Guild Wars was one of those on again, off again guilty pleasures for me. It’s a very very solid game that can be a lot of fun, but it’s also easy to forget about. World of Warcraft clearly has the heart of most MMO players and I’ve spent a fair share of time in that game as well. However, I could never quite shake the feeling that WoW was more of a job and less of a game. I can’t quite explain, but rarely did I feel like I was “playing” WoW and more often I was “grinding” WoW for lewt or what have you. Now, a lot of that has to do with my play style, but who cares it gets old after a while. I’m not terribly social. Guild Wars seems to fit the more Diablo 2 style that is more my personality. It’s free to keep playing. It’s fun. It’s more of a pick up and put down kind of game which I love.

Anyhow, there’s a great preview of that game available on Massively.com.

Guess what, the new iPhone is only $199! Awesome, cool, rah rah rah! Wait, hold on a tic… The 3g service is $30 a month instead of $20? So, by cutting price by $200, they actually jacked the total price up by $240. Greeeaaaat. Well played Apple. Well played At&T. Let’s not even mention that 3g isn’t available in most areas that aren’t major metropolitan areas. Oh well. At least it’s still a relatively cheap way to get into an iPhone. Relatively. Still, if you want to save money, buy an iPod touch and duct tape a RAZR to it. It’s a win win win that way.

So, I’m maybe like 5 months late to the party, but Portal is seriously amazing. It’s probably the best game to come out in 2007, and that was a crazy year for gaming. Mario Galaxy, Mass Effect, Halo 3, Portal, Peggle, um…. oh yeah Bioshock too! What a crazy year. I’m not caught up yet. maybe by summer I’ll be caught up, but not yet. Sad really. Anyhow, while you can still get it on steam, you really need to buy the Orange Box. It’s worth the $50 and then some. Portal + Peggle + TF2, c’mon. You can’t beat that. Oh yeah, there’s some Half Life 2 goodness in there if you haven’t played that yet. Now, if only I could construct a real portal gun.

So, finishing Halo 3 this weekend made me think about how similar the Halo and Starcraft universes are. Coincidentally, I’m also going back and playing through the Starcraft campagain this month and it’s downright uncanny how close the two universes are. Here’s a bunch of similarities: (more…)

If you followed E3 last week, then you probably heard about the PS3 price cut that actually was more of a way for Sony to clear out stock of the 60gb model. Sony PR people and Sony execs seemed to go back and forth over whether or not the 60gb model was being discontinued. For such a big announcement to lead to such confusion in Sony’s message to the public is bizarre at the very least.

That led me to thinking about what Sony was trying to accomplish by calling a system update(and a pretty good one at that) a price cut. When Sony CEO Kaz Harai is seen on video talking about how Sony has a single SKU strategy in the US, it doesn’t make sense that other Sony employees would lead us to believe that Sony was going back to a dual SKU strategy. Or does it?

Here is what I think Sony was trying to accomplish with all the spin around the price cut. Marketing/PR wanted to make this sound like Sony was cutting price on the 60gb PS3. Then, with the obvious sales increase that seemed to cause it would look like the PS3 was in demand. By creating that perception knowing that the 60gb model is selling well, when they are no longer on shelves, Sony could come out and act like the PS3 is selling out everywhere, just like the Wii. The illusion of scarcity would drive more people to go ahead and impluse buy the $600 version, for fear that it might sell out too.

Ironically, the only time I can even remember the PS3 being sold out is the first week maybe. After that, they’ve been in ample supply. Yesterday I was at Best Buy and there was a giant pile of maybe 50+ PS3’s at $500 and it didn’t look like anyone was interested, so it’s not very likely that at $500 the PS3 will fly off shelves either.

All of this just goes to show that Sony is looking very desperate to find any angle they can to sell the PS3. Sure, they’ve priced themselves right out of the market, but that’s not going to stop Sony from doing whatever it takes. Even if they have to lie, cheat, or channel stuff to find success. Hey, it almost worked with the fake PSP blog they launched last year too.

Just so everybody knows, we’re working on a site redesign and a couple cool game related projects right now, so posting might slow down a bit. No worries though, if you just hold tight we’ll be rolling better than ever in a week or so. That’s all for now. If you are bored head over to Arcade Next’s free arcade.

I’m sure by now many many of the original Xbox 360 owners have experienced the dreaded “ring of death”. When the ring of light turns red, that means terrible things for your Xbox 360. In the case of my Xbox this week, it means that I’ll probably have to replace it or try and have Microsoft fix it. Too bad it’s just out of warranty. Go figure. From what I’ve heard Microsoft isn’t exactly doing this for free anymore. Some well known bloggers are battling with Microsoft pretty hard over this. Me personally, I still have to call them about that. It sucks to have such a great system go down for the count. I hadn’t even finished Crackdown yet. Sad. Let’s just hope that Microsoft is cool and will fix it for free or at least for less than $100.

As a rabid gamer and sometimes game blogger, there are many many games that I don’t get to sit down and really play for long periods of time. In my game collection there are probably 20+ excellent games that I haven’t sat down and finished. Warcraft 3 is one of those games. It came out a very long time ago and I really enjoyed playing it, but the problem was that I spent too much time on multi-player and I never got around to finish the single player campagain. Since quitting World of Warcraft a few months back, I’ve had a real need to go back and finish Warcraft 3 and now I’m finally doing that. I’m over halfway through and it’s fantastic. Sometime I’ll have to pick up the expansion and run through that too. What a great game though.

I really wanted Superman Returns to be an awesome game. I really did. Playing as Superman could be loads of fun. Sadly, that is not the case for this game. Instead, this game just isn’t that much fun. It took the GTA approach to open ended gameplay, but it doesn’t have the strong story elements that made GTA interesting. Also, the fight system is somehow both boring and isn’t much fun to control at the same time. All and all it’s a painfully mediocre experience that looks great, but it’s not much fun. The curse of crappy Superman games continues.

I have had my xbox 360 for the better part of a week now. I finally today got a chance to sit down and spend some well deserved time with it. The shocker in my pile of games is certainly Viva Pinata. It start out slightly childish, but as it gets going you start having to manage your time, animals, garden, make them mate, build houses, etc, etc, etc… I mean the list just goes on and it gets slightly complicated. It is not action packed, nor does it have any gimmick to it, it is just flat out fun. Sound is great, graphics are great, gameplay is simple yet addictive.

I suggest it if anyone out there likes the off beat games, this is certainly off beat by the way, anyway I give it 9.5/10! I know it is quite high but the surprise factor really bumped up the score.