More Dullness

Went to office. Wrote article, played Monster Hunter Freedom, went home, played Call of Cthulhu while the Wife solved puzzles in the game I was too clueless to process.

But MAN, that game is unforgiving…

The Boring Life Continues

Played games, wrote comics. That is all.

The Quiet Sunday

In which not much was done apart from playing Call of Cthulu and Monster Hunter Freedom which is bringing out the loot whore in me. This is an evil, EVIL PSP game and I’ve already gotten my friend addicted to it. We’ve agreed to try and meet up once a week so we can go multi-player on it, but I’m going to see if I can get in some extra practice with folks at the GameAxis office.

iSee iDead iPeople

While walking around, talking with the Wife, the idea (as ideas are wont to do) cropped up during discussion that the iPod and its various spin-offs was more or less inspired by the super-clean, minimalist aesthetic of 60′s science fiction, the prototypical example being Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. This immediately made me seize upon the idea of the most perfect and final expression of Apple’s ethos, the iCoffin.

As shown above, the cryogenic suspension apparatus of the Discovery already perfectly fit the design sensibilities of an iCoffin; it’s white, with smooth lines, and almost entirely featureless except for one square panel where you can view the deceased. In that sense, it is exactly like an iPod designed to house dead people.

Of course, it wouldn’t be an iCoffin without the appropriate multi-media features which is why, just like an iPod, you can store the favortie songs and movies of the deceased, available for play back wireless through your iPod. You can also store podcasts of the deceased waxing lyrical about everything, and even include a video of the deceased to play back on the face screen/display.

The best part is that your music and videos can be synched, shared or downloaded with the deceased, so that others wandering the cemetery can find out exactly what your dearly departed liked to listen to, and can leave you tunes and videos that they (Or their dearly departed) enjoyed so that you can surprise yourself the next time you pay visit. Pay your respects, get free music and videos, now THAT’S how you cope with death.

Geek Friday

And the total damage for purchases made today:

1 PSP game in the form of Monster Hunter Freedom. This is one of those rare occasions where I reviewed a game and then liked it enough to go out and buy it for myself. The evil part about this game is that it lets you team up in wireless multi-player with other owners of the game to… well, hunt monsters, and that simplistic purpose is a hell of a lot of fun with other people involved.

1 DS Lite. Those little white bundles of super cute gaming just got into Singapore today, although in a twist, the iDS, as I call it, is for the Wife, not me. She really liked the new look of the DS enough to actually want one. I’ll stick with my old DS because though it’s far less bright, it feels a lot more durable, and I dont feel bad about dropping it, kicking it, or otherwise abusing it.

The Short Boring Post

Woke up. Did stuff. Wrote this.

Pimp: The Game

It occurred to me over dinner at our favorite German restaurant that there is no game that completely embraces the Pimp Lifestyle. While it’s true that Grand Theft Auto has always incorporated some pimp elements (Usually driving hookers to meet… John) what we really need is a game that fully immerses gamers in the pimp lifestyle.

I figure if we could combine some of the customization and open plan style gaming of Will Wright’s The Sims with some traditional 3rd person action mechanics a la God of War or GTA, we’d have the start of a really intriguing title. Imagine it; you spot a particularly good looking girl who works for an office, she’s educated, she’s healthy, she’s attractive, but she has no interest in being a hooker. Until you get her hooked on crack and suddenly she’s turning those office wiles into tricks for the pricier clients that want something a little less street.

You can beat on people that beat your girls, you can wear crazy hats and outfits and you can dictate exactly what kind of policy your girls execute while on the job, all while trying to run a profitable business in the oldest industry of the world.

Heck, it may be crude, but even I have to admit, were a pimp game to come out and were it of reasonable quality, I’d buy it.

Score For Catholicism

For most people who are not American or Canadian, the big thing right now is the World Cup. Being Canadian, I could care less, but then I also didn’t give a damn about hockey and that is my country’s national sport. However, everyone else in all the other countries seem to put as much stock in it as North Americans do in Football, Basketball or Hockey.

One of the things the Wife mentioned off-handedly is that most of the top soccer teams in the world all have one thing in common; their country is predominantly Catholic.

That seems like an excellent recruiting point for the Catholic religion. Maybe not in North America, but everywhere else, if it were pointed out that “God favors the faithful with godly soccer skills” then this just might be the ticket for getting more people to think Pope-tastically. Plus it makes for tons of cheesy advertising slogans.

Just imagine sitting in a movie theater as the commercials start up and watching what you think is yet another sytlized Nike commercial when a shaft of light breaks down from the heavens and some soccer player utters, “JESUS CHRIST!” to which he gets the reply, “Actually, it’s his father. And nice goal by the way. See, you say your prayers, you get the points.”

And then the deep, cigarette smoking voice over intones, “Thank God you won, and you’ll keep on winning. Catholicism, Gooooooooooooooooooal! Goooooooooooooooooooooooood!”

And this is why I shouldn’t be allowed back into advertising full time.

The End Is Nigh

Actually, all I really mean is the heavier than usual workload of articles from GameAxis is well over the half-way mark. Only a few articles to write now and that’ll be it for this month. However I still have a Maxim article to crank out which I’m doing much more slowly but that’s also over halfway done. Lots and lots of writing being done this month…

XX Gamers

I normally try to refrain from double posting identical entries in my normal blog and the GameAxis blog, but this one merits some crossover. Witness the pictures below:

The whacky thing is, they’re not models, they’re not girls hired for the E3 as booth babes, these are actual females that play games because they enjoy it. Software developer Ubisoft, sensing a motherlode of marketing exploitation when they see it, have officially sponsered this group of girl gamers, who call themselves The Frag Dolls. So at last we have clear and clincal proof–in photography no less!–that females can and do enjoy playing video games.

This of course means that geeks now have no excuse. If you were using the ol’ “yeah, but I can’t get a girlfriend because they hate games,” then that particular justification has just evaporated and you may have to own up to the brutal truth that you could just be a jerk.