I know I promised a wonderful longer post for what is now late last week, but unfortunately events have conspired to delay my writing. Marathon training has begun for me again, and being more out of shape than I thought, combined with a cold, has reduced me once again to lots of napping while I try to get my energy levels back up.

As such, I'm probably going to be both late and shorter than I intended, I will promise a good meaty blog sometime before next monday. and i'll shoot for thursday, but that depends on how fast I get over my illness/soreness.

I know that was quick...but I'm tired :).

I will post a good long one soon.

Adios for now,

Good Juju

Hey all!

I'm back! After an overly, crazy long hiatus, due in part to computer failure, a HECTIC first semester (which is finally done!), and some minor (but draining) surgery...I'm glad to have the time to blog again.

I'm going to make this one a relatively quick blog, just so I'm sure that I actually finish and post it, but I'll be sure to check back in soon with a longer entry. If this entry seems a little disjointed, I blame my multi-variable calculus final. That stuff hurts the brain my friends.

Knowing I'll be pretty much WAY late on all of this, I'll give a quick breakdown on what I'm playing/watching/listening to/ lusting after, to give some idea of what I've been up to... (If you don't care too much, please at least do me the favor of skipping to the question at the end. Thanks!)

Gaming: Still running my old clunker PC (but see below!), so I haven't gotten to most of the hot new titles, but the Orange Box is still providing me with oodles of entertainment. And whoever thought of putting Peggle on the iPod owes me hours of my life. (I think I'm sufficiently late on both of these I don't need to go into too much detail).

Movies: If you haven't seen Juno yet, you really owe it to yourself to go see it. One of the funniest movies I'm seen in a while, it not only has great performances from Michael Cera and Ellen Page, but Allison Janney (C.J. from the West Wing) and J.K. Simmons (J. Jonah Jameson from Spiderman) are absolutely HILARIOUS as the parents. As an added bonus, the soundtrack rocks.

Music: I've gone back to listening to a lot of The National (especially Alligator and Boxer). Those guys are definitely worth checking out for some good indie flavored urban alienation rock (yea, that sounds weird, but trust me, it's good). And, as I mentioned, I'm really digging that Juno soundtrack, as well as, strangely enough, Huey Lewis and the News' Sports album.

Lusts: The clunker rig of mine is destined for the graveyard in my basement, and I'm going to be buying myself a new laptop for use at college. I have about a $3,000 budget, and I'm looking at getting either the new Alienware m15x or the m17x whenever that comes out (and if costs are not uber prohibitive). As someone entirely new to shopping for laptops (I've always had desktops), I was wondering if any of the enlightened Gamespot readers (or at least all 2 that are still reading...) have any suggestions before I make my final choice?

Thanks to those who read this far, and I look forward to posting again soon!

Back at last,

Good Juju

One of my best buddies recently picked up a Wii, which mens I've basically permanently "borrowed" his gamecube and some of his games. This is new in gaming for me, because I've basically been a PC-exclusive gamer for a long time...mostly because I had trouble justifying spending 3 digits of scratch on something I could use only for games (maybe silly, but oh well), but also because I wasn't very comfortable with controllers. I mean, whenever I get talked into playing Halo or whatever, the whole concept of one stick for look and one for move...it makes me want my mouse and keyboard. But, admitting to myself that the Gamecube was definitely not the hot console of its generation, I've still been pleasantly surprised by my experiences with it.

The two games I've spent significant time with so far have been Rouge Squadron 2 and REsident Evil 4, and both of them have kept me highly entertained. Maybe because neither of them have control schemes requiring crazy multi button combos (something I suck at no matter the paltform), but maye also because they both have set-ups which really use the gamecube controller well, whether it's Rouge Squadrons system for commmanding squadmates or RE4's highly intuitive combat system. It still took me a while to adapt to the controller to the point where I started to feel close to as comfortable as I do on the PC (I died a LOT when I first started out in RE4), but I think I'm getting there. And while I haven;t finished either game yet (I'm on the last mission of Rouge Squadron II and about 2/3 (?) of the way through RE4), this whole experience has made me much more open to buying one of the next gen consoles...though I admit I wa already leaning towards an XBox 360 because of Mass Effect...

And in a different vein of exploring gaming history, I recently learned that GameTap is now offering Free "green" memberships that le you join up and play about 40 games for free, if you're willing to have to watch an ad before you launch them. Just for fun I went and checked out the sections of the library reserved for "gold" members, and I was genuinely surprised by what I saw: there were probably 50- games I'd always wanted to play but never goten around to. The Icewind Dales, Deus Ex, X-com, The Tomb Raiders (even legend and anniversay i think), Beyond Good and Evil, Psychonauts...the list just goes on. I'm thinking of upgrading to the gold eventually, especially since it comes with access to the new Sam and Max games...

