Like every other gamer, i'm always looking forward for great titles, here i will share some of mine.

For the Xbox 360 i'm waiting for the following games:

Mass Effect - Really loved Knights of the Old Republic, and Jade Empire was a great game aswell, i expect no less from this game, making this the best RPG of this year, if not, then please tell me the title of the game that you think can match it or even beat it, because i would definetly be interested.

Halo 3 - While it's not very original to say, and while imo it's also not as much as it is cracked up to be, i do however like to play big multiplayer games with friends, and this is the kind of game everyone has, because it's a easy to pick up and fun to play.

Banjo 3 - Loved the Banjo games, and i can't wait for the third, it will come, but when remains the question, hopefully Rare will release it pretty soon, or atleast offer me something else to keep busy with, like a second Kameo.

GTA 4 - I might not have mentioned it first, but this is however the game i want most, i can't express in words how much i want this game, i've played all GTA's, and while the old ones were fun, it just was no match at all compared to GTA 3 and the GTA's after that. This GTA with the new engine, and all the new options, and the amazing visuals, is simply my most wanted game, i just have to have this. As you can imagine, i took the delay pretty hard...

There are ofcourse other titles that i'm interested in, depending really how good they are, games such as Assassin's Creed, Burnout Paradise, TimeShift (played the demo today, plays great) and Prototype,

For the Nintendo department only Mario Galaxy and Zelda Phantom Hourglass are doing it for me now, there are no other games yet that i'm really looking forward for.

For the Sony department i got a few things to look for, for the PSP it's the new FF7 and God of War, and then there is the PS3, i don't own 1 yet, but i will eventually, there are definetly some titles i'm looking forward to, most of all the game Infamous, i haven't seen much of it, but the game definetly left me a great impression when i saw it at the E3, ofcourse there are quite a few other games, but i would have to do some more research into it. Ofcourse there is also a chance that the PS3 will have better versions of the game (right now the 360 usually beats the PS3 with framerates and such), and in that case, if i would own a PS3, then i would get that version.

A lot of time has passed since the last time i updated, by now i'm upto 17 360 games (and i got 4 games coming in for 10 euro a piece), i bought a Wii with Zelda, and i got a NDS with a bunch of games, so i definetly spend a good amount of money on my gaming addiction.

My 360 expierence has been pretty great so far, except for that part that my 360 is being shipped to Germany for repairs, my DVD wasn't working properly, and constantly gave errors that my discs were dirty or unreadable, or that it wasn't a 360 game, or even better, that i had to put my game in a Xbox 360... but besides that i'm loving the Xbox 360, there are lots of great titles, and even better titles coming up.

Microsoft is definetly giving it all to win the fight between de 360 and the PS3, and i know how much fanboys keep claiming that the PS3 will win, and the same for 360 fanboys, i have to say that i don't see the PS3 winning this. The PS3 is a great system, games look great, especially if you're on a 1080p screen, the Blu-Ray in it makes the PS3 worth it's money, and the design is really nice.

But while those are positive things, it doesn't mean they all are, games are expensive to make causing smaller developers and publishers turn away, the 600 euro/dollar price is well spent if you want to use the BR for movies, if not then it's just an extra 200 compared to the 360, developers also been having diffeculties developing games for it, causing bad frame rates in some games (or perhaps they just didn't bother to much adjusting the game for the PS3, because in quite a few cases the 360 sported better frame rates), and it's losing exclusives all over the place, most going multiplatform or going exclusive for Microsoft.

The PS3 is in a pretty bad circle right now, to develop games for the PS3 is expensive, because of the still pretty low quantity of games, gamers don't buy the PS3 that much (afterall what use is a console when it has only a few games you want), due to the pretty low amount of gamers developers don't want to produce expensive games (after all they make their money by selling them, and if there aren't many gamers, then there isn't much money to be made) and these factors causes Sony to be stuck in a circle, to make more money they need more gamers, and to get more gamers they need more games, and to get more games they need more gamers.

Their rival Microsoft doesn't have this problem at all, due to the much earlier release they got a headstart, while people pay 65 euro for a game for the PS3, the 360 has a great collection of games for 30 euro and less (games that are 9 months and older), considering the average gamer doesn't care who makes the system, most go for the 360, besides having cheaper games, it als has a much bigger collection due to the earlier release.

