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Wow, this whole filmmaker section was shot in an abandon train station in Oakland that I shot about 10 years ago. So crazy to see it in this context. EDIT: this part of the keynote: EDIT: My photos, taken on my old Powershot camera: http://rustyjaw.com/work/abandoned/16th-st-train-station/

Got to see a lot of Glaciers in Alaska. Can't really fathom how large they are until you are right next to it. This one is the Hubbard Glacier which our Cruise ship visited before heading to the last port, Seward. It was amazing just listening to the ice crack and seeing the occasional calving. Managed to get a picture of one.

I just finished Yoshi’s Island tonight. I completed all the levels, earned 100 points on each, opened all six Extra levels, beat those, and got 100 points on them too. I basically 100% completed the game. It’s probably the first time I’ve played it from beginning to end in over 20 years. Overall, it still holds up. The level design is fantastic, the controls are tight and precise without being too stiff, and it has an aesthetic that is incomparable to any other SNES game. Plus, it has some great music from Mr. Koji Kondo. I am thankful, however, to have had the ability to use save states and rewind gameplay. This is a tough game, and these features saved me lots time and frustration. Though there are checkpoints throughout each level, they are spaced pretty far apart, and it is possible to lose several minutes worth of gameplay with one simple mistake. Being able to stop the game, rewind a few seconds and try a tough jump again made the experience more fun and satisfying. This is particularly true when trying to get 100 points on all the levels. Sometimes something you need to collect — like a red coin — will appear for a few seconds and disappear for good if you don’t collect it fast enough. The only thing you can do then is die and start over (hopefully from a checkpoint), but the rewind feature means you can just step back a few seconds and try again. At first part of me felt bad about this — like I was cheating. But I ultimately decided to hell with it. I don’t have to prove anything to anyone, and I’m playing this game to have fun more than anything. And I did have fun. I waited in vain for years for Yoshi’s Island to come to the Virtual Console — first on Wii, then Wii U — and I finally got to play it again. I couldn’t be happier.

It looks like we’re getting another three years of South Park. ‘South Park’ Renewed Through Season 26 at Comedy Central Season 23 premiers on September 25.

Comes with free Smilex gas too?

https://shop.ee.co.uk/watches/pay-monthly-watches/apple-watch-series-5-44mm-silver-with-white-sport-band/details £28/month - when I spoke in the shop recently about the exact same deal on the S4 they were willing to drop the £30 upfront the 44mm asks for, so you could probably persuade them into the same deal, particularly given you're not going into the preorder rush. Makes the base price £552 over the two years, which isn't an obscene markup over the £530 you'd pay up front.

Unlimited data/minutes/texts as well. But really, check out the cost of a contract watch; when I did the maths it was cheaper to take the watch on contract for two years than buy outright and pay the £5/m

Synapse has their first Ultra HD Blu-ray release on the way. It is, of course, Suspiria. HDR + Atmos to boot!

Speaking of the laptops, did you guys see this? Apple identifies cause of MacBook keyboard problems John Moltz for Crazy Apple Rumors: Reached for comment, Apple Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering Dan Riccio was unequivocal. “We investigated each and every case where a complaint was filed about MacBook keyboards and found that in each one the user was a dirty nose-picker.” Gotta love Moltz.

This was fun to watch:

It looks like all three of these collections will be 50% off on PSN starting tomorrow: https://blog.us.playstation.com/2019/09/09/ps-stores-big-in-japan-sale-offers-savings-up-to-60/ For those keeping track, that's $9.99 for each collection. Not a bad price considering what you get in each.

But not the only one. Only held my interest when Pitt was onscreen and the last 20-30 mins.

Didn't have to configure anything. When you say "Alexa" there's a delay as it mutes the music and when it beeps for the command. It basically integrates into the Alexa app on your phone which I guess is the only configuration you will have to set when you setup the device.

I wanted to finally post about this game which has been out for some time. I bought and played through it a number of months ago and really enjoyed the hell out of it. It’s a mid-range AA production with AAA production values. I like to call it this years Hellblade in that regard. It’s a primarily stealth based game with a really well told story that veers into the supernatural. It has an fantastic sense of time and place and again visually it’s pretty stunning. Digital Foundry did a nice video of its technology here: What really reminded me about the game is that there is currently a free trail version available on PC, Xbox One and PS4 right now that lets you play the first stage. Again, I highly recommend it!

Nov 4th for Universal Soldier in the UK: NEW 4K REMASTER OF THE FILM DOLBY VISION/HDR PRESENTATION OF THE FILM Audio Commentary featuring Roland Emmerich, Jean-Claude van Damme, Dolph Lundgren and Dean Devlin A tale of two titans - Featurette Guns, Genes and Fighting Machines - Featurette Behind The Scenes - Featurette Alternate Ending Original Trailer Optional English SDH subtitles for the main feature Still hoping they will announce the one Emmerich movie I DO want (Stargate).

