Think of the children...

The list of top 100 names for the year came out. Most of them are the norm, but a few really make me wonder. Here is the list if you're curious, but I thought I would go over a few.

No 2 is Madison. I guess that's a girl's name. I never really thought of it that way. Sounds more like a street to me. I mention it mostly, though, because my new neice born this year is named Madison. Just hope people don't walk all over her when she gets older. Get it? Like a street. Maybe I shouldn't start off with bad puns...

Next one I notice is number 6 on the boys list: Jack. Not too unusual, except that apparently it wasn't anywhere near that high until recently. The network execs in charge of Lost should be happy about this.

Let's see, 13 on the boys list: Caden. Really? Is that even a name? Do you pronounce that with a S or K sound? I'm honestly not sure.

14 on the girls list: Lily. No I didn't forget an L there, but apparently a whole lot of other Americans did. If I ever meet anyone with their name spelled like that, I'm going to pronounce it just how it's written. I hope they complain to their parents about it. They deserve it. What were they expecting? "We'll just leave an L off. No one will notice, and it will make it easier for her to do paperwork." I hope your daughter grows up hating you.

Now here's the other side of that convention of respelling names: Brayden. Number 22 on the boys list. I've known some Bradens in my life, never a Brayden. I was never confused by the lack of a Y. Braying is something donkeys do people. When are they going to realize that naming your child something that sounds like a barnyard animal noise is asking for the child to grow up cutting himself?

I have to mention number 24 on the boys side, not because there's anything wrong with it, but because it's the best name on the list: Benjamin. Seriously, shouldn't this be higher up? At the same time, I notice number 100 is Ben. Just Ben. Now I go by Ben 99.9 percent of the time. If I hear Benjamin and it's not in a job interview or something equally professional, I instantly correct the person. It actually bugs me to hear my whole name. On the other hand, it would seem totally wrong to never have anything more to my name. Just Ben? How boring is that?

Number 53 on the girls list and number 99 on the boys is the same name: Peyton. Two questions: First, when did Peyton become a girls name and when did it become more popular than the male version? Only thing I can think of is too many football fans are having girls when they thought they were going to have a girl. "Well honey, the baby's room is already decorated to look like a Colts locker room, might as well just go with it. Otherwise she might grow up confused." Wouldn't want that now would we?

Well the list wasn't as bad as I thought it would be. Only see one stripper name this year, Destiny, and that's pretty low on the list at 93. Jenna's pushing it, since the only famous person ever to have the name Jenna is a porn star. I guess most of these kids are fairly safe from abuse. Maybe once we get rid of all the stupid bad names, we can get parents to start actually raising their children again, instead of letting the TV do it. Ha! Yeah right.

So I bought a 360...

I was gonna get a Wii. I was thinking I'd wait on the 360. I really had no intention of buying one for a few months yet. But no, my old trusty Xbox had to start to have some issues on playing DVD's. I don't have a regular dvd player. I know, I really should. They're like 19.99 down at Wal-Mart. Whatever. I liked using the Xbox. It never had any problems with playing games, just on the movies. On top of that I realized something else. I had about 30 games for the thing, but I only played 2 or 3 on a regular basis. Two of those games have a particularly angelic cranial adornment in the name. So it just didn't seem worth it to keep the thing around. If the Wii had played movies, I'd probably have just gotten it. It doesn't. I bought an Xbox 360.

My roomate, who happens to be my little brother, also happens to work at Hollywood Video. Because of this we get any video games or movies we want for free. Can just only have 3 out at a time. I'm taking big advantage of this. So far we've had 6 games in the week since I bought the thing. Some of those games have been pretty good, some of had been so impressive. Dead Rising, for instance, was visually and conceptually impressive, but in the end flawed and boring. I can understand why a lot of people liked the game and I really liked where they were going with it. I didn't care too much for the results though. There were too many times of running back and forth between the same spots in the mall you were in. Just got tedious. I took it back after a few hours of playing.

There have been good games, though, like Call of Duty 3 and Fight Night 3. I've got quite the career going in Fight Night. I've beaten The Greatest of All Time, Muhammed Ali, and a bunch of other famous boxers. Fun stuff. Call of Duty games are always fun, if you're into that kind of thing. Good story. Great action. Really feel like you're part of a battle. I kinda think CoD2 was a little better action wise. 3 puts you as the star of the battle too often. There's nothing like the God Complex in games like that to really pull you out of the feeling of realism. Still a great game.

