Spotted an excellent question over at ‘Rock, Paper, Shotgun’ regarding Crytek’s whining about piracy killing Crysis’ sales.

“in these splendidly idea-rich times for PC, do we even still need someone pushing quite so hard against the graphical ceiling?”

Not even getting into the fact that DRM simply DOES NOT WORK, the bigger question is really whether or not Games have reached the point where we can start focusing on the medium from an artistic instead of purely technical standards.

Crysis pushed the boundaries of what is possible visually, but by doing so, shut out probably 90% of their potential target market.  Piracy didn’t kill Crysis, Ridiculously high system requirements did.

Finally got around to watching the 4 1/2 finale for BSG.  Holy-fraking-crap.  The writers for this show seriously have to get some kind of fraking medal or something.  The ease at which they wind the threads of the world together is stunning to watch.   Congrats to everyone involved in the show - it has blown everyone’s expectations out of the water, unlike so-many-other-shows (insert obligatory soprano’s & LOST failure links).

The only thing that really pisses me off about the show is this whole ‘half-season’ crap.  I mean seriously if they wanted to put out some short seasons, just DO IT and be done with it.  Just because YOU want it to be considered a single season, does not make it so.

This is, of course, no fault of the writers or likely the producers of the show - they are at the whim of the network exec’s that toss their content around time slots and programming windows like uncared for mutant children.  Which is pretty much how most TV Networks seem to treat the content producers that they deal with.

Anyways, the GOOD news is that they are going to have a THREE HOUR FINALE - I mean the ‘actual’ finale - once Season 4.5 starts (just typing that makes me cringe, try saying it out loud without laughing).  Not only a 3 hour finale, but they have confirmed that there is going to be another 2 hour movie (ala Razr) that will be produced seperately.

All in all, this has been a good couple of years for sci-fi fans all around.  Can’t wait to see how it all goes down.

Oh well, work has apparently been too busy for me to update lately.

Started playing Mass Effect (the PC version of course).  I’ve been pretty impressed with it so far, bullshit DRM issues notwithstanding.  Oh well, some companies can’t be forced to help themselves, and now that BioWare has been sucked up by the Beast , I guess this kind of thing was somewhat inevitable.  The only good thing I can see about this is that BioWare is primarily based out of Edmonton, which if you aren’t familiar with - SUCKS ASS.  Yes I can say that, I was born there, and promptly escaped as soon as I was legally able to.

Not that Vancouver’s weather has been anything to brag about as of late.  What the frak is going on?  Seriously feels like it’s fucking January outside and it’s JUNE fer-cripes sake.   CBC was calling it ‘June-uary’, which pretty much hits the donkey on the forehead.

No, no, there’s no such thing as ‘Climate Change‘ - it’s all in our heads.  Fucking Morons .

Destructoid just posted an excellent writeup on Call of Duty 4.  Well worth the read:

Read Article

Two of the most hyped games of the past few years, Crysis and Unreal Tournament 3 were released a few months ago. While these games aren’t necessarily the most mass-market products that Halo and/or Call of Duty are, but from a technological standpoint, these two games stand out as raising the bar visually of what you can do in a game.

The argument that myself and many others have been making for quite some time (that of gameplay over graphics) seems to have finally hit the developers and publishers where it counts - sales. Full Story »

Someone grabbed video of the recent FarCry 2 Tech Demo showing by Ubisoft. Looks pretty sweet. Full Story »

I’ve ranted and raged about PC games and the absolutely piss-poor job that they do with providing anything near a reasonable customer experience for PC gamers.Which brings me to the latest horrific culprit in the never-ending world of screwing the PC gamer.

Just bought Gears of War for PC. Yes, I finally succumbed to the marketing goliath. Since I refuse to buy a 360 on principle, I wasn’t able to join in the mass-brainwashing that happened with the original 360 release of GOW. As usual, about a year later, Microsoft Studios finally decided to grace the PC with a release of GOW for windows. Full Story »

The fine folks over at Action Trip had a momentary glimmer of genius in their comments this morning:

So I’ve finally (partially) recovered from having pus in my mouth that I couldn’t just spit out or scrape off.

Which got me to thinking.

What if God was just the oldest person in the universe? Someone who remembers how universe was created. What if this planet in particular was a result of a faulty faucet on an intergalactic level that was leaking all over the equivalent of incomprehensibly large space tiles?

Think about it.

Think about the fungi that develop. It might take you a week or two to figure out where the funky smell from the kitchen sink is coming from. By that time, you’ve gotten some cleaner, you’ve fixed the leaky faucet and eradicate the fungi. In the meantime, the fungi have, relatively speaking, had an eternity to develop their colony, to see the numerous rises and falls of their ever-changing civilization before some celestial body (in this case, a soccer mom) took a mop and a cleaner to their world and wiped it off the map.

It’s so deep is abso-fukin-lutely meaningless.

Note: Sometimes a story comes to our attention that needs no polishing or enhancement to make it a good Block tax story. This is one of those. It is a real letter submitted to the IRS in the midst of last year’s weird and bizarre denial of dependents, exemptions, and credits. We believe the letter speaks for itself:
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Dear Sirs: I am responding to your letter denying the deduction for two of the three dependents I claimed on my 1994 Federal Tax return. Thank you.

I have questioned whether these are my children or not for years. They are evil and expensive. It’s only fair that since they are minors and not my responsibility that the government (who evidently is taxing me more to care for these waifs) knows something about them and what to expect over the next year. You may apply next year to reassign them to me and reinstate the deduction. This year they are yours! Full Story »

I’m all about getting stuff for free. I’m sure you are similar. Free is good, free means that I can actually legally use software for the purposes that it was intended. I think someone much smarter than me said ’software wants to be free’ - this is a good mantra to use for any software developer.

IBM recently released their revamped ‘Lotus’ software suite to the market. Built on Open Office (a good start), and adding a bunch of other cool features that make it very appealin, I decided to give it a whirl.

Normally, this would be where a review would kick into descriptions of how the software works and the differences between it and whatever competition the software might have. Unfortunately I can’t even begin to describe the software because I haven’t managed to get it downloaded even.

There is quite a bit of noise in the ‘blogosphere’ (such a retarded fucking term) about all of these various pieces of software being ‘Office killers’ - meaning usurpers to the long-held Microsoft crown jewel (and cash cow). Based on my experiences however, the average user will never even get to the point of USING the software alternatives because the process of acquisition is so cumbersome as to be generally useless. Full Story »