Odds and Ends - Non-LAN edition

Games:

Bioshock - I downloaded the demo last night and played it for a bit.  Wow.  This game was a "must buy" before I played the demo.  Now, it is moving close to "will never sell" territory.  That will all depend on whether the combat gets repetitive or not. 

Aesthetics - Graphics, immersion, creepiness.  Wow.  This game incorporates all 3 expertly.  The water graphics are especially impressive, and the rest of the game is graphically crisp and lighted impressively.  Attention to detail is awesome.  Find the dead cat if you can.

Surround sound 5.1 is especially awesome, and if you don't have it for this game, you are missing out big time.  I can't wait to hear the game over my Trittons.

Controls - Very smooth and familiar.  Only deviate a little from the Halo layout.

Gameplay - This game could take a long time to play.  Exploration of each and every room is highly recommended.  There were items that I would not have found if I had not taken the time to just look around and poke through things, as well as see what was destroyable and what wasn't.  My only wish, is that (and this is going to sound macabre) I wish bodies would break apart when you hit them (after they have died).  Yeah, blood splatters and you hear squishes when you whack them, but a head should break apart when you lay into it with a pipe wrench.

Story - Didn't get far enough into the demo to learn more of the story.

Question - Any idea what the tattoo's on your character's wrists are?  1960.  Tattoos were very frowned upon, especially visible ones like those.  (Granted, the entire game is a suspension of disbelief, but the attention to detail of the time period is quite good.

Viva Pinata - I won this at the LAN raffle, and I had entered to win it specifically for my daughter.  She loves the game, though she doesn't quite grasp the concept of what needs to be done to progress throughout the game.

I can see why people consider it an addictive game.  Just playing a few hours already with my daughter has me hooked.  I have to force myself to put the game down, when she gets tired playing it for the evening.

Books -

The Ice Man:  Confessions of a Mafia Contract Killer - Wow.  I've seen the HBO specials on Richard Kuklinski, but those are nothing compared to the book.  I'm only about half-way through at the moment, but I can understand how he became the way he was.  He still deserved punishment for his crimes, but his parents deserve to roast in hell, as they were the ones who molded him into a ice-cold psycho.

In his early years, Richard's father beat him, his brothers, and his mother mercilessly.  Always drunk, Stanley (the father) would come home and beat on his family.  One episode, he beat Richard's older brother to death.  His mother covered for his father saying that the boy fell down the stairs in an accident.  Richard's mother also beat him, often with a broomstick.  She never showed him any love, and never tried to protect him from his father.

Although his parents were Catholic, Richard was never taught basic morals, or learned how to be empathetic towards other people. 

By 16, Richard, his younger brother, and his mother were left to fend on their own as Stanley left the family.  By that age, Richard had already started torturing and killing the neighborhood stray animals.  So much so, that there hardly were any strays to be found in the entire neighborhood.

His favorite thing to do was to tie the tails together of two cats, and then hang them over a clothes line and watch as they tore each other apart.

From there, it was a short jump to killing people.  Richard killed his first person around the age of 16 when he caught the leader of a group of bullies (who constantly harrased him) alone and beat him to death with a rod from a closet.  Kuklinski removed the body's teeth and fingers and then dumped it in a lake.  He was a devout reader of crime magazines, and learned that it would be hard to identify the body from those stories.  The body was never found.  On the day he killed his first person, he learned it was "better to give than to receive."

Richard soon came to the attention of the Mafia, and soon became an independent contract killer for the 5 mafia families in the New York area.

One of his most infamous kills was a man who had pissed of a "made" man.  The "made" man requested that this man suffer.  Richard took the man out to a cave in the wilderness where he knew there were a lot of rats.  Tied him up, and set-up a motion sensor controlled camera.  He came back 3-5 days later, and the man had been stripped to the bone.  Eaten alive by rats.

A very interesting read and insight into the mind of a true psycho.

World War Z - I finished this while at the LAN.  A very different way to present a story, this book presents the post-reports of the World War against the zombies.  Part 28 Days Later (People became undead via a virus, but were truly dead), and part War of the Worlds (The entire planet was at war, with mass exoduses and death on a huge scale).  The point-of-view of the book is a writer interviewing people who survived the war and had major and minor roles in the war.  A very interesting read.

TV / Movies - Nothing new at this time.