Dan’s Green Hammock

Why sit at the office when you can take a little field trip to the ironworks…

After watching two of the “awesome” blockbusters that came out lately, namely Terminator 4 and the new Transvesti… *sigh* …Transformers, I think I got to the point where I have pretty much had enough of this mainstream, special effect- and explosion-laden crap. The new Terminator made me feel like someone detonated a stun grenade in a close proximity to my head and the new “awesome” (again the word!) blockbuster by the one-and-only Michael Bay melted whatever was left of my brain. The movie was like 2,5h long and if it wasn’t for the friends I was at the cinema with, I don’t think I would survived the final hour. Oh how much I wanted to just leave the cinema and go home. I was constantly reminded of Uwe Boll’s youtube video (can’t find the original so no link ), which was coincidently directed at Bay, in which the world-class video game movie director told him exactly what he thought of his movies (quotes like, “you make shitty movies”, “explosions” and “I am a fucking genius” come to mind). If you, my dear reader, are lucky enough not to have been to the movie yet, take my advice about seeing it: DON’T!!!!

Or else you may find yourself scared to death of a little trolley the cleaning-lady keeps her bucket and mop on… fearing that any moment it will transform into something completely different. Oh the horror!

Last weekend I was in Szczecin to attend a wedding ceremony, and of course the party that followed… But that’s not what I really wanted to write about (although yes, lots of vodka and I won a karaoke contest at 3am in the morning). Anyways, to get to Szczecin I had to take an InterCity train. It was maybe halfway through the journey that I noticed the following on the corridor:

The Hammer of Safety: +5 Defense?!

An ordinary glass breaking hammer…

A few more random things which I found interesting while watching the E3 presentations (in no particular order and nowhere near complete). As was the case with 2008, it seems that the holiday season will be once again packed with interesting games to play.

Heavy Rain
“What would you do to save someone you love?” – that’s the game’s story in a nutshell. Still not much is known about it except that the player takes control of four different characters all in search an elusive Origami Killer. Quantic Dream’s previous title, Fahrenheit, was one of the most interesting games I have ever played, so this is probably going to be a game I will get a PS3 for… It looks like it’s going to be an amazing experience. And I absolutely love the music in the trailer.
Check out the developer walkthroughs: one two three four five

Uncharted 2 – Trailer / Gameplay
I’ve seen the first Uncharted in action and it seemed to be a really good game, so I suppose it’ll be on my list when I someday perhaps get my hands on a PS3. I love the city view seen in the gameplay video – seen it via a live feed yesterday at much higher quality and it was very impressive.

Mass Effect 2
Rumored to come out in January 2010, it’s a sequel to a hit sci-fi RPG of 2007. I still remember the times when I played the first Mass Effect. Play till 3/4am, go to sleep, wake up at 9am, go to work, go back home, relax, start playing at midnight till 3/4 am… repeat. A two week long marathon.

Assassin’s Creed 2 – Gameplay / Trailer
This time we take control of an assassin living in Renaissance Venice, in year 1486. Developers promise much more diversity in what the player can do compared to what was possible in Assassin’s Creed 1.

Splinter Cell: Conviction
The fifth game in the successful stealth series, this particular title has an interesting development story. The first gameplay trailers (the actual gameplay starts around 5:30) were shown in 2007 and featured completely different gameplay mechanics, truly redefining the series. And suddenly, perhaps because of similarities to Assassin’s Creed, the title went MIA, a couple of my friends who worked on it left UbiSoft, and now it seems that the game was reworked from scratch – with a different story, different gameplay… and a new creative team.

Fallout 3: Point Lookout
The new Fallout was quite enjoyable and since Broken Steel was also fun to play, I’m definitely looking forward to this next expansion.

Wet
Patrick Fortier, know to Myst fans as the Creative Director of Myst 4: Revelation, is working on this game at A2M, so check it out!

Project Natal
I’m very skeptic to the whole idea. Wii at least had a physical controller, but I’m not sure if driving using an imaginary steering wheel made of air will actually work well. It seems, however, that everyone is doing everything they can to bring motion-sensing controllers to their consoles, as both Sony and Microsoft revealed new pieces of technology to try to jump into a nice little niche that Wii has created for itself.

Having said that though,

Project Milo
Molyneux took Natal and created another insane prototype with it. Obviously the whole thing had to be hugely scripted and it feels like the Fable dog all over again, but it’ll be interesting to watch how the idea will evolve into a full-fledged game. Perhaps this is the how Natal could make sense, compared to driving using an imaginary steering wheel…

The Last Guardian
Previously known as Trico, the third game in the Ico/Shadow of the Colossus universe.

