Springtime in the Valley is really to be treasured! Today I got home around 5:15 - and I got slightly over a hour of sunlight on the back porch. I so dig the early schedule! I've been out back with the trusty laptop, drinking my new Belgian beer, and watching Urusei Yatsura. Laptops with DVD drives just rule. It's getting kind of twilighty - I'll probably go in soon and do my Tai Chi practice - but damn do I love this time of year!

You know, if you borrowed my long network cable, and got a copy of Everything or Nothing for PS2 we could try the online coop play. Oh and get a voice headset as well. I think they sell them at the EA store - if you know somebody who can shop there for you.

Gaahh! Jason Rubin delivers a call to arms at DICE - everyone knows that already. But then there's the Merc's coverage - which makes it sound like he's throwing a temper tantrum for being less popular than Tara Reid. Great, so any point he's trying to make is getting obscured by laughter - and he brought it on himself. Then he quits Naughty Dog - which is pretty much his business I guess. I'll give him some points for putting his money where his mouth is. But then he goes on to compare himself to Rosa Parks. Dude, you got dissed an industry party. Maybe even looked dumb in front of some friends. And Sony probably does owe you better than that. But fighting that doesn't make you Gandhi, and it doesn't make you Martin Luther King, Jr. If you're lucky it makes you a striking baseball player. Drop the hyperbole, stick to the Hollywood analogies, and maybe we can get the Mercury to take you seriously.

For some reason last week triggered off a wave of game acquisition. Ninja Gaiden was understandable - as it just came out. However, I also laid hand on Everything or Nothing (the latest James Bond game), and finally installed and patched Deus Ex: Invisible War. I'd had Deus 2 for a while - but I had decided to play through the first one (which I had never finished) - so I just finished it a week or so ago. Of course with three games, and only one weekend my opinons of all three is still rather cursory. Super short-takes: Ninja Gaiden is stupidly hard (all of my designer friends - even the Exile - are complaining about how hard it is). The camera reaches new lows in bad camera-ness, and it's the third level before you start learning the useful attacks. But so far it's had just enough really cool moments for me to keep plugging at it. EON is super-polished, but really about as expected. The demo level from the fall Jampack (which I thought was too difficult) has been toned down. And the presentation so nails Bond movies - it's really nice in that regard. The gameplay . . . seems fairly par-for-the-course. Deus Ex 2 is slow starting. I've played it for about two hours - only had some very sketchy combat and the plot is still lumbering out of neutral. Interesting note - I've already maxxed one of my biomods (the Hacking one). That struck me as quite fast compared to the skill/biomod development pace of the first game. Since I recently snarfed up the ATI 9800 Pro Radeon I left the fancy "Light Bloom" on and my frame rate stays pretty solid. My major knock so far is I've had it crash twice while picking up a new item. I actually quick-save before grabbing weapons now. Jeff and I also finished Champions of Norrath on Sunday. The ended seemed rather anti-climatic to me. Snowblind needs to do three things for the sequel. 1) Improve the quality of the cinematics - extreme closeups for several minutes of the same looping "chatting" animation does not equal high quality. 2) The story was convoluted, while being extremely stock fantasy. Get some twists in there or just go the Doom route and pare it down to the killing. 3) I'm all for the booby eye-candy, but somebody at that developer is obsessed It got pretty ridiculous - culminating in the "Hot Goddess in bondage" finale.

I'm about halfway through watching Seven Samurai (those of you hyper-familiar with my domestic details will know a joke about that - more later), and I had an idea for a video game that I really want to see. The thing that struck me is the scope. Imagine an entire video game set in one little agrarian town . . . each mission is protecting it against bandits during various seasons, in various conditions. I think video games are a dialog between the designers and the players. If they both agreed to carry on that entire dialog in a small setting, it would be a setting that both sides agreed to learn about and love. You can destroy that bridge, but those two houses and the mill will be lost. In the scale of a Warcraft III, nobody cares. Burn 'em! But if that means evicting the Smiths, and losing the easy production of flour . . . now we're talking sacrifice. I want to play that game. Somebody should make it! :-)