Mashing buttons since 1984
To start thinking about the next edition of the Carnival of Gamers. The May Carnival is heading over to Conservathink, a conservative (if you didn’t get that from the name) blog run by Damian.
Get your submissions ready, because the Carnival is turning 3!
I don’t comment on Uwe Bolle movies here because a) they universally suck and b) I don’t hate myself enough to watch any of them. Unfortunately, his movie In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale (based on the overrated PC game Dungeon Siege) stars man crush #1, Jason Statham, which all but obligates me to suffer through the movie.
I have been avoiding any news or previews of the movie because I already know what I’m in for. It’s going to HORRIBLE. The movie looks like it will have a lot of star power (seriously!) so it going to crash and burn but good.
Anyway, if you hate yourself as much as I do, you can watch the trailer for the movie here. It takes a few minutes to download, but trust me, it’s not worth it. (via Dethroner)
I’ve been in a bit of a gaming lull the past few weeks. I haven’t been completely out of gaming, but for the better part of the past two weeks, there has been very little buttonmashing going on. I don’t know if it’s apathy, lack of anything compelling to play, or what, but I just haven’t been playing much.
I got over my initial fear of firing up my 360 last week and everything seems to be copacetic with my system — my downloaded games and content was all there and everything went off without a hitch. It felt good firing up the white and green machine and loading up Crackdown from some mindless jaunts through town. I even downloaded a new arcade game (Dig Dug) to play around with. The kids have asked for “the Pinata” game a couple of times, but they get bored with that after a half an hour or so. The kids love naming the pinatas, and my daughter loves outfitting the pinatas with accessories, but even that gets old after a while. The 360 has returned to service, new and improved.
And yet, that has only been a few hours of gameplay. I watched most of Dawn of the Dead the other night, so I feel like playing Dead Rising again, but that’s about the extent of my gaming ambitions on the console front. I still log in to EQ2 a couple times a week, but it’s been a little tough to get my rag-tag group together. Hopefully we’ll have some time this weekend to get some questing in.
I’m also considering picking up the new Halo 2 maps, as one of them is a remake of my favorite Halo 1 map, Hang ’em High (also the best map name, ever). I’m pretty rusty with Halo 2, though, so I’d just embarass myself. Not that it would be any different from when I was playing Halo 2 nightly, but now I have an excuse.
What have you been playing? Anything new or exciting that I probably missed?
This video, Haloid is making the rounds, but as both a big Halo fan and a HUGE Metroid fan, I’d have to turn in my fanboy card if I didn’t link it as well.
It’s extremely well made, excellently choreographed and has a lot of charm. While I don’t care for the ending, this video is a must watch.
I usually don’t post videos here, but this was too funny not to post. Sorry about the auto-start, I can’t seem to turn it off. The language gets borderline NSFW-ish. Just turn it down. Don’t want to get anyone in trouble!
(I took the embedded video out because I got tired of it constantly reloading and auto-playing. Go watch it if you haven’t seen it yet. It’s still hilarious.)
I love Will Ferrell
I am in no way minimizing the horrible shooting that occurred this morning on the Virginia Tech campus. It’s an awful mess and I feel terrible for those that were involved.
I’m just wondering how long until it’s blamed on video games. I haven’t read many news stories recently — maybe it already has.
Update: Just as Josh pointed out in the comments, Kotaku mentions that Jack Thompson was on Fox News spewing his tripe all over the place.
Here is a link to a video of his appearance on Fox News: Jack Thompson on the VT shootings. (I couldn’t make it past the first minute)
More: Rush Limbaugh, the voice of reason.
It’s no secret that I have loved Bloglines for a long time. I’ve been a vocal supporter of the service they provide and have convinced more than a few people of the virtues of not only a feed reader, but an excellent feed reader like Bloglines.
Recently, I’ve been having issues with Bloglines. Feeds that are frequently updated were showing up with no updates, the number of updates of other feeds weren’t consitent with the site, things like that. So I decided to give Google’s feed reader, “Google Reader” a try. Now I’m torn. The more I use Google Reader, the more enamored I become with it. It may just be the effect of being “the new shiny thing,” but I’m really liking it. Both sites basically do the same thing (and do it well), but for some reason, Google’s offering seems better to me. It seems a little more streamlined, less cluttered and it has a better way to save interesting posts. Not sure which one I’ll stick with, but for now, I’m really enjoying Google’s toy.
There’s no point to this post, as I know plenty of you guys are already using Google Reader to follow Buttonmashing, but I just wanted to let everyone know I have a new love. Bloglines will always have a place in my RSS-reading heart, but Google Reader is moving in on its turf.
The 23rd edition of the Carnival of Gamers is now up at #23 April 5th, 2007: Gaming Nexus.
Make sure you check it out!
I wanted to post this Monday after the season finale of Prison Break, but the Ohio State/Florida game was on (and didn’t end well) so I never got around to commenting on the last episode of my (currently) favorite show. (Spoiler Warning)
So for my fellow Prison Break fans, what did you think? The finale certainly left quite a few storylines wide open. What happened to Kellerman? Was he gunned down in the back of the police van, or were his escorts? Is Sucre going to buy the farm on a Panamanian street corner? And what’s the deal with the crazy old man and Sona? Is there something more to Michael than meets the eye? My theory? He’s some kind of super-soldier genetically enhanced by the government, and the whole frame-job of his brother was to get his training kick started. Far fetched? Of course. But things certainly got wierd in this last episode.
And who else will be in Sona with Scofield? It’s obvious that Mahone is in there. Bellick, too, right? I’m assuming Bagwell will find his way in there somehow, and will hopefully meet an ignominious end. I think his time has finally come.
So it looks like we’ll be breaking out of prison again in the fall. I can’t wait!
So my 360 arrived back from the repair shop last week. And I still haven’t powered it up. I’m nervous. A little while ago, after posting my 360 woes, I got a note from buttonmashing.com reader Cyriel. In part, his email reads:
I also had my 360 die on me a couple of weeks ago, got it back 2 days ago.. not bad.. only 7 days. I went to play my arcade games. They worked fine….when I was online… if I logged off Live they all turned to trial versions. My wife has a gamertag that she bought stuff with as well and she doesn’t seem to have access to any of her games on or offline. She doesn’t have access to any of the games I bought at all either.
I called Microsoft and was on the phone with them for 2 hours making 2 new silver accounts to which they will supposedly deposit some microsoft points to purchase my games back for this xbox… my wife had to do the same. BUT they are not going to add ALL the points electronically, only some, for the rest they will call me with a 25 character code that I need to enter in as if I am redeeming a points card…..what????!!
I don’t have a ton of purchased content on my system, but I’m still worried something is going to go awry and I’ll be stuck with less of a machine than what I sent in. What a pain.
I know some of you readers have sent in your Boxes to have them repaired. Any similar horror stories? Or was it just plug and play? (Yeah, right. Like anything Microsoft has done was ever plug-and-play. Zing!)