I like my PS3. Despite its high asking price and insistence on the best audio and video equipment, there’s a lot of value packed inside that giant black box of immovable shiny metal. It’s too bad that in these trouble times, the machine is completely unattractive to customers’ wallets.
Despite the shoddy sales, Sony finally realized – in beta form – one of the cornerstones of their online strategy. The virtual microtransactive land of Playstation Home is a chatroom, game extension, and virtual avatar system, all rolled into one tidy world.
And it’s completely sterile.
For brevity, Part I and Part II of this guide.
Hm, I’m about a week late on my self-imposed schedule. It’s been feeling a lot like Christmas; I’ve been receiving the packaged spoils of my Black Friday extravaganza, propelled by the 3+ months of shopping abstinence imposed when I was anticipating the new condo. With that out of the way, really good prices hawked by sagging retailers, and a need to furnish the little things by my lonesome, well, it’s been a pretty happy and busy week.
But the speaker wires are strung, the remote is mostly set up, and the netbook is unboxed and running; time to get back to writin’. Onto the Wii!
Here’s the previous post if you missed Part I.
As I write and edit this post, the memories of a great Thanksgiving feast has been swiftly superseded by the traditional binge shopping event known as happy, happy Black Friday. The internets have been clogged, innocents have been tragically implicated, and civilization takes another step closer to the capitalistic anarchy idolized by desperate retailers.
Not to say that I’m above the shopping frenzy, of course; I just prefer to wrestle for the overhyped (cyber?) door-buster deals in the comfort of my room. Having hedged my shopping funds on my persistance of hitting the F5 key instead of, say, my endurance against the lack of sleep in the frigid morning airs, I was able to nab me a cheapish HP 1000 Mini netbook within two hours of multi-tab, multi-browser clicking.
Incidentally, the live.com search deal that made the price possible still works for eBay, who’s currently featuring a 30% cashback offer.
Anyway, back to that console guide…
In these troubled times (), video games – specifically, consoles – are supposedly the stocking stuffers of choice this winter. The theory goes that money that would have gone to vacations and gasoline are instead funneling into the more mundane home entertainment sector; that is, people are looking to buy new TVs and things gadgets that hook up to ‘em.
Of course, 
It helps that HDTV prices have followed the stock market’s lead, and the season of excessive shopping starts with everybody’s favorite overcrowded sale-fest, the soon-to-be epic Black Friday. Since I’ve had a few friends ask me about TV’s and consoles recently, I figure I should write a console purchasing guide, for those who are confused and intimidated by the machines lined up in the store.
I was going to do one big post, but realized there was so much to put down that I split the original into three big posts.
And for those who don’t like reading (spoilers!) – the final, conclusive recommendation for a console this winter is…It depends.
Metal Gear Solid 4 is a ridiculously good game.
Even by itself, it’s an awesome experience just previously unseen in video games. Global conflict has become the sole economic pillar. You play as Old Snake, a grizzled battlefield veteran with one final mission: assassinate the leader of the world’s private military corporations (i.e., mercenaries), who happens to be your genetic twin brother. Nuclear deterrence, nano-machines technology, genetic manipulation, and world superpower conspiracies, they all weave into an alternate universe with events drawn from the annals of modern history.
Forget the princess in the other castle.
In the cruel world of competitive typing, the difference between crossing the finish line first and repeatedly hitting the “reset” button is but a ‘teh’ and ‘playign’ away.
My fingers need to be in sync.
I forget where I found this site, but TypeRacer takes the dry task of keyboard pounding (of the computer variety, not the musical) and makes it multiplayer, which I guess takes it a step beyond schooling Mavis and, uh, zombies. Incidentally, I’ve found that I type a lot faster on my flat-keys, notebook-style diNovo keyboard than my ergonomic Microsoft Ergo 4000 keyboard at work. I even get to boast about it:
Of course, compared to the real typists of the Dvorak discipline this is laughably slow. And it took me around 8 tries to find an easy-to-type passage and not screw up on teh wrods. Stupid fingers.
I like my PS3. Despite its high asking price and insistence on the best audio and video equipment, there’s a lot of value packed inside that giant black box of immovable shiny metal. It’s too bad that in these trouble times, the machine is completely unattractive to customers’ wallets.
