Thus Spake Zarathustra

So now my good friend is borrowing Fallout 3 and I feel like I've got nothing to play. (Can you imagine? A problem like that at this time of year?)

I beat Fable 2 the other day and couldn't have cared less about the plot. I'm not sure what the point of the game is after beating it. (I'm not sure what the point of the plot was either. It was so cold and distant that I scarcely felt a part of it.) You can buy more property and do some sidequests and earn more gold that's ultimately pointless... I don't know. Maybe it just doesn't "jive" with me completely. I don't really understand the purpose of playing it more. So I can make my character even more hideous? Seriously, get a good look at your character when you start, because they'll never look more attractive than they do then.

I don't really want to play Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts either. If it was a platformer, that'd be a different story. Guess I'll just have to wait until GameStop gets my preorder code in so I can play a Banjo game I enjoy.

I thought about playing some Orange Box and finally finishing Half-Life 2: Episode 2, but right now I want to play a game that I can ignore the specifics of so I can catch up on podcasts. I played a few Portal challenges, but gave up when I remembered how frustrating it was to get gold medals (I sincerely hope the console versions are more lenient with time trials than the PC version).

Next I decided to play some XBLA games. I got new personal high scores in Hexic and Geometry Wars and then I tried the demos for Bomberman Live and Age of Booty. Neither of those where bad, and had I a copious amount of pretend Microsoft money, I'd purchase them. Bomberman could potentially be quite fun online (as I'm sure anyone who played it in the NES days knows) and Age of Booty was like an even more simplified Civilization Revolution. Now there's a game I'd like to play right now... It has the perfect balance of involvement and not-having-to-pay-attention for listening to podcasts.

Or what would also be really good is a version of Tetris Attack for XBLA. Queue up the music for Poochie's stage and I'd buy that for a dollar... Or five.

It makes no sense that I feel like I have nothing to play at this time of the year -- not to mention all my old games I could enjoy. Listening to the Retronauts podcast on Chrono Cross/Radical Dreamers makes me want to play those, even though I sort of despise them. (To put it succinctly: As a standalone game, Chrono Cross is fairly good. As a sequel to Chrono Trigger, it's terrible.)

Or maybe I'll just fire up some Yoshi's Island or Super Mario Bros. 3 and have at it. Those are always fun.

And to anyone that has to work on Thanksgiving/Christmas: Fuck your employer. Bunch of greedy pricks... I bet your CEOs aren't working those days, are they?

The future, ladies and gentlemen

... is sort of here. I downloaded the "New Xbox Experience" this morning and I'm damned impressed. Now, I haven't been galavanting around looking at everything yet. No, the part I'm impressed with is the new Netflix integration. Simply put: I'm sold on the future of streaming video. Putting HD (and even SD) films and television shows into my instant queue is slicker and easier than I could have imagined. Plus, it's practically instant when putting items in the queue on the computer and those items showing up on my 360.

The quality for SD content seems to vary a bit. Most of it seems sub-DVD quality though. I mean, that's about what I expected. And that's not bad for a two week free trial. The HD content, however, seems to be on par with over-the-air broadcasts, which is good. (Netflix does throttle the quality back if you don't have adequate bandwidth though. Even on some of the lower settings when I had bittorrent running, the quality was still very good, however.) Having access to both seasons of 30 Rock and all four seasons of the American Office at my beck and call makes me feel warm and fuzzy. This is how people's video libraries should be in the future. We need less clutter. Instead, what we need is more hard drive space and faster internet connections.

While this is hardly revolutionary for some of you (or even most of you, given the "niche-ness" of this site), the ease of integration between Netflix and the 360 has convinced me utterly that wasting shelf space on physical discs is going to go the way of the dodo in about 5 years. Granted, for the films I really love, I wouldn't be averse to buying a copy on Blu-ray or keeping some legacy DVDs and whatnot that will never appear on Netflix (instructional guitar material comes to mind), but for most everything else, I need to just rent or stream it from Netflix.

The only thing that needs improvement is the selection of streaming HD content. Right now, there's only six pages of material and hardly any of it is stellar. Indeed, the only notable items I could find where the Office, 30 Rock, and the King of Kong (which, if you haven't seen it yet, is an absolute must!). I'd love to have more streaming television shows and more notable movies available. That would make Hulu and bittorrent pretty much obsolete for me then.

The other big feature that comes with the New Xbox Experience is the ability to install games to your hard drives. If you've got a somewhat older Xbox 360 like me, then this is crucial for two reasons. One is that doing this shortens load times by as much as twenty seconds for some games (Oddly, Halo 3 seems to be the only game that's load times got worse). The Orange Box benefits greatly from this and now I don't dread loading it up as much and waiting for the menu screen to switch to another game.

