First things first, my Wife has her own blog now (oddly enough on Moe’s real estate), so go head over there to see what she has to say – and be nice or I’ll kick yer ass…

Second off, the aforementioned Moe has become engaged to the hopefully-now-more-contnent Adam, much to the chagrin of pathetic male Internet lurkers everywhere. Congrats you two.

Now then, the most impressive game package I’ve seen in years I picked up last week. It’s the DVD Special Edition of Unreal Tournament 2004.

Back when Unreal Tournament came out, I still had this thing/complex about game loyalty. Now to some degree this never goes away – unless id Software passes a real turd I’ll continue to buy their games day one (hardware requirements permitting) – but back then I had this attitude that you had to play one game to exclusion of others. Back then that game was Quake 3: Arena, whch had several novel concepts – for starters it was the first id Software game to require a 3-D accellerator, and it was multiplayer-only, a response to the fact that despite the inclusion of a single-player component in the previous two Quake games, all anyone seemed to care about was the multiplayer component. The only problem was, someone else happened to have the same idea – Digital Extremes and Epic happened across the same idea at more or less the same time. Although Quake 3 was the more popular of the two, most critics favored Unreal Tournament. id Software had come out with Quake and Quake II in the timeframe it took DE to come out with Unreal, but the Unreal engine was considrably more impressive than either of the Quakes. Most people agreed that the Quake 3 engine was more impressive than the newer Unreal Tournament engine, but that Unreal Tournament did more with what it had and, more importantly, Unreal Tournament was released, it had more bang for the buck – more modes, more maps, more innovations in gameplay. Whereas id Software charged for additional content in the form of an expansion pack, Epic/DE released four bonus packs for free online.

id Software moved on to work on DOOM 3 and Epic/DE moved on to a sequel to UT. What was once known as Unreal Tournament 2 became Unreal Tournament 2003. The name change implied that yearly updates were coming, and Epic/DE’s line was that the updates were more akin to a sports game and more aimed at professional play. This got some gamers upset, since the pattern with most sports games is to come out with marginal upgrades and then charge full price – only console hardware breaks cause engine upgrades. When Unreal Tournament 2003 was released, most gamers who loved the original game hated it – the more subtle nuances had been traded in for the more popular mechanics of the Quake series. Me personally I liked it and like its predecessor, it was an impressive package – weighing in at 3 CD’s, it also included the Linux port straight out of the box and the Maya Personal Learning Edition with an UT2003 plugin for modifications.

When UT2004 was formally announced, most gamers scoffed. Despite selling over a million copies, UT2003 for some reason never really took off with gamers. Most servers had bots enable by default for whatever reason and it gave many the impression that the game wasn’t popular since filtering out non-bot servers with server browsers meant few were left. Ergo, releasing a sequel so quickly was seen as some as desparate. The most popular game online was and still is Counter-Strike, but coming in at second or third is Battlefield 1942 with its Desert Combat modification – in more or less the same timeframe as UT2003. Another seemingly desparate move was the inclusion of vehicles – something done well in BF1942 and poorly elsewhere.

But then a few weeks back they released a demo – and the results were quite well recieved. More of the original UT style of gameplay had returned (which had been previously been incorporated in a bonus pack for UT2003) and most liked maps and vehicles. But the biggest surprise was Onslaught mode. Something of a cross between Tribes 2 and BF1942‘s Conquest mode. Couple this with the fact that the game has more than twice the maps of UT2003 (and has all of the maps from UT2003) and only retails for $40 before a $10 mail-in rebate for UT2003 owners, and most cynical gamers became converts.

The game weighs in at six CD’s, but thankfully, Epic/DE released a second version on DVD-ROM. Originally the DVD version was going to retail at $60, but it was brought back down to $40 at some point. This is the version I picked up, since I not only have a DVD-ROM drive, but I support the movement to DVD-ROM. However, not only did they ship the game on a DVD-ROM, but they included a second disc of video tutorials from 3D Buzz covering everything from scripting to level editing to Maya. Some gamers have reported that they have spent more time watching the videos than playing the games.

And as if all that weren’t enough, it came in this neat metal box and it even came with a pair of Logitech headphones with microphone. It’s really overkill – but it’s cool. The installation takes a 5.2GB chunk of your hard drive, but that’s the cost of doing business these days. The second bonus disc even has DVD-Video trailers and designer interviews for your DVD player.

The one thing I was looking forward to that didn’t make it into the final product was network compatibility between UT2003 and UT2004. I’m not sure to what degree the games are compatible, but I know that UT2003 mods are compatible with UT2004, but UT2003 players and UT2004 players using the same mod can’t play against each other. I do believe this actually was for technical reasons, but it does have the convenient side-effect of promoting sales of the new game.

The only thing that concerns me is that, if there is an Unreal Tournament 2005, I don’t know how they’re going to top this. This may sound like I’m kidding, but what I wonder is – what if they can’t come up with a mode better than Onslaught mode? What if there’s not another vehicles-like innovation in the pipes? What if more maps won’t be enough? Most gamers expected an incemental upgrade and instead got over 100% more – what if that’s not enough next time?

We’ll see next year. In the meantime, I’m off to play…

My job as of late has been showing me new definitions of the word “busy”, so we’ll call that my latest non-updating excuse.

In any event, I’ve recently decided to “move” on my proposal of over a year ago. I’ve converted the vast majority of my games to DVD cases.

