The Thing from Another World was on TV last week…  We DVR’ed it and watched it a couple days later.  Decent movie…  Dated, but still fun.  And it’s great to see where what the original looked like, before Carpenter got his hands on it.

What was even more interesting was listening to John Carpenter talk about the movie…  Apparently it is one of his favorites.  I can’t imagine what it was like for him to be able to re-make it.  Must’ve been a lot of fun.

Then we watched The Thing a few days later.  This remains one of my favorite horror movies – right up there with Alien.  I love the isolation and the paranoia.  You can’t just run away and escape, you can’t just wait it out, and you don’t know who is still human.  Great fun.

The new Thing comes out next week, and we’ll be going to see it.

I’ve really gone back and forth on this movie…  Carpenter’s film is one of my favorites, and I’d hate to see the story sullied by a bad prequel (like Star Wars).  And the early teasers and trailers didn’t look terribly impressive.

But the more recent trailers look far better.  And it’s being done by the same folks who did the Dawn of the Dead remake, which was terrific.  I think the thing that makes me most hopeful for a decent movie is this bit from Wikipedia:

After creating the Dawn of the Dead remake, producers Marc Abraham and Eric Newman began to look through the Universal Studios library to find new properties to work on. Upon finding John Carpenter’s 1982 film The Thing, the two convinced Universal to create a prequel instead of a remake, as they felt that remaking Carpenter’s film would be like “paint(ing) a mustache on the Mona Lisa” Eric Newman explained; “I’d be the first to say no one should ever try to do Jaws again and I certainly wouldn’t want to see anyone remake The Exorcist… And we really felt the same way about The Thing. It’s a great film. But once we realized there was a new story to tell, with the same characters and the same world, but from a very different point of view, we took it as a challenge. It’s the story about the guys who are just ghosts in Carpenter’s movie – they’re already dead. But having Universal give us a chance to tell their story was irresistible.”

Sexual Intelligence | When a Chicken is Too Sexy…

I used to have a subscription to NewsWeek.  Used to be a pretty decent magazine.  Well, I thought so at least…  I was younger, maybe I just didn’t know any better.

Regardless, I let that subscription run out years ago when I stopped caring about the magazine.  The articles seemed less and less substantial, more and more sensational.  There just wasn’t much point in reading it.

And, it seems, things haven’t changed much in the last few years.  Or, if they have, they’ve changed for the worse.

NewsWeek has a new, sensational article about The Growing Demand for Prostitution.  Except that it doesn’t actually talk all that much about prostitution…  It lumps pretty much every kind sex entertainment together and calls that a “growing demand” for, specifically, prostitution.  But, what can you expect from an author who calls herself a sex work abolitionist?  She’s obviously got an axe to grind.

Which isn’t to say that biased people can’t do good research and write good articles…  Honestly, everybody is biased in some way.  And good reporters are constantly putting aside their biases in favor of objectivity.  But this article doesn’t do that.  She doesn’t quote any real sexologists or sociologists or anything.

And then she rolls out the whole “human trafficking” thing…  Somehow she leaps from legal sex entertainment like strip clubs to children being sold into sexual slavery.  Without, of course, a trace of actual evidence.

Somehow “Nearly 100% of men in the study said that minors were always available for purchase in Boston” even though about half of the men she interviewed had never seen so much as a lap dance.

I guess I’m not surprised that garbage like this is getting written.  The United States is going through another Puritanical phase…  Or maybe it’s always been this way, but less obvious.  Regardless, there are a lot of folks out there who don’t want you to enjoy sex, who don’t want you to drink alcohol, who don’t want you to have an abortion, who want to make sure you go to church – basically who want to turn the whole of the nation into some kind of fundamental Christian state.

But I am surprised that something like this made it into NewsWeek.

Then again, when CNN’s breaking news revolves around a new viral video on YouTube, I guess maybe I shouldn’t be.

Just got back from seeing the local display of fireworks.

We tried to avoid some of the crowds by parking a mile or so away.  Looked like a good spot – a secluded chunk of lakefront.  I figured we’d have a good view, and it’d be less crowded than down at the monument.  We showed up over an hour early so we could get a decent spot.  And then we had some time to kill…

The fireworks eventually started, and it turned out that we had a pretty bad spot.  I thought the fireworks would be going off more-or-less in front of us…  But it turns out that the monument, and the fireworks, were behind us.  And behind some trees.  So we didn’t get a very good view.

