Warning: Thar be spoilers here. If you don’t wanna find out what happened in the previous season(s) of the shows mentioned in this post, then you’d be wise to skip over that show’s section. With that being said…

Summer is fading fast in the rearview mirror, which means the networks will be trotting out their season premieres soon.  Here’s a quick rundown of what I’ll be keeping my eyes on this season, starting with the returning shows:

Californication – I started watching Californication this summer thanks to Netflix Instant  Streaming, and was hooked pretty quick.  I had caught the first few episodes when it premiered back in 2007, but it didn’t really grab me then (I’m not really sure why not, because it is a terrific show).  I quickly went through the first two seasons, and now sit in wait for more.  David Duchovny plays a writer struggling to come up with anything new, while constantly screwing up his relationships and sleeping with half of L.A.  The third season looks to have him teaching college courses after his latest book flops, while raising his daughter on his own after the mother moves back to New York City.  The third season of Californication will premiere on Sunday, September 27  at 10PM on Showtime

Castle – Nathan Fillion (Firefly, Dr. Horrible) plays a writer who is experiencing a bit of writer’s block after killing off his main character due to boredom with the series.  The first season saw him shadowing a female detective named Kate Beckett (played by Stana Katic), who is serving as the model for the main character in his next chain of novels.  The last season ended with Castle revealing some information to Beckett about the unsolved murder of her mother, and Season 2 looks to pick up with the aftermath of his reveal.  The second season of Castle will premiere on Monday, September 21 at 10PM on ABC.

(more…)

This past week, Microsoft released the “New XBox Experience“, which provided a wide range of enhancements to the system.  One of these was streaming video via Netflix for XBox Live ‘Gold’ subscribers with an unlimited Netflix subscription.  I’ve been a Netflix subscriber off and on for a few years now, and already had the Gold subscription to XBL, so I gave it a shot.  The results were so-so.

To get it setup, you need to download a small update for the XBox, and then type the code it gives you into a form on the Netflix webpage.  This was a painless process, the update was only a few MB to download, and the account linking went off without a hitch.  After that, any movies in your ‘Instant Queue’ will show up within the Netflix player on the console, with a UI similiar to the ‘Cover View‘ of iTunes.

After you choose an item to watch, the player attempts to determine your connection speed, buffers for about 15 seconds, and your video starts playing.  You’ve got basic controls during playback – pause, fast forward, rewind, skip back/ahead.  All in all, it is a very simple, painless process.

At first, things seemed to be great.  I queued up one of their HD movie selections, and it played through fine.  After the initial success, I queued up a handful of movies and TV shows.  The selection was fairly limited in my opinion – of the 30 or so movies in my regular queue, only 5 of them were available for instant streaming.  Of those five, two were not able to be streamed to the XBox because of licensing issues with Columbia Tristar, a studio owned by Sony.

My ultimate test of the service came over the weekend, with a marathon of the short lived TV series “Jericho“.  I ran into pretty much the same issue as earlier in the week – watching episodes early in the day was fairly painless, but as day turned into night, my connection suffered and soon I was watching episodes barely above YouTube quality.

Now, this isn’t really the fault of Netflix – it is a problem with the internet connection from the cable company, that they don’t have the infrastructure to support the connection they sell you when the entire neighborhood gets online at night.  The problem with this is that they don’t seem to be that great at figuring out your connection speed from the start.

Early in the evening, each episode would start out at 4 bars (out of 4), and about a minute or two in, the video would freeze, and the Netflix screen would popup saying that the connection speed had changed, it would redo its speed test, then buffer a lower quality video.  As the hours got later this would sometimes happen again partway through an episode, and the quality was downgraded to the YouTube quality version. Eventually it got to the point where it was starting at 3 bars, and partway through would drop down.

The 4 bar quality is pretty good, and the 3 bar quality is acceptable.  Any lower than that and it’s not worth it in my opinion.  I only hung in there because I was already pretty far into the series and wanted to see how things ended, but if I were watching a movie, I would have just cancelled it and waited for the actual DVD to come.

Another HUGE drawback is that there is no way to browse the Netflix library on the XBox – you can only watch the titles that you have already added to your instant queue via your PC.  This isn’t a huge deal if you have a computer close by, but it does add another layer to the service that just seems unecessary.

All in all, if you are already an XBL Gold and Netflix subscriber, this costs you nothing extra and is a nice bonus.  If not then, I don’t feel it is really worth it, given the current title selection, potential bandwidth issues, and the inability to browse titles on the console.  Overall, I think Netflix is a good deal, but if you are really only interested in the streaming video, its probably not worth the $8.99 a month for the cheapest plan that offers unlimited streaming.

