What a terrific way to end my GameSpot membership. Thanks CNET, for destroying the integrity of this site, undermining my faith in the quality of reviews, and giving me reason to transfer my time and money to Ziff Davis.

Adios, a$$holes.

Braving the Black Friday crowds, my wife and I headed out early Friday morning in the hopes of finding a few gaming bargains and potentially hard-to-get items.

WalMart opened early and we nabbed a Rock Band rather easily, which was great, because most other people were fighting over what size Polaroid LCD TV to get, so it was a quick in and out. Of to Target, where I picked up a copy of Gears of War (remember, I was late to the 360 show, so it was one game I hadn't got) for $40.

Anyway, to Rock Band. The box was impressively huge, almost intimidating, with about 100 different cardboard shipping boxes inside of it as well, but the notable addition was the bright neon pink leaflet with a warning/instructions regarding returning problematic peripherals. I figured this was EA's way of saying, "we figure that the drum kit will get some abuse, but here's our site for the limited warranty." So, my wife and I set it all up, plugged it all in, and away we went with the multiplayer. She deferred to me with the guitar, and took the drums instead. My wife is brave, but I was happy that we had another game to play along. We weren't terrific on a few songs (ok, she wasn't terrific with the drumming, but thanks to the "easy" setting, we managed) but we were having a blast. In fact, I would say that Rock Band far and away eclipses the GH experience if only because the gameplay so directly ties everyone in so well. It's not completely different from the bass/rhythm guitar co-op in GH2, but it feels much more... symbiotic, and when you get unison bonuses and other perks as a band, it is truly fun.

That is, until your guitar breaks.

Let's set the record straight, though. First, I'm an experienced GH player. No, I did not manage to 5-star Jordan on expert difficulty, but I have gone through the set list for all GH games on medium, and most on hard. I don't strum the crap out of the guitar, and I certainly don't have any unorthodox playing styles. I'm a down-strummer, like 95% of us out there.

So anyway, after my wife went to bed, I decided to try out the solo tour. I took my character and started with some comparisons to GH in my head. I played through about 12-15 songs and I had a blast. I had some trouble on the last couple of songs, and decided to call it a night.

The next day, we decided to get the band back together and we started it up with high hopes. The very first song was atrocious. I scored far less than my wife, who on easy difficulty, struggled mightily to get through the song. So, we tried it again. Same thing. I thought that there was lag, so I went through the robust calibration menus to see if I could fix it. Nope, similar problem. It wasn't that I couldn't hit the notes, it was that the guitar wasn't registering them completely, or it wouldn't hold certain notes. Then I thought, the USB hub might have an issue. I went through several checks, plugging, unplugging, and then finally just plugged in the guitar to the console itself. Played "Black Hole Sun" about 1/8 of the way through, and then I stopped, realizing there was a serious problem.

It was about 10 minutes later that I found message boards on various gaming sites that were filled with posts about Rock Band guitars failing exactly the way mine seemed to have. Apparently, downstrumming breaks the guitar. Period. People have reported failures within the first 3 hours of gameplay, and the issue has to do with the guitar registering double strums which effectively ruins the gameplay. Some people posted solutions ranging from "upstrumming" and "light flicking" and managed to overcome the issues... but you know what? No. I'm not going to upstrum. I wasn't hammering down on the strumming in the first place. I spent $170 on this gigantic box, and the centerpiece item failed to work after the most pedestrian of gameplay.

Good thing I had that handy neon leaflet to direct me to EA's support site, right?

After a few questions and an exchange of information, apparently EA is sending me a new guitar. 2 days air shipping, no cost to me. I just have to box up my other guitar in the box they provide (shipping too) when the new one arrives, which seems simple enough. Maybe a little too simple. I figure that with so many peripherals shipping in one box, EA must have figured in a marginal failure rate, but I get the feeling that these precautionary measures--while great for EA's customer service--were put in place because the anticipated failure rate was a little more than marginal. Perhaps even considerable, if you read the message boards on various sites.

Here's hoping that the replacement guitar can handle, um, downstrumming.

It's kind of a crazy combination, but it works. Really.

