Trailers

2003.09.30

Two of the biggest movies trailers of the year for two of the biggest movies of the year came out almost on top of each other last week and yesterday. These are of course the trailers for The Matrix: Revolutions and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

The third and final Matrix film is probably going to make or break the franchise. While the second movie wasn't exactly bad, it was definitely odd and maybe weird. Too weird for a lot of people, I think. The trailer for Revolutions paints a much more appealing picture of the final battle between Humans and Machines, and between Neo and Agent Smith. The story seems to move along more in the trailer for Revolutions than in the entire two and a half hours of Reloaded. There's even a shot of a Human ship flying through a blue sky with the moon rising. Something big obviously happens.

The Return of the King looks a little less certain to me. It will obviously be good, but I'm hoping it will be better than the first one. I imagine we'll get some awesome battle scenes, not to mention more CG Gollum goodness, and Shelob. As with the Matrix trailer, there are some visual effects shots that look incomplete. Hopefully they'll get more work done on them before December rolls around. I imagine it's absolutely crazy working on either of these movies right now.

Hopefully they'll both kick ass and we can forget the summer!

Eternal Darkness

2003.09.29

I finished Eternal Darkness: Sanity's Requiem last night after having played it heavily for about a week. I'll try and write a full review sometime this week, but I just wanted to talk about the game briefly.

I'm not sure why people call it a survival horror game when it really isn't. It's much more of a Tomb Raider or Zelda style adventure game once things really start moving. It really is a lot better than I was expecting it to be, and I can see why it scored high marks with most of the reviewers out there.

Anyway, a review will be coming, but for now, I'm recommending it.

Game Collector

2003.09.25

Game Catalog Software

I never thought that I would consider buying a piece of software like this. Since I went on my vintage game eBay shopping spree a while back, I've got so many games that when people ask me what I have, I can't tell them. I can name a few things, and I can name all of my Gamecube games, but I can never remember all of the N64, SNES, NES, Master System, Genesis, Game Boy or Virutal Boy ones. I suppose there are just too many. That's not even getting into all of my PC games.

The other problem with having so many games like that is finding space for them. I'm doubling up on shelves as it is, so I'm not quite sure what I would do if I started collecting again. I will start again, once I'm working. There are still a couple of RPGs to get for the SNES, and then I'll probably go back to browsing eBay until I find something I like.

I love shopping from home.

Ikaruga

2003.09.24

I have to take a moment to talk about this game, because it is amazing in more than a few ways. Ikaruga is a top down shooter game in the vein of "1942" or "Raiden", with one major difference. Take a look at this screen shot:

Can you tell what's going on? Notice how there are two colours of enemy weapons fire? Big blue beams and little blue balls, as well as the big black and red beams and the black and red balls. While you're playing the game, you can change your ship's polarity between white and black with the push of a button. While in white mode, white weapons are absorbed by your ship, charging up your super weapon with every hit. You also fire white shots back, which do double the damage to black enemies. Everything is reversed while in black mode. As with most top down shooters, one hit from an opposite polarity shot will kill you.

The entire game is insanely fast. Your reaction time has to be in top form, assuming you can even figure out what to do. With white bullets and black bullets flying at you constantly, at the same time, you have to be on your toes. Some sections of levels require you to switch polarity two or three times in as many seconds just to avoid being destroyed. Playing the game is almost like having an out of body experience. You just can't believe you're avoiding being shot down, because everything happens so fast, the game is played on an almost unconscious level.

Once you get the hang of that, you can try playing it cooperatively with a friend!

Flying

2003.09.23

I actually got to fly a plane on Saturday. I've flown one before, but this time I got to do takeoffs and landings. It was a lot of fun, definitely challenging, and very interesting. I wasn't expecting to have so much trouble with the directional control on the transitions between rolling and flying, but I guess it's good to find out. Flight sims certainly have nothing on the real thing, at least when it comes to the feel of the plane.

Hopefully someday force feedback technology will advance to the point where household rudder pedals can create the feel of the runway on the wheels. The shaking around stuff that they do now just doesn't cut it. They have to be able to create a steady amount of force that pushes the controls around, instead of a vibration. Joysticks have gotten better in the last few years, but they've still got a way to go.

The military guys probably have good force feedback. They get all the cool toys.

Underworld

2003.09.22

Whatever you do, do not see Underworld! I went to see it yesterday with my friends Chris and Jeremy. We were expecting the movie to be bad, but we obviously had no idea what we were dealing with. Even the undeniable hotness of Kate Beckinsale isn't able to rescue this trash for even a nanosecond. What's even worse is that there aren't even any good visual effects shots to look at and say "well at least the effects were cool". There aren't very many effects shots in the abomination to begin with, and the ones that are there seem like pretty standard fare. They even reuse one of the Werewolf transformation shots!!!

