So I watched the Spike Video Game Awards on Sunday and I must say after being really disappointed with last year’s award with Samuel L Jackson I think this year the awards were really good. The awards seemed to be structured differently, as most of the show was about premiering new games than actually presenting awards (which was kind of fun) Jack Black was a very good host and of course, because he’s the main star of Brutal Legend, it got a really good promotion. Here he introduces my favorite game designer Tim Schafer to the crowd, as well as the Brutal Legend trailer:
So the American Presidential Election was this week and one thing I noticed is that the social news sites (digg, reddit) are American-focused and it’s hard to note much Canadian content on-line. So I rounded up the stuff I knew about:
Blogs:
Michael Geist: A Canadian DRM activist. Talks about copyright news in Canada. I interviewed him for a paper I did on DRM last year.
Amber Macarthur: Tech personality based in Canada. Haven’t watched her show CommandN yet, but she used to co-host Call For Help with Leo Laporte.
It’s pretty frustrating that Hulu doesn’t stream their stuff on-line to Canadian users, but the Canadian TV channels have some stuff setup.
Rick Mercer Report: Great satire, guy formerly of 22 minutes, the most popular Canadian commentator next to Don Cherry.
The Hour with George Strombolopolous: This is probably one of my favorite news shows now, this guy’s a great journalist and they always get interesting people on the show.
JPod: A short-lived comedy about a bunch of people working at a game development company. Geeks owe it to themselves to watch this, whether they’re Canadian or not.
The Comedy Network/CTV: Just some miscellaneous TV channels and their shows. Wow, CTV’s site really needs a redesign.
Stores:
Yah, a lot of digital distribution stores aren’t around in Canada, and the iTunes music store is really behind the curve. Here’s some canadian digital distribution/online order stores:
ZeStuff/Splitreason: These are canadian thinkgeek-style stores, and they’ve got some pretty good stuff. It’s also the official VGCats outlet, which is a great canadian webcomic. (PS: ZeStuff seems to be down as of the time of this writing)
PureTracks: I haven’t used this, but this is a canadian digital music store. It looks alright.
Yaaaay! The gallery is now beautiful and not annoyingly difficult to use. Thanks, Mike! <3 I’m really starting to draw a lot more now, so I’ll be reorganizing my artwork and taking out some things that should not be there. Expect some new additions soon!
This is pretty cool, this Japanese company makes adult shirts of Pokemon, the idea being that those kids that were into Pokemon when they were 8-10 years old are all grown up now, Like me and Callyn, for instance. Pokemon has been around for over 10 years…
Japan only for now. There’s more on the Pokemon 151 site.
Here’s just some misc. pictures and videos from PAX2008:
Lineups were rediculous everywhere.
Video games weren’t the only games at PAX…there was also Magic/TCGs and D&D stuff. Yah, I dunno. It seemed cool I guess.
Only panel I really wanted to see at PAX. From Right: Doc from Sarcastic Gamer,
This was that M.C. Frontalot playing his “tut tut” song live. We tried to miss his concert, but after we saw some of it it turns out he was pretty good.
This was M.C. Frontalot doing a surprise duet with Johnathan Coulton, who headlined the day we weren’t there.
This was the only good pic I got of Darkest of the Hillside Thickets, who are actually from Burnaby. Check out those costumes…
This is probably the best video I got from PAX. It’s from the guys who headlined that night: The Minibosses. They did rock covers of NES games.
This was pretty cool: The whole computer is submerged in mineral oil. Water cooling to the extreme..
Felicia Day from Dr. Horrible/The Guild
PC Freeplay area. You get a computer for a little while and play some games. We played UT3 and some Starcraft.
The Brothers in Arms: Hell’s Highway booth was giving away free copies of the game if you got your head shaved with a “hell’s haircut.”
I <3 my companion cube.
Just some picture that Mel took. I wish I had Mel’s camera, her pictures are all clear and most of my pictures were all blurry.
