Metroid Prime 3: Corruption

2008.01.30 - Wednesday

I had a miserable night last night, waking up sick just after midnight and unable to get back to sleep, even after going down the street to Shoppers Drug Mart to get something that I hoped would knock me out. Needless to say after "getting up" at 4:15am I took the day off work and went to the doctor for some antibiotics since this bug just hasn't gone away in quite a while. The plus side is that all of that free time meant I was at last able to complete "Metroid Prime 3: Corruption".

I picked the game up when it was released around the same time I got back from my vacation in the summer. With everything that's been going on I ended up dropping it for a while, and even played all the way through Mario before coming back to my half-finished Metroid save file. The game is solid, just as good as the first two in the series, maybe even better than the 2nd one, since it lacks that title's frustratingly difficult boss battles. I have to say that Retro Studios has got to have some of the best artists in the industry these days. I hope they're able to hold onto most of them. The environments and creatures in all three "Metroid Prime" games are wonderfully designed and the entire series has a great visual style. It's not realistic by any means, but everything in the games looks cool. I especially love the radioactive, mutated, and glowing Phazon environments, especially the sentient planet "Phaaze" at the end of this latest installment. Just fantastic design work.

I have a feeling it might be a while before we see another Metroid game. Who knows if Nintendo will even get around to publishing another one during the Wii's lifespan. Part of me hopes that they don't, so the series can rest for a few years, and when the next round of consoles comes along, and Nintendo has hopefully embraced HD by then, we can see a really great looking title. At the very least, we know that the "Prime" storyline has come to an end after three releases. Whenever the next Metroid is finally made, I hope it will stack up to what are, in my view, some of the best games to be released over the last few years.

Downtown Vancouver

2008.01.20 - Sunday

Low Quality Future

2008.01.18 - Friday

I'm really close to going out and buying a PS3 for the purpose of watching HD Blu-Ray discs. I've got the full-HD screen at home; I use it as my computer monitor, but so far I've avoided getting either kind of HD player because of this format war business. Sony's Blu-Ray is winning, by a lot, and with Warner Bros' recent defection it gives them about 75% of the Hollywood film catalogue, exclusively. It's a shame that Toshiba and HD-DVD aren't gracefully bowing out at this point, but they are Japanese. Still, I'd love to go and pick up "Planet Earth" and "300" on Blu-Ray as a start. Soon, soon.

Personally, I don't see the death of physical media coming very soon as some have predicted. Even if you ignore the obvious DRM issues inherent with downloads, there are still very real quality concerns in my mind. Apple's new "HD" movie rentals from iTunes are only 720p, and while Quicktime looks pretty good, I'd still rather have the larger, less compressed stream off a disc, and at 1080p to boot. Some people say that they can't tell the difference between standard DVD and HD, and I feel sorry for those people, because I can. It's sort of like the pity you might have for someone who can't hear the difference between a crappy MP3 audio file and a live performance. In general, however, I'm a little concerned about this push towards lower quality becoming the standard.

Everywhere you look these days, people are getting used to watching and listening to lower and lower quality entertainment, just because it's invading every aspect and every spare moment of our lives. When people are used to watching standard television and YouTube videos, it's no wonder they don't see a pressing need for a proper HD solution. You can even rent movies and watch them on your cell phone these days. Who the hell wants to watch "Pirates of the Caribbean" on a cell phone? Is it really so important to fill those dead minutes during your day? I don't know about anyone else, but I actually like having some quiet time where I can just think to myself. Sometimes, I know this will be hard to believe, but sometimes I actually drive without the radio on! Last week I saw a guy in a Safeway parking lot listening to his iPod in one ear and shouting into his cell phone pressed against the other. Do you know how I know he was actually listening to the iPod? As I passed him, I could hear the music. I was at least five feet away, but there it was.

Everywhere, people, especially young people, are demanding to be entertained constantly. The entertainment that's meeting that need seems to be of lower and lower quality. I'm not talking about the merits of rap or punk rock, but of the actual audio or video files themselves. People are ripping CDs at low bit-rates to fit more songs onto their MP3 players. They're downloading whole series of television in compressed media files measuring just 320x240, or whatever the norm is, and they don't seem to care. It's like someone telling you they don't need to see a real Van Gogh in a museum because they saw the same picture on a postcard once. Even HD buffs are beginning to think that Blu-Ray and HD-DVD will remain a niche market because the general population just doesn't seem to see the point.

The upside is that those of us who can notice the difference should be able to enjoy our physical HD disc media for some time to come. If downloaded films start to catch on, especially if they're even in "half HD" 720p, I'll be curious to see the reaction of internet service providers. I seriously doubt they'll sit back while their bandwidth use multiplies by a factor of one hundred or more. At the end of the day, the internet is not a cable or satellite network and was never designed to move that kind of information around that quickly. The only reason it works at all is because access is more or less random across the entire system, but if that begins to change, things are going to slow down, a lot. If people want that to speed up, ISPs are going to have to upgrade their networks, and I doubt that's a cost they'll simply be willing to eat.

