Kolzig

Of the current situation I don't actually know that much, the last time I saw the situation myself was March 2009, the last time I was in Japan. They have been to my knowledge very much the first to push the use of touch screen, high resolution screens, mobile tv and e-mailing on mobile phones instead of text messaging. One of my wife's Japanese friends actually has an iPhone 3G or 3GS, she showed me that when she visited us in January. She told us that she uses an iPhone because it was cheaper than other options, but doesn't like the phone much, because of many restrictions and it doesn't work as well as her previous phones. My wife's old clamshell type phone Fujitsu f905i (I think that was the name) came out 2,5 years ago or so. I have no idea what the phones are like now over there, but that phone is dynamite. We don't use it anymore because it's sim locked and so on, but that mobile phone blew my mind. One thing that I absolutely like about Steve's iPhone, the user interface is really nicely done, I have not seen anyone do that better on a mobile phone with a touch screen.

In Japan they throw around a few new line ups per year of new phones to the market. They have three phone providers there that sell phones connected to their SIM cards, so all those phones are basically SIM card locked, which I will never support. I also hate that providers in Finland are starting to do this damn SIM card locking crap. AU, NTT Docomo and Softbank. Softbank is the former Vodafone and it's the worst of the three, they promise a lot but always deliver less etc. but they have the funniest commercials with a dog that talks. AU and NTT Docomo only sell Japanese phones, but Softbank has/had in their line up Samsung, LG and even Nokia phones. Nokia left from Japan last year because their mobile phones are stone age shit compared to what the Japanese companies make and nobody buys Nokia over there. The Japanese mobile phone companies are not exactly in the best shape from what I've heard, for example Mitsubishi completely stopped developing mobile phones because they were losing too much money. It has something to do with the development costs being way too high, because they need to have something new with every line up really fast. I have heard that this year or the next NTT Docomo was supposed to expand to North America, and so bringing their Japanese phones also to the US and Canada. I don't know what is the current status of that because it's risky business to go fighting on the home turf of RDF Jobs, Blackberry and Motorola. They will get butchered even if they would have better phones, marketing would need to invest tons and tons of money.

I'm perfectly happy with my Nokia E51, but that's just me I guess. I predict Apple to sell this gadget millions on the first second they put it to the market. If Fujitsu, Toshiba and the others would take over the western market instead of just being in Japan, then I would be interested because those phones are years ahead of the iPhone. But even then I would propably not buy even those, it's no use to drop more than 150 euros on a mobile phone.

What do you guys think are the chances of getting Christopher Lloyd and Michael J. Fox to do some voice acting? Both are really respected actors and I don't think Michael J. Fox has ever done anything like this. Christopher Lloyd on the other hand was in the Toonstruck project and the cancelled sequel to that great game.

So, MP3 got pushed back propably one year from the latest release date. Now it's supposed to come out most likely in 2011. Hopefully they are redesigning the whole game. They propably finally realized that sun light, old fat bald guy and no James McCaffrey makes the game not a Max Payne game.

Lets see, Paul Meegan is now the new president of Lucasarts. He has mostly worked on Chinese "sweatshops" like Ubi Shanghai and Epic China, I didn't even know Epic had a Chinese sidebusiness. He was also at Ubi Montreal and at a company that Ubi owns. Latest game credit says he was involved in the production of Fat Princess.

Oh yes, the fun of getting old good Windows games to work on Vista/7. Such a pain in the ass, especially if you got a multiple core processor. I tried running Blood II sometime ago and it didn't work at all and I tried a lot of stuff... Need to really get a VirtualPC setup running, maybe then I will ge these oldies to work. Though GoG has Blood II so I should just propably get it from there so it would at least work, but I don't like using multiple services for games. I'm too attached to Steam already.

Oh yes! Holy crap! Telltale has to get Jeff Goldgate Goldblum as a voice actor in the games! There's no other choice now.

This reminds me somehow so much about Laser Squad and that is an extremely good thing.

The whole weekend was not crappy. Sunday was overall really nice, we had our first wedding anniversary as it was exactly one year ago that we got married. The bad thing was that both of our presents were still "in the mail", but that should get sorted during this week. I got her a Kalevala necklace and she got me this from Amazon.co.uk.

