There was a time when iChat fell distinctly into the category of Why Did They Bother, because, even on Macs, AIM was king. You had to be a total Apple loyalist to use old, featureless iChat. Those days are dead and buried.
As soon as iChat added folder hierarchy - which for quite some time was the killer feature that kept it under AIM, in my opinion - I dumped AIM and never looked back. The leap to iChat AV and easy-as-pie video or audio chatting seemed like the pinnacle for the concept. But the new Leopard iChat turns the formerly frill-less mini-app into something much grander.
The silly bit of the new iChat is the crowd-pleasing background feature. While live chatting, you can put yourself over some ridiculous pre-built background (like a serene waterfall or a shot of the Eiffel Tower). You can also drop in any image of your own, and yes that includes your own movie files. Here's Tony and me testing it out.
SAN FRANCISCO, Nov 1 (Reuters) - A fox-like alien and his robot sidekick on a mission to save the galaxy could also help save sales of Sony's PlayStation 3, which has struggled to find a game so good that it gives people reason to buy the pricey console.
Microsoft's Xbox 360 has had several, including this year's "Halo 3," but Sony is still trying to find a megahit of its own as games like "Heavenly Sword" and "Folklore" have failed to make the kind of splash needed to convince holdouts.
Number of paragraphs until Microsoft gets mentioned in an article that isn't about Microsoft at all: 1
I call "several" a generous term. Halo 3 and Bioshock. As far as console exclusives go, that's it.
And Folklore sucks, by the way.
Now comes "Ratchet & Clank Future: Tools of Destruction," a beautifully crafted game that is being compared to Pixar animated films and touted as a must-have for Sony fans.
"We're using lots of the same techniques that would be used in a Pixar film," said Brian Allgeier, creative director on the "Ratchet" titles at developer Insomniac Games.
Seasoned video game fans can be forgiven for rolling their eyes -- claims by industry executives over the years that their games are "Pixar quality" have turned out to be just so much marketing bluster.
But the "Ratchet & Clank" that hit stores last week comes closest to delivering on that promise.
Yes, I did roll my eyes. "Lots of the same techniques"... what, like computers?
Just this past weekend I was wondering about the status of my five free Blu-Ray movies offer, figuring that I'd never see those movies and that yet another reason for buying a PS3 so early was dashed upon the fjords of futility.
And then they showed up today.
Bonus... the five movies came with a note that one of my selections was unavailable, so they swapped it with Happy Feet. The movie I did not receive was Babel, or maybe Italian Job. I forget. Happy Feet is probably far better. At the least it's another kid-friendly pick, coming from an original list that was anything but. Can you imagine if Sony had swapped my missing Babel Blu-Ray for something like Devil's Rejects? It's bad enough that I now own a high-def copy of Resident Evil: Apocalypse.
I always take those gaming surveys when they crop up. Nintendo is always sending them out, occasionally making them a requisite to receiving some cool freebie. (Hey Nintendo, when you suggest that supplies are limited for your feather-pen stylus or whatever, that makes me do the survey immediately... which means that your questions about What Did You Like/Not Like About the Game? are completely blown because I have barely played it.)
This was a Sony survey, sent out to PlayStation Underground members. It was one of those really obnoxious types, where you have this huge list of possible marketing avenues and you have to declare which ones would likely first alert you to a game's existence, then which would first provide further info about a game, then which ones you would personally turn to for more information about a game, and then which ones you would look to when actually purchasing a game. Nuts. It went on forever, but now I'm registered to win three free PS3 games, so there you are.
Collection of Freakies commercials (YouTube) Freakies cereal (1973-1975) was well loved in our house, perhaps more accurately the in-box toys were well loved. I don't actually recall eating much of it because I was, like, one, but my folks liked it and kept the toys around. It was resurrected in the '80s as a marshmellow cereal and that sucked.
CNN using commercial countdown clocks (Lost Remote) I find this to be a really amusing idea, counting down through the commercials... but do people still watch news on TV?
Biggest BSOD of All Time? (Gizmodo) Hilarious photo of a gigantic outdoor billboard that went blue screen.
You've seen these. Repackaged boxes of card boosters, no doubt cobbled together from overstock suppliers. Always with ugly, un-licensed artwork and generally a little tricksy on the actual card game side, preferring to puff up the bundle with non-game card packs. Like, the $20 Pokemon box will have a TCG starter, perhaps two TCG boosters, and then a handful of packs from the collector card series of Pokemon: The First Movie, those silly lenticular sticker sets, or even simply a pack of Digimon cards.
