Well, everything's pretty well settled now. Raven's new building flat-out rocks. Our apartment is great. Walking to work is refreshing. Though I don't enjoy walking by two very dark wooded areas after those late nights at the office. A little eerie, that. I'm browsing the NewEgg site right now. Lots of new goodies to be had hardware-wise, and I'm fearing the inevitable upgrade coming soon. I originally just wanted to replace my Radeon 9800 sometime before Quake shipped. Now I'm going to have to go all-out and get a GF7800. And of course, we can't have my CPU be a bottleneck... so now I'm leaning towards the brand-spankin' new AMD FX-57, which also then requires a new motherboard, better RAM, etc... And my dual 120 gig hard drives are even filling faster than I can manage with my over-the-top game purchasing. Ouch. I've got time yet, but I feel for our bank account about now. On the gaming front, I've not had time to play much, but earlier today I gave the PSP a little time with both Lumines and Untold Legends. Lumines rocks and is a must-have; this much is a given. Untold Legends is a pretty bland hack-and slash, but I'm still really liking it. I could use some better camera controls, but it's raw hacking and slashing (oddly enough) and full of phat loots. I approve. Not like I bought it expecting anything very deep. Also spent some time in front of the Xbox with Destroy All Humans earlier this afternoon. I highly recommend it. Crazy over-the-top and hilarious human-destroying action with an edge of late 40s/early 50s satire and an open-ended GTA-style model? Yes please. I mean, any game that can dish out the line "But they're covered in nippled!" within the first 5 minutes of play deserves special commendations. Psychonauts now joins BG&E as the only non-Raven title I own multiple copies of. I bought the PC version some time ago, thinking the lower price would prevent Maggie from yelling at me. Turns out she wanted the game anyway and was annoyed I didn't get it on a different system. So today I caved in and bought the Xbox version. And by "caved in" I mean gleefully embraced my excuse to get another copy. This is one of the best games I've ever played, and a low-profile one at that. As such, I was probably going to get all platforms anyway - I gotta support their sales numbers and do crazy comparisons between all the versions! God I'm a nerd.

This better, CJ? :) So Maggie had me watch The Dark Crystal last night. I wanted to like it, I really did... It had this fantastic mythology to it, a darker/sinister edge, creative creature designs, and a whole host of other great things. But nothing happened. The narration at the start went on far too long, was far too repetitive, and not that interesting. Big events fell flat. A scene would occur... then two extended scenes of nothing. Scenes would be conveniently interrupted by the scarab things busting through the wall, then 30 seconds later all is well again. It was really disappointing, this fantastic buildup and potential all for something that... dull. Got some hip Raven swag the other day... Quake 4 and X-Men Legends II t-shirts. Woo. Gotta love getting an extra two days before you need to do laundry. They're pretty cool, though. And now, the best story ever^TM, brought to you by said swag: I went into work for a little while yesterday afternoon. Ended up heading over to Rocky Rococo for dinner with our lead designer Jim "Jersey" Hughes and more recent Raven addition Matt "Lunaran" Breit. Jersey and I, of course, ended up wearing our spiffy new Quake 4 t-shirts - Q logo on the front, "Quake 4" written across the back. Woman in line behind Matt looks inquisitively at the Q4 shirts, then leans over to Matt and asks "Excuse me... What's Quake 4?" Matt quickly responds, "The sequel to Quake 2." I think he expected her to continue questioning him, but she just looked at him like he was a sarcastic jerk.

New work in progress to share this morning; a little something I fiddled with last night and an excellent excuse to show off DW's kickin' image thumbnail support in the news posting system. Some of you familiar with my older work might recognize what this comes from.

So apparently Middleton is the #7 best place to live in the US. I'm not sure who comes up with this list nor the criteria they use to rank the cities, but I guess it's kinda cool. I was really impressed with some of the stuff on the fact sheet, though. Confirms some of the good things I've heard about this area. Made some more progress on the Eclipse Keyhole remake. Coming along nicely. Just need to finish cranking the detail and give a lighting pass. Who knows, I could have it done this weekend!

All my old portfolio content from my Half-Life days can now be found in the appropriate sections. I finally had time the last couple nights to sort through all my files locally and get everything re-organized and re-uploaded, then entered into the backend. I'm really pleased with how the shots look on the new layout; I think making the thumbnails and content listing shots bigger was a good choice. The simpler backdrop makes a world of difference, too. Hopefully will have some more updates to the Eclipse partial remake soon and I also will hopefully get around to filling in the remaining gaps in the site over the next couple days as well. I still need to finish sorting through my old links listing and see what sites don't exist and what ones I need to add...

Don't suppose anyone would know why my favicon.ico file isn't working entirely properly? IE hates it and Firefox refuses to display it unless I'm actively browsing in that tab. Boo. I was pleasantly surprised to find a familiar screenshot in this last week's Steam Update. That shot was Minerva, an episodic single player pack under development by an old friend of mine, Adam Foster. I had seen these shots (early versions of them, at least) as Adam showed his first dabblings in Source on the Nightwatch forums. Adam was also kind enough to hook me up with a playable test version. Hoo-ah! (but I didn't tell anyone that!)

Small update to the Eclipse remake thing. Yes, I've noticed I need to use less jpeg compression. I'll fiddle. I apologize for any loss of quality in the meantime. :)

I've been trying to avoid talking about this, for a variety of reasons, but I've just snapped and all patience I had is now gone. I know not many people read this site, but I need an outlet somewhere. I'm going to talk about Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Ok, sure, poor judgment to leave the animations in the game, intentional or not. Poor judgment of the mod maker to offer nude versions. I'm not a huge GTA fan, nor do I really care much at all for Rockstar (particularly after their childish walk-out after GTA:SA was denied any awards at a GDC presentation), but this mess has to stop. An 85-year-old woman is now suing Rockstar/Take Two over the whole debacle, claiming "false, misleading and deceptive practices." Ok...? Let's look at the first quote from this article... "A woman upset that she bought the video game "Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas" for her 14-year-old grandson without knowing it contained hidden, sexually explicit scenes sued the manufacturer Wednesday on behalf of consumers nationwide." So. She's suing because she bought a game intended for people of age 17+ for her 14 year old grandson, and was shocked to find sexual content in the game. Coffee burns, doesn't it? Now hold up a sec. Here is a scan of the back of the Xbox version of GTA:SA, the M-rated version: Click. Listed, in order, the justifications for the M rating: Blood and Gore. Intense Violence. Strong Language. STRONG SEXUAL CONTENT. Use of Drugs. Now here is the new AO label, straight from Rockstar's web site: Click. Listed, in order, the justifications for the AO rating: Blood and Gore. Intense Violence. Strong Language. STRONG SEXUAL CONTENT. Use of Drugs. Nudity. I'll respectfully disagree with Hilary Clinton on the standard 'protect the children' stuff, but I think she needs to bust out that unified ratings system idea again. Keep it voluntary, keep it clear, and put the blame somewhere else, because some people just are too thick to figure it out even when it's spelled out clearly in front of them. I'm certainly feeling violent as a result of GTA. I want to go claw my own face off now.