The heat finally let up around here. It's still going to be hot and humid, just not the bitch-dog heat that we and most of the nation has been suffering with. There really wasn't much you could do with the heat but sit around waiting for it to go away. The last time we had a heat wave here in Alabama was back in the early 80's. I remember those days because my mom had the bright idea to take us to the zoo then. There's nothing that makes you feel too hot to move then seeing elephants too hot to stand up.

I'm more than halfway through the first draft of "Meanwhile" the screenplay that I'm writing. The whole story has finally formed in my head so I know where everybody is going in it. There's just a lot of little details to discover along the way. I'm enjoying the process of creating it because it is a challenge to think visually, to write stuff for a camera to capture. Just for the record, I have not used one voice over yet.

I finished Tomb Raider: Legend for the PS2 the other day. I enjoyed it. The graphics were as good as the gameplay. It felt adventurous and was filled with action. Though, there is some bad to it. It's too short in more than one way. The over all game length is short. You feel that you are just getting started and then it's over. Some of that feeling is because the game is enjoyable, and I wanted more. Another way the game is short is that each level doesn't seem to have the depth and length associated with other Tomb Raider levels. Tomb Raider: Legend would have been a perfect game if a few of the levels had been as least as long as any of the levels in Tomb Raider 1 or 2. I am looking forward to more Tomb Raider games, that series has always been one of my favorite game series. I just hope that the next Tomb Raider has some epic levels and a bit longer.

Currently, I'm playing Shadow of the Colossus. Also currently, as I write this, I'm listening to soundtrack for the game. The soundtrack is called Roar of the Earth. One of the really strong parts of Shadow of the Colossus is its soundtrack.

When I first heard about Shadow of the Colossus, I wanted the game. I've watched it slip out and slowly pick up speed as a sleeper hit to popular hit to a controversial hit -- people either love it or think everybody who loves it is stupid.

Shadow of the Colossus sounds like a simple game. There are (at least) sixteen huge colossi that roam a vast world. You play a guy who brings his dead love to a temple. To bring her back to life, you have to find the colossi and kill them. That's it. When you find a colossus, you have to figure out a way to get on them and then find their weak spot. Boy, it really sounds simple. People have complained about this being all there is to the game.

The graphics. Shadow of the Colossus looks different than most games. The previous game Ico is the only thing that comes close (Ico is sort of the prequel with Shadow of the Colossus containing some references to Ico -- the project name for Shadow of the Colossus was Nico). I have never played Ico so the graphics of Shadow were kind of a shock to me. It's lush and light blooms over everything. When things get exited in the game, the frame rate does slow down. To deal with this, things blur. That's another complaint some have about the game. If I hadn't read online that things blur because the frame rate goes down, I would have thought it was a stylistic effect in the game. The blurring, by the way, looks amazing and adds to the beauty of the game.

Game play. I was nervous about playing the game for the first time fearing that I wouldn't get that wonderful feeling that those who love the game got when they first played it. I road my horse into the temple and cut scene here and cut scene there I'm back on my horse and riding across an enormous field. I ride for a while and then have to climb a cliff to get to the first colossus. It was huge, but even if you don't know anything about the game I'm talking about, you probably had the notion that the colossi were going to be huge. Well, the first one was bigger than I thought, and it took me some time to figure out how to get on him. And when I did, the game sped up and started doing things I didn't think the PS2 was capable of doing. This huge creature covered in hair started to shake and tilt trying to get me off while stomping around mountains. It took a while to kill the first one. I've killed two more since then. Each one make the first one seem smaller and way too easy. I have to travel more and more land to get to the colossi. The land in itself is a work of art. This is the first game I've ever played with three dimensional waves of water at a shoreline. The waves, several feet high, knocked me over and acted like water at a beach.

God of War stunned me with being such a good game. I've been playing video games all my life. Legend of Zelda stunned me. The first Tomb Raider stunned me. Xenosaga stunned me. Final Fantasy VII stunned me. Morrowind stunned me. There's probably a dozen more, but I've played hundreds of games. And so far, I'm stunned with Shadow of the Colossus. I just hope that the developers of Shadow of the Colossus are still around and making video games when the PS3 comes out. I'd love to see next gen games from them. Somebody should tell Sony about these developers and get them working on games for the PS3.  ¶ 2:49 AM