Picasa Site Having Problems

The day they announce my new iPhone game, Highborn, Google's Picasa site has problems and my blog is full of broken picture links. Sigh.

Fixed the Valve Apple Ad

You may have seen the faux Apple ads that Valve released today.

Well, I thought one of them wasn't quite right, so I fixed it for them.(click image for full size)

Winter is Coming

It isn't that I haven't been keeping my blog up to date, it's just that I haven't been doing ANYTHING! I go to Pub Quiz at McMullan's Irish Pub on Tuesdays from 8 to 10 and maybe a movie on the weekend. That is it besides work. Seriously, I've been here on average for 12 hours, 7 days a week. Nice to be back doing what I like. :-)

Actually, I'm not doing Pub Quiz tonight, I'm going to The Double Down Saloon for the release party/book signing for Blue Vegas: Stories which was written by the saloon's owner. I don't know how I am going to get my copy signed though, since I bought the Kindle version.

The Double Down Saloon is over in "that" area of town nestled between leather fetish shops and tattoo parlors and none of my so-called friends are brave enough to go with me. If you don't hear from me in a week either send help or forward my mail.

Anyway, the real reason I was making a post was to say that HBO gave the Game of Thrones TV series a greenlight and we can expect to see it next year! Woot!

Lots more fun and reading over at the "Winter is Coming" fan page which recently moved to a new location at http://winter-is-coming.net/

I've been pretty much avoiding George R. R. Martin's blog, because I get frustrated reading about all the convention hoping he is doing instead of writing the next book in the series. I wonder, if the TV series is popular, will that inspire him to finish writing the series knowing that if he doesn't, some HBO script writers will do it for him?

No Fun at Interzone Games

Seems that things are hitting the fan with regards to Interzone Games back in Perth. The following news article went up on Kotaku yesterday. My heart goes out to all the great guys (and girls) in Perth who are stilled owed money and are still having to deal with all this a year after I resigned.

Kotaku Australia Link: "WA Dev Interzone Games Close To Liquidation"

I am getting some of the news as it is happening, but as its after midnight I can't keep up with it. I just wanted to put a quick post with the Autralian Kotaku link.

UPDATE 02/10/2010:
Here are two more links that went up last night:

Tsumea "Interzone Games (Perth studio) close to liquidation"

Giant Bomb: "A warning from a designer at Interzone Games"

UPDATE 02/11/2010:
Small news blurb in the West Australian newspaper today:

Workers have picketed the Bentley office of a state-backed computer game company which is being investigated by the Fair Work Ombudsman and pursued by the Australian Taxation Office.

Full Article: West Australian

The WA Business News put up this article today with a promise of a further in-depth article in next week's edition.
Front Page of the Western Australian Business News


UPDATE 02/120/2010:
Here is the news clip that ran yesterday:


Recap on Gamasutra

Article on Tsumea

And for those of you that asked, I was the Lead Designer/Creative Director at Interzone Perth from Feb 2008 till I resigned due to lack of pay in Feb 2009 when I was forced to return to the United States.

UPDATE 0280/2010:
I haven't been posting the daily blow by blows of the downward spiral of Interzone but there has been a few more stories posted. The Perth guys have documented much more than I have over at The Magic Pantry including video they took when the servers and IP were removed from Australia. You can find all the info here:

http://kranzky.rockethands.com/2010/02/13/interzone-the-downward-spiral/

Back to the Past

There has been talk of a Back to the Future remake circulating around the internets. I personally wanted to be counted among those that thinks this is a horrible idea. But, there has always been one thing about the trilogy that has bugged me.

Well, first I hate that the third movie was them back in the wild west instead of them jumping back through the first and second movie, like they jumped back into the first movie in the second. I was really expecting a clever three layered time travel extravaganza, since they shot the second and third movies back to back. That is what is cool about time travel movies!

And that is the problem, they really didn't take advantage of the fact they are doing time travel stuff! Case and point: the big problem in the third movie is that they are stuck in 1885 because the DeLorean has run out of gas and the flying circuits have been destroyed. Thats why they have to do the whole thing with putting the car on the train tracks to get it up to 88 miles per hour which nearly gets them killed. Why didn't they just go back to where Doc Brown hid the DeLorean in the mine and stick a note in there that read, "Marty, bring some extra gas. Love Doc Brown." There, problem solved.

Dead Laptop Sketch

I had my laptop boot up three times saying the time/date wasn't set. The third time I ran the little diagnostic program, which instantly said it couldn't find the hard drive. Rest of the diagnostic went fine. I figured the hard drive thing was a fluke, it found the hard drive before I ran the diagnostic right? Rebooted and that was it. It never found the hard drive either.

