I have been a fan of Ghostbusters even since I saw the first movie on TV. I must have seen it over 30 times and it’s still one of my top favorites. I was overjoyed when I heard that they are soon going to be releasing a game based on a new storyline written by Dan Ackroyd and Harold Ramis, the original writers and actors of the movies. I hope that they pull it off and make an interesting game out of this. Here is a sneak peak:

My goodness, it has already been two months since my last post. A quick update to let you know that things are going well, just busy as usual. I recently took a week off work so that we would work on a home renovation project: redo the basement. We got rid of the old industrial carpet that was on the floor and put in some laminate floor. Andree also patched up the walls and did some painting with help from our friend Jean and Andree’s father Mario.

On the entertainment front, we managed to catch The Incredible Hulk on the big screen and really enjoyed it. I was hoping to write a little review for it but have not had a chance yet. It was extremely well written and Edward Norton is just perfect for the role. The action was good from beginning to end and it was extremely interesting to see Tony Stark show up at the end and mention that they are putting a team together.

After a bit of digging online, I saw that an Avengers movie is announced for 2011 with Captain America, Iron Man and Hulk. It’s far, but hopefully it will be worth the wait.

I was taken by surprise yesterday when I stumbled upon the trailer for a new full-length feature Star Wars film that is set to come out in August. Completely done in computer animation, Star Wars: The Clone Wars, will be set between episodes 2 and 3 and will tell us more about the devastating Clone Wars. The movie will be followed by a regular TV series on the cartoon network this fall. I will go back to drooling now.

A few weeks back, my wife and I just tried out a new babysitter and went out to enjoy the movies. Of course, we already had my sister and mother-in-law look after the kids after they were in bed, but this was the first time that it was someone outside the family. Through the scarce listings, we settled on Iron Man. While the preview looked very cheesy, we decided to give it a chance and were really not disappointed.

Check out my review of the movie.

Now that we have a new option for babysitting, we’ll be able to enjoy many of the other comic book movies that are coming out this summer (The Dark Knight, Hellboy II, Incredible Hulk).

I have always been what I refer to as a “bargain gamer”. While I love playing games, I am not willing to pay the full price to get them when they first come out. I am also not one to always try to keep my PC up-to-date to be able to play the latest and greatest of game titles.

This approach is paying off right now since I just got myself a new mid-range computer for home and am now looking at all of the titles that I’ve missed over the past four years. The first thing that I did was to pull out a few games that I had bought as part of a collection but had never even played (yes, kind of lame, I know!), namely:

• Prince of Persia: Sands of Time, a wicked remake of the classic action puzzler that got my hooked immediately.

and Splinter Cell

I have also been looking at the Best PC Games Compilations from the past few years and am currently looking at getting the following titles to augment my game collection:

• Orange Box: A collection of Half-Life 2, HL2 Episode 1, HL2 Episode 2, Portal and Team Fortress 2. Since I have never even played or seen Half-Life 2, let alone all the other titles, this should be hours of fun.

• Company of Heroes: I’ve always loved RTS games and this one seems to be quite amazing from everything I’ve read. I have also tried out the demo version and am already hooked.

• Sam & Max: Season 1: Another type of game that I have also been fond of is adventure games (Full Throttle, Syberia). The return of Sam & Max in an episodic format seems like it would be a lot of run to play through.

You can click on any image to see a higher resolution version of them.

If you can think of any other memorable game titles that you’ve played in the last 3-4 years that you think that I should check out, just leave a comment or drop me an e-mail.

After writing for Uneporte.net for over 4 years, I’ve grown used to writing about some of the movies that I watch. Instead of starting to write for a different site, I have decided to publish my thoughts on DVDs, Blu-Ray discs and other things directly on my web site under the new section ‘Critique DVDs et Blu-Ray.

The first review that I have posted under this new section is my review of the Transformers DVD, something that left over when Uneporte closed.

I don’t promise to write reviews that are as exhaustive as this one but I will definitely try to share my thoughts on good movies on here on a regular basis.

