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Archives for 2006

Wii’s pricetag…

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… and other things that make me happy.

I don’t post a lot of the news that other sites pick up before me (I try not to blog from work too much) but when I read the announcement of Nintendo’s pricing for the Wii, I couldn’t stop smiling. I had to post something! At less than 250 bucks, Nintendo hit one out of the park. That price is the proverbial sweet spot for gamers.

I did read a rumor earlier this week, though, that Nintendo was ready to announce a $200 price point, but after Sony announced their ridiculously overpriced PS3, Nintendo held off and went with the $250 price. That’s just a rumor, but it makes sense, from a business point of view. Fricken Sony!

The only thing I’m worried about now is if the Big N can meet the demand. They say the want to sell six million units by next March, but if they had that many ready by Christmas, they would sell every single one of them. And then half of them would be on eBay the next day. I also worry about price gougers retailers bundling the Wii with all manner of unnecessary crap. It’s already being done with the DS Lite, and I after what we witnessed with the 360, I see no reason why it won’t happen again. All of this adds up to some serious frustration, come launch-day. That bothers me, because I refuse to “pre-order” and I’d rather not wait out in the cold at 11:30 at night outside of Best Buy to get my Wii.

I just want to get my Wii on, is that so wrong?

You?!

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123814201_2470a1cf13_m.jpg (**24 Spoilers Below. But honestly, you missed the season finale? Shame on you!**)

Wow, what a finale!

“You?!” That’s the question (or was it resignation?) Preisdent Logan asked Jack as he took his helmet off and took control of the Marine 1 helicopter. It’s also the question Jack was probably asking as the final minutes of his day came to a close and Cheng Zhi came into focus. So where does this go next year? Will Jack be a double agent? Will he simply work for the Chinese government? Or will we simply follow Jack as he tries to escape? I had no idea what the direction the next “day” would take, but it’s already looking intriguing.

I thoroughly enjoyed the 24 finale. I was surprised to see that Jack shot Henderson, but let’s be honest, he had it coming. I was also surprised to see that Rooney (I don’t remember his first name, he was the guy on the submarine) didn’t bite it, considering the fate of others that have crossed Jack’s path. Good for him. I also liked the contrast of President Palmer’s body being ceremoniously loaded into Air Force One, en route to Arlington Cemetary, while President Logan was unceremoniously loaded into a limo, mostly likely on his way to jail. Palmer was a man of honor and integrity, Logan a whiny little weasel.

So yeah, no complaints here. The show ended with a cliff-hanger which means you know I’ll be tuning in next January!

Big Carnival Update

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First off, thanks to everyone that has offered to help out with the Carnival. I appreciate that. For the June Carnival, Kim Pallister will be hosting the Carnival at his blog “…on pampers, programming & pitching manure“. It’s the post-E3 Carnival, so make sure you get your submissions to the Grumpy Gamer (and creator of some great games), has offered to host the Carnival. He’ll be taking the July Carnival. Ron has been involved in some of the greatest adventure games of all-time (mmy personal favorite is Full Throttle) so I’m pretty excited about having the Carnival at his blog (which is also a great read).

Next, CheapyD, the proprietor of Cheap Ass Gamer has also offered to host a Carnival and he’ll be hosting the August Carnival. CheapyD’s site has single-handedly populated my gaming library with more games than I’ll ever have time to play and is a great resource for finding games on the cheap. While he’s not strictly a blogger, he does a regular podcast that is a good listen and his site has a wide audience of passionate gamers. Having CheapyD host the Carnival will be an opportunity for them to read your stuff. Make sure it’s good!

I received offers from both of these guys over the past month or so and I was surprised, to say the least, at the offers. What really struck me was that this really opened my eyes to who is reading the Carnival. I know that the audience of game blogs is relatively small, but maybe I’m under estimating that. It’s cool that many people are involved in one way or another and I hope it continues to grow.

We’ve also had offers from past hosts that have offered to host the Carnival, along with a couple other offers from other bloggers. That means we’re flush with hosts for the foreseeable future. Again, thanks to all that have be involved in one way or another with the Carnival. It’s looks like we’ll be going strong in our second year.

