DIABLO III!!!!!!!! Goodbye life.

My top ten most anticipated games of 2008. This list is subject to change.

10. who cares?

9. who cares?

8. who cares?

7. who cares?

6. who cares?

5. who cares?

4. who cares?

3. who cares?

2. who cares?

1. Starcraft 2!

If I had a PS3, GT5 would be on that list as well, but alas... not yet.

This has absolutely nothing to do with games. Itäs just what I'm going to be up to the last weekend in april.

April 26th - Gigantour (Megadeth, Children of Bodom, Job for a Cowboy, etc.) Merriweathe post pavillion, Baltimore, MD

April 27th - Behemoth, Dimmu Borgir - 9:30 club, DC

April 28th - Paganfest (Ensiferum, Turisas, Tyr, Eluveite) Jaxx, W. Springfield VA

I don't know about you but I have tickets to all three shows on the way and I'm pretty excited. It couldn't have worked out better for me, as I live no more than an hour from each venue. An the fact that they are all in the same weekend just rocks so hard. It'll be a miracle if I don't die from exhaustion by the 29th. I may nend up taking that day off of work, but who knows.. who cares? METAL!

So here's a little story to tack on to my reasons for regretting the purchase of my 360.

I'm sitting down to play some Forza 2. I load up my career and start one of the last three races I need to beat the game. It's an endurance race, and for those of you who don't know, the endurance races are a lot of fun but they can take anywhere from about 45 minutes to an hour to complete. I start the race and easily take the lead within the first few laps. I finish the race in first place with nearly the entire field one lap behind me. It was a flawless race and I was having a blast. I won and was waiting to collect my reward when the unthinkable happened. I get an error message that my disc may be scrathced or dirty. At first I was worried. I immediately eject the disc and check it for damage. The 360 has been known to eat game discs. My disc, however, looked fine... brand new in fact. My worry quickly turned to anger when I realized I just sat down and wasted an hour to win a race only to have my 360 give me such a BS error. "What the Hell!?" I think to myself. An hour wasted trying to win a race and some money and perhaps even an acheivement or two (could have used the money to buy the last few cars I needed in some regions).

Now I know it could have been a lot worse. I could have gotten the RROD. I already had that once before, and luckily it was before the 360 hardware failures were a major problem. I got it shipped out and back within a week. I really feel sorry for those of you who had to wait a month or longer. Anyways, the point I am trying to make is that the 360's problems are far too many and far too often and it boggles my mind that Microsoft is still on top. I mean, come on. I paid $400 for this console and I've had 3 games ruined, one hardware failure, many, MANY freezes, and let's not even get started with the recent Xbox Live problems. Each time something like this happens, I regret ever buying the thing. Sure, the games are a blast, but how much fun is it to invest time in a game you really enjoy only to have your console take a crap all over your progress?

It's really a shame too. Forza 2 is one of my favorite racing games.. and I am a man who loves his racing games. I generally keep my racing on consoles as I hate using the keyboard to turn. If I had the money though, I'd throw down $300 on the Logitech G35 racing wheel in a heartbeat and play all my racing games on the PC. Unfortuneatley I don't. I was really considering perchasing the wireless racing wheel for the 360, but now I think I'm going to hold off on everything for that $400 paperweight.

With all the problems, and not just mine as these types of problems are common, I'm now really considering trading in my 360 for a PS3. Hell, if it wasn't for Forza 2 being an exclusive, I may have gotten one at launch. Don't get me wrong, I love the games for 360, and when it works, I love the 360 itself, but I have never had so many problems with any other console, ever. Even my overclocked, poorly cooled PC is more stable.

Let's take a look at the pros and cons of both the 360 and the PS3:

360 - The good

-Great games

-superb graphics

-awesome HD support

-downloadable demos, movies, game content (except for the BS that EA pulls), etc.

