Two things came in the mail yeasterday. First was my XBox 360 HD DVD drive with King Kong, I hooked it up and hit play. Now, I have a Sony Grand WEGA 50" LCD with the 360 running at 1080i. I sat there looking at the movie and the only thing I noticed for a while was people with bad skin. There was one scene where Jack Black was on the deck of a ship at night and the lighting caused his face to be patches of orange and grey. Really didn't do anything fro me. I was getting ready to put it back on EBay when they hit the island. Action scenes are what HD DVD is made for. It blew me away. So I'm keeping it and waiting fro the price of HD DVDs to drop a little more or a sale. DeepDiscountDVD.com has some good prices, but last tiem I ordered UMD movies from them, they sent me the wrong titles and didn't respond to my emails so I stay away from them. Second thing that came was Lost Planet. Great visuals, OK game play. The grappling hook reminds me of playing Halo online with people who "customizes" their characters. You can only dash in the VR machines. If you jump, there is a second when you land that you can't move. And you have to keep collecting thermal energy or you'll die. I blasted throught the first actual level on hard with no problems. Not really interested in finishing it. Finally, I've been playing Superman Returns. It was fun for a while, until I figured out how to kill things faster. The last two times I played, I fell asleep flying around waiting fro something to happen. I'm 80% done and I have to finish, if I can stay awake. Finally, I've started renting from GameznFlicks.com. Not a great selection, but the prices are great. Much cheaper that GameFly and the speed seems the same up here in the Northeast.

OK. It's been a long time since I've posted. I no longer work in a school, but the new job is very hi-tech and I love it. I don't know what happened this XMas. I wanted the PS3 so bad, but I got an XBox 360 off EBay for $299 shipped and new. Yeah, not a great price, unless it's the premium edition. I also ended up with a WII. I had the PS3 at my house, but sadly walked back to Walmart with it because I couldn't come up with a reason to use it. I've been renting games like mad for the 360 before buying. I'm supprised at the great games that have not so great graphics. Saints Row and Dead Rising were especially disappointing. Gears of War blew me away though. Great gameplay, but why did they have to put that stupid warthog/UV light mission in there? It sucked. The WII I got for one reason, WII Sports. I got 4 controllers and the component cable and it rocks. My arms are sore, but that's a good thing, I think. Back to the 360. My hd-dvd drive arrives in 2 days. I was blu ray all the way a few months ago, but for $150 shipped on EBay, how could I resist. It comes with King King and if the difference between my upconverted DVD's and this isn't noticable, look for it on EBay. One last note, what is up with the Microsoft PrePaid card errors? I bought 4 cards and none of them work. Ended up buying online from microsoft directly for a little more. Google microsoft live prepaid error for a really long thread on this on Microsoft's own site.

So the PS3 isn't coming out until next XMas season, which means I'll be sitting in a corner hugging the box wondering if I should sell it on EBay the first day I have if the price goes high enough. On top of that, all HD-DVD players have had their release delayed by about a month. Are there that many problems with the new formats? I'm usually very weary about buying first gen tech products anyway because of bugs and glitches, but with all these hold ups, I'm hoping that these new systems will work flawlessly on release. Next, Walmart ain't gonna sell UMD movies no more. Major studios are starting to drop the format. Is it the end of using UMD's for movies? Yeah, it is. I own 2 UMD's that have video on them, HellBoy and the free sampler. The only reason I have HellBoy was a buy 1 get one half price sale at deepdiscountdvd's, whom I will never buy from again (but that is a different story). I bought 4 UMD's and sold 3 on EBay to pay for HellBoy. Before I even owned HellBoy, I owned a 1 GB memory card and PSP movie conversion software. So when I decided I wanted KungFu Hustle, I bought the DVD and converted it. Can the UMD movie format be saved? I think it can, but they are going to need to make the movies cheaper. A lot cheaper. Like half the cost of a DVD. I remember the first movie I bought. Eddie Murpy RAW on VHS. My mom wasn't too happy with me, but at the video store this used movie was on sale for $25, marked down from $75! Only the rich had personal video collections back then. The rest of us rented. DVD's started off in the $20 to $30 range where VHS left off for new release movies and delivered much, much, much better quality video and sound. When the DVD Players started droping to $25 on sale, Blockbuster should have yanked all the VHS tapes off the shelves. Honestly, why are they still there? Anyhow, the PSP is not going to replace the portable DVD player I own. It's just going to allow me to watch movies when I want to take a break from a game. If there were home UMD players with a HDMI connector and a UMD-RW drive for my computer , both reasonably priced, that would also help the format out. On it's current track, I expect to find cheap UMD movies flooding EBay in the near future. Oh, yeah. They are already there. Finally, I work in a school. A girl needed an MP3 on her flash drive for some class performance, but it wouldn't play. I went to use WMP to play it, but the DRM from walmart.com prevented it. Nothing I tried could play or convert the MP3. Not that I tried to hard. If I had an analog solution at work, I could have converted it to CD, but since I usually don't deal with music files excpet to keep them off the network, I didn't. I believe in DRM, but there has to be someway to transfer songs to another computer. I have 5 at my house in different rooms and I stream my MP3 collection. Would buying a song online prevent me from doing this? I'm guessing WMP would let me burn and rip the song into a non-DRM format. Honestly, the last CD I bought was the latest Saw Doctors CD and before that was the previous Saw Doctors CD. I have a 6 CD changer in the car that I don't use and XM Radio. DRM doesn't effect me right now and I do believe in it, but my first experience with it made it feel a little too restrictive.

