Both Sony and Microsoft need to have a price drop on their system in the next couple months. I say need as in it would be more profitable for them to do so than to not given our current market saturation. The only people who haven't bought one of these consoles or the other are people who just outright don't want to pay as much as they are charging and seriously their time has come. Now with Metal Gear Solid 4, Sony has something to sell their system with besides Blu-Ray, and Microsoft has a great number of exclusive, and timed exclusives comming out this year (plus all the ones already out). Anyway, I can see a lot of reasons for people to be interested in both of these consoles and if both of them just sit there and do nothing, they'll lose sales.

Meanwhile the Wii is still happily priced at $250. On might wonder if Nintendo couldn't have sold it for more up to this point (and maybe beyond). It might have helped with supply problems.

I had the honor last weekend of meeting one of my fellow Gamespoters, 31160618. My wife, my son, and myself risked lide and limb to meet up with him last Saturday. If you didn't know already from this blog, 31160618 is a student at the University of Illinois. Using the map below you can see how dangerous this perticular journey actually was. Thanks to Google Maps' convienient avoid monster option, we were able to arrive safely on campus after only about an hour travel.

It is a long jounery filled with peril!

Despite the danger, the trip was worth it. 31160618 is a pretty impressive individual, having been emulsified by a rouge processing unit and survived. This same processing unit has proven to be extremely dangerous and has abducted many other Gamespot users, including: Bozanimal, GabuEX, and ThaSod. Gamespot user 31160618 now spends his time bringing sexy back, and taking blog requests. No topic is out of range for his blogging abilities as he's already proven by tackling such controversial topics as butt hair and violent, but appealing, old men. If that weren't enough, he is also Soapbox blogger and an aspiring artist.

Given all that information, it wasn't much of a surprise to find 31160618 was just as interresting in person. We talked quite a bit about his college cla.sses and about plans for after college. Also, I was able to confirm his current state non-gaming, mentioned in this blog (also talking about school). He still did pretty good for being a total n00b on Rock Band. He was also a little aprehensive around my son, but I don't blame him. I doubt you see many kids on college campus, plus he tends to be an attention hog. Next time I'll leave the boy at home, him being a constant destraction prevented any deeper conversation. Still, 31160618 has to be one of the most interesting people I've had the honor of meeting. If you're not currently tracking his blog, you should start right now.

I saw a recent Mac commecial where the PC had joined a group of other PCs who are, "Living with Vista". One PC goes to volunteer that he's been error free for five days, but then he just keeps repeating that. This commercial is rather offensive to me as I've been using Vista since a couple of months after its release and it is more than reliable.

Vist actually has a built in reliability monitor. It rates your computer on a scale from one to ten with one being the worst and 10 being the best. If you have one problem on your computer it knocks down your score and to gain it back you have to go 3 days with no problems. My current system rating is at 9.65.

My Reliability Score

Over the Past month I've had ONE application crash. On the 22nd of May, Windows Live Messenger crashed, and no I don't remember why. Consider the use my computer gets and the number of applications I use thats pretty good. Now my score has been lower at times. For a while I was getting an error when I opened Media Center, which is the application I use most. That problem seemed to take care of itself though, probably being addressed by an automatic update to Media Center.

Macs are not immune to software crashes or hardware problems. Of course Apple's Mac OSX doesn't have nearly the ammount of hardware or software compatability that the "horrible" Windows Vista has. For what its worth, Microsoft has done one heluva job ensure my computer's system stability with Windows Vista, and I enjoy using it every day... without errors.

is Rock Band ok? Thankfully it is. In a weird twist of fate my Xbox 360 and all the Rock Band equipment has been over at my parents and avoided the water. My wife who I couldn't get to even try video game a week ago has formed a "girl band" with 3 of my sisters. She's been playing the game more than I have over the past three days. Back to the flooded basement, my nice rug got wet, so I rolled it up annd dragged it dripping to my porch. If the sun will ever come out here it will dry. Our basement actually floods all the time, but this time was worse than usual. So anyway, no damage to speak of. Now we've just got to wait for things to dry out a bit.

My brother bought it for me and my family members to share. I'm so happy! :D He also bought Eternal Sonata. :)8)

So this creates a problem I never thought I would face. I have more video games to play then I have time for. Its strange because that makes me both happy and sad.

_Edit_

My wife played video games yesterday. It wasn't playing Rock Band either. She played Pac Mac Championship edition and Mable Blast Ultra. There is some hope for her yet. Of course she only played because my 16 month old son is obsessed with the 360 and could cause all sorts of problems were he left to "play" by himself. So mom helped. I think its neat.

