We The Free

Great news. The cops found the guy who tried to break into our house. It seems that last night he was caught inside a house that wasn’t his, and he used a philips head screwdriver to do it. This unusual tool (the screwdriver) was used to attempt to break into 4 houses, and successfully got him into 2.

I’m sure the police are looking at other properties as soon as they get hold of home owners.

It would be really nice to be able to confront the guy and give him one solid kick in the gonads. For about 20-30 minutes.

Then I’d like to pretend his face was cheese for my nachos and grate the fuck out of it.

Nothing too harsh.

Or undeserved.

Hollywood Reporter is reporting that Warner Brothers are going to start demanding higher royalties from game publishers if the licensed games suck.

Basically, WB will read a bunch of reviews and charge the publisher higher royalties if the average score is less than 70%.

We all know that publishers are always cutting corners in games just to get product out in time for marketable seasons. We also know that publishers like Acclaim and Ocean have been giving us very very bad licensed games for years.

No doubt the recent Oslen twins lawsuit against Acclaim doesn’t help matters either. That lawsuit came about because Acclaim produced a shit game which damages the Olsen Twins’ brand. Game publishers should be getting sued more often for creating crappy games, but finally people are standing up and saying enough is enough.

And Atari is mad because Enter the Matrix sold four million copies and netted them US$250 million. But the game still sucks.

This move by Warner Bros. will either encourage publishers to make good games, or to seek licenses elsewhere. I think the former is especially critical because we are probably going to enter a game development boom over the next few years which will resemble the dotcom boom of last decade. If companies like WB can start weeding out the trash now, then gamers will at least be able to ride the boom with some playable games.

Our landlords have decided that they are going to sell the house. Very nice of them after both having assured us that they weren’t going to sell. So now we can give them 21 days notice, wait until they sell the house and they give us 42 days notice, wait around and see if the buyers want to rent it out to us, or we can buy it.

Considering that I don’t know how long the piles holding the house up are going to last, buying it isn’t going to happen.

Now I have to find out whether they can do that legally. So it’ll be an interesting battle.

My body is complete agony. Me and Tanya just spent the day cleaning the house and weeding. I don’t remember ever having done as much work and I sure as fuck am going to feel it tomorrow.

My back is sore, my legs are killing me, my left knee is hardly functional, my hands hurt and they feel disgustingly dry.

I have to drive out to my parents’ house tonight for dinner because one of my cousins is over from Australia. My body is trying to tell me it’s a bad idea to drive. We’ll see. If I stop posting, it’s because I died while trying some drastic life saving manoeuvre like turning my steering wheel.

Fuck, the insides of my elbows are killing me too.

And all this was because the landlady is coming over to have someone value the house. She’s eleven minutes late.

Maybe I do need a faster laptop. I probably shouldn’t be thinking about it because I just end up buying too easily. Tanya is playing episodes of Dead Like Me off my machine, I have eDonkey running downloading episodes of Stripperella and Deadwood, I am downloading some porn to update my website (finally……..) and I’m trying to google some links to put into this blog.

Ah well, it could be worse. I could be on dialup.

But while my porn and TV shows are being downloaded, my mind strayed to the trades/graphic novels I have in my collection and the others that I want to add to my collection.

Some of my faves at the mo are the Bone, Madman, Barry Ween: Boy Genius, The Essential Spider-Man books, and now, A Dame To Kill For.

Although Bone is the greatest comic in the world overall, Barry Ween 4: Gorilla Warfare is an amazing book. Lots of action & adventure, but at the end you’re really hit emotionally. I’ve never had a comic make me feel that way before. Actually, one other time – when May Parker found out Peter was Spider-Man. THAT gave me some serious fucking goosebumps.

Some books I want to add to my collection are more Sin City, Dark Knight, and Dark Knight 2, a new Peanuts collection which collects every single Peanuts strip from 1950-1952 (but it’s NZ$75), and the rest of the Bone volumes. Although I hav the Bone comics, I want the collected volumes so that I can read and re-read them.

It’s an expensive road ahead, and I’ve got no more room for comics. All my shelves are full and there are comics in random boxes and sitting on temporary shelves. Too many, not enough. What’s a guy to do?

I have to make a confession.