-Very user friendly

- The bad

- online community can be quite immature 99.9% of the time. There are cool people out there, but you really gotta have patience to find them

-record breaking errors and failures

-no real action taken towards correcting the wrongs

PS3 - The good

-see 360

-bluetooth capability

-FREE online services (multiplayer gaming included)

-blueray tech.

- The bad

-Game catalogue not as expansive as the 360

- system is quite pricey

-freezes sometimes (not nearly as often as 360 though)

By now you may think I am becoming a "fanboy", but I assure you I'll play anything as long as it's fun. If I really did hate microsoft, I wouldn't play so many PC games either. Anyways, I thought I'd post this to share my story and get some feedback on what other 360 owners think, as well as any PS3 owners. I probably won't trade in my 360 and it may be a while before I can afford a PS3, so in the meantime I'll just suck it up and stick with it.

Hurrah! The shopping madness is over... or it's just begining for all of those who got money, gift cards, etc. My christmas was excellent. Wanna know what I got? Well I'm going to list it anyways: A new desk, because I needed one badly. I waffle iron! It's pretty wicked. Some new pants, socks, etc. Nothing feels better than new socks on cold feet. I also got some metal CDs; Blizzard Beasts, Diabolical Full Moon Mysticism (Immortal), and Malice (Through the Eyes of the Dead). I got some gift cards as well, to Gamestop and various restaraunts. My girlfriend got me a killer Immortal t-shirt, because nothing says "I love you" like a shirt that has the sons of northern darkness on it. The best gift of all though (material-wise) was one that I bought about a month back. My girlfriend and I are going to see a few of our favorite bands in April; Ensiferum, Turisas, Tyr, and more at what has been dubbed Paganfest. I'm super pumped about it and so is she. It's going to kill. So this rant has nothing to do with video games, but regardless, I hope everyone in the gamespot community had a wonderful holiday and here's to a happy '08. Play games and stay metal (or whatever). Cheers mother effers!

So Hellgate London is out now and it's everything I expected. Very awesome game if you're into the sort. I think I'm gonna be playing this for a long time to come, and if they make the subscription service worthwhile, I'll definately get into that as well.

Enough about that for now though. I got the January issue of PC Gamer in the mail this morning with the world excluse review of Crysis. I stated in an earlier blog that I really wasn't too concerned with it. After reading the review, however, I become more and more intrigued with this game. There's only one problem. I don't have a DX10 PC yet :( Soon though... soon. To sum up the review with out giving any spoilers whatsoever, it got a 98% (wowee). So if you get a chance, pick up the issue and check out the review. It's a good read and it will probably persuade you to buy the game, although you probably already will as I think I was one of maybe 2 r 3 that was skeptical.

Hopefully by christmas I'll have my new kill-machine done and will be killing many a foe in Crysis. Until then, HG:L will suffice, and as if that wasn't enough, there's Soldier of Fortune: Paback!!! Oh man, just the thought of a new SoF wets my loins. I don't care how "standard" the game looks. I love the gore in 1 and 2 so if for no other reason, I'll get it just for that. Trust me, or check out the trailers on Youtube. This one looks sick. Anywho, that's enough typing for now. I need to play Hellgate: London some more.... NOW!!!

It's been a long time coming, but the beta for Hellgate: London is here (has been here). Since I reserved the game, I got an open beta invitation and that's pretty much all I've been doing for the past few days. Unfortuneatly I can't go in to details about the game, but what I can say is that my opinion hasn't changed and I will still be one of the first in line to pick it up on the 31st of October. I've been having a blast with it. Flagship has done a really good job so far. It's not perfect (duh, it's only the beta), but I love it.

I also got my hands on Halo 3. I beat it, played some multiplayer and it was a pretty good. I'm not the biggest Halo fanatic, so it wasn't the greatest I've played, but it was still pretty awesome.

