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!

The root of the problem is that I don’t understand what the advantage is in having these games launched from your browser.  The browser is just another layer of bullshit that can cause problems.  You have to install the proprietary plug-in for each game anyway, so it’s not like there’s a convenience or quick access factor.  And at least in their current state, every time they do an update you have to manually reinstall the plug-in.

I guess the idea is to have a social networking web 2.0 package around these games to make them more appealing to people who normally wouldn’t care.  Maybe that will work, maybe it won’t.  Either way, there has to be a better way to do this.

For instance, what would be wrong with having the game installed and launched like every other game and application on my computer?  You can still have a website with stats and community features.  You can even render that website inside of the game.  And another plus would be that people couldn’t block your advertising with browser plug-ins like AdBlock.

Maybe someone can explain their logic to me, because I can’t figure it out.

You plug it into the wall and the USB port on your computer, and the conveyor belts inside the thing move in sync with realtouch-enhanced pornography.

I don’t know.  I don’t really want to stick my dick inside anything with “dual belt drives.”  The anti-DRM crowd may not like this device for other reasons, as it requires an online activation.

Having said all that, DRM is not that big of a deal.  I’d bet that 99% of people will never even notice its there.  I only know it’s there because I notice an occasional activation dialog or disc-check indicated by spinning disc cursor thing.  I’m not saying no one has ever had a legitimate issue with DRM, just that it’s not any more likely to be a problem than any other aspect of software.  It’s almost equivalent to complaining that DVDs can be scratched or broken so it’s not acceptable for stuff to be put on DVDs.  There are some things you just have to live with, and for now DRM is one of them.  So can we stop making a big deal about the DRM for every PC game that comes out?

Which leads me to the inspiration for this post.  This two page Q&A about GTA4′s DRM is probably one of the dumbest things I’ve seen on IGN recently.  Although I suspect the entire Q&A was written by Rockstar, despite IGN acting like they took the initiative to ask Rockstar these questions.  And I can see why Rockstar would want to get this information out there in a way they can control.  So I guess it’s not that dumb really.  They do sort of attempt to answer the question of piracy making DRM pointless, and their answer is better than what most companies come up with.

In the seemingly inevitable event that some dirty pirate manages to crack GTA IV PC and make it available, what are the advantages and disadvantages to using a legitimate copy over a pirated one?

Rockstar: Aside from the fact that warez are a great place to pick up a Trojan or key logger, using a cracked copy of GTA IV PC will result in varying changes to the game experience. These can range from comical to game-progress-halting changes.

Rockstar Games rewards loyal, paying customers and will offer incentives and downloadable content that will only be available to registered users of the game, running non-hacked copies, via Rockstar Games Social Club.

The second part of the answer I’ve got no issue with.  That should be the only protection a game needs, post-release support exclusive to paying customers enforceable with online registration and a serial number.  As far as the first point, I’ve occasionally heard about a bad crack that can interfere with game progress, but they’re usually fixed very quickly after discovering problems.  Still their answer is not totally off base.  The only problem is this doesn’t address the pointlessness of DRM.  I guess maybe you could stretch the logic that if pirates have to crack the DRM they’re more likely to screw something up and introduce new bugs into the game, but that’s not a good thing for anyone.  Someone who downloads a badly cracked game and encounters a bug probably isn’t going to blame the crack, unfair as that may be.

There’s nothing new or surprising about the DRM Rockstar is using, if anything it’s more lenient than most DRM schemes these days in that it allows unlimited installations on an unlimited number of computers.  And yet you can see the comments on IGN or anywhere else this story was posted, almost every single one of them is acting like this is terrible and they’re not even going to buy the PC version now (most of them already weren’t I’m sure).  People are dumb and I hate them.  This is nothing new, I think what annoys me about this is they’re not entirely wrong to have a problem with DRM.  They’re just taking the wrong angle on it, and overreacting.

I never played a Wipeout game before Wipeout HD, but I am a fan of the F-Zero series. Wipeout HD is not dissimilar to F-Zero. It feels more floaty than F-Zero, but it’s not that far off. Another difference is the presence of weapons, but in my experience so far they don’t screw with the game balance too much. There’s no Mario Kart blue shell on your ass every time you get the lead crap going down. At least not on the Novice difficulty. Maybe I’m speaking too soon, being a total newbie to Wipeout and only having played HD for an hour or so. Oh well. This game has a very slick style, from the menus to the design of the vehicles and tracks; and being rendered in 1080p at 60fps doesn’t hurt either. The main motivator for writing this blog entry was the screenshot function, so here’s some screenshots I took (click to expand one then use the next/previous links).

I’ve written about Burnout Paradise before (and I still get hits from people searching Google for “burnout paradise sucks” every day, despite my writing in the title that it’s a good game), I just started playing it again yesterday after a long break. They’ve added some significant (free) stuff to this game since I last played it. The most recent (and most significant) additions being motorcycles, weather effects, and a day/night cycle. The weather and day/night cycle add a lot to the game’s atmosphere, the transition periods of dawn and dusk are especially pretty. Motorcycles are a weird addition to Burnout. They have no boost, and they don’t crumple up in a cool fashion when crashed. Instinctively I want to say they don’t belong in a Burnout game but they’re fun to drive and they add a little variety to the gameplay. And it’s a free addition, why complain about it. Burnout Paradise has only gotten better since the last time I played it, and I think developer Criterion is pretty awesome for supporting the game like this.

