So it’s starting to look like I make one post a week, which I guess isn’t bad since I’ve been pretty consistent at that rate thus far. In theory I’d like to post more often but eh. What are you going to do.

Last week I was planning on making a post about some of the big games that have come out and alas, I did not. On Tuesday Oblivion came out for the 360 and PC. For those of you that don’t know, Oblivion is an RPG that is different from any other. Penny-Arcade put it best when they said it is a Sandbox RPG where you can basically do whatever you want for as long as you want. Gamespy had another good comparison calling it the single player version of World of Warcraft. Anyway, I’ve had that to mess around with all last week and I have already rerolled my character 3 times. I’ve probably had about 12-14 hours of gameplay so far and really not done anything storyline wise. That’s how awesome it is. I had a tough time deciding between the 360 version and the PC version. With the 360 I could play on 50 inches of plasma and on the couch as well as earn achievements as I went along. But with the PC version I would probably get a little bit better graphics and could install any mods that I wanted. I ended up going with the PC version. Before Oblivion I played through Ghost Recon and beat it on Normal. I give it a 9/10. The single player is glorious and the multi play is probably my favorite of all the current 360 games. (Can you say Co-Op!)

Saw a couple of articles today which peaked my interest and I wanted to comment on:

According to Business Week, Facebook was offered to be bought for $750 million but they turned it down and are waiting for something more along the lines of 2 billion! 2 freaking billion. Whenever I read stories like this it instantly gets me dreaming. I mean Facebook is a pretty simple idea that was started by just a few guys in college. And look what it is now. A pop-website that is turning down a buy-out offer of $750 million. The web is just full of simple ideas being translated into boatloads of cash. Many of you might have heard about the 1,000,000 dollar homepage. A guy made website that was just a blank page of 1 million pixels and then sold 10 x 10 pixel squares of his site for $1 a pixel as advertisements. All the space was bought up within a matter of months and now the guy has a million dollars. And he’s just out of high school. Why not ME!!?!!

Another article I saw today was from the NY Times and talked about why Windows is so slow compared to OS X. I haven’t spent a whole lot of time around Mac’s but the general consensus is that they are faster and snappier at what they set out to do (digital media editing, etc). The basic idea behind the article is that Windows is a lot slower because it has to support all sorts of new features and what not, but then it also has to support every other piece of software and hardware that has come out in the past (Legacy Support). Almost all applications and hardware that runs on Windows 98 can run on Windows XP. This is not so for OSX. If you have an OS 9 app, you’ve got to boot up into OS9 in order to run this most of the time. There are pro’s and con’s to both choices and since MS has a much MUCH larger user base I can see why they have to have massive legacy support, but it is very interesting to think about.

Tonight we’re having a “Screw you Nick you’re still in school” party which really kind of backfired since the rest of us also have school and work early tomorrow. But whatever. Nick bitches more than all of us and that makes it worth it. Sorry Nick
Hopefully pictures of the event will bring this website some joy.

So I went over to Tuttle Mall today to pickup a new comforter for my bed as an early birthday present (thanks Mom & Dad) and while I was over there I remembered the new Ghost Recon was released yesterday and I wanted to pick it up. So I went down to EB Games and asked if they had it in yet. They responded with asking if I had a pre-order. I did not. I think pre-orders are a waste except for major releases such as a hardware unit or huge game like Halo 2. Anyway they said they didn’t have any copies if I didn’t have a pre-order and that in the future I should always make sure I have a pre-order for a new release. Screw that! When I was young and naive and used to place pre-orders for every game I planned on picking up it would often turn out that some other store would get it first and since I’d already put money down I had to wait until X store got it. I really wanted to tell the guy off, but I’m quite non-confrontational so I just walked out and drove down the road to best buy where they had plenty of copies for me to pick from. I then really wanted to drive back to EB and tell the guy how much pre-order’s suck because BestBuy has plenty of copies down the road, but my lunch break was up and alas I did not. Anyway, I’ll be enjoying the nice 720p action of killing terrorists and hostage takers tonight no thanks to EB Games.
The draft went well and was very enjoyable. Every participant showed up for some amount of time which I guess was a first. It’s kind of cool to watch the World Baseball Classic and see some of my team member’s play. I’ll try to post my roster later on this week.
I still haven’t got a chance to snap some shots of my new laptop but I promise I will. I’ve actually been messing around with it trying to get OSX installed as a dual boot, which I did successfully except I messed up the MBR to where I can’t boot into Windows now. That will also need to be taken care of tonight. /end geek talk