Monday Meanderings hopes to break up the Monday Morning Monotony by bringing you a quick run-down on notable things occurring in the various geek sub-cultures at large.
This week’s Monday Meanderings is a little short. I’ve been engulfed by the fever to slay demons courtesy of Diablo III’s release amongst other distractions.
Battleship Sinks
I don’t think there was any real doubt in anyone’s mind on whether Battleship would score a Hit or a Miss at the Box Office. Even though Movie Critics aren’t always reliable in gauging the popularity of a movie with audiences, I think it was safe to assume we’d need a handful of White Pegs for this movie. The waters were turbulent enough for creating a movie based on the classic boardgame, but to throw aliens in to the mix it would likely have been far safer to forgo any connection to the game at all and just try selling a Navy vs. Alien Invasion action film. For a movie that cost $209 million dollars to produce, it only grossed $25 million the US’s domestic box office. Luckily for Universal and Hasbro it’s managed to eke out $240 million in worldwide sales (someone somewhere likes it) but it’s doubtful that once all the international distribution costs are tallied that Universal will consider this gamble to have been worth it.
The Avengers
Outpacing Battleship in sales by 2 to 1 easily was Avengers which topped $55 million domestically in its third weekend. It looks like it’ll do very well this Memorial Day weekend and is poised for very good early summer sales.
MiB3
Almost ten years after Men In Black II, and fifteen years since the debut of the movie franchise itself, Men In Black will release it’s third major motion picture. Agent J must time travel back in time to save his partner Agent K and as per usual the fate of the world rests on his shoulders. Is it me or Agent J now the one in danger of being “the Old Guy”?
Diablo III
Blizzard released Diablo III last week and there was no small amount of disgruntled fans as the game’s log-in servers (the servers that processed the log-in requests, not the ones running the game) were so overloaded that many folks weren’t able to get through during the first day and a half of gaming. There were also a couple spots where the game’s servers themselves had to come down for maintenance. This resulted in pretty bizarre rankings on Metacritic were the Reviewers were giving the game a quality ranking of about 88 out of 100, while the score from Users was ranking an average of 3.7 out of 10 based primarily on the coupled issues of not being able to access the servers and the inability to play the game offline solo. Still, apparently hundreds of thousands of users were still able to access the game and server downtime disappeared mostly by the end of the week allowing most folks to get on and play without issue. As a Blizzard veteran whom remembers the release of WoW, I’m personally counting my lucky stars over how smoothly this launch has gone. What were your impressions? Leave a comment below!
For those that want to keep track of Diablo III’s servers status, especially with the release of the Real Currency Auction House tomorrow (which has separate servers for each currency) Blizzard has posted this handy dandy server status page for your convenience.
Also to the right side of the page is a list of upcoming events and releases. If you know of something geeky and noteworthy that should belong there or have a suggestion for something to post on Monday Meanderings please let us know!
