E3! I almost said “E3 News,” but it’s not really new, is it?

I’m going to talk about what each of the big three put out during this year’s mini-E3 and what excites me most!

Microsoft.

I really liked the way Microsoft handled their press conference. Their angle was to show everyone all of the games that will be out by the end of the year. This was them basically giving gamers a real reason to buy a 360 this holiday season by not showing what will be out next year or the year after that, everything they showed (including Xbox Live Arcade titles) will be out before this year’s end. Microsoft did a real put-up or shut up show. Some people were disappointed because there were no huge surprise announcements but I came away from the presentation hyped for a ton of games that I’ll be able to play by Christmas.

There were a few hardware announcements, including the much-awaited message kit which attaches a full QWERTY keyboard to your controller for in-game chat. This won’t be a big deal to me since most of the games I play revolve around voice communication, but anyone who’s playing Phantasy Star should be excited. They also showed new colored controllers. Again, not a very exciting announcement but they’ll be nice to have I suppose. And finally! Their show stopper as far as hardware announcements go – a new Halo 3 themed Xbox 360 console. It’s green with orange trim and has some of the Halo 3 forerunner designs on it. I personally think the thing is ugly as hell and the colors really clash but hey, Halo fans might want to pick it up.

The real highlight was the huge catalog of impressive games they showed off, including Call of Duty 4, Bioshock, Halo 3, Blacksite, Mass Effect, Grand Theft Auto IV, and Assassin’s Creed. This only puts a small dent into the list of awesome games coming down the pipe, and as I’ve said they’ll all be out before the year’s end. A lot of people are saying that this might be the greatest holiday line-up in the history of gaming, and my wallet agrees.

Sony.

Sony had the most surprise announcements of the bunch. For that reason they had a lot of the attention and therefore stole the show this year. Their major announcements included a (temporary?) price cut for the 60 gig model of the PS3 as well as Killzone 2 and Metal Gear Solid 4 previews. Killzone and MGS4 are the two games that might be able to get a lot of people to jump on board to buy a PS3 and the price cut helps consumers make that decision even more easily.

The PS3 price drop had been leaked a little while before E3 went down so I don’t know how much of a surprise it really was, but to have it confirmed by someone a little more in-the-know than Circuit City was nice. I have to admit that I’m still considering getting one, mostly because of the price cut, but the anemic library of games is still the greatest deterrent. That’s where MGS4 and Killzone 2 come in, however, and are starting to change a lot of people’s minds. Metal Gear is the type of franchise that causes people to purchase a console (if only for the one game) and Killzone 2 is beautiful. Arguably the best looking console game out there…maybe even a little better-looking than Crysis (though it pains me to admit it).

I came away from E3 with the opinion that Sony is starting to right their ship. They finally have some purchase-worthy games coming and the $100 price drop is much-needed. My only problem is that I’ve also heard that they have a new 80 gig model that they’ll release soon at the original $599 price, while at the same time getting rid of the 60 gig model. So basically it seems that the price cut may only be temporary which is pretty lame. The only alternative would be to release the 80 gig model at the price cut price ($499) which might piss a lot of people off who are running out to get the 60 gig model right now at the same price. My official verdict on Sony for the time being is to wait and see.

Nintendo.

I’m concerned that my Nintendo discussion might be sort of brief, but I’ll give it my best shot. Nintendo came out and had some new footage of some old games that we’ve known about for a while like Super Mario Galaxy and Super Smash Bros Brawl, as well as the sequel to the Metroid franchise – Metroid Prime 3: Corruption – which looked pretty cool. Their other “major” announcement put some doubt in gamers’ minds however, and was decidedly less cool.

Nintendo showed off Wii Fit, a new game from the guys that made Wii Sports. It comes with a white pad that the player uses to perform various exercises which are then tracked over time to show the user’s progress. I think this is a cool little app, but I’m not sure if gamers are going to be very thrilled about it. This seems to be another move by Nintendo to make the Wii mainstream and pull in new non-traditional gamers. That may work but it didn’t exactly leave Nintendo fans breathless. After all, it’s really just a little white thing you stand on, right?

I came away from Nintendo’s conference with a good view of some solid titles but much like Sony, from a gamer’s standpoint, I’m still not sold. I really want to buy a second console (I’m an Xbox 360 owner) but I can’t decide between the PS3 or Wii.

So that’s it. My wrap-up of E3 ‘07. I’m most excited for Call of Duty 4 out of the whole lot…I’m a huge fan of the franchise and they really seem to be knocking this one out of the park. It’s not even out yet but I’ll go out on a limb and say it’ll be the Game of the Year.

