LEGO Indiana Jones

Gaming

Interestingly, this game is $20 cheaper on PC than it is on Wii, 360 or PS3 and this heavily influenced my buying opinion that I should buy it for PC. Thankfully the game did not disappoint—it fully supports the Xbox 360 controller which made it a snap to play.

The game is awesome, as anyone who played LEGO Star Wars should be able to corroborate. There was plenty of LEGO-inspired humor throughout the game and the use of the original musical score added a great deal. The game is a bit short at less than eight hours of gameplay, but there are plenty of extra goodies to collect in free play mode to keep gamers yearning for 100% completion occupied.

Of course, the theme song is stuck in my head now.

I Am Iron Man

General

I’m a little late writing this, as I went to see this opening day. However, this movie was fantastic. It looks like it will be kicking off a fantastic summer season for movies. Indiana Jones, The Incredible Hulk and Batman all look worthwhile.

I already have tickets for Indiana Jones on Friday 8)

Spring Semester Over, At Last

Gaming, School

I turned the heat down this semester by only taking two classes. It turns out that was the right call, since those two classes ended up taking almost all of my spare time. Interactive Machinima, a relatively new course to the Computer Science program, had us creating short films using Half-Life 2 and the Source engine. Some of the results were really extraordinary, and many of the finished films are viewable online.

Software Practice II was a continuation of last semester’s course where we learn the principles of software engineering and taking ideas through the design process. We used C# and XNA Game Studio to build games that were eventually deployed on the Xbox 360, which was pretty cool, all things considered. It’s not every day that one can say that he got his custom code running on a modern and very content-restricted platform. For all the flak that Microsoft gets, they got XNA right and it was a lot of fun (and a lot of work).

I got only four and a half hours of sleep last night in preparation for our live game demonstration this morning, and I am awfully tired. Summer, here we come!

Crysis

Gaming

I have been hearing so many good things about Crytek‘s newest game and spiritual successor to 2004’s sandbox shooter Far Cry that I decided to pick myself up a copy of Crysis and play it while I enjoy this wonderful Spring Break, especially having recently built myself a computer that can run it. With few exceptions, I did not have any trouble running the game at my LCD’s native resolution at 1680×1050 at high detail, but there were rare times when it felt like it wanted to destroy my computer.

The game is fun, I’ll just say. If you’ve played Far Cry and liked it, you’ll love this game because it is loads better. If you didn’t really care for Far Cry (I fit into this category), you’ll probably still love it because it is loads better. Honestly, they fixed so many things I had a problem with in Far Cry, not the least of which is the horrible voiceover acting. The story is quite well-done, even if it is a bit recycled, and the combat is just plain fun. There are a few times when an action of mine would trigger one of those blasted helicopters to hunt me down, but thankfully those times were rare. Finally, I need not mention the freaking awesome graphics. There isn’t a game out there now that can match them, and yes, it does cost a pretty penny to get the hardware to pump out visuals like that.

The only thing I can really make a legitimate complaint about is its length. It is way shorter than Far Cry and feels artificially shortened. Well, as it turns out, it is the first game in a trilogy. Frailty, thy name is Halo Syndrome. Nonetheless, if I had played Crysis in 2007, it would have been my number two game of the year. Definitely worth picking up.

Pink Floyd Laser Spectacular

Music

I was curious about this when I heard the commercial for it on the radio back in November, and with the lack of information about it online (apart from the official site) I was a bit hesitant to order tickets to go see it, but I decided to anyway. What else was I to do on a Saturday night?

Well, my take on the whole shindig is mixed. It is worthwhile to see, but the first half of the show clearly outclassed the second. Playing Dark Side of the Moon in its entirety was great, and the laser show was a good companion to the music (which sounded fantastic, I might add—the bass was wonderfully hard-hitting, a feat considering it was recorded in the 70s). What didn’t excite me was the second half of the show, which was little more than “The best of Pink Floyd,” except with no real progression of the music. Whereas Dark Side has a wonderful pacing to it, the excerpts from The Wall and various later albums were a little scatterbrained. They did play several hits, but the projected video on several occasions was more interesting than the laser light show.

The special glasses they hand out for the lasers were nice; there was one pair that were to be used to view the 3D images the main laser contraption projected (It’s hard to explain—see the website). The other pair was useful for just about everything else, multiplying everything visible by four to create an absolute overload of psychedelic weirdness. Comments heard after the fading heartbeats on “Eclipse” indicated that those who wore both pair over top of each other were witness to “a whole different show” than those who chose to wear one or the other. Trying this on the second portion of the show, I would have to agree.

I would say that it is fun to hear Dark Side of the Moon on equipment that far outclasses any of the sound systems one typically can hear the album played on, but as a complete experience it just doesn’t approach having the actual band there. Audience participation was pretty much absent in the second half of the show, and the song selection left much to be desired. The finale delivered a rousing rendition of “One Of These Days”, which was more than decent. The biggest qualm I have about the show as a whole is I firmly believe the person who designed the show appreciates the music of Pink Floyd, but does not really “get” the idea behind the music, and instead of enhancing what is being heard, just merely echoes it onto the screen.

Not a bad show, but for one that has been touring for over 20 years, I would have expected more.