E3 Coverage

Via Cnet, go to Crave for some excellent E3 coverage. 

I’m going to HAVE to get a Wii sometime soon.  I wonder how much I’ll get if I trade in all of my other systems . . .

Yeah, it’s a rail shooter, but I loved the House of the Dead shooters for the Xbox.  I even have the gun. 

Speaking of guns, ever played Splinter Cell?  Well it looks like Tazer has manufactured the StickyShocker:

“XREP is a self-contained, wireless projectile that fires from a standard 12-gauge shotgun. It delivers the same Neuro-Muscular Incapacitation (NMI) bio-effect as our handheld TASER X26, but can be delivered to a distance of up to 100 feet, combining blunt impact with field proven TASER NMI….

The TASER XREP launch velocity is approximately 300 feet per second….

Okay, that’s the real one.  But what about the one from Splinter Cell? 

A high voltage discharge device coated in adhesive resin. The Sticky Shocker will adhere to an enemy and give him an incapacitating shock. Hint: Fired into pools of water, the Sticky Shocker can neutralize multiple opponents.

Life imitating art.  You just gotta love it. 

Now where’s my damned jetpack?

Two Jerichos to Watch For

While I am admittedly a little too excited about CBS reversing their decision to cancel Jericho (starring Skeet Ulrich) and ordering new episodes (Go Rangers!!), there is some gaming news to share about a vastly different Jericho.  One that may actually get me to buy a PS3 once I can afford it.  Or at least rent one for the week. 

Clive Barker’s Jericho, to be exact, and it looks bitchin’.  Yes, I’m in my 30′s and I said “bitchin’.”  Deal with it. 

Clive Barker, if you don’t already know (and where the hell have you been if you don’t!) is the author of numerous books, plays, and screenplays.  Hellraiser movies ring a bell?  Those are based on a story in Clive Barker’s Books Of Blood.  He’s also gay, just as an aside.  Obviously if you’re not a fan of horror then this won’t be your particular schtick.  But it looks hella fun to me.  From Gamespy:

The game hinges on a regular recurrence of an ultimate evil, a seventh season big bad level of evil. Every few centuries or millennia, it begins to manifest in the real world, presumably to end the world. Throughout history, brave soldiers have forced it back into its otherworldly lair. Each time this occurs, the city it’s manifested in is pulled into its lair as well. By the modern day, its lair is a regular old onion of evil, with each city you clear leading back in time to another city, each of them utterly saturated with this ultimate monstrosity.

Gamespy’s reviewer seems to think the controls need some tweaking, so I’m hoping it gets the fine-tuning it deserves.  If you’ve played Undying then you know how horrifically enmeshed in a Clive Barker game it is possible to find yourself. 

What the hell happened to his voice?  He sounds like Harvey Fierstein in that clip, not the dapper englishman I’m used to seeing and hearing.  Oh, well. 

And while we’re talking about Clive Barker, there are several books of his I’d like to recommend: Imajica, The Great And Secret Show, Everville, and Weaveworld. 

And don’t forget to watch the other Jericho on CBS this summer so you can catch the new episodes in the fall!!! 

Swamped!!!

Due to an extremely heavy workload right now posting will probably be fairly light for the next few weeks.  Weekends right now are for fixing up the fixer-upper.  Heh. 

In the meantime, enjoy this:

Or maybe, this:

Robin Williams playing Spore.  Yes, you read that correctly. 

Unfortunately, with all of the delays this game has experienced, I fear it’s going to go the way of Peter Molyneux’s BC. . . namely, nowhere.  Dammit.  Oh, well, at least the video is funny. 

Every Played It?

I’ll admit I had my doubts.  I’ve seen a few people with those phony, hokey guitars strapped to themselves in the game stores at the mall, and never did I think I’d use one myself.  Little did I know some friends of ours had bought one for the kids.  Saturday night they brought it all over, and we played Guitar Hero II for the PS2. 

OMG what a blast I had with that game.  We used the guitar–you can use a regular controller, but the guitar is so much more fun–and were rocking out and laughing for hours on end. 

Personally, I think standing up while you play is the only way to go.  And, since the game lets you accumulate extra points for moving your guitar around as if you were really on stage–”Star Power”–hamming it up actually gets you a higher score.  If you can keep the beat. 

You can play either lead guitar or bass, and I chose lead–admittedly the harder of the two, but I swear, we had so much fun–we were all eighteen for a few hours that night.

Somehow, someday, I’m going to have to pick one of these babies up.  Even Norm was playing. 

Talk about laughing.    Love you, babe.       

Of course, we only had the one guitar.  Brian tells me that you can play with/against each other if you have two guitars. 

Put away the breakables, and look out for Jamie, king of the whammy-bar.  lmao

Gravitonus Workstation

Hardcore gamers, eat your heart out.  While it may look like a cross between the cockpit of The Nebuchadnezzar in The Matrix and the gunner’s seat in The Last Starfighter, I know I’d buy one in a heartbeat if I could afford it.  The cool factor alone is enough to justify it.  (Insert Manly Grunt here.) 

From LiveScience (via Technovelgy.com) :

The Gravitonus system allows the user to move freely in space. Like any good gaming system, it constantly orients the user relative to the user’s Earth Gravitational Field. (What, your gaming system doesn’t?) The Gravitonus system comes with an on-board computer that constantly analyzes the position of the user’s body, measuring local temperature and pressure for different body parts, and gently rotates the frame accordingly.

I can see myself locked into that thing playing CivIII on all 3 screens at once.  Sorry about the drool.  (But honestly, couldn’t they find anything besides cheap 70′s porn music for the video?)