Waffle Squadron Omega

So, after reading Wednesday’s awesome Penny Arcade and seeing that they used the Creature Creator to make a pretty convincing Deep Crow, I decided to finally go and grab the free demo. First off, it runs great at max resolution on my 1.7GHz laptop, which is a huge check in the plus column right out of the gate! My laptop is getting almost elderly by today’s standards so it’s nice to have a new game work so well.

It’s really easy to slap a passable monster together right away, and the Help feature clearly instructs you on how to make more detailed creations. Even for a free trial version of a demo of a full game, there are a whole lot of options at your disposal. There’s not really that many body parts to choose from in the free version, but you can customize the placement, shape, size and orientation of each one. The ability to sculpt, bend and stretch the main body mass also ups the variety potential. I’m sure you’ve seen (on Kotaku or wherever) the vast cornucopia of clever and risqué final products people are pumping out with this program.

Once you’ve sculpted, potato-headed and painted your creature, you can Test Drive him. In the Test Drive mode, you have a lot of animation options, most of which are pretty fun. Funny dances, emotions, etc. What’s really cool about the Test Drive mode is that you can easily snap screenshots, make animated GIF avatars or even capture AVI video! Not only that, but when you’re done capturing the video, a prompt automatically asks you if you want to upload it to YouTube! The video quality is so-so even at the highest setting, but it’s pretty darn good for such a user friendly integrated feature. It’s YouTube-quality video, so it serves its purpose admirably. Also, it’s free.

The full version of the Creature Creator is $10, and at this point that’s Pretty Hot And Tempting. If this is just a small taste of what we’ll get in the full version of Spore, I just might be buying my first PC game since Half-Life 2. In the meantime, please enjoy my latest creation…the delicious and refreshing, yet sadly extinct Purplesaurus Rex:

Following up from my original Bacon Salt post, I am continuing to taste-test this wonderful seasoning on all sorts of different foods. Tonight I tried a piece of leftover sausage pizza from my local Pat’s Pizza shop.

Big ups to my local Pat’s on Philadelphia Pike in Claymont, DE. Anyway, Bacon Salt is absolutely fantastic on pizza. It’s like it was specially made for it! Soooo baconey and salty… it’s just so good! I imagine that this would make even week-old pizza taste great!

So yeah, that’s pretty much it. Thumbs up for Bacon Salt on pizza!

This week, Apple announced the new iPhone 2.0 at the WWDC. While the addition of 3G is good (shoulda been there in the first version if you ask me), there’s a lot of disappointments:

No additional storage
No better camera
No camera on the front for videoconferencing
No additional RAM
No MMS
No bluetooth audio
No video capability
No turn-by-turn navigation
No copy/paste function

But… you get GAMES!!!11 Oh, and 3G is important, but not really a selling point since the data plan adds up to $45 to my existing $50 plan. Is it worth it? For some people, maybe. The drop in price will definitely convince a lot of people to buy the new iPhone. For me, I was hoping for some extra features.

Since I already have a Jailbroken iPod Touch, I have added a lot of neat software that gives me the ability to send MMS via email, and copy/paste functions. And, I’ve almost filled up my 16 GB storage. So what’s the incentive to buy an iPhone now? Will there be a SIM card slot in this new version? Maybe that will be a selling point for some people. I might consider it if it meant I can hook up my work SIM card into an iPhone and let my job pay for the data!

So, I saw an advertisement for Bacon Salt, a new seasoning whose motto is “Because everything should taste like bacon”. It is zero calorie, vegetarian, kosher certified salt which adds a bacon flavor to whatever you sprinkle it on. I decided to buy the 3-pack sampler for $12.99 from the Bacon Salt website, to try it out. My impressions after the break.

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A video game based on Afro Samurai, coming in October, was recently previewed by Fidgit, a new gaming blog hosted by SciFi.com. The game is described as “hip-hop infused”, to which Fidgit editor Tom Chick comments “Oh, dear. “Hip-hop infused”? “

I’ve been enjoying the new gaming blog from Fidgit, but you know I had to say something. Tom goes on to compare Afro Samurai to 50 Cent: Bulletproof, and then confesses to never having seen the Afro Samurai series to begin with. Then, despite Sammy L.’s awesomeness and bad-assedness in Star Wars, Tom states: “anything with Samuel Jackson that doesn’t have the words “Star” or “Wars” somewhere in the title can’t be all bad.”

