Month: April 2007

An end to a personal gaming era…

D'Arque Bishop

I’ve come to a decision. It’s one I’ve not made entirely lightly, but it’s made all the same.

Up until now, all of the PCs I’ve built for myself have been gaming-quality PCs. They typically last about three years or so, and when I upgrade it tends to be a large upgrade consisting of CPU, memory, motherboard, hard disk, and video card. That kind of upgrade isn’t really cheap. However, more and more, I’ve been finding myself playing my Xbox 360 far more than I have my PC. Gaming on my PC is becoming much less of a priority, to the point where I think the next machine I buy will probably be a Mac Mini or something similar, and the two 320 GB hard drives I have in my main PC now will just be put in enclosures and used as external USB 2.0 drives.

As for why I’m migrating to the Xbox 360… well, the fact that it has more games I want to play like Mortal Kombat: Armageddon and Gears of War is certainly a factor. There are a couple of other factors as well. For one thing, unless I want to run long cables, the 360 has a better display/sound setup. My PC has a 19″ LCD monitor and a four speaker/one subwoofer system. The 360 is in my entertainment center, and as such is hooked up to my 27″ LCD HDTV and my Dolby Digital 5.1 home theater receiver. Also, the 360 itself cost far less than a gaming-quality PC, and has a longer shelf-life, so to speak. Finally… with the 360, I don’t have to futz with installing into Windows and dealing with system requirements and the like.

So, what games am I looking forward to for the 360? Well, the three that come to mind right now are Command & Conquer 3, Unreal Tournament 3, and John Woo’s Stranglehold. I’ll probably pick up a few games on Xbox Live Arcade when the time comes. For now, though, I’m going to stick with the games I’ve got, especially with online Gears of War. I’m having fun, and that’s really all that matters. :-)

Another three-day weekend gone by…

D'Arque Bishop2 Comments

Bleh. It’s nearing the end of Sunday, and I could do with some more time off. Right now I’m just sitting at my desk, with my TV set to CourtTV, and kind of watching Cops out of the corner of my eye. Ah, well…

I finally got around to buying a 12 month subscription to Xbox Live Gold on Friday, while out getting lunch. Of course, I ended up getting the value pack that came with a headset, 200 Microsoft points, and a free Xbox Live Arcade game. (For $10 more than just the subscription, it was a decent deal.) I was hoping that the free game could be one of my choice. It turned out it was a specific game: Bankshot Billiards 2. I’m not complaining, mind you; I don’t mind having a free billiards game. I must say, though, that I don’t do much better in the video game version of billiards than I do in real life. :-) Ah, well… it’s still a fun little game.

However, more to the point, I played Gears of War with friends online. I had fun Friday night. Saturday night was… not so fun. I was finding that I could never get opponents down with the machine gun before they knocked me down with the shotgun. However, I just could not get the shotgun to work. No matter what I did, I could never get any damage in, and I’d end up getting killed in response. By the end of the night I was so frustrated I felt like throwing my controller across the room. I ended up leaving the game and shutting off the console, extremely frustrated. I don’t mind losing. What makes it not fun is when it becomes purely obvious that I’m not doing any good and that I’m apparently nothing more than cannon fodder. *sigh* My teammates (BloodySinner and Murdoink) weren’t happy that I left, but what’s the point in playing when it’s not fun anymore?

At least today was a bit better. I got a little Easter bag with Cadbury Crunchies and Dove chocolates. :-) We ended up having lasagna for Easter dinner, which ended up being VERY good. As for the rest of the day, I’ve spent it napping and talking to Misty. I MIGHT play some Gears of War or Mortal Kombat: Armageddon a bit later, but I haven’t quite decided yet. Of course, talking to Misty is a given as well, though she’s going to be watching The Tudors. Ah, well.

As for the rest of this week, I don’t have any real plans. I’ll have work to do, of course, but overall I don’t know what the main tasks for this week will be. Ah, well… I’ll find out soon enough. For now, though, I’m just going to sit back and watch some more TV.

