth II: Soulblighter
3. Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War
4. Age of Mythology
5. Myth: The Fallen Lords
6. WarCraft III:Reign of Chaos
7. StarCraft
8. Darwinia
9. Total Annihilation
10. Lord of the Rings: Battle for Middle Earth

Runners up: Majesty, Homeworld, Shogun: Total War, Dune 2, Herzog Zwei, Dungeon Keeper,

My list is, admittedly quite different than most people’s. Looking at the list, seven of these games are fantasy. What’s up with that? Also, you won’t find mainstays like Rome: Total War on my list…as much as I’d like to say I loved the game, the truth is that I just didn’t have the patience. I loved Shogun (flaws and all), but Rome just didn’t do it for me. Ditto for Medieval. I plan on trying them again at some point (I still own both), but so far I’ve had no luck.

As for Command & Conquer, I’ve never been a fan. When people were raving about C&C back in the day, I was way too caught up in WarCraft II to come up for air. The same goes for Age of Empires, oddly enough. I’ve never played AoE 1 or 2 or even 3, but I loved Age of Mythology (it’s too bad The Titans was such a disappointment). At some point I really need to do something about that, because I think I’ll probably wind up loving them if Mythology was any indication of their quality. I just find the subject matter bland for an RTS. Turn based sure, but in real time it just seems dull.

Also, Homeworld would have placed on the list if it wasn’t so brutally difficult. The Myth games are too, but at least they have a sense of humor about it.

I’m currently in the middle of another personal moratorium on new game purchases. My reasoning behind this is simple: I still have a ton of games I’ve already bought (or received for free, thanks to my occupation) that I haven’t played, and past history has shown that by the time I do get around to playing these games, the price has plummeted. If I can just hold back from buying the game at launch, I’ll save a ton of money. This is always the case in PC games (and I mean always).

But naturally there are exceptions to the rule. This year there’s virtually no exceptions, making it an unusual year for me. I’m not buying a PS3 at launch, and unless I can manage to sell enough stuff back to GameStop to cover it, I’m not getting a Wii either. No, there’s pretty much only one game I’m going to buy for the foreseeable future: Introversion’s Defcon.

Not only is it the next game from the developers of one of my favorite games of last year (even if it did take me until nearly the end of the year to finally play it), but it looks really cool. Especially for an idiot like me who has fond memories of WarGames (memories which will no doubt be trashed by the impending sequel). Also, it’s already cheap. Like, shockingly cheap. You can pre-order it on Steam for the bargain basement price of $10. As much as I’d like to order it directly from the developer, it’s almost twice as much (thank you very much exchange rate) if you do it that way.

I haven’t really played any games other than my own for the past two months, insane as it sounds. Oh sure, I’ve played plenty of Uno, and I’ve gotten some Burnout: Revenge in there, and Brain Age and Final Fantasy IV are my portable games of choice, but I haven’t played any significant single player game since starting my IF Comp project. And what do you know…Defcon’s due to be unlocked on Steam on the very day I have to turn in my game. I can’t think of a better way to end my gaming celibacy than that. And maybe once I’m done with that I’ll get around to the other 50 games I’m sitting on.