I’ll be updating the Carnival HQ page with all the new informaiton soon.

Carnival Happenings

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Things have gotten a little crazy recently with the Carnival for June. We had a host lined up, but I just realized they never followed up with me after the initial offer, so things are in limbo for the June host. I’m working on getting things straightened out, so bear with me and things will be clear as mud soon.

That being said, don’t hesitate to get your submission in for this month’s Carnival. I will forward them on the host and we shouldn’t have any delay in the Carnival. With the glut of E3 info, I’m sure there will be plenty of bloggable material.

Also, I’ve got some pretty exciting Carnival news, but I’ll hold off until things have settled down with the hosts. Besides, that’s what the news is about anyway, so it will be worth the wait.

Let me know if anyone has any questions.

How do they keep up?

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blah blah blahWhen I was into the BBS scene, I was a pretty active message board poster. My main haunt, a place called Inverted Reality, had some pretty lively discussions on a variety of topics – sports, video games, high school (I was 18 at the time), things like that. I would probably average 20+ posts a day. There were probably 50 active users, with about 10 of us being “heavy posters.” Since then, I’ve participated in various message boards and the like, but I have never returned to my prolific posting ways. I still participate in the occasionaly discussion over at Evil Avatar, but that’s about the extent of my posting nowadays.

A while back, I came across a link to the site Forum Rankings, which ranks the most active message boards across the ‘Net. I was simply amazed by the numbers some of these boards are boasting. Unbe-fricken-lievable! Gaia Online, the #1 board, has 3.8+ million members and 630+ million messages. That is insane! (Don’t even get me started on the way the message threads are laid out, what an atrocity that is.) Honestly, how do the members of these forums keep up!? If you go into the actual discussion areas, there are threads that are 25 THOUSAND posts long! I simply can not wrap my brain around those kind of numbers. The Boards at IGN (aka the Bane of Gamers everywhere) come in a distant second, with a paltry 132 million posts. Honestly, are there that many things to say about things? That’s a lot of things! With those kind of numbers, shouldn’t the internet be full by now? Holy shnikes!

Funny thing is, I wonder how many of those messages are “me too!” and “O RLY?”. Is anything really accomplished in these threads? Are people ever convinced by the other side? Or is it simply the inane cacophony of millions of disparate voices? The mind boggles at the collective hive that is the internet. I think the singularity may be farther away than some people think.

How not to break out of Prison (Spoiler Alert)

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So last night was the season finale of Prison Break. All things considered, I enjoyed it. What did you guys think? Was that how you thought things would go down? Me either.

SPOILERS BELOW, so if you haven’t seen the episode yet, don’t read any further. But you’ll have to reevaluate your TV viewing priorities. I mean, come on!

AbruzziSo first off, I wasn’t exactly happy to see the plane take off without its cargo. I know if they safely made it on that plane then the series certainly would lose excitement in season two, but I’ve long thought this series could only be good for two or three seasons, top, so I thought them getting to Mexico would have been interesting.

I will say that watching Abruzzi (or as I like to call him, Zydrunas Ilgauskas) hacking off T-Bag’s hand with an axe was one of the most gruesomely satisfying moments this season. I don’t think anyone could have watched that scene and not wince. What makes it better is that the wincing wouldn’t be for T-Bag. It was simply for the pure brutality. There is no sympathy for Theodore Bagwell. They did such a good job developing Bagwell’s character that you couldn’t help but hate him. He was such a conniving weasel! He got what he deserved. It was equally satisfying that Abruzzi did it, as Peter Stormare has been one of my favorite actors since he was Lev Andropov, Russian Cosmonaut, in Armageddon. “I’m a very important person in Russia!”ilgauskas_zydrunas060411.jpg

I was disappointed how quickly Dr. Tancredi was discarded. I honestly thought she and Scofield had a future together, helping out the orphaned children in Mexico or something, but she was definitely much more unstable than I thought. Her demise wasn’t pretty and Scofield will shed a tear when he finds out.

