Zephyrus of the Anemoi

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I got the new Animal Crossing for the Wii this Christmas. I had played the GameCube release before, and found it to be very enjoyable. Unfortunately, the methods by which letters were sent to friends that had their own copy of the game required extremely long and complex codes to be shared that were essentially encrypted messages. This was a neat feature, but one that prevented me from being very social with it. The other frustrating feature was that everything closed down at 8 or 9 pm, real time. Since I was not usually getting home from work until then, I was missing out on nearly everything that was available to do in the evening.

So, shortly after my time in the city of “Room 12″ began, I had moved on. I ultimately traded the game on Goozex, knowing that the Wii version would make up for the shortcomings of the GameCube version. Now, having got the Wii version, I can confirm that I was correct. Citizens of the town stay out later, Tom Nook’s shop stays open later, and with the city available to visit from the early stages of the game, there’s always something to go do.

But the really big feature of the game is being able to visit friends’ towns. My wife was awesome this Christmas, and even though the Wii Speak/Animal Crossing bundle was sold out everywhere, she managed to find a deal on Amazon to get them both separately for the same price as the bundle. And I am so glad that she did.

Last night, I visited my friend Andrea’s town. She and her husband have been playing together for the last several days and (thanks to the fact that they got a 12,000 Bell gift from a reindeer on Christmas Eve), have  already upgraded their house and spent enough money with Tom Nook that he has opened a Kum’N'Go (okay, Nook’N'Go, but seriously, the parallel must be drawn). I visited her town for about an hour or so and spoke to her via Wii Speak the entire time. She didn’t have the microphone herself, but she plugged in her USB keyboard and away we went. She was so impressed with the way the Wii Speak worked that she decided she’s going to get one herself. And, never once did she have trouble understanding me.

Today I turned on my game to check my mail and an hour later I finally put down the controller so that my wife could create her character. The best part of all this is that when my son visits his mother, my wife and I will be able to play with him (assuming his mother doesn’t freak out on him for it).

If anyone is interested in coming to town to visit, my friend code is listed in the About Me / Contact page, but I’ll list it again here for convenience:

Friend Code: 3867-2149-5247
Town Name: Taurith

Come by anytime!

The command line prompt on the computer in the hatch is a greater-than sign, a colon, and a cursor. It looks like this:

>:❚

While not important to the story, it’s funny because it looks like an angry face.

The food found in The Swan station and airdropped in via resupply has the same series of numbers and letters on every item. Some research over at Lostpedia indicates that it may designate where the airdrop originated from (in this case, Nigeria). It’s also possible that it somehow denotes the location or operating number of the installation/island, though this is merely conjecture and has no supporting evidence.

While not exactly a revelation, watching Season 2 again confirmed my belief that the hatch was a very important installation on The Island and that the fail safe was not used earlier because the DHARMA Initiative wanted to study it rather than detonate it. They obviously felt that the risk of studying it was worth it and that the potential knowledge from the magnetic anomaly was more important than the safety of Island-/world-/overhead-travellers. The real question is whether or not the fail safe destroyed the hatch, or merely “moved” it, similarly to the finale of Season 4.

I got Animal Crossing for my Wii for Christmas and the Wii Speak accessory, as well. If anyone is interested in visiting my town, add me using the friend code below. If you leave your code in the comments, or send me a message, I’ll add you as soon as I can.

Animal Crossing Friend Code: 3867-2149-5247
Town Name: Taurith

And, for those of you that want to just talk to me using Wii Speak, you can get my Wii number (and any other Wii/DS codes) from the About Me / Contact page.

My favorite thing about being a father is picking up my son and carrying him to bed when he falls asleep watching a movie.

The first 10-15 minutes of Lost are still some of the most intellectually compelling, visually stimulating, and cinematically breathtaking minutes I’ve ever seen in television.

Jack as a “healer”, not a doctor. J.J. used jump-zooms as Jack was banging on Charlie’s chest. Some could say this was for dramatic effect, but it’s never just that simple with J.J. I think it was his way of showing that something out of the ordinary was happening. That Jack’s force-of-will was so strong, so powerful, that Jack wanted Charlie to live so strongly, that Jack somehow made it happen.

