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Rodney and Jane came over to our place during the weekend for a movie night on our giant TV. I wanted to watch a movie that looked great in HD, and my friend Netflix recommended I check out Red Cliff. Never heard of the movie, but it was apparently a recent blockbuster in Asia about Three Kingdoms stuff. It also stars the hottest Asian guy ever (AKA Takeshi Kaneshiro), so hey, why not?

The red cliff in question

We watched the full, two-part Asian version. That’s almost 5 hours of epic Chinese movie… LOTR territory there. We started at 7:30ish, had a late dinner, and finished the film around 2:30AM. (Of course, Rodney passed out during the movie.) It looked very, very pretty on our TV. So if you want a film to test out your home theater system that’s not Planet Earth, this is a good one to try. Audio was great, too.

You have a lot of boats, I get it

The movie itself is entertaining enough. It’s the most expensive movie made in Asia to date, and it shows. Sometimes, it takes itself way too seriously and is inadvertently funny as a result. For a movie of this budget, it has a surprising amount of stupid in it. Also, the movie borrows a lot from other films; 300 in particular comes to mind (anything involving shields, extraneous sex scene), Saving Private Ryan, Star Wars (scene transitions, ha!)… It lives up to the main expectation of most viewers, which is lots and lots of epic battles. I love the heroes in the film, too. All their fight scenes are very well choreographed. It makes me want to go play Dynasty Warriors.

Fighting with baby a la Hard-Boiled. Go figure, it’s a John Woo film.

Here’s some more not-too-spoiler-iffic screens from the film. I already returned the Blu-rays, so I could only grab stuff from the theatrical US version, which is edited down to half the length, off Netflix streaming. From what I browsed, I can’t believe the stuff they cut. I can’t believe the stuff they left in even more!

The two leads. Notice the incessant sexual tension between the two.
Their Chinese harp battle is pretty steamy…

And as hot as Takeshi Kaneshiro is, does he really look like the greatest strategist that ever lived? He looks like a doofus.

Tony Leung flying through China in his mind. I can’t believe they kept
this in the theatrical US version. All four of us LOLed during this part.

Sun Shangxiang, the token girl. Surprisingly, she was one of the best characters
(she’s like Mulan!)… and they cut out all her scenes for the theatrical US version!
No acupressure or Shaolin soccer, WTF!

Sure, it looks cool… but it makes no f*cking sense!!

Here’s another Takeshi-Tony love gaze battle for good measure.

In summary, a worthy movie to test out your new HDTV with. I know Kelvin disagrees with me, but I recommend watching the full 5-hour version. Some of the most entertaining scenes are cut out (I mean, who wants to miss horse-birthing?!), and several crappy scenes are left in the shortened version anyway.

New thing I learned today: Chen Chang, who plays Lord Sun in the film, was the bandit guy in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

I knew he looked familiar! And the pirate guy in Red Cliff was in Letters of Iwo Jima and Fearless.

Kevin Butler spoke many truths during his speech at E3 a few months ago. We now literally live one of those truths. Unless bathrooms count as separate rooms, in which case I suppose our place technically has three rooms.

This is pretty much our entire apartment.

In celebration of having two paychecks again, we (and by we, I mean Kelvin) decided to upgrade our television. We had a nice 42″ Sharp Aquos we bought a while back (which was already a super nice TV), and now we have a 60″ Sony Bravia. We bought it from Costco, and it came with a sound system for free, which is good since Kelvin was planning on getting one. The new TV is… really big. I think it’s excessive. Kelvin thinks it’s perfect.

My camera is crooked, not the TV

Geoff came over yesterday and helped Kelvin mount it, so our TV is on the wall FINALLY. It’s still not within most recommended minimum viewing distances you find online, but oh well. Colors are vibrant on this TV, so Kelvin’s turned down the backlight and brightness so we won’t go blind. For gaming, graphic flaws are more obvious, and SD content (like Wii stuff) looks terrible. However, HD content, especially Blu-rays looks fantastic. (Pixar’s Up looks AMAZING.)

