So Weezer is going around the country right now and inviting fans to play songs with them. They recently stopped in Seattle. My co-worker was one of the lucky ones to play along with them. Check out a couple of the tracks they recorded, especially a great cover of Creep.
So what will probably be the biggest game for the Playstation 3 game out a couple weeks ago in Metal Gear Solid 4. I have been holding off on buying a Playstation 3 for sometime now, but due to Walmart giving $100 gift cards with the purchase of a 40 GB PS3, I decided to pull the trigger and get a PS3 right before MGS4 came out.
I did the midnight sale for MGS4 at the Bellevue Best Buy and was shocked of how many people were in line. I figured PS3 exclusive there would be 60 or 70 people show up. 100 would have shocked me, but there probably was 200 people that showed up that night. I stuck around talked games with some people, got my copy and went home. Only to then have to install the game, which sucks. At least I didn’t have to do a firmware update.
So the game is straight up Metal Gear. The humor, the weapons, the story. It is all there. The cinematics are amazing. They are in such a different leauge it isn’t even funny. Truely amazing work done by the team at Kojima Productions when it comes to the cinematics in the game. The gameplay is alright. I just played the game Rambo style not concerning myself with saving ammo or sneaking around. It made it pretty fun just to blow stuff up. I won’t spoil anything in the game, because I do think that people should play through it. I ended up beating it in 18 hours or so. So most people could probably finish it in a long weekend.
So I am always a sucker for a good rock band AND good rock bands with girls that rock out!! I have heard nothing but great things about the Von Bondies live shows, so I had to jump on the chance to see them live. After an awful first opening band, some old guys doing lots of leg kicks, and the Die! Die! Die! played, the Von Bondies took the stage and started to rip it up. Everything I heard from friends or online was totally spot on, the Von Bondies put on a great live show. They played some of my favorites including No Regrets, C’mon C’mon, Not That Social with members of Die! Die! Die!, and Fever. Jason really blew me away with his range, and Christy can really shred, she was so cute dancing around with her SG. It was a great show, and if you get the chance to check out the Von Bondies live go for it. Check out photos from the show. I might even make the trip up to Vancouver to see them at Richards on Richards on Saturday.
Die! Die! Die! is a punk noise band from New Zealand. They opened for The Von Bondies at the High Dive and put on a pretty fun show. Lots of running into the crowd which was cool. Check out the pics.
So with the upgrade to Wordpress 2.5 I thought I’d look into the plugins I was using and see if there was anything better. And what do you know someone made a Picasa XML Gallery plugin that uses Lightbox2. It is great.
So I downloaded and installed to Wordpress 2.5 and I am REALLY impressed. This is freaking awesome. Talk about improvements. Great job Wordpress Team!!
So today was the day I flew into San Fran for GDC 2008. I got in, checked into my hotel, got some dinner, had some drinks. Met up with some people from various companies. Nothing special. Tomorrow is when the real stuff starts. I should have something to post about tomorrow. Must get sleep now.
So I am off to GDC 2008 tomorrow morning. This year should be great with lots of great talks lined up. Also seeing lots of people I really never get to see and hopefully meeting a whole bunch of new people as well.
So every website and their mother is doing a big ol’ list of games that they are all hot and bothered to play for 2008, and rarely update the blog, so I decided to make one myself. Now these games are in no order, but just a list of games I am looking forward to getting my hands on. Lets begin…
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So for the holiday break I got a hold of a Playstation 3 and decided to try out all the hot games for it. My number one game to play was Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune from Naughty Dog. Really the game is just Tomb Raider meets Gears of War, but that really isn’t a bad thing. The graphics are amazing, the story is probably one of the better character based stories I have played in recent years, and the gameplay is fun. What more from a game do you want? If I had the cash I think this might be a game, or at least one game that could make me actually buy the Playstation 3. Perhaps when I get an HDTV in the next couple months.
So I have had very little time to play game recently being in crunch for my own game, but sometimes you just have to make time and that is what I did for Call of Duty 4. I decided to check out the PC version and I was extremely impressed with what Infinity Ward was able to do. The attention to detail and polish was just outstanding, as well as the extremely well crafted combat scenarios that keep you on the edge of your seat through the entire game. The graphics were were not on Crysis level, but still very nice looking and consistent in terms of art direction which is becoming more and more important these days. The story while cliche, was memorable because of the shocking risks that Infinity Ward did with character development, I’ll try not to spoil what happens, but you rarely see anything like this in games these days. I have read various people complain about the length of the game, but I found it to be hitting the sweet spot of long enough without becoming a chore. I wouldn’t have mind a little longer game, but the experience was very satisfying. I am personally waiting to play multiplayer on the Xbox 360, so I really can’t comment on how it is in the final game. I was on the beta on Xbox Live and that was extremely fun, more so then the Halo 3 beta. I’m really interested in what Infinity Ward will be doing next, hopefully doing a new intellectual property as they are an extremely talented team and it would be a shame if they have to keep churning out Call of Duty year after year.
So Apple released the long awaited update Leopard, and was it worth it. The updates are so far amazing and the speed increase is a great bonus. One of the first thing is Stacks, which are two icons that are on your dock. Clicking them fans out a number of files associated to that stack. It can be your documents, or recent downloads. It just makes it a great deal easier managing files. Stack animate when clicking on them in a curved icons, or you can change it to a grid by a simple click. I never really used Spaces in previous versions of OSX, but I started with Leopard and I don’t know how I can not use it anymore. Various Linux distros have desktop spaces like this, but being able to apply specific programs to specific desktop spaces is just really easy to setup and very intuitive. Some of the other nice features is the new search which will highlight and expand the text you are looking for. I am running on a Mini Mac with a Core Duo, not to be confused with a Core 2 Duo, with 2 GB of RAM, and it screams. Applications open up extremely fast, switching programs is extremely responsive. I have stopped using Camino because Apple made some major improvements with Safari 3.0.So if you have a Mac, I’d suggest going and picking up Leopard as soon as possible!
So I got to see Metric tonight for the second time, and it was a great show. Emily was really playful with the crowd and the band was really tight. Emily was sporting a Jimi Hendrix t-shirt for the locals in Seattle. It was great to see them up close and personal this time as the last time I saw them I was fairly far back, but this time I was smack up front. I snapped a fair amount of photos from this show, but I have come to the conclusion that I need a new digital camera that does low light levels fairly well if not excellent. I didn’t remove any photos, so there are a fair amount of blurry shots as well as some black ones. But I hope you like the photos.
So I went and checked out Metric tonight (more on that later), but this Canadian band Crystal Castles penned for them and was pretty cool to see live. Crystal Castle has two members, Ethan Fawn and Alice, as well as a touring drummer. Their sound can only be described as 8-bit riot dance, or if you took various sounds from classic Nintendo Entertainment System games, and threw them up with a Casio keyboard. It doesn’t sound very pleasant but it is pretty awesome once you hear it. Alice was dancing all around the stage while Ethan was stuck behind his various array of keyboards and synths. They have a full length album coming out in February 2008, but here is a sample of their work. Listen to more on their MySpace page.