The Mentalist is a new show on CBS, the pilot episode debuted a couple days ago.  It’s about a guy whose observational skills are so sharp that people would assume he’s a psychic if he let them.  He used to make money doing John Edward (biggest douche in the universe) style shows, now he works with the police to investigate serious crimes.  Apparently there’s a show on the USA network with a similar premise called Psych, but I’m assuming that show is terrible because.. it’s on the USA network.  And also its website shows that it’s really wacky.  The Mentalist is not wacky.  It’s a funny show, but the humor mostly comes from the main character being a dick.  Kind of like House.  Actually everything I said about House yesterday probably will apply to this show as well.  Of course only one episode has aired so far and I could just as easily see this show being softened to appeal to a bigger audience if it doesn’t do well at first (or if the writers get sappy/lazy which is probably more likely).

10/3 Update:

Episode two was pretty mediocre.  I still laughed at a couple of the being-a-dick moments but overall the concept of the show is too stupid and the writing is not good.  I doubt I’ll watch any more episodes of this show.

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.

Awake has a premise that seems interesting but they just use it as a backdrop for a mediocre thriller.  The premise is that a small percentage of people are paralyzed but still conscious when they are given anesthetic for surgery, so they stay "awake" for the whole surgery.  In the movie the guy getting a heart transplant stays awake to hear the doctors expositing their plan to kill him during surgery (by injecting his new heart with some killing-dudes stuff) so that his wife (who is working with the doctors) will get his hundreds of millions of dollars and they’ll all be rich.  Whoops I just spoiled the “twist,” but don’t worry it’s irrelevant.  I think the writer forgot that you have to give a shit about the story before a plot twist means anything.

I’d say the best part of the movie is Anakin Skywalker (aka Hayden Christensen)’s humorously bad acting.  Especially when he’s getting his ribs spread open, it’s on par with the “NOOOOOOOOOO” from Star Wars.  I think he literally says “Oww.  owww. ouch.”  Speaking of bad actors, Terrence Howard sucks.  He’s not as bad as Anakin but he picks the most boring characters and he has the same low-key delivery in every movie.  He’s also under the mistaken impression that he can sing and that people want to hear him sing.  Like his acting, it’s not that bad it’s just kind of a “why are you doing this?” type thing.

The movie ends with some ridiculous crap where Anakin’s mom figures out what’s going on because she looked through the wife’s purse and found an envelope from a nursing school.  I don’t know.  Anyway so she calls this other doctor she knows, then kills herself so that Anakin can have her heart.  But before they move the heart over, Anakin and his mom are talking to each other in we’re-both-dead land, and Anakin’s mom forces Anakin to remember that she killed his father right in front of Anakin when he was a small boy.  Which for some reason makes Anakin want to live again and thus the heart transplant is a success.  Hooray.

Redbelt is a David Mamet movie, which means it’s full of theater-performance supporting actors with fake-sounding dialog and the story involves an overly complicated conspiracy to screw somebody over.  Chiwetel Ejiofor is the main reason the movie is not completely worthless.  He’s really likable in everything I’ve seen him in.  Like the anti-Terrence-Howard.  You might know him as The Operative from Serenity, or the black leader guy from Children of Men.  His character here is kind of one dimensional, but it sort of makes sense because he’s a Jiu-Jitsu instructor and I imagine those guys have a pretty one dimensional outlook on life.

The real problem in the movie is the plot.  It totally falls apart and loses all coherency in the last third, but even from the beginning there’s a lot of holes and obvious set-ups.  I still have no idea why his attorney slapped him in the parking garage, or why he had to fight his way back to the ring, or why the old dude gave him the red belt at the very end.  Or why Tim Allen was in this movie.

War, Inc. is a screwball comedy masquerading as a political satire.  Pretty similar to Idiocracy in some ways, but less obnoxious.  They both carry a message that’s a little too obvious and heavy-handed, which probably would be ok if they were really funny movies.  But they’re not.  War, Inc. is a slightly humorous movie.  There are ideas that seem funny but actually aren’t so much in practice.  Like tanks with Golden Palace ads on them.  Ok… should I be laughing when I see that, or is it just supposed to elicit a kind of “oh.  that’s cute.” reaction?  That’s how most of the movie goes.  There are a couple genuinely funny moments, and John Cusack and Marisa Tomei are pretty likable actors which helps carry the movie.  Also I just found out on IMDb that the whoreish pop star was played by Hilary Duff.  That’s surprising, she was good then.  This movie didn’t really suck, it was just ok.

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.

This would be awful anyway, but I’m also sad to see Michael from The Wire in a new version of 90210.  On the other hand his acting here is pretty awful.  Maybe he’s lucky to have any part he can get.