Because of our new toy and new Netflix subscription, I’ve spent most of my weekend watching television and movies instead of gaming. (btw, Dear Zachary is one of the best crime documentaries I’ve ever watched. If you’re into that sort of thing, don’t read up on the background at all and check out the movie.) I’m sure that will change once I figure out a console game to get into.

New thing I learned today: Factory farming is a farming livestock in high density to produce highest throughput at lowest cost.

Another decent documentary I checked out this weekend was Food Inc., a documentary that talks about where your food comes from. (Summary: Most of it comes from evil corporations.)

After much nagging from the WordPress dashboard, I finally upgraded to WordPress 3.0. Actually, 3.0.1 to be exact. I can’t tell what the difference is so far. I tried to do an automatic install, but it left me with blank pages. Thankfully, a manual install got it back working. Considering I haven’t updated for two weeks, I’m sure no one noticed.

I’ve also installed a W3 Total Cache. I know my website has been on the slow-ish site with all the crap it runs, but Kelvin recently suggested I install a caching plugin while I’m upgrading. Hopefully, my ranting will load faster now.

I’m not bored with work so far; I’m still learning a lot of new things everyday. It’s also very busy, so I haven’t been blogging much. There’s not much to blog about either, as all I do is work, eat, sleep, and play video games. And watch TV… I blasted through the first season of Lie to Me using my Netflix trial. The writing is predictable, but I like the gimmick: basically House for deception detection. (He even has a girl underling, white guy underling, black guy underling, and a female co-worker with whom he has sexual tension with.)

Also, we’ve ordered a new TV and are still waiting for it. It’s ridiculously huge for our < 1 bedroom apartment, but it’s what Kelvin wanted to splurge on in celebration of having two paychecks again. Unfortunately, Kelvin just sold our old TV (which I’m missing already *sniffle*), so I’m TV-less for the moment. Which is dumb, since I just started this Netflix trial. We might continue the subscription. After all, once we get our new TV, we will have at least EIGHT different devices that support Netflix. So far, I’ve been using my PS3 (was 360 but switched once I got the PS3 disk so we can use a remote control) and Kelvin’s iPad for streaming. Anyway, I’ll post pics when we get our new toy.

I’ve had Justin Bieber’s Somebody to Love stuck in my head for weeks. Here’s the music video so you can get this obnoxiously catchy tune stuck in your head too (the video’s actually okay):

New thing I learned today: Lie to Me is based of an actual research project studying people naturally good at deception detection called Truth Wizards.

So busy at work, I’m three days late with a video game tab post. Oy.

Didn’t feel like unplugging the headsets, so I took this pic on our messy desk

Video games and other gaming related purchases:
SteelSeries 5H v2 USB headset (PC) – $107.00
Turtle Beach Ear Force HPA2 headset (PC) – $79.34
StarCraft II (PC) x 2 – hookup from friend
BlazBlue: Continuum Shift (360) – $36.99 from Amazon
Total cost: $223.33

Even though my racist Mexican friend hooked me up with copies of StarCraft II, I still managed to spend quite a bit on gaming. I didn’t even include the $200+ in RAM Kelvin and I bought (2x2Gb each).

And the SC2 games weren’t free… he’s using them to guilt trip me into making him baked goods and giving him company swag (from… a biotech company?). I still have to figure out a baked good that’s worth shipping and I won’t completely eff up. (I don’t know how to make anything except bread right now.) I’m leaning towards cookies. Still, I don’t know if I can make and deliver $120 of cookies. Especially ones that taste like their worth.

I bought two sets of expensive headsets to replace our busted cheapo ones. Neither perform all that fantasticly on my computer. I was originally going to use the SteelSeries, but I can’t get them to work right at all on my computer. Mic’s always too soft or too noisy or has retarded low-pitched beeping. The Turtle Beach ones Kelvin chose work okay on my computer, but they’re heavy (4 speakers in each ear!) and clamp your head. However, sound is pretty good (after noise filtering), so I opted for the Turtle Beach ones while Kelvin took my SteelSeries. I still had to do a lot of ridiculous settings tweaking for decent mic clarity. It’s so much more complicated than the cheapo USB ones we had. I suspect my board has shitty audio drivers. We’ll see how long these last. I probably should have returned them, but I’m lazy and don’t want to go without a working headset. If they break within a year, I’m never spending more than $20 on a headset ever again.

