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I’m not a huge fan of FPS on consoles mainly because controllers don’t quite lend themselves to the precision that a mouse does. Maybe it’s just me. At any rate, I caved and bought the Valve Orange Box (VOB) for the PC. One thing that helped to entice me is that Valve actually did something magnanimous. I already owned Half Life 2 and Episode 1, both of which which come with the VOB package. Originally that meant wasted money but this time around they’re letting me gift those two games to someone. That’s right, I can give them to anyone. So I got 3 games I wanted and two I can give away for a total of $50. Not bad. So how do the games stack up? Read the rest of this entry »

In 1993 Wizards of the Coast shared with the world a little game called Magic: The Gathering, giving geeks around the world yet another hobby to obsess over. Since then everyone seems to have tried their hand at latching onto that popularity, and now we have collectable card games based on anything from Bratz to World of Warcraft and even Penny Arcade. If you can think of a topic, they’ve probably made a CCG for it.

WotC’s latest development is Eye of Judgment, a CCG that uses Sony’s PlayStation Eye technology to display the monster or spell depicted on the cards as you play them.

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So, Galyn regaled you with stories of “too many games, not enough time” recently. But he barely scratched the surface. I’m currently working on Ratchet & Clank Future, an amazing game, in-between sessions of Eye of Judgment and Tony Hawk’s Proving Grounds. I’m not a HUGE Tony Hawk fan, but I enjoy picking one up every 2-3 years or so, and this one has been a lot of fun so far. I have Folklore and Zack & Wiki waiting patiently for me on the shelf. And that’s not to mention some other “older” games in my backlog. I picked up a Wii around the time Metroid came out, and with it I got Zelda, Super Paper Mario and Resident Evil 4 - all of which have sat untouched.

Today I placed an order for Guitar Hero 3 (which is completely free, so no guilt there really). Later this month I’m getting Mass Effect (also free…), Uncharted and Mario Galaxy. Oh, and a little something called “Rock Band”. Unless you live under a rock, you’ve heard of it - it’s the $170 evolution of Guitar Hero - where you can not only play lead & bass guitar, but can also play the drums and sing. Of course, you can’t do all of that at once - which basically makes it the ultimate party game. Recently, at Galyn’s b-day party, we broke out Karaoke Revolution and Guitar Hero. Problem was, the Karaoke people weren’t so keen on playing Guitar Hero, and vice-versa. This way, everyone will be involed at once, in a face-melting rock explosion. Party at *my* house.

I’m trying to ignore Assassin’s Creed next month, mainly because I don’t think I can add more hours to the day. If I’m successful, then the only other game for me this year will be Orange Box in December - and I think Galyn will kill me if I don’t pick this one up.

Of course, then there’s the movie backlog I’ve built up thanks to recent blu-ray sales. And yet, I’m looking forward to picking up Ratatoille next week, and the Harry Potter collection in Dec. (all on blu-ray). Once you go blu, you never go back. I have a problem picking up movies on dvd now. TV sets I don’t mind so much, but I just can’t bring myself to buy movies on dvd. When Paramount went hd-dvd only, they may have thought they were forcing people like me to jump into the hd-dvd format. What actually occured, in my case at least, is that I passed over movies such as Transformers completely when I would have picked them up day one had they been released on the format I’m supporting. I have no desire to split my movie collection between 2 competing hd formats, and since all indications show blu-ray movie sales far out pacing hd-dvd (and this can be seen by most stores having much larger blu-ray sections than hd-dvd) then that’s what I’m sticking with.

Ah well - I think we have similar conversations to this every year. The spring will come, the release lists will dry up, and all of these things will be watched/played then. And we’ll do this again next year. Ah, consumerism!

I’ve been watching the console wars with some interest. This go around has vastly more drama than previous ones and I’ve struggled to put it into words why. I got to thinking about it and realized that we may be watching the beginning of a paradigm shift in how game companies approach hardware, features, and extras.

Console subsidization has almost been a given since the 90’s. As initial hardware releases became more expensive, game companies cut back on amenities. No more pack-in games. Only one controller. It even got so bad, for a while there it looked like Nintendo was going to release the N64 without any video cables (their premise was that most N64 users would own an SNES, which used the same cable). Conventional wisdom holds that if you eat some loss on the console, you can make it up when royalties from the games come in. But the current generation is challenging that in some very interesting ways.

Let’s look at the three approaches to the current console costs and extras.

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Life as a gamer can get pretty overwhelming. Lately it seems as if there’s been a glut of games to play. And while this is not exactly a bad thing, it makes it hard to keep up, or even finish a game. Especially for me, as I tend to have the attention span of a gnat.

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