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.