Bill Gates

That is, unless you are a Sony or Nintendo fanboy.  Since I don’t own either a wii or a PS3, that makes me an Xbox fanboy.  For those of you like me, the winner, it’s we.

The big 3 console vendors have each had their E3 moment in the sun and one thing was clear, Microsoft has deep pockets.  Nintendo had little, if any, things to shake a wii stick at.  Sony is trying hard to catch up to Xbox Live and boy, the PS2 is sure doing well.  Microsoft on the other hand, dropped all sorts of bombs.  Some of which probably caused Sony to drop some bombs as well.  Mostly of the F variety.

The first shot was the news of previously exclusive PlayStation developer Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XIII coming to the Xbox.  Not really sure if I care much about that since I’ve never played an FF game, but it’s still a huge blow to Sony.  If MS would get their heads out of their asses and release a Blu Ray addon for the Xbox they would crush the PS3 for good.

The second shot was the official announcement of the Netflix streaming movie collection becoming available through the Xbox to Netflix subscribers.  While the news itself is something that’s been rumored for awhile, it was also something most expected to see on both platforms.  The news here is that it appears to be an Xbox exclusive deal.

The third big Xbox announcement was the news of a dashboard update and this new avatar concept.  From what I’ve seen so far, they can keep em.  I’ll take the current blade system and my gamerpic.  The proposed new interface looks underwhelmingly uninspired and the avatars look like bad mi clones.

Overall, I’m still glad I have an Xbox, even despite it’s hardware deficiencies (when compared to a PS3).  Hopefully some worthwhile game news will continue to come out of E3 the rest of the week.  Meanwhile, the Bungie countdown continues to work towards 7/16/08 07:07:07 GMT.  Please be something other than Halo 4…

[Update] Bah.  The Bungie reveal was squashed by Microsoft.

Air Guitar

It’s probably a bad thing if, when you are driving down the road, you see the painted lines and your mind is trying to figure out how to play them on a Rock Band guitar.  Not quite as bad, but equally sad, as when any song you hear is now being broken down into various green, red, yellow, blue ( + orange if you’re leet) color combination’s.

Hi, my name is Brian and I’m a Rock Band addict.

What do you call it when you are doing air guitar of a Rock Band guitar?  Besides the obvious things like sad, pathetic, or a cry for help?

On a mostly unrelated, although probably eventually related when more Rock Band 2 info comes out, note.  If you are a gaming freak like myself, but just came out of cryogenic stasis, E3 is this week.  For the unaware, E3 is like a week long Christmas for gamers.  Except instead of presents you get information about things which may or may not ever come out.  OK, bad analogy.  Think of something awesome.  Now trust me when I say E3 is like whatever it is you just thought about.

Hopefully E3 will help remove the sadface I’ll be having once I return Rock Band to my friend Dave on Monday.

Hair Metal

I love my job.  We are having a Rock Band, Battle of the Bands competition at this years departmental meeting thing.  The winning band gets $100 for each member and the copy of Rock Band used for the competition + the instruments.  Sadly, the winning band will probably split up shortly after the competition due to fighting over who actually gets the game portion of the prize, since there is only one copy.

I had never actually played the game before, but luckily a room in our office has been turned into the Rock Band Studio for people to come and practice or whatever.  Our band has been holding “band practice” every day at lunch, as well as various other times of the day.  It took me a whole one song to realize that this game shizzles my nizzle.

In the highly probable event that I’ve improperly used the phrase, “shizzle my nizzle”, then substitute that with “pwns me like something that pwns things”.  I don’t know what the hell it is that’s so good about the game, but it probably has something to do with the fact that you feel like you’re Jack Black in Tenacious D.  You probably look like an idiot to anyone who’s looking, but you are melting faces none the less.

The downside.  My friend Dave was kind enough to let me borrow his game and equipment over the weekend.  As a result, my daughter was up till midnight with me while we took our band on a world tour.  She is on lead vocals while I am shredding guitar.  After she went to bed I stayed up for another 3 hours rocking my solo tour, playing some 30+ songs.  My son then woke me up 4 hours later so he could play “Wock Band”.

On top of that, my pal Carpal Tunnel called and said he’d be over on Sunday.

Lies

Took the kids to see WALL•E this weekend and while it is a good film, though a tad too slow to keep it’s target audience fully interested, the opening short was excellent.

As is customary of every Pixar movie, they open with an animated short film. This one was called Presto. To sum up, it is about a magician who has two hats with a magical connection that allows objects to pass through one to the other. Through these hats, and with the assistance of his rabbit, he performs his magic.

If the creators of Presto ever come out and state that the game Portal was an influence, I wouldn’t be surprised. If they ever claim the opposite, much like the cake, they will be full of lies. The short plays out just like I’d envision a movie based on the Portal technology would with limitless applications of the Portal’s portalness. Because it is a short, the film’s concept never becomes tired and leaves you wishing it would keep going, much like it’s gamesake.

In other Portal related news. Someone has actually created a Portal inspired, custom voice file for specific models of Garmin GPS’s. GLaGPS

Lego my Lego Eggo

As a child, I loved me some Lego.  I played with those things all the damned time.  With a huge container full of miscellaneous parts you could build anything you wanted.  The only limit was your imagination, how many pieces you had, and if you happened to have a crowbar and blow torch to separate those flat pieces that would seem to bond on a molecular level if you ever stuck two of them together.

As time went by the Lego folks started cheating.  They started making sets with pre-fab pieces.  Entire castle walls already assembled.  All you had to do was place them in the correct location to build your castle, but make no mistake, that’s all you could do with em, because who would want to build a spaceship with stone wall looking pieces.  Now, if you wanted to build a spaceship or car or house, you had to convince your parents to buy you the sets with those pre-fab pieces.  The Lego world I had grown up with had died.  I imagine you will eventually have completely built objects that just have the Lego name and Lego bumps on them.  No assembly required.

Skip ahead a few years.  I can’t tell you why someone thought Lego + Star Wars made sense, but if I could meet George Lucas I would punch him in the face.  As it has since spawned fake-Lego Spiderman, Lego Indiana Jones, Lego Batman, and countless other Lego bastardizations.  To make it worse, these wouldn’t just be Lego toys, there would be video games.  When I was younger I would have just built Lego crap for my action figures to play in, but that required imagination and the kids of today aren’t allowed to have that anymore, the fun has to be given to them in a way that keeps them from fucking it all up.

With all that out of the way, we can come to the world of today.

I have just received the Lego Indiana Jones game in the mail.  I got the game for my kids because they have become huge Indy fans thanks to all the recent showings of the original, aka good, movies in preparation for George Lucas destroying yet another piece of my childhood.  Anyway.  The game is utter crap and reminded me exactly why I hated the Lego Star Wars demo I had tried out.  Hunting around a world for hidden pieces of Lego bits so you can build Lego junk to get your Lego incarnations of movie characters through the Lego version of the movie it’s based on.  You know how the story is going to progress because you’ve already seen the movies.  There is no dialogue, just cutesy Lego animations.  There are endless villains that attack you while you are trying to figure out the puzzles for no other reason than to annoy the piss out of you because for all the damage they are doing to your character, he will just immediate respawn right where he fell.  Oh yeah, there is no fun.

My kids, they love it.  Just like they loved Indy 4 and think Jar Jar is funny.