For those who are unfamiliar, the Burnout series is a racing game focused on being the first and, if possible, only person to cross the finish line. No weapons or anything, just good ol’ paint rubbin’.

For the previous iterations of Burnout, it’s had a more traditional racer look and feel; choose a track, choose a car, race in a circuit to the finish line. In Paradise City, they changed the format to an open city (aptly named Paradise City) where you drive around wherever you want and start races at the street intersections. You can choose any route to race from point A to point B in several game modes - reach the finish first, cause the most opponents to crash before the finish line, reach the finish line before crashing a certain number of times, and a few others. It’s about as arcadey as you can get in a racer, and it’s fun as hell, especially with other players.

Criterion has done a bang-up job supporting the game, putting out a few massive updates since the game was released. The most recent update advertises adding motorcycles, day/night cycles, and weather into the mix. In the end, it’s a very fun update, but a little unpolished.

Meh:

• The bikes don’t have show any destruction when they crash. When you crash in a car, the metal crumples, glass shatters, and wheels fall off, all in beautiful slow-motion. Similarly, when you graze lightly against something, paint rubs off the car and the glass breaks a little bit depending on where you hit. Bikes lack this sort of realism - when you crash, no paint is exchanged and no crumple damage is shown.
• Motorcycle racing is entirely separate from car racing. On top of that, when playing offline, you can only choose one racing mode: race against the clock - no other bikes are on the road. Apparently there’s future updates planned that will add more racing modes for bikes, including bike vs car racing.
• Rather small selection of bikes (four) and weather effects (just fog). Hopefully they have some updates in the works to beef up these options too. I like the idea of skidding around in the rain or snow.

Sweet:

• It’s free. This ultimately trumps all the above complaints. I’d have easily paid a pittance for the features in this update.
• Messing around on the bikes is fun, even if you’re not racing. Just seeing how fast you can go, dodging cars, listening to music is quite relaxing, especially in the rural areas. The custom soundtrack feature in a previous update is very nice for this. Also, if you switch into first person camera, your view tilts with the bike when you turn - a nice touch.
• The day/night cycles are a nice addition. You can switch between real-time and 60x sped-up-time for how fast the clock moves. The roads become gradually less crowded as evening turns to night.

Playing around with the bikes reminds me of Road Rash 3D - a game I used to play a lot back in the day. There was a mode in there where you could tool around the huge city on the bike of your choice. If Criterion were to take the bike mode from Burnout and toss it into a separate game with other bikes and weapons, I’d be a guaranteed purchase from me. Until then, I’ll be dreaming of the next update that brings some more options to the bike game.

On a side note, this week’s PSN update is going to be epic: another (albeit smaller) Burnout update, WipeoutHD, and Megaman 9… I think I need a clone.

Screw books, how could I forget about games?

Being summer, especially right before the expansion, WoW is getting a bit boring - almost chore-like - with nobody raiding and nobody to talk to. For those who are unfamiliar with the phenomenon, when an expansion is released everybody’s equipment goes to waste, no matter how awesome. So raiding 10 hours per week (or more) for the ‘big boy gear’ is futile, as it will be replaced in the first few levels of the expansion. And with everybody doing other stuff for the summer, the servers are pretty barren. Fortunately that means I don’t need to split my time as much between WoW and other forms of digital entertainment. Unfortunately, it reminds me I have so many games that I haven’t yet beaten.

The first game that needs a shout-out is Bionic Commando: Rearmed. It’s cheap, easily accessible, and challenging. It’s also visually pleasing, which isn’t a very common thing for me to say about 3d side scrolling games, especially remakes. Grin (the developers) did an awesome job giving the gameplay and visuals a hefty update, while keeping them reminiscent of the original. My hat goes off to you!

I gotta give some love to Harmonix and MTV Games for releasing so many awesome songs for Rock Band (and the upcoming sequel), and not missing a single week of DLC since the release of the game. Not only that, they are making DLC and disc songs available and the original instruments usable in the sequel! Sofa King Awesome! They really know how to take care of their customers.

I picked up Folklore a while ago and never finished it. It’s an action-RPG with a unique method (or methods, in this case) of telling the story, and beautiful flashy effects. I didn’t finish it ’cause I picked up Burnout, a fun arcadey racing/crashing game, shortly thereafter. Before that, I played half of a great golf game from the Hot Shots series, and a Tower Defense type game that I picked up cheapish on PSN.

