Karin and I watched the second episode of Sci-Fi's The Dresden Files last night. Much as I wanted to like it (I've heard good things about the books and I'd like to encourage Sci-Fi buying book properties and turning them into shows), I don't. The writing is just . . . flat I guess. It's not MST3K bad, but it's not good either. Karin objected to not having more backstory by the end of episode 2, and I'm not sure I agree (I'd contend episode one had too much backstory). But there's definitely something wrong with the show at this point, and I agree that it's mainly about not caring for any of the characters yet. Two hours in if somebody isn't sympathetic something's gone wrong.

I don't hate the show exactly, but I did cancel the season pass on the TiVo. (shrug)

And can somebody explain to me why putting it before Battlestar Galatica made sense? I kept seeing discussion about how Sci-Fi was trying to get a third night of solid programming (arguments about the "solidity" of Saturday aside), and they were using BSG to launch Dresden. I understand the idea of leading with a popular show and hoping people stay tuned and watch the following show, but I don't see how that turns on its head. "Hey I want to watch BSG in an hour and I'm so effin' bored I'll just watch whatever is on before it?" Wow, that sounds like a desirable demographic. Talk about settling!

technorati tags:SciFi, television, DresdenFiles

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So . . . 2007. Games and stuff.

I've been playing Sly Cooper 3. I'm not quite sure why I didn't get Sly 3 when it came out, but whatever reason I didn't. I put it on my Amazon wish list and got a copy for Christmas (hey thanks Mom! :-)) I like it. I don't think it's the best in the Sly series - they lost the bottles with the hidden codes, which I really enjoyed hunting for and they added this 3d mode which doesn't work very well (and gives me a headache). But it's an enjoyable platformer. This series has never been groundbreaking, but it's always been a really solid platformer. While my 360 drowns under Tom Clancy FPS games, it's nice to have a change of pace, almost a palette cleanser.

Speaking of the 360, if you haven't tried the Crackdown demo definitely go get that. A lot of people were dubious about Crackdown, including me. It does have that Microsoft Game Studios "We focus extensively on bumpmapping" graphics goo where everything is shiny and overdone and that's combined with some cell shading effects (just like Shadowrun (sigh)) but the gameplay is solid. It's a "sandbox" game but it doesn't really feel like a GTA clone when you play it. I enjoyed Saint's Row, but that game was clearly heavily GTA inspired. I don't mind that per-se, it out-GTA's GTA in several key respects but it's refreshing to see a game that has an open city you can tool around and do your own thing and doesn't rely primarily on carjacking and running over hookers. At first I was messing around with cars, but once you level up your agility a bit it turns into almost super-hero gameplay - you're jumping to rooftops and maybe throwing girders at people and the like. Tony and I played a bit of it co-op yesterday and it seemed maybe a touch crashy but it was solid fun. The first time I played the demo I thought "hmm that was pretty neat, I'll watch this game closely". The co-op sessions made me want to play again and specifically level up other skills (like demolitions - for bigger grenade explosions!) and play with them. This morning I played it again and bumped it up to "Go ahead and pre-order this, it's a must-buy."

And just to make sure I'm not being too positive I'll dump on Lost Planet briefly. Uggh. I played through the first level before sending it back to Gamefly. The intro sequence has a boss that you have to run away from (or die) once, twice, and then the third time for some mystical reason you have to turn and fight it. It's unkillable mind you, but you have to fight it until it almost kills you then watch a story cinematic. If you try that on the second time your screen is COMPLETELY filled with icicles that oddly have no collision (Really. As in I couldn't see my character because there were icicles between the camera and the character.) Then the boss hits you. Two or three tries of that and you die. Hey let's watch the cinematic again. UGH. I played through the first level (which consists of the two parts in the E3 '06 demo), and the boss at the end started doing the same crap. The screen fills with smoke effects, you can't even see the boss who's rolling around like a tire on it's way to orbit and then he starts throwing you across the arena. Bah. I liked it even less than Dead Rising - Capcom is not winning any votes of confidence from me on the 360 platform anytime soon. Multiplayer might be neat, but A ) I'm not buying a game with that bad of a single-player game and B ) how many goddamn FPS deatmatch games does one console need for crying out loud? I've got GRAW, Gears of War, Rainbow Six: Vegas, and Splinter Cell: Double Agent on the platform already. All of those have good single player, deathmatch, and most of them have some sort of innovative cooperative multiplayer play as well. Deathmach with giant robots was innovative in 2002. It doesn't cut it in 2007 for me.

