Elsewhere, 3/7

IGN previews the first hour or so of Mass Effect: “We’ve come to expect great gaming experiences and flashy visuals out of BioWare games. Mass Effect already looks beautiful, though our own desire for perfection naturally led us to start nitpicking the game as soon as the demo was over. And nitpicking is all it was, as most of our complaints were admissibly trivial.” I’ve loved everything I’ve ever played by BioWare, so I’d probably get an Xbox 360 simply so I can play Mass Effect (and Halo 3).

Michael Henaghan has posted his list of “Albums of the Year (So Far)”: “I have decided to include records that have been reviewed here only, mainly because I haven’t managed to catch up with some releases as of yet, most notably Do Make Say Think and Arcade Fire.”

Love & Honor, the latest “jidaigeki” from Yoji Yamada, is now available for pre-ordering. Yamada has made two of the finest samurai films in recent history. The Twilight Samurai is especially moving, and I highly recommend it.

Web Standards: it’s about quality, not compliance: …how about we redefine the case for Web standards for what it really is: the case for Web craft quality. Standards will certainly follow, but this concept cannot serve effectively as the poster child for this important effort. To paraphrase a catch-phrase: it’s the quality, stupid.

Wow… it’s been a long time since I’ve been to a concert — I think the last concert I went to was Sufjan Stevens in September of ’05 — but that may change later this month: Mew will be playing in Lincoln on March 29.

Adobe will officially announce Adobe Creative Suite 3 on March 27, though the software will actually ship later on. I’ve been using the Photoshop CS3 beta on my home machine, and I’m very impressed with its performance. It’s easily the fastest version of Photoshop I’ve ever worked with, can’t wait to see how the final version handles.

Enjoy reading Opus? Want to support my writing? Become a subscriber for just $5/month or $50/year.
Subscribe Today
Return to the Opus homepage