Sony posts a half-billion 3Q loss…

D'Arque Bishop

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/gaming/2007-04-04-psp-price_N.htm

The cuts come two months after Sony’s gaming unit posted a third-quarter operating loss of $443 million, largely due to hefty costs for the launch of its PlayStation 3 video game console.

Although Sony promised business at the gaming unit would improve by the latter half of the fiscal year, the company said declining sales during the October-December period of Sony’s predecessor console, PlayStation 2, as well as the handheld PlayStation Portable and PSP game software, hurt quarterly profits at the gaming unit.

The word “ouch” comes to mind. The sad thing is, very few of my friends are really going for the Playstation 3; most are waiting for the Nintendo Wii and/or are getting the Xbox 360. Even those friends who have a PS3 like ShingoEX are reporting not-so-good bits of information, like how it took him FIVE HOURS to download a 650 MB demo from Sony. The more I see from Sony these days, the better I feel about having gone with the Xbox 360 when I did… heh.

Cellular phone weirdness…

D'Arque Bishop2 Comments

All right, I had a rather… spooky bit of weirdness with my cell phone late yesterday afternoon.

As I was driving to meet Louie for drinks last night, my cell phone rang. I answered it via my Bluetooth earpiece (as the phone itself was folded closed and in my shirt pocket), and I heard a male automated voice say, “Connecting.” Then I heard the phone ring twice, and the automated attendant at my office answered. I raised an eyebrow, and hung up, thinking that someone must have messed up trying to transfer a call to me.

A few minutes later, my phone rang again. I didn’t recognize the number, but I answered it. I heard the phone ring twice, and then someone said, “Thank you for calling the Cheesecake Factory of Houston. How may I help you?” Shocked, I mumbled something about maybe having a wrong number and hung up. A few minutes later it happened AGAIN while I was on the phone with the network admin at work about it; this time it also had the voice saying, “Connecting.”

I ended up calling Cingular, but they were about as baffled as I was. Fortunately it didn’t happen again.

What caused this to go from just weird to goddamned weird was what happened later in the night. After returning home, I was doing a brief check of mail and chat before going to bed. I looked in #mortalkombat, and a regular with the nick GuiltyByDesign was telling everyone that the same thing that had happened to me earlier in the day had happened to her as well. As for what could have been in common between us… beats me. She’s in South Dakota and I’m in Houston, and she uses Verizon while I use Cingular.

I need to take a look around on the net later to see if anyone else has had that issue. Still, it’s damned odd, and I wish I knew what the hell happened. I don’t need this kind of spookiness in my life… heh.

Meh… April Fools’ Day.

D'Arque Bishop1 Comment

It’s April Fools’ Day. Bah.

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t mind it per se. I even manage to get a couple of good minor jokes off on people every so often. It’s just that some of the sites I go to like Slashdot and FARK just completely overboard on it and make it much more annoying than funny. One or two joke stories is fine. Overdoing it just drives me away for the duration of the day. At least Slashdot is less annoying than last year; the whole “OMG PONIES!!!” thing got very old on the very first viewing.

So, you might be wondering what the April Fools’ joke for MK Online is. There isn’t one, so stop looking. We didn’t remember that April Fools’ was today until late last night, and by then it was far too late. In retrospect, we probably should have forced everyone onto a Mokap theme and left it like that for the day. Ah, well… I did put a minor joke on the site’s IRC channel, though:

[11:58] *** Topic for #mortalkombat: The #MortalKombat Online IRC Network! – Congratulations to our newest ops: outworld222 and Coltess! – IGN Previews MK: Armageddon For Wii! – http://www.mortalkombatonline.com/

(No, there is no way in hell I would ever put outworld222 or Coltess on ops. Heh.)

Anyway, I’m just going to finish up this cup of coffee and wander off elsewhere to see what I can do about lunch… and hopefully I can avoid April Fools’ annoyances the rest of the day.