When I went to take a look at the Dead Space website I was greeted with an age verification question.  Had to tell them when I was born, so they could make sure I was old enough to see the website.

Now, I do understand that since it’s a M-rated game there’ll likely be some pretty graphic content…  And I know that EA is just trying to cover their asses, make sure no little kids are exposed to anything horrible…  But it seems to me that this kind of age verification thing is kind of pointless.

I mean, what’s to stop a little kid from putting in a different birthday?  Are they just basically assuming that everyone is going to tell the truth?  And would that really hold up in court?  Would that little question of age be enough to absolve EA of any responsibility for little kids who have nightmares after watching a scary trailer?

Stumbled across a trailer for an interesting looking new game…

…and then a new one from E3 this year…

Dead Space reminds me a lot of Alien(s).  Not so much the monsters, which look more like zombies than anything else, but the tone and setting.

Looks kind of lonely, isolated, claustrophobic.  My favorite kind of stuff.  I’m just hoping it isn’t too much like typical survival horror games…  I never really enjoyed stuff like Resident Evil.  It was far too easy to get yourself killed, really took the fun out of the game for me.  I like a little more action.

Still, I’m going to have to keep an eye out for a demo or something.

My first night of warfare in EVE was very boring.

I trained up some combat-oriented skills and outfitted a Merlin for tackling the day before the wardec went live.  Flew all over gathering up skillbooks and bits of equipment.  Hauled it all over to our corporate HQ…and then sat there twiddling my thumbs.

During war we aren’t allowed to do much solo - no missions, no mining, no ratting.  The idea is to avoid giving the enemy any easy targets.  They’ve even raised the taxes on missions and bounties to 100% for the duration of the war to discourage stubborn people.

The problem is that the corporation we’re at war with is apparently comprised of 5 german players.  So there’s only five targets for us to go shoot at.  And they’ll be playing in a different timezone than I am.  So the odds of me actually seeing one of these war targets is pretty slim.

So last night I just sat in our HQ, twiddling my thumbs, along with a couple dozen other people.  Corporate chat was full of bored people trying to come up with ways to amuse themselves, all waiting for something to kill.

I recently joined EVE University…  Been a member for about a week now…  And someone has just declared war on the corporation.  Guess I’m going to learn about PvP sooner than I expected.

Terri and I were both in the mood for a scary movie last night, so we watched Left in Darkness through the “watch it now” service on Netflix.  The description of the movie itself didn’t really sound that great…but all the reviews were positive, so we gave it a shot.

The movie’s a little weird…  The protagonist is a woman who’s mother died giving birth to her.  So she was raised by her grandfather…who later dies.  And we eventually catch up with our protagonist on her 21ist birthday.  She goes to a party, gets drugged, gets raped, dies…  And that’s where things start getting really weird.

There are monsters all around who want to eat her soul.  And she’s getting messages from deceased relatives…who may, or may not, actually be what they appear to be.  And she’s got some kind of ghostly protector looking out for her…kind of.

But, ultimately, it was a pretty decent movie.  Plenty of suspense and tension.  Not a whole lot of horror…  But it delivered quite a bit better on the “scary movie” promise than The Ruins did.