box came yesterday... mailed out today... now...... wait

so i think i figured out why my 360 died... my roomate was movin around his Wii because he brought it with him when we went to san diego for the weekend. When he set up his wii again my power supply got knocked onto the carpet.... i didn't notice this until after my 360 died, but i played it like 3 times with the power supply on the carpet... it froze twice, and then got the rrod the next day.. and i am betting that is why it overheated / got the rrod.

it's been over a week since i asked them to send my coffin... i am betting that its takin a while because of thanksgiving... i might buy a 360 arcade and play that while i wait.. i'll sell one off when it comes back i think.

i've gone all the way until now without any real problems with my 360, but now I have the 3 red lights.  ggrrrr...  i guess i was just hoping that it was something that happened to "other" people.    i think i just didn't play enough for it to happen that soon, so it took this long to break down.     hahahha  glad they extended the warranty

http://www.get-well-gamers.org/
i just found this and support it whole-heartedly.  I've been in an out of hospitals since I was 7 and can remember playing atari 2600 because it was the only thing they had there.  I will be donating my old stuff here.

I saw the Darjeeling Limited, the new wes anderson movie, yesterday.  It's awesome.  If you like previous wes anderson movies you will love this movie.


I finally got to rank #1 in PGR4 2 days ago.  I'm saving my money right now, but I am gonna try to get guitar hero 3 and assassin's creed eventually.


I have quite a bit of work to do in the next couple weeks, like a 15 page literature review for my geo600 **** but I hope to get some gaming in there somewhere.  Anyway, thats all.  Have a great halloween everyone!

ok.... so possibly no games for the rest of the year....  unless i get some as presents or something.  I paid bills today and after that i calculated that i have 50 dollars in my bank account.  crap!     so yeah.  no more games for me! 

Ok i didn't bother doing any math whatsoever... I haven't played gears single player in a while, but I don't like the fact that PC is getting more of the story than the 360 owners.  I don't wanna hear that the engine "evolved" to the point that it can't run on the 360... that is utter rubbish!  I am not asking for the newer version of the engine!  I am asking for the levels.  Which, correct me if i am wrong, could be implemented fairly easily and the "enhancements" of the PC version just wouldn't be put in.  I know it's not as simple as that, but it is also NOT impossible, as Mark Rein is saying. 

He is full of crap.  They better figure out some way of providing that content to us or I doubt I will be spending my hard earned money come Gears of War 2 or even UT3.  I would have even thrown a few bucks their way for the new content, but now I don't think they deserve to be paid for it.    

They gave us a great game, but it was incomplete.  They showed off a huge enemy and made a big deal about it, especially in the trailers and yet.. we were never going to be able to fight.  The story jumped and moved rather fast, especially at the end.  The last section of the game had much fewer chapters than the rest.  

Epic is on my blacklist for now.

Ok, thus far I have never had a single problem with my 360.  I have had since launch and I was pretty proud of the fact that nothing had gone wrong with it.

then today i turned it on and the whole screen was tinted red and shifted to the right!!! i was freakin out.    i was about to call the xbox hotline thing but then i realize that the extended warranty covered the red lights and not something like this.   After I calmed down I tried taking out the VGA cable and plugging in the component cable.  It worked fine.....   so i was thinkin   "ok, the vga cable is just messed up"     then after sitting around doing homework for a while i tried plugging in the vga cable again and all of a sudden it works fine!!!   

i guess all i really needed to do was unplug/re-plug the connections... which seems weird because i've never had a problem before, but whatever.


i feel better now..... im gonna go have a beer  haha

Games, at their heart is an art form.  It's a money making art form, but then again, what isn't?  On the forums I saw a person that compared Bioshock to piece of piano music.  I thought that was amazing and a insightful.  Many games can be made, but aren't really technically good in an artistic sense.  If I may I would like to make a comparison.       

Halo, while it is popular is like a Micheal Bay film.  It's shallow and not very artistic.  I know the game has good graphics, but Transformers had good CGI, but that doesn't make it artistic.  

Bioshock played out like something that George Orwell or Orsen Welles would envision.  It was a beautifully crafted and scripted game.  It was well thought out.  It had a darkness that you don't find often in games because this industry isn't always taken seriously.  If you point out games like Doom or Manhunt-- these are not dark.  They are graphic and adult oriented in a visual sense, but they are not dark.  Bioshock has a very mature storyline.  It did not have violence for the sake of violence.  It had violence that actually meant something.  I have felt anything at dramatic as beating Andrew Ryan to death with a golf club while he did not ever once try to defend himself.  That is a darkness that is beautifully graphic and powerful.

There are only a handful of games that I would consider art.  What is true art in games is not limited to this list, but I would be hardpressed to list them all.

Bioshock
Ico
Shadow of the Colossus
Half Life 2 --- Half Life (the first one) was good, but nowhere near as groundbreaking as HL2
Zelda series --- the majority or beautifully crafted games with only minor setbacks in certain games
Castlevania Symphony of the Night
NiGHTS
Final Fantasy 7 --- other final fantasy games, such as X, that are very good as well.  FF12 was amazingly mature and beautiful.

Games don't always need a deep story or a story at all to be artistic.  Rez was a prime example of this.  I'm very glad to hear that it will be coming to XBL.

I don't remember what it was called but Sony showcased a game for PSP I believe a while back that was amazingly artistic.  It was a stick figure that walked around a maze that changed depending on the orientation that you looked at it.  It was beautiful.  

I just have a desire to see more artistic games in the industry.  They don't always do so well, which is sad.  Like Okami, was amazingly artistic and beautiful.  It didn't sell too well though.  I am very interested in Eternal Sonata because it seems to have a very unique story that you usually don't see in a jrpg.  I haven't played it so I cannot vouche for its artistic value, but it certainly looks beautiful.

Art in games isn't always flashy graphics.  Art is a combination of things.  Making game immersive, original, and fun all at the same time is difficult and should be praised.  Like I read in the forum, a genre doesn't need to be redefined to creat an original game.  That game has to simply use what it has in an extraordinary way.

i was just wondering.....  gears got a 9.6   and bioshock go a 9.2 or something....  now i love gears, but i think bioshock blows it out of the water.  i don't understand why gears got that high of a score when bioshock just seems to be such a more well thought out game.    i mean.  gears doesn't even have the complete game in the 360 version... i know  i am splitting hairs...  it just bugs me.   i know tha bioshock is doing very well.. and i am glad it came out now before the craptastic juggernaut that is halo 3 crushes everything in it's path.  i don't like the halo games that much.  i don't think the story is very interesting and the multiplayer never tickled my fancy (i also suck at it.. or let me rephrase... everyone else is a lot better than me).   i never had xbox so i never got sucked into halo 

I am a good amount of time into bioshock now.  just finished running errands (killing certain people) for a crazy dude...  i love this game so much!............anyways,    I think i just need gears 2 to come out and actually be a good and complete game this time.  don't ever tell me that just because we get a game earlier that we only get part of the story!       i can't afford all these games coming out that i want.  


oh yeah, i should have gotten the special edition of bioshock....  i got the special edition of gears and the bioshock SE seems much more worth it.  i think i am just gonna have  grudge against mark rein b/c he seems like a bastard.... he lies, minces words whathaveyou.. then agin who doesn't?    it's the politics of the industry.