Google Trent Lott and Benjamin Nicolas to Find Out Why Trent is Resigning
My experience with the Xbox 360
About two weeks ago I received an Xbox 360 for my birthday from my wife. She did a lot of research and got a really good deal on a refurbished machine with an extra controller and a copy of Halo 3. Now, I know that 360s are notoriously unreliable and one might immediately assume getting a refurbished machine is a bad idea, but the reduced cost and the supposed elimination of the red-ring-of-death problem (that’s what they refurbish) made it seem like a good idea.
Once opened I immediately activated Xbox live and went to a store to pick up a game with the 25$ gift card that some friends had given me. I expected to get Gears of War or Crackdown because they’ve been out for a year–I was wrong. The used version of each was pushing 50$ which I found astonishing. It turns out that triple-A 360 titles are holding their value as much as triple-A Nintendo titles (go try to find a used copy of Smash Bros or Mario Kart). The only good game that I could afford was Dead Rising by Capcom. I think it was a launch title and it was still 30$ so I had to pay a little. I’d never played the game before but I know it reviewed well and I trust Capcom with zombies. The game turned out to be great (lawn mower + zombies = awesome), I had a fellow eightandfiver over and we played passing the controller. We also played a little halo but the game isn’t that good to watch and my wife was playing with us and wasn’t a big Halo fan. We actually ended the night playing Super Mario 3 that was just made available on the virtual console–score one for the Wii.
Within the next week I had gotten Bioshock and Orange Box through game fly. I also had Gears of War briefly but there were too many new games to play before I went through the catalog. I sent it back and got Resident Evil: The Umbrella Chronicles (another good Capcom game, this time for the wii, also with zombies). I also managed to throw down a reservation for Rock Band that involved trading in an assload of games to get to the $160 and the last 360 reservation available at the GameStop I shop at.
Bioshock was great, although with Orange Box I had trouble committing to it, I’m sure the significant other and I will get around to it at some point. I put a lot of time into portal and even started replaying Half-Life 2. Damn these are great games. I had trouble playing team fortress 2 because all my multi-player time was going to Halo 3 (also a great game). I really felt like I had in the heyday of the PS2 when we had just tons of great stuff all at the same time (GTA, SSX, Burnout, Katamari…). I was in heaven—and it was during a game of portal just after I got the weighted companion cube that my 360 froze for the first time.
I restarted and started to play Half-Life 2 and got pretty far when it froze again (thank god for tons of auto saves). This time when I restarted the 360 it was flashing red. It was the standard red-ring-of-death that a refurbished Xbox isn’t supposed to get. I know this because the towel trick worked. The problem lies in some solders that fail to connect. The towel trick involves wrapping the console in a towel to deliberately overheat it so the solder expands and connects again. A temporary fix at best.
The real downer was that the next day I got to pick up Rock Band and then leave the house and spend thanksgiving in North Carolina (where I had a marvelous time). I got back on Sunday ready to try the 360 again, with the towel trick if need be, to finally get to try out the killer rock band drums… I couldn’t get past the title screen.
I managed to get a hold of the company that refurbished it and get a return authorization. They were really responsive and allowed me to keep the hard drive and all other accessories. The system is currently in transit to them, they’ve assured me they have a quick turnaround time and that they’ll mail off another system within a day of receiving mine.
I hope I get it soon. I’m afraid my weighted companion cube is going to miss me.
How Sony will end up on top of the video game industry, again
Two generations ago Nintendo introduced the world to the analog thumbstick on the Nintendo 64 Controller (1996) and changed the way video games were interacted with. It gave console players an intuitive controller that allowed for more complexity than they’d experienced before. At the same time PC gaming was experiencing a revolution with the now standard mouse and keyboard coming into their own as incredibly deep and also intuitive game interface devices. Roughly one year later Sony introduced the Dual-Analog Controller to their Playstation and created the best controller that will ever be made that doesn’t feature motion sensing (I would probably consider the 360 controller the best if it weren’t a complete rip-off, an argument can be made that it’s wirelessness differentiates it enough to garner it the top ranking but I disagree. Leave a comment if you’re still pissed).
Whether Sony realized it or not their dual-shock effectively mimicked and simplified the keyboard/mouse pc standard and allowed Microsoft’s Xbox to step into the market with Halo and Halo 2. The games that most effectively used the dual shock style controller and allowed Microsoft to compete in a market where they could have easily failed.
