Anyone who knows me knows I’m a big Stephen King fan. I have most of his books, thanks to an on-again, off-again affiliation with the Stephen King Book Club and some visits to Half Price Books. I must confess I haven’t read them all, or even half of them. There are several reasons for this – his books tend to be long, I’m not as strong a reader as I would like to be (unlike my Wife, who can devour tomes in a day), I don’t have as much free time as I would like (ASP and Torque won’t code themselves, you know) and mostly I’m lazy. Still, whenever I do get a chance to read I do like King’s work. It’s not Shakespeare but it’s fun.

So I read now that he’s retiring. On the one hand that sucks – no more new stuff. But then again it took him 30 years to write all these books, and at the rate I’m going it might take that long to read them all, so it’s not as if it’s a huge loss. Plus he’s retreading old ground – the forthcoming From a Buick Eight is Christine again (both about psycho cars). Dreamcatcher was IT again (both about groups of friends with psychic connections in Derry, Maine), etc. King wants to retire on the top of his game, like the Neil Young lyric “Better to burn out than fade away”.

Hell, part of me wants him to retire – he can almost churn these things out faster than I can read them. He claims he has five books left – From a Buick Eight, a short story compilation called Everything’s Eventual, and three more entries in the Dark Tower series. However, that seems like an odd note to go out on – some speculate that he’s not counting EE and there will be another unannounced book as a “last caress”. As of now even his agent doesn’t even think he’ll retire (this is apparently not the first time he’s announced something similar). Still others believe that King will continue to write, we just won’t see it. He reportedly has a number of books he’s never finished. Some of his biggest bestsellers have rested on a shelf for years because they were headed somewhere King didn’t like. He comes back to them later, pitches out the last part he didn’t like, and finishes them. Perhaps he’ll write books with posthumous publication dates – it is rumored that J.D. Salinger (The Catcher In The Rye) has written a sequel to his lone book, to be published after he dies (he’s currently living in seclusion). Still another theory says he’ll publish occasionally – under a pseudonym, something he did for a while as Richard Bachman, until someone figured him out.

In any event, I’m sure he’ll have fun.

Linux for PlayStation 2. Coming this May in the U.S. for $199. Hmm…. tempting.

For all you Trillian types having difficulties connecting to AIM, you’re not alone. AOL’s server is giving Trillian crap, though the AIM program isn’t having any problems. Whether this is an accidental error that AIM’s own client is immune to or a deliberate attempt to foil Trillian by AOL remains to be seen. Suffice it to say the Trillian people are working on it but in the meantime either suck it up and use AIM or go the Java route.

Looks like FOX decided to cancel Family Guy. Everyone do me a favor and go sign this petition. Yeah I know, I don’t believe petitions work either, but I would like to see how many people they can get on this one (over 7600 so far).

Previously I had posted regarding the parallel between art and videogames. I however posted it from the perspective of someone who was not an artist. This article, however, was written by Gabe, the artist of the Penny Arcade pair. He gives a much deeper parallel from the perspective of an artist who is also a gamer. Good stuff.

So last Wednesday night, I had my three videos ready. I had my first tape ready to record Star Trek: The Next Generation on TNN at 7:00 PM. I had my second tape ready to record The Job‘s return to Wednesday nights on ABC at 8:30 PM. And I had my third tape ready to record Enterprise on the local WB station which is kind enough to carry UPN programming. However, while the first two recording appointments went off without a hitch, when I turned to the local WB, I was shocked to learn it was now a Univision station. Univision is of course the all-Spanish channel. I flipped frantically from channel to channel, hitting another Univision channel in the process. I couldn’t find Enterprise. I hit the TV Guide website to see where it was, and I discovered that I was right about my original presumption – I was on the correct channel number from several weeks earlier when there was a new episode of Enterprise, but that channel is now one of two different Univision networks.

I at first got flustered with how retarded the notion of two Univision networks on one cable rotation is, but at work the next day I got the scoop: the WB Cox was carrying locally got sold to Univision, and that channel did not see fit to warn Cox about it. Cox is trying to get another WB channel, but until or unless they do, I’m without Enterprise. Worse yet, the only reason I could see Enterprise is because that particular WB was nice enough to carry some UPN programming – no word on if the next one will.

