Jeff Gerstmann is Still Alive

We both agree that the movie Go is impossible to watch in this day and age. Don’t watch Go.

We also agree that Clerks ain’t all that anymore, either. I love Clerks, but dude!

Also, we’re split on the topic of an Anchorman sequel. He’s all “whatevs.” I’m all “they’ve been making Anchorman sequels for the past few years, haven’t they?”

I still need to unwrap and watch my copy of Clerks II at some point. It’s on HD-DVD, so it’ll surely have The Look And Sound Of Perfect on its side.

Also, Big Audio Dynamite. Pro or con?

Not to bore you all with more talk about things I do to my computer, but I ditched that D-Link hunk of junk today and put an AirPort Extreme in its place. That raises the number of Apple products in my home up by one and it’s starting to really freak me out. Am I becoming one of those people? Am I going to suddenly start wearing turtlenecks and hanging out at Starbucks? Will I be the ass telling people about my screenplay every chance I get?

Hell, I even work in an all-Apple office now. Madness!

Jason Ocampo, you were right all along. There, I said it. If I didn’t use this PC for playing games, and if it wasn’t the only computer I own that is fully equipped with music-making stuff that I enjoy using (most of which could probably be replaced with Mac equivalents, if I really wanted to learn some new software), I wouldn’t need a PC at all.

It’s starting to feel like the summer I spent transitioning from using an Amiga to using a 486.

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It’s sad to watch, but my poor lonely blog here has seen better days. Traffic is dwindling, though I’m not sure if that’s because I’m not posting here very often or because people have stopped checking it in favor of checking giantbomb.com instead. It’s probably a bit of both. Once my life stabilizes a bit and I’m not spending every waking hour thinking about the new site, I expect things around here will pick up a bit.

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In music news, the new Goldie Lookin’ Chain album is out in UK stores next week. I’m pretty excited about that, already have a copy pre-ordered.

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One more nice thing about switching network devices… the AirPort only has one fairly dim light on it. The D-Link was full of those PlayStation-style super-bright blue lights. If you’re throwing that in a closet, that’s no biggie. Mine sat right in the middle of my sightline from bed, making the room too bright, even when my eyes were closed. I felt like some kind of old man/crazy person, putting black tape over lights at 3AM while muttering curses under my breath. Now if I could just get those TiVo hard drive fans to quiet down… that’s my fault, though, the thing was plenty quiet until I threw a second hard drive in it. How else could I keep the entire run of Cheap Seats a couple of button presses away?

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Oh, and it’s about two guys driving cross-country who catch wind of a plot by evil Germans to kidnap UK super-girl-group, Shampoo, and how they decide to take matters into their own hands to save the girls and stop the terrorists.

So, now that Giant Bomb has launched in blog form, I’m not 100% sure what to do with this blog. I’ll keep it going as best I can, but that sort of depends on how many non-gaming things that happen to me. Anything gaming-related probably belongs on the other site. With a site to launch and a game blog to keep up, I’m not sure what sort of non-gaming things will actually happen to me, but I’ll drum something up.

- I’m currently in the process of making my way through the Human Giant Season 1 DVD, which was released last week. I missed most of the episodes when they were on originally, and I’m pretty surprised by it. It’s better than “sketch show on MTV that isn’t The State” sounds. And, unlike The State, they were thinking ahead when they made this stuff and properly licensed the music for the DVD release. I couldn’t bring myself to buy the Xbox Live Marketplace or iTunes versions of The State because they went in and replaced all the music with generic-sounding stuff for licensing reasons. The music was a significant part of The State’s comedy, so… I don’t know, maybe it’s just nostalgia, but it isn’t the same without it. I guess I’ll have to stick with my 80th generation VHS tapes.

- It’s daylight savings time now, which has me way excited, because I’m due to start commuting to an office again as of, well, later today. Driving home in the dark always sort of leaves me depressed.

- I dislike the wireless router I picked up. While it’s easy to configure and everything, it’s still a router. My ISP provides me with 8 static IP addresses, so I don’t have to put up with port forwarding and internal IP addresses and all that crap, but I am now. So far, it’s been mostly smooth, but it pops up and gets totally irritating just enough to make me remember/regret my decision. Like when an AIM file transfer seems to not work. Or when, for whatever reason, I can only upload files to the Giant Bomb media server from my Mac when it’s got a wired connection. That makes blogging from the bathroom (the American dream, maybe you’ve heard of it) totally impossible. Not cool.

- The long-awaited album from Crystal Castles is only a little over a week away. If you haven’t heard of them, it often sounds like a girl singing/shrieking over an NES, an Atari 2600, a Game Boy, and/or a Commodore 64, all of which are running through distortion pedals, including (especially) the girl. That’s a bit of an over-simplification, but whatevs. I like their sound, and the songwriting is good, too. Take a listen on their myspace page if you haven’t heard of them already. It fits my criteria in that it occasionally sounds like they’re playing dancey music on a device that is about to break or catch on fire.