Whatever you do, do not see Underworld!

Organization

2003.09.19

I spent almost half a day yesterday reorganizing my music playlists. Of course, this isn't something I had to do, but I was getting bored with the playlists the way they were. I cut out some old stuff that I was always skipping past anyway, and added in some new tracks that I've recently downloaded (legally...I know, it's amazing). The whole thing has made me re-realize that keeping files organized takes a huge amount of work.

Keep in mind that this is just one person's data. I may have more data to organize that the average computer user, but not that much more. Over the years I've developed a file structure and naming convention for things which has served me well and hasn't had to be changed in a long time. I think the really big change was the switch from Windows 3.1, with it's 8 character file name limit, to Windows 95, which allows 255 characters, including spaces. I had a lot of stuff to rename on that day, some of which still hasn't been converted.

I've become convinced that, at least when dealing with Windows, keeping files organized is an essential part of keeping your computer running smoothly. I delete stuff I don't need, I don't leave it sitting around in some unnamed folder for years, never to be touched. I rename almost everything I download from the Internet, and put it in a separate folder depending on what sort of program or file it is. I have separate hard drive partitions for different kinds of data, instead of keeping everything on one big C: drive. I don't have anything in "My Documents" or "My Pictures"; there's nothing saved to my desktop.

Big deal, you say? Well all I know is that my computer has been running smoothly and stable for over 6 months now. No problems at all, worth mentioning. Of course, the main problem with keeping data organized is that it takes a huge amount of unwavering vigilance. Few people have it, which is probably why everyone's always bitching about their computers not working.

The Expanse

2003.09.18

While last night's episode of Enterprise was an improvement over the disappointing season premiere, the series still doesn't feel right. It's hard to explain why I don't like it. Maybe I just don't like it because I don't like it.

Somehow, they've actually managed to make the opening theme song worse than it was before. Captain Archer's attempts at torture using an airlock are an almost exact rip-off of Janeway losing it while interrogating a member of the U.S.S. Equinox, that evil Starfleet crew that was killing alien life forms to get home faster.

It feels like a waste of energy to complain about the show! Bah!

Elingsh

2003.09.17

"Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn't mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteers are at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a toatl mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by it slef but the wrod as a wlohe."

Pretty interesting stuff. It's always interesting when people discover strange things like this about how our mind is actually processing information. I suppose this sort of thing is the basis for how some speed readers can read entire pages of words in the time it takes most people to read two or three. I wish I could do that.

Two Years

2003.09.11

Hard to believe it's been two years since 9/11/2001. I was thinking yesterday that even I have trouble believing that it actually happened. They can show the footage over and over, but part of it just doesn't seem real.

I didn't want to make a huge deal about this post today, so I'll go with some humour instead. I haven't been reading The Onion much lately, but something made me check it out today and they've got another great top story for this week.

Relations break down between U.S. and Them

Sometimes, that map of the world sure seems accurate.

Napster

2003.09.10

It looks as though the former music sharing program is about to make some kind of comeback. I'm going to assume this will be a legal adventure, so it will be interesting to see how the new Napster stacks up against Apple's iTunes and similar online music sale services. I for one hope that Napster has come up with some kind of decent sales strategy. iTunes is great, but it uses a proprietary file format, is Mac based, and can't be used outside of the States. I know Apple has said that a Windows version of the service will be coming before the end of the year, as well as availability in other countries, but it's not exactly happening quickly. I guess they don't want to make money badly enough.

In the mean time, check out www.napsterbits.com for some pretty decent Flash cartoons, featuring that adorable Napster mascot, the cat with the headphones. A couple of them are pretty funny.

Today is the one year anniversary of this website. It doesn't feel like it's been that long, but I guess the archives don't lie. The really great thing is that I still don't feel like the design or colour scheme needs to change. I suppose that means it's been a success, at least in my own eyes. There are still many more years to come.

The New NASA

2003.09.09

With the recent report on the Shuttle Columbia's destruction, the NASA "culture" was fingered as one of the problems with the agency. Gee, what a big surprise!

I heard an interesting comment by a former NASA employee on The Discovery Channel's "Discovery.ca" program yesterday. He said that all you have to do to get an accurate measurement of how safe the NASA culture is was to look and see if NASA employees or those of contractors were using their real names while making complaints or posting warnings on several websites. As it stands right now, especially at the contractor level, people use fabricated names or Internet handles in order to discuss potential problems with the program, for fear of losing their jobs.