I had a pretty nice weekend. I promised myself that I would finish Lost: Vis Domus and got really close, but I hate the game, so to avoid killing myself I put of the final three achievements until later. I did put in a good effort though and because Memorial Day weekend is so full of family get togethers I ended up having to drag my 360 to my wife's parents house to play it. I thought it would be pretty cool because we could all play together on Halo 3 or any of my wide selection of XBL Arcade games. I left Guitar Hero 3 at home on purpose because all my relatives suck so bad at the game that it is embarrasing even being in the room with them. I definitly didn't want to watch them fail on songs on easy for hours.

Anyway, after I got there I was reminded that my wife's family is not the same as my family. Where I have my siblings coming over to my house to play video games all the time, even when I bring the video games to them they're aprehensive. Even when it comes to a game like Pac Mac Championship Edition, they just looked at the controller and say it is too hard. The average complaint comes from their distaste for the dual analog sticks. They say they don't understand the whole moving and shooting thing. Well, I don't see how that relates to games like Pac Man and Bomberman, but I wanted to see if it was really all that hard for them.

I asked, maybe more like forced, my father-in-law to play a co-op campaign game on Halo 3 on easy. As soon as we could his character is looking at the ground and he is running around in circles trying to figure out how to go forward. When I explain to him the you pretty much always just hold forward on the left stick and just move your views to turn he managed to walk forward, but would continue walking until he hit a wall, then get disorientied and start walking back in the same direction he came. It was very bad. In that short time he was able to throw a grenade and kill our computer controlled team mates. That was the closest thing he had towards accomplishing anything on the stage. Of course after a few minutes he just gave up.

I thought this was perticularly sad. My father-in-law is not an avid gamer, but he does spend hours at a time playing Age of Empires on his computer. That is the only game I see him play, and he does only set the computers to the normal difficulty, but if you can manage the difficult multibutton, multi-mouse-click, control system of an RTS game, dual analog sticks shouldn't be too hard for you. You could say that you can't teach an old dog new tricks, but I don't think age has anything to do with it. The problem is that there is a mental block.

Now there is the Wii. The Wii has only one analog stick and to get it you have to plug in an adaptor. I personally find the Wii controlls needlessly complicated where I have to move the controller in some sort of special motion, which is always misinterpreted to perform a regular action (like swing your sword in Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess). Now maybe Zelda might be too complicated for people new to gaming, but they are more apt to try it if they have to flail their arms all around then if they use Gamecube control system which was much more acurate.

People say the Wii emulated your motions onscreen. Anyone who's used the Wii extensivly knows that this isn't true and button presses are just replaced with certain motions. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't, but like ALL video games, it is more about learning how to work things in the game than trying to force the game to adjust to your idea of how it should work (which is impossible). In fact this is how all new situations should be approached, but again there is that mental block. It is like the people who try to learn French by reading all the words as if they were English. Just shut-up forget what you know and learn what you don't. That is what my relatives wouldn't do.

Anyway I believe people like the Wii because it at least seems more like what they're used to. Whether it is or not depends on the game, but either way the mental block of Dual Analog Sticks are removed. They are happy to fail miserably repetedly on Wii Bowling because it at least seems like real bowling even though they are controlled in completely seperate ways. If you don't believe me, try to get me to bowl a turkey in reality and then have me try one on the Wii. I can tell you I will get the Wii one pretty easy, the real one... maybe on a good day. So despite an ever increasing number of fun and creative casual games, the xbox 360, and the PS3 (and the PS1, PS2, and original Xbox) are destined to remian unfriendly to casuals because of their "inaccesible" control schemes.

Lost: Via Domus follows the larger story of the TV show Lost. Like most games based off of television series I wasn't expecting much, but to be fair this game does a lot of things right. That doesn't mean it is any fun. This game exists only as a cruel form of punishment for people who dare venture to play it.

To be fair I'll list what is right about the game first. The graphics are all beautifully done, and you'll get a nice hands on look at areas in the island. The music is excellent and always complements the action. The voice work is also done well, but they did not get the actors from the show to do their characters (a glaring omission in my opinion).

Where the game fails in the completely horrid gameplay. The game consists of very few sequences repeated over and over. Though you might have fun a few times switching fuses around, you'll be entirely sick of it by the end. The worst thing they can have you do is walk through an unlit cave. You'll find yourself retrying these section over and over again because of annoying deaths caused by walking into a hole or running out of torches and being killed by... the dark, I guess. Most of the rest of your time in the game will be spent running around the island trying to figure out who you have to talk to or what specific item you're supposed to click on or the correct path you need to walk on. It doesn't take any skill just patience.