So what do you do when you’re now one of the unlucky bastards unable to see your own show? Simple – download it. I hit up the newsgroups alt.binaries.multimedia.startrek and alt.binaries.startrek and lo and behold, there it was, “Silent Enemy”, episode 12, which was available for download prior to airtime, it would appear. I queued it up, and sometime the next day the downloads were done. I fired it up as a VCD and watched it using my APEX player. In some ways it was better than if I had taped it – there were no commercials, no logos, perfect editing, no problems with the signal, the end credits were intact, no tracking problems, no fear of the tape wearing out or breaking over time. It was nice. However, the picture did appear to “jump” just a little bit, plus there was the pixellation and artifacting that naturally come with an MPEG-1 file. Whereas DVD-Video uses a DVD disc and an MPEG-2 video file (amongst other things), a VideoCD or VCD uses a compact disc and an MPEG-1. Call it “DVD Lite” if you will.

So is what I did illegal and wrong? Well, technically it’s illegal – copyrighted material and all. But it’s not as if I could actually watch it – no WB and all. If I had the WB or UPN I would have happily watched it, and you could reason it out to say that downloading it isn’t all that different from recording it, in the grander scheme of things. Therefore I plan to make it a regular routine – making a VCD out of the Enterprise episodes – the durability is there, the neato factor is there, and since I have all this bandwidth and CPU cycles doing nothing useful overnight and all say, I figure why not. I didn’t want to do this originally, since I was afraid it was going to make me a slave to downloading from newsgroups, but one hour-long show a week isn’t going to kill me.

I’d like to take a break now from my usual rumblings about computers, gaming and violent heavy metal music and discuss one of my other, more bizzarre interests.

Yep, Disney.

I’m something of a Disney nut, hampered by lack of income and certian realism factors (i.e., going to Disney World perperually is infeasible) but I’ve always liked what Walt’s company has been able to come up with, from the animation styles to whatever new fangled rides they come up with.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not about to go see Snow Dogs or anything (in fact, I think appearing in any live action movie with the name “Disney’s…” in the start of the title is a death-knell for a career), I don’t always get out to go see the animated flicks, and I don’t always agree with what they do (more later) but I do enjow most of what the Walt Disney Company comes up with.

The part of Disney I’m most interested is their Animated Features. Disney was the first company to take the usually four- to five-minute format of the animated short and suggest that it might be suited for a full-length movie. Now, in the late 1930’s when they conjured up this idea “full length” was somewhere between seventy and ninety minutes, a far cry from the 2.5 hours movies average today. While this may seem like something that could be done away with successfully today, when I found out the South Park movie was 83 minutes I felt disappointed until I watched it – it seemed like a full two hours (perhaps I was just too used to the half-hour format). Their first Animated Feature was 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, some 84 minutes long. Over the last 65 years they have made 40 Animated Features, and according to them this is their list:

1. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs – December 21, 1937
2. Pinocchio – February 2, 1940
3. Fantasia – November 13, 1940
4. Dumbo – October 23, 1941
5. Bambi – August 13, 1942
6. Saludos Amigos – February 6, 1943
7. The Three Caballeros – February 3, 1945
8. Make Mine Music – August 15, 1946
9. Fun and Fancy Free – September 27, 1947
10. Melody Time – May 27, 1948
11. The Adventures of Ichabod and Mr. Toad – October 5, 1949
12. Cinderella – Febrary 15, 1950
13. Alice in Wonderland – July 28, 1951
14. Peter Pan – Febrary 5, 1953
15. Lady and the Tramp – June 22, 1955
16. Sleeping Beauty – January 29, 1959
17. 101 Dalmatians – January 25, 1961
18. The Sword in the Stone – December 25, 1963
19. The Jungle Book – October 18, 1967
20. The Aristocats – December 24, 1970
21. Robin Hood – November 8, 1973
22. The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh – March 11, 1977
23. The Rescuers – June 22, 1977
24. The Fox and the Hound – July 10, 1981
25. The Black Cauldron – July 24, 1985
26. The Great Mouse Detective – July 2, 1986
27. Oliver and Company – Nov 18, 1988
28. The Little Mermaid – November 17, 1989
29. The Rescuers Down Under – November 10, 1990
30. Beauty and the Beast – November 15, 1991
31. Aladdin – November 11, 1992
32. The Lion King – June 15, 1994
33. Pocahontas – June 23, 1995
34. The Hunchback of Notre Dame – July 21, 1996
35. Hercules – June 27, 1997
36. Mulan – June 19, 1998
37. Tarzan – June 18, 1999
38. Fantasia 2000 – January 1, 2000
39. The Emperors New Groove – June 2000
40. Atlantis: The Lost Empire

These are the films that when you see them showing in a movie trailer will denote themselves as “Disney’s __th Animated Feature”.