I heard/saw/read a joke thing once, maybe one of those lists of stupid things IT people have had to deal with. It involved a guy trying to hold what ever piece of equipment the computer couldn't find up to the monitor so the computer could see it.

I took the laptop down to Jane's Computers. He says the hard drive is fine, but the computer won't recognize any hard drive connected to it. It the connection or the motherboard. The conversation went KINDA like this:

"The man from the Monk shop said that it needed a whole new motherboard, but then pointed out that the new improved Monk Plus models were twice as powerful, had an entirely new multi-tasking, Negative Capability feature that allowed them to hold up to sixteen entirely different and contradictory ideas in memory simultaneously without generating any irritating system errors, were twice as fast and at least three times as glib, and you could have a whole new one for less than the cost of replacing the motherboard of the old model."

He didn't charge me for taking a look at it, even though I tried to offer him something just for his time. So Thumbs up to: Jane's Computers at 1725 S. Rainbow Blvd. right at Oakly Blvd. Las Vegas, NV 89146. Phone (702) 597-0600. Apparently no website though.

I went to Fry's and got a USB enclosure. Took the hard drive out of the laptop and stuck it in that. Then I thought, wait, I know the laptop is set up to try and boot from USB, I could just plug it in and boot and still a working laptop right? Nope. It starts to load windows and reboots. Googling around the Internets I see that lots of people are trying to install and boot Vista from a USB drive and it isn't easy. I was hoping that since it is already installed, which appears to be the difficult part, that I could get it to work but apparently not.

I had planned on maybe getting a new laptop in a few months. I just wanted to wait long enough for all the new stuff coming out of CES was out and slightly lower in price. I want both Windows 7 and Office 2010 on it already, no upgrading. I want small, because I have big screens on my desks that I can plug it into and small is better to carry around when I'm not at my desk. But I do kinda want something with a graphic card so I can play games when I'm out somewhere away from my desktop computer. My current laptop played WoW initially, but sometime between installs it got upset with it. Now it plays (well, before it died) but it wouldn't render the world correctly. Not that I have really even played WoW since leaving Perth, but the new expansion is coming out and I'll at least check that out.

Anyway, I'll leave you with this surprisingly video trailer for, "Office 2010: The Movie!"

...you know... this means I am going to have to install iTunes again doesn't it? $#!+!!!

Year's End

Yeah, so I've been pretty quiet lately. Let's see if I can do a quick recount of the last month or so.

Been spending a lot of time at work, very busy doing difficult things at the moment. Nothing I can talk about since the game is unannounced, and to be fair it's just normal 'that's why they call it work' stuff and it isn't that interesting.

I've also playing a few games on the XBox 360 and PS3. Finished Demon's Souls the other night. Even managed to get through the first level, defeating a PvPer and the first boss, and then back to the Nexus with all the souls I got for defeating the final boss. I didn't really defeat the PvPer so much as not follow him into the monster spawn he thought I was stupid enough to follow him into. Shot him with some flaming arrows instead. He ran away and fell down a hole which made me giggle especially since I'm sure I had already destroyed his expensive armor with my Scraping Spear.

Starting the God of War series, not really liking the whole 'mini-game' aspect of it. Especially when I can't quite figure out what they are telling me I should be doing. "Oh, when you show the button being tapped, what you really mean is 'change the way your holding the controller so you can mash the button in some insane attempt to push it through the other side and therefor need to replace it with a new one." Took a quick peek at the God of War III demo and I like how they put the button you are supposed to press on screen where it is on the controller. I never could remember what position the four buttons are in. But it still breaks me out of the game to be watching for the button symbols to show up on screen and the game doesn't give you much of a time window to press the button before it's too late. Also don't like how they teach me I can climb up the side of the boat using this netting, but not back down the identical netting next to it and things like that.

I LOVED Shadow Complex! If you liked old school Metroid and haven't gotten this $15 game from XBox Live Arcade, you are missing out. Only two things drove me nuts, when they put two items in the same 'square' of the map. One is in the same square as a Save Room so you don't see the dot. The other removes the dot when you get the first item even though there is still something else hidden there. First one didn't get me, but I spent forever trying to get the last part of the key due to the second issue. I'll just say that when you find the mask that lets you breath underwater, keep looking around there for a part of the key. That isn't a spoiler, consider it a bug fix.

We finally got around to finishing off all the divorce stuff, so I am legally single again. I even tried dating again for almost 3 weeks, but it didn't work out so well. Somehow asking her if she had already gone to lunch ended with us breaking up. ...via text messaging even! How sad and depressing. Kind of ruined my whole Christmas break. It actually happened on New Year's Day, so 2010 isn't starting off very well.

