Gutsy.

I’ve been using Gutsy Gibbon a bit, the newest release of Ubuntu, and I have to say it’s pretty good.  There are a lot of new features some of which are pretty cool and others of which I can’t get to work.  Let’s start with the good things.  First off there’s a new Deskbar app that lets you quickly perform common actions that you use.  For example, say you find yourself constantly launching Firefox to check Gmail.  You can set up a Deskbar action that lets you quickly do this without having to individually launch Firefox and then type in the address.  It can also be used as a desktop search, allowing you to find files on your machine.  If you’ve ever used Quicksilver for OS X then you’ll be pretty comfortable with Deskbar.

There’s also a nice fast-user switching option which lets you get into a different account without having to shut down individual user sessions.  This has been in Windows for a while, starting with XP I think, so I’m glad they finally got that in there.  I’m the only one who uses the machine that I have Ubuntu installed on however, so that isn’t a big deal for me.  Out of all of these new things (I’m sure I’m leaving out a bunch, I haven’t had a whole lot of time with Gutsy yet) the one I was most excited for was the default integration of Compiz.  If you don’t know what Compiz is or what it does, it basically adds a bunch of visual effects to your desktop.  Think Vista Aero Glass only cooler.  This is the one area where Gutsy seems to really have stepped it up – with display improvement and tweaks like the graphical configuration tool – but unfortunately I can’t use any of it.  That is to say I can’t use Compiz.

I run Ubuntu under VM on my macbook and it has never liked Compiz.  Before Gutsy you could install it separately but I could never get it to work right.  Now, with Gutsy, it still doesn’t work.  I’m kind of bummed about it (if anyone has a solution please post a comment),  but I have seen it in action and it’s pretty slick even if it’s a bit buggy.  I’ve been trying to use Ubuntu more and more lately, especially because I need it in a couple of my classes, so apps like these that are somewhat exclusive to Ubuntu really catch my eye.   If only all of my games were supported natively and it ran Visual Studio I might be able to make the complete switch!  I don’t know if that will ever happen though, I sort of like being comfortable with as many platforms as possible.

Currently Listening To: Christy Moore & Shane MacGowan – Spancil Hill
Currently Playing: Project Gotham Racing 4, Orange Box

Webcomics.

  I’ve been meaning to do a post about webcomics and the particular ones I read regularly, and since I can’t think of anything else to write about right now I suppose this is a good time.  My taste has become varied since I first started reading a long time ago – but still if anyone reads this who is already familiar with webcomics you’ll probably find no surprises here.  I first got into webcomics through Penny-Arcade.  Penny-Arcade is a webcomic that revolves around gaming news, which doesn’t sound particularly fantastic but they were the first to do it right and be successful.  There have been a lot of imitators since they rose to the top but no one has been able to duplicate what Gabe and Tycho do.  The nice thing about Penny-Arcade is there are actually two creators – one excels at art and the other excels at writing.  When you mix those together you get some content that really has value to it.  I’ve grown to love Penny-Arcade so much over the past few years that I now look forward to Tycho’s usually lengthy and wordy blog posts just as much as the comic itself.  I say "blog post" because that’s the only term I can think of to describe it, but what he writes is really much more than that.  Perhaps it could be considered an essay.  Tycho’s a true wordsmith and he’s able to craft awesome posts which are related to the comic’s subject.  This adds a whole second dimension to Penny-Arcade which is why they’re still my favorite.  You can look forward to new strips every Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Penny-Arcade became a sort of gateway drug to a couple other comics – PvP and Control-Alt-Delete.  I don’t really read Control-Alt-Delete much anymore, but PvP is a worthy bookmark.  Although it started out as a gaming comic too it has since evolved in a sort of sitcom of a webcomic with an awesome cast of characters that are the true focal point.  PvP’s creator, Scott Kurtz, is constantly striving to better himself and you can really tell from looking over his archives that he’s made some giant leaps since he first began.  He’s a great story teller which keeps me coming back every Monday through Friday.  As far as Control-Alt-Delete goes, it’s another gaming webcomic that is purposefully cut from the Penny-Arcade cloth.  The two comics are much too similar and Penny-Arcade is better on many more levels which makes reading CAD kind of pointless.  It seems to be the same gag over and over and yet there are still a ton of CAD fans out there.  If you’re one of them I mean no disrespect, I’m just not a big fan of Tim Buckley’s art or comedy style.

