Iron Man 3

I saw Iron Man 3 on the Swedish premier this Wednesday, in short, as much as I love the first Iron Man movie and how it executed the origin story I think Iron Man 3 is probably the best of the three movies. If you liked the prior ones you'll probably like this one.

Some more detailed thoughts below, I'll avoid spoilers.

The story borrows a lot from the Extremis story line, Iron Man Vol 4 #1-6, 2005-2006. I say borrow as it uses a lot of it but is not a complete recreation. For the parts that doesn't stick to the comics there was really only one part I kind of disliked and that is exactly what extremis is, in the comics it's based on nanites while in the movie it has been changed to bioengineering, rewriting DNA. While you'll have to suspend your disbelief in both cases I for one find it a lot easier with nanites than with rewritten DNA for instant effects, specially with the effects it has...

An addition to the story is of course the Mandarin. I won't say much on that to avoid spoilers but I'll say this. Based on what I know of the Mandarin, which admittedly is limited since I haven't yet read any of the comics with him in them, I can imagine that a hardcore fan of the comics might be disappointed with how they handle it but I liked it and felt it worked well for the movie.

Thanks Steam

When I sat down at the computer this morning I was greeted with a Windows info balloon telling me my games hard drive was running low on space so I opened the computer to find it was down to 7MBs of free space...

Only two things that could possibly use up space on their own on that hard drive, Steam and Origin. Since Steam is generally the more buggy one I checked it first and indeed it was to blame. Steam had decided to download Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, all on its own. Not sure why Steam would do that, but honestly, I can't say I'm all that surprised.

The success of Blu-ray

The Blu-ray format hasn't exactly seen the success the big publishers hoped for. They were adopted as the standard format of the PS3 and the upcoming PS4 and likely will be the disc format of whatever the next Xbox is called but when it comes to movies it hasn't worked out too well.

Looking in stores that sell DVDs and Blu-ray there is generally still a lot more shelf space dedicated to DVDs than for Blu-ray.

Personally I've kind of wanted to switch to Blu-ray, problem being that I can't just buy a Blu-ray drive, put in my PC and play a movie, no, I would have to also buy some expensive (and without doubt shitty, with the amount of competition they have) software to be able to play back a movie as you need a license to play Blu-rays. Why this license isn't simply part of the drive allowing any software to play it or why there even has to be a license I'm not quite sure, how about just letting me watch the movie I bough huh?

In any case, it seems like I'll have to get myself some form of Blu-ray player now. Why? Well, it seems the movie industry figured that if we aren't going to simply move to Blu-ray on our own they should probably start pushing us in that direction by other means. The latest of these tricks I've seen is that the commentary track that pretty much became standard for the DVD release of any big budget movie is no longer present on the DVD version of many recent movie, it's being held hostage on the Blu-ray version.

Doubt that specific trick will have much of an impact as far as Blu-ray adoption goes but they got me... Wonder what they'll do next?

Transformers: War for and Fall of Cybertron

Played through the campaign of both of these games recently. I first picked up War for Cybertron when it was a flashsale during the Steam holiday sale.

War for Cybertron was pretty good, not the best but a good shooter. The story was OK, the shooting was fine though a few more guns or upgradable weapons would have been nice. They did a great job on the level design, the missions very all varied in the design and didn't get repetitive, what did get repetitive however was the visuals, most environments was built using the same dark metal walls and this is what hinders it from being more than a good shooter.

Continue reading...

VLC for Windows Store funded, this will be fun

For those who didn't know VideoLAN, the makes of the rather popular mediaplayer VLC has been running a Kickstarter with the aim to do a version of VLC that will go in the Windows Store and run on Windows RT and Windows 8 device. Well, they just got funded. That's nice, will give RT users a good video player in the future, might even work well on Windows 8 for some.

However the app turns out the thing most interesting about this to me is that we will see if a certain Rémi Denis-Courmont is indeed a valiant defender of licenses or if he's just simply full of shit (excuse my language). If you don't remember there was a port of VLC by a team called Applidium posted to the iOS AppStore about two years ago, shortly after the app was posted in the Store it was removed again. The reason behind the removal was that Rémi who is a lead contributor to the VLC project and thus of course have a lot of code in the project claimed that the app violated the GNU public license that is used for VLC (and presumably many individual parts of the code) since the iOS AppStore has "DRM" and doesn't allow you install any app be it free or paid on more than five devices.

Well, this same restriction is used in the Windows Store as well so unless they've changed the license for every part of the project that used it (seems unlikely) we should either see Rémi go after this version of the app as well or he won't in which case we know he's either just anti-Apple biased and his entire crusade against the iOS port was all bull-crap. If the latter is what turns out to be the case I sure hope someone (maybe Applidium) once again post VLC to the iOS AppStore and use the existence of the app in the Windows Store as a defence should they need to. Not because iOS needs it, there are plenty of good media players, but just because really.