So I am going to try my hand at some sort of review of Fallout 3.  I am going to break it down into two parts, the first being more of an overview of the game mechanics, like skills, stats, perks, and a little bit of background info.  I’ll try to avoid anything about the actual story or game play, leaving that for part two.

(more…)

I bought Fable 2 yesterday. I had some very high expectations despite the fact that I avoided all of the marketing hype. I have only played it for a couple hours so far, and I’d just like to post some of my initial thoughts.

I absolutely loved the first game. I thought that it was one of the most unique RPGs I had played. My only complaints were that it was too short and a little too linear. That didn’t stop me from playing it several times. I thought the character development systems that they used were great. Your character’s appearance would change depending on the decisions you made and NPCs would react to you differently based on how you looked or what deeds you were most famous for. You could buy up property and use it to make money from rent or to stash your collections of wives. There was a lot to do and I enjoyed it.

Fable 2 seems very close to being the same game, but in a bigger world. I don’t mind that at all. There are now more factors that determine your character’s appearance. In addition to good/evil we now have thin/fat, corrupt/pure, and young/old. I really want to make a character that just sits in the starting town and does nothing but eat pies. And then maybe occassionally breaks into people’s houses to steal money and then buy more pies.

The collection of melee weapons at your disposal remain unchanged, though now the choice of weapon seems to have more of an impact on your character’s fighting style. Ranged weapons now include guns. The magic system is pretty different. There is no more mana bar; instead, you charge your spells to make them more powerful. Each spell also has a surround mode and a targetted mode. Right now the only spell I have is Time Control. I can use it in surround mode and slow down time, or I can target a specific enemy and use it to sort of teleport to them (similar to the Assassin’s Rush spell in the first game.) So while I’m in combat, I can just tap the B button anytime I want and I’ll cast my Time Control spell at level 1 and slow down time. If I spend my experience points on another level of that spell, then I can still tap the button at any time to cast it at level 1. If I want to cast it at level 2, I need to hold down the button to charge the spell up. The new system makes using magic simpler than the previous game, so I might actually buy more than one spell this time.

In Fable 2 you get a dog. The dog is awesome. Mine doesn’t seem interested in helping me when I’m in a fight. I’m guessing I need to train him to attack my enemies. What he is really good at, though, is finding treasure. Not only will he sniff out chests, but he can also find items that are buried and show me where to dig.

He has found some pretty epic treasure for me so far. I was really excited the first time I heard him bark and saw him pawing at the ground. “Buried treasure!” I exclaimed as I ran to my faithful canine companion with shovel in hand. I dug up the soil in the spot he indicated and I found… (more…)

World of Goo by 2D Boy is a game.  Specifically it’s an independent game that evolved from physics simulations.  In this game you manipulate Goo, which are little blobules of… goo.  You can’t define a word using that same word, but man, what am I supposed to say?  You’ve got these little squeaky, squishy balls of semi-sentient ooze that, somehow, make for a great construction material.  Ostensibly this game is about making your brain explode.  It accomplishes this by employing a creepy art style, adorable and chilling sounds and music, and an ambitious assortment of perplexing puzzles.  Watch the teaser at Amazon‘s page (it’s old timey Tim Burtonesque).

Your guide for the game is the Sign Painter.  Hints for the levels are provided on painted signs throughout the levels, but you’ll want to read them for the humor and wit as much as the puzzle clues.  The goo doesn’t talk, but the Sign Painter doesn’t shut up.  It’s great writing in tiny tidbits.

It’ll take probably 4-8 hours to beat it, depending on how often you fail and how much time you spend screwing around with the physics engine.  Of course you could spend more time in WoG than you did in Liberty City – assuming you want to complete all of the OCD requirements.  OCD = Obsessive Completion Distinction goals.  Whereas you might need to collect 6 goo balls to complete a level, you may need 24 to earn the OCD flag.  Some OCDs are time based, but most require you to perflectly plan and execute a cunning strategy with no mistakes.  Most are fun, almost all are fiendishly difficult.

As you complete levels and collect goo balls you can use them to build a massive tower – competing with players across the globe to see who can make the tallest tower.  Flags, names and heights pepper the sky and you build your tower upward (a la Tower of Goo) so you’ve got some extra stuff to enjoy once the story is done.

I’m being vague about the storyline gameplay because discovering how it works is part of the fun.  They (2D boy) designed it so that you have no idea what’s coming up, which makes it all the more exciting when it arrives.  I may be an anonymous person on the internet, but you can take my word for it: it’ll be thoroughly enjoyable.

