Stuff (but no things)

All kinds of stuff to discuss today! I'm not even gonna try to make it thematic, just blurb 'em out.

1) Battlestar prequel announced. SciFi will be doing a series concerning the creation of the original Cylons. It will be called Caprica. Color me tentatively excited, although it sounds like a better mini-series concept to me. And I'm worried about the "family drama" quotes - I don't really want to see Dallas or Knot's Landing in space. And given that I think the second half of season two was weaker, the concept of splitting Ron Moore's focus even further could have some downside. But I'll have faith for now.

2) Wii think the the name is stupid. Nintendo renames the perfectly usuable Revolution to Wii. You know what - I'm tired of kicking Nintendo around. I'll assume this makes sense in Japan - to my ears it's just stupid sounding. This is the textural equivalent of the Gamecube's industrial design. It's like Nintendo always has to do something to make your feel vaguely embarrassed to even have their console in your AV system.

3) Oblivion continues to rock. I'm like 18 hours into Oblivion and the "time to giant spider counter" is still running - a possible record for a fantasy RPG. (Were there giant spiders in Morrowind? I don't remember any.) There might be some in Oblivion, I've spent more time in towns than dungeon crawling. Oblivion's disc however is giving me fits. I rented it from Gamefly, as is my way these days and played several hours. Then I started having trouble in towns - it would noticeably freeze before playing certain voice clips. Then I found several shopkeepers where talking them would actually cause the game to kick back to the Dashboard with a "the disc is dirty" message. I took it out and noticed it was pretty badly scratched. So I sent it back to Gamefly and bought a copy at Best Buy. Well, that was great until a couple of days ago the "disk is dirty" behavior started happening again. I took the disc out and noticed it has a faint set of circular scratches. I don't think I put those there, but I can't say 100% I didn't. I finally buffed it with the GameDoctor, but now it's sort of iffy whether the 360 will read it. Sometimes it doesn't read at all, and sometimes it reads as a DVD-Video disc (which plays a movie saying "put this in your Xbox 360 console". Thanks guys!). But if it does boot then it seems fine, so I guess I'm slightly ahead - although nervous my $60 disc is going to crap out entirely.