The Ziggurat of Doom

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http://wildammo.com/2009/07/27/unusual-paintings-of-obama-naked-with-unicorns/

Someone is making a Twilight MMO.

… I can’t actually manage to form words for this other than “No. Just… no.”

If you liked Chewbacca’s blog, you might also enjoy Wookiepedia

Prototype (360): Did you play Grant Theft Auto IV, and wish that (a) you could get right to the murderin’, (b) there were a lot more tanks, and (c) more missions involved eating people’s brains? Prototype might be for you.

The movement controls are slightly finicky and prone to over-compensation, but once I got used to them I was moving right along. The power upgrades are pretty awesome — sure, the whipfist is the go-to weapon in 99 out of 100 fights, but it’s not like most of the fights are particularly hard, so use whatever’s fun for you. And the ones that are hard, you generally need to use something more specific anyway. I think the challenge is in a pretty good place for most of the game.

The one big issue I have is that once you can hijack helicopters, it becomes trivially easy to fly around, nuke stuff from orbit, collect your “EP”, and upgrade all your attacks to 11. This is mostly very boring, and not helped by the extremely dubious helicopter controls.

Still: open world mayhem, an action-movie plot, plenty of violence. Good game to blow off some steam.

BlazBlue — Calamity Trigger (360): Apparently the Guilty Gear property got tied up in some legal wrangling with Sony, so Arc Systems Works told them to go to hell and rolled a new property. The plot is fighting-game-incoherent (which is to say, consists mainly of hilariously over the top cutscenes), so whatever. The graphics are crisply gorgeous, the animations are smooth, and the soundtrack ranges from decent background noise to actively great. I haven’t exactly plumbed the engine in depth, but so far it’s at a nice place in terms of execution. Most gatling combos and special cancels are pretty slick and intuitive, and the “Drive” button is something of an all-purpose “do something cool” command that helps add some variety to character combos. Obviously there’s more at the high end, including the return of Roman Cancels (now called Rapid Cancels) that should give competitive players something to work with.

Character variety is decent, though a couple of the designs aren’t as original as I’d hoped for. Fortunately, they all seem to play pretty well and differently.

The Story mode is a pain. Getting 100% completion on a character’s story mode involves iterating through the win and loss branches of every fight, even when the loss branch is not much more than “u lose game over”. So the pattern of “save, lose, load, win, save, lose, load, win” gets pretty tedious after a while. And there’s an awful lot of text for a story that’s pretty spare.

Overall, still a blast to play, and hoping to spend a lot more time learning it. Highly recommended.

As most of you know I’m on furlough this week, which, in addition to giving me time to cook real dinners for once, also gave me a spare hour to shuttle back and forth between the Sprint and Apple stores in Legacy Village today, comparing the iPhone and the Palm Pre. I came away with a Pre, but since I’ve got 30 days where I can return it and still not be locked into a contract, I’m still thinking of it as “on probation”. Full review below the cut - it’ll be a long one.

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Apparently, the Nepal airport is so prone to corruption that the government has decided Something Must Be Done:

Nepal’s anti-corruption authority has come up with a novel solution to rampant bribe-taking at the country’s only international airport — the pocketless trouser.

The authority said it was issuing the new, bribe-proof garment to all airport officials after uncovering widespread corruption at Kathmandu’s Tribhuvan International Airport.

Brilliant.

(Via Bruce Schneier.)