faketrout

Thursday, March 31, 2005

Future Perfect

Halo 2 has been out for nearly 5 months. Inspite of the announcement of the expansion pack and the continued online obsession, I thought it was time to try another shooter. Being a fan of Timesplitters 2, featuring a good deal of the old N64 GoldenEye team, I figured the third installment of the series Timesplitters: Future Perfect was the obvious choice.

Halo's hero is Master Chief

He's an unstoppable war machine.

Timesplitters has Cortez

He's a fucking idiot even when there are two of them.

The story is contrived and ridiculous in purpose. Cortez is part of a future military force and is sent back in time to nab some time travelers and stop an alien menace. Along the way, he'll meet an array of oddball characters he'll have to assist and be assisted by in order to get the job done. Cortez will also frequently run into himself via some wormholes so you enjoy all his one-liners twice! Its goofy fun, and aside from being an excellent shooter on its own, TS:FP also functions as a satire game, taking shots at Indiana Jones, Resident Evil, Jurassic Park, etc...

Timesplitters doesn't offer the graphical brilliance of many other xbox games. In fact, I doubt it looks much different from the Playstation 2 edition. But, its got fantastic character designs and magnificent animation.

Multiplayer is available as well with mountains of options, gametypes, weapons, maps and probably variables I never thought of. The kitchen sink approach might actually be a negative here because it creates so many options that it makes it nearly impossible to play a pickup game. On the other hand, having some friends together online or off and a couple hours to kill and you'll be able to explore and chip away at the options at your ease. If you've got the time and patience, you could pretty much play any kind of FPS variant there is, with more odd weapons than just Halo's Brute Shot and Sentinel Beam.

Tuesday, March 29, 2005

Bring Your Own Bombs?

So my brother has been at me over the new SOAD for a few days, and I was ready to redeem one of the dozens of free iTunes credits to get it when he offered up this download which I now share with you.

the pepsi/itunes contest is totally sweet this time around because you can get mt dew and other pepsi stuff with winning caps. i bought a case of 12 winners last week.

Friday, March 25, 2005

Relocation

whats all this? toys in bins? CDs packed up? DVD and game systems returned to their boxes?

Why it must be moving day!

Punishment

Here's a first: I'm linking to another blog. This type of thing is common in the blog world, but I wasn't going to do it until now. Check out the Punisher t shirt, complete with a famous canadian mugshot!

Wednesday, March 23, 2005

U-Haul, U-nbelievable!

I move on saturday. I should've secured a moving vehicle before now, but I finally tried to do it today. I found the U-Haul location nearest me and called them up. the phone rang for 2 minutes solid before I hung up and checked the number. When I called a second time, a gentleman answered. I asked to reserve a truck on saturday.
"Did you call before?"
"Yes, I called just a moment ago. The phone rang for 2 minutes without answer"
"So you didn't call before"
"This is me calling now, can I get a truck on saturday?"
He seemed to think I should've called to reserve a truck before I called the reserve a truck. He told me didn't know and he'd have to ask his manager who was not at the location at the time. What else could someone possibly do working there except take calls from people like me with similar requests? I was beginning to understand why he didn't answer the phone the first time I called.
He took my number and promised to return my call. 30 seconds later, I he informs me that a 14 foot truck would not be available, but they had 2 10s and a 20. I opted for a single 10. He then put me on hold, or at least held the phone away from his mouth as he spoke to someone else in the room. When he returned, he told me the computer was down and I could call back tomorrow morning. I explained that I work during the day and would not be able to get them until after 4 PM. Apparently this isn't a problem and he assured me that if I wanted to I could come at 8 AM on saturday and just rent the truck without a reservation.
I thought about reserving one on the company website, but my confidence in this company is questionable, and I've had rotten luck brick and mortar businesses fulfilling web demands. OK, so it was expedia losing a hotel reservation 4 years ago, but I still feel nervous.

Tuesday, March 22, 2005

the school kids call it "The Daily"

I had expanded cable without paying for it thanks to a mistake from the cable company for the past 6 months. They fixed the glitch last week.

The only thing I miss is The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, but thanks to the love of btefnet and bittorrent I download it the next day, without commercials!

televised piracy is way better than music piracy. plus unlike music downloading, I actually do delete the files within 24 hours most of the time so I can rest easy in that "testing" grey area. No idea if thats really legal, but the TV industry is way behind the movie industry which is in turn still behind the struggling music industry so it might be a while before they take the DVRs away.