That sort of simple measuring system makes sense to me. Can a massive bureaucracy like NASA ever really be as safe as it needs to be? Who knows. I'm sure it'll be safe for a while, but things will start to slip with time just as they did after Challenger. The real question is this: will NASA voluntarily take the Shuttles out of service when they become too old, or will it take another lost crew before the aging ships are replaced?

Fall Comes

2003.09.08

As soon as September rolls around the weather changes. It's almost like someone throws a switch somewhere. It's still reasonably sunny here, but it's not as hot anymore, especially at night. Pretty typical for this time of year, I'd say.

I'm sure you've noticed that I've been avoiding the political commentary for a while. One reason for this is the job hunt, but more than anything I'm just not terribly interested in what's going on right now. The Tony Blair business is probably the most exciting thing on the table. Well, maybe. In any case, I'm sure I'll get back to it at some point.

Planned Cities

2003.09.05

Even though people can have jobs as city planners, cities really don't get planned all at once. Cities grow, like biological structures, and no one can ever predict how or when things will change. I just finished watching a program on the Discovery Channel about a massive, planned city structure that some people want to build in Tokyo, and it looked pretty interesting.

Essentially, the structure would be a giant pyramid, almost a mile high, build of out huge cylindrical beams. The beams would form smaller pyramids inside the entire structure, and it's inside these small pyramids that huge skyscraper-like buildings would be built. People would move around the pyramid city on a transit system that would run inside the beams; a combination of computer controlled trains as well as vertical and diagonal elevators, and moving sidewalks. Cars would obviously have no place in the pyramid city.

It seems to me that we aren't going to have much choice soon, and structures like the pyramid city will have to become the norm. The cities which exist today can't keep spreading indefinitely, and even if they could, people wouldn't want to start spending two or three hours getting from one place to another for work. It will be interesting to see if anything like the pyramid city ever gets built. I certainly like the idea however. I'd live in one.

Life Sucks

2003.09.04

Well, it sucks sometimes. Breaking up with Girlfriends sucks.

*sigh*

Going Digital

2003.09.03

I was reading an article earlier about LCD TVs, which mentioned that all television signals in the world are supposed to transfer over to digital broadcast by 2010. This would mean that most of the world's 8 billion televisions will have to be replaced in the next 10 years. Obviously electronics companies like Sharp, Samsung and Sony are betting that people will want to replace their TVs with LCD or Plasma screens.

Of course, just because a station is broadcasting digitally doesn't mean the signal is going to be HDTV, which is too bad. I can't wait to have a flat panel TV mounted on a wall, displaying an image so clear that it looks like a window. I also can't wait to play games on it, which brings us to another problem. Console makers like Nintendo and Microsoft are going to get a kick in the pants when their next generation machines have to start rendering at HD resolutions. Despite a PC's huge hardware advantage, consoles have been able to produce equally beautiful graphics because they only have to render an NTSC image. PC's typically have to render at least twice the pixels, if not more. HD resolution, however, is larger than even the largest PC monitor resolution (typically), so it's going to take a lot of effort on the part of the console to stay on equal visual footing.

Pretty soon every TV in the world will be a flat screen, using less energy and producing a better image. Hopefully wireless technology will catch on quickly, and people will be able to access the Internet from anywhere. We're almost living in the future. I can't wait!

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines Review

2003.09.03

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines has been out for a while now, and I thought I would finally do a review of it, since it's pretty much the only summer movie to be worth my time this year. That doesn't necessarily mean that this is a good movie...well, yeah, it is a good movie, as long as your hopes aren't too high.

Terminator 2: Judgment Day is such a masterpiece that this new film could never stack up against it in people's minds. For the most part, it doesn't try to, either. John Connor, the boy who was destined to lead humanity against the machine army in the future in T2, is now a man. However, living with the knowledge of the future that never happened has taken its toll on John, who lives in constant fear that judgment day might still happen any minute. He spends most of his time as a drifter, never holding a job or paying any bills for fear of the machines finding him. Of course, when the new T-X Terminator and the good old T-800 arrive from the future, it takes them all of one night to zero in on John and get the movie rolling.

Arnie makes his appearance by teleporting from the future without any clothes, which seems to be the only way to go. His face looks noticeably older, but you wouldn't know it by looking at the rest of him, which is pretty impressive for a guy who's in his mid-fifties. The female Terminator, the T-X, appears in much the same way. This Terminator is even more advanced than the liquid metal T-1000 which appeared in T2, and sports a built in plasma cannon which seems capable of excessive amounts of destruction.