The second reason that this is important is that that loud fucking disc drive isn't spinning while you're playing! How many late night sessions have you had where you just realized how amazingly loud your 360 is? Now the only thing you're going to hear is the fan. And noise-wise, I'd say it's almost on par with my PlayStation 3 now. Rejoice!

So now that I'm off of work, I'm going to tool around with the "NXE" some more before I start watching the second season of Lost. (Yes, I've been ashamed to pick it up for so long for fear of people saying that it starts to suck like Heroes supposedly did.)


Update: I'm watching the SD version of Zach Galifianakis: Live at the Purple Onion and the quality is superb. I was saying that the streaming SD quality seemed to vary. The British Office didn't look too hot and the streaming version of Ratatouille was definitely inferior to the DVD, but ZG: LATPO looks just as good if not better than DVD quality. It's also one of the funniest stand up movies I've seen in a while. The Comedians of Comedy: The Movie is like comfort food to me and this is proving to be another good one.

"When you look like I do, it's hard to get a table for one at Chuck E. Cheese."

I am a sexy guy... A very sexy guy

I always thought Sweden was pretty cool. It's known for its beautiful women, bikini teams, neutrality and its amazing music (see: Friska Viljor, Jens Lekman, Elias and the Wizzkids, the Bent Pen Project, Suburban Kids with Biblical Names, José González, Lykke Li, etc.). After viewing the following link, I'm not so sure anymore. All that I know now is that Sweden is fucking white. Also, their women may be hot, but their fellas certainly ain't. Of course, a couple decades of copulating could have rectified that, but I'm not so certain.

So without further ado: Swedish Dance Bands of the 1970s: A Pictorial.

Link courtesy of Jeff Green.

A family of trees wantin' to be haunted

Maybe I was a bit harsh on Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts earlier. It's true that it's not the game that I wanted it to be, but it's not terrible by any means. I mean, I'm somehow still a little compelled to play it. And I've got Fallout 3 and Fable 2 just sitting around... I guess I needed a break and it does an okay job.

Anyway, I'm not sure if this exploit is known or not, but you can levitate to many places that you're not supposed to be able to get to by using my little trick. First, get the cart that you drive around town and put a box inside of it. Other objects (such as chairs) work, but boxes are best since they are flat (if the object isn't flat, there's a high probability that you'll crash before you get the the place you want). So put the box in the cart, and stand on top of the box inside the cart. Your R2 power should now focus on the cart (it will glow yellow). Hold R2 and you'll levitate upwards with the cart underneath you. You can control the direction you go by facing in that direction with the left stick and you can throttle R2 so that you don't just keep going.

This trick will help you get a lot of parts boxes and stuff like Jinjos before you're able to legitimately. I've gotten a lot of stuff that way (getting a small rocket engine early helped with a lot of races). Plus, it's more interesting to me than entering another race. So I broke the game, have at.

I still wish this game was "Banjo-Threeie", but I guess I'll just have to deal. At least I can play the original with up-rezzed graphics, widescreen mode and achievements in a couple of weeks. Banjo-Kazooie is still my favorite Nintendo 64 game -- more so than Super Mario 64 or Space Station Silicon Valley or Ocarina of Time or Blast Corps. or Mischief Makers. I'm going to use a speed run video to help me get all the notes and jiggies and see how fast I can beat it. I'm not going to submit my run or anything, I think it'd just be kind of fun.

I'm starting to jones for Left 4 Dead a little more now. I'll probably just wait until my birthday or something to get it. It'd be nice to have a PC that could run it too. I'd get that and STALKER: Clear Sky in a heartbeat. I never imagined myself to be a "first person shooter guy", but they've just gotten so much better in recent years (remember the days of Doom, Duke Nukem and all their clones? Not a fan). I think a big part of that is that we've started blending more genres together so that "first person" is more of a camera style than a game type.

Also of note, my boss called me tonight at work to ask for help in BioShock. It probably doesn't interest anyone else, but I thought it was funny. Like the days of giving my middle school science teacher advice in Ocarina of Time... Geeking out with other people is fun.

Angry Fists

I'm still venturing through the wastes in Fallout 3 and I'm still enjoying it immensely. I might post my formulated character plan later on. Hint: Agility and Intelligence are still the most important statistics in Fallout.

I booted up Banjo-Kazooie: Nuts & Bolts the other night. First, this game needs to be installed to the hard drive because the load times are long and frequent. November 18th will bring the "new Xbox experience" and you'll be able to install games to the hard drive then. This game needs that badly.

Barring that technical hurdle, my feelings can be summed up by the text in one of the load screens. It says that if you don't enjoy the vehicle-based gameplay of Nuts & Bolts (I don't), then you should buy the original on Xbox Live Arcade. Yeah, you're game isn't fun like the original was. So thanks for admitting that this game isn't as good and thanks for shilling your other product... Assholes.