So after Portal and HL2:E2, it was off to get slaughtered on the TF2 servers, or so I thought. I honestly thought, like how it's been in my Halo3 multiplayer games, that I would get it handed to me to the point of frustration, but that really hasn't been the case with TF2, and that says a lot about the game design and tweaking done at Valve.

Granted, I put in my hours with TFC years ago, and I had 2, maybe 3 ****s down (depending on the map) and enjoyed a moderately successful run with that game. Having been put off Counterstrike by rampant cheating, I was, like most people, wishing that TF2 would be the game TFC tried so hard to be--a vast paced AND well-balanced team shooter. After about 20-30 min of getting reacquainted with the mechanics (a bit of a switch from Halo3...), I found that I was enjoying the game--a lot--without feeling like I was falling short of the learning curve. Sure, I don't have rocket jumps down yet, nor do I have the spy controls mapped the way I'd like, and I am far from mastering the range of the demoman's sticky bombs or the pyro's flamethrower... but the fact that I was playing all of these ****s even from the outset says a lot about how TF2 has been balanced. A few thoughts:

1. Forget the lusers criticizing the lack of grenades in the game. Grenades were overpowered and spammed far too much in the original TFC. If every ****was going to spam grenades, then why bother having different ****s at all? By the end of TFC's run, the best players were running scripts for just about everything: rocket jumps, conc jumps, grenade timers... sniper duck-shoot-duck-jump movements... but honestly, the worst were grenade scripts. Adjusting the timers and spam scripts made some games entirely unplayable. Removing them in TF2 gives meaning to ****selection again, and TF2 is better for it.

2. Purposeful ****s. There is a purpose and a play****that fits each **** TFC (partly due to grenade spamming) allowed just about everyone to play offensively with the same tactic, no matter which map. Annoying. It's good to be in games where medics and scouts can't run rampant and avoid damage 75% of the time. It's good to see people playing pyros and demos--properly. And giving Engineers teleporters to maintain gives another element to the game, breathing life into games that stall when spawn/choke points become dominated by one team. Sure, dustbowl and granary have a few notable chokepoints, but a well-placed (and timed) teleporter can turn the tide for one side pretty quickly.

3. The helper medic. I'm up and down on this one, mostly because while I enjoy playing the medic, I'm often compelled to be one if I'm on a team that (for some reason) doesn't have one already. If you're locked in a 12 vs. 12 game and your team doesn't have a medic, you're probably going to lose. Especially in CP games. A well-timed uber with a demo rush makes quick work of control points, and you are beginning to see this regularly in most well-played games. I see how medic points can be interpreted as "cheap" since you are essentially gravy training someone else's ability (ever continuously heal a skilled sniper? Hilarious), but then again, in CP maps, if you stay alive long enough to heal everyone over and over, and deliver 3 or 4 ubercharges in a row, then in my opinion, you're deserving of those points.

4. Game VOIP. Ok, well, those of whom on Xbox Live, this is nothing new. You take the good with the bad. But the one area that has not changed in TFC is the know-it-all ****player. The "hey we need a heavy, not a sniper" or "take out that f*ing turret, you losers," etc. I'd like a squelch button, please. Maybe I have overlooked this in the control panel, but give me the option to turn a-holes off. If they want to mouth off, then they can type it and risk dying themselves. Save the VOIP for people with useful comments like "spy is a sniper, coming up the left side" or, "turret is down in cap room." Because you know what? If you're dropping f-bombs about how much your team sucks, and the admin won't boot you, then we all should be able to tune you out and then watch you try to win the game on your own. Because you won't. You may be better than us, but you're not going win by yourself. So you can swear at yourself, douchebag.

Anyway, TF2, very satisfying. I am hoping that the various server connect issues (server not responding errors, hiccups w/ server refreshes, etc.) are solved soon, although they are better than at release. I only have a couple more weeks to play before Mass Effect, so hopefully I can rack up some acheivements on Steam until then...