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HD-DVD is dead
It looks like HD-DVD vs Blue Ray battle is pretty much over. A crack has been released that can decrypt HD-DVD movies. As long as Blue-Ray stays secure for a few more months HD-DVD will go the way of the Dreamcast. Once a format is “insecure” studios will see fit to put all their eggs in the other basket, and HD-DVD should die like beta-max. The only thing that could fix this problem is finding a flaw in Blue-Ray. I wonder how much money Sony and Microsoft have invested in a strategy to break the security of the opposing format. If they haven’t, they are fools, being the secure format is a sure fire way to win the latest format battle. Apparently the crack isn’t complete, it lacks the code to extract the keys from memory, so I guess we will have to wait until January 2nd to find out the rest of the story, will HD-DVD movies be posted to the internet, and whether a Play Station 3 is a good investment…
Where are the Wii games?
Going into the wii launch I was really excited about what appeared to be a great launch line-up. Wii Sports, Zelda, Monkey Ball, Rayman… and I thought there were a lot more… but it’s a month in and there aren’t. Elebits is on it’s way but one ain’t enough.
Perhaps I’m mouthing a look horse in the gift but at the 250$ price point I think Ninty could be selling a lot more games right now. Sure other consoles rarely launch with more than two good games and there can be an argument made that the Wii has at least 4. But the experience with the wii-mote is so fresh that I have this need to try more new games with it. It feels like when I first got my PS1 with the dual shock, I couldn’t stop playing every game that existed for it (granted that was well after launch but it was a compulsion none-the-less).
Wii Play seems to be available everywhere in the world but here!This Should Be the Third Secret
After playing through a chunk of Call of Duty on the Wii I’ve come to the conclusion that the wiimote makes a really good fps controller–at least as good as the dual-analog alternative. Although the Wii set up is adequate, adding a motion sensing headset would make it better.
A while back I read a blog by a kid who suggested the addition of another analog stick to control “looking” on the wiimote side. Giving the player movement control with nunchuck and look control with the analog stick on the wiimote then allowing free pointing around the screen with the wiimote itself.
It sounded good to me but the addition of another control on a hand that is used for one set of orientation seemed complicated and I don’t think it would catch on. It would probably work well but it would take a long time to learn and would be daunting to new players.
As I played COD3 last night I had a bit of an epiphany, if I could move the camera by moving my head then I could use the wiimote as a pointer (gun) naturally pointing it anywhere on the screen–even the corners. As I thought about this I remembered that when the Wii was still the Revolution one of the first accessories Nintendo showed was the headset. That was accompanied by a commitment to voice recognition built-in (programmed in?) to the Revolution. Then there was nothing more about it.
I doubt that Nintendo forgot about it, perhaps they just stopped working on it because the controller garnered so much attention, but if it’s still out there it seems to me that adding some gyroscope/tilt sensing stuff to it would be easy.
So that’s my hope for the third secret, a motion detecting device in the headset. Where is it Nintendo? I want it in Metroid (I also want matchmaking for Metroid as good as in Halo 2).
We Digress, Feminism!
This is just a bit of a conversation Sarah and I had a couple of day’s ago regarding feminism. Nothing too profound, but there are some good observations. Sarah is nearly complete with her MFA in theatre and has approached her art from a feminist perspective ever since I’ve known her so she has become a bit of an expert on the subject and I consider myself a strong feminist as well. We talk alot about theatre and mention some plays including “Third” by Wendy Wasserstein and two by Martin McDonagh, “Six Shooter†(an Oscar winning short available from iTunes) and his great play “The Lieutenant of Inishmore”. We also touch on Shakespeare and a bit of Tarintino. We spoke while we walked through the beautiful and poor East Missoula where every house has a fence and a dog behind it, thus the barking.
The picture is from the Rythym Method Actors production of Lysistrata done here in Missoula last summer.
We Digress, The Game One
I’m pretty sure I just make up most of the facts I come up with… I need to work on that, or at least I need real time fact checkers to work on it for me. This episode is more entertaining than I expected, some cool stuff about Video Games if you give a crap about it. We even talk about World of Warcraft and mention “the Halo 3 release date”. Listen to find out the truth.
We Digress Episode 5.2, Febuary 26, 2006 Part 1