So anyway, I was sitting in best buy, wondering what I should look at, when I spot the 360 section. I walk on over, and seeing that I got a load of cash available to me to spend, I ponder over getting an Xbox 360 Pro system. I even grabbed one off the shelf, started looking at the box (as I always do for like 10 minutes before I buy something that is over $200). Then I thought to myself... "why do I need one?"

All my thinking came to a halt, as I sat the box down on the ground, went over to the Apple store, and sat down in a lounge chair nearby. If I was going to spend that much on something, then I definitely needed to remind myself why I was doing it. I failed to think of anything. After all, pretty much all good 3rd party titles that I want are coming out either for PS3 only or for PS3 AND 360... and the ones that come out for both consoles these days are usually the exact same (hopefully that means everyone knows how to make PS3 games now).

So, Mass Effect? Nah... it looks like its gonna pull the same stunt that Shadowrun did: lots of hype, and sad result. Do I want Ace Combat 6? Well somewhat, but not really.. my dad wants that game more than I do. Then I think... HALO 3 AND GEARS OF WAR, PLUS GEARS OF WAR 2 WHICH YOU ALREADY KNOW IS GOING TO COME OUT!

But my stupid thinking kicks in again... "do you really wanna buy an entire console if you're only going to buy 2 or 3 games for it? Plus, you barely have time to play your PlayStation 3 as it is with school". Also, another question I had was "am I willing to pay the fee for Xbox Live Gold?"

I walked out of best buy... No Xbox 360, and a wallet which still has that $349. I'm glad as hell that I didn't buy it.

So I mean look at all the great games that I want that are coming out for both systems: COD4:MW, NFS:Prostreet, Burnout Paradise, MoH: Airborne... And look at the titles which are coming to ps3 exclusively that I also plan to buy/download: MGS4, Singstar, Home, LittleBigPlanet... So I mean, thats quite a bit of money spent right there on just the eight games that I listed, and I most likely have left some other ones out by accident. And, I only can play like 2-3 hrs of PS3 per week now, because of my homework load.

Regardless... Microsoft better come up with some game ideas besides for Halo 3, And I highly doubt they do. I think they were so excited for Halo 3 and that they basically got a free ride off of it, that they didnt plan after that. If they think Halo 3 will last any bit of long as Halo 2 did, they're wrong... because from what I can see, multiplayer between the two really ain't all that different. If they come up with 2 good upcoming exclusives, I will buy a 360. Otherwise, forget it MS, the only way you'll be gettin money from me is when I upgrade all my computers to Vista and buy office 2007 for all of them.

I just wanted to give my opinion on the reasons I believe may have an affect on the whole "you can't hear your online singer for your band on Rock Band" thing... Here is the things i think may have caused this:

• 1. The unavoidable internet-lag screwed up the timing of the singer to the other two people when they tried it
• 2. They don't want singers replacing every word in a song with "f***"
• 3. They're afraid that, like MySpace, 40 year old men will pose as hot singers and coax small children into giving up their personal details
• 4. They're too lazy to implement the feature.

Those are my thoughts. Thanks for reading this completely random post, but I thought it was time to make a post that wasn't a rant against GameSpot.

My title is of course sarcasm because Gamespot now quite obviously is not for PS3 and totally for 360. Yesterday, Tor Thorsen posted YET ANOTHER ONE of his anti-PS3 news articles, saying that Sony quote "Begged" for 3rd party support, although he got the information from a clearly biased, untrustworthy source. News for you Tor! Just because someone says it, doesnt mean its true. So here, I'll help you out with your next article Thorsen. Miyamoto... Is scared of monkey screeches. COME ON! GO! SPREAD THE WORD! WRITE A LITTLE NEWS ARTICLE ON GAMESPOT SAYING HOW SOMEONE TOLD YOU THAT, AND make sure you spin my quotes so that everyone thinks I was implying something that Nintendo is begging monkeys to buy their consoles but its not working!

But seriously... Don't ever get the Idea that I'm saying the guy should be fired. no no no. I'm implying that the guy clearly knew people, and thats how he somehow managed to get a job at GameSpot. So, I won't hold the actual GameSpot team as a whole accountable for hating the PS3. After all, the review team obviously is subject to no bias, because some Multi-platform titles even got rated higher for PS3 than they did 360. However, the same cannot be said about the news team. So, news team.. EVER WONDER WHY YOUR JOB IS TO ONLY POST A FEW NEWS ARTICLES EVERYDAY? Well, its because of this.

Today, a headline was released: PS3 is outselling 360 in Europe in a 2 to 1 ratio, respectively. However, does this get put on GameSpot? Nope. Now, yesterday, some random japanese dude who doesn't know s*** about video games comes and says that "Sony begged 3rd parties for PS3 support"... does that make it to GameSpot? You bet you're ass it did.

So GameSpot staff.. when you come to my page to moderate it.. the go ahead and moderate it, but do something about the damn News staff.

