I finished the GBA version of the The Sims yesterday. It's odd enough that a Sims game has an ending, but it's a pretty crazy one. Nontheless - I quite liked the GBA version. In many ways it's a better console game than the two "bigger" versions for PS2 et al. The good news is most of the enhancements seems to be folded into the Urbz, due out this fall. I also picked up Mario vs. Donkey Kong and I've played the first two worlds. I like it - it's old school gameplay, but creative fun. And it's not stupidly, punishingly hard (which is a trait that often goes along with the phrase "old school" in video games). I try not to talk too much about politics here - I just don't think blogs are a great forum for those sorts of discussion. However, I'd be greatly remiss if I didn't point you at the text of Gore's speech yesterday. Powerful stuff, and well worth reading regardless of your political leanings. This link is to moveon.org, but they didn't add anything other than a few odd paragraphs in bold. I read it on Salon.com, but you have to watch an ad to see it there. I do have to agree to a comment I saw on another blog that said "Where was this passion in 2000?"

A smartass would point out that the very last post is A) over two weeks old and B) contains a promise to update more often. And unfortunately for me, I'm a smartass. Suckage. In my defense, it's been a very busy two weeks. So a quick outline. Two weeks ago today, Lee and I drove down to LA for E3. There was three days of E3, followed by 4 days of the "Big Honking Road Trip 2K4" where I tooled around California with a couple of my buddies from Virginia and went to Hooters. THEN, on the last day of that I picked up my new HD TiVo. THEN I broke my television while trying to fix some settings that were blocking using the HD TiVo. Then I had to repair that somewhat, arrange for a professional calibrator to fix the rest, and stay home while he did that. Woot. Then this weekend was the Prerelease tournament for the newest Magic set (Fifth Dawn), and my friend Tony bought an Xbox so I got another free 2 month Xbox Live account and bought Project Gotham Racing 2 to race against him. Oh and during E3 my server machines barfed, so I couldn't update the web page or even get email during E3 or BHRT2K4. Whew. I think that's it in the super short form. Some of these topics obviously merit more discussion. Most obvious point: Enterprise in HD is AMAZING. I thought HD hockey was good, but Enterprise is just totally insane. Any TV retailer worth their salt needs a TiVo with some of the last eps on it. Does anybody in my readership actually give a rats-ass about Magic? I could discuss Fifth Dawn more, but I don't think anyone cares. If you do, comment below . . . . Lastly, my current Live Gamertag is ChromaticGnu. The problem with using the 2 free month cards is that they never release the GamerTags I use - so all the variants of HiddenJester are blocked up now. Anyway, if any of you have a Live account send me a friend req. And if you have PGR2 let me know, Tony and I would like to have more than 2 people in our races :-)

Folklore.org has a series of fascinating little articles about creating the original Macintosh. It's been my incessant build reading for the last couple of days - each article is short and fits nicely into watching the PC chew on code. Yes, I did find this due to some Mac RSS feeds I have lying about. No I don't want any Kool-Aid. Sheesh, what is with you people and Kool-Aid lately?

So everybody has probably seen the news about Alex Seropian leaving Bungie to found his own game studio. And that had the little, almost content-free blurb about how Wideload was going to be small and contract out a lot of the production. Gamesindustry.biz has an interview with him that gets a little deeper into the plan.