About half the fireworks were low enough that it was just a vague light in the sky, which kind of reminded me of the numerous sci-fi movies I’ve seen.  But the ones that detonated higher in the air were pretty.  Especially the sparkly ones.

I had a pretty good time…  But it seems to me that the fireworks display was pretty short.  Seemed like just 15-20 minutes.  Seems like they used to be longer.  Or maybe that’s just me remembering things wrong.

It was actually almost more fun to watch the people around us, than to watch the fireworks themselves.

One guy acted like he was triangulating a missile launch or something…  Made a big show of carefully positioning himself.  But he obviously had no idea what he was doing because he wound up pointed in the wrong direction just like the rest of us.

Then there was the lady who complained very loudly about how she couldn’t see anything and she was going home – while beautiful fireworks burst in the air above us.

There was a lull about halfway through…  The fireworks stopped for a minute or so…  And one family decided they must be over.  They started packing up, and were so intent on getting things stuffed into their car that they didn’t notice when the fireworks resumed.

Another family that arrived roughly the same time we did brought an absolute crapton of cold beverages.  Big cooler.  And they kept drinking.  It was warm out…  But we don’t live in the middle of the Sahara.  You do not need to consume a chilled drink every 15 minutes to remain hydrated.

Then there was a steady stream of people leaving all evening.  Some left before the fireworks, some left during…  But there was a steady stream of cars starting up and driving away.  Wasn’t so bad before the fireworks, and maybe they knew better than the rest of us…  But once the fireworks started, those headlights were pretty damn disruptive.  Hard to enjoy the show when you’ve been blinded by somebody’s highbeams.

Ultimately, Terri and I came to the same conclusion – if you’re going to do it, do it right.  Next year we’re going to have to just deal with the crowds.  Go early, leave the car a few blocks away, and do the whole 4th of July thing with all the other people for the afternoon.  Because the 15-20 minutes of vaguely glowing skies punctuated by actual fireworks really wasn’t worth the multiple hours it took us to get down there, park, and then get back out of there.

Greta Christina’s Blog |  Wealthy, Handsome, Strong, and with Endless Hard-Ons: Is Masculinity Impossible?

Imagine that…  The media’s ideal image of masculinity is no more realistic or attainable than their ideal image of femininity.

We’re planning on seeing Super 8 tonight…  Not sure how I feel about that.

It looks interesting, but the trailers don’t really reveal much.  It could be some kind of sci-fi extravaganza…  Or it could be a heartwarming coming-of-age story, set against a backdrop of alien hijinks.

Stephen Spielberg is on-board, which is usually a good thing…  But so is JJ Abrams, and I haven’t been much impressed with his work.

I finished The Witcher a few days ago.

I tried to fire up some of the bonus content…  The extra adventures and stuff…  And they just didn’t do it for me.  Most of them didn’t have voices, which was just plain weird.  I’d gotten so used to hearing people talk, just looking at text seemed wrong.  There were two that did have text…  But after battling against Salamandra for so long they just didn’t seem epic enough.  Didn’t hold my attention for long.

I’m not going to un-install The Witcher just yet…  I’m sure I’ll get around to playing all that bonus content eventually.  But, for now, I need a bit of a break.

I complained about the controls initially, and they really were weird.  Not bad, necessarily, but weird.  It took a lot of getting used to…  But I did get used to them.  I hit my stride partway through Chapter II, and it was smooth sailing from there out.  Quickly drawing the right sword, switching between combat styles mid-swing, chopping down enemies left and right.  Combat was really a lot of fun.  Especially some of the bigger fights.  Having different weapons and combat styles to switch between added a more cerebral aspect to combat.  There was more to killing something than just mashing a button over and over again.

I will say, though, that all the other weapons were completely useless.  I basically just used my steel sword and my silver sword throughout the game.  I got the occasional upgrade to each…  But all those extra weapons – axes, daggers, maces, weird swords – were useless.  I swung them once or twice, but never got any satisfaction out of them.  Anything that didn’t use a witcher combat style was a waste of time.  And most of the weird swords had penalties to damage, with no bonuses to offset it.  I’d haul those weapons back to a blacksmith and sell them for a few orens, which was nice…  But as far as actually equipping and using them?  No way.