Oh, and I also picked up Beautiful Katamari. Hey, I'm a fan of the PS2 Katamaris, and I really wanted to see this hi-def game. I am feeling blase about it, truthfully, but after reading the reviews, I thought I would be. But it's not that I am bored of the gameplay and/or polygonal graphics--I really love them the way they are--no, it's actually a couple of other issues. For whatever reason, controlling the next-gen Katamari seems a little broken. I am running into far more edges and blocks, and turning/strafing is altogether slower than before. Much slower. To the point of massive frustration. If you have played a Katamari game before, you'll know that the "secret" is finding the largest "small" objects at the beginning of the level to accellerate your growth (like power-leveling in an RPG) so the rest of the time you can just roll through everything else. This is far more difficult, it seems, in this game than in previous iterations. Furthermore, your progress seems to be hindered much more by a stupid camera that consistently drops you behind walls. It is disappointing to be doing well in a level, and then suddenly, you're in Super Mario Sunshine, swearing at the camera.

Nonetheless, the game retains its humor (although the King of all Cosmos is definitely b*tchier IMO) but is likely aimed at an audience somewhere between "I've heard about this game on the PS2" and "I'd like to try it on the XBox360". If you're a "I played the hell out of both PS2 Katamari games", then you'll likely run into the same frustrations I did.

The music still is great, though.

Going through Halo 3 last week was enjoyable, and I admit I am motivated to finish Heroic and track down some skulls. I can't really put myself through the multiplayer as much as I should, or should want to, since I'm still very much connected to my mouse and keyboard. There is a difference between using a gamepad in single player than in mulitplayer. Something about unpredictability and effective turning radius... I'll keep practicing though, as Halo 3 is such a solid gaming experience to just ditch the gamepad entirely.

So it was back to the PC this weekend with the Orange Box, which so far, is excellent. Portal is a short but terrific game, with some humor and twists to go along with the amazing gameplay. I'll reiterate what others have said about the ending credits music: upbeat, catchy, hilarious... all of the above. I'm playing TF2 now, and I'm finding that it hasn't taken that long to get back into the flow of the maps even with the updated classes. I've read how people are miffed at how there are so few maps to play at release, but seriously, I think with TFC there were probably 10 total that people played most often. We are all waiting the TF2 version of "Hunted," however.

Finally, I picked up a copy of Psychonauts to play backwards compatibly with my 360, and it was worth the hype. A strong platformer although the difficulty ramps up quite a bit at the end... not horrible, but just a little off. My only complaint was the excruciating number of figments to collect through the maps... just too many to really want to bother with, even if there is an extra mini-movie to reward the Rank 100 players... still, a great game which, after finishing, slightly saddens me that so few others have ever played it.

Back to TF2.

It was bound to happen that Bioshock was subverted by Halo 3, although I didn't expect it to happen to me, since I promised that I would play through Bioshock before I even picked up Bungie's monster title.

Fortunately, I caved in on the 25th and picked up the Limited Edition and I am playing through the campaign. Regardless of the "not true HD" backlash that I've been reading on the site (and others), Halo 3 is a beautiful game and I am enjoying it immensely. I'm sure I will get my licks in with all the multiplayer modes after that, and make my way through the higher difficulties.

And then I guess I'll get back to Bioshock. Sorry, 2K, but Bungie has you beat for a little while yet.

Will the 360 finally start to break through in Japan?

It's hard to tell... watching the Microsoft conference at TGS was on the low-key side of things. But that is to be expected in a country where Nintendo reigns supreme. It's just difficult to see how Halo 3 can be marketed in Japan with the same enthusiasm as it is stateside, with all of the branding and ridiculous marketing going on. Not to mention the radioactive orange soda.

Yet it was good to see game announcements for the system into the holidays (post-Halo) and generating some enthusiasm for new titles not shown much (or at all) at E3. Lost Odyssey is very much Final Fantasy, which is great... although I can hear the detractors now saying how LO is not "innovative" or that it is "derivative." Whatever. This title is perhaps Microsoft's best means to improving their install base in Japan--with an epic JRPG built by the founders of FF themselves. I am looking forward to it, personally.

But not before Mass Effect.

Symphony of the Night was a great game to go back and play--I missed it the first time around (for whatever reason) but it was fun playing through it on Live Arcade. I did not go all point-crazy but I spent enough time with it to really discover what made it such a great game.