Then finally the one I just started reading recently is Starslip Crisis.  Starslip’s creator Kris Straub teams up with Scott Kurtz of PvP quite a bit so I found out about Starslip through PvP in a way.  The two have a joint website together called Halfpixel where they post a lot of collaborative content.  They’re a great team, but that’s not to take away from Straub’s solo work.  Starslip Crisis is a sci-fi comedy strip which again has very memorable characters and a lot of laughs.  I’m sure there are a lot of other sci-fi webcomics out there but this is the only one I’ve ever come across and I really like it because it represents a unique genre compared to my other favorites.  A new strip’s up every Monday through Friday – just like PvP.

A couple other strips that may or may not be worth a look are Sheldon and Evil Inc.  I haven’t really had much time to read these two webcomics but I’ve listened to their two creators in podcasts and they seem to have a lot of passion in their craft.  They’re also funny which can’t hurt.  Sheldon’s creator Dave Kellett and Evil Inc’s Brad Guigar do a podcast called Webcomics Weekly along with Scott Kurtz and Kris Straub that’s pretty interesting to listen to.  At first I didn’t think it would be for me because it was advertised as a serious "shop talk" type of podcast about comic creation but I listened to the first episode and they really have a lighthearted approach.  A lot of what they talk about can be applied to a lot of other types of content creation, plus you’ll always find some laughs along the way even if you aren’t interested in the advice they’re giving.

So that’s it, that’s what I used to read, what I’m currently reading, and what I may read in the future.  It’s funny – before I wrote this post I was sort of scrambling for something to write about and now that I look at this I think it might be one of my longest posts ever!  I guess that just goes to show how much I value those 5 minutes a day I spend reading webcomics.

Currently Listening To: The Pogues – Waxie’s Dargle
Currently Playing: Project Gotham Racing 4, Orange Box, Puzzle Quest

The new social.

Microsoft finally announced the much anticipated follow-up to the Zune, tentatively called the Zune 2.  That’s not what they’re really calling it – they’re actually naming the new units by their capacity (the Zune 4, Zune 8, and Zune 80 – the original model will be known as the Zune 30).  There are some pretty cool upgrades both to the hardware and software side of Microsoft’s MP3 player which I’d like to discuss.  Honestly I haven’t been very excited about Apple’s iPod lineup lately aside from the iPod Touch, but even that’s hard for me to justify.  I’m glad to see Microsoft is stepping it up and, who knows, if the Touch doesn’t receive a price drop or capacity upgrade sometime soon I might just end up picking up an 80 gigabyte Zune instead.  Let’s get started.

The most noticeable upgrade to the Zune 2 is the fact that there are now 2 different skews of the model – a larger hard drive based unit that is similar in size and look to the old model and new flash based models which are smaller, much like the 2nd generation iPod Nano.  The smaller units come in 4 and 8 gigabyte capacities while the hard drive model has been upgraded from 30 to 80 gigabytes, showing that Microsoft is trying to compete with Apple’s most popular iPod models.  There were also some physical changes to the Zune line-up, most notably a new scroll button called the "Zune Pad" which is touch sensitive and lets you flick through your content.  Also, in the case of the Zune 80, the player has been made 27% thinner.