Sunday, March 20, 2005

3 out of 4 can't be wrong

I've read on only 3 seperate blogs maintained by friends some level of excitement over a new nine inch nails record. Allow me to join this crusade.

Saturday, March 19, 2005

Take a damn good look.


Because thats the cleanest this sink will ever be.

I cleaned it because I am moving. I'm also packing things. Very, very slowly. I shoudl be doing that right now. Instead I've wasted the whole day catching up with Red VS Blue and eating burritos.

Actually, I cleaned a lot, but this place is such a fucking disaster that you'd never know.

Once I start moving things will be a lot better because it'll be more like "this goes in the truck, this doesn't" and I'll just be putting stuff to the curb all over the place. This will include my futon, which has been my precious bedding for the past 18 months, but broke today when I sat down to put on my pants. How timely.

Friday, March 18, 2005

Get Fuzzy


Get Fuzzy caught me by surprise when I started reading the paper every day at work last fall. it had been years since I regularly checked the comic section and in the post Watterson/Larson world, I didn't miss it.
But I've enjoyed Bucky Katt and Satchel Pooch's endless torment of their owner Rob so much over the last few months, I went ahead and grabbed Groovitude last night and virtally devoured it today. It hits that same level of pet owner humor that many other strips have successfully done in the past, but without the calm and occaisionally sappy moments. "Fuzzy" is anything but. Its brutal and hurtful as often as possible, and scratches on some of that weird kind of Adult Swim kinda humor here and there, which is pretty damn edgy for anything in the newspaper comics pages.
Darby Conley's writing may have me in stitches, but his art is what caught my eye. He lives in his details and shading, with depth and dynamic imagery thats far too uncommon in the comics section. He's writing and drawing and monthly comic book 3 panels at a time it seems! The rest of the comics page seems to be made up of people who have little to no art skills at all, getting by on their jokes. I guess the only thing that bothers me is that joke writers can just write their joke, and if they can't do better than they're doing (and I won't name names) they need to partner with an better artist.
Conley has got it as much as Aaron McGruder does, and that a high complement from me, since I continued to read Boondocks on the web for years after not reading it in print, and even now when the paper I read doesn't print it. PvP creator Scott Kurtz may be gunning against Syndication, but Get Fuzzy makes me beleive its not broken yet.

Tuesday, March 15, 2005

Episode Three

please enjoy this torrent of the trailer

Wednesday, March 09, 2005

The balance has shifted.

I firmly believe now that my cat is pooping far more than she eats. And she eats a lot.

Tuesday, March 08, 2005

Devil's Due NEEDS this.

Don Figueroa's submission for the license.
Its been 3 months since a new Transformer book shipped. Thats too long for the cliffhanger return of Megatron.

Could things get any worse?

X-Ecutioners: Revolutions



Wow, so this record came out last summer and I bought it and loaded it onto my computer but it wasn't until tracks started popping up while shuffling on my iPod did I actually really listen to it. I took off the skits after listen to them each once, as I'm prone to do on rap records.
The bulk of the record is some pretty good beats that are NOT mucked up by guest rappers. Sure, we got some favorites like Cypress Hill, Ghostface, and Fat Joe, but the tone is VERY much the opposite of rap radio, so I'm all for it. The instrumentals make this record and I'm sure I'll have to go back and get some of their older hits to complete the collection. I'm already thinking of using only X-Ecutioners for the no-brand movie I've got on the table for next month.

Thursday, March 03, 2005

Constantine

I understand that this movie is based on a very successful comic called Hellblazer, but I've never read it and given that I haven't been to a comic store in 2 months to buy books I want, I'm not likely to start. Apparently a lot of stuff changed.

I understand that this movie contains a fair amount of religious implications and references, but I've never gone to church and I'm not likely to start. Apparently a lot of stuff is wrong.

Those two qualifications out of the way, I enjoyed this movie. I'd highly reccomend it to anyone not reading comics or involved in the church. The guy who played the devil was funny and cool, and even Keanu had a little more personality than we're used to.

I was about to insert a hilarious photo of Jon Lovitz portraying the devil from SNL, but google image search failed.

A recurring theme in photography.

If you look at the moblog link to the left (shamefull updated more than my words in this column) you'll see I love taking pictures of funny signs and labels. If feel my most recent post of Soda flavors best represents this.