I am beginning to sense that the console wars are starting the quieting-down stage, as the PS3 gets less and less terrible, and begins to actually compete with the 360.

So what is one of the remaining things that continues to keep the console war going? Well, its another war itself... format wars. HDDVD vs BLURAY. So, I'd just thought I'd throw in my two-cents about what I think the format war looks like right now.

Right now, Its looking like Sony actually did make one majorly good decision, which was making blu-ray the main PS3 format. So far, it has outsold HDDVD 70 to 30 percent (thats a little more than a 2 to 1 ratio). Also, Blu-ray's library is more expansive, and supported by the biggest publishers, excluding Paramount because dumba** toshiba paid them to go HD-DVD only (now I will never be able to see Blades of Glory in 1080p)! Additionally, Dell is Blu-ray exclusive, offering only to place Blu-ray drive upgrades into their computers, not HDDVD. Blockbuster only rents Blu-rays. So right now, it definitely is the most popular.

However, this has the potential to change. Right now, the PS3 is the cheapest Blu-ray player on the market, however that is even still a bit pricy. Whereas, they have HDDVD players that are cheaper. What that means is that all the people who havent upgraded to HD formats yet (which is the overwhelming majority of the world), will all be making the decision as standard DVD is slowly phased out. So, Blu-ray better hope that they can manufacture a bluray-laser that is really cheap in price in the next few years, or they'll be losing lots of sales.

BTW... in a random note, Toshiba's laptops suck. dont buy them. I have one, and I went through 3 motherboards in the warranty period, and now it fried again, and the warranty is out. The best part.. the laptop is only 2.5 years old.

I love how I hear people insult Sony all the time because they want to see them fail so much. They are totally ignorant to the fact that Sony is actually a bigger company than Microsoft is. Sony is actually on position number 69 on the Fortune Global 500 Companies list. Where's Microsoft? Well, they're all the way down at position number 139.

Now, what does this mean? I'm just trying to say that Sony owns so much of the electronics market, that most of the people who insult sony and want them to die, also own one of their TVs, stereos, computers, laptops, surround sound systems, DVD players/VCRs, computer monitors, software, GPS's, phones, PDAs, camera, or digital camcorders. So really, people who say "I'VE NEVER BOUGHT A PRODUCT FROM SONY, AND I NEVER WILL! MICROSOFT FTW!"... go look around your house. Chances are, you own at least one of their products.

Aside from that, what I especially think is funny is how most people who have Xbox 360s this generation had PS2s Last generation, so its really funny how much some people hate sony, when not long ago they were waking up to their PS2 and huge library of PS2 games every day.

[UPDATE 10/14/07]: As pointed out to me by DPumbliQ Sony extends way farther than consumer electronics... They're you're source for many Movies, TV shows, and Music too! Can't stop watching Casino Royale? Always turn on the TV to watch Jeopardy every night? Do you have every Chris Brown, Chris Daughtry, Bruce Springsteen, Foo Fighters, or Kelly Clarkson song on your iPod? Then Congratulations! You are helping Sony thrive yet another day.

Thanks again to DPumbliQ for pointing out my huge oversight there :)

You know, If I had a quarter for every time some dude on GameSpot has yelled at me for supporting/defending the PS3, I'd be a very wealthy young man. Which is why I fail to understand... Why did I just get in trouble for yelling at some guy for making an ignorant, stupid insult at the PlayStation Network? Its to the point of being really gay Oh wait... did I just say gay am I even allowed to say that on here? who knows... gay gay gay You know honestly, I dont care if GameSpot takes my points away. If they take away my points, it doesnt matter. if they ban me, I really dont care. honestly.

P.S. i betcha that this blog post will either A: get deleted or B: get me banned, and then get deleted. how much u wanna bet?

Then again, I'll only get in trouble if someone reports me. plz dont report me. thx

hi guys... i just got started with school (as I'm sure a lot of other people just did too), so I haven't been able to post all that much.

anyway... like my title said, I think PlayStation Home will not be here for a while.

Why do I think this? Well, some of the things that have happened relating to Home surprise me. First of all, www.homebetatrial.com, the official Home Beta website, was risen early this year, and updated only ONE TIME (which was merely adding bilingual stuff). It still reads "Keep checking back to register an interest in an exclusive CLOSED beta trial of Home." Closed? The Closed beta has been underway since April, and the website still hasn't been appropriately updated.

Second, They announced an open beta multiple times, and pretty confidently too. And it doesn't seem like they'd ditch the idea. However, if they didn't delay the launch, Open beta testers would have a mere approx 30 days before the release of home to find bugs and inconveniences, and sony would have to implement any needed changes and rush the final build of Home out just in time for the beginnning-of-october launch (launch date from: IGN.com). I seriously doubt that they would ditch the Open Beta idea.

