And since I went to E3 this year, I wrote some stuff about the Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo press conferences.  I also contributed to N-Philes’ Best of E3 Staff Picks and Jacob’s Brink impressions.

Other things I’ve been up to… I added a Twitter Updates embed so that I could update my blog in easy bite-sized chunks, then stopped Twittering not long after.  Once a few people started following me I felt weird about posting updates.  Doesn’t make much sense, I know.

On the suggestion of a friend I created one of those memey keyboard cat videos back in April; it currently has about 78,000 views on YouTube.  I’m famous on the internet!

The same friend ( Adam) also encouraged me to start taking photos again, so I’ve been doing quite a bit of that recently.  You can check them out on flickr.

That’s about all I’ve been up to.  See you in another few months!

I downloaded The Fall on a whim.  Never heard of it before, but it was in the HD section of my movie download source and it has a pretty good rating on IMDb so I figured I’d give it a shot.  Usually when I do this I watch about 5 minutes of the movie before deciding there’s a good reason I never heard of it because it sucks.  However the first opening credit at the start of The Fall is “David Fincher and Spike Jonze present.”  Those are two guys whose work I really like, and though it’s not entirely unusual to see a well-known director/producer’s name slapped on the beginning of a movie for marketing purposes, it’s a little weird that these two guys who as far as I know never worked together share the credit.

Anyway, so I watched the whole thing.  And it’s pretty good.  Great locations and cinematography and costumes and those types of things that people don’t really care about but like to bring up when they can’t think of anything more meaningful to say.  It’s about this little girl in a hospital with a broken arm, and a silent film actor who was paralyzed from the waist down after performing a stunt involving a bridge and a horse (it’s set in the early 20th century).  It’s sort of set up like The Princess Bride, the dude is telling the little girl a story and we see it visualized as it would be in her imagination, intercut with some serious stuff happening in reality.  It’s a good story.

The little girl is not a very good actor but she does a good job of being a little girl.  Usually kid actors are at their most unlikable when they’re being very precocious and acting above their age.  This girl can not be accused of doing that, and as a result you end up feeling for her.  Apparently the writer/director/producer, a guy annoyingly credited by first name only (“Tarsem”), spent four years and millions of his own money to make this movie.  Watching the movie you definitely get a sense that this is one person’s vision put on film.  So if that’s interesting to you it’s probably worth seeing.

Heroes (still) blows.  That is all.

Ok here’s a little more.  The series of events in any particular plotline are almost always completely illogical.  The entire premise of the show is stupid.  The dialog is fucking awful.  The pseudo-science is insulting to intelligence.  I hate this show.  I think I gave up on it sometime last season, but I was bored enough to download the premiere of season 3.  I’m pretty sure I’ll never be bored enough to watch another episode.

I enjoy House.  He’s a sarcastic ass that hates everyone, it’s easy to relate to.  The whole medical show angle is a means to an end, I don’t give a shit about what is wrong with the patient in any particular episode.  Which is fortunate because often times the storyline of an episode is a mess and the editing is sloppy, if I cared about the stories those might be real problems.  The show is about House being an antisocial douche, TV rarely has characters like this.  And it’s very rare that he does anything sitcom-y or out of character, they stick to their guns past the point of uncomfortable.  It’s great.

I’ve been reexamining the alternatives lately, because I decided to buy one of those new iPod Nanos.  I was considering buying a Touch but decided I would rather have something more compact since I’m never ever going to watch videos or play games on an iPod.  I was also considering a non-Apple player, but the ubiquity of iPods is appealing and there’s nothing significantly superior out there anyway.  I used to still do hate the iPod white plastic bar-of-soap design, but these Nanos are pretty slick.  Plus it comes in orange.  Orange rules.  So yeah, iTunes alternatives.  Winamp does more or less everything iTunes does, but somehow they made an even worse media library interface than Apple did so that’s out.  My music player of choice (Foobar2000) has an iPod plug-in but it would require some work to get it doing roughly 90% of the stuff iTunes does.  And like I said at the start, I just don’t want to spend time messing around with that anymore.  Maybe this winter when I’m sitting at home with nothing to do.