To recap, I grew tired of jewel cases and I wanted some singular way of organizing the games I own and the cases they come in. The majority of games I own prior to the late 1990’s were stored (crammed) into a CD folder binder. This worked, but it’s not really an attractive solution. It’s more the solution of a guy in college, not a guy with a house and a working knowledge of bookshelves. For that matter, if I had tried to put them all back in their cases it wouldn’t have worked – the cases are long gone, so we’re back to the square one of buying all new cases.

Which led me back to the DVD case idea. I figured that, since eventually PC games will move to DVD’s (witness that Unreal Tournament 2004 will take up six CD’s, or one DVD) then the odds are that cases will move there anyway. I could be wrong, but even if I am, I just like DVD cases right now.

Of course most of my games aren’t on DVD, and some of them take up multiple discs. This was the main thing keeping me from going ahead and trying this idea – the fact that most games take up multiple discs. This would mean that many games would require multiple DVD cases. This just isn’t a cool solution. Then one day I was walking though Office Depot and I spotted dual disc DVD cases for sale. This would solve the problem of dual disc games, but not that of games with three discs (like Neverwinter Nights or Unreal Tournament 2003) but I figured it was close enough – down to two cases instead of three.

So I started to explore label options. I found sites which did custom DVD cover art for games, but this idea was plagued with problems. For starters, I would need a color printer. Specifically a color laser printer, since ink jet just sucks, both quality and cost wise. Now, while my workplace has a color laser, I just don’t like that idea. And Kinko’s is unweildly and expensive. Plus, the other big problem was, the custom covers tended to be crappy and all over the board. While some were nice, most were pretty bad. Plus, there was no way all the games I had were going to have covers available anyway, so that idea was out.

So I decided to fire up CorelDRAW and make a standard, generic template. I put the name of the game on the top of the spine and across the front. I put the year the game was made across the bottom of the front. Any CD key involved I placed across the bottom of the front as well. Any special designation (like “Installation Discs”/”Play Disc”) I put across the bottom of the spine.

Then one day while I was in Fry’s I spotted special DVD cases that could hold three discs. The way they accomplished this was to hold all three discs on the spindle. I snatched some up, this got NWN and UT2003 down to one case, though it didn’t fix the one four-disc game I have, Wing Commander III.

A few years back we bought a little shelf thing for our movie DVD’s and, since I don’t have hundreds of them, it hasn’t become completely full (though it’s close now). My Wife spotted our neighbors having a garage sale with a second one, so I picked it up for $5. So now I had the shelf, so I printed out the case sleeves and got to work.

It’s been rather interesting to say the least. I think the first time I owned a PC was 1991 or so. I had a Commodore 64 back in the day and sort of fell out of the computer thing for a while (it wasn’t my fault – I had no income). The first PC I ever owned with a CD-ROM drive on it was in 1996, so most of my collection occurs after this date. The earliest CD-ROM game I own is 1993’s Myst and Return to Zork. The single earliest game I have on CD-ROM that originated from floppy disk is 1991’s Wolfenstein 3-D. Wing Commander III is the largest game, at 4 CD-ROM’s. Ironically were it not for the DVD version I plan to pick up, the next record would be taken by Unreal Tournament 2004 at 5-6 CD’s.

The only game I own which came in a DVD case is a reissue of Call to Power II which I picked up at Fry’s since the source code had been released and though lots of FPS have released source, I hadn’t seen a turn-based strategy game released before. Fry’s carries a number of games like this – some European company re-releases old games in DVD cases with electronic manuals. It’s literally the black sheep of my collection, but I don’t really mind.

Now the only problem I have is the fact that I still have way too many games for the case I’ve got, so I haven’t decided what to do with the runoff, especially since I’m now down to the games which sat happily in a CD book for years now. I have dozens of sleeves printed for games which weren’t at or towards the top of the pecking order.

In a similar vein, I’ve now completed my Twin Peaks television collection. Twin Peaks, if you’ll recall, is the cult television show from the early 1990’s by David Lynch. In 2001, the pilot episode was released via a Hong Kong import DVD and the first seven regular episodes (the first season) were made available via a DVD set. The problem is that the second season isn’t on DVD. People anxiously awaited Artisan to release the second season on DVD but besides the delays, Artisan turned around and announced that the first season hadn’t sold well enough to merit a second season release. The real story, however, is that while Artisan holds the rights to the second season, they don’t have access to the original source material to make digital transfers and Paramount won’t give up the transfers for a reasonable amount, so the earliest the DVD’s could be released would be when Artisan’s rights expire and Paramount does it themselves, late 2005. Meanwhile they plan to do it in all the other countries this year.

So screw it, I tried to play nice. Instead I downloaded all the episodes. Funny thing is, while I was able to get all of the episodes, the sources were varied. About half of the episodes have Finnish subtitles. I converted the 23 episodes to VCD and burned them. Of course, 23 DVD cases next to the other Twin Peaks DVD’s I had were kinda bulky, so I picked up a bunch of slim cases and made more sleeves. I got a little more creative with these – I got a font which was more Twin Peaks-ish and I even got episode descriptions from TV Tome. They still don’t fit on my shelves but at least I’ve got them now.

So anywho, I don’t know why in the heck this post took so long, and I’ll have some pics online at some point, but in the meantime I’m going to bed.