Flying off my Handle :
Xbox 360 & Windows Live and the loss of identity
Or, How fraudulent and useless is my marketing information?
Ask yourself - what is your online identity worth to you?
OK, so this post probably only represents a thin sliver of the world’s population of gamers (unless you live, say, in one country and elect to move to another).
Here’s the catch – your Xbox 360 or Windows Live profile cannot move with you. (more…)
Flapping around in Iowa at the moment – don’t ask me why. Have tried to plot out a few malls, get my bearings on tech availability, and tried (unsuccessfully at first) to find a Wii – see what all the fuss is about. There is a pronounced Wii shortage nationwide at the moment, and periodic shipments trickle into the Midwest only to be snapped up by hordes of juniors who have cajoled and entreated their elders out into the desolate cold wastes to ambush the store staff at various outlets.
Missed the delivery at Target and Walmart by scant minutes – this, on my second day of hunting for one of Nintendo’s new systems. End up at Best Buy, and miss the tickets they were handing out by an hour. My brain is beginning to hurt – started to ask around inside the store – see where the stock was – what exactly was the deal with the tickets?
Just a quick aside : Sony’s supremely powerful next-gen system is crippled by relatively simple tasks like background downloading and simple multitasking. Presumably (one would think) this will be addressed in a future OS update. For the moment however, downloading teaser content for a Sony PS3 system through the provided service (anywhere from a 250-900MB footprint) locks up your Playstation for the duration. Depending on your link this could be hours of non-fun. Not even a mini-game. No DVD. Where is all that processor power going?
Hmmm…
OK, I spent the last day before Christmas cruising my little slice of America for a Wii or PS3 – I didn’t care, I just wanted that tingly next-gen feeling for this holiday season. That caveman compulsion to put something tasty on the table – even if technically I didn’t have to kill it or dig it out of the ground, I still wanted to… hunt it.
Last year was the 360– even though I was in China the strange biting need grabbed me, but this year I wanted The Next Big Thing. Knowing as I did that both the Wii and PS3 were both sold out everywhere bar Ebay and specialist sites (http://www.ps3finder.com/), I was pretty much resigned to buying an Xbox 360 with a HD kit, so I could buy into that whole DVD hi-res vibe and really push that new screen to the limit – see what all the kids are talking about.
Jabbering through strip malls – Best Buys, EBs, KMarts, Targets - negotiating back alleyways where a bunch of crumpled fifties palmed to a disgruntled Circuit City worker will get you the latest black market digital ice – all to no avail. Things were starting to look grim. (more…)
The stark simplicity and darkly menacing architecture that is standard in almost every FPS actually seems to have a real-life counterpart in this fantastic Soviet submarine facility. It looks like it might even pre-date DOOM (which, in other news is getting nicely recursive as well as morbidly self-referential). Which is nice, because the genre can use a few new ideas.