Normally my girlfriend is anti-video games.  It’s not so much that she hates them as much as she sees them pointless.  Often times she reminds me of my mother telling me “It’s such a beautiful day outside, why don’t you go play with your friends?”

She may have just found another way to kill them for me.

To put this into proper context, I had not played Guitar Hero until just recently.  But my roommate happened across a Nintendo Wii and one of the games he had was GH3.  I, being as persistent as I can, tried to convince my girlfriend that because it was more physically interactive that she would enjoy this more than say… Halo.

And she agreed…

“Yeah, I think you’re right!” she said.  “It’s a lot like that Simon game from when we were little kids!”

…

She just turned into .

And the worst thing is, she’s absolutely right.  I hate it when she does that.

Th!nkEmpire: I’m blogged out

Th!nkEmpire: I’ll get something tomorrowish

Th!nkEmpire: chewing around a few ideas

Gr00veMerchant: lol

Gr00veMerchant: yeah

Gr00veMerchant: I’m thinking about talking about the death of the Xbox 360

Th!nkEmpire: the death, eh?

Gr00veMerchant: yep

Th!nkEmpire: how so?

Gr00veMerchant: Cause of Death: Stupidity by not having the foresight to A.) Support a Hi-Def format fully and B.) Shamefully put their tail betwixt their legs and embrace Blu-Ray as champeeen.

Th!nkEmpire: ah

Th!nkEmpire: lack of hard drive?

Th!nkEmpire: integrated, at least

Gr00veMerchant: not so much that, I have a 120 GB hdd on my Xbox, and I have support for externals and flash drives and better still my pc rig.

Th!nkEmpire: hmmm okay

Gr00veMerchant: but to 1.) Not have some sort of hi-def drive built in or pumping money into HDDVD before it was way too late.

Th!nkEmpire: yeah

Gr00veMerchant: and now to turn their back on blu-ray after its success is just effin’ retarded

Th!nkEmpire: but, the lack of a hdd shoots the concept of provided a relatively uniformed platform for development, does it not?

Gr00veMerchant: the inclusion of a hdd at the sub-350 price point and a 120 GB hdd at the sub-450 price point shoots that concept to shit.  And worse still, they’ve still provided an option of a unit without a hdd, which impedes the progress of “next-gen”/now current gen gaming.

(more…)

Sorry there hasn’t been much in the way of new content lately!  Th!nk and I have been doing our best to post as much as possible, but he’s had limited internet horsepower and I’ve been without a steady computer!  All that should be over soon, and normal posting will resume within the next day or two.

Gr00ve’s post, with respect to waterboarding and modern interrogation methods, got me thinking about American culture and their treatment of prisoners and interrogation suspects alive.

I find that, for better or worse, we accomodate our prisoners much like a cheap motel provides accomodation to its guests: Somewhat accomodating, cigarette smoke baked into the carpet, wallpaperings and curtains, strange guests and a rather limited, unfulfilling continental breakfast.

But, frankly, nothing in the world can top this modern interrogation tactic. Yes, force your prisoners to perform, perfectly, the Thriller dance. Complete with a male playing the role of a female companion. Something tells me, with something like 4,100 other males pining over his hot little drag-queen ass, he’s the one up for interrogation.

But where can we go from here? How far can we push people before personal rights advocates will simply not take any more of this rampant abuse? Dare I say, Beat It. Oh yes, the mother of all music videos, dancing gang fights and all! Take that waterboard-haters!

Media Spin at it’s finest!  “Dems Slam Bush veto on waterboarding ban.” 

A senate bill outlawing waterboarding ¹ was vetoed by President Bush.  What they wait until the very bottom of the article to tell you is the grounds for which he vetoed it.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I’m not usually the first in line to defend Dubya.  But I’m gonna have to step in on this one.

He didn’t object to banning waterboarding, he objected to limiting the ability of an intelligence agency to gather information.  Waterboarding, by the way, is not part of the interoggation procedure for the Central Intelligence Agency.

“I cannot sign into law a bill that would prevent me, and future presidents, from authorizing the CIA to conduct a separate, lawful intelligence program, and from taking all lawful actions necessary to protect Americans from attack.”

-President George W. Bush

I feel that with the exception of the appropriate oversight committee, tactics of the CIA should be a government matter; it should not be a matter of public record.  Keep ‘em guessin’.

Let the debate storm begin.

… I would let Th!nkEmpire handle all of the reviews, but I feel that I must do my civic duty and release a firestorm of obscenities at SimpleTech’s external hard drive.

The Packaging: Promises a stylish, yet functional exterior.  The case to the hard drive is a glossy deep blue, with a LED lighted blue oval ring on the top.  In the center of the ring sits a button, which is supposed to activate a “One-Click Backup” feature.

The Promise: The drive promises a simple, easy-to-use, One-Click feature for backing up a system.  The LED-lit oval, the oval lights up according to how much space is being consumed by the drive.

The Price: Reasonably priced, especially given all the features.  I wonder why that is?

The Reality: This piece of $h!7 causes my computer to completely and instantaneously reboot every time you try to do a automated backup.  Therefore, the One-Click feature is useless.  And to top it off the LED doesn’t work properly. 

The Verdict: Leave this one on the shelf.

Regarding Th!nk’s post, I remember talking to him about Vista when it was first starting to flesh itself out before the launch.  I remember hearing his excitement about all of the great features, especially Vista Ultimate, that Windows was supposed to encapsulate.  I remember when I talked about getting a MacBook and his single response to me was: “Sinner”.  I shall now relish in this, without saying: “I told you so”.

