Amazon, why do you torment me so...

I like comics. I think I've mentioned this before. I know I reviewed The Walking Dead series here and gave it a perfect score. Amazon knows I like comics as I usually order my stuff from them. I would go to my local comic shop, but that will ultimately lead to me spending another $30-$50 a month on series that aren't really all that praise worthy. I like to get the 6 month to 1 year collections and read the story in large chunks similar to buying a TV series on DVD.

100 Bullets is the next series I've elected to start reading so as usual I ordered the first 5 volumes from Amazon. I made sure to specify that I want my order to ship complete because I would have no use for issue 4 if I haven't read 1-3 yet and the cover could very well spoil something that has happened in previous issues I haven't read yet. Sure enough Amazon sent me volume 3 & 5 before volumes 1, 2, and 4 shipped. So now I have comics I can't read staring me in the face.

They've done this before when I was reading the Preacher series. By the way, Preacher is excellent and one of the best stories I've ever read/seen/heard. I was heavy into the series and read about 3 volumes in one weekend. With only 2 left I immediately ordered the rest of the series only to have Amazon do the same thing and send volume 8 instead of volume 6 like I needed.

I know there's no control over this and the most likely answer is they're coming from different shipment locations and they're just trying to send the stuff as cost effectively as possible, but you'd think they'd write an algorithm into their ordering system to prevent them sending a later volume in a series before the earlier volume ships. It's like getting Half Blood Prince before Prisoner of Azkaban. That's my rant for the day.

So I Netfliked it this weekend...

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So this DSi thing...

Nintendo is the king of making people buy stuff twice. They make a decent product, loads of people eventually buy it and just around the time it hits critical mass, they make a change to it. Sometimes it's slight like offering different colors. Sometimes they add functionality or make subtle improvements to the hardware. And for some reason millions upon millions of people find a reason to buy the piece of hardware of software again despite already owning a perfectly good older, or in some cases original version. To their credit, the products they make are stellar and solid enough that you are actually buying a 2nd product instead of replacing a broken or malfunctioning product. My original clunky Gameboy still works to this day. I've been to the Nintendo store in New York and saw one that had been taken to Iraq during Desert Storm and survived a firebomb. For the most part I've been resistant to this. I did get a Gameboy Color because I didn't have my original with me in college and I really wanted to play this crazy game called Pokemon and the cost of making the drive home and back was relative to the cost of just buying one of the newer better Gameboys. I never owned a GBA and came close to buying one but that's around the time the DS was announced so I figured I'd just wait for that. Resistance however is not immunity. Last week I decided to get the new and improved DSi. Partially because I never upgraded to the DS lite, but mostly because with all the updated functionality built into it I know the phase out is on the way so I might as well upgrade while Nintendo is still giving incentives to do so.

The first incentive is once you've purchased the thing and log onto the DSi store you are given 1000 DSi points ($10) to buy DSi Ware with. This offer is only good until October of this year so tick-tock everyone on the fence. Also as with any other Nintendo purchased console if you register it on Club Nintendo you warranty is extended by 90 days (useless considering I've never had or known a Nintendo product to fail aside from 1st Gen Wiis who couldn't handle Smash Bros) and you also get 160 coins to redeem for prizes from Nintendo. This is the only Nintendo console you get coins for and I can't image this offer lasting long.

So that's enough about the extenuating factors. Since I'm upgrading from the original DS my thoughts on it will differ greatly from those who had DS lites. For starters, the screen is huge and much brighter. It has 5 brightness settings instead of the 2 on my previous unit. It is much less clunky and can actually fit in my pocket without having that old movie cliche line which I won't reprint here begin to cycle through my head whenever I put it in my pocket. I have long fingers and this feels much better in my hands. The pad and buttons are placed higher so I don't have to bend my thumbs as much which made extended play sessions quite uncomfortable. The buttons are also much springier. The interface has changed and is now more similar to the Wii interface where you scroll through your options. This was necessary because you can now download games directly onto the console. The resolution hasn't changed though so if you're like me know what happens when screen size increases without a change in resolution you'll be spotting a few "imperfections" here and there. The Wifi now works with WPA security so for the first time every my DS can connect to my wifi. You have to go into advanced settings to do it but it's not too troublesome. It has a web browser you can download for free. Another reason to early adopt is the free web browser because they did the same with the Wii and then decided to charge 500 points ($5) for it later. Honestly though, the browser is crap. It runs out of memory on every page you actually want to view (even gmail), if you're at home you probably have several better ways of getting online, and if you have a decent cell phone you wouldn't care about it. I suppose in a pinch at a coffee house it'll do ok. The DSi has two cameras one facing you and the other facing everything else. All you can do right now is take pictures and play with them, but eventually this will change. It also has an SD card slot you can use to load and unload photos and music and DSi Ware games. Yes this is yet another device capable of playing music (see my comment about the web browser). DSi Ware games can only be played from the DSi's internal memory and not from the SD card, so if you buy a lot of games you'll be playing the transfer back and forth game a lot as well. Picto chat is still there and it's easier to mess around with due to the increased screen size which is also .5" bigger than the lite's screen. Oh and there is no GBA slot. That's about it. For all other intents and purposes it's the exact same thing. It's like a friend of yours coming back from the weekend with a tattoo a piercing and having lost 30lbs or so. The battery is supposed to last 11 hours on the lowest brightness setting. John Davison from What They Play said they tested it and it lasted about 9 hours, which is pretty good. It can survive a flight from the west coast to London and I may put that to the test myself should another opportunity arise.