technorati tags:gaming, LostPlanet, Crackdown, SlyCooper, Xbox360, PS2

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Am I the last person around to realize that in Battlestar Galactica there were twelve human tribes (ignore the thirteenth for a second) and there are twelve humanoid cylon models? (I should also note that I originally posited it was only twelve models, which would have counted the Centurions, the Raiders, the Basestars, and the Resurrection Ships; but it's clear now that the count is supposed to be twelve humanoid models.)

The whole "twelve tribes" thing hasn't really gotten much play - it's not terribly clear what the tribes were/are to the humans.

Why is this significant (and why did it occur to me while watching tonight's episode)? It bridges a gap between the monotheistic faith of the Cylons and the polytheism of the humans. They both seem to impart mystical significance to the number twelve (although it's not clear to me that all the Cylons see the "Final Five" as mythological/sacred).

Hmmm - I hit Wikipedia to see what they had to say, and from there linked to a Battlestar Wiki and noticed that in the Religion page they list the known Lords of Kobol - there are seven of them. Seven known Lords, seven known Cylons? Or am I being overly conspiracy minded?

One last observation, getting back to the oddball thirteenth tribe. If I'm right and there is a connection that means there aren't twelve Cylon models - there will be thirteen.

technorati tags:BattlestarGalactica, ramblings, ConspiracyTheory, television

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Been some new games since the last time I posted about what I was playing. Figured it would be worth running down what's sitting in the various machines.

Saints Row (Xbox 360) - Yeah, yeah it's a GTA clone. I'm not entirely sure why the gaming public reacted so poorly to this. Like 83.72% of the market isn't clones of Castle Wolfenstein or Pole Position. If we were getting a GTA this year then maybe I'd feel we don't need two, but the only GTA flowing this year is Vice City Stories, which is ITSELF a clone of Vice City, which is basically a clone of GTA III, so I don't see the problem. And it fact out GTA's GTA in a few things. The combat model is WAY better - the right stick controls look/aim while the left stick controls motion. So suddenly you can do things like drive-bys reasonably. The gang interfaces make sense and are integrated into the game much better than GTA: San Andreas where all the gang stuff was pretty half-baked. The map shows a route to your waypoint so you can focus on your driving instead of constantly pausing to bring up the map screen and plot your course. If you fail a mission it asks you if you want to restart it, skipping the whole painful reload, return to the start of the mission gameflow that GTA always has. Short form: it's a fun carjacking, sandbox sort of thing. And since it actually competes with GTA and extends the form in some ways I'm hopeful we'll see GTA fix some of it's most glaring problems (c'mon nobody could figure out using the right stick for aiming over three titles?). Competition is good, so I'm happy to see someone step up to the plate and take GTA  on.

Mario vs. Donkey Kong II (Nintendo DS) - I enjoyed the first one and this one got good reviews, so I picked it up. I like it, and surprise! after all my DS bashing it's the first game where I can say "Yes, this is a good game and it requires the touch screen to play." So Nintendo finally found a game with more than 5 minutes of content that uses the touchscreen effectively and the console isn't even two years old yet! Wahoo! However, there is a downside - you also have to use the dpad (to scroll the camera) and it turns out that even with my DS Lite I can only play for 10 - 15 minutes before the DS  Hand Cramp(tm) comes back.  Luckily the gametype is such that it's best in small doses. I'm on world 5 of 10, and that means I've played through ~40 levels so it's doing something right, even if I do sometimes have to stop because of the poor form factor.