Combine all these with Resistance, which was given to me for my birthday, a few neglected Wii games from waaay back, and a few games coming out in the fall that really make me happy in the pants area… I think I need to take a few weeks off and shut myself in my basement to get caught up.

The couch futon will be very convenient for that.

Pineapple Express is another one from the Apatow/Rogen crew, and it’s my favorite yet. Gone are the romantic undertones of their other movies, but they kept up the humor. Bravo!

Batman needn’t be mentioned here but I’ll do it anyway. It’s easily the best comic movie to date, and one of the better movies overall in recent history. You’re doing the movie a disservice if you don’t see it in IMAX, and yourself a disservice if you don’t see it at all. It’s a masterpiece.

Step Brothers was meh. Watch it if you like Will Farrell or his crazy persona movies. I like ‘em enough so I got a kick out of it, but it’s really, really dumb. Rent it and turn off your brain.

Presidents of the United States of America put out a new CD a few months ago. I was listening to Pandora and I heard a song I didn’t recognize from them. So’s I opened up their webpage and saw their new CD on the front page. Kick ass! I picked it up and it’s very awesome. Highly recommended.

The Police rank up there in my top ten favorite bands. When I heard they were coming to the DTE, and I heard that my folks got us a set of tickets, I was ecstatic. They played an awesome set, and came back for two encores for a total of 2.5 hours. I’m sad they didn’t play Canary In A Coal Mine, but I can’t have everything. Elvis Costello was the opening act - he was pretty darn good too.

Books are still for suckers and I still avoid them like the plague (mostly ’cause I can’t read) but I needed another form of media so I could make that played out Wizard of Oz reference.

Want to see a magic trick?

The project I’m currently working on has failed to hold my interest nearly as much as the last one. I would spend a half hour typing out some code, then I’d find myself on Kotaku or something browsing through comments. I didn’t have that problem with Smart Tan.

I’ve been trying to figure out why this is happening, going through a few explanations like ‘it’s a dumb idea for a site’, or ‘the customer is too fickle, doesn’t know what he wants’. On my way home from another Saturday at work catching up from another week of lack of progress, I think I’ve pinpointed the problem: my own perceived inadequacy as a programmer.

When something is broken in the hardware and software industry, be it a server or a website, it’s very easy to please the customer. They see the broken thing before and they see the fixed thing after and there is a definite metric of improvement. I like these customers and the prospect of working on these types of projects makes me happy because I know the customer will be happy in the end. Smart Tan was one of these ‘Fixer-Upper’ projects, and I didn’t mind putting in 10 hours/day on it.

When dealing with new hardware or software, here’s where the industries diverge. If someone wants a new computer, they call us, we send the specs to Dell or whatever, then Dell makes the computer for us. It’s really a simple process; more simple, really, than fixing a broken computer.

Creating a brand new website, on the other hand, is much more stressful than fixing a broken one. The customer doesn’t have a ‘broken’ site to look at for a metric for what’s ‘better’. All they have is other sites - that have been in development for years - to use for ideas for their new site. When I receive phone calls from a new-site customer, 75% of their requests are met with, “No, we can’t do that in our time frame/budget.” It’s especially frustrating when the sales person originally tells them that something is doable, but I’m not completely aware of the scope when I give my estimate. The overall negativity in new-site projects really drains me after a while. Repeatedly telling a customer ‘no’ makes me perceive myself as an inadequate programmer subconsciously, and it takes away from the focus I try to put in every day.

Hopefully, now that I’ve found why I feel so crappy after working on these projects, I’ll be able to psych myself into coping with telling a customer ‘no’. Some requests are just too difficult to complete, and that doesn’t make me a bad programmer.

The following is what I consider to be a Proper Rant. This involves me berating some dumb kid who probably doesn’t deserve to be picked on. Then again, I didn’t deserve to have my time wasted by what he had to say, so we’re even. Parental discretion is advised.

Read the rest of this entry »

For his birthday, my sister’s fiancé got a few pre-screening tickets to the Will Farrell movie, Semi-Pro. I like Will’s work, the movie was free, and it’s a movie about a Michigan basketball team. It was an easy decision to take one of the four tickets.

First event of the evening was dinner at Buffalo Wild Wings, or ‘BW3′. For the uninformed, the third W stands for ‘weck’ - a salty bun. Chalk one up for Wikipedia. Anyway, this was the first time I’ve been to a B-Dub (my nerdiness precludes me from doing things that are considered cool) and I was excited to see what all the hype is about. Sadly, I was disappointed.