I've seen Yu-Gi-Oh sets, Pokemon sets, "anime" sets, Neopets sets, Harry Potter sets. Usually the value comes from you paying for the real stuff (the TCG stuff) and just accepting the crap stickers and movie cards as free. This, however, is the first time I have seen one for super heroes...
Let's pick this apart. 50 card sleeves, 4 packs, 1 starter. Originally $5, now $3. $3 is pretty much the going rate for a single booster pack, so this already ranks as one of the best bundle deals ever.
The Wal-Mart and Target holiday catalogs arrived at fourhman.home 2.0 this week, and the PS3 is nowhere to be seen. No new $399 model. No big spread on Ratchet / Uncharted / Rock Band / Haze. I suppose Sony could have done this on purpose, ordering these retail giants to focus on the PS2, but that seems totally crazy. The PS3 bungle keeps throwing its net wider and wider.
Here's the Wal-Mart center page on video games (all of these scans will boldly embiggen if you click them.)
Wii, DS, 360, PS2. As if the PS3 doesn't even exist. Is there any planet where this wouldn't be a colossal mistake?
Speaking of mistakes, Wal-Mart still hasn't forwarded the memo that Smash Bros was delayed. "Available 12/3," right right.
Super Mario Galaxy hit most retailers today, and since most people like to think that Mario Sunshine never existed, this is considered the first true Mario game since 1977. Man, what is up with the Fashionable-to-Hate-Sunshine thing? I thought it fantastic and, in fact, the only part that I distinctly hated was the only part that the anti-Sunshine crowd liked... those awful, non-themed, fall-into-darkness pure platformer levels. I've mentioned this before, I'm sure.
Anyway, Tony and I planned a Mario Galaxy jaunt for today, so as to be sure not to miss Toys R Us's free $25 gift card offer. That really is an insanely great bonus. We figured on driving out to TRU over lunch.
So, because I've been burned by these situations before, at 11am I called. I was very specific in my language so as not to mislead: "Are you selling Super Mario Galaxy for the Wii yet?"
"No. That's not in yet."
I met that with complete and purposefully awkward silence. The speaker continued...
"I mean, it's supposed to be in today and it will be in today, we just don't have the shipment yet."
Bullshit. That truck was there, the box is on the dock, you just haven't gotten somebody's lazy ass to open it. I promise to call back.
Tony does the second call, around 12:30. I guess we would have continued alternating calls every hour or so until we heard what we wanted to hear... but the news is good. "I just opened that box ten minutes ago," the voice chirrups. And so we are off.
Having some actual PS3 games to play - and since The Simpsons Game Demo was so terrible - I haven't grabbed many PS3 demos lately. But here's a little about some that I did.
Timeshift: The opening movie is actually really damn cool and made me think of what a perfect Flash game could be like. In fact, somebody should get working on a mod for that right away... skin the lead in red-and-yellow and drop all the gun stuff.
I didn't think the demo explained the time controls very well, or at least I never grokked them enough to know when to utilize them. Until the exploding corridor scene (where you are expected to rewind time so that the corridor fixes itself and you can run through safely), I barely activated my Amazing Time Powers.
Hillary Clinton's "Chinese" Clapping (Angry Asian Man) MSNBC's Chris Matthews keeps referring to Hillary Clinton's clapping habit as "Chinese." The hell? Is he trying to invent a stereotype?
Super Powers: Wave Four & Beyond (Toy Otter) Fantastic pic collection of pitch materials for some never-produced expansions to the 1980s DC Super Powers toy line. The Green Lantern Oa playset is completely sweet.
Maybe it's because I am not of the Old School Nintendo world, having never owned an NES or SNES, but I think Mario Sunshine is better than Mario Galaxy.
Yes, Galaxy looks better... yes, Galaxy is a lot of fun... yes, Galaxy is clever and cute and challenging. But every time I play it - and I'm eight hours and 44 stars in at this point - I have this nagging feeling that I would rather be playing Sunshine.
Last week I checked my fourhman.com stats and was surprised to see November 2007 pageviews tracking to best October 2007 by a wide margin, and the month was only half over. I had over 130,000 views in October and as of last week, November had already posted over 100,000. It's always fun to see your pageviews jump like that, but you kinda want to know why.