But that's not why Microsoft is doing so well, the reason why they are is because they are throwing with money to get exclusives, and they are getting them, and many of the great games for the 360 are either published by Microsoft, or developed by Microsoft Game Studios. Just recently they paid 20 million dollars for exclusive content for GTA 4, causing many games to doubt wether they should still pick that PS3.

Microsoft is definetly not perfect, not at all, but they do know business, even if the PS3 manages to get out of that circle, then the Xbox 360 will still have had a great run at the end, it has some fantastic games so far, and some great titles coming up this year, so it's impossible for the Xbox 360 to be a failure.

Anyway enough about the 360, let's talk about the Wii. The Wii was probably the biggest console, everybody was talking about it, and everyone wanted to give it a try. Owning one now i do have to say it's been a dissapointment so far, now i'm sure many of you will disagree or want to argue the points i'm giving, but i do feel they are valid, and while it doesn't define the console, it did dissapointment me.

First of all the graphics are horrible, when you play on the Wii, then you have the feeling you went back 6 years or so, and that's comparing it with other consoles, if you compare it with the PC then you would probably have to go back another 3 years. I got a nice 32 inch HDready TV and i bought the component cable (and put the Wii on 480p), but it just doesn't look good, sure i been spoiled with the 360, but the simple fact is that Nintendo decided to put old crap in their machine (as usual) to save on production costs, where Sony and Microsoft loses money at the beginning of their new machines, Nintendo makes money from the start. Now i don't think they should lose money, but if you pay for your games, then gaming is pretty expensive, so when Nintendo rips you off with old crap, then i don't think they are doing things right. The fact is that if they had chosen to make no profit on the console, and use the extra money to make a better system, then we would probably have a console that would run 720p with much nicer graphics. If you consider that Microsoft now makes the 360 without losing money and can still offer the Core version for 300 euro, then why can't Nintendo make a pretty powerful machine for 250? It's just wrong, what's also wrong is that you have to pay 30 euro for a lan adapter, i mean come on, to build that in would cost them hardly anything, but no, Nintendo rather sells you it for 30 euro.

Second, the Wiimote doesn't work aswell as they want you to believe, yes in Wii Play it works great, and other games that are specificly created for it it works great aswell, but in the other games it works pretty crap, they want you to believe that you control Links sword in Twilight Princess, but forget about it, all you can do is shake the controller, there is no fun in it, better said it's pretty annoying, if it would really give me control over the sword then sure, but now it feels like you got a regular gamepad of which the attack button doesn't work properly and you keep smashing it untill your arm hurts. The Wiimote also left the door open for really bad games, basicly the make a bad game, add some Wiimote touches, and they sell it for 50 euro to you, the worst thing is that people buy that crap, because they like working with the Wiimote, sure i can understand that, but that doesn't justify the game being so poor, some motion control shouldn't go at the cost of quality, and right now that's happening, the quality is missing in many of the games, but they do use the Wiimote, and that's a really bad development.

Third, Nintendo anounced it would offer it's online services free, well that's true, it's also true that you need to pay 30 euro to even be able to use the services, because that's Nintendo's specialty, coming up with extra costs that are never spoken about, i was pretty surprised when i didn't see a lan port on my Wii, and pretty pissed off when i saw the price of 30 euro for the adapter. But i still wanted to go online, so i did bought it, the Wii does have a few cool features, i especially like the weather channel, but overall their online network is really poor, friends work with a code (instead of the handy gamertag from Xbox Live), adding friends is not user friendly at all, as both need to input the code, and no messages can be sent before both added each other, to get to your friendlist is not userfriendly either, whereas Xbox Live allows you to get to your friendlist with a few clicks, in the Wii you have to search for that list, a simple friendlist icon in the main menu would have fixed that. The speed on the network is also extremely poor, on Xbox Live it pushes your connection to the max, making big downloads a simple thing to download, on the Wii it all takes a lot of time, even the small things. There are also no demo's, which is a real shame, Xbox Live has a huge list of demo's, and every arcade title has a trial version, on the Wii you got none of that, which makes it harder to decide wether a game is worth your money or not.

