Kolzig

Got back from our trip on late sunday evening. Used my dad's Toyota Auris model 2010 for the trip as my old shitty Mazda 323 from 1990 would've got broken somewhere after 150km propably. New cars are so sweet. Total trip length was 3157km and I did all the driving while my wife was just reading the maps. It's pretty damn cool to use my wife's Nokia 5230 with it's free navigator service, it worked perfectly. I had no idea these things work this well. Trip was Vaasa-Rovaniemi-Levi-up the arm to Kilpisjärvi-Tromsø-Alta-Honnigsvåg(Nordkapp)-Saariselkä-Rovaniemi-Ranua Zoo-Vaasa We didn't unfortunately see any aurea borealis, because the weather was really cloudy, gray and snowfall every day. First time we saw clear sky was when we came back to Vaasa... that means we have to go for a new trip during the real winter. 15 different reindeer sightings during the trip ranging from 1 to 50 reindeers, also saw one dead reindeer being eaten by crows just after passing the border to Norway. 60km from Vaasa while returning back on sunday we almost run over a big dead elk that had crashed into possibly a huge truck, it was so foggy and dark that it was impossible to see what had happened there. Almost nobody was in Lapland now as it's the "dead season" of October. All the tourists start coming in after November. Oh yeah and I got a pretty big surprise on monday a week ago, I was driving up the Finnish maiden's arm in Lapland towards Norway and my boss called me. They selected me to go to Hamburg, Germany on a three day work assignment and also to Helsinki on one day assignment. My first work assignments in another city/country! Pretty wicked cool!

Holy shit, today is the day.

Phantom Hourglass AND Spirit Tracks are still on my to-finish list...

The guy seems pretty good, a real surprise casting with what seems to be a perfect replica voice of Marty McFly. Hopefully he can do the normal tone of voice also and not just freaking out shouting like Kingz said. Shame that Telltale can't really offer anything really surprising with the pre-orders. I think this will be the second time in a row that I'm not pre-ordering their product. Not interested in free episode offerings as I already have most of their products and I still got Sam&Max 2,5 seasons to play and the Monkey Island season 1. I just don't seem to have enough time to be in front of the PC to get rid off the backlog. A good idea to give one dollar to the MJF foundation commited to Parkinson's disease research, but one dollar out of 25 dollars isn't really much nothing... EDIT: F5cQu5-caqA At the end you can hear Marty speaking with a normal voice, first word "usual" sounds a bit weird to me, but the later sentence sounds exactly like M.J. Fox. In the video you get to see stuff like the Marty 3D model and Einstein(?) the dog concept art. I wonder will we see characters like Clara, Jules and Verne in the games? Because Einstein sure looks a lot like the cartoon version rather than the movie version. I always thought the animated series was not that good except for the wacky live action parts in the beginning and the end when Christopher Lloyd was acting as Emmett Brown. I wonder also if the animated series will get now a dvd release like Sam&Max Freelance Police.

I've used Miranda IM for quite many years, but I have to check out that digsby now.

We will be there two nights, tomorrow we will leave to Tromsø, would be great to hear some tips. We have three museums to visit and maybe some beer brewery thing. That's all we know so actually not much at all.

Getting ready to go on a nine day journey tomorrow. Me and my wife are going to Lapland and Northern Norway. Route is something like Vaasa-Rovaniemi-Levi-TromsØ-Alta-Nordkapp-Inari/Saariselkä-Rovaniemi-Ranua-Vaasa. Lets see if I make through this alive, the winter just started in Finland so the weather is surprising, winds are strong, the roads are icy and we have about 3000 kilometres ahead of us and I'm the only one doing the driving. The longest I've ever driven is Vaasa-Helsinki-Vaasa and is "only" 421km x 2. I've never been in Norway so I hope the North doesn't disappoint, timeframe isn't the best possible one, but now we just felt that it's time to go.

I have a lot of love for the old Megadrive Sonic games, I have never actually played "the true Sonic 3" with the Sonic&Knuckles add on. I will get the game at some point, but not right now as the backlog is big and this will be in Wii Shop Channel waiting anyway. It's not going away so no need to rush in and buy it.

Played through Singularity. Man that game was a big waste of time. I really have to start using my money more wisely. It wasn't long game, but it sure was boring. Felt like a generic fps game in every possible way. The story was generic, all the functions were generic and they didn't even use the TMD in ways that would be actually fun. Everything was so scripted and set in a way that the player couldn't have any freedom. Only certain items could be broken/repaired and most of the environment had no effect with the TMD. Just static background that was just there working as blocking the way of moving in the levels. Also not really a fan of the console style gun handling, you can only have two guns, plus a special gun as the third gun that drops every time you try to change weapon. Then if you want to change guns you always have to drop one or then rearrange your "inventory" at a gun closet that were littered everywhere on random, that also felt weird why the gun closets were basically everywhere. There was some cheap explanation in the plot for this but I don't buy that. It felt like I'm playing a game. A REALLY BAD GAME. Just read today morning that Raven has been hit by the bad success of their game and maybe around 40 people have been let go by Activision, because of "organisational restructuring". Raven used to have three teams working and now only one team. There's not much left anymore of the legendary Heretic/Hexen developer.