Just got around to updating the blog to replace the Interzone and Auran links with the Jet Set Games logo. I wish I could figure out how to put a background into the posts, so that I could replace the background with the one I use for my twitter page. See how the game boxes are crowded over on the left, I can't let them go any further to the right or you wouldn't be able to read the post text in a smaller screen resolution. I tried poking around in the HTML but without an example, using the same template, to steal from I'm over my head. Also I'm still using the old templates from before Blogger upgraded them a few years ago. I'm afraid of losing all the tinkering I've already done if I upgrade.

Also did a real quick resume update, always hate defining what I do into bullet points. I wanted to convert the resume MS:Word file to a PDF, but the first converter program I found didn't keep the margins, extending it to a 3rd page and did some other odd things. I'll work on that later since I'm hopefully not sending it out again anytime soon. Though next time I do, I will definitely convert it to PDF first so it can't be altered easily. Recruitment agencies like to put their own giant logo across the top of all the pages. I understand why they want to do that, they need to remind the employer who is representing you, and I suppose it works with most resumes. The last time it was a disaster for my nicely laid out, 2-page resume. Since it also indented what I wrote, it turned into a 6-page resume, 2 pages wide by 3 pages long. It was confusing and an almost unreadable mess. They also did the same for my 2-page published title list. It was an embarrassment for them to even have sent it out like that and who knows, may have even contributed to me not getting the job. It's okay since I'm much happier where I am.

Finally, I found out that I can get a rebate on my taxes for the sales tax I paid on my car; which is great considering the tax burden I'll have this year.

Okay, that's it for now. Be safe.

Netflix's Customer Service Box

Dear Netflix, please let me out of your little customer service box.

I hooked up the PS3 streaming disc as was watching a movie. One of my PS3 controllers was low on battery after an extremely long session of "Demon's Souls" which is almost impossible to pronounce correctly. Go on try it and remember, apostrophe 's' and plural.

Anyway, I plugged the cable into the PS3. The controller wasn't actually connected to the cable which may or may not matter. The result; however, was the PS3 shut off. Is this a problem related to the PS3 or Netflix. I dunno but I thought I would report it to Netflix. ...only I can't.

Netflix's website insists on pre-defining your customer service experience. There is no way for you to actually enter an issue they haven't expected you to have.

Let's start with even trying to report an issue with streaming through the PS3. The only options you are allowed to have are:

• The disc arrived broken
• The disc is scratched or unplayable
• I received the wrong disc
• I have lost the disc, and need a replacement
• I haven't received the disc

Absolutely nothing about any problem you having with the service itself, not even an option for "other."

What if I went to the section to report a problem with the movie? That doesn't work either; because, the only options that come up are to report problems with movies that I already watched. The movie that I was in the middle of watching isn't listed.

What if I decided to go off the sidewalk, and just report the problem with the movie I failed to watch by selecting one I did watch, did not have a problem with, but is on the list that I am allowed to choose from? I could just explain that this wasn't the movie I was having a problem with and detail my problem, right? Nope, because there is no way to explain the problem again, only pre-defined choices:

Please tell us if you experienced any of the following problems. (Check all that apply)
• Audio did not match the picture/was out of sync
• Parts of the audio were missing or cut-off
• No subtitles on a foreign language film
• Picture was blurry
• Picture was unwatchable or missing
• Wrong movie/TV episode started playing
• Unexpected pauses/frequent stops and starts

There is a continue option at the bottom, and from the way it words the question, leads me to believe I don't have to select any of those options and can go onto the next page where I can actually tell them about my problem. Nope. You press continue, even without selecting a single problem from their list, and you get, "Thanks for your input. We will investigate and resolve the problems as soon as possible."

Good to hear, glad their on top of things.

Though to be fair, I am enjoying my Netflix subscription and really haven't had any other problems. Now that I'm working again, I have even increased my disc limit to two DVDs at a time. I really can't believe all the good, new TV shows that came out and you people let get canceled while I was in Australia. Shame on you.

I Break Things

Things don’t work for me, mostly electronic / computer type things. Unless somebody is watching. I may have mentioned that before, but this is a story of what my evening has been like.

I got one of the new Xbox 360 Wireless ‘N’ Network adapters. It is brand new, ordered from Amazon and shipped the day it was released. I put the Driver disc in my new Xbox 360 as instructed and it doesn’t install any drivers. It just tells me it is a “Mixed Media Disc” with only the option to eject it. I popped it into the computer and I can see the files on it just fine. But I am told that just popping it into the 360 should start running the driver install process.

I went to the Xbox website. They don’t even list the new wireless adapter on the site. I filled out an email service request form. When I pressed submit, it told me that nothing matched my search. I am sure I wasn’t filling out a search. Luckily, when I pressed the back button my data was still in all the fields. When I pressed submit again it went through. I gave me an email service request number, but oddly enough didn’t send me one of those generic “We have received your service request and somebody will answer you soon” generic emails. It has been 24 hours and no response, they not work weekends?