You’ll notice the list of Animated Features is somewhat exclusive. The most important exemption is that none of the “direct to video” features are included. No The Lion King II or The Return of Jafar. Also notice that none of Pixar’s films are included – they merely have a licensing deal going with Disney.

Also somewhat confusing is what qualifies as “animated”. Animated/live action fare is mostly disqualified (no Bedknobs & Broomsticks or Pete’s Dragon), but The Three Caballeros, along with the two Fantasia films do flirt with live action a bit. The only Animated Feature sequel is The Rescuers Down Under, after which Disney instituted a “no sequels on the big screen” rule (Toy Story 2 was originally a direct-to-video sequel, but it turned out to be “too damn good” to waste on that market).

1959’s Sleeping Beauty was the last fairy tale Disney did until The Little Mermaid broke the trend thirty years later. In the 80’s the amount of money made on the films dipped so bad that they started to lose money – The Black Cauldron lost over $30 million (a high price in 1985). Mermaid was the first to break even in some time. The peak was 1994’s The Lion King, which had the largest opening weekend ever for an animated film until Monsters, Inc. beat it this year (and may go on to top the overall gross as well). The grosses have mellowed out a bit, but Disney still churns them out. There’s never been an Oscar for animated film (and if there is this year then either Shrek or Monsters, Inc. are a lock for it) but over the years many of these films have either won or been nominated for Oscars in technical achievement categories. The only one to ever be nominated for Best Picture is Beauty and the Beast.

Absent from the list is 1946’s Song of the South. Whether it ever qualified for AF status is debatable (it was a live action/animated hybrid) but one thing’s for sure – Disney wants to all but bury it. I saw it back in 1986, but I don’t completely remember all of it. Most of it centers around the stories told by Uncle Remus, a black slave on a southern plantation. Consequently, Disney caught a lot of hell when they re-released it back in 1986 for its 40th anniversary and pulled it off of theaters. The NAACP and others complained that it sugar coated slavery (I wonder what they think of Gone with the Wind) and the term “Tar Baby” has come to be a derogatory term for blacks. While Disney will probably never release it on any home or theater formats here in the states ever (ignore the problem, it will go away), they did put it on VHS in Europe (a much sought-after item) and they still have a Splash Mountain ride in Disneyland and Disney World, with characters from the film.

Most of the Disney AF’s tend to be musicals – all the better to sell soundtracks, my dear. Also, usually when there’s an animal or two (or when the animals are the main characters) they can talk – but the “traditional” animals (cats, dogs, etc.) usually won’t talk to humans (in 101 Dalmations and Lady and the Tramp they had to “pretend” they didn’t talk when humans were around). In Pocahontas, none of the animals talked at all, causing quite a stir of people who plain didn’t like that sort of thing. Also, whereas most Disney AF’s have a happy ending of some sort (usually it’s built into the pre-existing fairy tale) Pocahontas didn’t. Not by any coincidence was Pocahontas‘ predecessor, The Lion King, the last Disney AF (so far) to be a runaway hit.

The Lion King was also the last in some other things as well, most importantly the last of the Katzenberger flicks. Jeffery Katzenberger was the head of Disney’s animation department and the executive producer on Disney’s AF’s through Lion King. After feeling snubbed when he didn’t recieve a high ranking (and recently abandoned) position at Disney he left to form Dreamworks SKG (with Steven Speilberg and David Geffen) and head that animation department. While The Prince of Egypt was a hit under him, he struck out with The Road to El Dorado and Antz, but he’s back in black with Shrek.

Another notable departure from Disney was Don Bluth. An animator for them, he left to form his own studio where he made the critical smash The Secret of NIMH and All Dogs Go To Heaven, but has yet to experience a theatrical hit. His last attempt was Titan: AE. He’s most known, however, for doing the animation behind the Dragon’s Lair and Space Ace Laserdisc Arcade Games. Most of his studio’s money is made churning out The Land Before Time direct to video sequels (for which they stopped affixing numbers to after part 9).

But of course for me the most fascinating/important thing about the Disney Animated Features is their eventual positions on home formats.

Until the mid 70’s and the introduction of Laserdisc the idea of a Disney Animated Feature on a home format wasn’t even a question. Disney made some films available on Laserdisc, expanding the idea when VHS came out. They would, however, hold back certian films from release, the idea being that these could continue to make more money in movie theaters. To this end, they would continue to re-release older films to the theater periodically to make more money.

