May
30
Guitar Hero 4

There’s no doubt Rock Band turned up the gain on mock rock video games, but this fall Activision will be firing back with the next installment of Guitar Hero – which evidentially is no longer just for guitars. The same Rock Band assortment of instruments will be part of the new game (mic for vocals, one guitar for lead and one for bass, and drums).

I’m really excited about the new drum kit. It’s like someone listened to my gripes about Rock Band’s set and ran with it. The cymbals pads will now be dedicated (no split duty with toms) and elevated above the other pads. Reportedly, the pads will be more quiet, and will be velocity sensitive (harder hits = louder sounds in-game). And as a very practical evolution, the drum kit will be wireless! Hopefully, they’ve got a better, more durable design for the kick drum pedal and I’ll be all set.

I’d still prefer to see a hihat located more on the far left and an additional tom pad, but these are steps in the right direction without taking up too much more space. Heck, I’d really prefer separate pads you can move around to suit your tastes, but now I know I’m crossing the line toward the real deal.

EDIT 6/02/08: better photo added

Posted Friday, May 30th, 2008 9:40 AM1 Comment

Filed under General News

May
28
Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Pros:

  • It’s Indiana Jones
  • Campy 50s schtick (when it works)
  • Constant action (motorcycle chase, jungle chase)
  • A few comedic bits that work

Cons:

  • Aliens, WTF!
  • Campy 50s schtick (when it doesn’t)
  • Where are all the cool traps?
  • Cate Blanchett’s terrible Russian accent
  • Tarzan vine swinging
  • CGI overkill

The verdict: Entertaining, but…weird. As they say, it’s the journey not the destination. It’s a good thing the journey in this flick is decent enough because I hate where it ended up.

Posted Wednesday, May 28th, 2008 10:09 AM4 Comments

Filed under Movies

May
16
Weekend Movie Roundup

Last weekend was pretty active for watching movies – which means I was largely inactive. Here’s a quick rundown:

Iron Man
Exceeded my expectations! Not a thinker’s flick by any means, but finally a comic conversion I actually enjoyed, a lot. Granted, I’ve always like the idea of this billionaire inventor who actually engineers his way to super herodom, instead of all the freak cosmic ray mishaps that transform your usual caped/web throwing reluctant hero (thinking about it now, I guess Bruce Wayne is similar to Tony Stark, but Stark’s stuff is way better). Nice post-credits teaser, too.

An Inconvenient Truth
D and I finally sat down to watch this and it was very interesting. Like any docu, I suppose the info presented can be debated, but it is well done and engaging and the data depicted (and in particular the rate of change in the data) is alarming. We followed it with watching an update Gore gave at a recent TED talk. Who’s ready for solar panels and a hybrid? This guy. Heck, you can even get both in one.

Good Luck Chuck
Just like Dane Cook’s comedy – brash, crude, and at times, so much so to a fault. There’s some genuine laughs in there, but there’s a ton of in your face lowbrow gags as well. Not even Jessica Alba can make up for vision of Dane with the penguin in the closing credits.

Posted Friday, May 16th, 2008 4:06 PMNo Comments

Filed under Movies

May
14
Twittervision

I’m not going to go off on the current fascination with twitter. I’m not going to claim it doesn’t bring anything to social networking that can’t already be done 100 different ways. I’m not going to suggest it’s dragging down the signal to noise ratio of our infotainment sphere.

No, instead I’m just going to watch this for hours:

twittervision in 3D

Posted Wednesday, May 14th, 2008 11:34 AM1 Comment

Filed under General News

May
12
Eddie Izzard – Stripped

Last weekend we saw British comedian Eddie Izzard perform downtown. This was just the 4th stop on his 34 city tour of the US – the largest tour of his career. Eddie’s mostly known now for his role on the FX series The Riches, but he was first and foremost a touring comedian before landing television and film roles. D and I first were introduced to him with HBO’s showing of his 1998 tour “Dressed to Kill”. He no longer performs in drag (at least not this tour – he wore jeans and a tux coat with tails), but his comedy is as spot on as ever.

Eddie started the show by telling us he’d be talking about everything that’s ever happened…ever. Turns out, he wasn’t far off. Eddie started out with bits about his #1 source of information…wikipedia (“which is all written by three guys on toilets”), how we’re all a bunch of lairs for checking “yes” to having read software terms and conditions, and how Bill Gates gives away billions…but he keeps Billions. From there, he went way back to the creation of the Earth, God’s shitty track record, the 150 million years of monsters, paleontologists vs. geologists, playing Scrabble before language, hunting Bison and the beginning of the stone age, hunters vs. the gatherers, the weather report in Ancient Egypt (“let’s see tomorrow…eye, eye, feet, mostly and over here, wolf’s head, eye, man pointing sideways, eye, feet, eye…”), Noah’s challenges with loading the arc, Moses and toad-blindness, then quickly through the Greeks and Romans, and on up to landing on the moon. Yeah, Eddie covered A LOT of ground. He picked on Christianity throughout (“Why would our Creator choose to live in the cold, damp clouds?”) and the crowd didn’t seem to mind a bit. The highlight for me was his routine about monsters going to church (I won’t ruin it for those that will see it eventually).

This show will keep me laughing for months. Can’t wait till he makes a DVD of it.

Posted Monday, May 12th, 2008 11:03 PMNo Comments

Filed under General News

May
09
Coolin the Pixel Spitter

Another little mod to the gaming system this week. I picked up a nice Zalman video cooler on sale for about 25 bucks. I haven’t installed a GPU cooler before so I thought it’d be interesting to see what kind of impact it’d make. Here’s a look at my aging, but able, BFG 7900GT with the stock fan/heat sink.

Installation was simple. Just took the stock cooler off, cleaned off the old thermal compound, attached the new heat sinks to the ram chips and then mounted the new cooler. With everything back up and running I was first surprised at how much quieter the new one is. I have it running on 5V “quiet mode” (which is still ~2500 rpm) and it’s barely audible over the other fans in the case. Temperature-wise it’s equally impressive. Between idle and load the GPU temp ranged between the low 40’s to the mid 50’s, which is consistently 10 degrees cooler than with the stock cooler. Even though I’ve got the GPU overclocked by about 24%, I never saw it break 58C while gaming. Ready for this summer’s four day frag-fest!

Posted Friday, May 9th, 2008 9:44 AMNo Comments

Filed under Comp hardware / mods

May
01
Red, White, and PSU

I got home last night excited to find my replacement power supply had arrived.

  • It’s the same model – yay! all my modular power cords will still work with this unit.
  • It’s reconditioned – ok, fair enough, these are out of production and mine was over 2 years old.
  • It’s blue.

WTF? While I’m super glad to have a fully functional PSU again, and it only set me back about $15 in shipping, I wasn’t expecting this aesthetic twist. I had this whole silver / red theme going and boom, they send me a blue replacement for my chrome original. Since only the unit was replaced and not all the modular cables, I’m now stuck with red braided cables coming from the blue PSU. The icing on this monstrosity is it has fans with blue LEDs which can’t be turned off.

Oh well, it looks like I’m perfectly prepared now for MillionManLan which falls over July 4th!

Posted Thursday, May 1st, 2008 1:31 PM2 Comments

Filed under Comp hardware / mods