There will be no bike There will be no joy

For years I've yearned for the type of friends who'd pull up one morning at some ungodly hour and rouse me from some mundane dream to go on a spur-of-the-moment adventure trip to rock climb or mountain bike or possibly sky dive---HELL! maybe even to go find Bigfoot. Instead, over the years I've collected the type that would rather order greasy food and mindlessly press X or Square on a PS2 controller. I've even got one that lives with his mom and rolls for initiative on weekends in some dingy basement somewhere and it's ridiculous.

So it is with great joy that I've made a new friend at work who actually likes adventure. He's been prepping for the 07 season of mountain biking and asked me to tag along. Thing is, I don't have a bike and even used ones cost upwards of 1500$.

I started training so that I could go because I wasn't going to pass up the one kind of friend I've waited about two decades for and even though I was putting most of my pennies away to buy my first house, I was going to do the unthinkable and scrape a chunk off my tax return to pay for a 2nd hand mountain bike of AWESOMENESS!

Mr. Mountainbike was really stoked when I told him my plan and has been reminding me daily to get my taxes done sooner, rather than later, so that I could get hooked up to the super bike of AWESOMENESS and so about an hour ago I actually completed the family tax returns and asked my accountant (also known as Software Out of a Box) how much we could expect back.

The grand total for one gainfully employed designer in the video game industry, one girlfriend and two dependent lovable, gorgeous daughters is just under poorteenhundredandzerocents.

Thank you Canadian government, thank you oh so generous employer, and thank you Fate for reminding me that I've a ways to go before I give my poverty a good kick in the crotch. With more hard work and insanely vast amounts of overtime I might actually get beyond not being able to afford anything exotically fun.

There will be no mountain bike. There will be no joy.

Quick Thought on Movie to Game Adaptations

The Godfather is hands-down one of the best films ever made and certainly the best in terms of mob movies. It will easily last for ages in cinematic history but I'm unsure if it ever needed to be adapted into a game.



I love games. I love this business. I have high hopes about what is being done and what can be done but seeing adaptations like Scarface and The Godfather strikes me as nothing more than an attempt to cash in. And what the hell were they thinking making JAWS into a game??



When a developer enters into the great cinematic vault in search of the perfect film-to-game adaptation I can think of so many and none of them would have been The Godfather. Some movies you just don't mess with. But if you do intend to go ahead and pillage a famous film a necessity should be that you have something significant to offer the player that the movie didn't offer.



So, for those of you considering the next big film-to-console venture do have a care and avoid tampering with the greats, will ya?



Here are a few you should steer clear of:

Platoon

Apocalypse Now

The Untouchables

Close Encounters of the Third Kind

Blade Runner

King Kong (for shame Mr. Jackson!)



Feel free to add to this list.



Which films would you prefer never be adapted into a game?

America says, 'set your clocks forward'

'It won't cause problems,' they said.



'No one will complain,' they said.



'Come Monday, it will hardly be an issue,' they said.



I've spent the better part of my weekend dragging my clocks, kicking and screaming, an hour forward because the US government decided it would be fun to fuck with the world. So of course, Canada followed suit.



Great.



After dozens of clocks, laptop settings, watches, TVs and media players had their times changed, my work was done.



Until I arrived at work today. Then we tried sending out meeting invitations and the time kept showing up wrong. My boss also made the pleasant discovery that everyone's availability may be an hour off despite being displayed in the proper time.



And something tells me that this nightmare is far from over because when April rolls around all the automated time changes will kick in and we'll be repairing everything in reverse.



Thanks Congress. Remind me, if we ever meet, not to ask you if you have the time.





Technorati Tags: time change, spring forward, America, US time change

What's in a name

What's in a name? Sadly, in the case of this blog, not much. Augo is nothing more than a derivative of a sentence I found on a crumpled bag of french bread. I believe it read, 'Au bon gout' but the remnants of the expression, wrinkled and barely legible, read simply, "Augo".



My last blog had a long and overly meaningful title. It pained readers to type it in or to pronounce it when the time came. Rather than try to find some deep meaning for this new blogging attempt I decided from the start that I would choose something easy to say, remember and type. The meaning would be superficial or even meaningless so it's my hope that Augo doesn't mean something deeply Zen in another language because I really can't be bothered telling some long drawn out story of how I had a moment of enlightenment about the meaning of my life and crammed every last molecule of it into a blog title.



Chances are that as you read this, you'll remember some old boyfriend or girlfriend who's name was Augo and that they gave the best oral sex you ever received and in that case --- yes, that's exactly what augo means.



So there you have it. I'll leave the deeper stuff for the actual content and inevitable discussions that follow.