Has it only been 7 days since my last blog? It seems so long ago, it's strange. But we're all back in full swing now at our workplaces, schools and colleges and I can't really say it's good to be back but it could be worse. On the gaming side I've been playing yet more Halo 3 as well as Guitar Hero III (it's a game that never gets old) but i'm still trying to work my way up to hard mode, i'm finding it a little tricky. I've also started playing The Simpsons Game and I knew it wasn't gonna be the greatest game ever made but as a big Simpsons fan i'm still slightly disapointed by the games flaws but it does have its moments and there's no way i'm not seeing it through to the end. I also want to pick up Burnout Paradise and Advance Wars: Days of Ruin which'll be coming out this month but there's stil huge backlog from 2007. I also did manage to pick up that headset and controller at GAME last Saturday but this stuff is still greedily expensive.

The industry still seems to be very eager to get right into the thick of it as we saw quite a collection of interesting items at CES 2008 from realistic Guitar Hero controllers with custom designs (one of my personal highlights of the show)to ridiculously powerful gaming rigs. One of the biggest events though was of course the Microsoft keynote address which was very strange to say the least. For some reason I also find myself somewhat surprised by the huge rush of subscriptions over the Christmas holidays which has led to the totalling of the 10 million members, I suppose with the kind of games it got delivered fresh onto its plate in 2007 it's not that unusual, it's kind of funny when you think Sony were proclaiming the Wii shortage this Christmas would benefit them so strongly and while I'm on the subject I hope the fact that Nintendo did announce a Christmas shortage will change the minds of some who think the shortage is artificial. Back to what I was saying before though i'm also kind perplexed by the announcement that the film company MGM, of which Sony own 20% will be releasing their movies onto Microsoft's Xbox 360, sounds like Sony didn't have much of a say in thw whole thing. What made that keynote really special though is that it had the one thing that every good keynote needs, what's that you ask? Why, Slash of course. I think Gamespot summed it up when they captioned this picture "You were OK, but the guy with the funny hat behind you was great". On the flip side the lowest point of the convention for me (besides, of course the obvious lack of Jeff)was "Air Guitar Hero" which from all observation at this point simply seems to be a cheap toy among giants but you can't have everything.

But with further weirdness apparently the Queen plays the Nintendo Wii (where do they get this stuff?), somebody is sueing Microsoft for the Xbox Live outage but if I've got this right our free game to compensate for the outage is worth more than the subscription time we lost, this guy is the only one actually making a loss, paying for the legal costs of an unwinnable case. Another interesting case is also from a guy claiming that Sony and Nintendo's (interestingly he's taking no action against Microsoft) wireless controllers use a patented system invented by him, all he has to do is take those two companies down then he can just get onto busting the manufacturers of every wireless electronic device ever created.

Thanks for reading once again, shout out to CmdrNcNeil,PJ24, zxv33 and in response to Fishdalf's comment from last week I think they've made the downloadable tracks for Guitar Hero 3 generally more challenging as they probably it'll be more hardcore fans who wanna buy those tracks. I'll just leave you with something this week which is quite special although totally unrelated to gaming, freerice.com where you can donate rice to the starving simply by playing a word game (thanks to Conver for originally posting about that one)... Bye!

-Gamer_152