loonyblog.

Yep, I’ve updated the description of this blog to reflect my relocation to the lesser other coast. Don’t worry, the blog won’t be changing…it’s just a different description.

My life however, will be undergoing serious changes, which I’ll talk about in future posts. Right now the biggest changes are the physical relocation (we’re in temporary housing for two weeks, but will be moving into our new house soon) and earlier today, I joined the Californian auto-owner’s club by buying my first ever brand new car…a silver Toyota Yaris. Heather’s getting a Honda Fit, which we expect to close on tomorrow.

I gotta say, I’m driving, but I will always prefer to walk or take the subway. I feel dirty driving all the time. Not to mention lazy as hell. Pictures of the new cars and other stuff will be coming soon…stay tuned.

I’ll miss New York in more ways than I can possibly express here. Aside from all my friends and family over there, NYC was my home for the best 12 years of my life…the city was like a member of the family, always there for me, always reassuring. I plan to visit often.

Whee…I’m back from Games Convention. I’m badly jet lagged (plus I never slept well my entire stay, which really didn’t help), and I move tomorrow, so updates will continue to be a bit light for the next week while my life settles in on the west coast. But right now I’m back in New York, even if it is for only a day and a half (*sniff*).

Games Convention was fun, but I really didn’t get to spend any time walking around. I spent the entire time more or less in the 2K area, and didn’t see much of Leipzig either (although from what I did see, it was a pretty rural area…not quite as happening a city as Munich).

I did get to wander over to Bethesda and check out Fallout 3. That was thanks to the indefatigable Pete Hines, who was doing the demos entirely on his own for the entire show (!). The game was (as expected) pretty damn awesome. I was pleasantly surprised by the combat system…I was expecting a total real-time system, and while that’s there, it seems like they’ve done a really good job of emulating the old Fallout turn-based combat system from a first person perspective. Plus it just looks great.

Anyway, it’s back to the insanity of moving for me…updates will come eventually.

According to IESB, there’s movement on the Justice League live action movie, enough so as to speculate that the next Superman movie may be delayed to make room for the ensemble film instead.

I’m always excited for anything movie and Superman related, and I’d love to see Green Lantern (preferably Kyle Rayner, but I’ll take anyone) on the big screen, but there are just too many potential pitfalls with a movie that big. Plus of course, if it has a non-Christian Bale Batman it’ll just feel weird coming so soon after The Dark Knight.

But then again, I never thought a successful X-Men movie could be made, and they made two and a half great ones. Some other movies I said would never get made include The Lord of the Rings trilogy and Titanic, so clearly it’s a good thing I’m not a Hollywood executive.

Still…it’s hard to write a good Justice League story. Especially when you have to incorporate origin stories for so many characters. And the writers involved don’t have much experience…the best thing they can say is that they’re related to Dermot Mulroney, which let’s face it, doesn’t mean a whole lot.
I think I’ll just go back to waiting for the next Superman. I have a lot more faith in that project.

Funny story. In 1999, I received a review copy of Planescape: Torment, the massive RPG that is generally considered to be among the greatest games of all-time. 1999 was a hell of a year for gaming mind you, and I never got around to it. Also at the time, I was really not into PC RPGs at all. They just weren’t my bag. There were notable exceptions, of course, like Fallout 1 & 2 and most of the Ultima series, but the whole Baldur’s Gate/D&D license thing never grabbed me.

Years went by, and games came and went. RPGs like Morrowind and KOTOR completely sucked me in, but I still wasn’t ready for Planescape. Over the years, I gave away or sold a ton of PC games, but I never got rid of Planescape, because I knew that someday I would be ready. That day finally arrived last Sunday.

It was a perfect storm of events, actually. I was going through my crap in preparation for the move, when I came across my old review copy, and I had a realization. Because of various things in my life, I have some free time at the moment…and this will not last. Basically, if I don’t play this game in the very near future, I’ll never get to it. I just can’t see myself being able to play a 100 hour epic like this ever again. So there was that. But also I found myself having to be in the office on Sunday, sitting in vigil while a prominent journalist played through a certain soon-to-be-critically-acclaimed game. I couldn’t just sit there and watch him (for many reasons, not the least of which is that I would be interfering with the review process), so I had about nine hours to kill. So I installed Planescape: Torment, and had myself a little marathon session.

Every time I’d attempted to play this game in the past, I’d only been able to devote 30 minutes or so to that first session. That’s how I play most games…I really don’t have the time to sit there for huge sessions anymore. But with nothing else to do on Sunday, I got the full marathon experience.

And let me just say…holy crap is this game brilliant. I think after the first three hours or so I was already willing to call it the best written game ever made. 15 hours later I don’t think I’m more than a tenth into it, but I’m already putting it among the best games I’ve ever played. It’s just so…amazing. I mean really, it’s humbling. I like to think I know a lot about the history of the medium, but jeez…to think that I’ve had this masterpiece just sitting on a shelf for all these years is crazy.

If you’ve never played it, track it down. The dialogue, the characters, the gameplay…it’s all just so brilliant. And it’s aged remarkably well! I’m not sure if I’ll ever have this kind of opportunity again, but playing this is making me wonder if I shouldn’t give Baldur’s Gate 1 & 2 another try as well. I’ve heard great things about them over the years as well, but I think the subject matter is a little more commonplace, where Planescape just feels so fresh and unusual (not to mention oddly humorous).

I’m in Germany all next week and after that I’m moving, but during that period I’ll have my laptop with me, and wouldn’t you know it…it runs perfectly on my MacBook Pro (in Boot Camp…not so much in Parallels). See, there’s one good thing about waiting eight years to play a game…just about any machine in the last five can run this game with no load times whatsoever.