I got the vibe from the trailer that it's pretty much "meh" to me, but my opinion isn't really counting as I've actually never played much of Deus Ex. I have the first one as two copies, one bought big boxed version and one from the Steam sale a while ago. I've only played a little bit from the start of Deus Ex about 5 years ago? Second one I've only experienced through a demo years ago.

My weekend was a bit weird and a roller coaster ride. First on friday I was supposed to install my new internal 750GB HDD and at the same time do a complete fresh install of Windows 7 to the new HDD. Well, I was doing the thing with a friend of mine and we opened the HDD from a sealed bag and when we plugged it in to the computer it started making a lot of noise. Turns out it's broken, straight from the box. Brand new and broken. I was so pissed. I need to call the store today and they need to send me a new replacement and quickly. I was supposed to copy all my external HDD data to this new one on friday so I would have a back up. Then of course with my luck on saturday evening I frigging lost all my data from my external hard drive, it had all the pictures and other files that I've collected during the years. Of course I had no existing back up anywhere. Unbelievable, but I actually went and bought the license to this ZA Recovery program that Drath mentioned in toblix's "Keeping your data safe" thread and it worked! With the help of one friend I got all my missing data back. I had to ask friend's help, because my still current internal HDD is only 150GB in size and my friend has 650GB HDD that he could help me with to copy the retrieved data to. The other side of the coin is that something happened to my friend's computer after the data recovery and his OS blue screened and he had to install the Windows completely again and possibly lost stuff that he had on his harddrive? The lesson learned from this one is that always back up your data at least to one other place and not keep all the eggs in same basket. Holy crap I owe my friend a lot.

Rewatched both Toy Story movies this weekend with my wife as we are going to see in July the third one in Japan in an IMAX 3D theater. It's going to be my first time in an IMAX theater. Both movies are really good, I especially like first Toy Story, I can't believe that it's from 1995, time flies so fast, but the movie still looks amazing. I did not remember that Joss Whedon was part of making the script for that one. No wonder the movie is so good and the dialogue is so snappy. Also executive producer in that one is Mr. RDF himself Steve Jobs when he was still at Pixar. Pixar just seems to be the only company that can make computer animated movie the right way. I'm a big supporter for traditional hand painted animation, but there's something special about these Pixar movies. I think it's because you guys continuously talked about BttF trilogy, I had to go on saturday and buy the whole set for 9,99€. It was about time I got that to my collection. Started watching some of the extras immediately. The old original trailer for the first movie is really funny.

So god damn it I bought a while ago a new Western Digital external HDD to replace my old Lacie. Today the stupid thing changed itself to RAW format and now I fucking lost 390GB of data and that is my life! I really really REALLY hope I can recover my data back... How can I recover this thing I think this is different from having a flash stick that I had previously with this kind of problem as this one has a real HDD inside it? I will seriously die if I lost my data. EDIT: Seems this Z-A-Recovery might be the one I need IF I would pay the license as the free portion limits to 4 folders per run and I have a looooot of folders on that HDD. Recuva was useless as it doesn't recognize RAW system type. Also Handy Recovery doesn't seem to recognize HDD RAW, even though it did recognize the USB stick RAW status when I had it with one USB memory stick. EDIT2: YES! It worked! Z-A Recovery is amazing. The best $29,95 I've spent in a long time.

I have played The Dig only once through and that was definitely 10 years ago or so. Should replay it, I don't remember much of it anymore. Really liked T1000 as the main character's voice. I have Alan Dean Foster's book version of The Dig, but I have not read it yet...

You have to really appreciate Christian Bale's work on this one as I think he was working on Batman Begins and then this one or the other way around. In one his scarily thin guy that weighs nothing and in other one his a really muscled weightlifter type. You really put your body in health in danger for just a couple of movies.

