I really enjoy watching movies where you can feel that the actor(s) actually wanted to make the movie. Like Adam Sandler in “Don’t mess with the Zohan”, or any other of his production company’s, “Happy Madison Productions”, productions. Whow, what a sentence.
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The latest James Bond movie, Quantum of Solace, and the subsequent discussions among friends that it sparked got me thinking about how we are always striving to improve. This, in general, is a good thing, but what happens if the thing we are trying to improve is already good, great or even perfect?
As I don’t really have anything deep and interesting to discuss I thought I’d just make a random post about things and events. Just so, you know, you are up to speed.
So currently (close to midnight) I am slouched on my red sofa, the Acer on my lap, watching no only Dylan Moran’s Standup “Monster” on the telly (Xbox for some reason can’t read the “Like Totally” DVD), but also the missus playing Sims2 on her Laptop. We’re quite technologised. If you were to remove all technical items from our household, you’d probably end up with a dusty carpet and a fork or two. It’d be pretty boring.
So whee are we at currently? Still waiting for our future to decide itself. Next week Wednesday we’ll set out for Paris again for Julia’s job interview at Monte Cristo (Community Manager). Courtesy of EasyJet’s flight times and prices we’ll be going there Wednesday morning (leaving the house around 4), flying back the same day (coming home around midnight). Will be a stressful but hopefully result-full day. So seeing that this could actually work out, we might be headed to Paris rather soon.
In between waiting, dreading and looking up job openings, I’ve spent quite some time on the Xbox over the last few days/weeks, and I have to say that it is actually rather fun. Even though I have an uncertain future looming at the horizon, I am able to relax a lot more than before. So I have been playing a good few different games, completed Fable 2 (apart from that horrible Westcliff Shooting Range), and also got the Xbox Chatpad so I can chat easier while on the couch. It’s a tiny keyboard you clip to the controller and it makes things soo much easier. Great thing.
As a side-effect of unemployment, I have also lost track of time almost completely. Only because the sun still rises I know when it’s “Oh now it’s really time for bed”-time. My sleeping cycle is currently from sunrise to sunset, which is, in addition to the general dark and rainy season, super depressing when you don’t get any light during your day. But it’s a lot easier to get into that cycle than to get out of it. Well, by Wednesday I will switch to a different cycle somehow. either by sleeping a lot or by beeing awake for far too long. Either way I should be back to normal by Thursday.
Apart from Wednesday there isn’t much planned. I will hopefully go and see Saw V when I’m back from France, and maybe even Max Payne. Not sure when it shows over here. Supposedly it’s bad, but I have refrained from watching /reading reviews so far.
I may have mentioned this before, but it just again crossed my mind, so please excuse if I bore you with the same old. Sometimes I realise that I spend more time reading about games than actually playing them. I really enjoy watching game trailes on gametrailers.com, I read the occasional print magazine (Edge usually), Kotaku is llinked on my iPhone home screen and is usually the first website I read in the morning after checking my email (and usually before I take a shower), and also the last online games news resource I check before I put my head to rest, and my iPhone next to me, playing a Poirot audio book.
It’s not due to a lack of games that the majority of my free (as in “free to game”) time is spent brushing up on the latest and greatest in the video game industry. I have a good half dozen games that I have only bought recently, played for a few hours or so, and then haven’t had the time or motivation to pick up again, even though I keep on promising myself that I will. And it’s also not the problem that these games aren’t good or anything. Fallout 3, Dead Space, GTA IV, Halo 3, Pure, Infinite Undiscovery, Lost Odyssey, Time Shift, the list goes on. And that’s just games I bought, not even mentioning games I only borrowed from friends.
I know that I do have a natural affinity to not finish games I play. There are only a few exceptions, apart from all the Lucas Arts adventures back in the day, where I play from start to finish, and even less titles where I manage to do this within a set time frame and not spread out over a year. Notably Fahrenheit (or “Indigo Prophecy” as it’s known in the US), which I played from start to finish in one sitting, going to bed at 6 a.m. But this is a very rare exception.