The warm-up: “When you want to have it all, including the ability to shift smoothly between the worlds of play and productivity, there’s Windows Vista Ultimate.”

The sales pitch: “Exclusive to Windows Vista Ultimate are Windows Ultimate Extras. Windows Ultimate Extras are add-ons that extend certain capabilities of your operating system or just make using your PC more fun. Windows Ultimate Extras currently available include”

And final sale: Over one year after release, the Vista team produced the following ‘Ultimate’ extras: DreamScene, Windows Hold ‘Em, Language pakcs for a Multi-lingual UI, Online Key Backup and BitLocker.

Awesome, I can have animated backgrounds, a new card game for when I’m bored of solitaire and other stuff I won’t use. Don’t I feel privelaged cheated to be an Ultimate user. What beguiles me is how can a team of professionals have their head so far up their collective asses as to create such a gaffe.

The Vista team didn’t go wrong in October, when they announced on the 23rd that they had finished pushing out the initial extras and failed to announce or let a detail or two slip of what was in the works.

They went wrong when they conceived the Vista Ultimate extras as an ever-evolving platform requiring continuous development and deployment of programs and other knick-knacks. Essentially, what is has become now, where users wait until their patience wears thin, poke the windows vista blog to see if any updates came up, see none and then go about their day wondering why they spent so much money on unfulfilled promises.

Where could they have gotten the Extras right? Well, for one, realize that the Ultimate platform should not be one of program distribution, but one of encapsulating distribution–where program co-exist with additional options, such as exclusive betas, game access and even Microsoft offers.

Which means, this: instead of rolling out Service Pack 1 in the fashion they did - giving Enterprise customers sole access until Update deployment in mid-March/April - they could have given Ultimate users access to this when it hit on Feb. 4. By and large, Ultimate users are power users, give them the chance to stir up some encouraging words on forums, blogs and whatnot about how much SP1 improves performance.

What else can you give the Ultimate users to give them something to toot their horns about?

The team was getting close with this offer, but it shouldn’t have been limited to additional copies of Vista. Instead, give Ultimate users a good discount on additional softwares, such as the Office suite. Give them additional discounts of Microsoft games, too. Limit it to PC-based games if you want, but I’m sure they could stir up some nice feelings if they spread Ultimate discounts to Xbox 360 software as well. Hell, they could even offload excess useless inventory onto Ultimate customers!

At this point, with how lambasted the service is, a complimentary year-long Games for Windows - LIVE gold service could come tied with Vista Ultimate.

It’s a shame that, as a Vista Ultimate user who was excited by the thought of an updated stream of exclusive extras, I feel like I’ve been terribly cheated.

What an exciting two days of sports.

In the Badger State, Packer fans mourn over the loss of quarterback Brett Favre.  Favre is the current record holder for just about every statistic a quarterback can hold including wins, passing yards, touchdown passes, 3 MVP awards, and oh yeah… he did it while starting 275 consecutive games.

Already the debate has sprung around whether or not he’ll come back or decide to play again.  I would like to think that he has more character than that.  I’d rather not see him go in and out of retirement like Michael Jordan or Roger Clemens.  Enjoy your time now, Brett.

Speaking of greatness, Boston Bruins goaltender Tim Thomas must be flailing in his dreams screaming, “Ovechkin!”.  In a 10-2 trouncing of the B’s, Ovechkin had a hat-trick… in the FIRST PERIOD.  He finished the night with four points total. 

Giving up seven goals total, Thomas started the game, but was pulled twice.

When the much-aligned gaming drought is onset, I usually find myself looking to either the rest of the crap that’s dwindled out since the holiday boom, or scour the archives of my hard drive searching for an .iso I missed, say, playing Crysis or Call of Duty 4.

So what have I been doing to keep my mind sharp and my WASD hand nimble (don’t go there)?

Well, I picked up copies of Frontlines and Turning Point, both of which have turned out to be pretty big duds, Turning Point moreso than Frontlines, as I managed to find a game-stopping bug which prohibits me from switching weapons, firing them, or even having their models display correctly. So I uninstalled it. Expect a review of both of these guys coming sometime soon.

I have begun to play through Warhammer 40K: Dawn of War, it’s been the first RTS I’ve been able to get into in a long while and I’m having fun playing it so far, so we’ll see how far I get into it.

I’ve also been entrenched in a staring competition with Sins of a Solar Empire, seeing who can outlast the other. My brother only says great things about it (I’ve gotten three text messages early in the morning, saying both how tired he is and how great the game is). I played through a tutorial, liked it and never picked it up. Hopefully that’ll change at some point.

I’ve been also watching more and more YouTube lately and have been captured by this video of an Airbus A320 attempting to land in Hamburg, Germany. It’s undeniably badass.

But, let’s get to the point of the post: The gaming drought is done! The gaming gods doth rain upon us big-name releases! Hooray for Spring! What’s coming out in the next month, you ask? Let’s see:

-God of War: Chains of Olympus
-Army of Two
-SSBB
-Condemned 2
-Rainbow 6: Vegas 2
-Metal Gear Collection
-Dark Sector
-FFVII: Crisis Core
-C&C3: Kane’s Wrath
-STALKER: Clear Sky
-and maybe even Home!

Hooray for March! If I ever get a job, maybe March will be the month I find myself picking up a PSP and seeing what I can do with it.