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!
Monday May 8, 2006 at 11:19 pm | Filed under Gaming
What are you doing November 16th? It’s a Thursday. Go ahead and check your calendar, I’ll wait. …okay, I’m not waiting that long. Where did you go anyway? I was trying to tell you something. Aww, screw it, I’ll tell you anyway. Sometime on Thursday November 16th, I’ll be making my over to the Cerritos Best Buy* with my zero-G sleeping bag and some food and I’ll be camping out until the morning of the 17th when said Best Buy opens. Why? Oh, just for fun. C’mon! It’s the launch of the Playstation 3! It’s taken all of the willpower I have not to have jumped on the Xbox360 bandwagon (well, okay, the limited number of games and the fact that you still can’t FIND a system for a reasonable price has a lot to do with it too).
The reason I know my schedule 6 months in advance is because Sony released the hard facts about the PS3 today. It seems to have most all of the stuff that we had heard about before… Cell chip, CD/DVD/Blu-Ray (for the geeks out there, it’s a 2x Blu-ray drive capable of 72Mbps), Bluetooth, WiFi, Ethernet, Dolby Digital, Full HD Support 1080p (although details are still coming in on this as it doesn’t look like the PS3 will have dual HDMI outputs as previously proposed), wireless controllers (up to 7, for some reason), a pre-installed Hard Drive, USB, and a Memory Stick/SD/Compact Flash reader built into the unit. Not to mention the thing plays EVERY PS2 and PS1 game ever made. It will also have an online community (yes!) as the Xbox360′s “Live” does, we’ll see if this still turns out to be a freebie thing.
Also, the boomerang controller is dead and there’s a new, but oddly familiar controller that was announced. This one is much like the dual shock 2 that came with the PS2, but it has NO RUMBLE! What? Yeah, not sure if I’ll miss that or not. I mean, it’s kinda cheesy as it doesn’t really do much for the game, but I’ve gotten kinda used to it. Anyway, the controller has been updated with analog (some would say trigger-like) L2 an R2 buttons, a new PS logo button (probably to bring up a menu of some sort… online account?), bluetooth wireless, and some sort of gyro functionality that will enable the controller to know where it’s positioned and be able to react to tilts and altitude changes. This could make flying games much much better!
Here’s the big number part of the post. The PS3 will have two different configurations, and while the differences in features aren’t all out on the table yet that I could find (we’ll learn more in the next couple of days at E3) the cheaper one will have a 20Gig Hard Drive while the premium model will have a 60Gig hard drive. They’ll sell for $499 and $599 respectively. *gulp* Good thing I have about $250 in Best Buy gift cards I’ve been holding on to. There’s more on the two flavors of the PS3 here.
So anyone who wants to come hang out with me outside of a best buy for a handful of hours, lemme know!
P.S. Sharks won tonight! YEAH!!
*Best Buy location subject to change based on in-stock estimates.
Tuesday August 9, 2005 at 11:45 am | Filed under Gaming, Sports
Yup, that behemoth EA released their new pro football game today. With ESPN stymied by the agreement that EA made with the NFL, there will be no competition for the Madden franchise this year. While I think that’s a real bummer, I am pleasantly surprised to see the folks at EA add so many features to their game after pretty much releasing the same game the last three years. It actually looks pretty promising, and while I know that if ESPN’s game would be much better this year if they were still allowed to use the NFL license, I’m probably gonna be pickin’ this one up.
Ever since a friend who worked there told me how horrible life at EA was, I vowed never to buy an EA game new again. I plan to keep that pledge with this new game too, but I’ll have to find it used or buy it through ebay or something.
So who’s buyin and who’s boycotting? Or who’s waiting for the next generation to get this thing?