Now there's another game I actually bought. I had to. I shouldn't have. I can't show this game to my mom. I play this game and feel dirty afterward. No, it's not DoA Xtreme Beach 2. It's Gears of War. This has got to be the bloodiest, most violent game ever made. Not in the killing hookers after having sex with them way that the Grand Theft Auto games are. It's not violence just for the sake of being violent. It's war. It's gritty, explosive, alien, scifi, bloody war. Except for the way you can run up to an enemy with the chainsaw on the end of your gun revved up and cut them in half. That's just violence for the sake of violence. There's never a time in the game, so far that I've played, when you actually need to do that. You will if you play this game, but you don't need to. The rest of it though. The way the enemies just explode when hit with a grenade. I've seen that kind of thing in games before and it felt really campy and unreal. In this game though, it feels like the beginning of Saving Private Ryan, except with aliens coming up from out of the ground. If you're trying to decide whether to get this game or not, and your stomach isn't queasy in the least, cause I'll tell you I've seen and done things in this game that make me churn a little bit, get this game. Even if you don't have a 360. Get it in preperation for getting a 360. You want to, trust me.

Oh, and the last game I tried was called Enchanted Arm. It looked alright until I was forced to put up with an ambitiously gay character for the first hour of the game I played. Look, you put a gay character in your game, that's fine. They've been in games before. At least one in a Final Fantasy and plenty I've thought might be. But when you do everything you can to shove down the players throat that yes, this character is gay. Flamingly. This is why I say ambitiously gay. It was just wrong. Much too much.

Beside all of this, the best game I have played for the Xbox 360 so far is Geometry Wars. It's one of the Live Arcade games. Costs about 5 dollars and is more than worth it. No way to describe the game. If I tried you'd probably think it sounded boring. You just gotta play it. If you've got the system and haven't tried it yet, download the demo. Trust me.

That's it from me tonight. Will try to update more often from now on. Maybe get someone to read it someday.

Happy Turkey Day

It's Thanksgiving! Turkey's and pumpkin pie and mashed potatoes and gravy and all that. Oh, and something about pilgrims and indians eating each other or something. I don't know. Anyway, what're you thankful for?

As if anyone is actually reading this thing yet. Maybe I should tell people about it or something. I'm kinda enjoying it being just my place to act as if people are reading what I have to say.

So Amazon just died. They put up an offer for the Xbox 360 Core System for 100 dollars. Only offered 1000 of them. Someone was not thinking when they put up that offer. I'm still trying but it's not looking good. It took about 5 minutes for the page to try to load before and that was to an error page. Seriously, they do this at 11 on one of the two days of the year most Americans are guaranteed to be home. Not smart people, just not smart.

Moving on...

Well no luck on the PS3. Looking at the incredible amount of them on EBay The way things are going there's no guarantee of how much it would sell for or when it would sell. It's all nuts.

On the other hand it looks like tons of people got Wii's and that seems to make everyone happy. I want one. I got to play it the other day at the mall. Fun. Great controls. It's cool.

I'm a little tired right now so not saying a whole lot.

Oh, one more thing, the PS3 controller feels like crap. No, really. Go to the store and just hold one. Try the triggers. Yeah, that's right. Triggers. Not L2 and R2 buttons, but triggers. Crappy ones at that.

I'm done now.

Disappointment..

Well, no luck tonight. There are a couple I can try in the morning, but it's not looking good. Going to bed now so that I can get up early to head out again.

While I was out I asked some questions of the people waiting in line. Many of them had been there since monday or tuesday, so I really didn't stand much chance. Of all the people I talked to tonight at seven different stores, only two were actually keeping the PS3. The rest had the same idea as me. At one store as I was talking to someone, a car came driving through the parking lot pretty fast with a guy hanging out the back window expounding upon the virtues of the Xbox over the PS3. The guy I was talking to laughed and said he was just going to use the money he makes from his on a Xbox.

So just to see before I went to bed, I checked the current EBay prices. Pretty crazy, as expected, commonly going for upwards of 3,000 dollars. However, one in particular caught my attention. It is currently going for 11,000,299 dollars. Not kidding. Look for yourself. There's 50 bids. I'm thinking someone's not going to be happy when that auction ends.

Well, to bed with me. I will try again in the morning but not expecting anything now.

Superman's not so super anymore

So I'm watching Smallville right now and wondering how the writers can get away with completely making crap up. I mean, I know it's a superhero show, so people can fly and stop trains and shoot lasers out of their eyes and stuff like that. I accept that. I'm a big fan of superhero shows. Spiderman is the best, by the way. Anyway, even if it's a superhero show, if they're going to talk about something that is real and part of the real world, maybe they should do some research on it before they write dialogue using it. (Random note: The Blogger spellchecker keeps telling me dialogue is spelled wrong. I looked it up and it's right. Back to the story now.) I won't go into the technical details, but they're trying to talk about the radio spectrum. They compared narrow band and VHF modulation. One person got transported "to another frequency". Then they were going to bring him back by using triangulation, which is stupid on it's own right, but on top of that the triangulation was done from one machine. You would think at the least the "tri" at the beginning of the word would lead them to get the idea it needs three points to triangulate from. It's just stupid. It would have taken them five minutes to look up the phrases they were going to use before they made themselves look like idiots.