I decided to see if I could Google some information. I found an article on the new adapter on Tom’s Hardware. Mostly the comments section was divided between the people who were going off about how Microsoft and the Xbox suck and those people who just thought the adapter was way to expensive. I posted a comment… I know, I know. But that isn’t the point, and please don’t bring up the Xbox/PS3 debate or even how expensive the wireless adapter was. I needed one for reasons that are none of your business, and that isn’t the point of this.

The point is that Tom’s hardware lets you make the comment and then just asked for you user name and an email address. It then sends the follow email:

Thank you for your participation in Tom's Hardware!

You have less than 48 hours to register with your Username and Email Address.

Username : "XXXXXXXX"
Email : "XXXXXXXXXX"


To register, please click on the link below:
http://www.tomshardware.com/membres/#registerForm

If you don't validate your account within 48 hours, your Username and Email Address will be automatically deleted.

Tom's Hardware Team

------------------
This email is generated automatically; replies are not read. To contact us, please use the contact form on the site.

You can see the link isn’t tied to my email address as a confirmation or anything. I just takes me to their registration page which gives me two options: “Sign up for free by clicking 1” and “Already member.” You’ll note that both of those don’t actually make sense.

I suspect the first should be reworded to “Sign up for free!” and then have another title that says, “New Member.” he second one is missing the article and should be, “Already a member.”

Anyway, I fill out the first one. It tells me, “The email address is already in use.” If I click on the “Already member” option it asks for a username and password, which I don’t have. I try entering what I would have as a user name as password if I did have one, but that didn’t work. The window has its own “Not a Member” link but when I try to fill it out, it keeps telling me that my email in the two fields (you know, the standard thing where they make you type it twice just in case) don’t match. I copy and pasted them in making sure there were no extra spaces screwing it up and even reloaded the page and tried it again from scratch.

Finally, I go to the recover account information and enter my email which it tells me does not exist in their database.

I can’t find the “contact form on the site” which the email mentions but does not link to.

So, is it just me or is it Tom’s Hardware that is fubar? I am willing to believe it is just me; because as I've said, this stuff happens to me all the time!

So in the end I’m going back to playing Demon's Souls on my PS3.

Joining the Jet Set crowd

So it looks like I have procured gainful employment and am joining the work force again. The jet set gang over at Jet Set Games have decided they wanted their office adorned with my Homestar Runner figures. That means they have to pay me to show up every day and dust them.

Jet Set was formed last year by Westwood Studios Alumni Bret Sperry, Adam Isgreen, Rade Stojsavljevic and Steve Wetherill. Besides working with such wonderful talent again, this also means I get to stay in Las Vegas.

So let's add this up: new car, new job, possibility of being able to move back into my house next year when the tenants' lease is up. So that just leaves one thing... anybody know any cute single women?

Zoom Zoom Stripes!

I had planned on getting up really early this morning and heading up to Red Rock when the loop opens at 7 AM to take some pictures of the car with the racing stripes. I did get up on time, but I woke up with a monster headache. I didn't get out of the house till 9 and just took a couple of quick shots. I'm planning on staying up late playing video games tonight, so I probably won't get to Red Rock till next weekend.

I originally was going to go with Black stripes, then was thinking Dark Grey, then I saw pictures of White stripes on albeit, darker Grey car. I had one of those gut feelings that don't usually lead me astray, so I went for it. They guy at Eco-Tint had originally spoke up against White, but the result won him over.

I got the car registered after only three hours. I even got the same personalized plates I had on my old '99 Miata. It was still on hold, but since I was the previous owner, the woman got her supervisor to release it. It's nothing special, just my initials, JBHIV. I did get the "United We Stand" plate with the eagle and American flag. I thought about getting a space before 'the fourth' this time, but that plate only allows five characters. I still don't have the title for the car. The things I've gone through with the dealership in Van Nuyes you wouldn't believe. I thought I was done with them when they finally sent me the Manufactures Certificate of Origin, but they didn't fill in the millage section so I spent another two hours at the DMV for nothing.

I do want to say I am having a blast with the car. I'm zoom zooming all over the place. Though I do have one small problem. Cup Holder Fail:

Zoom Zoom is BACK!

If you don't hear from me for awhile, it isn't because I'm off on a fun filled, exciting road trip... more likely I'm still stuck at the DMV.

IMPORTANT SANDWICH UPDATE!

A long time ago I posted about how to make a Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich. You can read all about it here. I am writing you now to make an update. Somebody mentioned putting peanut butter on both slices of bread and then putting on the jelly. Yeah, I shot them down right away.