I’ve been quiet on the subject of Watchmen casting so far…personally I was kind of hoping if I ignored it, the whole thing would just quietly go away. But this latest bit of miscasting is just too much for me…it’s bad enough that Laurie Juspeczyk is being played by a swedish supermodel, but now it’s been confirmed that the elder Silk Spectre will be played by Carla Gugino.

Don’t get me wrong, I like her. She was the best thing in Sin City (for several reasons), she’s gorgeous…what’s not to love? But while she is many things, she is not who springs to mind when I think of a long-retired, polish super hero. Yes, they’re going to go nuts with makeup (which seems like a waste in this case) and I’m sure she’ll look appropriately aged when necessary. But I don’t think Gugino is going to be able to pull off the tone needed for when she’s younger.

I don’t know. I should just go back to hoping this movie never gets made. But it will, and I’m sure I’ll go see it. But casting like this doesn’t inspire me with confidence that Zach Snyder is the right person to make it. I still don’t see how they’re going to get a two hour movie out of this, and I have this fear that major storylines, such as Dr. Manhattan’s mars trip and origin or Rorschach’s backstory will have to be dropped entirely. Mr. Snyder, please don’t screw this up. I’d love nothing more than to be wrong.

A story at the North Denver News reports on a man who had his thumbs surgically altered to better use his iPhone. Here’s an excerpt:

The procedure involved making a small incision into both thumbs and shaving down the bones, followed by careful muscular alteration and modification of the fingernails. While Martel’s new thumbs now appear small and effeminate in comparison to his otherwise very large hands, he says he can still lift “pretty much anything I could lift before the surgery - though opening spaghetti sauce jars has been a problem. That was a big surprise.”

Have we already gotten to this point in society? I figured we were still at least a few decades from this level of insanity.

Update: This story may be fake. Let’s all hope it is.

Without a doubt, this year’s release schedule is amazing…I’d go so far as to say it’s the best in recent memory. But with all of these games comes the hard, hard decision of what to buy. With the imminent move and other notable distractions on the horizon, my time will be limited for a while, but there are just too many games coming out to ignore. Also of course, I have to set aside money for the super awesome Blade Runner collection, so that’s one less game I have money to pay for.

Anyway, I’ve definitely decided to pick up Mass Effect (my #1 most anticipated game of the year), Halo 3 and Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction (finally a legitimate reason to own a PS3!).

The hard part is deciding whether I’m going to pick up Rock Band or Guitar Hero III. I’m definitely getting one or the other, and a wireless guitar to go with it, but it’s a total tossup as to which one I get. It’ll probably come down to reviews. I’m sure eventually I’ll get both, but with so many great games coming out this year, it’s tough to justify two games that basically do the same thing. Yeah, Rock Band has other instruments, but for me, it’s just more Guitar Hero with a different name.

Still, there’s an awful lot of awesome gaming on the way this year, and everything I skip, I’ll pick up eventually without a doubt.

(Oh, and for the record, I left the Half-Life games off the list because I’ve got contacts at Valve and so I won’t have to pay for them. I’ll still get to play Ep2, Portal and TF2 this year. w00p).

WARNING: The following post violates the rules.

Over the past couple of years, particularly as I deal with the deluge of crap I’ve accumulated in a lifetime of being a geek, I’ve grown to loathe buying PC games. You have to deal with multiple CDs, manuals, boxes (those new plastic monstrosities are not an improvement, if you ask me) and god help us all, CD-keys. It took me a while, but I’ve now fully embraced digital distribution. I use both Steam and Direct2Drive, and I’ve even used Stardock’s service (for GalCiv II, of course).

While they all get the job done, I’ve grown to really love Steam in particular. I like having a single repository for all of my games. And I have a ton of games on Steam. Take a look at the image on the right (the thumbnail is just an excerpt). By my guess, I have something in the area of 70 games on my Steam list, not counting things like dedicated servers and other tools.

Granted of course, that many of these games are my own (hence the rules violation in this post). We work with Steam (and D2D and many others) at 2K, and I’ve worked directly with Valve to get the Firaxis titles up there and make sure every configuration of retail and digital game and expansion pack is fully compatible.

The latest bit of awesome Steam-related news is this weekend’s announcement that id has put their entire catalog (going all the way back to Commander Keen!) up for download. And they’re cheap, too. Needless to say, I’m all over this. I lost my Doom discs ten years ago, and have been manually copying my WADs from machine to machine ever since, and this is just so convenient.

Not every game I want is available digitally yet…I recently had to buy a meatspace version of Secrets of the Ark, for example. But that’s been the exception, and the only exception in a very long time.

GameTap, the Turner-run subscription service, has done a lot of things very well recently (the addition of Saturn games is a particularly awesome feature), but I’ll always prefer to own, rather than rent, stuff digitally. I know it’s silly, but my Steam list (in all its enormous glory) is a list of games that I own, and can play anywhere. Sure, it’s a silly distinction, but it’s a distinction nonetheless.

In any event, Steam just keeps getting better. There are still a lot of things I’d like to see…browsing games is a little clunky at the moment - there definitely needs to be an adventure games tab (right now Runaway: The Dream of the Turtle is classified as exactly…nothing. If you don’t know it’s there, you’ll never find it), and I’d like to see user reviews as well. But There’s plenty of time for that. For now, I just love that I can buy a game on my laptop while I’m out of town, play it there (either in Boot Camp or Parallels), play it on my games PC when I get home, or play it on my desktop machine at the office. That’s just downright awesome.

Mr. Flight Attendant: If you were really that funny, you wouldn’t be a flight attendant.
Also, if I didn’t find it funny when we were sitting on a runway for two hours, I’m really not going to find it funny six hours later.

Save it for amateur night.