But for now, I’ve got iTunes 8 installed and I’ve been using it for about a week.  I still wouldn’t say it’s a well designed program but it does some things well and I haven’t been driven away in frustration… so it’s not so bad. I’ve been using the Genius playlist generation feature a lot.  It’s a feature that appeals to people who like the experience of listening to the radio (except without commercials).  You hear some songs frequently enough that they get stuck in your head, with some less often played songs filling the space between.  Coverflow is also kinda neat, assuming you have nice album art for everything.  Which reminds me, one time-consuming task was getting all my album art showing up in iTunes.  It won’t just look for a .jpg in the album folder, you have to embed it into each MP3’s id3 tag.  I first tried a program that automates this task, but it resized all my album art into a low resolution blurry mess before embedding.  So I had to hunt down good quality album art for each of my ~300 albums and embed them all within iTunes one album at a time.  That fucking sucked.  But not totally iTunes’ fault.

As for the iPod Nano, it plays MP3s.  That’s all I really need.  I’ve always felt the wheel was a little awkward for scrolling through large lists of items, but other than that I have no issues with it.  I like that I can generate Genius playlists on the Nano.  I like the way it looks.  Not sure what else you can say about an iPod anymore.  Oh, I had bought a better pair of in-ear canalphones before I got the iPod, knowing the reputation of Apple’s bundled earbuds.  And if I’m just sitting at my desk I can definitely tell the difference in quality.  But the microphonic effect of the cable brushing against my clothing (caused by having a sealed ear canal) is really distracting.  So when I’m moving (i.e. any situation where I would want to use the iPod), the bundled Apple earbuds are less irritating and I can’t really tell the difference in quality anyway.  So that was a waste of 80 bucks.

In summary, I’m totally over hating on Apple.  Mostly.

In other news, it’s fucking hot right now god damn it’s hot.  I’d buy an air conditioner but I’m afraid it would blow a fuse any time I turned it on with the massive amount of electronic devices sucking power in this room (which I’m sure is not helping the heat issue).

I found this kind of neat app/web site recently that keeps track of which applications you use on your computer, and how long you use them.  I guess it’s pretty useless but it’s the type of useless information I like to know.  It’s called Wakoopa.

I still enjoy roaming around the city in single player, and the story was pretty strong.  There are some weird moments in the story where the free-roaming nature of the game gets in the way of character development and believability.  Particularly Niko; unlike the previous games you are not playing a character whose only motivations are money and power.  Since he’s not portrayed as a sociopathic mass murderer it feels a bit odd to go on a rampage killing innocent people.  On the other hand, killing innocent people is fun.  It’s quite the dilemma!

But I’m done with the story now anyway, so the point where that was bothering me has long been passed.  Now the problems are more about the sense of speed in cars feeling limited by the framerate, and my inability to find a damn Infernus anywhere.  Also I’m at 98.33% completion and I have no fucking idea what thing I am missing to get that last 1.67% (I even read a FAQ which told me I had everything needed.  fuck you FAQ you didn’t help me at all!). (hooray I got it)  Life is hard you know.

On a broader level, I have some conflicted feelings about the game.  It’s so much better than previous GTAs, and those are games that I love.  But.. it feels like it should be better.  It’s sort of like the uncanny valley, it’s so real that it’s not real at all.  They’ve crossed a threshold where a lot of the staples of the series don’t make any sense anymore.  They have cut down on a lot of that stuff but there’s also a lot left, but get rid of everything and it’s no longer GTA.  I don’t have the answer, but there’s just something about GTA4 that’s not right, even it does take you 90 hours to recognize.

Also I should probably say that some of the points in this post were stolen from inspired by the most recent GFW Radio podcast, but it’s how I was feeling about the game.  And part of the problem is likely the insane amount I’ve played the game in less than two weeks.

I had decided to go back to XP because I had stripped Vista down to the point where I was using the Windows Classic theme and I figured without Aero what does Vista really offer.  Well, after using XP for a couple days I have to say Vista does have more to offer than a new interface.  It feels more stable overall, the OS is almost always responsive even when programs are crashing or consuming 100% of the CPU.  Programs launch faster, resource management is smarter.  A lot of the control panel stuff is better, the search bar in the start menu is handy (although I prefer to use other launching programs because they are slightly faster and/or have more features).

So I decided to give Vista one more chance.  I gave it another pass of tweaking, this time using Autoruns to disable a bunch of stuff that was automatically starting with my computer (tip: use the Hide Microsoft Entries to more easily see what you can probably safely disable) and I used Blackviper’s service guide to disable unnecessary services.  At first I had Aero completely disabled (including the Themes and DWM services), but I later found that that was not causing any significant slowdowns after all.  So now my games (and applications) perform at least as well as they did on XP, but I also have all the benefits of Vista.

Which makes choosing between them rather easy.  If you’re willing to work for it, Vista can be better all around.