But then last month somebody brought it up again. Again I leveled my guns on them, but then they brought up a point that I hadn't considered. If you are planning on eating the sandwich right away, as you are want to do, let the jelly breath by applying it directly to the bread. However, if you are wisely planning for the future, packing away the sandwich for a quick, delicious snack later, THEN you want to apply peanut butter to both bread slices and have the jelly between them. The reason, as was pointed out to me, was that the peanut butter prevents the jelly from soaking through the bread.

Thankfully I was able to get you this information to you before it was too late.

Retro Gamer - Lands of Lore

Issue 67 of Retro Gamer is finally out unless you live elsewhere in which case you already missed it. Not sure why the U.S. is a month behind. Why issue 67? Because that is the issue with the long over due "Lands of Lore" article. Damien McFerran actually interviewed Rick Gush and myself over two years ago, back when I was living in Brisbane. Damien's finishing of the article was interrupted by his wife having a baby, his triumphant return to the Tour de France and drafting Obama's Presidential acceptance speech. Did that come off as funny or mean? I was trying for funny. Writing it a little off at the moment, I'm watching the Emmy award show and I'm a bit upset Neil Patrick Harris wasn't in the red and black Dr. Horrible uniform. Why would he go back to the white uniform when the red and black one was so much more evil?

Okay, sorry. Seriously Damien's wife did have a baby. Again, congrats on that! Then the article was originally supposed to be in issue 64, but the editor felt that that issue had to many "making of" articles so he decided to push it back.

Unfortunately, the layout artist of the issue was too smart to publish the picture I gave him of members of the team. Actually, it is a picture of the "Eye of the Beholder" team, though it was pretty much the same people on "Lands of Lore." Note to the guy who wrote the Wiki article, Westwood did not split from SSI over artistic differences. Westwood became a part of Virgin Games, though we still provided a lot of help, support and love to our friends over at SSI while there were doing the EOB III. And if you don't beleive me, you'll have to deal with my bad-ass self from the early 90's in the picture. Oh yeah, don't mess with me!

It might be obvious by now that I am really just typing away trying to add some meat to this post to balance out the two pictures. I don't want to actually post a copy of the article itself until it has been off the shelf for a few months. It a glorious 3 page article with a nice shout out to the late great Rick Parks. I think you should rush right out and buy at least two issues. I did.

How to win friends and influence people

My beard is starting to turn grey. It is really annoying that it is doing so in patches so it looks really bad and I’ve had to start dyeing it. I have been thinking about how I can turn this to my advantage. I’ll admit that my thoughts were initially more along the lines of dating, but as that hasn’t been working out too well I’ve decided focus on other areas.

I am hoping that I’ll be getting a job pretty soon (praying) and a new job brings new people, new opportunities to make a first impression. So, I am thinking of ways to convince these new people that I’m a time traveler. This may have something to do with the fact that I’m watching Journeyman on Hulu. You people sure let them cancel some good TV shows while I was out of the country.

First thing is that I am going to start sneaking off to dye or shave my beard back down during the day. The ‘shaving it back down’ thing has to do with how I keep it pretty short and am always shaving it back to stubble. After four or more days since my last dye job, I can go from brown back to grey-ish. This means that I can appear to alter my apparent age.

I am also going to start carrying around another set of cloths and change in and out of them at odd times. If anybody notices I’ll either deny it or make overly lame excuses. One trick I just thought of is to have two identical shirts and pre-stain one with ketchup or something. That is the one I’ll start the day in. Then I’ll switch to the non-stained shirt and make sure it’s noticed by some people who I’ll later let see me “accidently” spill some ketchup on it.

I’ll also throw in some more subtle conversational bits. I am going to start asking people the date and then when they tell me, I’ll say, “yeah, but what year?” I’ll spend time on movie spoiler sites and then casually working in tidbits of information about movies that aren’t out yet into conversations. Occasionally after asking a question about whether or not somebody has done something and told no, I’ll follow it up with a serious sounding, “good, that means there is still time!”

Now you are probably thinking that these new people may read my blog and see this post. Experience has taught me that although people I work with may occasionally read my blog, they never read too far back into the older posts. But in thinking of this I realize that I can also leverage the thing I discovered about how Blogger publishes posts that started as drafts by the time and date I first started writing them. By occasionally starting posts and saving them as drafts, I’ll be able to go back and seemly make posts in the past filled with things that I wouldn’t have known at the time of the postings, like this post I made back on December 14, 2008. Hey, that reminds me those aliens are due to land next month!

Publishing in the Past

Oh that sucks. Because the "I'm Batman" blog post was actually started and saved as a draft, before I got tired of tossing and turning last night and wrote the Warehouse 13 post; when posted it inserted itself before the "Warehouse 13" post. (Was that sentence punctuated correctly?)

