Geekery

Went to see the new Iron Man movie this weekend. Suffice it to say that I had a great time, and the movie deserves the glowing reviews it's been getting. The two hours went by like a breeze, with a great mix of action, drama, and humor to keep things going, and I left the theater eager for a sequel.

Long-time readers -- and I mean really long-time readers -- of this web site might recall that I'm a fairly enthusiastic pinball affectionato. I don't get to blog about it very often, though, since real-world pinballs (and arcades, for that matter) are pretty much extinct in this day and age. And while video pinball games are a fun diversion, almost all of them suffer from shoddy physics and unrealistic "video game" elements that detract from the genuine experience.

Okay, I got Metroid Prime 3: Corruption for the Nintendo Wii the other day (via Amazon's $30 sale), and I have to ask -- what the frig is up with the game's save points?

While driving into work this morning, I was listening to my copy of Pac-Man Fever, rockin' my inner geek with some cheesy '80s pop music.

After a while, I realize that it's been 25 years (plus a few months) since the album was first released in 1982.

And then I wondered, "Wouldn't it be cool (in an unabashed geeky way) if someone were to commemorate the 25th anniversary of Pac-Man Fever with a follow-up album?"

As soon as I saw this, I just had to put it up, if only so my pal Dr. Dave can chime in and answer the darn thing:

Regular readers of this blog will know that I am a major Pixar junkie -- I follow news of their new releases, I try to catch their new movies in the theater on opening weekends, and I've got boxed-set deluxe editions of the home DVD releases. Granted, my fanboyish devotion has wavered a bit lately due to external distractions, but I'm still enough of a geek to plunk down big bucks for fanboy fodder like this (buy it now, it's awesome!).

Yeah, I know, I know -- this site hasn't been getting a lot of attention lately. But if it makes you feel any better, it's just a reflection of how full my schedule has been these days. I've got a backlog of comics I haven't touched, a backlog of movies I haven't seen (I really want to catch Ratatouille, Sicko, Rush Hour 3, and The Simpsons before they disappear from the theaters), a new game I've barely touched, and a zillion other things I've had to put on hold for the time being -- though, hopefully, not for too much longer.

(This one's for the video-game nerds out there. Non-nerds need not apply.)

So apparently Sony just launched the (tanking horribly) PlayStation 3 video-game system in Korea the other day.

As an old-school video-gaming geek, this photo...

Okay, it's not as if the world needs even more stories about non-gamers enjoying the Nintendo Wii. But my blog postings have been waning lately, and this is the only blog-worthy thing that's happened to me recently, so what the fig.

For those of you (like me) who have been cringing with fear over Michael Bay's upcoming live-action Transformers movie, your fears have been confirmed: high-resolution pictures of the movie's mechanoids have been released, and they are -- to use a highly technical term -- damn uggggggggggggggggggggly.

Here are a few samples:

An interesting trend from today's headlines:

Y'know, when I first heard that Nintendo and Sega were collaborating on a game with their two companies' beloved mascots, I wasn't entirely sure what to make of it. I mean, sure, it's cool that the two biggest characters ever in video-gaming history would finally get to go head-to-head against each other, but pitting them in the summer Olympics seemed like an odd fit.

Well, after originally getting all a-twitter at Apple's announcement of the iTV (now renamed AppleTV), I'm disappointed to learn that the final product doesn't quite match my original expectations.

[Updated 11:38am] For those who haven't been keeping track, sales of Sony's bleeding-edge Playstation 3 video game console have been dropping like an iridium controller. The $600 machine, which brought out scalpers and inspired shootouts in November, fizzled out soon after Christmas and is now roundly being outsold by its competitors.

For those of you long-time visitors who remember our first (and only) encounter with Captain Copyright, it's time to break out your polybags -- Captain Copyright has fallen, never to return!

Here's a fun 'n free little Flash game you can play from your web browser: Stick Remover.

The instructions are in Japanese, so for those of you who don't read Japanese, here's a quick summary:

Coming to a theater near you, here's the star of Pixar Animation Studio's 2008 animated movie, WALL*E:

[Updated 12:21pm] Like all true Mac fans (and here you thought I'd gone all-Wii, all the time, eh? ), I'll be spending a lot of my meager attention today following Apple CEO Steve Jobs' keynote speech at MacWorld Expo. In fact, as I'm writing this, I'm reading updates from the continually-updated live blogs at Engadget and MacDailyNews, feeding me the latest revelations.

My brother directed me to Ms. Dewey the other night, a new search engine cooked up by the geeks up at Microsoft.

What makes Ms. Dewey different from the myriad other search engines (past and present) is that she's essentially a stand-up comedienne wrapped around Google. She does a short quip (with accompanying live-motion video) before presenting the results.

[Updated December 26, 12:29am] Well, I've got my Wii unpacked, and here is the obligatory blog post from it.

As for Nintendo's strategy of reaching non-gamers with the Wii, it's hopeful around here. My wife the non-gamer was hesitant at first, but enjoyed goading her mother into trying Wii Sports Tennis, and later bowled a few frames too.