→

First off, I wrote 90% of the 20th’s post and never published it, so when you’re finished reading this post go ahead and read the one right under it.

With that out of the way, I watched the Harry Potter movie over the weekend. Workable stuff. Having read the book right before I saw it, it’s interesting – it follows the book pretty closely, which means most of the suspense and crap was ruined for me. Yet I’m glad I read the book first, it’s a good feeling walking out of the theater thinking to yourself all the things they left out of the movie that were in the book (not that many, but you know). Lord of the Rings is next.

Thank GOD all the freaking consoles are out. No more hype. No more speculation. No more pages of my favorite Imagine magazines wasted on promoting that XBox magazine. People I know love to ask me which one I’m getting and they always seem shocked to discover I’m buying neither this season. Instead whatever exteraneous funding I recieve this Christmas is going towards PC upgrades. A GeForce 3 200 Titanium (the budget power video card) and WinXP. Probably a game or two as well. I did the “bust your ass to get the console ASAP” thing with the PS2 and in the past year I’ve bought ONE game. Not worth it to buy two more consoles when most of the console games I could want fit snugly on the PS2 anyway.

When I played Return to Castle Wolfenstein at QuakeCon I was disappointed to see that the logo of the Nazi’s wasn’t a swastika, but this sort of phoenix/double eagle thing. It’s no fun blasting Nazis if you can’t see the right logo when you’re plugging away at them. As an example this weekend I was able to convince my parents to buy a Dell system and have it delivered to their house. As an example, when my dad asked what all the system could do I detailed some of it but I told him it probably couldn’t run many games. He asked me “well can we blow away the Nazis?”, referring the old Wolfenstein 3-D game. However this morning I discovered that it’s only the multiplayer game which bars the swastikas, the single-player component keeps them. What’s happened here is that the game contains only the “double eagle phoenix” in Germany (where if it had the swastika it couldn’t be sold, something they learned with the original game), so the multiplayer component in all games has the swastika removed from the muliplayer game so that everyone is playing the same game online. Clever, but I betcha the game still gets banned in Germany – it’s not too flattering to that country.