And on a different note: the Bulls picked Jaokim Noah, and I swore that if they did I wouldn't go to one of their games...so it looks like I'm out. In the words of one Chicago sports writer "Shoot! The Bulls picked the guy who can't." Oh well. At least a certain baseball team who i will not name for fear of jinxing them is on a big time winning streak..including an awesome walk-off home run today.

And if you haven't heard of it, and you are even a mild fan of risk, check out conquerclub.com, which is an amazingly fun site that lets you play multiple games of risk online for free. The games stretch out longer b/c you have to wait for everyone to play, but it only takes about 5 or 10 minutes a day (if your as casual as I am, I guess), and the wide variety of maps and, from what I've experienced, wealth of good and friendly competition makes it worth checking out, since basic membership is free (basic just makes it slightly more inconvenient to play with your friends I think...it's not like you're disadvantaged in the games because you didn't pay).

In various places around Gamespot, including a series of great predictions by nocoolnamejim, I've seen a lot of love for Bioware's upcoming Mass Effect. I'm not surprised - the game looks truly awesome, has a great sci fi setting, an innovative conversaton system, and hey it's being done by freaking BIOWARE! I won't deny that I myself am getting excited about it - it has got me seriously conidering the purchase of an Xbox 360, just so I don't have to wait like I did for KOTOR (and from a guy who has played through maybe nine or ten console games in his life, mostly mooched from friends, that's a pretty big deal).

But there's another game out there that isn't getting as much attention around Gamespot, from what I've seen. And admittedly, It's farther out than Mass Effect (I believe the release date was tentativley the winter 2007 or spring 2008, I think that has been pushed back to later 2008), but it deserves more than four threads in its forum anyway. This game is called Dragon Age, and it is also being developed by freaking BIOWARE! It's first destination, is, however, the PC- one reason why I'm excited about it. The other big reason might be that the words "spiritual successor to Baldur's Gate" have been spoken.

Like Mass Effect, this game will take place in a setting created totally by Bioware, and work has been going into it for several years. Described as a "dark heroic fantasy" (with an emphasis on dark), the game wil feature an innovative origins system, with different game beginnings depending on your characters race and character type. I'm not going to list all the cool info on the game here, but be sure to check out this MASSIVE preview over at 1UP (from Games for Windows Magazine), that really shows how much there is to be excited about. You should also check out the screens they have there, which give a much better idea of the game than the five shotsGamespot has, all of which look much worse than what is shown there ( I think Gamespot's are from an E3 concept demo from way, way back).

If that's still not enough to satisfy your curiousity, this thread over at Bioware gathers together a lot of what has been said by devs over on the boards there (thanks to konrad_arflane for posting it in the Dragon Age forums here).

Hopefully this game'll get a bit more buzz as the year moves on (and hopefully Bioware will release more about it!), but I just wanted to pur some info about it out there.

(@ nocoolnamejim: hope that sort of answered your wuestions about it)

The almost-full presentation can be seen here. It really does seem like there are a lot more differences than i originally expected - the warp in feature is by far one of the cooler ideas i've seen in an rts in a while. My nly question is how you balance that?

 

Also: A hilarious, celebratory starcraft "take on play that funky, music white boy." 

STARCRAFT II BABY!!!!!!!!! I have been waiting for this so long and it is finally here! The trailer had Blizzards usual awesome cinematic quality, and even though I knew it was coming, it was still such a rush to finally see the name StarCraft II fade in at the end of the trailer. The gameplay footage blew me away even more.

But once I got beyond the initial joy that comes from my inner (and outer) Blizzard fan, there were details I was very pleased to see. From all that I've read and seen so far, it looks like there won;t be any introduction of a new race, which I am very happy about actually, because the Terran-Zerg-Protoss balance that the original StarCraft acheived was perhaps the most complete balancing of any RTS EVER. However, even from the get go, Blizzard is showing us lots of new units within those already existing factions, meaning that they (and we) won't get stuck in complete reverance for that old balance. This is going to truly be a sequel, not just StarCraft with updated graphics (Speaking of that, doesn't this announcement render that StarCraft WarCraft III total conversion mod kind of a moot point?). The new units mentioned for each faction are all listed in GameSpot's article, but I'm excited enough to relist them here anyway:

Terran:

Reapers: Infantry with jetpacks (was I the only one who thought of Dawn of war when i read about these?)