It should always put posts up by the date & time the user presses the publish post button.

What use would I have for posting things in the past? People coming to the blog's main link will see the top post and think the blog hasn't been updated. Stupid move Blogger.

Warehouse 13

I've been watching Warehouse 13 on SyFi since it started and I really haven't been impressed yet. It seems so dumbed down. I kind of view it as the Sci-fi version of NCIS and CSI. Let's just make crap up and insult everybody with a brain because most people don't have one. They are crime scene investigators, why are they investigating the crimes, interviewing suspects and arresting people! They aren't even cops let alone police detectives! I know people like those shows, as they are doing quite well in the ratings. It is probably just me. But what is the Internet for if not a place to vent.

So on with the venting about Warehouse 13! In the latest one, episode 10, "Breakdown," Claudia Hacks the door keypad by using an "ASCII-Binary-Algorithm?" Okay, even if that made even a little sense, how do you do that by entering numbers into a keypad? Not that you have to bother with that; because, a well placed kick can disable the whole ultra, super security lock on the scary Dark Vault.

What is next? Is somebody going to re-route the encryptions? Divert power through the deflector dish? re-shizzel the fah-shizzel? Please, can these shows get a tech-writer or something? Maybe teach these people that you can't write a program to do anything in 30 seconds by banging on the keyboard no matter how much flashy graphics you have on screen. Maybe if you used the mouse and pretended to click on drop down menus and file menus for 30 seconds I'd beleive you were actually doing something.

Oh and the Dark Vault with it's ultra, super "purple" containment fields because we've never seen a black light before.

Okay on to the acting on the show. I'm fine with the delivering of the lines part. It isn't the greatest acting in the world, but I've seen much worse. What really bothers me is the way they move sometimes, the lack of any effort on the physical acting. Dodging the lighting bolt thing that went down the corridor, they didn't even really get out of the corridor let alone make me think they really were seeking cover. In a previous episode they take cover behind something while somebody is shooting at them, only they aren't really doing a very good job of it with half their bodies still stick out where they could get shot. They looked more like they were just getting more comfortable so they could continue their conversation.

Again in episode 10, at the end where Claudia trying to act like the Silly String is really hard to break wasn't working for me. It could be the Silly String's fault that it drooped and didn't look like it was resisting her slow, agonizing pulls. But then even when Myka and Claudia are struggling not to get pulled into the gears, they arn't really selling it.

You know the one thing that I would have forgiven all the other stuff in that episode for. If Myka had done something like lifted up her shirt, instead of using a broom to knock Peter away from Sylvia Plath's typewriter, and that caused him to snap out of it. Not asking for nudity, just a harmless over the shoulder shot where she lifts up her shirt and a reaction shot from him. Because really, if the broom worked she could have just ran and tackled him away from it in half the time it took for her to run out of the room and find the janitor's closet... assuming it wasn't an evil broom artifact.

Another little annoyance. They put all this emphasis on low-techy-tech, yet have these custom LCD displays for all the artifacts? Modern LCD screens with flashy custom animated graphics and yet the machine that keeps all the artifacts in the warehouse safe is run by a set of big, giant-toothed gears... that nobody thought to put a cover over... even though it they are right under some sort of air vent with space enough for frick'n can of Evil Silly String to fall though?!

I like that they finally vented one of my other fustration issues in episode 7, "Emplosion" by addressing the Gandalf syndrome problem the show has. You know where the brains of the outfit can't simply take the two seconds to explain anything causing things to be way more complicated and difficult than need be. My theory is Marty can't explain anything because even the writers don't even know what is going on. At least we have on-going plotline now and maybe they have mapped some more of the mythos out.

Okay, I'll stop whining now, at least until the toilet Elvis died on shows up as an evil artifact.

See, you last that long through one of my stupid rants you get a decent joke. Admit it you laughed. Don't try and say you didn't. Next time the show comes up in conversation, you know you'll be bringing up the possibility of the evil Elvis killing toilet artifact.

I'm Batman!

Wow. Batman: Arkham Asylum really took me by surprise. Of the four PS3 games I have, it is the one I would have put last on my list of what I thought I’d enjoy.

As it turns out, I had just forgotten how much I loathe trying to play First-Person Shooters on a console system; so that kills two of my four games. Seriously, it’s like I’m floating around while looking at the world through a paper-towel tube.

The fourth game is Little Big Planet, and the spongy jump is getting on my nerves. I’m hoping the level building stuff will be fun, but I haven’t gotten around to that yet as Batman took all my time. I finished it last Friday and I’ve been replaying it on hard, though I did just pick up Assassin’s Creed PS3 used for $17 and Braid PC on special this weekend on Steam for $5.