We told the waitress we were in a hurry and the place was empty so I figured we’d be eating in fifteen minutes. Thirty minutes later she came with our food, and the chicken on my sandwich was about half to two-thirds the size of the bun. The friggin’ patty weighed less than the bun, lettuce, and tomato combined.

I know this isn’t a five star establishment and it doesn’t claim to be, but they could put forth some effort in satisfying the customers. Everybody else’s food was good; I guess I can give it another chance. Plus there was more total TV screen surface area than the floors of my house. Quite impressive.

After BWW, we headed over to Emagine Theater, who hosted the pre-screening event. The seat cushion was really tall and tough so my legs fell asleep half way through the movie - which tends to be distracting. I don’t remember the chairs being as high as they were last time I was at the Emagine. Maybe they have different types of chairs in each of the theater rooms. Blah.

Leg-related distractions aside, the movie was pretty funny. They mentioned Ann Arbor which gives an automatic +10 cool points in any movie. A suitable addition to the collection of WF movies in the line of Anchorman, Talladega Nights, etc. I’d have paid to see it, so getting the free ticket was really cool. Thanks Levent!

It’s 3 am and I can’t sleep. I think I’m going to be tired as hell tomorrow. It’s OK though cause my cat is playing with a piece of dental floss that’s statically clinging to her face. It’s hilarious. Every time she bats it away, it comes right back and sticks to her face.

While I’m awake, I might as well make a mini-rant about a bumper sticker I saw today. It said something along the lines of, “If bugs don’t eat it, why should I?” with a reference to some organic food webpage. Personally, I eat non-organic foods because bugs don’t. Actually, I eat non-organic food because it’s more convenient, I’m cheap, and I don’t give two shits about what I put in my gullet. But after all those it’s definitely because bugs don’t make good seasoning.

I’ve started the habit of making these blog posts on Wednesdays. This week had to wait until today so I could share my opinions on Cloverfield.

Yesterday morning, a coworker came in with a bunch of free passes to a sneak peak of Cloverfield, a monster movie in the same strain as Godzilla. Skyler beat me to the punch (may contain spoilers) on the review front and I agree with a lot of the things he said. Mostly that the movie isn’t just seen, it’s experienced.

The most impressive part of the movie, I think, is the cinematography. JJ Abrams chose to film the whole movie from the perspective of a hand-held camcorder recovered after this monster attacks New York. Throughout the movie, the small angle of the camcorder added to the suspense, depriving me of my senses. Whenever I wanted to see something on the screen - the monster, things blowing up, etc. - the camera would move away because the guy holding the camcorder would be running away from said danger, and I could only *hear* people panicking, which further increased my own sense of panic.

The camcorder is also used to inject some comedy and drama into the suspense. Early in the movie we learn that the camcorder is actually recording over a tape that’s particularly important to one of the main characters. Occasionally, for one reason or another, the camera stops recording and parts of the previously recorded tape are shown on the screen, as you might see in a home movie that’s been recorded over a few times. These short bits are thrown in strategically during the beginning of the movie for a bit of comic relief, and toward the end for a greater feeling of attachment to the two main characters.

The movie was short, clocking in at under 80 minutes, which is believable considering the battery life on a camcorder. I’m reading a lot of people would have liked an ending with more closure or answers, but I disagree. This was a movie about people trying to save their loved ones and escape a rampaging monster, not people trying to find out what it is or where it came from. I would go on but it would reveal the ending and I don’t want to do that. Other critics say the dialog is too unintellectual. The cinematography, not the dialog, is what makes this movie great. Again these people aren’t intellectuals so they don’t talk like them.

Right now, Rotten Tomato critics average about 70%. I’m hoping that score will go up as more critics submit their scores. I think this movie deserves around 85%-90% as one of the better films in the ‘Giant Monster Attacks Huge City’ genre. I’ll definitely be adding this to my collection.

Speaking of ‘Giant Monster Attacks Huge City’ films, when are we going to see a Rampage movie?

Happy New Year, everybody! *sigh* Going back to work after the holidays really sucks, especially when you’re coming down with a cold. =( Whatever, I can deal.

As a holiday bonus, I’m giving everybody a wishlist of some bands I want to see in Rock Band’s Download Content over the next 12 months:

• Green Day
• Presidents of the United States of America
• Alice in Chains
• Seven Mary Three
• Bluegrass(!)
• Our Lady Peace
• Gorillaz
• Aquabats
• Local H
• Barenaked Ladies
• Bush
• Anything from the Guitar Hero 80’s Mix

Never before has a group been so awesome only to become so terrible.

That’s all I have for today.