So yes, the online services are free, just like the one on the PS3, but so far neither is a match to Xbox Live, Xbox Live Silver (free) is a whole lot better then the ones from Nintendo, and beats the one on the PS3 at quite a few points aswell, and Xbox Live Gold (60 euro a year) is at every single point better, it's been worked out so well, and makes playing online such a great thing, that it really is worth the money.

In the end though the Wii is a fun console, and it will have good games in time, but Nintendo could have treated their gamers a whole lot better, and so can many of the developers for the machine, who abuses the Wii to sell poor games.

For now i will stick with my Xbox 360 (well as soon as it's back), it really offers a great expierence.

So for my games are:

List sorted by when i bought them

Gears of War

Test Drive Unlimited

Saints Row

NBA 2K6

Crackdown

Kameo Elements of Power

Call of Duty 2

Enchanted Arms

The Godfather

Perfect Dark Zero

Spider-Man 3

Chromehounds

Fifa 07

Burnout Revenge

Ninety-Nine Nights

The Lord of the Rings, the Battle for Middle-Earth

Oblivion

Gun

Tony Hawks American Wasteland

Quake 4

Amped 3

(the last 4 will be arriving next week)

I decided to add my Xbox Live Gamertag to GameSpot.
So if you decide to add me to Xbox Live then make sure to leave me a message with who you are and why you added me, to many people are addicted to big "friends" lists which has only 1 result... that you get spammed with online messages, but if you just want to do some gaming then i'm in. Currently i still only own 2 Xbox 360 games, but i own some Xbox games that can be played online through the X360 aswell.

My next buy will probably be Crackdown, the demo has been really good, and i'm definetly interested into exploring the game further. I love the jumping around from rooftop to rooftop, the car upgrades are sweet aswell (Batman anyone?), and the overall expierence of upgrading yourself, a well made city and a great gameplay makes it a good chance to be 1 of the biggest hits for the X360. Ofcourse it remains the question wether it's really as great as i hope it to be, or that it will still be kinda dissapointing because they didn't work out the missions and all well enough.

I guess we will see, but i'm really hoping it would be good, as it has real potential.

Btw if anyone has some good advices for games, then let me know and i'll check them out.

Today i was very impressed with the support from Cnet/TV.com, i replaced my harddrive a few days ago and lost some data in the process, anyway after everything was installed i wanted to go on 2 of my most visited sites, TV.com and GameSpot, to find out that i had a serious problem, i lost my password during that, and my account was still registered to a email account i no longer have access to. So i decided to mail them asking if they could change it for me, i ofcourse did give some proof i was who i claimed, and they happily changed it for me.

This really did impress me, Cnet is obviously a big company, and to give such quick and personal support is very impressive, especially considering i'm not a paying user or anything (although i am a decent contributor)

So big thank you to Cnet for their excellent support and quality sites!

Not many people checks my profile these days, not so strange considering i hardly post these days on any of shows forums, but i guess that eventually i will, and you will read this, obviously you are, otherwise you couldn't read this. ;)

Anyway i just wrote a review, which i tend to do when something is really worth reviewing, so after i submitted it i saw all my reviews listed, and if people agree/disagree, and even though it's to be expected, i was kinda surprised about that.

Like 95% of the "agrees" are on shows/episodes/people that i wrote something positive about, and 95% of the "disagrees" were on the ones where i was either negative, or had both good and bad things to say. Now while most reviews are read by people who like that show/person, and thus don't like it when people trash it, i'm still surprised about some of the outcomes, i pretty much only review things i like, as i'm not about watching things i don't like, but every show has it's weak episodes, and i know i'm not the only 1, if i take a look at a episode i reviewed from Two and a Half Men then i see 3 of the 4 reviews being negative, yet the majority of the people disagreed with the reviews.
And it's not just with that show, it's with most shows, kinda makes you wonder wether only idiots read reviews, or it's just the idiots pushing the agree or disagree button.

It's a real shame imo, i write reviews not just to voice my opinion, but to also give people a insight, wether they are new people to a show, or regular viewers, and with idiots running around just disagreeing with every negative, and agreeing with every positive without thinking about what is being said, ruins it for new people, because they will just disregard honest reviews thinking it's just a review to bash a show/person, and instead read a poor review from a person who just loves every single thing a show or person does, wether it was good or bad.

Anyway i hope you all have a happy newyear, and enjoy watching your shows, just don't forget to get away from the TV from time to time. ;)

 Firmware 1.5 is mostly known to the people to play back-ups, due to a flaw in the FW it allows homebrew programs to be run.

