I’ve been losing my nights this week to Torchlight, a hack-n-slash RPG from a bunch of ex-Blizzard employees that worked on Diablo. And you can tell the resemblance at any step: the games are pretty much the same. Torchlight is basically a combination of Diablo 1 (three classes, vertical structure, just one town) and Diablo 2 (socketed items, sets, skill trees) with World of Warcraft-like cartoony graphics. That being said, it has all the addictiveness of Diablo, which accounts for many nights spent looting chests hoping for better drops. You know what I’m talking about.

On the literary front, I’m currently reading Makers, Cory Doctorow’s latest book. It’s about… real-life hackers – in the most literal sense, as people changing the world around them by creating gizmos and tools out of anything is available. It’s a very fun book, it really rubs the nerdy insides. On Monday he was in NYC so I went to the signing. The guy is really smart and funny, a great geek. No wonder there are so many XKCD comics about him

On the professional level (at work, that is), I finished my first ever iPhone app. Which means that now I have the basic know-how to create applications for both Android and iPhone. I want get into this in my own time as well, so I’m planning buying a Mac in the near future (you can only do iPhone development on a Mac, grrrr). It will be my next gadgety purchase so I’m already giddy about it. It’s gonna be great

This weekend I started to catch up with some of the shows I recorded on my DVR the past days, most notably History Channel’s World War II in HD. Which is absolutely great, I highly recommend it to anyone interested in WW2 history out there. Think Band of Brothers, minus Holywood, plus realism. An extraordinary documentary. Speaking of Band of Brothers, looks like HBO is preparing another WW2 miniseries, The Pacific. Can’t wait.

The little free time that I had this week was spent in Borderlands, a co-op FPS/RPG I got on Steam. I preordered it with some friends last week and since Monday – when it came out – we’ve been visiting it’s arid landscapes, armed to the teeth.

I can’t say much about it’s singleplayer – probably plays a bit like Fallout 3, but more boring – but the co-op multiplayer is definitely a lot of fun. It has the adrenaline-filled action of a FPS combined with the obsessive-compulsiveness of Diablo loot (or WoW, for that matter). The weapons are procedurally generated, meaning that you can get really exotic combinations (like a shotgun that fires rockets that deal lightning damage on impact) and the world is pretty interesting, with a post-apocalyptic, Mad Max theme.

But the most important aspect is that it’s just… fun. It’s been a while since my last LAN party (or multiplayer StarCraft, after work ) so this brings back all the good memories. Nothing builds teamwork like yelling expletives while running for your life, shooting at some huge monster poised on turning you into rice pudding. Then the blasted sniper rifle reloads, you aim, score a headshot and the whole screen lights up: LEVEL UP. Good game.

On Sunday night I went to see VideoGamesLive, a concert where a live orchestra is playing music from video games. I’ve been wanting to go for a long time, ever since Roxy and Mike told me about it in early 2007. I had tickets for last year’s performance, but I got sick the day before and I was in no condition to go. I had to wait another year and a half for them to come back to NYC, so I got tickets as soon as I could, over 6 months ago.

We ended up going a large group – 12 people. I enjoyed the concert – the crowd, not so much – but I wish they’d played some favorites of mine (that I missed last year) like Civilization or God of War. Still, I have to say I discovered new beautiful music like the theme from Chrono Cross (here’s live in the second half of this video) or the Halo suite.

Other highlights were a pianist who could play blindfolded most of the themes form classic videogames (Mario, Zelda, and the like) and a Guitar Hero performance (on Expert), played on the big screen. Also, during the play of One Winged Angel (the boss fight theme from Final Fantasy VII) they had a nice montage of cosplay.

You can find my pictures in this SmugMug gallery. There’s a ton of videos on YouTube of the event (i.e. this one: part1, part2). For more info, here’s the NY Times coverage of the event.

Now I go back to replay for the hundredth time the Chrono Cross theme, acoustic version.