Oh, and yes, that review is in French. This was the language used on Uneporte. I might switch between French and English for my reviews based on how I feel

I have just performed an update of the web site authoring system that I use, called Wordpress. You should not really notice anything new on the front end, but if you do see something acting weird, drop me a note.

Television has been quite boring since Christmas due to the Writer’s Guild of America strike. After starting the strike in November, new episodes finished airing around the time of the Christmas break and never came back.

Thankfully, the strike finished in April and the whole television industry will soon be coming back to life with new episodes from your favorite TV shows. To see a full list of the shows that are coming back, along with a number of episodes and air dates for the first ones, check out this page on TVGuide.com.

One thing that you will notice as you go through the list is that studios took the time off to cancel some shows and have decided to post-pone most that had not started yet (like 24) to the fall or next winter.

My personal favorites these days are CSI: NY, The Unit, The Big Bang Theory, How I met Your Mother, 30 Rock. I was very disappointed to see Journeyman not coming back. I felt that the show had really found its rhythm in the last few episodes that aired. I also saw on this list that Bionic Woman was cancelled. No big loss there. It was more filler television than anything else.

I flew from Montreal to San Jose in California yesterday to attend a conference organized by one of our partners and visit an office that we have in this area. As I was waiting for my flight in Montreal a little bit before noon, I heard a very interesting computerized announcement from WestJet come over the loud speaker: “WestJet flight XXXX will be boarding at 12:80 am.” A lot of people looked at each other with a very confused look on their face. It’s not April 1st or anything, so some computer was having a really bad day.

The trip to San Jose was quite uneventful, with all flights departing on time, except for a very strange announcement from the flight attendant when we landed: “Welcome to San Diego”. Again, a lot of confused looks and a couple of laughs from the passengers, and the flight attendant did not even correct herself. Given that the two cities are about 740 km apart, we were really hoping that we were in San Jose.

The last funny tidbit of this venture was going to pick up my rental car. The San Jose airport has a consolidated rental car center with a single shuttle line deserving it. After getting on the bus and getting close to the center, they announced that the first stop was for Avis (the company I was using on this trip), Hertz, and shuttles for off-site rental car places! I pity the poor folks who have to get on a second shuttle to get to their car rental. Can’t they just have two different shuttle buses passing my the terminal to save people time?

Like many airports around the US these days, the San Jose airport is expanding. They are building a brand new terminal, which looks like it will cater a lot better to large aircrafts. Coming in on United Airlines on a large plane, we actually had to walk down stairs out of the plane and walk into the terminal. I had not done something like that in a long time. At least the weather was fairly warm.

I mentioned a few weeks ago that things looked pretty grim for the HD-DVD camp as Warner decided that it would soon only be releasing its movie in Sony’s Blu Ray format. Well, as of two weeks ago, Toshiba has announced that they were officially dropping out of the High-Definition format war and stopping to produce all HD-DVD players and support for the format. There will still be a few HD-DVD discs coming out over the next few months, but that will be the end of this adventure.

Now, as mentioned before, that does not necessarily mean that you can just run out and pick up a Blu Ray player since most stand-alone players produced today are not going to be compatible with the next version of the BD format, which is usually referred to as BD Profile 2.0. The one player that is a safe bet is the Playstation 3 since it will be upgradeable through a firmware update to support Profile 2.0. There are also starting to be a few stand-alone players that are promoting the fact that you will be able to upgrade them to the new version.

Personally, I am leaning more towards a standalone player than a PS3 for one main reason, the lack of an infrared port on the unit. Its controllers and optional remote control only work via Bluetooth so it is not possible to control it with a universal control such as the Harmony 550 that I have. For a unit that is supposed to become the center of a home theater system, that is quite a way to be closed to other controls and fit inside of a larger environment. I have read a few things about a third-party controller that comes with a USB component that you can jack into the PS3 to get an IR port but I am not sure how well these work. If you’ve tried one of these devices before, drop me a note and let me know how useful they are.