After taking an unannounced sabbatical from my blog, I have returned. I've saved up a bunch of crap to talk about; I'll be spewing forth in the following days.
April 2004 Archives
This last weekend Dave, Micah & two Phils came up for the weekend to play some Halo. We made it an all day event and it was so much fun! We spread out across the house with 4 xboxes & 4 tvs and killed each other all day long. Usually we play straight deathmatch, but this weekend we played a bunch of Team Deathmatch & Capture the Flag. It was a nice change of pace, but I am NOT a team player… There was always a suck or two on my team that really brought us down ;)
BUT, when we pulled the free-for-all deathmatch out, my pent up fury was unleashed on my friends and I became death incarnate. Scorched & eviscerated Master Chief carcasses lay strewn in my wake. Thumbs trembled on thumbsticks at the very sight of me.”Fear not,” I’d shout, “for your death will be far quicker than you can even imagine.” And before a trigger could be pulled, their lifeless corpses would crash to the ground…
Oh, and Micah was pretty good too…
Kara & I signed up for Netflix again a couple of weeks ago. This is actually our third time we’ve subscribed… you can take the constant onslaught of DVDs bombarding your mailbox for only so long before you scream “ENOUGH” and cancel your subscription (that, and last time they were having serious problems with shortages on popular DVDs).
Anyway, we signed back up, this time to rent all the Stargate SG1 & CSI DVDs to catch up on the past seasons that we’ve missed. It’s really been a handy setup because there is a distribution center in Tacoma, so it only takes 1 day for each DVD to arrive! It’s also pretty messed up though, because we’ll go through an entire Stargate DVD (that’s 4-5 episodes) in one night!
I’m thoroughly enjoying Unreal Tournament 2004 now that I finally got it! I preordered the special edition a couple of weeks ago, under the impression that it’d ship on Monday 3/15… gamestop.com didn’t actually get around to shipping it until Friday of that week!! I did cheap shipping, so it took another whole week just to get to me. I come home from work on Friday 3/23 and there she was all bundled up in a cardboard box. I ran in, unwrapped and sat down at the computer. I open up the DVD case that it came in, and… NO GAME DISC! I search the scattered wrappings for the disc I must have misplaced, but no, the disc just wasn’t there. I called up gamestop and they said I’d have to mail it back to them and once they received it they’d mail a new one to me! Another whole week to wait!!!
Meanwhile Kara started getting interested in it, so I figured we could soup up her computer (actually, I mean soup MY computer, and transplant my old parts into her computer) and both play the game. This gave me the perfect reason to go out and buy a regular copy of the game so I didn’t need to wait another week for the special edition (2 computers, 2 copies, right?) As for the souping, I was able to get a KILLER deal on a Radeon 9800 Pro through my work, but… it’s back-ordered until April 22nd!!! So now I have 2 copies of the same game (SE on 1 DVD, and regular on 6(!) CDs) and only one computer that can play it. Someday we’ll get that video card (by then it’ll probably be out of date ;) and then Kara and I will be able to kill each other all day long…
Last night I watched The Rundown, the new-to-DVD action movie staring The Rock. This movie was a blast to watch; it reminded me that action movies don’t have to be crap! Sean William Scott (Stifler from American Pie) provides the comic relief as the dude that is being ‘rundown.’ Christopher Walken plays the bad guy in that weird Walken way (the scene where he goes off about the tooth fairy to Brazilian mine workers that don’t even speak English is classic).
The plot is formulaic & predictable, but the action scenes more than make up for it. AND, if the action sequences don’t get you, the humping monkeys will!
If I’ve learned anything from J.J. Abrams (creator of Alias), it’s that women are evil duplicitous bitches. Apparently J.J. has had women troubles in his past, because he really can’t seem to get over this whole “my wife is really an evil spy” theme. It all started off with Sydney’s parents Jack Bristow & Irina Derevko. And the obvious second case is the current plot line of Vaughn discovering that is wife, Lauren Reed, is a baddie. However it doesn’t stop there… Christian Slater had a guest star role for a couple episodes as some math wiz or something… You want to guess what his wife was? That’s right, a spy that pretended to love him to get access to his work. And then, as revealed in last week’s episode, Lauren’s mom & dad had the same relationship… Dad = good, Dad’s wife = bad (we don’t know much about them, but it’s not hard to come to that conclusion since Mom helped the Covenant put a bullet in Dad’s head). Then of course there was the Francie & Will relationship… though they weren’t married & Francie (I called her Francie-bot at the time cuz I joked that the look-alike would be something ridiculous like a robot) wasn’t the real Francie it was still yet another relationship where the woman was a deceiver while the man thought everything was just great! I hope J.J. has finally gotten it out of his system, because it’s really starting to get old.
