Friday, August 13, 2010

Rockettes, joining the Mafia, and the Irrational Bomb!

The Rockettes held their Kick Across America yesterday, and Wichita was one of the eight locations picked. They gave away tickets to the first 100 yesterday afternoon at the Intrust bank arena to those who came out for the 'kick line'. I expected more people, but when my daughter and I arrived at noon there was only about 50 people in line, so we hung out for an hour and got tickets. I'm sure people driving by the arena, and working across the street were trying to figure out why 100 people where in a line wearing santa hats, in the middle of the afternoon. :)


When I got home yesterday afternoon, I turned on the 360 to finish downloading the Mafia II demo (the power went out Wednesday evening to the entire neighborhood, cutting short the download then). It turns out it is the same demo that was on the show floor at E3, but that one I played on the PS3. I've played through it a couple times now (had to find all 5 of the Playboy magazines in the demo), and it's really good. I took more time (the demo has a 10 minute timer) to just wander around, shoot people, steal different cars, and buy weapons. As I stated in my E3 ramblings, this wasn't a title I was looking forward to (I was actually waiting to play Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood multi-player when the Mafia guy handed me the controller) but the demo has swayed me. I was burnt out after GTA IV plus the fact that I didn't like the characters (in GTA IV) so I had let third person open world games slide off my radar then we get Red Dead, and now Mafia. I guess maybe I just need my open world games set in a different time period to get me excited about them.


While the Mafia demo was downloading, I had also added "Irrational's new game announcement-What is Icarus" video to my queue from the dashboard ad. When I finished messing around with Mafia I remembered the video download so I went and fired it up not knowing what I was about to see. The video starts off with murky green background that rapidly changes into bubbles and focusing on what appears to be descent underwater, while the music sounds like a 1900's victrola. I'm thinking OMG, OMG it's Bioshock (I was probably out of my chair jumping up and down at this point). The video continues as the plants, and rocky bottom come into focus then we pass a Big Daddy statue, finally coming over the horizon as a city comes into view... Why are you still reading this? Download the video, and check out the Whatisicarus.com (which now redirects to Bioshockinfinate.com).

Hopefully you've now watched the trailer in all it's splendor, and found that it is an announcement trailer for Bioshock Infinate. The new game takes place in 1912 (and as the video shows fantastically) in the floating sky-city of Columbia, and supposedly is coming out in 2012 if internet chat boards are to be believed. I don't think a game trailer has ever made me this 'giddy' before.