Alchemy turned out to be a lot of fun.  Wandering the countryside, looking for plants, ripping bits out of defeated monsters…  Then brewing up something to help you kill more monsters…  Very satisfying.

I didn’t go anywhere without a full stack of swallow and blizzard potions, and both cat and white raffard’s decoction were insanely useful.  But I didn’t experiment with too many of the other potions.  I never once built a bomb, and I only got around to using an oil in the epilogue.  I feel like I probably missed out on some depth and complexity there…  But I still had fun.

Armor was kind of useless, too.  I mean, it did offer some protection, and it looked cool…  But there’s only three suits of armor in the entire game.  And you only actually purchase one of them.  It doesn’t seem like that really merits an armor slot in your inventory.  Seems to me that could’ve just been handled as a quest event or reward.

It doesn’t really matter how the game mechanics handle it…  But seeing an armor slot there sort of implies that you’ll be able to buy different suits of armor and equip them.  Which you can’t really do in any meaningful way.  And I didn’t realize this until I went out and read the wiki, because I was wondering where to go to buy armor.

Inventory management was kind of a miss all-together, really.  You had enough room for alchemical components that it didn’t generally matter.  You never really ran out of space.  And there wasn’t really much in the line of junk loot to deal with.  Most weapons were just useless.  There wasn’t any armor to speak of.

And I guess that’s not really a bad thing…  Lots of folks don’t like messing with an inventory, and more RPG titles are doing away with it entirely.  But I still kind of like the treasure hunting aspect of older RPG titles.  Looting interesting bits from slain enemies…  Comparing statistics between what you’ve got equipped, and what you just looted…  Debating over which items are valuable enough to haul back to town, and which should be left behind…  Debating over whether you need the stats more than you need the money…  And that just wasn’t a part of the gameplay in The Witcher.

The game world itself was wonderful.  Very rich.  Very interesting.  Lots going on.  The people and the locations felt genuinely alive.  Folks had things to talk about that werren’t necessarily related to some quest objective.  There were little problems and complaints that you couldn’t actually fix.  There were bits of interesting geography that didn’t really feature into the storyline at all.  It had the feel of a real, continuous world that you were just passing through.

The storyline was genuinely interesting.  Some great little twists and turns that I really didn’t expect.  It seemed to develop organically.  It all made sense, all tied together well.

I really liked that there were no clearly “right” or “wrong” answers to the dilemmas posed in the game.  You had choices, and some of them sounded nicer than others…  But it wasn’t like a normal game where you can clearly tell which is the “good guy” answer, and which is the “bad guy” answer.  They were all just answers.  And they had consequences.  Often consequences that really didn’t turn out the way you’d intended.

My only real complaint about the storyline or setting is that it all felt vaguely sexist…

I’m not talking about that misogynistic preacher back in Chapter I – he was obviously a villain and got his just desserts fairly quickly.  And there were plenty of strong women throughout the game.  I didn’t spend the entire game rescuing damsels in distress or anything like that.  The women had some real depth of character, they weren’t just window-dressing.

But Geralt is a bit of a womanizer.  You have the option of having sex with a couple dozen women in the game.  Some of them require courtship, some of them just about leap into your bed as soon as you say hello.  And then you collect a racy calling-card from each of your conquests.  All of which feels just plain weird.

That’s not to say that there’s no romance in the game…  You do have the option of pursuing a more substantial relationship with either Shani or Triss.

And it doesn’t seem like the women are being used or anything like that – they all seem quite satisfied with the encounter.

But it just seems weird to play a character like that.  Weird, and vaguely wrong.

Beyond that, Geralt was a genuinely interesting protagonist.  And they really did pull off the amnesia angle pretty well.  I liked running into past acquaintances that I’d forgotten, and hearing about my old exploits.  It really gave a feel for who Geralt was.  Or, at least, what he’d been like before I got my hands on him.  Because you have the opportunity to very literally define your identity in the game.  One of the quests is to come to grips with who you are and how you fit into the world.

All things considered, an absolutely wonderful game.

I’m eager to play the sequel, and I’m dying to get my hands on some of the original books.