As far as the software goes, Microsoft is starting from the ground up.  The Zune Marketplace is being completely overhauled by adding audio and video podcast support and new DRM-free songs.  They’re also giving their users access to a new feature called the Zune Card.  Zune Cards are much like Xbox Live gamercards which show what you’ve been playing except they work for what’s been playing on your Zune.  Therefore you can place a web badge on your site, MySpace/Facebook page, blog, anywhere really and let people know what you’ve been listening to.  Along with this Microsoft is launching a community specifically for the Zune.  Finally, and this is a big one, they’ve finally made the wifi do what we all want it to do – Wireless Sync.  Now you can bring your Zune into your home, connect it to a power source (this is done for stability, so your battery doesn’t die in the middle of a sync for example), and automatically your content will be moved wirelessly to your Zune.  This is a feature that even Apple hasn’t been able to execute yet.  In addition to the wifi upgrade they’ve enhanced the wifi sharing feature, letting the songs you share remain active for longer than the 3 days from before.  You still only get 3 plays with licensed music, but for content like podcasts you can share them with your friends and they can keep them for how ever long they like.  It’s pretty cool.  Also, did I mention that if you’re already a Zune owner all of the software upgrades will work with your current Zune?  That’s right.  Microsoft is going to release a firmware update for the Zune 30 that will unlock almost all of this functionality.  This is an awesome move on Microsoft’s part, move that you would never see Apple make.  I guess when you only have 2% of the market you value your current customers just as much as your potential new ones.

So now that I’ve hyped the dang thing up so much how much does it cost?  Well, the 4 gigabyte model will be $149, the 8 gigabyte model will be $199, and the 80 gigabyte model will cost $249.  If you keep track of iPod prices you can see that they’re almost exactly the same as the prices of comparable iPod units.  At this point I think they should have undercut the iPod a little bit, maybe by $50 or so, in order to gain market share.  It’s almost like when they were newcomers to the gaming console market with the original Xbox – the key goal is to gain market share (as opposed to profit).  Still, given the upgrades I think the prices are reasonable.

Currently Listening To: The Pogues and The Dubliners – The Irish Rover
Currently Playing: Project Gotham Racing 4, Puzzle Quest, Orange Box

The value of Vista DreamScene

Okay so one of the Vista Ultimate Extras that I was excited for since I first heard about it at CES ‘07 was DreamScene.  In case you don’t know about it, DreamScene is an extension to desktop backgrounds.  It lets you use a video file as your desktop wallpaper.  You can either choose from some stock videos that come with DreamScene or use your own video.  From what I can tell though, the video you use has to be mpeg…no .avi files or quicktime.  When I first installed Vista Ultimate (I was using Vista Business previously) there were two things I was excited to use – the built-in Media Center and DreamScene.  For some reason the thought of having a waterfall as my desktop background excited me.

Video: Windows DreamScene Released – New DreamScenes

I’ve used the beta and the final release – but both times I ended up removing it after using it for a day or so.  Since then Microsoft has released DreamScene content packs that add additional videos for you to use and they finally released the video background that was shown during the demo at CES of DreamScene.  So now I’m using it again, and I kind of like it.  It’s totally gimmicky but for some reason I’ve kept it around.  So basically I’ve ended up asking myself what the value of using DreamScene was.  I don’t think there’s much more to it than aesthetics.

My first concern with using DreamScene is that I’m a gamer, and I’m fairly stingy with my computer’s resources.  That is to say, I don’t run any extra applications than I have to – I close down IM, my web browser, and pretty much everything else whenever I don’t absolutely need them.  You would assume then, since DreamScene offers even less value than say my Pidgin IM client, I would want to get rid of it instantly.  That’s how I felt at first, but to be honest DreamScene is pretty good on memory.  Surprisingly good actually.  With it running I don’t notice a performance hit at all, and that’s not just because it’s a lightweight application – Microsoft has built in some very simple but sensible features that really prioritize your system’s resources (ram, CPU usage, etc.).  For example: the only time you’re really going to notice the DreamScene playing is when you’re doing something at the desktop.  If you’re just going to the desktop to launch Firefox then, that’s when you want to see DreamScene.  Therefore, when you have a window maximized and can’t see the desktop at all, Dreamscene pauses itself.  This way it’s not sitting in the background eating up CPU cycles and ram without you benefiting from it.  So at least it doesn’t hurt your machine’s performance.