Other than those 2 games, Warhammer 40k: Dawn of War has been taking up the rest of my gaming time. I've had DoW and the Winter Assault expansion for a while now, but I just recently got around to finishing the game. If I can pull myself away from HG:L long enough, I may pick up Dark Crusade this week. It'll probably be the last game I buy until HG:L hits the retail shelves. That'll give me a good month to play and beat the campaign and hit up the multiplayer, which is supposedly awesome in this expansion. I'm a big fan of the 40k table top game, so I have a lot of fun playing 40k on my PC when I can't play the table top version with my friends. Plus, Dark Crusade makes my army (Necrons) playable. I'll probably have some text reviews up soon for those games within the next month, but no promises there as school occupies all of my non-gaming free time these days.

So I hear that Dragonforce is confirmed for GH3. Am I totally pumped about it, being a fan of metal? Not really. It's awesome that DF made it into the game, but if they had to pick a legendary power/speed metal band for the line up, they picked the wrong one. Don't get me wrong, I dig Dragonforce but contrary to the "OMG DARGONFOREC INVINTED PWER MATAL!"-esque comments I seem to see everywhere, they did no such thing. They play power metal and they do it very fast, no doubts there. I've kinda grown so tired of seeing/hearing stuff like that from people I know and things I read on the internet, so I really can't be as excited about that as some people. Now if it were something like "Curse of Feanor" or "Heeding the Call" (Blind Guardian/Hammerfall) I'd probably need to change my pants after hearing about it.

Anyways, that's enough about rythm games. How about that E3 shin-dig? All I can say about that is that I am going to be sooo broke come this fall. Hellgate: London is still my most anticipated release. I'm also psyched about Resident Evil 5, Halo 3 (If you're paying $130 for the legendary edition, I'm sorry), Rock Band, Turok (holy crap! Turok? Totally!), Mass Effect and so on. Some of the games I can't get excited about, for example, Crysis. I wanna play it bad, but meh. I don't know what it is, but from what I have seen, which isn't much and may be the problem, I just can't get pumped about it. I loved Far Cry for PC, and I'm a huge FPS fan, so I'll definately play it and more than likey enjoy it when it does come out.

You might be saying to yourself, "Hey Jason, how you gonna play those sweet new PC games on your piece of crap system?" Well that question brings me to my next topic. I'm excited to say that I am finally going to throw down the money and build a new system from the ground up. It'll be a nice entry level Vista ready gaming rig. I hope to have it by the end of August. The spec will be as follows:

AMD Athlon 64 6000+ CPU

Geforce 6150 ATX Mobo

Geforce 8600 GTS 256MB (I can't help but feel bad for not getting an ATI card this time)

2 gigs of DDR2 800 courtisy of Corsair

A new 22" display to replace my dying 17" CRT

and a bunch of other goodies you probably don't care about. All of this is tentative at the moment. I may end up with a different mother board and an ATI powerhouse video card if I can afford it. That or run two 8600 GTS in SLI. I can't wait to try the GFW format with Xbox players. Having a Live account already, I'll have one ready for me on my PC aswell. I'm pretty excited about that.

Well, I'm bored with typing. Until I feel like posting the random thoughts of my scattered mind again, catch ya later.

I really thought that World of Warcraft would be the end of Blizzards other top selling franchises (SC and Diablo)... but now, my faith in the company has been restored with the announcement of Starcraft 2. I must say that I am quite suprised and equally excited right now. As for other updates.. well, who cares about that right now. Starcraft 2!

Aqua Teen Hunger Force Colon Movie Film For Theaters... Funniest thing I've seen since Borat. If you like the television show, you must see this movie. It's pretty much just an uncensored, hour and a half long episode. Some other movies coming out that I think people should look foward to:

 

The Condemned

Reason you should check it out: Prisoners sentenced to death forced to fight on a remote island for their freedom. Plenty of action and explosions. Steve Austin.

 

Pathfinder

Reason you should check it out: Vikings

 

Until next time... I so excite! High five!