Author: littlemute

Tron Sound Track – let's not make a big deal of it

It’s so Hollywood meh in the “THIS IS HOW YOU SHOULD FEEL RIGHT NOW” vein as expected, and what they had to do: however some parts are indistinguishable from the Inception sound track!  For such an electronic movie why did Disney settle for second-rate electronicists?  It should have been Richard D. James!

NEW COSMIC ENCOUNTER EXPANSION

Queen's Blade Mellowna
Mellowna says YAY!

Wow, I can’t believe I missed this last month!  Looks like we have Lunatic (new), Claw (new), Filth and Empath confirmed as part of the new set of 20 aliens (bringing the total to 90!) as well as another set of planets and ships in JET BLACK for 7th player slot.   Not that I needed another reason to play Cosmic Encounter, but there it is: I’ve never played a 7-player game unless player 7 was the Advisor variant (who could still win).  I just feel bad for many of the other board games slowly going to dust in my basement region.  They have emotions and they are crying (except for Calyus and Agricola).

Which aliens are you hoping for? I was really hoping for the Filth and that’s in, but for me– Silencer, Aristocrat, Vampire, Terrorist.

Map of Metal

Map of Metal

Does there need to be 15 kinds of Danish, Finnish, Swedish and Norwegian death metal while all Grunge from the pansy Screaming Trees and Eddie Vedder’s bro-rape quintet to Mudhoney is lumped together?  Anyway, it’s fun for a good 15 minutes.

The THING 2(!?)

Norwegians.  Remember them?  They flew in over the station in a helicopter chasing a dog.  One got shot inside the eye and the other got blown up real good.  Their lines were not subtitled so it sounded like gibberish.  There were other Norwegians–lots of them died at their own base–but what really happened?

Thing 2,  coming out next year, details the events that happened before the fateful helicopter chase.  Notable: the main protagonist is a chick, and it’s a Norwegian film.  More here.

I expected Hollywood to puke a sequel out in the last few years along the lines of Highlander 2, but shockingly, this doesn’t look like some rehashed Hollywood schlock from the imagination-devoid hack writer’s guild to cash in on the street cred of one of the finest horror films ever made.

Oh and if you haven’t read this fanfic of the original film from the Thing’s point of view– get on it.

Damn the Minecraft

I ‘played’ Dwarf Fortress an hour or so a day for about two weeks awhile back so when Minecraft started getting the buzz on, it was quite easy to say: “fool me once” and not try it.  I bit the bullet over the weekend and picked up the Alpha version and now, predictably, it’s an obsession (at least for the next two weeks or so).

That said last night, I learned how to make stone picks, wandered away from my spawn point, got lost and had to dig into a mountain when night fell to avoid the rapening.  I underestimated the speed with which digging can be accomplished with a pick and dug down down DOWN until I ran out of picks and couldn’t see anything and got lost.  Of course I hadn’t found any coal at this point so no light, no pick, lost inside a mountain.  I started digging up and it took me half an hour to get to the surface, only to find that it was night again.  Waiting for daylight, I chopped down some trees and then wandered back down into the mountain hole I made to build it out a bit (I had no idea where my respawn area was).  ten steps down and BAM blown to pieces by three giant green penises.  How did they get in there? At least I found my spawn point again.

More scrumfail in the gaming industry?

It’s not explicitly stated by the interveiwees, but some of the statements by both the lead on Elemental War of Magic and now APB’s Josh Howard lead me to believe that they tried to adopt scrum or some form of Agile to their development process and,it added up to fail.  I just happened upon this interview and noted the line: “‘we don’t need specs’ and ‘we don’t need this, we’re just going to move” which is a classic scrumn00b statement.  The only game company I know 100% uses scrum is Blizzard, but I suspect Torchlight followed an agile model.  However, just like any method of project management, it takes training, practice and diligence.  Jumping on the ‘no specs!’ bandwagon is easy when sitting in meetings at the beginning of projects, and you get a lot of head nods from people who hate it, but even with the most document-lean methods of Agile, you still needs something to capture and report what the hell the software is supposed to do.