Overall, I enjoyed the finale and I really liked Prison Break as a whole. A good show, interesting premise, decent character development and enough action to keep everything going. I am definitely looking forward to next season!

Back from the dead

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I have returned from my long weekend of family visits and no internet. As I’m sure you’ve heard before, disconnecting for a while feels great. I didn’t completely disconnect, though. I took my Xbox to the in-laws since the brother-in-law loves NCAA Football and his wife loves Burnout 3. He also had never experienced the Halo/Halo 2 experience, so I took that along to show him there is life after football games. I also played a little Splinter Cell Chaos Theory to further my point that there are games that are fun to play that don’t involve Heisman Trophies and Maryland-I formations. He was impressed.

This gave me a chance to go back to games that I had neglected since I started my EVE binge. The long weekend (coupled with losing my partner in EVE-crime) hasn’t lessened my desire to play EVE, it will just be on the back burner for a while. I think I’ll be doing a little AFK mining while I play some of the games on “The Stack.” I think the first order of business will be finishing Splinter Cell. I forgot how enjoyable putting bad guys in the choke hold was.

On the buttonmashing.com side of things, I noticed the site was down today for most of the afternoon. I don’t know what caused the problem, but whatever it was seems to have already been straightened out, so yay for that.

E3 glut

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Things are going to be somewhat quiet around here over the next week. With the forthcoming onslaught of information and booth babes that E3 brings with it, the signal-to-noise ratio goes way down, to almost imperceptible levels, rendering any discussion moot for a while. While I eat up all the information that accompanies the cacophony, I don’t buy in to much of the hype. I’m excited to see what Nintendo has to show off (starting this morning!) and all the new games make my inner-nerd twitter in anticipation, but I’ve always got my guard up, lest I be let down yet again.

All that being said, I’m anxious to see people’s reactions to the Wii controller. I certainly hope it lives up to its hype. I also hope Nintendo has some more concrete plans about their online gaming service. I’d love to see them offer something similar to Xbox Live with Gamerscores and the Live Arcade. There are so many possibilities that they could do with their download service. And will there be Wii/DS connectivity? I wouldn’t be surprised. I also wouldn’t be surprised if their presentation starts of with, “Wii were just kidding. It’s not called the Wii. It’s still the Revolution.” And I stand by my other prediction that Zelda will be a Wii-only release. That would be fine by me.

On the gaming front, I can still be found in the EVE-Online universe, ridding the galaxy of bad guys, one pirate at a time. I’m also very excited to see that the New Super Mario Bros. game is getting rave reviews. The return to 2D is very exciting. I think this will be my next pick up. I’ll be out of town this weekend, visiting with the in-laws, so that means lots of NCAA 2006. With details leaking out about 2007, I figure it’s time I get my money’s worth out of 2006.

So I won’t be commenting too much on the E3 happenings in real-time here. I’d suggest you check out Joystiq’s E3 coverage or Evil Avatar. That’s where I’ll be.

Carnival of Gamers #14

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tilt a whirl.jpg

Welcome to the one year anniversary of the Carnival of Gamers! A little over a year ago, I tossed out the idea of holding a blog carnival for fellow gaming bloggers. The idea was well received and since then, we’ve had thirteen other carnivals. So now, here we are, one year later. Welcome to the first annivesary of the Carnival of Gamers. Step on up and wander around the Carnival of Gamers.

I wanted to do something different with this Carnival, but I just drew a blank. I initially tried to make witty comments about everyone’s submissions but realized I was out of my league. Something clever like Thomas’ old-school interface or Cosmic’s screenshot Carnival would have been nice, but I just couldn’t do it. So instead, I categorized, as best I could, the links and will present them with little commentary, letting the writers speak for themselves. Besides, they do a better job than I would. So without further ado…

Casual and Hardcore Gamers

Gianfranco Berardi at GBGames’ Blog asks if Can You Envision a Casual FPS?

Finster at Top of Cool proclaims We Still Matter. That’s “we” as in us hardcore gamers. Some people get “us”. Some obviously don’t.

