Links For 2-8-2010

Shameless Shilling

Right now Amazon has a buy two platinum hits titles, get one free promotion running. Lots of good titles in there, so you might want to jump on this before it expires.

Entertainment

Bill Murray decides the fate of Peter Venkman in GHOSTBUSTERS 3. Big spoiler here, if it's true.

ABC picks up Chiklis-Driven superhero pilot. He was 1/2 of the only good thing about FANTASTIC FOUR (along with Chris Evans' Human Torch) and THE SHIELD was awesome. I'll give this a shot.

Six reasons why '24' has jumped the you-know-what. Season 5 was 24's peak. I'm not even sure why I'm still watching.

LOST's Daniel Dae Kim tapped for HAWAII 5-0 remake. Ugh. Another remake. Still, the one of the busiest guys in show biz needed another project when LOST ends.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Joel Edgerton to star in THE THING. As decent an actress and as hot as Mary Elizabeth Winstead is, I still have no desire to see a prequel to one of the best movies of all time.

Captain America as USO song-and-dance man?. Wow, that sounds awful.

Video Games: Bioshock 2

1Up's BIOSHOCK 2 review

Destructoid's review: BIOSHOCK 2

Joystiq's review: BIOSHOCK 2 (single player)

Kotaku: BIOSHOCK 2 Review: In Case Of Rapture

Destructoid interview: The music of BIOSHOCK 2. I loved the soundtrack to the first game. Along with FALLOUT 3's soundtrack, it's been in constant rotation in my playlist on my computer. I definitely need to get the sequel's soundtrack.

BIOSHOCK 2 director talks about moral choice in games.

BIOSHOCK 2 Xbox 360 vs. PS3 - screenshot comparison. They look about the same to me. In one or two of the shots, the PS3 even looks slightly, just slightly, better.

2K on BioShock 2 ending leak: It 'won't make much sense'. I'm trying to avoid spoilers. If I was able to resist the temptation to download the leaked PC version today to tide me over until my PS3 disc arrives, then I can avoid spoilers.

Video Games

2K Marin says console wars “silly,” waste creativity. I agree with that. I'm happy with both the Xbox 360 and Playstation 3.

FALLOUT: NEW VEGAS to have wittier writing. Sounds good to me.

ALPHA PROTOCOL delayed again, this time with reasoning. Another game I've given up on waiting for. Hopefully I can muster some enthusiasm when/if it eventually comes out.

Tar Pit Time

Porn companies launch anti-piracy program. I'm honestly curious, is there anybody left who is willing to pay for porn in the 21st century? There's so much and all for free out there. Is that industry holding on to the few dinosaurs left willing to pay $30-40 (or more) for a DVD to maintain their old business model?

February Is Alright So Far

It's almost BIOSHOCK 2 day. My plan for Tuesday is play poker until UPS comes and while the game installs on the PS3's hard drive.Then, aside from bathroom/food breaks (for both me and the puppy), I'm going to play the hell out of BIOSHOCK 2 until LOST comes on.

I've been grinding* my way through all the seasons of ALIAS on DVD. I only watched the show sporadically when it was on TV, and have owned season 1 on DVD for years. Then asked for and received season 2 for Christmas. After burning through that, I saw that Amazon had the remaining three seasons on sale, so I picked them up. I'm about to start season 4 today. I recall watching most of seasons 4 and 5 on TV since they were usually paired with LOST. Anyway, I go through about a disc a day, sometimes less.

* Why not apply gaming/poker terminology to marathoning TV series box sets? It certainly fits.

I've also read through quite a bit of HELLBLAZER, I just finished Mike Carey's run, which was probably the best run since Garth Ennis'. Some of the in-between issues were a bit of a chore to read, and I found myself skimming those.

Poker has been going well in February. I'm actually crushing it this month. (I've been running at 66 bb/100.) I'm probably jinxing myself by saying that though. Anyway, I've nearly made back everything I lost last month. My losing sessions have been few, and losses small. I haven't been putting as much volume in as I want to/should be. I know it's because I'm trying to quit while I'm ahead or breaking even. So instead of sitting down and playing 300-500 hands or whatever, I'm stopping if I've been losing and break even, or if I win a buy-in or two.

When I sit down to play poker, I usually to open a few different programs. Of course, I open the PokerStars client. But I also have to open Holdem Manager. Then I like to have a notepad open, with a text file reminding me of some of the mistakes I make, and where I can take various notes while I play. I also like to keep calculator open for when I need to do some math that I can't quickly do in my head. (Usually when an opponent's bet is an odd fraction of the pot like 3/11ths or whatever. So, being lazy, I decided that all that mouse clicking every time I sat down to play was sort of wasteful and created a small .bat file that I click on and it fires all that stuff up at once. I don't know why I didn't do that sooner.

Links For 2-6-2010

Entertainment

Get ready for WATCHMEN 2. Comic sequels or prequels. Not a movie. At least, not yet. (See: WATCHMEN sequel? "Not a chance" says Hollywood.)

Video Games

BIOSHOCK 2 on PS3 requires mandatory 5Gb install. Between this and HEAVY RAIN, I better free up some space.

BIOSHOCK 2 devs prepared for fan backlash. Given how good the advance reviews have been, I say they shouldn't worry too much.

BIOSHOCK 2 soundtrack song list revealed. I love the first BIOSHOCK's soundtrack. So I'll definitely be downloading 2's soundtrack. (I'll probably hold out for a mega-rip from the PC version's audio files, like I have of the first game, which has EVERY piece of music from the game.) I've been checking out the streaming radio station a little bit over the last day or two.

SPLINTER CELL CONVICTION hits April 13. Yeah, I'll believe it when I'm putting the disc in the 360. Not until then.

