Feb 04 2008
Uncategorized

Uru Live to Discontinue in 60 Days

Cyan Worlds and Gametap have just announced that they are not going to be producing a second season, and that Uru Live will be removed from the Gametap servers in 60 days. I’m going to cancel my subscription in 60 days in protest.

Hi Everybody,

I have some news that some of you have probably not been looking forward to. GameTap has decided to discontinue the operation of Myst Online: Uru Live.

The decision was a very difficult one and was made for business reasons rather than due to any issues regarding the design and vision of the amazing world that Cyan Worlds and Rand Miller have brought to us. Despite the great Myst Online experience coming to a close, Cyan is still a very valued partner of GameTap, we are on excellent terms, and we look forward to continuing our relationship in the future.

Many of you have made good friends while playing Myst Online, so here is the bittersweet part. Although Myst Online: Uru Live will be completely shut down in the near future, the game servers will remain live for the next 60 days. During that time, both newcomers and existing players can continue to experience the amazing world of Myst Online, explore the game’s many Ages, and interact with other players in the game and on the MystOnline.com website and forums. After 60 days, the title will be removed from the GameTap service, though MystOnline.com will remain live and active for fans to continue to share their passion for this important game franchise.

I know this is not the news fans of Myst Online wanted to hear. I want to thank all of you who have been extremely supportive of the game and made this grand experiment in an alternative MMO format so much fun. All of us at GameTap also want to thank you again for your tireless enthusiasm for the title.

There has been a clamor for information about the status of season 2 for some time, and the reason we haven’t announced anything sooner is because we have literally been examining a wide variety of possibilities for maintaining the game, but in the end, we had to bring the exploration of the great cave to a close.

So thanks again for supporting us as we launched this truly unique game. GameTap is still committed to exploring new genres of gameplay and encouraging bold visions. If you haven’t already tried Season 2 of Sam & Max, give it a try, it is as anarchic as one could hope. And I can tell you from first hand experience that the upcoming Grimm is novel and exciting experiment as well.

Ricardo Sanchez
VP of Content and Creative Director for GameTap

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Jan 26 2008
Life in general

New Star Trek Movie In The Works

I’ve always been a Star Wars fan, and saw it as the ultimate king of Sci-Fi. Any other Science Fiction movie I viewed as lesser than it, and some I even refused to watch, considering them to be not even worthy of my time. The Star Trek saga was one of those. I simply refused to admit that there was any merit to it, because I viewed it as competing with Star Wars. I maintained that attitude until I realized that the plot (at least, of the old show) is somewhat similar to that of Dr. Who. Space Travellers, landing on alien worlds and doing stuff on them. Aliens are met, fights had, problems solved, red shirts die, everyone beams back to the Enterprise. Good stuff. Even with my change of heart, I still never watched it, because like Dr. Who, there’s just so much of it. Where do I start? How can I watch it?

Well, after seeing this trailer for the new Star Trek movie, I know where I’m going to start. The movie is directed by J.J. Abrams, the producer of Lost and more recently, Cloverfield, so I’m sure this is going to be a good movie.

I think my friends, who still maintain my original attitude towards Star Trek, are going to disown me for seeing it, but it really does look like $8.50 well-spent to me.

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Jan 21 2008
Life in general

Cloverfield

I saw Cloverfield today, the new J.J. Abrams movie, about a monster attacking New York (what an original idea!). All in all, it was a pretty standard giant monster movie, though it was also very similar to The Blaire Witch Project, because the whole thing was made to look like it was filmed by one of the characters in the movie (Hud), using a hand-held camcorder. There are no establishing shots and basically nothing that couldn’t be filmed by hand (no crazy panning, pretty much no completely stable & sharp shots, except for the beginning at the party).

About the blurry, shaking camera work. I get it, it was filmed by a panicking clumsy guy with a hand-held camera, but still. I had a headache by the end of the movie, because it was so hard to tell what was going on. I’m sure the attempt to make it look messy left the production company with a very low special effects budget, since there are only two or three clear shots of the monster for the entire film. The mini-monsters get a lot more screen time, and they look somewhat like giant spiders with fangs and maybe more legs. They move very fast, so it was hard to get a good look at them.

Meanwhile, the big monster is seemingly indestructible, and is still up and moving after being repeatedly bombed. It is a very well-made monster, plenty able to realistically pull down skyscrapers and such.

It was an ok movie, not something I’d see again, but I’d say it was worth my $8.50 to see what the monster looked like…

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Jan 19 2008
Life in general

Messing with iPod Apps

I hacked my iPod Touch the second day I owned it, so that I could put new applications on it. So far, my favorite by far is Lights Off (an awesome game where you have to turn all of the blocks dark), and my second is iPhysics (a physics simulator where you can create objects and try to get one object to a goal).

I tried to use Stack, which puts Leopard-esque stacks on the iPod Touch, and was very cool but it had this annoying problem where it stays on top of other applications once they’re launched. So I tried to uninstall it, but it kept telling me to remove the stack before uninstalling. I tried that, but it didn’t work, so eventually I had to use ftp to remove them.

Oh well…Still, a lot of good stuff…Yes.

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Jan 01 2008
2 Comments
Life in general

Happy New Year!

Well, it’s that time again. Welcome to 2008, everybody!

Song I was listening to when the clock struck 12: I’m Only Sleeping by The Beatles

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Dec 26 2007
Life in general

Voyage of the Damned

The Dr. Who Christmas special, entitled Voyage of the Damned, aired yesterday in Great Britain, and I just got around to downloading/watching it. This is the first new episode I’ve watched, since I started watching just after season 3 finished, and I must say, I was impressed. The visual quality was superb, the action intense, the humor…humorous, and so on and so forth.

(Continued, with spoilers and all, below)
Continue reading →

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Dec 25 2007
Life in general

Merry Christmas!

Well, happy birthday, Jesus!

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Dec 25 2007
Life in general

Merry Christmas!

Well, happy birthday, Jesus!

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Dec 19 2007
Life in general

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian Trailer

There is now a trailer for the sequel to the Chronicles of Narnia, entitled Narnia: Prince Caspian. Looks pretty good, but I need to re-read the book to be sure about certain things. Oh well.

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Dec 19 2007
Uncategorized

Keyboard Issues – Fixed

Apple released a patch yesterday entitled “Macbook Macbook Pro Software Update 1.1”, which fixes the unresponsive keyboard issues I and other people have been having, where the keyboard will simply stop responding for a minute or so. Anyone with a Macbook or Macbook Pro should probably launch Software Update and grab the patch, as well as that security update that went out a few days ago, if you haven’t gotten it already.

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