I just realized I haven’t been posting about Zoe much lately. I’ll try to make up for that with a few photo posts, but let me kick-start the process by sharing a few things:
A Few Things About Zoe
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Monthly Archives: October 2008
Fallout 3 First Impressions
I’ve only played for a few hours, and I’ve only made it a few hundred feet outside the Vault so far, but what I’ve seen, I like very much. The character creation system is clever, starting you out as a baby, and learning how to move around and interact with people. Eventually you take an aptitude test which helps determine which skills you start with. Most important though, is I think they nailed the feel of the original games. It feels a little strange bolted onto the Oblivion engine, but they’ve done a good job of adapting it to allow shooting. The shooting is not quite as fluid as a dedicated game like Halo, but it definitely works, and the addition of VATS for RPG-like targeting works well, and the results are often hilarious, just like the original games. I can’t wait to play more.
Reason I Love Portland #375
This was the image used on the cover of the most recent issue of the Willamette Week. The original image was done by Barry Stock, and is a suprisingly good parody of the Shepard Fairey “Hope” poster. The fact that this can run on the front page here in Portland makes me very happy.
Mark Wahlberg vs Saturday Night Live
A couple weeks ago, Andy Samberg did a parody of Mark Wahlberg in a throwaway sketch called “Mark Wahlberg Talks to Animals.” It was basically just Andy telling various animals “Say hi to your mother for me.”
It was pretty funny, but not amazing, and I doubt anyone would have paid any attention to it except that in an interview with the New York Post, Mark let it slip that he didn’t think it was very funny.
“Someone showed it to me on YouTube. It wasn’t like Tina Fey doing Sarah Palin, that’s for sure. And ‘Saturday Night Live’ hasn’t been funny for a long time. They’ve asked me to do the show a ton of times. I used to watch it when Eddie Murphy was there and Joe Piscopo and Bill Murray. I don’t even know who’s on the show now.”
– Mark Wahlberg interview in the New York Post
Now, here’s where it gets brilliant. In the most recent episode of SNL, Mark storms onto set during the opening scene and demands that Lorne tell him where Andy is. Later in the show, they aired this confrontation where Mark tells Andy his parody is way off, and then proceeds to confirm it.
To my mind, this means one of two things. Either Mark really was annoyed by the sketch, and they asked him on the show to make it up to him, or they planned this from the start, and asked him to complain in his next interview. Either way, totally genius.
How About We Pay You?
“We have a saying at Blizzard when something looks like too much work. How about we pay you? You can work on it, and every two weeks we’ll cut you a check.”
– Jay Wilson, Diablo III Lead Designer