Hey ThunderPeel, a new package is in the mail. Tried sending you PM but your quota is full again.

I remembered that my hometown used to have a great floorball team back in 90's, the name was Wizards of course. Damn they had a cool logo. I used to be a big fan of that team. Shame that they don't exist anymore. Wizards are extinct.

I went to see Scott Pilgrim vs The World on saturday. I had no idea Brandon Routh was in the movie so that was a surprise. It's not that common to see so stylized movie like this, it was like a comic book had became alive. All in all it was quite enjoyable and it was funny to watch my wife's reactions regarding this funny geeky movie and she approved it and had fun watching it! Cool to hear Zelda/Mario/Donkey Kong musics in the background on some scenes. I watched Robin Hood during the weekend and just could get in the movie, it was such a strange story somehow. Not that I really know the history of the Robin Hood legend, but Robin Longstride? Russell Crowe was his normal mumbling self, I had a hard time understanding what he was saying when he was speaking. The cinematography was well done as can be expected in Ridley Scott movies. The movie was rather long, too long actually as it was dragging forward too slowly in some scenes.

Happy belated birthday Erkki!

Apparently they just yesterday unveiled Icewind Dale + the expansion pack as the latest addition to their catalogue.

It really was a bad game, the ultimate bad game I guess. I just wanted to get rid off it so I just had to swim through the shit that is the game and try to grind through it. I think I would get more satisfaction of destroying the gamedisc in some EXTREME way, than to try to find a buyer for this crap. If I keep this from going to resale, I will save somebody from having to experience this horrible pile of steaming crap. Activision sure has some great games in their catalogue.

Well, Costume Quest is not coming to PC so all eyes towards Deathspank.

Chris is taking role at Irrational, I can feel that soon some old friends* in the industry will pop up for an Irrational Interview! *Jake, Steve, Sean and F-Nick

YES!

Watched Prince of Persia, only because of Jordan Mechner. Well that movie was exactly what I feared and expected it to be. Chesty Jake running in a Jerry Bruckheimer world. I wonder how much input Jordan actually had in the movie even though he was billed as creator and executive producer in the project. If I remember correctly from the Remo interviews, Bruckheimer changed pretty much everything from the first draft to make it more Hollywood™. I've started to watch two series by Stephen Fry. America and Last Chance to See. If I'm not mistaken, both are BBC produced miniseries that consist of six hour long episodes. America is of course about America, Stephen Fry driving a London cab through all the 50 states of America and Last Chance to See is about endangered species of animals of the world. Really cool shows.

Those Razer keyboards are looking pretty sweet. I hate the modern keyboards that have all kinds of useless media buttons. What I want is just a basic keyboard that is normal sized and without any kinds of extra unnecessary functions. It's true that scroll lock and pause/break button are pretty much useless on modern keyboards, I can also say the same about num lock. At the moment I have a basic keyboard from Logitech without anything extra, the bad thing about it is that it's made from the cheap shiny piano black plastic so fingerprints and dust are always visible. Would like to find someday a nice keyboard that is cordless.

Would take up on the L4D offer if I cared even a microscopic amount about L4D, but I don't. The comic mini series is fun though.

I completed during the weekend a game that I really can't begin to understand why I even owned it. Well, it was not actually bought by me. My wife bought it about a year ago from a supermarket sale for 10€. She thought this game was an on rails shooter for Wii. It turns out this was just a regular fps, a really shitty one at that. She played it for 5 minutes and didn't want to play it after that. The game I'm talking about it Cabela's Dangerous Adventures, in US known as Cabela's Dangerous Hunts. The engine for the enviroment doesn't actually look that bad, but the controls are the most horrible ever in a Wii fps game and the whole idea of the game is totally stupid and pointless. I made it an obsession for myself to complete this shitty game and a year later I'm done. I think I didn't play it for about 10 months at all because it was just so horrible. During the past few weeks I was grinding through it. It is actually less than 10 hours game that has only like seven missions or so, just that the whole game is so bad that you can't play it for long times without going into a rage mode and you want to through the gamedisc out of the window. My worst GotY so far. I hope I can sell it for 5€ somewhere, I will never get 10€ back for this in some fleamarket / internet auction site.

I finally got the original to work on PC and it sure is awesome. Still looks great, actually I don't mind that there is no PC version for the HD version. The original looks awesome enough, I was way too harsh to speak lies about the graphics. Some cutscenes still seem to run sluggish, but otherwise the game is playing great at this point. It is a shame that PC gamers get shafted by Ubisoft, but I don't mind now that the original amazing version is playable for me. Beyond Good & Evil is one of the most beautiful looking games that I've ever played, I really love the art design.

Yes, but I must vent my anger in some kind of gibberish writing or my head will explode. PC gets shafted always these days. "It's a dying platform after all" says the idiots in marketing.

Of course there is no god damn PC version for this HD release... The original is already hard enough to get running on PC and does suffer a bit for being 7 years old with the PS2 level textures and you have to turn off features to get it to be not flickering and slow. Thanks Ubisoft. Just release it as Steam exclusive at the same time as the console releases.