Third, they have just about no first-party official info about home out. All of us have pretty much a very vague picture of home in our minds, because Sony so far has failed to release an official website, or even a descent information page about Home. The only sources we have is the closed beta vids on YouTube and the third party Press sites (like GameSpot and IGN).

It will truly be interesting to see if Sony will release Home on time, or if they will yet again manage to take one of their most highly-anticipated new products, and turn it into a launch failure, similar to that of the PlayStation 3 itself.

I'll cut to the chase on this post: I got Vista, it just plain sucks.

My first complaint: How would you like it if you had friends (or kids, for the older people) and every time you asked/told them to do something, they would say... "I need to confirm that you actually want me to do this. Please say yes if you do." Well, that's how you're gonna feel when you upgrade to Vista. Whenever you want to make a change in any setting, the screen will dim (microsoft wanted the mood to be dramatic and really make you think about what you are doing) and the message will pop up "Windows needs your permission to continue." EVERY SINGLE TIME! This is one of those things where, when I was beta testing windows vista back in the middle of last year, I thought for sure they would get rid of it. But they didn't. It's still in the thing i just spent $250 on.

Next complaint: THEY COPIED MAC OS X. The search, the photo sorting, Windows Mail, the calendar thing, and gadgets... IT WAS ALL seen first on Mac OS X. No surprise, they copied features in many other products besides windows (lets look at Office, their servers, and Xbox 360) but I won't get into that now.

Next complaint: Networking support is weak, overly complex, and not as flexible as what was found in XP service pack 2. For example, I have Comcast Broadband Internet service for my home. So far, setting up that service has been easy, seeing that I have a broadband router. However, Vista didn't like the way my router was set up, even though XP, my PlayStation 3, and even my friend's XBOX 360 had no problems with my router before. But vista did. I had to change a lot of settings to get it to work. On another story, my grandfather does not have a router, he connects his computer directly to his cable modem. Vista wanted him to setup PPPOE with endless settings, usernames, passwords, and other useless crap that Comcast didn't even have in place, just for simplicity of setup. In XP, you could simply plugin the Comcast modem into your Ethernet port, setup a simple IP and service name thing, and you would be done. Just another example of what used to be a simple function turned to Vista hell.

Next: There's basically three ways to do everything, but none of those ways is uncomplicated. It seems like Microsoft's way of making windows more secure is just by making it overly complex, so much that even some of the easiest tasks on XP take 4 times the effort to achieve with Vista. As i mentioned above, with the network problems... there are four COMPLETELY SEPARATE places you can go to in order to change a connection's settings, and most times to change or even open one of those setup windows, the permissions box will bother you again.

Finally: Whoever's idea it was to run an already-unstable operating system using an unstable video technology (directX) should be fired. The Vista UI runs off directX, and the experience has never been more sluggish. I ran vista on a computer I own with 2 GB RAM, a $200 NVIDIA video card (its a good performer, although its not top of the line), and on a DUAL CORE processor. The whole computer with all the other features cost me over $1000, but the performance of Vista? Average. When vista boots, performance, I will admit, is perfect. But, as any longtime windows owner knows: Every minute running makes it slower. By the time a few hours rolled around, the system would sometimes fail with layer processing (that is, the window I was viewing might fall behind other windows and then come back, or sometimes begin to flash and fail to render correctly. And, a typical Internet Explorer failure: I would type an address into the address bar, and it would take one second to draw each letter, until eventually all the letters i had typed 10 to 15 seconds ago were finally in the bar, and I could hit enter.

And that performance was on my middle-end machine. More than half of windows users who would UPGRADE to vista would not have a computer with spec even close to middle-end. Many with very low end. How will windows run there.

Well, that ends the long post. I need to say, I've beta tested and RC-tested (release candidate tested) windows since middle of 2006. I need to say, in the beginning, I was semi-impressed, but once RC2 came around and I realized these problems weren't getting better, i realized that Vista was a problem

Thanks for reading my long post.

EA: "PS3 is hard to develop for and Xbox 360 is easy"

... Not according to the GRAW 2 team. They think it's nonsense.

I want every single person that reads this page to VISIT THIS LINK:

http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=27782

[UPDATE] I withdraw insulting EA. They defended the PS3 "Madden 08" and stated simply that developers have been developing with the 360 for almost 3 and a half years now, whereas ps3 developers have only had just over a year with the console. This can be found here: http://www.gamesindustry.biz/content_page.php?aid=27671

Another week is almost gone... another week with no home beta.

That means, my prediction was wrong. No home beta appeared AT ANY TIME today in the PlayStation Network Store, so don't fear that you missed anything. I am sorry if I caused anyone to sit staring at their TV screen all day today to see if Home appeared there.

Anyway, I G2G... my brother's friend is spraying a can of compressed air all over the room while holding it upside down, so that he can get me off the computer.. and I'm geting really high real fast

omg the stuff has a bittering agent in it...