Nintendo’s Wii – [You knew we couldn’t get through this carnival without at least a couple mentions of Nintendo’s newly named console! -ed]

Brinstar at the Gaming Chair would like to remind us that Wii isn’t alone in the naming weirdness.

Kehaar, projecting the Comic Store Guy, proclaims the Wii is the Worst.Product.Name.Ever. He goes on to say, “Wii will be the straw that breaks the back of the camel that has been carrying Nintendo in the horse race that is video gaming these days.” Time will tell…

Jason has thoughts on the name Wii. In particular, the marketing implications of choosing such an odd name. Is it genius on Nintendo’s part? Not likely, as he says, “it’s more like nakedly exposing how much they don’t understand the American gaming market.”

More thought on Wii from John Watzke at Pure Digital Thought, where he asks, “Do they really think that naming the console the Nintendo Wii that it will grab these new fans?”

Violence, Politics, Public Service and video games [Oh my! -ed]

Greg at Among the Dust points out “Media influences people, and it influences them strongly. This is true of all media, and it has been true for a very long time.”

Kim Pallister talks up Public Service Gaming. Public Service games? As Kim says, “A mini-meme seems to have caught regarding government funding and ‘public service games’.” Check out to see what he’s talking about.

Violence, immigration, and bad taste. Johnny Pi tackles them all in his post “Shock Value.”

Our MMO-World [Who am I kidding? It’s a WoW world and you know it. -ed]

The Curmudgeon Gamer thinks gamers can deal with gold farmers in a similar way some people have dealt with getting people to quit smoking in his post, Gold farming and the war on smoking.

Tobold at Tobold’s MMORPG Blog compares players that don’t interact with other players in WoW as the dark matter of this game.

The Prognosticator asks what makes us go Ding?

Bill Harris looks at what could be a rather startling precedent started in the virtual world of Project Entropia and being able to access in-game cash at real-world ATMs. This could be huge, both for good and for bad. As Bill says, “What matters is that the door is opened and it will never be closed again.”

Foton relates “Seven Things I Have Tried Unsuccessfully to Ban from My Guild,” where he tries, and fails, to improve his own guild experience in World of Warcraft.

Time to take some Tests (Tests? At the Carnival?)
Jeff asks Carnival readers grade a test for him. What kind of test? You’ll have to read on to see.

After you’ve graded Jeff’s test, you have to take the MMO Proficiency Test from Van Hemlock. I was stumped with question #3. “Nerf” means “b) To have one’s character victimised by God,” right? I sure hope I passed!

Everything Else
Jacob at the Gaming Chair asks Microsoft “Where is my co-op Gaming?”

In what could be a first, we have a video blog from Resident Gamer, their interview with Marc Ecko, talking about the urban gaming space. .

Corvus ruminates on the inadequacy of Evil. “Evil, I always felt, was simply inadequate for the task of giving people someone to be truly afraid of.”

Over at Tea Leaves, psu discusses the decline of a strong narrative in video games, comparing the recently released Oblivion and the venerable Planescape. Me, I simply can’t get that picture of that character from Oblivion. shudder

Josh at Cathode Tan is talking about “ESRB’s Line In The Sand.” He says, “The ESRB needs to focus on their actual job – reviewing and rating content intended for gameplay.”

That’s all, folks!

Well, this brings us to the close of the Carnival. A year older and a year wiser. It’s been a great trip and we’ll be pulling into another blog next month. The schedule over the next couple months is currently up in the air, but once I get that straightened out, the Carnival will be back before you know it!

Thanks for reading and enjoy all the great gaming bloggage this month. Read ’em all!

Carnival is just around the corner

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I probably won’t get to all the entries tonight, so the Carnival probably won’t be posted until tomorrow evening. That means I’ll accept submissions for the Carnival for the next 24 hours hour. Submit away!

(I hope to get back to a more regular posting schedule after the Carnival. I’ve got a bunch of stuff in the pipeline, I just haven’t finished anything lately.)