...Busy Week

Had a fair amount of stuff to do this week so far. Valentines day was fun...we went to a morrocan place...good food you can eat with your hand and girls dancing...can't ask for much more out of dinner. Then the guys who helped with Call of Duty: Finest Hour fly down to LA for the COD party at gotham hall...free drinks and gambling turned out to be a good time. Check out some badly framed and lit pics (some of them taken by Brad an actual artist...I took the bad quality pics of our activision friends dancing).
















...the end.

...reason #1 San Francisco is great

...If there was ANY band I could see right now it's be Journey WITH Steve Perry...none of this Steve Augeri nonsense.

In other news, in case you think big business doesn't control our country perhaps you should read this.

...XVIIII

A friend of mine Darion once said "you must be the only person under 30 that tivos 60 minutes every week". I think he might be right. I am getting to be a pretty nerdy old guy. I watch 60 minutes 1 and 2, British House of commons, and the Daily Show every week...well every day for the daily show. In addition I read the examiner (free daily paper) every day on the way to work and I read the SF Guadian and SF Weekly every week. Am I old and nerdy?

This isn't all I do, of course...

To counteract the above I have similar tastes on the opposite end of the spectrum: I tivo the real world, real world/road rules challenge, surreal life, 24, celebrity poker challenge, the amazing race, and the chapelle show...In addition I read all the free music mags from amoeba (amp, mrr, etc...), punk planet, guitar world and stuff like that pretty regularily.

I forgot to CAPITALIZE the stuff in paragraph 3...how marvelous!

...cam pics (dog, karaoke)

Check out this dog...it was huge and had pig-tails...for some reason giving your dog pig-tails makes it seem more human. This was outside tu-lan, a vietnamese restaurant. Over the past few years vietnamese food has become my favorite food...luckily SF has vietnamese restaurants everywhere and they are cheap. Not so much for FL which I only saw and eat at a vietnamese restaurant once in my life before the age of 24 :(










...the end

...Game Review Resident Evil 4 - Gamecube

Resident Evil 4 - Gamecube

Resident Evil 4 is the best resident evil game in a series that has lasted since the early days of the Playstation. It is also one of the best games of this or any year and stands as one of the best horror games ever made. Even those who haven't enjoyed the series or genre in the past would be wise to give this game a chance as it reinvents every aspect of itself in the name fun.

Director Shinji Mikami stepped in halfway thru RE 4's design and totally started over. Gone are most everything that made the RE series a chore in the past. Things fixed or made better in RE4: proper 3rd person camera, proper 3rd person aiming, very limited inventory/saves/ammo/health, relentless backtracking, switching to your knife. In addition all the new features were added to serve one purpose: make the game more fun. Context-sensitive actions such as climbing, knocking down ladders, jumping thru windows, and attacking work surprisingly well. The revamped fighting is a blast with the "zombie's" location-specific damage, shooting projectiles out of the air, and protecting the president's daughter all being more fun than I possibly expected. All of this with an incredibly helpful map, perfectly based saved points (except right after the disk swap - arg!), a fun weapon upgrade/balance system, and a couple bonus modes when you beat the game that extend the already long (~20 hours) game indefinitely.

Oh yeah and the game is beautiful. This consistent an artistic vision hasn't been seen since Metal Gear Solid 2.

RE 4 has me wishing for the first time ever in the series "please keep the series like this!" I can't think of too much they could add or change to the next Resident Evil game to make it much better, which is definitely a first! In fact I pray that they don't make like this a lot of shooters and allow you to move and shoot 360 degrees at any time. The list of things that could be improved upon is short: better script/story, more scares per hour (I only jumped once all game), better weapon switching and possibly a sidestep.

RE 4 is a fantastic game. There is no reason to not own this game if you have a Gamecube and you like to shoot things.

A