Arzt is a duplicate of my friend Joe. Only Joe knows even more than Arzt and isn’t the most annoying person to ever be exploded on television.

The last 5-10 minutes of episode 21, “Exodus, Part 1″, when the survivors launch the raft are still some of the most heartwarming minutes I’ve ever seen in television.

The production and writing teams had planned a lot of stuff in Season 2 (the stuff I can currently remember) before or during production of Season 1. However, from what I can tell so far, very little of what is discovered in Season 3 is foreshadowed in Season 1. Perhaps, though, I’m just not remembering the latter details, yet.

One thing I did notice is that Boone tells Jack he’s letting him off the hook for his promise to save him before Jack’s then-future/now-ex-wife does. Which I thought was a nice touch, and indicates either excellent planning of Season 2 during production of Season 1, or just an opportunity seized upon by the writers to make themselves look awesome by reusing a piece of dialogue. But, Jack’s reaction certainly makes it seem as though they knew he had been told he was “off the hook” before and it struck a chord with him, even if it didn’t mean anything to us, yet.

That’s all for now. I’ll have another post about Season 2 when I finish it.

Watch the trailer first, full-screen if you can. Then, read on below for my take.

Direct link here.

ZOMG! Did you see that? Gambit portrayed as the greatest badass that ever assed bad! Emma Frost?! Seriously?!?! I don’t even know who half the people they portrayed were, because my eyes were glazed over by the awesome that is Gambit!

Okay, now that that’s out of the way, I want you all to think about what this movie means. It’s still in the hands of 20th Century Fox, so it’s unlikely to be as awesome as Iron Man or The Incredible Hulk. But hey, if it doesn’t frak it all up, then it should at least be fun.

Thanks to my buddy jPar for indirectly informing me of the legitimate release of the trailer. Be sure to check out the podcast thing that he and I do.

So, the guys over at Cracked.com loved the first episode of our Two Assholes Watch a Movie podcast so much, that they stole all of our jokes and presented them as their own. Not that I can really blame them, you’d be hard pressed to find an intelligent human being that wasn’t already under the glamour of Stephenie Meyer that saw this movie and didn’t make the same realizations that we did.

But that’s beside the point. Anyway, go check them out and be sure to spread the word to all of your friends about our podcast. If you’re super-awesome at recommending people, you may even get a shout out or a guest spot on a future episode. Unless you’re lame. In which case, you’ll probably end up with a permanent spot like us.

Cause… we’re lame… see?

The summer after my freshman year of college, I was working at Pizza Hut. During the course of that job, a friend of mine and I were having a discussion about video games. He and I had spent quite some time playing Warcraft 2 over a direct modem connection in high school, so I told him about an idea I had for the ultimate cross-over video game event. My idea was simple, if simple means frakkin’ crazy-complicated. I wanted a video game that was a FPS, RTS, and world-building sim all in one.

Shortly after, I can only assume that he sold my idea and Savage was born. Savage was a 3rd-person melee combat role-playing game combined with a real-time strategy component that allowed one player to build defenses and upgrade your side’s capabilities as an army. The entire purpose was to wipe out your enemies, collect resources, and use those resources to further wipe out your enemies.

Now, I realize that there are differences between my idea and theirs, particularly because mine was set in space and also grew to include a flight-sim aspect. However, the fact remains that someone stole my intellectual property and I chose not to sue them, because I’m a benevolent being.

Well, a few days ago, said company decided to repay my kindness by giving away the sequel to Savage for free.

That’s right, free.

The game has been out for some time now, and after selling it for $20 for quite a while and distributing it solely through downloads or mail-ordered discs for a while, S2 Games has decided the best way to continue making money is to let people play for free, hook ‘em on the concept, and then let the truly dedicated players pay for additional inventory space, customizable items, and persistent power-ups.

What this means for you, is you get to play a kickass multiplayer murderfest for free.

So, if you think it might be fun, check it out here.

Also, if you put my account name (Zepfhyr) in as how you were introduced to the game, we automatically become friends, making it easier to play together and track each others’ stats. I hope to stab you in the back and spit on your corpse soon. Or shake your hand, depends on which side you join.