loonyblog.

I found this video surprisingly moving:

Details on the guy here.

If you’re even remotely interested in games, chances are by now that you know Blizzard has announced Diablo III. Like any Blizzard announcement, this is of course, GIANT FREAKING NEWS (I give due credit to Chris Remo for the best headline of the day). If you haven’t seen it yet, here’s the announcement trailer, which is typically Blizzard-awesome:

(Incidentally, it’s a shame Frank Gorshin isn’t still with us…his narration in Diablo II pretty much made the game for me)

Yes, I’m totally excited about this game. I mean, it’s more Diablo! What’s not to love? But here’s the funny thing about this announcement…why in god’s name is it PC-only?

I say this, not as someone who hates PC games — on the contrary, I love PC games! But Diablo? Diablo ain’t StarCraft. There’s no good reason why this has to be PC-only. Baldur’s Gate: Dark Alliance, Champions of Norrath, X-Men: Legends, etc, etc, etc, etc. All those games have proven conclusively that this type of action-RPG works on consoles, and works really, really well on console systems. All I can think of is that someone at Blizzard is content with the moneybags they have now, and doesn’t want the extra gobs of cash they’ll get from PS3/360 versions of the game.

You have to figure that someone at the new Activision-Blizzard is scratching their head about it, but I suppose when you’re bringing in the same amount as Iron Man every month with WoW, you have the right to turn down a hundred million dollars in profit.

Still, I’d be lying through my teeth if I said I wouldn’t rather play this game on my couch over Xbox Live. That would just rock.

But I’ll still play it on PC. I’ll play the hell out of this game. And there’s a lot of hell to play out of Diablo. Bring it on.

WARNING: This post blatantly violates the rules.

Following our first bit of Civ-related artwork from Shepard Fairey and Studio Number One, we contacted Aidan Hughes, AKA Brute to try his hand at some Civ propaganda. Here’s what he came up with:

Pretty cool, huh?

You may remember Brute from his awesome KMFDM covers or other illustration work, or maybe from the terrible (but awesome looking) Doom clone ZPC from way back when. Either way, the man knows his propaganda. Check out his stuff at his official website, and look for wallpapers and posters and stuff on the official Civ Revolution website.

This has been a fun little project, contacting guys like this. We have one other Civ-art related announcement coming, but it’s more of a small thing we did for fun (it’s still pretty cool though). Stay tuned.

Oh, and as long as I’m breaking the rules, look for CivRev in US stores next week!

Last night on the shack there was some reminiscing about The Old Days and sites that are long gone. This got me thinking about various people I’ve lost touch with over the years, one of whom was Jeremy Allford, who used to run AGN3D. He was one of those hardware review guys back the day, alongside guys like Kyle from Hard|OCP and Tom of his eponymous hardware site. I worked with him (virtually), although I did meet him in person a few times.

Jeremy was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor back in ‘99. He had to stop working shortly after that, which was sad to see. And sadly from there we all lost touch with him. I heard he had recovered somewhat, and even saw a website where he put up happy pictures of him and his family (that’s since been taken down).

I looked him up again last night, and it saddens me to say that Jeremy passed away just over a year ago, on June 5th, 2007. He was 35 years old. I was unable to find a published obituary, but I was able to look him up in the Social Security index. I also found a year-old forum post from his son Christopher confirming this.

I won’t pretend that I knew Jeremy very well. I knew him as an extremely prolific writer (good lord was that man prolific with his news posts) and as someone who was really well liked among those of us in the gaming scene. I know he was a very devoted husband and father and my belated condolences go out to his family.

I’ll leave you with this slideshow created by his son to be played at his funeral. They show a happy husband and father with his family, which I’m sure how he would like to be remembered. Jeremy was a good man, and he will be missed by all of us who knew and worked with him.

WARNING: This post violates the rules.

We’ve released a new trailer for CivRev featuring voiceover by…me:

Funny story about this trailer. I know it sounds like I’m speaking really fast here, but that’s actually my voice after being mechanically slowed down in the editing room! The recorded speed was much, much faster.

