loonyblog.

Apparently Jessica Biel has passed on playing Wonder Woman in the inexplicably moving forward JLA movie. As one of the few actresses who might actually look good in that ridiculous costume, this is sort of a shame, but at least they started at the top. You may recall that Kate Beckinsale (who did actually wear the costume once) nixed rumors that she was going to be playing the role (and may not have even been asked).

So…who else you got, Hollywood? Let’s be frank here. The Wonder Woman costume is not flattering to most actresses. If the actress in question doesn’t curve where a woman should curve, it’s just going to look silly, and let’s face it, way too many of these women could use some filling out. Sarah Michelle Gellar looked like a 12 year old out on Halloween when she put it on. I don’t know who I’d cast, other than Jessica Biel. Carla Gugino might be a good fit, but she’s already filming a superhero movie this year. And while she’s definitely too old (alas), I’d still find a way to put Julie Strain in that movie (hey, she’d make a good Athena). If nothing else, at 6′1″ she’s a genuine amazon.

Hopefully someone has the foresight not to cast some bony bubblehead in the role. And while they’re at it, I would suggest redesigning the damn costume. It’s just so silly looking in real life.

First female ninjas rob a gas station, and now there’s a ninja burgler terrorizing Staten Island. What’s going on in this country? And more importantly, where’s Toshiro Mifune when you need him?

On a whim, and knowing full well that this would never go anywhere, I decided last week to put in an inquiry to the baby-eating-scum-sucking-sleezebag who owns the .com version of this domain name about acquiring said domain, since he is clearly not doing anything with it. The whole process was automated through Sedo, and it went something like this (edited/made up for humor):

Me: It says the minimum bid I can put in is $60. That’s like $50 more than a domain actually costs, but whatever. How about $60?

Baby-eating-scum-sucking-sleezebag: LOL. $1500.

Me: LOL. WTF? How about $60?

B-E-S-S-S: $1450?

Me: Bwahahahahahahahahaha

B-E-S-S-S: I don’t like you anymore.

That’s all made up, but the numbers are real. Seriously. $1500 for a domain name that literally got 26 unique visits last month. I like to think those were all people attempting to visit this site instead, and were mildly inconvenienced. The domain by itself is, quite frankly, utterly worthless. I’ll just wait for him to realize that and swoop in and pay my normal $7 registration fee to get it. But hey, it was worth a try, right?

And yes, cybersquatting is lame, lame, lame. I sort of did it once, when I owned dawnofthedead.com, but I was genuinely planning on putting a fan page up there. I just never got around to it. I ended up selling it for a nice fee to a guy who swore he was going to do something really cool with it (I needed money to upgrade my PC…a sad reality of doing freelance PC previews is the need for current hardware). I guess he never did, because these days it’s just another cybersquatted site.

Shacknews is having a Halo 3 contest, and since I loves me some Halo, and was looking for something to keep me busy yesterday when I was doing my best not to eat, I decided to throw my cat helmet in the ring. The contest is to throw together some kind of ad for Halo 3. Here’s my entry:

Download: full HD version (80 MB) half-res version (40 MB)

It’s definitely not going to win — it’s not terribly clever or anything, it’s just an ad for Halo 3. But it was fun to make.

Incidentally, the new version of iMovie is terrible. I’ll have to do another post on what hell it was trying to deal with that. I ended up doing some things in the previous version of iMovie (you know it’s bad, when Apple intentionally leaves the previous version still installed on your hard drive) and a surprisingly large amount using plain old Quicktime Pro.

And yes, I will be finishing the fight on the 25th. Until my copy arrives from Amazon it’s more Space Giraffe and probably another bite-sized chunk of Sam & Max.

Update: I won me a prize…w00p.

The other night I completed level 100 in Space Giraffe. Unfortunately the walls didn’t start melting, and I’m fairly certain I made it through the experience with minimal brain damage, but hot damn was that awesome.

I should stress: this is not a game for everyone. In fact, it’s probably not a game for most people. But it’s totally my kind of game. It’s insane…more insane than Tempest 2000 was in its day, and that’s a double-edged sword. There are times when even after playing it for hours and hours, you just have no idea what’s going on…but that’s also part of the fun.

The crazy self-referentialism is also an acquired taste, but again, it’s totally up my alley. It’s sort of a shame that there isn’t any kind of crazy ending sequence, but the fact that it unlocks “Super Ox Mode” is pretty cool. I’ve long given up the hope of getting all the achievements in the game (although I do like that they’re crazy-hard), but I’m definitely not done playing this game.

Regardless of what OXM may have said (I need to have a stern talking to Dan Electro) Space Giraffe is a remarkable game. If you own a 360 and can spare the $5, go for it. I wouldn’t say it’s a mind-altering experience, but it sure is cosmic.

Oh, and in case you were wondering, playing with the Tempest 2000 soundtrack is indeed a kick. I think I need to create a special Space Giraffe playlist, featuring songs from T2K, SG and some other similar tracks (I’d probably throw in a song from Wipeout XL or Wipeout 3 for good measure).

We finished getting all our crap out of boxes late last week, just in time for a visit from my family. We haven’t actually gotten everything where it’s going to settle in, but we needed to get it out of those boxes so we could have something that felt like home instead of a warehouse.