One of the last Disney AF’s to be denied the home video format was Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. The film was cleaned up and restored for re-release in 1987, the 50th anniversary of the film. However, it didn’t make as much money as Disney had hoped, so they finally released it to home video in 1989. That video has since mostly sold out and Disney has not made any new printings of it until recently (more later). Fantasia saw a similar fate, being put out in 1990 and having not been put out again until recently.

Disney has a policy of making certian films available on a home format and then at some point ceasing manufacture of them for a certian period of time (usually a decade). Snow White saw this fate, with its recent re-issue being twelve years later. Disney does not (usually) go to the extreme of removing the film from stores, they simply don’t make more. As a result, while these films don’t neccessarily become impossible to obtain, they do dwindle in supply. Several years back, however, Disney re-released Pinocchio to theaters and took the extra step of not only recalling unsold copies of the Pinocchio video, but also purchasing back copies from rental retailers. However they discovered that, since it was in fact already in most people’s homes, the re-release bombed. As a result, Disney usually opts for “limited screenings” of re-issued movies. Right now Beauty and the Beast is playing in IMAX theaters (limited enough) and next year The Lion King gets the same treatment.

And then in 1997 came DVD. Disney originally passed on the format (as others did) and then signed on for DIVX, the pay-per-view DVD variant. While their motives were likely rooted in money, Disney maintains that the added security of limiting the set of players that could view the discs (i.e., no DVD-ROM copying) was their reasoning. However, DIVX never took off and in 1999 died without Disney ever having released an AF on it. Later that year Disney released nine “Limited Issue” DVD’s, eight AF’s and the DTV sequel Lion King II. I bought the eight AF’s, since the threat was that once these “Limited Issue” DVD’s were gone they would also likely be in the vault for a decade. As I still now see these DVD’s on shelves (alongside their non-Limited reissues) I wonder how limited they were. Interestingly, the last AF to ever see release was 1985’s The Black Cauldron, the only Disney film other than last year’s Atlantis to be rated PG. The reason was simple – the movie wasn’t popular, but in 1999 when it was released to video and DVD it was “sprung” on people who had never seen it.

But then Disney turned around and decided to quit being so stingy. They decided that their entire AF catalog, minus ten, would continuously be available. These would be under the moniker of “The Gold Collection”. The other ten, which include Snow White, Beauty and the Beast, Lion King, Aladdin and others, will be available as “The Platinum Collection”. They will be released one per year and will have a limited production run, after which they will go back into the vault for a decade. 2001’s entry was the double DVD Snow White. October 2002 will see Beauty and the Beast, and 2003’s is likely The Lion King. New releases, such as The Emperor’s New Groove and Atlantis will be available as soon as the VHS is released but their ultimate fate is to be decided.

Disney’s been advertising that January 31st is the last day for Snow White on DVD. If this is the same as years past, this really means they’ll be merely halting production of the disc, rather than revoking it from stores. However that is of course not the impression the commercial leaves. January 31st is also the last day for the Tarzan discs, but they’re not advertising that one so well. That having been said, I went out and picked up Snow White just in case they change their minds. Perhaps I’m a Disney sucker, but we’ll see come Febuary 1.

Next up is Febuary’s release of Return to Neverland, a Peter Pan sequel involving Wendy’s daughter and an ageless Pan. This summer we see Lilo & Stich, about a Hawaiian child on an adventure with a silent and psychotic alien (the trailer explains a little more) and then next October there’s Treasure Planet – think Treasure Island in space. This movie signals for some the return of Disney Animation to the mainstream, as it looks awesome so far.

In any event I’m off to play with the 84 minute Snow White movie, after which I’ll probably play with the 900 minutes of features.

Yuppers, it looks like they can make the iMac more gay and stupid

So last night I got the Return to Castle Wolfenstein hookup. I also bought Serious Sam: The First Encounter, which I figured was appropriate, given the fact that Serious Sam: The Second Encounter is coming out next month.

Wolfenstein‘s an odd one. Gray Matter studios, who formerly called themselves Xatrix (everyone “quit” Xatrix to “form” Gray Matter) did the single player, Nevre Studios did the multiplayer. Id did the original game, so it’s “An id Game, developed by Gray Matter (with multiplayer by Nerve)”, somewhat akin to “Steven Speilberg Presents a Robert Zemeckis film”. The movie Back to the Future was directed by Zemeckis, but is usually credited to Speilberg by most since he’s the most recognizable name on the poster. Wolfenstein is a Gray Matter title but it’s considered an “id Game”. It makes sense all around – the game sells better because the average joe can’t tell the difference between “developed by” and “just has their name on it” (witness the number of people who think the same people who made Atari games in the 1970’s are making the new PS2 games by Infogrames with the Atari logo on them). In addition, id gets sales revenues from the fact that their logo is on it and it was their game to begin with (though I wonder who owned the rights to the old Castle Wolfenstein Apple II game the game Wolfenstein 3-D was a remake of).

