Kolzig

I played through GTA:Chinatown Wars on DS maybe two weeks ago. Amazing game, I only completed something like 60% which was mainly just the story. Took me in real life about one year to complete the game, but there were long periods of time that I did not play the game at all. I'm still puzzled how the tiny DS cart can contain such a big and living city inside it. The game was very well made and only sometimes it was a little bit annoying that the draw distance was not always up to speed when you were driving some very fast sports car and trying to run away from cops. After I finished the game, I was just driving around and got my first six star cop rating, hahah. There was insane amount of cops, SWAT teams, FBI agents and tanks after me.

I have not watched any movies in two weeks. I feel sad and miserable because of that. I even missed all the movie possibilities during my flights from France to Canada and back because I was too tired.

Pre-ordered the Sam&Max season today alongside with the Monkey Deluxe edition. To my great surprise the good people at Telltale are shipping the Monkey DVD with the deluxe gear for free to me! Holy crap! I guess the total amount went over some limit, I think this doesn't happen normally.

I saw Alice in Wonderland yesterday. I seriously have a problem with 3D glasses. Those just don't fit on my nose. Movie itself was quite mediocre in most ways, but I still enjoyed it. Stephen Fry is always a nice bonus even as a voice actor.

http://www.motherboard.tv/2010/3/10/the-aquatic-life-of-dennis-chamberland-one-man-s-quest-to-colonize-the-sea Real life Andrew Ryan?

I can't check the links right now, but is in the deal included the possible dvd release with the price of the shipping after the season is done, like always previously has been?

Heh, that is an excellent subject to make thesis on, I learned a lot of English while playing Monkey Island 1 when I was young. It was fun to surprise the teacher with all kinds of strange words that she had no idea about how I knew all that.

Other interesting stuff is that apparently with the release comes some previously unreleased artwork from Steve Purcell and Peter Chan if I read correctly? Also there is supposed to be some kind of developer commentary included? Oh hell that would be so sweet if there's commentaries from Ron and Tim in there also.

Is it just me or does GDC feel every year more and more like just another gaming show to promote new products? Has it been always so that big companies come there to unveil and promote new products? I had this feeling that it used to be more about just game developers talking with each other and having the discussion panels etc.?

Yeah the MI2 special edition is looking quite ok. Of course there is no real point why to do the special edition, but it's always really nice to have the option to hear with the voices. I've always liked the voices they got to Monkey Island 3. Just re-releasing MI2 in Steam etc would have also been enough. Now that the special edition is coming, I absolutely like the idea that this time also the original mode will have the speech option available. The first special edition should've also had that. It would've been nice to have the original great graphics and still hear the voices. I don't like the new cover so much, but even that looks better than the first one they made. I treasure Steve Purcell's original cover artwork too much that I can't really appreciate the new one. Now to hope that after this LucasArts would make an original IP adventure game to test the waters, propably it would not work in the modern market, but you never know...

We had a kind of mega movie weekend. We watched during last weekend Moon, Princess & the Frog and The Fountain (which I wrote about here already) Moon was awesome, makes me want to watch movies like 2001: The Space Odyssey again very soon. Clearly a homage to that movie in some ways. Sam Rockwell was really good. Princess & the Frog was a quite mediocre animated film, but I loved the fact that Disney is back to where it should be. Making traditionally animated 2D movies for the big screen instead of outsourced to Asia for cheap production and straight to dvd release.

The Japanese developer of such games as Another Code, Another Code R: A Journey into Lost Memories, Hotel Dusk: Room 215, Last Window and Little King's Story (co-developed) has gone bankcrupt 1st of March 2010. They had more than 200 million yen in debt. That's more than 2,2 million US dollars or 1,6 million euros. Last Window was just finished and had a release in Japan, but I think there are no news yet what will happen to the possible western release of the game. I am very sad that that this company has gone down as these people made some great games. The games had a lot of good going for them at least adventure gamewise even though all the games were very dialogue heavy.