Back when I first got my Xbox I subscribed to the Xbox magazine to get the demo discs. I renewed a year later, but shortly after I decided that it was a bad idea. The magazine started getting smaller and smaller, and the writing and game coverage was just terrible. It got so bad, in fact, that I emailed the Xbox mag people and told them to cancel my subscription and send my remaining money back. They wisely assumed I was a lazy gamer that wouldn’t take action on my words, so they ignored my email. I never did anything about it and kept receiving the god-awful magazines month after month. The demo discs never got touched and a quick 5 minute flip-through would confirm that there was nothing of value in each issue.
Finally, 2 months ago the magazine had the “this is your last issue, resubscribe!!!” warning plastered across the front. I rejoiced, no more crap!! But, oh was I wrong… Last month they sent me an issue with no demo disc and a paper that said something to the effect of “man, you’re missing out on this kickass magazine, resubscribe and we’ll send you the crappy demo disc that you’re missing.” Although I despised it, I still flipped through to see if there was anything good… nope. And then yesterday, I received the second free demo-less magazine (again with no content). I assume this is some sick joke, they thought “oh man, not only will we not cancel his subscription, but even after it’s expired let’s keep sending him more!!! Hahahaha” Ok, very funny… you can stop now.
I picked up Final Fantasy X over the weekend and I’ve played ~5 hours so far. For being an avid videogamer, I’m shamefully uncultured in the way of Final Fantasy. This is the first FF game I’ve ever owned, and I’ve only briefly played others (I’m sure I played a bit of FF1, and I also played probably halfway through FF7). I’m enjoying the game so far, but it’s like no game I’ve ever played before. At its roots it’s (obviously) a console RPG, but the story elements are SO prominent that it changes the feel of the game. In fact, it almost feels more like a movie with some gameplay scattered throughout. Now, maybe that’ll change once it gets going (5 hours is still introduction time in a 40 hour game), but even if it doesn’t, I think I’m going to stay interested. I’m sure I’ll post more as get further in my quest to save the world.
Kara and I saw Kill Bill Vol. 2 over the weekend and it was a blast. I thoroughly enjoyed the first volume and was looking forward to see the conclusion. I was, however, a bit apprehensive that Vol. 2 would be just more of the same stuff of Vol. 1. So I was pleasantly surprised that the second half is VERY different from the first half. Gone are the sword fights and fountains of blood, and instead we get a ton more dialog and emotion. Don’t get me wrong, there’s still plenty of ass kicking and there’s a gross-out scene that tops the ear removal in Reservoir Dogs (I won’t give it away, but it involves something disgusting squishing between toes, and no, it’s not what you think).
Anyway, I highly recommend this movie, but do yourself a favor… If you haven’t seen the first one, rent it on DVD first. Ebert & Roeper claim that you don’t need to see Vol. 1 before you see Vol. 2. I don’t know that I’d disagree with them, but there should be no reason to see them out of order! I mean get your lazy butt down to Blockbuster and rent the DVD before you go to the movie theater…
One of my favorite video games of all times is a PS2 game called ICO. The game is so near perfection in all ways that it’s truly an artistic masterpiece. The stunningly beautiful graphics and the minimalist sound and music draw you into the game environment like none other I’ve ever played. The controls are simple and the puzzles are so well designed that you want to keep playing just to see the next one. 1up.com recently posted an article covering a talk with the creators of ICO and it’s clear from their descriptions of the development process that the quality of the game wasn’t a fluke. Read the article, then go pick up a copy of ICO (if you don’t have a PS2, buy one of those too… it’s worth it).
Recently I’ve had Bubble Bobble on the mind, so yesterday morning when I got out of bed I went straight for the NES. Kara and I played through level after level of monster popping fun; that game is one of the best 2-player games ever made if you ask me. After Bubble Bobble, I stuck in another game and we played all the way through. We ended up defeating the vile Red Falcon and saving the universe! I considered myself a hero… that’s right, Contra. Of course we had to use the most famous of all cheat codes to get our 30 lives, and boy did we need them! I can’t imagine ever beating that game with only 3 lives and 2 continues… INSANE! We had 30 lives per continue, and we STILL had to use both continues! Thank goodness Konami put that cheat in the game or I would have never seen the credits roll.