Modern Warfare 2
I liked the first Modern Warfare, as it finally got rid of the shooter stereotype: “let’s make a WW2 shooter!”. Plus multiplayer was insanely enjoyable. I find it interesting that “Call of Duty” is not part of the title. Seems like Infinity Ward is leaving Call of Duty in Treyarch’s hands now.

The Saboteur
Another interesting game that I’m looking forward to. It’s set during WW2 and allows the player to control a spy living in Paris.

The Secret of the Monkey Island – Special Edition

Now if only they’d also refresh Indiana Jones and The Fate of Atlantis…

For those of you unfamiliar with the game, it’s a jRPG spanning 4 DVDs of content, which tells the story of a group of immortal beings who lost all of their memories living in a world that’s going through a ‘magic-industrial’ revolution. Sound fun, right?

The game’s beginning is very slow and slightly boring, so that is perhaps the reason it landed on my shelf and stayed there for more than a year. As I mentioned before, however, recently I decided to give it another try and up until now I completed the first three discs (or acts if you will). The game turned out to be extremely enjoyable and in some places even reminded me of older adventure games (especially a certain haunted house part, where you have to figure out a small puzzle concerning mirrors and stone plates). In other words, tons and tons of fun.

Unfortunately, as soon as I started on the fourth disc, everything went downhill very quickly. Not because the game went bad – or well, I can’t really say if it does or not. Why? To put it simply, the fourth disc refuses to work. At first it kept giving me read errors during a certain loading screen and after I tried to clean it, the XBox no longer even recognised it as a game disc! All it does now is display the following message:

Wow! Seriously? So you mean it's not in an XBox console?!

Every other disc works fine, so thankfully it’s not an issue with the console itself. The worst part is that I bought the game more than a year ago in an Australian internet store, so I supposed getting a replacement is out of the question.

Oh, right! I keep forgetting! There is always Microsoft’s WONDERFUL disc replacement program! All you have to do is send them the faulty disc and they will send you a new one! Now, how cool is that? Actually, it’s not. Unless you want to pay €15, which at this point is the amount the game costs right now.

I’m going to get the disc repaired (which means putting it into a machine which sands away the outermost later of the disc and replaces it with a new one). We’ll see how that works. If it doesn’t, there’s always the toothpaste method…

Kosheen's 2009 Concert in Warsaw

It was my second time a Kosheen concert and there is only one thing that can be said about it: it was insanely awesome! Great tunes and great performances by the energetic Sian Evans and others. I managed to find a spot right at the stage, which allowed me to see everything at close distance and even send a huge thumbs-up at Sian (which I think she noticed, as she responded with one too :]).

Along with their older hits they performed three new songs called respectively “Spies”, “Another” and “Sign”. I have heard “Sign” and “Another” a year ago in Cracow, but oh boy did the tracks change. The new versions played yesterday were very different from what I heard before. Hopefully, the new album will come out soon as I can’t wait to hear the final studio versions of the new material, which so far promises to be very, very good.

I found a video of the concert on YouTube (whoever recorded it was close to my location, judging from the camera’s position) – it’s a track called “Catch”, one of the last ones Kosheen performed yesterday. You can see for yourself how great the concert was!

I decided to make a move from Blogger to WordPress. I think it’s a pretty good decision seeing that I won’t be dependent on google’s software and servers and will be able to keep all the blog data on my server. Anyways, keep in mind that this new blog is a work in progress and I will be making smaller and bigger changes in the coming days.

E3 is almost here and as usual a substantial amount of new teasers and trailers for games is being released. And that’s good.

What caught my attention today (in no particular order):

Batman: Arkham Asylum
Not really looking forward to this, but Joker mayhem does look kind-of fun, I suppose.

Brink
The upcoming shooter from Splash Damage – the sci-fi setting looks interesting, but we’ll see how revolutionary the gameplay will be.

DJ Hero
Nothing interesting to see here really… I watched it in hopes of seeing some actual gameplay, but perhaps it is too early for that yet. Not a game I will get, not a chance.

Mass Effect 2
This game doesn’t need a comment.

Alpha Protocol
Still not sure what to think of this game. I guess I’ll wait for the reviews.

Brutal Legend
Not a Jack Black fan myself, but this new game from Tim Schafer could actually be pretty good. A friend of mine is excited about it, so I guess I’ll just borrow his copy.

Obviously, all who played Alone in the Dark 4 (released in 2001) know that the game had a quite unique soundtrack consisting of disturbing, loud, industrial noises. It was an enormous change from the atmospheric instrumental soundscape of the first trilogy, nevertheless the new style fit the game quite well. If you’re like me, that is a huge fan of the series since 1992 (when the original Alone in the Dark premiered), check out this remastered soundtrack of The New Nightmare, available for download on the net. It’s actually quite listenable… and brings back good old memories of playing the game.

Alone in the Dark: The New Nightmare Soundtrack