FALLOUT: NEW VEGAS set for fall 2010. Something to look forward to in the fall. Let's get some more info...

First FALLOUT: NEW VEGAS info from PC Gamer. Sound interesting.

Oh, and here's some pix: FALLOUT: NEW VEGAS

PROJECT NEEDLE MOUSE is SONIC 4 Episode 1. I have fond memories of the original SONIC games.

Links For 2-3-2010

Entertainment

RedLetterMedia's PHANTOM MENACE review series was hilarious and despite being a comedy video, incredibly insightful. Now he's saving me from having to watch AVATAR! AVATAR Review (Part 1 of 2). (The second part is linked in the first part.)

Awesome Rip Torn update: he thought the bank was his house. That just makes this story even better.

Leaked LOST episode spurs surprising fan reaction. I'm among those who didn't download the leaked episode. I wanted to wait and watch it in HD. The only thing that sucked about that was all the commercials, which it felt like came up more often than usual.

LOST fans are 'asking wrong questions'. Uh oh. This sounds like the sort of talk that led to the endings of THE SOPRANOS and BATTLESTAR GALACTICA. I'm getting nervous.

LOST stars Fox, Lilly 'to quit TV'. Can't say I'll particularly miss either. They've become the worst characters on the show.

Peter Davison dismisses Doctors reunion. They could do one with Doctor's 7-10 though. (McCoy still looks pretty close to how he looked in the TV movie these days.)

Video Games

HEAVY RAIN: why a great game may be destined to fail. I can hazard a guess as to why HEAVY RAIN could fail: Not enough shooting and probably too smart a title for the average consumer.

HEAVY RAIN is a 4.2Gb install, lets you make origami. One of these days I should look into freeing up space on the PS3 hard drive.

BIOSHOCK 2 gets knock-out launch trailer. Less than a week to go!

FINAL FANTASY XIII Xbox 360 ships on three discs, says GameFly. Not wanting to deal with disc switching means that I'm probably going with the PS3 version if I get it. FINAL FANTASY is a Playstation title to me anyway.

Capcom developing new games primarily in Japan. Is this really news? Aside from a few studios elsewhere, Capcom being a Japanese company has always primarily developed games in Japan.

CRYSIS 2 set three years after original, more details on Nanosuit 2. I hate when I read articles like this and it makes me want to replay the original game. Sure, I've got a few days until BIOSHOCK 2 arrives at my door, but I feel like I should be using that time to work on poker (playing or studying) rather than reinstalling and farting around with a video games I beat two years ago.

Links For 2-1-2010

Catching up on links from the last few days...

Funny

See where STAR WARS credits go when they scroll off screen. This is pretty cool, in a home made special FX looking as good as Hollywood way.

Entertainment

RIP Zelda Rubinstein, our favorite movie psychic. Insert joke about "going into the light".

LOST's off-island character coincidences mapped out. This is obsessive nerdism.

Barrie hints at full RED DWARF return. I could swear that I read last year that it was confirmed that there was going to be a full new series of RED DWARF.

Reclusive author J.D. Salinger dies at 91. I remember reading CATCHER IN THE RYE in English class in school. We were supposed to read a chapter every few days or whatever. You know, the way books are read for class in school. I blazed through the whole thing the first day since it was interesting. I even bought a copy eventually.

THE LOSTER killed THE DIRTY DOZEN! Good. Even though it's inevitable, they shouldn't remake THE DIRTY DOZEN. While we're at it, check out the trailer for THE LOSERS. Looks pretty good to me, and the comic was great.

Probably how a meeting about SPIDER-MAN 4 should have gone. Oh yeah!

Steve Carell: I want to star in US version of ONLY FOOLS AND HORSES. I wonder if he's being serious.

Actors Gone Wild

HEROES actor Adrian Pasdar arrested in LA. Bah. Typical celeb trouble. Let's look at something more juicy...

Actor Rip Torn arrested drunk, armed in Conn. bank. Now that is interesting!

Video Games

BIOSHOCK 2's 'Scout' Plasmid, explained. I can't wait for next week. I just checked and Amazon has it as a release date delivery item. That and the $10 games credit made ordering it through them a smart move for me. (Went with the PS3 version.)

GRAND THEFT AUTO IV episodes coming to PlayStation 3, PC. Anybody who didn't think this was going to happen was kidding themselves. I was impatient and grabbed it for the 360, but I wish I held out for the PS3 version. On the 360 the pop-in and disappearing textures drove me nuts. I don't know if the full GTA4 game had that on the 360, but the PS3 version had none of that.

SILENT HILL: SHATTERED MEMORIES Wii vs PS2 FIGHT! Sounds like it's not worth buying the PS2 version. Glad I forgot this even came out then.

SYSTEM SHOCK 2's surprise ending — for Ken Levine, anyway. I bought SYSTEM SHOCK 2 years ago, and never got around to playing more than the first little bit of it. Maybe I should try installing it and giving it a go. (I also own the first one and never played it at all.)

FFXIII development started on PS2, delayed launch by a year and a half. I hope XIII plays like XII which is the only FINAL FANTASY game who's battle system (enemies are visible on screen and don't just suddenly appear every 3 or 4 steps you take) that I could ever stand to play again.

Kojima: “There is no greater crime” than delaying a game. Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!

HAHA

Feds plan to fight internet piracy like physical piracy. So they plan to fight it completely incompetently and ineffectively?

Final Poker Results For January 2010: Doomswitched

This one's a long one, so I went with the "click for more" option.

January, like December (and the end of November) before it has been a confidence destroying month for me. It also hasn't helped my bankroll any either. January 2010 was actually my first losing month since June of last year. I've been down from my bankroll's maximum since the end of November, but I have made a consistent profit every month since last July. Even in December, when I was running below expectation, I managed to turn a profit. This month was horrible though.