So will I still be using DreamScene in a month?  I don’t know.  It’s something nice to look at and it’s something different but the novelty may wear off.  I think there could be some better applications to this type of program in the future.  One idea I thought would be to make the background an application.  You could set an RSS reader to be your Windows background and then there would actually be a benefit for using something like this.  In fact, there already might be something like that out there, but I don’t know if it would be as efficient as DreamScene is right now.  No one wants to have a slow machine just to save themselves a couple of clicks.  Any purely aesthetic feature like DreamScene has to be almost transparent.  You should never even have to think about if they’re running, what they’re doing, and especially how much memory they’re using.  If you’ve got Vista Ultimate I’d say you should at least try out DreamScene.  Microsoft has been pretty slow to release Ultimate Extras like DreamScene so you should take advantage of those extra features you’re paying for.

Listening To: Macbreak Weekly

Corsair Pulls Through

A few weeks ago my main Windows Vista box started to act up.  I would get frequent blue screens and had to reboot way too often.  So the lovely job of troubleshooting the problem began.  I researched it a bit, and what I read plus some previous knowledge having to do with such matters led me to believe that it was probably a memory issue.  I use Corsair ram and they usually make pretty high-quality stuff, but I ran MemTest86 and one of my sticks of ram showed up with around 100,000 errors after one pass.

If you don’t know what Memtest86 is (shame on you! =P) it’s a program which runs on boot that scans your ram one module at a time.  Basically it writes to the ram, then checks the ram for what it wrote, and if what was written to the ram isn’t the same as what Memtest wrote then it knows there’s an error.  It does this over and over with various different tests and one entire battery of tests is known as a "pass."  You can do tons and tons of passes if you want and, if you let it, Memtest can run for 24 hours without fully completing the scan.  Usually though, if there’s something really wrong with a stick of ram it’ll only take 1 or 2 passes for it to find errors, if that.

Anyways, I ran Memtest, saw the errors, and knew that I had to replace one of my sticks of ram.  My first impulse was to go to Newegg and buy a replacement, but then I remembered that Corsair provides a lifetime warranty on its memory.  I went ahead and submitted a case to them and they issued a return to me.  All I had to do was ship it in to them (which took only a few days – I sent it in on September 28th and they had it by October 1st) and then wait for them to send me my replacement.  That’s where things got a little…slow.  Without turning this into a gaming post, a game I’ve been anticipating greatly – Valve’s Orange Box – just came out on October 10th.  Without that stick of ram though I was pretty sure my machine wouldn’t be able to run it, so by the 5th when I hadn’t heard back from Corsair with an update about the return I started to get nervous.

I went ahead and shot them an email just asking for a status update and to see if anything was wrong.  A couple days later I heard back and was assured that they had packed my return up and were getting ready to ship it.  That night I received the shipping confirmation, and 3 days later (on the 12th) I received my ram replacement.  Overall I’m pretty happy with my experience and if nothing else it saved me a hundred bucks so I really can’t complain.  So to anyone out there with hardware troubles this is just a suggestion – check with the manufacturer to see if they offer warranties before you buy a replacement!  It seems like a simple enough thing but it totally slipped my mind at the time.  The Orange Box is great by the way.

Currently Listening To:  Dropkick Murphys – State of Massachusetts
Currently Playing: Project Gotham Racing 4, Orange Box, Puzzle Quest

Stick to the schedule!

For the past two weeks I’ve been trying to maintain a blogging schedule.  Before I established one I found that I either would go for long amounts of time without posting anything or I’d have to rush a post mid-week.  I didn’t really like having either of those things happen so I figured it was time to get serious and commit to a schedule.  I’ve been testing out a 2 post a week (Tuesday and Thursday) schedule and it seems to be working pretty well.  I don’t really have enough to say for more than 2 posts a week, and Tuesday and Thursday are situated in the week nicely enough for readers I think.

