Radio Active #5: WiFi Wackiness, Bug Comes Home, Unfinished Games, Wheel of Time, Ring/Ring 2 Soundtrack

by

Show #5 starts off with some Windows and Mac tales before settling down into its more traditional science fiction and fantasy fare. This time around I talk about The Greatest Games I Never Finished (Diablo II, A Fool’s Errand, Legend of Zelda: Orcina of Time), the appeal of the Wheel of Time series, and offer some thoughts on The Ring/Ring 2 soundtrack, as well as getting permission to review music in the podcast.

Getting the Podcast

You can get the podcast in two ways:

  • Download the MP3 directly

I post new episodes of Radio Active every week or so. Comments–particularly audio comments–about the podcast are always welcome, and can be sent to nuketown@gmail.com (which should have more than enough space to handle any audio notes).

 

Show Notes

  • Opening Quote: “It’s Got Raisins in it … you like raisins.” — Better Off Dead
  • Monolouge
    • Weyerbacher Beer and their Hops Infusion Ale
    • Reader Comments
      • Paul Maclean of yog-sothoth.com sent a note, and promises to get in an audio comment.
      • Kevin Guyer
    • Update on the DC Newsletter: Despite telling me I couldn’t get it, I’m not receiving it. Weird.
    • MepaCon
    • Tirade on Sue’s Viao and the “on/off” switch for wireless access
  • Quote: “We thought we were smarter than bugs” — Starship Troopers
  • Bug Comes Home
    • Bug, a lime-green iMac that I bought for my day job when I first arrived at the university, has come home. The computer is about five years old, and had been replaced by a PowerMac G5 next year. Since I’m getting an assistant at work, I needed to free up some space, so I asked if I could adopt bug — the university was cool with it, so I brought it home.
    • Only has 128 mb of ram, and is running Mac OS X. Still works like a charm however, and — because of a hard drive failure about two years ago — has an 80 gig drive.
    • Planned on using it for Jordan, but couldn’t get IE to hit Disney or PBS Kids. THen realized it needed Flash updated; once Flash 7 was installed, worked perfectly. Now she can use it (with my help of course) to surf her sites, and can happily use the keyboard and mouse.
  • Island of Lost Games
    • Diablo II
      • Never finished it — got sidetracked by Warcraft III, and the birth of my daughter.
      • Decided to return to it now when I was thinking about doing a column about the great games I never finished.
      • Had forgotten how satisfying it was as a hack’n’slash game.
    • Other games I never finished but should return to:
      • A Fool’s Errand: Classic old puzzle game for the Mac; still have it on my iBook, and really, really need to concentrate on finishish it. Sequel: A Fool and is Money” is coming out after a dozen-odd years sometime in the next year or so.
      • Legend of Zelda: Orcina of Time: Loved this game on my N64, but went to the future too soon and got stuck. Hoping that it’ll return in some form on the Nintendo DS.
      • Warcraft: Frozen Throne: Got half-way through the campaign, my computer died, and I didn’t have any backed up save files. Really want to pick up that campaign again.
  • EarthCore
    • by Scott Sigler
    • Intriguing premise — think I’ll have to try it out.
    • Like the idea of a serialized novel (as in, an novel in episodes, rather than just a “chapter a week”. But I was always a sucker for Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series.
    • I don’t want radio dramas, exactly, but rather, something more like serialized short stories. Haven’t had a chance to check out EarthCore yet (too hooked on the 5th Wheel of Time book) but will.
  • The Attraction of Robert Jordan’s Wheel of Time
    • I’ve been slowly working my way through Robert Jordan’s 10-volume Wheel of Time series, listening to them as audio books.
    • I know a lot of folks don’t like them, arguing they’re too long, or two cliched, and while I see their points I’m still hooked.
    • Why? I’ve spent some time thinking about this, and a post on Amazon.com finally nailed it down for me: it’s like a D&D campaign. The poster meant it as a bad thing, but as a DM who *loves* huge, sprawling, multi-year campaigns in which dozens of plotlines are spawned, and only a handful are pursued, I LOVE this.
    • In fact, it’s sort of wish fulfillment for me, letting me “read” a campaign with multiple adventuring parties scattered across a continent, each engaging in its own individualized quests that only occasionally overlap.
  • Reviewing Soundtracks
    • My plans to do soundtrack reviews are on hold temporarily.
    • I want permission to use track excerpts. I asked a rep for one of the PR firms that sends me soundtracks about their podcast policy, she went back to the folks who make the music, and apparently set of a bit of a firestorm as they realized they didn’t have a policy on that. So hopefully they’ll figure it out soon ’cause man, I really want to review the Deadly Spawn on here.
  • The Ring/The Ring 2
    • Buy it from Amazon.com
    • Speaking of soundtracks, I recently got a review copy of The Ring/The Ring 2 soundtrack.
    • Pretty darn creepy, just like the first film. I see this as being useful if I ever run Delta Green again.
    • Good combination of mellow background music as well as the seriously weird. “Inspired by” tracks may disappoint those looking for pure soundtraacks.
%d bloggers like this: