Having a XBL-Gamertag without an actual Xbox in its physical form at home turns out not to be the best way to keep your points up. So I gotta get my hands on a X360 and before some of you fellow PC-aficionados out there cry "Blasphemy" you gotta admit that not only the Xbox is the closest thing to a PC you can get while sticking to consoles in general, but also that the X360 with its seamless XBL-support is a damn tempting piece of hardware. Seriously though, it's all about points. Sony can do whatever they like and Nintendo can wave with their Wii-mote in front of my face as much as they want - give me Achievements and give me points and you can consider myself hooked to a platform. And who knows, with Windows Vista supporting the "Live experience" as Peter Moore and ol' Bill Gates called it, I might even reconsider my verdict about that new OS to some degree. Who cares if it's just the old arcade-formula of beating the highest number on the scoreboard but combined with the connected experience of XBL, the direct competition with other players online and the simple fact that points are gathered playing whatever game you like, it's just priceless. I don't know who to blame for this time-killer, but whoever it is - he should be sitting on his own yacht right now, playing with his X360 and wasting his free time aboard gathering points... I think you got my point.

So I'm currently testing this G15-keyboard by Logitech, which is marketed at being the ultimate gaming keyboard. Y'know what - this is also a casemodder's dream in addition to being a gamer's dream and it's a real nice keyboard in and of itself. First of all, typing on that thing is really a blast, it's not as hard as Dell's OEM keyboards (that are already nice to type on) but not really soft either, it's nice and responsive and that's exactly what a gamer or even a heavy keyboard user needs. But with every new keyboard it needs some time getting used to - the first days I was always typing one letter next to the one I was actually hoping to hit. But after two or three days it works like a charm. And then there are the "gaming-features" - 18 seperate keys on the left side of the layout programmable with macros and keypresses or to launch programs and websites. It's basically what many current keyboards from Microsoft or Logitech are sporting nowadays: Programmable keys. But instead of just letting you launching the website or program of your choice, you can map actions to it. With it's current software's revision it even records delays between keypresses which makes it even account for in-game delays caused by lag and their like. So how does it work? You can either assign each of the keys a macro, keystroke or whatever using the profiler-application that always runs in the background (and therefore replaces the iTouch-software used in other products from Logitech). Each one of the 18 "gamer-keys" can be assigned three different functions thanks to three seperate buttons on top of the keys, which let you "switch" between sets of macros or keystrokes. This makes for a whooping number of 54 programmable "keys" - sounds nice but has a catch: You have to remember each and everyone of it, because those keys are only labeled with "G1" to "G18" - no OLED-extravaganza here. But it doesn't end there - the profiler is application-aware, which means that it detects when an application or game is started it got a seperate profile for. Remembering each macro for every game sounds like an awful task, but at the end of the days it's each gamer's choice how many profiles he wants to create and maintain. So what if you notice that an additional macro you haven't recorded yet might come in handy, but you're currently in the game and task-switching to windows isn't the solution you're looking for? Simply press the button labeled "MR" and follow the procedures on the LCD-display the keyboard is outfitted with. Yeah right - a LCD-display on the keyboard. And here's where the casemodders come into play. After days G15-communities have given rise to native applications for that display and even found ways to use third-party LCD-software (for those LCD-panels used in - right - casemodding) to display systems stats and more. I think I'm gonna end it here and save the rest for my official review at eXtreme-players.de. Don't worry, I might even try to translate it and publish it here as well ;)

After years and years of just reading Gamespot I finally decided to participate. I don't expect many people to read this blog - hell I don't even expect that anyone even cares if he reads this, but just for the sake of filling the emptiness you just wasted one or two minutes of reading this paragraph! Now E3 is over, yet another year without me participating but as my executive editor told me, 2007 might be the year and you bet I'm gonna pay Gamespot's fishtank a visit. All I need is one of those new passports with biometric data in it - hurray I always wanted to get my eye scanned and my fingerprints taken - a child's dream come true. That's it for now, I'm trying to fight myself through that plethora of options Gamespot's giving me here and I hope I really find some time running this blog as I'm currently swamped with work and the Games Convention is knocking at the door of us poor German editors who missed their chance at E3.