Protoss:

The Collosus: A war-of-the-worlds like machine with lasers (you can see one coe in from the left in the gameplay footage I think)

The Mothership: Uber-powerful unit with a time slowing and shield dropping power (all in one!), and massive firepower.

The pheonix: can overload other flying units.

The warpray: A ship with a laser. Wheeeee!! (Though the more damage with a longer focus seems really key).

Immortals: Uber-tanks. With shields.

Stalkers: have blink ability, remind me of huntresses from Warcraft III.

Zerg:

Zerglings can now turn into suicide units (I will probably find this really annoying when I get pwnt by it the 4th time...what could be more pathetic than losing to a "suicides" rush?

And while in the gameplay footage and in the article it's clear that many old units will be returning, I'm gald to see that there will be new abilities incorporated (like the zealot's rush atack they mentioned), making even those old "friends" something new to discover and play around with.

Hopefully we'll get mroe info soon, but overall this has been an AWESOME and extremly smart announcement from Blizzard (I mean, where else to announce StarCraft II than South Korea?)

Edit: There's been an additional article released which confrims only the three factions, and additionally says thet Kerrigan, Zeratul, and Jim Raynor will appear in the game's story. Check it out here.

Also, It doesn;t look like Blizzard is going to carry over any hero units stuff from WarCraft 3. Has anyone heard anything else about that? 

 

Please Dear God, let it be so. Please.  To be updated come Saturday...

Seeing as I'm going to running a marathon in a few weeks, I downloaded the now open source bungie title "Marathon" and all i'll say  now is that it still ROCKS. I'll post more later after I'm done playing through,

So I just finished playing the old adventure game Sanitarium during Spring Break, and although it wasn't too long (or two hard, except fro one music based puzzle that stumped my musically-challenged self..) it was one of the best adventrue games I'd everr played. The journey through Max's (that is, the main character's) delusions, whether as his sister at a zany circus, himself in a crazy (and creepy) town full of mutated children..even ogres and Aztecs came into play...it was all vrey atmospheric and a ton of fun to experience. I'll try to write of review of it soon...but for now just know that I highly recommend it.

Also, I have started playing a bit of Titan Quest (I picked it up on masive sale recently, figuring it would be a good time waster), and it's surprised me. While it does have some problems (I am roling in gold, and there's nothing to spend it on, the "enchantments" don;t really seem to be worth the bother because I can't seem to enchant my really good already enchanted stuff), it is surprisingly fun, and seems to have done a good enough job with refining the Diablo formula to be worth a shot..and as a bonus..it will run on low end machines (I should know..I definitely have one).

Besides this, I wanted to give a quick shout out for the GFW Radio podcast which is actually a lot of fun to listen too (even more fine when Ryan actually decides to talk!). In addition, I've been reading a lot of the Gardner-Dozois-edited "The Year's Best Science Fiction" collections, and they are extremely good collections for people who like science fiction...even if you aren;t usually a big short story person, I would recommend checking it out, because there are a lot of gems in the collections, and I ahve yet to find anything remotely close to a dud. A great place to find new author's to check out as well.

Also while many of you have probably seen Children of Men, either in theatres or on the recently released DVD (and if you haven't you should - it's an awesome movie) you should really check out the soundtrack to that movie, which is surprisingly killer. A John Lennon rare cut, a killer Beatles cover, Jarvis Cocker...it's all good.

And while it's been a while admittedly...I still have to take the time to say that the Battlestar Galactica season finale reminded me what a great song "All Along the Watchtower" is...can't wait till 2008. And it's finally getting relatively nice out and has been staying that way for a while...YAY (while it has since my last post all that time ago).

Promise to check back again sooner than last time. Good Juju.

Sometimes, when you have a lot to do, and not much time to do it, and are feeling the constraints of time, space, and the universal laws that don't let you rewind to last Teusday, you just gotta take a break. I mean, come on: you know you're not really going to just work all day straight. This, my friends, along with a geeky desire to try the Lord of the Rings Online, is what led to the short but sweet life of EricCartman, obese hobbit of Middle-Earth. He was brave, he was bold, he was fat, crass and rude...and for a good hour he annoyed the role-playing Tolkein dorks in the Shire...before remebering that he himself loved Lord of the Rings and doing his part (kill 6 wolves! oh boy!) in the fight against Sauron. If he hadn't been deleted when the beta was over, he'd tell you that HE had saved Middle Earth.