- Speaking of music, I haven’t had a whole lot of time lately to work on new Midnight Brown material, but I’m hoping to find some time for more of that in the near future. With a Mac available to make recording vocals easy and portable (before I had another desktop set up in a spare bedroom), it’s all a little easier to deal with now. Now I just need to find a decent host/sequencing application for OSX and see if I can find anything I like more than FL Studio. I doubt I will, but I should at least give it a shot.

- OK, fine, one little gaming thing before I remember to post about it in greater detail. You should check out Nexuiz if you haven’t seen it before. It’s a free, open-source update of the Quake 1 engine that makes for a decent online first-person shooter. You’re not going to confuse it for Crysis or anything, but it’s very playable, and the price is definitely right.

Just noticed this (click for a full-size image) and wanted to say thanks to all of you for making the Arrow Pointing Down podcast the #2 video-game-related podcast on iTunes today. We have some exciting and dangerous ideas kicking around for the future, so stay tuned!

Someone needs to come up with an internet-friendly equivalent to “stay tuned.”

Stay bookmarked! No.
Stay down with RSS! Nah.

OK, well, I don’t have anything good enough to replace that. But that’s beside the point.

Also, while I have you here, do yourself a favor and go over to Street Carnage to listen to Bobby Brown reciting every number and letter he can think of after busting into someone’s studio space and demanding to drop hot rhymes over their beats. Just listen to the one marked “Brown Bomber” if you’re in a hurry. I’ve been wandering around the house, often in my underwear, shouting “BROWN BOMBER! A, B, C, D, E, F, G!” for a couple of days now.

After spending a few hours setting up microphones and yelling at a laptop, we’ve recorded another installment of the Ryan Davis Weekly Podcast Classic, the Arrow Pointing Down podcast.

Sounds like there’s a bit of echo, primarily from mic bleed if I had to guess, but the high ceiling in my living room probably didn’t help matters much. Either way, it sounds way better than the Skype-based test we did last week, and is probably more scattered and insane than last week’s, too! So check that out!

Good news, Audiosurf is coming out this week through Steam. If you pre-order, you save a dollar and get it for $8.95. On top of that, the game comes with Valve’s soundtrack for The Orange Box, which is a pretty cool addition.

Apparently it’s using those new Steamworks tools, too. The game will have achievements, much like the games in The Orange Box do. Very cool. I look forward to dusting all of you on various MSTRKRFT songs.

Quick one here before I step out for the evening, but you might want to head over to the official site for Audiosurf and sign up to take part in its beta weekend… that’s this weekend!

It’s an IGF finalist that reads your music and makes levels out of it. Apparently you can play along with the songs in a variety of modes. Check out this video for an idea of what it does. I haven’t played it, but it looks totally rad.

(h/t to "Gage" for pointing this out to "me.")

I actually wrote this post last night, only to have my machine crash (iTunes has been acting up) and lose it. As it was locking up, I snapped a photo of the post, but rather than typing it in, let’s use this opportunity to boil it down to its key points!

There have been many lists of this nature floating around since Rock Band’s release. The best I’ve seen so far has been Jane’s over at Game Girl Advance. I love the girl rock, and Elastica would be an especially fantastic addition.

My list is probably a bit more obvious than most. I’ll update it as I think of more. But before we get to that, I have to say that Harmonix absolutely needs to develop and patch in some sort of in-game song-purchasing interface for the game. Something along the lines of SingStar PS3’s SingStore. Xbox Live Marketplace is horrible when it comes to getting actual info about what you’re buying, and listing the packs and the individual tracks right alongside each other with a warning that you might accidentally purchase the same thing twice has “fix me” written all over it. The PS3 side seems a little bit better, as the PlayStation Store is better at presenting text, but navigation and finding the new stuff isn’t so hot.

With that out of the way, I bring you this growing list of songs and albums that I would immediately purchase if and when they turned up in Rock Band.

Juliana Hatfield - Universal Heart-Beat
Belly - Feed the Tree
Weezer - The entire first album.
Green Day - Dookie
Green Day - American Idiot
Frank Black - Los Angeles
Smashing Pumpkins - Zero
The entire soundtrack to Judgment Night
Bloodhound Gang - Fire Water Burn
Golden Earring - Radar Love
Doobie Brothers - Long Train Running
Duran Duran - Hungry Like The Wolf
Hum - Stars
Everclear - Santa Monica
Def Leppard - Photograph
The Distillers - City of Angels (this is mostly here to elicit a negative reaction from Alex, who both hates this band and songs about Los Angeles. Eat it!)
Hard-Fi - Suburban Knights
Rancid - Olympia WA, or just about anything else from “…and out come the wolves.”