It turns out that the movers were a little overzealous in their use of boxes and paper. We quickly ran out of room within the house, so we had to throw the boxes and paper out on our patio:

Yeeeah.

The nice thing about using a relocation company (okay, one nice thing…there are many) is that they’re coming by tomorrow to pick up all the packing materials. Which is good, because this goes well beyond what is possible from a standard weekly recycling pickup. This requires professional intervention.

It’s been kind of a novelty living on a garbage scow, but I’m looking forward to being able to use our patio. We’re going to buy comfy chairs and have ourselves a nice place to relax outside. And if they don’t show up tomorrow, we’ll just get us up some cinder blocks and an old car and fully embrace the slack-jawed lifestyle.

1UP has posted a wonderful multi-part feature devoted to my all-time favorite gaming franchise, Panzer Dragoon. It goes game-by-game, presenting a mini-review (showing both the original score and what they would give it today), followed by an interview with people associated with the game. Most of those are with Yukio Futatsugi, the Creative Director and general driving force of the Saturn games.

Like I said, it’s a wonderful feature. Futatsugi is remarkably open about most topics, commenting on everything from the rumors of one of the Saga team members committing suicide because of the sales of the game (not true, although there was a death on the team), his feelings about the Smilebit-developed Panzer Dragoon Orta, and whether or not we’ll ever see a new game or a remake of Saga.

That last one is apparently very difficult, as the source code has been lost. That’s not as uncommon as you’d think. When we did Civ Chronicles last year, we had to deal with the lack of source code, and I’ve also had to deal with that same issue with the X-COM 2 re-release on Steam (so if you have issues, don’t ask me for a fix…we can’t fix ‘em!). I do think there’s some hope now that GameTap seems to be successfully emulating Saturn games (including Panzer Dragoon Zwei).

Naturally I already own the whole series (well, except for Mini, but even Futatsugi admits to not owning that), but I’d love (read: LOVE) to see Saga re-released in some form. Whether that’s on Virtual Console (currently impossible, due to the lack of storage space — it was a four CD game) or PSP or whatever. It is one of the best games ever made and a landmark work of interactive art, so it deserves to be given the exposure it never got (particularly in this country, where only 20,000 copies were ever made). If Rez can be born again on Xbox Live Arcade, surely there’s a home for Panzer Dragoon somewhere.

In addition to covering the full Panzer series, the article also touches on Phantom Dust, the card-based game Futatsugi headed up for Microsoft Japan. 1UP seems to love the game, but I just couldn’t get into it. I liked the game world and general premise, but the gameplay did nothing for me. I might have to give it another shot. It’s on the backwards compatible list, although my personal experiences with backwards compatibility have differed wildly from title-to-title.

Anyway, even if you’ve never heard of the series, check out the feature on 1UP. It’s a great read, and has this line from Futatsugi in it, “if my wish were to come true, I would be allowed to create a sequel to Panzer Dragoon before I die.” He later goes into detail on how he’d like to make a shooting version of Panzer Dragoon Saga, or possibly an all-new game for PSP. I say let the man do both. The world created in these games has room for so much growth. Hopefully someday it will be allowed to continue.

(Thanks to LAGI for the artwork).

Last night I finally managed to get our new place fully online…that was due to two problems: one, we didn’t pack our own stuff, we used a relocation company. That’s great, but that meant we didn’t necessarily know what was in any of the boxes, since we didn’t pack them ourselves. Which lead to the second problem, which is that I use a Mac mini as my home server. It’s great and compact and I love it, but it’s so small that it was extremely hard to find among all those boxes. I don’t think the movers even knew it was a computer, as it was packed deep into a box of books.

Anyway, once I got the whole apartment/house (it’s an attached townhouse…I guess I should call it a house?) online, the first thing I wanted to do was check out all the stuff I missed on Xbox Live. And by “all the stuff” I mean, of course, Space Giraffe.

Space Giraffe is everything I hoped it would be. It’s completely insane. It lacks the purity of the Tempest gameplay, but it’s so over the top, and so outrageously wacky, that’s it just plain brilliant. Jeff Minter remains one of the most important game designers in the industry, even if most people have never heard of him. It’s kind of like the way I think about John Waters and movies. I may not like his movies (I don’t think I’m supposed to), but I’m glad he’s there making them. Even if you think Jeff Minter is an insane, farm animal obsessed weirdo (that’s probably an accurate description, by the way) you have to at least be glad someone out there is doing stuff like this.

I didn’t have my media streaming set up last night, but at some point I really need to try playing Space Giraffe with the Tempest 2000 soundtrack. I think the game might implode, or worlds might collide or something, but it should be a fun experiment.

The other thing I downloaded was Streets of Rage 2. I grabbed the demo and started playing it, and next thing I knew I had unlocked the full game and was getting my first couple of achievements. I have the first one on Wii Virtual Console, but the second one is a much better game, and more importantly, the version on XBLA is cheaper (400 points!) and offers a lot more for your virtual money.

Thanks to PartnerNet (the developer-only version of XBL) I know there are some pretty cool games in the pipeline…I’m looking forward to checking those out when they eventually get released.