I got the PSP for XMas with 2 games. Two months later I have 11 games. How many have I beat? None. Am I the only person that does this? My neighbor on the other hand has the problem I had in college. He plays the same game constantly. For him, it's MGS on the PS2. In college, I let perilousrealms.com distract me for the better part of a year. I became a powerful human/elf assassin with a clan and everything. I was so into the gameplay that it became the first and last game I really let myself get sucked into. There are times since college when I will not play games for weeks or months at a time. When I finally sat down to finish Pandora Tomorrow on XBox, I saw that my save games were 9 months old! Now that I think about it. I was addicted to games long before college. I remember spending every dime and all my time playing or watching people play Pacman, Gorf, Space Fury, Donkey Kong and whatever other games that were kept in the corners of the three local penny candy stores that went out of business before I hit high school. PerilousRealms was just the first time I noticed that playing games was overshadowing the other areas of my life. When my wife takes the kids to her mothers for a week to enjoy the ocean, I play games from the time I get home from work until bed. The PSP has made gaming more accessable to me recently. All I need is a pair of headphones and I'm not bothering anyone or hogging the TV. But still, I bought 9 games in 2 months! And I remeber thinking "I'll play thins after I beat the other games" yet I know I'll be lucky if I beat 2 or three of the games. Not because they are hard. That's not a problem. So far, Metal Gear Ac!d and WipeOut Pure are the only games holding my attention since I got them. I'm taking a small break from them while playing Medievil, but that's what I say now. The only one I want to go back to is Ac!d because I want to figure out how to get better than a D on every level. I can complete the missions, I just use too many cards. I have to go, but what is wrong with me? Am I addicted to buying games or am I secretly hoping for a major relapse back into game addiction and keeping a stash handy?

Sadly, I cannot bring myself to buy an XBox 360. Why? First of all, I can only find the core system. The best thing about my XBox was no memory cards needed so I want my HD. Second, while passing a display the other day I noticed the prices of the games for the first time. I could wait for the prices to go down. There are enough $10 XBox titles to keep me busy for years and PSP games have had quite a few discounts lately. I could also rent the 360 games from GameFly, but if you ruin more than one disk you pay for it. The 360 ruining disks is another thing. I read about it as much as the power supply overheating. I work in a school district and I have been talking with kids who have gotten their hands on one. None of them have any problems. Oddly enough, the only one I know of locally that had problems was the Toys R Us display model. The RZone guy I talk to said they had problems with it since day 1. I think if I had a 360, I really wouldn't have any problems except affording the games. The last thing that pissed me off was an article I read about original XBox's and availability. All the sudden I see only $170 bundles. Where is the $150 core system gone. That's just not fair. Sorry, Microsoft. I'm going to wait for a new version. One thing that kept me from getting too 360 crazy was the promise of a spring full of PS3's. Well, the international standards people had a hard time agreeing on standards, but I think there was some progress today with the DRM standard used with the BluRay drives. Despite that, the news has been reporting the PS3 is going to be about $900 to make! I don't know about anyone else, but I was hoping for a sub $500 tag. I know overtime the price to make them will go down, but the $230 cell processor and the $300 BluRay drives are killing them. No wonder the 360 shipped without an HD optical drive. I guess for now I'll just hold my PSP close to my face and pretend it is a PS3. Sony's stock has been hurt by all the news and rumors abotu delays and production costs. So much new that it got me to thinking "What has Nintendo been doing with their new console". Honestly! Every night I go through 10 good video game news sites and I can't remember the last article I read about the system. I've seen pictures of the system and the controller looks like a remote from hell, but I know nothing about how production is going. Is no news good news or are they playing if you don't have anything good to say, don't say anything?

