CAPCOM
San Diego Comic-Con '09
I spent all day Saturday in the San Diego Convention Center, attending Comic-Con with my brother. Once again, an amazing experience.
The first thing we did was make a bee line to the SAE/FSM booth, where I picked up a copy of the Battlestar Galactica Season 4 soundtrack. After that was done, we took a quick walk around the rest of the exhibit hall. This is a pretty damned big exhibit hall, spanning the entire bottom floor of the convention center. With all the people there to push through, it takes about 10 minutes to walk from one end to the other.
While walking around the hall I happened to find Call of Cthulhu: The Card Game, with cover art done by friend Cyril Van Der Haegen. I mentioned this to the guy behind the counter, but he just feigned interest hoping I would buy it! Oh well.
After that I went looking for the Oni Press booth, where I bought my brother the first Scott Pilgrim book. He finished reading it before we left (he was not so interested in Ray Bradbury) so we went down to the floor again and he bought himself the next few books in the series. With any luck, I'll have got my brother hooked on graphic novels! I also went to the Top Shelf booth hoping to pick up a copy of Blankets but they were all out.
The first panel we attended was for Dune, with Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson. They were discussing their latest novel The Winds of Dune and commenting on the process of making a new book every year. I must admit, I have read many of the new Dune books and although they aren't Frank Herbert material, I have enjoyed most of them ( Sandworms of Dune being a notable exception for having a very shallow plot and invoking several dei ex machina).
After that we headed back over to the SAE/FSM booth to get the CDs signed by Bear McCreary. We were first in line! At the same time, Bryan Lee O'Malley (author of Scott Pilgrim) was signing at the Oni Press booth—we went over there afterward but the line was so long that we didn't care to try for it. The Bioshock 2 booth was small—basically a small veiled closet with a gameplay trailer playing for 5-6 people at a time. But that trailer made the game out to look pretty awesome. You play the first big daddy, the only one with free will. You can take airlocks to go outside of Rapture into the ocean. You now make the choice to either harvest or adopt little sisters. Adopting them seems to store them inside your suit somewhere, it wasn't too clear on that. You can take them out to have them harvest adam from certain bodies. While harvesting, you need to guard them from hoards of splicers. Then comes something new—your little sister says "Uh oh, I don't think big sis wants me to play with you anymore", and in comes the big sister—these are very quick, super-agile enemies that possess telekinesis.
The second panel we attended was that of Ray Bradbury. He talked of his fascination of space exploration and walking on the moon for the first time. Perhaps most interestingly, he claimed to have total recall of his entire life. He said he was a 10 month baby, and developed hearing and sight within the womb. He claims his memories go back to being in the womb and after birth.
The final panel was for Human Target, the new TV series from Fox. In the show, our main hero (Christopher Chance) gets hired by rich people to solve any problems or threats against them. He is a very intelligent detective, impersonator, and all-around bodyguard. It stars Mark Valley as Christopher Chance, Jackie Earle Haley as Guerrero, and Chi McBride as Winston, with the score done by Bear McCreary. We got to screen the pilot before a short Q&A with the stars and producers.
Human Target has some pretty awesome action scenes, pretty similar to the Bourne series. It is some of the best action I've seen on TV for as long as I can remember. The acting is stellar, and the score sounds somewhere between Caprica and The Sarah Connor Chronicles. The characters have a light quirkiness similar to Pushing Daisies. The show is being billed as a procedural with a light sprinkling of serial, which is pretty typical for Fox. They want to give you a new action movie every week. Unfortunately, the pilot had a lot of faults that I hope they steer clear of in the series.
For one thing, the characters are too flawless. The main characters—all antiheroes it seems—always know exactly what to say, have a perfect plan, and immediately know exactly what to do to keep the plan on track (pun!) from any curveballs. Not once did it show an imperfection, and I had a hard time believing or relating to them because of it.
Another problem I saw was with Guerrero—he had no introduction, and just sort of imposed himself on the story. He is a computer hacker, but it never really showed that process. Most of his scenes were just quick cuts to him revealing some new information that he hacked off screen.
I had planned to meet some friends while I was there, but that was a pretty big failure all around. One didn't pick up his phone. Another didn't wake up until really late and my phone died in the middle of a conversation with him. The one guy I was able to meet I didn't do anything with because he spent the whole day playing D&D.
The BBC America booth featured a lot of Doctor Who trinkets and apparel, with lots of advertising for the new Torchwood mini-season Children of Earth(which is pretty good, by the way—go watch it!). There was an awesome life-sized Dalek on display.
We spent the two hour ride home listening to the Battlestar CD, and it didn't disappoint!
Street Fighter IV rocks on PC
Street Fighter IV came out a few days after I left to visit family and I've been chomping at the bit to play it ever since. I came back home yesterday, and it was the second thing I did after stepping off the plane (the first being grabbing some fish tacos at El Siete Mares).
Having played the arcade and 360 versions, I knew what to expect. You get a lot of your favorite old characters, including all the originals from Street Fighter II and introducing four new to this game. Gameplay is a lot like Street Fighter III, with a big focus on strategy and the ability to pull off devastating but finger-twisting combos. A new feature I really like is a challenge mode that teaches you the special moves and combos your character can do, which really helps when you're trying to learn how to use one of the new characters or just refreshing yourself on an old one.
The only part still missing is the World Tour mode of the home editions of Street Fighter Alpha 3. As you fought through the roster, the points you get would let you level up. This let you upgrade your character to shift between a focus of power or defense, and let you select power-ups that let you do longer and more complex combos. It created a more unfair form of gameplay compared to Arcade mode and probably would have been too unbalanced for competitive gameplay, but it was still a lot of fun and would have been great to have in IV.
One thing I was worried about was how good the game would run on my system—from past experience, games ported from console to PC tend to run amazingly sluggish. With a sigh of relief, I put those worries to rest when I saw the game not skip a beat when run with all the settings maxed out. The game even has a special PC-specific settings screen with loads of rendering tweaks including the new Ink, Watercolor, and Posterize visual styles.
I've been having a lot of fun in IV between all the various modes of play. It doesn't top Alpha 3 as my favorite of the Street Fighter series, but it's up above everything else!
Bear McCreary to score Capcom’s Dark Void
Bear McCreary, composer of Battlestar Galactica, let out the information today that he is scoring Capcom’s new game, Dark Void. I remember some videos of this coming out a while ago, from E3 maybe, and it looked like a pretty fun game but after so much time I had forgotten about it. These new videos make it look as awesome as ever, though, and with Bear scoring it, you know the music will be amazing!
If you like his music, consider posting at Capcom where Bear is trying to get authorization to release a soundtrack CD.