Especially since classes started back up I don’t have as much time to dedicate to writing unfortunately, but  I am comfortable putting up 2 a week while knowing that eventually if I had a consistent readership they would get used to the format, and I wouldn’t have to pressure myself more.  As a result of having class and work during the week what I do now is write my posts over the weekend (Saturday, usually), format them sometime before they go up (usually Saturday also but it depends, seeing as how the formatting part is my least favorite), and then use WordPress’ handy Timestamp feature to set when they go live.  This is a really handy tool to have and I’m glad I started using it.  The time I have set for now is 8:00AM eastern, so if everything goes to plan you should see something new around that time on Tuesday and then again on Thursday.  The only downside of writing this way is that I feel like I’m not being as current as I could be.  For example, if something is announced on Saturday and I write about it, there are 3 days before my post goes live so a lot of what I write about might be disproved or modified in that time.  I’ll try my best to avoid that situation though, and hopefully what you read won’t be too stale.

So there you have it!  I think it’s important to have a solid schedule for anyone who posts content to the internet regularly, that way anyone who is interested knows when to show up.  It’s all about consistency.  I think the reason I value consistency so much is that I’m a web comics reader and some of the comics I read aren’t very consistent time-wise.  They have schedules, sure, but sometimes you’ll check their site to see if the new comic is up and it won’t be there until almost night time.  That can be frustrating for me as a reader of their particular works, so I assume it would be frustrating for a blog reader as well.

Currently Listening To: Dropkick Murphys – (F)lannigan’s Ball
Currently Playing: Orange Box, Project Gotham Racing 4

Windows Live Writer

About a week ago I found a post on Digg where the poster mentioned WordPress clients.  I use WordPress for my blog so I figured I’d give what he had to say a read.  Basically he was trying to find a decent Windows application that served as a stand-alone blogging client, something he would be able to use to write blog posts separately from WordPress’ WYSIWYG editor, and then upload to the server.  He rounded up about 5 different alternatives, none of which I am currently using.  The reason is that in one of the comments a Digg user suggested trying out a free program Microsoft has called Windows Live Writer.  I installed it, set it up, and now it’s what I use to create all of my blog posts.

Having a program like this is pretty essential if you work with WordPress because their editor is…well…garbage.  Don’t get me wrong, WordPress as a whole is an awesome CMS with a lot of valuable features that are relatively easy to use but when it comes to content creation it lacks quite a bit.  With something like Windows Live Writer though, you’re able to work in an almost Microsoft Word-like environment which makes things much nicer.  What I have the most trouble with are both finding and including the images I put in some blog posts as well as going through after the fact and linking all of the words I want to have linked.  It’s not that these are particularly difficult to do with the stock WordPress editor, but they take longer than is necessary to complete.  Now I find myself finishing up posts a lot quicker than I was before.

Live Writer is easy to install, just like any other application you might find on the net.  There’s no Genuine Advantage verification required or Microsoft updates that need to be applied, so it installs just like a normal program.  Then, once it installs, it walks you through a few steps so it can sync with your blog and you’re good to go.  That was the part that impressed me the most about it.  Live Writer is meant to be able to work with a lot of different blogging services like Windows Live Spaces, Blogger, and of course WordPress.  All I had to do was give it the URL of my blog and it went ahead and pinged it, found out automatically that it was a WordPress blog, and then – after prompting me for my login information – it pulled down my theme and everything right into the program.  Because of this I now have a true WYSIWYG editor, because the "document" for lack of a better term which I work in while writing the post has my blog’s theme pre-applied, so without even saving and especially without publishing the post I already know what it will look like once it’s live.  That’s pretty handy.

