Which one should I put on my list?
Thursday November 23, 2006 at 12:29 am | Filed under Gadgetry, Gaming
I’ve been all over the map on my views of what “next generation” game console you should have in your home. Ideally it would be wonderful to own them all. The PS3 has a lot of bells and whistles that might even justify the cost, the Wii has all kinds of originality that makes it attractive to everyone, and the Xbox 360 has a year head start on both of its rivals. With all the holiday hub bub, I thought I’d just let everyone know how my experience is going.
On June 5th of this year, I bought an Xbox 360. I have since logged many many hours on it, and I have actually found my self complimenting Microsoft for its work on more than one occasion. I’ve found that that online portion is so well done, and so seamlessly intertwined with the offline experience (Leaderboards, Achievements, Friends, etc.) that it’s a totally different experience than yesterday’s consoles, PS2 and the original Xbox included. I can’t speak enough about the online community that is built and waiting for anyone who gets a 360, and most of the online features are free! The only thing you have to pay a small monthly fee for is the ability to actually play online with friends, all of the stats and the chatting is free.
One thing I’d like to see improve on the Xbox front is the variety of games offered. Sure, there’s a wide variety, but the ones I miss are the crazy-artsy-clever titles, like Katamari Damacy, Ico, and Shadow of the Collossus. I’m sure they’ll get there, but they’re not there yet. It also wouldn’t hurt to at least attempt to tap the party console market that the Wii will certainly enjoy. It’s something that the Live Arcade games seem to accomplish a bit better than the store-bought games.
Now it’s important to keep in mind that I haven’t spent a whole lotta time with the PS3 and the Wii, just a little in store experience and even less at last year’s E3. But I have read a whole lot on both of them and it doesn’t seem like they’ve paid attention to building an online community as much as the Xbox has. Not to mention some blockbuster titles that are heading the 360’s way (Mass Effect, for one, looks amazing!).
I don’t think you really can lose with any of these consoles, but I would certainly recommend the Xbox 360 based on my experience with it over the last 5 1/2 months. Choose whichever you want, but if you get an 360, look me up online!
Flickr GeoTagging
Wednesday November 1, 2006 at 2:58 am | Filed under Gadgetry, On the Web
Flickr has added maps. I wasn’t sure how this fit into the flickr I know and love but check this out. You can now “geo tag” your photos by assigning map coordinates to them, indicating to folks where the photo was actually taken. For example, I ate lunch last Wednesday at Los Sanchez Mexican Restaurant in Anaheim. I took a photo, yes of my food, with my camera phone and uploaded it to flickr. Today I went into the Organizr feature of flickr and placed it on a map giving it a geo tag. Flickr offers separate privacy settings so that not everyone can see your geo tags if you don’t want them to. I imagine somewhere down the road the option of adding GPS capabilities to your photos you take may be an option but for now you can manually add them for the photos you want. I’m not sure it’s a feature I’ll be using a lot, but it’s sure a cool toy to play around with.
Xbox Redux - I did a 180 (x2)!
Tuesday June 6, 2006 at 11:07 am | Filed under Gadgetry, Gaming, Mac
After a bunch of thought about what I saw at E3 this year I decided to go back to my original plan when my Xbox died and turned in my store credit at Best Buy for an Xbox 360. With a couple of gift cards left over from the holidays I had nearly $300 to put towards the purchase. That made a pretty big dent, but of course, I had to buy an extra controller and some battery packs for the wireless (they’re SWEET!) controllers. So I got outta there spending about $100. Not bad for a next gen gaming system.
Don’t get me wrong, the PS3 is going to be amazing, and I’ll have one someday, but it won’t be the day it comes out. I think it would be a smarter move to give them some time to work out some bugs and get some great games put out for the system. Then maybe the following summer I’ll pick one up, but we’ll see how it’s received and how the luanch goes. $600 is a lot to throw down for a system, blu ray or not. The PS3 purchase may slide to when I have a TV and there are games out there that utilize 1080p.
I’ve been really impressed with the 360. There still aren’t a lot of games available, I think there are 30-40 or so that are out right now (more if you count the ones you can download online), but there should be close to 100 out by the holiday season. More impressive than the horsepower of the sytem, the gorgeous graphics and great gameplay is something that is expected. What has impressed me more is the way that it’s all tied together in the community called Xbox live. This was one of the things that I loved about the previous generation, and it got a whole lot better this time around. You can download all kinds of content through the service including: demos of games so you can “try before you buy,” full versions of old-school arcade games that have multi-player aspects added to them, movie trailers, and more. The downloadable games are in something called the Xbox Live Arcade, and it’s pretty addicting. I’ve been playing Uno with some friends online as well as some complete strangers. Yeah, I know… Uno. Go outside Joe! But really, it’s pretty cool with teh sense of community that’s built into it. Two things specifically make it great: Achievements and Gamer Score. Every Xbox 360 title has certain 
achievements that you can do that have a point value assigned to them. For example, if you play 40 “draw two” cards in Uno over the course of your playing career, you unlock an achievement and you get 15 points added to your gamer score. My Gamerscore is currently 410. My “Gamercard” is pictured to the right.
Being a mac guy, I had my concerns about how the 360 will interact with my computers over my network, if at all. Luckily, I have found quite a few little apps that make the 360 talk to macs. With Connect360, I can stream music from any mac on my network, listening to anything in iTunes, including playlists, while I play games both online and offline. It also lets me view photos that I have in iPhoto. Pretty slick for quick slideshows on the big screen.
There’s also some really cool 3rd party web tools that interface with the 360, but one in particular I have to point out. My 360 actually has a blog about me! It makes an entry daily (which is more than I can say for me on this blog) re-capping what I’ve played and how my Gamerscore is progressing. Check it out!
If you ever end up with a 360, send me a friend request! I’m known as “The Chickening” on Xbox Live!