And if you are willing to do that, check out the Vista Annoyances Resolved article at TweakGuides.com.  Aside from his stance on UAC which I disagree with (I still say it’s worth the convenience of disabling it altogether with the small theoretical added security risk), it’s an excellent article explaining why Vista does not suck.

• Mouse and keyboard.  Yeah I know it’s an endless (pointless) debate about which is better, mouse/keyboard or gamepad.  Honestly this issue is a relatively minor one, a gamepad (or Wii remote) feels slower and less natural to me but not by a huge margin.
• Steam.  I think without Steam I might’ve given up on PC gaming by now.  I know this isn’t completely logical, but I’d much rather spend 4 hours downloading a game in the background than 15 minutes installing it from a DVD.  There’s just something about the whole installation process that really bugs me, it’s so archaic.  And having to put a disc in every time you play a game, yuck.  The consistent interface and community options that St eam provides are pretty hard to live without once you’re used to them being there.  The 360 dashboard offers a similar experience, but it’s weirdly slow and has a completely confusing layout.  And it costs money to get access to all the services.  And it’s ugly.  Like your mother.
• Speaking of interfaces, console games generally have a really unappealing interface.  They have to be big blocky things that are legible on old TVs and navigable with an analog stick.  Unfortunately now that the majority of PC games are lazy console ports, PC gamers unnecessarily suffer from these things too.  And often they don’t even bother to get rid of the console gamepad buttons displayed onscreen.  Do they not understand how these seemingly small things can turn somebody off immediately?
• Mods.  This one is probably overplayed in the PC vs. consoles debate.  There are some great mods out there but they are few and far between.  It’s an advantage but not a really significant one for the most part.  That said some games are completely saved by mods and I can’t imagine playing them out of the box on a console (see Oblivion).
• Piracy.  Yeah I know I’m a horrible person and I’m singlehandedly killing PC gaming.  I download games because if they even bothered to make a demo it likely doesn’t give a very good impression of the game.  And I’m not going to pay full price for a game I play for 2 hours and then get bored of.  Sorry.  I honestly do buy games that turn out to be good.  And I even occasionally impulsively buy a bad one that I didn’t try first from Steam because it’s just too easy to buy games on Steam.
• Dedicated servers for multiplayer games.  I can’t believe we 360 Live Gold members pay Microsoft for the privilege of peer-to-peer game hosting on the 360.  It’s complete shite.  Dedicated servers have many advantages, one of which is lower latency.  Another is the persistent nature of a dedicated server.  You find one that you like and you keep on coming back to it.  You become sort-of-friends with the other people who regularly play on that server.  Idiots are kicked off the server by active admins.  The game doesn’t end when one person decides to leave the game (as can happen sometimes on the 360).  It’s so much better.
• Hardware upgrades.  Believe me I understand it s ucks when you buy a game and can’t play it because your computer is not good enough.  But at least in that situation you have the option of buying better hardware.   It may not be practical for most people, but it is an option.  On consoles, 30 frames per second has somehow become not only acceptable but something to strive for.  We’re now at the point where a lot of games peak at 30 fps and constantly dip in the 15-20 range.  I’ll put up with it if I feel like I just have to play the game, but any average quality game with a bad framerate hasn’t got a chance.  And there’s nothing you can do, you can’t overclock your console or put in a new graphics card.  Either you live with it or you play a lot less games.
• Control.  This can cover a lot of different points.  Like the one above, if I’m playing a PC game that’s all about the graphics, then ok I’ll set everything to high and put up with the lower framerate because I want to see the pretty pictures.  If it’s not about that then fuck it, I’ll make a game unbelievably ugly if I can play it smoothly.  Some people complain about having to configure their games and system to optimize performance, for me it’s always better to have that option than not.  That’s the beauty of PC gaming, it’s up to you.

Man consoles stink don’t they?  Too bad almost nobody makes PC games anymore.

Fable 2 – Everyone knows Peter Molyneux’s reputation and yet some people still fall for his crap.  Watch these Fable 2 videos with the sound muted and it’s pretty god damn boring.  Nothing much happens, the stuff that does happen is very buggy looking.  But turn the sound on and you can hear Molyneux hyping all the features that obviously don’t exist and explaining why this boring shit is actually really exciting.  I’m not saying the game is going to suck but I’ll be shocked if half the things Molyneux talked about are actually in there and fully fleshed out.

APB – From the developer of Crackdown, one of my favorite games last year.  It’s supposed to be some sort of MMO, but not the usual sort.

I’m not sure how well missions like this will work in the reality of gaming online with strangers who are usually idiots, but as an idea I love it.