If HD discs really don't catch on the way DVD has, it's going to be incredibly frustrating to see people everywhere as they become acclimatized to the low bit-rate, on-demand entertainment that the internet is capable of delivering. I don't care how awesome the iPhone becomes in the next ten years, I'm never going to watch to watch "Lord of the Rings" on it.

I Love the Occasional Doomsday Piece

2008.01.16 - Wednesday

Subprime Nation

I love Pat Buchanan sometimes. I will admit though that I find it hard to argue with some of the points he makes here. It's certainly going to make for an interesting century, as we can almost certainly be assured of a good change from the situation today. Still, I tend to think that the US and other Western nations are on slightly more solid ground than Pat suggests, but I could be wrong. One thing is for sure, with talk of being in recession and demands on the Federal Reserve to cut interest rates again to keep stockholders and traders happy, for a while at least, it's clear that those people haven't learned their lesson after the subprime disaster. At the end of the day they're going to keep cooking the books and selling the next generation's collective inheritance to pad their quarterly reports.

Who knows what's going to happen, but at the rate that wealth is flooding out of America and the West, it's hard to imagine us getting it back easily once we realize what our parents have done.

Germ-free? No thanks.

2008.01.08 - Thursday

Everyone knows about the relatively recent explosion in food, environmental, and chemical allergies among children today. A lot of people seem to jump to the completely illogical conclusion that we're polluting our bodies and environment too much, and allowing too many germs into our lives. Personally, I tend to believe it's the opposite. Chris and I had an interesting conversation about it a while ago.

Reading his post reminded me of something I read a while back. It was a list of "breakthroughs" that leading scientists in the year 1900 believed we would have made by 2000, and appeared in a volume of Readers' Digest or a similar magazine. Among the advances was the belief that we would have "paved over" all wetlands and still-water ponds, thus eliminating the mosquito and other bothersome insects and pests, as well as malaria. Of course today, such a proposition is known to be both insane and impossible, as wetlands provide a crucial water filtration system and storm break function to ecosystems everywhere. I'm convinced that in the future, our incessant efforts to create germ and allergen free living spaces will be looked upon as equally stupid and short sighted.

I'm not allergic to anything. I grew up in a townhouse complex in Richmond where there was plenty of outdoor space. Richmond is protected from flooding by a dike, and we were right near that. On the other side of the dike is a large marsh that eventually meets the ocean. I have fond memories of when I was young, playing in the dirt outside, making mud pies or bricks and trying to build things, and then later spending hours and hours out in that marsh exploring, building forts out of driftwood. My friends and I caught snakes and were bitten, tried to catch mice, shot makeshift bows and arrows at birds, and fell into disgusting, oil saturated mud ponds. I remember one day being out there in a summer rainstorm when the ditches were nearly overflowing, practically swimming around in the dirty water as we tried to jump across and nearly always failed. I remember riding my bike through one of the near-land trails and hitting a stump that was covered in grass. I went over my handle bars, headfirst into a blackberry bush and came out with cuts and scrapes all over the place. Even with all of those years of play, no one was ever seriously hurt, no one was ever seriously ill, and we're all still around and healthy. Maybe we were just lucky, but I can't help but think that the rarer that sort of childhood becomes, the more we're going to see children, and then adults, whose immune systems simply aren't prepared for what they will encounter during the course of a real life.

The over-protected, sterilized child may not be an "epidemic" today, but I'm sure that one day it will be ranked right up there with other social "diseases" such as obesity. The bubble boy may be a joke today, but in a way, that is how many children are being raised now, and it's an existence they will literally be unable to escape.

2008

2008.01.04 - Friday

Happy New Year to everyone. I've been thinking a lot about what's going to be in store for me in the coming year but I always draw a blank. Though I don't usually spend a lot of time wondering about that sort of thing at year's end this time it seems different somehow. So far it's the year of uncertainty personally and professionally, so that's probably a big reason for the change. With the ongoing writer's strike in the US it should make things interesting for a while with all of the film production companies in town. Of course, apart from what Hollywood may think, not every television or film project is produced through their system so there is still work out there to be had. I'm curious to see how much longer the strike goes for.

Atmosphere had a pretty good 2007 with the VES, Emmy, and Gemini award wins. I doubt we'll be able to top that this year, but I'm hopeful we'll get some interesting work in that will change things up a bit. "Stargate: Atlantis" has a 5th season coming up and I'm sure we'll get some work on that show as well.

I've spent most of my free time over the holidays "cleaning", as it were. I've gone through my system here at home, finished some organizing of my music and photo libraries, done a fresh backup, and all of that sort of fun stuff. I'm going to have to buy a new, bigger backup drive soon, but I'm not quite at the stage where I need it yet. I've tried to do a bunch of old fashioned cleaning of the apartment, taken a few things down and put a few things up, and gotten rid of some junk, all in an effort to make it at least somewhat presentable to guests. I've still got a few odds and ends to take care of, but it's nearly there. It all sounds terribly boring, but I just love the feeling you get when you clear out that backlog of nagging chores. By the time I go back to work, I don't want to have a list of things I "need to do". Struggling to figure out how I'm going to spend an evening is something I haven't had to deal with for at least a couple of months, so it should be nice once that returns.

It should be a slow start to 2008. Where is goes from there, I have no idea.