All in all, that ain't so bad, being able to play old console and handheld games on your PSP is fun, and you even got a bunch of old PC games such as Doom, Quake and quite a few others working on it.
Ofcourse playing games you don't own is illegal, while companies aren't to bothered about this as there is very little money to be gained in old games, Sony is bothered by this a lot, as the most used homebrew program is 1 that allows you to download and load games from your memory stick.

So while Sony kept bringing out newer FW's to remove this exploit, newer exploits were found to run homebrew on later versions, or to downgrade it to FW1.5

Now gamers who buy their games legitimate might wonder why it's good for everyone, well that's quite simple, loading times, not having to bring UMD's with you and playing old games that you own.
A while ago i read a article on here about the awful loading times of games on the PSP, when you load games from the memory stick this ain't a problem, most games load like 5 times faster, this is because a UMD is quite slow, and it needs to look the info up, memory is almost instant, and is quite fast, i don't know how fast it is compared to a UMD, but the loading times are much faster.
Ofcourse if you got like a 4 gig memory stick then it holds on average 3 to 8 games, so you don't have to carry around your UMD's around anymore.

The question remains, is it legal, i have to honestly say that i don't know wether it is or not, you have to ask yourself though, do you care? You can just buy the game, and then download the game and put it on your memory stick, the end result is you having a game that loads faster, and the companies having their money.

As for homebrew, the whole legal thing has a question mark there aswell, but the way i see it, if you own the game then it can't be illegal, and if they don't even sell the game, then they shouldn't complain at all.

In the end you make up for yourself what is right to you, but there are definetly some real advantages for FW1.5 gamers.



Btw, do NOT pm me with questions to links or whatsoever, i can't check for what purposes you will use it, and therefor i won't supply you with such links.

Since i do actually reguraly use Gamespot i figured i would add a banner to it, it's not exactly my best work, but i didn't spend much time for it.
The characters are from GTA 3, GTA Vice City and GTA San Andreas.

If you are visiting this page on TV.com then you can go to this link for my Gamespot profile. http://www.gamespot.com/pages/profile/index.php?user=GohanSSJZ
If you are visiting this page on Gamespot then you can check my banner from TV.com here http://www.tv.com/users/GohanSSJZ/profile.php

Recently i have been getting messages of people tracking me, i'm guessing that's a new future, as i never knew before that anyone was tracking me.
Anyway this is ofcourse not a problem, but if anyone of you wants to be added aswell to get on each others friend list, then you should PM me or something, because in all honesty i don't care to much about the friend list unless it's someone i could actually be friends with, or atleast have a friendly chat with.

My old banner was really quite poor, way below my standards, but i had no real inspiration, and i couldn't really care.
Today i was bored and wanted to make something, i decided to create a new banner. It took quite a while to make, as i was mostly trying to figure out the best look, i finally decided i like this best.

Background picture on the right is obviously the season 5 cast of Angel, the background behind my nickname is the same as the symbol next to my nickname, only then much larger, and as Angel fans will know is the symbol that is on the calling cards that is used by the members of Angel Investigations.

I hope you all like it, if not then tough luck, if anyone has however some good suggestions then feel free to share them with me, i will happily apply them if they are good suggestions.

Anyway feel free to leave some feedback on this blogpost.

But i'm not happy at all yet, this was only a quick thing, i already was planning to make a new one, but i was quite dissapointed to find out that it needs to be JPG, i hate JPG, yes it's small, but the quality is so bad, i truely hate it, they should of atleast given use the option to use gif (256 colors but atleast it doesn't blur the image) Ofcourse in a perfect world they would only accept PNG, as everyone should know, PNG is THE format to use, it doesn't blur the image, and it allows 16,7 million colors, if you save it right then it looks exactly the same as how you made it in your editing program. Anyway that plus lots of stuff is through the image, i got something in mind already again though so i should have it up in no time. EDIT: Check freaksngeeks logo ( http://www.tv.com/users/freaksngeeks/profile.php )i must wonder how he got that quality, i never really paid much attention to JPG because of my earlier statement (and it's a fact that PNG has better quality as JPG), still it doesn't seem right to me... must learn his secret... i think i will pester him untill he spills it...