Same As It Ever Was

I played some more Audiosurf (while Painkiller was downloading). In fact, I did worse than that. I played a CD I bought exclusively for playing in Audiosurf. I enjoy Sinatra, Deano; Nat. But James Darren was the crooner who played hologram Vic Fontaine on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. So I really needed to play through "This One's From The Heart". As usual, it's an oddball enough choice that I'm the only one on the global scoreboard for most of the songs. Audiosurf sends email when I lose my records. So far the world has reclaimed Monty Python's "Finland" (which seems only fair as I don't even know any Fins), They Might Be Giants "I Should Be Allowed To Think", and Dean Martin's "Sway". (For Paul's reference, a super tacky latin brass version of this song was what you heard every time that deaf lady one row over's cell phone rang.)

It's just tickles me to know that someone out there in the world might say, "I don't even try for Weird Al anymore. Those songs are a war zone", with a straight face. (Seriously, I was just happy to be on the scoreboard for "It's All About The Pentiums".)

But me buying music just to play in a game puts me well behind the times. It was recently announced that Rock Band sold six million songs in its first four months of release. And they charge double what iTunes is charging. The music industry is probably very concerned / interested, as well they should be.

On the "Be Afraid. Be Very Afraid" front, I noticed that I've put ninety hours into Steam based games in the past two weeks. That's roughly forty of BioShock, forty of Titan Quest, and ten of Audiosurf. Keep in mind, I also played Super Paper Mario and two episodes of Sam & Max start to finish and had a few social evenings which contained gaming not included in that figure. Now if I could just finagle a way to get paid for this... Nah. It wouldn't be any fun if I had to do it when someone else said to.

Speaking of not fun, Conflict: Denied Ops (possibly the most generic game title ever) came to GameTap recently. It got bad reviews, but so did Jericho, and I liked that well enough. It makes my eyes hurt. I have never gotten motion sickness playing games. You got a jet car you need piloted down a spiral tubeway, I'm your man. But C:DO is continually applying so many funky video effects, it drives my eyes nuts. Oh well. That's four gigs of hard drive space freed up.

In unrelated news, a spokesperson for id software said the company is changing focus to consoles. I suppose that doesn't mean much, as a whole. But as someone who loved DooM on the PC, even creating maps for it, it's disheartening. I suppose it's also disheartening as someone who just bought a PC. :P Meh. I'm sure I'll enjoy the new consoles when the prices finally drop. Plus a gaming world without free and uncensored user created content is a pretty horrible thought. I'm not saying that stuff completely justifies the expense of a PC, but it matters (a lot).