Yeah, that Avengers series was spot on.

I second the vote for the Corsair. It's overly expensive, but the Lapdog tray for it is also great.

Aladdin (2019) - I mean, I liked it? I didn’t see that coming. The main cast is pretty solid overall, really. Naomi Scott has to be one of the most gorgeous women walking the planet right now and she has a voice to back it up. “A Whole New World” is wonderfully executed here and Massoud does well with the Aladdin specific numbers even if “One Jump Ahead” (one of my favorite Disney numbers ever) didn’t entirely land for me. Will Smith is actually pretty funny/entertaining as the Genie. The problem is he has no business singing. Ever. The hip hop versions of the Genies numbers just don’t work for me at all. At least his performance otherwise is very good and there’s real emotion /friendship developed between Aladdin and the Genie by the end. I have my issues with the production and overly “green screen” feel of the movie and I’ll never choose to watch this over the orginal. However considering my view on these live action remakes, this is quite entertaining and there are far more offensive ways to spend two hours of your life. I dare say you may actually find yourself smiling now and again.

Bob Iger’s stepped down from Apple’s board of directors after eight years, presumably due to potential conflicts of interest with Disney+ and AppleTV+.

DF with new patch performance: Pretty big improvement. The base PS4 is actually pretty damned playable now.

Love that Ring Fit.

It’s nice to come back from a work trip to find some Retro goodness waiting for me. Even if it took Terraonion a damned month to ship the thing. A match made in heaven: The entire Sega/Mega-CD library at my fingertips along with the whole Genesis, Sega Master System, Game Gear and Colecovision libraries between the two FPGA devices providing original hardware accuracy. It’s an amazing time to be a retro gamer. If you want to get a deep dive on the Mega SD, go here:

Conarium is free this week, with some sort of Batman tease for next week - bunch of different games in the logo, so who knows. https://www.epicgames.com/store/en-US/product/conarium/home

The cameras on the XS are very good. I’m more than happy to live with them until the 2020 phones.

50 minutes of gameplay....

Preorders are up now so I have ordered my new watch from EE Looking forward to the upgrade - and I did go with the 44mm Gold Aluminum.

Briefing trailer.....

Yea the EE contracts for the Watch are pretty reasonable. Buying a GPS edition is of course lower cost but, if you want 4G (and in my case, I’m reluctant to give it up now) then a watch on contract is a good deal; EE also include 6 months Apple Music as well which is nice.

Yeah, all high end video cameras with raw/pro-res support. The Micros are essentially aimed as being “crash cams” as Iain said, while the other Black Magic cameras (Ursa, Pocket...etc) are production cameras. They’re tremendous value but need to be kitted out with external battery packs, monitors and storage...etc, so don’t end up as compact as they appear at first sight.

Blackmagic bodies are aimed at indie/low budget cinema, not stills. Or for times when Michael Bay wants to mount one in a car before crashing that car into another car and blowing both cars up.

Crazy that some of the most niche of niche labels are the ones trying their hand at UHD discs before the likes of Criterion , Arrow and Shout.

You had me at "Michael Lewis". Thanks for the recommendation!

Patch update: https://controlgame.com/control-september-update/

For what it's worth, there's nothing even remotely that challenging afterwards, so once you make it through that, you're in the clear.

Recommended: Against The Rules

I was never a watch person, but I love my 4. So much easier to quickly see messages, email and notifications . Not to mention controlling podcasts and music while at work.

Its at the end of Act 2, new boss.

