Various and Sundry

I must get back to being an inadvertently incompetent FBI agent in Heavy Rain (in fairness, my private eye is doing a stellar job), so just a few short notes:

  • First, an announcement! Yes, the Oscars are this Sunday, and in accordance with tradition, I will be liveblogging the event (as I have for the last several years). Feel free to stop by and stick around. I might even get me one of them event chat thingies.
  • The 2009 Muriel Awards: Speaking of movie awards, it’s nice to see that some other folks are as tardy as I am with my awards. In any case, it’s a good list, and lots of worthy winners.
  • I’m probably the only person who cares about this, but I found this announcement that 2K sports won’t be putting out a NHL game for the PS3 or 360 (instead focusing on a Wii version) mildly interesting, and probably a victory for PS3 and 360 owners. My own experience with the 2K Hockey game was rather poor, and I found it very strange indeed when the unforgivable bug that was in my 2005 game was still in evidence at least 3 years later. In any case, this move probably makes sense for 2K, as they only sold somewhere on the order of 150 thousand copies of the game last year (on the PS3 and 360) while selling 250 thousand on the Wii. I suppose it also helps that EA isn’t putting out their NHL game on the Wii (yet), as EA’s games are clearly superior to the 2K versions. That being said, hockey games (and probably sports titles in general, including Madden) have gotten a bit too complicated for their own good these days. Aside from the tacked-on inclusion of the NHL 94 controller scheme in EA’s games, these aren’t really games you can just pick up and play. Whatever you may think of the Wii, it does represent an opportunity to rethink the way you approach a game. Often, making a game simpler can increase the fun-factor. But then, I’m not exactly confident in 2K games making that sorta leap. Still, it could prove interesting if EA followed 2K to the Wii. In other news, both 2K and EA missed out on another opportunity at an Olympic Hockey themed game, which I think could be a great change of pace for the Hockey gaming crowd.
  • Frederik Pohl has been writing a sorta retrospective of his friend Isaac Asimov (part 2, part 3, part 4, and ostensibly more coming). I’ve read a ton of Asimov and credit him with being one of the first SF authors to really get me into reading, but I’ve never read any of Pohl’s books. Yet another addition to the book queue, I guess. In other news, I’ve actually been making some progress against the queue of late (3 books in 3 weeks, which is pretty good for me, though probably not a sustainable pace), so perhaps I’ll get to a Pohl book sometime in the next decade.
  • Holy cow is this post boring… To spice things up, I present this item from the “I’m not scared enough of the Japanese” file (not really NSFW, but worth noting I guess). MGK, as usual, perfectly captures the situation with his captions (note the one underneath the image too).
  • Haven’t seen many 2009 movies, why not spoil them all?

Alright, I better end here, or this is going to get really boring.

3 thoughts on “Various and Sundry”

  1. Oh noes, I might not be around for liveblogging! Maybe I can get kaedrin to work on my phone…

  2. I’d keep you company tallman, but I have no way to watch the Oscars and am not sure I would anyway. They were sooooo boring last year. I started a good book, and it may be raining Sunday evening, so that’s perfect reading time.

  3. Sorry to hear that, Sov… Obviously you can read after the fact (and honestly, you’re not missing that much:p) And I don’t really blame you Spence – if I wasn’t liveblogging and drinking, I probably wouldn’t be able to take it either:p Still, this year’s ceremony should be at least a little more interesting. There are some races where I genuinely don’t know how it will turn out. I’m pretty sure Kathryn Bigelow will win Best Director and Avatar will win Best Picture, but it could just as easily be reversed. And the new way they do best picture could lead to a dark horse winner like Inglourious Basterds or, uh, hopefully not The Blind Side… Anywho, I’ll post my predictions tomorrow afternoon.

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