I read a number of reviews where Batman: Arkham Asylum is being called this year’s BioShock and frankly, I don’t see it. Other than the visuals and atmosphere, where I see the comparison on quality, I think Batman eats BioShock’s lunch. I’m saying that having played BioShock on the PC for those of you paying attention where I mentioned my view on FPSs on a console system. Anyway, Arkham Asylum’s story may or may not be better, but I think it came across as part of the game better. The depth of the gameplay is better. Arkham Asylum is a much better game.

The camera work was amazing, Batman hardly ever got in my way. I remember how frustrated I got at the old Alone in the Dark game back in the early 90's because of the way they handled the camera. We have certainly come a long way. (BTW, Has anybody played the new Alone in the Dark: Inferno?")

The world is very immersive and beautifully rendered. The game is a confined, open world; meaning you’re stuck on Arkham Island but it isn’t a series of levels your forced though. You travel back and forth across the island and through its buildings all of which change a bit as the story progresses. That is exactly the type of set-up I like in a game. It makes it feel like a real place. I hate games that are nothing but hallways. Even Half-Life 2 is really nothing but a game full of well disguised hallways.

The gameplay in Arkham Asylum feels great. The controls are intuitive and easy to master; and that is being said by somebody who hasn’t seriously played with a console controller in a few years. Although, I do have a small problem with the combat system in the game. Don’t get me wrong, it was easy and fun. But it was kind of too easy. The extra combat combos and other unlocks didn’t do it for me. I wasn’t able to use them very much. The combos themselves are only available after you chain a certain number of attacks and the situation is right. In

my case, by the time I noticed that the combo was available; it was too late to use it. All of the other unlocks felt a bit useless. It took more time and effort to try and use them when I could just have easily defeated the goons normally. I felt a little like they designed and balanced this decent combat system and then added the extra stuff instead of having it all in the mix in the beginning. Maybe that was just me and not having played a console game in awhile. I would have rather see those just unlocking generic combos that you could use much more freely. Again, just to be clear, the basic system was still fun. I was Batman and I kicked some butt exactly as Batman should.

The best thing about the game is that it is Batman in this world. Batman feels like the big, bad, Dark Knight. He looks grim and gruff, and even that evolves as the game progresses; rips appear on his costume, he gets bruised a bit and even develops a five o’clock shadow. He moves, gestures, and fights exactly like Batman should. And when you are controlling him, you feel like Batman. It really hit home for me when I was spraying the explosive gel on a wall, and didn’t bother to step back before blowing it up. In another game Batman might have taken damage and that would have taken away from the mystic that this is actually Batman. In Arkham Asylum Batman simply turns his face away from the explosion and takes it like a man with no damage.

The designers/writers/artists also included a lot of subtle things that really show you how much of a grip they had on the source material. I’m not a big Batman reader myself, but even I was catching lots of little things.

The voice actors were also great, I beleive they are a lot of the same people from the cartoon series including Mark Hamill as the Joker. Excellent.

Some of the other nitpicks I had besides combat being a little too easy, was that I felt like I had to always run around in Detective Mode. Even though its graphic effect was subtle, I would have rather enjoyed the visuals naturally without the color shift, but it was too easy to otherwise miss things like hidden Riddler’s question marks alignment puzzles which you could only see in Detective Mode.

I also didn’t like that some of the Riddler “camera puzzles” were ones that you couldn’t solve unless you came back later in the game when you got some more equipment. I wasted a lot of time trying to figure them out only to find that I needed the zip line or something else that I wouldn’t get till much later in the game. I’m fine with some of the Riddler’s other hidden stuff not being accessible right away, but the “camera puzzles” text are thrown in your face when you enter a new area so I expected to be able to solve them.

Control wise, when doing the hanging movement along a ledge, the game tilted the camera at an angle but you still moved the joystick straight to the side. I thought they should have let you move the joystick to the side in a matching angle to move Batman to the side. Wouldn’t have hurt to have both directly to the left or angled to the left work.

Story nitpicks:

Batman can remotely summon the Batwing to fly in so he can get his zip-line launcher out of the glove compartment (which I really wish he’d brought with him in the first place) but he can’t use it to fly out some Arkham personnel? Especially since he keeps finding guards and doctors, telling them to sit tight, only to find them dead next times he comes through.

About the entrance to Croc’s Lair from Batcave: Batman says, “I found a door in the Batcave, but it was locked.”

Umm, didn’t YOU build the Batcave? And isn’t it supposed to be a secret? If somebody is building new passageways, and putting in locked doors you can't open, that’s bad.