The only people who don’t seem to come out on top in this deal are Nerve – they’ve been pushed to the back, so to speak. This is ironic since it was essentially their multiplayer game that made the game popular initially. I’ve heard from some people who just figured the single player portion of the game was a side dressing of sorts for the multiplayer game, which was the case with Quake III: Arena. This is not uncommon – I’ve known people who bought Goldeneye and a Nintendo 64 just to do deathmatch – caring nothing about the single player portion.

In 1998 Valve released Half-Life, instantly hailed as the best PC game ever made. However the multiplayer, while it didn’t suck it more or less was tacked on. It wasn’t until Counter-Strike came out a year later people started to play online a lot – and buy the game a lot. Valve did the smart thing and hired the CS team and made them Valve employees. Now they’re working on full blown Counter-Strike games. Ironically their original idea was to do the same thing with Team Fortress 2. Team Fortress was a pretty popular Quake (1) modifcation. The team wanted to make Team Fortress 2 for Quake II when they started to get the idea of making it a commercial expansion pack, or maybe even a standalone game. Then Valve got a hold of them and signed them to make Team Fortress 2 a Half-Life add-on pack. To tide the fans over they had them do Team Fortress Classic, a version of the original for Half-Life and made it a free download. However, TF2 has yet to be released and has gone from a Half-Life expansion to a full-blown standalone game using its own new engine. Meanwhile fans are getting their fill with TFC and CS.

The long and the short of this the fact that it now apparently takes multiple developers to properly do a game with single and multiplater components properly. When id did DOOM, they invented the deathmatch game (more or less) so there was nothing to worry about. However as time goes on the amount of quality gamers expect has multiplied. The development of the game Goldeneye 007 for the Nintendo 64 took twice as long as needed, due to the multiplayer component. As a result the game sold tremendously better. id Software grew tired of having to make single and multiplayer components for Quake and Quake II and then have gamers mostly just play the multiplayer, so they made Quake III multiplayer only, shaving development time in half. Whereas Valve is having internal teams do their multiplayer development, when id looked to farm out production of a Wolfenstein sequel they turned to the newly formed Gray Matter to do the job. The initial plan was for a single player game, perhaps with a multiplayer component later (an approach that Ion Storm Austin took with Deus Ex, which worked to a large extent), but then they decided to also contract Nerve to do the single player component. Now Wolfenstein is looking to shape up to be an example of how things can be done right – both the single and multiplayer aspects are outstanding.

Still, it’s almost sad that id will get the credit for this game. True, they did write the engine and the original game it was based on, and they did help a bit in the development, but it’s really Gray Matter and Nerve who made the game. Still, id gets the credit for whenever DOOM and Quake get ported to another platform, even though it’s someone else who does the work to port it. Plus, Gray Matter and Nerve could do much worse than “from the people who bought you Wolfenstein…”.

However, I bet Robert Zemeckis gets tired of being called “The Forrest Gump guy”.

I love my Wife – she never ceases to amaze me. Sometimes I lament that we have some important things not in common – she doesn’t really care too much for video games, I don’t give a fig about decorating. However, we do have other things in common – we both like to read, we both like Twin Peaks (me moreso, probably), etc. She loves Fantasy/Sci-Fi stuff. So long as Mercedes Lackey, Anne McAffrey and Robert Jordan can still write, I’ll always have stuff to keep her entertained with. We usually pick up a paperback or two when we leave town – she’ll have them read by the time we get back. And she’s a hardcore reader, too – she doesn’t feel the need to keep the books, whereas I make it a point to have hardcover on the bookshelf whenever I can.

So we make plans to go see Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring Saturday night. I had finished reading the book hours before. I figure it can’t miss – hit movie, big budget, three hours, based on a book, fantasy. Good stuff. She hated it. No point, too drawn out, useless scenes. Like I said, she never ceases to amaze me.

In any event, I liked the movie, but I wonder if I’m just another victim of “supposed to like it” syndrome. I read the book and I liked it – the part I could follow – but I wonder if that’s another sign of “supposed to like it” syndrome. In any event I plan on reading the other two books in the saga before the next movie comes out and I guess I’ll know then if it really was the epic of our time or another geek syndrome beaten to death.

More later – I got my game on this weekend.