That being said, the game controls wonderfully. Effortlessly traversing the environments feels great. The problem is this quickly becomes boring because of the aforementioned problems.

If only the game’s design were as well executed as its gameplay and art direction, this would have been a fantastic game.  What could have been a great game is only decent. As it stands, this game is distraction that will last you ten hours or so, making it just worth a rental.

The game is challenging, but not impossible.  Highly recommended.

Shit.  Have I really not updated since August?

SOMA wasn’t as terrible as I had assumed, but yeah it was bad.  You can read a review of the show here that will paint a picture of it for you.

Setlist after the jump.

Agenda Suicide
Dropkick the Punks
Hospital
Machine in the Ghost
Desperate Guys
Forever Growing Centipedes
Birth
Your Retro Career Melted
I Treat You Wrong
Psycho
Posed to Death
Get Seduced
Disappear
In Concert
Mirror Error
Worked Up So Sexual

—
Paranoiattack
The Geeks Were Right
Glass Danse

I saw Chromeo play at the House of Blues here in San Diego last week, which was awesome.  It happened to be P-Thugg’s birthday so they brought a cake out and sang for him.  Immediately after that they did a short Journey tribute.  Totally rad.  Here’s some video I took of it… sorry it sucks.

Later this month I’ll be seeing Radiohead and next month I’ll see Ratatat.  I can’t wait for those shows.

Before that was Comic Con.  My objective of not spending money was a devastating failure.  I bought Tachikoma, Fuchikoma, EVA-01, Paragoomba, and Bob-omb action figures, as well as 8 Samurai Executioner books and 2 Hellboy books.  Overall, the show was a laid-back experience.  We didn’t make a big effort to get there early on any day, and didn’t go to many panels.  The three panels I attended in full were Watchmen, Pixar, and Kevin Smith / Seth Rogen.  We tried to go see the Ghostbusters Game panel, but it was cancelled due to a “scheduling conflict” with the talent (aka Dan Aykroyd).  I also got some awesome t-shirts.  Among them are designs featuring Donkey Kong, Megaman, Watchmen, Ghostbusters, and Marathon.

Aside from that, I’ve gone to see some movies.  The highlight has to be the Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, which I’ve seen twice now (once in IMAX).  This was the Batman film I’ve always hoped for.  Heath Ledger steals the show and sets the tone of the movie.

The movie does a few interesting things.  It mixes in some live-action video clips, for one, bringing actor Fred Willard into the film.  The most daring thing the movie does is that it goes for long stretches without any dialogue aside for the very small vocabulary the robots have, limited basically to their names and a couple other words.  Both of these are risky moves for Pixar, but I think they were a rousing success, particularly the lack of dialogue.  It makes for one of the most heartfelt, funniest movies of the year.

Something else to note with WALL-E is the short that runs with the film, Doug Sweetland’s Presto.  Presto had me laughing harder than I have in a long time.  In the short, Sweetland channels Chuck Jones at the top of his form… it’s very trippy to see a Disney short done in the Warner Bros. style.  The short alone is worth the price of admission.

Yes, that’s what the new Megaman game actually looks like.

A couple blogs have linked to this forum post which confirms that Megaman 9 is coming as a Wiiware/PSN/XBLA downloadable exclusive game.  Rumored bosses include Magma Man, Galaxy Man, Jewel Man, Concrete Man, Hornet Man, Plug Man, Tornado Man, and Splash Woman.  The most exciting part is the news that it’s going to look like an NES game and go back to the series’ roots in terms of design and gameplay.  I can’t wait to play this… it’s most likely I’ll download it for the PS3.  Unfortunately, the Wii’s storage space is too precious, so I’d rather save it for Wii-exclusive titles.

After the movie, Lannice mentioned the scuffle over the final cut of the film between Edward Norton and Marvel. This left me curious, so I did some reading. Norton and Louis Leterrier (the director) pushed for a cut that was about 20 minutes longer, a little more meditative. Marvel wanted a streamlined cut, the most commercial film possible. Marvel obviously won the argument. Some film blog got wind of this, broke the story, and branded it a “feud.” The story exploded, but apparently it’s way out of proportion, at least according to a statement Norton submitted to Entertainment Weekly. You can read the whole story and the statement here.

Anyways, I’m left curious about the alternate cut. Theres a total of around 50 minutes of unused material; I guess we’ll have to wait for the DVD release.

A sidenote: at last summer’s Comic Con, they had announced that Norton would also be working on the film’s script. According to another article I read, Norton did a page-one rewrite of the script, rewriting mostly the dialogue but also adding some scenes. When Marvel submitted the script to the Writer’s Guild, the previous writer, Zak Penn, won the arbitration and was given sole credit. The article says “the Guild tends to favor plot, structure, and pre-existing characters over dialogue,” but that’s still unfortunate.

The first Legend of Zelda is, arguably, Miyamoto’s true masterpiece, the culmination of his first design era. His benchmarks: Donkey Kong created context and narrative, Super Mario Bros. brought speed and an expanding world beyond a single screen, and the Legend of Zelda created an actual world to explore, an organic place peppered with secrets. After its release in 1986, the next decade of Miyamoto’s career was one marked more by refinement than creation. But, in 1987, Miyamoto got experimental. Alongside the aforementioned Super Mario Bros. 2 is Zelda’s sequel, The Adventure of Link, a sequel so bizarre in its design choices that it’s still seen as a blemish on a series considered unimpeachable by gamers and designers alike.

Just thought I’d share that.  Now, back to MGS4.