This whole episode is really bugging me. There are a lot of interesting things going on. The whole thing with Clark and the people from the phantom zone could be really cool. Good big battle opportunities. So of course the battles have been almost worthless. Instead they spend almost the whole episode dealing with this half thought out unresearched idea of a bad guy kidnapping Lex Luthor and the relationship between Lex and Lana. There's no real chemistry between the two on the screen. When you watch them they don't look like two people in love. It's a part of the show that doesn't work, so they should be shoving it into the background instead of spending half the season's episodes on it. We got 30 minutes tonight of Lana talking about how much she loved Lex and at the same time hinting about how little she trusts him. Oh, and him lying to her about everything. Then we get 15 minutes of Superman, the person the show is supposed to be about, looking around Seattle for some guy that we never found any real information about. Then before they really fight some other guy kills him and we see the other guy fly off. Our only hint about the guy? An oreo. Oh, and in the five seconds we see him at the end of the show he finds another oreo in his barn. Why do I even watch this show anymore? They'd better start bringing the good stuff back or I'm going to find a different show.

Paragraphs still need work.

This PS3 thing is getting annoying...

Well I went over to my chosen Best Buy to see what the line looked like, since I won't be able to go out until 11 or so and I wanted to know how bad it would be. I drove up to the store and, miracle of miracles, there was no line. Then I saw two people standing around in the front. Ok, so two people, that's not bad. That's what I was thinking until I saw that they were both wearing Best Buy shirts. I couldn't believe it. What luck! No line at all. I kept driving around and saw that they were having a sidewalk sale on the side of the building. I was wondering when Best Buy starting selling tents when it sunk in that this was the line. I drove around until I could see the whole thing. It stretched all the way around to the back of the building. I mean, there were a good 30-35 tents. From what I've heard and read there are going to be about 26 PS3's per store. So that's a lot of people going home empty handed in the morning after a long, cold, rainy night. It is Seattle after all. So I came home a little disappointed. I called around to try to find out where else I might try. Fry's confirmed the bundle. Walmart isn't going to have enough per store to make it worth it. CompUSA is apparantly not getting any shipments until January. I think that's a scoop, cause I haven't seen that written anywhere else. Possibly a scoop on two counts. One is the fact that at least the CompUSA here isn't getting one until January, and the other scoop is that this could mean the second shipment of PS3's isn't coming for almost two months. That sucks. That really sucks.


I need to remember that paragraphs are my friend.

Countdown to PS3

I'm starting to get excited about the PS3 coming out. I mean, if what I've seen on Ebay so far is true, we're talking a good 200%+ profit from Ebay. Read an interesting article talking about the Japanese launch. There was something like a 0.8 tie in ratio. That means for every PS3 sold, 0.8 games were sold. You gotta figure quite a few people bought more than 1 game. That sucks for retailers. Developers probably aren't going to be happy either. Man I hope this helps the thing fail. Don't get me wrong here, I'm not a huge MS or Nintendo "Fanboy" or anything. I just really really hate Sony. And EA.

So as a result of the horrific tie in rate over in Japan, a lot of US retailers have suddenly announced the need to purchase bundles, including the retailer I was planning to get it from. So I'll have to find somewhere else to go. Looks like Best Buy will be selling them for the actual price instead of forcing me to buy nine freaking games along with it. I mean, if I had $1400 to blow on a PS3 I'd probably be buying one from Ebay like the rest of the idiots that will hopefully be buying mine. I'll be offering a Buy it Now price and free overnight shipping, buy mine and get it Saturday! Morons...

First Post

Welcome! Thanks for reading. This is, obviously, the first post on my blog. I guess I will get it started by telling a little about myself. My name is Ben. I am 24 years old. I study video game design and I'm working on getting a job in the industry soon. At the moment I do game testing part time, but I can't talk about that much, so don't expect me to. Mostly I'm going to talk about video games and technology. Maybe a little about myself and my life when things are interesting, so probably won't happen too often. I live a boring life. I might also just talk about random stuff like whatever happens to be on tv at the moment I start writing. Who knows.

I never really understand why people read these things. I mean, what gives me the right to talk about an industry I'm not a real part of yet? Besides being part of the target market I'm not really qualified to have an opinion. Yet for some reason there will probably be a day when someone reads this blog and takes whatever opinion I have about some product as fact. Isn't the internet an amazing thing? Everyone's an instant expert.

I think I'm going to be an expert on the Playstation 3 today. I hate the thing. I hate the whole idea of it. Sony has created a system almost guaranteed to have a high failure rate. The developers are doing nothing but complaining about how hard it is to program for, and that at the same time it doesn't have any more graphics power than the 360. In some ways it has less. It costs 200 dollars more. Bluray is going to fail. Blah blah blah. If you're interested in video games you've probably heard all this before. Unless you're actually looking forward to the system, then you've heard it all before , but you didn't believe a word of it. But hey, you're on the internet, so that makes you an expert too, so you can choose who to believe. It's your right to be an idiot. Pay for your bloated system. In fact, buy the one I'm going to be putting up on Ebay for 1500 bucks on friday. The money's going to a good cause too; I haven't got a 360 yet and the Wii comes out sunday.