Spore

I just remembered this is one of the few games I'm really looking forward to seeing more of: "Spore". The idea of creating your own organism and guiding it through 20+ levels of evolution is very very appealing. Watching Robin Williams trying it out does not make it any less appealing. :-D

I doubt I'll be too much into the "endgame" bits though, that's all about strategy and warfare/exploration. But you never know, maybe once you've created your character/being and guided it/nurtured it through the evolutionary stages you might passionately want to follow it out in space (end level, space exploration).


The game serves up a totally different experience depending on what you do, how you evolve your character. The character's evolution depends on what you make it eat, where you go, how you interact with other beings. Your "world" will also be filled with the creations of other players, so the different servers (or single player with imported characters?) will really be quite different.

Spore demo on YouTube.

Cloverfield

The other night, against better knowledge and induced by a long running film-abstinence we decided we could handle watching a movie. We ended up watching "Cloverfield" (imdb link) at 2 in the morning (school night).
It's a brilliant action/horror film and it kept us wide awake despite being preceded by a few sleepless nights. It's the first time I have wholeheartedly enjoyed a movie recorded with the now quite common "hand held camera shake" technique. That very effect made the whole difference throughout and they managed to stay on the right side of "too much", it never got so much that I started to think about the filming technique rather than the story.

Well played, not that it really required high octane acting skills, but neither of the characters annoyed or stuck out as 'bad'. It was a collection of nice new faces (to me at least).
[SPOILER] The only thing distracting me towards the end of the film was the design of the thing that happened upon New York, the monster looked like someone running wild on Spore and forgetting about gravity etc... :-D

More about Spore.

The apple tree is gone

Our neighbor took down his apple tree today, wee! :-) That means we have to build a new fence. That old apple tree has slowly been pushing the old fence over to our side making it so skewed that we found it would be impossible to build a new terrace without straightening it up (e.g. replacing it with a new one). Fortunately our neighbor wants a new fence more than he wanted to keep his apple tree, so there was no argument about taking it down. :-)

So the ball is rolling now. S has measured up and worked out what's needed to make a new fence and placed an order with a local sawmill. The timber will arrive chopped up and ready to be put together sometime next week. Then it's time for the new terrace... :-)

First day of Age of Conan

I will give it three months. If it still feels like a bugged out rough edged flawed version of Oblivion by then I won't give Funcom any more of my money (499 SEK to purchase Collector's Ed and 15 EUR/month subscription).
But it's early days. There are undoubtedly lots of defects still to be fixed and unbalanced environment/race/profession/quests to fix (like for instance the low level volcano quests! I stopped counting the times I died after the first twenty times or so...). The whole game might also leave a completely different impression once you get past the low level quests.

So I'll give it a few more hours and wait for higher level quests, game-feel (my own) and eventual bug fixes.

Fool's gold

T and I watched the film "Fool's gold" today (imdb link). It was rather glittery (in many ways) and even with occasional breakouts in crying (T) and playing (me with T) it was worthwhile watching. Especially since both of the two leading actors (Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey) are such incredibly good looking people. :-)
Add to that some quite nice diving/underwater action, nice surroundings (a Caribbean island) and lots of good people in supporting acts and you're left with a warm and fuzzy feeling from watching it. :-)