Game finished: Defense Grid

image courtesy of Kotaku - check out the their coverage of the game

image courtesy of Kotaku - check out their coverage of the game

Defense Grid: The Awakening is fantastic. 2008 was definitely the year of the tower defense games, at least for me. I played and enjoyed a ton of them, most notably PixelJunk Monsters, Desktop Tower Defense, several Warcraft III mods, and now as the coda to the list, Defense Grid. This is a commercial release you can pickup off of Steam and later this year on your Xbox360 via XBLA. It’s $20 for the PC and worth every penny. It distinguishes itself from the pack with excellent graphics and audio, a really well designed UI, great unit and tower balance, and a healthy dose of replayability. I’ve listed this as ‘finished’ because I’ve beaten every level now at the default difficulty level, but there’s a ton more to do, including replaying the levels at a higher difficulty level and medaling in each level. The developers have more planned for this game if it sells well, so please consider it if you like tower defense games – there are few better ones than this and it’s a bargain for what you get.

The day the 1up died

Actually it was yesterday. This is a pretty major bummer. Craptacular web portal ‘ugo’ purchased 1up.com yesterday, shuttered EGM, laid off a significant percentage of the staff, and canceled all 1up podcasts and the 1up Show video blog. This has been rumored to be in the works for a while, but the extent of the changes is surprising. EGM was one of the longest in-print gaming magazine and one of the few remaining ones published in the US, and while I was never a regular reader I was a huge fan of the podcasts and video blog that it spawned – I was listening to at least 5-6 hours of 1up audio content a week and I’m really sad to see them end. Here’s hoping they land on their feet in this down economy. Meanwhile, this is further evidence of the death of print, which seems to be happening faster than most folks, myself included, thought it would. There’s a good piece over here by Clay Shirky that talks about this and other media-related subjects.

Just finished: Crystal Rain

So I just finished reading Crystal Rain. I didn’t enjoy it quite as much as the reviewers over on Amazon, but all in all it was an enjoyable read. Strengths would be: imaginative setting (descendents of an Aztec and carribean islander diaspora battle it out on a world fallen far from it’s starfaring origins, proxies in a war between interstellar powers trapped on the planet with them), action packed. Cons would be writing quality, cardboard characters, unsatisfying ending. It’s the authors first book, so he deserves some slack, but I’m not sure if I’ll continue on to the subsequent books in this setting.

New Year’s resolution

Last year my resolution was to give up my daily diet coke habit, and I actually succeeded, so this year I’m going to go for two resolutions. We’ll see how it goes. My first resolution is similar to last year’s, but this time I’ll focus on coffee. I drink way too much. My daily intake looks like: 2 cups before I get to work, a cup at work in the morning, and another cup in the afternoon after lunch. Things are even worse on the weekends, when I often drink three pots of coffee with Susan. For this year I’ll keep it simple, and resolve to lose the cup of coffee when I get to work.

My second resolution is to revisit one I madeand failed to keep a couple of years ago. You may notice the new lifestream in the right column of this site, and I’m going to do my bit to populate it by resolving to record every book and movie I read this year, much like I started to do in this booklog and movielog back in 2006. Part of the reason I abandoned the logs back in 2006 was it started to feel like a chore. To make this easier, this time around I make no guarantees as to how much I’ll say about a given book/movie/whatever – the resolution is to simply at a minimum record the fact that I did it, and maybe a sentence or two about what I thought. We’ll see how it goes.

Input lag: it’s why LCD televisions suck

I’ve had innumerable conversations with my friends about why I’ve stuck with my Sony XBR960 CRTV television (ie tube-based television), a model that’s often called the last great tube-based tv, despite it being only 32″ in this age of 46 and 52″ televisions. I stumbled across an exhaustively researched post that explains why I’ve stuck with my CRT which is better than anything I could write

RIAA finally gets a clue?

The RIAA finally appears to have figured out what pretty much everyone else has known for years – suing your customers is not good business practice, nor is it likely to convince the rest of your customer base to change their behavior. They’ve announced they’re going to stop suing individual file sharers and turn instead to partnerships with ISP‘s. Of course I’m happy to see this happening, but my message to the RIAA remains unchanged: FUCK YOU. I continue to hope you’ll be obsoleted out of business. No one loves a middleman, especially not a litigious heads up their ass middleman.

Low carb diet contributes to cognitive issues

Here’s a report on a the results of a study indicating that folks following a low carb diet perform poorly on memory-based tests. This is serious stuff to me as I definitely have short term memory issues. The good news is re-introducing the carbs solved the issue in the folks participating in the study. The bad news for me is, I can’t without inducing blood sugar/cholestoral/heart disease issues! Oh, the dilemma: die young but witty and on top of my game, or live long and a bit dimly. For now I’m sticking with the low carbs.

Technolust, December edition

Check out this unbelievably cool motion simulator rig for racing sims:

No price listed, and I’m sure it’s out of my range, but damn isn’t that cool? Now to convince Susan it’s an acceptable alternative to buying a sportscar for my pending mid-life crisis…

Friday Fun: Doom in Flash

Episode III: Inferno is set in Hell. The marin...
Image via Wikipedia

Been a while since I last posted a Friday Fun link, so here’s a doozy – play the original Doom from Id Software right in your browser with the flash plugin. This works surprisingly well and really brought back memories. Funny too, in that back in the day this was the most intense thing ever, and now of course it looks desperately crude. Still, it’s pretty fun to play and authentically recreates the experience, right down to the sluggishness you probably experienced back when this first came out, trying to get your 386 or 486 to push Doom along at a reasonable framerate. Check it out!

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