The only problem I have left is that now I’m stuck on my Vista box whenever I want to write a post.  I used to use my laptop exclusively for this, I’d write in an app called WriteRoom, copy and paste what I wrote into the WordPress editor, and then add the images and links.  Now I have to be sitting at my desk to get anything written which is much less desirable than sitting in front of the TV on the couch.  So here’s where I do a bit of crowd sourcing (I just made myself laugh a little, comparing my blog’s audience to a crowd was a bit of an over exaggeration I think).  If anyone knows of a good OS X or Ubuntu 7.04 WordPress blogging client I’d love to test it out.  Post your recommendations as a comment, and keep this couch potato where he belongs!  =P

Currently Listening To: The Pogues – If I Should Fall from Grace with God
Currently Playing: Project Gotham Racing 4, Halo 3, Team Fortress 2 Beta

Co-op’s effect on games

It’s become increasingly popular for games these days to allow you to join up with your friends over the internet to play through the single player campaign.  The most recent examples of this are Epic’s Gears of War and, of course, Bungie’s Halo 3.  I know, I know, "not another Halo post!" you scream…but I promise, this will be the last.  Plus it’s really not about Halo, right?  It’s about co-op.  At least that’s what I’m telling myself.

A lot of the hype surrounding the aforementioned mega-hit had to do with fans’ anticipating of knuckling up with 3 of their buddies in online co-op.  I have no beef with this, and truthfully I was excited for some co-op action too, but I think my mind has been changed on that front.  When I got Halo 3 the first thing I did was start up the normal single player campaign by myself.  I made it about 3 levels through when I was invited to join a 4-player co-op game with some of my friends.  I was excited to get rolling but about half way through the first level I realized I wasn’t having as much fun as I had had by myself.  There are a few reasons for that I think.

First off, it’s hard to enjoy a game, especially when it’s your first play through, when you have 3 people squawking in your ear the whole time.  I found myself struggling to keep up with the story and the game was more or less transformed into a shooting gallery.  We’d kill all the enemies in one level, move on, kill all the enemies in the next, and so on.  We didn’t care about the story, we were just killing stuff.  I think that when you’re playing something co-operatively it’s much easier to lose your suspension of disbelief…people are more prone to point out a game’s over-the-top cutscenes when they have an audience listening.  That’s all fine, and I’m not hating on my friends list full of good guys, but once again, it takes you out of the game.

I didn’t have this problem so much with Gears, probably because it was only 2 player co-op.  Two players, both who hadn’t played before.  Not only that, but Gears was really focused around having 2 players work together to get through a level, so we were more apt to talk about what was happening in the game then meandering and noticing some of the more unbelievable moments.  In Halo 3, the extra players are pretty much just extra bodies…there are no multiplayer objectives, and everything can be done with just one person.  What that means is that the other 3 people just serve as 3 extra guns that help you kill enemies faster which, admittedly, can be pretty mindless.  That’s why, I think, the game discussion goes off the deep end.  When you have 4 people dominating a level of a game without much effort your mind wanders since you aren’t really "in the game" as much as you would have been.

The other reason I think I’m going to stick to single-player is that you lose that epic scale when you’re playing with 4 people total.  When I’m by myself and I single-handedly drop those brutes or destroy a couple wraith tanks with grenades it’s an accomplishment.  You feel like you’re making an impact in-game and realize you’re Master Chief, badass of the universe.  In 4 player co-op everyone’s flocking the wraiths and they get taken out in 2 seconds with minimal effort…it just loses the authenticity of the experience.

Anyways, that’s my commentary on co-op…personally I’m going to stick with my tried and true method and at least play a campaign through once on my own even if co-op is offered.  The experience ends up much better that way.  On an unrelated note, I have to really get away from all of the gaming posts.  If you have any ideas about tech subjects or just other things you’d like to hear me babble about please post a comment.  If anyone bore the burden of reading this consistently I’d really feel I was doing them a disservice and I’m sure they’re going through DmK gaming-post fatigue.  My sincerest apologies.