I could make a lot of parallels between WoG and Braid, e.g. beautiful and unique visuals, wildly varying gameplay as the levels progress, and a low, low price point!  World of Goo clocks in for $20 at retail and that’s a fair price given the length of the game ($/hr is one way to evaluate).  It’s got all the shine and polish of a mainstream studio game, but with a… stranger story and a lot  more inventiveness. A lot.  The whole thing’s an experiment, which I declare to have been a success.

Official 2D Boy World of Goo site

PreOrder & Buy the game at Amazon (see videos of the goo in action!)

Update: I totally forgot to gift the world with my knowledge of Goo!  2Dboy has already been informed, but I can attest that the ideal input method is the Tablet PC touch screen.  Mice are OK, but you can’t beat the speed of touching the screen itself.  Moving goo is as easy as pointing at it.  Touchpads are horrible.  I have not tested trackballs, sorry.

I’m not a regular concert goer, but I’m going to bullet point and provide tidbits about all of the concerts. 3 from Friday, 4 from Saturday. (more…)

So everyone reading this is probably familiar with Marvel Ultimate Alliance, either through first hand experience, word of mouth, or by having played what I refer to as the first two installments in the ‘series’ – X-men Legends 1 and 2. While these games are really nothing more than updates of Gauntlet with a pop comic superhero twist, their madcap button mashing beat ‘em up antics take me back to gaming days of old. Add to it the RPG elements of leveling up and character customization allowing you to take your favorite character along a somewhat different path – want Storm to be a brawler? Put all her stat points into body and striking! – and you’ve got the makings of a comic/gaming geek’s wet dream.
(more…)

We So PAX day one is over with, and day two begins. I can’t even begin to say how totally fucking awesome it is. Probably the worst part was waiting in line for 2 hours before the show started to get in – we were all packed into this huge room (thousands and thousands of geeks), and it got pretty warm, which is never a good thing in a room full of geeks. At least I can’t smell.

We headed to the exhibit/showfloor room, and wow. The booths aren’t quite as extravagant as those at E3 ’04, but they are still pretty impressive. We spent about three hours in there playing & watching various games – there is just too much awesome in there to write about, but here are a few highlights:

• Pasty played PMS Missy in a game of quake (The final score: 12 to negative 4), but he at least got a free shirt out of it.
• Free shaves at the Brothers in Arms booth – let them shave and tattoo your head, and get a free copy of the game. We will definitely make pope do this.
• Seeing gabe and tycho walking around – we were standing next to tycho and his kid for a few minutes at the Hothead Games booth, until someone asked him to sign a few books. It was down hill from there, as he got surrounded by people.

We headed out of the show floor a bit after 5pm to head to a panel about writing for games, and on the way, I noticed that Felicia Day was at The Guild’s booth with Sandeep Parikh. I picked up a copy of the guild, chatted with them for a few seconds about stuff (like WoW), and got a picture. Mission accomplished for the weekend.

After that we went to the writing panel which was OK – it was interesting to hear some of the answers from the writer’s perspective. I’ve not much to say about the panel. After the panel, we grabbed dinner at Bayou on First, a cajun / french restaraunt down by the Pike St Market, and it was damn tasty.

We headed back, and got there about 15 minutes before they were going to screen season one of The Guild. We headed to the theater it was in, to see an INSANE line already in place. We figured it was a lost cause, but my adoration for all things felicia day made me get in line anyways. So the line starts moving, and we finally get close and the line stops, and they are only letting people in one or two at a time as they find open seats. Then they say “Only 19 more people are being let in”, and I figured we were doomed. They start counting off people, and its getting up into the teens, and I breathe a sigh of relief – we were #s 17-18-19. Last three people allowed in! Pope however misunderstood his #, and left to go to the concert. It was pretty amusing to watch the guild again, and then the Q&A was entertaining. Felicia Day managed to embarass herself again, much like she did at the Comic-con panel earlier this summer. We also heard about how to get Ron Jeremy to be in your show, the Retarded Policeman, Gorgeous Tiny Chicken Machine Show, and the Legend of Neil.

We headed off to the concert after that, and got in just in time to see Freezepop. They put on a pretty rocking show, I only knew who they were thanks to Rock Band, but now I guess I could say I am a fan. After that, Jonathan Coulton played, and I wasn’t expecting much – I mean it is just one guy, right. He put on an amazing show, and I am definitely glad we got to check it out. The highlight? A duet of “Still Alive” with FELICIA DAY. Totally fucking awesome. And he rick-rolled us. Twice.