Even though I’ve been reading comics for at least the last twenty years and collecting seriously for at least the last fifteen, I have never previously read a Sin City comic. I’ve known about a central character called Marv, and that it was created by Frank Miller, but that’s about it.

Admittedly, part of the reason for not reading any of them before is because I’ve only ever seen the trades on sale. I’ve never seen any of the original comics. I’m more inclined to buy “normal” comics because of their size and cost. Amongst my thousands of normal comics are a couple of piles of trades & graphic novels.

But a few days ago I bought “A Dame To Kill For.” It’s written like an old noir crime movie, with the protagonist effectively doing a voice-over throughout the book. It’s very nicely done and I’m most impressed with Miller’s ability to paint most images from the negative space. It gives the book a darker, more sinister feel.

I’m definitely going to get more Sin City books, but I’d prefer to collect the comic versions — assuming they even exist… but I’d hate to think what they’re going for these days. Let alone what they’d cost if they were slabbed by the GCG.

Sometimes it does pay to RTFS (Read the screen)….

I couldn’t access my blog from work or home since I created it, and put it down to DNS propogation initially. In hindsite, that’s pretty daft because it’s only a subdomain. Yeh, ok ok…

When I still couldn’t access it by today, I got concerned, so I did a dig and saw it was resolving through my work DNS servers.

What is left to do? Load the page and read the error message, of course.

Turns out the bottom hint says underscores were illegal characters in the blogspot domains. Some simple error checking on their part might have saved me some hassle, but on the flip side, so would some engagement of my own cranial functions. So I take partial blame.

At E3 today, VIA showed off their new ‘handheld’ gaming console, interestingly named Eve. It will be able to play PC games that have been reproduced on Subscriber Identity Modules, or SIMs.

Eve is the first handheld x86 based console in the world, and after looking at photos of it, the impracticality really hits home.

It’s certainly small, and the architecture, VIA’s Grace platform coupled with the Eden-N processor is designed for ultra low power consumption while still allowing demanding multimedia applications to run.

Eve is, by no stretch of the imagination, portable. Yes, it is handheld, but you can’t stick it in your pocket and carry it on the bus or train with you. Its dubious L-shaped design is reminiscent of Stanley Kubrick’s vision of futuristic devices in the appalling ‘Clockwork Orange.’ Fitting in batteries to make the console last 4 hours, plus the 3D capable video card, plus the processor, all add up to some serious potential heat, or a pipedream of 4 hours battery life.

The name Eve is ironic because VIA are going to actively encourage other people to build their own consoles based on the Grace platform. Perhaps that is why theirs is ugly and non-portable — to make room in the market for others to do just that. This may well be the eve of the x86 portable gaming era.

If you think about it, there’s a lot of sense in that. Fighting against Sony and Nintendo could be very difficult this late in the game. Worse if Microsoft decide to get in on the handheld market.

However, if you produce a platform that others can use to build their own consoles, suddenly, the market could be flooded with lots of different styled, cross-compatible, handheld gaming units that all play a wide range of readily available PC games.

Hell, even Microsoft would probably consider developing something Grace-based.

What I don’t like with the whole concept is that most PC games are designed for mouse/keyboard combo. Consoles are good at playing basic flight sims, racing sims, beat-em-ups, shoot-em-ups (not FPS’s), platform games, sports games, and puzzle games. FPS, RPG and strategy games, which are probably by far the most prominent PC games will not be very playable with a d-pad, or thumb sticks. Games like Baldur’s Gate, Quake 3, Fallout, Rainbow Six 3, and many others, took a lot of work to convert with a new interface.

Original games in the same vein as popular PC games, such as Advance Wars and Halo have proven that any game can be played with a console, and can be very good, but it involves a new UI and a bit of a learning curve for the player. Or perhaps, more appropriately in games like Halo, it takes a lot more patience to excel with a different control system.

The downside is that a thumbstick or a d-pad will never equal the speed needed for movement that can be offered with a mouse/keyboard combo.

If the VIA Eve really is the eve of portable x86 gaming, then here’s hoping the next company to produce a VIA-based console understands games more, so that the era truly begins.

I’m moving my blog from LiveJournal to Blogger. See the past couple of years of my life there.

The main reasons for this are that LiveJournal can be slow for non-paying users, and secondly, Blogger is owned by Google, which I like.

I’m off to a LAN session tonight, so I may post something useful tomorrow.