Congratulations! I've been fascinated by this guy's perennial quest; according to his web site, this is his fifth try to circumnavigate the globe in a balloon by himself. It's humbling to keep in mind that even with all of our crazy technology, it's still this difficult to accomplish such a feat.  7:13:18 PM  (comments [])   

I physically measured the size of the HUD at the 4:3 aspect ratio vs. the 3:2 aspect ratio, and the HUD's height is the same. So you do get (a little) more viewable area on the widescreen display.  2:25:20 PM  (comments [])   

Seems like a big deal for the platform to me. How can they be missing it?

Update [7:41pm]: OK, here's a pretty good article on the subject.  1:59:59 PM  (comments [])   

With all options up, the visuals are (natch) indistinguishable on the PowerBook and the big-ass rig.

I wish it was possible to hide or minimize the HUD, which takes up a lot of real-estate. The PB's screen has a wider aspect ratio than the desktop machine (running one at 1024x768; the other at 1152x768). I can't tell how they scale the HUD for the widescreen (if it gets wider or taller), so it's possible I'm actually getting even less viewable terrain area on the widescreen machine.

Considering the minimal system requirements of StarCraft and WarCraft II, this is kind of sad, but 3D acceleration is clearly the future/present. And the incredible response to WCIII implies that the market is out there. (I'd kill to know what the demographic breakdown of systems running WCIII is -- not just Macs vs. PCs, but how much VRAM, what graphics card, how much system memory, processor speed, etc.)  1:15:30 PM  (comments [])   

• It would appear the Blizzard went to some lengths to deal with the logistics of an ungodly number of pre-orders. I can now no longer find the number, but it was... maybe 4 million pre-orders? Anyway, they clearly got all of the orders packed up and shipped off to stores by July 2nd so that they could be available by July 3rd -- and they also clearly embargoed those July 2nd shipments so nobody got their copy early. So many stores (including the EB I pre-ordered at) opened up at midnight on July 3rd for maximum freaky response.
• Since I can't resist a good game freak out, I decided to show up at midnight. It turns out there were about 80 people there, including a few folks videotaping the whole works (perhaps for some kind of school project?). I arrived at midnight; I managed to eventually walk out with my game at 12:45am.
• It's deeply exciting that this game was released at the same time (on the same disc) for Mac OS X and Windows. Now I finally have something to play on trips :).
• I installed the game (of course) pretty much as soon as I got home. Unfortunately, the game seemed kind of jerky and skippy, even when I lowered the resolution. I realized this morning that this was because Radio chews up the processor to do regular disk scans -- the game was pretty smooth after a reboot, even at 1152x768.
• You will recognize many units from WarCraft II. You will recognize many voice acknowledgments.
• The level of detail in the maps is pretty impressive; there's more visual ambience than there was in the previous game. There seem to be a lot of buildings and terrain features that can be placed down as eye candy from within the map editor.
• I haven't tried the game on my big-ass rig yet; the visual quality on the PowerBook is not as nice as Neverwinter Nights is on the big rig. But the big rig has a GeForce 4 Ti.
• The game feels a little cozier. The map doesn't zoom out as much as I'd like, and frankly the zoom in only seems useful for cinematic effect (since it also changes your angle of view). We'll see how I feel after some battles.
• The food cap limit is 90 (unlike 200, for example, in StarCraft). Again, feels cozier.
• The hero concept seems interesting, but I don't know how it will play out yet. Heros can be respawned (at a cost of gold and time) if they die, so you aren't terrified to use them. And they seem to have some interesting spells & abilities.
• You can actually group a force of disparate types usefully. They'll fall into a reasonable formation, and there's a way to select different subgroups out of your group so you can cast the different spells more effectively. There are also some spells that are now autocast (for example, Bloodlust was the key to victory in WarCraft II, but required excessive micromanagement to use effectively).
• I'm looking forward to some bloody online matchups. Another potentially nice feature is that Battle.net will do anonymous matching for you to find other players with a similar play record (and hopefully skill level).
• Huhu! Skobu! Job's Done!
  

11:08:01 AM  (comments [])