There is one redeeming section of gameplay and that is in the flashbacks. Your job it to recreate a photograph you're only shown parts of. It isn't hard, and only take a minute usually, but is more fun than the rest of the game. It is also the primary way the main character's story is revealed.

Of course the good of recovering your memories is totally washed out by one MAJOR annoyance. At the begining of every chapter, and every time you continue your game, it will show an unskipable scene of what happened "previously on Lost". Like you hadn't just played through it only a second ago! Since the chapters are only about 10 minutes long these 1-2 minute reviews are extremely redundant and only serve to frustrate you enough to put off finishing the game until later, at which point you'll still have to watch the scene again.

Despite well made graphics and sound it is hard to have good feelings about this game. Honestly this game would be better if it just played itself and you could set back and watch it (considering its based off a TV show, that kind of makes sense). The gameplay is at best boring and at worst completely frustrating. Even if you're a fan of the show or looking for easy achievement points, you should avoid this game.

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Haze has come out and the general trend seems to be for it to get bad reviews. I am apt to believe the editorial reviews because they're all pretty much in agreement, but I'm curious as to what other people WHO HAVE ACTUALLY PLAYED THE GAME have to say. I should be able to look at Gamespot player reviews to get an idea, but I can't.

Check here, here, and here.

Its no wonder most people have switched to writting blog reviews. The player reviews mean nothing because they're written by 13 year olds who haven't played the game and can't seem to write more than 80 characters on it, but insist on putting out their bad/good SCORE anyway. Like I care what score they put on it. They will give it a 7.0 and their review calls it bad. I don't get it.

Anyway if anyone has a non-idiotic opinion of Haze and wouldn't mind sharing it, I'd like to hear it.

Earth Defense Force 2017 takes mediocre graphics and combines it with mediocre gameplay, a nonessential story, and some lame voice acting and music. Plus, it is an Xbox 360 exclusive that in no way takes advantage of Xbox live. Basically this game falls short in every way, but somehow it manages to still be a little fun.

The game consists of 53 levels of alien killing. You start out with only a few weapons to take on the hoards of bugs and robots invading earth. Over time you gain more weapons and more health to take on more bugs and robots. That is the game in its entirety.

What makes it fun is that trying out new weapons can be pretty fun. Even within the categories of assault rifle, sniper rifle, rockets, missiles, grenades, and special, there is a lot of variation. For example on assault rifle might have a high rate of fire and less damage while one might have the inverse. It allows for a good amount of customization, though certain weapons will always be better on certain stages.

The negative side of the game is the repetition. The game plays pretty much the same through all of the levels. For a single play-through on the normal difficulty it will probably take a new player about 12 hours. While this would be great if there was enough content to justify it, but most of the levels are very similar. It is one of the few games that just seems to be a little too long. Also to unlock the achievements for the different difficulties you have to play through the whole game 5 times. I don't know that there are many people who wont get bored before investing the 60 hours in this game.

The most redeeming aspect is the two player co-op. With a second human working with you the stages move a bit more quickly. Of course this is local only and only for two people. It seems a glaring omission to leave out online. You'll have quite a few computer team mates and it is difficult to understand why there is no 16 player online.

The game has a few other problems worth noting. The frame rate drops quite a bit in this game. It is worse with two people. It is pretty easy to play through these instances and thankfully they wont get you killed. There are vehicles in the game that you SHOULD be able to use to help you, but you can't. All of them are so glitched you'll probably avoid them completely. Another issue is there is no auto save. You must remember to save before quiting. Though it should be easy, the one time you forget after playing through 20+ stages will be enough to make you quit for good.

So what is comes down to is Earth Defense Force 2017 is a game that can easily burn up a rainy Saturday with a friend, but it is hardly worth owning. However if someone would insist on beating it all, the game plays better in short burst rather than trying to beat it in one marathon session. Even then you'll probably want a friend to help you endure the whole thing. The harder modes can be pretty hard. If you're up for endless hours fighting repetitive enemies then this game is for you.

Click here for score and for Thumbs up/down

Now there is proof on my profile page of my console of choice. I've gotten the Xbox 360 Aficiondo emblem. Though I don't really like the quote on it, I do love achievements. I just don't think mine is high enough to justify making someone's grandma weep. Still, Xbox 360 is the only console I've saved my exclusive love for in any console generation. Maybe its because I had to buy all the stuff for it myself, or maybe its because it is that good. Either way, I love the Xbox 360 and wouldn't trade it for any other.