I have finally gotten around to putting my whole Game Collection back up on this site. This time I have it set up so that I can simply export from Gamepedia and then run a quick Automator script to upload it to my site. From there a simple PHP script displays the information. It is just a simple text based list this time. I may try to add the images back in at a later date, but I could just as likely leave it the way it is.

I have also added a Game Wish List that works exactly the same way. In the wish list instead of showing the date I added the game to my collection it says either Wanted or Watching beside the game. Wanted is pretty self explanatory and Watching simply means that it is a game I am keep a close watch on.

Not too much been going on around here lately. I am still waiting on my Xbox 360 power adapter. I knew that the 3 to 5 days I was quoted would probably get thrown out of whack by Christmas, but that doesn’t make it any easier to take.

Thanks to my sister and her fiance my Xbox 360 game collection has climbed to 14 with the addition of Gears of Wars and thanks to my brother and sister-in-law it will probably climb to 15 once I get around to spending the Best Buy gift card they got me. Though I don’t plan on spending it until after I have a working 360 again. Gears of War is kind of old, but it is a great game. I haven’t bought it for myself already because I didn’t feel like spending $60 on a game that is over a year old and has a very short and limited single player experience. I had been waiting on a decent price drop so I could pick it up.

I also scored a new lens for my camera. I finally have a decent telephoto lens now. It is the Canon EF 75-300mm f/4-5.6 III USM. I haven’t gotten to fully test it yet, but so far it seems like an okay lens. The autofocus is a bit slow, but that is to be expected from a lens this long in the $200 price range.

My stepdad made out like a bandit this year though and I can proudly announce that we have a new addition to our small family of Macs. My stepdad is now the very happy owner of a MacBook. My mom (with help from me of course) got him the mid-range white MacBook with the SuperDrive and a decent case for it. I went ahead and got him an extra 2 gigs of RAM for it from Other World Computing. According to Xbench it is way faster than my iBook or his eMac in everything except for the disk tests (which is pretty standard thanks to the slow HDDs used in laptops) and the OpenGL tests. It still beats my iBook in everything, but just barely in the OpenGL tests and the eMac scores almost double for some reason. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that the iBook and MacBook are both running Leopard while the eMac is still running Tiger. Looking at the Xbench database I see that other MacBooks have scored over twice as high on the OpenGL tests with less RAM and with Tiger. In the end I knew that the graphic performance of the MacBook was less than stellar, but I expected it to be much better than it was when compared to my over three year old iBook and the eMac that is a little bit older.

My brother and sister-in-law made out very well as well. Me and my mom got them a Playstation 2 and Guitar Hero 3 and my sister and her fiance got them SingStar Pop to go with it. My brother got hooked playing Guitar Hero 2 while he was in the Air Force, but for some strange reason they never made an Xbox version. I came across a couple of killer Black Friday deals so we hooked them up. I have to say I was surprised by both games. I won’t be running out to buy SingStar anytime soon, but it was kind of fun as long as you are the type of person who can laugh at yourself. I only knew like 5 of the 30 songs on the Pop edition so I bet I could have had much more fun with one of the other editions. Guitar Hero 3 was a ton of fun though. I have played other rhythm games and I hated them, but I could actually see myself buying Guitar Hero 3 for the 360. I wouldn’t mind getting it and a couple of the wireless guitars. On the PS2 version the cords for the guitars were so short that we had to sit on the coffee table to play it on the big screen.

I also finally got to spend a bit of time with a Wii and a DS and the experiences have pretty much killed any desire I had for either system. I am so far outside of their target market that it is scary. The Wii game I got to play was Super Mario Galaxy and pretty much the whole time I was playing it I wished I had had a Nintendo 64 controller in my hands. I have never been a fan of the motion controls but I do see how it could be fun to play a game that was really designed for it. This wasn’t the case with Super Mario Galaxy IMHO. I don’t think motion controls add anything to this game and for me they actually hurt it. The sad thing is that it reminded me so much of Super Mario 64 that I really wanted to keep playing it just not with the lame tacked on motion controls.

I have also been pretty critical of the DS in the past. The touchscreen stuff is pretty gimmicky as far as I am concerned and most of the games that people rave about being awesome examples of touchscreen game-play just look like the kind of crap I have been seeing in browser based flash games for years now. So far the console has only had two games that really interested me and neither one really used the touchscreen: New Super Mario Brothers and Mario Kart. Then along came Zelda: The Phantom Hourglass. Zelda is without a doubt the game series I have missed the most since dropping support for Nintendo’s systems. Sadly Phantom Hourglass is another game that I feel was ruined thanks to Nintendo trying to come up with an innovative control scheme. Phantom Hourglass reminded me of Diablo 2 and Icewind Dale and a number of other point and click RPG’s that I was never able to get into because I didn’t enjoy the combat or the way you moved your character around. Playing games like that always makes me feel like I am not really in control of the game. It sort of reminds me of playing Pac-Man 2 on the Super Nintendo. In Pac-Man 2 you didn’t control Pac-Man at all. Instead you used a slingshot to hit stuff in the world and catch his attention. If he was in a good enough mood he would interact with the thing you shot. Now none of these games are quite that bad, but the disconnect between you and your character is pretty annoying to me. I consider the control scheme of the very first Zelda game to be superior. The other thing I didn’t like about Phantom Hourglass is actually just a general dislike of the DS in general: I don’t like having the stylus or my hand blocking parts of the screen.