The two Terminators locate John and his female companion quickly and immediately start shooting each other. Arnie's T-800 character is vastly outclassed however, and about all he can do it run away and hope he makes it. Almost all of the confrontations between Arnie and robogirl are chase scenes, in fact, with Arnie using some sneaky and highly destructive escape tactics to get away. It is during one such lull in the action that we learn judgment day was merely postponed in T2, and that Skynet becomes operational just as before and launches a massive nuclear attack against Mankind. Pretty soon we discover that Arnie wasn't sent back to help John destroy Skynet, but simply to protect him so that he would survive judgment day and be able to lead humanity to ultimate victory against the machines. John is obviously not too impressed with this information, and demands that Arnie help him to stop judgment day from ever happening. The T-800 is reluctant, but eventually agrees, and the group heads off to a secret military base where Skynet is being developed.

Once they arrive, they find out that a computer virus has been infecting the entire world's computer network. The military is anxious to let their artificial intelligence project, obviously named Skynet, out of its cage in order to destroy the virus and get everyone's computers working again. The general in charge of the project is reluctant however, and while looking over a lab filled with experimental robot soldiers and jet aircraft, worries aloud that Skynet isn't ready for deployment. When military computers start becoming effected by the virus however, the general's superiors order the deployment of Skynet. It is at this moment that John, the T-800 and the T-X arrive at the base. Skynet goes online and instantly destroys the virus, but locks humans out of any kind of computer control all over the world. The base's automated robot soldiers and aircraft come to life and begin killing at will. The general realizes what has happened when John tells him that the computer virus was Skynet, and points John to another facility where he says the Skynet system is located. As Arnie protects his escape from the T-X, John heads towards Skynet armed with explosives.

That's all I'm going to say about the plot, because the ending is so good that no one should have it ruined by a review. It is a fantastic ending however, and one that I was surprised to see come out of Hollywood; I didn't think they had the balls.

The visual effects in T3 are excellent as far as I could tell. The extreme damage that Arnie suffers at the hands of T-X is very well done, and there's really only one or two shots that look blatantly fake. Even when shots look fake, they look good, and considering what was involved, the artists did a very good job. I really do love to see a movie where there aren't any "cringe" shots, and you don't even have to think about how cool the effects are while you're watching it.

The story was pretty standard fare until the end, which more than makes up for any mediocrity earlier in the film. I only wish that more movies of this sort would take these kinds of chances. You'll have to see it to know what I mean. The action is well done, and the movie moves along quite well. It's certainly not as good and especially not as deep as T2 was, but it's a good addition to the Terminator franchise that rounds out the overall story well.

Hopefully we won't see any other Terminator movies and it can be left as a trilogy. I think they'd be pushing their luck otherwise. Of course, we are talking about Hollywood, and they love to make money.

Gaming Notes

2003.09.02

It's been a while since I've done a gaming post so I'll start off the month with one. I'm busy playing F-Zero GX on the Gamecube, and it's actually better than I thought it would be. I've always been a fan of the F-Zero games, although I never did play the N64 version (from what I hear, I didn't miss much). Sega's "Amusement Vision" team handled the development of F-Zero GX and they've done a great job. Sega sure does have a knack for making flashy, arcade style games with lots of energy and style.

In case you're wondering, F-Zero is a futuristic racing game where players race jet powered hovercars at speeds approaching 2000 km/h on mind-bending tracks suspended amongst cities. There are 29 other racers during the "Grand Prix" sections of the game, and the sense of speed can be quite convincing at times. So far the only downside I can find is the insanely difficult "Story Mode". I haven't been able to get more than three levels into that part of the game. Another cool element is the garage, which allows you to build your own machine from a variety of parts which you can win by competing in the races. You can even create customized logos or textures and slap them on your new vehicle.

If you like racing games at all, give it a shot.

My good friend Kyle pointed me towards the new demo for Call of Duty over the weekend. This is a new WW2 shooter in the same style as Medal of Honor, although better looking and more realistic. The game's official teaser site features a number of tag lines that take aim at Medal of Honor's Rambo-esque, one man against the Nazis style of gameplay. The demo only includes one level, but it's a lot of fun. You start on the ground, having just parachuted into Normandy and joined up with a small squad of allied troops. Your objective is to make your way into a small town and destroy some German flak guns.

The graphics are quite nice, and there's plenty of stuff to look at. During the entire level, you can look up and see allied paratroopers coming down in the distance, and DC-3s flying high above or being shot down. There's a lot of squad level tactics involved. AI troops will call for covering fire, then actually run to a better position when you give it to them. They'll call out enemy positions, or yell things like "we're pinned down, we've gotta flank 'em!" Enemy troops will toss grenades back at you, or shoot around corners. A lot of the action is obviously scripted, but it should make for good fun at least the first time through.

Check out the demo here, and start looking forward to this one!