All right, I finished The Witcher over the weekend. As promised, here are my thoughts on it: Hardware and Technical Stuff I think the best place to start with this “review” would be to talk about my hardware setup. I played The Witcher on a 5K iMac, 27-inch, late-2015 model. Its specs can be found here. Mine is the base configuration with the two important upgrades: I installed 32GB of third-party RAM and a 512GB SSD from Apple. The latter made the huge difference in that it significantly reduced the load times throughout my play through. From what I gathered from old reviews, these could be extremely lengthy on a standard HDD. While not a top-of-the-line gaming machine by any means, I was able to run The Witcher at high settings at 1920x1080. The frame rate, while not a locked 60fps, ran smooth enough most of the time to be acceptable. During a few sections performance dipped into the 20s and below (particularly toward the end of Chapter V), but this isn’t a game that requires super-fast reflexes to play, so it didn’t bother me that much. Screen tearing was also noticeable throughout. This wasn’t a deal-breaker by any means, but it was distracting. As far as technical issues go, the worst I faced was that the game frequently crashed. As a result, I had to replay several areas more than once. The game does auto-save but only when a quest is started, progressed to the next step, or completed. Of course it could never crash immediately after an auto save. I remind myself often to manually save so that I wouldn’t find myself having to repeat everything I did the previous 20-30 minutes. There were many other technical glitches throughout the game, which I won't take the time to detail here. Suffice it to say, this is not the most polished game I ever played. An interesting note — as of this writing, my iMac runs on macOS Mojave. In a few weeks, we’ll probably see the release of the next version, Catalina. Had I waited a little longer to start playing this, I may have been unable to do so. Catalina removes support for 32-bit apps, and The Witcher is a 32-bit app. I suspect a lot of Mac gamers are going to be pretty pissed off in a few weeks when they discover that many of their games no longer work. The Game Here’s the thing: I’m not a PC gamer, and I’m not a big fan of RPGs. The Witcher is an RPG that plays on PC (or Mac in my case). Right away, that’s two strikes against it. I’ll admit it was hard to get excited about playing the game because of this. My plan was to give it at least 10 hours to hook me. If it didn’t by then, I would step away and jump into The Witcher 2. That first 10 hours, which lead me up to the beginning of Chapter II, were rough. The toughest part was just getting my bearings and figuring out who everyone was, what I was doing, and most importantly, how to play the damn game. The user interface is a mess, and it was very difficult figuring out how to do certain things like, meditate (oh, I have to click this hour glass icon in the middle of this circle), mix potions, or change battle stances on the fly. Everything seemed why more complicated than it needed to be. The game does try to ease you in with tutorials, but when you're fed a dozen of them in the first couple hours, it's easy to forget or miss something. Once I settled into the game and started completing quests, things got better. I found myself compelled to keep going. I wasn't necessarily in love with the game or this world, but it was interesting at each step. One thing I didn't like was that once I started a new chapter and entered a new location, I couldn't go back to places I already had been and complete side quests I hadn't finished (the one exception being the transition from Chapter II to III). The reasons for this are explained well enough in-game, but it would have been nice to know that entering the city walls of Vizma would have cut me off from the outskirts. I also enjoyed how the story unfolded naturally. Usually in games like this, where the story changes depending on decisions you make, you know exactly when you’re making one of those decisions. In The Witcher, I never felt like that was the case. Okay, maybe I did when I had to choose between giving Alvin to Triss or Shani, but that was it (SPOILER ALERT: I chose Triss). The end result is a story I know could have gone very differently, but it doesn’t feel to me like it could have gone any other way. I like that. In an earlier post, Magness said that the combat was complex. I agree to a point. There's a lot to keep in mind during combat -- which weapon to use, which stance to pick, what magic works best, and which potions should be taken first, and so on -- but it's also relatively easy to execute. Just point your mouse cursor on the bad guy and click when you see the sword icon. Wait a little longer and click again when you see the flaming sword icon. Keep doing this until all the bad guys are dead. Granted, I was playing the game on Easy difficulty, so maybe I missed out on some of the depth of the combat, but given how much I did not enjoy this part of the game to begin with, I don't really care. I could go on, but I said more than enough already. I'm glad I played The Witcher, mostly because I have a familiarity with this world that will help me get into the second and third games a little easier. I'm not super-impressed of far, but I didn't expect to be. If I don't take to the sequels more, then I will be disappointed. Let's hope that doesn't happen.

A new Apple monitor that does not cost $7,000 would be nice.

Apple TV+ is also $4.99/mo, I'm suddenly interested. Edit: And one year free with purchase of an iPhone, an iPad, a Mac, or an Apple TV, nice

My money is on Konami remaining eternal twats.

The Josh Gadd Muppets series project (not the short form Muppets Now that was announced) has been canned. This would have been the show that was allegedly set after Muppets Take Manhattan. Apparently it was canned following a change of leadership at the Muppets division. Iger has recent put the former head of parks live entertainment in charge which is interesting. Just - do - damn - variety - show!

Lol yeah. Quite the unexpected result. Just got back fro Alaska last week. Beautiful state. Really enjoyed it there. Denali National Park was quite awesome to see. Will post more pics later.

Since Sony and others are in an acquiring mood, they should buy the Silent Hill IP and give it to Kojima Productions to work on after Death Stranding.

Thor 4’s shooting at Fox Australia (as did Ragnarok I think). Black Widow’s been shooting at Pinewood, and Dr Strange 2 and Eternals are expected to move in as well. First Dr Strange was at Shepperton. Age of Ultron used stages at both Pinewood and Shepperton too. There’s been rumours of Star Wars productions moving to a site in Dagenham for the Rogue One Disney+ spin off and for the Game of Thrones guys trilogy. I could see Disney just buying UK studio space within ten years, particularly if the £ tanks even further.

Happy 20th, dearest Dreamcast... (again) Totally deserving of celebrating its 20th Anniversary three times.

Any American Ninja Warrior fans here? I haven't shared this before, but my nephew has been on the show for a while now, and with the final two episodes left this season he has his best shot yet at coming out on top. He's great at keeping secrets, so we have no clue how this will play out. Keep an eye out for him.