Okami (PS2) - I just got this from Gamefly yesterday, so I don't have a firm opinion on it yet. I wasn't bowled over by the gameplay at the 2005 E3, and that assessment still stands so far. The art style is neat, but the gameplay so far is ho-hum. And it's talky as hell, which is aggravated by the fact that everyone talks in Charlie-Brown-Teacher voices. And there's no hurry-up button. The first save occurred after about two minutes of gameplay - but that was 19 minutes after hitting "New Game" - that's a lot of talking. Oh, and the second save point? at 1 hour 15 minutes. So if you want to play more than 20 minutes but less than 75 this may not be the game for you.

Gamefly (Motto: Dead Rising Doesn't Really Exist) is still annoying the crap out of me. I cut the living crap out of my rental queue - as of right now it has 7 titles, 2 of which are future releases. Dead Rising is still not available - today is actually the first day I've seen Lego Star Wars II list as being in stock. Okami was 5 on my list when they sent it. Right now they are still worth their monthly fee, but they are really pushing it.

technorati tags:gaming, Saints_Row, Mario_V_Donkey_Kong_2, Okami, Gamefly

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OK, so now I'll talk about Lost season 2 - as requested by Weezie in the comments thread here. Before I dive into the spoilers let me say to anyone catching up on DVD - they were pretty good about avoiding spoilers in the season 1 commentaries - not so the season 2 discs. They spoil several major plot points in the commentaries. I even put my hands over my ears during one discussion. And the season 2 commentaries were pretty vanilla - some interesting stuff, but not much and none of the way-cool season 1 "stop the film" tricks I mentioned in the above post.OK, enough of that - onto to the spoiler-rific discussion. If you haven't watched the first two seasons and you care about spoilers move along now.Overall, I liked season 2, and there were aspects I liked even better than season 1. The "how do we survive on the island" plot was wearing thin before season 1 ended. The "oooh, a possibly evil/crazy organization doing crazy experiments" plot of season 2 was much more up my personal alley.There were certainly a few things I didn't care for - I didn't really buy some of Locke's transformation. One of the commentaries talked about how they were building up a conflict between Eko and Locke where Locke was the "man of science" and Eko was the "man of faith" and how that contrasted with the Jack/Locke debates from season one. A neat idea but I never bought into Locke as a "man of science". A "man of faith" that's lost his way certainly, but I don't think I would have even realized they were attempting a parallel if I hadn't heard it on a commentary track. The things they don't bother to investigate bug me. Locke has a theoretical map that shows all the hatches right? Nobody is even really bothered by the monster from season 1, even after Eko encounters it in season 2. Claire dumps Charlie for being a psycho (rightfully so) but then takes him back because his ears are ringing? WTF was that? Michael was basically a stupid rube all season and it wasn't plausible that nobody but Sayyid was suspicious. There were at least two episodes that consisted almost entirely of "Look how incredibly stupid Michael is being" that I found mostly tedious.I seriously didn't see the whole twist coming where Desmond failed to push the button and caused the plane to wreck - I realized it only a few minutes before he told us. I thought that was very cool. I liked how the hatch let them move up Maslow's hierarchy of needs. Weird bonus note - the washer and dryer they find in the hatch are the same model as what we bought when we moved into this house - except we got the white model. I laughed when I saw them though. From a character standpoint I seriously dug the way they started to turn on each other as they settle into the island and make new roles for themselves.So, would I say it was better or worse than season 1? That's a hard call to make. While I didn't care for some of the character development in 2, some was quite good. And I enjoy the DHARMA Initiative plotline more than I do the "survivors vs. nature" plotlines of season 1. I probably enjoyed most of the season 2 episodes more, but they also had the luxury of building on season 1's foundation. I'd call it a draw.

technorati tags:TV, Lost

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