and “On the Edge of a Cliff” by “The Streets”

I somehow managed to survive Blizzcon ‘08 without my feet exploding from standing in lines for 3 days straight. I’ll say this for Blizzard - they put on one hell of a convention for their fans! The tickets were $100 each, but I think they we got half that back in the goody bag alone. A starter pack of the WoW collectible card game, an account authenticator, three different keychains, and a 4-foot-long inflatable sword among other things. Oh, and a minature bottle of hand-sanitizer. Precious, precious hand-sanitizer.

I’d normally think using hand-sanitizer when you’re not a health-care professional would be a little extreme. I didn’t think that after I sat down at one of the communal Diablo 3 PCs. This is not a joke, or an exaggeration: One of the people who sat at or near that terminal before me smelt like a backed-up toilet. When buying a few shirts from the store, I stood behind a man who smelled like stale urine.

Probably the highlight of the show was the closing ceremony. Patton Oswalt did infact appear to do a show, and I hope some of it appears in his CD coming out next year. The in-house Blizzard band, Level 70 Elite Tauren Chieftan played 4 or 5 songs. For those of you not familiar with them, L70etc is a heavy-metal band made up of Blizzard employees, including the Art Director on vocals and the president of the company on Bass. Closing out the night was Videogames Live playing selections from various Blizzard games.

Unfortunately, I missed most of the section on Friday night hosted by Jay Mohr. I’d really liked to have seen the costume contest. Check out the winner. That turtle is not a dude in a costume.

I did get to see the Dance contest, though. Here’s the winner of that:

Anyway, I’m looking forward to seeing the exhibits and going to some of the panels. Maybe I’ll see some of my old World of Warcraft guildmates around. Comedian Patton Oswalt is going to be there… apparently? I don’t see any mention of it on his website. Hope I don’t buy too much stupid shit while I’m there!

http://www.chainsawsuit.com/20080328.shtml

The celebrations themselves were very tame, which was good. The last Bachelor party I went to, we all went to play a variation of bumpercar lacrosse. This time, it was just straight up go karting at Kart-O-Mania. That was a lot of fun, even if every single one of us walked out with a massive welt along the ribs from slamming sideways into the walls.

Anyway, I’m just bringing the trip up as an excuse to talk about how awesome Sirius’s satellite radio is. The variety and quality of channels is pretty great. Also, the feature where you can set up your tuner to alert you whenever an artist you like is playing is amazing. What it needs is the opposite of that, so that if an artist you hate comes up, the radio will automatically switch.

The first thing I would use it for is to make sure I never heard Kid Rock’s All Summer Long ever again. Let me get this straight. You wrote a song about listening to another song? Well, “wrote” is a strong word when you use that as an excuse to sample that song. Writing music is hard, guys!

And if you have Xbox Live, you can get the demo right now. Holy crap!

And that was my entire experience with Space Invaders up until this point - a week spent with that handheld almost 20 years ago.

Well… I’m still playing Space Invaders on a handheld, but everything else has changed! There’s the expected - the graphics are better, although they’ve kept the pixelated look. Every object in the game is colourful and vibrant. The music is all new, including a great remix of the ominous Space Invaders theme. The backgrounds throb and pulse with the new music, music that is accented by the sounds of your ship’s laser firing, and the impact noises on enemies.

The original enemies are all there, but now they can scatter projectiles across the whole screen, drop columns of burning light down on you, even reflect your shots back at you. They come in 3 different sizes now too, which doesn’t sound too game-changing until you fight them. The larger versions are logically equivalent to a group of 4 invaders, all moving at once across the screen. They can take ten times as long to kill it, but fire a quarter of the time that 4 invaders could. The small ones are the real threat - hard to hit and see. Even the regular invaders can turn sideways now, exposing less surface area for you to hit.

The flying saucers that sweep the top of the screen make a return, only this time they have colour variations that reveal their hidden powers. Some saucers will add another invader to the descending column. Others will charge and unleash lasers of their own at you. The bonus points they used to provide are now a real bonus level, where you can rack up points, or charge up your weapons. Oh yes, this is a modern shooter, and there are weapon power ups: Screen-clearing beams, spread shots, explosive and shots. The unmoving shields from classic Space Invaders even make a return as a temporary addition to the front of your ship.

Like the Pac-Man remake on Xbox Live released last year, Space Invaders Extreme keeps enough of the classic game to invoke nostalgia, but also updates the game enough so that people unfamiliar with the original can enjoy it. And at the budget price of $19.99, it’s hard to go wrong.

I can only assume this was the reason for her poor driving. It could have been anything. For example: extensive brain damage.

I’m using the brief periods where I can connect to write and post this update. In a way it’s a good thing, because it lets me focus on the recently released Metal Gear Solid 4 for the PS3. I’m a pretty huge fan of MGS1 and 2 (and Twin Snakes, of course) but sadly never got around to MGS3. It’ll definitely be hard to try at this point, since 4 is so good and fixes a lot of things that people consider “broken” about the series.

I also picked up Coldplay’s latest album, Viva La Vida and Tiesto’s newest entry in the “In Search of Sunrise” series, “In Search of Sunrise 7: Asia.” I always enjoy a lot of Coldplay’s songs, but this latest album is fantastic throughout, especially in the last half. “Life in Technicolor” reminds me of something that Bloc Party would do (although I suspect it has more to do with producer Brian Eno), and you can definitely hear the influences of Blur in “Yes.”

In Search of Sunrise is also good, although I don’t think it has any standout tracks like the Gabriel & Dresden remix of Way Out West’s “Mindcircus” from In Search of Sunrise 3: Panama. At least it plays like an actual trance CD, unlike Armin Van Buuren’s Imagine. If you haven’t seen the video for “Going Wrong” yet, I highly recommend it! It answers the question “What if you tried to make a boy band video with one boy, no budget and a blue screen?” The funny thing is that they’re blue-screening the streets of some Mediterranean city. You guys are European. You couldn’t fly to Ibiza for a weekend? The whole thing looks like it was cut together on a Sega Saturn.