Sumo Lounges were everywhere, especially in the handheld lounges. They were really comfy. They’re supposed to be the definitive gaming chair.
And that’s PAX2008! Thanks for checking out my pics and videos.
And now for the pictures of all the weird cosplayers I saw this year.
This is one of my favourite pics from the PAX trip. Seriously, me and the Dark lord of the Sith are best buddies.
This was taken with melissa’s camera. I have no idea what game this is… or what’s going on… and I’m not going to even try to explain it.
Umbrella employee guy was pretty cool.
Yah I don’t know who these guys are supposed to be either. They were nice enough to pose though when they saw me take the camera out. I saw them sumo wrestling on the floor later.
Princess peach was there selling classic games. I bought Burgertime from her.
Together at last…(Que romantic music)
The Fruit Fucker live at PAX! There was even a demonstration of him..erm…with some fruit.
Godot from Phoenix Wright: Trials and Tribulations, drinking his coffee.
I don’t know who she is..either.
Okay so that’s it for Cosplayers, one more gallery to go up with just misc pictures and stuff and that’s it for the PAX 2008 posts.
So here’s some Games we were able to check out at the Penny Arcade Expo 2008.
STARCRAFT II
Starcraft II was pretty sweet. The version they had on display seemed to be just Starcraft 1 running in the Starcraft II engine (there wasn’t that much different from Starcraft 1 yet).
I used Terran vs Zerg and pretty much used the same strategy and process that I would use in Starcraft 1, however a good chunk of the units were different. The animation looked great.
The game was definately early though. Eric and I agree the sensitivity for scrolling was set way too high to an annoyance, it was essentially Starcraft 1, and Greg said he ran into some glitches. Apparently Terrans are a little more powerful in this one, they were able to “Terran Rush” Greg in like 6 minutes.
I’m definitely sold on it though.
LEFT 4 DEAD
This game had a huge lineup (even longer than Starcraft II…) and it was a pretty big blast too. Me and the 4 people I went with played a short co-op session. I was expecting it to be closer to Resident Evil, but it was a lot faster paced. Zombies RUN at you, tons of them. I remember there was this one room where it was just kind of silent in a tight hallway and all of the sudden a crowd of zombies just came straight at us. I had an Uzi though and unloaded on them.
The highlight of the demo was when all 4 of us were in what we knew to be the safe room to end the level (I had seen a few demo plays before ours) when the unexpected happened: A tentacle thing came out of nowhere and pulled Greg’s character out of the room just like a horror movie. Dood, epic. Co-op is awesome.
Wii Music
Have to admit, this was pretty bad. They showed me a drum simulator with the wiimotes, but instead of aiming the wiimote at imaginary drumsets, you would press any combination of the buttons C, Z, A, and B to aim at the various drums and hit them. You would use the Wii Fit Board to use the footpedals. It felt very awkward and weak. The Nintendo guy said “You see? You can have the full drum experience without buying a giant peripheral.” Hmm…let’s see. Rock Band Drums: 70 bucks. Wii Fit Board: 100 bucks. Rock Band Drums: Work Great. Wii Fit Board: Painfully awkward to use. Clear winner here.
Chrono Trigger DS
The quality of this port blows me away. It has the Anime cutscenes from the PS1 version of the game (without any of the load time issues). The Square Enix guy told me the game had perfect sound emulation (I couldn’t hear it for myself on the show floor obviously). The dialogue looked like it was rewritten a little…but it looked better. The touch screen controls feel so natural. Also, the Square Enix guy told me there’ll likely be a pre-order bonus, and that there is a multiplayer mode, but it’s not co-op. (so…versus I’m guessing).
Lord of the Rings: Conquest
There isn’t really anything particularly interesting about this game. It’s a beat-em-up in middle earth. You vs 100s of Orcs. It didn’t feel different from other games of it’s kind. I guess it might be worth a rental.
