Holy Shit, Duke Nukem Forever

Guys, it’s really happening. They’ve said it before but 2K Games is, for reals, releasing it in May.

For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, Arstechnica has a write-up on the long history of “Coming Soon, We Swear!” that has made Duke Nukem Forever synonymous with vaporware.

Seriously, playing DNF will be like being in a bar when a horse actually walks in. I’m totally there.

Wii Would Like To Play

When news started leaking about a new Nintendo console, it was codenamed “Revolution”. I liked the ring of “Nintendo Revolution”, and I was excited about many of the features that were being kicked around as possibilities — like the ability to buy legacy games online and play them on the console.

Then they made the official announcement…and they called it the Wii. And I thought that was the dumbest name I had ever heard. It’s not even a word! I proclaimed that, regardless of its official name, I was going to continue calling it the Revolution.

Well, that didn’t even last a month. Revolution is harder to say, and harder to type, so I gave in and went with Wii. Admittedly the name has grown on me. The tagline (see post title) is clever and so is the “the two ‘i’s are people — it’s about playing together!” design thing. Plus the Wii has been out for two years, and laughing at the name is passe.

So, we had our XBOX 360. We got a PS3 around Christmas. The only console we needed to complete our Next-Gen collection was a Wii — and EVERYWHERE was sold out.

Brian got a bunch of gift cards to Target for Christmas — literally just enough for a Wii. So since Christmas, we (by which I mean Katie) have been calling Target at 8 AM to see if they got any shipments. At first it was just Sunday mornings at the local Target. Then it was every morning at the local Target (apparently they get daily shipments). Then it was every morning at every Target within 20 miles. It was getting to the point that the calling took an hour of her day and she was starting to seriously demand some money for the gig. Having worked in retail myself, I’m sure that the Target employees didn’t enjoy it any more than we did.

On Friday we had a cock-block (I tried to come up with an amusing equivalent that started and rhymed with “Wii” but I couldn’t do it): our local Target had a Wii in stock! I raced out there and got there five minutes after the store opened — and discovered that they had only had one, and some woman had been there AT OPENING and snagged it. That put a damper on the whole day.

Then yesterday, Saturday, Brian and I are both awakened by Katie, who frantically informs us that a Target in Culver City has 20 Wiis in stock, and the guy said if we get there in the next hour we have a shot at getting one.

So we all rush down to Culver City (a 40 minute drive) and come back, at last, triumphant owners of a Nintendo Wii. We spent the rest of the day playing Super Mario Galaxy. Fun game so far, although all of Mario’s grunts and exclamations make it sound like whatever drugs he takes to get to the Mushroom Kingdom (I guess I just answered my own question) are starting to take a toll on his sanity.

I was also excited about being able to play Super Mario World. Even though I had a Super NES, the SNES did not come packaged with Mario World and I never wound up getting a copy. I played it a little bit at my cousins’ house, but they wouldn’t let me play for long because watching someone play is boring and they wanted to go hit wasp nests with sticks. So I’m finally getting to play it.

My In Bruges review is forthcoming — short version, go see the flick!

We built this city…

So, we have Rock Band. The purchasing of which was primarily precipitated by my roommate Brian’s winning a PS3 in a holiday raffle¹, and us needing games for it.

We’ve been down with Guitar Hero since the first game. Right around the time Guitar Hero II came out I was unemployed for a period of around six months, with a really good severance package (best and worst job I’ve ever had, remind me to talk about it sometime) and unemployment benefits. This was also the post-production period on RvD2. So I had no job to speak of, and when I tired of rotoscoping lightsabers, I turned my attention to Freebird.²

We also had Guitar Hero on the set of the film I shot this summer — not only GH2, but Guitar Hero Encore: Rockin’ the 80s.

Point is, I really played a lot of Guitar Hero this past year. When I played Encore, and when GH3 came out, I started off in “Hard”. Not “Easy” or “Medium.” Admittedly, not “Expert” either, but I’m not familiar with a lot of these songs. And now with Rock Band I find myself doing the same (and playing on “Expert” the songs I do know).

I’m something of a musician. I was in marching band in high school. I played first chair clarinet and I was Drum Major my junior year.³ And I’m a little ashamed to admit that I sight-read the songs in the Guitar Hero/Rock Band series far, far better than I ever sight-read actual sheet music.

WHO YOU GONNA CALL?!

I’m going to stop promising to cover topics in my “next” blog post, and just say “a later” blog post, so I have something to come back to in the lean times. We’ll call them blog residuals.

I say that because I said in my last post I was going to touch on the subject of humility, but I’ve decided I don’t want to do that today, so I won’t. I have a lot of other, more current stuff to talk about.

Case in point: There’s a new Ghostbusters game coming out.

This is, as my friend Travis likes to say, a big damn deal.

To use another Trav-ism: Let me explain something to you.

The cake is a lie…

So I spent most of the wee hours last night playing Portal, part of the Orange Box released by Valve. Very fun game, you play a test subject solving puzzles with a portal gun. You can open one here, the other there, and transport yourself instantly. Probably the best part of it is the writing of the A.I. in the testing facility. It has a hilarious personality, switching from kind and encouraging to vindictive and abusive, sometimes within the same sentence.

For those interested in puzzle games who don’t have an XBOX or the dough to buy it on PC, you can play the 2D Flash version for free here.

I plan to get back on pace with blogging tomorrow. I started this blog when I did in part because I thought Descendants was almost rolling and so I’d be able to blog through the process, but the writer’s strike has kind of buggered that. Still, there’s a lot of interesting stuff and developments out there to talk about, so I’ll get on that.