You might notice there’s an extra copy of BlazBlue: Continuum Shift if the background. That’s the first copy I received from Amazon that arrived all busted up with the disc fallen out of the broken holder and ending up with scratch marks. I requested an exchange, and Amazon one-day shipped a second copy. Which is handy, because now I can use its packaging to return the first copy.

Games I beat:
Heavy Rain (PS3)
Mass Effect 2 (PC)

Now that I work hard, I play hard, too. I managed to pull myself away from TF2 to finish a couple games. Heavy Rain was very good. The graphics take some time to get used to, as the characters go into uncanny valley all the time. Gameplay is reminiscent of adventure games to me: very linear and you have to hunt for things to interact with to progress the story. Since I love adventure games (pretty much how I got into gaming), this action-light-story-heavy style of game is something I appreciated. The only thing that’s different is the emphasis on quick time events as a primary gameplay mechanic. I just played one ending. There’s other paths to take to the end, but I’ll save them for when I return my coworker’s copy and find my own. This isn’t really a game that would have a sequel, but I hope Quantic Dream makes more games like this.

Mass Effect 2… I made a whole blog post about it. Technically, I made three because I kept reposting it so it would show up in Facebook news feed properly. Yes, I’m a dork.

Now I’m working on the single player campaign in StarCraft II. (I’m too sucky to do multiplayer.) One annoying thing I’ve found is that the game actually uses most of the function keys. I was using F11 to do my screenshots, but since the game uses that button, most of my StarCraft II screenshots look like this:

Thankfully, Fraps has implemented Alt+<key> as a hotkey option, so I should be able to take screens without a message log in the way now.

New thing I learned today: The difference between ice cream, sherbet, and sorbet is their milk content.

I beat Mass Effect 2 a couple weekends ago. Overall, definitely an excellent game. I liked where the story went in this game (especially finding out what was up with the humans disappearing), so this time I paid attention enough to where my knowledge of the Mass Effect universe is now slightly-better-than-vague. Sniping people was enjoyable as always, graphics were nice (though my Shepard still had fake eyelash issues once they grew back after she came back from the dead), and characters were diverse and likable (except Miranda… shut up Miranda!). I miss Wrex, but Mordin’s my new favorite character. There were also plenty of side missions to play, choices to make, and even some useless junk to collect, which I’m always a fan of. (Except for maybe the fish. EDI can manage an entire ship’s systems but can’t feed my fish for me??)

Why am I in my own crosshairs?

Of course, there’s still things to gripe about. Most of the time, unlocking extra goodies only yielded money, which is about as rewarding as omnigel (meaning… it’s not). This time around they made up for the crappy inventory management of last game by not having any; I almost never messed with the weapons setup of any of the characters. I hated that missions were on separate levels that you can’t go back and explore. And the alien (not)sex scenes were weak (Jacob is not hot and has the personality of a potato, so I didn’t even bother with the human one).

And there’s always bugs. The most annoying one for me were collision issues people and objects in my game always seem to have. Walking next to tables was a dangerous act for Shepard, as she would enter a mysterious tabletop zone that she could never leave, often requiring me to load to my last save.

Shepard stuck in the CIC display thingy

This next one, Shepard’s on the wrong side of the counter. I can’t remember if the game crashed or not, but I remember she couldn’t even move or wiggle when she got in this position.

Shepard stuck at a random Citadel stall

It didn’t even have to be a table surface sometimes. In this next one, Shepard got too close to a rock wall, scaled up the wall, and started walking on thin air. Then Grunt and Mordin began tagging along.

Shepard, Grunt, and Mordin stuck in some random place

Even the bad guys wanted to get in on the air walking action.

Enemy walking into air via box

Annoying, but also entertaining. Slightly better than getting stuck underneath a mountain.

New thing I learned today: Your surname in Mass Effect, Shepard, is spelled “Shepard”, not “Shepherd”.

For some reason, I thought the Mass Effect protagonist’s last name was Shepherd, and I had used it through my post until I saw its correct spelling in the Mass Effect wiki.