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January 28, 2008
Media Glutton Monday, Jan 28
Happy media Monday everybody. Although I didn't get out to see and movies this weekend, as I was busy celebrating various family birthdays, including my own (which is coming up on Wednesday). But that didn't stop me from my usual gorging on media.
Let's start out with a plug for my friend Amy's new web show, Great Ideas. Here's the trailer:
You can see the whole first episode and then a new one each week at their web site here.
I'm a bit fan of the idea of this sort of internet micro-media thing, although I don't imbibe as much of it as I'd like to as it's sometimes hard to find good stuff and I spend so much time in front of my computer anyway that I don't often want to watch shows on it either. That's why I never stick with video podcasts for very long. Something short like these though makes for a great break when I need to rest from surfing my list of a million blogs that I read while taking a break from working.
Video Games!
So, much of my media intake of late has involved video games. Nothing new there of course, but I've got something for every system I own that's sucking up my time these days. The thing I play the most is actually my Nintendo DS, because I can play it and watch TV at the same time, thus doubling my rate of intake and fending off boredom twice as effectively. I played a hell of a lot of Geometry Wars: Galaxies, which is awesomely addictive in a way that Asteroids never was for me. Plus it lets me live out my fantasy of a never-ending jihad against the hated forces of geometry. Stupid two-dimensional shapes! I hate them soooooo much. Lately I've moved on to Panzer Tactics DS, which is a pretty cool WW II turn based strategy game that strikes just the right balance of complexity and ease of play for me. I like that one a lot.
For my birthday I got Ace Combat 6: Fires of Liberation for the x-box 360. This is a weirdly cool air combat simulator game. The Japanese company that makes the series did an interesting mash-up of modern air warfare and their own invented mythology. So you have two totally made up countries at war, using real planes from our world like F-16's and what not, which is kind of cool. And luckily for me, it's not a totally faithful simulation of air combat - they designers obviously realized that in the real world fighters only carry a handful of missiles and would rarely win out against superior numbers in comparable aircraft. In this one you've got over a 100 missiles of various types and blow away scores of enemy jets, helicopters, tanks, artillery pieces, bunkers, and even a tent or two. It's fun stuff, although I find the story that binds the missions together kind of onerous. The cut scenes look good and the plot itself seems interesting enough, but they're all done in these dreary, slow-paced, depressing voice-overs where the actors s p e a k v e r y s l o w l y which is like hitting the breaks after you've been zooming around at 700 mph shooting missiles at things. I've heard that the earlier storylines ended up involving demons and magic and stuff, which will make the game even stranger.
Saturday my brother and I picked up the new game No More Heroes for the Wii, which is as wild and over the top as advertised. I've only played a few hours of it, but basically you're a goofball guy with a laser katana who's looking to slice is way to the top of the assassins ranks. In between boss battles you do little missions a-la-Grand Theft Auto style play. It's a fun, funny, incredibly bloody (in a cartoony way) game. So far so good.
Television remains uninspiring apart from The Wire. I have caught a couple episodes of Reaper, which have been pleasant enough. I like it better than the awful Chuck, which is most closely resembles. But hey, this week we get new episodes of both Lost and House, so I'm excited about that. I've also started regularly watching the new version of X-Play on G4 TV, and that's actually pretty interesting. I like that they've gone to a more kind of newsy format covering the video game industry in general rather than just doing reviews of obscure PSP games I'm never going to play. You can also get the show as a podcast or maybe on their site if you're interested. It doesn't suck and is sometimes pretty interesting.
Posted by rdakan at January 28, 2008 09:08 AM