Maybe it’s an age thing, maybe it’s an indicator for other problems I have on my mind, maybe it’s just a general problem of being able to realx and shut off. Playing games is 100% free and wasted (in a good way) time for me, and getting into a state of mind that would allow me to accept this and indulge in it has become rarer and rarer over the years. It was a lot easier when I was 15, when there was nothing to worry about once the homework was done. Sitting in front of the keyboard, reading about games has a completely different feel for me than lying on the couch with a controller in hand. Maybe I trick myself into believing this was more constructive and less lazy because PC equals work, who knows…
In retrospective though, maybe I should just have downloaded the demos for all these games and left it at that. Maybe I should even consider this for the future, and use the money I save to buy more important things. Like Scrubs DvD sets, or get those other Smallville Series… or I could just put the keyboard down now and stop writing about me reading about games, and just pick up the controller and play a bit*. Or hey, isn’t Gears of War 2 coming out soon? And Mirror’s Edge? Gotta go check the release dates…
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* I actualluy can’t, because the Xbox is occupied, but that would have ruined the flow
… as well as radioactive pockets and super mutants.
Fallout 3 is upon us. Bethesda+Oblivion Engine+Humor. Not much that can go wrong, or so I hope. I have refrained from reading any reviews or watching any videos, as I tend to be negatively influenced, even by positive reviews. The tiniest issues in a game that I normally wouldn’t even notice, and much less mind, will suddenly become the center of attention for me when I read about them in a magazine or on a website. So I have decided that, for any game that I really want to play and enjoy, I will boycott any and all “free” media. Give me the official publisher media blowout, launch trailers and whatnot, but I will not get near any 3rd party publications.
We all know them… the orphan farmer’s son who looses his family to the arson-loving evil wizard and who, against all odds, will in the end defeat said wizard with the help of a good friend, loosing another one along the way, and they will live happily ever after.
Then there is the hockey team that’s mainly made up of loosers with freckles and glasses, fat kids and at least one girl, who will, once again against all odds be led to victory not only by the mum of one of the loosers, fat kids or the girl, but first and foremost by the leading team’s arrogance and attitude problems.
Last but not least we have the evil empire that surpresses it’s ctizens with terror and force. All but one single individual who, usually by the power of love, trust, or some other virtue, will deny the empire a grip on his mind, and, defying all odds, either makes it out alive to reach a far-off land where milk and honey flows, or, and this is far more common, joins an underground movement to bring the evil oppressors to their knees. And he gets the girl in the end.
Now what have all these Clichees, as common, predictable and simple as they may be, in common? We love them. We grew up with them, we know them. They have guided us on our path through countless books, movies, series and video games. They are predictable, they are simple and they are common. You know what you get, and you know they follow a well-established principle that not even the worst actor, director, author or designer can ruin.
So one would think that sticking to these Clichees would be a good thing in general. Slow and steady won the race, as they say. But at some point in movie-, book-, and game-making history, someone thought “Wow, I’m sick of solid stories, they are quite worn out. Let’s come up with something completely new. Something challenging and engaging.”. I can not even begin to fathom how the following conversations and meetings must have gone, but at some point some of the participants had a genius idea an spurted out “Hey, I know something completely boring (engaging) and confusing (challenging) we could use, that no one has used for ficton before. Politics!”. And for some reason, no one screamed out in terror. No one raised a hand in disapproval. No one stopped the terror from taking on shape in the real world. Everyone agreed.
So now, instead of a movie filled to the brim with action, suspense, emotion and fun, we get Episode 1-3. Where the original Star Wars movies greeted the viewer with the well known yellow letters, describing how the Empire builds a Death Star or how Han Solo was frozen in Carbonite and is now in the hands of a head hunter, the opening credits for these new movies sound more like the stuff that I scribbled next to my history books in seventh grade. The only remaining connection seeming to be the term “Empire”. Remember kids, if you tell stories about an Empire, you can go so right, but by god, you can go so wrong.
Another good, albeit bad imho, example would be the video game “Mass Effect”. Where Bioware delivered amazing stories with their previous games, telling us the stories of the Old Republic in an entertaining, non-history-book-like fashion, the spiritual successor managed to completely and utterly bore me in the first few minutes, when I was supposed to go to a “council hearing”. The only time I ever heard that term before was when I didn’t pay my council tax in time and I received a court summons. But do I need to bother with that stuff in my free time? I don’t think so, Sir Specter.
Turning our back to the Politics issue, there’s another path to go aside the Clichee Route. It’s commonly referred to as “Completely and utterly shite”. This category of stories is usually made up from various elements of other fictional works, put into one big hob, and stirred through a few times. This then results in movies like the latest Indiana Jones, or “X-Files Season 7″ meets “Tomb Raider 2″, starring a drunk Harrison Ford on Morphine, side-kicked by “Highly overrated up-and-coming actor” Shia TheOx.