We did another round of these yesterday, and all I can say is that VO work is really hard. I guess I just naturally speak way too fast, because I had to really, really concentrate to read at a “normal” speed. The next video we release is going to be superfast as well, but the ones after that should hopefully be a little more manageable.

Until then, feel free to make fun of my Micro Machines-like voiceover work. I swear, I had no idea I talk that fast.

Well, it’s been a few more weeks, and I’m still playing World of Warcraft. A few basic updates: I’m level 21 now, and I’ve even joined a guild. When last we spoke on the subject, I mentioned that I generally don’t enjoy playing multiplayer games (which raises the subject of why am I playing an MMO, but that’s a whole other conversation which will come up later), but that my few experiences playing with other humans was generally pretty positive. Ultimately, I reached a point of diminishing returns on WoW as a solo experience. It was fun enough playing solo, but kind of hollow. So, once I got up to a major group dungeon, I decided it was time to actively find humans to play with.

This turned out to be much more of a challenge than I was expecting. It’s hard to find people to play with in WoW when you’re a n00b, particularly when you don’t know anyone! The interface for finding people is pretty rough around the edges, and I found a lot of people were really hostile towards newbies in general…particularly ones as completely clueless as me.

Eventually I found a couple of groups to play with, and was invited by one very nice person to join a guild. Since joining a guild I’ve found it’s slightly easier to find people to play with, but I’m still having a hard time with it. I think the primary reason for this is that I’m playing on an East coast server. Don’t ask me how that happened…I just chose the first server that popped up on my list when I created my character…I never gave any thought to it at all. But apparently I’m playing when it’s the middle of the night on the East coast, so it’s always pretty scarcely populated.

So for the most part, I’m still soloing, since I have a hard time finding other people. But the game gets a hell of a lot easier (and more fun) when I play with other humans, so I might create a new character on another server and see how that goes.

But the important thing is that I’m sticking with it. I’ve now done group quests and an instanced dungeon, and those were fun! I can’t see myself getting to level 70 or anything, but so far, it’s a good time. I just wish it were easier to find people to play with.
And yes, that’s my dorky looking character there on the right. Plain vanilla Human paladin with a giant hammer. That’s me!

The delightfully named Holy Taco has posted a list of what they say are the 10 most worthless college majors. The expected ones are all on there, like Art History, Dance and so on…but at #1 is my major…Religion. Actually my major is technically Philosophy and Religious Studies, which means I get both #9 and #1. Sweet.

I like to think I’ve put my major to good use. Not a day goes by that I don’t use it in my every day tasks.

Okay, maybe not. But I do find unusual uses for my knowledge. And chances are that any major would have been equally useless in my job, so I might as well have studied something that interests me, right? Right?

Yeah, that’s right. As the crude widget on the sidebar there shows (assuming you’re reading this from a web browser, and not an RSS client), I’ve joined Twitter. Whee. I’m apparently really late to this party…I mean, Jordan’s on Twitter, for god’s sake!

I’m not sure I really get Twitter. It’s basically just an external way of updating my Facebook status. Which I’d probably ignore, but since I update that every couple of days anyway, and the two things can sync up with each other, I figured there was no reason why I couldn’t just do that on Twitter.

In any event, this gives me a whole new way to stalk Veronica Belmont, which to be honest, I’ve really felt like I’ve been doing lately. For the record, she showed up in my office, not the other way around, and the extent of our interaction was me rushing back to my desk to close the window with Tekzilla open before getting back to you know, actual work. Beyond that, I can’t be blamed for her popping up in every podcast I listen to, dammit.

But I digress.

Anyway, if you’re so addicted to my incoherent ramblings that you need to get me in 140 characters or less (and aren’t already seeing said ramblings on Facebook), well, then you can catch me on Twitter.

Now I just need to make that Twitter box on the left there slightly more attractive looking. It’s awfully ugly right now.