A nitpick about the DC universe in general as far as Batman goes; reading these villian back stories, I’m seeing a constantly reoccurring pattern. So if I ever find myself in theGothem area, I need to remember to be careful to not so much as bump my head or stub my toe. If I do I’m more than likely to develop some physiological break-down and/or neurosis which will cause me to become a super-villain. This normally only seems to happen to people with names that easily, and stupidly, relate to their pending neurosis. This is so their super-villain name can be easily identified. I’ll be an ax-murderer if you were wondering, Hewitt. = Hew It.

P.S. Blogger's new (actually it's kinda old by now) editor sucks. It keeps screwing up the formatting and is just flooding the post with unnecessary HTML. It is also preventing the Crome browser's spell checker from working at times. I also have no idea why these last two paragraphs are printing in a lighter color. Spent a few minutes trying to fix them, then I stopped caring as I have other things I need to go do.

P.S.S. Yeah, like I could let something like that go. I fixed the color.

Rocket Fuse

A number of the talented people I used to work with at Interzone Games in Perth, have managed to escape the long arm of the law long enough to get together and formed their own little indie game start-up called Rocket Hands.

On the left there, starting at 12:00 and going clock-wise is Jason, Anthony, Brad, Daniel, Jack, Robert and Simon.

They just released their first iPhone game called Rocket Fuse for the iPhone. If you're sensing a rocket theme going on, you're not alone.

I'd love to tell how great it is and all that, only I havn't played it. My iPhone was locked to the evil Telstra network in Australia so I had to have a violin duel out on some lonely crossroads to get out of it. Anyway the result of all that is that I no longer have my iPhone.

Here is the offical trailer video though, so you can take a look for yourself.

Do the guys a favor and pick it up.

I've finally arrived at the next generation... updating...

Back in October-ish of last year, I was in San Diego visiting the Sony Online offices. And because of somethings that were in the works finally bought a next gen game system. I think I would have gone XBox 360, but because of the SOE stuff I got a Playstation3 instead. I also bought Little Big Planet and Resistance 2.

Now in generations past I always bought every system, as soon as it came out. But living in Australia with the region codings, had me just skip this generation. I didn't want to buy a U.S. region 1 system and have to import the games and I didn't want to buy a Australian region 4 system with the risk that I'd be back here in the U.S.

I was worried about customs and such bringing it back with me to Australia, so I took it out of the box, roughed up some of the manuals, tangled up the cords, and then dragged the box across the parking lot to scuff it up. Turns out all that was completely unnecessary, but still a little fun.

Then it sat there. I couldn't find my power converter since moving from Brisbane to Perth. In February I moved back to the U.S. (and found the power converter as I was packing up the house.) It was on a boat for a few months and then when it got here I really didn't have a proper TV to hook it up to... and so on.

Then the other day I decided to take my previous generation systems down to Gamestop and trade them in. They told me they no longer take XBox systems or games, so I still have those to sell on Craig's List or something. But I did sell them my Nintendo GameCube, Playstation2, lots of extra cables & controlers, and about 35 games. In return I got Batman: Arkham Asylum, Wolfenstein, a subscription to Game Informer magazine (which is part of their Edge Card deal, which got me bonuses and discounts that affected my total), and Picross for the DS (which I had bought for Connie and she either remembered to take back from me or I lost). I also have $10 left over.

I had one PS2 game that was unopened. I was on the Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences' Game of the Year panel, twice. They are supposed to send you copies of the games that have been nominated. Only they tend to send you only about a third of the games you are supposed to get, a third that seem to be just random games they had lying around, and the final third you just don't get at all. As a result of this I had a few unopened games, but my roommate years ago checked out all by one of them. The Gamestop manager says he isn't allowed to take unopened games and can't buy it from me today.

I understand this is policy implemented to discourage you from stealing new games and selling them. I asked if I could go outside, open it, and come back in.

He gave me a deadpan look and said, "I can't take this from you... today."

So, I took it back and sold it to him two days later. He also gave me some advice on how much some of my XBox games are worth. The two Baulder's Gate games are supposed to fetch top dollar.

Anyway, I finally decided it was time to get the damn system hooked up. Got my LDC TV (unfortunately kinda small and not High Def) out of storage and started plugging things in. I was kinda surprised that it not only worked right away, I even got it to connect to the internet on the first try. After that shocking turn of events, I was kind of afraid to put a game in the thing.

When I finally overcame my fear and decided I needed to, as Brad Pitt said it, "kill some Nat-zies."; it told me that I needed to update the PS3. Waiting...

Then once I got that done and tried again to play, it told me I have to update the game. Still waiting...

I almost felt like doing the old man voice, "When I was a boy, Console systems was different. Didn't have no bugs, cuz you tested'em real gud! Once they was out there in da market, wasn't no way to do no updates. That was it! If ya screwed up, you was screwed!"

Woot! Update done!