So I invite everyone to join me in my cause to rescue the clichees. Read that trashy Fantasy Novel with the adolescent youngling on the cover, ramming his sword into a dragon’s belly, watch that straight-forward action movie where the best buddy is the bad guy and the hero survives everything with but a scratch, so he can still pose in his white undershirt, play that mindless zombie-slasher with its stereotype characters and predictable story where everyone dies except the girl and the dude, just so they can make out in the end. I promise you, you will not be disappointed.
and Dollar Short.” - The Acrobats - “Day Late, Dollar Short”
While I intended to start writing on a daily basis now, I gloriously missed the first opportunity to actually do so. However, nothing special happened over the course of yesterday, so I will just blog a bit about how our job search is going as well as some general stuff. Read on! 
I can still remember…
Time is a very special and precious thing with one annoying side-effect; The lack thereof.
Looking at how long days are, and how you waste most of them with useless (but oh so sweet) sleep, you almost have to start maintaining a private schedule in order to keep track of all activities to do. I’m not quite that far yet, but I am constantly getting closer to that point.
Today I realised that I was actually spending more time reading about all the games that I’d want to play, than actually playing them. So I would end up spending a few hours in front of the PC, reading up on the Tokyo Game Show, a Dead Space Review, general Kotaku news, watching Gametrailers for all kinds of new titles (and even ones that I own), posting on message boards, etc.pp. After that I’d usually eventually decide it’s time to play some games now before going to bed, just to realize it’s way past bed time.
Am I the only person that’s affected by that? I just somehow lack the inner calm to sit down, relax, and play some games. A long, long time ago, I can still remember, I would just sit down straight after work, switch off my brain, and play until bedtime.
Speaking of a long, long time ago, way back then, I also used to have a job. Now I am on the lookout, after my position within NCsoft had been made redundant in the wake of restructuring. This might also be a minor factor when it comes to my ability to relax. But I am hopeful I will find a great new job, and I am sure everything will turn out well.
At this point I will end this post, as I don’t really have to tell much and was trying to use this more as an excercise to get back into posting. Hopefully a bit more regularly. Talk to you soon, and hopefully I don’t have to start my next post with a reference to the fact that I haven’t written anything in ages
“We got up to dance, but we never got a chance.” - Don McLean “American Pie”
And to clear up any confusion, BS is short for Blade & Soul, the latest MMO project unveiled by NCsoft these days. Word don’t do it justice, and I won’t bore you with marketing blah. Blade & Sould has titts, blood and the Unreal 3 engine. ’nuff said! Check out the footage.
Some comments:
“NCsoft just announced a new MMO (…) I’ve decided to start another fansite just for it.”
-’Mark’ aionsource.com admin
“OMG OMG OMFG this game is too sexy for words!”
-’Kadeom’ on mmosite.com
“NCsoft done it again.”
-’noname’ on mmosite.com
“SO SEXY SEXY!!!! SEXY ”
“OMG THATS THE MOST KICK ASS THING IV EVER SEEN ”
-some guys on mmosite.com
“Omg, those screenshots so totally have me convinced that it’s gonna be awesome.”
-’Lady Kismet’ on aionsource.com. Before the hi-res shots were even released.
.. in a galaxy far, far away, beziehungsweise in Brighton, hat der Volker auch mal was in seinem Blog geschrieben. Zeit wirds mal wieder aber irgendwie bin ich momentan mal wieder echt beschäftigt 
Was ich zur Zeit so treib:
- Rubik’s Cube lösen (bin momentan so um die 2 Minuten)
- Aion Videos kucken und Artikel lesen (mann wat bin ich gespannt)
- Koreanisch lernen (안녕하세요)
- Magic spielen (nach ewiger Zeit mal wieder angefangen, immer noch gut)
- Kuchen backen (skille momentan meinen Rotkäppchenkuchen skill)
- An einer Aion-Item-Datenbank und einer Aion-Gilde basteln
Von der Datenbank gibts leider noch nicht viel zu sehen, aber heute habe ich den Abend damit zugebracht ein Logo für meine (noch non-existente) Aion Gilde zu bastel. Namentlich “Aegis Asmodea”. Und als Schmankerln gibts die Logo-Entwürfe (chronologisch geordnet) in meiner Galerie hier.
Und hier ist mein momentaner Favorit:
Und damit sag ich gute Nacht. Einen Freitag noch, dann ist Wochenende! Juhe!
