Archive for the ‘Gaming’ Category

The latest ads from Nintendo are a perfect example of a bad TV advertisement.
In case you haven’t seen them, they feature pop star women using Nintendo DS with assorted games (Brian Age, Nintendogs, Mario, etc). That’s fine, but the format of the ad is worse than bad… it’s alienating.

Yes, this is pretty much every second [...]

It’s been awhile since the Xbox team did something stupid. Fortunately, this week they did something stupid… with gusto!
In a nutshell, in case you haven’t heard, Microsoft has announced that they have tenative plans to stop selling certain Xbox Live Arcade games which both have low review scores, and have a low “conversion rate” (users [...]

One of the nice things about the new MacBook Pros (and technically the previous revision) is their GeForce 8600GT Go graphics.
Which, after running through Halo 3 for the n-th time, gave me an idea… MacSoft was really hyping how their version of Halo was the most refined, so why not put it to the test?
And [...]

Crazy, but it appears to be true. The Nintendo Wii version of House of The Dead 2 & 3 appears to have been ported by Sonic Team.
Where’s Sonic? Bueller? Bueller?
Anyways, the evidence that they did the port lies in all the online files residing on Sonic Team’s Japanese servers… Like, here.
After the disaserous game Sonic [...]

FYE retail stores are running a $40 rebate on Halo 3 right now. They appear to be mistakenly offering this rebate without the requirement that you buy an Xbox 360 (which appears to be where the rebate originated). However, the rebate makes no mention of the need to purchase an Xbox 360, and prints at [...]

Target appears to be clearancing Ghost Squad for $10.98. This is one of the best games from Sega’s AM2 in years… and is a military rail-based shooter straight out of the same vein as their classic Virtua Cop series (and, like Virtua Cop, is a direct-from-arcade port). In fact, many believe this is AM2’s response [...]

Seems to be a codec-filled day… First Xbox 360 adds DivX, then Adobe Flash adds H.264… now DivX has updated DivX for Windows to version 6.8. Run the Check for Updates… app in the DivX menu to grab it if you’ve already installed.

So, I updated at 2:30 AM (hey, I was up… no, I don’t stay up for Xbox Live updates). And, sure enough, my tester bones were ready to ask the question “how fast can Christopher crash the new Xbox update?”
And the answer? Well, considering there’s a blog post… it shouldn’t surprise you that it didn’t [...]

One thing that irks me, is when social networking features change privacy settings without notice. Microsoft has done some campaigns to alert users, but honestly, they should prompt post-update if they want to do these kind of things…
What are they doing? The December Xbox 360 Update, set to be released at 2 AM Pacific tomorrow, [...]

Tonight I updated my Xbox 360 with the latest backwards compatibility update. It didn’t add any games I’m still missing from my library (MGS 2: Substance, Gunvalkyrie, and DOA: XBV being the three major stragglers)… but it did update support for Breakdown, so I went ahead and updated.
However, things didn’t go smoothly. Upon finishing the [...]