My comments to Tom on his cluelessness are posted, after the break.

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Zeus over at Bucket Bros. made a recent post about an RPG called “Mount & Blade“, developed by a Turkish husband-and-wife development team. Reasons on why this is good for you after the break.

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Well, this comic isn’t necessarily NEW, per se. But it’s new to ME, dammit, and I hope it’ll put a smile on your face too.

Online webcomic Warehouse seems to have been around for awhile. Why I’ve never heard of it is beyond me. Mix one part cutesy with one part bizarre, and you’ve pegged the majority of the Warehouse comics. They are also purveyors of sound advice, such as: “Don’t bring a kiwi to a cassowary fight. Don’t do it.”

A sample is provided after the break.

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What’s up guys. Once again it the most distant, hidden and formidable of the Waffle Squadron team here to bring you a review so mind bogglingly cool you may need to change those Alf underroos you got on afterward.

So here I am, stuck at work for a 9 hour Sunday, no one else here and my wife is in Japan with her feet kicked up. What’s a guy to do right? How about surf the web for cool web comics. Its my thing afterall. So this one may be news to you, it may not; but Tokyo is the weirdest place on earth and appearently the guys from MegaTokyo are experiencing this frist hand.

MegaTokyo is the story of two friends Piro and Largo who end up “trapped” in Japan broke, homeless and confussed. As the two attempt to make their way home they also seem to be tearing poor Japan apart in the process. Piro, the resident artist; is spending what little they earn to get home on what can only be described as a R.O.D. level infactuation with Japanese love manga.

Largo on the other hand is spending everyone elses cash (cause he’s the mooch of the pair) on beer and action games. He’s also the computer junkie and speeks fluent L33T. He’s that friend everyone has…the one so into games that it seems to bleed out into his real life and language. He’s right at home in Japan.

Japan itself is far from typical either. Everthing that you could possibly imagine would happen here does. Monsters invade with permits from the police. The local cops ride around in Mechas and you can get a passport by beating a ninja in Mortal Kombat.

Hands down MegaTokyo is a Otaku’s dream. Making ridiculous jokes about everything from D&D to game noobs and the designers who create them. Even other web comics aren’t sacred as they spend several stips making fun of their buds at Penny Arcade. If you haven’t read this awesome web comic you need to. Go check it out at www.megatokyo.com this I command!

There was a two part miniseries on the UK’s SkyOne channel this week called “Terry Pratchett’s The Colour of Magic“. It’s an adaptation of his first two Discworld books and it’s far and away the best Terry Pratchett adaptation I’ve ever seen. Jenn and I watched the first part and a little of the second part last night and we were really impressed. Sean Astin plays the cheerful but clueless Twoflower, the Disc’s first tourist. Tim Curry plays a conniving wizard named Trymon, who is constantly looking to move up in the ranks at Unseen University. Jeremy Irons plays The Patrician, the incredibly intimidating ruler of the sprawling city of Ankh-Morpork. Christopher Lee is the voice of Death. The miniseries is also filled with a million other UK actors you may have seen somewhere, maybe flipping past WHYY or BBC America or something. The guy who plays Mr. Filch (the grumpy old caretaker of Hogwarts) in the Harry Potter movies is in the second part. He plays Cohen the Barbarian, an adventuring hero who so good at what he does that he’s able to survive into his 90’s. But the celebrity actors are only half of what makes this miniseries great. The overall presentation, the look and feel of it, brings a good measure of class to an otherwise ridiculous comedy.

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Our good friend and resident DS expert MasterP has written an awesome review on the new turn-based strategy game Advance Wars: Days of Ruin. I’m posting it on his behalf for now…mainly to experiment and see how reviews should be posted here before setting the general format guidelines us authors should try to follow. Anyway, hope you enjoy it as much as I did!

“Days of Ruin” places a dark veil on the Advance Wars series that we’ve come to know and love. While I am typically a huge fan of games that take a light hearted approach, I have to be honest in the fact that after playing this game, I wholeheartedly welcome the majority of the changes that Intelligent Systems has made. The removal of the “Blue Sky” atmosphere, along with a wonderful narrative, has worked wonders for the game in comparison to its predecessors.

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