Yeah, I'm currently 32 and yeah, I own more video games than all the kids in my neighborhood. I still have my pong game from when I was a kid and my first hand held game called Split Second. They both work fine. On ocassion I pull out the Sega CD system and play Eternal Champions because I love the way the game cheats on the harder levels. At one time or another, I've owned ever video game system out there except for one or two rare ones and the XBox 360 (I'll get to that later). Until recently, my favorite console was XBox, followed by GC, Sega Genesis/CD/32X, N64, Nintendo DS, Sega Saturn, Atari Jaguar, etc, etc, pong and then PS2. I've owned and returned the PS2 5 times and never understood why the system with the worst graphics in it's generation was the most popular. The longest I played PS2 games wasn't even on a PS2, but the courts ruled Bleem for the PC illegal and ended support for my favorite PS2 emulator. The system with the best graphics (GC) couldn't get anyone over the age of 13 interested in it . The middle child, XBox, was perfect. He had OK graphics, but the games were not geared towards kids. This was a system for adults. Take a look at the original controllers. They were huge and I loved them. Going back to the until recently part, the next generation is coming out. I already had and sold my Nintendo DS last christmas, but my loathing of the PS2 made me cringe at the sight of the PSP. I was laughing at the original reports that the UMD's were popping out of them when players twisted the system a little. I didn't even look at the specs after that. Then while visiting a friend, her 12 year old was playing Twisted Metal: Head On. Being the good kid, he offered the system for me to try a round. It was then I realized that Sony put some time and thought into this system. I ended up buying a used one with 2 games (WipeOut Pure & Dynasty Warriors) and a hard case on EBay for $214, showing it to my wife , thanking her for the early present, and immediately installing an XM radio in her car to return the kindness of giving me a gift so early. I even bought the PSP version of her favorite series, SSX, which oddly she likes better than the XBox version on a 50" Sony LCD projection TV with the component adapter attached. The PSP is not without fault. I like the original XBox controllers because I have bid hands. 6'3" with a size 13 shoe has problems with smaller controllers. My hands were cramping after playing WipeOut for more than 15 minutes. I hadn't felt pain like that since Nintendo Thumb from playing the original 8 bit system for too long. I was able to reproduce the PSP cramp effect on my tiny wife and some older nephews. Luckily they have solutions for this. I opted for the Sound Grip that Circuit City had for $15 after XMas. Not only did my fingers wrap around the system without touching in the back, but the curve of the grip chased the pain away. The Sound Grip also solved problem #2, lousy speakers. The first time I put the ear buds in, I realized the original speakers had no power even though the PSP is capable of fantastic sound, The Sound Grip isn't the best speaker system, but it was fine when playing poker with some friends. I've heard of dea and stuck pixels, but I haven't had those problems. Great things about PSP: I have a computer dedicated to recording TV shows using Beyond TV and a Sony DVD Camcorder (dvr-401). Nero Recode was fine for converting video to PSP format, but I ended up buying IMToo. I liked the video manager that was included and it worked great. Add a 1 GB Duo Pro card and while people were showing family photo's at the next XMas party, I was showing the video of my 4 year old holding her baby brother for the first time at the hospital (he's almost 4 months old now!) in very high quality. I thought the wireless was fantastic. I went online and got all the WipeOut Packs. Then I updated from 1.5 to 2.6. Yeah, I can't do homebrew now, but I don't feel like making my PSP a brick anytime soon, so the web browser and some of the other little tweaks was worth it. Then, I added a poker game and Twisted Metal to my collection and played others online. I think you can do this with WipeOut, but I could never find a game going on. Finally, I think the best thing about the PSP is all the accessories that are out and the ones in development. The BlueTooth Dongle for BT Headphones is already out. In Japan there is a 20GB drive that can work through the USB port. At E3 there were mentions of a GPS system. And if I didn't already have BeyondTV, I'd probably buy a LocationFree box to watch TV on my PSP. Can you tell I love the PSP? Next time....more on TNG of gaming (360 vs PS3 and some Nintendo thing)