Bought a 37" LCD TV to make my Xbox 360 feel better, it's pretty sweet. Also had my first Xbox Live Halo experience tonight and it lived up to my expectations: I got brutally destroyed by some kid yelling racist stuff at everyone. Ah, the future.
I turned 31 yesterday. I'm old as hell! My girlfriend gave me an Xbox 360 though so I've got a lot of game-playing to do. I've got Halo 3 and I believe I shall be subscribing to Xbox Live -- anyone out there playing? What are the good online games?
The history of Vinyl Data has some surprises. I didn't realize there were artists encoding Sinclair ZX Spectrum programs into their records as far back as 1983 such as Pete Shelly from the Buzzcocks and the Thompson Twins. That's awful hardcore for 20+ years ago. I would say it beats the crap out of manipulating spectrograms.
Even more awesomely The Thompson Twins included an adventure game (called The Thompson Twins Adventure) where you wander around beaches and caves for no real reason:
You can actually play it online here. OH GOD I FOUND A BOTTLE OF SPICE.
My favorite of course is Urusei Yatsura's 'Everybody Loves Uresei Yatsura' album:
Examining the source for the program reveals the following comments:
"Hi Nick, is Robin there?""Judas Priest Satanic Message #3"
"What is sadder: a.) finding this b.) writing it"
Lick his cloven hoof.\m/ (via kotaku)
So I got a Wii a few days ago and it's great of course. But I think the best part is watching other people play it for the first time. I took it over to my parents' tonight and watching my mother beat the hell out of a boxer, well, it just about brought tears to my eyes.
If I have a complaint it's the lack of online multiplayer. I'm pretty good at tennis now and I desire to kick international ass.
I guess I should "camp" more on my "credit card statements" as Blizzard has been conducting "raids" on my "money" for the past "year" since I quit "World of Warcraft".
Anyway I'm like a level 20 complainer now. At 30 I think I finally get to talk to a manager so I've got a lot of grinding to do.
WFMU has an awesome overview (with mp3s) of Atari Music -- "quickie albums released to cash in on the booming video game craze" during the Eighties.
I have Guitar Hero on the brain. Here are some videos:
These two dudes rock pretty hard.
Ace of Spades is an awesome song, but that's not Lemmy singing, is it? Sad.
A guy gets hit in the head with the Guitar Hero controller and everyone enjoys it.
The Last Guitar Hero: a docu-drama about the dangers of Guitar Hero addiction.
Freetar Hero - a fella from my hometown is working on a free version of Guitar Hero that you can use any music with. I still need to try that game.
A few people have asked me about how World of Warcraft is going. Well, I quit playing it. I got about three or four weeks of nicely addicted fun out of it where I needed to play it every chance I possibly could, but then it wore me out and I never logged back in. I didn't make a decision about it, there was no particular angry quitting moment. I just got tired. Here's my boring story:
Let me tell you something about World of Warcraft: there's too much running. Seriously, there should be an in-game counter of the sheer number of hours you put in jogging from one destination to another like a chump, it would be startling. I start a quest and it's all "hey, run down the coast for 30 minutes" and then I get there and someone gives me a quest saying "hey, run on back up to where you started". Even sitting on my ass at my desk it made me tired.
I also understand that most of the fun of the game comes from having a good group of people to play with, but I couldn't keep up with the majority of players I met. They were willing to put many, many hours a day into the game whereas I had about two maximum, so it was a little hard to keep in sync.
So I made it up to around level 26, but my isolation combined with my hatred for retardedly jogging around a virtual world has bored and annoyed me out of it. There were certainly a lot of neat things in there and fun was definitely had, but as I ran around I felt the game designers were purposefully rubbing my face in the fact that I was wasting my life and money by playing this game. At least try to conceal that from me, guys. It's really all I ask from a video game.