We did this with all the Call of Duty games and also with F.E.A.R. 2. Me and two other friends gathered together to one place and played on one computer as a "co-op" thorugh the game, changing the seat everytime a mission/level was completed. It was really cool to do that, to follow what the other guys are doing in the game and seeing their reactions to various situations. Basically all of us had a very different take on the game always. It's funny to see how one handles the mouse for example. One of these friends of mine is really hardcore with FPS gaming, playing a lot of Quake Live and Q3Arena in the beginning so his mouse handling style is completely different to mine as mine is more like "the way to break your hand completely while gaming". Also you totally see the game in a different view as you don't need to focus all the time, you can watch all the little stuff happening in the background. We sometimes said that we noticed some small details somewhere and the one of us who was playing at the moment did not necessarily always notice that same thing as especially when playing FPS games, things fly by so fast that you just can't focus on everything.

Europe release is hopefully not so far away from that date.

I'm not going to play the game as I don't feel the need to because the first one is good enough on it's own, but

Some crazy Rube Goldberg style stuff from Ok Go. qybUFnY7Y8w These guys have so many crazy amazing music videos.

I have only played the demo of the first one that was in the Wiiware channel, and these games really have something good going. My Wii is temporarily out of use but when I get it back on I'm most likely going to start buying the Bit.Trip games and Megaman 10 of course.

Awesome news Toblix, sorry I forgot to mention about Recuva. That was the first program my friends told me about when I had the Kingston USB problem a weeks ago. It didn't help me with my case as it can't handle RAW file systems when a USB has gone to hell, but I tried it anyway and even then it looked like a really efficient program for normal file loss situations. Great to hear that you got almost everything back!

I have a feeling that Europe won't see any kind of demo disc of Monster Hunter Tri.

I'm very happy for yesterday's news that Nintendo threw at my face. Looks to be quite insanely good year for gaming at least in the Wii sector. Mario Galaxy 2 looking really sweet and coming before summer, the little bit suspicious Metroid: Other M coming during summer and Cave Story FINALLY coming to Wiiware in the end of March at least in US, but hopefully also in Europe. Also Megaman 10 is coming next month to Wiiware and this Friday Castlevania: Rebirth comes after a few months of waiting also to Europe. Also Monster Hunter Tri is coming up before summer, might not get that but I am very interested in learning more about it. Visuals look great, and free online play seems really interesting, but there's something about it that doesn't make it go higher in my lists. Apparently there's a Warioware game coming to Wiiware also, I think I was completely in the dark about that. Super Meat Boy is now coming to Xbox Live Arcade also, so that's no longer a Wii exclusive, and it looks to be coming to all platforms in the summer or late spring. I can't really tell you how happy I was to watch Mario Galaxy 2, that's me the old Sega and Sonic nut being happy that a new Mario game is coming out. What has the world become?

The Fountain - a movie that works on so many levels. I think I was a bit too tired to watch this with my wife last night. This felt like a movie that you have to watch with a clear mind and not so sleepy. Darren Aronofsky has made only a few movies, but all of them are great. Of course latest The Wrestler is not same category as The Fountain or Requiem for a Dream, but in my opinion is maybe even a better movie, mainly because of Mickey Rourke. Pi I have not seen.

Apparently Kotick accused West and Zampella for "breaching the contract and insubordination". And also had them thrown out by bodyguards. WTF! This doesn't make any sense.

This is something really unique as a viral campaign for an upcoming release which this is really starting to look like. Also the hardcore crazy gaming community never stops to amaze me. It's been less than a day since this update went live and groups of people have already figured out so much about all kinds of "secret" stuff Valve has put out.

Mysterious update.

There's some weird news in the net that the heads of Infinity Ward, Jason West and Vince Zampella have been fired by Bobby Kotick. Everything began from this I guess: http://g4tv.com/thefeed/blog/post/702911/Security-Appears-Unannounced-At-Infinity-Ward-Studio-Heads-Missing-Staff-Freaked-Out-.html