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.

As it was announced previously, Sony’s music library is coming to Amazon MP3 soon. How soon? I would guess in the next week or less. Why so soon? See Exhibit A. Yep, that’s a Foo Fighters album that’s loaded into Amazon MP3 without any pricing or buying button on there yet. So, what seems to be happening is that Amazon is loading up all their database and then when it’s all loaded, it will all go live to buy at the same time. In the meantime all you and I can do is wait patiently and buy some Led Zepplin or Pink Floyd.

For those of you who have been following the 700mhz spectrum auction, you know that if the C block doesn’t meet the $4.6 billion reserve price, then it will not remain open and a new auction will begin. Luckily, the bidding has gone extremely well and it’s up to about $4.3 billion right now. The next round just started and will be done in 45 minutes…

The minimum bid for the next round is $4.86 billion, so as long as someone bids for it, it will be forced to have open access. That’s a big win for everyone. Here’s to hoping that Google or someone else makes the bid to get the C block. That has the potential to really open up the mobile industry and there is a lot of room for innovation in that space. Perhaps the Google/Apple relationship will finally bear fruit. Open iPhone + Open Google Network could be amazing.

UPDATE: In round 14, there were no new bids for the C block and the minimum bid has dropped to $4.79 billion for round 15. Also, the grand total for the 700mhz spectrum auction is over $10 billion now.

So, it was only a matter of time for the DBZ franchise to make its way to the next gen systems and I for one am super stoked about this. Granted, DBZ is a franchise that’s been fairly mediocre as a fighting game franchise overall, it was fun to play for a while on the PS2. Not incredible, but solid. Here’s to hoping Atari doesn’t screw this up.

[tags]Xbox 360, Playstation 3, Dragon Ball Z[/tags]

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: Read the rest of this entry »

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.