Until next time…

Currently Listening To: Juno Reactor – Mona Lisa Overdrive
Currently Playing: Resident Evil 4, Forza Motorsport 2

John McClane is the master of the universe.

This is going to be a sort of follow-up post to the one I made about Microsoft’s announcement of the extended warranty for Xbox 360s that fail with the “Red Ring of Death” error.

Let me start out by saying that shortly after this announcement, actually right after E3 finished up, Peter Moore left his position at Microsoft as Master Chief of the Xbox (see what I did there?) to go work for Electronic Art’s “EA Sports” division. At first I didn’t really think that the warranty had anything to do with Moore’s resignation (that is to say I was sure that he wasn’t forced to resign as a result of it) but now I’m starting to think a little differently. Maybe he took a little heat for the high Xbox 360 failure rate and the 1.5 billion dollars it’s going to take to fix the problem.

The biggest reason for my change in heart is the fact that, weeks before the warranty announcement and Moore resignation, Robbie Bach (President of Microsoft’s Entertainment and Devices division) sold off a fairly large amount of his Microsoft stock. It seems that these events (the warranty and Moore’s departure) may have been known to Microsoft weeks in advance. Sounds like someone might have been doing a little insider trading, eh? I’m not accusing anyone of anything and it could have been just coincidence and I’m completely wrong, but let’s just say that Bach wasn’t known to sell Microsoft stock very often. Very peculiar.

In other news, I saw Life Free or Die Hard this past week and I have to say – surprisingly enough – I really enjoyed it. I liked the other movies because they’re classic action movies and this one doesn’t disappoint (techobabble aside). I’ve come to the conclusion that John McClane is the toughest man ever conceived. All of the things you’ve heard about Chuck Norris are actually true about John McClane, and still don’t even begin to adequately describe his awesomeness.

Finally, expect an E3 sum-up post from me eventually, it really is overdue. There are a lot of other sites that you can hit to find a lot of the post-mortem about how things went but I want to talk about what I’m interested in personally.

Currently Listening To: Can-I-Bus – Poet Laureate II
Currently Playing: TQIT, Resident Evil 4, Forza Motorsport 2

That takes care of that.

Well I sent my macbook in for repair since Apple saw it fit to brick my superdrive with their firmware update, and I’m now posting this from the very same macbook that was broken just one week ago. Overall I’m extremely impressed with Apple’s handling of the issue.

I called Apple Wednesday night of last week to have my macbook fixed and I was only on hold for about 10 minutes before I spoke to a nice English bloke who helped me out quickly. I was maybe on the phone with him for 15 minutes after which he let me know that a box would be sent to my house to be shipped off for repair. He said that the repairs could take up to 10 days but generally don’t take quite that long. To say the least I was skeptical. This is Apple we’re talking about, a huge company that, despite their supposed devotion to customer service, would probably be slow to solve my problem.

The next day I received the box for my macbook, and last Friday I sent it back down via a DHL pickup. Then, just yesterday, I was surprised to see my Macbook was back already. It took a total of 6 days from the day I talked to customer service for them to return my repaired machine to me. So all in all I have to say that even though it was technically their fault the drive broke I’m satisfied with the experience. Apple really does have great customer service and I didn’t have to spend a nickel.

Yesterday I installed the 2 gigs of RAM and 160 gig hard drive. After that I re-installed OS X and everything is running great right now. I have most of my previous applications back, iTunes is rocking, and for the most part I’m good to go on the OS X side. I still have to install Windows and get it up to speed but other than that I’m just enjoying the additional speed and hard drive space. The macbook is really easy to upgrade and I had everything installed in about 5 minutes.

Currently Listening To: Brad Sucks – Making Me Nervous
Currently Playing: Resident Evil 4, TQIT, Gears

So, the Macbook upgrade.

Installing the 2 gigs of RAM was very easy, I had no problems with getting them installed and both sticks work wonderfully. Once it came time to install the HDD I ran into a small problem: I didn’t have the tiny T8 Torx screwdriver required to pull apart the HDD housing. I was able to borrow one though, and the HDD installation went fine.

Then, with the new hard drive and RAM in the machine I booted it hoping to install OS X followed by Windows. This is where things became very messed up. I noticed that when I tried to slide the OS X installation disc into the Macbook’s supderdrive it wouldn’t physically pull the disc in. I can literally shove it all the way inside but the drive won’t grab ahold of it to start reading from it.