So while waiting on my Xbox 360 to be functional again I figured I might as well have something to play so I picked up a couple of Super Nintendo games from an eBay seller. I was just going to get Space Megaforce but then I noticed the seller had a number of decent games going for $1 each plus $2 shipping. I ended up letting a few of them go because other people got in on them and the price got higher than I was willing to go. I ended up chasing Syndicate to a much higher price than I should have and I was able to get Castlevania 4 and Super R-Type dirt cheap. Next to U.N. Squadron, Space Megaforce is the best shoot ‘em up available on the platform and I have wanted it for a long time. I used to play it via emulation all the time, but that just isn’t the same as playing on the real system. I am really looking forward to the shoot ‘em ups that have been announced for Xbox Live Arcade like Ikaruga.

Well I guess that this is enough for now. I didn’t intend to go off on Nintendo because in times past I have loved their systems and games (hell the Super Nintendo is still the best gaming system ever IMHO). I used to be a huge Nintendo fanboy back in the day and I think that some of their games still look very fun, but I have been turned off by their hardware design and their decision to explore quirky and somewhat gimmicky control schemes. I kind of wish that they would go the way of Sega and just makes games for other consoles.

Last post of the night. I have been meaning to get these last two out for a while, but I just never got around to it.

On the Xbox 360 front I think I am going to have to send the damn thing back in. The DVD-ROM makes a number of scary noises, spins up at times it shouldn’t (when I am in the Dashboard or streaming video from my Mac), and sometimes refuses to open or opens about a quarter of an inch and then closes again. This is bullshit. Microsoft should just start replacing red ringed consoles with brand new units with the new motherboards and DVD-ROM’s instead of trying to fix the old ones or replacing them with refurbished units like they did with mine.

I got The Orange Box the same day I got my 360 back and I have to say that Portal is awesome. I played through it in one sitting even though I had to be at work early the next morning. Portal is short but I still ended up playing it past my normal bedtime. I haven’t really touched Team Fortress 2 or Half-Life 2 Episodes 1 & 2, but I have been playing through Half-Life 2 again. Sadly it has the same annoying load times that the Xbox version had and this is sad because just like the Xbox version there are better looking games with bigger levels that don’t have annoying loading screens like this game does. Valve makes great games but they either need to really learn how to make console games or they need to team up with a developer who does. That said I hope they bring out another collection like this in the future. My suggestion would be to call it The Blue Box (because in color theory blue is the complimentary color to orange) and to include Half-Life 2 Episode 3, Half-Life: Source, Opposing Force: Source, Blue Shift: Source (these last two are the expansions to the original Half-Life), and as the multiplayer component: Counter-Strike: Source. A follow-up to Portal would also be nice, but I am hoping to see that as downloadable content on Xbox Live.

This week I went ahead and got Call of Duty 4 along with a free copy of Call of Duty 3 thanks to the special offer they had at Circuit City. It is a very cool game so far but I haven’t had enough time to play it much. I can say that it is every bit as intense as Call of Duty 2 if not more so. Which reminds me I need to pick up Call of Duty 2 sometime.

Other than collecting all of the skulls I haven’t touched Halo 3 that much. I found a few skulls on my own (one gold and two silvers) and walked right past a few others, but there was no way I was getting them all on my own. I partially misunderstood what they would do though. I knew that some of them would make the game harder, but I was hoping that more of them were just silly and goofy things that would make the game more fun kind of like the unlockable cheats in Goldeneye 007 and Perfect Dark on the Nintendo 64. Unlimited ammo and the ability to have whatever weapon you wanted would be fun.

I am getting swamped by games and the cool thing is that while I don’t have enough time to play them I can at least afford them (the opposite of my normal problem this time of year). I would like to pick up Tomb Raider Anniversary (wouldn’t mind getting Tomb Raider Legend for the 360 either) and Beautiful Katamari which are both out now. Next week is Assassin’s Creed which I am pretty interested in even though I do have some doubts about the control scheme (I wish there was a demo). I wouldn’t mind getting Ace Combat 6 because it has been a long time since I played a flight sim that I liked and the demo was pretty cool. And of course in less than two weeks my number one most wanted game for this year is due: Mass Effect. If it wasn’t for the damn hardware issues I would be a very happy Xbox 360 owner right now.

Oh and I almost forgot that Bioware and LucasArts have announced that they are working on a new game. If it isn’t Knights of the Old Republic 3 then I may have to fire bomb their offices. I might hold off on that if it is a Knights of the Old Republic MMO with support for the Xbox 360 though. I have never really liked MMO games, but I would be willing to give that one a chance.

I finally got around to finishing up my Gamercard Widget. You should be able to see it over at the top of my sidebar. Instead of just embedding the thing Microsoft makes available I decided to customize it a bit using PHP. I have also set it up so that it is cached. It will only update once every ten minutes so it shouldn’t cause as much loading lag as Microsoft’s version did on my old site.

If anyone out there wants to add me to their friends list that is okay with me. I am thinking about getting Xbox Live Gold but I am still undecided. I am probably going to be playing some Halo 3 and Team Fortress 2 online soon with the 1 Month Gold card I got with my replaced Xbox 360.

For the most part I think everything is golden with my 360 now. My unit ended up being replaced not repaired. It isn’t a newer unit though so no HDMI and the DVD-ROM is still loud as hell. I am a bit worried about said DVD-ROM because it makes a bit more noise than my old one did but I am going to give it a shot. Time to get caught up on some gaming.

Alight looks like I will be getting my Xbox 360 back in a little bit. They tried to deliver it today but there was no one home so I am going to have to go pick it up in about 30 minutes.

Here is the timeline:

Monday, October 1st - Red Ring Of Death.
Friday, October 5th - Shipping box arrives.
Saturday, October 6th - Shipped for repairs.
Wednesday, October 10th - Received at repair center.
Wednesday, October 24th - Xbox 360 returns home.

Big question now is: does it work? Guess I will find out in about an hour. In the meantime I think I will go buy The Orange Box.