There aren't any DSi Ware games that has peeked my interest. I've been enjoying GTA Chinatown Wars on it as of late and much more with the improved hardware features of the DSi. If you want a reason to upgrade, I can't give it to you even if you were in my position. If your in the market for a DS and it's you first one, this is the one to buy as it will be able to keep up with what Nintendo and other developers have planned for the system going forward, but you will also effectively be cutting yourself off from a gigantic library of quality GBA games. I suppose new buyers aren't too worried about that last bit. There are incentives to buy it sooner than later, but to be quite honest, by the time this one reaches critical mass the price it's selling for will likely outweigh the current incentives. And that's it.

So tell me...

Why is it that when you return to work after a vacation it feels as more of a punishment than a welcome back. Your co-workers are all cool and want to know how your trip went and look at your pictures, but your boss is all “while you were gone this and this happened and now you need to do this and this by this date or you’re going to miss…” and doesn’t understand how returning from a 9 hour flight from a country 7 hours ahead of you makes your actions more zombified than anything. Then you get hit with the “I found these things that you are late on and should have taken care of before you left line” only to be countered with “I did all that stuff and here’s where I did it” which leads to “oh, well I thought they were late so don’t let it happen again.” Let’s not mention that while you were away no one else on your team was performing at super high level so you boss looks to you as the sole person who can raise his numbers to an acceptable level before the month is out. “So you want more than the usual monthly goal from me in 10 days time?” You know, whatever happened to measuring someone’s performance by actually looking at what they’re doing instead of what some computer formula says they’re doing. Let’s not consider the man has the memory of a fish and swarms his team with hundreds of useless file activities every week, let’s see what the numbers say about him. I digress. Anyway, for the rest of the week I’ll be coming in earlier and working later because I thought it’d be nice to get away from it all and see some family I haven’t seen in a while and just have fun for a week. Silly me.

So this weekend...

Madden 2008 ruined my weekend. While I was away having a great time in London, my new roommate decided to download Madden 2008 for his Macbook which was flagged by my ISP because EA has that crazy evil DRM and they shut off my internet. By the time I was able to figure out what happened from them their offices had closed for the weekend. It’s still off now but I’m at work enjoying a lovely cup of tea and pondering my next move. Anyway, I didn’t spend the entire time sulking because I couldn’t join my friends in Halo. I saw 4 movies. One of them was good, one was half decent, one I enjoied a lot but will certainly not be for everyone, and one that was just bad, but not as bad as it could have been. I completely recommend State of Play with Russell Crowe and Ben Aflick. It’s a good mystery movie and is well acted. My only real complaint about it is they didn’t want to pull the trigger at the end and went more for an easy out twist ending. It did make for a more powerful final moment for Crowe’s character, but wasn’t so good for the movie itself in my opinion. To Observe and Report managed to keep me laughing, but it was mainly cheep laughter and the gags weren’t really that well thought out, just well executed by the actors. Seth Rogan is able to carry just about every comedy rather well though. Crank: High Voltage simply has to be seen. I saw the first one and thought it was “Grand Theft Auto the Movie” with its craziness. The 2nd iteration is no joke as well and is even more extreme and outlandish if that’s possible. Stay for the blooper bits after the credits. (I may actually make an more in depth post about this one). Finally I saw Dragonball Evolution. Well, it was better than the Street Fighter movie that just came out. Strangely enough I’m actually going to say they managed to stay pretty close to the original source material as a major motion picture will allow. It contains elements from all of the original manga series condensed, manipulated, and squeezed into a runtime just over 1.5 hours. All of the adult elements are gone. It’s way more kid friendly than the actual manga and anime series was, it’s not good, yet it isn’t all that bad. Don’t see it for full admission price. Maybe wait for a weak moment on HBO or Netflix.

Mind The Lag

So it's been a while since my last update. I apologize, I've been pre-occupied, I've been in a far away land called London, I've been jet lagged, and my internet is down because my new roommate decided to download Madden 2008 for his computer while I was gone and my ISP cut my service off until something is done about it. So I'm now using my company issued air card to make this post (don't tell my job though). Anyway I think it's time to announce some changes. Seeing as how it was rather difficult for me to keep to my schedule of posting regular movie pics, I'm going to stop doing weekly pics and am going to just try to recommend something on a regular basis but not a set schedule. 2nd, instead of trying to do a full game review for everything I play I'm just going to do mostly impressions while I'm playing through it and a full review when I feel it's called for and I have time to write it. 3rd, as for movie reviews, I apologize. They will also follow the same impression/review format as games. This is all simply because I find myself with less and less time on my hands these days and I desperately want to keep writing. Finally, I'm going to try to blog more on a daily to every few days basis. As most writers at newspapers and magazines will tell you, it is much easier to write having 15 - 20 deadlines a month than 5- 10. You see how much trouble I've had with trying to do a weekly movie pic and a few reviews once a week. So in short, I'm not dead, this blog isn't going away, and I assure you these changes are for the better.

P.S.
My movie pic this week is: Paris, je t'aime from multiple directors. My family that I was visiting London with will appreciate the humor. Sorry to make an in joke, but it is my blog after all. Often times I hate it when a movie just feels like it's a collection of scenes loosely strung together by something that resembles a plot, so I figure I'll recommend something that is a collection of scenes that does it correctly. I believe 15 different directors were all given under 10 minutes a piece to tell a story with the city as the backdrop. There's everything in here form vampires, romance, and everything in between. What striking about it though aside from the fact that so many seemingly complicated stories can be presented and resolved so quickly is that while most of them have nothing to do with each other, at the same time they have everything to do with each other because they are all Paris. It's worth your time.

And that's in for now. Sorry I left you, but I won't do so again. Look forward to more updates.