This Ain't Rock n' Roll, This Is Genocide

I think I'm done with this for a while. I'm really busy, to the point that I can't even get anywhere with most of what I want to do... And considering all of those things (comics, social networking site, etc.) are more important to me than blogging, this is on the chopping block.

I've not posted much of note here recently and when I do it's short and pointless. I'm not sure when I'll be back on, but it'll be a while. I had to muster all of my energy just to write this.

I've never felt more exhausted in my entire life.

I just watched an episode of The Boondocks and it was one of the most boring things I've ever seen in my life,

Off to STL tomorrow. Fun fun fun fun fun.

I was never on the fence about the new Banjo-Kazooie game. I was interested from the first shots and videos we saw. It was always a purchase.

But I read something else that makes it a buy-right-away thing instead of a wait-a-few months thing:

http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/900/900010p1.html

1.) It's only $39.99 (I'm hoping they might follow this price with Viva Pinata 2 too).
2.) Pre-ordering it gives you a code to download the XBLA version of the original N64 Banjo-Kazooie for free, two weeks before it officially goes on sale to everyone else.

Good deal. Apparently BK2 will be hitting XBLA too, so I'm all for saving some money since I was interested in all three games.

Rare has been noticably stingy with XBLA games, their only release so far being an update of Jetpack (which, admittedly, is fun and worth $5). But this being a N64 game opens up some good opportunities too.

Hopefully this means we'll eventually see fucking Blast Corps.

So the NDA for Warhammer Online's closed beta ends tomorrow. Does anyone that reads this care about it at all?

I feel like I'm the only one on the Internet that couldn't care less about Joss Whedon.

Although I imagine there are more people like me than it seems considering what happened to Firefly.

Suddenly it looks like I'll be doing pretty well financially. I get paid decently at my current job, but it's nothing to brag over. It could and should be more.

I've spent a lot of time trying to supplement this. On Monday, I was called by two places. One was a part time job I applied to weeks earlier. The other was completely out of the blue.

I interviewed with the former today and I think it went extremely well. They are a small company that builds web sites for small businesses. They've developed their own CMS that handles a lot of the actual coding... so I mostly would just be designing and implementing sites according to client needs. Seems relatively simple and I should be hearing back for sure in a few days. They talked to me like I have the job already, though.

The latter was a friend of a friend. Her company needed someone to change things on their site since their last developer disappeared off the face of the planet. I was recommended to her. Pretty simple stuff: adding rows to a database to add content to the site. The thing was that their last developer apparently couldn't figure this out and was in the process of creating static pages. It made no sense; while they didn't provide the database login, but it was easy to find within the site's files.

I really lowballed the price for this, saying about $15 an hour. I did it in about 1 and a half total (including time just talking with people), which is obviously not much money. She called me back and let me know that this was grossly underpriced and that their last guy wanted $125 an hour and had a minimum of 8 hours. So she put me in at $100 an hour and rounded it up. I got $200 for what was essentially 45 minutes of real work.

Too bad that won't be more common, but I am their go-to guy now. Even a couple hours a month with them would be nice.

So we'll see what happens. I can use the money.

Never did I realize how out of touch I was with what's popular in music than when I saw the Top 20 MP3 downloads on Amazon's site. It's not that I hate any of these musicians. I didn't even know who a majority of them even were.

I forgot how awesome this game was. I remember Computer Gaming World panning the game, I think largely because it uses a checkpoint system. I don't know if it's still like this (not that it's easy to check, since so many of them went under), but computer gaming mags hated anything that didn't let you save whenever you wanted.

CGW in particular saw this as a concession to consoles. The magazine would regularly bring this up and I remember several articles from their editorial guy that used to always appear on the last page of the magazine. Reviews would also mention save game limitations if a console title ever appeared on the PC. FFVII comes to mind, although you'd think that the reviewer would realize that there's an item that lets you save anywhere in the game even in the console version... Basically implying it was a choice, not a requirement due to the PS1 sucking.

The N64 was a big hotpoint too. Going to cartridges alone was a big problem. But the idea of consoles focusing so much on true 3D was also threatening. I remember the editorial guy, again, saying that polygons weren't that important and that it wasn't a big deal that Mario could move in 8 different directions in Mario 64... After all, he could do that in Ultima years ago!

I don't even think I need to explain the difference between those titles.

I remember their reason for consoles sucking also revolved around the lack of FPS games, which gets me back to Powerslave. There was a bit of a to-do for the game being game of the month or something for Saturn in another console gaming mag. CGW, in all their wisdom, saw this as a combo attack possiblity. Consoles suck, Powerslave sucks, the end.

I always think about this when I play Powerslave... Mostly because it's just so ridiculous. People like talking about the console wars and certainly fanboys in that case are annoying... But I remember back when it was far more PCs versus consoles, at least as far as CGW was concerned lol. I never really understood it. I enjoyed games on both. The animosity was always weird and, honestly, it was offputting. I stopped subscribing to the magazine largely because of those reasons.

Powerslave is essentially similar to Blood and Duke Nukem. It uses a version of the same engine. Goofy one-liners, probably way too much gore. It's completely focused on Egyptian themes and basically revolves around breaking into ruins and so forth. I like it.