More missing time

So I made a promise to myself to try to update this blog more often and boy have I sucked at keeping that promise. Some days I wonder if I should stop updating at all. Not sure what I'm getting out of it let alone you the reader. I guess I'll just babble and see where this post leads to.

Playing through Castlevania: Order of something or other on the DS right now. The DS is pretty much my favorite Next Gen system. Although I fucking lost mine on a plane trip here recently (with my coveted Soul Bubbles!). Thanks to an awesome person - they sent me a replacement. I was thinking about holding off and picking up that DSi thing - but that thing might as well be the Gameboy Color of DS's. Of course we all know what's going to happen - Nintendo is going to come up with some way of using the Camera in Animal Crossing and sell 9 million more units just like that.

Castlevania is pretty damn hard this time around. I'm a huge fan of the route that Castlevania has gone since Symphony Of The Night - the whole Metroidvania route. This one doesn't seem to have a whole lot of exploring to it which bums me out, but it's still fun - when I'm not using Magical Tickets to escape back to the village so I can heal myself.

I've been a traveling fool here lately. I've been in Madison, WI twice, Vancouver and Albany all within the last month or so. I have a stack of receipts scattered through out my laptop bag, bedroom and office that I need to collect and turn in. Anyone have a good method of keeping all that stuff organized? I definitely suck at it.

The trips were fun though - I always enjoy going to visit the fine folks at Raven (madison). Something about making videogames in the midwest speaks to me. Plus I get to see an old co-worker of mine, Gustavo. Vancouver was fun because I had never been there before. Visited Radical now that they are part of the huge Activision Blizzard umbrella or whatever. Super Super nice studio - the main meeting room is a log cabin. It's completely out of control. Albany was also a brand new city for me - super cold but a lot of fun as well. I can't remember what projects have and haven't been announced so I'll just shut up now.

I went to Universal Studios this year for their Halloween event. Wow - that place was amazing. Definitely hollywood level of makeup and gore combined with people jumping out and scaring me nonstop. There was one event where you take a tram to another part of the park and there is a huge plane crashed on the ground, broken in half, etc. Totally looked like the set of Lost or something.

I went to the 1st halloween screening of Dr.Horrible here in LA on halloween night. That was a lot of fun as well - Joss Whedon himself was there along with Nathan and Felicia Day; no Doogie Howser but what do you expect. The movie was subtitled so everyone could sing along - plus they sold a bag of random interactive items. These were really random things like little 'curtains' so the crowd could lift them up when Dr. Horrible says, '...you're curtains.' or some nonsense like that.

Oh yeah - started playing Dead Space (told you I was going to babble). Hrm...Need to play it some more to really form an opinion. The presentation is off the chart but I feel like I'm doing a lot of fetch quests so far which is getting a little annoying. I'm only on chapter 3 or 4 right now so hopefully it gets better.

I'm downloading the demo's for the new Tomb Raider and Mirror's Edge - I'll go check those out when I'm done updating.

Oh yeah - so a lot of games have been released (or about to) that I worked on the past year or so. Spider-Man: Web of Shadows, Quantum of Solace and Guitar Hero: World Tour. Where to begin? Spider-Man seems to either click with people or not. Never been involved with a game that is all over the map as far as review scores are concerned. Usually they are super bad or decent.

All the games seem to suffer from a little nostalgia (Guitar Hero a little less but it's there) - Web of Shadows vs. Spider-Man 2 and Quantum vs. Goldeneye. In both instances (SM2 and Goldeneye) people seem to remember these games being perfect 10's or something. I'm not making excuses as I'm proud of both games but, damn - nostalgia is a motherfucker.

There is good stuff in both games and it will be interesting to see what happens with both.

Guitar Hero was definitely interesting. The only part I was involved with was multiplayer and it was interesting due to competing with Rock Band and trying our best to not straight up copy for fear of litigation. Now that the game is out - I see where a few mistakes were made and this is more of a mental reminder for myself to email some people on Monday. In all honesty though - both games (RB2 and GH4) have issues when it comes to multiplayer, both parts have good things but neither is perfect. Maybe next time out some issues can get ironed. But if you hate the multiplayer in GH4 then feel free to yell at me.

Let's see - I finished reading, 'The Art of Learning' by Josh Waitzkin. Josh is the main character in, 'Searching For Bobby Fischer' - the child chess phenom. He talks a lot about how when the movie came out - for a variety of reasons he lost interest in chess and took up a type of taiwanese martial arts. He then went on to become world champion in that as well. Discusses how he conquered both a mental game and a physical game and the process of learning both. Super interesting and I definitely recommend it. Although his writing gets worse as the book goes on IMO.

I think both demo's are finished so I'm going to go check those out.