TWO NEW VIDEOGAMES

I totally love Uncharted: Drake's Fortune. I'm a little over halfway through it and it's exactly what I love in a game -- exploring ancient ruins, a few puzzles, shooting some bad guys. It's just challenging enough to be fun, but forgiving enough not to be a chore, with a breakneck, action-movie pace, eye-popping environments (especially in 1080HD) and some surprisingly great storytelling. Very impressive. I can't wait to finish it.

However, I'm totally hating the demo for Burnout Paradise... and I'm a huge fan of the Burnout series. Burnout 3 was a masterpiece of Pavlovian gaming design -- challenging enough to be fun, but rewarding enough to keep you playing. Even the last one, Burnout Revenge, was fun and playable, albeit with a slightly screwy camera and somewhat confusing visuals. But with Paradise, they've taken everything great about the basic linear mechanics and pick-up-and-play accessibility of Burnout and thrown it all out the window, instead favoring a "sandbox" game in a completely open city environment.

Yes, it's beautiful and yes, you can drive everywhere and seemingly destroy anything -- but sometimes unlimited choice doesn't make for a good gaming experience. What worked for the driving-shooting-crime-spree of Grand Theft Auto doesn't really work in the adrenaline-speed-instant-gratification-world that's been established in previous Burnouts. You're forced to drive around looking for events, which gets tedious and repetitive. Because success in the events depends on knowing the layout of the city (instead of the previous installments' mostly-linear paths), you have to keep your eye on the radar map in the corner of the screen -- which impedes the super-fast, keep-your-eye-on-the-road gameplay that Burnout is known for. Worse of all, if you don't qualify in an event, you have to drive all the way back to the other side of the city to start it over again. Dumb!

Alas, this was only the demo, and not the full game (which comes out later this month) -- but you'd think the demo would entice me to buy the whole game, right? No dice -- it just frustrated me and reminded me how much I miss the gameplay of the previous installments. Paradise might be an innovative game by itself -- but it's not what I want out of Burnout.

WII-MOTE HEAD TRACKING VR

Thanks to urbear for sending this my way.

Hurray for nerds with spare time on their hands! Using the Wii's existing movement-tracking hardware, this guy has coupled it with visual software that counters your movement, creating a pretty neat illusion of "VR-like" depth, albeit only in 2D.

This is actually quite feasible, and something Nintendo could actually bundle with a game for a "VR-style" experience -- and with some of the 3D hardware I've been seeing built-into new consumer TVs, that could be extended into a fully dimensional VR experience quite easily.

(This guy is from Carngie-Mellon, and has some pretty incredible projects on his website, in particular his auto-calibrating projector and foldable, tracked projection screens)

COMMENCE COZIFICATION!

Los Angeles weather drama is hilarious. First, the local news inevitably creates massive build-up and hype: STORMWATCH '08!! Then, everyone panics and traffic is terrible. My commute home tonight sucked, naturally.

However, I still love love LOVE the rain when I'm at home.

Heater on? Check. Cozypants on? Check. Soup on the stove? Check. Blanket on the Couch? Check. Stack of videogames and DVDs and books at hand? Check. Commence rainy weekend cozification! Yay!

Fellow Los Angelenos, feel free to come by and join me in the cozyness. Mmmm.