We tried out the co-op multiplayer in Portal 2 last night…

There’s a nice little interface that allows you to invite your Steam friends to a co-op game.  Much nicer than simply being paired up with a random stranger, or having to wade through a server finder, or something like that.  I’m sure there is some kind of matchmaking system out there…  I can’t imagine they’re going to force people to only play with folks on their friends list.  But I didn’t use it, so I can’t say much about it.

Seems like the person who sends out the invite winds up as Atlas/Blue.  Don’t think I like that too much.  I would have preferred to be able to pick which robot I was when I joined the game.  But I guess there aren’t that many different ones to choose from…  And it doesn’t really matter anyway.

So, we started out in some kind of a training course.  Learned the basic mechanics of playing co-op.

You’ve got some quick commands that let you tag things in the world…  You can indicate where you’d like your partner to stand, or where you’d like them to place a portal, or which button to hit, or what they should look at.  You can even do a countdown to throw a switch together.  Makes communication fairly simple…  Even though we were sitting in the same room, and just talking to each-other, being able to tag stuff in-game was still handy.  Made it easy to place portals and things like that.

You’ve also got some gestures you can do.  They’re completely useless, but fun.  And you seem to be awarded more gestures as you progress through the co-op.  Which really makes me wonder why you’d bother to buy them in the cash store…  But maybe I wasn’t paying attention, and those are different gestures.

Playing with another person is interesting.  You’ve got two pairs of portals.  Orange gets and orange and a red portal…  Blue gets a blue and a purple portal.  The portals don’t cross-link – you can’t go in an orange portal and out a purple one.  But you can chain them together to accomplish some interesting things.  You can use a couple portals to jump off something high and get flung out of an angled surface…  And then a couple more portals to catch you on the other side and throw you down a hallway.

The teamwork is very weird.  After playing through both Portal games all by myself, it seems almost counter-intuitive to have another person along.  Puzzles seem downright insoluble until you remember that you’ve got another person along who can push buttons and open portals and things like that.

And even then, the puzzles are mindbending.  You think it’s hard to think with just two portals?  Try thinking with four.

So…  We went through the tutorial bit.  Then we went to the hub.  It’s a main chamber that links to all the real courses.  And there’s a jumbo screen that shows some interesting information…  How many steps you’ve taken, how many science points you’ve earned.

We did two courses, though I don’t remember what they were called.

GLaDOS is back, and she’s heckling the robots.  Although she seems kind of disappointed that she can’t actually harass you like she could a real human.  I can easily see her growing to miss Chell, and hunting her down for a repeat appearance in Portal 3.

Each course consisted of a number of puzzles set in the now-familiar Aperture Science Enrichment Center.  Moving panels, gleaming which surfaces…  The kind of stuff you expect from a Portal game.

But, after completing a number of those puzzles, we were then sent off the beaten track…  We were sent to a level that looked more like it belonged to the old Aperture Labs – the disused section down below the Enrichment Center.  We were first sent to find a disc, and later some blueprints.  When I found the disc and inserted it into the computer it said something about unit locations…  And when Terri found the blueprints we noticed a sign that said we should not upload the blueprints, right before we did upload them…  I’m wondering if GLaDOS is actually using us for some more nefarious purposes.

There seems to be some kind of basic plot or storyline going on here, with the robots becoming increasingly human (or at least more emotive) as the game progresses.  And GLaDOS seems to have something up her sleeve (again).  I wonder if there’ll be some kind of co-op boss battle when this is all said and done?  Or if we’ll ever find out what exactly we’re doing outside of the Enrichment Center?

Will be very interesting to see…

Terri finished Portal 2 yesterday, which means I can finally post my thoughts without having to worry about spoilers.

All things considered, I think it was a good game.  Good level design, nice graphics, roughly 10 hours of gameplay, interesting storyline…  I definitely think I got my money’s worth.  The folks who are complaining that it’s too short, and they don’t like the cash DLC store, and the ARG was crap…  Well, they can go to hell.

The cash DLC store has absolutely no impact on the actual gameplay.  It’s all cosmetic stuff.

The ARG has absolutely no impact on the game either.  It was just some marketing stuff to sell more games.  Nothing more than a fun ad campaign.