By now it was after 1am (or 4am in real-people time), and we were all exhausted, so we headed back to the hotel to crash. And now we are awake and getting ready for day two. I’ll upload my pictures to flickr laster, but for now enjoy pictures with FELICIA DAY, and a video from pasty’s phone of “Still Alive”. Peace out!

Booking with Flier Miles

They employ a fairly terrible call center in India for booking flights.  Jessicas, Johns, Jennies one in all.  My English is fairly unintelligible to them.  They apologized often and repeatedly routed me to a ‘specialist’ who was no better equipped to handle the call than the person before.  The final specialist was special in that she had the ability to say “I’m sorry, it doesn’t look like I can help you.”

Confirming the Flight

I was asked to confirm my flight by phone (days after the above fiasco) when the holder of the frequent flier miles booked the flight and needed me to pay the remainder with my credit card.  I was asked to confirm my flight.  I asked for the details of my flight, she said she didn’t know and her question, “Do you want to confirm your flight?”  “Can you tell me the details of the flight before I confirm?”  “I can transfer you to someone who can help you with that.”

Flying (waiting)

I was running a bit late.  I do blame myself, but I didn’t know the consequences would be so high.  My flight was to board at 7am and depart at 7:30am.  I didn’t get to my gate until 7:22am.  The plane was gone.  I was placed on the next flight to Charlotte and was told I was put on standby for the 4:15pm flight to Jacksonville, NC.  When I made my way to the gate for the 4:15pm flight I was informed that I wasn’t on the standby list.  I then put my name on and was 6th in line.  They then announced that they overbooked the flight and they were looking for people to forfeit their seats, they’d be rewarded with a flight voucher and a seat on the next flight to Jacksonville.  The voucher could get you anywhere in the main 48 states or could be used as a $200 credit to fly outside of the 48.  They needed two volunteers, which meant really I was 8th in line.  There was a girl (Amanda) I started hanging out with as she was 2nd in line and didn’t get on.  We killed time together.  She did have a ticket for the 6:20pm flight and I was placed on standby (third in line) over there.  Then things get fun.

Of course the 6:20pm was also overbooked.  Amanda was in zone 3 and tried to get on.  The boarding agent told her to wait.  The 1st in line for standby boarded and the flight left.  Amanda nearly broke down.  The boarding agent was a little annoyed and told her that was the peril of standby.  I told the boarding agent that Amanda had a ticket for that flight, with a seat number and everything.  Boarding agent was confused and looked at the ticket, looked through the computer system.  “Oh, I show that she boarded the 4:15pm flight.”

Should be here noted: Amanda needs anti-seizure medication and epi shots.  She takes the anti-seizure medication daily at about the same time.  Someone from US Airways in Chicago told her she had to check her medicine as it involved needles.  The boarding agent, when pressed, admitted to not knowing where Amanda’s checked bags were (and accordingly her medicine).  Amanda started breaking down the rest of the way as she anticipated having a seizure and having to go to the hospital and missing her 10:30pm flight.  I pushed matters with the agent and Amanda was richly rewarded with a $10 food voucher for the airport.

Amanda called her airport ride/husband who was sure this was all her fault no matter what was said.  I was of the belief that if people who voluntarily give up their seats when they overbook get a free flight voucher, they should probably give one to a person who was forced by US Airways’ mistake to give up their seat.

I got on the 10:30pm flight, so did Amanda, she didn’t have a seizure.

The quickest of reviews on the Jacksonville, NC National Car Rental

When it became clear that I might be later than my 2:30pm reservation for my car rental I notified them that I might be as late as midnight.  The guy responded “As long as planes are still arriving, I’ll still be here.”  I’d been relieved.  When I got off of my plane at 11:30pm and went to retrieve my car National Car Rental was closed.  I called the number and watched the phone at the airport counter ring.  I called the 800 number.  It told me that the help line was open 8am – 10pm seven days a week.

So… I’ll try to avoid US Airways and National Car Rental from here on out.

Ever since the good old Dreamcast days, I have been in love with Soul Calibur. I remember the frustration of VMU data corruption and the subsequent 24-48 hours of solid playing in Quest Mode to regain all of the unlockable content. I remember the epic battle against Pincus to stay at the top of the time-attack scoreboard. I remember the parties I ignored, opting instead to play as many 8-on-8 Team VS matches as I could squeeze into a night. Soul Calibur was just an awesome gaming experience.

(more…)