Google Reader has a neat new feature where it supports offline use. It can download up to 2000 articles and store them locally. It uses the Beta Google Gears extension and it looks good. Cool.

Yes. I’m a sad Blizzard fanboi I admit it. I put up a Starcraft 2 Wiki site. http://www.sc2-wiki.com. It cost me $9 to buy the domain name and I already have web hosting for chen.net, so that part was free. I also wanted to learn some more about MediaWiki, and it’s uglier than I remember. Dreamhost does make everything as easy as you can expect though.

I went over to a friend’s house and finally got to play on a Wii. It’s pretty fun I have to say. The controls are mostly intuitive, but for some reason I am terrible at all the games. I was the worst in the crowd at Tiger Woods Golf and Wii Sports Bowling. Sad yes.

Tracy and I took today off and we took Lucas to the SF Zoo. I’ve never been there before so it was fun. It’s right on the coast so it’s a bit windy and chilly and we were hoping for better weather, but it wasn’t too bad. Lucas is a bit young to appreciate anything except the petting zoo, but he saw some giraffes and gorillas and other interesting wildlife. There are pictures.

When did we pass the point such that the average PC has enough 3d rendering horsepower so that the 3D engine looks better than the 2D DiVX sampled video? I was watching the 450MB video of 20 minutes of Starcraft 2 gameplay and it occurred to me that the video I was watching was much worse than the real gameplay. The video suffered from some noticeable artifacting and pixelization, but I’m sure the graphics will render better in 3D on normal hardware. All the games I play(though I don’t play any brand new 3D games) can be run on any mid class PCs with an integrated graphics chip. It’s a testament to how quickly graphics cards have evolved. Of course, I’ll still be buying a graphics card for my next PC just so SC2 looks that much better.

I spent time this weekend soaking up as much information as possible on Blizzard’s announcement of Starcraft 2. Here are some impressions of what I’ve seen.

• It’s pretty. This isn’t really a surprise. Blizzard games have always been visually stunning and have excellent sound and a cohesive style and theme. The cinematic trailer is very well done.
• The game play is not fundamentally all that different from the original Starcraft. I was expecting some more dramatic changes. Maybe an MMO, maybe a console game, maybe more races. This is good and bad. It means it will draw in the existing player base and should appeal to the hard core gamers in particular.
• The game is much closer to completion than I would’ve thought. Everything I saw looked fully playable and complete. It looks like it already has enough polish that many other game companies would’ve released it. Of course Blizzard has a much higher standard for polish than most game companies, but it leaves me hopeful that it could be released in 2008.
• The new units are badass. Holy Mothership. One thing that they seem to emphasize in the gameplay videos is the weaknesses of each type of unit. Putting in very specific weaknesses for all units and styles of play is good because it means that building counter-units and making strategic decisions is good and can overcome simple unit massing. Unit massing and fast building will still be important, but I think Starcraft 2 will have stronger counters and more decisions.

I guess I broke one of my RSS feeds like 6 months ago. So My Yahoo! users haven’t been getting regular updates. You’ll need to delete and re-add my feed. If you just do a Add Content and then Find Content and type in “Hubert’s Home” then it should come up with my RSS feed and that should fix it. There are probably other readers out there who haven’t been getting updates. I’ll try and fix it at some point, but my XSL is weak and I need to re-learn it all to fix my problems.

Yay Starcraft 2.

I’m waiting up tonight potentially until 1am for Blizzard to announce their new game. I’m hoping that it’s Starcraft 2, but I would also be pleased if it were a completely new franchise either. I’ll be disappointed if it were another Warcraft game or another Diablo. But no matter what I think I will play it.

At first I wasn’t too excited about Apple’s iPhone, but then today I read this article about how cellular carriers have been treating their customers and partners. This isn’t really new of course. Most everyone hates their cellular provider for a variety of reasons: poor reception, poor phone selection, long term contracts, poor customer service, confusing billing, too many different plans. Switching carriers sucks and this is the main reason I didn’t see that much of a market for the iPhone.

What occurred to me is how nice the iPhone’s automatic Wi-Fi switching capability would be for me. At home, I get terrible cellular reception and it’s one of the few places I make calls from. On the other hand, my Comcast internet connectivity has very good bandwidth and excellent reliability. So that might be enough to get me to switch if the phone is as cool as it looks. It’s still pretty expensive, but the prices will come down I’m sure.

I’d be more excited about it as I would be if it was a bit more open so we could get all sorts of cool applications for it. But I can live without fancy applications for now.