And the people complaining that the game is too short are doing something wrong.  The first Portal game was so short it couldn’t even be sold by itself – it was bundled in the Orange Box.  The first Portal game was only an hour or two long.  I got about 10 hours out of Portal 2, and I was not taking my time.  If you’re finishing Portal 2 in less than 5 hours you’ve got to be absolutely sprinting through it and not paying any attention to what’s going on around you.

So, ultimately, I think it’s a solid game.  Definitely a worthy sequel to Portal.  Definitely a good purchase.  I’d recommend the game to just about anyone.

It’s very interesting to see how they managed to turn a building into a character.  How the test chambers themselves manage to tell a story.

You’ve got the abandoned, decaying test chambers in the beginning.  They look like something right out of a Fallout game.

Then GLaDOS wakes up and starts putting things back together.  The panels act as extensions of her will…  Like her arms and hands…  And she seems more embarrassed at the state of the labs, than angry at you for killing her.  She’s quickly tidying things up and trying to make the place look presentable.

Then Wheatley takes over and you wind up in the old labs…  The old labs, plus Cave Johnson’s pre-recorded messages, tell you the story of Aperture Science’s rise and fall.  From a prestigious institute partnering with astronauts and war heroes and Olympians to test their products…  To bribing homeless folks to participate in tests…  To mandating all employees participate in testing…

And, along the way, I noticed something odd about the testing…  It doesn’t seem like you were ever really testing a product. In the first Portal game it’s kind of assumed that you’re testing the ASHPD to make sure it works correctly.  But as you make your way through the old Aperture Labs in Portal 2 you discover that they had a portal device (though it certainly wasn’t handheld) back in the 60′s.  So they knew the device worked.

In fact, the tests are more like the mazes you’d send a lab rat through to see if they can get the cheese.

Which makes me wonder what exactly was being tested in Aperture Science through all these years…

You eventually make it back up to the new labs, which Wheatley is doing a great job of destroying.  And it’s interesting to really see behind the curtain, to see how the new labs are put together.  It’s all just panels put together, hanging over a yawning chasm – not actual rooms and buildings.  And it’s kind of disturbing when Wheatley crams different test chambers together, or moves the chamber you’re in, or drops something through a chamber.  Makes the whole facility feel very fragile.

And then you’ve got the fight with Wheatley…  And this is where I got a little annoyed.  The Wheatley fight seemed far too easy, and didn’t make a whole lot of sense.  And then the ending didn’t make much sense either.

Fighting Wheatley seemed far easier than fighting GLaDOS in the first game.  It was very easy to him him with those bombs.  Very easy to grab the cores and plug them in.  Seems like I had a much harder time with GLaDOS in the first game.  Seems like there were time limits, or distractions, or more hazards, or something.  I died several times trying to shut down GLaDOS…  I defeated Wheatley on my very first try.

And then he’s trapped the button, which seems far too clever for him.  We’ve spent basically the entire game hearing about how dumb he is.  About how he’s been built from the ground up to make bad decisions.  And he went and trapped the button.  Which, while it didn’t work quite right, is actually a pretty good idea.

Then you get blown up, and you’re injured, and all you can do is shoot a portal at the moon…

Now, I understand why that works.  I know that conversion gel and all those white surfaces that you’ve been shooting your portals at are made from ground-up moon rocks.  I get it.  But…  How is the moon so readily available when you’re supposed to be deep underground?  I mean…  After you defeat Wheatley and get on the elevator you wind up passing through several more floors before you get to the surface.  So, why is the moon visible right there in the main room?

Anyway…  You get sucked out to the moon, and hang on to Wheatley for a while, and then GLaDOS is back in charge and fixes everything and hauls you in.  But I’m a little fuzzy on how exactly that happened.  The first time you did a core transfer it took a few moments…  There were whirs and sparks and GLaDOS was un-plugged and Wheatley was plugged in…  And none of that seems to happen this time around.

Granted, you’re busy trying not to die on the moon, so I might have missed something…  But it doesn’t seem like there’s enough time for the transfer.  Especially when you consider that she’s also had time to fix the meltdown.

