Metroid Prime 3, The Fountain, Apple Wireless Keyboard, Spook Country, The Wire Season 3

by Mike Shea on 14 September 2007

Personality spam is a hard thing to spread. I have a little list on the side of my website with the latest things I've read, played, listened to, or watched. I doubt any of my four readers bothers to look at it and those that would already know what I'm doing there.

Instead, I'll offer an article with mini-reviews of a bunch of these things. Titling it is hard so, in the theory that Google likes descriptive titles, I'll just stick to a list of the things I'll be reviewing. Let the personality spam begin.

With Stranglehold and Bioshock finished, I'll be digging back into Metroid Prime 3. It's nice to have a game for the Wii worth playing since it went dark after I finished Zelda and the Twilight Princess. Nintendo systems seem to have few good games over the lifetime of the system but the ones it does have are really great. I was almost regretting my Wii purchase, steering friends to the Xbox 360 instead, but Metroid Prime 3 is beautiful, detailed, well controlled, and a lot of comic-book style fun. It is a bit too much like Halo, though, especially in the beginning. Great game, though.

I have my new HD-DVD copy of The Fountain but Shell and I haven't had a chance to watch it. I'm still in love with that movie and especially the Fountain soundtrack. The guy who did it did the haunting soundtrack to Requiem for a Dream, one of the mystery soundtracks to the Lord of the Rings Two Towers trailer. His work is great and the Fountain soundtrack is worth every penny. I even sold my soul to the devil by buying it from iTunes with full DRM.

I've also been listening to a bit of John Lennon, which, I am happy to say, can be purchased through iTunes without DRM. I mixed the Fountain and Lennon music together into a Lennon's Fountain playlist which I like a lot. I like to build playlists for a story I'm working on but I haven't been writing much recently.

I'm typing these words on a brand new, absolutely tiny, Apple wireless keyboard. There's nothing more zen than a clean desk with as little hardware as possible. I have some Apple keyboard pics on Flickr. It probably isn't for everyone since it's the equivalent of typing on a laptop keyboard, but it sure looks cool.

Last night, after a two-night reading binge, I finished Spook Country. It isn't nearly as good as Neuromancer and the Sprawl series and, like a lot of books by popular authors, it needs better editing. I'm not sure Bobby Chombo's nose requires a full page description. None of the characters were particularly interesting or very well described. It took a lot of slogging through painful descriptions of magnetic beds and iPods to learn more about the Russo-Cuban gangster ninja family. It read like a dramatized version of Boing Boing's front page. My negativity seems in the minority so your milage may vary.

My next few books to read include Fall of Hyperion, Dune, and the Moon Is A Harsh Mistress.

I've also greatly enjoyed Sea of Red, a pirate vampire comic series; The Ultimates Volume1, and soon I'll be reading Ultimate Galactus.

I've started using my Lamy 2000 fountain pen a bit more since discovering that my review on this humble website is the number two Google hit for Lamy 2000. The official website is number three. I'm going to be bringing a fresh Moleskine and a couple of fountain pens on my trip. Oh yeah, I'm headed to Deep Creek Lake MD for a week and then Bermuda for a week. Two weeks of vacation starting right now!

I haven't been writing any fiction, instead focusing on D&D adventures and my journal. I am about half way through a vampire story set in Faigon where a young vampire is trapped in a crypt for about a thousand years and then uncovered.

Shell and I have been watching The Wire on our Tuesday night date-night. It's a great show with good writing, characters, sets, and story. One of the characters, Omar, is one of the best I've seen on TV. I highly recommend the show.

I've still been playing a lot of D&D and D&D Miniatures. I've added some house rules to my game to make it more 4th edition-like even though we know little of the rules. These changes include:

Crit automatically, no crit rolls on threats.
No iterative attacks. Instead of +24/+19/+14/+9, a fighter might get +24/+24 with + 1/2 level in bonus damage.
Diagonal movements count as 1 square.
Skills are based on stat and level instead of skill points. Skill rolls = attribute + 1/2 level + 5 class bonus.
No + 1/2 strength bonus damage on two-handed weapons.
Spell damage above five dice becomes 5dX + 1/2 the die max rounded up. A level 15 cone of cold does 5d6 + 40 damage.
Turn undead does 1d6 damage per level, max 20d6, DC 10 + 1/2 caster level Will save for half.
Group buff spells can be cast as auras that last the whole adventure with the removal of that spell slot. These can be figured into a character sheet.
Action Points: Twice each adventure, a player can roll 1d6 and add it to any 1d20 roll.
Allowed classes: fighter, rogue, monk, barbarian, sorcerer, warblade, shadowcaster, binder, warlock, crusader, swordsage, and favored soul.

We've also been playing some fun D&D Miniature scenarios. We plan to bring them on our trip.

I've also started up a Magic The Gathering 10th Edition league with a single 10th edition fat pack per player. We have about five players and we're having a good time.

I picked up Brain Age 2 and Phoenix Wright, Ace Attorney for my DS. I can't wait for Phantom Hourglass. The 1Up podcast had a lot of good things to say about it. The Nintendo DS is still my favorite game system with the Xbox 360 as my favorite home console.