Good thing I've got a code to download the original Banjo-Kazooie for free because I pre-ordered Nuts & Bolts. I wanted a platformer, not a racing game based on the Kingdom Hearts Gummi Ships. There's hardly any personality in the world and all of the worlds are too large and don't really encourage exploration. They're basically just large, empty race tracks.

I don't hate it, but it's not really for me... Nor is it for kids either. I mean, none of the dialogue is voiced and (as I'm sure you've seen reported on the internet) it is unplayable on SDTVs.

What I was surprised with was Left 4 Dead. The demo just floored me. It was fast, fun and free of frustration. It was pretty cool to see a huge swarm of undead start coming at your party and you can't help but think "Oh shit! ... This is gonna be fun!" If I had money, I'd definitely consider purchasing it.

I got access to the Home Beta this morning and tried that out. What a monumental waste of money and time on Sony's part. What reason do I have to ever use this? Boring and pointless.

Still haven't picked up my copy of LittleBigPlanet though... I don't have the money yet.

Time is just a room without space

A quick update (knowing me, that's probably going to be a lie):

Fallout 3 is amazing. I love you, Bethesda. Rats off to ya. I'm now replaying Fallout 1 and Fallout 2. After that, I'll restart Fallout 3 and the cycle will be complete... Well, I might dig out Fallout Tactics (yeah, I'm one of the few people who like it). Anyway, here's some great advice for those playing Fallout 3: You should probably stop doing the main quest after you get Power Armor training, because once you beat the game, there's no going back to do sidequests.

I watched Kung Fu Panda on Blu-ray last night (it's release date has been pushed to this Saturday, by the way). It's one of DreamWorks' best films. Yes, it is super predictable. Yes, it has a stupid message about believing in yourself. Yes, one of Pixar's short films still has more heart and imagination in two frames than the entire DreamWorks library will ever have. Still, there are some funny moments and it does look very nice. Especially the intro, which is presented in two wonderfully stylish dimensions. I kind of wish the whole film was done like that... it was almost like Samurai Jack in HD.

I began watching Hellboy II: The Golden Army this morning (now pushed up the 11th). Now, it could just be the beautifully rich and saturated colors speaking, but this is the most fantastic looking live action Blu-ray I've ever seen! It's also refreshing to see something so original for once (every other film looks like it's ripping off the same few sources by comparison). The creatures and the effects are brilliant and make it feel much more like the comic than the first movie. Still, I haven't finished it yet.

I rented Young Frankenstein on Blu-ray the other day too. I was curious to see how a black and white film would look in high definition, and it's really quite incredible for something that's nearly 35 years old. There's still film grain and small defects (whatever you call those vertical lines and cigarette burns), but it is vastly superior to the original DVD pressing. I remember seeing that on an HDTV a couple years ago, and it was hideous. This new version is sublime, however. And of course, it's still freaking hilarious. My favorite Mel Brooks movie by far.

What else? Oh yeah, I watched Get Smart (speaking of Mel Brooks, I guess). I enjoyed it, but didn't love it. Steve Carrell and Anne Hathaway's chemistry is by far the best part of the film. Worth seeing? Absolutely. I love Steve Carrell. Whether as Produce Pete (The Daily Show with Jon Stewart), Dan Burns (Dan in Real Life), Michael Scott (The Office), or Frank Ginsberg (Little Miss Sunshine), I just love the man. He's like this decade's Mike Meyers to me. Of course, their comic styles are vastly different, but I think it's the same sort of love.

Moving on to television... I started watching and am now (unfortunately) caught up on Chuck. Now I'm waiting for new episodes like a sucker. It's not the spy parts I like, it's the geekiness of the Buy More (their version of Best Buy) and the relationship between Chuck Bartowski and his lady spy friend Sarah Walker. The last episode featured Rush, Missile Command, and Stan Bush's "The Touch" for Christ's sake! How can I not like that?

I'm also caught up on Pushing Daisies. I love that television is now able to create something so artistic and charming with production values that rival movies. Pushing Daisies is something every sane person should instantly fall in love with, but I hear it's not getting good ratings. It's a crying shame. If the brilliant It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia can continue on FX, then there's no reason that Pushing Daisies should vanish from existence any time soon.

Other than those two shows, the Office and 30 Rock are really the only other things I watch regularly on television. I hear the Wire is good, but I'm not sure if I want to be sucked into a drama... Plus I still haven't finished Six Feet Under.

In the realm of music, of Montreal's Skeletel Lamping is pretty good and I've become a bit obsessed with Denver indie folk band Paper Bird. They're almost the kind of band I wish I was in (I have day dreams about having girls with pretty voices harmonize the lyrics to Nine Inch Nails' Closer and Big Man with a Gun... I guess I'm pretty sick). Too bad I can't sing... I'm still enamored with Minus the Bear's Guns & Ammo. I'm a bit sad that I had to miss a Boulder Acoustic Society show in Fort Collins tonight because of work.

Well, I guess that's about it for my brain dump tonight. Back to Fallout and whatnot.