Mortal Kombat VS DC
Isn’t much to say about this one. Just played a round of it, I was The Joker, Greg was Subzero. One thing weird that this game did was quicktime events…in a fighting game. It felt so out of place it was kind of rediculous. Definately not on the same level as Soul Calibur.
Rayman Rabbids: TV Party
Didn’t play this one. Was able to see a bunch of people make idiots of themselves though. Observe.
Political Machine 2008
This was an election game (with this particular level) starring Obama..versus an evil Alien on the republican side. It looked like an original quirky game that has a lot of strategy to it, but unfortunately wasn’t very easy to pick up and play.
Puzzle Quest: Galactrix
This game had a comfortably short lineup for, and was pretty fun. I haven’t played the original Puzzle Quest yet, but according to Greg this was essentially the same except the new pieces fall from the points of a circle. It still has attacks and a bejeweled-like puzzle sequence, but with a sci-fi setting instead.
Dragon Age: Origins
This was kind of a weird case. There was a GIANT CASTLE on the show floor, but instead of having a playable demo, the Bioware guys invited you inside, where it was a big theater, and you watched them play the demo. It was pretty sweet, I’m not gonna lie, but a good chunk of the stuff they demoed was some conversation stuff, that we couldn’t hear over the noise, and then they showed some battle stuff, which looked really really fun. The signature Bioware good path/bad path stuff was in there. Cutscenes looked good too. The release is 2009 for PC..so that would probably be interesting.
OTHER GAMES, NOT PLAYED BUT SEEN:
Rock Band 2
Didn’t play it, but I did see it played live on stage alot and I have to say it looks virtually identical to Rock Band, the only way to tell the difference was if they paused it. I did get to play the new drumset though, and the footpedal was reinforced metal and was very nice, and the pads felt like a dream to drum on.
Guitar Hero: World Tour
Blatant rip-off of Rock Band with circles instead of rectangles.
Animal Crossing: City Folk
Actually didn’t bother to play the demo after I saw the guy in front of me play it..it looks way too similar to Animal Crossing. It was kind of gross, actually. I think there’s a city area, but the area I saw was a village that looked exactly like the other Animal Crossing. What’s even more gross is I’m probably gonna get it anyways, cause I’m like that.
Mirror’s Edge
We waited in line 17 minutes for this one just to be turned away cause the floor was closing. We tried to wait in line again, but we’d seen the demo played so many times that it would almost be an injustice to play it at that point. So we gave up and played some other games instead.
Fallout 3
Didn’t see this one, had an awesome booth though.
And..that’s it for the game impressions. I am gonna post a few galleries of various other PAX things though, stay tuned.
So I decided to try out Flock today, the “social” web browser that is based on Firefox 3. It’s designed specifically to work with all of the social networks. When you first sign in to Flock, it’ll ask you to start adding accounts and services.
Once you add an account to Flock, it keeps you logged in (like actually logs you in if you somehow logged out) and gives you extra functionality based on what you’re doing. For example. most social networks would give you a list of your friends in the people sidebar.
The Media sidebar can fill up with lots of different things from your social network, such as stories from digg or recent photos from your friends from Facebook.
Lots of drag and drop stuff, like a drag and drop web clipboard and drag and drop photo uploading for Facebook and stuff like that.
And most importantly, an integrated blog editor that I’m using right now to write this post.
Since Flock is based on Firefox 3, a lot of Firefox extensions work with Flock, like stumble upon and Foxmarks.
I am a little disappointed, however, at some of the social networks that are missing from flock, such as reddit, stumbleupon (with the people sidebar stuff) and stuff like drag and drop photo uploading to open source photo platforms (such as the one my site runs). Oh, and the theme is ugly and there doesn’t seem to be anyone who’s made a theme for it yet.
But yah, I’d definately say it’s worth trying out.
UPDATE: Trying to put photos in this blog post using Flock was not very easy and I ended up going online anyways. That’s another strike against it.