Of course I instantly assume that I goofed something up when I was installing the RAM and hard drive, so I switch back to the old hardware and everything boots correctly but again, the superdrive won’t accept discs. After researching the problem I found out that Apple pushed out a firmware update for the superdrive (2.1) and it bricked a TON of people’s superdrives…including mine. I just never really used it so I didn’t notice the problem until now. I do remember noticing that the superdrive wasn’t making the whirring sound on startup  for the past week since the update however.

So now I’m going to have to either drive to Buffalo (which is the nearest Apple Store) or send in my Macbook to Apple for them to fix. I’ll probably send it in. It’s a good thing I still have a few months left on my warranty or I’d be completely screwed right now.

Anyways…I said I would post an update about how the upgrade went so here it is. Let’s just say it didn’t exactly go as planned.

Man, I’m a terrible writer.

I was just reading back through the post I made and I realized that I’m a pretty bad writer. I used to be proud that I could write at least decently, but when I make blog posts I tend to write everything like I would speak it.

I should probably try to break that habit.

Microsoft, the PS3, and Crysis…where could I possibly be going with this?

This is going to be a gaming geekery post extraordinaire. Let’s get started.

I have to start by both thanking and giving props to Microsoft. A day or so ago Peter Moore made a post on Xbox.com letting all of us Xbox 360 gamers know that from now on, if your 360 fails as a result of the “Red Ring of Death,” you’re covered. Microsoft will foot the bill to have the 360 replaced. Not only that, but anyone who has had to have their 360 fixed in the past because of the RROD will be reimbursed! It’s nice to see some positive news about MS. I’ve been one of the lucky people who bought a launch 360 and hasn’t had any problems with it (so far). The reason I’m thanking Microsoft is that now I know I’m covered in case something goes wrong…as long as that something is caused by the RROD.

Almost everyone I know who has a 360 has had problems with it of some sort, and a recent report said that the failure rate was something like 30% (don’t quote me there, I know that’s not exact). As a result, I was pretty much planning for having to have mine fixed eventually…it moved from a matter of “if” it happens to “when” it happens, and I toyed with the idea of putting aside some money so I’d be ready when it did. This announcement has made the urgency of creating said “Xbox 360 Repair Fund” much less imposing. Thank you Microsoft for having the guts to admit you screwed up and to do something about it.

So…I recently read that this year at mini-E3 we might be hearing about a $100 price drop for the PS3. That would drop the price for the 60 gig standard model from $599 to $499. Not bad…it actually made me consider getting one. I’ve been in the hunt for a Wii but I have to be honest, my interest has waned as of late. Nintendo is the Apple of gaming consoles, I know that if I finally found one and dropped the $250 to pick it up I’d see an announcement the next week about a new black or silver Wii for $200. So basically I said forget it, the Wii still doesn’t have a whole lot of games out there made specifically for the remote/nunchuck combo and by the time they’ve built up that library the thing will probably cost $150 so maybe I’ll pick it up then. For now I’m going to think long and hard about the PS3…having a BluRay player would be nice! Though the Matrix trilogy was only re-re-released in HD-DVD as far as I know.

Crysis. What can I say about Crysis that hasn’t already been said? It’s probably my most anticipated game right now…even ahead of your Half-Life: Episode 2’s and Halo 3’s. The only problem is that my current gaming rig would wither up and cry in the fetal position if I even inserted a Crysis DVD-ROM…this game takes a beast of a machine to run. With that in mind I think I’m going to upgrade my gaming rig. I’ve been spec’ing it out and I think for another $300 I could have a machine that would destroy any games I’m playing now as well as run Crysis quite handily. The only components I’d really need to upgrade would be my processor (and therefore, my motherboard) and my graphics card. Here are a few links to what I’m thinking about using right now: Asus mobo, AMD X2 4400+, and last but not least the GeForce 8600GT.

Crysis requires a dual core CPU to run even with its minimum requirements if I remember correctly, and I’m still running on a single core so it really is time to upgrade either way. The mobo is just to house the CPU really, my current mobo is fine…but the GeForce 8600GT is a big leap up from my 6800XT (mine was an XFX, the link points to a Biostar). Hopefully by the time Crysis drops (September, as of now) the hardware will have dropped in price or maybe better hardware will have dropped into the price range of what I’m looking at now. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see.

That’s pretty much it, a long rambling post of what’s happening in gaming right now for me. Just one quick note before I end this puppy, I ordered a couple upgrades for my Macbook earlier this week and they should be here sometime this weekend…if so I’ll throw up another post about how the upgrade goes. From what I’ve read it’s supposed to be pretty easy.

Until next time…

Currently Listening To: Porcupine Tree – Fear of a Blank Planet
Currently Playing: GRAW2, Gears of War, Battlefield 2142, Titan Quest: Immortal Throne