Anyway…  You get hauled back in and black out for a while.  You wake up a little bit later and GLaDOS has had time to repair that main chamber.  You’re briefly introduced to the cooperative robots.  GLaDOS deletes Caroline, and then lets you go free…

Which seems a little atypical to me.  Seems like GLaDOS held on to a grudge for an awfully long time just to let go of it at the last minute…  Doesn’t seem very characteristic of her…

You hop in the elevator, go up a floor or two…  And there’s some turrets waiting to shoot you.  I was actually pretty happy to see them.  Thought GLaDOS was up to her old tricks again.  Thought she was going to try to kill me again, or capture me, or something…  And she doesn’t.

Then you’ve got the floor full of singing turrets, which just seemed random to me.  No idea why they were in there.  I recognized the giant, leopard-print king turret in the back…  But I’m not sure what any of that had to do with the game itself.  I don’t really recall anything with singing turrets at any previous point in either of the games.

It kind of feels like they were just stretching out the ending.  Trying to make it more interesting, or epic, or weird.  Like there wasn’t really much point to the singing turrets.

That whole ending-sequence – from the beginning of the boss battle with Wheatley to seeing Chell walk off into the sunset – felt sort of weird to me.  Thrown-together, less-polished, random, stretched-out…  Like they weren’t quite sure how to wrap things up, so they just threw in a boss fight and some kind of ending movie.

Of course that isn’t really the end of the game…  I’ve got the co-op to play now.  Which obviously takes place after the single player storyline.  And I’m anxious to see how that works out…  We put in a couple hours last night, and I’ve got some stuff to say about it, but this isn’t really the place.  I’m getting long-winded enough as it is.

The gels and funnels and faith plates and lightbridges were all neat…  Felt appropriate in the setting…  Made interesting tools…  Changed the game mechanics nicely…

But I felt like too much time was spent on them.  Like the game became too focused on the new mechanics, and the portals got left behind.  To a certain degree, I guess this makes sense…  You need to introduce the new stuff, let people play around with it, get familiar with the new mechanics.  We had a full game to get used to the portals.  So I guess I’d expect to see some focus on the new gels and things, at least for a while.

But it seems like the portals almost became secondary.

You were using portals in solving the puzzles…  But you were basically just using those portals to position the gels, or lightbridge, or funnel, or whatever.  Portals weren’t really the solution to a lot of the puzzles – the gels were, or the funnels, or whatever.  The portals were just tools to make it happen.

Especially if you compare the final boss battles…

GLaDOS is defeated entirely through use of portals.  A couple portals to redirect the rocket into her and knock off a core…  A couple portals to hit the button and drop the core into the incinerator.

The Wheatley fight requires you to cover the room in conversion gel before you can use any portals at all.  Then you use portals (on the conversion gel) to throw the bombs back at him…  But you have to use the repulsion gel to bounce up and grab cores…  The fight would be just plain impossible without the use of the gels.

And that didn’t feel right…  I mean, the game is called Portal, not Coversion Gel.

Still, despite my whining, it really is a solid game.  Lots of fun.  Thoroughly enjoyed myself.  And now I’m playing co-op and going back through looking for achievements.  So it’ll be a little while before I put it away and move on to something else.

Just started playing Dragon Age II, and I’m thinking the title is more than a little bit misleading.

Dragon Age: Origins did pretty much exactly what it said on the tin.  It was the first game of the series, of course…  But it also explained the origins of the “Dragon Age”…

That “II” in Dragon Age II implies that it is a sequel…  But it isn’t, really.  Yes, it is the second game they’ve released, but it’s only tangentially related to the first game.

DA2 starts out during the Fifth Blight, shortly after the battle at Ostagar…  You’re a refugee of sorts, fleeing from the Darkspawn.  You make your way out of Ferelden entirely and wind up in Kirkwall.  Your character has nothing to do with the Grey Wardens, or the Darkspawn, or the blight, or any of the events of the first game.  In fact, if you do import your save file from the first game, all it does is change some of the background.  It doesn’t do anything to your own character or party.

So it seems a little misleading to call this game Dragon Age II, when it has so little to do with the first game.

I’m also a little annoyed at the lack of choices in character creation.

I thoroughly enjoyed playing my dwarven rogue through DA:O, and was looking forward to playing her through a second game…  Or at least another dwarven rogue…  But, instead, I’m stuck playing a human of some sort.

This also means that the dramatically different opening chapters, which I thought were absolutely amazing, are all gone.

Also – since when do Qunari have horns?  Wasn’t Sten, in DA:O a Qunari?  He didn’t have horns…