Currently Listening To: WebbAlert
Currently Playing: Halo 3, Project Gotham Racing 4

Halo 3 follow-up and Rock Band pricing

It’s been a week since Halo 3 came out and I’ve had plenty of time to beat the game and spend some time with the multiplayer so I figured I’d do a post on how I liked it.  Microsoft successfully hyped the hell out of this game, and it paid off for them since Halo 3’s launch was the biggest media launch ever.  It raked in $170 million its first day alone, proving once again that gaming is just as mainstream as watching TV or going to the theater.  Much like computers, gaming is cool now – check your bias at the door.

So the game obviously was a success financially.  I for one think the game was successful on its own right as well.  Halo 3, all else aside, is an extremely fun game to play.  They put you into a lot of epic situations and make you truly feel like Spartan 117 himself.  Whether you’re single-handedly destroying wraith tanks, dropping massive Scarabs, or just laying waste to hordes of Covenant and Flood enemies, you feel like a badass.  I had a lot of fun playing through the game and am here to say that if you own a 360 you should own Halo 3.  In fact, chances are you already do.  So go play it.

The multiplayer component is also solid.  It’s the most intricate matchmaking system to date with tons of game variants and something for everyone to enjoy.  I do wish they would have thrown in some more maps though, preferably some of the classics like Blood Gulch (aka Coagulation), and Danger Canyon.  Others are well represented though, including updates to Zanzibar, Timberland, and a handful of new maps as well.  I’m sure that more will be released via Xbox Live eventually, so if your favorite didn’t make the cut I wouldn’t be too put off.  To make up for the slightly lacking amount of maps you get a 4-player co-op throughout the campaign as well as new features including the Forge and Theater.  The forge allows you to re-work all of the existing maps to make them play the way you want them to, and the theater lets you view clips you can save from your multiplayer and campaign matches.

For instance, did you just pull off a really cool frag?  You can go into the theater (where all of your played games are saved) re-watch the game that contains said "cool frag," and make a video clip or screenshot of it.  Then you can put it in your fileshare which enables anyone else who views your profile to be able to view it for themselves.  Bungie.net has been reworked to include this feature (a long with a ton of in-game stats).  It adds a whole different element to the game and there’s something very addicting about going back and watching the games you played to see how you did, and then pulling out the cool moments and dropping them into your file share.  This feature is a huge advancement in multiplayer gaming and I’d love to see more like it.

The one area where Halo 3 lacks is the story.  I won’t spoil anything, but let’s just say it’s not very cohesive.  I also think they didn’t really take advantage of the fact that this is the final Halo installment (presumably).  They could have really worked in a lot more to the story to make it much more interesting.  It’s pretty hard to follow, especially if you aren’t particularly well-versed in your Halo universe mythos, so I’d suggest viewing this link to get caught up before (or after) playing.  It really fills in a lot of the holes and tells the story right up to the beginning of Halo 3 in great detail.

So to summarize – Halo 3 is awesome.  It doesn’t deliver on the hype exactly (what could, anything less than total perfection would fall short) but it’s a blast to play and the replay value will have you coming back for more.  Now on to other matters – Rock Band.  Rock Band was finally priced this week at $169.99.  Since the game arrives in less than 2 months I’m glad they finally got this out of the way.

The price is way less than most people expected, and the kit includes all of the peripherals (including the game) needed to play.  So for only $70 more than buying Guitar Hero 3 with guitar you can get a drum kit, guitar, and microphone.  I’m still not completely sold on Rock Band but I think this is a great deal and they’re making the right moves to be successful.  The only downfall here is that while the Playstation 2 and Playstation 3 versions will have wireless guitars, but the 360 gets owned yet again by Microsoft’s proprietary wireless technology and will receive wired guitars at first.  That’s pretty lame but it’s sort of the running standard when it comes to 3rd-party wireless peripherals and the 360.

Currently Listening To:  Red Hot Chili Peppers – Snow
Currently Playing: Halo 3, Team Fortress 2 Beta