Unfortunately, my DreamHost stats' section on referring URLs gets too bogged down with Google image results to be of much use (for years I was the top hit for an image search on "waffles") so until today when I checked my Technorati links, I had no idea where all the traffic was headed. And it seems to be all coming mostly from Game|Life's quickie on Fatal Frame: the Card Game. It's interesting, because it's not like Fatal Frame: the Card Game is a new thing... it just somehow popped up on the radar and enjoyed a week of getting passed around.
Here's some grabs from the sites I discovered through Technorati, and some happy-to-do-it links back.
11/05/07 - Between the Bits, John Hummel's weblog. You know, I would consider a trip to PAX if I knew there was some kind of Fatal Frame card game thing going on. If anybody wants to see the game in action at next year's Origins, let me know.
Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie (1997) does not contain nearly enough actual Power Rangering.
Seriously. Clark had to sit through an hour of villainous posturing and the team standing around looking frightened before they put on the damn suits and got to kicking!
Skipping nap to attend an Adoption Celebration event is cool. Expecting to go to the mall afterwards on the weekend before Black Friday is not.
We lasted through about fifteen minutes of stifling crowds and fussy Clark before we bailed.
It's an animated webcomic about Animal Crossing. Don't watch it at work. Don't watch it when you have a roomful of giddy friends hanging over your shoulder. Don't watch it if you don't have a few minutes to really absorb it.
I've played Rock Band for the better part of the last two days. I wanted to unlock all of the songs so that when the great No Longer About Stupid Thanksgiving visits start, we have a full complement of choices. And I did buy a couple songs... Fortunate Son and My Sharona. (Both covers, although My Sharona could potentially pass for the original, in my estimation. Fortunate Son? No frigging way.) I've beaten the guitar campaigns for Easy and Medium, and started Easy drums and Easy singing.
Although, as usual with me and music games, I don't much care for the song list. It took like fifteen songs on the Solo Tour Mode track before I found one I liked enough to hum it the next day. I'll be into the DLC.
Speaking of that, the PlayStation Store is just about the worst UI ever. It would be fine if they were selling five items tops, but the slow-ass navigation and ugly presentation sucks. Where's the style? I know Sony has some. Somewhere.
I am currently among the top 60 guitarists on "My Sharona."
Although that's probably more of a comment on the number of people who bothered to download the song than my shredding skills. And the spread between me and the top 20 scores is heartbreaking.
Happy Feet is really bad.
This movie exists just to entertain people who still enjoy watching realistic animals lip-sync to pop songs. And those who enjoy Robin Williams doing borderline racist vocal impressions.
Rhon pointed out that, by the end of the movie, the one thing that makes Mumble special - his ability to dance rather than sing - is erased when everybody else learns how to dance. So now he's back to being the jerk who can't sing. Plus, he has some kind of mutant anti-molting problem.
96 stars. Tossed Bowser into the sun. I think that's probably a respectable finish.
There's 120 stars to find - and I'm sure something INCREDIBLE happens if you get all of them - but the last few levels I completed were so miserable that I really no longer have the taste for it.
Never did get that "big world" level. Everything was a small floating asteroid. Even the bigger asteroids were small. Although the gravity thing was fun, I really grew tired of it halfway through. Keeping your brain on straight as you keep correcting your analog stick to compensate for Mario's ever-changing heading just is not a friendly experience. I don't see how Nintendo can pitch Mario Galaxy as a new Wii Sports-style Game For Everyone when things get so dizzy. Your TV spots can show a twelve-year-old and his mom playing together, but casual gamers are not going to get past the third galaxy cluster. The last galaxies are hard and the last thirty stars are insane. This game ramps up to hardcore for the final act; this is why Nintendo's star collection system lets you stomp Bowser when in the 60 star range.
Although the final Bowser stage/fight was pretty hard, too. I appreciated having the skills buildup of 90 stars before going into that level.
I still like Sunshine a whole hell of a lot more. In my opinion, you cannot beat free-roaming.
Just this past weekend I was wondering about the status of my 
Turbo: A Power Rangers Movie (1997) does not contain nearly enough actual Power Rangering.
Skipping nap to attend an Adoption Celebration event is cool. Expecting to go to the mall afterwards on the weekend before Black Friday is not.
I am currently among the top 60 guitarists on "My Sharona."
Happy Feet is really bad.
96 stars. Tossed Bowser into the sun. I think that's probably a respectable finish.