Bioshock is waiting...

I'll wait for the big shots to breakdown the brightest stars at E3 this year, but I feel compelled to write a bit about a few things that I saw in the past few days.

First off, it is tiresome to listen to all of the "who won" arguments because this year's show was different, scaled down, and was a huge shift in focus from last year. We all expected to see games, and we did, but did Sony really come out on top? Many posts I've read fault Microsoft for "rehashing old material." I'm not quite sure I buy that, even if the first 1/4 of their press conference reiterated the 360's massive base and top-selling titles. Microsoft showed games. Why would you fault them for showing a PC version of Gears of War when they have just as much right to showcase (and support, somewhat desperately) the Games for Windows/Vista platform? Halo 3 is going to have a huge launch in September, and so many games are to follow. I might be the only one who was impressed with 360. Maybe I'm just feeling good about their warranty announcement in the past couple of weeks.

Nintendo continued to aim straight towards mainstream with all of its products, and Wii Fit is sure to sell well. The gimmicky zapper wasn't... awesome... but for it's price, it's not a bad little accessory to have. I enjoyed the demos of the Super Mario and Metroid games, but there wasn't much else I was geared up for.

Sony's E3 showing has apparently been undermined by the "announcement" that they will discontinue the newer--cheaper--60GB systems in favor of focusing on the cheaper-for-Sony 80GB machine without the Emotion Chip. So, emulation for all of the older generation of titles, but more importantly, Sony still stands as the system you only get if you have money burning a whole in your pocket. Where was FFXIII, by the way. The titles they showed, however, were excellent, but none that really surpassed what I saw the 360 doing. Killzone2 was great... but you know, COD4 was a bit better.

Only PC games I was intereted in had limited showing, and none with new footage. Starcraft 2 and Crysis really did not demonstrate much. All I know is that I am going to have to call Alienware or Voodoo and take out a second mortgage to build a rig that can run Crysis properly... and you know, that 360 Elite is looking better and better all the time.

Pretty soon I'm just going to get a 360 out of spite, since Nintendo can't put Wiis into stores. Actually, I would be getting a 360 for Mass Effect, but right now I'm just feeling annoyed. And spiteful. I do not feel so spiteful as to purchase a PS3, however. I would have to be furious and crazy to do that.

Guitar Heroes I and II are fun to play. I am glad that I have been able to catch up and enjoy them both. My only issue is that the songs that you buy are from no-names... I didn't say they were bad songs, but you don't feel like much of a guitar hero when you're playing a song from an indie band on an indie label, etc. It would be great to see The Who, Pink Floyd, etc. at a later date (perhaps Rock Band? GH III?) although I do like the 80's titles they are putting out for the next go-round.

I cannot believe that I have had Final Fantasy XII since November and I have not played it yet. It's not that I don't want to, it's just... maybe I don't quite have the time to devote right now, and games like GH are quick to pick up and play in small sessions, and you don't have to fish through strategy guides to make progress, unlike the FF series.

I thought God of War II was a bit easier than God of War... maybe it was just that playing the first one made me a bit better with Kratos, or that I could use the same type of attack patterns with Rage of Poseidon-ish combos.

Also put BF2 on my PC, mostly crashing helicopters and jets in spectacular fashion.

But where are the Wiis?

It is about time I started playing Oblivion.  I mean, I had the rig to run it, and run it pretty well, but I... well, to be honest, I was afraid that my life would be slowly sucked away in Tamriel, much like it was during Morrowind.  So far, though, so good.  I'm enjoying the experience, and I even went out and added Knights of the Nine to boot.  I'll hold off on Shivering Isles this month until I put in a few more (hundred?) hours.

Why did I cave?  Mostly because I finished Twilight Princess this past weekend and I was feeling ambitious.  Not that TP was much of a challenge, but it was nice to get back involved in an engaging story arc.

All things considered, losing hours to Oblivion is better than losing your soul to WoW... haven't touched the MMORPG stuff... too afraid I'll need rehab if I do.  Diablo II taught me a few lessons about life--like the importance of having one.