Last weekend we watched a few movies. After ten years since last seeing The Exorcist, it's still as effective as it was when I first saw it. This one was the Director's cut that came out in 2000 or 1999. I've had it for years on dvd, but I guess it was waiting for the right moment. I really love the older movies that don't use computer graphics at all. All the scenes are really effective when you see the true work of art that the cast and crew have done in the movie and not some five cent CGI. Linda Blair is simply perfect in her role as Regan, I am not surprised that she got an Oscar nomination for the role in 1974. Max von Sydow's role as Merrin in the end is relatively short, but he delivers his acting with such power and effect that I would've given him an Oscar and all the other major trophies for the role. I want to watch the movie with William Friedkin's commentary. I've never done that before and I usually have problems watching commentaries because I'm a bit lazy. The other movies we watched were Se7en by David Fincher, and both versions of Willy Wonka and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I had seen the Burton version couple of times before, but my wife had not. We watched first the original 70's version starring Gene Wilder and afterwards the Burton version. Both of us agreed immediately after watching these that the original is the superior version in all possible ways. I'm losing faith in Tim Burton, he used to be one of my favourite directors, but he is making quite a lot of shit these days. Planet of the Apes, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Alice in Wonderland... all remakes. One big problem with Burton's movies the days is that he just seems to be really lazy and is using the green screen all the time. I have not seen Big Fish or Sweeney Todd yet for some reason, but his recent record doesn't look good. But to get back to the Willy Wonka, Gene Wilder was really unique as Wonka. The scenes were he starts to go a bit crazy are wonderful to look at. Johnny Depp is of course being Johnny in the new one and he is actually the only interesting thing about the new movie. I seriously have a problem with Helena Bonham-Carter beíng in every Burton movie. Come on, you don't need to put your wife in every movie just because she is your wife. Se7en I had never seen before. It was a two hour movie, but didn't feel it took that long, the movie went really quickly as it really pulled you in to the sick world of John Doe. The dvd is full packed with all kinds of extras, I usually have a hard time going through and listening to the commentary tracks of movies, even though originally when I started collecting dvd's about 10 years ago, I tried to hunt always the best dvd version of each movie with the most extras. This one has four commentary tracks and lots of other extras. I did watch the alternative ending which was clearly not as good as the one in the final movie. I get why they wanted to chance it after test screening.

Well, that's good to hear. I just hope that Michel Ancel doesn't get pushed around and he can make his game in peace. Be it a new real Rayman game or BG&E2.

Amiga had an incredible library of great games and game musics. DanJW put two great ones there, Cannon Fodder's music I will remember always. Chaos Engine is just one of the many amazing games Bitmap Brothers made. Xenon 2, Speedball 2 had some really cool musics as well. Here's Xenon 2 intro: Speedball 2:

Out of those I know Zool, Zorro, Lighthouse and Tachyon: The Fringe. Tachyon I only remember because of Bruce Campbell being the main character's voice and face. Zool is of course a classic platformer which I have never played on PC, I did play it a lot on Commodore Amiga. I remember that someone *copied* this 2D Zorro game to me because of unknown reasons ages ago when copying games on floppies was "what everyone did". I never got the game running well as it crashed in the beginning, but I remember it ripping off a lot from Prince of Persia. Lighthouse was crap, I've never liked that kind of Sierra adventures. I bought it as a Sierra Originals release in the 90's. I don't even remember did I complete it or not, but I did sell it for a few finnish marks back in the day.

Turrican 2 intro: Fvha_2hAzq0 Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge 2 intro: LQSsq7HCNHw Holy shit, I want back to my childhood to play these all day long and don't care anything about anything else.

I love the old tunes for the Amiga era. Especially musics that Chris Hüelsbeck made for Rainbow Arts and Turrican II was the best. Great game and great soundtrack. Also the old Lotus Esprit Turbo Challenge games had really nice soundtracks, the third game had one slighty altered song from Zool. All the old LucasArts musics are classics of course. There's a lot of good stuff in the Megaman soundtracks. Dr Wily's Fortress is really memorable and from that I've seen many fan made covers in the net with electric guitars and such.

Oh yes, Firefly. The greatest show ever that never got the chance to be a long show because of some insane and damn ass tv company executives. I have to re-watch it this summer, and I will introduce it to my wife who has never seen Firefly or Serenity.

Yes, but starting from scratch at a new developer is never an easy task. If he is truly leaving, I have no idea what the hell Ubisoft is doing. This guy was one of the main reasons why Ubis games like Rayman sold a ton during the past 15 years.

Well that's real a shame if they've cancelled it and he is leaving or will leave soon... Michel Ancel is one of my most favourite game designers in the world.